by Allen Steele
Franc was three-quarters of the way down the catwalk, just past the airshaft between Cells Ten and Eleven, when he heard German voices echoing from somewhere close by. He stopped, breathing hard as his eyes sought movement within the dimness of the envelope. He couldn’t see anything, but now he could hear footsteps against metal. There was someone—two engineers, probably—on the middle catwalk just ahead of him.
Franc turned, walked as quickly and quietly as he could back to the airshaft he had just passed. With a final glance over his shoulder, he opened its hatch, then ducked inside, pausing on the ladder just long enough to close the hatch behind him.
The shaft thrummed loudly with the muffled noise of the nearby engines; the ladder vibrated beneath the palms of his hands as he climbed downward. If his memory didn’t betray him, this shaft would take him to the lower catwalk running along the keel, just aft of the crew quarters. Yet there were no cargo hatches in this part of the ship’s underbelly, and he didn’t dare enter the forward engine cars, where engineers would be stationed during landing operations.
Like it or not, he’d have to make his way through the crew quarters to B Deck of the passenger compartment.
Reaching the bottom of the airshaft, he placed his ear against the hatch, yet the engine noise made it impossible for him to hear anything. Time was running out; he’d have to take a risk. Franc started to open the hatch, then he felt a familiar weight against his thigh. Looking down, he saw the crowbar he had taken with him from the Oberon, still dangling by its crook from his belt. Useless now, and an unexplainable liability if he was caught with it. Franc pulled it out of his belt, hung it from a ladder rung, then opened the hatch.
The keel catwalk was deserted. On either side of its triangular framework were the massive horizontal cylinders of fuel and water tanks; directly ahead lay a duraluminum bulkhead, with a closed door leading into the compartment beyond. Franc shut the airshaft hatch, then walked quickly past the tanks to the door. From somewhere far above, he could hear the indistinct voices of the engineers he had managed to avoid. He hesitated at the door, his right hand on the knob, then he turned it and pushed open the door.
The warmth of the crew quarters was welcome after the unheated chill of the envelope. Franc quietly shut the door, then put his back against the plaster wall, straining to listen for human sounds from the narrow passageway that lay before him. Just ahead, he heard vague movement within a cabin to the right; as he crept closer, he saw that its door was open. The crew quarters were almost empty, but not quite.
Holding his breath, walking on the balls of his feet, Franc stole toward the cabin door. Peering through the jamb, he spotted a young, dark-haired man bending over an open suitcase. Franc recognized him as one of the dining-room stewards; indeed, it was the same one who had escorted him and Lea to the Hindenburg when it left Frankfurt. With the ship coming into Lakehurst, his job was done, and now he was packing for a weekend layover in New York. Humming to himself, he turned toward the closet, and Franc took the moment to tiptoe past his cabin. Auf wiedersehen, mein freund, he thought. Hope you get out alive.
At the end of the passageway was another door. Franc carefully opened it, then slipped through into the corridor that lay beyond. He immediately recognized his surroundings; he was on B Deck, across from the keel corridor which ran through the lower deck of the passenger compartment. Just ahead was the landing that led to the stairs to A Deck; just around the corridor behind them, below his feet, were the twin gangways, still folded up within the airship’s belly.
He sighed with relief as he sagged against the bulkhead. Perfect. All he had to do was remain hidden for . . . how long? Realizing that he hadn’t checked the time in at least fifteen minutes, he raised his wrist, glanced at Murphy’s watch.
It read 7:23. Two minutes, perhaps less. The Hinden burg should be hovering directly over the landing field by now, slowly easing its way toward the mooring tower.
Just enough time to make contact with the Oberon. He pulled the headset from his trouser pocket, clasped it against his face. “Oberon, do you copy?” he said softly.
A few precious moments passed, then he heard Lea’s voice. “Franc, where are you?”
“B Deck, near the gangway,” he whispered. “Where are you?”
From down the corridor, he could hear the clatter of cookware in the galley; somewhere above, the faint voices of passengers watching from the A Deck promenade as the Navy ground crew ran to grab the ropes that had just been dropped. Up there, he would be touching the rim of his glasses, surreptitiously checking the time, murmuring something to Lea about getting ready. . . .
“We’ve landed at the northern edge of the airfield,” Lea said. “Zack’s coming to . . .”
From the other side of the stairs, he heard a commode flush. A second later, the door to the nearest of the three toilets on B Deck swung open, and a passenger stepped out into the corridor: a tall, gray-haired man, instinctively looking down to check the fly of his trousers.
Franc whipped the headset from his face, shoved it back in his pocket as he glanced first one way, then the other. There was no place for him to hide. All he could do was stay still, hope that he wouldn’t be noticed.
Then the passenger turned to walk toward him, and Franc suddenly felt an icy chasm open in the pit of his stomach.
It was John Pannes.
For an instant, he believed it was he himself: the other version of Franc Lu, disguised to resemble one of the ill-fated passengers. Yet as the other man came closer, his eyes met Franc’s, and there was no hint of recognition, no shock of seeing oneself. Pannes merely looked at him oddly, as if spotting a fellow passenger who had somehow escaped his notice during the past three days, then turned toward the stairs leading to A Deck.
As he put a foot on the first riser, though, Pannes paused to look back at Franc. “Can I help you, young man?” he asked politely.
“No . . . no, sir,” Franc stammered. “Just . . . I’m just waiting, that’s all.”
Pannes nodded curtly. “One bathroom’s as good as the next,” he murmured, then he continued climbing the stairs.
Franc felt himself trembling as he watched Pannes disappear from sight. No doubt about it: that was the real John Pannes, the one who should now be in the twenty-fourth century, not taking a last-minute run to the toilet before the Hindenburg landed. Which meant that, one way or another, Franc wasn’t aboard, nor was Lea . . .
“Oh, my God,” he whispered. “What went. . . . ?”
There was a loud, hard thump from somewhere above and behind him, as if a great weight had suddenly landed on the back of the airship.
An instant later, the deck pitched violently beneath his feet, and Franc was hurled face forward. His breath was knocked from his lungs as he hit the carpeted floor, and for a moment he lay dazed and confused. Then he heard men and women screaming in terror as the airship made a sickening lurch and the deck tilted farther forward, throwing him against the floor even as he tried to clamber to his knees.
He managed to twist to one side just before he hit the bulkhead below the stairs. A sharp pain in his left shoulder; he ignored it as he grabbed a railing and staggered to his feet. Now he could feel heat against the back of his neck—something above him was burning—and all around him he heard heavy objects crashing against walls. From down the corridor behind him, men were shouting in German.
Another lurch, and now the airship plummeted downward. He grabbed a post next to the gangway stairs, clung to it with both hands as the ceiling behind him caved in. Through the cellon windows on the other side of the lower promenade, he caught a brief glimpse of the ground rushing toward him; he turned away just as the windows shattered.
Glass lacerated the side of his face, ripped skin from the backs of his hands. He was deafened by an infernal roar: burning hydrogen, groaning metal, voices raised in horror. Somehow, though, the gangway remained intact; dislodged by the impact, it gaped open, an exit from hell barely discernible through walls
of acrid smoke.
Franc released the post, covered his face with his arms, charged headfirst down the gangway, Flaming debris rained down around him as his feet touched the ground; through heavy smoke, he caught glimpses of men and women running for their lives.
Hands above his head, gagging and coughing against fumes that threatened to fill his lungs, he lurched away from the flaming wreckage, ignoring the hands of the sailors who sought to rescue him.
He was safe. He had escaped. The Hindenburg had exploded, just as history had predicated it would. . . .
And just as before, something had gone horribly wrong.
Thursday, May 6, 1937: 9:15 P.M.
“And you’re sure it was him?”
“Of course, I’m sure,” Franc insisted. “I wore his face for four days, didn’t I? And he was so close I could have . . . ow!”
“Sorry.” Lea withdrew the antiseptic spray, carefully examined the burns across his shoulders and back. Stripped to his briefs, his twentieth-century outfit now tattered rags heaped on the floor, Franc sat on one of the couches in Oberon’s passenger compartment, leaning forward on his elbows as Lea tended to his injuries. “Hold still,” she said. “I haven’t gotten to your legs yet.”
Franc grimaced, but obediently stretched out his legs as she bent down next to him. “I wouldn’t complain if I were you,” Murphy said. “You’re lucky to have gotten out of there at all. That thing went up like a furnace.”
Lea nodded, but avoided looking his way. The scientist was sitting on the couch formerly occupied by Tom Hoffman. Although she had balked at leaving his body behind, Vasili had pointed out that, if Murphy was going with them, there wasn’t room for Tom’s body aboard the timeship. In the end, they had buried him on the summit of Mt. Sugarloaf, near the base of the ruined observation tower.
“You should have been inside,” Franc hissed between his teeth as Lea sprayed the backs of his thighs and knees. He hadn’t even realized that he had suffered first-degree burns until he made it back to the Oberon. He looked down at Lea, then reached forth his hand to gently stroke her hair. She looked up sharply, and he smiled at her. “I’m glad it didn’t work out the first time,” he said softly. “I don’t think . . . I’m not sure we would have escaped.”
For a moment it seemed as if she was repressing a shudder, then she deliberately looked away. “Pass me that, will you?” she said to Murphy, pointing to the open med kit on the floor. Murphy leaned and pushed the box toward her. “So you don’t think the Pannes got away? You said he was on the stairs to A Deck when the bomb went off.”
“It’s possible, but . . .” Franc shook his head. “If this is the way it happened . . . the way it should have happened, I mean . . . then they didn’t escape. According to the historical record, he remained aboard to find his wife, and neither of them got out in time.” He looked down at the floor. “It’s too bad, really,” he added quietly. “I only met him for a moment, but he seemed like a good man.”
“Then consider yourself lucky,” Murphy said.
Franc nodded. He knew that he had been lucky, in more ways than one. Knowing that Franc was in serious trouble, Metz had gambled that Oberon’s chameleon would render it invisible to everyone at the naval station, and touched down at the edge of the landing field only a few hundred meters from the mooring tower. Since their attention had been focused entirely upon the Hindenburg, though, no one noticed the slight disturbance it made during touchdown. As soon as Franc was away from the crash scene, Murphy exited the Oberon, found him at the edge of the crowd, and, under the cover of twilight, guided him back to the timeship. Once they were both safely aboard, Metz lifted off again.
As makeshift rescue operations went, this one had gone off without a hitch. Yet every time Franc permitted himself to think about it, whenever he allowed his mind to reach back to those terrifying seconds—although they seemed like much longer: minutes, even hours—it all came rushing back. The hollow thud of the explosion, the violent plunge, the falling debris, the screams . . .
“Just be still,” Lea murmured. “This should only tickle.” She had pulled on a pair of thin plastic gloves, and now she was carefully opening a small, hermetically sealed canister. She noticed Murphy’s curious gaze and held it up for him to examine. “Naderm-310 . . . nanocellular epidermal restorative. It’s like a lotion. We, uh, put it on, and it . . .”
“Repairs the skin, using microscopic nanites.” Absently stroking his beard, Murphy inched a little closer as he studied the canister with fascination. “C’mon . . . it’s not like I’m a caveman, you know.”
“You had this?” she asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
“Not yet, but an Italian biotech firm was supposed to be working on it.” Murphy watched as Lea carefully poured a little of the lotion onto Franc’s back. “Where did this stuff come from?”
“I don’t know. The Moon, probably.” Lea began massaging the Naderm into the red and blistered parts of Franc’s skin. “So let’s try to figure this out. If you saw John Pannes on the Hindenburg, then that means you and I never got aboard. Right?”
“That’s the way it seems to me.” Franc scowled as he resisted the urge to reach back and scratch at himself. She was wrong; the lotion didn’t tickle, it itched, like a bad case of poison ivy. “And that shouldn’t have happened, if we’ve returned to our original worldline . . . that is, the worldline we left in 1937.”
“No, that would have been the changed worldline.” Murphy raised a finger. “The way you’ve explained it to me, in Worldline A, the Hindenburg explodes on schedule, killing John and Emma Pannes along with a couple of dozen other people.” He raised another finger. “And in Worldline B, the changed worldline, the two of you are on board instead of the Pannes, but screw things up so that history is altered and this new worldline is created . . . the one I’m from. Have I got it right so far?” Franc nodded. “So this shouldn’t be Worldline B, because you went back and changed things back to the way they should be, in Worldline A.”
“Yes, but when we boarded the Hindenburg, we were in Worldline A.” Lea finished spreading the lotion on Franc’s back and moved to his legs. “The night before we left Frankfurt, we arranged for the Pannes to be abducted on their way to the opera. We wouldn’t . . . we couldn’t have boarded the airship if that hadn’t succeeded.”
“So now we’re in Worldline C . . . a completely new worldline?” Franc suddenly felt hollow inside. “Then all this has been for nothing.”
“No. . . no, not necessarily.” Murphy stood up and walked to the wallscreen. It displayed Earth from low orbit, where Franc had taken the Oberon after leaving New Jersey. The elderly scientist had relished the ride into space; now he gazed down upon Earth, marshaling his thoughts. “You say you reset the bomb from eight o’clock to seven-twenty-five, right? It may have been that the bomb was set for eight o’clock all along, but the timer simply malfunctioned and it detonated prematurely. The fact that Lea encountered this Spehl guy may have been totally coincidental.”
“That doesn’t work,” Lea said. “When we checked the recordings made by the divots we placed in the envelope, we saw Spehl go back to Cell Number Four shortly before the Hindenburg reached Lakehurst.”
“Yes, but did you actually see him reset the timer? Or was he simply checking to make sure the bomb hadn’t been discovered?”
“That . . . seemed to be the logical assumption,” Franc said reluctantly.
Murphy smiled and shook his head. “Never assume anything . . . and that includes the notion that Worldline A has been altered because of events that occurred prior to today.”
Lea’s mouth fell open; for a moment she stared at Murphy. Then, without bothering to put away the Naderm, she got up from the floor. “Is there something wrong?” Franc asked.
“No. Stay here. I’ll be right back.” She left the compartment, heading in the direction of the monitor room.
“Nice lady,” Murphy said once she was out of earshot. He returned to his seat and sa
t down. “Your girlfriend?”
“No . . . not really.” Franc impulsively reached down to scratch at his legs, then thought better of it and removed his hand. The nanites were rebuilding his burned flesh; the pain had disappeared, but the constant itch threatened to drive him out of his mind. “What gives you that idea?”
“She was worried sick about you while you were aboard the Hindenburg. I thought she was going to tear your pilot’s head off when he told you that he couldn’t maintain position any longer.” Murphy’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but I think she cares a lot for you. If you don’t know that . . . well, like my generation used to say, you need to get a clue.”
Franc felt his face growing warm. “Let’s get back to what we were talking about before,” he said, deliberately changing the subject. “What did you mean by that?”
“What I meant was, you’re working under the assumption that this worldline may have altered solely because of actions you may or may not have taken before this date. Given the nature of your previous visit, I don’t blame you for reaching that conclusion.” Murphy shook his head. “But you’re forgetting that nearly three hundred years have gone by since 1937 and 2314. In other words, something in the future may prevent you from coming back here. And that . . .”
“Would you two mind keeping quiet? I can hear you all the way across the ship.”
They looked up, saw Metz standing in the doorway. Pleading exhaustion, the pilot had chased everyone from the control room shortly after the Oberon had achieved orbit, then shut the door to get some sleep. Now he stood just outside the passenger compartment, bleary-eyed and slump-shouldered, plainly irritated at having been wakened.