Time Travel Omnibus, page 676
“You feel compelled,” I said. “All right. But don’t you see that it’s just a delusion? You’ve been under tremendous stress. You’ve escaped from a terrible situation. You find yourself holding unbelievable knowledge and power. You’re alone, isolated, cut off. Nobody could blame you for going just a little crazy, for trying to give up all responsibility for your actions. But that doesn’t make it any the less a delusion.”
The gun seemed to waver in his hand.
“You can stop, Reeve,” I said. “If that’s your name. You can step right off this crazy conveyor belt that’s going to deliver you right back where you started from.”
“Paradox,” he said. “It would be a paradox. Like killing my own grandfather. I have to follow the script. The economy has to collapse.”
“Maybe it will collapse without you,” I said. “Who the hell knows? It’ll work out one way or another. But you don’t have to have any part of it.”
“I have to publish the letter,” he said. “I have to invest. I have to have money to escape the collapse. I can’t just sit around and wait for it to happen. I have to be prepared. Prepared.”
“You don’t,” I said. “You don’t have to do any of those things.”
“No,” he said. He shook his head vigorously. “No. Advances in strategic metals. Disasterous coffee crop. Changes in world microclimate. Pollution of fisheries. Opportunities in orange juice futures. Middle eastern war. Assassination . . . No.”
He was decompensating before my eyes, and I wasn’t sure that it was going to be any improvement. It wasn’t a great moment to make my move, but I was unlikely to have a better one.
I threw the microfiche box into his face, and dived at his legs as he raised a hand to ward it off. it was not a great tackle, but it was enough to bring him down. We struggled. I tried to pin the arm with the gun to the floor and he tried to point it up at me. The gun went off and blew a hole out of the plaster in the ceiling. I got a better grip on his hand, forcing the gun downward. The gun went off again and blew a hole in his chest.
I thought about calling the police. I did not think about it for very long. There was a reasonable chance that I would get out of any criminal charges, except perhaps breaking-and-entering. There was a fainter chance that I could keep my license when I got back home. But that was all almost beside the point. There was dynamite in Reeve’s filing cabinets, and I had to get rid of it before it blew up the world.
There was a working fireplace in the living room. I started to carry the microfilm boxes in and pile them on to the grate. It took me half an hour to transfer them all. The last one to go was the reel in the microfilm viewer. It was set up with next month’s news.
I realized that the police had not arrived of their own accord. Obviously no one had heard the shots, or no one had thought enough of them to report them.
I realized also that I had failed to start the fire. I could have already destroyed most of the stuff. I had taken a real risk of being interrupted before I got around to starting the blaze. I cursed softly, and knelt to light a match.
The matches wouldn’t light. I pawed my pockets for more. I had none.
I went into the kitchen. No matches. I turned on the electric burner on the stove and lit a rolled up piece of newspaper. I carried my torch into the living room and knelt again in front of the fireplace. And froze.
When the paper began to bum my fingers I dropped it on the tiles and stamped it out.
I picked the top spool off the pile and walked back into the office. Reeve was still lying on the floor. I ignored him: there would be time to dispose of him later—plenty of time before I left for Edmonton. Or rather, I told myself, New York.
I put the spool in the viewer and turned the machine on. I scanned forward to the first business page and began to take notes.
Dawn was breaking when I sat down at the desk and began to write.
“Interesting opportunities are developing in the long term bond market,” I wrote. “Expect the Federal Reserve to loosen controls on the money supply, sparking an upward movement in. . . .”
And later, “Sincerely Yours, Reeve.”
Snow flurries were developing outside my window. It would be a lot warmer in Greece.
COMING BACK
Damien Broderick
Yes, by now he admits that Jennifer is not deliberately driving him crazy. Quit laying it on her, Rostow chides himself. His Bastilled lunacy is self-evidently self-inflicted. There can be no doubt, as Tania had always insisted, that his is a personality gruesomely at risk, pumping through spasms of mania and depression, elation and reproach. As he glances up, the bulwarks of censure shear free of their hinges. The three coil techs, finishing up, share his appreciation with ogles and grins.
Descending the worn rubber treads of the catwalk, its nonmagnetic structure faintly creaking and spronging in ludicrous counterpoint, Jennifer’s legs are golden with undepilated summer hairs. Certainly he will lose his reason. It is her innocent, unconscious hauteur that propels Rostow’s intolerable aspirations.
Who would believe that less than three weeks ago, governed by hard liquor and soft drugs, his hands had crept like pussycats over those shins, pounced past her knees to her thighs and beyond, while all the while dexterous Auberon Mountbatten Singh, D.Sc., coolly worked at the far end of her torso with mysterious expertise, soothing her brow, the edges of her jaw, the latent weakness at her throat, the revealed swell of her breasts? Even at this moment Rostow can scarcely credit his role in that maniacal and tasteless contest. Was it a contest? As she steps from the catwalk to her computer terminal, Rostow groans at an ambiguity only he perceives.
If even once she took stock; fixed him with, say, a single killing glance of rebuke and rejection . . . that would put an end to it. He might flail himself definitively and be done. Instead, she moves with languid competence in his marginal survival spaces like a neutrino beam wafting through a mountain of solid lead.
“Hi,” she offers, settling herself in a molded seat. Her gaze penetrates him for an instant, moving after a beat to her keyboard. “Stan’s on his way with the entire entourage. I spied.”
“Jambo,” says Rostow. It’s all there, bolted into his larynx. Dutifully he runs the coded sequence of knobs and toggles which shunts the system from Latent to Standby. He nods to the departing technicians. There is a Parkinsonian tremor in his stupid fingers. “Pouring spirits down their throats, I guess. Softening them up.”
Neat square indicators simmer vividly as the control instrumentation, swift bleats from his console to hers and back, patch into readiness. “This little number should sober them,” she observes. “ ‘Jambo’ ?”
“Swahili for ‘Hello, sailor.’ ” A thread of mush in his voice and his brain tells his ear that the inflection was wrong. I blew it. Every time I blow it. With a mental fist he clouts his forehead. There is no time for limping second guesses. Stan Donaldson’s abrasive voice precedes the man by half a second as the door swings wide for the expensive feet of the Board of Directors.
“We acquired it from Princeton, Senator,” the department head is saying. “ERDA paid out a quarter of a billion dollars for a Tokamak Fusion Test reactor that was obsoleted overnight when Sandia secured sustained fusion by inertial confinement.”
It seems to Rostow, squinting from the side of his eye and jittery with alarm, that this approach is a mistake. The senator is notorious for his loathing of costly obsolescence. Uh-huh. Buonacelli halts in midstride, pokes a finger into Donaldson’s chubby chest. “Another sonofabitch Ivy League boondoggle. By the Lord, that’s the kind of crap I won’t abide.”
Donaldson stands his ground. His own rasp is melodic after the senator’s gravel hurtling from a tip-truck.
“Their blunder was our good fortune, sir,” he says. “They were going to haul off the toroidal coils for recycling, but I managed to have them diverted to this laboratory. Everything is surplus or off-the-shelf. It made for a considerable saving.”
Somewhat mollified, Buonacelli pushes forward to loom over Jennifer Barton’s supervisor terminal, his minnows in attendance. “I’m still god-damned if I know what your magnets are for. Come straight out with it, man. The trustees won’t be slow to scrap any project that smacks of self-indulgent tinkering.” The set of his agribiz frame shows approval of Jennifer at least. “Convince us, and fast. This is the third department we’ve been dragged through today, and my feet are killing me.”
“Miss Barton, could you fetch the senator a chair?”
Incredulous on her behalf, Rostow burns. Buonacelli holds the woman’s biceps as she rises. “That’s fine, honey, I’ll stand.” An arm goes around her shoulders in a friendly squeeze nobody in his right mind could construe as avuncular. Eddie Rostow damages his tooth enamel. “Don’t bother buttering me up, Dr Donaldson. Let’s get straight to the meat. What does this pile of junk do? Why do you deserve more megabucks?”
Rostow’s chagrin buckles to delight as Stan’s moist, unhealthy jowls darken. No doubt this will be the third or fourth time Donaldson has tried to explain the advanced-wave mirror to the accountants. Probably, Eddie decides, Buonacelli is just baiting him. The old bastard might know zilch about high-energy physics, but he’s nobody’s fool.
There again, it would serve Donaldson right if they haven’t followed a word he’s been saying. The man revels in pretentious jargon. Rostow hears a scurry of furry feet in the cardboard box near his own, cranes his neck, breaks up in silent mirth. The white bunny rabbit in the box is making its own critical observations. Cottontail high, it’s dropping a stream of dry pellets into the shredded lettuce that litters the box.
Florid, Stan has decided to simplify his spiel. He’s saying: “A totally new branch of technology, gentlemen. Perhaps my previous remarks were overly technical.”
“New like Princeton?”
“New like Sandia,” the professor says, grasping thankfully at the straight line. “Yet thoroughly rooted in classical theory. What we have here, gentlemen, is the answer to a puzzle provoked by James Clerk Maxwell more than a century ago. Maxwell,” he glosses, “was the genius who first showed that electricity and magnetism were one and the same. His equations are the basis of all electronic technology.”
“For history we fund historians,” one of the committee says coldly, currying favor, and recoils slightly when Buonacelli growls.
Irritated and emboldened, the great physicist states loftily: “Physics is precisely the accumulated history of great physicists. My point, Senator, is that Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic wave motion have two sets of solutions. One set describes what we term retarded waves, where fluctuations are broadcast outward due to the acceleration of a charged particle. Radio waves from a transmitter are retarded waves, akin to the ripples from a stone dropped in a pond.”
Rostow monitors surges of power in the system, holding it in equilibrium. He seeks Jennifer Barton’s eye, hoping for a shared long-suffering grimace, but her attention is directed to the listening senator.
Donaldson is creeping into pomposity again. “The other solutions, equally valid in theoretical terms, we call advanced waves. Until now they have never been detected, let alone utilized.”
“Radio waves get drawn back into a transmitter?” Buonacelli poses acutely, puzzled.
“Exactly.” Donaldson rewards him with a satisfied pout. “Advanced waves converge to a point. Another way of looking at it is to say that they travel backwards in time. They put time into reverse. Normally, for complex reasons, the two sets of waves interfere, yielding no more than the retarded component. What I’ve done here with this equipment—”
Unnoticed, Eddie Rostow sits bolt upright and his face distorts in a throttled shriek. What you’ve done, you thieving sonofabitch?
But Buonacelli’s scandalized roar has filled the lab. Suddenly it is obvious that indeed he had not grasped the earlier explanations. “Who in hell do you think you are, Professor—H.G. Wells? Don’t you ever learn? How dare you stand there and shamelessly tell us you’ve been spending the university’s endowment on a time machine? Credit me with the sense I was born with.”
As Rostow spins in his chair, the dignitaries are stomping toward the door. Before Donaldson finds words, Jennifer Barton has magically slipped into Buonacelli’s path. “Surely you’re not leaving yet, Senator. Won’t you at least wait for the demonstrations we’ve prepared for you?” She blinks as if something is in her eye.
“Harrumph!” Buonacelli lifts her hands in his beefy paws. “I don’t know how they’ve taken you in, my dear. Never trust a scientist. If they’re not lunatics, they’re swindlers. Either way, it’s a waste of good tax revenue.”
“Why, Senator! I’m a scientist myself.”
He releases one hand, strokes his jaw. “My apologies, dear lady. To tell the truth, my eldest son is a chemist at Dow.” Gallantly he bows, retaining one of her hands. “Very well, gentlemen. To please this charming lady, let’s take a look at the professor’s so-called demonstration.”
Wincing, Rostow spins quickly back to his station. He knows he’ll be the butt of Stan’s fuming humiliation the moment the directors are on their way. Why do I put up with it?
Tersely, the professor tells Buonacelli, “You may examine this equipment thoroughly.” He leads them to the mirror chamber buried between gigantic doughnut-shaped magnets, slides open the weighty hatch. With heavy sarcasm he says, “Assure yourselves it’s quite empty. There are no hidden trapdoors or disappearing rabbits.” Rostow swallows a snigger, his eye on the white bunny munching in its box between his feet. Poor little beast, he thinks an instant later. I hate that part of it. But it’s going to rock Buonacelli on his heels and open his wallet.
“Advanced waves are generated in every molecular interaction. Within these confines they are reflected almost totally. The crystalline surface of the chamber constitutes an array of laser-like amplifiers which augment the advanced-wave component.” My idea, Eddie Rostow wants to shout. Without that, you’d have a big magnetic field going absolutely nowhere. But whose name will go on the paper? He says nothing. Donaldson puts his head inside the chamber. Dully, as he twists back and forth, his muffled voice states: “As you see, it’s perfectly safe at the moment.” An almost irresistible impulse floods Rostow. Regretfully, he pulls his finger back from the power switches.
“Okay,” growls Buonacelli, “it’s empty. So?”
Jennifer Barton leaves her terminal and returns with a flask of boiling water in one hand and a tray of ice cubes in the other.
“This will be simple but graphic, Senator,” she says. It is Stan’s notion of theatrics to have her fetch the props. “As you can see, this water is very hot. Would you care to dip in your pinky to test it, sir?”
“Thank you, honey, but I guess I recognize hot water when I see it.”
A crony adds, unnecessarily, “You’ve been in plenty of it in your time.” Everyone laughs ingratiatingly. Jenny drops two large ice cubes into the flask, places it inside the chamber. She goes at once to her terminal, and her features blank out in the inert Zen concentration of perfect egoless programming. The assembled company stare foolishly at the sight of two ice cubes slowly dissolving. Donaldson dogs the hatch. An enhanced but rudimentary image of the interior comes to life on an adjacent TV screen. It shows two ice cubes slowly dissolving.
“Ideally,” the professor says, fists clenched at his sides, “the chamber would be absolutely shielded. We’ve sacrificed some signal purity so you can see what’s going on inside. The process will still work reasonably well. Is the system on-line, Eddie?”
“Yeah.” Rostow’s own palms are wet. The whole performance is premature. Five successful tests and two fails. Donaldson’s a yo-yo, bobbing from an obsession for publicity at any cost through close-mouthed paranoia and back. It’d almost be nice if the damned thing blew out. Bite your tongue. It’s my baby. Go, go.
“Well, don’t just sit there.”
“Right, Stan,” says Rostow through his teeth, and smashes the toggle closed.
There is no new sound, no deep shuddering hum or rising whine. Current in the magnetic coils goes to fifty thousand amps, and there is a faint creaking as monstrously thick nonmagnetic structural members crave one another’s company in the embrace of the stupendous field. Sometimes, with the lights dimmed, Rostow has seen phantom bars of pale light crossing his line of sight. Field strengths of this magnitude can screw with the visual cortex. Or maybe the magnets bend cosmic radiation through the soft tissues of his eyeballs and brain, nibbling tiny explosions of pseudolight in his synapses. It isn’t happening now. Everyone stares at the TV monitor, waiting for something apocalyptic. Caught by the mood, Rostow abandons his console and steals across to join them.
“I’m still waiting,” Buonacelli barks.
“Watch the ice cubes, Senator,” Jennifer tells him.
“Dear God.” It is one of the accountants who first grasps what is happening. “The bastards are getting bigger!”
“Just so,” Donaldson says, loosening his fists. “The basic conservation law: heat can’t pass from a cold object to a hot one. But time inside the mirror is now running backwards, gentlemen, for all practical purposes. Advanced Maxwell radiation, amplified by the lasing action, is converging on the flask. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is repealed.”
Rostow’s body thumps to his pulse. Steam is rising once more from the flask. A pair of unblemished cubes jounce at the surface of the boiling water.
“Fantastic,” Buonacelli groans. “I take it all back. Dr Donaldson, this is the wonder of the age.”
“You have yet to witness the more dramatic part of our demonstration.” Turning abruptly, the professor stumbles into Rostow. “Wouldn’t it be better if you were at your console, Eddie? Please power the system down immediately and put it on Standby. Where’s that animal?”
