Timothy Zahn: Time Bomb And Zahndry Others

I am startled so much that, for the first time, I stop working. This is wrong, I know, and I try to begin again, but this new sight is so different that I cannot concentrate. Finally, I simply give up, despite the deep longing I have to continue. I must understand this new sight.

It is, I quickly learn, much more limited than my normal sight. It can only be used in one direction at once, and things it shows me are not like what I see normally. They are dark, indistinct, and flat. Some are not even there; I cannot see my work moving along in front of me, no matter how I try.

It seems wrong that I should have two sights when one is so weak. But even as I wonder at this an exciting thought comes to me; perhaps, just as the normal sight shows me things the new one cannot, the new one can show things the normal cannot. And if so, perhaps I can discover them.

Eagerly, using both sights, I begin to search. The hunger within me to return to work is still strong, but I try to ignore it.

—

Operations Chief Ted Forester was across the control room, looking at the power monitors, when Vic O'Brian made the laconic announcement.

"Glitch in Number Twenty-Seven. Bad one."

Forester was at his shoulder in four strides. The indicator was indeed flashing red; the data were already appearing on the screen. "Damn," Forester muttered under his breath, scanning the numbers.

"Not puttin' out a damn thing," O'Brian commented with thinly veiled disgust. "This is the fourth time in three weeks he's drifted off-mark."

"I can count," Forester said shortly, aware that the other two operators had suspended their chitchat and were listening silently. "Have you tried a booster yet?"

"Don't figure it'll do much good this time." O'Brian tapped at a number on the screen. "He's got all he oughta need already. I figure it's just time to terminate this one; he's nothin' but trouble."

Forester kept his temper firmly in check even as the first twinges of anxiety rumbled through his ulcer. "Let's not go off the deep end right away. We'll try a booster first—double strength."

He waited in silence as O'Brian adjusted the setting and pressed the proper button. "Nothin'," the operator said.

"Give it a minute," Forester said, eyes on the radiation readouts from the conveyer by Twenty-Seven's position. Come on, he urged silently, and for a moment the numbers crept upward. But it didn't last; in fits and jerks the readings slid back down, until only the normal radiation of nuclear waste was registering.

Forester let out a long breath that was half snort, half sigh. Reaching over O'Brian's shoulder, he tapped for Twenty-Seven's bio data. Respiration, normal; heartbeat up two or three counts—

"Hey, the little bugger's tryin' to move," O'Brian said, sounding both surprised and indignant.

Sure enough, the restraint sensors were registering slight, intermittent pressures. "Yeah. I guess we'd better take a look," Forester said, steeling himself as O'Brian flipped a switch and the closed-circuit monitor came to life.

Strapped, wired, and tubed in place, Number Twenty-Seven lay in the soft confines of his form-fit cubicle/cradle. His face with its cleft lip, slanting eyes, and saddle-shaped nose was turned toward the camera. Forester's stomach churned, as it always did when he looked at one of Project Recovery's forty-nine Spoonbenders. Why the hell do I stick with this damned. Project? he wondered for the billionth time—and for the billionth time the same answer came: Because if I don't, people like O'Brian will be in charge.

"I don't see anything obvious," Forester said after a moment. "You'd better give Kincaid a call."

"We could try a restart first," the operator suggested.

Restart—shorthand for cutting off the Spoonbender's oxygen for a minute to put him to sleep, in the hope that whatever made him stop work would be gone when he turned the air back on. One of the more gruesome euphemisms in a project that thrived on them. "No, we're going to do some thinking before we push any more buttons. You'd better get Doc Barenburg down here, too." If he's sober, he added to himself; the doctor's off-duty habits were well known.

O'Brian turned away. Forester's gaze drifted back to the TV screen... and suddenly he stiffened, inhaling sharply through clenched teeth.

"What's wrong?" O'Brian, phone in hand, spun around.

Forester pointed at the screen. "Look! His eyes are open!"

O'Brian's response was a startled obscenity. Turning back, he started dialing.

—

The overpowering urge to go back to work has passed, and I am able again to ignore it if I try hard enough. It is still wrong, though—I know this even though I don't really understand what "wrong" means. There is much I don't understand.

My new sight is less and less interesting. I have used it everywhere I can, and it still shows me nothing I cannot otherwise see. Why then does it exist?

Before I can wonder further, something new catches my attention. Movement/flow begins in one of the boxes I can see, the same movement/flow that I see in some of the small things attached to me and also the things by my work. What is different is that I cannot ever remember this one box doing this.

(Again I am knowing something that is not now. This time it does not frighten me, though I still do not understand it.)

The movement/flow continues. I reach up and touch the box, and I see that the movement/flow continues away from it. I wonder about this, and after much thought I touch one of the things attached to me and follow along it to the place where my new sight ends. Here, too, I feel the movement/flow continuing on.

But this is wrong. I must work now.

I reach out to the work moving in front of me. Inside the cold boxes is something which has another kind of movement/flow. I touch it as I know to do, encouraging the flow and making it faster. There is deep satisfaction in this, and I wonder why I stopped to try and understand the new sight I had discovered. Perhaps "wrong" means to do what is not enjoyable.

And then I see something I had not noticed before. One of the movement/flows in my work feels like the movement/flow in the box near me!

Once again my work slows and then stops as I look at the box. No, I was not wrong. But there are many differences I do not understand. The work and its movement/flow move along a path in front of me, but the box remains still. Where then does its movement/flow go?

I am curious. Reaching to the box, I begin to follow the movement/flow away from it.

—

The numbers on the screen bounced up and down gently, like a yo-yo in honey, before finally settling down once again to show nothing but ordinary radiation levels.

"Almost had it," Project Recovery Director Norm Kincaid muttered, glancing down at O'Brian. "What did you do?"

"Just now? Nothin'."

"Hmm." Kincaid nodded and stepped back from the control panel to where Forester was standing. "You said you already tried an RNA booster?" he asked the operations chief.

"Double dose. Twenty-Seven just doesn't seem to want to work today."

"He doesn't 'want' anything," Kincaid reminded him quietly, with the barest edge to his voice. "They're vegetables, Ted; tools to help solve one of the umpteen critical messes we've gotten ourselves into. You start seeing them as human beings and you'll lose all sense of perspective."

The pro-abortion philosophy of a generation ago, Forester thought bitterly. How far that argument had spread!

Kincaid looked back at the monitor, rubbing his chin. Twenty-Seven's eyes, Forester noted, were closed again. "I don't know," the Director mused. "Maybe we should go ahead and move in a new unit. This isn't the first trouble we've had with him, but a good dose of memory RNA always got him back on the track before. Maybe there's some metabolic flaw developing."