Downtiming the Night Side

MAIN LINE 236.6 THE CALVERT CLIFFS, MARYLAND, U.S.A.

It was not an imposing structure, rather low, as nuclear power plants went, and sprawling across the tops of the great wide cliffs that were filled with the fossil remains of forgotten seas and looked down at the wide Patuxent River as it flowed towards Chesapeake Bay. The whole plant had been white once, but age and weather had taken its toll, and it was now a grimier gray than the sea gulls that continually circled and squawked around the cliffs.

Most nuclear power plants, including this one, were obsolete now, too expensive and dangerous to maintain. The people around the site, for the most part, and those throughout the state continued to believe that this hulking dinosaur, this monument to the misplaced, golden-age optimism of the past, supplied much of their power, but, in fact, it supplied none at all—and had not for years. And yet, so complete was the fiction that families down for a warm weekend to swim and hunt fossils still often wound up going up to the visitor’s center and getting the Gas and Electric Company’s spiel on the wonders and safety of nuclear energy in general and this plant in particular.

He reflected on this as he cleared the gate to the employees’ parking lot and drove through the massive fence that surrounded not only the lot but the true access to the plant. He couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to collect money week after week telling cheery, convincing lies to a gullible public.

The big security system had been put in ostensibly to protect the plant from anti-nuclear protesters, of which there were still legions, and also because a Naval Reserve unit had been set up on a part of the grounds to deal with nuclear power and waste. In point of fact, the whole thing was a cover so good it should not, perhaps, have amazed him that it had lasted this long and was this complete. So complete, in fact, that here he was, pulling into a parking space and preparing for a few weeks of orientation before becoming chief of security for the installation, and, as of right now, he himself hadn’t the slightest idea what they really were doing here.

He knew the problems, though. Only a month earlier a crack Air Force security team had managed to get in and literally take over the place, despite all the elaborate precautions. That had cost the previous security chief his job, and when those whom the National Security Agency’s computers said were best qualified for the job were given complex plans and blueprints and asked to pinpoint holes and suggest better security measures. Within the limits of security, he’d apparently done the best job. A jump to GS-17 came with it, so he’d accepted the post when it was offered even though he had no idea at the time where or what the place really was. When he’d discovered that it was barely two hours south of his current job at the NSA, he’d been delighted.

What would come today was the less than delightful prelude. Today he’d have to meet with Joe Riggs, the man he was replacing, and with Riggs’ very proud staff. It would be an awkward time. He paused a moment to savor the bright, fresh June air off the water, then walked up to the unimposing door simply marked “Employees Only! Warning! Unauthorized Personnel Not Permitted Beyond This Point! Badges and I.D. Required!” That was an understatement.

He opened the unlocked door and stepped into a relatively small chamber that seemed to have no exit. The door closed behind him and he could hear a chunk! As special security bolts shot into place. The chamber was lit with only a small, bare light bulb, but he could see the security cameras and the speaker in the ceiling. Somewhere, perhaps in back of the speaker, would be a canister of knockout gas.

“Name, purpose, and today’s password, please,” came a crisp woman’s voice through the speaker.

“Moosic, Ronald Carlisle, new Security Director. Abalone is no worse than baloney.”

There was a moment’s hesitation, then a section of steel wall slid back far enough for him to pass through. He stepped out of the chamber and the door slid shut again behind him. He was now in a hallway lined with heavy armor plate for six feet up from the floor, then thick security mesh from there to the high ceiling. Cut into the metal plate were three security windows, such as you might find at a drive-in bank. He went up to the first one and saw a man in a Marine uniform sitting behind three-inch thick glass staring back at him. A small drawer slid out: “Place your I.D. and security badge code in the drawer,” he was instructed.

He did as ordered, then waited until the drawer opened again with a small card in it and a tiny inkpad. “Thumbprints where indicated,” the bored Marine told him. Again he did as instructed. The clerk took all of the material, fed it into a computer console, and waited. After a short time, the computer flashed something to him and a tiny drawer opened. The Marine removed a badge, checked it against the thumbprints and checked the photo against the face he was seeing, then fed it back through the drawer.

He looked at the badge, similar to the one he’d used at NSA, with its holographic picture and basic information, then clipped it on. He knew that this badge had a tremendous amount of information encoded within its plastic structure. Computer security would read that card by laser hundreds, perhaps thousands of times as he moved through the complex. Doors would or wouldn’t open, and defenses would or would not be triggered, depending on what the card said in its unique code. None of these badges ever left this building. You picked it up on the way in; you turned it in on the way out. In fact, there would be other areas requiring different badges with different codes, all premanufactured for the authorized wearer alone. Each time you turned in one badge, you picked up the next.

He walked down the rest of the corridor and found that the door at the end slid back for him. He walked through and entered a modern-looking office setup, very military but very familiar to him. He’d worked at NSA for nine years and was used to such things.

A pudgy, gray-haired man in a brown, rumpled-looking suit waited for him, then came up to him and stuck out his hand. “You’re Moosic, I guess. I’m Riggs.”

He took the other’s hand and shook it. “Sorry we have to meet like this,” he responded.

“No, you’re not. Not really,” Riggs responded in a casual tone, without any trace of bitterness. “Not any more than I was when I took over the same way. It’s no big deal. I’ll be bumped to an eighteen, push papers for two years, then retire with over thirty. Short of running for President, it’s about as high as I ever expected to get anyway. Come on—I’ll show you around the place.”

They walked back through the central office area. Three corridors branched off the room, each of which was guarded by a very mean-looking Marine with a semiautomatic rifle. Moosic looked around and noted also the cameras and professionally concealed trap doors in the ceiling. Anyone who made it even this far would still be under constant observation by people able to take action. It was impressive, but it made the Air Force penetration even more so. As they stood near a corridor entry way, each of them inserting his gold photo I.D. into a computer and waiting for the red ones to appear in the slot at the bottom, the newcomer said as much.

“No place is totally securable,” Riggs replied. “You can say they were pros with some inside information, but any enemy trying the same thing will have those advantages as well. The big hole in the end was the centralized control of security within this installation, as I’m sure you know. If you got in, you could get out.”

Moosic nodded. “That’s the first priority now. Central control will have a permanent override elsewhere, connected directly to this place. We received funding for it.” He didn’t mention that it would take ten weeks to install even the basics, six months before it could be fully tested and operational. Riggs no longer had a need to know that sort of thing.

They got their red tags and went on down the corridor. “This place is as bad as Fort Meade,” the newcomer remarked as they passed Marine after Marine, computer check and trap after computer check and trap. “Maybe it’s about time you told me what we do here.”

Riggs chuckled. “They didn’t tell you, huh? Well, it wouldn’t matter. Nobody would believe it anyway, not even if we let the Washington Post in and they made it a page-one cover story. You know this plant doesn’t generate any public electricity?”

Moosic nodded. “I figured that out from the problem they handed me and a close look at the place. But it’s in full operation.”

“Oh, yeah. More than ever. Close to a hundred percent capacity. It takes one hell of a lot of juice to send people back in time.”

Ron Moosic stopped dead. “To… what?”

Riggs stopped, turned, and looked highly amused. Moosic had the uneasy feeling he was having his leg pulled. “Come on—seriously.”

“Oh, I’m serious. I just get a kick out of seeing anybody’s face when I tell ’em that. Come on down to the lab levels and I’ll see if anybody’s free enough to show you the works.”

Dr. Aaron Silverberg was a big bear of a man with a wild lion’s mane of snow-white hair and penetrating black eyes. He was not only physically imposing; he had that deep-down egotism that assumed that everybody he met had not only heard of him but was also awestruck at his very presence. Ron Moosic, of course, had never heard of him before in his life.

“To tell you how we happened on it would take far too long,” the chief scientist told him. “It was the usual— one of those accidents that happened when some folks were doing something totally unrelated. Basically, a few odd random particles in the big accelerator out west consistently arrived before they left when you did things just so. Only a few quadrillionths of a second, of course, but it shouldn’t have been possible at all. The first thought was that something had finally broken the speed limit—the speed of light. Later, using various shieldings, we found that light had nothing at all to do with it. The damned things arrived before they left, that’s all. Knocked causality into a cocked hat all at once. For those of us who knew about it, it was more gut-wrenching than if God wearing a long beard and flowing robes had parted the heavens in front of us.”

Over the next half-hour Moosic spent a good deal of time looking at evidence of trips back in time, mostly photographs and small objects. There were already a huge number of more elaborate things—a tape of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, several of tavern conversations between Franklin and Jefferson as well as many others of the founding fathers, and others recording personages who’d lived even earlier. The earliest was an eavesdropped argument between an incensed Christopher Columbus and the refitter of the Santa Maria, or so he was assured. He spoke no Spanish, let alone fifteenth-century Aragonese with a thick, equally archaic Italian accent.

“Funny,” Silverberg commented. “Nobody ever plays Franklin with a New England accent, although he came from Boston, not Philadelphia, and nobody ever gave Jefferson that hill country twang he really has. Had. Whatever. Napoleon had a silly voice and never lost his Corsican accent. If they’d had television back then, he’d never have made it in politics.”

Moosic just shook his head in wonder, still not quite believing all this. “I find it all impossible to accept. What was was, that’s all. You can’t recapture a moment that’s past.”

“And so I was raised to believe. As the poor two-dimensional creature in Abbott’s Flatland could not accept depth, so we cannot accept but a single perspective of time. In a way, it’s like motion. We know we’re in motion because of a lot of phenomena and reference points. We move in relation to something else. Yet the Earth is now turning at around twenty-five thousand miles per hour and we can’t feel it. It’s going around the sun at an even greater speed, and we can’t feel or sense that, either. The sun, in turn, is going around the galactic center, and so on. Since all that is around us, including us, is moving at the same speed and in the same way, we cannot sense that motion and speed relative to us. Since we are going forward in time, all of us at the same rate and everything else around, we cannot really relate to time in any way except as the progress of one moment to the next. But it’s all there—the past is forever. We are immortal, Mr. Moosic. We exist forever frozen in our past moments.”

“But time is… immutable.”

“Oh, so? Even before we knew that it was not so. Einstein showed it. Time is relative to mass and velocity. The closer you approach the speed of light, the slower your time is relative to the universe. Time also gives way around areas of heavy gravity—suns, to a small extent, and black holes to an enormous extent. No, it’s not the fact that time is malleable that is the stunner. Apply enough power, it seems, and time will finally give. Rather, the shock is that time exists as a continuum, a series of events running in a continous stream from the Big Bang all the way to the future. How far we don’t know—we can’t figure out how to go into the future relative to our own time. It may be possible that far future scientists can go past today, but we cannot. But the past record is there, and it is not merely a record: it’s a reality. Now you understand the need for security.”

He nodded, stunned. “You could send an army back and have it pop up out of nowhere.”

“Bah! You’re hopeless! Mr. Moosic, you will never send an army back in time. We need the entire capacity of this power plant, which is capable of supplying the energy needs of roughly ten million people, just to send four people back a century, and the further back you go, the more power is required. To get one human being back to 1445 would require our total output. That and to sustain him there, anyway, for any period of time. Beyond that the energy requirements get so enormous that we’ve estimated that just to send one person back to the first century A.D. would require every single bit of power this nation could generate for three solid weeks.”

“But for only, say, a week back? Surely—”

“No, no. It’s impossible. Physics is still physics and natural law is still natural law. Just as nothing is permitted past the speed of light, no one is permitted to coexist at any point in the past where he already exists. It just won’t do it. In fact, it won’t do it within a decade of your birth date. Why we haven’t any idea.”

He thought about it, trying to accept it at least for argument’s sake. “A decade. Then you could go back and live past the time you were born.”

“No. Not exactly, that is. You could go back, yes, but by that time you wouldn’t be you anymore. Nature does resist tampering. We made that discovery the first time out. You’re back there, and you don’t fit. Time then makes you fit. It is far easier and more efficient to integrate you into that present you’re now in than it is to change all time. It creates a curious niche for you. It adjusts a very small thing in what we call the time frame so that you were born and raised there. In a way, it’s very handy. Go back to fifteenth-century France and you’ll find yourself thinking in the local language and dialect and generally knowing your way around. Only the massive energy link, a lifeline of sorts, between here and there keeps you from being completely absorbed. Unfortunately, the longer you are there, the more energy is required to sustain you. It’s in some way related to the subject’s age, although we haven’t gotten the exact ratio. It requires more energy to send an older person back than a younger. Someone up to about the age of fifty we can generally sustain back there for the number of time-frame days equal to half his age. How old are you?”

“Forty-one,” he told the scientist.

“Yes, so we could safely send you back for a period of twenty days with an adequate safety margin. Over fifty, it accelerates like mad. It’s simply not safe.”

“What happens, then, if you overstay your welcome? Don’t come back within that margin?”

“Then the energy required to retrieve you would exceed our capacity. The line would break. You would literally be integrated into that past time as that created person, eventually with no memories or traces that you were not native to that time and place. And if that was, say, 1820, we could not later rescue you. You could not go forward of your own present—1820—and even if there was a way, we would retrieve someone else, not you. Someone, incidentally, invariably minor and unlikely to change any events. We learned our lesson the hard way.”

“You’ve lost someone, then?”

He nodded, “An expert in Renaissance history and culture, who was also a valuable agent when he attended East European conferences, which is why he was one of the few scholars we allowed to downtime personally. He was forty-six when he went back the first time, and he stayed two weeks. Later, he needed a follow-up, so we sent him back again—and lost him. The clock, we learned, starts when you arrive the first time, and it does not reset if you return again. He, and we, assumed at the time that he had two weeks a trip. He didn’t. So he’s there now, for all time, a meek, mild Franciscan monk in a monastery in northern Italy, a pudgy little Italian native of the time. To give you a final idea of how absolute absorption is, Dr. Small was also black—in our time.”

Ron Moosic whistled. “So then how do you get the recordings and pictures?”

“They tend to have a stronger sense of shape and substance, being inanimate. We’ve discovered that recorders and the like can be retained for almost the safety period. Weapons, on the other hand, tend to be absorbed into period weapons rather quickly. One supposes that a battery-powered recorder has a minimal chance of affecting history, while a new weapon or something else of that sort could do a great deal of damage. Why and how such judgments are made by nature we don’t know at all. Why is the speed of light so absolute even time must bend before it? We don’t know. It just is, that’s all.”

“Still, the old saw about going back and killing your own father before he met your mother still holds. How can you do that and still exist? And if you didn’t exist, you couldn’t go back.”

“But you could. We haven’t actually had a test, but this absorption phenomenon seems designed mostly to counter that sort of thing. In theory, you would in fact cease to exist in the present as soon as you committed the deed, which would snap your energy link. You would then become, immediately, this wholly new personality, this created individual. Joe would become time-frame John, and it would be John, not Joe, who shot the man who would have become Joe’s father. Of course, John would create a ripple that would then wipe out Joe, or so we believe, but the deed would still be done.”

“It would seem, then, that there’s very little to worry about in all this,” Moosic commented. “The only real risk is to our time traveler, not our present.”

Silverberg sighed. “That, alas, is not entirely true. The time mechanism itself, for example, is rather bulky, much like a space suit. You don’t need it where you’re going, but you need it to keep you alive until you get there. That can fall into other hands with potentially disastrous results, as you might understand. We can take precautions on that. But for the active period in the time frame, you—the present you—are still in control. During that period, particularly in the early stages of it, you are a walking potential disaster. The fact that it was John, not Joe, who shot Joe’s father does not make Joe’s father any less dead. We haven’t yet tested it because of the dangers and unpredictability, but we suspect that if causality is challenged, in the same way light speed is challenged, then something has to give, and what gives will be time.

“We suspect, in general, a minimal disruption—if you kill Hitler, someone will arise who is substantially the same and formed by the same sort of hatreds and prejudices. If Joe’s father had sired three children in the present track, those children would still be born—to a different father, but one rather similar to the first. But there are key figures in key places at key times who might be irreplaceable. Would a Second Continental Congress without John Adams ever have declared independence? Would we have won the Battle of Saratoga and gotten French and Spanish allies if Arnold had been killed earlier? What would a contemporary Britain be like without a Churchill, or a U.S. without Roosevelt? That is why the Nobel prizes must be unawarded and this installation protected. I would rather have it melt down than have proof of what we have here leak out.”

Moosic nodded. “I think I see. So somebody could change things.”

“We believe so. The best model we have begins with the Big Bang. With all of the rest of creation, a time wave is created as a continuous stream. It might be an anomaly, might be necessary to keep everything else stable, but there it is. Think of it as a thick glob of paint on a sheet of glass. It runs down the glass, when we tilt it, at a slow and steady speed. The edge is where time is now, still running down so long as everything else is expanding, but the paint trail it left is still there. The edge, where we are now, is the sum of that trail. Alter that trail, and you will start a ripple that will run down to catch up with the leading edge. The math is rather esoteric, but the ripple will run at ten times the edge rate primarily because it’s smaller. If it’s a tiny ripple, it may resolve things and die out quickly. A big wave, though—it would change the sum of the world.”

Moosic had a sudden, uneasy thought. “What about others? Would we even know if, say, the Soviets had a project like this? They’re doing fusion research now.”

“No, there’s no way of knowing. Of ever knowing. A time war would be the most frightening thing of all. However, it would still be badly limited in several respects. It would require enormous power. It would require a country insane enough or desperate enough to risk its own lot on a new roll of the dice. And it would certainly involve few participants in any event, participants who would be limited to a small amount of time in any frame to accomplish much at all. The Soviets are our opponents. They are not mad, which is why we are all still here. Neither are the current Germans, Japanese, Chinese, or others capable of such a project. It is only the fear that someone else is doing it that keeps us funded at all, so expensive is this operation. We spend a lot of time trying to convince them that there is military potential, when actually there is not. But we don’t know, of course. And so long as NSA’s very budget is classified, we can continue to get the money. You keep us out of unfriendly hands.”

“I’ll try,” Ron Moosic assured him, shaking his head and feeling far more worried now than when he’d walked in the door. This was a bit much to digest, even after a career in high-tech environments. In a sense, there was more unsettling business going on here than at the Pentagon and Kremlin war rooms. Here, just one well-meaning scientist could obliterate all that was constant in the world. A social experimenter would be even worse.

“That’s who we fear the most,” Riggs agreed. “The Air Force boys showed it wasn’t impossible to infiltrate here, but it’s pretty near so. On the other hand, how do you really get into a guy’s head when he’s being considered for downtiming?”

“Downtiming?”

“That’s what we call it, since you can’t seem to go uptime from here in any way except the way we’re doing it—one second at a time. You see, the big problem is that the boys here are mostly technical types. It’s a crew over at NSA that looks around for candidates for research and approves ’em before they even know about this place. The weed-out’s pretty extensive, but you can go only so far without spilling the beans about the place. Then, of course, they get the full treatment—drugs, lie detectors, you name it. We try as hard as we can to make sure that nobody goes into the chamber if they have even the remotest impulse to do anything but observe.”

“But nothing’s perfect,” Moosic noted. “Even the sanest of us has sudden impulses and urges. Until that person goes back there, you can’t know for sure.”

“Yep. And there are ways to beat the system—any system. It’s a constant worry. That’s why we don’t let any professional historians go back at all. After all that, they’re told we have a way of observing and even sometimes recording the past. They give us the targets, and then we send one of our agents back. They have romance in their souls but no stake in the actual work and not enough professional background to know just what wrong button to push. They know, too, that one false move and we can nightside them—cut them off in the past.”

“But this nightsiding, as you call it, wouldn’t prevent them from doing something. It would only mean they couldn’t profit by it.”

He nodded. “That’s about it. It’s a chance we have to take.”

Ron Moosic stared at the man. “Why?”

Riggs chuckled. “Because, throughout history, you can’t uninvent something. Oh, you can suppress it for a while, but it’s funny that lots of discoveries of the same tiling seem to happen around the same time, whenever the technology of the world will allow it.”

“The Greeks invented the steam engine but didn’t do anything with it,” the younger man pointed out.

“That they did—but they invented it in a closed society that kept their discoveries not only from non-Greeks but from the bulk of their own people. Silverberg will go on and on telling you that science is a collective and not really an individual sport these days. Oh, sure, Einstein dreamed up all that stuff on his own—but did he, really? Or did he take a lot of stuff discovered and discussed by a bunch of scientists in a lot of countries and put it all together to see something they missed? What if Einstein didn’t have a way to get that stuff from the others? No mass-produced books, no international postal system, no way to know what all those guys were thinking or finding out? And even if he did—what if all Einstein’s theories were written down on paper and filed away in one spot in just a single hand-written book? Who’d know it to make use of it, except by accident? The Greeks had that kind of problem. Lots of brains working, but nobody telling anybody else. Not like now. This whole project can be traced to a hundred different teams working in half a dozen countries on different stuff. Let just one word leak out that we’re doing this and others can put the same information together through mass communications, computer searches, and stuff like that.

“With Einstein and the others to build on, almost every one of the major countries in World War II was working on the A-bomb. We just got there first. Now everybody’s got the damned things. A couple of dozen countries so poor they keep their people in starvation still have computer-guided smart missiles, and everybody and his brother has something in orbit now. The Russians have an accelerator at least up to ours. They’ll eventually get the same results we did, if they haven’t already. So much power and so many people are required for something even this size that eventually there’ll be a leak, others will get on the track, and it’ll be a real mess. We better know all the rules of this thing backwards, forwards, and sideways, or we’re gonna be up shit creek when the time ripple comes along and wipes out you and me and maybe the whole damned Constitution.”

“Nice thought. I’m not sure I even like the idea that I know it now. Even without this job, it’s going to make sleeping a lot harder.”

“Tell me about it. The only thing I can tell you is to think of the thing just like the H-bomb and all the other things out there that can cripple or kill us. It’s just another in a long line of threats, just another doomsday weapon. It’s so complicated and so expensive it probably won’t be the one that gets us, anyway.”

Some comfort, Moosic thought sourly. He wondered how long it would take him to grow as cynical and pessimistic as Riggs, then considered it from the other man’s point of view. Too long, he decided. Riggs had, in fact, the only way of really living with this.

“I guess you should meet the security staff now,” Riggs suggested. “That’ll give you a picture of the whole layout.”

Moosic nodded. “I guess we—”

At that moment the lights went out, then came back on again, and there were shouts, screams, and the sound of muffled explosions. Bells and sirens went off all over the place. Riggs recovered quickly and ran out the door, Moosic at his heels. They made it through a screaming mass to the central area. There were bodies all over the place, and the smell of gas, but the bodies were all office and Marine personnel. Areas of the ceiling were bubbling, smoking masses occasionally dripping ooze onto the floor as they smoldered and gave off foul smells.

“Somebody’s going for the chamber!” Riggs shouted, drawing his pistol and moving off down a corridor that should have blocked their entrance. No passes were necessary now, though—the computer terminal was another smoldering mass of fused metal and plastic.

Moosic recognized it as the corridor he’d come from only a few minutes earlier, the one that led to Silverberg’s offices and the time chamber.

A bunch of uniformed and plainclothes security officers were near the elevator. They saw Riggs and rushed up to him, all talking at once. With a mighty roar of “Quiet!” he got them settled, then picked one to tell him the story.

“Four of ’em,” said Conkling, the middle-aged uniformed man picked as the spokesman. “They knew the exact locations of everything, Joe! Everything! They had the password, knew the right names, and when the door slid open for the one who came into the entrance, the other three blew open the outer door. By that time, that first one had set off a mess of gas bombs from someplace. None of ’em had any masks I could see, but one whiff and you died while they walked through it cool as can be. They had some kind of gun that worked like a bazooka one minute and shot gas the next.”

“What about the gas in the reception area?”

“Didn’t bother ’em. They shot everybody up, then fried all the ceiling weapons with some type of laser gun. I tell you, Joe, I never saw weapons like that before from any country! Never! Right outa Buck Rogers.”

“How many of ’em did we get?”

“Uh—none of ’em, Joe. They all got down here—and, so help me, the damned elevator opened for ’em just like they had the pass and the combination. Took ’em down and stuck there.”

Riggs nodded and turned to Moosic. “Inside job.”

The younger man nodded. “All the way. Any way down there other than by this thing?”

“There’s a stairway, but the panels are designed only to open from the other side.”

“So were ours. Let’s blow them or get whatever it takes to blow them. I assume the whole level below was gassed?”

“Knockout type. Real strong—six to eight hours. But if it didn’t get them up here, it sure won’t down there.”

“Maybe not,” Moosic responded, “but it’ll get everybody else down there. You can’t tell me they can work all that stuff down there without anybody except their inside man.”

“Hardly. The computer alone would freeze up without five different operators at five different locations, each of whom knows only part of the code. And one of those operators is at the end of a special phone line topside and a mile from here.”

“Then we either wait for them or go after them. The Air Force thing is one way, but with the commotion they caused getting down there’s no way out short of hostages, and those they’ve got.”

Riggs took complete charge. He ordered various security personnel to make certain all exits were blocked with heavy firepower, ordered another to establish an external command post, and still others to report to NSA and Pentagon higher-ups. Finally he put a heavy firepower team at the only stairway exit, and it proceeded to line the area with enough explosive to bring down the entire wing. Nobody was going to get out that way without Riggs’ personal permission.

Then they walked back to the security command center, which hadn’t been taken or touched. It had been the key to the Air Force team’s success, but these people hadn’t touched it. They obviously had no intention of coming back out this way—or they wanted it intact for reasons of their own.

The command center was impressive, with its masses of monitors and one whole wall showing a complete schematic of the entire installation, even the public parts, parking lots and roads, along with lights indicating the location of cameras, mikes, and defensive equipment. Much of the board was flashing bright red.

The security personnel inside the center had remained at their posts, but it was clear that they were bewildered and frustrated. They had been attacked in a manner that the installation was designed to thwart, and the invaders had simply marched right through.

A crisp, professional-looking woman with gray hair sat at the master controls and barely looked up as Riggs and Moosic entered.

“Hey, Marge? What’s the story?” Riggs called.

“Twenty-four dead, thirteen critical, about forty more with minors, give or take,” she responded. “They’re immune to all our gasses and pretty cold-blooded. I’ll put them up on number six for you over there. Three men, one woman. No makes yet, but give us time.”

Riggs and Moosic went over to one of the monitor banks. A screen flickered and came on, then a whole series, showing every room below. Most had unconscious forms, lying about, a sea of limp forms in lab whites. In the central control chamber, though, the four were clearly visible. No—not four. Five. “Who’s that other one?” Moosic asked.

Riggs ordered a zoom. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, short, fat, and dumpy, with big hornrimmed glasses, the lenses of which looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles.

“Karen Cline,” Riggs told him. “There’s our insider. My career was already shot to hell, but I’ll still retire. Somebody back at the Palace is going to swing for this.”

Moosic looked at the woman. “What’s her rank?”

“Oh, she’s a top-grade physicist. I don’t know how they got to her, though. Conservative family, workaholic, and don’t let her looks fool you. She’s slept with so many guys they need a separate computer just to keep track of them. Just goes to show you.”

“Got a make on two of them,” Marge called from the command console. “The young, good-looking boy is Roberto Sandoval, twenty-eight, born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The girl’s Christine Austin-Venneman, twenty-four, born in Oakland, California.”

“Terrific,” Riggs muttered. Christine Austin-Venneman was the daughter of one of the country’s most prominent liberal Congressmen, a very popular and powerful man. Her mother was the heir to a fairly large fortune based on natural gas, and had always felt guilty about it. If there was a liberal cause, she was in the forefront of it and usually much of the bankroll behind it. Christine had been on forty protest marches for twenty causes in half the states in the union before she was five.

“More on Sandoval,” Marge reported. “Father unknown, mother a committed FALN member and revolutionary Trotskyite, trained in Cuba and Libya years ago. His mother was killed three years ago when a bomb she was working on blew up her and her safe house in Washington. Sandoval is suspected of being involved in several robberies and bombings, mostly in the New York area, since that time. Since Austin-Venneman’s mother organized the March on the U.N. for the Liberation of Puerto Rico from Colonialism last year, we can guess how the two got together.”

Both security men nodded absently. The figures below seemed in no hurry, but all had nasty-looking weapons, except for Cline, and were making a methodical check of the area, room by room. A small status line at the bottom of each monitor indicated that gas had been released throughout the complex and that the elevator and stairway doors were sealed.

Ron Moosic just stared at them and felt helpless. His first day on the job and this happened. He looked at the status line again and noticed that there were two small blinking areas in it on the right. “What are they?” he asked Riggs.

“The area is far too dangerous to risk. Those are last-resort items. There is enough explosive in the walls to fry and liquefy the whole lower complex. They’re on a failsafe mechanism, though. We can fire them, but we can’t arm them. Only the President or the collective Joint Chiefs can do that. If the left one stops blinking, it means the system is armed and at our discretion. If both go solid, we have twenty minutes to clear out, or so they told us.”

At that moment the left one stopped blinking.