The Time of The Cat 53

The Park

The mountain wind was still from the north and had picked up so that it felt a lot colder. There was a trace of frost forming on the rocks as we came out of the Fall River transporter head, and the stars appeared even brighter than before. I shivered and looked around for Jefferson, but there was no sign of him near the door.

Rudy, Joe, and Stormbreaker started down towards the car, walking cautiously in the moonlight and stopping to listen for Pug-bear sounds every few steps. Liz started after them and then realized that I had turned up the slope and halted to see what I was doing.

As I stepped upwards into the chill wind, I realized that whatever had happened during my encounter with the old Pug-bear had made a permanent difference to my perceptual ability. I was now aware of my surroundings in a way that I’d never experienced. It was kind of like having super-sensitive hearing and sight, but I realized that my eyes didn’t need to be open to see! My feeling of more acute senses was paired with a mental receptivity to thoughts and patterns of energy.

I stood still and looked up at the stars. They suddenly seemed brighter and looked as if they were coming down on me for a moment. I felt dizzy, and my head felt strange, but then everything straightened out. It was like plunging into a cold pool of water. It was a shock, but then I got used to it.

My perception opened and spread out. I was aware of little nuances in the wind, of the pattern of light and shadows that the moon made, and of... Something pulled at the edge of my mind. Something that was familiar and was up the hill from my location.

I focused my attention, sensing a feeling of desolation and loneliness along with a distinctive impression of total self-confidence. That could only be coming from Jefferson. Following the energy flow in some way that I couldn’t describe, I walked up the hill about a hundred yards as Liz watched.

I used my newfound ability to send thoughts and summoned him, putting a sort of signature flourish on my thought as I did. I could sense that he viewed me in a particular way, and the flourish that I created contained some of the elements he associated with me. My mental signature had equal parts of strength, large size, fighting ability, and kindness. As I sent it, I realized that I had created a personal identity pattern that would be helpful in sending messages to humans as well as to our feline partner.

I heard a querulous “Meowp?” carried on the wind from behind a boulder farther upslope, then a quick rush as he ran full speed down to me. I had to shift gears and come back to my normal sense pattern in order to catch him as he jumped at me from about ten feet away.

Don’t let anyone tell you that cats are light. You try and catch twenty pounds of furry lightning coming at around thirty miles per hour. It wasn’t easy, and I had a hard time keeping my footing on the slope. It was worth the effort, though. I could hear him starting to purr even before he hit my arms.

Now reunited with our cat (I’d say ‘kitty’ affectionately, but that would be too demeaning to our furry warrior), we started down after the others. As we walked, I extended my senses, searching for any aliens. The area seemed clear, and we hurried to catch up.

Stormbreaker cautioned us that we’d better slow down and watch for ambushes, but I told him not to worry about it. That necessitated a discussion that took several minutes. The main problem was due to my being unable to find satisfactory words to describe my suddenly increased abilities. I couldn’t seem to make them understand that something had happened to my senses.

There was considerable resistance on their part, and I got the impression that the idea offended Stormbreaker. He felt that one of the strengths that he brought to our group was his ability to track and encompass the natural environment to the point where no animal could surprise him. He was upset because I was now telling him I could sense the presence of other creatures better than he could.

We discussed it for a while, but I finally told them to watch my lips and then held them very still as I mentally broadcast to them, “Enhanced perception isn’t all I can do.”

This caused Joe, who hadn’t been paying much attention, to jump. Rudy tapped on the side of his head in a puzzled manner, while Stormbreaker only muttered something about, “Damned, weird white men.”

I was going to send them a second thought, but the transporter suddenly exploded. There was a flash and a loud ‘boom’ as the thing went off. We spun around and saw a large part of the ridgeback structure fall into its component pieces. There was a rattle as debris fell around us. A rumble followed as many of the larger pieces came rolling down in our direction.

We scrambled up the side of the shallow valley we’d been following on our trek downward and huddled behind a large boulder. The rock slide rattled past us, staying mostly in the gully. There were a number of loud cracks as good-sized rocks hit the other side of our shelter. Some of the debris flew over the top, and Rudy yelled out an imprecation as he was struck.

The landslide faded out, still moving downhill, and we took a deep breath of relief.

“What made that thing blow?” Rudy asked, rubbing his head where a goose egg was forming.

“I’m not totally sure,” I answered, “but I have an idea. Remember, we’ve never noticed any time lag as we went through the transporters. It’s as if the trip has been instantaneous, no matter whether we were going next door or to the alien base.”

I paused as I realized that I somehow knew far more about the transporters than I’d realized. The subconscious knowledge I’d received from the ‘Ancient One’ seemed to bubble up when I needed it. Now that I’d had some time to start to assimilate the knowledge, I suddenly realized that the ‘Ancient-One’ had not really understood it. The information had been lifted from some other creature’s mind that the ‘Ancient-One’ had dominated. Perhaps that was why it leaked it to me on a secondary channel; it didn’t recognize the value of what I was assimilating.

The thought made me stutter a little, but then I continued, “Th-The only thing that can move that rapidly are so-called ‘torsion waves’ that are movements in the quantum plenum. These waves can travel about a billion times faster than light and are responsible for things like quantum entanglement.”

I took a deep breath, “If I understand correctly, the transporters are linked on a quantum level. We didn’t travel through space when we went through them; we de-materialized somehow into an energy field. Then we were transmitted far faster than light in torsion waveform. We re-materialized into our bodies as we exited from the linked destination portal.”

“That’s why most of the transporters only have one or two connections. It’s too difficult for them to build ones that can be ‘tuned’ to numerous destinations. They simply use quantum entanglement to link the structures of two of the transporter heads together. They’ve only recently gotten far enough along to be able to place two such linked heads in the same mechanism, each activated by its own button.” Liz was shaking my arm, trying to interrupt the flow of subconscious information that I was spewing. “How do you know all of that?” she demanded.

“Yeah. Where did that come from? You’ve never acted like a theoretical physicist before,” Rudy added.

I thought about it for a moment, “I received a lot more information from the Pug-bear than it thought I was receiving. There was kind of an undercurrent of... I don’t know how to describe it.”

I shook my head in frustration and then went on, “I think the alien somehow imparted a lot more knowledge than it intended. To its surprise, when I was able to resist its control and then struck back, it shoved even more information into my mind. It was totally shocked that I could send a mental strike through its control. I remember feeling like I understood everything clearly for a moment as I attacked. I think I’m going to begin to remember things from that connection that I couldn’t otherwise know.”

“But what caused the transporter to explode?” Rudy hadn’t forgotten the point of my original monologue.

“I was getting to that when I was interrupted,” I looked at Liz with a smile. “The transporters are linked instantaneously, and the central controlling unit was the one on Titan. When it blew up, this one lost the controlling influence of the other, and it blew up, also. They’re inherently unstable without that central control. The control linkage passes through the entire network. Why – ” I stopped as it hit me.

“None of their transporters are working now!” Liz filled in. She’d been following me closely and understood the critical point.

“They’re without their main advantage. The aliens on Earth are isolated, and they can’t transport,” I concluded.

“I hope that’s right,” Stormbreaker said. He was unwilling to believe we could be that lucky.

The others looked somewhat skeptical, but even so, the ramifications of what I’d told them stopped the discussion, and we started to move on toward the vehicles while they were thinking about what it might mean. Despite being able to move more easily due to my enhanced senses, it still took us some time to get back down to the road. We climbed up on the gravel and huddled to discuss our next step.

“I believe that we may have stopped the invasion for at least a few years,” I started to explain, but Liz interrupted me with a question.

“How long has it been since the bombs should have gone off?” she asked.

“Well, the short answer is that they went off when the transporter blew up, but I think I see what you’re trying to get at,” I looked at her, and she nodded encouragingly. “Let’s see. I set the timers for about fifteen minutes, and it probably took us a couple of minutes to get back through the two transporters. Then I had to retrieve Jefferson, and that took maybe five minutes. We caught up to the guys, and that took us another few minutes. We had that argument where I had to convince everyone that we were safe – ”

Stormbreaker interjected, “Yeah. Then there was that ‘boom,’ and we had to dodge falling rocks. We might be safe in your dreams – maybe. I’m not feeling happy until I see the last of those things dead.”

“I agree completely,” I responded. “But, what I was saying is that the discussion took about another ten minutes, so we’ve taken almost an hour to get here in total.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Liz. “Look up there to the west,” she pointed. “That’s Saturn right there.”

We could all see the shining planet hovering in the ecliptic.

“I think that it takes about seventy minutes or so for light to travel from there to Earth,” she explained. “If I’m right – ”

There was a flash of light that was momentarily brighter than the planet. It sparkled a little but wasn’t terribly bright overall. Even multiple atomic bombs aren’t powerful enough to make much of a flash from almost eight hundred million miles.

“That flash was from an explosion that happened about seventy minutes ago based on light speed. It must have been from the bombs. If you’re correct, and you seemed to be making some sense for a change, then all of the transporters all over the world blew up when it went off,” Liz summarized.

“That will certainly get everyone’s attention. A lot of those things are hidden in heavily populated areas, and there’s likely to be a lot of damage and casualties,” I responded.

We climbed in the truck and car and headed back down Old Fall River road towards Estes Park.