"He wants Greighton to build him a fleet of time ma-chines to invade the past. He calls it a 'preemptive strike' against the future. He actually plans to take over the world."
Joe chuckled mirthlessly. "That ruthless son of a bitch!"
"There's nothing funny about this! He's planning germ warfare. And our present—it'll cease to exist!"
"None of that's going to happen," said Joe.
"How can you be so sure?"
"I'm an engineer, or at least I was one. I've spent a lot more time with Green's new toy than he has. Those knobs and switches on the control panel look ordinary because they're made for human fingers, and people's fingers haven't changed. What's beneath them, the control panel itself, is a whole different story. It's engineered on the atomic level. It doesn't even use electricity, at least not the way we understand it. And that's just the control panel. Everything about that machine is completely over our heads. Who knows how many generations it took to discover its technology. No one's going to copy it."
"He still has this machine," Rick countered.
"Yeah, but it only goes to two destinations—this place and our own time."
"That doesn't make sense."
"I know you love this godforsaken place," said Joe, "but do you really think Green would take Greighton here if he had a choice?"
"You've lost me," said Rick
"Look," said Joe, "why don't you turn off that gun, and I'll explain the whole thing." Joe reached into his pocket and Rick quickly pointed the gun at him. Joe very slowly pulled out his flask.
"An-other night like this, and I'll run out before we leave." He unscrewed the top and held out the flask to Rick. "Want some?"
"No."
Joe took a sip from the flask, then put it away. "Come on, the gun belongs in the plane. We can talk there."
Rick hesitated before he turned off the gun. When he finally did, a great feeling of relief came over him. Word-lessly, he began to walk to the plane. Soon, he and Joe were sitting inside it, watching the night sky through its crystal fuselage.
Joe broke the silence. "Green is a man with connec-tions. Some are legitimate, most aren't. He gets his hooks into people, and then he uses them. He got me several years ago." Joe sighed. "It's a long, sad story. Anyway, he got connected with Sam somehow. That's what we called the guy with the time machine. I don't know his real name, probably something unpronounceable. He was an arrogant asshole and weird-looking, too—tall, baby-faced. Dressed like some guy from India. Wore an old-fashioned turban and had one of those dots on his forehead. He may have looked like a foreigner, but he spoke perfect English.
"Sam sought Green out, at least that's my impression. He had some scheme going, and he needed a native to carry it out. I never found out what the deal was about. Whatever it was, it was definitely illegal in the future. Sam was nervous as hell about getting caught in the twenty-first century. That's how I got involved. Sam wanted to do all the planning here."
"Why?" asked Rick.
"Because it was safe."
"Safe?"
"Manned time travel is banned in Sam's era, he wanted to go to someplace private."
"Then why go somewhere built by people from the fu-ture?"
"I don't think he had a lot of choices. From the little I know about it, navigating through time is mind-bogglingly complicated. I suspect this was one of the few places.he knew how to reach."
"I still don't understand why it would be safe."
"Sam never told me why. I can only speculate. Maybe it's off-limits. Maybe it no longer exists in the future. That seems more likely."
"Now you've really lost me."
"Time travel becomes illegal when people figure out that traveling downwhen can alter their own present. Af-ter that discovery, time exploration is only done covertly by unmanned probes. Sam knew visiting our time would change history, and I suspect that was the point. It's likely he also altered events to erase knowledge of this place in the future."
"If he did that," said Rick, "how could he know it still exists?"
"If Sam initiated the change, he'd be unaffected by it. What you do in the past only affects the future. He wouldn't be in the future when the change occurred."
"That's what Green told Greighton," said Rick. "That they could change the future with impunity. If that's true, what did Sam have to worry about? He could wipe his pursuers out of existence."
"I imagine a change of that magnitude would not be easy to pull off. Also, he'd have to worry about betraying his presence. Cause and effect gets very tricky in time travel. As soon as Sam appeared in our time, his presence made changes that could be detected in the future. All the clues of a person's whereabouts—hotel records, com-munications logs, all kinds of stuff—would instantly ap-pear upwhen."
"It would be like looking for a specific grain of sand on a beach," scoffed Rick.
"These people discovered time travel, Rick. Who knows what they're capable of? Sam did, and he was seriously worried about it. I imagine Greighton's unex-plained two-week absence will be a red flag to them."
"Two-week absence!" said Rick. "I was told this trip would take up only a few seconds in our own time."
"It's easy to see why Green wanted you to believe that, but it's not true. Something Sam called 'temporal link-age' prevents that."
"Temporal linkage? What's that?"
"It's really pretty simple," said Joe. "Imagine a target range inside a moving airplane where I've locked my gun on the bull's eye so I can hit it every time. I can do this because the gun and the target are moving together, linked by the aisle of the airplane. A temporal linkage works the same way, except the target and the gun are moving through time, not space. Sam set up the link to simplify navigating the time machine. Our own time and this time seem like fixed coordinates only because there's an inflexible connection between them. In practical terms, it means that if I spend three days in the past and want to return to my own time, I can only return to a time three days after I left. It works the same in reverse."
"Crap! I'll miss two exams!"
"Too bad. The two weeks we spend here will also pass in the twenty-first century. They're gone. Once a link's established, it determines which destinations are acces-sible."
"We're getting side tracked," said Rick. "How do you know all this? What's your involvement?"
"That's easy to explain," said Joe. "Green and Sam didn't trust each other. Green refused to come here unless he had his own pilot. I got mixed up in this because I was the guy Sam trained."
"So he trusted you."
"Hardly. I pieced together most of what I know from things he let slip. If he hadn't thought I was as dumb as a dog, he might have been more guarded. As far as trust-ing me—he taught me as little as possible. I only learned how to shuttle between Montana Isle and our time. Those are the only coordinates I have."
"Green spoke about 'gaps' in his knowledge'," said Rick. "That's what he must have meant."
"Fat chance of filling them," said Joe. "Ignorance sees easy solutions for all problems. Sam thought he could control Green by keeping him in the dark. In doing so, he underestimated Green's capacity for self-delusion. A fatal error, I suspect."
"You mean ..."
"Green decided Sam was unnecessary. One day Sam was gone and the time machine was still there," said Joe. "You do the math."
"And you work for him," said Rick with disgust.
"Yeah, I do," said Joe with resignation. "But not for long. Soon, I'll be free of him. Sam's people will see to that."
"I thought their hands were tied, that's what Green said."
"That's his ignorance talking. They'll get him, all right. They know they have to. That's why Sam was so anxious to hide out here. Our own time is much more accessible to them. Even as we speak, they're scanning history for clues . . . sending probes . . . employing tech-nologies we can't even imagine ... and on top of all that, they have time. They can take centuries to track down Green, then show up the instant he returns to our time."