Sabine cut him off impatiently: «You said you knew my grandmother.»
At once, Bantam’s entire demeanor shifted. Her words hit him like a blow. Not in a bad way; just … deeply. She saw it at once, there was no mistaking it — or faking it. She was surprised by this.
«Yes,” Bantam swallowed thickly. «Your great-grandmother. Rachelle Archenstone. An extraordinary person. And wonderfully beautiful, of course.»
«Hmm,” Sabine said. «I never knew her. She died before I was born.»
«Yes,” Bantam whispered reverently. «I know.»
«Okay, explain,” Sabine snapped suspiciously. «How did you supposedly know my great-grandma? And you’re supposedly also my age, all at the same time?»
«Because there are two of me,” Bantam said. «Right now, anyway. Pretty soon there will only be one of me — the me me, the one here right now.» Bantam jabbed his thumb at Fort MacLaren. «See that behind me? That’s why asked you to meet me here. We could’ve met anywhere. But I needed it to be here, so you could see for yourself when it happens, when they make the Volzstrang Wave. They didn’t know it would put on such a light-show outside of the Collider!» He laughed for moment.
«Right now, my twenty-four-year-old self is in that building. He’s in the Army. One of the best soldiers they have right now, I’ll have you know. That’s why they picked me. Young-me is in there, deep underground, being strapped into the capsule, this very second. And soon — very soon — they will fire up the world’s largest supercollider and produce a Volzstrang Wave.
«And that capsule, containing the young Ben Bantam, will surf the Volzstrang Wave. The young Bantam will ride the Wave back through time, back to the year 1944. It will work: the Volzstrang Wave actually can propel a capsule containing a live person back through time, and it can be surfed with great precision, just as the equations showed. Humanity will have achieved time-travel for the very first time.»
Sabine nodded. Her expression indicated that she didn’t believe any of this, but she’d go along with it for the money. At least for now. «Ooookay. So, the Army is sending people back through time. Why?»
«The BlackPox,” Bantam said. «The Shadow. It’s a mutant strain of smallpox. Everybody knows that. But what isn’t common knowledge, because it is top secret, is that the Shadow was actually created during World War II, right here at Fort MacLaren. It was created as a weapon. They were going to use it on the Nazi’s, infect them all. That was how we were going to win.
«But before that happened, the War ended. There was no need to use the weaponized, highly lethal smallpox anymore. It was stored on a shelf somewhere and forgotten. Until three years ago, of course, when it somehow got loose and started killing half the planet.
«And the other part nobody knows is: back in 1944, there was a cure.»
«Ah,” Sabine nodded. «Why make a plague if you might catch it yourself.»
«Exactly,” Bantam replied.
«So they sent you back in time to get the cure.»
«Yep.»
«And you were the first person to ever go back in time.»
Bantam nodded. «One small step for maniacs.»
Sabine stewed on this for a moment. «But how do you know you were the first?»
«Well … that’s what they told me. And they seemed pretty nervous about it not working. I got a lot of averted looks like I was about to fry inside that capsule or something.
«There was another guy who started posting on the Internet, back in 2000. He said his name was John Titor and he was also in the Army, like me. Said there was, like, a time-travel branch of the military in his time, which was in 2036 or something. And he had just gone back to the 70’s to get a schematic for an old IBM computer part: he claimed it was critical in the future. Anyway, Titor said online that he was just stopping off in 2000 on the way back to his own time. Sort of sight-seeing.
«But you know what I think? I think he was full of crap.»
«Really,” Sabine said. This was amusing.
«Yeah. His time-travel tech didn’t sound right to me. He said it worked by using two rotating singularities mounted in a car. Huh. A time-traveling car. That sound familiar to anyone? And why post all that stuff online with your real name, etc.? Especially if you’re a for-real time-traveler? Maybe someone will come along and kill your young self, just to see whether that erases all your Internet posts.»
«Well?»
«Well, what?»
«Well, would it?»
Bantam winced. «I’m getting to that.»
«Okay. So you’re my age, you say you were born when I was born. Okay. What music did you listen to?»
Bantam snorted a laugh. «I listened to Planet Furious. But I’ll bet your speed is more Dandelion Smash. And I’m going to bet your favorite tunes are ‘Tantricity’, ‘Sea Mountain’, and probably ‘Catatonic Leopard Print’. Am I close?»
Sabine nodded, whistling and impressed. «You nailed it.»
«Yeah. I figured you for the lightsticks-and-lollipops crowd.»
«I used to be. Not any more.»
«That music all sounds like a broken washing machine to me. But I’ve got the Furious on my gym iPod. Or at least, it was. Back now. No iPods in 1944.» Bantam scrunched his face up, perplexed.
«You were saying,” Sabine said.
«Yes,” Bantam replied, eyes snapping back to the present moment. «I was just remembering the old-today. The first time I was in today, on that very base behind us, about to travel back through time …»
Two: The Volzstrang Wave
INSIDE THE Gaultier-Ross Supercollider, a young, twenty-four-year-old Ben Bantam screwed up his courage, waiting for the Volzstrang Wave to send him back to 1944.
He wore a spacesuit. Well, not actually a ‘space’ suit, of course, since he was a Chrononaut, not an Astronaut. Nevertheless, he was covered from head to toe in a white lead suit, and he wore a helmet with a lead-lined clear plastic visor. Volzstrang radiation was calculated to be very deadly.
Though no one had ever produced a Wave of this size before … so no one really knew for sure.
He was strapped into a chair inside the cramped time-capsule. One side was considerably larger than the other — the side that faced out of the circumference of the supercollider. The Wave would form and pick the capsule up and carry it around and around the supercollider at blindingly terrific speeds.
And then — if everything went well — Ben Bantam would become the world’s very first time traveler.
He was excited beyond belief.
He was going to be the guy that went back in time, found the cure to the Shadow, and saved the world. He would be an American hero. He would be the Beatles, Steve Jobs, Luke Skywalker, Buzz Aldrin and Harry Potter all rolled into one.
Sure, this mission was classified now. But it would eventually be made public. There’d be movies. There’d be books. Tours. Ticker-tape parades.
Girls.
And more girls.
And even more girls!
With great power … comes great fun in abusing that great power!
He laughed at himself. Was that really his motivation to be a hero?
Why, yes, when he thought about it. It was.
Well, not all, his brain retorted quickly. And there was truth to that also: Bantam had a very deep and abiding love of America. He loved the Constitution. He believed that the United States was the last, best hope of humanity. He was a patriot and really did want to do his part to serve his country, to do the right thing. That was just who he was: it wasn’t really a choice so much as an expression of a forgone conclusion.
The previous weekend, Bantam and his friend Rocco had gone out on one hell of a bender. It was Bantam’s last furlough before the Big Mission. But somehow, at the end of the night, Bantam had ended up having his fortune told by a certain Europa Romani.
She was a third-generation psychic, she explained. Her grandmother had come over from the old country at the turn of the twentieth century and lived in New York, before dying suddenly in 1912. Her granddaughter, this Europa Romani before Bantam now still possessed a severe and smoky beauty, despite her advancing age.