by David Drake
“D-Dave,” his wife said, “the little camera is automatic and I could hide it—”
Dave Myaschensky did not move. His face settled into gray curves like a concrete casting. His right hand, with which he had been about to indicate the cocking lever, twitched; only twitched. “Arlene,” he said in the deadly silence, “listen this once. I need identifiable photographs, not colored blurs. The Nikon’s big and old, but we couldn’t afford a new package that does the same thing.”
He curled his fingers around his wife’s right wrist. His swarthy skin was a contrast to the white delicacy of hers, and his tendon-ridged grip began to sink as well into her plumpness. “We could have bought a new camera if you hadn’t decided you needed a master’s, couldn’t we, dear?”
“Dave, let go of me,” Arlene said in a small voice. Then, louder and with undertones of strength rather than panic, “Dave, if you hurt me, I won’t be able to go at all. There’ll be no pictures.” The fingers released like springs. Into her husband’s startled eyes Arlene added, “They may not let me go anyway. Really. The chairman’s going to go, and I don’t know what’ll happen next.”
“Now, doll,” the entomology student said. He converted his grip of a moment before into a pat for his wife’s soft shoulder. “You always say what a sweetheart Gustafson is. He won’t keep you off when your heart’s set on it, right?”
“He may not—” Arlene began.
Again the gentle pat, but Dave’s face was congealing. “And if you have to, you’ll remind the chairman that all this he’s joining is a fraud on the government, isn’t it?”
Dave Myaschensky put his hand back on the camera. “You’ve got to understand what it means,” he said. For the first time that evening his voice held an emotion that was not frustrated anger. “Doll, if you bring back so much as a picture of a housefly, I’ll do a paper on ‘Preliminary Investigations of Cretaceous Dipterids in a Living Environment.’ They’ll think it’s a fake at first, but when the story about this comes out on TV, well…”
He clutched Arlene’s hands, raised them, kissed them. “Doll, wherever I send it, they’ll print it—Science, Nature, it’s my choice. If we wait till it’s all public, the big names take over and I’m out in the cold forever. But if I’m the first, I’m a big name, and I’m on the ground floor of the biggest thing that ever happened to entomology.”
Arlene nodded slowly. After all, no one had said anything against taking pictures … and according to Mike Gardner, there was no reason not to walk around, just out of sight, so that the question would not arise.
“Okay, bunny,” she said aloud to her husband. “Show me again how I keep the light right on this one.”
“Tomorrow’s going to be a great day!” Dave Myaschensky beamed.
* * *
“The funny thing is,” said Mike Gardner, “that yesterday I believed in it, in the time machine. But now that I’ve gone and it really works, it’s like I was watching a movie, is all.” He smiled. “A pretty boring movie. They needed Godzilla tramping down the middle of the swamp, didn’t they?”
Isaac Hoperin grinned back abstractedly over his own beer. The bustle of the pizza parlor was warm insulation instead of a distraction to him. “Well,” he said, “I continue to be less concerned with what we saw than I am in how we were able to see it. It’s an awkward position for a physicist, being quite certain that the apparatus I see couldn’t do anything except set up a fluctuating magnetic field—of the sort which might indicate a Dobbs phasetime basis for…”
Hoperin stopped and glanced up, realizing that his companion was not equipped to care about what he was being told. The physicist began again, “But to actually have been a part of the, the temporal shift these Travelers claimed was going to occur.” His lips pursed, just over the rim of his mug. “I’ve met their type, you know. So sure they have all the necessary data. So sure there’s two ways to look at a problem, their way and the wrong way. Every soldier and damn near every politician I’ve met was that way.” The lips relaxed in a smile. “Most engineers as well, Gardner.”
Mike grinned. “But it’s Astor you mean,” he said.
“The tall one?” clarified the physicist. “Yes, well … It’s a mistake to think any group is monolithic, I know. Astor has the face and bearing of a colonel who told me how much he’d like to order his men to use me for bayonet practice, though that was a long time ago. I can never believe that a person like that has the right answer to anything. Even though we both were part of the proof.”
The two men had met for the first time that afternoon. They were together now because, alone of the jetsam hurled out of the day’s events, they had no one else with whom to discuss matters. “What I can’t understand,” Gardner said, “is—the test unit the three of us built, it never worked. Never. Down in the basement, the big one made things disappear, and they came back … even a cage full of guinea pigs. But only when the Travelers were there. Why the hell does the little rig work when the power to the coils isn’t even on?”
“I take this with a grain of salt,” said the physicist. “With a whole handful if you like, but your Astor seemed to be claiming that the coils were energized by induction so long as the correct control signal was reaching the boards. Now even if that were true, we should be talking about field effects in an asymptotically flat spacetime, not a”—he barked a laugh at the absurdity of the thought—“not time travel, whatever that could conceivably be. I seem to be being offered the engineering benefits of Grand Unification, a form of simulated initial instant in which omega equals one, and thus symmetry—and tunneling—can take place.”
He shook his prematurely balding head. “Forced Unification? Well, perhaps if Einstein were here, he’d be able to make something of this. But I keep expecting to learn that this tunnel has an oncoming train at the end of it, too.”
Hoperin studied his companion for the first time as a person. A nice-enough fellow, whose observations of the general circumstances and of the event itself were as clear as the physicist’s own. But Gardner came from a different generation—eighteen, maybe nineteen years, but a generation nonetheless; and even with the same background as Hoperin, the younger man’s personality would not react to certain forms of authority in the same way.
The physicist said, “The truths that people like Astor tell you, uh, Mike, are false. Partly because the truth is never so simple that it can be grasped by a mind with only go/no go responses. And partly because that sort of mind always prefers a lie.” He smiled because he fully realized how absurd his absolute statement was according to his own terms. But it was nonetheless the philosophy which had guided Isaac Hoperin throughout his adult life.
“Not my sort of lady, either,” said Gardner as he stood. He was smiling also, but wryly and thinking more about women for the moment than he was about the project. He’d gotten into something without thinking much. Not thinking about it further wouldn’t make it go away—if that was what he wanted—but it certainly felt better in the short run. “Well,” he continued, “I’m going to take a run back to the school and look things over. Just for the hell of it. You want to come, too? I’ve got keys.”
Hoperin shook his head in self-amusement. “I’m going home with the formulae,” he said, tapping his briefcase. “I’m going to see if they make any more sense to me now than they did over the past two months. Quite frankly, I find concrete objects confuse me more than they help.”
Mike Gardner laughed as he fished in his wallet for his half of the bill. “That’s one thing we sure don’t need,” he said. “More confusion.”
* * *
“What confuses me,” said Charles Eisley as he sipped his drink, “is what these future visitors do with their time machine. Besides help us build time machines of our own, of course.”
“They explained that,” said Mustafa Bayar. He was the only one of them drinking raki again this evening, and he was sipping rather than tossing glasses down the way he had the night before. None of them were drink
ing heavily except the newcomer, Danny Cooper. Cooper had anesthetized himself with Scotch before he had time to give a connected account of what had happened to him and was now slumped on the couch, holding a glass no one had volunteered to again refill.
“You see,” Mustafa went on, “they find crises and correct them, so that their world—their time is peaceful, comfortable.”
Sue Schlicter frowned. “You mean they make things like, oh, Auschwitz not have happened?” she said. “Or World War Two, period? But they did happen.”
“Do you suppose the machine has to be invented, so-called invented, before they can travel to an era?” Eisley suggested. He had become interested in the situation as an event, not just because of Mustafa’s involvement.
“No,” said Sue, “because they did go back to whenever, long before man. Right?”
Mustafa pumped his head vigorously and said, “But to change, not just to visit—perhaps that?”
“That’s all bullshit, you know,” said Danny Cooper in a gloomy, muzzy voice.
The other three looked around abruptly. The secretary had not moved on the couch; in fact, he had not even opened his eyes. Toward the empty glass, he continued, “Peaceful? If they’re so peaceful, why the guns?”
“Well, those were tools,” said Mustafa with a frown. “They were for animals when they guided us back into time. Common sense, not … unpeace.”
“Bullshit,” Cooper repeated in a singsong. His body was struggling to lift itself upright, but his eyes were still closed. “You weren’t there, boyo, you weren’t there.”
The Turkish student’s mouth opened momentarily. He closed it again, swayed either by the fact that Cooper was drunk or remembrance that they both were guests in a friend’s house. Eisley was already moving to place himself between the other two men, just in case.
“At first there wasn’t a damn soul,” Cooper was saying, “just the walls and the furniture that looked like somebody poured it. And the city, the mother-huge city, but they were all ants, you know?” Unexpectedly, Cooper’s eyes popped open. He glared at the other three people intensely. As suddenly, the lids closed again and the voice went on, “It was a goddamn army when they came for us, though, wasn’t it? I don’t care they were all split-tails, they all had guns.”
“Split-tails?” Mustafa whispered in puzzlement.
“Women,” Sue Schlicter translated with the shadow of a smile.
“Pointing guns at us and shouting,” Cooper said. “Ready to shoot, you bet your ass. Ready to rub us away like we never were.…” The secretary stood up with more coordination than he had shown since the second glass of whiskey. “I need a drink,” he said clearly; and as he crumpled at the knees, all three of the others caught him and lowered him safely to the couch.
“You know,” said Charles Eisley as he looked down at Cooper, “he’s got a point. If the future really is so peaceful, what are the armed guards doing?”
* * *
Astor slung the gun on its hook again after she had taken her atmosphere suit from behind it. Keyliss had already removed her orange garment from the locker, but Selve’s still hung in back of his weapon. The tall female stared at her male colleague with disapproval. As he continued fiddling with something in the center of the docking area, the disapproval hardened to outright anger. “You’d better get ready, you know,” she said. “All three of us are to be present to check the programming.”
“The programming at Four, yes,” Selve agreed coolly. “I’ll be ready. I’ve set our unit for a preliminary transport to Eleven, however—before we go. Tight focus, but let’s both get well out of the way, shall we?” He beckoned the woman with a gesture which took account of the tiny parcel he had aligned for transport.
“What?” blurted Astor. She started directly across the docking area to Selve, but the mounting hum of the pillars warned her. The coils were already cycling at a far higher rate than they should have been if they were accumulating for the scheduled transport. “Keyliss, come here,” she called as she skirted the docking area quickly.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Keyliss as she flung open the door of her room. She was mostly into her atmosphere suit, but one sleeve and shoulder dangled and her left breast was bared. “The unit—is it running away?”
“This one,” Astor snarled at Selve, “had the bright idea of doing a preliminary run. I suppose you realize that you’ve destroyed the whole schedule? You’ve maybe destroyed the whole world, the timing’s so close?”
The three members of the team were in simultaneous but varied motion. Keyliss was running from her room with the loose sleeve flapping. Astor, closer to Selve, was scuttling around the area that might be affected by the transport. And Selve himself was walking nonchalantly back toward the instruments, which were already well into the course of guiding the unscheduled run. The trio met at the consoles with a timing which could not have been choreographed more precisely.
“But Selve,” Keyliss said as she peered toward the docking area, “what are you trying to send?”
“A bud,” her male colleague answered. He recognized and appreciated the fact that Keyliss spoke from concern rather than anger. “It’ll grow into a bowl. Not an exceptional one, I’m afraid, but I think it will give Sara Jean some pleasure.” With a challenging glance at his colleagues, he added, “I think we owe them that, don’t you? Some pleasure.”
Astor had taken the time to check the current settings before she spoke. “We’ll go in on the damping curve of this run,” she said, half in approval—and half for reassurance that she had correctly interpreted the instrument readings.
“Yes, that’s right,” Selve agreed calmly. “There’ll be a balance surge at the other end, but it won’t affect the schedule.” Keyliss had surreptitiously begun recalling data from the memory of the console she ordinarily ran. Selve noticed her and added, “I’ve already programmed it, but of course check my values.”
The coils reached drive frequency and flashed their fierce, soul-filling glare. Though the team were as experienced with transport as anyone else in the world, it was unusual for them to watch an operation of which they were not themselves a part. The flash, coupled with the continuing solidity of their surroundings, induced a sense of failure and disquiet in the three spectators. The tiny bud and its globe of nutrients were gone from the edge of the docking area. Nothing else had changed.
“I’ve shrunk the area of our transport slightly,” said Selve. He spoke quietly. Without the raw buzz from the pillars behind it, his voice seemed preternaturally clear. “Wouldn’t do to pick the bud up and shift it here before I could give it to Sara Jean, would it?”
Astor cleared her throat uncomfortably. Selve’s behavior had put the project at risk to a greater degree—not, perhaps, a measurably greater degree—than it would have been without his antics. While Astor could not have verbalized that thought, it was a subconscious component of her unease. She said aloud, “You’d better get your suit out of the locker now.”
Selve nodded. He walked across the docking area. It was safe, although the pillars were already beginning to sing with the next charge.
Keyliss fed her arm through the sleeve and sealed the torso of her suit. She did not bother to close her hood as yet. “What duration did you send the pot for, Selve?” she called.
Her male colleague had begun to strip off his ordinary clothing at the locker. Time was short, and the three of them lived too closely for the normal ceremonies of modesty. “About thirty-seven days,” he replied as he stepped into his orange suit. “I was more concerned to get the damping curve right than I was that the initial transport be precise, of course.”
“We can’t be absolutely sure that we’ve cured the ghosts and backflows,” Astor said with a partial return to her normal hectoring demeanor. “That could throw everything off.”
“If we still have anomalies,” Selve snapped back, “then we’ve got to cure them before we report the project is operational, don’t we?” His hand brushed
closed the seam of his suit forcefully. “The system will work or not work independently of any change I made today in the pattern of testing.”
Keyliss touched her bigger colleague’s elbow to silence the useless argument. “We’d better take position,” she said. Then, louder, she added, “Yes, thirty-seven days should be adequate. A great deal more than adequate.”
* * *
“I don’t think you’ve got an adequate program, Gustafson,” said Henry Layberg, “without a medical adviser.” He gestured with the rabbit scapula from which he had just sucked the meat. “Think of the situations you could get into, hey, Shroyer?”
“Barring a failure of the entire system,” said Louis Gustafson with a puzzled frown, “I can’t see that we’re any more prone to injuries than”—he shrugged—“anyone else who climbs stairs to their work place. These aren’t lengthy excursions, at least at present. No one’s going to become seriously dehydrated in twenty minutes, even in the midst of a desert. For instance.”
Robert Shroyer laughed and thumped Layberg on the arm. “What my old roommate’s trying to suggest, Louis,” he said, “is that he’d like to watch things tomorrow.”
“To go along, actually,” the MD corrected with a grin.
“Oh, dear God,” whispered Sara Jean Layberg. She lowered the tumbler she held to the table with a thump and a slosh of water onto the cloth.
Everyone stared at her in concern. She looked around with a brief smile, then patted her husband’s wrist. “I’m sorry,” she said to the watching men, “but it was such—such a disorienting experience—that I can’t imagine anybody wanting to do it to themselves. Not you, Henry.”
“Ah,” said Professor Gustafson, “it was very kind for you to feed me so wonderfully, Mrs. Layberg, when I just appeared with Robert. But—”
“Well, don’t worry about that,” said Henry Layberg. He did not realize that the engineer’s statement was an apology in advance for disagreeing with his hostess. “You tried to call, after all, and if the calls hadn’t been shunted to my office, we would have told Shroyer of course to bring you. This whole business has fascinating possibilities. Haven’t you ever wondered how an additional three hundred generations would affect modern man through microevolution?”