Ancient Fire Read online

  Next to him, by his feet, was a green box. Made out of metal.

  “Sunny California,” Mr. Howe said. “At least, when it isn’t raining. Good for you.” He stood up and held out the box. “Housewarming present.”

  Dad just looked at him.

  “I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to see you,” I said. Somebody had to say something. I pointed to the box. “What’s in there?”

  “Top secret, son,” Mr. Howe said, winking at me. I wasn’t his son.

  “I’m done with secrets,” Dad said.

  “Not these secrets,” Mr. Howe replied confidently. “Wait till you hear what they are.” He leaned over and whispered in Dad’s ear.

  “WOMPERs?” my dad said out loud.

  “You have WOMPERs? I thought they didn’t occur on Earth,” I added, looking at Mr. Howe suspiciously. He looked at me, then back at Dad. “Do you tell him everything?”

  “The fact is, I haven’t told him everything.” Dad looked at me. “We used WOMPERs back in the lab at Princeton. They did supercharge the time sphere. And that’s what caused the explosion.”

  “The one Mom was in?”

  “Yeah.” He was sounding far away again. Then he turned to Mr. Howe. “You already cost me my wife. I’m done with your experiments. I don’t care how many old space rocks you find.”

  “These aren’t from space rocks. We have an almost limitless supply now. Thanks to nanotechnology!”

  I couldn’t understand what he was saying. “Nano — what?”

  “Nanotechnology.” Dad repeated the word, looking at Mr. Howe, and looking a bit scared. “It’s when you build things, Eli, molecule by molecule. A way to engineer living machines, even new life forms.”

  “We have a nanotechnology project at DARPA, too. Didn’t I tell you? We don’t concentrate only on time travel.”

  “But a WOMPER isn’t a molecule. It’s not even an atom.” Dad was giving Mr. Howe his don’t-lie-to-me look.

  “We can make WOMPERs from other particles now. Call it… hyper-nanotechnology. It’s not easy… but we can do it. There’s nothing holding you back now.” Mr. Howe thrust the box at my dad again. “Compliments of the house.”

  “Nothing holding me back, except my disgust for you.”

  Dad took me by the arm, stomped into the winery, and slammed the door.

  I’m not sure how long we stood there blinking at the soldiers who were already inside.

  At some point, I became aware the front door was opening and Mr. Howe was letting himself in. For some reason, he started speaking to me.

  “Your dad’s got to do it, Eli. Before somebody else does. Somebody who might not be working for us. Besides, it’s his experiment.”

  “Don’t look at me.”

  Over the next few days, Mr. Howe kept showing up with different squads of men. Not soldiers, though there always seemed to be a couple of those around to “guard” the place. And keep an eye on Dad and me.

  These new guys, Mr. Howe would introduce as “fellow scientists.” When it became clear they were trying to set up a kind of WOMPER reaction in the time sphere, Dad, who’d been successfully ignoring them the whole time, finally marched into the tasting room.

  “I’ll do it.”

  We all looked at him.

  “I’ll do it,” Dad said again. “You’ll just kill everybody.”

  Mr. Howe smiled.

  As Dad worked, he talked. “Don’t you worry about what the neighbors might think out here?”

  “Don’t worry,” Mr. Howe said. “We bought up every house and ranch in a two-mile radius. Even took over that old park and closed it down.” Which meant Wolf House and all the trails around it.

  Dad just shook his head.

  “It was national security, Sandusky. National security. We have to keep everybody safe.”

  “We didn’t keep Margarite safe.”

  Safety was on Dad’s mind, especially as he got close to creating the WOMPER reaction, so he agreed to let one of Mr. Howe’s men take me down to San Francisco for a day while he brought the local spacetime field into a state of high excitement.

  It worked. My dad didn’t blow up the neighborhood. In fact, it worked so well that when I got back, something had already happened, causing everyone to stand around and just stare at the machine. The greenish glow of the time sphere was making their faces look even more pale than they already were.

  Everyone was staring at something on the floor. Some kind of bundled paper.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “The time sphere,” my dad said. But it just sat there humming away, a perfectly normal time sphere from the looks of it.

  “What?”

  “It’s a newspaper from 1937,” Mr. Howe said. He was kneeling close to it, trying not to touch the little field of spacetime that Dad had created. “It was like it was just spit out from the past. It just appeared here.”

  “Like it was tossed through a hole,” my dad added. “This time, there wasn’t any explosion.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing, right? I mean, you’re still here.”

  Dad shook his head slowly. “This might be worse. We might’ve done something to the time stream. Things keep popping through.”

  “Like what?”

  Dad was pointing. “That showed up right after the newspaper. It’s an old —”

  “Cool!”

  I recognized the logo. I’d just seen one in a sports museum down in the city: the San Francisco Seals. I was considering making up a new Barnstormer squad called the Seals.

  My first thought was, Wow, if this was from the thirties, then maybe this was Joe DiMaggio’s actual baseball cap from when he was a Seal! Without thinking about it, I reached in to take a closer look — “Eli, no!” — violating every rule my dad had ever given me about being near the generator.

  My hand went through the charged field to clutch the cap, and I could feel the jolt run up my arm. My whole body felt like Play-Doh being mashed around.

  Somebody was screaming my name, and I think I screamed back, right before everything went black. And then exploded into color.

  The colors stayed. But now I was sitting next to a dinosaur.

  Chapter Six

  Clyne: Homework

  Final Class Project: 10,271 S.E.

  Find an alternate Earth to visit and report on Saurian culture there. Summarize your experience, and be sure to answer the questions below. Remember, you will get history, social studies, and science credits for this project, and the final score will help determine your herd placement when you leave middle school for the upper grades. Good luck!

  THE QUESTIONS:

  1. Where did you go?

  2. Were the Saurians on the other Earth helpful?

  Why or why not?

  3. How was this culture different from your own?

  Describe.

  EXTRA CREDIT:

  4. Would you recommend this reality to other students?

  1. Where did you go?

  As our science books teach, the Fifth Dimension is that passageway that connects different universes and different times to each other. My first trip through the Fifth Dimension, like that of most Saurians my age, was scheduled so I could finish my science research for graduation. I’d been told what to expect: It’s as though you’re moving through a kaleidoscope full of colors, sometimes traveling in slow motion. You feel like you’re surrounded by warm mud, a nestling back in the egg, yet the egg is cracking at the same time, shaken apart at top speed.

  I was moving through the Fifth Dimension, thinking about the various Earths described in our alternate history and geography texts, and wondering which one I should choose. There were the other known Saurian worlds such as Earth Fanda Rex, ruled by the child king, Fanda, and Earth Hydro, that planet covered almost entirely by water and populated by swimming beings who engage routinely in aquatic competitions and mermaid-themed costume balls.

  But these Earths have been reported on in other classes, and
I think one of my nest-mates even did his middle-school project on Fanda Rex, so maybe it’s just as well things worked out the way they did.

  Here’s what happened: I was in my timeship, charting a course toward one of the known alternate Earths, moving through the crosscurrents of the Fifth Dimension, when all of a sudden there appeared in the seat next to me a boy.

  The boy was a growing hatchling like me. But he had skin that was monocolored and odd fur on top of his head, and he wasn’t really any type or species of advanced Saurian at all. When I figured out what he was, I was as shocked as you will be when you read my answer to question two. But first let me tell you where I went.

  I call it Earth Orange, because that is where I discovered you can taste colors! There, the color orange can be found in a sweet fruit tasting like a bright afternoon, though it can be hard on the Saurian stomach. The planet also reminds me of the orange lava that flows from our volcanoes. Not only in color but also because things always seem to be in danger of blowing up, exploding, or otherwise falling apart on this version of Earth.

  The actual colors of this Earth, by the way, are similar to the blues, greens, browns, and yellows of our own planet. But I’m calling it Earth Orange because I want to, and because I get to. As far as I know, I discovered it. It’s not mentioned in any of our texts or histories or on our maps.

  Do I get extra credit for that?

  You might well ask how I got pulled into an altogether undiscovered Earth. It turns out, I began my field trip at precisely the same moment three of their people were discovering the basic principles of time travel. On their Earth, they thought they belonged to “different” times, but as we Saurians know, time bends. They were actually working on opposite sides of a curve.

  Or maybe different sides of a triangle. I entered the Fifth Dimension at precisely the moment a female, Hypatia, who comes from the city Alexandria, and two males, Sandusky and Eli the Boy, who come from Valley of the Moon, solved the first basic step of rendering light into its component parts. Just as their own signals sparked through the Fifth Dimension toward each other, I entered the time stream in the ship I checked out from the school supply room.

  At that precise instant, we were all fused together. Separate Earths, separate times, but suddenly a single destiny — that was how the moment was structured. We were like Saurians making a triple-jump move over each other’s cranio-tops on the field of battle during a particularly tail-curling game of Cacklaw — a move that can never be taken back.

  The reason this Earth was unknown before was because no one on it had deduced how to time-travel. Until now. They aren’t aware of the alternate Earths that surround them in multiple dimensions. On their planet, many act as if all truth and reality were immediately apparent. And easily known.

  But as we know, the universe is more like a Cacklaw field than anything else, with its nooks, crannies, confusions, and unexpected connections.

  The arrival of the Eli boy in my time-ship was proof of that. He appeared quite suddenly, and he was frightened — he had no idea where we were.

  After his first long scream, he spoke. My lingo-spot took a moment to adjust. He spoke a kind of crude, guttural language filled with long, wheezy breathing sounds like heeee and ahhh and wehhh, with occasional tongue clicking thrown in to stop all the gasping. But at last some sense was made of all the noise.

  “Where am I?”

  “What are you?” I thought that was a reasonable question, since he was in my vessel. But he just stared at me as if I was speaking with a mouth full of petrified eggshells. Which, from his standpoint, I was. He couldn’t understand me. I peeled off a little of my lingo-spot and dabbed it behind his ear. I hoped that, because of its plasmechanical properties, the substance would adapt to my guest’s nervous system and biology in short order so that we could converse.

  The boy looked scared when I reached out to him. “Don’t be afraid. I’m just out on a field trip.”

  “I can understand you,” he said, staring at me in disbelief. “But you’re a dinosaur! Where is this? What’s happening?”

  A dinosaur. That’s what we’d be called on Earth Orange. “You’re in my vessel!” I told him. “I’m supposed to be doing schoolwork. We’re in the Fifth Dimension, moving through time.”

  “Time . . .” He looked a little nauseous, then stared at a piece of blue cloth in his hands. I would later learn to call it a “cap.” For now, he was transfixed by it. “Oh, no,” he went on. “The Wompers.” I still have not found out who the Wompers are.

  Meanwhile, as we found out later, Hypatia, perhaps the senior female in her city of great learning, was creating a time beacon that was pulling us toward her, and toward the light- house — just like a water-ship heading for a beacon.

  “Where are we going?” the boy asked.

  I looked at my chrono-compass, which was spinning around wildly. Perhaps things hadn’t stopped going wrong on this field trip after all. “I have no idea. You’ve upset all the controls.”

  “How come I understand you?”

  I tapped the side of my head to indicate the lingo-spot. “School supplies.”

  2. Were the Saurians on the other Earth helpful? Why or why not?

  There are no living Saurians on Earth Orange! Scanners do show traces of one or two “dinosaurs” — evolutionary cousins of ours — in a lake called Ness in a region called Scotland, and a couple of other places. But that’s it.

  There are no living Saurian species. By and large, they all became… extinct!

  I expect I will lose points for this answer, as if I stayed home and made all this up, rather than going on my trip and doing actual research, but it’s true. I shudder at the thought of a planet without Saurian culture, too. But I am attaching several history texts — translated from the rough languages of their planet — to show what they believe to be the truth: That one time, long ago, a comet collided with their Earth, causing a disaster that stopped Saurian evolution completely, like a dragonfly hitting a tar pit.

  It’s horrible to think about, and maybe it’s just a crazy local myth. But could this event correspond to the same comet sighting in our own prehistory — and the prehistories of several other parallel Saurian Earths? — the nest-tale of the Great Sky Hammer? It was said to be a near miss with some kind of asteroid.

  You will have a harder time believing what happened after this presumed extinction, though

  I have digitized much visual and aural evidence and attached it to this homework. I hope to prove my thesis that on Earth Orange, in the absence of Saurians, mammals evolved.

  Yes, mammals! Those little ratlike creatures who scamper around the feet of the more advanced Saurian species have grown here into all sorts of exotic creatures who roar, growl, beat their chests, walk around on two legs, and use all kinds of tools. Their records show that, like mammals everywhere, they also engage in the high-risk “live birth” of their young, as opposed to hatching from the vastly safer egg-and-nest method.

  Eli the Boy was one such mammal. His species call themselves Homo sapiens, because they all presume they can think. They do have many languages. But they are always making trouble for each other and lighting many fires.

  That said, I must add the most surprising thing of all: This Eli the Boy, this young mammal, has become my friend. As has Thea the Girl — born of Hypatia, the time scholar from Alexandria — whom the boy and I would soon meet.

  They were helpful because they trusted me and wound up defending me, despite our having just met. Like two leaf-eaters assisting a stranger in a roomful of carnivores — before knowing which I was.

  I realize such closeness breaks all the basic rules about field-trip safety.

  One thing about Earth Orange: It never runs out of ways to surprise you.

  Chapter Seven

  Eli: The Lighthouse

  415 C.E.

  I’d become unstuck, unglued in time. Tangled in it.

  Thanks to my dad’s experiments, and Mr. Howe’s WO
MPERs, I wasn’t going to move straight through from the beginning of my life to the end of it, like everybody else. I was going to be twirled around in time and history, like a smoothie in a great big cosmic blender.

  Strange things happen when you zigzag through time like that. First, you go into the Fifth Dimension, where it’s much harder to tell the difference between time and space, or when and where. Or even who and what — you’re not quite sure, when you’re there, where you end and the rest of everything else begins. In the Fifth Dimension, things kind of flow….

  Time gets stretched out. And somehow, in some part of your brain, when you land in a ship next to a talking dinosaur, who turns out to be about your age in dinosaur years, you’re not that surprised.

  And when the time-ship journey seems to be taking a while, like a cross-country drive with your father, you get to know the dinosaur boy. After all, you’re not going anywhere else. Yet.

  His name is Clyne, and he was doing some kind of science project for his school. Apparently, by landing in his ship, I’d messed up all his careful calculations, and now his trip was ruined, because he didn’t know where he was headed.

  As it turned out, he was headed for ancient Alexandria, in the year 415. And so was I.

  Judging from the sun, we arrived around noon.

  We first appeared hovering over a giant lighthouse in the harbor. Now, arriving in a round, metallic ship in full daylight isn’t exactly the way to slip in somewhere without being noticed. On top of that, there was a beam of rainbow-colored light pouring out of the tower, directly hitting Clyne’s ship.

  Making us even more obvious than we already were.

  There was a big crowd of people around the lighthouse already, but whatever they were there for, they stopped doing it to stare at us.

  Clyne looked through the glass at the people below. I was squinting because the rainbow beam was so bright.

  “Mammal dance! Tchkkk-tchkk-kk!” Clyne said excitedly. He’d already taken off his lingo- spot in the ship, because after we’d been talking awhile, he said human speech seemed pretty simple, and if he learned it on his own, he could maybe fulfill some language requirement at his school.