by Allen Steele
Murphy sat down at the desk, picked up the hardwired phone, switched off the cordless. “I’m here, sir. Sorry to …”
“Is this a secure line?”
What was this? “I’m on another extension, yes sir, if that’s what you’re asking. I was in the bathroom, speaking on a cordless. Just got out of the …” Realizing that he was starting to babble, Murphy stopped himself. “Yes, sir, it’s secure.”
A pause, then: “There’s been a wreck.”
Oh, Jesus! One of the guys did try to drive home drunk! Kent or Harry—probably Harry, he had been the most inebriated—climbed behind the wheel, and then he …
Then Murphy remembered with whom he was speaking, and why it might be so important that they’d want to have a phone conversation on a line that couldn’t be casually monitored, and what this particular phrase signified in a different context.
“Yes sir, I understand.” His mind was already racing. “Where did it happen?”
“Tennessee. About sixty miles east of Nashville. About an hour and a half ago.”
“I see …” Murphy glanced around the office, trying to spot his road atlas, before he remembered where he had seen it last: in Steven’s room, where he had taken it for a homework assignment. Forget it. “Has anyone … I mean, has anyone found the car?”
“We’ve located the vehicle, but no one’s looked inside yet. An ambulance is being sent to check it out. Can you be ready to go in ten minutes?”
Something cold raced up his back. “Ten …? Mr. Ordmann, I haven’t even left the …”
“We’ve sent a car to pick you up. A plane’s waiting at Dulles, and we’ve got the rest of the team assembled. You’ll be briefed on the way. Can you be ready in ten minutes?”
Murphy was in his robe. His suit was still on the hanger and could probably use a pass with a lint brush; he hadn’t even picked out a tie. But an old Adidas gym bag in his closet had some clean clothes left over from last fall’s hunting trip, and it would only take a moment for him to pack up his laptop. “I’ll be ready.”
“Very good. You’ve got the ball, Dr. Murphy. Don’t drop it.”
“I won’t, sir,” he said, managing for the moment to sound much more confident than he felt. “We’ll be in touch.”
“Good karma,” Ordmann said, then he hung up.
Murphy gently placed the receiver in its cradle, sat back in his chair, and let out his breath. Sometime during the night, a light snow had fallen on Arlington. Through the office window, he could see where it had frosted Donna’s backyard garden and laid a white skein over the swing set Steve no longer used. It looked cold and lonely out there. He wondered if it was any warmer in Tennessee.
He sighed, then stood up and went to tell Donna that he was going away on a business trip.
Thursday, May 5, 1937: 8:00 P.M.
Thirty-five minutes after the Hindenburg docked at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, an explosion in one of the aft gas cells destroyed the airship.
No one was aboard when the fire ripped through the dirigible. All the passengers and crew members had disembarked by then, and even the ground crew managed to dash to safety before the burning airship hit the ground, taking out the mooring mast with it A newsreel cameraman caught the conflagration on film; it was later remarked how fortunate it had been that the Hindenburg hadn’t exploded while still in the air, or otherwise an untold number of lives might have been lost.
Franc and Lea watched the fire from the safety of Tom’s rented Ford sedan, which he had driven to the outskirts of the aerodrome and pulled over on the shoulder. They had quietly collected their bags and walked down the gangway stairs; a stunned shuffle through customs, where officials stamped the Pannes’ passports and welcomed them back to America, then Hoffman met them just outside the receiving area. He instantly started to ask questions, but they signaled him to stay silent until they were out of earshot of the other passengers.
As they walked out to the car, Franc spotted Eric Spehl, still wearing his flight coveralls, climbing into the back of a checker cab. Unnoticed by either his fellow zeppelin men or the Luftwaffe intelligence officers, the rigger made his getaway. Fifteen minutes later, the bomb went off.
As clanging fire trucks raced down the road toward the inferno, the three of them looked at one another. “Well,” Tom said, “at least we haven’t created a paradox. We’re still here.”
Franc stared at the blazing airship. “The hell we haven’t!”
“We don’t know that yet,” Lea said from the backseat. “There’s been an anomaly. A serious one, to be sure, but it’s still only an anomaly.”
“Some anomaly.” Franc nodded toward the burning ship. “This isn’t like someone in Dallas noticing a couple of our people behind a fence during the Kennedy shooting. That didn’t change the course of history. This …”
“Oberon’s still there.” Tom cocked his head toward the uplink case where it lay open next to Lea; she had just used it to contact the timeship. “If this was a paradox, Vasili shouldn’t be up there and we would have disappeared. Right?”
“Define paradox,” Franc said angrily. “Tell me exactly what happens during a spatiotemporal paradox.”
“I don’t …”
“Come on, tell me precisely how a spatiotemporal paradox would affect a contemporary worldline …”
“Cut it out.” Lea snapped the case shut. “We can figure it out after we get to the rendezvous point.”
So they drove away from Lakehurst, heading southwest down lonely country roads into the cool New Jersey night. Deep within the Pine Barrens, house lights gradually became farther apart until they disappeared altogether. A low fog had settled upon the marshlands; the sedan’s tires beat against frost heaves in the weathered blacktop. Lea moved the case to the floor and lay down in the backseat; she remarked how incredibly large automobiles had been during this period, and Tom responded by observing how much gasoline they consumed in order to move this much mass. Franc, sullen and impatient, switched on the dashboard radio and turned the knob from one end of the dial to another, picking up AM-band stations out of Trenton, Philadelphia, and New York. Ballroom jazz, comedy shows, crime melodramas: he roamed back and forth, searching for something that might explain what had just happened.
Just as they turned off the highway onto a narrow trip of dirt road, a variety show out of New York was interrupted by a news flash. The German airship Hindenburg, which had mysteriously exploded an hour and fifteen minutes ago just after it had arrived in New Jersey, had been destroyed by an act of deliberate sabotage. An unsigned communiqué received by the station only a few minutes earlier stated that an underground organization in Germany was claiming responsibility for the act. The note stated that a bomb had been placed aboard the airship to awaken the world to the atrocities being committed by the Nazi government, and to send a clear signal to the German people that Adolf Hitler could yet be overthrown.
Franc switched off the radio. There was a long silence in the car. “That’s what I define as a paradox,” he said at last.
“We’re still here,” Tom said softly.
“Which only means that we’ve survived our own disturbance.”
“Who says it’s our fault?” Lea was sitting up again. “No one knows why Spehl’s bomb went off when it did. Maybe the timer was faulty, and it was supposed to go off at eight o’clock.”
“Or maybe he went back and reset it,” Tom said.
Franc nodded. “Sure. He ran into Emma Pannes the day before and decided that he didn’t want to sacrifice a beautiful fraulein to the flames.”
“So it’s my fault?” Lea gaped at him. “I can’t believe you …!”
“I’m joking.”
“That’s not very funny. I don’t even think you’re …”
“Will both of you just shut up?” Tom gripped the wheel more tightly as he strained to make out the primitive road through the fog. “We can’t do anything about it now, so just …”
Lea wasn’t through. �
�Do you think this is funny?”
“No, I don’t. But it’s a possible hypothesis for how …”
“Shut up!” Tom yelled. “Goddammit, both of you, just shut up!”
Once again, there was cold and awful silence in the car.
The road finally opened onto a broad clearing where a farmhouse had once stood some ten years before, until it had been destroyed by one of the brushfires that periodically raged through the Pine Barrens. Only a half-collapsed brick chimney remained; the rest was rotted cinders, old cedar stumps, and high grass, damp with rain and age.
Tom stopped the car and switched off the headlights; a chorus of bullfrogs and crickets greeted them when they opened the doors. Lea shivered and drew her overcoat more closely around her as she instinctively stepped closer to Franc. She had been born and raised on the Moon; nature sounds made her nervous. Franc put his arm around her as he stared up at the overcast sky. A westerly breeze was blowing the clouds away, revealing crisp bright stars in the moonless sky.
“You gave Vasili the correct coordinates, didn’t you?” he asked, then saw the expression on her face. “Sorry. Only asking.”
Tom pulled the uplink case out of the backseat, carried it a few feet away, and set it down. He returned to the car, clicked on the dome light, briefly inspected the car’s interior. No, there was nothing here that shouldn’t be left behind; Franc’s and Lea’s bags were stowed in the trunk, and they had all their documents and recording equipment with them. He pulled a small gold box out of his breast pocket, thumbed a recessed switch on the side, carefully placed it on the wheel well in the backseat. Five minutes after they departed, the Hertz company would be mysteriously deprived of one Ford sedan, or at least until some hunter chanced upon its charred wreckage.
When he joined Franc and Lea again, he saw that they were staring up at the sky. Looking up, he saw nothing for a moment. Then a small black shape moved past the Big Dipper, a circular patch slightly darker than the night sky. “Better get out the way,” he murmured. “Grab the case.”
The three of them hurried to the edge of the clearing. When they turned and looked up again, the shape had expanded into a broad opaque spot that grew larger as it blotted out the stars. Metz had the Oberon in chameleon mode; it was now nearly invisible to the naked eye. Even if radar had been in widespread use at this time, the timeship wouldn’t have appeared on any screens; the beams would have been deflected by its fuselage. Only the negmass grid on the craft’s underside could be detected, and that operated in near-total silence. It wasn’t until they heard a low hum and the wet grass of the clearing began to flatten out that they knew the Oberon was at treetop level.
The humming grew louder, then the timeship suddenly appeared just above them. Deliberately designed to resemble a classic sombrero-shaped flying saucer, it could have appeared on the cover of a late-twentieth-century UFO magazine; indeed, it had, for an alien-abduction story debunked by most contemporary experts. Light gleamed from its single porthole as landing gear opened like flower petals from its flat underside between the hemispherical pods of its wormhole generators. Oberon seemed to hesitate for just a moment, then the humming of its negmass drive sharply diminished, and the timeship settled to the ground.
The research team was jogging toward the craft when a hatch above one of the flanges irised open. Metz appeared as a silhouette at the top of the ladder. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “We gotta get out of here! Go, go, go!”
Franc was the first to reach the ladder. “Not so fast,” he said, hoisting the uplink case above his head. “We need to see what’s been done here. There might be something we don’t …”
“What, you mean you’re not through yet?” Metz reached down, grabbed the case’s handle, and snatched it out of Franc’s hand. “Maybe we should drop by Washington on the way up, let you assassinate Teddy Roosevelt …”
“It’s Franklin, not Teddy …”
“Who cares? You’re done.” Metz deposited the case behind him. “I just hope you haven’t screwed things up so much that we can’t get out of here.”
“Dammit, Vasili, it’s not our fault!” Lea’s voice was outraged. “We don’t know what happened, but it’s … we didn’t.…”
“Save it for the Commissioner, Oschner. We’re on our way up.” Metz disappeared from the hatch. “Get aboard or stay behind. We’re out of here in sixty.”
“Vasili, wait!” Franc scrambled up the ladder and pulled himself up through the hatch into Oberon’s airlock. Contrasted with the cool New Jersey night, the wedge-shaped compartment was uncomfortably warm. The helmet of the EVA hardsuit lashed against the bulkhead reflected his face like a fun-house mirror. Franc took a moment to pull Lea the rest of the way up the ladder, then he darted through the inner hatch and followed the pilot down the narrow midships passageway to the control room. “Calm down. We’ve got to talk about …”
“There’s nothing to discuss, Doctor.” Metz entered the compartment, dropped into his seat and ran his palms across the console, clearing the timeship’s system for new programming. “And don’t tell me to calm down. Not after this. Now get your people strapped down. We’re lifting.”
“Okay, all right.” Franc raised his hands. “Get us out of here. Take us to orbit. But don’t open a bridge until we’ve assessed the situation and at least tried to determine what caused this in the …”
Metz swung around in his chair to jab a finger at Franc. “Look, Dr. Lu, don’t make me give you a remedial lecture in chronospace theory. Causality. Inconsistency paradoxes. The care and feeding of Morris-Thorne bridges. Remember?”
“All I’m saying is, we need to slow down, try to study what …”
“Study my ass. I’m making a hole while I can still can.” Metz swung back around, began stabbing at the console. Lights flashed orange, green, blue, and red; screens arrayed around the horseshoe displayed ship status, local topography, orbital maps, projected spacetime vectors. Metz glanced over his shoulder as he pulled on his headset. “Sorry, Franc, but you’re overruled. I’m the pilot, so what I say, goes. I say we make an emergency launch, so we’re going. Now get your team in their seats, because it’s going to be a fast ride to Chronos.”
There was no point in arguing. CRC protocols were strict on this point. Franc was in charge of the expedition’s research team, but timeship pilots had final say over what happened once its members were back aboard ship. And Metz was playing the situation by the book.
Franc turned and stalked out of the control room. When the hatch slid shut behind him, he slammed his fist against it in frustration. “Jerk!” he yelled.
Then he stepped across the passageway to the passenger compartment. Hoffman was already strapped into one of the three acceleration couches. “She’s in the monitor room,” he said before Franc could ask. “I think she’s …”
“I’ll get her. Stay put. Vasili wants to get us out of here.” Franc retreated from the hatch and turned toward the last of the timeship’s major compartments, located at the opposite end of the passageway from the ready room. “Lea! Vasili’s …!”
“I know. I heard.” Lea had already discarded her costume and had put on a skinsuit. Franc regretted the change; until Lea shed her disguise, the form-fitting bodysuit didn’t flatter her middle-aged appearance. He couldn’t blame her, though; once they got a chance, he would do the same. Sweat made these period clothes feel sticky. She stood at the pedestal in the middle of the compartment, her fingers dashing across its panel as she opened the library subsystem. “Just give me a minute. I want to see if I can access something from the mission recorders.”
“We don’t have a minute. Vasili’s going for an emergency launch.”
“Shut up and give me your cigarette case.” Lea had already hardwired her makeup compact to the pedestal; she held out her palm without looking at him. “Hurry.”
“We don’t have time for this,” he repeated, but he dug into his jacket and pulled out the cigarette case. Lea snatched it from h
is hand, impatiently shook out the unsmoked cigarettes, and ran a cord from the pedestal to the tiny dataport concealed in the bottom of the case. She tapped her fingers at the pedestal, then glanced up at the wallscreen. A red bar crept across the screen; the library subsystem was downloading everything the divots had collected aboard the Hindenburg.
“All right, we’ve got everything,” she murmured. “Now let’s see what happened in Cell Number Four just before …”
“Never mind that now. We’ve got to get strapped down.” Franc grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her away from the pedestal; she managed to grab the recorders before he propelled her through the hatch toward the passenger compartment. He got her inside just before the hatch sphinctered shut.
They were barely in their couches when the timeship begin to rise. Franc glanced at the status panel, and saw that Metz had switched off Oberon’s chameleon and gravity screen in order to divert power to the negmass drive. His lips tightened as he silently swore at the pilot. They were in for a rough ride …
Then they were shoved back in their seats as the timeship shot upward into the night. A wallscreen displayed a departure-angle view from beneath the saucer; the lights of the Jersey shore and New York City briefly appeared below them before they were obscured by high cloudbanks, then the Oberon punched through the clouds as it headed for space.
Too much, too fast. Franc clenched the armrests as pressure mounted on his chest. They shouldn’t be doing it this way. His vision was blurred, but he could make out Lea from the corner of his eye; she looked just as angry as he felt. Damn it, she was right. They still didn’t understand what had happened down there. He started to raise a leaden hand, then remembered that he had neglected to put on a headset. He couldn’t talk to Metz.
