Chapter Twenty-eight

THE DEPTHS OF TIME

THEBELLEBOYDXI
ONASSAULTAPPROACH TOCOMFORT
SOLACESYSTEM

The debris cloud bloomed out as Burl and Kalani watched.

Kalani Temblar had often wished that she could have had it in her to give up, to decide to stop, to turn around and walk away. Other people seemed to manage it. She never had.

It had taken a solid month, and then some, before she and Burl had found DeSilvo’sreal Glister headquarters, roughly nine hundred kilometers northeast of the decoy.

By the time she found it, Burl Chalmers had been within a day or so of doing what he never did—issuing a direct order—so as to force her to give up. But Burl didn’t issue that order, and Kalani had kept up her search, working from old maps and visual scans from orbit. When those failed to turn up anything in the area she suspected of containing DeSilvo’s HQ, she powered up other sensor systems. And still Burl had kept his patience—barely.

The best she had been able to do was establish that one small settlement shown on the maps had disappeared—not exactly remarkable, given conditions on Glister. Still, all the other sites were still visible from orbit, and the site of the missing settlement was in about the right spot. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was all she had.

Once the radar scans from orbit made it clear that there was somethingbig buried at the 900NW site, as they came to call it, Burl eased off, at least a bit. On the other hand, as he pointed out more than once, there were alot of buried installations on Glister. They had buried practically everything just before the final collapse of the planet.

Once on the surface, all she had to go on at first was an impression that some of the rock looked to have been moved recently—but neither she nor Burl was a forensic geologist, or whatever the expert on that sort of thing might be called—and neither of them knew remotely enough about the weather on Glister and how long it would take to wipe that “newness” off a shifted pile of rock.

But once she had indisputable readings that showed what could only be large, active, shielded power sources on standby, there beneath the surface, then at last Burl conceded defeat. In a sense, the difficulty in finding the base was part of the proof. The Chronologic Patrol’s sensor systems were the best available, bar none—and even they had failed to find anything until they were right on top of the target.

The sensors told them there were machines and electronics still operating down there, all most carefully hidden. Unless someoneelse had been wandering about Glister, planting supersecret installations thither and yon, it had to be DeSilvo.

Which left them with the non-trivial task of getting into 900NW, somehow, and the further task of getting past DeSilvo’s security. After plenty of false starts, they got in—after spending another month-plus on the job. Then, once they were in, they were for a time all but defeated by the simple immensity of what they had found.

They lost even more time searching the place for leads, until Burl found an unencrypted datapad that someone named Wandella Ashdin had left behind.

The datapad that told them the whole plan—and the reasons for it, in tremendous detail. They lost more time in the effort required simply to believe it could possibly all be true.

But too much effort had gone into preparing the information, and into hiding it, for it to be a lie. Too much of it rang true with all that Kalani had seen and learned before she ever got to Glister.

They had made copies of as much information as their own datastores could hold, then prepared to leave, making sure to leave Base Glister as well concealed as before they had found it.

It was a sore temptation to destroy what was near to being a second Dark Museum—but the place was a treasure trove of knowledge and equipment. It would be criminal to destroy it all. What decided Burl at last was the realization that DeSilvo had all the information already. He would not have traveled to Solace without taking full copies of the data with him.

Besides, the very existence of the Dark Museum demonstrated that Chronologic Patrol policy was to retain, conceal, and suppress dangerous technical knowledge, not to destroy it. Some or even most of the suppressed technology stored in Base Glister had been altogether lost to the Chronologic Patrol when the Dark Museum was destroyed, then looted by DeSilvo. The CP would have to know all about that hardware, if DeSilvo had the use of it. They left Base Glister intact.

All that accomplished, they began the long and weary journey to the Solace system, transiting the Starshine Station Wormhole en route. With so much material to study, they bought time by the simple expedient of cutting back on their stays in temporal confinement, staying in objective time for several months longer than they otherwise would have.

They had learned a lot in those months of study—enough to know what DeSilvo and company would be up to upon their arrival. Enough to understand what he was doing and to be scared to death by it.

Enough to stop him.

And enough to wonder, just a little, if they should.

But they had, anyway.

Kalani stared sadly at the expanding cloud of dust and debris that had been a small-scale Harmonic Gate a few minutes before. She did not feel proud, or even relieved.Mission accomplished, she thought.Now Earth will die in a thousand years.

“Hey, Burl?” she asked.

Burl glanced over at her from the pilot’s console. “What?” he asked.

“I was wondering. Did we just score a stirring victory for death, defeatism, retreat, and extinction?”

He shook his head. “I dunno,” he said. “I was asking myself the same question.” He was silent for a time, watching the expanding cloud blooming outward into the nothingness that seemed to be the fate of all. “Come on,” he said at last. “Let’s head in and sweep up the pieces.”

 

Admiral Koffield had warned them what might happen, long before. As usual, he was right. Koffield, naturally enough, handled the initial negotiations over the radio. It was agreed to hold the face-to-face negotiation—or perhaps surrender would be a better word—in theLodestar VII ’s main hangar deck. Not the most comfortable place to meet—but it would hold everyone and keep the issue of contact under some sort of control.

Koffield spoke to the group just before they went into the hangar deck. “There isn’t much time,” he said, “so please listen carefully and take what I tell you seriously. You were all briefed on this contingency as a hypothetical possibility. Now it’s all real. We have lost everything we were working toward. All we can do now is make sure the people of Greenhouse and Solace do not pay for it—with their lives.

“I have spoken with the commanding officer of the Chronologic Patrol ship. They found DeSilvo City, entered it, and know everything. They have spent months en route, studying the material. So it’s no good trying to fool them, or trying to be clever—and you shouldn’t try it in any event. The only way—theonly way—the planet Solace can survive this is by our confessing to everything we have done, by our cooperating completely, and by making sure they’re confident they’ve swept us all up. Work on the assumption that they’d burn the planet if they felt it necessary and think they were saving all the other worlds by so doing. Don’t hold back. Don’t play games. Don’t try to outsmart them. If you do,everyone dies. Is all that clear?”

He got the nods and muttered yesses that he was looking for. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go welcome our guests.”

As per arrangement, what was already being called the “core group” assembled on the hangar deck as soon as the gig from theBelle Boyd XI docked with the big ship’s external lock. Koffield had instructed all of them to pack a bag, bring it with them, and be ready to travel. The CP might want to take them into custody at once, and Koffield didn’t want to give them any problems that he could avoid. Elber had taken the chance to change into the best clothes he had along. He was glad to have done so, for just about everyone else in the group had done the same.

He was gladder still when the airlock hatch swung open and the two CP officers came aboard. The two of them were in full dress uniform: handsomely cut silver-grey tunics and jet-black trousers. An older, heavyset man, sad and calm, and a younger woman, plainly much more on edge than her companion. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that she had been crying, not so long ago. Well, Elber had shed his own tears already, and would likely do it again soon, and often. Jassa and Zari. He would never see them again. They would likely never even know why he had vanished.

The two CP officers came a step or two into the airlock and stopped. The group from theLodestar VII formed into a semicircle in front of them.

The older man spoke. “I am Lieutenant Commander Burl Chalmers, commanding the Chronologic Patrol Intelligence ShipBelle Boyd XI . This is Lieutenant Kalani Temblar. First, before all, I must speak of our security arrangements.”

“Excuse me, Commander,” said Admiral Koffield. “My name is Koffield. I served in the Chronologic Patrol, and know your procedures.” He gestured toward the others. “I have briefed them already about such matters.”

“Yes, Mr. Koffield. I recognized you.” It was impossible to miss the failure to call him “Admiral.” Perhaps Chalmers felt a man caught in the act of betraying the Patrol was not entitled to full military courtesy—though he was otherwise quite polite. “I am sure you have told them all that you know about such matters—but you have been away a long time, and things might have changed. In any event, the consequences of mistakes could be—wouldbe—so high that I do not want it on my conscience that there could be any chance of confusion or misunderstanding. And in any event, I am required by standing orders to follow the procedure I am about to describe—and I am also required by the same orders to describe the procedure. I have no discretion at all under the applicable standing orders.”

He turned his gaze away from Koffield and addressed them as a group. “Lieutenant Temblar and I are wearing biomonitors, and are carrying certain other devices, all of which are in constant communication with our ship. In the event that either of us, or both of us, should be harmed, or if we are simply cut off from contact with the ship for any significant length of time—then theBelle Boyd XI will shift over into marauder mode. She will attack and destroy this ship. You will not be able to stop her. She will attack and destroy any ship that attempts to challenge her. She will move on to Greenhouse and attack and destroy all of its orbiting installations—including, and indeed starting with, the NovaSpot. I am fully aware what the destruction of the NovaSpot would mean, and I trust you are as well.

“TheBelle Boyd XI will continue her attacks on Greenhouse, then on Solace, until her weapons are exhausted, or until she is damaged or destroyed. I doubt she would survive the detonation of the NovaSpot—but I doubt that would matter.

“We have left an automated message unit at the downtime end of Starshine Station. If we fail to return there, and fail to send the proper stand-down code, a message that we failed to return will be carried on the next ship to depart Starshine, and the next, and the next, and the next, until the stand-down code is sent. Once that message arrives at Earth, a fleet of Chronologic Patrol Ships, each of them far larger and more powerful than theBelle Boyd XI, will launch for the Solace system—and they will not treat you gently.”

He looked around the group again, at the ring of silent, shell-shocked faces. “Is all of this clear? Do all of you understand that Lieutenant Temblar and I must not,must not, come to any harm?”

There was a stunned chorus of assent, and Chalmers went on. “Very well, then. I need only mention that the consequences of anything short of full cooperation with the Chronologic Patrol will be met with similar reprisal, adjusted for the circumstance. Youmust cooperate with us, if there is to be any hope of Solace or Greenhouse surviving. Isthat clear?”

Another chorus of consent, scarcely more audible. “Thank you,” he said. “For what it is worth, which is perhaps very little, neither Lieutenant Temblar nor I are happy about this—quite the contrary. You will understand that the scale of the—ah—violationsbeing attempted here left us no choice or discretion whatsoever.” He turned to Dr. DeSilvo. “Sir. I recognize you from photographs, of course. Can you confirm that this is the core group, those with substantive knowledge of your plan to go back in time to terraform a world?”

DeSilvo blinked, swallowed a time or two, and then found his voice, his self-control. “Of those aboard this ship, yes. Obviously, the rest of those aboard knew we were doingsomething secret—and they saw the Test Article destroyed, and saw you arrive. But these are all of those who knew what it is—what it was—all about.”

Temblar looked them over and spoke for the first time. “Doesn’t seem like very many.”

“There are others on Greenhouse, and a few on Solace,” said Koffield.

“Including your head of government and head of state—your, ah, Planetary Executive?”

The room was silent.

“Is your Planetary Executive aware of this project or not?” Chalmers repeated.

“You can’t take the sovereign leader of aplanet into custody!” Drayax protested.

“We can, we have in the past—and we will, in this case,” said Chalmers. “Otherwise, the planet will suffer the consequences.”

“Planetary Executive Kalzant will cooperate with you,” said Koffield.

“That does not directly answer my question, but, very well,” said Chalmers. “I will not press the issue further—just yet. But youmust provide me with a complete list of persons with knowledge of the time-travel plan, and technical knowledge of the equipment.”

“You’ll get it,” DeSilvo said tersely.

“Good. There is more we’ll want—much more—but that will do for now.” Chalmers gestured toward the docking-port hatch, and the CP auxiliary ship beyond. “Let’s get going,” he said.

Elber gasped. “You—you mean, that’s it?”

“That’s it,” said Lieutenant Temblar. “What were you expecting? Speeches and a funeral march?”

“But—but what happens now?”

She pointed to the hatch. “We go aboard the aux ship. It’ll be crowded, but we can all fit for this short a trip. We fly over to theBelle Boyd XI, and all of you, except DeSilvo and Koffield, get shoved into our temporal confinement. While you’re in there, we’ll interrogate DeSilvo and Koffield, and probably we’ll pull several of you out of confinement to get your statements—to check on what Koffield and DeSilvo have told us. That’ll be a real tight fit in the TC chamber, but you’ll only be in there for a few seconds of subjective time, maybe a minute or two tops, while we make more permanent arrangements. Probably we’ll build a larger confinement on some unpopulated moon somewhere in the outer system and plant you all there until arrangements can be made for a transport to collect you and move you to a penal colony.

“But you all know too much to be put into any general prisoner population. More than likely, your group will be isolated. Permanently.”

Elber looked to Admiral Koffield in mute appeal, but Koffield could offer no way out of this disaster. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But there it is. We ran the risks—and lost the game. Now we have to pay. Or risk letting all of Solace and all of Greenhouse die.”

 

The aux ship wasn’t much more than a short, squat cylinder with a docking hatch on the nose and thrusters on the bottom. Its interior was one large compartment, with a pilot’s station to one side and the rest of the space left open.

It was going to be a very tight fit indeed to get everyone aboard while still leaving room for Chalmers to strap in at the pilot’s station and fly the ship. It would be altogether impractical to power up and tune the acceleration compensators so as to allow for the extra mass of the passengers for such a short trip. That meant everyone was going to have to be able to hang on, or else get knocked around every time a thruster fired. But the CP officers had planned ahead, and had wrapped stretch-net panels around the interior of the compartment, leaving a gap in the net so that Chalmers could make his way into the pilot’s station.

Temblar had as many as could fit lean their backs against the netting and hold on to it, while the rest crowded in, standing up, in the middle of the deck.

The CP officers had strung a few vertical hang-on ropes as well, stretching them between the deck and the overhead bulkhead through the center of the compartment. That gave everyone who got shoved into the center a place to hold on.

They stowed the prisoners’ pathetically small amount of luggage in the space between the netting and the inner hull, and then they were ready to go.

Elber was one of those caught in the middle, hanging on to one of the vertically strung ropes. It was impossible to look around at his companions, all hanging on to the netting and the ropes, and not see them all as trapped in a net, snared in a giant web.

Lieutenant Temblar stood where she could watch them all, in the center of the deck, hanging on to one of the vertically strung ropes—looking just as caught and trapped as all the rest of them. Elber found himself standing in front of her, holding on to his own rope. He was almost nose to nose with her. In her face he read anger, fear, sorrow, guilt, utter exhaustion, resignation. All of it, none of it, was there, moment by moment.

The overhead docking port slid shut, and they heard thebang-bang-bang of the docking latches letting go. Chalmers worked the ship’s controls. The forward thrusters fired, all but lifting everyone off their feet. The little ship came about and fired its rear jets, dropping everyone back into the deck.

The overcrowded little ship began its brief journey back to theBelle Boyd XI.

Elber looked at Temblar. Admiral Koffield had warned them all not to play games with the CP officers, but he hadn’t said anything about nottalking to them.

“You were at Glister, right? At Dr. DeSilvo’s base?”

Temblar had been staring over his shoulder at nothing at all. She blinked and took a moment to focus on him. “Hmm? Yes. I was there.”

“I wasn’t. I’ve never been out of Solace system. But I heard about it. Everything there. You saw the simulators? The ones that show what’s going to happen with all the planets?”

“Yes,” she said, plainly somewhat puzzled and distracted. “We even ran some simulations ourselves.”

“So you know,” he said. “You know what this does here.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Earth dies,” he said. “Everything dies.Everything .”

“I know! I know,” she said. Everyone was listening now, and she looked around the compartment. “I saw it all. But not for a long time. A thousand years—”

“Maybe less time than that.”

“And maybe more,” she snapped. “I was going to say, a thousand years is a long time. Lots of time to find an answer.”

“Do you think someone thought ‘we have lots of time’ five hundred years ago? Do you think they’ll think it in five hundred more?”

“Maybe. How should I know?”

“Will they even still remember that thereis a problem?” Koffield asked, very gently. He was holding on to the netting, off to the left of Elber. “I doubt anyone in Chronologic Patrol Central Command knows anything at all about it anymore.”

“We’ll remind them when we get back,” Temblar said stubbornly. “They’ll work on it. They’ll find an answer.The answer.”

“Do you think so?” Elber asked. “Really?”

“I hope so,” she said.

“You better hope pretty hard,” said Norla Chandray. “You’re betting the future of the human race on it.”

“They’ll find an answer,” she said again, but even Elber could see she couldn’t really believe it.

“We have found an answer,” he said. “Wehave.”

“You’ve found a fancy way for the human race to commit suicide,” Chalmers said, climbing out of the pilot’s seat. He looked to Temblar. “Controls are locked, autopilot on,” he said. “We’ve got a twenty-minute ride until we need to maneuver.” He turned himself to face Elber. “You’re saying a thousand years isn’t enough future for people to find an answer—but a million years of past isn’t long enough for someone to find a way to screw things up?”

“They’d do the time traveling away from any star system that was going to be inhabited.”

“Yeah, but they’lldo time travel . And they’ll have ships. And if you make it happen on this first planet, don’t you think there will be others? Don’t youwant there to be others? Maybe dozens, hundreds, of deep-time terraformed planets? And do you think every one of those operations will have perfect control, absolute security, over their Harmonic Gates, or whatever the hell you call them? Do you think no gate willever be misused?

“And tell me what happens if some ship is in the past, maybe on the very first mission to go back, and the time-travel gate breaks down, and the one hope for survival is to put everyone in cold storage and point the ship at the one world in all the universe theyknow has air to breathe and food to eat? Or suppose some clown figures out he can get rich if only he can get to Earth and scoop up a few fancy species that have gone extinct? Or suppose someone gets homesick? No problem—except if someone coughs after they land, and the germs get blown to the right spot in Africa—and poof! humanity is wiped out before it can get started. Or suppose someone, somewhere in all the thousands of years the job will take, decides to do the job on purpose? The voices in his head tell him humanity is evil, and God has sent him into the past for the explicit purpose of wiping out the blot on the universe? What’s your answer then?”

No one answered. Chalmers looked around the compartment. “You can’t dive that far back into the depths of time and assume you won’t make waves! That far back, all it would take was one tiny, tiny change—and everything is dead a million years ago, instead of a thousand years from now.”

Elber looked at him, hard, and whatever it was in him that had made him able to face Sotales, face Zak Destan, face vanishing forever in order to save his family, showed that it was still there. “You don’t believe there is any hope,” he said. “You don’t think they’ll find an answer in time.”

Again, the compartment was silent. All eyes were on Chalmers. “You’re right,” he said at last. “I don’t think they will.” He gestured to DeSilvo, hanging on the netting between Koffield and Chandray. “Your models and projections were pretty convincing,” he said. “Lieutenant Temblar and I spent half our waking hours on the trip here trying to find a hole in them. We couldn’t. And they match up with too many things we already knew. Things we haven’t had the courage to admit to ourselves for a long time.” He looked back at Elber. “A thousand years is all the future we have left,” he said. “But that gives us no right to risk a million years of our past.”

Chalmers looked around at all the faces turned toward him. “You want an answer? You’ll have all the time in the world to find one, after we’ve locked you all away. Find a way to do it without time travel, and then we’ll talk,” he said. “Take a million years to terraform your planet if you like. Just don’t do it inmy past.”

He turned to Temblar, and spoke again, but in a different tone, one that signaled that the topic was closed, nothing more to discuss. “Kalani, crank up the cooling system,” he said. “It’s getting kind of toasty in here with all these warm bodies.” Then he turned his back completely on Elber and started to climb back into his pilot’s chair. Discussion over.

But Elber barely noticed. Something had come to him.

“Wait a minute,” Elber said. “Wait just a minute.”

Chalmers turned back to him, the annoyance plain on his face. “Enough,” he said. “It’s over.”

“No,” said Elber. “No. Wait just a minute.” Hehad to get this idea clear and straight in his head. The future . . .

“No time travel, you said, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, fella, that’s right.”

“Is that what you mean? Or do you mean time travelinto the past ?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m—I’m no expert. But the timeshaft wormholes are really only good for going into thepast, right? I mean, you have to build them before you can use them, so you can’t use them to travel forward from—what do you call it? The uptime end. Right?”

“Yeah, right. Of course you can’t. So what?”

But Elber wasn’t listening. He was talking to himself, thinking out loud. “A timeshaft wormhole is, is, like atube with two ends. You can go from one end to the other and back, uptime and downtime, but that’s all. You can’t travel any other time distance, or travel to before or after the period when both ends of it existed.But Harmonic Gates aren’t like that.

Elber turned toward DeSilvo. “That’s right, isn’t it? Youcan use two Harmonic Gates to create a timeshaft, but you don’t have to, right? It can be open-ended?”

DeSilvo was just as mystified as anyone else, but it was plain he could sense Elber’s excitement. “Well, yes, of course,” he said. “We were preparing to do just that when, ah, we were interrupted. But yes, in theory, you ought to be able to create a link to any moment in the past.”

“The past! It’s always thepast !” Elber looked around and saw that they still didn’t see it. “You’ve all been trained by the timeshafts,” he said. “Time travel is what you doto go into the past .” He gestured at Chalmers. “The—the whole Chronologic Patrol is based on that. From the stories I heard, the only reason those Intruder ships were able to attack at Circum Central is that no one ever thought of anyone trying to gofrom past to future .”

He could see by DeSilvo’s expression that he had gotten it. So had Koffield. He turned to Chalmers again. “The future. If we went into the future and made our world—would that be all right?” It seemed insane, even to Elber, to ask permission that way, but how else was he to phrase it? “Would it?”

Chalmers was starting to look a little alarmed. He backed away from Elber a bit. “Well, yeah, fella, I suppose. Sure. But what would be the point? What good is a terraformed world a million years in the future going to do for you?”

“I know, I know. But would it be all right if webrought it back ?” Elber looked at him eagerly. “The Chronologic Patrol is supposed to keep the present from interfering with the past. Would it be all right if we interfered with thefuture ?”

Again, silence. Elber wanted to say more, but he didn’t dare. He couldsee the future balanced on knife edge, trembling there. The slightest jolt could send it tumbling, falling down into the depths of time forever. He had done his part. Let the others do theirs.

Chandray spoke first. “Stars in the sky,” she said. “Would itwork ?”

Koffield looked at DeSilvo. “Is it evenremotely possible? Could you scale things up that much?”

DeSilvo looked stunned as well. “The engineering challenges would be enormous, of course—but the odd thing about the gates is that it was always a question of scaling themdown . I don’t know how to put it more elegantly than to say the processwants to be big. Most of the challenge has been in forcing the chronoharmonic effects to work on smaller masses and volumes over shorter periods.” He looked to Elber. “Tell me again,” he said. “Tell me what you have in mind.”

Elber stabbed a finger at Villjae Benzen. “Just like what he told me about the first terraform-in-time plan, only backward. We were going to go back a million years, come back to now, then, I dunno, what?—get to 990,000 years, then 970, and so on, back to now. Instead we go, say, 20,000 years into the future and come back to here. I mean now. Then, 30,000, 100,000—until we get the planet how we like it. Then—then when it’s done, we bring it back to here and now.”

“Bring the planet back? Why not just send the people forward? The masses involved . . .” DeSilvo asked. His lips starting working silently as he worked the problem through.

“No, not if you want to keep paradoxes from happening,” Koffield said. “A lot of people wouldn’t want to be cut off from the rest of the human race forever. A lot of people who’d be willing at first might not be after a while. They’d try to come back anyway. Mr. Malloon is right. The planet comes back to the present.”

“And if we were going into the future,” Villjae said, “we wouldn’t have to worry at all about screwing up causality. Especially if it’s a dead planet. All we’d have to do is have a really strong setup to make sure that no one leaves the star system while they’re in the future. Plus we make sure anyone who gets information about anything about the future outside that system is stranded in the future, with no way back—and we make sure they can’t have kids, of course. Not easy, but that part would be a lot easier than the precautions you’d need in the past.”

“In fact,” said Koffield, “probably the safest thing you could do, from a causality point of view, would be to ban interstellar flight altogether for the terraformers. Make them remain in their home system, working with a planet that’s already dead—or is going to be dead soon.” He looked at DeSilvo. “We’d have to stay here,” he said. “We could—we’dhave to—reterraform Solace.”

DeSilvo looked up sharply at Koffield.

Koffield kept talking. “Mr. Benzen’s right, you’d have to have other safeguards as well. But thesafest thing to do, from a causality viewpoint, would be to quarantine the project by banning all forms of interstellar flight during the time period you were doing the terraforming. That way, any possible causality breach would stay isolated to that one system—and there wouldn’t be any starships floating around the time-travel portals to tempt anyone. Quarantine the system where you’re doing the terraforming.”

“This is nuts!” Chalmers protested. “We can’t listen to this.”

But Lieutenant Temblar grabbed him by the arm. “Burl! Burl—yes, we can,” she said. “We have to.”

“What?”Chalmers whirled about to face her. “This is all insane.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But it’sless insane than going a million years into the past—and ahell of a lot less insane than letting the whole human race go extinct because we can’t afford to take any risks!”

“Pulling aplanet out of the future?” Chalmers protested.

“Yes,” said DeSilvo, coming out of his half reverie. “Yes. I need time to work it through, I need to talk the idea over with the right people—butyes. It ought to be possible—and feasible. A distinctly possible piece of large-scale engineering. I’d put it roughly on the same scale of effort and expense as building a timeshaft wormhole.”

“Burl, you’ve got to turn this tub around,” said Lieutenant Temblar.

Chalmers’s eyes looked as if they were about to bug out of his head. “Turn itaround ?”

“And get us docked back to theLodestar VII, ” Temblar went on. “We won’t take chances. We’ll lock this group up on the hangar deck, seal them in. We’ll have the ship’s crew haul in worktables, datapads, sleeping cots, field meals, and so on. Keep them locked up. We can order the locals to deliver anyone they say they need to help with the work. We can cut off all their outgoing communications, just to feel safe. They’ll cooperate. You know they will. But we’vegot to let ’em have time to work the idea through.”

Elber looked from one CP officer to the other. He found himself wondering which one of them wasreally in command. The expression on Chalmers’s face made it plain he was wondering the same thing.

“We’vegot to,” she said again. “You said it yourself. We don’t have much future left. Maybe—maybethey can go get us some more future, alot more. What have we got to lose if we spend a week watching them find out they’re wrong? But suppose we say no, and it turns out later itcould have been done? We did damned good work scooping them all up—but are we going to spend the rest of our lives getting medals pinned to our chests, even though we know it’s for not letting them try to save us all?”

“We can’t just let these lunatics loose in the universe!” Chalmers protested. “They’ve got half the technology from the Dark Museum!”

“Then lock us in,” Koffield said. “Blow the wormholes that lead to Solace.” He glanced at DeSilvo. “We have people who could tell you how. Putus in quarantine, so the crazy ideas won’t spread—unless they work.”

“What if you fail?” Chalmers asked. “You won’t be able to evacuate your refugees.”

“No, we won’t,” Koffield agreed. “We’d have made ourselves into a whole planet, a whole planetary system, full of diehards, stuck where we were. Think of it as giving us an impetus to try harder. Besides, what would it matter, really? Do it your way, and you know as well as I do that the race will be extinct in a thousand years. Ifthat’s true, then the whole human race is just one huge diehard colony with nothing left to do but try and hold off the end as long as possible.”

“You have the FTL drive,” Chalmers objected. “The quarantine wouldn’t hold. You could get out.”

“Not if the Chronologic Patrol could detect an FTL drive—and Iknow you can at least detect one as it comes out of FTL. I saw what an FTL arrival signature looked like way back at Circum Central. Believe me, it’s hard to miss. Pass around orders to shoot to kill FTL ships, and that ought to discourage most people from trying it.”

DeSilvo spoke up. “Besides, the reason the Dark Museum technology was suppressed was because terraformed planets fail, and that makes refugees, and that speeds the collapse. If we create a world that doesnot fail, and we show the universe itcan be done, then there will be no reason for the suppression. Success would meaneverything changes.”

And it was in that moment that it happened. Elber could see it, see it plainly in the expressions on all of their faces. It was as if the clouds had finally broken open, and the sun was shining through at last. A look of hope, of possibility, that had not been so even moments before. It was even in Lieutenant Temblar’s eyes. Chalmers was the only holdout—but he could see what Elber saw.

Chalmers shook his head in bewildered resignation. “All right,” he said. “You’re nuts, all of you. But all right.”

Norla Chandray stepped away from the netting she had been holding, that had been holding her, and stood on her own two feet in the middle of the deck. She looked around at all of them, her eyes shining, her face flushed with excitement.

“Let us begin,” she said.