Millennium

by John Varley

  "I'm just surprised he thought of it so soon," Craig said.

  "I'm not," said Carole. "Think about it. He's a pilot in a cockpit and he's useless.

  Everything in his training is telling him to do something, but that's the Captain's job. So he's been trained to save the passengers, so he gets out of the cockpit where he can't do anything to help and goes back into the cabin where maybe he can."

  I nodded at her. It made sense. Tom thought so, too.

  "That would do it," he said. "But from an Operations standpoint, he's not part of the crew and his impulse should have been to do what the crew told him to do, not take off on his own initiative. He should have waited for orders from Crain."

  "Crain was pretty busy to be bothered with suggestions."

  It was batted around some more, until I called it off.

  "Turn it back on."

  This one went on a little longer than the other had. It was worse, in a way. You could tell that Gil really thought he had it. He reported his altimeter readings and they were looking better. His angle of attack was improving. He had his co-pilot calling around, asking about places they might ditch, wondering if they could reach the shallows of the Bay or the Sacramento River or something, they were talking about fields and country roads ... and suddenly his ground avoidance alarm started to shout at him. And there was the mountain.

  It would have been hard to miss even with a rudder. He tried everything he had, all his control surfaces, spoilers, ailerons, flaps, elevators, trying to wrestle the big beast into a turn.

  The talk in the cockpit became even more rapid, but still ordered, as Grain and his crew worked on it.

  He decided to get the nose up, flaps down, pull back on the engines, and try to stall into the ground, pancake it on that hillside and hope it wouldn't slide too far. By then he was out of good options and seemed to be thinking in terms of minimizing the violence.

  Then we heard a most surprising sound. Someone was screaming in the cockpit. I was pretty sure it was a man, and he sounded hysterical.

  The words were tumbling out almost too fast to be understood. I found myself on the edge of my seat, my eyes squeezed shut, in an effort to hear what the voice was saying. I had by then identified it as DeLisle. He'd come back.

  But why? And what was he saying? That's when the tape stopped abruptly and something heavy bumped into my side. I jerked in surprise and opened my eyes and looked down at my lap. There was a Styrofoam coffee cup there, on its side. "Warm brown liquid was soaking into my pants.

  "I'm so sorry, oh my goodness, here, let me help you with that. I'm such a klutz, no wonder they didn't want me for a stewardess."

  She went on like that for a while, crouching at my side and dabbing my lap with a tiny handkerchief.

  For a while there I was at a loss. I had been jerked away from total concentration on those dead guys in the cockpit, and then all this fell, literally, into my lap: She was inches away from me, looking up at my face with a strange expression, and she was stroking my thighs with a wet handkerchief. All I could do was stare at her.

  "It's okay," I said, finally. "Accidents will happen."

  "But always to me," she said, plaintively.

  It had been quite an accident, really.

  She had tripped over the power cord on the floor, which is why the tape machine went off. Her tray of coffee cups went one way and she, holding a cup in her hand, had gone the other. She'd ended up on the floor beside me, and the tray had ended up all over the tape machine.

  I went over to assess the damage.

  "I'll have to get another machine," the operator said. "Goddam stupid bitch. This is a five-

  thousand-dollar set-up here, and coffee's not going to -- "

  "How about the tape?" I'd had a chilling thought. Once, I played the original CVR tape before sending it on to the Washington lab. I was damn lucky this was only a copy. Nobody at the Board would be too amused if a tape came through a crash and then got ruined by spilled coffee.

  "It ought to be okay. I'll put it on a reel and dry it by hand: He glanced at his watch. "Give me half an hour."

  I nodded at him and turned to go find the girl, but she was gone.

  10 "The Man Who Came Early"

  Testimony of Louise Baltimore

  I got a taste of what the Council must lave felt. I had told those nine pitiful geniuses that my mission was vital to the success of the Gate project, and they had fallen over like ninepins.

  Now Sherman was doing the same thing to me. I suspected his authority was as spurious as mine had been, but didn't dare say it, and ... he could have been right. I felt the same superstitious dread of disobeying a message from the future.

  At that, I had healthy self-interest -- one might call it fear -- pushing me to argue against the proposal. Lawrence and Martin didn't even have that. It was fine with them if, assuming anyone had to go back at all, I lead a commando raid into that fateful hangar on that fateful night. They could sit safely uptime and have the great pleasure of second-guessing me when I came back with another failure.

  I had a very unscientific, very primitive premonition. I was going to fail again. I think Sherman knew it.

  It went off very quickly. There were details to iron out.

  Lawrence was horrified to learn how far he had deposited me from my goal. He set his teams to work on the problem, and shortly was able to assure me that he could get me to within ten inches of my intended destination. I didn't believe it, but why tell him that? The practical details, on my end, were a lot less complicated. It would be a commando raid. I picked a team of my three best operatives to go back with me: Mandy Djakarta, Tony Louisville, and Minoru Hanoi. There would be no masquerade this time. We'd go back as thieves in the night. Our objective would be to get into that hangar, find the stunner, and get out without being seen.

  I put Tony in charge of equipment selection and planning.

  I guess Tony had been subjected to the same data-dump I had. At least he'd seen the same films. The uniforms he picked for us to wear wouldn't have been out of place in a World War Two movie. We were dressed all in black, with gloves and soft black shoes, and he even had soot for us to smear on our faces -- except for Mandy, who didn't need any.

  We had equipment belts, but all we wore on them was detection gear that we hoped would help us locate the stunner. No weapons on this trip. Stunning someone would only magnify our problems.

  Martin Coventry hovered over us like a nervous stage mother as we stood in line waiting for Gate congruency. He was full of last-minute bits of advice.

  "You'll be there from eleven to midnight," he was saying. "We show Smith arriving at 11:30 and leaving an hour later. So for half an hour you'll be there in the hangar with him, and -- "

  "We'll walk on tippy-toe," Minoru finished for him. "We've been through this, Martin.

  You want to come along and hold our hands?"

  "It never hurts to go over these things."

  "We have, Martin," I assured him. "It's a big hangar. There's a million places for us to hide, and it won't be lit very well: "I'm more worried about your end," Tony said. "If we're going to get out of there while he's snooping around, you'd better ease that Gate in real slow and real quiet."

  "I don't like it," Mandy said. "Why don't we put the Gate outside the hangar and break in?"

  Martin looked pained. "Because there were guards around it that night."

  "I don't like that," Tony said, darkly.

  "It can't be helped. You just trust us. Lawrence and I will have all the suppressors operating. The Gate will show where we planned, and it will come in without any noise."

  Be that as it may, the Gate didn't arrive all that quietly.

  I could hear echoes reverberating in the empty hangar as we stepped out. I wasn't worried, because we knew we were alone in there and the noise wasn't loud enough to carry outside the building. But I remember thinking Lawrence had better do a better job on the pick-up.

  "Right on the butto
n," Mandy whispered, pointing to the concrete floor.

  She was right. My brief excursion through the building a few hours ago -- or about thirty-nine hours ago, depending on how you looked at it -- had been useful in selecting an entry and exit point for the Gate. We'd selected the northwest corner, behind what was left of the 747 tail section and other large pieces of Boeing fuselage. It was shadowy enough that we had to get out our pencil-beams for a few quick looks around or we might have stumbled over something.

  When I had my bearings I gestured silently to the team to spread out and start looking around. Myself, I got out my detector and headed toward where the stunner had been the last time I was in the hangar.

  All the trash bags had been moved. It made sense. They'd had almost two days to sort the junk, and they'd made a lot of progress. So I started searching, creeping silently as any cat through the nightmarish mounds of wreckage.

  Fifteen minutes later I was still creeping, and the indicator dial hadn't jiggled half a millimeter.

  I gave a low whistle, and pretty soon my comrades materialized out of the darkness and we put our heads together.

  "I'm getting nothing at all," I said.

  "Me neither," said Pony.

  "Nothing."

  Minoru just shrugged and shook his head.

  "Ideas?"

  "These things home on the power source. Maybe it ran out of juice."

  "Or somebody's taken it out of the hangar."

  "Not likely." I realized I was chewing on a thumbnail. "He'll be here in fifteen minutes.

  We'll take ten of those, leave ourselves a safety margin. Turn on your lights, look everywhere you can", don't worry so much about noise. If we don't find it, we'll hide under the tail section and wait for the Gate."

  "This is going to be dry, isn't it?" Mandy said.

  "Don't be such a pessimist."

  "All time travelers are pessimists."

  That was Minoru's contribution to the conversation. Me, I don't know if I was born a pessimist or had pessimism thrust upon me. What I do know is that I've had ample reason to embrace the philosophy. A case in point.

  I'd been turning over small items for three or four minutes when I heard Tony make the low warbling call we'd agreed on in the ready-room. We stole the call from some Cherokees in a film from the 1930s, and what it was supposed to mean was "I've found it!"

  He sure had. We converged on him. My heart was pounding. We were actually going to get out of this. Then I saw Tony waving at Mandy, telling her to stop. She did, skidding silently, crouching twenty meters away. I did the same, and watched as Tony motioned her closer. Minoru appeared silently at my elbow, and we crept the last thirty meters.

  The light was very bad. It took a while to be sure what we were seeing. The first thing t identified was the stunner, lying all by itself about ten feet from a line of folding tables that were heaped with debris. There was a long object lying in shadow just in front of the tables, a few feet from the stunner. Gradually, my eyes confirmed my first gut reaction. It was a human body.

  "Who is it?" Mandy whispered.

  "Who do you think?" I said, bitterly.

  We moved in closer. I turned my light beam on low. It was Bill Smith.

  "Is he breathing?"

  "I can't tell for sure."

  "Yeah, he's breathing. He's just stunned."

  "Then he can probably hear us."

  Mandy and Tony started to back away.

  "Shit!" I shouted. I went on in a lower voice. "If he can hear us, then the cat's already hit the fan."

  "There's no need to make it worse," Mandy suggested. I supposed she was right. We all backed away and crouched down.

  "Are his eyes open or closed?" I asked.

  "Open," Tony said. "I'm sure he saw me."

  "What do you think happened here?"

  We all surveyed the still-life of disaster, and pretty soon the scenario became apparent.

  He was on his back. His legs were out, one of them slightly bent and folded under the other; that bottom leg was probably going to sleep, and would hurt like hell when he could move again. The stunner was a few feet from his outstretched left hand. Inches from his right hand was a Swiss Army knife with the long blade opened.

  Minoru put it all together for us.

  "He came in here before we arrived. He found the stunner. On the time-scans, we saw a red light coming from it. Power leakage. That's probably what he saw, too. He got out that knife and started poking around inside it, and shorted something out."

  "It's been damaged enough that the stun beam wouldn't be focused anymore."

  "Damn lucky it was set on "stun." We could be looking at a dead man."

  "I don't want to hear about "could be," " I said. "He could have gotten here when he was supposed to, at 11:30. What the hell is he doing here now? Why was he here before we got here?"

  "We'll have to sort that out when we get back."

  "What do we do now? Should we take the stunner?"

  I chewed that one over. I knew the damage had been done, but we'd come back to get it and there it was, so I scooped it up. I opened it and confirmed that it was all out of power, which is why it hadn't showed up on our detectors.

  "We take it." I looked at my watch. "Shit. We've been here fifteen minutes just talking it over. The Gate's due in twenty minutes. Let's get the hell out of here."

  "He's sure sweating a lot."

  I played my light over him. Tony was right. Pretty soon Mr Smith would be lying in a puddle. I tried to figure what all this would sound like to him. He couldn't have gotten more than a few glimpses of us, but it would have been enough to scare the hell out of him. He'd heard a few phrases. I didn't know exactly what we'd said that he might have overheard.

  Any way you looked at it, though, we must have looked menacing as hell.

  And what could I do about it? Nothing. I motioned the team back toward the northwest corner of the hangar.

  I even followed them, for about twenty meters.

  Then I found myself stopped. I don't remember stopping. It was as if there was something in the air so thick I couldn't move through it. I wanted to go on, and I couldn't. l turned, and hurried back to him.

  He hadn't moved. I knelt beside him and leaned over until I was sure he could see me. I remembered the blackface I was wearing; surely he couldn't recognize me from our brief encounter almost two days ago.

  "Smith," I said. "You don't know me. I can't tell you who I am. You're going to be all right. You're just stunned. You messed with something you ... " Stop, Louise, I told myself.

  You're saying too much. But how much was enough, and why was I even talking to him? I was sweating as much as he was, by then.

  "I wanted ... Smith, you're endangering a project bigger than you can imagine. Forget about this."

  Christ. How could he forget? Would I have forgotten? Would you? "There's going to be a paradox if you don't leave this alone: I suddenly went cold all over. I knew what he was thinking.

  "Oh, no. We didn't. You think we made those planes crash, but we didn't, I swear to you, they were going ...

  Shit. I'd said too much already. I thought I saw one corner of his mouth twitch, but it might have been my imagination. There was just the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the rivers of sweat.

  Everything I touched seemed to turn to shit. Believe it or not, up until recently I'd been a crackerjack operative.

  I turned from him and hurried back to my team.

  In due course, the Gate appeared and the four of us stepped through it.

  There were recriminations. I spent an unprofitable time yelling at Lawrence and Martin about the wondrous power of their prognostications. I recall saying things like I could have done better with a crystal ball and tea leaves. I could feel properly self-righteous about it; I hadn't screwed up this time. We'd been told Smith wouldn't show until 11:30. I didn't mention n. grief monologue with Smith, and neither did any of my team Not that they knew what I'd said to him, but they
could hardly have failed to notice I went back and said something.

  It didn't do any good, unless an unworthy feeling of redemption could be regarded as a good. I knew as well as they did that the readings they had taken before we left had been invalidated by the chaotic state of the timestream. We all should have realized that we could no longer count on the time tanks to tell us anything reliable.

  And once again, there had been changes during my brief absence.

  Apparently, as soon as my team had stepped through the Gate, many things had suddenly become clearer in the time tanks. Some of the censorship had eased, and the operators could see things that had previously been clouded. One of the first things they saw was that Smith had entered the hangar at 10:30. They even were able to see him find the stunner, pick it up, and, like a fool, start poking around in it. The whole thing had gone off pretty much as Minoru had described it. And, of course, by the time they saw it was too late to call us back.

  Martin was having a fit trying to understand why the temporal censorship was lifting. I certainly didn't have anything to contribute; I've never been a theoretician. If I had an opinion in the matter it was simply that God was having his innings, playing his little jokes on us.

  Free will, indeed!

  The other big change was Sherman. His mouth was now a much more realistic creation.

  He had added a nose to his facial accomplishments. He was still quite unlikely to pass for human, even on the darkest night, but he had at least become an interesting humanoid..

  I kept looking at his mouth. I finally convinced myself there really was no resemblance at all. Only a badly frightened, obsessed, defensive and emotionally exhausted zombie could have found a lopsided grin on that plastic face.

  I was the only one who even wanted to consider Window B. I still hadn't revealed to anyone that I had ruled out Window C, so that made it harder to argue my position. Everyone kept looking to Sherman for guidance. He kept quiet.