Circles of Displacement Read online

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  Circles of Displacement

  by Darrell Bain

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  Science Fiction/Fantasy

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  Double Dragon Publishing

  double-dragon-ebooks.com

  Copyright ©2006 by DDP

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  Circle of Displacement

  Copyright © 2006 Darrell Bain

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc., Markham, Ontario Canada.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from Double Dragon Publishing.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Double Dragon eBook

  Published by

  Double Dragon Publishing, Inc.

  PO Box 54016

  1-5762 Highway 7 East

  Markham, Ontario L3P 7Y4 Canada

  www.double-dragon-ebooks.com

  www.double-dragon-publishing.com

  ISBN: 1-55404-362-X

  A DDP First Edition April 3, 2006

  Book Layout and

  Cover Art by Deron Douglas

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  Circles of Displacement

  Darrell Bain

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  To my son, Randy Bain,

  This story was written with him in mind.

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  Prologue

  The great ship entered the spiral arm of yet another galaxy. Only the beings in the control room were aware of trouble and they were terrified. It was theoretically possible for the time stress fields of the huge ship to get out of balance, but an actual occurrence was a rarity, something that had not happened for generations. The Engineer Commander's stalks sprang erect as wrongly colored patterns erupted inside its left forebrain, the engineer side, demanding immediate action. There was little time to spare, yet the Engineer Commander was forced to call on ancestral memory from one of its hindbrains in order to assess the problem. By the time a solution became apparent, it was almost too late. It did the only thing possible. It ordered the ship to cease its headlong flight in one violent maneuver, hoping the excess energy would discharge in one compact mass rather than leak backward into the ship and cause its utter destruction.

  It worked, just barely. A globe of weirdly tortured space-time formed around the laboring stress fields, a darker black than the space surrounding it. The globe hovered, wobbling in place with the unbalanced fields like a dancer about to lose balance. The ship shuddered all through its mile long length, as if shivering in fear at impending destruction, then at the last possible second, tore loose from the newly formed mass of energized time, instantaneously imparting an equalizing velocity to it in the opposite direction. The ship continued on its way, slower now, but no longer threatened. It would never pass that way again, nor would its commander ever know or care about what happened to the energy it had lost.

  The stark globe of space-time shot away in the opposite direction. It was more coherent than a laser beam, but even as laser light slowly attenuates over distance, so did this different form of energy. It spread, becoming miles wide in extent. The inherent energy, unable to maintain a single point of concentration, threw off smaller globes in a radiating circle, while its center gradually grew smaller. Where the globes of energy passed, hydrogen atoms and rare intrastellar molecules of cyanide compounds and other esoteric deep space molecules were thrown far back in time and replaced by other space and matter from that era in an almost imperceptible cone from it's point of origin, with the displacement in time gradually lessening as the attenuation grew. Given enough distance, the time energy would have lost all coherence, dissipating harmlessly over vast stellar distances. A few molecules displaced here and there would have made no difference whatever in the larger scheme of the universe. In fact, even when the globes impacted on a planet, the universe would go on in much the same fashion as it had for the last fifteen billion years. Such things had happened before. They would happen again.

  The second circle of smaller segments of distorted time spread from the center as the globes of terribly wrong energy approached earth, then a third and fourth budded off, with more following, each growing progressively smaller as it broke from its parent. Now the separate pieces were spread over dozens of miles from the still intact, though much smaller center portion. More than two thousand of the small globes of space-time struck the atmosphere, displacing molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and lesser elements, but they slowed down hardly at all. Only a large mass could accomplish that, and the sleeping East Texas countryside served adequately. In a circle with a radius measuring scores of miles, in a pattern affecting the mass they encountered, pure chance decreed who and what was affected. In places, circles of woods, brush and pasture hundreds of yards in diameter suddenly disappeared in claps of thunder and ozone and reappeared far back in time, simultaneously sending comparable areas from there into the future. Animals in the affected zones, unable to understand the changed circumstances, blinked and attempted to carry on their lives as before. Some succeeded; some did not. For humans caught in the time storms and thrown back to the Pleistocene era, it was a different matter. They could reason and wonder and become fearful or joyful, as circumstances dictated. In many cases, it depended on where they were when the displacements occurred. It all cases where humans were caught, they believed that they were the only ones affected. At first, that is. Eventually, many of them would make contact with inhabitants of other displaced areas. Sometimes they wished they hadn't.

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  Chapter One

  As Derek pulled his pickup into the circle at the end of the indifferently graveled road leading to the farmhouse, Sheila Holloway noticed immediately that, as she expected, her parents were still gone. On Saturday nights they might play forty-two with the Marlin family until well after midnight. That suited her fine. It was still only a little past ten, and she and Derek could sit in his pickup for an hour or so with little chance of interruption. She wanted to know where her relationship with him was going and this would be a good time to talk.

  “You want another beer?"

  “No,” Sheila said, “and you'd better not either. You've already had three. If we're still here when Mom and Dad get home and they smell beer on your breath, we'll both be in trouble."

  “One more won't hurt. They won't be back for another hour, at least."

  “No.” Part of Sheila's protest was simply that she didn't really care for the taste of beer, and when Derek had more than three or four, she didn't like the smell of it on his breath when he kissed her. And she wanted to be kissed. Her sixteen-year-old body was still a mystery to her, a thing to be explored and tested, like a swimmer working up to a dive from the high board, no longer content with mastery of the one still occupied by kids. She leaned into Derek's embrace. He kissed her, his breath smelling faintly of alcohol and tobacco.

/>   She thought Derek would be nice, in a way, if only he had interests other than hunting, fishing and drinking beer with the other seniors. Nevertheless, she allowed him more liberties than she ever had with other boys. It was a puzzle to her sometimes, but a minor one. At least he showed some consideration, touching her gently, rather than the rough and grasping embraces of some boys she had dated. His hand moved over her breast, and she allowed it, liking the sensation of his strong fingers as he squeezed and molded it in his hand. His tongue entered her mouth and explored pleasantly, like warm sunshine on bare skin. After a while he pulled her closer, letting her feel the male hardness pressing against her thigh, hoping that she would react to the sensation. Sheila did react, liking the feel of his body against her own. She allowed him to unbutton her blouse and slip his hand inside her bra. A wave of liquid warmth spread from her breast down to her belly, causing her to squirm restlessly against him.

  Had she drank one more beer, or had Derek not rushed things quite so much, she might have given in. Her young body was demanding release, beginning to overpower the dictates of reason, but Derek moved too fast. He left her breast and moved his hand down between her thighs, rubbing too urgently, too suddenly, too overpoweringly intimate with his attentions, digging his fingers into the denim of the jeans between her legs as if grabbing for a slippery prize that wouldn't come loose.

  Sheila broke away from him, breathing heavily. She pulled her blouse together and began buttoning it.

  “Sheila—"

  “No.” She fended off an encircling arm. “It's getting late anyway. Mom and Dad will be home before long. Let's just sit and talk."

  “I'm too bothered to talk. You know what you do to me.” Derek reached behind the seat and retrieved another beer. Defiantly, he popped the top and tilted it to his mouth.

  “If you're going to drink that, I'm going in."

  “Aw, this won't hurt me.” Derek pulled out a pack of Cambridge and lit a cigarette, hanging it from the corner of his mouth.

  “Do what you want to. I'm going inside.” Sheila slid over to the passenger door, frustrated and irritated.

  “Don't be mad."

  “I'm not mad."

  “See you tomorrow?"

  Sheila relented. After all, he hadn't really acted much different than he usually did. She leaned forward, kissed him on the mouth and slid out of the truck. “Why don't you try getting to school a little early in the morning? Maybe we can talk before history class?"

  “Okay. See you then."

  She closed the door and walked the few steps up onto the front porch, using the inside light filtering out through a window to find the light switch there. She flicked it on, then turned, intending to wave, but Derek was already driving away. She watched until the taillights were obscured by the tree line intervening between the house and the black top a quarter mile away, then turned to open the door.

  Just as she closed the screen door behind her, a clap of thunder sounded, and a flash of light surrounded her, illuminating the living room with an eerie suffused glow. It winked out immediately, leaving the farmhouse in total darkness.

  “Shit!” she muttered, an expression she seldom used, and never at home, at least not when her parents might hear. She fumbled her way toward a drawer where candles and matches were kept. She lit a taper and carried it to her bedroom, walking carefully to keep within the bounds of the flickering light. Had the house not been so dark, she might have noticed that the end of the hallway leading to her parents’ room was no longer there; indeed, their bedroom was not there either, nor anything else familiar in that direction. She did notice a coolness in the air, but passed it off to an impending thunderstorm. Unconcerned, she undressed and climbed into bed, wondering if she would still be awake to hear her parents come home. She wasn't, nor would she ever see her mother and father again.

  * * * *

  First Lieutenant Wanda Smith was still seething. She brushed a hand through her short black hair, irritated at every man in the world, then grabbed the steering wheel of the jeep Cherokee as it began drifting to the left on highway 59, heading south to Houston. Goddamn him. Goddamn him to hell, that son-of-a-bitch eagle-wearing, smirking army colonel that was destroying her career. Right now, if she never saw a man again in her life, she thought, it would be little loss. The son of a bitch! Trust him to catch her with the little WAC corporal. Bad enough that, but the way he handled it! Give him a little fucking or be reported! She would fuck him, all right, with a nine millimeter in the mouth if she could get away with it. It wasn't like she was a roaring butch feminist lesbian; in fact, she usually did prefer men, but every now and then an unaccountable urge drew her to a female, and damn, the little WAC had been so cute. They were just getting started when the colonel walked in, drawn back to the office by who knew what. Maybe he had suspected when she failed to react to his advances; more likely he was a long time sniffer-outer of what he thought to be sexual aberrations, regardless of what the regulations said. That didn't excuse his actions, though, even if she had been consorting with an enlisted person. That, she admitted to herself, was her own fault and she should have known better.

  This morning, he had called her into his office. The smirk on his face would have done justice to any cat with feathers hanging from its mouth. Wanda tried unsuccessfully to brush aside images from the scene that followed.

  “I know this sort of thing goes on in the service,” Colonel Brewster said, twirling a pencil in his fingers like a weathervane, “but you've gone beyond the bounds of propriety. Sex with a subordinate. While on duty. Of the same sex. Can you give me any reason not to report this?"

  “No, sir,” she said.

  “That's too bad. It might be overlooked, given the proper circumstances. You know what I mean?"

  Wanda knew all right. She wavered. The hint was plain enough, and possibly, just possibly, she could rationalize it to herself. Then she looked harder at her superior officer. Balding. Going to fat. Piggy little leering eyes, jumping from her breasts to her legs and back again as she stood at attention in front of his desk. He reminded her of her stepfather, the second one, undressing her with his eyes at every opportunity, bumping against her whenever she forgot herself and got near him, passing his hands over her in “fatherly” hugs and touches. It was impossible; she couldn't do it.

  “Colonel, you can go straight to hell."

  He twirled the pencil some more, obviously disappointed. “In that case, Lieutenant Smith, you leave me no choice. Consider yourself relieved of duty, as of now. Let the duty officer know your whereabouts at all times. If you change your mind before I get the paperwork processed, let me know. I might still be able to help. I could get you an honorable discharge, rather than a separation under, um, a cloud, shall we say?” He winked obscenely.

  Wanda turned on her heel and left, not bothering to salute. Let the bastard court-martial her if he wanted to; she was through with the military and everything it represented. It's not like I don't have a profession, she thought. I'm a good Medical Technologist; I can get a job anywhere. In fact, the medical center in Houston might be the place to go while her discharge was pending. Abruptly, she decided to leave and call the duty officer each day from there. If the colonel didn't like it, she might just file sexual harassment charges against him and see how he liked being under a cloud himself. She returned to her room in the BOQ, changed from her uniform into jeans and blouse and began throwing other belongings into assorted luggage. The way she felt now, she might not even return. Let them send the discharge to her, and if anyone gave her any trouble she would call the colonel and read him the riot act. She had nothing to lose, and was just mad enough to drag him down with her, regardless of the consequences of exposing her occasional sexual tendency for females. It wasn't as if it was anything unusual these days, and she doubted that any laboratory in Houston hiring her would give a damn one way or another.

  The Cherokee cruised almost silently south on US 59. An occasional vehicle passed in the
opposite direction, headlights bright in the moonless night. Wanda had her radio set to a station playing soft tunes from years back, some familiar, some older than she was. An eighteen-wheeler passed her, taking advantage of the reduced number of patrol cars at this late hour, and pulled on ahead. Somewhere in the distance, another vehicle approached, headlights dim at first, then growing brighter. Abruptly, they winked out. At the same time, the radio cut off in the middle of a song, changing to bursts of static. A sound of thunder pierced the enclosed cab of the Cherokee, and at almost the same time a burst of light illuminated the highway. Ghostly pines and telephone lines marched in ranks beside the highway, then faded from sight.

  Ahead, the taillights of the eighteen-wheeler brightened, and even from the distance, Wanda could hear the squeal of brakes. She trod hard on her own brakes, then stepped down with all her strength as a tearing crash sounded ahead, awful in the suddenness with which it happened. The Cherokee slewed and skidded, but didn't quite leave the road. Wanda brought it to a stop just short of where the highway abruptly ended in a tangle of huge trees and the mangled wreck of the eighteen-wheeler. Her headlights picked out the carnage in a surreal display of twisted metal tangled into scarred trunks of huge trees, still standing.

  Quickly, she pulled a flashlight from the glove compartment, dropped from the cab of the Cherokee to the pavement and raced forward. The incongruity of hundred-year-old oak and pine trees bisecting the highway didn't enter her mind until the pavement abruptly ended and she stumbled and fell into some rough tangles of undergrowth. She got back upright and moved more cautiously forward, playing her light on the ground.

  There was nothing to do for the driver. The cab of the truck was almost completely collapsed, crushing the driver inside like a bloody sardine, then flinging the body through the windshield with such force that the remains were a sexless blob. The van of the truck had separated from the cab and was wrapped almost completely around the trunk of a huge oak. The impact had knocked branches down on top of it. They lay dark and still, the white of the broken ends in stark contrast to the moody green of the leaves, barely colored in the beam of her flashlight.