Millennium (16 page)

And when you want to be sure a job is done right, there is only one possible person you can send.

*    *    *

At the rate of two hundred years per hour, we had just over eight days to work on the problem. It was not a lot of time. On the other hand, it was enough that I felt I should use every advantage available to me. So instead of hopping through the Gate to the morning of December 12th and simply sifting through the rubble, I decided to take the time to get an education.

It was ten hours well spent.

What I did was undergo extensive data dumping into the three temporary cybernetic memories implanted in my brain. The BC took everything it had in storage concerning the twentieth century up to the early eighties and unloaded it into my cerebral microprocessors.

I shouldn’t make fun of the mental capacities of twentieth-century natives. They did the best they could with what they had. In five hundred centuries the human brain had evolved a little—I could learn a language the conventional way in about two days—but the qualitative change was not much. A good comparison might be the times clocked for running the mile. At one time four minutes seemed unreachable. Later, it was routine, and people were shooting for three and a half. But nobody was planning to do it in two seconds flat.

Still, traveling a mile in
one
second is no problem if you have the help of a jet engine.

In the same way, learning to speak Swahili in one minute or soaking up the contents of a library in an hour is no special trick if you have the appropriate data storage, sorting, and access facilities built into your head.

It’s a great tool. You learn to speak a language idiomatically, like a native, and you get a great deal of cultural context in which to speak it.

Those three tiny crystalline memories soaked up encyclopedias, news, movies, television shows, fads, fantasies, and fallacies with equal facility. When I was done I had the lore of a century at my fingertips. I could feel right at home in the 1980s.

Like any tool, the cyber-booster had its drawbacks. It was
better at language and facts than it was at pattern recognition. I still would not be able to look at a dress and
know
, as a native would, whether it came from 1968 or 1978. I could move through the twentieth century with reasonable assurance. If I stayed there very long I’d surely pull some anachronistic boner.

But what could happen in one hour?

*    *    *

It was a terrible day. It had been raining all night; the only good thing about the day was that the rain had finally stopped. But with it had gone the cloud cover and, worse, all that precipitation had washed most of the flavor out of the air. The sky was this great, thundering, alien
blue
, and about a billion miles away. The sun was so bright I couldn’t look at it without risking damage to my retinas. It was bad enough that the thing was showering me with unhealthy radiation; how could these people live with such an oppressive weight hanging over them? And the air was so bland and clear I could see Marin County.

Words are funny things. I realize I’ve just described what certainly was, to a 20th, a beautiful morning. Cool, crisp, clean air; lots of bright, healthy sunshine; so clear you can see forever.

So there I stood, gasping for breath, feeling naked beneath the awful sky.

The shortness of breath was ninety percent anxiety. Still, I felt a lot better after a few snorts from the Vicks inhaler I’d brought with me. If anybody else took a sniff from it they’d be most disagreeably surprised. The chemicals in it would kill roaches and discolor stainless steel.

The Gate had dumped me near the east side of the giant, steel hangar that was being used to receive the remains of the two aircraft. At least, that had been the theory. When I walked around to the front doors I found them open. Inside were two PSA 727’s and a lot of mechanics.

I didn’t like that at all. It meant disruption in the timeline. Glancing around, orienting myself, I saw the proper hangar about a quarter mile away.

That far in the other direction would have dropped me into
the Bay. And of course, there was always the
other
direction. I could have shown up a quarter of a mile
above
the field…

It was a long quarter mile. I felt like a bug on a plate. There was just this endless concrete, still damp from the night’s rain, and the infinite, awful sky. You’d think that after five hundred centuries we’d have developed a pill for agoraphobia.

*    *    *

One of the first things I saw when I got inside was two women dressed just like me. That was reassuring; it put me on familiar ground. I’d spent a lot of time blending in with other uniformed women. I studied them to see what they were doing, and it turned out to be wonderfully prosaic. The recovery workers had been working through the night, most of them without time to stop and grab a bite to eat. So United had sent some women over to serve coffee and donuts. Nothing could have been more in line with my experience. Snatching a commercial jetliner is ninety-nine percent serving coffee and one percent snatching.

I found the table where the coffeepot had been set up, exchanged a few pleasantries with the woman behind it. She was perfectly willing to accept me as what I seemed to be. I took a tray, arranged a dozen foam cups on it, filled them, grabbed a handful of those paper packets of sugar and nondairy creamer, and set off to serve.

Or at least to look like I was serving. I quickly saw that one woman could easily have handled the job United had given to three. That was no surprise—since the days of mud huts it’s been a rule that it always takes at least three to get something done: one to do it, one to supervise, and one to offer helpful suggestions. I’ve seen it in mammoth hunts in 40,000
B.C.
and I’ve seen it in interstellar spaceships. I’d have been in trouble but for another universal trait of humanity. If you look busy and seem to know what you’re doing, nobody is likely to bother you.

So I kept moving and looked very efficient. In the first twenty minutes I handed out one cup of coffee and almost disposed of a donut, but the guy thought better of it in the end. No doubt
after the things he’d seen that morning he was wondering if he’d ever eat again.

When I got a chance I would steal a look at my wristwatch. It was a Seiko digital this time, and no more genuine than the greenbacks in my purse. It contained an indicator that was supposed to home in on the energy leakage we’d seen coming from the damaged stunner.

Lanes had been left between the heaps of wreckage, some to them big enough to drive a truck through; literally—a stream of trucks was arriving from Livermore all the time I was there, and fifty or sixty men were constantly employed unloading them. Two or three men directed the distribution of the junk, which fell into several broad categories: airframe, powerplant, electronics, hydraulics, and so forth. There was an area for interior furnishings, most of which were the burned shells of seats.

There was a lot of gaily colored paper and foil, most of it charred around the edges. I had to consult my cybernet memories before I knew what it was: the remains of Christmas presents. I saw new clothes, some still in plastic wrappers, and other things I was pretty sure were gifts. There was one heap of things that could only have been children’s toys. It was all badly burned.

There was another area, the largest by far, where they had dumped a category of wreckage best defined as “?”.

It looked like it covered about an acre, and my Seiko said the stunner was in there.

The stuff was contained in big Hefty trash bags. Some of the bags had fallen on their sides and spilled their contents, and I’d have been hard pressed to determine what most of it was myself. It was even possible there were some bits of passengers in there. Obviously, the crews had walked over the site picking up everything that didn’t look as if it belonged in a cow pasture, and if they couldn’t tell what it was it had been dumped here for someone to go over later.

I counted a hundred bags and I wasn’t a quarter of the way through.

I tried to think of some plausible reason for me to go wading into the middle of that, breaking open bags and dumping the contents on the concrete floor and rooting around in them. I couldn’t think of a good reason. I still can’t. If I’d had ten people alone and five or six hours to search, I probably would have found it. What I had was thirty minutes, me myself and I, and a hundred and fifty people to provide an interested audience. (“What’re ya looking for, babe?” Souvenirs? Fingers with diamond rings on them? The most important object in the universe?)

“I could use some of that coffee.”

Coffee? Oh, right, I was here to pass out coffee, wasn’t I? I turned, with a carefully calculated smile on my face, and there he was.

Bill Smith. The star of the show.

Time is my stock in trade. I shouldn’t be surprised, by now, at the tricks it can play. But that moment was very much like another one, not much earlier, when a hijacker’s bullet had hit me in the shoulder. Time slowed down, and a moment became an eternity.

I remember fear. I was an actress, playing a part on a stage before the most important audience I would ever face, and I couldn’t remember my lines. I was an imposter: everyone could instantly see it, there was no escape from exposure. I was a pitiful freak hiding in a lying skinsuit, a monster from an unimaginable future. And the whole world hinged on this one man, and on what I did to or with him, and I was now expected to speak to him, offer him a cup of coffee, just as if he were an ordinary mortal.

At the same time, that’s just what he was. I knew Bill Smith: divorce, incipient ulcer, drinking problem, and all. I’d read his biography from the childhood in Ohio right through Naval flight school and carrier landings and commercial aviation and the job with Boeing and the gradual rise through the Safety Board and the early retirement and the boating accident that would kill him.

And that’s what hurt. I knew how this man was going to die. If I succeeded in my project, if I could turn the course of events back to what the timestream could tolerate, back to predestination, he would continue his slow decline. He would eat away at himself until his death would be a mercy.

For the first time, a goat had acquired a name and a history. And a lopsided, tired grin.

*    *    *

I turned, having looked at him for no more than a second, and started to walk away.

“Hey, how about that coffee?”

I walked faster. In no time I was almost running.

*    *    *

I’ve made other mistakes in my career with the Gate. I did other things badly. After I got the top job, everyone’s mistakes were my mistakes, in a sense. I will always bear a load for the mistake Pinky made, for instance. It meant I hadn’t trained her well enough.

But a special guilt attaches to that day, to that first trip back to correct the paradox, because I don’t know why I did what I did.

I ran out of the hangar and ran the quarter-mile to the place where the Gate had dropped me. I cowered there beneath that hateful sky until the Gate appeared again on schedule and I stepped through.

Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.

That first meeting was the one and only chance I’d ever have to cut the paradox knot cleanly, right at the source, and I bungled it. Do I mention predestination to excuse my failure, or did inexorable fate really grab me like a marionette and frogmarch me through the stations of some cosmic ritual?

Sometimes I wish I’d never been born.

*    *    *

Then again, you have to be born to wish such a thing. And if I flubbed again as badly as I did the first time, that’s exactly the situation we’d all be facing. Never-born, never-lived, never
having tasted either success or failure. Bad as it is, my life is my own, and I accept it without reservation.

I returned with my sense of determination intact. We’d never expected this first trip to show much result; it was simply the direct approach, and the only one that could stop the paradox completely. Now we’d try more subtle avenues. Now we’d start the war of containment. Our goal would be to confine the paradox to limits the universe could withstand—we’d seal it off, encapsulate it, turn events gently back toward what they should have been, and, though the timeline might vibrate like a plucked guitar string eight billion years long, pray that its fundamental elasticity would eventually prevail.

“It’s like stuffing neutrons back into a critical mass of uranium,” Martin Coventry said.

“Fine,” I said. “You’ve got a machine that will do that, don’t you? Let’s start stuffing.”

“I think he was speaking in twentieth-century terms,” Sherman said.

That’s right. Sherman.

I glared at him. Apparently I didn’t have enough odd things in my life. Now my robot had started to act funny.

He had been there when I came back through the Gate, smiling and looking a bit guilty. Both of those things are hard to do without a face, so he had grown one for the occasion. His presence there was bad enough. So far as I knew, he’d never been out of the apartment since I uncrated him. But the face was utterly impossible.

Now the three of us were closeted in a room just off the operations level, discussing the shambles of the first trip. Lawrence was also present, via two-way remote, and I suspect somebody from the Council might have been listening in through the BC.

Three
of us! That shows how much Sherman had shaken me. Before, I’d no more have counted Sherman in our number than I would a chair or a table.

“I think Louise is right,” Lawrence said. I looked at his image
in the vidscreen. “We shouldn’t make too much of this. The thing to do is move on to the next phase.”

“I’m afraid too much damage has already been done,” said Martin. He really looked scared. His man-of-action phase had apparently faded; he was once again the cautious historian—worse, a
practical
historian, with the terrifying capability to write his own history.

“What damage?” I wanted to know. “Okay, I didn’t get what I went back for. We didn’t estimate my chances were very good even before I went.”