The Rock

THE CRATER

Fran stepped out into darkness, staggering slightly as she felt dirt under her feet. As her eyes adjusted, she could see stars faintly glinting overhead, but all around she was surrounded by darkness. It was as if she was at the bottom of a large bowl, with the sky circling overhead. "Where are we?" she asked.

It was Don who answered her. "We're in Arizona. I've been here before. We're at the bottom of Meteor Crater. Of course, I don't know when we are," he added.

"The location is correct," Pencak confirmed. "The when is your present."

"Then you don't need fixed sites like Tunguska and Ayers Rock to travel in time?" Fran asked.

"No," Pencak answered. "And traveling is not the right word for it. We bend space and time from our master control room in the future. We can travel to any time and any place on the planet. Debra Levy was very correct in her assumptions about wormholes, but she underestimated the scale to which it could be developed-which is very interesting, considering that, in our history, she was one of the key members of the team that developed time travel."

"Then why the whole setup at Ayers Rock if it wasn't necessary?" Don asked.

"Ah, but it was very necessary," Pencak replied. She lifted up her cane and squinted at the handle in the dark. "We only have an hour. I will try to do my best to explain what is happening in that time. It is most likely that you two will be the only ones who will know what has really occurred-what is still occurring. And that is how it must be-you must safeguard that knowledge. Many people have dedicated their lives to making what is happening occur. And we will not know for another hour if we have even begun to succeed. If we have, I, and the others like me, we will cease to exist."

The massive mountain of concrete that had once been the Chernobyl nuclear power plant loomed on the horizon as Tuskin brought the skimmer to a landing next to a two-lane tar road covered with wisps of snow.

"You think he came here?" Hawkins asked as the craft settled with a slight bump.

"I'm sure he did," Tuskin answered. "The question is, is he still in the area?" Hawkins looked around as the door opened and they stepped out. "How hot is it out here?"

"We have a half hour with no ill effects. Longer than that"-Tuskin shrugged-"longer than that you might as well stay." He squinted into the wind blowing across the road and pointed. "There. That's the grave site. I had to do a recon of this area three years ago with Sergot. We flew in low and fast onboard helicopters, taking pictures for the scientists to look at. We all received a good dose of radiation then, but the government certainly didn't care. Sergot pointed out the grave to me. He is a very bitter man," he added unnecessarily. Hawkins understood bitterness quite well.

Hawkins leaned over and looked at the ground. "I think someone's been here in a truck." He reached down and cleared some freshly fallen snow away with his bare hand. "There are tire tracks frozen into the dirt on the side of the road here."

Tuskin examined the marks. "A four-by-four military vehicle. It had to be Sergot."

Hawkins looked around. "Where did he go? The old reactor?"

Tuskin shook his head. "He could have headed anywhere. Those tracks are several days old. He could be on the outskirts of Moscow or he could be sitting by the reactor building with the bomb armed, just waiting for the right moment to push the button. One thing's for sure-if he drove here, he's received a fatal exposure, so he has nothing to lose."

Tuskin rubbed his chin. "Let's check out the reactor building. Maybe we'll spot him there. If not, then there are many targets within a few days' ride of here that he could head for to take out his revenge. We will have to make an educated guess."

They tromped up the ramp into the skimmer and halted in amazement at the black-robed figure seated inside. The figure rose and gestured for them to come on board. "The trail is cold here and there's not much time." It was the same metallic voice the Speaker had used.

"Do you know where the other bomb is?" Tuskin asked.

"He is headed for Kapustin Yar."

"Shit!" Tuskin exploded. "We must stop him!"

"What's at Kapustin Yar?" Hawkins asked as the door slid up behind them.

Tuskin staggered over to the bench and sat down, ignoring the black-robed figure. "I should have guessed. Sergot would not waste his life in a futile gesture. He would go for the one target that would have the greatest effect."

"What's at Kapustin Yar?" Hawkins repeated, disturbed by how upset Tuskin was.

"It's a storage facility for weapons. Nuclear weapons. It's also where the SS-27's are stored."

Hawkins frowned. "SS-27's? I thought your latest version of the strategic missile was the 24."

Tuskin nodded weakly. "That's what almost everyone thinks. The 27 is not just a missile, though-it's what you would call a doomsday weapon. The final threat. I was involved in the security testing of the storage facility for the missiles at Kapustin Yar-as was Sergot. We were briefed on what was inside and it scared even me.

"The 27's are designed to be radioactively dirty. They took old booster rockets from the space program and put a guidance system on board. Then they put a relatively small-yield nuclear explosive in the payload area and then surrounded it with nuclear waste. We have much more nuclear waste than anyone in the West even begins to fear. All those warheads we had to disarm when the Cold War ended and the West would not help us dispose of the plutonium-the waste had to go somewhere.

"When the SS-27 warhead blows, the waste is spread, along with the fallout from the bomb itself, making the long-term effects devastating. There are only twenty of the SS-27's, but that was estimated to be enough to completely blanket Europe with such a high level of radiation as to make the continent unlivable for generations."

"Jesus Christ!" Hawkins exploded. "That's just goddamn great. So we're dealing with much more than one explosion here." He turned to the Speaker. "If you knew where the other bomb was all this time, why didn't you tell us?"

The Speaker didn't move and the mechanical voice was emotionless. "We could not interfere. You had to change things."

"Then why are you here now?" Hawkins demanded.

"Because we are running out of time. We can no longer control events as we thought we could. There are too many variables. Good luck."

"What are you talking about? Control what events? What's going on?" Hawkins asked as Tuskin made his way to the cockpit.

In reply a black portal appeared and the Speaker stepped through and disappeared, leaving Hawkins staring at empty space as the portal collapsed.

"Who are you?" Fran asked, shivering in the cold night air.

"My name isn't important," Pencak replied.

"But you're not Pencak?"

"For your purposes I am. I assumed her identity in 1954 when she died in a car crash. Ever since I have lived her life."

Fran asked the question that was troubling her the most. "Why? Why are you doing all this? Why did you pretend to be aliens?"

"In a way we are aliens," Pencak said. "The future we come from is very different from what you know." She paused briefly in thought. "But there really was an overriding reason why we have acted this way, and you of all people should understand it. We have statistical projection in our time-much improved over what you use. We reversed the process, looking for the critical node that we could go back to.

"When we asked our computers how to accomplish our goal, the favored solution-the only feasible solution-was to present the people of the past with an external threat-something that the various countries and powers-that-be could bond together against."

"What was your goal?" Batson asked.

"To change our history," Pencak replied.

"But why us? Why now?" Batson asked.

Pencak looked at some glowing numbers on the end of her cane. "Because in my past, in thirty-two minutes, a nuclear bomb is exploded near a secret weapons facility twelve hundred miles southeast of Moscow. The fallout from that explosion blankets most of Europe and eventually makes its way around the world, drastically affecting life on the planet. Economic and political chaos follows and the world drifts into what some have called World War III but is more appropriately called the Chaos." She pointed at herself. "I am one of the relatively healthy people from my time. You saw some of the others just before we left."

"Why didn't you just stop the bomb yourself?" Fran asked. "Why did you even allow the first one at Vredefort Dome to go off if you knew about it and could go back in time and stop it?"

"If you could go back in time, what action would you take to stop World War I?" Pencak asked. "Would you go back a few minutes prior to Archduke Ferdinand's assassination and kill the assassin?" She didn't wait for an answer. "But you would not know if you were successful until the time of the assassination and if you were wrong, then what? Maybe there was a plot of several conspirators that no one knew about and if you stopped the first assassin, there was another killer waiting down the street who would step forward and do the job.

"And even then, if you had stopped the archduke from being killed, would that necessarily have stopped the war? Or just delayed it, with the potential for even more disastrous results? There were many factors that led to that war, just as with any other war. The assassination was just the spark. Stopping that spark would just have allowed another spark, a potentially more dangerous spark, to ignite the conflict. The same was true for us when we looked back.

"As far as one of us coming back and trying to tell you that we came from the future-would you have believed us any more than you believed the alien theory, even when presented with insurmountable evidence? And even if you believed, would you have changed? You know as well as I do that people change only when they are forced to. We had to force you, and even now we are not sure how well we have succeeded. That is why you two must be the only ones who know the truth. The governments must still believe in the alien threat."

Pencak leaned on her cane. "We had several goals, all of which we needed to accomplish concurrently. We needed to allow the first bomb to go off to focus attention on the problem. You can recover from that explosion. In fact, it should be the spur for greater controls on nuclear weapons.

"Stopping the second bomb is just one of several actions that are taking place to change the course of our history. Even as we speak, there are unprecedented conversations going on between world leaders, focused on what they think-and we want them to think-they have found in Ayers Rock and at Tunguska. That cooperation is essential if the future is to turn out differently and mankind is to survive as a race. And that if there is some form of Coalition out there-and our computers indicate there most likely is-we will be accepted as a fit race for a civilized culture."

Pencak stopped suddenly and looked surprised for a second, and even in the dim light Fran could tell that the other woman was fading and then she was back again, as solid as ever.

"What's happening to you?" Fran asked.

"History is already slightly different than in my past," Pencak said. "Not so much yet that things might not turn out the same, but different nonetheless. We cannot control time-we can only travel in it. We have interfered with what happened in our past, and once our actions cause an irreversible change, we will no longer exist."

She smiled grimly. "Or at least that is what the computer says. No one knows for sure because no one has ever done this before. In my future we invented time travel only months prior to implementing our plan. I have lived an entire adult life here in the past, yet for my comrades in the future, only a few weeks have passed since I left. My fading is the effect of the ripples from the changes already made. The fact that I am still here, though, says none of the changes that have occurred so far are significant enough to have truly altered my past and your future.

"You spoke of history as a river whose course is very hard to change. So far we have only thrown stones in it. But when it does change, it will be a momentous thing for those of us in the future. Our channel of time will dry up and be gone."

"How did you destroy Voyager?" Batson asked suddenly.

"I planted a time-delay bomb in it while it was still being assembled in 1972. We knew the exact moment we wanted it destroyed, so it flew for all those years out of the solar system with that bomb waiting to go off."

"What about the messages for Levy?"

"My comrades sent those. I was surprised how quickly she determined how they were being sent. You were only supposed to pick up the part aimed for you-the two messages with Levy's name. The part that disappeared was my communication with my comrades." Pencak held up her strange cane. "The receiver is in the handle. I had to keep in contact."

"And this crater?" he asked. "It really was formed by meteors?"

Pencak gave her lopsided shrug. "I don't know. I have studied the crater and I do believe it was most likely formed by a nuclear explosion, but I have no idea how that could have happened. We took as many possible existing geological features that we could use and linked them together in a plausible story along with other factors we could manipulate to try and convince your world leaders that there was an alien threat. It remains to be seen how well we have succeeded. You do have to admit we presented a very realistic and believable scenario."

"Why us?" Fran went back to her original question. "Why Don and me?"

"Because of your son."

"Our son?" Batson said. "We hardly even know each other. Why would we have had a son in your past?"

"Because you are part of the Hermes Project. When the Chaos came, the government evacuated those in the Hermes Project. At first to West Virginia. Then, after a nuclear exchange between China and the United States left most of North America uninhabitable, the survivors were moved to Australia. You lived in a sealed underground complex under Ayers Rock for years, working on ways to try to reclaim a planet that was un-reclaimable. Your son was the leader who kept us going for all those years when our projections showed nothing but slow and horrible death. He kept us going until we achieved time travel and then he led the staff that planned this entire mission."

There was a long silence, and the howl of a coyote sounded out over the rim of the crater.

"Do you really think things will change for the better if Hawkins and Tuskin stop the other bomb from going off?"

"Things have already changed," Pencak said. "It cannot be much worse than the present I knew. The human race was dying as a species, with the entire planet not far behind. Our best-case projection gave us only another twelve point three years before humanity was extinct. We in the future have nothing to lose except a few more miserable years of life."

"What about Debra?" Fran suddenly asked. "How come she didn't come back with us?"

Pencak sighed and leaned on her cane. "The bomb going off in Russia was only the beginning of the end. Even then mankind didn't learn. The Russians suspected the Americans of causing the explosion. The Americans suspected the Russians of trying to destroy Europe. The Europeans were too busy dying to suspect anyone. The southern hemisphere spiraled into economic and ecological disaster with the loss of the industrialized nations in Europe and the collapse of the South African gold standard. China tried flexing its military muscle and invaded Japan. The nuclear exchange between the United States and China was a result of the Americans trying to halt the takeover. Of course, the fact that the Japanese islands were left uninhabitable as a result of the war didn't stop anyone.

"But even then, staring extinction as a species in the face, the governments still worked against each other. Levy was picked up by the Hermes Project. She joined you all in the underground bunker, but her job was far different from yours. Hers was to work on weapons of destruction-the American government's last gasp at the ultimate weapon. And she did that very well." Pencak swiveled her gaze to Fran. "You recognized Ayers Rock when you saw it, but it was different, wasn't it?"

"It looked torn up," Fran said.

"It had been. The war was still going on even as we were running this mission," Pencak said. "Australia was the last habitable continent and you could see that it was barely livable-we had to heavily filter the air we pumped in from the surface. The remains of the U.S. government and the Hermes Project moved to Australia in year twenty-three of the Chaos. We built and occupied that vast underground complex underneath the Rock.

"Levy was the key to the team that developed the theories that allowed construction of the plasma projectors. A splinter group of survivalists used those weapons on our support facilities outside Ayers Rock when they discovered our plan to change the past and destroy our present. We stopped them temporarily, but only to gain time to complete this project. You could see what their weapons did to the Rock.

"The Russians-what remained of them-also worked on their own weapons. The other three men whose names we sent to the Russians were part of that team. Their deaths portend a change of our future even if the bomb does go off, because they will not be there to complete their particle-beam weapon, perfected twenty-five years after the start of the Chaos. Whether others may step into the breach and complete it we don't know. All we do know is that in twenty-seven minutes, the first true major change may or may not occur. All the other actions are a backup to that."

Fran looked up-there was a hint of light gray on the eastern lip of the crater. She shivered in the cold and wondered where Hawkins was right now and how close he was to succeeding in his mission.

The Russian drove sitting in his own feces, no longer able to control his bodily functions. He didn't even notice the discomfort of it as the pain that racked his dying body overrode such trivial feelings. Only the intensity of his single-mindedness allowed him to continue to control the truck along the deserted logging road. He knew he was close because he'd passed the first warning signs that he was entering a restricted area fifteen minutes before. If he kept going along this road, in three or four miles he would reach the outer security fence. He didn't plan on having to go that far. Just another mile or so would be close enough for the yield of this bomb to vaporize the greater part of the main post of the facility-particularly the mobile rocket launchers holding the SS-27's.

He reached up and slid his shaking hand along his jacket pocket, ensuring that the remote detonator was still there. He'd rigged the bomb yesterday, knowing that today he would not be well enough to do the intricate wiring work. All it would take was to flip up the cover on the detonator and press the switch, and it would all be over.

His eyes were so intent on the road that it took him a moment to realize that the sun had been blocked out and he was in a shadow that extended only a short distance on all sides of the truck. He slowly became conscious of a howling sound. The wind was swirling around the vehicle, blowing snow up into the air. He pushed the brake and rolled down the window, leaning out and looking up.

Twenty feet above, Tuskin leaned out the open door of the skimmer and recognized Sergot as the older man squinting against the down blast from the thrusters. Tuskin considered vaporizing the cab of the vehicle with the plasma projector, but quickly vetoed that idea. For all he knew, Sergot might have rigged a dead man's switch, in which case the bomb would go off. Or the bomb itself might be up in the cab, in the passenger seat, and he was unsure what effect the projector would have on it.

Hawkins appeared at his side, having set the controls to hold the skimmer in position. "The nearest place to land is about two hundred meters ahead!" Hawkins screamed into his ear.

"He's there!" Tuskin yelled above the roar of the thrusters. "There's no time to land."

The door of the truck opened and Sergot stepped out. He held something in his right hand. As Hawkins swung up his weapon, Tuskin made his decision. He leapt out the open door and fell the thirty feet to the ground, landing on top of Sergot.

Tuskin heard the snap as his left leg broke and could feel several ribs on the side that had hit Sergot splinter and tear into his left lung. He ignored the pain as he reached with both hands and seized Sergot's right hand, squeezing with all his might. The older man was dazed when Tuskin landed on him and desperately tried to flip open the lid to the firing device. Tuskin kneed him with his good leg and dug his thumb into the other man's wrist, forcing the fingers open. Tuskin grabbed the device as he heard the roar of a pistol and felt the thud of a large-caliber bullet slamming into his gut. As Sergot fired again with his left hand, Tuskin threw the firing device clear of the two of them and turned his head up at Hawkins, hovering in the doorway of the skimmer overhead. "Shoot!" Tuskin screamed, but his words were blown away by the roar of the engines.

Sergot shifted and again fired into Tuskin at pointblank range. Tuskin felt his hold on the other man slip away as a darkness came over his eyes. With all his might he gripped the other man one last time to keep him from crawling after the detonator. He smiled for the briefest of moments as he heard the crackle of the plasma projector come from above. Then the smile was obliterated along with the rest of his body and Sergot.

Hawkins gently lowered the skimmer into a field a short distance away and then walked back to the truck. He stepped, with hardly a glance, around the black charred spot that had been two men, and pulled aside the tarp that covered the back. The bomb sat there all alone in the rear. Hawkins got into the cab of the truck and drove it to the skimmer and trundled the bomb on board.

He went up to the cockpit and set the controls for Tunguska.