Millennium (19 page)

I gave a low whistle, and pretty soon my comrades materialized out of the darkness and we put our heads together.

“I’m getting nothing at all,” I said.

“Me either,” said Tony.

“Nothing.”

Minoru just shrugged and shook his head.

“Ideas?”

“These things on the power source. Maybe it ran out of juice.”

“Or somebody’s taken it out of the hangar.”

“Not likely.” I realized I was chewing on a thumbnail. “He’ll be here in fifteen minutes. We’ll take ten of those, leave ourselves a safety margin. Turn on your lights, look everywhere you can, don’t worry so much about noise. If we don’t find it, we’ll hide under the tail section and wait for the Gate.”

“This is going to be dry, isn’t it?” Mandy said.

“Don’t be such a pessimist.”

“All time travelers are pessimists.”

*    *    *

That was Minoru’s contribution to the conversation. Me, I don’t know if I was born a pessimist or had pessimism thrust upon me. What I do know is that I’ve had ample reason to embrace the philosophy. A case in point:

I’d been turning over small items for three or four minutes when I heard Tony make the low warbling call we’d agreed on in the ready-room. We stole the call from some Cherokees in a film from the 1930s, and what it was supposed to mean was “I’ve found it!”

He sure had. We converged on him. My heart was pounding. We were actually going to get out of this. Then I saw Tony waving at Mandy, telling her to stop. She did, skidding silently, crouching twenty meters away. I did the same, and watched as Tony motioned her closer. Minoru appeared silently at my elbow, and we creeped the last thirty meters.

The light was very bad. It took a while to be sure what we were seeing. The first thing I identified was the stunner, lying all by itself about ten feet from a line of folding tables that were heaped with debris. There was a long object lying in shadow just in front of the tables, a few feet from the stunner. Gradually, my eyes confirmed my first gut reaction. It was a human body.

“Who is it?” Mandy whispered.

“Who do you think?” I said, bitterly.

We moved in closer. I turned my light beam on low. It was Bill Smith.

“Is he breathing?”

“I can’t tell for sure.”

“Yeah, he’s breathing. He’s just stunned.”

“Then he can probably hear us.”

Mandy and Tony started to back away.

“Shit!” I shouted. I went on in a lower voice. “If he can hear us, then the cat’s already hit the fan.”

“There’s no need to make it worse,” Mandy suggested. I supposed she was right. We all backed away and crouched down.

“Are his eyes open or closed?” I asked.

“Open,” Tony said. “I’m sure he saw me.”

“What do you think happened here?”

We all surveyed the still life of disaster, and pretty soon the scenario became apparent.

He was on his back. His legs were out, one of them slightly bent and folded under the other; that bottom leg was probably going to sleep, and would hurt like hell when he could move again. The stunner was a few feet from his outstretched left hand. Inches from his right hand was a Swiss Army knife with the long blade opened.

Minoru put it all together for us.

“He came in here before we arrived. He found the stunner. On the time-scans, we saw a red light coming from it. Power leakage. That’s probably what he saw, too. He got out that knife
and started poking around inside it, and shorted something out.”

“It’s been damaged enough that the stun beam wouldn’t be focused anymore.”

“Damn lucky it was set on ‘stun.’ We could be looking at a dead man.”

“I don’t want to hear about ‘could be,’” I said. “He could have gotten here when he was supposed to, at 11:30. What the hell is he doing here now? Why was he here before we got here?”

“We’ll have to sort that out when we get back.”

“What do we do now? Should we take the stunner?”

I chewed that one over. I knew the damage had been done, but we’d come back to get it and there it was, so I scooped it up. I opened it and confirmed that it was all out of power, which is why it hadn’t showed up on our detectors.

“We take it.” I looked at my watch. “Shit. We’ve been here fifteen minutes just talking it over. The Gate’s due in twenty minutes. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“He’s sure sweating a lot.”

I played my light over him. Tony was right. Pretty soon Mr. Smith would be lying in a puddle. I tried to figure what all this would sound like to him. He couldn’t have gotten more than a few glimpses of us, but it would have been enough to scare the hell out of him. He’d heard a few phrases. I didn’t know exactly what we’d said that he might have overheard.

Any way you looked at it, though, we must have looked menacing as hell.

And what could I do about it? Nothing. I motioned the team back toward the northwest corner of the hangar.

I even followed them, for about twenty meters.

Then I found myself stopped. I don’t remember stopping. It was as if there was something in the air so thick I couldn’t move through it. I wanted to go on, and I couldn’t. I turned, and hurried back to him.

He hadn’t moved. I knelt beside him and leaned over until I
was sure he could see me. I remembered the blackface I was wearing; surely he couldn’t recognize me from our brief encounter almost two days ago.

“Smith,” I said. “You don’t know me. I can’t tell you who I am. You’re going to be all right. You’re just stunned. You messed with something you…” Stop, Louise, I told myself. You’re saying too much. But how much was enough, and why was I even talking to him?

I was sweating as much as he was, by then.

“I wanted…Smith, you’re endangering a project bigger than you can imagine.
Forget
about this.”

Christ. How could he forget? Would I have forgotten? Would you?

“There’s going to be a paradox if you don’t leave this alone.”

I suddenly went cold all over. I
knew
what he was thinking.

“Oh, no. We didn’t. You think we made those planes crash, but we didn’t, I swear to you, they were going…”

Shit. I’d said too much already. I thought I saw one corner of his mouth twitch, but it might have been my imagination. There was just the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the rivers of sweat.

Everything I touched seemed to turn to shit. Believe it or not, up until recently I’d been a crackerjack operative.

I turned from him and hurried back to my team.

In due course, the Gate appeared and the four of us stepped through it.

*    *    *

There were recriminations. I spent an unprofitable time yelling at Lawrence and Martin about the wondrous power of their prognostications. I recall saying things like I could have done better with a crystal ball and tea leaves. I could feel properly self-righteous about it; I hadn’t screwed up this time. We’d been told Smith wouldn’t show until 11:30. I didn’t mention my brief monologue with Smith, and neither did any of my team. Not that they knew what I’d said to him, but they could hardly have failed to notice I went back and said
something.

It didn’t do any good, unless an unworthy feeling of redemption
could be regarded as a good. I knew as well as they did that the readings they had taken before we left had been invalidated by the chaotic state of the timestream. We all should have realized that we could no longer count on the time tanks to tell us anything reliable.

And once again, there had been changes during my brief absence.

Apparently, as soon as my team had stepped through the Gate, many things had suddenly become clearer in the time tanks. Some of the censorship had eased, and the operators could see things that had previously been clouded. One of the first things they saw was that Smith had entered the hangar at 10:30. They even were able to see him find the stunner, pick it up, and, like a fool, start poking around in it. The whole thing had gone off pretty much as Minoru had described it. And, of course, by the time they saw it it was too late to call us back.

Martin was having a fit trying to understand why the temporal censorship was lifting. I certainly didn’t have anything to contribute; I’ve never been a theoretician. If I had an opinion in the matter it was simply that God was having his innings, playing his little jokes on us. Free will, indeed!

The other big change was Sherman. His mouth was now a much more realistic creation. He had added a nose to his facial accomplishments. He was still quite unlikely to pass for human, even on the darkest night, but he had at least become quite an interesting humanoid.

I kept looking at his mouth. I finally convinced myself there really was no resemblance at all. Only a badly frightened, obsessed, defensive, and emotionally exhausted zombie could have found a lopsided grin on that plastic face.

*    *    *

I was the only one who even wanted to consider Window B. I still hadn’t revealed to anyone that I had ruled out Window C, so that made it harder to argue my position. Everyone kept looking to Sherman for guidance. He kept quiet.

Then we heard I was being summoned to the Council again,
so the decision was postponed. Martin and Lawrence admitted they welcomed the delay, since they wanted to run tests on their temporal equipment. The goal was to create a statistical universe that had some things in common with the “real” universe, whatever that meant at this point. They knew they couldn’t look into the past any more and be sure what they were seeing was reality or probability, but they hoped to at least be able to express things in percentages. I thought that might be nice, especially if they were going to send
me
back again. So far we’d had a quarter-mile miss in one spatial dimension, and a one-hour miss in the time dimension. Martin once told me that twelve dimensions were involved in operating the Gate. I didn’t want to miss in any of the remaining ten.

*    *    *

The Council meeting was more of the same. I offered my resignation twice, and I think the second time they almost took it. I told them once again that this mission was vital to the success of the Gate Project, but I suspect that was starting to wear a little thin.

I couldn’t follow a lot of it. Much of it was technical, way over my head. The rest seemed tied up in the internal politics of the Council. There were at least three factions—actually, not too bad a split for a group as large as that—and one of them kept swaying back and forth. In the end, I was authorized for another trip.

Martin had conquered his distaste for the Council chamber and was with me during this second meeting. He told the members that nothing could be done for at least ten hours. I said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever gods there be. I hadn’t had a rest in almost two days.

And I needed to talk to Sherman.

Sherman said, “Call me Jesus.”

I threw my cigarette at him, simply because I didn’t have anything heavier close at hand. The butt never reached him. There’s a little laser mounted in one corner of my room, equipped with a little radar and a little brain; it tracked the butt and zapped it to plasma before it had gone two feet. I know, I know, what will modern science think of next, but it beats hell out of ashtrays.

“I’ll call you an ambulance in a minute.”

“There are some things I honestly can’t tell you, Louise,” he said.

“What can you tell me, then?”

He seemed to think it over for a while.

“Did your message really say you couldn’t tell anybody what was in it?” I prompted.

“Yes. With certain exceptions.”

“Like what?”

“Like you. I am allowed to tell you certain things. At certain times.”

“To manipulate me.”

“Yes.”

I stared at him bleakly, and he stared back. To give him credit, he didn’t look smug about it.

“So many levels…” I said.

“Yes.”

“I mean, you telling me,
admitting
to me, that you can tell me certain things at certain times, for purposes of manipulation…that’s manipulation right there.”

“Yes.”

“It makes me feel so…responsible! I know you’re using me, and I have to assume it’s for a good reason, so I ought to do what you want me to do…but how do I know what that
is
?”

“You simply must behave naturally. Do what you would normally have done.”

“But what you just told me alters the equation. Now that I know that you’re guiding me—however subtly—the awareness of it will make me do things differently than…” I sputtered to a stop. He was still regarding me innocently.

“So I have to assume that these layers of confusion are just part of your plan, whatever it may be…” That wasn’t going anywhere, either.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Wonderful,” he said, and clapped his hands together. “You’re back on track.”

I had to smile at that.

“I’m going to melt you down and use the scrap to make a tin can, then kick the can.”

“Great, great, get it all out.”

“Your mother was a vending machine and your father was a Roto-Rooter.”

“My, didn’t that twentieth-century tape work well? Every little detail of daily life, at your fingertips.”

I gave him a few more half-hearted insults in modern idiom, but they were just as useless. You can’t argue with Sherman. Even trying to is frustrating, and that’s the last thing I needed. So I tried to clear it all out of my mind and start from scratch.

“Okay. You’re Jesus. Will you tell me what you mean by that?”

“Yes. Jesus Christ was a prevalent myth-figure in the twentieth century, the Son of the Supreme Being, worshipped by a sect whose chief fetishes were a cross, a chalice or grail, and—”

“Crap, I know all that. Their big line was ‘He died for our sins.’” I looked hopeful. “Is that what you had in mind?”

“Not precisely. I had in mind his role as savior of humankind.”

I looked at him. Remember, at this stage his face was a simple cartoon, so ineptly drawn that Walt Disney must have been spinning in his cryo-suspension fluid. Parts of his body were straight out of
The Wizard of Oz.
I won’t say he clanked when he walked, but one look at him and you just
knew
he was the lineal descendant of a video arcade. This was the entity holding himself up to me as humanity’s savior.