Chung Lind was thumbing through some book or other on one of the couches. He looked up, nodded, and said, “You know something? You look like hell.”
TRIP POINT
“Moosic, you’re a mess,” Doc told him. “How long were you downtime, anyway?”
“Hard to say,” he replied. “Eleven, maybe twelve years.”
She nodded. “And you aged twenty-five. The only way I can explain the results of these tests is that everything came along gradually and you became inured to it all. You’ve got kidney problems, four kinds of internal parasites, several ill-healed breaks too far gone for much correction, and that’s only for starters. You had eye problems?”
“Some,” he admitted. “Not as much as Dawn has.”
“Well, you probably had slightly better eyes to begin with. The radiation levels are different back here than in the period when humans evolved. It’s so minor for a day or so that we don’t bother about it, and your body can self-correct to a degree, but you had a dozen years of straight exposure.”
“The kids—they were born in that environment!”
“I wouldn’t worry so much about them. They’re probably better protected than you, and they’re young. Whatever their problems are, we can certainly correct them. I can’t say about Dawn, but she’s a lot younger than you. I can say, with some certainty, that your vision will continue to deteriorate and you would have been stone-cold blind in another year back there. Here you maybe have three or four years, but I wouldn’t worry about it. The cancer will get you first.”
He swallowed hard. “You mean—that’s it? I’m going to die?” She seemed mighty unconcerned about the news.
“Not necessarily. Or, rather, yes and no. It’s usually accidental, but, if it’s carefully planned and timed, I think we can work it out. It’ll take some guts, though, on your part.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Going past a trip point, of course. Be someone else. Someone younger and healthier.”
That idea disturbed him almost as much as the medical news. “Be… someone else. That’s like committing suicide, isn’t it?”
She stared at him. “Do I look dead?”
“No, no, of course not, but—O.K., you’ve all gone through it, but you said yourself it was mostly accidental. It’s something else to talk about it cold-bloodedly instead of just letting it happen.”
“Nevertheless, it’s what you’ll have to do. It’s not so bad. Everyone I ever was is still in here,” she told him, pointing to her head. “You don’t really lose anything, unless you make the mistake of getting assimilated. That’s a close thing with trip points. We’re constantly monitored by our computers to make sure we don’t make an unintentional jump into someplace that could get us.” She sighed. “Look, it would have happened to you anyway, you know, if you’d joined us. It was inevitable.”
“But Dawn and the children…”
“Are no problem at all. This is time, remember? Safe Zone time. No assimilation, no trip points. We’ll go get them, and before they have had time enough to realize you’re gone. There’s no rush. None of us have been to the time frame you were in before, so there’s no relative time problem. Don’t think of them stranded there while you’re here. We could do it tomorrow, or next week, or next year, and we’d still get there ten seconds after you left.”
He sighed. “You’re right, of course. That’s not what I’m really worried about, although I admit it’s tough not to think of time passing there as it is here. It’s really—well, me. No matter what, I might see them again, but they’ll never see me.”
She had no answer for that.
“Look,” he said, “why not go get them now—before? I mean, one last time?”
She shook her head sadly. “I understand, but it’s not possible. First of all, it’d be sort of cruel, like facing them one last time so they know you’re dying. Swift and clean is best. It hurts, but it’s not as prolonged. But even if you did want it anyway…”
“I do. Very much.”
“…It wouldn’t matter,” she continued. “Ron, this is hard to say and even harder to explain, but you’re caught up in and committed to a loop.”
“A what?”
“A loop. It’s not your fault—you had no say in it—and it’s unfair, but it’s the due bill the Outworlders are rendering.”
“What do you mean? Due bill for what?”
“Saving your life. Time always takes the shortest method to resolve people like us. If we’d left you as Alfie Jenkins, you would have died, either in prison or at the hands of a fanatic or a mob. I’m afraid you would have been left there if Sandoval hadn’t been able to jump back. But he was, and our computer monitored it and monitored the consequences of the actions, particularly the early death of Marx. It ordered us to save you. In so doing, it initiated a loop—a string of effects stemming from that cause. A loop is initiated backwards. The last action comes first. This causes a backwash, as it were. Everything leading to that action is assumed by time to have already occurred. Saving you was the last action of the loop. You are now living the events leading up to that, under our management.”
“Wait a minute! Slow down! I’ve been away a long time, and this gets dizzier and dizzier!”
“It’s easiest to put it this way. Dawn appeared to Alfie and allowed him the means to escape. He did—and so you did, and continued to live. But, you see, Ron—Dawn hasn’t gone forward in time and saved Alfie yet. Didn’t she tell you?”
He shook his head wonderingly. “No, no. And I think I can see why. No wonder she was so upset that first time we met here. Time is insanity, she said.”
“No, it’s not insanity, it’s good mathematics. What it is is extremely complex. As complex as elementary particle physics or the biochemistry of viruses or any other complex science. What we’re doing was discovered by trial and error. It’s all been recorded in the ultimate mathematician, the computer here that is so complex and so advanced it is, in fact, an artificial intelligence of a high order. It’s capable of viewing the time stream, seeing any disruption, and postulating the results from that disruption, it’s equally capable of looking at those results and seeing how it would be best to minimize or even erase those disruptions. Time is on the Outworlders’ side in the conventional sense. If things just go the way they naturally would, they will win. So we are the guardians of time. A major disruption has taken place. You were not the cause of that disruption, but you are the key to minimizing or erasing it.”
“Me? How? And why me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Sometimes it does things, or tells us to do things, that we don’t understand at all. Later on, we’re able to see how a result was obtained. Sometimes it seems insane that we did it our way, or far chancier to do it our way, than some other, but it always has its reasons and it generally works. It seems easier if a couple of us were just sent forward to that square to neutralize dear Eric and take Sandoval out, but that’s not the way this one is being played out. Why you? Because you are a direct participant in the original action. The fewer outside elements introduced, the better the result. Why? Again, I don’t know. It just is. And until this is played out and you’re a free person again, you must play the hand it deals you.”
He considered that. “Why? What if I don’t?”
“You forget, there are alternatives at our disposal, just not alternatives as good as the one it’s using, in its opinion. I told you that Dawn has not yet gone forward to save Alfie Jenkins. If she does not do so, and the computer has real control over that, the loop will be broken. You will die as Alfie Jenkins. None of the rest of this will ever have happened. The children will not exist. You will not exist.”