"I'm afraid too much damage has already been done," said Martin. He really looked scared. His man-of-action phase had apparently faded; he was once again the cautious historian worse, a practical historian, with the terrifying capability to write his own history.
"What damage?" I wanted to know. "Okay, I didn't get what I went back for. We didn't estimate my chances were very good even before I went."
"I agree," said Sherman. I waited for Martin or Lawrence to protest the idiocy of letting an animated dildo have a voice in these proceedings, but neither of them batted an eye. They turned to listen to Sherman, so I did, too.
"To sum up what happened," he went on, "Smith saw her, she looked at him, and she ran.
Is that accurate, Louise? Don't bare your teeth like that; it's not attractive."
"Wait until I get you home with a screwdriver and a soldering iron."
"That's as may be. Right now we're talking about your recent failure. Is my account of your failure an accurate one?"
"I'll peel that smarmy face right off your head, you -- "
"This is not germane to the question of your -- "
"Stop using that word!"
" -- failure. Sit down, Louise. Breathe regularly; the faintness will pass."
I did, and it did.
Sherman leaned closer to me and spoke in a voice I'm pretty sure the others couldn't hear.
"I have taken certain actions I thought appropriate," he said. "The new face is one of them. The induced catharsis was another. If you're calm enough to continue and if you'll concede my right to be here in this conference, we can proceed, and discuss your grievances when we're alone."
I swallowed hard, and nodded. I didn't trust myself to talk.
"So he saw you, and you ran. Does that sum it up?"
I nodded again.
"Then I don't think the damage is great. There was no question of him penetrating your disguise."
"That's right," Lawrence said. "Look at it from his viewpoint. He saw a woman in a United Airlines uniform, and she ran from him."
"An odd thing to do," Martin said.
"Sure, but she can explain it to him the next time she meets him. We can think of some kind of story to -- "
"Wait a minute. What's this about me meeting him again?"
"That was my idea," Sherman said.
I looked from one to the other, taking my time about it.
"You didn't suggest it while I was here," I said. "So the three of you were talking while I was gone."
"That's right," Lawrence said. "Sherman arrived just as we were getting the new information."
"What new information?"
"Lawrence expressed it badly," Sherman said. "I arrived, and after a great deal of trouble making myself heard, managed to communicate to the operations team that I knew what they were about to discover. Shortly afterward, they discovered it."
"We're still not sure about the time sequence," Lawrence said, defensively.
"I'm sure," Sherman said.
"Will someone tell it to me straight?" I asked. "Start to finish, just the way things happen in real time?"
The three of them looked at each other, and I swear, Martin and Lawrence were the ones who looked uncertain while Sherman was stolid as a stone.
"He'd better tell it," Lawrence conceded.
"Very well," Sherman said. "Thirty seconds before you went through the Gate; I was at the Post Office, where the Big Computer had summoned me. I read the message that was waiting for me just as you stepped through. Pursuant to instruction in the message, I came here."
I hadn't known there was a message waiting for Sherman. I hadn't known that any robot had ever gotten a time capsule.
There was a good reason for that. This was an unusual message. It specified on the outside that no human was to be notified of the identity of the recipient, nor of the date of its opening. The BC, as I said, follows these instructions literally. Technically, the Programming Council has instructed the BC to follow the directions on time capsules, but I wonder what the BC would have done if the Council had said otherwise.
Well, "would have done" is nothing but a rarefied form of the verb "to do." And a very pointless one.
The message told Sherman -- among other things, and we'll get to that -- to go to Gate operations and tell Lawrence that I was going to have a face-to-face meeting with Bill Smith, and that I would fail in my mission. That word again.
He did that, or tried to. It was hard to get their attention, for two reasons: the operations team was still probing in and around the era with their time-scan tanks and things were clearing up a little, and ... well, he was a robot. Most people were astonished that he was there. It was as if my refrigerator had come into Operations, tap-dancing and singing Suwannee, wearing a sandwich board proclaiming the end of the world.
But he managed to tell them. Simultaneously, or a few seconds later, depending on who you believe, one of the operatives spotted Bill Smith in a helicopter returning from the 747 crash site and someone else found the same helicopter parked on the apron outside the hangar I was visiting. Inference: Smith and I could meet inside that hangar.
That's when they started listening to Sherman. It was a matter of a few seconds to confirm that he had indeed received a time capsule, at which point his stock went up tremendously. I'd recently experienced the same effect. Me and my people tend to listen to somebody who's just received a message from the future.
And of course that's when he started to clam up.
"The message was quite specific," he said. "There are certain things I can tell you, and others things chat I must keep secret."
"Come on," I said. "Don't bullshit a bullsh -- " That's as far as I got, and wished I'd buttoned my lip about five syllables earlier. I remembered my suspicion that the Council might be listening in, and the recent time-capsule-inspired performance I'd given them to get this operation authorized.
"There are a few more things I can say," Sherman went on. "The first is that my message confirmed yours, Louise. It said this operation is vital to the success of the Gate Project." He glanced at me, and I wished I had more experience at reading his eyes, but you can't read what isn't there. His new eyes were fake, of course, but looked very natural. His mouth was just a sketch. It could convey expression in the same way a cartoon can. He hadn't bothered with a nose.
"The second thing concerns the next phase, since we all agree the excursion back to window A was of no use."
So the subject was back to windows. What we had was B,C, and D. I thought D was too dangerous, B too unlikely to produce results, and C ...
Tell him about the kid. She's just a wimp.
Nobody knew it but me, but I wasn't going back to Window C. I took a deep breath, got ready to do a cowardly thing, which was to put all my weight behind a trip back to B. I was pretty sure Martin would vote with me, and I thought I could swing Lawrence. The one thing I was sure of was that nobody would go for D. D was the site of the paradox, and surely too dangerous to visit.
"The third thing I can tell you now," Sherman went on, "is that the next visit must be to 2300 hours, Pacific time, on the night of the 13th of December. This is the window you have referred to as D. And Louise should lead the operation."
9 The Shadow Girl
Testimony of Bill Smith
There was one of those stand-up places not too far away from our conference room. We went in there because we didn't think we'd have time for much more than that. I've seen those places in airports from LAX to Orly, and I've always wondered why people would want to stand up to eat their stale hot dogs. I guess the answer was obvious: they were in a hurry, like us.