“They can assume it.”
Bethany thought it over. “Okay. If Rob Pullman flies from Baltimore to Yuma, it’s almost unthinkable that their algorithms will flag it. And if he flies into the next town over from Yuma, there’s not a chance.” She took out her phone. “Rob’s gonna need a membership with Falcon Jet.”
Paige glanced at Travis. She managed a passing smile. “He’ll need a better job to swing it.”
“I get double time on Sundays,” Travis said.
“I’ll give him an oil tycoon uncle whose cholesterol intake caught up with him last spring,” Bethany said.
“While you’re at it,” Travis said, “give him an encounter with Renee on a park bench.”
Rob Pullman booked a private flight to Imperial, California, fifty miles west of Yuma. The ticket agent smiled politely, but nobody showed up to arrest them. The agent said the plane would be ready in forty-five minutes. They found an outdoor food court that was all but deserted, and ordered lunch.
Paige ate two huge slices of pizza in a few minutes. She hadn’t eaten since early the night before. She washed them down with most of a large Pepsi.
The food court looked straight down the airport’s busiest runway, eighty yards from its approach lights. Airliners passing overhead in the last seconds of their descent made the glass tabletop rattle.
Paige waited silently for one—a DC-10, Travis thought—to land, and then she said, “Most of what I know you’ve already figured out for yourselves. I’ll tell you the rest. Then at least we’ll have the same gaps.”
She spent a few seconds considering how to begin.
“We started testing the two cylinders Monday morning, in the labs. The first time we turned one of them on, it didn’t project the opening right away. Instead it made a sound. A sequence of high-pitched tones, like some kind of start-up process. We realized after a few seconds that both cylinders were making the sounds, in perfect unison, even though we’d only switched on one of them.”
“Were they synchronizing with each other?” Bethany said. “Matching up so they’d open onto the same point in the future?”
“They might have been doing that,” Paige said. “But there’s something else they were definitely doing, which we didn’t figure out until later. I’ll explain it when I get to that part.” She took a sip of her Pepsi. “The tone sequence lasted a little over three minutes. Then it stopped, and immediately after that, the projection appeared, from the one cylinder we’d switched on. Through the opening, all we could see was darkness. And then the smell hit us. Stale, dead air, like what it might smell like in a disused mine. We all put on ventilators. It helped a little. Then we shone flashlights into the darkness, and it didn’t take us long to realize what we were looking at.” Her eyes went back and forth between Travis and Bethany. “You know how it works, and you know we eventually determined that it was safe to go through, so I can skip to the relevant stuff. For starters, Border Town is empty in the future. The equipment is gone. The computers and paper records are gone.” She paused. “All the entities are gone.”
Travis felt the wind shift around. Felt it blow cool across the back of his neck.
“We checked out the whole place,” Paige said. “We spent the better part of Monday down there, walking the empty rooms and hallways of the complex. There are no bodies. No signs of any struggle. Basic furniture is still there. Some of the beds are made, some aren’t. It looks the way it would on any random afternoon, if everyone just left and shut off the power on their way out. That’s how it was in every lab, every residence, every common area. And then we went to look at the thing we were most anxious to see.”
“The Breach,” Travis said.
Paige nodded.
“We couldn’t get to it,” she said. “We climbed down the elevator shaft, and three stories from the bottom we saw that it was a lost cause. Starting at Level 48 the shaft was filled in, and there was no way in the world to excavate it. It’d be impossible, even if you could move heavy equipment into the future through the projected opening, bit by bit.”
“Why?” Travis said. “What’s filling it?”