The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (books to read for beginners .txt) 📕

mused. “From the temporal zone, you can access most of the Multiverse, so it would be the easiest way to cross the vibrational barrier.”

“Let’s conference in an expert!” Winn exclaimed, and before anyone could stop him, once again there was a hologram of Rond Vidar standing among them.

“Winn!” Rond shouted. “I’m in the middle of very delicate—”

“Forgive us, Mr. Vidar,” Barry said quickly, “but we’re out of our depth here. And we think you may be able to help save, well, everything. Including your century.”

Rond sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of course. Of course. I’m sorry. I’ve just been trying to figure out a certain problem for weeks now. I haven’t been sleeping much, and the Kathoonian stimshots are wearing off. Catch me up.”

Between Superman, Barry, and Sara—with Winn occasionally chiming in—they managed to bring Vidar up to speed.

“It sounds as though you collided with the Iron Curtain of Time,” Vidar said. The high-resolution hologram did an all-too-effective job of conveying his shock. “That’s precisely what I’ve been spending so many sleepless nights trying to puzzle out. You’re very lucky to have survived the experience.”

Iron Curtain? Barry mused. He knew that in the mid-twentieth century, there’d been an “Iron Curtain” that stretched between the borders of those countries controlled by the Soviet Union and those of the free West. There was no literal curtain made of iron—it was just a political metaphor to describe the way the Communist Soviets contained information and emigration from their side of the border, restricting the flow of news and people from East to West. This Iron Curtain of Time sounded like a similar metaphor.

“The Iron Curtain of Time?” Oliver’s voice was skeptical. “That’s not a thing. That can’t be a thing.”

Vidar shrugged noncommittally. “Technically, you’re right, Green Lantern.”

“Green Arrow.”

“Right. Sorry. I get my history confused. In any event, the Iron Curtain of Time is not, in a very real sense, a thing. It has no physical, corporeal characteristics. It is a temporal barrier athwart the time stream itself. We believe it to be constructed by a being from far in the future, a being called the Time Trapper.”

“You can’t build a wall across Time,” Barry protested. “It’s not just impossible—it’s nonsensical.”

“And he did not,” Vidar agreed. “The Iron Curtain is just a convenient metaphor to explain that now it is impossible to travel past the year 3102. What we refer to as an Iron Curtain is in reality a series of interlocking tachyonic breakwaters, a subatomic bombardment of superluminal particles that travel back and forth in time so quickly and precisely that they prevent passage.”

“I understood that it’s a metaphor,” Oliver admitted, “and not much else.”

“This Iron Curtain thing makes no sense,” Sara complained. “The Legends have been to the End of Time before. There’s nothing there except a place called Vanishing Point, where the old Time Masters had their headquarters.” She paused. “They’re not, uh, an issue any longer.”

“Vanishing Point is at the End of Time, where your specific universe collapses under its own weight and coldness,” Vidar told her. “Your foe—our foe—is at the End of All Time. Where every universe has its terminus.”

Barry felt a chill. Not merely the end of the world, or the end of the universe. Not even just the End of Time, as J’Onn had seen. It was the end of every universe.

That was where their foe lived. And they had no way to get there.

“Rond,” Superman said, “you’ve been studying the Iron Curtain, right?”

“Yes. As soon as it appeared on our scanners at the Time Institute, my colleague Circadia Senius and I immediately sent probes to analyze it. None of them came back. We’ve had to make do with remote viewing.”

“The Curtain blockades the year 3102 and beyond. In theory,” Superman said, “could we travel to the year 3101 . . .”

“And just wait!” Oliver snapped his fingers. “The Curtain stops time travelers, but it won’t stop people just living, right?”

Rond shrugged. For the first time, the hologram fuzzed ever so slightly. “We considered this. Once you passed the point at which the Curtain exists, you’d still need to time-travel to the End of All Time. But the enemy is capable of moving the Curtain at will, it seems. He would just reerect the barrier elsewhen, and you’d be right back where you started.” He pursed his lips, pondering. “Quite literally. And eventually, the enemy’s strikes throughout the timeline and Multiverse will corrode the barriers between eras and universes. The crossover effect will reduce the Multiverse to a single moment of entropy, destroying it entirely.”

Oliver threw his hands in the air.

“Great news,” Barry muttered.

“I refuse to believe that we can’t find a way to fight this enemy,” Superman said. “I’ve yet to encounter the foe who doesn’t have a weakness.”

“Do we think this guy can reach through the Curtain from his side?” Sara speculated. “Can that help us somehow? Can we lure him out?”

“He’s using Reverse-Flash to power some sort of machinery on the other side of the Curtain,” Barry said. “With all of that vibrational energy at his disposal, he doesn’t need to come through the Curtain. He can just reach back and do things like release Anti-Matter Man from his prison and have him do his dirty work.”

“Vibrational energy . . .” Winn mused. “Rond, you said the Iron Curtain was . . . Hey, Computo, play it back.”

The words floated from the air, a dead-on replication of Rond’s previous statement: “What we refer to as an Iron Curtain is in reality a series of interlocking tachyonic breakwaters, a subatomic bombardment of superluminal particles that travel back and forth in time so quickly and precisely that they prevent passage.”

“Clear as mud,” Sara pronounced.

“No, no, wait!” Winn said excitedly. He used his tablet to project some graphs and images into the air. Despite himself, Barry found his curiosity piqued and meandered over to watch.

“The breakwaters are actually moving at varying vibrational rates. That’s how they can block time travelers in the first place.”

“Time travel is all about vibrations,”