Timeline Wars 01 Patton's Spaceship by John Barnes

Author:John Barnes [Barnes, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Time Travel, Alternative History, Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9781453262597
Google: 947WAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00L2TDQH2
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-07-07T21:00:00+00:00

11

“May I turn around?” I asked, my hands kept high above my head.

“You may,” the voice said, and I did—very slowly.

You know how sometimes a face of a public figure stays with you forever? You see him a few times, maybe you hear him speak, and—presto, with you forever.

I’d heard this guy twice, both times because I was deliberately crossing a picket line to hear him. He was the great bête noir of a rather large faction at Yale when I was there, and even though he generally irritated hell out of me, and more so out of Marie, he was always much too interesting to ignore.

That is, as much of him as you could get to hear before the whooping and shouting got too loud.

He was a broad-shouldered man with bushy black eyebrows and a sharp nose and chin, bigger than he looked at first, and he stood a little awkwardly, like he might limp or stumble a bit when he walked. At the moment he had a very convincing Thompson submachine gun pointed at me.

His Hungarian accent was not as thick as it had been when I’d heard him speak at Yale, he was twenty years younger, and even in the dim light reflecting off the sea I could tell he was heavily tanned.

“Dr. Teller,” I said. “Are transistors unknown in this timeline?”

“You realize,” he said very casually, “that your knowledge of transistors, plus your knowledge of timelines, means that either you are what I have been praying for, without knowing exactly what it was, for years—or else that I should shoot you and your companions right now.”

“He’s legit,” Al said, and rattled off half a dozen passwords.

Teller nodded. “Then we had best get moving. Was this poor woman—”

“The contact you were supposed to have,” I said. “I’m sort of the best that was available as a substitute.”

“Let us pray you’re good enough,” he said. “Are we ready to go, then?”

“We can be,” Al said, “as soon as we pick up our three friends from back in town. They’ve nowhere else to go and, there’s a fair amount of incriminating stuff with them.”

By that time a dozen soot-faced men in black turtlenecks, watch caps, and dungarees—the very image of the World War II commandos in the movies of my childhood—had emerged from the shadows.

Teller spoke briefly into a handheld gadget that looked like a cellular phone, and we hurried up the beach, back toward Half Moon Bay. But we had gone no more than three hundred yards when we heard the rattle of gunfire. We picked up the pace, but long before we got near the town there was a huge explosion. Flames shot far up into the air.

“Can we wait ten minutes?” Al asked, shuddering, as he stared at the flames. “God damn the god damn luck, Mark, Sandy, we could have taken them along with us.”

Teller shook his head, and I could tell he didn’t like it any better than we did. “This beach will be swarming with cops of all kinds in minutes.

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