ChronoSpace Page 2

  The elevator opened onto a long corridor decorated with paintings of Saturn V rockets and Apollo astronauts being suited up. Murphy tugged off his coat as he strode down the hall, carefully noting the coded signs on each door he passed. In the seven years he had worked at NASA, he had been to this floor only a few times; this was the senior administrative level, and you didn’t come up here unless you had a good reason.

  The boardroom was located at the end of the corridor, only a few doors down from the Chief Administrator’s office. The door was half-open; he could hear voices inside. Murphy hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  Three men were seated at the far end of the long oak table that took up most of the room; one chair had been left vacant between them. Their conversation came to a stop as Murphy walked in; everyone looked up at him, and for an instant he felt a rush of panic.

  “Dr. Murphy, welcome. Please come in.” Roger Ordmann, the Associate Administrator of the Office of Space Science, pushed back his chair and stood up. “You’re running a little late. I hope you didn’t have any trouble getting here today.”

  “My apologies. There was a . . .” No point in telling them about his decision to take the Metro. “Just a problem with traffic. Sorry if I kept you waiting.”

  “Not at all.” Ordmann gestured to the vacant chair as he sat down again. “The Beltway can be brutal this time of day. At any rate. . . well, I believe you already know everyone here.”

  Indeed he did. Harry Cummisky, Space Science’s Chief of Staff, was the man who had hired Murphy seven years ago. Although only a few years older than Murphy himself, he was the person to whom Murphy directly reported. Harry gave him a nod which was cordial yet nonetheless cool. If it weren’t for Murphy, after all, he wouldn’t be here today.

  Next to him was Kent Morris, the Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA’s Public Affairs Office. Murphy knew Morris less well; they had met only three weeks ago, during NASA’s annual Christmas party. Morris seemed affable enough then, but there was a certain edge to him that Murphy instinctively disliked. As it turned out, his feelings were correct; Morris had just transferred over to NASA from the Pentagon, where the PAO was more inclined to scrutinize civilian employees for possible security breaches. It had been a little less than a week after the Christmas party when Morris had blown the whistle on Murphy.

  As for Roger Ordmann . . . although Murphy had only met him once or twice before, he knew him all too well, if only by reputation. The former vice president of a major NASA contractor, Ordmann had been recruited to the agency by the Chief Administrator after Dan Goldin himself had come aboard during the Bush administration. Ordmann was a company man; he followed Goldin’s visionary lead without having much of a vision of his own, beyond making sure that Space Science continued to be sufficiently funded through the next fiscal year. Courtly, urbane, and soft-spoken, he could nonetheless be unmerciful when it came to dismissing any personnel in the Washington office who roused his ire.

  “Yes, sir. I know everyone.” Murphy draped his coat over the back of his chair; there was a long, expectant silence as he sat down. Now it seemed as if everyone was staring at him, waiting for him to continue. “To start with . . .”

  Feeling an itch in his throat, Murphy coughed into his hand. “Excuse me. To begin with, I apologize for any embarrassment I may have caused the agency. It wasn’t my intent to cast NASA in a bad light. When I wrote that article, I didn’t believe it would be attributed to . . .”

  “David . . .” Roger Ordimann regarded him with a paternal smile. “This isn’t a formal board of inquiry, let alone an inquisition. We simply want to know . . . well, at least I’d like to know . . . how you drew your conclusions, and why you decided to publish them at this time.”

  “And who gave you clearance to do so,” Morris added, much less warmly.

  Murphy glanced across the table at the PAO deputy chief, and that was when he noticed a copy of the February issue of Analog resting before him. Not only that, but Ordmann and Cummisky also had copies. The very same science fiction magazine currently on sale in bookstores and newsstands across the country which, along with new stories by Michael F. Flynn, Paul Levinson, and Bud Sparhawk and book reviews by Tom Easton, also featured a nonfiction article by one David Z. Murphy: “How to Travel Through Time (And Not Get Caught).”

  “So . . .” Steepling his fingers together, Ordmann leaned back in his chair. “Tell us why you think UFOs may be time machines.”

  Mon, Oct 15, 2314—0946Z

  Franc Lu awoke as the lunar shuttle fired its braking thrusters. Feeling the momentary pull of gravity, he pushed off the eyeshades he had donned a couple of hours ago and carefully blinked a few times. The ceiling lights had been turned down, though, so he didn’t have to squint; free fall returned after a moment, and he felt his body once more beginning to rise above his seat; he was thankful that he hadn’t neglected to check the straps before taking a nap.

  Turning his head to the left, he peered out the oval porthole window next to his seat. Past the port engine nacelle, he caught a brief glimpse of Earth, an enormous, cloud-flecked shield that glided away as the shuttle completed its turnaround maneuver. Unable to make out any major continents through the clouds, he assumed that they must be somewhere over the Pacific. Probably just beyond the visible horizon lay Hong Kong, his ancestral home. Franc smiled at the thought. Someday, he would like to get another chance to visit . . .

  “Well. Now there’s a pleasant smile.” Across the aisle, Lea put down her compad to regard him with mischievous eyes. “Pfennig for your thoughts?”

  Franc started to reply, then realized, too late, that she was indulging one of her favorite games. “Caught you!” She playfully wagged a finger at him. “Now, tell me . . .”

  “A pfennig is a coin.” Franc laid his head back against the seat. “Smallest form of hard currency used in Germany until 2003, when the deutsche mark was replaced by the Eurodollar.”

  “Very good.” Yet she wasn’t about to let him get off so easily. “And what does that expression mean, ‘pfennig for your thoughts’?”

  “That you’ve made a bad pun. And I was thinking about Hong Kong, if you must know. It might be an interesting place to visit.”

  “I thought you’ve already been there. Three years ago, when . . .” Then her elegant eyebrows arched slightly. “Oh. You mean a CRC expedition.”

  Franc nodded. “Dec 31, 1997. The day Great Britain formally ceded the island to the People’s Republic of China. An intriguing period, from what I’ve read.”

  She shook her head as she folded shut her compad. “It might be, but it’s probably well documented. Nothing of major interest there. You could always file a proposal, of course, but . . .”

  “The Board would probably turn it down. You’re right.” He shrugged, then turned toward the window again. “Just a passing thought.”

  Earth had completely disappeared; now all he could see was the black expanse of cislunar space. From behind him, he could hear the small handful of fellow passengers beginning to move restlessly in their seats. They had been travelling for a little more than eighteen hours now, following the shuttle’s departure from the Mare Imbrium spaceport. A private spacecraft owned and operated by the Chronospace Research Centre, the shuttle didn’t have the luxury accommodations afforded by the large commercial moonships. Everyone aboard was a CRC employee; some were returning from furlough, while others like Lea and himself had their homes on the Moon. Yet because commercial craft weren’t permitted to dock at Chronos Station, you had to take the CRC shuttle or else try hitching a ride aboard a freighter.

  Thinking about their destination, Franc reached to the comp in the seatback in front of him. He ran his forefinger across the index, and the panel changed to display a forward view. Now he could see what the pilots saw from the cockpit: a cruciform-shaped station, each arm comprised of five cylindrical modules, with two spherical spacedocks located at opposite ends of its elong
ated central core. Within the rectangular bay of the closer dock, Franc could make out tiny spacecraft, while others hovered in parking orbit nearby.

  Out of curiosity, Franc touched his finger against the image of the spacedock farther away from the shuttle. As the shuttle completed an orbit around the station, for a brief instant he caught a glimpse of a small, saucer-shaped craft nestled within the hangar bays. Then, just as he expected, the scene was blotted out by a graphic inverted triangle.

  *** CLASSIFIED ** CLASSIFIED ***

  REMOTE IMAGING NOT

  PERMITTED

  CRC 103-B

  *DOWN*

  The screen wiped clean, to be replaced by the original index bar. “Verdammt,” Franc murmured in disgust. It was at times like this when the gentlemen in Security Division took their work a little too seriously. As if no one aboard a CRC shuttle had ever seen a timeship before . . .

  Lea chuckled. “You’re getting better with your explicatives.”

  “Cut it out.” He cast her a warning look. “I’ve been studying as hard as I can, and you know it.”

  Closing her eyes, she laid her head back against the seat. “I just hope you’ve learned your history better than your German. You’re going to need it.”

  Franc opened his mouth to object, then thought better of it. There was no sense in arguing with Lea when she was in one of her moods. So he tried to relax, but after a moment he touched the comp again, and passed the remaining minutes of the flight watching the shuttle complete its primary approach.

  As the spacedock filled the screen, he reflected that Chronos Station was just over a kilometer in length. It wasn’t very large, at least in comparison to some of the colonies in Lagrange orbit, yet it was amazing to think that, almost three hundred years ago, airships nearly this same size had been built—and actually flown!—on Earth.

  Franc smiled to himself. In just two days, they would see the Hindenburg. Then he’d offer Lea a pfennig for her thoughts.

  Monday, January 14, 1998: 8:06 A.M.

  Like so many physicists, David Zachary Murphy had fallen in love with science by reading science fiction.

  His love affair began when he was ten years old and saw Star Trek on TV. That sent him straight to his elementary-school library, where in turn he discovered, tucked in among more conventional fare like The Wind in the Willows and Johnny Tremain, a half dozen lesser-known books: Rocket Ship Galileo, Attack from Atlantis, Islands in the Sky, and the Lucky Starr series by someone named Paul French. He read everything in a few weeks, then reread them a couple more times, before finally bicycling to a nearby branch library, where he found more sophisticated fare: I, Robot; Double Star; Needle in a Timestack; Way Station; and other classics of the genre.

  By the time David Murphy reached the sixth grade, not only was he reading at college freshman level, but he was also taking a sharp interest in science, so much so that he regularly confounded his teachers by asking questions they couldn’t answer, such as the definition of a parsec. For Christmas, his bemused yet proud parents gave him a hobby telescope; when he caught a flu after spending one too many winter evenings in the backyard, his mother brought back from the neighborhood drugstore, along with Robitussin and orange juice, a magazine she happened to spot on the rack just below the new issue of Look: the January, 1969, issue of Analog. It seemed to be just the sort of thing her strange young son would like, and it might help keep him in bed.

  David recovered from the flu two days later, but he faked sick for another school day so he could finish reading every story in the magazine. One of them was the first installment of a three-part serial by Gordon R. Dickson, Wolfling; for the next two weeks, he haunted the pharmacy newsstand until the February issue finally appeared. Not only did it have the second part of Wolfling, but it also contained, as the cover story, a novelette by Anne McCaffrey, “A Womanly Talent.” An insightful observer might have noted, in retrospect, that the lissome young lady depicted in Frank Kelly Freas’s cover painting for this story bore a strong resemblance to the woman David would eventually marry, yet that may have only been a coincidence.

  For the next twenty-nine years of his life, David Murphy remained a devoted reader of Analog, seldom missing an issue, never disposing of any after he read them. On occasion he picked up some of the other science fiction magazines—Galaxy, If, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vertex—but it was only in Analog, in some indescribable way, that he found the sort of thing he liked to read. He went through high school with a copy tucked in among his textbooks—no small matter, for during the seventies it was far more socially acceptable to smoke pot than to be caught reading science fiction—and when he was in college and faced a choice between a meal or the latest issue, he would sooner go hungry before passing up on what he called “his Analog fix.” After he met Donna during his third semester of his postgrad tenure at Cornell, on the first night she spent with him she was astonished to find a dozen issues of Analog beneath the bed of his small apartment. She was even more amused the first time he took her home to visit his mother for Christmas, and she found boxes upon boxes of science fiction magazines stacked in the attic.

  It was during this time, while he was working on his Ph.D. in astrophysics, that David attempted to write science fiction. It didn’t take very long—only a couple of dozen reject slips, garnered not only from Analog but also Asimov’s, Omni, and F&SF—for him to realize that, no matter how much he enjoyed reading SF, he had absolutely no talent for creating it. Not that he couldn’t write at all—in fact, one of his dissertation advisors, no less than the estimable Carl Sagan, often remarked on his innate writing skills—yet the art of fiction was beyond him; his dialogue was tone-deaf, his characters wooden, his plots contrived and reliant upon unlikely coincidences. This wasn’t very heartbreaking; writing was little more than a hobby, and certainly not a passion. Nonetheless, his secret ambition was to have his name appear in the same magazine he had followed since he was a kid. Even after he received his doctorate and was happily married to Donna, with a ten-month-old baby in his arms and a new job at NASA waiting for him, he considered his life to be incomplete until he was published in Analog.

  Then, late one afternoon while sitting out a Beltway traffic jam with nothing but All Things Considered on the radio to keep him company, Murphy had a brainstorm. He may not have much talent as a fiction writer, but he wasn’t half-bad at nonfiction. After all, he had already published three articles in major astrophysics journals; it might be possible for him to turn those same skills to writing pop-science articles. Indeed, he knew several working scientists who moonlighted as regular contributors to Astronomy and Discover. Why couldn’t he do the same with Analog?

  After dinner that evening, Murphy sat down in his study and, very methodically, made a list of ideas for articles he could see himself writing for Analog. It was remarkably easy; as a lifelong reader, he had a good grasp of what the magazine published, and as a NASA researcher he was able to keep up with the latest developments in the space science community.

  At the top of the list was “Spacewarp Drives—Are They Possible?” This was followed by “Three Ways to Terraform Mars,” “Biostasis for Interstellar Travel,” “New Space Suit Designs,” “How to Grow Tomatoes on the Moon,” so forth and so on . . . and at the bottom of the list, added almost as an afterthought, was: “UFOs—A Different Explanation (Time Travel).”

  Much to his surprise, Analog bought his article about spacewarp drives. The check he received for six weeks of part-time work amounted to a little less than half of his weekly take-home pay from NASA, but that wasn’t the point. Nine months later, when the article finally saw print, Murphy blew away the money by getting a baby-sitter to look after Steven and taking Donna to the best five-star restaurant in Georgetown. He proudly showed his advance copy to everyone from the maître’d to the cab driver, and Donna was embarrassed when he got mildly drunk and suggested that they have sex in the ladies room, but it was all worth it. His life was complete.
He had been published in Analog.

  Few of his colleagues saw the article. This didn’t surprise Murphy; during the last three years he had learned that all too many NASA employees were civil-service drudges who cared nothing for space and would have gladly gone to work at the Department of Agriculture or the IRS for a few more dollars and a reserved parking space in the garage. Yet a handful of people in the Space Science office were Analog readers; they recognized his by-line, and they stopped by his office to offer their compliments. Among them was Harry Cummisky; much to Murphy’s surprise, Harry not only liked the piece, but he also gave him permission to do research during office hours, so long as it didn’t interfere with his work.

  That response, along with favorable letters published several months later in the magazine, was sufficient encouragement to send Murphy back to the keyboard. Over the course of the next four years, he became a semiregular contributor to Analog. The checks he received were deposited in Steven’s college fund, but earning a little extra cash wasn’t the major reason why he wrote. Besides the satisfaction of the craft itself, on occasion he found himself exchanging correspondence with science fiction authors who had read his articles and wanted to ask a few questions for stories they were developing. Likewise, his stock at NASA gradually rose. After his article on human biostasis was published, Harry sent him down to Huntsville to lecture on the subject at the Marshall Space Flight Center; a few months later he and his family were invited to Cape Canaveral to watch a shuttle launch from the VIP area. He became regarded within NASA headquarters as a member of the brain trust.

  Then he wrote an article linking UFOs to time travel, and that’s when the shit hit the fan.

  “This is . . . ah, it’s an intriguing theory.” Roger Ordmann slipped off his wire-frame glasses and pulled a handkerchief from his vest pocket to clean the lenses. “Rather unorthodox, but intriguing nonetheless.”