Jack Chalker: Downtiming the Night Side

To all those time travelers who came before: H. G. Wells, Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, Robert A. Heinlein, Randall Garrett, and Fritz Leiber most notably; and also to the one among all others who inspires my plots: Niccolo Machiavelli.

It was with mounting frustration that the computers and the experts who controlled them were well primed for nuclear defense, laser defense, outright invasion from space, and all the other exotic ways in which the enemy might inflict damage, yet not totally effective against the slingshot.

Somewhere a siren sounded, and soon a cacophony of electronic warning bells went off throughout the defense complex. Technicians put down whatever they were doing and scurried to their situation boards, but there was little for them to do even with danger approaching. The computers could handle things much faster than they, and all they could do was watch and worry and check the status of the defense systems.

“Incoming!” somebody shouted needlessly. “Oh, my God! Look at that board!”

The main situation screen showed it now: more blips of various sizes than any of them could count, all coming in in a wide pattern. Two blips, however, were enormous.

“What the hell are they shooting now? Planets ?” somebody else muttered, the awed question carrying in the sudden silence of the room, now that the warning signals had been cut off.

It was a meteor storm like they had never seen before— tens of thousands of chunks of space junk and debris with only one thing in common—all were at least large enough to survive entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Nor was this a random swarm. Like the rest, it had started out around Jupiter, with the great space tugs of the enemy forming them up and shooting them around with vast energy beams the defenders could only envy, using the gravity of the big planet to whip them around and send them in a predetermined spread inwards to the Earth.

This group had also been particularly well placed; they would strike within a relatively small area a quarter of a million kilometers square. Small, considering the enormous task of grouping such shots so that they would hit the planet at all; enormous, if you had to defend that area against such a rockfall.

A few hundred well-placed missiles would have done the job, but Earth was long out of missiles for this or any other use. Still, millions of ground-based laser cannon and other such defenses would get the majority of them, but at a tremendous cost in energy. The computers were also forced to target the largest meteors with the majority of weaponry, since to allow them to hit intact would be disaster, but this had the multiple effect of breaking them up into hordes of smaller rocks, and there would not be enough weapons to spare for them and the others.

“Mostly Indian Ocean,” somebody said, relieved, “but parts of East Africa are going to get creamed anyway.”

In the midst of the tension, a tall, lean man with flowing blond hair watched, sighed, and shook his head. He was not very old, but his gaunt frame, slightly bent, and his drawn face, lined and worn, made him appear much older than he actually was. He turned and stalked out of the situation room, taking the elevator up five flights to the Command Headquarters level. The sentries barely gave him a glance, so well known was he on the level, and he walked up to the secretary’s desk with a steady, determined gait.

“I wish to see the Chairman at once,” he told the secretary, who nodded and pressed a small intercom button.

“Colonel Benoni is here,” the secretary said crisply.

There was a muffled response, and he turned to the tall, blond man again. “He’ll see you now.”

Benoni nodded and walked around the desk to a large sliding door. This time the sentries checked his full I.D. as did the scan machines, despite the fact that they knew him. The Chairman trusted no one, and even inside Benoni knew he’d be under computer-controlled defense mechanisms that would evaluate his every move and mood and would make their own decisions as to whether or not he was a threat to the Chairman. It wasn’t that Benoni didn’t mind—he just didn’t give a damn.

Max Shumb, Chairman of the Leadership Council of the Democratic Motherworld, was a handsome man in his middle years, the kind of man age helped rather than hurt. He sat behind his huge, U-shaped desk looking over some papers and didn’t immediately acknowledge the colonel’s entrance. Benoni, however, knew just what to do, and took the comfortable chair opposite the desk and waited.

The Chairman looked up at him, nodded, and put down the papers, but he did not smile. “Well, Eric, we were lucky this time.”

Benoni nodded. “But perhaps not next time, and certainly not the time after that.”

Shumb sighed. “You’d think they’d run out of rocks at the rate they send them here.” He stared straight at the officer. “The project isn’t working. They’ve countered you at every turn. If anything, we’re slightly worse off than we were. We have to have the energy you’re bleeding away, Eric.”

“It won’t matter. That’s why you approved the project to begin with. Little by little the defenses break down. Before we began, we had an optimistic estimate that they would be able to invade within nine years at current rates. I have cost you perhaps a year, certainly no more than two. You could not shut down anyway. If they win, it’s the only exit available.”

Shumb did not attempt to rebut the truth. He spent too much of his time doing that as a politician. “I assume you’re here for permission to make another try.”

“We’ve run this through the computers and it looks most promising. Because it does not directly involve us, merely pushes certain period people in our direction, it might not be obvious that it is us at all. The degree of change is enormous in our favor, yet incredibly subtle. There is even the possibility that there would be no revolution, no war at all. We would be all one big, happy family—under Earth’s control. And your line remains constant. It will be a far different situation, but you will still be in control.”

“I’ll check it against my own computers on that. Still, I hesitate. Perhaps one more major operation is all we can stand. Two at the most. This last attack is a harbinger of things to come. Next time it might be Europe, or North America, or eastern China. Sooner or later it will be.”

“Run your computations. It’s worth a shot. As you say, tomorrow it might be here. Surely it is better to try for it all than rule over… this. Is it not?”

“If it wasn’t, I’d never have permitted you to do this in the first place. Still, after all this time, I am not clear about your own motives in all this.”

“You know the rules. I can live as myself only in prehistory or at the reality point. I’ve had enough of primordial dawn, and I have no love for the Outworlders. I prefer an unsullied humanity. If I am to live here, and not under them, then you must win. That is all there is to it.”

I wonder… Shumb couldn’t help thinking. He’d never liked nor trusted this strange man, who was of no time or place at all. Trust had never been one of the Chairman’s strong points. Finally he said, “I’ll run it through myself and let you know.”

The colonel got up, stiffened, and saluted. “That’s all I can ask, sir,” he responded, then pivoted and walked out of the office. He went immediately to make the preparations and check the final calculations. He already knew full well that it would be approved, and to what strange paths it would lead, the number of lives it would change, and cost—and create. He knew, in fact, exactly where it would lead him, but he did not know what he would find there.