Текст книги "The Accidental Time Machine"

Автор книги: Joe William Haldeman

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

They hurried up the ramp and strapped in.

“This could be a little bumpy,” La said. “We’re going suborbital.” Three bells rang, and then the machine roared. Matthew and Martha were pushed back into the cushions by several gees.

La looked back at them, unaffected. “This will only take a couple of minutes,” she shouted. “Then we’ll coast.”

“What’s going on?” Martha screamed.

“It’s just a different kind of flying,” Matt shouted. “A lot faster. When it ends, we’ll be weightless for a while.”

“How can you be weightless?”

“You’ll enjoy it,” he said hopefully. He knew people who really didn’t. He’d done it once, and barely kept his lunch down.

The ship was suddenly silent, and they were floating free.

“You can undo your straps and move around,” La said. “Just be strapped in before reentry, about forty minutes.”

Martha unclicked and drifted free. “Oh my,” she said. “It’s like being on a swing!”

“Yeah, exactly,” Matt said, choking back gastric juices. He was glad he hadn’t eaten in hours.

She closed her eyes and shuddered all over, smiling, hugging herself. Was she having an orgasm? Her first?

She grabbed her knees and rotated slowly. “Oh . . . this is glorious. Matt?”

“It’s . . . it’s really fine.” He needed a drink of water in the worst way. Would the faucets work? “La? I need—”

“Bottled water in the fridge.”

He clambered over the acceleration couch and pushed himself in that direction, which unfortunately caused him to rotate backward. After two and a half turns, he was able to snag the galley door, then drift toward the fridge.

“Bring me one?” Martha called.

“Sure.” He got the top off one and stopped spinning by grabbing on to the fridge handle. He drank greedily from it and snorted some out his nose, which caused some dignified sneezing, coughing, and retching. A small universe, globules of water, saliva, and snot, radiated away from him. But the nausea passed, and he kicked himself gently back into the control room, a bottle of water in each hand.

Martha squeezed the bottle experimentally, and a string of globes floated free, flexing in and out of globular symmetry. “Have you ever seen anything like that?” He had, but it from was somebody else’s missed barf bag.

“Don’t do too much of that,” La said. “It all winds up on the floor.”

“Oh—of course it will.” She chased after a bubble and bit it.

Matt discreetly crawled back into the seat and belted himself in while Martha cavorted. He drank the whole bottle of water and hoped there would be gravity again before he had to urinate.

After what seemed to Matt like more than forty minutes, La told Martha to strap herself back in.

“We have to use atmospheric braking.” They slammed into the atmosphere, and the machine shook violently, making disturbing noises, while the view of Earth dissolved into orange glow.

They were flying over what seemed to be unbroken forest. “This was deep in the middle of LA when it was me,” La said. They slowed, losing altitude and banking.

Abrupt cliffs fell into the sea. “You would expect ruins, at least,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “Even the Pyramids were wearing down after a few thousand years. After twenty-four thousand, they probably wouldn’t even be bumps.”

“There’s someone. Or something.” She banked toward a clearing where several small figures were running for the woods. Their approach would be pretty dramatic, screaming in out of an empty sky.

They eased down onto a soft meadow. “Defense,” she said, and with an oiled-metal sound, the gun barrels and lasers and pressors slid out.

“You don’t have to come with me,” she said. “But we should be safe even from dinosaurs.”

The three went down the ramp together, into the smell of pine and wildflowers. “We don’t look very friendly,” Martha said, looking back at the ship.

“Maybe we don’t want to,” Matt said. “There may not be any humans here, by that guy’s definition, but those were upright bipeds.”

“Smart enough to run away from us,” La said. “Let’s see whether they’re curious enough to come back.”

After a few minutes, one of them did. It was a bear, peering at them from behind a tree.

A sort of bear. It held a long spear with a metal tip and held it using an opposable thumb-claw. It stepped into the clearing, exposing a broad leather belt, from which hung two knives, large and small, and a pot and a frying pan.

It turned and spoke, or growled, quietly, to unseen companions, and they could see it was wearing a leather backpack with a tarred leather canteen attached.

It took a few steps toward them, then jammed its spear point first into the ground. It took a few more steps and stood still, facing them, arms folded.

“Do you speak English?” La said.

It growled at her, but the growl seemed gentle, and articulated, like language.

“Can you analyze that?” Matt said.

“Not without any referent. He might be saying that you smell good enough to eat.”

Matt touched his chest. “Matt.”

The bear looked at him for a moment, then touched its own chest. “Bear.” It pointed at Matt. “Mad.” Then at La and Martha. “Womads.”

“Two out of three’s not bad,” Matt said.

It smacked its chest twice. “Dot bad. Good.” It turned to the tree line and roared something. Five others came into the clearing and laid down their spears and clubs.

“Fum Aus’ralia?” it asked.

“No, we’re from here.” La pointed down. “Los Angeles. Twenty-four thousand years ago.”

It looked up at the ship and nodded. “Bime brav’lers.” It turned to the others and repeated the observation in bear language. Then it pointed at Martha and Matt. “Live.” Then at La: “Dead.”

“Not really,” La said. “But I’m not alive, either, the way you appear to be.”

“You know about time machines,” Matt said.

“Sh-ure. Bring in-fu-inza. Most humads die, doe bears. Lods do eat.” It said a long sentence to the other bears, and they laughed in a disturbing way, all snarls and teeth.

“Come bag wi’ us,” the bear said. “We cab dalk.”

“We’ll follow you in the time machine,” La said.

“No.” Its paw swung around faster than the eye could follow. But instead of the paw knocking La’s head off, the pressor field knocked the bear back in a cartoonish backward somersault. When it got back to its feet, the big pressor gun barked and it smacked it to the ground, obviously dead, bones pulverized.

“You two ought to get back up the ramp.” They were already halfway.

The surviving bears were picking up their weapons. “Don’t kill them,” La said. “Knock them down.” The pressor gun did, with a loud quintuple boom, as La walked unhurriedly away.

“I don’t think we’re going to make any progress here.” She took her station. “Might as well push the button.”

“Gladly.”

“You know where we’re headed?” La said. “What position in four-space?”

“We predicted this one was going to be in orbit,” Matt said. “That was going to be a problem.”

“No problem now. Do it.”

Matt pushed the button, and it all went gray except for the face of Jesus. “Stay close to her,” he said. “She is trying to push the button herself. But so far it only works if you do it.”

The Earth was a huge curve above them, and they were dropping up into it.

“How far up are we now?” Martha whispered.

“Call it A.D. 320,000,” Matt said. “Though they might be using a different calendar by now.”

“I mean miles.”

“I don’t know. Hundreds?”

“Three hundred twenty-eight, from sea level,” La said. “Shall we go back and see what’s happening in Australia?”

“They were so friendly there,” Martha said.

“It’s the only place to aim for. I’m getting a strong broad-spectrum carrier wave from the center of the continent. ”

“That’s all, a carrier wave?”

She nodded. “No information, just a position. Eighty minutes.”

“Think I’ll try to nap,” Matt said, not in the mood for a zero-gee romp. Martha nodded and closed her eyes, but she was too agitated to sleep, which probably kept Jesus away.

19

It was obvious as they approached the continentin their suborbital arc that things were much different. The signal was not coming from the southeastern coastal city; there apparently had been some continent-wide disaster, and as far as the orbital eye could see, there was nothing but ash and slag, giving off a faint aura of gamma rays. Not a trace of plant life.

“The signal’s coming from northeast of here,” La said. “Toward the geometrical center of the continent.”

The ship slewed sideways. “Strap in for de-orbit.”

Coming down was easier, knowing what to expect. When the ship stopped shaking, rattling, and rolling, and started to glide through the lower atmosphere, they could easily see their destination: a two-mile-high obelisk like a silver dagger pointed to the sky. The ground was a plane of tarnished metal.

They rolled to a stop at the base, a couple of hundred yards square, and walked down the ramp. The air was hot and thick and smelled of ashes.

La touched the metal wall. “Platinum. Built to last.”

“Can you read it?” Martha said. The wall was covered up past eye level with incised curlicues that were obviously writing.

“Not yet. I’ve sent a probe around to record and analyze all the markings. The building’s covered with them.”

“Is there a door?” Matt said.

“I’m not sure we’d want to go in. But no, we haven’t found one yet.”

After a couple of minutes, La said, “I’m getting it now. There’s a mathematical Rosetta Stone on the other side.”

“I know about the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Martha said, “but what does the Rosetta Stone have to do with mathematics? ”

“It has to do with language, actually,” La said. “Mathematics is universal, so you can start with logical operators and addition and subtraction and build it into something like a natural language. You put it all on a high-technology artifact like this, and anyone who uses high technology to find it should eventually be able to decipher the language.”

“How long will that take?”

“Maybe thousands of years. More likely, minutes. You could go make a sandwich.”

“I’ll do that,” Matt said, partly out of self-defense since Martha’s idea of a sandwich was pretty basic, and he went up the ramp. But by the time he’d finished, and put the meat and cheese and condiments back into the fridge, La and Martha had followed him up.

“It’s from the future!” Martha said, excited.

“It may be. It isfrom a time traveler, but he or she or it doesn’t say from which direction, or even whether it came from Earth.”

“So what happened to Australia?”

“It doesn’t say. It notes that this planet used to be the only place humans lived, but there weren’t any here now. After what it called the Truth Wars and the Diaspora, the planet didn’t have any ‘natural’ humans.”

“So what’s an unnatural human?”

“It didn’t say. Maybe something like me. Maybe robots, vampires, werewolves.

“Anyhow, it said it was going out to 61 Cygni. That’s a lot farther than we can go, about eleven light-years. So it came from myfuture, at least.”

“But it still may have forward-only time travel.” La shrugged.

“Look at the moon,” Martha said.

It was just rising, almost full. But it was like a miniature Earth, blue and brown, white at the poles.

“Terraformed,” Matt said.

“Made like Earth?” Martha said. “Maybe that’s where the people are.”

“It’s not impossible,” La said, “though you’d think the person who made this obelisk would check there before going a million times farther away.”

“It could have been later than the obelisk, though. Matt looked at the artifact, and then the Moon, “Like people came back, but didn’t want to settle on the Earth.”

La nodded. “It’s too radioactive, if it’s all like here. Short-term exposure wouldn’t hurt, but if you settled here, you’d have reproductive problems. Sterility, or at least a high frequency of mutations.”

“So we should look at the Moon,” Martha said. “Can you go that far?”

“Easily. Anywhere in the solar system. But it would be smart to check the rest of the Earth first. Let’s go up into orbit and look around.”

They did one pass in low-Earth orbit, passing North America in a line from Baja California to Maine, all sterile ruins, then back down through Africa, a gray tundra. The radiation wasn’t as bad elsewhere, but there were no signs of human habitation anywhere.

Up in a higher orbit, where they could see the planet as an entire globe, there were still no cities or obvious ports or roads. The gamma radiation diminished to a negligible trace in Africa and most of Asia, but there was still no sign of human life.

“Might as well try the Moon,” La said. “We could get there in a couple of hours, accelerating halfway, then decelerating. But to save energy, I’d rather blast for a few minutes and drift weightless for a day or so. Can you handle that?”

“Yes!” Martha said, before Matt could express an opinion.

They accelerated for a few minutes, and then were falling free. “You might as well go rest,” La said. “Come out when you’re hungry.”

Martha was more efficient at swimming through zero gee. She was waiting for Matt in their room, semi-sitting in a chair.

“This is funny,” she said. “Furniture is kind of useless.”

He grabbed the bed and perched at an odd angle, and laughed. “I guess to sleep, you have to slip under the sheet and hope it holds you in place.”

“At least you can’t fall out.” She rummaged through the bag and came out with the porn box, and looked at it, frowning. “I guess this is as close as I’m going to come to an actual Passage. Could you watch it with me and explain things?”

It was not Matt’s idea of a first date, but it was certainly interesting. She knew about fertilization in a vague way, bees and flowers, but hadn’t been taught anything about the mechanics of it. The other girls had told her the man sort of peed into the woman, and that was all she knew.

“Is this what they mean by rape?”

“When the woman doesn’t want to do it, yes. Or if she’s not old enough. Under eighteen, where I come from,” he added optimistically.

“The sisters warned us about rape, but they couldn’t describe it. Of course, they were virgins. They’d never seen anything like . . . what we just saw. But it doesn’t look like it hurts.”

“It can . . . when it’s rape, it does. The point of rape is to hurt, to dominate. But that’s not what they’re doing here.”

They watched several performances, fast-forwarding through the repetitive parts, and he explained which could lead to pregnancy and which were more or less for fun.

Of course his formfitting superhero costume did nothing to hide his own sustained reaction to the show and its audience, and she couldn’t help noticing.

“May I see?” He let her roll down his trousers. “Oh . . . so if you were circumcised, this would be—” One touch was enough.

She had just seen several examples of ejaculation, but none in zero gravity. Out of instinct as much as observation, she grabbed it and pumped up and down a couple of times, and the result was a kind of sticky spiderweb expanding in three dimensions. Fortunately, there was a tissue dispenser on the table by the bed, and they chased down the mess, laughing together.

He was startled by how matter-of-fact she was about it, but realized she was carrying a different set of cultural baggage. Like most men, he’d been more or less obsessed with the processes of erection and ejaculation ever since the first times they had happened, but she’d never given them much thought before the past hour. It was a process, not a fixation.

He tried to clean himself and put everything back where it belonged, but that was also something he’d never done in zero gravity, nor in a skintight Superman suit, and as he fumbled, slowly rotating, she had another giggling fit when he mooned her, upside down.

Finally he sat half-perched on the bed, with a semblance of dignity, though he was sure he could never be completely dignified with her again. Which was probably a good thing.

“How often does that happen?” she asked, when she was able to catch her breath again.

“Um . . . as often as possible?”

“But it can’t be pressure, like having to pee? Fathers go all their lives without doing it.”

That confused him for a moment. She meant priests. “It’s hard to explain. It hasn’t happened to me since the day we met.” Well, once. “It’s not at all like peeing. It’s more or less, well, voluntary. Sort of.”

She gave him an odd look, floating in midair with a tissue in her hand. “It’s something you want to talk about but don’t want to talk about.”

“Yes . . . I do, but I suppose . . . yes.”

“This part I think I understand: You want to put your thing in me and do like the men in the pictures. Don’t you?”

He tried to think of some answer other than an emphatic affirmative. “Of course I do, but . . . we haven’t really known each other very long.”

“And then there’s the getting married first part. There don’t seem to be any Fathers around.” She picked up the box and studied the gymnastics taking place. “Of course, these people can’t be married—you didn’t have marriages with two men and a woman back then?”

“No. In fact, I doubt that any of the people in those pictures are married to each other.”

She nodded. “They don’t seem to know one another very well. They’re actors?”

“Or just people off the street, friends of the guy with the camera. I don’t think they have to pay the men very much.”

“Even though they’re sinning, and probably going to Hell.”

“I doubt that any of them believe that.”

“You don’t.” She looked straight into his eyes. “You actually don’t believe in God at all, do you?”

He paused. “No. No, not really. The universe—”

“I’m not sure I do anymore, either. It’s like all my life they’ve told me what to believe and only let me see and read things that agreed with them. Until I met you. This really ordinary thing, they didn’t even hint about it. It makes me, it makes me so angry!

“And now we’re headed for the Moon in this machine, run by a godlike apparition that claims to be a machine as well. A Moon that looks like a little Earth—except that Earth itself doesn’t look much like Earth anymore!” She sobbed suddenly and pulled herself down to bury her face in his shoulder.

He put his arm awkwardly around her back, trying to think of anything he could say that would be a comfort. “We have each other, Martha. I trust you, and you can trust me.”

“I do trust you.” She looked up with a weird grimace that became a laugh. “You can’t even cry in this stupid world. The tears don’t run off.”

He wiped her eyes with the side of his hand. A few tears sparkled away in midair.

“You’ve been kind,” she said. “I’m so ignorant, and you could have taken advantage of me.” His face felt hot; he’d been trying to figure out a way of apologizing for just that. With the wrong judge and jury, what he’d just done could get him jail time for indecent exposure. Or, with another, be shrugged off as humorous sex education.

She worked her way around to his other side and wiggled herself between the sheets, which did seem to be designed as a kind of restraint against nocturnal zero-gee floating. Wouldn’t do to bump into the wrong OFF switch.

“I’m going to take La’s advice and rest for a bit, maybe pray.” She looked at him intensely. “Maybe see Jesus in my dreams.”

“It could happen,” he said, and slipped in next to her. She took his hand, under the cover, and squeezed it once.

“If we do find the backward time machine,” she whispered,“I don’t think I want to go back to my own time. Can I go back with you?”

“I would love that,” he said, and lay awake for some time.

After he did finally fall asleep, Jesus and the others appeared. This time there were six or seven, most of them indistinct. Some apparently not human.

“We think we can help you. But listen carefully.

“This stop or the next, she is going to force you to keep pushing the button. Do it as slowly as possible. Stall for time. We will try to catch up with you.”

“We must.” A compressed face, like an upside-down pear, appeared next to him. “If you die up here, we cease to be.”

Jesus was nodding as they faded back into the sleeping darkness.

20

La’s amplified voice woke them. “We’re approaching the Moon. Better come strap in.”

The Moon loomed ahead, looking curiously “wrong,” like Earth viewed through a distorting lens. Matt’s science knowledge sorted most of it out: The horizon was too close; the sky looked odd because the air was so dry, and the atmospheric gradient was less steep, which also explained the absence of large cloud masses. There were perfectly round lakes everywhere, craters filled with water, but no large seas.

“It’s funny,” he said to La. “If you took an old map of the Moon and distributed water evenly around it, there would be oceans. At least as much sea surface as land.”

“It must be artificially maintained,” La said. “They keep the water in small lakes because there’s not enough to fill an ocean bed. Oceanus Procellarum and Mare Imbrium would make huge mud puddles. Maybe quicksand. Then dry out.”

“It’s still beautiful,” Martha said. Velvet green, ochre desert, pure white snowcap. The mountaintops a sparkling chain of frost.

Highly magnified pictures of the surface appeared and faded on the screen. “No sign of human habitation,” La said. “Or talking bears or flocks of carnivorous lizards. But the atmosphere is breathable, like a high mountain on Earth. There could be surprises. Better be armed away from the ship.”

Matt thought about what the Jesus apparition had said. If La, rather than the Moon, had a surprise in store for him, his old pistol and a few rounds of ammunition weren’t going to do much.

Landing with atmospheric braking took longer than for Earth, and wasn’t as violent. Out of curiosity, La took them to the last place she had visited on the Moon, Aitken City, but there weren’t even any ruins left after so long, just grassland and a wide lake.

“They were making plans for that back in the twenty-first, ” Matt said. “Did they build underground?”

“They did at first. By the time I got there, they had a force-field dome over everything, so radiation wasn’t a problem.

“Not that I was ‘there’ in the sense that you would be. I’d given up my body long before.” They eased down by the shore of the lake. “Over a quarter of a million years, and it seems like yesterday.” Matt couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

Their ears popped as the ramp went down. “Why don’t you lovers take a stroll? You haven’t been actually alone in a long time. Take the pistol, though. I’ll have the ship go into danger mode if it hears a shot.”

“Thanks.” He felt uneasy, leaving the time machine behind. But she wasn’t going to leave them stranded as long as she needed his thumb . . . which gave him a macabre thought he didn’t want to linger on. In his home time, people had been murdered for their door-opening thumbs.

They walked down the ramp, bouncing in the lunar gravity. It was cold, barely freezing. The grass crunched under their feet.

“I wonder why it isn’t colder,” Martha said. “It looked like we were pretty close to that ice cap.”

“I think it’s the smallness of the world, along with the slow rotation, mild weather. Long time since I studied it.”

They walked to the edge of the water. Matt followed an ancient impulse and picked up a smooth rock and spun it out over the water’s surface. It went a long way between skips, almost to the horizon.

“Are we far enough away to talk?”

“I don’t know. That she suggested we leave makes me suspicious. But yeah. What do you think?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“You’re clear on the Jesus part?”

“That was just to get my attention?”

“And confidence. Some of those guys look pretty strange.”

“Demonic. Why do you think they only appear in dreams?”

“Well, La can’t read our thoughts,” he said.

“She can’t invade our dreams, either. So they’re more powerful than her, that way.”

“But they can’t physically intercede. I think that’s because they’re still in our future. Just my guess. They can only send information back, not solid matter.”

There was a long pause, just the quiet lapping of the water. “Does that mean . . . we’re never going back? It really is impossible?”

He threw out another stone. It sank after one skip, “I’m trying to recall the exact wording.”

“They said they had to catch up with us. That doesn’t sound like they’re in our future. Could it mean distance?”

“I don’t know. But distance is ourproblem. After a few more jumps, we’ll be too far from Earth to return in one lifetime.”

Staring into the water, she shook her head sadly. “We’d never want to go back there, anyhow.”

She stood closer to him, her shoulder touching his arm. He put his arm around her, and it was a good thing it was his left.

Where the stone had sunk, a huge creature surged out of the water, bigger than a car, all claws and wriggling feelers. A stink of rotten vegetation.

Matt fired at it twice; the second bullet trilled off in a ricochet. Then he remembered what La had said, and pulled Martha to the ground.

When the pressor beam went over them, it felt like a hot wind. It parted the water and hit the creature with explosive force, flipping it over, exposing dozens of wriggling legs.

“Come back,” La’s amplified voice shouted. They had figured that out, and were back on their feet, running hard.

They were both gasping huge, ragged breaths by the time they collapsed on the ramp. It lifted them up, not too slowly.

La was standing, looking out over the water. “That thing was mechanical,” she said. “Maybe a defensive robot.”

“Maybe a fun amusement-park thing,” Matt said, panting. “God knows what amused the people back then. Up then. Whatever.”

“It might be a hundred thousand years old,” La said, “Two hundred thousand. Can you imagine a self-repairing machine lasting for so long?”

“Maybe it’s not self-repairing,” Matt said. “We just haven’t met the people who maintain it.”

“They’re extremely well hidden. What are they hiding for?”

“From,” Martha said quietly. “What are they hiding from, that they need a monster like that?”

“An excellent point. Perhaps we should move along.”

“We should be safe in here,” Matt said, stalling. “We ought to wait and see what happens.”

La gave him an inscrutable look. “Matt, this science could be as far ahead of mine as mine is from primates learning to use sticks. I’m not sure we care to test what they can do.”

He looked at Martha and nodded slowly. “Can’t fight the logic of that. Except that futuristic science is exactly what we’re looking for. Maybe they havemastered backward time travel, and that’s where they all are. Vacationing back in the good old days.”

“This is not a time to joke. We should push the button and get out of here.”

“We could get out of the immediate vicinity by taking off and going into orbit.”

“That would not get us out of danger. Even in my time, it would be trivially easy to knock this thing out of orbit.”

Matt had run out of counterarguments. “You’re right, of course. Let’s strap in, Martha.”

“How far are we going this time?”

“A couple of hundred thousand miles. From Earth, that would have been cislunar space, closer than the Moon. And 3.5 million years.”

“Earth will be a lot different?”

“Maybe better.” He waited for the click of her harness. “Let’s go see.”

Out of the gray swirl, the man who had been Jesus. He was dressed in something like medieval mail. The others were behind him, similarly attired. “Come to Earth as quickly as possible. We’ll find you.”

When the gray faded, they reappeared in a spot apparently closer to the Earth than the Moon. At least the Earth was larger than Matt remembered seeing it in pictures from the lunar surface. They both unhooked and floated over toward the screen.

“There’s a little bit of green.” Martha pointed.

“Let’s go down and check it out.”

“It hardly seems worth the trouble.” La peered at the mostly gray globe. “Just push the button again.”

“We haveto go to Earth!”

La looked at Martha in an impatient way. “All right.” She gestured. “Get ready for acceleration.”

When Matt and Martha were strapped in, La turned to look their way and nodded.

Handcuff-style shackles snapped shut over their wrists.

“You haveto go? Did your ghostly dream friends tell you that?”

“Shit,” Matt said.

“It’s true that I don’t have any unusual powers over you when you’re outside the ship. But a directional microphone isn’t exactly magic.

“So Jesus and some demons are going to ‘catch up with you.’ Do they claim to have a backward time machine?”

“They just said they could help us.”

“That’s a pity. That really is. Because, of course, the time machine doesn’t work if I push the button via pressor field.”

“I’ll go with you,” Matt said. “Just land long enough for them to find her.”

“No!” Martha said.

“For some reason, I doubt your sincerity. Let me show you what I cando with a pressor field.”

Matt’s breath flew out of his lungs. It was as if there were hundreds of pounds of pressure on his chest. He could see the rictus of pain on Martha’s face. Just as he was about to black out, the pressure was suddenly gone. He heaved forward, coughing, and the right shackle opened.

“She’ll be dead soon. Push the button.”

If La had waited one more second before shackling them, Matt would have been helpless. When he buckled the harness, he’d realized the pistol was still in its special pocket, pressing painfully against his ribs, and he had been about to move it to the pants pocket.

Now, bent over, La couldn’t see him slip the pistol out. He slammed the nose of it up against the time machine box. “Hair trigger!” he gasped. “Don’t even think of it.”

“Oh. So you’ll let her die?”

“If she dies, I’ll blow this thing to pieces. In fact, I’ll do it on the count of three seconds anyhow. Two . . . one . . .”

“All right.” Martha started wheezing and coughing. “That was reasonably intelligent.”

“Take us to Earth right now. If I start to fall asleep—”

“You’ll pull the trigger, sure. I’ve seen a thousand times more movies than you have.” There was a slight surge of acceleration. “I suppose we should go back to that obelisk. Or whatever’s there after 3.5 million years.”

“Maybe they can help you. Show you how to use the time machine without me.”

“Sure. It isthe future, and he isJesus. Maybe Santa Claus is with him. Just stay awake for the next ninety-two minutes.”

“Santa Claus?” Martha said.

The obelisk was still there, shining in the low winter sun, but it was tilted about ten degrees out of true. “Earth was supposed to go through a comet storm,” La said, “about a half million years ago, if our predictions were accurate. It’s a wonder the thing’s still standing.”