Keely Pt. 4

(I've changed the name of the bad guy to Jorge Hsub for reasons of my own.)

We fade to the Present. I am still visibly upset, but Keely has calmed and seems thoughtful. “C’mon Grandpa” she says, “I’ll buy you lunch.”

We sit quietly for awhile over our fifty-five dollar plankton burgers. I’m trying to absorb and make sense of what has just happened when Keely takes a last sip of her Puragua and says, “ What’s really disturbing, Grandpa, is that when I was at the bridge the first time, the time we were visiting, Hsub wasn’t there. I stopped there precisely because it was a very serene time in my life, a moment when I realized that though I loved my music, science was where I could most contribute to the world. When Hsub showed up, I was, as you saw, quite startled in the Time Pod, because it means that Hsub has figured out how to move through time in other people’s life streams. Now I have to do the same before he can find a way to alter the Past and really screw us up, maybe even do away with us, here in the Future. I realized quickly, when he was lifting me at the bridge, that nothing would happen or I wouldn’t be there with you in the Pod. As you saw, the second he put me down, he blinked away. This says to me that he can only move through other people’s time for a limited period.”

“What do you know about Hsub?” I asked.

“Hsub and I were at MIT together freshman year. He was a brilliant, but unstable student. He suffered from depression and when he was in his black moods he hated everybody including himself. We had similar curricula, so we were in several classes together and I rarely saw him as anything other than an angry, hateful person. He was argumentative and seemed to ooze violence. Most of the kids were afraid of him and avoided any contact with him. He’d sit in class with nobody closer than three desks away and just glower. You could almost see the hate rising off him. When he attacked our Physics teacher near the end of the year, he was expelled and would have been arrested if he hadn’t just vanished. That was the last time I saw him until now. Of course, like everyone, I’ve heard about his End World cult and all the terror and havoc they take credit for. I’ve even read his manifesto “Oblivion” twice. I can’t imagine a worse mixture than his of brilliance, hate and insanity. He has to be stopped.

“What did you mean when you said to him ‘you’ll never know?’”

“I really can’t tell you right now, Grandpa, or as the old joke goes, I’d have to shoot you. Let me just say that at the Institute we are working on projects besides Time Travel and Hsub seems to have wind of them. We found the mole who leaked our Time notes to him, but as you saw, we were too late. Hsub has gained entrance to the Past and now I’m not the only one who knows how to do it. If he were to understand our newest project, not just this world, but all worlds will be in danger.