by Allen Steele
“Find anything interesting, Dr. Murphy?”
Startled by Ogilvy’s voice, Murphy turned around so quickly that he almost lost balance. “Oh shit, don’t do that! You . . .”
“Sorry.” The colonel was faintly amused. “Didn’t realize you were so nervous.”
“I’m not.” Not really. Murphy let out his breath, nodded toward the sandbar. “Just trying to figure out what . . . um, what makes it go away like that.”
“From what I’ve been told, nobody knows.” Ogilvy pointed farther down the beach; a pair of inflated rubber boats lay on the shore. “Six men paddled out there about a half hour ago. They approached within thirty feet of the sandbar, but couldn’t make out anything except that shimmer we saw from the air.”
“Did they . . . ?”
“No. They were under orders to only recon the area and drop buoys. One man said that he felt his paddle hit something under the water, like a smooth surface, but they didn’t see anything when they looked down. It spooked them, so they skedaddled.”
A smooth, invisible surface just under the water. “How deep is it out there, Colonel?”
“Maximum depth is about fifty feet. Around the sandbar, only ten to fifteen where the dinghy was. Five or less at the waterline.”
Damn! They were right on top of the thing, and still couldn’t see it. “This used to be farm country before the dam was built,” Ogilvy was saying, “so that’s probably the top of a low hill. The yew-foh might have sunk completely if it hadn’t hit it.”
“Maybe that’s what it was trying to do.”
“Maybe. But why would it want to do that?”
“Well, it was being chased by a fighter, so . . .” Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know. Still trying to figure that part out. When I know more, I’ll tell you.”
Ogilvy nodded, but didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Y’know, Dr. Murphy,” he said quietly, “you seem to have your head screwed on tight. For an OPS guy, that is.”
“How’s that, Colonel?” he asked warily.
“Call me Baird . . .”
“I’m Zack.”
“Zack.” They shook hands. “You’re a normal scientist, aren’t you?”
Normal scientist. Like there was another kind . . . “Astrophysicist, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I can tell. You’re asking questions, not assuming anything. You’re not jumping to conclusions, then trying to make the facts fit the answers you’ve already figured out. Ms. Luna, on the other hand . . .”
He didn’t finish, but stepped aside to let Murphy see for himself. Meredith Cynthia Luna had recovered her poise; she had now taken a lotus position at the picnic table, palms spread upward on her knees, head tilted back on her neck, eyes tightly closed. A handful of soldiers had paused to watch her, until an officer walked by and told them to get back to work.
“Asked her what she was doing,” Ogilvy murmured, “and she said she was trying to establish communion. Not communication . . . communion.”
On top of everything else, she was a Strieber believer. Lord . . . “She’s not in my division. If she wants anything, give it to her. I don’t care, just keep her out of my way.”
“So you don’t think she’s . . . ?”
“Got anything to contribute? Not really. But I can’t get rid of her either.”
“Sort of figured as much.” Ogilvy paused, then went on in a low voice. “Frankly, my people don’t have much respect for your people. Cashews and pistachios, we tend to call ’em. But you’ve got a good rep. Word up is that you’re probably the most reliable person at OPS. If you think you’ve got a lock on this situation . . .”
“I’m flattered, but I don’t.”
“This is new to all of us, but you’re the nearest thing we’ve got to an expert.” Ogilvy took a deep breath. “Look, Zack, we’re making it up as we go along. Mr. Sanchez is working with the locals to keep a lid on this thing as long as we can. We’ve been lucky so far . . . hardly anyone saw this thing go down, and we’ve got the area bottled up. But that dog won’t hunt much longer.”
“How much longer?”
“Six, twelve hours. Twenty-four, tops. My people are ready to fly in more people and equipment, but we need to know what we’re dealing with first. Think you can do it, Dr. Murphy?”
Ogilvy posed this as a question, but it really wasn’t one. They both had higher authorities to whom they had to answer, and nobody upstairs was going to accept no for an answer.
“Yeah, I can do it,” Murphy said.
Time unknown
“I’m sorry, Tom.”
Franc gently folded Hoffman’s hands together on his chest, then pulled a blanket over the body. He spent another moment with the mission specialist, then carefully stood up and made his way upward along the precariously slanted deck to the hatch.
He had just left the passenger compartment when something thumped against Oberon’s hull. Bracing himself against a bulkhead, he listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything until Metz’s voice rang out from the control room.
“Lu! Get in here! We’ve got a problem!”
Like they didn’t have enough already. Franc pitched himself down the dark passageway until he reached the ajar hatch to the control room, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the compartment. Seated at his station, Metz was a shadow against the luminescent band of emergency lamps. Most of the screens glowed with status reports; one, however, displayed a camera view from outside the timeship.
“Oh, no,” Franc murmured. “Where did they come from?”
Just outside Oberon, three soldiers in a rubber boat. One cradled an archaic rifle in his arms; the second had an old-fashioned film camera aimed straight at them; the third gently guided the boat with a long plastic paddle. The first two were looking back at the oarsman, who gazed uncertainly into the water just beneath the boat.
“I didn’t see them coming,” Metz said in a low voice, as if afraid the intruders could hear them. “I had my head under the console, didn’t know they were out there until . . .”
“I know. I heard it, too.” They were floating just above the submerged end of the ship; the guy in the rear must have hit the hull with his paddle. “Is the chameleon functional?”
Metz glanced at one of the displays. “Still working. They can’t see us. But if they get much closer . . .”
He didn’t finish his thought. It hardly mattered. The soldiers knew they were here. The first vehicles had arrived on the nearby shore little more than an hour after Oberon’s crash landing, and although the chameleon hid the timeship from direct view, a vague outline of its hull could be detected from certain angles in midday sunlight. Helicopters had circled low over the sandbar several times already, but this was the closest any of the locals had dared to venture.
At least the airlock hatch was underwater. In fact, judging from the position of the raft, it was directly beneath the soldiers. The locals would have to send out divers to find it. Judging from the amount of activity on the shore, though, it wouldn’t be long before it occurred to them to do so.
They watched as the men in the boat took a few more pictures—at such close range, they were probably photographing distorted reflections of themselves—before they hastily paddled away again. Metz let out his breath. “Close one. Worse than Dallas.”
“Far worse than Dallas,” Franc said, but not accusingly. Recrimination was pointless by now; whatever happened in 1937, they were foiled but good. One expedition member was dead, his neck broken during that first violent impact with the lake. The timeship was down, its operational condition uncertain. Contemporaries had discovered their whereabouts, and these weren’t aborigines who would leave little more record of their brief passage than a few legends and some mysterious cave drawings.
Worst of all, they were shipwrecked in the late twentieth century. The most dangerous era in the history of humankind.
“They’re cautious now, but they’ll be back.” Franc clambered forward to
peer at the screens. “How’s it coming so far?”
“Do you want the good news first, or . . . ?” Metz caught Franc’s stern look. “Never mind. I’ve been working my way through the system to the primary drive. It’s still down, but the AI’s located the major problem. Main bus is damaged, a few boards are shot. I’ve retasked some repair nannies and sent them in, so they should complete their work in about an hour or so. Backup’s fully operational, though, so I’m . . .”
Franc impatiently twirled a finger, and Metz got to the point. “Pods are still intact. The drive can be fixed, although the grid’s flooded and it won’t work at optimal levels until we’ve been airborne for at least sixty seconds.”
“So we can get out of here. Right?”
Metz didn’t reply.
“Come on, Vasili. We can or we can’t. Which is it?”
“Two problems. The first, you know about already. Energy reserve’s down to 15 percent, just enough to keep the chameleon operational and the AI alive. I’ve got the cells on full recharge. Fortunately, we can electrolyze all the hydrogen we need from the water around us . . . one good thing about crashing in a lake. AI estimate is that we’ll be able to lift off again within six hours, less if we reserve internal power as much as we can.”
“Including low-orbit escape and wormhole entry?” Franc asked. Metz nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked even more tense than usual. “So what’s the second problem?”
The pilot let out his breath. “We don’t know when we are. Where, that’s certain . . . the AI established a fix on our coordinates before we crashed. Tennessee, Cumberland Plateau, Center Hill Lake . . . the numbers are safely stored away. And judging from what we’ve seen so far, we’re in the late twentieth. Probably in the 1990s, but . . .”
“What year?”
“Can’t tell you that.” Metz shook his head. “That’s the problem. Primary telemetry grid is down, so we can’t pull in outside feed. No way to lock onto the local net. I might have been able to get a lock before we crashed, but I didn’t have to chance to . . .”
“I understand.” Under the circumstances, Vasili had done the best he could just to get them safely to the ground. However, lacking a precise fix on when they were, Oberon’s AI was unable to accurately plot a CTC return trajectory. This was something that couldn’t be guesstimated; the AI had to know exactly when and where in chronospace the timeship now existed. Spatial coordinates were estimated, but temporal weren’t; the most vital factor of the four-dimensional equation was missing.
“Sorry, Franc.” For once, Metz had put his arrogance in a drawer. “I wish I could give you better news, but . . .”
“Any idea what caused this? The paradox . . . the anomaly, I mean . . .”
“Lea’s still working on it. You might want to check with her.” Then he turned back to his console and didn’t look up again until Franc left the control room.
He found Lea at the library, running through the footage their divots had captured from the Hindenburg. Like Franc, she had taken a few minutes in the replication cell to change her appearance back to normal; her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail that fell over her broad shoulders as she braced herself against the pedestal. She didn’t look up when he entered the compartment.
“Find anything?”
“Yes, I have,” she said. “I think I’ve isolated the divergence point.”
Franc propped himself against the pedestal as Lea typed a command into its keypad. “There was a lot of sift through, so I concentrated on the last three hours before we landed. We passed over Lakehurst at four o’clock, but had to divert because of wind gusts and high cumulus clouds at the field.”
“Uh-huh, I remember.”
“We flew south along the Jersey shore to ride it out. An hour and a half later, according to the historical record, Captain Pruss received a telegraph message from the field, stating that the weather conditions were still bad and recommending that he not attempt a landing until later. He wired back a message, stating that he wouldn’t return to Lakehurst until we was given clearance. That message was sent at 5:35 P.M. local. Now watch . . .”
She pressed the PLAY button on the pedestal. The wallscreen displayed the vast interior of the Hindenburg’s envelope. Franc recognized the angle immediately; it was the catwalk beneath Cell Number 4, where he had placed a divot during their tour of the airship. The digital readout at the bottom of the screen read 5.6.37: 1741:29 when a lone figure walked past the divot. As he paused at the bottom of the ladder to quickly glance both ways, his face became visible for a brief instant. It was Eric Spehl, the rigger who had placed the bomb.
Spehl ascended the ladder, then passed out of camera range. “He’s gone about six minutes,” Lea said, tapping the pedestal again to skip forward, “and then . . .”
At 5.6.37: 1747:52, Spehl reappeared on the ladder, climbing back down from Cell Number 4. Once again, he hastily glanced again, then walked back up the catwalk, heading toward airship’s bow. “I checked the record from this divot again,” Lea said, “both before and after Hindenburg landed. He didn’t come back here again.”
“He came back and reset the bomb. I’ll be damned.”
“That’s a good way of putting it, yes. And he did it just after the second time Captain Pruss postponed the landing.”
“But why didn’t he do this earlier?” Franc rubbed his chin thoughtfully; it felt good to feel his own flesh again. “Why the sudden change of mind?”
Lea let out her breath. “Maybe you were right. Perhaps he remembered the woman he encountered at this same spot . . .” She pointed at the frozen image of the empty catwalk . . . “the day before, and decided that he didn’t want to be responsible for her death. So he came back and reset the timer so that the bomb wouldn’t detonate until exactly eight o’clock, by which time he was certain the ship would be safely moored and all the passengers disembarked.”
Franc wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that she was blaming herself needlessly for what had happened. The evidence wasn’t inarguable; he wasn’t convinced. He couldn’t believe that history had been changed only because the two of them had been aboard the Hindenburg.
“So we created an alternate worldline,” he said.
“Right. The airship was destroyed anyway, but this time the German resistance movement was able to claim credit for what Spehl had done.”
“We heard that much on the car radio. What sort of difference did it make?”
“That’s the question.” She drummed a pensive fingertip against the pedestal. “Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Spehl accomplished what he had intended. The Hindenburg was the very symbol of Nazi power. Assume that its destruction was the first act of open dissent that finally led to Hitler being ousted from power. Perhaps one of the subsequent assassination attempts was successful . . .”
“Come on . . . that’s one assumption too many.”
“Perhaps, but . . .” She hesitated. “Well, there’s one more thing. It’s not much, but . . .”
“Let’s have it.”
She turned back to the pedestal, began tapping in another set of commands. “Remember when the jets intercepted us after Oberon entered the atmosphere? When they tried to radio us?” He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. “I searched the flight recorder, full AV mode, then had the library backtrack historical sources. Here’s what I found.”
The two jets appeared on-screen as a pair of angular dots racing ahead of vapor trails; there was no digital readout at the bottom of the screen. As the dots began closing on the camera, they heard a static-filled radio voice:
“Sewert Tower, this is Wildcat One, we’ve got a confirmed bogey at . . .”
Lea froze the image, then gently moved a forefinger across the touchpad until a tiny square appeared over the nearest of the two jets. She then enhanced the image until it was magnified several hundred times; a window opened on the screen, showing the aircraft in greater detail. Another couple of keystrokes, and a
wire-frame composite appeared next to the photographic image.
“The library positively identified this as an F-15C Eagle,” she went on. “A one-seat jet fighter used by the United States Air Force from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, when it was later replaced by an updated version of the same jet, the two-seat F-15E. We know that they had to be F-15C’s because only one pilot bailed out of the Eagle that flew through our negmass field.”
“So?”
“During radio communications between the jets and their home base, you can clearly hear the base being referred to as Sewert Tower. I checked with the library system, and it turns out Sewert Air Force Base was decommissioned in the late 1960s. It shouldn’t be there, let alone sending up fighters not put in service until ten years later.”
Franc stared long and hard at the split image on the wallscreen. “All right,” he murmured. “You’ve convinced me. We’re in an alternate worldline . . .”
“An alternate worldline we inadvertently created. And when we tried to return from 1937 to our own future, we ran into a rift in chronospace . . . a divergent loop in a closed-timelike circle. We’re lucky that we weren’t destroyed completely. As it was, we were dumped out here . . .”
“In a parallel universe,” Metz said.
Franc and Lea looked around to find the pilot leaning against the hatch. How long he had been there, they couldn’t know; he had probably heard most of the discussion. Just as well, Franc thought. It would save them the trouble of reiterating everything Lea had learned.
“Don’t bother.” Metz held up a hand. “I know. I screwed up. If we had remained in ’37, studied this a little longer, we might have seen this coming. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
“No, Vasili. It’s everyone’s fault.” Holding herself up against the pedestal, Lea turned toward him. “Paradoxes like this had been postulated for a long time. Previous expeditions have been lucky until now. We were stupid to think our luck would hold out.”