Eric Flint: Time spike

There was nothing that indicated structural damage to the three-story, brown limestone building that had been built over a century before.

"It looks solid enough. We might have gotten lucky," he said, knowing that until daylight came and men could walk the building and examine it up close, there was really no way of knowing for sure. Andy watched part of his crew as they hurried along side the building's exterior, their flashlights playing against the eighteen-foot, chain-link fence topped with razor wire that enclosed the compound. He turned east and looked at the wall and then toward town. There were no lights anywhere. Even the hospital lights couldn't be seen. The entire area was darker than he thought possible-so dark, he couldn't even make out the shape of the bluff the town sat on. He felt a tap on his shoulder.

He couldn't remember the woman's name, but her face was familiar. She usually worked B-house. "Yeah," he said. She pointed to the sky. He looked up and his heart leapt in his chest. The clouds were gone and the sky was filled with more stars than he could remember seeing. Then he realized the temperature had changed. It was warm. Very warm.

Almost hot. Hot and moist. And there was a combination sweet and sulfur smell in the air. He looked north, away from the prison, and had to swallow hard. The skyline glowed red. "Hey, Andy!" Joe motioned toward what should have been the administrative parking lot. "It's gone. So is the gun range and the visitor parking area. Everything's been swallowed up by the quake. " "That was like no quake I ever heard of." Andy looked at where the parking lot had been. The blacktop and the cars were gone. Not destroyed, simply… gone. In their place was nothing but bare earth and some sort of odd-looking plants. What sort of earthquake could do that? "Get inside," he said, "and get on the phone. Call the state police. Find out what's going on. Wake up the warden, and get him down here. Then call in the off-duty first responders and E-team officers." "Already tried that." Kathleen was coming through the doors. "Greg sent me out here to tell you the phone lines are down, and none of the cell phones are working. He also said the radios are on the fritz. The ones used for communication inside the prison are working better than they've worked in days, but those used for outside…" She bit her bottom lip. "They're out. Same for the TVs and the regular radio stations." James Cook's ears popped.

The walls vibrated and hummed. The metal shelf with its two-inch foam mattress the prison staff called his bunk swayed. There was noise everywhere. Cook wanted to sit up so he could hop down from his bed, but couldn't move. He tried to turn his head, but even that was too difficult to accomplish. His eyes stayed focused on the small, iron-grated ventilation hole on the wall just a few inches below his ceiling. He watched as the six-inch bars vibrated faster and faster.

His vision blurred. The bars faded, almost disappearing, then returned. The hum turned into a roar. The roar became a whistle. The bars returned to their original color, and then one of them fell out.

It was lying on his bed and he could now move. He reached out to the black metal bar. It was warm, almost hot. Cook slid the bar back into the vent grill and then turned to face the door. It was tempting to try to hide it and hope the screws wouldn't notice that one of bars was missing. That piece of steel could make a big difference if he wound up having to fight one of the slabs of beef he'd seen when he arrived. But being found in possession of it could also add two years to his prison term. The bar was still loose, if he ever needed to pry it back out again. Paul Howard, his cellmate, was trying to get out of bed, and all hell had broke loose up and down the tiers. Men were screaming to be let out of their cells. They didn't want to be trapped inside during a quake or its aftershocks. Guards added to the bedlam, running up the stairs and down the walkways, slapping the metal bars with metal nightsticks and screaming for silence. He lay down, forcing himself not to look at the ventilation grill. The wall was probably as strong as ever, and they didn't build flimsy walls in maximum security prisons. Besides, what was the point of thinking about the ventilation opening? Even if he could squeeze himself through-not likely, to say the least-he'd just be looking at a three-story drop to cold, hard cement. He stared at the blue-gray steel separating his cell from the catwalk, his pulse racing and a thin sheen of sweat glistening above his upper lip. The broken bars would be found the first time the guards dumped the room. And even if they weren't, it didn't matter. He couldn't escape, and even if he could there was no life on the outside for a man on the run. James Cook was an excellent poker player. Three minutes later, when the screw played his flashlight around the room, his face was proof of that. He gave the C.O. a cold look, then closed his eyes.

Chapter 4 "Oh, damn," Margo Glenn-Lewis snarled. "Another one!" As she slowed the rental vehicle, seeing the police roadblock across the road ahead of them, she slapped the steering wheel in frustration. "I didn't think they'd have this dinky little county road covered also."

Richard Morgan-Ash was surprised himself. It was still the middle of the night, and he wouldn't have though the local authorities in a rural area would have been able to mobilize such an extensive set of police roadblocks on such short notice. They'd been stopped twice already by roadblocks, on the first two roads they'd taken. They knew from their contact over his cell phone with their colleagues still in Minnesota that the chronoletic impact had happened right after midnight. The exact time was impossible to pin down because the impact scrambled time around itself. By the clocks in the underground facility, it had happened at exactly 12:11:08. But the time at the impact site itself might very well have read somewhat differently, to anyone in a position to observe. Whether anyonewould be in a position to observe such an impact, from "inside," so to speak, was a hotly contested issue among the scientists in The Project. A minority were inclined to believe that anyone caught by such an impact would simply be destroyed. But the main school of thought was that they'd undergo a time transfer but might come out at the other end alive. By way of evidence, adherents to the majority view would point out that-assuming the vague reports were accurate-it seemed that animals coming theother direction-so to speak-came through it fairly intact. It would help, of course, if the authorities would allow anyone except their own scientists to have access to the remains that had appeared at Grantville. But that whole area, very soon after the impact, had been declared a national security zone. The same sort of tight security had been clamped down around it that you'd expect to find at weapons test sites and top secret installations. Richard's opinion was that all the existing hypotheses were simply rampant speculation. They needed hard evidence before they could do anything more than suck theories out of their thumbs. Margo brought the car to a halt. One of the officers standing by the police car parked in such a way as to bar the road started coming their way. Richard leaned toward Margo and said softly,

"Allow me to do the talking this time, would you?" Margo scowled.

Morgan-Ash decided that amounted to consent, and got out of the car.

He wanted to talk to the officer himself because Margo's notions of how to conduct a conversation with the police seemed to stem from some sort of deep-rooted adolescent resentment. He'd found that, despite appearing to be in her early fifties, Margo had a strong tendency to rebel against authority simply because it was authority. Richard had no such inclination, himself. Not because he had any greater respect for authority-qua-authority than she did. He probably had even less.