"What I said," Malcolm answered, quietly but pointedly, "was that we've done our job too well. Dov Eshkol proved that."
It was an almost incredible statement. "Yes. I'd say that he certainly did."
"And so we learn and go on." He still seemed unprepared to look me in the eye. "As you and I have already discussed, we must make sure that all future projects will be exposed in a reasonable amount of time. We'll plant hints — more than hints, obvious flaws — so that even the most obtuse—"
"Malcolm?" I interrupted, too shocked to go on listening to him but still trying to speak in a straightforward, calm manner. "Malcolm, I can't go on being part of this. What you're doing, it's more than just subversive, it's unimaginably dangerous. Surely even you see that now." He gave no answer, and my head began to grow feverish with incredulity. "Is it possible — are you really going to try to deny it? This business, this game of yours, it may seem manageable to you, but there are millions of people out there who have to make sense of thousands of pieces of bizarre new information every day, and they don't have the time or the tools to sort out what's real from what's blatant fabrication. The world's gone too far — people's minds have been stretched too far — and we have no idea what will set the next lunatic off. What'll you do if we carry out this latest plan, and some anticorporate, antigovernment lunatic in the States — and there are plenty of them — uses it as a rationalization to blow up yet another federal building? Or something even bigger?" I paused and then shifted gears, trying to direct the discussion away from the kind of moral and political dialectic of which he was a master and focus it instead on my very real concern for him and the others: "Besides, how long can you really hope to get away with it? Look at how narrow our escape was this time and what it cost us. You've got to consider something else, this isn't—"
I cut myself short when I saw his hand go up slowly. "All right," he said, in a voice choked with sorrow and regret. "All right, Gideon." He finally wheeled his chair around, his head drooping so low that his chin nearly rested on his chest. When he glanced up again, he still wouldn't connect with my gaze; but the grief in his features was apparent and pitiful to behold. "I would have done anything to prevent what happened to Leon," he said softly. "But every one of us knows the risks—"
" 'Knows the risks'? Malcolm, this isn't a war, for God's sake!"
At last those hypnotic yet unsettling blue eyes met my own hard stare. "Isn't it?" he asked. He began to reach around for the crutches that were clipped to the back of his chair. "You think," he went on, his voice getting stronger, "that this method of addressing the problem doesn't work." He fought hard to get to his feet, and though I felt more of a desire to help than I ever had before, I once again refrained. "You think that the world's illness is beyond this sort of treatment. Fine." He took a few steps in my direction. "What would you prescribe instead?"
I simply could not engage him on this level, and I made that fact plain: "Malcolm, this isn't about 'illnesses' and 'prescriptions.' Civilization is going to do whatever it's going to do, and if you keep trying to stand in the way you'll just create more disasters. Maybe you're right, maybe this information society is taking us into a high-tech dark age. But maybe it isn't. Maybe we just don't understand it. Maybe Julien's wrong, and this isn't a 'threshold moment,' and maybe there were people like us sitting in some scientifically advanced horse and carriage when Gutenberg ran off his first Bible screaming, 'That's it! It's all over!' I don't know. But the point is, neither do you. The only thing we do know is that you can't stop change and you won't stop technology. There's nothing in the past to suggest that it's possible."
As I was speaking, Malcolm turned, almost with the slowness of a clock, to look out at the birds again. "That's true," he murmured.
Ready as I was to argue on, his statement came as a complete surprise. "It is?" I said a bit dimly.
Malcolm nodded. "Yes. There's nothing in the past to suggest that it's possible—yet."
As he roamed back over to the window, I followed, suddenly feeling very nervous. "What do you mean, 'in the past, yet'? Malcolm, you're not making sense."
As he attempted to explain himself, Malcolm seemed to grow increasingly unaware of who I was or even that there was anyone in the room with him; and the vacant brilliance that his eyes took on as they stared at the similarly dazzling blue of the sky above the ocean offered the first hint of real mental imbalance. "Suppose I were to tell you," he said, "that through that room" — he indicated an adjacent chamber in the direction of his lab—"and behind a certain very thick door you'll find a device that may be able to redefine, even destroy, both history and time, at least as we currently understand them. That in a very short while it will be possible to move through our temporal continuum and alter the past, so that 'history' will no longer be an unalterable chronological record but a living laboratory in which we will conduct experiments to improve the present condition of our planet and our species."
Had it even occurred to me to take this statement seriously, I might well have fallen over; as it was, I only became steadily more convinced that the man's mind had snapped. "Listen, Malcolm," I said, putting a hand to his shoulder. "Try to understand — as a doctor it's incumbent on me to tell you that you've suffered a breakdown. A potentially severe one. And given what we've all been through, I'm not surprised. You have friends in Edinburgh, and no doubt they'll know of hospital facilities we can use quietly. If you let me run some tests and suggest a course of treatment—"
"You haven't answered my question yet, Gideon," Malcolm said, his voice still betraying no emotion.
"Your question?" I said. "Your question about roaming back and forth through time, that question?"
He shook his head slowly. "Not back and forth. No one seriously believes that we can create closed timelike curves that could allow a subject to move in one direction and then return to the exact point from which he or she started. At this point it's just not feasible."
"Oh, but going one way is?"
Malcolm ignored my sarcasm. "The physical problem isn't particularly exotic or complex," he said. "Like most things it's really just a question of power — electromagnetic power. And the only conceivable way of generating such power—"
"Would be superconductors," I said with a sudden shudder, vaguely remembering an article I'd read on the subject some months earlier. I looked to the floor, still in a state of disbelief but for some reason quite shaky all the same. "Highly miniaturized superconductors," I added, real apprehension beginning to belie my dismissal of his words.
"Sounds familiar, doesn't it?" Malcolm had increasing difficulty controlling his emotions as he went on: "Imagine not being forced to accept the present that's been handed down to us. Having instead the ability to engineer a different set of historical determinants. You say that the contemporary world can't be helped by the work we're doing now, Gideon, that it's beyond such remedies. Well, the same thought began to occur to me over a year ago. But the answer, I saw, wasn't to suspend what we were doing. We needed to adjust the work, certainly — that was part of the reason we brought you in. But we had and have to keep at it until the day comes when we can change the actual circumstances of our present reality by modifying the past." He put a hand to his head, obviously feeling the effects of the controlled but no less extreme passion with which he had told me his tale. "That day isn't far off, Gideon — not far off at all."