But no. How could it be? The Paradox, a creation of one woman's harebrained scheming? I couldn't accept it.
Fine. So what was I telling myself? Were we headed for an alternate reality, a universe where I didn't do my time loop, my temporal backward somersault, where Darla and I had never met the 'first' time… a place where none of this had ever happened…?
Or were we never going to make it back at all? I gritted my teeth. No, damn it. I would not permit myself to think that way. It was up to me. Somewhere up ahead, one of those roads led back through time. I had come here by way of the Red Limit Freeway, and now I would have to find the shortcut, the little side street that led directly back to where I started. I would have to find Paradox Alley.
Red lights yelled at me from the instrument panels. 'Looks like we're suffering high radiation losses in the plasma,' Sam said. 'Bremsstrahlung reading is way up, and electron temperature is dropping.'
'Kink instability?' I asked.
'Looks more subtle than that. Just guessing, but we may have a software foul-up here.'
Which meant that, although the engine was probably fine, there may have been a problem somewhere in the megabytes of programming that controlled and monitored the engine. Software difficulties can arise from any number of causes, indigenous bugs in the original coding being only one of them. However, as we had just flushed out and reloaded the entire operating system, I was more inclined to suspect that we may have screwed up somewhere.
I pulled off the road as the engine groaned and complained. By the time I stopped, we had lost controlled fusion entirely. 'No cover,' Sam said looking around. 'Well, it probably makes no difference anyway. They'll know where we are no matter what.'
I said, 'How 'bout we fire up the auxiliary engine, shoot up that side road, and hide out among those pyramids out there?'
'What pyramids? Oh, those. Looks to be about five kilometers.' Sam studied them. 'By God, those look familiar.'
'I was going to say that they looked like Egyptian pyramids. The ones at Giza.'
'Yeah, and right next to it… is that the Sphinx? Little too far away to tell.'
'Darla and I have seen other earthly structures here, so maybe they're the genuine article.'
They weren't. Close, but no papyrus scroll. The pyramids had a four-sided base and went up at an angle that looked right, but they were constructed of some off-white seamless material, not stone block. The sphinx was properly enigmatic; it simply wasn't the famous Terran one. The nearby mortuary temple, though, provided us with cover. It was big enough to hide a fleet of trucks.
'Let me try to wrestle with this,' Sam said, flipping down the computer keyboard terminal.
'I can't think of anyone more qualified than you,' I told him, 'seeing as how you used to be a computer.' I looked at Sam and he looked at me. 'Are you still a computer?' I asked.
Sam seemed a bit concerned. 'I don't know. I don't feel like a computer. Do I look like a computer?'
'You don't look like a computer. Can you do ten million arithmetic operations per second like you used to?'
He squinted his eyes and looked far away. Then, with some relief, he said, 'No. Definitely not. I'm no longer a math wiz. I can't tell you how glad I am of that. Never really took to being a computer.'
'Well, I always thought of you as sort of living in one,' I said, 'rather than being one.'
'But the real question is this: Am I the same person who was your father when he was flesh and blood?'
'Sure you are, Sam.'
'Am I? I don't have one cell of that body in me.'
'I don't see what that has to do with it.'
'No? Am I really Sam McGraw, or am I only an Artificial Intelligence program that's putting on a good show?'
'Both.'
Sam rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. 'Interesting notion.'
'Here's the way I see it,' I said. 'When you get right down to it, a human being is not a physical entity. A human being is a piece of software. Body cells are constantly dying and being replaced. Over a period of time, there's a complete changeover, right?'
'Brain cells, too?'
'I don't know. Doesn't matter, because the essence of what you are is really just information. The body dies one cell at a time, and is replaced at the same time. But the information stays, and that information can be stored any fiumber of ways and in any number of different containers.'
'You may have a case,' Sam said. 'Still, I often wonder if I've died and gone to heaven and don't even know it.'
'Maybe you're lucky. Maybe you didn't go to heaven.'
'Oh, ye of little faith. Well, we're wasting time.'
An hour went by. By this time Sam was deeply annoyed, swearing under his breath and stabbing at the terminal with his long fingers.
'Why do they insist on making things unnecessarily complex?' he was muttering. 'Who the hell coded this crap? Goddamn Egyptologist couldn't decipher this.'
In the meantime, I had checked the engine and found nothing I could see, which is usually how it goes. I got out what testing equipment we carried and attached leads all over the damn place, but got told nothing. Sam was right-it was probably a software glitch. That wasn't good. It might take forever to find it.
I got restless and went back to the trailer. I opened the back door, let down the ramp, and walked down it to the floor of the temple, thinking to take a quick walk and study the architecture of the place. I didn't wander very far. It would be a quick dash back to the truck in the event of trouble. The place was shadowy, though, and made me a little nervous. I was just about to go back when I heard sounds behind me-a shoe against stone, the intake of breath. I froze.
'Jake?'
I whirled around and went into a crouch.
'It's me. Roland.'
He came out from behind a column. He looked the same, dressed in his shabby survival suit and scuffed hiking boots. He looked very calm, almost detached.
'Roland,' I breathed. 'Where the hell did you-' I stopped myself, and chuckled. 'You shouldn't oughta do that.'
'Sorry. I couldn't think of a way to announce myself without startling you anyway, so… How have you been? I didn't get a chance to say good-bye.'
'I'm fine. Just fine. How are you?'
'Great. You ought to know.'
I put the gun on safety and put it away. 'I did know,' I said. 'Hard to remember… to recall the experience of what it was like.'
'You've forgotten completely. You wouldn't be able to go on living if you had to carry the memory around with you.'
'It's that powerful,' I asked, not really asking.
'Of course.'
'I have… some memory of it, though. I mean, I haven't blanked out any of it. The mountains… the way the air smelled:. the different landscapes. The heights.'
'You only remember the outward forms, not the substance of the experience.'
'I guess.' I took a deep breath. 'So what's up?'
Roland crossed his arms and began to pace slowly. 'We've given it a lot of thought. We must help you. There's no other way.'
'Thanks. We need it. Can you fix the engine?'
'That's really not an area where we could have much input.'
'What did you have in mind?'
