Time Loves a Hero (24 page)

Murphy laughed out loud, but not for reasons the colonel probably thought he did. For once, Meredith Cynthia Luna had come close to making the right guess. “I'm sure she's been wrong before.”

“Yeah, well …” Ogilvy looked around again. “Go on, get in the vehicle. It's warmer in there. I'm going to give my guys a few more minutes to find your mysterious friend, then we'll go back and start breaking down camp. I don't imagine we'll find anything else, do you?”

“No, I doubt it.” Wincing from the bruises on his stomach, Murphy stood up from the bumper. “We might check the island again, just to be safe, but you're probably right.”

He let Ogilvy open the Hummer's passenger door, and waited in the shotgun seat until the colonel walked away to see whether the soldiers had discovered anything. When he was finally alone, he pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket.

The paper had come from the stranger's inside coat pocket, in that half instant when Murphy had grabbed at him during their fight and torn it. Murphy had only the vaguest recollection of the other man whispering something as he knelt over him; the two dimes and the nickel were missing when he regained consciousness, but this single sheet of paper was still clenched in his fist, along with a shred of dark fabric.

Murphy gently uncrumpled the paper and studied it under the dim glow of the dashboard. At the top of the page was a stylized dirigible flanked by olive branches; a scroll beneath the airship declared it to be the LZ-129
Hindenburg
.

Below the picture of the airship was a list of names: a passenger manifest. Halfway down the list, two names caught his eye: Mr. and Mrs. John and Emma Pannes, of Manhasset, Long Island.

Murphy looked up, saw the colonel walking back to the vehicle, followed by the two soldiers. He had just tucked the paper into an inner pocket when Ogilvy opened the right rear passenger door.

“We're not going to find anything,” Ogilvy muttered as he settled into the backseat. “No need to rush, though. We've got until morning till we have to be out of here.”

“Yeah. No need to hurry.” Murphy turned his head to gaze out the window. The clouds were beginning to dissipate; for the first time tonight, he could make out a few stars. “‘Fools rush in …'”

One of the Rangers opened the driver's door to climb behind the wheel. “Pardon me, sir?” the soldier asked. “Did you say something?”

“Hmm? Oh, nothing.” Murphy smiled at his half reflection in the window. “Just thinking.”

PART 3

F
REE
W
ILL

Tues, Oct 16, 2314—0600Z

Against the darkness of space, from literally out of nowhere, there was the brilliant flash of defocused light as, for the barest fraction of a second, a tunnel opened within spacetime: a wormhole momentarily stabilized by exotic matter formed from vacuum fluctuations. In that sliver of an instant, the
Oberon
plunged out of chronospace.

The last tremors of the timeship's passage had barely subsided when Franc heard the warble of the master alarm. Dazed, his eyes shut as he gripped the armrests of his acceleration couch, at first he thought the sound was imagined. Then he was thrown against his harness as the
Oberon
suddenly rolled to starboard, and it was at that moment he realized they were in trouble.

“Franc! What …?”

His eyes snapped open as Lea screamed, and the first thing he saw was the wallscreen. Earth lay several hundred kilometers below; sunlight reflecting off the tops of dense white clouds hid the ground from sight. Even without checking the chronometer, he knew that they were no longer in 1998, for the last things he had seen before Metz activated the wormhole generators were the nighttime lights of North America. Yet that wasn't what he noticed.

Far above Earth, a vast gray wall stretched across space.

Terrifyingly enormous, apparently solid yet somehow oddly granular, it curved around the planet until it disappeared beyond the horizon, casting a broad shadow across the cloud tops. Somehow, it looked like …

“That's impossible.” Lea's voice was no more than an awestruck whisper, barely audible beneath the alarm. She stared at the screen, her mouth agape. “Please tell me it isn't there.”

“It's there. I see it, too.” Franc fumbled at his seat harness, finally locating the buckles and releasing them. His body started to float upward; he hastily grabbed the armrest to keep himself in his seat. With his free hand, he slapped the lobe of his headset. “Vasili!” he shouted. “Give us some gravity! And kill the alarm!”

The pilot didn't respond, but the alarm abruptly went silent. Franc let out his breath, then glanced to his right. Tom Hoffman's body was still securely strapped in the third couch, his corpse wrapped in a blanket. At least the sudden maneuvers hadn't dislodged him, and so long as
Oberon
itself was still in good condition …

Franc turned his head to check the status panel next to the wallscreen. The bar graphs for all the major systems were still in the green, and there were no red warning lights. So what triggered the master alarm? He was about to shout for Metz again when his gaze fell on the real-time chronometer.

The readout was 16.10.2314/0601:06.06.

The
Oberon
had returned from the past. In fact, it had reliably emerged from chronospace less than a second into the future after its relative time of entry, with the remaining sixty-six seconds accounted for by the events of the past minute and few seconds. Indeed, they should be directly above the same point on Earth where the timeship had opened its wormhole to May 2, 1937. Therefore, if they were back in their own time, nothing should be different.

Suddenly gaining weight, his body fell back into the couch. The ship's localized gravity field had been restored. A moment later, he heard Vasili's voice in his headset.

“You guys better get up here,” he said. “Something's wrong.”

Franc nearly laughed out of loud. “Something's …?” He pointed at the gray shape on the wallscreen. “Do you see that?” he demanded, forgetting that the pilot wasn't in the same compartment. “That's a
ring!
That's a goddamn
planet ring!
”

“I know.” Vasili's voice was subdued. “We almost collided with it when we came out of chronospace. We got lucky … when the AI detected it, it went into autopilot mode and put us into lower orbit.” There was a pause. “Never mind that now. Just get up here. That's not the worst of it.”

Lea was already unbuckling her harness. She hesitated as her eyes met Franc's, then she prodded her headset. “What aren't you telling us? Have you tried to raise Chronos?”

Another pause. “Chronos isn't there. Nothing's there. The orbitals, the Lagrange colonies … they're all gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Franc snapped. “They're not responding?”

“No, I mean they're
gone
. They're simply not there.”

“What about Tycho?” Lea demanded. “Can you raise Tycho? Someone there should …”

“Lea,” Vasili said, ever so quietly, “the Moon is gone, too.”

Saturday, January 17, 1998: 2:30
A.M.

The Gulfstream II was still parked in front of a hangar at Sewert Air Force Base, right where Zack Murphy had last seen it only this morning … yesterday morning, he reminded himself, although it was difficult to remember that fact. In the predawn darkness, a brittle wind whipped across the airfield, tugging at the hood of his parka as he marched toward the waiting aircraft.

The Ranger team was still breaking camp at Center Hill Lake when Colonel Ogilvy began gathering the OPS team for the helicopter ride back to Sewert. Meredith Cynthia Luna had refused to leave, though; stubbornly insistent that the spacecraft belonged to alien emissaries, she wanted to remain behind for a little while longer, to “gather residual psychic impressions” from the crash site. Although Murphy secretly believed that she simply didn't want to share company with him and Ogilvy, he wasn't about to argue to the contrary. Much to his surprise, though, Ogilvy agreed to let her stay with the troops, so long as she caught a commercial flight back to Washington within the next twenty-four hours. Perhaps he was trying to appease OPS, or maybe he was just as sick of her as everyone else was; whatever the reason, after Ogilvy placed her in the care of Lieutenant Crawford—who didn't seem thrilled by the prospect of baby-sitting the psychic—he herded Murphy and Ray Sanchez aboard the Blackhawk.

So now they were back where they had started. Chilled to the bone, exhausted beyond all meaning of the word, Murphy pulled his parka a little more tightly around himself as he shuffled toward the jet. With any luck, he might be able to grab a few winks before the plane landed at Dulles. The flight would take about two hours; factoring in the one-hour time difference, that meant they'd arrive in Virginia at about 5:30
A.M.
An hour or so after that, and he'd be walking through his front door. Donna would still be asleep, but Steven would probably be up already, watching cartoons in the living room. Murphy absently patted the jacket pocket where he had tucked the little Darth Vader action figure he had found on the island beach. When he got a chance, he'd rinse the sand off it in the airplane's washroom and give it to his son as a travelling present … and then he'd take the phone off the hook, climb into bed next to his wife, and sleep until well into the afternoon.

And after that?

Although he was too tired to think straight, Murphy knew that nothing would ever be the same again. After all, he had just met a time traveller. You don't go to Disneyland after something like this …

Forget it, he told himself. Figure it out later.

Just ahead of him, a pair of Air Force officers in flight gear were standing next to the Gulfstream's lowered stairway. Murphy assumed that they were the aircraft's pilots. Ogilvy and Sanchez had stopped to speak with them; the four men were huddled together tightly, their shoulders hunched against the wind. As Murphy approached, they fell silent.

Murphy halted next to the stairs. “Anything wrong?” he asked. “Is there something I can do?”

He caught a sullen glare from Sanchez, but the FBI agent said nothing as he turned away. Ogilvy mustered an easy smile. “Don't worry about it,” he said, then cocked a thumb toward the plane. “Go ahead, get aboard. I'll tell you about it later.”

In that instant, Murphy had the premonition that he wasn't going to get any sleep during the flight back to Washington. Yet there wasn't much he could do about it now, so he trotted up the stairs and found a seat in the back of the plane. When he took off his parka, he made sure that he kept it folded in his lap, where he could keep his hands on it at all times. Through the window, he could see Ogilvy and Sanchez still talking to the pilots. As he watched, they turned and headed toward the stairs. A moment later, the pilots emerged through the hatch, followed by the colonel and the FBI agent. The pilots walked into the cockpit and shut the door behind them as Ogilvy and Sanchez took their seats near the front of the plane. Ogilvy propped his feet upon a vacant seat and lay his head back, while Sanchez placed his laptop computer on a table and opened it. Neither of them looked his way; after a few moments, Murphy cranked back his seat, pulled his coat up around his shoulders, and closed his eyes.

The Gulfstream had been airborne for a little less than fifteen minutes, just enough time for Murphy to doze off, when he heard someone settle into the seat next to him. “Zack?” Ogilvy said, insistent but not unkindly. “Wake up, son. We need to talk.”

Reluctantly, Murphy opened his eyes. The colonel had brought two foam cups of black coffee from the galley. “Do me a favor and fold down the table, will you?” he asked, nodding toward the seatback in front of him. “My hands are full.”

“Hmm …? Oh, sure.” Murphy reached out from beneath the parka, pulled down the tray table. “None for me, thanks,” he said as Ogilvy gently set down the coffee. “I'd like to get some sleep sometime before we land.”

“Sure. We've all had a hard day.” The colonel shook his head apologetically. “But I can't let you do that just yet. We've got some loose ends to tie up first.” Picking up his coffee, he looked toward the front of the plane. “Agent Sanchez, would you like to join us?”

As if waiting for his cue, Sanchez moved down the aisle. Instead of taking the vacant seat on the other side of the aisle, though, he rested his elbows on the seatback. He gazed down at Murphy with cool dark eyes, but didn't say anything.

“Is this about the nondisclosure agreement?” Murphy picked up the other coffee, took a tentative sip. Caffeinated or not, its warmth was welcome after the chill of the night. “I said I'd sign whatever you want me to, if that's what's bothering you.”

“Glad to hear it, Dr. Murphy. I'm pleased to know that you're willing to cooperate with us. But that's not what I … what we want to discuss with you.” Turning half-around in his seat, Ogilvy folded his hands together on the armrest. “Let's cut to the chase, shall we? What happened to you on the road just before we found you?”

Oh, hell … “Nothing happened,” he said, looking the colonel straight in the eye. “I took a walk up the road, that's all. Just catching some air. And when I got to the top of the hill, some guy came out of the woods, asked me what time it was …”

“You said earlier that he asked you for spare change.”

“Well … yeah, I mean, he asked me for some change, and then he …”

“Roughed you up, right. That's what you said.” Ogilvy reached up the ceiling panel above Murphy's seat, clicked on the reading lamp. The sudden glare made him wince. “Y'know, for someone who's been punched around,” Ogilvy said as he peered closely at Murphy, “you look like you're in pretty good shape.”