The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “What’s your point?” Koffield asked, speaking for the first time.

  “Well, sir, on a ship like this”—he gestured with a wave of his hand to indicate the DP-IV—”there’s only healthy crew of adult age on board, and most of them have cryo experience that’s on the shipboard computer file. The ship can’t afford a full-time med staff, and doesn’t really need one. No high-risk cases on board. So you stick your arm in the cryomed detector. It does some scans, takes skin and blood samples, looks up your onboard med history, and issues you the right types and dosages of cryomeds. The automatics are all you really need to deal with the limited-population universe. No muss, no fuss.”

  Phelby shook his head. “But you can’t do it that way on a colony ship. You’ve got older people, people with medical conditions that would scratch them from starside service, teenagers, pregnant women, people with bad or missing or inaccurate med files, and so on. Colony ships have to go to the expense of keeping medical staff in temporal confinement. The doctors wake up every year or so to check on everyone, and the med-monitor Artlnts can wake them in an emergency.

  “Anyway, I learned a couple of things. One is that the meds they give to the cryosubjects on a colony ship are very carefully tailored, both for the individual and for the duration of the trip. On a cargo ship, we tend to let the medical systems do the worrying. The crew members take the meds the automatics give us, and we don’t much think about it. The flight plan called for us to be in cryo for about eighty ship-years on this flight, and we were dosed for that. There’s a big margin of error in those dosages—-but we were on ice for an extra forty-seven years.

  “The other thing is that young people are more susceptible to revival shock. They let pregnant women go cryo, because the mother’s body protects the fetus, but anyone from newborn up to about thirteen they don’t let into cryo, period. An immature human body can’t handle the stresses. After about age fourteen, children can manage cryo—but they have to make age adjustments to the standard meds, and increase the dosages, up until about age twenty-four.”

  “So what you’re saying is that you were all on the ragged edge of depleting your cryogenic support medications—and the two who died did so because they were young and consumed their cryomed dosages faster than the rest of you,” Marquez said.

  “Yes, sir. We were all at dosage exhaustion. None of us would have come out alive if we had been on ice much longer.”

  Marquez looked around the table at everyone else. He had been the only one in temporal confinement. If Phelby was right, and they had traveled much longer, all the other people here would have been dead. He would have awakened to a ship full of death and corpses.

  “That’s all theory, and nothing else,” said Hues Renblant. Renblant was officially first officer on the DP-IV, but he had signed up just before the DP-IV launched. Marquez barely knew him. He had hired Renblant for his skills in propulsion and guidance, and had not worried much about his command skills. There was something in Renblant’s tone of voice that made it clear that someone as low-ranking as Cargomaster Phelby wasn’t qualified to have opinions on’such subjects. “I for one don’t plan on getting back in a cryocan until we have something more.”

  “Fair enough,” said Phelby, his tone quite relaxed. “I wouldn’t want to bet my life on my explanation either. Not without checking it out. But it’s a place to start from.”

  Marquez drummed his palm on the table. Renblant looked as if he’d be interested in arguing the point further, but Marquez cut him off. “Let us remain calm,” he said. “Cargomaster Phelby raises some interesting possibilities, but we have to find out everything we can. The bodies of our unfortunate colleagues are in storage, and will remain there until we have a far better understanding of what has happened. If we reach some sort of facility where it’s possible, we’ll have full autopsies done. We have the revival-sequence medical information on all of us, and I want everyone to have a full medical scan as soon as possible, so we have some postrevival data.”

  “The automedics can do the scans, but who is going to interpret the data?” Renblant asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Marquez said. “We might have to educate ourselves to read them—in which case we will be here a while. Probably we will obtain some sort of local assistance, but that is by no means certain. Admiral Koffield will address that point in a moment. Before turning to that issue, however, let us remember there are more mysteries than those surrounding the deaths of our colleagues. Something, somehow, went terribly wrong with our ship. We have to find out what went wrong—and even if we are not competent to interpret medical scans, we had damned well better be able to understand a timeshaft ship! We must examine every system, every unit, every component on this ship. I will not trust her beyond the simplest of maneuvers until such time as I understand what happened. I will meet with section chiefs in my cabin at eighteen-hundred hours to discuss strategies and schedules for ship inspection.”

  Marquez looked around the table and got the nods and mutters of agreement he was looking for. It was important to be firm now, hard-edged, assertive. This crew had signed on for a routine cargo run that should have had them back in home port only a month or two of self-chron time after departure. Instead they were hopelessly marooned in the future, two of their number dead, face-to-face with the unknown. Such a situation required tight discipline for the crew.

  But such a situation also engendered fear, anger, perhaps even panic. Renblant in particular would bear close watching. The man was too tightly strung for Marquez’s liking.

  “That all being said, I now call upon Admiral Koffield to brief us on the situation in the Solacian system.”

  “Yes, sir,” Koffield said, in brisk, military tones. He nodded once sharply, and seemed to draw himself up a bit taller in his seat. Perhaps, Marquez thought, he was trying to remind the crew that a polite request from Marquez should be treated like an order from the ship’s captain. “Before I begin, I should point out there are some guesses and some assumptions in what I am going to tell you. They are educated guesses and informed assumptions, and I think I can safely say that my information is essentially reliable. I am probably wrong on a few small details, but I very much doubt that I am wrong about the general situation.”

  He looked around the table, as if daring anyone to protest, then went on. “We have been monitoring whatever communications we could pick up from the Solacian system—commercial broadcasts, ship-to-ship radio, radio traffic in the clear, video news reports, and so on. None of what we have heard or seen gave us direct information on the matters that interest us. No reporter came on the screen and announced that a drought had started twenty years before, or broadcast a detailed account of Solace’s history over the last hundred and thirty standard years.

  We haven’t seen statistical reports on population decline or infectious disease. What we have seen is normal, routine, everyday information, the sort of thing that assumes the person getting it knows the general background and just needs a quick update. Obviously, we don’t have that background.

  “What I have tried to do is study the daily news and other routine broadcasts to see what they can tell us about the background situation, or else to take note of the information that the sender does not even know is there.”

  “Sir, I’m not sure I follow,” Phelby said.

  “Let me show you one quick example,” Koffield said. He flipped open a recessed panel on the table and punched a few buttons. Two-meter-wide panels on the four walls of the conference room slid open, revealing large flatview screens behind them. The screens lit up, each showing the same images. It was of an outdoor scene, a protest rally of some sort, angry people shouting and waving banners. Koffield let the imagery run without sound for about ten seconds, then froze the shot. “This was broadcast at local noon from a town on the southern continent, where it is currently summer. The protest was about some group of farmers doing too much overtime and for too little pay. It is what we can see behind
that protest that is of interest. According to the archive data we have on file regarding general planetary climate, it should be hot and muggy there, with heavy afternoon showers nearly every day. Note that the people are wearing heavy clothes, more suited to late fall than midsummer. Note that the sky is deep blue directly overhead, while the horizon is a muddy brown, suggestive of a dry climate with a lot of dust in the air. Note that all the trees are bare, and the grass is brown. Not a very fruitful summer.”

  The room was silent, and Koffield pushed more buttons to make the screens vanish. “Those for whom the broadcast was intended would pay no attention to any of those details, because they would be aware of them beforehand. They would not notice that the information was there. Clear enough?”

  Phelby nodded.

  “Very good. We have developed a lot of information by using similar techniques with other forms of communication. We have combined that with data from direct observation of the planet, and with data from on board this ship. We have used the information from all these sources to develop what we believe is a plausible synthesis.”

  Marquez watched Koffield carefully. The man was playing tricks, using misdirection, hiding what he was doing by getting them all to look the other way. He had said nothing about his predictions, nothing about the warning he had been trying to carry, nothing about the contents of that personal pack he had gone to such pains to protect. But Koffield knew that Marquez knew of such things, and Koffield had to know that Marquez would notice the omissions. Did Koffield expect him to play along? What was he hiding, and why?

  Koffielcf went on. “To state the situation in very broad terms,” he said, “the Solacian system is in crisis, said crisis being brought on by major climatic problems on the planet. It’s raining when and where it shouldn’t, and not raining where and when it should. There are places where summers are too hot, and winters too cold, and others where just the reverse obtains. The ice caps are growing and the seas are shrinking.

  “All this, of course, means the land is less productive in terms of food production. That in itself shouldn’t mean much. The planetary population is only a few million. Even if crop yields drop further, far below what they are, there is plenty of land available for cultivation. But it is extremely difficult to prepare new cropland on a world terraformed as recently as Solace was. It takes a great deal of human and mechanical labor simply to waken the soil. The massive climate shifts now going on mean that it is unlikely for any crop field to be available for more than a few seasons before it is destroyed by drought or washed away by floods, or succumbs to some other climatic disaster.”

  Koffield went on. “Obviously, the climatic crisis on the ground has had its effect off-planet as well. It would seem there is some sort of evacuation going on at the moment, with large numbers of people being transported from the surface to the orbital facilities. News reports put the number at something like a hundred thousand.”

  “No one builds that much spare habitat space,” Renblant objected. “How the devil could they have enough extra capacity in orbit to handle that many?”

  “They couldn’t,” Koffieid said. “Either someone is deliberately lying for some reason, or a reporter got his facts wrong, or there is something we’ve missed. A lot of the refugees are already returning to the ground, which would account for a lot of it. But even a much smaller number of refugees taken to orbit could be enough to seriously disrupt an orbital station or habitat. We don’t know how much trouble they’ve caused.”

  And who is “we”? Marquez wondered. The man was making it sound as if a staff of fifty had been working around the clock. Collecting as much information as he had would have been an impressive accomplishment for fifty, but it had just been Koffieid and the comm center, no one else—and Koffieid had spent most of the morning with Marquez in the revival room. How had he learned so much so fast?

  “So,” said Captain Marquez, “this star system is in a hell of a mess.”

  “That just about sums it up,” Koffieid agreed.

  “What about technology?” Phelby asked. “It’s been a hundred twenty years. How different are things?”

  Koffieid frowned and drummed his fingers on the tabletop. Marquez got the impression he had been hoping to avoid that question. “It’s strange, but nothing seems greatly different,” he said at last. “Some refinements here and there. Of course, I haven’t checked all the data, and there’s more information coming in all the time, but so far, I haven’t spotted anything so advanced it’s unrecognizable, and I should have. Sometimes technology plateaus for a long time. Maybe that’s what happened. But I don’t know.”

  It was, Marquez noticed, the first time Koffieid hadn’t spoken in the plural first person. It that it? he wondered. Is it “we” who have successes, but “I” am the one who fails? Marquez wondered. “Thank you, sir,” Marquez said to Koffield. “Keep us informed.”

  “I will do so, Captain. But if I might ask, sir—can you tell us what you plan to do? Clearly it is only prudent to inspect the ship, but what is our next step after that?”

  The room was deadly silent for a moment. Marquez could not help but wonder why the man who had commanded Upholder would ask such a question of a ship’s master at such a time. No doubt he had a reason for such a serious challenge to the captain’s authority. But what was it? “There is no doubt a great.deal more for us to learn— and that is what I propose to do—wait and learn. I certainly don’t intend to make ourselves known to the Solacians until we know more.”

  “Sir?” Koffield asked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that this ship and her cargo are valuable, and that there are desperate people down there. We could certainly improvise some reasonably powerful defenses, given time, but this ship is essentially unarmed. If someone wanted to take the DP-IV from us, they could do it. What if, for example, we were docked at Solace Central Orbital when someone down there—the legal authorities or a mob, or anything in between—announced that desperate times called for desperate measures, or that we had no right to deny the use of our wealth to others during a time of crisis, or whatever other rationalization they cared to use. What could we do to stop them? Ships have been seized before.”

  “I have seen no indication that things are anywhere near to such a state down there, or that—”

  “You have just gotten through saying you had not seen everything, Admiral Koffield. L do not intend to risk my ship to the mob.”

  Koffield looked at him steadily, but did not speak. The silence held for a moment, until Phelby spoke up. Either the man was oblivious to the tension in the room, or else he did not care about it. “Excuse me, sir, but if we’re not going to make ourselves known, what—what are we going to do?”

  “Hide,” Renblant put in.

  “Quite right, Mr. Renblant, but I’ll thank you to allow me the luxury of answering questions for myself. We are, indeed, going to hide, Mr. Phelby. At least until we know more. Any action, any action at all, that we take now we would take on the basis of ignorance. Should we stay here, or head for Earth, or for some other port of call? What sort of place is Earth these days? Every star system we know of could have changed beyond recognition. And what of the ship? How did she fail us? Would she do so again? What of the cryosleep systems? Is the explanation as simple as what Mr. Phelby has suggested, or is there something deeper at work, some other malfunction? Should we choose to remain here, at Solace, for a time—or forever? Perhaps this is the best place for us, or perhaps our spacecraft is unrepairable.”

  “You’re saying we can’t go” out and we can’t head in,” said Phelby. “We can’t trust the cryo systems without a thorough checkout. Maybe we can’t ever use the cryos again. But if we can’t use them again—well, I don’t know, but no matter how bad it is down there, it has to be better than being marooned at the edge of the system for the rest of our lives. We can’t stay parked up here forever.”

  “You are wrong. We can stay up here forever,” said Marquez. “Or at least
for the rest of our lives. I do not wish to do it, and it might not be the most pleasant existence, but it would be possible, and probably much to be preferred to living on a planet facing famine. We have power and life support and food-generation systems.”

  “Many things are possible in theory, but madness in practice,” Koffield objected. “We must go in. The whole purpose of our—of my—mission is at stake.”

  A tiny little break in the armor there, thought Marquez. “I am not proposing that we do stay here. There can be no doubt it would be a grim life—but when you say you don’t know about’how bad it could be down there, you are speaking more accurately than you realize. You don’t know. I do know. I’ve seen it. I have three times before seen planets in the process of climate collapse.”

  “I know you’ve seen it,” Koffield said. “But still, we must go in.”

  And suddenly something connected. Marquez looked up at Koffield, and he could read it there. Somewhere in the man’s calm, emotionless expression, he could see it. Marquez had seen climate collapse. That was why Koffield had chosen his ship. There had been other ships headed for Solace, but Koffield had pressed hard to get a berth aboard the DP-IV. If things had gone as planned, and they had arrived at Solace in the previous century, before things had started to go wrong, Koffield would have faced a planet full of skeptics. It would have helped to have a climate-collapse survivor on his side, someone who knew what the nightmare would be like. Someone who could believe in the danger, could visualize it, and knew how to be afraid of it.

  But now the very fear, the very caution, he had sought out had turned against Koffield.

  “Ah, excuse me, Admiral Koffield,” said Phelby. “Maybe you had reasons for coming here, but we are over a century late. Whatever it is can’t still be urgent, can it?”

  Koffield looked at Phelby, but did not answer. But it was easy to read that cold, hard expression. It is not wise to meddle in my affairs.