The house was odd, he thought. Odd, and tiny. And the walls seemed to be made of mud.
How had Claire made the adjustment? From that house in Philadelphia - to this?
The entire house - all three bedrooms of it - was quite literally smaller than the library. The walls were bare; not a single picture adorned the walls. There was no paneling on the walls, no library, and one bathroom little larger than a telephone booth.
And while Claire had returned to her own bedroom, and put Amanda in a large bedroom near her own, she had put him in a tiny space off the kitchen he assumed had been provided for some sort of domestic help.
And here he had thought she was developing real feelings for him...
He lay in his bed that night thinking about this sudden uncomfortable turn of events, wondering if he should simply abort the mission and return to the ship, try to reconcile events that had already been altered with potentially more agreeable outcomes. Still, he knew what they'd say...
'It's a good plan...stick with it a little longer...'
Planting dreams...molding the shape of her intellect to help create the best possible outcome...and then she'd stumbled upon the Shift - the worst possible outcome imaginable. All it would take to sunder the current order was one simple ripple in the fabric of time caused by the shift - and then they would come. The people living on earth now thought they knew what true evil was, but no one here had ever met one of them. The silent ones, the mind readers. Keepers...that's what they called themselves. No one knew what they kept, unless it was a certain order to the universe.
He thought about that for a moment...
What if someone went back to the very beginning of time, to the moment when the universe came into being? To the moment of inception? What if someone went back and took that cosmic thimble full of matter and put it in a suitcase, then made the suitcase disappear? What if all the matter of the universe simply vanished? What then?
The theory said if the Shift began it would send the universe back to the zero point. Was that what the Keepers sought to prevent? What if the Shift was unstoppable once it started, if the arrow of time was to become corrupted?
The shift was fundamentally different than the time-shadows. The spheres could be controlled, and easily, and travel could take place without distorting the flow of time. Not so the Shift. The Shift was a one-way ticket back to the very beginning, and conceivably whatever lurked before the beginning.
Before the beginning?
Is that what the Keepers were guarding?
He sat up in bed and walked out the door to the kitchen, then he stumbled to another door and walked out onto the stone patio. He took a deep breath of the crisp air, then looked up at the stars. Was there something beyond, he wondered? Something on the other side of all that blackness? Was that the secret?
He heard someone coming out of the house, walking up behind him - and he stood perfectly still, looking at the pole star, imagining the earth spinning round and round.
Silence enveloped him. Only the sound of someone's breathing disturbed the perfect silence.
He turned, saw Amanda standing there, a large knife in her hand, a slash-wound across her belly.
His eyes went wide, he began to feel panic for the first time in his life. "What have you done!" he cried...then she lunged at him, the knife aiming right at his heart.
+++++
Claire heard Amanda walk from her room, heard the door that led to the backyard open. She shook her head and slipped on her jeans and hiking boots, walked through the living room until she saw Amanda in the yard, the knife drawing back. She saw Benjamin standing there with his back to them both, looking, as he seemed to do often, at the stars - and she knew what was going to happen. She started running and was through the door when Ben started to turn around. She came up from behind Amanda, her eyes fixed on the knife, and as she lunged she hooked her arm around Amanda's neck and knocked her to the ground; she then saw the belly wound and thought it must have happened in the fall.
Ben was kneeling now, applying pressure to the wound, but the flow of blood was simply catastrophic. Without thinking he pressed his left temple and waited...
+++++
The scientist's compound at Los Alamos was, in early 1944, one of the most heavily guarded facilities in the United States. Guards in Jeeps patrolled constantly - both the paved streets and the rugged arroyos that surrounded the compound. Several guards saw the blue sphere that settled over the small house on Sycamore Street, and they raced to investigate.
When they arrived they found blood in the backyard, the back door to the house standing open - and no one inside the house.
And no blue sphere.
Thirty four minutes later Harry Hopkins walked into the president's bedroom and gently shook him.
+++++
The room was impossibly small, the walls bright red - and Claire shook her head as the dream...but no, this wasn't a dream, was it? Amanda was on an operating table and two machines hovered over her body. Retractors had pulled open and revealed an enormous cavity; the robots were moving so fast she could neither see nor understand what they were doing. Screens flashed as readouts changed, one of the machines moved to what looked like a storage device and opened it, then plugged a bag of red fluid - was it blood? - into the IV that coursed into Amanda's arm.
She saw that Ben was beside her, and that they were in a small clean room off the operating room, and that Been was talking on an intercom of some sort.
"She's lost too much blood," she heard him say, and she began to fear the worst. Then she heard him say: "Are you sure?"
He listened for a moment, then keyed codes on some kind of electronic typewriter. One of the machines stopped what it was doing and went back to the storage unit, pulled out another bag and added that to the IV.
Ben turned to her. "She'll be alright now," he said.
"But...she's dying..."
"She was, yes."
"What do you mean, she was?"
"She is not dying now. She will be better in about five hours. We can return to the house then."
"Are you kidding? Look at her!"
But when Claire turned and looked at her sister the fourteen-inch long gash was gone, and her color was improving - right before her eyes.
"What have you done to her?"
"She'll be better now. In every way."
"In every way? What do you mean?"
"You will see."
"Where are we?"
"A hospital."
"Where?"
"Here."
"You won't tell me?"
"No. I cannot."
She turned and looked at Amanda. "Why did she do this?"
"I do not know."
"What's wrong with you, Ben? You don't...you're not speaking right."
"I am tired. I must rest."
And with that he turned and walked from the little room, but the door slid shut behind him as he left, leaving her locked in the cabin. She looked at Amanda, at the machines working on her, then she too felt tired. A small bed slid out of the wall and she just made it before she passed out.
+++++
She woke and looked around, rubbed her eyes and sat up in bed. Her bed, in her bedroom. In Los Alamos. The hard sunshine pouring in through the window left sharp shadows on the walls, and the sky over the spine of the Sangre de Cristo was the deepest blue she had ever seen...then she remembered the blood.
Amanda!
Then, knocking on the door. Frantic knocking, then men at the window, looking in. One saw her and tapped on the glass...
"Dr. Aubuchon?"
"Yes, just a minute. Let me get dressed, please."
The man seemed to visibly relax, then he disappeared around the side of the house. She slipped into her jeans and put on a flannel shirt, then walked to Amanda's room. Her sister was sleeping fitfully so she let her be, then walked to the kitchen, and into Ben's room.
Gone. The room was empty, and there was no trace of him at all.
She walked to the front door and opened it, saw a half-dozen uniformed and plain-clothes policemen standing there, all looking very agitated.
"Dr. Aubuchon?"
"Yes?"
"We've been searching for you for hours now!" one of them, apparently an FBI agent, said. "We found blood all over the backyard..."
"I'm so sorry," Claire began. "My sister fell and cut herself last night. I ran her down to Santa Fe."
"Officers saw some sort of sphere descend on the house. Do you know anything about that? Some sort of experiment, perhaps?"
She looked at the agent and shrugged. "I wasn't conducting any experiments."
"So...everything's okay here?"
"Yes, and thank you for your concern."
"Is your sister here, or at the hospital?"
"Here. Back in her bedroom now, sound asleep."
"There was a lot of blood...what happened to her?"
Claire looked down. "I'm sorry, but she has emotional issues. Hallucinations."
"Oh, I'm sorry," the agent said. "I didn't mean to intrude."
