Time Loves a Hero (5 page)

“Send it to me
before
you submit.” Morris glared across the table at Murphy. “And let me know if it's going anywhere else other than this magazine. Understand?”

Murphy's stomach turned to glass. For him, writing was an intimate experience; he never let anyone, not even Donna, see what he was doing before it was published. Being mandated to show his work to someone before he sent it away was like being told that he had to set up a camcorder in the bedroom. Yet the Associate Administrator had just laid down the law, with no hope of compromise.

“I understand, sir,” he said quietly.

Ordmann smiled sympathetically. “David, you're a fine writer. I don't want to do anything that puts a crimp in your creativity. But you've got to contain some of your wilder ideas … or at least while you're working for NASA.”

And that was the bottom line, wasn't it? For all Roger Ordmann cared, David Zachary Murphy could write that the President was under mind control by aliens from Alpha Centauri and that the Air Force had a fleet of starships hidden at the Nevada Test Range … but the moment he did so, he was out on the street. The last thing NASA HQ would tolerate was an in-house crank.

“I understand, sir,” Murphy repeated.

Harry exhaled as if he had been underwater for the last five minutes. He wasn't going to lose his job today. Morris looked like a hyena gloating over a giraffe carcass. “Well, then … I'm glad we've got this settled.” Ordmann pushed back his chair, glanced at his watch. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm running late for a budget meeting on the Hill. It's been a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Murphy.”

Then he was out the door, where a female aide anxiously waited for him, attaché case in hand. Harry mumbled something about making a phone call, then he hastily stood up and exited the conference room. Out in the hall, Murphy heard him taking the opportunity to shake hands with Ordmann and thank him profusely for his time and patience. Never too late to curry favor, he reflected sourly.

Which left him, for the moment, alone with Morris. At first, the Public Affairs chief studiously avoided meeting his eye as he folded his notebook and gathered his papers. Then he picked up the copy of
Analog
and his gaze lingered on the cover art, a Vincent Di Fate painting of an astronaut spacewalking outside a large spacecraft.

“You really like this sci-fi stuff, don't you?” he asked.

“Been reading it all my life.” Murphy kept his voice even. Like most lifelong science fiction fans, he despised the word “sci-fi.”

Morris shook his head. “Not for me,” he murmured. “Too unbelievable. I prefer real stories.” He dropped the magazine on the table. “Kinda like
The X-Files
, though. That's pretty good.” He turned toward the door. “Anyway, keep in touch.”

Murphy waited until he was gone, then he picked up the discarded
Analog
. Leafing through the magazine, he noted that several passages of his article had been highlighted with a yellow marker.

For some reason, he found himself oddly flattered. At least Morris had bothered to read the piece. Too bad he hadn't understood a word.

Mon, Oct 15, 2314—1045Z

Franc expected to have a meeting with the Commissioner, yet not for several hours. When he arrived at his quarters on Deck 5E to drop off his bag, however, his desk had a message for him: Sanchez wished to see him and Lea as soon as possible.

Lea apparently had received the same message; he found her waiting for him in the central hub corridor, just outside the hatch leading to Arm 5. As a selenian, she could have taken a room on one of the upper levels, but since she was trying to get herself reacclimated to Earth-normal gravity, she had requested a berth on 4E. During the flight up from Tycho, Franc had once again tried to talk her into sharing his quarters on 5E. She had politely turned down his invitation, but it wasn't too late to ask one more time.

“We can still get a room together, you know,” he said. “I checked with the AI. It told me there's a double available on my deck, right across from where I am now. I looked at it before I came up here, and it's really quite comfortable. All we have to do is move our stuff over there and …”

“Thank you, but no.” She favored him with a smile. “I'd prefer to sleep alone, if you don't mind.”

“Well …” He hesitated. “Yes, I do mind, since you ask. I thought we were partners.”

“Oh, come on now.” She gave him a admonishing look. “We are partners … but I think you're taking this a little too seriously for your own … our own good. Keep this up, and the next thing you know, you'll be asking for a contract.”

“I never said anything about a contract.” Although, in fact, the thought had crossed his mind more than a few times lately. Even a twelve-month MH-2, with a nonexclusionary clause, would do. “I just hate breaking up a good team.”

She was about to say something when they were interrupted by a shrill electronic beep. They looked around to see a service bot moving down the corridor, the electrostatic brushes at the ends of its rotating arms sweeping dust from the cylindrical walls. “Move aside, please,” it droned as it approached. “Move aside, please.”

Irritated, Franc resisted the urge to kick the bot out of the way. That would have been recorded by the bot's camera, though, and then he would have received a warning from the station AI not to interfere with maintenance equipment. He reached up to grasp an overhead handrail, and swung his legs up to let the bot pass. “Thank you for your cooperation,” the bot said as it whirred beneath him; its brushes barely missed Lea, who had flattened herself against the wall. “Please do not block the corridor.”

“That's the whole point.” Lea looked up at Franc while he was still hovering above her. “We're teammates. We've got to work together. Not only that, but we're about to go on another expedition …”

“You didn't mind New York.”

“That was different.” The first time they had slept together, it was while they were researching the causes of the Great Depression of the twentieth century. Three days after the crash of the New York Stock Exchange, it had been easy to get a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria; by then, they wanted some relief from the mass panic that had caused young millionaires to throw themselves through office windows. “That was a Class-3,” she added, speaking a little more softly now. “We're about to do a Class-1. You know how dangerous that is.”

Franc reluctantly nodded. Like it or not, he had to agree. Class-3 expeditions were relatively low-risk sorties so long as no one interfered with the turn of events. The stock-market crash of 1929 was one of these, as was the
Challenger
disaster of 1985. Class-2 expeditions were more difficult, since they required CRC researchers to be closer to hazardous situations: the Paris student riots of 1968 were an example, as was pre-Renaissance Europe during the Plague. Class-1 missions were those in which the lives of researchers were directly placed in jeopardy. During the entire existence of the Chronospace Research Centre, there had only been two previous Class-1 expeditions: the eruption of Mont Pelée on Martinique in 1902, and the Battle of Gettysburg in 1864. No one had been hurt during the 1902 expedition, mainly because the research team had vacated St. Pierre before the village was destroyed, but during the Gettysburg expedition a CRC historian posing as a contemporary newspaper reporter was shot and killed by a Confederate rifleman while attempting to document Pickett's Charge. His colleagues had been forced to leave his body behind, after first removing his recording equipment. Fortunately, there had been no risk of causing a paradox; so many unidentified corpses had littered the Gettysburg battlefield, the addition of one more made no real difference.

Since then, the Board of Review had been more careful in selecting potential missions. This wasn't a difficult task; because of the inherent limitations posed by chronospace travel, many destinations were already out of the question. For reasons as yet unknown, it was impossible to travel farther back in time than approximately one thousand years. No one knew why, yet all previous attempts to open Morris-Thorne bridges that extended beyond the mid-1300s failed when the tunnels through the spacetime foam collapsed in upon themselves. Although there seemed to be no static cutoff line, the barrier existed nevertheless.

Likewise, although a timeship was able to return to its point of departure—say, from 1902 to Tues, Feb 12, 2313, when the Mont Pelée expedition was sent out—it was impossible to travel past the departure point. Therefore, the future was just as unvisitable as the more distant past. Just as no expeditions would ever be sent to witness the crucification of Christ or the destruction of the Library of Alexandria no one from the early twenty-fourth century would ever know what happened even a nanosecond after their departure. Chronospace could be breached, but it would never be conquered.

The
Hindenburg
expedition was dangerous. Franc didn't dispute that. He was about to ask why this made any difference to their relationship when something scuttled across the ceiling past his shoulder. A tail gently flicked the side of his side, then a shrill voice shrieked next to his ear:

“Come now, come now, Franc Lu come to Paolo! Hurry! Come now!”

Franc quickly looked around, saw a blue-skinned lizard clinging to the ceiling rail. About fifteen centimeters in length, it regarded him through doll-like black eyes. When it spoke again, a long red tongue vibrated within its elongated mouth: “Come now! Now! Paolo wants you! Now!”

“Marcel!” Lea had anticipated seeing the little mimosaur again. Before she had boarded the shuttle at Mare Imbrium, she had taken a moment to purchase some cashews from a spaceport vendor. She pulled the bag out of her pocket and ripped open the cellophane. “Here,” she said, pushing off from the wall and gliding beneath Franc. “Brought these especially for you.”

“
Nuts!
Nuts nuts nuts nuts!” Marcel leaped from the handrail onto Lea's shoulder. She laughed delightedly as the lizard curled its long tail around her neck, then she let the mimosaur thrust its mouth into the bag, gently stroking the fin on the back of its head.

“That's one way of shutting him up,” Franc murmured. Personally, he found Marcel a trifle annoying. “He'll make a fine pair of shoes one day.”

Mimosaurs were among the more interesting inhabitants of Gliese 876-B, an Earth-like satellite orbiting a gas giant fifteen light-years from Earth. Discovered during one of humankind's first interstellar expeditions, they possessed the ability to learn simple words or phrases and recite them at will, along with an excellent memory for faces and names. Although they weren't much more intelligent than the average house cat, they were far more adaptable to microgravity, which made them the favored pets of deep-space explorers. Paolo Sanchez had brought Marcel home from his last voyage as captain of the
Olaf Stapledon
before taking his present position as CRC's Chief Commissioner. Now the mimosaur served as Sanchez's messenger, running errands for him within Chronos Station.

Lea cast him a hostile glare. “Better be nice, or I'll have him wake you up tomorrow morning.” She smiled at Marcel as she fed him the rest of his favorite treat. “Sousa. Do you remember Sousa, Marcel? Dah-dah-dah … dum-de-dah-dah-dum-de-dah …?”

On cue, Marcel lifted his head from the bag and began to whistle “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” just as Lea had taught him several months ago. That was as much as Franc could stomach. He had a low tolerance for cuteness.

“I get the point.” He turned and pushed himself toward Arm 6. “Let's go see what Paolo has to say.”

Monday, January 14, 1998: 9:15
A.M.

Sixteen letters awaited Murphy when he checked his morning email. This wasn't unusual; given a choice between picking up the phone or writing a memo, NASA people tended to opt for the latter. Sometimes his email came from people in the same building, even just down the hall. It was more convenient this way, to be sure, especially since it allowed the sender to attach files without having to use paper that inevitably would have to be recycled.

Nonetheless, there were times when he wondered whether email wasn't the largest drawback of the computer revolution. At least three times a day he had to check for new messages, and every one of them had to be answered, if only by a short line: “Got it. Thanks. DZM.” Government work used to be a never-ending paper chase; now it was an electron derby.

Murphy pulled off his snow boots, slipped on a pair of felt loafers he kept beneath his desk, then settled the keyboard on his lap as he put his feet up on the desktop. Most of the stuff in queue was fairly routine. A note from one of his contacts at JPL in Pasadena, answering a couple of questions he had about Galileo data. Another message from another JPL scientist, with an attached GIF from Mars Pathfinder. A half dozen news releases from the press office, updates on the next shuttle mission and the current status of the Space Station program. A letter from a friend at Goddard Space Flight Center out in Greenbelt, telling him that he was coming into D.C. on Thursday and asking if he would be free for lunch. A Dilbert strip from last week which he had already read and forgotten, sent via listserv by a pal at Interior who apparently believed the comic strip was the font of all human wisdom; another jester relayed Letterman's Top-Ten list of the come-on lines President Clinton might have tried on Paula Jones, which Murphy deleted without reading.

As he scrolled down the screen, Murphy picked up the chipped Star Wars mug Steven had given him for his birthday a couple of years ago, sipped the lukewarm coffee he had taken from the break room down the hall. Yet even as he skimmed through the email, his mind was elsewhere.

Why would an article in
Analog
garner so much attention from an associate administrator? After all, January was the beginning of the Washington budget season. As always, NASA would not only have to put together a proposal for the White House to take before Congress, but the Office of Space Science would also have to publicly defend its programs from critics on the Hill. So why would Roger Ordmann take an hour from his schedule—indeed, be willing to make himself late for a House subcommittee hearing—just to talk to some junior staffer who had written a piece about UFOs for a science fiction magazine?