Star Travels Tales of Science Fiction (2 page)

Every kid in the place fell to the floor.

Suddenly the class crawled like lizards
toward me. I pulled out my mini germ grenade. “Fire in the hole,” I
said calmly, pulling the pin and rolling the bomb gently across the
floor. “I wonder what super germs are in it? Have you been
vaccinated for SARS? I doubt it – that was a killing disease
centuries ago.” I skipped lightly over a crawling young man who
grabbed the grenade and heaved it out an open window; the ensuing
explosion excited a puff of smoke.

“I hope those germs aren’t airborne,” I
smiled.

“Mr. Pimple,” a female voice called to me, a
tall blond. Her eyes reminded me of Marie’s. This girl might be
beautiful if she hadn’t disfigured her face with a death mask
tattoo and sewn the corner of her lips together with leather
stitches that hung loose at the corners of her mouth, like she
hadn’t quite finished her spaghetti.

I reloaded my syringe-slinger, which looked a
lot like a caulking gun, with nasty precancerous cells. I swung it
slowly around the classroom, resting my sights on the girl.

“Call me, Veronica,” she said in a sexy
way.

I scanned her through my brain boggle. I
quickly lowered my weapon when the boggle warned me of a genetic
relationship to my wife. A gush of despair washed over me–a tear
leaked from a corner of one eye. I stopped in my tracks, too
flooded with emotion to think. How was it possible that this girl
was related to Marie? I watched lamely as Veronica made her next
move.

She pulled out a wooden straw, placed it
between her blackened death- lips and blew a small dart at me that
hit the sleeve of my coat disrupting the coat’s electromagnetic
field. I flared for an instant like the filament in an over-powered
light bulb and then my shield died.

I knew it, and so did everyone in the
classroom.

The shock to my system brought me back to my
sorry senses. Three giant steps separated me from the room’s red
panic button. I sprang up onto a desk, dove to the floor rolling as
far as I could to the other side of the room, narrowly escaping the
sting of a couple of laser-taser light-pins that pricked the kid to
my left. The student flipped like a landed fish.

“You hit Jason, you ass-hair,” Veronica said
to someone over her shoulder.

I punched the panic button. I smashed it with
my fist and the plastic cover splintered into a shower of red. A
steel door slowly slid out of the walls and windows.

Three of the students made for the exit with
me. They tumbled out into the hall at the same time, narrowly
escaping the heavy, closing door which clanged as it shut in the
students behind them, the trapped students pounded on the steel
door, wanting out. I heard their muffled cries of outrage which
made me glad for the door.

“They’re stuck until you release them,”
Veronica assured me.

She’d made it out.

Veronica tried to stand, but the spiky heel
on one of her shoes snapped away. She stumbled but caught her
footing. A bantom-bot scuttled up to her. The limping Veronica
scooped up the bot and dropped it into the large purse strung
across her shoulders. The bantam-bot tried to climb out of the bag,
but Veronica caught it and snapped off one of its legs.

“Where’s the staff in this school? The
dossier said a staff existed at this school,” I said.

“Funny,” Veronica remarked.

“What’s funny,” I asked.

“You asked the same thing the last trip you
timed-in here.” She sneered at me.

I wanted to hit something. I’d been here
before. That meant I wasn’t successful the first time.

“There’s the Silibot,” said the other two
boys sitting cross-legged on the floor, their backs against the
walls. They snickered and repeated the word ‘staff’ over and over
until I let the glistening tip of the dart of peek out from under
my sleeve. I didn’t want these kids to see how lost I felt.

Then I saw
the Silibot,
roller-blading down the empty hall toward me. The lovely and
shapely synthetic robot teacher came to a spiral stop in front of
me. I felt her scan right down to my marrow.

Breathe, Jack, Breathe.

I walked a tight circle around her, my dart
dispenser pointed in her direction, she definitely looked
human—enough.

She pushed my dart down to the floor and
rolled over it crushing it into tiny glittering dust and sulfurous
yellow goop. She took my free hand into her hers. I looked into her
quartz eyes, and I realized she provided a very sophisticated
techno-matrix of devices and was quite possibly my only chance at
finding my way out of the future and back to my home.

“My time-pitch? I want it back! One of your
reprobates stole it.” I let go of her hand

“Did you ask the bantam-bots where it might
be? My capacitor can locate one of those little rascal bots for
you.” She put her hands on her voluptuous robo hips, closed her
eyes and her corporeal façade appeared to disappear, waver, and
then, just as quickly returned. Her blue quartz eyes grew wide with
a mixture of emotions, fear and awe.

“
Your time-pitch--it’s in the
basement,” she said, in a frightened whispery voice, “Something’s
strained your time-pitch. Something unauthorized has come through!”
Silibot said, sounding panicked and excited at the same
time.

“Let’s find the pitch,” I said

My heart broke at the sight of the pitch. I
lifted each half of the orb that was once the time-pitch and gently
pushed the two palm-sized metallic case parts together, but a split
along the seamed edges kept the pieces from forming a complete
seal. I pushed as hard as I could and held them there.

“Jack, honey-babe,” I thought I’d never see
you again! You saved me. I love you.”

Rhonda’s voice from the pitch!

I quickly let the orb once again fall in
two.

The weakened orb, now rendered dangerous,
could let anything fall through into this chrono-zone, or fall out
without anyone knowing where they came from or where they’d
gone.

Silibot whirred over to me, her large,
crystal blue eyes fixated on the luminescent globe parts in my
palm.

The click clack of a single stiletto made us
turn. The lithe form of Veronica limped towards us. My finger
hooked gently round another germ bomb in my pocket.

“
Wait. There’s someone else. Who’s
that?” Silibot pointed away from Veronica to someone at the end of
the hall.

“Eh?” I spun around in the opposite direction
in time to see a man slip quietly down the hall.

I took off after him.

The last thing I remembered was seeing a pair
of black boots, exactly like mine, the coolest Doc Martians I’d
ever seen. And then he threw a germ bomb at me.

When next I opened my eyes, I found myself
sitting on a chair behind a desk in front of the time suspended
students I’d left locked in the classroom. My long black duster
coat lay over me; the level of pain pulsing in my skull made me
feel like vomiting.

“I feel so shitty,” I said. “I think he hit
me with a migraine shell.”

“You were dying, but I inoculated you,”
Silibot said from across the class. “I had to save you in order to
save him,” she said pointing to the
me
standing at the back of the room.

Beside her stood another man holding some
type of laser weapon. I rubbed my eyes,—Silibot with her arms
around another me!

“What the eff—“

Silibot did a quick heel-toe slalom between
the students’ desks roller blading towards the real me. She stopped
at my desk, behind her the students sat still, a frozen forest of
bodies in various positions of distress.

“I’ve frozen them in time,” she said,
indicating the students. “He,” she turned and pointed to the me at
the back of the room, “is a nastier version of you, from another
time-line, and I love him,” Silibot said.

“Great. I came here to kick the students’
asses,” I said, nodding to the suspended students. “Now I get to
kick my own ass.”

I leaned in close to the robot, using her as
shield against the possible laser fire of the other me, who knew
what kind of arsenal he’d brought with him. When I next peered over
her shoulder, I noticed that my competition had left the room and
took the laser with him.

Then, Silibot began to light up like a buoy
in a storm—a glowing lighthouse in a sea of time-glitched
students

“Sili? Now what’s going on?”

“I’ve been working on reproducing the
matrices of the time-pitch, “she said quickly. “I’ve used myself to
encase the space-time singularity. We’ve got to get you back home
before you both destroy all time versions of yourselves and really
get killed off--forever.”

“You
duplicated my time-pitch. But you need an accurate copy of
the azimuth-time bearings and the instruments--you need —a
time-pitch
to
copy—
You?
Silibot?
You
stole my
time-pitch?”
It all made sense. Only a Silibot could
enter a hot time-tank and function enough in time-fog to reach
inside my pocket! And she used it to bring the bad boy copy of me
here!

At that moment, Silibot became incandescent
and looked positively nuclear, burning red-hot like the white-hot
nose of a reentry pod--a firebot goddess. She decelerated the light
all around us. I found myself getting that heavy feeling I got
whenever I began to go into the drag of time-fog. Soon I’d be
speechless and immobile. She didn’t seem to need the sanctuary of a
time-tank to control time.

My counterpart came back into the room and
raced toward me with a huge semi-automatic syringe pointing
straight at me. He wore a pair of time-fog glasses exactly like
mine, which meant Sili’s time-shifting didn’t affect him.

Silibot glowed brighter than a small sun.

I leaped at his glasses.

I missed.

“Hey, Gramps! Catch!” From the classroom
door, Veronica threw me a pair of time- fogs, which I caught.

“Gramps?” I cringed at the word.

“Don’t get all emotionally disabled. I’m your
great- great- great- great granddaughter.” She reached into her
shoulder bag and pulled out the broken bantam-bot and like a
shot-put thrower from ancient Olympia she heaved the bot around
once, twice and then let it go. It hit the other me in the chops
and knocked his time-fogs to Timbuktu and he dropped his
semi-syringe dispenser but he still managed to shoot me with an old
fashioned bullet spewing gun.

He deadened my right forearm, but in midair,
I twisted like a slo-mo ninja master and threw my broken time-pitch
to the floor, slamming the whole scene into stasis.

Ribbons of my blood hung in the cold, eerie
aura of decelerated light. Globlets of my flesh and chunks of arm
bone created a macabre sculpture around me. With the time-fog
glasses on, I forced myself to move quickly grabbed the gun from
the now suspended intruder. I walked amongst the suspended pieces
of my blown-away arm, netting all of the bits and chunks with the
lining of my coat, blood and bones and flesh quickly gathered. I
gently closed the coat holding it in place with my good arm. Then I
removed my glasses and entered into time suspension and made the
chrono-leap home.

Days later I awoke and found myself in my own
bed, clean and comfortable. I heard a sound in the other room.
“Marie,” I called out. I knew in my head it wasn’t possible. I’d
screwed up and hadn’t killed the killer of my sweet Marie. Yet I
dared hope that somehow it had all turned out. My heart leaped with
anticipation.

“Marie?” I called again.

A moment later the Silibot whirred into my
room.

“There’s a surprise for you,” she said in a
sing-song voice, “under your covers.” I pulled my right arm from
under the covers. It shone as metallic and robot-like. My fingers
whirred and articulated better than they had when they were flesh
and blood. I noticed that my shiny tensor steel techno-right arm
ran right up to the shoulder.

“I had you repaired,” she said. Silibot
smiled

Sili gracefully lowered herself onto the end
of my bed.

I looked her straight in the blue quartz of
her blink-less eyes.

“I love you,” Sili blurted. “All
time-versions of you.”

I grabbed her by the throat with my new
arm. I squeezed her hard enough to make her eyes bug a little.
“
You
killed my wife,” I said.
She did look human, even though I knew a metallic chassis lay
beneath the shifting sands of her strange synthetic skin. I nearly
lost my resolve, but then I thought of Marie.

I sensed Silibot’s unease and squeezed a
little harder. The light in her quartz eyes began to pulsate.

“
I love you,” she choked out. “Marie
had to die.”

“If I destroy you then Marie can’t die,” I
said coldly.

“I’m bio-tec. Time doesn’t affect me. Destroy
me and I’m a pile of junk, but it changes nothing for you

I looked into Silibot’s blue quartz eyes.

I remembered Veronica’s warm brown eyes, like
Marie’s. Marie was out there somewhere. She’d made it and existed
in one of the time-lines because we had a triple great
granddaughter!

I snapped Sili’s neck with my new arm. Then I
lit a cigarette and drank the cup of coffee she brought me, held it
tight with the fingers of the new hand. With its awesomely fine
motor skills. I found my new limb very useful.

I carefully plucked out Sili’s matrices and
considered the difficulty of finding an ace that’d be able to jam
her guts into a time-pitch casing. I’d find someone who could do
it--finding people-- that’s the kind of thing I did for a living.
I’d find someone to fix my time-pitch, and then I’d find Marie,
even if it took all the time in the world.