Ancient Fire Read online

  “You’re getting sneaky, Eli. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”

  “It’s good for stealing bases. Or if I ever decide to become a spy.”

  Sometimes, you have to be careful what you joke about.

  Dad and I were driving cross-country, moving out of my hometown of Princeton, New Jersey. He’d inherited the old winery out in the Valley of the Moon from some uncle or something, and it sat there for a couple years, empty and abandoned, till my dad decided he’d had enough of Jersey and was going to try things out in California.

  I’d never lived anywhere else but Princeton. It’s where I grew up and where my best friend, Anderson Wall, lived. Andy. “Wall, wall, cracks on the wall.” I think that was the first thing I’d ever said to Andy. We were in second grade and had just met on the playground. When you’re little like that, the idea of moving away never really crosses your mind.

  I was born in Princeton because that’s where the Institute for Advanced Study was. The Institute was run by Princeton University and was supposed to be a place where scientists and thinkers could sort of noodle around and goof off and come up with stuff on their own, without any outside pressure. Einstein worked there back in the twentieth century. My dad and mom worked there in the twenty-first.

  Dad was good with spacetime. I don’t mean space and time but spacetime. One word for two sides of the same cosmic thing — ways to try and figure out where you are on the humongous map of the universe, like north and south. Except spacetime is where and when.

  Since his grad school days, he’d been tinkering with spacetime, changing the electrical charges of particles — the tiniest pieces of the universe, the bits that make up atoms. Dad figured out how to accelerate them through space and send them backward — not just through the air, but backward in time, too.

  That’s how he met my mom, Margarite, who was pretty good with spacetime herself. With her help, Sandusky had perfected his first “spacetime sphere” — a small area, the size of a basketball, maybe, surrounded by, well, kind of a force field. That’s what it’d be called in one of those corny old sci-fi movies, anyway. Especially since it was pumped out by a constantly humming generator.

  Inside the force field, time moved differently. You could put a banana in there, and it wouldn’t get soft and mushy for days. Sometimes weeks. Because time was moving slower for the banana.

  Dad thought the little spheres could have practical uses — like keeping an organ fresh if you were waiting to transplant it, or storing blood for a transfusion. You could slow down disease cells and study them. All kinds of uses like that.

  Word about his experiments got out, and one day Mr. Howe showed up. I was pretty young, maybe around seven. He would come by the lab, and he would also come by the house. He tried to act the way some long-lost uncle would — way too friendly and smiling too much.

  I guess things started to change for my parents at the Institute, too. They couldn’t do their experiments just for the sake of finding stuff out. Mr. Howe wanted everything to have a purpose. He was full of ideas: Like, he wanted to start putting live animals inside the spheres and running tests on them, to see if their aging could be slowed down. Dad said he wasn’t ready to put living creatures inside his time sphere. I remember one particular argument he had with Mr. Howe.

  Both of them were standing in the backyard after dinner on a really cold October evening, and I could hear them through the closed window in my room. It was the first time they had their “weapon” argument.

  Sandusky said he wasn’t going to use his science to hurt people or make war. Mr. Howe just kind of laughed at that. He said something about how the time sphere wasn’t really a weapon at all, it’d just be helping his country.

  A lot of things started to go wrong in a hurry after that.

  Mom stopped going into the lab with Dad so much, which meant I got to see more of her in the afternoons when I came home from school. Those were pretty good times — when I felt like a regular kid, just getting along in my life.

  Andy and I had joined a Gaming Guild to be part of our favorite Comnet game, Barnstormers. It’s a baseball game with monsters. See, you pick a squad of “Barnstormers,” creatures who go around the country on a team bus, playing pickup ballgames in small towns or challenging minor-league teams to matches. Like a scarier version of a fantasy baseball league. The kind of monsters you pick affects how you play: Like, if you have a lot of vampires, you can only play at night. If you have too many zombies, they run slow and you don’t have base speed. Werewolves? They can really keep their eye on the ball — but watch out for full moons. And if you beat the local team, you’ll probably be chased out of town. With torches. You can trade players, and even play league games on the Net. Andy and I just did it for fun.

  There was a place on the edge of town called Herronton Woods. Andy and I rode our bikes together all the way down Nassau Street and spent afternoons there. There was a spot we liked in the middle of all the oaks — some kind of plant disease had swept through there a few years back. In one area, where they had chopped down the sick trees, it made a kind of creepy clearing, full of stumps and twisted branches. We liked to go and stay till late afternoon, when the shadows would get long, because the area reminded us of a place where some Barnstormers might really play a game — a little spooky, but still with enough room to hit a ball around.

  Andy and I would play some real ball — usually a version of over-the-line, with oak stumps to mark the different kinds of hits you could get — and then we’d take out our roam boxes.

  Roam boxes let you capture extra-rare characters that weren’t available on your vidpads. The characters were signals you could only pick up in a certain area, sort of like the way my dad describes old TV broadcasts or something. In other words, you could only receive them in a specific place. There were thousands of Barnstormer characters all over the country. You could pick them up in shopping malls, parks, schoolyards — anywhere anyone wanted to make one up or sponsor one. But you had to have a roam box, and you had to be standing in the right spot.

  In Herronton Woods, someone kept making up Barnstormer characters, like the Jersey Devil — who was actually a good shortstop — and the Pine Barrens Thing — who was slow, but a fair catcher. Then they would put them out in the air for someone to catch in a roam box.

  Andy and I never figured out who was behind it — there was no ad that went with any of the new characters — and there wasn’t always a new player to catch every time we went out there, but part of the fun was never knowing what might be lurking in the woods. It felt cool, like you were actually inside the game a little bit.

  So Andy and I were out there, with our roam boxes and gloves and bats and balls, pretending to be Barnstormers ourselves, about four o’clock on a November afternoon, and this is one of the last great memories I have of my mom, before everything just got really bad and confused.

  I remember it the way grown ups say they remember things: suddenly, with no warning, triggered by some movement in the light, or a smell or something, anything that takes you back to that crystal-clear place in your memory, which isn’t really what’s happening to you right then, but comes from some earlier time. Which is sort of like being in a time machine, too.

  When my mom showed up, she was all bundled up in a coat and actually looked kind of pretty right then, in a way that wasn’t too corny. Kind of like herself and not just a mom.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She smiled at us. “There’s a storm coming in pretty fast. I didn’t think you’d have time to make it back to the house, so I brought the truck. You can throw your bikes in back.”

  When we slid into the front seat, I saw some cookies there on a paper plate. Molasses cookies, which she’d just made. They were still warm.

  “Mom…” I wasn’t sure if I should be embarrassed in front of Andy, if the cookie thing was too corny.

  “‘Thanks, Mom,’” she said, trying to imitate me.

  “H
ey, thanks, Margarite!” Andy never passed up a chance to have a snack.

  “You’re welcome, Andy,” she said in her regular voice, giving me a little elbow in the side.

  It had clouded up by then, and right after that the ice storm began. We watched the slush fall against the windshield.

  After we dropped Andy off, my mom got out, grabbed a fistful of ice from off the truck, plopped back down on her seat, and shut the door behind her.

  “First snowball of the season,” she said. “It’s not really snow, Mom.”

  “That’s okay. We don’t really have seasons anymore, either. Let’s take this home and put it in the freezer, and we’ll use it when we get some real snow.” She set it up on the dashboard.

  We never did have that snowball fight. Some things you shouldn’t put off. The next thing my mom said was, “Your dad wants me to start helping at the lab again.”

  It had something to do with Mr. Howe. He’d gotten his hands on a rare particle that isn’t normally found on Earth — it was discovered inside the air pocket of some kind of space rock — and given it to Dad.

  Dad had been wanting to create a bigger kind of time sphere by re-creating the conditions in the early universe, like a really tiny big bang — which is how the whole idea of time got started anyway.

  Think about it — who kept track of time before everything was created? If nothing was there, why would you need to? No endings to anything, no “after” — just one great big long “before” — until the universe cooled off and there were galaxies and places and stories to go with them.

  So with the chance to use rare particles in his experiments, Dad actually let himself get talked into something by Mr. Howe. I guess Dad figured he could keep control of the situation, but it didn’t work out that way.

  Sandusky also needed Margarite’s help. She was better at splitting atoms than he was. She finally agreed to do it, so they were both getting talked into something they weren’t sure they should do. They say kids pressure each other that way a lot, but I don’t think it’s just kids.

  It was later, when my mom was working by herself in the lab, that the explosion happened. They never found her. No body, nothing. She just disappeared.

  My dad stopped all work on the time sphere. Over the next few weeks, he barely talked to anybody, including me. The weeks turned into months, then a year. And there was still no trace of my mom. But for a long time, my dad kept acting like she could return at any moment. Our lives were kind of frozen with the terrible, sudden loss of her.

  It was a piece of paper — a tax bill on an abandoned winery my dad had inherited in California — that finally helped him decide he’d had just about enough of New Jersey. The winery was called Moonglow, because of the Valley of the Moon. I guess I was ready for some kind of change, too. I hardly ever went to Herronton Woods anymore, and Andy didn’t seem to come by all that much.

  When my dad and I drove out of Princeton in our truck, there were fierce storms in the Midwest, so we weren’t able to take a direct route to California. We headed south, and that’s how we wound up in New Orleans. There’d been snow on the ground for a few days by the time we got there, and I’m not sure what it was that finally broke through my dad’s mood during that snowball fight. But I was glad to see him back, at least a little bit. The way I remembered him. Kind of the time- machine effect again.

  In the motel room, I unrolled my vidpad. Maybe Andy had sent me an e-package; we promised to try and keep in touch when we were saying goodbye, but again, all the weather was making it difficult for some of the messages to go through. So I wound up playing a short Barnstormer game with some local kid with the screen name SpudRuckus, and that’s how I hit two grand slams in one inning.

  SpudRuckus had a lot of zombies and what he called swamp critters on his team, and no real pitching, so it wasn’t all that hard to load up the bases and hit one out. Still, I felt kind of proud.

  When I went to tell my dad about it, he’d already fallen asleep on the big double bed. But there was a smile on his face. And then I remembered how my mom smiled that day in the woods, with the ice storm coming. And I wondered if my dad was dreaming. Maybe in his dreams, he found a way to be with my mom again.

  Chapter Three

  Eli: Driving through Thunder

  June 9, 2019 C.E.

  We left New Orleans the next day. One of the museums was having a pirate exhibit that I really wanted to see, but Dad wasn’t stopping for anything.

  We ate breakfast in the truck, driving along, with just the quiet buzz of the electric motor joining our chewing and sipping noises as we ate beignets and drank chicory coffee.

  Beignets are those special donuts they make in New Orleans that are covered with powdered sugar and don’t have holes in the middle.

  “Your mom and I came down here before you were born,” Dad said after a few minutes. “When we were both still in grad school. The first morning here, we had beignets and coffee, just like this.”

  I don’t know why grownups like coffee — it’s really bitter — but after I put enough milk and sugar in it, it tasted okay. Actually, this was the first time I’d ever had it — to my surprise, Dad just nodded when I asked if I could order some, too. And hearing him then, I wondered if it was his memory of that time with my mom that made it important to know there was still someone around he could order a second cup of coffee with, even if it was just a twelve-year-old kid.

  “Dad? What really happened with Mom in the lab? You and Mr. Howe told me she disappeared, but people don’t disappear in explosions — they get hurt. Or they die.”

  He stopped chewing his beignet. I could tell Dad was getting uncomfortable.

  “This was a different kind of explosion, Eli. It was an explosion of time.” Now it was my turn to stop chewing.

  “It has to do with your work?”

  “It’s not my work anymore. That’s why we’re going to California.”

  We were both quiet again, and Dad just kept heading west. Eventually, he turned on the satellite scanner to listen to a music station out of West Africa that he really likes. I unrolled a vidpad to check messages — just ads, nothing from Andy — and see if I could pick up another Barnstormer game.

  The weather kept doing weird things, so the Comnet links weren’t very reliable, and eventually I just read some stuff I’d stored in one of my files, on twentieth-century minor- league baseball teams.

  The weather was pretty wild during the whole drive; our storm siren kept going off, which meant we had about fifteen minutes to pull over or adjust course before the next cloudburst hit. Bad weather had been hovering over the Midwest and was shifting south toward us, so we had to zig while it zagged. Instead of heading straight through Texas, and then New Mexico and Arizona, we wound up on a road my dad called old Route 66 and spent an afternoon and part of a night in a place called Vinita, Oklahoma.

  The clouds were dark, and there were streaks of lightning coming out of the sky when we pulled into town.

  We saw a flickering electric sign that said CABIN CREEK MOTEL. We both ran from the truck into the main office, and since there weren’t any other cars around, figured that getting a room would be pretty easy.

  When we stepped in, we heard a strange tapping sound, not quite like hammering — more like somebody knocking two small rocks together with a steady rhythm. “Shhh. Listen to that,” my dad said, holding up a hand. “Typing.”

  “Typewriter typing?” I don’t think I’d ever seen a typewriter before, except in pictures. I know people used to write on them, while they were waiting for computers to be invented. Of course, hardly anybody writes on a computer anymore, either. They usually just speak into their vidpads and print it out somewhere later, if they still need it down on paper.

  My dad just stood there listening a minute before ringing the bell.

  Eventually the tapping stopped, and a man came out of the back. Older than Dad, with sandy gray hair and a square jaw, he stared at us through a pair of old-
fashioned wire-rim glasses that magnified his eyeballs so that the most casual expression on his face seemed really intense. He looked at us like we had stepped out of a dream and he was having a hard time believing we were there.

  “It’s you,” he said at last, looking right at me. Neither my dad nor I knew what to say.

  “Well, yes, it’s us,” Dad finally answered. “And we’d like a room.”

  The man nodded, and with the tiniest hint of a smile, slid a large guest book across the counter. “You coming here, or passing through?”

  “Passing through.” My dad shrugged.

  “We all pass through don’t we?” the man said with that sudden, intense eyeball-look as he stared at my father.

  The man gave Dad an old-fashioned ink pen, and it was Sandusky’s turn to stare — at the antique in his hand. Then he signed us in. “Room number one,” the man said. “Right next door.”

  My dad took the key without speaking, and we ran out into the rain and then let ourselves into the room.

  Stepping inside and flipping on the light, we could see the place was fixed up to have a Civil War theme from two centuries back, but that wasn’t the unusual thing. At the foot of the bed was a TV!

  I don’t mean a wall monitor, but an old, bulky television in its own wood cabinet, standing on four legs, and plugged into the wall — like straight out of a museum. It even had preprinted numbers on the dial… and it only went up to channel thirteen!

  Not expecting anything to happen, I flipped the on switch, and after nearly a minute of flickering light, a big eye-looking symbol came on, and then there was a serious-looking man reading the news. He was showing films of soldiers somewhere in a jungle.

  My dad looked at it, then turned the dial to a different channel. There wasn’t much on, and it was all black-and-white. I guessed there was some local festival of old shows on. Dad stepped away and watched the screen, then stepped up close again and grabbed the round wire loop from the top of the set. Suddenly, the picture got fuzzy, like when your local satellite link goes bad.