"This is the day!" Phillip giggled excitedly.
Gerald stood behind him, holding Phillip in his arms on the balcony of a high rise apartment as they both gazed out onto the quadruple sunset-rise of their planet. They were bathed in the perpetual golden glow of their suns.
"This is the day," Gerald agreed as he leaned forward and nipped his lover's ear. "Let's go inside and check."
"Alright," Phillip turned around and bounced into the building, his blue eyes alight with excitement.
Gerald smiled to himself as he watched the boy go. He was a gorgeous specimen, that was for sure. But if not for the help of the device that masked his true self...well, except for his degree in temporal mathematics, Phillip was as average as any other rent boy he might have taken up with. He was meant to be expendable, and he was going to be expended. Gerald chuckled, pleased with himself and his conquest. He followed Phillip into the room. They approached the computer terminal and Gerald sent the picture to the holographic display in the corner of the room then regarded it. Everything seemed to be in order. The captives were locked in the room...just as planned. Just as planned, Mary stood guard outside the door.
"It was too easy," Phillip laughed.
Gerald smiled at him and stroked his blond hair. "Good boy," he said. Then turned his attention towards the display. A red alert flashed in the corner.
"What's that?" Gerald muttered and zoomed in with the one mobile remote-controlled camera he had placed outside the building.
"Nothing," Phillip said. "Probably just a minor slip. We've been sending them out, it's bound to disrupt the natural order of things right? Bound to cause a bit of natural slip..."
"Shut-Up," Gerald snapped at him and zoomed in on a duo of snappily dressed men who had only just appeared.
"What?" Phillip whined. "Can't we get on with it? I want to see if it's going to work."
"What did you use to encrypt our time passages?" Gerald asked with strained politeness that barely contained his range.
"What do you mean?"
"What algorithm did you use," Gerald said. "It was the Galactian cipher, right?"
"Uh..." Phillip stared down at his feet. He hadn't thought he'd done anything wrong by substituting the algorithm, but it was apparent that Gerald didn't think so.
"The Galactian Cipher, Phillip," he repeated...a vein in his neck started throbbing angrily.
"No," Phillip admitted. "It was the McSvens Algorithm. It's easy, it's concise, it gets the job done. The Galactian Cipher would have taken hours to complete for each time we jumped. It just wasn't..."
"Those were your instructions!!" Gerald roared. "Can't you follow a simple set of instructions you stupid little whore."
"Hey!" Phillip shrunk under the weight of Gerald's storming rage. He didn't especially like being called a whore, but he didn't want to say anything to further infuriate the other man.
"Come here," Gerald said...seemingly calmer than he had been only moments before, but Phillip was afraid. There was a cold hard expression in his eyes. Phillip approached timidly and Gerald wrapped him tightly in his arms.
"Look at this," Gerald pointed towards the screen at the two figures.
"So? Two guys." Phillip tried to shrug away his worry, but the vice grip that Gerald had on him wouldn't allow him to do so.
"So? Those are Time Detectives, Phillip," Gerald giggled unnervingly in his ear. "Any idea how they traced us?"
"McSven's Algorithm," Phillip replied glumly as he turned his face from the screen and stared at the floor.
"Yes, McSven's Algorithm," Gerald confirmed. "It's easy, it's simple, it's effective...and they teach an introductory course on it at the Academy. I do things for a reason, Phillip. Do I have to remind you that I'm the brains of this operation?"
"Yes, sir," Phillip replied. "I'm sorry. It won't happen again."
"That's right, it won't," Gerald replied. He spun Phillip around to face him and then pulled him tightly into an embrace, kissing him hard on the lips then pushing him away. Phillip stumbled and lost his balance for a moment before regaining his composure.
"What was that for?" He breathlessly asked Gerald who had stepped a few feet away.
"This." Gerald held up the Masking device that Phillip kept in his pocket at all times.
"but..." Phillip searched his pockets frantically. He felt the weight of a device still firmly entrenched where he had left the mask, yet there it was in Gerald's hand as plain as the quadruple suns. As it turned out there was a device in Phillip's pocket. He pulled it out and stared dumbly at it for a long moment. It was a Time Travel Device.
Gerald laughed manically. While Phillip had been fishing around in his pockets, his partner, his creator, Gerald, had thrown the masking device on the bed and pulled a remote control from his pocket.
"I gave you one task, Phillip." He shook his head and sadly tutted to himself. "This is going to be a shame. You were really good in bed." He depressed the button on the remote.
And then Phillip was gone.
It was almost as if he was never there.
*****
Detective Arker pulled a pair of shades out from his jacket pocket and donned them. Detective Powers eyed him curiously.
"What are you doing, John?" He finally said after he had gotten enough amusement out of Johns attempts at posing, only to be passed over without a glance by the many tourists milling about.
"There isn't a hint of sunshine," Bertram said. "Take the shades off."
John shook his head adamantly. "Temporal glasses," he said. "Do you want your eyeballs to get temporally displaced?"
"Seeing the future might be nice." Bertram grinned slyly at him. Psychic ability was a side effect of staring for too long at a certain type of temporal storm. The people of Earth in 2008 hadn't yet discovered that it was, in fact, a real possibility to see the future. It was an easy thing to do when one's eyeballs and by extension one's neural pathways had become permanently linked to a tear in the fabric of time. Of course there was always the opposite effect.
"Yeah, but you could get stuck seeing the past over and over," John replied. "Do you really want that?"
Bertram chuckled to himself at John's showiness. What John lacked in confidence he made up in false bravado. Bertram was used to it.
"Look." Detective Powers removed a small computer from his back pocket. He activated a time field and they disappeared from view of the passers by. This allowed him ample room to flick on the holographic display without attracting a crowd. He moved through various displays full of numbers before finally settling on one screen.
"Not that kind of storm," Bertram said and nudged his partner with his elbow.
An alarm sounded from the computer, and Bertram pulled up yet another screen. Not a few yards away a minor time slip had occurred.
"Well, they're not even trying now." John clicked through to the signature. "This is blatant use of a unauthorized TTD. What the fuck is going on?"
"I think we should call for back up," Bertram decided as he looked nervously up at the impending storm.
"You see those clouds, John. This isn't good. Someone is playing at something here, and innocent people are going to pay the price if we don't get someone else in here right now!"
"But you see that!" John pointed at the display where a homing signal flickered on and off. "The guy is right there! We can apprehend him and put an end to this ourselves. We can get out of the basement, Bert. Don't you want that? Don't you want to show those fools upstairs what we're made of?"
"Of course I do," Bertram snapped. "But this...Jumping with an unauthorized TTD? Only stupid kids and idiots do that. These guys have been smart enough to use a cipher to hide their tracks. They've got enough technology to conjure up one hell of a storm! This can't be coincidence. It's got to be a trap."
"They think they're smart," John replied. "Confidence breeds carelessness. This could be our lucky break. We've got to take the chance."
Bertram wanted to call for backup. He knew it was the best option. He knew they wouldn't be looked down upon because of it. The fact remained that they were the bottom of the barrel, and they would probably never get recognition for it either. John's field skills and Bertram's technologically inclined brain were going to be doomed to spend the rest of their lives in a basement monitoring naturally occurring minor slippage. He sighed and held his hand out towards the area where the homing beacon was directing them.
"After you, Detective." Bertram grinned.
"I knew you would see the light," John said an returned the grin. "You'll see, Bert. We're going to be heroes!"
*****
*****
"Right, so..." David eyed the newcomer. They had been trapped in the small room for longer than an hour. The prospect of meeting Snoopy had somehow sounded so enticing coming from the manager, Mary's, lips. Snoopy left a lot to be desired, however. He was only a blond kid in an over-sized costume. He hadn't even been wearing the head. His scrawny neck stuck out from the giant neck hole, and his unkempt blond hair hung stingily down to his shoulders. His eyes were bloodshot.
Snoopy hadn't been the strangest thing to happen. It only took Jerry five minutes of disappointment, followed by consternation, then bewilderment, to determine that the door had been locked, and anybody who tried to open one of the windows was greeted with a sharp electric shock. He'd gotten angry then and had attempted to throw a chair through one of them. The chair only bounced off an invisible force field and tumbled away into a corner. Jody and Catherine had found each other and had found their own corner to sit in and cling on to each other. They were strangers, but they were the only girls there, and they took comfort in each other as the boys ranted and raved and banged furtively on the walls.
And then he was there, as if he had always been there.
He was a skinny kid, somewhere between David and Jason's age. His hair was dark, almost black, and he was wide eyed, bewildered, and shocked. He pulled a small, black, square device from his pocket and thumbed desperately at the buttons.
"We haven't got any service," David finally informed him. He couldn't stand watching the boy pressing buttons and becoming increasingly more distressed.
He looked up at David and blinked. His icy blue eyes were startling against his brunette hair. They were the only thing about his previous appearance that had been the truth. He heaved a despairing sigh and pocketed the device that David had assumed was a cellular phone.
"You're right," he muttered. He sighed again and looked around.
"You can stop banging on the walls," he said loudly. "We're never going to get out."
Jerry, Jason, and Ned turned from their appointed wall banging tasks and faced the new comer. They were curious only for a moment before they resumed what they were doing.
He couldn't take it then. The boy sank to the ground with a shudder and shielded his eyes in hopes that it would stem the oncoming tide of tears that threatened to burst forth.
"Are you okay?" David asked from his standing vantage point.
"He said he loved me," Phillip cried. "I only made one mistake."
David looked uncomfortably towards the girls. He thought they might do a better job of consoling the stranger, but they were lost in their own little world of despair
"This was supposed to be fun!" Phillip wailed and made desperate flailing gestures about the room from his spot on the floor.
David crouched down.
"We all thought snoopy was supposed to be fun," David replied. He scratched his head and pondered that. They were all far too old for cartoon characters. It was truly inexplicable to him.
"That was only a mask," Phillip sniffed. "I slipped one into Mary's pocket. Everything the woman says from now on is going to seem like the best idea ever."
"What are you talking about?" David asked. He was the only person paying attention to Phillip. At least he was trying to. As far as he could tell the man was making no sense at all.
"Nevermind." Phillip sniffed once and stood up. He was nattily dressed in black trousers and a perfectly pressed shirt adorned with a waistcoat. He smoothed down the front of his shirt and made his way towards an overturned chair. He righted the furniture and calmly sat down upon it. He gestured towards another chair, and David joined him.
"Shouldn't we help..."
"There's nothing we can do," Phillip replied sadly. "It's the perfect crime. All we have left to do is wait."
*****
Mary eyed the two men marching up to her. She wondered what they wanted and if they would try to get in the way of her plans. She wasn't going to let that happen. They stopped a few yards away from her. She tried her very best to look innocent by shuffling her feet and staring at the floor, occasionally glancing at her watch.
"Is it her?" John asked his partner.
Bertram shook his head in the negative as he gazed attentively at his hand-held. "She's 21st century human alright, but she's carrying around a mask."
"A mask?" The surprise in John's voice was apparent. "Shit. Can you disable it?"
"No," Bertram replied. "That kind of technology is far too advanced for this computer. Can we call for backup now?"
"C'mon," John scoffed at him. "A little mask never hurt anybody. It'll be far less effective now that we know she's wearing one."
"This is a stupid idea," Bertram grumbled. He was hoping that his partner would hang back and give him yet another chance to do a little convincing. It was a bad idea. They both knew it, but the lure for redemption was proving far too great for both of them. John plowed on ahead, and Bertram followed in suit.
They arrived in front of Mary, who smiled pleasantly at them and asked if she could help them.
Their hardened detective exteriors melted the instant they came within range of the mask. They both grinned dreamily at her and flashed their badges in an effort to impress her. The mousy brown haired girl suddenly looked like the most gorgeous captivating thing either of them had ever seen. They knew it was only the mask, but there was nothing they could do to break out of the spell. She deactivated the door lock and led them inside.
The rest of the captives turned to stare at her. Emotions of rage, and confusion flickered across their faces, but Mary only smiled sweetly and told them that if they just sat tight the wait staff would be around to provide complimentary boysenberry mimosas for all. That seemed to satiate them enough for the moment.
"Now I'll just take those Time Travel Devices," she heard herself say even though she had no idea what it meant. John Arker and Bertram Powers handed them over without a word of protest. She thanked them politely for their cooperation and exited the room. The door clicked shut after her and the force field reactivated around them, and then The Time Detectives snapped out of their trance.
"Fuck!" Bertram crowed, then shoved his partner as hard as he could. John let him take out his frustration. He knew that this time he deserved it.
"I told you to call in for backup!" Bertram yelled. "But no! We have to be heroes. Some heroes we turned out to be. Now we're trapped too."
John hung his head. He knew he had been wrong. Again. Maybe he did deserve to be in the basement, and this time he had dragged Bertram down with him. One partner...stuck in a time loop, and the other...well, who knew what was in store for them.
*****
Above the Knott's Berry Farm Restaurant, the storm clouds crackled to life. The thunderheads crept lower and lower to the ground as the tourists stopped their busy bustling about to look at the impressive weather. It wasn't raining. Temporal storms never rained. The clouds were plumped, full with time. The time that was, the time that is, and the time that will be, all roiled around in one big temporal stew, ready to descend upon the poor, unsuspecting population. The storms were generally wild and uncontainable, and rare. There was only so much a time detective could do to protect the populations should one naturally occur.
It wasn't a naturally occurring storm though. It was man made, and it was controlled all the way down to the very last detail. Gerald watched from his hidden camera in a galaxy far away, in a time line that had yet to be created. He laughed at the chaos he was creating as he directed the cloud down over the back end of his target...The Knott's Berry Farm Restaurant and the room that housed his captive audience. There had never been a temporal storm quite like it, and that pleased him. He was doing something that had never been seen before just because he could, and he was going to get away with it. Nobody would ever suspect the son of an ambassador to be involved in such dangerous and illegal activities. But he was bored, and he needed something new to play with.
There was a knock on his door. He quickly deflated the holographic display, straightened his tie, and walked over to answer it. His mother stood there, dressed in her finest. They were expected at a charity ball, father, mother and son. They would show up and look their best and play to the crowd and give their speeches. Then they would go home, and the mother would get drunk, and the father would be ensconced in his diplomatic responsibilities for the rest of the night. No one would even know about the storm until the things around them started to change. It would be subtle at first, but as the days went by the changes would become more dramatic. Nobody would ever know the difference though. It would only seem as if that future was the one that was always meant to be. Now that Phillip was gone only Gerald would know the truth.
He had rewritten his very own Time line.
*****
Detective John Arker stood on a table and commanded the attention of the captives, while Bertram stood at ground level with his arm crossed, a scowl adoring his face. They had no way to contact help within the force field, and with their TTD's gone, rescue was impossible. The storm was descending upon them and it was apparent that it was being controlled and being funneled in their direction for reasons unknown. There would be no riding this out. They were going to slip through time, and the people had to be prepared.
"What you see out there is a temporal storm," Arker shouted over the whine of the swirling winds. "We're about to slip through a tear in the fabric of time and...well, we don't know where we're going to come out. This kind of thing is uncontrollable."
Phillip sat next to David, who had provided a boysenberry mimosa. They had found a cart full of champagne and a few jugs of juice hidden in a closet. They'd kept the find to themselves and the champagne seemed to have calmed Phillip down drastically. He was staring glassy eyed up at the time detective who was giving the speech, the back of his head resting lightly on David's shoulder. David's discomfort at the situation had slowly but surely melted away.
Phillip giggled drunkenly then turned his head to whisper in David's ear.
"Here comes the part about the light and the sonic boom."
"...and you'll see a flash of light," Detective Arker was saying from his makeshift platform. "You won't feel anything. You won't know anything. It'll will be like you don't exist in that moment. And you don't. You'll have broken apart traveling through time and come back together on the other end. It's a complicated business, lots of maths, isn't that right, Detective Powers?"
"Yes, lots of maths." Bertram nodded vigorously. "It's not dangerous," he added when he noted the look of concern and dread on the faces of the captives.
"No, it's not," Detective Arker confirmed. "It does take a lot of energy to bring the particles back together, so you'll hear a loud noise when you rematerialize. It's coming from inside of you, but don't worry. It doesn't hurt. It just takes some getting used to."
"How did you know that?" David murmured in awe, but Phillip didn't answer. He had fallen asleep.
He did not wake up when the storm swallowed them up, and he did not awaken for the sonic boom either.
*****
It was quiet where they had landed. The force field had dissipated and it was dark.
"Have you got anything?" John asked Bertram as they sat there contemplating their next move. The rest of the captives sat huddled and frightened in the middle of the room, the detectives having forbade them to attempt going outside. They had no idea when or where they were after all.
"The computer's working," Bertram said. "Thank heaven for small miracles."
"Can you call out?"
"Now's the time for back up, huh?" Bertram looked smugly up at his partner from behind his glasses. "Now that we're in deep shit up to our eyeballs."
"Past our eyeballs," John confirmed with a sigh. "I'll take the blame if we ever get back."
"No, it's fine." Bertram shrugged. "I'd rather go down with you. If I'm with you maybe I won't get stuck in a time loop for eight months..."
"Look, that wasn't my fault," John grumbled. "She let her guard down. Alric Van Die Welt is clever. You don't think he..."
"No." Bertram shook his head adamantly. "This doesn't bear his signature. This place isn't on the map."
"What?" John stared incredulously at Bertram who was staring at his hand held computer.
"Not on the map." Bertram confirmed.
"That's not possible," John replied. "Everywhere is on the map. We can't have gone beyond the map. It goes out several trillion years in either direction...I..."
"No," Bertram said. "That's not what I mean. This when is on the map. This place is not."
"Shit." John slapped a hand over his eyes and groaned. "That is not good."
"Nope." Bertram stood up himself and pocketed his computer.
"This storm has overwritten a time line," John sighed. "Crap. A brand new..."
"Yep," Bertram gave voice to a Time Detective's biggest fear. "It's not a natural expansion. It's a fissure. Where we came from...that time line is eroding. It will be replaced by this one eventually."
John surveyed the frightened crowd.
"So these people are important?"
"I would assume so," Bertram replied. "I mean, they could attribute the building damage that taking this room left back on Earth...to, I don't know, an earthquake or something. Taking a building isn't going to cause a fissure. At worst it would create a few new expansions."
Taking away important people, however was a different story altogether. Get enough of them in a room together, and transport that room across time and space...
"We are so getting fired," John said.
Bertram knew very well that it was all John's fault for not calling in the back up, but he wasn't going to let the detective sit there fall into a depressed state of inaction. They may very well be stuck in god knows where for the rest of eternity...a place which very well might not even have a sustainable atmosphere or anything edible. They had both been to many places like that in their travels. In any case, Bertram wasn't going to give up. Not without a fight.
"Come on." He punched lightly at his partner's shoulder. "We have protocol for situations like these."
"Bert..."
"Listen," Bertram leaned over and whispered at John. "There was a time jump that led us here. One of these people is not who they seem to be. Let's get going. We've got some interviews to do."
*****
David was the last person Bertram interviewed. John had gone through his entire list of interviewees as well, and had not found one suspicious character. He hadn't found that any of them were likely to be great world leaders, or anything else that might affect a change as big as a fissure, but he knew as well as anybody else the hidden potential that most human beings carried around within them.
"Just think," Bertram sighed exasperatedly. "Was there anybody who just sort of appeared?"
David scowled. The detective had asked him the same question a hundred times or so it seemed.
"No, I told you," David grumbled. "We were all eating brunch with our families than the lady came and told us we won a special meeting with the man in the snoopy costume." He pointed towards Ned...who was still snoopy-fied and curled up asleep in the corner of the room, using his giant Snoopy head as a pillow.
"We all thought it was the greatest thing ever."
"Yeah," Bertram said. He rolled his wrist in an effort to cajole David into skipping over that part of the story. He'd heard it all before. "That was the mask."
"That's what Phillip said."
Bertram perked up at that.
"What?" he asked.
"I said, that's what Phillip said." David eyed the detective suspiciously. "What's going on?"
"What else did Phillip say?" Bertram eagerly continued his line of questioning.
"He...nothing. Look, he's upset. His boyfriend just broke up with him."
Bertram scowled at the teenager. He knew he was leaving something out.
David collapsed under the weight of Bertram's angry expression. If there was anything that his father had taught him it was to respect authority figures.
"Look, he was trying to call him on his cell, but we had no service. Then he tried to tell the guys that we couldn't get out of the room. I mean. We couldn't. It's not like he knew something we didn't."
"Keep going," Bertram prodded his witness.
"He knew." David looked down at his hands and muttered the words more to himself than to Bertram. He didn't want to get Phillip in trouble, and more than that...he didn't want Phillip to have done something wrong.
"Knew what?"
"He knew about the sonic boom and the light."
Bertram stood and lay a hand on David's shoulder. "That'll be all. Thank you."
And with that dismissal David returned to sit next to his new friend on the other side of the room.
"What did you tell them?" Phillip sat on his chair facing forward. He knew very well that David had told the detectives everything. They would be there at any moment to interrogate him.
"You knew about the sonic boom," David replied softly. "You've time traveled before."
"Yeah, so?" Phillip said. "Lots of people have."
"Are you from the future?"
"Don't ask me that." Phillip kept his blue eyes pointing straight ahead.
"Did you do this?"
"I said don't ask me that."
*****
"Do you believe any of this," Jason asked Ned. Jody and Catherine had both joined them and they were shaking their heads negatively. Ned however was nodding away.
"I knew we could time travel," Ned spoke, then giggled. "It's all a conspiracy, man. To keep us from the gold."
"What are you talking about?" Catherine asked. She was somehow entranced by Ned's stream of conscious babbling.
"The golden city, man. It's out there in time!" He accompanied his story with grand sweeping gestures of his arms. Jason only rolled his eyes at his friend.
"Is he always like this?" Catherine asked. She tried to sound amused, but her amusement only came out scared and confused.
"Yeah, pretty much," Jody confirmed it.
"He's still a little high," Jason admitted. Ned ignored both of them and kept ranting about forbidden golden cities hidden away by the aliens through time
*****
"Phillip," Bertram said his name, and it sounded like an order. An order to follow the detective. An order to confess.
Phillip had nothing left to lose. He was no longer the handsome blond young man that had so captivated Mary that very morning. He was shown as he truly was, as scared boy longing for acceptance. He thought he had found it with Gerald, and he'd let the older man mold him into whatever he wanted through the use of the masking device. That was over, though. It was time to face up to the truth.
"What time are you from?" Bertram asked as he offered Phillip a seat. John sized him up and squinted imperiously at him.
"I'm from the 82nd century," he said. "Planet 82393179274."
"Right," John nodded to himself. He let a smile creep over his face. He had vacationed on that planet many times. "The one with all the suns."
"Yeah." Phillip shrugged. It was beautiful to some. To the natives it only made the planet very hot and uncomfortable. At least that was how it had been for Phillip when he was living on the streets. The sun glinting off the golden towers of the rich held no beauty for him; not even when the men of repute cornered him in the alleyways at night and took him up in those towers to lay him down in their beds for no payment more than a place to sleep and a cup of coffee in the morning. Such was the way of the Golden Utopia as the planet was commonly nicknamed for the rich perpetual sunset light that the quadruple suns provided every corner of the planet at all times. As with most Utopias...it really wasn't. Brochures could make everything seem so nice.
"Can I go now then?" Phillip wondered as the detectives weren't saying anything. They seemed to be lost in thought.
"No," John spoke up. "Let's have it."
"Let's have what?" Phillip wondered.
"The Time Travel Device," Bertram supplied the answer to his query. "Let's have it, kid. You didn't just fall out of the sky. Your atoms would be scattered across all corners of the universe if you didn't have one to unscramble you upon your arrival."
Phillip sighed and handed over the TTD.
"Nice," Bertram couldn't help but marvel as he held it in his hand. "Have you ever seen one from the 82nd?" He handed it over to John.
"Once or twice," John replied. "This isn't from the 82nd though." He arched a skeptical eyebrow at Phillip. "Are you going to tell us when you're really from?"
"I swear," Phillip replied. "I never even seen a real one of those things until Gerald showed me! I'd only ever studied them in textbooks."
"And who is Gerald," Bertram asked.
"My friend," Phillip muttered. "Or at least I thought he was. This was his plan. He thought he could get away with it, and I cocked things up. That's why he dumped me here. It doesn't work."
Bertram pressed the Time Travel Device's on button and nothing happened.
"He's smart," Phillip uttered miserably. "He's really smart and he disabled it. I don't know how to fix it. I went to school to become a coder before...things. Temporal mathematics was my concentration... I can cover up time tracks; I'm good at that. "
"Yeah, right!" Bertram opened his mouth before thinking and laughed at the boy. "The McSven algorithm? Come on, even John could see that one coming and he's the muscle of the operation here."
"Excuse me," John cut in. "But John is the ONLY one who saw that coming, by the way."
"It would have taken us days to figure it out if you'd used something like..."
"The Galactian Cipher," Phillip supplied. "I fucking know, okay?"
"ooo, that's a good one," Bertram conceded. "That may have taken a couple of weeks to decode one jump if we'd even been able to see it at all until it was too late."
"It is too late," Phillip muttered caustically. He glared up at the older man with his blue eyes gleaming. "Gerald got away with it. Look at us. Some of the most brilliant minds of the twenty first century...trapped in a fissured time line. The world's going to change, detectives, and it's Gerald who changed it."
Detective Arker continued on his crusade of silent eyebrow arching skepticism, prompting Phillip to let slip even more of his feelings.
"He was brilliant," Phillip said sadly. "I loved him."
"And you see how you've been repaid," John snapped. Then he addressed Bertram.
"At least we know we're among the best and the brightest..."
"You weren't supposed to be here," Phillip pointed out. "If I'd have used the right cipher..."
"Hindsight," John replied. "Enough of this lovey dovey talk. This Gerald...what was his plan exactly anyway? Cause a fissure, replace the time-line...to what end?"
"He wanted to see if he could do it," Phillip replied with a shrug. "He wanted to steal some of the greatest minds, break the time line, and then put it back before anybody noticed. The perfect crime. He's going to put us back. I just know he is. All we have to do is just sit here for a couple of days."
"I don't think I believe that," John said then turned to his partner. "Do you believe it?"
"Not really," Bertram agreed. "I mean, come on, man. Do you really think he's going to put us back now that he's stuck two detectives with a witness...nay! an accomplice?"
"I loved him," Phillip replied sadly. It wasn't really an answer to the question, and it was barely an excuse. He had been used for his skills at temporal mathematics. It was what he had gone to school for before he fell on hard times and turned to a life on the streets, turning tricks for money. Gerald had seen something in him. He had seen the potential and the intelligence. Gerald had taken the masking device and made Phillip everything he wanted to be...tall, strong, blonde, titled. Everyone in Gerald's circle knew him as Sir Phillip of Clim-Port, a wealthy and bustling sea side town on the opposite side of the planet. He had gone from a nobody to a somebody overnight, but having come to know that that he had been used...he was ashamed. He felt more ashamed for falling so hard for a man such as Gerald than he ever had for being a rent boy.
"Alright," Bertram sighed. "We've all been in love, and none of us are going anywhere. We'll keep your TTD if you don't mind."
"Fine." Phillip shrugged.
"I think it would be best if you all try to get some sleep. There are some tablecloths in that closet with the champagne, right?"
Phillip nodded.
"Good," Bertram said. "Why don't you and David hand them out. We'll work on this some more tomorrow. Maybe you know a way to get back..."
"I don't," Phillip replied. "The TTD is broken. I don't see any other way. I'm good at temporal mathematics...the mechanics of the machine, especially a future model..."
"Get some rest kid." Bertram smiled kindly and finally shooed the boy away.
"What was that about?" John asked. "You're being awfully nice to the bad guy."
"Bad guy, hardly," Bertram scoffed. "That kid isn't the brains."
"Still an accomplice. Still a criminal," John said. "It doesn't lessen his crime because he was in love with some criminal mastermind."
"Maybe," Bertram said. "Still doesn't change the fact that we're all stuck here. I really don't think he's a threat to anybody anymore."
"We're still keeping watch," John said.
"Of course," Bertram agreed. "I wasn't going to argue that. I mean, I wouldn't put it past one of these great minds of the twenty first century to go wandering out in the darkness of a hostile...possibly alien environment either."
