Millennium

But what could happen in one hour?

It was a terrible day. It had been raining all night; the only good thing about the day was that the rain had finally stopped. But with it had gone the cloud cover and, worse, all that precipitation had washed most of the flavor out of the air. The sky was this great, thundering, alien blue, and about a billion miles away. The sun was so bright I couldn't look at it without risking damage to my retinas. It was bad enough that the thing was showering me with unhealthy radiation; how could these people live with such an oppressive weight hanging over them? And the air was so bland and clear I could see Marin County.

Words are fu

So there I stood, gasping for breath, feeling naked beneath the awful sky.

The shortness of breath was ninety percent anxiety. Still, I felt a lot better after a few snorts from the Vicks inhaler I'd brought with me. If anybody else took a sniff from it they'd be most disagreeably surprised. The chemicals in it would kill roaches and discolor stainless steel.

The Gate had dumped me near the east side of the giant steel hangar which was being used to receive the remains of the two aircraft. At least, that had been the theory. When I walked around to the front doors I found them open. Inside were two PSA 727's and a lot of mechanics.

I didn't like that at all. It meant disruption in the timeline. Glancing around, orienting myself, I saw the proper hangar about a quarter mile away.

That far in the other direction would have dropped me into the Bay. And of course, there was always the other direction. I could have shown up a quarter of a mile above the field ...

It was a long quarter mile. I felt like a bug on a plate. There was just this endless concrete, still damp from the night's rain, and the infinite, awful sky. You'd think that after five hundred centuries we'd have developed a pill for agoraphobia.

One of the first things I saw when I got inside was two women dressed just like me. That was reassuring; it put me on familiar ground. I'd spent a lot of time blending in with other uniformed women. I studied them to see what they were doing, and it turned out to be wonderfully prosaic. The recovery workers had been working through the night, most of them without time to stop and grab a bite to eat. So United had sent some women over to serve coffee and donuts. Nothing could have been more in line with my experience.

Snatching a commercial jetliner is ninety-nine percent serving coffee and one percent snatching.

I found the table where the coffeepot had been set up, exchanged a few pleasantries with the woman behind it. She was perfectly willing to accept me as what I seemed to be. I took a tray, arranged a dozen Styrofoam cups on it, filled them, grabbed a handful of those paper packets of sugar and non-dairy creamer, and set off to serve.

Or at least to look like I was serving. I quickly saw that one woman could easily have handled the job United had given to three. That was no surprise -- since the days of mud buts it's been a rule that it always takes at least three to get something done: one to do it, one to supervise, and one to offer helpful suggestions. I've seen it in mammoth hunts in 40,000 B.C. and I've seen it in interstellar spaceships. I'd have been in trouble but for another universal trait of humanity. If you look busy and seem to know what you're doing, nobody is likely to bother you.

So I kept moving and looked very efficient. In the first twenty minutes I handed out one cup of coffee and almost disposed of a donut, but the guy thought better of it in the end. No doubt after the things he'd seen that morning he was wondering if he'd ever eat again.

When I got a chance I would steal a look at my wristwatch. It was a Seiko digital this time, and no more genuine than the greenbacks in my purse. It contained an indicator that was supposed to home in on the energy leakage we'd seen coming from the damaged stu

Lanes had been left between the heaps of wreckage, some of them big enough to drive a truck through; literally -- a stream of trucks was arriving from Livermore all the time I was there, and fifty or sixty men were constantly employed unloading them. Two or three men directed the distribution of the junk, which fell into several broad categories: airframe, powerplant, electronics, hydraulics, and so forth. There was an area for interior furnishings, most of which were the burned shells of seats.

There was a lot of gaily-colored paper and foil, most of it charred around the edges. I had to consult my cybernet memories before I knew what it was: the remains of Christmas presents. I saw new clothes, some still in plastic wrappers, and other things I was pretty sure were gifts. There was one heap of things that could only have been children's toys. It was all badly burned.

There was another area, the largest by far, where they had dumped a category of wreckage best defined as '?'.

It looked like it covered about an acre, and my Seiko said the stu

The stuff was contained in big Hefty trash bags. Some of the bags had fallen on their sides and spilled their contents, and I'd have been hard pressed to determine what most of it was myself. It was even possible there were some bits of passengers in there. Obviously, the crews had walked over the site picking up everything that didn't look as if it belonged in a cow pasture, and if they couldn't tell what it was it had been dumped here for someone to go over later.

I counted a hundred bags and I wasn't a quarter of the way through.

I tried to think of some plausible reason for me to go wading into the middle of that, breaking open bags and dumping the contents on the concrete floor and rooting around in them. I couldn't think of a good reason. I still can't. If I'd had ten people alone and five or six hours to search, I probably would have found it. What I had was thirty minutes, me myself and I, and a hundred and fifty people to provide an interested audience. ("What're ya looking for, babe?" Souvenirs? Fingers with diamond rings on them? The most important object in the universe?) "I could use some of that coffee."

Coffee? Oh, right, I was here to pass out coffee, wasn't I? I turned, with a carefully calculated smile on my face, and there he was.

Bill Smith. The star of the show.

Time is my stock in trade. I shouldn't be surprised, by now, at the tricks it can play. But that moment was very much like another one, not much earlier, when a hijacker's bullet had hit me in the shoulder. Time slowed down, and a moment became an eternity.

I remember fear. I was an actress, playing a part on a stage before the most important audience I would ever face, and I couldn't remember my lines. I was an imposter: everyone could instantly see it, there was no escape from exposure. I was a pitiful freak hiding in a lying skinsuit, a monster from an unimaginable future. And the whole world hinged on this one man, and on what I did to or with him, and I was not expected to speak to him, offer him a cup of coffee, just as if he were an ordinary mortal.

At the same time, that's just what he was. I knew Bill Smith: divorce, incipient ulcer, drinking problem, and all. I'd read his biography from the childhood in Ohio right through Naval flight school and carrier landings and commercial aviation and the job with Boeing and the gradual rise through the Safety Board and the early retirement and the boating accident that would kill him.

And that's what hurt. I knew how this man was going to die. If I succeeded in my project, if I could turn the course of events back to what the timestream could tolerate, back to predestination, he would continue his slow decline. He would eat away at himself until his death would be a mercy.