Interlude
Leo Dingley looked up at the white-painted walls of the underground lab. He rubbed his eyes as he tried to ignore the headache that was more from the complexity of the data on the screen than the lights. They were banks of LEDs anyway, not fluorescents. There was a quiet hum from the AC unit and Leo needed a break. He got up, went and got a bottle of water from the mini fridge, then went to look over Margo’s shoulder.
“What’s got you so engrossed, Margo?” asked Leo. He leaned over her shoulder, gazing at the complex geometry being displayed on the monitor screen she was sitting before. There was no computer in sight, just the monitor. The computer it was connected to was two levels below them in the huge laboratory that had once been a deep mine and was far larger than any PC.
What was showing on the monitor was a fractal pattern of great complexity, ninety-nine percent and more of which was unmoving. It hadn’t always been unmoving. A few days after the event, a lot of it, maybe as much as ten percent, had been moving. And in the moments just after it, a fair percent had been moving and then seemed to disappear. But by two weeks after the event, that ninety-nine percent had stabilized and had remained unmoving since. Most of it was right where it had been from the beginning, but a big chunk was still some distance away.
“These . . . doohickeys, I call them, for lack of a better term.” Her forefinger indicated six luminous squiggles whose shapes were constantly in flux. “I can’t for the life of me figure out what they are. The other stuff has mostly stopped moving.”
Leo scanned the rest of the screen. “You’re looking at a representation of the time track made by the truck, right?”
She nodded. “Yes. The truck, the other truck, the store, or at least the part of it that got sent into the past. That part’s clear enough.”
He squinted. “You call that ‘clear enough’? To me it looks like a bowl of spaghetti, except everything has an angular shape.”
She chuckled. “Better you stick to your own field of expertise. Yes, believe it or not, this is pretty clear. Pretty damn clear, in fact. By now, after all the time we’ve spent crunching the numbers—”
A voice came from behind them. “For which—ahem, I despise false modesty—I had to develop the math. Took a while.”
Margo waited until the interruption was over. “Hello, Malcolm. Nice to see you again. As I was saying, we can now pinpoint the time and place of arrival of the truck to within three kilometers and within nine months—well, closer to eight and a half months. Trying to narrow the time any further would take far more effort than it’s worth, if we could do it at all.”
Leo straightened. “You can locate the space and time of transit that closely? I had no idea you’d made so much progress. The accuracy with which we were able to track the course of Alexander Correctional Institution’s strane wasn’t nearly that precise.”
The term “strane” was an acronym that had developed over the years since the scientific project had been launched following the disappearance of the West Virginia town of Grantville more than three decades earlier. It stood for Spacetime Transportation Event. Bolides caused stranes sometimes, but, from the readings, not always.
Margo shrugged. “The instruments we had then were a lot more primitive—”
“Please!” complained Leo. “I prefer ‘less refined,’ if you don’t mind.”
Margo’s lip curled. “That’s like calling an outhouse ‘less refined’ than a fancy ladies room at an upscale hotel in New York. But, as I was saying, we didn’t have instrumentation as sophisticated as what we have now. And what’s more important is that the instrument package wasn’t directly attached to the object that underwent the strane.”
Again, she pointed at the screen. “The data that enables us to create this image is coming to us directly from the truck that took the monitor unit for the thousand-year-long ride they both went on.”
“Don’t let her kid you,” Leo said. “A lot of our data is based on carbon dating of the stuff we found after the strane passed. That gave us a range, and I could then use math and nuclear signature to refine the data.”
“And that’s coming in real time?” Richard asked. “I mean, one-to-one correspondent time?”
Now they were venturing into Leo’s field of expertise. “Yes,” he said firmly. “However mutable space-time may be and however many timelines may exist, one thing we’re sure of by now is that a unit of time in every one of the multiple universes is identical. A second in Universe One is exactly the same as a second in Universe Umpty-Quadrillion.”
He now pointed at the screen. “Everything you’re seeing there is happening in real time, just as we experience it.” His lips quirked into a sardonic smile. “Insofar as you can interpret what you’re seeing, anyway. Good luck with that. If you can figure out how half a dozen luminous shape-shifting blobs fit into what looks—to me, anyway—like a fractal nightmare, have at it.”
Malcolm O’Connell pursed his lips. “I wonder . . . ”
He looked around and pointed at a monitor on a nearby desk. “Is that hooked up to Freddie?”
Leo got a pained look on his face. “I really wish people would stop referring to a computer that cost sixty million dollars as ‘Freddie.’”
Margo ignored him. “Yes, it’s functional.”
Malcolm headed toward it. “I may—just possibly—have an answer to Leo’s question. If I’m right, it won’t take long.”
* * *
A few minutes later, Malcolm straightened up from working at the computer. “Come over here, you two. I have something very interesting to show you.”
Margo got up from her chair. She and Leo went over to Malcolm’s computer.
“The first thing I established,” said O’Connell, “was that while the shapes of the six objects—blobs, to use Leo’s term—do change constantly, their luminosity stays exactly the same. Never varies in the slightest. So let me show you how they rank in those terms. I’m rounding off slightly just to keep the display easy to follow, but even if you use precise figures there isn’t enough difference to worry about. I’m indicating each blob by a letter.”
The following list appeared on the screen:
A. 100
B. 50
C. 40
D. 30
E. 15
F. 13
“Okay,” he said. “Translating those figures into units of mass, using exactly the same ratios, here’s what you get. I’m expressing this in kilograms.”
A. 134
B. 67
C. 54
D. 43
E. 23
F. 21
“And now . . . ” A note of triumph came into his voice. “Look at this.”
A. 134 134 Michael Anderle
B. 67 67 Melanie Anderle
C. 54 54 Alyssa Jefferson
D. 43 40 Shane Anderle
E. 23 20 Miriam Jefferson
F. 21 17 Norman Jefferson
“The figures in the second column are the last recorded weights of these six people before they were swept up in the strane.”
They had gotten everything they could about all the people who’d been caught in the strane. Even the old guy who’d been cut in half. That had included government records and an investigator asking questions.
“The figures for the three adults match perfectly. The figures for the three children vary slightly. The luminosities shown on Margo’s screen are larger than what was on record, but that’s exactly what you’d expect. They’re children. They get bigger over time—and the increase is in line with the amount of time that’s passed between the last record while they were still in our timeline and what’s showing now.”
Margo’s eyes were wide. “But . . . could we just be looking at a coincidence?”
Leo’s head had started shaking even before she finished the sentence.
“No. Not a chance. That’s . . . ”
He looked down at O’Connell. “You’re the mathematician among us, Malcolm. What are the odds that six completely unrelated objects would show this close a matchup under these circumstances?”
“I’d have to have Freddie crunch the numbers to give you anything close to precise statistics. But as a mathematician, all I have to do is look at these numbers to tell you that the odds we’re looking at a correspondence, not a coincidence, are astronomically huge.”
Leo nodded. “That’s what I thought. And the only way I can interpret the fact that these luminous objects are moving constantly on the screen—which they do, Margo, yes?”
“Yes. They move more or less but they never stop moving entirely.”
“Then those six people still have to be alive. And since they are all in about the same place relative to the point the strane arrived, Alyssa Jefferson and her two kids must have hooked up with the Anderles after all six of them survived the strane.”
“You realize what that means, if it’s true,” said Margo.
Malcolm nodded. “It means that—probably, we can’t be sure—at least most of the people who’ve been caught up in all the stranes we know about have to be alive as well.” In a whisper, he added: “Jesus, Joseph and Mary. Whatever else they were, at least the stranes weren’t a slaughter.”
Leo waggled his hand back and forth. “Well . . . probably. But we can’t be sure without”—he nodded at the screen—“this kind of evidence. What if Grantville, the cruise ship, or Alexander Correctional got dropped in the ocean? Or somewhere off the planet entirely? On Venus—or on the sun itself? Or just somewhere in empty space?”
“You’re such a bundle of joy, Leo,” groused Margo.
“Just saying.”
“Except we know that a chunk of seventeenth-century Germany arrived in West Virginia in 2000. That a chunk of the Cretaceous landed in Alexander Correctional’s location and a bit of Formosa Island landed in the Caribbean when the Queen of the Sea disappeared. So it’s unlikely that they landed in space or the middle of Venus. There seems to be something tying them to the surface of the planet.”
“Maybe.” Leo shrugged. “Or maybe the baddies have some way of controlling the bolides.”
Malcolm shook his head. “Whatever the reason, nature or intent, I think Margo has the right of it. And the reason I think so is because”—he pointed at the screen—“here we have people moving around. And they are right about the time that the chunk of prairie they were replaced by comes from. That means that it’s a swap when a strane happens. At least, all of them we’ve recorded have been. Statistically, given the immensity of the universe compared to those portions of the Earth which are habitable, the fact that all of the displacements have gone to places where people could survive almost has to be intentional.”
Leo scratched his jaw. “Point. So now what do we do?”
“Well, whatever else, we’ve got to tell Alyssa Jefferson’s husband,” said Margo. “And the Anderles’ families.”
Malcolm frowned. “Are you sure about that, Margo? I mean, Alyssa’s husband—I don’t recall his name—”
“Jerry,” Margo provided.
“Yes, Jerry. The poor guy has spent months going through the grieving process. Do we really want to reopen that wound? I mean, it’s not as if anyone can do anything about the situation.”
“At least he’d know that his wife and two kids were still alive,” said Leo.
Malcolm shrugged. “Not for him, they wouldn’t be. Separated by a thousand years in time. How is that any different from his point of view from them having died?”
Leo and Margo exchanged a glance. Sometimes, the fact that Malcolm O’Connell had been a lifelong bachelor showed.
“I’ve got a wife and two children myself, Malcolm,” Leo said softly. “Trust me. There’s a hell of a difference. Even if I couldn’t ever see Rachel and Steve and Horace again, just knowing they were still alive would be far better than thinking they were dead. A lot.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Margo. “We don’t have any right to keep this information from Jerry Jefferson. We’re not tin-pot gods and goddesses. We’re telling him. As soon as possible. End of discussion.”
* * *
After they finished explaining the significance of their data to Jerry Jefferson, he swiveled his chair and just stared at a wall for more than a minute. Then he wiped his face and swiveled the chair back.
“Have you shown this new evidence to the Joint Committee on Catastrophes?” he asked.
“We’ve sent it to them, yes,” said Margo. “And we got the usual ‘we will take it under advisement’ verbiage.
“We’re making progress, though. At least they’ve stopped trying to pass off the stranes as ‘acts of terrorism.’”
Jefferson grunted. The sound had a sarcastic undertone. “Acts of terrorism by unknown terrorists for unknown reasons. The reason they’ve dropped that after all these years since Grantville is because nobody in the nation outside of drooling idiots thinks it’s anything but drooling idiocy.”
He rose from the chair. “But I think what you’ve got now is enough to blow the lid off and finally get the U.S. government to take it seriously. That’s because now you can put faces on it. Three faces—Alyssa’s, Miriam’s and Norman’s. No, four—you’ll have mine too.” He waved his hand. “And that of the Anderles’ families. But the punch in the government’s gut will come from my wife and kids—and me. Now you’ve got a man who knows his wife and children are still alive. Stranded like no one in history has ever been stranded, but alive—and he wants to get them back or go join them, whichever is possible.”
Leo winced. “Probably neither, Mr. Jefferson.”
Jerry gave him a level gaze. “Do you know that?”
“Well . . . no, we don’t. But—”
“Screw the ‘but.’ Why aren’t we trying to find out, if we don’t know?”
“Well . . . ”
“Be expensive as all hell, for starters,” said Malcolm. “I mean, like the Apollo program that put men on the moon.”
“And how much was that?”
“In today’s dollars? Somewhere around two hundred and fifty billion dollars,” said Margo.
“That’s all?” demanded Jerry. “We spend three times that much on the military every year. The Apollo program’s cost was spread over an entire decade. Which is about how long what I’m proposing would take, right?”
Leo ran fingers through his hair—at least, where there was any left. “Longer than that, Jerry, would be my guess. The Apollo program was mostly just engineering. We’d need a lot of pure scientific research before there’d be anything for engineers to do. You want my guesstimate? Fifteen to twenty years—and at the end of that time, the answer might very well be ‘no, we can’t do it.’”
Jerry nodded. “Makes sense. It also makes the cost less of a sticker shock. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would think funding research wouldn’t be as expensive as funding whatever it takes to do a time-travel expedition.”
“Probably not, no.” Malcolm smiled wryly. “Unless the research turned up a way to just duplicate H. G. Wells’ time machine. Which I seriously doubt.”
“Okay. I’ll quit my job and we can start with you hiring me. I don’t need much.” Jerry’s tone of voice became bleak. “Seeing as how I no longer have a family to support.”
“But . . . hire you to do what?” Margo asked.
Jerry shook his head. “You really are babes in the woods. Or have just spent too many years in the ivory tower. I’m a manufacturing sales rep, Margo, which is just a fancy title for salesman. I’m good at it—and what you need most of all, to kickstart everything, is a good salesman.”
His expression was determined; you could even call it grim. “Put me in front of the Special Committee and see if they can still get away with platitudes. A father who knows his wife and children are still alive and knows where and when they are and wants to go rescue them. Or at the very least, share their fate. That’ll stir things up. You watch and see.”