Time Spike: Chapter Seventeen

    “You’re sure about this?” Margo asked, peering at the graphics display on Leo Dingley’s laptop screen. “I mean… it seems…”

    “Really weird?” Dingley chuckled. “As opposed to everything else about these…” He turned his head to half-glare at Richard Morgan-Ash, who was sitting next to Malcolm O’Connell on the couch in the living room of the large suite he’d rented at the hotel in Collinsville. “Whatever we’re going to call these things, which we’ve never been able to decide because Mr. Fussbudget over there shoots down every proposal I make.”

    Morgan-Ash smiled thinly. “I have probably ruined my reputation as it is, associating with you heretics. I will be damned, however, if I will hammer the nails into my own professional coffin by presenting a paper entitled ‘Some Observations on the Mystery Bombs from Outer Space.’ Much less ‘Some Observations on the Bizarre Bolides from Beyond.’”

    “They’re good names,” insisted Leo. “’Myboos’ and ‘Bibobs’ are right up there with quarks.”

    “’Myboos’ will be turned into ‘Myboobs’ within eight seconds of reaching the blogosphere,” said Morgan-Ash. “I shudder to think what would happen to ‘Bibobs.’”

    “Will you two quite clowning around?” Margo said crossly, still peering at the graphics. “Dammit, this new data you brought down here with you just doesn’t make sense. Why would there be a time dilation? We’ve never seen it before.”

    Malcolm O’Connell shook his head. “That doesn’t mean anything, Margo. The data that exists on the Grantville event is sketchy, to say the least. None of the equipment that detected anything at the time was designed for the purpose, the way our stuff is now. And all the other events since Grantville have been tiny in comparison. The energy levels either weren’t high enough to produce this phenomenon, or—more likely, in my opinion—the phenomenon existed but we simply weren’t able to detect it. The fact that you can track a jumbo jet’s trajectory from miles away doesn’t mean you can track a sparrow’s from the same distance.”

    He heaved himself up from the couch and came over. “And it’s weirder than you think.” He pointed to a sidebar in one corner of the screen. “See this? If I’m interpreting it correctly, it means the time bolide or whatever the hell we wind up calling it isn’t simply speeding up—so to speak—relative to our own timeline. It’s… I’m not sure what it’s doing, exactly. Call it stuttering.”

    “What do you mean?” asked Nick Brisebois. He was sitting on the other couch in the room next to Timothy Harshbarger, his friend from the state police. Every time Margo looked at the two of them next to each other she had to struggle not to smile. Where the air transport specialist was stocky and on the short side, Harshbarger was at least six feet, four inches tall, and as lean as a rail. The effect was even more striking when they were standing next to each other. Mutt and Jeff, absent the facial hair and the antique costumes.

    Neither man had said anything, since Richard explained the gist of what The Project had been doing in Minnesota for the past few years. Brisebois seemed interested, at least. Harshbarger’s expression had been completely neutral. Margo wondered if the policeman thought they were all half-nuts.

    O’Connell looked over at him. “What I mean is that—if I’m interpreting this correctly, mind you—the bolide’s timeline isn’t speeding up steadily in relation to our own. It’s stuttering. Stopping and starting. At various points, it seems to suddenly slow down and match our own. Or slow down even further. It’s hard to know, of course.  And there seems to be a wobble in the spacial dimension. If I’m right about that, what it means is that the area of impact as the bolide moves back in time isn’t holding steady. It’s moving around. Not much, but some. And it keeps getting bigger too. Well. I think.”

    Brisebois looked a little cross-eyed, as if he were trying to visualize the process. Margo had tried that herself and suspected she looked cross-eyed too, when she did.

    “In other words,” Nick said, “it’s like a spike being driven back in time. But the penetration isn’t steady. It stops or slows down at points. And the—tip of the spike, I’ll call it—is shifting around. And spreading out.”

    “Hey, that’s not bad!” said Malcolm. “What if we call them ‘time spikes,’ Dick? You can’t possibly object to that.”

    “Oh, I can manage to object to almost anything. To start with, there doesn’t seem to have been anything ‘spiky-ish’ about the Grantville event. That was more like a time scoop.” He shook his head. “But forget that, for a moment. Nick’s translation—yes, yes, it’s a layman’s attempt to put mathematical concepts into words, with all the usual imprecisions but it’s still damn good—brought something into focus for me. Is there a correlation between these stutters, as you call them, and the shifting of the spacial locus?”

    “Huh!” O’Connell frowned. “I dunno. Actually, I’m not sure exactly how you’d match the two.” He peered at the screen. “I mean, the way these figures are generated…”

    “Sure we can,” said Leo, sounding excited. “Hold on a minute.” For just about that period of time, he typed furiously at the keyboard. Not the laptop’s own, which Dingley found a nuisance, but a full-sized keyboard he’d brought with him and had connected to one of the computer’s USB ports.

    He finished whatever he was doing and, quite dramatically, pressed the “Enter” key. A completely new graphic appeared on the screen.

    “God damn. Will you look at this?” He lifted the laptop a few inches off the table and swiveled it so that everyone could see.

    Brisebois laughed. “Oh, swell. Leo, that spiderweb or whatever it is may mean something to you, but it’s Greek to me.”

    The reaction of the scientists in the room, however, was quite different. All of them immediately understood what was being displayed. And all of them—including Margo herself, she was pretty sure—practically had their eyes bulging out of their sockets.

    “Jesus,” she whispered. “It’s a perfect correlation.”

    Morgan-Ash, naturally, interjected a cautionary note. “Nothing in nature is ‘perfect,’ Margo. Not to mention that this is simply a graphic depiction of some mathematical concepts which may or may not have any correlation to the real world.”

    O’Connell rolled his eyes. “Oh, great. Just the time and place to have another philosophical debate about whether mathematics inheres in nature or is simply hard-wired in the human brain and our way of interpreting data that has no inherent mathematical nature of its own. God, I swear. If the day ever comes that we master this stuff enough to create our own time machines, I vote that the first expedition goes back and shoots David Hume.”

    “You’d probably have to shoot Locke and Berkeley too,” Brisebois said, smiling. “And just to be on the safe side, jog forward a bit and plug Immanuel Kant. I’m afraid that debate’s pretty deeply rooted in the western intellectual tradition. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if, in the end, you wound up putting out a contract on Plato and Aristotle.”

    Margo stared at him. It would never have occurred to her that a man whose institution of higher learning had been the Air Force Academy would be familiar with the history of philosophy.

    He must have spotted her stare, because he shifted the smile to her and shrugged modestly. “I read Will Durant’s History of Philosophy when I was a teenager and got interested. I don’t have the training to work my way through Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, but I’ve read most everything else. Even worked my way through Hegel’s Science of Logic once. The Big Logic, too, not the condensation in his encyclopedia.”

    His friend Tim spoke, for the first time in over an hour. “Good thing for him he was just a lowly trash-hauler. They make allowances for such. If he’d been a fighter jock, he’d never have lived it down.”

    Again, Brisebois did that little modest shrug. “What can I say? I simply didn’t have the wherewithal to be a fighter pilot. My reflexes might have been good enough, but I lacked the key temperamental ingredient.”

    “Which is?” Leo asked.

    “You’ve got to be a complete asshole to make a good fighter jock. I’m just not that arrogant. Even my kids admit it.”

    A little chuckle went through the room. Margo joined in, although she wasn’t moved so much by the humor as by a new peak of personal interest. An impulse made her ask: “What did you think of Schopenhauer?”

    “You mean, besides being a misogynistic jerk?”

    She decided that maintaining one’s focus exclusively on professional matters was probably not what it was cracked up to be. She gave Nick a gleaming smile and said: “No, that’ll do quite nicely.”

    Morgan-Ash cleared his throat. “To get back to where we were, I wasn’t actually raising an abstract philosophical issue. I was simply pointing out that even Malcolm will admit that half the principles—if I may be allowed the term—of his invented mathematics—”

    “Discovered mathematics,” O’Connell interjected.

    “—are just first approximations.” Richard pointed to the display on the screen. “What that is, with all its crispness, is simply a display of logic that’s at least partly guesswork. It’s more like a drawing—or a cartoon—than a photograph.”

    O’Connell looked on the verge of exploding. Richard held up his hand in a somewhat placating gesture. “I’m not sneering, Malcolm. I’m simply cautioning against trying to draw too many exact conclusions.”

    Fortunately, Leo came into it—on Richard’s side, where he normally tended to align with O’Connell. “Hey, look, Malcolm, he’s right. Still and all”—here he shot  Morgan-Ash a reproving look—“the fact remains that while Margo was over-shooting to call the correlation ‘perfect,’ it’s awfully damn good. You’re the statistician, Richard. You tell me what the probability is that a display like that would emerge from random correlations.”

    Morgan-Ash grinned. “Oh, there’s none at all. Not worth talking about. I agree that we’re looking at something real. I’d just be a lot happier if we could match the numbers against—dare I say it—some bloody evidence. You know, that filthiest of all filthy four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. ‘Fact.’”

    The state policeman shifted in his seat. “What sort of fact are you talking about?”

    Morgan-Ash tugged his neatly trimmed beard. “Lord, I don’t know. If we could just get our hands on whatever showed up in Grantville! One thing that seems clear about these time impact events is that, in their own way, they adhere to the principles of thermodynamics. Action, reaction. Nothing is free. If they shift something into the past, something gets shifted forward to the present. If we had enough data to find out, I’d be willing to bet we’d discover the mass involved was identical.”

    Harshbarger stared at him, for a moment. Then, suddenly, came to his feet. “All right. I’ve decided you guys are real. Give me a minute. Nick, I’ll need a hand.”

    With no further ado, he left the suite, with Brisebois on his heels. They were back in less than three minutes, carrying something large and heavy into the suite. It was encased in a peculiar sort of wrapping that Margo realized must be one of the storied body-bags she’d heard of, and seen occasionally on television news footage.

    “Clear the table, would you?”

    Hastily, the scientists moved aside the remains of their lunch. Tim and Nick placed the body bag on the table and, with no further ado, Harshbarger slid open the long zipper.

    “Okay. You tell me. Is this the kind of evidence you’re looking for?”

    After a long silence, Leo said: “Holy shit.”

    Richard’s contribution was more sedate. “Unless there’s a hitherto unreported species of large reptile in the central United States, I’d say the answer is yes. This is indeed the evidence we’re looking for. And the odds of that being true—I speak here as a expert statistician, you understand—I estimate as being indistinguishable from zero. Seeing as how—”

    He peered at the carcass on the table. “Did you weigh it?”

    “Yup. Eighty-three pounds, four ounces. Measures six feet, three inches, from the snout to the tip of the tail.”

    “As I said. The chances that a reptile not much smaller than a Komodo Dragon has been wandering around loose along the Mississippi river without ever being noticed is indistinguishable from zero.”

    Malcolm—unusually, for him—played the devil’s advocate. “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Maybe it got mistaken for an alligator.”

    “Wouldn’t matter,” said Tim. The policeman pointed to the patch on his shoulder. “State Police, remember? There have never been any sightings of alligators in Illinois. This isn’t Florida or Alabama. I can guarantee you that if anyone spotted what they thought was an alligator in these parts, we’d have heard about it.”

    He leaned over. “Besides, it doesn’t look the least bit like an alligator, other than having a generally reptilian appearance. But I don’t think it’s even a reptile in the first place. My partner and I got a clear look at it before we shot it. This critter wasn’t running on all fours, the way a lizard or alligator will. Hell, look at those forelimbs. Those aren’t designed for weight-bearing. It was running on its two hind legs. Like a bird, except the body was level, with the heavy tail counter-balancing the head and chest. Which is to say—”

    Margo finished the sentence for him. “Exactly the way paleontologists these days figure dinosaurs moved.”

    “Yup.” Harshbarger poked the reddish skin with a long forefinger. “That’s what I think this thing is. A real, no-fooling dinosaur. Got no idea what kind, though. It’s not something I ever studied.”

    So far as Margo knew, none of the scientists in the room had any real knowledge of paleontology either. She certainly didn’t.

    “Where’s your partner?” Nick asked.

    Tim grinned. “Knowing Bruce Boyle, he’s probably knocking down his fourth boilermaker at Jimmy’s, telling himself he was hallucinating. It was all I could do to get him to agree not to turn this over to the siblings, like we’re supposed to.”

    “Excuse me?” asked Morgan-Ash.

    The grin stayed on policeman’s face, but the humor in it vanished completely. “The siblings. Those clowns from FEMA. They’ve given orders—just as arrogantly as they do everything, speaking of assholes—that ‘anything unusual’ is to be turned over to them immediately and not to be discussed. Apparently, deep matters of national security are involved.”

    “Huh?” asked Leo. He frowned at the carcass. “I mean, sure, it’s nasty-looking. But I really can’t see where even a thousand of these things running loose would be more than a local problem, for a while. Hell, it’s not even the size of a mountain lion, much less a bear.”

    Tim barked a little laugh. “Oh, you’ll get the news tomorrow. It’ll be all over the country’s news channels. It seems—no, I’m not joking—that the disaster at Alexander wasn’t any sort of natural catastrophe. It turns out it was a terrorist attack.”

    “Huh?” Leo repeated.

    Obviously, Nick had already gotten the story from his friend. His own grin was sardonic. “Oh, sure. We knew Al Qaeda was crazy. Now we know it for sure. They strike at the Great Satan by blowing up thousands of our hardened criminals.”

    “Good God,” said Morgan-Ash, his normal imperturbability shaken. “That’s… that’s… preposterous.”

    “Yeah, it is.” Tim’s grin was finally replaced by the scowl it had so thinly covered. “I really, really hate being played for a damn fool. Even by people who are polite about it, which these shitheads certainly aren’t.” He poked the carcass again. “That’s why I brought this thing here, after Nick told me about you guys. I just held my peace until I was sure you weren’t fruitcakes.”

    Margo smiled. “Don’t jump to conclusions. We’re Ph.D.’s, don’t forget. Probably a bigger concentration of fruitcakes in academia than anywhere else. Not to mention that we’ve spent most of the past few years living half a mile underground in an old iron mine. That’s got to be borderline fruitcakery, at least.”

    The state police officer smiled back. “Yeah, I guess. But you’re pikers in the fruitcake department compared to the of-fi-cial clowns who are telling me that Moslem terrorists blew up a maximum security prison.” Again, he poked the carcass. “I wonder how they’d explain Nasty here? Probably claim it was a stem cell experiment gone bad.”

    He leaned back and shook his head. “No, I think I’ll toss in with you folks. Nick and I spent quite a bit of time talking it over. So. Now what?”

    The scientists stared at him. The tall, skinny policeman planted his hands on his hips.

    “Looks, folks, you might as well understand something right from the start. I guess for you this whole thing is just a matter of scientific curiosity. Well, that’s fine. But for me—and there’ll be more than just me—it’s goddamit personal. These are small communities down here in southern Illinois. It ain’t Chicago. I knew a lot of the people who worked at Alexander. One of the guards was my high school girlfriend. And the lieutenant in charge of afternoon shift, Joe Schuler, was my best friend. I’ve known him since we were both six years old.”

    He looked down at the carcass, glaring fiercely. “I want to know what happened to my best friend. I want to know what happened to my high school sweetheart. What really happened. Not some lying bullshit fed to me by federal agents covering up God knows what.”

    He shifted the glare to them. “Do you understand? I’m not interested in spending years under a mountain somewhere studying more data. You’re scientists, I’m a cop. I think a crime’s being committed and I want to goddam fucking well know the truth. And I don’t much care what gets taken apart in the process.”

    Margo couldn’t help it. She burst into giggles.

    “What’s so funny?” asked Harshbarger.

    She shook her head, weakly. “Sorry, Tim. I wasn’t laughing at you or your feelings. It’s just…”

    She shook her head again. “I think you’ve just ended a debate that we’ve been having amongst ourselves for almost eight years now. Call it the Eggheads vs. the Dudley Do-Rights.”

    She gave her companions a serene gaze. “I’ve always been one of the Dudley Do-Rights, myself. And I do believe we just won the debate.”

    Morgan-Ash smiled, and stroked his beard. “So am I. Oddly enough, since I’m normally the most conservative of this lot of wild-eyed radicals. And, yes, I think we just won the debate.”

    He gave Malcolm and Leo—who’d been charter members of the Egghead faction from the beginning—a gaze that was just as serene as Margo’s. “Wouldn’t you agree, gentlemen?”

    O’Connell and Dingley were eyeing the state police officer. His hands were the size you’d expect from a man that tall. And they looked quite capable of taking many things apart, if he was in the mood. Which he so obviously was.

    “Guess so,” said Leo.