Curtis and Cisco stayed under the protection of the trees as the sun set overhead. Now that his thirst was quenched, Cisco turned his attention to the matter of food. He’d last eaten the morning before he’d been booted out of the twenty-first century. Mad science kept no regular business hours, so even though it had been five in the morning, he’d wolfed down a cheeseburger from the S.T.A.R. Labs cafeteria along with half a bag of Cheetos. Breakfast of champions.
The calories from that repast had long ago been burned up. As Curtis had mentioned, they could survive quite a while without food, but the prospect wasn’t pleasant.
There were some nearby bushes that appeared to be flowering with blueberries, but Cisco didn’t trust his ability to discern safe from poisonous. The berries glimmered in the leaf-filtered light of the setting sun, mocking him with their deliciousness.
Cisco and Curtis emerged from the trees as the day cooled. A band of red and purple glowed around the sun and distant mountains.
“What’s that all about?” Cisco wondered. The rich colors reminded him of the effect of air pollution on sunsets—smog ironically made for beautiful twilights. But they were far from any cities both temporally and spatially. There should have been no smog effects.
“This makes no sense,” said Curtis, frowning. “The sky shouldn’t be so . . .”
“Beautiful?” Cisco supplied.
“Well, yeah.”
They hunkered down at the tree line and watched as the sun set and the sky flamed crimson and lavender. After a while, the gorgeous lights dimmed, the sky darkened, and the moon rose, low and pendulous in the blackening sky. As the night sky was revealed, Cisco caught his breath, sudden tears welling in both eyes.
“My God,” he whispered.
“No light pollution,” Curtis whispered back with something like awe.
The night sky was alive with stars, more stars than Cisco had ever seen outside a planetarium. There were so many stars, giving off so much light, that the night almost seemed like an afterthought. The speckled sky twinkled and shone with a million brilliant pinpricks. The glowing band of the Milky Way stretched across the firmament, sparkling, pristine, iridescent. It was like a spill of quicksilver across a swath of black velvet.
No light pollution, Curtis had said. In his own time, Cisco knew that the development of electric lighting had changed the way the night sky appeared. When daylight faded and everyone turned on their lights, all that earthbound illumination shone up into the air, blocking out most of the visible stars so that only a smattering remained visible to the naked eye. Astronauts could see this panoply of brightness, but not the poor suckers trapped on Earth. For the first time in his life, he was seeing the true night sky, and it was absolutely gorgeous.
“I could stare at this all night, too,” Curtis said, “but we have work to do.”
Cisco tore his gaze away from the sky and focused on the electronics Curtis had removed from his pockets. He started lining them up on a nearby rock.
“We can see the Milky Way, so we know we’re in the Northern Hemisphere at least.”
“The bison told us that,” Cisco reminded him.
“True.”
Together, they connected some of the disused T-sphere components to Curtis’s cell phone. The idea was simple—take a high-resolution photo of the night sky, then measure the angles between known stars. Due to something called “proper motion,” stars in constellations changed their positions slightly over long periods of time as the solar system wound its way through the Milky Way galaxy. Normally, it would take an extremely high-powered telescope to see these deviations, but they were hoping that the hi-res camera on the phone and the massive computing power of the T-sphere would compensate.
Cisco snapped the picture, then handed the phone over to Curtis, who started mucking around with the other components.
Growing impatient after a few minutes, Cisco asked, “Well, Mr. Wizard, what’s the verdict? How far back are we?”
“It’s Mr. Terrific.”
“I know. I’m making a pop culture reference. It’s sort of my thing.”
Curtis double-checked his numbers. “There isn’t that great a deviation from our present. According to this, we’re probably only a century or two back in time. Which isn’t much more helpful than what we already knew.” Curtis slumped to the ground, deflated.
The idea of being “only” a century out of his own time tickled and nauseated Cisco at the same time.
“We’re gonna need to be as precise as possible if we want to tell someone how to rescue us,” Cisco pointed out. “If we get a message to the present somehow, we’ll need to tell them—”
“Cisco!” Curtis said excitedly, grabbing at his elbow. “Krakatoa!”
“Kraka . . .”
Cisco’s eyes widened in joy and realization. Krakatoa! Yeah, he’d zoned out during history class, but this was science history: A massive, massive volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa threw absolutely enormous amounts of volcanic ash into the sky. There was so much junk in the sky, hurled with such incredible eruptive force, that it reached the other side of the world, causing all sorts of strange meteorological phenomena for about a year.
Strange meteorological phenomena . . . like a crimson-and-purple twilight where there shouldn’t have been one.
“Krakatoa exploded in 1883,” Cisco said. “Right?”
Curtis nodded in excited agreement. “And that fits into the estimate we just made with proper motion—1883 is right around a century and a half before our time.”
Cisco whistled. He’d take that. Now they had their temporal location narrowed down to a year or two. It was 130-plus years too early, but a lot better than, say, being stuck back in the Pleistocene or something; 1883 felt manageable. It was about a century and a half too soon for Mama Ramon’s little boy Francisco, but there would be towns and cities. Somewhere. Bathing had been invented, which was feeling really important as he caught a whiff of his own sweat-infused body odor. And while the food might not be four-star cuisine, it would be a heck of a lot better than trying to teach Anthro the Caveboy how to start a fire in order to fry up that hunk of mastodon meat.
Curtis rubbed his hands together excitedly. “Assuming I’m judging the positions of the stars correctly, then we’re west of the Rockies. So the explosion did move us in space, albeit not that much, relatively speaking. Now we have to figure out how to get home. There’s no technology in this era that can do it—”
“Never fear,” Cisco interrupted. “After Barry went walkabout in the time stream awhile back, I started working on an emergency time retrieval protocol. Because I plan ahead like that, yo.”
“And you have this device on your person?” Curtis clenched his fists in anticipation.
“Not exactly.”
Curtis groaned. “It’s a pretty black-and-white question, Cisco. Not a lot of shades of gray.”
“I know exactly where it is,” Cisco said. “I could put my hands right on it. If, you know, we were in the present. The future. Whichever we’re calling it.”
At Curtis’s groan of dismay, Cisco hurried on: “But look, it’s just a matter of communicating with the present—our present—and getting them to fire up the—”
“Cisco.” Curtis shook his head, his expression doleful. “Get real. We don’t even know if there’s a present to return to! Oliver fired that arrow and now we’re here. For all we know, it didn’t work.”
“It worked,” Cisco said defensively. “We both did the math.”
But a part of him—a big part, if he was being honest—went cold at the very notion. He’d never even considered the possibility that Curtis had just suggested. What if the arrow hadn’t worked properly? What if they’d screwed up and the future was nothing more than a toxic, uninhabitable wasteland being roamed by Anti-Matter Man, with all their friends dead?
“There were still variables,” Curtis reminded him. “Especially on the Earth 27 side of the breach. Who knows what happened? We sure didn’t predict this!”
“I concede your point. I also do this.” He stuck his tongue out.
“Who can argue with that kind of logic?” Curtis asked dryly.
“Look, it’s simple,” Cisco told him. “We’ll just pull a Back to the Future and send instructions to the others in the present. Easy-peasy.”
“You see a Western Union office around here anywhere?” Curtis spread his arms out to encompass the entirety of the world around them. “We could walk for months and never hit civilization.”
“Not months,” said a new voice. “Maybe a week, if you’re fast.”
With a high-pitched scream, Cisco startled and jumped behind Curtis, grabbing Mr. Terrific by the arms and spinning him to stand between Cisco and the newcomer, who was breaking through some of the bushes behind them.
The man was a Native American, tall and lanky, wearing a tan, fringed buckskin shirt with a high black collar and buckskin pants. Over his left chest was pinned a shiny tin star, and a gun belt with two holstered pistols hung low over his hips.
“We come in peace!” Cisco wailed.
The newcomer rested his hands on his hips, not far from the grips to his pistols. Then he spat laconically into the bushes, eyed the two of them up and down, and said, almost too casually, “So. You fellas are from the future, eh?”