Chapter 22: Going Backward, Part Two
On their second attempt at time travel, Meridiem discovered that she couldn’t skip back in the past, but had to travel through every moment in-between. At least she could control the speed.
That meant that they had to go to the Sun first before they could reach their destination.
“This is ridiculous,” Gnosi commented as they waited inside an opaque bubble on the surface of the sun. “Why is it easy to jump 146 million kilometers in space and two days in time, but impossible to go six kilometers down and one day back?”
“Energy consumption,” muttered Meridiem, concentrating on five or six things at the same time.
“And why is it perfectly safe bathing in the unimaginable radiation sea of the sun, while getting too close to a hundred kiloton bomb is enough to kill us?”
Meridiem gave an exasperated glance over to Gus.
“Because,” Gus answered, “the energy of the sun is a relative constant, while a nuclear explosion is constantly increasing. This instability is hard to handle, even in stop time. Now there’s some interesting work in mathematics going on in recent years, something called ‘chaos theory’, but I was never able to wrap my head around it. A pity, because we could probably model a perfect radiation shield that let in enough energy to power time manipulation if either of us knew it. The sun has fluctuations as well, but as a percentage of total output these are small enough that the current shield model can easily handle them. Plus you Markists seem to have a natural affinity for sunlight, something I’d love to study in the lab when we get back from all this. Any other questions?”
Gnosi shrugged. “Don’t mind me. I’m just trying to be useful—you two are doing all the hard work.”
“Sorry to make things worse,” Meridiem announced, “but I just figured out that I can’t go forward in time, only back.”
“I was afraid of that,” Gus said. “My equations had the limitation that you can only fast-travel through any one moment in time once. I was hoping by not telling you that the rule wouldn’t apply.”
“So if for example we pass 1980 to try 1975 and later discover we should have stopped at 1980, it will have become impossible?” asked Gnosi.
“Yes, unless we change history, which removes the limitation.”
“That’s just great!”
“Hey, maybe we’ll get this done on the first try, and don’t have to worry about missed opportunities!” Gus said with a cocky grin.
“In any case,” Meridiem warned the group, “brace yourselves.”
10:03 am on June 26, 1985. Nevada Test Site, Yucca Flat, Area 2. 381 meters underground.
From the bright light of the sun, the three travelers suddenly found themselves in seeming blackness.
For a moment, Gus was driven to his knees, his mind so fogged that it seemed he had forgotten how to stand. With an effort, he raised himself up on his cane. He was going to retrieve a flashlight from his pocket, but he needn’t have bothered, as he found he was soon able to see quite well from the light of a nuclear explosion. It was only in contrast to the sun that this bright light was momentarily too dim to see by. He found that Meridiem and Gnosi had also been knocked off their feet. Unlike him, they were easily able to stand unaided.
The group looked around. They were in a narrow, rocky chamber. The walls and ceiling were gouged out into deep spiral cuts, looking as if they had been routed out by heavy machinery in the recent past. The bomb, a large cylinder measuring a meter wide by three meters long, occupied most of the space in the chamber. A maze of cables and pipes surrounding the bomb trailed out of sight, into the depths of a tunnel.
“I’ve never actually seen one of these sites in person,” Gus commented.
Gnosi meanwhile removed his backpack and handed the necessary paperwork to Meridiem. “Good luck,” he said.
“Thanks.”
After getting the flashlight from Gus, she started crawling down the tunnel. Gnosi sat down to wait, while Gus decided that getting up was too much work, and so remained leaning on the umbrella.
After a while, Gus noticed that he was growing weaker. He tried edging farther away from the bomb, but it was a very small chamber, and there was no way that he’d be able to escape the way that Meridiem had gone. He was about to tell Gnosi to go himself, when Meridiem returned, her arms clutched to her chest. Seeing the look of distress on Gus’ face, she took them all back to the safety of the Sun.
“Well?” asked Gnosi. “Any luck?”
Meridiem shook her head. “The tunnel got too narrow long before I reached the limit of how far I could go. I did find a few things, though.” She opened her arms to show them her discoveries. “This lantern, which appears to be in good working order.”
“Well at least we’ll be safe from grues now,” remarked Gnosi with a knowing smile.
“From what?” asked Gus.
“Never mind. Anything else?”
“A walkie-talkie.”
Gus took the item from Meridiem in order to examine it. “Wow, this is an antique,” he said. He pointed to a worn brass label on its bottom. “See? Made in 1956. Now if we ever figured out how to start time during an explosion without being incinerated, we could use this to communicate with the outside world.”
Both items were placed inside Gnosi’s backpack.
“That’s a big ‘if’,” commented Meridiem. “The bigger issue is that hit we took coming in, and the damage you two took from being too close.”
“What damage?” Gnosi asked.
“Take a look at your face,” Meridiem said, handing him her pocket compact.
Gnosi opened the compact and used the mirror to inspect himself. He found that his cheeks and forehead were splotched with broken blood vessels under the skin.
“Going forward,” Meridiem continued, “we’ll need to find explosions where we can be far enough away not to get hurt. Also, we need to know for sure that there’s someone there we can contact. All I was able to rescue was this little lizard.” From her pocket she produced the creature, still frozen in time and mostly curled in on itself. It would be about 4 in [10 cm] long if stretched out from nose to tail. The thin tail was a bright sky blue, while the body was brown with white and black stripes running from nose to back legs. The legs were quite short compared to the proportions of the rest of its body.
“It’s a skink,” said Gnosi, taking it to look it over. “They have this neat defense mechanism: if a predator bites onto the bright blue tail, they can detach it and run away, then regrow a new tail a few months later.”
“Too bad we can’t escape a bomb blast by jettisoning a useless body part,” commented Gus.
“He looked so cute and defenseless!” said Meridiem. “I couldn’t just leave him there.”
“No, I suppose not,” said Gnosi, handing the reptile back to Meridiem, who slipped it back into her pocket.
“Getting back on topic, we need to be able to detect people as well as explosions,” said Gus.
“I don’t know how you’re going to justify doing that with my mark,” said Meridiem.
“I don’t have to,” said Gus. “Instead, we’re going to use your mark.”
“My mark?” asked Gnosi.
They found themselves once again in Meridiem’s mental room.
“From here, you should be able to combine your powers,” Gus explained. Pointing at Meridiem, he said, “You can detect power sources.” Turning to Gnosi, he added, “And you can detect souls.”
“Oh!” Gnosi exclaimed. “I guess I can.” He held his hand out to Meridiem. “Want to give it a try?”
& & &
“So what about Three Mile Island?”
“Not enough radiation released. We’d be stuck inside the reactor, and nothing we’d leave behind would survive long enough to be found.”
“We could at least give it a shot.”
“Well that’s the thing—every time we visit a new location, we’re going to take a radiation hit as I get my shield adjusted. So basically we can only make a handful of visits before…”
“Keeling over?”
“Basically. Therefore, we need to go for the best bets.”
11:33 am on October 30, 1961. Mityushikha Bay Testing Range on the island of Severny, part of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago of Russia, far north of the Arctic Circle.
This time they had plenty of free space, since this test was conducted above ground. The explosion, as seen from the ground was like a second sun, if the sun happened to fill most of the sky above your head.
“That’s got to be the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” Gnosi commented in a small voice.
“Tsar Bomba,” Gus said, nodding grimly to himself. “60 megatons, the biggest man-made explosion of all time.” He noticed that it was getting harder to breathe.
“So, which way?” Meridiem asked Gnosi.
Gnosi collected himself. “Uh…that way.” He led them towards the coast. “Watch your step.”
Gus had expected that the warning was in reference to gopher holes, but as they continued onward, what they found were small frozen rodents, more and more of them as they got closer to the island’s edge.
In a few minutes they had reached the edge of a cliff. At one time, this was a river bed, the location of a waterfall spilling an unnamed river into the Arctic Sea.
There still was a waterfall here, but not one made of water. Instead it was the rodents, numbering in the hundreds or thousands, all blindly diving off of the cliff side to their doom.
“Are they running away from the bomb?” Meridiem asked, looking over the edge in horror.
“They’re lemmings,” Gnosi explained dispassionately. “Pushed into madness and suicide by population pressure. They were doing this long before Man came here.” He sighed. “And now humanity is doing the same thing.”
“Don’t go asking if we deserve to be saved again,” Gus warned him sternly. “Now is there a man on this island, or not?”
Gnosi nodded in acknowledgement. “Over here.”
& & &
Twenty minutes of slow trekking later—punctuated by two visits to Meridiem’s mental room so Gnosi could heal them of their accumulated exhaustion—they finally reached a shelter, where a lone man was staring out of a window with welder’s goggles over his eyes.
Gus opened the door of the shelter. “At last!” he exclaimed. “We have found our savior…”
“I can’t go in, there’s not enough power for me,” Meridiem reported, finding herself stopped by an invisible force at the boundary of the door. “That means that this man would have survived the blast, along with anything you give him.” She noticed that Gus hadn’t moved. “Professor? What’s wrong?”
“Him,” Gus answered. “Why did it have to be him?”
The frozen observer’s nametag identified him as “Юрий Андропов”, which was Cyrillic for “Yuri Andropov”.
Gnosi confirmed that nobody else on the entire archipelago was close enough for Meridiem to reach without running out of power. They could start time, pulling Meridiem into the shelter, and thereby survive themselves. But they would be in the custody of one of the most virulent Communists in history.
They left their materials with him anyway before leaving. To no one’s surprise, this act failed to change history.