Rebel in Time

She pulled the chair over in front of the terminal, then spun the adjustment to raise it up high enough for her. When she sat down her legs dangled like a little girl's, her feet not reaching the floor; she twined her legs around the chair supports. But she knew very well what she was doing. Her fingers flashed over the keyboard, pulling up a menu of all the programs running, then accessed the one she wanted and checked it through. Thirty seconds later she leaned back and pointed her thumb at the rows of numbers marching down the screen.

'There it is. Ready and waiting.'

'Great!' Kleiman said, patting her on the shoulder. 'You are a genius, baby. Now give us a print-out, if you please.'

'What? There are all of two years plus of read-out in there. Haven't you heard of the energy crisis and the paper shortage?'

'That's the name of the game. Type.'

She pressed two keys and the high-speed printer against the far wall began to hammer away with a rapid, paper-tearing sound. The printing head tore back and forth across the endless sheet of fanfold paper which began to pile up higher and higher in the wire tray.

'Is that all you geniuses need now?' Nina asked.

'Thank you, doll, I'll remember you in my will.'

When the printer had finally lapsed into silence, Kleiman tore the paper apart at the end of the last sheet and carried the book-thick pile of print-out over to his desk.

'Now we'll see what we will see,' he said, turning the pack over and pulling free the last pages. 'Right up to date, yep, here's the one I did this morning. Now let us flip back a bit, to last week-end when the colonel went missing… mamma mia!'

'What is it?'

'There it is, right here, late last Saturday, when the joint was supposed to be closed up. Power, man, power. Whatever they were doing in here they were burning enough juice to light up Chicago. We've never pulled a ten-thousandth of that amount. I'm surprised that they didn't vaporize every one of the circuits. And what's this? No, this I do not believe! Too much!'

He pointed to a line of print-out, his thumb on a set of numbers. It looked in no way different to Troy than anything else on the page. Kleiman flipped through the sheets in consternation, then back to the original page.

He shook his head with disbelief.

'Here, see it, right there. The polarity of tau input, it's reversed. It shouldn't be like that. We never do that — look at all the others. The results were consistently negative, we abandoned that approach.'

Troy held his impatience under tight control. 'What does it mean? This tau thing. Why does it bother you?'

'It doesn't bother me — it's just impossible, that's what. It can't be done. But it has been done.'

The paper slipped from Kleiman's fingers and fell to the floor. He turned to Troy, and when he spoke again his voice was hushed, his face drawn.

'Whatever was moved in time wasn't moved forward. It was sent in the opposite direction. Sent back in time — to the past.'

Chapter 15

Troy accepted the fact of time travel without hesitation. Why shouldn't he? He had grown up in the age of technological miracles. First there had been the atomic bomb, well before his birth, then, one after another, the hydrogen bomb, atomic energy, jet aircraft that could fly faster than sound, followed by orbiting satellites, and lastly the almost unbelievable, real-time television pictures of men walking on the Moon. There seemed no end to the cornucopia output of the laboratories and he, like many others, had stopped trying to understand how they worked. They just did. He had used electronic guided missiles in the Army. You pressed the button and they went. That's all that you had to know.

So you pressed another button and something travelled through time. There was really no difference. The only question was — what had the machine been used for? What was it that McCulloch and Harper had sent backwards in time? Was it the gold? What would that have possibly accomplished? But if it hadn't been the gold — then what had it been?

When the question was asked this way, the answer became obvious. The pieces fitted together at last. Troy spun about and called out to Kleiman, who did not hear him. The physicist was muttering to himself as he pawed his way through the sheets of print-out. Troy had to raise his voice to get the man's attention.

'What?' Kleiman said, looking up and blinking distractedly. 'What did you say?'

'I asked you, can you tell from the figures how big the thing was that was sent through your time machine?'

'How big? Its mass, you mean? Yes, we can find out. I'll have to work out the equation though, the tau settings against the power consumed as the factorial aspects…'

'Can you tell me now, even roughly, how big a mass can be moved through time?'