The second window -- which we called, with fine lack of imagination, B -- was later that same day, from two to four in the afternoon.
Window C was a long one. It started at nine in the evening on the 12th, and went all the way to ten in the morning the next day.
And Window D was the paradox window. It coincided with Smith's visit to the hangar on the night of the 13th.
Each of these windows had advantages and disadvantages.
A was far enough, downtime from the paradox that Smith would be unlikely to be alert to anything. Our research showed that at the time of Window A the wreckage of both planes was, in large part; already in the hangar. If we used that window, it would be m an attempt to find the stunner in the unsorted wreckage and bring it back. If we could do that, all our troubles were over.
B seemed the least promising. What was happening at that time, most probably, was the first playing of the cockpit tape from the 747. I figured I'd go back to that one if and when my first option failed, as it still involved the least interference possible.
As for Window C ...
I was the only one who had read the time capsule message, and even that early in the preparations I had developed a dread for C. I couldn't tell you why. I just know that I felt very bad when I thought of going back and spending a night in Oakland. Tell him about the kid.
She's only a wimp.
No thank you.
Coventry argued for D. Take the bull by the horns, was his feeling. I wondered if he'd started seeing himself as Lars, Cleaver-of-Heads -- a man of action if there ever was one -- instead of an historian. And I wondered if he'd feel the same way if he was the one going back to confront the site of a paradox.
Again, no thank you.
I voted for A, and by voting very hard and as often as I could, eventually got my way. I further decided the expedition should be as small as possible: that is, one person. Coventry had to admit the wisdom of this. When messing with the timestream, you push as gently as possible.
And when you want to be sure a job is done right, there is only one possible person you can send.
At the rate of two hundred years per hour, we had just over eight days to work on the problem. It was not a lot of time. On the e other hand, it was enough that I felt I should use every advantage available to me. So instead of hopping through the Gate to the morning of December 12th and simply sifting through the rubble, I decided to take the time to get an education.
It was ten hours well spent.
What I did was undergo extensive data dumping into the three temporary cybernetic memories implanted in my brain. The BC took everything it had in storage concerning the twentieth century up to the early eighties and unloaded it into my cerebral microprocessors.
I shouldn't make fun of the mental capacities of twentieth-century natives. They did the best they could with what they had. In five hundred centuries the human brain had evolved a little -- I could learn a language the conventional way in about two days -- but the qualitative change was not much. A good comparison might be the times clocked for running the mile. At one time four minutes seemed unreachable. Later, it was routine, and people were shooting for three and a half. But nobody was planning to do it in two seconds flat.
Still, traveling a mile in one second is no problem if you have the help of a jet engine.
In the same way, learning to speak Swahili in one minute or soaking up the contents of a library in an hour is no special trick if you have the appropriate data storage, sorting, and access facilities built into your head.
It's a great tool. You learn to speak a language idiomatically, like a native, and you get a great deal of cultural context in which to speak it.
Those three tiny crystalline memories soaked up encyclopedias, news, movies, television shows, fads, fantasies, and fallacies with equal facility. When I was done I had the lore of a century at my fingertips. I could feel right at home in the 1980s.
Like any tool, the cyber-booster had its drawbacks. It was better at language and facts than it was at pattern recognition. I still would not be able to look at a dress and know, as a native would, whether it came from 1968 or 1978. I could move through the twentieth century with reasonable assurance. If I stayed there very long I'd surely pull some anachronistic boner.
But what could happen in one hour?
It was a terrible day. It had been raining all night; the only good thing about the day was that the rain had finally stopped. But with it had gone the cloud cover and, worse, all that precipitation had washed most of the flavor out of the air. The sky was this great, thundering, alien blue, and about a billion miles away. The sun was so bright I couldn't look at it without risking damage to my retinas. It was bad enough that the thing was showering me with unhealthy radiation; how could these people live with such an oppressive weight hanging over them? And the air was so bland and clear I could see Marin County.
Words are funny things. I realize I've just described what certainly was, to a 20th, a beautiful morning. Cool, crisp, clean air; lots of bright, healthy sunshine; so clear you can see forever.
So there I stood, gasping for breath, feeling naked beneath the awful sky.
The shortness of breath was ninety percent anxiety. Still, I felt a lot better after a few snorts from the Vicks inhaler I'd brought with me. If anybody else took a sniff from it they'd be most disagreeably surprised. The chemicals in it would kill roaches and discolor stainless steel.
The Gate had dumped me near the east side of the giant steel hangar which was being used to receive the remains of the two aircraft. At least, that had been the theory. When I walked around to the front doors I found them open. Inside were two PSA 727's and a lot of mechanics.
I didn't like that at all. It meant disruption in the timeline. Glancing around, orienting myself, I saw the proper hangar about a quarter mile away.
That far in the other direction would have dropped me into the Bay. And of course, there was always the other direction. I could have shown up a quarter of a mile above the field ...
It was a long quarter mile. I felt like a bug on a plate. There was just this endless concrete, still damp from the night's rain, and the infinite, awful sky. You'd think that after five hundred centuries we'd have developed a pill for agoraphobia.
One of the first things I saw when I got inside was two women dressed just like me. That was reassuring; it put me on familiar ground. I'd spent a lot of time blending in with other uniformed women. I studied them to see what they were doing, and it turned out to be wonderfully prosaic. The recovery workers had been working through the night, most of them without time to stop and grab a bite to eat. So United had sent some women over to serve coffee and donuts. Nothing could have been more in line with my experience.
Snatching a commercial jetliner is ninety-nine percent serving coffee and one percent snatching.
I found the table where the coffeepot had been set up, exchanged a few pleasantries with the woman behind it. She was perfectly willing to accept me as what I seemed to be. I took a tray, arranged a dozen Styrofoam cups on it, filled them, grabbed a handful of those paper packets of sugar and non-dairy creamer, and set off to serve.
Or at least to look like I was serving. I quickly saw that one woman could easily have handled the job United had given to three. That was no surprise -- since the days of mud buts it's been a rule that it always takes at least three to get something done: one to do it, one to supervise, and one to offer helpful suggestions. I've seen it in mammoth hunts in 40,000 B.C. and I've seen it in interstellar spaceships. I'd have been in trouble but for another universal trait of humanity. If you look busy and seem to know what you're doing, nobody is likely to bother you.