Eric Flint: Time spike

Joe was laughing now. "Maybe we can feed that shit to the prisoners until someone squeals on who hit the Martinez kid. It shouldn't take more than one meal." "Sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to me."

Andy chuckled, slapping Rod on the back. "Thanks. Go home, we'll be fine." The door opened and the wind gusted in. Kathleen Hanrahan looked their way, giving them her usual easy smile. Her maternity uniform barely fit. Everyone knew at her age she had no business working this late into the pregnancy. But her husband, a laborer at the coal docks, had gotten laid off six weeks after she discovered her birth control measures hadn't worked. And with three half-grown kids still at home, she was stuck. She either worked until two weeks before the baby was due and came back six weeks after it was born, or she lost her job, her house, her car, and everything else she and her husband had managed to accumulate. "Good morning," she said, patting her rounded abdomen. "Nine more shifts to go." "Morning?" Joe shook his head. "My morning." She looked at the clock. Fifteen minutes until time to punch in. "The roads are so dark. Even the prison lights seem dimmer, like they aren't putting out like they should." Andy flipped his radio to the maintenance channel. The static on the radio drowned out everything except one word. Generator power. "Just what we need."

Andy looked at Joe. "Better check before we let anyone go home." Joe nodded toward Rod. "Go out to the parking lot and get everyone hanging around out there through the metal detectors. I want them all inside the walls, now. And let the afternoon shift know, no one leaves till I say so." James Cook sat on the top bunk of his cell, his home for the next many years. He wanted to cry, but didn't dare. If a guard saw any tears, and decided to do his job, that could land him in the psychologist's office and probably chained to a bed in suicide watch.

It'd be even worse if one of the prisoners saw him crying. Suicide.

The coward's way out. His mother, her eyes cold and knowing, had stared into his own when she told him that. She wanted him to come home no matter what price he had to pay to do it. His friends hadn't been so afraid of that. They thought they knew him. He was tough. He could handle himself. He would have to bash a few heads, the red man always had to do that in prison, but he would be okay. But when they said those things, they hadn't looked him in the eye. Instead, they had looked at his wiry frame and suggested he start lifting weights right away. They didn't think he should wait until he was convicted.

Just in case. He had taken their advice. Just in case. But he hadn't bulked up much. He had the wrong body type for that. Still, he was stronger and his endurance was up. He just hoped he didn't need either. He was no fool. He was no match for two or three men looking for a fight and a little fun. For that matter, unless he had an edge, there was no way he could handle even one of these huge mothers. The big ones hanging over the rail, whistling and calling out "fresh meat" as the new fish were walked from the processing area to their cells had left his mouth dry and feeling as though it was full of cotton. He knew he wouldn't commit suicide. But just the same, he wasn't sure he would make it home to his mother. He might-probably would-get killed.

He had already made up his mind. He would be no man's cocksucking bitch. He would die fighting if it came to that. If he couldn't die then, he would die later, when he went looking for revenge. Cook forced himself to take a few deep breaths. So far things had gone better than he had hoped. While being processed, his roommate had been a blond-haired, blue-eyed kid from the streets of Chicago. The boy had spent half his life institutionalized in one form or another. Foster homes, county jails, juvenile detention centers. He'd done them all.

This was his first trip to an adult prison, but he was already hooked up and doing a booming business for hispapa. Since the sharks were being well fed, Cook and the other fish had had a relatively easy job staying out of trouble. As for his new roommate, his permanent roomie, he was a white man in his mid-fifties who made it plain he was doing his own time. He wouldn't be trying to dish anything out, but he also wasn't willing to give a fish any help. Cook was grateful for that. If the man had offered to help, it wouldn't have been for free. There was no such thing as out of the goodness of your heart in a maximum security prison. He had been warned about the way things worked. Some guy, usually older, definitely stronger and with a track record for busting heads would be friendly enough. Offer a little protection from the others. And then would come the price tag. Loyalty. Sex. And maybe a little hooking to one or two of his friends. But he would keep the others off you. He would make sure you weren't jumped in the shower or shoved into your room when the screws were busy elsewhere. He would remind you it was better to be one man's bitch than prey for an entire cellblock. Cook shuddered and reminded himself he wasn't effeminate.

Young, yes. On the slender side, yes. Girlie, no. Except he didn't have much facial hair, and almost no body hair. He wished he was built more like the man on the bottom bunk; then maybe he too could sleep.

Paul Howard, his roommate, wasn't unusually large. But he was big enough and thick enough and exuded a don't-fuck-with-me attitude without saying one word. He had been asleep for almost an hour, but his light snore wasn't why Cook was still awake. It was the other noises. The ones coming from other cells. Some of those sounds he recognized, and some he didn't. He glanced at the iron bars and was actually glad for them. A two-bunk cell with the right roommate was easier to survive than a bed in an open wing. He knew he had been lucky so far, but he also knew his luck would run out. It always did.

Chapter 2 "We've got a big one, guys! Really big!" Margo Glenn-Lewis leaned over, squinting at the numbers appearing on the monitor screen, a frown gathering on her forehead. "Damn weird one, too." By then, Richard Morgan-Ash was already leaning over her shoulder. Within three seconds, so were Karen Berg and Malcolm O'Connell. Within ten seconds, Leo Dingley had arrived from the room next door. All five scientists working that night in the laboratory buried half a mile below ground in Minnesota had their attention fixed on the monitor. " 'Weird' is putting it mildly," Leo said, after a while. "If I'm interpreting these numbers correctly, we're talking about incredible energy here." Berg was already working the figures on her laptop. She carried it everywhere, even to the point of eliciting jokes about whether she took it into the bathroom-jokes which she laughed at but never answered. "It's as big as the Grantville event," she said, her tone hushed. "According to this." Morgan-Ash made a face. "Karen, to this day it has never been established what the figures were for the Grantville event." He gestured with his hands at their surroundings. "That was seven years ago. None of this was operating then, you may recall." The same meticulousness made him add:

"Well. Not for that purpose, anyway. I admit some stray detections were made, but hardly enough-" "Oh, cut it out, Dick," said O'Connell.

"We've crunched the numbers a thousand times over the years, and we know what it had to have been. A time transposition involving a sphere of space six miles in diameter and including umpteen jillions tons of matter-we've got that number figured somewhere, too, but 'umpteen jillion' does well enough for the moment-requires…" His own tone had grown hushed. His finger pointed at the screen. "Thissort of numbers." Morgan-Ash didn't pursue the argument. In truth, he didn't really disagree himself. He just found it necessary, as he had many times since he'd joined the project-The Project, was the only name it had-to restrain his colleagues' enthusiasms. In that, if nothing else, they tended to have the bad habit of conspiratorial rebels since time immemorial to be True Believers. The reason The Project had no formal name was because it had no formal existence. It was, in point of fact, something of a scientific conspiracy, launched less than a year after the Grantville Disaster by a small group of physicists and mathematicians who'd been completely dissatisfied with the official explanation of the event and just as completely disgusted by the scientific establishment's apparent willingness to go along with that official explanation. All the more so because, damnation, there wasevidence. Several of the deep underground experimental facilities located in various places around the world to study such things as neutrinos and nucleon decay and cosmic rays had detected…