"Lasers. You saw them in the temple. Cooligan must have stashed them in here someplace." He set to searching the plane systematically as Lizzie read.
11/17/2032
There's no more point in hoping. Metters keeps working on the time module like a man possessed, but it's been three months. I don't think we'll ever get out of here alive.
"That's heartening," Lizzie said, feeling her heart sink.
"What?"
"A lot of help you are," she said. "Suppose you did find the lasers. Do you think you can blast our way out of here?"
"Very funny. Do me a favor and mind your own business, okay?"
2/21/2033
I have given penicillin bread mold and Chinchona bark to the local healer, an old woman who delivers babies and makes herb teas for the dying. Communication was tough, but I think I got it across that one cures infections and the other malaria. She acted like they all do around me, as if I just blew in from Mars. I can't say I blame them, especially after the shoot-out we had with those crazy spearchuckers over the hill. Apparently the Olmec have been terrorizing this place for decades, raping and killing whoever got in their way. Unfortunately for all concerned, my plane and crew were the Olmec's target the last time. They haven't been back.
I don't like being a god, but they seem to have made me one. The king— an old timer who's as progressive as they come— just unveiled some ridiculous statue of "Kukulcan" (that's me) wearing my helmet. It took about thirty men to carry the thing over to the Cassandra.
I try not to interfere but, damn it, this is the best thing I've ever done. All the farms are planted in steps now, and the harvest these people get is unbelievable, what with the heavy rain and year-long summer. This mad king has even opened up trade with other villages down the road. Said road, incidentally, was designed by Major Bolam, botanist, copilot, and now civil engineer.
To hell with not interfering. We make a difference here, a big difference.
Sometimes I even manage to forget about Sandy and Michael.
"Sandy and Michael?" Lizzie said aloud.
"Huh?"
"Nothing. Did you find your guns?"
"Nope. What's Cooligan say?"
"He seems— happy."
"Terrific. Is he, by chance, happy because he discovered a way back to the twenty-first century?"
"No. Not yet, anyway."
"Some captain," Remo said in disgust, going over to the control panels.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm going to see if I can get this heap to work."
"Just like that? Don't you even need the flashlight?"
"No. My eyes adjust." He lifted off the lightweight metal panel and explored around the thousands of wires beneath it.
"You're serious, aren't you?" Lizzie asked, amazed.
"Would I lie to you?"
"Then why did you act like you needed light before?"
"So that you wouldn't ask me the kind of dumb questions you're asking me now," Remo said.
She dug back into the log.
7/2/2033
It's getting so hard to write. The headaches are happening almost every day now, and my vision is beginning to blur. It's no surprise. The doctor said this would happen. Glasses would help, for a while at least, but then glasses haven't been invented yet. Hah hah.
It's funny— now that my eyes are going, Sandy and Michael are clearer to me than ever. I guess the important things are what you see with your heart. That's pretty sloppy sentiment for a captain's log, but what the hell. Nobody's ever going to read this anyway.
Since I've been here these past fourteen months, watching the crew's hopes turn into bad jokes, I've been giving a lot of thought to fate. The king— he's got a name a yard long, like everyone else in this place— says that our crash landing here was part of some prophecy. Like it was our destiny to blow out of the sky so we could build roads and invent mortar and teach these folks what zero is.
Bolam, our Renaissance man, is now supervising the construction of an observatory to read the stars with. I thought it was pretty crazy, but then, why not? What's a botanist got to do around a wrecked plane except go nuts? Metters, too. Sometimes I swear he's in love with the time module. He talks to it like a woman. He's already taken it apart and put it back together four times. He thinks he's getting close.
Let him play, too. We know our destiny, the king and I.
By the way, I've learned some of the language here. As the captain, I'm the official spokesman, but of course Bolam has picked it up, too. There's a guy who never should have enlisted. He's a born teacher, a real intellectual. Military life really held him back, I think.
I must admit I'm a lot freer myself than I used to be, but then I didn't want to befree before. If the truth be told, the U.S. Air Force was all that kept me from jumping off that bridge where Sandy and the baby crashed into the guardrail.
A blowout. A turbine malfunction. It's all the same, isn't it? You're going along, not doing too much of anything, and then fate steps in and gives you the finger. It's sure waving in my face now, 6,000 years away from home. But Sandy got worse than that.
I should never have let her drive that old clunker. Money was so tight then, but I should have made them take the bus. Or driven them myself. Then maybe she wouldn't have had the blowout and maybe she wouldn't have skidded into the guardrail, and maybe the car wouldn't have blown up and burned my baby son to death.
The military kept me together then. The rules, the routine, the other guys.
But I know I should have been in that car with them.
We've moved. After more than a year of sleeping in tents and foraging in the jungle like monkeys for food, I let the guys move into the rooms that the king set aside for us since we got here. It's in the royal palace, no less, with dancing girls and the works. Yesterday we played a game of baseball out on the grounds. We started out with teams of three, but all the local guys wanted to join in, and by the fourth inning there were more than twenty players on each team. I suppose baseball will turn into a national institution here, too. Then, afterward, the whole town got plastered on this brew made from fermented woodpeckers or something. Bolam, the botanist, was the worst of the lot. He has really changed. I didn't touch the stuff myself. Booze has the wrong effect on me. It makes me remember.
And now the headaches are starting, just like the good, discrete, private doctor said they would, and I made the mission, and the mission fizzled, and I'm going blind in a place where nobody can help me.
That's fate.
Sandy, I'm glad it's finally my turn.
Lizzie closed the book. "Remo, we've got to get out of here."
"Really? I hadn't thought about it," Remo said sarcastically. He looked up from the tangled mass of wires to see Lizzie's face glistening with tears. "Hey, what's the matter?"
She told him Cooligan's story. "He must have loved her so much," she said. "He was going blind, and all he could think about was his wife."
Oh, Dick. I've never even told you I loved you.
"Please try, Remo. I want to go home."
"I'm doing what I can," Remo said, winding two wires together. To his surprise, a hum began, low and erratic.
"You've done it," Lizzie gasped. "You fixed it!"
"Now cool it. I haven't done anything, except start a hum."
"That's a motor. That Metters guy must have fixed the module, after all. They all escaped!" she cried jubilantly. "And we know where the switch is. We can make this thing take us back."
"How?" Remo asked.
"That's up to you. I'll get the others."
?Chapter Eleven
"Quick, we're leaving," Lizzie shouted, interrupting Chiun's 450th stanza of an Ung poem about a bee lighting on a flower.
The court musicians playing behind him stopped abruptly. The king snorted out of deep slumber. In the corner of the king's throne room, where Po and Nata-Ah were playing dice, the spotted snakebones twirled in the air and landed in the silence with a dead thump.