by Allen Steele
Now the limbs of the surrounding trees were whipping back and forth as if caught in a supernatural gale. A loud hum surrounded him, then Franc was pinned by a bright shaft of light. For an instant, he caught a glimpse of Murphy’s face—he didn’t seem much older than Franc himself—then he turned to see a broad, black oval hovering only a few meters above the ground.
Metz was in a hurry; he hadn’t lowered the landing flanges, and he hadn’t switched off the chameleon again. The light was from the open airlock hatch; Lea knelt in the hatch, extending her arm downward.
“Move it! We’ve got to get out of there!”
The wind whipped at his ripped coat; Murphy had managed to tear it when he went down. In a panic, he felt at coat pockets; the glasses still there. But he wasn’t done here yet …
“Hold on!” he shouted, then he stole a moment to kneel beside Murphy. Not completely unconscious, the scientist groaned softly as Franc rolled him over, but he was too groggy to offer any resistance. Franc pawed at his parka until he felt coins and heard the soft jingle of loose change. He reached into a pocket, retrieved the two dimes and one nickel that he had thoughtlessly left in the pay phone. Now the scientist had no tangible proof that he had ever encountered a chrononaut.
He started to stand up when he heard Murphy whisper something to him:
“Does … it … get any better?”
Franc knew what he meant.
“Depends what you do, my friend,” he murmured. Then he leaped up and dashed toward the waiting timeship.
7:02 P.M.
Headlights were already racing up the hill when Metz took the Oberon back into the sky. Minutes later, the timeship pierced the dense cloud layer above the Tennessee countryside. This time, there were no hostile aircraft in the sky, only the thinnest reaches of the stratosphere and, far above, the twinkling stars.
By then, Lea had taken Franc’s glasses to the library pedestal, where she downloaded the chronological figures gathered by its nanochip into the AI. She and Franc hurried into the control room and held their breath until Metz informed them that the parameters for a successful crosstime jaunt had been established. Oberon was still wounded, but it was healing rapidly; a few orbits, and it would be capable of opening a tunnel.
“But we can’t go home.” Metz’s fingers nervously tapped the console beneath a flatscreen image of two parallel closed-time circles. “We’ll get back to our year, no question about that. But we’ll still be in a different continuum.”
“So Chronos Station won’t be there.” Lea’s voice was flat, nearly hopeless.
“Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.” The pilot shrugged. “We’ll have no idea until we get there. But we can’t stay here, and don’t even consider returning to 1937 …”
“I know,” Franc said. “We can’t change what we’ve already done. Not without creating another paradox, at least.”
“Sorry, but no.” Metz shook his head. “What’s done is done. We’re stuck with the results, whatever they may be.” He looked over his shoulder. “On the other hand, we could always go back to some point before 1937. Find a place to settle down in the past. A little farm in Kansas, circa 1890? A chateau in southern France around 1700? A modest vineyard in ancient Greece …?”
“Not tempting in the very least.” Franc smiled. “It’s a new universe, to be sure, but I don’t think it’ll be all that different.” His smile became a broad grin. “In fact, we may find it surprisingly similar.”
Metz’s face was unapologetically skeptical, but Lea stared at him. “What makes you think that?”
Franc absently played with the torn lining of his coat. “Only a hunch.”
Friday, January 16, 1998: 7:09 P.M.
“And you didn’t see the guy who hit you?”
“Not clearly, no.” Seated on the front bumper of the Hummer, Murphy leaned back against the grill. “I mean, it’s pretty dark.…”
“I got that, but I still don’t understand why he’d just attack you.” Illuminated by the headlights, Ogilvy crouched on the road before him. “Neither do I understand what you were doing all the way up here. The sergeant at the checkpoint said you had just gone to the store for a soda. That’s a quarter mile down the road from here.”
Murphy gently touched the bruise on his forehead. It wasn’t very sore, but the motion helped hide his face. “Only wanted to stretch my legs a bit more before heading back to camp, that’s all. I hope I didn’t get your man in any trouble.”
“He’ll live.” Ogilvy glanced over his shoulder at the two soldiers searching the roadside with flashlights. “Let’s try it again. You walk all the way up here, just to stretch your legs, and when we find you, you’re beat-up and lying here in the road. You say it’s because some total stranger stepped out of the woods and asked you for some spare change, and when you told him you didn’t have any, he attacked you. Then he vanishes, just like that. Have I got everything?”
“I don’t have an explanation, either.” Murphy looked the colonel straight in the eye. “Maybe he was just … I dunno. Some crazy hitchhiker. Things happen like that.”
“Right.” The colonel slowly nodded. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me the truth?”
“That’s all there is. Honest.”
Ogilvy sighed as he stood up. “Well, whatever happened up here, it made you miss all the excitement. The yew-foh vanished. We think it lifted off.”
“Oh, shit! Really?” It was all Murphy could do to feign astonishment. “You mean it’s gone?”
“Happened about ten, fifteen minutes ago. First, it went invisible again, right under the eyes of the guys we left on the island. We heard a loud hum, then all the lights and electronic equipment went dead. Water shot up into the air where the saucer had been resting, and then … well, it was gone.”
“And you didn’t see anything?”
“Just a black shape taking off, but it was gone before we could track it.” Ogilvy tucked his hands in the pockets of his parka. “That’s when we discovered you were AWOL. It’ll be sweet bringing you back. When she found out you were missing, Ms. Luna claimed she received a psychic impression that you’d been taken by her aliens.”
Murphy laughed out loud, but not for reasons the colonel probably thought he did. For once, Meredith Cynthia Luna had come close to making the right guess. “I’m sure she’s been wrong before.”
“Yeah, well …” Ogilvy looked around again. “Go on, get in the vehicle. It’s warmer in there. I’m going to give my guys a few more minutes to find your mysterious friend, then we’ll go back and start breaking down camp. I don’t imagine we’ll find anything else, do you?”
“No, I doubt it.” Wincing from the bruises on his stomach, Murphy stood up from the bumper. “We might check the island again, just to be safe, but you’re probably right.”
He let Ogilvy open the Hummer’s passenger door, and waited in the shotgun seat until the colonel walked away to see whether the soldiers had discovered anything. When he was finally alone, he pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket.
The paper had come from the stranger’s inside coat pocket, in that half instant when Murphy had grabbed at him during their fight and torn it. Murphy had only the vaguest recollection of the other man whispering something as he knelt over him; the two dimes and the nickel were missing when he regained consciousness, but this single sheet of paper was still clenched in his fist, along with a shred of dark fabric.
Murphy gently uncrumpled the paper and studied it under the dim glow of the dashboard. At the top of the page was a stylized dirigible flanked by olive branches; a scroll beneath the airship declared it to be the LZ-129 Hindenburg.
Below the picture of the airship was a list of names: a passenger manifest. Halfway down the list, two names caught his eye: Mr. and Mrs. John and Emma Pannes, of Manhasset, Long Island.
Murphy looked up, saw the colonel walking back to the vehicle, followed by the two soldiers. He had just tucked the paper into an inner pocket wh
en Ogilvy opened the right rear passenger door.
“We’re not going to find anything,” Ogilvy muttered as he settled into the backseat. “No need to rush, though. We’ve got until morning till we have to be out of here.”
“Yeah. No need to hurry.” Murphy turned his head to gaze out the window. The clouds were beginning to dissipate; for the first time tonight, he could make out a few stars. “‘Fools rush in …’”
One of the Rangers opened the driver’s door to climb behind the wheel. “Pardon me, sir?” the soldier asked. “Did you say something?”
“Hmm? Oh, nothing.” Murphy smiled at his half reflection in the window. “Just thinking.”
PART 3
FREE WILL
Tues, Oct 16, 2314—0600Z
Against the darkness of space, from literally out of nowhere, there was the brilliant flash of defocused light as, for the barest fraction of a second, a tunnel opened within spacetime: a wormhole momentarily stabilized by exotic matter formed from vacuum fluctuations. In that sliver of an instant, the Oberon plunged out of chronospace.
The last tremors of the timeship’s passage had barely subsided when Franc heard the warble of the master alarm. Dazed, his eyes shut as he gripped the armrests of his acceleration couch, at first he thought the sound was imagined. Then he was thrown against his harness as the Oberon suddenly rolled to starboard, and it was at that moment he realized they were in trouble.
“Franc! What …?”
His eyes snapped open as Lea screamed, and the first thing he saw was the wallscreen. Earth lay several hundred kilometers below; sunlight reflecting off the tops of dense white clouds hid the ground from sight. Even without checking the chronometer, he knew that they were no longer in 1998, for the last things he had seen before Metz activated the wormhole generators were the nighttime lights of North America. Yet that wasn’t what he noticed.
Far above Earth, a vast gray wall stretched across space.
Terrifyingly enormous, apparently solid yet somehow oddly granular, it curved around the planet until it disappeared beyond the horizon, casting a broad shadow across the cloud tops. Somehow, it looked like …
“That’s impossible.” Lea’s voice was no more than an awestruck whisper, barely audible beneath the alarm. She stared at the screen, her mouth agape. “Please tell me it isn’t there.”
“It’s there. I see it, too.” Franc fumbled at his seat harness, finally locating the buckles and releasing them. His body started to float upward; he hastily grabbed the armrest to keep himself in his seat. With his free hand, he slapped the lobe of his headset. “Vasili!” he shouted. “Give us some gravity! And kill the alarm!”
The pilot didn’t respond, but the alarm abruptly went silent. Franc let out his breath, then glanced to his right. Tom Hoffman’s body was still securely strapped in the third couch, his corpse wrapped in a blanket. At least the sudden maneuvers hadn’t dislodged him, and so long as Oberon itself was still in good condition …
Franc turned his head to check the status panel next to the wallscreen. The bar graphs for all the major systems were still in the green, and there were no red warning lights. So what triggered the master alarm? He was about to shout for Metz again when his gaze fell on the real-time chronometer.
The readout was 16.10.2314/0601:06.06.
The Oberon had returned from the past. In fact, it had reliably emerged from chronospace less than a second into the future after its relative time of entry, with the remaining sixty-six seconds accounted for by the events of the past minute and few seconds. Indeed, they should be directly above the same point on Earth where the timeship had opened its wormhole to May 2, 1937. Therefore, if they were back in their own time, nothing should be different.
Suddenly gaining weight, his body fell back into the couch. The ship’s localized gravity field had been restored. A moment later, he heard Vasili’s voice in his headset.
“You guys better get up here,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”
Franc nearly laughed out of loud. “Something’s …?” He pointed at the gray shape on the wallscreen. “Do you see that?” he demanded, forgetting that the pilot wasn’t in the same compartment. “That’s a ring! That’s a goddamn planet ring!”
“I know.” Vasili’s voice was subdued. “We almost collided with it when we came out of chronospace. We got lucky … when the AI detected it, it went into autopilot mode and put us into lower orbit.” There was a pause. “Never mind that now. Just get up here. That’s not the worst of it.”
Lea was already unbuckling her harness. She hesitated as her eyes met Franc’s, then she prodded her headset. “What aren’t you telling us? Have you tried to raise Chronos?”
Another pause. “Chronos isn’t there. Nothing’s there. The orbitals, the Lagrange colonies … they’re all gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Franc snapped. “They’re not responding?”
“No, I mean they’re gone. They’re simply not there.”
“What about Tycho?” Lea demanded. “Can you raise Tycho? Someone there should …”
“Lea,” Vasili said, ever so quietly, “the Moon is gone, too.”
Saturday, January 17, 1998: 2:30 A.M.
The Gulfstream II was still parked in front of a hangar at Sewert Air Force Base, right where Zack Murphy had last seen it only this morning … yesterday morning, he reminded himself, although it was difficult to remember that fact. In the predawn darkness, a brittle wind whipped across the airfield, tugging at the hood of his parka as he marched toward the waiting aircraft.
The Ranger team was still breaking camp at Center Hill Lake when Colonel Ogilvy began gathering the OPS team for the helicopter ride back to Sewert. Meredith Cynthia Luna had refused to leave, though; stubbornly insistent that the spacecraft belonged to alien emissaries, she wanted to remain behind for a little while longer, to “gather residual psychic impressions” from the crash site. Although Murphy secretly believed that she simply didn’t want to share company with him and Ogilvy, he wasn’t about to argue to the contrary. Much to his surprise, though, Ogilvy agreed to let her stay with the troops, so long as she caught a commercial flight back to Washington within the next twenty-four hours. Perhaps he was trying to appease OPS, or maybe he was just as sick of her as everyone else was; whatever the reason, after Ogilvy placed her in the care of Lieutenant Crawford—who didn’t seem thrilled by the prospect of baby-sitting the psychic—he herded Murphy and Ray Sanchez aboard the Blackhawk.
So now they were back where they had started. Chilled to the bone, exhausted beyond all meaning of the word, Murphy pulled his parka a little more tightly around himself as he shuffled toward the jet. With any luck, he might be able to grab a few winks before the plane landed at Dulles. The flight would take about two hours; factoring in the one-hour time difference, that meant they’d arrive in Virginia at about 5:30 A.M. An hour or so after that, and he’d be walking through his front door. Donna would still be asleep, but Steven would probably be up already, watching cartoons in the living room. Murphy absently patted the jacket pocket where he had tucked the little Darth Vader action figure he had found on the island beach. When he got a chance, he’d rinse the sand off it in the airplane’s washroom and give it to his son as a travelling present … and then he’d take the phone off the hook, climb into bed next to his wife, and sleep until well into the afternoon.
And after that?
Although he was too tired to think straight, Murphy knew that nothing would ever be the same again. After all, he had just met a time traveller. You don’t go to Disneyland after something like this …
Forget it, he told himself. Figure it out later.
Just ahead of him, a pair of Air Force officers in flight gear were standing next to the Gulfstream’s lowered stairway. Murphy assumed that they were the aircraft’s pilots. Ogilvy and Sanchez had stopped to speak with them; the four men were huddled together tightly, their shoulders hunched against the wind. As Murphy approached, they fell silent.<
br />
Murphy halted next to the stairs. “Anything wrong?” he asked. “Is there something I can do?”
He caught a sullen glare from Sanchez, but the FBI agent said nothing as he turned away. Ogilvy mustered an easy smile. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, then cocked a thumb toward the plane. “Go ahead, get aboard. I’ll tell you about it later.”
In that instant, Murphy had the premonition that he wasn’t going to get any sleep during the flight back to Washington. Yet there wasn’t much he could do about it now, so he trotted up the stairs and found a seat in the back of the plane. When he took off his parka, he made sure that he kept it folded in his lap, where he could keep his hands on it at all times. Through the window, he could see Ogilvy and Sanchez still talking to the pilots. As he watched, they turned and headed toward the stairs. A moment later, the pilots emerged through the hatch, followed by the colonel and the FBI agent. The pilots walked into the cockpit and shut the door behind them as Ogilvy and Sanchez took their seats near the front of the plane. Ogilvy propped his feet upon a vacant seat and lay his head back, while Sanchez placed his laptop computer on a table and opened it. Neither of them looked his way; after a few moments, Murphy cranked back his seat, pulled his coat up around his shoulders, and closed his eyes.
The Gulfstream had been airborne for a little less than fifteen minutes, just enough time for Murphy to doze off, when he heard someone settle into the seat next to him. “Zack?” Ogilvy said, insistent but not unkindly. “Wake up, son. We need to talk.”
Reluctantly, Murphy opened his eyes. The colonel had brought two foam cups of black coffee from the galley. “Do me a favor and fold down the table, will you?” he asked, nodding toward the seatback in front of him. “My hands are full.”
“Hmm …? Oh, sure.” Murphy reached out from beneath the parka, pulled down the tray table. “None for me, thanks,” he said as Ogilvy gently set down the coffee. “I’d like to get some sleep sometime before we land.”
