Majestic Read online

  “That sounds good to me. Can you drive a little faster?”

  They both laughed.

  “Oh, you haven’t told me what that phone call was about.”

  “No, I didn’t. But, it’s pretty exciting. That was Cardinal Valenti. As you know, he started up the Arizona observatory sooner than the timeline we came from. And, he’s spent the last eight years building the Lucifer telescope. He phoned to tell me that it’s now in full operation, several decades sooner than it was before.

  “But, what’s interesting is that there are now satellites in the sky that shouldn’t be there for another couple of decades or so. He’s picked them up with the early testing of Lucifer. LANDSAT 7; NOAA 17; GoldenEye; Galaxy 14; and even the Hubble Space Telescope. These are just a few that he was able to identify so far. And, none of those were launched earlier than 1990. He’s still calibrating Lucifer, so it’s not even operating at full efficiency or distance yet, but he was so excited at this discovery about the satellites that he had to call me. Neat, eh?”

  “I guess—but what does it mean?”

  Allison laughed. “We had a good chuckle over that. They may be up there, but we have no capability on the ground of communicating with them. We have those satellites now, but we don’t have the technology yet to talk to them or even receive information. So, they’re pretty useless. The cardinal and his team are pretty excited about this, though. And, he and the CERN scientists that came back with us have all of the specifications on their hard drives, so it should only take a year or so before we have the first means of communication with those futuristic satellites.”

  Wyatt threw his cigarette out the window. “By coming back, we sure advanced Earth more than we ever realized, huh? But, how did those damn things get up there? This 1960s society didn’t launch them—we did, years from now.”

  “The cardinal’s not sure. But, he thinks our wormhole expanded a bit and pulled the satellites back with us. So, now we get to enjoy the benefits of that. Our observation and understanding of outer space will be decades ahead now.”

  Wyatt grinned. “I think Bobby should give us all ‘medals of honor.’ Whaddaya think?”

  Allison stretched her arms out in front of her. “We do deserve something, I agree. Maybe just a cryptic footnote in the history books would be nice—some little notation that most people wouldn’t understand, but we would know.”

  “Well, you work for the government. Get on that, will you? Don’t forget—the victors always get to write the history books. And, it sounds like we’re the victors here.

  “And, hey…I’m gonna be a twin. Try to top that!”

  Chapter 60

  Wyatt loved their summer home. It was on the shores of beautiful Kootenay Lake close to downtown Nelson; so close that they could walk it.

  They’d bought the house four years ago in an estate sale for a couple who had lived and loved there for fifty years.

  It had needed updating badly, but Wyatt was good with his hands and it didn’t take him long to develop the property into their dream home. He hired local contractors for some of the tough stuff, but was proud that he’d done a lot of the work himself.

  And, he had time on his hands.

  With Allison’s busy career running the Mojave Desert LHC complex, he was a proud house-husband. Regular trips back and forth between Nelson and their home in Palm Springs had become a way of life for the Carson family.

  On extended trips, he tutored the twins himself in harmony with their curriculum, but they never really needed much tutoring.

  They’d been labelled as “gifted” by the California school system and at times Wyatt was overwhelmed with how much knowledge they were able to absorb. They were particularly proficient with mathematics and he could easily see that perhaps a career like Allison’s was in their futures.

  Usually, they flew from Los Angeles to Calgary, then rented a car to make the rest of the trip to Nelson. But, this time, because of the planned stopover in Syracuse, they’d decided to make it a family road trip.

  They’d been living on the highways and byways for three weeks now, and he was glad that they could finally relax at their lake home for a while before making the long trek back to California.

  So far, he hadn’t missed police work. Although, he knew that as the kids got older and didn’t need him as much, he would probably start having a mid-life crisis of some sort.

  Wyatt was proud of how clever and resourceful Allison was, and of the important work she was doing. He also wanted her to be proud of him and he knew that she was.

  For now.

  But, once his “Mister Mom” duties were no longer needed, would she look at him the same way? Would he look at himself the same way?

  In the previous life he’d lived back in the future, he enjoyed stimulating and responsible positions with the RCMP, and as Chief of Police for Nelson. But, all that experience was now wiped out. His record didn’t exist. He couldn’t just pop into the RCMP and apply for a senior position; likewise, with the Nelson police force.

  And, he was too old now to attend the police academy to start all over again.

  Allison, on the other hand, was in a different position entirely. Her revelations and knowledge that were used to convince JFK to begin building identical CERN complexes in Switzerland and Nevada, decades ahead of time, had set her up in good stead.

  JFK used his influence to recreate her degrees, because he trusted her and wanted her in charge of the Mojave installation.

  And, after JFK finished his two terms, RFK took over and continued the trusting relationship between Allison and the Kennedy family.

  Her career was set for life.

  Which was a good thing for her and for the entire Carson family. But, it made Wyatt begin to question his own future usefulness. What would he do to fulfill his need for stimulation once his fathering duties were over?

  He knew that he was probably overthinking everything, but that was just the way his mind worked. The old detective brain still had its juice.

  Renovating the lake house had been stimulating for him. Maybe he could do more projects like that, which he was sure would be both fun and satisfying. And, lucrative.

  He strolled along the side of the house, down to the sandy beach. Walked onto the dock and gazed up at the sky. It was nice not to see streaks of chemtrails poisoning the atmosphere.

  Before they’d regressed to 1963, it had been a long time since he’d seen a perfectly blue sky. Back in 2015, that had been a rarity with those damn planes spewing their mess across the horizon. All designed to hide the incoming Gargantuan from the eyes of the unsuspecting public. Wyatt suspected, though, that in the coming decades chemtrails might once again become common, depending on how successful the early development of CERN facilities proved to be.

  He was hoping that by the time 2015 rolled around again, the threat from Gargantuan would be minimal, and the need to hide it would no longer be required.

  The future would unfold now as it was meant to, because it was impossible to speculate as to what this advanced science could do for them. According to Allison, the possibilities were endless now that they’d gotten such a head start.

  Wyatt walked along the dock back to the beach area. He smiled when he saw the twins’ shovels and pails sitting alongside the collapsed ruins of yesterday’s sandcastles. It was going to be another warm day, so he looked forward to helping them build new ones this afternoon.

  Allison came out onto the porch and waved at him.

  “Hey there, beach bum! Do you want to take a walk downtown with the kids? I told them we’d pop into the ice cream shop.”

  “Sounds good to me. I’ll be right in.”

  He stole one last look at the sky before heading inside.

  Yep, it was going to be a picture-perfect day.

  He entered the kitchen and passed by the twins, who were sitting at the kitchen table. At first, he thought they were coloring but then noticed they had pencils in their hands, both scribblin
g furiously. He walked over to the table and peeked over their shoulders.

  It was a familiar sight.

  Each of them had already filled three pages, and were working on their fourth. Seemingly in unison. Numbers, symbols, and letters, with no rhyme or reason to them.

  “Are you guys ready for ice cream?”

  No answer. They just kept scribbling.

  Wyatt walked down the hall and into the bedroom, where Allison was pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweater.

  She smiled at him. “Ready for our walk?”

  He wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a kiss.

  “They’re doing it again.”

  “Who? What?”

  “Eric and Lisa. The scribblings.”

  Allison frowned. “Oh, no.”

  “It’s been getting more frequent. Remember, the first time was about six months ago? Then, it stopped. But, it started again. Now, it’s a weekly thing. They go into their little trances and their pencils just start flying across the pages.”

  “Didn’t you tell me you discussed it with their teacher?”

  “Yeah, but she just said it was common for “gifted” children to do these things once in a while.”

  Allison pulled up the sleeves on her sweater. “Well, that may be true. They’ve both been tagged as having genius IQs. And, math seems to be their specialty.”

  Wyatt nodded. “Just like their mom.”

  She laughed. “Hey, I can’t even figure out what they’re doing, so I think they’re beyond me!”

  “Maybe we just need to accept that this is a sign of their altered DNA. I have that remote viewing skill, you have the power of mind-reading, and our kids have these genius math abilities. Our fathers passed things down to us, and now we’ve passed some things along to Eric and Lisa. It is what it is, I guess.”

  Allison nodded. “There are worse things parents could worry about. We’re pretty lucky that our kids are loving and sensitive little angels. If they have some extra skills, all the better.”’

  “Maybe it’s just the detective in me, but I wish I could figure out what all those scribblings mean. They seem to be jotting down the exact same things—like they’re in sync.”

  “Well, remember, Wyatt, they are twins. Most twins tend to be in sync with each other on a lot of things.”

  “True. But, it’s still weird. Okay, let’s go for that walk.”

  Suddenly, the phone rang. Wyatt dashed into the living room and picked up the handset.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Wyatt. It’s Cardinal Valenti.”

  “Oh, hi there, Cardinal. Nice to hear from you. How are you?”

  “Busy, busy. But, that’s a good thing. I wanted to try to get in a game of golf this afternoon. The weather here in Arizona is great right now, but it looks like duty is calling and I’ll have to pass.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. Hey, Allison was telling me that the Lucifer telescope is now up and running?”

  “It sure is. I’m excited about that, but it keeps discovering new things every day now that its calibration is finished. That’s what I want to talk to Allison about.”

  “Okay, I’ll put her on.”

  Wyatt handed her the phone and then walked into the kitchen, to the coffee percolator. One more cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt.

  He smiled to himself when he remembered that back in 2015 he’d always used a Keurig machine. Now, he had to get used to the old-fashioned way of making coffee. Which he didn’t mind, because it tasted so much better. But, it took a hell of a lot longer.

  He listened in on Allison’s side of the conversation.

  “My God! What the hell?”

  “We can’t get to them! It could take years!”

  “Yes, we have all the specifications on the hard drives. It’s a start, but NASA and the JPL will have to pull out all the stops. If they can do that, I guess it’s possible.”

  “Well, I could fly down in a couple of days.”

  “Alright, then. I’ll see you in Florida.”

  Allison put down the phone and wearily ran her fingers through her long hair.

  Wyatt walked back into the living room. “That doesn’t sound good. What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, Wyatt, I have to fly down to Cape Canaveral in Florida. We’re all meeting there. A bit of a crisis that needs a herculean effort from everyone. RFK’s orders.”

  “Okay, we’ll drive to Calgary tomorrow. You can catch a flight to Florida and I’ll just continue the drive back to California with the kids.”

  “I’m so sorry. I was looking forward to just relaxing here for a week or two.”

  “It’s okay. We’ll come back again after your crisis is over. So…what is it?”

  Allison sighed. “Oh, it’s horrible. Lucifer has picked up the International Space Station. It’s up there, along with those satellites I told you about. There are three astronauts and three cosmonauts onboard. As far as they’re concerned, they’re in the year 2015.”

  “What the fuck…”

  “Exactly. What the fuck. Our wormhole expanded more than we realized.”

  “They’d all be dead by now. We came back here eight years ago.”

  “Valenti doesn’t think so. He thinks the wormhole didn’t fade out as we thought it would. He thought at first that it was just the calibration of Lucifer that caused a delay in seeing these satellites and the ISS. But, now he’s convinced that the wormhole is still alive. It’s been bringing objects back a few at a time. Which means, since the ISS has just been seen now, we still might have time to save them. The eight years we’ve spent here are equal to only a few minutes in 2015.”

  “That alone is hard to fathom. But, how could this have happened? That wormhole was supposed to have just been sudden and temporary.”

  Allison nodded. “That’s what we thought. But, remember, the science was largely untested. It looks like we’ve unleashed something that we didn’t totally understand. Now, we have to try to save those folks.”

  “Can’t NASA just send up a rocket or a shuttle?”

  She shook her head. “The ISS was launched in 1998. This is 1971. There are no shuttles, and certainly no ability for a rocket to dock with the ISS. Back in 2015, the only methods of getting astronauts to and from the station were on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The United States stopped their shuttle program around 2005 and deferred to their partners, the Russians, to get people there and back. Their craft were designed to dock perfectly with the space station. They fit like a glove.

  “And, as for supplies, the only ships capable of delivering those were the SpaceX Dragon ship, and the Russian Progress craft. Both were unmanned spacecraft designed specifically for the complex docking procedure.”

  "God, those poor souls."

  “Yes, they’re stranded up there. So, we have several problems. We don’t have the technology to communicate with them. We can’t supply them with food, water, or fuel. And, we don’t have any spaceships capable of bringing them home.”

  “Why does the ISS need fuel?”

  “It maintains an orbit at between 205 and 270 miles above the Earth’s surface. But, without an occasional re-boost, it goes into gradual freefall. Starts slipping out of its orbit. So, it has to constantly turbo boost itself back to where it wants to be. If it slips too low in its orbit, Earth’s gravity will just suck it down.”

  “What about oxygen and electricity?”

  “It gets its breathable air from an oxygen generator. A Russian made device. So, that’s not a problem unless it breaks down. As for day-to-day electricity, that all comes from solar panels. The biggest concerns right now are food and water, as well as the fuel needed to keep it in its upper orbital range.

  “The ISS uses about 20,000 pounds of liquid hydrogen each year, so hopefully they have enough left from their last fill-up to last them a while. If they run out, they’ll start falling.

  “As for food and water, they should have enough to last up to six months but of course we don’t know ho
w long it’s been since the last grocery run.

  “So, we have a very tight deadline.”

  “You’re going to build a spacecraft?”

  Allison nodded. “Yes. We have the detailed specs on our hard drives for the Soyuz spacecraft. It’ll be a rush job and it won’t be perfect, but, it’s the only chance we have.

  “We have to hope in the meantime that it doesn’t fall out of its orbit. That space station is the size of a football field. If it does come down, a good portion of it won’t burn up—it’ll pose a real danger to populated areas, depending on where it hits.”

  Wyatt couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Six astronauts had come back in time with them—on a delayed reaction basis. And, they were probably wondering why no one from the ground was talking to them anymore.

  “This wormhole thing—it’s giving me a headache trying to understand it.”

  “I know. We’re all learning more now that we’ve unleashed it. All I can tell you is that it was designed to transfer objects that had their own magnetic fields. So, anything electric or powered that was of sufficient size to have a tangible field.

  “My plane fit the bill, and we calculated that we would transfer back and the wormhole would die out. But, it didn’t. For some reason, it continued to expand into the atmosphere, hovering, hesitating, and then expanding again. It seems to have a life of its own now.

  “The CERN physicists had also calculated a ‘fallback’ scenario back in 2015. That, if it did somehow expand after transferring us, it would simply slam into Earth’s magnetosphere and die out. Well, there was a small chance that wouldn’t happen and it looks like ‘lady luck’ wasn’t with us.

  “The Earth’s magnetosphere back in 2015 had thinned considerably, and from time to time had cracks in it—openings that allowed solar radiation to enter the planet’s atmosphere. Valenti thinks that the wormhole found a nice big crack and penetrated through it beyond the magnetic shield.

  “Ergo, we now have futuristic satellites and the International Space Station. Just like in Jurassic Park, nature finds a way, huh?”