Killing Time (27 page)

And so, when at last Larissa
entered my quarters after making sure that Malcolm was resting quietly and
proceeded to fall tearfully into my arms, I elected to view it as a sign that
her love for me was beginning to outweigh her dedication to her brother. I said
nothing to that effect and nothing about my deluded plans for the future, thinking
it only fair to broach the subject with Malcolm first. I maintained this silence
through several ensuing days on Hirta, during which each member of our group
continued to try to reach some separate peace with all that we had seen and
endured. It wasn't an easy time; despite the fact that we successfully avoided
discussing the subject with one another, a near compulsion to privately read
and view news reports concerning the Moscow disaster afflicted us all, and as
the casualty numbers mounted, a common but unacknowledged grief bore down
hard. The truth about Dov Eshkol eventually did emerge, but so did reports that
he'd had accomplices who'd escaped in some sort of advanced aircraft, at which
point apprehension over possible aggressive moves against St. Kilda joined the
list of anxieties that were afflicting everyone on the island.

The last of these fears, at
least, was allayed when Larissa emerged from two days of ministering to her
brother to announce to the rest of us that Malcolm had been in contact with
Edinburgh: the Scottish government had refused to reveal anything about Malcolm's
purchase of St. Kilda to the U.N. allies, and he had promised more funding
for the Scots' war of independence. Relieved that we would be left in peace, at
least for a time, the others went back to the business of pondering the recent
past as well as the uncertain future. I turned to do the same, but Larissa
caught my arm.

"He wants to see you,"
she said, indicating Malcolm's quarters, which were situated so as to block any
entrance to his private laboratory. "But don't let him get excited, Gideon—he's
better, but he's not well." She kissed me quickly but tenderly. "I've
missed you."

I ran one hand through her silver
hair and smiled. "It's been lousy."

She held me tighter at that.
"Very lousy," she murmured.

"Larissa," I whispered.
"There's something—" I looked into her eyes, wanting to see curiosity
but finding only severe exhaustion. "Jesus, you've got to rest."

She nodded, but managed to ask,
" 'Something'?"

"We can talk about it
later," I answered, believing that we would have plenty of time to do so
and still wanting, like some well-heeled suitor, to talk to her brother before
I sprang the idea on her. "For now, rest."

She sighed acknowledgment, kissed
me again, and strode wearily away, leaving the door to her brother's quarters
ajar.

I stepped inside, sure of what I
was going to say and hopeful that Malcolm would approve of the plan; wholly
unsuspecting, in short, that he was about to tell me what he considered the
greatest of his many secrets, a tale so bizarre and unbelievable that it would
force me to the conclusion that he had, in fact, lost his mind.

Malcolm's quarters in the
compound were even more spartan than his cabin aboard the ship, offering, it
seemed to me, few comforts that could not have been found on the sparsely populated
Hirta of two hundred years earlier. In the far wall a bay window similar to the
one in my room looked out over another rocky, mysterious stretch of oceanfront,
and before this window Malcolm sat in his wheelchair, bathed in the soft
sunlight of St. Kilda and watching the hundreds of seabirds on the rocks with
the same simple enthusiasm I'd seen in his features several times before. It
was a vivid reminder that the young boy who had entered that hellish hospital
all those years ago had not been completely destroyed by the experience; yet,
paradoxically, the very youthfulness of the look should have been enough to
remind me of the extent to which Malcolm depended on Larissa and to convince me
that any notion of his approving of my running off with her was absurd.

He sensed my presence but made no
move to face me. "Gideon," he said in a voice that seemed not so much
strong as an attempt at strength. He paused for a moment, during which I
prepared to make my case to him; but before I could speak he asked, "Are
the materials for your Washington plan still in place?"

The question caught me with my
jaw already open; and now that mandible seemed to actually fall to the floor.
"I beg your pardon?" I mumbled.

"Your Washington plan,"
he repeated, still watching the birds. "How soon can you be ready to
implement it?"

I somehow managed to collect my
wits enough to say, "You're not serious."

Still not turning, Malcolm nodded
as if he'd expected just such an answer. "You think that what happened in
Moscow means that we should suspend our work. You think it may happen
again."

At that instant every ounce of
self-delusion somehow drained out of me like so much blood. I took a few shaky
steps toward a straight-backed mahogany chair, falling into it as I suddenly
realized the folly of my recent plans as well as the extent of Malcolm's
commitment to his undertaking. Emotional protests and declarations seemed pointless,
given the situation, so I answered him in a voice that was as rational and
grave as I could make it: "Malcolm—you yourself have said that there are
terrible problems inherent in what you're doing."

"What I
said,
"
Malcolm answered, quietly but pointedly, "was that we've done our job
too well. Dov Eshkol proved that."

It was an almost incredible
statement. "Yes. I'd say that he certainly did."

"And so we learn and go
on." He still seemed unprepared to look me in the eye. "As you and I
have already discussed, we must make sure that all future projects will be
exposed in a reasonable amount of time. We'll plant hints—more than hints,
obvious flaws—so that even the most obtuse—"

"Malcolm?" I
interrupted, too shocked to go on listening to him but still trying to speak in
a straightforward, calm manner. "Malcolm, I can't go on being part of
this. What you're doing, it's more than just subversive, it's unimaginably
dangerous. Surely even you see that now." He gave no answer, and my head
began to grow feverish with incredulity. "Is it possible—are you really
going to try to deny it? This business, this
game
of yours, it may seem
manageable to you, but there are millions of people out there who have to make
sense of thousands of pieces of bizarre new information every day, and they
don't have the time or the tools to sort out what's real from what's blatant
fabrication. The world's gone too far—people's minds have been stretched too
far—and we have no idea what will set the next lunatic off. What'll you do if
we carry out this latest plan, and some anticorporate, antigovernment lunatic
in the States—and there are plenty of them—uses it as a rationalization to blow
up yet another federal building? Or something even bigger?" I paused and
then shifted gears, trying to direct the discussion away from the kind of moral
and political dialectic of which he was a master and focus it instead on my
very real concern for him and the others: "Besides, how long can you
really hope to get away with it? Look at how narrow our escape was this time
and what it cost us. You've got to consider something else, this isn't—"

I cut myself short when I saw his
hand go up slowly. "All right," he said, in a voice choked with
sorrow and regret. "All right, Gideon." He finally wheeled his chair
around, his head drooping so low that his chin nearly rested on his chest. When
he glanced up again, he still wouldn't connect with my gaze; but the grief in
his features was apparent and pitiful to behold. "I would have done
anything to prevent what happened to Leon," he said softly. "But
every one of us knows the risks—"

" 'Knows the risks'?
Malcolm, this isn't a war, for God's sake!"

At last those hypnotic yet
unsettling blue eyes met my own hard stare. "Isn't it?" he asked. He
began to reach around for the crutches that were clipped to the back of his
chair. "You think," he went on, his voice getting stronger,
"that this method of addressing the problem doesn't work." He fought
hard to get to his feet, and though I felt more of a desire to help than I ever
had before, I once again refrained. "You think that the world's illness
is beyond this sort of treatment. Fine." He took a few steps in my
direction. "What would you prescribe instead?"

I simply could not engage him on
this level, and I made that fact plain: "Malcolm, this isn't about
'illnesses' and 'prescriptions.' Civilization is going to do whatever it's
going to do, and if you keep trying to stand in the way you'll just create
more disasters. Maybe you're right, maybe this information society is taking us
into a high-tech dark age. But maybe it isn't. Maybe we just don't understand
it. Maybe Julien's wrong, and this isn't a 'threshold moment,' and maybe there
were people like us sitting in some scientifically advanced horse and carriage
when Gutenberg ran off his first Bible screaming, 'That's it! It's all over!' I
don't know. But the point is, neither do you. The only thing we
do
know
is that you
can't
stop change and you
won't
stop technology.
There's nothing in the past to suggest that it's possible."

As I was speaking, Malcolm
turned, almost with the slowness of a clock, to look out at the birds again.
"That's true," he murmured.

Ready as I was to argue on, his
statement came as a complete surprise. "It is?" I said a bit dimly.

Malcolm nodded. "Yes.
There's nothing in the past to suggest that it's possible—
yet."

As he roamed back over to the
window, I followed, suddenly feeling very nervous. "What do you mean, 'in
the past,
yet'?
Malcolm, you're not making sense."

As he attempted to explain
himself, Malcolm seemed to grow increasingly unaware of who I was or even that
there was anyone in the room with him; and the vacant brilliance that his eyes
took on as they stared at the similarly dazzling blue of the sky above the
ocean offered the first hint of real mental imbalance. "Suppose I were to
tell you," he said, "that through that room"—he indicated an
adjacent chamber in the direction of his lab—"and behind a certain very
thick door you'll find a device that may be able to redefine, even destroy,
both history and time, at least as we currently understand them. That in a very
short while it will be possible to move through our temporal continuum and
alter the past, so that 'history' will no longer be an unalterable
chronological record but a living laboratory in which we will conduct
experiments to improve the present condition of our planet and our
species."

Had it even occurred to me to
take this statement seriously, I might well have fallen over; as it was, I only
became steadily more convinced that the man's mind had snapped. "Listen,
Malcolm," I said, putting a hand to his shoulder. "Try to
understand—as a doctor it's incumbent on me to tell you that you've suffered a
breakdown. A potentially severe one. And given what we've all been through,
I'm not surprised. You have friends in Edinburgh, and no doubt they'll know of
hospital facilities we can use quietly. If you let me run some tests and
suggest a course of treatment—"

"You haven't answered my
question yet, Gideon," Malcolm said, his voice still betraying no emotion.

"Your question?" I
said. "Your question about roaming back and forth through time,
that
question?"

He shook his head slowly.
"Not back
and
forth. No one seriously believes that we can create
closed timelike curves that could allow a subject to move in one direction and
then return to the exact point from which he or she started. At this point it's
just not feasible."

"Oh, but going one way
is
?"

Malcolm ignored my sarcasm.
"The physical problem isn't particularly exotic or complex," he
said. "Like most things it's really just a question of
power—electromagnetic power. And the only conceivable way of generating such
power—"

"Would be
superconductors," I said with a sudden shudder, vaguely remembering an
article I'd read on the subject some months earlier. I looked to the floor,
still in a state of disbelief but for some reason quite shaky all the same.
"Highly miniaturized superconductors," I added, real apprehension beginning
to belie my dismissal of his words.

"Sounds familiar, doesn't
it?" Malcolm had increasing difficulty controlling his emotions as he went
on: "Imagine not being forced to accept the present that's been handed
down to us. Having instead the ability to engineer a different set of
historical determinants. You say that the contemporary world can't be helped by
the work we're doing now, Gideon, that it's beyond such remedies. Well, the
same thought began to occur to me over a year ago. But the answer, I saw,
wasn't to suspend what we were doing. We needed to adjust the work,
certainly—that was part of the reason we brought
you
in. But we had and
have to keep at it until the day comes when we can change the actual
circumstances of our present reality by modifying the past." He put a hand
to his head, obviously feeling the effects of the controlled but no less
extreme passion with which he had told me his tale. "That day isn't far
off, Gideon—not far off at all."

I sat back down in my chair. The
worst insanities often come in ostensibly rational forms; and I told myself
that such was the reason I had been momentarily uneasy, even credulous. I also
acknowledged that there was no way I could force him into the kind of serious
program of rest, medication, and psychotherapy that he clearly needed;
nevertheless, I made one final, weary attempt to reach him: