by Allen Steele
“If you do cooperate,” Sanchez added, his voice quietly persuasive, “everything that just happened here stays here, on the plane. I won’t file a report about this discussion, and neither will the colonel. Your record remains clean.”
“That’s right.” Ogilvy nodded in agreement. “No one at OPS will know, and neither will your family or colleagues. It’ll be classified at the highest levels.” Then he let out his breath. “But if you don’t cooperate . . .”
“I think I get the picture.” Nervously running his fingers through his hair, Murphy gazed out the window. Through a thin skein of clouds, he could see the lights of a large town passing beneath the strobes at the ends of the jet’s left wing. If they were above the Kentucky border, then it was probably Fort Campbell. If that was the case, the Gulfstream could be on the ground in five minutes. Military police were probably already waiting at the airstrip, ready to bundle him into a car for a quick ride up I-24 to Marion, Illinois.
He remembered the Darth Vader figure in his coat pocket. He had been looking forward to giving it to Steven when he got home. Sure, the kid probably had one already—Murphy had lost track of all the toys in his collection—but the look on his face would be priceless.
Yet there was something else in his parka, wasn’t there? He glanced down at his coat; it had fallen to the floor when he tried to get up, and it still lay there, rumpled around his feet. He had meant to protect the mysterious thing that he had found, keep it his own private secret, yet that no longer seemed to be an option. It would be found eventually, once his clothes were taken away and he was given a prison track suit . . .
“Your call, Dr. Murphy,” Sanchez said. “The clock’s ticking.”
Murphy slowly let out his breath. “All right,” he said, “you’ve got me.” He hesitated, then bent forward to pick up the parka. “There’s something here you need to see.”
Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1123Z
Seen from geosynchronous orbit, just above the plane of the equator, the changeling Earth was a thing of vast and frightening beauty.
The innermost rings, buff-colored swatches of fine dust less than a meter in depth, lay in low orbit only a few hundred kilometers above the planet. Rotating most rapidly of all, they were also in the slow process of disintegration; the night skies past the daylight terminator were constantly lit by the firefly sparks of micrometeorites flaming out in the upper atmosphere. Past a narrow, translucent gap lay the broad, charcoal-colored bands of middle rings; here, the rocky debris ranged in size from pebbles to small boulders, nearly a half kilometer in depth and extending for thousands of kilometers. Beyond them was another, slightly wider gap, and finally there were the outer rings, nearly as fragile as the inner rings yet having a higher albedo than their closer cousins.
The rings were all that remained of the Moon. Obliterated by forces beyond human comprehension, Earth’s former companion had betrayed it, become its murderer. The rings cast an elongated shadow upon the southern hemisphere over five hundred kilometers in width; at high noon, everything from the tip of Central America through the Caribbean to Africa’s western coast lay within a perpetual eclipse zone that changed only with the passing of the seasons. Worse, without the Moon’s gravity to moderate the ocean tides and wind patterns, coastal areas had disappeared beneath the oceans while windstorms perpetually raged inland.
Yet, the heaviest toll had been taken by the asteroid-size chunks of the Moon’s mantle and core that had rained down upon the planet’s surface. Seen through occasional breaks in the global cloud cover were vast stretches of scorched and cratered terrain. Where there had once been cities were now ruins, and what had once been plains and forests were now blackened wastelands.
Regardless of whatever had caused this planetary catastrophe or when it had occurred, its devastation was as merciless as it was complete. It was impossible for anything to have remained alive down there. Earth was dead.
“I’m not picking up anything.” His voice barely more than a whisper, Metz ran his hand across the com panel, searching every available frequency. “No radio, no cyber-net, no microwave transmissions . . . nothing. Not a single source.”
“Have you tried . . . ?” Franc started to say, then stopped. He was about to ask if there were any satellite uplinks, but that was unlikely; the rings would have wiped out anything orbiting the planet.
“Have you received anything from the colonies?” Standing beside him, Lea trembled against his shoulder. “It’s been over an hour. You should have heard something from Mars at least.”
“There wasn’t anything the last time I checked, but . . .” Metz tapped a button on the panel, listened intently for a few moments, then shook his head. “Nothing. Not even a tachyon pulse.” He frowned. “You’d think we’d get some sort of space traffic, though, or least an answer from Deimos Port. But I’m not even receiving word from Ceres.”
Franc’s throat tightened. Earth and the Moon, wiped out . . . that much was hard to accept. Yet there were nearly fifty million people scattered across the solar system, from the Aresian settlements to the asteroid colonies, and even farther, to the Jovian and Saturnine moons. “I . . . I really can’t believe this,” he murmured. “I mean . . . every place in the system . . .”
“No . . . no, I don’t think so.” Lea’s eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, her voice a dry rasp. For a short time she had been on the verge of hysteria, yet she was beginning to pull herself together again. “Even if the major colonies had been destroyed, there’s too many places for people to hide out there.”
“Then maybe . . .” Metz thought about it a moment. “They might have evacuated everyone from the system. Picked up survivors, taken them . . .”
“No. Too many people for that.” Removing herself from the comfort of Franc’s arm, Lea stepped closer to the porthole, staring through it as if searching for answers in the obscene rings which encircled the planet. “They couldn’t get everyone aboard starships, even if they packed them in like . . .”
Her voice trailed off as her mouth slowly fell open. “Damn,” she whispered. “We’re forgetting something.”
“What’s going on?” Franc asked. “Lea, what are we forgetting?”
“This isn’t our worldline,” she said. “This isn’t the place we left.”
“But we came back to the same time . . .” Metz began.
“The same time, yes . . . but not the same place.” Lea continued to stare at the rings. “We changed history in 1937, right? That means our worldline changed. When we tried to return to 2314, we got dumped out into 1998, but it was the 1998 of another worldline. So it stands to reason that, when we left 1998, we would continue to follow this worldline to 2314 . . .”
“So it’s not our 2314,” Franc said.
“Right.” Lea pointed to the com panel. “That’s why we’re not picking up any transmissions from the colonies . . . because there never were any colonies, on Mars or Ceres or anywhere else. Maybe not even on the Moon.”
“Wait a minute. Hold on . . .” Turning around in his chair, Metz touched a different panel. Horizontal patterns appeared on a flatscreen; the pilot examined them closely, then pointed at the broadest group. “Look here. The infer-ometer doesn’t pick up any man-made metals in the ring debris, but there should be tons of it floating around out there, from all the orbitals . . .”
“That’s because there weren’t any orbitals. Chronos Station wasn’t destroyed because there never was a Chronos Station. Not in this worldline, at least.” Lea gestured at the porthole. “And that didn’t happen yesterday, or even last year. I don’t know much about planetary physics, but those rings aren’t new. They took time to form.”
“Three hundred sixteen years?” Franc was skeptical. “That isn’t my area either, but . . .”
“You’ve got another theory?” Lea shot him a hard look, then bent over the console and pointed toward the image of the ring-plane on another screen. “Vasili, can you get us a little closer to the center ring? If we can get
a good sensor lock on one of those boulders, maybe the AI can run an analysis, tell us how long ago this happened.”
“Sure, I can get us closer, but I don’t know . . .”
“Good. I’ll be in the monitor room, setting up the program.” She turned so quickly that she almost collided with Franc. “You want to help me, or . . . ?”
“No, no. You know what you’re doing.” Franc hastily stepped aside, and Lea brushed past him without another word. He waited until she had left the flight deck before he dared let out his breath. “She’s upset,” he said softly.
“You mean you’re not?” Metz was already entering the new trajectory into the flight computer. “Maybe it’s not our worldline, Dr. Lu, but in case you haven’t noticed . . .”
“I know. Sorry.” Everything was still sinking in. There was a certain sense of surrealness to all this, as if he was living in a nightmare. Perhaps it was only the lack of sleep; the last time he had closed his eyes, it was while he was aboard the Hindenburg, somewhere above the Atlantic. He glanced down at himself, grimaced in disgust. Although he had long since discarded his nanoskin, he still wore his 1937 clothes, donned again during his foray into 1998. The cuffs of his trousers were caked with dried mud over three and a half centuries old. “I think I’ll change, if you don’t mind,” he murmured, turning away from the console. “Might make me . . .”
“I’m getting something!” Metz snapped.
“What?” Franc looked around, saw that the pilot had his hands clasped over his headset. “What . . . you mean, a signal? Where . . . ?”
“I don’t know! It just . . . !”
“Franc! Get in here!”
Hearing Lea, Franc bolted for the hatch. “Get a fix on that!” he yelled at the pilot as he dashed out of the control room. “Don’t lose it!”
Lea stood in front of the library pedestal, her hands locked onto the platform as she stared straight ahead “Vasili just received a transmission!” Franc shouted as he charged into the compartment. “He’s trying to . . . !”
“I know,” she whispered, and pointed at the wallscreen. “Look.”
Franc skidded to a halt, almost fell against her. Displayed across the screen, in characters the size of his hand, was a message:
OBERON
COME HERE
72˚ 35’ N 42˚ 39’ W
ALL WILL BE EXPLAINED
“Franc!” Vasili’s voice was loud in his headset. “I’ve got a fix on the signal! It’s coming from . . .”
“I know. It fed a message through the AI. We’ve got it on the screen.” All at once, Franc’s fatigue evaporated. “Seventy-two degrees, thirty minutes north, forty-two degrees, thirty-nine minutes west.” He was already entering the coordinates into the pedestal. “Sounds like it’s somewhere in North America. Go ahead and lay in a landing trajectory. I’ll figure out exactly where that is.”
“You’re not seriously thinking of going down there, are you?” Lea stared at him in astonishment. “You don’t know who sent that.”
“No . . . but they obviously know who we are.” Franc tapped the pedestal’s touch pad, and waited while the map formed on the screen. “Besides, it’s rude to ignore an invitation.”
Monday, January 19, 1998: 8:49 A.M.
The conference room was located on the second floor of the Capitol, just a few steps down the hall from the Senate cloakroom. Normally used for budget reviews and parliamentary sessions, on certain occasions it also served as a quiet, private place for closed-door hearings. This morning, a Capitol Hill police officer stood guard outside; so far since the meeting had begun, three senators, four aides, and two pages had paused to ask what was going on within, only to be given a wordless shrug in response.
The emptiness of the room made Murphy nervous. Whenever he glanced over his shoulder, all he saw were rows of vacant chairs. Off to one side sat the only spectator, a uniformed U.S. Army lieutenant, her gaze focused upon some distant place as her fingers danced across the keyboard of a portable stenograph. To his left, almost unrecognizable in his braided and service-striped dress uniform, sat Colonel Ogilvy, his papers spread out across the witness table. And directly in front of them, flanked on either side by three senior senators, was no less than the Vice President of the United States.
There was a long, silence as the Vice President studied the photocopy in his hands. No one said anything for a long time. Colonel Ogilvy had opened the hearing by making his statement; Murphy followed with his testimony. Although the men seated on the dais remained quiet, Murphy was acutely aware of every small sound in the room: the restless shifting of feet, the occasional phlegmy cough from the flu-stricken senator from Vermont, the gentle tinkle of cracked ice as the senator from California poured water into a glass from the pitcher on her desk. His wool suit, comfortable when he put it on this morning, was now unbearably warm, yet he dared not loosen his tie, and he was reluctant to even mop the sweat from his brow until Ogilvy, sliding his hand beneath the table, surreptitiously placed one of his ever-present handkerchiefs in his lap.
The Vice President gazed at the facsimile for another few moments, then raised his questioning eyes. “So, Dr. Murphy,” he said, “I take it that this . . .” He raised the photocopy. “. . . is your only evidence that you’ve encountered someone from the future.”
“Uh . . . yes sir.” Murphy had trouble finding his voice; he covered his mouth and cleared his throat. “Sorry . . . yes sir, Mr. Vice President. The only tangible evidence, that is. As I’ve told you, it was recovered only by accident, during my . . . uh, encounter . . . on the road outside the campground.”
“We have the original, Mr. Vice President, if you care to inspect it.” Ogilvy picked up the Hindenburg passenger manifest. Mounted on a piece of cardboard and sealed within a polyurethane wrapper with a red Top-Secret strip across its upper edge, it less resembled a historic artifact than evidence gathered from a crime scene. “I’ve brought it to show you and the other members of the committee that it’s not a forgery, but an authentic item.”
The Vice President was unimpressed. “I don’t doubt its authenticity, Colonel, yet this is the sort of thing one could find in any private collection.”
“We’ve got antique stores in my state where you could easily find something like this.” The senator from Vermont rubbed his nose in the paper tissue, then reached for the pint carton of orange juice on his desk. “In fact, just a few years ago, a dealer opened the back of a framed painting he had purchased in an estate auction and discovered a copy of the Declaration of Independence. A passenger list from a German airship . . .”
“With all due respect, Senator,” Ogilvy interrupted, “any document that old would show signs of aging. The paper would be brittle, the ink faded.” He gently laid the manifest on the table, then opened the report which lay before him. “If you’ll read page nineteen of our summary, you’ll find that we submitted this document to the FBI Crime Lab for analysis. They determined that it was printed no more than two weeks ago, on a type of industrial-grade paper that hasn’t been manufactured in Germany since the end of the Hitler regime. It’s brand-new, sir. It can’t possibly be a forgery.”
The senator from Vermont scowled at Ogilvy, then opened his unread copy of the report to the appropriate page. The Vice President, though, remained stoical. “Thank you for clarifying that point, Colonel, but the question was addressed to Dr. Murphy. Aside from this, what proof do you have of your allegation?”
Murphy knew that he had to be careful. Before he became the President’s running mate in the ’92 election, the Vice President had served as chairman of the Senate Science and Technology Committee, the same position now held by the senator from Vermont. Although the committee approved the annual OPS budget, the VP, no friend to mind readers or spoon-benders, was known to be profoundly skeptical of the agency’s purpose. Convincing him would be the toughest task of all.
“Mister Vice President,” he started, “regardless of the conclusions made by my agency, I believe t
hat the origin of the . . . uh, the Center Hill Lake anomaly . . . wasn’t extraterrestrial . . .”
The senator from California raised a hand, politely interrupting him. “Excuse me, Dr. Murphy, but I wish to clarify this particular point. Although you’re a senior OPS investigator, you’re presenting testimony which runs contrary to your agency’s official findings. May I ask why?”
Again, he had to be careful, although for different reasons. Unlike the Vice President, the senator from California was a major supporter of the Office of Paranormal Sciences; no surprise, since she was known to employ psychics during her reelection campaigns. Murphy was about to reply, but Ogilvy beat him to it. “With respect to OPS, ma’am, Dr. Murphy is here today without his agency’s knowledge or approval. He has agreed to offer his testimony on behalf of the Defense Department, under the condition that whatever he says remains classified.”
And besides, Murphy thought sourly, it beats hell out of sitting in prison. Yet they were far past that point by now. He and Ogilvy had long since reached their peace. Now they had an entirely different agenda.
“Please let Dr. Murphy answer for himself, Colonel.” The senator returned her attention to Murphy. “The OPS report unequivocally states that the object which crashed in Tennessee was an alien spacecraft. The other OPS investigator, Ms. Luna, is convinced of this, as is your Chief Administrator, Mr. Ordmann. You, on the other hand, seem to be jumping ship. May I ask why?”
Murphy let out his breath. “Ms. Luna reached that conclusion even before we reached the crash site. She based her opinion on . . . well, personal convictions, rather than the evidence of her own eyes. I can’t speak for the Chief Administrator, since I haven’t yet personally discussed the matter with him, but I’m basing my conclusion on the evidence of my own eyes . . . along with the document we’ve shown you.”
“Which brings us back to the original question,” the Vice President said. “What other proof do you have?”