appear much older than he actually was. He turned and stalked out of the situation room, taking the elevator
up five flights to the Command Headquarters level. The sentries barely gave him a glance, so well known was he on the level, and he walked up to the secretary's desk with a steady, deter-mined gait. "I wish to see the Chairman at once," he told the secretary, who nodded and pressed a small intercom button.
"Colonel Benoni is here," the secretary said crisply. There was a muffled response, and he turned to the tall, blond man again. "He'll see you now." Benoni nodded and walked around the desk to a large sliding door. This time the sentries checked his full I.D. as did the scan machines, despite the fact that they knew him. The Chairman trusted no one, and even inside Benoni knew he'd be under computer-controlled defense mecha-nisms that would evaluate his every move and mood and would make their own decisions as to whether or not he was a threat to the Chairman. It wasn't that Benoni didn't mind—he just didn't give a damn. Max Shumb, Chairman of the Leadership Council of the Democratic Motherworld, was a handsome man in his middle years, the kind of man age helped rather than hurt. He sat behind his huge, U-shaped desk looking over some papers and didn't immediately acknowledge the colonel's entrance. Benoni, however, knew just what to do, and took the comfortable chair opposite the desk and waited. The Chairman looked up at him, nodded, and put down the papers, but he did not smile. "Well, Eric, we were lucky this time."
Benoni nodded. "But perhaps not next time, and cer-tainly not the time after that." Shumb sighed. "You'd think they'd run out of rocks at the rate they send them here." He stared straight at the officer. "The project isn't working. They've countered you at every turn. If anything, we're slightly worse off than we were. We have to have the energy you're bleeding away, Eric." "It won't matter. That's why you approved the project to begin with. Little by little the defenses break down. Before we began, we had an optimistic estimate that they would be able to invade within nine years at current rates. I have cost you perhaps a year, certainly no more than two. You could not shut down anyway. If they win, it's the only exit available." Shumb did not attempt to rebut the truth. He spent too much of his time doing that as a politician. "I assume you're here for permission to make another try." "We've run this through the computers and it looks most promising. Because it does not directly involve us, merely pushes certain period people in our direction, it might not be obvious that it is us at all. The degree of change is enormous in our favor, yet incredibly subtle. There is even the possibility that there would be no revolution, no war at all. We would be all one big, happy family—under Earth's control. And your line remains constant. It will be a far different situation, but you will still be in control." "I'll check it against my own computers on that. Still, I hesitate. Perhaps one more major operation is all we can stand. Two at the most. This last attack is a harbinger of things to come. Next time it might be Europe, or North America, or eastern China. Sooner or later it will be." "Run your computations. It's worth a shot. As you say, tomorrow it might be here. Surely it is better to try for it all than rule over . . . this. Is it not?" "If it wasn't, I'd never have permitted you to do this in the first place. Still, after all this time, I am not clear about your own motives in all this." "You know the rules. I can live as myself only in prehistory or at the reality point. I've had enough of primordial dawn, and I have no love for the Outworlders. I prefer an unsullied humanity. If I am to live here, and not under them, then you must win. That is all there is to it." I wonder . . . . Shumb couldn't help thinking. He'd never liked nor trusted this strange man, who was of
no time or place at all. Trust had never been one of the Chairman's strong points. Finally he said, "I'll run it through myself and let you know."
The colonel got up, stiffened, and saluted. "That's all I can ask, sir," he responded, then pivoted and walked out of the office. He went immediately to make the preparations and check the final calculations. He already knew full well that it would be approved, and to what strange paths it would lead, the number of lives it would change, and cost—and create. He knew, in fact, exactly where it would lead him, but he did not know what he would find there.
MAIN LINE 236. THE CALVERT CLIFFS, MARYLAND,

U.S.A.
It was not an imposing structure, rather low, as nuclear power plants went, and sprawling across the tops of the great wide cliffs that were filled with the fossil remains of forgotten seas and looked down at the wide Patuxent River as it flowed towards Chesapeake Bay. The whole plant had been white once, but age and weather had taken its toll, and it was now a grimier gray than the sea gulls that continually circled and squawked around the cliffs.
Most nuclear power plants, including this one, were obsolete now, too expensive and dangerous to maintain. The people around the site, for the most part, and those throughout the state continued to believe that this hulking dinosaur, this monument to the misplaced, golden-age opti-mism of the past, supplied much of their power, but, in fact, it supplied none at all—and had not for years. And yet, so complete was the fiction that families down for a warm weekend to swim and hunt fossils still often wound up going up to the visitor's center and getting the Gas and Electric Company's spiel on the wonders and safety of nuclear energy in general and this plant in particular. He reflected on this as he cleared the gate to the employees' parking lot and drove through the massive fence that surrounded not only the lot but the true access to the plant. He couldn't help but wonder what it was like to collect money week after week telling cheery, convincing lies to a gullible public. The big security system had been put in ostensibly to protect the plant from anti-nuclear protesters, of which there were still legions, and also because a Naval Reserve unit had been set up on a part of the grounds to deal with nuclear power and waste. In point of fact, the whole thing was a cover so good it should not, perhaps, have amazed him that it had lasted this long and was this complete. So complete, in fact, that here he was, pulling into a parking space and preparing for a few weeks of orientation before becoming chief of security for the installation, and, as of right now, he himself hadn't the slightest idea what they really were doing here.
He knew the problems, though. Only a month earlier a crack Air Force security team had managed to get in and literally take over the place, despite all the elaborate precautions. That had cost the previous security chief his job, and when those whom the National Security Agency's computers said were best qualified for the job were given complex plans and blueprints and asked to pinpoint holes and suggest better security measures. Within the limits of security, he'd apparently done the best job. A jump to GS-17 came with it, so he'd accepted the post when it was offered even though he had no idea at the time where or what the place really was. When he'd discovered that it was barely two hours south of his current job at the NSA, he'd been delighted.
What would come today was the less than delightful prelude. Today he'd have to meet with Joe Riggs, the man he was replacing, and with Riggs' very proud staff. It would be an awkward time. He paused a moment to savor the bright, fresh June air off the water, then walked up to the unimposing door simply marked "Employees Only! Warning! Unauthorized Personnel Not Permitted Beyond This Point! Badges and I.D. Required!" That was an understatement. He opened the unlocked door and stepped into a rela-tively small chamber that seemed to have no exit. The door closed behind him and he could hear a chunk! As special security bolts shot into place. The chamber was lit with only a small, bare light bulb, but he could see the security cameras and the speaker in the ceiling. Somewhere, perhaps in back of the speaker, would be a canister of knockout gas. "Name, purpose, and today's password, please," came a crisp woman's voice through the speaker. "Moosic, Ronald Carlisle, new Security Director. Aba-lone is no worse than baloney." There was a moment's hesitation, then a section of steel wall slid back far enough for him to pass through. He stepped out of the chamber and the door slid shut again behind him. He was now in a hallway lined with heavy armor plate for six feet up from the floor, then thick security mesh from there to the high ceiling. Cut into the metal plate were three security windows, such as you might find at a drive-in bank. He went up to the first one and saw a man in a Marine uniform sitting behind three-inch thick glass staring back at him. A small drawer slid out: "Place your I.D. and security badge code in the drawer," he was instructed.
He did as ordered, then waited until the drawer opened again with a small card in it and a tiny inkpad. "Thumbprints where indicated," the bored Marine told him. Again he did as instructed. The clerk took all of the material, fed it into a computer console, and waited. After a short time, the computer flashed something to him and a tiny drawer opened. The Marine removed a badge, checked it against the thumbprints and checked the photo against the face he was seeing, then fed it back through the drawer.

He looked at the badge, similar to the one he'd used at NSA, with its holographic picture and basic
information, then clipped it on. He knew that this badge had a tremen-dous amount of information encoded within its plastic structure. Computer security would read that card by laser hundreds, perhaps thousands of times as he moved through the complex. Doors would or wouldn't open, and defenses would or would not be triggered, depending on what the card said in its unique code. None of these badges ever left this building. You picked it up on the way in; you turned it in on the way out. In fact, there would be other areas requiring different badges with different codes, all premanufactured for the authorized wearer alone. Each time you turned in one badge, you picked up the next. He walked down the rest of the corridor and found that the door at the end slid back for him. He walked through and entered a modern-looking office setup, very military but very familiar to him. He'd worked at NSA for nine years and was used to such things. A pudgy, gray-haired man in a brown, rumpled-looking suit waited for him, then came up to him and stuck out his hand. "You're Moosic, I guess. I'm Riggs." He took the other's hand and shook it. "Sorry we have to meet like this," he responded. "No, you're not. Not really," Riggs responded in a casual tone, without any trace of bitterness. "Not any more than I was when I took over the same way. It's no big deal. I'll be bumped to an eighteen, push papers for two years, then retire with over thirty. Short of running for President, it's about as high as I ever expected to get anyway. Come on—I'll show you around the place." They walked back through the central office area. Three corridors branched off the room, each of which was guarded by a very mean-looking Marine with a semiautomatic rifle. Moosic looked around and noted also the cameras and professionally concealed trap doors in the ceiling. Anyone who made it even this far would still be under constant observation by people able to take action. It was impressive, but it made the Air Force penetration even more so. As they stood near a corridor entry way, each of them inserting his gold photo I.D. into a computer and waiting for the red ones to appear in the slot at the bottom, the newcomer said as much.
"No place is totally securable," Riggs replied. "You can say they were pros with some inside information, but any enemy trying the same thing will have those advan-tages as well. The big hole in the end was the centralized control of security within this installation, as I'm sure you know. If you got in, you could get out." Moosic nodded. "That's the first priority now. Central control will have a permanent override elsewhere, con-nected directly to this place. We received funding for it." He didn't mention that it would take ten weeks to install even the basics, six months before it could be fully tested and operational. Riggs no longer had a need to know that sort of thing.
They got their red tags and went on down the corridor. "This place is as bad as Fort Meade," the newcomer remarked as they passed Marine after Marine, computer check and trap after computer check and trap. "Maybe it's about time you told me what we do here." Riggs chuckled. "They didn't tell you, huh? Well, it wouldn't matter. Nobody would believe it anyway, not even if we let the Washington Post in and they made it a page-one cover story. You know this plant doesn't gener-ate any public electricity?"
Moosic nodded. "I figured that out from the problem they handed me and a close look at the place. But it's in full operation."
"Oh, yeah. More than ever. Close to a hundred percent capacity. It takes one hell of a lot of juice to send people back in time."
Ron Moosic stopped dead. "To . . . what?" Riggs stopped, turned, and looked highly amused. Moosic had the uneasy feeling he was having his leg pulled. "Come on—seriously."
"Oh, I'm serious. I just get a kick out of seeing anybody's face when I tell 'em that. Come on down to the lab levels and I'll see if anybody's free enough to show you the works." * * *
Dr. Aaron Silverberg was a big bear of a man with a wild lion's mane of snow-white hair and penetrating black eyes. He was not only physically imposing; he had that deep-down egotism that assumed that everybody he met had not only heard of him but was also awestruck at his very presence. Ron Moosic, of course, had never heard of him before in his life.

"To tell you how we happened on it would take far too long," the chief scientist told him. "It was the
usual— one of those accidents that happened when some folks were doing something totally unrelated. Basically, a few odd random particles in the big accelerator out west consis-tently arrived before they left when you did things just so. Only a few quadrillionths of a second, of course, but it shouldn't have been possible at all. The first thought was that something had finally broken the speed limit—the speed of light. Later, using various shieldings, we found that light had nothing at all to do with it. The damned things arrived before they left, that's all. Knocked causal-ity into a cocked hat all at once. For those of us who knew about it, it was more gut-wrenching than if God wearing a long beard and flowing robes had parted the heavens in front of us."
Over the next half-hour Moosic spent a good deal of time looking at evidence of trips back in time, mostly photographs and small objects. There were already a huge number of more elaborate things—a tape of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, several of tavern conversations between Franklin and Jefferson as well as many others of the founding fathers, and others recording personages who'd lived even earlier. The earliest was an eavesdropped argu-ment between an incensed Christopher Columbus and the refitter of the Santa Maria, or so he was assured. He spoke no Spanish, let alone fifteenth-century Aragonese with a thick,
equally archaic Italian accent.
"Funny," Silverberg commented. "Nobody ever plays Franklin with a New England accent, although he came from Boston, not Philadelphia, and nobody ever gave Jefferson that hill country twang he really has. Had. Whatever. Napoleon had a silly voice and never lost his Corsican accent. If they'd had television back then, he'd never have made it in politics." Moosic just shook his head in wonder, still not quite believing all this. "I find it all impossible to accept. What was was, that's all. You can't recapture a moment that's past." "And so I was raised to believe. As the poor two-dimensional creature in Abbott's Flatland could not accept depth, so we cannot accept but a single perspective of time. In a way, it's like motion. We know we're in motion because of a lot of phenomena and reference points. We move in relation to something else. Yet the Earth is now turning at around twenty-five thousand miles per hour and we can't feel it. It's going around the sun at an even greater speed, and we can't feel or sense that, either. The sun, in turn, is going around the galactic center, and so on. Since all that is around us, including us, is moving at the same speed and in the same way, we cannot sense that motion and speed relative to us. Since we are going for-ward in time, all of us at the same rate and everything else around, we cannot really relate to time in any way except as the progress of one moment to the next. But it's all there—the past is forever. We are immortal, Mr. Moosic. We exist forever frozen in our past moments." "But time is . . . immutable."
"Oh, so? Even before we knew that it was not so. Einstein showed it. Time is relative to mass and velocity. The closer you approach the speed of light, the slower your time is relative to the universe. Time also gives way around areas of heavy gravity—suns, to a small extent, and black holes to an enormous extent. No, it's not the fact that time is malleable that is the stunner. Apply enough power, it seems, and time will finally give. Rather, the shock is that time exists as a continuum, a series of events running in a continous stream from the Big Bang all the way to the future. How far we don't know—we can't figure out how to go into the future relative to our own time. It may be possible that far future scientists can go past today, but we cannot. But the past record is there, and it is not merely a record: it's a reality. Now you under-stand the need for security."
He nodded, stunned. "You could send an army back and have it pop up out of nowhere." "Bah! You're hopeless! Mr. Moosic, you will never send an army back in time. We need the entire capacity of this power plant, which is capable of supplying the energy needs of roughly ten million people, just to send four people back a century, and the further back you go, the more power is required. To get one human being back to 1445 would require our total output. That and to sustain him there, anyway, for any period of time. Beyond that the energy requirements get so enormous that we've esti-mated that just to send one person back to the first century A.D. would require every single bit of power this nation could generate for three solid weeks."
"But for only, say, a week back? Surely—" "No, no. It's impossible. Physics is still physics and natural law is still natural law. Just as nothing is permitted past the speed of light, no one is permitted to coexist at any point in the past where he already exists. It just won't do it. In fact, it won't do it within a decade of your birth date. Why we haven't any idea."
He thought about it, trying to accept it at least for argument's sake. "A decade. Then you could go back and live past the time you were born."

"No. Not exactly, that is. You could go back, yes, but by that time you wouldn't be you anymore. Nature
does resist tampering. We made that discovery the first time out. You're back there, and you don't fit. Time then makes you fit. It is far easier and more efficient to integrate you into that present you're now in than it is to change all time. It creates a curious niche for you. It adjusts a very small thing in what we call the time frame so that you were born and raised there. In a way, it's very handy. Go back to fifteenth-century France and you'll find yourself thinking in the local language and dialect and generally knowing your way around. Only the massive energy link, a lifeline of sorts, between here and there keeps you from being completely absorbed. Unfortunately, the longer you are there, the more energy is required to sustain you. It's in some way related to the subject's age, although we haven't gotten the exact ratio. It requires more energy to send an older person back than a younger. Someone up to about the age of fifty we can generally sustain back there for the number of time-frame days equal to half his age. How old are you?" "Forty-one," he told the scientist.
"Yes, so we could safely send you back for a period of twenty days with an adequate safety margin. Over fifty, it accelerates like mad. It's simply not safe." "What happens, then, if you overstay your welcome? Don't come back within that margin?" "Then the energy required to retrieve you would exceed our capacity. The line would break. You would literally be integrated into that past time as that created person, eventually with no memories or traces that you were not native to that time and place. And if that was, say, 1820, we could not later rescue you. You could not go forward of your own present—1820—and even if there was a way, we would retrieve someone else, not you. Someone, incidentally, invariably minor and unlikely to change any events. We learned our lesson the hard way."
"You've lost someone, then?"
He nodded, "An expert in Renaissance history and culture, who was also a valuable agent when he attended East European conferences, which is why he was one of the few scholars we allowed to downtime personally. He was forty-six when he went back the first time, and he stayed two weeks. Later, he needed a follow-up, so we sent him back again—and lost him. The clock, we learned, starts when you arrive the first time, and it does not reset if you return again. He, and we, assumed at the time that he had two weeks a trip. He didn't. So he's there now, for all time, a meek, mild Franciscan monk in a monastery in northern Italy, a pudgy little Italian native of the time. To give you a final idea of how absolute absorption is, Dr. Small was also black—in our time."
Ron Moosic whistled. "So then how do you get the recordings and pictures?" "They tend to have a stronger sense of shape and substance, being inanimate. We've discovered that record-ers and the like can be retained for almost the safety period. Weapons, on the other hand, tend to be absorbed into period weapons rather quickly. One supposes that a battery-powered recorder has a minimal chance of affect-ing history, while a new weapon or something else of that sort could do a great deal of damage. Why and how such judgments are made by nature we don't know at all. Why is the speed of light so absolute even time must bend before it? We don't know. It just is, that's all." "Still, the old saw about going back and killing your own father before he met your mother still holds. How can you do that and still exist? And if you didn't exist, you couldn't go back." "But you could. We haven't actually had a test, but this absorption phenomenon seems designed mostly to counter that sort of thing. In theory, you would in fact cease to exist in the present as soon as you committed the deed, which would snap your energy link. You would then become, immediately, this wholly new personality, this created individual. Joe would become time-frame John, and it would be John, not Joe, who shot the man who would have become Joe's father. Of course, John would create a ripple that would then wipe out Joe, or so we believe, but the deed would still be done." "It would seem, then, that there's very little to worry about in all this," Moosic commented. "The only real risk is to our time traveler, not our present." Silverberg sighed. "That, alas, is not entirely true. The time mechanism itself, for example, is rather bulky, much like a space suit. You don't need it where you're going, but you need it to keep you alive until you get there. That can fall into other hands with potentially disastrous results, as you might understand. We can take precautions on that. But for the active period in the time frame, you—the present you—are still in control. During that period, particu-larly in the early stages of it, you are a walking potential disaster. The fact that it was John, not Joe, who shot Joe's father does not make Joe's father any less dead. We haven't yet tested it because of the dangers and unpredict-ability, but we suspect that if causality is challenged, in the same way light speed is challenged, then something has to give, and what gives will be time. "We suspect, in general, a minimal disruption—if you kill Hitler, someone will arise who is substantially the same and formed by the same sort of hatreds and prejudices. If Joe's father had sired three children in

the present track, those children would still be born—to a different father, but one rather similar to the first.
But there are key figures in key places at key times who might be irreplaceable. Would a Second Continental Congress without John Ad-ams ever have declared independence? Would we have won the Battle of Saratoga and gotten French and Spanish allies if Arnold had been killed earlier? What would a contemporary Britain be like without a Churchill, or a U.S. without Roosevelt? That is why the Nobel prizes must be unawarded and this installation protected. I would rather have it melt down than have proof of what we have here leak out."
Moosic nodded. "I think I see. So somebody could change things." "We believe so. The best model we have begins with the Big Bang. With all of the rest of creation, a time wave is created as a continuous stream. It might be an anomaly, might be necessary to keep everything else stable, but there it is. Think of it as a thick glob of paint on a sheet of glass. It runs down the glass, when we tilt it, at a slow and steady speed. The edge is where time is now, still running down so long as everything else is expanding, but the paint trail it left is still there. The edge, where we are now, is the sum of that trail. Alter that trail, and you will start a ripple that will run down to catch up with the leading edge. The math is rather esoteric, but the ripple will run at ten times the edge rate primarily because it's smaller. If it's a tiny ripple, it may resolve things and die out quickly. A big wave, though—it would change the sum of the world."
Moosic had a sudden, uneasy thought. "What about others? Would we even know if, say, the Soviets had a project like this? They're doing fusion research now." "No, there's no way of knowing. Of ever knowing. A time war would be the most frightening thing of all. However, it would still be badly limited in several respects. It would require enormous power. It would require a coun-try insane enough or desperate enough to risk its own lot on a new roll of the dice. And it would certainly involve few participants in any event, participants who would be limited to a small amount of time in any frame to ac-complish much at all. The Soviets are our opponents. They are not mad, which is why we are all still here. Neither are the current Germans, Japanese, Chinese, or others capable of such a project. It is only the fear that someone else is doing it that keeps us funded at all, so expensive is this operation. We spend a lot of time trying to convince them that there is military potential, when actually there is not. But we don't know, of course. And so long as NSA's very budget is classified, we can con-tinue to get the money. You keep us out of unfriendly hands." "I'll try," Ron Moosic assured him, shaking his head and feeling far more worried now than when he'd walked in the door. This was a bit much to digest, even after a career in high-tech environments. In a sense, there was more unsettling business going on here than at the Penta-gon and Kremlin war rooms. Here, just one well-meaning scientist could obliterate all that was constant in the world. A social experimenter would be even worse.
"That's who we fear the most," Riggs agreed. "The Air Force boys showed it wasn't impossible to infiltrate here, but it's pretty near so. On the other hand, how do you really get into a guy's head when he's being consid-ered for downtiming?"
"Downtiming?"
"That's what we call it, since you can't seem to go uptime from here in any way except the way we're doing it—one second at a time. You see, the big problem is that the boys here are mostly technical types. It's a crew over at NSA that looks around for candidates for research and approves 'em before they even know about this place. The weed-out's pretty extensive, but you can go only so far without spilling the beans about the place. Then, of course, they get the full treatment—drugs, lie detectors, you name it. We try as hard as we can to make sure that nobody goes into the chamber if they have even the remotest impulse to do anything but observe."
"But nothing's perfect," Moosic noted. "Even the san-est of us has sudden impulses and urges. Until that person goes back there, you can't know for sure." "Yep. And there are ways to beat the system—any system. It's a constant worry. That's why we don't let any professional historians go back at all. After all that, they're told we have a way of observing and even sometimes recording the past. They give us the targets, and then we send one of our agents back. They have romance in their souls but no stake in the actual work and not enough professional background to know just what wrong button to push. They know, too, that one false move and we can nightside them—cut them off in the past."
"But this nightsiding, as you call it, wouldn't prevent them from doing something. It would only mean they couldn't profit by it."
He nodded. "That's about it. It's a chance we have to take." Ron Moosic stared at the man. "Why?"

Riggs chuckled. "Because, throughout history, you can't uninvent something. Oh, you can suppress it for a
while, but it's funny that lots of discoveries of the same tiling seem to happen around the same time, whenever the tech-nology of the world will allow it." "The Greeks invented the steam engine but didn't do anything with it," the younger man pointed out. "That they did—but they invented it in a closed society that kept their discoveries not only from non-Greeks but from the bulk of their own people. Silverberg will go on and on telling you that science is a collective and not really an individual sport these days. Oh, sure, Einstein dreamed up all that stuff on his own—but did he, really? Or did he take a lot of stuff discovered and discussed by a bunch of scientists in a lot of countries and put it all together to see something they missed? What if Einstein didn't have a way to get that stuff from the others? No mass-produced books, no international postal system, no way to know what all those guys were thinking or finding out? And even if he did—what if all Einstein's theories were written down on paper and filed away in one spot in just a single hand-written book? Who'd know it to make use of it, except by accident? The Greeks had that kind of problem. Lots of brains working, but nobody telling anybody else. Not like now. This whole project can be traced to a hundred different teams working in half a dozen countries on different stuff. Let just one word leak out that we're doing this and others can put the same information to-gether through mass communications, computer searches, and stuff like that.
"With Einstein and the others to build on, almost every one of the major countries in World War II was working on the A-bomb. We just got there first. Now everybody's got the damned things. A couple of dozen countries so poor they keep their people in starvation still have computer-guided smart missiles, and everybody and his brother has something in orbit now. The Russians have an accelerator at least up to ours. They'll eventually get the same results we did, if they haven't already. So much power and so many people are required for something even this size that eventually there'll be a leak, others will get on the track, and it'll be a real mess. We better know all the rules of this thing backwards, forwards, and sideways, or we're gonna be up shit creek when the time ripple comes along and wipes out you and me and maybe the whole damned Constitution."
"Nice thought. I'm not sure I even like the idea that I know it now. Even without this job, it's going to make sleeping a lot harder."
"Tell me about it. The only thing I can tell you is to think of the thing just like the H-bomb and all the other things out there that can cripple or kill us. It's just another in a long line of threats, just another doomsday weapon. It's so complicated and so expensive it probably won't be the one that gets us, anyway." Some comfort, Moosic thought sourly. He wondered how long it would take him to grow as cynical and
pessi-mistic as Riggs, then considered it from the other man's point of view. Too long, he decided. Riggs had, in fact, the only way of really living with this. "I guess you should meet the security staff now," Riggs suggested. "That'll give you a picture of the whole layout."
Moosic nodded. "I guess we—"
At that moment the lights went out, then came back on again, and there were shouts, screams, and the sound of muffled explosions. Bells and sirens went off all over the place. Riggs recovered quickly and ran out the door, Moosic at his heels. They made it through a screaming mass to the central area. There were bodies all over the place, and the smell of gas, but the bodies were all office and Marine personnel. Areas of the ceiling were bubbling, smoking masses occasionally dripping ooze onto the floor as they smoldered and gave off foul smells.
"Somebody's going for the chamber!" Riggs shouted, drawing his pistol and moving off down a corridor that should have blocked their entrance. No passes were neces-sary now, though—the computer terminal was another smoldering mass of fused metal and plastic. Moosic recognized it as the corridor he'd come from only a few minutes earlier, the one that led to Silverberg's offices and the time chamber. A bunch of uniformed and plainclothes security officers were near the elevator. They saw Riggs and rushed up to him, all talking at once. With a mighty roar of "Quiet!" he got them settled, then picked one to tell him the story.
"Four of 'em," said Conkling, the middle-aged uni-formed man picked as the spokesman. "They knew the exact locations of everything, Joe! Everything! They had the password, knew the right names, and when the door slid open for the one who came into the entrance, the other three blew open the outer door. By that time, that first one had set off a mess of gas bombs from someplace. None of 'em had any masks I could see, but one whiff and you died while they walked through it cool as can be. They had some kind of gun that worked like a bazooka one minute and shot gas the next."

"What about the gas in the reception area?"
"Didn't bother 'em. They shot everybody up, then fried all the ceiling weapons with some type of laser gun. I tell you, Joe, I never saw weapons like that before from any country! Never! Right outa Buck Rogers."
"How many of 'em did we get?"
"Uh—none of 'em, Joe. They all got down here—and, so help me, the damned elevator opened for 'em just like they had the pass and the combination. Took 'em down and stuck there." Riggs nodded and turned to Moosic. "Inside job." The younger man nodded. "All the way. Any way down there other than by this thing?" "There's a stairway, but the panels are designed only to open from the other side." "So were ours. Let's blow them or get whatever it takes to blow them. I assume the whole level below was gassed?"
"Knockout type. Real strong—six to eight hours. But if it didn't get them up here, it sure won't down there."
"Maybe not," Moosic responded, "but it'll get everybody else down there. You can't tell me they can work all that stuff down there without anybody except their inside man." "Hardly. The computer alone would freeze up without five different operators at five different locations, each of whom knows only part of the code. And one of those operators is at the end of a special phone line topside and a mile from here."
"Then we either wait for them or go after them. The Air Force thing is one way, but with the commotion they caused getting down there's no way out short of hostages, and those they've got." Riggs took complete charge. He ordered various secu-rity personnel to make certain all exits were blocked with heavy firepower, ordered another to establish an external command post, and still others to report to NSA and Pentagon higher-ups. Finally he put a heavy firepower team at the only stairway exit, and it proceeded to line the area with enough explosive to bring down the entire wing. Nobody was going to get out that way without Riggs' personal permission. Then they walked back to the security command center, which hadn't been taken or touched. It had been the key to the Air Force team's success, but these people hadn't touched it. They obviously had no intention of coming back out this way—or they wanted it intact for reasons of their own. The command center was impressive, with its masses of monitors and one whole wall showing a complete sche-matic of the entire installation, even the public parts, parking lots and roads, along with lights indicating the location of cameras, mikes, and defensive equipment. Much of the board was flashing bright red.
The security personnel inside the center had remained at their posts, but it was clear that they were bewildered and frustrated. They had been attacked in a manner that the installation was designed to thwart, and the invaders had simply marched right through. A crisp, professional-looking woman with gray hair sat at the master controls and barely looked up as Riggs and Moosic entered.
"Hey, Marge? What's the story?" Riggs called. "Twenty-four dead, thirteen critical, about forty more with minors, give or take," she responded. "They're im-mune to all our gasses and pretty cold-blooded. I'll put them up on number six for you over there. Three men, one woman. No makes yet, but give us time." Riggs and Moosic went over to one of the monitor banks. A screen flickered and came on, then a whole series, showing every room below. Most had unconscious forms, lying about, a sea of limp forms in lab whites. In the central control chamber, though, the four were clearly visible. No—not four. Five. "Who's that other one?" Moosic asked.
Riggs ordered a zoom. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, short, fat, and dumpy, with big horn-rimmed glasses, the lenses of which looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles. "Karen Cline," Riggs told him. "There's our insider. My career was already shot to hell, but I'll still retire. Somebody back at the Palace is going to swing for this." Moosic looked at the woman. "What's her rank?" "Oh, she's a top-grade physicist. I don't know how they got to her, though. Conservative family, workaholic, and don't let her looks fool you. She's slept with so many guys they need a separate computer just to keep track of them. Just goes to show you." "Got a make on two of them," Marge called from the command console. "The young, good-looking boy is Ro-berto Sandoval, twenty-eight, born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The girl's Christine Austin-Venneman, twenty-four, born in Oakland, California."

"Terrific," Riggs muttered. Christine Austin-Venneman was the daughter of one of the country's most
prominent liberal Congressmen, a very popular and powerful man. Her mother was the heir to a fairly large fortune based on natural gas, and had always felt guilty about it. If there was a liberal cause, she was in the forefront of it and usually much of the bankroll behind it. Christine had been on forty protest marches for twenty causes in half the states in the union before she was five. "More on Sandoval," Marge reported. "Father unknown, mother a committed FALN member and revolutionary Trotskyite, trained in Cuba and Libya years ago. His mother was killed three years ago when a bomb she was working on blew up her and her safe house in Washington. Sandoval is suspected of being involved in several robber-ies and bombings, mostly in the New York area, since that time. Since Austin-Venneman's mother organized the March on the U.N. for the Liberation of Puerto Rico from Colonialism last year, we can guess how the two got together." Both security men nodded absently. The figures below seemed in no hurry, but all had nasty-looking weapons, except for Cline, and were making a methodical check of the area, room by room. A small status line at the bottom of each monitor indicated that gas had been released through-out the complex and that the elevator and stairway doors were sealed. Ron Moosic just stared at them and felt helpless. His first day on the job and this happened. He looked at the status line again and noticed that there were two small blinking areas in it on the right. "What are they?" he asked Riggs.
"The area is far too dangerous to risk. Those are last-resort items. There is enough explosive in the walls to fry and liquefy the whole lower complex. They're on a fail-safe mechanism, though. We can fire them, but we can't arm them. Only the President or the collective Joint Chiefs can do that. If the left one stops blinking, it means the system is armed and at our discretion. If both go solid, we have twenty minutes to clear out, or so they told us."
At that moment the left one stopped blinking. TIMELY DECISIONS
Ron Moosic suddenly felt like the President faced with Armageddon on the day of his inaugural. He didn't even know the names of most of these people or the way to the nearest men's room, yet here he was, facing what might quickly become the shortest job he'd ever had. Riggs looked over at him. "Well? What do you think?" I think I want to know the location of the men's room, he thought sourly, but aloud he said, "You say
there's no way they can operate the time machine or whatever from down there?" Riggs nodded. "There's no bypassing that outside code, and nobody down there or even up here knows what it is."
Moosic sighed. "Then all you've got here, when all is said and done, is a classic hostage situation. Sooner or later they'll threaten to shoot the hostages one by one if we don't come up with the code, but if we blow it we just as surely kill them all. They've trapped themselves, and even if they eventually go suicidal, we're no worse off than if we push their button. I'd say let's string 'em along and work at getting them. They have the counters for a lot of the nasty stuff, but they still have to get air down there from somewhere." "It's all super-filtered stuff from its own buried source. No way to get a man in there. Still—I'll get a team working on tapping into it. We already have one working on bypassing the stairway seals. If we can just buy enough time, we can puke 'em to death. There's some pretty nasty stuff near here I can get my hands on, stuff that's absorbed by the skin and pretty ugly, but stuff with an antidote. I agree." Riggs left to issue the proper set of commands, leaving Moosic alone to watch the monitors and think. He didn't like to think much right now, but he did feel a little bit more comfortable with a classical hostage situation. He watched the tiny figures on the monitors and tried to figure out just what they were doing. Ron Moosic hadn't started out to be a cop, not even the kind of high-tech one he wound up being. His great-grandfather had come to the eastern Pennsylvania coal mines when that area was flourishing. The family name then was thirty-seven letters long and pure Georgian—the one south of Russia, not the one south of South Carolina. The old boy had heard that if you didn't Americanize your name, the immigration boys would, so he looked at a map of where the Immigration Society had written he'd be living and saw, near Scranton, a little town that sounded reasonable to him, and he'd written in the name Moosic with no understanding of the jokes his descendants would have to bear because of it.

Ron's father had also worked in the mines, and the boy had grown up in the small town of Shamokin,
Pennsylvania, a town whose biggest claim to fame was the largest slag heap in North America. It towered over the town, and it was on fire all the time. Still, it was a nice town in which to grow up, large enough for all the civilized amenities and small enough not to have many of civilization's biggest penalties. One penalty for a miner was always injury, though, and his father had been hauled out of the mine when Ron was still small. A loader had backed into him, crushing him between it and the wall of coal. He'd lived a few more years, a permanent invalid with a strong spirit and sense of life, but complications finally took him when Ron was just eleven.
Vic Moosic had been a big bear of a man, with bright eyes and walrus moustache. He looked a little like all those pictures of another Georgian, Joe Stalin, and always had claimed to be related to the Soviet dictator. "Old Joe got all the meanness," he often said. Later, when Vic's son needed an exhaustive security check, it was found that the Moosic family was not even originally Georgian, but rather Uzbeck. Young Ron had always rather liked the idea of being an Uzbeck. Nobody else he'd ever met could make that claim.
Insurance and the union helped out a little—his mother had needed it, with six kids ranging from ages seven to fourteen—but they were not a wealthy family. His older brothers had gone into the mines, but he had not. He'd always been more intellectual and reclusive than his broth-ers and sisters, but he'd worshipped his father and his father had understood his peculiarities. "You're not like them," Vic kept telling him. "You got the family brains, boy. Don't go into the mines. Find a way out. You'll be the first one." And he had found the way. It was called the U.S. Air Force, and it offered a smart, young high school graduate free college for a set number of years of service. He'd majored in geography at Penn State, with a minor in computer science, and done pretty well. The Air Force, at least, thought highly of him, and after graduation they assigned him to intelligence work. It sounded romantic, but it wasn't. Nuts-and-bolts stuff, mostly—cryptography, aerial photo interpretation, that sort of thing. Still, at the end of twelve years he was thirty, a major, and on the right career track. He also, along the way, met and married Barbara. He never quite came to grips with splitting up. At the start, she'd been pretty and sexy and had a desire to see the world. She was a college graduate, but was never really on his intellectual level, something he knew from the start. Well, maybe that was unfair, but she read very little and watched a lot of TV, and she seemed to have not the slightest curiosity about his work, although he really couldn't have told her anything specific anyway. She wanted kids, and he did, too, but after three miscarriages, the last of which almost killed her, the doctors told them that she could never have them. She'd changed after that, although he'd told her that it didn't make any difference to him. Somehow, she seemed to blame him for her enforced barrenness, although it was clearly the fault of no one. Her irrationality became progressively worse and painful to him. It was his fault she could not bear children, yet somehow this made her, in her own eyes, less a woman, and she dreamed up all sorts of paranoid fantasies that he was having affairs all over the place. She became increas-ingly bitter, and frigid. Ultimately, he'd given up, inventing excuses not to be home, and, eventually, he'd had an affair. She never knew for sure, but when you're accused of something incessantly, you don't incur a penalty for really doing it. Ultimately, they'd had a final blow-up, and that had been that. The temporary alimony she'd been awarded had stopped three years ago, with the last check going to an address in San Francisco, and he had no idea where she was or what she was doing now. The funny thing was, he still loved her—or, rather, he loved the woman he'd married and hated what she'd become. He'd been faithful to her through all the good years, and if she'd accepted things, he'd have remained so, or at least he liked to believe he would have. He'd certainly had a series of strictly physical affairs since, but he found it impossible to get really close to another woman. He wanted some permanence, perhaps even a kid or two before he was too old to see them grow up, but he couldn't take the plunge again. He was, he knew, just too afraid that it might all happen again, and that would be more than he could stand. Shortly after the divorce, he'd been posted to the NSA. He owed the Air Force no more service, and it didn't take much genius to realize that he could take on the same sort of jobs permanently at a much higher pay level than the Air Force would give him, with all his service time count-ing towards government seniority and retirement. Despite a lot of pleading, he resigned from the service and took on a permanent job as a civilian. Within a year he did the usual, joining a reserve unit at Andrews, hiking pay and benefits still further. It was the way the government game was played, and he played it pretty well. Not that things were any more romantic at the National Security Agency. The massive complex, about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, was the real nerve center of U.S. Intelligence, happy to let the CIA take the publicity and the heat. Still, what it was was mostly dull, plodding, boring work, the biggest

challenge being to sift through the enormous amounts of information pouring in at all times for things that
seemed important or worth following up. Computers made it possible, but it still came down to the human element at the end. The tens of thou-sands of NSA agents employed there were, in fact, a highly paid infantry forever trying to take the paperwork hill—and losing. And now, thanks to some boredom and the ability to solve complex topological puzzles that were security problems, here he was, staring down at somebody else's failure. "One of them's calling for negotiations," the woman at the control panel called out. "What do you want to do? Mr. Riggs is topside now, talking to the National Security Advisor.'' "Put it on here, if you can," Moosic instructed her. "I'll talk to him." It was Sandoval, his handsome face and large, dark eyes telling the world how he got so many women to commit treason for him.
Somebody came over and showed Moosic how to work the intercom. "Ron Moosic here, Sandoval. Let's hear it."
The revolutionary could not repress a snicker. "Moosic?" He turned to Cline, the traitor within. "Who's he?"
She shrugged. "Never heard of him."
"All right. Who are you, Moo -sic?" A little edge. Not much, but something. "I'm the Secu-rity Director for this station." "That's Riggs."
"I'm his boss. I'm the man who decides if we can evacuate this place and I'm the man who can push the button that will make it a big blob of bubbling goo." "You wouldn't do it. Not with all these hostages here. Not with the brains you'd melt with us, and the money."
"Riggs wouldn't do it, maybe. I would. And I already have the presidential authority. I don't know those people down there, so it's not as hard for me. Sort of like a bomber pilot who never sees who his bombs land on. I do know we were closing down this place and moving to a better one with more power, so we don't lose there. No-body down there is irreplaceable, either." He checked the monitors and saw the drawn faces and nervous glances among the others there. He had drained them of their self-confidence, and that was a victory. Now it was time to drop a little sugar in the vinegar. "Still, there's no reason for any more people to get killed than already have been," he went on. "I can wait a while. And while I wait, maybe you can explain to me why you went to all this trouble to seal yourself in with no exit."
"There's an exit," Sandoval came back, sounding a little more confident now. "You know it and I know it. You can blow us up, yes, but you cannot cut our power, not within the next twelve hours. If you attempt to break in or pour some agent through the air system, I assure you all down here will be dead. We are committed to victory or death, Moo-sic. We all live, or we all die. The hostages are simply a wall between you and us. We intend to bargain. I suggest you call Admiral Jeeter and tell him to check his mail today. When you have done so, we will talk again." Jeeter was the current head of NSA. Ordinarily, the man would be impossible for someone on Moosic's level to reach, but he had a suspicion that today the call would be put right through. He was right, at least as far as the admiral's executive secretary. When the conversation was relayed, the secretary, himself a Marine colonel, instituted a frantic search for everything that had come in addressed to the admiral. It took very little time, surprisingly, to find it. It had been delivered by express mail.
Within another ten minutes, the admiral himself was on the phone. "It's a massive file," he told Moosic. "Still, it's only parts of things. Enough. It's selections from almost every major research paper relating to the project. It's almost inconceivable that we could be penetrated to this degree." "Is it just the files?"
"No, there's a note. It points out that these are merely photostats and that they are one among hundreds of sets. They assure me that none of them have been sent any-where yet, but that they will be mailed to just about every newspaper and foreign government if we don't give in to their demands. Even if it's no more than this, it'll blow the whole thing wide open!" "I assume you'll try the trackdown of the accomplices. In the meantime, what do you want me to do here?"
"Keep this line open. I'll go downstairs and patch in to where I can see and hear everything in the lab. We'll hear what they want; then it'll be up to the President and the NSC whether or not we give it to 'em." Moosic nodded to himself, sighed, and turned back to the monitor board and opened communication. He

wouldn't wait for the admiral—whatever he said and did was already being recorded, and he knew that
there would be a lot of calls for the old boy to make before he made it down to a situation room. "So our little letter was received?" Sandoval said smugly. "I assume they do not like it much." "You know they don't. But we can't afford to believe you haven't already mailed them or that you might not just let us know where most of them are while sending one or two elsewhere to do the most damage." "To whom would I send it through the back door? Russia? Czarist pigs masquerading as Communist liberators! China? Half of China doesn't even have the electricity to run its villages, let alone power this. No, my offer is genuine. You will not be able to stop it from being made public. Public, not secret. But if we get what we want, you will receive all the copies—every one. This I swear on my mother's grave." Ron Moosic sighed, glad it wasn't his choice. He didn't believe the oily revolutionary, but if the alternative was taking a chance he was being honest for once or just letting it all come out—which would be the best chance?
"Your demands aren't for me to decide, as you must know, but you tell 'em to me and they'll also be reaching the ones who do decide," he told the revolutionaries below. "We have looked in the chamber and found three time suits. Dr. Cline has told us that there are but four, and one is in use. Very well. We will need to use them. I am told that sending three back will strain things, but that two will be no problem. The codes will be given. We will go back, while my associates here make certain you do not break in and cut our cords, as it were. However, once back there, you still will not know where the hundreds of other copies are. Only I know that. I will return in ten days and tell you. I will have no choice—I must return here or cease to exist. If I do not tell you within fourteen days from nine o'clock this morning, all of them will be sent." He thought about it. "Then you don't go. You could have anything at all happen to you back there, stuff way beyond our control."
"It could," he admitted, "but I go or no deal. You will have to take some chances. If you press that button and blow us up, some cover story will have to hit the papers, causing the material to be sent immediately. We have your bosses by the balls. Moo-sic. And they know it." The bosses knew it. It was a heavy decision, and the debate was not yet over, but clearly they were in the mood for a deal if one could be struck. Security, in particular, argued for it, confident that they could find and plug the leak, and equally confident that there was very little the two could really do downtime. The military had the oppo-site opinion, wondering if such a highly planned and thought-out infiltration could be so easily dismissed. Crazy radicals might be sent back with no real risk, but these people were extremely well-prepared. Whatever change they were going to attempt to make, it was argued, had already been computer-tested and found to have a high probability of success. Most of the hostages had been hauled into a central office complex early in the attack, and most were now awakening to bad headaches and the sight of Stillman's and Bettancourt's submachine guns pointing at them.
Moosic noted that Riggs had not returned and that every-one now was deferring to him. He hoped the security man was working on the break-in and not strung up someplace. "All right, boys and girls, they're willing to listen," he told them, keeping the calm tone of someone in control at all times. In truth, he hadn't had any time to really think about his position, but he was still more than a little scared at the potential down there. He honestly didn't know if he had the guts to press that button if it came to that—but the invaders and his bosses thought he would, and for now that would do. "They want to know exactly when and where you want to go." "London, England; September 20, 1875," Sandoval responded. Moosic frowned. Not only was this the first indication that one could travel in space while traveling in time; it was also a totally puzzling combination. Why there at that particular date? The National Security Agency had the finest and most complex computers the world had known up to that time, and they came up with a lot of small things and even some major figures in and around that time and place, but nothing that would significantly alter the time-line, particu-larly when correlated with the known ideology and goals of the radicals. In fact, man and machine could find only one correlation that made any sense at all.
"On September 20, 1875," the admiral told him, "Karl Marx arrived back at his home in London from a mineral bath treatment at Karlsbad. Unless they're so convoluted we can't follow their thought processes, it's the only event on record that fits."

"They want to consult with Marx?" Moosic responded, puzzled.
"We doubt it. The best idea we can come up with is that they want to give the time machine to Marx. We think that they've had no better luck than we on what could be changed to make their goals close. So, they have the machine and the means—why not give it to the man whose ideas they profess?" The security man thought it over. In a way, it made a perverted kind of sense. Particularly if you were a commit-ted radical getting more and more disgusted and disillu-sioned with the progress of your goals. In all but rhetoric, nationalism had triumphed over ideology long ago. The Russians always sounded like Communists but acted like Russians had always acted, as did the Chinese and others. The true believers had been systematically purged or assassinated, from Trotsky down to Maurice Bishop in Grenada—by the very states and systems they'd established. The radicals below were no stooges of Russia; they were true believers. Not only their statements but also their intelligence files and psychological profiles proved it. Ron Moosic sighed. "All right, I'll buy it. I assume this has already gone to the President and the NSC. What do they say?"
"Our computer models indicate no particular danger. They're not going to meet the man they imagine, but rather a nineteenth-century philosopher very much a prod-uct of his times. Still, there's a risk. There's always a risk. Joe Riggs tells me that they've bypassed virtually all of the systems at this point. One of his teams has managed to tap into the system and reduce the available power to the time chamber itself. Still, we'll have a two-hundred-year range to deal with if they really have some other date in mind. If they know this much, they might know how to bypass and go remote on the suits." "Bypass?"
"It was built in as a safety factor after we lost that fellow back in the Middle Ages. If you know you're going, you can boost yourself out of there into one other time frame without severing the automatic connection. It'll save your ass until the automatics on this end can bring you back. They'll have a second chance once they're where they say they want to be, although travel in space will be severely restricted." "Then we can't afford to let them go. Simple as that." "Maybe not. We've proposed to let them go, all right, but doing a little funny business ourselves. The time-space coordinates change every moment, and they're continually updated. That update is partially through a satellite link with the Naval Observatory. We have proposed, and they have tentatively agreed to, a little alteration. Instead of getting the atomic clock, they'll be plugged into one of our computers. Let's send them back to September 10, 1875— ten days early. The suits will have a low charge, and won't be able to boost immediately. That'll give us a week or more to get back there and track them down, as well as work on this end to trace their accomplices. We think it's worth the risk." Moosic thought it over. "But we'll have to get in there pretty quickly to go after them," he noted, "and that's not going to be bloodless. Then we'll have to have these time suits or whatever they are available for us. I assume they're going to destroy what they don't use." "That's where they have us, of course. There are two spares, but they are both down for repairs right now. That leaves the one on the man now downtime, and he's due back on automatics at six tomorrow morning. That means we have to convince them to go now, then deal with the remaining ones by whatever means we have to use and regardless of costs. Cline knows when that other one comes back, too." The security man frowned. "That gives us less than eighteen hours. Why not just cut the power to them when they go back?"
"Because they'd still have those few days of grace to do whatever mischief they wanted before they got absorbed. We must know what they do, where they go, all of it. And even if we cut 'em off, restore power two weeks from now, and send somebody back, I'm told that the new-comer will re-energize their suits anyway. Don't ask me how—I'm not a physicist." Ron Moosic sighed. "And this was supposed to be my first day on the job." A MATTER OF PERFECT TIMING
Dr. Aaron Silverberg was anything but pleased. On the one hand, he felt he had the biggest hangover a human could bear; on the other, his baby was in the hands of kidnappers and one of the nannies was telling them what to do.
Still, he led Sandoval, Austin-Venneman, and Cline back to the time chamber and its control center. The

center itself was behind massive multiple sheets of lead-impregnated glass. A single operator's chair was in
the center, sur-rounded by an inverted crescent-shaped control panel with myriad instruments and controls as well as a number of differently colored telephones. Christine Austin-Venneman, who'd been fairly quiet dur-ing much of the takeover but who'd also looked from the start like the kid turned loose in the candy store, looked around. "Wow!" she said in a soft, deep voice. "This looks like the bridge of a spaceship!" "Or the supervisor of a telephone exchange," Sandoval responded, less awed. In point of fact, it looked far less exotic than he'd imagined and he felt somewhat let down. "Everything is controlled from here?" This was addressed to Silverberg. Cline, obviously, was there to make sure he didn't trip anybody up. Silverberg sighed and tried to keep himself erect. His head was killing him, the aftereffects of the gas. He also felt somewhat frustrated; he could not understand how Karen could be with these people, but they had made talking to her impossible. Still, she avoided his glances. "Nothing whatever is controlled from here," the scien-tist told them. "It is exactly what its name implies—a command center. The director sits here and gives the orders necessary to accomplish the mission. He cannot initiate, only abort. The instruments confirm that all is as it should be, nothing more." Sandoval went over and peered through the dark glass. The time chamber itself was quite small, no more than a dozen feet square, and unimpressive. There was an airlock-like door to one side, and then the chamber itself, a barren and featureless box of a room. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all made out of a single material and looked cast as a whole. The material itself was smooth and featureless. Sandoval turned. "Where are the time suits?" Silverberg sat down in the chair with a groan and held his head. The weapons came up, but he waved them away with a gesture. "I do not care if you shoot or not. I did not have your handy filters stuck up my nose and my head is splitting. Shooting me would be a mercy." "I'll show you," Cline said, and Sandoval looked over at Austin-Venneman. "Go with her and get them. Bring them here," he ordered.
Silverberg lay back in the chair and breathed deeply for a few moments. He seemed to feel a little better. "What do you hope to accomplish by all this?" he asked the terrorist. "I mean, no matter what, you have to accept much of what is done here on trust. Karen is the only one who knows anything at all about the proper things to monitor, and she must sleep. I still expect them to blow us all up the moment we begin, anyway—although, I must admit, with this head I am not sure it would not be a mercy to me." "We have confidence in the plan. We know we will go back to the right place and time." "So confident! Even I am never that confident!" Silver-berg's brows lowered. "Unless—it has already been confirmed?"
"I think if you want to live, you won't go any deeper into that, Doctor," Sandoval responded nervously. It took three trips for the women to bring in the suits. They looked very much like the spacesuits worn by astronauts, all made of some fine, silvery, mesh-like material. The helmets were airtight. Each contained a backpack air supply and a front pack consisting of instrumentation, which told the status of the air and other suit systems, and also a meter series with small, recessed pentometers above each meter. Cline checked each one of them. "This suit's a bit large, but has a four-hour air supply and a fully charged power pack," she told them. "This second one might just fit Chris, but has a little under three hours of air and a ninety percent charge. Enough to get you both where you want to go. The third one fits you like a glove, Roberto, but has only an hour-and-a-half s worth of oxygen and a sixty percent charge." With Chris covering the doctor, who, despite some romantic notions, was in no condition to try much of anything even if he had the gun, Sandoval tried on the large suit. It was clear even without the helmet that the fit was ridiculous, and with that helmet he would barely be able to balance himself. "No use," he muttered. "It'll have to be the other one." Dr. Karen Cline sighed. "Yes, I agree. But you haven't much reserve. You'll be O.K. for the trip, but if you have to make a boost, it'll be touch and go." "We are traveling in time!" Sandoval exclaimed. "Why do we need much at all?" "Time is relative. All other things being equal, time breaks first, so you'll go back. But the journey takes time because it requires a steady power supply. Inside the suit, it'll take time to get there at the same rate as power is being supplied. To 1875, it'll take, oh, forty minutes or so. Once there, the reality of the suit is the only link you'll have with the present. The suit must be kept energized from here, using full power, or you'll nightside. That means we can't add anything once you're on your way. The internal suit charge will remain at where it was when you left, minus the power required to get you there. Even then, it'll deteriorate as time will try and throw it out. The effect is progressive. Twelve days is all it's safe for Chris, fourteen for you, in any one time slot. And we have to hold this installation for the exact same amount of time you spend back

there, because we can only send power at the normal clock rate."
"In other words, the shorter the better," Sandoval said. "Well, I depend on you. All of you. You know the stakes."
Sandoval quickly got into his suit, then took the rifle while his companion donned hers. "Get Clarence in here," he ordered, and Cline left.
Silverberg was feeling much better. "I'm curious—just what are the stakes?" "The future of humanity on the face of Earth, and I do not mean that as a metaphorical or idealistic statement," the terrorist replied. "If we fail, humanity will be wiped out to the last man, woman, and child. I don't just believe this, Doctor—I know it." The big black man entered the command center, fol-lowed by Cline. He grinned when he saw the two dressed in the suits. "Buck Rogers, huh?" "Don't get funny. Are you sure John can handle that mob alone?" Stillman nodded. "They're pussycats with bad headaches. Still, they'll be trouble later on. I wish we didn't need 'em as hostages."
"We're depending on you to keep this place operating and secure until we return, even if it's two weeks," Sandoval told him. "There's food down here, enough to last if you ration it, in the little cafeteria." "Plenty of locks, too. Don't worry about it, Roberto. These dudes didn't even trust themselves." "Then I think we had best be at our business as quickly as possible," the terrorist leader told them. The two suited people followed Karen Cline out of the command center. Soon Silverberg and Stillman saw the inner door open and the three of them enter the time chamber. First the woman, then the man, kneeled down so that the scientist could fasten their helmets and activate their internal systems. Soon she exited the room, leaving the pair there alone, and returned to the command console. "Doctor, will you handle this or shall I?" she asked him. "I would prefer that you do it, for safety's sake. Remember, all our lives depend on you doing it exactly right." Silverberg chuckled dryly. "Do you really think they gave the enabling command?" "They gave it. Either that or we are all going to be very dead very fast. It doesn't matter to me, Doctor. I'm dead, no matter what. But I wouldn't like to see you and a lot of the others, a lot of my friends, die as well." She seemed on the verge of hysteria, and that made him more nervous than the big man with the gun. Clearly, Karen Cline was having a hell of a fight between what she saw as her duty to her friends and associates and her resolve to see it through. He wished he had more time to work on her. "I'll do it," he told her. "And I'll do it straight. We're still pretty much on automatics because of Jamie, but I assume you've already fed the instructions into the computers." She nodded. "I made them up and tested them weeks ago. The code is Auer, comma, Geib, comma, Bebel, comma, Liebknecht."
"That you'd better input. I might make some terrible spelling error. The rest I will do." Quickly she went over to the keyboard on the side of the control panel and typed in the passwords. The board came alive.
"Just what's gonna happen?" Stillman wanted to know. "They'll just . . . disappear in there," Cline told him. "Or so it will seem to us. Actually, we're going to keep going and they're going to stand still." "Huh?"
"I'll try and explain it later. All right, Doctor—we've got limited air and power on one of those suits. Let's do it."
Silverberg shrugged and turned to the console. The sequence and number of controls he changed, punched, pulled, pushed, or otherwise manipulated seemed enormous. Stillman couldn't follow any of it and turned to Cline. "You sure he's doing it right?" "He's doing it right; don't worry. Most of it is security, anyway. The whole operation's computerized and, as I said, I did that. If he does anything wrong, they just won't go anywhere." An alarm buzzer sounded, making the big man jump. "What's that?" "Warning to clear the area. Here they go!" Suddenly the walls blazed with light, and the two fig-ures inside clasped metallic gloved hands. Beams of energy, beams nearly too bright to look at even through the shielding, shot out and enveloped the two. There was a sudden burst of light from where they stood, and then all of the energy seemed to flow into that spot, as if swallowed by some great mouth. In a moment, all was normal again—except that the time chamber was empty.

"They're away!" came the call over every security frequency. Ron Moosic held his breath and just
watched and waited. It was now or never—with the two dangerous ones separated and only one man, no matter how crazed, with the bulk of the hostages. "Stairway doors are open!" came a cool, professional voice. "We are going on down." "We're on top of the elevator," said another voice, equally calm. "On your mark we'll enter." "Now!" came the not so calm voice of John Riggs.
The operation was handled with surprising quiet and determined professionalism. The cameras had shown that the terrorists had constructed a makeshift barricade at the base, of the stairway door, not so much to keep out anyone who reached that level but to make one hell of a clatter when they did so. The elevator, however, was not so well guarded. It was designed to have its door open if held by its stop on a floor, and it was not in full view of anyone at this point. At the start, there had been two holding the hostages, one in the hallway and one covering the central working area, but now both the traitorous Dr. Cline and Stillman were still in the command center, while two were downtiming and no longer a direct threat, and Bettancourt was alone with the hostages. Nobody could see the eleva-tor area, and three well-armed, black-clad agents slipped into the car.
Quickly they took up positions to cover one another in the hallway, and one crept silently down the hall towards the stairway door. This route took him directly past the open door in which Bettancourt lounged with the surviving staff, but all areas were covered by cameras and all of the agents had earpieces connecting them with Riggs and Moosic. It was rather easy to time the quick dart past the door under those circumstances.
The agent heard the voices of Stillman and Cline, and hurried to remove the debris piled up against the access door. It could not be blocked with desks or other heavy objects, since it opened in towards the stairwell.
A small horde of similarly clad agents came through and quickly took up positions to cover all avenues of entrance or escape. Two agents took positions on either side of the door to the hostage room, while others stood poised at the entrance to the command center. They were prepared to move immediately if Cline or Stillman came out and dis-covered them, but now they waited until the cameras, which the terrorists had left intact to demonstrate their control, told them when Bettancourt would be most vulnerable. They didn't have long to wait. The big terrorist grew annoyed at a woman sobbing in the back, got up from his perch atop a desk, and started to walk back to the small crowd, snarling, "Shut that bitch up or I'll shut her up for good!" At that point his full back was to the door, and Riggs shouted, "Kill him!" through the agents' earpieces.
The two agents converged as one, and pulled their triggers. The semi-automatics were well silenced—there was a muffled sound like furniture being pulled across a floor, and Bettancourt went down, his back a bloody mess. He never even knew he'd been had. The hostages began shouting and screaming, and this brought Stillman out of the command center, gun at the ready, moving fast enough that he went right past the agents flanking the door. When he saw what he was facing, he tried to bring up his rifle, but he was quickly cut down. At the same time, the two flanking the door entered the command center to see a surprised-looking Dr. Cline and an equally surprised Silverberg staring back at them in amazement. Cline was clearly not armed, but she suddenly looked stricken, then cried, "No!", and popped something into her mouth. They reached her almost immediately, but it was too late. The pill was designed for a very quick death. Silverberg rose from the chair and looked over at the two agents checking the limp form, and he shook his head sadly in bewilderment. "Why?" he asked softly, of no one in particular. "In God's name, what would drive someone to this?''
* * *
It took far less time to clean up the mess than to try to sort out what had happened and why. Teams of specialists interrogated the surviving staff workers, who were then hustled off to secure medical facilities, but on the work level there were no physically wounded people—all were either alive or dead. Admiral Jeeter had come down person-ally in

a helicopter to discuss the final stages.
Silverberg had refused all attempts to get him to leave, although he patiently gave his account and his reactions to the clean-up team. With Moosic and Riggs, he went through the command center instrumentation checks and estab-lished what he could.
"There's no question that the two of them went downtime," he told the security men, "although they seem to have missed their target by a matter of ten days. Ten days early, I would think." Riggs nodded. "We were able to create a power drain, operating on the theory that it's Marx they want to see." The physicist sat back and thought for a moment. "I see. So they are now faced with the choice of waiting ten days or returning here. They destroyed the spare suit here, so I assume that you intend to use the one coming back tomorrow morning to go and get them."
"That is precisely the plan," Jeeter replied. "How soon can the other suit be charged up enough for a try?" Silverberg went over to the time suit that remained crumpled on the floor and, with the help of Riggs, pulled it out to its full length and examined it. "The electrical system on this one is shot to hell, but if we have any luck at all in this business, we might salvage the power pack. I would get this up to technical services in a hurry, gentlemen. If we can salvage that much, then we might be able to insert the batteries from this one into the returning suit. It would be a jury-rig, but it might work. If so, we could turn around in, oh, six or seven hours. If not, we would have to wait for the other suit to recharge, and that would cost three or four days." "Too long," the admiral told him. "Six hours I can sweat out, but no more." He gave the instructions to his aides to get the suit upstairs in a hurry. "This equipment— you're certain we can't just pull the plug on them?"
"We could, but they would still have their two weeks, and if we break off the power, we will have no way to monitor them. They could cause a great ripple, perhaps change everything, and we would never even know they did it. Not that it would do us much good to know, but at least we might be able to rest easy if we detect no ripple," the scientist responded. "No, I would let them go." "Then I have no choice but to send somebody back," said the admiral. "I'm going to have enough grief from this without being accused of letting them get away with this. Besides, there is something unsettling about this whole operation, far more than the penetration." Silverberg nodded. "Yes, I think I know what you mean. They acted like they knew the outcome in advance. What could convert dear Karen to such dedicated fanaticism? Surely she had every background check, was under near constant surveillance, passed lie-detector tests—all that, as we all have. I am not saying that she couldn't somehow fool the system, but she seemed genuinely torn here. She was acting against every instinct, every shred of decency or humanity she felt, yet she felt such conviction that she not only went through with it but died rather than face interrogation and reveal anything. She would have cracked."
"That's the most unsettling part, Doctor," Ron Moosic put in. "I got the same impression of her, just watching her in the monitors. It took a supreme act of will for her to go through with what she did. I have to agree that she would have cracked—and anybody good enough to fool all the security we have wouldn't have cracked under any conditions. Sandoval said to me that what was at stake was the survival of the human race. At the time, I passed it off as radical rhetoric, but maybe he meant it." Jeeter looked worried. "You mean that this isn't the only time project?" Silverberg thought it over. "I think it is—now. But suppose, Admiral, that 'now' isn't really 'now.' We've gone through this in theory for the past few years, you know. Suppose the leading edge of time isn't right now, but some time in the future? How far? Ten years? Fifty? Five hund-red? With cheaper energy, perhaps from sources we don't even understand at present, and better technology. . . ." He paused a moment. "No, that wouldn't make sense. If that were true, then they would do their own temporal dirty work, not depend on some silly radicals." "But suppose there wasn't cheap energy," Moosic said, picking up Silverberg's reasoning. "Suppose, in fact, there was less. A future civilization on the ropes, able to send one or two people into the past but not far enough to do what had to be done. You said you were limited to a few hundred years. Maybe they are, too. But able to come back far enough and with enough proof—and enough rec-ords of who might pull something like this off—to con-vince these people to do whatever they had to." The scientist grew excited. "Yes! Yes! Perhaps a few survivors of some atomic holocaust, using their version of this project, perhaps this very project, to come back and convince these people that only they can halt the extinction of mankind. What sort of proof we may never know, but it would explain your security leak, Admiral. I assume our computer records will be uploaded someday into new gen-erations of computers. They might only have had to call up this day to get everything from the security measures to the passwords. What little minutiae they couldn't know, Karen would." Jeeter shook his head in amazement. "Are you telling me we should let them go and do whatever it is they intend doing?"

"Perhaps we should," Silverberg replied. "But per-haps we are just whistling in the dark on this, too."
"I can't take that sort of gamble, and you know it. Somebody is going back and getting those clowns. I wouldn't trust that kind of mind with the future of my cat, let alone the human race." Ron Moosic sat back and considered the arguments, and realized that he sided with the admiral. Roberto Sandoval was no savior of mankind; he was a cold-blooded killer. His girlfriend was a limousine radical, with no more con-cept of the proletariat than Marie Antoinette, and seemed vacuous to boot. Even granting his original speculation, those people of the future would have been faced with a dilemma. The best people to get into this place, and take it, and get back in time, were hardly the best people to trust once they'd done it. On the other hand, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, they'd compromised about as much as they could. If their agents didn't get in, the rest wouldn't matter, and if they were faced with certain death, they had nothing to lose.
"Have you thought about who's going back after them, Admiral?" Riggs wanted to know. His tone indicated clearly that he was not volunteering. Jeeter looked at Silverberg, who shrugged. "My agents are the test-pilot type," the scientist said. "They might be best in tracking the two down, but they would hardly be a match for Sandoval when the showdown came."
"I guess it's the CIA's baby, considering it's London," Riggs noted. "But this is our project," the admiral reminded him. "They left here in our . . . vehicle . . . and they are legally still here, tied to that machine. If you want to pull legalisms, it's the FBI's baby, but I wouldn't want to pull somebody in to do it. No, it's NSA's job, and specifically NSA Security's." He looked over at Ron Moosic. "You're the new boy on the block here, but I was very impressed with your handling of the entire situation, and so was the President. Do you think, if push came to shove, you could shoot them down in cold blood?"
Ron Moosic was shocked. This level of involvement, after all he'd been through, was not something he'd consid-ered at all. He was tired and pretty much spent. "I don't know, Admiral," he managed. "I just don't know."
"Your record's good; your psychiatric profile is excellent, and you have some background and feel for history. You're single, childless, and haven't been very close to your surviving family. I cannot and will not force you to go, but I am asking you. The suggestion came right from the National Security Council. We just don't have any time to tap somebody, brief them fully, and send them back cold." "I'm pretty cold, too," Moosic reminded him. "Until this morning, I didn't have any idea this place existed or that what it did was possible. I'm still not sure I believe it." But, even as he protested, he knew that he would go. He was always the one who volunteered to do the things that had to be done, even when he knew somebody else alway got the credit and he always got the blame. But—to go back in time, to really visit the London of Victorian England. . . . If he refused, they would find somebody, perhaps one of the agents long experienced at this station. He, of course, would never know the result—and the admiral knew that he understood. His career, the entire rest of his life, depended on this decision. "If I can get some background, and some sleep, I'll give it a try," he said at last. The admiral smiled in satisfaction; Riggs smiled in relief.
DOWNTIMING THE MAIN LINE
Ron Moosic had a brief time to eat and relax before they were ready. The cuisine wasn't the greatest, being mostly hot dogs and microwaved soup, which made him wonder about whether those old movies showing condemned pris-oners eating lavish feasts were just fantasy. Somebody had brought down copies of the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post, and the lead stories in both were, at the very least, amusing. It seemed some Cuban-financed radicals shot their way into and briefly took over the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Generating Station with the avowed purpose of causing a nuclear meltdown as a pro-test against U.S. policy—there was even a "manifesto" from the radicals, allegedly given to authorities after the bloody takeover—and that all of them were subsequently killed by federal and state security forces. All of them were named, and named correctly. Only Dr. Karen Cline was not listed as among them; instead, her name appeared among the plant workers who died in the onslaught. They had allowed some reporters and photographers in to photograph the upstairs carnage, and it

shocked, as it was intended to, while giving away nothing. Interviews with hostage survivors, however,
were carefully controlled, and while he couldn't tell, he suspected that none of the people interviewed were actually people held down there. It was, nonetheless, a compelling and convincing story. There was even mention of a "low-level secret Defense Department project" at the site, which served to allow security to be clamped where it was needed and which explained the large number of federal officers and military personnel involved.
He almost believed it himself, although he knew that at least two of those radicals were not dead, but simply away somewhere, or some when. To him, there was still an air of unreality about it all that he couldn't shake. Not the inva-sion and its aftermath, that was something he could at least accept, if not understand. To travel back in time, to actu-ally change the past—that was the problem, and quite possibly the root cause of his accepting the assignment. To be convinced, he would have to see for himself, and were he to say no to this, he'd never really believe it. Dr. Aaron Silverberg looked tired, but he was going to see it through, at least until Moosic was back. Then, perhaps, he would allow himself the luxury of sleep. He'd tried on the couch in his office earlier and hadn't been able to, and his body screamed at him. "The suit will be a bit snug, but it will fit," the scientist assured him. "We've had someone doing adjustments on it. The batteries transferred nicely and took a good quick charge to boot, so you will be going with over ninety percent of full power, which is more than they've got. The instruments show that they are now still in 1875, in London, and by this time they must know that the date is off. They have chosen to wait, it appears, and that is to our advantage. However, they are now in phase with the time frame, and that puts time at risk."
"You'd better tell me what that all means," the agent suggested. "What's this 'phase' business?" "Let's start from the beginning. First of all, everything is in motion—Earth, solar system, galaxy, whatever. Re-member our paint sliding down the glass? Each moment that the paint has passed over the glass is a real place, a physical point. What we do is put the brakes on you, so to speak. You remain motionless relative to here and now, and we slide past. Now you are, so to speak, out of phase with time. A gentle nudge, and you move from this frozen spot in time back along the temporal paint smear. A slight lateral nudge, and we wait for the point where you and the universe are both where we want you to be. Presto! You are in London, because the spinning Earth, the rotation, and solar movement have been calculated. When you are where and when we want you, we keep sufficient power to maintain you in that spot. Your motion and the motion of the time stream become identical. However, as long as you are in the suit and in the direct energy field, you will remain out of phase. You are not moving relative to point X, so time is standing still relative to you." "Clear as mud, but I think I have the general idea. I'm stuck in the moment, with everything frozen. Can I move around?"
"Not in the suit. So, the first thing you do is check your gauges here and make certain you are, indeed, where and when you are supposed to be. Our people have already gone over how to read and reset them?" He nodded. "That's simple arithmetic."
"Good. Then you remove the suit, and you will find that you have some mobility. You will begin to accelerate relative to the Earth's normal time speed. This can be disorienting, so prepare for it. You will have more than four hours to find some place to hide the suit. That is a tricky part, and we can only make vague suggestions on it. Remember, though, that the suit's power pack is quite heavy; the suit's systems will not be bothered by water or other routine elements, and sinking it tied to a small rope such as the one in the utility pouch works well."
He nodded. "We've been through all that." "All right. Eventually, you will become somewhat ill. You will pass out—and awaken in phase. This is the easy part. You will, quite literally, be someone else. That someone can be very old or very young, male or female, but it will be someone rather insignificant and ordinary, and with a past. However, you will be in control. At the start it will be easy and fun. As the days pass, however, you will find it slightly but progressively more difficult to retain control. The other you, the new you, will become more real to you, while your own self will erode in little bits. That is where you will have an advantage. At your age, you will be able to remain in control longer than they. In nine more days, they will be hard-pressed to remain themselves, while you should have all your wits about you." "Wait a minute! Are you telling me that I might come out a woman?" "It's quite common, really, although there seems to be no rule on it. It's actually quite logical. In most of the past, women had less power and position and, therefore, were the least likely to make a major change." Moosic had another worry, almost as pressing as who he'd become. "This is going to make things nearly

impos-sible for me," he pointed out. "I don't know who I'm looking for, or what. They may not even know
each other. Both of 'em could be kids, or they might be fifty years old. If we're wrong about Marx being their objective, there's no real way I can find them." "That's true. But I don't think we have to worry about that so much. The passwords used for their program were related to Marx's work of the time frame. Four German communists of the period, I think someone said. No, it's Marx all right. You've memorized the pertinent details?" "As much as we can guess is pertinent. I still think it's impossible, though." "If it is, you've gained an experience I would love to have and it will have cost you nothing. At fifteen days, simply go back and put on the suit, and it will automati-cally bring you back. You will be your normal self once more, and the richer for the adventure. But I am convinced that anything important enough to cause even a minor ripple in time will be obvious. If you can see it, you can stop it. The odds there favor you. Time is always on the side of the least change." "I hope you're right," he said worriedly. "Well—let's get on with it." They stripped him naked so he'd fit in the suit better. It didn't matter, he was told—the only artifacts he would need would be carried in a pouch in the suit. Time, adjusting to his unnatural presence, would provide what-ever else was necessary.
Even so, he had to be helped just to walk in the thing. The airlock looked even more imposing and final as it opened for him. The room itself was as cold and barren as it had looked from the command center, and the nature of the lighting made even the super-insulated glass panel before him seem dark and featureless, although he knew Silverberg and several technicians off-duty at the time of the invasion were there, checking on everything.
Silverberg had feared that Cline had somehow fouled up the computer programs. They all checked out O.K., but, taking no chances, he bypassed them and tied into comput-ers with backup programming at the NSA's headquarters at Ft. Meade.
Two white-clad technicians fastened on the space helmet, turned on the internal systems and checked them, then closed the seals. He had done it three times without them, of course, since he'd have to do it on his own to get back, but this was the first time out and they could check all the mechanical and electrical systems better than he.
Now he could hear nothing but his own breathing, which seemed nervous and labored to his ears. The suits contained no communications gear, since that would add to the anachronism of the suit itself and, of course, be-cause there was no one really to communicate with to any purpose. He was perspiring profusely, despite the small air condi-tioning unit in the suit. He turned his head and could barely make out that the airlock had been closed and the signal light on the door was now red. With the suit pressurized, the chamber became a near-perfect vacuum. There was no sense in expending already precious energy by also transporting back a lot of surrounding air. Come on, come on, you bastards! he thought nervously. Let's get this over with! He suddenly had the
urge to back out, to hold up his hands and make for the airlock controls. This is insane! his mind shouted at him. How the hell did I get myself into this mess, anyway? The room filled with a blinding light. The photosensors in the faceplate snapped on, but he could see nothing. Suddenly he felt a mild vertigo, as if he were falling— falling, but in slow motion—like Alice down the rabbit hole. He tried to move, but the suit was locked into position. All he could see, and that tempered by the tre-mendous faceplate filters, was the blinding nothingness, the awful sun that seemed all around him. Still, beyond that, there was only the sound of his breathing and that feeling of falling, ever so slowly. . . .
It seemed an interminable journey. The relative time clock in his helmet clicked off the seconds and the minutes, but no matter how fast it went, it seemed agonizingly slow. Faces, their voices from his past, seemed to form in his mind like ghosts and whisper to him. "Your father would be so proud of you!" his mother whispered to him. "One of his sons an officer,
for Jesus' sake! The only one who'll not kill himself in the mines. . . ." "So there you go again,''
Barbara chided him, sound-ing thoroughly disgusted. "Always volunteering, always stick-ing your neck out! And for what? Nobody'll ever know, and your bosses will take all the credit, even if it works.
Why are you always everybody's sucker?"
"All I wanted was some love and some understanding!'' he heard himself shouting. "Just somebody to
care about me as much as I cared about them!''

"Nobody gives a damn about you," Barbara snarled back. "Nobody in this whole fucking, stinking
world ever gives a damn about anybody but themselves in the end! Well, maybe it's time I started
joining the garbage!"
Why me? he wondered. Why did they stick me in this job? But he knew the answer. He was the most
expendable dependable they had. Living alone in a tiny apartment, drowning himself in his work, no social life to speak of. As the admiral had pointed out, he hadn't even talked with his family in almost a year, except to send up some gifts around Christmas and beg off the family gathering. Work, you know. . . . Important work. . . .
Pop another frozen dinner in the microwave and take a couple of drinks while it cooks. . . . "Who's cooking now, Moo-sic? Who's floatin' in the middle of nowheres with the sun all around?
Who's got to pee and can't never get to the potty? . . ."
They never told him it would be like this. . . . Expendable, dependable; expendable, dependable. . . .
Suddenly the photosensors flipped off with a dramatic click, and the blinding light was gone, replaced with a ghostly gray. He checked his instruments and they said, as near as he could remember, that he'd arrived. The relative time clock kept going, and the system gauges continued to supply air and some cooling, but all else had stopped. The destination LEDs were flashing now, telling him to get on with it. For a moment, he couldn't. It wasn't that he didn't want to reach up and throw the proper switches, only that he was suddenly overcome with a massive fear that it hadn't worked, that he would release it all in a vacuum, that to take off that helmet was to die. He hoped that the two bastards that had brought him here had undergone a similar fear, but he suspected not. Sandoval was too much the fanatic and Austin-Venneman too much the airhead.
He steeled himself, reached up, and punched the release buttons. There was a mild hissing sound, and he felt the suit deflate and seem to cling to him. He reached up and removed the helmet. All was still, and surprisingly chilly, but there was air he could breathe. He decided that freezing was better than remaining in the suit, and removed it. There was no wind, no air movement of any kind except his own breath. He had been warned about this period, and moved with purpose. He was caught right now in a moment, a single slice of time. His body could breathe the air in that slice, but he had to keep moving, for other air would not rush in to replace it. He bundled up the suit and looked around. What he had taken for a gray nothingness seemed instead to be a dense, sooty fog. He was near water, that was for sure, and walked down a rocky path to where it seemed to be.
There was no sound at all that he didn't make, no movement, nothing. The water looked choppy, what he could see of it, but the scene was frozen. Only he could make waves in such a still life. He made his way along the bank to a massive stone outcrop and realized, with some surprise, that what he was seeing was the main support of a bridge. He looked under it, and saw that there was no real foothold there under the arch itself. Quickly he removed the rope and small ham-mer from the suit, then attached the rope to the suit itself, which had a small hook for that purpose. Slowly he eased the suit into the water and then pushed it a bit under the bridge. It continued under his momentum until the rope became taut, and he took the end, which had a small piton attached, and hammered the thing into the rock just below the water line. He knew the suit would not sink until time caught up, but it made him nervous to look at it all the same. The pouch it had, like its power pack, was watertight, which was important. He would have need to return to this spot when things returned to "normal," if there now was any such thing. Satisfied he had done what he could do, he got up and walked back up the bank to the top of the river wall. The fog was so thick it cut visibly to the bone, but it certainly was not night. Early morning, he guessed. Early morning on Saturday, September 11, 1875. . . . He had wondered why he couldn't just travel back to a point in time just before the two would have appeared, still fresh and vulnerable in their silver suits, but it had to do with the limitation of the equipment. If they had had a second time chamber, it might have been possible—but to the same period, with people already downtime, the com-puters simply could not handle it all. He had to live within their relative time frame, and that was that.
He had to keep moving, both for warmth and because any time he stood still he grew quickly short of breath. The streets were gaslit, but shed little light on the gloom, which was not only wet but also incredibly dirty.
He came suddenly upon a frozen tableau—two men: one dressed in the uniform of a Victorian policeman, complete with rounded hat and billy club; the other, a middle-aged man in shabby-looking tweeds: both of them frozen stiff in some sort of argument. Just behind the fellow in tweed, a nasty-looking bulldog was

frozen, its left hind leg raised.
He resisted the temptation to play games with the two, to pick their pockets or push the policeman's hat down over his eyes. He'd been told that no matter what he did, the next time frame and all subsequent ones would not be changed, so whatever he did would be unnoticed and undone. That was something of a relief now, since he knew that if he could barely resist it, the two he was after certainly could not. Time was not easily trifled with, although it could be done. Certainly, two people were here, someplace, dreaming of doing just that. How nice it would be if he could find them while still in this phase. That, however, was impossible. The variations in the mo-tions of the bodies of the universe were such that it was miraculous that the project could even get him to London; landing someone in the same spot a day later was simply impossible. Still, he walked quickly, partly to keep warm and partly to get to know a little of this area. Normal time agents— how quickly this had become "normal" in his mind! —received weeks of briefing on the time and place they would visit, often months. He had been sent in cold, the only justification being that anyone else sent would have to go cold, too. The small amount of time he'd had had been spent in learning the operation of the suit and the specifics of this time-travel medium. That brought him back towards the river in something of a panic, and he spent some time walking along it, trying to find that certain area of the bridge again. How long had he been walking? How far had he gone? Was this the Thames, or some other body of water? How many bridges crossed the Thames, anyway? And did they all have cobblestone sea walls and stone arches? As he ran along the path beside the river, he was barely aware of a whistling sound, faint at first, but growing steadily louder. Finally it became so pervasive that it shocked him out of his panic and redirected his mind to the unknown, new danger. He stopped, and it seemed all around him. Vaguely he was aware that he was breathing normally, despite the fact that he was standing still, and that a breeze was chilling his sweat-soaked body.
Abruptly he was hit by a trememdous dizzy spell that brought him crashing to the ground. He tried to rise, but the nausea wracked him while the terrible whistling sound became unbearable. He was abruptly in the worst agony of his life, and it became too much to bear. He passed out. Alfie Jenkins awoke coughing. He often did, particu-larly during times of heavy fog. He got up from his makeshift bed of straw and crudely fashioned wood framing. After a bit the coughing stopped, at least for a while, and he was able to take in some deep breaths and get awake. From far off, the bells tolled six, and he knew at least that his personal clock hadn't failed him. Somehow, he always woke up at six, no matter what the previous day and night had been like. He struggled to put on his well-worn shoes and tattered jacket that he'd found discarded in somebody's rubbish, then pushed a bit against the board held only by one nail and peered out into the street. All clear, it looked like. He squeezed out and made certain the board fell naturally back in place. The old stable hadn't been used in months, but it was still owned by somebody and he'd rather they not find out they had a boarder.
The neighborhood, down by the old docks, could be called a slum only by someone with extreme charity, but he knew it as an old friend and liked the fact that he felt so free and comfortable in an area where the coppers went around in pairs and most adults would avoid unless there was a bright sun on a clear day. He ducked into an old warehouse through a broken ground-level window and heard the rats scuttling away, wary of the unknown intruder. He treated them with respect, but they didn't particularly bother him unless one crept into his "home" and bit him in the night, as had happened. The warehouse was as abandoned as his stable, but it had something most of the other buildings accessible to him lacked—a working pump. The thing screeched an awful racket when used, the sound reverberating through the large, empty building, but it was the one chance he took each time. In the two years he'd lived this existence he'd never been found out, and he knew more exits than any investigator could. He was good, he was, and smart, too. He hadn't stayed long in that hole of an orphan asylum where they'd put him after his mum had died of consumption. His father, she'd said, had been a seafaring man, but he'd never known that man and never would. Mum hadn't even been sure which of the dozen or so seamen it had been, anyway.
His life now was luxury compared to that asylum. Up at six, some cruddy mess they called porridge for breakfast, then off to the woolen factory promptly at seven. Twelve hours a day, and if you made your quota, the asylum got the two quid a week the company paid. If you didn't, you got beaten real bad. All by stern men who seemed to really think they were doing their best for the "poor, unfortunate children."

Well, he'd foxed them. Lit out one Sunday in the middle of church, when they couldn't do very much.
Back up to where things never changed much from when he played here as a kid. He wasn't no kid anymore. He was past thirteen.
Finished with his drink and wash-up, he relieved him-self in a corner and then scrambled back out again. Break-fast was first on his mind, thanks to old Mrs. Carter paying him a few shillings to clean up the pub from the previous night's rowdiness. He wasn't sure if Mrs. Carter suspected his existence or just filled in the blanks to suit herself, but he didn't mind. They didn't ask no questions in this area. It was a very routine morning for Alfie Jenkins in every respect but one. Instead of the usual hustling over by the market, he had to go down to the river. Ron Moosic could waste no time in finding that time suit. It had a lot of period money—and a pistol. MAIN LINE 351.1 LONDON, ENGLAND
There was a strangeness about this temporal existence he now lived. For one thing, he knew intellectually that, until this morning, there had never been such a person as Alfie Jenkins, at least not the one he now was. Time had adjusted to accommodate his alien presence by creating the boy by some process not understood.
There were natural laws, Silverberg had explained, that we knew nothing about, and this appeared to be in the arcane field of probability mathematics. He had created a ripple in the time stream by appearing where he should not be, but in this case it was a backward ripple, flowing the shortest possible rearward distance to find the point where Alfie Jenkins might have been conceived or, perhaps, had been stillborn. A minor probability had been changed, and he now existed and, in fact, had now and forever after-wards always existed. But time had not been indiscrimi-nate in its creation; it had created the first individual to fit
all the time and place criteria who had the least possibility of interacting to cause a forward ripple. There were millions of Alfie Jenkinses in the past and present and, probably, the future as well. The legions of those who might as well have never lived. But now Jenkins did live, and he was subject to the same randomness in his subsequent existence as anyone else born into this time and place and situation. There were no guarantees now, any more than Ron Moosic had had in his own life and time. The experience, the dual personality, was odd but nonetheless clear to both parties. Alfie was Alfie, and would act and react as Alfie, but Ron Moosic was there as well, sharing Alfie's body and his memories and sensations, although it was by no means clear that the reverse was true. Still, Alfie knew he was there and regarded him as a distinct and separate individual, one whose important and romantic mission appealed to the boy. Moosic made suggestions, but mostly he remained along for the ride, letting Alfie be himself. He knew, though, that he could take control, if he wished, simply by willing it. The sunlight burned off some of the industrial smog, but it was still thick and ugly even in the full light of day. It was almost ten o'clock by the time Alfie had finished his chores, gotten his shilling and breakfast, and was able to be on his way. It didn't take very long, though, to find the path and the bridge. Apparently, location was specific in this time business—the bridge was very near Alfie's lair. Much more difficult was getting down there and doing the business unobserved. The streets, deserted in the early morning darkness, were now alive with traffic and pedestrians. Ron Moosic took it all in with a feeling of awe. The hansom cabs clattered across the bridge, and peddlers with horse-drawn carts went this way and that. The dress styles seemed archaic, but really not that much different in the details than his own time, at least insofar as men were concerned. Women were extremely well covered from neck to ground, with most of the dresses appearing to have been made to hide almost any physical attributes.
The atmosphere was certainly big-city cosmopolitan, with lots of people of all sorts going this way and that on countless unknown errands, while the physical atmosphere was a mixture of garbage-like smells and foul industrial odors. To most, perhaps all, of the people, the sights and sounds and smells were normal and taken for granted. To Moosic, it was not at all that romantic or pleasant, despite his awe and excitement.
This was, after all, the London of Sherlock Holmes, of Disraeli and Gladstone, Victoria and the British Empire near the height of its glory. Holmes might not really be here, but Doyle was, somewhere, and probably Wilde, perhaps Kipling, Lewis Carroll and Robert Browning. Win-ston Churchill was a year old; Albert Einstein, whose work would eventually lead to Moosic being where he was, hadn't even been born

yet.
And in nine days, up in the northwest part of the city, at 41 Maitland Park Crescent, Karl Marx would be returning home from the continent.
There was simply no way to gain access to the bridge in broad daylight, so he abandoned it for now and allowed Alfie to have his own way. The boy was a streetwise thief, panhandler, and hustler of the first order. He was well known to a number of people of all ages from the docks up to Whitechapel, and he wasn't the only young boy work-ing the streets. Moosic watched with growing admiration as the boy hustled anyone who looked like a soft touch, slickly grabbing an apple from a fruit stand almost in full view of the suspicious and nasty-looking proprietor, and getting a few pennies for helping a vegetable merchant bring out more stock.
It was an active, and educational, day for the time traveler, a day that would normally not have ended with darkness but did this time. Alfie went back to his "digs" to catch a catnap, knowing that he had to get down to that bridge when things quieted down once more. It was not, in fact, until the bells chimed two that he risked going back down there. The fog had closed in even more, making sight almost totally useless, which was fine for Moosic and all right with Alfie, too. He didn't need to see much in this neighborhood. Only the boy's occasional coughing spasms caused any problems at all.
Getting down to the right spot was no problem, and even though occasional boat whistles could be heard as the commerce of a big city continued, there was no chance anyone could see him down there in this fog. The river helped, of course, to make it so dense. Away from here, in the better neighborhoods, it was probably rather pleasant.
Alfie, however, was not Ron Moosic. The suit was extremely heavy, and it seemed as if he was never going to be able to haul it up and close. Going into the water was out of the question; Alfie couldn't swim, and Moosic was not all that certain he could manage the boy's unfamiliar frame. Still, he was almost willing to take the chance after repeated tries to pull the suit in had failed. Finally, though, with one last mighty effort, the boy managed a mighty heave and the helmet broke the surface. It still took some tying-off of the rope and a lot of breath-ers before it was within his grasp. Quickly the seals were broken and he removed the precious pouch from the outside. The pocket was then reclosed and sealed, and the suit eased back into the water once more, where it sank quickly from sight.
Alfie hurried now, clutching the precious cache with both hands, and made it back to his hiding place in no time. Although he was nearly done in by the night's work, both he and Moosic were not about to nod back off without seeing the contents of the pouch. "Cor!" Alfie swore as he looked at the most familiar of the contents. "It's a bloomin' fortune!"
Well, it wasn't that, but it was the amount of pre-1875 notes they could round up on short notice. Fortunately, this period was one of those in which some research project was ongoing, and they had accumulated a small store of such material to help with the work. While very little from the future could go back and remain unchanged, things could be brought forward, including currency. Then, as now, a little ageless gold or gems could be converted into cash rather easily in London. There was, in fact, more than two hundred pounds in the pouch, mostly in small bills. That was a year's wages to many in this period of time, and men had been killed for far less. Additionally, there was a small map of London of the period and a short dossier on what was known of Marx and his neighborhood and friends. There was also a small .32 caliber pistol of the era, along with a box of twenty-five cartridges. Alfie was almost overcome with the sight of all that money, more than he had ever seen in his whole life or expected to see. The pistol provided an almost equal thrill, one that Moosic wasn't sure he liked. Still, the boy was exhausted from his night's work and finally succumbed to sleep. Moosic abandoned any ideas of tracking down the two fugitives ahead of time. Just being Alfie had convinced him of the futility of that task. He used the time well, though, first making some judicious purchases to get the boy in better clothes. There was really no way for a thirteen-year-old to take a room at a hotel or rooming house without arousing suspicion, and Alfie's manners and dialect were a dead giveaway that no cover story could be really convincing. There was something to remaining cau-tious and, particularly, not arousing suspicion at the sight of sudden wealth. In his neighborhood, it would have meant death; in the better ones, it would raise questions as to its source. Still, by using the small bills one at a time and never showing the money in the same place, it was convertible. Far more so, in fact, than if he'd had no

money at all to work with.
Sandoval and his girlfriend had nothing of this sort when they had traveled back to this time and place. That put him a jump ahead.
There was also the advantage that no one really took much notice of a young cleanly dressed man when he boarded the horse-drawn omnibuses or walked through various neighborhoods by day. Forty-one Maitland Park Crescent, N.W., was easy to find with the map and some exploration. It was a nondescript three-story, gray frame house—Moosic thought it Victorian, until he realized the ridiculousness of that term in 1875—that was, nonetheless, a large and comfortable single dwelling in a peaceful, middle-class neighborhood. Moosic was enough of a cynic to think that this was one of the ironies of the founders of Communism. Somewhere in Britain, Engels, the millionaire industrialist, was financing the Communist movement while living what could only be thought of by a twentieth-century mind as the Playboy philosophy. Marx, the middle-class German, descendant of a line of rabbis, college-educated and
devoted to intellec-tual pursuits, lived in a house the London proletariat could only dream about, although it was certainly no mansion and no luxurious abode in any sense of that word, and took frequent trips to Karlsbad to take the mineral bath "cure" far beyond the means of the working man. Later, this man's work would be modified by the upper-middle-class born and bred Russian son of a school superin-tendent who would call himself Lenin and the upper-middle-class librarian in Hunan, Mao Tse Tung.
These men all sincerely believed they were revolutioniz-ing the world for the poorest and the most downtrodden of humanity. Marx, who loved children as a group and class of their own, had been horrified by the child labor and the terrible factory conditions. They had all been, at least to some extent, and Marx totally, devoted to removing the mass of the proletariat from these inhuman, near-slavery conditions. Let them spend more than a week in the body and mind and existence of Alfie Jenkins, Moosic thought sourly. It would make them all more dedicated than ever to their goals, certainly, but perhaps it would also add true under-standing of just what it was like to be the lowest of the low in a class-oriented society. That had been the basic prob-lem and the reason for the perversion of the noble ideals of men like Marx, after all. It was an intellectual problem, or a problem dealt with out of guilt in the way many rich men became champions of the poor, but these were human beings in the individual sense as well as the faceless "masses." How could they know, or really understand, what it was like to be an Alfie Jenkins? When you reduced the millions of Alfies of the world to a faceless class, the "masses" or the "proletariat," you dehumanized them. None of the leaders, the intellectuals and the politicians who acted at or near the top of and in the name of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," had anything really in common with the Alfies, not really. Nor had Ron Moosic, no matter his truly proletarian back-ground and upbringing, although he was certainly far closer to the Alfies than the Marxes and the Lenins. Nobody had ever tried a "dictatorship of the proletariat," and nobody ever would. Many, of course, established that in name, but it always turned out to be a "dictatorship for the proletariat," not of or by it. When the proletariat objected, the proletariat was forced back in its place—for its own good, of course. For the good of the masses, the proletariat, the downtrodden of the world. Of course.
Moosic was reminded of a tour of Versailles he'd taken while posted to NATO during his Air Force years. In back of the magnificent palace had been a peasant village, with peasant houses and small gardens. It was not a true peasant village, but rather an antiseptic recreation of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat's concept of what a peasant village was like. They used to go there, the guide told them, and put on "peasant garb" and play at being peasants, the better to get the "feel" for the people. The masses. But when Marie Antionette, who used to lead such playing, was faced with the concept of starvation, she had not been able to conceive of it. And the leaders of the dictatorship of the proletariat collected fancy cars and lived in lavish apartments and brought their children up in much the same manner as royalty had raised their own. They believed in the ultimate socialist dream; they couldn't understand why the Alfie Jenkinses of the world could not. "Why, let them eat cake, then!"
Sandoval was here, someplace. Had probably already stood where Alfie Jenkins now stood, looking over the house. He was a true proletarian and a true believer in the dream. In the revolution he'd fight to win, the rulers he would put in power would make sure he was the first to be shot. In the meantime, he was fed at their direction by the guilt money of the Austin-Vennemans of the world, the Engelses of the late twentieth century.
Who had sent them here, with such perfect intelligence, and on what mission? Did it, in fact, center on that house over there, so innocent and calm? It had to. It just had to.

Alfie Jenkins had never heard of Karl Marx.
The assimilation process was so insidious he really was only slightly aware of it. Still, he was beginning to dream Alfie's dreams, beginning to think more and more Alfie's way. Slowly, but quite progressively, he was beginning to merge with the mind and soul of the boy. It hadn't hit him at all until, in the late afternoon of September 19, he'd taken out the dossier one last time to look through it and had found considerable trouble in reading it. Alfie, of course, was illiterate.
The problem scared him, and set his mind to wondering. Just how much had he begun to become the street urchin whose body he wore? It was beginning to be very difficult to separate the two of them, and he was still well within his "safety margin," according to the time project's formula. The two revolutionaries had a far narrower margin. Austin-Venneman would reach the critical point by the twenty-second; Sandoval on the twenty-fourth. Within a day or so after that point, they would become more the personalities they now were than their old selves; they would not go back of their own free will. Both had to know and understand that, all the more because what was happening to him must be happening with even more force to them. He was convinced that they would waste no time once they had their objective where they wanted him. If, in fact, Marx was their objective, they would attempt a visit on the afternoon or evening of the twentieth; of that he was certain. If the old boy was too tired and fatigued to see them, well, all the better. Callers late on the twentieth who were turned away and then returned the next day would certainly be prime suspects. Stuffing a leather pouch with sandwiches and a water bottle, he was determined to camp out within sight of 41 Maitland Crescent from early on the twentieth until—well, until as long as it took.
The waiting was the most difficult thing. Stakeouts were dull, boring work of the worst kind, not the sort of roman-tic cops-and-robbers business most people thought of when they thought of police work. At the start, he and Alfie had been distinctly separate personalities, but now it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. He chafed with the impatience of a thirteen-year-old and found distrac-tion in small games satisfying only for a brief while. The house, however, was not bereft of activity, for it was clear that something was up. Many times he saw the squat, rotund figure of Helene Demuth, the Marx family's devoted housekeeper who looked the very model of the quintessential German nannie, rushing to and fro, airing out rugs and cleaning up inside and out.
But the tip-off that they were expecting something im-portant was the occasional appearance of Jenny, Marx's wife, who was in extreme ill health and had not been seen on any of the earlier forays when he'd "cased" the place. She looked very old and very tired. Seen, too, was the pretty but frail-looking Eleanor "Tussy" Marx, an aspir-ing actress who usually went with her father to the conti-nent but had not this trip. Unseen was the truly frail and sickly daughter Jenny, but he had no doubt that all were working hard to get things just right for the homecoming.
As the day wore on, the sky darkened and a light rain began. He had never felt so miserable or so bored out of his mind. Every time a cab had clattered past, he'd gotten his hopes up, but it was well after the city clocks chimed four that one of them came up the street and stopped in front of the gray frame house. The driver, a fat, jolly-looking man, jumped down with surprising agility and opened the door on the curb side, away from the watcher's view, first helping someone out of the cab and then unloading the luggage. Moosic decided on a more open approach and actually crossed the street and walked right by, seeing the cabbie and Helene Demuth struggling with a large trunk while another figure was already on the porch, affectionately greeting his wife and youngest daughter. It didn't pay to stop and stare, but Moosic's impression was of a surprisingly slender man of medium height who gave the impression of youth and great strength, despite a flowing white beard and shoulder-length white hair; he was dressed in a dark brown suit. Although appearing quite wrinkled, he was highly emotional and his joy at being home and with his loved ones was obviously genuine. It was a touching, very human scene glimpsed in passing, one that caused Moosic some unease, and he was surprised by that.
Somehow, Karl Marx had never been a real person, a real human being. He'd always been a face on the Kremlin wall during parades, a posed statue in the history books. Up until now, Alfie's London had been a real place, but in an exotic sort of way, like visiting some remote island country in the Pacific or an ancient village in the heart of Europe. Now, suddenly, this was Karl Marx—the real one—looking and acting very