Millennium

For the first time, a goat had acquired a name and a history. And a lopsided, tired grin.

I turned, having looked at him for no more than a second, and started to walk away.

"Hey, how about that coffee?" .

I walked faster. In no time I was almost ru

I've made other mistakes in my career with the Gate. I did other things badly. After I got the top job, everyone's mistakes were my mistakes, in a sense. I will always bear a load for the mistake Pinky made, for instance. It meant I hadn't trained her well enough.

But a special guilt attaches to that day, to that first trip back to correct the paradox, because I don't know why I did what I did.

I ran out of the hangar and ran the quarter-mile to the place where the Gate had dropped me. I cowered there beneath that hateful sky until the Gate appeared again on schedule and I stepped through.

Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.

That first meeting was the one and only chance I'd ever have to cut the paradox knot cleanly, right at the source, and I bungled it. Do I mention predestination to excuse my failure, or did inexorable fate really grab me like a marionette and frogmarch me through the stations of some cosmic ritual? Sometimes I wish I'd never been born.

Then again, you have to be born to wish such a thing. And if I flubbed again as badly as I did the first time, that's exactly the situation we'd all be facing. Never-born, never-lived, never having tasted either success or failure. Bad as it is, my life is my own, and I accept it without reservation.

I returned with my sense of determination intact. We'd never expected this first trip to show much result; it was simply the direct approach, and the only one that could stop the paradox completely. Now we'd try more subtle avenues. Now we'd start the war of containment. Our goal would be to confine the paradox to limits the universe could withstand -- we'd seal it off, encapsulate it, turn events gently back toward what they should have been, and, though the timeline might vibrate like a plucked guitar string eight billion years long, pray that its fundamental elasticity would eventually prevail.

"It's like stuffing neutrons back into a critical mass of uranium," Martin Coventry said.

"Fine," I said. "You've got a machine that will do that, don't you? Let's start stuffing."

"I think he was speaking in twentieth-century terms," Sherman said.

That's right. Sherman.

I glared at him. Apparently I didn't have enough odd things in my life. Now my robot had staffed to act fu

He had been there when I came back through the Gate, smiling and looking a bit guilty.

Both of those things are hard to do without a face, so he had grown one fur the occasion. His presence there was bad enough. So far as I knew, he'd never been out of the apartment since I uncrated him. But the face was utterly impossible.

Now the three of us were closeted in a room just off the operations level, discussing the shambles of the first trip. Lawrence was also present, via two-way remote, and I suspect somebody from the Council might have been listening in through the BC.

Three of us! That shows how much Sherman had shaken me. Before, I'd no more have counted Sherman in our number than I would a chair or a table.

"I think Louise is right," Lawrence said. I looked at his image in the vidscreen. "We shouldn't make too much of this. The thing to do is move on to the next phase."

"I'm afraid too much damage has already been done," said Martin. He really looked scared. His man-of-action phase had apparently faded; he was once again the cautious historian worse, a practical historian, with the terrifying capability to write his own history.

"What damage?" I wanted to know. "Okay, I didn't get what I went back for. We didn't estimate my chances were very good even before I went."

"I agree," said Sherman. I waited for Martin or Lawrence to protest the idiocy of letting an animated dildo have a voice in these proceedings, but neither of them batted an eye. They turned to listen to Sherman, so I did, too.

"To sum up what happened," he went on, "Smith saw her, she looked at him, and she ran.

Is that accurate, Louise? Don't bare your teeth like that; it's not attractive."

"Wait until I get you home with a screwdriver and a soldering iron."

"That's as may be. Right now we're talking about your recent failure. Is my account of your failure an accurate one?"

"I'll peel that smarmy face right off your head, you -- "

"This is not germane to the question of your -- "

"Stop using that word!"

" -- failure. Sit down, Louise. Breathe regularly; the faintness will pass."

I did, and it did.

Sherman leaned closer to me and spoke in a voice I'm pretty sure the others couldn't hear.

"I have taken certain actions I thought appropriate," he said. "The new face is one of them. The induced catharsis was another. If you're calm enough to continue and if you'll concede my right to be here in this conference, we can proceed, and discuss your grievances when we're alone."

I swallowed hard, and nodded. I didn't trust myself to talk.

"So he saw you, and you ran. Does that sum it up?"

I nodded again.

"Then I don't think the damage is great. There was no question of him penetrating your disguise."

"That's right," Lawrence said. "Look at it from his viewpoint. He saw a woman in a United Airlines uniform, and she ran from him."

"An odd thing to do," Martin said.

"Sure, but she can explain it to him the next time she meets him. We can think of some kind of story to -- "

"Wait a minute. What's this about me meeting him again?"

"That was my idea," Sherman said.

I looked from one to the other, taking my time about it.

"You didn't suggest it while I was here," I said. "So the three of you were talking while I was gone."

"That's right," Lawrence said. "Sherman arrived just as we were getting the new information."

"What new information?"

"Lawrence expressed it badly," Sherman said. "I arrived, and after a great deal of trouble making myself heard, managed to communicate to the operations team that I knew what they were about to discover. Shortly afterward, they discovered it."

"We're still not sure about the time sequence," Lawrence said, defensively.

"I'm sure," Sherman said.

"Will someone tell it to me straight?" I asked. "Start to finish, just the way things happen in real time?"

The three of them looked at each other, and I swear, Martin and Lawrence were the ones who looked uncertain while Sherman was stolid as a stone.

"He'd better tell it," Lawrence conceded.

"Very well," Sherman said. "Thirty seconds before you went through the Gate; I was at the Post Office, where the Big Computer had summoned me. I read the message that was waiting for me just as you stepped through. Pursuant to instruction in the message, I came here."

I hadn't known there was a message waiting for Sherman. I hadn't known that any robot had ever gotten a time capsule.

There was a good reason for that. This was an unusual message. It specified on the outside that no human was to be notified of the identity of the recipient, nor of the date of its opening. The BC, as I said, follows these instructions literally. Technically, the Programming Council has instructed the BC to follow the directions on time capsules, but I wonder what the BC would have done if the Council had said otherwise.

Well, "would have done" is nothing but a rarefied form of the verb "to do." And a very pointless one.

The message told Sherman -- among other things, and we'll get to that -- to go to Gate operations and tell Lawrence that I was going to have a face-to-face meeting with Bill Smith, and that I would fail in my mission. That word again.