The Dance, page 18
“Gwen gets a little upset when people point that out.”
“Suit up!”
Hauptmann’s voice boomed out of the loudspeakers.
“We’ve got a big load coming in!”
Douglas had been at the Museum long enough to notice that whenever some really turbulent and extreme phenomena rolled into the Scoop, none of the senior analysts seemed to be around.
“Less than three minutes…”
Sure enough, Christine and Gwen were suddenly not around.
“Come on, folks!” Hauptmann was starting to sound pissed.
Douglas got up, pulled on an insulated lab coat and grabbed his Tandy.
His glasses were fogging up before he was even halfway to the entrance of the Beast.
This was going to be one very cold event.
– So open it.
– More printed matter. A book.
– Anything interesting?
– Don’t know. Paperback. The Handmaid’s Tale.
Once you got inside the Big Show, you knew why they called it the Beast.
Or rather the Belly of the Beast.
Because you were in the middle of things, you got bounced around a lot (like you were being chewed and digested), and it was certainly very loud.
It was also pretty confusing on the first dozen or so retrieval runs.
There was a lot of lightning inside the Show that was (usually) pretty harmless, and that often sent all kinds of sensory spikes and flares out all around you. Also, the cold was going to fog up your glasses and that made it hard to see what was going on.
Douglas supposed that it was indeed true that you could get used to just about anything because, like all the other analysts, he was eventually able to identify patterns in all those sparking occurrences, and he even managed to use his Model 100 to tag different objects coming down the time streams.
Even though Douglas knew that he was helping people who didn’t like him very much, he couldn’t help but feel satisfied whenever they managed to snare something.
“Come out here!” Hauptmann yelling again.
The Event must be dying down.
Douglas had scored six artefacts. All paleo stuff. Rare.
If it had been Gwen or Christine or any other of the more senior analysts coming back with six paleo-loads, more of a fuss would have been made. Maybe even something like what approached congratulations in this miserable place.
But nobody even acknowledged Douglas as he emerged from The Beast. Of course he rarely collected as much stuff as the more senior personnel, but that was because they only went in for the easy runs. First crack of lightning, they’d be out and Douglas would be in.
Douglas almost convinced himself that none of this mattered as he brushed off his coat and walked towards his terminal.
– Handmaid’s Tale? Never heard of it.
– It’s warming up now.
– It’s still a book.
– Same author, new title.
– False Marriage, True Love.
– Harlequin, eh?
Some mornings the mundane becomes transcendent.
The Reference Library didn’t open until noon on Sundays, so the potential patrons (many of whom wore that half-hungry/half-inspired expression of the yet-unbroken graduate student that Douglas recognized so well) were all clustered around the main entrance. There could have been over a hundred of them. Clearly, recent efforts to starve out the intellectual class had not yet succeeded.
When the security guards slid open the glass doors (ten minutes late, of course), everyone stopped talking, finished their coffee and cigarettes and started to file inside. It was like they were part of some telepathic hive mind.
The Library stacks were distributed over six floors; this made the collective choreography of data acquisition quite magnificent. Only a few patrons opted to use the Great Glass Elevator located at the near end of the vast atrium, the remainder started slowly walking up the grand winding staircase that led to Social Sciences, Business Opportunities, Humanities, Performing Arts... and more.
During this procession, Douglas listened to Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” on his Walkman. When he looked around, it felt as though he was a part of a massive assembly of angels gently ascending into Gutenberg Heaven.
Yeah, yeah, Douglas thought as he marched up the carpeted steps, I’m making too much of this. Still, the reason for today’s trip was hardly routine.
Level Four.
Douglas turned left off the staircase, and there she was. Sitting at the table across from one of the microfiche readers. She was wearing the agreed-on identifier: A Howard the Duck t-shirt. Good signal. Nobody wore Howard the Duck stuff anymore.
This must be “Rachel” from the Secret Society of Super Villains.
Douglas was wearing a replica No. 2 badge from that TV show about the guy who was stuck on a permanent vacation.
“Rachel?”
“Douglas?”
He sat down. “What does the Secret Society of Super Villains want to talk to me about?”
“You have access to the Beast, right?”
“Beast? The animals are at the Zoo, not the Museum.”
She rolled her eyes. “We know you have a terrible work record, Douglas.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“But you are smart and they desperately need someone like you to get into the Beast.”
Douglas caught himself smiling. Hell! She’d smoked him out through a flattery sneak-attack.
Rachel reached into a large Something that Douglas wasn’t sure was a purse or a backpack or a fabric container for transporting bazooka shells and entrenching tools.
“The Society needs your help.”
She removed a large binder and a shoebox and placed them on the table.
“My help? How?”
“Do you own a videotape player, Douglas?”
“No.” Those suckers were expensive.
Rachel pushed the objects towards Douglas.
“Rent one. VHS format, not Beta-max.”
Douglas opened the binder. It was full of newspaper clippings, photographs, some crazy complicated diagrams and lots of dot-matrix type.
“Why would I want to help this Secret Society?”
“They don’t like you much at the Museum, do they?”
Douglas frowned. “Why would you think that?”
“Nobody likes you very much.” Rachel shrugged. “It’s a sign of character.”
“Okay...”
“The Society is hoping that, in turn, you don’t like the people at the Museum very much.” Rachel slung the huge zippered sack over her shoulder. “One thing you should think about when you look over all this material.”
“What’s that?”
“You know that new documentary series about the War in Vietnam? On PBS?”
“I guess?”
So the Secret Society of Super-Villians was just some anti-war crowd? What did they want him to do? Distribute “Refuse the Cruise” petitions around the Museum cafeteria? Lame.
“There’s a line they use in the ads for the show.”
“There is?” Douglas supposed he could look for them after Doctor Who.
“Some people are unhappy with the show; but it isn’t certain if they are unhappy with this account of history or if they’re just unhappy with history.”
The videotapes inside the shoebox were pretty interesting.
Two episodes labelled as Season Five of Star Trek. Then there was something a little more recent from something called the NBC Blue Network which looked like a documentary about the death of a supermodel named Margaret Trudeau; finally, there were highlights of the 1980 Presidential Election results. Douglas was a little surprised when Cronkite announced that Carter won.
Then, Douglas looked back into shoebox. In less than five minutes, all the tapes had turned into old episodes of Family Ties.
– So you were able to connect the equipment?
– Not a problem.
– Got the image captures?
Douglas had just finished rolling the elastic bands around his latest shoebox when he heard the alarms.
They must be on to me, thought Douglas. Just a matter of time, he supposed. Douglas did what he had always done when he was stealing artefacts: check that the elastics were holding the shoebox shut, zip it into his backpack and put the whole thing into his locker. Panic never helps.
The alarm was still blaring away. Douglas heard a few dozen pairs of boots racing up and down the corridor. For some reason, none of those boot-wearers had decided to enter the change room.
Whatever.
If those morons wanted him, they were going to have to make the effort and come and get him. Douglas didn’t see why he had to make any of this easy for them. He spun the dial on the padlock and headed towards the exit. Maybe this Purloined Letter method was going to hold up after all. As a contractor, i.e. “outsider,” it annoyed the silo-dwellers to pay too much attention to him. If any of the security staff actually asked to look inside his backpack when he was making his way towards the bicycle rack, they’d just see the shoebox and would conclude he’d been to the J.C. Penny and bought a pair of Pumas on his lunch hour.
Whereupon the staffers would make some snarky remark about how the Museum must be paying him too much and go back to ignoring him.
“Douglas Mace!” The alarm was interrupted by Hauptmann’s voice bellowing over the PA system: “Stop whatever you’re doing! Right! Now!”
Oh well, Douglas thought, I never really liked this job anyway. Being in jail or dead might be a drag.
“Go to the Beast!” That was not the message that Douglas was expecting.
“You are needed!”
Wow. Things must be pretty dire. No staffer would ever say something like that under normal circumstances. The alarm went back on, and Douglas had to sidestep to avoid colliding with some custodians in gas-masks pushing cleaning trolleys at high speed.
– What’s in today’s shoebox?
– Something different.
– Different time period? Past? Future?
– Present.
The Beast had looked better.
Something had ripped a huge hole in the corrugated door and apparently vomited a moderately-sized mountain of ice and blood all over the concrete floor.
“Grab a mop!” Hauptmann had spotted him. His boss was standing at the other side of the chamber and holding a megaphone.
Of course, thought Douglas. I am absolutely essential. For menial work. He picked up a mop from one of the trolleys. At least I’m not handcuffed or dead or tortured or something else horrible.
The custodians had already started in on the floor with their brooms and sponges. They were decked out in plastic parkas and translucent hazmat hoods.
Of course, no protective gear for me, thought Douglas. He buttoned up his shirt and wrapped a towel from the trolley around his head.
“Keep sweeping!” Hauptmann kept on calling directions: “Put the clean ice fragments into the blue buckets.”
After six years of graduate studies, Douglas figured he might be able to manage that.
“Anything that looks like it might be a specimen, an artefact, or a piece of an artefact, sweep into a green bucket.”
Douglas looked up and caught a glimpse through a big hole in the door. There was a long, ragged crack bisecting one of the Scoop’s capture domes. A whole lot of time-debris could get spilled out of that crack.
“… And watch carefully… ”
Douglas saw a few dark bits on the floor and wondered if he might be able to snag a few more specimens for today’s shoebox shipment.
“… for anything that might be a body part.”
Body part?
“… Those go in the covered yellow bins.”
Yuck.
Maybe this wasn’t a good time to swipe stuff.
After a few minutes, Douglas uncovered a couple of frosted fingers and an ankle that was still attached to the heel of a shoe.
After dropping it in the bin, he almost stepped on something round and sort of angular. Roughly crescent shaped. Looking closer, Douglas noted that the object was opaque, almost transparent; and streaked with tiny blue fissures.
He couldn’t be certain, but he was fairly sure that he was holding a piece of Gwen’s face.
– Is that why it’s so stable?
– Seems so, doesn’t it?
– Okay, I’ll bite. What is it and why are we looking at it?
Hauptmann had a bottle of scotch sitting on his desk.
There was just one glass in the room, and the Chief Curator was drinking from it.
Hauptman drank deep and gestured at Douglas.
Douglas sat.
Hauptmann refilled his glass. “We lost Gwen, Christine and Graham today.”
The old man pushed some mimeographed pages across the desk.
“We need you to sign an agreement form for double shifts on weekdays until we get back to full staff levels.”
Douglas picked up one of the pages. It was indeed a form with lots of words and punctuation and a line for his signature.
“So what happened?”
His boss drank some more and replied: “We were doing some broad range scans of the southwest regions. We were seeing if we could weed out some archaeological sites in advance of future development.”
“Development as in condos and roadworks?” asked Douglas.
“Looked like any easy run.”
Of course it looked like an easy run. Douglas kept his face as immobile as possible. If you’d thought it was going to be a rough scoop, then Gwen would have been picking my face off of the concrete.
“Tragic.” Douglas couldn’t think of anything else appropriate to say.
Hauptmann sighed. “I just heard from Discher that we just got approval for our research reactor. They want to go ahead with Phase II right away.” Hauptmann shrugged. “Not that I’m likely to see it happen.”
“So, what are they saying caused the accident?” Once they fixed the Scoop, Douglas would be the only one trained to do retrieval runs, and he was interested to know if he would be getting killed anytime soon.
Hauptmann slapped the pile of print-outs on his desk. “They checked the computer files and say that the system was gradually going out of calibration for the last few months.” The Chief Curator chewed on his knuckle for a moment. “Since we weren’t picking this up and correcting the dome dynamics, the pressure levels got too high and broke it open.”
“How is that possible?” Douglas hoped he didn’t sound too insincere when he asked this question because he had a pretty good idea what booted the pressure up. All his unauthorized collecting on the runs. He hadn’t adjusted the system calibrations.
“It’s not fucking possible.” Hauptmann refilled his glass. “Not on my watch.”
Sure it is, boss, thought Douglas. Sure it is.
– So what is it?
– Control component from the Beast.
– No way!
– Way!
– They’re tooling up for Phase II and threw this one out.
– We can extrapolate a lot of useful data from this thing. I have something else for you.
– What is it?
– Information. I can tell you what Phase II is.
Douglas was back in Discher’s office.
“So, on top of the additional shifts, the Museum will need you to put in some extra hours to train new retriever team members…”
“That’s a lot,” Douglas said quietly.
“… We’re going to do a lot of hiring as the new reactors come on board.”
“What are you offering in terms of compensation?”
“You’re paid what you’re paid, Mace.”
“My understanding is that with increased workload and responsibility comes increased payment.”
“You know…” Discher narrowed his eyes. Douglas found the effect more comic than menacing. “… we could have you imprisoned…”
The man was just pathetic.
“You could even get some big guys to hold me down and saw my head off,” replied Douglas. “But that would make it hard to train all those new people you need.”
Both ends of Discher’s mouth were trying very hard to point upward.
“What do you want?”
“Full benefits and staff status.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Also…”
“Also?”
“I want Hauptmann’s job.”
– So you’ve got Phase I pegged.
– We do?
– Adjustment of the timeline to make it conform to a specific set of beliefs and values.
– Ideologies. Yeah, we told you that.
– Phase II is much more ambitious. Which is why they need all those new scoops and reactors.
– You’re not making sense.
– That’s because Phase II is a nonsensical plan.
– Nonsensical?
– Bubble World.
– As in baby bubble universes?
– They want to create multiple timelines.
– Why? Wouldn’t that take incredible amounts of energy?
– Like-minded persons can buy a ticket for the timeline of their preference and live in their own bubble-reality.
– Your very own ideological zone.
– Makes sense. In a completely insane sort of way.
– It’s not just turning the universe into a multiverse... it’s spinning all those realities into an infinite number of pretzels and twisting them all around each other.
– Quite the cosmological fustercluck.
– And you need vast amounts of energy to do that.
– Again, hence the reactors, and the scoops are at a powerful leverage point.
– But making temporal changes of that magnitude, it might change basic physical laws—ouch!
– Are you okay?
– The unit feels like it’s getting warmer.
