by Allen Steele
A faint rumble passed through the walls of the room. Murphy looked again from his notebook as the floor trembled beneath his feet. “Janet’s gone Mach,” an Air Force lieutenant seated at the carrel in front of Everett reported, his right hand clasped over his headset as he studied the radar panel before him. “Altitude 22,000 feet, range 10 miles.”
Murphy nodded. Like a hawk rising on desert thermals, the SR-75 was ascending in the steep gyre which would keep it above Area 51 even as it headed for the the stratosphere. Through his headset, he periodically heard the pilot’s terse voice as he communicated with the tower. The men in the back of the room murmured to one another, and Murphy was all too aware of General Leclede standing directly behind him, watching his every move. Murphy wished he could rid the room of all of them, Leclede included, but since there was no way he could do that, he nervously tapped his pen against an armrest and waited.
Eight minutes later, they heard the pilot’s voice again: “Farm, this is Janet Two. Angels one hundred and holding position. Waiting for your word, over.”
“We copy, Janet. Transferring com to Barn.”
“Janet, this is Barn,” the lieutenant said. “Stand by for preliminary test, over.”
“Roger that, Barn, we copy.”
“Okay, we’re on,” Murphy said. “Doris, how are we looking?”
“Good visual contact.” The TV monitor clearly showed Herbert reflecting the moonlight as it rode its saddlelike pylon on the back of the mother ship. Murphy smiled with satisfaction; they had deliberately picked this night for the test to take advantage of the full moon. “Activating onboard cameras,” she added as she flipped toggle switches on her console. A moment later, a second monitor lit, revealing the SR-75’s forward fuselage as seen from Herbert’s nose. “Flight recorders running, we’ve got good downlink.”
“Very well.” Murphy turned a page of his checklist, took a deep breath. “Everett, bring the SDM online up to fifty percent, then hold for check.”
Everett said nothing, but Murphy noticed that he quickly wiped his palms across his jeans before he laid his hands on the slidebars of his console. “SDM up to fifty,” he said softly as he gently raised the power levels of the spacetime displacement module within Herbert’s fuselage. The bar graphs on his screen rose halfway up the screen, then obediently stopped. “Fifty and holding,” he murmured. “All levels within safe parameters.”
They spent the next few minutes conducting a last-minute diagnostic check of all of Herbert’s major systems. Finding no problems at their end, they waited another minute for the SR-75’s crew to conduct their own checks. “All right,” Murphy said at last. “Gentlemen, ladies . . . if you’re ready?”
Everett gave his board a final lookover, then nodded. Doris slowly let out her breath, then gave him a thumbs-up. They were even more anxious than he was, if such a thing were possible. He glanced over his shoulder at Leclede, but received no solace from the general’s stoical expression. “All right,” he said, turning back to his console. “Lieutenant, tell them we’re ready for the drop.”
“Janet Two, we’re ready for deployment,” the lieutenant said tersely into his mike. A moment passed. “Commencing countdown . . . ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
At zero, there was a brief flash of pyros as Herbert was detached from the back of the SR-75. Murphy heard mild applause from behind him as the drone lifted away from the Penetrator. Its wings waggled briefly as it caught the larger aircraft’s slipstream, then the screen on the left went dark while the right showed the vague image of the black ship peeling away.
“Janet Two moving to safe distance,” the lieutenant reported. “Herbert at 100,000 feet and holding altitude, eight miles downrange.”
For the next few moments, the drone would remain at its present altitude, gliding at the edge of the stratosphere a little more than sixteen nautical miles above the desert, before it began its long plunge back to the ground below. Which was exactly what they wanted: a high-velocity fall toward a large gravitational mass.
“Everett, bring the SDM up to 100 percent,” Murphy said. “Arm master program, execute on my mark.
Backofen’s hands flew across his console. “SDM at 100 percent, master program loaded and armed, waiting your mark.”
“Doris . . . ?”
“Telemetry locked, clear fix, recorders running.”
“Lieutenant?”
“Janet Two reports safe distance at 90,000 feet, two miles west from Herbert. They say they can see it clearly. Ground radar tracking both bodies.”
“Commence countdown on my mark.” Shoving back his chair, Murphy quickly moved to the lieutenant’s side. Leaning over him, he saw two distinct blips on the screen: Herbert in the center, the SR-75 just below it. He felt men pushing against his back as they tried to get closer, but he paid no attention to them. He glanced at the twin mission clocks on the wall. Both read the same: 00:23:18:46. He waited until they were at ten seconds short of the minute . . .
“Mark!” he snapped.
“Go on mark!” Backofen jabbed switches on his console. “T-minus ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
Murphy checked the mission clocks one more time, then he pointed his finger at a blank area on the radar screen, directly to the right of Herbert’s blip. “Watch that,” he whispered to the lieutenant. “Don’t blink, not even for a second . . .”
“I’m watching it, sir,” the lieutenant murmured. His right hand was clasped over his headset, listening to the voices from the SR-75.
“Five . . . four . . . three . . .”
“I’m getting a corona!” Gofurther yelled.
Murphy kept his eyes locked on the radar screen. “C’mon, sweetheart . . .” he whispered.
“Two. . .one. . .!”
“There it is!” Doris shouted.
At that instant, a third blip appeared near the right edge of the radar screen, directly behind the drone.
“Zero!”
Herbert’s blip suddenly vanished . . . but the one behind it remained.
“It went through!” the lieutenant yelled.
“I saw it!” Doris pointed at her TV screen. “It vanished! It disappeared, then it . . . Zack, I saw it!”
The SR-75 pilot was saying something, but his voice was lost in the uproar that swept through the control room. Murphy stared at the radar, watching as the new blip traced a solitary trajectory across the scope, while the men around him shouted in astonishment, cheered, clapped him on the back. It was then, and only then, that he raised his eyes to the mission clocks.
The one on the left, displaying the time as perceived by the SR-75, was 00:24:03:24. Yet the one on the right, which relayed the time as transmitted from Herbert, was 00:24:02:24.
For an instant barely longer than a human heartbeat, Herbert had caused a wormhole to open around itself, then slipped back in time . . . for one second.
In that single second, there had been two Herberts: the one about to disappear into chronospace, and the one that had appeared out of nowhere some distance behind it. When that happened, the ground radar had briefly captured both of them as two distinct blips.
Not only that, but Herbert’s nose camera had picked up an image of itself . . . as seen from behind.
“Jesus . . .” Feeling his knees beginning to buckle, Murphy sagged against the lieutenant’s console. He made himself take deep breaths; for a moment he thought he was going to faint. All around him, Air Force officers were shouting at one another as Doris and Everett hugged each other. He looked around, caught the expression on General Leclede’s face. It was nauseatingly smug, and Murphy had little doubt that, when he made his final report, he would claim most of the credit for the success of Blue Plate.
All of a sudden, the one thing he wanted most in the world was to get a breath of fresh air.
“Save the data,” he said to Everett, “and transfer control to the tower for the flyback phase.” Then, muttering apologies no one seemed to hear, Murphy grabbed his parka
and began pushing through the crowd. Leclede called after him, but he pretended not to hear as he headed for the door.
The chill desert air was a relief after the closeness of the control room. The wind had died down, so he pulled his Mets cap out of his pocket and put it on. The ground crew was gathered at the edge of the airstrip, waiting for Herbert to make its remote-controlled landing. Murphy hoped he would get a chance to inspect the drone for himself before it was spirited away into one of the hangars. However, now that the Air Force knew the secret to temporal transit, everyone involved in Blue Plate—or at least the civilian R&D staff—would be retired. Herbert had just become a military asset.
Now he knew how J. Robert Oppenheimer must have felt . . .
The hell with it. Thrusting his hands in his jacket pockets, Murphy strolled away from the operations building. Perhaps it was just as well. He had never intended to let Blue Plate consume nearly one-third of his life. All he had ever wanted to do was figure out how someone with a handful of archaic pocket change and a passenger manifest for the Hindenburg could wind up in 1998.
“So now you know,” he murmured to himself. “Happy?”
Well, at least he had a military pension coming to him. The mortgage was paid off, and he had come to enjoy living in New England. Perhaps he could see Steven a little more often, and take in a few ball games at Shea Stadium . . .
Suddenly, everything around him seemed a little brighter, like the first light of dawn breaking over the secret airstrip.
Murphy was looking at the ground when it happened. He saw his own shadow stretching out before him, much as if a great floodlight had abruptly been switched on the night sky. Then he heard men shouting behind him . . .
“Hey, what . . . ?”
“Holy shit, it’s . . . !”
“Nuke!”
Murphy whipped around, stared upward. For an instant, he, too, believed that the nuclear bomb had exploded far above the desert. He instinctively covered his eyes with his hands, yet there was no sound, no concussion, only a hellishly bright glare from high in the night sky, as if a miniature supernova had suddenly erupted far out in space . . .
“Oh, my God!” someone yelled. “Look at the Moon!”
Lowering his hands, Murphy gaped at the sky. The source of the glare was coming from where he had seen the Moon only a few moments ago . . .
He was still staring at the white-hot orb in the sky when something flashed directly behind him.
At first, he thought it the high beams of a nearby truck. He couldn’t take his eyes off the sky, and so he ignored it, but then the illumination grew brighter, overwhelming even the distant cataclysm, and suddenly he was aware of nearby men pointing his way, shouting in horror . . .
Murphy turned, found himself standing at the edge of a ball of light that had materialized directly behind him. Within the center of the aura was a vaguely man-shaped form, yet with wings that rose above its head.
Raising his hands against the blinding glare, Murphy started to step back, yet any thoughts of escape came much too late. The corona stretched out to envelop him, the figure within its nucleus reaching toward him . . .
The taloned hands that grasped his arms weren’t human.
Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1547Z
“You say you saw it?” Lea asked. “The angel, I mean . . . you got a close look at it?”
“Only for a second.” Murphy shrugged as he continued to gaze into the remains of the bonfire, as if summoning memories from its dying embers. “I’m not sure what happened then, except that I blacked out. When I woke up, I was here.” He gestured toward the fire. “I guess it left that to keep me warm. I don’t why or how, but I knew that you were coming, so I just waited until . . .”
“Tell us about the angel,” Lea said quietly. “What did it look like?”
Murphy shivered. “Lady, whatever it was, it was no angel. More like a reptile on two legs, with a face that would give you nightmares.” His brow furrowed as he thought about it. “About seven, eight feet tall, with long fins coming from its back. Leathery brown skin, long bony skull, black eyes. Evil-looking, but . . .”
He said nothing for a moment, then he shook his head. “But they’re not evil. At least, that’s what it’s telling me now. It says it’s deliberately hiding its appearance because we associate ugliness with evil, and it’s aware that we’d consider it repulsive.” A corner of his mouth inched upward. “I can’t fault its reasoning. From the brief glimpse I got of the one who brought me here, it’s about the worst thing I can imagine.”
The sun was starting to set behind the western side of the valley. With twilight closing in, the rings in the sky were beginning to change color, assuming muted shades of orange and red which vaguely resembled the autumn foliage that once graced New England at this time of year. “But these . . . this race, I mean . . . weren’t they the ones who destroyed the Moon?” Franc picked his words carefully, mindful that someone or something else was eavesdropping on their conversation. “That led to the destruction of our planet and everyone on it. Why shouldn’t we regard them as evil?”
Again, Murphy shut his eyes and lowered his head, assuming the posture of someone listening carefully to an unseen voice. “It insists that it’s . . . I mean, they . . . that they’re not evil,” he said at last, speaking haltingly. “It’s speaking about its race. It claims that they’re destroying our satellite . . . the Moon, I mean . . . was necessary in order to prevent us from damaging spacetime any further. If they hadn’t done so, we would have caused more paradoxes to occur, until . . .”
“So they snuff out five billion people?” Metz hurled a stick into the fire as he angrily rose to his feet. “You just can’t. . . I mean, who the hell elected them God? They’re . . .”
“For chrissakes, shut up!” Hands clamped over his ears, Murphy bent forward as if in physical pain. “I didn’t . . . I can’t . . . !”
“Vasili, sit down, please.” Lea moved closer to Murphy, wrapped an arm around him. “Take it easy,” she whispered. “It’s all right. Don’t rush, just take it easy . . .”
She shared a meaningful look with Franc. Like him, she was concerned about the precarious state of the scientist’s sanity. No wonder he was frightened; for the last couple of hours, he had been forced to act as a telepathic channel between them and the . . . whatever it was. Indeed, watching Murphy lay his head against Lea’s shoulder like a frightened child, Franc wondered whether he wasn’t close to snapping.
Metz regarded Murphy with disgust and loathing. “Sure,” he muttered. “Take it easy. We’ve got all the time in the world . . .”
“Be quiet.” Franc locked eyes with the timeship pilot. “And if you can’t be quiet, then go back to the Oberon.” Perhaps there was some sort of washover effect associated with the telepathic link; whenever any one of them—particularly Vasili, the most irritable of all—had become emotionally aroused, Murphy had reacted accordingly. He returned his attention to the old man cradled in Lea’s arms. “Dr. Murphy,” he said as quietly as he could, “if you need some rest, we can continue this later.”
Like it or not, he had to admit that Metz was right on one point: they did have all the time in world. Indeed, time was the only thing Earth had left. . . .
Murphy surprised him by shaking his head. “No, no . . . this is too important. I just . . .” Opening his eyes, he sighed as he sat up straight. “I’m sorry, it’s just that . . . when I woke up this morning, it was 2024, and everyone I knew was still alive. And now . . .”
“We understand,” Lea said. “If it makes any difference, it hasn’t been easy on us, either.”
Daylight was beginning to fade, the fire quickly dying out. Franc found another branch behind him; he broke it in half, fed it into the low flames. “So tell us everything you know,” he said quietly, giving Metz an admonishing look. “We won’t interrupt again, I promise.”
“Everything I know. Sure . . .” Murphy pulled off his baseball cap, absently ran his fingers across its em
broidered logo. “Okay, for what it’s worth, here goes . . .”
Again, a reticent moment. “The angels . . . the aliens, or whatever you want to call them . . . are an old race. I mean, very old . . . they were technologically sophisticated when we were still in the Stone Age. They won’t tell me what they called themselves, or where their home world is . . . was, I mean . . . located, because they wish to keep that secret. However, they will tell me that, for about a thousand years . . . our years, I think . . . they dominated a quadrant of our galaxy nearly two hundred light-years in diameter, and had explored most of the rest.”
“So they were conquerors,” Metz said flatly.
Franc shot him another look, but Murphy didn’t seem to mind. “At first they were, yeah, but as time went on they abandoned their ambitions for empire. I guess you could say they grew up. They realized it wasn’t much fun being the toughest kid on the block, because then nobody wants to play with you.” He smiled. “Those are my words, not theirs, but you get the point.”
“We do,” Franc said. “Go on, please.”
“There’s lots of intelligent races out there . . . no surprise, I guess we knew that all along . . . but very few reach the point of achieving space travel, and even fewer learn how to construct wormholes. The ones that do, though, soon discover that if they’re able to bridge space, they’re also able to bridge time. If you’re able to accomplish one, then the other comes naturally. Follow me so far?”
“Sure. That’s the way it happened with us,” Franc said. Lea shook her head at him, but he ignored her. At this juncture, there was no sense in hiding anything from Murphy; his future was their past, even if on different worldlines, and right now none of them had anything left to lose. “Where we came from, humankind launched the first hyperspace starship in 2257. We started exploring chronospace about twenty-five years later. And you’re right . . . we’ve found plenty of eetees, but none of them are capable of space travel, let alone time travel. So far, at least.”
Murphy nodded. “Well, they’re out there . . . or at least, the ones that survived. Apparently, time travel is the most dangerous thing an intelligent race can discover, because a civilization capable of exploring its own history is likewise capable of changing it. When that happens, more often than not they destroy themselves . . . and sometimes they take other races with them.”