have to say that last part aloud. He got it. I could see his so-called face icing over. The poor bastard just wanted to talk. He thought he was still my friend. Well, boo-hoo. This was his first day dealing directly with walkies, and it was about time he learned how we felt about each other. I didn’t take this job to win the Miss Congeniality award.
He became all business, which is just what I had intended.
“The snatch is to 1955 Arizona. A Lockheed Constellation.It still has about twenty minutes, 55time, and then it’s going to lose most of its right wing. All the team is still aboard. They’re looking for the gun and trying to finish the snatch at the same time. Indications from the scanners are still inconclusive. We can’t tell if you’ll find it. It might be possible.”
I thought briefly of the period jokes inherent in losing one’s right wing over Arizona, then shoved it out of my mind.
“Give me the bridge, then,” I said. “I’m going back.”
He didn’t argue, though he might have. It’s a breach of temporal security to send somebody back who’s not replacing somebody else. I suspect he wouldn’t have minded if I rode it down and bought myself a piece of Arizona real estate. For whatever reason, he gave the order. One of his scurvy underlings played with his buttons and the bridge moved out over the sorting floor. I slammed through the door and out onto it, ten meters above the shouts and screams and curses of the passengers who’d already come through from 1955. They would be the first-class people. There is a special indignant quality to their shouts. They had paid the extra fee, and now
this.
I shall write my congressman, Cecily, really I shall.
I paused at the end of the bridge where it touched the narrow strip of floor that ended in the uptime side of the Gate. I always do. I’ve gone through the damn thing a thousand times, but it’s not something one ever does lightly. Down below me, somebody was demanding to speak to the stewardess. No kidding. He really was.
The poor fellow thought he had problems.
* * *
In the twentieth century people used to jump out of airplanes with silk canopies folded into packs on their backs. The canopies were called parachutes, and what they did was—theoretically—open up and retard one’s fall to the ground. They did this for fun. It was called skydiving, aptly enough.
Trying to understand how somebody who could expect to live seventy
years
would take that sort of chance—with a body the contemporary medicine men could heal only imperfectly or notat all—how, in spite of that, they could take that first step out the door of the plane, helped me some in dealing with the trip through the Gate. Not that I ever understood why those people jumped: 20ths don’t have the brains of a sow, that’s well known. But even
they
didn’t actually enjoy it. What they did was sublimate the universal fear of falling into another part of the brain: the part that laughs. Laughter is an interrupted defense mechanism. They’d interrupt their fear of falling so well they could pretend to themselves that jumping out of an airplane was fun.
With all that, I’m convinced that even the most experienced of them had to hesitate at the door. They might have done it so many times they no longer noticed it, but it was there.
It’s the same way with me. Nobody watching would have seen me break stride as I came to the end of the bridge and stepped into the Gate. But that moment of gut-clutching fear was there.
The trip through the Gate is different every time. It is instantaneous, and it’s plenty of time to go insane. It is a zone of simultaneity where I become, for a time too short to measure or remember and too long to endure, all things that have ever been. I encounter myself in the Gate. I create myself, then create the universe and emerge into my creation. I fall downtime to the beginning of the universe and then bounce back to a time elsewhen. That
He became all business, which is just what I had intended.
“The snatch is to 1955 Arizona. A Lockheed Constellation.It still has about twenty minutes, 55time, and then it’s going to lose most of its right wing. All the team is still aboard. They’re looking for the gun and trying to finish the snatch at the same time. Indications from the scanners are still inconclusive. We can’t tell if you’ll find it. It might be possible.”
I thought briefly of the period jokes inherent in losing one’s right wing over Arizona, then shoved it out of my mind.
“Give me the bridge, then,” I said. “I’m going back.”
He didn’t argue, though he might have. It’s a breach of temporal security to send somebody back who’s not replacing somebody else. I suspect he wouldn’t have minded if I rode it down and bought myself a piece of Arizona real estate. For whatever reason, he gave the order. One of his scurvy underlings played with his buttons and the bridge moved out over the sorting floor. I slammed through the door and out onto it, ten meters above the shouts and screams and curses of the passengers who’d already come through from 1955. They would be the first-class people. There is a special indignant quality to their shouts. They had paid the extra fee, and now
this.
I shall write my congressman, Cecily, really I shall.
I paused at the end of the bridge where it touched the narrow strip of floor that ended in the uptime side of the Gate. I always do. I’ve gone through the damn thing a thousand times, but it’s not something one ever does lightly. Down below me, somebody was demanding to speak to the stewardess. No kidding. He really was.
The poor fellow thought he had problems.
* * *
In the twentieth century people used to jump out of airplanes with silk canopies folded into packs on their backs. The canopies were called parachutes, and what they did was—theoretically—open up and retard one’s fall to the ground. They did this for fun. It was called skydiving, aptly enough.
Trying to understand how somebody who could expect to live seventy
years
would take that sort of chance—with a body the contemporary medicine men could heal only imperfectly or notat all—how, in spite of that, they could take that first step out the door of the plane, helped me some in dealing with the trip through the Gate. Not that I ever understood why those people jumped: 20ths don’t have the brains of a sow, that’s well known. But even
they
didn’t actually enjoy it. What they did was sublimate the universal fear of falling into another part of the brain: the part that laughs. Laughter is an interrupted defense mechanism. They’d interrupt their fear of falling so well they could pretend to themselves that jumping out of an airplane was fun.
With all that, I’m convinced that even the most experienced of them had to hesitate at the door. They might have done it so many times they no longer noticed it, but it was there.
It’s the same way with me. Nobody watching would have seen me break stride as I came to the end of the bridge and stepped into the Gate. But that moment of gut-clutching fear was there.
The trip through the Gate is different every time. It is instantaneous, and it’s plenty of time to go insane. It is a zone of simultaneity where I become, for a time too short to measure or remember and too long to endure, all things that have ever been. I encounter myself in the Gate. I create myself, then create the universe and emerge into my creation. I fall downtime to the beginning of the universe and then bounce back to a time elsewhen. That