“Bunger!” shouted Otis. “Where the hell did you—”
Conrad jumped back out and Otis seemed to freeze again. Conrad went around to the driver’s side, opened the door, and grabbed Otis. Under the influence of Conrad’s magic touch, Otis flipped back into Conrad’s time, protesting loudly. Moving quickly, Conrad hustled him over to the roadside, and let him turn back into stone. Then he went and got Audrey.
Audrey kept her hand on Conrad’s shoulder while he restarted the Mustang. It fired up fine, and he drove out toward the main highway, weaving around all the stopped cars.
“Look at that,” exclaimed Audrey, suddenly. “Soldiers!”
Conrad and Audrey were a block past the campus, and there, lined up in a residential street, were hundreds of soldiers, armed to the teeth. They had tanks and bazookas, machine guns and armored cars.
A fleet of helicopters hovered over the treetops, frozen en route to Clothier. High overhead, you could make out the black, triangular silhouettes of fighter planes.
“Wow,” said Conrad. “They were really planning to cream me if those bullets didn’t work. I bet there’s soldiers on the other side of campus, too.”
“And in the Crum! Aren’t they going to be surprised when their time starts up. You and I’ll have disappeared!”
“I just hope their time doesn’t start up any time soon,” said Conrad, driving a little faster.
“What happened to your speech, anyway, Conrad?”
“I stuffed it in Dean Potts’s mouth. That’s what it was written for, really.”
Chapter 29:
“Thursday, September 22, 1966” Normally, the drive to Louisville would have taken a day and a half. But with the world’s time effectively stopped, the road was often jammed by motionless cars in every lane, so that Conrad frequently had to pull onto the shoulder to get around the photo-finish speedsters. The tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike were particularly tough. Some cars simply had to be pat-patted out of the way. Two or three times, Audrey and Conrad walked into a motel, took a key to an empty room, and got some sleep. With all this, the trip took something like four days.
Of course, really, there was no telling justhow long it took. Neither Conrad nor Audrey was wearing a watch, and the sun, stuck in the old timestream, forever hung there in its near-noon, September 22, position.
They ran into a rainstorm west of Pittsburgh, which was interesting. Each raindrop that hit their car would join their timestream and slide down to the road. Looking back, they could see a carved-out tunnel through the rain. It was interesting, but Conrad couldn’t figure out how to put up the convertible roof, and they were getting wet. So they stopped at a Howard Johnson’s, took the keys from the hand of a man about to unlock his Corvette, and proceeded in even better style.
The ease of taking the man’s keys gave Conrad the notion of robbing a bank, but Audrey talked him out of it. The trip was dragging on longer than they’d imagined, and it was all getting kind of spooky. It was on the last leg—from Cincinnati to Louisville—that itreally started to get strange.
They were weaving along from lane to lane—every now and then skidding out onto the shoulder. Conrad was driving, and Audrey was staring out the open car window.
“Is it always so hazy in Kentucky?” Audrey asked.
“Hazy ...” Conrad realized he’d been squinting for the last couple of hours. Things were getting harder and harder to see. It was like wearing the wrong pair of glasses.
“And look at the sun, Conrad, it’s gotten all fuzzy!”
Indeed the sun was fuzzy, and the landscape hazy. The great tapestry of past reality was beginning to fade.
“That’s not normal, is it, Conrad?”
“Normal! None of this is normal.” He tried to drive a little faster. Pass a car in his lane, dodge a truck in the other lane, skid around a solid block of three cars either way.
“We’re getting too far away from the main timestream, Conrad! That’s why the world is getting so vague.
It’s out of focus!”
“I’m scared, Conrad.”
“Maybe I should let you go. I could put you out by the roadside, and you’d leave my timestream. You’d be out there with all the regular people.”
“But it’s you I want, Conrad.”
“Well, hang on then, Audrey. Once I get that crystal we’ll see the flamers, and maybe they’ll help me out.”
Fortunately, Conrad remembered Louisville’s roads well, and they were able to find their way to Skelton’s. They pulled up his driveway, and the sun-hazed farmhouse reared up before them like a haystack by Monet. Hand in hand, they left the now-shimmering car and mounted Skelton’s steps. At the touch of Conrad’s feet, the steps grew satisfyingly solid.
They found Skelton on his back porch, poised over a trout fly in a vise. He was busy wrapping it with yellow thread. Like everything else now, Skelton had the gauzy outlines of an Impressionist painting.
Conrad laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder. It took him a moment to get fully solid, and then he looked up.
“Conrad! How’d you sneak in like that, boy?”
“I’m outside of normal time. I just pulled you into my timestream. This here’s Audrey Hayes, who I’m engaged to. Audrey, this is Mr. Skelton.”
“Pleased to meet you, Audrey. Engaged to the saucer-alien, hey? Well, I suppose he can have kids like anyone else.”
“This is the first timeI’ve heard we’re engaged,” said Audrey, smiling. “Conrad and I came here to see if you still had that crystal.”
“That crystal!” exclaimed Skelton. “If you only knew, Conrad, how the feds have been pestering me. Of course I never even allowed as how I had it back, but theywould keep poking around. Yes, sir. I’ve got that crystal hid, and I’ve got it hid good.”
“Well, can I have it?”
“Yes ... if you let me watch you use it. You know how much it would tickle me to see another saucer, Conrad, and—”
“No problem. And the sooner, the better. You notice how hazy everything is getting, Mr. Skelton? If my timestream gets too far off of the old reality, there’s no telling where we’ll end up. I want to get that crystal and call the flame-people for help.”
“Okey-doke. The crystal’s hid out in the smokehouse. I wedged her on into one of my country hams. It was my rolling the hams in rock salt that gave me the idea. It seemed fitting, what with you being made of pigmeat and all in the first place, Conrad.”
“Pigmeat?”exclaimed Audrey.
“Didn’t tell you that did he, hey?” chuckled Skelton. “Yep, that’s how Conrad got here. He was a stick of light attached to that crystal. When his saucer landed, he flew on out, stabbed his light into my prize hog Chester, doctored that pigmeat into human form, and walked off to join the Bungers. March 22,
1956. I saw the lights, but all I found was the crystal. Here we are.”
“Let’s go outside where there’s some light.”
They went out and sat down on the grass. The ham was in the middle, and the three people sat around it.
The haziness had gotten so great now that everything outside of a small circle around them was gone. No house, no smokehouse, no sun, and no sky. Just raw color, lively specks of scintillating brightness.
Skelton felt around under the ham’s outer hide for what seemed quite a long time. Finally he drew out the crystal, shiny and glistening with fat. It was considerably smaller than the last time Conrad had seen it.
“Here, Conrad. You hold it, and I’ll keep my hand on you.”
The crystal tingled in Conrad’s palm. Where earlier it had been big as a matchbox, now it was no larger than a sugar cube. Even so, it nestled into the curves of his palm in the same tight way it had done back in the Zachary Taylor cemetery.