Time spike

by Eric Flint

  Between Elaine and this… It was sure as hell the best day since three cops showed up at his apartment one morning, with handcuffs and an arrest warrant. He'd forgotten what it was like to look forward to the future. Okay, it had dinosaurs in it too. Big fucking lizards. Who cared? He clapped his hands, quite cheerfully. "Okay, guys, listen up!

  In twenty minutes, we're gone." He pointed at Elaine. "And we're going to need all twenty of them to get her ready. Her, not just the litter.

  She has to be completely wrapped back up in the sheets. Head to toe, with just her face clear." He hesitated, torn between new-found anxiety and common sense. "Well, that's a little much. We should leave her hands and arms free too. And then we're going to have to move her very carefully, all the way along, making sure she doesn't ever get spilled out of the litter. We'll spell each other, carrying it, so nobody gets worn out." He looked at the ground cover he was standing on, which was nothing he recognized. "We've got no idea what's down there." Elaine frowned. "James, I'm not a porcelain doll. Okay, I'm not in great shape, but-" "I'm not worried about breaking you, sweetheart. I'm worried about infection. That wound hasn't really healed yet, I don't think. I'm not positive and I can't be, without taking off the bandage. Which is the very, very last thing I'm going to do. Right the way it is, it's the best protection you've got."

  "Oh." After a moment, she smiled up at him. It was a great big smile.

  "Thank you for thinking of that, James. I knew I could count on you.

  Sweetheart." He wondered if a throat lump could be surgically removed.

  Probably not, as fast as it seemed to be growing. He'd just have to get used to it.

  Chapter 34 Margo Glenn-Lewis sat at the large conference table in the center of the underground site's main chamber and silently berated herself for being an idiot. Worse still, a confused idiot. That she was an idiot, was now a given. It was the confusion that annoyed her this afternoon. She was fifty-two years old, for Pete's sake, a highly respected and well established physicist. So you'd think that if she found it damn near impossible to concentrate on the discussion in a critical meeting because she kept finding herself thinking about one of the men around the table, she'd at least know the reasonwhy. Did she really find Nicholas Brisebois that attractive? Answer: shestill didn't know. Well… That was nonsense. Twaddle produced by a confused and befuddled brain, such as had no business residing inside the skull of a teenage pom-pom girl, much less a woman who'd been able to make a successful career-no, even a quite distinguished career-in a notoriously male-dominated branch of science. Of courseshe found Nick attractive. Very attractive, in fact. If she didn't, she wouldn't be fidgeting like this in the first place. The problem was that in the course of the week he'd spent in the research facility in Minnesota, she'd gotten to know him well enough to understand that any relationship with Brisebois would not be a casual one. Assuming any relationship got started at all, of course. She still had no idea if he found her attractive. The man was very self-contained, in some ways. To start with, he was a devout Catholic. Not ostentatious about it, but he was. Margo was a devout atheist. True, not ostentatious about it, either. She'd never do something like sue a school board or a city because their Christmas pageantry included scenes from the Nativity. Who cared? If the dolts wanted to wallow in their tribal superstitions, let them. Any kid who wanted to figure out things for herself could do it easily enough, when she got a little older. It wasn't as if you had to pry lose anything from the government using the Freedom of Information Act to figure out that any creed which thought that a Being capable of creating an entire universe gave a rat's ass whether you ate fish with scales or lobsters was no more sophisticated than hunters and gatherers somewhere who refused to eat rats because rats were their totem. That'd be a problem. On the other hand… She also knew Nick well enough by now to know that he was extremely good in the mind-my-own-business department. For that matter, so was she. If they had kids, the religious thing would become an issue-and she couldn't believe she was scatter-brained enough to even be thinking about stuff like this at a critical professional meeting-but that was a moot point. She'd never wanted kids, was too old now to have them anyway, and Nick already had plenty of his own.

  Five, no less. Besides, he'd said once, in that slightly sardonic way of his that she found very attractive, that it would take a direct intervention by God with the divine finger pointing right at him to get him to go through child-rearing again. That brought up problem number two. "-what we've tentatively concluded," said Leo Dingley.

  He turned away from the display on the far wall. "The time spike isn't simply stuttering and wobbling, as it keeps driving back in time, it's reverberating. That's what we've decided to call the effect, anyway, for lack of a better term. If you want the math, Malcolm can give it to you, but prepare to have your eyes glaze over. Me, I like to think of it in acoustical terms. The spike is emitting time bongs like a bell every time it stutters-and every time it does so, the time effect sends an echo ahead of it." "Excuse me, Leo," said Esther Hu. She was one of the paleontologists who'd come to the conference. She wasn't connected with the museum in Montana, though, as most of them were.

  She had a faculty position with SUNY and worked on the side as the expert adviser for the man she was sitting next to at the table. That was Alexander Cohen, a New York financier who'd nurtured a lifelong interest in paleontology through a foundation he'd sent up that dispensed grants. "Yes, Esther?" "Is this stillhappening? You keep speaking in the present tense. What I mean is-" "I understand what you mean. And it's a good question, too." Leo looked at the display on the wall and puffed out his cheeks, then blew the air out and said: "The answer-yes, I know you're probably getting sick of it-is that we simply don't know." "Leo's fudging," said Malcolm O'Connell. "It's true that we don'tknow, but the math really only allows for one solution that I can see." He pointed to the display. "What we're facing here is the chronoletic version of the uncertainty principle that's been bedeviling particle physicists for over half a century. We can analyze the raw data that comes in across only one axis, so to speak. We can tell youwhen it is-where it stopped, so to speak-or we can tell you where it's reverberating, or we can tell you where it's stuttering, or where it's wobbling. But we can't put all four of them together without removing the first axis." Cohen had a trim beard much like the one Morgan-Ash favored. And, like Richard, he had a habit of stroking it. He was doing that now. "Yes, I can understand that. But what would it look like from the viewpoint of someone inside the phenomenon?" He nodded toward Tim. "Let's posit, for the moment, that I'm Officer Harshbarger's friend Joe Schuler. What would I be seeing?

  Or have seen?" Leo looked uncertain. Margo leaned forward a bit and said: "Again, we're not positive. But the likelihood-the great likelihood-is that for anyone caught in the radius of the time spike's effects, everything would happen simultaneously. And, for all practical purposes, instantaneously." She gave O'Connell and Morgan-Ash a gleaming smile. "I will leave it to these two mathematicians-later, gentlemen, later-to debate the issue of whether the word 'instantaneous' has any real meaning. For a lowly physicist like myself, it means way faster than I can flag down a cab in Manhattan, and if that were an Olympic event, I'd have a real shot at the gold medal." Nick Brisebois took advantage of the round of laughter to study Margo, rather than having to pretend he wasn't. And, as had now happened many times over the past week, his resolve to let the matter slide because it obviously wouldn't work flew south for the winter. And, as so often, it was the smile that did it. That quick gleaming smile with the crinkled and intelligent eyes above it that that made telling himself he could just walk away seem utterly ridiculous. As the conference returned to business, he chewed on his thoughts. He had to leave the day after tomorrow, since he'd almost used up the week he'd taken from his vacation time. So he'd better start nailing down whatever conclusions he could. Conclusion number one. He could live with her political attitudes, even if some of them set his teeth on edge a little. Like almost
all military officers, active duty or retired, Nick was politically conservative. In his case, as with many if not all, that was not due to any attachment to any particular political party. He simply had a deep skepticism about the human race's ability to do more than muddle through, and was generally of the opinion that the old maxim "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applied in politics just as much as it did anywhere else. On the other hand, he wasn't oblivious to the fact that whether something was broken or not was often in the eye of the beholder-and the beholder's viewpoint was heavily influenced by where they stood. From the standpoint of many people at the time, Jim Crow worked just fine.

  So it wasn't as if the issues that Margo would occasionally express pungent opinions about weren't real issues. He could even see-quite easily, in fact-her side of the matter. The problem was the attitude that usually lay beneath, for him. He'd found most people with liberal or radical political views to be glib and cavalier in the solutions they advocated, and it was that more than anything else he found so irritating about them. Measures and policies that seemed clear and simple in a Manhattan cocktail party were not clear and simple at all, if you were the poor bastard in the trenches who had to carry them out. On the gripping hand-he was a science fiction fan, and particularly liked Niven and Pournelle'sThe Mote in God's Eye -it was difficult to imagine Margo at a Manhattan socialite's cocktail party.

  She'd been born, bred and raised on that most peculiar of America's islands, and in most ways shared its inhabitants' unique mix of hyper-sophistication and abysmal insularity. But there was nothing flighty about her at all. As he brooded and pondered, giving only half his attention to the discussion at the table, Margo flashed the smile at some jest made by Karen Berg. Nick, quit stalling. Just ask the lady out. If you leave without even giving it a shot, you'll be cursing yourself the rest of your life. Everything finally came into focus. That left the problem, of course, of where you went out on a date in an iron mine. "-world they'd be in would be predominantly early Cretaceous, but there'd be elements from every time and place the spike stuttered and wobbled-including, of course, their own-and every place in time periods still earlier where what we've called the reverberations struck." Cohen paused in his summary, for a moment, and stroked his beard. "You'd have everything in that mix, from modern plants and animals and people to animals and plants from-possibly, at least-as early as the Devonian. Am I right?" "Yes, Alex, you are."

  That came from Morgan-Ash. "How big would the geographical area be?

  What I mean is, at whatever time the spike finally stopped and… dropped everything off, how's that?" A little laugh went up.

  "At that specific place in time-let's assume for the moment that the center of the estimate is valid and they wound up in the year one hundred and thirty-five million BP-how big would the area be in which this incredible time jumble applied? I'm assuming, at least, that it couldn't possibly cover the entire planet." "Oh, God no." Dingley looked startled, for a moment. He'd obviously not considered this aspect of the problem. "I have no idea what sort of energy figures you'd need to carry through a complete time jumble that covered the whole surface of the planet, but…" He looked at the display.

  "Karen, go back to image ten, would you?" After she did so, he studied the new display for a moment and shook his head. "Not a chance, Alex.

  Even with almost all of the energy striking along the time dimension, that sort of energy would have left a crater in southern Illinois the size of…" He peered at one of the paleontologists from the museum, Fred Gibbs. "What's the name of that damn thing in Yucatan?"

  Gibbs smiled. "Chicxulub. The best way to learn to pronounce it"-here he gave Margo a theatrically apprehensive look-"but make sure there aren't any radical feminists around-is 'Chicks Who Lube.' If you say that maybe ten times in a row accompanied by any serious use of your visual imagination, I guarantee you'll remember how to pronounce it."

  That brought a big round of laughs; Margo's, louder than anyone else's. Once it died down, Leo shook his head. "I'm afraid-again, alas-that we can't give you a precise answer. But I figure the radius of the… okay, guys, what do we call it?" "Blast zone," said Brisebois. "Call it that, why not? I'm sure from the standpoint of the people caught in the spike, that's what it must look like." The somewhat grim note quieted everyone for a moment. Then, Leo nodded. " 'Blast zone' it is." He pursed his lips, studying the diagram. "I figure the radius of the blast zone has to be at least fifty kilometers. At the upper limit… figure two hundred kilometers. If I was placing a bet, though, I'd probably plunk it down on a radius of somewhere between seventy and eighty kilometers." "And-assuming you were in position to explore at all-if you traveled beyond the perimeter of the blast zone," said Cohen, "you'd find yourself in the normal conditions of the early Cretaceous." "That's right." The elderly financier leaned back, his hands on the table. "I have to tell you, I am deeply impressed with the work you've done here. It exemplifies, I believe, the reason I've been so devoted to the pursuit of science my whole life." A wry smile came to his face. "Perhaps some of that is compensation, I suppose, for a lingering feeling of failure. You'd think someone who can play the stock market as well as I do would have managed to get better than a 'D' in high school math and a 'C-minus' in physics and chemistry." Another little laugh went up. It was a bit hushed, though. All of the scientists around the table, if not perhaps the policemen, understood that they were on the verge of that precipice that all scientific projects were forced to skirt. The great yawning chasm called "money." Cohen understood it also, of course. He smiled serenely. "I think I can spare us all a lot of awkwardness, at the cocktail party you've gone to such lengths to organize this evening-no small feat, I imagine, in such an isolated area. I will have my people running the foundation start funneling every dime we can manage to The Project. We do have many existing commitments, of course, which I feel obligated to sustain. But I'm quite prepared to tap deeply into the foundation's capital, if necessary, not just use the interest and dividends." The scientists at the table seemed frozen. That would be their way of maintaining decorum. Otherwise, they'd be leaping around the room making war whoops and whatever pitiful attempts they could at dancing. The Cohen Foundation had alot of money. "There are some conditions, though. The first and most important is that I want someone running this show. I mean no offense, but the sort of relaxed and collegial way you've managed The Project's work thus far simply won't do any longer." The scientists were not entirely pleased with that, of course. But they'd half-expected it, assuming Cohen had proved interested. "Yes, of course," said Morgan-Ash firmly. "That sort of funding needs careful handling and accounting for." "I'm not particularly concerned about that," said Cohen. "Yes, obviously, we'll need serious bookkeeping and accountability. But I've done quite a few inquiries since I arrived.

  One of the things I discovered-not to my surprise-is that every scientist attached to The Project undoubtedly suffered some damage to their career prospects as a result of it. I hardly think people who'd do that voluntarily are people I need to watch like hawks to make sure they don't pilfer the till." He shook his head. "The problem lies elsewhere. As much as I'm fascinated by the science involved, my personal attitudes are far closer to those"-he nodded at Harshbarger and Boyle-"of the policemen sitting at the table." Grimly: "I also think a crime is being committed here. And quite possibly more than one. As I'll explain in a moment." He looked at the display. "The point is, I want someone in charge who isn't quite as… detached, so to speak. And, even more importantly, has a completely different mindset. I believe The Project is the most important-critical, at least-scientific project since the Manhattan Project. I will let you scientists choose your own equivalent of Oppenheimer. But I want my equivalent of General Groves." Nick Brisebois shook his head. "Alex, I think you're going way over the top. I'm not sure I even agree with Tim that you can call the government's policies with regard to these time events a 'crime' in the first place. National security run amok, sure. But that's not the same thing." "Isn
't it? I believe I can make a good case that, in a democracy, what you call 'national security run amok'is a crime." Cohen waved his hand. "Leave that aside for the moment. It's public knowledge that I am sharply critical of the current administration. They have no love for me; nor I, for them.

  But, being fair about it, it's not as if I think the previous administration would have handled the problem all that much better.

  Some, yes. I believe they would have, at least, avoided the absurdity of labeling the Alexander Disaster a terrorist incident-and, by the way, I can tell you from my sources that they will soon be announcing that they have finally concluded the Grantville Disaster wasalso a terrorist attack." "What?"said Margo. "Oh, yes. Wait and see if I'm not right. But don't put money on it, betting against me. My sources are very good. Yes, it turns out that Grantville was Osama Bin Laden's test run, so to speak, for 9-11. And if that strikes you as risible beyond belief, you will soon be part of a club numbering in the billions." Nick was the only one not joining in the sarcastic laughter. "Look, I'm not going to defend blithering stupidity. Believe me, I've seen plenty of it, after spending my whole adult lifetime in the military and the Defense Department. I still think you're overreacting. Dealing with a government abusing its authority-and doing it stupidly, to boot-is not the same thing as being at war. The Manhattan Project was a wartime project. And we're not at war."