Timothy Zahn: Time Bomb And Zahndry Others

I nodded and pointed toward the rear of the plane, watching Jeffer's face closely. There was no reaction that I could detect. Whatever it was he was seeing, it didn't seem to match the nonexistent body my subconscious persisted in giving me during Jumps. Which meant hand motions, expressions—body language of all sorts—were out.

Which left me exactly one method of communication. I hoped it would be enough.

Carefully—mindful of both the deadline breathing down Jeffers's neck and the danger of him losing track of me if I moved too fast—I began backing down the corridor toward the rear of the plane. For a moment Jeffers held his ground, a whole raft of conflicting emotions playing across his face. Then, almost reluctantly, he followed. I had another flicker of darkness as someone came up from behind and walked through me, nodding greetings to Jeffers as they passed. For a bad second I thought Jeffers was going to point me out to the other man; but it was clear that he still wasn't entirely sure he wasn't hallucinating, and after a few casual words he left the other and continued on toward me. I got my breathing started again and resumed my own movement, and a minute later we were standing across from the rear door.

And I ran full tilt into my inability to speak or even pantomime. The parachutes were racked across from the door, inconspicuous but clearly visible... but moving over and hovering by them didn't seem to give Jeffers the hint. I tried moving away, then back again—tried backing directly into and through one of the neat packs and then back out—tried moving practically to Jeffer's nose, back to the chutes, and then to the door.

Nothing.

I gritted my teeth. With the usual fouling of my time sense I had no idea how many seconds we had left before the balloon went up, but I knew there weren't a lot of them. There had to be some other way to get the message across to Jeffers—there had to be—but for the life of me I couldn't come up with one. Back and forth I went, parachute to door back to parachute, repeating the motions for lack of anything better to do, all the whole racking my brain trying to think of something else—anything else—that I could do. Back and forth...

On what must have been the tenth repetition, he finally got it.

You want me to jump from the plane? his lips said. I started to nod, caught myself, and instead tried moving my whole body up and down.

For a wonder, he interpreted the gesture properly. Is someone going to shoot us down? he asked.

Close enough. I nodded again and moved back to the parachutes. Any second now—

Jeffers didn't move. What about the others? he asked, his hand sweeping around in a gesture that encompassed the entire plane I can't just leave them to die.

I blinked, feeling my stomach tightening within me. Jeffers's ability to think and care about average American people had been one of my major reasons for voting for him in the first place; to have that asset suddenly turn into a liability was something I would never have expected. I thought furiously, trying to figure out some way to answer him—

From outside came a dull thud... and an instant later the floor beneath Jeffers tilted violently, throwing him through me and into the parachute rack.

I spun around, heart thudding in my ears, half expecting to see him sprawled on the floor, dazed or unconscious from the impact. It was almost a shock to find him on his feet, fully alert—

And pulling on one of the parachutes.

I didn't stop to try and figure it out. Pulling laterally to the direction of my tether, I ducked outside for a moment, trying to estimate how much time Jeffers had before we were too close to the ground. Thirty seconds, perhaps, depending on whether the winds would be blowing him toward or away from the mountain sloping away directly beneath us. I went back inside, and to my mild surprise found Jeffers already in harness and fighting his way uphill along the sloping floor toward the door. I held my breath... and as the plane almost leveled for a second, he lunged and managed to catch the lever before the floor angled beneath him again.

I glanced back toward the parachute rack again to fix in my mind exactly which chute he'd taken; and as I did so, something skittering along the wall caught my eye. It was a flat package, covered in bright orange: one of the emergency packs that were supposed to be clipped to the front webbing of each of the chutes. I looked back at Jeffers, but before I could get in position to see his chest the plane almost-leveled again—

And in a single convulsive motion he shoved the door hard against the gale of the air outside and squeezed his way out.

I dropped straight down through the floor and luggage compartment, falling as far below the crippled plane as my tether allowed. Below and behind me, Jeffers tumbled end over end, shirt billowing in the breeze. If he'd hit something on the way out—if he was unconscious—

The drogue chute snaked its way out of the pack, followed immediately by the main chute. It filled out, stabilized... and for the first time the reality of what I'd just done hit me.

We'd used the Banshee machinery to save a man's life.

All the private agony I'd had to endure throughout my time at Banshee—all the pent-up frustration of watching disasters I couldn't stop—all of it seemed to flow out of me in that one glorious moment. All the millions of dollars—all the backhanded bureaucratic comments we'd had to put up with—it was suddenly worth it. Let them scoff now! We'd saved a life—a President's life, no less. And on top of it, we'd even done so without any of Rennie's and Hale's fears about changing the past coming true. The minute I was back, Shaeffer could direct the searchers at the crash site to move their operations back a couple of miles to where I could see Jeffers coming down....

And as my attention shifted from Jeffers's parachute to the rocky, tree-covered slope below, the flood of wonder and pride washing over me evaporated. Beyond his landing area, perhaps a mile further down the slope, a small village was clearly visible.

A village he'd be able to walk to in an hour.

—

I don't remember much about the minutes immediately following the Jump. There was, I know, a lot of shaking of my arms and some fairly insistent use of my name, but for some reason I was unable to really come out of it, and after a short time the voices and hands faded into blackness and disturbing dreams.

Eventually, though, the dreams faded. When I was finally able to drag myself back to full awareness, I found I was back upstairs in my room, lying on my bed with an intravenous tube running into my arm. I lifted the arm slightly, frowning at the tube.

"Just relax and don't try to move," a voice said from my other side.

I turned my head, and with a complete lack of surprise found Griff sitting beside the bed. "What—?" I managed to croak before my voice gave out.

"You came out of the Jump in something approximating a hysterical state," he said. "Babbled something about Jeffers bailing out and changing the past and then collapsed. Shaeffer's had them pumping stuff into your arm ever since."

I glanced again at the needle and shivered. "How... what time is it?"

He checked his wrist. "Almost four-thirty."

Which meant I'd been out of commission for something close to three hours. "What's been happening with the search?"

Griff shrugged fractionally, the lines around his eyes and mouth tightening a bit. "Nothing, as far as I know. Shaeffer's been running back and forth between here and the communications room, not wanting to launch anything major until he could talk to you and find out just what you were talking about back there."

A shiver went down my back. "He got out of the plane," I whispered. "The parachute opened okay, and he was on his way down.... but there was a town an hour's walk downslope of him. There's no way he could have missed it."