Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [25]
Shel had always been a wild type, a guy who’d been everywhere, who had pictures of himself standing in front of the Vatican, riding a camel around a pyramid, standing on a rope bridge in Turkestan. He’d once played a guitar with the Popinjays in Dallas, and had apparently fit right in. How could Dave, whose folks thought hanging out in the Poconos was a big deal, keep up with that?
Nevertheless, they’d remained close friends over the years. Despite his advantages, Shel was a solid guy. No pretense. No illusions about self-importance. And the last person who was likely to suffer a blackout and wake up two hundred miles away. That business Wednesday had sent chills through him and left him with a sense that reality was coming undone. It was like an experience he’d had when he was about ten. His folks had taken him to see a magician perform at the Walnut. The guy had made basketballs flo at through the air, put a woman into a cabinet and taken the cabinet apart and she wasn’t there anymore. They’d put chains around the magician, put him inside a narrow box, and hung the box from the overhead, so there was no way he could have gotten out of it without being seen, and when they lowered the box and opened it, he was gone, and in his place was the woman who’d disappeared from the cabinet.
It was the night in which Dave came to believe in magic. To conclude that anything could happen, that there were no rules. No boundaries. Wednesday had felt like that, too. The bewildered look in Shel’s eyes, the way he’d sat slumped in the car on the road back from western Pennsylvania, the way his voice shook when he tried to explain what had happened and discovered he had no idea what had happened.
Sometimes it was just magic.
Then the phone call: Something had happened again. Shel hadn’t admitted it, but it was in his voice. The guy was scared.
SO Dave passed on Helen and the Serendip, and was dutifully waiting when Shel pulled up outside a little before nine. It was raining, one of those steady, bleak October drizzles. “What’s wrong?” Dave asked.
“It’s hard to explain.” Shel was carrying a computer bag. He dropped the bag on the floor, took off his jacket, and fell into a chair. “Dave,” he said, “I know what happened to my father.”
The room grew still.
“Is he okay?”
“No. I don’t think so.” The weather rattled the windows. “I also know what happened Wednesday.”
Dave sat down on the sofa opposite him. “What happened?”
“Okay, what I have to show you is off-the-wall stuff. I mean seriously off the wall. But before I say any more, I want you to promise it’ll go no further.”
“Okay.”
Shel’s eyes narrowed. “You promise?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“Come on, Shel. I promise.”
He picked up the computer bag, unzipped it, stopped, thought about it. He looked at Dave as if he were a stranger. And opened the bag. He removed a Q-pod from it. Or maybe one of those new game-playing devices that were always coming on the market. Dave had lost track of the technology years ago.
Shel held it out as if it had special significance. “What is it?” Dave asked.
“I’m not quite sure what to call it. My father called it a converter.” He handed it to Dave.
Dave took it, turned it over, and shrugged. “So what’s it do?”
“Lift the lid.”
Dave complied and watched the converter light up. A lot of numbers appeared on-screen. “Okay. What do you want me to do with it?”
“I’ll show you. You’ll need a jacket, though.”
“We’re going outside?”
He smiled. But it was a dark smile. A smile that signaled way outside. “More or less.”
Usually, Shel was straightforward. This kind of juking around was utterly unlike him. Dave felt his hair beginning to rise. The way it had Wednesday when he’d picked him up at the Chevron station. “Whatever