Millennium (5 page)

Which was fortunate. There is one more trick I can use on a flight where the cockpit crew becomes aware of the snatch before it’s finished, but I
really
hate to use it.

We could bring in a man from my Very Special Team. (I’m speaking 20th Amerenglish; “man” includes “woman,” or so it says in my
Strunk and White
.) This would be a man with a bomb in his head to insure no teeth survived for identification. A man who was willing to fly an airplane into the ground.

Did I hear someone say flight recorder? Ah, yes. Those people up front
do
chatter when they get into trouble. There is an interesting solution to that problem. Uptime, it was already being prepared, had been set in motion as soon as the cockpit crew came through and we knew it might have to be used. It was an elegant solution. More than a little puzzling, but elegant.

With our time scanners we can look anywhere, anytime. (Well, almost.) That’s how we knew this plane would go down. We scanned newspaper stories and found accounts of the crash. It might have been nice to look inside the plane and see how the operation was going to go off, but unfortunately we can’t look into any place or time where we’ve been, or will be. (Time travel is tough on verb tenses.) So we couldn’t know we’d have to take the pilot. But we could now scan ahead to the investigation afterward. (See what I mean about verb tenses? This was happening
now
—if that word retains any meaning—uptime, in
the future. They were scanning events a couple days in the ’55 future: my future, at the moment.)

At that investigation the tape from the cockpit recorder would be played. So we’d make a recording of that recording, put it on a self-destructing tape player, like the ones on
Mission: Impossible
, and leave that in the cockpit where it would play into the original recorder.

Paradox!

Because of what we were doing now or had already done, those words would never be spoken by the man whose voice everyone would hear. They would have been/will be/had been merely recorded from the recording itself, which had never been made, because of what we were doing or had already done.

Look at this sequence hard enough and you realize that cause and effect become a joke. Any rational theory of the universe must be shitcanned.

Well, I shitcanned all my rational theories a long time ago. You may hold on to whatever makes you happy.

*    *    *

I was getting nowhere with my search for the missing stunner. I looked up, saw we were the only ones left, and yelled.

“Hey! All you zombies!” When I had their attention I went on. “Everybody keep looking. Tear this plane apart. Don’t rest until the wimps start arriving, and don’t even rest then. I’m going uptime to see what I can do from there.”

I hurried to the front of the plane and…stepped through.

And landed on my ass at the bottom of the sorting floor.

I saw instantly what had happened and started yelling bloody murder. That did me no good.
Every
goat through the Gate comes through yelling bloody murder.

At the uptime end of the Gate is a complex series of cushioned, frictionless ramps. They’re designed to catch people who are unconscious or out of their minds with fear and shuffle them off very quickly before the next goat comes through. Sometimes this process breaks bones, but seldom important ones. Time is of the essence. We can’t be too fussy.

But the system is designed to sort snatch team personnel from the goats: goats to the prep room and then the holding pen and then the deep freeze, snatchers to a well-deserved rest. We all carry a radio squealer on snatch runs. The sorter listens for that squeal. I knew where my squealer was: back in the ready-room.

So I got a chance to see how the other half lives. I could have done without it.

There was no way to get a grip on anything (that’s why they call it frictionless). I slid through a series of chutes and onto a flat surface coated with a sheet of plastic that clung to my skin. It all happened so fast I never did understand the sequence. At some point mechanical hands removed my pants and I found myself wrapped in a tight cocoon of clear plastic. I was straitjacketed, arms at my sides, feet together.

I was tumbled in a blue light. It was frightening, even to me, and I knew what was happening. My body was being studied in minute detail, from the bones outward. The process took about two seconds. I was catalogued out to eighty decimal places and the Big Computer began thumbing through its card file of wimps, looking for the best match. That took about a picosecond. Miles away, a morgue drawer would be springing open in the wimp vaults. My slumbering double would then come rushing toward the prep room, pulling twenty gees of acceleration at the beginning and end of her trip. Twenty gees is a lot—enough to cause brain damage if sustained for any time, but that would be carrying coals to Newcastle. Compared to a wimp, a carrot is a mental giant.

I knew the process was fast, but I’d never seen it. I was dumped on a slab no more than fifteen seconds after coming through the Gate. The wimp arrived five seconds later and was slapped onto the slab next to me. I was still being probed and prodded by mechanical examiners. When the human customizing team arrived everything would be in readiness.

The plastic wrapping was permeable. I could breathe through it, but there was no hope of talking. So I lay there, simmering. I could turn my head just enough to see the wimp. The likeness
was very good: my vegetable twin sister. Of course, her left leg was real and mine wasn’t. I wondered how the BC would cope with that.

I found out.

A mechanical leg came down from an overhead conveyor and was deposited beside the sleeping wimp. Surely that would indicate something to the human operating team, which I was beginning to think would never arrive.

But they did, and they gave me unwanted insight into why goats are so jumpy after going through customization.

There were five in the team. I knew one of them to speak to, though not well. He looked right through me.

They prodded me and turned me. They referred to the computer screen, consulted hastily, and apparently decided to pass the problem of the artificial leg on to others. All they were supposed to do was make the wimp look enough like me to fool FBI investigators in 1955. I was just a piece of meat wrapped up like a frozen steak in a supermarket.

The team worked damn well together. Nobody got in anyone else’s way, everything needed was always at hand. Literally. They would reach without looking, and it would be there.

They were
fast.
They sliced that wimp’s leg off and kicked it aside the instant it hit the floor. Meanwhile someone was extracting all the wimp’s teeth and plugging in new ones that would look just like mine. They hooked up the artificial leg, slashed the wimp here and there in the places where my skinsuit shows scars. They peeled the skin away from her face and began building it from beneath, then closed it again and applied the forced regenerators. It healed without a scar.

But there were scars they wanted the wimp to have. The only way to make those is with a timepress field. When everybody was ready they plugged feedlines from big nutrient tanks into the wimp, connected her ureter and anus to evacuator lines, and jumped back.

The blue glow of the Gate surrounded the wimp. It began to breathe so fast the chest was a blur. Its hair and fingernails grew
visibly. It used nutrient fluid so fast that it had to be pumped in, and it emitted urine in a pulsed, pressurized stream that hissed into a tank on the floor. In ten seconds it grew six months older. The scars healed normally.

Then they pulled my jeans onto the wimp, inserted a funnel into its mouth and were about to pump it full of half-digested airline food when one of the workers looked at my face.

I mean she
really
looked at it. She had looked right at me several times before but nothing had registered.

Her eyes grew wide.

When she managed to make them realize who it was they were duplicating, the whole team helped me peel out of the plastic skin.

Things got a little hazy for a time.

I remember looking down at the sleeping face that looked just like mine. Then they were pulling me away from it. There was a stout aluminum bar in my hands and a rip in the palm of my skinsuit from thumb to index finger. I had wrenched the bar loose from one of the examining machines.

And I had sure made a mess of that wimp.

I regret that. I really do. The thing had been wearing my jeans, and I never did get all the blood out of them.

*    *    *

The head of the wimp-building team trailed me all the way to the door.

He kept trying to apologize and I kept ignoring him. If there was blame, it was mostly mine, but I didn’t want to say that. Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it. Inside, I was whipping myself severely for pulling a tyro stunt like leaving my squealer in the ready-room. Outside, I trust, I was at work and the man’s apologies simply got in my way.

I had wasted five whole minutes in there. I would never know if those minutes were the margin between life and death for Pinky.

I wasted fifteen more seconds just getting through the door.

There were no procedures for it. The whole goat-sorting operation was designed to prevent anybody getting through easily. But with a few quiet, totally sincere death threats, I managed it. I raced up to Operations, told Lawrence to put every available operative on the search for Pinky’s stunner in the city from which the flight had originated—which I learned was Houston—got him to extend the bridge again, and…stepped…through the Gate.

It was a shambles.

They had looked just about every place it was possible to look, and they had not been gentle. The aisle was knee-deep in torn seat cushions. The carpet was ripped up. The contents of the galley were strewn from nose to tail of the plane. Tiny bottles of booze clinked underfoot.

To make everything worse, the customized wimps began arriving.

So much time had already been wasted that we had to hurry getting them placed. We seated a few and strapped them in, but most we just threw. We had our portapaks on full power, and we were
strong.
Instead of just enriched blood, adrenalin, and vitamins—the wake-up mixture—we were now getting an insane brew of hyper-drenalin, methedrine, Essence of Hysteria, TNT, and Kickapoo Joyjuice. We picked up those half-corpses and tossed them around like beanbags. I could have torn sheet metal with my eyebrows.

Three-quarters of the wimps had been through the process I had recently seen firsthand. They looked exactly like the people they were replacing. To save time, the other quarter came pre-mutilated. Most were hideously burned. Some were still smoking.

One is supposed to say the smell of charred human flesh is revolting. It’s not, actually. It smells pretty good.

Most of the wimps were still breathing. They’d existed an average of thirty years in the wimp tanks, kept alive by machines, exercised mechanically to keep the muscle tone. Theoretically
they didn’t have the brains to breathe, but the fact is they were too dumb to stop. Most would still be breathing when they hit the ground.

It didn’t take long to get them all through. When we were done we still had three minutes and forty seconds. I sent one of the team back to the future to see if anyone had located the stunner in Houston. The rest of us kept looking for it on the plane. The messenger returned with the expected bad news, and now we had two minutes and twenty seconds.

Pinky had calmed down, if you could call it that. She was no longer crying. I believe she was paralyzed with terror. I found Lilly Rangoon, the squad leader, and pulled her aside.

“I don’t know Pinky well,” I said. “What does she have in the way of twonkies?”

“Nothing. She’s clean.” Lilly looked away from me.

That’s a rarity. We were talking about such things as artificial legs, kidneys, eyes—medical implants of any kind that were too advanced for 1955. Pinky was a healthy girl. She would be a great loss to the team, if for no other reason than that.

At the same time, her lack of medical anachronisms made Lilly’s job a little easier. It would have fallen to Lilly to cut those items out and bring them back with us.

“Thirty seconds,” someone called out.

“There’s a minute leeway,” I said. “We’ll have to go on the click. You stay long enough to get her skinsuit and—”

“
Shut your freaking mouth!
I know my job. Now get out of my aircraft.”

Nobody talks to me like that. Nobody. I looked into her eyes. If looks could freeze I’d have been a one-legged popsicle.

“Right,” I said. “See you in fifty thousand years.”

I hurried to the front, where everyone was hanging back, away from the Gate. Nobody wanted to go. Neither did I. It would have been a lot easier to ride it in.

I looked back and saw Pinky hand something floppy to Lilly. I knew it was Pinky, though it didn’t look like her, because there was no one else it could be. The floppy thing was her skinsuit.
She was no longer a sexy stewardess; without her disguise she was a terrified, naked little girl.

Lilly gave her a salute, which Pinky did not have the will to return, and sprinted toward me.

“Start walking through, or I start kicking ass,” I said.

They did. I turned to Lilly.

“How old was she?” I asked.

“Pinky? She was twelve.”

I didn’t make the rule. I’m not trying to absolve myself by saying that. I think it’s a good rule. If we didn’t have it, I’d write it myself.

No hardware gets left behind. The penalty for carelessness is death. You bring it back, or you stay with it.

We couldn’t always work it the way we did with Pinky. That was the
best
way. It could be done because this flight would hit so hard and burn so fiercely that no one would expect to recover more than fifty percent of the bodies in any form at all. If they got ten identifiable corpses it would be miraculous, so one girl who shouldn’t be there would never be noticed.