MORTINSON UNHARMED
(UPI) Doctor Alfred Mortinson, Nobel Prize laureate, was rescued by Los Angeles police this evening after being kidnapped by two criminals who had earlier been arrested in the vicinity of his office at the Pacific Institute of Technology.
Mortinson was unharmed though shaken by his ordeal, and refused all comment.
Police speculate that his abductors belong to an anti-nuclear fringe group from the northern part of the state who may have intended holding Mortinson captive until local governments agreed to abandon all nuclear research and close all nuclear power plants.
The two men are still at large and are believed to be holding television reporter Jamie Hamilton as a hostage. Detectives are scrutinizing film footage taken by award-winning journalist Dana Anderson from a mobile news unit, but as yet the identities of the kidnappers remain unknown.
15
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
(Science News Service) For the second time in less than 24 hours, the Los Angeles area was flooded with reports of UFO sightings.
According to Professor Stuart Brownstein of the UCLA Department of Astronomy, the usual causes of such sightings—meteorites, low-flying civilian aircraft, and various atmospheric disturbances—do not explain these particular sightings, most of which had a pair of objects flying almost straight upward at enormous speeds.
"Almost ninety percent of the sightings agree that these objects were moving perpendicular both to the Earth and to any tangential planes," said Professor Brownstein. "And I think there have been too many reported sightings to assume all these people were just looking at swamp gas, or whatever the Air Force is pushing these days."
Professor Brownstein declined to speculate on the causes of the sightings.
16
FROM THE RECOLLECTIONS OF
COMMANDER ADAMA AND DOCTOR ZEE:
Boomer did a double take when he saw the respiratory readout on Troy's Viper, then promptly signalled Adama.
"Yes?" said Adama.
"The last two Vipers are returning from Earth," Boomer reported. "But we've got a little problem."
"Of what nature?"
"There seem to be two people aboard Troy's Viper. The chromosome count confirms that the second entity is a human female."
"But that's strictly against orders!" thundered Adama.
"It's possible that they could be in some kind of trouble. After all, it's been quite some time since we sent out the recall message."
"We'll see," said Adama grimly. "Have them report to my chambers the moment they arrive."
"The female too?" asked Boomer.
"Yes," said Adama. "I don't imagine that we have anything further to hide from her."
The two Vipers executed smooth landings and an armed escort ushered Troy, Dillon and Jamie out of the landing bay and into the interior of the Galactica.
"It's as big as a city!" exclaimed Jamie as they made their way to Adama's quarters.
"It's far more than a city," said Troy. "It has had to serve as our planet."
"Then your last planet wasn't Earth?" said Jamie.
"No," said Troy. "We're not from Earth."
"But . . . but you look just like us!"
"The race of man is not unique to Earth," said Dillon.
"And your English . . . you speak it perfectly."
"Preparation for contact," said Troy. "We also speak Italian, Russian, French, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and a number of lesser dialects. Right, Dillon?"
"Languages are a snap, n'est-ce pas?" grinned Dillon.
"And you're really not from Earth!" repeated Jamie. "I mean, even after we got into your spaceship I figured you were CIA or some super-NASA group." She looked around her and shook her head vigorously, as if this would make the walls of the Galactica recede, to be replaced by more familiar surroundings. "I wonder if this trip wasn't a major mistake."
"Our Commander is likely to feel much the same way about it," said Troy apprehensively as they reached Adama's door.
A guard pressed a button and the panel slid open. Adama stood with his back to them, his eyes on the viewscreen that presented him with a vision of fully half the galaxy. As Dillon coughed nervously he turned to face them.
"Well, Captain Troy and Lieutenant Dillon . . . and guest. I hope you realize the gravity in which you've placed this young lady, as well as ourselves."
"They didn't have any choice," Jamie spoke up. "I'm Jamie Hamilton of United Broadcasting. You're—?"
"Commander Adama."
Jamie whipped out a cassette recorder and held it out toward Adama, who flinched but held his ground, eyeing the machine warily.
"Would you mind repeating that?" she said.
"What is that?" Adama demanded.
"Probably some kind of recording device," said Dillon. "She's associated with Earth's communication media."
"I assume you had no choice other than to bring her back with you?" said Adama.
"I insisted," said Jamie smugly.
"That's true," Troy admitted. "And your recall order was battle urgent. It left us no time to find alternatives."
"Besides," added Dillon, "if we hadn't taken her along, she would have made public everything she had seen."
"And she saw a lot?" asked Adama, raising an eyebrow.
Dillon nodded vigorously.
"Well, young lady, we'll just have to deal with you as best we can," said Adama resignedly.
"I must warn you that abusing the press is dealt with very harshly where I come from," said Jamie.
Adama could not resist a smile at that. "I assure you that you'll be treated quite well for the duration of your stay here."
"Duration?" said Jamie. "That has an unpleasant ring of semi-permanance to it. I only came up here for a story."
"Unfortunately, your story is not one that we can permit you to publish for the foreseeable future," said Adama. He turned to Troy and Dillon. "We've got a problem. Our mission to Earth must be suspended."
"But why?" said Troy. "I think we were on the verge of making some real progress. We got to Doctor Mortinson."
"And?" said Adama.
"And if the rest of the scientific community is as receptive as he was," said Dillon, "I don't forsee any serious difficulties in gaining their confidence and acceptance."
"We'll have to take up the subject later," said Adama. "Right now we have an emergency to deal with."
"What could be more important than preparing the Earth to defend itself?" said Troy, puzzled.
"Defend itself?" said Jamie. "From who?"
Adama ignored her. "Xaviar has commandeered a ship and returned to the Earth in the year 1944 of the Christian era."
"Commander," said Troy, "if Earth isn't advanced enough to help us now, what can Xaviar possibly hope to accomplish back in 1944?"
"You mean you guys can travel through time?" exclaimed Jamie unbelievingly.
"You travel through space, don't you?" said Dillon. "Time's just another dimension."
"Getting back to Xaviar . . ." said Troy.
"Perhaps we'd better have a talk with Doctor Zee," suggested Adama, opening his door and leading the way to the fourteen-year-old genius's chambers.
"I repeat," said Troy: "What can Xaviar expect to accomplish in 1944?"
"He intends to accelerate Earth's technology by introducing superior weaponry into her past," said Adama patiently.
"But that's ridiculous!" said Troy.
"Not at all," said Adama. "The Snowball Effect clearly stipulates . . ."
"No, that's not what I mean," said Troy. "But why 1944? That only allows thirty-six years for development. Why not three thousand years ago? Or thirty thousand? Why not hunt up an ape sitting in a tree two million years ago and give him a bow and arrow?"
"An excellent question, Captain Troy," said Doctor Zee, speaking for the first time. "But the closer to the present you are when you attempt to adjust the past, the less powerful will be the Snowball Effect."
"Could you ex
plain that, please?" said Troy.
"Certainly," said Doctor Zee. "If you introduce no change prior to 1944, no matter what happens the likelihood is that the major nations will still exist thirty-six years later. The air shouldn't be so polluted as to be unbreathable, the oceans shouldn't teem with radioactive waste, there should be no new major languages which our translator banks will have to master. Now let's take your hypothetical apeman of two million years ago. It's possible his species would grow into Man—but it's equally possible that they would destroy each other, turn Earth into a huge garbage dump teeming with radiation, or simply take a different turn on the evolutionary ladder and not become men at all."
"I see," said Troy.
"It's a gamble from Xaviar's point of view," continued Doctor Zee. "He wants to go far enough back in time to make the necessary changes, but remain close enough to the present so that the changes don't snowball all out of proportion. It's like a man standing atop an icy mountain, pursued by a large carnivore. He knows he can defeat it even though he has nothing but a tiny snowball in his hand. He begins rolling the snowball down the mountain, and at a certain point the snowball will be large enough to dispatch the beast. But if the snowball continues to roll and accumulate more matter, eventually it will be too big for him to control or even lift."
"But why 1944?" asked Dillon.
"Because the German rocketry experts were experimenting with the V-2," said Doctor Zee.
"But the Americans harnessed the atom in 1945!" said Jamie. "Why didn't he go there?"
"Because the Americans never used the atom for warfare after 1945," said Doctor Zee. "On the other hand, from what I have been able to glean from our inadequate supply of information concerning Earth's political history, Germany's Third Reich was a military machine that would have continued to perfect any weapons Xaviar placed into their hands."
"And this Xaviar guy's really in Germany now?" said Jamie. "In 1944?"
"Correct," said Doctor Zee.
"Then he didn't pull it off!" said Jamie triumphantly. The others regarded her silently. "Don't you see? If he had accomplished his mission, I would come from a world in which Germany won the war. But it didn't, so he must have failed!"
"You know, it makes sense at that," admitted Dillon.
"A thing can make sense without being right," said Doctor Zee. "Dillon, both you and this young woman are making the mistake of viewing Time as a straight-line progression."
"Isn't it?" asked Dillon.
"Only up to a point," said Doctor Zee. "You see, there is only one past, but there are an infinite number of futures. Now, without the benefit of time travel, past and present merge in an immutable series of events, though any occurrence made in the present instant will have immense and unforeseen consequences in the future. And indeed, Dillon, were time travel impossible, I would agree with you that Germany lost the war and didn't develop any super weapons.
"But Xaviar has changed all that," continued the mental mutant. "His present is now 1944, and any action he takes there will have an effect, possibly a disastrous one, on the course of Earth's history."
"But it didn't happen!" repeated Jamie.
"Wrong, my dear," said Doctor Zee. "It merely hasn't happened yet. The fact that we are all here discussing the topic, and that you come from a world in which the Third Reich didn't develop the Ultimate Weapon, merely means that we haven't done anything wrong yet."
"I'm afraid you've lost me, Doctor Zee," said Adama.
"We must send Troy and Dillon into the past after Xaviar. It is their job to stop him from whatever he intends to do. If they succeed, all will be as it is; if not, then this young woman and her particular Earth will blink out of existence to be replaced by the one Xaviar has created. Neither she nor the Earth nor even this conversation will ever have been anything but an alternative future which, like an infinite number of other futures, did not come to pass."
"Then we're not actually in a hurry," said Troy. "I mean, as long as all we have to do is stop Xaviar back in 1944, it doesn't make any difference whether we leave now or five years from now, as long as we appear at the right moment in 1944."
"If we were free from all other considerations you would be quite correct," said Doctor Zee. "But that is not the case."
"I don't understand," said Troy.
"We've got the Cylon forces to consider," said Doctor Zee. "To remain in the vicinity of Earth for five years, or even five days, would be to invite disaster to our fellow humans on the planet's surface. And to leave and then return when you felt you had assimilated enough of Earth's history would be to call even more attention to this sector of the galaxy. No, Troy, you must leave as soon as possible. And you must leave with the knowledge that should you fail, the Galactica you return to may not be the same one you left, and the Earth will most certainly not be the one you just visited."
"I might be able to help," said Jamie hesitantly.
"In what way?" said Adama.
"I was a history major before I became a journalist," she said, gathering enthusiasm as she spoke. "I'm sure I can be useful to you—in exchange for exclusive rights to the story, plus film at six."
"Film at six?" said Dillon.
"You wouldn't understand," said Jamie. "But that's my deal: let me go with Troy and Dillon and I'll help in every way I can."
"It's out of the question," said Adama. "The situation is deadly enough without dragging a civilian into it."
"On the contrary, Adama," interposed Doctor Zee. "Our knowledge of Earth's past is growing with every hour, but for the reasons I've stated, our two warriors do not have the luxury of remaining aboard the Galactica until we can thoroughly brief them on the history and customs of the era to which they must go. If this woman is truly a student of history . . ."
"Try me," said Jamie with more confidence than she felt.
"The time-distance co-ordinates would seem to place Xaviar in a small hamlet in the nation known as Germany, which at that time is being ruled by the Nazis. You have heard of them?"
"Who hasn't?" said Jamie. "They were responsible for the coining of the word 'genocide'."
"Genocide?" said Troy.
"The wholesale slaughter of human beings in enormous quantities," said Jamie. "The practice originated—and ended—in World War Two."
"World War Two?" said Adama unbelievingly.
"Yes," said Jamie. "To quote a comic strip character named Pogo Possum, I guess they had to have a second war to decide who won the first one."
"This is no time for levity," said Doctor Zee emotionlessly.
"All right," said Jamie. "Through a series of misjudgments and accidents that would have been funny had the results not been so grim, Europe stumbled into a multi-national war in 1914. The major powers were Germany on the one side, and England and France on the other. The United States entered on the side of England and France after a couple of years, and Germany surrendered in 1918. But the terms that the allies forced upon Germany were so untenable that her economy collapsed, her government couldn't function, and numerous other situations all came together to form a climate whereby a madman named Adolph Hitler, who had been a mere corporal in World War One, could take control of the German government in the early 1930s."
"By force?" asked Adama.
"The force came later," said Jamie. "The wild part of it all is that Hitler was voted into office. He promised to give the downtrodden German nation back its self-respect."
"Reasonable on the surface of it," said Adama.
"Ah, but there are all kinds of ways of accomplishing it," said Jamie. "First of all, he gave the Germans a scapegoat: the Jews."
"Who were they?" asked Troy.
"They were, and are, a people who practice the religion which gave birth to Christianity," said Jamie. "When Hitler came to power there were perhaps twelve million Jews in the world. When the dust had settled he had killed more than half of them. He had most of them shipped to concentration camps, where they were slaughtered in gas chamber
s and buried in mass graves. Some, a few hundred thousand at least, were turned into soap, and a few even had their skins made into lampshades. It was hideous. And at the same time he was making his followers feel superior—indeed, they finally accepted his notion that they were a Master Race—he was building up a huge war machine, which got the economy back on its feet. The war began innocuously; he marched into a neighboring country, claiming that he needed more living space for his people and stating that this was nothing but a border dispute between two nations. The wild part is that everyone, or almost everyone, believed him, despite the fact that he had outlined his plans for world conquest in a book called Mein Kampf. Sometimes I think no one except Winston Churchill ever read that book before 1939!
"At any rate, Germany began conquering the European nations one by one. Most took only a day or two before they fell. France had its Maginot Line, a miles-long line of defense that they felt was invulnerable. Hitler simply marched around it, and France fell within a week. But when he went up against Russia and England, they fought him to a standstill. By 1942 the United States had declared war on Germany, Italy and Japan—though Japan was a separate case, and was Hitler's ally only insofar as both were at war with the United States—and in 1943 we shipped troops into Africa and Italy. By 1944 the handwriting was on the wall. Germany finally fell in 1945, and was divided by the four great powers—Russia, the United States, England, and France (though I'm sure I don't know what ever qualified France as a great 20th Century power)—and it remains divided to this day."
"You see, Adama," said Doctor Zee. "She can be of help. We don't even know what a Swastika, the Nazi symbol, looks like. I think it is imperative that she accompany our two warriors into Germany's past."
"You are right, as always," said Adama with a sigh.
"Some country we're going to," said Troy. "Didn't any of the Germans stand up to him?"
"It wasn't as easy to stand up to the Gestapo as you might think," said Jamie. "There was an underground, to be sure, just as there were undergrounds in all the nations Hitler conquered—but they were never as big nor as active as modern fiction writers would have people believe. Don't forget: not much misses the eyes and ears of a police state that's more than a decade old."
Battlestar Galactica 5 - Galactica Discovers Earth Page 7