Time Travel Omnibus, page 854
Then the elevator doors opened. The roommate had arrived. It must have been 7:20.
She looked terrified. Someone told her to remain at that end of the hall. Her gaze kept going to the open apartment door.
Finally the cops arrived. They cuffed the perp, then covered him as Wheldon moved away. He flashed his badge at them, but Kingsbury covered for him, telling them she was FBI and this was a planned sting.
She told them to book the perp and she’d meet them at the precinct. She waited until they took the perp down the stairs before pulling Wheldon aside.
“You made one hell of a mess of this,” she whispered. “We’ve got to figure out what to do now and how to make sure this guy gets charged with a crime. The problem is that there’s two of me and two of you in this timeline and things are about to get very confusing.”
“No, they aren’t,” he said. “Your younger self is going to take care of this.”
“How?” she said. “She doesn’t even know about you or this case.”
He nodded. “Give me something of yours, something she’ll recognize. I’ll go to her and explain. She’s with the Temporal Unit. She’ll understand.”
“No, she won’t.” Her voice was calm. “I never thought I’d break the rules. She won’t believe you.” “Really?” he asked. “You never thought of this? Never wondered how hard it would be to just observe?” She looked away. “No.”
He didn’t believe her. “Then why did I hear your footsteps behind me when I ran to stop the murder?”
She didn’t say anything, and that surprised him. He expected her to lie, to say she was trying to stop him. But she could have stopped him easily. She had ahold of his arm when the attack began. She could have held him back.
Instead, he had felt her fingers slipping away, maybe even felt a slight nudge from her body, propelling him forward, making him act in her stead.
Maybe that was why she had picked him. Not because this was his case, but because she could trust him to break the rules. She had studied him after all. She had gotten him the clearance. She knew how much he cared about the victims after they died. Did she think he’d stop caring just because they were alive?
And then his eyes narrowed. Of course she hadn’t. She knew him. They all knew him.
“You set me up,” he said.
Kingsbury raised her gaze to his.
“What the hell is going on?” he said.
She shrugged, looking remarkably calm, considering what had just happened. “You didn’t understand the mission. You acted without thinking, saving the woman. And I couldn’t stop you, so now we have to deal with the consequences.”
“What?” he breathed. He had never misunderstood a mission in his life.
“Fortunately, you’ll be fine. We brought you in from outside, and we’ll never make that mistake again.” Then she grinned. “At least, that’s what we would have told the folks who administer the new technology if they knew what you’d done.”
“What?” he asked.
“At least,” Kingsbury said, “we now know what happens when someone takes an action in the past. I’ll be able to brief the entire unit when we get back. Unofficially, of course.”
People stood in the hallway, watching them, staring at the open apartment door. A couple of cops surrounded the roommate, interviewing her.
His shock was turning into anger. “You risked my life.”
“Not really,” she said. “We figured one of two things would happen. Either you would push him out of the way and we’d both vanish, going back to a brand new present with no knowledge of what we had done, or we’d be standing here, discussing how we changed things.”
“You used me.”
“Yeah?”
“Why the hell couldn’t you have done this yourself?”
Her smile was guileless. “It’s against regulations. They’d have taken the technology away from us if things hadn’t gone as we’d planned. We would have had to blame you. But we were lucky. As it stands right now, they’ll never know. Only you and I know what we did. Schlaffler’s still dead in our timeline. We saw a few things, but we didn’t get the perp’s name. And that’s all that happened.”
He looked down the hall at the open apartment door. He’d thrown the perp against the wall. He’d felt the man’s back beneath his knee. He’d heard Schlaffler speak after the attack.
“I did all this for nothing?” he asked.
Kingsbury shook her head. “She’s fine in this timeline. We have him. You probably saved several lives, not just hers. The problem is that we didn’t get his name. We don’t know who this guy is. Once we get back to our own timeline, we’re screwed.”
“Maybe,” he said softly.
She frowned at him. “What?”
He stared at the scene. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the perp, peeling himself off the side wall. The hand, catching the doors as they split apart, the fingers grabbing the edge.
He said. “We can make a case.”
“Against whom?”
He smiled. He was already imagining it. The prints removed from the elevator door, the sketch artist drawing the perp’s face, the legwork—going to various Godiva stores in New York, canvassing the neighbors.
Because Wheldon had seen enough to know this perp had staked out the building. The perp knew what time Schlaffler got home. He probably knew when the roommate arrived. Wheldon would wager the perp knew everything about both women.
Only he hadn’t been interested in Schlaffler. He’d been targeting the roommate, planning to free her from the person who weighed her down. That was why he cleaned up the room, added the chocolates, made the place more inviting.
Wheldon could catch this guy easily now, using old-fashioned police methods, building an old-fashioned case that would stick.
“You gonna tell me how we’ll have a case?” Kingsbury said.
“I’ll tell you after I send your younger self to the precinct,” he said. “I want a little more time to think about this.”
The roommate was wiping tears away from her eyes. The cops were still talking with her. The neighbors had inched closer, watching everything.
Kingsbury hadn’t moved. She was looking at the apartment door too.
“I wonder why she was so sad,” Kingsbury said softly.
It took him a moment to realize that she meant Schlaffler. From Schlaffler’s perspective, her day had gotten even worse—arriving home to be stabbed by a crazy man waiting in an elevator.
She would never know how close she came to being another statistic, how the fine spray of blood on her apartment wall would have become a spurt that dripped rivers into the baseboard if Wheldon hadn’t been there.
She would never know that in another universe, she had died.
Wheldon had saved a life.
He had never done that before, at least, not directly. By pulling the perp off her, he had saved a number of lives—not just in this new universe, but in his as well. Because Kingsbury had brought him back here, Wheldon would be able to make sure this perp would never kill again.
And that pleased him. Even though he was annoyed at being used, he didn’t mind that the blood trail had led him here, to this moment.
To this odd, but somehow satisfying, point in time.
CONVOLUTION
James P. Hogan
Professor Aylmer Arbuthnot Abercrombie looked up irascibly from the chore of tidying up his notes as the call tone sounded from his desk terminal. He moused the screen’s cursor to the Call Accept icon and clicked on it. “Yes?”
A window opened showing the head of a youth aged twenty or so, with collar-length, studentish hair, a wispy attempt at a beard, and shoulders enveloped in a baggy sweater. “Oh, er, Jeremy Qualio here, Professor.” He was a postgraduate that Abercrombie had assigned a design project to, in one of the labs below in the building. “We were expecting you here at ten-thirty, sir.”
“You were?”
“To review the test of the transcorrelator mixing circuit. You were going to help us set the power parameters for the output stage.”
“I was?”
“We’ve completed the runs with simulated input data and normalized the results. They’re here ready for you to check through now.”
“They are?” Abercrombie’s brow knitted into a frown. He cast around the littered desk for his appointments diary on the off chance that it might give him a way out, but couldn’t see it. He was cornered. “Very well, I’ll be there shortly,” he replied, and cut off the screen.
Abercrombie left his “public” office at the front of the lab area, which he used for receiving visitors and dealing with routine day-to-day affairs. On the way out, he stopped by the open cubicle and reception desk from where the stern, meticulous, and fearsomely efficient figure of Mrs. Crawford, the departmental secretary and custodian of all that pertained to proper procedures, commanded the approach from the elevators.
“Do you have my appointments diary, by any chance?” Abercrombie inquired. “I appear to have mislaid it.” “You took it back this morning.”
“Did I?”
“After I found it again, the last time.” The pointed pause, followed by a sniff, invited him to reflect on the enormity of his transgression. “You know, Professor, it really would be more convenient if you’d keep your schedule electronically, as do other members of the staff. Then I could maintain a copy in my system, which wouldn’t get mislaid. And I’d be in a position to give timely reminders of your commitments—which it seems you are in some need of.”
Abercrombie shook his head stubbornly. “I won’t go into that again, Mrs. Crawford. You know my views on computerized records. Nothing’s private. Nothing’s safe. They can get into your system from China. The next thing you know, some fool who doesn’t know a Bessel function from a Bessemer furnace is publishing your life’s work. No, thank you very much. I prefer not to become public property, but to keep my soul and my inner self to myself.”
“But that’s such an outmoded way to think,” Mrs. Crawford persisted. “It’s absurd for somebody with your technical expertise. If I may say so, it smacks of pure obstinacy. With the encryption procedures available today . . .” But Abercrombie had already stopped listening and stalked away to jab the call button by the elevator doors.
“Oh, and by the way,” he threw back over his shoulder while he waited, “has that FedEx package arrived from Chicago yet?”
“Yes. I’ve already told you so, Professor.”
“When?”
“Less than half an hour ago.”
Abercrombie checked himself long enough to send back a perplexed, disbelieving look before stepping into the elevator. Mrs. Crawford shook her head in exasperation and returned her attention to the task at hand.
Jeremy Qualio and Maxine Turnel, his bubbly, bespectacled, blond-haired partner on the project, were waiting in the prototype lab with the bird’s nest of wires, chips, and other components connected to an array of test equipment. The results from their trial runs of the device were displayed on a set of monitors. Abercrombie jutted his chin and scanned over the bench with a series of short, jerky motions of his head.
The layout was neat for a lab prototype, with careful wiring and solid, clean-looking joints; the data had been graphed onto screens showing time and frequency series analysis, along with histograms of statistical variables, all properly annotated and captioned. A file of hard copy was lying to one side for Abercrombie’s inspection. He looked at the circuit work again and grunted. “You’ve used nonstandard colors for the board interconnections. I expect the approved coding practices to be observed.”
“Yes, Professor,” Qualio agreed, looking a bit crestfallen.
But Abercrombie couldn’t fault their experimental design and procedure as they went through it and discussed details for over an hour. The analysis was comprehensive, with computation of error probabilities and the correct algorithms for interpolation and best-curve fits. Maxine took the absence of further criticism as indicating a rare opportunity to probe the obsessive screen of secrecy that Abercrombie maintained around his work. She and Qualio had been given just this subassembly to develop to a specification in isolation. Abercrombie hadn’t told them its purpose, or the nature of the greater scheme of which it was presumably a part.
“We’re still trying to figure out what it’s for,” she told him, doing her best to sound casual and natural. “What, exactly is a ‘transcorrelator’ ? The inducer stage seems to create an electroweak interaction with the nuclear substructure that stimulates a range of strong-domain transitions that we’ve never heard of before.”
Qualio came in. “They’re not mentioned in any of the standard references or on the Net. It’s as if we’re dealing with a new area of physics.”
“That’s not for you to speculate about,” Abercrombie said. “All you’ve done is graduate from basic training in the army of science. It doesn’t give you a voice in deciding strategy. Leave the big picture to the generals.” He gave a curt nod in the direction of the bench. “Satisfactory. Have the report written up by the end of the week.”
“Yes, Professor,” Qualio said. Maxine flashed him a look with a shrug that said, Well, we tried. Abercrombie picked up the folder of hard copy and turned to leave.
“I told you. It has to be something military,” he overheard Maxine whisper as he went out the door.
After stopping for lunch in the cafeteria, Abercrombie took the stairs back up through the warren of partitioned offices and labs that now filled the space amid the massive brick walls and aged wooden floors of the original building. The City Annexe of Gates University’s Physics Department occupied a converted warehouse on the downtown waterfront of what was no longer a major trading port. Hence, it had been acquired at a knock-down price and qualified for the city’s urban-renewal grant scheme, making it a fine investment property for the university trustees. It was also where the department secluded its oddball projects and other undertakings that the governors preferred to keep out of sight, away from its main, prestigious campus. They were retained, as often as not, to humor some high-paying source of research grants or other primary influence on funding.
No premature publicity, Abercrombie reiterated to himself as he emerged on his own floor and weathered Mrs. Crawford’s Gorgonesque stare to return to his lab. When this project came to fruition, it would be the news event of the century. And not just with the public media. Everyone who was anyone worth talking about in the entire physics-related sector of the scientific Establishment would learn of it in a mass-announcement that Abercrombie had been preparing as methodically as the design studies and calculations that had occupied him for eight years. He had all the names listed, covering academic, private, and government science elites throughout the world. This would be his ticket to a Nobel Prize and permanent fame as surely as geometry had immortalized Euclid and the laws of motion were virtually synonymous with Newton. Maybe even more. The things that Nobels had been awarded for seemed mundane in comparison. Perhaps, even, a new grade of award would have to be instituted especially for him.
He came to the inner, windowless workshop area that he had designated as the place where the device would be assembled, and stopped for a moment to picture it completed. It wouldn’t be especially heavy or bulky—little more than a metal lattice boundary surface to define and contain the varichron field, with a control panel supported on a columnar plinth, and the generating system and power unit beneath. If anything, it would resemble an oversize parrot cage with a domed cap, standing on a squat cylindrical base. Howard Jaffey, the dean, and the few others from the faculty who were in the know as to the aim of Abercrombie’s project, were polite in avoiding mention of it; but with a billionaire like Eli Zaltzer writing the backing, and the amounts that he lavished on the university as a whole, nobody had been inclined to turn the proposal down, even if they secretly thought Zaltzer was an eccentric. Well, let them think what they liked, Abercrombie told himself. The parts were coming together now, and the initial tests were under way. It wouldn’t be much longer before the full system was assembled—three months, maybe, in his estimation. They’d be singing a different tune then, when the whole world came flocking to his door. Never mind for a better mousetrap. Abercrombie was going to give them a working time machine!
He stood, savoring the moment in his imagination for a few seconds longer, and then proceeded through a door and along a corridor to his inner, private office at the rear of the lab area. This was where he conducted his more secretive business. Inside, he locked the door, cast a wary eye around instinctively, even though it was obvious there could be no one else there—and at once spotted the missing appointments diary on a corner of the desk. Tut-tutting to himself, he went over to the wall cabinet and released the catch that allowed it to slide aside, revealing his hidden safe. Armor plate, sunk into the brickwork of the original walls. No electronic security for him, whatever the administrators tried to say about how solid it was these days. How could anyone believe it, when half the people in the world seemed to spend their lives trying to make computers do what they were supposed to do instead of contributing to anything useful?
He dialed in the combination sequence and swung the door open to disclose his trove of files, papers, and notes from the time when he first met Eli Zaltzer and the dream began the course that would one day make it reality. He took out the file box reserved for test results, added the hard copy that he had brought from downstairs, and was just replacing the box, when he heard footsteps in the corridor outside. They sounded furtive, as if someone were creeping past warily. Normally, Abercrombie always locked the door when he opened his safe, but on this occasion, after the momentary distraction of seeing the appointments diary on the desk when he walked in, he was unable to recall whether or not he had. “Who’s there?” he called out, fearful of being found with the cabinet open. There was no reply. The footsteps hastened away.
Hurrying to the door, Abercrombie found that he had locked it after all and had to fumble for his keys before he could get out, by which time the corridor was empty. He followed it to the back stairs and the freight elevator but found no sign of anyone there. As he began retracing his steps toward his rear office, a peculiar, low-pitched whine emanated from the other side of the door to the workshop area ahead of him. He increased his pace, heading past his office door. “Who is that in there?” he yelled ahead, but the noise ceased just before he burst in, and he found the place empty. With rising agitation he carried on through to Mrs. Crawford’s post, but she had seen no one go that way. Then Abercrombie realized that he had committed the cardinal sin of leaving his private office door unlocked with the safe open.
