Davidson pursed his lips. "The random destruction has started up again since we got in last night."
"This surprises you?"
Davidson opened his mouth; closed it. Tried again. "I'd... rather hoped you weren't so clearly the pivotal point of the effect."
"I thought we'd discussed all that back in Champaign," Garwood reminded him. "I'm the only one who knows how to build the machine, so of course the probability-shift effect centers around me."
Davidson's eyes flicked to the computer terminal/optical scanner setup. "And Saunders wants you to let him in on the secret."
"Naturally. I don't intend to, of course."
"And if he doesn't give you that choice?"
"Meaning...?"
"Meaning he tried once to use hypnosis to get your equations out of me. With you, the method would probably work."
Garwood's mouth felt dry. "He knows better than to try something that blatant," he said. Even to himself the words didn't sound very convincing.
"I hope so. But if he doesn't... I trust you'll always remember that there's at least one other person in Backdrop who recognizes the danger your knowledge poses."
Garwood nodded, wishing he knew exactly what the man was saying. Was he offering to help Garwood escape again should that become necessary? "I'll remember," he promised. "You're going to be here for awhile, then?"
Davidson smiled wryly. "They let me out on a tight rein to go after you, Doctor. That doesn't mean they want me running around loose with what I know about Backdrop. I'll be on temporary duty with the security office, at least for the foreseeable future." He paused halfway through the act of turning back toward the door. "Though I don't suppose the term 'foreseeable future' has quite the same meaning as it used to, does it?"
Without waiting for an answer, he nodded and left. No, it doesn't, Garwood agreed silently at the closed door. It really doesn't.
He thought about it for a long minute. Then, with a shiver, he turned back to his papers.
—
One by one, the leads faded into blind alleys... and two months later, Garwood finally admitted defeat.
"Damn you," he muttered aloud, slouching wearily in his chair as far away from his terminal as space permitted. "Damn you." An impotent curse hurled at the terminal, at the program, at the universe itself. "There has to be a way. There has to be."
His only answer was the vague and distant crash of something heavy, the sound muffled and unidentifiable. A piece of I-beam from the ceiling, he rather thought—the basic infrastructure of Backdrop had started to go the way of the more fragile plaster and electronics over the past couple of weeks. Saunders had spent much of that time trying to invent correlations between the increase in the destruction with some supposed progress in Garwood's mathematical work, and he'd come up with some highly imaginative ones.
But imaginative was all they were... because Garwood knew what was really happening.
Perversely, even as it blocked his attempts to find a safe method of time travel, the universe had been busily showing him exactly how to transform his original equations into actual real-world hardware.
It was, on one level, maddening. He would be sitting at his typewriter, preparing a new set of equations for the optical scanner to feed into the computer, when suddenly he would have a flash of insight as to how a properly tuned set of asynchronous drivers could handle the multiple timing pulses. Or he'd be waiting for the computer to chew through a tensor calculation and suddenly recognize that an extra coil winding superimposed on a standard transformer system could create both the power and the odd voltage patterns his equations implied. Or he'd even be trying to fall asleep at night, head throbbing with the day's frustrations, and practically see a vision of the mu-metal molding that would distort a pulsed magnetic field by just the right amount to create the necessary envelope for radiating plasma bursts.
And as the insights came more and more frequently—as a working time machine came closer and closer to reality—the environment inside Backdrop came to look more and more like a war zone.
Across the room the terminal emitted a raucous beep, signaling the possibility of parity error in its buffer memory. "Damn," Garwood muttered again and dragged himself to his feet. Eventually he would have to tell Saunders that his last attempts had gone up in the same black smoke as all the previous ones, and there was nothing to be gained by putting it off. Picking up his hardhat, he put it on and stepped out of his office.
The corridor outside had changed dramatically in the past weeks, its soothing pastel walls giving way to the stark metallic glitter of steel shoring columns. Senses alert for new ripples in the floor beneath him as well as for falling objects from above, he set off toward Saunders's office.
Luck was with him. The passages were relatively clear, with only the minor challenge of maneuvering past shoring and other travelers to require his attention. He was nearly to Saunders's office, in fact, before he hit the first real roadblock.
And it was a good one. He'd been right about the sound earlier; one of the steel I-beams from the ceiling had indeed broken free, creating a somewhat bowed diagonal across the hallway. A team of men armed with acetylene torches were cutting carefully across the beam, trying to free it without bringing more down.
"Dr. Garwood?"
Garwood focused on the burly man stepping toward him, an engineer's insignia glittering amid the plaster dust on his jumpsuit collar. "Yes, Captain?"
"If you don't mind, sir," the other said in a gravelly voice, "we'd appreciate it if you wouldn't hang around here any longer than necessary. There may be more waiting to come down."
Garwood glanced at the ceiling, stomach tightening within him as he recognized the all-too-familiar message beneath the other's words. It wasn't so much interest in his, Garwood's, safety as it was concern that the cloud of destruction around him might wind up killing one of the workers. Briefly, bitterly, Garwood wondered if this was how Jonah had felt during the shipboard storm. Before he'd been thrown overboard to the whale... "I understand," he sighed. "Would you mind passing a message on to Dr. Saunders when you have the chance, then, asking him to meet me at my office? My phone's gone out again."
"A lot of 'em have, Doctor," the engineer nodded. "I'll give him the message."
Garwood nodded back and turned to go—
And nearly bumped into Major Davidson, standing quietly behind him.
"Major," Garwood managed, feeling his heart settle down again. "You startled me."
Davidson nodded, a simple acknowledgment of Garwood's statement. "Haven't seen you in a while, Dr. Garwood," he said, his voice the same neutral as his face. "How's it going?"
Garwood's usual vague deflection to that question came to his lips... "I have to get back to my office," he said instead. "The workmen are worried about another collapse."
"I'll walk with you," Davidson offered, falling into step beside him.
Davidson waited until they were out of sight of the workers before speaking again. "I've been keeping an eye on the damage reports," he commented in that same neutral tone. "You been following them?"
"Not really," Garwood replied through dry lips. Suddenly there was something about Davidson that frightened him. "Though I can usually see the most immediate consequences in and around my office."
"Been some extra problems cropping up in the various machine and electronic fabrication shops, too," Davidson told him, almost off-handedly. "As if there's been some work going on there that's particularly susceptible to the Garwood Effect."
Garwood gritted his teeth. The Garwood Effect. An appropriate, if painful, name for it. "Saunders has had some people trying to translate what little he and the rest of the team know into practical hardware terms," he told Davidson.