by Allen Steele
The old man barely glanced at Lea, but he regarded Franc with puzzlement which slowly turned to recognition.
“I … I know you,” he said, his voice a quiet stammer.
Franc stared back at him. “Have we met?” he asked. “I don’t …”
“You don’t remember me? It’s been nearly twenty-five years, but …”
“Twenty-five years?” Lea asked. “How would you know him from …?”
“I only sort of remember your face.” Ignoring Lea, he pulled a hand from his pocket, pointed a trembling finger at Franc. “But your coat … that’s what I remember the most. It didn’t look right, even back then. That’s the first thing that tipped me off …”
His coat? Franc self-consciously looked down at himself. He was wearing the same wool suit coat he had worn aboard the Hindenburg … yet hadn’t he worn it a second time? Only a few hours ago, in Tennessee …?
“Oh, my God,” he whispered.
“Your name is …” The old man shut his eyes. “John Pannes. We met a long time ago, in a place in …”
“You’re the man on the road,” Franc said. “The person I met when I …”
“When you made the phone call, yes.” The old man raised his eyes, took a deep breath. “My name is Zack Murphy … Dr. David Zachery Murphy. I’ve been brought here to meet you.”
Franc found himself unable to speak. “Brought here?” Lea asked. “By whom?”
For the first time, Murphy seemed to notice her. He opened his mouth and was about to answer when, out of the corner of his eye, Franc caught a sudden flash of light.
He turned around, looked at the observation tower. At its top, a luminescent halo had appeared: a corona of light, brighter than either the autumn sun or the bonfire beside which they stood. Within its nucleus, suspended within the phosphorescent glare, hovered a figure, featureless yet vaguely humanlike, save for the broad, wing-shaped appendages that spread outward from behind its back.
An angel.
“That’s what brought me here,” Murphy said, his voice shaking. “It … it brought me here because …”
He suddenly stopped, glancing to one side as if he had just heard something. When he looked back at them again, his face was ashen.
“It tells me we’re responsible for the end of the world.”
Thursday, August 6, 1998: 9:04 A.M.
“You’re sure no one’s going to find this place?” Murphy gazed at the towers of the University of Massachusetts as they drove past the campus on Route 116. “We’re pretty close to town.”
“Right on the Amherst line, to be exact.” Baird Ogilvy kept his left hand on the wheel as he reached for the cell phone tucked beneath the Blazer’s dashboard. “It’s actually in Sunderland, but that’s not much of a difference. Sure, someone’s bound to notice. There’s not too many places left where you can put something like this … at least, not unless you want to move out to the desert, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth, believe me.”
“Then why here?”
“The trick is to hide in plain sight. Now pay attention. This is how you get in.” Turning on the phone, the colonel switched to hands-off mode, then pressed a couple of digits on the keypad. The dial tone was replaced by the swift electronic beeping of a number being dialed, then the phone on the other end of the line buzzed three times before it was picked up. “ICR, may I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Extension 121, please,” Ogilvy said.
“One moment, I’ll connect you.” Ambient music drifted over the speakerphone for a few moments, then the other line was picked up again. “Shipping, Roucheau speaking,” a man’s voice said.
“Hi, is Gary in?” Ogilvy asked, giving Murphy a sly wink.
“Sorry, he’s out sick today.” The voice sounded bored. “Wanna leave a message?”
“Thanks. Just tell him Jeff called, okay?”
“Jeff called. Right. Will do.”
“Thanks, bye.” The line was hung up, and Ogilvy reached over to switch off the cell phone. “Got that? As you’re coming in, you call this number—555-8602—and ask for extension 121, then ask whoever picks up for Gary. He’s always going to be sick or out to lunch … unless there’s a site emergency, then he’ll be out of town. Understand?”
“Right. Ask for Gary, tell ’em Jeff called.” Murphy was admiring the countryside. Woods, farmland, mountains on all four sides. The foothills of the Berkshires. Deer season was pretty good around here, or at least so he had been told, although he had a feeling he wouldn’t get a chance to do much hunting. “What happens if there’s an emergency?”
“Drive past. Go straight home and wait for someone to call you.” Baird shook his head. “Don’t worry, it’s just a precaution. We’re not anticipating any problems.”
Murphy nodded. Although this part of western Massachusetts was as rural as you could get, they weren’t exactly in the middle of nowhere. On the right, they passed a convenience store and log-cabin barbecue shack; on the left, a farm-equipment supplier and a vegetable stand. Hidden-in plain sight, he reminded himself. “What does ICR stand for, anyway?”
“Doesn’t stand for anything.” The colonel smiled at him from behind his sunglasses. After seven months of working together in the Pentagon, Murphy was still getting used to seeing him in civilian clothes again. “Three letters a DOD computer selected at random. If anyone asks, though, we make precision machine parts for offshore oil rigs. Hope you like being a company VP.”
“It’s a promotion,” Murphy said sourly. Although he was glad to get out of Washington, Donna had been upset when he resigned from OPS to take an unglamorous job in the private sector, until he pointed out that his annual salary would be three times that which he earned as a government employee and that Steven would be able to attend public schools where they wouldn’t have to worry about him getting harassed by street gangs. And the place they were buying in Deerfield was a bargain: a refurbished turn-of-the-century farmhouse on two acres, with a clear view of Mt. Sugarloaf from the kitchen window. For the first time in years, they wouldn’t have to worry much about traffic, crime, or smog. They would even be able to give Steven the dog he wanted so much. Life was looking up.…
So long as he continued to lie to his family about what he was really doing out here, and pretend that the words Blue Plate only referred to a restaurant dinner special.
“Here we are.” Ogilvy slowed down, clicked the turn indicator downward as he turned left into a paved driveway. “Your new lab.”
It didn’t look anything like a government research facility: a large, flat-roofed factory building, the letters ICR painted across one panel of its beige aluminum-sided walls. Although a ten-foot chain-link fence surrounded the premises, there was no gatehouse, no armed guards patrolling the perimeter. Three sixteen-wheel trucks, each stenciled with the ICR logo, were parked beside the loading dock; Murphy spotted several men hauling crates from the trailers, some large enough to require forklifts. A black man riding a mower looked up as they pulled into the parking lot, then went back to cutting the grass. Everything was as boring as boring can be.
As Murphy and Ogilvy opened the Blazer’s doors and climbed out, a young man wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt pulled out over a T-shirt and a pair of jeans sauntered toward them. He glanced at Murphy, then raised a hand to Ogilvy. “Hi, Jeff!” he called out.
“Hi, Gary,” Ogilvy said, returning the friendly gesture. “Hey, lemme introduce you to my friend Zack. Zack, this is Gary. Gary, Zack Murphy.”
“Hi, Gary,” Murphy said, offering his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.” The young man shook Murphy’s hand, then he strolled away. “Have a nice day.”
Ogilvy moved a little closer to Murphy. “U.S. Marine,” he murmured. “He’s stationed out here to greet everyone who arrives. I’ve just introduced you, so he’ll remember your face from now on.”
Murphy stared at the young man. “Is he armed?” he asked quietly.
�
��Of course, though I bet you can’t figure out where he hides his weapon.” Ogilvy nodded toward the man on the riding mower. “So is he, and so’s the guy out back. They’re all named Gary, and so are their reliefs. We’ve got three guards on active duty at all times. When you see them, call them Gary after they call you Jeff. That’s the password.”
“Gary. Jeff. Got it.” Murphy watched Gary as he stopped, casually looked around, spit on the asphalt, and began moseying his way back across the parking lot. “Hard to believe that’s a Marine,” he said quietly.
“You’re telling me.” Ogilvy shook his head as he escorted Murphy toward the front door. “You don’t know what it took to get those guys to stop saluting every time they saw me.”
They walked into the building through the front entrance, where a nice-looking young woman sat behind a reception desk decorated with Beanie Babies and framed snapshots of children. “Hi, Jeff!” she said as they approached her desk. “Who’s your friend?”
“Lucy, this is Zack Murphy, our new VP. Zack, Lucy.” Ogilvy nodded toward the door behind her. “Is Doug in?”
“Yes, sir, he …”
“Don’t call me sir,” Ogilvy said, very softly. Lucy blanched as she hastily nodded. “Don’t do that again, okay?”
“Okay.” Embarrassed, Lucy reached into her desk drawer, pulled out a pair of laminated ID badges. “Doug’s in. Right that way.”
“Thanks, Lucy. Right this way, Zack.” Ogilvy led Murphy through the door behind Lucy’s desk, then sighed as it closed behind them. “That’s the third time I’ve had to tell her that.”
“So what does Lucy do, besides give us these?” He clipped the badge to his shirt pocket and flicked it with his finger.
“She’s the gatekeeper. When I called in, she was the one who answered the phone, so she knew we were coming. Remember, you have to do that every time before you arrive.” They began walking down a narrow corridor whose walls were decorated with framed photos of offshore oil rigs. “Other than that, she handles the public. When someone comes looking for a job, she tells them we’re not hiring. When the Girl Scouts drop in, she buys some cookies. When a reporter from the local paper wants to meet the company president, she arranges for an interview …”
“We’ve got a company president?”
“Sure. Doug reports to work every day.” Ogilvy grinned. “And before you ask, we really do ship machine parts out of here. They’re actually made in Taiwan, but you wouldn’t know unless you checked the serial numbers. We bring them in, put them in our own crates, load ’em on the trucks, send ’em to a warehouse in New Jersey, recrate them, and send ’em back here again, complete with new truck manifests for the interstate weigh stations. A never-ending cycle.”
Murphy was impressed. “You’ve got everything covered, don’t you?”
“Not yet. We still haven’t invented a time machine.”
The elevator at the end of the hall didn’t open until both Ogilvy and Murphy passed the bar codes on the back of their badges across its concealed scanner, then it took them upstairs, where the real offices were located. Here, everything was as busy as downstairs was quiet; the hallway was filled with stacked boxes and open shipping crates, and men were setting up computer terminals and phones on government-issue desks. “The first members of your team begin arriving next week,” Ogilvy said as they strolled down the corridor. “We hope to get everything up and running by Labor Day.”
“Three weeks?” Murphy raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty short, isn’t it?”
Ogilvy shrugged. “For the main research center, sure, but we’ll be doing work elsewhere. One of the reasons why we’ve established operations in New England is because we’re close to MIT and Cornell …”
“And Washington, of course.”
“The Senate committee insisted upon that.” Ogilvy clasped his hands behind his back. “We may see some of them from time to time, but overall I think they’re going to … ah, check this out.”
They stopped in front of a large windowless room whose open door was a little thicker than the others. Coils of thick black cable lay scattered across the floor; several men in overalls stood on stepladders below open ceiling tiles or squatted beside floor panels, consulting wiring charts as they installed nests of electrical line. “This is where the supercomputer will go,” Ogilvy said. “It may take a little longer before it goes online, but the schedule calls for it to be operational by the end of November.”
Murphy was beginning to feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. “And the main lab? Where’s that going to be?”
Ogilvy smiled and crooked a finger, silently beckoning him to follow. They walked to the end of the corridor, and the colonel paused before a pair of wood-paneled doors on either side of the hallway. “My office is here,” he said, pointing to the left: a strip of masking tape on the door read Ogilvy—MD. “And here’s yours. After you.”
The door to the right was marked Murphy—SD. Military Director and Scientific Director, respectively. Murphy opened it and stepped into an office a little larger than the others down the hall. The furniture was still covered with plastic, the walls as yet unpainted; among the cardboard boxes stacked in the far corner, Murphy recognized some as the ones he had packed during his last days at OPS three weeks ago.
One wall of the office was dominated by a broad pane-glass window overlooking what had once been a factory floor. The building that Blue Plate now occupied was formerly owned by an industrial ceramics company that had folded two years earlier; its machinery had been removed, and now the main floor was being converted into a high-energy physics research lab. From this vantage point, Murphy could see a couple of dozen workmen preparing for installation of the equipment that would soon go here: parallel-processing computers, control consoles, ruby lasers, a lead-lined radioactive materials storage vault, the tall steel cylinder of a vacuum experiment chamber.
Forget Christmas, Murphy thought. This is Creation itself.…
“Just don’t blow us up, okay?” Ogilvy said quietly. “You wouldn’t believe how many strings we had to pull to get funding for this.”
“I can believe it. Black budget, right?”
“Zack, the budget for this isn’t black … it’s ultraviolet.” The expression on the colonel’s face was as hard as his voice was soft. “The most ambitious scientific program in over fifty years. Nobody’s undertaken anything like this since the Manhattan Project. Nine months ago, I would have said it was impossible.” His reflection studied Murphy’s in the window. “I know what you’ve told the committee, Doc, but that’s Washington and this is here. So tell me the truth … you really think we can do this?”
Good question. He had been losing sleep over it for months now. In fact, the last time Murphy remembered having a good night’s rest was sometime last January, just before a UFO had crashed in Tennessee. Ever since then, the last words of the mysterious stranger he had encountered at Center Hill Lake had haunted him:
Depends what you do, my friend.
“Someone in the future did it,” he replied. “That much we know for certain. Which means they had to get started sometime in their past.” He looked straight at Ogilvy. “Yeah, we can do this. In fact, I’d say it’s a matter of predestination.”
Ogilvy didn’t respond. Instead, he rested his elbows on the windowsill as he contemplated the activity on the lab floor. “You know,” he said at last, “I was raised Lutheran. Religion never really took with me, but I remember some of it, and the idea of predestination was one of those things I remember being taught in Sunday school.”
Murphy put his hands in his pockets. He had never been particularly religious either, yet he felt even less comfortable talking about his beliefs than others. “Yeah? So?”
The colonel shrugged. “Well, you tell me that we’re predestined to do this, and on the face of it I’m not going to argue with you. As you say, someone managed time travel in the future, so it’s only logical that they … or, I guess, we … started here and now.”
He hesitated. “But personally, I was always something of a Sunday school heretic. I happen to believe in free will.”
“And …?”
“And …” Ogilvy appeared as if he was ready to say something before he thought better of it. “Never mind,” he finished, turning away from the window. “Just a thought. C’mon, let me show you the rest of the setup.”
Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1512Z
“And you say you began researching time travel in 1998?” Franc stared at Murphy in disbelief.
“That’s when the lab was built. We didn’t actually …” Murphy paused. He held his head a little to the right as if listening to something none of the others seated around the bonfire could hear. “I’m … I’m told that there’s other things you should know first,” he said. Noticing the curious expressions on the faces of the others, he shrugged in bafflement. “I don’t know how, but every now and then I hear a voice in my head. I was unconscious for some time before I woke up here, so maybe … perhaps it implanted something in my head.”
“I rather doubt that,” Franc said. “You don’t show any signs of surgery.” He peered up at the top of the nearby observation tower. The “angel” had vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared, yet nonetheless he had the eerie feeling that it hadn’t gone very far away. “Telepathic link?” he asked quietly, glancing at Lea. “It might be using him as a conduit.”
“It’s possible. Right now, it’s as good an explanation as any.” She looked back at Murphy. “But why doesn’t it want to reveal itself?”
“Where were you before you woke up?” Metz asked. He had left the Oberon and joined the others by the fire. “Did the angel …?”