by Allen Steele
“I’ll be there.” Metz was already crawling back underneath the console. Franc heard the thin whine of a screwdriver as he loosened another panel. He waited another moment to see if the pilot had anything more to say, but apparently their discussion had come to an end.
Monday, January 14, 1998: 12:55 P.M.
Murphy almost collided with a pair of nuns as he flung open the glass front doors of the Air and Space Museum and dashed out onto the broad plaza.
The nuns glared at him as he trotted down the stairs to the sidewalk. He stopped to look first one way, then the next. A couple of teachers sneaking a smoke near the line of yellow school buses idling at the curb, a hot-dog vendor chatting with a police officer next to his pushcart, a homeless man rummaging through a garbage can. The fake Gregory Benford, though, was nowhere in sight.
There was no way he could have disappeared so quickly. He must still be nearby. Neglecting to button his parka, Murphy walked quickly past the school buses, then left the sidewalk and jogged across Independence Avenue to the Mall. Frozen grass below the thin blanket of fresh snow crunched beneath his boots as he jogged down the greenway, his eyes darting back and forth as he searched the faces of pedestrians strolling past the Smithsonian.
A couple of hundred feet away, he spotted a red M-sign: Smithsonian Station, the nearest Metro stop. He must have gone there. Lungs burning with each breath of cold, dry air, Murphy ran past snow-covered park benches and bare trees until he reached the subway station. Ignoring the slow-moving escalator, he bolted down the stairs, taking the steps three at a time.
He halted on the upper concourse, glanced in all directions. There were a dozen or so people in sight, purchasing farecards from the ticket machines or hurrying through the turnstiles to the lower platform, yet of the impostor there was no sign. A train rumbled into the platform below, and for a moment he fumbled in his pocket for a dollar. If he was fast enough, he could still buy a card and catch the next train. Yet common sense told him that there was no way Benford—or rather, the pseudo-Benford, as he now thought of him—could have reached the Metro before he did.
Gasping for air, Murphy sagged against a newspaper machine. He had guessed wrong. Whichever direction the impostor had taken after leaving the museum, it clearly hadn’t been this way.
He waited until he caught his wind, then he stepped onto the escalator and rode it back up to street level. He glanced at his watch: five after one. He could turn around, catch the subway to L’Enfant Plaza, yet there was always the slim chance that he might spot the impostor on the sidewalk. And even if he didn’t, he needed time to think.…
Why would anyone impersonate a science fiction author just to talk to him? That was the big question, of course, but besides why? there was also how? The impersonation had been nearly perfect; not only had the impostor looked exactly like Gregory Benford, but—judging from the brief conversation Murphy had with the real Benford on the phone—he sounded like him as well. True, a good actor might be able to don a wig, a false beard, and fake glasses. An even more talented actor could mimic someone’s voice …
But why go to so much trouble?
Buttoning up his parka against the cold, his head lowered against the wind, Murphy strode down the sidewalk. As he reached the corner and waited for the green Walk light, another thought occurred to him: hadn’t he read somewhere that Gregory Benford had a twin brother?
Yes, he did: James Benford, another physicist, an identical twin who had also written some science fiction, both on his own and in collaboration with his more famous sibling. Could that be the person who …?
No. Murphy shook his head as the light changed and he stepped into the street. That didn’t make sense either. For one thing, why would Jim Benford want to impersonate his brother? Perhaps as a practical joke, but what would be the point if the intended victim was a complete stranger? And for another, Jim Benford wouldn’t have made the mistakes that had gradually tipped him off: not knowing that c was the common variable for the speed of light, for instance, or being unaware that his brother had written a time-machine novel.
He could always call Greg Benford again, once he had returned to the office. Yeah, sure; Murphy could imagine how that conversation would go. Hello, Dr. Benford? You don’t know me, but my name’s David Murphy and I work for NASA Headquarters in Washington, and I just had lunch with someone who looks exactly like you … well, yes, I know there’s a lot of guys who kinda look like you, but this guy said he was you, and … anyway, can you tell me where your brother is right now, and if he has a weird sense of humor? Right. And if he was Greg Benford, he’d call someone at NASA to say that some wacko named Murphy was asking bizarre questions about him and his brother Jim.
The sky had begun to spit snow again. Glancing up, Murphy could make out the Capitol, obscured behind a milk white haze beyond the Reflecting Pool. He lowered his gaze again, began making his way back up Independence toward the Air and Space. No, better leave the real Gregory Benford out of this. Yet whoever the impostor was, he knew enough about Murphy to know that he would have been impressed enough with Benford’s reputation to meet with him for lunch to discuss …
An article in Analog about time travel.
Murphy stopped. That was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? Forget for a moment whom he had met; it was the subject of their conversation that mattered.
This was the second time today that someone had paid undue attention to a piece he had written.
Despite the warmth of his parka, Murphy felt a chill run down his spine. First, a meeting with a senior NASA administrator, who had expressed concern that Murphy might somehow embarrass the agency by writing about UFOs and time travel, and then requested … no, mandated, really … that any future articles he wrote be submitted in advance to the Public Affairs Office. Then, less than an hour after that meeting, a phone call from someone pretending to be a noted physicist and author, who in turn wanted to know where he had gained the inspiration to write the same article …
How much of a coincidence could that be?
Murphy pulled up the parka’s hood and tucked his hands deep in its pockets. For some reason, his article had attracted someone’s attention. Yet all he had done was taken a few available facts, tied them to possible explanations, and come up with a plausible scenario, however unlikely it might be. Yet his piece hadn’t appeared in Nature or in the science section of the New York Times, but in a science fiction magazine. Hardly a venue guaranteed to gain a lot of attention.
Only … hadn’t this sort of thing happened once before?
Yes, it had. Back in 1944, at the height of World War II, when a writer … who was it again? Digging at his memory, Murphy absently snapped his fingers. Heinlein? Asimov? Maybe Hal Clement or Jack Williamson …?
No. Now he remembered. It was Cleve Cartmell, a writer almost completely forgotten today were it not for one particular story he had written for Astounding.
Titled “Deadline,” it was otherwise negligible save for one important detail: in it, Cartmell accurately described an atomic weapon, one which used U-235 as its reactive mass. He even went so far as to say that two such bombs, if dropped on enemy cities, could end the fictional war depicted in his story. An innocuous novelette in the back of a pulp SF magazine, yet within a few days of its publication in Astounding, its editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., was visited at his New York office by a military intelligence officer, who inquired who Cartmell was and how he might have come by his information. Yet Cartmell hadn’t worked for the Manhattan Project; his bomb was strictly the product of his imagination, his sources no more classified than textbooks found in any well-stocked public library. Nonetheless, he had stumbled upon the closest-kept secret of World War II; little more than eighteen months later, Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If this sort of thing had happened before, why couldn’t it happen again?
Murphy found his hands were trembling, but not from the cold.
; He glanced over his shoulder, saw someone walking up the sidewalk a couple of dozen feet behind him. He quickened his pace … then, on impulse, he crossed the street, putting a little more distance between himself and the man following him. At the end of the block, he turned another corner, taking an unanticipated detour on his route back to the office. When he looked back again, he no longer saw the other pedestrian.
Get a grip, he told himself. You’re jumping at shadows.
What he had written was fantasy. Sure, it possessed a certain air of verisimilitude—a handful of footnotes, some well-turned bits of technobabble—but it had no more basis in reality than the average Star Trek episode. There was no way that UFOs could actually be time machines.…
Could they?
Suddenly, it seemed as if the city itself was watching him, the windows of the government office buildings peering down at him like great, unblinking eyes.
He began to walk a little faster.
Tues, Oct 16, 2314—0550Z
“Thank you, Traffic. Oberon ready for departure.” Metz tapped the lobe of his headset, then glanced over his shoulder at Franc. “If you want to take your seat …”
“Thanks, but I’d like to watch.” Holding on to the back of Vasili’s chair, Franc gazed through the control room porthole. “If you don’t mind, that is.”
Metz seemed ready to object, then he shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just as long as you and your people are strapped down in ten minutes, you can watch all you want.” He turned back to his console. “Traffic, take us out, please.”
A pair of spiderlike tugs began moving away from the timeship. The slender cables they dragged behind them uncoiled and became taut, then there was an almost imperceptible jolt as they began to haul Oberon out of spacedock. Spotlights passed across the timeship’s hull as it was slowly pulled toward the hangar door; off to one side, Franc caught a glimpse of a tiny figure in a hardsuit, holding a pair of luminescent wands above his head. The Oberon was on full internal power, of course, and capable of leaving spacedock without the assistance, yet for safety reasons it was customary not to activate the negmass drive until the vessel was clear of the station.
There really should be a band playing, Franc mused. Back in the early twentieth century, when a ship left port on a long voyage, it was a ceremonial occasion. A brass band performing “God Save the Queen,” colored ribbons tossed from the decks, the bellow of foghorns, cheering crowds gathered on the wharf. Now, there were only images flashing across flatscreens, the faint murmur of voices over the comlink. Logical, perfect, and utterly without soul.
The hangar door disappeared behind them; now they saw the blue-green expanse of Earth’s horizon. “All right, we’re clear.” Metz leaned forward against his straps, began tapping commands into the keypad. “T-minus six minutes to warp. Dr. Lu …”
“You don’t have to remind me.” Yet he lingered for another moment, observing the tugs as they detached their lines and peeled away to either side. In the far distance, above the limb of the earth, he caught a glimpse of a tiny spacecraft: a chase-ship positioned to observe Oberon’s passage into chronospace. “You’re sure you’ve got the right coordinates?”
Wrong question. “You want to go back and have the AI rechecked?” Vasili murmured, gesturing to the dense columns of algorithms scrolling down the screens on either side of him. “We can always scrub the launch, if you’re not …”
“Sorry. Didn’t meant to insult you.” He pushed himself toward the hatch. “Tell us when you’re ready.”
“I always do. Just make sure your people are strapped in.”
Franc left the flight deck, floated across the passageway to the passenger compartment. As he expected, Lea and Tom were already in their couches, the seats turned so that they could see the broad flatscreen on the far wall. Lea looked up as Franc pulled himself along the ceiling rungs to the middle couch. “Everything set?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. All we have to do is wait.” He pushed himself into the vacant couch, then reached for the lap and shoulder straps. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Hoffman was anxiously watching the status panel next to the screen, his hands gripping the armrests of his couch so tightly that his knuckles were white. “Hey, Tom,” he said softly, “don’t damage the upholstery.”
“Sorry.” Hoffman managed a nervous smile. “First time.”
“Relax.” Franc gave him an easy grin as he cinched his straps tight. “It’ll be over so quick, you’ll barely know it happened.”
If the transition into chronospace went well, of course. There was no sense in reminding Hoffman of what would happen if something went wrong. The smallest, most seemingly insignificant miscalculation by Oberon’s AI and the wormhole would collapse in upon itself, forming a quantum singularity which would instantly destroy the timeship. If that happened, they’d find out what it was like to be stretched into spaghetti just before they were obliterated. Such catastrophic accidents had never occurred, or at least not to a timeship carrying a human crew, yet everyone in the CRC was aware of the fate suffered by primates aboard test vehicles during the late 2200s.
Now he was spooking himself. Deliberately casting the thought from his mind, Franc turned his attention to the wallscreen. It displayed a rear-view projection behind the Oberon; propelled by its negmass drive, the timeship was quickly moving away from Chronos, and now the space station was a small toy receding in the distance. Farther away, a small band of bright stars moved above the limb of the Earth: orbital colonies, solar-power satellites, other spacecraft. Even now, Chronos traffic controllers would be closely monitoring Oberon’s flight path, making sure that the sixty-kilometer sphere of space surrounding the timeship was clear of any other vehicles.
“T-minus one minute.” Metz’s voice in his headset was terse. “Wormhole generators coming online.”
He felt Lea’s hand stray to his lap. He glanced at her, caught the look in her eyes. She wasn’t saying anything in front of Tom, but she was nearly as anxious as he was. Franc briefly clasped her hand, gave her a comforting smile. She nodded briefly, then returned her gaze to the status panel. Displayed on a smaller screen was a wire model of Earth’s gravity well. Oberon was coasting along a steep incline deep within the well; it was here, using the planet’s natural perturbation of spacetime, that the timeship’s wormhole generators would soon open a tiny orifice in the quantum foam.
“Thirty seconds and counting,” Metz said.
Franc closed his eyes, forced himself to relax. Imagine a pinhole in a sheet of tightly stretched rubber, he told himself. You push your finger against the pinhole, and it grows a little larger, dilating outward. You exert a little more pressure, and now the hole expands, large enough for you to stick your finger through. Yet you don’t stop there; you keep pushing, and now you can insert your hand … now your arm … now your entire body …
“Ten seconds,” Metz said.
He opened his eyes, saw the planet rushing toward him. The timeship was hurtling toward Earth’s atmosphere. If it remained on this course for four or five more minutes, the timeship would soon begin entering the ionosphere, and Metz would have to correct its angle of descent to prevent burn-up. The status panel, though, told a different tale: the timeship was rushing down an invisible funnel, the event horizon of the wormhole Oberon was beginning to form around itself. Push a finger against a pinhole, and keep pushing until …
“Five … four … three …”
“Oh, God …” Hoffman whispered.
“Shut your eyes,” Franc said, just before he did so himself.
“Two … one …”
In the next instant, it felt as if reality itself had become that imaginary rubber sheet, stretched to an infinite length, longer than the entire galaxy, longer than the universe itself …
Then abruptly snapped.
He slammed back into his couch, so hard that he felt the vertebrae at the base of his neck pop, and at the same instant he heard a distant scream—Tom, or maybe it was Lea—as
everything seemed to shake at once. There was a harsh, high-pitched whine that came from everywhere yet nowhere; he smelled something acrid and sickly-sour, and then …
“All right,” Metz said, “you can relax now. We’re through.”
Franc opened his eyes.
The first thing he saw was a globular, semiliquid mass floating in midair next to his couch. Mystified, he raised a hand and reached out to touch it … then recoiled when he realized what it was. He carefully turned his head to the right, saw Hoffman wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
Tom caught Franc’s scowl, winced with embarrassment. “Sorry …”
“Never mind. Happens now and then.” And now you understand why we warned you not to eat breakfast, he silently added, but there was no sense in pointing that out now. He tried not to smile when Lea ducked away from the globule of vomitus as it floated closer to her. He touched the lobe of his headset. “Vasili, if it’s not too much trouble, we could use some gravity in here.”
“Just a moment,” the pilot said. A bar on the status panel shifted from red to green, and a few seconds later he felt the sudden sensation of falling, as if he were in an elevator that had just dropped a few floors. The globule splattered messily on the deck between their couches. It wasn’t pleasant, but at least it was better than having it wandering freely around.
Franc unclasped his lap and shoulder harnesses, rose unsteadily to his feet. At first glance, the image on the wallscreen seemed unchanged, until he looked a little closer and noticed that they were at a higher altitude. The daylight terminator, too, was in a different place; now it ran across the eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, with nighttime falling on the British Isles and Spain.
“Are we in the right frame?” Tom asked.
“The AI says we’ve hit the correct coordinates,” Metz replied. “May 2, 1937, about 1800 hours GMT. I’d like to get a stellar reading to confirm it, though. Dr. Oschner, can you do that for me, please?”