Keely Pt. 9

Oh my. I'm thinking this story is going to be very different when I rewite it. I am just now getting a feel for it.

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The Trip Room at the Institute is a rectangle about half the size of a basketball court. There are glass room dividers separating several sections from the main floor. Behind those dividers are banks of three dimensional compuscreens, levers, switches, buttons, lights, and enough beeping and blipping noises to appease Star Trek fans the world over; all twelve versions of it. None of them, I thought while watching the light show, had humankind planet hopping without a spacecraft. I grabbed an Orthochair, adjusted it to fit my ancient frame and dialed up Steven King’s 146th and latest creepy thriller. The old guy still had it. He was back to vampires in this one, a familiar theme, but now they were cosmic time travelers looking for exotic blood sources on distant planets. I wondered, with all I now knew, if he was being prescient, as he had so often been in the latter stages of his career.

I was on chapter four, perhaps an hour later, when I sensed something different about the room. I switched off my Holobook, looked around, and there he was, all six foot four of his ugliness, standing at the far side of the room. He was looking directly at me and smiling, if you could call that hideous arrangement of features a smile. I mean he displayed a lot of teeth, but there was a serious lack of joy in the effort. I rose from the Ortho and slid a little to my right. I did this kind of casually, making old man groans and grunts as if it was causing me pain to make these small movements. In truth I didn’t feel a thing but excitement. I moved a little further right niftily putting myself between Hsub and the only unbolted exit door from the Trip Room. He could run back to the Past if he chose, but he would have to go through me in the Present to find the Future.

Hsub thought I was trying to get away. He laughed. “Go for it old man” he said as he began to cross the room towards me. “Let’ see what you got.” This from a guy who could Time Travel, I thought? Let’s see what you got? I was less than impressed.

I wanted to take a fighter’s stance, get on the balls of my feet, put my hands up, maybe bob and weave a little, but I knew those days were long gone. Instead, I just crossed my arms and stared at this, the most dangerous man in the world. I was completely confident that Keely had prepared me properly. I also wanted to say something clever, something erudite and memorable, a verbal one up or in your face or skomp as we called it when I was a kid. Let him know ,I might be old but, I was still all there. But, story of my life, nothing came to mind, so I went with the predictably macho and just said, “No Asshole, you show me what you got.”

He walked right up to me and stopped a pace away. We did a stare down thing for awhile that was going nowhere until he finally graced me with another of his charming smiles. He was going to say out of my way as he grinned, but all he managed was “out of” before he got the shock of his life. Literally. He had reached out to shove me and touched the silver suit. I’m not real conversant about watts and volts and currents and such, but whatever that suit was geared to deliver was more than enough. Hsub was writhing on the ground in a split second, smoke and a nasty smell emanating from his ugly self. I looked around for something to bind him with and found a roll of duct tape on a nearby counter. Stuff was still the same fix-all in the twenty-first century that it had been in the twentieth. I got his hands wrapped up and was working on his feet when, damn,” he disappeared. “Shit,” I said aloud, “shit.” I was still not able to think of something clever.