Time Loves a Hero

by Allen Steele

  “Sure. We’ve all had a hard day.” The colonel shook his head apologetically. “But I can’t let you do that just yet. We’ve got some loose ends to tie up first.” Picking up his coffee, he looked toward the front of the plane. “Agent Sanchez, would you like to join us?”

  As if waiting for his cue, Sanchez moved down the aisle. Instead of taking the vacant seat on the other side of the aisle, though, he rested his elbows on the seatback. He gazed down at Murphy with cool dark eyes, but didn’t say anything.

  “Is this about the nondisclosure agreement?” Murphy picked up the other coffee, took a tentative sip. Caffeinated or not, its warmth was welcome after the chill of the night. “I said I’d sign whatever you want me to, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  “Glad to hear it, Dr. Murphy. I’m pleased to know that you’re willing to cooperate with us. But that’s not what I … what we want to discuss with you.” Turning half-around in his seat, Ogilvy folded his hands together on the armrest. “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? What happened to you on the road just before we found you?”

  Oh, hell … “Nothing happened,” he said, looking the colonel straight in the eye. “I took a walk up the road, that’s all. Just catching some air. And when I got to the top of the hill, some guy came out of the woods, asked me what time it was …”

  “You said earlier that he asked you for spare change.”

  “Well … yeah, I mean, he asked me for some change, and then he …”

  “Roughed you up, right. That’s what you said.” Ogilvy reached up the ceiling panel above Murphy’s seat, clicked on the reading lamp. The sudden glare made him wince. “Y’know, for someone who’s been punched around,” Ogilvy said as he peered closely at Murphy, “you look like you’re in pretty good shape.”

  “I got a good punch in the face. After that he hit me in the gut, then he threw me down and …”

  “Threw you down on the road?” Ogilvy asked, and Murphy nodded. “The road was paved, so you should have some asphalt bums on your hands, maybe some scrapes on your coat.” He studied Murphy’s hands, then the back of his parka. “I don’t see any marks.”

  “I didn’t … I mean, I didn’t hit the ground all that hard.”

  “C’mon, Zack. I didn’t buy it back then, so why would I buy it now?” Ogilvy frowned, shook his head. “Something else happened up there. I know it, and you know it, so why don’t you just make things easier and come clean?”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Murphy said quietly.

  Baird Ogilvy regarded him silently for a few moments, then slowly let out his breath as an exasperated sigh. “Agent Sanchez, you want to help me out here, please?”

  “Dr. Murphy,” Sanchez said, “right now this plane is circling above the Kentucky state line, its pilots awaiting my instructions as to its next destination. If you don’t agree to render us your full cooperation, the plane will divert to Fort Campbell, where a military escort will meet us at the airfield. They will then drive you to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where you’ll be placed in their custody under maximum …”

  “What?”

  “You will placed in their custody under maximum security conditions until appropriate federal charges can be levied against you.” Sanchez’s voice never rose, his eyes never blinking once. “During this time, you will not be permitted to have any contact with the outside world. You will not be allowed to contact an attorney, or speak with your family, or …”

  “You can’t do that!” Livid with anger, Murphy began to rise from his seat. “That’s illegal! You can’t …!”

  The .45 automatic appeared so fast, he barely saw Sanchez’s hands move.

  Murphy froze. From somewhere many miles away, he felt the liquid warmth of spilled coffee seeping through his right knee of his trousers.

  “Please sit down, Dr. Murphy,” Sanchez said, his voice remaining even. “Any further action on your part will be considered a threat to …”

  “Relax, please. Both of you.” Ogilvy placed a hand on Murphy’s shoulder, easing him back down. “Calm down, Zack. No one’s going to prison today.” Then he looked up at Sanchez. “Ray, please lower your weapon. That’s not necessary.”

  The FBI agent hesitated, then withdrew his finger from the trigger and returned the .45 to the belt holster behind his back. Murphy’s heart galloped as he fell back into his seat. No one had ever pointed a gun at him in his entire life. For as long as he lived, he hoped it would never happen again.

  “You …” he started, and realized his mouth was too dry to speak. He swallowed a hard lump in his throat. “You’re serious. You’d do this, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, but … yes, I would.” In the heat of the moment, Murphy hadn’t noticed that he had knocked over Ogilvy’s coffee as well. The colonel set the empty cup upright, then pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and used it to sponge up the coffee. “Try to look at this my way,” he continued. “An alien spacecraft … or at least what appears to be an alien spacecraft … crash-lands in a rural lake after an encounter with two military jets, one of which is forced down for unknown reasons. After being surrounded by army troops and remaining silent for over half a day, the craft inexplicably takes off again, becoming radar-invisible within moments of departure. I don’t know about you, but anything that demonstrates that sort of capability scares the cookies out of me.”

  Ogilvy wadded up the wet handkerchief and dropped in the vacant seat on the other side of the aisle. “Then the senior OPS consultant charged with investigating this event is found on a nearby road. He claims to have been mugged … in the middle of the night, out in the middle of nowhere … but all evidence points to the contrary. Kind of suspicious, don’t you think?”

  “I think …” Murphy hesitated, then looked away. “Nothing. I’ve got nothing to say.”

  Ogilvy shook his head in disappointment. “Dr. Murphy, believe me, this isn’t a bluff. You’re hiding facts regarding a possible threat to national security. I know you’re in this way out of your depth, and I’m sorry that it has to be this way, because you seem to be a nice guy. But I’m telling you right now, if you don’t start talking, you’re going to be seeing the inside of a prison cell before the sun comes up.”

  “If you do cooperate,” Sanchez added, his voice quietly persuasive, “everything that just happened here stays here, on the plane. I won’t file a report about this discussion, and neither will the colonel. Your record remains clean.”

  “That’s right.” Ogilvy nodded in agreement. “No one at OPS will know, and neither will your family or colleagues. It’ll be classified at the highest levels.” Then he let out his breath. “But if you don’t cooperate …”

  “I think I get the picture.” Nervously running his fingers through his hair, Murphy gazed out the window. Through a thin skein of clouds, he could see the lights of a large town passing beneath the strobes at the ends of the jet’s left wing. If they were above the Kentucky border, then it was probably Fort Campbell. If that was the case, the Gulfstream could be on the ground in five minutes. Military police were probably already waiting at the airstrip, ready to bundle him into a car for a quick ride up I-24 to Marion, Illinois.

  He remembered the Darth Vader figure in his coat pocket. He had been looking forward to giving it to Steven when he got home. Sure, the kid probably had one already—Murphy had lost track of all the toys in his collection—but the look on his face would be priceless.

  Yet there was something else in his parka, wasn’t there? He glanced down at his coat; it had fallen to the floor when he tried to get up, and it still lay there, rumpled around his feet. He had meant to protect the mysterious thing that he had found, keep it his own private secret, yet that no longer seemed to be an option. It would be found eventually, once his clothes were taken away and he was given a prison track suit …

  “Your call, Dr. Murphy,” Sanchez said. “The clock’s ticking.”

  Murphy slowly l
et out his breath. “All right,” he said, “you’ve got me.” He hesitated, then bent forward to pick up the parka. “There’s something here you need to see.”

  Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1123Z

  Seen from geosynchronous orbit, just above the plane of the equator, the changeling Earth was a thing of vast and frightening beauty.

  The innermost rings, buff-colored swatches of fine dust less than a meter in depth, lay in low orbit only a few hundred kilometers above the planet. Rotating most rapidly of all, they were also in the slow process of disintegration; the night skies past the daylight terminator were constantly lit by the firefly sparks of micrometeorites flaming out in the upper atmosphere. Past a narrow, translucent gap lay the broad, charcoal-colored bands of middle rings; here, the rocky debris ranged in size from pebbles to small boulders, nearly a half kilometer in depth and extending for thousands of kilometers. Beyond them was another, slightly wider gap, and finally there were the outer rings, nearly as fragile as the inner rings yet having a higher albedo than their closer cousins.

  The rings were all that remained of the Moon. Obliterated by forces beyond human comprehension, Earth’s former companion had betrayed it, become its murderer. The rings cast an elongated shadow upon the southern hemisphere over five hundred kilometers in width; at high noon, everything from the tip of Central America through the Caribbean to Africa’s western coast lay within a perpetual eclipse zone that changed only with the passing of the seasons. Worse, without the Moon’s gravity to moderate the ocean tides and wind patterns, coastal areas had disappeared beneath the oceans while windstorms perpetually raged inland.

  Yet, the heaviest toll had been taken by the asteroid-size chunks of the Moon’s mantle and core that had rained down upon the planet’s surface. Seen through occasional breaks in the global cloud cover were vast stretches of scorched and cratered terrain. Where there had once been cities were now ruins, and what had once been plains and forests were now blackened wastelands.

  Regardless of whatever had caused this planetary catastrophe or when it had occurred, its devastation was as merciless as it was complete. It was impossible for anything to have remained alive down there. Earth was dead.

  “I’m not picking up anything.” His voice barely more than a whisper, Metz ran his hand across the com panel, searching every available frequency. “No radio, no cybernet, no microwave transmissions … nothing. Not a single source.”

  “Have you tried …?” Franc started to say, then stopped. He was about to ask if there were any satellite uplinks, but that was unlikely; the rings would have wiped out anything orbiting the planet.

  “Have you received anything from the colonies?” Standing beside him, Lea trembled against his shoulder. “It’s been over an hour. You should have heard something from Mars at least.”

  “There wasn’t anything the last time I checked, but …” Metz tapped a button on the panel, listened intently for a few moments, then shook his head. “Nothing. Not even a tachyon pulse.” He frowned. “You’d think we’d get some sort of space traffic, though, or least an answer from Deimos Port. But I’m not even receiving word from Ceres.”

  Franc’s throat tightened. Earth and the Moon, wiped out … that much was hard to accept. Yet there were nearly fifty million people scattered across the solar system, from the Aresian settlements to the asteroid colonies, and even farther, to the Jovian and Saturnine moons. “I … I really can’t believe this,” he murmured. “I mean … every place in the system …”

  “No … no, I don’t think so.” Lea’s eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, her voice a dry rasp. For a short time she had been on the verge of hysteria, yet she was beginning to pull herself together again. “Even if the major colonies had been destroyed, there’s too many places for people to hide out there.”

  “Then maybe …” Metz thought about it a moment. “They might have evacuated everyone from the system. Picked up survivors, taken them …”

  “No. Too many people for that.” Removing herself from the comfort of Franc’s arm, Lea stepped closer to the porthole, staring through it as if searching for answers in the obscene rings which encircled the planet. “They couldn’t get everyone aboard starships, even if they packed them in like …”

  Her voice trailed off as her mouth slowly fell open. “Damn,” she whispered. “We’re forgetting something.”

  “What’s going on?” Franc asked. “Lea, what are we forgetting?”

  “This isn’t our worldline,” she said. “This isn’t the place we left.”

  “But we came back to the same time …” Metz began.

  “The same time, yes … but not the same place.” Lea continued to stare at the rings. “We changed history in 1937, right? That means our worldline changed. When we tried to return to 2314, we got dumped out into 1998, but it was the 1998 of another worldline. So it stands to reason that, when we left 1998, we would continue to follow this worldline to 2314 …”

  “So it’s not our 2314,” Franc said.

  “Right.” Lea pointed to the com panel. “That’s why we’re not picking up any transmissions from the colonies … because there never were any colonies, on Mars or Ceres or anywhere else. Maybe not even on the Moon.”

  “Wait a minute. Hold on …” Turning around in his chair, Metz touched a different panel. Horizontal patterns appeared on a flatscreen; the pilot examined them closely, then pointed at the broadest group. “Look here. The inferometer doesn’t pick up any man-made metals in the ring debris, but there should be tons of it floating around out there, from all the orbitals …”

  “That’s because there weren’t any orbitals. Chronos Station wasn’t destroyed because there never was a Chronos Station. Not in this worldline, at least.” Lea gestured at the porthole. “And that didn’t happen yesterday, or even last year. I don’t know much about planetary physics, but those rings aren’t new. They took time to form.”

  “Three hundred sixteen years?” Franc was skeptical. “That isn’t my area either, but …”

  “You’ve got another theory?” Lea shot him a hard look, then bent over the console and pointed toward the image of the ring-plane on another screen. “Vasili, can you get us a little closer to the center ring? If we can get a good sensor lock on one of those boulders, maybe the AI can run an analysis, tell us how long ago this happened.”

  “Sure, I can get us closer, but I don’t know …”

  “Good. I’ll be in the monitor room, setting up the program.” She turned so quickly that she almost collided with Franc. “You want to help me, or …?”

  “No, no. You know what you’re doing.” Franc hastily stepped aside, and Lea brushed past him without another word. He waited until she had left the flight deck before he dared let out his breath. “She’s upset,” he said softly.

  “You mean you’re not?” Metz was already entering the new trajectory into the flight computer. “Maybe it’s not our worldline, Dr. Lu, but in case you haven’t noticed …”

  “I know. Sorry.” Everything was still sinking in. There was a certain sense of surrealness to all this, as if he was living in a nightmare. Perhaps it was only the lack of sleep; the last time he had closed his eyes, it was while he was aboard the Hindenburg, somewhere above the Atlantic. He glanced down at himself, grimaced in disgust. Although he had long since discarded his nanoskin, he still wore his 1937 clothes, donned again during his foray into 1998. The cuffs of his trousers were caked with dried mud over three and a half centuries old. “I think I’ll change, if you don’t mind,” he murmured, turning away from the console. “Might make me …”

  “I’m getting something!” Metz snapped.

  “What?” Franc looked around, saw that the pilot had his hands clasped over his headset. “What … you mean, a signal? Where …?”

  “I don’t know! It just …!”

  “Franc! Get in here!”

  Hearing Lea, Franc bolted for the hatch. “Get a fix on that!” he yelled at the pilot as he dashed out of the control
room. “Don’t lose it!”

  Lea stood in front of the library pedestal, her hands locked onto the platform as she stared straight ahead “Vasili just received a transmission!” Franc shouted as he charged into the compartment. “He’s trying to …!”

  “I know,” she whispered, and pointed at the wallscreen. “Look.”

  Franc skidded to a halt, almost fell against her. Displayed across the screen, in characters the size of his hand, was a message:

  OBERON

  COME HERE

  72° 35' N 42° 39' W

  ALL WILL BE EXPLAINED

  “Franc!” Vasili’s voice was loud in his headset. “I’ve got a fix on the signal! It’s coming from …”

  “I know. It fed a message through the AI. We’ve got it on the screen.” All at once, Franc’s fatigue evaporated. “Seventy-two degrees, thirty minutes north, forty-two degrees, thirty-nine minutes west.” He was already entering the coordinates into the pedestal. “Sounds like it’s somewhere in North America. Go ahead and lay in a landing trajectory. I’ll figure out exactly where that is.”

  “You’re not seriously thinking of going down there, are you?” Lea stared at him in astonishment. “You don’t know who sent that.”

  “No … but they obviously know who we are.” Franc tapped the pedestal’s touch pad, and waited while the map formed on the screen. “Besides, it’s rude to ignore an invitation.”

  Monday, January 19, 1998: 8:49 A.M.

  The conference room was located on the second floor of the Capitol, just a few steps down the hall from the Senate cloakroom. Normally used for budget reviews and parliamentary sessions, on certain occasions it also served as a quiet, private place for closed-door hearings. This morning, a Capitol Hill police officer stood guard outside; so far since the meeting had begun, three senators, four aides, and two pages had paused to ask what was going on within, only to be given a wordless shrug in response.

  The emptiness of the room made Murphy nervous. Whenever he glanced over his shoulder, all he saw were rows of vacant chairs. Off to one side sat the only spectator, a uniformed U.S. Army lieutenant, her gaze focused upon some distant place as her fingers danced across the keyboard of a portable stenograph. To his left, almost unrecognizable in his braided and service-striped dress uniform, sat Colonel Ogilvy, his papers spread out across the witness table. And directly in front of them, flanked on either side by three senior senators, was no less than the Vice President of the United States.