Oddly, he looked a little like Robert Redford, my Hollywood heartthrob. If Redford had been a heavy drinker weighed down by fifteen years of quiet despair and burdened with an unfortunate way of holding his mouth and a pair of slightly misfocused eyes straddling a nose that leaned to the left ... if Redford had been a rummy and a loser, he'd have been Bill Smith.
It was as if two people had built a model using identical parts, but one had followed the instructions and the other had just bashed it together and left glue oozing from the cracks.
I resumed.
"Smith's actions following the last of the blank spots are crucial. We have established that he entered the hangar containing the wrecked airplanes forty-eight hours after the crash itself.
When he emerges, he has come unstuck from the time stream: I let that sequence unfold in the tank. I was weary of talking.
We saw him come out, but he was no longer the sharp, perfect little model of a man he had been when he went in. He was fuzzy around the edges. He was like a badly focused film, a vidscreen tuned incorrectly, or, more to the point, a photographic quintuple-exposure.
"We have identified five distinct main lines of action from this departure point -- or cusp, if you will. In two of them he emerges from the hangar with the weapon -- at least we think he does. He's very hard to see. In one of those two, the weapon is not sufficient as a disruptive force in his life. He eventually reenters his predestined lifeline. In the other, finding the weapon changes his life forever, with consequences for us I need not detail.
"In three other scenarios he does not have the weapon when he comes out. In two of those, he once more reintegrates into the path of history. But again, in the fifth and last, he departs radically."
Even though he does not have the stunner," Peter Phoenix said. "That's right. We don't know why."
"Something happened to him in there," Yokohama said.
"Yes. Naturally, we tried to find out what it was, but since the event happened during a period of temporal censorship we're unlikely to ever know." I was assuming they didn't need that phenomenon explained to them, but perhaps a few more words about it are in order, since I was now bracing to hit them with my plan, and it hinged on the laws of censorship.
There is absolute temporal censorship, and there is the censorship of proximity. The presence of the Gate is the best example of the first; when it is in operation, when it has actually appeared at a particular time, we can neither see nor go anywhere in that time ever again.
The Proximity Effect is a bit different. My recent trip back to 1983 New York is a good example. The Gate appeared, I zapped Mary Sondergard back through it, and it vanished. It didn't reenter 1983 until the next day. But for almost twenty-four hours I had been living in the past. l became a sort of twonky. If I tried to look into those twenty-four hours in New York, I'd see nothing but static; f was a disruptive factor in the timestream. An inanimate twonky did the same thing, but much less so.
You can't meet yourself. As far as we know, that's an absolutely inflexible rule of time-
traveling. It extends even to seeing yourself, and further, to someone else seeing you and giving you a report. Thus, Martin Coventry could not look into that motel room where I spent the night and see anything but static, nor could anyone from my time. That area was sealed to us.
In fact, my presence in that room had created a zone of censorship that took in most of the Eastern Seaboard. We could still scan in California during that night; but we'd have no luck seeing what had been happening in Baltimore.
For much the same reason, we could no longer follow Smith very accurately after he got to California to begin his investigation -- and that's what my argument to the Council would be based around. In addition to the windows of absolute censorship that told us when the Gate would be used -- might be used -- there was a great deal of proximity effect to be seen.
This probably meant that one of us had been involved in the events in the hangar. It meant, to Coventry and me, anyway, that somebody from our time was going to be moving around in 1983, with the result that temporal censorship was preventing us from learning anything that could be useful in planning what we would do -- had done.
If you don't understand that, take fifty aspirin and call me in the morning.
"I take it you are in favor of a mission to repair this situation," Phoenix said, anticipating me.
"Yes, I am. For two reasons. If we do nothing, the cumulative effects of this thing are going to work their way up the timeline. I believe I was told the rate of approach of this ... one of the engineers called it a "timequake" ... is on the order of two hundred years per hour.
If you can make sense out of a figure like that. I -- "
"We are familiar with the concept," Teheran chided me. "When the timequake arrives here where the disturbance originated, the readjustment in reality will take place all up and down the timeline."
"And we'll all be edited out of it," I finished for him. "Us, and all the effects of our work.
A hundred thousand rescued humans will reappear on falling airplanes, in sinking ships and exploding factories and on battlefields and in the bottom of mineshafts. The Gate Project will be over. I don't suppose it will matter to us since we won't be around to witness it. We'll be never-born."
"There are other theories," The Nameless One said.
"I'm aware of that. Yet in five hundred years of snatch operations no one has suggested we rely on any of them. A few hours ago I let a girl die because it has been so strongly impressed on me that we must treat this theory as if it were proven fact. Are you telling me we're changing theories now?" Do it, you impossible obscenity; tell me that, and I'll find you, and find a way to make you hurt.
"No," it said. "Get on with it. You mentioned a second reason for undertaking this project."
"Which, in my opinion," Teheran added, "might well produce the very temporal catastrophe we are trying to avoid."
"I have to defer to your judgement on that," I said. "I suspect it may be true, myself.
However. The second reason has to do with the time capsule message I opened and read two days ago."
That got a stir out of them. Who says we highly evolved future types aren't superstitious? That message was in my handwriting. That meant I was going to write it when I was a little older, and presumably a little wiser.
But just as cynical. The message had said: "I don't know if it is [vital], but tell them anyway."
There had been no need for her/me to add "don't let anybody see this message." A con like that wouldn't work if anybody but me had seen it.
So I said, "The message said this mission is vital to the success of the Gate Project." And I sat back, not pushing.
Sure enough, in twenty minutes I had the authorization I needed.
8 "Me, Myself, and I"
There were four days to consider: the tenth through the thirteenth of December. During those four days the Gate had made/would make six different appearances.
The first was my entrance on the 10th, in the New York motel.
The second was actually many trips, carefully spaced, from the afternoon through the evening and early night of the 11th, during the flights of the two aircraft. Both these periods were now closed to us. It hardly mattered: both periods were before the loss of the stunner.
The planes crashed at 9:11 P.m., Pacific Standard Time. The first temporal blank after that was from eight to nine AM. on the following morning, the 12th. We decided to call that Window A, since it was the first period we knew we had not yet stet the Gate to -- which meant we would do so some day.