If it was God’s voice I heard. Then it was a very cruel God. Frost thought. The litany of pain and misfortune he had experienced over the years would have broken a lesser man. He’d lost his son Elliot at age three; he himself had almost died in the world flu pandemic of 1918; he’d had to commit a sister and daughter to sanatoriums-yes. He knew they heard the voices, but it overwhelmed their minds and both died there; another of his sons had also heard the voices and Frost had tried to talk to him about it, but the boy had killed himself with a hunting rifle in 1940.
God? What kind of God brought such pain and misery? Frost wondered. And now death to all on the planet? The voices and visions had directed him here onboard this metal can, but he didn’t know exactly why. What could be saved?
Frost reached under the bunk and pulled out a wooden box. He lifted the lid. A crystal skull was inside. It had a faint blue glow. The time was still not here, but it was getting closer.
He closed the cover and lay back on the bed, pulling a pillow over his head, vainly hoping it would stop any message sent his way by the “gods.”
“I do not understand,” Kolkov said, breaking the long silence.
“It was me from another time line,” Earhart said. “One who was taken by the Shadow and not helped by the Ones Before. She was strapped to one of the vertical tables. They’d opened up her skull and put implants into her brain.” She turned to Dane. “You’ve seen what I’m talking about.”
Dane nodded. He wondered how he would feel seeing himself-a parallel self-in such a situation. He’d been in the Valkyrie cavern and seen the people strapped down. Some bad their brains exposed with wired leads placed in them, connected to monitoring machines.
“They’d taken a baby from her with the machine. I knew it-” here she glanced at Dane once more, and he understood how she knew it. “I also had been shown what I needed to do with it.
“I brought it back with me. Then I went into a portal. I went to Earth, but back in time, I’m not sure exactly when, probably around the middle of the nineteenth century as I probably around the middle of the nineteenth century as I used the machine on an Indian woman in a lodge. I then went back later. When she gave birth. To two children. One hers, one mine. I told her what I’d been told to tell her-that these would meet again in battle and in the course of doing that help save a world.”
“My world?” Dane asked.
Earhart shrugged. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
‘’The question is, was the world you traveled to my world’s past or another parallel world’s past?” Dane asked.
“Does it matter?” Earhart asked in turn.
“What great battle would these two meet in?” Kolkov asked. “And how would a battle help?”
“Her son’s name was Crazy Horse.”
“Little Big Horn,” Dane said.
Earhart nodded. “That’s my guess.”
“And your son’s name?” Dane asked.
“He’s not really my son. He’s my parallel son. Sort of.” Earhart said, “I don’t know what the hell to call him. His lame is Mitch Bouyer. I gave him one of the crystal skulls. I’m assuming Taki took the others to him.”
Dane let out a deep breath as he considered the information he had. “So we’ve got the Battle of Little Big Horn and two men — one’s Crazy Horse, the other Bouyer. Connected via birth, although not genetically. And at least one crystal skull-and hopefully all of them-which means there’s going to be power involved. And we’re going to need power for the sphere, because it seems dead in the water. And we’ve got Robert Frost and the Nautilus waiting at the North Pole in a dying time line. For what?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I think there’s a portal at the North Pole.”
Kolkov leaned forward. “So perhaps you will have both power for the sphere and a portal to send it through?”
“It’s not that easy,” Dane said: ·’We still have to get ozone from some time line to bring back.”
“Maybe the Frost portal is the one to do that?”
“Then how do we get back?” Dane asked. He shook his head. “We’re being used by the Ones Before. They send us these messages telling us the next step to take, but not much beyond that.”
“It’s worked so far,” Earhart pointed out.
“Has it?” Dane asked in turn. “Earth is dying. My Earth. Which,” he added, looking at Earhart, “might not even be your Earth time line. We just assumed that the first time we met. The Earhart in the Valkyrie cavern could be the Earhart from my time line. God knows how many time lines-how many of each of us — there are.”
Earhart shook her head. “You’re giving me a headache. What choice do we have? Do nothing? And then what will happen? Your time line is dying, right? It looks like we have a chance to help it. We could sit here all day and argue about the motives of the Ones Before, but maybe they’re just doing the best they can, too.”
Dane knew she was right, but he still had his misgivings about everything. Just a month ago{) he’d been living a simple life, working search-and-rescue with Chelsea. Now he was here, in a place he couldn’t have dreamed existed, talking about parallel worlds and parallel people. His old reality was gone, and he didn’t have much grasp on this new reality.
Earhart drew him out of his reverie as she addressed Kolkov. “You’re a scientist?”
Kolkov nodded. “Yes. I’ve been studying the portals for all of my adult life.”
“These crystal skulls. We know where they come from — priestesses who fight the Shadow. But how do they work?”
Kolkov rubbed his chin. “I think they do two things. One is redirect energy. Massive amounts of energy. I also think, though, that they can store energy.” Kolkov turned to Dane. “On the way here you explained to me what Sin Fen told you about the power of your mind. I think the skulls are a higher level of that. They connect in some way with the crystalline Structure of the planet. I studied the ones we had in Russia.
Quartz is posed primarily of silicon dioxide. It can also form huge crystals that weigh several tons. It is extremely rare in nature to find pure quartz like that in the skulls, which is colorless. Even the slightest influence of other material can greatly color quartz. Do you know there are those who try to manufacture quartz?”
“Why?” Dane asked.
“Because of what we are talking about-the power potential. Theoretical work up to now, but apparently a good theory. The problem is that quartz is very difficult to manufacture and work with. If one goes against the grain the crystal shatters. Do you know what is used to carve quartz? Diamond, which has a rating of ten out of ten on the hardness scale. Quartz is rated at seven. This was the dilemma when people found some of these buried at ancient sites. Those who studied them wondered how ancient people could have carved such perfect specimens given they didn’t have diamond tools.”
“Because they weren’t carved,” Dane said.
“Yes. We know that now. Also, the grain cut on the skulls I saw in Russia goes against the natural axis of the stone, which is impossible to achieve even with diamond tools. Quartz in crystal form has a rhombohedra structure. One of the reasons scientists have tried to manufacture pure quartz structures is because of the piezoelectric effect.”
“What’s that?” Earhart asked.
Kolkov put his hands on either side of his head and pressed inward. “When quartz is subjected to pressure along certain lines of axis it will produce electric voltage, which in turn can help control the frequency of radio waves. It also rotates the plane of Polarized light.”
“Aren’t radio waves a form of power?” Dane asked.