Time Bomb And Zahndry Others

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. Si

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 Schr?dinger'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 pla

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

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, God. 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.

Assuming, 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 passed. 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...