Rebel in Time

'Well, electricity then. Is there a meter? Any record kept of how much you use?'

'No way. I suppose we get a bill every month or something like that which someone in the office pays. Not my department. I know that we use a hell of a lot of it. So much so that about a year back we were popping breakers in the substation and they had to run in a new line…'

Kleiman stopped suddenly and stared into space. Then he blinked and shook his head, turning slowly to face Troy.

'Do you know what you are?' he said. 'You are a genius. The Sherlock Holmes of Foggy Bottom. You act like a nebbish about science — when all of the time you are leading me by the hand to the answer. I'm the one who is the yold. Without your kick up the ass I never would have remembered.'

'Remembered what?'

'Remembered about the time when the electric company got all excited, and we got excited too because we were losing experiments that crashed when the current pooped out. That was when we started to monitor the line to find out how much juice we were using, keep a record so they could guarantee a sufficient supply for us at all times.'

Troy felt he was close to an answer now, very close. 'What kind of monitor?'

'It wasn't really a monitor. They tried to bring in one of their ususal recorders, but you should have seen the monster. Clanking and sputtering while it drew a graph on a rotating drum. No one wanted the big dirty thing leaking red ink all over the place. It really was Stone-Age technology. I remember, they tried to set it up, but we tossed them out. All of the functions of the equipment here are controlled and monitored by our mainframe computer. It has I don't know how many K of random access memory on hard disk, plus a real-time clock and all the extra goodies anyone might possibly want. So one of the software people wrote a program to monitor the electricity being used, and after that everyone was happy. We had the records we needed and life was beautiful.'

Troy was puzzled. 'But wouldn't this computer meter be disconnected after it was no longer needed?'

Kleiman shook his head. 'You got it wrong. We didn't add any meters or junk. We just wrote a program, instructions for the computer, to remember some facts for us. All of which operated invisibly and unseen until someone asked the thing to tell us what had gone on. We even added some inputs of our own to help us in recording experiments. Very handy it was in the early days.'

'But you no longer use it?'

'We no longer access the information. You've got to learn the jargon if you are going to be hanging around here. Once a program is started it will keep running forever unless you stop it.' He waved his hand at a row of steel cabinets. 'It's all in there. All you have to do is ask.'

Troy gazed in wonder at the featureless doors. 'Are you serious? Can we really find the record of all the experiments?'

'Every one. Just ask the right question.'

'Then ask!'

'Not me,' Kleiman said, reaching for the telephone. 'This is the age of the specialist, young man. I'm a physicist, not a flow-chart doodler. For this you need the right person. Nina Vassella, our head programmer. She'll know what to do… Hello, Nina? Come 'sta? Bene? That's what I like to hear. Look, we got a little problem down in nine that only you can solve. When? Now, of course. Be a sweety-pie. That's my girl. Thanks.' He hung up. 'She'll be right down.'

Nina was dark, petite, lovely — and she knew her business.

'Of course I remember the program,' she said. 'Particularly since I wrote it.'

'Is it still running?'

'Undoubtedly. Since it would probably crash the entire system if one of you ham-handed masters of cosmic theory tried to get anywhere near it. And I haven't wiped it. So it must still be ticking away. Let's see.'

She pulled the chair over in front of the terminal, then spun the adjustment to raise it up high enough for her. When she sat down her legs dangled like a little girl's, her feet not reaching the floor; she twined her legs around the chair supports. But she knew very well what she was doing. Her fingers flashed over the keyboard, pulling up a menu of all the programs running, then accessed the one she wanted and checked it through. Thirty seconds later she leaned back and pointed her thumb at the rows of numbers marching down the screen.

'There it is. Ready and waiting.'

'Great!' Kleiman said, patting her on the shoulder. 'You are a genius, baby. Now give us a print-out, if you please.'

'What? There are all of two years plus of read-out in there. Haven't you heard of the energy crisis and the paper shortage?'

'That's the name of the game. Type.'

She pressed two keys and the high-speed printer against the far wall began to hammer away with a rapid, paper-tearing sound. The printing head tore back and forth across the endless sheet of fanfold paper which began to pile up higher and higher in the wire tray.

'Is that all you geniuses need now?' Nina asked.

'Thank you, doll, I'll remember you in my will.'

When the printer had finally lapsed into silence, Kleiman tore the paper apart at the end of the last sheet and carried the book-thick pile of print-out over to his desk.

'Now we'll see what we will see,' he said, turning the pack over and pulling free the last pages. 'Right up to date, yep, here's the one I did this morning. Now let us flip back a bit, to last week-end when the colonel went missing… mamma mia!'

'What is it?'

'There it is, right here, late last Saturday, when the joint was supposed to be closed up. Power, man, power. Whatever they were doing in here they were burning enough juice to light up Chicago. We've never pulled a ten-thousandth of that amount. I'm surprised that they didn't vaporize every one of the circuits. And what's this? No, this I do not believe! Too much!'

He pointed to a line of print-out, his thumb on a set of numbers. It looked in no way different to Troy than anything else on the page. Kleiman flipped through the sheets in consternation, then back to the original page.

He shook his head with disbelief.

'Here, see it, right there. The polarity of tau input, it's reversed. It shouldn't be like that. We never do that — look at all the others. The results were consistently negative, we abandoned that approach.'

Troy held his impatience under tight control. 'What does it mean? This tau thing. Why does it bother you?'

'It doesn't bother me — it's just impossible, that's what. It can't be done. But it has been done.'

The paper slipped from Kleiman's fingers and fell to the floor. He turned to Troy, and when he spoke again his voice was hushed, his face drawn.

'Whatever was moved in time wasn't moved forward. It was sent in the opposite direction. Sent back in time — to the past.'

Chapter 15

Troy accepted the fact of time travel without hesitation. Why shouldn't he? He had grown up in the age of technological miracles. First there had been the atomic bomb, well before his birth, then, one after another, the hydrogen bomb, atomic energy, jet aircraft that could fly faster than sound, followed by orbiting satellites, and lastly the almost unbelievable, real-time television pictures of men walking on the Moon. There seemed no end to the cornucopia output of the laboratories and he, like many others, had stopped trying to understand how they worked. They just did. He had used electronic guided missiles in the Army. You pressed the button and they went. That's all that you had to know.

So you pressed another button and something travelled through time. There was really no difference. The only question was — what had the machine been used for? What was it that McCulloch and Harper had sent backwards in time? Was it the gold? What would that have possibly accomplished? But if it hadn't been the gold — then what had it been?