So the beat goes on. Confrontations loom. Volcanos erupt. News at eleven.

Music matters? I thought this was interesting. Then again, so is this.

5.18

Deborah Sorensen never really understood why she visited the Titanic, let alone how it happened. These experiences just came to her, and she had no apparent control over them. Yet her father had pointed out one condition that seemed to be a common denominator: she ended up in a shower each time one of these events happened, and her arrival in the shower was followed by a rush of seawater and, usually, remnants of shattered icebergs. But…why the Titanic?

She had been sitting in her stateroom onboard the Disco Volante lost in thought, and had been since leaving the shipyard. She now understood a little about Harry Callahan and how he’d mastered using some sort of tonal inducement to enter the necessary mental state for a jump, but she had no idea what he did or even what his abilities were, and if she was going to be completely honest with herself she remained in the dark about how she’d managed her Titanic viewings.

“But they aren’t really viewings,” she said to herself. “Somehow…I was going there. The seawater and the ice are proof of that…”

No. She wasn’t simply viewing, she was traveling through time. Her first experiences had taken place in Los Angeles, and the location of Titanic’s sinking had been more than 3,600 miles distant – yet she’d been there, and at the moment of impact each time she’d been. 

There was a 21-inch chartplotter on the wall above the desk in her stateroom and she could plainly see the Disco Volante’s position on the current chart as the little ship advanced westward across the Mediterranean. Corsica was now almost 200 miles behind them, but her mind ranged over the chart and soon settled on Naples Bay. She’d never been to Italy until a week ago, yet she’d always wondered about Pompeii and what those first shattering moments must have been like. To have lived through such a thing…what must it have been like?

The earthquakes. Small, but increasing in frequency. Puzzlement, maybe? Had people grown so used to Vesuvius’s rumblings that they just stopped for a moment then got back to what they were doing. Maybe one or two people looked up at the mountain, before…?

She read a passage online from Pliny the Younger’s account, an eyewitness report from someplace called Paestum, a village south of Vesuvius. People there felt the earthquakes but late in the afternoon on that fated day they heard an uncommonly violent explosion – the type of explosion not at all common 79 years before Christ came along – just before Vesuvius blew it’s top, literally. The volcano had erupted before, of course, but never like this, and as people came out of their houses, or turned in the market square and looked past the Temples of Hera and Athena, she imagined they would have stood in awe as great gouts of cloud and lava jetted into the evening sky.

She closed her eyes as she tried to imagine their surprise, or their horror, and she felt a tremor of recognition as the Disco Volante rolled atop a large swell. She felt that familiar wave of nausea she had always felt on the first day or so of a long passage, and she knew the best thing she could do would be to get to the rail and focus on the horizon…

…but when Deborah Sorensen opened her eyes she saw she was no longer aboard the Disco Volante; no, now she was standing in an open air market surrounded by men and women, most wearing rough togas and crude leather sandals. A startled boy herding goats jumped back when he saw her appear out of nothingness, and he cried out in a language she had never heard before, and in the commotion several people turned to the sound of his despair.

They saw a woman easily a foot taller than the tallest man among them, and she was wearing strange gray pants and vibrant yellow things on her feet, but the strangest thing of all was her tunic – a maroon and gold thing with peculiar writing on it, and an image of a warriors head emblazoned across the front. Stunned first by the earthquakes rocking the area throughout the afternoon and now the sudden appearance of this Goddess, they watched as she pulled something from inside her clothing, and then, aiming some kind of device at the village, she swung the thing in her hand slowly in an arc…

…but just then Vesuvius let go…

Deborah watched as several hundred feet of the summit literally disappeared in the concussive explosion; smaller house-sized rocks vaulted into the sky while much larger fragments of rock and snow started rumbling down the southeast side of the volcano. Steam vents opened near the summit, and lava began streaming out of dozens of long, narrow slits under the new summit, and just then another earthquake hit, this one bigger than anything Deborah imagined possible. The ground underneath her feet seemed to come alive, the air seemed charged with impossible energy as a high-pitched grinding sound penetrated the core of her being. And then, another explosion.

She thought it must have been an atomic bomb detonating nearby, but no, it was Vesuvius, coming alive again.

An impossible column of roiling, dark gray clouds was boiling up into the evening sky, and she realized the sound had hit several seconds after this latest eruption began, but most of the violent energy was now on the northwest slope of the volcano and so just out of view. Another equally cataclysmic eruption began, another equally thunderous clap of explosive energy hit her and she realized she was no longer standing. No one was standing. And yet everyone was staring in open-mouthed fear not just at the erupting volcano, but at her.

She had obviously made the mountain explode and now everyone around her was drawing back from this strange creature, for they were clearly terrified by this sudden appearance of one of the Gods…

She looked at her iPhone, saw that it was still recording so she aimed the camera at the erupting volcano then hit the red button on the screen to stop recording, then she powered-off the unit before she put it back in a pocket. The boy, the young shepherd, was now kneeling at her feet, his outstretched hands palms-down on the cobbled stone square, and then another explosive gout of lava and flame erupted from the seething fissures as she watched, yet most of the men and women gathered there were pointing at her, awestruck that a God had come to them. Then a handful of the woman cried out and ran away, the overwhelming despair of the moment suddenly filling their eyes with pure adrenaline-charged terror.

“Oops,” Deborah sighed…

And in the span of a human heartbeat she was back on the Disco Volante, only now she was on the foredeck – while flaming embers and black ash rained down on her. She saw the man at the yacht’s helm scream and jump back, then she heard his voice over the ship’s intercom.

“Emergency! Fire on the forward deck. All hands to fire stations!”

She wondered where the fire was, until she looked down and saw flames licking at her face.

Henry Taggart looked around the cubicle, his entire world in the here and now, still not really knowing what to think. The blue walls, blue as in the shifting colors of the sea, gently curving and with one large viewing port in the exterior wall. The moon, Earth’s moon, filled his view, and when his eyes had first opened here he had looked out over the stark shadows cast by the jagged peaks of Shackleton Crater near the South Lunar Pole – and he’d never been as afraid in his life.

A man, well, maybe not a man, had been standing at his bedside, looking at what just had to be medical instruments of some kind, only this man had to be eight or nine feet tall, and his skin was pure white. White like snow was white, yet his eyes were as black as night. All in all, the man – or was he a man? – reminded him of Michelangelo’s David, that statue he’d seen once in Florence, yet its actions were human, his mannerisms were too. But he – it? – certainly wouldn’t be speaking English.

That was when he’d first noticed the viewport, and the moon beyond, and right then he’d wanted to scream. Then again, he remembered all the times growing up in Newport Beach when he and his friends had rumbled up to Anaheim and gone to Disneyland, and how he’d always run straight to Tomorrowland, right to the Mission to the Moon attraction. When the Douglas Corporation took over ‘the ride’ from TWA they’d added a realistic Mission Control room, complete with animatronic technicians manning the consoles, and then there was the ride itself. Blasting off and looking down at the receding Earth, then looking up at the moon as it got closer and closer, but then with Armstrong and Aldrin everything had changed, and for a few years anything had seemed possible.

And now, here he was. Looking down on the moon. In orbit in some kind of space station built by…who, exactly? He wasn’t sure. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, either.

All he’d known, up until a few minutes ago, was that he was half-past dead, his body eaten up by cancer, and now some creature had him hooked up to weird looking medical instruments and it was injecting something that looked an awful lot like that silver liquid, was it mercury? that they’d used in oral thermometers when he was a kid. Whatever it was, the fluid was thick as concrete so they’d had to insert a catheter into a fat vein under his collarbone and the stuff burned like hell going in and all of a sudden he didn’t want anything to do with this place!

He started to move but found he couldn’t. He couldn’t even move his hands.

Then the real panic set in.

The instruments beeped once and the creature looked down at him. “Please relax,” it said, but the inflection, or was it the syntax, was all wrong. Taggart wanted to ask it a question but while his mouth moved a little he couldn’t form words – and then his panic ratcheted up a notch.

And the creature really didn’t like that. It took out some kind of doohickey that looked like an old metal tire pressure gauge and then held the thing up against his forehead, and he felt himself falling again, falling into an infinite darkness, just like he was falling down into those shadows on the moon.

+++++

When his eyes opened he looked around at little bumps and protuberances on the ceiling and it hit him then: ‘Wherever this is, it isn’t human.’ The scale of things was all wrong, and then it hit him: this placed smelled, and bad. Like dirty feet that had been camped out in the same pair of sneakers for about six months. Sharp, acrid filth, in other words. He hadn’t noticed before, but then he remembered: his sense of smell had been compromised for months, well before they’d arrived in Paris. Maybe right after Amsterdam, after the bomb.

He tried to wiggle his toes and to his surprise they felt fine, so he experimentally flexed his wrists. Both hands responded, and he felt a wave of euphoria wash through his sense of anticipation. He lifted his head and that worked too, so he pulled his arms up a bit and lifted his torso up on his elbows and looked around. His head felt clear, clearer than it had in months; no headache, no blurry vision clouded his sight, so he lifted his legs and saw them respond under the thin transparent membrane that served as a sheet. An alarm chirped and a moment later Michelangelo’s David walked into the cubicle again, and the statue actually smiled at him when it saw he was awake.

“Look better. How feel?”

“Good. I feel very good. What did you do to me?”

“Bad cells, gone now. Body can heal.”

“Bad cells…?” Taggart sighed. “You mean the cancer?”

“I mean bad cells. Errors in replication, fixed.”

Taggart’s eyes welled up as he struggled to regain his composure. “Where am I?”

“This ship belong Pak. Your people close.”

“My people?”

“Your people coming. You go ship. Your ship send shuttle. Soon come.”

“My ship?”

The creature pushed one of the bumps on the ceiling and the transparency holding him in this ‘bed’ disappeared, and after a slight electric jolt Taggart felt himself floating free, drifting up towards the ceiling. Another wave of panic came for him but the creature grabbed his arm and pulled him over to the viewport. “Ship there,” it said.

Taggart shrank from this new world. This Pak, whoever he was, had a ship that was at least two miles long, and the flight deck below this viewport had at least a thousand shuttles docked in neat, orderly rows. He could see some kind of orbiting space station, minuscule next to Pak’s ship, just beyond the flight deck, and it too was orbiting the Moon, and there were several small ships docked to this station. What had to be his shuttle was drifting between this space station and Pak’s ship, slowly heading this way, and right now he could see Earth in the distance, well beyond the Moon.

“Do I have any clothes?” Taggart asked.

The creature looked at a display on his wrist, and Taggart assumed it was a translating device of some sort. “No. Shuttle bring.”

“Do you have a name?”

Again, it looked at the device on his wrist and nodded. “Yes. I am Physician. Much pleased treat you.”

“My name is Henry. Much pleased being treated.” He looked out the viewport and saw the shuttle was much closer, and that it was headed to a docking port above this room, which was itself above the massive flight deck, so all things being equal he had to be in some sort of tower that overlooked the rows upon rows of docked shuttles. He found it difficult to move again, but then realized that movement in zero-G had to be radically different from walking about on land, and this ship was most definitely in zero-G. He pushed off the wall beside the port and went sailing across the room… “Oh, shit,” he cried, but the physician deftly pushed off and caught him.

“Maybe sit best,” it said.

“You got that right.” The creature deposited Henry on the slab that seemed to be the equivalent to a bed, and with another tap on the ceiling a field of some kind settled over Taggart and he was glued to the surface again.

“I go, bring human,” the physician said as it disappeared into the corridor beyond his cubicle, and it seemed that now his bowels were getting with the program and kicking into gear. He looked nervously around the cubicle for something that resembled a toilet, then started to sweat…

A few minutes passed and a girl, a human woman entered and the look in his eyes must have said it all.

“You feeling alright?” the woman said.

“Poop-chute is waking up, fast. I gotta go something fierce, and soon.”

She went to the wall and hit a protuberance and something that might have been a toilet, in a Daliesque nightmare, morphed out of the wall. “There ya go, Sport,” the woman said. “Hope you don’t need privacy. They aren’t real big on that here.”

“Uh, is that a toilet? It looks, well, kind of alive?”

“It is. It’s an organism, been genetically altered to absorb waste. It excretes pure protein.”

“Right. And how does it do its thing?”

“Just sit on it.” She reached up and hit the protuberance on the ceiling and he drifted free, then he pushed off and rocketed over to the wall above the…toilet. “Whoa there, cowboy! You don’t need much force to move around up here,” she said as she grabbed him, then she helped get him settled on the…toilet.

The…organism wrapped itself around Taggart’s midsection, then he felt warmth down there. Everywhere, as a matter of fact. 

“Just relax,” the woman said, smirking. “I know, it takes some getting used to.”

Taggart’s eyes crossed as something grabbed his penis, then his eyes shut when he felt something form-fitting around his anus. “This ain’t right,” he just managed to say as his bowels cut loose.

“Beats shitting in your spacesuit in zero-G,” she deadpanned.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he moaned. “You bring some clothes for me?”

“In the shuttle.”

He shook his head. That meant he’d get to strut through this ship in his birthday suit, but one more indignity surely wasn’t going to make a difference now. “Great,” he sighed. “So, what do they use for boom-wad up here?”

“Boom-wad?”

“You know…toilet paper?” an exasperated Taggart sighed.

The woman laughed at that. “Never heard that one before. Just hang on tight, because it’ll…”

But Taggart’s eyes crossed again as the organism set about cleaning him up. “Oh, no way man, this can’t be right…”

+++++

“So,” Henry asked the woman as she helped him into his seat in the shuttle’s tiny cockpit, “you gotta name?”

“Ellen,” she said as she struggled with one of his shoulder harnesses. “And you’re Henry, right?”

“Taggart. Just call me Taggart, okay?”

“Well then, I guess that makes me Ripley.”

“I think I like Ellen better.”

“And what if I like Henry more?”

Taggart sighed. “Then Henry it is,” he said as he held out his hand. She took it and smiled as she worked her way into the pilot’s seat to his left. “You fly this thing, too?”

She nodded as she worked switches on the overhead panel, then she shot a ‘thumb’s up’ to one of the creatures standing inside the nearby airlock, and a second later he heard the shuttle disconnect from Pak’s ship. Ripley hit the thrusters in the shuttle’s nose, and the big central display kept updating the shuttle’s vector as it swung away from the massive ship’s gravity well, but Taggart didn’t recognize the technology on the shuttle’s panel.

“You mind if I ask a personal question?” he said.

“No. Fire away.”

“What year is it?”

Ripley looked at him and smiled, but she didn’t answer the question.

“So, I’m not supposed to know, is that it?”

“I’m not sure that’s been decided,” Ripley replied. “Anyway, you’ll be briefed when we get to the Gateway.”

“The Gateway?”

“That space station,” she said, pointing to the odd looking jumble of cubes and toroids dead-ahead.

“Are those ships docked to it, or part of the station?”

“It is hard to tell, I guess,” Ripley said. “But yes, there are two ships docked there right now.”

“When I, when I was about to die we hadn’t even made it back to the moon.”

“I know. A lot’s happened, I guess. Still, I can’t even imagine what you must be feeling.”

“Other than freaked out by that toilet thing?”

“That scared me the first time I had to use one.”

“Scared? You were scared?”

She looked at him quickly and nodded, then got her eyes back on the central display. “Yeah, scared.”

“I can’t imagine you being scared,” Taggart said with a brief shrug.

“Oh? Do I look that tough?”

“No. You look confident.”

She looked at him again and smiled. “I read your file. You’re kind of an anarchist, aren’t you?”

“Me? An anarchist?”

“What they called a tech bro? Didn’t believe in much, no close attachments?”

Taggart nodded. “Yup. That’s me. No close attachments.”

“Well, at least you’re looking better now.”

“You’ve seen me before?”

“Yeah, a couple weeks ago one of the Pinks deposited you on the hangar deck and disappeared. You were just about dead, too. The medics onboard didn’t know what to do so the decision was made to get Pak’s people involved.”

“Who are they?”

Again, Ripley just shrugged. “We’re not really sure who they are…yet. They appear to have taken our side…”

“Side? Is there a war going on?”

“Isn’t there always?” she smirked. “Anyway, urPak got you to his father’s ship and we didn’t hear much for about a week. After Pak told us you were going to make it, well, we’ve been trying to figure out why the Pinks brought you to us.”

“Pinky.”

“What?”

“Pinky. One of the Pinks. She’s been protecting me for years.”

“Sorry, got to concentrate now…” she sighed, lining up one set of vectors with some kind of landing approach aid on the display, and suddenly this Gateway didn’t look so small, and neither did the ship docked overhead.

“Hyperion?” he said, reading off the name painted near the ship’s stern. 

“That’s right,” Ripley sighed, struggling to match vectors on what appeared to be the approach’s vertical axis and then, when the shuttle was perhaps a quarter mile out a huge hangar door opened, revealing a fairly large shuttle landing area actually inside the station. Men in spacesuits were inside the hangar, and Taggart realized the shuttle he was now in was actually like some kind of four man craft, because there were two really large shuttles inside this hangar. “The Gateway is much older than Hyperion and was built to handle the first shuttles transiting to and from Armstrong Base…”

“Armstrong Base?”

“The first American base on the lunar surface.”

“Ah. Of course. You know, when I was a kid I went to the moon every month or so.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. At Disneyland, the first one, in Anaheim.”

“I haven’t been?”

“To Disneyland?”

“To Earth.”

He looked at her again, not sure if she was kidding or not, then, deciding she wasn’t, Henry Taggart thought better of asking her any further questions. He was already sure he wouldn’t like the answers.

+++++

He was sitting in a conference room by himself. Earth appeared to be about the size of a kid’s marble when held at arm’s length, and the pale blue dot rotated into view about every two minutes. At least, he said to himself, up was up inside this room, and down was down. The gravity here onboard the station was, Ripley told him before she left him here in this room, about eighty percent of Earth’s, so walking was not only possible, it was also almost effortless. Playing football up here would be, he thought, hilarious.

A door opened and two military types ambled in and took a seat; a moment later two short men in civilian clothes entered and sat across from him, and one of these, the younger one, was staring at him. This character had short blond hair and looked like he’d been plucked right out of the sixties: houndstooth sports coat, Levis, old school Adidas sneakers, RayBan Wayfarers on his forehead. Piercing silver blue eyes that looked like laser beams, and those eyes looked angry, too.

And then Harry Callahan walked in and he didn’t know why, but the sight made Henry Taggart bust out laughing. Callahan stopped dead in his tracks and looked at Taggart like he’d suddenly grown a second head.

Then it hit him. Callahan looked like he was about thirty years old, and the last time he’d seen him Callahan had been much older. Like fifty years older. Taggart stopped laughing, then crossed his arms over his chest.

Then two Navy admirals walked in – just ahead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Who appeared to be about thirty and who was walking, not in a wheelchair.

Taggart looked away. Looked at the Earth coming onto view again. He felt light-headed, like he was lost inside a dream…

“This the man, Callahan?” Roosevelt asked this much younger version of Harry Callahan.

“Yessir, it is.”

“Detective Bullitt? Anything you want to add to your report?”

“No sir, not at this time.”

“This ship she’s on? It was still in the Mediterranean? I mean, when you last saw her?”

“Yessir. She made a jump, apparently to Vesuvius around the time of that big eruption. When she returned her clothes were on fire.”

Roosevelt turned to Taggart. “Detective Callahan tells us you were once close to Miss Deborah Sorensen? Is that about right?”

Taggart was speechless. “Excuse me, but are you Franklin Roosevelt?”

Roosevelt looked around the room, exasperated. “Has no one briefed this man?”

Shrugs all around. Everyone was suddenly avoiding eye contact, too.

“Well, dammit,” FDR grumbled, “why am I not surprised?” 

“I knew her,” Taggart said, trying to take some of the heat. “What’s she done now?”

Roosevelt wheeled on him. “What are you implying, Mr. Taggart?”

“Deborah was kind of a world class screw up, sir. Like everything she touched turned to shit. A dilettante.”

“More money than sense? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yessir. Classic case. Sweet as could be but absolutely no self understanding.”

“Easily manipulated?” Roosevelt added.

“That’s right,” Taggart said, stifling a burp.

“You alright, son?”

“I haven’t eaten in…well, I don’t remember the last time I held down food.”

“You were pretty sick when you got here. Some kind of cancer, they tell me. How are you feeling now?”

“Great, sir. Never better.”

“Pak’s people are world class,” Roosevelt said, missing the irony completely.

“Does anyone know what they did to me?”

Roosevelt turned to one of the naval officers. “Captain Ripley? Care to explain?”

The younger of the two officers nodded and stood. “Pak’s civilization has mastered all forms of genetic manipulation. When they go after cancerous disease they simply go after replication errors, but you’ll soon begin to feel other effects, as well?”

“Oh? Such as?” Taggart sighed.

“The first thing is you’ll feel younger. You’ll also feel, well, more easily aroused…”

“Sexually, you mean?”

“That’s correct,” Captain Ripley said, smiling a little impishly. “And you’ll perform better in that department, as well.”

“Oh,” Taggart deadpanned, “joy. I can hardly wait. So, when will the disease return?”

“It probably won’t,” Ripley said, confused by Taggart’s reaction. “You’ll likely live without any further disease for the rest of your life.”

“Great,” Taggart sighed, clearly depressed by this news. “Now, can anyone tell me why I’m here?”

“Detective Bullitt?” Roosevelt said. “Care to tell our guest?”

Bullitt stood. “I’m going to take you there, get you as close as I can. You’re either going to talk her out of her current mission or you’re going to have to kill her.”

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