Professor Aylmer Arbuthnot Abercrombie looked up irascibly from the chore of tidying up his notes as the call tone sounded from his desk terminal. He moused the screen's cursor to the Call Accept icon and clicked on it. "Yes?"
A window opened showing the head of a youth aged twenty or so, with collar-length, studentish hair, a wispy attempt at a beard, and shoulders enveloped in a baggy sweater. "Oh, er, Jeremy Qualio here, Professor." He was a postgraduate that Abercrombie had assigned a design project to, in one of the labs below in the building. "We were expecting you here at ten-thirty, sir."
"You were?"
"To review the test of the transcorrelator mixing circuit. You were going to help us set the power parameters for the output stage."
"I was?"
"We've completed the runs with simulated input data and normalized the results. They're here ready for you to check through now."
"They are?" Abercrombie's brow knitted into a frown. He cast around the littered desk for his appointments diary on the off chance that it might give him a way out, but couldn't see it. He was cornered. "Very well, I'll be there shortly," he replied, and cut off the screen.
Abercrombie left his "public" office at the front of the lab area, which he used for receiving visitors and dealing with routine day-to-day affairs. On the way out, he stopped by the open cubicle and reception desk from where the stern, meticulous, and fearsomely efficient figure of Mrs. Crawford, the departmental secretary and custodian of all that pertained to proper procedures, commanded the approach from the elevators.
"Do you have my appointments diary, by any chance?" Abercrombie inquired. "I appear to have mislaid it."
"You took it back this morning."
"Did I?"
"After I found it again, the last time." The pointed pause, followed by a sniff invited him to reflect on the enormity of his transgression. "You know, Professor, it really would be more convenient if you'd keep your schedule electronically, as do other members of the staff. Then I could maintain a copy in my system, which wouldn't get mislaid. And I'd be in a position to give timely reminders of your commitments—which it seems you are in some need of."
Abercrombie shook his head stubbornly. "I won't go into that again, Mrs. Crawford. You know my views on computerized records. Nothing's private. Nothing's safe. They can get into your system from China. The next thing you know, some fool who doesn't know a Bessel function from a Bessemer furnace is publishing your life's work. No, thank you very much. I prefer not to become public property, but to keep my soul and my inner self to myself."
"But that's such an outmoded way to think," Mrs. Crawford persisted. "It's absurd for somebody with your technical expertise. If I may say so, it smacks of pure obstinacy. With the encryption procedures available today . . ." But Abercrombie had already stopped listening and stalked away to jab the call button by the elevator doors.
"Oh, and by the way," he threw back over his shoulder while he waited, "has that FedEx package arrived from Chicago yet?"
"Yes. I've already told you so, Professor."
"When?"
"Less than half an hour ago."
Abercrombie checked himself long enough to send back a perplexed, disbelieving look before stepping into the elevator. Mrs. Crawford shook her head in exasperation and returned her attention to the task at hand.
Jeremy Qualio and Maxine Turnel, his bubbly, bespectacled, blond-haired partner on the project, were waiting in the prototype lab with the bird's nest of wires, chips, and other components connected to an array of test equipment. The results from their trial runs of the device were displayed on a set of monitors. Abercrombie jutted his chin and scanned over the bench with a series of short, jerky motions of his head. The layout was neat for a lab prototype, with careful wiring and solid, clean-looking joints; the data had been graphed onto screens showing time and frequency series analysis, along with histograms of statistical variables, all properly annotated and captioned. A file of hard copy was lying to one side for Abercrombie's inspection. He looked at the circuit work again and grunted. "You've used nonstandard colors for the board interconnections. I expect the approved coding practices to be observed."
"Yes, Professor," Qualio agreed, looking a bit crestfallen.
But Abercrombie couldn't fault their experimental design and procedure as they went through it and discussed details for over an hour. The analysis was comprehensive, with computation of error probabilities and the correct algorithms for interpolation and best-curve fits. Maxine took the absence of further criticism as indicating a rare opportunity to probe the obsessive screen of secrecy that Abercrombie maintained around his work. She and Qualio had been given just this subassembly to develop to a specification in isolation. Abercrombie hadn't told them its purpose, or the nature of the greater scheme of which it was presumably a part.
"We're still trying to figure out what it's for," she told him, doing her best to sound casual and natural. "What, exactly is a 'transcorrelator'? The inducer stage seems to create an electroweak interaction with the nuclear substructure that stimulates a range of strong-domain transitions that we've never heard of before."
Qualio came in. "They're not mentioned in any of the standard references or on the Net. It's as if we're dealing with a new area of physics."
"That's not for you to speculate about," Abercrombie said. "All you've done is graduate from basic training in the army of science. It doesn't give you a voice in deciding strategy. Leave the big picture to the generals." He gave a curt nod in the direction of the bench. "Satisfactory. Have the report written up by the end of the week."
"Yes, Professor," Qualio said. Maxine flashed him a look with a shrug that said. Well, we tried. Abercrombie picked up the folder of hard copy and turned to leave.
"I told you. It has to be something military," he overheard Maxine whisper as he went out the door.
After stopping for lunch in the cafeteria, Abercrombie took the stairs back up through the warren of partitioned offices and labs that now filled the space amid the massive brick walls and aged wooden floors of the original building. The City Annexe of Gates University's Physics Department occupied a converted warehouse on the downtown waterfront of what was no longer a major trading port. Hence, it had been acquired at a knock-down price and qualified for the city's urban-renewal grant scheme, making it a fine investment property for the university trustees. It was also where the department secluded its oddball projects and other undertakings that the governors preferred to keep out of sight, away from its main, prestigious campus. They were retained, as often as not, to humor some high-paying source of research grants or other primary influence on funding.
No premature publicity, Abercrombie reiterated to himself as he emerged on his own floor and weathered Mrs. Crawford's Gorgonesque stare to return to his lab. When this project came to fruition, it would be the news event of the century. And not just with the public media. Everyone who was anyone worth talking about in the entire physics-related sector of the scientific Establishment would learn of it in a mass-announcement that Abercrombie had been preparing as methodically as the design studies and calculations that had occupied him for eight years. He had all the names listed, covering academic, private, and government science elites throughout the world. This would be his ticket to a Nobel Prize and permanent fame as surely as geometry had immortalized Euclid and the laws of motion were virtually synonymous with Newton. Maybe even more. The things that Nobels had been awarded for seemed mundane in comparison. Perhaps, even, a new grade of award would have to be instituted especially for him.
He came to the inner, windowless workshop area that he had designated as the place where the device would be assembled, and stopped for a moment to picture it completed. It wouldn't be especially heavy or bulky—little more than a metal lattice boundary surface to define and contain the varichron field, with a control panel supported on a columnar plinth, and the generating system and power unit beneath. If anything, it would resemble an oversize parrot cage with a domed cap, standing on a squat cylindrical base. Howard Jaffey, the dean, and the few others from the faculty who were in the know as to the aim of Abercrombie's project, were polite in avoiding mention of it; but with a billionaire like Eli Zaltzer writing the backing, and the amounts that he lavished on the university as a whole, nobody had been inclined to turn the proposal down, even if they secretly thought Zaltzer was an eccentric. Well, let them think what they liked, Abercrombie told himself. The parts were coming together now, and the initial tests were under way. It wouldn't be much longer before the full system was assembled—three months, maybe, in his estimation. They'd be singing a different tune then, when the whole world came flocking to his door. Never mind for a better mousetrap. Abercrombie was going to give them a working time machine!
He stood, savoring the moment in his imagination for a few seconds longer, and then proceeded through a door and along a corridor to his inner, private office at the rear of the lab area. This was where he conducted his more secretive business. Inside, he locked the door, cast a wary eye around instinctively, even though it was obvious there could be no one else there—and at once spotted the missing appointments diary on a corner of the desk. Tut-tutting to himself, he went over to the wall cabinet and released the catch that allowed it to slide aside, revealing his hidden safe. Armor plate, sunk into the brickwork of the original walls. No electronic security for him, whatever the administrators tried to say about how solid it was these days. How could anyone believe it, when half the people in the world seemed to spend their lives trying to make computers do what they were supposed to do instead of contributing to anything useful?
He dialed in the combination sequence and swung the door open to disclose his trove of files, papers, and notes from the time when he first met Eli Zaltzer and the dream began the course that would one day make it reality. He took out the file box reserved for test results, added the hard copy that he had brought from downstairs, and was just replacing the box, when he heard footsteps in the corridor outside. They sounded furtive, as if someone were creeping past warily. Normally, Abercrombie always locked the door when he opened his safe, but on this occasion, after the momentary distraction of seeing the appointments diary on the desk when he walked in, he was unable to recall whether or not he had. "Who's there?" he called out, fearful of being found with the cabinet open. There was no reply. The footsteps hastened away.
Hurrying to the door, Abercrombie found that he had locked it after all and had to fumble for his keys before he could get out, by which time the corridor was empty. He followed it to the back stairs and the freight elevator but found no sign of anyone there. As he began retracing his steps toward his rear office, a peculiar, low-pitched whine emanated from the other side of the door to the workshop area ahead of him. He increased his pace, heading past his office door. "Who is that in there?" he yelled ahead, but the noise ceased just before he burst in, and he found the place empty. With rising agitation he carried on through to Mrs. Crawford's post, but she had seen no one go that way. Then Abercrombie realized that he had committed the cardinal sin of leaving his private office door unlocked with the safe open.
Abandoning Mrs. Crawford in mid sentence, he raced back through the workshop area, slammed the office door behind him, and rushed across the room to check the contents of the safe. Moments later, he emitted a horrified groan. The master notebook, in which he had brought together and summarized the essential design information for the time machine—the distilled essence of his past eight years of intensive labor—was gone.
He had to inform Eli Zaltzer and the university governors that the project had run into unexpected difficulties, forcing him to put the schedule on hold. Zaltzer remained as trusting and optimistic as ever, but the faculty members who were privy to Abercrombie's crazy scheme chortled behind raised hands and told each other it had only been a matter of time—deriving added glee from the intended pun. Abercrombie became convinced he was the victim of a conspiracy to either sabotage or steal his project. Several times, he thought he heard prowlers about in the labs, but he never managed to catch anyone. On one occasion, late in the evening when the lights were turned down, he did actually accost and pursue an intruder; but on rounding a corner was met full-force by the discharge from a fire extinguisher, and by the time he had cleaned the froth from his eyes and recovered, the trespasser had vanished.
And then, a week or so after the loss of the notebook, he heard the strange noise again. He was on the phone in his public office at the front near the main elevators, wearing a dress suit in anticipation of an honorary dinner he was due to attend that night, when the same low-pitched whine as before reached him through the wall from the direction of the lab and workshop area. He excused himself, saying he would call back later, and hung up. Then, giving no advance warning this time, he rose and went over to the door, checked the corridor beyond, and crept stealthily to the double doors leading through to the workshop. The noise had by now ceased. Turning one of the handles gently, he eased the door open far enough to peer around it and inside . . . and almost fell over from shock and disbelief. The time machine was there, standing in the middle of the floor, exactly as he had envisioned it! But there was nobody with it.
He stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him, and walked past it warily—almost as if fearing that a sudden movement might cause it to vanish—and secured the doors leading to the rear before coming back to study the machine more carefully. It stood over seven feet high from the bottom of the cylindrical base frame, crammed with circuit boxes, generator manifolds, and coil housings, to the top of the field delimiter capping the cage. The ticking and clicking of hot parts cooling came from beneath, as from the hood of a car after a long run. Abercrombie reached out and touched part of the structure gingerly, as if unsure if it might be an illusion. It was solid and real.
And as he thought through what it meant, his indignation rose in a hot flush climbing slowly from his collar. Evidently, at some eventual future time, somebody would build the machine. So was he now supposed to go through the protracted effort of redoing all the work he had lost, in order for someone to steal it and go careening around through time and having who-knew-what kinds of adventures? Dammit, he had been though all that once. And here he was, seeing the fruits of his own labors for the first time. It was his!
Furious now, he opened the access gate, stepped up into the cage, and stared at the control panel atop its plinth. He wasn't really sure what he intended to do. And as he looked over the keys, lights, and the command lines displayed on the screen, it slowly came to him that he wouldn't have had a clue how to go about doing it. The machine was based on his original design, yes; but a lot of detail that he was not familiar with had been worked out in the final stages. But it was rightfully his, wasn't it? Maybe he could turn things around and be the one to benefit from his interloping future self's labors instead. That would require studying the construction and wiring and trying some tests, which could take a while. It couldn't be done here; his other self who had arrived in it for whatever reason could return at any moment. He needed a safe place to hide the machine, where he could investigate it at leisure.
But could such a plan work? He frowned, bemused by the bizarre logic. Surely, whatever he decided to do, his future self would remember having decided, and be able to pursue him accordingly. Unless the time line somehow reset itself to accommodate changes. Or maybe some multiple-universe explanation applied, in which the possibly similar past that a person returned to was still different from the past that was remembered. He had long speculated about such alternatives, but a working machine was the prerequisite to being able to test them. And now he had one! Forget all the questions for now, he told himself. Worry about getting the machine to a place where he could devote himself to the only prospect in sight—without having to repeat eight years of work—for finding some answers.
It would need to be reasonably close but unfrequented by people. Anywhere in the City Annexe itself would be out of the question because of the comings and goings of staff, students, visitors, and a host of others. But a short distance away along the waterfront there was a disused dock building, a former customs warehouse still owned by the Port Authority, earmarked for development into an indoor market and restaurant mall one day, but derelict for years. The cellars beneath would provide a suitable place—not perfect, maybe, but they would do until he found something better. And with the limited time at his disposal, that was good enough. He stepped back down out of the machine and went through to the rear part of the building to find a means of moving it.
By the freight elevator he found a hand dolly that was used for moving equipment cabinets, machinery, and other heavy items around the labs. A utility room nearby, where maintenance and decorating materials were stored, yielded a painter's floor tarp that would serve as a cover. He hurried the dolly back to the workshop, eased the lifting platform under the time machine's base, elevated it, draped the machine with the tarp, and trundled it back through to the rear. The freight elevator took him down to the goods-receiving bay at the back of the Annexe building, where he signed for use of the departmental pickup truck. He brought the truck around to the loading bay, and minutes later was driving his purloined creation out through the rear gates of the premises, onto the waterfront boulevard.
He had gone no more than a few hundred yards, when he heard the wail of a police siren behind and saw red and blue lights flashing in his mirror. For a sickening moment his heart felt as if it were about to fall into a void that opened up in his stomach. Then he realized it had nothing to do with him; a car a short distance back was being pulled over. Exhaling loudly with relief, Abercrombie entered the weed-choked lot surrounding the derelict dockside building, drove around to the side, where he would be less conspicuous, and parked in front of a once-boarded-up entrance, its planks long ago stripped and broken up for firewood by vagrants. He climbed out of the truck and went in to reconnoiter the interior for a suitable hiding place for the machine.
The figure who had observed Abercrombie's arrival retreated to a hideaway in the cellars below the front part of the building, screened by fallen debris but commanding a view of the ramp down from the ground-floor level. His name was Brady. He was long-haired and bearded, dressed in a military-style camouflage parka with paratrooper combat boots. As Abercrombie came out of the room into which he had wheeled the strange contraption, and disappeared back up the ramp to the side entrance, the watcher murmured into a cell phone to a person that he referred to as "Yellow One."
"I dunno. It looked like a machine."
"What kind of machine?"
"I never saw anything like it before. A man-size birdcage. Maybe some kinda surveillance thing. I don't like the look of it."
"What does the guy look like?"
"Tall, about sixty, maybe. Thin. Could be kinda mean. Hair white and gray. Wearing a black suit."
"A suit? There's only one kind of people that wears suits. They're onto us, man. Get—"
"Wait!" Brady interrupted as the sound came of tires squealing to a halt outside the front of the building, close to where he was concealed. Moments later, footsteps pounded in on the floor above, followed by crashing sounds and metallic clanging. "There's more of 'em breaking in upstairs!" Brady said, sounding alarmed.
"It's a bust," Yellow One told him. "Get yourself out!"
Professor Abercrombie came back out onto the waterside boulevard and drove the truck back to the university Annexe. Just as he was turning in through the rear gate, a dull boom and a whoosh sounded from a short distance away as the building he had just left exploded and collapsed in flames.
Police and fire-department vehicles arrived by the dozen, and the ensuing spectacle meant that little work was done anywhere in the nearby university buildings for the rest of the day. Curious officials from the Annexe went to find out what they could from the officers in charge, and the gossip in the staff coffee room by the end of the afternoon was that an extremist group of survivalists, who trained in the hills with guns and believed in preparing for catastrophe or nuclear holocaust, had been using the place to store weapons and explosives. The police had been waiting for a special shipment, due within the next few day, before moving in, but evidently there had been some kind of accident in there first. Rumor had it that the charred remains of one of them had been found in there. Nobody else had been caught.
All of which was of peripheral interest to Abercrombie, who was now left without either design data or machine, after having had the completed, working model literally in his hands. And just to make his day, when he left the office to go home, he found that his car had been stolen.
That night, in a fit of dejection, he took out the folder with the lists of media contacts, scientific notables, and others that he had prepared for the day of his great announcement, which he kept in the desk at home in his apartment, carried it downstairs to the basement, and threw it into the building's incinerator.
The next day, Abercrombie stood at the window of his private office, staring despondently out in the direction of the old customs warehouse. What was left of the shell had been pronounced unsafe and reduced to rubble by a demolition crew, who were now fencing off the site pending a decision on eventual disposal. But the professor's thoughts were not on how the Port Authority should best manage its piece of still-prime downtown waterfront real estate.
Why, he asked himself, was the obvious always the last thing that occurred to people? Probably for the same reason that a lost object always turns up in the last place one looks: Nobody is going to carry on looking after they've found it. The mysterious intruder of the day before, and no doubt those that he had suspected previously, hadn't been from any conspiracy at all. It had been himself, coming back from a future where the machine had been built! It had taken the discovery of the machine for him to realize it. He no longer possessed the notebook containing the design information necessary to build it. Could it be that the notebook had been used, nevertheless, stolen from the past by means of a machine that will exist in the future? It sounded preposterous, but the evidence was there. However, if so, that raised another logical conundrum. For if, somewhere in the future, he had built a working machine—possibly after having to work it all out again—then what motivation would he have for going back and stealing the design? He wouldn't need it!
No. He shook his head decisively. He wasn't going to get embroiled in any more of those impossible tangles. He had problems enough as things were. Just take the facts one at a time and let philosophers or mystics worry about the contradictions and deeper meaning of it all, he told himself.
Yet the implication remained that at some point in the future he would find himself the owner of such a device. He stared distantly out along the waterfront and allowed himself to relish the thought. If he ever did go back to regain the notebook, he would take out some insurance to prevent anything like this from happening again, he resolved. Computer people were always impressing the importance of keeping backups. Well, maybe they did have a valid point there, he conceded grudgingly. Very well, he would follow their advice. If—or when?—such a day came, he would leave a backup copy of the notebook in some secure place, back there in the past. Then, if he ever lost the original, had it stolen, or found himself without it for any other reason, from then onward, anytime in the future, the backup would always be there, waiting to be retrieved. It was so breathtakingly simple—once again, eminently obvious now that he had thought of it. Had he done so before, he would have taken the simple precaution of maintaining an additional copy to the one that had been in the safe.
He turned his head unconsciously from the window toward the wall cabinet concealing the safe while he thought this. And his jaw dropped as the bizarre realization hit him of what the very act of his thinking it signified. The fact of having made this decision meant he would carry it with him into the future. And the decision would still be in his head when he traveled back via the machine to what was now the past. Provided, then, that he abided by that decision, it had already been done! Somewhere, right now—unless his penchant for forgetfulness were to reach impossible proportions in the future—a hidden copy of the notebook existed! That must have been how he had built the machine! He looked around the office, licking his lips in the excitement that had seized him, as if now that he had worked the implication out, the hiding place would somehow leap out and advertise itself. He cast his mind over all the places there were to choose from. Somewhere in the Annexe? His downtown apartment? Somewhere else in the city? . . . Where, out of all the possibilities, would he have picked?
And that was when the full craziness of it all finally hit him; he realized that it didn't matter! There was no need for him to try and second-guess himself at all. For all he had to do was pick a place—any place—right now, and be sure to put the backup copy in that place when he came to travel back. And that would be where he would find it today!
Surely it couldn't be that easy. He went back in his mind through the insane logic, looking for the flaw, but couldn't find one. Okay, then, where would he hide the copy? He looked around again. And his eyes came back to the window and the site where the demolition crew were finishing the fence around the ruin of the old warehouse. Down there in the cellars beneath, where he had taken the machine yesterday, there were bound to be corners and cubby holes left beneath the rubble. Nobody would be going in there for a long time now, probably years. With the design information available, building the machine would only take about three months. It was close by, being posted with Keep Out and hazard warnings. . . .
Then his eyes blinked rapidly as the inevitable complication reared its head. There was another version of himself at large out there somewhere—the version who had arrived in the machine. And his disposition would not be very friendly, since by now he would have discovered that the machine had been stolen and he had no way of going back. But if this Abercrombie—the one looking out of the window, trying to make sense of it all—now chose a place to hide the backup in, then the other one of him would not only have remembered it too, but have known it all along while he (this Abercrombie) was still having to figure it out. On the other had, knowing it wouldn't have helped his other self to do much about acting on it, since the place had been swarming with firemen and demolition people since yesterday. So did that mean it would be a race to see which of them would get there first, probably tonight?
And then a malicious twinkle came into his eyes as the last skein of the tangle unraveled itself. He couldn't lose! For the machine had come to be built. He was here, installed in the Annexe, with all the resources at his disposal to build it, while the other Abercrombie was somewhere outside in the cold. Therefore, somewhere in the strange convolution of causes and effects that he didn't pretend to grasp yet, events must have shuffled themselves out in such a way that he had obtained the information he needed—and hence the other Abercrombie, presumably, had not.
But the other Abercrombie would just as certainly know all this, and yet was out there somewhere, unable to change it. Knowing himself, he pictured the rage of frustration that the other version of him must be in at that very moment. Not a pleasant character to cross, he told himself. Better be careful not to bump into him. A frown darkened his face then. But wasn't he destined to become that version eventually, and have to undergo the same frustration? Surely not. If knowledge had any value at all, there had to be a way to avoid it. But there was no way to be sure of any answer at present. He turned away from the window and sat down at the desk to consider his plans. One step at a time, he told himself again. Just follow where it leads.
The police found his car abandoned less than a mile away. Late that night, wearing dark coveralls and a woolen hat, Abercrombie parked by the remains of the warehouse building, forced a gap through the fence, and followed around the outside until he found an opening under a tilted slab of concrete that gave access to what was left of the cellars. Using a flashlight, he worked his way down to a part of the center gallery that had survived, and from there found a collapsed room almost buried in rubble and mud still wet from yesterday's hoses. On poking around, he discovered a run of pipes low on one wall, and beneath them a row of recesses between the support mountings, almost like pigeon holes. A perfect place!
The first slot that he examined was empty, but the one next to it was blocked by a brick outlined in the congealed muck—just as would have been placed by somebody wanting to conceal something. He pried the brick loose with a jackknife he had brought, and pulled it clear to uncover a rectangular shape. It proved to be the end of a flat, plastic-wrapped metal box. His hands shaking, for surely this couldn't mean what a rising premonition was already telling him it did, he slid the catch from the hasp and opened the lid of the box to reveal . . . a notebook and documents!
But they weren't his. Flipping rapidly though them, he found names and pseudonyms, addresses, contact numbers, and a section on what looked like codes and encryption procedures, but none of it was familiar. This wasn't possible, he told himself. He couldn't have reasoned things through and have gotten this close, only to have it all go wrong now.
All but whimpering aloud in dismay, he turned the flashlight beam back and prodded frantically among the other recesses. And sure enough, the next one along was also closed by a mud-encased brick, which also divulged a package. And this one, indeed, turned out to contain a full set of copies of the information from his master notebook! Exultation swept over him. No other version of himself had materialized to interfere. His only thought now was to leave, before anything could go amiss. Stuffing his finds into a bag that he had brought for the purpose, he clambered back to the gallery and picked his way up through to the opening that led back outside. His car was there, untouched, and he left without incident.
Even after his success, Abercrombie was mindful of the presence of his other self still at large somewhere, probably bordering on homicidal by now and capable of causing mischief. He approached Eli Zaltzer to say that the problems were resolved and the project could move ahead as scheduled. However, he had reason to believe there was some kind of opposition movement afoot who had gotten wind of the project and were opposed to it. In view of the precedents seen in recent times of protest groups sabotaging scientific research that they disagreed with, perhaps security around the lab should be tightened up. Zaltzer talked to the authorities, who were ever ready to appease his whims, and a private security firm was contracted to provide twenty-four-hour guards for Abercrombie's lab and office area, and to control access. His life became a fever of activity day and night, and as weeks passed by, the machine began taking shape in the center of the workshop.
And during that time, there were indeed several attempts by unknown persons to get into the labs. On one occasion, an alleged repairman who had come to check the air-conditioning produced credentials that didn't pass scrutiny, and on checking turned out not to be from the company he claimed. Abercrombie himself was elsewhere that day and so wasn't able to confront the imposter, and a slick lawyer intervened who prevented the security people from detaining him, so his identity was never established. But the description didn't sound anything like Abercrombie, and Mrs. Crawford confirmed it. So his other self was using fronts to test the waters, Abercrombie concluded.
Another time, somebody actually did get in under cover of what was almost certainly a contrived power failure, but one of the guards accosted him, and he got away without accomplishing anything. Inwardly, Abercrombie was impressed by what was, after all, effectively his own resourcefulness in an area where he had no prior knowledge or experience. He had never suspected that he had such talents in him.
And eventually the day came when the machine was ready for the first live tests.
Eli Zaltzer had to be there to see it, naturally. So was Howard Jaffey, the dean, along with Susan Peters and Mario Venasky, two others members of the faculty. Abercrombie briefed them, cautioning them to stand back, and announced that he was initiating a control program in the machine that would activate automatically ten minutes from now and send the machine back that far in time. Everyone watched the open area of floor expectantly. Moments later, an eerie whine filled the room, and a copy of the machine appeared beside the first. Even Abercrombie, though he had seen tangible evidence before that it would work, was astonished.
"My God!" Venasky breathed, staring pop-eyed. "It's real. I mean, really real."
Susan Peters was staring at Abercrombie with a mixture of awe and mortification. "Aylmer . . . you were right all along. The things some of us said behind your back for all that time . . . I'll never know how to make it right now."
"Quite understandable," Abercrombie condescended in a paternal tone.
"There, you see!" Zaltzer pronounced triumphantly. "I am not the nutball that you think I don't know you think. Next we talk about changing the name to Zaltzer University. Okay?"
Howard Jaffey just stood gaping, without, just for the moment, being able to say anything.
In the stupefied words and semicoherent comments that followed, nothing really meaningful was said through the next few minutes, at which point Abercrombie, enjoying his role as master of the show, called one of the security guards in from outside and said they needed help to move the machines. Looking puzzled but asking no questions (up till then there had been only one machine), the guard draped his jacket over a nearby chair. Then, following Abercrombie's directions, Jaffey and Venasky shifted the duplicate machine a few feet farther from the original, while Abercrombie and the guard moved the original into the space where the duplicate had stood. The guard turned to leave at that point, but Abercrombie's intoxication made him crave a greater audience. "No, stay," he commanded. "It doesn't matter anymore. Twenty-four hours from now, the whole world will be talking about this."
The guard waited obediently. Moments later, the original machine suddenly emitted a series of warning beeps followed by its characteristic whine, and then popped out of existence. At the same instant, a new voice from somewhere shouted "Get down!" in such an imperative tone that everyone automatically obeyed—just as the gun holstered in the guard's jacket still hanging over the chair exploded, sending bullets ricocheting around the room.
"Calm down, all of you. It was just an oversight," the voice continued, while they were picking themselves up and looking about dazedly. Another machine had materialized, this time with a copy of Abercrombie inside. He made no effort to contain a look of smug amusement at the expressions on the others' faces. Even Abercrombie-One was stunned. "The varichron radiation induced by the process evidently triggers unstable materials like cartridge caps," Abercrombie-Two went on. "Now that we are aware of the fact, we will know to avoid such instances in future."
Abercrombie-One was about to ask how far in the future his other self had come from, when A-Two looked at him loftily and supplied, "Thirty minutes."
A-One collected his wits raggedly. But it made sense. "Which you knew I was about to ask, because you were me," he said.
"Exactly," A-Two confirmed.
"So in the next thirty minutes I'll figure out it was the radiation that did it, and decide it's something we can work around?"
"No, you won't have to. I've already told you."
"In the same way you were told?"
"Yes."
A-One still couldn't make sense of it. His other self had the advantage of having had more time to think it through, which irked him—and which, from the expression on the other self's face, the other self was also well aware of. "So I presume too that you also know how irritatingly supercilious you appear just at this moment?" A-One said.
"Of course," A-Two agreed. "But then I don't care, because I can assure you that you'll enjoy it every bit as much as I am right now, when you come to be me."
Harold Jaffey was finally managing to find his voice. "This is crazy," he croaked. "How can he tell you what you'll do, like some kind of robot executing a program? You're a human being with free will, for heaven's sake. What happens if you plumb decide you're not going to do it?"
Susan Peters was frowning, trying to reason it through. "No machine or copy of you came back from, let's say, an hour ahead of now. But what's to stop us setting the machine to do that, just like you did before? Let's go ahead and do it. So why isn't it here?" She directed her words at Abercrombie-One. He didn't know either, and looked appealingly at Abercrombie Two, as if the extra thirty minutes might have conferred some superior insight.
"Those are the kinds of things we'll be testing in the weeks ahead," A-Two told them. "But for now, enough of the mundane and methodical. I've been shut up in this lab, working virtually nonstop for three months." He went over to Zaltzer and draped an arm around his shoulder. "This is the man who believed in me, and he'll share in the glory. Tonight, Eli, we'll go out and celebrate, and talk about how this will be the sensation of the century. Tomorrow we'll be the talk of the world."
This was becoming infuriating. "You seem to be taking over," Abercrombie-One told his other self peevishly. "Might I remind you that I had some little part in bringing this about too?"
"Yes, but that doesn't really come into things, because in a little under thirty minutes from now, you won't be here, will you?" A-Two replied.
That did it. "And suppose I refuse to go back?" A-One challenged. He folded his arms and sent Jaffey a look that said, Good point. Let's try it right now. "What are you going to do—hit me over the head and throw me into the machine?" he asked A-Two. "Even that wouldn't work. You came out of it in good shape."
A-Two grinned back as if he had been expecting it—which of course he had. "Later, is when we test the paradoxes," he said. "You know as well as I know how full of uncertainties this whole business is. We pursue it methodically and systematically, isn't that what we've always said? And now you want to jeopardize years of work by giving in to a fit of pique. Is that what you want?"
A-One felt himself losing ground at hearing his own often-reiterated principles recited back at him. But it would need more yet to dissuade him. "A cheap debater's ploy," he pronounced. "You'll have to try better than that, Aylmer."
"No I don't. All that's needed is for you to think about it. You've got about twenty minutes to figure out that if somebody doesn't go back and warn them, some of these friends of yours back there might very well get killed. I don't know the ins and outs of the logic either, yet. That's what we have to look into. But for now, are you going to risk it—just for the sake of that stubbornness of yours?"
A-One felt himself wilting. He knew already, with a sinking feeling, what the outcome would be, as he could read his other self knew perfectly well also. He didn't need twenty minutes. He was trapped.
"All right," he said in a voice that could have cut seasoned teak. "I'll do it."
But Abercrombie's elation had subsided into gloom and wistfulness by the time he and Zaltzer sat down to what was to have been their celebration dinner at the five-star Atherton Hotel in the heart of the city. "The most staggering discovery in the history of physics, Eli," he lamented. "When it happened, we said that the world would know. I had a list of all the names, the contacts . . ."
Zaltzer nodded enthusiastically "Yes I know. You showed it to me. It—" he checked himself as he saw the look on Abercrombie's face. "Why, Aylmer? What happened?"
"I never told you this before. But there was a period . . . you remember when I almost put everything on hold? Oh, it's a long story. But it seemed everything was over." Abercrombie looked up. "The short answer is, I destroyed it."
"What?"
"The file with all the lists. I burned it."
For a few moments Zaltzer seemed taken aback. Then his irrepressible ebullience resurfaced as always. He waved a hand. "So . . . the announcement won't be as widespread as you planned. I still have contacts. We'll get the word around. It's hardly the Dark Ages."
"But it won't be the same," Abercrombie said. "The lists I had prepared were the work of years. Not just the regular media hacks—with respect, Eli, but you know what I mean. They covered the whole scientific establishment too: Nobel laureates, directors of the national labs, national advisors . . ." This time it was Abercrombie's turn to break off as he saw that Zaltzer wasn't listening but staring across the table suddenly with a strange, inscrutable smile. "What is it?' Abercrombie asked. "What do you find so funny?"
"You've already forgotten this afternoon," Zaltzer told him. "Your own machine. You don't have to be without your file now, Aylmer. You can go back and get it!"
The problem was, Abercrombie had no way of knowing just what days in the past, or times in the day—it was over three months ago now—he should aim for to avoid running into people and being apprehended. To compound the difficulty, the short-range tests that were all he had experimented with so far did little to help him calibrate for longer hops back, and he was unable to set an arrival time with accuracy, even if he had known which one to select. His first few attempts were cut short when he realized he had been detected—on one occasion culminating in a narrow escape when an earlier version of himself actually chased him, and he escaped only by remembering that he had used the fire extinguisher. (He never was able to work out who had thought of that.)
But he persevered, and eventually succeeded in rematerializing in the workshop at a time when the surroundings seemed empty and quiet. He still didn't know exactly when it was; and even if he had, he had no way of knowing what his earlier self had been doing on that particular day, and hence how much time he was likely to have. He needed to get out of the Annexe and to his apartment, which was where the folder was, make copies of the contents, conceal them in the cellars of the pre-demolition customs building nearby, and then get back to the machine with the original folder, and away. Planting the backup seemed a bit odd now, he had to admit, if by that time he was going to have the original in his possession; but he had resolved to adhere rigidly to his plan. He was taking no chances. The thing that would tell him what he had been doing that day would be his appointments diary, which was usually in his public office.
He came out of the workshop and padded toward the main-elevator end of the lab area. When he was about halfway there, the door at the far end of the corridor opened, and Mrs. Crawford came through. Abercrombie froze; but she gave him only a cursory look and disappeared into one of the offices. As he began moving again, she thrust her head back out. "The FedEx package that you were waiting for from Chicago has arrived," she informed him.
"It has?" He had no idea what she was talking about. "Thank you. I'll pick it up later." Mrs. Crawford's head disappeared back through the doorway. Abercrombie scuttled quickly to his office, found the diary, and retreated with it to his private office at the far end of the facility.
That had been the day when he'd gone downstairs to review Qualio and Turnel's project assignment, the diary told him. He thought back. He had spent over an hour with them in the prototype lab, he recalled, and then lunched in the cafeteria. He had enough time. But he couldn't afford to leave the machine standing in the workshop that long, inviting discovery. He went back and sent it away under automatic control to a quiet period in the middle of the night, programmed to return after ninety minutes. The alarm on his watch would warn him fifteen minutes before it was due to reappear.
He left the building via the back stairs and drove home using the keys already in his pocket. The same keys let him into his apartment, where he retrieved the contacts folder and took it to a commercial copying store to make the backup.
And that was when he discovered the master notebook containing his design calculations for the machine. It hadn't been stolen from his safe in the office at all! At some time he had taken it home to work on and inadvertently dropped it among the papers in the contacts folder. Oh well, too bad. There wasn't time to do anything about rectifying that now. He did copy the notebook's contents as well, however, and sealed them in a separate, plastic-wrapped package before leaving for the old customs building.
Down in the cellars, he located the room where he remembered finding the documents—intact now, of course, but still conveniently obscured and out-of-the-way—and went to the recesses between the piping supports. There were even some bricks lying handily close among some rubble. He placed the packages in two of the slots and covered the openings. Just as he was about to leave, he remembered something odd. When he found them, the notebook had been there, sure enough, but the other package had contained things he'd never seen before. He turned back uncertainly and stared down at the pipes. Had someone else changed the other package? Had he himself revisited this place on some future errand that he was as yet unaware of? But then his wristwatch beeped, warning him that it was time to be heading back to the machine. Shaking his head and telling himself that it would all be resolved somehow, he hurried back toward the ramp leading up from the gallery.
He almost didn't make it. By the time he emerged from the freight elevator in the Annexe building, his earlier self was already back from lunch and in the private office—putting Qualio and Turnel's test results in the safe, he remembered now. He heard his own testy "Who's there?" as he crept past the door. He ran to get out of the corridor, hearing keys being fumbled into the lock on the inside of the door behind him. He let himself into the workshop, remembering that his other self had mercifully chosen to investigate in the other direction along the corridor first. The workshop was empty. He gazed frantically at his watch, as if sheer willing could make the seconds count off faster. The door at the far end of the corridor was opening, footsteps approaching. Then came the blessed sound of the machine arriving right on time.
"Who is that in there?" his voice demanded loudly from just yards away.
Clutching the documents that he had brought from the apartment, he threw himself into the machine, stabbed at the control as he latched the gate behind him, and was gone. . . .
And so it was done—apparently without mishap. Abercrombie stood in the machine, looking out over the familiar scene of the workshop. He had the contacts file with him, which was what he had gone to get, along with the original master notebook as a bonus. He'd had thoughts of maybe returning that to its proper place in the private-office safe before returning, but time had run out on him and that had proved impossible. Now, for what it was worth, backups of both were secure in their hiding place from the past. There were still loose ends of unanswered questions dangling in his mind, but all in all everything seemed to be working itself out. He didn't pretend yet to understand precisely how.
Zaltzer had hoped to be waiting for him when he got back, but in view of the imprecision still bedeviling the process, his absence was understandable. Abercrombie climbed down from the machine and drew in several deep breaths of relief. He hadn't realized how tense the undertaking had made him. He let himself out the rear door of the workshop, went back to his private office, locked the door, and stowed the two sets of documents in the safe. That essential task accomplished, he sank down into the chair at the desk to unwind. A vague feeling of something not being quite right had been nagging from somewhere below consciousness since he came out of the machine, but just at this moment he was too exhausted to give it much attention. His mind drifted; he might even have dozed. . . .
Until the muffled sound of something being moved along the corridor outside brought him back to wakefulness. By the time he had sat up and let his head clear, the noise had gone. He rose from the chair and was about go to the door and check, when his gaze traveled across to the window and he caught the view outside. He stared in confusion for a moment, then crossed to the window to be sure. The old customs building along the waterfront was intact. . . . Yet it was supposed to have burned down three months ago. And then he realized what was wrong that he had noticed but not registered: There weren't any security people around the lab. This was no minor error. He hadn't returned to anywhere near the time he was supposed to be in. So when, exactly, was this?
Infuriatingly, nothing in his office would tell him. He came out into the corridor and headed for the front of the building, either to seek some sign in his other office or find out from Mrs. Crawford, but stopped dead the moment he entered the workshop area. The time machine, in which he had arrived only a short while ago, was gone. His mind reeled, unable to deal with what seemed an insurmountable hurdle. But as he forced himself to think, the pieces of what it had to mean came together. If the customs building was still there, this had to be before it was demolished—pretty obviously. Then this could only be the day that he had been in the public office, heard the strange noise, come back to investigate, found the machine unattended, and stolen it. The noise that aroused him had been himself moving it to the freight elevator. He thought back rapidly, trying to recreate the sequence of events. Knowing what he did, if he moved quickly enough, there would be time yet to intercede.
He ran back through to the rear stairs, started down, and then halted as a cautionary note sounded in his head. After all he had been through to get them, would it be wise to leave the notebook and contacts file here? No. Until he was a lot clearer about this whole business, he wasn't going to let them out of his sight. He ran back to the office and removed them from the safe. Then, deciding it was too late to intercept himself in the loading bay—and in any case, he didn't want a scene involving two of him in front of the service people there—-and knowing that he still had his keys, he raced instead to the front lot, where he parked his car.
He screeched out onto the waterfront boulevard without stopping and saw the truck carrying the tarp-covered time machine exiting from the rear gate a few car lengths in front of him . . . a split second before a horn blared, brakes squealed, and something hit him in the rear. And that was when the police cruiser that just had to be there turned on its siren and pulled him over. He remembered it too late, while he sat through the ritual of insurance information being exchanged, radio check of his license number and record, and the ponderous writing out of the ticket. By the time he got moving again, the truck had long since disappeared.
Nervous about the time now, instead of going around the long route to the side entrance that the truck had taken, he drove straight up to the front of the building, leaped out, and ran inside, in the process knocking over a pile of steel drums just inside the door and causing enough noise to make any thought now at concealing his presence a joke. But by this time he didn't care. All that mattered was getting to the machine.
"Wait!" Brady, interrupted, sounding alarmed. "There's more of 'em breaking in upstairs."
"It's a bust," Yellow One told him. "Get yourself out!"
Brady looked around at the boxes of gelignite, HMX, PETN, rocket-propelled grenades, and other explosives, along with the cases of detonator caps and fuses. "But the stuff . . . It's taken months," he protested.
"It's all lost anyway. What we don't need is them getting you to talk too. Get yourself out!"
Brady nodded, snapped off the phone, and pulled himself together. The fastest exit was up a service ladder to the front entrance. He emerged without encountering anyone and found a car right there with the keys left in. There was no arguing with a gift from Providence like that. He jumped in and accelerated out onto the boulevard, failing, in his haste, to wonder why, if the place had been busted, there were no other vehicles in the vicinity.
While down in the cellars, surrounded by explosives, incendiaries, and sensitive detonating devices, Professor Aylmer Arbuthnot Abercrombie started up the time machine that emitted varichron radiation. . . .
One thing that Yellow One did want from the ruins, however, if it could be retrieved, was the group cell leader's book of codes, contacts, command structure, and other information that could prove disastrous if the law-enforcement agencies got their hands on it. The next night, after the fire crews and demolition teams had left, Brady went back down to the place where the documents had been concealed. He found a package in one of the recesses beneath some old pipes as described, but then he was forced to hide when he heard someone else coming. From behind cover he watched as the same figure whom he had observed wheeling the strange machine down from the truck the previous day entered and extracted another package from one of the other recesses. The contents didn't seem to be what he wanted when he examined them with a flashlight, and he became agitated until he located yet another package, checked it, and then left taking both of them. Brady followed him back up and looked out in time to see him depart in the same car that Brady had "borrowed" the day before, just before the building went up. Brady reported all the details when he handed over the package that he had recovered.
But it turned out to be the wrong one, containing lists of names and details of media people, scientists, political figures, and others who were of no interest to the group. The stranger, therefore, must have taken the group's code and organization book. With the help of a friend in the police department, they traced the car's number from the records of stolen vehicles. It turned out to belong to a professor who worked in the university Annexe nearby.
The organization sent a couple of its bagmen into the premises to see if they might be able to uncover something further, one posing as a repairman, the other under cover of an arranged power outage, but the security arrangements they came up against were astonishingly strict for a university environment. Eventually, the leaders gave it up as a lost cause.
All of it very odd. It turned out that there hadn't been a police bust at the old warehouse that day, after all. Brady often puzzled about the professor, because he had assumed him to be the body that was found in the ruins. In his own mind he was sure there had been nobody else there. Yet there the professor was, still coming and going for months afterward. Brady decided he probably never would figure it out.