A Gift of Time Read online

  A Gift of Time

  by

  Jerry Merritt

  Copyright © 2016 Jerry Merritt

  All rights reserved

  ISBN:

  978-0-9894321-5-3

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any

  resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ***

  for

  Linda Lightner Harris who suggested

  I write a novel on time travel.

  Prolog

  I have lived Micajah Fenton’s life more than he ever did. Four times, to be exact.

  It all began when the subspace transfer rod in Lovely Pebble’s time glider snapped just as it attempted a cross-galaxy hop to its home dock….

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Suffice it to say I’ve never made full sense of it all. While living his life, I visited the times and places where his memory gaps left so many events vulnerable to myth. I saw for myself what actually happened. So I am now as much him as he ever was, and you can consider me to be Micajah Fenton as I tell you his story from back during the time when we all lived in the real world.

  I’ll just start at the beginning. When Cager Fenton had nearly completed his first time through.

  Chapter 1

  Put quite simply, my plan was to kill myself as soon as I got home and disarmed the security system. I had already taken care of all my worldly affairs. Even the fish in the pond out back had a week’s supply of food in the auto feeder. So knowing everything was ready, I settled comfortably into the darkness on my drive home. As the road wound ever upwards my headlights cut through the evening gloom flashing briefly on patches of fog where night had chilled the summer air to mist. In the daylight these foothills resembled rumpled quilts tossed off against the base of the mountain. The mountain where I would exit this earth.

  I had made the winding drive down about this same time a month before with Barbara slumped unconscious next to me. It was her last trip to the hospital. She abandoned her struggle as they moved her onto the gurney. I never even got to say goodbye. Not that it mattered. We had hardly spoken the past few years anyway. But her passing had affected me more deeply than I had expected, and I began finding myself at moments with a near pathological impulse to end my own life as well. Just to escape the endless little failures and misunderstandings that I suppose everyone has.

  Finally, with the end so near, I dared to call out old memories previously crammed down into the darker recesses of my mind. I studied them for a time as I swerved around the hairpin curves on my way home. Bothersome little flashes of my past. Regrets. From when I was a kid mostly. Forgettable things. Except I could never seem to forget them. A perfunctory encounter, a studied indifference, an ignored touch. Oh, and I was always behind in class and among the last chosen on the playground. I was a loser. Everyone knew it. Only one other kid was a worse athlete than me. Little Arlen who killed himself in junior high school. Or so I had heard. Arlen, who could be forgiven for being the biggest loser in Stubbinville, that little scab of a town on the pine barrens of the Florida Panhandle.

  But eventually things began to change. I spent a summer practicing batting and catching and discovered it was all just a matter of learning how to do it. But the earlier failures stuck with me anyway.

  Now it would all be over in a few more minutes. What relief. There was nothing left that could alter my plans for the night. Nothing whatever. And there was a certain sense of fulfillment in carrying out a well-formed plan. I turned off the highway and continued up the quarter-mile private road to my summer house. As the drive leveled off and turned right along the front acreage, I noted a rather large hole. That was new. I stopped the car and climbed out into the late evening air. The night’s moon was already well up.

  But this was no small hole. It was a crater. It must have been two hundred feet across and deep enough to hide a barn. In mild alarm, I peered across the abyss and noted with some relief the silhouette of my house against the Milky Way. At least this hole wouldn’t interfere with my evening’s plan.

  Still baffled, though, I returned my attention to the crater. It was perfectly round. There was no debris field thrown up as a meteor would have done if it had impacted my front yard. And where was the missing dirt? I surveyed the surrounding area. There should have been dirt. Lots of dirt. But there was nothing. I stepped cautiously over to the rim and peered down into the darkness.

  Something touched my neck. “Be careful. The edge is unstable.”

  “Shitfire!” I yelled, almost jumping into the hole.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “You didn’t startle me,” I wheezed. “You damn near sent me into cardiac arrest. I’ll be eighty next week.”

  Then I remembered that, actually, I wouldn’t. I’d be dead. I finally turned to confront whoever had destroyed my front lawn. Not that it mattered, I reminded myself. But when I saw her, I wondered if perhaps I was already dead and had just forgotten about it. She stood a bit shorter than me with spiky red hair that caught the moonlight on its tips. As she studied my face she said, “I’m Lovely Pebble.”

  If I had been F. Scott Fitzgerald, I might have said right then and there that she was not like you and me.

  “I’ve had an unforeseen equipment failure,” she continued quite unfazed by my near death at her hands. “On my time glider. And it has dropped out of sequential bypass on its return home.” The moonlight was just bright enough that I noticed her lips didn’t move when she spoke. They remained frozen in an elfish grin. Then I noticed she was jaybird naked. My nearly eighty-year-old heart almost stopped for the second time since I’d gotten out of the car. Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill myself after all. This Lovely Pebble thing already had a pretty good start on it.

  “I see.” I dropped my hand from my chest. “Well I’m real sorry to hear that.” Then realizing the poor girl must have been stressed, I remembered my manners. After getting my breath back, I extended my hand. “I’m Micajah Fenton by the way, but my friends call me Cager.” She studied my hand and, after a moment of obvious confusion, touched it gently.

  “Then may I call you Cager?”

  “You may if it suits you,” I said, ever one to enjoy a double entendre.

  She responded with obvious relief, “Then you may call me Love,” oblivious to the undertone. “Would that be appropriate?”

  “Well, normally it might,” I said with as straight a face as possible. “To keep things respectable, though, why don’t I just call you by your first initial. Ell.”

  “Yes. I like that much better. Actually, we use formal names in only the most extraordinary circumstances. This is only the third time I have ever used mine.”

  Well, clearly something most extraordinary had occurred in my front yard to leave me facing a two hundred-foot-wide crater and a naked woman whose lips didn’t move when she spoke.

  “Then we are friends?”

  “As long as you don’t make any more holes in my yard.”

  “I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, in that case, I suppose it’s okay.”

  Ell now appeared vaguely perplexed. I began to suspect English wasn’t her native language. Hell, maybe Earth wasn’t even her native planet. “Relax,” I said as I started back toward the car. “I was just messing with you.” She seemed to ponder the exchange as she tagged along. I pushed the car door shut then leaned against the cold front fender. “So. You say you’re, a what, a time traveler? Do I have that right?”

  She perked up at that. “Yes. Well, almost. I’m a space-time traveler. My travels cross both space and time.”

  “Then I take it you’re not from around here.”

  “Well, ye
s and no. I’m from your galaxy.”

  “This very galaxy? You don’t say. Then we’re almost neighbors. But, and I’m just guessing here, you’re not actually human are you?”

  “No,” she said with a trace of concern in her voice. “No, I’m not.”

  “Then why do you look human?”

  “I don’t.” Then after a studious pause, “Oh. You mean why do I look human to you. It’s a matter of protocol. We aren’t supposed to interface with humans. Or any advanced creature for that matter. But this is an emergency and emergency protocol is to appear as a non-threatening organism of the same species if that ever becomes necessary. My glider’s records on humans are sketchy at best but indicate females might be the least threatening way to interface with males.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. So, am I doing it right?”

  “Well, yeah, so far.” She hadn’t quite managed to kill me yet.

  “Okay. That’s a relief. I’ve been in space-time research in this area for only about fifty of your years and this is also the first time I’ve had to interface with an outside race of intelligent beings. I don’t want to mess this up.”

  So, I actually was in contact with an alien from another star system. And my evening’s plans had been going so well up to this point.

  “So I guess I should mention that I detect you plan to end your life tonight. I hope you won’t do that. I really need some help here. The failed part has never failed before in the history of space-time research. But I was working on your planet’s early history. The period shortly after your moon formed.

  “I thought I was far enough back from the ocean to avoid the mile-high tides generated when your moon was orbiting every ten hours, but I failed to account for how far those tides would reach inland and I had left the real-world access door open by mistake. My glider flooded under a rushing wall of seawater. That wasn’t the actual cause of the failure, though. It was the boulder that washed in with the water. It struck the subspace linkage. The glider cleaned itself up immediately but the linkage was damaged just enough that it snapped right after I departed for home. I dropped back into reality here right where I was when I left but billions of years later.” She paused to see if I was following.

  “I see,” I said, unable to come up with anything to top what I’d just heard.

  “Anyway. The glider came out just below the present ground level. Its failsafe cleared away the surrounding earth so I had access to the surface. But I still need help. I’m fairly sure your technology can manufacture a replacement part. The tolerances aren’t so critical a civilization that can make your car can’t make this part. And I’ll gladly reward you for your effort. In fact I’m compelled to reward you. You have only to tell me what you want.”

  I just stood there for a long time. Was this creature reading my thoughts? It already knew of my evening’s plans for self-elimination. Probably knew the reasons, even if I didn’t understand them myself. But so what. It seemed harmless enough. Finally, without moving my lips I thought, “Of course I’ll help you. You won’t owe me anything. I’m head of a corporation that probably has the resources to build whatever it is you need. Let’s go over to my house and we can work out the details.”

  Chapter 2

  As I threw the living room lights on, they fully illuminated Ell’s nimble form. There was an instant response as she caught my reaction. “Oh. I apologize. I see you humans are creatures who wear garments for other than protection from the environment.” She immediately appeared in clothes identical to mine. Then after another awkward moment, switched inexplicably to a clown suit. I hesitated in surprise. During the pause, Ell got my favorite papasan chair. I settled for the leftover sofa and wondered if that awkward clown suit would come back to haunt her years from now.

  “I appreciate your offer of free service but must insist you come up with an appropriate payment for your help in repairing my glider. As I’ve already stated, it’s protocol.”

  “Yes, protocol. I understand. Okay. Give me some time to think about it. As you know, I don’t plan to hang around for long after you leave. But I’ll help you while you’re here, if I can.”

  “Certainly, and thank you. And I should add, I will need your help in removing the defective part. I cannot do the work required and the glider is unable to do the work for me because of the nature of the defect.”

  I started to get up. “We might as well get started then. What tools do I need?”

  “No tools. It doesn’t work that way. You’ll see.” Then as suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone.

  A moment later I found myself standing on bedrock at the bottom of the crater. An open door spilled an eerie light out across the night, backlighting the glider in a ghostly radiance. It wasn’t an elegant craft. I had conjured up an image of a sleek machine with graceful curves and backswept wings as its name might imply. But it was just a rugged shipping crate-like affair; not unlike an old boxcar. It was well-worn and grimy from hard use and sat directly on the ground. There were neither supporting struts nor landing gear. Nor wings. Nor apparent engines. Nothing I would have dreamed up as a time glider.

  Beyond the open door, however, the glider was spotless. Ell stepped up to the opening and invited me in. The interior was well lit but barren. The air odorless, though slightly astringent. It reminded me of an empty operating room. There were no chairs, no tables. No dials or switches. Just the bare gray walls. And a slight tingle on my skin like there might be a lot of static electricity in the area.

  “The superstructure becomes transparent when the glider is working, and you feel like you’re standing in the open,” Ell explained for some reason. Then she pointed down a long hallway that clearly could never fit inside the glider. “Down there is where I came from. If the glider was fully operational we could walk back there and see your moon when it appeared twenty times larger than it does tonight. And your day was a little over three hours long.”

  “You mean you’re still connected to the past.” I nodded toward the hallway. “Down there?”

  “Not at all points. Just two. Here and there. But that hallway ends not only in the distant past. It reaches across millions of light years of space as well since your earth and our galaxy have moved during that time.”

  As she turned, the hallway to the Hadean rotated from view as another chamber took its place. “This is the, I guess you would call it the engine room or control room.” She led the way into it, her clown shoes flapping heavily against the deck. “It’s where the quantum paradoxes are set up and carried out. The little impossibilities that drive the glider in the direction of space and time you want to go. There’s my broken linkage right there,” she said pointing to a dull gray rod with an obvious crack through its midpoint. It connected two unremarkable, consoles about the sizes of small refrigerators. “It’s a simple piece that should never have broken. But it did. After the boulder strike that should never have happened either. And I have no way to construct another. Almost anything else could have failed and the glider would have fixed it on the spot or worked around it without my intervention. But not this.”

  I stepped over to the slightly out-of-kilter link. It was about four feet long and as thick as my wrist. “Looks like a solid piece of metal,” I muttered.

  “It is. Or was.”

  I leaned down to study the broken linkage. “So how critical are the specifications on that thing?”

  I thought I detected a feathery probe sweep along my left frontal lobe. Perhaps a scan for the specific measurement terms needed. Then, “Twelve microns in width but only a few tenths of millimeters in length. Is that a problem?”

  “It might take a while to mill the width precisely but I don’t see any problems with the rest. What’s the material?”

  “Titanium. It’s the only titanium on the glider so I can’t give you any to work with except the piece itself. It couples the spatial and temporal flight actuators. Proper coordination between the actuators requires exacting feedbac
k so the titanium has to be pure to minimize navigation errors due to uneven distortions in the metal.”

  “Um, how pure?”

  “I’m not sure. The specifications aren’t detailed since the part was never expected to fail. It’s listed only as titanium. Such an entry usually implies pure.”

  That was my first clue this creature with the magnificent time glider wasn’t all-knowing. I felt a little better seeing that chink in her knowledge. Maybe we were more alike than I had first thought. I didn’t know the composition of the alloy in the crankshaft in my car either. “Can you tell me anything about its manufacture? What levels of expertise did the builders have in working with titanium?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know that either. Extensive, I would imagine.”

  Another twinge of satisfaction. “Well, like you said, the part was never expected to fail. But I can get a metallurgical analysis to see how pure it is and what minor impurities it might have, if any. I hope it’s not one hundred percent pure. We don’t have the ability to do one hundred percent. But I think we can get pretty close to what you need.”

  “Will you be able to lift the piece out and get it up to your car?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem if you help.”

  “I can’t help.”

  I glanced at her disapprovingly.

  “I’m not actually real,” she added. “Not like you think, anyway.”

  It took me a moment to catch on. “Ah. You mean you’re like a projection into my mind? A thought?” That explained her lips not moving when she spoke. “Then who touched my neck back on the edge of the crater earlier?”

  “That was a mental construction too. I can appear to touch you and cause nerve impulses so you to feel my imaginary touch but I exist only in the machinery of the glider. I never exerted any actual force on you. I just didn’t want you to get any closer to the edge.”

  “Then why not run a mental construct of the cracked titanium rod and be done with it?”