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Chapter 1

"The Man on the Doorstep"

By Aladdin and Christopher Leeson

But suddenly my anger grows,
A mighty spirit fills my nose.
My inward feelings all revolt.
A creature such as thou! A dolt!
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The two of us stood faced off on the doorstep of my Canoga Park home. The stranger looked neither formidable nor frightening at about five feet tall with light red-brown hair. I’d rate him as looking soft-bodied and overweight. His features were West European features and his dark tan suit was unassuming. The only curious thing about him was his old-fashioned shoestring tie. What was giving me the willies was the fact that I had brushed with this man before—at the mall only hours earlier. It's never good when a stranger follows a person home, it’s never good.

"I saw you at the restaurant," I said through gritted teeth. "What are you doing here?"

He returned an awkward smile. "I urgently need to confer with you, Mrs. Blake. Something happened to you today, something that has mystified you. I want to help you understand it."

His accent sounded like American English, but it had a rhythm that struck me as foreign somehow. He was right about something weird happening to me a couple of hours ago. I was suddenly wondering whether he had been the one who had caused it. If that was true, I had a good excuse to do some mayhem. The only reason that I wasn’t already beating on him was that the little man wasn't making threats, only asking for a parley.

With my arms crossed, I sternly stated, "I asked you, what are you doing here?"

"I ask your pardon for the means I used to contact you,” he jabbered. “I’ve only done so because a very great crisis is impending. Without help, I have no dependable means to deal with it."

"Deal with what?" I asked with a snarl.

"The menace. I stand in great need of an ultra hero, the most powerful hero that I can locate on short notice."

“Well, good luck in finding one,” I said.

"Please, Mrs. Blake. I know almost everything about you. You are my best choice for an assistant. Believe me when I say that the world stands in unparalleled danger. But even danger is too weak a word to convey the overwhelming proportions of the oncoming catastrophe."

"How overwhelming?"

"The Multiverse will cease to exist, and trillions of inhabitants in every part of Creation will blink out of existence.”

That sounded like raving. “The only multiverse I’ve ever heard of comes out of my son’s comic books.”

“Oh, the Multiverse is genuine. There are nearly infinite universes, and these are collectively called the Multiverse.”

“Sorry, but it doesn’t sound like that has anything to do with me?”

“It involves everyone in the Multiverse! What a god makes, a god can unmake, and a very malignant god is making its way to Earth!”

I grimaced. Was the stranger a “the world is doomed” type?

"May we go inside?" he inquired.

"Look, let’s take this a step at a time,” I said. “Who are you and where do you come from?"

The corners of his mouth tightened into a smile. "I come from a place that you have visited more than once. The Godwheel."

Yikes! I had visited the Godwheel and nothing had ever come out of the Godwheel except trouble! I didn't want to involve myself with the Godwheel ever again. I glanced over my shoulder toward the children's bedrooms. "It's not a good time for me to be entertaining beings from outer space," I said. "I've got children to watch out for."

"Of that I am aware, Mrs.... ah, Sir Lukasz. But I could suggest that we conduct our conversation in some alternate spot."

I blanched. If this little man knew that I had been Sir Lukasz, an entirely different person from the one I was now, he knew something he shouldn’t have been able to know. I was desperate to keep my past a closely held secret. "Decent parents don’t go out at night and leave their children alone in an empty house," I said in a way of evasion.

He smiled again. "I was not suggesting you should be neglectful. If you don’t mind, may I ask whether the youngsters are secure and well – at just at this instant?"

His emphasis made me wary. "As far as I know."

"Excellent. Then we shall remain in this exact instant for as long as necessary. If we do that, the little ones will not be the least disturbed while we parley."

"Can you be less foggy about what you’re saying?"

"Foggy?" He paused as if mentally peeking into a phrase book for foreign visitors. Then the red-haired man exclaimed: "Oh, you're saying that my words have been somewhat unclear. I can explain things best by a demonstration. Is that acceptable to you?”

“As long as you don’t touch me or destroy anything.”

The man reached into his pocket, an unexpected movement that caused an instinctive flare-up of my protective force field. When I sense danger, it rises to a power level so intense that it sets my aura aglow so brightly that it casts a verdant light upon his innocuous face.

The stranger barely reacted to the visible light while casually taking a small foil-wrapped item from his coat pocket.

"What's that?" I asked. I’ve been around the block and know that some very terrible things can come in small packages.

"It's a piece of candy–a chocolate kiss, actually," he said. The little man held the milk chocolate between his right thumb and forefinger. Then he took his fingers away.

And the candy didn't drop.

It had stopped in mid-air, hanging there, levitated.

But my surprise was brief. "What is this game? If I wanted to, I could pull tricks like that, too.”

"What you are seeing is a very elementary demonstration of the effects of the two of us occupying a field of zero time."

"What’s zero time?"

“It is a state in which time passes exceedingly slowly. We’re in zero time now. In and around your house no significant time is passing.”

"I don’t feel anything strange. If you have anything to say, it’s time you said it.”

"To say what’s on my mind succinctly, I've come to recruit you as an ally."

"You seem to know everything about me. I suppose that you’ve been using some sort of super technology to spy on me.

"That's exactly the case! I have virtually all your memories downloaded into my VIGOPS and can draw upon them at will!"

"What's a VIGOPS?"

"It's an anagram in my home language. In your speech, a VIGOPS is, oh, ahh -- a memory bank! "When I introduced my nanotechnology into your bloodstream, it was able to monitor your brain activity and convert your stored memories into a retrievable data stream. I can tap into it remotely wherever -- and whenever -- I am."

I looked at him incredulously. "You've put something into my bloodstream? Was that the reason you poked back at the restaurant? You did it so you could steal the whole contents of my mind? And now you're saying you can read the juiciest parts of my life story anytime you want to?"

"Why, yes. But that is only the most elementary function of the VIGOPS. It is useful in so many different ways."

I was so steamed that I could have whistled. "I usually kill people who shoot me full of high-tech crap without asking!"

He nodded contritely. "That was discourteous, I grant, but I’m functioning under immense pressure because the time is short and the stakes are huge. Be assured that these nanites do not adversely affect the human physiology. Their purpose is to allow a controller to maintain contact with his subject. While you carry those nanobytes, the control relationship can be carried out across multiple planes of reality and through extreme degrees of temporal displacement."

"Get this, Bud! I don't care for being controlled. You'd better hope that you've got me controlled like a roped calf at a rodeo, or else I'm going to do something to you that’s painful and very long-lasting."

"I sincerely hope not, madam -- sir. Once you understand what the situation is, I'm certain that you will come to judge my methods of operation less critically."

If this character was actually in control of me, could he make me do anything he wanted? Could he make me drop dead with a single thought? I took another gander at that damned chocolate kiss of his, still hanging in space.

"Perhaps I should clarify a few more details about zero time," he said.

“Yes, do that,” I said guardedly.

"Because we both have the appropriate nanites in our bodies, we can operate normally while in the same time-dilation field created by my technology. This field places us into a temporal sub-dimension. In such a state, our chronological progression becomes so attenuated that a single second of real time may be perceived by us to be as long as a year."

It sounded like he was claiming to have stopped time, using nanobots that were connected to some sort of alien gizmo. But had time actually stopped? I looked around, trying to find some evidence that would prove that he was talking nonsense. The second hand was stopped and the leaves across the street did not sway with the breeze. Everything in sight was paused like images in a photo. On the other hand, my face, clothes, and hair all felt perfectly natural.

"Anything that contacts our bodies becomes part of the zero-time environment," the stranger explained as if reading my mind.

Damn it! My ultra friend Pinnacle also reads minds, and it always annoyed me.

"The field affords us the illusion that Time is passing normally for ourselves, though that is not so. Feel free to experiment with the concept all you like."

My glance went to the small table beside the doorpost. Upon it rested one of Gus's model autos. I reached back through the door and pushed the latter over the edge. The toy started to fall, but the instant my finger lost contact with it, it stopped dead in space -- just like the candy.

I rounded on my visitor. "Did you stop the kids, too?"

"Of course!"

He had said that bombshell as if it were a good thing! I was very close to flying off the handle.

"Preserving the cherubs in perfect safety was the whole point of suspending Time, was it not?" the stranger asked.

"Maybe we should sit down," I said.

I went into the living room and let the little man follow me inside. I sank into the couch next to Mr. Paws, Evie's teddy bear, and told him, “Please, take a chair." This was all a forced play on my part and I was not feeling the least hospitable.

He laid claim to an upholstered chair. I had expected the stranger to start chattering again, but he seemed to be at a loss for words all of a sudden.

"You're a very strange man," I remarked. "How can you do the things you do?"

He gave a modest shrug. "I have had an excellent technological education."

"Education has its value," I agreed, "but there must be more to it than that. By the way, if it turns out I have to murder you, I'd like to know your name!"

He flashed a grin. "I have been remiss. On Earth, I usually go by the name of Gabriel."

"All right, Gabriel, you have some explaining to do. Are you actually able to play tricks with time?"

"I'm afraid so," he admitted apologetically. The man's mildness didn't exactly reassure me. Some of the most notorious serial killers in history were innocuous-seeming men. "A full explanation would take a long while. It is difficult to adequately explain the basic laws of multi-dimensional mechanics to one from a civilization unversed in that discipline."

"If you're saying I'm too dumb to understand your explanations, maybe you should be recruiting a different person."

"Oh, I'm sure you are by no means...dumb. You have lived for centuries and solved thousands of difficult puzzles, and that requires profound intelligence."

"Well, I’ve had my failures, too," I said. "If you'd prefer working with a big-brained scientist type, you ought to be interviewing my friend Pinnacle."

"Oh, I have analyzed Penelope Lammers' suitability. Alas, she lacks your amazing ultra powers and is sorely deficient in diplomatic flair."

"I don't see myself as being anything special," I told him. "I've made plenty of mistakes and they’ve gotten me killed more times than I can remember."

"But yet, for all those past miscalculations, you once were fated to live in the life of Eden Blake for centuries.”

“Were once fated?” I replied.

Was he saying the prophecy that I had about living for centuries was no longer to be counted on? If I had really lost all those years, I wanted to know the reason why!

TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER 2