Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Last of all, Endicott tossed aside the revolver, dropping it on Edwards’ corpse. For the briefest moment, he stopped and surveyed the carnage—three shattered bodies, endless blood. How many of these phantoms, these aliens, have I killed? He was jarred to find he had almost lost track. Eight. No, nine. Mustn’t forget the first. Can’t forget killing myself.

  Cleaner hands next time, he vowed silently. I’ll let others do the killing the next time. That’s what separates Presidents from mobsters, after all.

  Then he walked toward the wall, through the gate, and out of the world to which he had never meant to come.

  It had been so long that the sensations were almost new, the shuddery tingling in his limbs, the coursing energies flowing like water over skin dead to sensation, the sightless images pouring directly into his brain. Endicott laughed in the soundless corridors in celebration of his victory.

  See what I am, Peter! he cried, lingering at the junction. See all the choices I have! I give you one world, a token for your hospitality. Scratch, you silly bastard, scratch and fight for your empty words, your shallow ideals. You’d have been better to stay in bed with Janice than to rise up to hatch your plots and plan your quests.

  Ah, Peter, you simple fool, you never learned the secret. Wait until your new world becomes real and your real world moves out of reach. Then you’ll see that none of it matters to God. Then you’ll see that we are God. So easy. Too easy!

  He chose a corridor at random and fought his way upward to it, seeing it as a well to be climbed, a journey from the darkness into daylight. His hands grasped, feet slipped and found purchase in nothingness. Upward he rose, the substance of the maze a channel for his will, the challenge a harmonic with his intent. His body grew light, floating, drawn upward as much as driven.

  Then the light above him vanished as though the corridor had closed, and Endicott was suddenly touched by awe. A gatekeeper for the gate. A cruel and lovely joke. He continued on, borne toward the new presence by currents in the very substance of the corridor. It was no mere runner that awaited him, no accident of transit. This one was one with the maze. This one embodied all the powers of the maze, and something more besides.

  Liar, he cried. Cheat. Oh, yes, now, you demon trickster, now you come to ask an accounting. Silken whore. Who are you to judge me? Thief and liar. Mother-raping murderer, you kill millions. I defy you. I defy you. You judge me for being like you, for learning your rules and playing the game too well. I know you, coward! I know you. Come for me, then, you bastard god—

  Then they touched, and Endicott screamed. He felt the cold dispassion, the inexorable power, the inevitability of his own destruction. For one brief moment, he merged with the other, before his will was drained and his essence dissipated like a handful of salt in the sea.

  And in that one frozen instant he saw with the demon’s eyes, saw the twinkling worlds like beads on a string, the whirling stars marching in soundless synchrony, the many-folded fabric of Time shot through with threads of gold, saw the pattern and the purpose, the patient handiwork, the intricate design.

  It was too late to recant, too late even to understand. There was time only to know that it was beautiful and that his death would erase a blemish on its sculpted face.

  Lexington, Massachusettes, The Home Alternity

  Margaret Mills was accustomed to looking out her bedroom window, beyond her backyard, beyond the gleaming outer fences of Hanscomb Air Force Base, and seeing the slump-winged tanker aircraft arrayed on the parking apron. She was accustomed to the deep-throated roar of a takeoff, rattling the house windows a dozen times a day.

  But never in the eleven years she had lived there, never in the five years since the big planes had replaced the mosquitolike fighters, had she seen and heard anything like what was before her now. Ever since Albert Tackett’s curious call that afternoon, she had been drawn again and again to the window, wondering what he had thought might be happening at the base. At last she knew.

  The base was lit up like a Christmas display, every spotlight and floodlight ablaze. Trucks scurried everywhere, and men ran instead of walked. It seemed as though every aircraft was in motion, creeping along the taxiways, queueing up for the runways. She stood at the window with the telephone receiver at her ear, barely able to hear the ringing over the thunderous rumbling of a hundred idling jet engines. Their smoky exhaust formed a haze over the base, blowing eastward like an oily fog rolling off a concrete sea.

  Margaret did not know where the planes were headed. Neither did she understand just what they would do there. But she was a pilot’s widow, and she felt the urgency of their departure as a shadow on the night—and feared both for them and for herself.

  “Answer, Albert,” she said anxiously. “Answer, Marian,” she pleaded. “Please be home to tell me how foolish I am—”

  At the end of the runway, a pale-bellied tanker lurched forward, its screaming engines a sharper note against the unrelenting background tumult as it rolled ever faster along the concrete ribbon. Trailing four twisted tendrils of smoke, it strained upward into the darkening sky, hurrying to a distant rendezvous.

  Stubbornly, desperately, she let the phone ring until after the last plane was gone, though she knew the phone was ringing in an empty house. When the futility overtook her and she hung up at last, there was not even enough feeling left inside her to allow her to cry.

  Boston, The Home Alternity

  The skies outside Tackett’s office were as dark as the tone of the meeting taking place inside.

  “I have to tell you, I feel betrayed,” Robinson pronounced in a stentorian voice. “Betrayed by Senator Endicott, and betrayed by you, too, Albert.”

  Tackett grunted in indignant surprise. “Me?”

  “There’s no excuse for this kind of screw-up. Three dead in a shootout, an evacuee lost, a violation of the gate house, of the gate itself—carelessness, that’s the only explanation. Carelessness and incompetence. Your internal security stinks, Director. Why were there only two sentries at the gate? Why was there no metal detector to catch the gun?”

  If he had been huddled privately with Robinson, Tackett would have pointedly reminded him of his contribution to the fiasco. With Monaghan and Rodman for an audience, Tackett made an effort to cloak his rebuke.

  “Senator Endicott was a highly motivated individual with special knowledge of the gate house,” Tackett said. “No one else on the evac list could have done what he did.”

  “You want me to write it off as an aberration, an exception—”

  “Mr. President, there was nothing wrong with our security at the gate house. We think of the Cambridge as our back door, and we keep it locked up tight. The problem was this morning I had to throw the front door wide open. I’ve got a hundred and sixty security breaches camped out on the ninth floor. I assure you they don’t usually get in that easily.”

  “You knew they were coming. You should have made better provisions for internal security—”

  Tackett fumed. It would help if you wouldn’t sabotage the ones we do have, you son of a bitch—

  “—I assume you’ve already taken steps?”

  Monaghan answered, “I’ve placed a Special Forces team on each floor, in the main corridor.”

  “Fine.” Robinson glanced at Tackett and thought better of voicing his next thought. “To other matters. Just before coming in here, I received a discouraging report. One of our patrol planes has disappeared off Puget Sound. It may have been shot down by a missile from the Russian sub it was tracking. And according to a CIA intercept, civil defense ‘drills’ have been scheduled for tomorrow morning in Moscow and several other major Russian cities—that’s the middle of the night here.”

  That conformed in every detail to what Tackett had heard on the recordings being made for him in the signal shack. But it did not explain why so far none of the conversations captured had been between the President and his Secretary of Defense. Robinson had talked to Rauche, to other members of the Jo
int Chiefs, to Madison, to the head of the FNS—but not to O’Neill, the man he had proclaimed would be his eyes in Washington.

  “It’s starting to look more and more like there’ll be fighting,” Robinson was saying. “In all good conscience, I don’t think that we can sit still and let ourselves be caught here. Starting at midnight, I want Alpha List moved to Alternity Blue.”

  And you’re number one through the gate, Tackett thought. He made one more attempt to catch Robinson in a lie. “Mr. President, does the Secretary of Defense agree with that evaluation?”

  But there must have been something in the way he asked it that betrayed his suspicion, for Robinson answered the accusation behind the question. “I don’t know, Albert,” he said somberly. “The fact is that, at the moment, I’m without Gregory’s counsel. I’m sorry to have tell you that the Secretary suffered a stroke overnight.”

  A lie to cover another lie, Tackett thought bitterly. O’Neill had anticipated his own disappearance, just as he had predicted everything else. Wheels were turning—the great steel wheels of a war juggernaut hurtling out of control.

  “He’s in Georgetown University Hospital, under wraps, very weak,” Robinson continued. “Bill thought we should try to conceal from the other side the fact that we’re without him. I suppose I carried the deception further than strictly necessary. My apologies, Albert.”

  “We can’t have the Russians thinking we’re weak, Albert,” Rodman said. “You understand that.”

  “Yes,” Tackett managed to say.

  “We just need to hold together, all of us,” Robinson said, backing away toward the door. “We’ll come through this, Albert, and we’ll be stronger for it.”

  He nodded, not trusting his voice. Thoughts in turmoil, he sat woodenly in his chair as Robinson and Rodman retreated from the room. Would it be such a tragic thing if Moscow were transformed into radioactive sludge? And after so many years of playing by pragmatic rules, why should covert action—even on this scale—suddenly make him queasy? How much did it matter who threw the first punch, after all?

  Slowly, his thinking crystallized. It did matter, somehow. There was something cowardly about throwing a rock at a bully and then running to your mother’s skirts. Even if you took a beating, you had to stand your ground and finish what you started. Honor. There was a question of honor involved.

  It mattered, too, because Rathole had perverted the organization he had worked so hard to build. Everything the Guard was, everything they had done, had been done to strengthen and secure, not an individual, not a government, but a country, a people, a tradition. Yet Robinson had co-opted the Guard into helping him endanger what they previously had struggled to protect.

  Monaghan was eyeing Tackett with a troubled gaze. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” Tackett said. “Something’s very wrong. We’ve been badly used, Bret. And I’ve been trying too hard not to see it.”

  “Oh.” There was a pregnant pause. “Do you mind letting me in on it?”

  “Do you mind being shot for treason?”

  Monaghan blanched momentarily, then moved closer. “What’s going on, Albert?”

  “I’m serious. In a showdown between the President and me, which side do you want to be on?”

  Monaghan crossed his arms over his chest. “Albert, I’ve got a lot of friends who aren’t going to get anywhere near that gate tonight. I’m scared to death for them. If you’re talking about something that might save their lives, I want a piece of it. What do you want me to do?”

  Tackett looked up with grateful eyes. “Help me stop a plane.”

  The senior communications specialist was playing cribbage with one of his technicians when Tackett appeared in the communications center. Tackett chased the technician away and dragged the comspec into the privacy of a glass-walled booth.

  “We’re going to find out how good you are, Zack,” Tackett said.”

  “What do you need, Director?”

  “I need to talk to Europe.”

  “That’s easy. We’ve got international access through the transatlantic phone cables.”

  “That’d have to be patched through a local switching center, right?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “That’s no good, then. This has got to go through. I need something that can’t be jammed or cut off.”

  “Then there isn’t any way.”

  “There has to be.”

  “The only medium with no middlemen is radio. We’ve got shortwave, because of Defnet—five thousand watts worth. We can flood any channel from 3 megahertz to 30. It’s a long bounce, but they’ll hear us all the way to the Ukraine. But radio can always be jammed. And if you’re looking for something private, look somewhere else.”

  “Who listens? Do you know who’s on what channel, worldwide?”

  “Not every little one-watt transceiver. But we’ve got a directory of the major players. This building is a hell of an antenna. We do a lot of listening when we have the time. Who do we want to talk to?”

  “The Kremlin. The Soviet high command. Any military units that could relay a message to them. Their Atlantic task force, whatever.”

  He whistled. “I didn’t think we were going to get directly involved in that.”

  “We need to, now.”

  The comspec’s jaw dropped. “Son of a bitch. Did they knock out Washington?”

  “Not yet,” Tackett said. “And if you do your job, maybe they won’t have to. Do you know the Soviet frequencies?”

  “Sure. They’re in the book.”

  He reached in his pocket. “I want this message to go out immediately, repeated at one minute intervals,” he said, unfolding a half-sheet of paper and handing it over. “Notify me immediately if there’s any response or acknowledgment.”

  Blinking, the young man looked up from the paper. “Are you sure about this, sir?”

  “Yes. Will you know if you’re being jammed?”

  Zack nodded, swallowing hard.

  “I’ll want to know about that, too. As soon as I’m gone. Special Forces is going to seal off this floor. I want this place locked up tight. No one gets in or out. Ditto for traffic. Everything incoming is embargoed, starting now. Nothing interferes with this, do you understand?”

  “Yes—”

  “Then move, boy, move. It’s getting late in the day.”

  The Baltic Sea, The Home Alternity

  Thirty thousand feet above the choppy waters of the Baltic, the modified VC-24 bearing the bomb in its belly bored on through the darkness toward Moscow.

  Its pilot, an eleven-year CIA veteran named David Matthews, used a light touch on the controls to keep the heavily laden plane in the center of its invisible lane in the sky. The copilot, as fluent in Russian as he was in the workings of their four-engined metal condor, quietly monitored the radio while idly scanning the blackness below for the running lights of freighters and fishing boats.

  They had every reason to think that the hard part was over. It had been almost two hours since the switch had been made, in the cloud-shrouded skies over the Norwegian Sea. Approaching from the southwest, flying a mere hundred feet off the water, they had seen the Soviet airliner go down, a fiery ball falling ten thousand feet through the blackness to the sea.

  How many other eyes also saw it and knew it for what it was, they had no way of knowing. Nor could they know if the key British air traffic control center had experienced the brief power failure intended for it, blinding controllers to the switch. They could only do their part: switch to the destroyed plane’s frequencies, activate their identification transponder, climb to altitude, and hope.

  The first hour had been the most tense. By the time they reached the Norwegian coast, they were beginning to feel confident enough to flash smiles and thumbs-up signals across the cockpit. They acquired Copenhagen air control, were handed over to Leningrad, all without incident. Ten minutes ago, the lights of Stockholm, looking like a carnival in the night, had slipped by just to the sou
th.

  Then, without warning, the copilot sat up suddenly and grabbed for a clipboard. One hand clamped the headset cup to his ear, closing out the noise of the cabin, while with the other hand he wrote furiously on the blank page.

  “What’s going on?” asked Matthews.

  The copilot shook him off, continuing to write. When he was done, he snapped the pencil back into its holder and stared at what he had written. “This just came over the Soviet A channel,” he said. “ ‘To General Secretary Kondratyev, Minister of Defense Pokryshkin, Commander in Chief of the Voyska Protivovozdushnoy Oborony Strany, units of the Soviet military everywhere: Warning. A United States military aircraft disguised as a Soviet commercial transport will attempt to detonate a thermonuclear bomb over Moscow—’ There, it’s starting again, plug in, you can hear it yourself.”

  Reaching out with his left hand, Matthews complied. He heard, “—will attempt to detonate a thermonuclear bomb over Moscow. This plane may already be in the air, following a direct commercial route from a West European city, with a scheduled arrival at a Moscow airport at or near 8 a.m. Moscow time. This is an unauthorized mission. Do not delay. Locate, intercept, and destroy this aircraft immediately.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the pilot breathed.

  “I don’t believe it. They sold us out,” the copilot said, still staring. “What the hell do we do now?”

  Matthews glanced down at his flight plan. “We keep going.”

  “An hour and twenty minutes to go. We’ll never get there. We’ll never even get to the border. Do you know how many fighters there are at Tallinn? How many SAMs between here and Moscow?”

  “I don’t care,” the pilot said firmly. “We keep going. You didn’t expect to live forever, did you? We’re supposed to deliver this package to the Kremlin. And it’s going to take a missile or a recall in God’s own voice to stop us.”