Jack L. Chalker - Downtiming the Nightside.rtf

DOWNTIMING THE NIGHT SIDE

Jack L. Chalker

To all those time travelers who came before:

H. G. Wells, Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, Robert A. Heinlein, Randall Garrett, and Fritz Leiber most notably; and also to the one among all others who inspires my plots: Niccolo Machiavelli

PROLOGUE

It was with mounting frustration that the computers and the experts who controlled them were well primed for nuclear defense, laser defense, outright invasion from space, and all the other exotic ways in which the enemy might inflict damage, yet not totally effective against the slingshot.

Somewhere a siren sounded, and soon a cacophony of electronic warning bells went off throughout the defense complex. Technicians put down whatever they were doing and scurried to their situation boards, but there was little for them to do even with danger approaching. The comput­ers could handle things much faster than they, and all they could do was watch and worry and check the status of the defense systems.

"Incoming!" somebody shouted needlessly. "Oh, my God! Look at that board!"

The main situation screen showed it now: more blips of various sizes than any of them could count, all coming in in a wide pattern. Two blips, however, were enormous.

"What the hell are they shooting now? Planets?" some­body else muttered, the awed question carrying in the sudden silence of the room, now that the warning signals had been cut off.

It was a meteor storm like they had never seen before— tens of thousands of chunks of space junk and debris with only one thing in common—all were at least large enough to survive entry into Earth's atmosphere. Nor was this a random swarm. Like the rest, it had started out around Jupiter, with the great space tugs of the enemy forming them up and shooting them around with vast energy beams the defenders could only envy, using the gravity of the big planet to whip them around and send them in a predeter­mined spread inwards to the Earth.

This group had also been particularly well placed; they would strike within a relatively small area a quarter of a million kilometers square. Small, considering the enor­mous task of grouping such shots so that they would hit the planet at all; enormous, if you had to defend that area against such a rockfall.

A few hundred well-placed missiles would have done the job, but Earth was long out of missiles for this or any other use. Still, millions of ground-based laser cannon and other such defenses would get the majority of them, but at a tremendous cost in energy. The computers were also forced to target the largest meteors with the majority of weaponry, since to allow them to hit intact would be disaster, but this had the multiple effect of breaking them up into hordes of smaller rocks, and there would not be enough weapons to spare for them and the others.

"Mostly Indian Ocean," somebody said, relieved, "but parts of East Africa are going to get creamed anyway."

In the midst of the tension, a tall, lean man with flowing blond hair watched, sighed, and shook his head. He was not very old, but his gaunt frame, slightly bent, and his drawn face, lined and worn, made him appear much older than he actually was. He turned and stalked out of the situation room, taking the elevator up five flights to the Command Headquarters level. The sentries barely gave him a glance, so well known was he on the level, and he walked up to the secretary's desk with a steady, deter­mined gait.

"I wish to see the Chairman at once," he told the secretary, who nodded and pressed a small intercom button.

"Colonel Benoni is here," the secretary said crisply.

There was a muffled response, and he turned to the tall, blond man again. "He'll see you now."

Benoni nodded and walked around the desk to a large sliding door. This time the sentries checked his full I.D. as did the scan machines, despite the fact that they knew him. The Chairman trusted no one, and even inside Benoni knew he'd be under computer-controlled defense mecha­nisms that would evaluate his every move and mood and would make their own decisions as to whether or not he was a threat to the Chairman. It wasn't that Benoni didn't mind—he just didn't give a damn.

Max Shumb, Chairman of the Leadership Council of the Democratic Motherworld, was a handsome man in his middle years, the kind of man age helped rather than hurt. He sat behind his huge, U-shaped desk looking over some papers and didn't immediately acknowledge the colonel's entrance. Benoni, however, knew just what to do, and took the comfortable chair opposite the desk and waited.

The Chairman looked up at him, nodded, and put down the papers, but he did not smile. "Well, Eric, we were lucky this time."

Benoni nodded. "But perhaps not next time, and cer­tainly not the time after that."

Shumb sighed. "You'd think they'd run out of rocks at the rate they send them here." He stared straight at the officer. "The project isn't working. They've countered you at every turn. If anything, we're slightly worse off than we were. We have to have the energy you're bleeding away, Eric."

"It won't matter. That's why you approved the project to begin with. Little by little the defenses break down. Before we began, we had an optimistic estimate that they would be able to invade within nine years at current rates. I have cost you perhaps a year, certainly no more than two. You could not shut down anyway. If they win, it's the only exit available."

Shumb did not attempt to rebut the truth. He spent too much of his time doing that as a politician. "I assume you're here for permission to make another try."

"We've run this through the computers and it looks most promising. Because it does not directly involve us, merely pushes certain period people in our direction, it might not be obvious that it is us at all. The degree of change is enormous in our favor, yet incredibly subtle. There is even the possibility that there would be no revolution, no war at all. We would be all one big, happy family—under Earth's control. And your line remains constant. It will be a far different situation, but you will still be in control."

"I'll check it against my own computers on that. Still, I hesitate. Perhaps one more major operation is all we can stand. Two at the most. This last attack is a harbinger of things to come. Next time it might be Europe, or North America, or eastern China. Sooner or later it will be."

"Run your computations. It's worth a shot. As you say, tomorrow it might be here. Surely it is better to try for it all than rule over . . . this. Is it not?"

"If it wasn't, I'd never have permitted you to do this in the first place. Still, after all this time, I am not clear about your own motives in all this."

"You know the rules. I can live as myself only in prehistory or at the reality point. I've had enough of primordial dawn, and I have no love for the Outworlders. I prefer an unsullied humanity. If I am to live here, and not under them, then you must win. That is all there is to it."

I wonder . . . . Shumb couldn't help thinking. He'd never liked nor trusted this strange man, who was of no time or place at all. Trust had never been one of the Chairman's strong points. Finally he said, "I'll run it through myself and let you know."

The colonel got up, stiffened, and saluted. "That's all I can ask, sir," he responded, then pivoted and walked out of the office. He went immediately to make the preparations and check the final calculations. He already knew full well that it would be approved, and to what strange paths it would lead, the number of lives it would change, and cost—and create. He knew, in fact, exactly where it would lead him, but he did not know what he would find there.

MAIN LINE 236.6

THE CALVERT CLIFFS, MARYLAND,

U.S.A. 

It was not an imposing structure, rather low, as nuclear power plants went, and sprawling across the tops of the great wide cliffs that were filled with the fossil remains of forgotten seas and looked down at the wide Patuxent River as it flowed towards Chesapeake Bay. The whole plant had been white once, but age and weather had taken its toll, and it was now a grimier gray than the sea gulls that continually circled and squawked around the cliffs.

Most nuclear power plants, including this one, were obsolete now, too expensive and dangerous to maintain. The people around the site, for the most part, and those throughout the state continued to believe that this hulking dinosaur, this monument to the misplaced, golden-age opti­mism of the past, supplied much of their power, but, in fact, it supplied none at all—and had not for years. And yet, so complete was the fiction that families down for a warm weekend to swim and hunt fossils still often wound up going up to the visitor's center and getting the Gas and Electric Company's spiel on the wonders and safety of nuclear energy in general and this plant in particular.

He reflected on this as he cleared the gate to the employees' parking lot and drove through the massive fence that surrounded not only the lot but the true access to the plant. He couldn't help but wonder what it was like to collect money week after week telling cheery, convincing lies to a gullible public.

The big security system had been put in ostensibly to protect the plant from anti-nuclear protesters, of which there were still legions, and also because a Naval Reserve unit had been set up on a part of the grounds to deal with nuclear power and waste. In point of fact, the whole thing was a cover so good it should not, perhaps, have amazed him that it had lasted this long and was this complete. So complete, in fact, that here he was, pulling into a parking space and preparing for a few weeks of orientation before becoming chief of security for the installation, and, as of right now, he himself hadn't the slightest idea what they really were doing here.

He knew the problems, though. Only a month earlier a crack Air Force security team had managed to get in and literally take over the place, despite all the elaborate precautions. That had cost the previous security chief his job, and when those whom the National Security Agency's computers said were best qualified for the job were given complex plans and blueprints and asked to pinpoint holes and suggest better security measures. Within the limits of security, he'd apparently done the best job. A jump to GS-17 came with it, so he'd accepted the post when it was offered even though he had no idea at the time where or what the place really was. When he'd discovered that it was barely two hours south of his current job at the NSA, he'd been delighted.

What would come today was the less than delightful prelude. Today he'd have to meet with Joe Riggs, the man he was replacing, and with Riggs' very proud staff. It would be an awkward time. He paused a moment to savor the bright, fresh June air off the water, then walked up to the unimposing door simply marked "Employees Only! Warning! Unauthorized Personnel Not Permitted Beyond This Point! Badges and I.D. Required!" That was an understatement.

He opened the unlocked door and stepped into a rela­tively small chamber that seemed to have no exit. The door closed behind him and he could hear a chunk! As special security bolts shot into place. The chamber was lit with only a small, bare light bulb, but he could see the security cameras and the speaker in the ceiling. Somewhere, perhaps in back of the speaker, would be a canister of knockout gas.

"Name, purpose, and today's password, please," came a crisp woman's voice through the speaker.

"Moosic, Ronald Carlisle, new Security Director. Aba­lone is no worse than baloney."

There was a moment's hesitation, then a section of steel wall slid back far enough for him to pass through. He stepped out of the chamber and the door slid shut again behind him. He was now in a hallway lined with heavy armor plate for six feet up from the floor, then thick security mesh from there to the high ceiling. Cut into the metal plate were three security windows, such as you might find at a drive-in bank. He went up to the first one and saw a man in a Marine uniform sitting behind three-inch thick glass staring back at him. A small drawer slid out: "Place your I.D. and security badge code in the drawer," he was instructed.

He did as ordered, then waited until the drawer opened again with a small card in it and a tiny inkpad. "Thumbprints where indicated," the bored Marine told him. Again he did as instructed. The clerk took all of the material, fed it into a computer console, and waited. After a short time, the computer flashed something to him and a tiny drawer opened. The Marine removed a badge, checked it against the thumbprints and checked the photo against the face he was seeing, then fed it back through the drawer.

He looked at the badge, similar to the one he'd used at NSA, with its holographic picture and basic information, then clipped it on. He knew that this badge had a tremen­dous amount of information encoded within its plastic structure. Computer security would read that card by laser hundreds, perhaps thousands of times as he moved through the complex. Doors would or wouldn't open, and defenses would or would not be triggered, depending on what the card said in its unique code. None of these badges ever left this building. You picked it up on the way in; you turned it in on the way out. In fact, there would be other areas requiring different badges with different codes, all premanufactured for the authorized wearer alone. Each time you turned in one badge, you picked up the next.

He walked down the rest of the corridor and found that the door at the end slid back for him. He walked through and entered a modern-looking office setup, very military but very familiar to him. He'd worked at NSA for nine years and was used to such things.

A pudgy, gray-haired man in a brown, rumpled-looking suit waited for him, then came up to him and stuck out his hand. "You're Moosic, I guess. I'm Riggs."

He took the other's hand and shook it. "Sorry we have to meet like this," he responded.

"No, you're not. Not really," Riggs responded in a casual tone, without any trace of bitterness. "Not any more than I was when I took over the same way. It's no big deal. I'll be bumped to an eighteen, push papers for two years, then retire with over thirty. Short of running for President, it's about as high as I ever expected to get anyway. Come on—I'll show you around the place."

They walked back through the central office area. Three corridors branched off the room, each of which was guarded by a very mean-looking Marine with a semiautomatic rifle. Moosic looked around and noted also the cameras and professionally concealed trap doors in the ceiling. Anyone who made it even this far would still be under constant observation by people able to take action. It was impressive, but it made the Air Force penetration even more so. As they stood near a corridor entry way, each of them inserting his gold photo I.D. into a computer and waiting for the red ones to appear in the slot at the bottom, the newcomer said as much.

"No place is totally securable," Riggs replied. "You can say they were pros with some inside information, but any enemy trying the same thing will have those advan­tages as well. The big hole in the end was the centralized control of security within this installation, as I'm sure you know. If you got in, you could get out."

Moosic nodded. "That's the first priority now. Central control will have a permanent override elsewhere, con­nected directly to this place. We received funding for it." He didn't mention that it would take ten weeks to install even the basics, six months before it could be fully tested and operational. Riggs no longer had a need to know that sort of thing.

They got their red tags and went on down the corridor. "This place is as bad as Fort Meade," the newcomer remarked as they passed Marine after Marine, computer check and trap after computer check and trap. "Maybe it's about time you told me what we do here."

Riggs chuckled. "They didn't tell you, huh? Well, it wouldn't matter. Nobody would believe it anyway, not even if we let the Washington Post in and they made it a page-one cover story. You know this plant doesn't gener­ate any public electricity?"

Moosic nodded. "I figured that out from the problem they handed me and a close look at the place. But it's in full operation."

"Oh, yeah. More than ever. Close to a hundred percent capacity. It takes one hell of a lot of juice to send people back in time."

Ron Moosic stopped dead. "To . . . what?"

Riggs stopped, turned, and looked highly amused. Moosic had the uneasy feeling he was having his leg pulled. "Come on—seriously."

"Oh, I'm serious. I just get a kick out of seeing anybody's face when I tell 'em that. Come on down to the lab levels and I'll see if anybody's free enough to show you the works."

*       *       *

Dr. Aaron Silverberg was a big bear of a man with a wild lion's mane of snow-white hair and penetrating black eyes. He was not only physically imposing; he had that deep-down egotism that assumed that everybody he met had not only heard of him but was also awestruck at his very presence. Ron Moosic, of course, had never heard of him before in his life.

"To tell you how we happened on it would take far too long," the chief scientist told him. "It was the usual— one of those accidents that happened when some folks were doing something totally unrelated. Basically, a few odd random particles in the big accelerator out west consis­tently arrived before they left when you did things just so. Only a few quadrillionths of a second, of course, but it shouldn't have been possible at all. The first thought was that something had finally broken the speed limit—the speed of light. Later, using various shieldings, we found that light had nothing at all to do with it. The damned things arrived before they left, that's all. Knocked causal­ity into a cocked hat all at once. For those of us who knew about it, it was more gut-wrenching than if God wearing a long beard and flowing robes had parted the heavens in front of us."

Over the next half-hour Moosic spent a good deal of time looking at evidence of trips back in time, mostly photographs and small objects. There were already a huge number of more elaborate things—a tape of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, several of tavern conversations between Franklin and Jefferson as well as many others of the founding fathers, and others recording personages who'd lived even earlier. The earliest was an eavesdropped argu­ment between an incensed Christopher Columbus and the refitter of the Santa Maria, or so he was assured. He spoke no Spanish, let alone fifteenth-century Aragonese with a thick, equally archaic Italian accent.

"Funny," Silverberg commented. "Nobody ever plays Franklin with a New England accent, although he came from Boston, not Philadelphia, and nobody ever gave Jefferson that hill country twang he really has. Had. Whatever. Napoleon had a silly voice and never lost his Corsican accent. If they'd had television back then, he'd never have made it in politics."

Moosic just shook his head in wonder, still not quite believing all this. "I find it all impossible to accept. What was was, that's all. You can't recapture a moment that's past."

"And so I was raised to believe. As the poor two-dimensional creature in Abbott's Flatland could not accept depth, so we cannot accept but a single perspective of time. In a way, it's like motion. We know we're in motion because of a lot of phenomena and reference points. We move in relation to something else. Yet the Earth is now turning at around twenty-five thousand miles per hour and we can't feel it. It's going around the sun at an even greater speed, and we can't feel or sense that, either. The sun, in turn, is going around the galactic center, and so on. Since all that is around us, including us, is moving at the same speed and in the same way, we cannot sense that motion and speed relative to us. Since we are going for­ward in time, all of us at the same rate and everything else around, we cannot really relate to time in any way except as the progress of one moment to the next. But it's all there—the past is forever. We are immortal, Mr. Moosic. We exist forever frozen in our past moments."

"But time is . . . immutable."

"Oh, so? Even before we knew that it was not so. Einstein showed it. Time is relative to mass and velocity. The closer you approach the speed of light, the slower your time is relative to the universe. Time also gives way around areas of heavy gravity—suns, to a small extent, and black holes to an enormous extent. No, it's not the fact that time is malleable that is the stunner. Apply enough power, it seems, and time will finally give. Rather, the shock is that time exists as a continuum, a series of events running in a continous stream from the Big Bang all the way to the future. How far we don't know—we can't figure out how to go into the future relative to our own time. It may be possible that far future scientists can go past today, but we cannot. But the past record is there, and it is not merely a record: it's a reality. Now you under­stand the need for security."

He nodded, stunned. "You could send an army back and have it pop up out of nowhere."

"Bah! You're hopeless! Mr. Moosic, you will never send an army back in time. We need the entire capacity of this power plant, which is capable of supplying the energy needs of roughly ten million people, just to send four people back a century, and the further back you go, the more power is required. To get one human being back to 1445 would require our total output. That and to sustain him there, anyway, for any period of time. Beyond that the energy requirements get so enormous that we've esti­mated that just to send one person back to the first century A.D. would require every single bit of power this nation could generate for three solid weeks."

"But for only, say, a week back? Surely—"

"No, no. It's impossible. Physics is still physics and natural law is still natural law. Just as nothing is permitted past the speed of light, no one is permitted to coexist at any point in the past where he already exists. It just won't do it. In fact, it won't do it within a decade of your birth date. Why we haven't any idea."

He thought about it, trying to accept it at least for argument's sake. "A decade. Then you could go back and live past the time you were born."

"No. Not exactly, that is. You could go back, yes, but by that time you wouldn't be you anymore. Nature does resist tampering. We made that discovery the first time out. You're back there, and you don't fit. Time then makes you fit. It is far easier and more efficient to integrate you into that present you're now in than it is to change all time. It creates a curious niche for you. It adjusts a very small thing in what we call the time frame so that you were born and raised there. In a way, it's very handy. Go back to fifteenth-century France and you'll find yourself thinking in the local language and dialect and generally knowing your way around. Only the massive energy link, a lifeline of sorts, between here and there keeps you from being completely absorbed. Unfortunately, the longer you are there, the more energy is required to sustain you. It's in some way related to the subject's age, although we haven't gotten the exact ratio. It requires more energy to send an older person back than a younger. Someone up to about the age of fifty we can generally sustain back there for the number of time-frame days equal to half his age. How old are you?"

"Forty-one," he told the scientist.

"Yes, so we could safely send you back for a period of twenty days with an adequate safety margin. Over fifty, it accelerates like mad. It's simply not safe."

"What happens, then, if you overstay your welcome? Don't come back within that margin?"

"Then the energy required to retrieve you would exceed our capacity. The line would break. You would literally be integrated into that past time as that created person, eventually with no memories or traces that you were not native to that time and place. And if that was, say, 1820, we could not later rescue you. You could not go forward of your own present—1820—and even if there was a way, we would retrieve someone else, not you. Someone, incidentally, invariably minor and unlikely to change any events. We learned our lesson the hard way."

"You've lost someone, then?"

He nodded, "An expert in Renaissance history and culture, who was also a valuable agent when he attended East European conferences, which is why he was one of the few scholars we allowed to downtime personally. He was forty-six when he went back the first time, and he stayed two weeks. Later, he needed a follow-up, so we sent him back again—and lost him. The clock, we learned, starts when you arrive the first time, and it does not reset if you return again. He, and we, assumed at the time that he had two weeks a trip. He didn't. So he's there now, for all time, a meek, mild Franciscan monk in a monastery in northern Italy, a pudgy little Italian native of the time. To give you a final idea of how absolute absorption is, Dr. Small was also black—in our time."

Ron Moosic whistled. "So then how do you get the recordings and pictures?"

"They tend to have a stronger sense of shape and substance, being inanimate. We've discovered that record­ers and the like can be retained for almost the safety period. Weapons, on the other hand, tend to be absorbed into period weapons rather quickly. One supposes that a battery-powered recorder has a minimal chance of affect­ing history, while a new weapon or something else of that sort could do a great deal o...