NINE

 

 

July 2nd, 1909

Grapevine Creek Valley, Idaho

 

DUSTER KENDAL SPENT a week exploring the wonderful, hidden valley. He caught large rainbow trout from the stream and ate trout for both lunch and dinner. He never got tired of fresh rainbow trout cooked in butter so that the meat fell off the bones.

This valley was so peaceful, he might have to come back here more often, at least in the summer. He knew for a fact that the winters in this area were brutal and the snow deep.

In the future, he had watched skiers on the mountain right above him.

Then on the third day, he had decided to do a little gold panning himself.

It had turned out amazingly simple to pull color on a pan.

He hit ten different areas of the stream for a mile upstream and a couple miles downstream from his campsite, finding gold every time.

A lot of it.

There was no doubt there were some rich veins in this valley somewhere.

This area really should have been found, and how it hadn’t been, he had no idea. More than likely the area was just far too remote.

For him to get here, he had had to go up to Edwardsburg and then over to the main Salmon River on the south side. He followed the trail down the river to Campbell’s Ferry and crossed there, then went up the drainage of a side creek, going North, working his way without much more than game trails until he found the valley.

So after a week of camping in the Grapevine Valley, it was clear something was very wrong.

Very wrong.

No town by the name of Grapevine Springs ever had existed here.

Now he needed to get back to 2018 and find out why this fake had been played.

It took him a good two weeks to make his way to the Monumental Lodge, and he stayed there until just before the first snowfall in late September before heading back to Boise and the Historical Institute.

The institute had been started by him and Bonnie and twelve others who knew about timeline jumping to help historians in their research. Most of the historians working there at the institute knew nothing about being able to actually jump into the past of an almost identical timeline to do hands-on research.

And since each jump into another timeline only lasted two minutes and fifteen seconds, a person could stay in that other timeline, live a full life, even die, and find themselves having only a few minutes pass in their real life.

That was how he and Bonnie had lived so long.

Twenty-two others now knew about the massive hidden caverns under the main institute building and had jumped back into the past of another timeline at different points. He and Bonnie and the other twelve founders of the institute were very selective in who they chose.

When he finally reached Boise in late September, the year was 1910. He and others from 2018 had gone back into the past to 1880 and built this institute so that through all periods of time, they would have a place as a base.

He got his horse settled in the stable behind the main mansion, patted her a goodbye, and went in through a hidden door in the stable that took him directly to the caverns under the mansion.

He quickly dropped off the gold he had panned in the regular safe, left his saddlebags in the preparation cavern, and, with only the map from the future in his hand, jumped back to 2018 by unplugging a wire from a machine he and Bonnie had invented.

The machine was simple. It was hooked to a crystal that looked like a glowing quartz crystal. The machine allowed a person touching it to step into the past of the timeline held in that crystal.

Every time a decision was made, a new timeline was formed.

An infinite number of timelines for almost all major decisions.

By Duster simply being in the past of that timeline, he had caused millions of new timelines to be formed in the Nexus, the place where all energy, matter, and time combine into gigantic caverns full of crystals, each crystal holding a unique timeline.

A person could go back and alter a past, just not their own past. Only the past in another timeline.

The thousands of crystals brought to the institute in Boise from the Nexus were all timelines virtually identical to their own. And every year or so 2018 time, all the crystals that had been used were returned to the Nexus and new ones brought out to replace them.

Now, by removing that simple wire, he had returned to 2018. August 4th, actually.