He said, ‘I’m here, which as far as I’m concerned is two weeks in the past, and there’s also a version of me, two weeks younger, living in a pioneer sheaf. It seems to me that if I stop the cycle repeating itself, that earlier version of me won’t be called in to help find Tom. He’ll stay right where he is. He won’t become me.’
Eileen Barrie unravelled the paradox with ease. ‘You travelled back in time, and now you are moving toward the point where you set out, two weeks in the future. If everything happens the way it has already happened, you will complete a closed loop, your younger self will be sent off to find Tom, and he will end up here. But if you’re able to make a significant difference, you will create a new sheaf where history plays out differently.’
‘And the younger version of me won’t be reactivated. He’ll stay where he is.’
Stone had to be certain that there really was a chance that he could save Susan, even if it meant that he had to ask the advice of a woman who was part of the conspiracy that had caused Susan’s death.
‘If you do the right thing and break the loop open, you can think of the younger version of yourself as a doppel,’ Eileen Barrie said. ‘He’ll go on to live his life, and you’ll go on to live yours.’
‘But I won’t be able to go home.’
‘No, you won’t. If you make a significant change here, you will unmake the future - the place you came from.’
They stopped at a McDonald’s in High Rolls, a dormitory town of mini-malls, fast-food joints and cheap apartment complexes for technicians and service workers at White Sands. After an early breakfast of Egg McMuffins and sugared coffee, Stone stood guard outside the bathroom while Eileen Barrie freshened up, then escorted her across the parking lot to the gas station next door and used its pay phone to call the number he’d pulled off the Company system.
He got through to an aide who wanted to know where Stone had obtained the number for General Ellis’s office.
‘From the command and control list. I’m an old friend of the general’s. I need to talk to him urgently.’
‘If you have a message for him, sir, I’ll pass it on.’
‘I need to talk to him myself. Right now wouldn’t be too soon,’ Stone said, but the aide was wedded to protocol and wouldn’t give way. At last, Stone gave his name and said that he would be visiting the general’s office shortly. ‘I want to talk about Tom Waverly and SWIFT SWORD - be sure you tell General Ellis that,’ he said, and hung up.
‘What now?’ Eileen Barrie said.
‘I’m giving you what you want, Dr Barrie. I’m taking you to a place of safety.’
Stone opened the hood of the stolen Ford and fired up the engine. After they had climbed inside, Eileen Barrie said, ‘You like this Boy Scout stuff, don’t you?’
For a moment, Stone thought she was actually going to smile.
‘Used to be what I did for a living. Turn right, Dr Barrie.’
She turned right, neatly merging into the thin flow of traffic heading toward Alamogordo. Sunrise was still an hour away, but the sky was already turning blue above the steep bare ridge to the east. After a few minutes, she said, ‘The Company office at White Sands is compromised. If that’s where you’re taking me, you might as well shoot me dead right here.’
‘I know the guy in charge of perimeter security. He’ll take good care of you.’
‘I don’t want to talk to some army officer, Mr Stone. I want to talk to the Director of Central Intelligence, no one else. And before I do that, I have to discuss my position with my lawyer.’
‘When my friend hears what you have to say, he’ll put you on the next plane to Washington. If you behave yourself, he might even let your lawyer ride along.’
‘Or he’ll put me in front of a firing squad. Or you’ll take me out into the desert and shoot me.’
Stone didn’t blame her for getting the jitters. Officers usually spent many weeks cosying up to potential defectors, gaining their confidence, becoming their best friend, slowly and surely bringing them around to the idea of going over to the other side. But he’d taken Eileen Barrie prisoner at gunpoint and threatened to kill her if she didn’t answer his questions, and now he was forcing her to betray Operation GYPSY. He knew that he couldn’t make her trust him, but told her that she was doing the right thing, that she would feel better once she had been taken into custody.
‘You’ll be able to talk with your lawyer,’ he said. ‘You’ll be able to start to put your deal together. You’ll be able to move forward.’
‘That’s easy for you to say.’
‘I’m in as much trouble as you, Dr Barrie. More, probably. You’ll get a sympathetic hearing from the DCI; after I’ve dealt with Victor Moore, I’ll get a hot debriefing, probably in handcuffs.’
But for the first time since Pottersville, Stone felt that he was in control. That he was making things right. If he could bring down GYPSY right now, Susan would be saved, and so would his other self, his doppel. They’d live out the rest of their lives on the farm in New Amsterdam and never know anything about this, he thought, and remembered with a pang the summer’s day when he and Susan had rambled through the woods, with Petey running ahead of them, running back to show them the treasures he’d found - a black pebble, a bird’s feather, an oyster shell dropped by a gull - and he had resolved to talk to her about what was happening between them when the right time came, when the raw wound of Jake’s death had healed. Maybe in six months, maybe a year: he’d been prepared to wait as long as it took. There’d been a moment when they’d been walking back from the Harvest Home dance a couple of weeks ago, and he’d thought
now, speak to her now
, but he’d lost his nerve. And there’d been another moment when Susan had been watching him getting ready to leave with David Welch, but before either of them could say anything Petey had burst in on them . . .
Knowing now that he’d never be able to go back to the First Foot sheaf and tell Susan what he felt, that when this was over he would have to walk away and start afresh, a defector from his own life, was as hard and cold as anything Stone had ever faced. But there was some small comfort in knowing that it would mean his doppel, his secret sharer, would have the chance he’d lost.
They were driving through the edge of Alamogordo’s sprawl now, past gas stations and tyre depots, generic restaurants and warehouse retail units, dingbat apartment blocks offering no-deposit rentals and cable TV. Billboards overtopped each other like rainforest trees struggling for sunlight. Amoco. Midas Mufflers. Winston Tires. A fast-food restaurant got up to look like a wooden fort was offering a super-saver deal on mammothburgers.
Stone said, ‘Have you ever thought we’re the wrong kind of people to be spreading our influence throughout the multiverse?’
‘There’s no wrong or right,’ Eileen Barrie said. ‘There’s no manifest destiny. There’s only chance and probability. We just happen to be the sheaf where the probability of quantum computing coming into existence is highest. The one where Alan Turing emigrated to America, where he invented the concept of the universal quantum computer, where Richard Feynman provided the theoretical background for manipulation of single supercooled atoms, where the first quantum calculation was performed at Bell Labs in 1962. There’s nothing special about us, Mr Stone, it’s just that in other sheaves a host of factors conspired against those key events. Take the Nixon sheaf, for instance. They had a Second World War in the 1940s, and Alan Turing was an important part of the British war effort, taking a lead in a top-secret operation to decipher German code. He stayed in Britain after the end of the war, and that’s where he killed himself, in 1954. He was hounded by the security services because of his homosexuality, and one day he injected cyanide into an apple and took a bite. Highly symbolic, don’t you think?’
Stone, remembering the cemetery in Pottersville, remembering Willie Davis describing how Marsha Mason had died after she’d swallowed her poison pill, tried to get away from the subject of suicide. ‘It sounds like you’ve done some research on Turing and his doppels.’
‘When I was growing up, Alan Turing was something of a hero to me. Other girls had pop stars or movie stars. I had the man who made it possible to walk between worlds.’
‘You mean you had a poster of him on your wall, stuff like that?’
‘As a matter of fact I did have a photograph. Also a form letter his secretary signed when I wrote him once. And copies of his papers, of course, and a first edition of his autobiography. You think that I’m some kind of android, Mr Stone, but I can assure you I’m as human as anyone else.’
‘You risked your career for love, so I guess you must have a human side.’
Stone had a brief image of Eileen Barrie and Tom Waverly moving over each other on some hotel bed. He couldn’t imagine any tenderness in the act. It must have been like spiders mating.
‘My career was effectively killed off a couple of years ago, Mr Stone. They used me, and when they had what they wanted they sidelined me. They put me in charge of the research that was covering up the real purpose of GYPSY. They made it clear that I couldn’t go anywhere else, or my life would be forfeit. I had offers to work in Livermore, in Princeton. I was offered a senior professorship at the University of Chicago - the very same position that Alan Turing held. I was forced to turn everything down.’
‘Tom gave you a way out,’ Stone said, understanding now how Tom had turned Eileen Barrie, how he’d worked on her dangerous mix of arrogance and naivety.
‘Perhaps this isn’t the way it’ll be,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Perhaps this path has a very low probability. Perhaps it’ll collapse, and all that’ll be left are trace memories of what might have been.’
‘Don’t put yourself down, Dr Barrie. What you’re doing right now is world-changing.’
She glanced over at him. ‘Don’t you feel a certain transparency, Mr Stone? Do you get increasing attacks of déjà vu? Do you feel as if you’re walking on thin ice?’
‘We’re on the right road, Dr Barrie. Straight ahead, all the way.’
‘Maybe we’re a transient loop. A footnote rather than a new page. A change that won’t take.’
‘What I have in mind,’ Stone said, ‘is a lot more permanent than that.’
They turned onto the Strip and drove through the centre of Alamogordo. In the stark early-morning sunlight it looked shabby and two-dimensional, like a movie set waiting to be struck. Eileen Barrie slowed down as they drove past a string of motels. A black sedan and a squad car were drawn up at the kerb outside the entrance to one of them, the El Dorado. In front of a fake stone monolith carved in pseudo-Aztec style, two uniformed cops were talking with a man in a black suit.
Stone got a bad feeling and said, ‘Keep going, Dr Barrie. There’s no help for you here.’
Eileen Barrie reached inside her leather jacket, tossed a cell phone into Stone’s lap. ‘That’s the phone my handlers didn’t know about. I palmed it when you were searching my attaché case. Back at the McDonald’s, I used it to call Victor Moore.’
Stone looked at her, at her sly smile. ‘If you warned him, it won’t help your case.’
‘I didn’t tell him about you. But I did let him know that Tom Waverly was hiding out somewhere in Alamogordo.’
Stone’s hard-won confidence vanished. Dropped straight into a black pit and vanished, just like that. ‘You think they found him.’
‘We used various motels for our trysts,’ Eileen Barrie said. ‘The El Dorado was the first. Tom’s fatal weakness is sentimentality - my guess is that it has let him down again. You wanted to end the cycle, Mr Stone. Well, I’ve done it for you.’
They were coming up to the end of the block. Stone jammed his pistol into Eileen Barrie’s side and said, ‘Make a right, park in the first space you find.’
She made the turn. ‘I didn’t betray him when he contacted me because I thought he loved me. But your story convinced me otherwise. You told me that he’ll murder as many of my doppels as he can—’
‘That was in another history.’
‘I had to do it, Mr Stone. I had to make sure that he wouldn’t be able to come after me.’
Stone saw a service alley that ran along the back of the string of motels, told Eileen Barrie to drive into it and park. ‘If Tom was staying in that motel, his daughter was probably staying there too.’
‘Linda’s here?’ Eileen Barrie was genuinely startled.
Stone grabbed her wrists and handcuffed her to the steering wheel. ‘I’m going to check things out. I won’t be long.’
‘Take me into custody before you do this. I’m a noncombatant, Mr Stone. And I can tell you everything you need to know about Operation GYPSY.’
‘You can wait in the car while I check out the motel. Then we’ll do the other stuff.’
She tugged at the handcuffs. ‘What if you don’t come back? What do I do then? Sit here until they come for me?’
There was more than a hint of panic in her voice now.
‘Maybe this isn’t anything to do with us. Maybe Tom and Linda were staying at some other motel. Sit tight, Dr Barrie. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’
Stone locked her attaché case and the Macy’s bag in the trunk of the car, set his Stetson on his head, and moved down the alley, past parking lots, past cinder-block walls topped with razor wire, past steel gates stencilled with the names of different motels. The El Dorado’s gate was painted green. He climbed over it, dropped down between a pair of Dumpsters, and edged along the back wall of the motel. At the corner he took a fast peek, saw service carts parked under a steel stairway, a swimming pool inside a chain-link fence, cars and pickups angle-parked along a two-storey L-shaped block, and a man in a black suit standing about twenty yards away.
Stone pulled the brim of the Stetson low on his face and walked out into the early-morning sunlight, holding his pistol behind his back and waving his army ID, saying loudly, ‘Maybe you can help me. A couple of people used false papers at one of our checkpoints last night. I understand you might be looking for them too.’