Timelines

by Bob Blink

  “Then, there are John and Al. They have been aboard since almost the very beginning as well. But those two will be okay. Their specialties of advanced computer systems and quantum electro-dynamics/multi-dimensional calculus have kept them tightly linked to a couple of key programs and mostly removed from our unofficial work for a long time. We haven’t had a need for their talents lately anyway, and any check on them would use up a lot of resources and come out clean.” I thought for a moment. “I don’t even think they would be interested in those who left us the first few years. At least not unless they find something that would point them that way, in which case it’s a new ballgame.”

  She knew what I meant. A number of the key individuals we had recruited early on had supposedly left the company seeking other opportunities. In fact, they remained part of our group, working for companies we secretly owned or running activities for us from within other organizations. This makes us sound like a big operation, but in truth all of these outside activities represent very small, specialized activities that serve our needs, but usually involve less than half a dozen people each. It was part of a plan to decentralize our people. Too much concentration in a single location posed an unnecessary risk. We even had a small group in Canada, just north of the border providing a key fall back in another country. We also had accumulated a number of properties around Seattle, which had no obvious link to us.

  “What about Dave or Eric?” she asked pointedly. She named the two people who actually had been directly involved in the abduction of Kurt Morris. Dave, our on-board historian and linguist, was one of our key assets. There were no direct links to the firm, and we had met face-to-face in current time only twice, very early on. Dave was the only member of our team that had made anything resembling progress regarding the alien visitors, uncovering a couple of oddities in the historical records that seemed to correspond to possible alien interference. As a result we now had permanent on-site teams in both the post Civil War, the middle ages around 1350 AD, and the mid Roman Empire eras. He was also the individual who had originally made a friend of the old priest downtime where we had incarcerated Morris for safekeeping.

  Dave had been shocked when Morris showed up at the tunnel cave last year with two of his hired investigators; two determined men that Morris had working and reporting directly to him on special assignment for a number of years. How had he learned of the cave, and how had he discovered the way to it? It no longer mattered, the damage was done.

  Eric was also a long time member of the team. He had no association with the firm either, and from the beginning of his involvement had spent the majority of his tenure downtime, one era or another. Allegedly a field explorer, searching for new oil fields as part of a team supplied very indirectly by us to one of the major oil companies, he had spent the last several years running the group we had established in the 1350 AD era. He had been uptime to meet Dave, who was headed downtime for a week of investigative research, when the altercation had developed. It was fortunate for us Eric had been there or the whole secret may have been blown then. Dave was not the fighting type.

  Eric ended up shooting one of Morris’ people. He was usually armed, and not just with the battered sword which was part of his cover. Carol and I had been out of town and, surprisingly, Dave had taken the lead in dealing with Morris. Eric already had had a little experience with body disposal in the uptime era which Carol had pioneered years before. They handled it well enough, disposing of the body, and securing Morris and his investigator employee downtime.

  “They have to be in the clear,” I said without hesitation. “No hint of any interest in either of them has filtered back since Morris disappeared. I can’t see how a connection could ever be made. And neither is connected to us to generate interest from that angle.”

  “So, at worst, only a couple of us need to expect some form of scrutiny for a while,” she observed. “That will minimize interference and make it easier for us to track their interest. Well, I can play my role full time for the next month or so if necessary. I’m not planning a trip uptime soon, as there haven’t been unexpected breakthroughs that require supporting materials from the future.”

  She was referring to our continued lack of progress finding anything useful about either the time complex or the activities of the aliens despite the years expended and the professionalism of the team we had assembled. The continued lack of any real form of breakthrough was a festering sore, which seemed to affect her more than it did any of the rest of us.

  “That’s good. I’m sure part of the objective of that meeting was to spur some action out of us that would help them find a direction to investigate.”

  “But I don’t think that will work for you,” she replied. “I think there is a problem we need to act on now that only you are going to be able to handle. It is something we have neglected for too long.”

  “Morris,” I guessed correctly. I thought for a minute. “Has there been any follow up on them since they were left down there?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “That’s what I mean. No one wanted to deal with the situation because they felt it was an issue between you and him, and final resolution fell to you. People were just happy that we had dodged the bullet so easily, and there were no leads back to us. You were always planning to handle it, and decide what we should do about him. Too much has happened lately and it just dropped in a crack.”

  It was a little more than that. Morris had always made me uneasy. I was afraid that if I confronted him directly the secret would leak out. Then I would be placed in a position where something permanent would be required. One of his people had been killed already. Given what was at stake, sometimes killing would be necessary, but I had never come to a point where I was comfortable with the possibility.

  “You think I need to go downtime and see him?” I asked. In truth, I had already come to that conclusion. She and I usually arrived at the same place, often almost simultaneously. And after all, Morris was the only person who could tell us the real story behind the gun and what other information might be in the hands of the Feds. If he would, that is. I doubted the last year of confinement would have done anything to make him any more receptive to our needs.

  “Right away,” she agreed nodding her head for emphasis. “Despite the problems that might be associated with your disappearing suddenly. We really need to know if we are reading this situation correctly. You even indicated earlier that you suspected the NSG hadn’t been telling you everything. Maybe our evaluation is flawed from a shortage of information.”

  “I’ll need to be careful. I don’t want to lead them to the entrance if they have started watching. After all, I’m the one they are mostly likely to watch.”

  It was a problem that plagued us continuously. How to come and go without creating awareness of the time complex entrance. It wouldn’t do for someone to connect frequent comings and goings from that area. Unfortunately, the cave was located on BLM government land and was simply not available for sale. Even if we could have acquired the property, the simple act of buying, even using an individual unassociated with us could only serve to bring attention to the area. So it had to stay wild.

  Also, it was more than ninety minutes out of town. Another minor hurdle, especially in bad weather. We therefore minimized the trips, another reason for most of activity being centered downtime, where such concerns were non-existent. Only a few people made any regular use of the tunnel, and they never came to the firm offices or had any direct contact with team members. Vehicles represented another problem. Unlike the old days when I would leave my car parked in the woods not too far from the cave, we decided a variety of vehicles frequently parked there was ill advised. Now it was a prime rule that vehicles are never to be left in the area. Instead, we had purchased several acres about ten minutes down the road. Moderately wealthy baby boomers had been buying up the land and building their summer properties in the area. Some stayed the year round. There were enough people around to provide cover,
yet the properties were separated enough to allow privacy. We had hired a special construction firm to build a highly modified ‘residence’ there a number of years ago.

  A few extras had been included in the construction of the ‘residence’. From ground level, the house appeared as a large 6500 square foot home of a well-to-do retiree. Hidden were the two lower levels that supported a number of rooms for ‘guests’ and a large garage for vehicle storage. A large lift in the four car garage would allow raising or lowering any of the many vehicles hidden below. Travelers would come to the residence, and drive their vehicle into the garage. Then, either George or Mary, our people who lived full time in the house, would drive the traveler close to the entrance and drop them off. Similarly, pickups could be scheduled as well. Frequent travelers also used motorized dirt bikes, and in this case the traveler would either bring a motor bike directly from Seattle or take one of the bikes stored at the house. Bikes could be taken through the tunnels, so we didn’t leave any abandoned vehicles behind. Care had to be taken so we didn’t leave a lot of tracks pointing to the tunnel cave, but that wasn’t a real problem. We had learned about tracks the hard way early on, and now those who used the bikes made sure to cover their presence. Fortunately, the ground was mostly rocky, and even where a rider had to cross the dirt, it was usually firm enough not to take much of an impression and was easily swept clear of tread marks.

  “They can’t place a tracker on you,” she reminded. “The same technology that makes us totally secure here protects you and your vehicle. If they try to follow, it has to be eyes on.”

  “And they can’t be geared up for anything fancy. Not yet, at least. I think it will be relatively easy to evade them. We really aren’t professionals in something like this. However, a little technology and surprise should work for us right now.”

  “If they are trying to watch you, at some point they are going realize you are gone. That is going to pique their interest. That might cause them to watch their other suspects more closely.” I knew she was thinking of herself. “And they are going to be furious with you for eluding them.”

  “It might give us some insight into whether they are even watching,” I suggested. “Those security gadgets of yours can tell if attempts are being made to probe or whether bugs have been planted, can’t they?”

  “The more sophisticated ones here in the office and at home. Not the devices we are currently using in the cars,” she responded. “But at least so far I am not seeing any indication of an attempt to listen in on us. But if we do detect it has started, we should warn Ron that the traffic load might be increasing on the secure network.”

  Communication is another one of the weakest links. Uptime technology, using encoding techniques never dreamed of in this time era that would ensure that any messages we sent could never be decoded. But that clearly wasn’t enough. It was equally important that it wasn’t obvious that a message was being sent at all. If anyone decided to monitor us it was important they didn’t see anything. Transmitting RF energy is a clue, even if the intelligence contained on the carrier cannot be interpreted. Undecipherable emails or blocks of characters on computer or telephone lines can be detected. Sometimes where they go can be traced, linking the communicators. Clues to an unseen organization could be painstakingly uncovered.

  Fortunately a business like ours has a myriad of legitimate signal lines coming into the building. They run everywhere, and connect outside the facility to national and international telephone and cable networks. Add to this, noise. All signals have noise. Factor in a few centuries worth of progress on slicing and dicing information, encoding schemes designed to mimic the various types of noise; impulse, multi-frequency white noise, etc., already present, and you have a signal that can be sent undetected.

  Then there is the problem of location. Many of our people moved around, or were located at a variety of sites spread around the Western Hemisphere. Getting that signal to the right places presented another hurdle. Fortunately, there are communications satellites. The hemisphere is blanketed with dozen of satellites. Television, telephone, even digital radio is beamed from space to everywhere imaginable twenty-four hours a day. The signals are uplinked to the satellites from a ground station, and then spread via CONUS or earth coverage beams so they can be received by stations anywhere in the respective pattern. Enter Ron.

  Ron is a long time friend of mine. Unfortunately restricted to a wheel chair as a result of a skiing accident a few years before, he was still able to perform his responsibilities as chief RF engineer at the satellite ground station. I was introduced to him on a project a while back, and found another candidate for our team. After a few months of careful probing, we brought him on board. A weekend with the special medicines fixed the wheel chair problem. Most don’t know, as he maintains the illusion that his legs still haven’t been fixed. He has ‘been seeing a specialist’ and over the next couple of years expects to regain full use of his legs. That works for public consumption anyway.

  Located in Castle Rock, Colorado, Ron enthusiastically agreed to allow me to pirate, on a low usage and random basis, some of the bandwidth in one of the wide band TDMA transponders of their system. Use of an existing facility solves a number of problems. There is no need to build a site of our own, not only expensive, but detectable when sending spurious signals to the spacecraft. Since our signal is going up to the spacecraft as part of their normal transmission, the only people who have any real chance of detecting it would be ground station people themselves. And that would be Ron.

  Wide-band TDMA uses a signal modulation where each of the carriers fills the entire bandwidth of the transponder. All other carriers are seen as noise. An extra carrier would never be detected. Thus, we can route our message from any of a half dozen sites, to the ground station and our special equipment, and then send it to all of our people. Special receive hardware inside the ever present cell phone allows them to receive and decode the message. Knowing we planned on a significant increase in our usage of the system, Ron would undoubtedly monitor the transponder and make a few advantageous albeit unsanctioned adjustments in the various carrier levels.

  “We should be working on a couple of backup plans,” I said, bringing my mind back to the subject at hand. “Approaches to cover various possibilities. You may have to stay put a while longer than we like.” I could tell that this was not high on her list. Carol had worked for years to get her fully integrated uptime, and that existence was actually far more important than this one. “Or,” I said, “if this becomes too intrusive, we may have abandon the Carol Martens personality, and you move out of this era, maybe to re-establish later depending.”

  She surprised me. “And would that be so bad? We have found little in more than a decade of searching. We have the infrastructure secure elsewhere. Maybe it’s getting to be time for all of us to try something different.”

  “It would be hard on many of our people,” I countered, a little off balance by her willingness to make such a drastic step. “They aren’t as free as you and I and Naiya to relocate.”

  “That would be the hardest part,” she admitted. “And the Seattle location was not an accident. While we could set up many of the activities elsewhere, access to the entrance requires proximity to the area for our people. Still, it may become necessary.” She looked at me judging my response to her assessment.

  I decided to change the subject. It was clear she had thought about this before. We would need to discuss it later. Perhaps the strain was starting to take its toll on her. She carried more of a load than any of us. In addition to maintaining two full lifelines, she was a single link in our ability to use much of the uptime technology she acquired for us. While much of it was ancient to her, most of it was totally new to our 21st century people. She spent a not inconsiderable amount of time demonstrating the operation and function of new items she acquired. Even when not at the downtime base actively teaching, she spent many hours documenting the use and operation of various uptime e
quipment. It was an awesome responsibility.

  “Do you think I should try and get the gun downtime somewhere?” I asked. “I mean if we can learn where Morris found it, then perhaps there will be an opportunity to grab it before it ever comes into his hands. Then all of this goes away.”

  “Ooooh. That’s a bit scary,” she whispered. “Can you see how much history that changes. It violates one of our most established rules about trying to change the timeline. Morris and his influences, good and bad, have played a key role getting us where we are. I don’t think that is even an option.”

  It would be a dramatic move, and as risky as any action I could imagine. None of us could predict the consequences of such interference. “I know you are right. But if only we had found the damn thing, then we wouldn’t have to deal with this now.”

  She was leaning back in her chair, eyes closed, thinking. I knew she was reviewing all we had said trying to see if there was anything we needed to probe deeper. After a bit she said, “You are going to need Dave to go with you I think.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “But not Eric. He is responsible for the death of one of Morris’s people. That won’t help the situation any. I think I’ll even try and keep Dave in the background. Two of us should be enough. It should be a relatively quick trip.”

  “How long do you think?”

  I thought for a minute. In truth, these trips mirrored many of the business trips we all made regularly. A lot of time spent in getting somewhere and not much time completing the business at hand. “Today’s Saturday, and a bit late now to get Dave headed this way. Coming from the East Coast he would want to jump an early flight. So let’s assume he’s able to leave tomorrow. It would take something pretty important to present a conflict. Dave is always ready to go back downtime.”