ChronoSpace

by Allen Steele

  Franc took a deep breath. The C120-12 was his dream mission: an expedition to Southampton, England, in 1912 to place two or more researchers aboard the HMS Titanic before it embarked upon its doomed Atlantic crossing. Within the CRC, this was widely considered to be the Mt. Everest of historical surveys, mainly because of the extraordinary risks it presented. In many ways, the C120-37 was a rehearsal for the C120-12; if he and Lea could prove that two CRC researchers could record the Hindenburg disaster and survive, then putting historians aboard the Titanic would be considered feasible.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I appreciate your support.”

  “That’s beside the point. I’m referring to the last expedition. The one which returned last week.” He peered at him through the bars of his desk. “The C314-65. The Miranda expedition to New Mexico. You haven’t studied the final report?”

  He knew about the mission to which Sanchez was referring, but he was embarrassed to admit that he hadn’t been keeping track of it. Lea stepped in to save him. “Many apologies, sir,” she said. “We were so involved with our own work, we didn’t have a chance to . . .”

  “Not acceptable, Dr. Oschner. All researchers are required to read reports from previous expeditions. The objectives may be different, but there’s much to learned from . . .” Sanchez sighed, looked away. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I should know better. Thirteenth-century North American history isn’t your area, and you’ve been preoccupied with the C120-37.” Then he looked back at them. “You say you haven’t spoken with Hans Brech? He was the Miranda’s pilot for that mission, and for your own as well.” He hesitated. “By the way, Vasili Metz will be your pilot on the Oberon. Any objections?”

  Franc pursed his lips and hoped that Sanchez wouldn’t pick up on his distaste for Metz. He was a good timeship pilot—one of the best, Franc had to reluctantly admit—yet they had worked together during the C320-29, and Franc had found Metz to be insufferable. “No, sir,” he said, then he changed the subject. “I haven’t spoken with Hans. Did something happen during his last flight?”

  Sanchez said nothing for a moment. He settled his wiry frame back in his chair and solemnly regarded them with his unfathomable black eyes.

  “Hans says they saw an angel,” he said at last.

  Monday, January 14, 1998: 11:58 A.M.

  A frigid blast of wind followed Murphy through the rear entrance of the National Air and Space Museum. Pausing for a moment by the Robert McCall mural to unbutton his parka, he glanced around the lobby. Save for a boisterous group of elementary-school children on a field trip, the ground floor was uncommonly quiet. A handful of people strolled through the Hall of Flight, pausing now and then to examine the Apollo 11 command module and Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule, while kids in hockey jackets chased each other beneath the Wright Brothers flyer and the Bell X-1. By next spring, the museum would regain its stature as one of Washington’s most crowded public sites, yet during winter it was mainly visited by locals taking advantage of the dearth of tourists.

  Blowing into the palms of his chilled hands, Murphy quickly walked through the museum, entering the Hall of Astronautics in the building’s west wing. He had been here countless times, yet still he hadn’t become jaded to the exhibits on this side of the building. A life-size mock-up of the Skylab space station; just beyond it, Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft, permanently docked in low orbit; between them, a small forest of boosters—Scout, Mercury-Redstone, Atlas, Titan II. As often as he had seen these giants, Murphy still found himself slowing his pace to marvel at them, and it was only when he happened to spot the digital clock above the entrance to the IMAX theater that he remembered that he had a lunch date to keep.

  At the far end of the hall, symbolically positioned in front of the tall windows overlooking the Capitol Building, rested a full-size mock-up of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. Schoolchildren impatiently shuffled their feet while a teacher attempted to explain its historical significance; they were more interested in the posters advertising the Star Wars exhibit on the third floor. Yet the tall gentleman standing near the red velvet rope seemed fascinated by the spacecraft. As Murphy walked closer, he saw him hunch forward slightly, as if to more closely examine one of the silver Mylar-covered panels on its lower fuselage.

  Murphy approached him. “Dr. Benford?”

  Startled, the visitor looked around sharply, then turned to face him. “Dr. Murphy, I presume.” He pulled a hand from the pocket of his parka. “Greg Benford. Pleased to meet you. Thanks for taking time to . . .”

  “No, no, really. The pleasure’s all mine.” Murphy returned the affable smile as they shook hands. “Like I said on the phone, this is a real surprise. I never expected . . .”

  “Any chance I get to come here, I take it.” Benford glanced again at the LM. “Always seems a little bigger than you think it is. When you see it in pictures from the Moon, it looks small, but then you get up close . . .”

  “I know what you mean, yeah.” For once, though, Murphy found himself ignoring the LM. It was an odd experience, meeting someone whose photo he had previously seen on the back flaps of book jackets. Nonetheless, it was the same person: trim gray beard, salted brown hair, calm and studious eyes framed by wire-rim glasses. About his own height, with a middle-age paunch around the waistline. The barest trace of a Southern accent.

  So this was Greg Benford. The author of “Doing Lennon,” the story which caused him to blow a high-school chemistry exam because he preferred to read it behind his textbook when he should have been paying attention to a review session, and In the Ocean of Night, which made him forget that he was supposed to take Karen Dolen to the freshman mixer, and Artifact, which he read during his honeymoon vacation in England, and . . .

  “It really is an amazing machine.” Benford took a final glance at the LM, then he pulled back the sleeve of his L.L. Bean parka, glanced at the Rolex on his left wrist. “But, hey, I don’t want to keep you. I know you’ve got to get back to work soon.”

  “No problem.” Murphy shook his head. “Really. I’ve done my last meeting for the day, and it isn’t like I’ve got to punch a clock.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve still got a plane to catch.” Benford nodded toward the nearby staircase. The field trippers were already scurrying upstairs, screaming with adolescent excitement, followed by their exhausted teacher. “We’d better hurry, if don’t want to get caught behind the rugrats. After you . . .”

  And so they marched up the four flights to the café, carrying on idle conversation until they reached the restaurant. The kids got there first, of course, but they were clustered outside, waiting for the rest of their group. Murphy led his guest past them into the cafeteria, and while they picked up plastic trays and began moving down the serving line, he told Benford about his work at the agency, how he had been hired to write summaries of current NASA science programs and expressing his frustration that it wasn’t the basic research for which he had been trained, his hopes that he might one day get transferred to Marshall or Goddard, or maybe even JPL in Pasadena. He even found himself talking about the irritation of having to take the Metro to work today before he realized that this probably wouldn’t interest anyone.

  For his part, Benford kept his silence, listening attentively yet nonetheless remaining laconic. He said that he was writing a nonfiction book titled Deep Time, but he didn’t say much of what it was about, and he casually mentioned his involvement in a TV miniseries about a Mars colony, yet he distracted himself by asking for Italian dressing to go with his garden salad when Murphy pressed for details. After a while, Murphy came to the conclusion that Greg was better at listening than talking. So much the better; during his tenure at NASA, he had met far too many egoists who could smother you with their bombast, and with far less justification.

  They took their trays to a table near the back of the room, where they hoped to avoid the noise created by forty children piling into the cafeteria. “So,” Benford said as he reached for the pepper shaker, “about this UFO ar
ticle . . . what inspired you to write it?”

  Murphy shrugged. “Remember that piece in Analog a long time ago, ‘How to Build a Flying Saucer’?” Benford thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “Anyway, someone examined the reports about UFOs—their general appearance, how they fly, the electromagnetic disturbances they’re supposed to cause, so forth and so on—and wrote an article which explained them, more or less, on the basis of aeronautical science and known physics. I just took it a step further, really. Ask the next question, as Theodore Sturgeon used to say.”

  Benford speared a cucumber slice with his fork. “And what question was that?”

  “If we accept the premise that UFOs exist . . . just for the sake of argument . . . then we’ve got to ask where they come from.” Warming to the subject, Murphy ignored the cheeseburger growing cold on his plate. “The extraterrestrial hypothesis, of course, is the favorite explanation, but that falls apart when you look at it from a logical perspective. There aren’t any other planets in our solar system where intelligent life could have evolved, let alone a technologically advanced race. The nearest habitable star systems are dozens of light-years away, so someone out there could conceivably have built starships to visit us, but any ship capable of travelling such enormous distances would have to be very large. The size of a small moon, really, if they’re reliant upon sub-c drives . . .”

  “Sub-c?” Benford shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Umm . . . y’know. If c is the mathematical constant for the speed of light, then something travelling slower than light-speed is . . .”

  “Oh, right. Of course.” Benford shook his head. “Sorry. Just a little distracted.” He nodded toward the children cavorting nearby. “You were saying . . . ?”

  “Right . . . well, if no one has seen a UFO that’s the reasonable size of a starship, and if we reject the notion that mother ships are lurking nearby . . . because, y’know, any backyard astronomer with a decent telescope would be able to spot them. . . then we have to discard the idea that they’re from space.”

  “As most scientists already do.” Benford used his fork to play with his salad. “Have you read Philip Klass’s work? He’s been debunking UFO sightings for a long time.”

  “And I don’t argue with any of it.” Murphy chuckled. “Believe me, I’m not a UFO buff of any sort. I think Klass is on the right track. If you ask me, ninety-nine percent of UFO sightings are a crock. If they’re not hoaxes or optical illusions, then they’re cloud formations, airplanes, meteors, hot-air balloons . . . anything but spaceships.”

  “And the remaining one percent?”

  Murphy picked up a couple of fries, daubed them in the tiny cup of ketchup. “The remaining one percent is the stuff no one’s been able to adequately explain, or at least without stretching things . . . swamp gas, Venus, all that. That doesn’t mean there aren’t reasonable explanations. We just haven’t learned what they are yet.”

  “Which brings us to time machines.”

  “Sort of.” Murphy shrugged. “I’m just playing the ‘what if’ game. Time travel may not be a reasonable explanation, but it certainly is a rational one. I mean, realistically speaking, an operational time machine would have to perform much like a spacecraft. First, it would have to open a quantum wormhole, and the only place you can safely do that is outside the atmosphere. Second, it would have to be capable of atmospheric flight. A saucer-shaped vehicle could do this. And third, a time traveler would probably want to be secretive, which accounts for why no flying saucers have landed on the White House lawn.”

  “Sounds like a reasonable line of thought.”

  “I kind of think so. Maybe it’s baloney . . . but like I said, I was just conducting a thought experiment.” Realizing that he was hungry, he picked up his cheeseburger. “Hey, apropos of nothing, but . . . if I sent you my copy of Heart of the Comet, would you sign it for me?”

  “Sure, I’d be happy to.”

  “That’d be great.” Murphy lifted the cheeseburger’s bun to make sure that there wasn’t a pickle hidden beneath it. “Maybe someday I can get Brin to sign it, too.”

  “Who?”

  “David Brin.” Murphy peered at him, but Benford’s expression remained neutral. “Your collaborator. The guy who cowrote . . .”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.” Benford grinned sheepishly. “David, of course.” He shook his head. “Sorry. It’s been a long weekend.” He plunged his fork back into his salad. “It’s an interesting theory, but not entirely original. I’ve seen some New Age books that postulate much the same idea.”

  “So have I. One guy even went so far as to claim that Einstein was a time traveller. But that’s not where I’m coming from. In fact, I don’t even believe this myself . . .”

  “You don’t?” Benford looked up. “But you made a pretty good case, and you supported it with known physics. The idea that wormholes, if they could be artificially created, could serve as gateways through time as well as through space . . . that was very convincing.”

  “Thanks, but I was only reiterating things Hawking and Thorne have said. You’re familiar with their work, of course.” Benford gave a noncommittal nod. “Really, I was just doing the same thing that science fiction writers do . . . throwing out ideas, playing with crazy notions. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I think UFOs are time machines. It’s just . . . well, it’s just something to think about.”

  “It certainly got my attention, that’s for sure.” Benford reached for the pepper shaker again. “That’s why I decided to call you. I read your piece on the plane flight over here, and thought it might be a good premise for a novel.”

  “Really? I’m flattered.”

  “Uh-huh.” Benford shook some more pepper over his salad. “I’ve never written a time-machine story, y’know. I figured this might be a good place to start.”

  Murphy said nothing for a moment. Behind them, the schoolchildren were making a ruckus as they moved through the cafeteria line, fighting over slices of pizza while their harried teachers tried to keep them from turning the restaurant upside-down. Gregory Benford continued to poke at his salad. For the first time during their conversation, it seemed to Murphy as if he was consciously avoiding his gaze.

  “Will you excuse me a moment?” he asked.

  “Sure.” Benford barely looked up from his plate. “Not a problem.”

  Murphy forced a smile as he pushed back his chair and rose from the table. He looked around for a moment until he found the signs indicating the way to the rest rooms. Trying not to walk too fast, he left the cafeteria.

  As he hoped, there was a pay phone on the wall between the men’s and ladies’ rooms. Picking up the receiver, he shoved a quarter into the slot, then dialed the number for NASA’s main switchboard from memory. “Jan Zimmermann, please,” he said once the operator answered, and glanced at a nearby ceiling clock. It was almost a quarter to one; he hoped that Jan was still brown-bagging her lunch at her desk.

  A short pause, then the phone buzzed twice. It was picked up on the third ring. “Policy and Plans, Janice Zimmermann.”

  “Jan, it’s David Murphy. How’ya doing?”

  The voice brightened. “Dave! I read your article in Analog this month! Great stuff!”

  Murphy smiled despite himself. Although she held a low-level position, Jan Zimmermann was one of NASA’s true believers, those who worked for the agency because they fervently supported the idea of space exploration. But more importantly, or at least at this particular moment, she was a science fiction fan.

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.” Murphy glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, I’m in a little bit of a rush here, but . . .”

  “What can I do for you, hon? Did you get my email about the next Disclave?”

  A longtime member of the Washington Science Fiction Society, Jan was deeply involved in running the annual SF convention held in Maryland. As head of programming, Jan had been bugging him to be a guest speaker for several years now. He had always turne
d her down, if only because the thought of sitting on a panel made him uneasy, but now that invitation might work in his favor. . . .

  “Sure did,” he said. “In fact, that’s sort of why I’m calling. I’d like to show up this year, but I’m sort of thinking that I’d like to do a panel with Gregory Benford, if he’s going to be there.”

  “Well, I dunno . . .” Jan sounded reluctant. “He was a Disclave guest several years ago, but he hasn’t been back since . . .”

  “Do you have his number?” Murphy asked, seeing his opening. “I’ve been in touch with him recently . . . I mean, he sent me a letter just a little while ago . . . and maybe I could talk him into coming out here for the next convention.”

  “Really? That would be fantastic! Hold on a sec . . .” There was a short pause, during which Murphy heard a vague rustling in the background; he imagined her searching through the perpetual mess on her desk for an address book. He reached into his shirt pocket, found a Bic pen. After a few moments, her voice came back: “Okay, here it is. It’s his office number . . .”

  Cradling the receiver against his shoulder, Murphy scribbled down the number on the back of his left hand, then repeated it back to Jan to make sure he had copied it correctly. “Thanks, dear,” he said. “I’ve really got to run. I’ll get back to you.”

  Hoping he wasn’t being rude, he hung up, then pulled his wallet from his back pocket. After locating his ATT card, he carefully dialed the number Jan had given him, charging it to his home phone.

  Somewhere on the other side of the continent, a phone began to ring. Once, twice, three times . . . Murphy glanced at the clock. It was nearly ten to one; in California, it would be almost ten o’clock. It shouldn’t be too early to . . .

  The phone was picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?” a familiar voice said.

  Murphy felt something tickle the nape of his neck.

  “Ahh . . . Dr. Gregory Benford, please.”

  “Speaking.”