Caldwell chewed his lip and thought. Then he glanced at Hilyard. “What do you think, Major?”
“I think it’s worth a shot . . . sir.”
“Ferris?”
“I—I can’t say, sir. I . . . I don’t know. This peace . . . it isn’t real. It can’t be.”
“Only time will tell,” observed Oslovski. “You know, back in the early 20th century a gentleman named Abdu’l-Bahá Abbas said, ‘Why not try peace for a while? If we find war is better, it will not be difficult to fight again.’” She spread her hands toward Caldwell, pushing the ball into his court.
“You’d be willing to set up counseling clinics, uh, reorientation, or whatever?” he asked.
“Whatever it takes,” said Oslovski.
“Damn!” Caldwell slapped the table with the flat of his hand, making everyone jump. He pointed a finger at Oslovski.
“You’ve got my back to the wall, Doctor. I’ve got no choice and you know it. It’s either put up, or shut up and go back empty-handed. I’ll get the Chiefs up here. You can start your psycho-stuff on them while I package a few ideas and try to sell them on the Hill. Shouldn’t have too much trouble with the environmental lobby, I suppose. Right now, I’ve got to lie down. I’ve got a hell of a headache.”
He pushed himself away from the table, rose and left, Ferris trailing behind him like a woebegone pet.
Hilyard sat where he was and smiled at the tabletop. The tension in the room mounted by the second. Finally, he got up and glanced down the table at Oslovski. “I don’t know how you did it,” he said. “And I’m not sure I want to. There’s a part of me that wants to blow the whistle on you, even though I couldn’t prove a damn thing . . . at least, not without implicating myself in certain matters. But there’s another part of me that knows what you did was right . . . for everybody concerned.”
He gave the circle of stunned faces a long, lingering look, then nodded and moved to the door, stopping just short of the pressure pad. He turned back. “One thing I’ve got to know: When did you play out that little scene Caldwell and I just saw?”
Oslovski cleared her suddenly dry throat. “Two days ago in the theatre downstairs.”
He nodded, smiling. “Thank you,” he said. The door slipped open to let him out, then closed silently behind him.
oOo
Less than a month later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a groundbreaking proposal to Congress that instead of mothballing fleets, bases and men, the government embark on a military overhaul, converting whatever was convertible to peacetime use. Battleships could fight oil slicks; tanks could fight fires; troops could learn to build shelters for hurricane victims, shore up leaking levees and plant forests.
The EPA loved it, Greenpeace was ecstatic, the Red Cross was more than grateful for the offer of troops and equipment to aid in their relief efforts. The Chiefs spoke of global applications and the United Nations applauded and handed them a list of ideas as long as the Great Wall of China.
“I would love to take credit for all this,” said Vance Keller, scanning the latest edition of a national news magazine, “but to tell you the truth, the counseling program hasn’t been as much of a factor in the conversion process as we expected. Oh, there are the inevitable individuals who are having trouble accepting the sudden shift in orientation—”
“Ferris?” Magda Oslovski glanced over the top of her coffee cup.
Vance puckered. “Actually he’s doing okay. He’s finding a great deal of comfort in playing Gamaliel.”
Magda raised her eyebrows questioningly.
“‘If this work be of men, it will come to naught,’” he quoted. “He’s been studying his scriptures a lot. He’s come up with some interesting alternatives to the party line interpretations of prophecy.” He grinned. “Vahid is overjoyed—Ferris has been asking all sorts of questions about Muhammad and Islamic prophecy. Anyway, most of the G.I.s we’ve interviewed seem to be happy to be beating their swords into plowshares. Practicing for war takes a lot out of a person. If you want my honest opinion, I’d say General Caldwell and his bunch were a lot less keen on being heroes than they imagined they were.”
“Oh, but they are heroes.” Magda fielded a folded page of flimsy newspaper nylon. A half-page color picture of a glowing General Caldwell with his young aide, Lieutenant Colonel John Hilyard, smiled up from the glossy sheet under a banner headline announcing Project Plowshare. “At least, I’m pretty sure Dr. Niebuhr and Abdu’l-Bahá would have said so.”
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Any Mother’s Son
This is another Analog story from 2000. Like “The Doctor’s Wife,” (which follows) it’s a cautionary tale about the limits of human perception and understanding. While it is the most recent of my Analog time travel tales to date, it falls closest to “Heroes” on the Questlabs timeline.
oOo
Dr. Sharon Glen could set her watch to her moods. From the time she woke until noon she was eager; from lunch to dinner she was determined; from dinner to bedtime she was ambivalent. But once she had poked her head into Alec’s room one last time, turned off the lights and gotten into bed herself, the ambivalence gave way to anxiety and guilt.
The anxiety was for the technology in which her career lived and moved and had being. The guilt was for Alec. If the technology failed, Alec would be alone in the world except for his grandmother, whose condition at times made her unaware she even had a grandson.
It was the shock of losing Robert that had derailed Helen Glen’s fragile mental train. Her son had been the center of her universe, and when he had one day walked into the future and failed to return, Helen Glen had suffered a sudden and swift descent into Alzheimer’s.
Sharon could understand that. Her own universe these days revolved very much around Alec. He was their legacy—hers and Robert’s—the light of her life, the reason she put one foot in front of the other every day.
Sharon knew a certain guilty relief that her mother-in-law could have no idea what her work entailed. The Helen that had been would have told Sharon in no uncertain terms what she thought of a mother who, having lost her husband to his work in a very literal sense, was preparing to put herself at the same risk. But in those long moments of introspection between lying down and sleeping, Sharon recited Helen’s lines for her: You know what could happen to you. What are you thinking of if not Alec?
She did know what could happen. Only too well. Ten years—he had only Shifted forward ten years—a simple mission financed by the National Weather Service. He would assess the effects on climate of several large-scale Midwestern reforestation projects. He would search electronic archives, sample NWS data. Simple. But something had gone wrong—a power drop off, the technicians called it. It had caused the Temporal Grid to pull her husband into the future where it collapsed, killing him.
That had been two years ago. Now there were more safeguards, double and triple and quadruple checks and redundancies and backup systems. Spectral Shift technology was perceived as essentially stable and would continue to be so until another anomaly surfaced and another tripper was lost.
Sharon Glen was on countdown to her first future-trip. As a QuestLabs historian, she’d gone into the past a number of times. It had been fascinating, exhilarating, sometimes unexpected. But the future—that was different. Where the past was at least forensically known, the future was terra incognita. It was also where Robert had died.
Now, two days before her shift, she found herself fighting the sense that she was tying up loose ends. She spent as much time as possible with Alec. They had launched model rockets, played endless board and card games, solved computer mysteries, looked at family albums. And now, she thought of Helen.
“I’d like to visit Gramma today,” she told Alec at breakfast. It was Saturday and they had tentatively planned a trip to the beach with a friend. “We can drop by on our way to pick up Trevor.”
“Do I have to go in?” Alec’s eyes were eloquent with reluctance.
&
nbsp; “No, you don’t have to go in, honey, but it would be nice for Gramma if you would.”
“She doesn’t know who I am half the time, mom. How can it be nice for her to get visited by people she doesn’t even know? Besides, I hate that place. It’s creepy.”
“Alec, you’ve never been inside. How do you know it’s creepy?”
It was true that in the two years Helen Glen had been in the high-tech high-care home, Sharon had never gotten Alec further than the manicured lawn. It was also true that Gramma hadn’t known him; worse, she had taken him for Robert. It had been a painful visit for everyone but Helen, who, for a brief span of hours, had been transported to her own quarter of heaven. Before the elder-care facility, she had had her own home—a place from which holidays seemed to originate and which Alec had begged to visit.
Sharon was doing the begging now. “Come on, hon. She might have a good day.”
Alec shook his head emphatically, poking at his yogurt with the tip of his spoon.
“Please?”
Alec sighed as only a severely put-upon eleven-year-old can. “Mom, please don’t make me go there.”
She relented, of course. She visited Helen alone. It had not been a good day, after all. Helen had not known her, and when she had tried to engage her mother-in-law in news of Alec’s exploits on the baseball diamond, Helen had vanished into a reality in which Robert—her precious only son—was a championship pitcher in the Bear River Little League. Sharon had salvaged what she could, absorbing facts about Robert she hadn’t known, wondering how veiled they were by time and neural degradation.
Sunday, she and Alec went to their local Bahá’í Center for devotions, had pizza for lunch, played miniature golf. Sharon tried again to get Alec to visit his grandmother. He would not.
“Old people are creepy when they’re like that,” he said and she barely resisted the impulse to slap him.
“They can’t help the way they are,” she told him and did not try to keep the anger out of her voice.
He was instantly ashamed. “I know. It’s just . . . scary.” He was silent for a few minutes, then asked, “Will you get like that?”
“I’m not that old.”
“I mean, like, when I’m grown up.”
“Folks on my side of the family have always been sharp as a tack till the day they die,” she reassured him. “My mom told me once that her great uncle Joseph died in the middle of a sentence in which he was expounding a theory of molecular biology.” She smiled, but Alec merely nodded and stared out the car window.
All in all, he made it harder by the day for her to be a field historian—to accept missions like the one she was prepping for. She was torn. Maybe it was something she needed to take to one of the QuestLabs counselors. She knew Alec was her first responsibility, she merely had to find that elusive balance between self and selfishness.
In the end, she left it with Alec. “Do you want me to cancel my mission?” she asked him.
His brow furrowed. “Won’t you get in trouble?”
“I might.” Especially since QuestLabs was sponsoring the Shift on its own dime for a study in culture and ethnology in future America. It would be more than an inconvenience to have to replace the senior historian on the project. And how many times had she assured them that she really wanted this type of assignment? She realized, belatedly, that this question should have been asked some time ago.
“You don’t have to do that,” Alec said, still looking a bit bemused. “I’ll be okay at Aunt Kathi’s house. It’s not like I’ll be there for a long time.”
True enough. A successful Temporal Shift literally took no time at all—if the retrieval was successful. Any time lag was purely for the benefit of the staff and machinery. You seemed to return only minutes after you left, regardless of whether you had spent hours or days at your post. Preparation and debriefings usually took longer than the Shift itself. Altogether, Alec would be with Kathi only a day and a half. In subjective time, Sharon would be gone for several hours.
Sharon found wry irony in that. Human beings had been looking for ways to make extra time for centuries. This was as close as they had come.
There were unsuccessful Shifts, of course. Like Robert’s. That was the way it was with Temporal Shift Technology. Either you came back on schedule, or you didn’t come back at all.
oOo
“Huh?” Sharon glanced up into her partner’s face.
“I said, ‘Are you ready for this?’” Trevor Haley repeated. “But I think you may have just answered the question. What’s getting to you?”
“Who says anything is getting to me? I was looking at our itinerary.”
“Sharon, you’ve been reading the same page for the past ten minutes. Either coordinates and time stamps have become a consuming passion for you or you’re zoning. Are you nervous?”
“Now that you mention it, yes, I am nervous. This is my first future-trip, after all.”
“I know.” Trevor sat down on the edge of the table where he and Sharon were assembling their gear, and leaned toward her. “Is it . . . is it because of Robert?”
Sharon wanted to deny it outright, but couldn’t. She murmured something about feeling more at home in the late 20th Century, then caught the expression on his face. She put her hand over his. “It’s okay, Trev. You can talk about it without throwing me into a deep pit of despair. And no, it’s not because of Robert—not directly, anyway.”
“So, there is something.”
He knew her too well. “It’s just . . . Alec. I wonder sometimes if I ought to give up field work—well, at least temporal field work—until he’s an adult.”
“It’s never easy to lose a parent,” said Trevor. He’d lost his seventy-year-old mother the year before to a new strain of influenza. “Besides, I doubt you could give up field work. You thrive on it.”
“I could if I had to.”
Was she whistling in the dark or did she really mean that? Temporal field work was heady stuff. Hands-on history. It made you feel like Indiana Jones and James Burke all rolled into one and blurred the distinction between the historian, the anthropologist and the archaeologist. It made you feel alive, aware, vital. All things, Sharon realized in a sudden epiphany, that had been all but snuffed out when Robert failed to return from a ‘routine mission.’ Was she replacing that relationship with temporal euphoria? More importantly, was she showering attention on her work at Alec’s expense or drawing emotional sustenance from it that mothering him should provide?
She didn’t think she was doing that; she made it a point, when she was with Alec, to really be with Alec.
“You’re a great mom, Sharon,” Trevor said. “The best. And I happen to know Alec thinks so, too.”
“Mind reading, Trev?” she chuckled. “You’re just full of unexpected talents.”
“I’ve just known you a long time.”
True, she admitted as she gathered her goods into a shoulder bag, the design of which had been ‘sniffed’ from the window of a sporting goods store fifty years in the future. She had known Dr. Trevor Haley since her first days on staff at QuestLabs in ’78 as a junior associate. She was fresh from obtaining her Masters in History and her doctoral thesis was a biography of Magda Oslovski, the primary mind and driving force behind Spectral Shift Technology.
Sharon and Trevor had become instant pals. Robert joined QuestLabs a year later and her reaction to him was instantaneous and profound. Fortunately, her feelings were reciprocated; they had married and Alec had been born a year later.
She had most often partnered with Trevor on her Shifts. Dr. Oslovski, still QuestLabs grand-dame, had a standing rule about allowing married couples with children Shift as a team. It was simply not done. Sharon had thought the rule a nuisance at first; now she could only applaud its wisdom.
At 1300 hours, she and Trevor were Shift-ready. Their electrolytes and hydration levels were checked, their serotonin levels elevated against post-shift depression. They were dressed in casual clothe
s carefully selected from fashions sniffed at their Shift point. Jeans and shirts—styles that had altered little for the better part of two centuries. Their target was Washington, D.C. 50 years in the future, their purposes mixed.
This was a “peek” as opposed to a “poke”—both terms borrowed from computer technology to indicate the scope of a mission. A peek was the minimal mission—no planned contact with future residents, no touching. It was little more than a manned sniff, which was done by a Totem, or Totable Environmental Monitor—an instrument package designed to gather images, sounds and environmental data on the Shift target. Sniffs, peeks and pokes usually were run in that order, and future-pokes—which involved interacting with people in the future—were relatively rare. There had been only a handful that Sharon knew of in the 25 year history of QuestLabs.
Any Shift was, brief or no, an expensive proposition, so Sharon and Trevor would be performing a number of tasks for QuestLabs, for Stanford University and for the North American Parliament. It was a lot, Sharon mused, standing in place on the Temporal Grid, like being a member of one of the early space shuttle missions—performing a plethora of experiments in order to maximize the cost-effectiveness of the trip. Now scientists traveled in time and college students used the stock Horizontal Takeoff to Landing shuttles regularly.
“Ready?” The question came from Shiro Tsubaki-Manyfeather, seated at the console from which she would monitor their journey. Beside her, fellow Lab Rat George Wu got baselines on their vital signs.
They nodded, gave a thumbs-up and waited while the Temporal Grid powered up. A dancing veil of light motes shimmered in an aura around the time travelers. The last thing Sharon Glen heard in 2091 was the sound of Shiro’s soft voice counting down.
“Shifting . . . yellow plus one . . . orange . . . plus one . . . red . . .”
The delicious tingle of the Shift cascaded down Sharon’s back, colors chased vividly before her eyes—yellow, orange, red. Her heart rate climbed. All delightfully normal. Only the colors were different; the past was cool, its spectrum contained blues and violets; the future was ablaze.
All the Colors of Time Page 7
