by Allen Steele
Franc switched off the radio. There was a long silence in the car. “That’s what I define as a paradox,” he said at last.
“We’re still here,” Tom said softly.
“Which only means that we’ve survived our own disturbance.”
“Who says it’s our fault?” Lea was sitting up again. “No one knows why Spehl’s bomb went off when it did. Maybe the timer was faulty, and it was supposed to go off at eight o’clock.”
“Or maybe he went back and reset it,” Tom said.
Franc nodded. “Sure. He ran into Emma Pannes the day before and decided that he didn’t want to sacrifice a beautiful fraulein to the flames.”
“So it’s my fault?” Lea gaped at him. “I can’t believe you. . .!”
“I’m joking.”
“That’s not very funny. I don’t even think you’re . . .”
“Will both of you just shut up?” Tom gripped the wheel more tightly as he strained to make out the primitive road through the fog. “We can’t do anything about it now, so just . . .”
Lea wasn’t through. “Do you think this is funny?”
“No, I don’t. But it’s a possible hypothesis for how . . .”
“Shut up!” Tom yelled. “Goddammit, both of you, just shut up!”
Once again, there was cold and awful silence in the car.
The road finally opened onto a broad clearing where a farmhouse had once stood some ten years before, until it had been destroyed by one of the brushfires that periodically raged through the Pine Barrens. Only a half-collapsed brick chimney remained; the rest was rotted cinders, old cedar stumps, and high grass, damp with rain and age.
Tom stopped the car and switched off the headlights; a chorus of bullfrogs and crickets greeted them when they opened the doors. Lea shivered and drew her overcoat more closely around her as she instinctively stepped closer to Franc. She had been born and raised on the Moon; nature sounds made her nervous. Franc put his arm around her as he stared up at the overcast sky. A westerly breeze was blowing the clouds away, revealing crisp bright stars in the moonless sky.
“You gave Vasili the correct coordinates, didn’t you?” he asked, then saw the expression on her face. “Sorry. Only asking.”
Tom pulled the uplink case out of the backseat, carried it a few feet away, and set it down. He returned to the car, clicked on the dome light, briefly inspected the car’s interior. No, there was nothing here that shouldn’t be left behind; Franc’s and Lea’s bags were stowed in the trunk, and they had all their documents and recording equipment with them. He pulled a small gold box out of his breast pocket, thumbed a recessed switch on the side, carefully placed it on the wheel well in the backseat. Five minutes after they departed, the Hertz company would be mysteriously deprived of one Ford sedan, or at least until some hunter chanced upon its charred wreckage.
When he joined Franc and Lea again, he saw that they were staring up at the sky. Looking up, he saw nothing for a moment. Then a small black shape moved past the Big Dipper, a circular patch slightly darker than the night sky. “Better get out the way,” he murmured. “Grab the case.”
The three of them hurried to the edge of the clearing. When they turned and looked up again, the shape had expanded into a broad opaque spot that grew larger as it blotted out the stars. Metz had the Oberon in chameleon mode; it was now nearly invisible to the naked eye. Even if radar had been in widespread use at this time, the timeship wouldn’t have appeared on any screens; the beams would have been deflected by its fuselage. Only the negmass grid on the craft’s underside could be detected, and that operated in near-total silence. It wasn’t until they heard a low hum and the wet grass of the clearing began to flatten out that they knew the Oberon was at treetop level.
The humming grew louder, then the timeship suddenly appeared just above them. Deliberately designed to resemble a classic sombrero-shaped flying saucer, it could have appeared on the cover of a late-twentieth-century UFO magazine; indeed, it had, for an alien-abduction story debunked by most contemporary experts. Light gleamed from its single porthole as landing gear opened like flower petals from its flat underside between the hemispherical pods of its wormhole generators. Oberon seemed to hesitate for just a moment, then the humming of its negmass drive sharply diminished, and the timeship settled to the ground.
The research team was jogging toward the craft when a hatch above one of the flanges irised open. Metz appeared as a silhouette at the top of the ladder. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “We gotta get out of here! Go, go, go!”
Franc was the first to reach the ladder. “Not so fast,” he said, hoisting the uplink case above his head. “We need to see what’s been done here. There might be something we don’t . . .”
“What, you mean you’re not through yet?” Metz reached down, grabbed the case’s handle, and snatched it out of Franc’s hand. “Maybe we should drop by Washington on the way up, let you assassinate Teddy Roosevelt . . .”
“It’s Franklin, not Teddy . . .”
“Who cares? You’re done.” Metz deposited the case behind him. “I just hope you haven’t screwed things up so much that we can’t get out of here.”
“Dammit, Vasili, it’s not our fault!” Lea’s voice was outraged. “We don’t know what happened, but it’s. . . we didn’t. . . .”
“Save it for the Commissioner, Oschner. We’re on our way up.” Metz disappeared from the hatch. “Get aboard or stay behind. We’re out of here in sixty.”
“Vasili, wait!” Franc scrambled up the ladder and pulled himself up through the hatch into Oberon’s airlock. Contrasted with the cool New Jersey night, the wedge-shaped compartment was uncomfortably warm. The helmet of the EVA hardsuit lashed against the bulkhead reflected his face like a fun-house mirror. Franc took a moment to pull Lea the rest of the way up the ladder, then he darted through the inner hatch and followed the pilot down the narrow midships passageway to the control room. “Calm down. We’ve got to talk about . . .”
“There’s nothing to discuss, Doctor.” Metz entered the compartment, dropped into his seat and ran his palms across the console, clearing the timeship’s system for new programming. “And don’t tell me to calm down. Not after this. Now get your people strapped down. We’re lifting.”
“Okay, all right.” Franc raised his hands. “Get us out of here. Take us to orbit. But don’t open a bridge until we’ve assessed the situation and at least tried to determine what caused this in the . . .”
Metz swung around in his chair to jab a finger at Franc. “Look, Dr. Lu, don’t make me give you a remedial lecture in chronospace theory. Causality. Inconsistency paradoxes. The care and feeding of Morris-Thorne bridges. Remember?”
“All I’m saying is, we need to slow down, try to study what . . .”
“Study my ass. I’m making a hole while I can still can.” Metz swung back around, began stabbing at the console. Lights flashed orange, green, blue, and red; screens arrayed around the horseshoe displayed ship status, local topography, orbital maps, projected spacetime vectors. Metz glanced over his shoulder as he pulled on his headset. “Sorry, Franc, but you’re overruled. I’m the pilot, so what I say, goes. I say we make an emergency launch, so we’re going. Now get your team in their seats, because it’s going to be a fast ride to Chronos.”
There was no point in arguing. CRC protocols were strict on this point. Franc was in charge of the expedition’s research team, but timeship pilots had final say over what happened once its members were back aboard ship. And Metz was playing the situation by the book.
Franc turned and stalked out of the control room. When the hatch slid shut behind him, he slammed his fist against it in frustration. “Jerk!” he yelled.
Then he stepped across the passageway to the passenger compartment. Hoffman was already strapped into one of the three acceleration couches. “She’s in the monitor room,” he said before Franc could ask. “I think she’s . . .”
“I’ll get her. Stay put. Vasili wan
ts to get us out of here.” Franc retreated from the hatch and turned toward the last of the timeship’s major compartments, located at the opposite end of the passageway from the ready room. “Lea! Vasili’s . . . !”
“I know. I heard.” Lea had already discarded her costume and had put on a skinsuit. Franc regretted the change; until Lea shed her disguise, the form-fitting bodysuit didn’t flatter her middle-aged appearance. He couldn’t blame her, though; once they got a chance, he would do the same. Sweat made these period clothes feel sticky. She stood at the pedestal in the middle of the compartment, her fingers dashing across its panel as she opened the library subsystem. “Just give me a minute. I want to see if I can access something from the mission recorders.”
“We don’t have a minute. Vasili’s going for an emergency launch.”
“Shut up and give me your cigarette case.” Lea had already hardwired her makeup compact to the pedestal; she held out her palm without looking at him. “Hurry.”
“We don’t have time for this,” he repeated, but he dug into his jacket and pulled out the cigarette case. Lea snatched it from his hand, impatiently shook out the unsmoked cigarettes, and ran a cord from the pedestal to the tiny dataport concealed in the bottom of the case. She tapped her fingers at the pedestal, then glanced up at the wallscreen. A red bar crept across the screen; the library subsystem was downloading everything the divots had collected aboard the Hindenburg.
“All right, we’ve got everything,” she murmured. “Now let’s see what happened in Cell Number Four just before . . .”
“Never mind that now. We’ve got to get strapped down.” Franc grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her away from the pedestal; she managed to grab the recorders before he propelled her through the hatch toward the passenger compartment. He got her inside just before the hatch sphinctered shut.
They were barely in their couches when the timeship begin to rise. Franc glanced at the status panel, and saw that Metz had switched off Oberon’s chameleon and gravity screen in order to divert power to the negmass drive. His lips tightened as he silently swore at the pilot. They were in for a rough ride . . .
Then they were shoved back in their seats as the timeship shot upward into the night. A wallscreen displayed a departure-angle view from beneath the saucer; the lights of the Jersey shore and New York City briefly appeared below them before they were obscured by high cloudbanks, then the Oberon punched through the clouds as it headed for space.
Too much, too fast. Franc clenched the armrests as pressure mounted on his chest. They shouldn’t be doing it this way. His vision was blurred, but he could make out Lea from the corner of his eye; she looked just as angry as he felt. Damn it, she was right. They still didn’t understand what had happened down there. He started to raise a leaden hand, then remembered that he had neglected to put on a headset. He couldn’t talk to Metz.
Earth’s horizon appeared on the wallscreen as a vast dark curve, highlighted by a thin luminescent band of blue. Stars appeared above the blue line at the same instant he felt his body begin to rise from the seat cushion. They had achieved escape velocity; Metz was throttling back the negmass drive. But they had to stop. They had to abort to low orbit. They needed time to study what had happened aboard the Hindenburg before . . .
And then the timeship’s wormhole generators went online.
Oberon’s AI discovered a quantum irregularity in Earth’s gravity well; exotic matter contained within the pods beneath the saucer enlarged the subatomic rift into a funnel large enough for the timeship to pass through, and laced the funnel’s mouth with energy fields that would keep the wormhole temporarily stable. Within moments, a small area of spacetime was warped into something that resembled a four-dimensional ram’s horn: a closed-timelike circle. Relentlessly attracted by the wormhole it had just created, the timeship plummeted into the closed-time circle.
Then something that felt like the hand of God slapped the timeship and sent it careening . . . elsewhere.
Friday, January 16, 1998: 10:26 A.M.
The jet was a fifteen-year-old Grumman Gulfstream II, a relic from the days when the government was still able to purchase civilian aircraft manufactured in the United States. On the inside, it only looked ten years old, which was a little better than the last ride on a Boeing 727 Murphy had taken. Yet the seats were threadbare, the overhead compartments smudged with handprints; there had been some turbulence when the jet had taken off from Dulles that had caused the fuselage to creak a bit and gave the woman sitting on the other side of the aisle reason to recite her mantra in a low, tense voice.
Once the jet leveled off at thirty-three thousand feet and the pilot switched off the seat-belt lights, an Army lieutenant walked down the aisle to ask if anyone aboard wanted refreshments before the briefing started. Murphy settled for coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. The woman demanded to know whether the bagels were kosher, the cream cheese was low-fat, and the coffee was from Guatemala. She was miffed when the lieutenant politely informed her that the bagels were frozen and that he didn’t know about the fat content of the cheese nor where the coffee beans had come from; she settled for hot tea and scrutinized the label on the tea bag before she dipped it in her mug.
There were five passengers aboard the Gulfstream, including Murphy himself. The humorless lady was also from OPS, but he didn’t know her name; he recognized her only from having passed her in office corridors, so he assumed she belonged to another division. The two military officers were in civilian clothes; so was the FBI man, but he was the only one besides Murphy who was dressed for the outdoors. He sat in the back of the plane, speaking on a phone while he worked on a laptop computer. When Murphy got up from his seat and went aft in search of a bathroom, the FBI man turned aside and cupped his hand over the phone as Murphy went past.
Weird. But not half as weird when, a half hour after takeoff, the senior military officer started the briefing.
“Gentlemen, ma’am,” he began once his aide had helped everyone swivel their chairs around so that they faced the table behind which he stood, “thank you for being here on such short notice. Your government appreciates your willingness to be summoned to duty so quickly, and I hope it hasn’t caused you any undue embarrassment.”
He then introduced himself as Colonel Baird Ogilvy; with him was Lieutenant Scott Crawford, also from U.S. Army Intelligence. The FBI agent’s name was Ray Sanchez; he was here principally to facilitate matters with local law-enforcement officials and to act as an official observer. Ogilvy seemed pleasant enough, a gray-haired gentleman in his mid-fifties who would have been at home in a golf cart; his aide was younger and a bit more intense, but he managed a brief smile when he was introduced. Sanchez, who put down his phone only reluctantly, looked as if he were carrying a glass suppository; he frowned when Ogilvy called him by name, but said nothing. Murphy decided at once to give him a wide berth if he could help it. Most of the guys he had met from the Bureau were decent enough chaps, but Sanchez was one of those who had seen too many Steven Seagal movies.
After the colonel introduced Murphy himself, identifying him as the OPS lead investigator for this mission, he went on to name the last two people on the plane. Murphy put a hand over his mouth when Ogilvy introduced the woman as Meredith Cynthia Luna. Lean and fox-faced, her brown hair styled in a rigid coif, she looked like a real-estate broker who had dropped acid and seen the face of the Almighty in a breakfast croissant. Murphy knew Luna only by reputation; a psychic from Remote Sensing Division, she was supposedly difficult to work with, apparently believing that she possessed a sixth-sense hot line to another dimension. She preened when Ogilvy mentioned her ESPer abilities, and Murphy wondered if she would demonstrate her talents by proclaiming that they would soon be flying over water.
Not for the first time, Murphy wondered why he was working for the Office of Paranormal Sciences; not for the first time, he remembered the reasons. NASA was dead, salary jobs at the National Science Foundation were vanishing faster than hu
mpback whales, and far more astrologers were gainfully employed these days than astrophysicists. So Murphy did the best he could, trying to be a voice of reason among spoon-benders and firewalkers, and when he found himself contemplating resignation, he reminded himself that there was a mortgage that needed to be paid and a son who had to be sent to college, and thanked God that Carl Sagan was no longer alive so he wouldn’t have to tell his old Cornell prof what he was now doing for a living.
As Colonel Ogilvy continued, Crawford began passing out blue folders with eyes-only strips across the covers. “At 6:42 A.M. Eastern this morning, two F-15C fighters from Sewert Air Force Base outside Nashville were on a training sortie over the Cumberland Plateau sixty-eight miles east-southeast of base when they encountered an unidentified object.” Ogilvy’s eyes occasionally darted to his folder. “The planes were at 30,500 feet at this time, and the object was on a due-east heading above them, altitude approximately 45,000 feet when first sighted, approximately 10 to 15 miles distant from the planes’ position. It appeared to be entering the atmosphere at a sharp downward angle of approximately 47 degrees, at an airspeed in excess of Mach 2. Although the object wasn’t detected by radar either from the planes or by military or civilian air-traffic control, both pilots reported clear visual confirmation of the object.”
Ogilvy flipped to another page. “Upon receiving clearance from base, both planes moved to intercept the object. Upon close approach at 34,000 feet, they described the object as a flying saucer approximately 65 feet in diameter and 20 feet high—about the size of their own aircraft—which flew without any visible means of propulsion. At the front of the object’s upper hull was a single window.”