“Fifty seconds,” the Game Master said.
It seemed impossible that only ten seconds had elapsed, but Balenger didn’t have a chance to think about that. Turning to Amanda’s green-tinted figure, he yelled, “Grab my arm!”
His wounds were in agony as he led her down the stairs. At the bottom, they stepped over Karen Bailey’s corpse, the green tint of the binoculars making her blood seem unreal. They raced toward the metal door beyond her.
“Forty seconds!” the squeaky voice yelled from the observation room.
Again, the countdown didn’t seem right. Balenger felt that it took longer than ten seconds for them to get down the stairs and reach the door.
Amanda used the rubber glove to turn the knob.
The door wouldn’t open.
Something growled behind Balenger. Startled, he realized that the remaining dog had entered through the open door on the opposite side of the cavern. Ten feet away, its eyes — now tinted green — blazed at him.
“Thirty-five seconds!”
Impossible, Balenger thought. So much couldn’t have happened in so little time.
“Game Master!” Amanda yelled. “God keeps His word!”
Balenger understood what she was trying. “Yes, prove your game’s honest!” he shouted.
“Thirty-four seconds!”
“Open the door!” Amanda insisted. “We found the Sepulcher. You swore that’s all we’d need to win. But now you changed the rules!”
Silence lengthened, moments passing.
“Show us God isn’t a liar!”
The dog snarled.
Abruptly, the door buzzed, the lock thumping, the Game Master freeing it.
Frantic, Amanda twisted the knob. As she opened the door, the dog attacked. Or seemed to. Guessing that the panicked dog’s motive was to escape, Balenger pushed Amanda down. He felt the animal leap over them and race into darkness. Then he and Amanda charged through.
They found themselves in another tunnel. Hurrying along, Balenger felt that surely the remaining time had elapsed. The tunnel seemed to extend forever. Running, he silently counted seven, six, five, four and waited for the explosion’s impact. Three, two, one. But nothing happened. His night-vision binoculars showed a lighter shade of green in the area ahead as the darkness of the tunnel changed to the darkness of the valley. He ignored the pain in his knee and forced himself to run harder.
The clatter of their footsteps no longer echoed. Leaving the tunnel, feeling open air around him, Balenger heard Amanda next to him and suddenly was weightless. The roar of an explosion lifted him off his feet. He landed heavily and rolled down an incline. Unlike the blighted area in front of the mine, the slope here was covered with grass. His breath was knocked out of him. He kept tumbling and suddenly jolted to a stop. Amanda hit beside him, moaning. Rocks pelted the grass. One struck Balenger’s shoulder. Agonized, he crawled toward Amanda.
“Are you hurt?” he managed to ask.
“Everywhere,” she answered weakly. “But I think I’m going to live.”
He’d lost the rifle and the binoculars. In the glow of a three-quarter moon, he turned and saw dust and smoke spewing from the tunnel above him.
“Server down. Game over,” he murmured.
“But is it?” Amanda’s voice was plaintive. “How will we ever know if the game truly ended?”
Balenger didn’t have an answer. Motion attracted his attention, the dog racing along a moonlit ridge.
Amanda collapsed next to him. “The Game Master kept his word. He let us go. He proved he wasn’t a liar.”
“God tried to redeem Himself,” Balenger agreed.
He trembled.
So did Amanda. “What’s supposed to happen next? Do you think Karen Bailey told the truth that there was a car?”
“Would you trust it?” he asked.
“No. An exploding car is one way to end a video game.”
“The alternative is to shrivel like Pac-Man.” Balenger thought of something. “Or like the townspeople in the cave. One thing the Game Master taught me is, a lot of video games can never be won. The player always dies.”
“Yes, everyone dies. But not tonight,” Amanda said. “Tonight, we won. In the cave, when he counted down, the minute seemed to take longer than usual.”
Balenger realized what must have happened. “The countdown was in video-game time. One minute in his reality took two minutes in ours.”
The thought made them silent. In the distance, the dog howled.
“Why did he give us that chance?” Amanda wondered.
“Maybe he didn’t intend to give us a chance,” Balenger said. “Maybe the only time he knew was virtual.”
“Or maybe he knew the difference, and the countdown was the final level of the game. ”Time is the true scavenger,“ he told us. At the end of the obstacle race and the scavenger hunt, he gave us something precious: an extra minute of time.”
“Our bonus round.” Balenger had the feeling that, from now on, this would be the way he thought, as if he had never escaped, as if he were still in the game.
Amanda tried to sit up. “We’ve got some walking to do.”
“After we rest a while.” Balenger hugged his chest, trying to subdue his tremors.
Amanda fell back. “Yeah, a little rest is a good idea,” she admitted.
“It gives us a chance to plan our future.”
“No,” Amanda told him. “Not the future.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A time capsule’s a message to the future that we open in the present to learn about the past, right?” she asked.
“That’s what he said.”
“Well, the game made me realize that the future and the past aren’t important. What matters is now.”
Balenger was reminded of Professor Graham. “There’s an elderly woman I met who learned the same thing from video games. I’ll take you to see her. You’ll like her. She’s dying, but she says that the countless decisions and actions she makes in a video game cram each second and keep her in an eternal moment.”
“Yes,” Amanda said, “I’d like to meet her.”
Balenger managed to smile. He peered up at the dazzling stars. “They were right.”
“Who?”
“The ancients. The sky does look like a dome with holes poked into it. That’s a celestial light glowing through.”
“Everything exists in God’s imagination,” Amanda said.
Balenger touched her arm. “You’re not imaginary.”
“You’re not, either.” Amanda reached for his hand. “Thank God.”
Author’s Note
WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME
When it comes to ideas for novels, I’m a packrat. My office shelves are crammed with file folders dating back several decades. Scribbled summaries of radio reports and TV interviews are bundled with yellowing pages ripped from magazines and newspapers. Stacks of them. Anytime something grabs my interest, a part of my imagination wonders why. The theory is that, if a topic catches my attention, maybe it will catch the attention of my readers. Over the years, I put together so many files that I never had time to organize them into categories, let alone develop their contents into novels.
On occasion, curiosity makes me explore them. With great expectation, I put some on the floor, blow away dust, and read them. But nearly always, the brittle pages in my hands refer to issues and events that seemed important at the time but now are lifeless. The narrative themes and situations they suggest no longer speak to my imagination. Musty artifacts of the mind, they show me the gap of years between the person who put those fragments into file folders and the changed person who now reads them.