The Winds of Time

Book 487: Gateway Essentials

by Chad Oliver

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

They were visitors from out of space. They had slept for 15,000 years. But they were men. Nevertheless it was a fantastic experience for Wes Chase to discover them while on a casual fishing trip. It was a long time before they were able to explain to Wes why they were on earth and what they needed. It was even longer before Wes conquered his horror and decided he could help them in their mission to bring peace to the universe. When Wes finally found the daring answer to their problems, he realised that he would have to leave his own life behind and go with them into the future and the winds of time.

Release date: April 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 153

Sample

THE CABIN WAS A NEAT COMPROMISE. FOR THE MAN, FED UP to the gills with the stinks of the city and afflicted with the annual back-to-nature bug, it had yellow pine walls with prominent rustic knotholes. For the woman, resigned to another season of losing her husband to a series of glassy-eyed trout, it offered an electric refrigerator, a moderately efficient gas stove, a shower with hot water, and inner-spring mattresses on the beds.

Weston Chase, pleasantly fueled with ham and eggs and three cups of coffee, had only one immediate aim in life: to get out of the cabin. He sat on the unmade bed and tied the laces of his old tennis shoes, then clapped a stained mouse-colored felt hat on his head and shrugged into a supposedly waterproof jacket. He stuffed chocolate bars and cigarettes into his pockets and picked up his tubular rod case and his trout basket.

Now, if only—

“Will you be long, hon?”

Too late, he thought. Now came the Dialogue. He knew what he would say, and he knew what his wife Joan would say. The whole thing had the massive inevitability of Fate.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can, Jo.”

“Where are you going?”

“Up the Gunnison, I think. Pretty rough going that way. Sure you wouldn’t like to go?”

“Wes, there’s nothing to do up there.”

Weston Chase edged toward the cabin door.

Joan sighed audibly, shoved back her fourth cup of black coffee, and put down the paper with a flourish. (It was the Los Angeles Times, which caught up with them two days late.)

“Run along, hon,” she said. “Mustn’t keep the trout waiting.”

He hesitated, smothering his guilt feelings. It was sort of a dirty deal for Jo, he supposed. He looked at her. With her blonde hair uncombed and without her make-up on, she was beginning to show the years a little. She had refused to have any children, so she still had her figure, but her good looks were blurring a bit around the edges.

“I’ll be back early,” he said. “Tonight maybe we can go see Carter and Helen, play poker or bridge or something.”

“Okay,” Joan said. It was a neutral noise; she was Being a Good Wife, but not pretending to be ecstatic about it.

Wes kissed her briefly. Her mouth tasted of sleep and coffee.

He opened the door, stepped outside, and was a free man.

The thin air was clean and cold, and it hit him like a tonic. It was still early, with the Colorado sun wrestling with the gray morning clouds, and the deep breaths he took tasted of the night and stars and silence. He got the engine of his car running on the third try—the carburetor wasn’t adjusted for mountain driving yet—and then switched the heater on.

He pulled out of the Pine Motel drive, vaguely annoyed by the two wagon wheels at the entrance, and drove back through Lake City. Lake City wasn’t much to look at but, as always, it filled him with a nameless longing, a half conscious summer wish to get away from the smog and the traffic and settle down in a place where the world was fresh. His eyes told him the truth: Lake City was not precisely a ghost town, but the coffin was ready and the hole was dug. It was just a pale collection of wooden stores and houses at the foot of Slumgullion Pass, kept more or less alive by tourists now that the silver mines were gone. The sign on the road outside of town claimed almost a thousand residents, but most of them must have been of the invisible variety.

But he watched the curls of blue smoke rising in the air and sensed the warmth behind the glass windows of the Chuck Wagon, where a tired girl was putting plates of ham and eggs on an old scarred counter. He saw three oldsters already swapping lies in front of the ramshackle post office, and he was honest enough to envy them their life.

His car hummed out of town, crossed the bridge, and sped into the morning along the Gunnison River. The Gunnison was blue and inviting, framed by snow-capped mountains and bordered by dense green brush and reddish strips of gravel. He opened the window and could hear the icy water chuckling and gurgling by the road. He knew the Gunnison, though; it was swift and deep and rugged. Wes cut off from the main road a mile outside of Lake City and drove over a dirt trail until he came to a small winding creek that tumbled down out of the mountains. He took the car as far as he could, and then parked it in the brush. He opened the door and climbed out.

There was only one sign that a man had ever been in this spot before—an empty, dirt-streaked jar that had held salmon eggs lying by a rock. He had tossed it there himself a week ago.

He smiled, feeling the years fall away like discarded clothing. He felt his heart eager in his chest, and his mind filled with warm, faraway images: a boy shooting tin cans on the Little Miami River in Ohio, building rock-and-clay dams on back yard creeks, snagging a sleepy catfish from a green river island …

He locked the car, gathered up his gear, and hit the path with a long, springy stride. He grinned at a jay squawking across the sky, caught just a glimpse of a doe fading into the brush ahead of him. The path angled upward through a valley of green and gold, choked with grass and flowers, and then climbed along the white-flecked stream into the mountains.

The trail was rough and little used, but he stuck with it. For the most part, he kept the stream on his right, but he had to cross it twice when the rocks and brush cut him off. The water was glacially cold and his tennis shoes squished when he walked. He knew there were trout in the creek, fanning their fins in the ripples and hovering in the black, shaded pools. There were enough of them so that he could count on getting seven or eight if he spent the day at it, and probably two of them would be pretty good rainbows. But today he wanted to do better than that. There was a tiny lake, fed by melting ice, up above timber line, and there the golden native trout were sleek and hungry, far from the hatcheries and the bewildered fish that were dumped into the more accessible streams and caught before they knew where they were.

The lake was almost fourteen thousand feet up, so most of the boys with the fancy equipment left it alone.

Wes climbed steadily, knowing he would be dog-tired before he got back down again, and not caring. His doctor’s mind told him his body was in good shape, and he was reassured. The sun was still playing tag with grayish streaks of cloud, but he could feel his face burning a little in the thin air.

Around him, he was aware of magnificent scenery without looking at it directly: cool pines and stands of graceful aspens, their slender white trunks like cream in the sun. A miniature jungle of ferns and hidden insects, and a soft wind rustling through the trees. Once, the mournful cry of a wolf far above him.

If only a man could come here and live, he thought. If only he could forget his security and the string of runny noses that were his patients.

And then the trapping whisper of reason: You’d freeze in the winter, Jo would hate it, where would your kids go to school if you had any kids …?

It was eleven o’clock when he got above the timber line, and even the stately spruces were behind him. The path twisted through rocks and dark clumps of brush with startling green leaves. The stream was only some three feet across here, but fast and cold as it rushed with a sibilant shhhhhhh down from the lake.

The lake itself, when he finally reached it at twenty minutes past eleven, was nothing much to look at, unless you happened to be a fisherman. It was a flat pond, almost circular, perhaps one hundred and fifty feet across. The sun was almost directly overhead, and the water appeared dark green; the few spots that were rock-shadowed looked black. There was still ice on the peak that rose behind the pool, blinding in the sunlight.

It was as silent as though the world had just been created, fresh and clean and new.

Wes sat down on a rock, shivering a little. He wished the clouds would disperse for good, even though the fishing would be better if the sun weren’t too bright. He wasn’t tired—that would come later—but he was hungry. He wolfed down two chocolate bars, getting an almond fragment stuck in his teeth as usual, and drank some cold water from the stream where it ran out of the pond.

He slipped his brown fly rod out of its case and stuck it together firmly. He took the black reel from his trout basket and clipped it into place. He squinted at the leader, decided it was okay, and tied on two coachman flies. Probably the salmon eggs would do better in the deep water, but there was plenty of time.

He stood up, lit a cigarette, and maneuvered himself into position: shielded on one side by rocks, but with a clear space behind him for casting.

The world held its breath.

He flicked the flies with an easy wrist motion and they patted the water to his right, only five feet from shore. He left them a moment, two specks of brown and red resting on the green surface of the water. There was a slight wind ripple on the pond; otherwise, all was still.

He tried again, letting out more line and casting straight out in front of him. Nothing. He drew the line back, wiggling the flies in the water—

Strike!

A flash of flame-colored fins, a heavy shadow beneath the surface, and the flies disappeared. The line tautened, the fly rod bent double and jerked with a life of its own.

Wes excitedly muttered a crackling string of choice swear words, directed at nothing in particular, and backed away from the lake. A bad spot to use the net, just toss him out on the rocks—

There! The trout broke water and tried to snag the line on a boulder. Wes kept the line tight, waited until the trout relaxed just a trifle, and heaved.

He had him. The trout flopped on the rocks, the fly worked out of his mouth—

Wes snatched off his hat with his left hand and dived for the fish, clapping the hat over him like a basket. Carefully he reached under the hat, grabbed the trout, and broke its neck with one quick jerk.

He sat on the rocks, grinning idiotically, admiring his catch. It was a nice one—a good fourteen inches, and heavy with firm flesh. Wes popped him in the basket, fastened the buckle, and shook out his line.

“Won’t get skunked today,” he said, exhilarated out of all proportion to what had happened. What was it about a fish, anyhow, that made him feel like a kid again? The thought died in birth; he didn’t care why it made him happy. It did, and that was enough.

He advanced on the pond again with a sure instinct that today was his day to shine. He forgot everything: food, rest, promises to Jo. Every atom of his being was concentrated on the trout in the pool. Every fish he caught stimulated him to want more.

For Wes Chase time ceased to exist.

The trout basket grew heavy against his hip.

His wet feet ached, but he didn’t feel them.

He noticed the gray clouds that filled up the sky around the mountain peak only because the fishing was even better now that the water was shadowed and restless.

At four o’clock in the afternoon the storm hit with a paralyzing suddenness. He was taken utterly by surprise as the pond before him was instantly transformed into a pitted black mass of excited water. He felt a numbness in his wrist where something icy rested. He looked around, trying to adjust himself to a change that had caught him thoroughly flat-footed.

Hail.

It wasn’t rain, but hail—round pelting chunks of ice that seemed to materialize on all sides, blanketing the rocks and plunking into the water. It was very still; there was no wind.

At first he wasn’t afraid. He was annoyed, and that was all. He picked his way back to where he had left his rod case, took the rod apart, and put it in the tube. The hail got under his collar, melted, and trickled down his back.

He noticed two things: it was darker than it should have been, and he was cold. His first thought was of shelter, but the unhappy fact was that there wasn’t any. He was above the timber line, and there wasn’t even a tree to break the hail.

He stood up straight, trying to make as small a target as possible. He wished fervently that his hat had a wider brim on it; he could hear the hail pocking into the felt, and the crown was already getting soggy.

He remembered an abandoned miner’s cabin back down the trail. Its roof had collapsed, but the four walls were more or less intact, unless his memory was tricking him. No matter—the cabin was a good two miles away, and the hail was so thick he could hardly see the trail.

The storm got worse.

A cutting wind came up, sweeping out of the north, slashing the hail against his face. He stuck his red, numbed hands in his pockets and held the rod case under his arm. He raised his head and looked around almost desperately.

There was nothing. The slick rocks were blanketed with hail, and the world that had seemed so inviting a few hours earlier now presented a bleak aspect indeed. He checked his watch. Four-twenty. It would take him two hours to make the car under the best of conditions, and he wasn’t anxious to try that path in the dark. He waited, shivering, but in ten minutes the hail showed no sign at all of letting up.

He turned his back to the wind and managed to get a cigarette going on the fifth match. Then he squinted his eyes and fumbled his way to the path that led along the rushing stream, back down the mountain. He was decidedly miserable, and more than willing to concede that civilization wasn’t so bad after all.

If he could just get to it.

The hail rattled down with a vengeance, and Wes began to worry about his glasses. If they broke, he would be in a bad fix for following a mountain trail. He tried to keep his head down, but that exposed his neck.

He tried to increase his pace, and promptly slipped on the hailstones and fell on his back. He got up, unhurt but touched by panic.

Slow down, he thought. Take it easy.

It was hard to see. He couldn’t just follow the stream because the rocks and brush barred his way. If he could remember which side of the stream the path was on—

He couldn’t. He floundered along what he had thought was the trail, and it just stopped against a rock wall. The wind was whistling now, the hail the worst he had ever seen. He looked at his watch.

A quarter to five.

It would be dark in an hour unless the clouds lifted.

He tried to retrace his steps and fell again, landing in a clump of wiry brush that scratched his face.

Wouldn’t do to bust a leg. No one knows where I am.

He stopped, shielded his eyes, tried to spot something, anything.

There.

Above him.

Was that a rock shelter, that shadow beneath the ledge?

He put dow. . .