Jack Chalker: Downtiming the Night Side

“Downtiming?”

“That’s what we call it, since you can’t seem to go uptime from here in any way except the way we’re doing it—one second at a time. You see, the big problem is that the boys here are mostly technical types. It’s a crew over at NSA that looks around for candidates for research and approves ’em before they even know about this place. The weed-out’s pretty extensive, but you can go only so far without spilling the beans about the place. Then, of course, they get the full treatment—drugs, lie detectors, you name it. We try as hard as we can to make sure that nobody goes into the chamber if they have even the remotest impulse to do anything but observe.”

“But nothing’s perfect,” Moosic noted. “Even the sanest of us has sudden impulses and urges. Until that person goes back there, you can’t know for sure.”

“Yep. And there are ways to beat the system—any system. It’s a constant worry. That’s why we don’t let any professional historians go back at all. After all that, they’re told we have a way of observing and even sometimes recording the past. They give us the targets, and then we send one of our agents back. They have romance in their souls but no stake in the actual work and not enough professional background to know just what wrong button to push. They know, too, that one false move and we can nightside them—cut them off in the past.”

“But this nightsiding, as you call it, wouldn’t prevent them from doing something. It would only mean they couldn’t profit by it.”

He nodded. “That’s about it. It’s a chance we have to take.”

Ron Moosic stared at the man. “Why?”

Riggs chuckled. “Because, throughout history, you can’t uninvent something. Oh, you can suppress it for a while, but it’s funny that lots of discoveries of the same tiling seem to happen around the same time, whenever the technology of the world will allow it.”

“The Greeks invented the steam engine but didn’t do anything with it,” the younger man pointed out.

“That they did—but they invented it in a closed society that kept their discoveries not only from non-Greeks but from the bulk of their own people. Silverberg will go on and on telling you that science is a collective and not really an individual sport these days. Oh, sure, Einstein dreamed up all that stuff on his own—but did he, really? Or did he take a lot of stuff discovered and discussed by a bunch of scientists in a lot of countries and put it all together to see something they missed? What if Einstein didn’t have a way to get that stuff from the others? No mass-produced books, no international postal system, no way to know what all those guys were thinking or finding out? And even if he did—what if all Einstein’s theories were written down on paper and filed away in one spot in just a single hand-written book? Who’d know it to make use of it, except by accident? The Greeks had that kind of problem. Lots of brains working, but nobody telling anybody else. Not like now. This whole project can be traced to a hundred different teams working in half a dozen countries on different stuff. Let just one word leak out that we’re doing this and others can put the same information together through mass communications, computer searches, and stuff like that.

“With Einstein and the others to build on, almost every one of the major countries in World War II was working on the A-bomb. We just got there first. Now everybody’s got the damned things. A couple of dozen countries so poor they keep their people in starvation still have computer-guided smart missiles, and everybody and his brother has something in orbit now. The Russians have an accelerator at least up to ours. They’ll eventually get the same results we did, if they haven’t already. So much power and so many people are required for something even this size that eventually there’ll be a leak, others will get on the track, and it’ll be a real mess. We better know all the rules of this thing backwards, forwards, and sideways, or we’re gonna be up shit creek when the time ripple comes along and wipes out you and me and maybe the whole damned Constitution.”

“Nice thought. I’m not sure I even like the idea that I know it now. Even without this job, it’s going to make sleeping a lot harder.”

“Tell me about it. The only thing I can tell you is to think of the thing just like the H-bomb and all the other things out there that can cripple or kill us. It’s just another in a long line of threats, just another doomsday weapon. It’s so complicated and so expensive it probably won’t be the one that gets us, anyway.”

Some comfort, Moosic thought sourly. He wondered how long it would take him to grow as cynical and pessimistic as Riggs, then considered it from the other man’s point of view. Too long, he decided. Riggs had, in fact, the only way of really living with this.

“I guess you should meet the security staff now,” Riggs suggested. “That’ll give you a picture of the whole layout.”

Moosic nodded. “I guess we—”

At that moment the lights went out, then came back on again, and there were shouts, screams, and the sound of muffled explosions. Bells and sirens went off all over the place. Riggs recovered quickly and ran out the door, Moosic at his heels. They made it through a screaming mass to the central area. There were bodies all over the place, and the smell of gas, but the bodies were all office and Marine personnel. Areas of the ceiling were bubbling, smoking masses occasionally dripping ooze onto the floor as they smoldered and gave off foul smells.

“Somebody’s going for the chamber!” Riggs shouted, drawing his pistol and moving off down a corridor that should have blocked their entrance. No passes were necessary now, though—the computer terminal was another smoldering mass of fused metal and plastic.

Moosic recognized it as the corridor he’d come from only a few minutes earlier, the one that led to Silverberg’s offices and the time chamber.

A bunch of uniformed and plainclothes security officers were near the elevator. They saw Riggs and rushed up to him, all talking at once. With a mighty roar of “Quiet!” he got them settled, then picked one to tell him the story.

“Four of ’em,” said Conkling, the middle-aged uniformed man picked as the spokesman. “They knew the exact locations of everything, Joe! Everything! They had the password, knew the right names, and when the door slid open for the one who came into the entrance, the other three blew open the outer door. By that time, that first one had set off a mess of gas bombs from someplace. None of ’em had any masks I could see, but one whiff and you died while they walked through it cool as can be. They had some kind of gun that worked like a bazooka one minute and shot gas the next.”

“What about the gas in the reception area?”

“Didn’t bother ’em. They shot everybody up, then fried all the ceiling weapons with some type of laser gun. I tell you, Joe, I never saw weapons like that before from any country! Never! Right outa Buck Rogers.”

“How many of ’em did we get?”

“Uh—none of ’em, Joe. They all got down here—and, so help me, the damned elevator opened for ’em just like they had the pass and the combination. Took ’em down and stuck there.”

Riggs nodded and turned to Moosic. “Inside job.”

The younger man nodded. “All the way. Any way down there other than by this thing?”

“There’s a stairway, but the panels are designed only to open from the other side.”

“So were ours. Let’s blow them or get whatever it takes to blow them. I assume the whole level below was gassed?”

“Knockout type. Real strong—six to eight hours. But if it didn’t get them up here, it sure won’t down there.”