Chapter 14. We Meet Andrew
But I didn't get to see his reaction, at least not quite the way I had envisioned. When we got downstairs, Angel was waiting for us in the big room. She looked into my eyes for a very promising second and then dropped hers and walked up to Shep and stuck out her hand.
"Hi," she said. "I'm Angel. Welcome back to—I was going to say the real world, but I'll just say the waking world. Mitch has told you about the TSA?"
"Yes," answered Shep. "Hi, Angel, nice to meet you. And nice to be awake. And, uh, thanks for saving me—us."
"You're welcome. Um, Andrew Kirk," she started, and then looked at me. "My dad," she added, "would like to see both of you. Um, now, if that's okay."
"Let me check my Palm Pilot," said Shep. He was always quicker with the witty repartee. "Nope, I seem to be clear for the next hour or so." He grinned at her.
She smiled back, but she didn't simper or bat her eyelashes or anything, the way the ladies often do when Shep repartees them. "Good," she said. "I'll take you."
We walked together, more or less three abreast with Angel in the middle. She tried to turn her head back and forth, to talk to both of us equally, but I think she actually talked more to me. She would say, "That's the library," to Shep and then turn to me and say, "You've been there, right? How did you like it?" and look at me while I answered.
She took us down toward the lab, the building I'd been in to see Nicholas Durwood, but then around past it to either a wing sticking out of the back of it or a separate building—there was a thick grove of trees either between the two buildings or at the corner where they met, so you couldn't tell which it was.
We went into the new building or wing and past the grand staircase that was in this grand entrance hall, and Andrew Kirk's office was there on the back of the building. When Angel opened the door, Shep and I were both stunned motionless, because the whole back wall of the office was windows, and instead of the view you would expect from that spot, it looked as if we were high on the bank of a huge river looking across to the other side, all craggy and forested, like a Bierstadt painting of the Hudson or something.
Andrew Kirk got up from wherever he'd been sitting and came over to us, and Angel introduced us. He was a little shorter than me, about Shep's height, but broader—stocky. Not fat at all but like a former college football player maybe. His hair was gray around the edges but otherwise dark, which surprised me, as Angel's was so blond, but his eyes were blue like hers. He had a good handshake and a good smile, a wide mouth and a square face, and was actually good-looking for an old guy, I guess.
He took us over to a bunch of furniture at the left end of the room and put Shep and me on a couch with our backs to the windows, facing a wall of bookcases. He sat facing us, and Angel sat to our right, against the short wall of the room.
After he'd asked if we wanted coffee or anything, and we'd declined politely on account of just having finished breakfast, he got down to business.
"We're—all of us are very glad that you're both all right, that we were able to help you so that you both survived your accident with no lasting damage," he said. "Make no mistake about that. At the same time, you do realize that your being brought here was, uh, unauthorized?" He glanced at Angel, who nodded and got a little pink.
"Yes, sir," I said. "We know that it was pure serendipity from our point of view. And we're very grateful."
"Absolutely," said Shep. "Thank you. There isn't any way we can repay you except just to say thank you, also on behalf of our folks."
"You're most welcome," Kirk said. "And although your—rescue was, as I said, unplanned and unauthorized, please don't think that we have any objections to helping people, or any reason not to help people. On the other hand, we obviously can't help everyone who needs it or deserves it. As a general thing, we don't actively go looking for people to help, people who've had accidents or whatever. But again, this doesn't mean that we aren't very happy about Angel's—crusade to save you, happy about its success, and so on."
He pursed his lips and looked down for a moment. "Angel has told you that we'll be returning you to the exact moment—"
"Are you going to wipe our memories?" interrupted Shep.
Kirk smiled. "Interesting," he said. "No, we're not. First of all, despite the powers you seem to be ascribing to us, we can't. Second, what would be the point? You will tell people about your experiences here, or you won't. They will believe you, or they won't. Either way, there isn't anything you or anybody else can do about it. There is no way for you—or any unauthorized person—to access the TSA without the help of someone here."
"So it's okay to tell people?" I asked. I'd sort of thought they'd swear us to secrecy.
He nodded. "I have the feeling that you'll be pretty discreet about who you tell," he said. "You'll probably want to tell your immediate families. They'll probably believe you. You probably won't want to tell anyone else, because they'd probably think you were delusional, or nuts, or at least a little weird. 'Beam me up, Scotty.' And the name is purely coincidental, by the way."
It took me a minute and Shep was quicker. "Oh—Captain Kirk!" he said.
"Yes, and please don't call me that—although I am well aware that some of my associates do, behind my back." He smiled again.
"Sir," I said hesitantly. "You said that there's no danger of us being able to come back without the help of somebody here. Would we—is it possible—could we ever come back? Or"—I rushed on—"is it possible to, to get in touch with somebody here, like, I don't know, do you have the equivalent of phone or e-mail?" I sneaked a glance in Angel's direction. She was looking at me, but I couldn't read her expression.
"It's very interesting that you should bring that up," said Kirk. "You"—he turned to Shep—"mentioned a few minutes ago that there was no way you could ever repay us. Actually, there might be. And that would involve returning." He sat back and looked at our faces. I don't know about Shep, but I was grinning with amazed delight and relief.
"Sure!" said Shep. His voice had a grin in it too. "We'd be happy to."
"Not so fast," said Kirk, but he was smiling too. "Don't you want to know something about what you'd be getting into?"
"We'd be glad to hear anything you'd care to tell us." I'd finally got my vocal cords working again. "But basically, we'd really be happy if we could repay you in some way, and we'd really be happy to be able to come back." I glanced over at Angel, and she was smiling too.
"Well." Kirk stopped and thought for a moment. "You both know the basics of the TSA—what it is, and how it works. Or, not how in the sense of the mechanics, but the fact that there are parallel worlds, all of which we can access from here at any point on the time line of that world—with a few exceptions that aren't relevant at the moment. Right?"
We both nodded. I was not at all convinced that I understood anything about the TSA, but I wasn't about to say so and possibly jeopardize our chance to come back. Shep knew even less than I did, because everything he did know was what I'd told him, but he was keeping quiet too.
"What you probably don't know," Kirk continued, "is that we think it's possible to make changes in a parallel world without screwing up—without even changing—that world's history very much. What has actually happened seems to have a—a certain resilience, so that if a change is made at an earlier point, then from that point on, history seems to work extra-hard to get itself back, as nearly as possible, to where it was. So a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo, as the old adage has it, does not cause a blizzard in New York.
"If we went back in time"—he was looking at me—"and killed your great-grandfather, your great-grandmother would then, in the new time line that we had created, marry someone else, maybe your dead great-grandfather's brother, or cousin, or something, so that she would bear your grandfather—"
"Shep's grandfather," I broke in. "My grandmother. Our moms are cousins."
"Really!" He looked at both of us with a kind of amazed smile. "Better and better."
/> "I'm sorry, sir," I said. "I interrupted you."
"Yes. Well, what I was saying is that although the person we killed would be out of the equation, things would adjust themselves so that there would be the least possible resultant change. Your great-grandmother would marry someone and produce your grandmother and"—he looked at Shep—"your grandfather, and the two of you, or two very similar people, would in due course be born anyway.
"Which is why," he went on with a little smile, "it probably wouldn't do much good to kill Hitler as a baby, or make sure he was never born. Someone else would simply step into his place in history, someone who might be just as bad, who might even be worse. Because all the people who were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and in the fighting in the Second World War would somehow end up dead anyway.
"I should say that we're not completely clear yet on how this actually works. It does seem to be the case that if something completely anomalous happens, something that could not even remotely have been predicted, we can go in and remove the anomaly, and history will continue as it would have without the anomaly.
"In other words, if in some time line Hitler had arisen in a perfectly stable political situation, rather than the desperate straits in which Germany found itself in the post–World War I era, and had somehow managed to come to power and cause all the horrors that he did cause, his appearance on the scene would be an anomaly, one that could never have been predicted from the actual situation. And in that case, we could—we think we could—go in and remove him before he came to power, and things would go along as one would expect, would have expected.
"Does that make any sort of sense?"
"It's pretty confusing," I said, trying to sound interested and eager to hear more, which I was.
He smiled again. "It is indeed. We're still trying to work out what is and is not an anomaly and how to tell the difference, and whether or not removing the anomaly actually works, and whether, if it does work, it improves the situation or not."
"Is that what you want us to do?" asked Shep. "Come back and help you do research?"
"Not exactly," answered Kirk. "We have a—project in the works. Of course we have a lot of projects in the works, involved mainly with trying to answer the questions I've just listed. But there's one rather different project, for which we need two young men who are close friends. Two young men who are actually related are even better. Thanks to Angel, you two rather fell into our laps, so instead of going out and looking for people and recruiting them, we thought we might offer it to you two first.
"You have to realize that although there is a certain urgency about this particular project, we have the luxury of time in all our projects. Because we can access any point in time from the TSA, we don't ever have to rush. We can spend as much time as we like here, preparing. So there's no hurry, no time pressure. Which is why we haven't gone recruiting."
"Whatever it is," said Shep, "we're in." He looked at me. "Right?"
"Absolutely," I nodded.
"Excellent," said Kirk, and Angel smiled at me.
"There's just one thing," I went on, carefully avoiding Shep's eyes. " As you said, we're probably going to tell our families about this, and they're probably going to believe us. When we tell them about this project—we don't need to know any details, but—is it going to be dangerous?"
Shep began protesting loudly, but I held up a hand and he stopped.
"It won't make any difference to us," I added quickly. "We'll do it anyway—we'll be delighted to do it. We just need to know how to sell it."
Kirk was nodding. "I understand. You can tell your mothers, your parents that you will definitely not be in any sort of physical danger, and the only mental or emotional danger will be that of being thrust into a different time line, much like finding yourselves here in the TSA. We don't anticipate that it will cause you other than momentary disorientation, certainly no lasting harm of any kind."
"Great!" I was grinning my relief as Shep chimed in, "It won't be a problem at all."
"So—when do we come back?" I asked.
"Wait," Shep interrupted. "Why do we need to come back? Why can't we just stay and do it—then it's a done deal, and our folks really can't object."
"That's exactly why," said Kirk. "I'm a parent"—he looked over at Angel, trying to make it a stern look—"and I would appreciate and expect the courtesy of being consulted, if only in a pro forma manner, if my child were to be involved with people I didn't know doing something mysterious that I knew nothing about. I would be somewhat upset if I found out about all this afterward.
"Whereas I would be favorably disposed toward the mysterious strangers and inclined to look favorably on their proposal if I knew they had rescued and ministered to my child when she was hurt and then sent her home for my fiat before having her do a job for them."
"Gotcha," said Shep, which I thought was a little disrespectful.
"Very good point, sir," I said. "So when do we leave, and when do we come back?"
"You can leave right now," he said. "You were on your way home when the accident occurred?" We nodded. "So we put you back where you were, and you go home, and you spend—let's see, it was a Thursday, you spend the weekend at home and come back Monday morning. That will give you plenty of time to tell your families and reassure them, and also for you two to talk it over and see if you have any further questions or concerns, which you can then bring up when you get back here."
Shep put his hand up. "Wait," he said slowly. "Why can't we—I'm not sure I can explain this, but why can't we just stay and it can be after the weekend? Or no, I guess that won't work. Why can't you put us back and pull us out again—what I'm trying to say is, if we spend the weekend at home, we spent the weekend at home, so we don't actually have to do it. Right? We can just cut to the chase."
"I understand what you mean," said Kirk, "and it won't work. We can't pull you out of your time line at a time you haven't actually lived until. You have to go through it. We can look ahead and see that you passed the math test"—he was looking at Angel again—"but even so, you still have to actually take the math test. You can't skip portions of your life.
"So for us here, no time needs to elapse. We can put you back and then go directly to Monday morning and pull you out again, but you have to actually live through those hours.
"A corollary of that is that we can't go ahead in our own time line—all of us here are from the same time line—beyond what one of us has actually lived on the ground, in reality, in that time line. So we can only look ahead and see that you passed the math test if one of us has gone through the intervening time to the moment that the grades are posted. So we can't find out our own futures.
"We can go ahead in parallel time lines that are close to ours and see how our equivalent in that time line did on her math test—this is all very confusing, I know, and not something you're liable to need. So let's just keep to what you do need, which is that you have to go back and live through until Monday."
"Interesting," said Shep, shaking his head.
"Right—maybe we don't need to know it," I added, "but it's really interesting. Thank you for explaining it."
"You're welcome." Kirk grinned. "I somehow always tend to get carried away when I'm talking about this stuff. At least your eyes didn't glaze over. And thanks for saying it was interesting. Now Angel will take you to the labs and see that you get started on your way home, and we'll see you again after the weekend—your weekend."
He stood up and held out his hand, and the interview was definitely over.