Millennium (10 page)

So I pulled the curtain.

I picked up the phone and ordered a big meal from room service, then discovered Sondergard had almost no cash. She had lots of plastic, but signing her name on the check was not something I was prepared to do. So I went to my own purse and dug out the wad I’d brought with me. I checked the dates on a couple of bills—ultracautious, I guess, but it never hurts to be sure—and even went so far as to rub one with my thumb to be sure the ink was dry.

They’d fool the Treasury Department, no doubt of that.

I sat on the bed and read the Gideon Bible until the food came. That Gideon sure had a weird sense of humor. Try “The Book of Genesis.”

The book was bogging down in a lot of begats when the bellhop
arrived. Along with a rare steak I’d asked for a six-pack of Budweiser and a carton of Camels. I lit a couple of the cigarettes, turned on the television set, and ate the steak. The meat was bland, as twentieth-century food always is. I looked through the closet, but mothballs were no longer a common item in hotels, so I wolfed it down as it was.

Then I took a warm bath and stretched out on the bed, wiggling my bare toes in front of the TV screen.

Who needs disco? I was having a wonderful time, I realized. It was nice to be completely alone. I watched the news and the Johnny Carson show. The late movie was
The Candidate
, with Robert Redford. I could eat that guy alive. I’d been in love with him since they showed
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
on one of the flights I was snatching.

All I can say is he better watch what planes he gets on. If I ever get my hands on him, Sherman goes on the junk heap.

*    *    *

I slept late. I can’t remember how long it had been since I’d done that.

The television kept me company through the afternoon, until it was time to dress, call a taxi, and get to the airport. It was a beautiful day. The freeway was blanketed in a thick fog of hydrocarbons. The air was so rich I smoked the Camels one at a time.

I was aware that I was surely the only person in New York that day who was enjoying the air, but that made it even better.
Suffer, you healthy bastards!

I deliberately arrived as late as I safely could. When I got there, the other flight attendants were boarding. I was able to keep the chatter to a minimum; since some of the others knew Sondergard I had to be careful. I pleaded a hangover, and that went over well. Apparently it wasn’t out of character.

For the early part of the flight I kept away from the others by working my tail off, keeping too busy tending to passengers to spend time jawing with the rest of the crew. That got me some odd looks—I was realizing Sondergard had not exactly
been the Pride of Pan Am—but it didn’t matter. As the flight went on I replaced the stews one by one as the Gate appeared and then vanished in the midship lavatories.

That’s an easy trick. There’s an indicator on my wristwatch. It senses the presence of the Gate. When my wrist tingled I’d simply go to the lavatory, open the door, and call for one of the flight attendants.

“Look at this,” I’d say, with a disgusted expression. They were invariably eager to see what new atrocity the passengers had worked on their domain. (Flight attendants are almost as contemptuous of the goats as I am.) When she was in position I’d plant my boot on her fanny and she’d be through before she could draw a breath. Her replacement would arrive almost as quickly.

We started the old thinning gambit when the dinner trays had been cleared.

There are many ways to go about a snatch. Thinning them first is something we do when we can. The in-flight movies often help with that. While the cabin is darkened people don’t notice as much as they would otherwise. We could take this one or that one and, in most cases, they never would be missed. From the moment the last stew was replaced there was a team member stationed at all times in the lavatory corridor in the center of the 747. When circumstances permitted we’d see to it that a passenger who got up to piss didn’t actually get to do it for fifty thousand years.

Each snatch is unique, each presents different problems.

On this one we were clearing two jumbo jets simultaneously. That’s good—numbers usually are—and bad, since the Gate can appear at only one location during any moment of time. That meant it had to be shuttled back and forth between the two planes.

Both these flights were transcontinental. That sounds like an advantage, but it usually isn’t. We can’t take the people out during the first hour and let the plane fly empty across the country, hoping the pilot never leaves the cockpit.

In this case, the 747 was going to remain marginally airworthy after the collision. That meant the real pilot had to stay with it to the end. It was just too dicey to take him and replace him with one of our people—even a kamikaze. There was too much chance the plane would come down in a place history had already shown us it would
not
come down.

With the DC-10 we had a lot more leeway. If it came to it, we could take the cockpit crew and simply follow instructions from Air Traffic Control, since that’s what was going to cause this crash.

The thinning was going well. We still had two hours to fly, and we’d taken forty or fifty out of the 747. The plane had departed with almost every seat full. One would think people would begin to notice empty seats, but the fact is it takes them a long time to realize what’s happening. Part of that is because we pick the candidates for thinning very carefully. We would not take a child without its mother, for instance. Mommy would come looking. But taking a mother and her crying infant is perfect. The other passengers may notice on some level that the crying has stopped, but they
never
try to find out why. That’s the sort of good fortune you just don’t question.

In the same way, we were alert for people most dissatisfied with the sardine-can seating arrangements, such as anybody sitting next to a tall person, or three unrelated men sitting in a row, especially if they were trying to work. If that middle fellow got up to get a drink or visit the rest room he was unlikely to come back. I’d never heard anybody complain about that, either.

But the biggest thing we had working in our favor was the unimaginable nature of what we were doing. I’d see someone looking troubled, walking the aisles. Maybe he’d noticed all the seats were filled when we took off, and now there were all these gaps. What gives? But logic is on our side. The guy
knows
nobody has stepped outside for a smoke. Thus, logic proves everyone is still aboard; ergo, they must be in some other part of the plane. Nobody ever gets farther than that, not even if we take half the passengers.

I concluded things were going smoothly and decided to take a look at the other plane, the DC-10. So the next time the Gate appeared I…stepped through into the future, changed into a United uniform while Operations shifted its focus to the other plane, and…stepped onto United Flight 35.

Another advantage to jumbo jets: nobody notices a new flight attendant.

Since the hazard was less on this flight, the team was being even more aggressive. They were summoning passengers to the rear of the plane on one pretext or another, never to return. I surveyed the situation with approval, and signalled to Ralph Boston. He followed me into the galley.

“How’s it going?” I asked him.

“Easy. We plan to start the final operation in another couple minutes.”

“What’s the local time?”

“There’s twenty minutes left.”

That can be disconcerting. When I’d left the 747 it still had three hours to go, which meant it was somewhere over the midwest. This plane was already in California, two and a half hours later. It’s enough to give you a headache.

But why not work it that way? Why, for instance, should the people uptime wait twenty-four hours while I watch the Carson show in a New York motel room?

They had not, of course. As soon as the Gate vanished in my motel room Operations had reset it for the lavatory of the 747 the next day. What had happened, from Lawrence’s viewpoint, is that I’d stepped through, Sondergard had come out, the Gate had flickered, and out came the first flight attendant I pushed into the lavatory the next day.

It takes some getting used to.

“Something wrong?” Ralph asked. I glanced at him. Ralph was
not
impersonating a male flight attendant this trip. His skinsuit made him a perfect copy of a very black, very female person whose name he probably did not even know. Ralph is small, and has been with my teams a long time. Over a year.

“No. We might as well get going. Should I stay here, or go back to the other plane?”

“Lilly’s alone in first class. You could help her out up there.”

So I did. Technically, of course, I’m in command, but Ralph was the DC-10 team leader, and Cristabel was in charge on the 747. On a snatch like this one I find it best to let my team leaders lead.

The first-class operation went smoothly. We used the standard “coffee-tea-or-milk” gambit, relying on our speed and their inertia. I leaned over the first two seats on the left, smiling big.

“Are you enjoying your flight?”

Pop, pop. Two squeezes on the trigger, close to the head and out of sight of the rest of the goats.

Next row.

“Hi, folks. I’m Louise. Fly me.”

Pop, pop.

We were close to the rear of the cabin before anybody tumbled to anything. Finally, a few people were standing up and looking at us curiously. I glanced at Lilly, she nodded, and we plugged the rest of them rapid-fire. All of the first-class cabin was now peacefully asleep, which meant none of them could help us pull sleepers through the Gate. It’s completely unfair, but there’s no solution for it. Another benefit of your first-class–ticket air travelers!

We hurried back to tourist, which is always a bigger problem. They hadn’t started putting people to bed yet. Ralph was still working the thinning con, and as I watched, he leaned over a man in an aisle seat and asked if the man would please come with her (him) for a moment.

The guy stood up and Ralph’s back exploded. Something hit me hard in the right shoulder. I spun around on my heel, starting into a crouch.

I noticed a fine film of red on my hands and arms.

I thought: hijacker, the guy’s a hijacker.

And: But why did he wait so long?

And: Hijackers were rare in the 1980s.

And: Was that a bullet that hit my shoulder? Is Ralph dead?

And: The goddam motherfucker is a
hijacker!

It seemed I had all the time in the world.

What actually happened was the bullet hit my shoulder and I turned with it and brought my left arm up and thumbed the selector switch to OBLITERATE and crouched as I came around and took careful aim and blew him apart.

His upper torso and head lifted away from the rest of his body. It leaped into the air and landed six rows back, in the aisle. His left arm landed in somebody’s lap, and his right, still holding his gun, just dropped. His legs and groin fell over backwards.

Okay. I could have stunned him.

Better for him that I didn’t. If I’d taken him through the Gate with me alive, I’d have fried his balls for breakfast.

*    *    *

There’s little point in describing the pandemonium that followed. I’d have a hard time doing it, even if it was worth describing; I was sitting in the aisle during most of it, looking at blood.

The crew had to stun just about everybody. The only bright spot was the number we’d managed to shuffle through during the thinning phase. The rest would have to go through on our backs.

When Lilly finally knelt beside me she thought I was hurt more than I actually was. She acted as if I might break if she touched me.

“Most of this is Ralph’s blood,” I told her, hoping it was so. “I guess it’s a good thing I stopped the bullet. It could have punctured the fuselage.”

“That’s one way of looking at it, I guess. We had to take the cockpit crew, Louise. They heard the ruckus.”

“That’s okay. We’re still in business. Let’s get them through.”

I started to get up. On the count of three:
one
, and a
two
, and…

Not that time.

“We can’t move them yet,” Lilly said. I didn’t care for the
alarmed expression on her face when I had tried to rise. Well, I’d show her. “We’re stacking them by the lavatory,” she went on. “But the Gate is with the 747 right now.”

“Where’s Ralph?”

“Dead.”

“Don’t leave him here. Take him back with us.”

“Of course. I’d have to anyway; he’s mostly prosthetics.”

I managed to get to my feet and that felt a little better. This didn’t have to be a disaster, I kept telling myself. One dead, one wounded; we were still all right. But I was beginning to appreciate the drawbacks in snatching two planes at once. I like to have the Gate
there
, ready to use, all during the operation.

We couldn’t. The most limiting factor about the Gate is the Temporal Law that states it can only appear once in any specific time. Once, and once
only.

If we send the Gate back to—for instance—December 7, 1941, from six to nine in the morning on the island of Oahu, we can snatch most of the crew of the Battleship
Arizona
, but then those three hours are closed to us forever. If something interesting is happening during those same hours in China, or in Amsterdam, or even on Mars, it’s just too damn bad. We can’t even see the events of those hours in the time scanners.

This results in another paradox. The timestream is littered with these blank areas. Most of them were the result of snatches we’d done, or time traveling done by people who came before us. But some were the result of trips yet to be taken. In other words, in a few years or a few days somebody would decide it was worth our effort to go to those times, at a location we didn’t know yet. Because we
would
take that trip, that stretch of time was closed to scanning.

The phenomenon was known as Temporal Censorship. We couldn’t look back and see ourselves and thus find out what we would do. We could know a blank area existed and that nobody had yet visited that time, but we couldn’t know
why
somebody would decide to go there.