Time Bomb and Zahndry Others Part 27

Baylor here*all of them Jumping into the same fifteen-to-six minute time slot."

I looked at Griff, saw his eyebrows go up. "Didn't we decide," I said carefully, "that sending more than one person into the same slot*?"

"As each comes back," Shaeffer went on as if I hadn't spoken, "you will immediately administer a sedative, before there can be any indications one way or the other as to what the Jumper has seen or done. Understand?"

For a long moment Griff just stood there, looking as flabbergasted as I felt. Beside me, Morgan stirred.

"Mr. Shaeffer," he said hesitantly, "I'd be the first to admit I'm not all that smart. But are you tryin' to say that if we don't know what the other Jumpers saw, then a lot of the problems go away?"

Shaeffer's mouth compressed into a tight line. "I'm hoping the paradoxes will, yes," he said. "It ought to work*it's a version of the Schrodinger's cat setup*" He broke off, took a deep breath.

"Anyway, we have to risk it; and we have to risk it now, Mr. Portland."

I looked at Morgan, expecting him to nod and take his position on the couch. "No," he said quietly.

I stared at him. We all did, for what seemed to be a very long time. "What did you say?" Shaeffer asked at last, very softly.

"I said no," Morgan told him, equally softly. "Sorry, Mr. Shaeffer, but even the way you got it I don't think it's safe enough. And if you're wrong..." He shook his head. "It all goes bad real quick."

"And you came to this conclusion all by yourself?" Shaeffer growled pointedly.

Morgan's forehead creased. "Just 'cause I never had much schooling doesn't mean I ain't got any common sense," he said without rancor.

"And common sense is important in abstract physics, is it?" Shaeffer bit out. He shifted his glare to Hale and Rennie. "All right. Which of you two put him up to this? Or would you rather the Marines upstairs ask the questions?""You don't need to do that," Morgan sighed. "It was Rennie who told me that you couldn't fiddle things so's it wouldn't be dangerous."

"Common sense may not be the best thing to go by here, Morgan," Griff put in quietly. "What about your sense of honor, your loyalty to the rest of us? What do they tell you?"

Morgan gave him a long look. "It's 'cause of that that I'm just quittin' straight out," he said. "Otherwise I'd prob'bly do what Hale thought I should: Jump, but stay as far as I could away from President Jeffers."

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Shaeffer ground out, turning his glare on Hale as his hand dipped briefly into his side coat pocket. "You're under arrest*both of you."

"On what charge?" Rennie asked calmly. "You had no legal authority to drag me back here to Banshee in the first place*there's been no declaration of martial law, and I wasn't served any kind of papers, Federal or otherwise. You have no power over me, Shaeffer*you or Griff. Arrest me and I'll sue your eyes out."

Behind him, the elevator opened to reveal two Marines. "These men are under house arrest," Shaeffer told them, pointing to Hale and Rennie. "Take them to their rooms and make sure they stay there." He looked at Morgan. "Last chance, Portland. Are you going to join them?"

Without a word, Morgan stepped over beside Rennie and Hale. Shaeffer nodded to the Marines and the entire group disappeared back into the elevator.

And as the doors closed on them, all of the starch suddenly seemed to go out of Shaeffer's backbone.

His hands went up to rub his face and he actually staggered, and I found myself wondering just how much sleep he'd gotten the night before. Probably not much. "Dr. Mansfield, you'd better call Ms.

Cosgrove down here."

I looked at Griff. "There's no way we can do this with just two Jumpers," I said.

He took a deep breath and nodded. "Adam's right, Mr. Shaeffer. Especially if you still plan to go with sedation after each Jump."

"I'd say it's obvious that idea's not going to work as is," Shaeffer bit out. "Just get Ms. Cosgrove down here*let me worry about procedure."

Griff pursed his lips and for a moment I thought he was going to argue. Then, without a word, he stepped over to the control board phone.

Kristin arrived about fifteen minutes later, looking even worse than Shaeffer did. Her eyes were red and half-lidded, her hair had the disheveled look of someone who'd spent the night doing more tossing and turning than actual sleeping, and her feet seemed to drag as she walked toward us from the elevator. I stepped forward to take her arm; she sent me a halfhearted glare and pulled back from my grasp.

"What's going on, Griff?" she asked.

"Mutiny," he told her grimly. "You and Adam seem to be the only Jumpers on our side at the moment."

"We*what?"

"Ms. Cosgrove," Shaeffer interrupted her, stepping over from the control station. "I understand you're still recovering from last night's Jump, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to do another one this morning."Kristin closed her eyes, and I saw a muscle in her cheek twitch. "All right," she sighed. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Same thing you tried to do yesterday; get President Jeffers to see you," Shaeffer told her. "We're going to put you in his private office on Air Force One fifteen minutes before the engine catches fire. When he sees you, you will stay in the room, hovering in front of him, until the clock in the room shows three minutes before the crash. That was*what, three-twenty-five, Pacific Time?"

"Right," Griff nodded. "The engine fire probably started a minute or two before that, though.

"Point," Shaeffer agreed, forehead furrowed in thought. "Yeah. All right, then make it three-twenty. At three-twenty exactly, Ms. Cosgrove, you are to move to a spot in front of the door and then end the Jump. Understood?"

Kristin hesitated. "What if he doesn't see me...?"

"He has to," Shaeffer said, very quietly. "He has to."

For a moment none of us said anything. Then Shaeffer took a deep breath. "No point in delaying it. This is it; let's go."

The lights flickered, Kristin's body sagged on the couch, and I turned to Shaeffer to wait for the other shoe to drop.

It did so immediately. "Mr. Sinn, I want you to wait in your quarters," he said. "When Ms. Cosgrove returns, she'll be put under immediate sedation, but I don't want there to be any chance at all she'll say something you'll hear."

Griff turned back from the control board, his eyes wide. "I thought you said*"

"I said the plan would need modification," Shaeffer cut him off. "This is that modification: adapting it to only two players. Problems?"

"Yes," I said with a sigh. "It isn't going to work."

"It's a perfectly reasonable*"

"No, it's not!" I snarled. For once, I was tired of tiptoeing around other people's feelings. "Think about it a second, Shaeffer. Whatever Kristin experiences on that plane, a long nap isn't going to make her forget it You're the one who mentioned Schrodinger's cat awhile back*do you really know how that experiment was supposed to work, or were you just spouting words?"

Shaeffer held his temper with obvious effort. "A gun is set up so that if a particular radioactive atom in a test sample decays in a given time, the gun goes off and kills the cat. If it doesn't decay, the cat lives."

So he did know. "Right," I nodded. "Do you also remember why there's no way to know what actually happened?"

Shaeffer pursed his lips. "If you open the box, the cat automatically dies."

"Right," I said softly. "Were you ultimately planning to kill Kristin?"

He closed his eyes and exhaled between his teeth; a hissing sound of defeat. "Then this really is it. Isn't.i.t."

My stomach churned with sympathetic pain. "Hang onto the bright side," I urged him. "He might see her; and if he does, I'll be able to talk to Kristin about it before I do my own Jump. Which means I'll know what the situation is before I go into it."

He gave me an odd look, as if being comforted by what he clearly regarded as an underling was outside his usual experience. Then, turning, he wandered off toward the elevators, hands clasped tightly behind him. Griff and I exchanged glances and silently settled down to wait.

We waited nearly ten minutes; and when it came, the snap of circuit breakers made me jump. We were crowded over Kristin's couch within seconds, all three of us. She gasped, eyes fluttering"What happened?" Shaeffer snapped. "Answer me! What happened?"

"Uh... uh... Griff," she managed, hand reaching up to grip at Griffs sleeve. Her eyes were wet as she blinked tears into them; wet, and strangely wild. "Griff*oh, G.o.d. It worked*it really worked. He saw me!"

President Jeffers's Air Force One office was small but sumptuous, something that rather jarred against his public image as one of the common people. The room's decor registered only peripherally, though, as I concentrated my full attention on the man standing behind the oaken desk in shirtsleeves and loosened tie... the man who was likewise concentrating his full attention on me.

Or, more precisely, on my Banshee image. Or, even more precisely, on Kristin's Banshee image.

According to the clock I could just see on the side wall*and the settings Griff had used*I would be overlapping her Jump for another thirty seconds. Enough time for me to orient myself and to get into position in front of the office door where she would be when she ended her Jump. Ready to take over from her.

a.s.suming, of course, it wasn't just Kristin's image Jeffers could see. In that case, I'd have to abort the Jump and we'd be forced to wait until Kristin could try it again.

I watched the second hand on the clock... and when the half minute was up, I began to drift back toward the door. Holding my nonexistent breath.

Jeffers's eyes adjusted their focus to follow me.

I continued to ease back; and with my full concentration on him, it was a shock when the universe suddenly went dark around me. For a second I lost control and snapped to the length of my tether toward the front of the plane before my brain caught up with me and I realized that I had simply gone into the honey-combed metal of the office door. Fortunately, Jeffers moved slower than I did, and I was back in the corridor outside his office when he hesitantly opened the door. His eyes flicked momentarily around, found me again. His lips moved*soundlessly, of course, as far as I was concerned. But Griff had long ago made all of us learn how to lip-read: Am I supposed to follow you?

I nodded and pointed toward the rear of the plane, watching Jeffer's face closely. There was no reaction that I could detect. Whatever it was he was seeing, it didn't seem to match the nonexistent body my subconscious persisted in giving me during Jumps. Which meant hand motions, expressions*body language of all sorts*were out.Which left me exactly one method of communication. I hoped it would be enough.

Carefully*mindful of both the deadline breathing down Jeffers's neck and the danger of him losing track of me if I moved too fast*I began backing down the corridor toward the rear of the plane.

For a moment Jeffers held his ground, a whole raft of conflicting emotions playing across his face. Then, almost reluctantly, he followed. I had another flicker of darkness as someone came up from behind and walked through me, nodding greetings to Jeffers as they pa.s.sed. For a bad second I thought Jeffers was going to point me out to the other man; but it was clear that he still wasn't entirely sure he wasn't hallucinating, and after a few casual words he left the other and continued on toward me. I got my breathing started again and resumed my own movement, and a minute later we were standing across from the rear door.

And I ran full tilt into my inability to speak or even pantomime. The parachutes were racked across from the door, inconspicuous but clearly visible... but moving over and hovering by them didn't seem to give Jeffers the hint. I tried moving away, then back again*tried backing directly into and through one of the neat packs and then back out*tried moving practically to Jeffer's nose, back to the chutes, and then to the door.

Nothing.

I gritted my teeth. With the usual fouling of my time sense I had no idea how many seconds we had left before the balloon went up, but I knew there weren't a lot of them. There had to be some other way to get the message across to Jeffers*there had to be*but for the life of me I couldn't come up with one. Back and forth I went, parachute to door back to parachute, repeating the motions for lack of anything better to do, all the whole racking my brain trying to think of something else*anything else*that I could do. Back and forth...

On what must have been the tenth repet.i.tion, he finally got it.

You want me to jump from the plane? his lips said. I started to nod, caught myself, and instead tried moving my whole body up and down.

For a wonder, he interpreted the gesture properly. Is someone going to shoot us down? he asked.

Close enough. I nodded again and moved back to the parachutes. Any second nowJeffers didn't move. What about the others? he asked, his hand sweeping around in a gesture that encompa.s.sed the entire plane I can't just leave them to die.

I blinked, feeling my stomach tightening within me. Jeffers's ability to think and care about average American people had been one of my major reasons for voting for him in the first place; to have that a.s.set suddenly turn into a liability was something I would never have expected. I thought furiously, trying to figure out some way to answer himFrom outside came a dull thud... and an instant later the floor beneath Jeffers tilted violently, throwing him through me and into the parachute rack.

I spun around, heart thudding in my ears, half expecting to see him sprawled on the floor, dazed or unconscious from the impact. It was almost a shock to find him on his feet, fully alertAnd pulling on one of the parachutes.

I didn't stop to try and figure it out. Pulling laterally to the direction of my tether, I ducked outside for a moment, trying to estimate how much time Jeffers had before we were too close to the ground. Thirtyseconds, perhaps, depending on whether the winds would be blowing him toward or away from the mountain sloping away directly beneath us. I went back inside, and to my mild surprise found Jeffers already in harness and fighting his way uphill along the sloping floor toward the door. I held my breath...

and as the plane almost leveled for a second, he lunged and managed to catch the lever before the floor angled beneath him again.

I glanced back toward the parachute rack again to fix in my mind exactly which chute he'd taken; and as I did so, something skittering along the wall caught my eye. It was a flat package, covered in bright orange: one of the emergency packs that were supposed to be clipped to the front webbing of each of the chutes. I looked back at Jeffers, but before I could get in position to see his chest the plane almost-leveled againAnd in a single convulsive motion he shoved the door hard against the gale of the air outside and squeezed his way out.

I dropped straight down through the floor and luggage compartment, falling as far below the crippled plane as my tether allowed. Below and behind me, Jeffers tumbled end over end, shirt billowing in the breeze. If he'd hit something on the way out*if he was unconsciousThe drogue chute snaked its way out of the pack, followed immediately by the main chute. It filled out, stabilized... and for the first time the reality of what I'd just done hit me.

We'd used the Banshee machinery to save a man's life.

All the private agony I'd had to endure throughout my time at Banshee*all the pent-up frustration of watching disasters I couldn't stop*all of it seemed to flow out of me in that one glorious moment. All the millions of dollars*all the backhanded bureaucratic comments we'd had to put up with*it was suddenly worth it. Let them scoff now! We'd saved a life*a President's life, no less. And on top of it, we'd even done so without any of Rennie's and Hale's fears about changing the past coming true. The minute I was back, Shaeffer could direct the searchers at the crash site to move their operations back a couple of miles to where I could see Jeffers coming down....

And as my attention shifted from Jeffers's parachute to the rocky, tree-covered slope below, the flood of wonder and pride washing over me evaporated. Beyond his landing area, perhaps a mile further down the slope, a small village was clearly visible.

A village he'd be able to walk to in an hour.

I don't remember much about the minutes immediately following the Jump. There was, I know, a lot of shaking of my arms and some fairly insistent use of my name, but for some reason I was unable to really come out of it, and after a short time the voices and hands faded into blackness and disturbing dreams.

Eventually, though, the dreams faded. When I was finally able to drag myself back to full awareness, I found I was back upstairs in my room, lying on my bed with an intravenous tube running into my arm. I lifted the arm slightly, frowning at the tube.

"Just relax and don't try to move," a voice said from my other side.

I turned my head, and with a complete lack of surprise found Griff sitting beside the bed.

"What*?" I managed to croak before my voice gave out."You came out of the Jump in something approximating a hysterical state," he said. "Babbled something about Jeffers bailing out and changing the past and then collapsed. Shaeffer's had them pumping stuff into your arm ever since."

I glanced again at the needle and shivered. "How... what time is it?"

He checked his wrist. "Almost four-thirty."

Which meant I'd been out of commission for something close to three hours. "What's been happening with the search?"

Griff shrugged fractionally, the lines around his eyes and mouth tightening a bit. "Nothing, as far as I know. Shaeffer's been running back and forth between here and the communications room, not wanting to launch anything major until he could talk to you and find out just what you were talking about back there."

A shiver went down my back. "He got out of the plane," I whispered. "The parachute opened okay, and he was on his way down.... but there was a town an hour's walk downslope of him. There's no way he could have missed it."

Griff swore under his breath as he scooped up the phone and punched at the b.u.t.tons. "Get me Shaeffer...

Mr. Shaeffer? This is Griff. Adam's awake, and we've got a h.e.l.l of a problem.... Okay, and if you've got more of those maps maybe you'd better bring them... Right."

He hung up and looked back at me. "You think you'll be able to locate the exact spot where he went down?"

I shivered again. "With that town sitting practically beneath him? Of course I can."

He pursed his lips and fell silent.

Shaeffer arrived a couple of minutes later, a stack of his fine-detail maps in his arms. "Glad to see you awake," he said shortly, his mind clearly on other things as he all but pushed Griff out of his chair and sat down, laying the maps across my chest. "Show me."

I propped myself up on my elbows and began sorting through them. Someone had sketched out the plane's trajectory across the maps in red, and it took me only a minute to find the one I needed. "Here," I said, tracing a circle around the spot with my finger. "He came down about here."

Shaeffer's eyes were shining as he glanced at the number in the map's corner and then at the spot I'd indicated. "All right," he breathed. "All right. Important point, now: did you notice whether or not he had an orange emergency pack attached to his parachute?"

"No, he didn't. In fact, I think I saw it on the floor just before he jumped out. It must have come off while he was getting into the chute."

Shaeffer grunted. "Good. I guess. Eliminates the problem right away of why there wasn't a transponder for the search team to tag onto. Unfortunately, it also means he didn't have any food or water with him, either. Any chance he could have had trouble with the landing itself? Would another Jump be a good idea?"