Time Bomb And Zahndry Others

by Timothy Zahn

  He was just starting back to the time machine when there was a faint sound from the double doors.

  He turned, stomach tightening into a knot. It could only be Saunders, here for a late-night briefing on the day's progress. If he noticed that the cameras were running—realized what that meant—

  The doors swung open, and Major Davidson stepped in.

  Garwood felt an instantaneous burst of relief... followed by an equally instantaneous burst of fear. He'd specifically requested that Davidson not be cleared for this part of Backdrop... "Major," he managed to say between suddenly dry lips. "Up—ah, rather late, aren't you?"

  Davidson closed the doors, his eyes never leaving Garwood's face. "I only hope I'm not here too late," he said in a quiet voice. "You've done it, haven't you?"

  Garwood licked his lips, nodding his head fractionally toward the machine beside him. "Here it is."

  For a long moment neither man spoke. "I misjudged you," Davidson said at last, and to Garwood's ears there was more sorrow than anger in the words. "You talked a lot about responsibility to the world; but in the end you backed down and did what they told you to do."

  "And you?" Garwood asked softly, the tightness in his stomach beginning to unknot. If Davidson was willing to talk first... to talk, and to listen... "Have you thought through the consequences of your actions? You went to a lot of illegal trouble to get in here. If you kill me on top of that, your own life's effectively over."

  A muscle in Davidson's cheek twitched. "Unlike you, Doctor, I don't just talk about responsibility. And there are things worth dying for."

  Unbidden, a smile twitched at Garwood's lips. "You know, Major, I'm glad you came. It gives me a certain measure of hope to know that even in the midst of the 'not-me' generation there are still people willing to look beyond their own selfish interests."

  Davidson snorted. "Doctor, I'll remind you that I've seen this nobility act of yours before. I'm not buying it this time."

  "Good. Then just listen."

  Davidson frowned. "To what?"

  "To the silence."

  "The—?" Davidson stopped abruptly; and all at once he seemed to get it. "It's quiet," he almost whispered, eyes darting around the room, coming to rest eventually on the machine beside Garwood. "But—the Garwood Effect—you've found a way to stop it?"

  Garwood shook his head. "No, not really. Though I think I may understand it a bit better now." He waved a hand around the room. "In a sense, the trouble is merely that I was born at the wrong time. If I'd lived a hundred years earlier the culture wouldn't have had the technological base to do anything with my equations; if I'd been born a hundred years later, perhaps I'd have had the time and necessary mathematics to work out a safe method of time travel, leaving my current equations as nothing more than useless curiosities to be forgotten."

  "I'd hardly call them useless," Davidson interjected.

  "Oh, but they are. Or didn't you notice how much trouble the various fabrication shops had in constructing the modules for this machine?"

  "Of course I did," Davidson nodded, a frown still hovering across his eyes. "But if the modules themselves were falling apart...?"

  "How was I able to assemble a working machine?" Garwood reached up to touch one of the machine's supports. "To be blunt, I cheated. And as it happens, you were the one who showed me how to do it."

  Davidson's eyes locked with him. "Me?"

  "You," Garwood nodded. "With a simple, rather sarcastic remark you made to me back in my Champaign apartment. Tell me, what's the underlying force that drives the Garwood Effect?"

  Davidson hesitated, as if looking for a verbal trap. "You told me it was the possibility that someone would use time travel to change the past—" He broke off, head jerking with sudden insight. "Are you saying...?"

  "Exactly," Garwood nodded. "There's no possibility of changing the past if my machine can only take me into the future."

  Davidson looked up at the machine. "How did you manage that?"

  "As I said, it was your idea. Remember when I balked at flying back here and you suggested putting a bomb under my seat to make sure a crash would be fatal?" Garwood pointed upwards. "If you'll look under the seat there you'll see three full tanks of acetylene, rigged to incinerate both the rider and the machine if the 'reverse' setting is connected and used."

  Davidson looked at the machine for a long moment, eyes flicking across the tanks and the mechanism for igniting them. "And that was really all it took?" he asked.

  "That's all. Before I installed the system we couldn't even load the modules into their racks without them coming apart in our hands. Afterwards, they were still touchy to make, but once they were in place they were completely stable. Though if I disconnected the suicide system they'd probably fall apart en masse."

  Slowly, Davidson nodded. "All right. So that covers the machine. It still doesn't explain what's happened to your own personal Garwood Effect."

  "Do you really need an explanation for that?" Garwood asked.

  Davidson's eyes searched his. "But you don't even know how well it'll work," he reminded Garwood. "Or if there are any dangerous side effects."

  That thought had occurred to Garwood, too. "Ultimately, it doesn't matter. One way or another, this is my final ticket out of Backdrop. My equations go with me, of course—" he pointed at the secured wastebasket—"and all the evidence to date indicates Saunders and his team could work till Doomsday without being able to reproduce them."

  "They know how to make the modules for this machine," Davidson pointed out.

  "Only some of them. None of the really vital ones—I made those myself, and I'm taking all the documentation with me. And even if they somehow reconstructed them, I'm still convinced that assembling a fully operational machine based on my equations will be impossible." He paused, focused his attention on the cameras silently recording the scene. "You hear that, Saunders? Drop it. Drop it, unless and until you can find equations that lead to a safer means of time travel. You'll just be wasting your own time and the taxpayers' money if you don't."

  Turning his back on the cameras, he climbed once again up into the seat. "Well, Major," he said, looking down, "I guess this is good-bye. I've... enjoyed knowing you."

  "That's crap, Doctor," Davidson said softly. "But good luck anyway."

  "Thanks." There were a handful of switches to be thrown—a dozen strokes on each of three keypads—and amid the quiet hum and vibration of the machine he reached for the trigger lever—

  "Doctor?"

  He paused. "Yes, Major?"

  "Thanks," Davidson said, a faint smile on his lips, "for helping me quit smoking."

  Garwood smiled back. "You're welcome."

  Grasping the trigger lever, he pulled it.

  The President's Doll

  It started—or at least my involvement in the case started—as a brief but nasty behind-the-scenes battle between the Washington Police and the Secret Service over jurisdiction. The brief part I was witness to: I was at my desk, attention split between lunch and a jewelry recovery report, when Agent William Maxwell went into Captain Forsythe's office; and I was still on the same report when they came out. The nasty part I didn't actually see, but the all-too-familiar glint in Forsythe's eyes was only just beginning to fade as he and Maxwell left the office and started across the crowded squad room. I noted the glint, and Maxwell's set jaw, and said a brief prayer for whoever the poor sucker was who would have to follow Forsythe's act.

  So of course they came straight over to me.

  "Detective Harland; Secret Service Agent Maxwell," Forsythe introduced us with his customary eloquence. "You're assigned as of right now to a burglary case; Maxwell will give you the details." And with that, he turned on his heel and strode back to his office.

  For a second Maxwell and I eyed each other in somewhat awkward silence. "Burglary?" I prompted at last, expecting him to pick up on the part of the question I wasn't asking.

  He did, and his tight lips compressed a
fraction more. "A very special burglary. Something belonging to President Thompson. All I really need from you is access to the police files on—"

  "Stolen from the White House?" I asked, feeling my eyebrows rise.

  "No, the doll was—" He broke off, glancing around at the desks crowding around us. None of the officers there were paying the least bit of attention to us, but I guess Maxwell didn't know that. Or else mild paranoia just naturally came with his job. "Is there some place a little more private where we can go and talk?" he asked.

  "Sure," I said, getting to my feet and snaring my coat from the chair back as I took a last bite from my sandwich. "My car. We can talk on the way to the scene of the crime."

  I was very restrained. I got us downstairs, into the car, and out into Washington traffic before I finally broke down. "Did you refer to this burglared item as a 'doll'?" I asked.

  Maxwell sighed. "Yes, I did," he admitted. "But it's not what you're thinking. The President's doll is—" He broke off, swearing under his breath. "You weren't supposed to know about this, Harland—none of you were. There's no reason for you to be in on this at all; it's a Secret Service matter, pure and simple. Left at the next light."

  "Apparently Captain Forsythe thought differently. He gets like that sometimes—very insistent on having a hand in everything that happens in this town." I reached the intersection and made the turn.

  "Yeah, well, this one is none of his business, and I'd have taken him right down on the mat if time wasn't so damn critical." Maxwell hissed through his teeth.

  "So what files do you need?" I asked after a minute. "Professional burglars or safecrackers?"

  He glanced over at me. "Nice guess," he conceded. "Probably both. We've checked over security at the—office—and it took a real expert to get in the way he did."

  "Whose office?"

  "Pak and Christophe. Doctors Sam and Pierre, respectively."

  "Medical doctors?"

  "They say yes. I say—" Maxwell shook his head. "Look, do me a favor; hold off on any more questions until we get there, okay? They're the only ones who can explain their setup. Or at least the only ones who can explain it so that you might actually believe it."

  I blinked. "Uh..."

  "Right at the next light."

  Gritting my teeth, I sat on my curiosity and concentrated on my driving.

  —

  Dr. Sam Pak was a short, intense second generation Chinese-American. Dr. Pierre Christophe was a tall, equally intense first generation Haitian. Pak's specialty was obvious; the lettering on their office door proclaimed it to be the Pak-Christophe Acupuncture Clinic. It wasn't until the two doctors led us to the back room and opened the walk-in vault there that I found out just what it was Christophe supplied to the partnership.

  Believing it was another matter entirely.

  "I don't believe it," I said, staring at the dozen or so row planters lining the shelves of the vault. Stuck knee deep into the planters' dirt were rows of the ugliest wax figures I'd ever seen. Figurines with bits of hair and fingernail stuck on and into them... "I don't believe it," I repeated, "Voodoo acupuncture?"

  "It is not that difficult to understand," Christophe said in the careful tones and faint accent of one who'd learned English as a second language. "I might even say it is a natural outgrowth of the science of acupuncture. If—"

  "Pierre," Pak interrupted him. "I don't think Detective Harland came here to hear about medical philosophy."

  "Forgive me," Christophe said, ducking his head. "I am very serious about my work here—"

  "Pierre," Pak said. Christophe ducked his head again and shut up.

  I sighed. "Okay, I'll bite. Just how is this supposed to work?"

  "You're probably familiar with at least the basics of acupuncture," Pak said, reaching into the vault to pluck out one of the wax dolls from its dirt footbath. "Thin needles placed into various nerve centers can heal a vast number of diseases and alleviate the pain from others." His face cracked in a tight smile. "From your reaction, I'd guess you also know a little about voodoo."

  "Just what I've seen in bad movies," I told him. "The dead chickens were always my favorite part." Christophe made some sort of disgusted noise in the back of his throat; I ignored him. "Let me guess: instead of sticking the acupuncture needles into the patient himself, you just poke them into his or her doll?"

  "Exactly." Pak indicated the hair and fingernail clippings on the doll he was holding. "Despite the impression Hollywood probably gave you, there does seem to be a science behind voodoo. It's just that most of the practitioners never bother to learn it."

  I looked over at Maxwell, who was looking simultaneously worried, tense, and embarrassed. "And you're telling me the President of the United States is involved in something this nutzoid?"

  He pursed his lips. "He has some pains on occasion, especially when he's under abnormal stress. Normal acupuncture was effective in controlling that pain, but it was proving something of a hassle to keep sneaking Dr. Pak into the White House."

  " 'Sneaking'?"

  He reddened. "Come on, Harland—you watch the news. Half of Danzing's jibes are aimed at the state of the President's health."

  And whether or not he was really up to a second term. Senator Danzing had played that tune almost constantly since the campaign started, and would almost certainly be playing it again at their first official debate tonight in Baltimore. And with the election itself only two months away... "So when the possibility opened up of getting his treatments by remote control, he jumped at it with both feet, huh?" I commented. "I can just see what Danzing would do with something like this."

  "He couldn't do a thing," Maxwell growled. "What's he going to do, go on TV and accuse the President of dealing in voodoo? Face it—he'd be laughed right off the stage, probably lose every scrap of credibility he has right then and there. Even if he got the media interested enough to dig out the facts, he'd almost certainly still wind up hurting himself more than he would the President."

  "He could still make Thompson look pretty gullible, though," I said bluntly. "Not to mention reckless."

  "This wasn't exactly done on a whim," Maxwell said stiffly. "Drs. Pak and Christophe have been working on this technique for several years—these dolls right here represent their sixth testing phase over a period of at least eighteen months."

  I looked at the dolls in their planters. "I can hardly wait to see the ads when they have their grand opening."

  Maxwell ignored the comment. "The point is that they've been successful in ninety-five-plus percent of the cases where plain acupuncture was already working—those figures courtesy of the FBI and FDA people we had quietly check this out. Whatever else you might think of the whole thing, the President didn't go into it without our okay."

  I glanced at the tight muscles in his cheek. "Your okay, but not your enthusiasm?" I ventured.

  He gritted his teeth. "The President wanted to do it," he growled. "We obey his orders, not the other way around. Besides, the general consensus was that, crazy or not, if the treatment didn't help him it also probably wouldn't hurt him."

  I looked at Pak and Christophe, standing quietly by trying not to look offended. "Did it help?"

  "Of course it did," Christophe said, sounding a little hurt. "The technique itself is perfectly straightforward—"

  "Yeah. Right." I turned back to Maxwell. "So what's the problem? Either Dr. Pak moves into the White House until after the dust of the election has settled, or else Dr. Christophe goes ahead and makes Thompson a new doll. Surely he can spare another set of fingernail clippings—he can probably even afford to give up the extra hair."

  "You miss the point," Maxwell grated. "It's not the President's pain treatments we're worried about."

  "Then what—?"

  "You mean you have forgotten," Christophe put in, "how voodoo dolls were originally used?"

  I looked at the doll still in Pak's hand. "Oh, hell," I said quietly.

  —

  "
Our theory is that it is the protein signature in the hair and nail clippings that, so to speak, forms the connection between the doll and the subject," Christophe said, gesturing broadly at the dolls in the vault. "Once that connection is made, what happens to the doll is duplicated in what happens to the subject."

  I gnawed at my lip. "Well... these dolls were made specifically for medical purposes, right? Is there anything about their design that would make it impossible to use them for attack purposes? Or even to limit the amount of damage they could do?"

  Christophe's brow furrowed. "It is an interesting question. There was certainly no malice involved in their creation, which may be a factor. But whether some other person could so bend them to that purpose—"

  "If you don't know," I interrupted brusquely, "just say so."

  "I do not know," he said, looking a little hurt.

  "What's all this dirt for?" Maxwell asked, poking a finger experimentally into one of the row planters.

  "Ah!" Christophe said, perking up. "That is our true crowning achievement, Mr. Maxwell—the discovery that it is the soil of Haiti that is the true source of voodoo power."

  "You're kidding," I said.

  "No, it's true," Pak put in. "A doll that's taken away from Haiti soon loses its potency. Having them in Haitian soil seems to keep them working indefinitely."

  "Or in other words, the doll they stole will eventually run out of steam," I nodded. "How soon before that happens? A few hours? Days?"

  "I expect it'd be measured in terms of a few weeks, maybe longer. I don't think we've ever gotten around to properly experimenting with—"

  "If you don't know," I growled, "just say so."

  "I don't know."

  I looked at Maxwell. "Well, that's something, anyway. If it takes our thief long enough to figure out what he's got, it won't do him any good."