Big Time by Ben H. Winters

Author:Ben H. Winters [H. WINTERS, BEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

17.

So, wait. Are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“Come on, Mom.”

They were on the elevator, and River, who had sat in sullen silence the whole way to work, now would not shut up. “Tell me what the deal is with this missing girl.”

“It doesn’t matter because there is nothing we can do.”

“Yeah, but you have to tell me.”

“Nope. I don’t.”

But she knew the kid would never quit. Would never give up. So instead of marching directly across the open-plan office to her desk, Grace stopped River by the elevator bank and said, very quickly, “Look. There is this girl—not a girl, a young woman—who came to our office’s attention, okay? She had a port placed in her chest.”

“A port?”

“A portacath. It’s a surgically implanted medical device that facilitates giving and taking fluids from a patient.”

“Very sci-fi.”

“Not really.” Grace shrugged. “It’s a common medical device. Cancer patients, for example, are often ported so they don’t have to keep getting lines put in. But, um—” Grace stopped. She lowered her voice and said, “But, see, this one, this port, in this woman… oh, hey, Randy. How are you?”

The new guy strolled past the elevators in a sharply tailored dove-gray suit, grinning ear to ear and smelling faintly of soap. “Cannot complain,” he said. “Absolutely cannot complain.”

“Is that guy serious?” River said, too loud, and Grace scowled at them.

“Come on, Riv. This is my work.”

“So what were you saying? About the port?”

Grace opened her mouth to answer and then realized that she was about to say something out loud for the first time. River waited. Grace glanced at the elevator doors to make sure they weren’t opening, then back at River.

“Mom? What?”

“It seems like maybe this particular port was inserted as part of—part of a procedure.”

“Procedure?”

“Yeah.”

What a sinister word that was, Grace thought, procedure. It whispered of sterile rooms, of scalpels gleaming under cruel light.

River was waiting, looking at her bug-eyed. “What kind of procedure?”

“Basically, I found this article about a…” She didn’t want to say procedure again. “A novel form of medical intervention. And the author of the article, he worked at a facility that was using a very unusual model of a port. And now this woman turns up in a hospital with that exact kind of port. And she’s baffled and disoriented and fearful. What I assume is—”

“They did this procedure on her.”

Grace nodded, and River asked the obvious question.

“What kind of procedure is it?”

Grace took a deep breath and then just said it: “A procedure to extract something they call the durational element. Which is basically…” She stopped. She looked at River, who was waiting. “Time. A procedure to extract time.”

“Time?” River started to laugh but then looked at Grace and stopped. “Mom.” They grabbed Grace’s arm. “Are you fucking with me?”

“I am not. These people think that time is, like, a thing. Like part of our physical structure somehow, and it can be extracted.”

“Whoa,” said River, and Grace nodded.

“Yeah. Whoa.”

And she was smiling, just a little bit,

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