“All right.” He touched a stud on his console. “What is it?”
I recounted my travels to Atlantea, from the funny generating room where I’d rescued Glammis to the time currents and my diving difficulties.
“ … and I don’t have a hard fact to go on, but if I had to guess, I’d say that they’re tapping the time tides somehow and wrenching time out of its flow.”
When I began, Baldur had a half-bemused, let’s-humor-Loki look on his face. By the time I finished, he was running his stubby fingers through his white-blond hair. He did that when he was excited. Freyda told me that, but this was the first time I’d seen it.
“Fascinating concept—fascinating but dangerous. Let me think about it, Loki. Let me think about it.”
As far as he was concerned, I had ceased to exist. Baldur was back in his world of numbers and concepts.
While I was deciding what I ought to do, I walked back over to my own work space and began to finish cleaning and running maintenance checks on a faulty duplicator that Frey had sent down from the Domestic Affairs weapons storeroom.
The duplicator wasn’t faulty. Frey or someone else was. Someone had tried to copy some sort of hand weapon with a power pack in place. Luckily, there had only been a residual charge in the weapon, or Hycretis would have been scraping Frey and his light saber off the nearest wall.
As it was, in its discharged state, the power cell had released enough energy to melt down the weapon, the holding chamber, and warp the adjacent modules.
Boring … that’s what repairs like that were. In spite of the light pouring in from the long windows and the airiness provided by the high ceilings, milling and otherwise breaking apart the fused modules and replacing the sections one by one was a tedious task. Some were so hopeless that all I could do was black-box them.
While I worked on the duplicator, a handful of trainees delivered several other busted objects to the bin Baldur had set up when I came to Maintenance.
All in all, I enjoyed being able to fix things, see a pile of metal turned back into a functional machine. As Baldur had pointed out, repairs were usually more efficient than sending trainees and junior Guards all over time to pick up more and more hardware when so often the repairs were minor.
Besides, there was another problem with merely black-boxing it all. Trash, waste … I’d hated the waste detail as a trainee. If cleaning up after Frey was boring, it was nothing compared to lugging busted stuff off to the dump on Vulcan. But if somebody didn’t, we would have been buried. Still, the waste pile there stretched for kilos down that empty canyon, and I wondered what someone might think if they ever found it—someone besides the Guard, that is!
But Baldur insisted that I help lug off anything that I couldn’t fix. So there was a personal incentive not to create too much waste.
As I finished the duplicator and rolled it back to the front where Frey’s flunkies would pick it up, I saw someone standing in the shadows.
Loragerd.
With all the rush, and especially after dealing with Heimdall, I’d lost track of her. I looked down at the glowstones, wondering what I could say. The morning had to have been hell on her. I stepped toward her.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
I could feel my throat tighten. Here she was, waiting for me, asking how I was. What could I say? I didn’t say anything—just shook my head and held her tightly.
“Loki.” She leaned back and wiped my cheeks. “I’m fine, just fine. Heimdall was after you, and worried about Glammis. You handled everything except you. Freyda told me to take off early and find you. I did.”
I still couldn’t say anything.
After my fling with Freyda, our relationship had cooled, but she still worried. Imagine, sending Loragerd to look after me.
Imagine, Loragerd caring how I was. Me?
Ridiculous—except there I stood in the afternoon shadows of the ancient and time-protected machines holding Loragerd and shaking.
I finally relaxed enough so that we could walk back into my spaces. I shut down the equipment, and we had a short dinner at Hera’s before going back to my rooms.
All night long, I kept waking up, wondering if someone would appear out of nowhere and grab me. Loragerd slept better, I thought. At least, she didn’t wake up in fits and starts like I did.
On that long night, with my arms around Loragerd, wondering about the chain of tomorrows that loomed ahead, I kept recalling the shock of the morning. Seemed a lot longer ago than the same day.
I was going to get a place, even if I had to build it stone by stone, where no one could slide into it. Heimdall could rot in Hell before dragging me out of sleep.
Thinking that, knowing it would be so, in the early morning silence, I drifted into an uninterrupted sleep and did not wake again until the wake-up chimed.
Loragerd and I ate some juice, some fruit, and dressed. She left for the Linguistics Center before I was quite together, but within units I was headed for Maintenance. I made the Tower in a quick slide and hustled down the ramps from the west portal to see what Baldur had come up with.
From the look of his area, he’d been there all night. The circles under his eyes were blacker than ever, but he gave me a smile. That was, after I’d waited ten units or so for him to come out of his thought-world.
“Most intriguing problem, most intriguing, Loki, but I suspect a self-resolving one.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve checked the files. Glammis located this device fifty centuries back, and the records show the station was abandoned and destroyed. The Atlanteans succeeded in transferring some energy across time. I’ve
postulated a theoretical basis for the mechanism. I did have a head start; it parallels some theories I’ve been developing.”
“I’m lost,” I admitted.
He beamed faintly because I’d asked a question. A lecture was coming.
“If your conjecture is correct, and I suspect it is, the total of mass and energy—energy really, since mass is a stabilized form of energy, and that’s simplifying it grossly—does not need to be constant. The average energy level of a given locale over objective elapsed time must approach some constant. Because of the forces involved—call them resistance for lack of a more precise term—it takes more and more power input per unit of output as the duration of operation increases.
“The Atlantean power plant was diverting energy from the nearer time levels. That was why you couldn’t dive into the area immediately around the generator.” Baldur stopped and gestured an end to his response, lifting his bushy blond eyebrows as if the conclusion was evident.
I didn’t feel like guessing. “And?”
“There is a definite limit to the energy easily available to the generator. Within a few years, seasons, perhaps days, the generator will stop delivering power. Five, ten years later, left to itself, it might function again for a period before stopping. The idea isn’t too bad for an emergency power source. It’s really an energy concentrator more than a generator.”
“The damned thing will quit by itself?”
“I’d calculate so. And …” Baldur launched into a detailed explanation of how and why, which I listened to with my thoughts elsewhere. I’d have to go back and check the Atlantean generator over a period of years before making a final report.
I’ve always disliked loose ends.
After that, I was going to discover the location I’d visualized for my private retreat—where Heimdall and his thugs couldn’t track me down.
Baldur wound up his technical dissertation.
“Then I’ll dive back and check out your theory.”
“You doubt everyone, don’t you?”
I grinned. He’d caught me out. “Let’s say I have extreme difficulty accepting what I can’t understand without some proof.”
Baldur dismissed me with a nod, and I marched back up to the ramps to the Travel Hall. I should have checked in with Assignments, but I could claim I was acting under Baldur’s orders if anyone complained.
The backtime trace on the Atlantean generator was a snap. At least, finding it provided no problems.
Ten years foretime from my pickup of the disminded Glammis, I
came across not a malfunctioning power plant, nor an empty structure, but a fused and leveled pile of rubble, glazed over as if by a tremendously hot energy source.
I tried to locate the exact point of destruction, but couldn’t. In one instant, five years objectively after Glammis’s near demise, the complex stood, with high fences around it, vacant and nonfunctional. In the next unit remained only the glazed pile of junk.
No matter how I concentrated in the undertime, I couldn’t identify that fraction of a unit when the destruction occurred. Between the two instants of time, I could only sense a vortex, a whirlpool of time, an instantaneous unleashing of power striking between the threads of time, yet a power totally separated from the Time surrounding those instants.
I recorded the results on the portable holo unit I’d carted along for that purpose, including some scenes of the Atlanteans practically barricading the complex. What else could they do? Close to the generators, machinery didn’t work right, and they clearly had some idea of what was going to happen. So they stayed away.
I packed up the unit and dived back to the Travel Hall.
A few trainees were popping in and out of the Hall, but there was no one around I had to account to. I still logged the dive, before I took the holo unit and went and cornered Baldur again, not that it was hard because he seldom left Maintenance during the day.
“Not surprised,” he commented tersely, for once trying to get rid of me. He’d solved the problem. I was the doubter. “Time recoil, showing the limits to which energy can be transferred.”
I wandered back to my own area, thinking it over. I didn’t understand the why of it, but that’s the way Time is. You can only bend it so far before it strikes back.
Ferret-face was waiting for me.
I glared at him, still angry for his entry, and for what they’d done to Loragerd. He cowered. Damned if I knew why. He was an experienced Temporal Guard with the power of Heimdall behind him, and I was a junior Guard with no one behind me.
“Heimdall would appreciate seeing you in the Assignments Hall.”
I still wondered about ferret-face’s politeness, but that’s not the sort of question you can ask.
Heimdall was back behind his console, as if nothing at all had happened the day before. His eyes were a bit bloodshot. That was all. His shoulder-length black hair was as smooth and stiff as ever, and the coldness he carried with him filled the Hall.
He got away with the longer hair because he wasn’t an active diver, and now that he was a Counselor who would question it?
Intent as I was on Heimdall, I missed seeing Freyda at first. She was standing a few steps to the left of Heimdall.
“Honored Tribune, Counselor.” I gave them both a half-bow.
Heimdall pointed to the chair on the platform next to his console. I plunked myself into it. Freyda seated herself next to Heimdall, and both of them looked at me from their higher stools.
Heimdall nodded at Freyda. She accepted whatever invitation it was and began. “You’re to be commended for your recovery of Glammis. While she will need a total reeducation, there was no lasting physical or genetic damage. She may retain some residual memories and traits. That remains to be seen.
“Second, the Counselors have recommended that you be assigned to take over as assistant supervisor of Maintenance. Glammis will not be able to resume her duties for some time.”
Was that an understatement. Glammis would take years to recover her skills, and there was no guarantee that the stimuli of her second childhood would lead her down the same mech-oriented path as her first had.
The promotion wasn’t that much, if you thought about it. Maintenance had basically been the three of us, and off-and-on trainees. While Baldur would continue, obviously, as the supervisor of Maintenance, I’d have wide latitude … and more to do. I think Baldur just talked them into it to keep me from bothering him. But I could see the need to drag in some trainees as soon as I could, and I could also see the thinness of the pool of Guards with mechanical talents. That’s what happens when you rely on duplicators.
I nodded again, and thanked Heimdall and Freyda for their confidence, vowed to follow the high standards of tradition, bowed once more, and was dismissed.
Back down the ramps to Maintenance I ambled, musing over the latest turn of events. The first thing to do was to move into Glammis’s old spaces. She’d had better equipment and full access to the data banks for equipment.
Several days passed before I was satisfied with the results, and I’d rearranged the area three or four times before I got the layout I liked. By that time the repairs had piled up, and that meant I was working late for a good ten-day stretch catching up, because I was handling both what had gone to Glammis and what I’d handled.