wisecrack. He did not.
“Well?” Griffin said.
“An artificial one. The Unchanging approached us with time travel in one hand, and a list of restrictions in the other. Naturally, we assumed it came from them.”
“Christ on a crutch!” Jimmy said suddenly. “Will you look at this fucker?”
She turned. Jimmy was staring out the window at a grotesque, long-jawed giant of a predator that was padding slowly down the river road.
“I saw that same creature inside Terminal City! It scared the daylights out of me.”
“It’s only an Andrewsarchus,” Griffin said irritably. “So it’s big! Something has to be. There’s really no reason to make such a fuss over it. Sit down, Jimmy. In a chair, with your back to the window.”
Meekly, Jimmy obeyed.
“Continue,” Griffin said to Molly.
“That’s pretty much it. But it explains why they’re all of a height and a size and an appearance. Why they have no genetic variety at all. Why they look so pleasing to the eye. They were simply created for a job—dealing with us. And it explains why the negotiations have gotten nowhere. We’ve been talking to the wrong folks. The Unchanging aren’t our sponsors. They’re just our sponsors’ tools.”
For an instant, no one spoke. Then Griffin said, “We need to talk with the Unchanging.”
The door opened.
An Unchanging walked in. “You require me,” it said. “I am here.”
“Yes,” Griffin said. “But what use are you?”
It regarded him with polite, bland patience. Molly Gerhard recalled that Griffin had once told her that one of his chief tools was boredom. Sitzflesk, he said, was even more important to a bureaucrat than it was to a chess player. Many a concession had been made by a negotiator who simply couldn’t face running through the same excruciating drivel for the seventeenth time. Yet he had never been able to out-sit an Unchanging. He could not match their perfect lack of expectation. He could not rattle them, nor insult them. They never displayed emotion.
“We’ve been discussing you,” Griffin said. “It has been suggested that this is not your proper time.”
“I am here. Time is always proper.”
Griffin grinned. He was a warrior, Molly Gerhard realized, and this was his field of combat. However discouraged he might have been mere minutes ago, the possibility of victory exalted him. “It has been suggested that you are an artificial construct. Is this true?”
“Yes.”
“How were you made?” Molly Gerhard asked.
“I was grown from human genetic material, suitably altered for the purposes to which I am put.”
“Who made you?”
“I am not authorized to tell you that.”
“Then we must talk to those who made you.”
“I cannot authorize that.”
“Who can?”
“I am not authorized to tell you that.”
Tick-tock, she thought again, her suspicions confirmed. The Unchanging was just another machine. Nothing more. Nothing less. They could stay here forever arguing with the thing, and not make a single inch’s headway.
Griffin, unfortunately, was a battler. It took three hours’ repetitive argument for him to give in.
“Can anything at all be resolved through you?” he finally asked. “Have you the authority to make decisions without precedent? Can you, under any conditions, send us forward on your own cognizance?”
“No.”
Griffin looked disgusted. “Then leave.”
It turned to go. Suddenly, Molly remembered another of Salley’s hints. “Tell me something,” she said. “Exactly how many of you are there?”
It paused. “One.”
“No, not you personally. I mean of the Unchanging. How many Unchanging are there in Terminal City? How many are there in the world at any given time? How many exist if you add up every one of the Unchanging no matter what era in time it inhabits?”
“One,” it said. “I am all there is. I perform all tasks, fulfill all functions, suffice for all that must be done. Only me. One.”
When the Unchanging was gone, Molly Gerhard said, “Yikes.”
“What annoys me,” Griffin said, “is the very real possibility that the Pentagon has had this information all along, but didn’t deem it important that we share in it.”
Jimmy scratched his head. “Let me get this straight. There’s only one of them.”
“Yes. One single individual, looped through time a thousand, a million, however many times it takes to do all the tasks that need doing.”
“Like that old notion that there was only one single subatomic particle running from one end of time to the other and back, over and over, until it’s woven an entire universe out of itself?”
“Yes.”
Jimmy stood, scraping his chair back on the floor. “Then I know what to do. Gather up everything you want to take with you. We’re leaving.”
When they came to the center of Terminal City and saw the guard waiting for them, Griffin said mildly, “I hope that whatever you plan doesn’t require our getting past the Unchanging. Without my pass, we won’t be allowed anywhere near the funnel.”
Molly Gerhard felt a sudden chill. Without access to the funnel, they had no way go get home. “Ever?” she asked.
“Now don’t you worry one least bit,” Jimmy said. “Let me show you how we handle problems like this back in Belfast.”
Unhurriedly, but not slowly either, he walked up to the Unchanging on duty before the cavern’s entrance. “Excuse me just a sec,” he said. “I have something here that—”
He was alongside the Unchanging now. His hand came out of his pocket and moved with uncanny speed toward the being’s back. Then he stepped away.
There was surprisingly little blood. Just a spreading crimson stain on the robe where the knife hilt stuck out of the Unchanging’s back.
Quietly, without protest, it fell.
It was quite dead.
“If there’s only one of him, then he has to end somewhere,” Jimmy commented. “And if he ends here, then he couldn’t see it coming.”
He started toward the funnel. “Come on.”
16. Buddy System
