“Riggs wouldn’t do it, maybe. I would. And I already have the presidential authority. I don’t know those people down there, so it’s not as hard for me. Sort of like a bomber pilot who never sees who his bombs land on. I do know we were closing down this place and moving to a better one with more power, so we don’t lose there. Nobody down there is irreplaceable, either.” He checked the monitors and saw the drawn faces and nervous glances among the others there. He had drained them of their self-confidence, and that was a victory. Now it was time to drop a little sugar in the vinegar.
“Still, there’s no reason for any more people to get killed than already have been,” he went on. “I can wait a while. And while I wait, maybe you can explain to me why you went to all this trouble to seal yourself in with no exit.”
“There’s an exit,” Sandoval came back, sounding a little more confident now. “You know it and I know it. You can blow us up, yes, but you cannot cut our power, not within the next twelve hours. If you attempt to break in or pour some agent through the air system, I assure you all down here will be dead. We are committed to victory or death, Moo-sic. We all live, or we all die. The hostages are simply a wall between you and us. We intend to bargain. I suggest you call Admiral Jeeter and tell him to check his mail today. When you have done so, we will talk again.”
Jeeter was the current head of NSA. Ordinarily, the man would be impossible for someone on Moosic’s level to reach, but he had a suspicion that today the call would be put right through.
He was right, at least as far as the admiral’s executive secretary. When the conversation was relayed, the secretary, himself a Marine colonel, instituted a frantic search for everything that had come in addressed to the admiral. It took very little time, surprisingly, to find it. It had been delivered by express mail.
Within another ten minutes, the admiral himself was on the phone. “It’s a massive file,” he told Moosic. “Still, it’s only parts of things. Enough. It’s selections from almost every major research paper relating to the project. It’s almost inconceivable that we could be penetrated to this degree.”
“Is it just the files?”
“No, there’s a note. It points out that these are merely photostats and that they are one among hundreds of sets. They assure me that none of them have been sent anywhere yet, but that they will be mailed to just about every newspaper and foreign government if we don’t give in to their demands. Even if it’s no more than this, it’ll blow the whole thing wide open!”
“I assume you’ll try the trackdown of the accomplices. In the meantime, what do you want me to do here?”
“Keep this line open. I’ll go downstairs and patch in to where I can see and hear everything in the lab. We’ll hear what they want; then it’ll be up to the President and the NSC whether or not we give it to ’em.”
Moosic nodded to himself, sighed, and turned back to the monitor board and opened communication. He wouldn’t wait for the admiral—whatever he said and did was already being recorded, and he knew that there would be a lot of calls for the old boy to make before he made it down to a situation room.
“So our little letter was received?” Sandoval said smugly. “I assume they do not like it much.”
“You know they don’t. But we can’t afford to believe you haven’t already mailed them or that you might not just let us know where most of them are while sending one or two elsewhere to do the most damage.”
“To whom would I send it through the back door? Russia? Czarist pigs masquerading as Communist liberators! China? Half of China doesn’t even have the electricity to run its villages, let alone power this. No, my offer is genuine. You will not be able to stop it from being made public. Public, not secret. But if we get what we want, you will receive all the copies—every one. This I swear on my mother’s grave.”
Ron Moosic sighed, glad it wasn’t his choice. He didn’t believe the oily revolutionary, but if the alternative was taking a chance he was being honest for once or just letting it all come out—which would be the best chance?
“Your demands aren’t for me to decide, as you must know, but you tell ’em to me and they’ll also be reaching the ones who do decide,” he told the revolutionaries below.
“We have looked in the chamber and found three time suits. Dr. Cline has told us that there are but four, and one is in use. Very well. We will need to use them. I am told that sending three back will strain things, but that two will be no problem. The codes will be given. We will go back, while my associates here make certain you do not break in and cut our cords, as it were. However, once back there, you still will not know where the hundreds of other copies are. Only I know that. I will return in ten days and tell you. I will have no choice—I must return here or cease to exist. If I do not tell you within fourteen days from nine o’clock this morning, all of them will be sent.”
He thought about it. “Then you don’t go. You could have anything at all happen to you back there, stuff way beyond our control.”
“It could,” he admitted, “but I go or no deal. You will have to take some chances. If you press that button and blow us up, some cover story will have to hit the papers, causing the material to be sent immediately. We have your bosses by the balls. Moo-sic. And they know it.”
The bosses knew it. It was a heavy decision, and the debate was not yet over, but clearly they were in the mood for a deal if one could be struck. Security, in particular, argued for it, confident that they could find and plug the leak, and equally confident that there was very little the two could really do downtime. The military had the opposite opinion, wondering if such a highly planned and thought-out infiltration could be so easily dismissed. Crazy radicals might be sent back with no real risk, but these people were extremely well-prepared. Whatever change they were going to attempt to make, it was argued, had already been computer-tested and found to have a high probability of success.
Most of the hostages had been hauled into a central office complex early in the attack, and most were now awakening to bad headaches and the sight of Stillman’s and Bettancourt’s submachine guns pointing at them.
Moosic noted that Riggs had not returned and that everyone now was deferring to him. He hoped the security man was working on the break-in and not strung up someplace.
“All right, boys and girls, they’re willing to listen,” he told them, keeping the calm tone of someone in control at all times. In truth, he hadn’t had any time to really think about his position, but he was still more than a little scared at the potential down there. He honestly didn’t know if he had the guts to press that button if it came to that—but the invaders and his bosses thought he would, and for now that would do. “They want to know exactly when and where you want to go.”
“London, England; September 20, 1875,” Sandoval responded.
Moosic frowned. Not only was this the first indication that one could travel in space while traveling in time; it was also a totally puzzling combination. Why there at that particular date?
The National Security Agency had the finest and most complex computers the world had known up to that time, and they came up with a lot of small things and even some major figures in and around that time and place, but nothing that would significantly alter the time-line, particularly when correlated with the known ideology and goals of the radicals. In fact, man and machine could find only one correlation that made any sense at all.
“On September 20, 1875,” the admiral told him, “Karl Marx arrived back at his home in London from a mineral bath treatment at Karlsbad. Unless they’re so convoluted we can’t follow their thought processes, it’s the only event on record that fits.”