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  “Ummm,” Carol muttered from her desk where she had walked to pick up an airline schedule. “American has a flight at 8:30 that would get him into Seattle by 4:00 tomorrow afternoon. Allowing an hour to retrieve luggage and rent a car should be more than generous. He should be able to get to the ‘residence’ by 7:00 at the latest. That’s a bit late, but workable. Days are longer now, so on this end it would still be daylight when you reach the entrance. You could still get to our downtime base late in the day there with the time shift.”

  I was anxious to get going now that we had identified a direction. My curiosity about what Morris could tell us, there was still a real question as to whether he would, urged me to hurry. But I was uncomfortable about possible complications. The time schedule was too tight, and a simple flight delay could throw everything out of whack. I decided it would be better if Dave was in place before I made my move.

  “Let’s try and get Dave on that schedule,” I agreed. “But we will have him stay overnight at the ‘residence’ and they can confirm his arrival before I slip away from our agent friends. Monday is a better day for what I am planning anyway.”

  “Okay,” Carol agreed readily. “After we’re done here I’ll get word to Dave securely. If there is any issue, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks. Let’s see. So we can get to the base really early, pick up the equipment we will need, and then jump back up to 650 BC where we have Morris. From what I remember it will take most of the day to get to the compound. That means Monday night and perhaps most of Tuesday with Morris. Come back Wednesday, and back here on Thursday.”

  “That’s a long time. If you are being watched, there will be no way to hide the fact you have ditched them. It can only serve to make them more persistent.”

  “No choice,” I shrugged. “And as we noted, it might tell us something about their true interest.”

  Carol nodded. “So, how are you going to do this?” she asked curious.

  “Nothing fancy. I’ll do nothing to alert them today and tomorrow. A little shopping in preparation for the trip. I can think of a few things I want to bring along. Then Monday, I’ll go into work at Aero like it’s just another day. But instead of going up to the office, I’ll slip aboard the commuter shuttle and go right back out the gate again.”

  “You don’t think they will notice?”

  “I suspect they won’t be thinking along those lines. Also, on Monday the Shuttle is always full, coming and going. Lots of business trips. It will be relatively easy to hide out in the resulting crowds. You bring your car to work, drop it off, and take the Shuttle to the airport. Saves money and you don’t have to leave your car exposed to the elements and all that jet fuel crap for days on end.”

  “And once you get to the airport you pick up a rental car using the fake identity we set up a while back.”

  “Pretty simple,” I agreed. Of course, it wouldn’t work if they had mounted a serious surveillance, but I was convinced they hadn’t reached a point where they could do that just yet. “I’ll run out to the residence, and Dave and I will be on our way.”

  “I’ll be extremely interested to see what you can find out. Somehow I think there is more here than we think. It may turn out to be nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence that causes us grief, but somehow I sense we may be on the verge of something very important.”

  “That intuition again?” It had been on the money a few times in the past.

  “Maybe,” she replied, “And maybe I’m just tired and wishful. Five hours just to travel from coast to coast. After a decade here I have still not gotten used to the incredible slowness of your travel. And I have to brief Mark before I can go home.”

  I smiled. “Tell you what. You go see Mark, and I’ll send the travel plans to Dave. And, what do you think? How about we have dinner tomorrow night? The usual?”

  “You’re on,” she said rising from her chair and stretching. “I’ll pick you up,” she offered.

  Chapter 11

  Northern Africa

  52000 BC

  Dave was as rotund as ever. If anything he had packed a few additional pounds onto the sturdy five foot eight frame of his. Never less than two hundred and thirty pounds, he was none-the-less a fireball of energy and enthusiasm. Short dark brown hair with a clipped matching beard, the combination of his personality, intellect, and physical appearance reminded me of character in a series of books I had enjoyed some years earlier. While experts in different fields, Dave was every bit as effective in his area of expertise as the fictional character he resembled, and shared the ability to make friends, young and old, wherever, or in our case, whenever, he went.

  We were currently at downtime base, every aspect of our departure from the 21st century having proceeded smoothly. Ed, our site manager, had seen to getting everything we needed together, allowing Dave to renew a few friendships and me to spend a little much appreciated time alone with my wife. A couple of hours only, but I hadn’t seen her in two weeks and we made the most of our visit. Naiya was still planning to head uptime for home in a couple of days and I brought her up to speed with the current mission and possible implications. Now, Dave and I were getting into ‘costume’ for the trip to 650 BC. He was dressed as a marginally successful merchant, a role he could play well, and I was one of his hired bodyguards.

  Given the focus of this trip, where we wouldn’t spend much time mixing with the populace, I was not particularly concerned with appearances. We wouldn’t be going into any major cities, and were unlikely to run into anyone who would care about our appearance. The priest knew enough about us that he wasn’t going to be fooled by our dress. I don’t know what Dave really called him when the two spoke in the local dialect of the time, but Dave always referred to him as father to me. He didn’t know where we had come from, but he was very aware we were not local. He didn’t care. We had saved his adopted daughter and greatly improved the lot of his charges. We were friends. The rest didn’t matter. Dave, however, wanted to stay in character, which was probably the best policy, but I hated the ill-fitting garments of the time. Instead I wore a pair of faded jeans and a comfortable T-shirt. I threw a wrap-around outer garment characteristic of the time over the top to mollify Dave and checked my weapons.

  We weren’t expecting trouble, but then you never are. This was not a settled period, and although the Roman Empire was coming into existence and would control most of the western world in a few centuries, it hadn’t happened yet. Soldiers were a fairly common sight moving around the empire, and tried to keep conquered areas peaceful, but not every bandit and misfit felt obligated to acknowledge the fact. There had been a number of tight situations on previous outings that had taught me a little about being prepared. Eight hundred years uptime and not far from here, my wife, well she wasn’t my wife when it happened, had saved our bacon and almost died in the process. That had left me a little uneasy about the period ever since.

  “You have your gun?” I asked Dave. He was reluctant to carry a weapon, but there was a good reason for it, which even he had to acknowledge. I had told him that if he didn’t arm himself appropriately, we would ban him from further time trips. He cherished the chance to visit the places most historians could only read about, and feared we might do as threatened. We wouldn’t have of course. He was too valuable. But so far the threat had forced his reluctant cooperation. It probably didn’t really matter. I doubted he would use it in anything but the most dire of situations.

  “Yeah, Yeah,” Dave muttered, as he patted the left side of his impressively padded frame.

  I checked my Wilson .45 automatic in its shoulder holster. No uptime weapons had been added to our stockpile. They were extremely difficult to acquire, as weapons of all sorts were more carefully controlled than in my own time. Carol had her uptime rifle, but otherwise we all used 21st century firearms. I preferred side carry, but the shoulder rig made the pistol less conspicuous. It was a beautiful weapon if you liked such things, and I always had. This one sported
a two tone olive drab and black finish; something called Tuff-Kote which was advertised to take a lot of abuse. My own experience seemed to validate the claim. More important than looks were the careful gunsmithing that yielded a defensive pistol that would feed reliably every time. One had complete confidence that a jam would not be an issue in the middle of an altercation. It also claimed an accuracy of better than an inch at 25 yards. I was glad it was that accurate. I only wish I were. A reasonable shot, I wasn’t going to be boasting groups that tight even under range conditions. Nope. The buck stopped with me for any misses.

  After checking the loads and making sure the first round was chambered, I slid it back into the holster. The four spare magazines were in place, all loaded with the 230 grain Black Talon rounds I had stocked up on before the PR folks forced Winchester to pull them from the market some years earlier. Screw ‘em. I liked the round. My Buck knife, as much a utility tool as backup weapon, sported a four inch fixed blade. It slid into a sheath on the back of my right hip. Outside, where it showed, was a fifteen-inch blade of crude metal. Battered and scarred, it was a weapon of the era, and added substance to my role as the protector of my prosperous and overweight boss.

  We also had a couple of travel bags, fuller than I would have expected given our plans for such a short stay. I knew what was in mine, but hadn’t had a chance to confer with Dave to see what he was bringing along that could take up so much room. He had brought everything in a large suitcase when we had come downtime, and transferred the items to the carry-bags while I was with Naiya. The bags rested at our feet along with a number of water skins, two food bags, and a couple of the extremely comfortable uptime sleeping pads Carol had provided. There we also several barrels of trade goods, mostly to add a touch of realism to our cover as a traveling merchant, but the contents would be a welcome bonus by the priest and his charges who always had a rough go of it. Some of the items were obviously out of place for the period. Someone had argued that in the older periods most of the populace wouldn’t recognize the fact, and would simply assume the unrecognizable items were just one more thing outside of their economic reach.

  We also had radio gear. Our communication items were all from Carol’s future home, and were amazingly compact and powerful. They would allow communication back to the cave entrance from up to a couple of hundred miles distance. The laws of physics weren’t flexible though. Despite incredible advances in communications technology, the RF carrier had to get from point A to point B. Uptime, when all of this gear was developed, multiple repeater sites and satellite relay are a basic component of the communications networks. Distance and terrain were defeated by multiple redundant communication paths provided between users due to the infrastructure that forms the backbone of the network. None of that existed where we were going. Thus, radio communication fell back to the same point to point restrictions that plagued the early years of radio. Terrain could defeat us. The microwaves required line-of-sight, or something to bounce from. That meant we could be cut off for periods when we traveled through the mountains.

  We operated under another restriction. Radio waves would not penetrate into the time complex. At least not carrying any intelligible information. Not by any means we could discover, and we had tried. The failure of the first test was not really surprising. Someone inside the center attempted to communicate with someone just outside with the entrance closed. Absolutely nothing received. Then the same test with the entrance activated. This time we were surprised. Again, nothing. Two very powerful transmitters were tried, one placed just inside the tunnel and another just outside with directional antennas pointed towards each other. A slight blip on the noise floor was detected, but no useful signal.

  People tried being clever. With the tunnel entrance active, you could ‘see’ into the cave from the inside, and ‘see’ into the complex from the cave, although not very well. We thought we could modulate the light with signal information and provide a link that way. More equipment and the tunnel entrance would have to remain activated, but that might be okay. So far we had found no restriction on how long the tunnel entrance could remain open. The mere presence of one of the ‘keys’ would activate it and it would stay activated until half a minute or so after the key was removed beyond the trigger distance. A distance of about ten feet. There was also no observed restriction on how many of the tunnels could be activated at one time. The various tunnels appeared to operate entirely independently of one another. So leaving a tunnel entrance ‘open’ wouldn’t restrict any operations. Except it didn’t work. What you could ‘see’ from the cave was the stationary walls of the tunnel. A person on the inside would appear distorted, blurred, unless they stayed absolutely still for minutes. Then they would slowly come into focus. The same effect worked looking the other way. While it appeared a clear open path between inside and outside, something significant was happening through the threshold. However the visual information was being passed by the alien technology, it effectively blocked any communication approach we had yet tried.

  That meant scheduled radio checks. When a team went into the field, preplanned radio contact times were arranged. The downtime base team maintained a staff whose primary job was to make the required contacts to all of the teams afield in the various eras. They would bring their gear outside the appropriate tunnel to make the contact, then move back inside. Annoying, but effective. We had an evening contact every day. More was not deemed necessary given the simplistic nature of our mission.

  “You guys ready?” One of the site workers arrived on the electric ATV and pulled to a stop in front of Dave with the attached trailer close to the piles of baggage scattered on the ground. The ATVs in various sizes had become the work vehicle of the base. The base was located a fair distance from the time tunnel opening and a significant amount of equipment, supplies, and personal possessions needed to be hauled from there back to this area. With a full time staff of over twenty people, supplies to support a total of fifty for multiple years, an extensive arsenal and ammunition dump just in case, plus all the supplies to support trips into the various time zones, we were talking trainloads of material. The first ATVs were too large to be brought through the cave entrances assembled, but early on a couple of the full time members had taken it upon themselves to disassemble one of the machines, and bring it through piecemeal. Reassembled here, the value was immediately apparent, and it wasn’t long before a full motor pool evolved. There were now fifteen of the indispensable vehicles here, most sporting the handy utility trailers.

  Other changes had suggested themselves with time. Large ATVs could carry a significant load, but smaller ones could drive through the tunnels. We now had an assortment of the handy vehicles. Gasoline soon became an issue. It’s heavy, and only available in two of the time eras. It didn’t exist in the earlier periods, and other, more efficient sources of energy took over in the later ones. Bringing in enough gas quickly became a major activity. That’s when Carol called a halt. The MC-cells provided the energy to power one of the ATVs for years. Bringing back more of the cells, and modified motors, some of our mechanics switched over from the noisy and troublesome gasoline engines to the electric drives. It had worked out perfectly.

  While I was helping the driver Jack load the supplies, Ed came walking our way from across the cave. “Are you sure you don’t need additional support?” he asked. “I’m not really comfortable going in there with such a small team.”

  Ed was not pleased. He knew that Mike, our head security coordinator, was going to go ballistic when he returned. Traveling through the various periods, we had learned quickly it made sense to have our own security. Usually disguised one way or another, the men Mike had brought on board ensured the safety of the teams when they were away from the base. Typically a team could be gone four or five weeks, during which time their defense was wholly dependent on the men with them. Mike had gathered men from the late 1800’s, from the Roman era, and from the 21st century. Those not native to our era had been indoctrin
ated with the use of Carol’s ‘Learn-It’ tabs, and now fit in quite well. They might not understand exactly what this was all about, but they performed the needed task.

  At the moment Mike and all of his people were off on other trips. When he left we had told him that absolutely no additional trips were scheduled for a month. Now, my need to visit Morris changed all that. Mike couldn’t get back in less than a week, and I didn’t want to wait. I ordered Ed not to tell Mike until he returned. Hence the concern Ed was showing at the moment. It was the typical issue we faced. Going into an era such as this, with an unsettled political environment and little civil structure, did you send a large team to ensure strength by numbers, or a small group, and rely on going covert, hoping to pass through un-noticed? But this was a quick-in, quick-out trip, in an area we had visited numerous times, although not for over a year. There was no rebellion or unrest here, not anymore. Caution, and the linguistic abilities of our historian, should serve to get us through.

  I looked at Ed and shook my head. “We should be fine,” I indicated. I realized that he would actually like an excuse to come himself. These days he had become essential to the smooth running of our largest center of operations, and supported the activities in other times, seldom getting to participate directly in trips anymore. It had to be hard for someone who had been the lead in all the serious exploration in the beginning. An accidental fall and a broken leg had sidelined him for a long time. For some reason even the miracle medicines we had at our disposal had had trouble with the break. It was fine now, but during his convalescence he had made himself indispensable in the lead role here. Now, we had no one to replace him. Besides, we were no longer conducting the same type of field trips anymore. Most activities had become routine, even in those eras where we had full time presence. Focus was on careful systematic investigation rather than exploration. This trip would be like a vacation for him. I almost suggested he join us when he interrupted my thoughts.