Time Loves a Hero

by Allen Steele

  “Tom, get up!” Lea was screaming at the top of her lungs. “Tom, wake up, wake up, oh God, we’re going to …!”

  And then they hit the water.

  11:57 A.M.

  From the Air Force chopper, Center Hill Lake looked cold and gray. High clouds reflected dully off its meandering channels and tributaries, where the Caney Fork River flowed into deep valleys inundated long ago by a flood-control dam. At midwinter, the waterline was at its lowest level; when the UH-60 Blackhawk dropped to about two hundred feet, the noisy clatter of its rotors reverberated off high bluffs as the chopper flew past densely wooded ridges and hilltops.

  From his seat behind the cockpit, Murphy studied Center Hill Lake with curiosity. Although most of the surrounding hills were filled were summer homes, a few of them almost mansions, none were on the shoreline itself; most of them looked closed for the winter. Colonel Ogilvy, who turned out to be a native Tennessean, told him on the flight out from Sewert AFB that the Army Corps of Engineers, which had erected the dam in the early fifties and maintained it today, had strict regulations against anyone building within five hundred feet of the shore. The few boathouses were ones protected by a grandfather clause in the regulations; most of the summer residents docked their boats at commercial marinas scattered along the lake. The regulations probably seemed draconian to the wealthy Nashville doctors, lawyers, and country musicians who kept summer getaways out here, but the trade-off was one of the most underdeveloped lakes Murphy had ever seen. He gazed down at the bare-branched woods and wondered how many deer he might bag during hunting season.

  Then the Blackhawk swept around a bend, and the main channel opened before them: a vast expanse of water stretching several miles from shore to shore, with a tall road bridge towering above a bottleneck at the eastern end of the channel. The pilot brought the helicopter down lower as he banked to the left, and Murphy saw a sandy beach within a shallow lagoon on the opposite side of the channel. The beach belonged to a picnic area; as the chopper came closer, he saw that it had been invaded by the U.S. Army. A large tent had already been erected in the nearby picnic area; a couple of dozen figures, most wearing military fatigues, moved around the tent and the olive trucks parked nearby.

  Even then, the helicopter didn’t immediately head for the beach. Instead, it veered toward the middle of the channel. From his seat next to him, Colonel Ogilvy unlatched his seat belt and leaned across Murphy to point at something through the window.

  “Down there!” he yelled. “Can you see it?”

  Murphy pushed aside the right cup of his ear protector as he looked where the colonel was pointing. At first, he couldn’t see anything; then he spotted a tiny island, not much larger than one of the summer houses surrounding the lake. Not an island, really, but rather a large sandbar; a couple of hardy oak trees had managed to survive the lake’s seasonal rise and fall, but he doubted that anything more than a few wood ducks lived out there.

  Yet he didn’t see anything peculiar, save for several small plastic buoys forming a half circle around one side of the island. “See what?” he shouted back, shouting against the prop noise. “I don’t see anything!”

  Across the narrow cabin, Meredith Cynthia Luna had her eyes tightly closed; she took deep breaths as her hands fondled a pair of animal energy stones: an armadillo for protection and safety, a butterfly for balance and grace. She had been airsick once already, shortly after the Blackhawk lifted off from Sewert AFB; apparently her painted pebbles didn’t work for nausea. Lieutenant Crawford sat next to her, relief bag in hand just in case she needed it. Her hair remained perfect.

  “I can’t see anything either!” Agent Sanchez had taken another window and was staring downward. “Where are you looking?”

  “Gotta look close!” Ogilvy jabbed a finger at the sandbar. “See that distortion? Like a warped mirror or something?”

  Murphy peered out the window … and yes, now that the colonel mentioned it, he could detect an odd, semicircular object shimmering in the shallow water within the buoys. At first glance, it was undetectable, melding almost perfectly with the tiny island and the lake surrounding it. Then the helicopter passed over the object, and he was startled to see its shadow bulge outward slightly, as if reflected by an invisible convex surface.

  “That’s it!” the colonel shouted. “That’s the yew-foh!”

  “What’s making it do that?”

  “Damn if I know! That’s why we called you!” Ogilvy reached forward to prod the pilot’s shoulder. “Okay, Captain, put us on the ground! We’ve got work to do!”

  White sand kicked up as the copter settled down on a concrete boat ramp within the lagoon; the pilot waited just long enough for his passengers to get clear of his aircraft, then he took it back up into the sky. Now that he was closer, Murphy noticed that the soldiers wore black tabs over the division patches on the shoulders of their parkas: Rangers from the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. All wore helmets and sidearms; a few carried M-16s on shoulder straps. Murphy noticed several soldiers using entrenchment tools to fill burlap bags with sand, while others lugged them to shallow foxholes scattered along the beach. One contained a canvas-covered machine gun. The military wasn’t taking any chances.

  A lieutenant hurried over to Ogilvy, saluted, and began to speak to him in a low voice. Sanchez headed straight for a concrete picnic table, where two other civilians had spread out topographic maps; the FBI had already gotten the state police to seal off all roads and highways leading to the lake, under the veiled pretense that a top-secret experimental jet had crashed here. Meredith Cynthia Luna walked on stiff legs to a picnic table, where she sat and tucked her head between her knees.

  That left Murphy alone, at least for the moment. Unnoticed by anyone, his hiking boots scuffing against the frozen sand, he sauntered past the soldiers, the sandbag emplacements, the trucks, and the FBI men until he reached the water’s edge. Now there was nothing between him and the tiny island; it lay about half a mile across the channel, clearly visible by its lonely stand of oak trees. Yet the crashed UFO was invisible; only the buoys gently bobbing in the water marked its whereabouts.

  What allowed it to camouflage itself like that? An energy field of some sort? That was his first guess, considering what happened to the jet that had flown too close to it. The pilot of the second F-15 claimed that his missile exploded before it reached its target, yet he also said that the object nearly disappeared when it got close to the lake; he had been able to follow it only by the shadow it cast against the lake, and he didn’t see clearly it again until it skipped across the lake’s surface like a flat rock before running aground on the sandbar. So if it was a field, perhaps it wasn’t completely impenetrable. It might be able to ward off kinetic-energy sources, like an incoming missile, but was useless against inert matter like …

  “Find anything interesting, Dr. Murphy?”

  Startled by Ogilvy’s voice, Murphy turned around so quickly that he almost lost balance. “Oh shit, don’t do that! You …”

  “Sorry.” The colonel was faintly amused. “Didn’t realize you were so nervous.”

  “I’m not.” Not really. Murphy let out his breath, nodded toward the sandbar. “Just trying to figure out what … um, what makes it go away like that.”

  “From what I’ve been told, nobody knows.” Ogilvy pointed farther down the beach; a pair of inflated rubber boats lay on the shore. “Six men paddled out there about a half hour ago. They approached within thirty feet of the sandbar, but couldn’t make out anything except that shimmer we saw from the air.”

  “Did they …?”

  “No. They were under orders to only recon the area and drop buoys. One man said that he felt his paddle hit something under the water, like a smooth surface, but they didn’t see anything when they looked down. It spooked them, so they skedaddled.”

  A smooth, invisible surface just under the water. “How deep is it out there, Colonel?”

  “Maximum depth is about fifty feet.
Around the sandbar, only ten to fifteen where the dinghy was. Five or less at the waterline.”

  Damn! They were right on top of the thing, and still couldn’t see it. “This used to be farm country before the dam was built,” Ogilvy was saying, “so that’s probably the top of a low hill. The yew-foh might have sunk completely if it hadn’t hit it.”

  “Maybe that’s what it was trying to do.”

  “Maybe. But why would it want to do that?”

  “Well, it was being chased by a fighter, so …” Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know. Still trying to figure that part out. When I know more, I’ll tell you.”

  Ogilvy nodded, but didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Y’know, Dr. Murphy,” he said quietly, “you seem to have your head screwed on tight. For an OPS guy, that is.”

  “How’s that, Colonel?” he asked warily.

  “Call me Baird …”

  “I’m Zack.”

  “Zack.” They shook hands. “You’re a normal scientist, aren’t you?”

  Normal scientist. Like there was another kind … “Astrophysicist, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I can tell. You’re asking questions, not assuming anything. You’re not jumping to conclusions, then trying to make the facts fit the answers you’ve already figured out. Ms. Luna, on the other hand …”

  He didn’t finish, but stepped aside to let Murphy see for himself. Meredith Cynthia Luna had recovered her poise; she had now taken a lotus position at the picnic table, palms spread upward on her knees, head tilted back on her neck, eyes tightly closed. A handful of soldiers had paused to watch her, until an officer walked by and told them to get back to work.

  “Asked her what she was doing,” Ogilvy murmured, “and she said she was trying to establish communion. Not communication … communion.”

  On top of everything else, she was a Strieber believer. Lord … “She’s not in my division. If she wants anything, give it to her. I don’t care, just keep her out of my way.”

  “So you don’t think she’s …?”

  “Got anything to contribute? Not really. But I can’t get rid of her either.”

  “Sort of figured as much.” Ogilvy paused, then went on in a low voice. “Frankly, my people don’t have much respect for your people. Cashews and pistachios, we tend to call ’em. But you’ve got a good rep. Word up is that you’re probably the most reliable person at OPS. If you think you’ve got a lock on this situation …”

  “I’m flattered, but I don’t.”

  “This is new to all of us, but you’re the nearest thing we’ve got to an expert.” Ogilvy took a deep breath. “Look, Zack, we’re making it up as we go along. Mr. Sanchez is working with the locals to keep a lid on this thing as long as we can. We’ve been lucky so far … hardly anyone saw this thing go down, and we’ve got the area bottled up. But that dog won’t hunt much longer.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Six, twelve hours. Twenty-four, tops. My people are ready to fly in more people and equipment, but we need to know what we’re dealing with first. Think you can do it, Dr. Murphy?”

  Ogilvy posed this as a question, but it really wasn’t one. They both had higher authorities to whom they had to answer, and nobody upstairs was going to accept no for an answer.

  “Yeah, I can do it,” Murphy said.

  Time unknown

  “I’m sorry, Tom.”

  Franc gently folded Hoffman’s hands together on his chest, then pulled a blanket over the body. He spent another moment with the mission specialist, then carefully stood up and made his way upward along the precariously slanted deck to the hatch.

  He had just left the passenger compartment when something thumped against Oberon’s hull. Bracing himself against a bulkhead, he listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything until Metz’s voice rang out from the control room.

  “Lu! Get in here! We’ve got a problem!”

  Like they didn’t have enough already. Franc pitched himself down the dark passageway until he reached the ajar hatch to the control room, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the compartment. Seated at his station, Metz was a shadow against the luminescent band of emergency lamps. Most of the screens glowed with status reports; one, however, displayed a camera view from outside the timeship.

  “Oh, no,” Franc murmured. “Where did they come from?”

  Just outside Oberon, three soldiers in a rubber boat. One cradled an archaic rifle in his arms; the second had an old-fashioned film camera aimed straight at them; the third gently guided the boat with a long plastic paddle. The first two were looking back at the oarsman, who gazed uncertainly into the water just beneath the boat.

  “I didn’t see them coming,” Metz said in a low voice, as if afraid the intruders could hear them. “I had my head under the console, didn’t know they were out there until …”

  “I know. I heard it, too.” They were floating just above the submerged end of the ship; the guy in the rear must have hit the hull with his paddle. “Is the chameleon functional?”

  Metz glanced at one of the displays. “Still working. They can’t see us. But if they get much closer …”

  He didn’t finish his thought. It hardly mattered. The soldiers knew they were here. The first vehicles had arrived on the nearby shore little more than an hour after Oberon’s crash landing, and although the chameleon hid the timeship from direct view, a vague outline of its hull could be detected from certain angles in midday sunlight. Helicopters had circled low over the sandbar several times already, but this was the closest any of the locals had dared to venture.

  At least the airlock hatch was underwater. In fact, judging from the position of the raft, it was directly beneath the soldiers. The locals would have to send out divers to find it. Judging from the amount of activity on the shore, though, it wouldn’t be long before it occurred to them to do so.

  They watched as the men in the boat took a few more pictures—at such close range, they were probably photographing distorted reflections of themselves—before they hastily paddled away again. Metz let out his breath. “Close one. Worse than Dallas.”

  “Far worse than Dallas,” Franc said, but not accusingly. Recrimination was pointless by now; whatever happened in 1937, they were foiled but good. One expedition member was dead, his neck broken during that first violent impact with the lake. The timeship was down, its operational condition uncertain. Contemporaries had discovered their whereabouts, and these weren’t aborigines who would leave little more record of their brief passage than a few legends and some mysterious cave drawings.

  Worst of all, they were shipwrecked in the late twentieth century. The most dangerous era in the history of humankind.

  “They’re cautious now, but they’ll be back.” Franc clambered forward to peer at the screens. “How’s it coming so far?”

  “Do you want the good news first, or …?” Metz caught Franc’s stern look. “Never mind. I’ve been working my way through the system to the primary drive. It’s still down, but the AI’s located the major problem. Main bus is damaged, a few boards are shot. I’ve retasked some repair nannies and sent them in, so they should complete their work in about an hour or so. Backup’s fully operational, though, so I’m …”

  Franc impatiently twirled a finger, and Metz got to the point. “Pods are still intact. The drive can be fixed, although the grid’s flooded and it won’t work at optimal levels until we’ve been airborne for at least sixty seconds.”

  “So we can get out of here. Right?”

  Metz didn’t reply.

  “Come on, Vasili. We can or we can’t. Which is it?”

  “Two problems. The first, you know about already. Energy reserve’s down to 15 percent, just enough to keep the chameleon operational and the AI alive. I’ve got the cells on full recharge. Fortunately, we can electrolyze all the hydrogen we need from the water around us … one good thing about crashing in a lake. AI estimate is that we’ll be able to lift off again within six
hours, less if we reserve internal power as much as we can.”

  “Including low-orbit escape and wormhole entry?” Franc asked. Metz nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked even more tense than usual. “So what’s the second problem?”

  The pilot let out his breath. “We don’t know when we are. Where, that’s certain … the AI established a fix on our coordinates before we crashed. Tennessee, Cumberland Plateau, Center Hill Lake … the numbers are safely stored away. And judging from what we’ve seen so far, we’re in the late twentieth. Probably in the 1990s, but …”

  “What year?”

  “Can’t tell you that.” Metz shook his head. “That’s the problem. Primary telemetry grid is down, so we can’t pull in outside feed. No way to lock onto the local net. I might have been able to get a lock before we crashed, but I didn’t have to chance to …”

  “I understand.” Under the circumstances, Vasili had done the best he could just to get them safely to the ground. However, lacking a precise fix on when they were, Oberon’s AI was unable to accurately plot a CTC return trajectory. This was something that couldn’t be guesstimated; the AI had to know exactly when and where in chronospace the timeship now existed. Spatial coordinates were estimated, but temporal weren’t; the most vital factor of the four-dimensional equation was missing.

  “Sorry, Franc.” For once, Metz had put his arrogance in a drawer. “I wish I could give you better news, but …”

  “Any idea what caused this? The paradox … the anomaly, I mean …”

  “Lea’s still working on it. You might want to check with her.” Then he turned back to his console and didn’t look up again until Franc left the control room.

  He found Lea at the library, running through the footage their divots had captured from the Hindenburg. Like Franc, she had taken a few minutes in the replication cell to change her appearance back to normal; her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail that fell over her broad shoulders as she braced herself against the pedestal. She didn’t look up when he entered the compartment.