Taking a deep breath Trask stepped forward, and Millie got between them. “Ben,” she said, “I’m with Jake. I’m with him all the way. He has gone along with you—been willing to do whatever you’ve asked of him—so now you should go along with him. And with me. This is something we need to know. It’s something you need to know, too, Ben.”
And again they were all looking at him. Liz, Lardis, David Chung, Ian Goodly, Millie…and Jake, of course; Trask’s espers, and even the techs sitting at their machines. Everybody.
He looked at Goodly. “You’ve advised them not to, right?”
“The same way Harry advised us,” the precog nodded. “But I can’t say that I’m right to have done so, or even if I had the right to do so. Call it a gut feeling. I have this thing about the future, as you know. Maybe it’s because I sometimes wish I couldn’t do it that I wish they wouldn’t do it.”
“But if we don’t,” Jake spoke to Trask, “then you’ll never be able to trust us. Me, I’ve just got to know. If you were in my shoes, wouldn’t you? Sure you would. And this way, we’ll all of us know what’s going down. So that’s that: there’s no other choice. If you stop me now—if you could—then as soon as I get the chance I’ll do it anyway, on my own if necessary.”
Trask looked at Millie then—tried his best to look stern—but she wasn’t backing down. “I’ve got to go with him, Ben,” she told him. “For let’s face it, I was down there with Szwart in that loathsome fungus garden a lot longer than Jake. And if some of those spores have been able to reach the surface—”
“—We don’t know that yet!” Trask cut her off.
“But if,” she came back. “Then isn’t it equally possible I might have been infected, too?”
At which Liz came in on it, saying, “In any case we really do have to know, don’t we? If Millie and Jake are in the clear, which I’m sure they are, then we can move on. And—”
“—And what if they’re not?” Trask’s voice almost cracked up, his throat was so dry. He knew how Liz felt about Jake, but it was Millie he was thinking about.
“If they’re not,” the Old Lidesci repeated him in his usual growl, “then we’ll be able to give them…well, whatever help we can.” And they all knew what Lardis meant.
Trask shook his head. “Nothing like that,” he said gruffly, turning on Lardis. “Man, what are you thinking? This isn’t some Szgany encampment on Sunside!”
And Lardis shook his head. “No,” he said, “not Sunside, but it could be the same problem.”
Trask didn’t much like where this was going; he didn’t want to scare Millie and couldn’t afford to give Jake any ideas. So:
“Very well,” he told them. “If you’re that set on it, let’s do it…here and now, and have done with it.” There was something else in the back of Trask’s mind, something he tried hard not to think about, keeping it firmly screwed down.
Jake looked at Millie and together they climbed up onto the stage or dais standing central in the Ops Room. With the exception of Trask, the rest of the team sat in chairs close together, where they could look up at the rostrum. And Trask said, “Jake, Millie, we’ve been some strange places today, but none stranger than where you’re going now. Jake, you take care of her.”
Jake looked down at him; their eyes met, and for once there was no animosity between them, no discord worth mentioning. And Jake said, “You, too, Ben. I mean, you take care of…of whatever.” So maybe Trask didn’t have it all that well screwed down after all.
Then, putting his arm around Millie, Jake said, “Hold on to me. You’ve been there before, but briefly. This time it will be longer because we aren’t just going somewhere but sometime. And we’ll be seeing whatever there is to see. I think that’s how it works, anyway.”
As what he’d said sank in, suddenly it dawned on Trask that while Jake was certainly the Necroscope, still his talents were very new to him. Did he really know what he was doing? Starting up the rostrum steps, he might have asked that very question—except Jake and Millie wouldn’t have heard him.
For they weren’t any longer there…
“Dart guns!” Trask said, even as he felt the breath of air that rushed in to fill the space where Jake and Millie had been. “In the armoury. The same kind of tranquilizers they had on Invincible. I want them in here, now!”
And Liz gasped and said, “You don’t think…?”
“It’s my job to think,” Trask told her. “You think! This is E-Branch HQ. Right now they are on their way to find out what’s what. That means we’re about to find out, too. Me, I don’t want to find out the hard way. No, I don’t think they’d rampage, not unless we put them under pressure. The darts are a safety measure, that’s all, to make sure there is no pressure. But if they were to come back in a nasty mood—and God knows Jake’s quite capable of it—well, need I go on? And stop looking at me as if I’m some kind of monster. I happen to be in love with Millie no less than you are with Jake.”
One of the techs brought the dart guns. Trask gave them to Chung and Goodly.
“Why us?” Chung wanted to know.
“Who better?” Trask snapped. “I was beginning to think that things were getting on top of me, but now it seems I’m the only one who’s still awake here! If those two get back knowing that they’re in trouble, won’t you know it—won’t you at least be able to sense something of it—too? You know you will. So for Christ’s sake get yourself in gear! Do what you do best and be on the lookout for mindsmog.”
He turned to Goodly. “As for you—”
“—I’m to try reading the future, right?” said the precog. “But do you think I haven’t been doing that all along? The fact is, I think I’m losing it, Ben. And it’s been getting worse for weeks now, ever since we went out to Australia. The more I pressure the future, the more it resists me.”
“Yes, I know,” Trask nodded. “And I’ve been having problems with my talent, too, and so have we all. But as long as you can apply pressure to your trigger finger I wouldn’t start worrying about it right now. So just get up on that dais and be ready. I would do it myself but there’s something else I want to look at while we’re waiting.”
As he left the dais and strode across the floor towards the big wall screen, Liz caught at his arm, bringing him to a halt. “Surely you don’t intend to dart them out of hand?”
Trask looked at her, shook himself loose, then glanced back at Chung and Goodly on the rostrum. They looked just as uncertain as Liz; and for that matter, as uncertain as Trask himself. And torn two ways, he said: “The hell with it! I’ll leave it up to you. See what you think the moment they step back out of the Continuum onto that stage.”
Then he reached the wall screen, where a tech set the great mass of information it contained scrolling for him. In the main it was a blueprint, a detailed schematic of the Perchorsk complex in its Ural Mountains hideaway. But Trask knew there had to be far more to it than that. According to John Grieve, the Duty Officer, there was something here that would make a difference to the team he wanted to take out to Turkey with him.
“Fast-forward it,” he growled. And the flow of information at once picked up speed. But as the Perchorsk schematics rolled up out of sight, something very different emerged at the bottom of the picture, rapidly taking shape as it elevated itself onto the screen. And Trask recognized it immediately.
It was a skewed, blank map of northern Russia and Europe, from Severnaya Zemlya at the far right of the screen, through the Kara, Barents, and Norwegian seas, up to and including the British Isles in the west. Or rather, it would have been blank if not for a handful of tiny, concentric-ringed “targets” centred with bull’s-eye dots, all of which appeared to highlight deep and occasionally not so deep oceanic locations.
Glancing at the tech, Trask raised a hand and said, “Hold it there!”…at which the screen froze with the map on centre stage. And then the flesh began to creep at the nape of Trask’s neck. He had seen similar charts before and knew precisely w
hat he had here: that the bull’s-eye targets were deep-water sites where a down-at-heel Russian Navy had already scuppered several of its supposedly “decommissioned” but still highly radioactive nuclear submarines, revenants of its cold-war fleet. Lacking the financial or technical clout—unwilling or incapable of detoxifying these lethal hulks, whichever—somebody in the Russian Navy’s top brass, probably one of Gustav Turchin’s enemies, had been dumping them on other nations’ doorsteps.
David Chung, never better than when he was tracking nuclear or illicit drugs sources, had been keeping tabs on such activities for years now. And quite obviously he’d have to be on this one, too. That was what John Grieve had been talking about: the locator wouldn’t be going out to Turkey with Trask and the rest of the crew because he’d be working on this. And it didn’t take a genius to work out why.
One of the small targets was missing its bull’s-eye centre; either the bull’s-eye was missing, or the target had not as yet been hit. Which probably indicated that it was a scheduled dump site, a theory that seemed corroborated by a much heavier, freehand circle with which “someone” (Premier Turchin himself?) had highlighted the site in question. As for its location: that was the really worrying factor.
It lay in the northern Atlantic’s Rockall Deep, one hundred and fifty miles west of Ireland, which according to some oceanographers was a major junction in the Atlantic Conveyor system, a region where the balmy surface waters of the Gulf Stream collide with cold water flowing from the Arctic, sink, about-face, and join a submarine current flowing back the other way. And in the event some lunatic in the Russian Navy dumped a clapped-out and highly toxic nuclear sub there…given sufficient time it could poison the entire conveyor, carrying deadly Russian waste all the way back to Florida and the Bahamas and eventually depositing its lethal radiation along every Atlantic coastline!
Well, the Atlantic Ocean is a big thing, and even a massive nuclear vessel is small by comparison. But that wouldn’t be the way that Greenpeace and all of the other powerful environmental bodies and lobbies would see it, especially in Earth Year, when the ecological balance of the whole planet was under discussion east to west and pole to pole. And with Russia many billions of dollars in the red and increasingly dependant on Western funds, it would be condemned as indefensible, the worst kind of pollution at the worst possible time in the history of planet Earth. Compared to the meltdown at Chernobyl—a terrible accident, a human error, which in the main had been paid for by its Russian authors—this would be seen as something else again; seen for what it was: the deliberate act of despoilers on an unthinkably massive scale…
Which was why Premier Turchin had released this information here, now. This was a weapon he could bring to bear against his Russian enemies. Simply by presenting the West’s environmentalists with the means to prove what they’d been saying for years, he could denounce the author or authors of this thing and have them removed from office, prosecuted, and locked away for good. It was Turchin covering himself; for in the event that his Perchorsk scheme should fail, he knew that this one would succeed.
Trask turned to the tech at the screen’s console. “Is there a legend, something to describe what’s going on here?”
“It’s in Russian,” the tech answered, bringing it into view on the screen. “We think it’s a timetable, encyphered, but nothing we can’t crack. It’s being worked on right now. However, we do have a date.”
“A date?” Trask repeated him.
“Yes.” The other nodded. And in all innocence: “Whatever it is that’s going down here, it’s all set to happen in three days’ time.”
And now Trask knew for certain that the locator David Chung wouldn’t be going to Turkey with him. No, for he’d be following this up instead. Indeed the locator—and perhaps Greenpeace or some similar organization, together with a whole gang of people from the government—would be doing their best to ensure that it didn’t happen. Oh, they’d let it develop, gathering proof of it along the way, but at the last minute they’d step in and put a stop to it.
That was how this kind of thing usually worked, anyway…
In total darkness—a darkness whose like had never been experienced anywhere on Earth, or under it, or in the spaces between the stars—Millie gripped Jake’s hand as tightly as she could, and floated or drifted alongside her physical guide in the metaphysical Möbius Continuum. And in a hoarse whisper (mercifully a whisper) she began to say:
“Jake, there’s nothing—”
Don’t! Jake at once cut her off, as her spoken words gonged like cracked bells and caused her to give a massive start where he held her. And as their echoes gradually faded away: You only need to think whatever it is you want to say, and I’ll hear you anyway.
Telepathy? she said. You?
No, he answered. Well, between Liz and me…there’s something between us for sure. But not with you. It’s the Continuum, that’s all. I thought all you people had read up on it?
You did? she answered. I mean, I have, yes. But the reality of it is something else. The last time we were here, we were in and out. There was no time to look around…or to talk…or anything.
There’s nothing here, Jake reminded her. The Möbius Continuum is the Big Empty. We aren’t supposed to be here, not you or me or anybody. So anything we bring here or do here or cause to happen here is alien, a foreign body or event—almost a calamity—except there’s no one and nothing here but the Continuum itself to experience it. It’s like when you’re the first person in the pool on a dead calm morning; the water is still, perfect, like crystal…until you jump in and ruin everything, so that it can’t ever be the same again. When you speak out loud you’re simply adding to the splash, that’s all. But even thoughts have weight in the Möbius Continuum, which is why we can hear them.
That’s like—I don’t know—like poetry, she said, sounding surprised. It’s a side of you that we haven’t seen too much of. I would have liked Ben Trask to hear that.
Oh, really?
Yes. Sometimes I think he thinks you’re soulless—oh! (For she’d suddenly realized what she had said.) And:
Well, said Jake, that’s what we’re about to find out, isn’t it?
But I didn’t mean—
I know you didn’t. He reassured her. And to change the subject: Have you seen all you want to see?
But that’s what I was trying to say before, she answered. I mean, there isn’t anything to see, or to feel…or anything!
Oh, but there is something, Jake told her. Except you have to remain still and quiet to experience it. Do you want to try?
Yes, Millie answered at once. But it isn’t easy being quiet when there are so many questions I want to ask.
Questions I probably can’t answer, said Jake, ruefully. But okay, fire away. Only while you’re asking keep still and try to feel the Continuum.
She kept very still, unafraid with her hand in Jake’s, and said, If there’s nothing here, why isn’t it cold? And how can I breathe? And why don’t I—why don’t we—explode? I mean, this has to be a vacuum, the mother of all vacuums! Following which she shivered, before slowly continuing: Yet now, suddenly, I do feel cold. And I don’t want to explode. And my breathing…my breathing seems a lot more difficult!
But it’s all psychological, he answered, giving her hand a squeeze. And psychology and parapsychology don’t mix. You’re a telepath, and in E-Branch it’s common knowledge that the unexplained really does exist…it’s just that no one’s explained it yet, that’s all.
But—
Listen, Jake said. You’re right, there’s absolutely nothing here. No time for you to suffocate in, no space you can explode into. This is like a place before God. Or if that’s a blasphemy, then maybe this place is God—the Mind of God, where the only influence we can bring to bear is that of willpower. See, Nothing happens here except we will it. After all, that’s all there is here: you and me and our free wills. I know it’s heavy stuff, but in a place where even thoughts have wei
ght, surely our free will—our concentrated efforts of will—must be heavier still. Anyway, it works for me.
And you may believe me when I say I’m so very glad it does! Millie assured him “breathlessly.” And a moment later, Oh! What was that!?
He felt her small start and asked knowingly, Is there something?
Yes, she “whispered,” shrinking down into herself a little. Just then, I thought…I could swear that I felt something!
Me, too, he told her. That was the Continuum. It’s moving us along. It wants rid of us. Since we haven’t exercised our will, we must be thoughts without a purpose. Which tells me it’s time we moved on.
And she could actually feel them moving now, as if she were in tow and Jake heading in a certain direction. But as for left and right, forward and back, up and down, breeze in her face or a wind at her back: there was none of that. The Möbius Continuum made no allowance for physical points of reference.
Yet there were coordinates, and knowing them, Jake was able to move with a reassuring certainty of purpose and “direction.” In short, Millie knew that they were going somewhere.
You know a lot about it, don’t you? she said.
All inherited, he told her. And the more I use it, the more I seem to remember. I don’t have Harry’s genes, but whatever it was that made him tick, it’s ticking in me, too. And before she could answer him: We’re there.
The time-door had no frame; it was simply a hole in nothing. But beyond that hole there was something—an incredible something—which gave it a “frame of reference” if nothing else.
And Jake and Millie, they came to a halt on the threshold.
Past time, he told her then, and even his mental voice was “quiet,” humbled by the very concept. That’s the world’s entire past that you’re looking at. It’s the entire human race, all of it. Everyone who ever was, or who is now, right up to this very moment, had his or her start back there. It’s where our hominid ancestors came up out of Africa—where they became men—maybe half a million years ago. That’s what you’re seeing back there: our ancestors, their first half-million years.