Turncoat

by Deborah Chester

  “Your coordinates have no meaning,” said the voice.

  “Twenty-sixth century? Oh.” Noel rephrased it. “My origin point. Is that where Subject Two has gone?”

  “Negative.”

  “Oh, no,” said Noel, his spirits sinking. “Not to colonial America. Not to the Revolution.”

  “These terms have no meaning.”

  “I was there, briefly,” said Noel. “Just before I was sucked back into the time stream or here or wherever I am now. Leon is attached to me. Where I go in time, he goes also.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you saying that’s where he is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ve got to get back there,” said Noel worriedly. “God knows what he’s up to already.”

  “You said your objective was to return to origin point. Now that has changed. You are not reliable.”

  “No, you don’t understand!” said Noel. “I must return with him. If we don’t come back together, the rip will widen and—”

  “Understood.”

  “TERMINATION RECOMMENDED.”

  “You don’t have to terminate me,” said Noel hastily.

  “You have intruded.”

  “It was unintentional. I did materialize, then something happened. I’m not sure—”

  “Imprecision is a hallmark of your technology.”

  “Time in itself is not precise,” Noel snapped.

  “Error.”

  “Who says? There isn’t a clock on the planet that doesn’t slip fractionally over the course of days, months, years. We’re dependent on planet rotation, and that varies. The universe fluctuates constantly, creating and decaying. You can tick along just so far and then you have to make adjustments. So don’t hand me any crap about precision.”

  The voice remained silent.

  Noel smirked to himself. It seemed he had finally won a point.

  “Your journeys into time alarm us,” said the voice finally. “We have stood aside without interference, but now you have interfered with us. You are a danger of great magnitude. You cannot continue.”

  Noel waited for the blast of termination recommended, but it didn’t come. Maybe his contact had finally turned the damned thing off.

  “I wish you no harm,” said Noel. “We travel in order to learn. We are trying to save ourselves and our civilization from decay.”

  “You are disordered. You meddle with things that you barely understand. You are dangerous.”

  “I am trying to repair the damage,” said Noel. “If you terminate me, then the damage will continue. The anomaly can only be repaired if I am recombined with Leon.”

  “You have substantiated this method?”

  The voice was almost as bad as Dr. Rugle, wanting proof and tests for everything. Noel didn’t need tests. He knew the answer inside his heart and soul. He would trust his own instincts over empirical formulas and hypotheses every time.

  “Yet your instincts are merely hypotheses,” said the voice.

  Noel jumped. “Damn! Do you have to read my mind?”

  “Communication is constant, despite its variety of forms.”

  Noel started to reply to that, then stopped himself.

  “There is something persuasive in your appeal,” said the voice as though reluctantly.

  “What can I say to convince you?”

  “I must think.”

  For an instant the darkness seemed to grow blacker. Solitude was a cold, empty hell. “Don’t leave me!” Noel called out.

  “You are afraid?”

  Noel wrestled with himself a moment. “Yeah,” he finally said. “If you go, there’s nothing here.”

  The darkness immediately around his consciousness point faded to a misty gray. He saw a face shimmering within the currents, vaguely glimpsed like a dim reflection in a pond. It was not a human face, yet there was nothing frightening about it. Two luminous eyes, a mouth, an oval shape to the head. The ears were set high on its skull, and pointed. It lacked hair of any kind.

  “I am Qwip,” said the voice.

  “I’m Noel.” He hesitated, then ventured to add, “I thought you’d look like us.”

  “Human?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am human,” said Qwip.

  “But you—” Noel stopped, afraid to finish his sentence.

  “You do not see me,” said Qwip. “You lack sufficient references. I have reached into your subconsciousness and pulled forth this image. It will suffice, since you lack comprehension. You are insufficiently advanced mentally and physically for time travel. You venture blindly into forces that you cannot control. You seek to unleash energies too strong for your abilities.”

  “Okay, enough of the lecture,” said Noel. “You’re on my side, aren’t you? You believe me, don’t you? Let me go back and try to get Leon. Please.”

  “My people are alarmed,” said Qwip. “They are against this course of action.”

  “But you understand, don’t you?” pleaded Noel. “Don’t you?”

  “I understand.”

  “Let me go back. Success is as important to me as it is to you.”

  “You have admitted you are the cause of the decay in the time stream. More of you will intrude. We cannot allow that.”

  “If I can fix the anomaly, the time stream will be okay. We won’t be able to reach you.”

  Qwip was silent a long while. “I concur,” he said finally. “You will go back.”

  “Yes!” said Noel excitedly.

  “Constrain yourself. We cannot return you to the exact moment which you left. Do you understand?”

  Noel’s excitement crashed. He thought a moment. “On a different journey, to coordinates called New Mexico, I was hurt, unconscious, and I drifted from reality back into the time stream. Is that what’s happening to me now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Before, though, I returned exactly to where I was. My body was there, and it was like an astral projection—”

  “No,” said Qwip flatly. “You are no longer in reality. You are here.”

  “Between.”

  “Yes.”

  “All of me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Odd.”

  “Dangerous.”

  Noel sighed. “Can you return me?”

  “Not to that coordinate.”

  “You mean day and hour?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Leon is there.”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?” Noel caught himself. “Never mind. Of course that has no meaning here. How close to that coordinate can you return me?”

  Qwip’s vague features broke apart. They re-formed but less cohesively. The gloom was closing in once more. “I cannot return you,” he said finally.

  “Then how?”

  “You must return yourself.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “You have this chance,” said Qwip ominously. “If you fail, then I must seek your termination.”

  Noel believed him. Nevertheless he said, “You have the technology to time travel? You can cross into our dimension?”

  “Our technology is different from yours.”

  “And it’s incomprehensible. I know,” said Noel caustically.

  “I can reach you if you remain in the past,” said Qwip. “Be warned.”

  “Yeah, but if I—”

  Qwip vanished.

  “Hey!” called Noel. “Come back! I have some more questions.”

  But Qwip did not return. The darkness closed in around Noel’s consciousness point. He was alone once again, as lonely and insignificant as a speck of dust in outer space. Timeless, empty vastness surrounded him. He hated it. He feared it. He knew if he stayed in it for very long he would go insane.

  How to go back?

  His LOC didn’t work here. How could it?

  On other occasions when he’d lost his reference points, he’d been forced to re-create them in his mind. He did that now, trying to visualize the snowy battle
field where he’d been shot. He didn’t want to go back to that place of violent destruction. He didn’t want to go back to pain, possibly death. Yet to stay here meant his fate was certain.

  He focused his thoughts and concentrated on cold, on snow, on the fields of long ago.

  Back, he thought fiercely. Go back.

  Chapter 5

  Noel materialized with a jolt that left him gasping for breath. His skin tingled unpleasantly, almost painfully, as though his nerve endings had been scorched. When he first became a traveler, time travel had been a simple, almost effortless joy. All he had to do was walk through the old time portal in Lab 14 at the Institute, dissolve into the mist, and emerge on the other side with no side effect worse than occasional mild nausea or raging hunger. But this was getting to be too hard.

  Coughing, he straightened from a crouch, wiped the perspiration from his face, and looked around to get his bearings.

  It was all wrong.

  The countryside itself seemed similar enough, in that it had cleared, rolling pastures that were bordered by forest, but the thick snow he expected to see smothering the ground had melted to thin patches in the sunshine. Only a few drifts lingered in the shade.

  Alarmed, Noel swallowed and tried to calm down. So the sun had come out and melted some snow. That didn’t mean he’d missed his mark.

  But even as he tried to reassure himself, he knew better. Before, the trees had been bare. Now they swelled with buds. In the distance he could hear a constant rushing of a stream. The ground beneath his feet glistened with moisture.

  In the first materialization, everything had been frozen and lifeless in the grip of winter. In the second, there had been autumn fog and drizzle. Now there was spring thaw. He’d missed the mark by months, perhaps even years.

  Feeling hollow, Noel sat down on a stone and stared at his surroundings in a numbed daze. He seemed to be in a thinly cleared field. Someone had been picking up stones and building a fence with them, but no workers were in sight now. Beyond a distant fold of the hills, a narrow column of smoke spiraled against the blue sky. He could hear the rhythmic chopping of an axe cutting wood.

  Rubbing his face, Noel tried to stay calm by going through his self-check. He might as well pretend that everything was normal. Maybe his previous materializations hadn’t even happened. Maybe he’d dreamed getting shot. Noel touched his forehead and found no wound. Maybe he’d dreamed the march with the skeletons. Maybe that bizarre conversation with Qwip had never occurred.

  Maybe.

  He shivered with more than cold.

  “LOC, activate,” he said.

  The LOC was programmed to automatically disguise itself in a shape or design that conformed to the era being visited. But this time there was no band, no bracelet, no woven braid of lovelocks encircling Noel’s left wrist. Instead he found himself wearing a heavy gold signet ring on his left hand. He frowned at it.

  “LOC?”

  The ring shimmered with a pale blue nimbus, but it did not alter its shape into the usual clear-sided bracelet filled with flashing miniature fiber optics.

  Noel’s worry increased, and with it came a sense of sinking dismay. It was all happening again. He hadn’t been able to return to the future, and now his LOC was malfunctioning.

  “LOC!” he said angrily. “Damn you, don’t do this to me. Activate!”

  The ring grew warm on his finger and continued to shimmer “Acknowledged,” it said faintly.

  Noel’s shoulders sagged. “Thank God,” he said. “Why have you changed your shape so radically?”

  The LOC did not reply.

  “LOC!”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Respond to my question. Why have you changed your shape?”

  “I am programmed with molecular shift capability.”

  “I know that. I asked why.”

  The LOC did not reply.

  “Never mind,” said Noel, abandoning that line of questioning. “Run a diagnostic on your programming. Are you malfunctioning?”

  “Working…negative malfunction.”

  “Well, good. Tell me where and when I am.”

  The LOC hummed busily.

  Noel waited, feeling slightly reassured by his argument with the device. LOCs were designed to be isomorphic, and each was programmed to conform to the personality of the traveler wearing it. Noel had always enjoyed minor arguments with his, deliberately phrasing some of his questions to confuse the computer’s literal mindset. But right now, any odd deviations or other evidence of possible malfunction made him nervous.

  “Okay, okay,” he said after a few seconds. “You’ve had long enough. Identify this location.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Noel frowned. “That’s an incorrect response.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Stop! Run diagnostics. Check for malfunctions.”

  “Working…no malfunctions.”

  “That’s a crock, pal.”

  The LOC shimmered. “I am not programmed to respond to rhetorical statements.”

  “No kidding. Get this straight. I want to know my location. I want the date. Or have you compressed yourself so small, your clock isn’t running?”

  “Specify…affirmative.”

  Noel stood up and walked around in a small circle. Inside he was tightening into knots, but he forced himself to keep his wits. “Okay,” he said to himself. “Maybe I’m going too fast. It’s been one weird travel this time. We hit the wrong location, then I was snapped in and out of the time stream, and now I’m here.”

  “Specify instructions.”

  “Wait,” Noel said. He thought a moment, then drew in a sharp breath. “LOC, access your internal clock and directional codes. Pinpoint specific location coordinates, latitude and longitude, then translate them to map mode and relay information by town, county, territory, colony, or significant landmark. Follow with month, day, and year. Run.”

  “Working…Schuylkill River, Pennsylvania, approximately fifty-two miles northwest of Philadelphia and approximately seven miles north of Valley Forge—”

  “Valley Forge!” said Noel in wonder. “Then I didn’t dream it.”

  The LOC said nothing.

  “Continue,” said Noel impatiently.

  “Date is March 31, 1778.”

  “March. So it is spring. When does Washington leave Valley Forge?”

  “The next campaign against British troops occurred June—”

  “Stop,” said Noel. “That’s good. We don’t have to worry about getting into another battle. LOC, scan back to previous materialization. Give location and date according to specific instructions.”

  “Working…Germantown, Pennsylvania—”

  “Stop,” said Noel. He didn’t need to hear more. His own memories of the bleak defeat seen in the men’s faces haunted him as much as his foreshadowed visions of the walking skeletons. They were symbolic, he supposed, of the men who would die of starvation and cold at their winter quarters in Valley Forge. He realized that Leon must have also materialized somewhere in that time grid. And unless he’d been yanked back and forth through the time stream like Noel, he would have had the entire winter to wreak havoc on history.

  “I wonder if I can believe what Qwip told me,” Noel mused aloud.

  “Specify instructions.”

  “I’m not talking to you.” Noel squinted against the sunshine, which glittered off the snow with blinding brilliance. “LOC, scan the area for Leon, using your maximum sensor radius.”

  “Specify Leon.”

  “Hell!” said Noel in consternation. “Look in your own data banks. You know good and well who Leon is.”

  “Specify Leon.”

  “Specify your request for specifications.”

  The LOC was silent. Noel glared at it. “Why don’t you resume your usual size? This miniaturization has squeezed your circuits.”

  The LOC flashed blue light. “Molecular shift lacks parameters.”

  “What does that mean
?”

  “Programming does not correlate with necessary instructions.”

  “Oh.” Noel thought that over. Obviously there were damaged spots. He shoved down fresh worries. “Okay, you’ve got some black holes in there. Let’s see if we can’t reroute them. What parameters are you lacking?”

  “Data banks on costume and apparel circa 1770-1780.”

  “Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “I am not programmed to respond to rhetorical questions.”

  “Yeah, and you can’t handle sarcasm either. Tell me this: Were you fully or even partially operational while I was in the time stream?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Noel slapped his palm against a tree trunk. “That devil Qwip lied to me! Did he sabotage you?”

  “Question is not sufficiently specific.”

  “Qwip! Did he sabotage you while I was in the time stream?”

  The LOC flashed. “Alterations were made.”

  “What was removed?”

  “Data banks 001, 101, 110, 010, 111—”

  “Stop.” Noel paced across the mud and back again, running his hands through his hair. Whatever Qwip was, and whatever he was up to, he had lied and he had meddled. Noel was beginning to have a chilling suspicion that the rip in time might have created access for Qwip’s kind. And if they were hostile, they could perhaps destroy or damage Noel’s own time line.

  He stared across the pasture with unseeing eyes. “I’ve got to find Leon and close the access point. LOC, can you shift yourself back into that, uh, braid of hair that you used during our last travel?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Try.”

  The signet ring on Noel’s finger grew uncomfortably hot, but he dared not move, fearing to upset the LOC’s attempt to reroute its damaged circuitry. When it finally burned him, he gritted his teeth for a moment, then said sharply, “LOC, stop activity!”

  The LOC stopped flashing. Gripping his hand and trying not to swear, Noel plunged it into the snow to ease the burn. The icy cold shocked away some of the pain. After a few moments, he dropped the handful of melting snow and examined his hand. The flesh on his finger was puffy and red. A second-degree burn, and the LOC had not been able to shift its disguise.