Time Enough for Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

lost their lives when the terrorists’ bomb had gone off.
    But now the screen was filled with live video footage taken during the earthquake.
    The madman had accurately predicted the future not once but twice.
    The madman very likely wasn’t mad at all.
    The telephone rang. Maggie wasn’t a time traveler from the future herself, but she knew exactly who was on the other end.
    She crawled across the carpeting to her coffee table and pressed the mute button on the remote control as she picked up her cordless phone.
    “Where are you?” she asked. “We need to talk.”
    “I’m at Tia’s,” Chuck’s soft baritone voice told her. “I was hoping you’d let me come by.”
    Maggie looked at the soundless pictures of the earthquake’s destruction on the TV. A road had been nearly ripped in half, the blacktop crumpled and folded.
    “I’d rather meet you at the restaurant,” she told him.
    He didn’t hesitate. “Fair enough. I’ll get a table for dinner.”
    “Order me a tequila,” Maggie said. “I think I’m going to need one.”
    ·    ·    ·
    “I called it the Wells Project,” Chuck said.
    “As in H. G. Wells?”
    He nodded. “Yeah. I’d been working on the theory for years—literally since I was a kid. But it wasn’t until a little more than three years from now that I came up with the breakthrough equation.
    “I got approval from Data Tech to run with it, but when the time came to actually build the Runabout, we had to look outside the company for funding.” He frowned down at the last of the refried beans that remained on his plate. His cheese enchilada was long gone. “That’s when I was approached by Wizard-9.”
    “They’re
really
called Wizard-9?”
    Chuck had to smile at Maggie’s expression of disbelief. “Yeah, they’re really called Wizard-9. It’s a pretty powerful organization. Covert too. And dangerous as hell. Not even the president himself knew about this group. Or if he knew about them, he didn’t know what they had planned, that was for sure.”
    He took a deep breath. “Anyway, they provided Data Tech—and me—with the money necessary to build the Runabout in return for the right to regulate use of the device. They told me that time travelcould be a deadly weapon, and without regulation, there was always the possibility that terrorists or criminals could get their hands on the Runabout and change the course of history. I suspected they were interested in more than regulating the project, but I let myself be blind to that. All I cared about was making the Wells Project a reality.”
    He stopped himself from drumming his fingers on the table before he even started. All this was his fault. He’d let Wizard-9 get involved. He was responsible for everything that happened as a result of that. He was responsible for all those deaths, for Maggie’s death.…
    “Turns out that the agents from Wizard-9
were
the terrorists,” he told her grimly. “They used the Runabout without my authorization to go back in time and set a bomb at the White House. The president, the vice president … everyone was killed.”
    “How did you know?” Maggie frowned. “I mean, if the agents from Wizard-9 didn’t tell you they were going back in time, how could you even know that everything didn’t happen the way it was supposed to happen? How did you know they were responsible?”
    “I probably
wouldn’t
have known, if I hadn’t been doing experimentation in something that I called ‘double memories.’” Chuck pushed his plateforward as he explained. “I just ate a cheese enchilada, right?”
    She glanced down at his plate and nodded.
    “You have a memory of me eating that cheese enchilada. If you were paying close attention, you probably have a memory of me burning my tongue. You have a memory of sitting across from me, eating your black-bean soup and a salad. You remember the waitress—the scent of her perfume, perhaps. You have memories of all those things,