Millennium (4 page)

To hell with them.

I got a few withering looks. They don’t care much for walkies, either.

There was something new behind the Operations Controller’s console. It was Lawrence Calcutta-Benares. Yesterday he’d been in the deputy’s chair, and five years before he’d been my team leader. There was no point in asking what had become of Marybeth Metz. Time flies.

I said, “What’s up?”

“We had an indication of a twonky developing,” he said, with deplorable grammar. A twonky used to mean some anachronistic object left behind during a snatch, but lately people had begun using the word to refer to the paradox situation that object tended to generate.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said. “Still, we thought you should be notified.” It’s a shame how a good team leader can degenerate into a slackbrain. I should have had the whole situation by then, and there he sat, trying to draw me into a fuggin’ conversation.

“Shortly after the twonky alarm, one of your girls lost her stunner on the plane.”

“Lawrence, are you going to dribble this story out over the next three days, or are you going to tell it to me and let me
do
something about it?”
Stop doddering, you ancient bag of shit.

I didn’t have to say that last part aloud. He got it. I could see his so-called face icing over. The poor bastard just wanted to talk. He thought he was still my friend. Well, boo-hoo. This was his first day dealing directly with walkies, and it was about time he learned how we felt about each other. I didn’t take this job to win the Miss Congeniality award.

He became all business, which is just what I had intended.

“The snatch is to 1955 Arizona. A Lockheed Constellation.
It still has about twenty minutes, 55time, and then it’s going to lose most of its right wing. All the team is still aboard. They’re looking for the gun and trying to finish the snatch at the same time. Indications from the scanners are still inconclusive. We can’t tell if you’ll find it. It might be possible.”

I thought briefly of the period jokes inherent in losing one’s right wing over Arizona, then shoved it out of my mind.

“Give me the bridge, then,” I said. “I’m going back.”

He didn’t argue, though he might have. It’s a breach of temporal security to send somebody back who’s not replacing somebody else. I suspect he wouldn’t have minded if I rode it down and bought myself a piece of Arizona real estate. For whatever reason, he gave the order. One of his scurvy underlings played with his buttons and the bridge moved out over the sorting floor. I slammed through the door and out onto it, ten meters above the shouts and screams and curses of the passengers who’d already come through from 1955. They would be the first-class people. There is a special indignant quality to their shouts. They had paid the extra fee, and now
this.
I shall write my congressman, Cecily, really I shall.

I paused at the end of the bridge where it touched the narrow strip of floor that ended in the uptime side of the Gate. I always do. I’ve gone through the damn thing a thousand times, but it’s not something one ever does lightly. Down below me, somebody was demanding to speak to the stewardess. No kidding. He really was.

The poor fellow thought he had problems.

*    *    *

In the twentieth century people used to jump out of airplanes with silk canopies folded into packs on their backs. The canopies were called parachutes, and what they did was—theoretically—open up and retard one’s fall to the ground. They did this for fun. It was called skydiving, aptly enough.

Trying to understand how somebody who could expect to live seventy
years
would take that sort of chance—with a body the contemporary medicine men could heal only imperfectly or not
at all—how, in spite of that, they could take that first step out the door of the plane, helped me some in dealing with the trip through the Gate. Not that I ever understood why those people jumped: 20ths don’t have the brains of a sow, that’s well known. But even
they
didn’t actually enjoy it. What they did was sublimate the universal fear of falling into another part of the brain: the part that laughs. Laughter is an interrupted defense mechanism. They’d interrupt their fear of falling so well they could pretend to themselves that jumping out of an airplane was fun.

With all that, I’m convinced that even the most experienced of them had to hesitate at the door. They might have done it so many times they no longer noticed it, but it was there.

It’s the same way with me. Nobody watching would have seen me break stride as I came to the end of the bridge and stepped into the Gate. But that moment of gut-clutching fear was there.

The trip through the Gate is different every time. It is instantaneous, and it’s plenty of time to go insane. It is a zone of simultaneity where I become, for a time too short to measure or remember and too long to endure, all things that have ever been. I encounter myself in the Gate. I create myself, then create the universe and emerge into my creation. I fall downtime to the beginning of the universe and then bounce back to a time elsewhen. That time turns out to be the dead past, come alive again, reanimated for me and the snatch team.

I could devote a billion words to the experience of stepping through the Gate and not come close to the actuality.

At the same time, what happened is that I stepped through. Simple. One foot in the dead future, the other in the living past (with my ass on the line: one cheek in the land of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the other in the Last Age—or my face in the fifties and my fanny in Tomorrowland).

Those two feet of mine were connected by legs. Yet they were some thousands of miles apart in space and billions of years apart in time.

One of the feet was not even my own, but that’s neither here nor there.

I shall simply say I stepped through. It should be taken to mean I went through a terrifying ordeal that I had become used to, to the point that I managed to convince myself it was routine.

I stepped through the Gate.

I emerged in the lavatory of the Lockheed Constellation in 1955, and immediately had to duck as two members of the snatch team threw a screaming woman over my head. Her scream cut off when her head went through the Gate. It would finish in the far future, and by then it would probably be a dilly. The situation was simply not going to make sense to the poor dear.
Greetings! Your descendants are proud to welcome you to Utopia!

I stepped out of the lav as two more snatchers dragged a bulky man in a torn gray suit toward the door. He struggled feebly; probably stunned at low power. It didn’t take long to see not much was going right with this snatch. For one thing, the passengers were rebelling.

Of course, we expect hysteria, eventually. No snatch is going to come off without some screaming and the involuntary release of a few pints of urine. If I got snatched, I’d probably piss, too.

But it struck me that the mayhem stage of this snatch had arrived ahead of schedule. There were still too many conscious goats against a handful of snatchers.

It was easy to distinguish the snatch team members from the goats. The snatchers were all dressed like stewardesses. In 1955, on this airline, that meant pert little caps and skirts reaching halfway between knees and ankles and precarious, high-heeled shoes.

They also wore blood-red lipstick. They looked like vampires.

1955. I had to take their word for it. When you’ve been to as many times as I have the styles blur. They
all
look weird. But I had no reason to doubt the date. Outside, down below us in the world, cars were sprouting tail fins. Chuck Berry was recording “Maybellene.” Phil Silvers and Ed Sullivan were on the vidscreens, which were being called television sets. Nashua would win the Preakness this year, and the Brooklyn Dodgers would win the World Series. I could have been a rich woman in 1955
if I could have found a way to get a bet down. Tomorrow’s newspapers, for instance:
Constellation Crashes in Arizona Desert…

Wanna bet?

But this little section of 1955 was not a healthy place to be. Even without the chaos the snatch operation had become, this airplane did not have much flying time left.

I shook my head to clear it. Sometimes that works. I get vague for a few seconds after a trip through the Gate. I forced myself to concentrate on what needed doing this second, and the next, and the next…

Jane Birmingham was hurrying down the aisle. I snagged her arm. Things were falling apart around her and I guess the last thing she needed was to have the boss show up to joggle her elbow.

“It’s a mess back there,” she said, gesturing to the curtain separating first-class from tourist. I heard shouts and the sounds of a struggle.

“We were shorthanded when we went in on them,” Jane was still explaining. “Pinky discovered her gun was missing not too long after we took off. We tried to locate it quietly; didn’t work. I had to start the snatch. I let Pinky look while we started caulking the folks up front.” She looked away from me, then dragged her eyes back. “I know I shouldn’t have done that, but—”

I waved it away.

“We’ll sort it out later,” I said.

“I don’t know what went wrong from there. Shorthanded, I guess. Plus, we were all on edge. When we faced them down a fight got going. Kate’s down and out. Some big bastard got past—”

“Never mind. Toss her out with the goats.”

There was no way to tell for sure what started the brawl. I’d been on snatches where the goats got out of hand. It’s a surreal experience, pointing a weapon at a twentieth-century native and telling him what you’re going to make him do. Some 20ths have no more sense of survival than a stalk of broccoli. They’ll walk
right into a gun. They don’t believe death can happen to them, especially the young ones.

Then there are their odd political ideas. They are often obsessed with the explanation they “deserve,” the things they have a “right” to, the decent treatment we “owe” them.

Very weird stuff. Me, I’ll do anything somebody with a gun tells me to do, and say please and thank you. And kill him instantly if he gives me a chance.

“How many are still awake back there?” I asked.

“When I left, maybe twenty.”

“Get ’em to work, quick. Where’s Pinky?”

“Tearing up the seats in tourist.”

I followed her back. Things had quieted a little. There were maybe a dozen passengers still awake, forty or fifty snoozing in uncomfortable positions. Lilly Rangoon and another woman whose name I couldn’t recall were facing the conscious ones, who huddled in the back of the plane. I could smell their fear. The two snatchers were facing them, one on each side of the aisle, stunners held in two hands and steadied on seat backs.

“Okay, folks,” Lilly bawled in a voice like a drill sergeant. “I want you to shut the fuck up. Calm down and
listen! You
, shit-head, pipe down before I cram my foot up your ass sideways. Is that your wife, mister? You got two seconds to shut her fucking mouth before I blow you both away. One…that’s better.

“
Now.
These people are not injured. They’re alive. Look at ’em and you’ll see they’re breathing. They can even hear us. But I can
kill
with this weapon, and I promise you I’ll snuff the first son of a bitch that gets out of line.

“You are in
great danger.

“You will all
die
if you do not do
exactly as I say.

“Each of you grab the nearest unconscious person and drag him toward the front of the plane. When you get there, the stewardess will tell you what to do. You have no time to waste. If you move too slowly, I’ll show you what else I can do with this weapon.”

She got them moving, with a few more shouts and obscenities.
That’s one of the main things we study when we bone up on a culture: what words will shock the hell out of ’em. In the twentieth century, it was mostly intercourse and excrement.

The other ability of the stunner that Lilly hinted at is to function rather like a cattle prod, but at a distance. It hurts but does not incapacitate. It works best when aimed at the soft, sensitive flesh between the legs—even better when delivered from behind. Lilly prodded a couple of them and they got the idea real fast, for 20ths.

I heard all this going on in the background. What I was doing was ripping up the seats in the front rows of tourist section. Pinky was across the aisle from me, doing the same thing. I don’t think she was aware she was crying. She worked steadily, monomaniacally.

She was rational. She was doing her job.

She was also scared spitless.

“You’re sure it’s on the plane?” I called across the aisle.

“I’m sure. I saw it in my purse after I got on.”

She had to think that, since there was nothing to be done if it was on the ground in whatever city this flight had come from. But she was probably right. My people seldom fall apart during an operation, not even if things have become hopeless. If she said she saw it after she got on the plane, then she saw it. Which meant we could find it.

While we looked, the conscious goats were busy dragging the sleeping goats to the front of the plane. When they got there somebody was directing them to toss their loads through the Gate and go back for more. It quickly became a routine. They huffed and they puffed, but there’s hardly anything stronger than a 20th. They abuse their bodies, drink, smoke too much, don’t exercise, let the flab build up, and they think they’re worn out after they’ve licked a postage stamp. But they’ve got muscles like horses—and the brains to match. It’s amazing the physical feats they can do if we push them hard enough.

There was one guy pulling his share of the load, and I swear he must have been fifty years old.

Jesus!
Fifty!

The plane was soon emptied. As each walker carried his last body to the Gate he was shoved through himself. Then there was only the snatch team. Even the pilots had been caulked this time. We really hate to do that, and we usually can’t. One of my people was flying now. If she didn’t do exactly what the pilot would have done the plane would come down miles from where it ought to. However, this one was on autopilot and would remain so until the explosion in the engine. There was not going to be anything the pilot could have done (if you can thrash your way through that thicket of verb tenses) to alter anything once that wing fell off.