Chapter 7

Down-time at the cave.

Mack awoke at dawn with his arm throbbing each time he moved it. After drinking the last of his water, he stirred the fire back to life. His face felt flushed, and he had the grandfather of headaches. Goosebumps sprang up as a morning breeze entered the cave. Feverish, he thought. To try to ease the stabbing pains that shot through the wound, he used a rawhide strip to make a sling for his arm. As he stood and reached for his water bucket, the world seemed to spin around him. He slumped to his knees as he waited for the dizziness to pass. When the worst of it was over, he forced himself upright and walked slowly down to the stream, his bucket tucked under his good arm. Craving water, he drank his fill, only to have his stomach heave the water back up a few moments later. Discouraged, he sat on the bank, weak and dizzy, until the nausea passed, then washed his face in the cool water, allowing himself only a small amount to drink. After a while, he lay back on the bank in the sun, taking occasional sips of the cool water or dunking his face in it.

What are you going to do now? Your shoulder is infected, and it looks as if it’s steadily getting worse. If only I had some penicillin, I would probably be okay. He thought that Fleming had made it from a fungus mold. Mack seemed to remember from biology class that the fungus would grow on several different things, none of which he had. Would it grow on meat? He couldn’t remember. It’s a moot point anyway, he reflected. I would probably be dead long before I could grow something — even if I knew how. I need an antibiotic, and I need it now.

After one last look around, he made his way back to the cave but spilled almost a third of the bucket’s contents because of his arm.

I need to eat to give my body energy so it can replace the blood I’ve lost. Maybe the infection isn’t as bad as I think. Maybe it’s only the blood loss that’s making me so sick and weak.

Fat chance, boy. You better do something while you still can.

He cooked some meat on his spit, and after forcing it down, he rested for a while before cutting a piece of hide and boiling it until he was sure it was as sterile as he could get it. After it had cooled somewhat, he applied it to his shoulder. The rest of the day, he kept a low fire burning around his pot, applying hot compresses until well into the night. Some of the swelling seemed to be going out of the arm. Maybe his body could fight off the infection after all.

Temporal.

Thad couldn’t seem to get his mind off it. They actually went through with it. Those idiots burned me at the stake. They must have dragged me up on that pile of wood, tied me to that pole, and burned me to death.

Thad wanted to take a weapon, go back, and burn the whole village to a cinder. He couldn’t do it, of course. It would cause too much disruption in the timeline. He wouldn’t really do it, if he could, and changing one’s own timeline would be a surefire way to never come back, but thinking about burning the place to the ground helped dissipate some of his pent-up anger.

Did I scream? Beg? How long did it take for me to burn to death? Too long.

Thad had avoided everyone he could after leaving Kathy. Word was obviously getting around, though. Most people just spoke quietly to him, and he was able to continue on without conversation, but twice he was asked if he were all right with that special inflection that echoed their concern. He decided there were a lot of good people at Temporal.

He needed to be alone, but his quarters would feel too much like a cage just now. The artificial sunlight in the area between the buildings — actually one large “U” shaped multistoried building — looked inviting. He stepped onto the courtyard and walked partway across the manicured lawn with its fountains and shaded tables with scattered seating of various types. The area was bordered on three sides by the building, but the fourth side was bounded by the swirling time fields.

He chose a chaise lounge near the edge of the grass, seemingly within touching distance of the time fields, had it not been for the force field that kept mere mortals away from disaster. It had been too long since he had relaxed in the sun, and he spent the next hour dozing and catching up. The swirling mist of the time fields didn’t require anything from him. He could stare with no questions asked, allowing his mind to wander where it willed.

He had been killed and brought back. At least, that view seemed the easiest way to reconcile the incident in his mind. Saying it had never been was pure bunk. It had happened. But he was alive and back at Temporal.

A hundred meters behind him, the light sparkled off numerous windows. Had someone been designated to watch over him — to see if he had cracked? Was that someone standing behind one of those windows watching him? More than likely, especially after the way he had left Kathy. She would have reported his abrupt departure to Kessler; someone would be checking on Thad — they couldn’t have an Op losing it. He looked toward the building again and waved just to bug the watcher if there were one. Put the psych unit away, people. I don’t need it. His mind had just about given up on the blackened corpse bit, anyway.

Thad’s mind shifted to Williams. He wondered why they hadn’t tried the same trick with the Op who had dropped out in vacuum. It might be tricky to send him back while not knowing when the vacuum actually started, though. They might drop him back into vacuum again. At least he was alive when they brought him back. Thad felt guilty for not visiting Williams before now. He had been so concerned with his own problems that he had scarcely thought about the other Op. Time to go cheer him up — past time. He thought about bringing Williams a sex vid to watch, but with him unable to see, a vid would be useless. The tiny hospital occupied a section of the larger building and had an entrance to the grounds only a short distance from where Thad sat.

After entering the hospital, Thad tapped his fingers on the counter until the tech on duty grudgingly tore his eyes from his screen long enough to wave at a door about halfway down the hall. He didn’t even have to ask who Thad was there to see. The little hospital seldom had more than one or two patients at a time. As Thad passed, he caught a glimpse of the tech’s screen where some voluptuous beauty was driving pitons into a solid rock face as she climbed. She didn’t look like any rock climber he had ever seen. Smirking, he walked a few paces down the hallway and asked for admittance to Williams’ room.

Thad half-expected the AI to refuse to let him in, but the door opened, allowing him entrance without incident — not that it made a lot of difference. All Thad could see of Williams was his arms and legs — everything else was encased in the medbooth. Unsure of what to say, Thad faced the general direction of Williams’ head and inanely asked how he was feeling. The injured Op didn’t even grunt. The AI, however, cheerfully announced that Williams was progressing normally (whatever that meant) and suggested that Thad return in a couple of days when Williams should be able to hear to some extent. A question about Williams’ eyes brought the same result. Thad gave up.

The tech didn’t bother looking up when Thad passed him on the way out.

Frustrated as he stepped back into the building, he called Kathy on his personal comm. She was back at her desk again, and he asked her to send him all the information she had on the anomaly. When he entered his apartment, there was a note on his screen saying he had a new file waiting. If Kessler were going to put him on this, Thad wanted as much background as he could get.

After ordering a drink from the server, he sat at the desk in his small office and began reading through the files. He had little hope of finding anything the technicians had missed because the facts were precious few, but this might, at least, get his mind off how his trip to 1456 ended.

Thad sipped his drink and started comparing temporal readings. He had a computer-generated baseline overshadowed by a red line (representing the anomaly) that seemed to start somewhere in the first quarter of the twenty-third century and disappeared at the barrier at one million B.C. Intensity, i.e., power of the Kline waves, was plotted vertically, while time was plotted in the horizontal plane. Although a graphic portrayal of the time chamber’s journey down-time wasn’t something he used on an everyday basis, he had seen enough of them. The computer usually used a scale that was one-tenth the one used on the vertical part of this graph, but if the computer had used the same proportions this time, the red line would have just remained on the very bottom of the screen. He whistled through his teeth as he realized how much power this (whatever it was) had used.

He asked the computer to overlay his trip to 1456 on the anomaly graph. Well, it looks like Kessler was right, he thought while leaning forward in his seat and scanning the new material. This ... anomaly had gone down-time while he was on his own trip. However, his trip, plotted on the same scale, sat almost on top of the baseline. This gave even more perspective to how much power that other time trip used. Where did this thing get all that power? There was no way Temporal could put out that much energy. “No wonder my trip got scrambled,” he mused aloud. Something like being run over by a truck — a big truck.

He stared at the graph on the screen, but his mind kept straying back to blackened corpses and dank prison cells.

He had been beaten only once (other than having his foot whacked with the staff), but the food they had given him was nearly rotten and the water filthy. Worse were the stocks and the waiting, not knowing what they had planned for him — still worse when he found out. They had questioned him perfunctorily on the morning after his capture, but they hadn’t really listened to his explanations. There wasn’t much he could say after dropping out of thin air in front of fifty-three witnesses. In a way, they were pitiful; they had held up crosses and kept the light as bright as they could when they were near him.

He admonished himself and dug into another set of data (this time, numerical) that described the down-time trip of the Others, or whatever it was. The Kline waves generated by Temporal’s jump equipment were directly related to the amount of power fed into the chamber’s fields as the chamber and its payload (usually one or two Ops, plus equipment) was pushed through time. The power consumption required to send something through increased at a near-exponential rate as the mass increased. Therefore, something as small as a coin could be sent through time with little energy consumption (comparatively), while sending a couple of Ops and their equipment required a great deal. The practical jump limit was about four hundred and fifty kilograms (almost a thousand pounds), and this mass traveled at a much-reduced time velocity. The velocity could be detected through an offshoot of the Kline waves. However, Temporal’s equipment would allow a change in speed on anything sent through time — the faster you went, the more energy required to do so — but only the base operator could change it; the Op in the stisis during the jump with an apparent time-lapse of zero to him or her. Instrumentation was similarly affected, thus ruling out automated controls inside the chamber.

An Operative sent down-time was then picked up after a predetermined lapse of time. There was a desperate need for equipment that would allow the Operative to signal when he or she needed to be picked up, but so far, the techs hadn’t been able to come up with anything reliable.

Thad could see the downtime velocity changes that Kathy had mentioned. It did appear that this thing, whatever (or whoever) it was, had gone down-time at a pace that was far beyond Temporal’s capabilities. The thing had slowed and even stopped, repeatedly. It seemed to have started somewhere in the early twenty-third century, but it was impossible to narrow the beginning down any more than that. There were normal fluctuations in the timelines, and the equipment picked up static that covered any low-level surges of energy as the Others, or whatever it was, slowed or stopped. The red line representing their trip first merged with Thad’s, and then was lost in the static. It was entirely possible that the traveler hadn’t originated where the energy was first displayed on the graph, and might well have been hidden in the static. If it had been moving slowly enough, its trip might not have shown immediately.