by John Varley
Martin Coventry explained it tome and Lawrence and few of my top operatives and Lawrence's deputy gnomes. He gathered us all around a time tank he had set up near Lawrence's console and outlined the situation.
I had to admit I liked Coventry. He was a walkie, and a worker, but not a snatcher. His field was temporal theory, which made him one of about a dozen people on the planet who could claim to understand a little of what time travel was all about.
What first made me like him was his skinsuit. I'm not sure how old he was, but it must have been the early twenties. It was rumored that he had just about every mutated disease it was possible to have and still retain a brain, but then one hears those rumors about a lot of people. I thought it likely he was closer to gnomehood than I was, even though I was older.
And yet he chose to wear a skinsuit that made him look like a man in his early sixties.
That's rare. Even I have fallen prey to the cultural imperative of our day that says if you're going to lie about how you look, then really lie. The face I wear could grace magazine covers -- had done so, in fact. And my body was a twentieth-century adolescent's dream.
Then here comes Martin Coventry mugging at the world behind a face that only a mother could love, pretending he's older than anyone has actually been for thousands of years.
But he couldn't have made a more brilliant choice. The drones probably back away from him in horror, but he doesn't have to deal with them any more than I do. The people he works with are all involved in time travel. We know what age looks like, and deep down where we aren't even aware of it there is something that still respects the wisdom of the Elder. Coventry plays on that for all it's worth. With that face and that bearing, he was able to stand before us and lecture us as if we were a bunch of schoolkids. I can't think of another person I'd have taken that from.
"Let us consider the case of the first twonky," he said. "The stunner lost in 1955, over Arizona.
"In 1955, accident investigation was the responsibility of the Federal Aviation Administration. In addition to FAA personnel, members of the sheriffs" departments of Coconino and Navajo counties in Arizona, and of Kane and San Juan counties in Utah visited the site in an official capacity. Constables, police, and volunteer firemen from Red Lake, Cow Springs, Tonolea, Desert View and several other tiny Arizona communities arrived within six to twelve hours, in addition to units from Flagstaff. United States Park Service rangers from the nearby Grand Canyon National Park were there and thought they were the first, but actually the site had been already seen by members of the Hopi and Navajo nations.
These were ethnic groups living in subjugation in the wasteland.
"Over the next several days people from the Federal Bureau of Investigation -- a sort of national police force who maintained extensive fingerprint files -- the Lockheed Aircraft Company, Trans World Airlines, and the Allison Corporation, manufacturers of the powerplants, visited the site. Several trucking firms were engaged to haul away the major or interesting portions of the wreckage, but a great deal of assorted trash was left behind as not worth carrying out. Seven local mortuaries were hired to cart away the organic debris generated by the crash, with eventual disposal and burial in fifteen of the United States and two foreign countries.
"In all, a total of five hundred and twelve people came and went at the crash site in the seven days following the crash. Another twenty-two, mostly morbid curiosity-seekers, came in the subsequent seven days, and the numbers tail off drastically from that point.
"We have done a scan over the ensuing three centuries. We have observed thousands of Navajos and Hopis, hundreds of hikers, and tens of thousands of coyotes in that time, and the Big Computer is following up on each potential contact. However, as you must realize, a completely thorough search of each person's life from the time he contacted the wreckage would take longer than the real-time events themselves; we must be content with a scan.
"In addition, if you go to the site of the crash even today and dig down about fifty feet it is possible to find pieces of airframe and engine. We have done that; it will take another day to completely sift the ground for a radius of three miles from the impact site, but the outlook for finding the stunner is not good. I will keep you posted on the results.
"The most promising avenue, naturally, is with the FAA investigators. We are looking into their subsequent lives minutely. There is still a chance that someone who went to the crash site picked up the stunner and carried it away -- indeed, if we don't find it in our digging, we must assume that someone did so. The problem, of course, is that the wreckage has been lying there for fifty thousand years, and the stunner could have been taken during any of the twenty-six billion minutes that have elapsed since that time."
I wondered why I'd ever liked him. The bastard was showing off. Facts at his fingertips, here's what we're doing, the investigation was in good hands ... I'd never have tolerated that kind of report from one of my people for even one of those twenty-six billion minutes. But since I wasn't in charge here I merely swallowed my anger and wondered when he'd get to the important part.
"The important factor," he said, confirming my judgement of what had gone before, "is the timestream itself. All the measurements we have taken so far show the timestream has absorbed this twonky with no disturbance."
I sat back and breathed a little easier. To sum up what he'd said so far, in a less windy way: Two guns had been left behind. One of them, so far as we could tell, would probably never be found. If it wasn't, then its mere presence in the past would not be enough to upset the delicate balance of events. We were home free.
Even if someone did find it, it did not necessarily mean disaster. It could have been rendered inoperative in the crash, in which case it was just an odd hunk of plastic and other junk. It might raise a few eyebrows, but nothing more. We could live with raised eyebrows.
We speak of the rigid framework of events, but the fact is there is some leeway.
Apparently things tend to happen the way they should happen, according to whatever plan was dictated by whoever's in charge of this stinking universe. Changes, if they are minor, correct themselves in ways no one understands but which tend to make a hash of anybody's theory of free will.
Picture an Indian passing through the site of the 1955 crash, many years later. He stumbles over Pinky's lost weapon -- broken, useless, but something that shouldn't have been there. He picks it up, scratches his head, and tosses it away.
If the universe were absolutely rigid then we'd be sunk: The time he wasted picking up the gun and throwing it away would change his life minutely, but the change would reverberate through time, growing larger with each passing year.
You could imagine any chain of events you wanted to.
The Indian gets back to his teepee five seconds later than he would have. The phone is ringing but he just misses a call he would have gotten if he hadn't stopped for the gun. (Do teepees have phones? Did Indians still live in them in 1955? Never mind.) If he'd gotten the call he'd have jumped on his horse and ridden into town and been struck by a car-driven by a guy who was on "his way to murder someone but now had to deal with a dead Indian -- so the guy who would have died didn't die, with the result that in a few years he'd discover a cure for a type of cancer -- which would afflict a President of the United States in 1996 -- so the President would be cured instead of dying when he should have died -- and a war would happen that shouldn't have happened.
If it worked that way we wouldn't be able to make time snatches.
But the way it really works leaves us a loophole. There are two salient facts to keep in mind: One: Things can be taken from the past as long as reasonable substitutes are left in their place.
Two: Events tend toward their predestined pattern.
Suffering from an energy shortage? Why not use the Gate to go back to 5000 B.C. and swipe a trillion barrels of crude oil out from under Saudi Arabia before there is any such thing as an uppity oil sheik? Fine. No sweat. Just as long as y
ou replace it with a trillion barrels of crude that cannot be distinguished from the oil that was stolen.
We can only take things that will not be missed, or that can logically vanish. (Who knows how many paper dips are in a box? Who is upset if one carton of cigarettes is missing out of a shipment of 10,000? A rational person assumes petty pilferage if he misses it at all; I have pilfered many a carton in my day.) But it's a very strict rule. It means we can only take things from narrowly defined times and places, and if we take anything major we have to leave behind good copies of what we took.
So if somebody is about to die and no one will ever see him alive again, why not kidnap him while he's still alive and leave in his place a wimp that is indistinguishable from the dead body he was about to become? Rule two makes that possible. The copy is not going to be exact, not down to the genetic level, not down to the sub-atomic level. It's going to weigh a few ounces more or less than the original. There will always be subtle differences, but the universe adjusts to them, short of a critical threshold.
And so we snatch.
But beyond these small, acceptable changes, things get very risky indeed.
The generic description for the trouble we were afraid of is "The Grandfather Paradox."
Simply stated, I go back in time, do something foolish, and as a result my grandfather dies at the age of eight. That means he never met my grandmother, and my father was never born, and I was never born. The paradox is that if I was never born, how did I go back and kill my grandfather? Nobody knows for sure. Theories about the Gate abound, some of them contradictory, but it is generally accepted that the universe readjusts along the simplest lines. It shifts around in some multidimensional fashion, and when it's through, no time machine ever existed. My grandfather lived, and my father was born because I never went back to fool with causality.
What that would mean to me, I don't know. Probably I'd have been a drone, laughing it up, having a great time, and finally learning to skydive. My entire life has been lived around the Gate. I have difficulty imagining myself without it.
On the other hand ...
(And there's always another hand in Time Travel ... ) My people did not invent the Gate. It's been sitting right where it is for thousands of years as civilizations grew up and fell around it.
We believe it was invented by humans, but we can't look into that time, obviously, since the Gate was in operation then.
And something happened to those people.
I wish I knew what. Possibly they got so scared of what they were fooling with they just turned if off and left it there, afraid or unable to destroy it, and wandered off into the desert.
We do know that the end of the First Gate Civilization coincided with a big war and a dark age. The survivors didn't write history books." It's the biggest gap between my time and the twentieth century.
People from my time have gone back to that era of the first Gate shutdown. So many of them that it is useless to scan it; the period is riddled with the blank spots of temporal censorship.
And none of them ever came back.
Perhaps this is tied up with causality and the Grandfather Paradox, but the connection is beyond me.
The point is, if the Gate had never existed I would be living in a very different world.
Possibly a better one, but it's more likely it would be worse. How could it be worse? Easy.
The Last Age could have been three or four thousand years ago instead of right now. The human race could already be extinct instead of just racing toward oblivion. It's sort of miraculous that we've lasted as long as we have.
That's one theory. It's the best one. The worst ...
It could very well be that if a grandfather paradox really gets going and history from the point of the twonky forward starts to come unglued ...
... we all softly and suddenly vanish away.
Not just you and me, but the Sun, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri, and the Andromeda Galaxy.
And so forth.
This is known as the Cosmic Disgust Theory. Or: If you're going to play games like that, I'll take my marbles and go home. Signed, God.
Coventry went on with quite a bit more eyewash about the Herculean effort his department was carrying out, peering into the intimate moments in the lives of around six thousand people who had been dead for millennia. It seemed to me like a good time to get some sleep. I probably would have, too -- let's face it, in just ten hours Coventry and his team had done a remarkable job, and so far seemed to have ruled out the 1955 accident as a source of temporal disturbance. I was feeling much relieved.
Then he got to the second twonky.
"Here," he said, "the situation seems hopeless."
Did you ever have the short hairs on the back of your neck stand up? Mine did. I heard a roaring in my ears, a sound of thunder like an earthquake building up steam, or the winds of change blowing through the ruins of time. I could hear God clearing his throat: Okay, folks, l warned you ...
"Ralph's stunner came down with the DC-10 in a pasture north of Interstate 580, not far from Livermore, California. There it was picked up by a recovery worker and taken with the rest of the wreckage to a hangar at Oakland International Airport, where it sat for about forty-
eight hours. At the end of that time, it seems to have come into the possession of a Mister William Archibald "Bill" Smith, an employee of the National Transportation Safety Board.
Of all the people who might have found the weapon, he is probably the worst possibility. He has technical training and an inquisitive mind.
"What he learned from his examination of the weapon is impossible for us to determine.
All we know is that he entered the hangar where the weapon was being stored at eleven P.m. on the night of December 13. We can observe him inside the hangar for only a short time; then a temporal blank intervenes, a period of censorship lasting two hours. When he emerges from the hangar, we can describe his actions only in terms of probabilities."
Somebody groaned -- it might even have been me. There was exerted talk, worried looks thrown back and forth, haunted eyes, the old smell of fear. You could hardly blame us. When we have to speak in terms of probabilities concerning events in the immutable past it means the shit has already hit the fan and the only reason we don't smell it is it hasn't hit us yet.
I won't go on quoting Martin. It's not really fair to him; he was as scared as the rest of us, and with him, fear shows up as pedantry. He got even more insufferably, prissily dry and didactic as he told us the story leading up to the casting of Bill Smith as the Most Important Man in the Universe, using the time tank as a visual aid.
My first thought when I finally saw Bill Smith there in the tune scanner was maybe I should go back and kill him.
Not the best way to begin a relationship. But if killing him would prevent him from upsetting the framework of fated events, I would have done it without batting an eye.
Naturally, that was the worst thing I possibly could have done. According to Martin's scanning, Smith had years to live. He was supposed to die in 1996, by drowning, and to kill him in Oakland could not fail to affect the timestream.
I sat and listened to the buzz of conversation after Coventry's exit, but I didn't join in. I was having an idea, and I didn't want to force it.
Finally, still not sure what I was doing, I left the others and went to a terminal.
"Listen up ... " I started, then decided ( was in no mood for those sorts of games just now.
"BC on-line, please," I said.
"On-line," it replied. "Am I addressing Louise Baltimore?"
"Yes, and don't sound so damned shocked. I'd like a straight answer."
"Very well. What is the question?"
"What do you know about Jack London Square?"
"Jack London Square is/was an area near the waterfront of Oakland, California. It was named for a famous writer. It came into being as an urban redevelopment project in the mid-
twentieth century, and was somethi
ng of a tourist attraction for those few people who visited Oakland for reasons of tourism. Do you want more?"
"No, I think that's enough."
I found Martin Coventry on the balcony outside the Gate building, looking over the derelict field. Or, as we snatchers sometimes call it, the Bermuda Triangle. In another age the place might have qualified as a museum. In our day, it was simply an historical junkyard. I joined Coventry and stood with him looking at the debris of five hundred years of Gate operations.
How would you go about snatching a one-Beater fighter plane? What about a plane that gets into trouble over the ocean and vanishes without a trace? Or a Spanish galleon going down in a hurricane? Or a space capsule that falls into the sun, killing all aboard? The best way to handle those types of disasters is to take the entire vehicle through the Gate. If it's a jet fighter, we field it in the retarder rings. The plane slows to a stop, we take the pilot off usually quite confused -- and then, depending on where he was going to crash, either catapult his wimp-piloted plane back a thousandth of a second later than we took it, or just dump it in the derelict field. Any vehicle which will never be found ends up out there on the field. Why send it back? It takes a lot of energy to send an ocean liner back through the Gate. There's a very good reason why nobody's ever found the wreck of the Titanic: it's sitting out there rusting away.
Right next to the pride of Cunard is a starship from the twenty-eighth century.
The derelict field is roughly triangular, five miles on a side, and is chock-a-block with every land, sea, air, and space vehicle imaginable. Right in- front of me were four propeller-
driven aircraft that, if memory serves, actually did come from the Bermuda Triangle."
They were in pretty bad shape. We'd taken them about fifty years ago and, like everything else on the field, the chemicals in the air had not done them any good. A rain shower :n the Glorious Future I call home is not something to take lightly.
"I was born to be an historian," Coventry said, unexpectedly. I looked at him. I couldn't have been more befuddled if he'd told me what he wanted Santa Claus to bring him for Christmas.