Paradox Gate

The time has come . . . to reinvent time. Oklahoma native Ben Culver possesses a sudden, strange power. Much like a sleepwalker, without awareness or intent, he begins to travel through time--into the past, into the future, and into serious trouble. Maude and Lucas Hawthorn, owners of an exclusive time travel agency in Kansas, hope to find Ben fast, before someone turns the sacred space-time continuum into cosmic Swiss cheese. For Ben has unwittingly provided the means for the evil genius Kaffer to escape from his pyramid prison and accomplish his diabolical goal: wipe out the Whispers--the Hawthorns' time-jumping friends who are searching for their origins back in the very roots of time. And it is there, deep in time, that the Hawthorns must discover the secret of Ben's uncanny abilities, stop the timemonger, and save the world from the lost realities and alternate universes that threaten to end it forever . . .

Dan Parkinson is the author of The Whispers and Faces of Infinity (Books One and Two of The Gates of Time), and the Timecop novels (Viper's Spawn, The Scavenger, and Blood Ties), as well as many westerns and a number of successful TSR fantasy novels.

Anywhen, Inc.
Eastwood, Kansas
The Present

Lucas Hawthorn had seen missing-persons posters before, but never one quite like this. have you seen this person? the big print demanded. or this house?

The two photographs below were of excellent quality, printed in full-color graphics on 20-pound rag bond: a head-and-shoulders of a young man with unruly blond hair and startled blue eyes, and a good-quality snapshot--like a Realtor's-book presentation--of a neat, small house on a town lot.

Maude peered over his shoulder, studying the pictures thoughtfully, then raised her eyes to the young woman across the kitchen table. Nancy Culver might have been in her twenties, a pretty girl with blond hair and skeptical blue eyes. "I suppose you've done the usual things," Maude suggested. "I mean, like talk to some of your brother's neighbors about any unusual activity, or maybe if they noticed which way the house went? Houses generally don't move around very much."

Nancy Culver nodded. "Of course I have. They're just as baffled as I am. Ben has always been a little weird, and he's disappeared before--a time or two--but this is the first time he ever took his house with him. The people next door are pretty upset about it."

"Sudden disappearance can be upsetting," Lucas assured her.

"They aren't upset about Ben," Nancy corrected. "They're upset about the hole where his house was. The whole house is gone, right down to the flashing under the foundation, and the water main ran wide open for two days before they noticed it. It filled the hole with water, and their cat keeps jumping in. They've filed a complaint with the city, I think." She sipped her coffee, gazing around at the interior of the Hawthorns' house. "This is an unusual arrangement," she said. "What did you do, replace the front wall?"

"That whole corner of the house," Maude indicated. "There wasn't anything left so we just restructured the whole thing. Do you like it?"

"Storm?" Nancy asked.

"Zen-gun attack," Lucas said. "A rogue time loop from a thousand years in the future tried to wipe us out."

"Lucas short-circuited it with a harpoon gun," Maude added. "So it left us alone and burned a warehouse in Topeka instead. That was in 1887."

Nancy Culver blinked at them. "Yeah," she said. "Sure."

"Try explaining all that to an insurance adjuster." Lucas grinned. "They finally put it down to storm damage from lightning. Anyhow, we changed the roofline and put in bay windows. So, anyway, you're looking for your brother. How did you happen to come here?"

Nancy stood, frowned, and moved around the table to peer through the open double doors adjoining the kitchen. There should have been a dining room there, but it didn't look like any dining room she had ever seen. "What's that?" she asked. "A steel floor?"

"That's the TEF chamber," Maude explained. "The thing on the tower over there--like a cone in a rat's nest--is a temporal effect focalizer. It's what bumps things around from time to time."

"Bumps things ..." Nancy glanced around at them. "You mean like it--it jostles things, now and then?"

"That's another way of putting it," Lucas agreed. "It's future technology. It uses electromagnetic analogy to reverse gravity and light. That's what makes time travel work. This one's primarily an accelerator for Whispers migrating to the past. A booster waystop. But we use it for historical tours. How did you happen to know about Anywhen, Inc., Miss Culver? Did someone refer you to us?"

As though making up her mind, Nancy pulled a business card from her purse and placed it on the table. "I guess this was a referral," she said. "It's your card, isn't it?"

Lucas picked it up. It was one of their own cards--anywhen, inc. with a          logo, fax and phone numbers, and the cheery slogan, have a nice time. He turned it over. Scrawled on the back was a handwritten note: "When you see Ben, tell him Molly said hi."

He read it again, then looked up. "So?"

"So, that note was in my mailbox yesterday morning. Somebody left it for me when I was out, I guess."

"Who's Molly?" Maude asked, reading the card.

"I haven't the vaguest idea. But whoever she is, she left your card in my mailbox, referring to Ben, two weeks after Ben and his house disappeared. That's why I came here. I'm hoping you might know what's going on."

Lucas and Maude looked at the card again, and at each other. Both of them shrugged. "Not a clue," Lucas admitted.

"Do you suppose her brother went somewhen instead of somewhere?" Maude suggested. "We might be able to get a handle on that, if he did." To Nancy she said, "Tell us about Ben."

Nancy shook her head impatiently. "To start with, he's thirty-two years old, going on maybe fourteen. He's irresponsible, unreliable, and unpredictable, and lately he's been almost impossible. He misses appointments, goes to sleep in sales meetings, and acts like his mind is a thousand miles away. He's been like that for months, and I can't find out what's wrong. And he collects the strangest things! His broom closet looks like a closing-out sale at a museum."

"What kind of things?"

"Just ... things. Weird things. Swords and statues and vases, some kind of a spear, a little coneybob thing like that one you have..." She indicated the dining room that wasn't a dining room.

Lucas's brows went up. "A TEF? He has a TEF? Where'd he get it?"

"Where does he get anything?" Nancy shook her head. "I don't think he goes anywhere, and I know he hasn't spent any money on mail order. But things just keep showing up in his house and all he'll say is he hasn't been sleeping very well."

"Where would anybody get a TEF?" Lucas muttered.

Somewhere a little bell sounded. Nancy glanced toward the open doors of the steel-floored transfer chamber, and her eyes went wide.

In the empty room, something was happening. It grew perceptibly darker in there, and abruptly it was full of people ... or almost people. They were more like shadows, dozens of them thronging together, almost filling the room--little, bald people with very large eyes.

The room grew rapidly darker, seeming to slow as it darkened until for the barest instant there was no light or motion at all. Then in that same instant a blaze of unbelievably intense glare filled the space, gone almost before the senses could register it.

And the room was as it had been before--an empty room with a gleaming steel floor and a little tower in one corner, supporting a maze of electronic components and a semitranslucent cone of all colors and no particular color.

Again the little bell rang.

"What--what was that?" Nancy gasped.

"Whispers," Maude said casually. "They were just passing through."

Lucas sat staring at the TEF chamber. "I know where we might get a lead on your brother," he said. "How do you feel about four-dimensional transference?"

"What?"

"Time travel. How do you feel about time travel?"

She looked at him with cynical blue eyes. "Look, I don't judge anybody's fantasies. If you folks sell time travel, that's fine with me. But don't try to sell me. I don't believe in things like that!"

"That's all right, dear," Maude said soothingly. "Most people don't, until they've tried it."

"Our best bet is L-383," Lucas decided. "The Whispers are pretty careful in accounting for TEFs. If anybody can help us find your brother, Teal Fordeen can."

Time Loop L-383

Though the Hawthorns had tried to explain to her what was about to happen when she and Lucas entered the room with the steel floor, Nancy Culver was unprepared for it. She knew there would be a light show or fog machine or something, but she wasn't a gullible kid. Special effects didn't impress her at all.

Not until now.

The first shock was the sheer suddenness of temporal transference. It just ... happened, so quickly that her senses barely noted the shift. The second was what lay before and around her when it did.

A closed temporal loop isn't easy to describe, because there is nothing to compare it to. It is unlike any other phenomenon. A closed loop is, essentially, a section of duration brought around to meet itself, thus forming what in three-dimensional topology would be either a simple closed curve or a torus. These terms are analogous, of course, because the essence of a durational phenomenon is not spatial. It is temporal. A closed loop--like a T1 conduit--occupies fully all four of the prime dimensions.

As related to its fixed-sequence--or atemporal--surroundings, a closed time loop isn't exactly anywhere, except for its intervals of passage from one time vector to another. Nor does it remain anywhen, in normal circumstance. To exist at all, a temporo-spatial phenomenon must be in constant motion along the linear coordinates of at least one dimension.

At "present," L-383 was hovering in 180-second resonance in the vicinity of the southwest Kansas high plains. This temporal rhythm--from a minute and a half ago to a minute and a half from now--was the normal idle mode of the loop. It wasn't going anywhere. It was just being there, instant by instant in 180 seconds of real time.

If there had been such a thing as an ordinary loop in durational time, L-383 would have been it.

But what confronted Nancy Culver a moment after entering the TEF chamber at Waystop I was not ordinary by any standards she could ever have imagined. If it was a room, it was like no room she had ever seen. It seemed endless and boundless, even though no large, open spaces were visible. Nowhere did there seem to be any vertical partitions, yet the area she found herself in was enclosed on every side by displays--magnificent, mind-boggling displays of all sorts of things, all in minutely detailed three dimensions and most of them in motion.

Somehow Nancy knew that what she was seeing in the displays was not reality, but virtual reality, though nowhere was there any hint of distortion, discontinuity, or even pixel grain. Starfields flowed and turned in deep space, mountain ranges and oceans rolled by, planetary orbits traced their elliptical paths, lava crept along stone chimneys in deep, layered strata lighted here and there by pressing magma, and grid patterns appeared and revolved, displaying coordinates and vector relationships. Some displays were of phenomena she couldn't even guess at. And among them all, scrolled columns and patterns of figures, equations, and arrays of characters and runes.

It was dizzying and it was breathtaking ... but no more so than the people who scurried here and there through the virtual mazes--tiny people, none approaching her own height of five foot one, and all of them completely bald, with eyes twice the size that eyes should be.

"Kind of boggles the mind, doesn't it?" Lucas Hawthorn grinned at her. "Mine, too, and I've been here before. This is Time Loop L-383, and these people are Whispers. That means World History Investigative Society. They're from a thousand years or so in the future."

She gawked at the little people hurrying here and there.

"Are they...ah...human?" she murmured. "They look so strange. And so busy!"

"They're as human as we are," Lucas assured her. "And they do seem busy, don't they? Must be something unusual going on." He took her hand and led her toward a group of Whispers gathered around a bank of what looked like electronic equipment grown up. A moment later he was making introductions. "Nancy Culver, this is Zeem Sixten ... and Toocie Toonine and Peedy Cue. That's Forel Embee over there, and KT-Pi. This is Deem Eleveno, and this gentleman--" He led her through a gathering throng to where a wise-looking Whisper perched on a translucent stool in front of a console. "--is the head honcho in charge of L-383, Teal Fordeen. Teal, Miss Culver is looking for her brother."

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Culver," Teal Fordeen said distractedly. "But I'm quite sure we don't have him."

"Didn't think you did," Lucas assured him. "What's going on? Something new?"

"We're just a bit distracted, I'm afraid," Teal said. "We have encountered a sequence of random anachronisms, all centered on the present era."

"Something serious?"

"We don't know. It seems random, but these are definitely anachronisms, and something is causing them. We're trying to find a pattern. So far, all we've determined is that they seem to come in pairs. When one occurs, another happens somewhere else." He shrugged, a shrug that was surprisingly eloquent and expressive in a person barely four feet tall. "What was that about Miss Culver's brother? Should we know something about him, Lucas?"

"I thought you might be interested in him, since he may have a TEF in his possession."

"That isn't possible," Deem Eleveno declared promptly. "Every TEF that ever was or will be extruded is accounted for. There are no strays."

Nancy Culver hadn't said a word. She simply stood there, clinging to Lucas Hawthorn's hand, her dazed blue eyes shifting from one to another of the small, bald creatures gathered around them. She felt as though she had fallen through a hole into a Mad Hatter world of playing cards and flamingo croquet.

"Maybe you'd better check your inventory," Lucas told the Whispers. "Miss Culver has seen our TEF at Waystop I. Her brother and his house have disappeared, and she says he has a TEF like ours."

"We're in the real estate business," Nancy blurted out, then blushed at the sound of her words. "God," she muttered, "what an inane thing to say!"

The one called Teal Fordeen rubbed a small hand across his bald head thoughtfully. "Puzzles and oddities today, Lucas. Unreconciled anachronisms ... and we've found a spatial alteration in the T1 conduit, apparently centering on the anchor vectors of L-316. We can scan the change but we don't know what it means. And now you come with this puzzle." He gestured with graceful little fingers, and several of the Whispers scurried off to various consoles and data bank pads. Nancy felt a tug at her sleeve and glanced down into the big, searching eyes of a pretty little bald creature.

"I'm Toocie Toonine," the Whisper reminded her. "Tell me about your brother, dear. The missing one, I mean."

"He's the only brother I have," Nancy said. "Thank God for small favors."

"I'll be glad to, if we encounter Him," Toocie assured her.

"We've charted only about fourteen percent of known time so far," another Whisper--a male one--explained, stepping close to Nancy, his eyes speculative. "We haven't yet discovered a definitive phenomenon that we can identify as 'God,' though there are some tantalizing consistencies in the references we've encountered. Ah, would you mind if I--"

"Leave her alone, Peedy!" Toocie snapped. "She didn't come here to have her topography investigated!" To Nancy, she said, "Don't mind Peedy, dear. He has an obsession with primitive feminine contour. He can be a nuisance about it sometimes, when he has a tape measure in hand, but he's harmless."

Nancy blushed again.

"Ah ... about your brother?"

"Oh, yeah. Well, his name is Ben. Benjamin Franklin Culver. He lives at 423 Oakhill, Pauls Valley, Oklahoma. But he's disappeared. And so has 423 Oakhill. There's just a lot there now, with a hole in it."

"She has a picture of her brother," Lucas said. "Show them your poster, Nancy."

Nancy opened her purse and pulled out a copy of the flyer. "This is him." She handed it to Toocie Toonine. "And that's his house. It's a three-bedroom, two-bath ranch bungalow with composition roof, weathered shakes over a gray brick facade. Two-car garage, of course, central AC and a formal entry ..."

"You're rambling, Nancy." Lucas grinned. "We don't want them to buy it, just help us find it."

"Oh ... yeah. Sorry. I ..."

"First meetings with future beings take some getting used to, I imagine." Toocie nodded. The reassuring smile on her little Whisper face was at once childlike and very wise.

She looked at the poster carefully, her eyes narrowing. Then she passed it around. One by one they studied the face in the picture.

Deem Eleveno in particular seemed to concentrate on the features of Ben Culver, then handed the poster to Teal Fordeen. "Look at this face, Teal," he said. "Isn't this--"

"I believe you're right." Teal nodded. "It certainly does resemble him."

"Resemble who?" Lucas prodded.

"We don't know who he is, exactly." Teal Fordeen shrugged. "But this resembles a person who came to L-383. But not through any transference of ours. He simply materialized here, momentarily. A timer, we assume, though he seemed quite startled at being here and left abruptly."

"That sounds like Ben," Nancy mused. "I swear it comes as a surprise to him every time his buttons match their holes. My brother is the most distracted person I know."

One of the Whispers fed data into a pad, and just beyond Teal Fordeen a virtual display winked out. The twice-life-sized hologram that took its place was a skinny, tousle-headed young man with startled eyes, crouching among virtual displays. He was naked to the waist, clad only in muddy, tattered pajama bottoms, and he had a dark thing like an assault rifle slung over one shoulder. For a moment he crouched there, turning one way and then another, then with a guttural hiss that sounded like "Aliens!" he plunged directly into a virtual starfield and disappeared.

"That's him!" Nancy exclaimed. "That's Ben! Where did he go? Did he have his house with him?"

"No house." Teal Fordeen shook his head. "Just that device at his back."

"It's a weapon indigenous to the early twenty-first century," Deem Eleveno elaborated. "Its basis is older--copper-encased lead projectiles propelled by a volatile carbon-nitrogen compound in a brass housing. The activating mechanism is a Sturn-Benning Model I gas-activated automatic rifle, circa 2002."

"We tried to trace him by resonance trace, after he penetrated the loop," Teal said. "But his transference was too quick. We surmise that he has the ability to catch slow-light crest somewhere below the true-light thrust. So far as we know, even Adam can't do that. If we're right, we have a new breed of timer here."

Nancy blinked at him. "Timer ... you mean Ben? Are you saying my brother is a time traveler?"

"It's only conjecture," Teal assured her. "But we can assume at this point that it's a newfound skill and he hasn't the vaguest idea what he's doing."

"Well, that part sounds like Ben. Who is this Adam you talk about?"

"He's a timer," Lucas explained. "A very unusual person. He's a sort of ... well ... like a policeman sometimes. Not everybody traveling in time can be trusted, and Adam sort of makes it his business to keep history straight. He'd want to know if there's a stray TEF running around loose somewhere."

"But where would your brother get a TEF?" Toocie wondered. "And why? If he's a natural timer, he doesn't require analogous transposition."

"We've reviewed the focalizer data, Teal," Deem said. "Every existing TEF is accounted for--forty-six of them in present use or inventory, two destroyed, and the one Adam recovered from 1KHAF4. The recovered one went to analysis at UEB Sundome, then was reissued. And, of course, there is one focalizer beyond recovery. But it is documented."

Teal Fordeen nodded. "L-270's prime drive TEF. The scout loop's cone, embedded in stone when 1KHAF4 was entombed. So that accounts for all fifty."

"1KHAF4," Lucas muttered to Nancy. "That's Kaffer--the son of a bitch who shot out our front wall. He used to be a Whisper, but he went wild or something. They got him, though. Adam sealed him up in a pyramid."

"Could this fit into our current puzzle?" Teal asked Deem.

"I don't see how." The impatient Whisper shrugged. "We've found no traces of photogravitational reversal. A few blips, but no tracks. TEF activity leaves a finite wake. These are just random anachronisms ... except that suddenly there are a lot of them."

"At least now our mystery visitor has a name," Toocie pointed out. "He's Ben Culver."

"We've been calling him Sleepwalker," Teal told Lucas and Nancy. "But we don't know where or when he is. I do think, though, that Adam might be interested. We'll try to get word to him."

"You already did," a deep, calm voice said, almost at Nancy's elbow. She looked around, gasped, and raised her eyes. The man standing there was tall--even taller than Lucas by an inch or so. Dark hair, dark eyes that had seen more than most eyes ever saw, and a sun-darkened face that somehow radiated irony, concern, and wisdom, all at once. He was dressed like an early-twentieth-century aviator.

"I was testing out a Spad at Somerset Aerodrome," he told Teal. "Mandy popped into the cockpit to tell me you had a problem." He glanced aside at Lucas, nodded, then lowered his gaze to Nancy. "Hello," he said. "I'm Adam. I'll see if I can locate your brother." He glanced at the others present and turned to Deem Eleveno. "Question," he said. "The temporal effect focalizers have been counted, but have they all been verified for authenticity?"

"Most of them are installed for use." The Whisper frowned. "Verification is a part of installation testing. The rest are in secured inventory. How could any not be authentic?"

"It's just a thought," Adam said. "Another thought is, what surety do you have that there are exactly fifty in existence? Couldn't there be more?"

"Nonsense," Deem bristled. "Extrusion of a polymorphic solid-liquid transformer attuned to pure light and pure gravity is one of the most exacting processes known, even to our culture. The raw technology behind it didn't even exist until the twenty-eighth century. And even in our home time, there is only one processing complex capable of making TEFs. It is within UEB Central. We know exactly how many there are!"

"George Wilson made the first ones in the twenty-first century," Adam pointed out. "He didn't have UEB Central's technology."

"But he did have the Institute for Temporal Research!" Deem said. "Besides, his devices were the prototypes. And they are all accounted for."

"I'm sure they are." Adam grinned. "Still, what would it hurt to verify the inventory?"

Before Deem could respond, Teal Fordeen raised a hand. "We can and will run a verification, Adam," he said. "And we'll order tests of all that have been out of service."

Adam nodded. "Good. Why not start with the one I took from Kaffer's tomb. And look for modifications, while you're at it. I'll see what tracks I can pick up, while that's being done." He glanced again at Nancy, and his sardonic grin didn't hide the determination in his eyes. "Don't worry, Miss Culver," he said. "We will find your brother."

He seemed only to turn away, toward one of the holographic screens, then he was gone. As though he had never been there.

Nancy Culver's eyes were like liquid starfields as she gazed at where he had gone. "Jeepers," she said. Her hand brushed a console sensor, and above it a display screen spiraled crazily.

"Interesting," Peedy murmured to Toocie Toonine. "Females of this era evidence remarkable similarities in their reactions to Adam."


To seek the beginning of time is to seek the limits of infinity, which has no limits. It is a paradox pursued. Yet as with any paradox, such pursuit is rational and valid from certain perspectives.

The WHIS T1 conduit, in effect a time tunnel, theoretically exists as an open bridge throughout T2 time, vulnerable only to massive anachronism and limited only by the extent of time itself. Time being infinite, the conduit also should be infinite. But in practice it has limits. Its distant upstream reaches, plunging back into the remotest past, become imprecise. The phenomenon loses definition, at a rate corresponding to the achronal discordance evidenced by time itself in the zones approaching universal origin.

The tunnel does not end abruptly. Rather, it simply fades into the swirling morass of conflicting probabilities and ceases to be a viable conduit.

It is this phenomenon that WHIS set out to explore initially--the temporal chaos of the "time when time began." But it was not what they found there that turned the exploration into migration. For what they found was a mystery far more startling than they could ever have imagined. In those furthest reaches of the universe's creation, a converging infinity where primal forces of gravity and light rampaged among empty dimensions, they found paradox. And they found the riddle of the gate.

---

Excerpted from Paradox Gate by Dan Parkinson
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.