Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  Disaster averted, Harry caught the eye of the cocktail waitress. He traced an imaginary circle over the table: Bring us another round. "This didn't work out at all like I'd planned," he groused. "I expected that story to get me a drink."

  His new friends rewarded him with another chuckle. Even Roger.

  CHICAGO, 2009

  The two seated women were a study in contrasts. The first was boldly striking: tall, statuesque, with billowing waves of chestnut hair and aristocratically high cheekbones. Her companion exhibited a quieter beauty: short and slender, with flowing, shoulder-length blond hair. Shining blue eyes transformed what would otherwise have been an ordinary face. The first picked diffidently at her salad; the second attacked a slice of quiche—as she did life—with gusto.

  They were sisters.

  "Just eat it, Becky," Julia Bowen said. "I come here often. The chef promised to omit the worms as a personal favor."

  Rebecca grimaced. "You know very well these greens weren't organically grown. There was a time when you wouldn't have been caught dead in a place like this. Eating eggs, yet."

  Playfully: "Guess I shouldn't expect you to stay for dinner, then. Chili and tamales."

  The straitlaced sister shuddered. "It's that mechanic you married."

  Harry claimed—ad nauseam—that engineers and scientists didn't know much about the arts and were privately embarrassed by it; fine- and liberal-arts types knew nothing about science or technology and were openly proud of it. Sure it was a stereotype, but some stereotypes have a basis in truth. Becky, for example.

  There, but for the grace of Harry, go I. Julia chose to misunderstand. "Physicist, quantum mechanic. Hah, hah. A very small joke." A blank look showed that Becky hadn't gotten it. "What have you heard from Mom and Dad lately?"

  The folks were a safe topic. They swapped anecdotes for a while, and childhood reminiscences, then fell silent. With a sigh, Becky set down her fork. "Tell me more about your show."

  "What show? I've got some sketches in a shopping-strip storefront."

  "It's a show if your stuff is on the walls, not in the bins."

  "Thanks, Sis. I appreciate it." Julia smiled. "Harry said last night that I've lost my amateur status. He figures that the gallery is making more money now from my sketches than from their frames."

  "You really love that big lummox, don't you?" Becky studied her intently.

  Julia grinned from ear to ear, like a sap. She didn't care. "Yeah, I really do."

  * * *

  Harry Bowen tipped back in his office chair, its front legs airborne. His own legs rested at the calves on the accumulated clutter of his desktop. His dangling, shoeless feet wiggled to the heavy-metal beat from his iPod. Afternoon sun streamed through blinds behind him, lighting the room-temperature fusion article in Nature that held his complete interest.

  The tall visitor tapped gently on the frame of the open door. No response. He knocked harder. "Dr. Bowen?"

  Harry looked up and had a moment of déjà vu. "What's this 'Doctor' crap? Come in, Terrence!" He set the open journal facedown onto one of the shorter paper stacks, and stood.

  "My pleasure—Harry." They shook hands. The Englishman's sparse, windblown hair gave him a pixieish air. He wore casual slacks and a plaid sport coat more suggestive of a used-car salesman than of Cambridge. "I see you remember me. Got a few minutes?"

  "Absolutely." He had not seen Terrence in over a week, not since his first night in New York. Harry pointed to a guest chair. "Take a load off. I'm dying to hear what airline flies from New York to England with a connection in Chicago."

  Terrence passed on the chair, instead closing and leaning against the office door. "As it happens, you're not the only one who told a whopper that night. I'm not at Cambridge. I don't live in England anymore—haven't for years. The truth is, I'm not even in physics."

  "So you're Catholic?"

  "My confession has nothing to do with guilt. It has everything to do with something we need to discuss. The Rothschild Institute."

  Not Harry's favorite topic. He'd woken up on the first full day of the conference, head pounding and stomach queasy, to what was definitely the morning after the night before. He had cursed himself out—quietly—as fourteen types of moron. What had possessed him to talk about the incident at Rothschild? Still, given the initial stupidity of having said anything, he thought he had recovered well.

  Terrence's surprise appearance suggested otherwise. Harry waited in silence.

  His guest shrugged. "Shall I begin at the beginning?"

  "Please," Harry said. "Then proceed through the middle to get to the end."

  "Fair enough. For starters, I am Terrence Ambling. I'm a grad student and teaching assistant, both in European history, at NYU. I admit to being a bit ancient of days for such a bohemian existence, but I'd had a midlife crisis. Crossing the pond and hiding in academia have been therapeutic. And like most grad students, I'm often strapped for cash."

  Harry made an educated guess. "The ersatz food at the conference brought you."

  "Sad, isn't it? Lots of the students do it, though—it's so easy. Conferences all use the same name-tag holders—you know, the clear plastic, clip-on kind. Download a conference's logo from the Web, print the logo and a name with a color printer and—voilà—gratis goodies. And there are often people off to dinner milling about the lobby, wearing their silly name tags, with unused drink tickets free for the asking."

  "That got you inside. It didn't require you to talk to anyone. For a historian, you make a fair physicist."

  Terrence chuckled. "You never heard me talk physics. I am, however, a pretty avid science-fiction reader."

  "So the starving grad student travels—hitches?—seven-hundred-plus miles cross-country because . . . ? To crash the Consumer Electronics Show for some chip 'n dip?"

  "Maybe, since I'm in town." Terrence paused as voices in the hall passed the closed door. "It's not what brought me, of course. That has more to do with my former life.

  "Have you ever heard of Interpol?"

  * * *

  Harry's living room was marginally less cluttered, somewhat larger, and much more comfortable than his office. He and his guest occupied the two well-worn armchairs; Julia puttered in the kitchen, stretching the chili with macaroni.

  Ambling had brought shocking news: Abdul Faisel, the vanished researcher from the Rothschild Institute catastrophe, was sought by Interpol. It seemed Faisel might know something about twenty kilos of missing plutonium.

  "Twenty kilos?" Harry was incredulous. "Surely even the Russians couldn't misplace that much. But if they did, why haven't I read about it?"

  "A few kilos of the stuff is practically a hobbyist A-bomb kit. If word got out, Harry, it would cause a panic. My former employer keeps these things quiet.

  "We think a corrupt Russian general first stole it in 2002. Russian intelligence didn't discover the problem until fourteen months and two middlemen later. They contacted Interpol after tracing the shipment to a Hezbollah front organization."

  "Hezbollah," Harry repeated. "The Syrian-backed terrorists?"

  "Yes, and a very scary bunch. Iranian-backed as well."

  Harry began pacing. "Explain something to me. Okay, so maybe Interpol could keep a situation like this quiet for a long time; I can understand why they would try. The buyers have no reason to be bashful. As you say, they can do almost as much harm by announcing they have plutonium as by using it.

  "The more I think about this, the more confused I get. If the plutonium had been recovered, you wouldn't be here. Just knowing that such a theft is possible could encourage others to emulate it.

  "On the other hand, what if the plutonium weren't accounted for? If you thought I knew anything useful, one call to a former coworker would start an official investigation. For stolen plutonium, an anonymous call would more than suffice.

  "Don't think that I begrudge you the dinner," Harry concluded, "but I have to ask. Why are you here?"

  And then, b
ingo, the lightbulb went on over his head. No, make that a giant flashing neon light—reading "Prank." Harry plopped himself down in his easy chair. "Don't bother answering, you old fraud. You're good. You caught on to my tall tale in New York faster than anyone. Tonight you topped me."

  The rattling of plates was reaching a definite predinner crescendo. "You certainly earned the meal. Let's go into the dining room, and you can tell us what really brought you to Chicago."

  "Oh, I was not joking about the reason for my visit. I truly am interested in that missing plutonium."

  The deadly-looking pistol that Ambling removed from a shoulder holster reinforced his seriousness.

  * * *

  Terrence thumbed the safety and tossed the handgun into the lap of his very startled host. "I wasn't allowed to keep my old identification. This was as convincing as I could get."

  Julia picked that moment to enter from the dining room, where she had just set down a steaming tureen. "Harry! What in the world are you doing with that thing?"

  Harry returned the thing—gingerly—to its rightful owner. "As little as possible. Okay, Terrence, you've made your point."

  "Good. I'm famished." He wandered into the compact dining room, where he dutifully admired the two framed photos on the wall. "When do I get to meet the little tykes, Julia?"

  "It will have to be another time. Johnny is always fishing for a dinner invitation at his best friend's house, so tonight I agreed. Melissa I sent off to my parents. A four-year-old and an eight-year-old aren't conducive to adult conversation."

  "You needn't have exiled them on my account." He silently added: But thank you. Terrence likened children to strychnine. They could be medicinal in small doses. In large doses, however . . . He nibbled on a too-spicy tamale while Harry Bowen inexplicably doused his own food with Louisiana hot sauce.

  Over after-dinner coffee, Terrence took pity on his new friend. Friends. "You've been more than patient with me. There was plutonium smuggled out of Russia. Your vanishing acquaintance at the Rothschild Institute was implicated."

  Julia did a most interesting double take, but said nothing.

  Terrence faced Harry. "I've done a little checking since we met. You were very brave, and not a little foolhardy, that day in Metz. A French colleague who owed me a favor confirmed your involvement. Claude also indicated that you were hospitalized for a week after the incident." He smiled at Julia. "You visited him daily."

  Harry shrugged noncommittally.

  "While you were still in hospital, Interpol conclusively traced the missing plutonium to the institute. Several Dewar flasks in the lab showed slight, but compelling, evidence of low-level alpha emissions, consistent with transporting insufficiently shielded plutonium. The Dewars had been delivered two months prior to the explosion, in a van owned by a known Hezbollah sympathizer."

  Not everyone could accept the measures required by a global war against terror. Eventually, neither could Terrence. That was why he had left. He chose his words carefully. "Two Iranian university students, questioned separately, were also quite convincing on the Hezbollah link.

  "The same driver and van returned the morning of the blast, supposedly to retrieve Dewars for refilling. The driver gave Dr. Faisel's name to the guards, and Faisel okayed the pickup. By the time this came out, Interpol was quite curious about Dr. Faisel.

  "It seems that Faisel's family—the entire village where he grew up, in fact—was killed by the Phalange, the Christian militia, in the Lebanese civil war. That was 1983. Three years later, he went on a hajj, the traditional Moslem pilgrimage, to Mecca and Medina. Returning from Saudi Arabia, he stopped over in Lebanon. He visited cousins in the Bekaa Valley, men with Hezbollah ties. It's unclear who recruited whom, but Interpol is convinced Faisel was involved with Hezbollah thereafter.

  "With twenty-twenty hindsight, it's apparent Faisel collected a great deal of interesting equipment in the intervening years. Some he ordered ostensibly for his work. Much was simply requisitioned from the institute stockroom. He took delivery of the most interesting items at his home. Add it up, and by six months before the Rothschild incident. Faisel had every component and tool necessary to fabricate a nuke. Everything, that is, except the fissionable material—and you just heard how that came to be in the wrecked lab. His lab, as it happens.

  "Institute security routinely videotaped every vehicle that entered or left the grounds, and there were no lapses in their coverage. Interpol searched every car or truck present at any time between the van's first arrival and the explosion. They found nothing. The material was not removed from the institute. Fissioned or just melted, that plutonium could not hide from Geiger counters—only it did. The only traces ever found were, as I said, in the Dewars—and in similar low-level radiation in the van.

  "It drives them crazy at Interpol that the institute's ruins aren't deathly radioactive. The inspectors are positive that the plutonium they had been tracking was at the institute that day. They're just as certain that it couldn't have been removed."

  "What about the van's driver?" Harry asked. "What was his story?"

  "He wasn't very talkative when Interpol found him. Of course, he'd been shot in the back and stuffed into the utility closet by Faisel's lab. Perhaps the good doctor had been less than candid with Hezbollah about his plans for their plutonium.

  "That left everyone without a clue to the material's location—until I heard your story. Time travel does make an eerie kind of sense. If the plutonium is not at the institute, but could not be elsewhere, it must somehow be elsewhen. I just can't see how to convince the powers that be of such a fantastic explanation.

  "Plutonium in the hands of any terrorist is a terrible threat to us all. When a world-class physicist like Faisel is involved . . ." Terrence shuddered. "We dare not delude ourselves that the madmen cannot fashion the stuff into a bomb.

  "I need to understand how Faisel used time travel to spirit away the material. I must know to when he might have gone, and to when he might reappear with his nuclear device. I must make a compelling enough case to convince even such hardheaded pragmatists as my former employers." Terrence locked eyes with his host. "To accomplish any of that, Harry, I need your help."

  * * *

  Harry turned away—

  And Julia's questioning stare was as uncomfortable. He closed his eyes. For so many years he had tried not to talk about time travel. He had sifted his memories of that horrible day for any clue, some detail however tiny, to disprove his chain of inferences. To speak openly now would be a tremendous relief. No wonder he had finally let slip the story.

  Harry opened his eyes. "All right, then, perhaps it is time that I talk. I'll tell you what I think happened. Don't expect it to help you."

  * * *

  The after-dinner coffee had cooled, untasted, while Harry organized his thoughts; he took a sip without noticing the temperature. He was conscious, instead, of two pairs of eyes studying him. Julia's pair still smoldered.

  He set down the cup. Where to begin . . . ? "George Gamow, one of the first nuclear physicists, said that a theory wasn't worth a damn if it couldn't be explained to a barmaid."

  Julia slugged him on the arm. "I'm less than thrilled that you held out on me for all these years. Condescension now won't help."

  "I would never condescend. . . ." Another jab to the same spot interrupted his feeble jest. He rubbed the incipient bruise. "Gamow's point was that good science doesn't hide in math: It's intuitive. I only meant that I'd try to live up to his standard."

  And so, he talked. Julia perched on the edge of the sofa scribbling notes, and Terrence sat as though mesmerized. Harry himself paced about the living room, hands jammed in his pockets. He talked about energy and time and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Julia and Terrence interrupted occasionally, but always with insightful questions. Gamow clearly was correct.

  Finally, talked out, Harry collapsed into an armchair, the cushion going whoosh beneath him. The whoosh seemed somehow metaphoric.
"I'll sit quietly till the men in white coats come."

  Julia spoke first. "Skip the dramatics. Just tell me if I have this straight. Given enough energy, applied quickly enough, any mass can move through time." Harry nodded. "The catch is that energy cannot be permanently borrowed from one time to another, so a moment later—the duration defined somehow by this uncertainty principle—the transferred object, and the energy which moved it, snap back to the time from which they originated."

  Ambling took over. "Because of this snapback effect, you physicists have considered this concept for time travel to be an interesting mathematical quirk, devoid of any physical meaning. Until five years ago, anyway. You assume that Faisel took this theory seriously and found a way to stay moved in time."

  Then Terrence, too, fell silent, so Harry went on. "There's always been another interesting mathematical possibility: Repay the energy loan from the destination end of the time trip, before the snapback happens. That's what I think Faisel did. That's why there was no sign of him after the explosion."