11

Chalk Talk

Xanadu Station: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Gallic epoch. Turonian age. 95 My B.C.E.

The meeting room was built into a cliff overlooking the Tethys Sea. Ordinarily the view through the glass wall was enough to fill the soul and elevate the spirit, and even at the exorbitant rates charged for its use, the room was booked solid for every clear day until its scheduled demolition. Today, however, the weather was dreary. A dull rain spattered against the windows and turned the ocean water gray.

Griffin sat in a leather conference chair, thinking about chalk.

It was only vertebrate chauvinism that made people think dinosaurs were the most important living things of their time. From the mid-Cretaceous onward, one of the most significant and varied families of organisms on Earth was the calcareous algae. Though microscopically small, these spherical plants had armored themselves with ornately structured overlapping calcium plates. The warm seas contained galaxies of calcareous algae, living uneventful lives and shedding their cunning little shields when they died.

The exoskeletal debris from the algae and other nannoplankton, both vegetal and animal, was constantly filtering down through the water, an eternal snowfall that deposited as much as six inches of finely-grained chalk on the ocean floor in a thousand years. The white cliffs of Dover were the patient work of billions of generations of tiny creatures leading orderly and bourgeois lives. Hopscotch diagrams and sidewalk artists’ naive copies of The Last Supper, grammar school sentence diagrams and physicists’ equations, the sure kiss of a pool stick against a cue ball, the frictionless grip of a gymnast’s hands upon the high bar, all depended on the anonymous contributions of these placid beings.

Griffin often meditated upon this. The thought that such transient lives served the diverse purposes of a higher order of life pleased him. He wondered sometimes if the human race would leave behind a legacy half so enduring. Such thoughts calmed him, usually.

Not today.

Today, everything was fucked. Griffin had come at last, as he’d always known he would, to a dead end. The fairy castle he had built out of playing cards and hope was trembling in the breeze. Any second now, it would collapse. Everything he’d worked for, the sacrifices he’d made, the hard and sometimes cruel decisions that had been forced on him—all was come to futility. Everything was fucked and done for.

The door opened and closed behind him. He did not need to look to know that Salley had entered the room. She came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. Briefly, she kneaded the muscles. They were stiff and knotted.

“All right,” she said. “What is it?”

There were so many responses he could have made. Almost at random, he said, “I’ve never hit a woman.” He could see her ghostly reflection in the window wall, tall and regal as a queen. Below her he was slumped in his leather armchair like a defeated king waiting for the barbarians to arrive. Their eyes met in the glass. “Today, I almost hit you.”

“Tell me why.”

Griffin had been away from Salley for a week when he finally returned to his room in Xanadu. But for her, it had only been a half hour. He knew because, as he always did in such cases, he’d written himself a memo.

His plan was simply to say a quiet good-bye. Salley was scheduled to leave on the Baseline Project expedition in the morning. Knowing what hardships she would face, and how long it would be before her rescue, he wanted to say something that would linger. Something that would, on reflection, offer her a touch of secret hope when it looked like she was stranded forever.

But when he’d tried saying the carefully composed words, she’d stopped his mouth with kisses. She’d hooked a leg behind him and shoved him on the chest, tumbling him down on the bed. Then she took his shirt in both hands and pulled, scattering buttons in all directions. What happened then should have been every bit as much fun as he’d had the first time with her.

It wasn’t, of course.

It made him feel guilty. There was no use denying that. But what choice did he have? Anything else would only have been that much crueler for her. So he was using her. So what? It hadn’t been his decision. She’d seduced him, for Christ’s sake! It would be different if it had been the other way around. But he wasn’t going to carry the can for a situation that was entirely of her own making.

Griffin had been married before, both times to women who ended up making him feel confused and defensive. Women who introduced chaos and emotion into what should have been an orderly existence. Women toward whom—it could not be denied—his feelings were mixed, even now.

This was why relationships were such a bad idea.

For all his experience, however, he had to admit that Salley was a particularly exhausting woman. She made demands. She took up all of his attention. She melted every bone in his body. By the time she was done with him, he lacked the desire even to sit up.

To her, on the other hand, sex was clearly a tonic. It made her glow. Afterwards, she crouched over him, smiling, and, bending down, covered his face with soft kisses. “Don’t try to get up,” she said. “I’ll show myself out.”

“I really should make sure you get back to the Carnian in time to make your preparations.”

“I’m already packed. I’m cleared to take the funnel back to half an hour before the expedition departs. All I have to do then is change my clothes.”

“No, really, I can’t let you …”

“Hush,” she said. “Don’t say a word. Let me watch you fall asleep, before I go.”

Gratefully, suspecting nothing, he let sleep overcome him.

In the morning he awoke to find Salley rattling about in the kitchenette, brewing a pot of coffee. She was wearing one of his shirts, and whenever she reached for something, it rode up to reveal her bare bottom.

Griffin sat bolt upright, shocked fully awake. “What time is it? Why are you still here?” He snatched up his watch. It read 8:47 A.M. Disbelieving, he slid it on his wrist.

“Relax.” She came into the room with two cups of coffee and handed him one. “There was a change in the expedition’s roster. Lydia Pell took my place.” She put down her cup and rummaged about in her purse. “Here. I brought you a copy of that day’s traffic log.”

Griffin unfolded the sheet one-handed and stared at it in disbelief. There was no denying its existence. Yet it simply could not be. He had seen that exact same sheet (the light blue flimsies were never duplicated nor their ID numbers reused) on his desk, with “Salley, G. C.” at the top of the roster. Now her name was absent, and replaced by Lydia Pell’s.

“You were supposed to be on that expedition. Goddamnit, you were on that expedition. It’s documented. It’s certain. I signed off on it myself. It’s already happened.” He placed his hand over his wrist and squeezed as hard as he could. “You’ve created a Class One time paradox.”

Salley smiled. “Yes, I know.”

“Tell me why,” Salley repeated.

So he did. It took a very long time, and he had to oversimplify wildly, but he managed. He told her something about the Unchanging, and quite a bit more about Holy Redeemer Ranch, and went into some detail about why, though he knew who was responsible, he couldn’t simply arrest the mole who’d planted the bomb in the expedition’s supplies.

He’d expected Salley to be angry when she learned that he had been prepared to send her off on a doomed expedition. She was not. To his astonishment, she was hanging on his every word, transparently fascinated.

Without intending to, he was, he realized, playing to her weaknesses. He was giving her a glimpse behind the curtain, where the Wizard of Oz operated the secret machinery that ran the cosmos, and showing her exactly which levers were attached to what pulleys.

“The expedition is lost for good,” he concluded. “The first time, the Unchanging lent us the equipment to pull off a recovery mission. They’ll never do that now.”

He didn’t mention that, according to the final reports, they’d recovered only seven people. That three had died as a result of injuries from the bomb, and two by misadventure thereafter. The sequence in which that had happened had, after all, been sundered from the main time line. In their frame of reference, it didn’t exist.

“All of which assumes that our screwing around isn’t going to destroy the universe,” he added in bitter afterthought.

“I don’t think we need worry about that,” Salley said. “And I doubt the Unchanging are really going to loop back on themselves and decide not to give us time travel. From what I was told, things will go on pretty much as they always have, paradox or no.”

“Told! Who told you that?” He was collected enough now to ask the questions he’d dared not earlier when, in furious silence, he had thrown on his clothes and stormed out of his room. He was collected enough now to listen to her answers. “Who put such a crazy idea into your head?”

“I did.”

“What?”

She laughed a small, self-conscious laugh. “It’s a funny thing. There must be a hundred movies in which the hero sees her exact double walk into the room, and she’s always stunned when it happens. But when it happened to me—when I looked up and saw myself walk into the tent, I had no idea who it was. It wasn’t until she held up a pocket mirror and told me to compare faces that I realized she was me, only older. She told me—”

Griffin at last turned his face up toward Salley. “And you believed her?”

But of course Salley had believed her. The stranger was, after all, herself. What possible motive could she have for deceiving her? So she had agreed to drop out of the expedition, accepted the changed roster sheet, and promised to seduce Griffin after the fund-raiser, make certain he was too tired to see her home to the Carnian that night, and hand him the paper in the morning.

Nobody else who knew Salley at all well would have gone along with a fraction of that. Everyone else knew she was a terrible liar. Only she herself was unaware of how untrustworthy she was.

“It hardly matters how we got here,” Salley said. “What matters is what we do now. I think we should hop up to the future and cut a deal. Everybody makes deals.”

He shook his head. “Time travel was given to us under certain conditions. We’ve violated every rule there is.”

“Okay, so we broke the rules. That’s good! There are no more rules—they’re broken. Anything is possible now. We’ll find a solution. There has to be a solution. There always is.”

“Not in my experience.” They were, he realized, standing on opposite sides of the great divide that separates those who deal with scientific fact and those who deal with the consequences of human actions. Which is to say, those who believe in a rational universe and those who know that, given the existence of human beings, there is no such thing. “You and I belong to entirely different universes, did you know that?”

“Then come join me in mine,” she said gently. “Yours doesn’t work anymore.”

It was true. God knows, it was true. Griffin felt something shift within himself. It was the rebirth not of hope (for he had never truly felt any hope) but of purpose. “Tell me something,” he said. “What were you trying to accomplish? Your other self, I mean. What did she say to you that made you go along with her?”

Incredibly, Salley blushed.

“She told me that I love you.”

When he had finished phrasing the invitations, Griffin glanced at his watch. Two minutes before the hour. He’d hold the meeting in two minutes, then. He filled in the spaces he’d left blank, and slid the papers into his attaché to give to a courier later.

There was a knock on the open door.

“Is it just the three of us, then?” Jimmy asked quietly. He nodded to Salley, and she smiled insincerely back at him.

“I’ve invited one more,” Griffin said. “He ought to be arriving just about … now.”

Jimmy strode in the door. He stopped as he saw himself.

“This isn’t good,” Jimmy said.

His older self looked extremely sad. “I have no memory of this at all. And it’s not the sort of thing I’d forget.”

Leaving unsaid, but understood: You’ve really stepped on your dick this time. Griffin and jimmy had worked together so long that they no longer had to say such things. Each knew the other well enough to dispense with all but the essentials.

“Have a seat, both of you.” Griffin picked up a piece of chalk. Presentation technology shifted so often in the twenty-first century, from electronic whiteboards to interflats, smartboards and body interpreters, that no one person could manage them all. But everybody knew how to use a blackboard.

He drew three parallel lines. “Okay, these are the pertinent segments of the Maastrichtian, the Turonian, and the Carnian.”

Most of Griffin’s publications were in the field of chronocybernetics. All of them were classified, at varying degrees of hardness. Some of them he suspected only he was cleared to read. But his single most useful contribution to the field was the invention of causal schematics. They were rather like a cross between cladograms and Feynman space-time diagrams, and were used to keep cause-and-effect events from becoming entangled.

Briskly, he overlaid the lines with a series of linked circles representing stable areas of operation. Then he cut through them with branching consequence lines. Completed, the schematic showed a major anomaly nested deep within Salley’s actions. Young Jimmy drew his breath in when he saw that. His older counterpart leaned back, looking sour.

“There’s our problem,” Griffin said. “Comments?”

Jimmy eyed Salley coldly. “How the hell did she get into her own history? We have safeguards in place.”

“She … Okay, let’s call the older vector Gertrude, to avoid confusion. And to remind you,” he said to a glaring Salley, “that she is by no means to be mistaken for yourself. Not any longer. Gertrude would’ve needed All Access clearance. Which is obtainable only from the Old Man. How she managed that, we’ll never know.”

“Couldn’t we—?”

“No. We can’t. Gertrude has disappeared on the far side of the anomaly. Any vector of Salley we could reach would be the linear descendant or predecessor of the one here with us, and completely blameless.”

The older Jimmy cleared his throat. “Are you sure?”

“Exactly what,” Salley said, “are you implying?”

Griffin held up a hand for peace. “It’s a fair question. Yes, I’m sure. Gertrude went to a great deal of effort to deceive Salley. Why? We don’t know, and we can’t even guess at her motives. So let’s not waste time trying.”

“What do we do now?” asked the older Jimmy. His younger self leaned forward.

“Whatever else, we’ve got an expedition to rescue. We need to speak with our sponsors.”

“Not possible. Access to the Unchanging is the military’s bailiwick. Even the Old Man has a tough time getting through to them.”

“Then we’ll have to do an end run. Meet them on their home turf.” He paused significantly. “All of us.”

“It’d be easier,” young Jimmy said, “if you didn’t take her.”

“That’s not up for discussion.” It had been a long time since Griffin had done anything that was out-and-out illegal—he preferred to work within the system. If he was going off-track, he wanted Salley with him, and Jimmy as well. Each was cunning in a way the other was not. And he was going to need all the help he could get. “Where do we start?”

Young Jimmy got up and erased everything Griffin had drawn on the board. Then he picked up a piece of chalk and drew a complex series of interlinking up-and-down lines. “The Subway of the Gods,” he said with a sharkish grin. “Local stops. As per your memo, I brought along a list of weak links.”

“Weak links?” Salley asked.

“When we set up security,” Griffin said, “we made sure to stir in a few guards who were less than optimally bright. Just in case. None of them are on duty very long. You’d have to have hired them to know where they were.”

“Now here,” Jimmy tapped a node, “in 2103 is a perfect opportunity. Security officer Mankalita Harrison. Officious, ambitious, bottom of her class. Filling in for Sue Browder for a period of two days. Never met the Old Man. Best of all, we’ve kept those days almost perfectly undocumented. We can insert anything into that silence we want. But you’ll need All Access clearance to pull it off. Is there any way you can get hold of the Old Man’s ID?”

The Old Man was a creature of habit, and had been since he was a teenager. Sharpened pencils always to one side of the top drawer, a ream of cream-colored bond in the middle. Griffin knew where he would keep his authorization papers. He knew what the passcodes would be. “I can do it.”

Old Jimmy cleared his throat. “I notice you assume the Old Man won’t play along?”

“Trust me. He’ll never cooperate on this one.”

“Well, if you can get the ID, I can do the rest. We’ll need documentation from—”

Old Jimmy threw Griffin a look. Griffin, in response, turned to young Jimmy, and said, “Okay. We’ve game-planned this sort of thing out. Take care of the paperwork and get the boys in the shop to build us the crate. We’ll be leaving in fifteen minutes.”

“The crate?” Salley asked.

Griffin ignored her. “Oh, and we’ll need another person on the security team. Any recommendations?”

“I’ve heard good things about Molly Gerhard.”

“Get her. She leaves us at age forty-something to start her own business. Requisition her as close to the end as you can. The older the better.”

“Done.” The young man got up and left.

Griffin turned to the remaining Jimmy. “All right,” he said. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure I should …” He cocked an eyebrow toward Salley.

“I have no secrets from her. Speak openly.”

Jimmy sighed and shook his head. “When you get to be my age, you lose your taste for his kind of games.” He nodded toward the door on his. “Harry, I’m about to retire. I bought a bar on Long Island. Tomorrow is my last day.”

“Then give me your last day. Find the Old Man’s intercept point and keep him away from me until after the travel roster’s been filed. Take him out for drinks. Get him talking about the old days.”

Jimmy looked pained. “I understand how you feel. But there’s no way you can convince me to take sides here.”

Griffin studied Jimmy carefully, making him the focus of all his attention, to the perfect exclusion of everything else. He waited until Jimmy filled the universe, then said, “Do you remember that time in the Texas roadhouse, outside of San Antonio?”

Jimmy chuckled. He remembered, of course. It was a beat-up old redneck hangout with dollar bills stapled to the ceiling for decoration. They were in town for a rock and gem show where a generation-one geologist had planned to sell a fistful of particularly flashy Caudipteryx feathers to a private collector. This was in 2034, a week before Salley’s press conference, and time travel was still a great secret. When the geologist checked into his hotel room, Griffin was there, Jimmy at his back, prepared to put the fear of God into the man. Later, they’d tossed the contraband out the rental car window on their way out of town.

They’d stopped in the roadhouse for a few beers and a game of pool (each played badly and fancied the other played worse), when a drunk came over and tried to pick a fight. “Hey!” he’d said. “Y’all ain’t faggots, are you?” He was an unshaven, sloppy-fat yahoo, who wore a plaid shirt open over a stained tee. But he had the look of someone who worked for a living. Griffin judged there was real muscle under that paunch. “’Cause you sure look like a pair a god-damned faggots!”

“Have a beer,” Griffin suggested. “My treat.”

The drunk stared at him in pop-eyed astonishment. He wove a little from side to side. “Y’all saying that I take drinks from faggots? You must think that I’m a faggot too.”

Jimmy was bent over the pool table, lining up a shot. Without looking up, he said, “I don’t have time for you. But that’s my bottle over there on the bumper. You can cram it up your arse.”

The drunk blinked. Then, with a roar, he ran at Jimmy, fist raised.

Jimmy stood and broke the cue stick over the man’s head.

He fell like an ox.

Griffin looked down at the man. He lay very still. There was a trickle of blood coming out of one ear. He didn’t seem to be breathing. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

Jimmy took out his wallet and laid several twenties down on the felt. He put his beer bottle atop them. “This should pay for the stick,” he said. There weren’t a lot of people in the bar, but every one of them was watching him.

Nobody said a word as they left the place.

Out on the road, they drove in silence for a while. Then Jimmy said, “You’re not going to like this.”

“What?”

“I left my driver’s license back in the bar. I had to leave it with the man to get the pool table.”

“Think there’s time to go back and get it?”

A police car, lights flashing, passed them, heading in the direction of the roadhouse.

“I don’t suppose there is.”

So they drove out to the airport and found a Cessna pilot who for two thousand dollars was willing to fly them back to D.C., no questions asked. There they ran out to the Pentagon, and looped back a day, so Jimmy could call the DMV to report his license had been stolen. After which, he and Griffin went out to a bar in Georgetown, where Jimmy broke a few things. They both spent the night in the drunk tank.

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Griffin told Salley. “But when the police came, this fellow here got behind me and lifted me by the belt and shoved me right into them. We all fell over in a pile.” They were both laughing by then.

“I just thought that as long I was going to be in jail, I might as well have company.” Jimmy wiped the tears from his eyes. “In any event, it did give us a darling of an alibi.”

“The Old Man had us on the carpet for that one. He chewed us both out good.”

“Well, he had to, now didn’t he?”

“Yes, but here’s the thing.” He paused until the laughter had died down. “On the way out, I turned and winked at him. He didn’t wink back.” He let the silence sit for a moment. “You get older, you get more conservative. You know how that is. Well, the Old Man’s forgotten what it felt like to be young and wild. But not us. Not you, and not me. Yet.”

For a long moment, Jimmy said nothing. Then he nodded. “All right. One last run.”

He got up slowly, and left without so much as a word or a glance to Salley. As if she weren’t present.

When he was gone, Salley said, “Did he die?”

“Did who die?”

“The man in the bar. The drunk.”

He could see by her expression that she hadn’t thought the story was very funny. He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. We never checked.”

A minute later, young Jimmy was back, wearing a different set of clothes. He dollied in a large wooden packing crate, and showed them how it opened up. “This is how you’ll be traveling,” he told Salley. “Nothing fancy. We went for simplicity here. Padded on the inside. This little shelf acts as a seat. Hand grips here and here. And this clip holds a flashlight, in case you want to bring a book.”

There was a bold orange-and-black sticker on the side reading THIS END UP, and another reading DANGER: OMNIVORE.

“I don’t understand,” Salley said. “Why would I have to go in a crate?”

“I’m afraid you won’t like the answer,” Griffin said uncomfortably.

“Don’t tell me what I will or won’t like.”

“You see,” Jimmy said, “we anticipated that something of this sort might come up and so we made preparations. There’s a rider on the Old Man’s clearance that allows me to be brought along as muscle. You, however, were not anticipated. There’s simply no way you could possibly accompany us as a member of the security team.”

Griffin wanted to tell Jimmy to moderate his manner. Salley had been simmering for a while now. She was ready to cause a scene. Griffin had enough experience with women to know this. But, though he mellowed in later life, Jimmy in his younger days was every bit as hard to handle as Salley herself.

“So?” Salley said.

That sharkish grin again. A jaunty nod toward the box. He was a sadistic little shit, was Jimmy, at this age. “So you’ll be traveling as a biological specimen.”