Time Was (23 page)

He climbed out of the cab and sprinted over to the section of the parking lot where his car awaited him. He had the ticket stub ready for the lot attendant, who quickly and politely took him to the silver Mercedes.

Janus stared at the car with contempt.

Shit—not exactly inconspicuous, this car.

He'd have to trade it for something more conservative, more trailer-park chic.

He waited for the attendant to be on his way, then opened the trunk and pulled back the tarpaulin to reveal the small arsenal Annabelle and Simmons had provided for him.

“Ooooh, Simmons,” he muttered under his breath. “Very impressive.”

The only things missing were disposable rocket launchers—one-shot bazookas, as Janus sometimes called them.

Those
he found in the hollowed area where a spare tire should have been.

He had enough hardware here to take over a small third-world country single-handedly, if he got the urge.

He checked the time.

He'd worry about switching cars later.

Right now, he had an appointment to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep
, he thought, grinning to himself.

 

Stonewall finished his final calculations, double checked the results, then looked up at the others. “Three times through, and there's less than a fifty second deviation in the numbers.”

“That's a good thing, right?” asked Itazura.

“Very,” replied Psy–4. “It means that, give or take fifty seconds, we've got eighty-four hours until Preston's system begins the final stages of the D and D.”

Stonewall studied the readouts again. “Right now it's 6:47
P.M.
on Thursday. The final stage of the D and D will last somewhere between one hour and one-hour-thirty-six minutes and will commence at 6:45
A.M.
Sunday.”

Psy–4 rubbed his eyes. “Which means we not only have to be inside the PTSI compound before seven, we have to be in the same room as Roy.” He slowly turned his head, glancing at everyone else. “The target time for probable maximum capacity is 7:12
A.M
., right, Stonewall?”

“Give or take a minute. After 7:10 but before 7:15 is the best window of opportunity I can come up with. According to my figures, if we can disconnect Roy from Preston's system and hook him up to a portable container within the given time frame, he stands to retain at least eighty-three percent of his original mental capacity, maybe even all of it. Any later than 7:15, and we can lop twenty percent off his IQ for each minute.”

“So at 7:20 we've got ourselves a vegetable salad, is that it?”

Stonewall glared at Itazura. “That's a bit harsher than I would have put it, but . . . yes, basically.”

“Just checking.”

For several moments, no one said anything.

The weight of it seemed too great even for their shoulders.

Finally, Radiant cleared her throat and said, very, very softly: “Which of us will tell Zac?”

“No!” snapped Killaine. “None of us'll be telling him. No arguments. The man's got enough worries crushing his spirit right now and I'll be damned if any of us will add to his burdens.”

Psy–4 nodded. “I hate duplicity as much as anyone, but Killaine's right. Zac's been wrung out for a while now. This would just give him something more to tie himself up in knots over. Maybe in a day or two, when things have been worked out in detail, maybe then we'll tell him. Until that decision is made, we keep it to ourselves, agreed?”

Everyone did.

“Fine,” said Psy–4. “Then we go about our daily routines as much as possible.” He looked at Radiant. “Any jobs waiting?”

“Construction workers, delivery truck driver, dishwasher, the usual.”

“No security assignments?”

Radiant huffed. “Don't you think I would have said something?”

Psy–4 held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, you're right, I wasn't—”

He noticed Stonewall then.

Across the room.

By the window.

Staring out at the rain with the saddest expression Psy–4 had ever seen on his face.

“Stoner? Stoner, what is it?”

“Looking at a butterfly,” he replied.

And, indeed, there was a butterfly perched on the ledge, under a pipe, protected from the pouring rain.

“Yeah . . .?” said Itazura. “I mean, sure, it's no puppy dog but it's nice. Don't think it'd make a good pet, though.”

“No,” said Stonewall, who either didn't notice or didn't care about his friend's jest. “I was thinking about what Edward N. Lorenz said about butterflies.”

“Lorenz?” asked Itazura.

“He was a mathematician who eventually went into the field of meteorology. He opened up the field of chaos math. He applied certain convection equations to the short-term prediction of weather and watched those equations disintegrate into insanity. He asked, ‘When a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, does it set off tornadoes in Texas?' His answer, of course, was yes, because that seemingly harmless movement creates a small but potent change in atmospheric pressure that interacts with other minute changes, and those combine with still other unpredictable variables that come down through the exo-, iono-, and stratosphere to mingle with the cumulative ‘butterfly effects' in the troposphere, and before you know it—wham!—you've got thirty people dead in a Kansas trailer park. Think about it.” He pressed a finger against the window. “This little fellow flutters his wings, and chaos could come crashing down to reduce our world to smithereens.”

Stonewall was not known to his friends as a talker—he only spoke when he considered it necessary—and when he
did
speak it was rarely for very long and never without a serious purpose. Now his words came out in a rapid, deadly cadence—a sure sign that he was working out a serious problem.

“Imagine,” he said, “that Lorenz's butterfly is the embodiment of everything that causes us to ignore or add to the suffering of others, and that the flapping of its wings is the force of that apathy spilling outward. In less than a second it combines with the myriad emotions already expelled into the air—anger, lust, despair, whatever—until all of them become a single entity. Multiply that by however many times a day a person turns away from another's suffering, then multiply
that
by the number of people in this world,
then
multiply that figure by the number of seconds in a day, week, year, or decade, and pretty soon you've got one hell of a charge building up. A point of maximum tension has to be reached, and then the combined forces will rupture outward, destroying whomever happens to be in its path.”

Psy–4 looked at the others, then back to Stonewall. “I'm afraid I don't see what this has to do with—”

“It has everything to do with it, don't you see?” Stonewall's voice broke on the last three words and for a moment he looked as if he might begin to weep, but he pulled in a deep breath, turned away from the window, and walked to the center of the room.

“We were created, not born, but we're not robots. We're something more. At that moment of creation, Zac gave us a set of moral guidelines in our programming, yet we still defer to our logical impulses. Those have no place here right now. For all our lives, I think most of us have been avoiding—if not outright
denying
—our emotional impulses. Maybe some of that stems from dealing with so many shades of gray, but that doesn't apply here. This is as black and white as it gets, folks. There is a
child
out there in pain, and he's afraid, and he has no one else to turn to for help.” He faced Psy–4. “We don't need you putting yourself on the rack about triggering the D and D; there was no way you could have known.”

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible,” whispered Psy–4.

“Don't quote S. J. Lee to me. You have a tendency to worry your wounds, my friend, and we don't need that in our leader—and you are our leader, and always will be.” He turned to face Radiant. “
You
, my dear sister, have to set your vanity aside until we figure out what we're going to do.”

“But I—”

“You've always been somewhat self-absorbed and you know it as well as anyone in this room. You and I have to plan how we're going to get back into PTSI because we cannot chance breaking in the same way as before. I need all your concentration for that.”

“What's so difficult about that?”

“The D and D program has been running for well over seventeen hours. We have to assume that Preston—or someone at PTSI—is aware of what's happening, and that they're taking steps to rectify the problem.”

Itazura shook his head. “You're assuming that Preston has enough sense to—”

“Do you remember what Zac told us?” asked Stonewall. “Under no circumstances do we ever,
ever
underestimate an opponent. I see no reason why we should operate under any other assumption.” He looked at Killaine. “We've had more than enough discussions about your temper in the past and I'm not going to waste any more time by reminding you of those discussions now, but take them to heart. You have to learn to reconcile your ideal of your existence with the reality of it. Face it, you're not wholly robotic, but you're not wholly human, either, and never will be. We are, all of us, like it or not, the next step of forced human/mechanized evolution. We're a new race, and until there are others like us, all we have is each other. I can't understand why you, of all of us, have such contempt for Singer—you, who go off the deep end every time you see an injustice. Tell me, Killaine, what justice has there been for him?” He pointed to Singer. “He's already been an immeasurable help to us, and what thanks does he get for it? Your scorn?” He touched Killaine's cheek. “Your prejudice will only get in the way. I don't expect you to overcome it in the next sixty seconds, but you
must
store it elsewhere until Roy is safe.”

Then, at last, he faced Itazura. “And
you
, with your ‘What's the point? What does it all mean?' Do you think you're asking yourself questions that are unique to this world? Every person on the face of the Earth has grappled with those questions, but for once, you have something like an answer within your grasp.”

“And that would be . . .?”

Stonewall pointed toward the butterfly at the window. “As of this moment, our purpose, our meaning, is to still the fluttering of the butterfly's wings for one child. If you can't find peace within yourself armed with that knowledge, then I'm afraid there's no peace to be found.”

Itazura lowered his head. “Do you think it will be enough?”

“It has to be. For then we will have made a difference in a way more profound than any governments, any armies, any politicians or poets ever have; we will have saved a life from suffering, we will have given hope to one who's never known what hope is, and we will
always know it
, regardless of what happens later. Even in the bleakest, darkest of nights, that knowledge will be our anchor: that once, not so very long ago, we did a great thing for someone else without any thought of our own reward, that we refused to look away while another's life was swallowed by darkness, that we stood as one and refused to allow a child to be sent not-so-gently into that good night.”

Stonewall held out his hand. “Are we together on this?”

Itazura put his hand on top of Stonewall's. “I'm with you all the way, Big Guy.”

Radiant put her hand on Itazura's. “Me, too.”

Psy–4 joined them. “Thanks, Stoner.”

Finally, Killaine put her hand on top of Psy–4's. “All for one and one for all, eh?”

Stonewall grinned, then looked at Itazura, who understood his meaning.

All of them—including Killaine—looked at Singer.

“Well?” said Itazura.

Me? Really?

“Wouldn't be a proper trip to see the Wizard without the Tin Man.”

Slowly, with great dignity, Singer walked over and gently placed his hand atop Killaine's.

“To the stillness of butterfly wings,” said Stonewall.

“To the stillness of butterfly wings,” repeated the others.

Psy–4 nodded his head. “Then we are decided.”

 

Preston's insides felt on fire as he made his way back to his office.

The fire wasn't just because of the newest wave of pain—though that was a large part of it.

No, some of the fire was his anger with McCarrick. Damn, he should have had the man snuffed months ago.

A Nobel-prize winner, and the man hadn't proposed one workable solution to the problem with Roy.

“As a last resort, Mr. Preston—since you have offhandedly discarded all my suggestions
—
I propose that we ready another robotic brain and program the system to deposit all of the information from Roy into it rather than have it absorbed into the mainframe. I realize that since time is short there would not be sufficient time to program the brain itself—we'd have the equivalent of the world's largest disorganized filing cabinet
—
but at least the information would be saved.”

“And what about Roy's personality?” asked Preston.

“That, I'm afraid, we'd have to deem expendable.”

“That's unacceptable, Professor.”

McCarrick had glowered at him. “Then our only other option is to disconnect Roy during the final stage of the program when the computer is running the data comparison, and I find
that
unacceptable, sir. There are too many variables, too many things that could go wrong. If not timed precisely, disconnection could destroy all the information
—
as well as his precious personality.”

Arrogant pissant!