Killing Time

She held me tighter at that. 'Very lousy,' she murmured.

'Larissa,' I whispered. 'There's something—' I looked into her eyes, wanting to see curiosity but finding only severe exhaustion. 'Jesus, you've got to rest.'

She nodded, but managed to ask, ' 'Something'?'

'We can talk about it later,' I answered, believing that we would have plenty of time to do so and still wanting, like some well-heeled suitor, to talk to her brother before I sprang the idea on her. 'For now, rest.'

She sighed acknowledgment, kissed me again, and strode wearily away, leaving the door to her brother's quarters ajar.

I stepped inside, sure of what I was going to say and hopeful that Malcolm would approve of the plan; wholly unsuspecting, in short, that he was about to tell me what he considered the greatest of his many secrets, a tale so bizarre and unbelievable that it would force me to the conclusion that he had, in fact, lost his mind.

CHAPTER 42

Malcolm's quarters in the compound were even more spartan than his cabin aboard the ship, offering, it seemed to me, few comforts that could not have been found on the sparsely populated Hirta of two hundred years earlier. In the far wall a bay window similar to the one in my room looked out over another rocky, mysterious stretch of oceanfront, and before this window Malcolm sat in his wheelchair, bathed in the soft sunlight of St. Kilda and watching the hundreds of seabirds on the rocks with the same simple enthusiasm I'd seen in his features several times before. It was a vivid reminder that the young boy who had entered that hellish hospital all those years ago had not been completely destroyed by the experience; yet, paradoxically, the very youthfulness of the look should have been enough to remind me of the extent to which Malcolm depended on Larissa and to convince me that any notion of his approving of my running off with her was absurd.

He sensed my presence but made no move to face me. 'Gideon,' he said in a voice that seemed not so much strong as an attempt at strength. He paused for a moment, during which I prepared to make my case to him; but before I could speak he asked, 'Are the materials for your Washington plan still in place?'

The question caught me with my jaw already open; and now that mandible seemed to actually fall to the floor. 'I beg your pardon?' I mumbled.

'Your Washington plan,' he repeated, still watching the birds. 'How soon can you be ready to implement it?'

I somehow managed to collect my wits enough to say, 'You're not serious.'

Still not turning, Malcolm nodded as if he'd expected just such an answer. 'You think that what happened in Moscow means that we should suspend our work. You think it may happen again.'

At that instant every ounce of self-delusion somehow drained out of me like so much blood. I took a few shaky steps toward a straight-backed mahogany chair, falling into it as I suddenly realized the folly of my recent plans as well as the extent of Malcolm's commitment to his undertaking. Emotional protests and declarations seemed pointless, given the situation, so I answered him in a voice that was as rational and grave as I could make it: 'Malcolm — you yourself have said that there are terrible problems inherent in what you're doing.'

'What I said,' Malcolm answered, quietly but pointedly, 'was that we've done our job too well. Dov Eshkol proved that.'

It was an almost incredible statement. 'Yes. I'd say that he certainly did.'

'And so we learn and go on.' He still seemed unprepared to look me in the eye. 'As you and I have already discussed, we must make sure that all future projects will be exposed in a reasonable amount of time. We'll plant hints — more than hints, obvious flaws — so that even the most obtuse—'

'Malcolm?' I interrupted, too shocked to go on listening to him but still trying to speak in a straightforward, calm manner. 'Malcolm, I can't go on being part of this. What you're doing, it's more than just subversive, it's unimaginably dangerous. Surely even you see that now.' He gave no answer, and my head began to grow feverish with incredulity. 'Is it possible — are you really going to try to deny it? This business, this game of yours, it may seem manageable to you, but there are millions of people out there who have to make sense of thousands of pieces of bizarre new information every day, and they don't have the time or the tools to sort out what's real from what's blatant fabrication. The world's gone too far — people's minds have been stretched too far — and we have no idea what will set the next lunatic off. What'll you do if we carry out this latest plan, and some anticorporate, antigovernment lunatic in the States — and there are plenty of them — uses it as a rationalization to blow up yet another federal building? Or something even bigger?' I paused and then shifted gears, trying to direct the discussion away from the kind of moral and political dialectic of which he was a master and focus it instead on my very real concern for him and the others: 'Besides, how long can you really hope to get away with it? Look at how narrow our escape was this time and what it cost us. You've got to consider something else, this isn't—'

I cut myself short when I saw his hand go up slowly. 'All right,' he said, in a voice choked with sorrow and regret. 'All right, Gideon.' He finally wheeled his chair around, his head drooping so low that his chin nearly rested on his chest. When he glanced up again, he still wouldn't connect with my gaze; but the grief in his features was apparent and pitiful to behold. 'I would have done anything to prevent what happened to Leon,' he said softly. 'But every one of us knows the risks—'

' 'Knows the risks'? Malcolm, this isn't a war, for God's sake!'

At last those hypnotic yet unsettling blue eyes met my own hard stare. 'Isn't it?' he asked. He began to reach around for the crutches that were clipped to the back of his chair. 'You think,' he went on, his voice getting stronger, 'that this method of addressing the problem doesn't work.' He fought hard to get to his feet, and though I felt more of a desire to help than I ever had before, I once again refrained. 'You think that the world's illness is beyond this sort of treatment. Fine.' He took a few steps in my direction. 'What would you prescribe instead?'

I simply could not engage him on this level, and I made that fact plain: 'Malcolm, this isn't about 'illnesses' and 'prescriptions.' Civilization is going to do whatever it's going to do, and if you keep trying to stand in the way you'll just create more disasters. Maybe you're right, maybe this information society is taking us into a high-tech dark age. But maybe it isn't. Maybe we just don't understand it. Maybe Julien's wrong, and this isn't a 'threshold moment,' and maybe there were people like us sitting in some scientifically advanced horse and carriage when Gutenberg ran off his first Bible screaming, 'That's it! It's all over!' I don't know. But the point is, neither do you. The only thing we do know is that you can't stop change and you won't stop technology. There's nothing in the past to suggest that it's possible.'

As I was speaking, Malcolm turned, almost with the slowness of a clock, to look out at the birds again. 'That's true,' he murmured.

Ready as I was to argue on, his statement came as a complete surprise. 'It is?' I said a bit dimly.

Malcolm nodded. 'Yes. There's nothing in the past to suggest that it's possible— yet.'

As he roamed back over to the window, I followed, suddenly feeling very nervous. 'What do you mean, 'in the past, yet'? Malcolm, you're not making sense.'

As he attempted to explain himself, Malcolm seemed to grow increasingly unaware of who I was or even that there was anyone in the room with him; and the vacant brilliance that his eyes took on as they stared at the similarly dazzling blue of the sky above the ocean offered the first hint of real mental imbalance. 'Suppose I were to tell you,' he said, 'that through that room' — he indicated an adjacent chamber in the direction of his lab—'and behind a certain very thick door you'll find a device that may be able to redefine, even destroy, both history and time, at least as we currently understand them. That in a very short while it will be possible to move through our temporal continuum and alter the past, so that 'history' will no longer be an unalterable chronological record but a living laboratory in which we will conduct experiments to improve the present condition of our planet and our species.'

Had it even occurred to me to take this statement seriously, I might well have fallen over; as it was, I only became steadily more convinced that the man's mind had snapped. 'Listen, Malcolm,' I said, putting a hand to his shoulder. 'Try to understand — as a doctor it's incumbent on me to tell you that you've suffered a breakdown. A potentially severe one. And given what we've all been through, I'm not surprised. You have friends in Edinburgh,