This work of fiction may be freely distributed on the net as long as it is not altered or sold.  Sliders and all related characters are property of Universal/Saint Clair and no infringement is intended.  The author (that's me) has received no monetary compensation for this work, but is very open to comments and criticism.  Yeah, let's see David Peckinpah say that!

Quinn Mallory is dead having sacrificed his life to save his friends from an evil counterpart of his, Quinn 1.  Logan Saint Clair - now biologically bonded to her own timer - has joined the group to escape.  Now, the sliders and Logan have entered into an uneasy partnership.

What happens next, is anyone's guess.

Rembrandt mumbled an apology to a man on crutches he bumped into as he waded through the human ocean that milled inside the corridors of Hockley Memorial HMO Subsidiary #441.  It was especially busy now with San Francisco picking up the pieces of a 5.2 shaker that had hit a few days before he and the other sliders came to town.

It wasn’t a severe quake, but the cuts and bruises, the fractured arms and broken legs that came with any tremor had clogged the arteries of this world’s health business.  Now the understaffed and under equipped hospitals were in a rush to cut corners, save money, and possibly ease a little suffering and mend some broken bodies if they had the time.

When they arrived on this world, Wade was still deep in withdrawals from the drug that the wealthy and quite evil Quinn 1 had injected into her on the last world.  A counterpart of Logan Saint Clair, Logan 7 as she was called, risked her life to bring Wade the medication to keep her withdrawal from killing her, and now, thanks to that woman, Wade was alive and was getting better.

Physically, if not emotionally.

“Excuse me,” Rembrandt said, grabbing the arm of a nurse running past him.

She glared at him through her wire-framed glasses as if he didn’t have the right to stop her and ask for a second of her time.  “Sir,” she huffed.  “I am extremely busy.”

“All I want to know is where I can find room #10-2231-B,” Rembrandt replied wearily, reading the scribbled pen on the palm of his hand.  “I have a friend who was moved there a few hours ago and I haven’t been able to find--”

“Tenth story, wing B,” the nurse snapped before spinning on her heels and walking away.

Rembrandt bit his lower lip.  “Thank you,” he said through clenched teeth.

Making his way to an elevator, he stopped for a moment to pull a blanket up over a child who was lying on a bed in the hall.  “There you go, sweetheart,” he said softy.

The little girl was obviously in a lot of pain, but managed to smile at him.  He had to turn away and keep walking to prevent the little patient from seeing the tears welling up in his eyes.

He got to the elevator and pressed the button to ascend to the tenth floor.  He was in sub-level three now and would be thankful to see the light of day again.

There was a chime, and the doors slid open.  Rembrandt allowed two little elderly women to vacate the car before he went inside and pressed the “10” button.  The doors slid shut and he was alone.

Immediately, he became wracked with sobs and pounded on the shut door.

*Get a hold of yourself, Rembrandt,* he cursed at himself.  *You can’t go see Wade like this!  Look at you!  Crying like a baby!  For God’s sake, pull yourself together!*

He took a deep breath and wiped the tears off his face.  It was time to be strong again.

There was another chime and the doors slid open.  The tenth floor was a little less hectic than the sub-levels.  Here, there was no crying, no wailing in pain, no angry shouts from parents wondering why the HMO wasn’t going to provide a medicine for their children.  Here, it was quieter.

He found wing B, and after a half hour of searching, found room #10-2231-B.  He opened the door expecting to find Wade lying on a bed sleeping… perhaps watching TV or something.

Instead, the sight appalled him.

The room was very large, and on a circular conveyor belt that slowly circled the room were at least fifty patients lying flat on their backs.  As they rolled past a station, a doctor would check their vitals, administer medication, or change a bedpan.  This was conveyor belt medicine at its most literal and HMOs at their worst.

Rembrandt walked slowly into the room, aghast at what he was witnessing.  Was this common practice on this world?  It MUST be!  The thought was too horrible to comprehend.

He was watching a doctor change a bandage at one of the stations when a patient rolled into view on the conveyor belt.

“Wade,” he said softly.

He rushed to her side.  She was sleeping, still very pale.  Her dark hair formed strings on her forehead where she had been perspiring.   Her eyes were red and puffy and her breathing was labored.

Rembrandt took her hand and held it gently.  He had to walk backwards to keep up with her as she advanced down the conveyor belt.

After a few minutes, she opened her eyes.  They were red and bloodshot, exposing her pain and exhaustion to the world.  “Hey,” her raspy voice weakly said.

Rembrandt smiled.  “Hey,” he replied.

Wade looked around.  She didn’t have the strength to move her head.  “Where am I?”

“Hockley Memorial HMO Subsidiary #441,” Rembrandt said as if he were a commercial.  He was trying to brighten things up with a touch of humor.

Wade squinted.  “What the hell am I doing in a bank?”

“It’s not a bank,” Rembrandt said.  “It’s a hospital of some sort.  Welcome to HMO world.”

Wade coughed and then took in a rattled breath.  “Am I moving?”

“Yeah.”

“Why am I moving?”

Rembrandt looked around.  “I’m really not that sure.  It’s some kind of mass production of the medical kind around here.  You roll to the doctors and they take care of you.”

Wade had reached a medical station.  A large woman with larger red hair laughed at Rembrandt’s explanation as she injected fluid into Wade’s IV.  “I’m no doctor, honey!  I just went to that technical college Sally Struthers was pitching on TV, but thanks for the thought!”

She continued to laugh as Wade rolled down the line.  Rembrandt grimaced.  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said.  “We slide in twelve hours.  We’re going to get you out of here.  But hey, look on the bright side!  The drug’s almost completely out of your system and soon you’ll be right as rain!”  He frowned.  “Well, as long as it’s not that acid rain we hit a few months back.  I’m telling you, that was some nasty…”

Wade shut her eyes.  “He’s really gone, isn’t he?”

Rembrandt stopped.  He was hoping to avoid this, at least until Wade was feeling better.  “Yeah,” he finally said.

Wade started to cry, but in her weakened state, all it amounted to was tears streaking down her face.  “Are…” she swallowed, “Are we going back for him?”

“Wade, you know we can’t,” Rembrandt whispered.

She opened her eyes.  “I just can’t stand it, Remmy,” she said softly.  “I can’t stand the thought of him back there all alone.  I want to take him off of that awful world, Rembrandt!  I want to take him home!”

“Quinn’s not back there, Wade.  It’s just a shell.  Quinn’s beyond it all.  No one can touch him or hurt him ever again.”  He was fighting to keep the tears from coming.  He took Wade’s hand and held it over her heart.  “This is where Quinn is now, girl, and as long as we remember him and love him… he’ll never really be dead.”

She put her other hand over his and grasped it as tightly as she could.  “It’s never going to be the same again, will it?”

Rembrandt shook his head.  “No, I don’t guess it will be.”

“We’re going to go through hell,” Wade cryptically said.  She probably didn’t know what she was saying, because her hand went limp and slid down to her side.  She was sleeping again.  Rembrandt’s visit and the memory of what had happened to Quinn had overtaxed her.

Remmy gently kissed her and caressed her cheek.  “We may go through hell, sweetheart, but at least we’ll go through it together.”

-----

Maggie crossed her arms and glanced at Logan Saint Clair out of the corner of her eye.  “I don’t like this, Max,” she grumbled.  “I don’t like this at all.”

Professor Maximillian Arturo placed his cup of coffee on the table and looked up from his seat.  They were in a charming open-air café under the Golden Gate Bridge.  “Captain Beckett,” he said almost silently, “please keep your voice down.  Aside from the fact that we are in a public place, Miss Saint Clair is within earshot and can more than likely hear every snide remark you have to say.”

Maggie glanced over at Logan again.  The newest addition to the dysfunctional family of sliding was sitting alone, tinkering with the timer and the unit implanted in her arm.  “Well,” Maggie huffed, “at least I’m not doing surgery on myself in the middle of a restaurant!”

“Miss Saint Clair is well aware of the patrons, Maggie.  That is why she is sitting alone.”

“I still don’t like it.”

Arturo leaned over and stared her in the eyes.  “And do you think I do?” he growled in a low voice.  “Do you think I like having to depend on a former enemy to transport us?  Do you think it was my choice to have to wire a timer into that woman’s arm to slide us out of that hellhole?”  He leaned back into his seat, but there was still an air of danger to his voice.  “These are trying times, Captain, and we must stay calm, rationale, and focused.  Miss Saint Clair is less than trustworthy… I do freely admit that, but for the time being, we NEED her.  She hasn’t done anything to indicate that she is trying to hurt or deceive us and, until she does, I say that we treat her as one of our own.”

“She’ll never be one of us,” Maggie snapped.

At that, Arturo grinned.  “Funny…  Miss Wells told me that she once said the same thing about you.”

Maggie wasn’t amused and she wasn’t about to be distracted.  “What makes you think that she won’t leave us behind the first chance she gets?”

A hand clasped down on Maggie’s shoulder and, as she looked up, she saw the face of Logan Saint Clair staring down at her.  There was no expression on Logan’s face at all when she spoke.  “If I was going to leave you behind, sweetie, I would have done it already,” she said.  “I could have left you all on hellhole world and would have been done with you.”

Maggie wasn’t about to be intimidated.  Instead, she stood and went eye-level with Logan.  “Why?” she said.  “Why don’t you leave us behind and go along your merry way?”

“Captain,” Arturo’s voice cautioned.

Maggie raised her hands and silenced him.  “What use are we to you?”

Logan raised an eyebrow.  “Truthfully, I don’t have the slightest idea,” she admitted.  “But you know what I’ve learned from bouncing from world to world over the last few years?  I’ve learned that it’s lonely going at it alone, and I’d rather have a regular face to look at slide after slide than be all by myself.  Even if that face is yours, Maggie.  I’d rather have people like you and Rembrandt and Wade watching my back than waiting for the next Quinn 1 to jump out of the shadows and grab me.  Simply put, Captain Beckett, I’m sick of the lone wolf routine.  I want companions, and right now… you need me a whole hell of a lot more than I need you.”  She smirked.  “Think about that a while.”

They stood there for a moment glaring at each other until Arturo cleared his throat.  “Perhaps you should sit down before you attract pigeons.”

They did so, but didn’t say a word to each other.  “So,” Arturo began, “Miss Saint Clair… what is our timer status?”

“The status is lousy,” she reported.  “It was never designed to work like we have it rigged.  The stabilizer is almost shot, the quartz diode is overheating, the power cells are draining, and I don’t even like this damn thing’s color.”  She tossed the timer onto the table.  It flipped open, revealing the display.

0-08:34:12

Zero days, eight hours, thirty-four minutes, and twelve seconds until the next slide.

“What’s your prognosis?” Arturo inquired.

Logan blew air out of her mouth.  “Well, it may be good for two or three more slides.  After that, we run the risk of it either not functioning properly, or just smashing us into subatomic goo while we’re inside the wormhole, but on the bright side… a few of our atoms might actually make it to our respective homes!”

Arturo didn’t seem amused.  “Have you thought of replacement parts?”

“Thought, sought, and bought,” Logan replied.  “I’ve replaced a few components, but tech on this world isn’t advanced enough to change out the critical systems.  If we don’t find something to replace the anti-proton diode, we’re screwed.”

“That’s quite a tall order,” Arturo said, his brow furrowing.  “As I recall, that was the piece of the timer that Quinn had the most trouble creating in the first place.  He basically had to invent the entire technology.”

“What’s it do?” Maggie asked.

Arturo opened his mouth to answer, but Logan quickly began to speak, picking up the timer as she explained.  “Basically, it keeps the wormhole from closing on us, atomizing our bodies.  It emits anti-protons which keep the sliding tunnel open.”

“We’ll just have to hope the next world offers a better selection of equipment,” Arturo said, rising to his feet.

“And if it doesn’t?” Maggie asked.

“If it doesn’t,” the professor said, “I suggest we start inquiring about real estate.”

-----

Rembrandt met the others at the hospital entrance.  “How’s Wade doing?” Maggie asked him.

“She’s better,” he said.  “She’s eating now, and she’s regained most of her strength.”

“I don’t mean that, Rembrandt,” Maggie said sadly.  “I mean…”

He understood.  “She’s hurting,” he said.  “Bad.  I’d go as far as to say that she’s almost lost the will to go on.”

“Then we help her to find the will,” Arturo suggested.  “After all, in moments like these, it’s best to be near family and friends.  Is she well enough to travel?”

“It doesn’t matter if she’s well enough or not,” Logan stated.  “We slide in thirty minutes, and with the timers cross-connected like this, we can’t track our photon trail.  We can’t come back for her later, so she either comes now or stays here permanently.”

They went inside, found an elevator, and went up to the tenth floor.  Once there, Rembrandt showed the others  the mass-medical ward he had first found Wade in.

Arturo gazed at the room in disgust.  “I can’t believe we left that poor child here,” he grumbled.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Maggie said, watching for Wade.  “It was either get her help here or watch her die, and I’ve seen way too much of the former.”

A few minutes went by and they still hadn’t found Wade.  Arturo went up to one of the stations.  “Pardon me, sir,” he said.  “I’m looking for a friend.  Wade Wells.”

The doctor gave him an uninterested glance, finished what he was doing, and then pulled out a keyboard.  “What was the name again?”

“Wade Wells,” Arturo said.

The doctor typed in the name.  “W-E-L-L-E-S?”

“W-E-L-L-S!” Arturo told him.  The professor was beginning to lose patience with the bureaucracy.

After a few seconds of waiting, the information came up on screen.  “Ah, here we are.  Wells, Wade: brought in for extreme withdrawal symptoms.”  The doctors sucked on his teeth, making as disgusting sound as he digested all of the data.  “Well, it looks like your friend was deemed well enough to be taken to the non-pay ward.”

And with that, the doctor began working on his crossword puzzle again.

Arturo slapped his hand down on the desk, covering the puzzle.  “And just where, pray tell, can we find the non-pay ward?”

The doctor looked up and clenched his jaw.  “You will find the non-pay ward in sub-level six, wing A, room #0600.  You mind?”  He held up the pencil in his hand.  “I’d hate to have to treat you for lead poisoning.”

Arturo’s face grew hot.  Rembrandt put a gentle hand on his shoulder.  “Professor,” he whispered, “now is not the time.”

Arturo took a deep breath and nodded.  “I agree, my friend.”  He looked back at the doctor and squinted his eyes.  He so wanted to tell this medical miscreant a proper place he could stick his pencil, but now was indeed not the time.  The slide was twenty minutes away, and they had to find Wade.

The professor grumbled silently to himself as they rode the elevator to sub-level six, the bottom level of the hospital.  The doors opened and the smell of decay, infection, and urine washed over them.  The sliders held their hands over their faces so not to be overwhelmed.

Logan coughed.  “Come on,” she said, “fifteen minutes.”

They walked down the dimly lit corridors.  The professor suggested that the reason the light level was so low was to hide the unsanitary conditions.  Rembrandt suggested that if they wanted to do that, a few air fresheners would have been nice.  Maggie laughed, but stopped when they passed a body covered with a sheet waiting out in the hall.  It had obviously been there for hours and flies were beginning to buzz around it.

“Let’s get Wade the hell out of this hell,” Rembrandt coughed.

It wasn’t much longer until they found room #0600.  Maggie pointed out a sign on the door.

NO ADMITTANCE
PATIENTS DETAINED FOR NON-PAY
ABSOLUTELY NO VISITORS

The steel door was locked and there were no windows to tell if Wade was even inside.

Logan looked at the timer.  “Nine minutes,” she said.

“Intolerable,” Arturo exploded.  “What is this?  A jail or a hospital?”

Maggie and Rembrandt pushed on the door, but it wouldn’t budge.  Arturo inspected the lock, but it was a card-activated bolt and wouldn’t succumb to a pick.  Minutes crawled by.  Finally, Logan knocked on the door.

“We’ve got another deadbeat for you,” she said in a gruff voice.  “Open up, I don’t have my key!”

She turned to the others and shrugged as if to say, ‘hell, what else are we supposed to do?’  There were a few  moments of silence until the card slot beeped and the light turned green.  The door began to slowly open.

Instantly, Maggie and Rembrandt pushed the door completely open, shoving the nurse on the other side to the floor.  She landed on her rump with an audible curse.  “W-What are you doing in here?  You can’t go in there!  It’s restricted!  What are you doing!?”

“We’re checking out, you old bag,” Logan retorted.  “Now sit down, shut up, and play nice before YOU become the beneficiary of this quote/unquote medical establishment.  Got me?”

The nurse quickly nodded.

Rembrandt, Maggie, and Arturo fanned out through the ward.  It was the size of a football field and was filled with small, dirty beds.  On every bed, a person lay either sick, in pain, or dying.  They shuddered at finding Wade down here in the state they had left her in.

“WADE,” Rembrandt called out.  “WHERE ARE YOU!?”

“Over here,” a weak voice replied.  Rembrandt called out to the others and they converged on the voice.  There was Wade, kneeling over a young boy who was lying in a bed covered in filth.

Rembrandt ran over and hugged her.  “Wade, what are you doing up?”

Wade managed a weak smile.  “I’m better, Remmy, really.”  She placed a hand on the young boy’s forehead.  “This is Tommy Dawkins,” she told them.  “His parents couldn’t pay his medical bills, and while they’re working it off on the upper levels, he’s been down here for weeks.”

The boy moaned.  “What’s wrong with him?” Arturo asked.

“He had his appendix removed,” she told him.  “But since he’s in the non-pay ward, he’s not getting any pain medication and minimal saline.”  She looked up at them.  “I gave him mine.”

Indeed, Wade had removed her own IV and connected her saline bag to the boy’s.

“Wade,” Maggie whispered.  “You need that.”

“Not as much as he does,” Wade explained.  “Without a proper dosage, he could die.”  She tousled the boy’s blond hair.  “Just trying to make a small difference like Quinn would have done.”

Maggie kneeled by her and gave her a hug.  “Quinn would have been proud,” she said, choking back the tears.

The doors to the ward flew open and several security guards entered.  The nurse began pointing frantically at the sliders.

“How much time?” Arturo asked Logan.

Logan held up the timer and activated the vortex.  “Not a whole hell of a lot,” she said.

The wormhole seemed to struggle to stay open, its borders fluctuated and shimmered in strange colors and it seemed to be daring them to enter the dangerous passage.

“What’s happening!?” Rembrandt asked.

Logan pushed him.  “Go!  Hurry!  It may collapse any second!”

Arturo and Rembrandt didn’t waste any time.  They leaped into the maw of the opening and vanished.  Logan leaped in after them.

The wormhole seemed to be fraying at the edges and straining against unseen cosmic forces.  Maggie helped Wade to her feet.  “Wade, come on!”

They got to the opening and Maggie leaped through.  Wade looked over her shoulder to get one last look at the boy and offer a silent prayer that he would pull through.  Much to her surprise, the boy’s eyes were open and were watching her and the vortex.  Young Tommy Dawkins managed a weary grin.  Wade smiled back, offered a quick wave, and jumped into the wormhole.

The swirling mass of light began to elongate and compress until it finally collapsed in on itself.

Tommy Dawkins took a deep, shaky breath.  “An angel,” he said to himself as security finally arrived only to scratch their heads and later ignore the whole affair to avoid the paperwork.

Tommy Dawkins did survive to become Doctor Thomas Dawkins a few years later.  As Surgeon General, he revolutionized the medical industry, doing away with bloated and greedy HMOs and returning proper care for all back to the country.  As a gesture, he demolished the large and impersonal Hockley Memorial HMO Subsidiary #441 building and erected a new structure with private rooms, a more experienced staff, and stocked with the latest in medical technology not just for the rich and privileged, but for all.

The new hospital was named “Holy Angels” and in its lobby, surrounded by trees and plants, there was placed a painting composed by Doctor Dawkins himself.  No one really understood why it hung in the lobby… after all, despite it being a lovely work of art, it made no sense to anyone other than Thomas Dawkins himself.

The painting was of a small, brunette woman in a hospital gown standing in front of a tunnel of light.  She was smiling and holding her hand out to a small boy in a bed.

-----

Wade was burped out of the vortex and caught in the arms of Professor Arturo.  “Are you all right?”

Wade smiled and nodded, but then keeled over and vomited.

“Oh, child,” Arturo said.  “I’m sorry we left you in that dreadful place!”

She wiped her mouth.  “I’m sorry about your shoes.”

Maggie and Rembrandt looked around.  The landscape was beautiful.  Trees everywhere sported pink and white blossoms that fell from the branches and blew around in the breeze.  The air was thick with the wonderful smell of pollen, and dandelion feathers danced around them.

“It’s beautiful,” Maggie observed.

Rembrandt looked over at Logan and decided to tell her something she wasn’t aware of yet.

“Uh, girl…  your arm is on fire.”

Logan looked down at the small fires licking out of the implant.  She quickly patted them out with her jacket sleeve and inspected the damage.

“How serious?” Arturo asked.

Logan grimaced.  “Still operational, but barely.  We’ve got a little over four hours to fix it.”

“What if we can’t?” Wade asked weakly.

Logan shrugged.  “It may produce another wormhole, but I can’t say for certain what it would do to us inside it.  We may be crushed, exploded, or just lost between universes.”  She snatched a passing blossom out of the air and crushed it in her hand.  “I have to say, this nature-lovers paradise doesn’t look promising for repair parts.”

Wade sank to the ground, but Arturo caught her.  “Regardless of the timer status, Miss Wells is still in dire need of medical attention,” he said.

Rembrandt pointed at something in the distance.  “Guys, look!”

About a mile away, a small village sat nestled in a grove of trees.  All of the buildings were white with blue trim and each seemed equipped with solar power mirrors.

“Those solar arrays may be promising,” Logan said, licking her lips.

Arturo nodded.  “And where there is science, there must be medicine.”  He picked up Wade in his arms and began to walk towards the village.

-----

Maggie knocked on the door of the first cottage they came to.   “Please, we need help!”

After a few seconds, a dark-skinned woman answered.  She was obviously Native American, possessing long black hair and deep black eyes.  She was wearing a red and white checkered dress and wiped her hands on a dishcloth as she answered the door.  “Yes?  Who are you?” she answered, seemingly taken aback that she had visitors.

Arturo was quickly approaching with Wade.  Rembrandt and Logan weren’t far behind.  “We need help, is there a doctor in town?”

The woman in the dress threw down the towel and ran to meet Arturo and Wade.  She checked Wade’s vital signs, looked at her pupils, and put her head to her chest to check her heartbeat and breathing.  “Has she taken anything in the last 24 hours?”

“She was drugged,” Arturo said.  “We’re not sure with what.”

“But she has been treated?”

Arturo blinked.  “Uh, yes…  Yes she has.”

“That’s what I thought,” the woman answered.  “Bring her inside.”

They didn’t argue.  Instead, they took Wade into the woman’s home, followed her to what they assumed was a spare bedroom, and sat Wade down.  “Is she going to be all right?” Maggie asked her.

The woman put her hand on Wade’s head.  “She’s running a temperature of 101.2.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Logan asked as the woman brushed past her and hurried to fetch something from another part of the house.

“You say that as if you don’t know where you are,” the woman called back.

“Well, we don’t!” Rembrandt called back to her.

“Interesting.”  The woman re-entered with a tray full of odd dried plants and crushed powders.  She knelt by the bed and began mixing some of the plants and powders with water.  “What’s her name?” she asked quietly.

Arturo shifted uncomfortably.  “It’s Wade.”

The woman placed her light brown hand on Wade’s forehead.  “Wade, I’m Eylisa Whitefeather.  Can you hear me?”

Wade nodded.

“I’m going to give you something that will help you flush the drugs from your system, okay?  I need you to drink as much of this as possible.”

Eylisa put the glass to Wade’s lips and she sipped the liquid slowly.

“Excuse me,” Arturo said, “what is that you’re giving her?”

“Roots and herb mostly.  A few other ingredients I’d rather not go into.”

“Is it safe?”

“I grew it and mixed it myself,” Eylisa said.  “Of course it’s safe.”

Wade coughed and splattered some of the liquid on herself.  “Sorry,” she said.

Eylisa smiled.  “Don’t worry about it, it’ll come out.  Think you can drink some more?”

Wade nodded and began to sip the liquid again.  After a few minutes, the glass was empty.  “Good,” Eylisa said.  “Very good, Wade.  Now, you get some rest and I’ll be back to check on you in a few minutes.”

Wade nodded again and closed her eyes.  Eylisa and the sliders left her alone and ventured into the living room area.  It was decorated with all sorts of Native American art and artifacts, making it look more like a museum than a home.

Logan seemed suspicious.  “What was that stuff?  I think we have time to go into the ingredients now.”

“Herbs, roots, and a few native beetles and insects,” she said.

Arturo’s face flattened.  “You mean to tell me that concoction you gave our companion was a plant-bug mixer?”

“That plant-bug mixer will save her life.  It was handed down through generations of my tribe and works wonders for poisonings as opposed to your method that calls for pumping more of the same poison into her bloodstream,” Eylisa shot back.

“Look,” Rembrandt said, stepping in between her and the professor.  “It’s not like we’re not grateful, just concerned.  We really do appreciate you taking her in like this.”

“Who are you people?” Eylisa demanded.

“I’m Rembrandt Brown,” Remmy told her, holding out his hand.  She shook it politely, though not without suspicion.  “That’s Professor Maximillian Arturo, Maggie Beckett, and Logan Saint Clair.”

Eylisa nodded to each of them.  “And how exactly did you get here?”

“We got lost and found it by accident,” Maggie simply said.

Eylisa didn’t buy it.  “Past the blockades, barbed wire, and armed guards?  I don’t think so.”

“Blockades?” Logan said.  “What is this, a prison?”

Eylisa gave her a look.  “You mean you really don’t know where you are?”

Logan shook her head.

-----

Eylisa led them outside and farther into the small village.   “We call this place Utopia,” she said under the afternoon sun.  “I know it’s a little pretentious, but that’s what we were aiming for in the first place... paradise.”

She led them into the central building.  Obviously, it was some sort of city hall.  As the sliders passed through the doorway, they were met by odd stares from the people inside.  “What’s their problem?” Maggie asked.

“They’re suspicious of outsiders,” Eylisa told them.

“Outsiders?” Arturo asked.  “What do you mean?”

“Utopia was built by the preeminent scientists of the world as a place where their collective minds could work together and solve problems like world hunger and disease, and bring humankind into a new age.  Unfortunately, the government of the United States saw us as an internal threat, mostly because a lot of the old guard refused to help develop weapons during World War II,” Eylisa explained.  “They blockaded us in, and we responded by declaring independence.  They’ve been scratching at our doors ever since.”

“What keeps the government from just coming in and raiding the place?” Maggie asked her.

Eylisa looked back at Maggie and cocked an eyebrow.  “I said we were peaceful, not helpless,” she grinned.  “This entire area is surrounded by a static field of energy that we put up right before the blockade.  So far, nothing the Americans have thrown at it has been able to get through, though I am a little curious how you got past it without deactivating the checkpoint.”

“Checkpoint?” Rembrandt asked.

“It’s a small doorway of sorts we open when scientists want to defect.”

“Where are you taking us?” Logan asked, trying to change the subject.

“I’m taking you to the old man,” Eylisa replied.  “He needs to be notified that we have guests.”

They reached a wooden door.  Eylisa knocked on it.

“Come in,” a voice from within replied.

Eylisa slowly opened the door and led the sliders inside.  “Doctor,” she said, “I found these people on the outskirts of the village.  They had a sick friend that I treated; she’s still at my home.”

In the center of the room, surrounded by books and scientific models, a little, white-haired man sat writing something down.  He looked up for a moment and smiled through his white mustache.  “Excuse me, Eylisa,” he said in a graveled, kind voice steeped in a German accent.  “Could you please tell me what 120 times 546 is?  My calculator has stopped working and my math skills are very poor.”

Arturo’s jaw dropped.

Logan just shook her head and whispered, “It can’t be!” over and over again.

Maggie and Rembrandt were equally amazed at the famous man who sat at the desk in front of them.

Eylisa smiled.  “It’s 65,520, Doctor Einstein.”

Einstein smiled.  “Of course.”

“Einstein?” Arturo gasped.

The white-haired man nodded.

Arturo squinted.  “Albert Einstein?”

“Yes?” Einstein replied.

“This… This is impossible,” Arturo said.  “How can you… How are you here!?”

Albert Einstein smiled.  “It has something to do with the birds and the bees, sir.”

Logan stepped forward.  “But you would have to be, like, a hundred and twenty!”

“One hundred twenty-two next March, as a matter of fact,” Einstein said.

The man who claimed to Albert Einstein did not look 122 years old.  In fact, to say he was sixty would be a stretch.  Certainly, the man was advanced in years, but to be a century and a quarter old?  Unlikely.

“You cannot possibly be Albert Einstein,” Arturo argued.  “Doctor Einstein has been dead and buried for forty-five years!”

“Professor, you never know…” Rembrandt began.

Logan interrupted him.  “It’s impossible.  Some counterparts may outlive others, but to live to be a hundred and twenty-two?  It’s simply not possible.”

“The world record is 124,” Rembrandt protested.

“Yeah,” Maggie said, “but I bet he didn’t look half as good as this guy!” she added, motioning to Doctor Einstein.

Einstein’s eyebrows went up at her remark.  “Thank you,” he said before turning to Eylisa with a puzzled expression.

“They’ve been saying things like that ever since I found them,” she explained.  “I think they’re serious that they have no idea where they are or who we are.”

Einstein walked forward, his cane steadying his uneasy steps.  “I see,” he said, looking curiously at Arturo’s face through his tiny spectacles.  The professor seemed a little uncomfortable with the close inspections.  “How is this possible, I wonder?” the doctor continued.

“Perhaps isolation,” Eylisa theorized, “but that wouldn’t account for the drugs in their companion's system.”

“Drugs?”  Einstein glared at the sliders with warning in his eyes.  “We do not allow that in Utopia.”

The computer behind him began to beep.  He turned his chair around and clicked a few buttons.  Logan couldn’t help but look over his shoulder to see what he was working on.  It was a status report on the static field that Eylisa had told them about.  The old scientist typed in a long password of over twenty keystrokes, checked the data, and then logged off.

“Now,” Einstein said facing them again.  “The drugs…”

“It wasn’t like that,” Rembrandt said.  “She didn’t take drugs, a… horrible person gave them to her against her will.”

“And what became of this horrible person?” Einstein asked.

“It’s a long story,” Rembrandt said.

Einstein sat there patiently, waiting for his answer.  Rembrandt couldn’t help but be reminded of Yoda.

Maggie shifted uncomfortably.  “I suppose you’d like to know how we got here?”

“Actually, I’m a little more curious – from a medical perspective - about the implant in your friend’s arm,” Eylisa said.  “I noticed it when I first saw you.”

“You did?” Logan replied in a shocked voice.  “H-How could you?  I--”

“Photographic memory,” Eylisa explained.  “Now, please… stop lying to us and tell us who you really are.  We promise you won’t be harmed.”

The sliders looked uncomfortably at each other.  “We might as well tell them,” Rembrandt offered.

“Oh, we will,” Logan said, “but first I want a few answers from you!” She pointed at Einstein.  “If you are Albert Einstein, how are you still alive?  You should have died years ago!”

Einstein seemed shocked at their ignorance.  “Your story should be an interesting tale if you do not know that, but I will honor your request.”
 

-----

Duncan bit his lower lip.  A brilliant physicist in his home country of America, his contributions to society were time and time again perverted into means to make the rich richer and ways to make the weapons of war more deadly.  So, one day he went home, said good-bye to his mother, father, and three sisters and made his way to California and the small community of scientists that thumbed their nose at the government and declared independence.

Once there, it was another three months before he figured out how to contact those on the inside.  And it was another month still before he managed to find a sufficient weakness in the American barricade that allowed him to get to the gateway in the static field.

He remembered as he crawled through the mud-soaked fields surrounding the perimeter of the static fields that if he was caught or if the residents on the inside wouldn’t let him in, he was done for… executed by the troops marching around the colony, or worse… sent off to a prison camp.

He remembered the light feeling in his chest when he stepped through the predetermined coordinates and found that a two-foot section of the static field had been deactivated, allowing him into Utopia and what he thought was going to be a life of uninterrupted discovery alongside some of the greatest minds to have ever lived.

What he found was quite the opposite.  The governmental barricade had all but crippled the community’s scientific research.  Supplies dwindled, the scientists used equipment that was pathetically outdated, and even basic medical supplies were at an all-time low.

Duncan had only lived there for a few months, but soon discovered that Utopia was a lost cause and the old guards who made most of the decisions regarding city operations were too set in their ways to make the radical changes the failing community needed.

So, ever the revolutionary, Duncan made the decision himself.  Over the course of two months, he gathered what little equipment he could and fashioned a small radio he used to contact the waiting troops outside.

It was time for a change and, whether they liked it or not, that change was coming tonight.

-----

“The story of my obscenely long lifespan, began in 1943,” Einstein said as a young man poured him some hot tea.  The old scientist mumbled a ‘thank you’ to him and motioned for him to serve his guests.  “I was privy to be one of twenty scientists to study a crashed alien spacecraft.”

“Alien spacecraft?” Arturo scoffed.  “Preposterous!”

“Exactly what I said,” Einstein said with a smile.  “But, there it was.  In my lifetime, I have hypothesized many wonders, but the day I saw that ship…” he paused, remembering that day.  “It was unforgettable.”  He took in a ragged breath and continued.  “To make a long story short, we dissected the marvelous technology on board and, thanks to a few medical experts we brought into our circle, fashioned implants to save decaying tissue, replace failing organs, and prolong our own life spans exponentially.”

“Let me get this straight… You’re cyborgs?” Logan asked.

Einstein and Eylisa nodded succinctly.

“By definition only,” Eylisa corrected them.  “We’re still very much human and prefer to keep it that way.”

“Is everyone here like you?” Rembrandt asked.

“Oh, goodness no,” Doctor Einstein said.  “Implants are only reserved for those whose bodies are ailing, and even then only for those who request it.  The children and most of the young in this village are totally organic like our young friend Garrett here.”  He motioned to the boy who had finished pouring the tea and then quickly walked out the door.

“And you harvested all this technology from the alien craft?” Maggie asked.

“Yes, all of it,” Eylisa said.  “Now, we lived up to our end of the deal.  Would you care to tell us who you are, and don’t give us any bullshit.”

“Eylisa, language,” Einstein cautioned.  She waved an apology.

“Very well,” Arturo said, “but you’re not going to believe us.”

“I am a 122 year old man with alien technology implanted throughout my body,” Einstein retorted.  “I have trained myself to believe quite a bit.”

Arturo nodded.  “Of course, sir.  My friends and I have crossed the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge.”

Einstein’s eyebrows hit the top of his hairline.  “You crossed my bridge?”

“Yes.”

“You… You’re from a parallel universe?”

“Yes.”

“And how was this possible?” Einstein asked with interest.

The sliders turned to Logan who took that as a sign to take over the explanation.  Of course, why not?  “Well, Doctor Einstein, the equation is quite complex…”  She looked up and saw Einstein’s face.  “Right,” she said, a little embarrassed.   “I’ve got it written down here somewhere.”  She’d been playing with the mathematics on the last world while messing with the timers.  She emptied her pockets onto Einstein’s desk.  The old genius appeared amused as she ruffled through scratch paper, candy wrappers, and assorted bills and coins until she found her equation folded up neatly in the refuse.  “There,” she said.  “That should be all the proof you need.”

“Oh, brother…” Eylisa remarked.

Einstein’s wrinkled and aged hands reached across the desk and towards the equation, but instead of picking it up, he found a penny.  He held it up to the light and peered at it until he finally reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin of his own.

“Interesting,” he said.  “Eylisa, look at this and tell me what you see.”

Eylisa looked at the coins.  “Could it be a forgery?”

“Perhaps, but it is an interesting piece of evidence to back up their theory.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Rembrandt asked curiously.

Einstein showed him his own penny.  “Notice anything strange about my coin, sir?”

Rembrandt studied it and shrugged.  “Something looks different, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

Maggie looked over his shoulder.  “Lincoln’s facing towards the left, and he’s missing the mole on his check.  The edges are ridged and not smooth.  It looks like the currency is slightly different on this world.”

“Actually,” Einstein said, “I was referring to the other side.”

Remmy flipped the coin over and saw what he and Eylisa were talking about.  Instead of the Lincoln Memorial, there were the words ONE CENT surrounded by wheat stalks.  To be sure it wasn’t an old coin, Rembrandt flipped it over and read the date.  1972.

“It’s a modern day wheat penny,” he said to the others with a grin.  “I used to collect these.  I think they stopped making them on our world around ‘59.”

“Interesting,” Einstein was heard to remark.

“Yeah, it’s pretty sweet,” Remmy said, turning back to the old scientist only to discover he had finally picked up Logan’s equation and was studying it with great interest.

“This appears to be proof of a unified field theory,” he said.  “Quite impressive.”

“Thank you,” Logan replied.  She actually appeared to be blushing.

“I should think that, if you are who you say you are, this should prove to be an interesting visit,” the old scientist remarked.

“Well, Doctor,” Logan said, nervously clearing her throat, “unless we repair the damage to our timer, our device we use to cross the Einste-- I mean, your bridge, sir, we may have to make our stay a permanent one.”

“And would that be so bad?” Einstein asked with a wink.

“We’re looking for a way home,” Rembrandt said.  “We’re lost.”

The smile disappeared from Einstein’s face.  “Oh dear me, I am sorry to hear that, Mister Brown.”

“Can you help us with replacement parts?” Maggie asked.

“Perhaps we can, wouldn’t you think so, Eylisa?” Einstein said.

“Perhaps they can have access to materials in storage, but we’re strapped for supplies as it is.  I question the wisdom of giving it to strangers,” she said.

“Why?” Einstein asked without emotion.

“Well,” Eylisa began.  It was obvious that, like Logan, the man intimidated her.  “We still don’t know if they are who they say they are!”

“You are our brightest medical doctor, Eylisa.  You should be able to tell if they’re lying just by looking at them.  Any pupil dilation? Increased respiration?  Heartbeat?”

“No,” she said, “but I still don’t trust them.”

“I founded Utopia to benefit the world,” the old scientist said to her.  “I know that my heart was in the right place when I did it, even if our efforts were met with suspicion throughout the world.  Thankfully, my heart is one of the last organs in my body that hasn’t been removed and replaced by machines, and I still believe that to benefit the world is this community’s destiny and, while we’re at it, we might as well benefit a few parallel worlds on the side.”

“You’re trusting them too easily,” she warned.

“I trust them now,” Einstein said softly.  “We’ll think of later when later gets here.  Now, take Miss Saint Clair to the storeroom and provide her with what she needs.”

Eylisa looked as though she was going to object, but instead nodded and motioned for Logan to follow her.

“I would like to come also,” Arturo said.  “That is, if you have no objection, sir?”

“None,” Einstein smiled.

Arturo, Logan, and Eylisa left and Einstein offered Maggie and Rembrandt something to drink.  They politely refused.   “You will have to forgive Eylisa,” he said.  “She’s always been an outsider at this community.  The last of her tribe and one of the last who practices ancient herbal medicine.  She will not divulge the secrets of her art, not even to me.  I suspect she will take them to her grave with her.”

“How did you become like this?” Maggie asked.

“A cyborg?” Einstein replied.  “Well, I do not know how the history of your world progressed, but here in the 1940’s the American government and several others were involved in a massive war.”

“World War II,” Rembrandt said.

Einstein blinked.  “To what?”

Rembrandt waved an apology.  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“The United States government was eager to end the war, so they used the works of myself and several others in the scientific community to fashion a terrible weapon of mass destruction.”

Maggie grew silent.  “The atomic bomb.”

“I see you’ve heard of it,” Einstein said gravely.

“I don’t come from the same world as Rembrandt, but on my world, we were involved in a fourth great war with Japan.  They had invaded the southern coast of California and we were overwhelmed, so we had to…”

“I see,” Einstein said.  “We were not so unfortunate, but we did construct the bomb under the impression that it would be used in a peaceful demonstration of our power off the coast of Japan.”

-----

“When he learned that he and the other scientists had been lied to by the president, that the bomb was going to be used at Hiroshima and Tokyo, he took off his protective goggles during a test blast and just allowed it to blind him.”

Logan and Arturo listened to Eylisa Whitefeather recount the tale with great interest.  “The government wasn’t impressed with his protest since, after all, he was the most brilliant mind of the twentieth century, and ordered the medical community to restore his vision.  They failed, and as a last resort, the government turned to the scientists studying the alien craft.”  She opened the door to the metal supply shed and motioned for them to go inside.   As she fumbled for the light switch, she continued the story.  “Using technology salvaged from the crash, we were able to fashion bionic eyes for him.”

The light came on and flooded the room.  Shelves lined the walls and were filled with boxes of equipment with names like “arterial pump” and “nano-tech.”   Arturo looked around the room in awe.  “This is incredible,” he said.

“Please,” she said, “regardless of what the old man said, we are dangerously short on supplies.  The spare parts in this room could be used to save lives here one day.  Take only the bare minimum of what you need.”

Logan nodded, walking by the shelves and mentally cataloging the equipment.  “You said we.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said ‘we’ were able to fashion a pair of bionic eyes for him,” Logan repeated.  “You were around in the forties?”

“Yes, I was.”

Arturo gaped.  “This bio-technology you have developed is remarkable!”

Eylisa seemed proud of herself all of the sudden.  “How old would you say I am?” she asked, placing her hands behind her back and standing a few inches taller.  At that moment, it looked like she had the body of a twenty year-old.

Arturo shrugged.  “A hundred?”

She slumped.  Her expression soured.  “That old?”

“No, no!  Don’t get me wrong, you’re a lovely lady, but this technology makes it hard to guess.”

“I’m 75,” Eylisa said.  “I was one of the first that received implants in the forties.”

“What was wrong with you?” Logan asked.

“A sort of degenerative muscular disorder called Yurin’s Disease.  Ever heard of it?”

Arturo and Logan shook their heads no.

“I had it when I was a teenager.  The implant is right above my heart, somehow it creates a field of anti-proton energy that actually seems to keep tissue from degenerating at all as if it’s held in some sort of stasis.  That’s why I’m a little more preserved than Doctor Einstein,” Eylisa explained.

“Oh yeah, we need one of those,” Logan said.

Eylisa blinked.  “Excuse me?”

“Your AP diode,” Logan said.  “That’s what we call it.  We need one to fix our timer, it’s essential to the formation of wormholes.”

Eylisa seemed shocked and appalled.  “You can’t have one.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she continued, “there are only a limited number of them and they’ve all been implanted into residents.”

“You don’t have any spare ones at all?” Logan asked.

Eylisa shook her head.  “No, none at all.  Even if we did, we wouldn’t let you have any.  We’ve lost three great men and women over the last five years in this colony just because we didn’t have any spare Lazarus Modules, that’s what WE call them.”

“And you haven’t mass produced them?” Arturo asked.

“No.”

Logan huffed.  “I thought you were a bunch of geniuses!”

“We are,” Eylisa said, “but we’re only as good as the technology available to us.  You might as well ask us to build a car in the middle of the desert…  It doesn’t matter if you’re a genius or the stupidest person on Earth, it just isn’t going to happen!”

“Perhaps we can fashion something similar,” Arturo suggested.

Logan never took her gaze off of Eylisa.  “Max, unless you’ve got some sort of anti-proton technology shoved in an orifice somewhere you’ve neglected to tell me, there is no chance in hell of replicating that technology in just,” she looked at the timer, “three hours.”

Arturo looked at Eylisa.  “Does any of this equipment produce anti-protons?”

“Some, but nowhere near the levels you need.”

Logan sneered at her.  “Then you’ve just stranded us here, sweetheart.”

-----

Rembrandt silently crept into Wade’s room as not to wake her.  However, the sheets were a mess and Wade was nowhere to be found.  He burst all the way into the room and instinctively called her name.

He was answered by a toilet flush.

Wade entered from the bathroom and dragged herself back into bed.  “I’ve been throwing up stuff I ate in high school,” she moaned when she saw that her friend had come calling.  “And I don’t even want to tell you what I just did in that bathroom just now.”

“Thanks for your restraint,” Rembrandt said.  “How are you feeling?”

“Lots better,” she said, sitting up.  “Still a little weak and sore… tired, but a lot better.”

Indeed, the color had returned to her face and she did appear stronger.   He put a hand to her forehead.  Her fever had broken.  “Well, you look better.”

“Where are we?” Wade asked.

“Genius town,” Rembrandt answered.  “Albert Einstein is the mayor.”

Wade shot him a dirty look.  “You don’t have to be sarcastic,” she hissed.

“No, it’s the God’s honest truth, girl!  The people here are, like, cyborgs and stuff.  They found a spaceship back in the forties and implanted all of this alien junk in their bodies and live to be over a hundred and twenty!”

“You’re serious?” Wade asked.  “Where are the others?”

“Maggie’s talking with Doctor Einstein, and Logan and the professor are looking for parts to fix the timer.”

Wade sat up again.  “What’s wrong with the timer?”

Rembrandt pushed her back down.  “Nothing you should be concerned about right now,” he said.  “They’re taking care of it.”

“How long?”

“About three hours.”

“No, I mean, how long has it been since…”

Rembrandt sighed.   Wade had been in and out of consciousness, and the last few days must have seemed like a fragmented nightmare to her.  “Three days,” he answered.

She nodded.  “I wish he was here, Rembrandt,” she said as a tear slid down her cheek.

“I wish he was too, girl.”

-----

Logan and the professor were going through an inventory list when a young man appeared at the doorway.   “Eylisa, may I have a word with you?”

“Yes, just a moment, Duncan,” she said, turning to the others.  “I’ll be right back.  Don’t touch anything until I get back.”

She left, leaving them alone.  Logan immediately began fondling every piece of equipment she could just to spite their escort.  “Uppity bitch,” she hissed between her teeth.

“Patience, my dear,” Arturo cautioned.  “This is not the time to lose one’s head.”

“That’s just the thing, Maxy!  Time!  We don’t have it!  We don’t have the equipment to fix this worthless piece of junk!”  She held up the timer and waved it around.  “And the killer of the thing is, they HAVE the technology, but won’t give it to us!”

“Because it’s implanted inside them!”

“Oh, that’s just an excuse!” Logan spat.  “If we were to cut the AP diode out of our little Indian friend out there, all that would happen would be that she would age at a normal rate!”

“It’s not our decision to make.”

“And why is stranding us forever THEIR decision!?”

”Forever?” Arturo said loudly.  “How do you figure THAT?  We’re here with Albert Einstein and the most brilliant minds on the planet!  They could probably build us an accelerator and timer twenty times better than the jury-rigged piece of rubbish we’re using now!”

“Eylisa said it herself,” Logan replied.  “They’re only as good as the tools they have.  If they can’t mass-produce AP diodes, then they can’t make a timer.”  She crossed her arms and bit her lip.  “This is one of those times we’re going to have to improvise.”

Arturo stood over her.  “Logan,” he said with a dead serious tone in his voice. His words almost sounded like thunder.  “I hope you are not planning anything you should not be.”

“What if I am?”

“Then I shall have to stop you.”

“Max, no offense, but you  - or rather your counterpart on my Earth – didn’t have very much success at stopping me.  As I remember, he ended up cooked like a McNugget.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“Simply put, Max, when I put my mind to something, not even the Harlem Globetrotters would have enough balls to stop me.”

“So, I take it you are planning something.”

“You’ll know when the time comes,” she replied with a smirk.

“And when that time comes?”

“When that time comes,” Logan said, her eyes narrowing into slits, “it would be in your best interest to stay the hell out of my way.  Screw me like your double did, and I’d like to say that you’ll live to regret it, but...”  She shrugged then patted him on the cheek.  “All’s fair in love, war, and sliding.”

-----

“What is it, Duncan, I’m busy!”

“The little errand girl running errands for the old man?  Why am I not surprised?” Duncan replied.

“Duncan, the little lame man with his lame sayings,” she said with a grin.  “Why am I not surprised?”

The young man thumbed back to the storage shed.  “Was that them?”

“Who?”

“Don’t give me that ‘who’ stuff,” he snapped.  “Are those the dimensional travelers?”

Eylisa looked at him.  “Goodness, you’re well-informed this afternoon.”

“Word travels at the relative speed of light around here,” he said.  “Garrett said that he saw them at the old man’s office.”

“It was two of them,” she told him.  “They’re trying to repair their gateway generator… timer, they call it.”

“So it’s true,” he said to himself before turning back to her. He took a deep breath and broke the news to her.  “Eylisa, there’s something going down.”

“What?” Eylisa asked.  “What are you talking about now?”

“First, I need to know where your loyalties lie, Eylisa,” Duncan warned.

“You know where they lie, Duncan,” she snapped.  “I’m not fond of Doctor Einstein’s stance either, but he was the first to…”

“Yeah, he was the first to establish Utopia,” Duncan said, rolling his eyes as if he’d heard it a thousand times.  “Whoopdee doo!  Hip, hip, hooray for him!”

“Your maturity is disheartening.”

“Lise, listen to reason!  Aren’t you tired of not having enough medicine to treat something as trivial as the flu or a cold?  Aren’t you tired of getting inspiration in the middle of the night and having to file it away in a drawer somewhere because we don’t have the equipment to implement it?”  He looked into her eyes.  “Aren’t you sick of watching people grow old and die because we’re out of Lazarus Modules?”

Eylisa said nothing.

“Come on, Doctor!  Don’t make me spell it out for you!”

“You’re planning on taking over Utopia?” she deduced.  “You and what army?”

“There are a lot like me, Lise.  A whole lot,” Duncan told her.  “And I’m not planning on taking over anything… just forcing a little change for the better.”

Eylisa thought about that.  “You’re taking an awful chance telling me this, aren’t you?  What makes you think that Einstein’s little errand girl won’t squeal to the old man?”

“Because this is for real this time,” Duncan told her.  “The outside world is catching up to us fast, and soon, we’re just going to be an insignificant succession from the country not even worth dropping a bomb on.  These… what do you call them?  Sliders?  They’re only proof that we’re growing complacent in our ways.  They came here with technology that puts anything we have to shame!”

“And we have technology that puts them to shame, Duncan,” Eylisa told him.

“Necessity is the mother of all invention, Eylisa,” Duncan countered.  “We’ve stolen half of this quote/unquote ‘wondrous’ technology of ours from a race of aliens we don’t even know about.”

She said nothing in return, so Duncan assumed he’d won that round of the argument.  “Eylisa, you know me,” he said.  “I’m not saying that we take over the village… that’s for the barbarians at the gate to think about.  All I’m saying is that we open up to the outside.”

“Explain.”

“We don’t give up our autonomy.  That would be a huge mistake,” Duncan said, detailing the plan.  “What we need is trade, we give them some breakthroughs we’ve made here – nothing that could be used to make weapons or anything – and they give us equipment.”

Eylisa looked at him.  “That’s quite a thing you’re suggesting, Duncan.  Do you think we can trust them?”

“I’ve already been in contact with the outside,” he said, smiling.  “They’re sending a negotiator here.  That’s why I came to you, Lise.  I need your help.”

“With what?”

“I can’t open the gate without the old man’s password,” he said sternly.  “I know that you know it.”

Eylisa looked at him for a minute and then laughed.  “Duncan,” she said.  “Go home.”

“What?”

“Go home now,” she said, her expression turning serious.  “I assume you’re using a radio of some sort to contact the outside.  Go home, get it, and bring it to me, and if I EVER hear you talking about this again, I swear to God that I will throw you out of the static field myself and let those barbarians at the gate do away with you, do you understand?”

Duncan couldn’t speak.  The one person he needed to enact his plan had just told him no.  “Lise,” he began.

She shot him a look that told him to can it.  “Duncan,” she said, “Now.  Bring the radio here.  Now.”

Duncan glared at her, but gave in.  “Fine,” he said, “but you can’t deny that Utopia is dying.  This village will wither and die unless we do something.”

And with that, he stomped into the night.

-----

Eylisa re-entered the shed and saw Arturo and Logan.  They looked like they were about to come to blows.  “Is there a problem here?” she asked.

Logan looked at her.  “Did you just join us, dear?  OF COURSE there’s a problem, Pocahontas!  We’re STUCK here and don’t have the technology to leave because you don’t want to part with your youthful good looks.”

Eylisa stood there for a moment before calmly shutting the door, casually walking over to Logan, and indifferently grabbing her by the collar.  “Alright, I’ve had enough of this,” she growled in a dangerous voice.  “It’s one thing that you came here unannounced, it’s one thing that even though we’re trying to help you, you’ve been rude at every turn, and it’s one thing that I just plain don’t like you or your attitude, but it is quite another when you insult me and the spirits of my ancestors.  Now, you will apologize for what you just said and kindly take what we give you and be happy with it.  If it’s not enough to fix your timer, that’s too bad.  Now, APOLOGIZE!”

Logan glared at her.  Who the hell did she think she was to touch her like this?   “I’m sorry,” she whispered.  Inside, Logan was screaming.  No, don’t apologize!  Don’t give her the upper hand!  Don’t!  Don’t!  Don’t!

“I apologize,” she said instead.

Eylisa put her down.  “Accepted.  Now, have you found a way to fix your timer with the equipment available?”

“It’s not possible,” Logan replied.  “Not within the two or so hours we have left.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Eylisa said.  “We should go see the old man, maybe he can come up with something.”

“There’s nothing he CAN come up with unless he rips the AP diode out of himself.”

Elisa let the remark slide.  “Logan, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” Logan spat back at her.  “We’re stuck here and you’re sorry?”  Her face contorted as she attempted to hold back the tears.  “Now who’s lying?”  She shoved Eylisa out of the way and ran out the door.

Arturo started after her, but Eylisa stopped him.  “Let her go.”

“You don’t understand,” Arturo protested.  “She might…”

“Try something?” she asked.  “She’s angry at circumstances, not people.  She just needs time alone.”

Arturo nodded, but kept a watchful eye as Logan ran off.

-----

For the first time in several days, Wade was restless.  Now that she was back in good heath, she wanted to run, jump, and do everything that was denied to her.  She paced uncomfortably around Eylisa’s spare bedroom, still dressed in her paper hospital gown that wouldn’t close in the back, waiting for one of her friends to come calling or maybe the woman who had given her the medicine that had finally brought her back around.  She’d love to thank her for her kindness.

She ventured into the living room and marveled at the decoration.  The entire room was decked out in Indian artifacts from framed arrowheads to Kachina dolls and even some crude spears decorated with bright feathers.  She touched the tip of one spear and brought her hand back in pain, a small trickle of blood ran down her finger.

“Wow,” she remarked, “they really made these things to last.”

-----

Logan kicked a garbage can as hard as she could and frowned when the refuse inside didn’t fly out like she wanted it to.  So, this was it… this was her last slide.  No way home.  Sure, she could chance the next wormhole alone – more than likely, the others would be too cowardly to follow her – and try to fix the timer on the next world, but it was a risk… a big risk.  She had to stop and ask herself, “Is that a risk you’re really willing to take, Logan?  Are you so intent on getting back to your own overpopulated and dying home world that you’re going to risk a death beyond all comprehemsion?  Are you willing to take the chance of getting stranded forever on some nightmare world with no way to escape the next time that Quinn 1 or one of the many other sliding psychos come after you?”

Out of frustration, she kicked the trash can again.  This time, a small glass bottle rolled out across the grass.

She looked into the sky.  The sun had gone down… yet another sign that their time was running out.

She gingerly fingered one of the wires on her implant and made her decision.  She wasn’t about to be caught defensless here or anywhere else.  Professor Arturo and his precsious sense of ethics could go to hell!  Logan decided that she was going to get an AP diode if it meant taking a chainsaw to everyone in the village.

But before she found that chainsaw, she saw someone leave the front door of his home, carrying a homemade device in his hands.

Interesting…  Very interesting.

-----

Rembrandt knocked on the wood door leading into Doctor Einstein’s office and was greeted with, “Come in!”  Inside, he found Maggie and Einstein laughing.

“…and then the snakes broke down the door and came after us!” Maggie said, laughing.

Einstein was in hysterics.  “No!  No!  No!  You are making that up!”

“It’s the truth, Doctor!  I swear!”

They both laughed for a while before Einstein remembered Rembrandt was at the door.  “Oh, Mr. Brown… your friend Maggie tells me you have had some amazing adventures.  Is it true you were once pregnant?”

Rembrandt blushed and gave a dirty look to Maggie.  “Yeah, I was.”  He sat down next to her.  “And you ain’t got no right to tell that story, girl!  You weren’t even around when that happened!  How about I tell them about you getting infected by that worm that turned you into a sex-crazed maniac?”

Einstein guffawed.  “Goodness, I haven’t had this much fun in years!  If nothing else comes from your visit, I am thankful for this.  How is your friend, Mr. Brown?”

“She’s better.  Your Doctor Whitefeather is quite a magician.”

“Ah,” the old scientist replied.  “She is simply taking advantage of the gifts Mother Nature has provided, but we, in our arrogance, sneer upon.”  He paused.  “I am sorry about the death of your friend Quinn.  I’m told he was the one who invented your sliding technology.”

Rembrandt nodded politely and quickly changed the subject.  “Any word from Logan and the professor yet?”

“None yet,” Maggie told him.  “I think we slide in a little over two hours or so.”

The door opened and Arturo entered with Eylisa.  The professor looked so downtrodden and defeated, it wasn’t hard for Remmy and Maggie to guess what the verdict was.

“We can’t fix the timer,” Arturo announced.  “Not with the materials that our hosts have graciously offered us.”

“There’s no possible way?” Rembrandt asked.

“No.  No possible way.”

Maggie looked up.  “So what do we do?”

“The timer may be able to produce one more wormhole,” the professor explained, “but there’s no way to tell what will happen to us when we travel through it.”

“What are our odds?” Rembrandt asked.

He thought about it and shrugged.  “Fifty-fifty, and even if we do get through, there’s no way to tell if there would be sufficient tech to fix the timer on the next world.”

Maggie looked around.  “Where’s Logan?”

“She didn’t take the news very well,” Eylisa told them.  “She needed a little time alone.”

“Well, if you are unwilling to make the trip when your timer expires, you are more than welcome to stay with us,” Einstein offered.  “Perhaps, given time, we could fashion a replacement?”

“It’s kind of you to offer, Doctor Einstein,” Arturo said, “but there is no way… no acceptable way of using the technology you have to offer.”  He inhaled and looked around.  “It appears we have a choice to make.  Put down roots here, or chance death and/or being stranded on a less than hospitable world down the road.”

“We should talk to Wade,” Rembrandt offered.  “She needs to have her say too.”

It was then that an alarm went off and warning sirens began to wail throughout the village.  Einstein peered out the window and then at his computer.

“What’s going on?” Rembrandt asked.

“I-I don’t know!” Einstein said in alarm.  “Somehow, the gate has opened in the Northern quadrant of the static field!”

Eylisa felt a lump in her throat.  “That’s… impossible!”  She then looked at the old man and swallowed hard.  “Doctor,” she began, “I’ve made a grievous lapse in judgment.”

“Explain,” Einstein said, working feverously at his station.

“Duncan came to me earlier this afternoon and claimed that he was going to force a change on us,” she told him.

Einstein didn’t have to be told the rest of the details.  “But… how could he have gotten my password?”

“I didn’t tell him, Doctor,” Eylisa said.  “I swear!”

The old man nodded.  “Of course you didn’t, old friend.”  His computer beeped and he looked at the screen.  “The gate is closed.  Whoever Duncan wanted to get in, they’re all ready here.”

-----

Duncan and a few others were on hand to welcome the new arrivals.  Two men and a woman, dressed in plain clothing.

“That’s far enough,” Duncan said with a raised hand.

The arrivals stopped in their tracks.  “Mister Duncan, I assume?”

“Scan them,” Duncan told one of his companions, the young man named Garrett who had, only moments prior, poured tea for Doctor Einstein and the sliders.

Garrett walked over to the visitors with a hand held scanner and did a quick sweep.  “No weapons,” he said, hoping he’d read the devise properly.

Duncan motioned for the visitors to come closer.  “Forgive my suspicion,” he said.  “It rubs off on you after a while, especially with all of the centurion geezers around here.”

“Mister Duncan, I’m Mariah Hancock,” the woman said, extending her hand.

Duncan shook her hand politely.  “And who are Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb?” he asked, referring to her escorts.

“My protection,” she answered.  “You’re not the only one with suspicions about this endeavor.  Suddenly after two decades of isolation and embargoes, the old man opens Utopia to negotiators?”

“This wasn’t the old man’s decision,” Duncan told her.

Hancock nodded.  “I see.  Are you setting up a little Coup d’état?”

“No violence,” Duncan sternly said.  “I want to make that clear to your people and mine.”

“Mister Duncan, the government and I share the same goal: to end this embargo and distrust between our two bodies,” she said diplomatically.  “We both stand to gain from this negotiation and, I personally assure you, violence is the last thing on our minds.  How about yours?”

“No violence,” Duncan said again.

“Of course,” Hancock said.  “Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to see Utopia to see if it’s as fantastic as the rumors say it is.”

“First, we talk to the old man,” Duncan said.  “He’s probably sweating bullets right now.”

“I look forward to that,” Hancock smiled.

-----

“Who?” Rembrandt asked.  “Who’s already here?”

“Negotiators from the government, I imagine,” Eylisa explained.  “Duncan arranged for them to slip in while the defenses were down.”

“Ah, yes,” the old doctor said sadly, “so the old ways can be swept aside for the new better ways.”

“Doctor,” Arturo said softly.  “If these are negotiators from the US Government, perhaps this could be an advantage for you.”

The old man looked at him and raised an eyebrow, his way of saying, ‘I’m listening.’

“I’ve seen your stores myself, sir,” Arturo explained.  “You’re running low on equipment and, if I’m not mistaken, running low on essentials as well.  Perhaps, sir, trade is a good idea.”

“You don’t know what you are saying,” Einstein said, shaking his head.  “You can’t trust the government!  You just can’t!”

“Why not?” Rembrandt asked.  “What’s got you so spooked?  I mean, maybe they’re just as scared of you as you are of them.  Getting your story out into the open and opening up this city might just sway public opinion in your direction!  I mean, America is a democracy after all, and regardless of what a lot of people think, public opinion does count!  You sound like one of those wacko militia men.”

Eylisa’s jaw dropped.  “Oh God, how could we be so stupid?”

“Don’t tell me you changed your mind THAT quick!” Maggie said skeptically.

Einstein rose from his seat and made his way to a nearby closet.  “It appears that we’re the victim of a cultural gap.”  He opened the closet door and found an American flag folded on a shelf.  He took the cloth and began to unfold it.  “On your world, America is a democracy, correct?”

“Yes,” Arturo replied.  He wasn’t sure where the conversation was going.

Einstein completely unfolded the flag and draped it over his desk.  “It seems history progressed a little differently on this world.”

The American flag looked normal at first glance… red and white stripes and the regular blue square in the upper left-hand corner, but that was where the similarity ended.  Inside the blue square, where the normal fifty stars of the flag were usually displayed, there was a large white swastika.

Rembrandt shook his head in disbelief.  “Is that America’s flag?”

“Yes,” Einstein said, sneering at the broken cross.  “I suppose it is time for a short history lesson.  I told you about the great war against Japan, Germany, and Italy, correct?  Well, after the use of the atom bomb, the war came to an abrupt end, but our economy was crippled and it appeared that the country was headed towards a financial collapse until the mid-fifties when a German immigrant named Adolph Hitler was elected president of the United States.”

Rembrandt couldn’t believe his ears.  “Are you honesty telling me that Hitler was president here?”

“I see you’ve heard of him,” Eylisa said.  “It only took eight years for him to take control of the government.  He abolished the bill of rights, set up concentration camps, and, worse of all, turned America into the most brutal dictatorship in the history of mankind.

“And you broke away?” Maggie asked.

“I refused to be a part of it,” Einstein said, slapping the palm of his hand against the flag, “so one day, my colleagues and I turned on the static field we had constructed in secret, and we declared ourselves independent.”

“Hitler died in the seventies despite the fact he’d been fitted with a Lazerus Module.  A lot of people think that his daughter, Eva Hitler, had him killed in what looked like a botched surgery.  She assumed the presidency after him and has been trying to kill us ever since,” Eylisa explained.  “She’s completely insane… makes her father look like a Tellytubby.”

Arturo thought about that for a moment.  The concept was staggering.  Hitler the president of the United States, now a dictatorship bent on world domination?  Hitler’s daughter now in command of what he assumed was the most evil empire on the planet?

“I think you should at least give it a shot,” Maggie suddenly said.

The statement brought a cloud of silence over the room.  “Captain Beckett, you cannot be serious!”

“It’s military thinking, Professor,” Maggie explained, “you keep your friends close and your enemies closer.  Doctor, I’ve heard ideas from you that would topple this country in a few years, but you don’t have the means to execute them.  Some sort of rudimentary trade agreement could do just that, or at least help you come up with some way to get your people to a country where the political climate isn’t so dangerous.”

The old man considered that.  “Relocation?”

“Exactly,” Maggie said.  “You can use America to get what you want…”

“And then screw them over,” Eylisa finished.

Einstein smiled.  “Not exactly the phrasing I would have used, but I do agree with the sentiment.”  He sat back down.  “Such a bold plan could take years.”

Maggie cocked her head and smirked.  “Maybe you should get started then.”

“Captain Beckett,” Eylisa said, “I think I’m beginning to like you after all.”

-----

Wade sat up in bed at the sound of the alarms.  “What the hell’s going on, now?” she mumbled to herself as she got to her feet and made her way to a window.  She saw people running around outside, yelling and looking around in confusion.

Something strange was going on.  That much was for certain.  She worried about her companions, running a thousand possibilities through her head.

Logan… Logan had to be behind this.  Whatever was going on, it had to be her doing.  She knew that Logan couldn’t be trusted, and now her friends were paying the price for her own short-sightedness.

“Quinn,” she rasped.  “Why aren’t you here to save the day like you always do?”

-----

Logan pulled her sleeve to cover her implant as she walked through a corridor of the town hall.  Curious, here where implants are a common thing, she was still self-conscious about her arm.  Well, why shouldn’t she be?  Every resident here who had them had implants inside their bodies.  They didn’t look like a science experiment gone wrong, like she did… like that bastard, Quinn 1, left her.  She pondered to herself… now that they were more than likely stuck here, she could ask them to remove the damn thing.

She met back up with the other sliders who filled her in on the situation so far.  Somehow, a revolutionary but misguided member of the community had managed to get a hold of Einstein’s password and opened the gate to negotiators from the United States Government.  Now, they were going to meet those negotiators from a modern day Nazi empire to try to work out a trade deal that the old man hoped to use to escape the country’s influence.

She looked over at Einstein in admiration.  The old man of more than a century walked proudly with his head in the air, ready to do anything to survive.

They had a lot in common.

“I believe Mr. Duncan’s negotiators have arrived,” Einstein said.

Through the main door, Duncan, Garrett, and a couple of other residents entered with Hancock and her bodyguards.  “Doctor,” Duncan said with respect.  “Sir, this is Mariah Hancock.  She’s with the government.”

Einstein gave Duncan a hateful glare which shut the man up instantly.  The old man then looked at Hancock and smiled.  “Forgive me for not being more prepared for your arrival, Miss Hancock.”

“I understand, sir,” she replied.  “It’s a great honor.”

“Yes, it is.”

Hancock seemed taken aback by Einstein’s remark.  “Sir,” she said.  “May we be introduced to your friends?”

“Yes,” he said.  “This is Professor Maximillian Arturo, a professor of cosmology and ontology.  Logan Saint Clair, an expert in the field of quantum physics and dimensional studies.  Maggie Beckett, expert in hand to hand combat and tactical matters, and finally, Rembrandt Brown.”

“And what is your field of study, sir?” Hancock asked him.

Rembrandt shrugged.  “Rhythm and Blues mostly.”

“The leading expert in the field,” Einstein said proudly.

ck rubbed her hands together.  “Well, sir, shall we begin?  I’m sure we have a lot of work ahead of us.”

“More than you’ll ever know,” the old man said, walking past her, never giving the confused woman a second to ask what he meant.

-----

Einstein invited Hancock to his private residence where he served them a pot of hot tea.  The sliders seemed a little uncomfortable with the arrangement and felt very out of place.  On the same note, Duncan and his gang appeared uncomfortable as well.

In the old man’s large den, Einstein gathered the other community leaders, two elderly men and an elderly woman.  Of course, their real ages were impossible to determine because, like Eylisa and Einstein, some of them were probably fitted with Lazarus implants.

Hancock outlined a plan that would give Utopia freedom from the two-decade embargo on the condition that technology that had been developed in the community would be shared freely with the American government and that government officials would be placed in the village as observers.

The silence of the room was broken by the murmurs of the town elders.   Einstein shook his head.  “No,” he answered.  “Out of the question.”

“May I ask why?” Hancock replied, her expression growing sour.

Einstein stood.  “Miss Hancock, the principles that this community was founded on were to make the world a better place, not to further American military technology.  I vowed never to make that mistake again.”

“But…”

Einstein silenced her.  “Please, let me finish…  Secondly, I do not like the idea of overseers.  It threatens the autonomy of Utopia.”

“Then what do you suggest?” Hancock asked.

“Recognize our independence.”

The negotiator blinked.  “I beg your pardon?”

“We want our independence officially recognized by the president.  No governmental control or interference.  Our work goes to benefit everyone, not just the American Government.”

Hancock sighed.  “I guess we can negotiate…”

“No negotiation,” Einstein said firmly.  “Those are our terms.  Either honor them or leave because you are wasting our time.”

Hancock sat there for a moment before responding.  “I… will have to run this by my superiors.”

Professor Arturo saw it first, but never had time to react from his vantage point across the room.  Rembrandt saw it  half a second later, and snapped into action, pushing two of the community leaders out of the way as one of Hancock’s body guards reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small white gun.

“HE’S GOT A GUN!”

The bodyguard managed to get a shot off when Rembrandt grabbed his arm.  The bullet whizzed through the air and hit the ceiling above Doctor Einstein’s head.

Hancock shot to her feet.  “No!  No!  No!” she screamed over and over again.

The other bodyguard wasted no time.  He quickly unholstered a similar white gun and took aim at Rembrandt.

Before he could fire, a cane cracked across his shin and sent him backwards in pain.  Doctor Einstein hit him again in the groin and sent him down.  The bodyguard dropped his gun and tried to crawl across the room to safety before Arturo punched him in the face, sending him to the floor a final time.

The bodyguard locked in combat with Rembrandt was strong.  Hancock ran over to him and began beating him with her hands.  “STOP IT!!!  STOP IT!!!” she screamed.  “This isn’t what we agreed on!  You’re ruining it all!”

The bodyguard slammed his forehead into Rembrandt’s face, sending him to the ground with a bloodied nose.  He whirled around and took aim with his weapon, only to have Logan grab his arm and throw his aim off, once again sparing the life of Einstein who, along with the other community leaders, was making an exit from the room.

The gun fired a few more times and, somewhere, someone cried out.

The bodyguard brought his elbow up and hit Logan across the chin, sending her to the ground.  He then took aim again… this time, neither Rembrandt, Logan, nor the professor would be fast enough to stop the bullet.  The bodyguard was breathing hard, adrenaline pumped through his system, and sweat poured off his face.  Still, he grinned… he had won.

He leveled the weapon at Rembrandt and prepared to blow the troublesome man to kingdom come.

Suddenly, he yelled in pain and quickly grabbed his shoulder which was becoming stained with blood.  “What the hell!?” he screamed in a rage.  He turned and what he saw that moment was the last thing he thought he would see.

A tiny, frazzled, dark-haired woman with huge bags under her eyes stood there dressed in one of those paper hospital gowns that didn’t close in the back.  In her hands was a beautifully ornate and evidently very sharp Indian spear… the very thing that had sliced into his shoulder as if it was made of paper.

“Go ahead,” the petite woman said.  “Make my day.”

“Wade!” Arturo said, getting a bearing on the situation.  “Are you all right?”

“Oh, fine,” she said.  “You?”

The bodyguard made a move at her and she slashed the spear at him.  He reeled back, grasping the cut across his cheek.

“Drop the gun,” Wade ordered him.

He stood there for a moment, studying the little girl who had foiled his assassination attempt.  He then took his hand from his face and smirked.  “No,” he said.

“Come on, Scarface,” Wade barked.  “Play nice and put the gun down.”

“I have a better idea,” he replied.  “Why don’t you take your toothpick you’ve got there and run me through?”

Wade glared at him.

“Come on, princess,” Scarface growled.  “Kill me.  You’ve got first blood already, can’t you finish the job?”

“Do it!” Logan shrieked.

Scarface saw the look of worry appear on Wade’s face… just the sign of weakness he was looking for.  He brought the gun up and got ready to pull the trigger when, suddenly, he felt a sharp pain on his back.

“Get AWAY from her!” Eylisa yelled.  She was holding another spear in her hands.

“Give me a break,” Scarface said, gritting his teeth in pain.

“Fine,” Eylisa answered, “what do you prefer?  An arm?  Leg?”

“You don’t have it in you.”

She slashed him across the chest, creating a long gash in his shirt and a thin cut that trickled a small amount of blood.

“Shut up or you WILL have it in you,” she growled.  “My father was run down back in ’36 by a racist moron like you, and it is taking every speck of restraint I have not to cut you in a few key places and turn you into the star of the Vienna Boys Choir, so DON’T TEST ME!!!”

He glared at her and then simply twisted his foot around and knocked her off her feet.  He pushed past her and ran out the front door.

Rembrandt and the professor chased him outside.  Around the corner of the house, they found Einstein and the community leaders.  “Did you see where he went!?” Rembrandt asked, sounding somewhat nasal as he held his bleeding nose.

He knew there wasn’t going to be an answer.  Einstein was cradling Duncan’s head in his hands.  The young man had been hit in the chest during the gunfire and it was painfully evident that he was drawing his last breaths.

The old doctor held his hand, trying to comfort the dying man.

“I…” Duncan said as blood poured from his mouth.  The effort he was putting into trying to talk sent his body into a fit of coughing, only causing him more pain.

“Shhh,” the old man said.  “Lie still.  We’ve sent Garrett to get help.  You’re going to be fine.”

Duncan smiled.  “Don’t try to lie to me, old man,” he said.  “It’s punctured a lung and there’s no exit wound.  I can’t feel my legs, so it’s pretty safe to assume it’s lodged in my spine.”

“Ever the observer,” the old scientist said.

“I’ve… I’ve had a great teacher the last few months,” Duncan replied. The young man coughed again and grimaced in pain.  “I... never wanted this, sir,” he wheezed.

“I know,” Einstein told him.  “I know you didn’t.”

“Getting light-headed… tunnel vision,” Duncan reported.  It seemed as if his pain was subsiding.  “This is it, isn’t it?”

The old man couldn’t answer.  He pressed his lips together, trying to keep the tears from welling.

“If they ask, tell them I said something profound,” Duncan whispered.

The old man felt his hand go limp.  One look at Duncan told him the whole story.  There wasn’t any need to check for a pulse, but the old scientist did anyway.

“Gone,” he said.

Hancock was standing a distance away with her arms crossed.  Her face was pale and she looked like she was only a few seconds away from hyperventilating.

“How did they get those weapons in!?” Einstein demanded of her.  “They should have been scanned by the metal detectors!”

She shook her hands feverishly.  “I-I-I didn’t know t-they had them!  I’m just a n-negotiator!”

The old man frowned and glared at her.  She had tried to stop her “bodyguards” from firing and was probably as much a victim of the deception as they all were.

“I think they were ceramic,” Arturo told him.

“Ceramic guns?” the female community leader said in shock.  “I didn’t think such a thing was possible.”

“And why should you?  Why should any of us?” Einstein asked.  “Duncan may have been misguided, but he was correct.  This embargo and isolation is keeping us in ignorance of the outside world.  We may have secrets we keep from them, but they in turn have secrets they keep from us.”

Einstein gently laid Duncan’s head down and stood.  His shirt and pants were soiled with blood.  “My dear Miss. Hancock, do you have any idea what your men could be planning?”

Hancock nervously shook her head.  “I was s-supposed to negotiate, that’s all!  The government wouldn’t let me go in unless I brought the b-bodyguards.  They weren’t supposed to have any weapons! None at all!”

Einstein scratched his chin.  “Then we have a problem,” he said.  “The two men in the village are obviously government trained and quite possibly saboteurs as well.  One must assume that, given the opportunity that poor Duncan gave them to get a man inside, they are waiting for them to bring down our defenses and take us over completely.”  All right.  I suppose they would need a lead party to make sure that all weaponry got across when the time came.

There was a hush among the leaders.  Finally, one of the men spoke.  “So, what do we do?  We don’t think like they do, no one here has been brought up to fight, how can we possibly know what he’s up to?”

Logan appeared at the doorway.  “Scarface’s friend is coming to,” she said.  “Why don’t you ask him?”

----

Logan hovered over the man tied to the wheelchair.  The bodyguard turned assassin sported a large black bruise over half his face and his eye was red and swollen.  He breathed silently as Logan paced around him.  “Feeling better?” she asked him.

The man smirked.  “I just got dropped by a fat guy and a 120 year old man,” he said.  “How do you think I feel?”

“Not very good,” Logan guessed, “but they say confession is good for the soul, buddy boy, and right now I think you need all the help you can get.”

He sat there motionless.

“Talk,” Logan yelled.  “What are you here for!?”

The man never moved.  Logan hit him with the back of her hand.

Wade flinched.  “Is that necessary?”

Logan cast her an uninterested glance.  “If we want this monkey-boy to talk, we’re not going to do it with tea and cakes.”

The man spit at Logan and she hit him again.

“This is not the way we do things,” Einstein said, once again voicing concerns over Logan taking the role as interrogator.

Logan treated Doctor Einstein with more respect than anyone else.  “Doctor,” she said, “this man doesn’t care about your benevolent stance in the world.  He is cold, calculating, and willing to do anything to accomplish his goal.”

“And so you think you must sink to his level.  Become like him?”

Logan sighed.  “Yes, I do.”

Einstein got between her and the man.  “I think not.  When we become someone like this person, someone without guiding principles of ethics or morality, we risk losing the values we’ve spent a lifetime cherishing.  Too many have given their lives for our philosophy… too many have died.”

Logan clearly didn’t like being told what to do, even if it was by Doctor Albert Einstein himself, but she backed down and ceded to his judgment.

“Doctor Whitefeather,” Einstein said softly, “Would you be so kind?”

Eylisa approached the man with a small syringe.  “What is that!?” the assassin asked angrily.

“Sodium penathol,” Eylisa answered, “Perfectly harmless, but it will make you a little more forthcoming.”

“Get that away from me!”

She ignored him and injected the fluid into his arm.  After a few minutes of silent waiting, aside from Logan’s immature sighs, the assassin seemed to be on the edge of falling asleep.

“Now,” Eylisa began, “what are you doing here?  What are your orders?”

“We’re supposed to bring down the Static Field.”

Murmurs of surprise sprang up in the room.  Eylisa angrily silenced them.  “After that?”

The assassin’s head slumped.  “The… The army’s massed outside.  They’re ready to rush the village w-when the field goes down.”

“Your friend’s still loose.  What can we expect from him?”

“He’ll carry out his mission.”

Einstein hobbled over on his cane.  “That’s enough,” he said.  “He’s told us all we need.”

“No,” Hancock said, rising to her feet.  She looked at the assassin.  “Tell them that I had no idea what you two were planning!”

The old scientist nodded and looked at the man in the chair.  “Well?  Is that true?”

The assassin nodded.  “S-She didn’t know.”

Vindication.  Hancock exhaled nervously.  Einstein nodded in her direction as a sign that he did not blame her for the insurgence.  The old man began to speak, “I think we should…”

“They’re going to kill you,” the man whispered.

Einstein turned to him as the man in the wheelchair continued.  “They’re going to burn your little village to the ground and use everything you’ve made here to bomb the shit out of tiny 3rd world nations full of starving brown people.  They’re going to use everything you’ve learned to perfect biochemical weapons that will leave entire countries sterile.”

Einstein bent over with no small measure of discomfort and looked the man in the eye.  “Why do you tell me these horrible things?”

“Because I hate you,” the man wearily told him.  “You and everything you stand for.  I want to see it all burned and destroyed.  I want to torture you.  I want to leave doctors absolutely confounded when they examine your body.  I want you dead.”

“But I don’t even know your name,” the old man said sadly.  “You don’t know me or any of the people here.”

“You’re going to die,” the man in the wheelchair said again.  “They’re going to kill you.”

“This isn’t helping,” Einstein said to the others, the sliders and the community leaders.  “He cannot be reasoned with and must be dealt with.”

“You can’t be serious!” Wade protested.

Einstein ignored her and approached Hancock.  “My dear, would you be so kind as to take this man to the perimeter fields and take him back to his people.”

“But if you shut down the fields or even open the gates, the troops outside will…” Hancock interjected.

Einstein raised his hand to silence her.  “The static fields are a one way barrier.  They push things to the outside, not allowing anyone or anything into the village.  You may exit at any point.  Please go.”

“What about you?” Hancock asked.  “What about Utopia?”

“We will tend to things here,” he told her.  “Go home, and good luck.”

“Doctor,” she said.  “I wasn’t lying when I said it was an honor to meet you.”

Einstein nodded as Hancock unlocked the brake from the wheelchair and wheeled it out the door.  The negotiator turned back, looking one last time at the rooms of collective geniuses before walking into the still of the night.

“Untie me,” the man in the wheelchair demanded, apparently having regained some of his senses.

She slapped him on the back of the head.  “Shut up, asshole!”

-----

Maggie bit her lower lip.  “I take it you have a contingency plan in case the field ever failed, right?”

“Our plan was to get everyone into the main bunker below ground,” one of the leaders explained.  “It’s a little place the government set up for us while we were still affiliated with them.  They built it during the Cuban Missile Crisis and it’s supposed to withstand a five megaton blast.”

“We’ve waited too long,” Einstein said.  “Get everyone below in case the field fails.  And hurry, I fear our time is short.”

The other community elders nodded and left quickly.  Maggie shakily got to her feet.  “Doctor, how many places are there around this village that someone could bring down the defenses?”

“My office,” he told her, “and in the hangar where I assume poor Duncan opened the gate.”

“Hanger?” Arturo asked.

Einstein licked his lips and nodded.  “Yes, it’s where we store the craft.”

“The alien craft?” Arturo said, his eyes lighting up.

Einstein turned to them and smiled.   “Would you like to see it?”

-----

At the far side of the village, there was a large metal structure the size of half a football field.  Armed with a flashlight, the old scientist cut down weeds and overgrowth with his cane.  It was obvious that no one had been this way in a long, long time.  They stopped at the rusted metal door and the old man punched in a code.

Logan couldn’t help it.  She looked over Einstein’s shoulder to get a peek at his code.

“EMC2”

Figured.

The door opened with a prolonged creak that sounded like a teenager scraping his fingernails across a chalkboard.  Maggie winced.  “Well,” she said, “if he is in here, he definitely knows we are too.”

“Then let’s get some lights on,” Wade suggested.

Einstein walked over to the wall and found the switch.

The room filled with light, and there… in the middle of the room, stood a strange craft.  Some of its outer hull had been removed and most of the inner components had been looted, but the skeletal gull-shaped craft still looked as if it could take off at any moment.

Wade backed into Rembrandt.

“Remmy,” she said in a shaky voice, “please tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”

Rembrandt held her tightly.

“W-What’s wrong?” Einstein asked.  “What do you see?  Is it the ship?  You couldn’t have possibly seen it before!”

“Rembrandt?” Maggie asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Rembrandt said, “we’ve seen it before.”

“Explain yourself,” Max demanded.

Rembrandt looked down at Wade.  Of course, they were the only two left who went through it.  Quinn and the first professor were gone.

“That,” he said in a voice of fear and warning, “is a Kromagg manta ship.”

-----

Hancock smacked the man in the wheelchair across the back of the head again and warned him to keep his trap shut.  She hated this man.  That was all she could concentrate on as she wheeled him down the dirt road and to the field perimeter.  The field itself was invisible, the only evidence of it even existing was the tremendous force it exerted on anyone trying to enter the village.  Like two like poles of a magnet repelling each other, people and equipment would be pushed backwards, but on the opposite side of the field, the side Hancock found herself on, it wouldn’t keep her inside… but like a river current, push her back to the waiting troops outside the village.

She looked and saw the grass on the ground near her bending away from the village, another sign of the static field.  A little farther away, the grass that remained was dead and pressed flat against the bare ground.  Hancock began to feel the tug of the field on her, the invisible force telling her, ‘You betrayed this village and everyone who trusted you, you bitch!  Get out!’

A pair of headlights appeared down the road and caught her attention.  It was an army jeep carrying a man in a military uniform sporting all sorts of medals, decorations, and swastikas accompanied by three grunts.  The jeep screeched to a stop and the uniformed man got out.  “Miss Hancock, are you well?” the man asked.

“You lied to me, General Rickman!” Hancock yelled at him.  “You said that these were genuine negotiations!”

General Rickman took the giant cigar he was smoking out of his mouth.  “I am sorry we didn’t tell you our whole plan.”

“Your whole plan!?  You USED me!  Those people trusted me and you…”  She was so angry, she couldn’t finish.

“Is that my man?” Rickman asked, placing the cigar back on his lips.

Hancock wiped a tear from her face.  “Yeah, it is.”

The man in the wheelchair spoke up.  “Special Ops James Garner, General, sir!”

“Are you well, son?”

“Yes, General sir!”

“Where’s Johnson?”

“Sir, Spec Ops Johnson is still active.”

Rickman considered that.  “How injured are you, Garner?”

“I’m not, General sir!”

The general took a puff from his cigar.  “Hancock, untie that man.”

Hancock looked at him.  “What?”

“Untie him,” Rickman said again.  “He’s got a mission to accomplish.”

“General, these people let him go after he tried to kill them!”

Rickman removed the cigar from his mouth and approached the field.  It pushed the hat off his head, but he never bothered to pick it up, leaving that to one of the bootlicking grunts he brought with him.  “Then it’s their mistake.  Mariah,” he said, “untie that man, now.”

“So he can bring down the field and let you and the army in?” she asked.

“Exactly,” he replied.  “Those eggheads in there think that they can just up and declare their independence just like that?  It doesn’t work that way, Hancock!”

“So it’s your way or no way, huh?”

Rickman smiled.  “Simply doing the job my heart tells me to.”

Hancock nodded and reached down to Garner’s bindings.  She stopped and thought about Duncan, a young brilliant man who made a bad decision and paid for it with his life…  By God, she was not about to do the same thing.

With all of her might, she shoved the wheelchair towards the field, which, as if it was equally revolted by the man, expelled him out of the perimeter and towards Rickman and the grunts.  The general simply stepped out of the way and allowed the wheelchair to crash into his jeep with a loud thud and cry of pain from the unfortunate and already battered passenger.

Rickman put the cigar in his mouth again.  “You just bought yourself a whole lot of trouble, little lady.”

“Well then, by all means, come and arrest me!” she shouted back at him before giving him the finger and walking back down the road towards the village.

“Get back here, young lady!  NOW!” the general bellowed.

Hancock turned around.  “General, from this point on, if Doctor Einstein approves, consider me Utopia’s official ambassador.  If you want to negotiate with this community in the future, you’re going to have to go through me!”

Rickman threw his cigar to the ground.  “I’ve got four-hundred men waiting around this town waiting for Johnson to bring that shield down, and even if that snowball’s chance in hell that those old men and women in there have to stop him actually happens, they can’t keep us out forever, Hancock!  Now, which side of that barrier do you want to be on when that happens?”

“Like you said, General,” she said to him.  “I’m doing what my heart tells me to.”

General Angus Rickman watched the defiant woman march back towards the village in disgust.  Garner moaned behind him.  “Oh, stop your whining and be a man!” Rickman told him.

-----

“Kromagg?” Arturo said.  “You mean like those disgusting creatures that were being held on that Earth where we first met?”

Wade nodded.

“Excuse me,” Logan said.  “Would someone mind explaining to me what a Kromagg is?”

“Indeed,” Einstein said.  “If this ship does not come from another planet, where did it come from?”

“A lot like us,” Rembrandt explained, “an alternate reality.  Professor Arturo – our first Professor Arturo – and Quinn said that they might be some sort of evolved form of a killer ape that was extinct everywhere else.”  He began to walk around the ship inspecting it.  “We ran into them a while back and barely got out in one piece.  You see, they have lots of technology and use it to conquer alternate worlds and absorb them into their dynasty.  Interdimensional Nazis, but not as nice as the ones you have here.”

“I feel I should contest that, but I’ll take your word for it,” Eylisa replied.

“It would certainly explain why the technology that went into your implants would be interchangeable with our timer since they were derived from sliding equipment,” Arturo said.  “Amazing.”

“I see,” Einstein said thoughtfully.

Logan waved her hands in the air.  “Look, this is all fascinating and all, but it’s not helping us stop the big mean man with the gun and desire to see us all compost, okay?”

“As much as I hate to admit it, she’s right,” Wade said.  “We’ve got to find this guy quick.”

“First we need a plan,” Maggie disagreed.  “This man is specially trained and mean as hell.  On top of that, he has a gun and we have weaponry that became obsolete in the Bronze Age.”

“So we’re screwed?” Logan asked.

Maggie bit the inside of her cheek.  “Ask me again in a few minutes.”  She walked up to the skeletal remains of the manta ship and inspected the metals.   “Doctor Einstein,” she asked.  “Just how tough is this metal?”

-----

It wasn’t long before the sliders and Doctor Albert Einstein crept into the auxiliary computer room, a room full of dusty old equipment that hadn’t been used for years.  On a table at the far end of the room sat a small laptop computer folded and sporting a thin layer of dust and a few new fingerprints that obviously belonged to Duncan.

“There it is,” Einstein said.

“That’s it?” Logan asked, somewhat disappointed.  “I was expecting something like mission control at NASA, not a Dell Laptop.”

Einstein unfolded the small computer and turned it on.  “We found out a long time ago that the more importance one places on locations, the more likely they are to augment a place with decoration and high tech devices, thus giving away the importance of a location to people of questionable natures.  Therefore, when we sat up auxiliary control for the village, we decided that the best way to disguise it from our enemies, is to make it seem the most unimportant place in the town.”

“Where’d the laptop come from?” Logan asked. “You know, with the embargo and stuff?”

“Smuggled in by some defectors,” Eylisa said.  “We DO sometimes get updated tech from the outside.”

The laptop emitted a short tune that got the old man’s attention.  “Ah,” he said, “it is ready.  Allow me to place a new password into the system before…”

“Doctor Einstein!” Wade exclaimed.

The old man turned around and saw Scarface at the door… his gun placed against the head of Eylisa.  “All right, do as I say and this little Indian maiden may walk away with her spine intact.  Take down the shield or I blow the bitch’s head off!”

“How did you find us?” Einstein demanded.

Scarface smirked.  “One intelligence officer following five civilians and an old man?  You figure it out!  Five seconds!”

Einstein, without taking his eyes off the gunman, pressed a key on the keyboard.  “You will not take control of our defenses.  That is more important than my life.”

“And is it more important than hers?” Scarface said, pressing the gun to her temple.

The old doctor never flinched.  “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

Scarface cocked his jaw.

“Look at him!” Maggie yelled.  “We’ve called his bluff!  He has no intention of…”

And with that, Scarface threw Eylisa to the floor, swung his arm around, and shot Rembrandt in the chest.  Remmy was thrown from his feet and landed on his back a few feet away.

Wade screamed and ran to him.  “Oh God, Rembrandt!  No!” she wailed.

“WHY!?” Arturo yelled.  “He has nothing to do with this!?”

“An expert in the field of rhythm and blues is expendable, Professor,” Scarface said, pointing the white ceramic gun at him, “and I have EVERY intention, Missy!” he spat at Maggie.  “Do NOT doubt that!”

Wade was crying over Rembrandt’s fallen body.

“SHUT UP!” Scarface screamed at her.

Einstein looked speechless.  Never in the two decades that his community cut itself off from outside authority had he ever experienced such hatred, such violence.

“Do you need another demonstration, Doctor!?” Scarface growled.  “How about the skinny girl?”  He pointed the gun at Wade.  “Take down the fields or I kill everyone in this room.”  He smiled an evil smile.  “No, I’m not going to kill them…  First, I’m going to shoot them in the knees, then the elbows, and finally I’ll put a bullet through their stomachs… they say that is the most painful place to get shot.  What’s say we find out?”

“There is no need for this!” the old doctor tried to plead with him.

Scarface crept to the old doctor and smacked him across the face with the weapon.  “Let’s get one thing straight, old man…  I don’t care about you, your town, your whore assistant, or anything you stand for!  What I want to do is put a gun to your head and paint the walls with your brains, but I don’t do that because I am on a mission.”

“And what is this mission?” Einstein said, spitting a few drops of blood from his lips.  “To destroy our way of life so that your president can claim our research for weapons technology?  So that, instead of curing disease and hunger, she can wipe out entire populations of people by remote control?”  The old man looked at the attacker with weary eyes.  “That is a world I do not wish to be a part of.”

“You won’t,” the gunman sneered.  “Trust me.”

“I see you and I think there must be one redeemable factor about you,” Einstein continued.  “One thing that can be salvaged about you.  One thing that…”

“GOD,” Scarface yelled at him.  “Are you always this long-winded!?”

“Only when I wish to distract someone.”

The remark only had a microsecond to register with the man before a fist cracked across the top of his skull.  Before he went down, he managed to get a look at the owner of that fist: Rembrandt Brown, expert in the field of rhythm and blues.

Scarface, in a blind rage, went to punch the man but only ended up fracturing his knuckles on the plate of metal under Rembrandt’s shirt… the plate of metal salvaged from the Kromagg ship.  Metal that was only a few millimeters thin, but strong as a steel plate.  Metal that had just stopped a bullet from entering his heart and killing him.

They all had metal sheets under their shirts, all of the sliders and Doctor Einstein.  The idea had been Maggie’s, of course… as a contingency plan in case the saboteur decided to unload a few bullets into them.  The plan worked, and had unintentionally given them the advantage.

“Are you alright, Rembrandt?” Wade asked, wiping a tear from her face.

He rubbed his chest and coughed lightly.  “I may never hit a high G again, but I’ll manage.”

“What’s that noise?” Maggie asked the others.

Logan looked down into her pocket.  And, much to the shock of the others, produced the timer.  “It’s time,” she said, pointing the device to the opposite side of the room and pressing the activation key.

The waves of energy leapt from the timer and began to form a vortex a few feet away from them.  It wasn’t pretty… the opening crackled with energy and undulated wildly in both shape and color.

“We have to decide now,” Logan told them.  “Stay or go?”

“What!?  Just like that!?” Rembrandt exclaimed.  “We either stay here for keeps or go through one more time hoping for better technology when we get to the other side.”

“If it doesn’t kill us!” Arturo added.

“Decide quickly, guys!” Logan warned them.  “The opening is unstable and could collapse any second.”

Einstein was in wonder as he stepped feebly to the gateway.  “My bridge,” he gasped in amazement.  “It does exist!”

“NO!” a voice shrieked from behind him.   He turned around and saw Eylisa jump to his side and then convulse as the sound of a gunshot boomed.  She fell forward into Rembrandt’s arms.

Scarface was lying on the floor, his face smeared with blood, holding the gun at them.  Eylisa, seeing that he was about to kill the doctor, threw herself between the two and took the bullet in her chest and, unfortunately, did not have the benefit of the shielding that the others did.

Maggie quickly picked up the Indian spear from the ground and threw it at the solider.  It pierced his neck and sent him to the ground gagging and eventually drowning in his own blood, a fate with more dignity than he deserved.

“Oh my God,” Einstein croaked as Rembrandt gently lowered Eylisa to the ground.

Logan didn’t waste time.  “You guys can stay if you want, but I’m out of here!”  And with that, she grabbed Eylisa and leapt into the maw of the gate.  Rembrandt grabbed the dying woman’s leg, but the force of the wormhole merely dragged him inside.

The sliders were shocked at her actions.  “What the hell is she DOING!?” Arturo yelled.

“Rembrandt!” Wade yelled, leaping into the wormhole.  Maggie followed him.

“Eylisa,” Einstein whispered.

Arturo stopped and looked back at him with an expression of hopelessness.  “Doctor, I don’t know what to say.”

It was obvious that the old doctor didn’t either.  He just stood there as if he had been betrayed.  “Eylisa,” he said again.

“I’m sorry,” Arturo said silently.  He knew his time was running out, so with one last look at the most intelligent man of the 20th century, he jumped into the swirling vortex and, as far as that dimension was concerned, simply ceased to exist.

------

When Arturo was unceremoniously spat out of the wormhole in a new dimension, he immediately howled in pain.  To say the slide was a bad one would be an understatement.  He felt he had been barbecued from the inside out and, judging from the expressions on his companion’s faces, they had too.

Once Wade got a hold of herself, she immediately looked for Logan and soon found her hovering over the body of Eylisa who she had dragged into the vortex.

“What are you doing!?” Wade shrieked.  “Get off of her!”

Logan had taken the tip of one of the spare spears they had been carrying and was cutting into Eylisa’s chest.  “I don’t have time to talk, Wade.  The timer expires in five minutes and I have to get the AP diode out of her before…”

“FOR GOD’S SAKE, SHE’S STILL ALIVE!”

Eylisa, though unconscious, was still breathing though the breaths were short and shallow.

“She won’t be for long.”

“That’s no reason to kill her!” Rembrandt said, adding his protests to Wade’s.

Logan stopped her ghastly work and looked up.  “She will die regardless of what we do or don’t do, and since she will die anyway, we might as well,” she searched for the word, “benefit.”

Wade was enraged.  “Benefit?  This is a living breathing person we’re talking about, not something we can strip spare parts from.  You just can’t…”

“Wade,” Arturo said softly.  “She’s dead.”

Eylisa’s labored breathing had ceased.  She lay on the grass still and silent, the wind blowing a few loose strands of her hair.

“There,” Logan said, “the debate is over.”

She bent over and began cutting into the body.  When Wade tried to stop her, she felt Arturo’s hand clasp on her shoulder.  She turned to look him in face and was met by a stern, somber expression.  He shook his head, telling her not to take action.  Wade couldn’t believe her eyes… was Arturo actually going along with this?

“Professor?” she whispered.

Arturo looked pained.  “If she doesn’t do it, child, we’re stranded for good.  I do not like it any more than you do…”

“Apparently you do or you’d be stopping her!” Wade shot back.

“Wade,” Maggie added, “he’s right.  We can’t be thinking of that right now.”

“Thinking of what?  Abandoning our values?”

“What about abandoning our search for home?” Arturo replied.  “Wade, this must be done.”

Wade didn’t want to hear anymore.  She looked over at Rembrandt.  “Remmy,” she said, “tell them!”

“I can’t ask them to give up our one chance to get home just to respect an empty shell, girl,” he said sadly.  “I don’t have that right and neither do you.”

Wade backed away.  All of them were with Logan… that murdering, conniving, back-stabbing bitch had turned them all against her.

Logan pulled the dime-sized diode from Eylisa’s body and quickly snapped it into the timer case.  She smiled, wiping the blood from the timer readout.  “All right,” she said.  “The timer’s one-hundred percent and we’ve got two minutes to the next wormhole.”  Logan laughed.  “We’re going to be alright.”

The other sliders didn’t participate in her merriment.  They felt dirty for allowing her to desecrate the body of one who had given her life to save them.  Logan noticed that none of them were very enthusiastic about her actions, so she put her hands on her hips and glared at them.  “Alright,” she said, “I’m sorry you had to see that, and I’m sorry you don’t agree with what I just did, but I suggest you get over it.  I’ve done worse to keep going, and I’ll probably do worse than that to keep going in the future.  This ain’t no hayride, no fun adventure, and it ain’t something you can pussyfoot around, people…  this is sliding and it is the most dangerous thing any of us have ever done.  You can’t keep yourself on a pedestal saying ‘I won’t do this’ and ‘I won’t do that’ because, before you know it, your life and the life of everyone around you is going to depend on you doing ‘this’ and ‘that.’”

“This is the way I do things,” Logan added.  “Get used to it or stay behind, it doesn’t make me a whole hell of a lot of difference.”

She turned and stomped away, mumbling to herself.  Maggie fell into step next to her.

“Nice speech,” she said casually.

“The slide’s in a minute,” Logan murmured.  “Can’t you leave me alone that long, or do you have some big ethical concern you want to crucify me with?”

“Just one,” Maggie told her.  “I found it funny that you disappeared about the same time that the gate opened.”

“Then you have a weak sense of humor, Maggie.”

“Well, see if this brings a smile to your face,” Maggie said, taking her by the arm and making her stop and look at her.  “You see, I’ve had this nagging thought in my mind.  You see, I saw you watch Doctor Einstein work his computer when we first arrived.  I thought you were just being nosey, but after Duncan mysteriously got his hands on the password for the gate, I thought to myself, ‘Hey, this is Quinn’s counterpart we’re talking about.’”

Logan glared at her.  “You wanna tell me when you’re going to get to the point?  I’m scared we’ll miss the slide.”

“The point is, Quinn had an almost photographic memory, and I’m pretty sure you do too.  You could have watched the doctor enter his password on the keyboard and memorized it.  Later, I’m assuming that you met Duncan somehow or another and gave it to him.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever…”

“You were hoping for one of two things.  One: that the trade agreement would go through and we’d get the necessary parts to fix the timer. Or two: things would go bad, people would get killed, and you’d just harvest an AP diode from one of the bodies.”

Logan showed no sign of guilt.  “Maggie, no one could have predicted how things would’ve went on the last world.”

“But nonetheless, we’ve got our replacement part and a good woman is dead.  Funny how things seem to work themselves out, huh?”

She activated the timer and the wormhole formed obediently as it was supposed to.  The vortex seemed stronger, more stable… it seemed Logan’s repairs had been successful.  “Yeah,” she said, “funny.”  She gave them one last look of disdain and leaped inside.

Maggie looked at her companions, who were approaching from behind them, and then followed Logan into the wormhole.  Arturo was next to go.

“I can’t believe this,” Wade said to Rembrandt.  “I can’t believe we’ve sunk this low.”

“Look on the bright side, girl,” Remmy said over the roar of the vortex.  “Look at the good we did.  We managed to stop a takeover today.”  He gave her a small smile and then jumped into the gateway.

Wade watched her friend disappear in a flash and stood there for a moment.

“No, Rembrandt,” she whispered to herself.  “We didn’t.”

And then, pushing all her revulsion to the pit of her stomach, she jumped into the wormhole and continued her journey.  Inside the wormhole, however, among the myriad of lights and waves of extra dimensional matter that was beyond her comprehension, the voice of Doctor Albert Einstein spoke to her in a memory.  It was something he had said earlier that she just couldn’t ignore.

“When we become someone like this person, someone without guiding principles of ethics or morality, we risk losing the values we’ve spent a lifetime cherishing.  Too many have given their lives for our philosophy…

“…too many have died.”

THE END