Rebel in Time

Chapter 14

In the fall of the year, when the leaves are turning to their autumn golds and reds and yellows, it is very pleasant to drive out of the city on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The river lies below with the forested bluffs rising up behind it, the landscape is a most relaxing one — as long as it is not the rush hour and the parkway has not been jammed solid by the notorious District traffic. But by mid-afternoon the cars had thinned out and Troy could drive with little attention to the road. He had left the Smithsonian, deep in troubled thought, and driven away with no destination in mind. Without thinking he had found himself heading for the Pentagon. There were no answers there. At the next junction he had turned and driven north, in the opposite direction.

The pieces to this puzzle were all there now, he could feel it. But they still made no sense. How could he tie in the gold, the murder — and now the missing blueprints and the antique weapon? They were linked together, he was sure of that, but what did it all mean? And the time machine as well; that had to be the crux of the situation. All of McCulloch's unusual behaviour had begun after he had been assigned to the Gnomen project. Something about the project had interested him, started him thinking, reading, going to the museum — then buying the gold. It had to be that. The answer was at the lab, and the only way he could find it would be by concentrating on McCulloch's movements since he had gone to work there. That job would have to start now.

Troy pushed down on the accelerator and moved up to the speed limit, turning off at the junction with the Beltway. When he reached the lab he checked into the security office, but there were no messages. He thought of talking to the director, then changed his mind. Roxanne had helped him as much as she could. Whatever had drawn McCulloch's attention was located in Laboratory 9. He headed there.

Bob Kleiman was seated at his desk, a cup of cold coffee in front of him, staring into space. He turned when he heard Troy come in.

'Dead? Murdered? Just like that? I can't get over it, and frankly, I find it hard to take in. I was working with him, right here on Friday night. Now… Poor Harper. Couldn't something have been done?'

'I'm sorry, Bob. When his body was discovered, it was far too late. He had been dead for some time when we got there.'

'Perhaps earlier? If I had called the police earlier instead of hacking around here and doing nothing—'

'Please. Don't beat yourself. He died during the weekend, so there is no possible way that you can possibly assume any blame. But there is something you can do now to help.'

'What do you mean?' Kleiman took a sip of the cold coffee, then made a wry face and pushed it away.

'I mean you can help me find the man who murdered him. The police are very certain about who it was.'

'They are? There was nothing in the papers about it.'

'That's because the facts aren't for public consumption yet. Harper's death is just part of a far more important case, one that is highly classified. I'm talking about the disappearance of Colonel McCulloch.'

'A mystery that, you should pardon my saying this, you shouldn't bother to solve. Old Snarly can stay vanished and no one will miss him.'

'Not even if he is the one who killed Harper?'

'He did?' Kleiman twisted around in his chair and leaned forward. 'This is the truth? He's the momzer who killed Allan Harper?'

'We are almost certain that he is. And I am equally certain that the murder, his disappearance, as well as a number of other items, that they all tie in with the Gnomen project.'

'How?'

'You tell me.'

Kleiman shook his head in bewilderment. 'You've lost me, really lost me. What can I possibly tell you that could help the investigation?'

'You can let me know about the project. The way I see it something here, something to so with the work in this laboratory, captured McCulloch's attention. In order to find out what that was I want to find out everything that McCulloch knew about the operation here, everything that he might have uncovered on his own or that Harper might have told him. For openers, what can you tell me about their relationship? Were they very close?'

'Not that I knew. In fact, now that I think about it, they barely talked to each other. If anything I always had the feeling that Harper was afraid of the Iron Colonel, even hated him. I caught him a couple of times looking at McCulloch when he didn't know he was being seen, with his face all twisted like he would like to kill the man. But he never said anything at all about it.'

'They must have had some sort of relationship — or the colonel wouldn't have killed him. Why? Did Harper know something about him — or perhaps Harper discovered McCulloch doing something here in the lab…'

'That's impossible. The colonel was a dunce. I doubt if he knew enough about technology to even change a fuse. About this highly complex and specialized electronic equipment I can guarantee you that he knew bubkas, or even less.'

'That's important information. So now we know that he couldn't have operated alone in here. If he somehow did make use of the time machine, then he must have had to have help. Could it have been Harper who aided him? But you said that the man hated him. So perhaps Harper was being forced to help him — which would explain his dislike of the colonel. There would certainly have been no love lost if McCulloch were blackmailing him.'

'Makes a good theory. So what's next?'

'Could the colonel and Harper have had access to the equipment when you weren't here?'

'Why not? Harper usually stayed on working here after I left at night. McCulloch could have joined him. He did almost all of the electronic maintenance in the evenings, so I could set up the experiments during the day. That's why he never came in until after noon. It was a good schedule for both of us.'

Troy rubbed at his jaw as he looked around at the roomful of unknown machinery. He had the strong sensation that the answer was right here, obvious, waiting for him to pick it up.

'So if they were here alone at night they could run the machine, even make unauthorized experiments?'

'I don't think they would do that. For one thing I wouldn't permit it.'

'How would you know?'

'A good question.' Kleiman stood and paced back and forth, thinking better on his feet. 'There might be a record of their staying on here at night, but I'm not sure. I think the guard just logs people in and out. But so what? That just means they were on the spot, but it doesn't say anything about what they were doing. That means nothing. Did they use the machine? I have no idea. If they left any records of any experiments I've never seen them. We'll never know.'

'But we have to know. Think. Isn't there a record book kept of what is done here? Maybe there is a dial that shows if the machine has been turned on and off?'

'Please, Troy, don't make this billion dollar hunk of highly complicated apparatus sound like an office copying machine that counts the number of copies made. It doesn't work that way. It's all new, all experimental.'

'I know. But there still might be records kept of something. Does it use things up, you know, like welding rods or carbon sticks in an arc lamp?'

Kleiman drew back and pressed his hand to his chest. 'My God,' he gasped. 'You live in the mechanical dark ages. Haven't you heard of the new physics? Even in Korea they get rich now knowing about that. Haven't you ever read about solid state circuitry or very large integrated circuits? We don't use radio tubes or filaments — not to mention your welding rods and carbon sticks — nor switches nor relays or anything like that any more. It's all solid state now, one big lump. The only things that move are the electrons and you can't see them. The only consumable — other than paper for the printer — is electricity.'

'Well, electricity then. Is there a meter? Any record kept of how much you use?'

'No way. I suppose we get a bill every month or something like that which someone in the office pays. Not my department. I know that we use a hell of a lot of it. So much so that about a year back we were popping breakers in the substation and they had to run in a new line…'

Kleiman stopped suddenly and stared into space. Then he blinked and shook his head, turning slowly to face Troy.

'Do you know what you are?' he said. 'You are a genius. The Sherlock Holmes of Foggy Bottom. You act like a nebbish about science — when all of the time you are leading me by the hand to the answer. I'm the one who is the yold. Without your kick up the ass I never would have remembered.'

'Remembered what?'

'Remembered about the time when the electric company got all excited, and we got excited too because we were losing experiments that crashed when the current pooped out. That was when we started to monitor the line to find out how much juice we were using, keep a record so they could guarantee a sufficient supply for us at all times.'

Troy felt he was close to an answer now, very close. 'What kind of monitor?'

'It wasn't really a monitor. They tried to bring in one of their ususal recorders, but you should have seen the monster. Clanking and sputtering while it drew a graph on a rotating drum. No one wanted the big dirty thing leaking red ink all over the place. It really was Stone-Age technology. I remember, they tried to set it up, but we tossed them out. All of the functions of the equipment here are controlled and monitored by our mainframe computer. It has I don't know how many K of random access memory on hard disk, plus a real-time clock and all the extra goodies anyone might possibly want. So one of the software people wrote a program to monitor the electricity being used, and after that everyone was happy. We had the records we needed and life was beautiful.'

Troy was puzzled. 'But wouldn't this computer meter be disconnected after it was no longer needed?'

Kleiman shook his head. 'You got it wrong. We didn't add any meters or junk. We just wrote a program, instructions for the computer, to remember some facts for us. All of which operated invisibly and unseen until someone asked the thing to tell us what had gone on. We even added some inputs of our own to help us in recording experiments. Very handy it was in the early days.'

'But you no longer use it?'

'We no longer access the information. You've got to learn the jargon if you are going to be hanging around here. Once a program is started it will keep running forever unless you stop it.' He waved his hand at a row of steel cabinets. 'It's all in there. All you have to do is ask.'

Troy gazed in wonder at the featureless doors. 'Are you serious? Can we really find the record of all the experiments?'

'Every one. Just ask the right question.'

'Then ask!'

'Not me,' Kleiman said, reaching for the telephone. 'This is the age of the specialist, young man. I'm a physicist, not a flow-chart doodler. For this you need the right person. Nina Vassella, our head programmer. She'll know what to do… Hello, Nina? Come 'sta? Bene? That's what I like to hear. Look, we got a little problem down in nine that only you can solve. When? Now, of course. Be a sweety-pie. That's my girl. Thanks.' He hung up. 'She'll be right down.'

Nina was dark, petite, lovely — and she knew her business.

'Of course I remember the program,' she said. 'Particularly since I wrote it.'

'Is it still running?'

'Undoubtedly. Since it would probably crash the entire system if one of you ham-handed masters of cosmic theory tried to get anywhere near it. And I haven't wiped it. So it must still be ticking away. Let's see.'

She pulled the chair over in front of the terminal, then spun the adjustment to raise it up high enough for her. When she sat down her legs dangled like a little girl's, her feet not reaching the floor; she twined her legs around the chair supports. But she knew very well what she was doing. Her fingers flashed over the keyboard, pulling up a menu of all the programs running, then accessed the one she wanted and checked it through. Thirty seconds later she leaned back and pointed her thumb at the rows of numbers marching down the screen.

'There it is. Ready and waiting.'

'Great!' Kleiman said, patting her on the shoulder. 'You are a genius, baby. Now give us a print-out, if you please.'

'What? There are all of two years plus of read-out in there. Haven't you heard of the energy crisis and the paper shortage?'

'That's the name of the game. Type.'

She pressed two keys and the high-speed printer against the far wall began to hammer away with a rapid, paper-tearing sound. The printing head tore back and forth across the endless sheet of fanfold paper which began to pile up higher and higher in the wire tray.

'Is that all you geniuses need now?' Nina asked.

'Thank you, doll, I'll remember you in my will.'

When the printer had finally lapsed into silence, Kleiman tore the paper apart at the end of the last sheet and carried the book-thick pile of print-out over to his desk.

'Now we'll see what we will see,' he said, turning the pack over and pulling free the last pages. 'Right up to date, yep, here's the one I did this morning. Now let us flip back a bit, to last week-end when the colonel went missing… mamma mia!'

'What is it?'

'There it is, right here, late last Saturday, when the joint was supposed to be closed up. Power, man, power. Whatever they were doing in here they were burning enough juice to light up Chicago. We've never pulled a ten-thousandth of that amount. I'm surprised that they didn't vaporize every one of the circuits. And what's this? No, this I do not believe! Too much!'

He pointed to a line of print-out, his thumb on a set of numbers. It looked in no way different to Troy than anything else on the page. Kleiman flipped through the sheets in consternation, then back to the original page.

He shook his head with disbelief.

'Here, see it, right there. The polarity of tau input, it's reversed. It shouldn't be like that. We never do that — look at all the others. The results were consistently negative, we abandoned that approach.'

Troy held his impatience under tight control. 'What does it mean? This tau thing. Why does it bother you?'

'It doesn't bother me — it's just impossible, that's what. It can't be done. But it has been done.'

The paper slipped from Kleiman's fingers and fell to the floor. He turned to Troy, and when he spoke again his voice was hushed, his face drawn.

'Whatever was moved in time wasn't moved forward. It was sent in the opposite direction. Sent back in time — to the past.'