Джанет Моррис - The 40-Minute War

“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.

He looked outside, at the destruction below, and saw not destruction, but clean water.

Even as he was letting the chop of the sea below soothe him, Thoreau said, “We’re out here so we can take off this headgear for a few minutes and relax a bit—it won’t hurt us much. I’d suggest we all take this opportunity to pick our noses or whatever. And Beck, would you come forward?” Thoreau’s voice sounded funny—sharp and clipped, not his usual slow drawl.

Ashmead slid out of the co-pilot’s seat: “Sit down but don’t touch anything. We’ve got something to tell you.”

“I do,” Thoreau said, his eyes never leaving his displays. “Slick lost Chris Patrick’s homer before we put down in Georgetown. I’ve been working with a rescue team to try and find out why, and why we lost contact with the other Black Hawk.”

Ashmead took over: “Beck, we’ve got people at the crash site in Kentucky now. There were no survivors.”

Beck pulled off one glove after the other and palmed his eyes. “Sabotage? That bastard Watkins?”

“Maybe,” Ashmead answered; “maybe not. These methane-fueled engines are new, chancy. Could have been natural causes.” Then he grinned bleakly. “But we don’t think so. We think it was Watkins and, since I’ve killed people on suspicion of a lot less, I took the liberty of radioing a friend of mine—in my business it’s handy to have as many friends as you’ve got enemies. So, just for your information, Watkins is as good as dead in the water. Prick McGrath,” Ashmead added ruefully, “and I went over every inch of both birds, and we couldn’t find any sign of tampering. We did that because we knew damn well that if Beggs wants to scream bloody murder about the Russian shoot-down, it’d be more convenient if there weren’t any survivors to mention Morse and argue that we let the 727 go down in a sacrifice play. I’m sorry about Chris Patrick—we all liked her—and sorrier than you’ll ever know about Prick, but at this point, if you believe what you’re telling us, it ought not to matter.”

Beck took his hands away from his face and looked into the blue, cloudless sky. “You know, there isn’t anybody on earth I’d rather be doing this with than you and yours, Rafic.”

He got up, went aft and, to take his mind off Chris Patrick, said to Nye: “Let’s get going on those numbers. We don’t have much time.”

Nye, who’d heard the discussion on the flight deck, nodded. Then he said soberly: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

“Let’s hope,” Beck corrected, feeling as if his entire body were encased in cotton batting and his mouth belonged to a lizard.

When they put down in a park where a low stone building still stood among leafless trees, though the stenciled sign that had said PARK COMMISSION MAINTENANCE: NO ADMITTANCE was gone, everybody knew exactly what to do.