Millennium

"Right on the button," Mandy whispered, pointing to the concrete floor.

She was right. My brief excursion through the building a few hours ago -- or about thirty-nine hours ago, depending on how you looked at it -- had been useful in selecting an entry and exit point for the Gate. We'd selected the northwest corner, behind what was left of the 747 tail section and other large pieces of Boeing fuselage. It was shadowy enough that we had to get out our pencil-beams for a few quick looks around or we might have stumbled over something.

When I had my bearings I gestured silently to the team to spread out and start looking around. Myself, I got out my detector and headed toward where the stu

All the trash bags had been moved. It made sense. They'd had almost two days to sort the junk, and they'd made a lot of progress. So I started searching, creeping silently as any cat through the nightmarish mounds of wreckage.

Fifteen minutes later I was still creeping, and the indicator dial hadn't jiggled half a millimeter.

I gave a low whistle, and pretty soon my comrades materialized out of the darkness and we put our heads together.

"I'm getting nothing at all," I said.

"Me neither," said Pony.

"Nothing."

Minoru just shrugged and shook his head.

"Ideas?"

"These things home on the power source. Maybe it ran out of juice."

"Or somebody's taken it out of the hangar."

"Not likely." I realized I was chewing on a thumbnail. "He'll be here in fifteen minutes.

We'll take ten of those, leave ourselves a safety margin. Turn on your lights, look everywhere you can", don't worry so much about noise. If we don't find it, we'll hide under the tail section and wait for the Gate."

"This is going to be dry, isn't it?" Mandy said.

"Don't be such a pessimist."

"All time travelers are pessimists."

That was Minoru's contribution to the conversation. Me, I don't know if I was born a pessimist or had pessimism thrust upon me. What I do know is that I've had ample reason to embrace the philosophy. A case in point.

I'd been turning over small items for three or four minutes when I heard Tony make the low warbling call we'd agreed on in the ready-room. We stole the call from some Cherokees in a film from the 1930s, and what it was supposed to mean was "I've found it!"

He sure had. We converged on him. My heart was pounding. We were actually going to get out of this. Then I saw Tony waving at Mandy, telling her to stop. She did, skidding silently, crouching twenty meters away. I did the same, and watched as Tony motioned her closer. Minoru appeared silently at my elbow, and we crept the last thirty meters.

The light was very bad. It took a while to be sure what we were seeing. The first thing t identified was the stu

"Who is it?" Mandy whispered.

"Who do you think?" I said, bitterly.

We moved in closer. I turned my light beam on low. It was Bill Smith.

"Is he breathing?"

"I can't tell for sure."

"Yeah, he's breathing. He's just stu

"Then he can probably hear us."

Mandy and Tony started to back away.

"Shit!" I shouted. I went on in a lower voice. "If he can hear us, then the cat's already hit the fan."

"There's no need to make it worse," Mandy suggested. I supposed she was right. We all backed away and crouched down.

"Are his eyes open or closed?" I asked.

"Open," Tony said. "I'm sure he saw me."

"What do you think happened here?"

We all surveyed the still-life of disaster, and pretty soon the scenario became apparent.

He was on his back. His legs were out, one of them slightly bent and folded under the other; that bottom leg was probably going to sleep, and would hurt like hell when he could move again. The stu

Minoru put it all together for us.

"He came in here before we arrived. He found the stu

"It's been damaged enough that the stun beam wouldn't be focused anymore."

"Damn lucky it was set on "stun." We could be looking at a dead man."

"I don't want to hear about "could be," " I said. "He could have gotten here when he was supposed to, at 11:30. What the hell is he doing here now? Why was he here before we got here?"

"We'll have to sort that out when we get back."

"What do we do now? Should we take the stu

I chewed that one over. I knew the damage had been done, but we'd come back to get it and there it was, so I scooped it up. I opened it and confirmed that it was all out of power, which is why it hadn't showed up on our detectors.

"We take it." I looked at my watch. "Shit. We've been here fifteen minutes just talking it over. The Gate's due in twenty minutes. Let's get the hell out of here."

"He's sure sweating a lot."

I played my light over him. Tony was right. Pretty soon Mr Smith would be lying in a puddle. I tried to figure what all this would sound like to him. He couldn't have gotten more than a few glimpses of us, but it would have been enough to scare the hell out of him. He'd heard a few phrases. I didn't know exactly what we'd said that he might have overheard.

Any way you looked at it, though, we must have looked menacing as hell.

And what could I do about it? Nothing. I motioned the team back toward the northwest corner of the hangar.

I even followed them, for about twenty meters.

Then I found myself stopped. I don't remember stopping. It was as if there was something in the air so thick I couldn't move through it. I wanted to go on, and I couldn't. l turned, and hurried back to him.

He hadn't moved. I knelt beside him and leaned over until I was sure he could see me. I remembered the blackface I was wearing; surely he couldn't recognize me from our brief encounter almost two days ago.

"Smith," I said. "You don't know me. I can't tell you who I am. You're going to be all right. You're just stu

You're saying too much. But how much was enough, and why was I even talking to him? I was sweating as much as he was, by then.

"I wanted ... Smith, you're endangering a project bigger than you can imagine. Forget about this."

Christ. How could he forget? Would I have forgotten? Would you? "There's going to be a paradox if you don't leave this alone: I suddenly went cold all over. I knew what he was thinking.

"Oh, no. We didn't. You think we made those planes crash, but we didn't, I swear to you, they were going ...

Shit. I'd said too much already. I thought I saw one corner of his mouth twitch, but it might have been my imagination. There was just the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the rivers of sweat.

Everything I touched seemed to turn to shit. Believe it or not, up until recently I'd been a crackerjack operative.

I turned from him and hurried back to my team.

In due course, the Gate appeared and the four of us stepped through it.

There were recriminations. I spent an unprofitable time yelling at Lawrence and Martin about the wondrous power of their prognostications. I recall saying things like I could have done better with a crystal ball and tea leaves. I could feel properly self-righteous about it; I hadn't screwed up this time. We'd been told Smith wouldn't show until 11:30. I didn't mention n. grief monologue with Smith, and neither did any of my team Not that they knew what I'd said to him, but they could hardly have failed to notice I went back and said something.