“I do,” said Anthropologist Wheaton.
“As do I,” said Deborah. “I didn’t think he’d be happy to leave all those behind.”
“My darling girl,” said her father.
“You are a darling,” said Noxon, allowing no trace of irony to enter his tone. “I need a blind clerk with a good memory.”
“And I need a facemask,” said Deborah. “Maybe we can work out a trade.”
“Let’s see what the future brings,” said Ram Odin.
After a few days, Noxon and Ram followed their host’s suggestion, skipping ahead a few months at a time. Deborah and her father stayed behind, ostensibly to research worldwide public opinion and government actions, but mostly, Noxon believed, for the professors Wheaton to read each other’s work and criticize it in a most friendly, collegial, and sarcastic manner.
Noxon and Ram lingered for a while after Ram’s ship launched, and then again when the Visitors’ ship took off. Ram was fascinated to study what scientists learned from his first passage through the fold. They had no idea of the split into nineteen forward ships and one backward one—though one mathematician did speculate that microdifferences among the onboard computers might cause a division of outcomes. To avoid any chance of that, the Visitors’ ship was designed to use only one computer for navigation and guidance, and all other computers were switched off during the leap across the fold.
For a couple of months after the Visitors’ ship was launched, Noxon and Ram skipped ahead only a few days at a time. Then Noxon stopped blind-jumping entirely. He only moved forward by very rapid time-slicing, so that they caught a glimpse of the intervening days.
Thus it was that they were time-slicing in the back bedroom of Wheaton’s apartment when there was a blinding flash of light and searing heat. The floor disappeared beneath them; the whole house disappeared. They plunged downward, but Noxon kept on time-slicing, so the fires were out for days before they landed.
The building was gone.
In the midst of time-slicing, they couldn’t converse about what just happened, but it was soon obvious that the event had flattened all the buildings in their vicinity. Forest fires had raged on the nearby hills, and here and there they were still smoldering, giving off a red glow at night.
Noxon increased the gaps in his time-slicing, so they raced forward, spending less time in any one minute or hour. The forest fires died out completely. Everything seemed calm. Noxon was about to bring them out of time-slicing mode when he saw several aircraft of strange, wingless design come hurtling by in the near distance, not very high above the ground. Only when they had passed by did he take Ram back to the regular flow of time.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Ram immediately. “I think that was a nuclear blast and we’re going to be eaten alive by radiation.”
“Let’s get to a place where there weren’t any buildings or parked cars, so we can jump back safely.” Noxon began scanning for paths so he could pick an appropriate moment to return unobserved. He tried to avoid noticing where all the paths ended abruptly with the blast.
“I didn’t know anybody was on the brink of war,” said Noxon as they walked.
“Nobody was,” said Ram. “Nobody on Earth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those aircraft that just went by. They clearly don’t operate by any technological system I’ve heard of. And I’ve heard of them all.”
“Not of human origin? Or some country had a secret program?”
“Not made by Homo sapiens. And I’m betting they weren’t Erectid ships.”
It still took a moment for Noxon to be sure what Ram meant. Not anthropes. Not from Earth. “What do we do?”
“Get back into the past right now.”
“This radiation exposure,” said Noxon. “You know we took a lot of it while we were time-slicing, too. Only a small fraction of what it could have been, but it looks like we weren’t all that far from the center of the blast.”
“So we’re probably dying already,” said Ram.
“Any cures?” asked Noxon. “Any effective treatments?”
“Well, if your facemask can’t cure it, I doubt anything my body can do will be of much help.”
“So we need to go back and warn ourselves in person,” said Noxon.
Ram understood at once. “Which will duplicate us.”
“If you and I are going to die,” said Noxon, “our copies need to go on. At the moment, I think we’re more indispensable to the survival of the human race than ever.”
“And if we don’t die?” asked Ram.
“The more the merrier.”
They could learn nothing. The next time they reached that point in time, at least they were out of town, well to the south. They had communications equipment, but there were no signals to pick up.
The third time, Ram and Noxon visited one of Ram’s friends from the space program. They made their explanations and demonstrations and were given a connection so they could look in on the communications of the international space exploration authority. This time there was a little warning. A ship of some kind spotted just outside the orbit of Jupiter. And then a complete loss of control over all computers and communications for only a few minutes, and a near-simultaneous launch of all missiles from all nations.
Armed with this data, Ram and Noxon visited the same friend, played the recordings and showed the data from the near future. With a lot of “never mind how I got it,” this data provoked some serious alerts and this time the spacecraft was tracked. It seemed to have come from a direction similar to the route taken by one of the exploratory drones sent out prior to Ram Odin’s colonizing mission, when the space authority was searching for planets likely to be habitable. And this time, given some warning, some of the communications systems were uncoupled from the worldwide networks, so they remained under human control.
What Noxon and Ram took back with them this last time was a much clearer picture. The best guess was that the drone sent out more than two decades before had discovered, not just a habitable world, but an inhabited one. A world with space travel and a keen sense of umbrage, or paranoia about what a follow-up visit from humans might bring.
“Given what Ram Odin’s expedition did to the planet Garden to get it ready for human habitation,” said Noxon, “I can’t say they were wrong to determine on a preemptive strike.”
“We would never have attacked a planet with sentient life,” said Ram Odin. “We would have moved on to the next prospective colony world.”
“You would never have attacked,” said Noxon. “But who knows what the expendables would have done while you were in stasis?”
Speculation was all they had to go on, when it came to causes and motives. Results were a different matter. The aliens had such advanced tech that, virtually unnoticed, they were able to infiltrate our computers and communications from a distance, read enough data to know our weapons capabilities and what targets to hit, and then activate the surviving nuclear arsenals of two dozen former nation-states. The killoff was nearly complete. Then the alien ship reached Earth orbit at incredible speed, and those aircraft sought out every source of radio signals and then every sign of body heat.
“There weren’t going to be any survivors,” said Ram Odin.
“So by the time the Visitors come back to Earth from their voyage to Garden,” said Noxon, “they’re going to find that they’re the last human beings left in the solar system.”
“Then why would they go back and destroy the surviving humans on Garden?” asked Deborah. Immediately she shook her head, answering her own question. “Right. It wasn’t humans.”
“They got inside our computer systems,” said Ram Odin. “They knew all about my voyage and then the Visitors’ trip, including all the data they collected. So it was the aliens who went to Garden and activated the built-in self-destruct system orbiting the planet. It was never humans from Earth at all. It didn’t matter what the Visitors saw. Their ship’s log would show the aliens that there was another clump of humans. They found us completely defenseless and wiped us out.”