Mallick nodded, rubbing his chin.
“It’s not like we have anything better to do,” Reyes said. “And what do you care? You’ll be in stasis most of the time.”
Mallick nodded. “Okay, I’ll get O’Brien up. Get started on the research.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s just hope the laws of physics will cooperate,” Carpenter said.
“We have to assume the anomaly was a one-time thing,” Mallick said. “A fluke resulting from some combination of our velocity and the damage to the gate.”
“So we’re going to assume that the laws of physics don’t work the way we thought, but assuming they’ll keep working the way they always have?”
“Carpenter,” Mallick said coldly.
“I’m not trying to be difficult, Captain. You’re asking me to do precise calculations involving time, matter, and acceleration, and apparently none of those things are what we thought they were. Even your statement that it was a ‘one-time thing’ is wrong. If I’m right, that anomaly wasn’t a one-time thing. It’s something that happened a few hours ago, and also thirteen hundred years ago. And it will happen again in thirteen hundred years. That anomaly will occur—or has occurred—an infinite number of times. It’s an endless loop.”
“I get it,” Mallick said. “I understand how unsettling this is. None of it makes any sense. But here we are, trying to make sense of it. And the only way I can do that is by boxing off whatever happened when we went through that gate and assuming reality is more-or-less the way it seems. Given that, I have to figure that in thirteen hundred years, the Cho-ta’an will be on the verge of wiping out humanity, and that delivering this bomb before that happens is our only chance. I know you want to wrestle with the philosophical implications of time travel, but now is not the time. Compartmentalize. Can you do that?”
Carpenter nodded. “I think so. But I have one more concern. A concern pertinent to our mission.”
“Fine. What is it?”
“Well, if it really is 883 AD, Earth is inhabited. It’s the Middle Ages down there right now. We’ll be screwing with history.”
“Shouldn’t be hard to find an uninhabited island somewhere. But in the end, we’re talking about the future of the human race. If we have to screw with history, so be it. Now do your job.”
*****
Three days later, Andrea Luhman rounded the sun in a wide arc, putting it on a path to intersect Earth’s orbit. It would then use Earth’s gravity to decelerate and change course toward Jupiter. It would use Jupiter’s gravity to further decelerate and redirect back toward Earth. Six weeks after its first swing, Andrea Luhman would enter Earth orbit.
Unable to anticipate the human ship’s course, the Cho-ta’an followed at a conservative distance, allowing the gap between the two ships to gradually widen. It was impossible to know what the Cho-ta’an had deduced regarding the temporal anomaly. At the very least, they must have figured out that the gate was missing, which meant they would probably not expect Andrea Luhman to return to its entry point in the solar system. If they had noticed she was using only her auxiliary thrusters for deceleration, they might have determined that the ship was going to have a hard time attempting interstellar travel, but it seemed unlikely they would anticipate a stop at Earth.
“Stop” was a charitable description in any case. Even after rounding the sun, Andrea Luhman would be traveling far too fast to enter orbit around Earth. They were going to have to rely on the lander’s more powerful acceleration to slow to Earth’s relative velocity. It would be a tricky and dangerous maneuver, but it was the only chance they had.
Mallick had selected a landing party of four. Reyes, as the head engineer, would lead the group. Dan O’Brien, whose expertise in geology and chemistry would be vital in forging a new manifold, was another obvious choice.
The third member of the team was Thea Jane Slater, the biologist who’d also been part of the mission to the Fractalist facility. Her knowledge of biology might come in handy if the expedition lasted for more than a few weeks and the team were forced to forage for food, but she was picked primarily for her experience piloting the shuttle.
The final team member was Gabe Zuehlsdorf, Andrea Luhman’s security officer. Carpenter argued against Gabe’s inclusion on the grounds that technical expertise was needed more than brawn, but Reyes figured she’d have enough to worry about without having to be concerned about wild animals and potentially hostile Earthmen. Gabe was an ex-Marine with wilderness survival and medic training. Just as importantly, from Mallick’s perspective, Gabe was an amateur historian, the only one of the crew besides Johannes Stauffer who possessed substantial knowledge about Earth cultures of the ninth century. Stauffer was never a serious candidate: although he knew a fair amount about Earth history, his primary field of study was Cho-ta’an culture, and he’d be less than worthless in the wilderness.
Another member of Andrea Luhman’s crew, Justin Schumacher, a physicist, had also been revived—not to be part of the mission crew, but to consult on what had happened with the gate.
Once the three newly revived members of the crew had more-or-less acclimated, the crew was assembled for a briefing. As O’Brien and Schumacher knew nothing of the planet killer bomb and Gabe and Slater had been in stasis during the time travel portion of the adventure, the meeting was predictably chaotic. Mallick did his best to get everybody up to speed.
“Everybody clear on the details?” Mallick asked when he’d finished the briefing. He stood at the front of the room, while those most recently revived—O’Brien, Slater, Gabe and Schumacher—sat on the chairs around the table. Reyes and Carpenter stood in the back.
O’Brien, the wiry, sandy-haired geologist, nodded. “We’re landing on Earth during the Middle Ages to build a forge to fabricate a spaceship part so we can carry an alien doomsday weapon across the galaxy to save humanity.”
Chuckles went up from the group.
Slater frowned. “Well, it sounds ridiculous when you say it like that.”
“Ridiculous or not,” Mallick said, “it’s what we have to do. That bomb is the only chance we have to win the war, and the only way to get the bomb to the IDL is to repair Andrea Luhman. The future of humanity rests on the four of you.”
“Do we really think we’ve gone back in time?” Slater asked. “That’s crazy.”
“All the evidence we have points to that conclusion,” Carpenter replied. “Constellations, positions of planets, background radiation, the lack of radio signals… every bit of empirical data we have tells us the date is March sixteen, 883.”
“This is absurd,” Gabe muttered.
“Which part?” Slater asked.
“The time travel part, for starters. Schumacher, you’re the physicist. Tell me this is a joke.”
“If it’s a joke,” Schumacher said, “it’s a damn good one, and I’m not in on it. I haven’t had time to look at all the sensor data, but it’s pretty clear something is very wrong. Stars don’t just jump out of position. If we deny the possibility of time travel, we’d have to allow the possibility of something even more bizarre.”
“But how?” Slater asked. “How could something like this happen?”
“The gates open a wormhole between two points in space,” Schumacher replied. “We can describe the phenomenon in great detail, but the mechanism is still a mystery. We stole the tech from the Cho-ta’an, and they may very well have stolen it from someone else. What we know of their scientific prowess indicates their knowledge of physics is no more advanced than ours.”
Gabe stared at him. “You’re saying we jump all over the galaxy in these damn things, and nobody knows how they work?”
“What I’m saying,” Schumacher said with a smile, “is that it’s a little late to start worrying about spacetime anomalies. The question isn’t ‘How did this happen?’ It’s ‘Why hasn’t it happened before?’ Space and time are inextricably linked. If you travel from one point in space to another instantaneously, you
’re screwing with time, one way or another. We’ve just found a new way to do it.”
“You think the effect could be replicated?” Reyes asked.
“Theoretically, sure. But it’s going to be difficult, since the first gate won’t be built for thirteen hundred years.”
“What if it’s never built?” O’Brien asked.
“What do you mean?” Slater asked.
“I mean, we’ve traveled to the past. We could change history. It was only happenstance that the Ubuntu ran across that Cho-ta’an mining site eighty years ago. Er, twelve hundred years from now. What if we alter the course of history, preventing that from ever happening? We’d never meet the Cho-ta’an, never get the gate technology. Hell, the war would never even start. Maybe we’ll save humanity just by setting foot on Earth.”
Schumacher shook his head. “We have to assume that temporal paradoxes are impossible. We can’t change what’s already happened. If we appear to change something, it’s because our knowledge of what actually happened is limited. What you are going to do on Earth—assuming you make it there—has already happened.”
“Another good reason we can’t wait around for the Sol Gate to be built,” Mallick said. “If a ship from the future had gone through the Sol Gate, the IDL would have a record of it. So if we try, we’ll fail.”
“Whoa,” said Gabe. “So much for free will.”
Schumacher shrugged. “Pick a number between one and ten.”
“Huh?” Gabe replied.
“Humor me. Pick a number. Tell me what it is.”
“Three.”
“Good. Were you free to pick any number you wanted to?”
“Sure.”
“Are you free now to have picked a different number?”
“Of course not. It’s already done. I can’t change the past.”
“Right. So when you’re making the choice, it’s free. When you’re looking back on it, it’s not. Same rules apply here. If you go to Earth and smash a grasshopper, you were free to do so. If, however, I were to look at the complete catalog of all grasshoppers ever smashed on Earth, I would find that you have already done it. Or chose not to, as the case may be.”
“That’s a dodge,” Slater said. “There’s no catalog of smashed grasshoppers. For a real test, you need to use an event that we know has happened. What if… Gabe strangles William the Conqueror in his crib?”
“William the Conqueror wasn’t born until 1028,” Gabe said. “I’d have to strangle his great-grandfather. And I’d have to live to a hundred and forty to do that.”
“Fine,” Slater said. “Gabe goes to Earth and strangles William the Conqueror’s great-grandfather. William the Conqueror is never born. The Normans never take over England. All of history is changed. England never colonizes America. America never lands on the Moon. Human exploration of the galaxy is delayed for decades. Maybe longer.”
“Clearly that didn’t happen,” Schumacher said. “Therefore, we have to assume that if Gabe tried to assassinate William the Conqueror’s great-grandfather, he failed.”
“So he never had a choice.”
“No, but there are lots of things we don’t have a choice about. I’m not going to Earth, so obviously I have no opportunity to strangle anyone’s great-grandfather. But does that mean I have no free will? Of course not. I still have thousands of other choices I can make. The fact that some avenues are closed to me doesn’t mean I can’t make choices.”
“You’re saying that if Gabe tries to kill William the Conqueror’s great-grandfather, something will stop him.”
“I’d say that it’s a bad idea to try to do something that you know is doomed to failure.”
“Our mission might be doomed to failure,” Slater said. “That is, we might already have failed.”
“True,” Schumacher said. “But as there’s no way for us to know at this point whether a group of people from the future landed on Earth in 883 A.D. to repair their spaceship, there’s only one way to find out.”
“I hate to bring this fascinating discussion to a close,” Mallick said, “but it’s time for Reyes and Gabe to suit up.”
“Aye, sir,” Gabe said, as he and Reyes got to their feet. They had been selected to detach the manifold and bring it inside the lander. The entire procedure was expected to take about an hour.
*****
Moving the manifold went as planned, and shortly after the manifold had been placed in the lander’s cargo bay, O’Brien and Slater boarded the shuttle. Reyes and Gabe came inside, changed into their flight suits and followed the others into the lander.
Mallick stopped Reyes as she was about to climb through the hatch to the lander.
“I feel like I should say something,” he said.
“Like what?”
“You know, a pep talk. About how we’re all counting on you to save the human race or something.”
“I know what I’m doing, Captain. It’s an engineering problem.”
“It’s a bit more than that.”
“There are things outside our control, sure. But there’s no point in worrying about those. If we’re careful and work together, there’s no reason we can’t do this.”
“I was referring to the stakes. If you pull this off, you’ll be heroes. If something goes wrong….”
Reyes shrugged. “I can’t worry about it. I’m just going to do my job. So if there’s nothing else…?”
Mallick laughed. “You really aren’t scared?”
A smile played at the edge of Reyes’s mouth. “Terrified, sir.”
“Well, remind me never to play poker with you. Godspeed, Reyes. I’ll see you in six weeks.”
Reyes smiled and climbed into the hatch.
Six weeks. That was the plan. While the lander stopped off at Earth, Andrea Luhman would keep hurtling through the solar system, round Jupiter and head back toward Earth. Carpenter’s estimate put them back in Earth orbit in six weeks. Hopefully that would give the ground team enough time to forge a new manifold. If not, Andrea Luhman would remain in orbit, its crew in stasis, until the mission team was ready to launch and rejoin them. If anything happened to the ground team, there was nothing Andrea Luhman could do about it but limp to the future location of the Gliese Gate at point two gees of acceleration. There was only one lander.
Chapter Nine
Sigurd Olafson lifted a chunk of sod from the pile and hefted it over his head with a grunt. The chunks were an arm’s length on a side and a good eight inches thick, and he’d been at this all morning. Sigurd had fences to mend and sheep to shear, but the roof was the current priority: a recent thaw had revealed a leak that was letting water into the house. Sigurd had half-expected it: a blight had killed much of the grass on the roof the summer before, but he hadn’t had time then to replace it. For now, the water was running harmlessly down a support beam to the wall, but over time it would cause the wood to rot, which was a much bigger problem.
Sigurd’s arms began to quiver under the weight of the sod.
“Yngvi!” he shouted.
“Sorry, Father,” the boy called from above him. A moment later, the burden was lifted from Sigurd’s hands. Sigurd took a step back from the ladder and wiped his brow as Yngvi moved out of sight to place the turf in the damaged area of the roof.
“Daydream later, Yngvi,” Sigurd chided. “We’re supposed to be working as a team.”
“I’m not daydreaming, Father. There are people on the road.”
Sigurd frowned. “Who?”
“I don’t know. Five of them. They have skis.”
“Get down, boy. Let me see.”
“Yes, Father.”
The sky overhead darkened momentarily as Yngvi leapt over the ladder, landing on the grass behind Sigurd.
“Odin’s beard, son,” cringing as he watched Yngvi land. “I’ve told you not to do that. You’re going to break an arm. And then what good will you be to me?”
“It’s barely eight feet,” Yngvi said, getting to his feet. “You’
re just jealous because you’re too old to do it.”
“Watch your mouth, boy,” Sigurd said, but he smiled to himself. His knees hurt just watching Yngvi perform his acrobatics. The boy was sixteen and already stronger than most full-grown men. Sigurd could still best him in wrestling, but that wouldn’t last much longer. Sigurd had been twenty-five when Yngvi was born, and he was now one of the older farmers in the area.
Sigurd climbed the short ladder to look over the roof of the house and saw why Yngvi had been distracted: there were indeed five men coming down the road. They were strangers, wearing colorful tunics and trousers. Strapped to their backs were skis, indicating they’d traveled some distance, probably from the north. Gabe watched for some time, waiting to see if the men continued down the road that led to the coast or turned down the narrow track leading to Sigurd’s farm. When they turned, he sighed and climbed down the ladder. Yngvi lay on his back in the snow, soaking up the sun.
“We’re going to have guests. Get some ale and bread. And see if there’s any of that duck left.”
“Are those men important?”
“Yes, unfortunately,” Sigurd said. “Go.”
*****
Yngvi brought out a tray of food and placed it on the stump they used as a table when eating outside. He returned to the house and got a keg of ale. He affixed the tap to the key while Sigurd cleaned himself up. “Fetch my sword as well, son.”
Yngvi eyes went wide but he didn’t speak. He ran back inside and returned with the sword, which was sheathed in a leather-clad wooden scabbard that hung from a wool belt. He handed it to Sigurd, who strapped it around his waist.
“May I stay?” Yngvi asked.
“Better if you don’t.”
“Are you going to fight them?”
“No, son.”
“I won’t say anything. I’ll just sit and listen.”
“It’s not that, son. These men are here in part to gather information. I won’t give them any more than I have to. You’re free to listen, but do so from inside.”
The Dream of the Iron Dragon Page 9