The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (25 page)

"Do you know who you are?" she asked. She had heard once that the first thing to explore in a possible amnesia case was whether the person knew their own identity. Being the most personal part of a person's psyche, if it were gone, there was a serious problem.

He looked at her with exasperation, "Of course I do. I am Garison Fitch, lawyer and wood-worker and one-time physicist. And I would like to know what you are doing in my laboratory, please!"

"'One time'?" she muttered, the confusion growing.

She stepped closer again and looked into his eyes as if she were trying to see what was wrong inside his head, again. It almost seemed as if she could see right down into his heart and the feeling made him not just uncomfortable but mad. He turned away, then was irritated by her actions and turned back to demand, "Once and for all, who are you?!"

"I'm Heather Fitch," she replied meekly. "You really don't remember me?" When she said it, it occurred to him that it was with genuine fear. He was starting to put some credence into his theory that she had been brain-washed.

Thoughts began to reel through her mind as rapidly as they had flown through Garison's during the voyage. She had heard of people being afflicted with selective amnesia: a case where a trauma causes a person's subconscious to make them forget certain unpleasant things while remembering other, more pleasant, things. Did some part of his subconscious want to forget her? Why?

He looked her over again, then replied, "No. I do not. I believe I've made that clear. I have an excellent memory and I am certain I have never seen you before in my life." She seemed to have some sort of purpose, or thought she did, he thought; so he elected to find out what that purpose was—if he could. Whatever the situation was that he had come back to, he was guessing he would need all the information he could gather to stay on top of it. And once on top, maybe he could figure out a way to get home.

She came back near him, still looking into his eyes with that strange, searching look. She said, "Something must have gone wrong in that other dimension. Maybe you hit your head, or something. After all, you are wearing these...odd clothes. And that hair...it must have taken months to grow it to that length. You have to have been gone for more than the seconds you disappeared."

It was his turn to look at her with curiosity. He asked, "You know of my experiments? How is that?"

"Know of them? I've only been working on them with you for two years now. I was with you back when you had your house in town and started building the machine in the garage. Do you remember that?"

"You think I had a house in Cherry Creek?" he asked.

"Cherry Creek? That's that store your uncle owns," she replied. Inwardly, she was wondering why the name of that little store would stick in his mind and no memory of her apparently had. "No. You were at your house in Durango. Our house in Durango. Remember, you used to be Justice of the Peace there."

"In Durango?" he asked.

"Yes. You don't remember any of this?"

"I know the town of Durango, but I haven't lived there since I was nine years old," he replied. For a spy, she sure had lousy information. He glanced out a nearby window—that was just a little further over to the left than it should have been—and said, "And we are in La Plata Canyon, I know that."

"Yes!" she said triumphantly. "Is it all coming back to you?"

"It was never forgotten," he replied. She had to be a spy and was using this extremely unconventional method to get information from him. His announcement to leave the conservatory and build a lab out in this remote canyon had not sat well with the Party and many officials had let him know that very clearly. Maybe she was there to convince him his memory was faulty and get him to talk. Strange tactic, he thought, but conceded that it might work on someone else. Someone of a weaker mind. "But, I do not even know what a Justice of the Peace is."

He continued, "I don't know who you are, or who you claim to be. I do know that I have all my wits about me and that you have never been a part of my life. I can honestly say that you are memorable enough that I would remember you if I had ever seen you before." It was his turn to get right up in her face as he asked, "Did the Party put you here? Are you a plant?" Direct confrontation seemed to be his best tool, he decided suddenly.

"The Party? What Party?" Heather asked, putting a hand on his arm. "Something must have happened to you, Garison. Maybe we need to get you to a doctor."

"There is nothing wrong with me," he told her, jerking his arm away. "It is you who are mistaken. I must now ask you to leave and tell your superiors that your attempt has failed. I must be about my work."

She backed away from him, seeing him as if a stranger. There was a hint of a tear in her eyes as she asked, "What happened to you, Garison? You were only gone for a moment, but you come back all...changed." Inside, she wondered if this really were Garison. Could the experiment have produced someone who was Garison—but wasn't? Could it have somehow scrambled his brain? Was there some hideous danger inherent with interdimensional travel that they had never considered? And how could his physical appearance have changed, as well? What was going on?

"I am the same person I was when I left," he contradicted. "Actually, that's not entirely true. I'm five years older than when I left. This is 2005. Isn't it?"

"Yes." She perked up a bit, finding solace in the fact that he had retained some basic sense of his surroundings. If only she knew what exactly was wrong, maybe she could help him. She suddenly wished she had studied medicine instead of spending all those years on a law degree she never used.

He mumbled, more to himself than anyone, "I am somehow five years older, while the world is only five minutes older—if that. I knew that would be true for a short trip, but—" He stopped talking, kicking himself mentally for having said so much in front of the probable spy.

She looked at him as if seeing him in a new light and nodded. She told him, "I see it now. You do look...older. It's not just the hair and the lines. You've put on weight. What happened to you, Garison?"

Garison noticed that tears were really beginning to form in her eyes. She was certainly a good actress. He wished he knew who her patron was. She didn't need to be in the spy corps—she needed to be on stage.

He stepped to her suddenly and took her chin in his hand. It was a more violent action than he had ever taken in his life—his size generally intimidating the few people he had crossed—but he felt that the situation called for extreme measures. If he had to shake the truth out of her, he told himself, he would. Holding her tightly so that she couldn't get away, he asked, "Who sent you? Where do you come from?"

The tears began to roll down her cheeks in earnest and he knew it couldn't be from pain. She was upset about the situation, it seemed, and she said, "Something's changed you, Garison. Please let me help. I love you. I'm your wife."

He pushed her back and let go. She fell to the floor and looked up at him with more pain than could have been caused by the fall. The look on her face seemed so genuine that he almost believed she was sincere. Had he believed in her, he thought, that look would have torn his heart in two. She was an incredible actor, he told himself again.

Still, this didn't strike him as the method a foreign country would use to infiltrate his studies. The more he thought about it the more he thought it was more like the mind games the KGB enjoyed playing. Realizing this—that she was probably a fellow countryman sent to spy by their own government—his distaste for her grew.

"What year is it?" he demanded sharply.

"2005," she replied meekly. "Like you said."

"When was I born?"

"December 14, 1975."

Information anyone could know, he thought. "Where did I go to school?"

"You graduated from the University of Colorado at the age of twelve and completed your law degree at Harvard at the age of fifteen."

Her answers caught him off guard and he stared at her with true puzzlement. What were these places she was naming? And why would a spy be so badly informed about such easily obtainable information? Harvard? Colorado? They were names he had never heard. Wait, hadn't there been a Colorado River somewhere in the Japanese lands? But certainly, there was no Université by that name. Her bizarre answers made him curious and he decided to pursue them to see what he could learn of her.

He held up his right arm and rolled up the sleeve. He pointed to a scar across his elbow he had received in a football game and asked, "How did I get this?"

"Sliding into second base," she replied. "You caught your arm on the buckle when ya'll were playing the University of Eastern New Mexico. You—you used your eligibility when you turned eighteen to play baseball for the University of Colorado. You were All-American in both baseball and football."

Second bass? he asked himself. What did an orchestra have to do with his scar? Anyone who knew him or studied him would have known he had no musical ability. And what was this rubbish about baseball? What was baseball? Yes, he had played football, but why get that detail right and the other so gloriously wrong? Why was she telling such obvious falsehoods? Again he told himself that a foreign spy would have much better information—as would a "local" spy.

"How far are we from Texas?" he asked.

"About five hundred miles, I think. From the panhandle, anyway," Heather replied. She was still on the floor, afraid to move and for the first time in her life afraid of her husband. There was power behind the hand that had shoved her to the ground. But Garison had never even shouted at her in anger, let alone raised a hand to her. This couldn't be her Garison, she thought. But as she watched him, she could see in his mannerisms her husband Garison. What had changed him so?

She worked up her nerve as he stood there, looking as if he were thinking of something, and stood up cautiously. When he made no move toward her, she carefully kept as much distance as she could between herself and him and went over to the video monitor and said, "Let me show you something."

"What?" he asked, coming out of his own thoughts.

"Let me show you something." She rewound one of the four cassette recorders and said, "Watch this. It's from right before you left. See if it rings a bell for you."

"'Rings a bell'?" he asked curiously. "Is it musical?"

She eyed him with a slight smile (for it was just the sort of pun Garison would have made), then repeated, "Just watch this."

He came over and looked at the screen, wondering what she was going to show him. Surely it was some sort of doctored tape she had planted in the machine. Video tapes, changed windows and rearranged labs? He must have been gone longer than just a matter of seconds for all this to have been done. Still, anyone who would show him a doctored video would have to know he would suspect it had been doctored. The situation was both expertly and amateurishly arranged, it seemed.

The tape began to roll and showed the laboratory, looking just as it had the day he left (but with the slight changes he had found this day). Garison Fitch, or an incredible look-alike, stepped into the camera's view and said, "Hello. My name is Garison Fitch." It certainly looks like me, Garison thought. Whoever the imposter is, he, too, deserves an award for acting—or makeup.

The Garison on the screen said, "I am here in my laboratory in La Plata Canyon about to make history by being the first person to make contact with another dimension. I made a brief trip into an alternate dimension two days ago, but it was halted, due to lack of power."

So, he thought, they know of my previous trip. He made a mental note to check his entire complex for surveillance devices. Someone must have been monitoring him.

He also wondered if it were possible, however unlikely, that he had been drugged. Perhaps they, whoever "they" were, had drugged him immediately upon his arrival and then awakened him moments ago to make him think he had just gotten there. But, he reasoned, that would have necessitated some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion so why not go ahead and make him believe all this?

The man on screen continued, "Before I go on, though, allow me to introduce my lovely assistant and wife, Heather Dawson Fitch." Heather stepped into the view of the camera and kissed Garison on the cheek.

That's a bit much, the Garison watching the tape thought to himself.

"Today, I will be travelling in this machine, we'll call it Bob . . ." He was extremely surprised that they even knew his "pet" name for the machine.

The two people on the screen explained the principals of the journey and got everything right, Garison admitted. The imposter on the screen got in the machine and did everything just as he had done it before his trip, even moving his hands in a perfect imitation of Garison's movements. Then, he watched as the screen was momentarily blinded by a flash of light, then returned to show an empty laboratory. Heather turned to say something to the camera, but was halted by another flash of light hit, blanking out the screen again. When the screen cleared this time, it showed Garison standing on a tarp outside the machine and one could hear the popping as the nuclear reactor melted down. They must have had it set up and ready to record when I returned, he rationalized. How had they known when he would return? Someone was pulling an elaborate spy mission, if that's what this was.

But when had the KGB ever done anything half way? he asked himself.

Deciding to fight fire with fire, he walked over to the machine and pulled the tape out of the Teslavision camera. Heather watched him and asked, "When did you mount a camera on the machine?"

He smiled in triumph as he realized he had found another item their research had missed. He started to stick the tape into the machine but it wouldn't fit. He tried again, then looked closely at the tape and the player and muttered, "It won't fit."

Heather looked at the tape and asked, more confused than ever before in her life, "Beta?"