Downtiming the Night Side

TRIP POINT

“Moosic, you’re a mess,” Doc told him. “How long were you downtime, anyway?”

“Hard to say,” he replied. “Eleven, maybe twelve years.”

She nodded. “And you aged twenty-five. The only way I can explain the results of these tests is that everything came along gradually and you became inured to it all. You’ve got kidney problems, four kinds of internal parasites, several ill-healed breaks too far gone for much correction, and that’s only for starters. You had eye problems?”

“Some,” he admitted. “Not as much as Dawn has.”

“Well, you probably had slightly better eyes to begin with. The radiation levels are different back here than in the period when humans evolved. It’s so minor for a day or so that we don’t bother about it, and your body can self-correct to a degree, but you had a dozen years of straight exposure.”

“The kids—they were born in that environment!”

“I wouldn’t worry so much about them. They’re probably better protected than you, and they’re young. Whatever their problems are, we can certainly correct them. I can’t say about Dawn, but she’s a lot younger than you. I can say, with some certainty, that your vision will continue to deteriorate and you would have been stone-cold blind in another year back there. Here you maybe have three or four years, but I wouldn’t worry about it. The cancer will get you first.”

He swallowed hard. “You mean—that’s it? I’m going to die?” She seemed mighty unconcerned about the news.

“Not necessarily. Or, rather, yes and no. It’s usually accidental, but, if it’s carefully planned and timed, I think we can work it out. It’ll take some guts, though, on your part.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Going past a trip point, of course. Be someone else. Someone younger and healthier.”

That idea disturbed him almost as much as the medical news. “Be… someone else. That’s like committing suicide, isn’t it?”

She stared at him. “Do I look dead?”

“No, no, of course not, but—O.K., you’ve all gone through it, but you said yourself it was mostly accidental. It’s something else to talk about it cold-bloodedly instead of just letting it happen.”

“Nevertheless, it’s what you’ll have to do. It’s not so bad. Everyone I ever was is still in here,” she told him, pointing to her head. “You don’t really lose anything, unless you make the mistake of getting assimilated. That’s a close thing with trip points. We’re constantly monitored by our computers to make sure we don’t make an unintentional jump into someplace that could get us.” She sighed. “Look, it would have happened to you anyway, you know, if you’d joined us. It was inevitable.”

“But Dawn and the children…”

“Are no problem at all. This is time, remember? Safe Zone time. No assimilation, no trip points. We’ll go get them, and before they have had time enough to realize you’re gone. There’s no rush. None of us have been to the time frame you were in before, so there’s no relative time problem. Don’t think of them stranded there while you’re here. We could do it tomorrow, or next week, or next year, and we’d still get there ten seconds after you left.”

He sighed. “You’re right, of course. That’s not what I’m really worried about, although I admit it’s tough not to think of time passing there as it is here. It’s really—well, me. No matter what, I might see them again, but they’ll never see me.”

She had no answer for that.

“Look,” he said, “why not go get them now—before? I mean, one last time?”

She shook her head sadly. “I understand, but it’s not possible. First of all, it’d be sort of cruel, like facing them one last time so they know you’re dying. Swift and clean is best. It hurts, but it’s not as prolonged. But even if you did want it anyway…”

“I do. Very much.”

“…It wouldn’t matter,” she continued. “Ron, this is hard to say and even harder to explain, but you’re caught up in and committed to a loop.”

“A what?”

“A loop. It’s not your fault—you had no say in it—and it’s unfair, but it’s the due bill the Outworlders are rendering.”

“What do you mean? Due bill for what?”

“Saving your life. Time always takes the shortest method to resolve people like us. If we’d left you as Alfie Jenkins, you would have died, either in prison or at the hands of a fanatic or a mob. I’m afraid you would have been left there if Sandoval hadn’t been able to jump back. But he was, and our computer monitored it and monitored the consequences of the actions, particularly the early death of Marx. It ordered us to save you. In so doing, it initiated a loop—a string of effects stemming from that cause. A loop is initiated backwards. The last action comes first. This causes a backwash, as it were. Everything leading to that action is assumed by time to have already occurred. Saving you was the last action of the loop. You are now living the events leading up to that, under our management.”

“Wait a minute! Slow down! I’ve been away a long time, and this gets dizzier and dizzier!”

“It’s easiest to put it this way. Dawn appeared to Alfie and allowed him the means to escape. He did—and so you did, and continued to live. But, you see, Ron—Dawn hasn’t gone forward in time and saved Alfie yet. Didn’t she tell you?”

He shook his head wonderingly. “No, no. And I think I can see why. No wonder she was so upset that first time we met here. Time is insanity, she said.”

“No, it’s not insanity, it’s good mathematics. What it is is extremely complex. As complex as elementary particle physics or the biochemistry of viruses or any other complex science. What we’re doing was discovered by trial and error. It’s all been recorded in the ultimate mathematician, the computer here that is so complex and so advanced it is, in fact, an artificial intelligence of a high order. It’s capable of viewing the time stream, seeing any disruption, and postulating the results from that disruption, it’s equally capable of looking at those results and seeing how it would be best to minimize or even erase those disruptions. Time is on the Outworlders’ side in the conventional sense. If things just go the way they naturally would, they will win. So we are the guardians of time. A major disruption has taken place. You were not the cause of that disruption, but you are the key to minimizing or erasing it.”

“Me? How? And why me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Sometimes it does things, or tells us to do things, that we don’t understand at all. Later on, we’re able to see how a result was obtained. Sometimes it seems insane that we did it our way, or far chancier to do it our way, than some other, but it always has its reasons and it generally works. It seems easier if a couple of us were just sent forward to that square to neutralize dear Eric and take Sandoval out, but that’s not the way this one is being played out. Why you? Because you are a direct participant in the original action. The fewer outside elements introduced, the better the result. Why? Again, I don’t know. It just is. And until this is played out and you’re a free person again, you must play the hand it deals you.”

He considered that. “Why? What if I don’t?”

“You forget, there are alternatives at our disposal, just not alternatives as good as the one it’s using, in its opinion. I told you that Dawn has not yet gone forward to save Alfie Jenkins. If she does not do so, and the computer has real control over that, the loop will be broken. You will die as Alfie Jenkins. None of the rest of this will ever have happened. The children will not exist. You will not exist.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. So there was no real chance at all. None. Because they had control of just one not-yet-taken action, all depended on him being a good boy and doing whatever they ordered. He and his other selves, except Alfie, and his children, his whole experience in the Safe Zone— everything wiped out, like it had never been. And they could leave Dawn in the Safe Zone, as she’d said, for weeks, months, or years. And all they had to do to wipe it all out was not to rescue her at all. Just shut down this complex and move to a better one. That’s all.

Round and round went time, looping and whirling and doubling back into itself. And yet, in the end, there were no paradoxes, only alternatives. All time, up to the leading edge, was the sum of what had gone before. But it didn’t matter what that sum added up to—as long as it all added up. The mathematics gave order to chaos, but in that mathematics was the master mathematician who gave the orders. Human beings, given their orders, might be driven insane by the complexity of it all, but they had to obey of die.

The exterior of the base looked quite different, because it was. When the attack had come, they’d been ready for it, but the computer had made the decision not to defend but rather to leave. Maintaining the loop had taken precedence over the inconvenience of moving the complex. And moving the complex had taken every single ounce of power the computer and its mysterious power source could command, hence the cessation of function in the belt. That was why the impression in the ground ten years after the attack had been so regular. Rubble, or even disintegration, would not have been so neat as to leave that enormous rectangle. The thing had simply moved itself through time and space, to a secondary preselected time and place in the Safe Zone. It was a demonstration of the amount of power that the Outworlders had at their command—and that they were denying Earth.

All the belts had, in fact, been repowered within a year of relative time, but by that time he and Dawn had lost theirs, having pretty well tossed it away as a useless reminder of a no longer relevant past.

How had the computer been so certain that Joseph or somebody would find it? Or was he thinking too linearly while the computer thought only of wholes? If one event, his salvation in London, had already proceeded its cause, a cause that had not yet occurred; then, perhaps all events in the loop did the same. Was he, then, only acting out a preordained future that had already occurred and could actually be changed only by his failure to follow orders?

And, if so, did the mathematics require much else, or did, in fact, everything done have to be undone? He wasn’t sure, but it didn’t really matter. Not only was he at the mercy of this crazy computer, but so were a lot of other folks he cared about.

They gave him a couple of weeks with physical therapy and some medical treatment—and lots of rest—just to let him sort it out. It didn’t matter to them how long he took; the sequence was as good if initiated late as it was if inititated early. No matter how ill he was, though, he couldn’t help but be terribly depressed by what he was being forced to do. For the first time in his life, he had people he loved, and with all the pain and all the problems, the years on the island had been among the happiest in his whole life. That, and they, were now denied him, but still dependent on him.

He spent what time he had trying to learn all he could about the Outworlders, their squad, and the war they had fought. He was not sure he liked what he found, and he certainly was less sure of the motivation.

Their entire picture of the Earthsiders, as the Outworlders called the masses who remained on the planet, was tremendously skewed in the negative, a portrait of a suffering and miserable planet of horror under a regime that made Hitler look like the head of the Boy Scouts. Outworlders, on the other hand, were romantic, democratic, and all things wonderful, the true future of the human race. He doubted if it was that simple, and he found that many of the squad agreed with him about that. The difference between them and himself was that he wanted to know the truth; they considered the truth irrelevant, which, in a way, it was.

It wasn’t, as Herb explained, that they felt that they were on the side of the good guys against the bad, but rather that they were on one of two bad sides. One of them had to win, and all they could do was their jobs and be thankful that they neither had to live with or pay the consequences of the win.

The evidence that the time war was more elaborate was also clear, and it was plain that the Outworlders played the game better. The computer that ran the war was not so much the guardian of “natural” reality as public relations liked it to be, either. The end result of history to the leading edge was littered with improbabilities in the extreme. Clearly, some of those had been tipped in the Outworlders’ favor. The best evidence of this was his discovery that, unlike the primitive time suit he’d started out with, the computer could understand enough variables to place a time traveler in a specific place at a specific time and often in a specific role. That meant that members of the squad were not at the mercies of time, but truly its masters.

Downtiming the night side was truly a science, not an art, and the mathematics was unthinkably precise.

That did, however, give him a little encouragement when he met with Doc for another treatment for his ills.

“If I decided now to go through with this trip-point business, it seems to me that this thing is precise enough to practically make me who I want.”

“It’s not that exact, and there are lots of limitations, but what did you have in mind?” she asked him.

“Tell me—can it know if I exist in the present as it’s currently constituted?”

“We thought of that already. You did exist, even in the revised future, but you didn’t live long. You were premature, you know, and it was touch-and-go for a while even on the main line. Conditions are changed just slightly enough on that level in the new main line that you didn’t make it. That’s pretty common for a wave. Of course, it works out. Some others who originally didn’t make it are alive because of the wave.”

He nodded. “But it might be easiest if I made it again, wouldn’t it? Is that possible?”

She considered it. “It would be very tricky. I don’t know if you can ever manipulate things to the degree to be a specific individual, particularly one that was real. Short of our intervening to save the baby, I would say no. And if the baby were saved, you would exist there and so it wouldn’t be possible. I’d say forget it. Now, if you wanted to be a security man from Pennsylvania, that we might work out.”

In other words, they could be exact enough to put him in the time project at the right time and place—but as someone else, and not under the same conditions. He might be any of the security staff.

“That’s close enough,” he told her. “Let’s do it and get this show moving. The sooner it’s over, the sooner everyone can take up their lives and the sooner I can be out of this madhouse.”

“I’ll get a belt now if you like.”

He nodded, but was surprised. “You can do it just like that?”

“Well, either the computer knows it already or it’s overheard us and is now doing the work. Something as tough as what you want might take it all of half a second to completely predetermine—it’s that difficult.”

She wasn’t being funny.

The time belt was pretty much the same as all the others he’d worn, but it had no settings. “This is designed for projects like this,” she told him. “The computer simply reads in the requirements directly to the belt, and when you activate, you’ll go forward to the spot. Then just take note of your surroundings, find a good spot to stick the belt that you’ll remember and will be likely to get to in a pinch, and take it off. The rest is automatic as far as the identity is concerned.”

“Yeah, but how do I know when I reach this trip point or whatever it is?”

“We’ve done the figuring. You’re overage for this, and the process of assimilation really accelerates as you get older. We’re going to put you in a year before you first arrived on the main line, to avoid any problems with a potential takeover again. That would be too confusing. May the ninth will be the day you’ll wake up, and that’s the key. You would be assimilated now in just twelve days. This is the tricky part, which we’ll try and help you with. You must use your belt again on May fifteenth. Any time on that day during daylight hours. By nightfall, it’ll be too late and we’d have to come and get you. We will if we must, of course.”

He nodded. “I see. So I come back to the belt and activate it again and wind up back here?”

She nodded. “Try and keep enough presence of mind to do it yourself. Keep thinking of Dawn and the children. Hate Eric, or us, if you must. But if we have to come and get you, all sorts of things might go wrong.”

“O.K. I’m ready,” he told her. “Farewell, Ron Moosic,” she responded. He pressed activate.

Michael O’Brien awoke in his own quarters at precisely six A.M. He always had, ever since he’d been in the Marine Corps.

O’Brien had been in the corps all his life, since graduating from high school in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, many years before. He loved it, even though the only time he’d ever been in a combat situation, he’d had the shit blown out of him within three hours.

He grabbed the bars atop the bed, pulled himself up and around, and eased effortlessly out into his wheelchair. He was proud to be self-sufficient, and if you wanted to make him mad, you simply had to show pity or try and help him do something he was perfectly capable of doing himself.

He was also proud that they didn’t just discard good men with good brains and skills anymore, just because they were handicapped in the service of their country. No, with a massive perimeter stretching around half the world, anybody who could do a desk job to free some other for the hot areas was retained. It was only fair, of course, particularly for the ones like himself who’d paid the price for being where he was ordered to be.

Sure, he felt depressed sometimes. Here he was, thirty-three years old and pretty good looking, if he did say so himself, with no feeling below the waist. None. And no movement or control, either. It was bad enough to be in diapers again, but much worse to know he’d never again make love to a woman or ever father a child. But he was tough, Irish-tough, and full of life and the will to live. If nothing else, his deeply felt Roman Catholic religion made suicide the immoral way out, but his Marine religion, just as strong, made it the coward’s way out. Nope, let the little Reich boys cry in their beer and either end it all or be finished off by their own as useless. He was living proof of the real difference between Americans of all types and the enemy.

He shaved and gave himself a change and a sponge bath, then pulled on his uniform and got back into the chair. Staff Sergeant O’Brien, ready for duty, sir!

Ron Moosic expected the disability joker or something similar. He knew how much time hated these things, and him in particular, it seemed. Still, he liked O’Brien, whose general background and religion matched his own, and he liked the man’s spirit and outlook.

He didn’t as much care for the world that O’Brien inhabited, a world with two great empires, one run from Berlin and the other from Washington, both bristling with nuclear missiles, both higher tech than his own time had been, thanks to a longer war and nearly unremitting tension since, and both less than democratic.

Of course, he still preferred America, which stretched by force from what used to be Canada to Tierra del Fuego. The country itself was heavily rationed and on a permanent wartime footing; the standard of living of the average citizen was well below what he expected, but far better than the lot of the Latin Commonwealths, which were essentially run by American military decree. Still, Presidents ran for election, and so did Congress, and there was still a Constitution worded much the way he remembered it. In fact, there were a couple of amendments there that hadn’t been there in his time, including a sexual equality one—and, in fact, women as well as men had to serve, and at all levels, including combat. And, of course, the seventy-two states took some getting used to.

And yet, oddly, there was still a Wicomico Group, by that name, and it was still run as a cooperative venture between the War Department and the State Security Bureau, the latter having far more sweeping powers, including many inside the country, than the NSA he’d known.

It was, in fact, a bit unsettling that his old bosses had become what the NSA’s old critics once feared—a sort of electronic secret police.

Private ownership of automobiles was banned, of course, but at 0715 sharp the van pulled up to take him to work a few miles to the south of his apartment complex. It was a special van, outfitted for handicapped people. No wonder those in the service were intensely loyal.

The day was pretty much routine. The place looked as secret and as disguised as ever; the entrance was just as tough to get through, and the interior central hall, which he’d last seen in shambles, was remarkably intact. About the only really strong change was that it was a bit drabber, with everybody in some sort of service uniform and everything a dull military gray, including his central admissions desk, from which he monitored the entry areas and also dispensed information and clearances through his computer keyboard.

The security chief was a cold fish named Sorban, and all of the SSB men and women seemed like the kind of folks who enjoyed robbing widows and kicking little children, but that was routine to O’Brien and he mostly ignored them or even cracked jokes about them as only somebody on the inside would dare.

At 1630 he was relieved and rolled back out through what they all called The Gauntlet to the lot where the vans and buses were waiting. All in all, a very routine day, but for Moosic something of a surprise, not that so much was different but that so much was the same. Indeed, Dr. Aaron Silverberg headed the project, although even on O’Brien’s level they knew only the general details of what went on below.

He wondered if Silverberg was the same sort of fellow as the one he’d known. Certainly he was in the same position, so much would have been the same. It would be interesting, he thought, to see the subtle differences in the familiar.

Back at his apartment complex, he considered his options. He could go over to the club, but he tended to eat too little and drink too much when he did that. Besides, tonight was a dance night.

Not that he was inactive. There was a wheelchair basketball team he was on that was pretty good, and a local Handicapped Service Organization social club that was nice, but he decided he just wanted to relax this night. He went inside, wheeled into the elevator, and went up to his floor, then down the hall to his door. He put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed himself in, the door sliding out of the way to accommodate him and his chair. He stopped just inside the door and cursed. He always left a light on so he wouldn’t have to fumble—whoever had built this place had done a lot for the handicapped, but hadn’t done much for light switches near the door—and yet it was fairly dark in the room. Bulb burnt out, he thought; then he began to tense. It was too dark. He always left the drapes open, and they were closed. The maid, perhaps? But she never had done that before…

The lights came on. Five glistening inhuman creatures stared at him, rifles aimed at his head. In the big stuffed recliner chair sat a man he’d seen before, a blond man with a strong Nordic face, dressed all in black, leaning forward so that he didn’t have to sit back on his time belt.

“Come, come, Sergeant O’Brien—or should I say Mr. Moosic? Surely that is not the kind of expression used to greet old friends.”