The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2)

by Crawford Kilian

  “1 have another reason to leave Beulah alone for a while. I don’t think it’s the only world we can reach.”

  The lecture hall exploded in noise. They had sat in respectful silence through one revelation, but this one was too much. People shouted at one another and at Ishizawa, got up, and hurriedly gathered in urgent conferences. Finally they quieted and Ishizawa continued.

  “We don’t have much theory yet to explain what we’ve discovered. But it seems likely that other worlds exist at different points on the timeline, and we may be able to reach them. Some of them could be at remote points in the past, even before humanity has evolved, so we wouldn’t face the same ethical problems about settling on them. Others could be in the future, and they may well have real answers to our problems.”

  “Wait a minute!” someone shouted. “If there are future worlds, they must have this time-travel device also, and they should have discovered us. Where are they?”

  “That’s what Enrico Fermi used to say about extra-terrestrial intelligence,” Hans Neumann answered. “The only answer we can give you is that we don’t know. Maybe we’re the first bead on the string. Maybe future worlds have missed this discovery somehow. We don’t know. But we propose to find out all we can. The Civil Emergency Administration has authorized Fermilab to suspend all other programs and to pursue research into hyper-magnetic fields. You’ve been invited here to become aware of this project and to begin planning for whatever applications seem appropriate.”

  The bureaucrat leaped to his feet. “It seems obvious to me that this discovery must remain a secret as long as possible. It we can keep the Russians and Arabs and Japanese in the dark, we can develop an unbeatable lead in exploiting this invention. Otherwise, it’ll be the arms race all over again.”

  More shouting broke out. Two scientists shook their fists in the bureaucrat’s face, while others loudly applauded him.

  Wigner took advantage of the uproar to murmur to Pierce: “The secret will be out before lunchtime. Then it’ll be every country for itself. We’ve got to get our own field generator and stake out some territory ourselves.”

  “I want to go through,” Pierce answered.

  “You will.”

  The shouting died down: Johnson, the Nobel laureate, gained the floor.

  “You’re not going to keep this secret very long,” he said. “Once a few other governments believe it, they’ll want to know how to build their own fields. If we don’t tell them, they may just make life uncomfortable for us in a lot of different ways. If we do tell them, they’ll all be heading off for Beulah and anyplace else that Ishizawa discovers, and it’ll look like the wildest nightmare of imperialism. We’ve got to reveal the secret, and we’ve got to make sure it’s used wisely and humanely, for the benefit of everyone. Some kind of international control is going to be essential, and I for one intend to work to set up such a control. This is a chance to make up for all our mistakes since the Manhattan Project, people, and I don’t want to throw it away.”

  Most of the listeners applauded; Wigner muttered: “International control my foot. No one’s going to give up any sovereignty over this issue.”

  “Trainables don’t care about sovereignty.”

  “Trainables have to live in the real world.”

  The first part of the meeting was adjourned; the second, Pierce suspected, would accomplish little but talk, and he was right. Well before the end of the day, Ishizawa and his colleagues had quietly left the lecture hall. Others, mostly Trainables, also slipped out.

  “Smart,” said Wigner. “These people are getting nowhere. Let’s go; I’ve got to talk to a few people about this.”

  Wet snow was falling as the helicopter took them back to O’Hare through a twilit afternoon. It landed near Pierce’s plane, but before he embarked Wigner took him on a short stroll across the tarmac.

  “I want to get you out of Idaho and into the Agency. Is that acceptable?”

  “They’re my people out there, Eric.”

  “You’ll be doing them more good than you could in your present job. We’ve got to be ready to move fast, and I’m going to need you.”

  “All right.”

  “It’ll take a few weeks, but we should have you in place not long after the new year.” Wigner looked up at the dull sky and the fluffy, clumped snowflakes drifting out of it. “‘Now God be thanked who has matched us with His hour.’ What an hour it is.”

  He clapped Pierce’s shoulder and waved him off to the plane.

  The next few days turned into weeks of laughter and astonishment. Each night that he visited Doria, he brought news: the first contact with the American government on Beulah, through a field generated in the basement of an Agency safe house on West 45th Street in Manhattan. (Only now the field was called an I-Screen in Ishizawa’s honour.) Two new worlds discovered in a single day at Fermilab, and soon a third opened up by an I-Screen in California: following Ishizawa’s lead, they too, received names from Blake’s mythology. Eden was at the year A.D. 1166, and Ahania at A.D. 91. Los was at 981 B.c. More worlds were anticipated, scattered through time at points now called chronoplanes.

  “Once you asked me to move you and your students out of this time,” he reminded Doria. “Now you can have your pick.”

  Pierce lay comfortably in her bed, enjoying the scent of her skin and the softness of her hair as they talked in the darkness about what would happen next: the wonder of meeting the giants of history, the care they would take not to repeat all the ancient follies, the havens they would build in the paradises of the past.

  “You pick.”

  “First, I want to look them all over. Then I’ll pick the best one for us — for you and me, my mother, your parents.”

  She held him fiercely. “I can’t wait.”

  *

  His Polymath switched itself on, and Polly’s little-girl voice called urgently: “Jerry! Jerry! Emergency message!”

  It came through the wailing-wall network, and soon was confirmed by Wigner. Ishizawa had been looking for a future chronoplane, and he had succeeded. Now his laboratory was in radioactive ruins; Ishizawa and his team were all dead.

  CHAPTER V

  The videotapes, thought Wigner, had something of the morbid fascination of the film of the Kennedy assassination. You saw a deterministic world from which free will had been removed, where the inhabitants acted with no awareness of what was about to happen; they looked a little foolish, when they were only ignorant.

  Wigner sat in his cubicle, running the videotape on his Polymath. It began with Ishizawa, in a striped golf shirt and blue jeans, seated at a control console in a large windowless lab with beige walls and fluorescent lights. Two technicians worked in the background. From the angle of the main camera, Ishizawa was on the left, with his back to it; the camera looked over his shoulder at the two-meter I-Screen generator. A digital time readout flicked on and off in the lower right comer of the computer screen.

  “Okay,” Ishizawa remarked conversationally into his throat mike. “This is Run 1 of Experiment 5. If all goes well, we hope to find a chronoplane somewhere in the twenty-third to twenty-fourth century. We’ll turn on the generator in thirty seconds from…mark.”

  Wigner froze the scene and examined each part of it under extreme magnification from the points of view of each of the three cameras running in the lab. Everything looked fine. The technicians, a man and a woman, seemed alert and slightly excited, but not anxious or otherwise stressed. Wigner had already been over their dossiers: they were clean, with no indication of subversive or criminal backgrounds that might have induced them to commit suicide in an act of sabotage.

  Another camera, mounted on the far side of the I-Screen, showed Ishizawa at the console and a small audience of hangers-on behind him: scientists, technicians, a couple of reporters, an Illinois congressman. Again, their backgrounds were so clean they were almost despicable. No one was nervous, and no one got up to leave.

  Wigner skipped through the tape in thr
ee-second steps. At minus ten seconds, Ishizawa tripped a switch and leaned back. The soap-bubble film appeared in the I-Screen, its colours rich and luminous: crimson, orange, green, blue, violet.

  At zero seconds, white light flared in the lab, simultaneous with a muffled bang. Voices cried out, sounding oddly distant.

  The explosive decompression of the laboratory was clearly not the result of a bomb. The light, Wigner saw, had come from within the I-Screen; he even glimpsed irregular structures of some kind within the circle of glare. Closer to the camera, a mist had formed as air pressure dropped, and snakes of fog writhed toward the I-Screen. Loose objects — a clipboard, a calculator, a wall calendar, a lab coat draped over a chair, the chair itself — leaped toward the I-Screen as well.

  Cutting from camera to camera, Wigner watched Ishizawa squint at the onset of the glare, then try to raise a hand to shield his eyes from the light. Behind him his watchers were doing the same. Then, in slow motion, everyone began to rise and float dreamily through the air toward the I-Screen. Ishizawa, as his feet left the floor, seemed to be groping for a switch on the console; he missed it and somersaulted toward the screen. The others were close behind him. For a few fractions of a second they blotted out much of the glare, and Wigner was able to study what was beyond the I-Screen. It seemed to be sun-baked rubble, rocks and chunks of masonry, with a little dust being stirred by the sudden gust of air from the lab.

  One technician had been behind the I-Screen; Wigner turned to a camera that showed the poor woman sucked in from the other side, toward a similar terrain of rubble.

  The timer on the screen indicated that the lab had been decompressed in just over three seconds. For another three, the victims could be seen twitching and convulsing before lying still. For two more seconds the I-Screen held; then it died, and a faint noise increased in volume to a scream as air blew into the lab and began to refill it.

  On one wall, a radiation alarm pulsed red and a klaxon sounded.

  Wigner went back to the sequence showing the deaths of the experimenters and observers. By juggling a few parameters, he was able to eliminate most of the glare and bring up details in the screen.

  Now he saw a black sky whose stars were blotted out by the glare of the westering sun. The rubble was a chaotic pile of bricks, girders, and dirt, and seemed to extend to the horizon. The predominant colour was a bleached yellow; the bodies of the victims were shockingly vivid in their colourful clothing and blood-splashed flesh. The congressman had evidently lived the longest and seemed to be trying to crawl back against the wind toward the I-Screen and safety. His face was a mask of blood, and most of his exposed skin was erupting with purple blisters as he finally collapsed.

  The rubble was not entirely chaotic. Wigner recognized the basic structures of several familiar buildings, and even the skeletal trunk and branches of a tree, which was at that very moment growing outside the building where Ishizawa’s lab had been. Wigner had no doubt that he was looking at the shattered ruins of Fermilab at a time when the Earth had somehow been deprived of an atmosphere.

  He cancelled the tape and ran some of the lab recordings through his Polymath. They had actually managed to identify enough stars in that sun-dazzled black sky to estimate the date: March 14, A.D. 2215.

  All of Ishizawa’s data were on record. Anyone could tune the field of an I-Screen to that new chronoplane, provisionally named Ulro. Wigner was aware of a project to send another robot tank through; it would learn something, but not enough. Scores of forays into that terrible place would be necessary.

  The Agency already had three I-Screens in operation and three more under construction. At least one of them ought to be devoted to researching the hell-world in the future, but at the moment all were committed to exploring the past.

  He sighed, hooked into the office LAN, and paged Clement to ask for an interview. Permission came at once.

  Jonathan Clement’s office was large and well furnished, with windows overlooking East 52nd and Lexington, and Ben Shahn prints on the walls. To Wigner it seemed bare and awkward because it lacked anything alive; Clement did not like houseplants.

  He was a strikingly handsome man, Wigner admitted to himself. Six feet tall, age forty-six but looking more like thirty-six with the taut musculature and quick movements of a racquetball player. An intelligent man, within his limits, with a Columbia Ph.D. in political science to go with two degrees from Yale. All hopelessly obsolete now, of course. But his biggest weakness was not that he was too old to be Trained; it was his hostility to Trainables themselves.

  That hostility radiated gently from Clement as he sat barricaded behind his desk. The two men had much in common: social class, education, family backgrounds in public service, a whole spectrum of shared attitudes and experiences. Yet they counted for little against the single difference of Trainability. Cement’s nonverbal antagonism overrode the geniality in his words.

  “Good morning, Eric. You’ve reviewed the tape.”

  “Yes. Sabotage is out of the question. Ishizawa just opened the wrong door.”

  “Poor man. May it stay shut forever.”

  “Oh, I don’t agree, sir. If something disastrous is going to happen between now and 2215, we certainly ought to know more about it.”

  “Hazardous, Eric. Hazardous.”

  “Of course. But if we can find out what caused the disaster, perhaps we can prevent it.”

  “Eric, we have limited resources. We’ve had to shut down almost a dozen programs to pay for the I-Screens we now have. They’re fully committed to exploring the downtime chronoplanes.”

  Downtime. At least Clement picked up quickly on the jargon.

  “For the time being that’s certainly sensible. Before two long, however, we should turn our attention uptime.”

  “No doubt,” Clement said. The man, thought Wigner, had a marvellous ability to turn you down while agreeing with you. “In any case, thank you for reviewing the tape. There was something else as well?”

  “I need a recruit seconded to one of our New York proprietaries. An Alpha-18 named Gerald Pierce.”

  “Oh, yes. Fellow out in Wyoming?”

  “Idaho. He’s the T-Colonel for District 23.”

  “Mm. You even invited him to the briefing at Fermilab, didn’t you?”

  Clement was paying attention to the paperwork. “Yes, sir. I’ve been following Pierce’s career. He’s a remarkable young fellow — lots of brains, plenty of physical courage, and the common sense to know when physical courage is beside the point. I think we’ll be able to use him very successfully on missions through the I-Screen.”

  “I realize you’re biased in favour of Trainables, Eric, but surely there must be a few un-Trainables out there who’d make good agents. After all, we got along without any Trainables for two generations and more, didn’t we?”

  Yes, and look at the mess we’re in now, Wigner thought as he nodded soberly in answer to Clement’s remark.

  “I’m keeping my eyes open, sir. In the meantime, I like this fellow’s looks. His dossier has been filed for your review.”

  “I’ll look it over when I find a moment. Meanwhile, I’d like an update on the People’s Action Front for this afternoon.”

  The poor old PAF is finished, Wigner answered silently. Even if it had half a million armed members, it’d be irrelevant. Bloody fool.

  “Have it for you by two this afternoon, sir.”

  “Don’t rush it, now; do a good, thorough job.”

  “Of course.”

  In a cool rage, he walked out and headed for Jasmin Jones’s cubicle.

  “Lunch?”

  “Where?”

  “Pietro’s.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They left the building and walked down East 52nd. At Lexington, a shabby old man stood on a kitchen chair, shouting to anyone within earshot that the end of the world was coming because of nuclear testing and a falling away from Jesus. He had a sizable crowd, large enough to attract the attention of
two policemen with holstered Mallorys and nightsticks in their big fists. Wigner and Jaz skirted the crowd just as the police moved in and began prodding people.

  “Best news some people ever heard,” Wigner remarked.

  “Including you.”

  “Ha!” True enough. Well, he wouldn’t be interested in her if she weren’t bright and observant.

  Pietro’s, thanks to its connections with the Agency and other government organizations, still had a considerable menu. Those connections ensured that Wigner and Jaz were given a booth in the rear. They chatted casually, ordered saltimbocca, and raised glasses of wine to each other.

  “I need your opinion of the Ulro phenomenon,” he said.

  “Little old men on street comers?”

  “Middle-aged men in comer offices.”

  “Hard to persuade.”

  “Persuasion shouldn’t be required.”

  “We’re all having trouble coping with the news. Some of us try to blank it out.”

  “You?”

  “Ignore things and they go away,” she said with a smile. “Besides, we’ve got two hundred years.”

  “Cute.” Meaning her facetiousness was inappropriate.

  “What’s your attitude, then?”

  “Making friends. Influencing people. Eliminating the middleman.”

  Jaz smiled. “Exciting! You sound like a take-charge guy.”

  “No. I just go with the flow. The flow is uphill, but papa wants to go downstream. I need more paddlers. Want to come along?”

  “My heart belongs to Daddy, Eric.”

  “You’re too charitable.”

  “He has his talents, we have ours. He’s still in charge.”

  “I’ll say no more.”

  “Neither will I.”

  As the saltimbocca arrived, Wigner reflected that he could have done worse. He hadn’t recruited Jaz to his new network, and she had confirmed her loyalty to Clement, but she had also slipped in a nice little option clause that would let her buy in later if she wished, on condition that she not advise Clement of Wigner’s activities and attitudes.