The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

4F 52—over and over, nearly covering the pages, and outside the circles, scrawled in red block letters, the translation: ERROR. ERROR. ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.
    She looked at Wheeler in shock. “What the hell has he done?”
    The knock on Wheeler’s door was sudden, loud, insistent. “Dr. Wheeler, Dr. Duncan,” a male voice called. “Please let me in. It’s important.”
    Steve and Kelly looked at each other. “Now what?” they said in unison.
    Wheeler opened the door to see a man in his mid thirties, wearing a large, metallic looking device with screens and buttons on his left forearm and coveralls that had an unsightly and somewhat suspicious bulge at the beltline. Wheeler’s eye was drawn immediately to it; he guessed it was a gun, a large one. The man noticed.
    “It’s all right, sir. My name is Arty. I’m a friend. May I come in?” Wheeler hesitated, looked back at Kelly. She shrugged. “Please, Dr. Wheeler,” the man insisted. “It’s very important.”
    Sighing, Wheeler stepped back and swept an arm toward the table. “By all means, do come in then.”
    “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” He looked at them, one to the other and then back again. “I have some very important information for you, but I’m not sure where to begin.”
    “Perhaps at the beginning,” Kelly offered.
    This seemed to amuse the young man. “Eh, maybe not,” he smiled. “That might take a long, long time. I think I’ll start in the middle, which is kind of where I came in. In any case, I think you should both sit down.”
    They sat, Wheeler in the folding chair and Kelly on the coffee table. She motioned for Arty to sit on the couch and turned to face him. “First, why don’t you tell us who you are?” she suggested.
    “Well,” the man said, “As I said, my name is Arty. I’m… a janitor.”
    “All right,” Wheeler said evenly.
    “In a bank building. In Colby, Kansas.”
    “All right.”
    Arty paused, took a deep breath. “In the year 2034,” he blurted out.
    “All ri—wait, not all right. What? ”
    Arty told them as much as he knew, in as much detail as he could provide, starting with his strange visitors, Aurora and Denes, and their account of their world. He recounted their patient explanation of time travel, the magazine with the moving cover photo, and their callback arm units like the one he wore.
    “You know,” Wheeler interrupted, “I’d have a hard time swallowing a story like that.”
    “So would I, Dr. Wheeler,” Arty replied, tapping his obviously-not-from-around-here callback unit, “except that this morning I was vacuuming floors in 2034 and tonight I’m here telling you about it.”
    Steve and Kelly examined the callback unit. It was of a smooth, pliable, blue-gray material, not metal but not plastic either. Covering most of Arty’s forearm, it had no discernable seams, seals, or latches, and contained myriad flat, backlit buttons with various characters on them, some recognizable and some not, and no fewer than three small but incredibly clear display screens. Arty said these often busily displayed coordinates, calculations, and other data that he admittedly did not understand, but weren’t doing so now because of an unknown problem “downstream.” He showed them what he knew about the unit, including the red emergency return button.
    Kelly nodded in acceptance. “Arty, how did you know I was here?” she asked.
    “I saw you arrive after Lokus left.”
    “Wait, what?” Wheeler exclaimed. “Somebody was here, in my apartment?”
    “Ah. That’s why your door was ajar,” Kelly observed.
    Arty retold Aurora’s story of Vice Governor Lokus taking his own time trip, with the intent of keeping his history, and thus his future, exactly as it was. He explained how Pan-Li and Lucinda—whom he had seen only briefly and indistinctly through the translucent wall of the transmission chamber—had picked him up from his building in 2034 and sent him on to Steve’s location in the hope of preventing what they called his “untimely demise.” Arty omitted the part about Lokus’s laser pistol and downplayed the incident, admitting only that he had spooked Lokus by waving the ancient Colt at him.
    Wheeler wasn’t fooled for a second. “He—he was going to kill me! Lokus was going to kill me!” he cried, aghast.
    “Perhaps,” Arty hedged.
    “Perhaps, my ass! I don’t know what untimely demise means in 2034, but here it means croaked, kaputski, worm kibbles, takin’ a dirt