Everyone had sat down again, Howard and Andrea side by side and facing Matt across a low glass table, the fire crackling off to one side. Susan set the tray down and opened the bottle in dead silence. Nobody reached for any chips. Oh, well, the important thing was to offer it. She poured wine into four glasses.
"What should we drink to?" Andrea asked. "How about the return of old friends?" Howard suggested, glaring at Matt.
"Disclosure of what?" Andrea said, brightly. She looked from Susan to Matt to Howard, obviously realizing she was way behind everybody else here, but not seeming too concerned about it.
"I'd go for that," Howard said, looking back to Matt.
"You first," Matt said. "Was that your dirty bomb?"
Howard drained his wine and set the glass down on the table, hard.
"You have entirely too high an opinion of me," he said. "Or too low, depending on how you look at it."
"Can somebody catch me up here, please?" Andrea said.
Matt kept staring at Howard, but finally sighed and looked away.
"Might as well, I guess. Let's see, where was I? Oh, yes. After the people who may have been government agents or may have been employed by a certain Mr. Warburton couldn't get anything out of me with drugs..."
CAUSE-and-effect was at the heart of the paradoxes of time travel, and Matt had had occasion to ponder the concept often in his ruminations while trying to construct a time machine for Howard Christian.
A Jew from Germany observes an atom of a heavy metal split into two parts, releasing energy.
Effect: The best minds of a nation are assembled in strict secrecy. A certain rare ore is mined at a fever pitch and trucked to Tennessee, where the infinitesimal fraction of it that is of any use is painstakingly extracted. A city rises out of the sand of the New Mexico desert. A device is constructed and flown first to a remote island in the Pacific, then to a much larger island where, one fine August morning, it is detonated in the air over a city, incinerating eighty thousand Japanese, mostly civilians.
A man sitting at a table in a room points to a particular spot on a map and says, "I last saw it here." In an adjoining room needles on a machine jump and twitch in a way that suggest the man is probably telling the truth.
Effect...
Three days later the operation had been planned out and preparations made. A truck was driven into position, a bomb threat was called in. When the local television news eyes in the sky were in place with good camera angles, the bomb in the truck was detonated, right in front of the old May Company building in the neighborhood known as Museum Row. Damage to the building was minimal. A cloud of smoke formed and drifted slowly eastward, toward the area where there had been that big hullabaloo two weeks earlier. Soon the police and special Homeland Security troops in their radiation gear were swarming all over the site, picking up every piece of wreckage.
But still no cause for alarm. And, oh, yeah, we're evacuating six blocks in every direction now.
No more "official" reports were really necessary after that. The only problem was to keep Angelenos from voluntarily evacuating the whole metropolitan area. Once again, someone had seriously underestimated the fear the public had of radiation, and of government reassurances.
For twenty-four hours the traffic on the freeways was a complete nightmare. Seven people died from natural causes, just sitting there, ambulances unable to get to them. Airplanes arrived at LAX virtually empty and left full. The next day traffic was better than it had been since 1947, at the opening of the Pasadena Freeway. Every hotel room from San Francisco to Reno to Las Vegas to Phoenix to San Diego was taken, some of them double-booked. For a mile in every direction from the point where Matt's finger had touched the map, there was hardly a human soul in residence. There was a cordon around the whole area.
Now there was room to work. The trouble was... work on what?
The results of Matt's interrogation had been very frustrating to those in power. The spectrum of drugs known collectively as "truth serum" were very sophisticated these days. Something could be mixed up that would force anyone to spill everything they knew in only a few hours. Thus the interrogators were used to getting the information they needed, pronto, and being able to deny later that any coercive methods had been used. Matt's hysterical aphasia was a new one to the interrogators, and one that drove them to distraction.
There were older, more distasteful ways of getting information, and back in Washington there were those who began to advocate them. What the heck? This guy holds the secret to something that makes the hydrogen bomb seem like a flint arrowhead, we must have it, and if a little blood gets spilled, it will be in a good cause. Always bearing in mind, of course, the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg. Because it is well known, it is axiomatic among students of this kind of thing, that everybody talks under torture. The only question is how soon, and the answer is that with most people you only have to lay the instruments of torture out there on the table. The tougher cases will sell out mothers, mates, and children after less than an hour of pain. Just give the word, Mr. President, and we will know everything this man knows by this afternoon.
The president was not one to enter into such an enterprise lightly, however, and the decision was not entirely up to him, anyway, and so the searchers were sent back to the transcripts to pore over them for a clue as to the location of the device.
The transcripts were maddening.
Q: When did you last see the device? A:A: (Analysis: He's telling the truth. Probability 90%.)
Q: Where did you last see the device? A: The question has very little meaning. I showed you on the map where I was the last time I saw it. (Analysis: True, 90%)
Q: Where did you put it? A: As I said, the question has no meaning. (Analysis: True, 55%)
He was waffling, he was concealing something, but not once in his interrogation did he make a statement that could be demonstrated to be false.
And so the search went on.
It was known that he had not had a great deal of time to conceal the device, so most of the analysts figured the device had to be somewhere on the grounds of the park that contained the tar pits and the museum. And so the park was taken apart.
Magnetometers found many, many things buried on the grounds, from water and electric lines to loose change. The walls of the museum were torn out, the plumbing was torn out, the floors torn up, even the mammoth skeletons on display were disassembled and x-rayed, under the theory that the device had been made of many small parts, and they might no longer be hidden as a single unit. Nothing was found.
But all that was easy. The nasty part was draining the tar pits themselves.
The pits went down a long way, but were not bottomless. The problem was that, anything with any weight that was tossed into the pits sank into the goo, just like a trapped mammoth. People had been tossing old wagons and cars and horseshoes and coins and cans and nails and just endless junk into the pits for over a hundred years, so a magnetic scan was useless. The only way to search the tar was to bring it out, bucket by bucket, and go through it by hand. They dug down one hundred feet, and found no time machine. Then they had to put it all back.
At the same time the National Guard was searching house to house in a one-mile radius. It was impossible to keep a search like that a secret, of course, with so many soldiers involved. The object of the search quickly leaked out, television stations were soon showing the pictures that had been handed to the searchers, so the public's help was enlisted, with the cover story that the metal briefcase being so urgently sought was thought to contain three pounds of weapons-grade plutonium smuggled by the same terrorists who had set off the dirty bomb.