“I didn’t see them coming,” Metz said in a low voice, as if afraid the intruders could hear them. “I had my head under the console, didn’t know they were out there until…”
“I know. I heard it, too.” They were floating just above the submerged end of the ship; the guy in the rear must have hit the hull with his paddle. “Is the chameleon functional?”
Metz glanced at one of the displays. “Still working. They can’t see us. But if they get much closer…”
He didn’t finish his thought. It hardly mattered. The soldiers knew they were here. The first vehicles had arrived on the nearby shore little more than an hour after Oberon’s crash-landing, and although the chameleon hid the timeship from direct view, a vague outline of its hull could be detected from certain angles in midday sunlight. Helicopters had circled low over the sandbar several times already, but this was the closest any of the locals had dared to venture.
At least the airlock hatch was underwater. In fact, judging from the position of the raft, it was directly beneath the soldiers. The locals would have to send out divers to find it. Judging from the amount of activity on the shore, though, it wouldn’t be long before it occurred to them to do so.
They watched as the men in the boat took a few more pictures—at such close range, they were probably photographing distorted reflections of themselves—before they hastily paddled away again. Metz let out his breath. “Close one. Worse than Dallas.”
“Far worse than Dallas,” Franc said, but not accusingly. Recrimination was pointless by now; whatever happened in 1937, they were foiled but good. One expedition member was dead, his neck broken during that first violent impact with the lake. The timeship was down, its operational condition uncertain. Contemporaries had discovered their whereabouts, and these weren’t aborigines who would leave little more record of their brief passage than a few legends and some mysterious cave drawings.
Worst of all, they were shipwrecked in the late twentieth century. The most dangerous era in the history of humankind.
“They’re cautious now, but they’ll be back.” Franc clambered forward to peer at the screens. “How’s it coming so far?”
“Do you want the good news first, or…?” Metz caught Franc’s stern look. “Never mind. I’ve been working my way through the system to the primary drive. It’s still down, but the AI’s located the major problem. Main bus is damaged, a few boards are shot. I’ve retasked some repair nannies and sent them in, so they should complete their work in about an hour or so. Backup’s fully operational, though, so I’m…”
Franc impatiently twirled a finger, and Metz got to the point. “Pods are still intact. The drive can be fixed, although the grid’s flooded and it won’t work at optimal levels until we’ve been airborne for at least sixty seconds.”
“So we can get out of here. Right?”
Metz didn’t reply.
“Come on, Vasili. We can or we can’t. Which is it?”
“Two problems. The first, you know about already. Energy reserve’s down to 15 percent, just enough to keep the chameleon operational and the AI alive. I’ve got the cells on full recharge. Fortunately, we can elec-trolyze all the hydrogen we need from the water around us… one good thing about crashing in a lake. AI estimates that we’ll be able to lift off again within six hours, less if we reserve internal power as much as we can.”
“Including low-orbit escape and wormhole entry?” Franc asked. Metz nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked even more tense than usual. “So what’s the second problem?”
The pilot let out his breath. “We don’t know when we are. Where, that’s certain… the AI established a fix on our coordinates before we crashed. Tennessee, Cumberland Plateau, Center Hill Lake… the numbers are safely stored away. And judging from what we’ve seen so far, we’re in the late twentieth. Probably in the 1990s, but…”
“What year?”
“Can’t tell you that.” Metz shook his head. “That’s the problem. Primary telemetry grid is down, so we can’t pull in outside feed. No way to lock onto the local net. I might have been able to get a lock before we crashed, but I didn’t have a chance to…”
“I understand.” Under the circumstances, Vasili had done the best he could just to get them safely to the ground. However, lacking a precise fix on when they were, Oberon s AI was unable to accurately plot a CTC return trajectory. This was something that couldn’t be guesstimated; the AI had to know exactly when and where in chronospace the timeship now existed. Spatial coordinates were estimated, but temporal weren’t; the most vital element of the four-dimensional equation was missing.
“Sorry, Franc.” For once, Metz had put his arrogance in a drawer. “I wish I could give you better news, but…”
“Any idea of what caused this? The paradox… the anomaly, I mean…”
“Lea’s still working on it. You might want to check with her.” Then he turned back to his console, and didn’t look up again until Franc left the control room.
He found Lea at the library, running through the footage their divots had captured from the Hindenberg. Like Franc, she had taken a few minutes in the lav to rinse off her nanoskin; her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail that fell over her broad shoulders as she braced herself against the pedestal. She didn’t look up when he entered the compartment.
“Find anything?”
“Yes, I have,” she said. “I think I’ve isolated the divergence point.”
Franc propped himself against the pedestal as Lea typed a command into its keypad. “There was a lot of sift through, so I concentrated on the last three hours before we landed. We passed over Lakehurst at four o’clock, but had to divert because of wind gusts and high cumulus clouds at the field.”
“Uh-huh, I remember.”
“We flew south along the Jersey shore to ride it out. An hour and a half later, according to the historical record, Captain Pruss received a telegraph message from the field, stating that the weather conditions were still bad and recommending that he not attempt a landing until later. He wired back a message, stating that he wouldn’t return to Lakehurst until he was given clearance. That message was sent at 5:35 P.M. local. Now watch…”
She pressed the PLAY button on the pedestal. The wallscreen displayed the vast interior of the Hindenberg’s envelope. Franc recognized the angle immediately; it was the catwalk beneath Cell No.4, where he had placed a divot during their tour of the airship. The digital readout at the bottom of the screen read 5.6.38: 1741:29 when a lone figure walked past the divot. As he paused at the bottom of the ladder to quickly glance both ways, his face became visible for a brief instant. It was Eric Spehl, the rigger who had placed the bomb.
Spehl ascended the ladder, then passed out of camera range. “He’s gone about six minutes,” Lea said, tapping the pedestal again to skip forward, “and then…”
At 5.6.38: 1747:52, Spehl reappeared on the ladder, climbing back down from Cell No.4. Once again, he hastily glanced around, then walked back up the catwalk, heading toward the airship’s bow. “I checked the record from this divot again,” Lea said, “both before and after the Hindenberg landed. He didn’t come back here again.”
“He came back and reset the bomb. I’ll be damned.”
“That’s a good way of putting it, yes. And he did it just after the second time Captain Pruss postponed the landing.”
“But why didn’t he do this earlier?” Franc rubbed his chin thoughtfully; it felt good to feel his own flesh again. “Why the sudden change of mind?” Lea let out her breath. “Maybe you were right. Perhaps he remembered the woman he encountered at this same spot…” she pointed at the frozen image of the empty catwalk “…the day before, and decided that he didn’t want to be responsible for her death. So he came back and reset the timer so that the bomb wouldn’t detonate until exactly eight o’clock, by which time he was certain the ship would be safely moored and all the passengers disembarked.”