Free Dragon Sword by Mark London Williams Page B

no home, but I am alive.
    “ Our ship needs direction,” K’lion
said. “Specific to f-chng! finding Eli.”
    “ Well, in Earth terms, I think the
year would be 1940 or 1941. Or maybe, by now, ’42. I can’t be quite
sure.”
    “ More, please,” K’lion
requested.
    “ You mean a season? A month?” Eli’s
father asked.
    “ An object. This is a new vessel,
with new gears. Thea t-t-t-ttt! knows it. Vessel itself
sniffs out beings in spacetime. Just needs a little atomic
structure from the thing being sought.”
    Eli’s father nodded. “WOMPER
radiation.”
    “ What is WOMPER?” K’lion
asked.
    “ Wide Orbital Massless Particle
Reverser,” Sandusky said. “Your scientists probably have a
different name. Fundamental particles of the universe that
determine the ‘time change’ of everything. Forward or backward.
We’re just — I’m just — now learning how to track them, to
use them. Everything — every being, emits a slightly
different…WOMPER halo, we could call it. Because everything —
living or not — is just a little somewhere different in spacetime
than everything else. Like a cosmic fingerprint. No two are alike.”
He shrugged and sat down by the fire. “All these splendid theories,
yet our families have been torn apart.”
    “ Particles come together in strange hkk-kk-khh! ways. Me and Thea now with you. Three beings,
three different times, two separate species, two parallel planets.
Who knows how many dimensions between us before? Odd com-
binations, yet here we are. Let us search kt! for
Eli.”
    Sandusky sipped from his cup again
and looked at both of us. “Well, if you’re really going after him…”
He reached in carefully to the pocket of his garment and drew out a
small piece of parchment. “I found an old paper of his when I was
cleaning up. I’ve been carrying it around.”
    He handed it to K’lion, and we both
looked at it in the firelight. I couldn’t read the markings of
their language, but K’lion could. “Barnstormer Robot Man!” he said
aloud. Below it was a child’s drawing of a mechanical
man.
    “ He’s loved that game for as long
as I can remember. His fingerprints are all over the paper. But
they’re old. He was little.” Sandusky paused, and his eyes wandered
over to the fire. “I don’t know if that’ll help you get a WOMPER
reading on him or not. But bring it back. Bring someone back. Bring
something.”
    K’lion said we would. I’m not
versed much in their modern tongue, but I did learn “bye.” So
that’s what I said. And I kissed him on the cheek.
    Sandusky of the Sands nodded, and
we went back into the ship, which had begun to hum
again.
    I showed K’lion again what Gennt
had shown me: the scanning panel that allows new material to be
absorbed by the plasmechanical direction finder. It worked to take
me to K’lion. Now we would see if it worked to take us to
Eli.
     
     
     

Chapter Eleven
     
    Eli: Sign Man
    December 24, 1941 C.E.
     
    “ I know you,” I say to Andrew
Jackson Williams.
    He doesn’t seem one hundred percent
surprised. “Where are you from?” he asks.
    “ Here and there,” I tell
him.
    “ I moved to California from Vinita,
Oklahoma. To spread the good word. But you’re not from back home,
are you?”
    “ Not that home. Not really.” How do
you tell someone you’ve met him, but not yet ? The answer is,
you don’t. I’ve probably already said too much. “What’s the good
word?”
    He taps his flyer. “The Nazis are
collecting power objects.” He motions over his shoulder. “And now
one has been taken from that museum. I wanted to keep a close
watch, but it’s already too late. And the exhibit hasn’t opened
yet. I believe they were after the sword.”
    “ No, I saw it. It was a
fake.”
    “ You were in there?” He seems
genuinely surprised.
    “ Yeah. But they weren’t after the
sword. They took antlers.”
    “ The White Stag’s
antlers!”
    “ How do you know about all this
stuff?” I ask. Does