Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(84)
“Eventually, when she’s ready. For now, I need her trust, and she needs to have her hope.”
THIRTY-TWO
SEARCH FOR THE CURE
Elise scowled at the column of machines lined up against the stone wall of her newly assembled lab. Most of the stuff was straight-up stone age, primitive tools from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that wouldn’t be fit for a grade-school bio lab in her time. The few modern pieces James had retrieved for her were so high-tech and in that weird twenty-sixth-century mumbo jumbo, and she couldn’t figure out for the life of her how to make the damn contraptions work.
The problem wasn’t so much the actual machines; that stuff she could figure out with time. Elise’s main source of grief was this century’s dialect. She never really had a gift for languages and couldn’t decipher more than half the words on these futuristic devices. It seemed the comm band that allowed her to understand all these people and their different languages didn’t extend to her ability to read any of it.
So there she had it. Between the primitive tools used by scientists in the tenth century and the super-advanced ones she couldn’t read, Elise was stuck, expected by everyone around her to cure the Earth Plague. Elise looked over at Rima, who at that moment was studying the characters for World English numbers. At least she had someone to help bring her food. Rima couldn’t read and Elise had a sneaking suspicion that they had assigned the girl to her only to keep the young troublemaker out of trouble. The lights in the room flickered. Elise looked up and waited for them to go out.
The Elfreth had enthusiastically embraced their new mission in life and moved her lab indoors to one of the higher levels adjacent to the sky bridges in the Farming Towers. Now, Elise had a room with four walls and a ceiling, and some pretty decent views from her own private lab.
They even relieved her of her daily chores and assigned Rima as her assistant. The girl had a steep learning curve, though, and Elise had to put aside time to teach her basic math. It was frustrating, to say the least. At this very moment, Rima was sitting on a stool in the corner working her way up rudimentary base-ten math.
James was as good as his word and had surprised her several days later with a roomful of equipment. He pulled literally almost a truckload of equipment out of his never-ending magic hat. In the end, he was able to obtain thirty-one of her list of forty-four items, with promises of fulfilling the rest of the requests once he located them. Chief among the things he obtained was a battery-powered generator hooked up to an array of solar panels on the roof. Now, she had all the lights and fires that she needed. By the end of the week, it was starting to feel like a real lab.
While both James’s and the Elfreth’s commitment to her research was heartening, the promises and responsibilities that came with it worried Elise to no end. Now, she felt a responsibility actually to succeed in finding a cure for the planet. Before, when it was just her and her three-sided hut, her experimenting was just that. Now that she had sold everyone on the idea that it was possible, the entire tribe had jumped on board and expected her to deliver a clean Earth.
The only problem with her new setup was that she had to climb up those stairs every single time she had to work. Elise was now going up and down the stairs at least three times a day, minimum. At least it was a decent workout. She considered moving her sleeping arrangements closer to her lab and tried that for one night. However, the top of the Farming Towers was pitch black at night and the wind howled through the corridors, so she decided she’d rather sleep in her old tent next to James for the time being.
When the lights from the power generator flickered, she motioned to Rima to pause in her studies and clean the beakers from Elise’s last experiment. That was one thing the people in the Elfreth were very good at; they were thorough when it came to cleaning, especially their utensils and food. Any hint of the plague on animals and plants had to be cut out and cleaned before consumption. These people had learned over time how deadly the Earth Plague could be if ingested.
Elise hurried out of the room. James must have just returned. The generators weren’t powerful by any period’s standards, and they had a tendency to flicker on and off when James’s collie was around. Recently, he had taken to parking his ship closer, in one of the abandoned garages on the periphery of the camp. Whenever the collie was flying around, all the power sources in her lab went haywire. Probably something to do with magnetic fields and power drains of energy fields or whatever. Elise could care less; she had never been interested in physics.
She hurried down the stairwell of the Farming Tower and, ten minutes later, emerged from the base of the tower and crossed the communal fields. Her legs and calves had gotten much stronger already. They were sore the first few days, but now she barely felt the climb. She passed by several of the Elfreth, who waved almost reverently as if she were some savior. This made her stomach churn. She couldn’t look them in the eyes as she passed them, too embarrassed to acknowledge their faith in her.
In the past few days, James had finally begun to use his abilities and technologies for the benefit of the tribe, something he had been reluctant to do earlier. The collie, like most ChronoCom vessels, was equipped to avoid detection, a necessary technology in the pirate-infested gas mines regions. However, it was still susceptible to visual sightings, so all his movements had to be made late at night.
Elise waved when James walk out of the garage. She saw him smile when he saw her; he was doing more of that these days. She felt her heart beat just a little faster as he approached. There were times when he would be gone for days, and though she knew he could take care of himself, she would worry until she heard back from him.