“…Where Angels Fear to Tread”

by Allen Steele

Illustration by Darryl Elliott

Thursday, January 15, 1998:11:12 P.M.

When the Center Hill Lake affair was over, after reports were filed with the appropriate agencies and various subcommittees had held closed-door hearings, when everyone with proper clearance had been reassured that the situation, although not completely resolved, at least was no longer critical… only then, looking back on the course of events, did Murphy come to realize that it really started the night before, in the Bullfinch on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Bullfinch was a venerable Capitol Hill watering hole, located about three blocks from the Rayburn Building in one direction and within walking distance of one of Washington’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods in the other. It was a favorite lunch spot for Congressional aides and journalists invaded it during happy hour, but by evening it became the after-hours hangout of federal employees from a dozen different departments and agencies. Coming off twelve-hour workdays, their shirts stained with sweat, their guts full of junk food, they emerged from Commerce and Agriculture and Justice and made their way to the Bullfinch for a few rounds with the boys before stumbling to Capitol South station to catch the next Metro out to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

Thursday was beer night for the Office of Paranormal Sciences. Murphy skipped these bull sessions more often than not, preferring to spend his evenings at home in Arlington with his wife and son. Donna was still mourning her mother’s death just before Christmas, though, and Steve seemed to be more interested these days in Magic cards than his father, so when Harry Cumisky tapped on his door shortly after eight and asked if he wanted to grab a couple of brewskis with the boys, Murphy decided to go along. It had been a long time since he had given himself a break; if he came home an hour late with Budweiser on his breath, then so be it. Donna would burrow into her side of the bed anyway, and Steven wouldn’t care so long as Dad took him to the comics shop on Saturday.

So he shut down the computer, locked up his office, and joined Harry and Kent Morris on a five-block trudge through sleet and slush to the Bullfinch. They were the last of the OPS regulars to arrive; several tables had already been pushed together in the back room, and an overworked waitress had already set the group up with pitchers of beer and bowls of popcorn. Although everyone was mildly surprised to see him, they quickly made room at the table. Murphy was aware of his button-down rep; he loosened his tie, admonished a wide-eyed Yale intern to stop addressing him as Sir and call him Zack instead, and poured the first of what he initially promised himself would be only two beers. A couple of drinks with the gang, a few laughs, then he would head home.

But that was not to be. It was a cold, damp night, and he was in a warm, dry bar. Gas flames hissed beneath fake logs in the nearby hearth, and firelight reflected off the panes of framed sports photos on the wood-paneled walls. Conversation was light, ranging from next week’s Super Bowl to current movies to the latest Hill gossip. The waitress’s name was Cindy, and although she wore an engagement ring, she seemed to enjoy flirting with the OPS guys. Every time his mug was half-empty, Kent or Harry or someone else would quickly top it off. After his second trip to the john, Zack stepped into a phone booth and called home to tell Donna not to wait up for him. No, he wasn’t drunk; just a little tired, that’s all. No, he wouldn’t drive; he’d leave his car in the garage and take a cab. Yes, dear. No, dear. I love you, too. Sweet dreams, goodnight. And then he sailed back to the table, where Orson was regaling Cindy with the joke about the Texas senator, the prostitute, and the longhorn steer.

Before he realized it, the hour was late and the barroom was half-empty. One by one, the chairs had been vacated as the boys polished off their drinks, shrugged into their parkas and overcoats, and moseyed back out into the clammy night. Where there had once been nearly a dozen, now there were only three—Kent, Harry, and himself—teetering on that uncertain precipice between insobriety and inarticulate stupor. Cindy had long since ceased being amused and was now merely disgusted; she cleared away the empty mugs, delivered a pitcher that she firmly told them would be their last, and asked who needed a cab. Murphy managed to tell her that, yes ma’am, a cab would be a mighty fine idea, thank you very much, before he returned to the discussion at hand. Which, coincidentally enough, happened to be time travel.

Perhaps it wasn’t so odd. Although time travel was a subject usually addressed in the more obscure books on theoretical physics, OPS people were acutely interested in the bizarre; they had to be, for that was the nature of their business. So it didn’t seem strange that Murphy would find himself discussing something like this with Kent and Harry; it was late, they were drunk, and that was all there was to it.

“So imagine…” Harry belched into his fist. “ ’S’cuse me, sorry… well, imagine if time travel was possible. I mean, le’s say it’s possible to go past to th’ past, y’know…”

“You can’t do it,” Kent said flatly.

“Sure, sure, I know.” Harry waved his hand back and forth. “I know it can’t be done, I know that, okay? But le’s jus’ pretend…”

“You can’t do it, I’m tellin’ ya. It can’t be done. I’ve read th’ same books, too, y’know, and I’m tellin’ ya it’s impossible. Nobody can do it. Nobody has the technology…”

“I’m not talkin’ ’bout now, dammit. I’m talkin’ ’bout sometime in th’ future. Couple’a hundred, thousand years from now, thass what I’m… that’s what I’m tryin’ to get at, y’know.”

“Somebody from the future, coming back here for a visit. That it?” Murphy had read a lot of science fiction when he was a kid, and time travel was a big subject in those stories. He even had a few beat-up old Ace Doubles stashed away in his attic, although he’d never admit that to these guys. Science fiction wasn’t well-respected at OPS, unless it was The X-Files.

“Thass it.” Harry nodded vigorously. “Thass what I’m talkin’ ’bout. Somebody from the future comin’ back here for a visit.”

“Can’t be done,” Kent insisted. “Not in a hundred million years.”

“Yeah, well, maybe not,” Murphy said, “but just for the sake of argument, okay. Le’s pretend someone from the future…”

“Not just someone.” Harry reached for the half-empty pitcher, sloshed some more beer into his mug. “A lotta someones… a lot of people, comin’ back from the… y’know, the future.”

“Yeah, right, okay.” Kent eyed the pitcher with avarice; as soon as Harry put it down, he picked it up and poured much of the rest into his own mug, leaving a half-inch at the bottom of the pitcher. “Simon sez le’s pretend. So where are they?”

“Tha’s it. Tha’s th’ point. Tha’s what summa the phizachists… phizzakists…”

“Physicists,” Murphy said. “What I am. I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I…”

Harry ignored him. “If you can go back in time in th’ future, come back to here…” He jabbed a finger against the table… then where are they? That’s what one of the Brits… the guy in the wheelchair, whassisname..

“Hawking.”

“Right, Hawking. Anyway, that’s what he says… if time travel is possible, then where’re the time travelers?”

“Yeah, but didn’t somebody say that about aliens?” Kent raised an eyebrow; for an instant, he almost looked sober again. “That other guy… whatchamacallit, the Italian, Fermi… once said the same thing about aliens. Luggit what we do now… look for aliens!”

Murphy was about to add that, out of all the UFO sightings and abductions he had investigated in ten years with the OPS, he had yet to find one which panned out in terms of hard evidence. He had interviewed dozens of people who claimed to have been taken aboard extraterrestrial spacecraft and collected enough out-of-focus photos of disc-shaped objects to fill a file cabinet, yet after a decade of government service, he had never found an alien or an alien spacecraft. He let it pass, though; this was not the time nor place to be questioning his agency’s mission or methods, nor were these the people to whom he should be expressing his doubts.

“Not th’ same thing, man. Not th’ same thing.” Although there was still some beer left in his mug, Harry reached for the pitcher, but Kent snagged it first. “If’n there was time travelers, they’d sway… stay hidden. Nobody would know they were there. They’d do it for their own good. Right?”

Kent barked laughter as he poured the last dregs into his mug. “Yeah, sure. Like we got people from th’ future all ’round us now…”

“Well, shit, we might.” Harry turned toward some guys seated nearby. “Hey, any of you fuggers from the future?”

They glared at him, but said nothing. Cindy was wiping tables and putting up chairs; she shot them a dark look. It was getting close to last call; she didn’t seem to be happy to have garrulous drunks harassing her last remaining customers. “You wanna cool it?” Kent murmured. “Geez, I didn’t meanta make it a federal case…”

“Hey, it is a federal case, man! Thass what we do, izzn’it? I say we bust this place for acceptin’ time-travelers withoutta… withoutta… fuck, I dunno, a green card?”

Harry reached into his suit pocket, pulled out his badge holder with the OPS seal engraved on its leatherette cover, started to push back his chair. That was enough for Murphy; he grabbed Harry’s wrist before he could stand up. “Hey, hey, take it easy…

Harry started to pull his hand free, but Murphy hung on. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cindy giving the bartender a discreet hand signal; they were about a second away from being thrown out. “Calm down,” he murmured. “Keep this up and we’re going to land in jail.”

Harry glowered at him, and for a moment Murphy wondered if he was going to throw a punch. Then he grinned and dropped back into his chair. The badge folder slipped from his hand and fell onto the table. “Shit, man… I was just kidding, thass all. Jus’ makin’ a point, y’know.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Murphy relaxed, pulled his hand away. “I know. You’re just kidding.”

“Thass right. Y’know an’ I know… ain’ no such thing as… geez, whatchamacallit…”

“I know, I know. We got the point….”

And that was it. Murphy hung around long enough to make sure that Harry had a cab ride and that he wouldn’t cause any more trouble, then he pulled on his parka and headed for the door, pausing at the bar to guiltily slip a five-spot into Cindy’s tip glass. The sidewalk was empty; the night frigid and silent. Pale exhaust fumes from the waiting taxi lingered above the curb like pallid ghosts; he climbed in, gave the driver directions to his place in Arlington, then settled back against the duct-taped seat and gazed out the frosted windows as they passed the floodlighted dome of the Capitol building.

Time travel. Jesus. What a stupid idea.

Thursday, May 6, 1937: 7:04 P.M.

The leviathan descended from the slate-gray sky. At first it was a silver ovoid, but as it turned northeast, it gradually expanded in size and shape, taking on the dimensions of a vast pumpkin seed. As the drone of its four diesel engines reached the crowd gathered in the New Jersey meadow, Navy seamen in white caps jogged toward an iron mooring mast positioned in the center of the landing field. Everyone else stared up at the behemoth as it cruised six hundred feet overhead, its great shadow passing across their faces as it began making a sharp turn to the west. Now they could clearly see the swastikas on its vertical stabilizers, the Olympic rings on the fuselage above the passenger windows, and—above its control gondola, just aft of its blunt prow, painted in enormous Gothic letters—the giant’s name.

Within the airship, passengers stood at tilted cellon windows on A Deck’s promenade, watching as the Hindenberg made its final approach to Lakehurst Naval Air Station. They were arriving thirteen hours late, due to high headwinds over the Atlantic and an additional delay while a thunderstorm swept out to sea, but few people cared; during the last few hours, they had gazed down upon the spire of the Empire State Building, caused a Dodgers game to grind to a halt as they passed over Ebbets Field, and watched whitecaps breaking on the Jersey shore. Stewards had already carried their baggage to the gangway stairs aft of the staterooms, where it now lay piled beneath the bronze bust of Marshal von Hindenberg. It had been a wonderful trip: three days aboard the world’s largest and most glamorous airship, a flying hotel where mornings began with breakfast in the dining room and evenings ended with brandy and cigars in the smoking room.

Now the voyage was over, though, and everyone wanted to get their feet on the ground again. For the Americans, it was homecoming; in a few minutes, they’d be reunited with family and friends waiting for them at the aerodrome. For the sixty-one crew members, it was the Hindenbergs seventh flight to the United States, the first this year. For a couple of German Jews, it was escape from the harsh regime that had taken control of their native country. For three Luftwaffe intelligence officers posing as tourists, it was a temporary layover in a decadent nation of mongrels.

For the passengers listed on the manifest as John and Emma Pannes, it was the beginning of the final countdown.

Franc Lu raised a hand from the promenade rail to his spectacles, gently tapped their wire frame as if absently adjusting them. A readout appeared on the inside of the right lens: 19:11:31/–13:41(1).

“Thirteen minutes,” he murmured.

Lea Oschner said nothing, but gripped the rail a little harder. Around them, passengers were chatting, laughing, pointing at baffled cows in the pastures far below. The airship’s faint shadow was larger now, and moving closer; according to history, the Hindenberg would drop to 120 meters as it turned eastward again, heading back toward the mooring mast. The passenger decks were soundproof, so they couldn’t hear the engines, but Captain Pruss should now be ordering the engines reduced to idle-ahead; in another minute, they would be reversed to brake the airship for its docking maneuver.

“Relax,” he whispered. “Nothing’s going to happen yet.”

Lea forced a smile, but furtively clasped the back of his hand. Everyone around them was having a wonderful time; it was important that she and Franc appear just as carefree. They were John and Emma Pannes, from Manhasset, Long Island. John Pannes was the Passenger Manager for Hamburg-American German Lloyd Lines, the company that was the American representative for the Zeppelin airship fleet. Emma Pannes, fifteen years younger than her husband, was originally from Illinois. She had followed John’s job from Philadelphia to New York, and now they were returning from another business trip to Germany.

Nice, quiet, middle-aged people who wouldn’t be at all nervous about being aboard the Hindenberg despite the fact that thirteen… no, make that twelve… minutes from now, they were destined to die.

Yet John and Emma Pannes wouldn’t perish in the coming inferno. In fact, they were very much alive, well, and living somewhere in the twenty-fourth century. The CRC advance team had quietly abducted them from their hotel suite at the Frankfurter Hof in the predawn hours of May 3, 1937, and delivered them safely to its safe house outside Frankfurt; by now they should have been picked up by the Miranda and transported to A.D. 2314. Franc hoped that the real John Pannes wouldn’t object too strongly to being kidnapped; given the alternative, though, he rather doubted that he would, once the facts were explained to him and his wife.

Now Franc was a sixty-year-old American businessman, and Lea was forty-five instead of twenty-nine. Nanoskin and vocodor implants had altered their appearance so convincingly that, two nights earlier, they were able to share a table in the salon with the Pannes’ old friend, Ernst Lehmann, the dirigible captain who was aboard the Hindenberg to observe Captain Pruss on his first transatlantic flight. They had dinner with Lehmann without the captain noticing any difference, yet they carefully remained aloof during most of the trip, preferring to remain in their cabin. The less interaction they had with the passengers and crew, the less chance of them inadvertently influencing history.

There had been a close moment yesterday, though, when they’d joined a tour of the ship.

The tour was necessary. John and Emma had toured the airship, so they had to follow the course of history. Yet, more importantly, it gave the researchers an opportunity to fulfill the primary objective of their mission: delivering an eyewitness account of the Hindenberg’s last voyage, and documenting the reason why the LZ 129 had been destroyed. So while the passengers marched single-file along the keel catwalk running, gaping at the vast hydrogen cells within the giant duraluminum rings, Franc and Lea paused now and then to stick adhesive divots, each no larger than the rivets they resembled, to girders and conduits. They had artfully scattered the divots everywhere aboard the airship; the divots transmitted sights and sounds to the recorders concealed within Franc’s cigarette case and Lea’s makeup compact, both of which had evaded discovery by the Gestapo agents who inspected everything carried aboard the Hindenberg by its passengers before they left the Frankfurter Hof the morning of the flight. Of course, the Nazis had been searching for a bomb, not for surveillance equipment so microscopic that it could be hidden within commonplace items of the early twentieth century.

The incident occurred when the tour reached the airship’s stern, just below the place where the bomb was carefully sewn into the canvas liner beneath Cell No. 4. Kurt Ruediger, the ship’s doctor who was conducting the tour, had paused to point out the landing-gear well in the lower vertical stabilizer when they heard footfalls descending a ladder above them. A few seconds later, a rigger appeared from the darkness, stepping off the ladder to head forward toward the nose.

When he came into the half-light cast by the electric lamps strung along the catwalk, Franc and Lea recognized him at once: Eric Spehl, whom history would cast as the man who had planted the bomb that would destroy the Hindenberg. He didn’t look much like a saboteur, although he was within sight of the tiny package he had hidden in the gas cell while the ship was hangared at Friedrichshafen. Indeed, he seemed little more than an overworked rigger: a tall, blond man in drab cotton coveralls and rubber-soled shoes. As the passengers stepped aside to let him pass, though, Lea hesitated on the narrow catwalk. The necklace around her throat held a nanocam; this was her only chance to record Spehl’s image.

The heel of her left shoe caught on the aluminum-mesh floor, though, and she tripped and staggered backward, her hands blindly groping for the railing. The airship’s taut canvas skin lay only thirty feet below the catwalk; past that was a three hundred meter plummet into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Franc reached out to catch her, but Spehl was closer. He grabbed her by the shoulders and steadied her, then he smiled politely and said something about being careful, Fraulein. Then he turned and walked away.

A small occurrence, over and done within a few seconds, yet the significance of such incidents had long been a matter of debate within the Chronospace Research Center. Some researchers argued that world-lines were so rigid that even the slightest disturbance could have vast ramifications; look what had almost happened when the CRC placed someone in a parking lot behind a high fence near Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Others contended that chronospace was more flexible than anyone believed; minor accidents were allowable during expeditions because history was already in motion. It didn’t matter how many butterflies one crushed underfoot during the Pleistocene; the dinosaurs would die anyway.

Nonetheless, once Franc and Lea returned to their cabin, they had quietly fretted over whether the incident would cause a paradox. Yet history apparently hadn’t been disturbed. Monitoring the airship from their cabin the following morning, as the Hindenberg approached the American coast, they watched as Spehl walked down the keel catwalk, furtively looked either way, then climbed the ladder to Cell No. 4. The divot Franc placed at the bottom of the ladder couldn’t make him out in the visible spectrum, but his thermographic image showed him clinging to the ladder beneath the cell as he set the photographer’s timer that would send an electric current from two dry-cell batteries into a small phosphorous charge.

At 7:25 P.M. local, plus an indeterminate number of seconds, 203,760 cubic meters of hydrogen would be ignited. Thirty-seven seconds later, the Hindenberg would hit the ground as 241 tons of flaming mass.

Now the mighty airship was slowing down. Through the promenade windows, they saw the crackerbox shape of the hangar, the skeletal mooring mast surrounded by tiny figures in white caps. Franc tapped his glasses again: 19:17:31/-08.29(?). In a few seconds, the aft water ballast tanks would be released, the bow lines dropped.

It wasn’t the next eight minutes that bothered him, though; it was the thirty-seven-plus seconds which would follow the explosion. He and Lea had had little trouble getting aboard the Hindenberg. Now they had to see if they could get off again.

Thursday, May 5,1937: 7:21 P.M.

One of the most interesting things about the early twentieth century, Vasili Metz concluded, was the way Earth looked from space.

It wasn’t just the relative smallness of its cities, or the clarity of the skies above them, or the subtle differences of the coastlines. It was surprising to see New York City when its skyline was new and not half-submerged, but even that was to be expected. This was his third mission as the Oberon’s pilot, and he had become accustomed to such changes. What struck him as unreal was the emptiness of near-Earth space. No power-sats, no colonies, no shuttles. Chronos Station, the CRC’s low-orbit port where timeships began and ended their missions, was nowhere to be seen. There wasn’t even any space debris; the first satellite wouldn’t be launched for forty years, and another thirty years would pass before free-falling junk would pose a navigational hazard.

On the other hand, it would be another twelve years before anyone ever reported having seen a flying saucer. And it would remain that way if he had any say in the matter.

For the past three days, after a brief visit to Earth to drop off Lu and Oschner just outside Frankfurt, then a suborbital jaunt to deposit Tom Hoffman in New Jersey, Metz had held station in geosynchronous orbit above New Jersey. Except for when he monitored the Miranda’s departure, when it opened the wormhole that would send the support team, plus two nice people named John and Emma Pannes, back to Chronos Station, he had been almost alone.

Three hours earlier, Oberon had descended to a new orbit 289 kilometers above New Jersey, and Metz had suddenly become quite busy. Maintaining the proper balance between the timeship’s negmass drive and Earth’s gravity, while simultaneously compensating for the planet’s rotation, was difficult enough; he also had to remain in contact with Hoffman. With no comsats available to assist them, and Tom unable to throw up a transceiver dish, they had to relay on old-fashioned ELF bands that wouldn’t likely be intercepted by ham radio operators of this period.

“Oberon, this is Lakehurst Base.’’Hoffman’s voice came over Metz’s headset. “Do you copy? Over. ”

Metz prodded his throat mike. “We copy, Lakehurst. What’s the mission status?”

“Status good. Hindenberg’s at the tower. Water ballast down, bow lines have just been dropped. Holding steady at about ninety-one meters. Event minus three minutes, sixteen seconds, and counting.”

Hoffman was trying to remain professionally detached, but Metz could hear the excitement in his voice. Nor could he blame him; the mission specialist was about to witness one of the classic technodisasters of this century, one which would put an end to commercial airship travel for the next nine decades. It was probably all Tom could do to remain seated within the automobile he had rented a couple of days earlier; however, it wouldn’t do for him to be seen lugging a comlink case around the aerodrome.

“Copy that, Lakehurst.” A flatscreen below the porthole displayed a false-color radar image of the Hindenberg floating above Lakehurst Naval Air Station. The dirigible was a light-blue bullet-shaped blip surrounded by hundreds of tiny white gnats. Above the image was the mission timer: 5.07.37/ 19.22.05/E-02.45(1). “Holding station, ready for pickup on your mark.”

“Very good, Oberon. I’m about…” The rest was lost in a wave of static. Metz’s hands moved across his console, correcting the timeship’s position; the static cleared and Hoffman’s voice came back: “…is huge. You wouldn’t believe how big it is. Almost the size of an asteroid freighter. It’s…”

“Keep your mind on the job.”

“The motor’s running. I’m ready to go.” Another pause. “Can you believe people actually used these things to get around? They smell awful.”

“I know. Stay focused.” Metz glanced at the mission chronometer again. Two minutes, eleven seconds and counting, plus or minus a few seconds due to the inexactness of contemporary records. Those few seconds were going to be the tricky part of this operation.

“All right, Franc,” he murmured. “Don’t screw up now.”

Thursday, May 6,1937: 7:23 P.M.

An odd stillness had fallen over the airfield. The light drizzle had let up for a moment as dull grey clouds parted here and there, allowing sunlight to lance down upon the aerodrome and reflect greenish twilight off the Hindenbergs silver skin. The Navy men had the zeppelin’s mooring lines in their hands; they dug in their heels, playing tug-of-war with the leviathan looming three hundred feet above their heads. On the outskirts of the crowd, a radio newsman from Chicago delivered a breathless report of the airship’s arrival into a portable dictaphone machine.

Glancing around the promenade, Franc realized that he was surrounded by dead people. Fritz Erdmann, the Luftwaffe colonel who had been trying to ferret out a saboteur among his fellow passengers, but failed to notice Eric Spehl; he would soon be crushed by a flaming girder. Hermann Doehner and his lovely teenage daughter Irene, taking a family vacation to America: they were doomed as well. Moritz Feibusch, the sweet man whom the stewards had segregated from other German passengers simply because he was a Jew; he would soon perish. Edward Douglas, a General Motors businessman the Gestapo believed was an American spy, whom Erdmann had dogged during the entire flight; he, too, was living his last minutes.

And so were John and Emma Pannes. At least, this was how history would record their fate.

Although the clothes he and Lea had put on this morning appeared to be made of contemporary wool and cotton, they were woven from flame-resistant fabrics unknown in this century. The handkerchiefs in their pockets, once unfolded and placed over their mouths, contained two-minute supplies of molecular oxygen. They had left nothing in their baggage which had been made in the twenty-fourth century; the divots they had scattered throughout the airship would dissolve when the ambient air temperature reached 96 Celsius. When no one found their bodies in the wreckage, it would be presumed that their corpses had been incinerated by the inferno. This wasn’t too far from the mark; some of the bodies recovered after the disaster had only been identifiable by wedding bands or engraved watches.

“Time,” Lea whispered.

Franc prodded his glasses again. “Sixty-five seconds, plus or minus a few.” Then he took off the spectacles and slipped them into a vest pocket. She nodded and returned her hand to the railing.

There was a sudden rush of cool air. A few feet down the promenade, someone had cranked open a window. A woman waved to a man with a bulky motion-picture camera on the ground far below. Ghosts. He was surrounded by ghosts.

In the breast pocket of his jacket, Franc carried the one souvenir of this trip he had permitted himself: a folded sheet of paper, engraved with the Hindenberg’s name and picture, upon which was printed the airship’s passenger list. This wasn’t for the CRC; when he got home, he would frame it on the wall of his Tycho City apartment. Lea had nagged him about taking it, until he pointed out that it would be destroyed anyway; he later pretended not to notice when she tucked a teaspoon into the garter belt of her stockings. Little things like that wouldn’t be missed. He just wished he could save the two caged dogs back in the baggage compartment. Dogs were so scarce where they came from, and he hated to think what would happen to them when…

Franc took a deep breath. Calm down, calm down. You’re going to get through this. Just don’t lose your head now…

They had deliberately placed themselves on the starboard promenade of Deck B, not far from the gangway stairs. Many of the survivors had lived simply because they were here and not on the port promenade of the same deck, where others would be pinned down by dining room furniture. The original John Pannes died because he left the promenade just before the crash to see about Emma, who had remained in their cabin for unknown reasons. Airsickness? A premonition, perhaps? History hadn’t recorded the exact reasons why the Pannes had died, but he and Lea wouldn’t make the same fatal error.

The airship’s stern would hit the ground first. Although the aluminum grand piano at the far end of the promenade worried them, they had already agreed to rush the gangway as soon as they felt that first, fateful jerk that everyone would initially assume to be a mooring rope snapping. Down the stairs past the Deck A landing, then down another flight of stairs to the passenger hatch… by the time they got that far, the airship would be almost on the ground. They shouldn’t have to jump more than four meters.

Thirty-seven seconds. From the instant when the first flame appeared on the upper aft fuselage to the moment the Hindenberg was a flaming skeleton, only thirty-seven seconds would elapse. Time enough to cheat history…

Or time enough to lose the bet.

Franc felt Lea slide against him. “If we don’t…”

“We will.”

Her head nodded against his shoulder. “But if we don’t..

“Don’t tell me you love me.”

Her laughter was nervous and dry. “Stop flattering yourself.”

He managed to chuckle, and her hand briefly squeezed his arm before it returned to the railing. Franc glanced to his left, saw the dirigible’s shadow gliding closer to the mooring mast. “Hang on… any second now…”

The airship drifted back, forward, back again. The ground crew fought the wind as they hauled the behemoth toward the iron tripod. The two ground shadows converged, became as one.

Franc clung to the railing, felt it dig into his palms. Okay, okay… when is it going to happen?

A sudden, hard jolt ran through the ship.

He grabbed Lea’s shoulders, turned her toward the door heading to the gangway. “Okay, let’s go!” he snapped. “Move, move…!”

Lea took a step, then stopped. He slammed into her back.

“Wait a minute…” she whispered.

“Move!” He shoved at her. “We don’t have…!”

Then he stopped, and listened.

The deck was stable. It wasn’t tilting beneath their feet.

No screams. No shouting. The chairs and tables remained where they were.

Passengers gaped at them with baffled amusement. Edward Douglas chuckled and turned to say something behind his hand to his wife. Moritz Feibusch gave him a look of sympathy. Irene Doehner enjoyed a brief moment of teenage condescension. Colonel Erdmann sneered at him.

Then one of the stewards strolled down the promenade, announcing that the Hindenberg had arrived and that all passengers were to make way to gangway stairs. Please do not forget your baggage. Please proceed directly to American customs.

Franc looked down at Lea. Her face was pale; she trembled against him.

“What went wrong?” she whispered.

Friday, January 16, 1998: 8:12 A.M.

Murphy didn’t hear the phone when it rang; he was in the bathroom, using a styptic pen on the cuts his razor had made against his chin and neck. Lately he been keeping the razor beneath a little glass pyramid that his wife had given him for Christmas, but it wasn’t preserving the blade’s sharpness the way its brochure claimed it would. Either that, or the brutal hangover he suffered this morning had made him sloppy while shaving.

At any rate, he wasn’t aware that someone was calling for him until Donna knocked on the door. Office, she mouthed silently as she extended the cordless to him, and Murphy winced. He was already running late, thanks to the blinding headache he’d awoken with; there must be some eight o’clock meeting he had forgotten, and someone at OPS had phoned to find out what was keeping him. Donna hadn’t been pleased when he’d come home drunk in a cab, and the prospect of having to give him a lift to the office wasn’t helping her forgive him. She gave him another withering look as he took the phone, then went back to watching the morning horoscope on TV.

“This is Zack.” He tucked the phone under his chin as he reached for the deodorant stick.

“Zack, it’s Roger Ordmann…”

The phone almost fell into the sink. Roger Ordmann was the agency’s Chief Administrator. Murphy had spoken with him exactly three times during his tenure at OPS; the first time was when he had been hired, the other two during social occasions. Roger Ordmann was the man the president called when Mary Lincoln’s ghost was seen roaming the second floor of the White House.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Ordmann. Sorry I’m running late, but the car battery died this morning. My wife’s about ready to bring me in, though, so…”

“That’s okay, Dr. Murphy. Perfectly understandable. We have a small problem here that we need to discuss.”

The bathroom tiles suddenly felt much colder beneath his bare feet. Oh, God, it’s something to do with last night. Harry got in a fight at the bar and was taken downtown. Or Kent cracked up his car while trying to drive home. The police got involved and his name came out. “A problem, sir?”

“Are you on a secure line?”

A moment of puzzlement. What was Ordmann asking? Then he remembered that he was on a cordless phone. “Umm… no, sir. Do you want me to…?”

“Please.”

“Just a moment, sir…” Murphy fumbled with the phone until he found the Hold button, then he stalked across the house to the little office next to the den. Donna barely glanced up as he shut the door behind him; the TV volume was up, which meant that she shouldn’t be able to hear what he was saying. The forecaster was explaining why this was a good day for Capricorns to renew old friendships, particularly with Scorpios…

Murphy sat down at the desk, picked up the hardwired phone, switched off the cordless. “I’m here, sir. Sorry to…”

“Is this a secure line?”

What was this? “I’m on another extension, yes sir, if that’s what you’re asking. I was in the bathroom, speaking on a cordless. Just got out of the…” Realizing that he was starting to babble, Murphy stopped himself. “Yes, sir, it’s secure.”

A pause, then: “There’s been a wreck.”

Oh, Jesus! One of the guys did try to drive home drunk! Kent or Harry—probably Harry, he had been the most inebriated—climbed behind the wheel, and then he…

Then Murphy remembered with whom he was speaking, and why it might be so important that he’d want to have a phone conversation on a hne that couldn’t be casually monitored, and what this particular phrase signified in a different context.

“Yes sir, I understand.” His mind was already racing. “Where did it happen?”

“Tennessee. Approximately sixty miles east of Nashville. About an hour and a half ago.”

“I see…” Murphy glanced around the office, trying to spot his road atlas, before he remembered where he had seen it last: in Steven’s room, where he had taken it for a homework assignment. Forget it. “Has anyone… I mean, has anyone found the car?”

“We’ve located the vehicle, but no one’s looked inside yet. An ambulance is being sent to check it out. Can you be ready to go in ten minutes?”

Something cold raced up his back. “Ten…? Mr. Ordmann, I haven’t even left the…”

“We’ve sent a car to pick you up. A plane’s waiting at Dulles, and we’ve got the rest of the team assembled. You’ll be briefed on the way. Can you be ready in ten minutes?”

Murphy was in his robe. His suit was still on the hanger and could probably use a pass with a lint brush; he hadn’t even picked out a tie. But an old Adidas gym bag in his closet had some clean clothes left over from last fall’s hunting trip, and it would only take a moment for him to pack up his laptop. “I’ll be ready.”

“Very good. You’ve got the ball, Dr. Murphy. Don’t drop it.”

“I won’t, sir,” he said, managing for the moment to sound much more confident than he felt. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Good karma,” Ordmann said, then he hung up.

Murphy gently placed the receiver in its cradle, sat back in his chair, and let out his breath. Sometime during the night, a light snow had fallen on Arlington. Through the office window, he could see where it had frosted Donna’s backyard garden and laid a white skein over the swingset Steve no longer used. It looked cold and lonely out there. He wondered if it was any warmer in Tennessee.

He sighed, then stood up and went to tell Donna that he was going away on a business trip.

Thursday, May 5, 1937:8:00 P.M.

Thirty-five minutes after the Hindenberg docked at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, an explosion in one of the aft gas cells destroyed the airship.

No one was aboard when the fire ripped through the dirigible. All the passengers and crewmembers had disembarked by then, and even the ground crew managed to dash to safety before the burning airship hit the ground, taking out the mooring mast with it. A newsreel cameraman managed to catch the conflagration on film; it was later remarked how fortunate it had been that the Hindenberg hadn’t exploded while still in the air, or otherwise an untold number of lives might have been lost.

Franc and Lea watched the fire from the safety of Tom’s rented Ford sedan, which he had driven to the outskirts of the aerodrome and pulled over on the shoulder. They had quietly collected their bags and walked down the gangway stairs; a stunned shuffle through customs, where officials stamped the Pannes’ passports and welcomed them back to America, then Hoffman met them just outside the receiving area. He instantly started to ask questions, but they signaled him to stay silent until they were out of earshot of the other passengers.

As they walked out to the car, Franc spotted Eric Spehl, still wearing his flight coveralls, climbing into the back of a Checker cab. Unnoticed by either his fellow zeppelin men or the Luftwaffe intelligence officers, the rigger made his getaway. Fifteen minutes later, the bomb went off.

As clanging fire trucks raced down the road toward the inferno, the three of them looked at one another. “Well,” Tom said, “at least we haven’t created a paradox. We’re still here.”

Franc stared at the blazing airship. “The hell we haven’t!”

“We don’t know that yet,” Lea said from the back seat. “There’s been an anomaly. A serious one, to be sure, but it’s still only an anomaly.”

“Some anomaly.” Franc nodded toward the burning ship. “This isn’t like someone in Dallas noticing a couple of our people behind a fence during the Kennedy shooting. That didn’t change the course of history. This…”

“Oberon’s still there.” Tom cocked his head toward the uplink case where it lay open next to Lea; she had just used it to contact the timeship. “If this was a paradox, Vasili shouldn’t be up there and we would have disappeared. Right?”

“Define paradox,” Franc said angrily. “Tell me exactly what happens during a spatiotemporal paradox.”

“I don’t…”

“Come on, tell me precisely how a spatiotemporal paradox would affect a contemporary worldline…”

“Cut it out.” Lea snapped the case shut. “We can figure it out after we get to the rendezvous point.”

So they drove away from Lakehurst, heading southwest down lonely country roads into the cool New Jersey night. Deep within the Pine Barrens, house lights gradually became farther apart until they disappeared altogether. A low fog had settled upon the marshlands; the sedan’s whitewalls beat against frost heaves in the weathered blacktop. Lea moved the case to the floor and lay down in the back seat; she remarked how incredibly large automobiles had been during this period, and Tom responded by observing how much gasoline they consumed in order to move this much mass. Franc, sullen and impatient, switched on the dashboard radio and turned the knob from one end of the dial to another, picking up AM-band stations out of Trenton, Philadelphia, and New York. Ballroom jazz, comedy shows, crime melodramas: he roamed back and forth, searching for something that might explain what had just happened.

Just as they turned off the highway onto a narrow strip of dirt road, a variety show out of New York was interrupted by a news flash. The German airship Hindenberg, which had mysteriously exploded an hour and fifteen minutes ago just after it had arrived in New Jersey, had been destroyed by an act of deliberate sabotage. An unsigned communique received by the station only a few minutes earlier stated that an underground organization in Germany was claiming responsibility for the act. The note stated that a bomb had been placed aboard the airship to awaken the world to the atrocities being committed by the Nazi government, and to send a clear signal to the German people that Adolf Hitler could yet be overthrown.

Franc switched off the radio. There was a long silence in the car. “That’s what I define as a paradox,” he said at last.

“We’re still here,” Tom said softly.

“Which only means that we’ve survived our own disturbance.”

“Who says it’s our fault?” Lea was sitting up again. “No one knows why Spehl’s bomb went off when it did. Maybe the timer was faulty and it was supposed to go off at eight o’clock.”

“Or maybe he went back and reset it,” Tom said.

Franc nodded. “Sure. He ran into Emma Pannes the day before and decided that he didn’t want to sacrifice a beautiful fraulein to the flames.”

“So it’s my fault?” Lea gaped at him. “I can’t believe you…!”

“I’m joking.”

“That’s not very funny. I don’t even think you’re…”

“Will both of you just shut up?” Tom gripped the wheel more tightly as he strained to make out the primitive road through the fog. “We can’t do anything about it now, so just…”

Lea wasn’t through. “Do you think this is funny?”

“No, I don’t. But it’s a possible hypothesis for how…”

“Shut up!” Tom yelled. “Goddammit, both of you, just shut up!”

Once again, there was cold and awful silence in the car.

The road finally opened onto a broad clearing where a farmhouse had once stood some ten years before until it had been destroyed by one of the brush fires that periodically raged through the Pine Barrens. Only a halfcollapsed brick chimney remained; the rest was rotted cinders, old cedar stumps and high grass, damp with rain and age.

Tom stopped the car and switched off the headlights; a chorus of bullfrogs and crickets greeted them when they opened the doors. Lea shivered and drew her overcoat more closely around her as she instinctively stepped closer to Franc. She had been born and raised on the Moon; nature sounds made her nervous. Franc put his arm around her as he stared up at the overcast sky. A westerly breeze was blowing the clouds away, revealing crisp bright stars in the moonless sky. “You gave Vasili the correct coordinates, didn’t you?” he asked, then saw the expression on her face. “Sorry. Only asking.”

Tom pulled the uplink case out of the back seat, carried it a few feet away and set it down. He returned to the car, clicked on the dome light, briefly inspected the car’s interior. No, there was nothing here that shouldn’t be left behind; Franc and Lea’s bags were stowed in the trunk, and they had all their documents and recording equipment with them. He pulled a small gold box out of his breast pocket, thumbed a recessed switch on the side, carefully placed it on the wheel well in the back seat. Five minutes after they departed, the Hertz company would be mysteriously deprived of one Ford sedan, or at least until some hunter chanced upon its charred wreckage.

When he joined Franc and Lea again, he saw that they were staring up at the sky. Looking up, he saw nothing for a moment. Then a small black shape moved past the Big Dipper, a circular patch slightly darker than the night sky. “Better get out of the way,” he murmured. “Grab the case.”

The three of them hurried to the edge of the clearing. When they turned and looked up again, the shape had expanded into a broad opaque spot that grew larger as it blotted out the stars. Metz had the Oberon in chameleon mode; it was now nearly invisible to the naked eye. Even if radar had been in widespread use at this time, the timeship wouldn’t have appeared on any screens; the beams would have been deflected by its polymer-coated fuselage. Only the negmass grid on the craft’s underside could be detected, and that operated in near-total silence. It wasn’t until they heard a low hum and the wet grass of the clearing began to flatten out that they knew the Oberon was at treetop level.

The humming grew louder, then the timeship suddenly appeared just above them. Deliberately designed to resemble a classic sombrero-shaped flying saucer, it could have appeared on the cover of a late-twentieth century UFO magazine; indeed, it had, for an alien-abduction story debunked by most contemporary experts. Light gleamed from its single porthole as landing gear opened like flower petals from its flat underside between the hemispherical pods of its wormhole generators. Oberon seemed to hesitate for just a moment, then the humming of its negmass drive sharply diminished and the timeship settled to the ground.

The research team was jogging toward the craft when a hatch above one of the flanges irised open. Metz appeared as a silhouette at the top of the ladder. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “We gotta get out of here! Go, go, go!”

Franc was the first to reach the ladder. “Not so fast,” he said, hoisting the uplink case above his head. “We need to see what’s been done here. There might be something we don’t…”

“What, you mean you’re not through yet?” Metz reached down, grabbed the case’s handle, and snatched it out of Franc’s hand. “Maybe we should drop by Washington on the way up, let you assassinate Teddy Roosevelt…”

“It’s Franklin, not…”

“Who cares? You’re done.” Metz deposited the case behind him. “I just hope you haven’t screwed things up so much that we can’t get out of here.”

“Dammit, Vasili, it’s not our fault!” Lea’s voice was outraged. “We don’t know what happened, but it’s… we didn’t…”

“Save it for the commissioner, Oschner. We’re on our way up.” Metz disappeared from the hatch. “Get aboard or stay behind. We’re out of here in sixty.”

“Vasili, wait!” Franc scrambled up the ladder and pulled himself up through the hatch into Oberon’a airlock. Coming in from the cool New Jersey night, the wedge-shaped compartment was uncomfortably warm. The helmet of the EVA hardsuit lashed against the bulkhead reflected his face like a funhouse mirror. Franc took a moment to pull Lea the rest of the way up the ladder, then he darted through the inner hatch and followed the pilot down the narrow midships passageway to the control room. “Calm down. We’ve got to talk about…”

“There’s nothing to discuss, Doctor.” Metz entered the compartment, dropped in his seat and ran his palms across the console, clearing the timeship’s system for new programming. “And don’t tell me to calm down. Not after this. Now get your people strapped down. We’re lifting.”

“Okay, all right.” Franc raised his hands. “Get us out of here. Take us to orbit. But don’t open a bridge until we’ve assessed the situation and at least tried to determine what caused this in the…”

Metz swung around in his chair to jab a finger at Franc. “Look, Dr. Lu, don’t make me give you a remedial lecture in chronospace theory. Causality. Inconsistency paradoxes. The care and feeding of Morris-Thorne bridges. Remember?”

“All I’m saying is, we need to slow down, try to study what…”

“Study my ass. I’m making a hole while I can still can.” Metz swung back around, began stabbing at the console. Lights flashed orange, green, blue, and red; screens arrayed around the horseshoe displayed ship status, local topography, orbital maps, projected spacetime vectors. Metz glanced over his shoulder as he pulled on his headset. “Sorry, Franc, but you’re overruled. I’m the pilot, so what I say goes. I say we make an emergency launch, so we’re going. Now get your team in their seats, because it’s going to be a fast ride to Chronos.”

There was no point in arguing. CRC protocols were strict on this point. Franc was in charge of the expedition’s research team, but timeship pilots had final say over what happened once its members were back aboard ship. And Metz was playing the situation by the book.

Franc turned and stalked out of the control room. When the hatch slid shut behind him, he slammed his fist against it in frustration. “Jerk!” he yelled.

Then he stepped across the passageway to the passenger compartment. Hoffman was already strapped into one of the three acceleration couches. “She’s in the monitor room,” he said before Franc could ask. “I think she’s…”

“I’ll get her. Stay put. Vasili wants to get us out of here.” Franc retreated from the hatch and turned toward the last of the timeship’s major compartments, located at the opposite end of the passageway from the ready-room. “Lea! Vasili’s…!”

“I know. I heard.” Lea had already discarded her costume and had put on a skinsuit. Franc regretted the change; until Lea shed her nanoskin, the form-fitting bodysuit didn’t flatter her middle-aged appearance. He couldn’t blame her, though; once they got a chance, he would do the same. Sweat made these period clothes feel sticky. She stood at the pedestal in the middle of the compartment, her fingers dashing across its panel as she opened the library subsystem. “Just give me a minute. I want to see if I can access something from the mission recorders.”

“We don’t have a minute. Vasili’s going for an emergency launch.”

“Shut up and give me your cigarette case.” Lea had already hardwired her makeup compact to the pedestal; she held out her palm without looking at him. “Hurry.”

“We don’t have time for this,” he repeated, but he dug into his jacket and pulled out the cigarette case. Lea snatched it from his hand, impatiently shook out the unsmoked cigarettes, and ran a cord from the pedestal to the tiny dataport concealed in the bottom of the case. She tapped her fingers at the pedestal, then glanced up at the wallscreen. A red bar crept across the screen; the library subsystem was downloading everything the divots had collected aboard the Hindenberg.

“All right, we’ve got everything,” she murmured. “Now let’s see what happened in Cell Four just before…”

“Never mind that now. We’ve got to get strapped down.” Franc grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her away from the pedestal; she managed to grab the recorders before he propelled her through the hatch toward the passenger compartment. He got her inside just before the hatch sphinctered shut.

They were barely in their couches when the timeship begin to rise. Franc glanced at the status panel, and saw that Metz had switched off Oberon’s chameleon and gravity screen in order to divert power to the negmass drive. His lips tightened as he silently swore at the pilot. They were in for a rough ride…

Then they were shoved back in their seats as the timeship shot upward into the night. A wallscreen displayed a departure-angle view from beneath the saucer; the lights of the Jersey shore and New York City briefly appeared below them before they were obscured by high cloudbanks, then the Oberon punched through the clouds as it headed for space.

Too much, too fast. Franc clenched the armrests as pressure mounted on his chest. They shouldn’t be doing it this way. His vision was blurred, but he could make out Lea from the corner of his eye; she looked just as angry as he felt. Damn it, she was right. They still didn’t understand what had happened down there. He started to raise a leaden hand, then remembered that he had neglected to put on a headset. He couldn’t talk to Metz.

Earth’s horizon appeared on the wallscreen as a vast dark curve, highlighted by a thin luminescent band of blue. Stars appeared above the blue line at the same instant he felt his body begin to rise from the seat cushion. They had achieved escape velocity; Metz was throttling back the negmass drive. But they had to stop. They had to abort to low-orbit. They needed time to study what had happened aboard the Hindenberg before…

And then the timeship’s wormhole generators went online.

Oberon’s AI discovered a quantum irregularity in Earth’s gravity well; exotic matter contained within the pods beneath the saucer enlarged the subatomic rift into a funnel large enough for the timeship to pass through, and laced the funnel’s mouth with energy fields that would keep the wormhole temporarily stable. Within moments, a small area of space-time was warped into something that resembled a four-dimensional ram’s horn: a closed timelike circle. Relentlessly attracted by the wormhole it had just created, the timeship plummeted into the CTC.

It should have been a smooth transition, no more or less violent than the Hindenberg’s departure from Frankfurt a few days ago. For a few moments, it seemed as if that was what would happen.

Then something that felt like the hand of God slapped the timeship and sent it careening… elsewhere.

Friday, January 16, 1998:10:26 AM.

The jet was a fifteen-year-old Grumman Gulfstream II, a relic from the days when the government was still able to purchase civilian aircraft manufactured in the United States. On the inside, it only looked ten years old, which was a little better than the last ride on a Boeing 727 Murphy had taken. Yet the seats were threadbare, the overhead compartments smudged with handprints; there had been some turbulence when the jet had taken off from Dulles that had caused the fuselage to creak a bit and gave the woman sitting on the other side of the aisle reason to recite her mantra in a low, tense voice.

Once the jet leveled off at thirty-three thousand feet and the pilot switched off the seat-belt lights, an Army lieutenant walked down the aisle to ask if anyone aboard wanted refreshments before the briefing started. Murphy settled for coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. The woman demanded to know whether the bagels were kosher, the cream cheese was low-fat, and the coffee was from Guatemala. She was miffed when the lieutenant politely informed her that the bagels were frozen and that he didn’t know about the fat content of the cheese nor where the coffee beans had come from; she settled for hot tea, and scrutinized the label on the tea bag before she dipped it in her mug.

There were five passengers aboard the Gulfstream, including Murphy himself. The humorless lady was also from OPS, but he didn’t know her name; he recognized her only from having passed her in office corridors, so he assumed she belonged to another division. The two military officers were in civilian clothes; so was the FBI man, but he was the only one besides Murphy who was dressed for the outdoors. He sat in the back of the plane, speaking on a phone while he worked on a laptop computer. When Murphy got up from his seat and went aft in search of a bathroom, the FBI man turned aside and cupped his hand over the phone as Murphy went past.

Weird. But not half as weird as when, a half-hour after takeoff, the senior military officer started the briefing.

“Gentlemen, ma’am,” he began once his aide had helped everyone swivel their chairs around so that they faced the table behind which he stood, “thank you for being here on such short notice. Your government appreciates your willingness to be summoned to duty so quickly, and I hope it hasn’t caused you any undue embarrassment.”

He then introduced himself as Colonel Baird Ogilvy; with him was Lieutenant Scott Crawford, also from US Army intelligence. The FBI agent’s name was Ray Sanchez; he was here principally to facilitate matters with local law enforcement officials and to act as an official observer. Ogilvy seemed pleasant enough, a grey-haired gentleman in his midfifties who would have been at home in a golf cart; his aide was younger and a bit more intense, but he managed a brief smile when he was introduced. Sanchez, who put down his phone only reluctantly, looked as if he was carrying a glass suppository; he frowned when Ogilvy called him by name, but said nothing. Murphy decided at once to give him a wide berth if he could help it. Most of the guys he had met from the Bureau were decent enough chaps, but Sanchez was one of those who had seen one too many Steven Seagal movies.

After the colonel introduced Murphy himself, identifying him as the OPS lead investigator for this mission, he went on to name the last two people on the plane. Murphy put a hand over his mouth when Ogilvy introduced the woman as Meredith Cynthia Luna. Lean and fox-faced, her brown hair styled in a rigid coif, she looked like a real-estate broker who had dropped acid and seen the face of the Almighty in a breakfast croissant. Murphy knew Luna only by reputation; a psychic from Remote Sensing Division, she was supposedly difficult to work with, apparently believing that she possessed a sixth-sense hotline to another dimension. She preened when Ogilvy mentioned her ESPer abilities, and Murphy wondered if she would demonstrate her talents by proclaiming that they would soon be flying over water.

Not for the first time, Murphy wondered why he was working for the Office of Paranormal Sciences; not for the first time, he remembered the reasons. NASA was dead, salary jobs at the National Science Foundation were vanishing faster than humpback whales, and far more astrologers were gainfully employed these days than astrophysicists. So Murphy did the best he could, trying to be a voice of reason among spoon-benders and firewalkers, and when he found himself contemplating resignation, he reminded himself that there was a mortgage that needed to be paid and a son who had to be sent to college, and thanked God that Carl Sagan was no longer alive so he wouldn’t have to tell his old Cornell prof what he was now doing for a living.

As Col. Ogilvy continued, Crawford began passing out blue folders with eyes-only strips across the covers. “At 6:42 A.M. eastern this morning, two F-15C fighters from Sewart Air Force Base outside Nashville were on a training sortie over the Cumberland Plateau sixty-eight miles east-southeast of base when they encountered an unidentified object.” Ogilvy’s eyes occasionally darted to his folder. “The planes were at thirty thousand, five hundred feet at this time, and the object was on a due-east heading above them, altitude approximately forty-five thousand feet when first sighted, approximately ten to fifteen miles distant from the planes’ position. It appeared to be entering the atmosphere at a sharp downward angle of approximately 47 degrees, at an airspeed in excess of Mach 2. Although the object wasn’t detected by radar either from the planes or by military or civilian air-traffic control, both pilots reported clear visual confirmation of the object.”

Ogilvy flipped to another page. “Upon receiving clearance from base, both planes moved to intercept the object. Upon close approach at thirty-four thousand feet, they described the object as a flying saucer approximately sixty-five feet in diameter and twenty feet high—about the size of their own aircraft—which flew without any visible means of propulsion. At the front of the object’s upper hull was a single window.”

Meredith Cynthia Luna held up a hand; Ogilvy acknowledged her with a brief nod. “Did the pilots see any aliens within the spacecraft?”

“No, ma’am, the pilots didn’t spot any occupants. They were doing the best they could just to match the object’s course and speed.”

“Did the pilots report receiving any psychic transmissions?”

“Ma’am, the pilots attempted to contact the craft by radio, on both LF and HF bands. They received no transmissions, radio or otherwise.” Was Murphy imagining things, or was Ogilvy trying to keep a straight face?

“But it seemed as if the object had entered the atmosphere. Is that correct?”

“Given the fact that it was first spotted in the upper atmosphere and was descending at supersonic speed, that’s the impression they had, yes ma’am.” Ogilvy held up his hand. “Please let me finish the briefing, then I’ll take your questions.”

The colonel consulted his notes again. “When they failed to establish radio communication with the craft, both pilots maneuvered their aircraft so they could get a closer look at the object. By this point the craft had decelerated to sub-Mach velocity and it appeared to be leveling off its approach as it passed an altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet. One pilot, Capt. Henry G. O’Donnell, took up position seven hundred feet from the craft’s starboard side, while his wingman, Capt. Lawrence H. Binder, attempted to fly closer to the object in order to inspect it. Binder was passing beneath the object’s underside when his jet apparently lost electrical power.”

“Lost power?” Murphy raised a hand; the colonel nodded in his direction. “You mean, he… his jet failed to respond to his controls?”

“I mean, Dr. Murphy, Capt. Binder’s aircraft lost all electrical power. Avionics, propulsion, telemetry, the works. He said it was if someone had pulled the plug. His plane went into a flat spin, and Binder was forced to manually eject from the cockpit.”

“I’ve heard of this happening before,” Meredith Cynthia Luna murmured. “A police officer in Florida had his car lose power when he encountered a spacecraft.”

“Did he eject?” Lt. Crawford asked.

Murphy slapped a hand over his mouth. Oh God, don’t laugh, don’t laugh… then he saw Ogilvy forcing a cough into his fist as he shot a look at his aide, and realized that he wasn’t the only rational person aboard this plane.

“It’s not funny!” Luna’s face was red with righteous indignation. “The poor officer suffered a terrible ordeal! He was held captive for twelve hours!” Then she turned to the colonel. “Tell me… did the pilot receive any psychic impressions when this occurred?”

Murphy jotted down a note in the margins of his binder: 100% loss of F-15 elec.—EMP?

Ogilvy ignored her. “Capt. O’Donnell, upon seeing his wingman lose control of his craft while in close proximity of the object, decided that hostile action had been taken by the object. Following Air Force rules of engagement, he fell back one thousand feet, then locked his AIM-9 Sidewinder missile onto the object.”

Luna was horrified. “Oh, no! He didn’t…”

“Yes, ma’am. After attempting one last time to establish radio contact with the object, Capt. O’Donnell launched his missile.”

Time unknown

“Hang on!” Metz shouted.

Franc barely had time to grab the armrest of the pilot’s chair before the timeship violently pitched sideways. Even so, he was hurled across the control room; his left shoulder slammed against a bulkhead and he slid to the deck.

“Did it hit?” he yelled.

“Detonated in the negmass field.” Metz was still buckled in his seat, hauling against the stick as he fought for control. He glanced up at the ship-status screen. “No hull damage. We’re lucky. But we’re still going down.”

Ignoring his bruised shoulder, Franc struggled to his hands and knees, crawled upward along the deck toward Metz’s chair. In the last moments before the timeship plunged into Earth’s atmosphere, the pilot had managed to reactivate Oberon’s gravity screen. If he hadn’t, the missile’s shockwave would have pulverized him against the bulkhead.

A small blessing. Oberon was plummeting through Earth’s lower atmosphere, less than nine thousand meters above the ground. They didn’t know when or where they were, or even how they got there, save that the wormhole had thrown them back toward Earth so quickly that the timeship’s negmass drive had drained most of its energy in order to make a safe reentry. The AI had stabilized the ship just enough to keep the crew from being roasted alive, yet the effort had severely drained its fusion cells.

If that wasn’t bad enough, two contemporary aircraft had spotted the timeship during its atmospheric entry. One made the mistake of flying within the electromagnetic field cast by Oberon a drive, causing the jet to lose power. Although its pilot had managed to escape, his partner apparently misinterpreted the accident as hostile action.

“Can you get us out of here?” The deck was tilting less sharply now as Metz began to level off the timeship. Grasping the armrest, Franc painfully clambered to his knees. “Maybe we can outrun that thing.”

“Any other time, no problem.” Clutching the stick, Metz stabbed at the console with his free hand. “But power’s down 47 percent and dropping, and the field’s getting weaker. If that jet launches another missile…”

“Understood.” The negmass field had effectively shielded the timeship from the missile, but they couldn’t count on the same luck again if the jet launched another one. “Hole generators?”

“Sure, I can open a hole.” Metz scowled as he punched at the flatpanels, trying to reroute more power to the drive. “If you want to blow an eighty-klick crater in the ground below us. That’ll screw up the world-line nice and proper, won’t it?”

“Forget I asked.” Stupid question; this was the very reason why timeships always departed from orbit. Franc glanced at a screen. The remaining jet had fallen back a little, but it was still dogging their every move. He tapped the mike he had snagged on his way out of the passenger compartment. “Lea? Got anything on that aircraft yet?”

Her voice came through the earpiece. “Library identifies it as a F-15C Eagle, circa late twentieth century US Air Force.” She began reading data from the library pedestal. “Single-seater… maximum speed Mach 2.5… ceiling 18,288 meters… range about 5,600 kilometers… armament includes 20mm cannon, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles…”

“Forget that! How do we dodge the thing?”

“Dammit, Franc, how should I know?”

“Tom,” Metz snapped, “what’s going on back there?”

“I’m working on it!” The last time Franc had seen Hoffman, the mission spec was on his hands and knees in the passenger compartment, his arms thrust deep into a service bay beneath the deck plates. “I’ve rerouted the gravity subsystem to the negmass, but I can’t access the main bus without… shit!”

The deck buffeted violently as the timeship hit heavy turbulence. Through the headset, Franc heard Hoffman curse as he pitched sideways once more; true to his word, he had cut off the gravity screen. Hanging onto the armrest, Franc glanced again at the porthole. The last skeins of cirrus clouds dissipated like smoke, revealing a countryside of rolling hills shadowed by the early morning sun. High country, dotted here and there by white spots and tiny irregular grids, sprawled below them: houses, small towns, farm fields. According to Lea, they were somewhere over Tennessee…

Franc glimpsed something that looked like two parallel black ribbons running through the hills—a highway, perhaps—then an irregular silver-blue surface swam into view. A large lake, its channels meandering past miles of sharp ridgetops…

“We can’t do this much longer,” Metz murmured. “I’m trying to lose that thing, but it’s…”

“Put it down,” he said softly.

“What?” Metz glanced over his shoulder at him, then followed his gaze to the porthole. “Down there?”

“Yeah, down there. Is the chameleon still operational?”

Metz glanced at his board. “If I divert 10 percent power, sure, but it won’t work unless we’re hugging the ground.”

“Not the ground. The lake.” Franc reached forward, punched up a close-up shot of the lake below them; two more taps on the panel projected a thermographic false-image. “There’s the deep end,” he said, pointing at a dark blue splotch within the lake’s widest area. “If you can get down there, do a water landing, maybe we can submerge, lose that thing once and for all.”

The pilot’s eyes widened. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Probably, but you got a better idea? Maybe you can find a nice little airport. We can always tell the locals we’re from Mars.” He nodded toward the flatscreen; the jet continued to follow them like an angry terrier. “Or we can let our friend lob another missile at us. Maybe he’ll get lucky this time.”

Metz’s eyes raced from the porthole to the flatscreen to his status board: the lake, the jet, the uncertain status of his craft. Any which way you added it up, it was a losing equation.

“Okay, all right. I’ll take us down.” The deck canted again as Metz pulled the stick to one side; this time, Franc hung on for dear life. “Now get back to your seat and buckle in. Whatever happens, it’s going to be rough.”

“Good luck.” Franc slapped the pilot’s shoulder, then let go of the armrest and flung himself toward the hatch behind him.

He nearly collided with Lea in the passageway; she opened her mouth to speak, but he shoved her into the passenger compartment before him. Hoffman was struggling back onto his knees; the tools from the fixit kit were skittering every which way across the deck, and he had only barely managed to shove the access panel shut.

“What’s going on?” he shouted. “What are we doing?”

“Landing in a lake! Hang on, going to be rough!”

Another violent swerve, and Franc fell headfirst into a couch. He managed to wrench its belly strap around himself just as the craft yawed once more.

“Going evasive!” Metz’s voice yelled in his headset.

Lea grabbed his thigh and clung to him as he grabbed her by the shoulders, but Tom was flung backward against a bulkhead. He slid down the wall, his arms limp at his sides.

“Tom!” Lea started to crawl toward the unconscious man.

“Strap down!” Franc yelled at her, then he flung her toward the adjacent couch. Lea hit the seat hard, but somehow she managed to land in it, not next to it. Dazed, she started pulling the straps around herself.

Franc glanced at Tom; there was nothing he could do for him. The timeship was probably working on 50 percent power or less; Metz was trying to dredge what little energy remained in Oberon’s cells for a controlled crash landing. Safely strapped down, Lea was shouting at Hoffman again, but he couldn’t answer; the mission specialist was out cold.

His throat gnarled with fear, his fingers digging into the armrests, Franc stared at the wallscreen. A rippling blue-green surface scudded past them only a hundred meters below, its edges marked by tall limestone bluffs. A road bridge appeared, shot beneath them with less than ten meters to spare, then it vanished and they were going down, down, down….

“Tom, get up!” Lea was screaming at the top of her lungs. “Tom, wake up, wake up, oh God, we’re going to…!”

And then they hit the water.

11:57 A.M.

From the Air Force chopper, Center Hill Lake looked cold and grey. High clouds reflected dully off the surface of its meandering channels and tributaries, where the Caney Fork River flowed into deep valleys inundated long ago by a flood control dam. At midwinter, the waterline was at its lowest level; when the UH-60 Blackhawk dropped to about two hundred feet, the noisy clatter of its rotors reverberated off high bluffs as the chopper flew past densely wooded ridges and hilltops.

From his seat behind the pilots, Murphy studied Center Hill Lake with curiosity. Although most of the surrounding hills were filled with summer homes, a few of them almost mansions, none were on the shoreline itself; most looked closed for the winter. Col. Ogilvy, who turned out to be a native Tennessean, told him on the flight out from Sewart AFB that the Army Corps of Engineers, which had erected the dam in the early fifties and maintained it today, had strict regulations against anyone building within five hundred feet of the shore. The few boathouses were ones protected by a grandfather clause in the regulations; most of the summer residents docked their boats at commercial marinas scattered along the lake. The regulations probably seemed draconian to the wealthy Nashville doctors, lawyers, and country musicians who kept summer getaways out here, but the trade-off was one of the most underdeveloped lakes Murphy had ever seen. He gazed down at the bare-branched woods and wondered how many deer he might bag during hunting season.

Then the Blackhawk swept around a bend, and the main channel opened before them: a vast expanse of water stretching several miles from shore to shore, with a tall road bridge towering above a bottleneck at the eastern end of the channel. The pilot brought the helicopter down lower as he banked to the left, and Murphy saw a sandy beach within a shallow lagoon on the opposite side of the channel. The beach belonged to a picnic area; as the chopper came closer, he saw that it had been invaded by the US Army. A large tent had already been erected in the nearby picnic area; a couple dozen figures, most wearing military fatigues, moved around the tent and the olive trucks parked nearby.

Even then, the helicopter didn’t immediately head for the beach. Instead, it veered toward the middle of the channel. From his seat next to him, Col. Ogilvy unlatched his seat belt and leaned across Murphy to point at something through the window.

“Down there!” he yelled. “Can you see it?”

Murphy pushed aside the right cup of his ear protector as he looked where the colonel was pointing. At first, he couldn’t see anything; then he spotted a tiny island, not much larger than one of the summer houses surrounding the lake. Not an island, really, but rather a large sandbar; a couple of hardy oak trees had managed to survive the lake’s seasonal rise and fall, but he doubted that anything more than a few wood ducks lived out there.

Yet he didn’t see anything peculiar, save for several small plastic buoys forming a half-circle around one side of the island. “See what?” he yelled back, shouting against the prop noise. “I don’t see anything!”

Across the narrow cabin, Meredith Cynthia Luna had her eyes tightly closed; she took deep breaths as her hands fondled a pair of animal energy stones: an armadillo for protection and safety, a butterfly for balance and grace. She had been airsick once already, shortly after the Blackhawk lifted off from Sewart AFB; apparently her painted pebbles didn’t work for nausea. Lt. Crawford sat next to her, relief bag in hand just in case she needed it. Her hair remained perfect.

“I can’t see anything either!” Agent Sanchez had taken another window and was staring downward. “Where are you looking?”

“Gotta look close!” Ogilvy jabbed a finger at the sandbar. “See that distortion? Like a warped mirror or something? ”

Murphy peered out the window… and yes, now that the colonel mentioned it, he could detect an odd, semi-circular object shimmering in the shallow water within the buoys. At first glance, it was undetectable, melding almost perfectly with the tiny island and the lake surrounding it. Then the helicopter passed over the object, and he was startled to see its shadow bulge outward slightly, as if reflected by an invisible convex surface.

“That’s it!” the colonel shouted. “That’s the yew-foh!”

“What’s making it do that?”

“Damn if I know! That’s why we called you!” Ogilvy reached forward to prod the pilot’s shoulder. “Okay, Captain, put us on the ground! We’ve got work to do!”

White sand kicked up as the copter settled down on a concrete boat ramp within the lagoon; the pilot waited just long enough for his passengers to get clear of his aircraft, then he took it back up into the sky. Now that he was closer, Murphy noticed that the soldiers wore black tabs over the division patches on the shoulders of their parkas: Rangers from the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. All wore helmets and sidearms; a few carried M-16s on shoulder straps. Murphy noticed several soldiers using entrenchment tools to fill burlap bags with sand, while others lugged them to shallow foxholes scattered along the beach. One contained a canvas-covered machine gun. The military wasn’t taking any chances.

A lieutenant hurried over to Ogilvy, saluted, and began to speak to him in a low voice. Sanchez headed straight for a cement picnic table, where two other civilians had spread out topographic maps; the FBI had already gotten the state police to seal off all roads and highways leading to the lake, under the veiled pretense that a top-secret experimental jet had crashed here. Meredith Cynthia Luna walked on stiff legs to another concrete picnic table, where she sat and tucked her head between her knees.

That left Murphy alone, at least for the moment. Unnoticed by anyone, his hiking boots scuffing against the frozen sand, he sauntered past the soldiers, the sandbag emplacements, the trucks, and the FBI men until he reached the water’s edge. Now there was nothing between him and the tiny island; it lay about half a mile across the channel, clearly visible by its lonely stand of oak trees. Yet the crashed UFO was invisible; only the buoys gently bobbing in the water marked its whereabouts.

What allowed it to camouflage itself like that? An energy field of some sort? That was his first guess, considering what happened to the jet that had flown too close to it. The pilot of the second F-15 claimed that his missile exploded before it reached its target, yet he also said that the object nearly disappeared when it got close to the lake; he had been able to follow it only by the shadow it cast against the lake, and he didn’t see it clearly again until it skipped across the lake’s surface like a flat rock before running aground on the sandbar. So if it was a field, perhaps it wasn’t completely impenetrable. It might be able to ward off kinetic-energy sources, like an incoming missile, but was useless against inert matter like…

“Find anything interesting, Dr. Murphy?”

Startled by Ogilvy’s voice, Murphy turned around so quickly that he lost his balance. “Oh shit, don’t do that! You…”

“Sorry.” The colonel was faintly amused. “Didn’t realize you were so nervous.”

“I’m not.” Not really. Murphy let out his breath, nodded toward the sandbar. “Just trying to figure out what… um, what makes it go away like that.”

“From what I’ve been told, nobody knows.” Ogilvy pointed further down the beach; a pair of inflated rubber boats lay on the shore. “Six men paddled out there about a half-hour ago. They approached within thirty feet of the sandbar, but couldn’t make out anything except that shimmer we saw from the air.”

“Did they… ?”

“No. They were under orders to only recon the area and drop buoys. One man said that he felt his paddle hit something under the water, like a smooth surface, but they didn’t see anything when they looked down. It spooked them, so they skedaddled.”

A smooth, invisible surface just under the water. “How deep is it out there, Colonel?”

“Maximum depth is about fifty feet. Around the sandbar, only ten to fifteen where the dinghy was. Five or less at the waterline.”

Damn! They were right on top of the thing, and still couldn’t see it. “This used to be farm country before the dam was built,” Ogilvy was saying, “so that’s probably the top of a low hill. The yew-foh might have sunk completely if it hadn’t hit it.”

“Maybe that was it was trying to do.”

“Maybe. But why would it want to do that?”

“Well, it was being chased by a fighter, so…” Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know. Still trying to figure that part out. When I know more, I’ll tell you.”

Ogilvy nodded, but didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Yknow, Dr. Murphy,” he said quietly, “you seem to have your head screwed on tight. For an OPS guy, that is.”

“How’s that, Colonel?” he asked warily.

“Call me Baird…

“I’m Zack.”

“Zack.” They shook hands. “You’re a normal scientist, aren’t you?”

Normal scientist. Like there was another kind… “Astrophysicist, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I can tell. You’re asking questions, not assuming anything. You’re not jumping to conclusions, then trying to make the facts fit the answers you’ve already figured out. Ms. Luna, on the other hand…”

He didn’t finish, but stepped aside to let Murphy see for himself. Meredith Cynthia Luna had recovered her poise; she had now taken a lotus position on the picnic table, palms spread upward on her knees, head tilted hack on her neck, eyes tightly closed. A handful of soldiers had paused to watch her, until an officer walked by and told them to get back to work.

“Asked her what she was doing,” Ogilvy murmured, “and she said she was trying to establish communion. Not communication… communion.” On top of everything else, she was a Strieber believer. Lord… “She’s not in my division. If she wants anything, give it to her. I don’t care, just keep her out of my way.”

“So you don’t think she’s…?”

“Got anything to contribute? Not really. But I can’t get rid of her either.”

“Sort of figured as much.” Ogilvy paused, then went on in a low voice. “Frankly, my people don’t have much respect for your people. Cashews and pistachios, we tend to call ’em. But you’ve got a good rep. Word up is that you’re probably the most reliable person at OPS. If you think you’ve got a lock on this situation…”

“I’m flattered, but I don’t.”

“This is new to all of us, but you’re the nearest thing we’ve got to an expert.” Ogilvy took a deep breath. “Look, Zack, we’re making it up as we go along. Agent Sanchez is working with the locals to keep a lid on this thing as long as we can. We’ve been lucky so far… hardly anyone saw this thing go down, and we’ve got the area bottled up. But that dog won’t hunt much longer.”

“How much longer?”

“Six, twelve hours. Twenty-four, tops. My people are ready to fly in more people and equipment, but we need to know what we’re dealing with first. Think you can do it, Dr. Murphy?”

Ogilvy posed this as a question, but it really wasn’t one. They both had higher authorities to whom they had to answer, and nobody upstairs was going to accept no for an answer.

“Yeah, I can do it,” Murphy said.

Time unknown

“I’m sorry, Tom.”

Franc gently folded Hoffman’s hands together on his chest, then pulled a blanket over the body. He spent another moment with the mission specialist, then carefully stood up and made his way upward along the precariously slanted deck to the hatch.

He had just left the passenger compartment when something thumped against Oberon s hull. Bracing himself against a bulkhead, he listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything until Metz’s voice rang out from the control room.

“Lu! Get in here! We’ve got a problem!”

Like they didn’t have enough already. Franc pitched himself down the dark passageway until he reached the ajar hatch to the control room, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the compartment. Seated at his station, Metz was a shadow against the luminescent band of emergency lamps. Most of the screens glowed with status reports; one, however, displayed a camera view from outside the timeship.

“Oh, no,” Franc murmured. “Where did they come from?”

Just outside Oberon, three soldiers in a rubber boat. One cradled an archaic rifle in his arms; the second had an old-fashioned film camera aimed straight at them; the third gently guided the boat with a long plastic paddle. The first two were looking back at the oarsman, who gazed uncertainly into the water just beneath the boat.

“I didn’t see them coming,” Metz said in a low voice, as if afraid the intruders could hear them. “I had my head under the console, didn’t know they were out there until…”

“I know. I heard it, too.” They were floating just above the submerged end of the ship; the guy in the rear must have hit the hull with his paddle. “Is the chameleon functional?”

Metz glanced at one of the displays. “Still working. They can’t see us. But if they get much closer…”

He didn’t finish his thought. It hardly mattered. The soldiers knew they were here. The first vehicles had arrived on the nearby shore little more than an hour after Oberon’s crash-landing, and although the chameleon hid the timeship from direct view, a vague outline of its hull could be detected from certain angles in midday sunlight. Helicopters had circled low over the sandbar several times already, but this was the closest any of the locals had dared to venture.

At least the airlock hatch was underwater. In fact, judging from the position of the raft, it was directly beneath the soldiers. The locals would have to send out divers to find it. Judging from the amount of activity on the shore, though, it wouldn’t be long before it occurred to them to do so.

They watched as the men in the boat took a few more pictures—at such close range, they were probably photographing distorted reflections of themselves—before they hastily paddled away again. Metz let out his breath. “Close one. Worse than Dallas.”

“Far worse than Dallas,” Franc said, but not accusingly. Recrimination was pointless by now; whatever happened in 1937, they were foiled but good. One expedition member was dead, his neck broken during that first violent impact with the lake. The timeship was down, its operational condition uncertain. Contemporaries had discovered their whereabouts, and these weren’t aborigines who would leave little more record of their brief passage than a few legends and some mysterious cave drawings.

Worst of all, they were shipwrecked in the late twentieth century. The most dangerous era in the history of humankind.

“They’re cautious now, but they’ll be back.” Franc clambered forward to peer at the screens. “How’s it coming so far?”

“Do you want the good news first, or…?” Metz caught Franc’s stern look. “Never mind. I’ve been working my way through the system to the primary drive. It’s still down, but the AI’s located the major problem. Main bus is damaged, a few boards are shot. I’ve retasked some repair nannies and sent them in, so they should complete their work in about an hour or so. Backup’s fully operational, though, so I’m…”

Franc impatiently twirled a finger, and Metz got to the point. “Pods are still intact. The drive can be fixed, although the grid’s flooded and it won’t work at optimal levels until we’ve been airborne for at least sixty seconds.”

“So we can get out of here. Right?”

Metz didn’t reply.

“Come on, Vasili. We can or we can’t. Which is it?”

“Two problems. The first, you know about already. Energy reserve’s down to 15 percent, just enough to keep the chameleon operational and the AI alive. I’ve got the cells on full recharge. Fortunately, we can elec-trolyze all the hydrogen we need from the water around us… one good thing about crashing in a lake. AI estimates that we’ll be able to lift off again within six hours, less if we reserve internal power as much as we can.”

“Including low-orbit escape and wormhole entry?” Franc asked. Metz nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked even more tense than usual. “So what’s the second problem?”

The pilot let out his breath. “We don’t know when we are. Where, that’s certain… the AI established a fix on our coordinates before we crashed. Tennessee, Cumberland Plateau, Center Hill Lake… the numbers are safely stored away. And judging from what we’ve seen so far, we’re in the late twentieth. Probably in the 1990s, but…”

“What year?”

“Can’t tell you that.” Metz shook his head. “That’s the problem. Primary telemetry grid is down, so we can’t pull in outside feed. No way to lock onto the local net. I might have been able to get a lock before we crashed, but I didn’t have a chance to…”

“I understand.” Under the circumstances, Vasili had done the best he could just to get them safely to the ground. However, lacking a precise fix on when they were, Oberon s AI was unable to accurately plot a CTC return trajectory. This was something that couldn’t be guesstimated; the AI had to know exactly when and where in chronospace the timeship now existed. Spatial coordinates were estimated, but temporal weren’t; the most vital element of the four-dimensional equation was missing.

“Sorry, Franc.” For once, Metz had put his arrogance in a drawer. “I wish I could give you better news, but…”

“Any idea of what caused this? The paradox… the anomaly, I mean…”

“Lea’s still working on it. You might want to check with her.” Then he turned back to his console, and didn’t look up again until Franc left the control room.

He found Lea at the library, running through the footage their divots had captured from the Hindenberg. Like Franc, she had taken a few minutes in the lav to rinse off her nanoskin; her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail that fell over her broad shoulders as she braced herself against the pedestal. She didn’t look up when he entered the compartment.

“Find anything?”

“Yes, I have,” she said. “I think I’ve isolated the divergence point.”

Franc propped himself against the pedestal as Lea typed a command into its keypad. “There was a lot of sift through, so I concentrated on the last three hours before we landed. We passed over Lakehurst at four o’clock, but had to divert because of wind gusts and high cumulus clouds at the field.”

“Uh-huh, I remember.”

“We flew south along the Jersey shore to ride it out. An hour and a half later, according to the historical record, Captain Pruss received a telegraph message from the field, stating that the weather conditions were still bad and recommending that he not attempt a landing until later. He wired back a message, stating that he wouldn’t return to Lakehurst until he was given clearance. That message was sent at 5:35 P.M. local. Now watch…”

She pressed the PLAY button on the pedestal. The wallscreen displayed the vast interior of the Hindenberg’s envelope. Franc recognized the angle immediately; it was the catwalk beneath Cell No.4, where he had placed a divot during their tour of the airship. The digital readout at the bottom of the screen read 5.6.38: 1741:29 when a lone figure walked past the divot. As he paused at the bottom of the ladder to quickly glance both ways, his face became visible for a brief instant. It was Eric Spehl, the rigger who had placed the bomb.

Spehl ascended the ladder, then passed out of camera range. “He’s gone about six minutes,” Lea said, tapping the pedestal again to skip forward, “and then…”

At 5.6.38: 1747:52, Spehl reappeared on the ladder, climbing back down from Cell No.4. Once again, he hastily glanced around, then walked back up the catwalk, heading toward the airship’s bow. “I checked the record from this divot again,” Lea said, “both before and after the Hindenberg landed. He didn’t come back here again.”

“He came back and reset the bomb. I’ll be damned.”

“That’s a good way of putting it, yes. And he did it just after the second time Captain Pruss postponed the landing.”

“But why didn’t he do this earlier?” Franc rubbed his chin thoughtfully; it felt good to feel his own flesh again. “Why the sudden change of mind?” Lea let out her breath. “Maybe you were right. Perhaps he remembered the woman he encountered at this same spot…” she pointed at the frozen image of the empty catwalk “…the day before, and decided that he didn’t want to be responsible for her death. So he came back and reset the timer so that the bomb wouldn’t detonate until exactly eight o’clock, by which time he was certain the ship would be safely moored and all the passengers disembarked.”

Franc wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that she was blaming herself needlessly for what had happened. The evidence wasn’t inarguable; he wasn’t convinced. He couldn’t believe that history had been changed only because the two of them had been aboard the Hindenberg.

“So we created an alternate world-line,” he said.

“Right. The airship was destroyed anyway, but this time the German resistance movement was able to claim credit for what Spehl had done.”

“We heard that much on the car radio. What sort of difference did it make?”

“That’s the question.” She drummed a pensive fingertip against the pedestal. “Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Spehl accomplished what he had intended. The Hindenberg was the very symbol of Nazi power. Assume that its destruction was the first act of open dissent that finally led to Hitler being ousted from power. Perhaps one of the subsequent assassination attempts was successful….”

“Come on… that’s one assumption too many.”

“Perhaps, but…” She hesitated. “Well, there’s one more thing. It’s not much, but…”

“Let’s have it.”

She turned back to the pedestal, began tapping in another set of commands. “Remember when the jets intercepted us after Oberon entered the atmosphere? When they tried to radio us?” He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. “I searched the flight recorder, full AV mode, then had the library backtrack historical sources. Here’s what I found.”

The two jets appeared onscreen as a pair of angular dots racing ahead of vapor trails; there was no digital readout at the bottom of the screen. As the dots began closing on the camera, they heard a static-filled radio voice:

“Sewart Tower, this is Wildcat One, we’ve got a confirmed bogey at…”

Lea froze the image, then gently moved a forefinger across the touchpad until a tiny square appeared over the nearest of the two jets. She then enhanced the image until it was magnified several hundred times; a window opened on the screen, showing the aircraft in greater detail. Another couple of keystrokes, and a wire-frame composite appeared next to the photographic image.

“The library positively identified this as an F-15C Eagle,” she went on. “A one-seat jet fighter used by the United States Air Force from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, when it was replaced by an updated version of the same jet, the two-seat F-15E. We know that they had to be F-15C’s because only one pilot bailed out of the Eagle that flew through our negmass field.”

“So?”

“During radio communications between the jets and their home base, you can clearly hear the base being referred to as Sewart Tower. I checked with the library system, and it turns out Sewart Air Force Base was decommissioned in the late 1960s. It shouldn’t be there, let alone sending up fighters not put in service until ten years later.”

Franc stared long and hard at the split-image on the wallscreen. “All right,” he murmured. “You’ve convinced me. We’re in an alternate world-line…”

“An alternate world-line we inadvertently created. And when we tried to return from 1937 to our own future, we ran into a rift in chronospace… a divergent loop in a closed timelike circle. We’re lucky that we weren’t destroyed completely. As it was, we were dumped out here…”

“In a parallel universe,” Metz said.

Franc and Lea looked around to find the pilot leaning against the hatch. How long he had been there, they couldn’t know; he had probably heard most of the discussion. Just as well, Franc thought. It would save them the trouble of reiterating everything Lea had learned.

“Don’t bother.” Metz held up a hand. “I know. I screwed up. If we had remained in ’37, studied this a little longer, we might have seen this coming. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

“No, Vasili. It’s everyone’s fault.” Holding herself up against the pedestal, Lea turned toward him. “Paradoxes like this have been postulated for a long time. Previous expeditions have been lucky until now. We were stupid to think our luck would hold out.”

“Forget it,” Franc said. “Point is, how do we get out of here?”

No one said anything for a moment.

“First thing,” Lea said softly, “we have to find out what time it is.”

3:00 P.M.

The second time the Rangers visited the sandbar, they approached the saucer from the opposite side of the tiny island, with four men in each of the two inflatable boats. They rowed slowly enough as to not cause any ripples when they dipped their oars in the water, and they observed strict silence during the journey, using hand signals to communicate. They went armed, with two of the soldiers carrying 35mm cameras and camcorders.

Col. Ogilvy placed Lt. Crawford in charge of the operation; Murphy accompanied the landing party in the role of a civilian advisor. Not surprisingly, Meredith Cynthia Luna objected to being left behind. After two hours of psychic meditation, she declared that the UFO was inhabited by aliens from a planet located somewhere in the Crab Nebula; on the eve of the Third Millennium, they had come to invite Earth into the Galactic Federation. Ogilvy heard her out, then handed her an M-16 and asked if she needed a refresher course in how to use it. It was a good ploy; she dropped the unloaded rifle as if it was a medium-rare steak, and although she bitched about approaching peaceful emissaries from another star system with weapons, the argument was effectively ended.

Murphy felt the bottom of his boat slide over the sandy shallows a few feet from the island. Crawford pointed to the sandbar, then balled a fist and pumped it down twice. The two Rangers at either end of the raft hopped out; their boots had barely splashed into the freezing water before they grabbed guy ropes and started hauling the boat ashore. About twenty feet away, the four soldiers in the second raft were doing the same. Everyone crouched low, rifles in hand, yet the Rangers were so quiet that a handful of ducks lounging in high weeds at the tip of the sandbar barely noticed their presence.

It wasn’t until the troops had taken positions behind the two oaks that Crawford signaled Murphy to get out of the raft. The sandbar was littered with beer cans, washed-up sandwich wrappers, and lost fishing lures. Between the two trees was a small circle of blackened rock, a rudimentary fireplace left by boat bums. The tree trunks were carved with initials; as Murphy knelt down behind one of the oaks, something jabbed against his knee. He looked down, spied a tiny hand sticking out of the soil, and reached down to pull up a sand-crusted Darth Vader action figure. A toy left here last summer by some child; the irony was inescapable. He smiled and tucked it into a breast pocket of his parka; perhaps Steven would like to have it.

Past the trees, though, there was nothing to be seen on the other side of the island. At least nothing that looked like an alien spacecraft, from the Crab Nebula or otherwise. Yet, as he looked closer, it seemed as if the waterline was distorted in a strange way, the late afternoon sun casting queer, inconsistent shadows upon the beach. If he could only get a little closer…

Murphy glanced one way, then another. The Rangers lay on their bellies on either side of him, nervously peering over their rifles as if expecting some monster from a fifties sci-fi flick to suddenly come roaring out of the water. Crawford tapped him on the shoulder, raised a level palm, lowered it to the ground, then pointed toward the opposite side of the sandbar. What the hell did he expect him to do, crawl across the island?

“Aw, nuts,” Murphy said aloud. “This is silly.” Then, before Crawford could stop him, he stood up and started walking toward the area of distortion.

The lieutenant called his name, the Rangers looked up at him in shocked confusion, but Murphy didn’t stop. Moving one step at a time, he raised his hands to shoulder height, hands out flat. His heart trip-hammered against his chest, his parka felt a little too warm; suddenly, he wondered if this was such a good idea after all. Yet there was no backing down; if he retreated now, Crawford would probably have him hog-tied and rowed back to the campground. And he was already past the trees, only a few yards from the waterline.

The area of distortion had a rounded look to it. As he drew closer, an image of himself abruptly appeared before him, flattened out as if in a translucent funhouse mirror. He reached out his right hand to touch the reflection…

His fingers met a cool, invisible surface. He was so surprised that his hand involuntarily jerked back. “Hey!” he yelled. “I found something!”

“Dr. Murphy, get back here!” Crawford shouted.

Murphy ignored him. He laid both palms against the surface, gently moved them across back and forth. He’d rather expected a tingle, and was mildly astonished not to receive it. Whatever was causing the invisibility effect, it wasn’t an energy field. He glanced at his wristwatch and observed that the second hand was still moving. If an electromagnetic source of some sort had disabled one F-15 and detonated the missile of a second, it wasn’t active now.

Behind him, he heard soldiers scuttling closer. Crawford was on the radio: “Grumpy to Stepsister One, Grumpy to Stepsister One. Snow White has approached bogey, established presence. Dwarves in position. Please advise. Over…”

He glided his hands across sloping surface, carefully exploring it as he established a mental map of the object. It seemed to go all the way down to his ankles, then it abruptly stopped, as if he had reached an edge of some sort. His reflection became sharper when he got closer, warped when he got further away. Fascinated, he carefully lifted his right leg and braced his knee against the surface. Yes, it was definitely a metal hull of some sort. Putting his full weight against it, he gradually inched forward on his hands and knees…

He almost laughed out loud when he realized what he must seem to be doing: crawling in midair, at least five feet above sand and water. Somewhere behind him, he heard the soft whir-and-click of an automatic shutter. One of the soldiers handling the camera record was taking pictures of him. Murphy was just enough of a ham that he didn’t want to miss the opportunity. Careful not to not lose his balance, he shifted his center of gravity to his haunches, rested the soles of his boots against the invisible surface, then slowly stood up. Good grief, he was…

At that instant, the UFO materialized.

One moment, it wasn’t there. The next, it was: an enormous silver bowl turned upside-down and cast up against the sandbar, with almost half of it submerged beneath the water.

Startled, Murphy turned around too quickly; his feet lost their purchase and he fell down against the side of the saucer. The breath was almost knocked out of him; he slid halfway down the hull before he threw out his hands and braked his fall by sheer friction. As he fell, his head jerked up and…

At the top of the craft was a large, round turret, much like the crown of a hat. In the center of the turret was a small square porthole. As Murphy slid down the saucer, an exterior shutter whisked sideways across the window, closing so quickly that he barely saw it before it molded so perfectly with the rest of the hull that it was impossible to tell it had ever been there at all.

Even so, in that briefest fraction of a second, Murphy caught a glimpse of something peering out at him. No… not something, but someone.

A human being.

Time unknown

The amber haze of winter sun briefly set the lake on fire before it set behind the hills, yet the darkness wasn’t complete. The timeship gleamed brightly within the halo of portable floodlights set up along the sandbar; tiny figures moved along the tiny island, some moving equipment into place, others standing guard with weapons in hand. Rubber boats shuttled back and forth across the channel; helicopters orbited almost constantly, their searchlights skimming across the dark waters.

Franc waited until night had completely fallen before he emerged from hiding. He had crouched in the shallows at the farthest end of the lagoon for the past half-hour, raising his head above the surface only when he thought the darkness would conceal the bulge of the EVA suit’s helmet. The camp was little more than fifty meters from his position, yet never once had anyone ventured over here. So long as he remained quiet, no one would know he was nearby.

It was a dangerous scheme, to be sure, but so far it had worked well. The moment he exited the timeship, Metz switched off Oberon’s chameleon. Its abrupt appearance so thoroughly rattled the soldiers who had just invaded the island that no one noticed the telltale air bubbles caused by the opening airlock. Franc had fallen less than three meters before his boots sank into the muddy silt; he waited a few minutes, peering upward through the water to see if anyone had detected his presence, then he began his long hike across the lake bottom.

It had taken nearly two hours to reach the end of the lagoon. He didn’t switch on the helmet lamps until he was twenty feet below the surface; by then, he had already paused to allow for pressure equalization. Lea had programmed the heads-up display with a map of the lake, but it could only show what lay above the water, not below it. The lake bottom was covered with man-made debris of every shape and size: rusting soda cans, coolers filled with muck, shapeless pieces of painted wood, fiberglass and metal, broken fishing poles, even an ancient automobile that had loomed out of the brown limbo like a dinosaur carcass. Artifacts from an age of negligence.

The hardsuit would only be the latest addition to the lake’s collection. When he was out of the water, safe within the woods along the shore, Franc lay on his back and struggled out of its ceramic carapace. The wool suit he had worn on the Hindenberg offered scant protection against the chill night air, but it would have to do; it was the only twentieth-century clothing he had saved from 1937. He took a few minutes to drag the EVA armor back to the lake shore and shove it into the shallows; he heard a soft gulp as it swallowed water, then it disappeared from sight. With luck, it wouldn’t be found for another dozen years or so, if ever.

Franc pulled up the coat lapels and tucked his hands beneath his armpits. He felt the tiny square of the compad in his shirt pocket, and briefly considered using it to contact the Oberon. No, that was a bad idea; the locals might be scanning carrier frequencies, including microwave. Better not tip his hand until he was good and ready. Lea and Vasili would just have to sweat a while longer. At least they were warm enough to sweat…

Trying not to think about the cold, Franc began making his way through the dense thicket, careful not to step on any frozen branches underfoot. He heard the muted voices of soldiers on the nearby beach; when he paused to look back, he could just make out the lights encircling the Oberon. He regarded the distant timeship for a moment, just long enough to make him wonder at the lunacy of his own idea, then he turned and began trudging up the wooded slope.

Dozens of houses surrounded him, on the hillsides above the lake, but he could see lights from none of them. He briefly considered breaking into one, but decided to hold that only as a last resort. Even if they were presently unoccupied, these homes might have intruder alarms; he didn’t possess the tools necessary to circumvent them.

Besides, his task was relatively simple from here on. All he had to do was locate a public telephone. If he could just make his way to a paved road, he knew that a phone wouldn’t be distant. This was late-twentieth-century North America, after all. The locals loved telephones.

Road. Phone. Information. What could be more easy?

Wondering why Lea couldn’t have done this instead, Franc fought his way through the dark and frigid night.

6:11 P.M.

Dinner was a brown vinyl bag containing a MRE: a Meal Ready to Eat or a Meal Rejected by Ethiopians, depending which definition one wished to accept. Inside were green foil wrappers containing diced cold turkey in gooey brown gravy, a tasteless potato patty, a handful of crackers, a packet of instant coffee, and some wispy blue tissue that Murphy first assumed was a napkin until he was informed that it was toilet paper. Eating at a picnic table by lantern light, he managed to choke down half of the MRE before he took the rest to a garbage can. He should have been ravenous, but the events of the last couple or hours had left him without much of an appetite.

Shortly after he and Crawford returned from the sandbar, Col. Ogilvy had held a briefing for the civilian advisors in the command tent. The facts themselves were clear: although the saucer inexplicably became visible at 1505, it had remained silent since then. Listening equipment set up around the craft hadn’t disclosed any new information, no hatches had been discovered, and aside from what Murphy alone had seen in that brief instant before its single porthole closed, the craft’s occupants hadn’t chosen to reveal themselves.

Cynthia Meredith Luna remained adamant that the craft was an alien spaceship from a distant star system, and insisted that it contained emissaries from an interstellar federation. The possibility that these travelers might be human, or at least human-like, only helped her embroider her revelation a little more: the human form wasn’t unique only to the planet Earth, but was widespread throughout the universe, and these “parahumans” were deliberately seeking out others of their own kind. We shouldn’t be confronting them with weapons, she charged, but had to find a more peaceful means of communication. She suggested that all the Rangers should immediately withdraw from the sandbar, and allow her and several other OPS psychics to congregate on the island to attempt telepathic communication.

That was when Ogilvy laid down his cards. Since the Pentagon believed that the object posed a possible threat to national security, it had been decided that an attempt would be made to force entry. Metal-cutting torches used by the Navy for submarine rescue work were being flown in from Groton, Connecticut, along with technicians trained in their use. At 2400 hours, they would be deployed on the sandbar, where they would attempt to penetrate the object’s hull.

Luna objected, and for once Murphy found himself in agreement, albeit for different reasons. They didn’t know what was out there, but the fact that it had deliberately dropped its cloak tended to argue that the craft’s occupants meant no harm. He needed more time to study the object; perhaps it hadn’t come from the Crab Nebula, but neither was it from Tennessee.

Ogilvy had held firm: there would be no further debate on this point. This mission was under Defense Department auspices, and his orders had come from the highest levels. The colonel ended the briefing by telling everyone that chow would soon be served at the roach wagon, and then he closed his notebook and walked away.

Sanchez collared Murphy just before he went in search of a hot and tasty MRE. Although the military was handling the investigation, the FBI had jurisdiction over civilians working on this incident; this meant OPS was now working for the Bureau. Because Murphy hadn’t yet received Top Secret security clearance, he would have to sign a document which would ensure that he wouldn’t disclose anything he had heard or seen to anyone who didn’t have similar clearance. So far as the public was concerned, the incident at Center Hill Lake never happened.

The document would soon be faxed to Sanchez. Once he received it, he would bring it to Murphy for his signature. One look at the agent’s face told Murphy that there was no question whether he would sign it. Not unless he wanted to risk losing his job, let alone being sent to prison.

So dinner had been indigestible and the company worse, and Murphy found himself alone once more. The night was cold, the wind rising now that the sun was down. He pulled up his parka’s hood and looked for a place to hide. The command tent had been taken over by Ogilvy and Sanchez, and he didn’t want to see them right now. He briefly considered taking a quick nap in one of the Army trucks, but realized that he wasn’t tired anyway. His eyes roamed to the distant sandbar, and the silver saucer captured within a circle of floodlights. All things considered, he was tired of looking at the bloody thing; just for a little whde, he wanted to get away from all this.

So he decided to take a walk.

It was surprisingly easy to leave camp. No one had placed a guard on him, after all, and he didn’t tell anyone that he was going away. A narrow paved road led uphill from the entrance to the picnic area; although a lone soldier stood watch at its gate, he didn’t object when Murphy told him that he wanted to take a short stroll and would be back soon. The sentry was there to keep people from sneaking in; since Murphy only wanted to stretch his legs, where was the harm? The sergeant informed him that there was a campground store a half-mile up the road, near the top of the hill. It was closed down, of course, but there was a Coke machine out front. Would Murphy mind bringing back a soda for him? Murphy didn’t mind: one ice-cold Dr Pepper, coming up.

The breeze seemed to let up a bit once he was away from the water, but it rattled the bare branches around him. He tasted the scent of winter pine as the night closed in around him; the lights behind him vanished entirely, and he threw back his head to check out the constellations. It would have been a rare treat, since light pollution in the DC area forbade any decent stargazing, yet the sky was still overcast. A dark night; even after his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could barely see his own hand when he held it at arm’s length. Too bad.

Before he knew it, he’d reached the top of the road, where the mellow glow of a forty-watt bulb faintly illuminated a crossroad nestled in a saddleback between two short hills. There was a small general store at the junction, one that undoubtedly offered minnows, Moon Pies, and Orange Crush during season. The windows were shuttered, its door locked, but the porch light had been left on, illuminating the battered Coca-Cola machine between an empty bait tank and a pay phone.

Someone was using the pay phone.

At first he thought it was one of the soldiers, perhaps sneaking a call home to a wife or girlfriend, but when Murphy got closer he saw that the figure wasn’t wearing military gear. Indeed, he seemed to be underdressed for the weather: a dark wool suit and nothing more, not even an overcoat. His back was turned, but even from a distance Murphy could tell that he was shivering in the cold.

Strange. Maybe he was a hitchhiker who had lost his way. Yet all the roads leading to this area had been blocked by state police; even then, the nearest highway was several miles away. Murphy studied the man at the phone as he walked toward the porch. Perhaps he was from one of the lakeside houses; Ogilvy had told them that they were summer homes, but maybe one of them was occupied year-round. Yet if that was the case, why would a permanent resident be using a pay phone to…?

“Thank you… yes, that would be most helpful.”

In the stillness of the night, Murphy heard the stranger’s voice clearly. It held an odd accent that he couldn’t quite place: British-American, yet with a faint Asian inflection.…

“Yes, operator, would you be so kind as to tell me the exact date? Yes, ma’am… today’s date. And the year, please.”

The date? The year? What, he didn’t have a calendar?

The porch steps creaked when Murphy put his weight on them. Startled by his sudden appearance, the stranger looked up sharply, all but dropping the receiver from his hand.

“Sorry,” Murphy said automatically. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

The man at the phone looked vaguely Eurasian. He stared at Murphy through wire-rim glasses, then seemed to remember what he had been doing a moment earlier. He raised the receiver again. “I’m sorry, ma’am… could you repeat that, please?”

Murphy walked over to the Coke machine, dug into his trouser pockets for change. He felt the stranger’s eyes upon him as he found a couple of quarters and fed them into the slot. He had to be a vagrant; his clothes were so old-fashioned, they had to have come from Salvation Army. Yet even the most destitute homeless men he had seen huddled on steam grates in downtown DC wore cast-off down coats or old baseball jackets. The last time Murphy had seen men’s apparel of this style was in old photos of his grandfather as a young man.

“Thank you, ma’am. You’ve been very helpful.” The stranger prodded the rim of his glasses as if adjusting them, then hung up the phone. He blew into his hands, cast a furtive glance at Murphy, then started to walk toward the steps.

“Cold night,” Murphy said.

The stranger hesitated. “Pardon me?”

“Cold night.” Murphy pushed the Dr Pepper button; there was a heavy clunk deep within the vending machine, then a can rattled down the chute. “At least twenty.”

“Twenty what?”

“Twenty degrees. The temperature.”

“Oh… well…” Drawing his coat lapels more closely around him, the man nodded in the general direction of the road behind him. “It doesn’t bother me. I don’t live far away. Just down the road. Came down to use the road… the phone, I mean.”

Was it his imagination, or did his voice sound a bit different now? Murphy bent to pick up the can of soda, and the stranger hurried past him. “I didn’t know anyone lived here year-round,” Murphy added. “I thought all these places belonged to summer people.”

“A few of us stay through the winter.” The other man took off his glasses, carefully folded them, placed them into his coat pocket. “Excuse me, but I…”

“Want to get home. Sure.” Murphy slipped the unopened soda into a pocket of his parka. “Take it easy.”

“Yes… uh, yeah.” He trotted down the porch steps. “I’ll take it easy. You take it easy, too.”

Murphy watched the stranger huddle into himself and quickly walk away, moving out of the faint glow of the porch light as he began marching up the road leading to the top of the nearest hill. Poor bastard probably lives in a trailer, he mused. Can’t afford a phone of his own, so he has to hike down here when he wants to make a call. Hope he’s got a good space-heater or something to keep him warm…

But why would anyone call an operator to find out today’s date?

Crazy people. Crazy people in Washington, crazy people in Tennessee. Crazy people still working for OPS even though they knew better. Murphy shrugged, then went down the steps. He’d better get back to camp before Ogilvy or Sanchez or someone else missed him. The sergeant minding the checkpoint was probably thirsty for his Dr Pepper.

He had only walked a short distance before he realized that he could use a soda himself. No sense in going back with only one soft drink; it was going to be a long night. Might as well grab one for the road. So he turned around and jogged back to the lonesome Coke machine.

When he searched his pockets, though, he discovered that he only had a quarter. Tough luck… then he glanced at the adjacent pay phone, and realized that the guy he just met had been talking to an operator.

Why would anyone walk all this way just to…?

Never mind. Point was, he hadn’t retrieved his change from the return slot. Probably too cold to remember that he had money coming back to him. And since the phone took twenty-five cents, there might be enough left in there for Murphy to buy himself a Sprite.

Murphy stepped over to the phone and poked an inquisitive finger into its tiny drawer. Sure enough, two dimes and a nickel. He dug them out, jingled them in his fist, then walked over to the Coke machine. He slipped his quarter into the slot and was about to slide home one of the dimes when he did a double-take.

It was a Mercury dime.

He hadn’t seen a Mercury dime since he was in grade school.

Then he opened his palm and saw another Mercury dime and a buffalo nickel.

What were the chances of this occurring by accident? So far beyond the realm of probability that Murphy instantly rejected it as an explanation. And these coins looked good as new.

Okay, so maybe the stranger was a rare coin collector. Yeah, right. A rare coin collector who couldn’t afford decent winter clothes, but drops spotless Mercury dimes and buffalo nickels into pay phones. Well, maybe he was an absent-minded collector who used rare coins to call operators on pay phones to ask them what time…

And just then, something Harry Cumisky had said last night at the Bullfinch came back to him.

Friday, January 16, 1997: 6:48 P.M.

Careful not to switch it off, Franc folded the compad and thrust it into his pocket, then clenched the jacket more tightly around himself. The wind at the top of the hill was fierce and bone-chilling; his legs shook involuntarily, and he had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. He stamped his feet against the blacktop in a vain effort to warm his frozen toes.

“Hurry up,” he whispered, glancing up at the opaque sky. “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up…”

It wasn’t only the cold that made him impatient. The chance encounter with the local had unnerved him to the point that he had almost forgotten his errand; it had taken an conscious effort to store the exact date and time in the memory of his faux spectacles. The man who had come to use the vending machine had been more than casually interested in his presence at the pay phone, and it wasn’t merely late-twentieth-century snoopiness. He might have been from one of the nearby homes, but Franc suspected otherwise.

Well, it didn’t matter much now. Metz was probably lifting off even now; once aloft, he’d find Franc by homing in on the signal from his still-active compad. He looked up again, although he knew Metz had probably reactivated the chameleon and that he wouldn’t be able to see the timeship until it was…

“Okay… who are you… anyway?”

The voice from the darkness was strained and out of breath, but familiar nonetheless. Franc whirled around, searching the road behind him.

“I said… who are you?”

The man from the store.

Franc finally made him out. Only a few meters away, struggling up the hill toward him.

“Nobody you would know, sir,” he replied. “I just live around here.”

“I… kinda doubt that.” The stranger stopped; he bent over and rested his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. He must have run all this way. “Nobody… lives around here… in winter. If they did, they’d… they’d… have their own phone.”

“I don’t.” Franc’s mind raced. The Oberon would be here any minute; he couldn’t allow his departure to be witnessed by a local. “I just use the pay phone to save money.”

“Yeah… right.” A soft jingle of loose change. “Money like this?”

Franc’s blood froze. Just the sort of anachronistic mistake the CRC trained its researchers to avoid committing; he had left 1937 currency in a 1998 pay phone.

“I think I forgot that, yes,” he said cautiously. “Thanks for bringing it back.” He held out his hand. “If you’ll let me have it, I’ll…”

“Go home… sure. That’s what you said.” The stranger didn’t come any closer. “Which gets back to… to my question. Who are you?”

“John Pannes.” The reply came automatically, as if he was again being queried by the Gestapo agent at the Frankfurt hotel.

“Okay… and where are you from, Mr. Pannes?”

“Sir, I don’t believe that’s any of your business.” Aware that the stranger’s night vision was probably as good as his own, Franc fought an impulse to glance up at the sky. “Now, if you’ll excuse me… ?”

“Don’t think… I don’t think you’re telling the truth.” The other man stood up straight, took a deep breath. “Not from around here, and don’t think you’re…”

He coughed hard, bringing up phlegm. “Not from this time,” he said finally. “Are you, Mister Pannes?”

Franc felt blood rush from his face. Whoever this person was—although it was almost certain that he was with the soldiers camped nearby—he had surmised far too much. Whatever happened, he couldn’t be allowed to witness the Oberon’a touchdown. Yet he was out of wind from running all the way up the hill, and Franc had darkness on his side. If he was quick enough…

“You could be right,” Franc carefully replied. “Of course, it’s a little difficult for me to answer, considering that I don’t know who you are…”

“Name’s Murphy… Dr. Zack Murphy.” The stranger seemed to relax a bit. “Astrophysicist. Office of Paranormal Sciences, United States Government.”

A scientist. However, despite his extensive research of the twentieth century, Franc had never heard of the Office of Paranormal Sciences. A manifestation of this new world-line? No time to wonder about that now.

“Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Murphy,” he said, taking a cautious step forward as he held out his hand. “I assume you’ve been looking for me?”

“Well, not really, but…” Murphy raised a hand, started toward him. “You still haven’t told me…”

He hesitated just then, and for an instant Franc wondered if Murphy had a glimmer of his intentions. Then he audibly gasped, and even in the darkness Franc could tell that he was staring upward at something in the sky above.

“What the hell is…?”

That was the break he needed. Ducking his head, thrusting his arms and shoulders forward, Franc rushed Murphy.

He cleared the distance in a few quick steps. Distracted, the astrophysicist was caught entirely off-guard. Two fast, hard blows to the stomach, and he doubled over. Franc heard the breath whuff painfully from his lungs, then Murphy stumbled against him; his hands clawed at Franc’s clothes, either in a feeble effort to fight back or simply to keep from falling.

Franc wasn’t about to let him do either; he slammed a fist straight into Murphy’s jaw. There was the angry sound of tearing fabric as the other man toppled backward, and he felt cold air against his chest. Then the scientist hit the asphalt and lay still.

Now the limbs of the surrounding trees were whipping back and forth as if caught in a supernatural gale. A loud hum surrounded him, then Franc was pinioned by a bright shaft of light. For an instant, he caught a glimpse of Murphy’s face—he didn’t seem much older than himself—then he turned to see a broad black oval hovering only a few meters above the ground.

Metz was in a hurry; he hadn’t lowered the landing flanges, and he hadn’t switched off the chameleon again. The light was from the open airlock hatch; Lea knelt in the hatch, extending her arm downward.

“Move it! We’ve got to get out of here!”

The wind whipped at his ripped coat; Murphy had managed to tear it when he went down. In a panic, he felt at his coat pockets; the glasses were still there. But he wasn’t done here yet…

“Hold on!” he shouted, then he stole a moment to kneel beside Murphy. Not completely unconscious, the scientist groaned softly as Franc rolled him over, but he was too groggy to offer any resistance. Franc pawed at his parka until he felt coins and heard the soft jingle of loose change. He reached into a pocket, retrieved the two dimes and one nickel that he had thoughtlessly left in the pay phone. Now the scientist had no tangible proof that he had ever encountered a chrononaut.

He started to stand up when he heard Murphy whisper something to him:

“Does… it… get any better?”

Franc knew what he meant.

“Depends what you do, my friend,” he murmured. Then he leaped up and dashed toward the waiting timeship.

7:02 P.M.

Headlights were already racing up the hill when Metz took the Oberon back into the sky. Minutes later, the timeship pierced the dense cloud layer above the Tennessee countryside. This time, there were no hostile aircraft in the sky, only the thinnest reaches of the stratosphere and, far above, the twinkling stars.

By then, Lea had taken Franc’s glasses to the library pedestal, where she downloaded the chronological figures gathered by its nanochip into the AI. She and Franc hurried into the control room, and held their breath until Metz informed them that the parameters for a successful crosstime jaunt had been established. Oberon was still wounded, but it was healing rapidly; a few orbits, and it would be capable of opening a tunnel.

“But we can’t go home.” Metz’s fingers nervously tapped the console beneath a flatscreen image of two parallel closed-time circles. “We’ll get back to our year, no question about that. But we’ll still be in a different continuum.”

“So Chronos Station won’t be there.” Lea’s voice was flat, nearly hopeless.

“Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.” The pilot shrugged. “We’ll have no idea until we get there. But we can’t stay here, and don’t even consider returning to 1937…”

“I know,” Franc said. “We can’t change what we’ve already done. Not without creating another paradox, at least.”

“Sorry, but no.” Metz shook his head. “What’s done is done. We’re stuck with the results, whatever they may be.” He looked over his shoulder. “On the other hand, we could always go back to some point before 1937. Find a place to settle down in the past. A little farm in Kansas, circa 1890? A chateau in southern France around 1700? A modest vineyard in ancient Greece… ?”

“Not tempting in the very least.” Franc smiled. “It’s a new universe, to be sure, but I don’t think it’ll be all that different.” His smile became a broad grin. “In fact, we may find it surprisingly similar.”

Metz’s face was unapologetically skeptical, but Lea stared at him “What makes you think that?”

Franc absently played with the torn lining of his coat. “Only a hunch.”

Friday, January 16, 1998: 7:09 P.M.

“And you didn’t see the guy who hit you?”

“Not clearly, no.” Seated on the front bumper of the Hummer, Murphy leaned back against the grill. “I mean, it’s pretty dark…”

“I got that, but I still don’t understand why he’d just attack you.” Illuminated by the headlights, Ogilvy crouched on the road before him. “Neither do I understand what you were doing all the way up here. The sergeant at the checkpoint said you had just gone to the store for a soda. That’s a quarter mile down the road from here.”

Murphy gently touched the asphalt scrape on his forehead. It wasn’t very sore, but the motion helped hide his face. “Only wanted to stretch my legs a bit more before heading back to camp, that’s all. I hope I didn’t get your man in any trouble.”

“He’ll live.” Ogilvy glanced over his shoulder at the two soldiers searching the roadside with flashlights. “Let’s try it again. You walk all the way up here, just to stretch your legs, and when we find you, you’re beat up and lying here in the road. You say it’s because some total stranger stepped out of the woods and asked you for some spare change, and when you told him you didn’t have any, he attacked you. Then he vanishes, just like that. Have I got everything?”

“I don’t have an explanation, either.” Murphy looked the colonel straight in the eye. “Maybe he was just… I dunno. Some crazy hitchhiker. Things happen like that.”

“Right.” The colonel slowly nodded. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me the truth?”

“That’s all there is. Honest.”

Ogilvy sighed as he stood up. “Well, whatever happened up here, it made you miss all the excitement. The yew-foh vanished. We think it lifted off.”

“Oh, shit! Really?” It was all Murphy could do to feign astonishment. “You mean it’s gone?”

“Happened about ten, fifteen minutes ago. First, it went invisible again, right under the eyes of the guys we left on the island. We heard a loud hum, then all the lights and electronic equipment went dead. Water shot up into the air where the saucer had been resting, and then… well, it was gone.”

“And you didn’t see anything?”

“Just a black shape taking off. It was gone before we could track it.” Ogilvy tucked his hands in the pockets of his parka. “That’s when we discovered you were AWOL. It’ll be sweet bringing you back. When she found out you were missing, Ms. Luna claimed she received a psychic impression that you’d been taken by her aliens.”

Murphy laughed out loud, but not for the reasons the colonel probably thought he did. For once, Meredith Cynthia Luna had come close to making the right guess. “I’m sure she’s been wrong before.”

“Yeah, well…” Ogilvy looked around again. “Go on, get in the vehicle. It’s warmer there. I’m going to give my guys a few more minutes to find your mysterious friend, then we’ll go back and start breaking down camp. I don’t imagine we’ll find anything else, do you?”

“No, I doubt it.” Wincing from the bruises on his stomach, Murphy stood up from the bumper. “We might check the island again, just to be safe, but you’re probably right.”

He let Ogilvy open the Hummer’s passenger door, and waited in the shotgun seat until the colonel walked away to see whether the soldiers had discovered anything. When he was finally alone, he pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket.

It had come from the stranger’s inside coat pocket, in that half-instant when Murphy had grabbed at him during their fight and torn it. Murphy had only the vaguest recollection of the other man whispering something as he kneeled over him; the two dimes and the nickel were missing when he regained consciousness, but this single sheet of paper was still clenched in his fist, along with a shred of dark fabric.

Murphy gently uncrumpled the paper and studied it under the dim glow of the dashboard. At the top of the page was a stylized dirigible flanked by olive branches; a scroll beneath the airship declared it to be the LZ-129 Hindenberg.

Below the picture of the airship was a list of names: a passenger manifest. Halfway down the list, two names caught his eye: Mr. and Mrs. John and Emma Pannes, of Manhasset, Long Island.

Murphy looked up, saw the colonel walking back to the vehicle, followed by the two soldiers. He had just tucked the paper into an inner pocket when Ogilvy opened the right rear passenger door.

“We’re not going to find anything,” Ogilvy muttered as he settled into the back seat. “No need to rush, though. We’ve got until morning before we have to be out of here.”

“Yeah. No need to hurry.” Murphy turned his head to gaze out the window. The clouds were beginning to dissipate; for the first time tonight, he could make out a few stars. “ ‘Fools rush in…’ ”

One of the Rangers opened the driver’s door to climb behind the wheel. “Pardon me, sir?” the soldier asked. “Did you say something?”

“Hmm? Oh, nothing.” Murphy smiled at his half-reflection in the window. “Just thinking.”

Content

“…Where Angels Fear to Tread”
by Allen Steele