“I know. We cannot change Prime’s past, and Freddy and his team have already proved it. But I suspect you don’t like this dinosaur thing anymore than I do, Gail Sovergarde.”
The other woman shrugged.
“OK, so we divert that asteroid. Then what?”
“We spot check over a few million years,” Gail replied, relieved the conversation had moved to safer ground. “See what happens.”
“Up until the present equivalent time?”
Gail shook her head. “I thought that was the obvious thing to do, until Freddy reminded me that we humans only got started pretty recently.”
“What has that to do with anything?”
“So what would we be like today, if our primate ancestors climbed down from the trees during the Mesozoic and not just four or five million years ago?”
“We’d be—” An awed expression crossed the captain’s thin face. “Pure intellect?”
“Perhaps. Or maybe we would have long since polluted ourselves to extinction. No one knows. The point is, Freddy would rather not expose us to whatever remote sensing capabilities those distant dinosaur descendants might have. Presuming they do evolve intelligence, we will shift back to Prime long before they develop space flight.”
Fuchs nodded, slowly. “It seems Freddy has thought of all the angles.”
“I think so. It is why my objections have been—” Gail’s smile was wan, “—muted.”
With a huge sigh of relief, the captain leaned back in her chair. “You know, although I felt in my bones there was something wrong, I could not figure out what it was. Now you’ve told me—and it’s pretty awesome—I am glad our lord and master decided to avoid it.” She smiled broadly. “Dammit, I feel much better!”
Bertha was launched on schedule. The detects had done their job, plotting the exact course of the mountainsized wanderer to a point of impact on the Earth’s surface corresponding to what would be—in sixty-six million years—the Yucatan peninsula.
The asteroid was still one hundred and ninety million kilometers from Sol’s third planet, when proximity fuses exploded Bertha’s fusion warhead just above the cratered surface. On the screens it was a mere wink of light.
For better or worse, it was done. There would not be another try. Bertha was a one-shot.
Detect 23 was destroyed by the blast, 8’s sensors were overloaded beyond recovery. So it was nearly three days before the Francis Bacon’s own instruments, plus data from the lagging Detect 48, finally confirmed that Mesozoic Earth was saved by a margin of slightly less than five hundred thousand kilometers.
A few years later, Gail Sovergarde dictated into her journal:
And then we flitted from eon to eon like gods watching the progress of their children. We saw icecaps advance and retreat. Deserts, forests and pla ins shrank and expanded according to the great cycles of nature. The dinosaurs themselves changed, becoming smaller, swifter and more intelligent. The giant carnivores and herbivores were extinct within ten million years after AV (asteroid avoidance), after which a few species of four-footed mammals emerged on the plains. There were no mammal primates.
We overshot the genesis of the dinosaur toolmakers by some one hundred thousand years, but not their early villages near the great rivers on both continents. We watched as the villages became towns, as agriculture spread and roads linked the towns in a great web of commerce. Square-riggers sailed the seas.
There were no wars.
Perhaps the lack of conflict is why technological progress was, by our standards, inordinately slow. It took more than five hundred centuries for the dinosaurs to evolve from early agriculture to the equivalent of a steam-powered industrial revolution.
It was another two hundred centuries before the development of the first dirigible, and centuries more before mixed fleets of dirigibles and lumbering heavier-than-air freight carriers flew in their skies. By our time, it was forty-five million years ago when we prudently shifted out from that timeline and returned to Prime’s familiar present.
For a few hectic months I traveled with the SD team from city to city, and then to the Mars colonies. I shared the accolades, although even Freddy freely admits my coaching contributed in no small degree to his blossoming as a public personality.
Still, as always, there were the questions.
Also, as always, the doubts.
No one, not even Freddy, was particularly surprised when the ban was imposed almost exactly one year after our return from the Dinosaur Alternate. Although the SD projects had not triggered the spacetime discontinuance forecast by Stennerdahl and others, in its collective wisdom the Assembly instructed the Secretary General to suspend the Shift Dispersion program pending “further investigation of any deleterious effects on the environment..”
So it was done.
The Francis Bacon resumed its unglamorous role as an interplanetary freighter. Captain Geraldine Fuchs joined the fledgling interstellar program, and I semi-retired from the small screen to become a director of the network. Frederick Degruton did not do much of anything, other than spend most of his waking hours going through the voluminous reports of Project Dinoshift, eating and showering when he was reminded to do so, catnapping but never getting a proper night’s sleep, and frequently muttering something about “What we can do—”
After a couple of months of this, I moved out. Because I assumed we were still friends, I tried to keep in contact with Freddy. But he did not return my calls or answer my messages. Finally, in desperation I returned to the apartment. As I expected, he had not bothered to reprogram the maglock—
He was asleep. For a few seconds Gail stood in the doorway of the familiar bedroom, watching as he snored softly. To her surprise the place was clean. His clothes were neatly folded over a chair, and what she could see of him was scrubbed and clean shaven.
But his face was painfully thin.
She checked her watch: 10:30 A.M.
In the old days, he was up by six. It was an irritant she had learned to live with, as she ignored his puttering around until she later joined him for breakfast.
That was another life.
Letting him sleep, Gail left the bedroom and wandered into his office. Again total neatness, in contrast to the chaos of tapes, disks, books, and paper strewn about the room the day she left. He had two terminals going at the same time, she remembered, each hooked into a different data base, neither ever being turned off. She also remembered their bitter words, when he refused her request to use one of the terminals after her portable crashed while she was uploading to the network.
On the evening telecast of that day, she had to use someone else’s copy.
Now there was just the one terminal, turned off, the keyboard placed with mathematical precision in front of the screen.
“Gail?”
She turned. He stood in the doorway, blinking sleepily. “Hi, Freddy.”
He did not seem particularly surprised as he asked, “What are you doing here?” For all the expression in his voice, he could have been inquiring about the weather.
She shrugged. “I was worried. You won’t answer my messages.”
He nodded. “Give me a few minutes to do this and that, then we will talk.”
Gail watched as he went into the bathroom and closed the door. “This and that” was an expression from their intimate days, and her heart skipped a beat when he used it. On the other hand, neither of them had ever completely closed the bathroom door.
Guess there’s not much of the old magic left, Gail mused sadly, as she went into the kitchen and busied herself putting out fruit juice, milk and a couple of bowls of cereal.
When he came in, clad in a white shirt and slacks that once fitted but now hung on his scrawny frame like an older brother’s discards, the journalist had to force herself not to overreact. She simply commented, “You have lost weight.”
“I know.” He grinned. “Guess I had better start eating again.”
She went to the autochef and called up
a preset program. It had not been changed. “Eggs, toast, and bacon just as you used to like them. OK?”
“OK,” Degruton agreed as he began to spoon up the cereal.
During the next half hour Gail did most of the talking while he ate and drank profusely. It was a chatty onesided conversation in which she described her new job at the network, the day she spent in the company of the Secretary General at the World Assembly Building, her new corner office on the 130th floor, and the delight of her parents when she introduced them to the cast of the eternally running soap, Tomorrow’s Day.
Finally, he pushed himself away from the table. “Thank you.”
“For the food or the talk?”
“Both. But especially for the talk.” “In the trade, it’s known as verbal diarrhea.”
“In your case, that is like calling a rose a skunk cabbage. Gail, you are the only person I know who can make even a discussion of potato blight interesting.”
“Potato blight? When did—?” She took a deep breath. “Dammit Freddy, I am having the hardest time not discussing you!” She glared at him. “No, not just you. Us!”
Degruton reached over and patted her hand. “I know, and I apologize.”
Is this about to become one of our reunions? Gail wondered giddily as she tried not to look in the direction of the bedroom. She hoped not. He looked frail enough that a simple hug might break him.
But if she was gentle—
Instead, he said, “As much as anyone, you are the one to blame for the past few weeks.”
The letdown was so complete, she could only gasp. “Freddy!”
“After all, you did spend a lot of time and energy trying to get me to call off Dinoshift. So when we finally got home and found everything as it was supposed to be, I was tempted to make you eat your words.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Didn’t have the heart for it. Instead, I knocked myself out reviewing the whole project from conception to end. I did not know what I was looking for anymore than you knew what was wrong, but the further I got into it, the more I had a nasty feeling I was missing something fundamental; like not seeing the forest for the trees.”
Gail said helplessly, “Freddy, I don’t—”
He was remorseless. “Your instincts were right, of course. I did miss something. And it is because of my bloody stupidity, life for all of us—all of humanity—may become very precarious.”
Gail just stared at him. Physically, Degruton had lost a lot during the past few weeks. But his eyes were bright, and his words were those of a man who knew exactly what he was saying. She licked her lips. “What have you found that is so—” she fluttered her hands, “—devastating?”
He beckoned. “In my office.”
She followed him into the unusually neat room, and sat down as he tapped keys. He said over his shoulder, “We were looking for the killer asteroid. Right?”
She nodded. “And we found it.” “Meanwhile, the ship’s sensors were scanning the local region of space.”
Gail shrugged. “I learned enough while I was on board to know space is not as empty as it seems. The computer routinely plots the movement of every bit of cosmic flotsam within range, and alarms the bridge if anything is a potential threat.”
“Exactly. Not being particularly imaginative, the computer doesn’t give a damn what it detects, as long as whateveritis isn’t on a collision course with the ship. In fact, unless instructed otherwise, the computer even ignores any object which changes direction.”
“Like a ship, you mean.” Gail thought a moment, added, “Makes sense, I suppose. There are a lot of ships—” Her eyes widened. “But not sixty-six million years ago!”
“And even in our time, not above the ecliptic.” Degruton grinned. It was a peculiarly humorless expression. “You are almost ahead of me, dear.”
He pointed at the monitor. “See that trace? It was noted and recorded while we were determining the trajectory of the asteroid. Course approximately paralleling that of the rock, but separated from it by a couple of hundred thousand klicks. Now look at the trace from about the time Bertha exploded, and continuing until we time-shifted out of there.”
“It’s—” Gail was not an expert, but after months aboard the Francis Bacon, she knew what she was looking at. “It changed course!”
“That’s right. Even after Bertha shoved the asteroid into an Earth-missing trajectory, the object continued to maintain exact station with that confounded chunk of rock.” The grin relaxed, became a smile. “Interesting, wouldn’t you say?”
“Interesting,” she echoed weakly. She stared at the innocent blip on the screen. “It is a ship, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“Not one of ours?”
“How can it be?” Degruton asked reasonably.
It was not the answer Gail Sovergarde wanted to hear.
Earth’s first multi-generation starship was still under construction. It was not scheduled for completion and launch for at least another five years, and then its crew would not see another world during their lifetime. It was their unborn grandchildren and great-grandchildren who would set foot on the fourth planet of Epsilon Eridani. So on the threshold of what was hailed as mankind’s greatest (and most expensive) adventure, it was a humbling realization to know an alien star explorer had already visited the Solar System sixty-six million years ago.
It was as if Degruton read Gail’s mind. “You are thinking it was a visitor from outside. Right?”
She nodded. “Of course. What else can it be?”
“Too small,” he said. “That trace is of an object comparable in size to the Francis Bacon. Big, but not big enough to carry generations of star travelers.”
The journalist shrugged. “Perhaps it is a scout. One of several launched from a mother ship.”
“Too big. I told you, only something comparable to the Francis could return an echo that strong.”
“FTL.”
“I beg your pardon?” “Faster-than-light!”
“Nah.” He shook his head. “Good science fiction, bad science.”
Gail was getting irritated. She muttered, “Small and sublight. So it’s either a robot, or manned by a crew kept in stasis during the years or centuries of transit.”
Degruton addressed the air. “What do you know? She is as smart as ever.” He shook his head. “Nevertheless, I don’t think so. Although you just mentioned a couple of remote possibilities, there is another scenario which is much more likely.”
“And that is?”
He told her.
Gail stayed with Degruton that night. She needed his company, although she persuaded herself it was the other way around. Yet Degruton was the one who after months of self-deprivation was now calm and rational, who had suspected a problem, discovered the nature of the problem, and then solved it to his own satisfaction.
That his solution anticipated the probable end of human civilization as everyone knew it, did not seem to bother him. He was transformed into a dispassionate observer, apart from life as a reader is apart from the characters and events in a novel.
Could they tell anyone of his conclusions?
Dare they?
Gail did not understand how Degruton could sleep as if nothing had happened, while she lay beside him and stared at the ceiling.
After all, even if he was wrong and mankind muddled through the next few decades more or less according to the prognostications of most futurists, there was no guarantee it would remain that way. Although “to the stars” had been the battle cry for generations, and the culmination of that yearning was currently nearing completion in lunar orbit, there were still those who persisted with the disconcerting question, “But what if the stars come to us first?”
Most people preferred not to answer that question, or even consider it. Although Copernicus had forever dislodged mankind from the center of the Universe, an unconscious but stubbornly insistent part of the human psyche held to the myth of human exclusivity. Degr
uton’s new evidence had the potential to shatter that exclusivity—although the threat was not from the stars, but from a co-existing continuum barely a thought away in space, and eons ahead in time.
Frederick Degruton had solved his problem.
But for Gail Sovergarde—journalist, instant insomniac and a member of the human race—the problem was just beginning.
It could have been the biggest scoop of the age, perhaps even of the past millennium, although that would predate the media by a few centuries. Yet despite the nagging insistence of Gail’s journalistic instincts, she continued her duties at the network as if nothing had happened. It was a burden she doubted she could carry for long. Either she would throttle Degruton, or vent her frustrations on some of the expensive appliances and furniture which were still unpaid for despite her exorbitant salary.
She even considered the purchase and installation of a punching bag.
But what Gail assumed was the scientist’s indifference, turned out to be a psychological smokescreen covering up an intense guilt. Degruton was convinced he had opened the ultimate Pandora’s box, and his guilt unleashed a side of his personality which, over hours of equal parts of cajoling and pleading, finally wore the journalist down to acceptance of his insistent, “No one must know about this. Ever!”
Ultimately, everyone would know. It was inevitable. But until then, as Degruton added with uncharacteristic passion, “Let people live their lives as if the future is theirs. .After all, until my stupid meddling, it was!”
Months went by.
Years.
Degruton immersed himself in theoretical physics, cutting himself off from all practical work. “A balanced equation is a lovely thing,” he told Gail, “but only if it remains a mental construct apart from any hardware.”
She doubted such a divorce was possible, especially considering the economic times and the natural requirement to recover costs. But she supposed the intellectual inertia of the academic establishment would keep the high-profile physicist going for a while, at least until some eagle-eyed bureaucrat cut off his research grants pending a review of “potential financial benefits.”
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