“Asmus,” Gallie says. “Have they found your Center?” Asmus is nursing his bloodied nose but still has enough wherewithal to look at Gallie in contempt. A short, threatening shake from Mack is all it takes.
“They haven’t got in. They can’t without me,” Asmus mutters.
“If we can get there, we can accel–” Gallie begins.
“Fuck you,” is what it sounds like from Asmus although the bloodied gurgle gives it comic effect.
“Do we need him to get into it?” Bruce asks.
“Yeah. Biometric access.”
“Well I can cut off his face or whatever body part we need,” Mack says.
“Not sure how it works,” I say, but not rejecting Mack’s idea. “There’s also an underground passageway that’d get us out of the building, if we can get to it.”
Asmus wriggles free of Mack’s grip in defiant irritation. “Look, let’s talk sense here my excitable friends,” he says. “This is way too much drama for the circumstances we’re really in.” He takes a couple of steps toward me and places a hand on my forearm. “Joad, let’s talk.” I look down at his hand just before everything changes.
FIFTY-ONE
I’m in a sepia hologram. We’re in the same room and everyone is standing where they had stood an instant before, but they have the faded red-brown hue of an antique photograph. I turn my head and I have the sense of a thousand small adjustments rather than a fluid motion. There’s a profound familiarity to this, like a deja vu but an overwhelmingly intense one. Everyone is frozen still. Everyone except Asmus, who removes his hand from my arm and takes a step backwards. He’s grinning.
“We need to have a few words,” he says, and the acoustics of his voice are close and deadened, as if spoken in a bubble.
“What have you done?” I hear myself ask, but the words seem to come from somewhere distant.
“Your curiosity excites me, Joad” he says. “The first time is a wonder.” I turn in an uncountable number of minute motions to look at Gallie’s face and frozen into it are the beginnings of suspicion. “Can you guess what’s happening? Can you?”
“You touched me,” I say feebly.
“Yes, I did. Because we must speak Joad. Just you and me. You’ll understand.”
“Time’s frozen?”
“Yet you and I aren’t frozen, are we?”
“No.”
“So what do you make of that?” he asks. “Think it through, Joad. No rush. Time is not pressing. Literally.” He grins. Then he waits. “Tee time and Tau time. Rings any bells?” It doesn’t and I shake my head in a series of tiny adjustments. “No. You never had much of an interest in my work, did you? But now you do, I think.” He seats himself and dabs his nose with a handkerchief soaked in sepia blood. “I’ll start you off because I know you need it. So why should space have three dimensions to it while time has but one? Seems unfair, no?” He pauses and then grins. “And as it turns out, it’s untrue, too.”
“Tee time and Tau time are two time dimensions?”
“They are, Joad. Quite perpendicular to one another the way left and right are perpendicular to up and down.” He holds up a small disk the size of an old-fashioned pocket watch that’s smooth and without markings. “Tee time I’ve frozen, and it’s Tau time through which you and I are now in motion.”
“Tau time,” I echo, dumbly.
“Yes. As you see, it lacks some refinements of Tee time: more discrete, less continuous–a quantum effect I don’t have time to explain. Plays with the light spectrum a little, too. But perfectly functional. It has most of the things you’d want out of a decent time dimension.”
“And that little device gets us into Tau time?”
“This? It’s really no more than an accelerator. Turns out that if you can sustain a backwards accel accurately enough to precisely offset forward Tee time, then Tau time shows itself. A discovery in your future–mine, too as a matter of fact.”
I try to affect irritated nonchalance at this revelation, which is impossible both because of its dizzying implications, and the fact that I’m now moving around inside those implications like a sequence of drawings being flicked to create motion. He jumps up as if suddenly inspired to action. “Come with me. I want to show you the world in Tau time.”
He walks and I follow him as my suspicion is trumped by awe. We walk through a sepia version of things, along the hallway, down the staircase, navigating the frozen soldiers. We step outside into a photograph: one of a landscape dotted by tents, campfires and troops, all frozen. The sky is aflame in red, like a sunset from horizon to horizon.
“You see me as a villain, Joad,” Asmus says. The acoustics of his voice are unchanged by the outdoors, as if this is the sound made when people speak within a photograph. “But what am I really doing to deserve that?”
“Well, let’s start with you having fifty TMA staff trapped here.”
“Ah, yes. Well, take them. Take them to wherever they want to be. Although, granted, at this moment I’m not one hundred percent in control.” He opens his arms at the encamped army. “But I will be soon. That’ll happen.”
“And there’s the matter of your vandalizing the timeline,” I say.
“Oh Joad, we’ve had that conversation. You can’t accuse someone of screwing up something that’s already completely screwed. Vandalism is about destroying something good, beautiful, desirable. There’s no vandalism here. Maybe if we try to change the timeline often enough, then something good will come out the other end. Play the odds enough and you might win. No?”
“And that’s your strategy is it? Chimps on typewriters? Maybe the chaos will in the end produce something good?”
“Come on,” Asmus says. “Let’s check out the barn.”
