We barely managed to reach a tiny atoll 40 miles from the time bell. A brackish stream provided us with a safe harbor. I used a harpoon to spear what turned out to be a three-foot-long scorpion-like creature called a eurypterid. It was a malevolent-looking creature with an awesome array of pincers and mouthparts. It looked like nature’s answer to the Swiss Army knife. There were cries of dismay and disgust when I tried to bring the squirming arthropod aboard. I almost threw it back, but Carlos stopped me.

“Don’t do it, Ted,” he told me. “That’s a valuable specimen, and it could make a good meal. But, ah, try to hold it over the water, at least until it stops moving.”

We finally ran aground about half a mile up the river. “Our first priority is to start a fire,” I announced. “Everyone except me, Dianna and Dr. Horne is on wood gathering detail. I’m staying here with the wounded.”
“Ted, I’m not hurt too badly to walk around,” Dianna said irritably.

“Di, you’re suffering from the early stages of hypothermia!” I shouted. She was taken aback by the outburst. I took her hands and helped her out of the boat. I then said, gently, “Your fingers are ice cold, and you can probably barely feel my hands.” She nodded reluctantly. “You’re in no shape to wander around gathering wood. Please, stay here, and I can help you get better.” She nodded again, and smiled. “Good. I have to change Dr. Horne’s bandage and put some more antibiotics on his wound, and then I’ll do yours. While I’m doing that, why don’t you take off those wet clothes? The blanket will keep you warm until we get a fire going. Don’t worry, I’m a gentleman. I won’t peek.”

I found myself thoroughly distracted by the sound of Dianna undressing. It was a struggle for me to keep my gentleman’s word. After what seemed like an eternity, Dianna walked back into view, with the blanket wrapped around her like a long, flowing robe. She huddled beside me in a fetal position. “I do feel warmer,” she said, “but I can’t wait for you to start a fire.”

Starting a fire proved extremely difficult. The wood the others gathered (if it could even be called wood) was green and usually wet. Even my most valiant efforts produced nothing more than feeble wisps of flame that burned out in a few seconds. The others soon built up a very large pile of wood, even as I tried in vain to light it. I grew increasingly frustrated. Finally, I made an outrageous proposal. “Carlos, couldn’t we start a fire with your incendiary grenade?”

“Sure,” he answered in a sarcastic tone. “The fire would burn itself out within 20 seconds, and it would endanger anyone within a radius of 20 meters, but yeah, you could start one.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Actually… There might be a way…”

Over the next few minutes, Carlos developed a fantastic plan. We moved the pile onto a sandy area next to the river, while Carlos dug a deep hole next to the pile. Carlos ordered us back 30 feet before planting the grenade. He set it for a timed detonation, dropped it in the hole and then frantically buried it. As he ran over to join the rest of us, he shouted, “Whatever you do, don’t look directly at the grenade!”

There was a brilliant flash and a muffled “wummpfsshh.” When I looked up, I saw a radiant column of dust and steam rising 30 feet into the air into the air. Within seconds, another column of steam rose from the woodpile. After about 10 seconds, the pile burst into flame. “It’s like when Elijah defeated the priests of Baal,” Dianna said through chattering teeth. Then she cheered.

We eagerly gathered in a semicircle around the fire. It wasn’t that warm, and it gave off an unpleasant moldy smell, but after the chill of the Devonian sea, it felt wonderful. Dianna curled up next to the fire, using her hands as a pillow. I knelt beside her and adjusted the blanket. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and smiled. “Thank you, Ted,” she told me. “Thank you for everything.”
I nearly choked with emotion. “You’re welcome,” I said hoarsely.

Carlos provided a merciful distraction. “We ought to roast the eurypterid,” he said. “There’s only two days of food left in the boat, and we need to conserve it.”

We roasted the giant chelicerae over the fire. I took a bite, and decided it was fine. However, Dianna was reluctant to eat such an unsavory creature. Carlos tried to encourage her. “Think of it as a big freshwater lobster,” He said with forced cheerfulness.
“Carlos,” Dianna said somberly, “I know what lobsters eat.”
“In that case,” Carlos said with a sight, “just close your eyes and pretend it’s a PUC. That way, it will at least seem surprisingly tasty.”

We ate quietly for a while. I helped Dianna crack open an armored leg. I felt desperate to tell her what I had longed to for man months, but I had to wait for the right time. After an hour or so, the others started leaving to set up camp, until we had the fire to ourselves. As soon as we had privacy, I spoke loudly and boldly: “Dianna… Dianna, I love you.”

She looked up at me blankly, obviously uncertain how to react. “I-I-” Her words trailed off. After further thought, she answered, “I care about you, too.” She sounded hesitant, even reluctant. There was a full minute of silence. Everyone else tried not to look at us.

I reached down and took Di’s hand. “Di, I don’t just care about you,” I told her. “I strained to keep from shouting. “I love you. Don’t you understand? I’m in love with you!”

She gently pulled her hand free. In a voice even huskier than usual, she said, “Ted, I know you feel that way now, but…”
“I’ve felt this way for two years!” I shouted. Her sad expression nearly silenced me, but I continued brashly, “Every mission I go on, every morning I wake up, I hope that I can spend time with you, and get to know you better.” I paused to wipe a tear from my eye, and then continued in a whisper, “I meant it when I said I would save you or go down with you. I couldn’t bear to live without you!”
“Ted, don’t say that!” Dianna’s face and voice were full of despair.

I leaned closer to her. “It’s true,” I whispered. I stroked her arm, and let my fingers stray. “More than anything, I want to live and die by your side. I want to know you; I want to be with you. I want to—I want to have a family with you.”
“Ted,” Dianna said coldly, “take your hands off of me.”
I reluctantly let go. “Please, Di,” I said, “I couldn’t bear it if you said no…”

Dianna sat up abruptly. “That’s the problem,” she said. Her voice was almost a hiss. “Look, I want to get married as much as anyone, but I want to be a wife, not an idol. Are you ready to serve and be served? Are you really ready to spend your life with me—the real me? I don’t even know if you love me for who I am, or just for qualities you imagine that you see in me.”

I felt hurt, and a little ashamed. “Trust me, Di,” I told her, “I do love you for who you are. We’ve spent too much time together for me not to understand you.” I tried to pat her on the shoulder, but she pushed my hand roughly away. She then started scooting away from me. “Please, Dianna,” I begged, “just think about it.”
The indignation passed from her face. “I already have,” she said. “A long time ago. But I made a decision, and I thought you felt the same way.”

“Ted,” Carlos interrupted, “we need to go check whether the raft is repairable.”
Carlos and I inspected the raft. The extent of the damage was daunting, but there was nothing that we couldn’t mend in a day. We thanked our respective deities that the raft was made of bulletproof carbon fibers; otherwise, we would have sunk within minutes of the collision with the reef. Lesser materials would have ripped wide open. The fabric of the raft had instead received scores of tiny punctures. We actually had to look closely just to find where the raft had been damaged.

“Ted, I want to talk to you about Dianna,” Carlos said casually. “The way you feel is no secret to me. You know that. But this was a bad time, Ted. You’re hurting her when everyone needs to be at their best. Maybe when she isn’t—quite herself. That wasn’t necessarily just her talkin’. Apart from purely psychological trauma, she has a nasty wound in the leg and who knows what from the beating that dunk gave ‘er. We should check her over in the morning. By `we’, I mean NOT you.”

“Could this change her, permanently?”
“That’s a tricky question. The human brain is a fantastically resilient organ. I once met a guy in a VA hospital who walked right into a helicopter rotor, an’ could still do the junior jumble. On the other hand, it’s a very sensitive organ. I’ve seen guys die from head injuries that nobody even noticed till after the fact. The best advice I can give is to ease off. Let her recover, and keep yourself focused on getting all of us home alive. When the time comes, you will both know what’s right.”

At Carlos’s insistence, I slept as far away from Dianna as possible. I left my tent in the middle of the night, and wandered past Dianna’s tent. As I walked past, I heard a soft sound. I stepped closer, and confirmed that I had really heard what I thought I had. Dianna was crying. I went back to my tent feeling sadder than ever. At Carlos’s insistence, I slept as far away from Dianna as possible. I left my tent in the middle of the night, and wandered past Dianna’s tent. As I walked past, I heard a soft sound. I stepped closer, and confirmed that I had really heard what I thought I had. Dianna was crying. I went back to my tent feeling sadder than ever.

In the morning, Dr. Horne was dead. He had apparently died in his sleep from an infection. I ordered heavy applications of antibiotics even to minor wounds, though for all we knew, our drugs could be as useless against Devonian bacteria as an air pistol against a tank. I became downright paranoid about Dianna’s myriad cuts, scrapes and scratches. If I could have, I would have immersed her in a tub of antibiotics. She resented my fretful attention, and emphatically refused to let me administer the medication myself. I reluctantly let Thatcher do it. I stood by and watched nervously, fearing that that my dearest one might die if the first mate missed a single scratch. Dr. Smith tried in vain to dispel my fears. “He could have died of the injury itself, not bacterial infection,” he told me. “Maybe the pteraspid punctured a lung.” I could tell that he didn’t believe what he was saying.

Dr. Horne’s mortal remains presented quite a problem. It seemed inappropriate not to bring his body back to the present for burial. However, I loathed the idea of making a perilous sea voyage with a dead body aboard. The worst part was that we had no way to preserve the body. In fact, we had nothing except his own sleeping bag to cover him with. It did not help that giant arthropods were already finding their way to his carcass. With some reluctance, I suggested that we bury him in the past. The others readily agreed, though I sensed a measure of guilt behind their enthusiasm.

After burying Horne, Carlos, Smith and I got to work repairing the life raft. As I worked, I was annoyed in the extreme by a bumble bee-sized insect that kept flying in my face. I finally took off one of my moccasins and waited for the bug to land within range. Within moments, the arrogant arthropod landed right in front of me, and I smote it mightily. “Damn bug!” I said. It was only then that I noticed that the two paleontologists had stopped what they were doing.

Carlos stared intently at my shoe. “Dr. Smith,” he said, “Do you by any chance recall how old the first known winged insects are?”
“Early Carboniferous,” Smith answered, with a note of excitement mixed with dread.

I guiltily lifted my shoe. About half of the insect was stuck fast to the sole. The rest was mashed into the bottom of the life raft. “You’re saying this is the first winged insect ever discovered?”
Carlos nodded. “And you just pulped it. I’m afraid you’re going to have to donate your shoe to science.”

I reluctantly handed over the shoe. My extra pair was back with the time bell, so I had to walk around barefoot. Dr. Jurgidsen carefully examined the pulverized insect. “This is actually no worse than a typical fossil insect,” he mused. “I can’t do a proper scientific description without a microscope, but I can tell that this is a new type of insect. Its wings could fold, so it must be more advanced than dragonflies. It would be wonderful if we could catch more specimens.”
“If we do, can I have my shoe back?” I griped.

In the afternoon, we piloted the raft through the brackish marshes around us to test my repair job. “This is the kind of environment where our ancestors thrived,” Smith enthused as we poled our way through a half-submerged prairie of horsetails.

“I guess we should be careful, or we might poke great-to-the-ninth-power grandfather’s eyes out,” Dianna snapped. I was troubled by her foul mood. She was always taking skeptical jabs at paleontologists over their belief in evolution, but she had always maintained a polite tone before.

We finally anchored the raft and climbed out to explore the marsh. The water was no more than waist-deep, so we could simply wade around. Dr. Smith speared a few fish, while Carlos and Jurgidsen caught small fish and a few invertebrates with butterfly nets, while I cast about with my trusty rod and reel.

The swamp held a menagerie of wonders and horrors. Dianna was attacked by a small creature that looked and acted like a leech, but was really a jawless fish. I pulled the mouse-sized thing off her leg, and then ordered her back in the raft. Dr. Smith speared a boxy placoderm called a bothriolepid, and made the unpleasant discovery that it could produce an electric current. Fortunately, all he suffered was a mild jolt. Once, we caught a glimpse of a heavily scaled fish the size of a crocodile. It swam away without showing any interest in us. The marsh plants rustled in its wake like long grass.

The arthropods we saw were far more pleasant. There were lots of spiders, some so small that they could barely be seen, and others as large as tarantulas. Some slid like ice skaters across the surface of the water, others sat in webs strung between the horsetails, and I saw a few that floated through the air on the breeze, casting out iridescent drag lines behind them. There were plenty of flying insects about, but we didn’t catch many. Once, a giant, six-winged dragonfly cruised over our heads. It was like an attack helicopter with a rainbow paint job. Carlos took a swipe at the bug, though its two-foot wingspan was almost twice as great as the diameter of his net. He managed to knock the titanic insect into a nosedive, but it recovered just before hitting the water and flew away.

“I need a bloody bigger net!” Carlos exclaimed.
“I wish we had a shotgun and some birdshot,” Jurgidsen said. “Then we could shoot it down.”
“What good would that do?” Carlos asked rhetorically. “The blast would tear it to pieces.”
“Probably, but all we need to describe the species is the genitals.”

I caught eight fish, mostly coelacanthoids. Dr. Smith joyfully identified one of my catches as a very early ray-finned fish. That evening, I managed to start a fire without the help of the grenade, so we were able to cook and eat some of my catches. The ray-fin went into a specimen jar.

I had a very strained conversation with Dianna. We both tried to avoid discussing the events of the night before. The conversation inevitably led to how we were going to get back to the time bell before retraction. Dianna was very concerned about our navigation sensor. “The weather is interfering with the signal from the beacon,” she said. “It keeps fading in and out, and sometimes I get false readings. On top of that, I think the device is damaged. It’s working now, but… there’s no telling if it will keep working all the way back to the bell.”

“Getting dropped in the drink could foul up most any machine,” I commented. A question rose to mind, about what was normally the definitive innocuous topic. “Um… How is the weather?”

“Hard to say,” Dianna said. “The storm front that swamped Kon Tiki has already passed us by, but the seas will stay choppy for the next day or so.”
“Will there be any more storms?”

“Yes,” she said with grim certainty. “I couldn’t give you a precise time, but there’s going to be another major storm within the next 48 hours, and once it hits, it could be days before it blows over. We obviously can’t afford to wait. If we don’t set out by the day after tomorrow, we won’t make it back.”

I decided to wait one more day (one Devonian day, that is) before setting sail, though by the end of our second day on the island, I wished I hadn’t. We had made all the preparations we could on the first day, so all we could do on the second was wait and worry. Being around each other only made Dianna and me feel worse. It was that, more than anything else, which drove me to take the boat out for a test ride on the open sea. Carlos and Thatcher did most of the piloting. We circled the island for almost five hours. Thatcher had a rather unsteady hand at the helm, which made Carlos extremely upset. “The seals are holding, so we should be fine if you don’t tear any new holes in her,” he once snarled at the first mate. That was one of his milder comments. There were times when I feared (however unreasonably) for Thatcher’s safety.

I was relieved when we finally sailed back to shore. Dianna was waiting for us, obviously worried. The first thing she said as we came ashore was, “Why did you stay out so long?” Tears came unexpectedly to her eyes; she wiped them away in anger. “We were worried about you.” She turned around and stalked back to camp. Even from behind, I could tell that she was blushing furiously.

“Notice,” Carlos whispered, “that she was the only one worried enough to wait for us.”
We set sail at dawn, which in the eighteen-hour Devonian day comes only a few hours after sunset. We all were tired, and Dianna was feeling ill. She vomited so often that a shark could have traced our course just by following the puke. She tried to conceal how badly she felt, and loudly insisted that any signs of illness were purely the result of seasickness. I could tell, however, that she had felt bad even before getting in the boat. I once again feared that she had picked up some deadly Devonian disease.

While she was busy being sick, I put a hand to her forehead. It was much too warm, especially considering the chilly weather. “You have a fever,” I told her.
“I know,” she admitted wretchedly and then vomited again. A few minutes later, she sat up and looked at me. “Do you still think you’re in love with me?”
I gazed at her face for a moment, and then pointed at my chin. She understood my signal, and wiped a streak of slime from her own chin. She missed a spot, so I pointed again. When she was done wiping her face clean, I patted her on the shoulder and said, “More than ever.” Her reaction was a little hard to interpret. For one reason or another, she promptly got sick again.

Thatcher kept us at a cautious pace of 5 knots. Carlos berated him constantly for going too slow, while at the same time chastising him for carelessness whenever we came within a hundred meters of a possible reef. We had to go miles off of our hypothetical straight-line course to avoid all the reefs, so at sunset, we had come barely 20 miles closer to the time bell. We spent the night on another island. Though I felt Carlos was being too harsh with the first mate, I didn’t trust Thatcher to navigate through dangerous waters in the dark.

We only got about six hours of rest before setting sail again. I woke up at the crack of dawn, and found that Carlos was already awake. I discovered him on the shore, keeling in ankle-deep surf. “G’morning, Ted,” he said when he heard me approach. The sound of his voice chilled me. He was talking in a special tone of his, a strangely flat tone that is usually a sign of sheer, abject terror. “There’s something here I think you should see.”
I could already see it. I stepped closer, and cringed. For several minutes, we just stared. Then we heard soft footsteps behind us, followed immediately by a scream. I turned to see Dianna rush to the water’s edge and be sick again. She had awoken and come to see what we were doing, only to behold a sight that would make even a healthy person nauseous.

“Any idea what kind of fish this is?”
“It was a shark, beats me what kind. Don’t much matter.”

We woke up Smith and had him take a look. We didn’t want anyone else to have to look at the grisly find. “Stethacanthus,” he said immediately. “I can tell by the funny brush structure on its dorsal fin. Alive, it would have been about a meter and a half long. Too bad the rest of it is gone.” There was slightly less than half a meter of the shark left.

There were long moments of awkward silence before Carlos asked the obvious question: “What killed it?”
“It’s hard to say,” Smith said hesitantly. He stared at the remarkably smooth edge where the shark had been sheered in two. “Whatever it was, it cut this fish in half with just one bite. It did a very neat job of it, too—this thing looks like it was snipped in two with a giant pair of scissors.” He concluded with a sigh: “Most likely… Dunkleosteus.”
Smith carefully photographed the mutilated shark before we dragged it back out to sea. “There’s something else I should mention,” Smith said. “Sharks don’t have swim bladders, and so they sink to the bottom after they die. To be washed ashore, this shark must have been killed in shallow water. Chances are that the attacker isn’t far from here. It might still be in this harbor.”

“Great,” Carlos muttered. “Just f*in’ great.”
We had a mishap as we packed up our things. As he was taking down the tent, Jurgidsen found a strange, worm-like creature hiding underneath. “It’s an onychophoran!” he exclaimed. “Somebody get a specimen jar!”

Thatcher and I ran over to capture the creature. It was more than two feet long, and about an inch thick. It resembled nothing so much as a moldy kielbasa with lots of stumpy legs. We were out of empty specimen jars, so after some deliberation, we got rid of a coral sample and prepared to place the worm in the now-empty jar. Thatcher bent down to pick it up. “Which end is the head?” he asked.

“The end with those two feelers,” I told him. On a few occasions, I had seen and handled modern onychophorans. As Thatcher reached for the worm’s tail, it suddenly reared up like a cobra and turned to stare into his eyes. I suddenly remembered an important fact of onychophoran biology. “Watch out, they spit!” I said.

Thatcher looked at me funny. “What?” he said. At that moment, the onychophoran sprayed him with disgusting gray foam. He shrieked when some of it struck him in the eye.

“I said, they spit,” I repeated, very unnecessarily. “It’s how they catch their prey.”
The worm tried to make a low-velocity getaway, but it only got a few feet before Carlos stomped on it and cut its head off. He then helped me tend to Thatcher. We washed his eye out with purified water, but the damage was done. “I’m not blind,” the first mate groaned, “but I’m seeing spots.”

Carlos had to pilot us out to sea. Thatcher couldn’t resist the chance to belittle Carlos’s skill, and he groaned constantly about the pain in his eye. Carlos answered Thatcher’s criticisms with blistering profanity. Meanwhile, Dianna got sick again, and didn’t lean over the edge in time. As if that wasn’t irritation enough, Jurgidsen chattered incessantly about the significance of the onychophoran. “It’s the link between arthropods and earthworms,” he repeated at least a dozen times, “and this is the oldest terrestrial one yet discovered.” For once, Dianna passed up the chance to argue with someone about evolution. I grimly put it down to her ill health. After about thirty minutes of this misery and bickering, I felt quite prepared to start throwing people overboard.

“Ted?” Dianna groaned as we sailed out of sight of the island. I looked at her expectantly, hoping that she might have something personal to tell me. No such luck. “I think something is following us.”

She pointed to a patch of water about a hundred yards behind us. I looked closely. There was definitely an unusual amount of rippling at the surface, which would be consistent with a large fish near the surface. “Put the boat in low gear for a few minutes,” I said grimly. “I’m going overboard.”

I had abandoned my scuba gear on the night of the wreck, but I still had my goggles and flippers. I quickly donned those, and armed myself with our remaining boing stick. “Ted—you don’t have to— to—” Di stammered.

“I think I do,” I told her. “Don’t worry; I’m just going to see what’s down there. No matter what I see, I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I then jumped overboard.
The water was a bit murky, but there was no missing the creature nearby. In the bright morning sunlight, the Dunkleosteus’ silvery hide shone almost as brightly as the sun itself. It was obviously swimming after us, and it accelerated when it saw me. It kept correcting for a list to port, and once I saw a glob of blood pop out of its mouth. It was undoubtedly the same one I had fought before. It quickly closed to a distance of fifty yards, almost twice the range of the boing stick. I fired my single shot into a coral outcropping, gambling that the fish had learned to fear the weapon. As I had hoped, the fish turned and swam away. However, it retreated a bit too slowly for me to write it off as a threat.

I promptly returned to the boat. “It’s a `dunk’, the same one that got Captain Bill,” I gasped. “I scared it off with a shot, but it may be back.”
“Before we leave,” Carlos growled, “we really ought to kill that thing.”
It was a very long and very hard day for Dianna. On the day before, she hadn’t had to do too much work, because we had been more concerned with navigating the dangerous reefs than staying on a set course for the time bell. As we drew nearer the time bell and the beacon, it actually became harder to keep ourselves pointed in the right direction. She had to struggle to make sense of the readings, while her sickness only grew worse. I tried to comfort and encourage her as best I could. She seemed to be warming toward me, though I knew better than to assume that it was reciprocated affection. “I think this might be easier,” I told her at one point, “If we tried singing a song.”

“How ‘bout The Song for Gulf War 7?” Carlos suggested. “So long, Mom, I’m off to waste Saddam…”

Dianna skewered him with a bloodshot stare. No further discouragement was necessary. “I have a better idea,” she said. “Let’s do a song they used to sing at my church…”
I had never heard Di sing before. I discovered at that moment that she had an enthralling contralto voice. Soon, we all joined her in song.

I’ve followed another false shepherd
I laid with another wolf in sheep’s skin
No I’m all alone in a valley dark.
Will you leave the ninety-nine to search for me?
And the ninety-nine, will they mind?
Don’t they all get lost too?

They say, ‘You can’t cross the same river twice.’

You can’t go home again can’t do it over again
Forgetting is the best you can get.
Father, can you forget my sins? Can Your water wash my stains away? Can Your Spirit make me over again? Can I come home again?

And when I’m washed up on that furthest shore,
Will you sift the wreck for me?
And if you do, can you pick me up and say,
‘My child, I died for you to live again.
I have kept my best in store.
And it doesn’t matter where you’ve been
When you come home again.

Some time later, Dianna started talking to me about my spiritual life. Before long, the conversation wound its awkward way to the subject of my parents’ death. “Did something happen that made you stop going to church?” she had asked bluntly.
“I suppose I stopped attending church regularly after my parents died,” I said after a moment of thought. “I know I’ve told you about it before. They were both killed in a plane crash while they were on their way to a new mission field.”
“Did you blame God for that?” she asked softly. There was sympathy and sadness in her voice.

“I suppose there were times when I felt a little angry at Him,” I said, “but the real problem was that I blamed myself. When they died, I was on my way to the United States to go to college. If I hadn’t made the decision to go to a college in the US, I would have been flying the plane.” I stared gloomily into the distance. The black clouds of a storm front could be seen well above the horizon. When I looked closely, I could make out gray streaks of rainfall.

“You thought God wouldn’t forgive you for leaving your family?”
“I never really thought about it that way, but I suppose so,” I said. “I certainly put myself through a lot of grief, thinking over whether I should have stayed and whether I could have helped them.” I spent a minute in thought, and then continued, “I guess the worst thing the accident did was shake my sense of purpose. I had really felt that it was God’s will for me to go to the States, and I was sure that it was God’s will for my parents to go minister to hunter-gatherers in Ecuador. But after my parents died, it seemed like I couldn’t be sure of anything.”
There was more silence. Di finally said, “If it’s any help… If it wasn’t for you and your American training, I would be dead.”

“But if it wasn’t for you and me, Captain Bill would still be alive,” I said bitterly. I Looked into her face, and saw an expression of deep sadness and barely-restrained anger. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I said immediately. The prompt apology didn’t help. Fortunately, Carlos broke in with something that did.
“You ought to know,” he said sternly, “that Captain Bill was going to go back no matter what. He would have done the same things you did, but without someone to back him up, he wouldn’t have had a chance, and he probably would have gotten himself killed in the process. Don’t either of you blame yourselves for what happened.”
Hours passed, largely in silence. The sun drew inexorably toward the horizon, and the storm front drew inexorably nearer. About half an hour before sundown, Dianna let out a horrible string of curses. What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did the device go out?”
“No, but I’ve been misreading it for the last half hour,” she said through tightly clenched teeth. “We’ve gone past the island where the time bell is.”
“That is bad,” Carlos said.

As we tried to get the boat pointed back toward the island, things suddenly got much worse. Our boat was struck from below, so hard that we almost capsized. “What the hell’s happening?!” I shouted as our boat rocked for a second time.
“I think our acquaintance the Dunkleosteus is back,” Carlos said coldly. He drew the submachine gun and fired over the side. While he was shooting, the fish struck again from the other side.

“Shine the lamp on the water!” I shouted to Thatcher. I frantically replaced the boing stick’s barrel, and cursed myself for not replacing it sooner. But then, I reminded myself, if I had reloaded it sooner, I might not have remembered to save the barrel. “I’m going to toss the used barrel overboard,” I said. “With any luck, that will draw the fish away, and I’ll be able to shoot it.” Without waiting for replies, I tossed the spent barrel as far as I could. Thatcher shone the light on the rippling region where the barrel sank. I leaned over the side, ready to shoot the fish as soon as it showed itself. That was nearly the last thing I ever did. The Dunkleosteus leapt from the water like a marlin, lunging straight for me. Carlos grabbed me and pulled me back, saving my life. The fish still came within inches of biting my arm off. The fish slammed into the boat and sank its toothless jaws into a gunwale. I was thrown backwards onto Dianna. There was a volley of shots, followed by a hissing sound. Carlos had shot the fish at point-blank range, forcing it to let go of the boat. Air flowed freely from two large punctures.

Carlos emptied the rest of a magazine into the water. “Don’t like bullets, huh?” he shouted. “Well, you might as well give up ’cause there’s no way you’re gonna get us without taking a lot more of ‘em!” With my ear pressed against a gunwale, I was able to hear a shriek from the fish. It struck us yet again, this time from below, knocking the raft several feet into air. Miraculously, the boat landed right side up.

I lay groaning on top of Dianna, which would have been a rather pleasant way to spend my last moments if she hadn’t been throwing up. I expected a final strike that would sink our craft, but it never came. Moments later, Thatcher shouted, “It’s swimming away!”
“Must have decided we were too tough to handle!” Carlos cackled.
“No, it must have realized it had worse problems than hunger,” Dianna said between heaves. “Don’t you feel it?” I certainly felt it: the first rain drops of the arriving storm.
“We’ve got to hurry!” I said. “Get a bearing on the time bell, Di!”
She was already examining the machine. She shook her head, and then bent over and sobbed. “It’s no use. The machine’s broken. Or the batteries are dead.” She vomited again, which couldn’t have helped matters.

“Can you fix it?” Carlos asked.
“In the dark, on a leaky boat in rough seas, in fifteen minutes or less? Not a chance, even if it is repairable”

“Any idea which direction we should go? A guess?”
Dianna waved over her shoulder. “I don’t know!” she said through her tears. “That way, maybe. Who knows? Doesn’t really matter; we’re doomed anyway.” She threw herself flat in the rising water within the boat.

I hauled her up. “Stay together, Di,” I told her. “We’ll find a way out of this.”
She hugged me tightly. “I don’t think so,” she told me. “But you know something? I’m glad we’re in this together.”

Carlos actually turned the boat in the direction Di had pointed, but Thatcher was trying to stop him. “The fish could have spun the boat 180 degrees!” the first mate was shouting. “Even if she’s remembering the readings correctly, she may have lost her bearings during the attack. You’re gambling with our lives!”
“You got a better f*ing plan?” Carlos retorted coldly. He pushed Thatcher aside and reached for the throttle.

At that moment, I saw something. “Wait!” I exclaimed. Carlos hesitated. “The time bell should be that way,” I said, pointing about sixty degrees from our current heading.
“You sure?” Carlos asked. It sounded like a rhetorical question.
“Do you have a better plan?” I retorted, trying to match his caustic tone.
“Why not?” Carlos mused. He swung the boat around and gunned the throttle as hard as he could. Thatcher was too shocked to protest.

Minutes passed. The boat sank lower and lower. “I see an island!” Dianna cried out. My spirits rose when I saw the telltale streak of luminosity where the sea crashed against the shore. However, the boat sank lower yet. Carlos pumped the accelerator repeatedly in a desperate effort to nurse a little more speed from the boat, while the rest of us frantically bailed water with our bare hands. Smith dumped out the contents of one of the hard-won specimen jars and began using it like a bucket.

The island drew nearer. I felt almost certain that my hunch had been wrong. This was not where the time bell had landed. It was only by chance that I had led us to land at all. We might make it to shore, but we would never return to our own time. For a few minutes, I fantasized that we could still survive. We would live off the land. Dianna and I would start a family, and there would be a thriving colony of humanity. I mused about the shock and confusion that would occur if paleontologists in our own time were to find fossil evidence of our settlement. In the face of facts, however, my whimsies evaporated like snow in the desert. We were vagabonds 360 million years from home. Our supplies were already nearly exhausted. Even if we were able to keep warm and gather enough food to live on, we probably wouldn’t last long. Once our water filters failed, in six months at the most, Devonian germs would begin to take their toll. Some of us would be killed outright, while the rest would be debilitated until they succumbed to starvation or the elements. We would be lucky if any of us were still around after a year. Some of us would go much, much sooner, and I knew with heart-breaking certainty that Dianna would die first. Cold water sloshed freely into the boat. We would sink before we reached shore, I decided, and it would be very much for the best. I impulsively pulled Dianna to me and held her while I cried.

Just when I was resigned to our doom, Smith cried out, “I see light—light from the time bell!” I looked up, and through a mist of tears, I saw a shining electric star: a floodlight on one corner of the bell. I promptly let go of Dianna, and we both began bailing more furiously than before.

Despite our best efforts, it looked like our boat was going to sink just short of shore. “Sweet Mother, preserve us!” Carlos bellowed. He pumped the accelerator one last time, and the boat seemed to pick up speed. Suddenly, we accelerated even more, and our boat began to rise higher in the water. We were caught in an ocean swell. Thatcher seized the tiller and banked the raft to keep it from capsizing. Dianna took my hand, and we both murmured prayers as we cruised toward our destiny. Carlos cried out something much less spiritual. The next thing I knew, we head run aground on some rocks in about four feet of water.

We hastily unloaded the boat, racing the rising waves. Carlos and Thatcher ran ashore with the last of our specimens moments before an exceptionally strong wave sucked the boat out to sea.
“You gotta tell me,” Carlos said after we reached base camp, “how did you know the island was here?”
I sighed; it was time to confess. “It was just a hunch,” I said. Reluctantly, I explained, “I was just looking at the sea, and I saw this silver streak that I realized was the Dunkleosteus. It was heading this way.”
“WHAT???” cried Thatcher. Carlos was for once at a loss for words. He just stood and stared with his mouth hanging open, as if searching his vast vocabulary for words foul enough to express his feelings.
“I just figured, with a storm rising, the dunk would head for the nearest safe harbor, which would be on the island where we landed,” I finished lamely. Carlos’s legs seemed to get weak, and he abruptly plumped down in the sand. Finally, he responded, not with words but with laughter. He laughed and laughed until the Paleozoic woods rang with the sound. Every lungfish and giant bug in the vicinity must have been badly frightened.
Dianna smiled and said, “It just goes to show, even a vicious creature like that fish can do some good.”
“Yeah,” Carlos said, wiping a solitary tear from his eye. “So can a big, dumb meathead like you, Ted.”

We spent our last day in the Devonian trying to collect enough specimens to make up for the tons of lost payload. I chopped down a large tree, which helped. After that, I went fishing. Since we had no boat, I fished from the amphibious tractor. Carlos and Thatcher came with me.

I caught four fish in an hour, all fairly small. “I think something spooked the fish,” I said. “When we were here before, I did better than this in half as much time.”
“I can guess what spooked them,” Thatcher said. “Look!”
On the beach a few hundred meters away, a fish had washed up on shore. Carlos steered the tractor to shore to see what it was. It was a big placoderm, almost ten feet long, and it was not in good shape. Something had bitten off most of a fin and tried to crush its head. “Looks like our friend is back,” I said.
“Should we go back to base camp?” Thatcher asked.
“No,” Carlos said coldly. “We should troll the bay until we catch that dunk. It’s a matter of honor. Captain Bill could still be in that thing’s belly. There may not be much left of him, but we have to try to bring back whatever we can for a decent burial.” I could tell from the look in his eye that he was more concerned with avenging our captain than retrieving his body. I didn’t object; I felt the same way.

We discussed how to go about catching the Dunkleosteus. “We ought to use the power winch on the tractor,” Carlos said. “Maybe use a big fish for live bait.”
“No, you can’t cast with the winch,” I said. “It’s best if I reel it in with my rod and reel. Then we can sink a boat hook into it and hold onto it with the winch.”
“Holding onto it won’t be the problem,” Thatcher said. “The problem will be killing it before it can smash our craft to pieces. It must be at least twice the size of the amphibian.”
“The most important thing will be using the right bait,” I said. “We know the fish is attracted to shiny objects. I have an idea for something that could work even better than a real fish…”

Over the next fifteen minutes, I hastily assembled a new lure. I fashioned it from strips of silver fabric that I cut out from an insulated blanket. I attached them all to a small light, which would make the cloth shine even brighter. The final product was about two feet long. I proudly held up my creation and twirled it. The silver strands shone brilliantly in the sunlight. “No Dunkleosteus can resist it,” I said.

“I just hope you have better luck with fish than you do with women,” Thatcher said. I shot him a venomous glance.
“Are you sure you can take the dunk with that rod?” Carlos asked.
“No problem. People have caught great whites with this rod,” I said, a little defensively. “The estimated maximum load is three and a half tons.”
“That fish out there probably weighs more than that,” Thatcher said. “It’s as long as a prize great white, and its armor would make it hundreds of pounds heavier than a shark of the same size. One good tug could snap your rod like a twig.”
“It will hold up,” I said confidently. “Just remember, I’ll be counting on you to take it out as soon as I get it within range.” Doubt entered my mind when I remembered my own failure to kill the fish before. “Actually, I have more doubts about the boing stick than I do about the rod and reel. Do you think the grenade blast could get through all that armor?”
“It won’t matter, because I won’t be aiming for the head,” Carlos told me. “No offense, but that was one thing you did completely wrong when you fought it before. The boing stick is designed to be fired into the belly. The idea is for the shaped charge to cause massive damage to internal organs. Ideally, a shark will have its stomach blown out its mouth.”

On that optimistic note, we went back out to sea. After another hour of fishing, I hooked something BIG.
“Holy s*!” Carlos exclaimed. “That thing is gonna snap!”
“Don’t worry, it’s made of aircraft-grade graphite fibers,” I said. “Flexible, but incredibly strong.” The rod was bent into an “F” shape. As I slowly reeled the fish in, the rod bent ever closer to an inverted “U” shape.

Words can’t describe the grueling battle I had with that fish. I would reel in a few feet of line, only to be forced to let almost as many feet back out when the fish tried to pull free. I was slowly wearing the fish down, but I was being worn down too. My hands blistered, and the ache in my muscles grew exponentially worse. Every few minutes, we would hear an eerie hum over the noise of the engine. That was the Dunkleosteus’ scream, reverberating through our hull. Disconcertingly, the screams did not grow fainter or less frequent as the duel dragged on.

After three hours of fighting, I had the fish within shooting range. When it showed its metallic face, Carlos fired a grenade at it. There was a gout of blood, and I could tell that the fish had grown weaker when I resumed reeling the line in. However, there was still plenty of fight left in the fish. Soon, it was thrashing about at the surface, raising its body halfway out of the water. Carlos fired another grenade, but missed. “Steer for the shallows!” Carlos called to Thatcher. “We don’t want to give this thing room to dive!” He then tried softening it up some more with the Super Uzi.

Thatcher did as instructed. I continued to reel the fish in. Just when it seemed that victory was assured, catastrophe struck. Without warning, my reel exploded. Fishing line flew all over the deck. It then immediately began to move like a herd of earthworms as the fish rushed for freedom. I grabbed the loose spool off the deck and tried to pull it in by hand, but it was obviously a hopeless fight. All I got in return for my efforts was a nasty cut when the line slashed through my glove.

“I’ve got a better idea!” Carlos shouted. Dropping his weapons, he grabbed a fistful of line and knotted it around a fixture on the boat deck. “Haul ass, Thatcher!”
Thatcher brought the Amphibian to full power. To my amazement, Carlos’s hastily made knot held against the fish’s best efforts. “Don’t act so surprised,” Carlos said when he noticed me staring at the knot. “I wouldn’t have lasted long in the Indonesian occupation force if I hadn’t been able to tie people up securely.”

The fish fought back so hard that it made the craft rear back like a horse. It might have broken loose, if our tracks hadn’t finally touched bottom. The added traction allowed Thatcher to overpower the fish. Soon, we had the fish thrashing around behind us in waters barely five feet deep. As we neared dry land, Carlos pushed the boing stick into my hands. “Go finish the job,” he told me.

Filled with bravado, I climbed out of the Amphibian and waded toward my harnessed foe. The water was up to my shoulders. I held the boing stick just above the waves and carefully aimed at the fish’s body, just behind the pectoral fins. The fish raised its head out of the water and screeched. In the air, the noise was like nails on a blackboard. The fish slowly turned to face me, obviously preparing for a vengeful last charge. Still, I held my fire, savoring the moment. Finally, I spoke: “Smile, you spawn of a fish!” Then I fired. There was a spray of blood and flesh. The fish let out one last groan as it rolled over on its side. Then it was still, except for a feeble post mortem twitching of its tail.
Carlos waded up beside me. “Sheesh. Bad puns are supposed to be my department,” he said. I paid no attention. Something was happening to the slain fish. I waded nearer.
“Sweet Mother!” Carlos exclaimed. I shot him a dirty look. “Hey, no pun intended,” he said. We both stepped nearer. There was genuine awe in Carlos’s voice as he continued: “Maybe this was why it—she—was so aggressive. She was eating for…” His voice trailed off as he tried to count the slender, translucent young that were streaming out of the fish’s body. Each was about six inches long. By my count, there were at least seven of them. There’s no telling how close the mother had been to term, but her offspring were obviously quite capable of surviving on their own. We watched in silence as they swam swiftly away.

“It’s a shame you didn’t catch any of the young,” Smith told us after we hauled the Dunkleosteus back to camp. “However, this will vastly improve our knowledge of arthrodire biology. We should take a picture of the three of you with the fish, for posterity.

Carlos, Thatcher and I posed in front of the giant placoderm. At my insistence, Dianna stood with us. It took some persuading, for the dunk smelled even worse than ordinary dead fish. “Without your help, I wouldn’t have survived our first encounter with it,” I reminded her. Carlos and I put on our biggest smiles for the camera. Carlos held the boing stick, while I held my “trusty” rod. The damage to the rod was irreparable, but
I keep it on my wall as a trophy. The fish itself was shipped to the Smithsonian in an oversized cargo container full of formaldehyde. Careful measurements showed that it was 29 feet, 8.73 inches long and weighed 10,568.95 pounds. I have been officially credited with the largest fish ever caught with a harpoon, though they put an asterisk next to my name in the record books.

“Maybe they should have just created a new category: ‘fish caught with rod, reel, submachine gun, grenade launcher and tractor’,” Carlos mused.
The remains of Captain Bill MacGregor were found “mostly intact” in the fish’s stomach. He was buried in a cemetery in Maryland, as per his wishes. (It was obviously not an open casket service.) I still sometimes regret that we did not bring back Dr. Horne, but my guilt was assuaged when I learned that his will called for him to be cremated and his ashes scattered. I like to think he would have been satisfied to be buried in the prehistoric world he spent his life studying.

Hours before we returned to the present, I had a talk with Dianna. “I still haven’t made up my mind,” she told me. “To be frank, I think I need to get to know you a little better before I can make a decision. Please don’t ask me about it again; when I make my decision, I will tell you. Until then, be patient, and know that I do care about you.”
You might say it took a lot of time—360 million years, and 6 weeks.

After our return from the Devonian, Di spent three days in the hospital, where physicians prepared to amputate her foot if the Devonian bacteria spread any further. Instead, the swelling subsided. However, she remained in the hospital for three weeks, and spent another two months in her apartment.

Di’s treatments were overseen by a new company physician, named Charles Ling. He was Asian, with skin a shade darker than most, in his late 40s or early 50s. He usually wore a cell phone that clipped to one ear; a tiny attached screen hung like a monocle in front of one eye. He carried a large briefcase made of bulletproof plastics, presumably first used during a term as an UNCOST health adviser to some less-than-stable nations. He was a good-humored and charming man, but not afraid to state a problem bluntly. He was the one who told us (that is, me, Di and Carlos) about Dianna’s other injury, a few days after our return

“Dr. Gonzalez, you are making an excellent recovery,” Ling said. “The infection in your ankle is receding, and—as I am sure you have noticed—the swelling is going away. You are now well past the stage where amputation would have to be considered.” I could tell from the tone of his voice that the news was not all good. “We conducted a careful examination for other injuries, particularly in the head. We found fairly extensive head trauma. In hindsight, you must have suffered a concussion.” (I winced, remembering our night by the campfire, and realizing for the first time how much I must have put her through.)

“The most extensive trauma is in the right temple. You suffered a minor fracture, which has already begun to heal. More seriously, you suffered sub cranial trauma—in essence, a bruise on the brain. Blood is pooling in the space between your brain and your skull, and it is already causing cerebral tissue to become enflamed. It is vital to operate as soon as possible.”

There was a long moment of silence. I felt heartsick, just as I had when I feared her dead in the shipwreck. Di was the one who spoke, more hoarsely than usual: “What will it take to fix it?”

“By the standards of neurosurgery, the treatment will be routine,” Ling said confidently. “I have already contacted several highly capable physicians, and they will be able to operate within the week. There are, however, certain necessary measures that may seem drastic. To operate at all, it will be necessary to remove a piece of your skull. This can be reinserted after the surgery, but it will be necessary to install a titanium plate to hold it in place. This plate may be removed once the bone has fused, but I advise against it. During the surgery itself, it may prove necessary to operate below the surface of the brain, and even with the best non-invasive techniques, this will almost certainly involve the permanent removal of a small portion of the brain. I have a legal obligation to inform you of this, and you have the right to decline treatment.”

Dianna laughed, with more than a trace of bitterness. “What’s to choose? Go ahead.”
The operation, from the beginning of preparation to the last suture, took 22 hours. I stayed in the hospital the whole time. In hour two, Dr. Ling told me that the doctors were making the first incision in her skull. In hour five, he reported that the treatment of the injury itself had begun. At hour 12, he told me that the treatment was complete, and the doctors were now working to replace the detached portion of her skull. During hour 21, he reported that the bone was fitted in place, and the doctors were performing a skin graft. At hour 22, the operation was finished. 90 minutes later, they wheeled her into the visiting room.

I went in to post-op immediately, though I knew there was no chance that she would be in shape to talk. I was startled to find that her eyes were open. She raised her head with difficulty, and smiled at me. I darted to her side and took her hand, not withstanding the raised eyebrows of the attendant. “Rest, Reyna,” I told her. I stroked her face, carefully avoiding the stitches on her forehead. Her skin was moist, and slightly chilly. She lay back, squeezing my hand tightly. Then her grip loosened, and she went to sleep.

A week after the operation, she was sent home, with the understanding that she would undergo enforced bed rest and physical therapy. Over the next two months, Carlos and I visited regularly, and assisted her in every way possible. A number of past clients sent messages of support. Dr. Carradine flew to El Salvador for a visit. All the while, romance thrived between Dianna and me, though our times together could scarcely have been further from the usual romantic activities. I helped her with therapy, kept her apartment clean, and ran errands for her while she was bed-ridden. On more than one occasion, she rewarded a small favor by ordering a dozen roses.

It was clear to me that Di was changed. But I could not be sure how much of it was from the ordeal of recovery, how much was a reflection of her changed feelings toward me, and how much was a result of her injury. At times, being with her seemed like being with a different person—or, even, several people. I quickly observed several distinct demeanors. One I dubbed “bubbly Di”. This was the most surprising to see. When she was with others, she would be talkative, more outgoing, and a little less abrasive than in the past. She was also a little freer in her speech and behavior. She spoke more frankly about her own feelings, and about issues beyond the strictly intellectual plane she usually dwelt in. On occasion, she said things that were “off-color”, even profane. Once, at a dinner to celebrate two months of successful rehabilitation, she had too much to drink. When Carlos said as much, she answered, “No! Just enough!”

When she was alone with me, or in small groups, darker demeanors came forth. There were truly frightening phases, which I called “quiet Di”. There were many moments, significant in hindsight, when she seemed to “space out”: to stop talking, not notice her surroundings, or do things she could not explain or even clearly remember afterward. During one of these episodes, she struck me with no apparent provocation and knocked me unconscious. Carlos, who was fortunately present, said he had to pull her off of me and lock her in her bedroom. When I regained consciousness, perhaps twenty minutes after it happened, Carlos was standing guard at her door with a rock hammer he had retrieved from his car.

The most painful times, but in the long run, perhaps, the most helpful, came in phases I called “weepy Di”, characterized by depression, anxiety and occasional outpourings of shame over the past. On more than one occasion, I stopped her, and begged her to tell me no more. “I love you, and I want to marry you,” I told her at one point. “I forgive you, no matter what you’ve done, even if I never know just what I’m forgiving. Isn’t that how forgiveness is meant to be?”

She only cried harder. “That’s pretty much what my ex said,” she cried.” That’s what he said at first.” Then, after a few minutes rocking in my arms, she began to softly sing:

They say, ‘You can’t cross the same river twice’.
You can’t go home again
Can’t do it over again
Forgetting is the best you can get.

She looked up into my eyes. “If we could go back to our own past, and see those things… Would you keep them from happening, make them never exist? And even if you did, could you still forgive them?”

“If we did,” I responded gently, “can we be sure that we would still be here?” I embraced her, with tears trickling from my own eyes. “I know it hurts. But we can’t be who we are without our past, and we have to accept whatever evil we went through to get here along with the good we have even now. I guess even time travelers can’t get around that.” She threw her arms around me and cried harder.

As the weeks passed, she talked with increasing frequency and excitement about getting married. Things came to a head in the fifth week of home care. “I don’t really care about the ring, or even the ceremony,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, we can just have a civil ceremony and have a reception for friends and family. In fact—did you know we already meet all the prerequisites of a civil union? Listen to this form: ‘To establish a civil union, it is necessary and sufficient to demonstrate a prior relationship, including (but not limited to) the sharing of a common dwelling for four or more days a week; shared income; provision of medical or other care; a shared legal or biological offspring; an express wish to bear and raise a common offspring; and Other.’ All we would have to do is fill out this form and send it to a government office.”

I was quick to shush her. “I’m looking forward to getting married too, but I can wait. I’m glad to,” I told her at one point. “And this isn’t really about being excited, is it? You’re afraid that given enough time, I might decide to back out.”

She sighed. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve felt afraid… but not so much of that,” she said. “Sometimes… This will sound crazy, but sometimes I’m not sure how much time we might have. I go through times when I’m scared I won’t live another night. And I get nightmares.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.

“You were right. But it isn’t just that,” Di told me later. “I’ve been having these feelings of…of…total dread. Like there’s no future for me. Like there might not be a future for anybody. And I’ve been having nightmares.” With a little coaxing, she described it: “It’s not the kind of dream where I feel like it’s happening to me. It’s like I know I’m dreaming, but it still seems real. I’m on a road—and the road is time. Ahead of me is a man made of metal. It’s like he’s made of angles. He’s coming toward me… and he’s coming between you and me. And standing there by the road, just watching, is a man. At least, he looks like a man. But inside, he’s…chaos. Ever seen a representation of a shape that is geometrically impossible, or a graph of an equation with no real solution? I see him like that. And beyond him is a black wall—a black wall of nothing. Not emptiness; emptiness still has length, width and volume. Just nothing. And that’s when I wake up.”

“I can’t tell you what it means,” I told her. “But I can tell you this. I love you. I want to spend my life with you. No matter what happens, I will never leave you. If anyone or anything should come between us, I will fight my way back to you. That’s a promise. No form, no ceremony, no vow, no ring, no night together could be more binding than that. If you can’t trust me now, nothing else is going to make it better. Can you trust me?” After a long moment of silence, she nodded. From that evening on, she was happy, and “quiet Di” and “weepy Di” seemed to go dormant.

It was during an expedition to the Miocene a few months later that I finally proposed. After she said she was interested in pursuing a relationship, our courtship proceeded rapidly. I knew that we both felt there was no point in waiting any longer. I developed an elaborate plan to propose to her after a picnic dinner under a pristine sky where the stars shone undimmed by man-made lights. What I didn’t count on was that said sky was filled with smoke from a forest fire. I felt annoyed that my perfect plan had been so perfectly fouled up. The prospect of possibly being burned alive by the advancing flames was also a bit of a drag.

Hours before our return to the present, my fiancé and I watched the advancing flames from the edge of the temporal displacement platform. I sat, and Dianna lay on her back. The orange glow from the fire provided more illumination than the smoke-obscured sun. I reached over and rubbed her exposed midriff. She giggled and pushed my hand away. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I said. I still felt a sense of euphoric fantasy every time I heard her say those words. I glanced at the fire, which was now about half a mile away. “Think it will reach us?” I asked.
“No, we’re definitely safe,” she said. “It’s, what, 15 minutes until we go?”
I glanced at my watch. “Thirteen minutes and forty seconds,” I said.

There was a long, somewhat awkward silence. A herd of Syndyoceras thundered by a hundred meters away. The animals looked like antelope, but the paleontologists said they were more closely related to camels. Then Carlos came stomping over. “Hey, lovebirds!” he shouted. “All the specimens and equipment are loaded, no thanks to you lazy bums.” He cracked a smile. “C’mon, it’s ten minutes until extraction. And by the way, Di, I totally agree with your decision. Ted’s genes definitely deserve to be preserved.”
Dianna took another look at the fire. “The wind’s kicking up. Sparks from the fire may reach us before we leave,” she said. “Is the Ora fireproof?”

The question was obviously meant for Carlos. As a former soldier, he had faced Ora armored cars in combat. “I’m afraid not,” Carlos said grimly. “The hull is almost impervious to heat, but the tires burn like sterno logs. If one of the middle tires catches fire, the flames can go straight from there to the fuel tank. If that happens… well, then we would have a `fiery dragon’ on our hands.” He wiped his brow, as if once again feeling the heat of some explosion from his army days.
“In that case, we should spray the tires with the fire extinguisher,” Di said
Carlos nodded. “Yes, that would work against stray sparks. I’ll handle it. You guys buckle up.”

I took the front seat, and Dianna rode shotgun. We had spent almost every night of the trip there in the cab, talking for hours about anything, everything or nothing. I flipped a switch, and heard a faint whir as four legs lowered from the vehicle’s sides. The legs had originally been designed to absorb the recoil of heavy weapons and to raise the vehicle during maintenance procedures. Now, they helped absorb the terrific shock that came with time displacement. “Stay buckled into your seats,” I said into the intercom. “Don’t brace yourselves; that will only make the shock worse. Just sit back and relax.” I gazed at Di. She blushed, but locked eyes with me. Then she reached out and took my hand.

“You know, I’ve been attracted to you since we met,” she said. “But it seemed like just a silly crush, and I was engaged…” She stopped to wipe a tear from her eye. She had not yet told me the full story of her breakup with her ex-fiancé. A bright bolt of electricity shot between the poles. The time machine was firing up.

I told her,” We both needed time to figure out what was right. Don’t be sad, and don’t be afraid. I’ll always be here for you.” For a moment, my eyes flicked to the windshield. In that moment, I saw something move outside. I stifled a curse and leaped to my feet. I grabbed the nearest weapon, which was an A^3 Eliminator hanging above the door. In the passenger area, I saw Carlos sitting down and preparing to buckle up. “Carlos, get a weapon! There’s a stowaway on the platform. SORRY ABOUT THIS, DIANNA!” Outside, the five-minute alarm sounded.

I got out the door and saw the stowaway. It was a Syndyoceras, undoubtedly a stray from the herd that had just gone by. It had 4 horns, two at the rear of its skull and two side-by-side on its snout. Carlos raised his weapon to shoot, but hesitated. Then he lowered the weapon. There reason was obvious: The syndie was standing in front of one
of the poles. A bullet that missed or exited the syndie might disable the time machine. “Aw, —–,” Carlos said. “What do we do now?”

“Let’s try to scare it off,” I suggested. I shouted an old soccer cheer while pounding the floor with the butt of the dinosaur rifle. Carlos joined in with a profane battle cry and 3 bursts into the air. I fired a thunderous shot of my own. Bolts of energy crackling through the air added to the noise. But the syndie was unperturbed. As the two-minute alarm sounded, it sat down.

Carlos finally took direct action. He fired one more burst and screamed, “Get off our time machine, ya cousin of a camel!” Then he rushed at the stowaway. The beast bounded to its feet. A disconcertingly human sneer was on its face; the hell glow of the forest fire made the expression even more unnerving. It charged and stabbed Carlos in the thigh with one of its rear horns. Carlos fell to his knees, and the syndie stood up on its hind legs and pummeled him with its hooves.

I circled this bizarre fight, trying to find a way to shoot the syndie without hitting Carlos or the pole. Before I could line up a shot, the syndie tried to retreat back to the corner. I stepped directly in its path. I couldn’t fire without hitting Carlos. Instead, I used the Eliminator first as a shield to block the thrusting horns, then as a club to drive the animal back. Unfortunately, the syndie reared up on its hind legs and countered with a hoof to the forehead. The gun fell from my hands as I went reeling into the pole. The syndie lowered its horns for a textbook goring. Before it could drive its horns home, a volley of shots brought it down.

“Carlos, are you OK?” I said.
“Jus’ a concussion and a bruised kidney or two,” Carlos mumbled. I saw that he was still kneeling. Dianna was standing next to him, with the rifle in her hands.
“90 seconds to departure,” she said succinctly.
She moved toward me, but I waved her back. “Get Carlos to his seat, and then strap yourself in. I’ll pitch the syndie overboard.”

I watched as Dianna led Carlos back to the Ora. Carlos was mumbling, “OK, here’s what we’ll say. A three-ton enteledont charged onto the platform, I was trampled during a heroic diversion, and Ted shot it when it was about to eat you.” The syndie may have damaged his body and his pride, but nothing could put a dent in Carlos’s sense of humor.

I turned to dispose of the syndie, and got a nasty surprise. It was back on its feet. Unable to gather enough strength for a charge, it staggered toward me with its head swinging. I took a step back, narrowly avoiding possible disembowelment, only to step right off the platform. I tumbled down the hill, but stopped myself by grabbing hold of a tree root. I felt a tingle of energy as I crawled back onto the platform. I found myself face to face with the syndie. It snorted in warning, spraying bloody saliva in my hair. I drew my bush knife, and grabbed one of its horns with my free hand. I held its head down just long enough to cut its throat. There was a sizzle as the dying animal tumbled through the energy field and off the platform. The time machine was safe. Now I had to get to my seat.

I dropped the rifle and ran into the Ora. I was halfway to the cabin when the time bell returned to the present. I felt another tingling sensation as we went from one time to another. For a fraction of a second after we arrived, nothing happened. Then the platform’s supports touched the ground. It is a little-known fact that the spinning of the Earth has slowed down over time. This makes returning to the present from another geologic era like jumping off a bullet train. In this case, the resulting jolt knocked me off my feet and into unconsciousness.

I woke to the sound of Dianna’s throaty voice: “Ted? Ted…” I became aware of motion and a pillow under my head. I was being carried on a stretcher. I opened my eyes to see lights and a steel ceiling. I was in the corridor leading to the temporal displacement chamber. Dianna’s face appeared overhead. She smiled and whispered, “I saw what you did. Thank you.”
I smiled back, and managed not to groan in pain. “Just doing my job,” I said. I sat up and spoke to the stretcher-bearers. “Guys! I can walk! Could you please let me down?”

Carlos’s grinning face came into view. “How ungrateful! I let you take the stretcher, and the first thing you do is complain.” There was a dull clumping; I looked down and saw that he was using the Eliminator as a crutch.
We took a left turn into the new infirmary. Carlos didn’t quite make it. There was a thump and a metallic ‘whang’ as he collapsed just outside the door. The stretcher-bearers set me unceremoniously on a bed and went back for him. Dr. Ling greeted us. “What seems to be the trouble this time?”

“A llama creature kicked him in the head, and he got tossed when the TDD landed,” Dianna explained. “He also took a nasty cut to the chest.” I looked down, and saw that she was right. The syndie’s horns had come closer than I had realized.

“Well, we’ll patch you up, and do a scan to make sure we didn’t miss anything.” Ling turned to Carlos and said, more in weary cynicism than in shock, “Dear God! You let this man walk in here?”
“He was very insistent,” a stretcher-bearer said defensively.
“He yelled, and made some pointed gestures with the assault rifle,” Dianna whispered.
“Put some antibiotics on this man’s wounds and put a tourniquet on the leg, like you should have before you left the time bell,” Ling ordered. “Then give him a transfusion; his blood type will be on file. We’ll need to scan him to determine the extent of his injuries. Mr. Flockman, if you’ll remove your shirt, we can scan you right away.”

I obeyed, a little self-consciously. “Maybe I should go,” Dianna said.
“You’ve seen me shirtless before,” I told her. “I’d like to have you here.”
“Put these on,” an aide told me. He handed me what looked like a pair of sunglasses dipped in black paint. There was a series of blinding flashes from the scanner. When I took my glasses off, I saw several images of my insides on an oversized screen.

Ling peered at the screen and pronounced, “Looks like a broken nose, a broken rib on the right- pardon me, the left side, and some blunt force trauma to the forehead. Looks like the cut is only a flesh wound. No internal injuries.”
Carlos chuckled. “If I have any internal injuries, I sure hope they’re on both sides.”

The scan showed that he had none. Ling bandaged both our injuries, and warned Carlos not to put pressure on his leg. Then we all walked out together. We were greeted by Dr. Werner and Lou Tanaka. Dianna gave Lou a hug, and ecstatically showed off her engagement ring. “Oh, no, she’s got `fourth-finger syndrome,” Carlos said. I ignored him.
Lou and I enthusiastically bowed to each other. “Congratulations!” he said. “Have you decided on a date?”
“Not really,” Di said. She turned to me and said sweetly, “Is tonight all right?”
I laughed. “No, we haven’t set a date,” I said. “But whenever it is, we want you to be the best man.”

“I’m terribly sorry about the close call,” Dr. Werner said. “The time probes showed that there had been forest fires in the area, and I tried to avoid them.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Forest fires happen all the time. I’m sure you did your best.”
“No, I didn’t,” Werner said. “I could have done much better. The problem is that the TDD is imprecise, and UNCOST won’t allow me to make the necessary improvements. The way it is now, there’s a margin of error of decades. But if they would only let me refine the program, I could be precise to within a matter of days. A new client is offering to pay for the installment. In fact, he’s hosting a dinner for the Naughtenny Moore staff next week. I hope you will all be able to attend.”

We exited the main building through what had become a trophy hall. Display cases, shelves and several complete specimens of very large animals were scattered about the former hangar. What little order there was based upon the order in which we collected them. A new arrival hung from the ceiling: a Dunkleosteus. As we walked under it, it snapped its jaws and screamed. Dianna gasped and pressed against me. “It’s an animatronic replica,” Lou explained. “We shipped the real one to the Smithsonian.” I gently moved away from Di, mainly so she wouldn’t feel me shudder.

“Dr. Wrzniewski!” someone called as we walked out the door. The speaker was a man in a business suit, with the look of an official. He walked up to Carlos and gave him a card. “This man wishes to speak with you.” The man got in his car and drove away. I saw that the car had official UN plates.

Carlos just stood there, staring at the card. When I tried to see it for myself, he stuffed it in his pocket. “Somebody wants to talk to me about something that happened when I was in the military,” he said. Then he went limping toward his car. I went after him.

“Come on, Carlos, talk to me,” I said. “What’s this about?”
Carlos turned his head. In his eyes, I could see the look of great but carefully veiled fear. “I can’t talk about it,” he said. “I’m not allowed to.”
“Can you at least tell me who wants to talk to you?” I said. “Can you tell me if you’re in trouble?”
“If you drive me home,” Carlos said, “I’ll tell you what I can.” I agreed.

I got in the driver’s seat, and he stretched out in the back. After a few minutes, he began to talk. “There’s no trouble—not legal trouble. As you’ve probably guessed, the man who wants to talk to me is with UNCOST. He’s in charge of an investigation into an incident that I was involved in, a long time ago.”

“It was Omega Facility, wasn’t it?” In the aftermath of the previous attack, I had discretely investigated Carlos’s background. I had suspected for some time that he had been involved in the Omega Facility incident. The so-called “Omega Facility incident”, is generally considered to be the deadliest episode in the history of biological warfare. Precious little is known about it, partly because of official secrecy, but also because nearly all the witnesses are dead. In the closing weeks of the Serbo-Albanian War, Albanian troops had closed in on a Serbian bioweapons facility. A deadly bioagent had been released. Thousands of civilians and military personnel on both sides were killed. It was very persistently rumored that a team of EU troops were sent to investigate, but never returned.

“Put the pieces together, did you? Well, I won’t deny it,” Carlos said.
“Has something been found?”
Carlos laughed bitterly. “If they did, do you think they would tell me? If they did, the question would remain of what they found.” I nodded again. The Serbs had not only developed conventional bioweapons, but pursued a program of ‘human enhancement’, led by the French biochemist. Dr. Arnault Chablan, sometimes known as ‘Dr. Nibeaux’. He had previously won a Nobel Prize for developing treatments of the congenitally ill. He had also been a leading investigator of ESP, and a prominent member of the Aryan Ophites, an occult society loosely rooted in Nazism. It was generally believed that Chablan had joined the Serb bioweapons program simply as a means to pursue the Ophite goal of breeding a physically and spiritually perfect form of the human race. No accounts of his death have reached the general public, but all official references say that he died in 2047. One of his known subjects, a convict and fellow Ophite known only as Zaratustra, had been briefly captured at that time, but escaped.

“But, that’s not what I really wanted to talk to you about. I asked you once before if you really believed in your god. Now, I want to ask you this: Do you believe in demons?” I was too surprised to answer. “Demons, now, Them I believe in. I believe in Them because I’ve seen Them. I saw them, there at Omega Facility. There were things there that looked human… except for the eyes. But they could do things—make things happen—that no man could do. And there is no doubt in my mind that the reason is that it wasn’t just the things there, but THEM working through the things. Whatever the men from UNCOST are investigating, it’s more of Their work. And I know if They are around, the only sensible thing to do is to run. That’s why, as soon as I talk to this man, I’m going on leave and taking the first flight to Canada. I suggest that you do the same. Marry Di soon—Hell! Call a justice of the peace and do it tonight!—and get as far away from El Salvador as you can.” I said nothing. What was there to say?

Soon, we reached Carlos’s house. After helping Carlos out of the car, I called Di and asked her to pick me up. “Thanks for the ride, and thanks for listening,” Carlos said. “I know you think I’m nuts. But still think about it!”

After the surreal conversation with Carlos, Dianna’s company was a welcome relief. Di sensed that I was troubled. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
I decided not to tell her about what Carlos had said, at least not in full. “Carlos seems upset,” I told her. “He’s planning to take a break and go to Canada.”
“Did he say anything about what that man wanted to talk to him about?”
“A little,” I said. “He says that it’s part of an ongoing investigation into something that happened years ago.”

“Was it in Serbia?” Dianna asked.
“Yes,” I said, startled. “Did he tell you he was in the Balkans? I didn’t find out until today.”
“He mentioned it, once,” Di said. We said nothing more about it. Dianna was clearly troubled. I suspected that Carlos might have told her even more than he told me.
I finally broached the question that weighed heaviest on both our minds. “Di, when do you want to get married?” I asked.

“To be frank, I really do wish it could be tonight,” she said. I was jolted by her answer, but she quickly added, “Of course, what we need is to wait. There’re things we still need to talk through, and I suppose we should get premarital counseling. I don’t care about planning a big wedding. Let’s aim to get it done by October.”

One week after our harrowing escape from the Miocene, Dianna and I were at the social function for our new sponsor. At the entrance of the museum, we encountered a strange group of people. One was a slight Asian woman, who looked to be about 45. She wore a short, black dress, a white vest and an antiquated pair of spectacles. I immediately pegged her as a professional scientist. Her companion could not have seemed more incongruous, resembling nothing so much as an over-the-hill biker. He was over 6 feet tall, with a barrel chest and heavily muscled arms. His scalp was completely bald, and there were no traces of a beard, making his age difficult to judge. I guessed that he was well over 50. The strangest thing about him was that he was still wearing sunglasses and gloves, even though the sun was setting and he was indoors. Close behind him were two identical short and stocky young men.

The woman spoke first. “Hello, I am Dr. Sara Marcos,” she said. “You must be Ted Flockman and Ms. Gonzalez.”
“Soon to be Mrs. Flockman,” she interjected.

Dr. Marcos gave a disdainful frown. “My companions are Albert Schwartz and his sons, Harold and Henry,” she said. I took another look at the twins. Their pallor and features were almost Asiatic. Their “father”, on the other hand, was the quintessential Nordic, with skin so pale he might be mistaken for an albino. I decided that they had to be adopted, though I was struck by a fundamental similarity in build. In spite of his greater height, the elder had the same stout build as the twins. Marcos noticed me looking at her companion’s sunglasses, and gave him a nudge. He hastily took them off, though the gloves stayed on. She then continued, “We are working for Charles Hodges on the upcoming expedition.” I recognized the name, and was immediately impressed. Hodges was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Given his reclusive reputation, I was surprised that he was hosting a dinner.

I was decidedly put off by Dr. Marcos, and was glad when Lou came over. “I see you’ve met Marcos and the Schwartzes,” he said. “Come on to the dining hall and meet the host.”

Counting ourselves, there were 33 people at the dinner. Dianna and I were seated as guests of honor at the same table as our host. Drs. Werner, Marcos, and Ling, the Schwartzes and an unfamiliar man in a wheel chair were also seated there. The man in the wheel chair was introduced as Dr. Paulus. Hodges himself required no introduction.

The billionaire was very different from what I had expected. The first thing I noticed was that he wore frameless sunglasses with mirror-like lenses that wholly concealed his eyes. The spoon-like lenses distorted and fractured what they reflected, like the eyes of an insect. I immediately felt embarrassed for staring at Schwartz. The second thing I noticed was how youthful he looked. I had known he was young, only 27, but his appearance and especially his behavior was more fitting for a nine-year-old boy. His child-like qualities were reinforced by an unusually large head and a disorderly mop of a haircut. He tended to talk quickly, on a bewildering range of topics, and as he spoke, he would nod his slightly oversized head like a living bobble head doll.

“I’m very glad to meet you,” he said on introduction. “I’ve read all about your work. Would you like some soy steak? I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat animal meat or products. If you wanna real steak, I can tell my cook to fix you one. It’s wonderful to meat you, just wonderful.”

“The soy steak is fine,” I said.
“I would like a real one,” Di said.
“Very well,” said Hodges. “Waiter! Two steaks, one soy and one beef. It’s unfortunate that Dr. Wrzniewski could not be here. I was looking forward to meeting him.”
“Carlos was injured on our last expedition to the Miocene,” I said. “He’s decided to take time off until he recovers.”

“Unfortunate. Unfortunate,” Hodges said. “I was looking forward to meeting him.”
He then began to enquire into my various adventures. I was pleased by his interest, but his limited attention span kept me off-balance. Many times, when I began to answer a question, he would say something like, “Fascinating, fascinating,” and then ask another question about a completely different topic.

There was a break in the conversation when a waitress served us soup. “Careful, it’s hot,” the waitress warned. I sipped a little from my own spoon. I had to disagree with the waitress: It was scalding! Beside me, I heard a loud slurp. I turned and saw the elder Schwartz drinking from his upraised bowl as if it were a coffee mug. He showed no signs of displeasure.
Dianna struck up a conversation with Dr. Marcos. “What kind of research do you do?” Dianna asked.

“I’m a Professor of Chiropterology at the Federal University of Jakarta,” Marcos replied. When she saw our confusion, she explained, “I study bats. In fact, I’m one of the premiere authorities on the subject. I have reason to believe that a fragmentary fossil mammal from Cretaceous Montana was either a bat or one of their immediate ancestors. If we can collect a living specimen, it could solve a lot of puzzles about bat evolution.”
I braced myself, expecting Di to challenge Marcos’s belief in evolution. Instead, she simply asked, “What puzzles?”

“For one thing, we aren’t sure whether bats evolved flight once or twice,” Marcos said. “The bats are divided into two suborders, the Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera, and we aren’t sure if they arose from a common flying ancestor or if the two suborders evolved flight independently. I lean toward the latter view. There are also questions about pre-adaptation. For example, the Microchiroptera hunt and navigate by sound. But, is the echolocation system one of their adaptations to flight, or did something like it already exist in a flightless ancestor?”

“Those are certainly some tricky questions,” Di said evenly. She saw my somewhat relieved expression, and squeezed my hand under the table.

“Mammal research will only be one facet of the expedition,” Hodges said. “We will also be conducting research on dinosaurs, of course, and particularly dinosaur behavior. We will be using some rather innovative methods. The Schwartzes will perform a demonstration tomorrow.”

The steaks arrived. The Schwartzes fell upon theirs like carnosaurs, quickly but methodically cutting away large bites and swallowing them after only a little chewing. I noticed another oddity about Albert. The middle finger on his right hand did not bend when he picked something up. This made his grip on his knife a little unsteady, and obviously made for social awkwardness. I concluded that he must have lost his finger somehow, and replaced it with a rigid prosthesis. That would explain why he wore gloves. I considered asking about it, but decided not to.

For the first time, Ling spoke. “Your kitchen staff is very good,” he said. “Are they your own staff?”
“Of course,” Hodges said. “My father gathered some of the best chefs in the world to serve in his household, but he made sure that others could enjoy their labors whenever possible. I continue that tradition.”

“I’m surprised you don’t hold dinners like this often,” Ling commented. “Your father was famous for holding extravagant social functions.”

Hodges laughed. “Quite true. I could put it down to humility, but the real truth is that I’ve never gotten used to crowds. I spent most of my childhood indoors do to health problems, and appearing in public tends to draw altogether negative attention. So, I keep a low profile.”

He did not say anything about what his illness was, and it certainly would be impolite to ask. I suspected that it was somehow connected to his bizarre behavior.

In between swallows, the Schwartzes conversed with each other and with Werner and Paulus in German. Though I didn’t understand them, they seemed cheerful and animated. However, I noticed that when the laughed, Werner would usually look upset. Albert also talked with Dianna, with a level of familiarity that made me a little resentful. I didn’t follow much of it. At one point, the conversation somehow turned to Friedrich Nietzsche, a subject on which the elder Schwartz spoke eloquently. “The main reason that Nietzsche is so misunderstood is that so many of his words are taken out of context,” he commented. “Take his most famous words, `God is dead.’ It is so frequently repeated as to be a cliché. But one almost never hears the second part of the statement: ‘—And we have killed him.’ Only then is his real thought clear. He was not really denying the existence of God- at least, that was not his primary intent. His point is, rather, that our idea of God was restrictive and sterile. And that says far more about us than it does about God.”

After a while, Hodges brought up the issue of changing the past. “Do you ever worry that time travel might destroy the present?” he asked.

“That’s a tricky question,” Dr. Werner said. “In our one experiment, we recovered an artifact intentionally planted by one of our expeditions. However, there is disagreement as to the import of the experiment. Most of my colleagues take it as evidence that any action by time travelers is already part of our time line. Therefore, it would be changing the past NOT to go. But I am not convinced. It is my own opinion that time travel may genuinely alter history, but the universe works to dampen any such effects.”

“Dampened how?” Dianna said critically. “Do you think the timeline actually defends itself, the way a body defends itself from disease?”

“A lot of people take that possibility very seriously,” Werner said. He chuckled. “I recall reading a story from the mid-20th century about a time traveler who saves himself from being shot, only to be killed by a meteorite. Of course, that begs the question why the universe would behave that way. I suppose a pantheist like Dr. Wrzniewski would say that the universe itself is sentient, and I assume you are suggesting that the universe is controlled by an outside intelligence.”

“Why should we content ourselves with only one intelligence?” Dr. Marcos said. “I know the story you’re talking about. It was one of several about a `change war’, where two rival armies of time travelers are trying to change history toward their own ends. It parallels the common religious idea of two opposing supernatural powers—God and Satan, Ormazd and Ahriman, Yin and Yang. Perhaps the supernatural conflict is fought through changes in what we perceive as history.”

“I’ve thought about this before,” I said, “and what bothers me is, if the past changes, what happens to the time traveler. To use the classic scenario, suppose somebody kills his own grandfather, and his own birth is erased. In that case, who will go back and kill his grandfather? It’s an irresolvable paradox.”

Albert spoke up, much to my surprise. “I read a story once with a very interesting solution to that problem,” he said. “It goes like this. A scientist uses a time machine to send a small metal cube five minutes into the past. After the cube arrives five minute in the past, the scientist decides to perform an experiment: He will not send the cube the cube to himself five minutes later, and see what happens to the cube from five minutes in the future. And what does happen?” He paused, and grinned. “The cube from the future stays. But the rest of the universe…vanishes!” He continued to grin, but everyone else frowned. Dr. Ling seemed especially disturbed.

Partway through the meal, Dianna and I stepped out into the museum. We wandered through the trophies. Di stopped beneath the Dunkleosteus, and let it make its tinny screams. “It’s not really the same, is it?” she said clinically. “The real thing, we could feel in our guts.”
I put an arm around her. “Do you really want to stand under…that?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I want you here with me.”

I don’t know how long we had been standing there when we heard another scream. I remember hearing it as a weird whistle. The next clear recollection is being on the museum floor with Dianna pinned under me. The doorway to the museum was smashed, and a thin, acrid smoke still hung in the air. I traced a plume of especially thick smoke to a mounted Saurolophus. Something was embedded in the dinosaur, and its tail was still burning. I jumped to my feet and threw Di over one shoulder, and ran for the ravaged door. A second projectile came in, whipping right past my face. I staggered from the deafening noise and the blinding, stifling smoke. I ran on. There was an explosion behind us, just as I did a flying dive through the glass.

I lay next to Di, gasping for air. “You’re very sweet,” Di whispered in my ear, “but I actually can walk.”
Lou came racing over. He wore a gas mask. “Get back! Get back!” he said. I could barely hear him. A cloud of smoke was rolling lazily through the museum. I pulled Dianna to her feet and kept running. “All staff clear!” he shouted into a radio. There was a loud bang and a bright flash from the museum. It was an implosion grenade, designed to suck air out of a room. The tide of gas was pulled back. “Are you all right?” Lou said.

“My ears are ringing something fierce, and my face feels like it just went through a cheese grater,” I said. “But under the circumstances, yes, I suppose I’m okay. What was that?”

“Home-made rockets, fired from an improvised projector,” Lou said. “Who knows what they were loaded with… We already have it traced back to a spot 300 meters beyond the fence, but there’s no sign of the operator.”
“We don’t really need to find him, do we?” I said.
“Right. Modus operandi tells us enough. The Keystone Kommies are back.”

The next day, the demonstration of Hodges’ field equipment was performed off-site. Dianna and I drove there together. I was surprised when we saw “Lacerto” Leo’s truck in the parking lot. We walked to a dirt lot where the dusting was to occur. Then we saw the technological apparition that was being tested. I stared. Dianna stifled a shriek.

The “equipment” was a combat exoskeleton—in essence, a mechanized suit of armor. It had a distinctly angular look, like faceted gems assembled into the shape of a man. An outer layer of padding softened the angles somewhat. The helmet, which looked like a five-sided pyramid, was grimy and bettered compared to the rest of the suit. At some point, someone had attached a crown of steel rods, now rusted and bent with age. Two bulky radiators hung from the back like vestigial wings. The man in the suit moved toward us, moving just as quickly as an ordinary man. “Greetings, Mr. and soon-to-be-Mrs. Flockman!” he said cheerfully. He removed the wedge-shaped face mask. “Lovely day for a field test, isn’t it?”

“Exactly what kind of research do you intend to do?” Di asked, a little bemused. Behind the bemusement, I sensed a lingering fear. I then recalled the figure in her dream.
“The up-close kind,” Schwartz said. “Mr. Hodges shall explain the details.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that suit before,” I said. “Who makes it?”

“It is a Russian 311A combat exoskeleton, the heaviest one ever fielded in combat,” he said. “Variants of the 300 exoskeleton are used by civilian and military forces all over the world. This variant is made of alternating layers of titanium alloy and ballistic fiber glass, with an outer layer of Kevlar and shock-absorbing foam. The chest plate is 50 mm thick, but because of the multiple angles and the sophistication of the materials, the protection it offers is equivalent to 800 millimeters of steel armor. In combat conditions, it has been proven to withstand anything short of an anti-tank missile—and those can easily be defeated with countermeasures.”

“What’s the gross weight of the suit?” I asked.
“With me in it, about 200 kilograms,” he said. I was startled when the twins walked over in their own suits, minus helmets. “It is considerably less for my sons.”
“How many suits do you have?”

“In theory, we could assemble 18 essentially exoskeletons,” said the elder Schwartz. “But in practice, we will only be deploying four. The rest of the components will be held back either as spare parts—exotroopers in the field commonly require enough spares to build two suits- or for unarmored ‘high-mobility’ rigs. Our support staff will need the high-mobility suits to keep up with us. They, in turn, will be supported by light tractors. The system may seem cumbersome, but it is essential for keeping exotroopers mobile.”

“Fascinating,” Dianna said. “I’ve heard about things like this, but I’d never thought about the logistics of it. Were you in the military?”
“No,” Albert said. “I learned how to use an exoskeleton as a hazardous materials handler in the civilian sector. There are actually many more civilian exoskeleton operators than military exotroopers. In fact, one of the earliest modern exoskeletons was designed for bear research.”
“How well will the suit hold up against a dinosaur?” I asked.
“That is what we are here to see,” Albert answered.

The trials were held with Dr. Ling and his aids standing by. The twins also stood by, ready to help repair their father’s suit or pull him out of danger. I helped in a number of them. In the first test, I tried to ram him with a Thing. He jumped out of the way twice before I hit him. The result was a very serious dent in the hood. Schwartz, who was thrown for over ten feet, got up without a scratch. Then he overturned the Thing. In the second test, I shot the detached chest plate and helmet three times with an Eliminator from 100 meters. (Schwartz wanted me to shoot while he was in the armor, but I refused.) Not one of the rounds penetrated. However, I did knock the helmet off. “That is the most common cause of exotrooper casualties,” Schwartz said, “but rarely a cause of serious injury. Of course, it would be very bad for one if the enemy closed in for a coup de grace, but that is why no exotrooper works alone.”

In the next few tests, we subjected the suits to attacks from devices built to simulate dinosaur attacks. A miniature wrecking ball knocked him down, but Schwartz immediately got up. A pile driver with a sharpened point knocked him for ten meters and left him unconscious, but failed to inflict anything worse than bruises. Finally, we attacked the suit and its components with “Jaws”, a light construction vehicle fitted with a claw apparatus to simulate animal bites. All components tested well. Even what seemed like the most vulnerable part, a hydraulic line connecting the engines to the lower body, failed to rupture under the bite pressure of a hyena. In the final “Jaws” test, I used the claw to pick up the whole suit with Schwartz in it, applied half a ton of pressure to the torso, and then tossed him ten feet. Schwartz got up immediately and dusted himself off.

In the final test, Schwartz faced my old acquaintance, Old Rip the crocodile. “I put in his good teeth for this!” the trainer cackled. Albert faced the same test I did. A dummy, this time dubbed “Kenny”, was thrown to the crocodile, and he had to rescue it. Schwartz literally leaped into action, flying over two meters and landing between the dummy and the crocodile. When Old Rip took a snap at him, Schwartz stepped on his snout, forcing the jaws shut and pinning the head to the concrete floor. “Henni! Heidi! Come!” he shouted. His sons rushed in and carried away the dummy. “Now, reptile, we shall see which of us is the stronger,” he said.

When he raised his foot, the first thing Old Rip did was turn around and try to hit him with its tail. Schwartz jumped over the swinging tail, and landed astride it. A taser shot out from a pod in his right arm, shocking the crocodile. Old Rip tried to retreat, but Schwartz held onto him by the tail. The crocodile lashed his tail mightily, and finally knocked him over. Rip turned around and caught Schwartz by the arm, then tried to drag him to his pool. Retractable climbing claws shot out from Schwartz’s fingers and his feet, and he dug into the concrete with them. With great effort, Rip pulled him a foot further. The reptile was clearly wearing out, and finally stopped and lay there, with Schwartz’s forearm still in his mouth. In a seemingly effortless maneuver, Schwartz thrust his free hand into Old Rip’s mouth and pushed the jaws away. The old croc slunk meekly into his pool.

The trainer was fuming. “That was the most dangerous, outrageous, contemptuous performance I’ve ever seen!” he yelled to me. “That joker could have hurt my crocodile! And he was lucky not to get hurt himself.”
The elder Schwartz laughed. “I showed him enough respect to test myself to the fullest. Is that not better than going against wild animals with unproven equipment?”
Hodges gave his usual double nod and said, “Excellent, excellent. As expected, the exoskeleton is a complete success. Now we shell test the other equipment.”

I gaped when I saw what else he planned to send into the past. Where the exoskeleton was the height of sophistication, the weapons and vehicles were themselves relics of another era. “I am a corporate sponsor of the World War 2 Re-enactors’ Society,” Hodges said. “Rather than buy new equipment, with all the expense and red tape that entails, I used surplus historical gear. These, in particular, are mainly left over from last year’s reenactment of the Battle of Moscow. Did you know that that is generally considered the decisive battle of World War 2?” I nodded absent-mindedly, concerned principally with examining the equipment. It consisted mainly of replica World War 2 Soviet vehicles and weaponry. There were 7 vehicles: 3 Soviet half-ton GAZ trucks, a larger ZIL truck, a Russian artillery tractor, and 2 weird German vehicles called kettenkrads (essentially a motorcycle with tank treads in the rear). In addition, there were 3 German demolition drones: two small Goliaths, and a vehicle called Borgward big enough for a man to ride in.

I rapped on the hulls, and found them to be made of fiberglass. “Of course, they aren’t exactly the same as the originals,” Hodges said, a little apologetically. “We had to replace the hull with ballistic composite plastic to meet safety regulations, and the engines were made diesel electric to meet modern emission standards. Just as well, for the present purposes: With those few modifications, these are almost as light, safe and fuel-efficient as modern ones. The demolition vehicles aren’t as close as the others to originals. In reenactments, they carry reloadable pyrotechnic devices rather than demolition charges. We intend to use them for carrying cargo. The Goliaths can carry up to 100 kilos, and the Borgward carries 500.”

The weaponry was a mixture of vintage Soviet and German equipment. The collection was dominated by 7.62 mm automatic weapons. I was leery of the large array of pistols and submachine guns. “It’s not a good idea to hunt dinosaurs with pistol rounds, let alone ones this small,” I said.

“Do not underestimate their performance,” Hodges said. “In terms of range and accuracy, these are the best weapons of their kind ever built. All of them fire a 7.63 x 25 mm round, first developed for these Mauser C96 pistols. The earliest C96s had sights that were good to a thousand meters, and with a long-barreled variant fitted with a stock, and a sturdier breech to accept cartridges loaded with modern propellants, a skilled marksman can indeed perform to that range. The same round was adopted by the Soviets for these Ppsh41 submachine guns—testimony to how effective they were. Of course, we would not attempt to use them on game larger than man. That is what our larger weapons are for.”

This brought us to the heavy weapons. The smallest of these were a pair of 7.62 mm DP machine guns. The rest were genuine anti-vehicle weapons. There was a 14.5 mm single-shot PTRD anti-tank rifle, four bazookas, and two grenade-launching Kampfpistoles. There were also a 20 mm quick fire cannon and a few mortars. “The PTRD rifle and the cannon are modified to fire modern ‘air-burst’ shells,” Hodges said. “If you look carefully, you will notice that they are equipped with modern electronic sights. They make them small enough now that they can be fitted to a vintage weapon like this without spoiling the illusion. The mortars will be used primarily for launching research rockets.”

I stated the obvious: “All this is a bit much, even for hunting dinosaurs. What can you really do with a bazooka that you couldn’t do with a good rifle?”

“I do not want to kill dinosaurs,” Hodges said. “It is my hope to capture them alive. For that purpose, a rocket-propelled grenade filled with gas or liquid tranquilizers will be better than a tranquilizer dart. We also have a compressed-air cannon for launching nets.”

My mind boggled at the idea. “Could you really take a dinosaur back to the present with what you have?” I asked.

“Our largest truck can carry up to four tons,” Hodges said. “We could certainly transport a relatively small dinosaur.”

I was not convinced. “That may seem good on paper, but remember, you’ll be off-road,” I reminded him.

He laughed. “The GAZ and ZIS trucks were practically off-road vehicles to begin with,” he said. “They had to be, to navigate what passed for roads in mid-20th-century Russia. Our trucks can handle any terrain.”

I oversaw a weapons drill for Hodges’ men. There were thirty of them, from a remarkably diverse range of nations. 5 were Chinese or Japanese, 3 were Chechens, and 10 were from Germany. A one-armed technician introduced as Omar was from Kazakhstan. The remainders were stocky, quasi-Asiatic people like Schwartz’s twins. What they all had in common was that they handled weapons well. I was used to dealing with clients whose knowledge of firearms seemed to be limited to which end the bullet came out of. But Hodges’ team showed professional marksmanship. The elder Schwartz showed off his skills and the strength endowed by the suit by firing the anti-tank rifle from the hip with only one hand. What I found even more impressive was the degree of coordination they showed. In group drills, I had seen even expert marksman fail. The underlying problem is that people who pursue shooting as a solo activity tend to be unprepared for coordinated fire, sometimes even less so than people with no prior firearms experience. But these people seemed not even to require instruction. They covered each other commendably, providing overlapping fields of fire without wasting too many shots on a single target. I quickly decided that my instructions were entirely redundant.

A few weeks later, the day of departure arrived. The day, as it would prove, of disaster…
When it all started, Lou and I were at the gun shed, supervising the loading of Hodges’ weapons. It was almost 7:00 PM, and we had been working since 7:00 in the morning. The ZIS truck was already loaded and aboard the time bell. One GAZ truck was at each of the major storage locations: the gun shed, the hazardous materials shed, and the hangar. Albert Schwartz used his exoskeleton to load huge crates onto the truck. His sons were assisting in the loading at the other locations. I loaded the last crate, just to feel useful, and the vehicle drove for the time bell. There was still just enough light to see the truck driving down the runway. Then there was a muffled thump, followed moments later by a continuous burst of similar explosions. Translucent objects started falling lazily out of the sky. The first one hit the runway and flattened.

“Aerial deployment mines!” said the elder Schwartz. The GAZ truck roared forward, swerving around the mines. Several of the projectiles visibly changed course to follow it. Schwartz fired a double-barreled grenade launcher into the sky. It released a thick cloud of smoke, streaked with brilliant streaks of light. A dense haze quickly descended upon the parking lot. Outside, shots rang out, a rocket shrieked, and two mines exploded. There were shots, screams, and dull splats from bullets striking exotrooper armor, with an occasional clang when a bullet reached the first layer of metal, which soon gave way to the sound of heavy blows and the occasional patter of flechettes.

Albert advanced into the haze. Lou prepared to follow. He looked over his shoulder and told me, “Stay in the shed. It’s not safe out here.”
“My bride,” I said, pointing toward the hangar, “is out there.”
“Very well. Follow me. It may behoove you to bring a weapon.”

I grabbed a Tactical rifle. I turned on the Tactical’s night scope, hoping to see what was happening in the parking lot. The asphalt glowed with dissipating heat. The countermeasures prove to glitter in the infrared spectrum, diffusing heat radiation into a sparkling mist. The cloud revealed streaks of light that could only be the lasers and infrared beams of our attackers. Lou emptied his .45 along one of these beams, which went dead. Schwartz showed as a dark shape, a silhouette within the landscape of heat. He marched across the pavement, while Lou scurried along behind him. There was a furious volley of gunfire from the hazardous materials shed, and the roar of a truck’s engine. A mine went off, and the truck swerved off the road with a flat tire, stopping in a ditch just a few meters away. A shredded canvas door dropped open, and one of the stocky Asiatics fell out, apparently in shock. The better part of one arm was missing. I almost went to help him but Lou urged me onward: “He’ll get help in moments. Now come on, or you will have to make it the rest of the way alone!”

Looking forward again, I saw three glowing white figures running across the luminous field of the asphalt, shooting at the truck with .50 assault rifles. The walls of the hazardous materials shed behind them were veritable constellations of hot bullet hits and fresh blood. Suddenly, the rearmost of the figures was ravaged by a spray of flechettes. As I watched, a constellation of spattered blood and impact points detached itself from the surrounding ruin and arranged itself into the form of another exotrooper. The other two looked over their shoulders in terror. The leader fired wildly, killing his hapless companion while scoring only one or two hits on the exotrooper. That was when the elder Schwartz struck, charging with his crowned head down like a bull. The gunman probably never knew what hit him.

More mines were falling out of the sky. A group of men jumped out of the disabled truck to fix it. The elder Schwartz shouted a command to his son (I heard the name Heidi), who ran out to assist them. A crew of three stocky men emerged from the hangar, carrying a capture net canister. They fired a shot that scoured the asphalt, detonating several mines. One of these mines fired a secondary charge into the air. If it had detonated in midair, as it was undoubtedly intended to, it would have killed the crew, but instead, it hit the ground and exploded. One of the men lost both legs. His companions, totally unphased, reloaded the launcher and fired another net. Shots were still being fired from the direction of the south fence. Lou loaded another clip into his .45 and shot back.

As we approached the hangar, I saw a crouching figure with a familiar briefcase. “Dr. Ling!” I shouted involuntarily. He turned, revealing a machine pistol in one hand. He fired a 4-gauge grenade that knocked over Albert. Before he could shoot at anyone else, Lou was upon him. There was no theatrical volley of fast and fancy moves, but only a weird tableau of two professionals trying to kill each other in the quickest and most efficient fashion possible. Lou kicked the machine pistol from Ling’s hand and got him in a headlock. He then attempted a slow but sure procedure for dislocating his neck, while Ling tried to drive the briefcase into his kidneys. I fired a warning shot from the Tactical. This broke their concentration, and Ling made the most of it. He broke Lou’s hold and threw him over his shoulder, then snatched up his machine pistol. That was when the elder Schwartz sat up. Ling fired a burst into the exotrooper’s face mask, and then retreated around the building.

Schwartz sprang to his feet and ran for the hangar. I followed. Then the exotrooper froze. I stopped, and looking past him, saw what had made him stop. Di lay on the asphalt, just inside the hangar. There were no obvious wounds, but I knew at a glance that something was grievously wrong. I dropped the Tactical and rushed for her, but the exotrooper stepped in my path and held me back with one raised arm. I wanted to pound against the unyielding armor. But my grief was too great. All I could do was lean against him and cry.

Hodges and two body guards, a Japanese man named Lee and one of the elder Schwartz’s stocky, swarthy crew, were still in the hangar. Lee carried a crossbow, and the other guard had a Mauser. The remaining truck was loaded. Several mortar bombs had detonated on the roof, making patches of debris on the floor. A large rocket bomb had come in through the open hangar door and hit the truck, but failed to go off. It was embedded in a crate, which had been unloaded and set behind a wall of Thing parts. “The mortar bombardment is letting up. But the enemy is entrenched in the museum,” Lou reported. “We cannot complete the loading until they are eliminated.” Most of their bazooka ammunition was stored in a storeroom in the museum.

I barely registered the conversation. I stood against a wall, barely supporting myself. The elder Schwartz crouched brooding by Dianna’s side. She was alive, but there was no telling how long she would stay that way. One thing did register with me: a smell, a somehow familiar smell that seemed to be coming from the broken crate. I moved toward the crate, and as I did, placed the smell: It was a marking scent of a genetically engineered fungus, with which the Colombian government had wiped out 90% of the coca harvest. I lifted a chain of linked Thing cleats for a closer look. Only then did I realize that all eyes were on me.

“Kill this man,” Hodges said tersely. Both bodyguards pointed their weapons at me at once. Before they could try to fire, someone came between me and the guards. It was Dianna! She struck the nearest guard in the face, scratching at his eye. Without flinching, or giving any sound of pain, the guard fired three rounds into her chest. She fell, still scrabbling at his gun hand. He fired another shot; I heard a distinct metallic noise as it bounced off the plate in her head. I slung the cleats over my shoulder, for impromptu armor and rushed for the guards. A bolt from Lee’s crossbow was stopped by the cleats. Finally, I was upon the guard who had shot Di. I swung the cleats like a whip, throwing off his aim, and lunged inside his reach. I hit him twice, as hard as I could, but he absorbed the blows with barely a stagger. I wrapped the cleats around my hand like a brass knuckle and struck once more. The guard fell, the right side of his face a bloody pulp.

I seized the Mauser pistol and pointed it at Hodges. “Hands up!” I ordered. Hodges laughed, but the noise was not that of a human, but some primeval beast. I hesitated, and then pulled the trigger. I distinctly heard the bullet bounce off a steel support directly behind Hodges. I stopped in uncomprehending horror. Hodges was completely unharmed. Then I was struck from behind. The gun went off once more, and then I was down, and the gun pulled from my hands. I raised my head to look at my attacker.

“You should have stayed in the shed,” Lou said sadly.

Hodges stalked toward me, a look of irritation on his face. Schwartz came up behind him. The exotrooper let out a snarling cough and struck, not at me but at Hodges. His right fist (with its perpetual insulting gesture) swung forth with blinding motion, backed by the power of a combat exoskeleton. But somehow, Hodges blocked it. For a moment, I glimpsed the incredible tableau of the exotrooper in the very act of a mighty blow, arrested by Hodges’ raised hands. Schwartz’s prosthetic finger protruded through one palm. Hodges made a strange contortion of his jaw, like a cow chewing cud. He bit down on his own tongue hard enough to draw blood, but did not seem to notice. He let out a contralto squeal that had no comprehensible meaning but the unsettling suggestion of words. I distinctly heard the exoskeleton motors whine from strain. “I thought you knew better, Zaratustra,” he said, in something close to his normal voice. “But I do not hold it against you.” Then he made one last eerie grunt, gave a hard push, and sent the exotrooper tumbling like a pill bug. “Lee, call Heinrich and Heidrich. Prepare for an assault on the museum.”

His gaze turned to me, and only then did I realize that his glasses had fallen off—and that he had no “gaze” at all. One eye was glazed over, and clearly useless. The other was apparently functional, but rolled in random directions, never focusing on anything. Hodges grinned and straightened his neck. I knew then what his perpetual slouch was really like: a puppet held up by stings, a puppet imperfectly animated by another being.” What are you?” I said.

A long strand of bloody saliva dripped from his gaping mouth. Then, abruptly, he spoke, in a different voice, the same one he had used when Zaratustra tried to strike him: “You ask what I am? Ask rather what I have been! Before the Law was spoken, I was Lawlessness. Before there was Light, I was Darkness. Before there was Fire, I was Ice. I am the incarnate Tiamat, Primal Chaos! Bow before me, mortal, and you shall only die!” With one last chuckle, he turned to leave. “Tanaka, you know what to do.” He, Lee and the injured guard climbed onto the truck, and it rolled out of the hangar.

Lou drew his .45. I gazed into his eyes. Somehow, I was not surprised or angry but only deeply sad. “Why, Lou?” I said.

“For my country. And because I know which way the winds of change blow. I hope, in the new world, we might be friends again.” What happened was too quick to perceive. One moment, I was looking down the barrel of a gun. The next, Lou was on the floor with a broken neck, and Di on top of him.

Just then, an explosion roared through the hangar. The doors leading from the museum flew off their hinges. I was thrown back to the floor. A familiar voice called out, “I’m here to kill Ophites an’ sell AmWay—and I seem to have left my briefcase in Saskatchewan!”

Carlos came into view. He was armed with a caseless 7 mm assault rifle, fitted with an over-under 4-gauge grenade launcher. “Zaratustra! I’m the last surviving member of Long-Range Reconnaissance Team 557!” he shouted.
“Come forth, Zaratustra! We have business to settle, and let’s keep it between us!”

The exotrooper seemed to pop out of the darkness. He carried Dianna in his arms. I stepped between him and Carlos. “Are you for us or against us?” I said.
“I am for myself, and my boys,” he said. “And I am against the God who made this world. All other attachments are only a matter of expediency. And who are you for?”

I stood there in stunned silence. Finally I said, “I am for Dianna.”
“Not a pious answer, but a noble one,” he said. “And what will you fight for when she dies—in all likelihood within the hour? All life is loss, Flockman. Surely you have seen that. Why should you fight? What for?”

“If not for what I have, then for what was lost,” I said, “and for what
might be had again.”

“Listen up,” Carlos said. “Here’s what I propose. Ted, you go forward. Get Dianna. Come back to where you are now. Then step aside.” I numbly did as he said, dreading every step closer to the man of metal. Finally, Zaratustra gently put Di in my arms. Her heart was still beating. In my
elation, I did not see the elder Schwartz bringing his wrist canisters to bear, until I was looking down the barrels. But, at that moment, Carlos fired a brilliant flare round over our heads that made the exotrooper stagger. I lurched out of the way. A second genade exploded in the air. This one shot a needle-like subprojectile downward into Zaratustra’s armor. The exotrooper went tumbling across the concrete like a pill bug, his armor striking sparks on the concrete. With a great crash, he made his unplanned exit from the hangar.

“You challenged him to a duel, and then you cheated?” I said in a daze.
“Right, and he cheated back. So, on average, it was a fair contest.” A volley of bullets started whizzing in from outside. “Hold your fire,you bloody idiots! We’re on the same side!” Carlos shouted. Moments later, half-a-dozen armed men were in the hangar. One of them greeted Carlos.

“So, Dr. Wrzniewski, you made it,” Dr. Ling said.
“Should I be pleased?”
“I think the question is, should I be pleased that you showed up,” Carlos said.

I touched Dianna’s face, and she sighed faintly. “She’s still alive,” I said. “We need to help her.”

“You think that any of us can help her?” Ling said. “Don’t you understand what is going on? Charles Hodges Jr. is an Aryan Ophite Perfect. He is leading a conspiracy to change the past. We do not know the details of his plan. We do know that he has several dangerous bioagents, including the Yersinia strain released at Omega Facility. We have good reason to believe that he also has a radiogenic device. Given his equipment, there is no question where he is going: the eastern front, circa 1941. By all objective reckoning, the decisive period in the most important theater of the Second World War. And if he succeeds, what will happen to her, and to all of us? We are in a battle, not only for our lives, but for our existence—perhaps even for our souls.”
“More than that, maybe,” I said. “Remember Schwartz’s story? He said a paradox might destroy the universe… Why? Why would anyone do it?”

“It’s a matter of applied theology,” Carlos said. “The Ophites have no allegiance to any god of this world. Quite the contrary: they believe this world is the creation of an evil demon called—Yaldaboth? Yog-Sothoth? Somethin’ like that. They believe that human—or at least, everyone of the right color—are pieces of the true God that was overthrown, trying to escape. For the true god to reign again, this world and its God must be destroyed. So, to them, the end of the universe isn’t just an acceptable outcome, but an ideal one!”

“Hodges,” I said dazedly. “What is he, really?”
“Human. Technic’ly speaking,” Carlos said.
“What about his head?” I said.
“That’s simple to explain: He’s hydrocephalic,” Ling said. He pronounced it strangely as “hi-dro-kef-ay-lic”, but I understood it well enough to stare at him in disbelief. “That’s correct. The majority of his brain case volume—possibly on the order of ninety percent—is filled only by water. Most hydrocephalics show a degree of mental impairment, but often much less than would be expected, and some perform so well that they reach adulthood before being diagnosed. Usually, the condition is a congenital defect, but Hodges’ condition is more likely a result of cancer. By age seven, he was a patient at one of Chablan’s clinics. The late doctor specialized in treating congenital defects. But he used his legitimate research to pursue his real interest of `psychic’ research. He believed that those with sensory handicaps or abnormal brain development were more likely to display psychic or paranormal abilities. He personally believed that these abilities were nothing less than the power to channel an occult force, or being.”

“Aye,” Carlos said. “And don’t tell me he couldn’t get results. Suppose that at some point, Hodges became ‘Hodges plus X’. And the real question then is, what’s the X? The only answer I’ll swear to is, something we have to kill at any cost…if we can. And I think we can. We can’t count on any weapon, and the more technologically sophisticated the weapon, the less it can be trusted. But even it must have limitations. It’s not of flesh and blood, or metal and fire, but not necessarily superior. That’s the only explanation why Hodges didn’t stay here to wait for us. Its power isn’t strong enough—yet. It gets its power, I should think, from all the things one would expect: fear, hate, treachery, sacrifices made in its name. Evil begets evil, as they say—and greater evil. Evil squared or cubed! But that, I think, is its weakness. If a lesser evil begets greater evil, then even a small good may undo great evil. It will send its servants in first, so as not to take chances, and grow stronger, if need be, by their deaths. Then it will come. When it does, I will be waiting for it with this—” He patted his assault rifle. “—And this.” He showed me a hammer tucked in the back of his belt.

“A number of his men appear to be Chablan’s subjects,” Ling said calmly and clinically. He touched a pool of blood on the floor, where the guard I struck had fallen. Only then did I see that it had a strange, rusty hue. “This could only have come from one of the ‘supermen,’ a genetically altered subject. This blood is a different color, because it has a different type of hemoglobin. It is also already coagulated. Only the opening of an artery could have caused the loss of this much blood. I suppose he fell down and appeared to lose consciousness? That is their way of responding to injuries. They become immobile; their metabolism slows down. But they can recover within minutes.”

“What about Zaratustra?” I said. “Is he a ‘superman’?”
“No—not exactly. He appears to have gotten the way he is naturally,” Ling said. “From childhood, he displayed abnormal psychology and physiology. He was born to Ophites of an unusually radical faction. At age 7, his parents were jailed, and he was placed in a psychiatric care facility. His psychological evaluation became a published case study, which described his condition as Hyperactive Obsessive-Compulsive Dissociative Disorder. He was placed on a high-powered amphetamine, which, in the reverse of the usual effect, moderated his behavior. He was released in 2035, and promptly reconnected with the Ophite movement. He was jailed by the Serbians in 2038 for the killings of three other Ophites. Dr. Chablan appears to have requested his release into his custody for the express purpose of replicating his condition. He was the prototype for the supermen that followed, and also served as Chablan’s de facto head of security. He was captured by EU troops in 2046, and sent to a field hospital with an untreatably infected injury to the third finger of his right hand. He escaped shortly after the digit was amputated. He is probably the most dangerous human being on the planet, dead or alive. ”

“You seem to know a lot about him,” Carlos said darkly. “Would you by any chance know how he escaped from the hospital? Or where Dr. Nibeaux really got his funding?”
“What do you expect me to say?” Ling said. “Certain decisions were made by certain parties, with unexpected negative repercussions.”
“You mean, the Ophites turned around and bit certain parties in the butt, and my unit got wiped out by their mess. Under any other circumstances, I would shoot you right here, right now.”

Ling answered, “It is far too late to discuss what was done. For now, all that matters is stopping Hodges. We had contact with an insider who could have locked the Ophites out of the TDD computer. He failed, and the launch is already initiated. It cannot be stopped. If we can hold the museum, we can at least prevent Hodges from loading his most dangerous bioagents. If that should fail, the final contingency is to take the control room.”

I dropped wearily to my knees. “I don’t care what happened,” I said. “I don’t care what’s happening now. We have to help Di.” I stroked her face. Suddenly, her eyes flew open.
“Hi, Ted,” she said weakly. I jerked back involuntarily. “Don’t be afraid. Just me… We’re at the wall, Ted. The wall of darkness. I understand it better now. At first, I thought it was death. But now I see… it’s uncertainty. Can’t see beyond it, ‘cause the outcome is unknown, undetermined. But you can break through it, Ted. I’ll be waiting for you on… the other side.” Then her eyes closed. I stood up jerkily.
“Fight now, cry later,” Carlos said. Then he hurried off.

We moved into the museum. I took Lou’s .45 and a spare clip. Ling handed me a .50 revolver, which resembled a scaled-up version of Robertson’s pistol. “This is a .50 Browning weapon, loaded with hyper-velocity rocket-assisted AP rounds,” he said. “There are five rounds in the cylinder, and here are five more. It may penetrate exotrooper armor. Peak velocity is reached 30 meters from the muzzle. Remember that at shorter ranges, they hit harder when the target is further away.”

There were twenty of us, all together. Ling ordered half of them to cover the front of the museum. “These guys couldn’t stop a persistent salesman, let alone a full frontal attack,” Carlos said in cheerful Indonesian.

“Of course not,” Ling said. As he spoke, there was a strange, electronic “ZZZap”. One of the KK dropped dead. I recognized the strange electronic sound of an electromagnetic rail gun.

Everyone ran for cover. Dr. Ling and I got to the shelter of two L-shaped wooden display cases, at the lower left corner of the intersection of the main aisles. Together, the cases formed a square enclosure. One of them consisted mainly of a fiberglass tub that held a 12-foot-long armored amphibian. Ling crouched behind his briefcase, and carefully raised his machine pistol. He had barely begun to raise the weapon before someone opened fire. There was another “ZZZap”, and a projectile tore through the intervening wood (and the amphibian) and shattered against Ling’s briefcase. Carlos fired two bursts and one grenade, and the KK joined in with a veritable storm of fire. Both potato guns went off. “I didn’t see him; I just fired where I thought he was,” Carlos explained sheepishly.

I scuttled from the dubious shelter of the case to a steel beam twenty feet to the right. As I moved, I caught a glimpse of two disks, shining in the shadows like the eyes of a cat. “He’s on the stairs!” I shouted as I dived to safety. “I think he’s wearing glasses!” A shot bounced off the beam. Carlos, Ling and the others returned fire, driving the terrorist deeper into the shadows.

“That’s Omar,” Ling said. “I have dealt with him before, even met him once. He was a specialist in electronic weaponry who left a job for a military research firm to take up bank robbery, piracy and counterfeiting. It’s not so much a career for him as it is a means to some very peculiar ends…” Ling nimbly avoided a furious volley of shots. “He seems to recollect our encounter.”

I peered around the girder, hoping to get a shot at Omar, when I heard the terrorist say one word: “Now.” I took cover just in time to avoid a three-round burst from an automatic shotgun. Two dozen tungsten pellets chewed into a nearby steel beam like metal piranhas. Omar’s gun fired again, but now the sound went, “Zzzap-pft.” I smelled smoke and heard him cursing. He was clearly going to be out of the fight for the moment. Marcos fired four more bursts in Carlos’ general direction. “If you’re going to spray, at least control your weapon!” Carlos shouted defiantly.

I peered around the beam and saw the second terrorist, standing next to an ankylosaur across the aisle from us. He was firing the weapon like a berserker would use a broadsword, flailing wildly, destroying almost at random. For some reason, there were pieces of duct tape all over the gun. The shotgun jammed, and the terrorist yelled and removed a piece of tape. I was startled to recognize “his” voice. “That’s Dr. Marcos!” I exclaimed. A Kommie just venturing into the open perished under a burst. Another volley nearly bored a hole in the case I hid behind.

I fired Lou’s .45 at her around the corner of the case, but missed. I thought I heard the click of the shotgun jamming. Marcos retreated between the ankylosaur’s front legs. She said something indecipherable and pulled off a piece of duct tape. Then she fired a blast that nearly took my head off. I got a glimpse of a strange, hand-painted symbol that the duct tape had covered. I quickly concluded that it was an occult sigil. Marcos was trying to use magic to keep her gun working! After the last blast, she retreated.

“Turn off your sights,” Carlos said. I was the only one to comply. Suddenly, the museum lights went out. There were cries of dismay from the KK: Whatever had knocked out the lights had also knocked out their laser sights and night scopes.

“They must have an EMP device!” someone shouted.

“Not a device,” Carlos said. “It’s HIM.”

There was a prolonged, unnerving silence. Ling fired a smoke grenade. Something in the smoke revealed a beam of light, almost a meter wide, that played back and forth across the museum. “We’re being painted! Take cover!” Ling shouted. “Be sure there’s something over your head!” He held his open briefcase over his head. Carlos dived under the ankylosaur. I retreated back to the cases.

It was none too soon. PTRD bursting rounds pounded methodically through the walls. Whoever was firing was getting off shots faster than many men could with a bolt-action rifle. I knew it had to be one of the Schwartzes. Three men were killed by as many shots. I fired the revolver along the line of the spotlight, resting a folding unipod on the case. The next shot embedded itself in the wooden case, mere inches away from my face. I fired two more shots, and the search light finally went out.

I turned on the night scope on the revolver and looked outside. The squat form of a demolition drone was making its way toward the front door. I fired the last two shots in the cylinder at it. It spun in circles, spurting smoke and sparks. Moments later, the armored tractor came roaring toward the front door. A machine gun on the hull opened up, killing another hapless Kommie. A potato gun shell exploded against the hull, knocking out the machine gun. When the tractor came to within five meters of the door, five men climbed out. Four of them had the unmistakable form of supermen. They all wore armor-plated gas masks, but I recognized one by his missing arm. Hodges had sent at least one of his casualties back into combat! The two leading supermen carried heavy bullet-proof shields, as thick as an exotrooper’s breastplate. The leader fired a smoke grenade through an opening in his shield.

Under the cover of the smoke, the Ophites fanned out. The potato gunner got off one more shot, killing the one “normal” man as he moved against our right flank. He lived just long enough to scream. A concussion grenade silenced the potato gunner for good. On the left, two more Kommies retreated from an onslaught of submachine gun fire, only to be cut down by Dr. Marcos. I glimpsed a shield bearer through the smoke as he wound his way through a cluster of display cases of Nemegt animals. I fired the revolver. The shot punched through his shield and body armor before the rocket motor was spent, and exploded. The man fell without a cry. The other shield bearer abruptly emerged from the smoke and dropped to his knees next to a pareiasaur, 15 meters away. I fired twice more and scored a hit to his shield, but the round hit with insufficient speed and ricocheted. Some sort of burden fell off his back. He fired a grenade that crashed into the case. It was a dud, but it still hit with enough force to knock me down with splinters of wood and glass in my cheek.

At that moment, Heidi came crashing in through the ceiling. He hit the Dunkleosteus on the way down, and crashed head-first into the ankylosaur. He landed on his side, and immediately fired a burst of chaff at Carlos. Carlos retreated across the aisle, taking cover behind the dicynodont. The exotrooper unlimbered a machine gun and started blasting. Two more Kommies perished. The gunfire was joined by the whiz of a bowstring. Lee had crept in through the passageway to the time bell, and moved to cut off the retreat.

When I tried to get up again, I was greeted by yet another volley from Marcos’ shotgun, and a short burst of machine gun fire. I took several hits to the chest. The Thing cleats stopped them, but I had the wind knocked out of me. Peering around an opening between the cases, I glimpsed the machine gunner. It was a legless superman; presumably the same one maimed clearing mines, firing from the cover of the pareiasaur. The leader’s “burden” had been another fighter.

Dr. Marcos moved toward me, while the shield bearer and the one-armed superman ran toward the storeroom, killing or driving back KK who threatened Heidi’s flanks. Only Ling prevented a total rout. He leaped from between the display cases, blocking a blast from Marcos’s shotgun with his briefcase, and stunned the exotrooper with a grenade to the helmet. He followed that with a short burst that hit the shield bearer in the leg. The superman staggered, and Ling hit him in the face mask, knocking him down. He loaded another grenade for a coup de grace. Before he could shoot, the legless superman shot him in the right arm. His shot went high and wide.

Ling switched the pistol to his left hand and fired back at the machine gunner, but the angle was poor, and he could not control his gun with his weaker hand. Fortunately, the superman faired no better. His gun jammed, and he rolled to cover beneath the pareiasaur, leaving it behind. Ling did succeed in driving Marcos back to cover; she fired one more blast and retreated to the Mongolian diorama. Meanwhile, the one-armed man rushed in and supported the shield bearer. The last of Ling’s men fired at them, but his shots only bounced off the shield, and Lee took him down from behind. Peering over the ravaged display case with revolver in hand, I saw the shield bearer take off his mask. I recognized him by the hideous wounds on his face and neck; wounds I had inflicted in the hangar. I cried out Dianna’s name and fired instinctively, without resting the unipod on the case. The recoil hurt as much as actually getting hit and the rocket round went wide and exploded against a beam in a miniature blue-white fireball. There were cries from the supermen, and several shots that might otherwise have found Dr. Ling as he retreated went wide.

Heidi and the shield bearer stood together before the closet. A Chechen emerged from the closet, “walking” a kettenkrad in low gear. He was clearly shaken. Omar came down from the balcony and climbed into the driver’s seat. At Omar’s order, the Chechen took a shield. The men with shields stepped to either side of Omar. The one-armed superman and the bowman took position just behind them, while the exotrooper stood before them all, a machine gun in his hands. Together, they moved forward.

Ling handed the case to me. “Hold this up, and give me some cover,” he said. “I’m going to take down the exotrooper.” The exotrooper was standing with his back to us, firing a machine gun at Carlos. Holding the gun with both hands, Ling scuttled out crabwise from the cases. I moved toward Marcos, holding up the suitcase with both hands. A single blast struck the suitcase. I shifted the case to my left and drew a pistol with my right. When I tried to return fire, I got a very nasty surprise. A spray of bullets came at me from the other side. It was the legless superman, firing through a display case about 10 meters away with a Mauser pistol. He paused to reload and clear away some broken glass for a clearer shot. Marcos used a spell and took aim, not at me but at Dr. Ling. I emptied the .45, hitting her several times in the chest and head. She stumbled in mid-burst and fell. I dropped the pistol and snatched up the briefcase with both hands.

There was a loud bang, an audible metallic clang, and an eruption of smoke from the direction of the legless superman. His pistol had backfired, sending the breechblock into his face. Meanwhile, Ling brought down the one-armed man with a short burst that penetrated an eyepiece of his mask, then fired his grenade launcher at Heidi. The launcher released three pairs of steel balls, each pair connected by a wire. Two sets of balls bounced or broke, but one wrapped around the exotrooper’s ankles. He stopped, and then came crashing to the floor, directly in the path of the kettenkrad. Omar swerved to avoid the exotrooper, almost running down the shield bearer. The shield bearer leaped out of the way, leaving Omar and the kettenkrad vulnerable.

Unfazed, the legless man pulled off his ravaged gas mask and came tumbling and rolling at me with a knife in one hand. He covered the distance in a matter of seconds. I dropped the suitcase and hit him over the head with my best judo chop. All I got for my troubles was a bloody gash on my own wrist. He countered with a devastating punch with his knife hand; the weapon had a set of brass knuckles built in. He grabbed me by the hair with his other hand and twisted me around for a more efficient throat-cutting, presumably assuming I was too dazed to resist. Almost involuntarily, I grabbed hold of the briefcase, and brought it up just in time to block the knife. Before he could strike from another angle, I grabbed his arm and hauled his whole body forward. His head slammed against the corner of the briefcase with a loud crack. I threw him over my shoulder. As he let out a single animal grunt, I grabbed the briefcase and lunged between Ling and Marcos, just in time to block another blast. Ling made good on the time. He fired into the kettenkrad’s drive train, causing the vehicle to fish tail. Omar was thrown from his seat. Lee vaulted onto the trailer and shot out its coupling with the tow vehicle, just before the vehicle overturned.

The last superman advanced on Carlos, blocking a hail of bullets and one grenade with his shield and countering with a chaff grenade. Omar, Lee and the Chechen moved in to push the cart themselves, while Heidi struggled to untangle his legs. I darted back to the shelter of the cases. I had one shot left in the revolver. Another blast from Marcos hit the case. As I drew the weapon, the legless man suddenly landed with a dull thud beside me. He wearily raised his knife. Suddenly, there was a muffled explosion. The grenade had gone off! The superman fell forward, a gaping hole in his back and a visible convexity in the body armor over his chest. I snatched up the rifle and aimed upward, at the damaged supports of the Dunkleosteus. I didn’t fire until the dunk screamed. The fish broke loose and came swinging down, crushing the superman. Just as Heidi extricated himself from Ling’s snare, Carlos leaned around the dunk and shot him in the neck joint with a grenade, blowing the helmet off. The Chechen dropped his shield and shouted, “There is no God but Allah—and he is against us!” Then he drew a pistol and shot Lee. Then he turned to Omar and cried to him in an unfamiliar tongue. In answer, Haman pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the heart. The dying man shot him point-blank in the chest. The Kazakh fell back against the trailer.

Ling returned to me and retrieved his briefcase. He pulled out his machine pistol, and advanced toward the case with gun in one hand and the briefcase in the other. “Ling,” I shouted, “look out!” Dr. Marcos had just emerged from cover. Ling raised his briefcase just in time to stop a blast of flechettes. Her gun jammed again. Omar called out to Marcos for help. She used another spell, but instead of trying to fire immediately, she pulled out a knife and cut Omar’s throat. He fell down, convulsing. As if given new strength, Marcos flung herself against the cart and pushed it along, firing all the while. Her wild volleys kept Carlos and Dr. Ling at bay. I crawled out of the enclosing cases, putting a little extra wood between me and her.

Marcos’ gun did not go silent until she ran out of ammunition. She continued to push the cart with all her might. Ling leaned out from an opening between the cases and shot off one of the wheels. This not only slowed down the cart, but caused it to swerve left. Moments later, it crashed into the case. Marcos tried to pull the cart back on course, but it was hopeless. She collapsed in exhaustion beside the cart.

Ling stood up and opened his briefcase. In an efficient but unhurried manner, he placed an explosive charge on the cart. “This is a thermate charge,” he explained. “It will burn the bioagents.” He quickly hooked it up to an electronic detonator. But when he pressed the button, nothing happened. He inserted a magnesium fuse and tried to light it, but his lighter would not work.

Hodges’ laughter echoed down from above. “What good is a bomb, little man, if it will not go off? What good is fire against the Lord of Ice and Darkness? Now, untermensch, die!” There was an ominous groan from the fish’s remaining support. Ling pulled out a match and struck it against the book. It did not light. He struck it again, and yet again. The fish broke loose, and its tail fell forward onto the ankylosaur. On the third try, the match lit, but it was too late. The fiberglass fish slid sideways, and the very tip of its tail shattered Ling’s skull. Hodges emerged imperiously from the passage to the time bell. “All in all, very impressive, for a bunch of untermenschen,” he said. “But you will still all die.”

Carlos raised his gun to shoot. Hodges made a gesture and said a few words. The odds of Carlos’s gun jamming were about 1 in 50,000, but that is exactly what happened. “Please,” he said. Carlos tossed a grenade, one of the same thermate devices he had used in our Devonian adventure. Hodges caught it in mid-air and tossed it disdainfully aside. It did not explode.
Schwartz came in behind him. “They killed… my boys,” he gasped.

“And I shall punish them for it. Carry the bodies to the time bell. We need ballast, and we can use the gear,” Hodges said. His head bobbed as he walked, a motion which now called to mind a stalking carnosaur. But his perpetual slouching brought to mind another image: a puppet, imperfectly controlled by invisible strings. Two bodyguards followed behind, obviously very nervous. I felt a rough-edged blade press against my throat. Marcos was back up. Meanwhile, more Ophites came out. Some hauled away the cart, while others carried away bodies. Zaratustra shouldered Heidi, armor and all, and carried him out. All of them studiously ignored us.

“Now that we have you at our mercy,” Hodges said, “what shall we do with you?” He stopped in front of me, and smiled. “Before you die, shall I tell you everything your betrothed hasn’t shared with you?” I struck him reflexively. His head jerked, and his eyes rolled, but the rest of his body seemed unaffected. My hand went numb. He went on toward Carlos without comment, as if my blow were too inconsequential to respond to. “And you, Wrzniewski, what are we to do with you? You knew what I am and what I can do, yet still you came to fight me. You stupid Aborigine—and all the more stupid for your learning. Did you think sheer incorrigibility could save you?”

Carlos ejected the bad cartridge and loaded a new one. A guard stepped between them, preparing to shoot Carlos, but Hodges waved him aside, and then moved toward Carlos. “What I find truly unfathomable,” he said cheerfully, “is that you have no faith. You trust no God, true or false. The closest thing you have to an object of faith is the weapon you hold in your hand.” With one short lunge, he reached Carlos and pushed the gun aside before he could even try to fire. “But in the end, your gun is no more effectual than a totem of a superstitious savage—less so, in fact, since the savages at least have faith in something beyond themselves and their works. You, Wrzniewski, are nothing more than a savage stripped by civilization of the savage’s one redeeming virtue. And so you hide, not behind a sacred amulet, but behind the latest technological toy. Did you really think it would do you any good, even if it worked?”

Carlos answered: “I didn’t come because I thought I could beat you. I came back because I never leave my mates in a lurch, and because I finally realized that I just couldn’t let a nasty f* like you get his way unopposed. And faith? I guess you could say I have a kind of faith. The faith of every Mesozoic fuzzball that ever stood its ground before a carnosaur. The faith of every man who ever stood unarmed against a lion. The faith of the mustard seed that throws the mountain into the sea. You act big, but I know what that means. You’re like any predator. When men run away, you crush and kill. But what happens when someone stands his ground?”

“So,” Hodges said nastily, “you think courage can save you?”
“Did I say anything about `saving’?” Hodges froze. “You hesitate, and that means one of two things. Either you might not be able to kill me, or if you do kill me, you get weaker. Either way, you walk out of here over my dead body—and maybe that’s all that ever really matters. So, shall we test a hypothesis? Or call it a draw and all go home?” Hodges grinned. He set his gun to Carlos’s brow and pulled the trigger.
It jammed.

Carlos laughed, long and loud. A guard dropped his weapon in shock. “Now try and jam this, you SOB!” Carlos cried. He whipped out his rock hammer and swung. Hodges raised his arm to intercept the blow. I think he caught it—but it certainly didn’t do him any good. The hammer struck home with a loud crunch of bone, and Hodges fell like a puppet with its strings cut. The other raised his weapon to fire, but Carlos fired the rifle with his free hand and got him first. Then Hodges started to rise. There was a steadily rising hiss, which I realized came from his throat. Carlos stared into the inhuman eyes. “So that’s how it’s going to be, aye?” he said. “Well, I came prepared for that.” He pulled out a double-barreled flare pistol. One barrel jammed, but the other fired a flare right into Hodges’ chest. He fell over, a cloud of smoke rising from his wound. This time, instead of landing in an inert heap, he writhed about and howled, with a sound that seemed impossible from a human throat.

“Drop the hammer, or I’ll cut his throat!” Marcos warned. She pressed the knife closer to my throat. Incredibly, Hodges began to rise yet again. He let out a demonic cackle. Carlos stepped back, but held his hammer at ready. Marcos drew back her blade ever so slightly. One guard ran for the door. The Hodges-thing slavered a command in German, and he froze, pleading, “Nein, nein!” Meanwhile, the plume of smoke rising from Hodges’ chest became a flame, and then suddenly, his whole body burst into flame. I glimpsed this burning effigy of a man lunging for the guard, and Carlos stepping between them with hammer raised. Then the sprinklers activated, and we were all enveloped in a haze of water, smoke and steam.

Marcos and I were hit by a blast of scalding steam. I protected my face with my hands, but she got it right in the face. For a moment, she went rigid from the pain, and I pulled myself free. Swinging blindly, I pummeled her with my fists. She tried to strike back, but she could see even less than I could. Listening for her painful grunts and the telltale whistle of her blade, I dodged her wild strokes. Finally, I got her right on the chin with a powerful upper cut. She went down, and her knife rattled on the concrete. I picked it up gingerly. It was a traditional Indonesian blade, so roughly made that it looked like it was forged from iron filings. A green fluid covered the blade. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that I was very lucky she hadn’t even scratched me.

Meanwhile, I heard the sound of Hodges moving, making disgusting squelching noises as he moved, and the guard screaming, and Carlos swinging his hammer. Once I heard the hammer strike home, not with a crunch but with a splat. Then I heard Carlos swear, and moments later the guard’s scream came echoing out of the tunnel. Then I heard the sound of very heavy footsteps. I heard Dr. Marcos’s voice through the fog: “You fools, you’ve accomplished nothing. It was already too late to stop the launch, and now we have our weapons—and our leader, too. You destroyed…only a vessel. Schwartz will return, and he will kill you. You shall not win, for it is prophesied…no gun will slay him.”

The smoke was still too thick to see clearly. From the corridor, I heard Zaratustra say wryly, “What, flames already?” Carlos fired a wild volley of bullets and grenades into the corridor. The exotrooper did not even break stride. Before I could even see him, he fired a volley of flechettes that almost minced Carlos. Then he made a final leap, and landed beside me with a mighty thump, as if he had dropped from the sky. A very large and very modern pistol was in his hand. Before I could react, he planted a targeting laser on my chest and pulled the trigger, but his gun jammed. He pointed at a nearby dinosaur and pulled the trigger, and the head disintegrated in a cloud of sawdust. But when he pointed the gun back at me, it jammed again. “Interesting,” he said. He holstered his gun and unsheathed his claws. “I shall have to dispatch you with weapons that will not jam.”

I retreated, and Schwartz pursued, easily closing the distance. Carlos fired a high explosive grenade, which narrowly missed. The blast rocked Schwartz, but failed to slow him down. Then Carlos fired a flare shell. Zaratustra froze and covered his eyes. For the first time, he screamed. Carlos fired a second HE grenade, and hit Zaratustra right in the chest. He toppled rump-first into the display case, where he became soundly stuck.

Carlos fired a smoke grenade at the tiny gap between helmet and breastplate. The grenade was too big to penetrate, but the explosion made the helmet jump visibly. Thin streams of smoke came from behind the face plate. Schwartz must have been blind, nearly deaf, and barely able to breath. “Come on,” Carlos said, aiming the rifle almost point-blank at the terrorist’s face mask. “Let’s see those pretty blue eyes.” Schwartz tasered him and sent him flying with a slap.

“You can’t take both of us down that easily,” I said. I picked up a dead guard’s AK 47, which was fitted with a bayonet. “If what the witch said is true, I won’t be able to shoot you, but she didn’t say anything about knives.” I poked experimentally at the belly armor.

Schwartz caught the bayonet in his left hand and snapped it off. “The question is academic,” he said. He coughed, spitting up red foam that trickled out from under his mask. “Observe.” He drew his gun. Before I could react, he pushed the gun under his face mask and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He holstered his gun. “You see?” he said wearily. “18 years ago, in Serbia, I was cornered, ready to take my own life. I tried. I could not. Then they appeared to me in a vision. I asked for death. They said I did not know what I asked. And they showed me what awaits me. Truly was it said: `better to have a millstone tied around his neck and be cast into the sea! Better if he had never been born!’ Still, I said, give me death, for there was no better that They could give me. Finally, They said that They could not. They told me I was marked for a course, and that I could not die until I had run the measure of my destiny. But, They said that they could offer something better. The one thing I truly desired: Oblivion, sleep without dreams—a consummation devoutly to be wished!” He planted hands and feet against the wood and began to push, struggling to free himself. The already ravaged case shook and groaned. I stepped back.

“And you, you are one marked as I was. That is why Hodges did not harm you. He could not. But I am not under his limitations. He is opposite; I am equal. Now let us see who is stronger.” With that, he gave a great push, and did a spectacular back flip out of the hole. He landed on his feet with enough force to leave shoeprints in the concrete.

I emptied the AK 47, hitting him repeatedly in the helmet. One struck a bullet lodged in his forehead and drove it deeper, knocking him down, but not unconscious. While Schwartz was getting up, I drew a dead Ophite’s pistol and fired a shot point-blank into his face mask. He merely slapped the gun from my hand; I was lucky he didn’t break off my hand in the process. Once again, I ran from him.

Schwartz staggered after me, slower than before. The motors in the right thigh of his suit whined in distress. Even so, he quickly gained on me. In desperation, I picked up the closest thing to a weapon in sight: a fiberglass replica of a Megaloceros antler sometimes used by the company for promotional photos. I ducked under Schwartz’s swinging fist and swung the antler at his dragging right leg. One prong got stuck in the damaged machinery, and I yanked hard, hoping to drag him off his feet. Instead, the prong snapped off.

Schwartz came at me even faster than before, slashing with his open left hand and stabbing with his right fist. I parried his blows as best I could with the unwieldy antler. I felt like I was fighting a duel with a combine harvester. I had no illusions that I could defeat Schwartz like this, or even hold my ground. My only option was to retreat before the relentless onslaught, and hope to get hold of a better weapon before I ran out of floor. When I reached the edge of a diorama of Cretaceous Mongolia, I knew it was time for me to make my last stand.

I turned my back on Schwartz long enough to toss the antler into the diorama and then vault over a glass barrier into the small but elaborate display. Schwartz shattered the barrier without breaking stride. I picked up the antler and darted between a pair of mounted dinosaurs. Schwartz came after me at a more leisurely pace. He paused ever so briefly to get the dinosaurs out of the way. He knocked over an oviraptor with a kick and beheaded a Gallimimus with a karate chop. A rat-like protolemur was crushed under foot. I bounded onto a rock ledge at the very back of the exhibit. Using the antler as a prod, I pointed a fluorescent overhead lamp in my pursuer’s face.

For the second time, Schwartz screamed. He held up his left hand to block the light while slashing blindly with his right fist. I parried his wild blows and then brought the antler down like an axe on his right shoulder. It went cleanly into a joint in the armor. I felt a slight shock as electrical connections were covered. Yellow hydraulic fluid and a little blood oozed from the joint. His right arm dropped twitching to his side. I ducked to avoid his slashing left hand. With one hard tug, I pulled the antler free. He jabbed clumsily at my belly with his right hand, but I darted left to avoid the blow and then stabbed him in the neck.

Blood came squirting forth, and for a moment, I thought the demonic prophecy was undone. The wound was only superficial, however. Schwartz struck back with a slash that I barely avoided in time. I feinted at his neck, and when he raised his hand to shield his neck from a second blow, I hit him in the lower back, stabbing between the overlapping plates that covered his abdomen. The antler snagged on something, and Schwartz was able to pull it from my hands. He spun around and lowered his head, like a many-horned bull preparing to charge. I narrowly avoided impalement on his crown of steel spines, only to be thrown over his left shoulder. The next thing I knew, he had me pinned to his chest with his left arm. His right fist hovered like a metal wasp a few inches from my face.

“You killed my boy,” he hissed. “You die slow—hrn?” With an uncomprehending grunt, he slapped his hand to his chest and fell over. I fell too, landing beside him. There was an electric sizzle, and he started to rise. I rolled to escape a thrust from his right hand. There were more electrical sounds, and he sat up only to fall again. There was another power surge, and he started to rise yet again. But then the central motor on his back burst into flames. A split second later, smoke and flame issued from every joint of his suit. His helmet was blown off by a plume of flame. I narrowly avoided being run though by the crown of spikes. For a moment, he stayed upright. Then he fell for good, his right hand still raised in a one-finger salute.

Moments later, Carlos staggered over. “What happened to him?”
“He must have had a heart attack,” I said. “It must have been a combination of things. Ling said that he was on an amphetamine-based drug, which might have strained his heart. Then you gave him a dose of tear gas, which is known to trigger cardiac arrest. After that, and all his injuries, his heart finally couldn’t take it any more. Power surges from his suit started to revive him, like a defibrillator. But then the motor burned out, and then there was nothing left to keep him alive. Another `fantastic coincidence’.”
“We’re going to have to storm the control room,” Carlos said, picking up his assault rifle. “But first, we have to check on something. We’re going to find Hodges.” I grabbed Zaratustra’s gun and went after him. He waved me back. “If anything happens to me, you have to get back,” he said.

Hodges had left an obvious trail. A series of foot prints, formed from his melting boot soles, went down the corridor. Drops of blood, pieces of charred clothing and occasional bits of burned flesh also marked the trail. A bloody handprint marked where he had steadied himself against a wall. On closer examination, I realized that the very skin of his palm had peeled off. Carlos registered no reaction to any of this, but proceeded with an intent, searching look. Finally, we found the ditched sole of a boot, fused to the floor. Carlos signaled be to come forward. I approached, though I was nauseated by the very smell. I stopped and stared. The body of the guard lay huddled against the wall. He bore no visible wounds, but a look of unspeakable terror was frozen upon his face. On top of him was what was left of Charles Hodges—seemingly nothing but a silhouette of a human form, already blurred by the sprinklers. I looked more closely. There was charred clothing and tissue there, including a sleeve stuck to the dead guard’s ankle. But there was nothing that could be called a body. “He must have disintegrated,” I said, not really believing it for a moment.

Carlos laughed humorlessly. “How? Even a crematorium couldn’t destroy the bones. And they sure aren’t here. Besides, why wasn’t the guard’s body also consumed? No, here’s what I think is more likely. Hodges was dying. The last hope of the thing living through him was to change itself, to metamorphose or molt. But it needed power to do it—a sacrifice. It became something else. Maybe more powerful, maybe less. Maybe human… maybe not.”

“Maybe his servants took away his body.”
“Hasn’t that been said before?”
“What if you’re right?” I said. “Then what?”
“Then there’s nothing we can do about it,” Carlos said. “We could try to get to the time bell and find out, but that would only get us killed. But, it will be something to think about on long, dark nights. C’mon, Ted, we got things still to do.”

“If possible, we should take the people in there alive,” I said as we reached the door to the tower. Not surprisingly, it was locked. “Maybe the access code will work,” I said.

“Screw the code.” Carlos shot out the lock with a grenade, and then kicked the door open. We were greeted with an arrow. I spotted the shooter and downed him with a couple shots. We rushed up the stairs to the control room, and found a strange scene. A Pakistani man, presumably the double agent Ling had mentioned, was tied to a chair in front of a console. A Japanese man stood next to him. Dr. Paulus and two other whites were huddled at the main console. The giant 3-D computer display, with its wormlike image of the Earth’s trail through time and space, towered above them all. I had always found the computer display eerie. Now, it reminded me of our smallness in the scope of time: the whole of human history represented just a tiny fraction of an inch of that twisted trail. Yet, according to the theorists, what these few men were attempting could end eternity.

I kept my gun trained on the Japanese man. Carlos advanced toward Paulus and his two companions. I wondered if he would simply kill them and try to get information from the other two. Carlos did nothing of the sort. Instead, he said, in a cheerful but chilling tone, “G’day gentlemen. I’m Dr. Wrzniewski, and this is my friend, Ted Flockman. I heard you’re plannin’ to rewrite the history books. Seein’ as the new editions won’t include me, I have to make sure that your planned unhappenings don’t happen. So, I’d appreciate it if you all raised your hands. DROP THAT CHEESY PEN PISTOL! And step away from the console. Thank you.”

The operators had complied, but I didn’t believe for a moment that they were really giving up. There was a series of meaningful glances between Paulus and his loyal colleagues. The man on his right nodded visibly. I spoke to the Pakistani: “How do we stop the—?”

Before I could finish my question, the Pakistani blurted out, “First of all, don’t let them—” While I was distracted, the Japanese man drew a concealed sword and plunged it into the Pakistani’s neck. I shot him dead before he could come after me. Another man drew a miniature rail gun. At least, he was beginning to draw when Carlos blew his head off. There was a spray of crystal shards and electrical sparks as the metal arrows bored through the 3-D display. Paulus reached down the back of his wheelchair and pulled out a small rocket launcher. Before he could fire, Carlos rushed in, disarmed him and threw him out of his chair for good measure.

Meanwhile, the last terrorist standing lunged for a green button on the end of the console. I knocked him down with one shot, but he reached up to hit the button. I impulsively emptied the clip at him. He stopped moving, but his upraised arm remained hooked over the edge of the console. His finger was less than an inch from the green button.

I turned to look at Carlos. He was crouched next to Paulus. “Can we get any information out of him?” I asked.

“Definitely not.” The grinning physicist held a crushed capsule between his teeth. His teeth were stained blue, and his skin was already changing color to match. “Just goes to show: nobody kills Nazis like the Nazis themselves.”

I turned back to the console. Shimmers and distortions ran down the length of the 3-D display. Smoke and an occasional spark came from the bullet holes. The controls themselves had not been damaged by the gunfire, but the terrorists had done some careful sabotage. A number of buttons were no longer identifiable, because their labels had been painted over or scratched out. One large button had been ripped out. My gaze reached the large green button. It had seemed somehow familiar, and now I remembered what it was: the lockout button. The dead terrorists had truly done everything possible to prevent us from undoing their work.

“You’ve made a terrible mess of things, but you’re too late to make a difference. Our work was almost complete. The time bell, its occupants and its cargo will land in Russia, as planned, though it may land in 1940 or 1942, instead of 1941.” The new speaker was on the far side of the console; he must have dived to the floor when Carlos and I burst in. The man was none other than Julius Werner.

“Dr. Werner?” I gasped incredulously. “Don’t tell me you were helping them.”
“Do you think anyone would hope to change human history without my help?” Werner said as he came to our side of the console.

My mind still rebelled at the appalling reality. “But—you can’t be a neo-Nazi.”
Werner actually chuckled. “Of course I am not. And, please believe me, I never would have helped them if I thought they could actually save Nazi Germany.”

Carlos stared at Werner in incomprehension. His confusion quickly turned to rage. Even under his dark skin, I could see traces of red as he flushed with emotion. He yelled, “What the hell makes you think they can’t?”

“And what about the consequences?” I added. “Your changes will destroy all our lives. They might even threaten the universe itself!”

Werner chuckled again, this time rather nervously. “I understand that the original Nazis were doomed,” he said with utmost confidence. “Even if they had won, their empire would have quickly collapsed. Their fall was as natural and inevitable as that of an apple from a tree.”

“So why did you help the Ophites?” Carlos said coldly.
“Because I saw the positive changes the Ophites could bring about, and I hope you will appreciate them too. Think what history could have been like if, before being destroyed, the Nazis had taken the Soviet Union with them! Millions of lives would have been saved, and decades of misery, fear and oppression avoided. Think of it!”

Carlos sneered. I expected him to shoot, but instead he spoke: “You sound like a f*ing accountant. You act like life and death and freedom and tyranny were things you could tally up on a balance sheet. Well, there’s one thing you need to appreciate.” Now he roared: “MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS WERE UKRAINIAN JEWS!” Carlos shifted the rifle, so that the targeting laser shone right into Werner’s eye. “Now, either you start explainin’ how we can keep the Ophites her in the present, or your nose goes out you scalp.”

“I can honestly say that you can’t,” Werner said sternly. “There was an override button, but it would be useless now, even if I hadn’t disabled it. See that console, where the Pakistani is seated? If you look, you will see that the anti-matter generator has begun working. In about 3 minutes, it will have created enough anti-matter to power a temporal displacement. Once the anti-matter begins accumulating, the TDD no longer responds to the `abort’ button. If it did, the generator would backfire, and this facility—and possibly El Salvador—would be blown off the map.”

Carlos clearly didn’t believe him. There was a long, tense silence as they locked eyes. I finally broke the silence: “I think he’s telling the truth. Marcos said the same thing. So did Ling.” My mind raced. There had to be something we could do. One of the terrorists has given his life trying to lock down the console. That meant that there had to be something we could still do to foil the terrorists. But what?

Meanwhile, Carlos made his own decision “I’d rather blow myself up than let a crazy dictator overrun the world,” he said. He stepped over to the cylinder that held the molecular computer, and raised the grenade launcher. “This is what Ling intended. One shot, and all your work should go straight to…”

“NO!!!” Werner jumped between Carlos and the computer (as if his body were enough to stop a grenade). His eyes were wide with fear. He shouted in a shrill voice, and so quickly that his words almost slurred together. “You don’t know what you’re doing! Destroying the computer is the worst thing you possibly do!”

“Give me a worst-case scenario,” Carlos said.
“Worst case? Well, I suppose the worst thing that could possibly happen is that the TDD would create an artificial singularity that destroys the planet. And lots of other things could go wrong…”
“Sounds better than a universe-destroying paradox,” Carlos said. “Get out of the way now, or you’re gonna die.”

I pondered the console where the dead Pakistani was slumped. If I was interpreting it correctly, there was one minute left until the time bell would launch. Werner called out, “Ted! Don’t let him do this! He’s crazy!” I looked over my shoulder to see Carlos carefully aiming at the cylinder. My gaze turned to the main console.
“Carlos!” I shouted. “I know how to stop the Ophites!”

Carlos looked at me, but kept the launcher aimed squarely at the computer. I rushed to the main console and the particular panel where the three neo-Nazis had been clustered. The panel held a large keyboard, with a number of the keys rendered unidentifiable, and a screen full of arcane equations. I began pushing keys at random. The numbers, letters and symbols I typed appeared on a monitor next to the keys. “We can’t keep him in the present,” I explained breathlessly, “but we can keep him out of World War 2. If we just punch in some gibberish, we can throw the time bell off course.”

Werner suddenly rushed over. The suddenly athletic old man knocked me out of the way with a chop to the neck. I regained my balance in seconds, but not before Werner deleted the new line I had typed with a push of a single, blank button. As soon as he pushed it, he seemed to reconsider. “Wait a minute. The computer is programmed to filter out flawed equations. It would have simply ignored anything that you typed in.”

Carlos came up from behind and caught Werner in a chokehold. “That’s what I thought. But now that we know how to delete whole lines, we can really f* up the program.” He tossed Werner aside and began pushing the button. “Delete. Delete.” One equation after another vanished from the screen. Werner got up and tried to interfere, but I held him back. The other console showed twenty seconds until the launch. “Delete, delete, delete, delete,” Carlos taunted. “Hmm… delete, delete, delete, deeleeete…”

At that moment, the whole universe rumbled as the time bell launched.

We all became still. Carlos began to slump. The roar of the machinery quickly reached a crescendo, and then slowly died down. The screen printed, LAUNCH COMPLETE. I held Werner in front of the screen. “All right, it’s over. Can you tell when they landed?”

Werner squinted at the screen. “It looks like Carlos erased about 15 lines, which contained a lot of the fine tuning and some of the safety parameters. They should land in the twentieth century…” He sighed and shrugged. “Ballpark estimate, sometime between 1910 and 1970. They will have—have had a rough landing. The time bell may have exploded on impact.”
“I like that possibility,” Carlos said.

Werner shook his head grimly. “That’s not good at all. The bio-agent spores are not easily destroyed. An explosion could disperse them over a very large area. Many people might be killed. And, if those in authority recognized that they were bio-weapons, they would go to war with the presumed originator—say, the United States. Instead of prolonging World War 2, the Ophites could trigger World War 3.”

“The Ophites would do that themselves if they had the chance,” I said.
“I know,” Werner said in a hollow voice. He laughed bitterly. “How ironic! You two may have allowed them to wreak more havoc than they originally planned!”

Carlos turned to face Werner. “We’re not the one who let them loose in history with one of the deadliest weapons ever built,” he said in fury. He socked the older scientist across the jaw. “You’re the one who programmed the time machine. You’re the one who risked the whole universe for a better yesterday. Let ‘im go, Ted. I’m gonna waste him.”

I shook my head. “That won’t help. What’s done is done.” I had an uplifting thought. “Since we are still here, doesn’t that prove that they failed?”

“Not necessarily,” Werner said. “Our timeline may continue for as long as it takes him to complete his mission, then—poof!”

That seemed unlikely to me, but I wasn’t the one with multiple degrees in quantum mechanics. I was getting tired of the whole discussion. “I don’t care,” I said. “I just want to help Di.” I rushed out of the control room. Werner and Carlos followed. As I approached Dianna, she opened her eyes and mumbled my name. I fell to my knees beside her. “Dianna, we did it,” I whispered. “The time bell still launched, but it went to the wrong time.” I hope, I added silently.
Dianna smiled and nodded. Her eyes opened a little more. “Dr. Werner!” she exclaimed happily. “Were you helping us too?” There was a long, grave silence.

Dr. Werner broke it with a command: “We have to get her to the infirmary. Carry her!”

The Ophites had locked the doors to the corridor but I unlocked them with my key. My heart sank when we reached the infirmary. The neo-Nazis had plundered it before they left. The only remaining supplies were some bandages, a jar of painkillers, a surgical mask and a ruptured packet of blood that had been accidentally dropped on the floor. I was about to set Dianna down and perform some desperate first aid when I heard a series of crashes from the museum area. It sounded like low-velocity projectiles breaking the glass doors. I heard Carlos shout, “Tear gas!” There was a loud whirring and an even louder crash as some kind of vehicle smashed through the entrance, followed by a screech of brakes and a wooden crunch as the vehicle hit the pareiasaur.

Finally, there was crunching, thumping and shouting as men in heavy boots ran in after the vehicle. The Army of El Salvador had arrived. A mechanical voice shouted, “Ponga la pistola, por favor.” I heard Carlos drop the rifle.
Carlos sputtered a reply. “Me es, uh, Carlos Wrzniewski…uh…Ted, get out here! You know I can’t speak a word of Spanish!”
I set Dianna on the table and turned to go. I hesitated a moment, and then decided to take her with me. I walked back into the museum area with her in my arms. A dozen heavily armed men in combat exoskeletons and one tank-like Mitsubishi battle drone greeted me with silent stares. “Mi novia necesita un doctor!”

The mechanical drone pointed its guns at me. “Liberte el prisonero, por favor!” it said. It clearly thought I was holding Dianna hostage, and expected me to put her down. There was a dead neo-Nazi at my feet, and I wasn’t about to drop her on top of him. I stood in helpless indecision, while the machine said, “Liberte el prisonero, por favor, o tiraría!”

A soldier turned off the drone with a click of a remote. “Maquina estupida,” he said. He ordered his men, “Ayude la mujer.” While two other soldiers took Dianna from my arms, he spoke to me in English: “You are Ted Flockman?” I nodded. Several of the soldiers became visibly excited. For some time I had been a minor celebrity—now I would be really famous. I couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed. “What happened here?” the captain asked, with more than a trace of awe in his voice. He waved a hand at all the bodies. “Who were these people?”

“Some were part of a group of terrorists that hijacked a time machine. Others were Marxists trying to stop them.” Finally, I pointed to Werner. “He’s the only terrorist who surrendered. A few others may still be alive.”
The captain sent more soldiers to check on Dr. Marcos and the other Ophites. Then he asked, “Where did this time machine go?”

“It went to Russia,” Werner said. “They were supposed to arrive in 1941, but these two fouled up my calculations, so there’s no telling when they went to.”

Dr. Marcos turned out to be alive. She was carried out the front door. “We brought paramedics. We also brought someone to see you.” While we had been talking, an exotrooper had discretely left the museum. Now he came back, supporting a familiar redhead. I called Di’s name aloud and ran to her. She disengaged from the exotrooper and ran to me, or tried to. She staggered, and almost fell, but then recovered to meet me halfway. We embraced. Then, for the first time, I kissed her.

An exotrooper gently separated us. This time, Di did not protest. “She woke up an hour ago,” the captain said. “We brought her to help with the big Maquina. Our orders are to return her to the hospital as soon as the machine is secure. Hurry and you can go with her!” As I walked out, I was surrounded by soldiers demanding autographs. I barely got to the helicopter in time. By then, Di was asleep on a stretcher. I held her hand as the helicopter took off.

Dr. Marcos chuckled. “I bet you think you’ve won,” she said.
“The way I figure,” I said, trying to sound more cool and confident than I really felt, “your people must have failed. Otherwise, how could we be having this conversation?”

Marcos laughed. “It seems logical. I myself thought that this world might simply dissolve, after the Incarnate accomplished his mission,” she said. “But I understand the true nature of the universe. It is a fundamental truth that the world is little more than illusion to begin with—a crude effigy of the true world, cobbled together by Yaldabaoth. It is Yaldabaoth’s nature to cloud men’s minds. Even when his creation has been destroyed, it can live on as illusion in the minds of the unenlightened.”

I shook my head at her bitter outlook. It was hard to fathom how someone could be so hateful toward the world when there was so much good in it. I clasped Dianna’s hand. Her eyes fluttered. “Ted?” she said, sounding like a tired child.
“I’m here. Hush,” I told her. “You’re hurt. You need to rest.”

She persisted. “I just… wanted to tell you something,” she said, gazing steadily into my eyes. “I see it all clearly now. Everybody wonders what makes… everything happen, and whether it really makes any sense. But I see it now. It’s… it’s a Terrible Hand. Terrible, but beautiful and wonderful at the same time. It guides our fates, even if we can’t see it, even if we resist it. I see it… It’s beautiful… But it’s pointing the other way. I’m coming back, Ted. Back to you.” Then she closed her eyes. I held her hand tightly and wept for joy, thanking God for saving both our lives.

Six months have passed since that fateful day. Dianna has been out of the hospital for four and a half months. We got married the day she was released. She recovered from her head injury without going through any serious physical or mental problems. She still has several scars on her face, which makes her very self-conscious. I tell her she is still beautiful. Sometimes, I think she acts self-conscious just to hear me say that.

Carlos went through this whole ordeal seemingly unchanged. It turned out that during his sabbatical, he had taken a mail-order bride from the former Indonesia. As far as I can tell, he has been a faithful and caring husband, but he scrupulously avoids talking about her. He attended church with us several times, but soon dropped out. “I won’t say what you believe isn’t true,” he told me. “But I don’t feel ready to get involved in religion again.”

By telling international authorities everything he knows about the Aryan Ophites, Werner came out with nothing worse than a twenty-year prison sentence and the loss of his license to operate a TDD. Amazingly, the Association is still paying him as a consultant.

Three Ophites were found still alive in the facility, including Marcos. A survivor from Ling’s team was also found alive near the building. One Ophite later died of his wounds, while another committed suicide in the hospital. However, Marcos staged a remarkable recovery. Two days before she was to be transferred to a police facility, she and Ling’s comrade escaped from the hospital. I believe that she made a deal with Ling’s organization. This mysterious group has been investigated even more heavily than the Ophites, but no revelations had been forthcoming.

The TDD is currently off-line, but the time-travel business still looks very promising. The Association has replaced the 3-D display that Carlos shot up, and it’s taking bids on a new and improved control room door. (Carlos is opposed to the improvement.) Three new medics and some new field workers have been hired. Lou has been replaced by a former CIA agent. Carlos is very busy renovating the museum. Nearly half the exhibits were damaged in the gun battle, and several specimens were a total loss. We do have a new exhibit, however: Zarathustra’s bullet-riddled armor.

Of all the investigations being made in the aftermath of the Aryan Conspiracy, I have followed the search for the time bell most closely. The only tangible result of months of searching is a mass of heavy metal found at the bottom of a lake in Northern Russia. Some people believe that it is the remains of one of the posts on the corners of the time bell, but Werner doesn’t think so. Historical records indicate that the region around the lake was the scene of several plague outbreaks, but nothing conclusive has been established.

Sometimes, I still stay awake at night wondering what became of the time-traveling Ophites. At times, Werner’s theory seems far too plausible. Six years, or even sixteen, would not be enough to lay his ideas to rest. After all, it’s possible that the time bell landed twenty years early. Werner estimates that eleven Ophites made it aboard the time bell—more than enough to carry out their plan. If they arrived early, they could have settled down in some innocuous Russian village and waited for World War 2 to start. Intellectually, I know that it’s possible that those hateful men might change history and destroy my world, but I no longer seriously worry about it. I have already seen the Ophites brought down by the real God. I have faith that they will be similarly brought down in the past. When I stay awake at night, I now mostly wonder what unknown heroes had to finish the job I started.

ca. 2020 - Carlos Wrzniewski born. Zaratustra born.

ca. 2030 - Ted is born. Dianna is born. Aryan Ophites founded.

2039 - Zaratustra jailed for murder of an Ophite leader; Arnault Chablan runs highly successful clinic.

ca. 2040 - Charles Hodges Jr. becomes patient of Chablan. Serbo-Albanian war begins.

2043 - Zaratustra released into “human enhancement” program. Carlos joins military.

2046-2047 - International forces intervene in Serbo-Albanian war. Omega Facility disaster. Arnault Chablan killed. Zaratustra escapes.

2050 - “Five-Way War” in Africa. Dr. Ling in Kazakhstan.

2054 - War between US and Indonesia. Carlos returns to active duty. Ted training as forester; parents die. Doctors Werner and Paulus developing TDD.

2055-2060 - Carlos returns to teaching; Ted works for Columbian Agriculture Ministry. development of TDD proceeds.

2062 - Naughtenny Moore, Ltd. founded. First use of time bell.

2063 - Job interview of Ted and Carlos. First four time travel expeditions: to Cretaceous Mongolia (Terrible Hand); to Permian Russia; to Jurassic Colorado; and Mauritius. Dianna’s engagement broken between 2nd and 3rd expeditions; she takes sabbatical. Carlos tried for weapons violations after 3rd expedition. KK attack.

2064 - 5th expedition, to Cretaceous Argentina (Land of Giganotosaurus)
7th expedition - to Cretaceous Australia (Referred to in Devonian Disaster)
8th expedition - to Devonian America (Devonian Disaster)

2065 - Ted and Di get engaged. Miocene North America (Uncertainty). Hijacking attempt.