Millennium (15 page)

So I summarized Coventry’s lecture of the previous day, telling them the tale of the first twonky, the one I had no responsibility for—other than the transferred responsibility of being in command of someone who makes a mistake. I told them we had
found no trace of it, and that the probability was nearly one hundred percent that whoever found it in the last five hundred centuries had done nothing with it, that it had not altered his, her, or its life.

“Some good news for a change,” Nancy Yokohama opined.

You want some more, O disgusting one? I just released a school of piranha in that fishtank your gray matter swims in…

I cut that thought short, I’m afraid. There are limits even to
my
irreverence.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” I beamed. “Now for the classical rejoinder. The
bad
news is that we have located the other weapon. It’s going to be a bitch to get it back. Can I have the tank, please?”

A time-scan tank rose from the floor beside me. In rapid succession we watched the results of thirty hours of scanning by almost a thousand operatives.

The first scene was the site of the DC-10 crash. The tank was almost black, punctuated by tiny, exquisitely lovely flames. The viewpoint zoomed in until most of the tank was filled by one worker looking dazed and dragging a plastic sack behind him. He stooped, picked up something, and started to put it in his bag. The picture froze and we zoomed in closer, to see the object in his hand. It was Ralph’s stunner, much the worse for wear. Deep inside it a red light glowed.

“This is the first human contact with the twonky. It’s nothing serious, as you can see. The man has no idea what he’s handling. His actions are not altered enough to produce change in the timestream.

“The twonky is taken to this building, which has been set aside to collect the nonorganic debris generated by the crash.”

I let them study the interior of the building as displayed in the tank. I surreptitiously wiped my palms on my hips. “Nonorganic debris generated…”

This was all getting to me. I’d been around Martin Coventry too much, and, to make it worse, much of the time-windows we could look into in our study of Bill Smith had been consumed by endless meetings. And suddenly I was babbling fluent tech-speak,
that universal human gobbledegook patois designed by “experts” to overawe the unwashed. It probably got started about the time of the flint hand-axe and has been getting denser and more impenetrable ever since.

I couldn’t help it. For twenty-four hours I’d been observing masters of the tongue outdoing themselves at the subsequent meetings and hearings and press conferences generated by the crash.

Still, I’d have to watch it. Before I knew it I’d be on speaking terms with bureaucrats and from there it’s only one short step downward to the nadir of language, which, in the twentieth century, was known as The Law.

“We can’t trace it in here,” I went on. “We’re hampered by the fact that no less than four distinct blank spots exist between the time the Gate was turned off at the end of the snatch, and the critical time, forty-eight hours later, when the paradox situation becomes inherent. Naturally, we can’t know for what purpose the Gate was used those four times. But we do know none of them are the result of operations conducted by us prior to this time.”

Ali Teheran spoke up, “Ergo, they will be caused by excursions into the past yet to be taken.”

For brilliant observations like this I hold the Council in awe? Oh, well. I nodded, and went on.

“Skipping over that for now…when we again pick up the twonky it is only in terms of probabilities.”

That statement produced much the same reaction it had earlier when Martin Coventry made it; I even heard someone groan, though this time I was sure it wasn’t me. I believe it was The Nameless One.

“Right now everything seems to hinge on the actions of this man. William ‘Bill’ Smith, forty-something years old, chief on-site investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.”

In the tank, the image was of an unkempt, slightly rheumy, tall, brown-haired guy I’d come to know all too well in the last hours. I let him linger there while the Council studied the man
who had suddenly become the pivot of history as we knew it. I couldn’t help taking another look myself. He was not the guy I’d have ordered up from central casting to be the Man for All Seasons.

Oddly, he looked a little like Robert Redford, my Hollywood heartthrob. If Redford had been a heavy drinker weighed down by fifteen years of quiet despair and burdened with an unfortunate way of holding his mouth and a pair of slightly misfocused eyes straddling a nose that leaned to the left…if Redford had been a rummy and a loser, he’d have been Bill Smith. It was as if two people had built a model using identical parts, but one had followed the instructions and the other had just bashed it together and left glue oozing from the cracks.

I resumed.

“Smith’s actions following the last of the blank spots are crucial. We have established that he entered the hangar containing the wrecked airplanes forty-eight hours after the crash itself. When he emerges, he has come unstuck from the timestream.” I let that sequence unfold in the tank. I was weary of talking.

We saw him come out, but he was no longer the sharp, perfect little model of a man he had been when he went in. He was fuzzy around the edges. He was like a badly focused film, a vidscreen tuned incorrectly, or, more to the point, a photographic quintuple-exposure.

“We have identified five distinct main lines of action from this departure point—or cusp, if you will. In two of them he emerges from the hangar with the weapon—at least we think he does. He’s very hard to see. In one of those two, the weapon is not sufficient as a disruptive force in his life. He eventually reenters his predestined lifeline. In the other, finding the weapon changes his life forever, with consequences for us I need not detail.

“In three other scenarios he does
not
have the weapon when he comes out. In two of those, he once more reintegrates into the path of history. But again, in the fifth and last, he departs radically.”

“Even though he does not have the stunner,” Peter Phoenix said.

“That’s right. We don’t know why.”

“Something happened to him in there,” Yokohama said.

“Yes. Naturally, we tried to find out what it was, but since the event happened during a period of temporal censorship we’re unlikely to ever know.” I was assuming they didn’t need that phenomenon explained to them, but perhaps a few more words about it are in order, since I was now bracing to hit them with my plan, and it hinged on the laws of censorship.

There is absolute temporal censorship, and there is the censorship of proximity. The presence of the Gate is the best example of the first; when it is in operation, when it has actually appeared at a particular time, we can neither see nor go anywhere in that time ever again.

The Proximity Effect is a bit different. My recent trip back to 1983 New York is a good example. The Gate appeared, I zapped Mary Sondergard back through it, and it vanished. It didn’t reenter 1983 until the next day. But for almost twenty-four hours I had been living in the past.
I
became a sort of twonky. If I tried to look into those twenty-four hours in New York, I’d see nothing but static; I was a disruptive factor in the timestream. An inanimate twonky did the same thing, but much less so.

You can’t meet yourself. As far as we know, that’s an absolutely inflexible rule of time traveling. It extends even to seeing yourself, and further, to someone else seeing you and giving you a report. Thus, Martin Coventry could not look into that motel room where I spent the night and see anything but static, nor could anyone from my time. That area was sealed to us.

In fact, my presence in that room had created a zone of censorship that took in most of the Eastern Seaboard. We could still scan in California during that night, but we’d have no luck seeing what had been happening in Baltimore.

For much the same reason, we could no longer follow Smith very accurately after he got to California to begin his investigation—and
that’s what my argument to the Council would be based around. In addition to the windows of absolute censorship that told us when the Gate would be used—might be used—there was a great deal of proximity effect to be seen.

This probably meant that one of us had been involved in the events in the hangar. It meant, to Coventry and me, anyway, that somebody from our time was going to be moving around in 1983, with the result that temporal censorship was preventing us from learning anything that could be useful in planning what we would do—had done.

If you don’t understand that, take fifty aspirin and call me in the morning.

“I take it you are in favor of a mission to repair this situation,” Phoenix said, anticipating me.

“Yes, I am. For two reasons. If we do nothing, the cumulative effects of this thing are going to work their way up the timeline. I believe I was told the rate of approach of this…one of the engineers called it a ‘timequake’…is on the order of two hundred years per hour. If you can make any sense out of a figure like that. I—”

“We are familiar with the concept,” Teheran chided me. “When the timequake arrives here where the disturbance originated, the readjustment in reality will take place all up and down the timeline.”

“And we’ll all be edited out of it,” I finished for him. “Us, and all the effects of our work. A hundred thousand rescued humans will reappear on falling airplanes, in sinking ships and exploding factories and on battlefields and in the bottom of mineshafts. The Gate Project will be over. I don’t suppose it will matter to us since we won’t be around to witness it. We’ll be never-born.”

“There are other theories,” The Nameless One said.

“I’m aware of that. Yet in five hundred years of snatch operations no one has suggested we rely on any of them. A few hours ago I let a girl die because it has been so strongly impressed on me that we must treat this theory as if it were proven
fact. Are you telling me we’re changing theories now?” Do it, you impossible obscenity; tell me that, and I’ll find you, and find a way to make you hurt.

“No,” it said. “Get on with it. You mentioned a second reason for undertaking this project.”

“Which, in my opinion,” Teheran added, “might well produce the very temporal catastrophe we are trying to avoid.”

“I have to defer to your judgement on that,” I said. “I suspect it may be true, myself. However. The second reason has to do with the time capsule message I opened and read two days ago.”

That got a stir out of them. Who says we highly evolved future types aren’t superstitious? That message was in my handwriting. That meant I was going to write it when I was a little older, and presumably a little wiser.

But just as cynical. The message had said: “I don’t know if it is [vital], but tell them anyway.”

There had been no need for her/me to add “don’t let anybody see this message.” A con like that wouldn’t work if anybody but me had seen it.

So I said, “The message said this mission is vital to the success of the Gate Project.” And I sat back, not pushing.

Sure enough, in twenty minutes I had the authorization I needed.

There were four days to consider: the tenth through the thirteenth of December. During those four days the Gate had made/would make six different appearances.

The first was my entrance on the 10th, in the New York motel.

The second was actually many trips, carefully spaced, from the afternoon through the evening and early night of the 11th, during the flights of the two aircraft. Both these periods were now closed to us. It hardly mattered: both periods were before the loss of the stunner.

The planes crashed at 9:11
P.M.
, Pacific Standard Time. The first temporal blank after that was from eight to nine
A.M.
on the following morning, the 12th. We decided to call that Window A, since it was the first period we knew we had not yet sent the Gate to—which meant we would do so some day.

The second window—which we called, with fine lack of imagination, B—was later that same day, from two to four in the afternoon.

Window C was a long one. It started at nine in the evening on the 12th, and went all the way to ten in the morning the next day.

And Window D was the paradox window. It coincided with Smith’s visit to the hangar on the night of the 13th.

Each of these windows had advantages and disadvantages.

A was far enough downtime from the paradox that Smith would be unlikely to be alert to anything. Our research showed that at the time of Window A the wreckage of both planes was, in large part, already in the hangar. If we used that window, it would be in an attempt to find the stunner in the unsorted wreckage and bring it back. If we could do that, all our troubles were over.

B seemed the least promising. What was happening at that time, most probably, was the first playing of the cockpit tape from the 747. I figured I’d go back to that one if and when my first option failed, as it still involved the least interference possible.

As for Window C…

I was the only one who had read the time capsule message, and even that early in the preparations I had developed a dread for C. I couldn’t tell you why. I just know that I felt very bad when I thought of going back and spending a night in Oakland.
Tell him about the kid. She’s only a wimp.

No thank you.

Coventry argued for D. Take the bull by the horns, was his feeling. I wondered if he’d started seeing himself as Lars, Cleaver-of-Heads—a man of action if there ever was one—instead of an historian. And I wondered if he’d feel the same way if
he
was the one going back to confront the site of a paradox.

Again, no thank you.

I voted for A, and by voting very hard and as often as I could, eventually got my way. I further decided the expedition should be as small as possible: that is, one person. Coventry had to admit the wisdom of this. When messing with the timestream, you push as gently as possible.