11
Warming Trail
“Perhaps we should take this to a venue where a bunch of people just standing around looking suspicious won’t stand out quite as much,” Captain Beck suggested.
“Robert’s right,” Agent Hessman agreed. “Mr. Nezsmith, would you know of such a place?”
“Not too far from here,” Jeffery replied. “This way.”
Jeffery Nezsmith led the way, Chief Duke just behind him to act as human plowshare through the crowd for the others, with Agent Stevens bringing up the rear. Across the one busy street, down a block, then up a side street, during which time Agent Hessman took the opportunity to engage the college student in a little informative conversation, while Clair continued to look around at all the wonder about her and sigh by Ben’s side.
“London is one of those places I wanted to go once I became a famous reporter,” she remarked as they walked. “You know, out on assignment in the likes of London, Paris, Berlin, or Rome.”
“Well, now you’re here.” Ben grinned. “Just a little later than you’d planned.”
“I also wanted to treat my parents to a trip,” she added. “Now I’ll never . . . I wonder if they ever made it on their own.”
“Feeling a bit melancholy?”
“That”—she sighed again—“and more than a little bit in shock, first from the wonders of your modern age and now this.”
“The term is ‘future shock,’” Ben supplied. “A term based on an old book someone wrote in the seventies about what life would be like in the futuristic nineties.”
“Well, I’m suffering from plenty of future shock, I guess.” She wrapped her right hand around his waist and pulled herself in closer to his side. “Fortunately, I have a fantastic shock-buffer,” she added with a smile.
While Claire was noting the wonders by Ben’s side, Agent Hessman was using the walk to grill Jeffery for a little information.
“The brief time I was on that kiosk, it showed a video of a storm at sea.”
“Yeah, we get plenty of them,” the college student admitted.
“This one seemed particularly vicious and perhaps a little unseasonal.”
They passed up a string of small shops, each with its small holographic signage displaying its services. Shoes made on-site by robotic hands, an Indian restaurant boasting of a live human cook, an ‘Auto-Seamstress,’ another hatter, and perhaps the first bookstore with actual physical books they had yet seen in this century and a pretty rare sight even in their own.
Jeffery thought for a moment on Agent Hessman’s words before replying with a shrug, “Yeah, I imagine they would seem pretty vicious compared to what you’re used to.”
“And the dykes,” the agent also noted. “Since when does the river Thames have dykes like Holland?”
“Well, I’d say since about the last forty or fifty years, actually. It gets pretty wet and cold around here under the best of circumstances, though I’m just glad I’m not back home right now. I hear it’s hurricane season again in the Midwest. An F six just ran through the middle of Kansas last week.”
“F six? What manner of—”
“There we are,” Jeffery suddenly indicated. “Park up ahead. Just in time, too, ’cause that sky looks like it’s going to break wide-open any minute now.”
He quickened his pace, the others following his example, while a glance up showed the reason for his concern. The clouds were dark gray and rapidly getting darker, the air temperature dropping by the second. The park that Jeffery had indicated stretched on for about a city block; a miniature landscape of rolling hills, quaint footbridges over little streams, a scattering of trees, and of course the occasional statues, though in this case not ones made of stone and mortar. As they stepped onto the grass they could see what at first looked like a statue of a warrior of many ages past standing proud with his brass spear; then a flicker and the statue shifted position, bearing his lance level as if before an enemy. The figure’s proud features shifted to something more threatening and he stabbed the lance forward before flowing back to his previous noble stance.
Jeffery saw the look on Agent Hessman’s face, not to mention everyone else’s, and grinned. Claire in particular was hugging herself extra tightly to Ben’s side.
“Holographic statues,” the college student supplied. “Look pretty real, don’t they? At least until you know how to spot the scan lines. This one’s supposed to be of a figure out of Celtic mythology, but I remember one time when a few kids from the computer department at the university hacked the system and as a prank had it displaying a naked nymph from Greek mythology trying to seduce passersby. They got suspended for a week, and I got myself some great snapshots downloaded.”
Across the small park he led them, right up to what looked like a park bench and accompanying overhang just as thunder rumbled from the sky and the first cold droplets began to come down. The bench was plastic and looked sculpted after an ocean wave, with no back, and long enough to seat four. The overhang stretched an extra couple of feet past either end and three extra feet each to the front and back; it looked like a flat blue plane curved down at the edges and raised along the center. It was just big enough to shelter them all as the skies opened up.
Agent Hill, Jeffery and Ben
Jeffery sat down in the middle of the bench, Agent Hessman to one side, Ben and Claire to the other, while Captain Beck stood behind them and Chief Duke took front position with a sharp eye out at their surroundings and anyone passing by. Agent Stevens stood off to one side just beneath the shelter, though he seemed to have an eye out for the underside of the roof just above them.
They watched as Jeffery put his case on his lap and opened it up. It was indeed a laptop, but the screen and a number of virtual controls floated in the air above its surface. In place of mechanical buttons there was a black panel, featureless until Jeffery activated his system; then the panel partitioned itself off into rows of buttons, complete with beveled surfaces rising up. Hovering in the air, starting an inch above the surface of the laptop and going up to fourteen inches above it, was the screen, filled now with a starry three-dimensional background and what looked like a row of winged toasters. Toasters flying through space shooting slices of toasted bread at each other.
Jeffery saw the looks on their faces and grinned sheepishly.
“My screen blanker. Based on the old toaster screen-blankers from back around your day.”
A pass of his hand through the image and it vanished, replaced by a series of charts, rows of floating three-dimensional icons, and an open text field. Jeffery stabbed a finger into the text field, and it vanished in a flicker.
“Term paper,” he explained.
“So this is what computer laptops are like nowadays,” Ben said, while sitting beside him Claire was speechless with wonder.
“Not exactly top-of-the-line,” Jeffery replied with a hint of pride, “but it’s mine. Latest in holographics, high multitasking capability, all the usual hookups, including a built-in 3D printer for small stuff, Net access—the whole bit.”
“And this is how you access the internet?” Agent Hessman now asked. “Because I noticed at that kiosk it said something about no chip implant being detected.”
“Nearly everyone has a Net-chip implant, of course,” Jeffery answered, “myself included. And it’s great for general info access and stuff, but for really big assignments the bandwidth can be limited, at least not without giving someone an aneurism. So, that’s when you break out a datapad. I need mine for my assignments, not to mention the latest in 3D games. Have you seen Car Wars 2550 in multiplexing 5200 p with a stag-core engine?”
The collective reply he received was a circle of blank faces, save from Chief Duke, who was still on guard detail, and Agent Stevens, who was examining one of the two poles that held up their protection against the weather. Meanwhile, just outside their shelter, the rain was coming down in sheets and the wind was tossing it all about—though somehow none of it seemed to get anything beneath the roof wet.
“No, I don’t suppose you would have.” Jeffery sighed. “Okay, to work. What do you need from me?”
“The Russians,” Ben supplied. “We need to find them.”
“And rescue poor Samantha,” Claire added. “But how do we do that in a city this big?”
“A problem for which Mr. Nezsmith may have already given us an answer,” Agent Hessman stated.
“I have?” The lad perked up. “Yay me. What’d I do?”
The pounding of the rain washed out nearly all sight and sound of the world without, the howling wind pushing it into a hard slant while chilling travelers to the bone. And yet, as Captain Beck now noticed, they all remained bone-dry and pleasantly warm.
“You said that nearly everyone has these chip implants,” Agent Hessman said.
“Pretty much,” Jeffery replied. “It’s like a rite of passage when you hit thirteen.”
“Including people from Russia?”
Jeffery’s was not the only face to begin to brighten as Agent Hessman continued with his idea.
“Assuming the Russians did use the London time chamber to kidnap Samantha, then their chips would have been used at some point—”
“And could be tracked!” Jeffery completed. “You know, as a history major I have access to the facility, and with a little help from a computer-major friend of mine, I might be able to log in to the system and get the chip codes of the last few users. If they’re Russians, then we have your guys.”
“Do you think your friend would do it?” Claire asked.
“And without revealing anything about us,” Agent Hessman added.
“My friend’s a conspiracy nut,” Jeffery said. “All I have to do is tell her that I may have a lead on some new conspiracy and that I need the info. Not a problem. Just give me a few minutes.”
“Then before you do,” Captain Beck broke in, “could you explain one thing to me?”
With a pass of his hand toward the wall of water just behind him, he cast the young man a questioning look.
“Just a flash storm. Give it a few minutes and it’ll be back to London sunshine again, which is to say weak and fog-filtered.”
“Not that,” Captain Beck amended, “but the fact that the slant of the rain should be drenching all of us and Claire’s floppy sunhat should be a drooping mess by now.”
“Oh, you mean the rain field?” Jeffery replied. “Just a low-intensity force field designed to work specifically against free water. That’s why I headed us for one of the sheltered benches. Okay, time to contact my friend.”
He then placed a palm onto the flat surface of his laptop and fixed his gaze on something far away.
“A rain field,” Claire marveled. “That is just so . . . Wow.”
“Quite remarkable,” Ben admitted. “But, Lou, you don’t seem too impressed.”
“We’re a hundred years in the future,” the agent replied. “I expect the fantastic. What has me more concerned is why Agent Stevens there has found such intimate interest in the structure of our shelter. Stevens?”
Stevens paused his examination of their shelter, which currently included having a palm pressed against the ocean-blue plastic-looking pole sweeping down to the ground from his side of the roof, and replied in an efficient tone: “I felt a slight prickling in the outer housing of this structure, which could be from this protective field just mentioned, but I may have discovered other possibilities.”
“Such as?” Agent Hessman prompted.
Agent Stevens pointed a finger to a spot on the overhang’s ceiling just above them. At first all anyone could see was more of the blue ocean-wave pattern sweeping across the surface, but then Agent Hessman narrowed his eyes and stood atop the bench for a closer look. Agent Stevens was pointing to a single blue dot.
“A blue dot,” he noted.
“It looks like it was painted as part of the ocean spray,” Claire remarked. “Or maybe a stray droplet of paint.”
“In a place as computer-exact as everything around here appears to be,” Agent Stevens replied, “I would rule that out and say it’s likely that it may be some form of observation device. Like a highly miniaturized camera.”
“That’s sounding a bit paranoid,” Ben remarked.
“I get paid to be paranoid,” Agent Stevens blandly stated.
Agent Hessman took another closer look, then got down off the bench with a curt nod. “I will err on the side of paranoia. We need to move as soon as the weather permits us. Chief Duke, have you spotted anything?” he said.
The large man was peering out into the sheets of rain, but in a far more specific direction than he had been before. He replied with a slight nod and said, “Hard to make out exactly through all this rain, but it looks like some local cops in some very unusual uniforms. It looks like they’re going from shelter to shelter.”
“Then I’m not taking any chances. Mr. Nezsmith, if you would kindly come out of your trance.”
He reached down a hand to gently touch the college student’s shoulder. Nothing happened at first; then Jeffery’s eyes blinked. Meanwhile, the weather outside changed as suddenly as it had begun, the rain suddenly slacking off as the clouds quickly began to clear. By the time Jeffery was back with them, it was sunny once again and the wind had dropped completely away.
“See?” he said, glancing around. “I told you the rain would stop. Oh, my friend’s ready to help. I had to tell her this convoluted story that may have suggested a conspiracy from the future; I just never mentioned whose future. She’s a comp-sci major, but her father also got her interested in—”
Agent Hessman dropped a hand onto the lad’s head and turned it a few degrees until Jeffery’s gaze was directed across the park to where the uniformed men were looking around. Blue-and-green uniforms with a symbol on their chests that looked like three concentric rings around a capital T. Immediately he stopped his chattering and his eyes widened.
“Time cops.”
“They’re really called ‘time cops’?” Ben pondered. “Nothing more inventive, or something that reduces to a cool acronym?”
“They’ve picked up your time trace,” Jeffery quickly explained, immediately slapping closed his laptop. “They want to send you back before you see any more of the future.”
“Not before we rescue Samantha,” Agent Hessman firmly decided. “We need to find a new place for you to work your hack.”
“Oh,” Jeffery said, getting to his feet with the rest, “I’m still connected to my friend.” A tap of an index finger to the side of his head and he grinned. “I’m chipped, remember. Always connected.”
“Then you can work on this hack while on the run?” Agent Hessman asked.
“Of course.”
“Then start running.”
The men in the unusual uniforms looked up from their current inquiry and across the park at the next nearest inhabited shelter-bench—which happened to be the team’s own. They saw a group of people starting to hurriedly leave and immediately broke into pursuit.