He tried the aerial projection portal located on the floor in the center of the pod. Its virtual companion opened in the sky exactly 5,000 meters above the portal in Hiram’s backpack. The platoon had occasionally used the aerial portal as a means of crossing large obstacles such as rivers or guarded perimeters. Get as close to the obstacle as safely possible, jump into the pod, then back out into the sky, and glide across the obstacle using a parachute or wingsuit. This one also balked at returning Hiram to Israel, or anywhere else in 2050 for that matter.
Hiram spent an hour trying to get either system working without success. With each passing moment, his level of concern grew. Living creatures could only occupy temporal artifacts for a short period of time. Natural cell death accelerated the instant an individual stepped into the pod, like a mountain climber venturing beyond twenty thousand feet, dying bit by bit. The body struggled to make the myriad of tiny repairs necessitated by the breakdown. Someone had called the effect Hagar’s Curse, and the name had stuck. Disorientation began to set in after about six hours, degradation of fine motor skills at about seven hours, partial paralysis took hold afterward, and by the ninth hour the effects were both irreversible and so severe that the sufferer would be unable to help himself. An automatic timer built into his C2ID2 helpfully chimed, indicating his remaining dwell time was down to five hours.
Frustrated, Hiram returned to the other end of the pod and set about placing Jacob’s body in a cadaver bag and stowing his equipment. He put one of Jacob’s two ID tags into his own jacket pocket, leaving the other around Jacob’s neck on its chain. He then turned his attention to the portal on the ceiling of the pod. If he exited that way, he expected to find himself back in Wah, at ground zero of a hyperbaric nuclear blast, and likely in the middle of a major mobilization by Pakistani Taliban security and emergency response forces. He had little choice but to at least check it out.
He donned a set of protective coveralls and a face mask. The outfit would do little to stop the neutron and gamma radiation sure to be flooding the area, but it would keep him from breathing in any radioactive particles and keep any beta particles off his skin. The plan had been to orient the weapon’s portal downward, maximizing the amount of residual neutron activation products created, thereby contaminating the immediate area without creating a substantial downwind hazard. That plan worked against him now.
When all was ready, Hiram activated the unit and, while standing on the third rung of the ladder leading up to the portal, stuck the probe of a radiation meter through the opaque opening. The probe disappeared from view as if it had been dipped into a bowl of milk, smooth ripples flowing away from the point of contact. The meter showed only normal background radiation, which surprised him. Using one arm, Hiram lifted one of the small recon robots up through the portal and placed it on the ground outside before quickly withdrawing his exposed limb. He activated the robot’s camera using the C2ID2 and saw nothing on the unit’s auxiliary nine-by-nine-inch monitor but bushes and grass, where there should have been a smoking hole in the ground surrounded by a burning industrial complex.
He sent the little robot moving away from the portal in a spiral pattern, but still saw nothing but bushes, grass, and eventually a cultivated area about a mile to the northeast. The robot’s on-board radiation meter continued to show only background radiation.
3
0548 hours, Friday, May 15, 1942, The Punjab, British India
Satisfied that he wouldn’t be fried or fired upon the moment he passed through the portal, Hiram climbed out into the real world and confirmed the little robot’s observations. He also confirmed the absence of any GPS signal. Hiram returned to the pod and removed his protective clothing.
He retrieved a small aerial recon drone from its storage locker and climbed back through the portal. He launched the drone into the air and sent it out from his position in a widening spiral. The drone had a dual mode onboard navigation system◦– one mode using GPS coordinates and the other an electron spin gyroscope, which provided positional information relative to its launch point. With no GPS signal available, only the latter mode was functional. Two hours later the drone was fifty kilometers out at 5,000 meters. Hiram sat in the shade of a young banyan tree surveying the terrain through the drone’s sensors. The local landforms, mountains to the west, a river to the east, told him that he was in the same place geographically as when he last entered the pod. Except that the Wah military garrison was gone, along with any trace of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Hiram launched a second drone, this one designed to listen, rather than look. He picked up an English language radio broadcast. At first, the broadcast made no sense. The Battle of Coral Sea? The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo? An hour later, he concluded that he had emerged from the pod in British India in May of 1942 at the height of World War II. Before India became independent. Before the civil war that resulted in the formation of Pakistan. Back when Wah was a part of the state of Punjab in British India.
He had jumped almost three dozen times before without incident. Even with the technology still under development, he hadn’t experienced a transport that cost him any more than ten milliseconds. Now, he sat at the exact location of the facility he destroyed with a nuclear weapon less than eight hours ago, but one hundred years before the device ever existed.
How in hell do I get home? He laughed. Maybe I don’t.
His father Moshi and sister Rachel waited for him back home. He wouldn’t make tonight’s scheduled video call with them and, if he didn’t think of another way out, he doubted ever making the call again. Like his mother, who had been killed in a terrorist attack in 2040, one of the many events that prompted him to join the IDF, Moshi and Rachel would become part of Hiram’s irretrievable past.
Hiram climbed back through the portal and into the pod. He checked each storage compartment, opened every door in search of something that might help to throw him back to his own time. His head ached, an unfortunate symptom of Hagar’s Curse. Inside one of the cabinets, he found the small wooden box his father had handed him before Hiram had taken off on his first mission almost ten years ago. The finish on the box had been worn away near the latch. He sat down on the floor of the pod and pushed open the discolored and worn brass latch.
A young Rachel smiled up at him from inside. The picture was old, almost twenty years. The edges had softened by wear. He picked up the stack beneath and cycled through the memories. More photos of Rachel, of his father, of the family before Hiram had grown up and joined the military. A family picture, taken the day he graduated basic training at Bakum, highlighted the family traits: light blue, almost hazel eyes, brown hair, rounded cheeks, and long necks, as well as the disparities. Hiram had inherited his build from his mother’s side. At almost 90 kilos, he was a much larger man than his father, despite their similar, average height. The IDF had packed still more muscle on him since and his hair had eventually grown back, though he kept it short nowadays. Rachel and Moshi both looked so proud of him that day.
“In case you need us and we can’t be with you,” his father had said. “I know. I could have dropped them all in some virtual storage facility or posted them to one of those family media sites. But I wanted you to have a hard copy. Just in case.”