Restoration

by Deborah Chester

  “But the technology remains, Bruthe!”

  “And we don’t understand it anymore!” Bruthe shouted back. He met Noel’s astonished gaze and turned red. “Back when the Institute was founded, they had some pretty sharp scientists working way out there on the far reaches of inverse quantum physics. I have the data, the notes on file, sure, but I can’t follow what they were doing. Amie can’t. Meissen takes stabs now and then, but she really doesn’t understand much more than we do. Old Tchielskov might have, since he worked with some of the early people, but he’s dead. It’s over, Noel. You’d better start polishing your resume for a new line of work.”

  Tossing his gloves and the hand torch into his helmet and clapping it beneath his arm, Bruthe marched away.

  Slowly the Institute started on mop-up procedures. Rumors spread quickly, demoralizing everyone from the data clerks on up to the travelers and administrators. When officials, including the owners of Work Complex 7 and representatives from the mayor’s office, showed up and were conducted to Dr. Rugle’s office, talk circulated around the place again.

  Noel avoided the clusters of people talking in the halls. Shedding his protection suit, he went to the infirmary to check on Trojan. The reception area was blocked with a crowd of people suffering cuts and other minor injuries. Someone was crying in hysteria. The medical team had its hands full filling out forms and asking questions. One nurse laden with scanning equipment was making routine checks for radiation poisoning, although for what reason Noel couldn’t determine. The Institute wasn’t nuclear fueled, and the time stream carried no radiation within it.

  Noel backed away and circled around through the narrow service hall, where medical deliveries were made and where the medics came and went. Only staff were supposed to use this entrance, but no one was checking security. Noel slipped in through the doctors’ lounge—empty—and went straight to intensive care.

  The beds in ICU, however, were empty.

  Noel stood there stricken, holding Trojan’s LOC and looking about as though if he stared hard enough the patients would rematerialize.

  “Trojan?” he said, feeling a lump growing in his throat. “Trojan?”

  “Hush,” said a nurse, appearing behind him without warning.

  Noel jumped as though he’d been shot and turned on her. “Where are they?”

  “You aren’t supposed to be in here,” she said severely. “No visitors—”

  “Where are they?”

  “Where are who? We have our hands full right now treating more cases than we’re equipped for and…how did you get in here anyway?”

  “The travelers who were brought in earlier today. Baker and…and Heitz. Where are they?”

  The nurse’s expression turned grim. “Are you a technician? How did you get in here? You aren’t allowed in here. No one is.”

  As she spoke, she started toward him. Noel held up his hands in a placating gesture, but his mouth was set with stubbornness. She wasn’t going to toss him out until he had a straight answer.

  “Trojan is my friend. The last time I saw him he was strapped to this bed, right here, and was on support machines. If he’s dead, I want to know about it!”

  “Noel,” said Dr. Ellis’s soft voice. “Don’t shout, please.”

  Noel turned, startled again. He frowned into her face, anxious, seeking answers. “Why the games, Doc? Where is he? What’s going on around here?”

  She sighed and took his arm. “That will be all, Nurse.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Disapprovingly, the nurse left.

  Noel felt cold, and he didn’t like the way she was beating around the bush. “Come on. Tell me.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to spread out the suspense,” she said quietly. “Trojan regained consciousness when the power was cut off.”

  Delight spread through Noel. “He did?”

  “Yes, he—”

  “Then he’s okay? God, you really had me worried there. Where is he?”

  “Noel, please listen to me,” she said, cutting him off. “He’s been transferred to…another unit.”

  “What? Where? Transferred where?”

  “He was quite unmanageable when he awoke. Incoherent, raving, violent.”

  Noel blinked, not understanding her. “Trojan? No way.”

  “He was hysterical, screaming. We had to sedate him heavily, I’m afraid. One of the medics, Dr. Reingold, was injured in the struggle to subdue him.” She pushed back her blond hair and showed him where a bruise was beginning to darken her temple.

  Frowning, Noel turned Trojan’s LOC over and over in his hands and thought about it. “You’re telling me he’s gone to the rubber room.”

  She sighed with annoyance. “The psychiatric treatment center is designed to help travelers. Slapping bigoted labels on it undermines its purpose.”

  Noel looked down, one corner of his mouth jerking, but he didn’t make an apology. He was too angry to retract his words. “Its purpose is bigoted. Who got the idea in the first place that going back in time would make us crazy? It hasn’t. The stress is minimal—”

  “Your experiences weren’t exactly pleasant,” she said.

  He stopped, expelling a breath, and glared past her at the wall. “No,” he said curtly. “They weren’t. But that doesn’t justify Filingby and his goons—”

  “At the moment Trojan Heitz is exhibiting signs of acute dementia. He is disoriented, confused, and we cannot make contact with him.”

  “You mean he’s—”

  “Yes, Noel. I’m sorry. At present, he’s quite mad.”

  Noel clenched his fists at his sides. “Because of the distortion. Because of being jerked back through it like that.”

  “Yes.”

  Noel scowled at the floor, his jaw working. His eyes stung and he had to wrench his head up to look at her. “His chances?”

  “It’s too soon to tell,” she said. “He’s very strong and healthy, physically. Talia Baker died when the power was cut off. Our auxiliary systems cut in seconds later, but she was holding on by such a fragile thread, she couldn’t…”

  Dr. Ellis’s eyes filled with tears and she swung away from him. “Damn! I hate losing patients. I hate losing them to unseen causes. There were no physical injuries to these people. Whatever they saw, whatever they experienced in that time stream was so dreadful, so horrible, their minds could not cope with it.”

  She swung around to face him. “You’re the only one who knows what it’s like when it goes wrong. You’re the only one who’s gone through anything approximating that and survived.”

  In spite of himself, Noel flinched. “I can’t—”

  “Noel, you’ve got to cooperate with Dr. Filingby and talk about it. For your friend’s sake, if not your own.”

  He shook his head, feeling the protests boiling inside him, knowing that she wouldn’t understand his refusal, knowing they were going to get angry at him all over again. But how could he make them understand that talking about it, describing it, meant reliving the nightmares in his waking hours as well as in his sleep? He’d tried facing it on his own, and it hadn’t helped. He’d tried facing it in a few sessions with Filingby, and it had made things worse.

  “For Trojan’s sake,” she repeated. “You say he’s your best friend. Do you really care about him? Do you, Noel?”

  Noel held out the LOC to her. “Let him wear this, okay?”

  She took the LOC from him, and her mouth pursed with emotions she wasn’t going to express. Tears glimmered briefly in her eyes, but she held them back. “It won’t help him now,” she said quietly.

  “It won’t hurt him,” said Noel. He refused to meet her eyes.

  She sighed. “Go and talk to Filingby,” she said. “The slightest detail might help them figure out what to do.”

  Noel said nothing. She had him boxed, and they both knew it. Only what Trojan needed wasn’t going to come from shrink sessions or tests. What Trojan needed had to be fixed in the past, somehow. And the past had be
en shut off from reach.

  Chapter 5

  “Noel,” whispered the voice through deep layers of sleep. It was a dark, gravelly voice—rough, as though from smoke and whiskey—a voice that reached through the eddies of dreams and subconscious fragments. “Wake up, my brother. Wake up.”

  Noel stirred unwillingly. His body was dead tired; his eyelids had been glued shut with sleep.

  “Noel,” whispered the voice, so familiar. “Wake up. I know how to help your friend. Listen to me.”

  He dragged opened his eyes and sat up before his mind was entirely alert. “Leon,” he said clearly.

  The sound of his own voice woke him up. With a blink he looked around the conference room, and saw faces staring at him from around the table, saw the litter of coffee cups and electronic notepads, saw Dr. Rugle glaring at him from behind the lectern.

  “Mr. Kedran,” she said icily, “you have snored through two-thirds of this meeting. Unless you have finally thought of something worthwhile to contribute, please do not interrupt the proceedings.”

  The heat of embarrassment flared in his face. He felt like a schoolboy caught by the teacher. The others cast him glances of sympathy, consternation, or impatience. From the looks of things, Rugle was still justifying her decision to power-down the portal and still refusing to let them try to activate it again.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bruthe,” she was saying now, while the senior technician glowered at her. “The safety of the Institute must override all other factors. We cannot possibly make any attempts to reactivate the Time Computer until we understand exactly what caused the problem.”

  “But our work, our research,” sputtered one of the scientists.

  “Delays are regretted but unavoidable. Until we have a firm basis to—”

  Noel scraped back his chair and stood up.

  She glared at him, then assumed an exaggerated expression of patience. “Yes, Mr. Kedran?”

  “I think we’ve all got a very clear grasp of what’s behind the distortions,” he said.

  She scowled. “Wild theory will not—”

  “Hold it a moment,” he said, putting up his hand. “I don’t have to express myself in technical terms to be understood at this table. A few months ago, you people performed a manual return, broke the time loop where I was trapped, and pulled me back. But you didn’t get all of me.”

  “Mr. Kedran—”

  “Just shut up,” he said.

  Her mouth flew open in astonishment, but before she could speak, he continued, “I know you looked at the wave pattern and determined it was too slight to cause much trouble. I accepted that at the time because I didn’t want to see my duplicate again. In fact, I was happy to leave him behind me.”

  “Go on, Kedran,” said Meissen, her thin face keen with interest.

  “Well, it’s like a grain of sand that gets inside a clam shell. One grain of sand that irritates the soft lining of the tissue there.”

  “Yes, yes, and a pearl results,” snapped Rugle. “What is the point?”

  “The point is that Leon has irritated the fabric of time. However slight he is, his existence remains a problem. We know the time stream is delicate. We’ve always been careful to slip in and out for short periods, never too greedy, never trying too much. Our motto has always been no disruptions.”

  “Exactly!” said Rugle. “And now we must leave things alone until they stabilize.”

  “Hiding your head under the carpet isn’t going to make the problem go away,” said Noel angrily.

  “We have contained the—”

  “No, ma’am, you shut the door. That’s something else entirely.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Meissen.

  “He means,” interjected Bruthe, thumping the table with his fist, “that if Leon is causing the time distortions, they will continue whether we have access to the time stream or not. And if those distortions can no longer reach into our century, then they will—”

  “Affect a different century,” finished Meissen for him.

  “I was afraid of that,” said Wemble, a third, extremely elderly technician. “Treating the symptom and not the cause.”

  “Foolish.”

  “Thought so at the time.”

  “Should have moved more slowly.”

  “Hasty judgment and ill thought out.”

  “No thought at all.”

  “I had the whole series of calculations running for a steady down-sizing of the situation. We were this close to control.”

  “Please!” said Rugle, red cheeked. She rapped the table. “Out of order. Out of order.”

  “To hell with order,” said Noel, glaring at her. “We can sit in meetings and waste hours, or we can do something to clean up this mess.”

  “I will not authorize any attempts to power-up the portal!” shouted Rugle. “That is my final word. If you cannot or will not agree to finish this meeting in an orderly, productive fashion, then I will exercise my prerogative to call an adjournment.”

  Bruthe turned to Meissen. “I still don’t think we can regain access, even if we bring the Time Computer on-line.”

  “It’s worth a try, though,” she said. “Erskine is going through the archives now to look up the original procedures. If we can integrate those with—”

  “I see,” said Rugle furiously. She started scooping up papers and her notepad. “Very well. Persist in discussing it among yourselves as a theoretical exercise. However, I will not authorize any activity in Laboratory 14 or Laboratory 12 until we’ve had time to cool down and examine this in a rational light. This meeting is adjourned.”

  She swept out, pausing only to glare at Noel. “You will report to my office immediately, Mr. Kedran. Immediately.”

  He stood there, his hands jammed in his pockets, and said nothing. As soon as the door closed behind her, he turned to the others.

  “What do you think? Can we try? I know Bruthe has his doubts, but—”

  “If we got the portal open again,” said Meissen slowly, her brow knit, “what exactly would you do with it?”

  “Return to 1697, where I last parted from Noel, and—”

  “You mean Leon,” said Bruthe.

  “Yes, Leon,” said Noel impatiently. “Of course Leon.”

  “You said Noel.”

  “What?”

  “You said Noel.”

  “Oh, leave him alone, Bruthe,” said Meissen with a shake of her head. “It was just a slip of the tongue.”

  “Go on,” said Wemble to Noel, who had found himself unexpectedly flustered by the slip. “Return to Leon and do what?”

  “Bring him back with me,” said Noel. He pulled the blank LOC from his pocket. “Give him this. Program it to interact with mine, and then use it for retrieval.”

  “Simultaneous retrieval,” said Meissen thoughtfully, her eyes alight with mental calculations. “Rebonding in the time stream.”

  “A reversal of the original duplication process, you mean,” said Wemble.

  “If we could make it work,” said Bruthe, gloomy with doubt.

  “We have everything from the archives,” said Meissen impatiently. “I don’t see why we can’t.”

  Bruthe snorted. “I meant the rebonding process in the time stream. It’s a dubious objective.”

  “A pretty problem,” said Wemble, his quavery voice shaking with excitement, his rheumy eyes glowing. “But let me see…yes, we have the LOC that was sabotaged. We know exactly what Tchielskov, poor fellow, did to it. We know how the time loop was closed around you, Mr. Kedran. Yes, a pretty problem indeed.”

  He sat back in his chair, mumbling to himself, his thoughts miles from the rest of them.

  Meissen smiled at him. “He’ll come up with a theory for us to try. That is…” She hesitated, gazing up at Noel, who was still standing. “If you’re willing to go back in.”

  One of the other scientists, who until now had sat in silence, leaned forward. “Seems to me there are a great many ifs, very large ones.” />
  “Oh, who asked you, Speratkin?” said Meissen with a flip of her hair. “You’re on Rugle’s side. I’m surprised you didn’t leave with her.”

  “You’re all talking big here,” said Speratkin, “but without authority from Rugle there’s no trying any of this.”

  “And if we do it,” said Meissen, her eyes flashing, “can Rugle stop us?”

  Speratkin smiled derisively, but his gaze went to Noel. “You are leading a mutiny, it seems.”

  “Oh, hush,” said Meissen. “It’s not a mutiny. We aren’t rallying around one traveler. It’s a question of solving a problem scientifically. Kedran’s right about us closing the door on it and hoping it will go away. I’m concerned about the exponential effect of that distortion bulge being shifted into some other century. There’s no telling which way it could go…into the past perhaps or possibly our future.”

  “And there is another problem you are not considering,” said Speratkin.

  “By all means, point out yet another problem,” said Bruthe darkly.

  Speratkin pointed at Noel. “Him.”

  “What? Why?” asked Meissen.

  “He’s unstable. He’s not certified to travel. How do you know he could even handle returning through the time stream, especially as rough as it is now?”

  Noel scowled, telling himself to keep his temper. Speratkin had a point, however sharp.

  “I’m not certain anyone could survive travel under the present conditions. We lost three today. Three! Casualties like that have never happened before—”

  “You lost two,” said Noel.

  Speratkin’s gaze never wavered. “Three. Heitz is insane. If he recovers—”

  “When he recovers—”

  “Face facts, Kedran. I realize he was a friend of yours, but—”

  “I’m sure the medics are doing all they can,” put in Meissen hastily. She shot Noel a warning look and shook her head.

  He held back the argument on the tip of his tongue. “I know I’m not certified, but that’s part of the—”

  “Bruthe!” said Speratkin. “You’re senior travel technician. Can’t you explain to this fool that we can’t guarantee sending him in one piece, much less bringing him back?”