He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. So there was no real chance at all. None. Because they had control of just one not-yet-taken action, all depended on him being a good boy and doing whatever they ordered. He and his other selves, except Alfie, and his children, his whole experience in the Safe Zone— everything wiped out, like it had never been. And they could leave Dawn in the Safe Zone, as she’d said, for weeks, months, or years. And all they had to do to wipe it all out was not to rescue her at all. Just shut down this complex and move to a better one. That’s all.
Round and round went time, looping and whirling and doubling back into itself. And yet, in the end, there were no paradoxes, only alternatives. All time, up to the leading edge, was the sum of what had gone before. But it didn’t matter what that sum added up to—as long as it all added up. The mathematics gave order to chaos, but in that mathematics was the master mathematician who gave the orders. Human beings, given their orders, might be driven insane by the complexity of it all, but they had to obey of die.
The exterior of the base looked quite different, because it was. When the attack had come, they’d been ready for it, but the computer had made the decision not to defend but rather to leave. Maintaining the loop had taken precedence over the inconvenience of moving the complex. And moving the complex had taken every single ounce of power the computer and its mysterious power source could command, hence the cessation of function in the belt. That was why the impression in the ground ten years after the attack had been so regular. Rubble, or even disintegration, would not have been so neat as to leave that enormous rectangle. The thing had simply moved itself through time and space, to a secondary preselected time and place in the Safe Zone. It was a demonstration of the amount of power that the Outworlders had at their command—and that they were denying Earth.
All the belts had, in fact, been repowered within a year of relative time, but by that time he and Dawn had lost theirs, having pretty well tossed it away as a useless reminder of a no longer relevant past.
How had the computer been so certain that Joseph or somebody would find it? Or was he thinking too linearly while the computer thought only of wholes? If one event, his salvation in London, had already proceeded its cause, a cause that had not yet occurred; then, perhaps all events in the loop did the same. Was he, then, only acting out a preordained future that had already occurred and could actually be changed only by his failure to follow orders?
And, if so, did the mathematics require much else, or did, in fact, everything done have to be undone? He wasn’t sure, but it didn’t really matter. Not only was he at the mercy of this crazy computer, but so were a lot of other folks he cared about.
They gave him a couple of weeks with physical therapy and some medical treatment—and lots of rest—just to let him sort it out. It didn’t matter to them how long he took; the sequence was as good if initiated late as it was if inititated early. No matter how ill he was, though, he couldn’t help but be terribly depressed by what he was being forced to do. For the first time in his life, he had people he loved, and with all the pain and all the problems, the years on the island had been among the happiest in his whole life. That, and they, were now denied him, but still dependent on him.
He spent what time he had trying to learn all he could about the Outworlders, their squad, and the war they had fought. He was not sure he liked what he found, and he certainly was less sure of the motivation.
Their entire picture of the Earthsiders, as the Outworlders called the masses who remained on the planet, was tremendously skewed in the negative, a portrait of a suffering and miserable planet of horror under a regime that made Hitler look like the head of the Boy Scouts. Outworlders, on the other hand, were romantic, democratic, and all things wonderful, the true future of the human race. He doubted if it was that simple, and he found that many of the squad agreed with him about that. The difference between them and himself was that he wanted to know the truth; they considered the truth irrelevant, which, in a way, it was.
It wasn’t, as Herb explained, that they felt that they were on the side of the good guys against the bad, but rather that they were on one of two bad sides. One of them had to win, and all they could do was their jobs and be thankful that they neither had to live with or pay the consequences of the win.
The evidence that the time war was more elaborate was also clear, and it was plain that the Outworlders played the game better. The computer that ran the war was not so much the guardian of “natural” reality as public relations liked it to be, either. The end result of history to the leading edge was littered with improbabilities in the extreme. Clearly, some of those had been tipped in the Outworlders’ favor. The best evidence of this was his discovery that, unlike the primitive time suit he’d started out with, the computer could understand enough variables to place a time traveler in a specific place at a specific time and often in a specific role. That meant that members of the squad were not at the mercies of time, but truly its masters.
Downtiming the night side was truly a science, not an art, and the mathematics was unthinkably precise.
That did, however, give him a little encouragement when he met with Doc for another treatment for his ills.
“If I decided now to go through with this trip-point business, it seems to me that this thing is precise enough to practically make me who I want.”
“It’s not that exact, and there are lots of limitations, but what did you have in mind?” she asked him.
“Tell me—can it know if I exist in the present as it’s currently constituted?”
“We thought of that already. You did exist, even in the revised future, but you didn’t live long. You were premature, you know, and it was touch-and-go for a while even on the main line. Conditions are changed just slightly enough on that level in the new main line that you didn’t make it. That’s pretty common for a wave. Of course, it works out. Some others who originally didn’t make it are alive because of the wave.”
He nodded. “But it might be easiest if I made it again, wouldn’t it? Is that possible?”
She considered it. “It would be very tricky. I don’t know if you can ever manipulate things to the degree to be a specific individual, particularly one that was real. Short of our intervening to save the baby, I would say no. And if the baby were saved, you would exist there and so it wouldn’t be possible. I’d say forget it. Now, if you wanted to be a security man from Pennsylvania, that we might work out.”
In other words, they could be exact enough to put him in the time project at the right time and place—but as someone else, and not under the same conditions. He might be any of the security staff.
“That’s close enough,” he told her. “Let’s do it and get this show moving. The sooner it’s over, the sooner everyone can take up their lives and the sooner I can be out of this madhouse.”
“I’ll get a belt now if you like.”
He nodded, but was surprised. “You can do it just like that?”
“Well, either the computer knows it already or it’s overheard us and is now doing the work. Something as tough as what you want might take it all of half a second to completely predetermine—it’s that difficult.”