by Allen Steele
If this sort of thing had happened before, why couldn’t it happen again?
Murphy found his hands were trembling, but not from the cold.
He glanced over his shoulder, saw someone walking up the sidewalk a couple of dozen feet behind him. He quickened his pace . . . then, on impulse, he crossed the street, putting a little more distance between himself and the man following him. At the end of the block, he turned another corner, taking an unanticipated detour on his route back to the office. When he looked back again, he no longer saw the other pedestrian.
Get a grip, he told himself. You’re jumping at shadows.
What he had written was fantasy. Sure, it possessed a certain air of verisimilitude—a handful of footnotes, some well-turned bits of technobabble—but it had no more basis in reality than the average Star Trek episode. There was no way that UFOs could actually be time machines. . . .
Could they?
Suddenly, it seemed as if the city itself was watching him, the windows of the government office buildings peering down at him like great, unblinking eyes.
He began to walk a little faster.
Tues, Oct 16, 2314—0550Z
“Thank you, Traffic. Oberon ready for departure.” Metz tapped the lobe of his headset, then glanced over his shoulder at Franc. “If you want to take your seat . . .”
“Thanks, but I’d like to watch.” Holding on to the back of Vasili’s chair, Franc gazed through the control room porthole. “If you don’t mind, that is.”
Metz seemed ready to object, then he shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just as long as you and your people are strapped down in ten minutes, you can watch all you want.” He turned back to his console. “Traffic, take us out, please.”
A pair of spiderlike tugs began moving away from the timeship. The slender cables they dragged behind them uncoiled and became taut, then there was an almost imperceptible jolt as they began to haul Oberon out of spacedock. Spotlights passed across the timeship’s hull as it was slowly pulled toward the hangar door; off to one side, Franc caught a glimpse of a tiny figure in a hardsuit, holding a pair of luminescent wands above his head. The Oberon was on full internal power, of course, and capable of leaving spacedock without the assistance, yet for safety reasons it was customary not to activate the negmass drive until the vessel was clear of the station.
There really should be a band playing, Franc mused. Back in the early twentieth century, when a ship left port on a long voyage, it was a ceremonial occasion. A brass band performing “God Save the Queen,” colored ribbons tossed from the decks, the bellow of foghorns, cheering crowds gathered on the wharf. Now, there were only images flashing across flatscreens, the faint murmur of voices over the comlink. Logical, perfect, and utterly without soul.
The hangar door disappeared behind them; now they saw the blue-green expanse of Earth’s horizon. “All right, we’re clear.” Metz leaned forward against his straps, began tapping commands into the keypad. “T-minus six minutes to warp. Dr. Lu . . .”
“You don’t have to remind me.” Yet he lingered for another moment, observing the tugs as they detached their lines and peeled away to either side. In the far distance, above the limb of the earth, he caught a glimpse of a tiny spacecraft: a chase-ship positioned to observe Oberon’s passage into chronospace. “You’re sure you’ve got the right coordinates?”
Wrong question. “You want to go back and have the AI rechecked?” Vasili murmured, gesturing to the dense columns of algorithms scrolling down the screens on either side of him. “We can always scrub the launch, if you’re not . . .”
“Sorry. Didn’t meant to insult you.” He pushed himself toward the hatch. “Tell us when you’re ready.”
“I always do. Just make sure your people are strapped in.”
Franc left the flight deck, floated across the passageway to the passenger compartment. As he expected, Lea and Tom were already in their couches, the seats turned so that they could see the broad flatscreen on the far wall. Lea looked up as Franc pulled himself along the ceiling rungs to the middle couch. “Everything set?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. All we have to do is wait.” He pushed himself into the vacant couch, then reached for the lap and shoulder straps. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Hoffman was anxiously watching the status panel next to the screen, his hands gripping the armrests of his couch so tightly that his knuckles were white. “Hey, Tom,” he said softly, “don’t damage the upholstery.”
“Sorry.” Hoffman managed a nervous smile. “First time.”
“Relax.” Franc gave him an easy grin as he cinched his straps tight. “It’ll be over so quick, you’ll barely know it happened.”
If the transition into chronospace went well, of course. There was no sense in reminding Hoffman of what would happen if something went wrong. The smallest, most seemingly insignificant miscalculation by Oberon’s AI and the wormhole would collapse in upon itself, forming a quantum singularity which would instantly destroy the timeship. If that happened, they’d find out what it was like to be stretched into spaghetti just before they were obliterated. Such catastrophic accidents had never occurred, or at least not to a timeship carrying a human crew, yet everyone in the CRC was aware of the fate suffered by primates aboard test vehicles during the late 2200s.
Now he was spooking himself. Deliberately casting the thought from his mind, Franc turned his attention to the wallscreen. It displayed a rear-view projection behind the Oberon; propelled by its negmass drive, the timeship was quickly moving away from Chronos, and now the space station was a small toy receding in the distance. Farther away, a small band of bright stars moved above the limb of the Earth: orbital colonies, solar-power satellites, other spacecraft. Even now, Chronos traffic controllers would be closely monitoring Oberon’s flight path, making sure that the sixty-kilometer sphere of space surrounding the timeship was clear of any other vehicles.
“T-minus one minute.” Metz’s voice in his headset was terse. “Wormhole generators coming online.”
He felt Lea’s hand stray to his lap. He glanced at her, caught the look in her eyes. She wasn’t saying anything in front of Tom, but she was nearly as anxious as he was. Franc briefly clasped her hand, gave her a comforting smile. She nodded briefly, then returned her gaze to the status panel. Displayed on a smaller screen was a wire model of Earth’s gravity well. Oberon was coasting along a steep incline deep within the well; it was here, using the planet’s natural perturbation of spacetime, that the timeship’s wormhole generators would soon open a tiny orifice in the quantum foam.
“Thirty seconds and counting,” Metz said.
Franc closed his eyes, forced himself to relax. Imagine a pinhole in a sheet of tightly stretched rubber, he told himself. You push your finger against the pinhole, and it grows a little larger, dilating outward. You exert a little more pressure, and now the hole expands, large enough for you to stick your finger through. Yet you don’t stop there; you keep pushing, and now you can insert your hand . . . now your arm . . . now your entire body . . .
“Ten seconds,” Metz said.
He opened his eyes, saw the planet rushing toward him. The timeship was hurtling toward Earth’s atmosphere. If it remained on this course for four or five more minutes, the timeship would soon begin entering the ionosphere, and Metz would have to correct its angle of descent to prevent burn-up. The status panel, though, told a different tale: the timeship was rushing down an invisible funnel, the event horizon of the wormhole Oberon was beginning to form around itself. Push a finger against a pinhole, and keep pushing until . . .
“Five . . . four . . . three . . .”
“Oh, God . . .” Hoffman whispered.
“Shut your eyes,” Franc said, just before he did so himself.
“Two. . .one. . .”
In the next instant, it felt as if reality itself had become that imaginary rubber sheet, stretched to an infinite length, longer than the entire galaxy, longer than the universe itself . . .
&nb
sp; Then abruptly snapped.
He slammed back into his couch, so hard that he felt the vertebrae at the base of his neck pop, and at the same instant he heard a distant scream—Tom, or maybe it was Lea—as everything seemed to shake at once. There was a harsh, high-pitched whine that came from everywhere yet nowhere; he smelled something acrid and sickly-sour, and then . . .
“All right,” Metz said, “you can relax now. We’re through.”
Franc opened his eyes.
The first thing he saw was a globular, semiliquid mass floating in midair next to his couch. Mystified, he raised a hand and reached out to touch it . . . then recoiled when he realized what it was. He carefully turned his head to the right, saw Hoffman wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
Tom caught Franc’s scowl, winced with embarrassment. “Sorry . . .”
“Never mind. Happens now and then.” And now you understand why we warned you not to eat breakfast, he silently added, but there was no sense in pointing that out now. He tried not to smile when Lea ducked away from the globule of vomitus as it floated closer to her. He touched the lobe of his headset. “Vasili, if it’s not too much trouble, we could use some gravity in here.”
“Just a moment,” the pilot said. A bar on the status panel shifted from red to green, and a few seconds later he felt the sudden sensation of falling, as if he were in an elevator that had just dropped a few floors. The globule splattered messily on the deck between their couches. It wasn’t pleasant, but at least it was better than having it wandering freely around.
Franc unclasped his lap and shoulder harnesses, rose unsteadily to his feet. At first glance, the image on the wallscreen seemed unchanged, until he looked a little closer and noticed that they were at a higher altitude. The daylight terminator, too, was in a different place; now it ran across the eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, with nighttime falling on the British Isles and Spain.
“Are we in the right frame?” Tom asked.
“The AI says we’ve hit the correct coordinates,” Metz replied. “May 2, 1937, about 1800 hours GMT. I’d like to get a stellar reading to confirm it, though. Dr. Oschner, can you do that for me, please?”
“I’m on it.” Lea was already out of her couch; shoulders hunched slightly, she staggered to the hatch, opened it, and exited the compartment. In the monitor room, she would be able to access historical star charts from the library and match them against the real-time positions of visible constellations.
Although Hoffman had unbuckled his restraints, the younger man still lay in his couch, his face pale as he stared up at the ceiling. “Are you all right?” Franc asked quietly, and Tom gave him a weak nod. “Good. Take it easy for a minute, but then we’ve got work to do.”
“Yeah . . . okay, sure.” Tom took a deep breath, let out a rattling sigh. “It’s . . . different from the simulator, isn’t it?”
“It’s always different in the simulator.” He swatted Hoffman’s knee. “Cleanup detail is yours. When you’re done with that, you can help Lea and me get ready for insertion.”
Tom nodded again. Franc walked to the hatch, then silently waited another few moments to see if Hoffman could get up without any further coaxing. When Tom finally stirred, he opened the hatch and headed for the control room.
“Hoffman got sick, didn’t he?” Vasili had left his chair; he stood in front of the main engineering panel, running a check on the main systems. “I told Paolo I wanted a more experienced mission specialist for this trip.”
“First time for everyone.” So far as he understood the Oberon’s major control systems, everything looked as it should. “He’s a little shaky, but he’s getting over it. How’s the ship?”
“Fine. Made it through without a problem.” Metz turned away from the engineering panel. “Soon as Lea confirms our position, I’ll raise the Miranda, tell her we’re in position.”
“Okay.” Franc hesitated. “Need any help in here?”
“None, thank you.” Metz shot him a dark look as he returned to his seat. “When I need a copilot, Dr. Lu, I’ll ask for one.”
“Sure.” Rebuffed, Franc stepped away. “Pardon me for asking . . .”
“You’re pardoned.” Metz inched his seat a little closer to the console, began typing commands into the keypad. “If you want to help, you can go see what’s taking Lea so long. I should have received those readings five minutes ago.”
There were a few choice words Franc had for the pilot, but he resisted the urge to voice them. Indeed, there wasn’t much point in saying anything. Leaving Metz to his work, he turned and left the control room. Once in the passageway, he took a few moments to slowly count to ten, then turned and headed for the monitor room.
The screen dominating the far wall of the monitor room displayed a stellar chart, overlaid across a real-time view of the starscape outside the timeship. Lea stood before the pedestal in the center of the compartment; although her hands rested upon its touch pad, she seemed to be intently listening to something through her headset. She didn’t notice Franc’s presence until he touched her shoulder, and even then she barely looked up at him.
“Metz wants to know . . .”
“We’re here,” she said, distractedly nodding toward the wallscreen. “We’re where we’re supposed to be. Hold on a sec . . .” Lea impatiently ran her fingers across the touch pad, relaying the data to Metz’s console. “You’ve got to hear this.”
The compartment was suddenly filled with a strident, somewhat high-pitched male voice. Apparently coming from a ground-based radio source, it was distorted by static. The language was clearly German, though, and the voice steadily rose with intensity.
“I don’t have a clear fix, but it seems to originating from Berlin. I’ll feed it through the interpreter.” Lea tapped another command into the pedestal, and the screen changed to display upward-scrolling bars of text:
I, too, am a child of the people. I do not trace my line from any castle. I come from the workshop. Neither was I a general. I was simply a solider as were millions of others. It is something wonderful that amongst us an unknown from an army of millions of the German people—of workers and soldiers—could rise to be head of the Reich and nation.
“You know who that is?” she whispered. “You know who we were listening to?”
Franc slowly nodded. Almost 377 years in the past, he was hearing the voice of one of the worst figures ever to emerge from human history.
Somewhere down there, speaking into a radio microphone, was the hate-filled monster known as Adolf Hitler.
Monday, January 14, 1998: 5:06 P.M.
It wasn’t until he heard people in the corridor that Murphy realized that the workday had come to an end. Raising his head from the paperwork in which he had deliberately absorbed himself, he watched as a couple of secretaries marched past the half-open door of his office, pulling on their overcoats as they chatted about a Billy Joel concert they were attending later that evening. Outside the window, night had fallen without his noticing.
Murphy slipped some files into his briefcase, then straightened his desk and switched off the computer. He exchanged his loafers for snow boots, then stood up and gathered his parka. All the while, his gaze kept falling on the phone. For the past several hours, as much as he had tried to distract himself, he had kept expecting it to ring. Yet it never did, not even once, until the prolonged silence became unnerving.
“Cut it out,” he said to himself, under his breath. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Oh, yeah? a small voice in the back of his mind asked. Then why are you scared to go home?
No. He wasn’t scared to go home. It was leaving the office that bothered him. For the dozenth time this afternoon, he considered calling Donna and asking her to drive into the city to pick him up at the office. Perhaps he could sweeten the deal by suggesting that they go out to dinner. But that would mean she would have to battle rush-hour traffic on the Beltway, and she was undoubtedly already making dinner, and Steven wouldn’t
get his homework done, and . . .
Nuts. He was taking public transportation, wasn’t he? There would be dozens of subway riders around him at all times. He’d never be alone for a minute. And what was he expecting anyway? A couple of guys in trench coats? That was like something from a Robert Ludlum novel. The pseudo-Benford? Okay, if he saw him again, he’d find a pay phone and call the cops. Or maybe the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America . . .
Murphy chuckled as he switched off the lights. No, there was nothing to worry about. He was just spooking himself. Hell, for all he knew, this might be an elaborate practical joke someone was playing on him. Whatever it was, he’d get it straightened out eventually . . .
The snow had continued to fall all afternoon, leaving the sidewalks covered with a layer of fresh white powder, the wind whisking it past streetlights and passing automobiles, giving it the appearance of fairy dust. A yellow snowplow grumbled up E Street, its blade grinding against icy asphalt as it shoved the drifts out of the way. Burying his face within his scarf, Murphy fell in with office workers trudging their way toward L’Enfant Plaza; he paused at the top of the subway escalator to buy the late edition of the Washington Times, then descended into the welcome warmth of the Metro station.
Murphy had become spoiled by having a reserved space in the NASA garage. In all the years he had lived in the D.C. area, he had seldom ridden the subway to and from work, preferring to use it on the weekends as a means of taking Steven to ball games at Kennedy Stadium or for Sunday shopping trips at Eastern Market. So the ride to the Virginia ’burbs took longer than he expected; the train was packed, with every seat taken and people standing in the aisles, gamely clinging to posts and ceiling rails as the car gently swayed back and forth. It was too crowded to open his newspaper, so after glancing at the headlines—the Times, in its usual self-righteous indignation, was making the most of the Paula Jones scandal—he tucked it beneath his briefcase and stared straight ahead, silently observing everyone while making eye contact with no one, the customary behavior of straphangers everywhere.
