Killing Time

by Linda Howard

“No, I’d never ask that kind of sacrifice of you,” she said gravely. “I want you to cut me.”

  He snorted at her dry tone, then paused and said, “You’re serious.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He grinned, shaking his head. “There are laws against a law enforcement officer using a knife on a prisoner, unless said prisoner is using violence against the officer or others. If I cut you even a fraction of an inch, you’d have me brought up on charges before the hour’s out. Good try, though.”

  “Well, okay then, cut yourself. I don’t care. Just cut someone.”

  He was actually laughing now, as if he was enjoying the conversation. “I’m not going to cut you, myself, or anyone else. Dead end. Try another one.”

  “Coward,” she muttered under her breath. “Give the knife to me and I’ll cut myself. It shouldn’t be difficult, even though I’m handcuffed. You can tell anyone who’s interested that I somehow got a knife out of my pocket, and my fingerprints will be on it, so you’ll be safe. Does that satisfy you?”

  “I won’t let you cut yourself,” he said mildly. “Give it up.”

  “I can’t believe you’re being so stubborn. Has anything I’ve shown you so far not worked? You couldn’t cut the ID card, the scanner worked. Why don’t you try a little trust?”

  “Because I’m not an idiot?” he offered.

  “You’re an idiot if you don’t. A homogenized, close-minded idiot.”

  “Homogenized?”

  He sounded as if he was enjoying himself; his eyes were sparkling, and his lips kept quirking before he’d catch himself and flatten them into a thin line.

  “That’s a delicate way of saying inbred. You have only two genetic sources? It’s nothing short of a miracle you can function.”

  “I’m functional in all ways,” he assured her, grinning.

  She groaned and closed her eyes in exasperation. Now he was making sexual innuendos . . . she thought. The language differences were just enough that she wasn’t certain. If he was, then she supposed men were men no matter what century they lived in.

  “All right, all right,” he said, suddenly capitulating. Nikita’s eyes snapped open and she watched as he dug his hand in his jeans pocket and pulled out a knife that, when he flipped it open, showed a wicked four-inch blade. Deliberately he sliced the edge down the pad of his left thumb, and dark red blood immediately welled and began dripping down his hand.

  “Open the Reskin,” she instructed. “Brush it on the cut. Well, wipe off the blood first, then brush it on the cut.”

  “Now you tell me,” he said, grabbing a paper napkin left over from their lunch and holding it to his bleeding thumb. “If you’re bullshitting me, that’s going to put me in a very bad mood,” he warned.

  She ignored him, watching as he held the thin tube of Reskin in his left hand and unscrewed the cap, pulling out a small brush that glistened with an opalescent liquid. “It doesn’t take much; just a light coating will do.”

  “It had better.” He pulled the napkin away and quickly dabbed the Reskin on his cut. “Ouch!” he immediately yelped. “Shit! You didn’t tell me this crap burns!”

  Nikita laughed; she couldn’t help it. “Look at your thumb.”

  He looked at his thumb and his expression changed in a way she couldn’t describe: it wasn’t shock, or disbelief, but a sort of numbness. Very slowly he recapped the Reskin and laid the little red tube back on his desk, then dabbed at the remaining liquid on his thumb.

  He didn’t say anything for so long she felt like screaming from the tension, but she held herself rigidly under control and waited for him to decide what he was going to do. He might reject what his own eyes had told him. People could sometimes be illogical, so she had to be prepared for that.

  Finally he got up from behind his desk and walked around to squat beside her chair and unlock the set of cuffs that held her ankle to the chair. Then he cradled her hands in one of his as he unlocked the cuffs that bound her wrists.

  Dropping both sets of cuffs on his desk, he resumed his seat and said, “Okay, start talking. Tell me everything.”

  “Everything? How long do you have?”

  “Just start talking. I’ll tell you when I’ve heard enough.”

  8

  Now that he was really listening, she didn’t know where to begin. She’d been rubbing her wrists, but she stopped and spread her hands. “What do you want to know? Give me a subject.”

  “You mentioned that you were tracking a killer. I’m not saying I buy into this time-traveler stuff, but I’m trying to catch a killer, too, so I’ll listen.”

  She was silent a minute, trying to organize her thoughts. “We might need a chart for this.”

  He took a flip-top notebook and spun it across the desk toward her. “Draw one.”

  Draw one, he said. She smoothed her fingers across the lined page. If the man knew how seldom she had actually used a pen and paper, he’d probably laugh. She was familiar with them only because of her studies. Real paper was almost priceless, saved for archiving crucial information and teaching a very small selection of investigators about the past. There was so much mankind had learned and could do, but preserving digital information for longer than a generation or so had so far eluded them. Maybe she could take some paper back with her, she thought. The sale of it would go a long way toward establishing her financially.

  “Pen?” she finally said, and he hooked one from inside his jacket, extending it to her.

  First she drew a straight line crosswise on the paper, then small lines bisecting it. Starting with Monday, above each small line she put a letter for the day of the week: M, T, W, T, F, S, S, all the way across the paper.

  Then she drew an arrow coming down between Monday and Tuesday. “Someone came through early Monday morning but we don’t know who. Whoever it was knew enough to bypass the security at the Transit Laboratory, and to send himself. We know when he—”

  “He?”

  “For the sake of convenience, I’ll say ‘he’ instead of ‘he or she,’ but it could just as easily be a woman. Anyway, because of the computer settings, we know when and where he transited. In the beginning, the weight of the transportee had to be known and the computer calibrated for that weight, but that was too dangerous, because what if he gained weight, even just a pound, in the other time? He wouldn’t be able to get back. So that method was refined, and now the weight doesn’t matter, just the links.”

  “Links?”

  He was a master at one-word questions, she thought. “They’re actual, physical links, worn around the ankles and the wrists, programmed to both send and retrieve.”

  “So where are yours?”

  “Safely buried, where no one can find them. If I lose my links, I can’t get back unless a SAR is sent with replacement links.”

  “When we say SAR we mean Search and Rescue,” he observed.

  “That’s what it still means. They’re a squad of specially trained commandos, because no one knows what conditions they will be going into. Usually just one SAR is sent, to diminish the chance of attracting attention.”

  He propped his chin in his hand and smiled at her. “If you’re spinning a yarn, it’s a damn good one. You have quite an imagination. Go on.”

  She gave him a long, level look. “If you thought this was pure fabrication, you wouldn’t be wasting your time listening, and you know it. Not only that, if this were an interrogation we wouldn’t be in your office, we’d be in an interrogation room and this would be taped. Maybe you don’t want to believe me, but you can’t explain any of my equipment, can you?”

  “I’m listening. Don’t ask for more than that.”

  She needed a lot more than that from him, but for the moment she let the subject drop and went back to the chart she was drawing. “A message was left on a computer at the Transit Lab, sort of a catch-me-if-you-can statement.” She paused. “You need to understand that there are several groups who are against time travel, for whatever reason. So
me see it as a moral issue—that you shouldn’t tamper with what God hath wrought, that kind of thing. For others it’s more practical, as in, don’t change history because all hell might break loose.”

  “Theoretically, you can’t change history.”

  “On a small basis, at least, that’s wrong. Say someone in my time discovered records of a winning lottery number. He could come back in time and buy a ticket with that same number, and the winnings would be split between him and the other winner or winners. Only the amount of money each lottery player won would change, and there would perhaps be a minuscule economic ripple but nothing else.”

  “And the time traveler would then take his winnings back to his own time.”

  “Yes, but the currency would be of value only to antiques collectors, so in effect he’d be taking back a specialized commodity rather than currency.”

  “How about changing history on a large basis?”

  “Time travel is extremely regulated; not just anyone is allowed to do it, because of the possible danger. What would happen if, say, someone went back in time and assassinated Hitler before World War II started? What would the repercussions be? Without the war to invigorate economies that had been devastated by the Great Depression, what would life for the next century have been like?”

  “You mean the United States wouldn’t be a superpower.”

  “No one knows, and that’s the danger of trying to change large-scale history. But if the United States hadn’t been catapulted to superpower status, would the space race have begun? Would computers have been invented, without the driving need of space travel as impetus? Without the huge economy, would food programs to third world nations have been instituted, would medical advances have been made at the same pace? So you see the ramifications. The prevailing theory isn’t that history can’t be changed; it’s that it shouldn’t be changed because no one knows what would happen instead.”

  “So even bad things shouldn’t be changed.”

  “Exactly. Everything, good and bad, has made up the path mankind has followed.”

  He sat back and surveyed her with narrowed eyes. “A lot of bad things have happened. You’d think the world would be a better place if some of them could be undone.”

  “You mean if people could live instead of die?” At his nod she said, “Can you guarantee that one of the people who died, if he’d lived, wouldn’t have committed or caused an atrocity that was worse than what did happen?”

  “No one can guarantee that.”

  “Exactly. So, not knowing, the Time Transit Council decided to leave well enough alone.”

  “And this renegade time traveler you’re hunting didn’t agree. Why leave a message, though? If you really want to accomplish something on the sly, you don’t leave a message broadcasting it.”

  “There’s no way he could transit without anyone knowing, though. The computers show every journey, when it originated and when it terminated. So I suppose he thought he might as well do a little taunting, maybe trigger an action that wasn’t well thought out. Which is exactly what happened,” she said bitterly.

  “You weren’t well thought out? Imagine that.”

  “The first agent sent through in pursuit was killed,” she said coldly, not liking his sarcasm. She drew another arrow that came in right on top of the first one. “The unauthorized traveler was waiting for him when he transitioned. His body was sent back to us.”

  “The first agent? How many have there been?”

  “I’m the third one. Houseman was killed. McElroy was sent to arrive about half an hour later, but he couldn’t make any progress and was recalled.” She drew the third arrow showing the timing of McElroy’s arrival, then her own arrival the next night.

  “All this coming and going,” he drawled, “you’d think someone would notice something unusual.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth he froze, his gaze going blank as his thoughts turned inward. “Stay right here,” he said, getting up and striding toward the door. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  He was back in fewer than five minutes, holding a black rectangle. He turned on the small video screen sitting on top of a file cabinet, and slid the black rectangle into a black machine. VCR, whispered her memory. It was a primitive data-reader, which translated the data into video and audio.

  A picture formed on the screen and he said, “Watch this,” as he pressed the control that made the film speed forward. He stopped it with another control, then began feeding it forward frame by frame. She recognized the courthouse where she was currently being held, but there was no action, nothing going on. From the stark shadows and angles she knew the film had been made at night.

  Then a bright white flash filled the screen.

  She sat bolt upright, staring. The next frame was the same scene, except now there seemed to be a hole in the ground, when none had been there a moment before.

  “You know anything about that flash?” he drawled.

  “That’s what happens when someone transits in or out,” she said, stunned. “But—but the records don’t show anyone coming in at this location. When was this?”

  “Monday morning,” he said, and tapped her chart showing when the killer had come through.

  “He didn’t transit here,” she insisted. “The coordinates were several miles east of here. I’ve been there, I found the location. That’s where he killed Houseman. He wasn’t here.”

  “Then who was? Got any ideas on that?”

  She shook her head. She’d seen the data; the only transits had been those made by the killer, Houseman, and McElroy—unless someone else had come through since she’d transited. That someone could easily have arranged to come through before the killer, before everyone else; it wasn’t exactly a simple matter to set the time and space coordinates, but the computers could handle the task within a fraction of a second.

  Someone else had come through. Who? Why? Was this someone also the person who had shot at her today? Again, why?

  9

  “I gather this isn’t good news to you,” he said, sharply watching her.

  Nikita shook her head. “Someone came through whom I don’t know about,” she said, feeling a little numb. “Could be good news, could be bad news. I have no way of knowing if that was an authorized traveler or reinforcements for the killer.” She pointed at the screen. “That hole in the ground . . . what was it?” She thought she knew, and wondered how she, how all of them, could have been so smart that they’d outsmarted themselves.

  “Twenty years ago, the town buried a time capsule there,” Knox said. “Monday morning, someone dug it up and stole it. You’re saying one of your time travelers did it? First, why doesn’t digging it up show on the film? Second—why in hell would anyone want a time capsule?”

  “First, when someone comes through, it sort of—freezes time for a little while, as if everything has been shocked and can’t move. That’s one of the arguments the anti-time-transit groups use to prove that we shouldn’t be doing it. The physicists haven’t been able to explain it yet, but they have a theory that the traveler has to completely mesh with the new time on a molecular level before everything returns to normal.”

  “But while everything else is ‘frozen,’ is the time traveler? Shouldn’t this last only a few seconds, instead of the time it would have taken someone to dig up the capsule?”

  “Theoretically, the pause is very brief, a fraction of a second. It’s so brief that I don’t think anyone has ever thought about whether or not the traveler is also immobilized.”

  “You can’t move a granite marker and dig up a capsule in a fraction of a second.”

  “No,” she said hesitantly. “Unless there’s technology that I don’t know about, but the FBI makes a real effort to stay abreast of new technological developments.”

  “So that still doesn’t explain how the time capsule went missing.” He looked disappointed. “Unless the pause is much longer than anyone thought. I would say that’s the only logical
explanation, but the word logic doesn’t really fit this conversation, does it? But how about the second part of my question: Why?”

  “There was a paper buried in this particular time capsule that contained the theory and some of the process for successfully traversing time,” she said. “If that paper isn’t in the time capsule when it’s opened in 2085, or if the time capsule itself is stolen, then the technology won’t be developed.”

  “In our little time capsule?” he asked skeptically. “Who wrote something like that? I don’t know of any quantum physics genius around here.”

  “No one knows who wrote the paper. Maybe it was known at one time, but the information didn’t survive. A lot of digital information was lost or corrupted before people realized discs weren’t a good way to archive anything.”

  “I was there,” he said in an abstracted undertone.

  “What? When?”

  “When the capsule was buried. January first, 1985. The newspaper said twelve items were going into the capsule, but I counted thirteen. A research paper wasn’t among the items mentioned. I never did find out what the thirteenth item was.”

  “Then it must have been that paper.” She sighed and stared out the window at the gorgeous blue sky, with the occasional fat white cloud drifting by. “Have you ever seen a bunch of really smart people overlook the perfectly obvious?”

  “Happens every day.”

  “Well, we did. In our defense, this is the first time we’ve had this kind of situation. When we were alerted that an unauthorized traveler had gone through all we thought about was sending agents to apprehend him. None of us thought of the obvious: go in ahead of him.”

  “Somebody did.”

  “I hope,” she said with a wan smile. “That’s the best-case scenario. The other possibility is that he isn’t the only one. I was shot at, remember? So the bad buys could have the time capsule—or the good guys might. I simply don’t know.”

  Knox checked his wristwatch, then yawned and rubbed his eyes. “There’s a lot that isn’t making sense, but enough of what you’re telling me is that I’m going to cut you some slack for the time being. Those gizmos you have, and the card, have bought you some time. That doesn’t mean I’m going to just let you go before I know for certain, one way or another, if you’re crazy, pulling a con, or if you really did come through time. So I have to decide what I’m going to do with you.”