WORKING FOR THE Far Travel Laboratory had some definite advantages—like a room of my own in the building next to the Lab. The immediate disadvantage? I had to go back to school … or learning.
I had not even put the kit bag that held all my worldly possessions on the graystone floor of the room before a thin and dark-haired man appeared.
“Sammis?”
“Yes?” I turned from the comfortable single bunk, complete with linens and a thick blanket.
“My name is Deric Ron Norften.” He looked down on me, a good head taller even as he gave me a half bow of greetings.
“Sammis.” I waited.
“Dr. Relorn asked me to look in on you, and to bring you these.” He extended several thick bound notebooks, along with what appeared to be a stack of datacubes. “Do you know how to operate a console?”
“I used to be able to handle an Omega Vee, but that was a while ago.”
“Our Gammas are trickier, I fear, but not impossible. Do you know where the briefing rooms are?”
I shrugged. “No. I know where this room is, where Dr. Relorn’s laboratory is, and that’s about it.”
His soft chuckle erased his formality. “She can ignore a few details.”
I nodded, trying to inventory the rest of the room as I did, taking in the two wooden armchairs, the narrow closet, the desk built into the wall, and the single window. A good three-quarters of a rod square, the room qualified as a ConFed officer’s quarters. No wonder the colonel-general wanted to keep the technicians away from the troops.
“Do I get the tour?”
“Why don’t you unpack? Then I’ll be back, and you can see how we’re laid out. After a quick tour, it will almost be time for dinner.”
“And then?” I asked straight-faced.
“Why then … you get to work studying all this material.”
“What’s the point?”
“I thought …” He paused and his thin face screwed up slightly. “ … at the proper time, Dr. Relorn will explain your assignment. I can say that you will need to know all this material before you can actually start your investigations.” About three long steps, and Deric was depositing
the notebooks on the otherwise bare desktop. He kept the datacubes. “I’ll be back shortly. Feel free to look around, but knock before you enter any of the rooms with closed doors. A number are occupied.”
He half-bowed again and was gone.
Much classier than the colonel-general’s minions, Deric was, but the bottom line was still the same. The good doctor wanted something from my scrawny carcass.
Unpacking into the closet and built-in drawers did not take long. Three sets of working uniforms and a single-dress uniform don’t take up much space, even with underwear, belts, and a few toiletries. The biggest item was the foul-weather parka.
One thing I appreciated immediately. The room, the entire building, smelled clean. The sliding window had been left ajar, and a slight breeze brought the fresh smell of early summer inside. My nose itched slightly, probably from grass pollen, but I’d take pollen over filth any day.
The walls were plain goldenwood panels, with the faint cracks and scratches of age that matched the indentations in the graystone underfoot. The door itself was of the black oak that was tougher than ironwood, but the latch was simple. The lock was a simple bolt.
Since I didn’t feel like exploring at that moment, I folded the empty kit bag and put it on the top closet shelf. The notebooks beckoned, despite my lingering irritation with the doctor’s cavalier assumption that I would automatically assume whatever duties she had in mind.
So I picked up the one on top. No title on the flexible cover. The page inside read,
Notes on Perceptual Thresholds in the Non-Time Interftice.
Instead of standing around and waiting for Deric, I sat down in one of the wooden chairs and began to read … very slowly. Some phrases made sense and squared with what I had already experienced—
“ … travelling into the red represents apparent temporal regression … although whether such regression places the traveler into a backtime setting purely subjective in nature, a setting representing one of a series of alternative universes, or a flexible ‘real’ backtime position will require further observation …
“ … gold (cold) orientation is non-mass/non-energy oriented … black (hot) represents mass/energy concentrations … in a quasi-logarithmic representation …
“ … intensity of subjective color perception appears related to the apparent temporal velocity …”
—while others seemed so much gibberish …
“ … autonomous unwilled determinism … as a manifestation of free will …
“ … difficult if not impossible to ascertain the validity of the ancestral suicide theorem …
“ … mass-cubed energy progressions inapplicable … or apparently so …”
“Are you ready?” The thin-faced blond man was standing by the half-open door I’d never bothered to close. “The doctor would be impressed …”
“Nothing else to do, and I might as well learn what I’m supposed to learn. It might even come in useful.”
He frowned, but I really didn’t care. “This way, then.” His voice wasn’t quite as cheerful.
“Who lives here—on this level?”
“Several technicians and three travelers, at the moment, I believe, and you, of course.”
I looked down the long straight corridor. On one side ran a line of windows, beginning at waist height and extending nearly to the inside roofline. On the other side were nearly a score of the heavy black oak doors.
Deric followed my eyes. “Only about half are occupied, now. A number of those associated with the project … left … with the disruptions.”
I nodded, not wanting to say more.
“Doctor Relorn anticipates we will be adding several more from your contingent.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know all the ConFeds personally, especially some of the senior forcers or the newer recruits.
Deric wiped a stray wisp of his thin blond hair back off his high forehead and began to walk down the corridor in uneven long strides.
“The Security Forces are billeted on the level below, while the senior project members are either in the few quarters in the main laboratory or in the family quarters.”
Deric only gestured at the first level corridor as we left the building. “Security quarters. On the first level on the other wing are the messing facilities.”
“And the second level?”
“Empty quarters, for now.”
His tone was so matter-of-fact that I didn’t bother probing. I used my undertime sight to study Deric while we crossed the old stone-paved road to the main laboratory. Trying to walk and look undertime, I stumbled and almost crashed into the side of the graystone archway leading up the wide front steps of the laboratory.
Deric cast a few sparks into the undertime. Not many, but enough that he could probably travel short distances.
“Are you all right?”
I nodded. “Just looking and not watching where I was going.”
“ …
aaaccuuughhh
…” My guide cleared his throat. “We’ll take the right-hand corridor. The first few offices are for administration, although we have little of that now. Beyond the double doors is our mathematical section …”
“Mathematical section?”
Deric raised his eyebrows again, this time further. “Someone has to calculate at least general directional vectors.”
“Oh …” I’d never needed vectors, but since I hadn’t tried stellar travel, perhaps I just hadn’t gone far enough to need them.
“Now that the main power net is gone, and we no longer have access to the mainframe at the university, we’ve had to simplify things somewhat.”
I really didn’t comprehend the complexity of the calculations he was describing. Still, I got the message. Mental travel or time-diving—whatever you called it—was a lot more complicated than I had realized. Either that, or I was more talented than the others. Or both.
We passed two open doors. The first held a young man sitting behind a desk, apparently waiting for something to happen or someone to enter. The second held an empty desk and chair, and several antique filing cabinets.
Next, we passed a closed door, with a wooden plate in the middle of the upper panel which proclaimed in gilded letters, “Mathematical Section.”
Farther down the corridor, Deric opened an unmarked door and stepped inside. The room was larger than the plain black oak door would have indicated, long and narrow, with nearly a score of black and white consoles lined up against each wall. Several blocked doorways, and two lighter colored sections of wall paneling—each about a handspan wide—testified as to where interior walls had been removed.
Two men and three women were scattered along the rows, their backs to the aisle in the middle of the room. I wondered at the placement, since, for engineering hookup, it would have been easier to have placed the consoles back-to-back down the center. That arrangement would have allowed more privacy as well.
“Your console is number fourteen, over there.”
I followed his gesture and walked as quietly as I could past a small dark-haired woman, who did not even glance up as I passed behind her.
Sure enough, on the console with the number fourteen was a brand-new nameplate—“Sammis.”
A notebook, similar to the others I had already received, lay on the flat surface beside the screen, while several datacubes were racked next to the input slot.
I nodded. Dr. Relorn definitely did not waste time. I wondered how she would do in a showdown with the colonel-general.
“We’ll come back later,” Deric added, moving up beside me.
I sniffed back an itch in my nose, refraining from scratching it. The room smelled both of dust and of long use.
The tall, thin man shambled back out through the same doorway, then down past the two doorways blocked on the inside by consoles. He turned right down another corridor, which narrowed into a covered walkway leading to the west wing of the laboratory building.
“Here’s the main travel laboratory.”
As Deric opened the door, I recognized the big enclosed space again, and mentally located the doctor’s quarters—down the corridor we had not taken.
“I’ve been here. That’s where I was tested.”
“Have you actually done any mental travel?” Deric’s tone was bland.
“From what you indicate is possible, nothing at all.”
“Well, learning it should be an interesting experience for you, then.”
I stared around the empty laboratory from the half-open doorway, wondering where the good doctor was. “You don’t operate this late?”
“We’re working back up to a full schedule, but our operations were curtailed by the lack of power.”
“I’m not sure I understand.” How did the lack of electrical power have anything to do with time-diving?
“Without power, we couldn’t run the gammas, or the necessary time-vectors for the travelers …”
It sounded like all their divers were as blind as the good doctor. That or they couldn’t recognize what they saw. Trying to use charts in the undertime sounded difficult. Or were they trying to memorize them before diving? I shivered at the thought of all that memorization.
“What next?”
“Down below are the electronics shop and the equipment rooms …”
“Good. I’d like to see them.” I said that because Deric clearly didn’t want to show them to me.
With a shrug, he turned and waited for me to back away from the door before closing it.
As I looked down the hallway, I could see that the late afternoon
shadows were fading under the clouds that gathered from the north.
“This way.” Deric turned to head back the way we had come.
“What’s down that way?” I pointed to the direction we had not gone.
“Just some guest quarters for visiting dignitaries.” His steps were hurried as he led me through another hallway door into a staircase leading down. At the bottom, a second doorway opened onto a hall identical to the one above, except that it had no windows, not surprisingly, since it had to be below ground level.
We walked silently to the left, away from the side of the building holding the “visiting dignitaries’” quarters. After another ten steps or so, Deric halted. On the door of the equipment room was a square metal panel with numbered buttons. Deric punched several in quick succession.
Looking through the undertime, I caught the numbers—six, thirteen, twenty-seven—noted the pattern, and then nearly laughed. So long as the room was big enough to stand in, I could enter it whether it happened to be locked or not.
The doorway’s modest size gave no clue to the size of the space—which sloped downward and into dim shadows beyond the range of an unaided eye. The doorway was nothing more than an interior building entrance to an equipment bunker that probably included the space under the parklike square across the stone-paved street from the laboratory.