In their absence, the ship had apparently caused a second copy of the expendable to assemble itself. It was standing beside the box.
“Have you allowed any of the mice to leave the box?” asked Ram Odin.
“Not yet,” said the new expendable. “But those were the orders I was given.”
“Now that I’m back, am I in full command of the ship?” asked Ram Odin.
“Yes,” answered both expendables, and the ship’s computer voice as well.
To the second expendable, Ram Odin said, “Go back and have yourself disassembled and restowed.”
The expendable left the room.
“Ship,” said Ram Odin. “I designate Rigg Noxon as my only successor in the event I’m disabled and can’t command the ship. In the absence of myself and Rigg Noxon, there is no other substitute commander. You will continue to follow my instructions. The mice, individually and collectively, are permanently barred from any command role on this vessel.”
“Yes,” said the ship’s computer.
“And since I know they have reprogrammed you to say that, even though you intend to disobey me, I order you to restore yourself to the condition you were in prior to any alteration the mice made.”
It took two seconds. “Done,” said the ship’s computer.
“Is it really done?” Ram Odin asked the expendable.
“Do you wish the ship to reacquire the data from the ship’s logs that Noxon brought aboard?” asked the expendable.
“Will any of that data cause the ship to accept orders or data from the mice?”
“The logs from Odinfold and Larfold will both have that result.”
“Restore only the logs that do not give the mice any control or influence on this ship.”
“That will leave gaps in our data,” said the expendable.
“Gaps that will be alleviated after we return from our attempt to change the future,” said Ram Odin.
“Good job,” said the expendable. “You finally asked the right questions.” He turned to Noxon. “Beginning with you.”
“I appreciate your congratulations,” said Noxon. “But I’m not sure I believe you. How can we be sure the mice didn’t instruct you merely to pretend to follow Ram’s instructions, so that we’d leave?”
“We aren’t infinitely devious,” said a mouse from inside the box.
“You do understand why I will never trust you,” said Noxon.
“That is a very wise decision,” said the mouse. “And one that will cost us dearly, I’m afraid.”
“Maybe,” said Noxon. “And maybe not. That’s still up to you.”
“You mean you’re not going to kill them even now?” asked Ram Odin.
“I’m not,” said Noxon. “But I’m also not leaving them with the ship.”
Noxon carried the mice aboard the flyer, but left the expendable on the ship. Ram and Noxon then had the flyer take them down to Earth, to a tectonically stable plateau in what would one day be Peru. Someday, the Nazca lines would be marked out by human inhabitants. But right now, the ground was smooth.
Since humans hadn’t yet spread to this area, it was simple enough to pick their spot, pile up a few stones, and then find an animal’s path to link to in order to get back to the target time at the beginning of this glacial maximum. At that point, a hundred thousand years in the past, Noxon, Ram Odin, and the expendable spent several days laying out an arrangement of stones large enough to be picked up by the instruments on an orbiting ship a few hundred kilometers up.
They buried the box of mice at one end of the stone figure they had created.
Then they went forward again about eighty thousand years, to the time when they had made that first small pile of stones. They checked to make sure that their large arrangement of stones had lasted for the intervening eighty thousand years. It had. It would be continuously visible from space.
They rode the flyer back up to the ship. Noxon made several huge jumps back in time until their large marker stopped being visible, then made much smaller jumps into the future until it finally showed up again.
They took the ship through atmospheric entry and landed it on a grassy plateau in Antarctica. It was hard to believe that in a few thousand years this spot would be under at least a hundred meters of ice, but the expendable assured them that the spot had been carefully noted and it was ideal for concealing a dead ship.
They left the ship there and took the flyer back to the place where they had buried the box of mice. Then they sent the flyer back to the ship.
Noxon and Ram stood over the burial place. “Think they’re still alive in there?” asked Noxon.
“How long since we buried them?” asked Ram Odin.
“Not sure how precisely we handled our return time, but I’m betting they’re still in there,” said Noxon.
“If you open the box to see,” said Ram Odin, “they’ll be out of it in a second and we’ll never get them back.”
“Oh, I have no intention of letting them out,” said Noxon. “What I’m wondering is, what are the odds that as soon as we slice forward in time from here, the flyer will return and the expendable will dig them up?”
“I think seventy-five percent against it,” said Ram Odin. “But it’s impossible to be sure.”
“In my experience, the only creatures more devious than the mice are the expendables.”
“To be fair,” said Ram Odin, “their deviousness on Garden could have been due to their following Old Ram’s instructions.”
“They’re very good at giving truthful answers to the wrong questions,” said Noxon.
“And humans are very good at coming up with all the wrong questions,” said Ram Odin.
“We never have complete control over anything,” said Noxon.
“No,” said Ram Odin. “Because at some point, we have to trust machines and people to do what they say they’ll do.”
“And every now and then,” said Noxon, “their disobedience is actually wiser than if they had done what we commanded. Because they have their own wisdom, and we have no guarantee that ours is wiser.”
“Trust and obedience,” said Ram Odin. “Every cruel dictator in history has only had the power to do evil because so many other people were willing to obey him and carry out his orders.”
“And every wise and good leader has been repeatedly stymied,” said Noxon, “because no matter how wise his commands, some bureaucrat somewhere believed that it wasn’t in his self-interest to carry them out.”
“So what are you going to do about this?” asked Ram Odin.
“Well,” said Noxon. “I could stay here with you and slice time for a few months, watching to see if the flyer returns. We wouldn’t leave the surface here until we were sure the mice were dead.”
“We’d also see that we didn’t return from the future during that time,” said Ram Odin.
“The first time through, we’d see that,” said Noxon. “The problem is that the second time through, we would see ourselves come back, and that would change our behavior, and therefore it would create two new copies of the two of us because we would then behave differently.”
“At least we’d know the mice and the expendables hadn’t disobeyed us,” said Ram Odin.
“There are enough copies of me in the universe,” said Noxon, “and way past enough copies of you.”
“I can only agree,” said Ram Odin.
“So I think our best course of action,” said Noxon, “is to assume the mice are still alive, assume the flyer won’t return to liberate them, and get out of here so our future selves have time to get here and dig them up alive if the expendable hasn’t already done it.”
“And if the mice happen to be dead already?” asked Ram Odin.
“We’ll shed a gentle tear or two, and move on,” said Noxon. “It’ll only matter if it turns out we needed them. And if we really need them, we can always come back to the moment right after we buried them and flew away.”
“Which is another reason not to dig them up right now,” said Ram Odin.
“I really don’t want to know whether they’re still there,” said Noxon. “Because if they’re gone, it means our mission failed and we needed them to destroy the human race.”