"You don't need to do that," Morgan sighed. "It was Rennie who told me that you couldn't fiddle things so's it wouldn't be dangerous."
"Common sense may not be the best thing to go by here, Morgan," Griff put in quietly. "What about your sense of honor, your loyalty to the rest of us? What do they tell you?"
Morgan gave him a long look. "It's 'cause of that that I'm just quittin' straight out," he said. "Otherwise I'd prob'bly do what Hale thought I should: Jump, but stay as far as I could away from President Jeffers."
"Son of a bitch," Shaeffer ground out, turning his glare on Hale as his hand dipped briefly into his side coat pocket. "You're under arrest—both of you."
"On what charge?" Rennie asked calmly. "You had no legal authority to drag me back here to Banshee in the first place—there's been no declaration of martial law, and I wasn't served any kind of papers, Federal or otherwise. You have no power over me, Shaeffer—you or Griff. Arrest me and I'll sue your eyes out."
Behind him, the elevator opened to reveal two Marines. "These men are under house arrest," Shaeffer told them, pointing to Hale and Rennie. "Take them to their rooms and make sure they stay there." He looked at Morgan. "Last chance, Portland. Are you going to join them?"
Without a word, Morgan stepped over beside Rennie and Hale. Shaeffer nodded to the Marines and the entire group disappeared back into the elevator.
And as the doors closed on them, all of the starch suddenly seemed to go out of Shaeffer's backbone. His hands went up to rub his face and he actually staggered, and I found myself wondering just how much sleep he'd gotten the night before. Probably not much. "Dr. Mansfield, you'd better call Ms. Cosgrove down here."
I looked at Griff. "There's no way we can do this with just two Jumpers," I said.
He took a deep breath and nodded. "Adam's right, Mr. Shaeffer. Especially if you still plan to go with sedation after each Jump."
"I'd say it's obvious that idea's not going to work as is," Shaeffer bit out. "Just get Ms. Cosgrove down here—let me worry about procedure."
Griff pursed his lips and for a moment I thought he was going to argue. Then, without a word, he stepped over to the control board phone.
Kristin arrived about fifteen minutes later, looking even worse than Shaeffer did. Her eyes were red and half-lidded, her hair had the disheveled look of someone who'd spent the night doing more tossing and turning than actual sleeping, and her feet seemed to drag as she walked toward us from the elevator. I stepped forward to take her arm; she sent me a halfhearted glare and pulled back from my grasp. "What's going on, Griff?" she asked.
"Mutiny," he told her grimly. "You and Adam seem to be the only Jumpers on our side at the moment."
"We—what?"
"Ms. Cosgrove," Shaeffer interrupted her, stepping over from the control station. "I understand you're still recovering from last night's Jump, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to do another one this morning."
Kristin closed her eyes, and I saw a muscle in her cheek twitch. "All right," she sighed. "What am I supposed to do?"
"Same thing you tried to do yesterday; get President Jeffers to see you," Shaeffer told her. "We're going to put you in his private office on Air Force One fifteen minutes before the engine catches fire. When he sees you, you will stay in the room, hovering in front of him, until the clock in the room shows three minutes before the crash. That was—what, three-twenty-five, Pacific Time?"
"Right," Griff nodded. "The engine fire probably started a minute or two before that, though.
"Point," Shaeffer agreed, forehead furrowed in thought. "Yeah. All right, then make it three-twenty. At three-twenty exactly, Ms. Cosgrove, you are to move to a spot in front of the door and then end the Jump. Understood?"
Kristin hesitated. "What if he doesn't see me...?"
"He has to," Shaeffer said, very quietly. "He has to."
For a moment none of us said anything. Then Shaeffer took a deep breath. "No point in delaying it. This is it; let's go."
—
The lights flickered, Kristin's body sagged on the couch, and I turned to Shaeffer to wait for the other shoe to drop.
It did so immediately. "Mr. Sinn, I want you to wait in your quarters," he said. "When Ms. Cosgrove returns, she'll be put under immediate sedation, but I don't want there to be any chance at all she'll say something you'll hear."
Griff turned back from the control board, his eyes wide. "I thought you said—"
"I said the plan would need modification," Shaeffer cut him off. "This is that modification: adapting it to only two players. Problems?"
"Yes," I said with a sigh. "It isn't going to work."
"It's a perfectly reasonable—"
"No, it's not!" I snarled. For once, I was tired of tiptoeing around other people's feelings. "Think about it a second, Shaeffer. Whatever Kristin experiences on that plane, a long nap isn't going to make her forget it You're the one who mentioned Schr?dinger's cat awhile back—do you really know how that experiment was supposed to work, or were you just spouting words?"
Shaeffer held his temper with obvious effort. "A gun is set up so that if a particular radioactive atom in a test sample decays in a given time, the gun goes off and kills the cat. If it doesn't decay, the cat lives."
So he did know. "Right," I nodded. "Do you also remember why there's no way to know what actually happened?"
Shaeffer pursed his lips. "If you open the box, the cat automatically dies."
"Right," I said softly. "Were you ultimately planning to kill Kristin?"
He closed his eyes and exhaled between his teeth; a hissing sound of defeat. "Then this really is it. Isn't it."
My stomach churned with sympathetic pain. "Hang onto the bright side," I urged him. "He might see her; and if he does, I'll be able to talk to Kristin about it before I do my own Jump. Which means I'll know what the situation is before I go into it."
He gave me an odd look, as if being comforted by what he clearly regarded as an underling was outside his usual experience. Then, turning, he wandered off toward the elevators, hands clasped tightly behind him. Griff and I exchanged glances and silently settled down to wait.
We waited nearly ten minutes; and when it came, the snap of circuit breakers made me jump. We were crowded over Kristin's couch within seconds, all three of us. She gasped, eyes fluttering—
"What happened?" Shaeffer snapped. "Answer me! What happened?"
"Uh... uh... Griff," she managed, hand reaching up to grip at Griffs sleeve. Her eyes were wet as she blinked tears into them; wet, and strangely wild. "Griff—oh, God. It worked—it really worked. He saw me!"
—
President Jeffers's Air Force One office was small but sumptuous, something that rather jarred against his public image as one of the common people. The room's decor registered only peripherally, though, as I concentrated my full attention on the man standing behind the oaken desk in shirtsleeves and loosened tie... the man who was likewise concentrating his full attention on me.
Or, more precisely, on my Banshee image. Or, even more precisely, on Kristin's Banshee image. According to the clock I could just see on the side wall—and the settings Griff had used—I would be overlapping her Jump for another thirty seconds. Enough time for me to orient myself and to get into position in front of the office door where she would be when she ended her Jump. Ready to take over from her.
Assuming, of course, it wasn't just Kristin's image Jeffers could see. In that case, I'd have to abort the Jump and we'd be forced to wait until Kristin could try it again.
I watched the second hand on the clock... and when the half minute was up, I began to drift back toward the door. Holding my nonexistent breath.