Forever Free

“Didn’t have time to. Let me check something.” I went back into the kitchen and found the fork she’d been eating with, on the floor to the right of the chair.

“Look at this.” I held up the fork, which had a twist of dried something in its tines. “I don’t think she had any warning at all. She just plain disappeared, in mid-bite.”

“Our antimatter didn’t,” the sheriff pointed out. “If we’re still thinking about a common cause.”

“You’re the physicist,” Charlie said. “What makes stuff disappear?”

“Collapsars. But they reappear somewhere else.” I shook my head. “Things don’t disappear. They might appear to, but they’ve only changed state or position. A particle and an antiparticle destroy each other, but they’re still `there’ in the photons produced. Even things swept up by a naked singularity don’t actually disappear.”

“Perhaps it was staged, for our benefit,” the sheriff said.

“What? Why?”

“I don’t have any idea why. But it seems to be the only explanation that’s physically possible. There would have been ample time to set it up.”

“Let’s play a joke on those renegades,” Charlie said with a broad Centrus accent. “Everybody make it look like you disappeared on 14 Galileo 128; leave your clothing and then tiptoe away naked. Meanwhile, we’ll suck the antimatter out of the Time Warp and force them to come back.”

“And then jump out from wherever they’re hiding.”

The sheriff was annoyed. “I’m not saying it’s reasonable. I’m just saying that so far nothing else fits the evidence.”

“So let’s find some more evidence.” I gestured. “Shall we leave by the window, or the door?”

——————————————————————————–

Chapter twenty-one

I talked to Marygay a half-dozen times before nightfall.

They’d been taking shifts on the binoculars, and hadn’t seen any sign of life other than the tracks we made in the snow. They were barely visible to the best observers, though, who knew what they were looking for; the binoculars were only 15 power. So in theory, there could be thousands of people holed up somewhere.

But that hardly seemed possible, in light of what we’d found and hadn’t found. Everything pointed to the same impossibility: at 12:28 in the afternoon on 14 Galileo 128, every human, Man, and Tauran disappeared into thin air.

The time was a supposition based on one datum: a broken mechanical clock on the floor of a man’s workshop that was full of such curiosities. His clothes were right by the broken clock.

It was starting to get dark as we neared City Center, so we decided to put that off until we had a full day of light.

We were all dog-tired, too, and had only managed to keep our eyes open long enough to have a supper of random boxed goods washed down with melted snow. There’d been a cabinet of wine in Roberta’s kitchen, but we were reluctant to take any, stealing from the vanished.

Charlie and I collapsed on the gurneys, or operating tables, in the back of the vehicle, even finding some blow-up pillows. The sheriff slept on the floor, the back of his head resting on a wooden block he’d found on the street.

He got up at dawn, evidently cold, and woke the two of us by turning on the heater. We spent a few groggy minutes regretting the lack of tea or coffee to go with our cold smoked fish and goldfruit. We could break into a house or store to find utensils and tea, and then conjure up a fire somehow. It would have been easy in Paxton, where every house had a practical fireplace. In Centrus it was all central heating and air pollution laws.

I had a sudden desire to go back to Paxton, partly curiosity and partly the irrational hope that this sinister disaster hadn’t spread that far; that my home would be the same place I’d left two months or twenty-four years ago. That Bill would be there, repentant but otherwise unchanged.

We saw the trio of ships drift overhead from the west, dim gold stars in the twilight. I turned on the radio but didn’t broadcast, and they were silent, evidently still asleep.

I hoped. Anything could happen, here, now.

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