by Allen Steele
“And this time, you succeed.” Clasping his hands together in a similar gesture, Zack pointed his forefingers at David. “Possibly because you used . . . could use . . . the article you published for Analog as the basis for your novel. At any rate, the solution is simple. Don’t write a novel . . . or at least not that novel.”
“So you’re warning me not to do something I hadn’t intended to do already.” David slowly nodded, and Zack shrugged offhandedly. “Easy enough, but I’m not sure that’s going to solve all your problems. Someone else may already be interested in time travel.”
Franc raised an eyebrow. “How so?”
“Well, just this morning, I had a meeting with NASA’s associate administrator, Roger Ordmann. He’s the chief of Space Science, my department, and . . .”
“Whoa! Wait a minute!” Zack Murphy raised a hand. “Did you say Roger Ordmann?” David frowned and nodded, and Zack gaped at him in surprise. “That’s the Chief Administrator of OPS in my worldline.”
“Another convergence,” Lea murmured. They had already noted a certain reoccurence of names; Paolo Sanchez and Ray Sanchez, for example.
“One more indication that the worldlines aren’t that far apart.” Franc absently rubbed his chin with his forefinger. “In this frame of existence, he’s a senior NASA administrator. In the other, he performs much the same function for the Office of . . .”
“Y’know, maybe you shouldn’t be telling me this.” David looked first at Franc, then at Zack. “I mean, you’ve already told me enough about the different worldlines. Maybe it’s better if I don’t know all the details.”
“At this juncture, I’m not sure if it makes much difference,” Franc said, “but if you’d rather not know . . .” David shook his head. “Very well, but what about this meeting you had with Ordmann?”
“He’d read my article . . . someone else at NASA had brought it to my attention . . . and he said he was concerned about it being published by someone who worked at the agency. Said it might cast NASA in a bad light and all that. But the thing that really struck me . . . especially later, after you and I had our little chat at the Air and Space . . .”
“I haven’t apologized for that,” Franc said. “Sorry. It had to be done.”
“You scared the hell out of me, but . . . well, apology accepted.” David grinned at him. “I’d love to know how you did it, but . . . I dunno, maybe that’s one of those things I shouldn’t know, right?” Franc smiled, and he went on. “What struck me later was that your questions were the same as his. Like, what led me to believe that UFO sightings were tied to time travel.”
Lea groaned softly. “Oh, no,” Metz said, closing his eyes and putting a hand over his face. “Here we go again . . .”
“No, no,” Franc said quickly. “They’re not necessarily linked. This could be exactly what it seemed to be . . . a senior government official concerned about public perception.”
“But what if it isn’t?” Zack asked. “Again, look at the convergences. In my worldline, in this very same year, the American government began a crash program to develop time travel. Does this mean that the same thing is going on here, in this worldline?”
Lea wrapped her arms around herself and turned away. “Nothing we do matters,” she murmured. “No matter how this turns out, someone will eventually build a timeship.”
“My point exactly,” David said. “It may not matter whether I publish a novel or if my son becomes a physicist, because the idea’s out there already. So what are you going to do? Go back to 1898 and kill H.G. Wells? You can, if you really want to, but what’s to prevent another writer from coming up with the same concept? Or maybe you stop Einstein from developing the theory of relativity. You might, but does that necessarily prevent Stephen Hawking or Kip Thorne or someone else from investigating the same problems?”
“Free will,” Zack said quietly.
“Pardon me?”
“It all comes back to the question of free will.” Pushing himself out of his chair, the other Murphy clasped his hands behind his back. “We may be able to do certain things,” he said, pensively staring at the floor. “In fact, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that we will. The question is, should we?”
“Like . . . I dunno.” David thought about it a moment. “Maybe like the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . .”
“If you mean atomic bombs, that didn’t happen in my worldline,” Zack said. “About five thousand American G.I.s were killed during the invasion of Japan, and nearly fifty thousand Japanese died defending their country, but no country has ever dropped a bomb in wartime . . . or at least not where I come from.” He shook his head. “But you get the point. The technology may be inevitable, but the consequences aren’t, and the consequences of time travel are far more hideous . . . at least in the long run . . . than nuclear war would ever be.”
“So what do we do?”
“You already know what you have to do . . . or rather, don’t do. It’s up to you. These people have already made their decision.” Zack took a deep breath, then turned to face the others. “Dr. Lu? You’re still ready to go through with this?”
Franc hesitated, then glanced at Lea and Vasili. Both quietly nodded, Metz a little more reluctantly than the others. He smiled grimly, then turned back to the two Murphys.
“Yes, we are,” he said. “We’re staying here.”
“What . . . ?” David Murphy rose from his chair. “Here? In this . . . I mean, in this year?”
“We don’t have much choice,” Lea said. “If we’ve succeeded, then the place we came from no longer exists. Or will never exist, technically speaking. The fact that we didn’t board the Hindenburg is proof of that. If we attempt to go forward from this point in time, we may very well crash-land again in some place farther up this worldline, as we did the first time we attempted to leave 1937.”
“Therefore potentially causing another paradox, with similar outcomes,” Franc said. “The same thing would probably occur if we tried to go back in time. No matter where we go, regardless of the year or location, in all likelihood another paradox would result. We would survive, of course . . . but the consequences would be unimaginable.”
“But . . .” David Murphy gaped at them in astonishment. “This is 1998. You’re from 2314. You don’t have a clue where you’re going to go, what you’re going to . . .”
“Sure they do.” Zack Murphy turned toward him. “I’m staying with them.”
“You’re . . . what?”
Zack smiled. “What else am I supposed to do? Come home with you, claim I’m your long-lost uncle?” He shook his head. “No, I’m going where they’re going, wherever that is. This may not be my 1998, but it’s close enough. So far, we haven’t done too badly. The currency’s a little out of date, but we managed to buy some clothes, rent a car . . .” He frowned, then gave David a wry smile. “We’re running a little low on cash, though. Think you could spare a few bucks?”
David hesitated, then reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet. A ten, three fives, and two ones. “That’ll do for a start,” Zack said as he took the money and folded it into his pocket. “Thanks. If Donna asks where you’ve been, tell her the car died and you had to call for a tow.”
“And what about the ship? You’re going to have trouble hiding something this big.”
Vasili looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “We’re not going to hide it,” he said. “We’re going to destroy it.”
Again, David’s mouth fell open in surprise. “Do you know what you’re saying? You’re going to maroon yourselves here.”
“I’m afraid so.” Franc appeared no less discomfited by the notion. “But again, we’ve got no other choice. As you just pointed out, we’d have trouble concealing it. Its chameleon requires a constant energy input, and once the batteries drained below a certain level it would become visible once more. There’s virtually no place on Earth where it could remain hidden without chance of discovery. Having someon
e stumble upon an operational timeship is far too great a risk for us to take. So destroying Oberon is the only option.”
“I’ve already programmed the AI to fly it out of the atmosphere.” Metz’s eyes were sad, his voice bleak. “The chameleon will remain operational until it’s achieved orbit. After Oberon reaches space, it’ll open a wormhole that will take it straight into the Sun.”
“Once it’s destroyed,” Franc continued, “for all intents and purposes, it will have never existed.” He gazed at the pilot. “I’m sorry, Vasili,” he added quietly, “but it has to be done.”
Metz nodded, but said nothing. Franc turned back to David Murphy. “Which brings us to a final question. Besides us, you’re the only person who knows anything about this . . .”
“Are you asking if I can keep a secret?” He shrugged. “Who would believe me?”
“Someone probably would,” Zack said. “In fact, there’s a lot of people out there who would be only too willing to suspend their disbelief, if they had any in the first place. You may be tempted to write a book about all this. Maybe you’d get lucky and it would become a best-seller. In any case, you could stand to make a few bucks.”
Temptation stole across David Murphy’s face. Zack noticed it; he frowned and shook his head. “Don’t do it,” he said quietly. “I beg of you, please don’t. You don’t know the things I’ve seen, but if you did, you’d never contemplate such a thing.”
“All right, so I won’t,” David said, reluctantly. “I promise. Mum’s the word. But you know, and I know, that the idea of time travel is already out there. Destroying this ship won’t make any difference if someone is already trying to figure out how to build something like this.”
“Which is another reason why we’re staying here,” Zack replied. “To make sure that no one does.” He smiled grimly. “Remember, I’ve already been through all this. I know what to look for.” Then he raised a finger and shook it at David. “And don’t think for an instant we’re going to forget about you. I know where you live.”
David didn’t reply. Franc studied him for a moment, then turned to the others. “I think that covers everything. Lea, is everything in the car?” She nodded, and he stood up. “Then it’s time to go.”
8:01 P.M.
The storm had let up while they were in the timeship. Although the sky was still overcast, the only snow that fell was a few crystalline flakes the wind blew away from Oberon’s fuselage. Lea shuddered within her 1930s-style overcoat as she marched through the drifts away from the timeship. “I’m going to have to get used to this,” she murmured to Franc through chattering teeth, then she looked at Zack. “Is it always this way, this time of year?”
“Usually. Sorry.” He took off his baseball cap, gave it to her. “We can always head south. Florida’s pretty nice in January.”
David Murphy trailed behind them, reluctant to leave the timeship behind. As they approached the road, he stopped and turned around. Vasili Metz had just climbed down the ladder and was jogging away from the Oberon. He was the only one who didn’t have a coat, and he wrapped his arms around himself in a futile effort to stay warm. On sudden impulse, Murphy pulled off his parka, offered it to him as he approached. Metz regarded it with surprise, then gratefully accepted it with mumbled thanks.
They trudged through the snow to the cars. “Mind if I borrow your brush?” Zack asked David, then he opened the left rear door of the Escort and found the long-handled ice scraper. He had just finished clearing the front and rear windows of the rental Chevy when they heard a low hum from somewhere behind him.
Murphy turned just in time to see the Oberon lift off. The hemispheres beneath its hull gleamed against the white pasture as the timeship slowly rose, the negmass drive whisking away sheets of snow from the ground below. The flanges folded up against the bottom of the saucer, and for a few seconds it seemed to David as if he were watching a scene from one of the fifties science fiction movies he had relished as a kid.
Then the Oberon faded from sight. The last impression they had of its passage from Earth was a vague shadow slightly darker than the sky, quickly disappearing into the night.
“Well . . . okay. Let’s go before we freeze to death.” Zack opened the Chevy’s rear passenger door, turned to help Lea inside. She stared at the place where the Oberon had once stood, then she allowed herself to be guided into the backseat.
Metz started to follow her, then he stopped. “I think this is yours,” he said to David, and began to pull off the parka.
“Keep it,” Murphy said. “You need it more than I do.” The former timeship pilot nodded, then climbed in behind Lea.
Zack shut the door behind him. “That’s awfully nice of you,” he said, “but wasn’t that a Christmas gift from Donna? Two years ago?”
“Umm . . . no, I bought it myself, at the outlet mall. Donna gave me a watch.” He grinned at Zack. “Maybe the convergences aren’t as close as we think.”
“I hope not.” He returned the smile, then handed the brush back to him, along with the keys to his own car. “Thanks, pal,” he said, extending his hand. “We’ll be in touch.”
Murphy hesitated, then shook hands with himself. “Take it easy, friend. Give me a call sometime.”
Neither of them seemed to know what to say next, so they left it at that. Zack turned and walked away.
Franc stood near the open front passenger door, still gazing into the sky. Murphy realized that he was looking upon a man lost in time, as homeless as any individual in history has ever been. When Franc lowered his face, Murphy noticed a faint wetness around his eyes. Franc saw him; he nodded once, distantly, then ducked his head and climbed into the car.
Murphy walked back to his own car, used the brush to clear the snow away from the windows. While his back was still turned, he heard Zack start the engine. The taillights flashed an amber glow across the windshield, then the tires crunched against the icepack as the car moved away, heading down the road out of the park.
Murphy resisted the impulse to watch them leave. Somehow, it seemed better that he not know which direction they were taking.
He was about to climb into his car when he detected a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. He turned around, saw an orb of light in the snow-covered pasture where the Oberon had rested. It remained for a moment, just long enough for him to realize what it was, then collapsed in upon itself like a mirage out of spacetime, finally disappearing with a faint thunderclap.
Murphy waited another moment, then he opened the car door and settled in behind the wheel. It had been a long Monday, and now it was time to go home.
AFTERWORD
For their assistance in the development of this novel, I’m grateful to the following individuals: Mark W. Tiedemann, Gregory Benford, Stanley Schmidt, Jim Young, Matt Visser, Scott Crawford, Ken Moore, Beth Gwinn, Judith Klein-Dial, my father-in-law Frank Jacobs, and my sister Rachel Steele.
As always, my wife Linda deserves special credit as my research assistant.
I also wish to thank my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, and my literary agent, Martha Millard.
—December, 1996–March, 1997;
St. Louis, Missouri; Sanibel, Florida December, 1998–June, 1999;
Whately, Massachusetts; Frankfurt, Germany
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Table of Contents
Autumn, 1365—8:05Z
PART 1 Monday Times Three
Monday, January 12, 1998: 7:45 A.M.
Mon, Oct 15, 2314—0946Z
Monday, January 14, 1998: 8:06 A.M.
Mon, Oct 15, 2314—1045Z
Monday, January 14, 1998: 9:15 A.M.
Mon, Oct 15, 2314—1101Z
Monday, January 14, 1998: 11:58 A.M.
Mon, Oct 15, 2314—1427Z
Monday, January 14, 1998: 12:55 P.M.
