by Peter David
The freighter angled down abruptly. The ground seemed to be approaching them at horrifying speed and Vandelia was certain that there was no way, absolutely no way, that they were going to forestall a crash, at which point the freighter zoomed upward once more. Mac tapped the control board again, and Vandelia was surprised to see on the rear view that a suddenly great gust of white was billowing behind them. “Are we hit? Are we leaking something?”
“No.”
For a moment she could see nothing on the rear view, and then the pursuing vessels burst through the mist and continued after them. But then Vandelia noticed something: Their hulls were starting to change colors.
“What’s happening to them?”
“Watch,” he replied. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the front view, but she could see a touch of amusement at the edges of his mouth.
The vessels that had been pursuing them were slowing, and then Vandelia looked on in amazement as she saw their lower hulls start to be eaten away. Huge spots of corrosion appeared on them and then rapidly spread. With each moment it spread faster and faster, eating through the exterior of the ships with the greed and velocity of a hungry child being handed a handful of sweets. Breaking off the pursuit, the three vessels dove as quickly as they could for the ground, but they didn’t quite make it in time. Within seconds the ships had fallen apart completely, and Vandelia watched with smug delight as the erstwhile pilots of the vessels tumbled toward the ground, waving their arms and legs in a most entertaining manner. She felt as much remorse and pity for them as they likely did for her…which was to say, of course, none.
Seconds later, the freighter tore lose completely of the planet’s surface, spiralling into space. “We’re clear of the planet’s atmosphere and gravity,” Mac announced. “Taking her to Warp One.”
“This ship has warp capacity?” Vandelia said in surprise. But then she reined in her surprise with clear amusement. “Well, why shouldn’t it? Apparently it packs some sort of gas that eats ships.”
“Only unshielded ships. We were lucky. Vessels that small don’t pack enough power or equipment to generate anything beyond the most minimal of shielding. They count on their speed to avoid attackers. Leaves them vulnerable. Warp on line.”
Space twisted slightly around them and the ship leaped into warp space. Vandelia leaned back in her chair, shaking her head in amazement. “I still can’t believe it,” she said. “An hour ago, everything seemed hopeless.”
“An hour ago, it was. Things change.”
She turned to face him. “I owe you my life.”
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly, without even looking at her.
“And what do you want.”
At that point, he did afford her a glance. “Want?”
“Yes. Want.” She cocked an eyebrow.
To her surprise, he seemed to laugh slightly to himself, and he shook his head. “It’s some world you live in. People do things because they want something in return. Everyone’s out for themselves. No one does something for the common good.”
She seemed puzzled by what he was saying, “That’s right. That’s my world. Yours, too.”
“And it’s impossible that I could have helped you just because it seemed the right thing to do at the time.”
She sat back in the chair, her arms folded tightly across her breast. “Everyone wants something in exchange. No one does anything if it doesn’t serve their interests, first and foremost.”
“You’re probably right,” he said with a sigh.
“Which brings us back to what you want.”
He appeared to give it a moment’s thought, and then said, “There’s a changing area and hypersonic shower in the back.”
Now here was something she understood. In a way, it was almost comforting to her. Her entire world view was predicated on the selfishness of all those around her, particularly males. The last thing she needed was someone coming along and shaking up the very foundations of her philosophy. “So…you want me to strip and shower, is that it?”
“Yes. You’ve been slapped around, tortured, shot at…you’ve worked up quite a sweat, and it’s detectable. So please shower it off. And there’s a jumpsuit you can change into.”
She was stunned. There was no interest in his voice at all. He wanted her to stop smelling. Beginning, middle, end of interest.
Then, of course, she understood.
“I see. You prefer men.”
Mac looked at her, and then laughed. He didn’t even reply, but instead continued to laugh softly to himself while shaking his head.
Without another word, Vandelia went to the shower and washed herself thoroughly. Even though it was merely a hypersonic shower, it was still a tremendous relief to her. It was particularly soothing for the injured thigh, the hypersonics caressing it so that, by the time she was done, there was not the slightest hint of pain in her leg.
She put on the jumpsuit, and walked back into the main cabin. Mac didn’t even appear aware that she was back. Instead he was finishing issuing some sort of report as to the completion of the “mission.” When he did notice she was there, however, he ceased the recording, or perhaps it was a transmission. Vandelia couldn’t be sure.
“Who are you?” she asked as she dropped into the seat next to him. “Are you some sort of spy?”
“If you wish,” he said.
“Who do you work for?”
“Myself.”
“Someone must be sponsoring you. You must report to…”
“Get some sleep. We’ll be at Starbase 18 before too long. I’ll be dropping you off there. There’ll be a connector flight there which will take you wherever you wish to go.”
“I…do not know what to say.”
“ ‘Thank you’ will suffice.”
She considered that a moment. Then she rose from the chair, went to his, and draped herself across his lap, straddling it.
“What are you doing?” he inquired.
“Saying ‘thank you.’ “She undid the fastenings of the jumpsuit and slipped it off her shoulders. It dropped to her waist, leaving her nude from the waist up.
He stared at her. “Apparently it’s cold in here,” he said.
“We’ll warm it.”
“Vandelia…”
She put a finger to his lips, and grinned in a most wolfish fashion. “I’m going to return the favor you’ve done me, Mac. And when I’m through,” and she put her hands behind her head, arching her back, “you’ll never think about having sex with men.”
“That’s probably true,” Mac said.
And she began to dance. And for the first time in her life, she danced only for one person…only for him.
It was not possible that anyone should be able to haul himself from the wreckage of the tower. Not possible that anyone should have been able to survive. Particularly when one was considering that the candidate for survival had had his body crushed by falling metal.
All this, Zolon Darg was most aware of. Nonetheless, as he lay there on the ground, staring up at the twilight sky that was rapidly becoming night, it was impossible to overlook the fact that he had, in fact, survived.
It was also impossible for him to move. Sheer fury, pure force of will, had pulled him from the flaming wreckage that had been his headquarters. That, and the memory of a green woman with a defiant gleam, and a man…a man with purple eyes and a scar on his face. A man he would never, ever forget.
He tried to feel something below his neck, but was unable to. Nothing would move, nothing would respond to the desperate commands that his brain was issuing.
He drew in a breath, and it was an agonizing effort. But it was worth it, for it allowed him to exhale, and when he did so, what he breathed out were the words, “I’ll…kill them…”
Then he lay there, a sack of broken bones and bloodied meat, and wondered when the dark gods he worshipped would see fit to do something about his condition.
He remained that way for three days before he
received his answer…
Now…
I.
DOCTOR ELIAS FROBISHER was 43 years and one day old, and he couldn’t quite believe he had made it. When he woke up, he had to pinch himself to make certain that he had really managed to accomplish it. When someone had lived under a bizarre death sentence for the last decade or so, as he had, the achievement felt particularly noteworthy. He lay in his bed, breathing in the filtered air of the cone-shaped space station, but never had that air felt quite so sweet. It felt like a glorious day. Granted, concepts such as day and night were entirely subjective, created and controlled by the computer core of the station. There was neither sunrise nor sunset, and this was something that had taken Frobisber some time to get used to. He had been planet-bound most of his life, and the curious and unusual life which existed in space was a difficult adjustment that Frobisher had made because he’d really had no other choice.
Quite simply, he’d had no other choice. He’d had to get away from the Guardian.
He took a long shower that morning, and felt that he had earned it. It was pure water rather than hypersonic, a rarity that Frobisher was revelling in that morning. As he did so, visions of the Guardian came to him unbidden, as they were wont to do. Frobisher shuddered, thinking about the hideous shadow he had lived under all these years.
Then he started to tremble more and more violently. He had lathered up his thinning brown hair, and the shampoo dribbled down into his eyes, but it barely registered upon him. The soap slipped from his hands, his legs went weak, and he sagged to the floor, still unable to control the spasms which had seized him. Paradoxically, he began to laugh. It was a bizarre sound, that choked laughter, a combination of chuckling and sobbing that grew louder and louder, so much so that it could be heard in the hallway outside his quarters. His assistant, Dr. David Kendrow, heard it, and started banging on the door. Normally Kendrow, a thin, blond man, was overly mannered and reserved in his attitudes, but one wouldn’t have known it at that point as he was fairly shouting, “Doctor Frobisher? Are you all right, sir?”
“Yes! Yes” Frobisher called back to him. “Yes, I’ll…I’ll be fine.” It was all that Frobisher could do to pull himself together. He hadn’t expected to react in that manner, but really, it was inevitable when one looked at it with hindsight. The amount of anxiety that had built up as he approached his 43rd birthday had been truly horrific. The knowing, and yet not knowing. That insane combination of certainty and doubt, warring within him as each passing day had brought him closer and closer to the inevitable…ex-cept, maybe not.
And he had made it. He had survived his birthday. It really was true, what they said: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
He emerged from the shower and, as he towelled off, looked at the gut that had been building up on him. As the dreaded day had approached, he hadn’t been bothering to exercise or take care of himself. He’d had a fatalistic attitude about him, and that was certainly understandable. But now the joke was on him, as was the extra flab. He was going to have to do something about working that off. After all, it wouldn’t be particularly attractive to women.
Women. His face lit up as he dressed. Relationships. He had been afraid to begin any, because the prospect of condemning some poor woman to become an early widow. Oh, certainly he could have had a string of casual relationships that went nowhere. Love them and leave them, and rationalizing that, since he was a walking dead man, it was the only way that he could conduct his life. But he was a highly moral man, was Dr. Frobisher. Highly moral, and more than that: He knew that one woman after another, used and tossed aside, was simply not for him. He wanted companionship, he wanted someone who, he knew, was going to be there for him. He wanted someone to wake up to, someone who would cheerfully kiss him in the morning and loved him so much that it wouldn’t bother her if he hadn’t had a chance to brush his teeth yet. Someone he would be able to look at across the breakfast and smile at. Someone who wanted to spend a lifetime with him…a real lifetime, not the truncated thing that had been handed him.
Oh, and someone who was a brilliant engineer in the field of artificial intelligence and computerization, of course. That was a must as well.
There were a few likely possibilities, actually. To give himself some vague bit of hope, something to cling to even though he was certain that it was hopeless, Frobisher had had the Omega 9 run a scan of potential mates. It was unbelievably quaint, even absurd: Using a creation as infinitely advanced as the Omega 9 for the purpose of, essentially, computer dating, seemed absurd on its face. But he had done so nonetheless, and the list that had been drawn up had been quite impressive. Now that the dreaded day had passed, he was looking forward to trying to act upon the possibilities. As he headed to the lab, having had his customary quick breakfast, he patted the data chip in his pocket to which he had copied the information that Omega 9 had obtained for him. His mind was already racing with possibilities. He would pick the most likely prospect, “likely” being derived from personality profile, shared interests, age, background, etcetera. He’d subtly do some checking to see if she was otherwise involved and, if not, he would find a pretense to begin a correspondence with her. Hopefully, he would be able to develop it into something substantive and sufficiently personal that she would be prompted to come out to the Daystrom Station where he worked and meet with him.
And then…who knew? Who indeed knew?
“I knew,” he said rather cheerfully to no one. “I knew, but I didn’t know. But now I know, and it’s great knowing and not knowing!”
He entered the lab, his lanky legs carrying him across it with a jaunty speed. Kendrow was already at work, but he was casting a watchful eye upon Frobisher. “Good morning, David!” called Frobisher.
“Good…morning, sir.” The surprise in his voice was unmistakeable. He wasn’t used to Frobisher sounding so cheerful in the morning…or ever.
Frobisher glanced over the station log, and frowned slightly. “Some sort of glitch in the standard running program?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I just noticed it. It’s minor systems fail-ures…so minor that we hadn’t even been noticing when they’d been going down. I’m running diagnostics checks on them, sir. I’m hoping to get it locked down by this afternoon.”
“Oh, you’ll get it sorted out, Kendrow.” He patted him on the shoulder. “I have the utmost confidence in you.”
“Th—thank you, sir.” Kendrow stared at him as if he were concerned that Frobisher had been replaced by a lookalike, lighthearted alien.
“Not used to seeing me this chipper, are you, Kendrow?” asked Frobisher.
“To be blunt…no, sir. I’m not.”
Frobisher laughed, and then sighed to himself. “Between my attitude now and what you heard earli-er…you must be somewhat puzzled, eh, Kendrow?”
“Yes, sir. I am, sir.”
“Sit down, Kendrow.”
Kendrow looked down at himself. “I am sitting, sir. Already, I mean.”
“Oh. Yes, of course.” Frobisher leaned against a console and smiled broadly. “I’m sorry, Kendrow;’ he said earnestly. “The truth is, this last week, leading up to the day I’ve dreaded for so long, seemed almost to fly by. Now I know I’ve been out of sorts the past few days…weeks…”
‘‘Try months,” Kendrow muttered, but then looked immediately apologetic.
Frobisher waved it off. “ ‘Months’ is probably more accurate, to be honest,” he admitted. “And yesterday was probably the worst of all.”
“Well, I have to say, your behavior was rather pensive considering it was your birthday. I know that some people become daunted by the prospect of turning forty or fifty…but forty-three.” He shrugged. “It seemed…odd. You seemed to want to do everything you could to ignore it.”
“Believe me, I did want to ignore it. Although I’m surprised that my parents did. Usually they send me a greeting on my birthday, but this year…nothing.”
“Had you told them
not to?”
“No. No, I kept my unease to myself…or at least I thought I did. But perhaps they picked up on unspoken signals nonetheless. Ah well…no use worrying about it now. You see…there’s been a reason for my concerns. Do you know what I used to do, Kendrow? Before I joined Daystrom, I mean, to work on the Omega 9.”
“You were involved in some sort of archaeology project, I think, sir.”
“Not just some sort. This was THE project. The Guardian of Forever.”
Kendrow blinked in surprise. “The time portal? I’d heard about that, but I’d almost thought it was a myth.”
“Oh, it’s not a myth, I assure you. It’s real.” Despite his newly achieved state of bliss, Frobisher shuddered slightly as he recalled the image of that cheerless place. It wasn’t just the Guardian itself that so spooked him. He couldn’t get out of his head that eerie, mournful howl of the wind that filtered through the remains of the ruined city around the Guardian. It was as if ghosts of a race long lost still haunted the place, laughing and taunting. “It’s…all too real.”
He was silent for a moment. Prompting him, Kendrow said, “And you studied it?”
“People…tend to come and go there,” Frobisher told him. “Oh, they’re excited at first. Word spreads, after all. And it’s an irresistible proposition: Studying the past, seeing it unspool before you. How can anyone pass that up? And yet…people burn out, very, very quickly. Six months, a year at most, and suddenly you see complete turnover in the staff there. I didn’t understand why. But now I do.” He laughed softly to himself. “Now I do. It just…gets to you after a while.”
Kendrow tilted his head slightly as he regarded the doctor. “What happened there, sir?”
“I…saw my future. At least, I thought I did.”
“The future? But…” Kendrow shook his head. “I thought that the Guardian only shows the past, not the future.”
“That was my understanding as well. That’s what they told us, at any rate. But I will never forget it, nonetheless. I had been there two months…well,” and he smiled ruefully, “two months, seven days, eighteen hours. I was monitoring a playback on the Guardian. No two are exactly the same, you know. Even if you ask for the exact same scenario to be replayed, there’s always slight variances in the scene. Some of them can be extremely minor…but they’re there. That’s one of the things we study: The reasons for it all. It truly supports the notion that time is in a constant state of flux.