48. Field Trip

It was really spring when they both had the time to spare. Gas was rationed, like everything but air, so Nigel suggested the train. Mateo didn’t argue. He’d never ridden on a train, and it’d be a nice distraction from the whole weird setup, plus Nigel would finally be able to wag him around without winding up sleep-deprived. He wasn’t sure if he could find the field, but Nigel said they could at least get to the not-murder not-Amish town and go from there.

“I brought sandwiches,” he added practically.

“Oh nice! What kind?”

Mateo tried not to bring the mood down. Nigel was being really nice about all this BS when he didn’t have to. He owed him bigtime, him using up a whole two off days like this. And he was scared out of his mind of finding the wormhole or not finding it. And what if he couldn’t find the field and just missed it? He just wanted this to be done, one way or another.

It was maybe four hours plus by train, about the same as his ride with the cops to 020. But like, knowing what was going on and not tied up twice, always a plus. Nigel passed out pretty early on and slept hard. There weren’t that many people on the train. Mateo wasn’t sure if that was normal, or a slow day, or a war thing. It was more comfortable than a car or a plane, he’d give it that. He wished he could sleep too, but no dice.

There were a lot of little stops, and he kept checking the piece of paper with the name of their stop on it. People got on and off, but the overall train stayed pretty empty. He was glad, for once. He knew he was jittery and acting a little weird. Some days, especially outside Station X and his Station X buddies, he still felt like he was disguised as a 40s person and anyone could see through him. And oh yeah, hopefully nobody in the town would recognize him. That’d be awkward. Not dangerous, but awkward as heck. At least he looked a little different now. He was stringier by about twenty pounds, plus a couple shades paler from all the cloud cover, and his hair hadn’t reddened up any this summer (same reason, plus a hat, he guessed).

“Hey, I think this is our stop.”

“Nh. All right.” He blinked. “Yes, it is.”

They got out and Mateo stood around on the platform and looked at the houses while Nigel peered at his map. What he wouldn’t give for a GPS right now, trying to find one random field...

This town had the same tan stone houses as the one he’d washed up in, and it only looked different in that it was bigger. How the heck was he going to tell fields apart if he was having trouble with towns?

“It’s about five miles that way,” Nigel said, pointing. “And you said you walked for about two hours before reaching the village?”

“Yeah.”

Nigel didn’t look thrilled.

“Sorry,” Mateo added. “I probably didn’t go in a straight line. I followed the roads.”

Nigel sighed. “So we probably should too. Maybe we can get a lift into the village.”

Mateo eyed him. “You want to hitchhike?”

“Yes, I do. It’s already noon.”

Well, he probably knew what was safe in his own weird time. “...ok.”

They wound up riding in the back of an empty farm cart. With a horse! Which, duh, but also, wow. Like a hayride or those backwoods small logging operations.

The farmer and Nigel sounded totally different, but they didn’t seem to have much trouble communicating. Mateo was relieved. He could barely understand her. At least they managed to swap a “Thanks, ma’am,” and what the context and expression probably meant was “No problem.”

Anyhow, it seemed pretty safe, if only because it was slow enough to jump out. The farmer and Nigel chatted some, while Mateo eavesdropped and tried to pick up some of the language. The farmer definitely asked some questions about Mateo, but when Nigel said “He’s American,” she nodded like that explained everything. She turned down a sandwich from Nigel when they ate, but seemed to think it was a polite offer.

They rolled into not-murder not-Amish town about an hour later, and hopped down. Mateo thanked the farmer again, actually sort of understood the response this time, and automatically patted the horse because he’d done all the heavy lifting.

It was kind of a shock, but the “weird costumes” on the people in the streets looked kind of normal now. Foreign, sure, time-foreign more than place-foreign, but also normal for here. Now. Whatever. He was the one who felt weird, like the odd man out. What if somebody recognized him?

Nobody did. They kept on doing normal-people stuff.

“Returning to the scene of the crime?” Nigel joked under his breath.

“Hah.”

“Anything look familiar?”

“All of it, kinda. That’s the problem. Let’s walk around.”

“Let’s.”

It turned out they were lucky. It was built mostly around what Nigel called one main “high street.” They’d ridden in and stopped on one end of it, and the other end, where it exited town and turned into a country road lined with trees, looked familiar. Mateo stopped, then sped up. Then almost started running.

When he’d fallen through the wormhole, he’d done the automatic thing to find people — go downhill and follow the roads, and if you found a paved road, pick it over dirt. Now he was just doing the reverse, and things seemed familiar. He’d totally forgotten about Nigel, who was keeping up and keeping quiet.

It was around three hours before he stopped. He’d gotten lost and almost panicked a few times, but eventually...

“Is this the place?” Nigel asked, breathing a little hard but, bless him, not complaining once. They were on a high green field, not as high as the rocky mountain pasturelands you saw in parts of the Driftless, but nearly at the top of a big long swell that went on down into the valley below. There were fields, divided up with hedges and bands of forest below them, stretching all the way to the horizon, and woods behind them. It was very quiet, aside from some birdsong, and Mateo’s boots were yellow from wading through a big swathe of little golden flowers.

“I think so.” He turned around slowly, in place. “Yeah. Yeah! This is it, this is it!” He started shuffling through the wet grass, staring at the ground.

“What are you looking for?”

“A note, something — if my friend could open it again he’d’ve sent something through.”

They both combed a fifty-foot radius around where Mateo remembered falling out — Nigel was noticeably leery of getting too close to what Mateo told him was probably ground zero, like it was going to pop up and suck him through to 2005. Then they moved out another fifty feet, then another, until they’d searched the whole field. Not even a coin that had been dropped through. At least it was bright sunlight today. It took almost three hours, but nothing.

“Let’s wait,” Nigel said. “The weather’s supposed to continue fine. Maybe after dark we’ll see something. Did it give off light?”

Mateo shook his head. “I dunno. Not on the lab side, I don’t think. Maybe something that would show up in the dark.” He sighed, frustrated. “I almost blacked out on the way through. I didn’t get a good look.”

“Stands to reason,” Nigel said, sitting down on a fallen tree on the edge of the woods. Mateo looked at him.

“What I mean is that there were bound to have been some odd gravitational effects, wouldn’t there? And if there were, I doubt the human inner ear is set up to handle them.”

“Huh,” Mateo said, sitting down too. “That would make sense.” Avi would like to meet this guy.

They waited, watching the field. Eventually the sun started getting low, like it usually did. It was a nice sunset, but Mateo didn’t really appreciate it. The sky got dark blue, then black, then the stars really came out. It was seriously dark, not even house lights. Mateo wasn’t sure if they were just too far away or hidden by trees, or they were worried about pilots seeing lights and thinking they were higher-value targets than they really were.

“I’m getting forty winks,” Nigel said. He hadn’t been smoking so they wouldn’t ruin their night vision, which was a pretty big sacrifice, and he was getting grumpy while trying to keep from acting like it.

“Go ahead. Thanks again, man.”

Nigel found a place on the log where he could put his back against a tree and apparently actually managed to sleep like that.

Mateo sat and watched the field. He saw little lights from time to time, but as much as it made him jump every time, they were just the little lights your eyes made on their own in the dark, especially when you were expecting to see something.

He got colder and colder and stiffer and stiffer, so he got up and paced every few hours. It got to be that weird kind of cold you got right before sunrise, and sure enough, the sky started getting paler.

Nigel woke up when the rising sun was casting long tree shadows from the woods behind them out over the field. He startled awake and almost fell off his long.

“Mateo?!”

“Over here.”

“Anything?” He was scrambling to get out his rain check smoke, but he was almost dropping it. “Anything at all?”

“Zip. Zilch. Nada. I even went and walked a grid pattern out there in case it was there and I couldn’t see it because it was night on the other side or something.”

“Do you want to stay a little longer?”

Mateo slumped. Honestly he wanted to go and get a hot shower and a change of clothes and breakfast and some sleep. Nigel looked beat and hungry too.

“A couple more hours ok?”

“Of course.”

They waited until noon. It warmed up, at least. No wormhole, though.

“Let’s go,” Mateo said. “It’s not there. There’s no note. There’s nothing.”

“We can come back later if —“

“Nah. Thanks, but it was... it was probably a one-time thing. If wormholes were easy to open we’d be using them instead of cars.”

“All right, then.”

***

Nigel hadn’t been sure at first if he’d made some dreadful mistake. Mateo had fallen asleep almost at once on the train back, which stood to reason, since he’d been up all night looking for wormholes. He was subdued and quiet on their arrival back at Station X, simply getting in some food, some sleep, and a shave before his shift started. He didn’t sulk, but he was oddly slow and robotic, like someone suffering from shell-shock.

When Nigel dropped in, the Wrens he worked with quietly admitted they thought that Mateo was ill, he was so pale and distracted, and all agreed he should have the day off before he made some foolish mistake. Nigel had agreed. Mateo had made a token attempt to argue, then admitted he was “pretty out of it, sorry,” thanked them very handsomely for covering for him, and wandered out.

He slept for the rest of the day and the next night. But the following morning he went to work and did well. He was still pale and unusually quiet, but not so shocky as the day before. The next day after his shift, he went into town and bought a few books — a few comic novels, a collection of essays by some journalist, and a brief popular history of England. Over the next few weeks, he started to read them, and started to lead his social life again, if gradually. There was some heavy sadness to him, but it seemed to be sorted away neatly for now.

It started to remind Nigel of a codebreaker he knew slightly — a widower whose only daughter, an ambulance driver, had been killed in the line of duty. For some weeks the news remained unclear, if she’d lived or died, her body not yet identified, and the man had been no use to anyone and had been given a leave of absence. Then news had come through that his daughter, his only family, had indeed been killed, and he’d almost gone mad with grief. Nigel had privately feared he’d drown himself in the lake. But after the funeral he’d returned to work and, while still in deep mourning, had worked very well. It was as though fearing the worst but not knowing it had been more of a torment than knowing the worst. Maybe that also went for losing home and family through more strange and scientific misfortunes.

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