Chapter 9

Temporal.

The mind is a marvelous thing. It can remember events that happened years in the past; it can envision the future; it can worry. Ian Kessler decided that he had the worry part down pat.

The holo of his wife held his gaze but not his thoughts. With his elbows propped on his desk, he massaged his temple before straightening up and taking another sip of stim. Cold. It seems as if I just filled the cup. Am I getting absent-minded? Ridiculous, I can’t be. My body is in perfect shape. The time fields keep it from getting old, and my brain is part of my body. Disgusted with himself, he emptied the cup, put it in the server and keyed it for more stim. With the cup of the hot brew in hand, he leaned back in his seat and propped his feet on his desk.

Unrealized, he stared at another holo taken at a much different time while his mind delved again into his recent actions. Attila the Hun stared back at him. Kessler had taken the holo while on a field trip long before the Others started altering history. Now the lodge at 10,000 BC was no longer even maintained, and field trips just for the fun of it were over until the Others could be stopped. Only one of many holos taken on a field trip to 440 AD, this particular image had made it to the wall of his office. More than lifelike, the stocky, broken-toothed Hun, long greasy hair flying behind him, sat astride a galloping horse that looked as wild as its master. He had ridden the horse hard, and foam dripped from its muzzle as lather shown white on its shoulders. Radiating hate, horse and rider stared from the holo. The shot was taken from half a kilometer away with a telephoto lens, but man and beast seemed ready to crash into the room.

Attila, however, in all his glory, couldn’t compete with Kessler’s worry. In retrospect, he conceded, Sending Kathy out as Thad’s backup might not have been the smartest thing I’ve done lately. No matter what I do, though, Mettling will find fault. This time, however, Mettling just might have some valid ammunition for his continuing complaints about my long-lived (according to Mettling) control of Temporal. When he finds out, he will fault the use of a semi-trained Op as Thad’s backup, but he would fault my sending only one Op if I had gone that route or for sending anyone at all, for that matter. Screw Mettling. At least he was appropriately named.

Kathy is smart — she’s proved it a hundred times. She’ll catch on. And we have to have equipment to match what the Others are using. What else could I have done? There weren’t any other Ops to send at the moment. And, I certainly have to send someone to find out what happened at 5000 AD. My team is already working to find exactly when the vacuum started up-time, but we have to know what caused it. Has earth moved out of its orbit, or did the Others do something else? All of this is time-consuming — time that I don’t have.

When the chamber drops Thad and Kathy, I’ll bring Millie back from her present assignment, long overdue, and send her to a point before the vacuum started to see if she can pick up the reason. But I’ll be low on reserve power after the push to get Thad and Kathy to one million BC, so Millie’s trip will be much slower.

I can’t keep everything shut down here indefinitely, or Mettling will have his way for sure, and I’ll be an Op again. Kessler laughed aloud, then glanced guiltily toward his door. My new assistant seems scared of me already. If she hears me laughing to myself, she’ll think I’ve lost it. No ... I probably won’t be an Op. If Mettling has his way, he’ll come up with something far more degrading than forcing me to step down to Op status again. But why can’t the idiot understand? This is an opportunity that we can’t miss. If we manage to get a couple of Ops within a few years of one of these Others, it should take only minutes to get the empty chamber to the Ops, and with full power, not much longer than that to move them into the Others’ time frame.

With the all-out push I gave the chamber, it should put Thad and Kathy near the barrier in the next few hours, Temporal time, but doubt crept in. Have I made the right decisions? I could have searched the twenty-third century or put out more sensors to try to track the Others back to their base, but nothing I’ve done so far has uncovered it.

No matter what I’ve done lately, Mettling has found fault with it, and from what I’m told, he shares his criticisms with anyone who will listen. If I don’t come up with something shortly, our people might well start listening to his idiotic ravings, and he’s bound to use my heavy expenditure of energy to push his governing council idea again — with him being the leader of it, of course. It might well go through if I don’t produce soon, and I’ll be an ex-director. Thad had better pull this off at one million. Kessler sighed as he sipped the strangely tasteless stim, frowned and put the cup down.

After getting up from his desk, he opened his liquor cabinet and removed a bottle of brandy. The decanter was made from Gorian crystal, the brandy within from a small distillery in 3117 AD. He well knew that the dark liquid was worthy of its container. After sparingly lacing his stim with the brandy, he took the opportunity to enjoy the aroma before easing the crystal stopper back into place. Kessler allowed himself a taste of the brandy only on special occasions. This wasn’t precisely the special occasion, he decided, but then again, maybe it was time for the brandy anyway.

While sipping his drink, he allowed his mind to wander again. He had always considered his job well worth the headaches; he had anything he wanted, within reason, but this constant second-guessing his decisions, accompanied by the escalating problems with the Others, was tending to make him question his own judgment. I used to be sure of myself. Am I losing my touch?

The shocked expressions on the lab techs’ faces revealed what they thought about me sending my assistant on an operation, but I didn’t have anyone else, albeit mainly because I hadn’t used the chamber to bring other Ops back from their current assignments, but I had to have someone now. Now. The Traveler that went through the barrier at one million has to come back sometime, and if he stops, even for a few minutes, I will have an opportunity to put Sullivan and Kathy in the same time frame.

Kesler realized he was gambling — playing the odds — but nothing else had worked. Time to do something positive instead of continuing the stopgap methods they had been struggling with for so long. But he couldn’t completely abandon the thumb-in-the-dike approach, either. If they didn’t correct the time changes, the alterations would accumulate until history would become a totally unrecognizable chaos of one disaster after another.

He hoped with all his being that this didn’t get Kathy killed. There was no way they could pull the same stunt they had at 1456. He had been lucky there. The distance down-time was such that the techs had been able to drop Sullivan’s body back, then go down-time a few hours and pick him up before the execution happened. Of course, the same thing was theoretically possible at one million as well, but it would require many hours of subjective time to put someone back with a reasonable expenditure of power. Even then, there was no way to know precisely when the person was killed. If they guessed wrong, the whole thing would have to be done repeatedly until they got it right, but repeating something in the timeline, even with the utmost caution, could create a paradox. They didn’t have the power or the time, and he was using up their reserves as well as everything the generators could produce. Also, tying the chamber up for weeks would give the Others all the advantage they needed. If only time travel didn’t take so much energy.

Why did Kathy have to be the only one he could send? He had racked his brain for someone else. He had even considered sending someone from support personnel, but they wouldn’t be any good if they couldn’t stay conscious, or were nauseated, or had some of the other side effects. Kathy had been tested in the chamber, and she seemed able to take it, although she did transfer out of temporal training to become his assistant. She was the best assistant he ever had also. She was highly intelligent, and at times, she seemed able to read his mind — nothing like the terror-stricken kid Billings had conjured up for her replacement.

Now, he remembered. The kid had come from an apartment complex fire. They had snatched her out with the chamber just before the roof caved in. She had no family or relatives, and at seventeen, she was the youngest ever to be brought into Temporal. That must have been about a year ago, subjective time; she should be eighteen now and is quite beautiful. Hmmm, I wonder if Sullivan has gotten into her pants yet. You can bet he’s tried. It isn’t any of my business, but I’m glad that Kathy keeps turning him down. Sullivan, however, maintains that he is just teasing with other women, and Millie is the only one for him. Of course, the next thing he always does is ask for the two of them to work an assignment together. If she had been back this time, and it was not for that thing at 5000 AD, I would have sent her with him to one million.

The techs had come up with a small auxiliary generator, and they now had minimal lighting in the hallways and where crucial work was going on, but living quarters still had no power at all. For the time being, people were not to use anything that used power. He also knew that the comparatively small amount of extra power being fed into the chamber’s circuits from this savings was of little consequence when compared to what the generators were producing. My people will be thinking this too and probably wondering about my sanity. But if Sullivan and Kathy are one second late, it will be as good, or as bad, as an eternity. They have to be there when this thing comes back up-time, and I need to build power so I can move them to this Traveler’s location ASAP. Our equipment certainly can’t catch up to this Traveler while it’s moving. Hopefully, we’ll have sufficient power to move them into its time before it leaves — if it stops there at all.

As he sat back at his desk, Jamison called on Kessler’s comm to advise him that Kathy and Sullivan have made it to one million BC. Now, they waited for the Other to come back through the barrier.

“Sullivan, that famous luck of yours better come through again,” Kessler said aloud. It seemed to have quit on you in 1456, but then again, maybe it hadn’t. You managed to get yourself killed and still survived. Kessler grinned before saying aloud, “Now that’s a real contradiction in terms.”

Kessler had heard some of the exchanges as Sullivan flirted with Kathy. It isn’t any of my business, but I’m pleased that she keeps turning him down, although he never seems to give up. Was he just teasing her? Whatever he was doing, it certainly pissed her off. She’s had a tough life after losing her husband, and I hope she manages to survive what I’ve just thrown her into.

In spite of what he had told Sullivan, he had considered sending Millie back as Sullivan’s partner. The two of them would stand a better chance, but there had to be someone working the thing at 5000 AD, and next to Thad, she was the best he had.

There weren’t enough people. There wasn’t enough power. Nor was there enough subjective time to get the things done that he must do if they were to win. Crap.

His wrist-comm beeped and announced, “Meeting in ten minutes.” Not wanting to set any precedencies for decision making by committee, he might have made a real mistake by scheduling this conference of department heads now, but just maybe, with a bit of judicious stirring up of things, he could catch Mettling with his pants down.

Kessler finished the stim, ran a brush through his hair and stepped out of his office to find his new assistant nodding at her desk. She snapped awake and stammered. “Mr. Kessler, I’m sorry, I just, uh...”

“Forget it. Go get some rest. If I need you, I’ll call. Or if Mettling needs you, he will,” he finished grimly.

“Mettling? But I don’t work for him,” she said, puzzled.

“Get some sleep,” Kessler said as he stepped out the door.

Next to the chamber lab, the conference room on level three was almost sparse compared to the one that opened off Kessler’s office. Ian Kessler never noticed the difference as he entered precisely on the hour. He had chosen this room as a convenience and in respect for Jamison.

The murmur of voices quieted as Kessler made his way to the head of the table and turned toward his department heads. The men and women seated around the long table looked haggard, with one exception, he noted almost gleefully. Tactical error there, Mr. Mettling. Now, if I can get you to make a few more.

“Relax people. This is going to be an informal meeting, and I’ll keep it as short as possible. I know that most of you have been putting in a few extra hours,” he said with a grin, “so if you didn’t get a chance to eat, or you want something to drink, feel free to use the server while we talk.”

There was a moment’s hesitation before Nepi laughed and said, “Well, you people can be bashful if you want, but I haven’t had time to eat anything all day, and I’m going to take the man up on his offer.”

As Nepi left her seat and approached one of the four portable servers, Kessler continued. “Normally I don’t interfere with the running of your departments. With few exceptions, I have always allowed you to make your own decisions concerning your people, and ... I don’t intend to change that. I have been, and continue to be, of the opinion that a department head, if saddled with the responsibility of his department, must necessarily also have the authority to function as he or she sees fit.