"Rick!" she called out in an uneasy voice. The eerie opalescent plane seemed to absorb her words. Con ap-proached it. The colors reacted to her presence, the hues becoming more vibrant the closer she came. As she reached out to touch them, her fingers began to tingle. When they were a few inches away, the tingling turned to pain. Con jerked her hand back, and the pain slowly disappeared. She became truly frightened. Someone had tended to her, but only minimally. This scarcely seems like a res-cue! she thought. Rather, she sensed that she had been kept alive for some purpose other than her own benefit. Looking for evidence of her keepers, Con spied foot-prints on the sandy floor. Most led to the empty former storage room. Little of the plaster on the far wall re-mained, and the doorway it covered was now revealed. It was sealed by a featureless silvery panel. The trail of footprints ended there. Con dreaded what might happen when the panel opened.
"Calm down," she told herself. "First things, first. I've got to take care of myself." Con checked out the bathroom, which was also choked with sand. Despite this, it still responded to her com-mands. Con craved a hot bath, and immediately began to scoop the sand from the tub. Someone had already cleared out the toilet.
The hot water helped ease Con's apprehension, but only slightly. The tub was gritty. There was no soap or shampoo, and neither were there towels, yet after what she had been through, a bath of any sort was the height of luxury. After Con had cleaned herself as best she could, she washed her filthy clothes. It took several water changes and much hand scrubbing before she had a mar-ginally clean tee shirt along with a pair of panties and trousers. The socks were beyond saving, and the shoe and sandal were unnecessary. Con decided to remove the nightstalker down from her jacket before attempting to clean it. Con was wringing out her clothes when she heard voices in the room. It sounded like people rapidly singing a tuneless song while popping their lips. Con quickly be-gan to dress in her wet clothes. She had her panties and her tee shirt on when two people entered the bathroom.
One of them pointed something at Con. The other spoke in perfect English. "Understand there is a weapon pointed at you. If you move suddenly, it will stop your mind."
Con slowly raised her hands. "I understand."
"You will come into the outer room and sit down on the bed."
Con obeyed. There was a third person waiting in the room. He held the charred remains of the gun. Con looked at him and the two other persons. Her first im-pression was that they were prepubescent children en-larged to the size of six-and-a-half-foot-tall adults. They had the bodies of young gymnasts and perfectly sym-metrical faces. Their dark hair and eyes and their olive complexions, accentuated by the metallic dot on their foreheads, gave them an East Indian look. In their im-posing presence, Con felt like a toddler among the "big kids" at elementary school. Despite their youthful ap-pearance, these people carried themselves with the grav-ity of adults. Their large, stern faces were devoid of childhood innocence.
"Who are you?" asked Con. "Where's Rick?"
"Are you referring to the male?" asked the person who looked like a gigantic fourth-grade girl.
"Yes, is he all right?"
"We will ask the questions," stated the boyish man with the weapon. "You will answer them."
"Please," begged Con. "I have to know about Rick."
"We will inform you about his status when we are sat-isfied by your responses," said the woman. "Truth is es-sential. Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Con meekly.
"Where did you get this?" asked one of the men, hold-ing out the remains of the gun.
"It was on the plane."
"Where did you get the plane?"
"It was here on the island."
"Who constructed this facility?"
"It was already here when we arrived," said Con. "I thought you built it." Her three interrogators began conversing among them-selves in their strange, rapid language. / don't think they expected that answer, Con thought. She decided their question, and the reaction her response provoked, proved Joe's assertion that history had been changed. Yet, if that's the case, why are they here? The rapid conversa-tion ceased, and the second man produced what appeared to be a small rock from the folds of his clothing. He spoke to it and a gray, rectangular plane materialized in the air a few feet in front of Con.
"This is data from an unknown probe," said the woman. "Identify what you see." An image appeared in the rectangle. It was so clear, Con felt she was peering through a window. On the other side of the window were her father and Peter Green. Green was moaning and covering his eyes. They were inside the cabin of the probe. Beyond the probe's clear walls there appeared to be fog or smoke, brightly illu-minated by the glow of flame.
"Daddy!" she cried out.
Con's father turned and seemed to look straight at her. His face was red and blistered, except for two hand-shaped areas around his eyes. "Pete!" shouted her father. "The time machine! It's starting to work!" Green replied, "Thank ..." The screen went blank. The man spoke, and it disappeared. Then the man put the rock away.
"Who were those two individuals?" asked the woman.
Con covered her face with her hands and began to weep. "That's my father, my father." When she looked up, one of the men had the weapon pointed at her. "What happened to him?" she asked between sobs.
"No questions," barked the man with the weapon.
"He was destroyed with the probe," said the woman. The woman's reply sparked an angry discussion among the interrogators. Con continued to weep as they argued.
"Cease crying," said the man with the weapon, when the argument ended. "If you persist in being uselessly emotional, I will fire."
Con stifled her sobs and told them about Peter Green and how he had acquired the time machine. Each state-ment she made elicited a rapid barrage of additional ques-tions. The interrogation continued for over an hour, and though Con answered every question directly and truth-fully, her interrogators became increasingly impatient and irritated. The men, in particular, seemed very an-noyed. The woman said something in their language, and the questioning stopped. "It is tiring to deal with an inacces-sible mind," she stated. The three moved to go. The man with the weapon raised it in Con's direction, but a rapid remark from the woman caused him to lower it. All three of them headed for the silvery panel, which opened as they approached.
"You said you'd tell me about Rick" called Con, as they departed. They did not answer her. The panel sealed itself as soon as they were gone.
Con was shaken and confused. The three individuals had told her nothing directly, except that her father and Green were dead, and she had already known that. Con was left to surmise what she could from her observations and from the nature of the questions she had been asked. Her first conjecture was that the people were from the future and their strange appearance was normal for their kind. They certainly were not children. Their somewhat androgynous bodies seemed strong and fully developed, though the woman's shape only hinted at feminine curves.
Con found their manner extremely upsetting. It went beyond condescension or even contempt. They acted like I wasn't human, she decided. The men took no more ef-fort to conceal their repugnance toward her than would a person before an animal. The woman was only margin-ally better. Her curiosity seemed stronger than her aver-sion. Only the woman had looked Con in the eye. The more Con thought about her interrogators, the more distraught she became. She was very worried about Rick. Is he alive? Why wouldn't they tell me that? A sickening thought came to her. Maybe they've disposed of him! "Disposed" seemed the appropriate word. Con felt they treated her like a stray animal, to be locked up in an empty shed. How else could they have left me here, naked and dirty? Perhaps, she reasoned, they thought I wouldn't mind. It seemed hard to believe that people had grown so insensitive. Maybe I'm being punished for stealing the time machine. The time machine was clearly their major concern. Most of their questions were either about it or its asso-ciated technology. They primarily wanted to know about the time travelers' contacts with others. It seemed to Con like they were trying to track the path of a contagion. It was also clear from the interrogation that these people had been unaware of the observatory's existence. Appar-ently, only the data from the probe tipped them off that it existed. Con guessed that the rock-like object contained the information that had been sent to the future. Did it reach our time to sit around for centuries, perhaps mil-lennia? It was the least of the mysteries that bedeviled her.