STEALING TIME

by

Christopher Stasheff

Copyright 2010

 

CHAPTER 8½

 

Angus saw the little gray pillbox, and swallowed.  "Who was sitting there?"

            "It's right between Abby and Elspeth—but Eli sat there when they came back from exploring the cavern."  Yorick slipped his fingernails under the edge of the pillbox and pried it loose.

            "That doesn't look like any substance I know."  Angus took the flat cylinder and turned it over in his hands, running a thumb along the edges.  "Plastic of some kind—better than any we have right now."

            "So it came from the future," Yorick said, "which means one of them is an agent for SPITE or VETO."

            "Doesn't matter which."  Angus set the cylinder down on the counter and pulled a little yellow-handled screwdriver from his pocket.

            "Careful," Yorick said.  "It might be booby-trapped."

            Angus froze, then dropped the cylinder into one of his lab-coat pockets and turned to the time-machine console.  He punched in new settings, took up the remote button, and stepped up into the booth.  "You can come along if you want to."

            "Where to?" Yorick asked as he stepped up beside Angus.

            "My lab at ICBM."  Angus pressed the button.

            When their stomachs had settled, Yorick looked around at a large white-walled room with black-topped benches along each side.  One was empty, but with an excellent collection of tools on the wall above it.  Two of the others had elaborate electronic setups.  Several bulky cabinets loomed from the floor.

            Angus went to one of them, put the flat cylinder inside, then stepped back to a panel, turned on the video monitor on top of it, and hit a power button.  He adjusted a dial.  The screen glowed to life, showing a dim shadow of the flat cylinder.  Angus scowled at the brighter images of the wires and cylinders inside, then nodded, satisfied.  "No bomb."  He shut off the machine, took out the flat cylinder, and went over to the workbench.

            The door opened, and a security guard stepped in with his gun drawn.  "Who's there?  ...Oh, it's you, Dr. McAran."

            "Angus," the inventor said absently.  "This is my friend Yorick.  Yorick, this is Joe Smith."

            "Pleased t'meetcha."  Yorick started to hold out a hand, then remembered the gun and paused.

            Smith holstered the weapon with a grin and shook Yorick's hand.  "Sorry.  Rules, y'know."  He turned to Angus.  "Didn't hear you come in."

            "I'm always here," Angus said.

            "Yeah, I know you keep a cot in the back."  Smith shook his head.  "You ought to take some time for yourself, Doc.  Well, good night."

            He closed the door, and Yorick said, "So that's why you don't worry about the futurians finding out where this lab is."

            "Anybody who wanted to check my resume would know," Angus said.  "Never occurred to me to keep it secret."  He looked up.  "I assume you folks up the line have made sure I don't have to worry about time travelers appearing out of nowhere."

            "Oh, yeah."  Yorick's smile turned predatory.  "If they showed up, they'd have twice as many GRIPE agents on them in an instant."

            Angus shuddered at the thought of what such a minor battle would do to his breadboard setups.  "Glad you cancel each other out."

            "Right."  Yorick nodded.  "No point in attacking.”  He lifted his head, understanding.  "That's why you're in no rush to get rid of that thing."

            "Oh, I am curious."  Angus pried the flat cylinder open and inspected its insides.  "Marvelous, what they're going to be doing in the future!  That disk with the silver trails must be the wiring—but the things it's connecting sure aren't vacuum tubes."

            Yorick bit his tongue; it had almost said, "integrated circuits."

            "Well, we'll have to judge it by what it does."  Angus took the flat cylinder over to one of the breadboards, which he switched on.  A meter jumped, and he whistled.

            "What's it doing?" Yorick asked.

            "Emitting a wave," Angus said.  "Stays exactly on the same frequency, exactly the same amplitude."

            Yorick frowned.  "What good does that do?"

            "It's a four-dimensional wave."  Angus pointed at a second meter.  "I can tell by the resonance.  You ever wonder how my remote works, to call us back to HQ?"

            "No," Yorick said truthfully.  An older Doc Angus had explained it to him when he was eighteen.

            "It sends out a wave that can travel in time," Angus explained.

            "And if it can travel in time, that makes it instantaneous?"

            "For all intents and purposes—you just send it to the moment you want.  So if anybody wanted to find the time lab, all they'd have to do would be to track down the signal this little beauty is making."  Angus pried out an even smaller cylinder.  "This must be the battery... yep, that turned it off."

            "So why didn't an assault force appear the moment Eli, Abby, and Elspeth showed up?"

            "Because this beacon isn't directional, and it would take them a while to figure out where the signal was coming from."  Angus shivered.  "On the other hand, we might have gotten out of there just in time."

            "You know," Yorick said slowly, "they did take an awful lot of convincing."

            "Not Abby."  Angus smiled.  "She's quick, that one—realized there was no way home in an instant."

            "But Eli needed proof.  No, wait a minute.” Yorick pursed his lips.  "Did he need proof, or time for his friends to be able to track down the beacon?"

            "Hard to say," Angus said, "but they're welcome to come into this lab any time they want.  Won't find anything having to do with time travel."

            Except you, Yorick thought, but they'd already been through the futurians' attempts to assassinate Angus when he’d thought he was alone.  Future GRIPE agents had made those attempts pointless, and Yorick was sure they wouldn't happen again.

            "Let's go home."  Angus scooped up the beacon, pulled out the recall button, and pressed it.  The room seemed to swing around them for a moment; then they were inside the big white booth under the temporal coil.

            "You kept the battery out of that thing, didn't you?" Yorick asked nervously.

            "I did indeed."  Angus put the battery back in and closed up the beacon.  He set it on the floor of the booth.

            "What're you doing?" Yorick yelped.  "They're gonna know right where to find us!"

            "No they won't.  Besides, they know already."  Angus stepped down, went to the console, changed the settings, and hit the "go" button.  The beacon disappeared.

            Yorick stared at the empty floor.  "Where did you send it?"

            "An isolated corner of the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on an early morning in 1945," Angus answered.  "If they want to try to pick it up during the first atomic bomb explosion, they're welcome to try."

            Yorick grinned slowly.  "You have a certain sadistic streak in you, y' know that?"

            "Just a sense of poetic justice."

            "Remind me not to read your poetry."

            "Remind me not to write any."  Angus took a notebook out of one pocket and a pencil out of another.  "We need to send a note down the line and tell them one of those three is a futurian agent.  Which is your pick?"

            Yorick gazed off into the darkness, then said slowly, “Elspeth.  She wasn’t curious about how they’d gotten there or were going to get out—she just wanted to know where.”

            “Good point.”  Angus started to write, then paused.  “What if we’re wrong?”

            Yorick shrugged.  "Why not all three?"

            "Good question."  Angus nodded.  "If they were going to plant one back in the pioneer days, why not a trio?  Okay, I'll just tell our descendants what happened."  He glanced up at Yorick.  “Our metaphorical descendants—I know I won’t have any of the real thing.”  He started to write again, then stilled and gazed off into space, his eyes narrowing.

            Yorick braced himself; he knew that look, knew the anger behind it.

            "Why don't we just wipe them all out?" Angus said softly.  "SPITE and VETO, both of them.  That's what they're trying to do to us, isn't it?  Why shouldn't we do it to them?  Find their headquarters and lob in a bomb?"

            "Because it wouldn’t work."  Yorick spread his hands.  "Sure, a bomb would knock out their headquarters for a few months, maybe even a few years—but time is irrelevant in a temporal war,” Yorick explained, couching his argument in solid logic.  “VETO could operate just as easily from that base before your bomb arrived, or after they finish rebuilding.  Then they'd go right back to assassinating key historical figures and hunting us on the side."

            "Not if that bomb got all of them."

            "It couldn't," Yorick said.  "At any one moment, at least a third of our time travelers are out on a mission, and I expect theirs do the same.  They come home and find their HQ gone, they'll just track down the drawings for their version of your time-coil and build a new machine.  Bingo!  Back in business."

            "Where are those dratted drawings, anyway?"

            "Nobody knows—at least, not on our side.    But we think they're in their HQ.  As far as we can tell, all they needed was to realize you'd invented time travel.  Then they hired some physicists to look up your other patents and figure out how you'd pulled it off."

            Angus sat very still, staring at the blank page.  Then he said, "I could do it.  If I knew somebody else had invented time travel, I could figure it out."  He looked up at Yorick, and his eyes were haunted.  "I'm not that much smarter than anybody else, you know."

            Yorick swallowed a comment and bit his tongue.  Instead, he admitted, "You're not the only genius who ever lived."

            "Scarcely a genius at all—especially when it comes to people." 

            Yorick nodded.  "Easier to kill 'em off than to outsmart 'em, huh?"

            "Yeah," Angus said sourly, "except that it looks as though I can't do either."

            "Oh, you're pretty good at outsmarting the opposition," Yorick said.  "If you weren't, GRIPE would die with you, but I happen to know it'll go on long after you."

            "How long?"

            "As long as I know anything about, Ang—and that's a very long time."

            Angus gazed at him, brooding.  Then he nodded.  "I don't suppose a man can ask for more than that—to have his work live after him."

            "Maybe to make a change in the world," Yorick said, "one that lasts—and yours will."

            "What kind of change?"

            "Who knows?"  Yorick shrugged.  "We only know what history is, Angus, not what it would have been without you.  Besides, trying to kill off the competition is pointless.  For every agent we assassinate, they'll recruit two more.  Better for you to recruit four more than try to kill those two."

            "What?" Angus barked, outraged.  "You mean we can't even protect ourselves?"

            "Oh, yes, we can do that," Yorick said softly.  "Any time we run into enemy agents, we'll defend ourselves as well as we can."

            "Do you succeed?" Angus demanded.

            Yorick shrugged.  "Y' win some, y' lose some—but we keep the idea of democracy alive.”

            Angus gazed at him for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod.  "Yes.  I guess that's what it's all about, isn't it?"

            "Other than trying to make GRIPE as rich as possible so it can counter the bad guys where it finds them?"  Yorick nodded.

            "All right, let's get busy getting rich!' Angus snapped.  Then his head whipped about, staring at the floor of the time booth.  "What was that?"

            "I saw it, too."  Yorick stepped over.  "Only a flicker of movement, but...  Oh!  It’s a letter."

            Angus frowned.  "Kind of expensive way to send a message, isn't it?"

            "Believe me, Ang, you don't know what the express services are going to charge."  Yorick handed him the sheet of paper.  “You won’t like this.”

 

*           *           *

 

            “A little to the east, Hiram!” George called.

            Sixty-six feet away from him, Hiram moved two feet to his right, keeping the chain taut.

            George was only sixteen, but the science of surveying still fascinated him.  One day, when he led a troop of infantry, he would be able to study maps of the terrain and gain an advantage over his enemy.  Now, though, he chafed at the delay.  Peace prevailed, and young men were not encouraged to be soldiers.  He schooled himself to patience—there would be another war.  There always was.

            A distant explosion made him look up.  The bullet took him straight in the heart.  He clasped his chest and fell.

            In the outcropping of woods on the hillside above, Elspeth nodded with satisfaction.  She stroked her rifle with affection; her boss at SPITE had certainly given her the right tool for the job this time.  “I should shoot the helper too, then go make sure the kid is dead.”

            “Don’t bother.”  Eli held the field glasses to his eyes.  “He’s dead.  There’s blood spurting through his shirt, right over his heart.”

            “Can’t hurt to make sure.”

            “Yes it can,” Eli said.  “One bullet is enough to disrupt the time stream.  As it is, they can still blame it on the Indians.”

            “Guess so.”  Elspeth stood up, slinging the sniper’s rifle over her shoulder.

“Besides,” Eli said, “Hiram had children.  There’s no telling what his descendants did.  We’d better get back.  Abby will be wondering what happened to us.”

            Elspeth nodded, reluctant to miss another chance to kill.  The two disappeared.

 

            Up the slope from where they’d been, two GRIPE agents watched them.  “There goes the Father of the Republic,” Hugh said. 

            Minerva nodded.  “And the United States of America, not to mention the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.”

            “Let’s do something about it.”  Hugh pressed the recall button.

            They stumbled as their feet dropped two inches into the booth of the time machine and gulped against nausea. 

“Find the crux point?” Doc Angus asked.

            Hugh nodded.  “Take us back an hour earlier, Doc.  We’ll set up a little surprise for them.”

            They went back with a deer blind, set it up high in a hickory, and trained hi-tech sniper rifles on the clearing downhill.  Waiting.  When Eli and Elspeth appeared, each squeezed off a shot.  The two enemy time agents fell.

            ‘Move quickly,” Minerva said.  “Their bosses will be sending agents back to see why Washington is still alive.”

            Sure enough, two men appeared to examine the bodies, then rolled them together onto a wide stretcher and faded away.

            Hugh leveled his rifle, but Minerva stayed his hand.  “Let be.  There’ll be more of them to shoot us – and more of us to shoot them.”

            Hugh ughnodded.  “Not much point in shooting Washington in the first place, was there?”

            “That’s the idea—but the bad guys refuse to admit it, refuse to stop trying.”

            Hugh nodded.  “Would it do any good if I volunteered to be one of Washington’s bodyguards?’

            “Probably,” Minerva said.  “Dangerous, though.”

            Hugh shrugged.  “The ideals of the Republic are worth it.”

            “You can volunteer,” Minerva said, “but let’s finish this job first.”

            Hugh nodded.

Halfway down the slope, two other agents materialized, raising laser-sighted rifles.

            Minerva and Hugh squeezed off shots.  The enemy agents fell, fading from sight.

            “I don’t feel as though they’re real people anymore,” Hugh said, troubled.  “More like targets in a shooting gallery.” 

Minerva gave him a worried look.  “Not a good sign—you’ve been in the field too long.  Time for a vacation.  Ask Doc Angus to send you back to some tropical island about 1000 AD, where you can go surfing with some friendly locals.”

They waited an hour and, when no other bushwhackers showed up, agreed that the futurians had finally gotten the idea.  “We’d better go back,” Hugh said.

Minerva nodded, took out the recall button, and pressed it.  The two faded from sight.

 

In the time lab, Yorick craned his neck, trying to see the writing. "What's it say?"   

Angus scanned the note.  "They sent the three of them back to the 1740s to shadow the young George Washington and protect him while he was making his living as a surveyor.  Easy enough to kill him out in the fields where he was working, with not a soul around—except the kid holding the other end of the chain, and even he was sixty-six feet away.  Of course, the assassin would have to kill them both."

                        "A murderer wouldn't have minded," Yorick said drily, “but they wouldn’t take the chance.  The assistant might have had children.” 

"What about the sheriff, or whoever found the body?"

            "Easy enough to blame it on Indians," Yorick said with disgust.  "Of course, they probably sent along a couple of seasoned agents to watch like hawks, and they caught Elspeth and Eli as they were taking aim.”

            “What’d they do with her?”

“Just shoved her back in the time booth.  No way she’d be any use to VETO, now that we know what she looks like.”

“There’s always plastic surgery,” Yorick offered.

“Probably make her look like a glamour girl while they’re at it,” Angus said.  “Remind me to beware of girls who look too good to be real.”

“Angus, beware of…”

“Okay, I got the message.”  Angus took the pencil and started writing one of his own.  Then his eyes widened.  “I recognized Elspeth’s voice!  I just now remembered another woman with the same timbre and accent!”

“Anybody I know?” 

“Yeah—the woman in London who ambushed Ada.”

“Okay, so now we know two of her faces.”  Yorick smiled.  “Think she’ll try for a third plastic surgery?”

“Maybe—or they could just find a really good make-up artist, and have Elspeth be one of the street vendors on the Embankment.  After all, they can try and try again until they get it just right, can’t they?”

            “Hold on a minute.”  Yorick frowned.  "If the futurians can take all the time they want to pinpoint a location and instant, they could have taken a year to figure out where that beacon's signal was coming from, then sent a strike force back to the instant the Talleys stepped out of the time machine.  Why do you think they didn't?"

            "Nice to be so certain," Angus said sourly and limped over to the console.  "Now I get to go back to last night and hide some shielding circuits inside those table legs."

            Yorick lifted his head as understanding flowed over him.  "So that's why they didn't have a small army hit us while Eli was exploring!"

            Angus gave him a thin smile.  “Right.  “They thought they’d be able to take all the time they wanted.”

            "But they couldn’t, because you'd already cancelled their beacon with your shielding."  Yorick shook his head.  "Y' know, time wars don't really work, do they?"

            "No," Angus said, "so why do SPITE and VETO still try?"

            "Human nature?" Yorick guessed.

Angus made a sound of disgust.  "Machines I can diagnose.  Gunfighter movies, maybe.  But human perversity?  No.  Maybe you’re right—maybe it comes from being raised believing in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.” 

Yorick shrugged.  "When it comes to psyching out the opposition, we can only guess.  How’s this?  For every agent we neutralize, they can send in ten more.   It's the ones we don't know about who maybe did the damage.”

            "Maybe?"

            "Who knows?  Did the first Pharaoh have a VETO agent helping him set up his despotism?  Did a SPITE agent walk into the Vandals' camp and say, 'Y' know, Rome's gotten so weak that you guys could conquer it?'  There're too many pivotal points in history, Angus, where the world could have gone to hell in a handbasket.  We can only try to keep history the way we know it is now, so it doesn’t get worse."

"Do you succeed?"

Yorick shrugged.  "Y' win some, y’ lose some."

“I was afraid of that.”  Angus went over to the console again.  “Let’s start shortening the odds, shall we?”

 

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