Free Ancient Fire by Mark London Williams Page B

all right?” I ask.
“Does she still know who she is? Or where she really belongs?”
    Dad adds a small shrug to his mixed-up
expression. “No one knows, Eli. I wish I did. I’m sorry. I don’t
think anybody’s ever been in a situation like this.”
    Mr. Howe comes over. “The world has never
been in a situation like this, and we have to try to fix it.” He
turns to Thirty and the Twenty-Fives. “We have to fix this before
it gets out of hand!” The Referees don’t respond.
    “Dad? Before what gets out of hand?” Mr. Howe
answers me before Dad can. “Time! If time, in fact, really doesn’t
move in just one direction…if history can be rearranged behind our
backs at a moment’s notice…then everything we know could be
changed” — he snaps his fingers—“like that. I mean, what if George
Washington suddenly loses the Revolutionary War, and there’s no
America? Or for you, personally, one of your grandparents winds up
married to somebody else, and you wink out of existence? Or worse,
what if that happened to someone important? What then?”
    “Who’s deciding who’s important, Howe? You?
DARPA?” My dad is standing up now. “I mean, what if hydrogen bombs
were never built? What about that?”
    “What are you talking about now!?” Mr. Howe
is sweaty and nervous, and turns back to the Referees. “What is he
talking about now?”
    Thirty looks at my dad. “What are you talking
about?”
    “It’s just that there are some things about
history we might be better off changing.”
    “We’re not here to play God, gentlemen,”
Thirty says to both of them.
    “Why not?” Mr. Howe snaps. Everyone stares at
him. “I mean,” he adds, “if the mission requires it.”
    Dad glares at him, getting more and more
annoyed. “I think we need to remember the reason this is happening
is that Mr. Howe kept pushing me to do the experiments before we
knew where they would lead.”
    Howe stares at my dad. “You told me once,
Sandusky, that the part you loved best about your work was when
something totally unexpected happened. You liked the surprise.
Well, I’d say you got it.”
    “Dad,” I say, loud enough so Mr. Howe can
hear, “do you think you could both stop arguing? So we could figure
out how to get Mom back?”
    That actually shuts them up for a minute.
Then Dad takes me by the shoulders. “In a way, that is what we’re
trying to figure out. They brought me down last night, Eli, to
brief me on the situation, and to ask my permission.”
    “Permission for what?”
    “They want to send you back to
Alexandria.”
    Now it’s my turn to shut up for a minute. I
hear water dripping somewhere in the BART tunnel.
    “Specifically, Mr.
Howe wants to send you back.” It’s Thirty, speaking as the
Twenty-Fives nod repeatedly. “It’s our job, as Referees, to decide
if he has a case.”
    “And then what?” I ask.
    “We give the agency our approval to go
ahead.”
    “You can’t make him go against his will.” My
dad says it out loud, just as I’m thinking it.
    “It’s not just about trying to fix time and
space anymore or even how to get Dr. Margarite Sands back to her
family.” Before any of us can ask Thirty what it is about, the wall
shimmers back to life with more images from Vinita.
    Mr. Howe jumps as though he hasn’t seen these
pictures before, either. Maybe DARPA is even keeping secrets from
him.
    The wall screen shows Andrew Jackson Williams
and a bunch of other people being taken away by men in Thickskins —
material that sticks to your real skin and protects it if you’re in
an area where there’s something dangerous in the air. It covers
your nose, too, and your eyes, but you can breathe and see through
it. It makes people look like big, shiny bugs.
    Only the government’s supposed to have it.
But I touched some once—when Dad brought some of the material
home.
    “There’ve been outbreaks in Vinita and a few
other places. As we did with the airplane incident, we’ve kept