Downtiming the Night Side

A MATTER OF PERFECT TIMING

Dr. Aaron Silverberg was anything but pleased. On the one hand, he felt he had the biggest hangover a human could bear; on the other, his baby was in the hands of kidnappers and one of the nannies was telling them what to do.

Still, he led Sandoval, Austin-Venneman, and Cline back to the time chamber and its control center. The center itself was behind massive multiple sheets of lead-impregnated glass. A single operator’s chair was in the center, surrounded by an inverted crescent-shaped control panel with myriad instruments and controls as well as a number of differently colored telephones.

Christine Austin-Venneman, who’d been fairly quiet during much of the takeover but who’d also looked from the start like the kid turned loose in the candy store, looked around. “Wow!” she said in a soft, deep voice. “This looks like the bridge of a spaceship!”

“Or the supervisor of a telephone exchange,” Sandoval responded, less awed. In point of fact, it looked far less exotic than he’d imagined and he felt somewhat let down. “Everything is controlled from here?” This was addressed to Silverberg. Cline, obviously, was there to make sure he didn’t trip anybody up.

Silverberg sighed and tried to keep himself erect. His head was killing him, the aftereffects of the gas. He also felt somewhat frustrated; he could not understand how Karen could be with these people, but they had made talking to her impossible. Still, she avoided his glances.

“Nothing whatever is controlled from here,” the scientist told them. “It is exactly what its name implies—a command center. The director sits here and gives the orders necessary to accomplish the mission. He cannot initiate, only abort. The instruments confirm that all is as it should be, nothing more.”

Sandoval went over and peered through the dark glass. The time chamber itself was quite small, no more than a dozen feet square, and unimpressive. There was an airlock-like door to one side, and then the chamber itself, a barren and featureless box of a room. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all made out of a single material and looked cast as a whole. The material itself was smooth and featureless.

Sandoval turned. “Where are the time suits?”

Silverberg sat down in the chair with a groan and held his head. The weapons came up, but he waved them away with a gesture. “I do not care if you shoot or not. I did not have your handy filters stuck up my nose and my head is splitting. Shooting me would be a mercy.”

“I’ll show you,” Cline said, and Sandoval looked over at Austin-Venneman. “Go with her and get them. Bring them here,” he ordered.

Silverberg lay back in the chair and breathed deeply for a few moments. He seemed to feel a little better. “What do you hope to accomplish by all this?” he asked the terrorist. “I mean, no matter what, you have to accept much of what is done here on trust. Karen is the only one who knows anything at all about the proper things to monitor, and she must sleep. I still expect them to blow us all up the moment we begin, anyway—although, I must admit, with this head I am not sure it would not be a mercy to me.”

“We have confidence in the plan. We know we will go back to the right place and time.”

“So confident! Even I am never that confident!” Silverberg’s brows lowered. “Unless—it has already been confirmed?”

“I think if you want to live, you won’t go any deeper into that, Doctor,” Sandoval responded nervously.

It took three trips for the women to bring in the suits. They looked very much like the spacesuits worn by astronauts, all made of some fine, silvery, mesh-like material. The helmets were airtight. Each contained a backpack air supply and a front pack consisting of instrumentation, which told the status of the air and other suit systems, and also a meter series with small, recessed pentometers above each meter. Cline checked each one of them. “This suit’s a bit large, but has a four-hour air supply and a fully charged power pack,” she told them. “This second one might just fit Chris, but has a little under three hours of air and a ninety percent charge. Enough to get you both where you want to go. The third one fits you like a glove, Roberto, but has only an hour-and-a-half s worth of oxygen and a sixty percent charge.”

With Chris covering the doctor, who, despite some romantic notions, was in no condition to try much of anything even if he had the gun, Sandoval tried on the large suit. It was clear even without the helmet that the fit was ridiculous, and with that helmet he would barely be able to balance himself. “No use,” he muttered. “It’ll have to be the other one.”

Dr. Karen Cline sighed. “Yes, I agree. But you haven’t much reserve. You’ll be O.K. for the trip, but if you have to make a boost, it’ll be touch and go.”

“We are traveling in time!” Sandoval exclaimed. “Why do we need much at all?”

“Time is relative. All other things being equal, time breaks first, so you’ll go back. But the journey takes time because it requires a steady power supply. Inside the suit, it’ll take time to get there at the same rate as power is being supplied. To 1875, it’ll take, oh, forty minutes or so. Once there, the reality of the suit is the only link you’ll have with the present. The suit must be kept energized from here, using full power, or you’ll nightside. That means we can’t add anything once you’re on your way. The internal suit charge will remain at where it was when you left, minus the power required to get you there. Even then, it’ll deteriorate as time will try and throw it out. The effect is progressive. Twelve days is all it’s safe for Chris, fourteen for you, in any one time slot. And we have to hold this installation for the exact same amount of time you spend back there, because we can only send power at the normal clock rate.”

“In other words, the shorter the better,” Sandoval said. “Well, I depend on you. All of you. You know the stakes.”

Sandoval quickly got into his suit, then took the rifle while his companion donned hers. “Get Clarence in here,” he ordered, and Cline left.

Silverberg was feeling much better. “I’m curious—just what are the stakes?”

“The future of humanity on the face of Earth, and I do not mean that as a metaphorical or idealistic statement,” the terrorist replied. “If we fail, humanity will be wiped out to the last man, woman, and child. I don’t just believe this, Doctor—I know it.”

The big black man entered the command center, followed by Cline. He grinned when he saw the two dressed in the suits. “Buck Rogers, huh?”

“Don’t get funny. Are you sure John can handle that mob alone?”

Stillman nodded. “They’re pussycats with bad headaches. Still, they’ll be trouble later on. I wish we didn’t need ’em as hostages.”

“We’re depending on you to keep this place operating and secure until we return, even if it’s two weeks,” Sandoval told him. “There’s food down here, enough to last if you ration it, in the little cafeteria.”

“Plenty of locks, too. Don’t worry about it, Roberto. These dudes didn’t even trust themselves.”

“Then I think we had best be at our business as quickly as possible,” the terrorist leader told them. The two suited people followed Karen Cline out of the command center. Soon Silverberg and Stillman saw the inner door open and the three of them enter the time chamber. First the woman, then the man, kneeled down so that the scientist could fasten their helmets and activate their internal systems. Soon she exited the room, leaving the pair there alone, and returned to the command console.

“Doctor, will you handle this or shall I?” she asked him. “I would prefer that you do it, for safety’s sake. Remember, all our lives depend on you doing it exactly right.”

Silverberg chuckled dryly. “Do you really think they gave the enabling command?”

“They gave it. Either that or we are all going to be very dead very fast. It doesn’t matter to me, Doctor. I’m dead, no matter what. But I wouldn’t like to see you and a lot of the others, a lot of my friends, die as well.” She seemed on the verge of hysteria, and that made him more nervous than the big man with the gun. Clearly, Karen Cline was having a hell of a fight between what she saw as her duty to her friends and associates and her resolve to see it through. He wished he had more time to work on her.

“I’ll do it,” he told her. “And I’ll do it straight. We’re still pretty much on automatics because of Jamie, but I assume you’ve already fed the instructions into the computers.”

She nodded. “I made them up and tested them weeks ago. The code is Auer, comma, Geib, comma, Bebel, comma, Liebknecht.”

“That you’d better input. I might make some terrible spelling error. The rest I will do.”

Quickly she went over to the keyboard on the side of the control panel and typed in the passwords. The board came alive.

“Just what’s gonna happen?” Stillman wanted to know.

“They’ll just… disappear in there,” Cline told him. “Or so it will seem to us. Actually, we’re going to keep going and they’re going to stand still.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll try and explain it later. All right, Doctor—we’ve got limited air and power on one of those suits. Let’s do it.”

Silverberg shrugged and turned to the console. The sequence and number of controls he changed, punched, pulled, pushed, or otherwise manipulated seemed enormous. Stillman couldn’t follow any of it and turned to Cline. “You sure he’s doing it right?”

“He’s doing it right; don’t worry. Most of it is security, anyway. The whole operation’s computerized and, as I said, I did that. If he does anything wrong, they just won’t go anywhere.”

An alarm buzzer sounded, making the big man jump. “What’s that?”

“Warning to clear the area. Here they go!”

Suddenly the walls blazed with light, and the two figures inside clasped metallic gloved hands. Beams of energy, beams nearly too bright to look at even through the shielding, shot out and enveloped the two. There was a sudden burst of light from where they stood, and then all of the energy seemed to flow into that spot, as if swallowed by some great mouth. In a moment, all was normal again—except that the time chamber was empty.

“They’re away!” came the call over every security frequency. Ron Moosic held his breath and just watched and waited. It was now or never—with the two dangerous ones separated and only one man, no matter how crazed, with the bulk of the hostages.

“Stairway doors are open!” came a cool, professional voice. “We are going on down.”

“We’re on top of the elevator,” said another voice, equally calm. “On your mark we’ll enter.”

“Now!” came the not so calm voice of John Riggs.

The operation was handled with surprising quiet and determined professionalism. The cameras had shown that the terrorists had constructed a makeshift barricade at the base, of the stairway door, not so much to keep out anyone who reached that level but to make one hell of a clatter when they did so. The elevator, however, was not so well guarded. It was designed to have its door open if held by its stop on a floor, and it was not in full view of anyone at this point. At the start, there had been two holding the hostages, one in the hallway and one covering the central working area, but now both the traitorous Dr. Cline and Stillman were still in the command center, while two were downtiming and no longer a direct threat, and Bettancourt was alone with the hostages. Nobody could see the elevator area, and three well-armed, black-clad agents slipped into the car.

Quickly they took up positions to cover one another in the hallway, and one crept silently down the hall towards the stairway door. This route took him directly past the open door in which Bettancourt lounged with the surviving staff, but all areas were covered by cameras and all of the agents had earpieces connecting them with Riggs and Moosic. It was rather easy to time the quick dart past the door under those circumstances.

The agent heard the voices of Stillman and Cline, and hurried to remove the debris piled up against the access door. It could not be blocked with desks or other heavy objects, since it opened in towards the stairwell.

A small horde of similarly clad agents came through and quickly took up positions to cover all avenues of entrance or escape. Two agents took positions on either side of the door to the hostage room, while others stood poised at the entrance to the command center. They were prepared to move immediately if Cline or Stillman came out and discovered them, but now they waited until the cameras, which the terrorists had left intact to demonstrate their control, told them when Bettancourt would be most vulnerable.

They didn’t have long to wait. The big terrorist grew annoyed at a woman sobbing in the back, got up from his perch atop a desk, and started to walk back to the small crowd, snarling, “Shut that bitch up or I’ll shut her up for good!” At that point his full back was to the door, and Riggs shouted, “Kill him!” through the agents’ earpieces.

The two agents converged as one, and pulled their triggers. The semi-automatics were well silenced—there was a muffled sound like furniture being pulled across a floor, and Bettancourt went down, his back a bloody mess. He never even knew he’d been had.

The hostages began shouting and screaming, and this brought Stillman out of the command center, gun at the ready, moving fast enough that he went right past the agents flanking the door. When he saw what he was facing, he tried to bring up his rifle, but he was quickly cut down.

At the same time, the two flanking the door entered the command center to see a surprised-looking Dr. Cline and an equally surprised Silverberg staring back at them in amazement. Cline was clearly not armed, but she suddenly looked stricken, then cried, “No!”, and popped something into her mouth. They reached her almost immediately, but it was too late. The pill was designed for a very quick death.

Silverberg rose from the chair and looked over at the two agents checking the limp form, and he shook his head sadly in bewilderment. “Why?” he asked softly, of no one in particular. “In God’s name, what would drive someone to this?’’

It took far less time to clean up the mess than to try to sort out what had happened and why. Teams of specialists interrogated the surviving staff workers, who were then hustled off to secure medical facilities, but on the work level there were no physically wounded people—all were either alive or dead. Admiral Jeeter had come down personally in a helicopter to discuss the final stages.

Silverberg had refused all attempts to get him to leave, although he patiently gave his account and his reactions to the clean-up team. With Moosic and Riggs, he went through the command center instrumentation checks and established what he could.

“There’s no question that the two of them went downtime,” he told the security men, “although they seem to have missed their target by a matter of ten days. Ten days early, I would think.”

Riggs nodded. “We were able to create a power drain, operating on the theory that it’s Marx they want to see.”

The physicist sat back and thought for a moment. “I see. So they are now faced with the choice of waiting ten days or returning here. They destroyed the spare suit here, so I assume that you intend to use the one coming back tomorrow morning to go and get them.”

“That is precisely the plan,” Jeeter replied. “How soon can the other suit be charged up enough for a try?”

Silverberg went over to the time suit that remained crumpled on the floor and, with the help of Riggs, pulled it out to its full length and examined it. “The electrical system on this one is shot to hell, but if we have any luck at all in this business, we might salvage the power pack. I would get this up to technical services in a hurry, gentlemen. If we can salvage that much, then we might be able to insert the batteries from this one into the returning suit. It would be a jury-rig, but it might work. If so, we could turn around in, oh, six or seven hours. If not, we would have to wait for the other suit to recharge, and that would cost three or four days.”

“Too long,” the admiral told him. “Six hours I can sweat out, but no more.” He gave the instructions to his aides to get the suit upstairs in a hurry. “This equipment— you’re certain we can’t just pull the plug on them?”

“We could, but they would still have their two weeks, and if we break off the power, we will have no way to monitor them. They could cause a great ripple, perhaps change everything, and we would never even know they did it. Not that it would do us much good to know, but at least we might be able to rest easy if we detect no ripple,” the scientist responded. “No, I would let them go.”

“Then I have no choice but to send somebody back,” said the admiral. “I’m going to have enough grief from this without being accused of letting them get away with this. Besides, there is something unsettling about this whole operation, far more than the penetration.”

Silverberg nodded. “Yes, I think I know what you mean. They acted like they knew the outcome in advance. What could convert dear Karen to such dedicated fanaticism? Surely she had every background check, was under near constant surveillance, passed lie-detector tests—all that, as we all have. I am not saying that she couldn’t somehow fool the system, but she seemed genuinely torn here. She was acting against every instinct, every shred of decency or humanity she felt, yet she felt such conviction that she not only went through with it but died rather than face interrogation and reveal anything. She would have cracked.”

“That’s the most unsettling part, Doctor,” Ron Moosic put in. “I got the same impression of her, just watching her in the monitors. It took a supreme act of will for her to go through with what she did. I have to agree that she would have cracked—and anybody good enough to fool all the security we have wouldn’t have cracked under any conditions. Sandoval said to me that what was at stake was the survival of the human race. At the time, I passed it off as radical rhetoric, but maybe he meant it.”

Jeeter looked worried. “You mean that this isn’t the only time project?”

Silverberg thought it over. “I think it is—now. But suppose, Admiral, that ‘now’ isn’t really ‘now.’ We’ve gone through this in theory for the past few years, you know. Suppose the leading edge of time isn’t right now, but some time in the future? How far? Ten years? Fifty? Five hundred? With cheaper energy, perhaps from sources we don’t even understand at present, and better technology…” He paused a moment. “No, that wouldn’t make sense. If that were true, then they would do their own temporal dirty work, not depend on some silly radicals.”

“But suppose there wasn’t cheap energy,” Moosic said, picking up Silverberg’s reasoning. “Suppose, in fact, there was less. A future civilization on the ropes, able to send one or two people into the past but not far enough to do what had to be done. You said you were limited to a few hundred years. Maybe they are, too. But able to come back far enough and with enough proof—and enough records of who might pull something like this off—to convince these people to do whatever they had to.”

The scientist grew excited. “Yes! Yes! Perhaps a few survivors of some atomic holocaust, using their version of this project, perhaps this very project, to come back and convince these people that only they can halt the extinction of mankind. What sort of proof we may never know, but it would explain your security leak, Admiral. I assume our computer records will be uploaded someday into new generations of computers. They might only have had to call up this day to get everything from the security measures to the passwords. What little minutiae they couldn’t know, Karen would.”

Jeeter shook his head in amazement. “Are you telling me we should let them go and do whatever it is they intend doing?”

“Perhaps we should,” Silverberg replied. “But perhaps we are just whistling in the dark on this, too.”

“I can’t take that sort of gamble, and you know it. Somebody is going back and getting those clowns. I wouldn’t trust that kind of mind with the future of my cat, let alone the human race.”

Ron Moosic sat back and considered the arguments, and realized that he sided with the admiral. Roberto Sandoval was no savior of mankind; he was a cold-blooded killer. His girlfriend was a limousine radical, with no more concept of the proletariat than Marie Antoinette, and seemed vacuous to boot. Even granting his original speculation, those people of the future would have been faced with a dilemma. The best people to get into this place, and take it, and get back in time, were hardly the best people to trust once they’d done it. On the other hand, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, they’d compromised about as much as they could. If their agents didn’t get in, the rest wouldn’t matter, and if they were faced with certain death, they had nothing to lose.

“Have you thought about who’s going back after them, Admiral?” Riggs wanted to know. His tone indicated clearly that he was not volunteering.

Jeeter looked at Silverberg, who shrugged. “My agents are the test-pilot type,” the scientist said. “They might be best in tracking the two down, but they would hardly be a match for Sandoval when the showdown came.”

“I guess it’s the CIA’s baby, considering it’s London,” Riggs noted.

“But this is our project,” the admiral reminded him. “They left here in our… vehicle… and they are legally still here, tied to that machine. If you want to pull legalisms, it’s the FBI’s baby, but I wouldn’t want to pull somebody in to do it. No, it’s NSA’s job, and specifically NSA Security’s.” He looked over at Ron Moosic. “You’re the new boy on the block here, but I was very impressed with your handling of the entire situation, and so was the President. Do you think, if push came to shove, you could shoot them down in cold blood?”

Ron Moosic was shocked. This level of involvement, after all he’d been through, was not something he’d considered at all. He was tired and pretty much spent. “I don’t know, Admiral,” he managed. “I just don’t know.”

“Your record’s good; your psychiatric profile is excellent, and you have some background and feel for history. You’re single, childless, and haven’t been very close to your surviving family. I cannot and will not force you to go, but I am asking you. The suggestion came right from the National Security Council. We just don’t have any time to tap somebody, brief them fully, and send them back cold.”

“I’m pretty cold, too,” Moosic reminded him. “Until this morning, I didn’t have any idea this place existed or that what it did was possible. I’m still not sure I believe it.” But, even as he protested, he knew that he would go. He was always the one who volunteered to do the things that had to be done, even when he knew somebody else alway got the credit and he always got the blame. But—to go back in time, to really visit the London of Victorian England…

If he refused, they would find somebody, perhaps one of the agents long experienced at this station. He, of course, would never know the result—and the admiral knew that he understood. His career, the entire rest of his life, depended on this decision.

“If I can get some background, and some sleep, I’ll give it a try,” he said at last. The admiral smiled in satisfaction; Riggs smiled in relief.