Vvvvvttt!
Copyright (c) Rick Yost

Vvvvvttt! The sound is almost like that of the smooth rapid pull of a
long zipper like you’ll find on a large suitcase or garment bag.
Then there is the bright, sky blue light, which seems to come from
everywhere at once. The deep, sharp, needle-like pain in his head,
right behind his ears. The nausea, the ache in his joints, it was all to be expected.
This was what Jodi felt every time he traveled from one time to another.
He was only 33, but with all the traveling he'd done, to look at him,
you'd think he was in his mid-forties. Time travel wears on the body
and has an aging effect. For Jodi, having Diabetes, it had another
inconvenient effect on him. It lowered his blood sugar level, drastically.
Although he always consumed a huge meal before stepping into the
blue beam of the machine, every time he reached his destination, the
first thing he had to do was eat. He always traveled with food in his backpack.
This afternoon was no different.
He stood in the basement of the house he had leased a month before.
It was a big house, built in the early 1920's. Six bedrooms, 3 1/2 bath,
two car garage with guest quarters over the garage. There was also a
good-sized swimming pool in the back yard in the shape of the state of Texas.
The panhandle was a hot tub. A little weird, Jodi thought, but it was built
well, and felt good after a day of traveling the hotter regions.
The house itself was a 2 story, English Tudor on an expensive, in his
mind, 'uppity' street, in the Lakewood area of Dallas.
It was an over-priced, fixer-upper, but for now it served it's purpose.
The basement had been turned into a game room by one of the
previous owner's. It was a very warm and comfortable room for Jodi,
with it's soft carpeted floor and real wood paneling on the walls and
ceiling. It reminded him of some of the old English Pubs he'd visited
in his travels throughout England, in the late 18th century.
He turned the equipment on and started the computer program that
controlled his movements through time and space.
And as always at this point, the hair on the back of his neck stood
straight up. He was just as excited by the thought of this jump, as he was on his first.
He typed in on the keypad, his desired destination and time frame.
It was never exact, but he would be sent to within 100 ft of the
desired space and within 1 to 2 hrs of the desired time.
It was the computer's job to make sure that the coordinates it chose,
were thoroughly checked out before the jump. This was to prevent
materializing in the middle of a wall or a tree or another person. It
would also check for dangerous areas like freeways, battle zones and
lava flows. You couldn't leave home without it.
He was casually dressed for this trip. Faded Levi’s, black sweatshirt
over a white tee-shirt, with white sneakers. And of course his small
khaki green military backpack. The backpack was rather worn,
but it had sentimental value. It had been given to him by a one-time, young
female lover, he’d met in Nepal in 1940.
It held the essentials for his travels.
He stood before the computer taking one last check to be sure
everything was set. He hit the enter button and heard the
accelerators under the 4ft round, I ft high jump platform start to whirl
into action. They made a sound like a jet engine warming up, only not quite as loud.
He turned away from the computer and made his way to the platform.
As he walked he took one last look in his backpack to be sure he had
everything. As he walked, he rifled through the contents making mental note of the items.
There were the sandwiches and candy bars he would need the minute
he arrived. He knew he would feel very weak when the trip was
through until he fueled up his body’s system again.
There was also the first aid kit, a clean and rolled up extra pair of jeans
and teeshirt, the hand held remote "retriever", as he called it. This was the
little electronic, computer device he needed to initiate the trip back.
And last but not least, the mint condition 1939 German Luger pistol,
he had lifted from that unfortunate SS officer in Berlin.
Unfortunate; because in 1939, Jodi was forced to kill him in self-defense.
He was satisfied of his readiness. He slipped his arms through the
shoulder straps and put on the pack as he stepped up onto the humming platform.
He reached and pushed the ‘go’ button of the keypad on the wall
beside him and he instantly could tell, something was very wrong with the machine.
He didn’t know what was different, but something was not right.
Whatever it was, he had no control. The bright light beam had
already flooded the platform, and it engulfed his body.
Once the button was pushed, he was stuck in that position until the
trip was over. It was a safety feature. If you were to step off the
platform, mid-jump, your atoms would scatter throughout the ether
wind and you’d become just so much dust in space.
He tried to focus his eyes on the computer screen, across the room.
All he could tell from this distance and blinding light in his eyes,
was that there was a warning box of some sort that had popped up on the screen.
He couldn’t read it. He could do nothing if he could read it.
He was trapped.
While he stood there, trying to remain calm and think of what to do,
he raised his hand and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
He was able to move while inside the beam, but the light source
above his head where the blue light came from was only 4ft in
diameter. This made the cylindrical column of light that encased him,
a very tight space to stand in for any length of time. Most jumps
were over within less than 30 seconds.
He’d not checked his watch to see how long he’d been standing there
contemplating the irony of his apparent doomed fate, but the stress of
the circumstance was already making him weary.
To think of all the time and space freedom he’d had enjoyed in his life.
In the six years he’d been using this simple machine to travel through
time and space, he had visited 58 countries and had existed in at
least 14 different centuries. And to think he would die in that same
machine, trapped in his own time and confined to such a small space.
He knew that none of his few friends would ever think it strange for
him to be out of touch. He lived alone, no maid, no servants to find
him. No one would ever come into the house and venture down to
the basement to rescue him by turning off the power and shutting off
the beam. He wrangled the pack off his back and dug out the retriever unit.
He tried to contact the computer, but to no avail. There was no response.
He placed the palm of his hand against the wall of light, and pushed
out. He knew this would do nothing but he had to try. It was as if he
were inside a giant glass tube.
Then before he could pull together his next desperate thought, he felt
the nausea, the pain in his head and heard the loud zipper-like sound of the jump taking place.
Vvvvvtttt
Viewed from the basement, Jodi disappeared inside the beam, and in
the next moment the beam shut off. From Jodi’s viewpoint, he was
still inside the beam and the basement disappeared. All outside the
beam was total darkness.
He felt so relieved. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying
to relax again. Then as abruptly as the jump commenced it ended.
He found himself standing in 3ft tall grass in a field in the middle
of nowhere. It was rather cold and windy and the sun was setting
behind him over the great expanse of hills and mountains that made
up his total horizon. He had no idea where or when he was, but this
was not his intended destination. Instinctively, he knew not to move,
in case the computer back in the basement set another jump.
In the next few seconds he stood there looking all around him, he felt something watching him.
Then he jumped again.
Vvvvtttt
He felt the pain and he was back inside the bright blue beam of light
and all outside the light, was dark. And it stopped again.
Now he was indoors, standing in what looked like a big, brightly lit,
underground parking lot. But it didn’t really seem like any parking lot
he’d ever seen before. The ceiling was 12 foot high and the room
was only maybe 30ft wide but it must have been a mile long.
He wiped his eyes and strained to see down the length of the room.
He could make out some people walking around this car that was
parked with its headlights on and facing his direction. From this distance,
the people looked like ants and the car, like a toy. Then a wave of
fear swept through him as he realized what was about to happen. He
then started to really notice the details of the room around him.
There were black and yellow caution stripes on the floor marking off a
big area, the area in which he stood right in the middle of. He then
snapped his head to see directly behind him the huge square concrete
barrier with the words; IMPACT ZONE stenciled in big red letters on it,
He noticed the floor where he stood was covered with that cat-litter-
like, oil dry stuff, and it had been spread out to soak up a huge area
of spilt automotive oil. "Oh shit!" Jodi said under his breath just as
the warning buzzer went off. The addition of flashing red,
warning lights added an even more dangerous, red hue to the situation.
Jodi quickly tucks his backpack between his knees and goes to work on his
remote retriever unit to try and jump out of his dilemma.
But before he can connect with home, a loud speaker somewhere in the room
crackles to life and a man’s voice declares,
"Mustang Test 16, here we go."
Talk about wrong place at the wrong time, Jodi knew the crash test
dummies in that car would survive this but he wouldn’t.
He heard just enough of the screech of tires and rev of the cars
engine as it raced towards the wall behind him, to make him give up the jump
spot and get out of the way.
And just then,
Vvvvtttt
Even the pain and nausea that the blue beam brought him didn’t
shake his feeling of happiness to be in the light again and out of danger.
"What the hell is going on here?" he asked himself as his attention
turned again to the retriever and he tried again to link with the computer.
He thought to himself how if he hadn’t waited as long as he
had, without moving, he might have missed being an intimate part of
"Test 16", but he might not have been able to jump again.
I have to keep my wits about me until this is over and I can figure out
what’s wrong with the machine. This Jodi thought to himself as he kept
trying to get the computer to respond. He also thought of how this was just
as trapped a situation as he was in when at first the jump wouldn’t
work back home. These jumps were so random, he thought, he could be sent
anywhere on the planet and into any time frame.
Jodi was starting to get very weak from all this jumping and he would
have to eat some food soon, before he would be unable to stand up in the beam.
The jump stopped.
He found himself in a warm nearly dark room, hearing loud Jazz piano
music. He had landed standing facing a wall, not but 6 inches away
from his face. On the wall, as he slowly turned around he saw the
orange flicker of firelight. As his eyes adjusted to the semi darkness,
He turned to see out of the two windows beside him. Looking out the
windows he could tell he was in what seemed to be a high-rise
apartment building. It was nighttime, it was snowing and he
determined from gauging the other buildings across the street, he
must be about twenty stories up.
Never moving from the jump spot, he slowly continued turning, little
baby steps at a time, then he stopped. He heard something besides
the music. He was not alone in this room.
He stopped turning his body and just turned his head the rest of the
way around from the wall to see the entire room.
It was a modest apartment, this looked to be the living room,
probably 15ft by 20ft in size. It was filled with the usual furniture and
household items, pictures on the walls, big square cushions on the
couch, entertainment center from which the music was coming.
And the flickering firelight came from a fire burning in the fireplace
at the other end of the room. And on the white, longhaired, fake fur
rug, laid out in front of the fire, was a naked couple, making love.
Jodi just stood there for a moment, his eyes on the scene before him.
The music was obviously at a volume high enough to smother the
sound of the jump ending, which he knew from previous experiences,
could be heard easily by anyone in close proximity.
That’s how he came to own his Luger pistol.
The room was also dark enough; he was not noticed at all by these
two, self-absorbed folks, whom, he found, had his complete attention.
He’d never considered himself a ‘voyeur’ before, but being not but
12ft away, from these two thirty-something lovers, going at it in fine
style, was a little too much for Jodi to ignore.
The guy was on his back on the floor, lying parallel to the brick face of
the fireplace. Most of his upper body was obscured from Jodi’s line of
sight by a big over-stuffed chair. But he had a great view of the front
of the young woman, who was mounted on top of him. She was
bathed in the firelight. She was beautiful.
She had long blonde hair and a strikingly well formed body, and Jodi
couldn’t take his eyes off Her. An embarrassed, self-conscious feeling
came over Jodi, and he turned away to look out the windows for a
moment. But soon found he was watching her again as she sat
straight up with her legs straddled her partners torso, she had started
to cup and massage her breasts. All the while she was slowly moving
her body up and down.
Jodi decided to try to use the retriever again and get out of there
before he was discovered. Wherever he was and in whatever time
frame, he was sure he didn’t want to be arrested for breaking and
entering of even worse, shot.
No sooner did he have that thought, then he heard them speaking to
each other, although he couldn’t make out the conversation due to the
volume of the music.
Then he was startled to hear her say in a volume he could easily
understand, "That’s all I needed to know Carl!"
Jodi turned to see her, still in position atop him, pointing a chrome-
plated revolver in the direction of the man’s head, which Jodi still
couldn’t see. Then she pulled the trigger.
There was a loud shot and a flash of light.
The man, who at one time had been matching her moves, now was quite still.
Jodi was paralyzed with fear. He couldn’t believe what had just
happened. His ears were still ringing from the noise of the shot.
He couldn’t move, even if he wanted to. ‘If she’ll shoot him, she’ll
damn sure shoot me’, he thought.
Shaken, he fumbles with his retriever and drops it to the hardwood
floor at his feet. She hears the noise made and lets out a scream.
She stands up and grips the pistol with both hands, arms out straight
and aims in the direction of the noise, right at Jodi.
"Who are you and what are you doing here?" she demands in a
powerful but calm voice as she walks her nakedness from around the
couch and towards him.
With gun aimed right at Jodi’s very frightened face, she takes one
hand away from the gun grip to lean to her side and switch on the
lamp on the end table beside the couch. Bright light fills the room.
Jodi quickly leans down and grabs the retriever from the floor.
As she starts to demand a response from him she hears,
Vvvvtttt
The last thing Jodi hears as the jump begins, and his view disappears,
is the muffled sound of another gunshot.
"Whoa!" Jodi exclaims to himself, as he slowly opens his tightly closed
eyes to the blue light. "Man, I can’t take much more of this!" he says
out loud. His body is shaking uncontrollably, partly from fear and
partly from his dangerously low blood sugar. His eyelids were getting
heavy and his palms were sweating. He knew he had to eat now or
he would soon slip into a coma-like state and slump to the platform at
his feet. He knew the light cylinder would hold him inside the beam
but once he reached his next stop, the beam would disappear and he
would spread out onto whatever surface he lands on. As tired and
exhausted as he was, this sounded very comfortable, but he’d never
jumped any way but standing up. He even envisioned whatever body
parts he might have outside the beam, being left behind. So he
closed his eyes and tried to regain some composure. He pulled a
plastic wrapped ham sandwich from his bag and started to devour it
like an animal in the wild. The point was not to enjoy a meal; the
point was to get some food into his system for the insulin injection
he’d given himself that morning to work with.
This jump was taking a little longer than the others. He couldn’t say
why, but he was grateful. He was still eating. The sandwich gone, he
ripped open a candy bar and ‘wolfed’ it down in two bites.
Taking a couple of big gulps of the plastic bottled, drinking water,
He took a moment to try and think. He must think. There must be
some way to cease this ‘Russian Roulette’, he was experiencing.
He then heard a beep. It was the retriever. The beep was the
retriever receiving information from the computer back in Dallas.
Seeing the activity on the small screen told him a very strange thing;
someone was in the basement of his house, on the computer.
But who?
A smile of resolve; spread across his face and little flicker of hope
shown in his weary eyes. There was only one other person, in his
time, that could work the machine.
Jackson Weber. The old man that taught Jodi all he knew about
traveling through time and space. Jackson Weber was the Particle
Physics Professor from MIT that had designed and built the machine.
But how and why? How did Jackson know Jodi was in trouble and how
did he get into the house? He last knew of the old man, living out his
natural days, in 17th century Spain.
Something was up, but Jodi wasn’t sure what.
He was starting to feel more like himself now that he’d had this little
respite to eat and regroup his thoughts after that last little episode
with the beautiful, naked, murderess.
Jodi couldn’t shake the eerie feeling of seeing that beautiful nude
woman, with those beautiful green eyes staring at him, all the while
ready to put a hole right through his head. He shook his head, trying
to mentally change the subject.
He vowed to himself that once he finally got back home, he was going
to take some time off and go out and get laid. It had been too long.
All these thoughts were shut down quickly as the jump ended.
With Jackson at the controls back home, he thought for sure, his next
stop would be back in the basement. But no such luck.
He was outdoors, in some strange expanse of what looked like desert.
A huge area of nothing all around him, many square miles of nothing
rimmed by faint whisps of mountain range on all sides.
The light was reminiscent of late dusk. Almost twilight, but with a
strange purple hue to the sky. A cloudless, moonless, starless, purple
sky. The distant hills all around his horizon were almost black. The
ground, if you could call it that, was almost a teal color.
Except for some dust he could scoot with his shoe,
there was no grass and no rocks, not even
a tiny pebble as far as he could see. The surface he stood on was
extremely flat and looked to be swept clean. There were no bird
noises or noises of any sort. The silence was quite loud.
There was not even a slight breeze, but the temperature did seem to
be cool. This didn’t seem to be a hostile place to stop, but for some
reason, it was very un-nerving for Jodi to stand there, waiting to go
again, this time home he hoped.
Jodi turned his attention to putting his backpack in order again and
slung it back onto his back. As he stood there calmly waiting to go
again, he straightened out his disheveled clothes and brushed the hair
back off his face. For the first time in months, since quitting, he
wished he had a cigarette.
Then, he felt it. Jodi could sense something was behind him, he was
instantly scared. He whirled around to behold standing not but three
feet from him, a creature. A huge, bipedal, green scaled, long-pointy-
eared creature. Jodi’s mouth fell all the way open as he gasped for a
breath. His eyes were forced wide open in disbelief of the thing
before him. It just stood there for a moment, towering over Jodi by a
good two feet, and staring into Jodi’s face with bright blue eyes.
The eyes were almost human, but they didn’t fit the face.
The head was that of a massive dog of sorts, but green and scaly.
Its huge muzzle mouth open displaying an assortment of very sharp
teeth. Jodi glanced up and down the creature’s frame in total shock
and horror. It might have had the head of a Doberman, but the body,
except being covered with slight, smooth scales, was definitely
human. And, wearing no clothing of any sort, it was definitely male.
The ‘things’, huge, ‘maleness’, was just swingin’ in the cool.
In the few seconds it took for Jodi to assess this situation, not a noise
was heard, nothing. But that changed quickly.
The creature reached out one long arm and with one swift move
grabbed Jodi’s entire head in its large, warm, clawed hand.
Its grip on Jodi was covering his whole face, but with its fingers
spread, Jodi could still breathe and still see the creature’s eyes staring
at him. Jodi was frozen in terror. He was obviously over-powered by
this giant. Jodi fought off his bladder’s desire to empty itself.
All he could think of, was the amount of pain this thing would inflict
on Jodi's frail body before it killed and possibly ate him whole.
Then, it spoke, with hot, foul breath in Jodi’s face, "Who are you?"
It asked in a slow, deep and menacing growl of a voice.
Jodi tried to pull together enough wind and courage to answer, but
couldn’t. All he could do was stand there in the jump spot and shake.
The creature’s huge hand was not squeezing Jodi’s head enough to
actually be painful, but it was very uncomfortable, nonetheless.
"Never mind!" the creature, shouted.
"Whomever you are, you go back and tell Jackson Weber, I need him
here now. Do you understand?" His frightening voice became even
more menacing as he spoke. And with every word, he would lean his
face a little closer to Jodi.
"Do you understand?" the giant demanded.
This was Jodi’s time to respond if there was no other.
He managed to nod his restricted head enough to respond in an
acceptable way for the creature. In a move just as swift as the
‘grab’, he let go of Jodi’s face and stepped back a few feet.
Jodi just stood there for a few seconds, very shaken, very confused,
still afraid, but with what the creature demanded him to do,
obviously, he intended on letting Jodi jump out of there.
This did let Jodi relax a bit, but not much.
Before he could put his next thought together, the thing got down in
Jodi’s face with his muzzle nose almost touching Jodi’s.
The move was so swift; it startled Jodi and made him jerk his head back.
"And tell Jackson to bring Her here with him, you got that?"
The creature stared straight into Jodi’s eyes, as he spoke and put
great emphasis on the word, "her".
Jodi nodded again, and was able to eek out a verbal response, "Yes,
I understand."
It was hard to detect emotion on this dog-like face, but Jodi thought
he caught a glimpse of a grin as the thing straightened back up and
said, "Yes, I think you do!"
He then brought from somewhere behind his back, what looked
curiously, very much like Jodi’s own, remote retriever unit. As he
used the claw-like nail of his left index finger to punch the buttons, he
spoke again, this time very calm, with a mastery of the English
language, as if from a well educated, ‘person’.
"Before I send you back to Weber, I’m sending you on an errand, my
young friend." He said, still pushing buttons, still programming Jodi’s jump.
"I need you to go to this place and find a man, a human like yourself
named Robert Imperial and give him the street address I’m leaving on
this screen, he’s looking for someone there." He looked down at Jodi,
with a questioning expression to his face. "You can remember all this,
can you not?"
Jodi still looking at the retriever in the thing’s hand, says without
looking up, "Yes, yes I can."
Jodi would have agreed to just about anything, if it meant he could
get out of this situation.
The creature then handed the retriever to Jodi. Then sidestepped a
few feet and quickly walked right past Jodi, who was still marveling at
the retriever he had been handed. When Jodi turned to see where the
thing was headed, the thing was nowhere to be seen, it had vanished.
Jodi was still scanning the perimeter for the creature when, the
next, welcome jump came.
Vvvvtttt
This was a quick jump.
When he stopped, he found himself in a nightclub. It was daylight, as
the late afternoon sun shown through the windows at the front of the
room. He stood facing the bar. There were a few folks at the end of
the bar and several musicians, setting up their equipment on the tiny
stage in the corner. Then, the bartender, who had been leaning over
the sink behind the bar washing glasses, raised up, in surprise.
"Oh, hello, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you walk in." the bartender said with
a sincere smile and held out his, clean and towel dried hand to shake Jodi’s.
He continued his greeting, "Welcome to the Balcony Club. My name’s
Todd, what can I get you sir?"
Jodi thought for a moment, finally feeling he might be able to relax.
Brushed the hair back from his face and still feeling that huge hand
over his face said, "You know, a cocktail would be great right about
now. How about, two shots of Crown and a black coffee?"
Jodi returned the mans smile, he was feeling very relieved to be away
from that thing and its weird landscape.
The Bartender, nodded and went about filling Jodi’s request. And as
he worked, he glanced back at Jodi and said, in a friendly voice,
"Please, feel free to sit wherever you’d like."
Jodi smiled back, thought for a second and replied,
"I’ll just stand right here for a bit, if you don’t mind."