They shifted in the space of perceived minutes, forward 50 years to a set of coordinates ascertained by Totem to be clear of obstacles or traffic and close to their goal—the Library of Congress. The arrival coordinates were in the basement of a parking structure one block from the Library.
It could not have been more perfect. A cloak generated by the Grid afforded them invisibility over an area of four square yards. In practical terms, it allowed Sharon and Trevor to stroll into sight of any bystanders as if they’d just come up on a nearby elevator. Blending in completely with the contemporaries, they were just another pair of students with backpacks and laundry lists of lookups.
Sharon quickly found that the hardest piece of Shift policy to obey completely was the injunction to study the contemporaries without appearing to study them. It was hard not to gawk at things that had changed subtly or not so subtly: clothing, environment, architecture, people. Language was expectedly and subtlety different, and snatches of conversation contained colloquialisms that were familiar, but in unfamiliar contexts.
“That’s so tab,” said a middle-aged businessman to his female cohort as they moved purposefully down the sidewalk.
To which she replied, “Well, Erin is such a straight-jacket anyway, what other kind of investment could he make?”
“He could take a chance once in a while.”
“Erin? Take a chance? Like you said, he’s too tab.”
All of which showed the wisdom of Rule #14 in what the Lab Rats affectionately called Time Travel for Dummies: Don’t use slang.
Once inside the Library’s main sanctuary, Sharon and Trevor checked their wrist units for time and instructions. Sharon’s “specialty,” such as it was, was the gathering of health and welfare data. She wasn’t sure exactly how it had happened, but somehow a report on personal hygiene and health she’d generated from a poke into Regency London had earned her a solid reputation as a keen sorter of pertinent health data.
“Okay,” she said, “I think you’ve got the lion’s share of work to do. Let me know if you need a hand.”
“You bet. Nobody ever accused me of taking on more work than I have to. I’m sure you’ll be done long before I am.”
They parted, Sharon wafting on a wave of incredulity. No matter how many times she shifted, she was always overcome at moments such as these, by the sheer paradox of it all. This was work, this traveling through the waves of time, and she was struck by the sheer banality of the conversation she and Trevor had just had. Like a couple of students setting out to prepare for oral exams. In that anomalous context, the Library of Congress was a perfect symbol of Sharon’s calling. Aged stone and antique appointments contrasted with the latest in information retrieval technology.
Sharon was gratified that the technology was still recognizable. She located a VR bay, seated herself in its wrap-around seat and looked for a helm and gloves. There were neither. There were only a pair of flat screens about one foot on a side, that lay at approximately a 120 degree angle to each other. It took ten minutes, but with the help of some written instructions and careful surveillance of her nearest neighbors, she discovered that the canted screen displayed two-dimensional data and the horizontal screen displayed 3D holograms and served as a control panel.
She proceeded carefully through her checklist, delving into health and census records, checking birth rates, noting how natural disasters had affected the general health of the continent. That collection effort completed, she moved on to the brave new world of medicine. It was bemusing, she realized, as her task became more yawn-inducing, that a future-trip, for all its novelty and the terrifying sense of awareness it provoked, was not nearly as exciting as a trip to a less obscure past.
Alec would be in his early sixties now, she realized, and wondered what kind of man he had become. Moved by something that was more than curiosity, she toyed with the idea of entering his name into the search engine, but her conscience bleated. She stuck to her agenda.
She was in a Who’s Who of medicine, when she found herself staring at the name Alec Glen. She hesitated momentarily, for the link was not strictly within her parameters, but in the end she followed the thread. What came up was beyond a proud mother’s dreams, for the name Alec Glen had both medical and political connections. Following her own inclination, Sharon pointed to the medical connection.
He would become a doctor and a researcher in the field of genetics. He would contribute to a cure for Hodgkin’s disease, would invent a supplement to reverse osteoporosis, would write a seminal paper on age-related dementia.
She was reveling in the glow of these discoveries when her watch reminded her that time was wasting. She returned swiftly to her legitimate research, downloading a sampling of medical research, trends, breakthroughs and new problems. She added to the general mix her own son’s contributions, wishing that Robert could be there to share her pride.
Sharon was still downloading when Trevor came to let her know he had finished his own research. She stifled a twinge of guilt that her digression might have cost her more legitimate research some time and tried not to look at Trev’s face, lest it prompt him to ask her what was taking so long. It was as she completed a final download of information to her recorder that she dared to glance up and caught the flicker of something like worry in Trevor’s eyes. He wasn’t looking at her, though, just staring up through the tall front windows where a single wisp of cloud could be seen flung across the visible patches of sky—an abstract painting on three tall canvases.
She poked her head out of the pod-chair. “What’s wrong,” she asked, forgetting Rule #14, “The pol-scene got you jinky?”
“Ah . . . yeah. Yeah, you could say that. Hey, it’s politics.” He checked the time. “You about ready?”
“Just.” She logged off, slipped her computer back into her bag and could not resist the motherly temptation to glow. “I came across something really interesting while I was searching. Alec’s name.”
Trevor’s surprise was evident. “Really? You did? In what context?”
“As a noted researcher in genetics. He contributed to a cure for Hodgkin’s and I gather, to a greater understanding of aging.”
“Wow,” Trevor said. “That’s quite a coincidence.” He took her elbow and steered her toward the door. “Time’s a-wasting.”
“Not considering where I was peeking.”
“I just mean . . . I didn’t mean to imply you were doing a personal peek. I just meant . . . Alec going into medicine.”
“Science. He’s been around science all his life. Some of our best friends are doctors and researchers. Besides, lately it seems as if medical research of one sort or another is all I do. It’s just kind of good to know . . . . I guess I’ve been a little worried.”
“I could tell.”
She stopped just outside the library’s main doors and smiled up at him. “Well, aren’t you impressed?”
“Of course. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me all that much. Alec’s a bright child—the child of bright parents.”
“I don’t suppose you came across him in your virtual travels,” Sharon asked.
“What?” Trevor checked the time again and started down the steps. “Why do you ask? I was pursuing a completely different line of research.”
Sharon shrugged, attempting nonchalance. “I found a couple of links that suggested he had some political aspirations as well, that’s all. I didn’t follow it—thought maybe you’d seen something. I just wondered . . .”
Trevor was silent long enough to make Sharon think he hadn’t heard her or had gone off on one of his internal hikes. She glanced at him, her mouth open, but he was not gazing into the distant hills of his mental outback. There was an expression on his face she had seen only once before.
Zero at the core, she stopped walking, stopping Trevor as well. “What’s the matter with you, Trevor? What did you find?”
“We need to get back to the Grid, Shar.” He took her arm.
She pulled it
away. A woman passerby gave them a sharp glance. Sharon lowered her voice and moved a step closer to Trevor. “Not until you tell me what you’ve found. Something about Alec? What happens to him?”
Trevor lowered his head till their foreheads were touching and the woman smiled and continued on her way. “Nothing happens to him,” he murmured. “Except that he goes into politics. I thought you might be disappointed. He apparently gave up his research to become a pol. Not exactly a progression his dear mother would be happy about, am I right?”
“Good Lord, don’t tell me he had a party affiliation or something like that?”
“No. No affiliation, but he was—or rather, will be—some sort of lobbyist for the medical PAC.”
Sharon shrugged. “Okay. I’m not wild about lobbyists as a rule, but at least it’s a good cause.”
Trev shook his head, straightened and smiled. “You’re no fun, Shar. You’ve mellowed too much with age.”
“Jerk,” she called him. “Let’s go.”
oOo
Sharon could not have said what made her open Trevor’s files. It was more than idle curiosity, less than suspicion. But she had known Trevor Haley too long not to know when he was embarrassed or uncomfortable and today, during the Shift, he had been both. The last time she’d seen that expression on his face—that sudden skittering away of the eyes—was at a dinner party when one of their colleagues had cracked a mean-spirited, misogynistic joke about Magda Oslovski and her husband, Vance.
Sharon’s own data drop was complete by the time she had changed her clothes and poured a cup of tea. She began riffling through her collection, preparing an index and overview for a morning briefing. She allowed herself a moment to linger lovingly over the information on Alec, then moved on reluctantly.
She’d spent perhaps a half-hour at this when some perverse demon drove her into Trevor’s domain. Anticipation building, she made a guilty search for the name Alec Glen. The search came up dry.
Puzzled, Sharon bent to her own work, but there is nothing so insidious and pervasive as fear, and Sharon had begun to fear, because she could think of no reason Trevor would fail to download the information on Alec, unless . . .
And that was her imagination’s stopping point. Was Alec destined to die a horrible death? Perhaps by assassination? What else could be so terrible that Trev wouldn’t let anyone see it?
The thought gnawed. She countered with stern logic. When she’d brought the matter up, his tone had been light and teasing. (Yes, even as his eyes crawled away to hide and his ears reddened.) He’d said Alec was a lobbyist—maybe his political career would be too unspectacular to warrant downloading. (But he might have at least done it for her, even though it meant bending the rules a bit.)
Stern logic was powerless. Not fifteen minutes had passed before she got up from her console and headed down the hall toward Trevor’s office. She would simply ask. Straight up. What did you find out about Alec? Just a mother’s fond and proud curiosity. No hint of inner panic. No what aren’t you telling me?
But Trevor wasn’t in his office. His console was on, his chair pulled back as if he had just left it. The palm unit was still in the docking slot. Sharon stood on the door sill, indecisively, aware of the familiar buzz and wash of sound from the offices and labs—the murmur of conversations in the hall.
She came into the room, the door swinging closed behind her. It took only a moment to slip into his chair, access the palm unit and check its contents. She found what she had been hoping not to find in a folder separated from the main index and named simply “JG.” She contemplated downloading it to her own console, but realized that in any case, Trevor would know she’d seen the data if for no other reason than that she would confront him with it.
She prepared herself for the worst; she could not have prepared herself for the reality. Dr. Alec Glen, Ph.D., noted research scientist, had indeed given up medicine to take up a political career and crusade. He was the father of the Euthanasia Act of 2137, a piece of legislation that put into the hands of doctors and judges and review boards the decision as to when an individual should die. He was the first doctor to be certified for euthanasia; the first to practice it.
Sharon stared at the monitor for an eternity before she was able to will her hands to move, to dig further, to try to comprehend how her son—her son!—could make himself the proponent of such a heinous law. No, not a law, an atrocity by which elderly people unfortunate enough to require institutionalization had their cases placed before a review board made up of medical doctors, judges, psychologists, clergy and ethicists. Based on a complex set of criteria, rules, conditions and formulas, a decision was made whether or not to euthanize. There was even a list of terminal illnesses for which euthanasia was the de facto “treatment” unless mitigating circumstances could be proven.
Sharon’s tears blurred the names on the list—cold, scientific names that said nothing of the suffering they inflicted: Myasthenia gravis, multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s. Some were conditions on which Alec would expend much time and effort during his medical career. It was as if he were trying to literally bury his failure.
Numbly, Sharon followed another link. She found numbers, statistics, a death roll. It numbered in the thousands.
Why?
“I was hoping you wouldn’t see that.” Trevor watched from the doorway, face grave. Gravity was something he didn’t do well under normal circumstances, but there was no hidden levity in his gaze now. “I guess I should have destroyed it. But, um, it’s a development the analysts will want to know about. Should know about.”
“You off-lined it.”
He reddened. “Like I said, I considered destroying it.”
“For me.”
He shrugged.
“How?” She shook her head.
“How does it happen or how does it happen to be Alec?”
“Both. Either.”
“People live longer, but in the end they still deteriorate. People continue to have children. Population demographics indicate a glut of elderly people, inflicted with certain diseases and too few facilities to care for them. It apparently reached a crisis—will reach a crisis—in the mid ’30’s.”
“Fine—a crisis. But how does a humane society justify this? How does a man with Alec’s background justify it? Here, it says he was supported by the religious right. Back at the turn of this century, that same lobby fought abortion, the death penalty and the right to die.”
“Ah, interesting, that.” He came into the room. “The new sensibility will hold that since death is reunion with God, and therefore not to be feared, it’s something to anticipate, not avoid.”
“‘I have made Death a messenger of joy,’” Sharon quoted from a well-known scripture. “Yes, but a forced reunion? Decided by—by committee? This . . . this is shades of Logan’s Run. Fiction. My God, Trev, you can’t justify that by scripture.”
“No.”
Sharon glanced at the screen where an image of Alec-to-be gazed back at her, soberly. There was, in the handsome, but severe middle-aged man, a great deal of the boy.
“What do I do, Trev?” she asked.
He moved to lay a hand on her shoulder. “What can you do?”
“Go back—forward—again and try to—”
“Sharon, come on. You know that’s not possible. It takes a team of Lab Rats to run the Grid, and Magda would never send you. Besides, what could you do there as you now that you couldn’t as you then besides create an anomaly?”
“Where will I be then, Trev, that I can’t convince him that what he’s doing is wrong?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know the answer to that one.”
“Then I have to do something here. Maybe I need to spend more time with him. Maybe—God, maybe it’s my fault.”
Trevor grasped her by both shoulders and swung her around to face him. “Shar, that’s ridiculous. You’re a great mom. And Alec knows you love him.”
“Maybe that�
�s not enough. Obviously that’s not enough.”
“Sharon . . .”
She glanced up directly into his eyes, capturing them. “Are you going to share this data with the Board?”
“I have to.”
She knew that. Of course, she knew that. “Trevor, what do I do?” she asked again. “My son is going to grow up to commit an atrocity that—” She lost her words, her thoughts, her direction and hiccuped on the horrid tightness in her throat.
“Let’s look at it carefully. Let’s let other analysts look at it.”
“He’s my son, Trevor.”
“What do you think you should do? Go home and tell him his future? What would you say? Sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to turn into a monster?”
She could only shake her head. He reached out to her again, laying a firm hand on her shoulder. “Go home, Sharon. Let me—let us get a handle on this. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Go home.”
The thought terrified her. “How can I go home? How can I see him knowing what I know?”
“You said it yourself: he’s your son.”
Her son. The son she couldn’t face. The son she no longer knew how to relate to. In the end, she called her sister and asked if she would mind keeping Alec overnight. A migraine, she said. She was desperate to see him—to hold him—but she couldn’t. Not yet.
She went home—thought about going for a swim. She always worked things out swimming—the soft, cool touch of water gliding over skin; the rhythm of arms, legs and breath. But on her way out the door to the gym, she got sucked into Alec’s room and spent an hour sitting on his bed, holding a stuffed Tigger in her arms, staring at shelves covered with models of space shuttles, starships, the space station, the first commercial Delta Clipper. A child’s room; a simple boyhood jumble.
He had never shown the slightest sign of cruelty toward animals or people. He was kind, gentle, thoughtful of others. How did someone like Alec grow up to believe a committee of experts should determine the end of a person’s life?
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