Downtiming the Night Side

TIMELY DECISIONS

Ron Moosic suddenly felt like the President faced with Armageddon on the day of his inaugural. He didn’t even know the names of most of these people or the way to the nearest men’s room, yet here he was, facing what might quickly become the shortest job he’d ever had.

Riggs looked over at him. “Well? What do you think?”

I think I want to know the location of the men’s room, he thought sourly, but aloud he said, “You say there’s no way they can operate the time machine or whatever from down there?”

Riggs nodded. “There’s no bypassing that outside code, and nobody down there or even up here knows what it is.”

Moosic sighed. “Then all you’ve got here, when all is said and done, is a classic hostage situation. Sooner or later they’ll threaten to shoot the hostages one by one if we don’t come up with the code, but if we blow it we just as surely kill them all. They’ve trapped themselves, and even if they eventually go suicidal, we’re no worse off than if we push their button. I’d say let’s string ’em along and work at getting them. They have the counters for a lot of the nasty stuff, but they still have to get air down there from somewhere.”

“It’s all super-filtered stuff from its own buried source. No way to get a man in there. Still—I’ll get a team working on tapping into it. We already have one working on bypassing the stairway seals. If we can just buy enough time, we can puke ’em to death. There’s some pretty nasty stuff near here I can get my hands on, stuff that’s absorbed by the skin and pretty ugly, but stuff with an antidote. I agree.”

Riggs left to issue the proper set of commands, leaving Moosic alone to watch the monitors and think. He didn’t like to think much right now, but he did feel a little bit more comfortable with a classical hostage situation. He watched the tiny figures on the monitors and tried to figure out just what they were doing.

Ron Moosic hadn’t started out to be a cop, not even the kind of high-tech one he wound up being. His greatgrandfather had come to the eastern Pennsylvania coal mines when that area was flourishing. The family name then was thirty-seven letters long and pure Georgian—the one south of Russia, not the one south of South Carolina. The old boy had heard that if you didn’t Americanize your name, the immigration boys would, so he looked at a map of where the Immigration Society had written he’d be living and saw, near Scranton, a little town that sounded reasonable to him, and he’d written in the name Moosic with no understanding of the jokes his descendants would have to bear because of it.

Ron’s father had also worked in the mines, and the boy had grown up in the small town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a town whose biggest claim to fame was the largest slag heap in North America. It towered over the town, and it was on fire all the time. Still, it was a nice town in which to grow up, large enough for all the civilized amenities and small enough not to have many of civilization’s biggest penalties. One penalty for a miner was always injury, though, and his father had been hauled out of the mine when Ron was still small. A loader had backed into him, crushing him between it and the wall of coal. He’d lived a few more years, a permanent invalid with a strong spirit and sense of life, but complications finally took him when Ron was just eleven.

Vic Moosic had been a big bear of a man, with bright eyes and walrus moustache. He looked a little like all those pictures of another Georgian, Joe Stalin, and always had claimed to be related to the Soviet dictator. “Old Joe got all the meanness,” he often said. Later, when Vic’s son needed an exhaustive security check, it was found that the Moosic family was not even originally Georgian, but rather Uzbeck. Young Ron had always rather liked the idea of being an Uzbeck. Nobody else he’d ever met could make that claim.

Insurance and the union helped out a little—his mother had needed it, with six kids ranging from ages seven to fourteen—but they were not a wealthy family. His older brothers had gone into the mines, but he had not. He’d always been more intellectual and reclusive than his brothers and sisters, but he’d worshipped his father and his father had understood his peculiarities. “You’re not like them,” Vic kept telling him. “You got the family brains, boy. Don’t go into the mines. Find a way out. You’ll be the first one.”

And he had found the way. It was called the U.S. Air Force, and it offered a smart, young high school graduate free college for a set number of years of service. He’d majored in geography at Penn State, with a minor in computer science, and done pretty well. The Air Force, at least, thought highly of him, and after graduation they assigned him to intelligence work.

It sounded romantic, but it wasn’t. Nuts-and-bolts stuff, mostly—cryptography, aerial photo interpretation, that sort of thing. Still, at the end of twelve years he was thirty, a major, and on the right career track. He also, along the way, met and married Barbara.

He never quite came to grips with splitting up. At the start, she’d been pretty and sexy and had a desire to see the world. She was a college graduate, but was never really on his intellectual level, something he knew from the start. Well, maybe that was unfair, but she read very little and watched a lot of TV, and she seemed to have not the slightest curiosity about his work, although he really couldn’t have told her anything specific anyway. She wanted kids, and he did, too, but after three miscarriages, the last of which almost killed her, the doctors told them that she could never have them. She’d changed after that, although he’d told her that it didn’t make any difference to him. Somehow, she seemed to blame him for her enforced barrenness, although it was clearly the fault of no one. Her irrationality became progressively worse and painful to him. It was his fault she could not bear children, yet somehow this made her, in her own eyes, less a woman, and she dreamed up all sorts of paranoid fantasies that he was having affairs all over the place. She became increasingly bitter, and frigid.

Ultimately, he’d given up, inventing excuses not to be home, and, eventually, he’d had an affair. She never knew for sure, but when you’re accused of something incessantly, you don’t incur a penalty for really doing it. Ultimately, they’d had a final blow-up, and that had been that. The temporary alimony she’d been awarded had stopped three years ago, with the last check going to an address in San Francisco, and he had no idea where she was or what she was doing now.

The funny thing was, he still loved her—or, rather, he loved the woman he’d married and hated what she’d become. He’d been faithful to her through all the good years, and if she’d accepted things, he’d have remained so, or at least he liked to believe he would have. He’d certainly had a series of strictly physical affairs since, but he found it impossible to get really close to another woman. He wanted some permanence, perhaps even a kid or two before he was too old to see them grow up, but he couldn’t take the plunge again. He was, he knew, just too afraid that it might all happen again, and that would be more than he could stand.

Shortly after the divorce, he’d been posted to the NSA. He owed the Air Force no more service, and it didn’t take much genius to realize that he could take on the same sort of jobs permanently at a much higher pay level than the Air Force would give him, with all his service time counting towards government seniority and retirement. Despite a lot of pleading, he resigned from the service and took on a permanent job as a civilian. Within a year he did the usual, joining a reserve unit at Andrews, hiking pay and benefits still further. It was the way the government game was played, and he played it pretty well.

Not that things were any more romantic at the National Security Agency. The massive complex, about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, was the real nerve center of U.S. Intelligence, happy to let the CIA take the publicity and the heat. Still, what it was was mostly dull, plodding, boring work, the biggest challenge being to sift through the enormous amounts of information pouring in at all times for things that seemed important or worth following up. Computers made it possible, but it still came down to the human element at the end. The tens of thousands of NSA agents employed there were, in fact, a highly paid infantry forever trying to take the paperwork hill—and losing.

And now, thanks to some boredom and the ability to solve complex topological puzzles that were security problems, here he was, staring down at somebody else’s failure.

“One of them’s calling for negotiations,” the woman at the control panel called out. “What do you want to do? Mr. Riggs is topside now, talking to the National Security Advisor.’’

“Put it on here, if you can,” Moosic instructed her. “I’ll talk to him.”

It was Sandoval, his handsome face and large, dark eyes telling the world how he got so many women to commit treason for him.

Somebody came over and showed Moosic how to work the intercom. “Ron Moosic here, Sandoval. Let’s hear it.”

The revolutionary could not repress a snicker. “Moosic?” He turned to Cline, the traitor within. “Who’s he?”

She shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

“All right. Who are you, Moo-sic?”

A little edge. Not much, but something. “I’m the Security Director for this station.”

“That’s Riggs.”

“I’m his boss. I’m the man who decides if we can evacuate this place and I’m the man who can push the button that will make it a big blob of bubbling goo.”

“You wouldn’t do it. Not with all these hostages here. Not with the brains you’d melt with us, and the money.”

“Riggs wouldn’t do it, maybe. I would. And I already have the presidential authority. I don’t know those people down there, so it’s not as hard for me. Sort of like a bomber pilot who never sees who his bombs land on. I do know we were closing down this place and moving to a better one with more power, so we don’t lose there. Nobody down there is irreplaceable, either.” He checked the monitors and saw the drawn faces and nervous glances among the others there. He had drained them of their self-confidence, and that was a victory. Now it was time to drop a little sugar in the vinegar.

“Still, there’s no reason for any more people to get killed than already have been,” he went on. “I can wait a while. And while I wait, maybe you can explain to me why you went to all this trouble to seal yourself in with no exit.”

“There’s an exit,” Sandoval came back, sounding a little more confident now. “You know it and I know it. You can blow us up, yes, but you cannot cut our power, not within the next twelve hours. If you attempt to break in or pour some agent through the air system, I assure you all down here will be dead. We are committed to victory or death, Moo-sic. We all live, or we all die. The hostages are simply a wall between you and us. We intend to bargain. I suggest you call Admiral Jeeter and tell him to check his mail today. When you have done so, we will talk again.”

Jeeter was the current head of NSA. Ordinarily, the man would be impossible for someone on Moosic’s level to reach, but he had a suspicion that today the call would be put right through.

He was right, at least as far as the admiral’s executive secretary. When the conversation was relayed, the secretary, himself a Marine colonel, instituted a frantic search for everything that had come in addressed to the admiral. It took very little time, surprisingly, to find it. It had been delivered by express mail.

Within another ten minutes, the admiral himself was on the phone. “It’s a massive file,” he told Moosic. “Still, it’s only parts of things. Enough. It’s selections from almost every major research paper relating to the project. It’s almost inconceivable that we could be penetrated to this degree.”

“Is it just the files?”

“No, there’s a note. It points out that these are merely photostats and that they are one among hundreds of sets. They assure me that none of them have been sent anywhere yet, but that they will be mailed to just about every newspaper and foreign government if we don’t give in to their demands. Even if it’s no more than this, it’ll blow the whole thing wide open!”

“I assume you’ll try the trackdown of the accomplices. In the meantime, what do you want me to do here?”

“Keep this line open. I’ll go downstairs and patch in to where I can see and hear everything in the lab. We’ll hear what they want; then it’ll be up to the President and the NSC whether or not we give it to ’em.”

Moosic nodded to himself, sighed, and turned back to the monitor board and opened communication. He wouldn’t wait for the admiral—whatever he said and did was already being recorded, and he knew that there would be a lot of calls for the old boy to make before he made it down to a situation room.

“So our little letter was received?” Sandoval said smugly. “I assume they do not like it much.”

“You know they don’t. But we can’t afford to believe you haven’t already mailed them or that you might not just let us know where most of them are while sending one or two elsewhere to do the most damage.”

“To whom would I send it through the back door? Russia? Czarist pigs masquerading as Communist liberators! China? Half of China doesn’t even have the electricity to run its villages, let alone power this. No, my offer is genuine. You will not be able to stop it from being made public. Public, not secret. But if we get what we want, you will receive all the copies—every one. This I swear on my mother’s grave.”

Ron Moosic sighed, glad it wasn’t his choice. He didn’t believe the oily revolutionary, but if the alternative was taking a chance he was being honest for once or just letting it all come out—which would be the best chance?

“Your demands aren’t for me to decide, as you must know, but you tell ’em to me and they’ll also be reaching the ones who do decide,” he told the revolutionaries below.

“We have looked in the chamber and found three time suits. Dr. Cline has told us that there are but four, and one is in use. Very well. We will need to use them. I am told that sending three back will strain things, but that two will be no problem. The codes will be given. We will go back, while my associates here make certain you do not break in and cut our cords, as it were. However, once back there, you still will not know where the hundreds of other copies are. Only I know that. I will return in ten days and tell you. I will have no choice—I must return here or cease to exist. If I do not tell you within fourteen days from nine o’clock this morning, all of them will be sent.”

He thought about it. “Then you don’t go. You could have anything at all happen to you back there, stuff way beyond our control.”

“It could,” he admitted, “but I go or no deal. You will have to take some chances. If you press that button and blow us up, some cover story will have to hit the papers, causing the material to be sent immediately. We have your bosses by the balls. Moo-sic. And they know it.”

The bosses knew it. It was a heavy decision, and the debate was not yet over, but clearly they were in the mood for a deal if one could be struck. Security, in particular, argued for it, confident that they could find and plug the leak, and equally confident that there was very little the two could really do downtime. The military had the opposite opinion, wondering if such a highly planned and thought-out infiltration could be so easily dismissed. Crazy radicals might be sent back with no real risk, but these people were extremely well-prepared. Whatever change they were going to attempt to make, it was argued, had already been computer-tested and found to have a high probability of success.

Most of the hostages had been hauled into a central office complex early in the attack, and most were now awakening to bad headaches and the sight of Stillman’s and Bettancourt’s submachine guns pointing at them.

Moosic noted that Riggs had not returned and that everyone now was deferring to him. He hoped the security man was working on the break-in and not strung up someplace.

“All right, boys and girls, they’re willing to listen,” he told them, keeping the calm tone of someone in control at all times. In truth, he hadn’t had any time to really think about his position, but he was still more than a little scared at the potential down there. He honestly didn’t know if he had the guts to press that button if it came to that—but the invaders and his bosses thought he would, and for now that would do. “They want to know exactly when and where you want to go.”

“London, England; September 20, 1875,” Sandoval responded.

Moosic frowned. Not only was this the first indication that one could travel in space while traveling in time; it was also a totally puzzling combination. Why there at that particular date?

The National Security Agency had the finest and most complex computers the world had known up to that time, and they came up with a lot of small things and even some major figures in and around that time and place, but nothing that would significantly alter the time-line, particularly when correlated with the known ideology and goals of the radicals. In fact, man and machine could find only one correlation that made any sense at all.

“On September 20, 1875,” the admiral told him, “Karl Marx arrived back at his home in London from a mineral bath treatment at Karlsbad. Unless they’re so convoluted we can’t follow their thought processes, it’s the only event on record that fits.”

“They want to consult with Marx?” Moosic responded, puzzled.

“We doubt it. The best idea we can come up with is that they want to give the time machine to Marx. We think that they’ve had no better luck than we on what could be changed to make their goals close. So, they have the machine and the means—why not give it to the man whose ideas they profess?”

The security man thought it over. In a way, it made a perverted kind of sense. Particularly if you were a committed radical getting more and more disgusted and disillusioned with the progress of your goals. In all but rhetoric, nationalism had triumphed over ideology long ago. The Russians always sounded like Communists but acted like Russians had always acted, as did the Chinese and others. The true believers had been systematically purged or assassinated, from Trotsky down to Maurice Bishop in Grenada—by the very states and systems they’d established.

The radicals below were no stooges of Russia; they were true believers. Not only their statements but also their intelligence files and psychological profiles proved it.

Ron Moosic sighed. “All right, I’ll buy it. I assume this has already gone to the President and the NSC. What do they say?”

“Our computer models indicate no particular danger. They’re not going to meet the man they imagine, but rather a nineteenth-century philosopher very much a product of his times. Still, there’s a risk. There’s always a risk. Joe Riggs tells me that they’ve bypassed virtually all of the systems at this point. One of his teams has managed to tap into the system and reduce the available power to the time chamber itself. Still, we’ll have a two-hundred-year range to deal with if they really have some other date in mind. If they know this much, they might know how to bypass and go remote on the suits.”

“Bypass?”

“It was built in as a safety factor after we lost that fellow back in the Middle Ages. If you know you’re going, you can boost yourself out of there into one other time frame without severing the automatic connection. It’ll save your ass until the automatics on this end can bring you back. They’ll have a second chance once they’re where they say they want to be, although travel in space will be severely restricted.”

“Then we can’t afford to let them go. Simple as that.”

“Maybe not. We’ve proposed to let them go, all right, but doing a little funny business ourselves. The time-space coordinates change every moment, and they’re continually updated. That update is partially through a satellite link with the Naval Observatory. We have proposed, and they have tentatively agreed to, a little alteration. Instead of getting the atomic clock, they’ll be plugged into one of our computers. Let’s send them back to September 10, 1875— ten days early. The suits will have a low charge, and won’t be able to boost immediately. That’ll give us a week or more to get back there and track them down, as well as work on this end to trace their accomplices. We think it’s worth the risk.”

Moosic thought it over. “But we’ll have to get in there pretty quickly to go after them,” he noted, “and that’s not going to be bloodless. Then we’ll have to have these time suits or whatever they are available for us. I assume they’re going to destroy what they don’t use.”

“That’s where they have us, of course. There are two spares, but they are both down for repairs right now. That leaves the one on the man now downtime, and he’s due back on automatics at six tomorrow morning. That means we have to convince them to go now, then deal with the remaining ones by whatever means we have to use and regardless of costs. Cline knows when that other one comes back, too.”

The security man frowned. “That gives us less than eighteen hours. Why not just cut the power to them when they go back?”

“Because they’d still have those few days of grace to do whatever mischief they wanted before they got absorbed. We must know what they do, where they go, all of it. And even if we cut ’em off, restore power two weeks from now, and send somebody back, I’m told that the newcomer will re-energize their suits anyway. Don’t ask me how—I’m not a physicist.”

Ron Moosic sighed. “And this was supposed to be my first day on the job.”