John Varley - Millennium

"This is not germane to the question of your -- "

"Stop using that word!"

" -- failure. Sit down, Louise. Breathe regularly; the faintness will pass."

I did, and it did.

Sherman leaned closer to me and spoke in a voice I'm pretty sure the others couldn't hear.

"I have taken certain actions I thought appropriate," he said. "The new face is one of them. The induced catharsis was another. If you're calm enough to continue and if you'll concede my right to be here in this conference, we can proceed, and discuss your grievances when we're alone."

I swallowed hard, and nodded. I didn't trust myself to talk.

"So he saw you, and you ran. Does that sum it up?"

I nodded again.

"Then I don't think the damage is great. There was no question of him penetrating your disguise."

"That's right," Lawrence said. "Look at it from his viewpoint. He saw a woman in a United Airlines uniform, and she ran from him."

"An odd thing to do," Martin said.

"Sure, but she can explain it to him the next time she meets him. We can think of some kind of story to -- "

"Wait a minute. What's this about me meeting him again?"

"That was my idea," Sherman said.

I looked from one to the other, taking my time about it.

"You didn't suggest it while I was here," I said. "So the three of you were talking while I was gone."

"That's right," Lawrence said. "Sherman arrived just as we were getting the new information."

"What new information?"

"Lawrence expressed it badly," Sherman said. "I arrived, and after a great deal of trouble making myself heard, managed to communicate to the operations team that I knew what they were about to discover. Shortly afterward, they discovered it."

"We're still not sure about the time sequence," Lawrence said, defensively.

"I'm sure," Sherman said.

"Will someone tell it to me straight?" I asked. "Start to finish, just the way things happen in real time?"

The three of them looked at each other, and I swear, Martin and Lawrence were the ones who looked uncertain while Sherman was stolid as a stone.

"He'd better tell it," Lawrence conceded.

"Very well," Sherman said. "Thirty seconds before you went through the Gate; I was at the Post Office, where the Big Computer had summoned me. I read the message that was waiting for me just as you stepped through. Pursuant to instruction in the message, I came here."

I hadn't known there was a message waiting for Sherman. I hadn't known that any robot had ever gotten a time capsule.

There was a good reason for that. This was an unusual message. It specified on the outside that no human was to be notified of the identity of the recipient, nor of the date of its opening. The BC, as I said, follows these instructions literally. Technically, the Programming Council has instructed the BC to follow the directions on time capsules, but I wonder what the BC would have done if the Council had said otherwise.

Well, "would have done" is nothing but a rarefied form of the verb "to do." And a very pointless one.

The message told Sherman -- among other things, and we'll get to that -- to go to Gate operations and tell Lawrence that I was going to have a face-to-face meeting with Bill Smith, and that I would fail in my mission. That word again.

He did that, or tried to. It was hard to get their attention, for two reasons: the operations team was still probing in and around the era with their time-scan tanks and things were clearing up a little, and ... well, he was a robot. Most people were astonished that he was there. It was as if my refrigerator had come into Operations, tap-dancing and singing Suwannee, wearing a sandwich board proclaiming the end of the world.

But he managed to tell them. Simultaneously, or a few seconds later, depending on who you believe, one of the operatives spotted Bill Smith in a helicopter returning from the 747 crash site and someone else found the same helicopter parked on the apron outside the hangar I was visiting. Inference: Smith and I could meet inside that hangar.

That's when they started listening to Sherman. It was a matter of a few seconds to confirm that he had indeed received a time capsule, at which point his stock went up tremendously. I'd recently experienced the same effect. Me and my people tend to listen to somebody who's just received a message from the future.

And of course that's when he started to clam up.

"The message was quite specific," he said. "There are certain things I can tell you, and others things chat I must keep secret."

"Come on," I said. "Don't bullshit a bullsh -- " That's as far as I got, and wished I'd buttoned my lip about five syllables earlier. I remembered my suspicion that the Council might be listening in, and the recent time-capsule-inspired performance I'd given them to get this operation authorized.

"There are a few more things I can say," Sherman went on. "The first is that my message confirmed yours, Louise. It said this operation is vital to the success of the Gate Project." He glanced at me, and I wished I had more experience at reading his eyes, but you can't read what isn't there. His new eyes were fake, of course, but looked very natural. His mouth was just a sketch. It could convey expression in the same way a cartoon can. He hadn't bothered with a nose.

"The second thing concerns the next phase, since we all agree the excursion back to window A was of no use."

So the subject was back to windows. What we had was B,C, and D. I thought D was too dangerous, B too unlikely to produce results, and C ...

Tell him about the kid. She's just a wimp.

Nobody knew it but me, but I wasn't going back to Window C. I took a deep breath, got ready to do a cowardly thing, which was to put all my weight behind a trip back to B. I was pretty sure Martin would vote with me, and I thought I could swing Lawrence. The one thing I was sure of was that nobody would go for D. D was the site of the paradox, and surely too dangerous to visit.

"The third thing I can tell you now," Sherman went on, "is that the next visit must be to 2300 hours, Pacific time, on the night of the 13th of December. This is the window you have referred to as D. And Louise should lead the operation."

Testimony of Bill Smith

There was one of those stand-up places not too far away from our conference room. We went in there because we didn't think we'd have time for much more than that. I've seen those places in airports from LAX to Orly, and I've always wondered why people would want to stand up to eat their stale hot dogs. I guess the answer was obvious: they were in a hurry, like us.

I got something they claimed was roast beef, then I spent a lot of time tearing open and squeezing those little packets of mustard and ketchup and some unidentifiable white sauce to kill the gluey taste of the meat. Tom got a chili dog he had to eat with a plastic fork.

"Have you heard that story before?" I asked him.

"Some of it. I had some idea that's what he'd say."

"What'd you think of it?"

Tom took some time with his answer. I was interested, because ground control and operations was his specialty, and he knows a lot about electronics in general -- an area I'll admit isn't my strongest. He was an M.I.T. graduate in computer science, whereas I was a member of the last generation who still knew what a slide rule looked like. You have to know something about computers in my line of work, and I did, but I'd never grown to love them.

"It could happen," he said, at last.

"Do you think it did?"

"I believed him, if that's what you're asking. We may even get corroboration out of the computer. It'll take some work."

I chewed that over. -- "Okay. Assuming it's true. Who do you think we hang for it?"