Time Travel Omnibus, page 824
“It looks sharp,” Mrs. de Cherville said, with a touch of alarm.
“Serrated, too. You might want to ask your mother if you can use it for a knife, next time you have steak,” I suggested.
Which won him over completely. Kids are fickle. Philippe immediately forgot all about Hawkins.
Melusine, however, did not. Eyes flashing with anger, she stood, throwing her napkin to the floor. “I want to know,” she began, “just what you think you’re—”
Fortunately, that was when Satan arrived.
The tyrannosaur came running up the hillside at a speed you’d have to be an experienced paleontologist to know was less than optimal. Even a dying T. rex moves fast.
People gasped.
I took the microphone out of my pocket, and moved quickly to the front of the room. “Folks, we just got lucky. I’d like to inform those of you with tables by the window that the glass is rated at twenty tons per square inch. You’re in no danger whatsoever. But you are in for quite a show. Those who are in the rear might want to get a little closer.”
Young Philippe was off like a shot.
The creature was almost to us. “A tyrannosaur has a hyperacute sense of smell,” I reminded them. “When it scents blood, its brain is overwhelmed. It goes into a feeding frenzy.”
A few droplets of blood had spattered the window. Seeing us through the glass, Satan leaped and tried to smash through it.
Whoomp! The glass boomed and shivered with the impact. There were shrieks and screams from the diners, and several people started to their feet.
At my signal, the string quartet took up their instruments again, and began to play while Satan leaped and tore and snarled, a perfect avatar of rage and fury. They chose the scherzo from Shostakovich’s piano quintet.
Scherzos are supposed to be funny, but most have a whirlwind, uninhibited quality that makes them particularly appropriate to nightmares and the madness of predatory dinosaurs.
Whoomp! That mighty head struck the window again and again. For a long time, Satan kept on frenziedly slashing at the window with its jaws, leaving long scratches in the glass.
Philippe pressed his body against the window with all his strength, trying to minimize the distance between himself and savage dino death. Shrieking with joyous laughter when that killer mouth tried to snatch him up. I felt for the kid, wanting to get as close to the action as he could. I could identify.
I was just like that myself when I was his age.
When Satan finally wore himself out, and went bad-humoredly away, I returned to the de Chervilles. Philippe had restored himself to the company of his family. The kid looked pale and happy.
So did his sister. I noticed that she was breathing shallowly.
“You dropped your napkin.” I handed it to Melusine. Inside was a postcard-sized promotional map, showing Hilltop Station and the compound behind it. One of the tents was circled. Under it was written, While the others are dancing.
I had signed it Don.
“When I grow up, I’m going to be a paleontologist!” the kid said fervently. “A behavioral paleontologist, not an anatomist or a wrangler.” Somebody had come to take him home. His folks were staying to dance. And Melusine was long gone, off to Hawkins’ tent.
“Good for you,” I said. I laid a hand on his shoulder. “Come see me when you’ve got the education. I’ll be happy to show you the ropes.”
The kid left.
He’d had a conversion experience. I knew exactly how it felt. I’d had mine standing in front of the Zallinger “Age of Reptiles” mural in the Peabody Museum in New Haven. That was before time travel, when pictures of dinosaurs were about as real as you could get. Nowadays I could point out a hundred inaccuracies in how the dinosaurs were depicted. But on that distant sun-dusty morning in the Atlantis of my youth, I just stood staring at those magnificent brutes, head filled with wonder, until my mother dragged me away.
It really was a pity. Philippe was so full of curiosity and enthusiasm. He’d make a great paleontologist. I could see that. He wasn’t going to get to realize his dreams, though. His folks had too much money to allow that.
I knew because I’d glanced through the personnel records for the next hundred years and his name wasn’t there anywhere.
It was possibly the least of the thousands of secrets I held within me, never to be shared. Still, it made me sad. For an instant, I felt the weight of all my years, every petty accommodation, every unworthy expedience. Then I went up the funnel and back down again to an hour previous.
Unseen, I slipped out and went to wait for Melusine.
Maintaining the funnel is expensive. During normal operations—when we’re not holding fund-raisers—we spend months at a time in the field. Hence the compound, with its army surplus platform tents and electrified perimeter to keep the monsters out.
It was dark when Melusine slipped into the tent.
“Donald?”
“Shhh.” I put a finger to her lips, drew her close to me. One hand slid slowly down her naked back, over a scrap of crushed velvet, and then back up and under her skirt to squeeze that elegant little ass. She raised her mouth to mine and we kissed deeply, passionately.
Then I tumbled her to the cot, and we began undressing each other. She ripped off three buttons tearing my shirt from me.
Melusine made a lot of noise, for which I was grateful. She was a demanding, self-centered lay, who let you know when she didn’t like what you were doing and wasn’t at all shy about telling you what to do next. She required a lot of attention. For which I was also grateful.
I needed the distraction.
Because while I was in his tent, screwing the woman he didn’t want, Hawkins was somewhere out there getting killed. According to the operational report that I’d write later tonight, and received a day ago, he was eaten alive by an old bull rex rendered irritable by a painful brain tumor. It was an ugly way to go. I didn’t want to have to hear it. I did my best to not think about it.
Credit where credit is due—Melusine practically set the tent ablaze. So I was using her. So what? It was far from the worst of my crimes. It wasn’t as if she loved Hawkins, or even knew him, for that matter. She was just a spoiled little rich-bitch adventuress looking for a mental souvenir. One more notch on her diaphragm case. I know her type well. They’re one of the perks of the business.
There was a freshly prepared triceratops skull by the head of the bed. It gleamed faintly, a pale, indistinct shape in the darkness. When Melusine came, she grabbed one of its horns so tightly that the skull rattled against the floorboards.
Afterward, she left, happily reeking of bone fixative and me. We’d each had our little thrill. I hadn’t spoken a word during any of it, and she hadn’t even noticed.
T. rex wasn’t much of a predator. But then, it didn’t take much skill to kill a man. Too slow to run, and too big to hide—we make perfect prey for a tyrannosaur.
When Hawkins’ remains were found, the whole camp turned out in an uproar. I walked through it all on autopilot, perfunctorily giving orders to have Satan shot, to have the remains sent back uptime, to have the paperwork sent to my office. Then I gathered everybody together and gave them the Paradox Lecture. Nobody was to talk about what had just happened. Those who did would be summarily fired. Legal action would follow. Dire consequences. Penalties. Fines.
And so on.
It was two A.M. when I finally got back to my office, to write the day’s operational report.
Hawkins’s memo was there, waiting for me. I’d forgotten about that. I debated putting off reading it until tomorrow. But then I figured that I was feeling as bad now as I was ever going to. Might as well get it over with.
I turned on the glow-pad. Hawkins’ pale face appeared on the screen. Stiffly, as if he were confessing a crime, he said, “My folks didn’t want me to become a scientist. I was supposed to stay home and manage the family money. Stay home and let my mind rot.” His face twisted with private memories. “So that’s the first thing you have to know—Donald Hawkins isn’t my real name.
“My mother was kind of wild when she was young. I don’t think she knew who my father was. So when she had me, it was hushed up. I was raised by my grandparents. They were getting a little old for child-rearing, so they shipped me back-time to when they were younger, and raised me alongside my mother. I was fifteen before I learned she wasn’t really my sister.
“My real name is Philippe de Cherville. I swapped table assignments so I could meet my younger self. But then Melusine—my mother—started hitting on me. So I guess you can understand now—” he laughed embarrassedly—“why I didn’t want to go the Oedipus route.”
The pad flicked off, and then immediately back on again. He’d had an afterthought. “Oh yeah, I wanted to say . . . the things you said to me today—when I was young—the encouragement. And the tooth. Well, they meant a lot to me. So, uh . . . thanks.”
It flicked off.
I put my head in my hands. Everything was throbbing, as if all the universe were contained within an infected tooth. Or maybe the brain tumor of a sick old dinosaur. I’m not stupid. I saw the implications immediately.
The kid—Philippe—was my son.
Hawkins was my son.
I hadn’t even known I had a son, and now he was dead.
A bleak, blank time later, I set to work drawing time lines in the holographic workspace above my desk. A simple double-loop for Hawkins/Philippe. A rather more complex figure for myself. Then I factored in the TSOs, the waiters, the paleontologists, the musicians, the workmen who built the station in the first place and would salvage its fixtures when we were done with it . . . maybe a hundred representative individuals in all.
When I was done, I had a three-dimensional representation of Hilltop Station as a node of intersecting lives in time. It was one hell of a complex figure.
It looked like the Gordian knot.
Then I started crafting a memo back to my younger self. A carbon steel, razor-edged, Damascene sword of a memo. One that would slice Hilltop Station into a thousand spasming paradoxical fragments.
Hire him, fire her, strand a hundred young scientists, all fit and capable of breeding, one million years BC. Oh, and don’t father any children.
It would bring our sponsors down upon us like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands—retroactively. Everything connected to it would be looped out of reality and into the disintegrative medium of quantum uncertainty. Hilltop Station would dissolve into the realm of might-have-been. The research and findings of thousands of dedicated scientists would vanish from human knowing. My son would never have been conceived or born or sent callously to an unnecessary death.
Everything I had spent my life working to accomplish would be undone.
It sounded good to me.
When the memo was done, I marked it PRIORITY and MY EYES ONLY. Then I prepared to send it three months back in time.
The door opened behind me with a click. I spun around in my chair. In walked the one man in all existence who could possibly stop me.
“The kid got to enjoy twenty-four years of life, before he died,” the Old Man said. “Don’t take that away from him.”
I looked up into his eyes.
Into my own eyes.
Those eyes fascinated and repulsed me. They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime’s accumulation of wrinkles. I’ve been working with my older self since I first signed up with Hilltop Station, and they were still a mystery to me, absolutely opaque. They made me feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.
“It’s not the kid,” I said. “It’s everything.”
“I know.”
“I only met him tonight—Philippe, I mean. Hawkins was just a new recruit. I harely knew him.”
The Old Man capped the Glenlivet and put it back in the liquor cabinet. Until he did that, I hadn’t even noticed that I was drinking. “I keep forgetting how emotional I was when I was young,” he said.
“I don’t feel young.”
“Wait until you’re my age.”
I’m not sure how old the Old Man is. There are longevity treatments available for those who play the game, and the Old Man has been playing this lousy game so long he practically runs it. All I know is that he and I are the same person.
My thoughts took a sudden swerve. “God damn that stupid kid!” I blurted. “What was he doing outside the compound in the first place?”
The Old Man shrugged. “He was curious. All scientists are. He saw something and went out to examine it. Leave it be, kid. What’s done is done.”
I glanced at the memo I’d written. “We’ll find out.”
He placed a second memo alongside mine. “I took the liberty of writing this for you. Thought I’d spare you the pain of having to compose it.”
I picked up the memo, glanced at its contents. It was the one I’d received yesterday. “Hawkins was attacked and killed by Satan shortly after local midnight today,”’ I quoted. “Take all necessary measures to control gossip.’ ” Overcome with loathing, I said, “This is exactly why I’m going to bust up this whole filthy system. You think I want to become the kind of man who can send his own son off to die? You think I want to become you?”
That hit home. For a long moment, the Old Man did not speak. “Listen,” he said at last. “You remember that day in the Peabody?”
“You know I do.”
“I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart—all your heart—that I could see a real, living dinosaur. But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. That some things could never be.”
I said nothing.
“God hands you a miracle,” he said, “you don’t throw it back in his face.” Then he left.
I remained.
It was my call. Two possible futures lay side-by-side on my desk, and I could select either one. The universe is inherently unstable in every instant. If paradoxes weren’t possible, nobody would waste their energy preventing them. The Old Man was trusting me to weigh all relevant factors, make the right decision, and live with the consequences.
It was the cruelest thing he had ever done to me.
Thinking of cruelty reminded me of the Old Man’s eyes. Eyes so deep you could drown in them. Eyes so dark you couldn’t tell how many corpses already lay submerged within them. After all these years working with him, I still couldn’t tell if those were the eyes of a saint or those of the most evil man in the world.
There were two memos in front of me. I reached for one, hesitated, withdrew my hand. Suddenly the choice didn’t seem so easy.
The night was preternaturally still. It was as if all the world were holding its breath, waiting for me to make my decision.
I reached out for the memos.
I chose one.
FORTY, COUNTING DOWN
Harry Turtledove
“Hey, Justin!” Sean Peters’ voice floated over the top of the Superstrings, Ltd., cubicle wall. “It’s twenty after six—quitting time and then some. Want a drink or two with me and Garth?”
“Hang on,” Justin Kloster answered. “Let me save what I’m working on first.” He told his computer to save his work as it stood, generate a backup, and shut itself off. Having grown up in the days when voice-recognition software was imperfectly reliable, he waited to make sure the machine followed orders. It did, of course. Making that software idiotproof had put Superstrings on the map a few years after the turn of the century.
Justin got up, stretched, and looked around. Not much to see: the grayish-tan fuzzy walls of the cubicle and an astringently neat desktop that held the computer, a wedding photo of Megan and him, and a phone/fax. His lips narrowed. The marriage had lasted four years—four and a half, actually. He hadn’t come close to finding anybody else since.
Footsteps announced Peters’ arrival. He looked like a high-school linebacker who’d let most of his muscle go to flab since. Garth O’Connell was right behind him. He was from the same mold, except getting thin on top instead of going gray. “How’s the Iron Curtain sound?” Peters asked.
“Sure,” Justin said. “It’s close, and you can hear yourself think—most of the time, anyhow.”
They went out into the parking lot together, bitching when they stepped from air conditioning to San Fernando Valley August heat. Justin’s eyes started watering, too; L.A. smog wasn’t so bad as it had been when he was young, but it hadn’t disappeared.
An Oasis song was playing when the three software engineers walked into the Iron Curtain, and into air conditioning chillier than the office’s. The music took Justin back to the days when he’d been getting together with Megan, though he’d liked Blur better. “Look out,” Sean Peters said. “They’ve got a new fellow behind the bar.” He and Garth chuckled. They knew what was going to happen. Justin sighed. So did he.
Peters ordered a gin and tonic, O’Connell a scotch on the rocks. Justin asked for a Bud. Sure as hell, the bartender said, “I’ll be right with you two gents”—he nodded to Justin’s co-workers—“but for you, sir, I’ll need some ID.”
With another sigh, Justin produced his driver’s license. “Here.”
The bartender looked at him, looked at his picture on the license, and looked at his birthdate. He scowled. “You were born in 1978? No way.”
“His real name’s Dorian Gray,” Garth said helpfully.
“Oh, shut up,” Justin muttered, and then, louder, to the bartender, “Yeah, I really turned forty this past spring.” He was slightly pudgy, but he’d been slightly pudgy since he was a toddler. And he’d been very blond since the day he was born. If he had any silver mixed with the gold, it didn’t show. He also stayed out of the sun as much as he could, because he burned to a crisp when he didn’t. That left him with a lot fewer lines and wrinkles than his buddies, who were both a couple of years younger than he.
Shaking his head, the bartender slid Justin a beer. “You coulda fooled me,” he said. “You go around picking up high-school girls?” His hands shaped an hourglass in the air.
