"Maybe you two should be teaching the rest of us. Times are getting tougher."
"Sure," Sarah said.
"That'd be fine," John said. They'd reached the point where no one here had anything to teach them about hand to hand fighting, not even the ex-military types.
"Maybe my kids should join you," Enrique said.
"Yeah, great," John said.
At the same time, Sarah gave a mischievous grin. "How about you, Enrique?"
He hesitated for a second, as if tempted, then said, "Not me, Connor. I'm getting too old."
John glanced at Sarah to see what she thought. She smiled slightly and nodded. Lately, she was loosening up, just the tiniest bit. It seemed as though Judgment Day had helped, in a way-removed some uncertainty. It meant she'd gotten through the worst, the part that always gave her nightmares. Even the fighting with the warlords seemed to have helped her. John could sort of understand it. It had given her a glimpse of how things were supposed to happen, how they were going to get from Point A: Judgment Day, to Point B: taking down Skynet.
Though he saw how she reacted, it affected him differently—the longer life went on like this, the more frustrated he became.
"Right," Enrique said. "It looks like the kids will have to fight all their lives. I've taught them what I can. I'd like them to learn from the best around. At the moment, I think that's you two."
"No problem, Enrique," John said. He guessed that there were people here now who might dispute it—people like Sarah's old boyfriend Bruce Axelrod, a pumped-up Rambo kind of guy with long hair and a mustache, who used to be a Green Beret. But John accepted the compliment.
Sarah shrugged. "That's right."
"Good, Connor. I appreciate it."
When Enrique left, John said, "This is driving me nuts." He leaned against a wall, kicking it with his heel, arms folded across his chest.
"Which bit do you mean, John?" Sarah said quietly. "There's plenty of choice."
"I mean Skynet. We're holed up here, thousands of miles away, while Skynet must be having a great old time, designing Terminators and stuff." He glanced at the T-800. "No offense, of course." The Terminator stood guard, legs set wide apart, in a comfortable stance, ready to act at a moment's notice. Like everyone here, since they'd started fighting with the warlords, it carried weapons openly. Right now, it had an AK-47, a hostered- .45-caliber pistol, and a 12-gauge shotgun for close-range stopping power.
"No problemo," it said.
"What do you want to do?" Sarah said.
"I don't know." John went and sat beside her. "I wish there was something more—I don't know—constructive..."
"I know, John. It's been hard." She stood and found her packet of cigarettes. She seldom smoked these days, just a few cigarettes per week, but now he had her thinking. "Maybe it's time to make some decisions." She sat on the edge of a table, lit up and shook the match to snuff out its flame.
"That's the trouble," he said. They'd had these conversations before, every few months, when the tension built up inside him. They kept going round in circles. "Skynet's making decisions, too, Mom. We can count on that. It's working out how to find everyone who's left, and how to exterminate us." Again, he glanced at the T-800. "Isn't that right?"
"Highly probable."
"Yeah, I know: you don't have the specific data."
"Correct."
"If we could just hit Skynet hard before it becomes too strong." John imagined it there, thousands of miles away in the Rocky Mountains, safely hidden from sight. Even now, it might be building the factories and machines it needed. "Right now, we're getting distracted. We've got to go forward... I don't know... somehow! We need to organize people."
"That's what we're doing, John." Her voice had that flat kind of sound, like she wasn't going to help him with this. Perhaps she'd had enough of it. Talking about the problem never seemed to get them anywhere.
"I know, but—"
"But what?"
He clenched his fists until his knuckles were white. "But it's not going to stop Skynet. Not this way." It was all happening like the messages said it would. Nothing they'd done before Judgment Day had helped, and nothing now was preventing the war against the machines. This was why it would take so many years to defeat Skynet, why the messages came back from 2029—nearly thirty years in the future! Meaning the war had lasted, or would last, for decades. He could see, now, why it would happen like that. There were so many other problems.
Skynet was built under a mountain. To crack open its defenses, they'd need massive explosive weapons. Weapons like that must be around somewhere. They couldn't all have been destroyed on Judgment Day. But he had no way of getting hold of them, let alone delivering them. They didn't even know what communities had survived. All communications had broken down, along with civil order. Before the Internet had totally crashed, he'd found some people still alive in Africa, central Asia, and elsewhere in South America. There must be others in remote places, but he couldn't contact them, use whatever resources they had. Not without a lot of re-building. If only they could all band together, share resources somehow, before Skynet acted first.
He looked at the Terminator, thinking it over. Nothing had changed the sequence of events. Skynet itself had tried and failed. Some time in the future, it would send back the first Terminator to 1984. The Terminator had tried to kill Sarah—and failed. It would also send the T-1000. Well, the T-1000 was still out there—but, so far, it too, had failed. Maybe time was like a solid lump of rock, except in four dimensions. Nothing ever changed it. If you knew the future and tried to stop it, or even if you sent back a time traveler, it didn't work. It would never work. Every time you did it, time had already taken it into account. If you tried to kill your grandfather in the cradle, you'd know in advance you were going to fail. You couldn't succeed, because the past had factored your actions in—and you hadn't succeeded.
In that case, all this NO FATE stuff was crap; it was nonsense, just a bunch of high-sounding, feel-good words, another useless distraction. Whatever he did, it would all turn out the same way. Right now, that was how it looked. Oh, he'd grind on, and eventually succeed, because he had to, because that's what the messages said, because it was all he could do. He was trapped.
"Let's talk later, Mom. I need to think. There's got to be a better way."
"We'll win, John," Sarah said. "One way or other, we'll win this war."
"I know," he said, feeling a twinge of anger, though not with her. Not really. "We'll win in the end. All the same, there's just got to be a better way." He looked sharply at the Terminator. "Give me an answer once and for all. Can time be changed?"
"Unknown."
"Yeah. Unknown. But Skynet must have thought it could. What did it know that we don't?"
"Insufficient data."
"Yeah, that's kinda what I thought. I guess you were just a grunt in Skynet's army."
"Correct."
"Just concentrate on surviving," Sarah said. "Everything depends on that."
"Does it, Mom? Does it? We just don't know."
"All right, then." She was suddenly hard. "I asked you what you wanted. It's your turn to have an idea."
"I don't know! I don't know!"
"Yes, John, you do. It's eating you up." Relentless now. "So make a decision. No one else can make it for you. What do you want?"
"I said, I don't know." He was almost in tears, he was so angry, so frustrated.
"What do you want, John? Tell me." She stubbed out her cigarette, and stared at him, searching for an answer.
"Tell me, John."
"Can't I think about it some more?"
Sarah seemed to deflate. "Of course," she said. "I'm sorry. If that's what you need—"
But something fell in place inside him. "No," he said. "It's okay." Before Judgment Day, John and Sarah had built a reputation on the Internet. They'd predicted the nuclear holocaust, and gotten it right. There must be people out there who'd trust them, who'd believe them and help.