Гарри Гаррисон - Rebel in Time

Troy was puzzled. 'But wouldn't this computer meter be disconnected after it was no longer needed?'

Kleiman shook his head. 'You got it wrong. We didn't add any meters or junk. We just wrote a program, instructions for the computer, to remember some facts for us. All of which operated invisibly and unseen until someone asked the thing to tell us what had gone on. We even added some inputs of our own to help us in recording experiments. Very handy it was in the early days.'

'But you no longer use it?'

'We no longer access the information. You've got to learn the jargon if you are going to be hanging around here. Once a program is started it will keep running forever unless you stop it.' He waved his hand at a row of steel cabinets. 'It's all in there. All you have to do is ask.'

Troy gazed in wonder at the featureless doors. 'Are you serious? Can we really find the record of all the experiments?'

'Every one. Just ask the right question.'

'Then ask!'

'Not me,' Kleiman said, reaching for the telephone. 'This is the age of the specialist, young man. I'm a physicist, not a flow-chart doodler. For this you need the right person. Nina Vassella, our head programmer. She'll know what to do… Hello, Nina? Come 'sta? Bene ? That's what I like to hear. Look, we got a little problem down in nine that only you can solve. When? Now, of course. Be a sweety-pie. That's my girl. Thanks.' He hung up. 'She'll be right down.'

Nina was dark, petite, lovely — and she knew her business.

'Of course I remember the program,' she said. 'Particularly since I wrote it.'

'Is it still running?'

'Undoubtedly. Since it would probably crash the entire system if one of you ham-handed masters of cosmic theory tried to get anywhere near it. And I haven't wiped it. So it must still be ticking away. Let's see.'

She pulled the chair over in front of the terminal, then spun the adjustment to raise it up high enough for her. When she sat down her legs dangled like a little girl's, her feet not reaching the floor; she twined her legs around the chair supports. But she knew very well what she was doing. Her fingers flashed over the keyboard, pulling up a menu of all the programs running, then accessed the one she wanted and checked it through. Thirty seconds later she leaned back and pointed her thumb at the rows of numbers marching down the screen.

'There it is. Ready and waiting.'

'Great!' Kleiman said, patting her on the shoulder. 'You are a genius, baby. Now give us a print-out, if you please.'

'What? There are all of two years plus of read-out in there. Haven't you heard of the energy crisis and the paper shortage?'

'That's the name of the game. Type.'

She pressed two keys and the high-speed printer against the far wall began to hammer away with a rapid, paper-tearing sound. The printing head tore back and forth across the endless sheet of fanfold paper which began to pile up higher and higher in the wire tray.

'Is that all you geniuses need now?' Nina asked.

'Thank you, doll, I'll remember you in my will.'

When the printer had finally lapsed into silence, Kleiman tore the paper apart at the end of the last sheet and carried the book-thick pile of print-out over to his desk.

'Now we'll see what we will see,' he said, turning the pack over and pulling free the last pages. 'Right up to date, yep, here's the one I did this morning. Now let us flip back a bit, to last week-end when the colonel went missing… mamma mia !'

'What is it?'

'There it is, right here, late last Saturday, when the joint was supposed to be closed up. Power, man, power. Whatever they were doing in here they were burning enough juice to light up Chicago. We've never pulled a ten-thousandth of that amount. I'm surprised that they didn't vaporize every one of the circuits. And what's this? No, this I do not believe! Too much!'

He pointed to a line of print-out, his thumb on a set of numbers. It looked in no way different to Troy than anything else on the page. Kleiman flipped through the sheets in consternation, then back to the original page.

He shook his head with disbelief.

'Here, see it, right there. The polarity of tau input, it's reversed. It shouldn't be like that. We never do that — look at all the others. The results were consistently negative, we abandoned that approach.'

Troy held his impatience under tight control. 'What does it mean? This tau thing. Why does it bother you?'

'It doesn't bother me — it's just impossible, that's what. It can't be done. But it has been done.'

The paper slipped from Kleiman's fingers and fell to the floor. He turned to Troy, and when he spoke again his voice was hushed, his face drawn.

'Whatever was moved in time wasn't moved forward. It was sent in the opposite direction. Sent back in time — to the past.'

Troy accepted the fact of time travel without hesitation. Why shouldn't he? He had grown up in the age of technological miracles. First there had been the atomic bomb, well before his birth, then, one after another, the hydrogen bomb, atomic energy, jet aircraft that could fly faster than sound, followed by orbiting satellites, and lastly the almost unbelievable, real-time television pictures of men walking on the Moon. There seemed no end to the cornucopia output of the laboratories and he, like many others, had stopped trying to understand how they worked. They just did. He had used electronic guided missiles in the Army. You pressed the button and they went. That's all that you had to know.

So you pressed another button and something travelled through time. There was really no difference. The only question was — what had the machine been used for? What was it that McCulloch and Harper had sent backwards in time? Was it the gold? What would that have possibly accomplished? But if it hadn't been the gold — then what had it been?

When the question was asked this way, the answer became obvious. The pieces fitted together at last. Troy spun about and called out to Kleiman, who did not hear him. The physicist was muttering to himself as he pawed his way through the sheets of print-out. Troy had to raise his voice to get the man's attention.

'What?' Kleiman said, looking up and blinking distractedly. 'What did you say?'

'I asked you, can you tell from the figures how big the thing was that was sent through your time machine?'

'How big? Its mass, you mean? Yes, we can find out. I'll have to work out the equation though, the tau settings against the power consumed as the factorial aspects…'

'Can you tell me now, even roughly, how big a mass can be moved through time?'

'Though we have only used small objects up until now there is theoretically no limiting factor on size. If we had a field big enough, why, I suppose that we could move the Washington Monument. There is nothing in the theory that precludes the possibility.'

Troy hesitated before he said it. 'If that's true, then it is within reason, it is possible — that a human being could be sent through time?'

'Yes, why not, mass is mass—' Kleiman stopped, and he tilted his head as he looked at Troy. 'Are you getting at what I think you are getting at? Is it your theory that this explains the colonel's sudden disappearance?'

'Possibly. It might explain a lot of things. The way he committed those brutal murders just to buy himself some time. Then there was his apparent indifference to leaving a trail that could be followed later. Why should he care what crimes he committed — if he were no longer here to face the consequences of his acts?'

'You're right, he wouldn't care in the slightest. If his escape through time were possible. But during the research to date we never even considered using living creatures in our experiments. It might very well be lethal, we don't know. It was never tried.'