Chapter 4

Gloria Carter, in a gray uniform jumpsuit, stuck her head into her manager's office. "Do you have a minute, Boss?"

"What's up?"

"I have a mission proposal that you'll probably want to turn down."

"Come in and tell me what you want to do."

Gloria restacked the contents of the least-burdened chair and sat down. "You remember the mission with the equations, the ones that got them off the planet and all the other good stuff?"

"The one where you killed that creep with the knife? Yeah, I remember."

Gloria said, "Well, the guy we gave the equations to didn't do too well, personally. He and his buds worked on it for a long time subjective, got the top international prize for physics, all kinds of good things were happening all over the planet but he

felt guilty that he needed that little nudge, like he didn't deserve the fame and fortune."

"What do you propose to do?"

"Go tell him he's not crazy and hold his hand long enough for him to believe it. I'll need a solid cover in his professional world 'cause he'll be pretty insulated against random outsiders."

"That'll take a lot of subjective time and I really don't want to spare you."

Gloria crossed her arms and cocked her head at her manager. "Boss, I've been doing this for eighty-seven years subjective, from just about the start of this."

She paused long enough for him to nod an acknowledgment.

"Everything we've done has been to preserve that planet so they could get off it in an orderly manner instead of a panicked evacuation and I've been involved with most of the big ones: the libraries like Alexandria, making the old man so sick he had to

step down before Prinzip and his buds showed up. Making those student pilots disappear. Sinking that sailboat with the dingbat on board."

Her manager replied, "The rest of the team did pretty well, too; especially the tech guys: silphium that grew everywhere, kerosene to replace whale oil, competitive steam engines for cars. Polywell fusion and depolymerization. There's nothing much left that we can fix easily except for some of the infectious

diseases and that's too muddled for the attempt."

Gloria said,"I really wish that we could have kept those two misogynistic clowns from marginalizing the girl from Magdala, or let one of the other prophet's sons survive." She sighed. "Oh, well. That last mission of mine gave them the keys to the stars

with the tech level to take advantage of it."

Her manager looked pensive before replying, "All that's

true, but I'm thinking there's something else bothering you."

Gloria looked down for a moment. "Yeah. All the tweaking we've done hasn't had any effect on us. The theoreticians that I've been able to pin down think that we're in some kind of separate timeline bubble that may or may not last. I want to spend however much subjective time I have left doing something for one of the individuals we've used. It'll be better than hanging around here waiting to vanish silently away or turn into somebody different without realizing it."