 
### The Smallest Giant

#### By GJ Winters

#### Published by Publications Circulations LLC.

SmashWords Edition

All contents copyright (C) 2014 by Publications Circulations LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, companies and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

**~ ~ ~ ~**

### DAY ZERO

### ONE

WHEN CAROL WREN woke up at five in the morning for her two-mile run, she hadn't expected that the day would be any different from the others she normally experienced.

As a gym teacher in Bristol Area Middle School in Bristol, Pennsylvania, she knew all about school shootings, Amber Alerts and anything else that ensured children received a good education. Of all the teachers at the school, she had received the most training in what was euphemistically called "assault management."

This, Carol thought as she slid her shoes on, was just a clever way for petty politicians to describe the unnatural fixation some people seemed to have with ruining the lives of children who had never done anyone harm.

Well, Carol thought to herself with a grin, mostly never.

Kenneth Yardrow, a child in one of her morning gym classes, might be the exception to the rule.

Yesterday, he had been caught writing colorful monosyllabic words on the school lockers prior to homeroom. Even after he'd been scolded by the school's vice-principal, John Hoover, Kenneth had just sat in the chair smiling as though he didn't have a care in the world.

Kenneth always chose to sit out gym class, declaring it a waste of time. Rather than provoke an argument, which usually inspired him to commit yet another prank, Carol let Kenneth have his way. She knew that wouldn't go on much longer, yet she couldn't think of a thing that would resolve the solution.

No matter how much the school tried to reform him, Kenneth always did what he wanted.

That, she thought as she tied her brown hair back into a ponytail, might be the whole problem with the school system, not just in Bristol but everywhere.

She couldn't think of a way to solve it, much less explain the necessary changes that wouldn't cause the administrators to frown at her and shake their heads as if to say, she's only a woman. They didn't dare say that these days, at least not since Wanda Tanner, the school nurse, had filed suit against the district after a seventh-grade history teacher had harassed her.

There were some days that Carol wanted to be rid of the entire bloody system that didn't seem to care about anything other than test scores and corporate profits.

This, she decided, was one of those days.

Stepping out her front door, she observed that the rain had come and gone the previous night.

The pre-dawn air had a cool, moist taste to it. It reminded Carol of the days she had spent as a child in rural North Carolina. The sky overhead remained dark, with a bare hint of light that would soon creep over the horizon. A silver crescent moon hung in the sky, obscured at times by gray clouds. The stars shone particularly bright that morning, the light from millions of years ago from another part of the galaxy only now just arriving.

All of it provided illumination to light Carol's way.

THE FIRST STEP'S both the easiest and the hardest.

She had been told this by her personal trainer after spending seven months rehabbing a knee injury. Her commitment to take the first step-figuratively and literally-always proved to be half the battle required for physical exertion. Once taken, the first step invariably led to another, and then countless more, all originating from that initial single step.

While this morning felt no different than any other, in the back of her mind remained the sheer agony that had come with twisting her knee out of place.

All it had taken was one errant misstep straight down into an abandoned groundhog's hole. Caught in mid-stride, her leg suddenly wrenched, tearing tendon inside her knee.

She hadn't screamed, at least not until she pulled her leg out.

There, grotesquely attached to her hip, protruded a limb that she didn't recognize.

Never before had she seen anything as twisted to the side as her leg had been.

She had always wondered in the back of her mind if this would happen, despite the precautions taken. She had always stretched appropriately during her pre-run warm-ups and knew the route she ran by heart. She even made sure to stay on the road's concrete shoulder.

THE FEAR THAT came with the recollection of her injury dissipated when she took the first stride leading out of her driveway and onto the country back road that lay parallel to her property.

Before long, she found herself running along the road, her sneakers pounding the ground in a soft, steady cadence that was reassuring.

Both knees felt the same that morning, and for this, Carol felt grateful. Her knee ached most of the time. Other times, it throbbed just enough to be a bother. Her doctor had told her that her running days might have to end soon, but she didn't believe him.

One step, and then another.

A short time passed before her breathing became heavy.

She remembered the lesson she'd learned in the Air Force, taught to her by a mean-spirited man with wide, thin metal glasses. Mind over matter, he'd said. A person could force themselves to breathe normally if they focused. Oxygen would reach the muscles, staving off cramps.

She only had to focus upon it.

She concentrated now, running down the side of the road.

One breath in, one breath out.

Her feet moved without her thinking about it.

Before long, the running came easier.

After her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw the usual sights along the road.

The painted white line marking off where the shoulder began diverted in a half-circle around some obstacle the road-painting machine had encountered where it had last painted. Water dripped from the leaves of trees on either side of the road. Birds called out their warbling songs here and there. A few of them flew across the road.

A brown squirrel ran across the gray asphalt, stopping at the double yellow line. He stood on his hind legs, intently watching Carol approaching. In his small hands he clutched an acorn that looked far too large to eat. Carol smiled.

FURTHER UP THE road, a grungy-looking Frank Charles plodded out to his mailbox on the side of the street in a blue bathrobe, his tangled hair appearing as if someone had held a magnet over his head. He ambled along in sopping-wet blue slippers, oblivious to his surroundings.

Opening the mailbox and sticking an arm inside, he came away with a hunk of mail that he held to his chest as he plodded back towards the house.

Carol didn't speak to Frank, nor Frank to Carol. She could count on one hand the number of times either of them had so much as even looked at one another. It had been that way as far back as she could recall. They ignored each other, for that was how things were in Bristol. Neighbors rarely bothered each other, except to utter a brief hello or to ask a favor.

Since Frank had never asked Carol for anything, Carol often had the sense that she ought to move somewhere different, back to North Carolina, perhaps.

The awkward silence that passed between them as Carol ran past only reinforced this idea.

Before she knew it, she reached the halfway point of her run. A pothole in the shoulder marked off exactly one mile away from her house. A puddle of dark water had pooled up in it, rendering it deceptively shallow. Carol knew better.

She turned around, running back the way she came. By this time, she felt as though she could run for a good long while.

Nothing in her body hurt.

Her breathing came free and easy.

Her opinion of the day gradually changed.

She felt it might be a good day after all.

If anyone had told her just then that two students would be kidnapped in the most bizarre way possible, she wouldn't have believed them.

So occupied was she with her morning run that she didn't notice the man sitting on the front porch of the abandoned property across from her own, staring at her.

### TWO

WORMS CRAWLED ABOUT on the paved recreational area behind Bristol Area Middle School. The chilly April rain had come around four in the morning, but had tapered off around seven, leaving a dense fog in its wake. As the sun rose, the fog dissipated. The ground, still wet, brought all the writhing pink crawlers forth, fresh from the loam that protected them from the usual predators. Some had been eaten by birds braving the weather. Some would perish on the pavement, separated from their place of sustenance by what, to them, proved to be a considerable distance.

As the morning's gym class assembled to listen to their teacher's instructions, one particular worm caught the notice of Kenneth Yardrow, known to his friends as Kenny, and known to his enemies by a variety of unpleasant nicknames.

The worm didn't look any different than the others wriggling about at the edge of the grass. In fact, its similarity to the others was what had caught Kenneth's attention. He had earnestly expected to see some of varying length, perhaps of varying color, yet when he glanced about, they all seemed the same to him.

He knelt before the worm, extending one thin finger to poke at it. The worm felt slimy to his touch and curled up into a ball when he made contact.

From past experience, he knew the worm would stay that way for some time, at least until it thought a perceived danger had passed.

Kenneth thought about putting the worm in his pocket-he had done so before-yet the day had only just begun.

He didn't want a repeat of last time when he'd forgotten about the worm he'd collected. He'd discovered that one squashed to juicy bits in his pocket when he'd put a hand in there.

He could think of only one thing to do.

He picked up the worm with two fingers and threw it, under-handed, back into the grass. He didn't know if a worm could survive such a throw, yet he hoped it did.

"Mr. Yardrow, care to join us this morning?"

The gym teacher had asked this question amidst silence, which to Kenneth meant that he'd been asked a previous question, one he hadn't heard.

Three girls standing together giggled at him.

The gym teacher, a thin, wispy woman known to Kenneth as Mrs. Wren, scowled at him. In her wrinkled right hand, she held an old wooden tennis racket with white tape about the neck. She'd judged the morning weather warm enough for all the students to go outside in their tight white t-shirts and loose green shorts, yet she herself had opted to wear a white windbreaker jacket with gray sweat pants and green sneakers. Her salt-and-pepper graying hair swayed in the morning breeze. Beside her sat a plastic barrel full of plastic tennis rackets. Another barrel, unopened, contained frayed white shuttlecocks.

The class was set to play badminton, as they had done the previous day.

Kenneth turned away from his study of the worms. He glanced at his teacher before looking down at the ground. "All right." He sighed.

"Good. Then let's start. You all remember the rules, right? We're short one net today, so you'll have to split into teams of three. Let's see, there are thirteen of you, so one person will have to be a substitute."

Kenneth, already knowing where this was going, sat down on the damp ground. The rest of the class, understanding all too well, pulled out rackets and shuttlecocks. Before long, the sounds of children playing badminton could be heard throughout the courtyard.

Kenneth noticed that one team only had two players. A tall girl with thick glasses had paired up with a boy who had yellow sweat stains decorating his armpits. The boy's left shoe was untied. The girl's hair appeared not to have been washed recently.

The student who was supposed to be their partner, a thin girl with a hole in the top of her sneaker, sat down next to Kenneth. Kenneth huffed.

"I don't want to do this either," the girl said.

Mrs. Wren, occupied with demonstrating the finer points of serving to a group of three, hadn't noticed her. The girl swiveled her head towards Kenneth. "I'm Savannah. You're Kenneth, right?"

"Only when I'm awake," Kenneth said.

Savannah pulled at one of her two pigtails, frowning. "I don't get it," she said.

"It's supposed to be a joke. You know, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? They both transform when they sleep by the dark of a new moon."

"What, both of them?" Savannah studied Kenneth's face intently, trying to discover if he was lying. "Who do they transform into?"

"They change into each other. They're like, what do you call it, alter egos. They're two people sharing the same body. You know what I mean? When I sleep, I turn into somebody else."

"I don't believe you. You're not a werewolf," Savannah said.

A short girl whose ponytail had come halfway undone took a clumsy swat at a shuttlecock. So close was she to the net that the object struck it, bounced off and dinked her on the forehead. She dropped her racket, falling to her knees, tears coming to her eyes as she began wailing. Mrs. Wren, having seen such episodes before, did not hurry to remedy the situation. The game continued in spite of the girl's crying.

"Like that, see? Like how Sarah there can turn on a dime into a weepy mess," Kenneth said, pointing.

"You don't turn on a dime. That's too small to turn anything on. Anyway, she's always like that. One time, in sewing class, she dropped her needle onto her shoe. She didn't even cut herself, but there she went. Stupid Sue, we all call her. Always crying about everything. That's not like sleeping in the presence of a new moon."

"Meh, you don't understand anyway. Why am I even talking to you?"

Savannah grumbled, "I'm the one who started talking to you."

"Why'd you do that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe I thought I could stop you from being such a smelly face. I can see that I was wrong about that."

"If I have a smelly face, then you have a smelly butt."

"If I have a smelly butt, then you have a smelly belly button."

"How would you know that?"

Savannah said, "It's obvious, isn't it? Everything about you is smelly, even your belly button."

"What would you know? You're just a girl."

Savannah, who had heard this statement many times before, got up and joined the team she had left. By this time, Sue's crying, with the teacher's consolation, had subsided into sniffling sobs. Kenneth crossed his arms over his chest.

"Play all you want. See if I care," he said.

### THREE

AFTERNOON CAME THE same way it always did for Kenneth. The day drew to a close while he sat at his homeroom desk, waiting to hear his bus announced as being ready for departure.

He was only one of two students in his class who rode the number seventy-four bus, along with Savannah. The thought of sharing a bus with her made Kenneth remember everything she'd said during gym class.

They hadn't spoken to each other all day, even during lunch when they stood next to each other in line to get french fries. He decided that when his bus number was called, he'd be the first one to board so he could sit as far back as he wanted. Savannah always sat in the front seat next to the door.

Kenneth found himself doodling on a piece of scrap paper when bus number fourteen was called over the PA system.

Fourteen had always been called after seventy-four. He probably missed hearing his number, but if he had, Savannah, sitting on the other side of the room, also missed it as well. Kenneth had never known her to be absent-minded about anything, particularly when it came to leaving school for the day. She never hesitated to leave, unlike Sue, who sniffled every time it was time to go home.

Kenneth glanced over at his homeroom teacher to see if anything might be amiss.

Mr. Dunkelson sat behind his desk, grading papers as he always did at the end of the day. If he had observed anything unusual, he hadn't thought it significant enough to look up from the motion of his red pen upon white paper. By this time of day, stubble had started growing on his face so that his normally open, smiling mug looked older than usual.

He reached with an index finger to push his glasses further up his nose. He seemed not in the least perturbed, not from where Kenneth sat.

Bus number thirty-three was called.

Kenneth's foot tapped against the floor.

He resisted the urge to bite his fingernails, a habit which had drawn the ire of his mother one too many times for his liking.

Only two more buses to go.

Seventy-four might be late, but surely not this late.

Eighty-three and forty-one were called.

Kenneth found himself sitting alone in the classroom with Mr. Dunkelson and Savannah.

To Kenneth's surprise, his teacher appeared drowsy.

Dunkelson's head drooped while his eyes, half-closed, failed to observe that he had scribbled red marks on the surface of his desk instead of on a test. Shortly thereafter, he fell asleep.

That was when everything changed.

### FOUR

A COLUMN OF air shimmered in front of Mr. Dunkelson's desk and bent in upon itself, as though from a nearby source of heat.

Kenneth had no other way to describe the phenomenon he observed.

It split vertically down the middle, like he'd seen on that Charlton Heston movie they put on television every Easter. In the movie, Heston had raised up his staff, and the sea had split apart so the Israelites could escape the pharaoh's chariots.

Now, the very air in front of Kenneth was doing the same thing.

A vertical blackness opened up, a blackness so complete that Kenneth thought no light could ever penetrate it.

A faint whirring sound echoed throughout the room.

Kenneth saw Savannah put her hands over her ears.

He wondered where the sound was coming from.

Then, he noticed a pencil suspended in mid-air next to his leg.

He'd knocked his pencil off his desk, yet it hadn't completed its fall. The pencil pointed upward, stuck in mid-air as though encased in glass.

Kenneth reached out a hand to grab it. The closer his hand got to the pencil, the more resistance he felt.

It reminded him of the time in science class when the teacher had him work with magnets. He had tried to nudge both north poles together, but no matter how hard he tried, they would slide away from each other of their own accord.

He thought of this as his hand slid off to the side, as though an invisible force prevented him from grabbing his pencil.

He tried standing up.

Before his knees could strike the underside of the desk, the resistance made itself felt again.

His whole body slid off abruptly to the left.

He struck the carpet, backside-first.

Kenneth blinked in surprise.

He hadn't expected that to happen.

He stood up, trying to get his bearings.

His feet felt unusually heavy.

The yawning chasm in front of Mr. Dunkelson's desk had grown wider.

Kenneth saw Savannah laying on the floor, curled into a ball.

All thoughts of the names she'd called him during gym class vanished from his head.

Trying not to touch anything, Kenneth staggered along slowly, awkwardly in front of the row of desks, struggling to maintain his balance, grunting mightily as he fought to walk across the room, something he had done countless times before, no more than ten, maybe twelve steps at most, but had never given much thought to until now.

What the hell's happening?

He passed the chasm.

He thought he heard a voice, though whatever sound registered in his ears had been so faint that he couldn't make out what had been said.

Had Mr. Dunkelson said something?

No, he remained sleeping at his desk, even as the whirring noise frantically increased in pitch.

Kenneth reached Savannah.

An angry purple bruise lay on her arm.

Kenneth looked down and saw that similar blotches had developed on his knees.

He hadn't noticed the pain until he looked down.

The throbbing suddenly made itself known.

Pain pulsated in his knees, nearly causing him to collapse.

He wondered if this was how magnets felt when they were forced towards together.

If so, he regretted all the time he'd spent in the classroom pushing metal objects with the same magnetic charge together.

Savannah, still curled in a fetal position, seemed not to notice him. Yet when Kenneth's fingers touched the bruise on her arm, he didn't feel the same force repelling him away.

Amidst the increasing chaos of the classroom, Kenneth had time to consider that he must not be repelled from Savannah because they must have opposite magnetic charges.

Why that should matter now when it never mattered before, he didn't know.

The black space widened until Kenneth saw it for what it was-a doorway.

He had seen such things on television before, though he hadn't ever expected a man to walk through.

Yet a man did walk through.

The man wore a spacesuit so cumbersome that he had to lift one foot up to the height of his shin before he planted it back down. The spacesuit, made completely out of metal, bore markings Kenneth didn't recognize.

By now, the whirring sound had increased so much that the desks were vibrating. Kenneth felt the sensations in his feet. Even so, each step Spacesuit took rang loud above the din. Every plodding footstep made produced a crash which left an indentation upon the tile floor. Debris sprang up in the air, slowed, then stopped before they could touch the ground. As a result, by the time the man reached Kenneth, he'd left a trail behind in midair to mark his passage.

Kenneth tried to speak.

He heard the words inside his head, yet all the noise around him drowned out all sound.

Spacesuit touched Kenneth on the shoulder with one hand.

Kenneth felt something puncture his skin.

Without warning, he felt his consciousness drifting away from him.

He struggled to stay awake even while his head drooped.

He had time enough to register Spacesuit touching Savannah on the back.

He wanted to shout a protest.

Instead, he crumpled to the ground.

### FIVE

THE AFTERNOON HAD become unseasonably hot.

Carol Wren had sweat her way through the afternoon gym classes, thankful at least that she didn't have to be reminded of Kenneth Yardrow for the rest of the day.

As she changed out of her sweaty, sticky workout clothes in the faculty restroom, she felt a twinge in her knee.

She held her shirt above her head, stopping to consider what that might mean. Other than her morning run, she hadn't exerted herself too strenuously. Her day had consisted of walking around to make sure each student was able to play badminton or volleyball without injuring themselves.

Now, of all times, when she finally had a moment to herself, her knee had twinged.

That meant something, but she did not know what.

She heard from a distance a sound she wouldn't have expected to hear in a middle school.

A great roaring noise erupted from somewhere.

She had time enough to think that someone had torn a hole in the universe, except that idea surely had to be the product of a feverished, overworked mind that had seen too many science fiction movies.

She slid her t-shirt over her torso and bolted out of the restroom, heedless of the duffel bag she left beside the toilet.

Behind the roaring, she heard a crunching noise.

It sounded as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to a classroom floor.

She brushed shoulders with Iris Oulette, the eighth-grade science teacher, hardly noticing the other woman's astonished expression, nor her insistent pleas to do something for God's sake.

Carol herself didn't know what to do other than push open the door of Leonard Dunkelson's homeroom class.

She was suddenly in the presence of a figure in a heavy metallic suit walking forward towards a gaping, black nothingness.

The figure carried two children under each arm.

Upon seeing both children Carol's knee gave such a painful complaint that she wondered if the injury had finally come back with all its unrelenting ferocity.

She struggled to step forward.

Taking the first step wasn't as easy as she expected. She moved as though mired in molasses while reaching her hand to the girl dangling like a rag doll underneath a powerful silver arm.

If he even noticed Carol at all, the silver-clad phantom paid her no mind. Each step he took left a four-inch-deep indentation in the floor, pulverizing blue and white patterned tiles.

He stepped into the black space.

Harold Dunkelson slumped over sideways, crashing to the ground.

The figure passed through the portal just the black space closed in upon itself.

Carol toppled forward just as she had been about to reach it.

Her knee had given out on her.

At that moment, her brain spinning and her stomach churning up bile, she didn't feel that pain that would haunt her for weeks to come.

She didn't even feel her head strike the floor, or see the blood that was leaking out from somewhere.

She blinked her eyes once, twice, three times.

She knew enough to say she was awake and alive, but more than that, she could not have explained anything that had just happened.

### DAY ONE

### ONE

KENNETH AWOKE WITH a metallic taste in his mouth.

Upon opening his eyes, he saw five bright lights above him.

He squinted his eyes shut, putting an arm over them.

He groaned.

Someone had set him on a hard-packed bed similar in feel to stone that Kenneth felt sore all over. His mind whirled about, trying to recall what had happened to him.

He felt as though he'd been thrown around in so many ways that he had lost all sense of direction.

The number seventy-four stuck in his mind, though at first he couldn't remember why this should be significant.

Then he recalled that this had been his bus number.

My bus hadn't arrived, and...

Kenneth sat up.

Doing so set off alarms of pain throughout his body. He blinked open his eyes, trying to acclimate himself to the light. Bright red stars danced along his vision.

Kenneth saw that he still wore his school clothes, which had been a pair of jean shorts and a t-shirt with a superhero symbol on it. Two twin bruises decorated his knees. He remembered banging into the desk, though some part of him wanted to believe that all of it had been a dream. He did remember falling asleep in study hall, then being woken up by a teacher.

Through parched lips, he called out in a hoarse whisper, "Savannah."

Someone must have heard him, for directly behind him a door opened.

He didn't hear the door open. He saw it in the reflection from the shimmering metal walls all around him.

A tall adult figure entered the room.

Kenneth turned around to look.

The man wore a toga after the style Kenneth had read in the history books about ancient Rome. The toga was gray with green trim at the top. The man's left shoulder lay exposed, though his right shoulder did not. He had a long, shiny mane of black hair that ran down his back to his hip. Kenneth saw that the man had bushy eyebrows.

The thirteen-year-old boy might have laughed if he didn't hurt as much as he did.

"Good morning, significant citizen," the man said. "I trust you are well?"

The words came to Kenneth as though they traveled a long way to reach him. He put a hand to his forehead, already despising the headache that he felt growing there.

"What?" was all Kenneth could utter. The back of his eyes felt like they were being punctured by shards of glass and he blinked his eyes in rapid succession, trying to will away the pain.

"I am your introductory guide to the 73rd century. My designation is Unquill Hester. Please be at ease. You were chosen out of an infinite number of lives in the time stream because you are special." The man, larger than any man Kenneth could remember seeing, looked delighted. He couldn't stop grinning.

A light danced in the man's eyes. He looked to Kenneth like a scientist who'd just discovered a particularly fascinating insect in its natural habitat.

"Say what?" Kenneth violently rubbed at his face with both hands.

The man bowed before Kenneth. His hair flopped over the front of his head in a way that Kenneth could not help but find comical.

"Ahh, yes, do forgive me. It always slips my mind that time transport subjects often experience a certain amount of-shall we say, disorientation-upon entering another point in time. Please don't be alarmed. It is not my intention to cause you distress. You have been chosen, you and one other. The other remains asleep at present. Shall I wake her for you?"

"The-the other. You mean Savannah?"

Kenneth didn't think he liked the idea of being alone in the future with a girl who had just got done insulting him only a few hours before. He started thinking of all the things he would say to her. Many of them he would not repeat to his parents.

"Is that her designation? A geographical area that is neither plains nor forest, yet a mixture of both. This land type vanished completely from record around the 30th century when-"

"Let her sleep," Kenneth said. "I'm hungry, and sore. You have anything to eat?"

"Ahh, yes," Unquill's green eyes glowed. "The consumption of nutrients. This possibility has been foreseen, fortunately. In preparation of your arrival, we have begun growing edible plants. We have not done so for many, many years. Such a long time it's been. But then, it's too much to expect citizens of the past to have evolved beyond the need for nourishment."

Kenneth grunted. "Whatever. I don't understand what you're saying. Just bring me anything. I'm hungry. It's supper time."

Unquill seemed to grow taller for a moment before he left the room.

Kenneth ran a hand down his face, trying to grasp his situation. He'd heard something about centuries and time stream.

Time travel, then?

He considered the possibility of Unquill being an actor hired by somebody as a part of an elaborate farce. Yet the man had seemed too genuine to Kenneth, too willing to serve while at the same time establishing the notion of his own superiority.

If he really was in the 73rd century, the man in the spacesuit must have brought him here.

With the room to himself, Kenneth tried to recall every detail he had observed before he had passed out. The behemoth he had seen touch Savannah on the back looked to be about the same height as Unquill. The black passage had appeared all of its own accord. Kenneth had just been getting ready to decorate the school yards with toilet paper when the mysterious rift had appeared.

The prank had been at the back of his mind, not yet fully formed into a conscious thought. Yet, he recognized it now as a true thought, one that would have remained if the bus didn't show when it was supposed to.

He thought about the math and geography homework he had been assigned, which he usually didn't bother doing. Kenneth liked math about as much as he liked waiting. The numbers had always filled up his head until he couldn't keep them straight anymore. Then the textbook would ask a question about trains or cars, or some other improbable event that never happened, and ask him to figure out the solution. Kenneth hadn't ever really understood why the people who wrote those math books didn't solve the problems themselves, then give him the answer. Even at thirteen, he knew the world worked that way. Those who couldn't solve problems on their own didn't try to improve their problem-solving skills but relied instead on people who could do the work for them.

The evening meal back in the twentieth century would have been leftover chili from the weekend. Kenneth's stomach growled, thinking of the two bowls he would have had-might still have, if he got back in time for supper. Unlike the school cafeteria food, which Kenneth had always found gross to the point of absurdity, his mother's cooking always left him with a full belly before he sat down in front of the seventeen-inch television in his room to play video games.

He wanted to play Super Violent Girls now. He wondered if anyone even knew of that game over five thousand years after its release.

While Kenneth was lost in thought, Unquill returned with a plate full of broccoli. Kenneth had never liked broccoli, even when his parents had smothered it in soy sauce. Unquill lay the plate of green vegetables on the bed. Kenneth felt it might be rude to refuse any kind of food after he'd asked to be fed. He picked up one piece of broccoli and bit into it. The vegetable tasted better than he expected, crisp and wholesome. To his own surprise, Kenneth found himself eating vegetable after vegetable until he'd eaten them all. Then he ate up the leftover pieces from the plate, licking his fingers afterward.

"That was good," Kenneth said. He surprised himself by meaning what he said. He hadn't intended to compliment anyone on futuristic food, especially when all the vegetables he had tried always tasted bland.

Unquill appeared on the point of tears. He clasped both hands before him, as though in supplication. "Oh significant citizen, you must forgive me. What a moving sight I have just witnessed. The past has come alive right before my very eyes. I never thought to see it! Oh, what a pleasant ritual it must be to consume plants. Tell me, is it true that people from your century consumed animals as well? Such things are forbidden today, of course. I cannot imagine yet. Is it even possible?"

"Yeah, we did that sometimes. Chicken and beef, mostly," Kenneth said, thinking of the pieces of hamburger meat in the leftover chili.

"Oh yes, I'd forgotten that as well. So many facts about your time had to be learned that I glanced over what I deemed to be minutiae. Now I can see I was wrong. How significant for you to be brought forward in time to a people who have forbidden activities you find commonplace. You must think us extra-terrestrials."

"Not really. You look like a Roman glam rocker," Kenneth said, smiling. He patted his stomach and suppressed a burp.

"Oh? I do not understand these terms. What is a 'Roman glam rocker'? Is that your terminology for asteroidal geologist? Oh, but people didn't start exploring space seriously until the 28th century. Dear me, it's all so confusing. You are from the 21st century, are you not?"

"Yeah," Kenneth said. "What difference does that make?"

"All the difference in the world, my young significance! All the difference in the world. Do you not know that at the beginning of the 22nd century, there was-oh, but perhaps I should not tell you about that. You are scheduled to return in two weeks, after all." Unquill looked away from Kenneth, blushing as though he had embarrassed himself.

"What do you mean, scheduled to return? You're going to send me back to school after all? I think I'd rather stay here." Kenneth crossed his arms over his chest. He was prepared to stay right there in that spot, even if the man called Unquill proved to be as strong as he appeared.

"Ahh, yes, antipathy for public education. Well, I can hardly blame you, given the nature of the education given out during your time. Most historians agree public education from those days more closely resembles propaganda than the dissemination of fact.

"Ahem, yes, to answer your question, you have been brought here to solve a problem we cannot. I regret to tell you this, for it is the shame of our people to interrupt the lives of two of the most important citizens in the time stream, yet I must tell you. Otherwise, how would you know what to do while you are here? Oh dear, troublesome indeed."

"Let's just start from the beginning," Kenneth said.

"The universe has no beginning," Unquill replied. He furrowed his eyebrows, trying to understand the meaning of Kenneth's statement.

"The beginning of...whatever it was that happened."

"Ah yes, that beginning. Yes, I can tell you that story safely enough, I believe."

### TWO

UNQUILL PAUSED FOR a moment.

To Kenneth, it appeared the tall man collected his thoughts. When Unquill spoke, the tone of his voice dropped. He sounded like a completely different person to Kenneth.

"We call this the Golden Century, for in all of our studies of the time stream, we have yet to discover a society more prosperous than ours. We live in the 73rd century. I told you that, yes? In the middle of the 75th century, there will occur a spiritual re-awakening which will lead individuals to question the wisdom of their current way of life. We have seen this. Afterward, people will have great faith. In exchange, they will begin consuming nutrients again. With our population of one hundred and twelve trillion-"

"Trillion?"

Kenneth was incredulous. He'd heard the word used when people on the news spoke about debt, but he hadn't ever really understood the significance of the word. How many fingers would he have to count on before he reached a trillion? A trillion, of course, he suddenly thought, answering his own question. That didn't bring him any closer to conceptualizing the number in concrete terms.

"Yes, with one hundred and twelve trillion people, there just won't be enough nutrients to go around for all. It will be a time of great upheaval. The prosperity we have enjoyed thus far will come to an end, as we are told all things must come to an end. The spiritual re-awakening occurs because of a single man. He is designated Hinjo Junta. We-that is, myself together with the other members of the Temporal Constabulary-don't have a lot of information on him. We know he was born on a Saturday sometime during April 7201. We know he will die in the year 7454, during the re-awakening. His cause of death will come as a result of his refusal to continue utilizing his body's own natural processes to stay alive. A foolish man, perhaps, yet one many will come to see as a martyr. We have grown too much, we are too many, they will say.

"So it will happen-or, from the perspective of one who can see the time stream, it has already happened-that many citizens of this world will follow Hinjo's path. Death upon death upon death until the world becomes paralyzed from the loss of so many of its citizens. By the year 7500, it is estimated that a total of one hundred thousand people will remain on this planet."

Kenneth involuntarily startled. Though he didn't know exactly what a trillion was, he had a sense that the number was far greater than one hundred thousand, a number more easily imagined. One hundred thousand had always been the number his father wanted to pass in yearly salary from his job working at a pharmaceutical company.

"Ah yes, I see you realize. It is the end of our history as we know it. One hundred thousand people will remain, many of whom have lost the ability to procreate. The human race, all of its successes and failures, all of it will be destroyed by a single man. Kenneth Yardrow, I wish for you and your companion to speak with this man. To do so, you will first have to find him. We've not been able to do so. We, the Temporal Constabulary, hope that you will succeed where we have failed."

"You said, 'significant citizen' a few times," Kenneth said. "What does that mean?"

Unquill cocked his head to one side, as though he did not understand why anyone should ask such a question. He cleared his throat, then said, "Why, you are significant. It has been determined by an evaluation of the lives of every person throughout history. I won't bore you with the details. It would take eons to explain. We only have, well, half an eon. Suffice it to say that you will do great things when you grow up. Great things. Greater than any other human being who has ever lived. Your companion is of no less significance than yourself. Both of you make a couple which continues to fascinate historians even unto this day."

"Couple?" Kenneth grimaced at the word. "But I don't like her. She said my belly button smells."

"How could it do that? You don't have a nose over your stomach."

Kenneth laughed. "It's a, whatchamacallit, an expression."

"Regardless of how you may feel, it's already happened." The corners of Unquill's mouth perked up as he smiled. "We suspect that-well, I won't tell you now. It would spoil the surprise. It's such a terribly difficult thing, to know all of history. Of course, one's own history is forbidden to be known. History, especially future history, is too rigid. To know the course one's life takes, oh dear, that would be too much."

"Why did you say I have two weeks?"

"That's the allotted time we have based on your temporal alignment device. You may have noticed it attached to your hip?"

In fact, Kenneth had not noticed the device. He lifted his shirt up, looking down at himself. He found a small bulge on the right side of his hip underneath his skin. He pressed his fingers there. The device had been implanted without his permission. When he applied pressure to it, the device gave way. When he released the pressure, the device bulged forth from underneath his skin once again.

"This is a temporal thing-a-ma-jig?"

Unquill nodded, pleased. "It's a temporal alignment device, but you may call it a thing-a-ma-jig if you find the name easier to remember. While it has been placed under your skin, you needn't worry about any ill effects. By the fourteenth day, it will have dissolved into your blood stream. It is a piece of organic technology that maintains your temporal charge so that you don't-well, explode."

Kenneth asked his next question carefully. "Explode?"

"Yes, yes, yes, don't worry. It won't happen as long as the device is in place. Were it not place, your presence here in this time would cause too many problems with your biology. We have studied the phenomenon in close detail. Our first time travelers, whom we sent a day forward into the future, bridged the void easily enough. Yet, I fear to report that a prolonged stay caused rather, um, unfortunate results. We know such things have happened to travelers in the past, for our historical records tell us so. The human body synchronizes with the time period in which it exists. Here in the 74th century, we've learned how to prevent that occurrence. So while you are here to complete a task, you only have fourteen days to do so. After that, if you have not completed your task, you will die."

"I don't understand what you mean about all that stuff," Kenneth interlocked his fingers behind his head, leaning against a wall. He looked away from Unquill. "I'm just a kid, remember? Sheesh, stop talking to me in all that complicated language. The only part I understand is that I have to find this guy, convince him not to be a prick, and I can go home, right? Is that all there is to it?"

"Well, not exactly, but-"

"Okay, then let's get started," Kenneth said. He jumped off the bed. Standing before Unquill, he remembered that he was short for his age. Unquill, at least eight feet tall, towered over him. Kenneth looked up. "If it's a mystery, Kenny Yardrow, Private Eye is on the case! There's no kickball too far for me to find, no lost hanky that I can't locate. One person should be easy."

"Yes? I certainly hope so," Unquill said.

Sweat trickled down his forehead.

### THREE

WHEN KENNETH ENTERED Savannah's room, he found her still sleeping.

The door, made of green energy, hadn't made any noise when it turned off to let him through. Nor did it make any noise once it came back on. With both himself and Unquill in the room with Savannah, Kenneth had the distinct impression that the room was a holding cell, rather than a guest suite.

He turned to Unquill, who raised his shoulders in a shrug. Unquill then clapped his hands. So big were his hands that the clap resounded through the room.

Savannah started awake. She rubbed at her eyes. Both her pigtails had come undone. Her brown hair lay about her shoulders in a tangled, knotted mass. Circles had developed under her eyes. Someone had replaced her buttoned shirt with a plain, loose white t-shirt. A yellow and pink friendship bracelet lay around her left wrist.

Kenneth hadn't noticed that before.

She blinked a few times before recognizing him.

"Good morning," she said, yawning. "What's for breakfast?"

Kenneth had a moment to wonder whether she really was awake, or if her brain had stopped somewhere along the way to unconsciousness. He had expected her first question to be about where she was, who the giant standing before her might be.

Instead, she had thought with her stomach.

Kenneth found that idea amusing.

Unquill seemed ready to burst with anticipation. "Once again? May I?"

"Wha...?" Savannah rubbed the back of her neck.

Kenneth said, "Old man, get some food, will you?"

"I'm not old," Unquill said. "I'll have you know I'm a stately three hundred twenty-seven this year. But I will comply with your request nonetheless. Such a joy it is to see antiquated rituals in person."

Once Unquill left, Savannah sat up in her bed. She looked at Kenneth for answers.

Kenneth shook his head, smiling. "I don't understand half of what he told me. You can ask him to explain, I guess. You might have better luck than I did. Basically, we've got to find this dude called Hinjo."

"Hinjo," Savannah repeated.

She stretched her arms out in front of her.

One of her elbows cracked.

They waited in silence until Unquill returned. Once he did, they both felt relieved at having someone else in the room. He brought with him a bowl full of cauliflower. Savannah made a face at the bowl. She took a tentative bite, then, just as Kenneth had, ate as though she hadn't eaten anything in years. She handed an empty bowl back to Unquill.

She said, "Why can't they make vegetables like that at home?"

"I am told they use a process called-"

"Hey, old man, come on, we're short on time or whatever. Let's get started," Kenneth said, poking Unquill in the wrist with one finger.

Savannah furrowed her eyebrows. She licked her fingers clean, then said, "What am I doing here?"

"Ah yes, let me explain," Unquill said. Then, he said to Kenneth, "Please do not interrupt me, significant citizen. I will accord her the same courtesy I have accorded you. Now then, to answer your question..."

### FOUR

AFTER UNQUILL FINISHED explaining, an explanation during which Kenneth interrupted anyway, Savannah sat on the edge of the bed she'd slept in, her eyes wide. No one spoke.

Kenneth leaned against a wall, fatigue coming over him. He didn't know why he felt tired after he had just finished sleeping.

Savannah said, "The 73rd century? You haven't gone, I don't know, crazy or something? This isn't a dream, right? If it is, it's not a very good one. I'm very sore, and I don't want to be here with this smelly head."

Kenneth waved a hand in the air, dismissively.. "It's not my fault if your sense of smell doesn't appreciate me. I can't do anything about that."

Savannah put her hands on her hips. She said, "Well of course I can't appreciate anyone who smells as much as you do. Smelly head."

"Now, now, please don't argue," Unquill said. "You two have to work together on this. One of you alone won't suffice. Both your minds are needed for this task."

Savannah turned away from Kenneth. "How hard can it be to find one man when you can see through all of space and time? I'll do it myself."

Kenneth turned from Savannah and said, "If you apologize for calling me smelly, I'll work with you, Savannah. Not before."

"Why should I apologize for something that's true?"

Unquill wrung his hands together. "But, but, but, this isn't the way married couples behave. At least, not in-"

Savannah suddenly whirled to face Unquill. "Married? Are you kidding? You really are crazy! This really is a dream!" Her face clouded and her words tumbled forth in a staccato burst of annoyance mixed with anger. "I'm a kid. I mean, he and I are kids. Married? There's no way. Absolutely not. Forget it. I mean, it's out of the question-totally out of the question! Never in a million years!"

"Then I shall take you both to the year 1,000,001 and you can be married."

"I'm thirteen years old! Thirteen-year-olds don't get married! And what makes you think I'd want to even be with old Smelly Belly here, anyway?" She paused long enough to cast a baleful stare at Kenneth.

Kenneth rolled his eyes. He snorted derisively. "Uh-uh. You gotta be kidding me. No way in hell am I marrying her." He paused, letting his annoyance at the situation subside. Then he suddenly spoke again, his voice tinged with resignation. "Look, I can't say I like the idea much either. I don't want to be around her any more than I need to. Even I know there's not much of a choice. But we might as we look for this dude or whatever. We've got nothing better to do." He paused again before changing the subject.

Anything to stop talking about marriage.

"Hey, you don't have video games here, do you?"

"Ah, no, I'm afraid we don't."

Savannah fumed, "And I bet you don't have horses either. You know, the ones you can ride?"

"Horses? I, um-"

"Never mind," Kenneth said. Then, turning to Savannah, he spoke in a softer, more conciliatory tone. "Look, can you stop insulting me? We don't like each other. I get that. That won't change. At least for now let's do this as fast as we can so we can back to our old lives. Okay?"

Savannah didn't answer. She turned to Unquill. "Can you take us back if we finish the job before the time expires?"

"Not I-but the Temporal Constabulary can. The answer to your question is yes. You can be returned to your own time whenever it is convenient to do so. All that is required is to make a request with the agency, which they will grant. Then, everything takes care of itself."

"Hmph, fine. Whatever," Savannah said. "Let's just do it then. I'm tired of arguing. Where do we begin?"

"With sleep," Unquill touched each of them at the nape of the neck. Kenneth felt his consciousness suddenly deserting him. "I'm afraid that I can't let you stay awake too long on the first day. The strain of-"

### DAY TWO

### ONE

IN ANOTHER ROOM, not far from where Kenneth and Savannah had slept, a cavernous door opened up before them.

A large, black pillar dominated the room from its position in the center. Energy pulsated through the pillar as it thrummed out a rhythm. Cords as wide as Kenneth's bed ran along the floor, all leading to the ebony obelisk. The resultant effect made the room look like it had several unmarked speed bumps designed into it. Four work stations, each containing a metal seat, a keyboard and screen, encircled the imposing black structure. Kenneth noted that even after the passage of so many years, the basic design of the keyboard hadn't changed. It even retained the INS key that he'd ripped out with a pair of pliers from his personal laptop.

Kenneth, Savannah and Unquill stood before a large computer screen. Unquill explained that the screen, larger than the chalkboards at school, represented access points to the planet's central computer. The computer, the only one in the world, had access points at every Temporal Constabulary station throughout the planet. There were over one hundred thousand of those, Unquill said.

The physical hard drive wasn't located in any one place. Instead, each component connected with one another so that the system as a whole only worked when their version of the internet-as Kenneth understood it-functioned properly. Since there hadn't been a malfunction in one hundred eighty-four years, Unquill felt confident about using it for their purpose.

Images came and went so fast that Kenneth could not keep up with them all. He tried focusing on several in particular, only to have them disappear out of sight before he could discover what they were.

He finally was able to discern a metal object that resembled a rickshaw, a woman sleeping on a couch, and a fluttering red bird. No matter how long he stared at the images, he couldn't see any pattern that might lead to Hinjo.

After several moments, he said, "What is all this?"

Unquill did not take his eyes off the screen. "I am searching for Hinjo, just as I have searched many times before. I entered his name into the search field, just as you saw. The computer brings up all the relevant results that might lead to his location. I have spent a total of three hundred fourteen hours in front of this screen, watching all the results. I have not yet seen anything that would provide a clue about him."

Kenneth sighed. "And you entered the same keyword into the field every time?"

"Why yes," Unquill said. "Naturally. Since the computer is constantly acquiring new data, one must repeat a search to account for new results."

"Why don't you try something like religion?" Savannah said. She looked at the floor, unable to keep her eyes upon the screen.

Unquill beamed. "Ahh, yes, I had not considered that. A different keyword. Yes, it's possible. I will try it."

A few moments passed. Kenneth frowned. He saw the images clearer this time: the metal rickshaw, the woman, the bird. He said, "Try another search. Look up, oh, I don't know, barn owl."

"I don't see what that has to do with Hinjo, but I will try it." Unquill said, resetting the search and entering the keywords.

With the third search, Kenneth saw the same procession of results. They came in the exact same order every time. "Unquill, I think your computer has a problem."

Unquill didn't say anything at first. He kept staring at the screen. At last he said, "I think you may be right. Oh dear, this is rather a bother."

"I don't understand what's going on," Savannah huffed. "It's just a lot of random stuff up there, right?"

Unquill paused for a moment, considering how best to reply. He shifted from one foot to the other. Having opted not to sit down in the chair, Unquill now gave Kenneth the impression of someone made uncomfortable by a person half his size.

"These images are anything but random. Terrible truncations, I think-well, the computer is returning the same search results for every query I enter."

"What does that mean?" Savannah asked.

Unquill massaged his right wrist with his left hand. He replied, "We can't rely on the computer. Or, at the very least, we'll have to fix the computer before we can get any information about Hinjo Junta."

Savannah said, "Can't we just hire a private eye?"

Kenneth had to keep himself from laughing.

"Eh? I don't see how a private ocular attachment could assist in this situation."

Savannah sighed. "I guess not."

Kenneth spoke up. "How long does it take to repair the computer?"

"Oh dear, oh dear, I really can't say for certain. I can't even say for certain where the problem is. It could be anywhere." Unquill paused, lost in thought.

Suddenly, he brightened.

"Indeed, it might not even be the computer that's giving us the same information over and over to us. It might be one of the access points. Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Yes, that's possible. I'll check."

Kenneth and Savannah looked at each other for a moment.

Over one hundred thousand of them.

Unquill was going to check them.

Savannah took a step back.

### TWO

KENNETH HAD NEVER considered patience a virtue.

Even during gym class, where he typically sat out all the class activities, he had always been restless, waiting for the period to end.

At first, it had been a game for him to fight with Mrs. Wren about whether he'd do anything other than twiddle his thumbs in a corner somewhere. Some days, he'd even show up to gym class in his jeans, not having changed into his workout gear. After a while, Mrs. Wren came to ignore him. When that happened, Kenneth had always been left on his own to pass the time in whatever way he could.

Sitting alone in the access room reminded Kenneth of those class periods.

He had to watch while Unquill fiddled about with the computer. Unquill's hands flew about the keyboard while he whispered to himself under his breath. Savannah had sat down on one of the wide power cords under the floor, away from Kenneth. He glanced at her once, just long enough to see that her eyes drooped. He didn't want to look too long, lest she sense his gaze.

He thought about what Unquill had said about marriage. His own parents had separated for two months when he was eleven. Kenneth had blamed himself. He remembered distinctly how it felt to walk on eggshells every minute while at home, lest the slightest word cause a blow-up.

He had decided one day that, if all he could expect as a result of attempting conversation was irascibility, he just wouldn't say anything.

Before long, he found himself staying quiet in class, even when called upon. He had been brought into the guidance counselor's office. The man with the off-color brown mustache smelled of wood shavings.

Kenneth had confessed everything right then and there.

The dam had burst.

He hadn't known that the counselor's report would reach his parents. If he had, he wouldn't have said anything.

Soon afterward, his parents got back together. Three months passed before Kenneth felt safe enough to ask for the salt at the dinner table.

In Kenneth's opinion, marriage had caused all those negative consequences. He didn't think he would ever get married, even if that meant learning how to cook his own meals.

Moreover, he couldn't see himself getting married to Savannah, a girl he barely knew.

He wondered why she had come to him that day.

She hadn't ever done so before.

They shared gym and English class. In gym class, she had always been aloof, separate from everyone. In English class, her favorite subject, she always had her hand in the air. Kenneth felt the classes might as well have been conducted as a conversation between the teacher and Savannah alone. All the other students only had to listen. Kenneth hadn't ever liked English, so he'd found himself doodling during that period.

He couldn't see himself spending time with her every day.

He found himself wishing that Unquill hadn't brought him forward to the future. The future, as Kenneth perceived it, turned out to be a boring place. They didn't even have pizza.

### THREE

SAVANNAH HAD TRIED to understand everything Unquill had said.

Bits and pieces of information floated through the barrier she believed was blocking her path to knowledge.

She had been abducted and brought into the future. Furthermore, she had been brought to this place in order to speak to a man who would destroy the human race.

Savannah didn't know what she thought about that.

She supposed there would be no one around to preserve the works of Robert Frost, a poet she particularly enjoyed reading while in study hall. That, to her, was the worst consequence that could come out of humans no longer being alive.

She understood the word marriage well enough, though. She had dismissed it at once, especially after Kenneth's reaction during gym class.

She, like him, hadn't wanted to play badminton that day. A little conversation never hurt anyone, yet he had persisted in drawing forth from her mind a few words Savannah had heard her own father mention at six o'clock when the phone always rang as he sat down to eat.

She didn't want to repeat those words, partly because she didn't understand them all and partly because she knew the word that galled him the most.

After searching the computer with Kenneth, Unquill worked on his own, trying to determine the problem. Savannah didn't have the slightest idea what he was doing. She yawned. Images flashed across the screen. Unquill typed so fast that Savannah wondered if he'd break the keyboard. Whenever she'd sat down in front of the computer, she'd always found herself looking at the keys to see where they were. She couldn't imagine being able to type as fast as Unquill did, or how much training had to be required in order for him to do so.

She suddenly felt tired. She wanted to sleep, but at the same time stay awake.

Staring at the flashing images on the screen, she began to sense that many of them did repeat themselves. She watched Unquill cycle through a restart process, only to find it unchanged.

She lay down on a cord. Her hair spilled out in all directions. She rubbed at her eyes.

Savannah wondered if they made flip-flops in the future.

### FOUR

UNQUILL WAS SHORT.

He knew that he shouldn't be ashamed of his height.

Eight feet tall had been the utmost maximum many humans throughout history could be said to expect to grow into. Yet, with the standard height of ten feet tall, eleven at most, Unquill had always been aware of his size.

Everyone looked down at him. He could tell when they did this, for each person, irrespective of gender or age, always possessed that same odd glint in their eye.

Unquill couldn't explain it.

He often felt as though everyone went about patronizing him.

In his first hundred years of life, when he'd tried to fit in as a normal member of society, the camaraderie he'd experienced with his colleagues always left him feeling inadequate. He knew that how he used his body mattered more than what his body looked like, yet he also knew that, even after many thousands of years of recorded history, the human race remained a species which always judged books by their covers.

Unquill didn't like his cover. He often wished people would look inside, even if only for a little while.

These thoughts crept through his mind while he performed the mind-numbing task of trying to determine what the problem was with the computer.

It would still let him play games, though, if he wanted. He could enter a command to enter the world of Battleship Centaurs, yet any serious search activity of the computer always produced the same maddening sets of repeating images.

When the plan to retrieve the two small human children from their time had been conceived at the highest levels of the Temporal Constabulary, Unquill had made no comment.

He'd seen them in his future.

They all seen the children in their future, impossibly short, always loud, always eating, always needing to use the bathroom.

They had been thought defective at first. Beings which produced noise without substance could be no better than animals.

Yet, when Unquill had been asked to give his opinion, he had stated that he could find no two citizens with greater significance to history than the two selected.

The Constabulary had seen his evidence.

They could not dispute it.

Nor did they try.

However, with the search function not presently working, Unquill wondered if time was indeed absolute as he'd always been taught.

The whole basis of the project was to prove that it was not, after all.

If he had seen the destruction of the human race as an event that had already happened, what would then occur if the destruction could be prevented?

Unquill wondered at the implications of that.

Preventing the destruction of the human race would mean that he, at various points in the past, would never have seen it.

He then would have never taken steps to avert it.

If such steps weren't taken, then the destruction would happen anyway, which would mean...

Paradoxes hadn't been his specialty.

Within the Constabulary-a group already perceived as rule-mongering pencil-pushers-he had been a journeyman. He had always been the one to wear the protective suits that kept him safe while a tunnel through time opened around him. He had traveled to various points in history, just to see if such places warranted further investigation.

Moreover, given the planet's rotation about the sun, calculations for spatial displacement had to be applied as well. At every time landing, Unquill came close to passing out. He always arrived just at the edge of unconsciousness before his body's natural processes asserted themselves.

The historians-those individuals who spent long stretches of their lives within the times in which they visited-didn't experience the same repeated sensations that a journeyman like Unquill did.

If he'd paid more attention in his ten-year theory course, perhaps things might have turned out differently.

Remembering temporal theory gave Unquill a jolt.

He stopped typing. He looked at the screen, which continued to flash the same images at lightning-fast speed.

He recalled a lesson where, sitting outside in a chair too big for him, he'd heard the instructor talk about the Causality Paradox.

First discovered in the 64th century, journeymen and historians alike had the ability to go forward in time in order to see how they solved any complicated problem. Seeing how they solved it, they then went back in time to apply their solution. However, as the instructor had been careful to point out, depriving the mind of its ability to work out the problem by itself could lead to the problem not being solved in the correct manner. What the time traveler perceived as a solution might, in fact, complicate matters.

Unquill could, in theory, test the Causality Paradox concerning the matter of Hinjo.

He could go forward to see if a solution had indeed been found.

If events could be changed, such information would prove revolutionary.

Every respected theorist, of which there were many, agreed that the time stream could only be known, not changed.

Knowing this, Unquill wondered why he'd been allowed to stomp about in that room of stone and wood before taking history's two most significant citizens.

Had he always taken them?

He could not say for certain.

Perhaps the people with greater levels of responsibility than himself knew something he didn't.

Some minutes had passed while Unquill had stood lost in his thoughts.

The images on the screen slowed.

A primitive bicycle, a great roaring beast, a remote-controlled machine moving along a world of red sand.

His eyes widened when the computer did something it hadn't done before.

It stopped flashing images past.

It showed, in clear detail, the image of Hinjo Junta, as the future historians had recorded him, emaciated and dying.

Unquill pressed the escape key.

Nothing happened.

### FIVE

SAVANNAH AWOKE TO the sound of a man whooping in excitement.

She knew she hadn't been asleep long, for she'd developed the headache she always got whenever someone interrupted her sleep.

She saw the image of a man, his skin stretched tight around his face, his eyes dull, emotionless.

To her, this was the image of a man who had given up on life.

She felt sorry for him, for she knew that he would soon die.

She turned her face away, unable to look at the man.

A flicker of recognition in the back of her mind told her that she'd seen this man somewhere before.

Even while Unquill shouted the name Hinjo, she knew it had to be true.

Here was a man who would, according to Unquill, destroy the human race, yet she had met him before.

He had to have been a time traveler, she thought.

She looked up to catch Kenneth staring at her.

She stuck his tongue out at him.

He turned his face away, pouting.

Savannah stood up, feeling the weariness in her bones.

Her mother had often said that Savannah had no business being tired or sore since she was so young, yet Savannah couldn't help it. She had caught the insomnia bug earlier in the year. Now, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't sleep more than three or four hours a night. As a result, she found herself growling at Unquill's exclamation, who, when he turned about to give her his good news, looked abashed.

"What's going on?" Savannah asked.

"This man, this is Hinjo," Unquill said.

Kenneth stood up. "Really? He doesn't look that dangerous to me."

Unquill smiled.

To Savannah, the smile looked rather sad.

"This is an image taken at the end of his life. No other images of him exist because he had not come to be known among us before he made his choice. We tried locating him before this, but with no success."

They all studied the image for a while. Savannah couldn't shake the feeling that she'd seen the man somewhere before.

Though his his hair lay in tufts about his head, his chin and forehead retained a certain something to it.

At that moment, Savannah happened to look at Unquill.

She saw that, where he hadn't bothered brushing his hair in the back, Unquill had the same pattern of tufts that Hinjo did.

Savannah swallowed.

She took a deep breath before speaking. "Unquill, that man-it's you."

Unquill's mouth hung open in shock.

He approached Savannah until he stood in front of her.

Then he knelt before her.

Their eyes met.

Unquill's eyes retained the animation of life whereas Hinjo's did not.

Yet, they were the same color.

Up close, so close that Savannah could feel the heat of his breath on her face, she became ever more sure of herself.

Unquill backed off.

He pulled a weapon from his belt. "You believe what you say. I don't see any deception in you. Then, if you are right, I will kill myself here and now. That will end all the problems once and for all."

Kenneth spoke up. "No, it won't."

Savannah turned to look at him. "What do you mean?"

"Do we know how old Hinjo was when the photograph was taken?"

"Surely, all you need to do is calculate how old I am now, together with how many years will pass between now and then," Unquill said.

Savannah picked up Kenneth's train of thought. "Unless you factor in how many years you'd been alive while traveling to some other time. That might explain why you can't find, well, yourself. It's because you popped back in right at the moment when everything got started. You've been expecting Hinjo to live a normal life in obscurity like everyone else, right? What if that's not how it is? What if Hinjo travels-traveled-from a point in the past or future to the critical point you've been worried about?"

Unquill said, "Such things are forbidden. One must always return to the precise point from which one has left. To do otherwise would lead to a banishment from the Constabulary for all time. Some have tried it, believe me. All have failed."

Kenneth scratched his nose, then his chin, deep in thought. "If you went forward to study a future in which people don't exist anymore, you could just use their thingies whenever you wanted, couldn't you? No one would stop you."

Unquill's eyes widened for a moment. "I had not considered that. Perhaps it's time we put this matter before the Council of Thirds. If indeed it is I, then-"

The more Savannah looked at Unquill, standing before her and Hinjo on the screen, the more she felt certain that Unquill and Hinjo were the same person.

### SIX

SCHEDULING A MEETING with the Council of Thirds proved to be less of a problem than Unquill had said it would be.

Kenneth wondered if the Council, like Unquill, had knowledge of events that hadn't happened yet.

Had they set aside some time in their schedule just for a meeting they foresaw?

Kenneth could not say for certain.

The notion made him curious about the world he'd been transported into.

If one saw the future, then prepared for it, all the surprise of life would be gone-provided, of course, that people looked into their own futures.

Kenneth thought these people did.

He'd been so busy talking with Savannah about her idea-that Unquill and Hinjo were the same person-that he hadn't noticed himself exiting the computer room, or boarding a lift.

Nor had he even observed Unquill strapping him against a wall.

Looking about, he realized that while he hadn't paid attention to his surroundings, the world had gone mad for a moment.

He struggled against the yellow straps that held him tight against the cold steel wall even as he observed Unquill strapping himself in place. Kenneth noticed Savannah, pinned against the wall as he was, counting up to one hundred with her eyes closed.

The door of the lift closed with a loud thrum. The pungent scent of motor oil wafted through the tight, confined space.

The overhead light switched off, replaced by a red emergency light.

A countdown sounded from somewhere.

Kenneth counted up to five when the floor vanished underneath his feet.

He yelped, kicking his feet about.

Then, he fell.

The wall itself conveyed him downward, together with Unquill and Savannah. Kenneth felt himself hurtling forth at a speed he never would have guessed he could endure. He felt his stomach rising while various floors whizzed past him, numbers flashing by so quickly that he missed them when he blinked.

After ten seconds of falling, he squinted his eyes shut. His whole body felt heavier, as though it mocked him for even thinking he could be thin.

Just as soon as it had started, the ride ceased.

The wall slowed his descent gradually so that, by the time he reached the bottom, he felt the mechanisms slide home when the wall locked into place.

Everyone's restraints let go at once.

A white bag inflated around Kenneth's feet.

He picked it up and retched into it, leaving the bag on the floor.

While Unquill looked no worse for wear, Savannah looked pale. All the color had drained out of her face. "What was...that?"

"Instant gravity transport," Unquill said. He then saw her expression and added, "It's the fastest way to transport oneself from one level of the Constabulary to another. We are now at the topmost level, 126-A."

"Top?" Kenneth said in between ragged breaths.

"Yes, the Constabulary maintains a system of artificial gravity so that, for lack of a better way to put it, one stands on the ceiling and reaches up to the floor. This system was constructed to accommodate our mode of transit from one area to another. You will see, you will see," he said, beckoning them both to follow him.

Savannah grabbed her unused inflatable bag, carrying it with her. Kenneth didn't want to carry his along with him. He held his stomach, trying not to think about the method of transit Unquill wanted them both to use.

At the top level, Kenneth noticed that the air felt somewhat thinner than it had before. He grew tired easily. Neither he nor Savannah could keep up with Unquill's long, flowing strides.

Unquill soon left them behind in an enclosed hallway. Kenneth sat down on the floor. Savannah followed his example.

They struggled to catch their breath.

Before long, Unquill came to fetch them. He didn't say a word as he pulled Kenneth up by his arm.

Kenneth didn't know where he found the strength to complete the journey down the long hallway, yet he found it, for after some time had passed, he found himself standing at the end.

The end, to Kenneth's surprise, was a bullet-shaped craft, painted red with a thick purple stripe along the middle. Unquill touched a part of the craft and a door disconnected, tipping over until it served as an entrance ramp. Savannah boarded first, walking with slow steps, fearing some mishap. She sat down in a leather seat, strapping herself in at once.

Unquill prodded Kenneth along, who found a seat next to Savannah. He worked at the restraints for a time until he managed to secure his neck, legs and upper body. His arms hung loose at his sides.

Unquill did not strap himself in. He stood at the forward section of the ship, only short strides away from Kenneth, while the door retracted. It latched shut with a hiss of air.

A visual display materialized in front of him. He moved various objects around until he found the configuration he wanted. Then he pressed his palm in the middle. The display turned green, then faded from view.

Unquill lay face-down on the floor.

Before the craft had moved more than a few inches, the gravity normalized. Unquill fell upwards into what Kenneth saw was a padded ceiling.

Savannah's hair stood straight up, as though attracted by magnetism.

Kenneth felt blood rushing to his head.

For him, nothing had changed. He still thought of the floor as the floor and the ceiling as the ceiling.

His sight told him otherwise, for Unquill stood up, having suffered no ill effects from the change.

He pushed a button on Kenneth's chair, and then Savannah's chair. The chairs rotated in place 180 degrees. Kenneth's head stopped pounding once the motion completed.

Unquill said, "You may unstrap now."

### SEVEN

THE CITY APPEARED as nothing Kenneth had ever seen before.

Looking down, he couldn't make out much of the surface. He saw metal polygons, shapes whose function he could not discern. Around him rose all manner of buildings, some extending so high he could not see their summit.

Vehicles moved about in every direction across the bottom of a system of beams that reminded Kenneth of train tracks. The beams never intersected, nor crossed one another. Instead, they existed in layers, a great number of layers.

Kenneth could not see where the system began or where it ended.

He expected the craft to leap out of its starting position to race along its beam. Instead, the craft lurched its way forward before establishing a slow, easy pace. Kenneth then saw all the other craft moved in the same manner. He supposed that, if a person happened to live for hundreds of years, no one bothered much with speeding. He further supposed that the future did not have its own equivalent of stock car racing.

Now and then, he saw what he could only describe as a spaceship passing across the top of the world. He saw ships shaped like oblong eggs with a conical spike at each end. He could only guess at how such craft moved about, for he saw nothing like the warp engines he'd seen on television. He thought about asking Unquill, yet the large man seemed not to notice anything.

Savannah kept her eyes shut.

Kenneth remembered she was afraid of heights.

The journey lasted over an hour. Kenneth couldn't take his eyes off the gigantic metal jungle that was the city. A city, Unquill said in a solemn tone, called Williamsport.

He hadn't quite believed Unquill's claim of the world containing one hundred twelve trillion people, yet looking around at all the activity, he found that he could believe it. The human activity was so relentless, in fact, that Kenneth thought about asking Unquill if he'd got the number right. One hundred twelve trillion, to Kenneth, didn't seem like enough.

The craft came to a stop at its destination. Unquill said, "If we have time, I will teach you the proper ways of reverence for the gifts bestowed upon us."

Savannah, who found she could look about again, said, "Gifts? What do you mean? Why do you have that gravity thing going on? I didn't see why the accommodation needed to be made."

"You had your eyes closed."

### EIGHT

SAVANNAH DIDN'T LIKE his answer. She said, "I'm afraid of high places. So explain it to me anyway."

Unquill looked out the window, a thoughtful expression flickering across his face.

"They're called the Soonseen. At least, that's what we call them. They have a name for themselves which we can't pronounce. Soonseen is the closest pronunciation we've been able to make. I believe you'd call them aliens. In point of fact, they are protoplasmic beings with psychokinetic potentialites which have-"

"I don't understand those words," Savannah said.

"Ah yes, do pardon me," Unquill wiped his forehead with his hand. "Such things are assumed as common knowledge today. Suffice it to say they are...aliens. Yes, let us use that word. They gave us the skycarts over seven hundred years ago with only two conditions: we must not alter any of the material they give us and we must always use the routes they established. We are not allowed, for instance, to drill a hole in the bottom of the craft so that we might enter from below. Nor are we are allowed to place the skycarts on top of their rails, lest we break our agreement. In such a case, the Soonseen would take it all away from us. So they have promised.

"As a result, we invert the gravity of all buildings which use the skycart system. Have you seen them, significant citizen? Their ships still orbit the planet, watching over us."

Kenneth frowned. "I saw them, but-" he paused. "I saw them in space?"

"Ah yes, we are in the thermosphere at present-very high up," Unquill said. "In the measurements of your time, we are perhaps three hundred miles above the planet's surface? I don't know if that number is correct, but-"

Savannah gulped. "We won't fall, will we? Not from up here?"

Unquill laughed. "Oh no, no, we shall not. Many live up here. Mind you, it's not the most ideal place to live. The temperature is very hot up here. Much radiation shielding is required just to make a passage across. The fact that we can see out the window without getting burned-that's a mystery we've never yet been able to figure out.

"That is why we honor the conditions the Soonseen have set before us. They have made the impossible possible. They gave us extra room at a time during our history when we thought no more room existed. The human race, do you know, has always perceived personal space horizontally. Yet, no one had ever thought to view it vertically. That is the frontier we explore-the frontier of the sky."

Savannah didn't understand how the sky could be a frontier. She kept her questions to herself as they disembarked the craft, entering another hallway. This time, Unquill did not pace himself so quickly. He took a few steps, waited for her and Kenneth to catch up, then took a few more steps. They proceeded in this fashion until they reached an unmarked door.

Unquill placed his palm upon it. The door opened.

A blast of cold air greeted her as she entered.

Savannah put her hands in front of her face.

She had always heard people complaining about the middle school never having a strong enough air conditioning unit. She had never heard anyone complain about the air conditioning being too strong, yet those same faculty members who always grumbled during the months of May and September would struggle in the situation Savannah endured.

Unquill urged her forward with a hand on her back.

She took a few steps forward.

The cold air stopped assaulting her.

She looked back and up to see a frosted metal vent blasting its fury all over Kenneth, who let out a yelp of surprise. Turning forward, she beheld the room she'd entered. All manner of people came and went. A large round kiosk manned by twenty people stood in the center of room. Some stood in lines to be served. Others moved through the lines as some moved back to make space. Savannah saw other people emerge through portals like the one she'd passed through. They went under the cold air. They seemed not to notice.

"Here we are," Unquill said. "Williamsport Station. From here, it's just a short journey to the Council of Thirds."

Savannah didn't like the word "journey." To her, that implied a lengthy process. For as high up as they were in the sky, it also meant she'd be sitting in a vehicle Unquill called a skycraft for a bit longer, perhaps a while longer, with only a layer of metal between her and a very long drop.

Though if she understood Unquill correctly, she'd burn to death before she hit the ground. She tried to picture herself igniting in mid-air even while she plummeted endlessly. She dismissed the picture from her mind.

"I hope it's a short journey," Savannah said.

### NINE

UNQUILL RETRIEVED HIS transit pass for inspection. Together with Savannah and Kenneth, he stood in line behind seven others. He had only seen the Council of Thirds twice before-once for his induction into the Constabulary and again when the Hinjo problem had first been discovered.

During the trip from the Constabulary to the station, he could only think about what might cause him to violate the rules, as Kenneth had suggested. In the middle of his fourth century, he had no complaints. Many people lived longer than he had. The oldest recorded person, to date, happened to be a man of 1100 years whose body had finally given way to the dictates of time.

Another few hundred years wouldn't go amiss, Unquill thought. So why throw all that time away?

He could only come to one possible conclusion: his life was coming to an end, no matter what he might choose for himself. He, like the majority of citizens in the world, had been forbidden to view his own end or any circumstances surrounding the end of his life.

If indeed he was Hinjo, the Council of Thirds would have no choice but to view that information from the time stream themselves.

Then Unquill would know for sure.

In a room full of people taller than himself, the two children at his side drew stares from all directions. The badge pinned to Unquill's chest proclaimed him to be an officer of the Constabulary. That badge alone, he perceived, kept curious citizens from grabbing up Kenneth and Savannah for their own purposes. Unquill had never liked his badge, nor had he ever made a point of reminding everyone why no one crossed the Constabulary.

Yet now, stuck amidst a sea of strange faces, he felt glad of his place in the time stream.

Minutes passed. The people in front of him received their service, then went on their way. When Unquill's turn came, he stepped forward.

A tall woman wearing the black and silver Transit Company uniform sat in front of him. She, like all the other representatives, shaved her head as part of the company's dress code. Unquill presented his identification card.

The representative said, "Greetings, citizen Hester. How may I service you today?"

"I am in spatial transit from the Constabulary to the Unbroken Tower," Unquill said. "With me are two citizens from the time stream. Please make the necessary arrangements."

The woman blinked. No one asked to visit the Council of Thirds. In fact, everyone did their best to stay away from there as often as possible. She said, "Certainly, citizen. One moment," she pressed a series of buttons on the translucent display in front of her. "And there you are. Skycraft 91024 is ready and waiting for your departure. Have a safe journey, citizen."

Unquill led Kenneth and Savannah to the 91000 block of departures. With only one hundred thousand skycrafts in service, Unquill couldn't help wondering if he'd been handed the short end of the stick. Savannah stayed close to him, hiding in the shadow of his torso. Kenneth seemed not to notice that, by comparison to his own size, he walked about in a world of giants, for walk they did. They walked their way across the oxygenated building. Unquill had heard once that people had gotten lost past the 50000 block. He made a point of stopping at every kiosk he saw to verify their location and destination.

Savannah rode on top of his shoulders by the time they passed the 70000 block. Unquill felt himself growing weary, despite all his conditioning for any possible temporal necessity, such as having to run away from any large armed force he might encounter. Kenneth continued on, though he appeared ready to keel over himself.

Unquill had by now lost track of how long he'd been walking, or how often he'd seen another person look at the girl upon his shoulders, then the badge on his chest, before looking away.

The crowd thinned out by the time he reached the 90000 block. Unquill sat down in a row of black metal chairs, huffing out his breath. Savannah climbed down off his shoulders. When Kenneth sat down next to him, he fell asleep at once.

Staring straight ahead, Unquill saw a display which said in red letters, "91024 Departure."

He knew the skycraft would wait twenty-four hours from the time he registered his departure at the service desk.

He could afford to wait a moment to catch his breath.

### TEN

SAVANNAH HAD ALMOST fallen asleep riding on Unquill's shoulders. She thought she might have been able to if his every step didn't jostle her body.

By the time she sat down next to Unquill, a soreness developed along the inside of her thighs. Her feet and back ached. She stretched her arms above her head.

A giant of a man passed by, so large that Savannah felt fear grip her stomach with a claw of iron. The man wore impossibly large boots, a sweater with sleeves that only came down to the middle of his forearms and a pair of denim jeans that left nothing to the imagination. His legs, bare below the knee, bore so much hair that Savannah might have called it fur. Like Unquill, the man had grown his hair out so that it fell past his shoulders, down the middle of his back. He possessed a head the size of an automobile tire with shoulders so broad that Savannah could have sat on either one of them. His hands hung by his side, each as large as a spade.

Even in passing, Savannah heard the sound of his loud breathing. She stared at the man's back while he walked away from her. He glanced back, his large eyes widening for a moment. He had not seen her in passing. Now, glancing over his shoulder, he marveled at her small size while she, never having seen anyone she could call a giant before arriving in the future, marveled at him in return.

She watched the passers-by while she waited for Unquill. She saw what she judged to be teenagers, five and six feet tall each, thin and gangly with arms and legs too long for their bodies. An old man, who to Savannah appeared to be a smaller giant, walked with the aid of a metal appendage attached to the small of his back, shaped like the number seven. The metal rod served as a third leg for the man, one which met the ground from behind. The rod rose and fell with the motion of his right leg, which he favored. The man cast a glace full of aspersion at Savannah. She looked away.

Just then, an alarm sounded, piercing the air with a tone that suggested mortal danger.

Savannah plugged her ears with her fingers, yet still she could hear it.

The announcement over the loudspeaker came through so clearly that she might as well have not tried to impair her hearing at all. "All citizens are requested and directed to locate and detain citizen Unquill Hester of the Temporal Constabulary. Repeating. All citizens are requested and directed to locate and detain citizen Unquill Hester of the Temporal Constabulary. This is a priority one alert."

The alarm continued.

Kenneth said something Savannah couldn't hear.

Unquill grabbed both of them by the arm, bringing them up.

Everyone in the area looked around. The alert hadn't provided any information as to what Unquill looked like.

Savannah didn't know if he was a household name for his work or not. The alarm continued for another ten seconds, then ceased. The people around them went about their business as normal. Anyone who saw Unquill didn't know his name.

Unquill said, "Why would they...?"

Savannah knew the answer.

She suspected that Unquill knew the answer too.

Instead of pointing out what they both thought, she said instead, "Let's board the thing-a-ma-jig and meet this council, okay?"

Unquill said, "Yes, let's meet the council. I'll be able to clear up everything."

As they walked towards through the archway that led to their departure, the display overhead turned from red to yellow.

Instead of "91024 Departure," it now read "Flight On Hold."

Before Savannah had made five steps into the departure tunnel, a loud, earsplitting whistle sounded from behind her, alongside a command in a language she did not understand.

Savannah turned to see large men in black uniforms standing at the threshold of the tunnel. Each wore a helmet with a visor covering the face. Two red stripes slashed diagonally down the torso of each uniform. The man blowing the whistle did so with his helmet off. He had cut his hair into a short buzzcut of brown fuzz. He had a hard jaw together with an expression like rock.

He called out, "Citizen Hester! Surrender at once. No further notices will be given."

Kenneth asked, "Who are they?"

"They're the Black Brigade," responded Unquill, his voice a bit unsteady. "They're like police. Well, not exactly like police. They don't hurt people without a reason. But-"

"Never mind that," Savannah said. "We have to get going."

Unquill protested, "But, if I leave now, I will become an outlaw."

"That doesn't matter," Savannah said. "Just go to the council and explain the situation. I'm sure they'll listen."

Unquill looked down to the tunnel to where the entrance to the skycraft lay, then back at the men in black waiting for him. He wrung his hands, then said to them, "I reserve my right to a hearing before the Council of Thirds. This is my destination. Would you like to accompany me?"

The man without a helmet called back, "Citizen Hester, you have been deemed by Council Leader Dillon to be an enemy of humanity. Your rights are null and void. You do not have the right to a hearing or trial. You will be detained for the remainder of your life. This is the judgment of the Council of Thirds."

Savannah tugged at Unquill's arm.

"Never mind, just run!"

Savannah ran first.

Unquill and Kenneth followed quickly behind.

They ran into the skycraft, the uniformed men close behind them. Someone pounded on the door of the skycraft with a melon-sized fist. A resounding thud echoed through the craft.

"Oh dear, oh dear," Unquill said, bringing up the control screen. "I have to override this-ah, there it is."

A warning flashed on the screen.

Unquill seemed not to notice.

The skycraft started moving.

As it did so, the men of the Black Brigade aimed palmed-sized weapons at the craft.

Bursts of blue energy followed.

The craft shook.

The firing continued even while Unquill, frantic at the controls, mumbled something about shielding.

Savannah wasn't sure if she should strap herself in or not. She closed her eyes, hoping beyond hope that none of the shots would puncture the craft's hull.

### ELEVEN

NONE DID.

The firing stopped.

Kenneth, with a headache from having his sleep interrupted, saw the men fade into the distance as the skycraft proceeded along. Before long, he could only see the massive station behind them and the criss-cross network of beams all around. He yawned. He wanted to go back to sleep.

Before he did, however, he asked Unquill a question. "Why are they after you?"

"They think I'm Hinjo."

Kenneth shrugged. "But you're not, right? At least, not yet. They can't put you in prison for something you haven't done yet."

"They can," Unquill said. He stepped back from the controls. "I used an override to change this craft's status from holding to active. That is in violation of our agreement with the Soonseen. Even they think I'm Hinjo, so it doesn't matter. Oh dear, I'm a criminal now."

"Why is the Council of Thirds against you?"

"They must have better evidence than a photographic resemblance. There are sealed records about Hinjo, of course. I don't know what they saw. This will be a long trip with a short ending."

"What do you mean?"

"The Black Brigade will be waiting for us when we depart. They may not even believe that you are citizens from the time stream. Since I have defied them, my word is worth less than nothing now."

"Then we'll just bust through them," Kenneth said, smacking his fist and his palm together. "The Council can't be far from the departure area, can it?"

"No, not very far," Unquill said. "But they won't meet with us even if we do manage to get past the Brigade. They will simply lock their doors against us."

Savannah spoke up. She said, "Then how do we determine if you're really Hinjo or not?"

"We can't," Unquill said. "They've already decided. Enemies of humanity are those who pose a great enough risk to the whole of the human race that they must be apprehended at once, regardless of what they may or may not have done. I can't believe that I-that I am one of them. The last enemy of humanity was apprehended seventy-seven years ago. The next one should have been apprehended five days from now."

Kenneth felt a chill run down his spine.

He grasped at once what Unquill seemed to miss.

"Do you suppose that, this person who gets arrested in five days, do you suppose that's you, Unquill?"

Unquill's eyes widened. "I had never thought about it," he spluttered. "But-but information on enemies of humanity are always sealed to members of the Constabulary who are not preparing for long-term missions. It could be me.

"But that would mean-how do I avoid getting caught for five days?"

No one had an answer for that question.

**~ ~ ~ ~**

**Read the next book by GJ Winters:**

**If you like this book, you will also like The Invisible Base...**

Unlikely Heroes: Two Kids and a Small Giant

JOURNEYING WITHIN ENEMY LINES

Kenneth and Savannah, humans from another time, have been taken – quite against their will – to the 73rd century to find a mysterious and dangerous man named Hinjo Junta. All past and future histories point to him being the cause of destruction of the human race – and of the known civilization.

With the help of the scholarly "journeyman" Unquill, a gentle giant and their guide, Kenneth and Savannah must find Hinjo before it's too late. But when Unquill is found to have a "future" identity as an enemy, they became fugitives instead of heroes. With the Constabulary and the members of The Black Brigade in hot pursuit, the three discover they must work together. To survive, and to fulfill their destinies.

Will Kenneth and Savannah succeed in their mission to find the true Hinjo Junta? What role will Unquill play in protecting the two underlings... and in preserving a future history where humans still live and has not become extinct?

**Unravel more of this fascinating book, continue reading The Invisible Base...**

**~ ~ ~ ~**

### Related Books

Did you enjoy this book? I recommend reading these related books, available on various retailers:

### The Unexpected Ally

### The Discovered Plot

### Mystery In Jakarta

### The Seventh Day

#

# Bonus Preview:

## The Invisible Base

### DAY THREE

### ONE

THE JOURNEY BY skycraft from the station to the council building proved longer than Unquill anticipated.

Kenneth slept for a while, woke up, then found himself hungry. Unquill informed him that he had slept for nine hours.

A gray metal box at the rear of the craft contained all manner of survival gear-thick yellow rope, a first aid kit, a gallon of water and, to his surprise, silver tins with the word "RATIONS" printed on them. He peeled open one of them to discover a small black spoon and a mound of white mush. When he asked Unquill what that food might be, he said children received such things until they grew into their ability to sustain themselves.

Kenneth took a spoonful and put it into his mouth. It tasted like wet, bland sawdust. His hunger drove him to try another spoonful, then another. Savannah, watching him eat, asked for one of her own. She made a face at the food, but ate it just the same.

Kenneth had finished off half the tin before he set it aside, either unwilling or unable to eat another bite.

While his aches and pains receded, in their place came an itch on the small of his back that he always felt whenever he went too long without a shower.

He sniffed at his underarms. He didn't notice anything, though he didn't know if that condition would last, either. Since no one had warned him he would be snatched out of his school to travel over five thousand years into the future, he hadn't thought to pack deodorant.

Even though Unquill said they didn't have far to go before they reached the council building, Kenneth nonetheless found himself bored quickly. The skycraft didn't come with video games, or board games, or a television monitor, or anything he might have expected to amuse himself on a long flight such as this. When he asked what people did to pass the time on skycrafts, Unquill replied in a matter-of-fact tone, "We talk to each other."

Kenneth found he didn't have much to say to Unquill or Savannah. He considered asking if there was any other food, even though he hadn't seen any. He silently wondered, for the fourth time, how long it would take to arrive at their destination. He also figured he could ask Savannah if she thought they had a shot at making it out of the future alive.

He didn't ask any of those questions.

He kept to himself, thinking of home.

He missed his family.

His father, a balding man of forty-seven, always read the newspaper every evening, rain or shine. Kenneth usually stood next to his father at the kitchen table while they worked out the crossword puzzle of the day.

Kenneth remembered his father's glasses, usually smudged at the end of a long day, sitting on the table next to a glass bowl full of green apples. He'd never remember to take them off, or clean them, unless someone told him to do so.

Kenneth had always reminded his father every evening before they began the puzzle. Every evening, his father always took his glasses off, leaving them on the table for him to find the next morning.

Except, one evening, Kenneth had been outside playing kickball with a group of kids from the neighborhood. The game had gone on longer than expected because the ball had rolled down a hill into a clump of underbrush. Kenneth had spent the better part of half an hour searching for the only ball they had.

Kenneth finally found the red kickball nestled against a thorn bush.

Pulling the ball free, air whooshed out of the ball.

A thorn had punctured it.

His days of playing kickball ended-at least for a while.

HIS FATHER HAD started the crossword without him.

Seven o'clock had already struck. The middle-aged man sat there, newspaper spread before him, pencil in hand.

Kenneth saw that his father's glasses had clouded up.

He had wondered then, as he wondered now, how his father had ever seen anything at all. Kenneth reminded his father as he always had.

He expected his father to put the glasses on the table without comment.

On that particular evening, however, Kenneth heard his father mumble a phrase.

He heard it perfectly well, yet he couldn't bring himself to believe what he'd heard.

He didn't ask for clarification. None was needed.

He didn't ask his father to remove his glasses a second time. Kenneth stood there, waiting for his father to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.

So dreadful had been the revelation to Kenneth that he could do nothing. His knees had frozen up. He was acutely conscious of his breathing.

Kenneth didn't want to breathe too deeply, lest he disturb his father's train of thought.

Kenneth's father had proclaimed in a hushed tone, "I'm going blind."

THERE HAD BEEN talk of surgery. Such things were not impossible. Kenneth didn't understand all the particulars involved. He didn't know what might be the benefit of having a laser procedure. He only knew that his parents couldn't afford it, even if they went abroad to have it done. That meant, so far as he could tell, that his father wouldn't need glasses anymore.

Such had been the situation before he left.

Kenneth held his knees close against his chest.

He asked Unquill, "What do we talk about?"

Unquill blinked at him in surprise. He took a moment to respond before he said, "We can talk about anything at all. We have, I'd say, another two hours before we have to face the symphony."

Savannah said quietly, "Music."

Kenneth said, "Okay, let's talk about why we're moving downwards, instead of straight."

Unquill frowned.

He looked at the control display.

"You're right," he said. "We're no longer on course for the Council of Thirds. This has never happened before. It's almost as if-as if the skycraft system itself has been altered."

"That's not possible, is it?" Kenneth asked.

"No, not for us. Only the Soonseen can-well, they must have. I mean, just look at it. Oh dear, we're heading for open space. Let's see," Unquill said, pressing buttons on the display. A number came up. "This says that our course has been altered. If this is right-and it must be right-we're going to crash!"

"No way," Savannah said. She had been rummaging through the supply box. She closed it at once.

"But we'll-we'll crash into nothing. There's nothing there," Unquill said.

A proximity alarm sounded throughout the craft. Red lights flashed. Kenneth felt the acceleration before he heard the craft's straining. It tilted at an angle, pointing downward. The craft shook as it gained speed.

Before he closed his eyes, Savannah sat next to him.

She squeezed his hand tight.

He squeezed back.

### TWO

ATHE LAST SECOND, a large metal door slid open.

The skycraft passed through the doorway, then scraped against a metal surface.

Once inside, the metal door slid shut.

The door abruptly disappeared from view as though it had never been there.

The railing, having been diverted away from the council building, bent back into its original state. Yellow lights flashed all around the skycraft as it entered head-on, then skidded sideways until coming to a stop against a thick white net.

Power had gone out inside the craft. Savannah found herself on the floor. Kenneth's breath touched her cheeks. He lay on top of her, his weight more than she expected. She lay underneath him, not sure what to do. His eyes remained closed, even after the craft stopped. He still breathed, yet Savannah couldn't tell if he was conscious. A shifting of his legs answered that question. Savannah pushed at his chest. Kenneth rolled over to one side.

"What happened?" Savannah asked, sitting up.

Unquill stood in front of a blank window. He had brought metal plates over the windows prior to the crash. A lone blinking light illuminated the vehicle's interior.

All else had gone dark.

Unquill passed his hand over the light.

"Hmm," Unquill said. "We crashed into something that wasn't there. It's-well- I don't know."

Kenneth groaned next to Savannah. He put both his hands against his forehead. "Ugh. How 'bout some warning next time, huh? Geez."

Someone knocked on the craft's outer door three times.

Savannah extended her arm, grabbing for anything she could find.

She pulled on Kenneth's shirt.

A thud from outside.

The door opened slowly, then was forced open manually.

Savannah had grown used to hearing the mechanical hums from automated doors.

Now, she heard people grunting, struggling to lift the door up.

Patches of light suddenly streamed in as the hatch was slowly, steadily raised.

Two people suddenly stood before her.

While in the station, she had become accustomed to seeing numerous giants roaming about. These two people were not giants.

In fact, Savannah thought they looked a bit on the short side.

The two strangers were undeniably female in form and proportion. Both carried the same type of weapon that she'd seen the Black Brigade carry. One of them motioned with a weapon.

Savannah hadn't seen any weapons in the supply box.

She stood up and walked towards them.

"Hey, hey," Unquill said. "Wait just a moment, you can't do what you've done. Everything, it's all been-"

"You will be silent," one of the women intoned.

From the sound of its voice, Savannah understood at once that this wasn't a woman at all, but a robot.

The voice was mechanical, emotionless, with emphasis on the wrong syllables as it spoke. The word silent came through in a higher pitch than it should have.

"No," Unquill said. "Can you at least explain-"

"Explanations are not needed," the robot interrupted him. "You will be silent. Obey all commands given to you. Do not resist or deviate from your instructions. If you attempt to escape, you will be terminated. Is that understood?"

Savannah nodded even though the robot hadn't spoken to her.

She didn't want to think about going outside, not with hundreds of miles of air between her and the ground.

Unquill opened his mouth as if to speak again. He closed it when the robot raised a weapon at him.

"Walk in front of me. Obey all commands," intoned Robot Number Two.

Exiting the craft into the hangar, Savannah took a step back when she saw one of their captors in full. Where she might have expected a mouth, she saw a black speaker. A wide luminescent visor covered the portion of the robot's face where its eyes might have been. A single green dot moved back and forth across the visor. Its skull, composed entirely of white metal, stood on its shoulders at a slight angle. The robot's creator had seen fit to make it anatomically similar to humans, though if Savannah had to guess, these robots resembled humans from before the 73rd century.

The robot wore no clothes to speak of, save for a pair of brown leggings whose function Savannah could not discern. The robot possessed three fingers on each hand. Instead of feet, small tripods served to balance the robot's body. Its legs bent just below the hip. When it walked, the robot produced long strides Savannah could not match. Each step produced a thud that echoed throughout the hangar.

She took her place walking in front of one robot, while keeping pace behind another. Kenneth and Unquill had joined her. Kenneth rubbed at his temples. Unquill muttered to himself about how impossible all of this was.

They left the hangar, entering a wide metal corridor. Markings on the walls gave directions in a language Savannah had never seen before.

A second language that made use of pictographs, however, was located directly below the first set of unintelligible markings. They reminded her of the hieroglyphics she'd seen in an educational video about ancient Egyptian civilization.

Instead of birds and jackal-headed gods, this language displayed machine tools. A drill bit had been paired with the half-moon shape of a buzz-saw blade. A series of instruments directly below these rebuses declared something else. Savannah put a hand against the wall where the symbols appeared.

"Do not touch the-"

"Do not touch the walls."

"-walls."

The robots spoke in near-unison.

Savannah withdrew her hand.

The corridor stretched on.

After a short while they came to a door marked with large key. The robot in front pressed its hand against the key symbol.

The door slid open.

"Enter."

Savannah entered the room.

She recognized a prison cell when she saw one.

Two cots on each side of the room hung in place by chains extending diagonally from one corner of the room to its opposite. A rank odor assaulted her nostrils. She held her nose, looking around for the source. Once she saw it, she wished she hadn't. A hole dug into the floor against the back wall served as a bathroom.

From what she could tell, the robots didn't bother cleaning it out regularly.

A single bare bulb flickered overhead, providing barely enough light to illuminate the cell.

Only Unquill hadn't entered the cell when Savannah turned around.

He stood there, dejected.

Savannah wanted to give him a hug just then, even if her arms wouldn't reach all the way around his body. A short time ago, he'd been a happy worker at the Temporal Constabulary, living his life without complaint. Three days had been all it took to put him at the threshold of a room that stunk of rotting feces, surrounded on either side by a robot pointing a weapon at him.

"Enter," one robot said. "Obey all commands."

Unquill didn't make a move.

He looked down at the floor.

The robot on his right placed a hand on Unquill's back and shoved him inside.

Once inside, the door closed behind him. He choked back a sob.

"You will wait here for a period of one point two hours," one of the robots said. "Then you will meet with Hensen Var. Do not attempt to escape. If you attempt escape, you will be thrown outside."

Unquill sat down on a cot and buried his head in his hands.

Savannah sat down next to him, putting an arm around his back. He began to cry, then stifled his tears. He shook his head once, then shook it again.

"I can't believe this is happening. It's not real. It's not. I'm still dreaming. It's not real. Oh my dear universe, what have you done to me?"

The robots moved away from the door, fading from view. Savannah ran her fingers through her hair, trying to work out the tangles that had developed there. She winced, then gave up the project when it hurt too much.

She didn't know what she could say to console Unquill.

She didn't even know if he could be consoled.

Then, thinking on what he had said, her mind stuck on a particular word.

Savannah said, "What do you mean, you're still dreaming?"

Unquill blinked. He himself didn't seem to know what he had said.

"Dreaming," he said.

"Still dreaming," Savannah said.

"Yes, that's right, I forgot, so I did. Forgetfulness, one thing that happens when you get over 150," Unquill said. "Before I met you. Well, should I tell you this? It might not be revelant."

Kenneth spoke up for the first time in awhile. "You might as well. We're just going to be sitting here, wherever this is."

Unquill sighed. "Okay, I'll tell you what I know, then."

### THREE

"IT'S NOT MUCH, but here it is.

"You remember how I told you there are different types of time travelers-the journeyman and the historian, right? I was a journeyman. What I didn't tell you that a journeyman is what people of your age would call a guinea pig-a test subject.

"You'd think information wouldn't have trouble surviving intact after five thousand years. But because journeymen are the guinea pigs, we're the first ones to investigate the unknown. The others never need to worry about getting their hands dirty, so to speak.

"In any time period we visit, we usually have incomplete information about the state of the world for that particular venue. If we're going to any place in the future for the first time, we simply have no idea what the world will be like when we go. For instance, when I traveled to your 21st-century world, I knew pollution had run rampant. Many history books tell of times when citizens were forbidden travel to certain areas of the world because a resource company had made a mess.

"We at the Constabulary didn't know the full extent of what had happened. We decided to take a precaution we usually don't take. I went in an atmospheric containment suit.

"As it happened, that decision saved my life.

"When I entered your part of the time stream, I detected inordinate quantities of particulates floating about in the air. Particulates are these little insidious things that get into lungs and stay there. When you live for seventy or so years, I guess it doesn't matter much. When you live to be 500 or 600 years old, particulates matter.

"Your lungs aren't like your stomach. Imagine what might happen if you live for a very long time and all the while, you're inhaling microscopic particles. It adds up.

"So we did away with unnatural particulate matter around the 62nd century. Now, a few generations later, we-or should I say the people of my time-have far less resistance to particulate matter than one might think. That's why I needed one of those suits.

"You see, decisions regarding the time stream aren't taken lightly. They're made well in advance of their execution. We have hundreds of people called actuaries who do nothing more than sit around all their lives and examine possibilities. When a problem is encountered, they come up with a solution. Faced with the annihilation of the human race, their solution happened to be two young people from a middle age with great potential. So it's only natural that I had this dream about a mission to retrieve you both.

"In every period, beginning with the widespread use of gunpowder on Earth, journeymen such as myself use special environmental protective gear if they are unsure of the area they explore. On occasion, the atmospheric predictor proves true and a person ends up in an area where particulate matter is non-existent. In that case, a further study of the area is made until the time stream path opens at the appointed time. If the predictor is wrong, the journeyman must wear their protective gear and wait until the path is opened from his or her point of origin.

"In your case, I expected the predictor to be wrong. You see, everything had been analyzed carefully-everything but one item of interest that often goes overlooked.

"Shall I tell you what it is? I suppose it wouldn't much of a story if I didn't.

"Chalk. Or, more specifically, the dust that arises from use of an eraser and a chalkboard.

"Your period of history is in the middle of a transition from chalkboards to projection-based learning. The actuaries didn't account for the economic situation of your township. They thought that your instructors would all teach via computer rather than making marks upon a blackboard.

"I didn't tell them, of course. It's not my business. I'm not an actuary. Besides, it's inappropriate for a member of the Constabulary to lecture another member on how to do their job. Besides which, I could have been wrong. Crunching the numbers of the township's public income statements wouldn't have revealed a large financial donor to the school that year. Bristol Area Middle School probably could have purchased new technology with funds received from other sources.

"So I had a dream whereby everything happened as it's happening now. But I'm having trouble telling the difference between what's real and what's in my head. Even as I speak, I'm only remembering parts of what I had dreamed. I never said anything because I never thought I would end up flying into a light-shielded sky harbor. I mean, such things don't usually occur.

"I remembered that part of the dream well enough, even after the rest of it faded from my memory. So what do I say now that the most improbable part of that dream has actually happened? Did I experience a two-week-long precognitive vision?

"And you may be wondering, what's a precognitive dream? I suppose the easiest way to define it is when you see the future in your dreams. Either way, only two possibilities are plausible- that I'm still dreaming, or that this is reality and my subconscious predicted everything that's happened thus far."

Unquill took a deep breath, then exhaled sharply. "It's a lot to wrap your head around, isn't it?"
