by Allen Steele
“Okay, time to head in.” Leclede prodded Murphy’s arm. “We can watch from inside.”
“Why can’t we stay out here?” Murphy looked around, saw that most of the onlookers were heading toward the nearby operations building. “Is this dangerous or something?”
“Only to your ears. See those guys?” He pointed to a handful of jumpsuited ground crew standing near a candy-striped rescue vehicle. They were fitting ear protectors over their caps. “When this thing takes off, it’s like standing next to a space shuttle during launch. If you don’t want to lip-read for the next few days …”
“Right.” At age 66, Murphy was proud of the fact that he hadn’t yet lost his sense of hearing.
He followed Leclede through the security door, then climbed the stairs to an observation room on the second floor. Everyone who had been on the apron was now gathered in front of a row of plate-glass windows. The inside lights had been turned off, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, but the airstrip was clearly visible by its runway lamps. The voices of the tower controller and the SR-75 pilot came through speakers in the ceiling:
“Runway check, Farm.”
“Runway clear, Janet Two.”
A pause, then: “All systems green-for-go, Farm. Request permission for takeoff.”
“You have permission, Janet Two. Happy trails.”
“Thank you, Farm. We’re rolling.”
For nearly half a minute, Murphy couldn’t see anything from the southern end of the runway. Then he began to hear a thin, high-pitched whine which quickly escalated into a howl as, all of a sudden, the SR-75 raced out of the darkness, its tricycle landing gear barely touching the ground as it hurtled past them. At that instant the whine dopplered into a thunderous roar that shook the window and made him instinctively cup his ears. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the flickering red torchlight of its afterburners, then the massive aircraft disappeared from sight.
“Wheels up, Farm.”
“Farm, we’ve started the clocks,” a new voice said. “Both are synched and running.”
“Copy that, Janet Two.”
Leclede unclasped his ears as he turned to him. “They’re away. All right, Zack, it’s your show now.”
“Thank you, sir,” Murphy muttered. He wondered how long that state of affairs would last. Not very much longer, if the test was a success …
They trotted back down the stairs, then crossed the operations building to an unmarked door guarded by an Air Force sergeant in camo gear. The general flashed his ID at the sentry; he saluted, then stood aside to let them pass. The room resembled a miniature version of Mission Control at Johnson Space Center; wide and dimly lit, the only light came from ostrich-neck lamps over the workstations arranged across the floor, its consoles winking with diodes, the CRTs casting a blue glow across the faces of the half dozen men and women seated at the carrels. The room was made more crowded by the military men gathered in the rear; Murphy had to push past a couple of Air Force officers just to get to his station.
“How’re we looking, Ev?” he murmured as he pulled off his parka and took his seat.
“So far, we’re golden.” Everett Backofen, the bearded young black man on his left, pointed with his pen toward a computer screen. It displayed a row of multicolored vertical bars, each pulsing slightly beneath a horizontal row of numbers that changed slightly with each passing moment. “We had a little spike about a minute ago, but I think that was just caused by g-force during takeoff. Otherwise, everything’s nominal. Herb’s staying within his parameters.”
“Good deal.” Murphy turned to the prim middle-aged woman sitting to his right. “Dorie, how’s telemetry?”
“We’re getting downlink now.” Doris Gofurther gently massaged her console’s trackball, and a tiny arrow leaped across her screen to a miniature pair of video images, both depicted in ghostly monochromatic shades of gray and black. She clicked once, and the one on the left expanded to show a vague form crossed by flickering lines of static. “There’s the rear-cockpit view,” she murmured. “I think I can clean it up a bit.”
“Do that, please. This looks like its coming from Mars.” Murphy studied the TV image of Herbert as seen from the backward-facing third seat of the SR-75. Even aided by starlight enhancement, it was difficult to make out the drone. “Ev, keep an eye on Herbert and tell me if he spikes again.” He allowed himself a smile. “And whatever you do, agree on which direction you want to go.”
Everett scowled as Doris chuckled under her breath, but no one else overheard the private joke. Which was just as well. Murphy had worked with Everett and Doris on Blue Plate for several months before he recognized the puns inherent in their last names. It was ironic that two of the physicists involved in the first attempt to penetrate chronospace would be named Gofurther and Backofen, but Murphy had long since decided to accept it as a good omen.
Pulling on a headset, Murphy opened the spiral notebook in front of him and ran his finger down the checklist. He studied the plan for a couple of minutes, listening to the reports coming from the other controllers in the room, then he glanced up at the pair of digital chronometers positioned on the far wall of the room, just below the strategic display of the SR-75’s flight plan. The clock on the left showed elapsed mission time as recorded by the SR-75; at this instant, it read 00:10:47:02. The one on the right, which showed the elapsed mission time as independently recorded by Herbert’s onboard computer, gave an identical reading. Both clocks had been synchronized to a tenth of a second, and both were set to begin recording the moment they were triggered by the mission specialist in the rear-facing backseat of the SR-75. Redundant recording systems had been built into both the Penetrator and Herbert, yet this was the one he and his team would monitor during the course of the experiment.
A faint rumble passed through the walls of the room. Murphy looked again from his notebook as the floor trembled beneath his feet. “Janet’s gone Mach,” an Air Force lieutenant seated at the carrel in front of Everett reported, his right hand clasped over his headset as he studied the radar panel before him. “Altitude 22,000 feet, range 10 miles.”
Murphy nodded. Like a hawk rising on desert thermals, the SR-75 was ascending in the steep gyre which would keep it above Area 51 even as it headed for the the stratosphere. Through his headset, he periodically heard the pilot’s terse voice as he communicated with the tower. The men in the back of the room murmured to one another, and Murphy was all too aware of General Leclede standing directly behind him, watching his every move. Murphy wished he could rid the room of all of them, Leclede included, but since there was no way he could do that, he nervously tapped his pen against an armrest and waited.
Eight minutes later, they heard the pilot’s voice again: “Farm, this is Janet Two. Angels one hundred and holding position. Waiting for your word, over.”
“We copy, Janet. Transferring com to Barn.”
“Janet, this is Barn,” the lieutenant said. “Stand by for preliminary test, over.”
“Roger that, Barn, we copy.”
“Okay, we’re on,” Murphy said. “Doris, how are we looking?”
“Good visual contact.” The TV monitor clearly showed Herbert reflecting the moonlight as it rode its saddlelike pylon on the back of the mother ship. Murphy smiled with satisfaction; they had deliberately picked this night for the test to take advantage of the full moon. “Activating onboard cameras,” she added as she flipped toggle switches on her console. A moment later, a second monitor lit, revealing the SR-75’s forward fuselage as seen from Herbert’s nose. “Flight recorders running, we’ve got good downlink.”
“Very well.” Murphy turned a page of his checklist, took a deep breath. “Everett, bring the SDM online up to fifty percent, then hold for check.”
Everett said nothing, but Murphy noticed that he quickly wiped his palms across his jeans before he laid his hands on the slidebars of his console. “SDM up to fifty,” he said softly as he gently raised the power levels of
the spacetime displacement module within Herbert’s fuselage. The bar graphs on his screen rose halfway up the screen, then obediently stopped. “Fifty and holding,” he murmured. “All levels within safe parameters.”
They spent the next few minutes conducting a last-minute diagnostic check of all of Herbert’s major systems. Finding no problems at their end, they waited another minute for the SR-75’s crew to conduct their own checks. “All right,” Murphy said at last. “Gentlemen, ladies … if you’re ready?”
Everett gave his board a final lookover, then nodded. Doris slowly let out her breath, then gave him a thumbs-up. They were even more anxious than he was, if such a thing were possible. He glanced over his shoulder at Leclede, but received no solace from the general’s stoical expression. “All right,” he said, turning back to his console. “Lieutenant, tell them we’re ready for the drop.”
“Janet Two, we’re ready for deployment,” the lieutenant said tersely into his mike. A moment passed. “Commencing countdown … ten … nine … eight …”
At zero, there was a brief flash of pyros as Herbert was detached from the back of the SR-75. Murphy heard mild applause from behind him as the drone lifted away from the Penetrator. Its wings waggled briefly as it caught the larger aircraft’s slipstream, then the screen on the left went dark while the right showed the vague image of the black ship peeling away.
“Janet Two moving to safe distance,” the lieutenant reported. “Herbert at 100,000 feet and holding altitude, eight miles downrange.”
For the next few moments, the drone would remain at its present altitude, gliding at the edge of the stratosphere a little more than sixteen nautical miles above the desert, before it began its long plunge back to the ground below. Which was exactly what they wanted: a high-velocity fall toward a large gravitational mass.
“Everett, bring the SDM up to 100 percent,” Murphy said. “Arm master program, execute on my mark.”
Backofen’s hands flew across his console. “SDM at 100 percent, master program loaded and armed, waiting your mark.”
“Doris …?”
“Telemetry locked, clear fix, recorders running.”
“Lieutenant?”
“Janet Two reports safe distance at 90,000 feet, two miles west from Herbert. They say they can see it clearly. Ground radar tracking both bodies.”
“Commence countdown on my mark.” Shoving back his chair, Murphy quickly moved to the lieutenant’s side. Leaning over him, he saw two distinct blips on the screen: Herbert in the center, the SR-75 just below it. He felt men pushing against his back as they tried to get closer, but he paid no attention to them. He glanced at the twin mission clocks on the wall. Both read the same: 00:23:18:46. He waited until they were at ten seconds short of the minute …
“Mark!” he snapped.
“Go on mark!” Backofen jabbed switches on his console. “T-minus ten … nine … eight …”
Murphy checked the mission clocks one more time, then he pointed his finger at a blank area on the radar screen, directly to the right of Herbert’s blip. “Watch that,” he whispered to the lieutenant. “Don’t blink, not even for a second …”
“I’m watching it, sir,” the lieutenant murmured. His right hand was clasped over his headset, listening to the voices from the SR-75.
“Five … four … three …”
“I’m getting a corona!” Gofurther yelled.
Murphy kept his eyes locked on the radar screen. “C’mon, sweetheart …” he whispered.
“Two … one …!”
“There it is!” Doris shouted.
At that instant, a third blip appeared near the right edge of the radar screen, directly behind the drone.
“Zero!”
Herbert’s blip suddenly vanished … but the one behind it remained.
“It went through!” the lieutenant yelled.
“I saw it!” Doris pointed at her TV screen. “It vanished! It disappeared, then it … Zack, I saw it!”
The SR-75 pilot was saying something, but his voice was lost in the uproar that swept through the control room. Murphy stared at the radar, watching as the new blip traced a solitary trajectory across the scope, while the men around him shouted in astonishment, cheered, clapped him on the back. It was then, and only then, that he raised his eyes to the mission clocks.
The one on the left, displaying the time as perceived by the SR-75, was 00:24:03:24. Yet the one on the right, which relayed the time as transmitted from Herbert, was 00:24:02:24.
For an instant barely longer than a human heartbeat, Herbert had caused a wormhole to open around itself, then slipped back in time … for one second.
In that single second, there had been two Herberts: the one about to disappear into chronospace, and the one that had appeared out of nowhere some distance behind it. When that happened, the ground radar had briefly captured both of them as two distinct blips.
Not only that, but Herbert’s nose camera had picked up an image of itself … as seen from behind.
“Jesus …” Feeling his knees beginning to buckle, Murphy sagged against the lieutenant’s console. He made himself take deep breaths; for a moment he thought he was going to faint. All around him, Air Force officers were shouting at one another as Doris and Everett hugged each other. He looked around, caught the expression on General Leclede’s face. It was nauseatingly smug, and Murphy had little doubt that, when he made his final report, he would claim most of the credit for the success of Blue Plate.
All of a sudden, the one thing he wanted most in the world was to get a breath of fresh air.
“Save the data,” he said to Everett, “and transfer control to the tower for the flyback phase.” Then, muttering apologies no one seemed to hear, Murphy grabbed his parka and began pushing through the crowd. Leclede called after him, but he pretended not to hear as he headed for the door.
The chill desert air was a relief after the closeness of the control room. The wind had died down, so he pulled his Mets cap out of his pocket and put it on. The ground crew was gathered at the edge of the airstrip, waiting for Herbert to make its remote-controlled landing. Murphy hoped he would get a chance to inspect the drone for himself before it was spirited away into one of the hangars. However, now that the Air Force knew the secret to temporal transit, everyone involved in Blue Plate—or at least the civilian R&D staff—would be retired. Herbert had just become a military asset.
Now he knew how J. Robert Oppenheimer must have felt …
The hell with it. Thrusting his hands in his jacket pockets, Murphy strolled away from the operations building. Perhaps it was just as well. He had never intended to let Blue Plate consume nearly one-third of his life. All he had ever wanted to do was figure out how someone with a handful of archaic pocket change and a passenger manifest for the Hindenburg could wind up in 1998.
“So now you know,” he murmured to himself. “Happy?”
Well, at least he had a military pension coming to him. The mortgage was paid off, and he had come to enjoy living in New England. Perhaps he could see Steven a little more often, and take in a few ball games at Shea Stadium …
Suddenly, everything around him seemed a little brighter, like the first light of dawn breaking over the secret airstrip.
Murphy was looking at the ground when it happened. He saw his own shadow stretching out before him, much as if a great floodlight had abruptly been switched on the night sky. Then he heard men shouting behind him …
“Hey, what …?”
“Holy shit, it’s …!”
“Nuke!”
Murphy whipped around, stared upward. For an instant, he, too, believed that the nuclear bomb had exploded far above the desert. He instinctively covered his eyes with his hands, yet there was no sound, no concussion, only a hellishly bright glare from high in the night sky, as if a miniature supernova had suddenly erupted far out in space …
“Oh, my God!” someone yelled. “Look at the Moon!”
Lowering his hands, Mur
phy gaped at the sky. The source of the glare was coming from where he had seen the Moon only a few moments ago …
He was still staring at the white-hot orb in the sky when something flashed directly behind him.
At first, he thought it the high beams of a nearby truck. He couldn’t take his eyes off the sky, and so he ignored it, but then the illumination grew brighter, overwhelming even the distant cataclysm, and suddenly he was aware of nearby men pointing his way, shouting in horror …
Murphy turned, found himself standing at the edge of a ball of light that had materialized directly behind him. Within the center of the aura was a vaguely man-shaped form, yet with wings that rose above its head.
Raising his hands against the blinding glare, Murphy started to step back, yet any thoughts of escape came much too late. The corona stretched out to envelop him, the figure within its nucleus reaching toward him …
The taloned hands that grasped his arms weren’t human.
Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1547Z
“You say you saw it?” Lea asked. “The angel, I mean … you got a close look at it?”
“Only for a second.” Murphy shrugged as he continued to gaze into the remains of the bonfire, as if summoning memories from its dying embers. “I’m not sure what happened then, except that I blacked out. When I woke up, I was here.” He gestured toward the fire. “I guess it left that to keep me warm. I don’t why or how, but I knew that you were coming, so I just waited until …”
“Tell us about the angel,” Lea said quietly. “What did it look like?”
Murphy shivered. “Lady, whatever it was, it was no angel. More like a reptile on two legs, with a face that would give you nightmares.” His brow furrowed as he thought about it. “About seven, eight feet tall, with long fins coming from its back. Leathery brown skin, long bony skull, black eyes. Evil-looking, but …”
He said nothing for a moment, then he shook his head. “But they’re not evil. At least, that’s what it’s telling me now. It says it’s deliberately hiding its appearance because we associate ugliness with evil, and it’s aware that we’d consider it repulsive.” A corner of his mouth inched upward. “I can’t fault its reasoning. From the brief glimpse I got of the one who brought me here, it’s about the worst thing I can imagine.”
