by Allen Steele
So long as he continued to lie to his family about what he was really doing out here, and pretend that the words Blue Plate only referred to a restaurant dinner special.
“Here we are.” Ogilvy slowed down, clicked the turn indicator downward as he turned left into a paved driveway. “Your new lab.”
It didn’t look anything like a government research facility: a large, flat-roofed factory building, the letters ICR painted across one panel of its beige aluminum-sided walls. Although a ten-foot chain-link fence surrounded the premises, there was no gatehouse, no armed guards patrolling the perimeter. Three sixteen-wheel trucks, each stenciled with the ICR logo, were parked beside the loading dock; Murphy spotted several men hauling crates from the trailers, some large enough to require forklifts. A black man riding a mower looked up as they pulled into the parking lot, then went back to cutting the grass. Everything was as boring as boring can be.
As Murphy and Ogilvy opened the Blazer’s doors and climbed out, a young man wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt pulled out over a T-shirt and a pair of jeans sauntered toward them. He glanced at Murphy, then raised a hand to Ogilvy. “Hi, Jeff!” he called out.
“Hi, Gary,” Ogilvy said, returning the friendly gesture. “Hey, lemme introduce you to my friend Zack. Zack, this is Gary. Gary, Zack Murphy.”
“Hi, Gary,” Murphy said, offering his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.” The young man shook Murphy’s hand, then he strolled away. “Have a nice day.”
Ogilvy moved a little closer to Murphy. “U.S. Marine,” he murmured. “He’s stationed out here to greet everyone who arrives. I’ve just introduced you, so he’ll remember your face from now on.”
Murphy stared at the young man. “Is he armed?” he asked quietly.
“Of course, though I bet you can’t figure out where he hides his weapon.” Ogilvy nodded toward the man on the riding mower. “So is he, and so’s the guy out back. They’re all named Gary, and so are their reliefs. We’ve got three guards on active duty at all times. When you see them, call them Gary after they call you Jeff. That’s the password.”
“Gary. Jeff. Got it.” Murphy watched Gary as he stopped, casually looked around, spit on the asphalt, and began moseying his way back across the parking lot. “Hard to believe that’s a Marine,” he said quietly.
“You’re telling me.” Ogilvy shook his head as he escorted Murphy toward the front door. “You don’t know what it took to get those guys to stop saluting every time they saw me.”
They walked into the building through the front entrance, where a nice-looking young woman sat behind a reception desk decorated with Beanie Babies and framed snapshots of children. “Hi, Jeff!” she said as they approached her desk. “Who’s your friend?”
“Lucy, this is Zack Murphy, our new VP. Zack, Lucy.” Ogilvy nodded toward the door behind her. “Is Doug in?”
“Yes, sir, he . . .”
“Don’t call me sir,” Ogilvy said, very softly. Lucy blanched as she hastily nodded. “Don’t do that again, okay?”
“Okay.” Embarrassed, Lucy reached into her desk drawer, pulled out a pair of laminated ID badges. “Doug’s in. Right that way.”
“Thanks, Lucy. Right this way, Zack.” Ogilvy led Murphy through the door behind Lucy’s desk, then sighed as it closed behind them. “That’s the third time I’ve had to tell her that.”
“So what does Lucy do, besides give us these?” He clipped the badge to his shirt pocket and flicked it with his finger.
“She’s the gatekeeper. When I called in, she was the one who answered the phone, so she knew we were coming. Remember, you have to do that every time before you arrive.” They began walking down a narrow corridor whose walls were decorated with framed photos of offshore oil rigs. “Other than that, she handles the public. When someone comes looking for a job, she tells them we’re not hiring. When the Girl Scouts drop in, she buys some cookies. When a reporter from the local paper wants to meet the company president, she arranges for an interview . . .”
“We’ve got a company president?”
“Sure. Doug reports to work every day.” Ogilvy grinned. “And before you ask, we really do ship machine parts out of here. They’re actually made in Taiwan, but you wouldn’t know unless you checked the serial numbers. We bring them in, put them in our own crates, load ’em on the trucks, send ’em to a warehouse in New Jersey, recrate them, and send ’em back here again, complete with new truck manifests for the interstate weigh stations. A never-ending cycle.”
Murphy was impressed. “You’ve got everything covered, don’t you?”
“Not yet. We still haven’t invented a time machine.”
The elevator at the end of the hall didn’t open until both Ogilvy and Murphy passed the bar codes on the back of their badges across its concealed scanner, then it took them upstairs, where the real offices were located. Here, everything was as busy as downstairs was quiet; the hallway was filled with stacked boxes and open shipping crates, and men were setting up computer terminals and phones on government-issue desks. “The first members of your team begin arriving next week,” Ogilvy said as they strolled down the corridor. “We hope to get everything up and running by Labor Day.”
“Three weeks?” Murphy raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty short, isn’t it?”
Ogilvy shrugged. “For the main research center, sure, but we’ll be doing work elsewhere. One of the reasons why we’ve established operations in New England is because we’re close to MIT and Cornell . . .”
“And Washington, of course.”
“The Senate committee insisted upon that.” Ogilvy clasped his hands behind his back. “We may see some of them from time to time, but overall I think they’re going to . . . ah, check this out.”
They stopped in front of a large windowless room whose open door was a little thicker than the others. Coils of thick black cable lay scattered across the floor; several men in overalls stood on stepladders below open ceiling tiles or squatted beside floor panels, consulting wiring charts as they installed nests of electrical line. “This is where the supercomputer will go,” Ogilvy said. “It may take a little longer before it goes online, but the schedule calls for it to be operational by the end of November.”
Murphy was beginning to feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. “And the main lab? Where’s that going to be?”
Ogilvy smiled and crooked a finger, silently beckoning him to follow. They walked to the end of the corridor, and the colonel paused before a pair of wood-paneled doors on either side of the hallway. “My office is here,” he said, pointing to the left: a strip of masking tape on the door read Ogilvy—MD. “And here’s yours. After you.”
The door to the right was marked Murphy—SD. Military Director and Scientific Director, respectively. Murphy opened it and stepped into an office a little larger than the others down the hall. The furniture was still covered with plastic, the walls as yet unpainted; among the cardboard boxes stacked in the far corner, Murphy recognized some as the ones he had packed during his last days at OPS three weeks ago.
One wall of the office was dominated by a broad pane-glass window overlooking what had once been a factory floor. The building that Blue Plate now occupied was formerly owned by an industrial ceramics company that had folded two years earlier; its machinery had been removed, and now the main floor was being converted into a high-energy physics research lab. From this vantage point, Murphy could see a couple of dozen workmen preparing for installation of the equipment that would soon go here: parallel-processing computers, control consoles, ruby lasers, a lead-lined radioactive materials storage vault, the tall steel cylinder of a vacuum experiment chamber.
Forget Christmas, Murphy thought. This is Creation itself. . . .
“Just don’t blow us up, okay?” Ogilvy said quietly. “You wouldn’t believe how many strings we had to pull to get funding for this.”
“I can believe it. Black budget, right?”
“Zack, the bud
get for this isn’t black . . . it’s ultraviolet.” The expression on the colonel’s face was as hard as his voice was soft. “The most ambitious scientific program in over fifty years. Nobody’s undertaken anything like this since the Manhattan Project. Nine months ago, I would have said it was impossible.” His reflection studied Murphy’s in the window. “I know what you’ve told the committee, Doc, but that’s Washington and this is here. So tell me the truth . . . you really think we can do this?”
Good question. He had been losing sleep over it for months now. In fact, the last time Murphy remembered having a good night’s rest was sometime last January, just before a UFO had crashed in Tennessee. Ever since then, the last words of the mysterious stranger he had encountered at Center Hill Lake had haunted him:
Depends what you do, my friend.
“Someone in the future did it,” he replied. “That much we know for certain. Which means they had to get started sometime in their past.” He looked straight at Ogilvy. “Yeah, we can do this. In fact, I’d say it’s a matter of predestination.”
Ogilvy didn’t respond. Instead, he rested his elbows on the windowsill as he contemplated the activity on the lab floor. “You know,” he said at last, “I was raised Lutheran. Religion never really took with me, but I remember some of it, and the idea of predestination was one of those things I remember being taught in Sunday school.”
Murphy put his hands in his pockets. He had never been particularly religious either, yet he felt even less comfortable talking about his beliefs than others. “Yeah? So?”
The colonel shrugged. “Well, you tell me that we’re predestined to do this, and on the face of it I’m not going to argue with you. As you say, someone managed time travel in the future, so it’s only logical that they . . . or, I guess, we . . . started here and now.” He hesitated. “But personally, I was always something of a Sunday school heretic. I happen to believe in free will.”
“And . . . ?”
“And . . .” Ogilvy appeared as if he was ready to say something before he thought better of it. “Never mind,” he finished, turning away from the window. “Just a thought. C’mon, let me show you the rest of the setup.”
Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1512Z
And you say you began researching time travel in 1998?” Franc stared at Murphy in disbelief.
“That’s when the lab was built. We didn’t actually . . .” Murphy paused. He held his head a little to the right as if listening to something none of the others seated around the bonfire could hear. “I’m. . . I’m told that there’s other things you should know first,” he said. Noticing the curious expressions on the faces of the others, he shrugged in bafflement. “I don’t know how, but every now and then I hear a voice in my head. I was unconscious for some time before I woke up here, so maybe . . . perhaps it implanted something in my head.”
“I rather doubt that,” Franc said. “You don’t show any signs of surgery.” He peered up at the top of the nearby observation tower. The “angel” had vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared, yet nonetheless he had the eerie feeling that it hadn’t gone very far away. “Telepathic link?” he asked quietly, glancing at Lea. “It might be using him as a conduit.”
“It’s possible. Right now, it’s as good an explanation as any.” She looked back at Murphy. “But why doesn’t it want to reveal itself?”
“Where were you before you woke up?” Metz asked. He had left the Oberon and joined the others by the fire. “Did the angel . . . ?”
“Wait, please.” Murphy shook his head, held up his hands “I realize you’ve got a lot of questions, but you’ve got to believe me when I say I don’t know all the answers.” Shivering against the late-afternoon wind, he tucked his hands within his armpits for warmth. “I’m just as confused about this as you are. The last time I clearly remember anything, it was . . .”
Once again, he abruptly fell silent, his eyes half-closing as his head tilted slightly forward. “I’m told,” he said at last, “that we’ve got to take this one step at a time, or otherwise you won’t understand anything. Does that make sense to you?”
“Sort of,” Franc said. Apparently, for reasons as yet unknown, Murphy was acting as a spokesman for the entity they had glimpsed at the top of the tower. “All right, we’ll take this bit by bit. What does it want us to know first?”
Frowning with concentration, Murphy stared into the fire. “Your history . . . your past . . . is somehow different from mine,” he said slowly. “The Hindenburg explosion . . . that’s when everything changed.”
“Yes, we know that,” Lea said. “We had gone back to 1937 to research its causes, and . . .” She glanced uncertainly at Franc, and he silently nodded. “Well, somehow we made a mistake that caused history to be changed, so that when we tried to return to our future . . .”
“You crashed in 1998,” Murphy said, “but now it was a different worldline than the one you left behind.” Again, the attentive pause, but this time his mouth dropped open in surprise. “There was a major war in the middle of the twentieth century, wasn’t there? Between Germany and the rest of Europe, with the United States, Russia, and Japan eventually becoming involved. Right?”
“That’s correct,” Franc said. “You mean that didn’t happen in your worldline?”
Murphy shook his head. “Germany annexed Austria in 1938, but that was as far as it went. The destruction of the Hindenburg was the turning point for the Nazi regime. After that, the German resistance movement rose against the Nazis, and it wasn’t long before the Vatican began secretly funneling aid to a Catholic underground organization known as White Rose.”
Hearing this, Franc felt a chill run down his back. Suddenly, he recalled the conversation he’d had with William Shirer in the bar at the Frankfurter Hof. The journalist had mentioned something about meeting with Catholic clergymen who were . . . how had he put it? . . . concerned about recent events. “Were they successful? White Rose, I mean.”
“Yeah, sure. It’s in all the history books . . . or at least, the ones I read. A few days after Germany took over Austria, the resistance staged a mass protest in Berlin. When the Gestapo arrested their leaders and publicly executed them, it touched off riots all across Germany. Nazi headquarters in major cities were torched, prominent party members were shot in their homes . . . overnight, the whole country turned against the Nazis. It ended when Adolf Hitler was assassinated by a conspiracy of his own generals, and after that the government fell apart pretty quickly. Their leaders were rounded up, or at least the ones who didn’t escape the country, and most of them put on trial and hanged or imprisoned. By then, the German army had retreated from Austria, and by 1940 it was all over.” Murphy seemed mildly surprised. “You mean it didn’t happen that way in your worldline?”
“No Second World War.” Lea was incredulous. “That means . . . no development of rocketry, no invention of the atomic bomb . . .”
“Sure, we got those,” Murphy said. “The U.S. tested the first atomic bomb in 1945. It was supposed to be dropped on Japan during the Pacific War, but President Truman opted for invasion instead. Russia sent the first satellite into orbit in 1960, and we launched ours a few months later. In 1976, America, Germany, and England sent a five-man expedition to the Moon, but that was the only time we . . .”
“When was the first computer invented?” Vasili asked.
“If you mean the very first one, that was designed by Charles Babbage sometime in the 1820s, but it was never actually . . .”
“No, I mean the ones that caused an information revolution in the late twentieth century.”
“Desktop computers?” Murphy shrugged. “I bought mine in ’91. A DEC Spectrum. One of the first on the market. Why?”
“I’m beginning to see a pattern.” Franc picked up a branch, fed it into the bonfire. “With the exception of the atomic bomb, there wasn’t major technological progress during the 1940s. Without World War II, there wasn’t an urgent need for the V-2 rocket or the Enigma codebreaker.
Manned spaceflight and microelectronics were eventually developed, but at a much slower pace.”
“You mean, it happened sooner than that?” Murphy was outright astonished, and just a little envious. “If your worldline is that different, you must have had people living on the Moon by the end of the twentieth century.”
“Well, not really,” Lea said. “We didn’t build the first lunar colony until . . .”
“Never mind that now.” Franc didn’t want to get sidetracked. “When I met you. . . when I first met you, I mean. . . you mentioned something about an Office of Paranormal Sciences. What’s that?”
“OPS? It’s . . .” Again, there was an abrupt silence as Murphy listened to the voice in his head. “They . . . the ones you call angels, I mean . . . say that’s important. They don’t say why, but I guess this is another point where the worldlines diverge.”
“Go on.” Franc struggled to remain patient. “What’s different?”
Murphy stared into the fire for a few moments before he answered. “I think . . . I mean, I think it has to do with something that happened while I was in college. Sort of a social trend or a fad or whatever you want to call it, but in the seventies and eighties a lot of people started getting interested in psuedoscience. Astrology, ESP, channeling, dowsing, all that stuff . . .”
“UFOs?” Metz asked, giving a meaningful glance at the others.
“UFOs, sure. Seemed like everyone you knew had seen one, or at least knew someone who had seen one.” Murphy glanced in the direction of the Oberon. “Guess they weren’t that far off. But the biggest part of it was what people called lost German science . . . the crap a lot of the Nazis believed in.”