“You might want to see this too, Rafic—it’ll make more sense to you… everything, I mean.”
Nye was glaring at Beck fixedly, as if a security breach could endanger anything at this stage.
Beck was about to say something very hostile to his best friend when Thoreau interrupted, from the flight deck: “I’d really like Rafic up here. Not that I can’t handle this bird single-pilot, but she’s not really built for it.”
Rafic’s heavy features registered something like relief and he left them.
Beck took the scratchpad and began drawing a leafless tree with a thick trunk and many branches, on an axis like cross-hairs. As he drew, he said: “What will happen to us, on site, is most likely terminal overexposure—in this particular future. What we’re going to do is try to create or hook into another future, one in which your team took out the Islamic Jihad who nuked Home Plate before they got out of Saudi Arabia. If it works, some theories suggest that we might not even have time for a long leisurely death.” Beck pointed to the tree trunk and drew a line on the positive axis toward the future that meandered up the trunk and swung left onto a short branch that ended abruptly: “It could be that in a forced, unnatural situation like this, everything we know and are will just… stop. Zero, zilch, zip—end of the world. And, of course, if that son of a bitch Beggs goes ahead with his secondary strike, it might be just as well.”
“Beck!” Nye’s pejorative had a tinge of hopelessness.
“I’m telling you, Sam, it doesn’t matter. CIA suggested that something like this might be possible in order to distract President Beggs from his primary intent: a second strike against the Soviets. Beggs authorized this little adventure, gentlemen, in order to instigate a pre-emptive strike against the Soviets.”
“Shit,” Ashmead’s voice came out of Beck’s helmet.
“But Nye—CIA—and I have an understanding,” Beck continued. “We don’t think there’s a chance in hell we can make something like a pre-emptive strike work, or that it would make any substantive difference if we could—probably the same, or a very similar, time-line to this one would be the result. And that, we agree, is unacceptable.” Beck took his pencil off the abruptly ending branch and tapped another, one a bit longer, which nevertheless dead-ended. “Like this one.” Then he moved the pencil again: “However, we think that if we can stop the terrorists, we we might hook back into a time-line that has a chance of continuing.” With the pencil, he traced a line from the bottom of the tree trunk that went up the main branch and disappeared off the paper: “An open-ended temporal flow, if you like.”
“No shit,” Slick grinned. “Well, we’ll be alive again, then, right?”
“You bet, Slick. We may be, somewhere, anyway, doing that instead of this—multiple novels, remember? I can give you the math, run it down to you in positives and negatives….” He began to jot x’s and y’s and complicate the diagram, but Slick put out his hand.
“That’s fine, Casper. I’m convinced—and Ashmead’s probably right about you being so smart you’re worth all this trouble. But run that by me again: we’re alive somewhere else?”
“Well, just mathematically, as far as I can prove. In the real sense, if we do this—make a temporal correction—we’ll be alive in the there-and-then trying to prevent this particular here-and-now from ever occurring.”
“So you’re not sending any body—” Thoreau’s voice entered the conversation, “—any person, that is, back in time. That’s good news. I don’t think you can do that—I mean, you’d be in two bodies at once, and that can’t happen.”
“That’s right, Thoreau, it can’t. But, even though we’ll never find out if this works—because, if it does, we’ll either just blink out of existence or die soon, wondering about it—you and Saadia and Jesse and Elint and Slick are going to get a second chance to save the world a lot of grief.”
“You mean to take out our Islamic Jihad targets. But we won’t know about any of this?”
“If you do your jobs, it will never have happened. We’ve never sent anything but test messages. It may not work. Langley may ignore my priority ‘go’ order—I certainly am not going to risk trying to send them an explanation. Or it may work but not change anything—the future may be fixed, the end result the same whatever we do. Interdicting the Jihad may trigger a superpower nuclear exchange by means of a nuclear terrorism variant scenario; all it would take is for the Jihad’s bomb to go off in Riyadh and—”
Nye cut in, “What he’s trying to say, gentlemen, is that all we can do is counterfeit an order that could well have come from Beck, an override that will cancel your pull-back order either before it’s sent or after. It won’t matter. There’s a chance that Beck will be contacted and deny it, that the past can’t be changed. But we think we can time it so that there won’t be any opportunity for that sort of thing until after the fact. There’s also the chance that you’ll fail, for one reason or another….”
From Ashmead, on the flight deck, came a chuckle: “Beck, I hope your counterpart in the past isn’t going to dump responsibility for this in my lap.”
“He may well, Rafic—if it works. There’s going to be a priority-flagged go order that should turn your people loose. What happens from then on is anybody’s guess.”
“Talk about long shots,” Slick breathed. “Well, it’s nice to know that you guys believe in what you’re doing. As far as I can tell, it’s going to make not one shit bit of difference to us in the here-and-now.”
“But if you do your jobs in the there-and-then, it might make a hell of a difference to the civilized world,” Nye said softly.
“If your message gets sent, and if somebody forwards it to us—they didn’t, if you’ll remember, which might mean they won’t—and if we can interdict successfully,” Slick said.
“I don’t think,” Beck replied, “that just because it didn’t happen means it can’t happen. If there’d been some attempt at floating a priority go order with my name on it, I’d have heard about it. So it hasn’t happened—yet.”
“You guys are making me dizzy,” Thoreau complained.
“All I’m saying, Thoreau, is that mathematics—and logic—bear little relation to reality. They’re just tools, and very limited tools at that. What happens—success or failure—will depend on reality, not mathematics.”
“And if it does work, we’ll never know it?” Slick’s cowboy grin was firmly in place, but his face was still white and he clutched his injured wrist with his good hand. “Damn, think of the promotions we’re going to miss—let alone raises, intelligence stars, tickertape parades….”
The fact that everyone was accepting his child-simple explanation made Beck feel better. He still didn’t really believe it was going to work. But now, with so much sacrificed, he couldn’t bear to call it off—Ashmead and Slick had a right to die for something, and Slick, at least, was surely going to—that taped suit wasn’t up to what Langley had to offer. Then he thought about Muffy’s charred hand and the ring that was somewhere in the ruins at Georgetown and admitted that he did, too.
He said, “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” and meant it. The Langley basement station was going to be hard to get into and hard to work in; it was probable that they’d never come out. At least he’d been able to divert Chris; he’d never have had the guts to go through with it if she were there beside him. She made him too anxious to live.