Time Bomb And Zahndry Others

by Timothy Zahn

  "Trouble?" Garwood asked, his mouth going dry.

  "Scanner seems to have quit," she frowned, tapping the glass slits as if trying to get the machine's attention. "Funny—they're suppose to last longer than this."

  "Well, you know how these things are," Garwood said, striving for nonchalance even as his heart began to pound in his ears.

  "Yeah, but this one was just replaced Saturday. Oh, well, that's progress for you." She picked up the next item and turned back to her register.

  Almost unwillingly, Garwood bent over and peered into the glass. Behind it, the laser scanner was dimly visible. Looking perfectly normal... No, he told himself firmly. No, it's just coincidence. It has to be. Nobody hates laser grocery scanners, for God's sake. But even as he fought to convince himself of that, a horrible thought occurred to him.

  Perhaps it was no longer necessary for anyone to hate laser grocery scanners directly. Perhaps all it took now was enough people hating the lasers in self-guided weapons systems.

  A dark haze seemed to settle across his vision. It had started, then; the beginning of the end. If a concerted desire to eliminate one incarnation of a given technology could spill over onto another, then there was literally nothing on the face of the earth that could resist Garwood's influence. His eyes fell on the packages of frozen food before him on the counter, and a dimly remembered television program came to mind. A program that had showed how the root invention of refrigeration had led to both frozen foods and ICBMs...

  The girl finished packing the two paper bags and read off the total for him. Garwood pulled out the requisite number of bills, accepted his change, and left. Outside, the parking lot lights were still humming their cicada/firefly song. Still beckoning him to the safety of the wilderness.

  A wilderness, he knew, which didn't exist.

  —

  The bags, light enough at the beginning of the walk, got progressively heavier as the blocks went by, and by the time he reached the door to his apartment house his arms were starting to tremble with the strain. Working the outside door open with his fingertips, he let it close behind him and started up the stairs. A young woman was starting down at the same time, and for an instant, just as they passed, their eyes met. But only for an instant. The woman broke the contact almost at once, her face the neutral inward-looking expression that everyone seemed to be wearing these days.

  Garwood continued up the stairs, feeling a dull ache in the center of his chest. The "not-me" generation. Everyone encased in his or her own little bubble of space. So why should I care, either? he thought morosely. Let it all fall apart around me. Why am I killing myself trying to take on decisions like this, anyway? Sounders is the one in charge, and if he says it'll work, then whatever happens is his responsibility. Right?

  The computer had finished its work. Setting the bags down, Garwood dug out his opera glasses again and studied the display. The machine had found three solutions to his coupled equations. The first was the one he'd already come up with, the one that had started this whole mess in the first place; the second was also one he'd seen before, and found to be mathematically correct but non-physical. The third solution...

  Heart thudding in his ears, Garwood stepped to the table and reached to the ashtray for one of the loose cigarettes lying there. The third solution was new... and if it contained the build-in safeguard he was hoping to find...

  He picked up one of the cigarettes. Squeezing it gently between thumb and fingertips, he gazed at the formula through his opera glasses, letting his eyes and thoughts linger on each symbol as he ticked off the seconds in his mind. At a count of ten he thought he felt a softness in the cigarette paper; at twenty-two, it crumbled to powder.

  Wearily, he brushed the pieces from his hand into the garbage. Twenty-two seconds. The same length of time it had taken the last time... which meant that while it wasn't getting any worse, it wasn't getting any better, either.

  Which probably implied this was yet another walk down a blind alley.

  For a moment he gazed down at the cigarettes. A long time ago he'd believed that this field contained nothing but blind alleys—had believed it, and had done all he could to persuade Saunders of it, too. But Saunders hadn't believed... and now, Garwood couldn't afford to, either. Because if there weren't any stable solutions, then this curse would be with him forever.

  Gritting his teeth, he stepped over to the counter and began unloading his groceries. Of course there was a stable solution. There had to be.

  The only trick would be finding it before his time ran out.

  IV

  "Well," Davidson said, "at least he's staying put. I suppose that's something."

  "Maybe," Lyman said, reaching over Davidson's shoulder to drop the report back onto his desk. "A broken laser scanner is hardly conclusive evidence, though."

  "Oh, he's there, all right," Davidson growled, glaring at the paper. His fingertips rubbed restlessly at the edge of his desk, itching to be holding a cigarette. Damn Saunders's stupid rule, anyway. "He's there. Somewhere."

  Lyman shrugged. "Well, he's not at any hotel or motel in the area—that much is for sure. We've got taps on all his friends around the country, checking for any calls he might make to them, but so far that's come up dry, too."

  "Which means either he's somehow getting cash in despite the net, or else he's been holed up for nearly three weeks without any money. How?"

  "You got me," Lyman sighed. "Maybe he had a wad of cash buried in a safe deposit box somewhere in town."

  "I'd bet a couple of days' salary on that," Davidson agreed. "But any such cash had to come from somewhere. I've been over his finances four times. His accounts have long since been frozen, and every cent he's made since coming to Backdrop has been accounted for."

  Lyman grimaced. "Yeah, I know—I ran my own check on that a month ago. You think he could be working transient jobs or something? Maybe even at that supermarket where the laser scanner broke?"

  Davidson shook his head. "I tend to doubt it—I can't see someone like Garwood taking the kind of underground job that doesn't leave a paper trail. On the other hand... do we know if he was ever in Champaign before?"

  "Oh, sure." Lyman stepped around to Davidson's terminal, punched some keys. "He was there—yeah, there it is," he said over his shoulder. "A little over two and a half years ago, on a seminar tour."

  Davidson frowned at the screen. Princeton, Ohio State, Illinois, Cal Tech—there were over a dozen others on the list. Silently, he cursed the bureaucratic foot-dragging that was still keeping his full security clearance from coming through. If he'd had access to all this data three weeks ago... "Did it occur to anyone that Garwood just might have made some friends during that trip that he's now turning to for help?

  "Of course it did," Lyman said, a bit tartly. "We've spent the last three weeks checking out all the people he met at that particular seminar. So far he hasn't contacted any of them."

  "Or so they say." Davidson chewed at his lip. "Why a seminar tour, anyway? I thought that sort of thing was reserved for the really big names."

  "Garwood is big enough in his field," Lyman said. "Besides, with him about to drop behind Backdrop's security screen, it was his last chance to get out and around—"

  "Wait a second," Davidson interrupted him. "He was already scheduled to come to Backdrop? I thought he came here only two years ago."

  Lyman gave him an odd look. "Yes, but Backdrop didn't even exist until his paper got the ball rolling. I thought you knew that."

  "No, I did not," Davidson said through clenched teeth. "You mean to tell me Backdrop was Garwood's idea?"

  "No, the project was Saunders's brainchild. It was simply Garwood's paper on—" he broke off. "On the appropriate subject," he continued more cautiously, "that gave Saunders the idea. And that made Backdrop possible, for that matter."

  "So Garwood did the original paper," Davidson said slowly. "Saunders then saw it and convinced someone in the government to create and fund Backdrop.
Then... what? He went to Garwood and recruited him?"

  "More or less. Though I understand Garwood wasn't all that enthusiastic about coming."

  "Philosophical conflicts?"

  "Or else he thought he knew what would happen when Backdrop got going."

  The Garwood Effect. Had Garwood really foreseen that fate coming at him? The thought made Davidson shiver. "So what it boils down to is that Saunders approached Garwood half a year before he actually came to Backdrop?"

  "Probably closer to a year. It takes a fair amount of time to build and equip a place like this—"

  "Or put another way," Davidson cut him off, "Garwood knew a year in advance that he was coming here... and had that same year to quietly siphon enough money out of his salary to live on if he decided to cut and run."

  Lyman's face seemed to tighten, his eyes slightly unfocused. "But we checked his pre-Backdrop finances. I'm sure we did."

  "How sure? And how well?"

  Lyman swore under his breath. "Hang on. I'll go get another chair."

  —

  It took them six hours; but by the end of that time they'd found it.

  "I'll be damned," Lyman growled, shutting off the microfiche record of Garwood's checking account and calling up the last set of numbers on the computer. "Fifteen thousand dollars. Enough for a year of running if he was careful with it."

  Davidson nodded grimly. "And don't forget the per diem he would have gotten while he was on that seminar tour," he reminded the other. "If he skimped on meals he could have put away another couple of thousand."

  Lyman stood up. "I'm going to go talk to the Colonel," he said, moving toward the door. "At least we know now how he's doing it. We can start hitting all the local landlords again and see which of them has a new tenant who paid in cash."

  He left. Great idea, Davidson thought after him. It assumes, of course, that Garwood didn't find a sublet that he could get into totally independently of the landlords. In a college town like Champaign that would be easy enough to do.

  The financial data was still on the display, and Davidson reached over to cancel it. The screen blanked; and for a long moment he just stared at the flashing cursor. "All right," he said out loud. "But why pick Champaign as a hideout in the first place?"

  Because his seminar tour had taken him through there, giving him the chance to rent a safety deposit box? But the same tour had also taken him to universities in Chicago and Seattle, and either one of those metro areas would have provided him a for bigger haystack to hide in.

  So why Champaign?

  Garwood was running—that much was clear. But was he running away from something, or running toward something? Away from his problems at Backdrop, or toward—

  Or toward a solution to those problems?

  His fingers wanted a cigarette. Instead, he reached back to the keyboard. Everything about the Champaign area had, not surprisingly, been loaded into the computer's main database in the past three weeks. Now if he could just find the right question to ask the machine.

  Five minutes later, on his second try, he found it.

  —

  There were men, Davidson had long ago learned, who could be put at a psychological disadvantage simply by standing over them while they sat. Colonel Bidwell, clearly, wasn't one of them. "Yes, I just got finished talking to Major Lyman," he said, looking up at Davidson from behind his desk. "Nice bit of work, if a little late in the day. You here to make sure you get proper credit?"

  "No, sir," Davidson said. "I'm here to ask for permission to go back to Champaign to pick up Dr. Garwood."

  Bidwell's eyebrows raised politely. "Isn't that a little premature, Major? We haven't even really gotten a handle on him yet."

  "And we may not, either, sir, at least not the way Major Lyman thinks we will. There are at least two ways Garwood could have covered his trail well enough for us not to find it without tipping him off. But I think I know another way to track him down."

  "Which is...?"

  Davidson hesitated. "I'd like to be there at the arrest, sir."

  "You bargaining with me, Major?" Bidwell's voice remained glacially calm, but there was an unpleasant fire kindling in his eyes.

  "No, sir, not really," Davidson said, mentally bracing himself against the force of the other's will. "But I submit to you that Garwood's arrest is unfinished business, and that I deserve the chance to rectify my earlier failure."

  Bidwell snorted. "As I said when you first came in, Major, you have a bad tendency to get personally involved with your cases."

  "And if I've really found the way to track Garwood down?"

  Bidwell shook his head. "Worth a commendation in my report. Not worth letting you gad about central Illinois."

  Davidson took a deep breath. "All right, then, sir, try this: if you don't let me go get him, someone else will have to do it. Someone who doesn't already know about the Garwood Effect... but who'll have to be told."

  Bidwell glared up at him, a faintly disgusted expression on his face. Clearly, he was a man who hated being maneuvered... but just as clearly, he was also a man who knew better than to let emotional reactions cloud his logic.

  And for once, the logic was on Davidson's side. Eventually, Bidwell gave in.

  —

  He stood at the door for a minute, listening. No voices; nothing but the occasional creaking of floorboards. Taking a deep breath, preparing himself for possible action, he knocked.

  For a moment there was no answer. Then more creaking, and a set of footsteps approached the door. "Who is it?" a familiar voice called.

  "It's Major Davidson. Please open the door, Dr. Garwood."

  He rather expected Garwood to refuse; but the other was intelligent enough not to bother with useless gestures. There was the click of a lock, the more elongated tinkle of a chain being removed, and the door swung slowly open.

  Garwood looked about the same as the last time Davidson had seen him, though perhaps a bit wearier. Hardly surprising, under the circumstances. "I'm impressed," he said.

  "That I found you?" Davidson shrugged. "Finding people on the run is largely a matter of learning to think the way they do. I seem to have that knack. May I come in?"

  Garwood's lip twisted. "Do I have a choice?" he asked, taking a step backwards.

  "Not really." Davidson walked inside, eyes automatically sweeping for possible danger. Across the room a computer terminal was sitting on the floor, humming to itself. "Rented?" he asked, nodding toward it.

  "Purchased. They're not that expensive, really, and renting them usually requires a major credit card and more scrutiny than I could afford. Is that how you traced me?"

  "Indirectly. It struck me that this was a pretty unlikely town for someone to try and hide out in... unless there was something here that you needed. The Beckman Institute's fancy computer system was the obvious candidate. Once we had that figured out, all we had to do was backtrack all the incoming modem links. Something of a risk for you, wasn't it?"

  Garwood shook his head. "I didn't have any choice. I needed the use of a Cray Y-MP, and there aren't a lot of them around that the average citizen can get access to."

  "Besides the ones at Stanford and Minneapolis, that is?"

  Garwood grimaced. "I don't seem to have any secrets left, do I? I'd hoped I'd covered my trail a little better than that."

  "Oh, we only got the high points," Davidson assured him. "And only after the fact. Once we knew you were here for the Beckman supercomputer it was just a matter of checking on which others around the country had had more than their share of breakdowns since you left Backdrop."

  Garwood's lips compressed into a tight line, and something like pain flitted across his eyes. "My fault?"

  "I don't know. Saunders said he'd look into it, see if there might have been other causes. He may have something by the time we get you back."

  Garwood snorted. "So Saunders in his infinite wisdom is determined to keep going with it," he said bitterly. "He hasn't learned anythin
g at all in the past four months, has he?"

  "I guess not." Davidson nodded again at the terminal. "Have you?" he asked pointedly.

  Garwood shook his head. "Only that the universe is full of blind alleys."

  "Um." Stepping past Garwood, Davidson sat down at the table. "Well, I guess we can make that unanimous," he told the other. "I haven't learned much lately, either. Certainly not as much as I'd like."

  He looked up, to find Garwood frowning at him with surprise. Surprise, and a suddenly nervous indecision... "No, don't try it, Doctor," Davidson told him. "Running won't help; I have men covering all the exits. Sit down, please."

  Slowly, Garwood stepped forward to sink into the chair across from Davidson. "What do you want?" he asked carefully, resting his hands in front of him on the table.

  "I want you to tell me what's going on," Davidson said bluntly. He glanced down at the table, noting both the equation-filled papers and the loose cigarettes scattered about. "I want to know what Backdrop's purpose is, why you left it—" he raised his eyes again—"and how this voodoo effect of yours works."

  Garwood licked his lips, a quick slash of the tongue tip. "Major... if you had the proper clearance—"

  "Then Saunders would have told me everything?" Davidson shrugged. "Maybe. But he's had three weeks, and I'm not sure he's ever going to."

  "So why should I?"

  Davidson let his face harden just a bit. "Because if Backdrop is a danger to my country, I want to know about it."

  Garwood matched his gaze for a second, then dropped his eyes to the table, his fingers interlacing themselves into a tight double fist there. Then he took a deep breath. "You don't play fair, Major," he sighed. "But I suppose it doesn't really matter anymore. Besides, what's Saunders going to do?—lock me up? He plans to do that anyway."

  "So what is it you know that has them so nervous?" Davidson prompted.

  Garwood visibly braced himself. "I know how to make a time machine."

  —