Scott rubbed his chin. "It occurs to me, Geoffrey, that we all crossed a line today. Or if we haven't, we should." Watkins thought about it.
Once he'd gotten used to Kershner's accent, he'd come to realize that the young sergeant was very shrewd. Quick-thinking, too. And, it was now obvious, prepared to be decisive and ruthless when he needed to be. All the things a smart old chief looked for in a successor. And why not? Cherokees had been intermarrying with whites for generations.
So had all the southern tribes. Watkins himself was at least a quarter white, in his ancestry. The top chief of the Cherokees, John Ross, was seven-eighths Scottish, if you calculated things the way white people did, by race instead of clan. They had a lot of years ahead of them.
Very dangerous years. But, maybe, their children and their children and their children would have forever. If they started the right way.
"Yes, I think you're right." That evening, before the soldiers started their usual separate campfire, Watkins went over to Sergeant Kershner. "Why don't you and your men start eating with us from now on?" he suggested. "We cook better than you do, anyway." He gave their tents a glance. "And starting tomorrow, we should build you a real cabin. Who knows? Winter might be coming." Kershner's smile was a lot more serene than you'd expect from such a young man. "Good idea. I was just thinking the same thing myself."
Chapter 23 After they were ushered into the room-chamber, it might be better to say-that served The Project as its operations center, Nick Brisebois and Timothy Harshbarger spent a minute or so looking around with interest. Their companion, Harshbarger's police partner Bruce Boyle, even lost the apprehensive expression that had been on his face since he arrived at the site in northern Minnesota.
Eventually, Boyle whistled softly. "This looks like something right out of a sci-fi movie." He gave the big table at the center of the chamber that the scientists used as a conference table a somewhat reproachful look. "Except you oughta have a captain's chair and a pilot's chair." Richard Morgan-Ash chuckled. "And how, exactly, would you fly an iron mine?" Boyle shrugged. "Don't ask me. But it wouldn't seem any stranger to me than the rest of this does." "Why'd you put it down here in the first place?" asked Harshbarger. "We didn't, actually. This facility was originally built back in the 1980s to study proton decay. That phenomenon was assumed to be so infrequent that they could only detect it if they could filter out the cosmic rays that would otherwise flood all the observations. Cosmic rays are so penetrative that you need an incredible amount of shielding to filter out their effects. Enough water would do the trick nicely, but it was more practical to use half a mile of earth." "Yeah, I can see that. Especially when the half mile is iron." "There's not much iron ore left, actually. Most of the rock above us is Ely greenstone.
That's ancient rock, dating back almost three billion years. But it doesn't really matter what the exact substance is, as long as there's enough of it. Water would have done just fine, except that building a laboratory at the bottom of Lake Superior or somewhere in the ocean would have cost a fortune. This was expensive enough, even as it was."
"So how many decaying protons did they find?" Brisebois asked. Richard smiled. "Not one, as it happens. Eventually they decided there was something wrong with the theory that predicted them. The whole thing would have been a bit of a boondoggle except the facility could be modified to study neutrinos and look for the postulated dark matter of most current cosmological theories." He nodded toward his colleagues.
"That's what they were doing here when the Grantville Disaster happened, and their equipment picked up traces of it." "Traces of what?" Leo Dingley snorted. "Good question. We're still trying to figure that out. Me, I'm partial to a WIMP side effect of some kind.
That's capital W-I-M-P, not slang. It stands for 'weakly interacting massive particles.' They're one of the proposed solutions for the dark matter problem." He gave his own nod toward his colleagues in the chamber. "Most of them, however, think that what we're observing will eventually be explained by some variant of string theory." Nick held up his hands. "Folks, I'm a trash-hauler and Tim and Bruce are cops.
Can you put this in layman's terms?" Most of the scientists looked very dubious at that proposition. Morgan-Ash smiled. "You have to make allowances. They've lived their whole lives in academia. I, on the other hand, once had to be able to explain things to paratroopers.
Even more valiantly"-here he puffed out his chest-"I have to explain things to a teenage daughter." Nick grinned. "Tough, isn't it? I had two of them. Thankfully, they're now both off to college." "So I'll do my best. You can think of what's happening this way. Our planet regularly gets hits by objects from space. Many of them are simply isolated occurrences, but many others are part of more concentrated impacts." "Like meteor showers," said Boyle. "That's one good example, yes. Most of these bombardments are barely noticed, beyond a show in the sky, because the objects are too small to have much effect when they hit the Earth. If they hit it at all, which most of them don't because they burn up in the atmosphere. You're with me so far?" The three visitors to the lab all nodded. "Well, we're looking at much the same thing. Exceptthese objects seem to be oriented along a different dimensional axis. If you think of time as a fourth dimension, perhaps that one. If you believe, as most of us do, that string theory is onto something, then we could be looking at as many as eleven dimensions."
Dingley jeered. "All of which except the first four-even you admit this much-don't get beyond the string itself. Or exist in some hypothetical multiverse that we're just a tiny four-dimensional part of." Morgan-Ash looked patiently long-suffering. "Leo, can we hold off on the debate for a moment? I'm simply trying to explain to our guestswhat we think is happening. Nothow it's happening. The point is, gentlemen-regardless of what's causing it-the way these objects strike the Earth has most of its effects along a time axis instead of a spacial axis. Where a normal bolide from space that strikes the Earth-a meteorite or an asteroid or a comet-would expend its energy moving mass through space, these objects move it through time. They don't leave three-dimensional craters, they leave time craters."
Brisebois scratched his chin. "In other words, you think Grantville was destroyed by what amounts to a time comet." Richard shrugged. "If it was destroyed at all. It's far more likely that it was simply carried back in time and left somewhere in our past." "But-" Margo interjected. "Somewhere ina past, he should have said. That much we're certain of. No matter which way you calculate the problem, there's no way to account for what happens without assuming that a separate universe is created by the impacts. Or separate timelines, if you prefer. Anything else produces insoluble paradoxes." Nick shook his head. "That's not what I was getting at. I know the old saw about time travel being impossible because you might kill your own grandfather or just do something by accident that has the same effect. What I meant was-" But he got no further, because Harshbarger exploded. "Wait a fucking minute! Are you telling me that Joe Schuler is stillalive?"
"Yeah," said Nick. "That'swhat I was trying to get at." The scientists in the room looked at each, even more dubiously than they had before.
So did Morgan-Ash, this time. "Well…" he said. Margo stood up. "I think we need to quit beating around the bush. It's not as if we haven't all been kept up nights wondering the same thing." She turned to face Harshbarger. "Tim, we can't tell you whether or not your friend is still alive. The truth is, he might very well be dead. What we can tell you-and we're pretty sure of this, now-is that the time impact wouldn't have killed him." Harshbarger's face, flushed red a few seconds earlier, was now rather pale. "How sure are you about that?" Margo hesitated, but O'Connell now spoke up. "As sure as we can be short of meeting the transposed people and talking to them."
Harshbarger stared at him. "Why?" asked Nick. "Two reasons. First of all, there's no mathematical reason they should have been destroyed.
As cold-blooded as it sounds, I can give you an exact mathematical explanation of why someone gets killed when he gets hit by a bullet in the right place or has a big rock dropped on him. It's just a matter of mass and energy, really." He turned and pointed to the diagrams that were displayed on a big board toward the far end of the huge chamber. "The same is true here-and it doesn't matter which way you calculate it. The point is, whatever these bolides are, almost their entire impact is along a time axis. They're no more capable of shredding three-dimensional objects like a human body than a bullet from a gun or a falling rock is able to send someone back in time."
"Jesus," whispered Harshbarger. "What's the second reason?" asked Brisebois. The mathematician shrugged. "Hell, Nick, you saw it yourself." He nodded at the two policemen. "We've finally been able to identify the creature they shot. One of our… call him a fellow traveler, is a paleontologist at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. He's a dinosaur expert. We sent him the carcass you gave us and he says it's definitely a dromaeosaurid of some kind." "Awhat?" asked Boyle. "Dromaeosaurid. The common name for them among dinosaur people is 'raptor.' They're one of the families in the theropod group of dinosaurs." Boyle's eyes were wide. He gave his partner a glare.
"You crazy bastard! Tim, you had us both out there in the night shooting at a goddam velociraptor. I saw that movie too, y'know? It's a good thingwe're still alive!" Harshbarger made a face. "Oh, cut it out. The thing was nowhere near as big as Spielberg's monsters-not to mention that it was trying to run away from us." Margo cleared her throat. "She, actually." The two cops looked at her. "Well, sure, of course we dissected it," she said apologetically. "Or, rather, sent it to the museum and had them do it." "As a result of which," Richard added, chuckling, "I don't believe our colleagues at Bozeman can be described as 'fellow travelers' any longer. Rabid converts to the cause, would be a more accurate way of putting it. And I believe you can put your mind at ease, Officer Boyle. There are-were-a lot of dromaeosaurids. The name itself is just Latin for 'running lizard.'
The velociraptors and their huge cousins the Utahraptors were just two genuses among many in the family. Our expert told us the one you shot is related to them, but was probably a scavenger. No more dangerous to a human being than a very large coyote would be, in other words." Nick ran fingers through his hair. "Okay. I see your point. Yeah, that's evidence, all right." Harshbarger was looking back and forth between Brisebois and O'Connell. His face was starting to get flushed again.
"Well, Idon't get it. What does the critter me and Bruce shot have anything to do with whether or not my buddy Joe is still alive?"
"Hell, Tim, you can figure it out for yourself. Think about what it means to say that a bolide's impact happens along the time axis instead of the three space axes. What happens when you shoot a bullet into a body?" Boyle grinned crookedly. "If I shoot it, the body dies."
He jerked a thumb at his partner. "If Ol' Tick-eye Tim here shoots it, who the hell knows? The brick wall eight feet from the target might get dented up a little." Harshbarger scowled at him. "Iam the one who brought down Slavering Sue," Bruce said cheerfully. "Not to mention thatmy scores on the target range-" "Ah, shaddup." Nick waited for the banter to end. Then said: "But whatelse happens? Does a neat hole just appear in the body? Does the flesh and blood vanish? Does the residue from the cartridge vanish? If the gun you used was a. 357 Magnum instead of a target. 22, was the recoil the same?" His friends still looked puzzled. "There's always are- action, is my point. And the reaction, just like the action, only happens in the three spacial dimensions. Well… yeah, sure, there's also a time element, but it's not distorted from the time around it. You follow me so far?" The two policemen nodded. "Then figure out what happens if the impact is fourth-dimensional. You get a reaction also-which is the residue of whatever time period the bolide is passing through getting kicked back." He looked at Malcolm. "Is that the right way to put it?"
"Uh… not exactly. Mathematically, it's more like a loop. But keep going. You're doing fine." The air transport specialist turned back to the cops. "Don't you get it? If there -action showed up alive and kicking-that's your Slavering Sue, fellas-then why wouldn't the same be true of the ones acted upon? The bolidecan't shred them, in three dimensions. All it can do is shift them around in time." Harshbarger's expression cleared. And, again, his face paled. "Jesus H. Christ.
Joe-all of them-they're still alive somewhere." O'Connell winced.
Before Harshbarger could get emotionally see-sawed again, Margo spoke up hastily. "We simply can't say that, Tim. I'm sorry. All we can say is that the time shift itself wouldn't have killed them. But what happened afterward…" The state policeman shook his head. "Yeah, yeah, sure. They might have landed in the middle of battlefield. But Joe and them were-are, dammit-pretty damn tough. I'm betting they can cut it." Margo wondered if she should leave it at that. But…
These men weren't children. If nothing else, they had a right to know.
"No amount of toughness could have saved them, Tim," she said gently,
"if they ended up in the wrong time. This-event-was a really deep one.
For all we know, they might have gotten driven back two billion years ago." Now, Brisebois winced. "Oh, hell." Harshbarger looked at him.
"What? Dammit, I don't care how big the dinosaurs ever got, I'm still betting on Joe Schuler and those men and women at Alexander." Nick shook his head. "There weren't any dinosaurs two billion years ago, Tim. There weren't any land animals of any kind. Nothing. Not even lichen." "Jeez," said Boyle, rubbing his face. "They'd starve. It's not like a maximum security prison has more food than maybe a month's supply." Margo sighed. "They'd have died almost instantly, I'm afraid.
That far back in time, the Earth's atmosphere was completely different. There wouldn't have been enough oxygen to keep them alive."
"Oh." Harshbarger's jaws tightened. He looked around the huge chamber, full of scientific equipment whose design and function meant nothing to him. "Isn't thereany way you can figure out where-when-they ended up?" Margo shook her head. "I'm afraid not. We just-" Karen Berg cleared her throat. "Uh, Margo, you've been out of the loop for a bit.
As it happens, we now think we can. Malcolm and I have been working on that almost round the clock, and we've got alot more data than we did when you left." O'Connell looked smug. Everyone else in the chamber stared at Berg. "Well. Roughly," she said apologetically. "It's sort of like a circular error of probability thing-and the farther back in time you get, the bigger the error factor." "Still!" exclaimed Richard. "That's fantastic, Karen." "Howbig?" demanded Harshbarger. He made a gesture with his hands, as if juggling a basketball. "That circular error thing, I mean." Karen Berg was normally given to being cautious in her projections. But, seeing the so evident distress on Tim's face, she clearly decided it was a time for being as precise as she possibly could. "They ended up somewhere-somewhen-in the Age of the Dinosaurs. We're pretty sure it was the early Cretaceous, approximately in the Hauterivian stage. Say, one hundred and thirty-five million years ago. But, that far back, the error spread is something like plus or minus eighteen million years. They could conceivably have landed as far back as the very late Jurassic, although that's not likely." Harshbarger looked at Nick. "Hell, I'm not sure, Tim. But I think-" "The air was almost certainly quite breathable any time during the Mesozoic, which that period was in the middle of," said Richard firmly. "Probably thick with moisture, quite warm, and I wouldn't begin to guess what it smelled like. But your friends wouldn't have suffocated. Dinosaurs may have gotten them, but they'd have been breathing till the end." Harshbarger slumped into a chair nearby. "I'm not worried about giant lizards. Joe and his people handle human lizards every day. Maybe not as big as dinosaurs, but every bit as mean and a lot smarter. They'll make do." His eyes started to water. "Damn, I'll miss him. But at least I don't have to grieve."
Chapter 24 Terry Collins whistled softly as he walked toward the armory. Things were working out perfectly. The Indian with his sob story had been the icing on the cake. Captain Blacklock, along with over two-thirds of the guards, was gone. They were off to savethe world, the silly bastards. Collins gave a small chuckle and slowed his pace. He wanted to enjoy the night. It was beautiful. The sky was clear of clouds, giving him a spectacular view of the heavens. He had never realized how many stars there actually were. The moon was just as impressive. It was full and golden. If he'd still been a kid he would have skipped across the parking lot, or tossed a rock at the man in the moon, just for the joy of it. He hesitated. Grinned. Bent and retrieved a rock. But when he looked up at the sky once more, the mood was gone. There was work to do. The rock fell from his hand. He knew from the shift roster, which Joe Schuler had so kindly given him a copy of, that the armory was unmanned. Almost everything was unmanned.
The sixty-four guards still inside the walls had been divided up into two twelve-hour shifts-forty guards on days, twenty-four on nights. He suppressed the urge to laugh out loud. This was going to be like taking candy from a baby. He didn't bother to look around, to check if anyone could see him. If they did, so what? He was the night supervisor, making his rounds. He was just being thorough. He pulled a key ring from his pocket and flipped through the keys till he found the one he was looking for. Unlocking the door, he felt a twinge of doubt, but suppressed it. If Andy Blacklock stayed in charge they were going to spend their lives working like dogs, and for what? To keep a bunch of guys who weren't worth the air they breathed alive and locked up? No. It was crazy. The prisoners needed to be released, or shot.
That simple. Oh, he had heard the arguments. If they were released they couldn't be given guns and ammo, so that meant they would starve.
And those that didn't would freeze if this time and place had a winter. They wouldn't be able to build a shelter and gather enough firewood to make it through even a mild cold snap. Winter could be too close. As for prisoners being released and allowed to stay inside the prison, that was an impossibility. There weren't enough guards to keep things controlled. Well, keeping them fed and watered till spring wasnot an option. Everyone would starve. This was a primitive time.
Survival of the fittest, and he intended to be one of the survivors.
If Andy Blacklock and Joe Schuler and Rod Hulbert were too stupid or weak to do what had to be done, that was too bad for them. He wasn't.
He could do what needed doing and it wouldn't keep him up at night. He stepped through the armory's door and closed it behind him before turning his flashlight on. He had a right to be here, but there was no sense in advertising his location. He glanced at his watch. He was well ahead of schedule. Luff had already been given his key to the cell house and a hand-drawn map. In one hour he would unlock the door and then he and his boyswould remove the guard and make their way to the armory. The guard would be easy to take out. He didn't have a gun, a nightstick, nothing. Not even a can of pepper spay. His protection was a battery-operated radio whose battery had been removed twenty minutes ago. That was another example of Andy Blacklock's stupidity.
Sure, in the world they'd come from, guards didn't carry guns inside the prison. That was standard procedure. No gun meant no prisoner could take it from a guard and then be armed. Well, that might have made sense when the world was still outside the walls. But now, the rules needed to be changed. When Joe suggested that change, Andy had shot him down. "No. That rule is there for a good reason. We can't afford to panic." Blacklock just didn't get it. He didn't understand how much things had changed. But he would. When he got back and found his prison was now Collins' fortress, he would finally catch on. If he got back at all. Collins wouldn't be at all surprised if he didn't. A man who couldn't figure out what to do with a prison filled with cons, sure as hell wouldn't know how to handle a bunch of marauders and wild Indians. Collins checked the shift roster once more, just to make sure he hadn't overlooked anything. He grinned again when he saw Marie Keehn's name scratched off. Obviously, that had been done at the last minute. Hulbert must have gotten his way, and taken the little honey with him. Collins couldn't blame him. Marie Keehn was fine-looking.
Not as fine as Casey Fisher, though, whom Collins had already picked out as his own. Andy Blacklock had left them forty women. Collins had made it plain to Luff that all forty of them were to be taken alive.
Even the old, ugly ones. That had been the one and only point the bastard hadn't argued about. He checked his watch once more. A half-hour to go. He unlocked the doors to the cabinet, and left them standing open. He pulled out the vests and the helmets, and then took down the radios. These were C.E.R.T. radios, set to their own channel.
The guards wouldn't be listening to that channel. Collins and his people could keep in touch, and no one would know. Adrian Luff turned the key, heard the click and gave a little sigh of relief. He hadn't dared try it any earlier. Getting too anxious had caused more than one solid plan to disintegrate. Using his mirror he checked the hall to be sure the guard was nowhere to be seen. It was clear. He moved down the row of cells, unlocking each door as he passed it. The men inside were expecting him. None of them made a sound. Instead, they stepped out and fell into line behind him. They carried their shoes. Many of them also carried jury-rigged weapons made from whatever material they had managed to locate. He came to the end of the row less than five minutes after leaving his cell. He passed a key to the man behind him and motioned for him to go up the metal stairs to the third floor. The rest of the men followed him to the ground level. The guard had just finished rounds, so he would be at the desk.
The idiots still did their paperwork. There was no administrative aide who was ever going to read it, but they did it just the same. Howard Earl Jameson looked up just as Luff cleared the last step. He snatched up his radio and keyed the send button, shouting a warning to the other guards. But the radio was dead, of course. Luff waved at the guard. Three prisoners moved toward him, blocking his way to the door.
The short struggle that followed didn't last long. Once it was over, the guard lay on the floor, tied up with a cord clipped from a now useless television. His keys were in Luff's pocket, his flashlight in Luff's hand. "Let's move," Adrian said. One of the prisoners took off down the cellblock releasing the men on the lower level. These were the men chosen for tonight, and for the months ahead. Most of them were smarter than the average con and all of them had backgrounds that Luff thought would be useful in this new world. And they included, of course, all the men who had become part of Luff's informal organization. That was something Luff hadn't bothered to explain to Collins. He had let the man think they were being chosen because of their fighting prowess. Collins was another idiot. He couldn't think past tonight. He couldn't see they were going to need farmers and soldiers, mechanics and laborers, everything you could think of.