All the Colors of Time (9 page)

“You’ve got my back to the wall, Doctor. I’ve got no choice
and you know it. It’s either put up, or shut up and go back empty-handed. I’ll
get the Chiefs up here. You can start your psycho-stuff on them while I package
a few ideas and try to sell them on the Hill. Shouldn’t have too much trouble
with the environmental lobby, I suppose. Right now, I’ve got to lie down. I’ve
got a hell of a headache.”

He pushed himself away from the table, rose and left, Ferris
trailing behind him like a woebegone pet.

Hilyard sat where he was and smiled at the tabletop. The
tension in the room mounted by the second. Finally, he got up and glanced down
the table at Oslovski. “I don’t know how you did it,” he said. “And I’m not
sure I want to. There’s a part of me that wants to blow the whistle on you,
even though I couldn’t prove a damn thing . . . at least, not
without implicating myself in certain matters. But there’s another part of me
that knows what you did was right . . . for everybody concerned.”

He gave the circle of stunned faces a long, lingering look,
then nodded and moved to the door, stopping just short of the pressure pad. He
turned back. “One thing I’ve got to know: When did you play out that little
scene Caldwell and I just saw?”

Oslovski cleared her suddenly dry throat. “Two days ago in
the theatre downstairs.”

He nodded, smiling. “Thank you,” he said. The door slipped
open to let him out, then closed silently behind him.

oOo

Less than a month later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a
groundbreaking proposal to Congress that instead of mothballing fleets, bases
and men, the government embark on a military overhaul, converting whatever was
convertible to peacetime use. Battleships could fight oil slicks; tanks could
fight fires; troops could learn to build shelters for hurricane victims, shore
up leaking levees and plant forests.

The EPA loved it, Greenpeace was ecstatic, the Red Cross was
more than grateful for the offer of troops and equipment to aid in their relief
efforts. The Chiefs spoke of global applications and the United Nations
applauded and handed them a list of ideas as long as the Great Wall of China.

“I would love to take credit for all this,” said Vance
Keller, scanning the latest edition of a national news magazine, “but to tell
you the truth, the counseling program hasn’t been as much of a factor in the
conversion process as we expected. Oh, there are the inevitable individuals who
are having trouble accepting the sudden shift in orientation—”

“Ferris?” Magda Oslovski glanced over the top of her coffee
cup.

Vance puckered. “Actually he’s doing okay. He’s finding a
great deal of comfort in playing Gamaliel.”

Magda raised her eyebrows questioningly.

“‘If this work be of men, it will come to naught,’” he
quoted. “He’s been studying his scriptures a lot. He’s come up with some
interesting alternatives to the party line interpretations of prophecy.” He
grinned. “Vahid is overjoyed—Ferris has been asking all sorts of questions
about Muhammad and Islamic prophecy. Anyway, most of the G.I.s we’ve
interviewed seem to be happy to be beating their swords into plowshares.
Practicing for war takes a lot out of a person. If you want my honest opinion,
I’d say General Caldwell and his bunch were a lot less keen on being heroes
than they imagined they were.”

“Oh, but they
are
heroes.” Magda fielded a folded page of flimsy newspaper nylon. A half-page
color picture of a glowing General Caldwell with his young aide, Lieutenant
Colonel John Hilyard, smiled up from the glossy sheet under a banner headline
announcing Project Plowshare. “At least, I’m pretty sure Dr. Niebuhr and Abdu’l-Bahá
would have said so.”

Return to Table of Contents

This is another
Analog
story from 2000. Like “The Doctor’s Wife,” (which follows) it’s a cautionary
tale about the limits of human perception and understanding. While it is the
most recent of my
Analog
time travel
tales to date, it falls closest to “Heroes” on the Questlabs timeline.

oOo

Dr. Sharon Glen could set her watch to her moods. From the
time she woke until noon she was eager; from lunch to dinner she was
determined; from dinner to bedtime she was ambivalent. But once she had poked
her head into Alec’s room one last time, turned off the lights and gotten into
bed herself, the ambivalence gave way to anxiety and guilt.

The anxiety was for the technology in which her career lived
and moved and had being. The guilt was for Alec. If the technology failed, Alec
would be alone in the world except for his grandmother, whose condition at
times made her unaware she even had a grandson.

It was the shock of losing Robert that had derailed Helen
Glen’s fragile mental train. Her son had been the center of her universe, and
when he had one day walked into the future and failed to return, Helen Glen had
suffered a sudden and swift descent into Alzheimer’s.

Sharon could understand that. Her own universe these days
revolved very much around Alec. He was their legacy—hers and Robert’s—the light
of her life, the reason she put one foot in front of the other every day.

Sharon knew a certain guilty relief that her mother-in-law
could have no idea what her work entailed. The Helen that had been would have
told Sharon in no uncertain terms what she thought of a mother who, having lost
her husband to his work in a very literal sense, was preparing to put herself
at the same risk. But in those long moments of introspection between lying down
and sleeping, Sharon recited Helen’s lines for her: You know what could happen
to you. What are you thinking of if not Alec?

She did know what could happen. Only too well. Ten years—he
had only Shifted forward ten years—a simple mission financed by the National
Weather Service. He would assess the effects on climate of several large-scale
Midwestern reforestation projects. He would search electronic archives, sample
NWS data. Simple. But something had gone wrong—a power drop off, the
technicians called it. It had caused the Temporal Grid to pull her husband into
the future where it collapsed, killing him.

That had been two years ago. Now there were more safeguards,
double and triple and quadruple checks and redundancies and backup systems.
Spectral Shift technology was perceived as essentially stable and would
continue to be so until another anomaly surfaced and another tripper was lost.

Sharon Glen was on countdown to her first future-trip. As a
QuestLabs historian, she’d gone into the past a number of times. It had been
fascinating, exhilarating, sometimes unexpected. But the future—that was
different. Where the past was at least forensically known, the future was terra
incognita. It was also where Robert had died.

Now, two days before her shift, she found herself fighting
the sense that she was tying up loose ends. She spent as much time as possible
with Alec. They had launched model rockets, played endless board and card
games, solved computer mysteries, looked at family albums. And now, she thought
of Helen.

“I’d like to visit Gramma today,” she told Alec at
breakfast. It was Saturday and they had tentatively planned a trip to the beach
with a friend. “We can drop by on our way to pick up Trevor.”

“Do I have to go in?” Alec’s eyes were eloquent with
reluctance.

“No, you don’t have to go in, honey, but it would be nice
for Gramma if you would.”

“She doesn’t know who I am half the time, mom. How can it be
nice for her to get visited by people she doesn’t even know? Besides, I hate
that place. It’s creepy.”

“Alec, you’ve never been inside. How do you know it’s
creepy?”

It was true that in the two years Helen Glen had been in the
high-tech high-care home, Sharon had never gotten Alec further than the
manicured lawn. It was also true that Gramma hadn’t known him; worse, she had
taken him for Robert. It had been a painful visit for everyone but Helen, who,
for a brief span of hours, had been transported to her own quarter of heaven.
Before the elder-care facility, she had had her own home—a place from which
holidays seemed to originate and which Alec had begged to visit.

Sharon was doing the begging now. “Come on, hon. She might
have a good day.”

Alec shook his head emphatically, poking at his yogurt with
the tip of his spoon.

“Please?”

Alec sighed as only a severely put-upon eleven-year-old can.
“Mom, please don’t make me go there.”

She relented, of course. She visited Helen alone. It had not
been a good day, after all. Helen had not known her, and when she had tried to
engage her mother-in-law in news of Alec’s exploits on the baseball diamond,
Helen had vanished into a reality in which Robert—her precious only son—was a
championship pitcher in the Bear River Little League. Sharon had salvaged what
she could, absorbing facts about Robert she hadn’t known, wondering how veiled
they were by time and neural degradation.

Sunday, she and Alec went to their local Bahá’í Center for
devotions, had pizza for lunch, played miniature golf. Sharon tried again to
get Alec to visit his grandmother. He would not.

“Old people are creepy when they’re like that,” he said and
she barely resisted the impulse to slap him.

“They can’t help the way they are,” she told him and did not
try to keep the anger out of her voice.

He was instantly ashamed. “I know. It’s just . . .
scary.” He was silent for a few minutes, then asked, “Will you get like that?”

“I’m not that old.”

“I mean, like, when I’m grown up.”

“Folks on my side of the family have always been sharp as a
tack till the day they die,” she reassured him. “My mom told me once that her
great uncle Joseph died in the middle of a sentence in which he was expounding
a theory of molecular biology.” She smiled, but Alec merely nodded and stared
out the car window.

All in all, he made it harder by the day for her to be a
field historian—to accept missions like the one she was prepping for. She was
torn. Maybe it was something she needed to take to one of the QuestLabs
counselors. She knew Alec was her first responsibility, she merely had to find
that elusive balance between self and selfishness.

In the end, she left it with Alec. “Do you want me to cancel
my mission?” she asked him.

His brow furrowed. “Won’t you get in trouble?”

“I might.” Especially since QuestLabs was sponsoring the
Shift on its own dime for a study in culture and ethnology in future America.
It would be more than an inconvenience to have to replace the senior historian
on the project. And how many times had she assured them that she really wanted
this type of assignment? She realized, belatedly, that this question should
have been asked some time ago.

“You don’t have to do that,” Alec said, still looking a bit
bemused. “I’ll be okay at Aunt Kathi’s house. It’s not like I’ll be there for a
long time.”

True enough. A successful Temporal Shift literally took no
time at all—if the retrieval was successful. Any time lag was purely for the
benefit of the staff and machinery. You seemed to return only minutes after you
left, regardless of whether you had spent hours or days at your post.
Preparation and debriefings usually took longer than the Shift itself.
Altogether, Alec would be with Kathi only a day and a half. In subjective time,
Sharon would be gone for several hours.

Sharon found wry irony in that. Human beings had been
looking for ways to make extra time for centuries. This was as close as they
had come.

There were unsuccessful Shifts, of course. Like Robert’s.
That was the way it was with Temporal Shift Technology. Either you came back on
schedule, or you didn’t come back at all.

oOo

“Huh?” Sharon glanced up into her partner’s face.

“I said, ‘Are you ready for this?’” Trevor Haley repeated. “But
I think you may have just answered the question. What’s getting to you?”

“Who says anything is getting to me? I was looking at our
itinerary.”

“Sharon, you’ve been reading the same page for the past ten
minutes. Either coordinates and time stamps have become a consuming passion for
you or you’re zoning. Are you nervous?”

“Now that you mention it, yes, I am nervous. This is my
first future-trip, after all.”

“I know.” Trevor sat down on the edge of the table where he
and Sharon were assembling their gear, and leaned toward her. “Is it . . .
is it because of Robert?”

Sharon wanted to deny it outright, but couldn’t. She
murmured something about feeling more at home in the late 20th Century, then
caught the expression on his face. She put her hand over his. “It’s okay, Trev.
You can talk about it without throwing me into a deep pit of despair. And no,
it’s not because of Robert—not directly, anyway.”

“So, there is something.”

He knew her too well. “It’s just . . . Alec.
I wonder sometimes if I ought to give up field work—well, at least temporal
field work—until he’s an adult.”

“It’s never easy to lose a parent,” said Trevor. He’d lost
his seventy-year-old mother the year before to a new strain of influenza. “Besides,
I doubt you could give up field work. You thrive on it.”

“I could if I had to.”

Was she whistling in the dark or did she really mean that?
Temporal field work was heady stuff. Hands-on history. It made you feel like
Indiana Jones and James Burke all rolled into one and blurred the distinction
between the historian, the anthropologist and the archaeologist. It made you
feel alive, aware, vital. All things, Sharon realized in a sudden epiphany,
that had been all but snuffed out when Robert failed to return from a ‘routine
mission.’ Was she replacing that relationship with temporal euphoria? More
importantly, was she showering attention on her work at Alec’s expense or
drawing emotional sustenance from it that mothering him should provide?