by John Kessel
“I’ll tell him you asked,” I lied.
She smiled. “Would you? Thanks.”
An old Globemaster was waiting on the runway, bound for undisclosed places but called out of the sky to snatch me up. Its crew had strict orders not to speak with their important passenger, which meant that I sat alone in the dark along with the rest of the cargo—a pair of battered Humvees and crates of medical supplies bound for some desperate place. My seat had the luxury of a tiny window, but there wasn’t much to see, what with the clouds of black smoke from the burning Saudi oil fields. But night found us over Missouri, and we crossed into a wide pocket of relatively clear air. The stars were exactly where they belonged, and I had the best reason to believe that none of them would explode in the near future. A power outage had struck Kentucky. A wilderness lay beneath me, broken only by a few headlights creeping along and the occasional home blessed with generators and extra fuel to burn. Who was the culprit tonight? At least two homegrown insurgencies had been playing hell with the TVA lately. But the power grid was tottering on its best day, what with every reactor mothballed and barely a fart’s worth of hydrocarbons finding its way to us.
I didn’t belong in this world.
Some years ago, I had carelessly stepped off my earth, entering a realm that only resembled what was home. I was lost, and it was the worst kind of lost. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t decipher which day and which hour had transformed everything familiar and happy.
Was it in ’99, when the future decided to invade us?
Or in ’02, when Ramiro was found just south of the Canadian border?
Neither moment felt worthy of this kind of dislocation. There were too many ways to redraw the following events, to many reasonable acts that would have minimized the damage wrought by faceless, nameless souls.
Even our early wars seemed incapable of obliterating so much.
But then we hit Pakistan, with India’s gracious help, and despite our assurances to obliterate the Muslim A-bombs, the Pakistanis managed to hit their neighbor with half a hundred blasts, pushing our final ally back into a peasant state, desperate and starving.
Three months later, fifty million were dead and the ash of the murdered cities was beginning to cool the world. That’s when a half-megaton nuke hidden in a barge was floated in close to the Indian Point reactors north of New York City. A cold front was passing through, and the resulting mushroom cloud threw up an astonishing array of toxins. Everything to the south was doomed. Infrastructure and millions of humans, plus trillions of dollars and the last relics of a working economy—all these good things were lost in a single act of undiluted justice.
Like most people, I watched the horror on television, from the safest room inside my helpless house. After years of government service, I had temporarily left the military. I was burnt-out, I believed. I was actually considering going back to college. To teach or learn; I didn’t have any definitive plan yet. I have a fair amount of imagination, but those following days and nights were too enormous to wring so much as a tear from me. I couldn’t grasp the damage, the horror. Great cities were rendered unlivable, perhaps for a thousand years. My countrymen, now refugees, were spreading a kind of inchoate, embryonic revolution as they raced inland. And during the worst of it, my government seemed unable to make even simple decisions about martial law and protecting our other reactors, much less mobilizing our shrinking resources and pitiful manpower.
That was the moment, at least inside my little circle of interrogators and ex-interrogators, that Abraham became a known name: The terrorist’s terrorist.
He was a mastermind. He was a disease and a scourge. But even then, the most informed rumors avoided any mention of time travel.
People who knew Ramiro’s story naturally assumed that Indian Point was the work of temporal jihadists. My government was temporarily hamstrung by the idea that their enemy had launched their bomb months or years ago, and there was no way to know where the next blast would blossom. It was almost good news when the event-team digested the nuke’s isotopic signature and ruled out the bizarre. What we had witnessed was a plain hydrogen warhead—an old Soviet model—that had been smuggled into the country by one of our countless, and to this day still nameless, enemies.
Two years ago, I couldn’t cry. But that night, sitting alone in the big overloaded aircraft, I began to sob hard. Sob and moan, but always trying to remind myself that in our quantum universe, every great event was nothing but the culmination of human decision and human indecision, chance and caprice. The poverty and despair surrounding me was vanishingly small. Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable, and why did people waste their time believing that we could ever be special in God’s unbounded eye?
After the tears, I got up to pee.
Turbulence struck before I could get back to my seat. I ended up taking refuge inside one of the Humvees, belting in as the entire plane shook and turned wildly. Obviously, the earth’s atmosphere was furious at the damage we were doing to it. Even the most rational mind slides easily into a mentality where ancient forces focus their rage on what looked like a fat, helpless, soon-to-be-extinct mechanical bird.
Somewhere in the jumping darkness, an alarm sounded.
Then after a long five minutes, and with no visible change in our circumstances, the blaring stopped.
The only voice I heard emerged from the cockpit. “Who would you fuck first?” he screamed. “Ginger or Mary Ann?”
“Why not Lovey?” an older, wiser voice asked. “She’s got the money!”
I laughed somehow, and I held tight to the seat beneath me, and with no warning whatsoever, we dropped hard, plunging through the last of the mayhem. Then the air calmed abruptly and the flaps changed their pitch as the big wings brought us around and down onto a great long slab of brightly lit concrete.
The tires screamed and survived.
Then the lights came up inside, and I finally saw my Humvee wasn’t just old, but it had seen a few firefights. Bullet holes and shrapnel gouges begged for repair, but someone must have thought: Why bother? Since we never brought equipment home from the Middle East, I was left wondering if this was LA damage. Or Detroit. Or just the run of the mill unrest that doesn’t earn national notice.
As the plane taxied, a crewman came to retrieve me. I rather enjoyed that moment when he stood beside my empty seat, scratching his tired head, wondering whether the only passenger had fallen overboard?
I said, “Hey.”
He said, “Ma’am,” and then regretted that tiny break of the orders. Without another sound, he showed me to the hatch and opened it moments before a ladder was wheeled into position, and I stepped out into what was a remarkably cool August night, pausing just long enough to thank him.
But he was already wrestling the hatch closed again.
A single limousine waited on the otherwise empty tarmac. I had expected a convoy and probably a quick ride to some bunker or heavily guarded warehouse. But in times like these, important souls preferred to slip about in tiny, anonymous groups. The Globemaster revved its jets and pulled down the runway, fighting for velocity and then altitude. I reached the limousine just as the runway lights were killed. A pair of secret service agents emerged and swept me for weapons. I can’t remember the last time I’d held any gun. I bent down and slipped into what proved to be an office on wheels. I would have been more surprised if the president was driving. But only a little more surprised. He offered his hand before he smiled, and his smile vanished before he was done welcoming me.
No pleasantries were offered, or expected.
I sat opposite him and sensibly said nothing.
He needed a shave, and a shower too. Which made me feel a little less filthy after my trip. I kept waiting for the voice that I often heard on the news—the deep voice that reminded us how the struggle wasn’t lost and courage was essential. But what I heard instead was a tired bureaucrat too impatie
nt to hold back his most pressing questions.
“What happened to Collins?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Suicide, or murder?”
I nearly said, “Yes.” Since this is a quantum universe, and everything that can happen does happen. Without hesitation or shame.
But instead of humor, I offered, “It was a suicide.”
“You’re certain?”
“Basically.”
He had to ask, “Why?”
“I warned you,” I said. “I’m not a criminal investigator. But I think that’s the way Collins would have killed himself. At home, quietly, and without too much pain. But if somebody had wanted him dead—”
“What about Jefferson?”
I shrugged. “No, he wouldn’t have been that neat or patient. Jefferson, or some associate of his, would have shot Collins and then planted evidence to make it look like a suicide. At least that’s my reading of things.”
The president wanted to feel sure. That mood showed in his face, his posture. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Jefferson. “What about the prison’s security?”
“You’re asking is there an agent on the premises. One of Abraham’s people, maybe?”
His mouth tightened.
“That I can’t answer,” I cautioned. “Really, I wouldn’t even know how to figure it out. If I had the time.”
He bristled. He had invested a lot of hope in me, and he expected at least the illusion of results. With a dramatic flourish, he opened a plain folder waiting on his lap. Then with a low grumble, he asked, “What about Collins?”
I wanted past this traitor-in-our-midst talk. But my companion happened to be my government’s most important citizen, and he was exactly as paranoid as it took to successfully represent his people.
“Was Collins one of them? I don’t think so.”
“You know the emergency council’s report,” he muttered testily.
“Which part? About the future knowing all our secrets? Or the DNA masking Abraham’s people?”
“I mean everything.” The president took a long moment to frame his next comments. “They didn’t show their faces, and for obvious good reasons. Even without Ramiro’s testimony, it’s hard to deny the possibility—the certainty—that profound genetic manipulation will be possible in a hundred years. Under those masks, the bastards could have looked identical to anybody from our world. At least anybody who happened to leave behind hair or a flake of skin.”
The emergency council was a cheerless room filled with scared specialists—off-plumb scientists and old sci-fi writers, plus a couple of psychics who happened to get lucky once or twice about future disasters. They had access to secrets, including scrubbed synopses of Ramiro’s insights. And during one pitiless night, they asked each other how could our fight, begun with so many good intentions, have gone so tragically bad.
Their answer was the worst nightmare yet. Among Abraham’s soldiers were there perfect duplicates of men and women who would have served in our highest offices, starting in ’01? Before our election, they could have slipped into the United States and replaced each of those historic figures. Unknown to us, the worst monsters imaginable would have worn stolen faces and voices. And later, sitting in Washington, those same pretenders could have done untold damage to the innocent, helpless world.
That scenario seemed to explain everything—bad decisions, incompetent methods, and the miserable follow-ups to each tragic misstep.
Paranoia had never enjoyed such an acidic, malicious beauty.
The file was important enough to leave open, and I caught one long glimpse. Which was what the president wanted, I suppose. He was eager to prove to me just how awful everything had become.
On top was a photograph, a famous face gazing up at the camera. The man was elderly now, shaved bald and very weak and far too thin. Each bruise was ugly and yellow, and together they defined the color of his cowering face. Was this where we had come? Taking our own people into a cellar to starve them and beat them, all in the vain hope that they would finally admit that they deserved this horrid treatment?
“Jefferson is Jefferson,” I maintained.
The president closed the file.
“And Collins was always Collins.”
He sighed. “Are you as sure as you are about the suicide?”
“Even more so,” I declared.
“But there was one day last year,” the president began. Then he made a rather clumsy show of pushing through more files, lending a banal officiousness to the insulting moment. This was what my leader had been doing while waiting for my plane. Thumbing his way through old security papers that meant nothing.
“I don’t care about last year,” I said.
“Collins went missing,” he snapped. “He was out on leave, and for fourteen hours, the man dropped out of contact with everybody.”
“He explained that later,” I pointed out. “The man was exhausted. He needed to be alone and regroup. And that’s what I believe.”
“You do?”
“More and more.”
“He wasn’t one of Abraham’s agents?”
“If he was, then maybe I am. And you are too.”
My reply was too awful to consider. I read revulsion in the man’s face and his fists. And I kept thinking that if I had bothered to vote in our last election, I never would have helped elect this dangerously incompetent man.
“I am not one of them,” he whispered.
“Maybe you are, and you don’t know it,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“If our enemies can remake their faces and blend in everywhere, then why not rewire the thought patterns inside other people’s heads? If they have that kind of magical technology, then why not inoculate the world with a tailored virus that makes everybody into loyal Muslims who have no choice but to accept the wisdom of this never-seen Abraham?”
Here was one proposition that had never been offered to the president. And he responded exactly as I expected, eyes opening wide, seeing nothing.
I laughed it off.
He hoped that I was joking now, but he didn’t dare mention my suggestion again. Instead he posed one final question. “And why did Collins kill himself ?”
“Remember the dollar?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“On the bathroom floor, they found a coin in the blood. Do you remember that detail from the reports?”
He had to admit, “No.”
“Collins didn’t see or speak to Ramiro for three days. Other than that, nobody remembers him doing anything out of the ordinary. But I have reason to believe that our prisoner gave him something. Something new. Something that was so difficult to accept that it took three days for Collins to wrestle with the concept. And then what the man did . . . I’m guessing this, but I would bet my savings on it . . . Collins went into his bathroom and ran a warm bath and got a knife and then flipped the coin. And the coin happened to come up tails.”
“Which means?”
“It’s a quantum-inspired game. In this reality, tails meant that he would slit his veins and bleed out.”
“And if it was heads?”
“Then Collins would have done something a lot more difficult.”
“And what would that have been. . . ?”
“Show the entire world what Ramiro gave him.”
“And what was that, do you think?”
“I wish I knew.” My laugh was grim and sad, and it suited both of us. “In my mind, I keep seeing Collins sitting in that bathtub, flipping the coin, working it until he got the answer he wanted.”
A phone set between us rang once, very softly, and then stopped.
The president gestured at the invisible sky. “Another plane’s heading west. It’ll arrive in another hour or two.”
His wave was a signal; my door suddenly popped open. It was still summer, but I could feel frost threatening.
“Do I still have full authority?” I asked.
“Full authority?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He stared at me for another moment. Then he quietly asked, “What do you think our world’s chances are?”
“Very poor,” I offered.
“Why?”
I had to say, “With people like us in charge, sir . . . our enemies don’t have to do much at all.”
9
The sound was soft but insistent, coming from the middle of my apartment door. I heard the first rap of the knuckles, but I did nothing for what seemed like a very long time. Aware of the bed beneath me, I looked at my hands in the faint blue glow of the nightlight, and then I turned and gazed at the red face of the clock on the edge of my nightstand. Eight minutes after three in the morning, I read. Twice. Then the knock quickened, and I sat up and put on my only robe and took the time to find my slippers before letting my visitor inside.
“You’re not watching,” Jefferson began.
I said nothing.
He looked at the darkness and rumpled sheets, his expression puzzled. Then his face fell back into a kind of breathless horror.
“What?” I asked.
He couldn’t say it.
What passed for the outside was gloomy, not dark. A single guard stood in the middle of the enormous tunnel, meeting my eyes before she retreated into the shadows.
After my guest stepped inside, I said, “Come in.”
Once the door was closed, Jefferson turned on my ceiling light. Then he showed me a tired, frazzled expression that set the tone. “Now Russia has been hit.”
“Hit?”
“Bad.”
I said, “Fuck.”
“Moscow,” he told me.
I sat on the edge of my bed.
“Half a megaton,” he muttered, standing in the middle of the small room, hands dangling at his sides.
I stood up again, slippers popping as I walked to my television. The filtering software had a lot of work to do before we could be trusted to see the news. That’s why the thirty-minute delay, and that’s why the world before me was nearly two thousand seconds in the past.