The pad flicked off, and then immediately back on again. He'd had an afterthought. "Oh yeah, I wanted to say ... the things you said to me today -- when I was young -- the encouragement. And the tooth. Well, they meant a lot to me. So, uh ... thanks."
It flicked off.
I put my head in my hands. Everything was throbbing, as if all the universe were contained within an infected tooth. Or maybe the brain tumor of a sick old dinosaur. I'm not stupid. I saw the implications immediately.
The kid -- Philippe -- was my son.
Hawkins was my son.
I hadn't even known I had a son, and now he was dead.
A bleak, blank time later, I set to work drawing time lines in the holographic workspace above my desk. A simple double-loop for Hawkins/Philippe. A rather more complex figure for myself. Then I factored in the TSOs, the waiters, the paleontologists, the musicians, the workmen who built the station in the first place and would salvage its fixtures when we were done with it ... maybe a hundred representative individuals in all.
When I was done, I had a three-dimensional representation of Hilltop Station as a node of intersecting lives in time. It was one hell of a complex figure.
It looked like the Gordian knot.
Then I started crafting a memo back to my younger self. A carbon steel, razor-edged, Damascene sword of a memo. One that would slice Hilltop Station into a thousand spasming paradoxical fragments.
Hire him, fire her, strand a hundred young scientists, all fit and capable of breeding, one million years B.C. Oh, and don't father any children.
It would bring our sponsors down upon us like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands -- retroactively. Everything connected to it would be looped out of reality and into the disintegrative medium of quantum uncertainty. Hilltop Station would dissolve into the realm of might-have-been. The research and findings of thousands of dedicated scientists would vanish from human knowing. My son would never have been conceived or born or sent callously to an unnecessary death.
Everything I had spent my life working to accomplish would be undone.
It sounded good to me.
When the memo was done, I marked it PRIORITY and MY EYES ONLY. Then I prepared to send it three months back in time.
The door opened behind me with a click. I spun around in my chair. In walked the one man in all existence who could possibly stop me.
"The kid got to enjoy twenty-four years of life, before he died," the Old Man said. "Don't take that away from him."
I looked up into his eyes.
Into my own eyes.
Those eyes fascinated and repulsed me. They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime's accumulation of wrinkles. I've been working with my older self since I first signed up with Hilltop Station, and they were still a mystery to me, absolutely opaque. They made me feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.
"It's not the kid," I said. "It's everything."
"I know."
"I only met him tonight -- Philippe, I mean. Hawkins was just a new recruit. I barely knew him."
The Old Man capped the Glenlivet and put it back in the liquor cabinet. Until he did that, I hadn't even noticed I was drinking. "I keep forgetting how emotional I was when I was young," he said.
"I don't feel young."
"Wait until you're my age."
I'm not sure how old the Old Man is. There are longevity treatments available for those who play the game, and the Old Man has been playing this lousy game so long he practically runs it. All I know is that he and I are the same person.
My thoughts took a sudden swerve. "God damn that stupid kid!" I blurted. "What was he doing outside the compound in the first place?"
The Old Man shrugged. "He was curious. All scientists are. He saw something and went out to examine it. Leave it be, kid. What's done is done."
I glanced at the memo I'd written. "We'll find out."
He placed a second memo alongside mine. "I took the liberty of writing this for you. Thought I'd spare you the pain of having to compose it."
I picked up the memo, glanced at its contents. It was the one I'd received yesterday. "'Hawkins was attacked and killed by Satan shortly after local midnight today,'" I quoted. "'Take all necessary measures to control gossip.'" Overcome with loathing, I said, "This is exactly why I'm going to bust up this whole filthy system. You think I want to become the kind of man who can send his own son off to die? You think I want to become you?"
That hit home. For a long moment the Old Man did not speak. "Listen," he said at last. "You remember that day in the Peabody?"
"You know I do."
"I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart -- all your heart -- that I could see a real, living dinosaur. But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn't going to happen. That some things could never be."
I said nothing.
"God hands you a miracle," he said, "you don't throw it back in his face."
Then he left.
I remained.
It was my call. Two possible futures lay side-by-side on my desk, and I could select either one. The universe is inherently unstable in every instant. If paradoxes weren't possible, nobody would waste their energy preventing them. The Old Man was trusting me to weigh all relevant factors, make the right decision, and live with the consequences.
It was the cruelest thing he had ever done to me.
Thinking of cruelty reminded me of the Old Man's eyes. Eyes so deep you could drown in them. Eyes so dark you couldn't tell how many corpses already lay submerged within them. After all these years working with him, I still couldn't tell if those were the eyes of a saint or of the most evil man in the world.
There were two memos in front of me. I reached for one, hesitated, withdrew my hand. Suddenly the choice didn't seem so easy.
The night was preternaturally still. It was as if all the world were holding its breath, waiting for me to make my decision.
I reached out for the memos.
I chose one.