Countdown to Armageddon
Page 3
“With twenty-twenty hindsight, it’s apparent Faisel collected a great deal of interesting equipment in the intervening years. Some he ordered ostensibly for his work. Much was simply requisitioned from the institute stockroom. He took delivery of the most interesting items at his home. Add it up, and by six months before the Rothschild incident Faisel had every component and tool necessary to fabricate a nuke. Everything, that is, except the fissionable material—and you just heard how that came to be in the wrecked lab. His lab, as it happens.
“Institute security routinely videotaped every vehicle that entered or left the grounds, and there were no lapses in their coverage. Interpol searched every car or truck present at any time between the van’s first arrival and the explosion. They found nothing. The material was not removed from the institute. Fissioned or just melted, that plutonium could not hide from Geiger counters—only it did. The only traces ever found were, as I said, in the Dewars—and in similar low-level radiation in the van.
“It drives them crazy at Interpol that the institute’s ruins aren’t deathly radioactive. The inspectors are positive that the plutonium they had been tracking was at the institute that day. They’re just as certain that it couldn’t have been removed.”
“What about the van’s driver?” Harry asked. “What was his story?”
“He wasn’t very talkative when Interpol found him. Of course, he’d been shot in the back and stuffed into the utility closet by Faisel’s lab. Perhaps the good doctor had been less than candid with Hezbollah about his plans for their plutonium.
“That left everyone without a clue to the material’s location—until I heard your story. Time travel does make an eerie kind of sense. If the plutonium is not at the institute, but could not be elsewhere, it must somehow be elsewhen. I just can’t see how to convince the powers that be of such a fantastic explanation.
“Plutonium in the hands of any terrorist is a terrible threat to us all. When a world-class physicist like Faisel is involved . . .” Terrence shuddered. “We dare not delude ourselves that the madmen cannot fashion the stuff into a bomb.
“I need to understand how Faisel used time travel to spirit away the material. I must know to when he might have gone, and to when he might reappear with his nuclear device. I must make a compelling enough case to convince even such hardheaded pragmatists as my former employers.” Terrence locked eyes with his host. “To accomplish any of that, Harry, I need your help.”
Harry turned away—
And Julia’s questioning stare was as uncomfortable. He closed his eyes. For so many years he had tried not to talk about time travel. He had sifted his memories of that horrible day for any clue, some detail however tiny, to disprove his chain of inferences. To speak openly now would be a tremendous relief. No wonder he had finally let slip the story.
Harry opened his eyes. “All right, then, perhaps it is time that I talk. I’ll tell you what I think happened. Don’t expect it to help you.”
The after-dinner coffee had cooled, untasted, while Harry organized his thoughts; he took a sip without noticing the temperature. He was conscious, instead, of two pairs of eyes studying him. Julia’s pair still smoldered.
He set down the cup. Where to begin . . . ? “George Gamow, one of the first nuclear physicists, said that a theory wasn’t worth a damn if it couldn’t be explained to a barmaid.”
Julia slugged him on the arm. “I’m less than thrilled that you held out on me for all these years. Condescension now won’t help.”
“I would never condescend . . . .” Another jab to the same spot interrupted his feeble jest. He rubbed the incipient bruise. “Gamow’s point was that good science doesn’t hide in math: It’s intuitive. I only meant that I’d try to live up to his standard.”
And so, he talked. Julia perched on the edge of the sofa scribbling notes, and Terrence sat as though mesmerized. Harry himself paced about the living room, hands jammed in his pockets. He talked about energy and time and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Julia and Terrence interrupted occasionally, but always with insightful questions. Gamow clearly was correct.
Finally, talked out, Harry collapsed into an armchair, the cushion going whoosh beneath him. The whoosh seemed somehow metaphoric. “I’ll sit quietly till the men in white coats come.”
Julia spoke first. “Skip the dramatics. Just tell me if I have this straight. Given enough energy, applied quickly enough, any mass can move through time.” Harry nodded. “The catch is that energy cannot be permanently borrowed from one time to another, so a moment later—the duration defined somehow by this uncertainty principle—the transferred object, and the energy which moved it, snap back to the time from which they originated.”
Ambling took over. “Because of this snapback effect, you physicists have considered this concept for time travel to be an interesting mathematical quirk, devoid of any physical meaning. Until five years ago, anyway. You assume that Faisel took this theory seriously and found a way to stay moved in time.”
Then Terrence too fell silent, so Harry went on. “There’s always been another interesting mathematical possibility: Repay the energy loan from the destination end of the time trip, before the snapback happens. That’s what I think Faisel did. That’s why there was no sign of him after the explosion.”
Julia nibbled on a lock of hair, concentrating hard. “Is there any way to know where—I mean when—he went? Can you even know whether it was to the past or the future?”
The first explanation had been hard enough, Harry thought. The next part will really be difficult. “I know exactly to when Faisel went, because he had no choice. I assume that you won’t mind my skipping some heavy-duty math.”
Julia snorted.
“Okay, then,” Harry continued. “The energy requirement to go anywhen is phenomenal. Not even the full stored power of the superconducting storage ring suffices for most destinations. There is, in fact, only one practical destination, a single time-shift interval whose energy requirement is currently practical.
“Einstein showed that gravity is only a manifestation of mass, a curvature of the space-time continuum caused by the presence of mass. No mass, no gravity. Time is similar—it passes only in relationship to . . . stuff. Each astronomical object, each planet, has a single achievable time transfer influenced by—and that can be calculated from—net local gravitation effects. That interval depends on its own mass, its sun’s, and the galaxy’s.
“It took me a while to figure it out, but yes, I know where Faisel went. He went more than a thousand years into our past.”
The long-suppressed story at last revealed, Harry was ready to move from coffee to liqueur. He poured Amaretto all around. “Can you see why I was less than eager to tell that tale?”
Ambling seemed greatly relieved by the strange narrative. “So Faisel must have triggered his homemade atom bomb on arrival in the past to repay the energy loan. Some of the power he unleashed snapped back to repay his energy debt, destroying the institute. The radiation remained in the past, probably covered by an avalanche. Small wonder no evidence was ever found.”
“I still don’t get it.” Julia spoke before Harry could express his own misgivings. “Why perform such an elaborate suicide? Steal plutonium, build an atom bomb, build a time machine, travel back a thousand years, then blow himself up where no one would ever know what had happened? I mean, what was the point?”
Ambling set down his drink. “Islam was in cultural ascendancy through most of the Middle Ages, something we Westerners have mostly forgotten. You can bet Moslems remember having won the Crusades. It makes a strange kind of sense that a depressed suicidal Arab chose to die then.”
Harry could only shrug. “I didn’t know about the plutonium until today, yet I always believed that Faisel had a way to stay in the past. I always believed that he had a purpose. Learning about the plutonium hasn’t changed my intuition.”
“Sorry, folks,” Harry said. “I’ve got one more lecture. I’ve read those stories, sure. Many do split the universe whenever more than one outcome is possible. How convenient: Never decide between outcomes, just spawn another universe.” Harry waved his arms grandly over his head. “See them all, a vast continuum of universes. Here’s a universe wildly different from ours—say, where Hitler won World War II. Here’s another where I chose Irish Cream instead of Amaretto, and another where I stumbled and spilled a drop on the floor.
“It would be easiest to think that Faisel can’t change the past, that he can only start yet another set of new universes. If you ask me, it’s also nonsense: a false worship of symmetry. Where do you suppose the energy could come from to create all those parallel universes?”
Ambling retrieved a novel from the shelf and flipped idly through it. “Okay, so Faisel went into our past. There was surely no way back for him. Even if Faisel somehow survived the trip, he’s long dead. We’ve already survived whatever mischief he may have planned.”
Harry had read the book Terrence held. In it, the paratime police conveniently put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Was life ever that simple?
He chugged the rest of his drink. “Not exactly. Faisel went into the past five years ago. We’ve only experienced the effects of his first five years there.”
“Huh?” Julia looked at him blankly. “Take pity on the physics-impaired.”
“This explanation really cries out for pencil and paper, but I’ll see what I can do.” Harry rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Let’s try this. We all move into the future at one rate: one second per second. That’s as true for stranded time travelers as for you and me. All right so far?” She nodded tentatively. “The timeline must be consistent from end to end. For example, our Johnny is eight years old now because he was born eight years ago. We haven’t yet experienced what he’ll do when he’s ten.
“In its own weird way, even time travel observes cause and effect. We can’t see effects at our end of the must-remain-consistent timeline until Faisel has had the chance to cause them.
“Still think we’ve survived everything he can do in the past? Here’s a disproof by contradiction. Suppose we can detect something today that Faisel did—will do—ten years after he went back. Whatever that effect is, it had to have a cause. Since Faisel has only been in the past for five years, as he sees the timeline, he hasn’t yet been that cause. In other words, we’ve assumed that he’s the cause and shown it would violate timeline consistency for him to do so.
“Ergo, barmaid,” Harry flourished his empty glass, “the assumption won’t fly. We can’t yet see an effect from Faisel’s travels that he hadn’t caused in his first five years there.”
Julia nibbled her lower lip, ignoring Harry’s hint. “If he’s in the past, how could he not affect the timeline daily? It could be something completely innocent. Maybe because of what he eats, someone starves who should be my ancestor. Maybe because he kills a wolf, someone who once died childless now lives to have them.”
Sighing, Harry poured refills all around. “We’re getting unnecessarily glum, I think. Terrence, you’re the historian, so correct me if I’m mistaken. I was taught history is robust. Things happen when conditions are ripe. Look how often inventors independently get the same ideas at about the same time. No, I doubt that Faisel can influence history very much.”
Harry handed his guest what he considered a more plausible time-travel adventure. “Now you’ve heard the whole story. It’s strange, mind-bending . . . and utterly useless. It’s a great story, but in the larger scheme of things, so what? On the off chance that I’m right, we’ve got a twenty-first-century Moslem fanatic safely trapped in France during the darkest of the Dark Ages. If Faisel truly has a nuke, I’d much rather believe that he’s in A.D. 730 than in the here and now.”
Terrence’s liqueur glass slipped from his hands and shattered on the planked-oak floor. His face was ashen.
NEAR METZ, 725
A Brobdingnagian roar engulfed the thick woods. Black clouds of dust swirled and swept dervishlike across the ruined landscape. Rubble bounced and crashed down the steep slopes. Forest animals fled, predators and prey side by side, in single-minded terror.
Amid the devastation, a lone man fought to keep his balance. He failed. Like the rocks and broken trees around him, he slid, willy-nilly, down the hillside.
It was a wild ride through which he prayed fervently. Random projectiles battered and bruised him. Time and again, he narrowly escaped careening boulders and toppling trees.
A great stone outcropping snagged him, knocking the wind from him. Grimacing in pain, several ribs clearly cracked, he crawled around the boulder to huddle beneath its broad overhang.
A large box, its sides battered and scarred, slid past. The box hesitated for a moment, until the shaking ground started it back on its way downhill. The container vanished into the thick dust.
Dust clouds covered the sun. What little light penetrated the haze was blood red. Gradually, the din lessened. The rocks stopped falling. Animals howled, lost in the otherworldly gloom. Randomly, in tremendous spasms, the ground continued to shudder.
Slowly, favoring his cracked ribs, the man climbed to his feet. He freed a sturdy branch from the rubble; using it as a cane he carefully made his way downhill. He stumbled frequently, for what little illumination the sun still cast was shrouded by airborne dust.
Never had he beheld such catastrophe. The earth moaned beneath his feet. From every direction came the delicate slithering of loose soil and untethered pebbles seeking downward for a new equilibrium. As though proud heaven felt itself challenged by the convulsions below, a great stroke of lightning split the sky. Seconds later, an enormous peal of thunder roiled the ground-hugging dust clouds.
Through chaos and ruin, the man worked down the slope. He listened, carefully, past the whistle of the wind, the subsiding of the soil, and the whimpers of injured animals. Finally, faintly, he sensed an ethereal music.
The melody called to him. Casting aside his improvised cane, he broke into a fast stumble, wincing at the pain in his side but unable to hold back. The music poured forth from places unseen, louder and louder. He stopped when it seemed to emanate from the rubble beneath his feet. Agitatedly he dug, flinging chunks of stone and handfuls of loose dirt in all directions. The music swelled louder and louder.
His hand slapped smooth paneling; something boomed hollowly from the blow. The contact only increased his excitement. Harmonies swelling all about him now, he feverishly swept away the last of the debris. There! Handles! He unlocked the cabinet with a key from his pocket and twisted the levers madly.
Battered hinges squealed in protest, but they could not resist the man’s frenzied tug. Then, as the doors flew open, the music reached a crescendo: the triumphant choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Abdul Faisel, eyes brimming with tears, listened to the only MP3 player within twelve centuries. When the last cadence had faded into the swiftly falling night, he would begin moving the generally intact artifacts from the battered cabinet into a nearby cave. There he would spread his prayer rug and give proper thanks for a safe journey.
Allah akbar. God is great.
Faisel had first explored the cave in 1993. Carrying only a liter of bottled water on a sling, the hike from the institute grounds had been pleasant. The same trip today, with a full backpack and cracked ribs, through toppled and entangled trees, was much harder.
It took seven tri
ps to transfer everything from the storage cabinet to safety. Dragging the empty, but still-heavy and awkward cabinet for almost a kilometer, Faisel nearly wished he had brought Ali the van driver at gunpoint. He would bring a wagon and muscular staff when he eventually returned. It was just one more specific for an already long and detailed plan.
Now—with a campfire crackling before him, his stomach full of canned beef stew, and his boots off—Faisel indulged in self-congratulation. He had done it! He, bomb, and supplies were now exactly when he meant them to be.
Hezbollah had merely lent him their plutonium, expecting an atomic bomb back in return. For his part, he had promised to the sheiks a sword for Allah unlike any that had ever before been wielded. It was the details about which he had been less than forthcoming; the sheiks cooperatively mistook his vague, apocalyptic vision for zealous hyperbole. His was the most radical solution of all, and Hezbollah could be proud of its contributions—although of course they would never know.
Exhaustion took its toll. Staring at the flickering flames, he fell into a near-hypnotic trance. The fire burned down. Embers glimmered, reminiscent of red symbols that had so recently flashed before him: 14, 13, 12 . . .
NEAR METZ, 2004
Abdul Faisel was shut inside the massive enclosure, the initiation sequencer counting the final seconds, when someone rapped firmly upon the locked laboratory doors. The rhythm changed quickly to an insistent pounding. The rising hum of his apparatus muffled the voice.
“Wait!” The doors crashed open, admitting the stocky director of the institute. It could not have been anyone else. Only Mlle. Hubert could override his reprogramming of the laboratory lock. Her appearance at this moment went beyond logical prediction to prescience: At some subconscious level, Abdul had always known he would face her before leaving. He would have to pay the piper.