Millennium

by John Varley

  It takes some getting used to.

  "Something wrong?" Ralph asked. I glanced at him. Ralph was not impersonating a male flight attendant this trip. His skinsuit made him a perfect copy of a very black, very female person whose name he probably did not even know. Ralph is small, and has been with my teams a long time. Over a year.

  "No. We might as well get going. Should I stay here, or Bo back to the other plane?"

  "Lilly's alone in first-class. You could help her out up there."

  So I did. Technically, of course, I'm in command, but Ralph was the DC- 10 leader, and Cristabel was in charge on the 747. On a snatch like this one I find it best to let my team leaders lead.

  The first-class operation went smoothly. We used the standard "coffee-tea-or-milk" gambit, relying on our speed and their inertia. I leaned over the first two seats on the left, smiling big.

  "Are you enjoying your flight?"

  Pop, pop. Two squeezes on the trigger, close to the head and out of sight of the rest of the goats.

  Next row.

  "Hi, folks. I'm Louise. Fly me."

  Pop, pop.

  We were close to the rear of the cabin before anybody tumbled to anything. Finally, a few people were standing up and looking at us curiously. I glanced at Lilly, she nodded, and we plugged the rest of them rapid-fire. All of the first-class cabin was now peacefully asleep, which meant none of them could help us pull sleepers through the Gate. It's completely unfair, but there's no solution for it. Another benefit of your first-class ticket, air travelers!

  We hurried back to tourist, which is always a bigger problem. They hadn't started putting people to bed yet. Ralph was still working the thinning con, and as I watched, he leaned over a man in an aisle seat and asked if the man would please come with her (him) for a moment.

  The guy stood up and Ralph's back exploded. Something hit me hard in the right shoulder. I spun around on my heel, starting into a crouch.

  I noticed a fine film of red on my hands and arms.

  I thought: hijacker, the guy's a hijacker.

  And: But why did he wait so long? And: Hijackers were rare in the 1980s.

  And: Was that a bullet that hit my shoulder? Is Ralph dead? And: The goddam motherfucker is a hijacker!

  It seemed I had all the time in the world.

  What actually happened was the bullet hit my shoulder and I turned with it and brought my left arm up and thumbed the selector switch to OBLITERATE

  and crouched as I came around and took careful aim and blew him apart.

  His upper torso and head lifted away from the rest of his body. It leaped into the air and landed six rows back, in the aisle. His left arm landed in somebody's lap, and his right, still holding his gun, just dropped. His legs and groin fell over backwards.

  Okay. I could have stunned him.

  Better for him that I didn't. If I'd taken him through the Gate with me alive, I'd have fried his balls for breakfast.

  There's little point in describing the pandemonium that followed. I'd have a hard time doing it, even if it was worth describing; I was sitting in the aisle during most of it, looking at blood.

  The crew had to stun just about everybody. The only bright spot was the number we'd managed to shuffle through during the thinning phase. The rest would have to go through on our backs.

  When Lilly finally knelt beside me she thought I was hurt more than I actually was. She acted as if I might break if she touched me.

  "Most of this is Ralph's blood," I told her, hoping it was so. "I guess it's a good thing I stopped the bullet. It could have punctured the fuselage."

  "That's one way of looking at it, I guess. We had to take the cockpit crew, Louise. They heard the ruckus."

  "That's okay. We're still in business. Let's get them through."

  I started to get up. On the count of three: one, and a two, and ...

  Not that time.

  "We can't move them yet," Lilly said. l didn't care for the alarmed expression on her face when I had tried to rise. Well, I'd show her. "We're stacking them by the lavatory," she went on. "But the Gate is with the 747 right now."

  "Where's Ralph?"

  "Dead."

  "Don't leave him here. Take him back with us."

  "Of course. I'd have to anyway; he's mostly prosthetics."

  I managed to get to my feet and that felt a little better. This didn't have to be a disaster, I kept telling myself. One dead, one wounded; we were still all right. But I was beginning to appreciate the drawbacks in snatching two planes at once. I like to have the Gate there, ready to use, all during the operation.

  We couldn't. The most limiting factor about the Gate is the Temporal Law that states it can only appear once in any specific time. Once, and once only.

  If we send the Gate back to -- for instance -- December 7, 1941, from six to nine in the morning on the island of Oahu, we can snatch most of the crew of the Battleship Arizona, but then those three hours are closed to us forever. If something interesting is happening during those same hours in China, or in Amsterdam, or even on Mars, it's just too damn bad. We can't even see the events of those hours in the time scanners.

  This results in another paradox. The timestream is littered with these blank areas. Most of them were the result of snatches we'd done, or time-traveling done by people who came before us. But some were the result of trips yet to be taken. In other words, in a few years or a few days somebody would decide it was worth our effort to go to those times, at a location we didn't know yet. Because we would take that trip, that stretch of time was closed to scanning.

  The phenomenon was known as Temporal Censorship. We couldn't look back and see ourselves and thus find out what we would do. We could know a blank area existed and that nobody had yet visited that time, but we couldn't know why somebody would decide to go there.

  If you think all this makes sense to me, you're giving me too much credit. I simply take the rules as they are handed to me and do the best I can.

  My right arm was useless. I can't say it hurt much by then. It simply wasn't there. So I ignored it and pulled the goats by winding the fingers of my left hand into their hair -- a trick known in the trade as Excedrin Headache number one million B.C.

  Finally the Gate appeared and we practically shoveled them through. It took three minutes, tops. As soon as that was done the Gate vanished again. It came back on almost instantly and the wimps started to pour through.

  No more than five percent of these had faces. Flight 35 was going to hit so goddam hard there was little point in expending our best work on them. A lot of them came through in sacks, just bundles of burnt body parts which we scattered through the plane.

  I guess I passed out. All I know for sure is somebody pushed me through the Gate and, for once, I didn't recall the trip. I sat there on the floor and the medical teams started to lift me onto a stretcher, but I waved them away. Something was bothering me. I saw Lilly step through.

  "Who got Ralph's stunner?" I yelled.

  Lilly looked at me oddly, then turned around. But she didn't get anywhere; the rest of the team came tumbling out behind her and she was sent sprawling on the floor not far from me.

  "I thought you got it," she said.

  "I didn't get it," I said.

  "Get what?"

  "Ralph? Did somebody say Ralph? He's dead."

  "Where's his stunner?"

  I was already up and running for the Gate. I had no idea how much time there was on the other side before the crash, but it didn't matter. Even if it was seconds I had to go back.

  A warning horn sounded. I glanced up, thought I could see Lawrence frantically waving his hands behind the glassed-in Operations section overhead. I turned back and screamed some thing, but Lilly was already through.

  Or at least she was half through.

  An odd thing happened to her. Leaning forward, she was into the Gate with her head and shoulders, almost to the waist.

  And the Gate shut down.

  We
had discussed what might happen in a case like that, but we didn't know because nobody had tried it. The theory was undear. It seemed certain that a body half-way through the Gate would not simply be cut in half. The process was much mote complex than that: When passing through the Gate one is never actually in two pieces. The integrity of the body is preserved through a dimension we can't sense.

  Lilly did not get cut in half. She just vanished. As she did, the building shook as if from an explosion. Alarms began sounding.

  I was picked up and put on a stretcher. I cold see frantic activity in Operations. Then I passed out.

  I was brought up to date as the doctors fixed my shoulder.

  The explosion I heard had resulted from Lilly's body overloading the power system that supplied the Gate with the awesome amount of energy it consumes. It would be inoperative for two days while repairs were made.

  What happened to Lilly? I don't even like to think about it. When we pass through the Gate we enter a region that is in many ways beyond the reach of human senses, yet in other ways impinges on our minds unpredictably. Some people emerge from a trip through the Gate as screaming animals, and they never get better. We lose five percent of the goats that way, and a fair number of snatch team novices.

  Whatever that region was, Lilly was in it, and she'd never get out.

  5 "Famous Last Words"

  Testimony of Bill Smith

  I never did find out who got the temporary morgue set up. Briley hadn't had the stomach for it, but apparently Rog Keane had somebody on his staff who had dealt with the problem before. When we got there it was already a going concern.

  Personally, I think it would be much neater and sweeter, more compassionate all around, just to dig a big hole where the plane went down and shovel them all in and put up a big stone with everybody's name carved on it. But nobody's ever going to buy that idea. The next of kin all want a particular body in a specific grave.

  In some crashes, we can accommodate them. In the worst ones, there's just no way, but they have to find that out for themselves. All that's left of uncle Charlie would fit into a plastic sandwich bag.

  What are you going to do? Show them a severed hand and ask if that wedding ring looks familiar? Most of them don't even have faces.

  This morgue was in a high school gym. The parking lot was full of cars belonging to relatives, and one news truck from a local television station.

  "Easy, Bill," Tom said, and guided me gently away from the camera crew. "You don't want to wind up on the six o'clock news. Not that way."

  "I hope there's a hell, Tom. And when those guys get there, I hope the devil's waiting to shove a camera in their faces and ask them what they feel like."

  "Sure, Bill, sure."

  It was a relief to get inside the gym with the corpses.

  There were maybe seventy or eighty of them. What I mean is, that's how many long, narrow body bags were arranged in neat ranks. Against the far wall were many, many more bags with no shape at all. An FBI team had arrived from Washington. They'd already taken prints from the reasonably intact bodies, and now were at-"work on whatever fingers they could find. Later, jaws would be examined for dental work, though you'd be surprised how few people get identified that way.

  We were introduced to the Oakland Special-Agent-in-Charge, or SAC, as they like to be called. We already knew the boys from the Washington fingerprint team. The FBI inherited this messy job simply because they have more fingerprints on file than everybody else put together. If you read their literature you might think they get about a ninety-nine percent match of names with carcasses. The plain fact is that, after a couple weeks, a lot of next of kin would be told there was just no way to find even a piece of their dead relative, and there would be a lot of memorial services in a lot of chapels. A lot of burned meat would go wherever such things end up for quiet disposal. I'd never asked where that was. Doctors and morticians should have some secrets.

  We met the Contra Costa and Alameda County coroners, the heads of paramedic and fire department teams, and quite a few doctors. It was a busy place.

  I've been to crashes where they were just letting relatives wander through the morgue lifting up the comers of blankets. There's no way you can make it pretty or easy to stomach, but there are limits. Here, they were mostly going by personal effects. In a separate room they had lines of tables covered with burnt clothing and jewelry, all tagged as to which corpse it had been taken from. A lot of people were looking through this stuff Tom and I were looking for Freddie Powers, the agent who had called us to the morgue in the first place. We spotted him on the far side of the property room. He's more or less your standard Texas blond-headed collegiate G-man, tall and conservatively dressed.

  "Hello, Bill. Tom. Got something over here you might like to see." Not too long ago he'd have said "Howdy." They say you can't take the Texas out of the boy, but Freddie was working on it. His drawl was practically gone.

  "Bill Smith, Tom Stanley, this is Jeff Brindle." Brindle was a short, curly-haired intern in his late twenties, dressed in a bloody smock. He had a quick smile and slightly buck teeth.

  "Jeff put all this together and brought it to my attention," Freddie went on. I thought he was looking a little uncomfortable. Strictly speaking, he was here to put names on stiffs; maybe he was afraid he was encroaching into my territory. Or maybe it was something else.

  "Actually, I don't know if it means a damn thing, but it sure as hell is funny," Brindle contributed. He glanced at Freddie. "You want me to show them?"

  "I wish somebody would," I said.

  Freddie nodded, and picked up a man's wristwatch. It was a Timex on an expansion band.

  The band was stained with dried blood and the crystal was cracked, but you could see the second hand still moving.

  "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking," Freddie drawled. I looked up at him. With Freddie, when the drawl gets thick, the kicker is on the way. I looked down at the watch. It read 10:45 and some seconds. I glanced at my own watch and saw that it was actually a couple seconds shy of 10 A.M.

  "I've got ten and about eighteen seconds," Tom said.

  Freddie beckoned me a few feet down the table, where he'd arranged about twenty watches. I leaned over and examined them.

  Several things could be seen at once. They were all working, though some had completely lost the glass. They all showed the same time -- 10:45. There was something else about the group, but it eluded me for a moment.

  "They're all mechanical," Tom put in. Of course, that was it.

  Freddie didn't say anything. He just led me to a second group o f watches.

  There were a lot more of these, though I could see down the table that the bulk of the weird exhibit was still to come. I sighed, and looked down.

  Again, all mechanical. None of them were working. Some were so badly melted they might have been scraped off a Salvador Dali painting. But of the ones that were still readable, none had a time later than ten o'clock. The great bulk of them read 9:56, exactly.

  "The planes hit the ground at 9:11," Freddie said.

  "And eleven and forty-five is fifty-six. They're forty-five minutes fast, like the others.

  What else have you got?"

  He seemed to realize I was getting impatient, because he hurried through the next part.

  "These four here, also mechanical, are reading 1:45. Still running. And over here we've got a dozen stopped mechanicals that all read 12:56."

  "These people hadn't set their watches back to Pacific time yet," Tom suggested.

  "That's the way I read it."

  I thought it over. I couldn't think of anything real intelligent to say, but I had to try something.

  "Are these from one plane, or both?"

  "Both. Most from the 747 -- I doubt we'll ever find all of them from the DC-10. But those we did get from the DC-10 agree with the rest."

  It was Tom who finally put into words what we'd all been wondering.

  "Who sets their watch forty-five
minutes ahead?"

  I sure couldn't think up a good reason, much less explain why two planeloads of people would all get the same brilliant idea "Thanks, Freddie," I said, starting away from him. "I don't know what it means yet, but we'll sure look into it."

  Freddie was looking a little guilty.

  "That's not quite all, Bill," he said. I should have realized. He led me further down the table, to where a large number of digital watches were arranged. They all had blank or broken or melted faces.

  "Maybe the old-fashioned stuff's the best," Freddie said. "At least the gear-and-

  mainspring equipment came through better than these things did. But we did get a couple of survivors. Like this one."

  He held out an undamaged Seiko and I glanced at it. It had constant day/date display, and a second indicator silently flicking out the numbers in its inscrutable digital way. The time read 3:14, December the 11th.

  "This one's really screwed up," I said. "It's not even close to the others."

  "You're telling me," Freddie said. "It's 'cause it's counting in a way I'd call a little odd.

  Take another look."

  I did, and this time I really looked at the seconds.

  Forty, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven ...

  I plunked it down on the table.

  "Goddam it, Freddie, every crash I ever saw plays crazy tricks, one way or another. All those watches reading forty-five minutes fast, now that's something I'll buy as having a bearing on the crash. Or at least it might. But one watch that's gone haywire and is running backwards ... shit."

  Freddie sighed.

  "I'd agree with you, pal, but for a couple of things. One of them is that I've had some electronics training and I couldn't figure out what would make one of these go backwards. I mean, anything that would knock it that far out of kilter would destroy the whole chip, you know what I mean?"

  I didn't, but these days nobody likes to admit they're ignorant about any part of computer science, else you start looking like an old biplane fogey. So I shrugged.

  "You said a couple of things. What's the others?"