John Varley: Millennium

Author's note

The time-travel story has a long history in science fiction. The theme has been so extensively explored, in fact, that I found it no trouble to write a book with chapter titles borrowed almost exclusively from the long list of stories that served, in one way or another, as ancestors to this one.

I would like to acknowledge my debt to these writers by listing them here. If you are at all interested in the possibilities presented by time travel, you would do well to read these stories: "A Sound of Thunder," by Ray Bradbury; " "All You Zombies -- " by Robert A. Heinlein; "Let's Go to Golgotha," by Garry Kilworth; The Time Machine, by Herbert George Wells; "As Never Was," by P. Schuyler Miller; Guardians of Time, by Poul Anderson; "Me, Myself, and I," by William Tenn; The Shadow Girl, by Ray Cummings; "The Man Who Came Early," by Poul Anderson; Behold the Man, by Michael Moorcock; The Productions of Time, by John Brunner; "Poor Little Warrior!" by Brian W. Aldiss; "Compounded Interest," by Mack Reynolds; "When We Went to See the End of the World," by Robert Silverberg; "The Twonky," by Henry Kuttner; Lest Darkness Fall, by l.. Sprague de Camp; The Night Land, by William Hope Hodgson; "All the Time in the World," by Arthur C. Clarke; and The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov.

The chapter entitled "Famous Last Words" is a play on the title "Famous First Words," by Harry Harrison; in this case, first had to become last.

"As Time Goes By" is, of course, the name of the song Humphrey Bogart asked Sam to play in Casablanca. It was written by Herman Hupfeld.

And A Night to Remember was a 1958 film about the sinking of the Titanic, by "The Rank Organisation, screenplay by Eric Ambler, produced by William MacQuitty, directed by Roy Baker, One final acknowledgement: The title of this novel, Millennium, is also the title of an excellent novel written by Ben Bova, and published in 1976. Mister Bova's novel had nothing to do with rime travel.

John Varley

EUGENE, OREGON

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

The DC-10 never had a chance. It was a fine aircraft, even though at that point in time it was still under a cloud of controversy resulting from incidents in Paris and Chicago. But when you lose that much wing you're no longer in a flying machine, you're in an aluminum rock.

That's how the Ten came in: straight down and spiraling.

But the 747, as I was telling Wilbur Wright just the other day, ranks up there with the DC-3 Gooney Bird and the Fokker-Aerospatiale HST as one of the most reliable hunks of airframe ever designed.. It's true that this one came out of the collision in better shape than the DC-10, and there is no doubt it was mortally wounded. But the grand old whale managed to pull up into straight and level flight and maintain it. Who knows what might have been possible if that mountain hadn't got in the way? And it retained a surprising amount of structural integrity as it belly-flopped and rolled over -- a maneuver no one at Boeing had envisioned in their design parameters. The proof of this could be seen in the state of the passengers: there were upwards of thirty bodies without a single limb detached. If it hadn't caught fire, there might even have been some faces intact.

I've always thought it would be a spectacular show to witness in your final seconds.

Would you really rather die in bed? Well, maybe so. One way of dying is probably much like any other.

Testimony of Bill Smith

My phone rang just before one o'clock on the morning of December 10.

I could leave it there, just say my phone rang, but it wouldn't convey the actual magnitude of the event.

I once spent seven hundred dollars for an alarm clock. It wasn't an alarm clock when I bought it and it was a lot more than that when I got through with it. The heart of the thing was a World War Two surplus air-raid siren. I added items here and there and, when I was through, it would have given the San Francisco earthquake stiff competition as a means of getting somebody out of bed.

Later, I connected my second telephone to this doomsday machine.

I got the second phone when I found myself jumping every time the first one rang. Only six people at the office knew the number of the new phone, and it solved two problems very neatly. I stopped twitching at the sound of telephone bells, and I never again was awakened by somebody who came to the house to tell me that the alarm had come in, I had been called and failed to answer, and I had been replaced on the go-team.

I'm one of those people who sleep like the dead. Always have; my mother used to tumble me out of bed to get me to school. Even in the Navy, while all around me were losing sleep thinking about the flight deck in the morning, I could stack Z's all night and have to be rousted out by the C.O.

Also, I do drink a bit.

You know how it is. First it's just at parties. Then it's a couple at the end of the day. After the divorce I started drinking alone, because for the first time in my life I was having trouble getting to sleep. And I know that's one of the signs, but it's miles short of alcoholism.

But a pattern had developed of arriving late at the office and I figured I'd better do something about it before somebody higher up did. Tom Stanley recommended counseling, but I think my alarm clock worked just as well. There's always a way to work out your problems if you'll only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done.

For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffee-maker. When you're up and have the coffee perking, it's too late to go back to sleep.

We all laughed about it at the office. Everybody thought it was cute. Okay, maybe rats running through a maze are cute, too. And maybe you're perfectly well adjusted, without a single gear that squeaks or spring that's wound too tight, and if so, I don't want to hear about it. Tell it to your analyst.

So my phone rang.

So I sat up, looked around, realized it was still dark and knew this wasn't the beginning of another routine day at the office. Then I grabbed the receiver before the phone could peel the second layer of paint off the walls.

I guess I took a while getting it to my car. There had been a few drinks not too many hours before, and I'm not at my best when I wake up, even on a go-team call. I heard a hissing silence, then a hesitant voice.

"Mr. Smith?" It was the night-shift operator at the Board, a woman I'd never met.

"Yeah, you got him."

"Please hold for Mr. Petcher."

Then even the hiss was gone and l found myself in that twentieth-century version of purgatory, 'on hold,' before I had a chance to protest.

Actually, I didn't mind. It gave me a chance to wake up. I yawned and scratched, put on my glasses, and peered at the dart tacked to the wall above the nightstand. There he was, C. Gordon Petcher, just below the chairman and the line that read "GO-TEAM MEMBERS -- Notify the following for all catastrophic accidents." The chart is changed every Thursday at the end of the work day. The Chairman, Roger Ryan, is the only name that appears on every one. No matter what happens, at any time of the day, Ryan is the first to hear about it.

My own name was a little further down the list in the space marked 'Aviation Duty Officer/IIC,' followed by my beeper number and the number of my second home phone. 'IIC,' by the way, is not to be read as 'two-C,' but as 'Investigator In Charge.'

C. Gordon Petcher was the newest of the five members of the National Transportation Safety Board. As such, he was naturally a little suspect. Those of us hired for our expertise always wonder about new Board members, who are appointed for five-year terms. Each has to go through a trial period during which we decide if this one is to be trusted or endured.