Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  And that was when he discovered the master notebook containing his design calculations for the machine. It hadn’t been stolen from his safe in the office at all! At some time he had taken it home to work on and inadvertently dropped it among the papers in the contacts folder. Oh well, too bad. There wasn’t time to do anything about rectifying that now. He did copy the notebook’s contents as well, however, and sealed them in a separate, plastic-wrapped package before leaving for the old customs building.

  Down in the cellars, he located the room where he remembered finding the documents—intact now, of course, but still conveniently obscured and out-of-the-way—and went to the recesses between the piping supports. There were even some bricks lying handily close among some rubble. He placed the packages in two of the slots and covered the openings. Just as he was about to leave, he remembered something odd. When he found them, the notebook had been there, sure enough, but the other package had contained things he’d never seen before. He turned back uncertainly and stared down at the pipes. Had someone else changed the other package? Had he himself revisited this place on some future errand that he was as yet unaware of? But then his wristwatch beeped, warning him that it was time to be heading back to the machine. Shaking his head and telling himself that it would all be resolved somehow, he hurried back toward the ramp leading up from the gallery.

  He almost didn’t make it. By the time he emerged from the freight elevator in the Annexe building, his earlier self was already back from lunch and in the private office—putting Qualio and Turnel’s test results in the safe, he remembered now. He heard his own testy “Who’s there?” as he crept past the door. He ran to get out of the corridor, hearing keys being fumbled into the lock on the inside of the door behind him. He let himself into the workshop, remembering that his other self had mercifully chosen to investigate in the other direction along the corridor first. The workshop was empty. He gazed frantically at his watch, as if sheer willing could make the seconds count off faster. The door at the far end of the corridor was opening, footsteps approaching. Then came the blessed sound of the machine arriving right on time.

  “Who is that in there?” his voice demanded loudly from just yards away.

  Clutching the documents that he had brought from the apartment, he threw himself into the machine, stabbed at the control as he latched the gate behind him, and was gone. . . .

  And so it was done—apparently without mishap. Abercrombie stood in the machine, looking out over the familiar scene of the workshop. He had the contacts file with him, which was what he had gone to get, along with the original master notebook as a bonus. He’d had thoughts of maybe returning that to its proper place in the private-office safe before returning, but time had run out on him and that had proved impossible. Now, for what it was worth, backups of both were secure in their hiding place from the past. There were still loose ends of unanswered questions dangling in his mind, but all in all everything seemed to be working itself out. He didn’t pretend yet to understand precisely how.

  Zaltzer had hoped to be waiting for him when he got back, but in view of the imprecision still bedeviling the process, his absence was understandable. Abercrombie climbed down from the machine and drew in several deep breaths of relief. He hadn’t realized how tense the undertaking had made him. He let himself out the rear door of the workshop, went back to his private office, locked the door, and stowed the two sets of documents in the safe. That essential task accomplished, he sank down into the chair at the desk to unwind. A vague feeling of something not being quite right had been nagging from somewhere below consciousness since he came out of the machine, but just at this moment he was too exhausted to give it much attention. His mind drifted; he might even have dozed. . . .

  Until the muffled sound of something being moved along the corridor outside brought him back to wakefulness. By the time he had sat up and let his head clear, the noise had gone. He rose from the chair and was about go to the door and check, when his gaze traveled across to the window and he caught the view outside. He stared in confusion for a moment, then crossed to the window to be sure. The old customs building along the waterfront was intact. . . . Yet it was supposed to have burned down three months ago. And then he realized what was wrong that he had noticed but not registered: There weren’t any security people around the lab. This was no minor error. He hadn’t returned to anywhere near the time he was supposed to be in. So when, exactly, was this?

  Infuriatingly, nothing in his office would tell him. He came out into the corridor and headed for the front of the building, either to seek some sign in his other office or find out from Mrs. Crawford, but stopped dead the moment he entered the workshop area. The time machine, in which he had arrived only a short while ago, was gone. His mind reeled, unable to deal with what seemed an insurmountable hurdle. But as he forced himself to think, the pieces of what it had to mean came together. If the customs building was still there, this had to be before it was demolished—pretty obviously. Then this could only be the day that he had been in the public office, heard the strange noise, come back to investigate, found the machine unattended, and stolen it. The noise that aroused him had been himself moving it to the freight elevator.

  He thought back rapidly, trying to recreate the sequence of events. Knowing what he did, if he moved quickly enough, there would be time yet to intercede.

  He ran back through to the rear stairs, started down, and then halted as a cautionary note sounded in his head. After all he had been through to get them, would it be wise to leave the notebook and contacts file here? No. Until he was a lot clearer about this whole business, he wasn’t going to let them out of his sight. He ran back to the office and removed them from the safe. Then, deciding it was too late to intercept himself in the loading bay—and in any case, he didn’t want a scene involving two of him in front of the service people there—and knowing that he still had his keys, he raced instead to the front lot, where he parked his car.

  He screeched out onto the waterfront boulevard without stopping and saw the truck carrying the tarp-covered time machine exiting from the rear gate a few car lengths in front of him . . . a split second before a horn blared, brakes squealed, and something hit him in the rear. And that was when the police cruiser that just had to be there turned on its siren and pulled him over. He remembered it too late, while he sat through the ritual of insurance information being exchanged, radio check of his license number and record, and the ponderous writing out of the ticket. By the time he got moving again, the truck had long since disappeared.

  Nervous about the time now, instead of going around the long route to the side entrance that the truck had taken, he drove straight up to the front of the building, leaped out, and ran inside, in the process knocking over a pile of steel drums just inside the door and causing enough noise to make any thought now at concealing his presence a joke. But by this time he didn’t care. All that mattered was getting to the machine.

  “Wait!” Brady, interrupted, sounding alarmed. “There’s more of ’em breaking in upstairs.”

  “It’s a bust,” Yellow One told him. “Get yourself out!”

  Brady looked around at the boxes of gelignite, HMX, PETN, rocket-propelled grenades, and other explosives, along with the cases of detonator caps and fuses. “But the stuff . . . It’s taken months,” he protested.

  “It’s all lost anyway. What we don’t need is them getting you to talk too. Get yourself out!”

  Brady nodded, snapped off the phone, and pulled himself together. The fastest exit was up a service ladder to the front entrance. He emerged without encountering anyone and found a car right there with the keys left in. There was no arguing with a gift from Providence like that. He jumped in and accelerated out onto the boulevard, failing, in his haste, to wonder why, if the place had been busted, there were no other vehicles in the vicinity.

  While down in the cellars, surrounded by explosives, incendiaries, and sensitive detonating devices, Professor Aylmer Arbuthno
t Abercrombie started up the time machine that emitted varichron radiation.

  One thing that Yellow One did want from the ruins, however, if it could be retrieved, was the group cell leader’s book of codes, contacts, command structure, and other information that could prove disastrous if the law-enforcement agencies got their hands on it. The next night, after the fire crews and demolition teams had left, Brady went back down to the place where the documents had been concealed. He found a package in one of the recesses beneath some old pipes as described, but then he was forced to hide when he heard someone else coming. From behind cover he watched as the same figure whom he had observed wheeling the strange machine down from the truck the previous day entered and extracted another package from one of the other recesses. The contents didn’t seem to be what he wanted when he examined them with a flashlight, and he became agitated until he located yet another package, checked it, and then left taking both of them. Brady followed him back up and looked out in time to see him depart in the same car that Brady had “borrowed” the day before, just before the building went up. Brady reported all the details when he handed over the package that he had recovered.

  But it turned out to be the wrong one, containing lists of names and details of media people, scientists, political figures, and others who were of no interest to the group. The stranger, therefore, must have taken the group’s code and organization book. With the help of a friend in the police department, they traced the car’s number from the records of stolen vehicles. It turned out to belong to a professor who worked in the university Annexe nearby.

  The organization sent a couple of its bagmen into the premises to see if they might be able to uncover something further, one posing as a repairman, the other under cover of an arranged power outage, but the security arrangements they came up against were astonishingly strict for a university environment. Eventually, the leaders gave it up as a lost cause.

  All of it very odd. It turned out that there hadn’t been a police bust at the old warehouse that day, after all. Brady often puzzled about the professor, because he had assumed him to be the body that was found in the ruins. In his own mind he was sure there had been nobody else there. Yet there the professor was, still coming and going for months afterward. Brady decided he probably never would figure it out.

  ITERATIONS

  by William H. Keith, Jr.

  William H. Keith, Jr., is the author of over sixty novels, nearly all of them dealing with the theme of men at war. Writing under the pseudonym H. Jay Riker, he’s responsible for the extremely popular SEALS: The Warrior Breed series, a family saga spanning the history of the Navy UDT and SEALS from World War II to the present day. As Ian Douglas, he writes a well-received military science fiction series following the exploits of the U.S. Marines in the future, in combat on the Moon and Mars. Recent anthology appearances include First to Fight II and Alternate Gettysburgs.

  They fell toward the Great Maelstrom, their vessel a black mote against the doomsday radiance of annihilation. A frail bubble of energy kept the vast sea of hard radiation outside at bay, shedding torrents of fierce-driven quanta like rain sleeting from glass. The fields would preserve them from the incandescent storm outside.

  Gravity, however, was another matter. Burned out by the near-collision, their drives could no longer battle the Maelstrom’s relentless pull.

  Within their bubble of momentary safety, Jon Cardell and Kevyn Shalamam waited to die.

  “Anything?” Jon asked, his voice anxious, grating. “Damn it, anything at all?”

  Kevyn floated in the compartment’s center, her empathic receptors closed to Jon’s mounting terror, straining to pull useful information from the insect buzz of thought still registering faintly within her mind. “Hush,” she said, hands massaging her temples as she curled tighter, fetal, listening. “Let me hear.”

  “We must be close to the Tau-limit by now.”

  “Quiet!”

  She tried again, drawing on the considerable talents of the Hawking’s AI to filter the telepathic whine, slowing it to a range and frequency her brain could grasp. It sounded like a single word, distorted beyond recognition.

  Jon was right, of course. This far into the black hole’s gravity well, space-time was stretched by gravitational forces literally unimaginable. Time dilation effects identical to those experienced by a ship nearing c slowed the passage of time for the Hawking probe. To Jon and Kevyn, of course, the slowing was unfelt; to their perceptions, time passed at its normal stately rate of one minute per minute . . . while the rest of the universe accelerated beyond their ken.

  I did not get that, she thought, willing all of her strength and fear and want into the transmission. Hawking’s AI boosted and accelerated the signal, striving to match frequencies with the distant mothership. Repeat. Boost signal, slow, and repeat!

  She tried to keep the wording of the message as brief as possible. To the telepaths and com AIs in the Far Star Explorer’s communication suite, her mental cry must take weary hours to receive . . . no, at this Tau ratio, it was taking several ship-days. Could she even make contact at all?

  Again, an insect whine, a half-grasped thought, a single word focused and repeated for days to slow it enough for her to catch its faint, racing echo.

  Far Star Explorer, this is Hawking. Repeat. Slow and repeat. . . .

  She could almost hear them, almost follow the thought. She had to keep trying.

  Explorer, this is Kevyn Shalamarn. Tell . . . tell Westin . . . I love him. Jon Cardell sends his love to Alicia and Van. Do you copy?

  And now, there was nothing. Nothing at all.

  “Could you hear anything?” Jon asked after a long and empty silence.

  “I think . . . I think they said ‘good-bye.’ ”

  She felt him closing in on himself. “That’s it, then. We’re going to die.”

  Her patience with Hawking’s pilot was wearing thin. “Everyone dies. Everything. Few get to do it in the shadow of such . . . splendor.”

  “Splendor? Is that what you call it? It’s a monster. And it’s going to swallow us whole. . . .”

  “It’s a monster,” she agreed. “But a beautiful one.” Hawking‘s AI had created the illusion that the vessel’s upper hull was transparent, revealing the whirlpool vista beyond. They fell through a golden cathedral, a vast open space walled in by thronging suns, a hundred billion stars swarming about the galactic core. At the center lay the Maelstrom, the galactic hub, the Center about which the entire Galaxy rotated. The light from the Maelstrom’s core was so intense it hurt the eyes, though the ship’s optics were screening out the flood of ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths, and stopping down the visible light to manageable intensities. The accretion disk was a vast hurricane of incandescent gas and glowing star stuff, slowly twisting in upon itself. The Hawking was sweeping in low above the cloud tops, toward the dazzling swirl of brilliance at the storm’s eye. There, infalling debris, hot gas, and raging streamers of plasma blended into a flattened disk radiating at temperatures usually reserved for the cores of giant blue-white suns, liberating torrents of x-ray and gamma radiation.

  And at the storm’s precise center, baleful, hungrily devouring the tide-ripped shreds of shattered suns, incalculable forces twisted the fabric of spacetime, yawning like some vast, black maw of ultimate night. . . .

  “We’re the first humans to see this, you know,” Kevyn told her pilot.

  “And God willing, the last.” His voice broke. “God, I don’t want to die. . . .”

  The emotions he was radiating tugged at Kevyn’s gut, beat around her ears. It was almost physically painful to be trapped in such close quarters with the man. She felt her own fear, dark and bitter, mingled with the pilot’s brighter, fluttering terror.

  She wondered if Far Star Explorer had received the data they’d sent them. It would be a pity if their imminent deaths turned out to be for nothing.

  Humankind was new to the stars. Hyper-c explorer ships like the Far Star had be
en probing beyond Earth’s micro-cosmic back yard for only a handful of decades, now finding everywhere wonder and splendor.

  So far, it was a cold and lonely splendor, however, one with subtle and tantalizing hints that Humankind was not alone in the universe . . . but without hard evidence of current neighbors. The Galaxy was a vast neighborhood, four hundred billion suns in a nebulae-tangled swirl a thousand light centuries across, and the Explorers had yet to probe as much as a billionth of all those possibilities.

  The apparent isolation of genus Homo was unnerving. There had to be other starfarers out there, everyone of them more advanced technologically than Humankind, since humans were the new kid on the galactic block. What might be learned by contact with such a civilization . . .?

  Hours before, the Hawking had definitely encountered . . . something. Something large, something unimaginably powerful, something advanced enough technologically to seem nothing less than magic.

  “I wonder where they were going,” she asked aloud.

  “Who?” Cardell demanded.

  “That ship . . . or whatever it was.”

  “Whoever they were,” he said, “they were in a hell of a hurry. And . . . I don’t think they even noticed us as they passed. Like we were insects or something.”

  The Far Star Explorer had approached the Galaxy’s central structure as closely as she dared, a distance of some two hundred light-years. Hawking, a sophisticated hyper-c probe with specially reinforced radiation shielding, had been deployed to investigate the outer reaches of the black hole’s outer accretion disk, searching for validation of the Tourist Concept.

  They’d certainly found that validation, rather more dramatically than they’d planned.

  The Tourist Concept suggested that there might be certain places scattered across the galaxy where advanced starfarers might meet or be found. In all that wild vastness of stars it might take millennia to find them . . . unless their ships or instruments or outposts could be discovered in the vicinity of certain natural galactic beacons, places that might draw curious and technologically adept species, which might even serve as watering holes, marketplaces, or convention centers.