Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Duly noted,’ Cramer said, and Echols switched off the camera.

  Stone said, ‘Where will that go?’

  ‘We report directly to the DCI,’ Cramer said.

  ‘Promise me he’ll see that last part.’

  ‘He already knows about it,’ Cramer said. ‘That’s why we’re here. You rest up now. Take it easy. You can bet we’ll be wanting to talk to you again very soon.’

  Although Stone wasn’t under arrest, he couldn’t leave the compound, and was dogged by two large men in black suits everywhere he went. An army doctor treated the fading bruises and minor burns inflicted by Walter Lipscombe’s goons. He was interviewed by a Company psychiatrist, and briefed four frighteningly young civilian advisers who planned to use game theory to predict GYPSY’s next move. He ran laps around the track in one corner of the compound. He had dinner with Bruce Ellis in the officers’ mess and they talked about everything but Tom Waverly and Operation GYPSY, and did their best to ignore Stone’s bodyguards at the next table. At last, two days after the assault on GYPSY’s clandestine facility, Cramer and Echols paid him another visit.

  ‘Tom Waverly wants us to help him get his daughter back,’ Echols said.

  ‘The cocky son of a bitch knows we have to go along with his goddamned story about a suitcase nuke,’ Cramer said.

  They were on the running track. Stone, in a khaki T-shirt, khaki shorts and running shoes, was blotting sweat from his face with a towel.

  ‘We’d like to investigate it thoroughly before we decide what to do,’ Echols said. ‘Unfortunately, there’s a time factor.’

  Stone felt a chill at the back of his neck. ‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’

  Echols nodded. ‘He received a bad dose of radiation when he secured the nuclear reactor.’

  ‘How long has he got?’

  ‘At the moment, he’s recovering from severe bouts of nausea and diarrhoea,’ Echols said. ‘Once he’s over that, he’ll appear to be quite healthy for a few days. But then he’ll begin to experience bleeding of his gums and his intestinal lining. His teeth will loosen in their sockets, his hair will start to fall out, and his skin will bruise as his blood vessels began to degenerate. He’ll lose his appetite, and then his motor control. He’ll suffer uncontrollable internal bleeding—’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Maybe a week, maybe two,’ Cramer said. ‘Three at the outside.’

  ‘It sounds about right,’ Stone said. ‘It took him fifteen days to kill six of Eileen Barrie’s doppels.’

  ‘It must get confusing,’ Echols said, ‘waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with what you already know.’

  ‘I don’t know everything. Things aren’t exactly the same this time around. But I do know that we can’t afford to sit on our hands and hope it will come out right. My offer to help still stands, gentlemen. I hope that’s why you’re here.’

  Stone had spent the last two days working out angles in his head. He was determined to do everything he could to make sure that the loop didn’t close.

  ‘You have to understand that we’re the tip of the iceberg,’ Cramer said. ‘Everyone is going balls-out on this thing. We have a team that’s trying to reconstruct half a ton of shredded documents. Another team is trying to retrieve data from smashed computers. We even have people down at Lompac trying to question Knightly. The guy is the next best thing to a vegetable, no way he had anything to do with GYPSY after his stroke, but he was in at the beginning and there’s a faint chance he’ll tell us something useful.’

  ‘A committee of experts chaired by Richard Feynman is trying to work out the implications of Waverly’s story about time travel and changing history,’ Echols said. ‘Feynman won the Nobel prize for physics. If anyone can make sense of this, he can.’

  ‘But Tom knows you won’t be able to find where that suitcase nuke went without his help,’ Stone said.

  ‘We did try to interview him while he was under the influence of truth drugs,’ Cramer said. ‘It didn’t go anywhere useful.’

  ‘We were trained to resist interrogation,’ Stone said. ‘And in any case Tom knows that he’s dying. He knows that he has nothing to lose.’

  Cramer nodded. ‘Bottom line, the clock’s ticking. Waverly’s got us, and he knows it.’

  ‘He said that there would be no discussion about or variation of his terms,’ Echols said. ‘He was very calm about it, laid it right out and sat back and let us think about it.’

  ‘He wants to use the time key to chase after the people who have kidnapped his daughter,’ Cramer said. ‘I’ll say this for him, the guy has big balls.’

  Echols said, ‘He doesn’t have long left, and we can’t wait for the scientists to get around to building a Turing gate that can do this trick with time. We have to go now. And we wouldn’t ask this if we hadn’t exhausted every other option.’

  Cramer said, ‘What my partner means, Mr Stone, is we’re going to accept your offer to help.’

  10

  Tom Waverly sat at a metal table in a brightly lit interrogation room, bare-legged in a green gown. A plastic sack of clear fluid hung on a steel pole beside him, connected by a line to his left forearm.

  Stone watched from the other side of the room’s mirrored window as Cramer and Echols told Tom that they were willing to let him go after the people who had kidnapped his daughter, but only if he would tell them now where the bad guys were hiding.

  Tom considered this, taking his own sweet time, grandstanding in front of the two weary interrogators. At last he said, ‘Take me to Brookhaven. Then we can talk some more.’

  He smiled at the mirrored window: smiled straight at Stone.

  11

  They flew to New York in an executive jet. Tom Waverly was secured in the bedroom at the rear with three doctors working to stabilise his condition with a cocktail of drugs and a whole-blood transfusion; Stone sat in the lounge area with Cramer, Echols, and the four young civilian advisers. Once the plane was in the air, Echols handed Stone his palmtop and played a video clip from the interrogation of one of the technicians who had been arrested at GYPSY’s White Sands facility.

  Stone watched the little screen as the man talked about time travellers. ‘That’s more or less what Eileen Barrie told me,’ he said.

  ‘There’s more,’ Echols said. He took the palmtop from Stone and jumped to another video clip and handed the palmtop back.

  ‘. . . didn’t know that the device was self-aware at first,’ the technician said.

  He was a small man in a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit, his face and bald scalp as pink as a boiled shrimp. His hands shook when he extracted a cigarette out of the packet on the table in front of him, and he flinched when one of the interrogators leaned across the table and snapped a flame from a lighter.

  ‘We found out when we were doing lab tests,’ he said. ‘We started out by sending clocks a little way back in time. We used clocks because they showed the time when they were sent through. A clock would pop out of the mirror, an exact duplicate of one of the clocks we had in the laboratory. We’d note the time it arrived and the time it displayed, which gave us the time it had been sent through, and then we’d wait until that exact second, and send the original clock back. Completing the loop, you understand? One day, all kinds of objects started popping through, and we had to scramble and find out where they came from, so we could send the originals back. It was like playing hide-and-seek with the future. And then we got more ambitious. We started doing experiments that could split the sheaf in two. By, for instance, receiving an object from the future, but refusing to send it back to the past.’

  The two interrogators spent some time questioning the technician about this. He asked for paper and pencil, sketched loops labelled with subscripted Ts. ‘What happens when you receive something from your future self, let’s say a clock, you end up with two identical clocks. One of them is the original, showing the correct time, T1, and the other is from some future time, T2. Okay? So now you wait until
the original clock reaches T2 and you send it back into the past, to T1. That means you’ve completed the loop and you’ve stayed on the same time line. But if you don’t send the original clock back, if you keep it, it means that the clock you received from the future must have come from an alternate sheaf where the original was sent back . . . You understand? By refusing to do what you’re supposed to do, you exercise free will, and that splits the sheaf into two. One sheaf ends up with two clocks, the other with no clocks.

  ‘We played dozens of variations on that kind of game. For a while, it was like Practical Quantum Mechanics 101. We were having a lot of fun, but we got carried away. We became careless, and left the device switched on for hours at a time. And after a couple of weeks it made its move. We’d been working in shifts, and luckily for me I wasn’t there. It struck down everyone in the lab, blinded them with headaches worse than any migraine or gave them seizures, and then it altered the settings on the gate. Two men came through. We can’t be certain, but we think that the device sent some kind of signal into the future, and the two men were sent to rescue it. What they didn’t know was the lab was being monitored from a remote location. The security people shut down the gate and locked the doors and ordered the two men who’d come through the mirror to surrender. They looked at each other, and they died.’

  One of the interrogators asked how the two men had died.

  ‘Like the others, the ones who were caught with the device in the first place. They willed themselves to die. I heard that the surgeon who autopsied them said it was cardiovascular collapse,’ the small man in the orange jumpsuit said. ‘After that, everyone who worked on the device began to suffer from bad headaches and nightmares. One guy killed himself sleepwalking. Walked straight into the electric fence. Another drank half a pint of liquid nitrogen. We didn’t think too much of it at the time. I mean, we were all pretty stressed. We were working twenty hours a day, eating junk food, drinking gallons of coffee, snatching catnaps. It wasn’t surprising that a few of us went crazy. But then people started to have seizures every time the device was switched on, and we realised that it was somehow getting inside our heads. After that, we didn’t dare switch it on again until Dr Barrie worked out how to control it. She designed a bridle that forces it to do what you tell it to do, but it can still hurt you when it does it. It can still get inside your head.’

  Stone thought about that as the plane flew east. He wondered what the time key might have done to him, wondered what it might have done to Tom Waverly after he’d stolen it. He thought about the story about people from the future, and Tom’s claim that TW Two had left the time key switched on in the drop in the 42nd Street post office in the Nixon sheaf, so that it could be retrieved by its owners . . .

  But that would only happen if the loop swallowed its own tail and ended up more or less where it had begun, and Stone was determined to stop that happening. He racked his seat back as far as it would go and tried to relax, half-listening to the four advisers argue about the scenarios they had constructed. They were eager young college kids with too much intelligence and not enough experience, wearing short-sleeved shirts or T-shirts, pleated slacks or expensive jeans, penny loafers, high-top baseball boots. One wore a bow tie. Another had a row of pens in his shirt pocket. They wielded palmtops like six-shooters. They scribbled on pads of yellow legal paper. They drank coffee and diet Coke and jabbered back and forth unceasingly, treading on the ends of each other’s sentences, trying to out-think the people who’d fled GYPSY’s black facility and figure out where they had run to, arguing about the reasons to select one sheaf over all the others. They talked about tipping points and esoteric statistical sieving techniques. They talked about emergent properties of history. Then they started over from first principles.

  ‘We’re still looking at everything.’

  ‘Because we can’t rule out anything.’

  ‘We can rule out client sheaves.’

  ‘We can’t rule out anything.’

  ‘We can rule out client sheaves because they’re already client sheaves. And we can rule out post-nuclear-war sheaves because they’ve already had a nuclear war. That leaves pre-contact sheaves. There are only a dozen, and we should be gaming all of them intensively. I mean, what’s the point of gaming post-nuclear-war sheaves?’

  ‘Some of those sheaves had their war thirty years ago.’

  ‘What are you saying? They’re ready for another?’

  ‘They’re pretty much reconstructed. Maybe the point is to tear it all down and start over. Maybe the point is to make it worse.’

  ‘We’re talking about the past, not the present. We have to focus on pre-contact sheaves because we have to place these guys somewhere, and without hard information to the contrary, pre-contact sheaves are the most likely targets.’

  That remark got Stone’s attention. He opened his eyes and said, ‘Place which guys?’

  Someone said, ‘Now you’ve done it, Howie.’

  Someone else said, ‘You’ll have to tell him. Otherwise he’ll break your fingers one by one until you do.’

  ‘What do you have to tell me?’ Stone said.

  Cramer, who had also been trying to sleep, opened his eyes but otherwise didn’t move. Echols looked up from his palmtop.

  Howie had a wet bottom lip and black-framed glasses that kept sliding down his nose. His Adam’s apple bobbed when he said to Stone, ‘I don’t have clearance to tell you.’

  Stone felt sorry for the kid. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything, Howie. It’s pretty clear you want to work out which sheaf GYPSY is going to hit because the Company wants to insert undercover officers - people Tom won’t know about. I don’t have a problem with that. I understand why the Company doesn’t trust Tom and me to get the job done on our own. But where GYPSY is going to hit is only half the problem. You also have to figure out when.’

  The four advisers looked at him with a mixture of pity and contempt, as if a chimp had ventured an opinion on experimental brain surgery.

  Howie said, ‘I really can’t talk about it.’

  ‘Too late, Howie,’ someone said.

  ‘When doesn’t matter, because we’re giving you a resource,’ someone else said. ‘Howie will explain.’

  ‘Quit it, you guys,’ Howie said. ‘This is strictly need-to-know stuff.’

  ‘I think he needs to know more than most, don’t you?’

  Cramer yawned and said to Echols, ‘I guess we’ll have to tell him now.’

  Echols said, ‘He’s supposed to be briefed at the gate.’

  ‘I know. But if these boys try to make him guess, he might get mad and kill them all.’

  Stone said, ‘Briefed about what?’

  Cramer said, ‘You and Waverly will go through with a technician and officers from Special Operations. The technician and three of the officers will guard the gate and take care of the time key while you and Waverly go look for the bad guys. The other officers will shadow you, and step in if you need any help.’

  ‘Tom knows about this?’

  ‘Waverly didn’t want to go through with anyone but you,’ Echols said. ‘But we soon disabused him of that notion.’

  Cramer said, ‘We made it plain that we’d rather he didn’t go through at all than trust him with the time key. We told him that if he didn’t agree, he could forget about saving his daughter. He called us all kinds of names, but he gave in.’

  Stone said, ‘I guess that means you figured out how to use the time key.’

  Echols smiled. ‘Not exactly. One of GYPSY’s technicians decided he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison. He’s going through the mirror with you.’

  ‘Even if you can trust this technician, the time key isn’t reliable,’ Stone said. ‘It has its own agenda. It didn’t do what Tom wanted it to do, so how do you know it will do what you want it to do?’

  ‘Because we have Dr Barrie’s bridle,’ Echols said.

  ‘We found it in a safe in GYPSY’s faci
lity in White Sands,’ Cramer said. ‘Luckily, none of the bozos who were trying to trash the place knew how to get the safe open. Our technicians have done all kinds of tests, and the thing works exactly as advertised.’

  ‘In laboratory conditions,’ Stone said.

  ‘We don’t trust it any more than you do, even with the bridle,’ Echols said. ‘That’s why we are providing you with additional backup - a resource that Mr Waverly won’t know about. As soon as we find out which sheaf GYPSY has targeted, we will insert two of our people. Not in the present, but in the past. All the way back to the first week the gate into the sheaf was opened, in fact.’

  ‘This is in case Waverly or the time key tries some funny move that puts you and him in one time, and the technician and the Special Ops guys in another,’ Cramer said. ‘Our two people will stay under deep cover for as long as it takes, and we’ll give you a way of making contact with them in case you find yourself stranded with Waverly.’

  ‘We sent the time key on ahead of us, in an Air Force jet,’ Echols said. ‘It’ll get there two hours before we do. As long as these bright young things can work out where you’ll be going, there will be ample time to set this up.’

  ‘In my opinion, you should place officers in all the pre-contact sheaves,’ one of the advisers said.

  ‘Spoken like someone who’s never worked in the field,’ Echols said.

  ‘Maybe we should send these guys back,’ Cramer said. ‘See how they cope when they’re cut free from everything they know, and have to build new lives and wait ten or fifteen years in deep cover for a call that might never come.’

  Stone said, ‘So my backup depends on these kids making the right guess.’

  ‘If things work out, you can call in an army division if necessary,’ Cramer said. ‘You’ll only need the deep-cover guys if the time key futzes things up.’

  ‘Well, that’s exactly what it did the only time I saw it used.’