Ancient Fire Read online

  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 them out of the news. But not much longer.”

  “Outbreaks of what?” I’m like Clyne with my questions.

  “Slow pox. A disease that causes a slow withering of the nervous system. Usually irreversible. Toward the end, people are prone to violent outbursts. The last outbreak we know about was before the Middle Ages. Before the Black Plague, actually. In Alexandria, around the year four hundred.” Thirty looks straight at me. “But we thought slow pox had been eradicated —or died out on its own—a couple of centuries back.

  “Then early this morning…this.” On the screen, there’s a section of a tile mosaic, a kind of landscape, or cityscape. The colors are still amazingly vivid, and I recognize the buildings, and the pink-blue light on the water. “This is an artist’s rendition of people fleeing a great fire in the library at Alexandria — done in tile about a hundred years or so after the actual event. It’s usually on display in the British Museum, in London. But not today. This was first discovered — rather excitedly, I might add — by a child visiting the museum on a field trip.”

  The lower-right corner of the image has been enlarged. You can make out the robes and sandals on the people running from the blaze. There’s a rhino stampeding by.

  And then, coming out of the library behind them is…Clyne. I don’t know how else to explain it. But it looks like Clyne. Running on his two legs, looking over what’s basically his shoulder at the flames behind him.

  Thirty doesn’t know about Clyne. She has a different explanation.

  “The two legs, the gray lizard-like skin, the big eyes. This might be a gray alien.”

  “What?”

  “A gray alien. Look at the large head. Oh, don’t be surprised, Eli. We’re not alone in the universe. Mr. Howe can show you the reports sometime. By the way, Howe, does he know he’s sworn to secrecy about all this?”

  “Yes.”

  Well, I do now.

  “Do you mean,” Mr. Howe says slowly, “that an alien race is trying to invade us…by invading our history first?” He’s worked himself up into a sweat.

  “It’s possible.” Thirty stays calm. “The WOMPERs may have created a breach in spacetime around our whole planet. Everything we thought we knew about our history could be changed, or changing, with unimaginable consequences. Like ancient diseases reappearing as new plagues. And it’s possible that other races, other beings, who already know how to travel in spacetime…are taking advantage of our predicament to make these things happen. A gray alien suddenly appears in a museum picture, when he wasn’t there before, because he decides to surprise us by getting here about sixteen hundred years early.”

  Thirty sure seems satisfied with herself, getting all that figured out. I want to tell her it wasn’t an alien, just a two-legged dinosaur. From a parallel Earth. And he’s not invading. Or making anyone get sick. He’s just trying to do his homework.

  “And what do you think my son can do about any of this?” Dad is sweating, too.

  “Alexandria seems to be one of the keys. He needs to go back there.”

  “And do what?” I ask.

  “Find out what you can about treating slow pox. See if you find any aliens.” That’s Thirty’s advice.

  “Fix what’s wrong.” Mr. Howe is less helpful.

  “I don’t know how. I’m just a kid.” Nobody seems to be listening to me. “And anyway, what if I just want to go back and find my mom?”

  Dad gets his sad look back. “The truth is, Eli, we’re not a hundred percent sure where you’ll wind up. Or if you’ll go anywhere at all. I’ve been running calculations, and I think since the WOMPER accident, your whole body is like a supercharged particle traveling backward in time.”

  “But I’m here now. I’m staying here. I’m not moving.” I look around at all the grownup faces. “Right?”

  A cart with a metal box on top is wheeled over to me. Mr. Howe puts on some Thickskin gloves, opens the box, and takes out my Seals cap.

  How did that get here?

  “It’s the baseball cap, Eli,” Dad says. “For some reason, that’s what carries the particular WOMPER charge that sets you off. Complete
s it. Turns you into a kind of giant positron.”

  “Just me? Can’t someone else do it?”

  Dad glares at Mr. Howe. “Apparently, Mr. Howe had the same question. He found three different soldiers to volunteer to put it on.”

  “What happened?”

  “Their bodies flickered like Christmas lights before they were thrown across the room by a burst of energy.”

  “Are they all right?”

  “Two of them, Eli, are in a psychiatric ward.”

  “And the third?”

  From the look my dad gives Mr. Howe, he obviously thinks it’s Howe’s turn to answer. But he doesn’t.

  “You don’t have to go,” Dad says softly. “You don’t have to do any of this.” Then, in a louder voice, he speaks to Thirty and the Twenty-Fives.

  “You can’t make him do any of this! And I won’t. This has to stop somewhere. And it stops now! With my son.”

  Thirty flips on the newspaper image of Mom, stuck in 1937. I think that’s a mean thing to do to my dad.

  “Dr. Sands. It is our job to decide if Mr. Howe can go ahead with his operation. But our decision was made before we got here. We’re in a dangerous situation. And as far as we know, your son is the best chance we have to keep it from getting worse. Eli, if something happened to Earth history back in Alexandria, to change things, to make them different for us now, you need to find a way to change it back.”

  “How do I know I’d go back to Alexandria?”

  “There’s a chance…” My dad lets that trail off.

  “What?” I ask him.

  He doesn’t really want to say. “There’s a chance, it seems, that whatever attracted you there in the first place will pull you back. You may have created a kind of particle trail connecting our time to Alexandria. Or at least connecting you.”

  “You think we’re so heartless, Sands. Look.” Mr. Howe holds up a Thickskin that looks about my size. “We’ve got protection for him when he gets there.”

  “He’s not going!” It looks like Dad is about to lunge for the suit, but a couple of DARPA men block his path.

  “Dad? What if I don’t go?”

  I look up at the wall, see Mom’s face staring out from the old newspaper photograph, see it change to the pictures of the confused and scared-looking airplane passengers, then see it change again to Andrew Jackson Williams being led away by the DARPA team. Thirty can play that screen like a violin.

  “What happens to the world, Dad?”

  “I don’t care what happens to the world anymore. I care what happens to you, Eli.”

  But if people are getting sick, or planes are disappearing and reappearing in the sky, or ghosts are wandering the streets, and history is spinning more and more out of control, it’s not going to be much of a world for me or him, anyway. And I don’t want my mom trying to survive things that happened before she was even born. I didn’t ask to get all tangled up in time like this, but now, I guess, that tangling is part of me.

  I reach for the hat in the metal case.

  “Put on the Thickskin,” Mr. Howe says.

  He holds it up, and as I take a corner in my hand, Dad yells, “Eli, no!” He breaks free of the guards and runs toward the cart holding the Seals cap.

  He smashes into it, fighting with the DARPA men, with Mr. Howe, even one of the Twenty-Fives. But no one notices the cap has been knocked loose and landed by my feet.

  I can already feel the tingling in my toes. For the second time in my life, I reach for it.

  Then everything winks out, I cross the Fifth Dimension like a dream, and when I come to, the fire in Alexandria has already begun.

  Chapter Twelve

  Eli: Tunnel of the Dead

  415 C.E.

  It’s definitely the hat.

  But shooting through the Fifth Dimension like a bodysurfer, without being in a ship like Clyne’s, is hard. It’s like every wave pulls you under, and you feel like you’re gonna upchuck when you arrive.

  I’m woozy when I materialize inside the library grounds at Alexandria. No rhinos this time—just lots of statues. I’m in a tiled courtyard. It’s night, and I can see the full moon through the open roof. Somewhere I hear a scratching sound.

  In the distance, I can also see that a couple of the walls I’d jumped over earlier with Clyne are now on fire. I look at the blaze, look up at the giant statues that surround me, then hunch over to throw up.

  Raising my head a moment later and wiping my mouth, I start to feel better.

  I see the cap on the ground, and I’m about to pick it up, but this time I stop. I just got here. I’m still holding the Thickskin Mr. Howe gave me. I wrap the cap in it, touch it lightly—it seems safe to handle that way. I pick it up and put it back on my head. As long as the Thickskin holds, I’m okay.

  Or at least, I would be okay if I didn’t just see one of the statues start to move in the dark…

  No. It’s not a statue. Did I say no rhinos? I was wrong. I’ve just puked all over the feet of one.

  Even the rhino isn’t sure what to make of it. I hear him snort and snuffle and paw the ground a little. Maybe he’s not sure whether to be insulted or feel sorry for me.

  Either way, I can’t move, so it’s a relief when somebody suddenly tackles me and drags me behind one of the real statues, where the rhino’s going to have a hard time getting at me.

  It’s the girl. She talks to me, but I can’t understand her. I’ve left my lingo-spot back in my own time. I like her voice, though. She sounds like she knows what she’s doing, but she doesn’t seem bossy about it. She just seems…kind of cool.

  She speaks again, and I gesture that I don’t understand. Then she reaches behind her ear. Clyne’s given her a lingo-spot, too. She peels some of hers off, reaches over, and rubs it near the base of my skull.

  “Wizard boy. You’ve come back.” She gives me a kind of smile. Not like she thinks I’m a doofus, but like she finds me faintly amusing, anyway.

  “I’m not a wizard. My name is Eli Sands. How do you do?” I hold out my hand, but she doesn’t shake it. Maybe that’s not the custom here. “Wow, we’re really talking. I mean, I’m talking to you, but you’re part of history!”

  “What do you mean? Whose history?”

  “Everybody’s! You’re living even before George Washington was born…or Shakespeare! You’re really old!”

  “You claim not to be a wizard, yet you claim to know who will be born? And for your information, rude wizard, I have lived only thirteen years.”

  “Look, I’m not claiming to be magic, and I didn’t mean you were old like a grownup…” Maybe I’m getting off on the wrong foot. I search in my pocket for something to give her as a gift. My fingers feel the baseball cards Mr. Howe had given to me. I pull one out. Ken Griffey Jr.

  She looks at it, watching the holographic highlights of Griffey’s career. “Perhaps you’re not a wizard. I certainly don’t need any cheap magic like this.” She flings the card away, and it lands somewhere on the tile floor with a small click. “And my name is Thea, daughter of Hypatia, head librarian of Alexandria and chief lecturer in math and astronomy.”

  “Was that your mom with you at the lighthouse?”

  “‘Mom?’” Her lingo-spot translates. “You mean ‘mother’?” I nod. “They took her. I watched them.”

  “Who?”

  “Tiberius. ‘Brother’ Tiberius. You saw him at the lighthouse, too.”

  “Why does he hate you so much?”

  “He thinks my mother and I are witches.”

  “Are you?”

  She gives me the kind of mixed-up look my dad specializes in, only this one seemed to say she’s mad at me, a little hurt, but still feels sorry for me, all at once.

  “Okay, you’re not a witch, and I’m not a wizard, but I did just come back through the Fifth Dimension. And I’m still a little foggy. And I could use your help.”

  “Fifth Dimension? But there are only four. Anyway, wizard, I might need your help. Your lizard f
riend might need it, too.”

  “Clyne? Is he all right?”

  “Yes, K’lion” —she pronounces the name in a way that makes sense to her — “is fine. I hope.” She points out toward the grounds. “He is somewhere out there, trying to fix his vessel. But the zoo animals have been loose since this afternoon. The guards have fled —or gone over to Tiberius. And Tiberius himself has almost broken through the walls. Or burned his way through.”

  The smell of smoke is definitely getting stronger.

  “He’s coming here to get you?”

  “Not just me. The scrolls, too. Everything. Everything the library stands for. That’s why I’m taking a few things now and planning to get out.”

  She has a satchel over her shoulder with a few odds and ends in it. She tiptoes back toward one of the walls, and the scratching sound resumes. She’s trying to chip a piece loose with a small pick she’s taken out of the bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I will not let them destroy everything,” she says. “This is my favorite tile and I’m taking it with me.”

  “What’s so special about it?” I ask.

  “It’s a picture of my mother when she was my age. My grandfather, Theon, put it up here when he was the head librarian.”

  On the other side of the statues, the rhino suddenly bellows and charges, followed by a “Tchkkk! Tchkkk! K’laaa!” from close by.

  “Who’s there!” Thea yells. But we both know. There’s only one voice like that on Earth.

  I can’t see clearly in the dark, but there’s another crash, and it sounds like the rhino has stampeded right through the pillars and stumbled down the stairs.

  “Poor thing. He’s nearly blind, you know.” Thea rises up, then shrieks as Clyne leaps down from the head of the statue above us.

  “Eli Boy! Klaak! Hello!”

  He turns to Thea. She hardly needs a lingo-spot with him—despite his klaaaks and tikks, Clyne is mostly speaking in her tongue. Their voices are too low for me to get a good translation.