John Varley - Millennium

"Nine minutes," Carpenter said, quietly.

"Nine minutes." Janz shrugged. "Time sort of gets mixed up. I had 'em all labeled ... " He looked up at me, puzzled. "You know what it's like when the computer goes down? You know how we -- "

"I know," I said. "You go back to manual marking."

"Right. Manual." He laughed, with no humor. "They didn't tell me it was gonna be that hard, I mean, I just about had it back under control ... and the next thing I know the computer was back on. There were even a couple of flights labeled, but not much altitude information available yet. It's like that, sometimes, when we're getting back on line. Some things get lost, and others -- "

"I know," I said. I was visualizing him trying to switch from one system to another, with inadequate data.

"Well, the computer was still slow. It wasn't real-time yet."

"It hardly ever is," Carpenter said, with a scowl directed at me.

The lawyer looked confused, and I thought he was about to make an objection. He was obviously out of his depth, and didn't know if he ought to let his client talk on about things he couldn't advise him about. Carpenter noticed it, and shook his head "Don't worry," he said. "Don's just saying the computer was running behind. We make it about fifteen seconds, which is about average on a busy night." The lawyer still looked confused, which exasperated Carpenter. "It means the picture Don was seeing on his screen was fifteen seconds old. And it's all he had to go by. Sometimes the computer falls behind as much as a minute and a half. There's no way anybody can blame Don because the computer is an antique."

I could tell from Carpenter's look that he had a pretty good idea who to blame, but he wouldn't say anything just now. The lawyer seemed satisfied.

Janz didn't seem to have noticed the exchange. He was still back there in the ARTCC, coping with a new situation.

"Right off, I could see three-five and eight-eighty were problem. They weren't close enough yet to set off the alarm, but they were getting that way. Or at least, considering the computer lagtime, I didn't think they were in trouble yet. But they weren't were they ought to be.

"They were on the wrong side of each other. Damn it, I couldn't figure out how the fuckers had passed each other like that. It didn't seem like they'd had enough time, no matter how bad my course figures were. But 35 should have been north of 880, and it was the other way around. And they were drifting back toward each other."

He put his head in his hands again, and shook it slowly.

"There wasn't a hell of a lot of time to make the decision. I figured they had about three minutes. But the fucking crash alarm wasn't going off, and I couldn't figure that, either. I turned them away from each other damn quick, and figured I'd sort it out later, in the incident report.

"That's when they switched places."

I looked up, and over at Carpenter. He nodded grimly at me.

"You're saying, Don, that the computer had mislabeled the two planes?"

He was nodding.

"Just for a couple of sweeps. I don't know ... transponder trouble, simultaneous signals ..

. what the hell. Whatever happened, for a minute there the computer was telling me the Pan Am was the United and the United was the Pan Am." He looked up at me for the first time, and in his eyes was a terrible emptiness.

"And ... see, what I had to do ... from what the computer was saying ... " He choked, but struggled on. "See, I tried to turn them away from each other. But since they were exactly reversed on my screen, what I ended up telling them to do was to steer straight toward each other."

There was a short silence in the room. A couple of my people looked skeptical -- hell, maybe I was, myself, in a way. But it was hard to believe, looking at him, that he was lying.

He went on; still calm.

"And then, see, when the computer got them straightened out, there was just time for the alarm to go off, and I looked down and you couldn't tell the blips apart anymore. They were just one blip.

"And the blip dropped right off my board."

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

Sherman took me in hand when I finally got home. He didn't ask any questions, and he didn't say anything. A very quiet machine, is Sherman. I suppose it's a result of his near-total identification with me, his near-perfect reading of my moods and his near-perfect knowledge of what is best to do about them. One might even he moved to call it empathy, if one wasn't such a cynical bitch.

And of course he read that, too.

"I talk to you when you need talk, Louise," he said. "And for you, cynicism is probably a necessary armor."

Maybe I need to talk now, I thought. This, after an hour soaking in a hot tub as Sherman scrubbed and scrubbed at the blood that had vanished long ago but still needed cleansing.

Out, damned spot.

"Maybe you do need to talk," he said.

"Ah ha! You do read minds, you devious android."

"I read bodies. The print is much clearer. But I know your thought processes, and your education. You just thought of Macbeth."

"Lady Macbeth," I said. "Tell me why."

"You know, but it would be easier to hear me tell it."

"So I won't let you. Keep washing while I talk; maybe you can get the guilt out."

"You're indulging yourself. But if you wish to wallow in it a little longer, who am I to object? Merely a devious android."

"Wallowing in it? Bite your tongue."

"I was speaking of the bathwater."

I knew what he was speaking about, but I still needed to talk.

"It was Ralph's stunner. He's dead, of course, so he can't be blamed. But then who should be? Lilly was second in command; no point in trying to find her for a drumhead trial and execution. That leaves me. I was in command; I should have brought the stunner back with me. Two stunners left behind in one day!"

Sherman continued to scrub. I looked at his blank face, for once wishing there was an expression I could read.

"Honorable behavior," he said, finally, "demands seppuku. Do you want me to go get the knife?"

"Don't ridicule me."

"There's not much else I can do. If you insist that someone die for the mistake you all made in a chaotic situation, you are the logical choice."

"That's what I told the others."

"And what did they say?"

I didn't answer him. I was still confused about it. What they said was, fine, Louise, but we'll have to be killed, too. They maintained -- every one of them -- that responsibility for overlooking the stunner was spread out among all of us. They further pointed out that Ralph and Lilly were already dead, and it would be terribly wasteful to kill everyone else, too.

I didn't know about that, but I did know that if any of them ever needed my hide for a doormat, I'd cheerfully skin myself. There are rewards in being a leader, dammit.

"Haven't you been scrubbing there a little too long?" I said.

"I'm not distracting you, am I?"

"I don't need that. It's not the right time."

As usual, I was wrong.

And that is how William Archibald "Bill" Smith entered my life.

Not therein the bathtub, of course; later, back at the Gate, in the first anxious hours as we all waited as best we could while the temporal technicians took the pulse of the timeline, checking for damage.

Martin Coventry explained it tome and Lawrence and few of my top operatives and Lawrence's deputy gnomes. He gathered us all around a time tank he had set up near Lawrence's console and outlined the situation.

I had to admit I liked Coventry. He was a walkie, and a worker, but not a snatcher. His field was temporal theory, which made him one of about a dozen people on the planet who could claim to understand a little of what time travel was all about.