Downtiming the Night Side

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Still, there’s no reason for any more people to get killed than already have been,” he went on. “I can wait a while. And while I wait, maybe you can explain to me why you went to all this trouble to seal yourself in with no exit.”

  “There’s an exit,” Sandoval came back, sounding a little more confident now. “You know it and I know it. You can blow us up, yes, but you cannot cut our power, not within the next twelve hours. If you attempt to break in or pour some agent through the air system, I assure you all down here will be dead. We are committed to victory or death, Moo-sic. We all live, or we all die. The hostages are simply a wall between you and us. We intend to bargain. I suggest you call Admiral Jeeter and tell him to check his mail today. When you have done so, we will talk again.”

  Jeeter was the current head of NSA. Ordinarily, the man would be impossible for someone on Moosic’s level to reach, but he had a suspicion that today the call would be put right through.

  He was right, at least as far as the admiral’s executive secretary. When the conversation was relayed, the secretary, himself a Marine colonel, instituted a frantic search for everything that had come in addressed to the admiral. It took very little time, surprisingly, to find it. It had been delivered by express mail.

  Within another ten minutes, the admiral himself was on the phone. “It’s a massive file,” he told Moosic. “Still, it’s only parts of things. Enough. It’s selections from almost every major research paper relating to the project. It’s almost inconceivable that we could be penetrated to this degree.”

  “Is it just the files?”

  “No, there’s a note. It points out that these are merely photostats and that they are one among hundreds of sets. They assure me that none of them have been sent anywhere yet, but that they will be mailed to just about every newspaper and foreign government if we don’t give in to their demands. Even if it’s no more than this, it’ll blow the whole thing wide open!”

  “I assume you’ll try the trackdown of the accomplices. In the meantime, what do you want me to do here?”

  “Keep this line open. I’ll go downstairs and patch in to where I can see and hear everything in the lab. We’ll hear what they want; then it’ll be up to the President and the NSC whether or not we give it to ’em.”

  Moosic nodded to himself, sighed, and turned back to the monitor board and opened communication. He wouldn’t wait for the admiral—whatever he said and did was already being recorded, and he knew that there would be a lot of calls for the old boy to make before he made it down to a situation room.

  “So our little letter was received?” Sandoval said smugly. “I assume they do not like it much.”

  “You know they don’t. But we can’t afford to believe you haven’t already mailed them or that you might not just let us know where most of them are while sending one or two elsewhere to do the most damage.”

  “To whom would I send it through the back door? Russia? Czarist pigs masquerading as Communist liberators! China? Half of China doesn’t even have the electricity to run its villages, let alone power this. No, my offer is genuine. You will not be able to stop it from being made public. Public, not secret. But if we get what we want, you will receive all the copies—every one. This I swear on my mother’s grave.”

  Ron Moosic sighed, glad it wasn’t his choice. He didn’t believe the oily revolutionary, but if the alternative was taking a chance he was being honest for once or just letting it all come out—which would be the best chance?

  “Your demands aren’t for me to decide, as you must know, but you tell ’em to me and they’ll also be reaching the ones who do decide,” he told the revolutionaries below.

  “We have looked in the chamber and found three time suits. Dr. Cline has told us that there are but four, and one is in use. Very well. We will need to use them. I am told that sending three back will strain things, but that two will be no problem. The codes will be given. We will go back, while my associates here make certain you do not break in and cut our cords, as it were. However, once back there, you still will not know where the hundreds of other copies are. Only I know that. I will return in ten days and tell you. I will have no choice—I must return here or cease to exist. If I do not tell you within fourteen days from nine o’clock this morning, all of them will be sent.”

  He thought about it. “Then you don’t go. You could have anything at all happen to you back there, stuff way beyond our control.”

  “It could,” he admitted, “but I go or no deal. You will have to take some chances. If you press that button and blow us up, some cover story will have to hit the papers, causing the material to be sent immediately. We have your bosses by the balls. Moo-sic. And they know it.”

  The bosses knew it. It was a heavy decision, and the debate was not yet over, but clearly they were in the mood for a deal if one could be struck. Security, in particular, argued for it, confident that they could find and plug the leak, and equally confident that there was very little the two could really do downtime. The military had the opposite opinion, wondering if such a highly planned and thought-out infiltration could be so easily dismissed. Crazy radicals might be sent back with no real risk, but these people were extremely well-prepared. Whatever change they were going to attempt to make, it was argued, had already been computer-tested and found to have a high probability of success.

  Most of the hostages had been hauled into a central office complex early in the attack, and most were now awakening to bad headaches and the sight of Stillman’s and Bettancourt’s submachine guns pointing at them.

  Moosic noted that Riggs had not returned and that everyone now was deferring to him. He hoped the security man was working on the break-in and not strung up someplace.

  “All right, boys and girls, they’re willing to listen,” he told them, keeping the calm tone of someone in control at all times. In truth, he hadn’t had any time to really think about his position, but he was still more than a little scared at the potential down there. He honestly didn’t know if he had the guts to press that button if it came to that—but the invaders and his bosses thought he would, and for now that would do. “They want to know exactly when and where you want to go.”

  “London, England; September 20, 1875,” Sandoval responded.

  Moosic frowned. Not only was this the first indication that one could travel in space while traveling in time; it was also a totally puzzling combination. Why there at that particular date?

  The National Security Agency had the finest and most complex computers the world had known up to that time, and they came up with a lot of small things and even some major figures in and around that time and place, but nothing that would significantly alter the time-line, particularly when correlated with the known ideology and goals of the radicals. In fact, man and machine could find only one correlation that made any sense at all.

  “On September 20, 1875,” the admiral told him, “Karl Marx arrived back at his home in London from a mineral bath treatment at Karlsbad. Unless they’re so convoluted we can’t follow their thought processes, it’s the only event on record that fits.”

  “They want to consult with Marx?” Moosic responded, puzzled.

  “We doubt it. The best idea we can come up with is that they want to give the time machine to Marx. We think that they’ve had no better luck than we on what could be changed to make their goals close. So, they have the machine and the means—why not give it to the man whose ideas they profess?”

  The security man thought it over. In a way, it made a perverted kind of sense. Particularly if you were a committed radical getting more and more disgusted and disillusioned with the progress of your goals. In all but rhetoric, nationalism had triumphed over ideology long ago. The Russians always sounded like Communists but acted like Russians had always acted, as did the Chinese and others. The true believers had been systematically purged or assassinated, from Trotsky down to Maurice Bishop in Grenada—by the very states and systems they’d established.

>   The radicals below were no stooges of Russia; they were true believers. Not only their statements but also their intelligence files and psychological profiles proved it.

  Ron Moosic sighed. “All right, I’ll buy it. I assume this has already gone to the President and the NSC. What do they say?”

  “Our computer models indicate no particular danger. They’re not going to meet the man they imagine, but rather a nineteenth-century philosopher very much a product of his times. Still, there’s a risk. There’s always a risk. Joe Riggs tells me that they’ve bypassed virtually all of the systems at this point. One of his teams has managed to tap into the system and reduce the available power to the time chamber itself. Still, we’ll have a two-hundred-year range to deal with if they really have some other date in mind. If they know this much, they might know how to bypass and go remote on the suits.”

  “Bypass?”

  “It was built in as a safety factor after we lost that fellow back in the Middle Ages. If you know you’re going, you can boost yourself out of there into one other time frame without severing the automatic connection. It’ll save your ass until the automatics on this end can bring you back. They’ll have a second chance once they’re where they say they want to be, although travel in space will be severely restricted.”

  “Then we can’t afford to let them go. Simple as that.”

  “Maybe not. We’ve proposed to let them go, all right, but doing a little funny business ourselves. The time-space coordinates change every moment, and they’re continually updated. That update is partially through a satellite link with the Naval Observatory. We have proposed, and they have tentatively agreed to, a little alteration. Instead of getting the atomic clock, they’ll be plugged into one of our computers. Let’s send them back to September 10, 1875— ten days early. The suits will have a low charge, and won’t be able to boost immediately. That’ll give us a week or more to get back there and track them down, as well as work on this end to trace their accomplices. We think it’s worth the risk.”

  Moosic thought it over. “But we’ll have to get in there pretty quickly to go after them,” he noted, “and that’s not going to be bloodless. Then we’ll have to have these time suits or whatever they are available for us. I assume they’re going to destroy what they don’t use.”

  “That’s where they have us, of course. There are two spares, but they are both down for repairs right now. That leaves the one on the man now downtime, and he’s due back on automatics at six tomorrow morning. That means we have to convince them to go now, then deal with the remaining ones by whatever means we have to use and regardless of costs. Cline knows when that other one comes back, too.”

  The security man frowned. “That gives us less than eighteen hours. Why not just cut the power to them when they go back?”

  “Because they’d still have those few days of grace to do whatever mischief they wanted before they got absorbed. We must know what they do, where they go, all of it. And even if we cut ’em off, restore power two weeks from now, and send somebody back, I’m told that the newcomer will re-energize their suits anyway. Don’t ask me how—I’m not a physicist.”

  Ron Moosic sighed. “And this was supposed to be my first day on the job.”

  A MATTER OF PERFECT TIMING

  Dr. Aaron Silverberg was anything but pleased. On the one hand, he felt he had the biggest hangover a human could bear; on the other, his baby was in the hands of kidnappers and one of the nannies was telling them what to do.

  Still, he led Sandoval, Austin-Venneman, and Cline back to the time chamber and its control center. The center itself was behind massive multiple sheets of lead-impregnated glass. A single operator’s chair was in the center, surrounded by an inverted crescent-shaped control panel with myriad instruments and controls as well as a number of differently colored telephones.

  Christine Austin-Venneman, who’d been fairly quiet during much of the takeover but who’d also looked from the start like the kid turned loose in the candy store, looked around. “Wow!” she said in a soft, deep voice. “This looks like the bridge of a spaceship!”

  “Or the supervisor of a telephone exchange,” Sandoval responded, less awed. In point of fact, it looked far less exotic than he’d imagined and he felt somewhat let down. “Everything is controlled from here?” This was addressed to Silverberg. Cline, obviously, was there to make sure he didn’t trip anybody up.

  Silverberg sighed and tried to keep himself erect. His head was killing him, the aftereffects of the gas. He also felt somewhat frustrated; he could not understand how Karen could be with these people, but they had made talking to her impossible. Still, she avoided his glances.

  “Nothing whatever is controlled from here,” the scientist told them. “It is exactly what its name implies—a command center. The director sits here and gives the orders necessary to accomplish the mission. He cannot initiate, only abort. The instruments confirm that all is as it should be, nothing more.”

  Sandoval went over and peered through the dark glass. The time chamber itself was quite small, no more than a dozen feet square, and unimpressive. There was an airlock-like door to one side, and then the chamber itself, a barren and featureless box of a room. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all made out of a single material and looked cast as a whole. The material itself was smooth and featureless.

  Sandoval turned. “Where are the time suits?”

  Silverberg sat down in the chair with a groan and held his head. The weapons came up, but he waved them away with a gesture. “I do not care if you shoot or not. I did not have your handy filters stuck up my nose and my head is splitting. Shooting me would be a mercy.”

  “I’ll show you,” Cline said, and Sandoval looked over at Austin-Venneman. “Go with her and get them. Bring them here,” he ordered.

  Silverberg lay back in the chair and breathed deeply for a few moments. He seemed to feel a little better. “What do you hope to accomplish by all this?” he asked the terrorist. “I mean, no matter what, you have to accept much of what is done here on trust. Karen is the only one who knows anything at all about the proper things to monitor, and she must sleep. I still expect them to blow us all up the moment we begin, anyway—although, I must admit, with this head I am not sure it would not be a mercy to me.”

  “We have confidence in the plan. We know we will go back to the right place and time.”

  “So confident! Even I am never that confident!” Silverberg’s brows lowered. “Unless—it has already been confirmed?”

  “I think if you want to live, you won’t go any deeper into that, Doctor,” Sandoval responded nervously.

  It took three trips for the women to bring in the suits. They looked very much like the spacesuits worn by astronauts, all made of some fine, silvery, mesh-like material. The helmets were airtight. Each contained a backpack air supply and a front pack consisting of instrumentation, which told the status of the air and other suit systems, and also a meter series with small, recessed pentometers above each meter. Cline checked each one of them. “This suit’s a bit large, but has a four-hour air supply and a fully charged power pack,” she told them. “This second one might just fit Chris, but has a little under three hours of air and a ninety percent charge. Enough to get you both where you want to go. The third one fits you like a glove, Roberto, but has only an hour-and-a-half s worth of oxygen and a sixty percent charge.”

  With Chris covering the doctor, who, despite some romantic notions, was in no condition to try much of anything even if he had the gun, Sandoval tried on the large suit. It was clear even without the helmet that the fit was ridiculous, and with that helmet he would barely be able to balance himself. “No use,” he muttered. “It’ll have to be the other one.”

  Dr. Karen Cline sighed. “Yes, I agree. But you haven’t much reserve. You’ll be O.K. for the trip, but if you have to make a boost, it’ll be touch and go.”

  “We are traveling in time!” Sandoval exclaimed. “Why do we need much at all?�
��

  “Time is relative. All other things being equal, time breaks first, so you’ll go back. But the journey takes time because it requires a steady power supply. Inside the suit, it’ll take time to get there at the same rate as power is being supplied. To 1875, it’ll take, oh, forty minutes or so. Once there, the reality of the suit is the only link you’ll have with the present. The suit must be kept energized from here, using full power, or you’ll nightside. That means we can’t add anything once you’re on your way. The internal suit charge will remain at where it was when you left, minus the power required to get you there. Even then, it’ll deteriorate as time will try and throw it out. The effect is progressive. Twelve days is all it’s safe for Chris, fourteen for you, in any one time slot. And we have to hold this installation for the exact same amount of time you spend back there, because we can only send power at the normal clock rate.”

  “In other words, the shorter the better,” Sandoval said. “Well, I depend on you. All of you. You know the stakes.”

  Sandoval quickly got into his suit, then took the rifle while his companion donned hers. “Get Clarence in here,” he ordered, and Cline left.

  Silverberg was feeling much better. “I’m curious—just what are the stakes?”

  “The future of humanity on the face of Earth, and I do not mean that as a metaphorical or idealistic statement,” the terrorist replied. “If we fail, humanity will be wiped out to the last man, woman, and child. I don’t just believe this, Doctor—I know it.”

  The big black man entered the command center, followed by Cline. He grinned when he saw the two dressed in the suits. “Buck Rogers, huh?”

  “Don’t get funny. Are you sure John can handle that mob alone?”

  Stillman nodded. “They’re pussycats with bad headaches. Still, they’ll be trouble later on. I wish we didn’t need ’em as hostages.”