Time spike

by Eric Flint

  Bradley Scott whispered. "We're ready. Sergeant Kershner says the soldiers are ready too." From somewhere south of them an animal bellowed. None of the people inside the camp recognized the beast making the sound. The six lizard-birds hesitated, and then became agitated. They sniffed the air and turned this way and that, using small hopping motions. For a few seconds, Watkins hoped they might get attracted by other prey. But, after a while, they resumed their careful stalking of the village ahead of them. The Cherokee chief was glad now that he'd instructed his warriors not to try for head shots.

  The way the creatures' heads bobbed and swayed as they moved would make them very difficult to hit. Ammunition was getting scarce, but time was even scarcer. To fire and miss, would mean taking time to reload. Even for a man good with a musket, or a well-trained soldier, that took at least a third of a minute. And while the creatures were moving slowly now, everything about the way their bodies were designed made it obvious that they could run very quickly when they wanted to.

  The soldiers, with their better muskets, had agreed to fire first.

  Watkins and Scott and their fourteen warriors would hold their fire until they saw what effect the soldiers' guns had on the monsters.

  They'd divided themselves into two groups of eight men each. Scott's men would fire after the soldiers, and Watkins' group would be the final reserve. If these things were like most reptiles, they wouldn't die easily. The soldiers were either very brave or very well-trained.

  Maybe both, but Geoffrey suspected it was their training. Sergeant Kershner was a stern disciplinarian, when he felt it necessary.

  Whatever the reason, they waited until the lizard-birds were thirty yards from where they were hidden before they fired their volley.

  Kershner, Geoffrey realized at once, must have come to the same conclusion that Watkins had. They hadn't had enough time to develop any detailed plans beyond the rough division of forces. The U.S. sergeant had obviously ordered his men to aim at only the leading two of the six monsters. Probably worried that if they spread their fire they wouldn't hurt any of them enough to matter. Those two creatures went down, as if they'd been poleaxed. The soldiers were all armed with muskets made at the Harpers Ferry armory. As big and dangerous-looking as the bird-lizards were, each of them had been struck by at least three. 69-caliber bullets. That still left four, completely unharmed. The beasts had scattered at the loud and unexpected noise, but they were already coming back. And now, unfortunately, they weren't bunched in a group. "Aim for the one on the far left!" Scott shouted. That was also the nearest one to his group, about fifty yards away. "And don't shoot until-" But three of the warriors had already fired before he got halfway through the command. Even when the Cherokees fought as allies with the Americans, which they often did, they fought as skirmishers. They weren't trained or accustomed to firing in volleys. Only one of the bullets hit, so far as Watkins could tell. Not surprising, at that range. The targeted monster screeched and jerked around, slashing with its teeth at nothing. The bullet had struck the tail, not far behind the hip.

  Geoffrey realized the creature must have thought it was being attacked from the rear. It suddenly dawned on him that the lizard-birds were under the same handicap he and his people were. They didn't know the capabilities of humans any more than humans knew theirs. This would be the first time they'd ever encountered gunfire-and as nasty as those heads looked, they also didn't look as if there was too much room for brains in them either. Bradley must had come to the same conclusion.

  There was no point in waiting until the monsters got closer, because they were now just milling around. Agitated and confused, smelling blood and knowing some of them had been attacked, but not knowing from where or by what. "All right, shoot at him again!" The other five muskets went off. At least one of the bullets struck something vital.

  The monster twisted, screeching, twisted back-lashing out now with that ferocious-looking huge claw, again at nothing-and then staggered and fell. When it hit the ground, it kept writhing and lashing out with the claw. That was enough. These were predators, not fanatics or soldiers trained to fight to the death. Even the most ferocious predators avoided dangerous prey. They went for the weak or lame or young, and ran if they encountered anything that looked like it might put up enough of a fight to kill or injure them. The three survivors took off at a run, heading for the other side of the clearing. Their speed was frightening. If they'd known enough to charge the soldiers after they fired, they'd have been upon them long before the soldiers could possibly have reloaded. Watkins would remember that. Belatedly, he realized he was forgetting something even more important. The best defense humans ever had against predators was the knowledge those predators gained that humans were prey to be avoided. And these monstersstill had no idea what had happened to them. Cursing his years and the creakiness of his joints, he lunged into the clearing, waving his arms and shouting as loudly as he could. A few seconds later, Scott and several other Cherokees joined him. Maybe one of the monsters looked back. He wasn't sure. "Will you look at those crazy savages?" sneered Private Sam Underwood. He'd broken off from reloading his musket to watch the Cherokees in the clearing, shouting and carrying on like wild men. "I told you they wasn't no different from animals." Sergeant James Kershner decided he'd had enough of Underwood. The Georgian's prejudices were so deep-rooted the man couldn't even think. And he was a nasty bastard, to boot. "Shut up," he said. "They're smarter than you are. They're trying to make sure those damn lizards learn to stay away from us." That didn't even budge the sneer on Underwood's face. "You say." "One more remark like that, Private, and I'll have you arrested. You're still under army discipline, and I'm still in command." His anger made Kershner's accent thicker than usual. Although he'd been born in Pennsylvania and his parents had given him what they felt was a proper American first name, he hadn't learned English until he joined the army. His whole town was populated by Swabian immigrants and still spoke their dialect of German. Underwood was just about as stupid as he was nasty. For a moment, he gaped at the sergeant. Then the sneer came back. "Arrest me, how? You ain't got a brig, Kershner, in case you ain't noticed."

  By then, Corporal John Pitzel had his own musket reloaded. "Good point." He cocked the weapon and shoved the barrel into Underwood's neck, just below the jaw bone. He wasn't gentle about it, either.

  Although English was his native language, Pitzel came from German stock also. He had less use for the Georgian than Kershner did. The man was even stupid enough to make wisecracks about Germans. Which, given that four out of the eight men in his unit were either German immigrants or born into German immigrant families, including the sergeant in command, qualified him as Stupid First Class. Especially since two of the other three men were Irish immigrants, and Underwood made just as many wisecracks about the Irish. "I think an execution in the field is called for, Sergeant," said the corporal thinly.

  "Insubordination during combat." It finally registered on the private that he'd crossed a line and was in serious trouble. His eyes widened and the sneer vanished. "Hey! Quit jokin' around!" Kershner considered Pitzel's proposal-which, he knew perfectly well, wasn't a joke at all.

  Normally, of course, he'd have dismissed the idea immediately. But there wasn't anything normal about their situation. And the fact was, they were heavily outnumbered by the Cherokees. Even if Underwood's attitudes and habits didn't get them killed, they were bound to produce an ever-widening schism between the soldiers and the Cherokees. Relations were tense enough, as it was. But what finally tipped the balance had nothing to do with military issues. James Kershner was twenty-four years and had all the normal desires that a man that age had. By now, he was certain they were stranded in this new world for the rest of their lives, with only the Cherokees for company. And he was pretty sure one of the Cherokee girls was even showing some interest. One of Chief Watkins' nieces. He thought her name was Ginger Tansey. A pert and lively girl, about nineteen or so, with a nice smile and bright eyes. "Shoot him,"
he commanded. The bullet damn near took off Underwood's head. He was dead before he hit the ground. The sergeant swiveled to bring the rest of the men in the unit under his gaze. "Any of you have a problem with this?" David McLean grunted. "Not bloody fucking likely. I plan to end my days surrounded by grandkids, like a proper Irishman should. And if their grandma is an Indian, I can't say I much give a damn." The only soldier who looked disturbed was one of the Germans. More confused than disturbed, really. The man was a bit slow-witted. The one and only native-born American soldier of old English stock in the unit looked downright pleased. "I couldn't stand that son of a bitch," he pronounced. "And I got no problem at all becoming a squaw man. Beats the alternative, hands down." "I don't think they like being called 'squaws,' " Kershner said mildly. "Fine. I got no problem at all becoming the swain of an Injun princess. That beats the alternative even better." "What's that all about?" Bradley Scott wondered. The sound of a gunshot had drawn their attention to the woods where the U.S. soldiers had been waiting in ambush. "I don't know," said Watkins. "I guess we'll know soon enough." And, in fact, less than a minute later the soldiers emerged from the woods, dragging the corpse of one of their own with them. They laid him down a few feet into the clearing and several of them took out spades from their knapsacks.

  Obviously, they planned to dig a grave, right here and now, with no further ado. "At a guess," Watkins said, "Sergeant Kershner decided to lance a festering boil before it got any bigger. That's the one they called Underwood. I had a feeling he'd be a problem, just from the few times I had to deal with him. He must have finally crossed a line."

  Scott rubbed his chin. "It occurs to me, Geoffrey, that we all crossed a line today. Or if we haven't, we should." Watkins thought about it.

  Once he'd gotten used to Kershner's accent, he'd come to realize that the young sergeant was very shrewd. Quick-thinking, too. And, it was now obvious, prepared to be decisive and ruthless when he needed to be. All the things a smart old chief looked for in a successor. And why not? Cherokees had been intermarrying with whites for generations.

  So had all the southern tribes. Watkins himself was at least a quarter white, in his ancestry. The top chief of the Cherokees, John Ross, was seven-eighths Scottish, if you calculated things the way white people did, by race instead of clan. They had a lot of years ahead of them.

  Very dangerous years. But, maybe, their children and their children and their children would have forever. If they started the right way.

  "Yes, I think you're right." That evening, before the soldiers started their usual separate campfire, Watkins went over to Sergeant Kershner. "Why don't you and your men start eating with us from now on?" he suggested. "We cook better than you do, anyway." He gave their tents a glance. "And starting tomorrow, we should build you a real cabin. Who knows? Winter might be coming." Kershner's smile was a lot more serene than you'd expect from such a young man. "Good idea. I was just thinking the same thing myself."

  Chapter 23 After they were ushered into the room-chamber, it might be better to say-that served The Project as its operations center, Nick Brisebois and Timothy Harshbarger spent a minute or so looking around with interest. Their companion, Harshbarger's police partner Bruce Boyle, even lost the apprehensive expression that had been on his face since he arrived at the site in northern Minnesota.

  Eventually, Boyle whistled softly. "This looks like something right out of a sci-fi movie." He gave the big table at the center of the chamber that the scientists used as a conference table a somewhat reproachful look. "Except you oughta have a captain's chair and a pilot's chair." Richard Morgan-Ash chuckled. "And how, exactly, would you fly an iron mine?" Boyle shrugged. "Don't ask me. But it wouldn't seem any stranger to me than the rest of this does." "Why'd you put it down here in the first place?" asked Harshbarger. "We didn't, actually. This facility was originally built back in the 1980s to study proton decay. That phenomenon was assumed to be so infrequent that they could only detect it if they could filter out the cosmic rays that would otherwise flood all the observations. Cosmic rays are so penetrative that you need an incredible amount of shielding to filter out their effects. Enough water would do the trick nicely, but it was more practical to use half a mile of earth." "Yeah, I can see that. Especially when the half mile is iron." "There's not much iron ore left, actually. Most of the rock above us is Ely greenstone.

  That's ancient rock, dating back almost three billion years. But it doesn't really matter what the exact substance is, as long as there's enough of it. Water would have done just fine, except that building a laboratory at the bottom of Lake Superior or somewhere in the ocean would have cost a fortune. This was expensive enough, even as it was."

  "So how many decaying protons did they find?" Brisebois asked. Richard smiled. "Not one, as it happens. Eventually they decided there was something wrong with the theory that predicted them. The whole thing would have been a bit of a boondoggle except the facility could be modified to study neutrinos and look for the postulated dark matter of most current cosmological theories." He nodded toward his colleagues.

  "That's what they were doing here when the Grantville Disaster happened, and their equipment picked up traces of it." "Traces of what?" Leo Dingley snorted. "Good question. We're still trying to figure that out. Me, I'm partial to a WIMP side effect of some kind.

  That's capital W-I-M-P, not slang. It stands for 'weakly interacting massive particles.' They're one of the proposed solutions for the dark matter problem." He gave his own nod toward his colleagues in the chamber. "Most of them, however, think that what we're observing will eventually be explained by some variant of string theory." Nick held up his hands. "Folks, I'm a trash-hauler and Tim and Bruce are cops.

  Can you put this in layman's terms?" Most of the scientists looked very dubious at that proposition. Morgan-Ash smiled. "You have to make allowances. They've lived their whole lives in academia. I, on the other hand, once had to be able to explain things to paratroopers.

  Even more valiantly"-here he puffed out his chest-"I have to explain things to a teenage daughter." Nick grinned. "Tough, isn't it? I had two of them. Thankfully, they're now both off to college." "So I'll do my best. You can think of what's happening this way. Our planet regularly gets hits by objects from space. Many of them are simply isolated occurrences, but many others are part of more concentrated impacts." "Like meteor showers," said Boyle. "That's one good example, yes. Most of these bombardments are barely noticed, beyond a show in the sky, because the objects are too small to have much effect when they hit the Earth. If they hit it at all, which most of them don't because they burn up in the atmosphere. You're with me so far?" The three visitors to the lab all nodded. "Well, we're looking at much the same thing. Exceptthese objects seem to be oriented along a different dimensional axis. If you think of time as a fourth dimension, perhaps that one. If you believe, as most of us do, that string theory is onto something, then we could be looking at as many as eleven dimensions."

  Dingley jeered. "All of which except the first four-even you admit this much-don't get beyond the string itself. Or exist in some hypothetical multiverse that we're just a tiny four-dimensional part of." Morgan-Ash looked patiently long-suffering. "Leo, can we hold off on the debate for a moment? I'm simply trying to explain to our guestswhat we think is happening. Nothow it's happening. The point is, gentlemen-regardless of what's causing it-the way these objects strike the Earth has most of its effects along a time axis instead of a spacial axis. Where a normal bolide from space that strikes the Earth-a meteorite or an asteroid or a comet-would expend its energy moving mass through space, these objects move it through time. They don't leave three-dimensional craters, they leave time craters."

  Brisebois scratched his chin. "In other words, you think Grantville was destroyed by what amounts to a time comet." Richard shrugged. "If it was destroyed at all. It's far more likely that it was simply carried back in time and left somewhere in our past." "But-" Margo interjected. "Somewhere ina past, he should have
said. That much we're certain of. No matter which way you calculate the problem, there's no way to account for what happens without assuming that a separate universe is created by the impacts. Or separate timelines, if you prefer. Anything else produces insoluble paradoxes." Nick shook his head. "That's not what I was getting at. I know the old saw about time travel being impossible because you might kill your own grandfather or just do something by accident that has the same effect. What I meant was-" But he got no further, because Harshbarger exploded. "Wait a fucking minute! Are you telling me that Joe Schuler is stillalive?"

  "Yeah," said Nick. "That'swhat I was trying to get at." The scientists in the room looked at each, even more dubiously than they had before.

  So did Morgan-Ash, this time. "Well…" he said. Margo stood up. "I think we need to quit beating around the bush. It's not as if we haven't all been kept up nights wondering the same thing." She turned to face Harshbarger. "Tim, we can't tell you whether or not your friend is still alive. The truth is, he might very well be dead. What we can tell you-and we're pretty sure of this, now-is that the time impact wouldn't have killed him." Harshbarger's face, flushed red a few seconds earlier, was now rather pale. "How sure are you about that?" Margo hesitated, but O'Connell now spoke up. "As sure as we can be short of meeting the transposed people and talking to them."