The week that followed was a surreal procession of paperwork, security briefings, and silent goodbyes. Robert was a ghost already, his presence at Wright Field fading as his new identity was forged. He was no longer Robert Vale, consultant. He was becoming a classified asset, a non-person to be transported to a blank spot on the map.
He packed his meager belongings—the clothes from Eleanor, the technical manuals he'd never asked for, and the wooden swallow. He held the carving one last time, its smooth wings a stark contrast to the cold, bureaucratic machinery now enveloping him. They always find their way home. The sentiment felt like a cruel joke from a lifetime ago.
On his final evening, he was granted a surprising concession: one unsupervised hour to himself on the base. It was likely Albright's doing, a final gesture of… what? Pity? Or a final test to see if he would run? Where would he run to? The entire country was mobilizing for a war he had accelerated, and he was its most valuable secret.
He walked to the edge of the airfield, away from the hangars and the roaring engines. The sun was setting, painting the Ohio sky in hues of fire and gold. He found a spot on a small, grassy knoll overlooking the main runway and sat down, the dry summer grass prickling through his trousers.
He watched a P-47 Thunderbolt come in for a landing, its distinctive, burly frame silhouetted against the dying light. The plane he had saved. It touched down smoothly, a testament to the stability his "intuition" had provided. It was a beautiful, powerful machine, a masterpiece of its time. And it was a weapon. It would soon be shipped to England, to be flown by young men who would use it to kill other young men. He had helped make it more efficient at that task.
This was the true cost of his interference. Every "brilliant" suggestion, every "lucky" hunch, was another brick in the arsenal of a coming cataclysm. He had been so focused on the immediate, mechanical problem in front of him that he had blinded himself to the larger, moral equation. He wasn't saving lives; he was making the machinery of death more effective.
The weight of it crashed down on him, more crushing than any fear of discovery. He had been complicit. He had used his knowledge not to warn or to prevent, but to perfect. He was the ultimate quartermaster for a war he knew would claim tens of millions of lives.
He thought of Arthur and Eleanor, their simple, decent world in Oak Creek. He had wanted to protect that. But by hiding in their home, by using their kindness as a shield, he had only delayed the inevitable. The war had found him anyway, and in his desperation to be useful, to earn his keep, he had walked willingly into its embrace.
A deep, shuddering sob escaped him, there on the knoll, alone under the vast, indifferent sky. He cried for Jimmy Miller, dead in a training accident. He cried for the pilots who would die in the planes he had improved. He cried for the cities that would burn, for the world that would be shattered, and for his own, irrevocably corrupted soul.
He was not a hero. He was not a savior. He was an accomplice. A man from the future who had gotten his hands dirty in the past, trying to fix a broken watch with tools that only made it keep worse time.
As the last sliver of sun dipped below the horizon, the airfield was plunged into a deep blue twilight. The stars began to appear, the same stars that had shone over his own time, witnesses to his folly. He had traveled ninety years to find himself at the heart of the very darkness his history books had warned about.
He stood up, brushing the grass from his clothes. His hour was up. It was time to go.
He walked back towards the barracks, his steps heavy but resolved. The grief and panic had burned away, leaving behind a cold, clear certainty. They were taking him to New Mexico to mine his mind for the ultimate weapon. They believed he held the keys to the future.
They were right.
But as he walked into the waiting darkness, a new resolve hardened within him. He would go to New Mexico. He would enter the lion's den. But he would not be their oracle. If he was to be the Keeper of the Flame, then he would also learn how to smother it. He would play their game, but he would play it to lose. He would use every ounce of his future knowledge not to build their terrible new world, but to subtly, secretly, sabotage it.
It was a desperate, likely suicidal plan. The minds at Los Alamos were among the sharpest of the century. Deceiving them would be infinitely harder than deceiving the engineers at Wright Field.
But he had to try. He had crossed a line, but he would not cross the final one. The sun had set on Robert Vale, the castaway. Now, the long night of Robert Vale, the saboteur, was beginning. He would find his way home not by returning to the future, but by ensuring that the future he knew—for all its flaws, for all its horrors—still had a chance to exist. The war for time was not over; it had just entered its most critical, and most secret, phase.