Visitors

Chapter 25 Preemptive

It wasn’t hard to persuade the younger version of Professor Wheaton that time travel was real, and that the oldish man with them was Wheaton toward the end of his career. Wheaton had always been an open-minded guy, and a few minutes of dis­appearing into slicetime could be quite convincing. The one thing Wheaton doubted was that his future career was in ­anthropology. “I’m a philologist,” he said.

“We had to catch him in his philologist phase,” sighed Old Wheaton. “You’ll get over it.”

“I don’t see why,” said Young Wheaton.

“The need for employment,” said Wheaton. “And the fact that whatever could be extracted from philology is already known. Besides, what does it matter that you’ve learned a half dozen languages? This boy can speak all of them.”

Young Wheaton—Georgia—tested Noxon in several ancient languages, then shrugged. “Party trick.”

In Gothic, Noxon said, “The only person who knows I got it right is you.”

“Well, I’m not going to lie. You really are speaking the languages. Badly.”

“My accent is identical to yours,” said Noxon.

“Not it’s not.”

“It has to be. I’m a perfect mimic, and I learned the language from you.”

“When? I never taught a class in Gothic.”

“Just now,” said Noxon. He turned to Ram Odin. “Georgia doesn’t understand how I could have learned Gothic from him, after hearing him speak it for ten seconds.”

“Not possible,” said Georgia. “Not even for a savant.”

“Not possible,” echoed Noxon, “and yet you just saw it.”

“For all I know, being a time traveler, you spent a year with a tribe that spoke Gothic with a particularly wretched accent.”

“Georgia Wheaton is well known to be tone deaf,” said Deborah. “No ear for accents.”

“Not true,” said Young Wheaton. “I speak like a native.”

“Dead languages, so nobody could check,” said Old Wheaton. “Perhaps another reason I abandoned philology. When I had a child to support.”

With theatrical flamboyance, Young Wheaton buried his face in his hands. “He knows all my secrets. Why are you here?”

“To save the life of your brother Arnold and his wife,” said Ram Odin. “And to save Deborah’s eyesight.”

Young Wheaton looked at Deborah. “You’re the baby?”

“All grown up,” she said. “You—he—raised me.”

“Well, aren’t I nice,” said Young Wheaton. He looked at Old Wheaton with some admiration now, instead of annoyance.

“Tomorrow afternoon they will set out on a car trip,” said Old Wheaton. “They’ll get onto the freeway and die in a fiery crash. Deborah is dragged out of her rear carseat by a passerby, but her eyes were already burnt out.”

“He’s the only father I ever knew,” said Deborah. “We’ll continue to exist—without my eyes, without his philology—but you won’t have to devote yourself to raising a baby, and my parents will get to raise a much prettier and better-functioning version of me.”

“So you’re going to this trouble for someone else,” said Young Wheaton.

“It would always be someone else,” said Deborah. “The undamaged baby. The only issue was whether to extinguish me or not.”

“And we don’t have any guarantee that they won’t all get hit by a bus a week from now,” said Noxon. “We’re not going to keep coming back to fix things. People die and things go wrong. We have work to do.”

“Heartless,” said Young Wheaton.

“Don’t judge,” said Ram Odin. “Every change he makes undoes everything that happens in other people’s futures. He tries to create minimal mess. But somebody won’t get a job because Deborah’s father isn’t dead to create the opening. Somebody won’t live in a certain house because Deborah’s family will be living there. Lots of changes that we can’t predict and won’t understand. Maybe somebody else will now die, hit by the same incompetent driver.”

“OK, I get all that,” said Young Wheaton. “He has to be heartless, to a degree. I can see that.”

“And now we need you to help us persuade your brother and sister-in-law to listen to us,” said Ram Odin.

“I can’t even persuade them to listen to me,” said Young Wheaton.

“All we need is an introduction, with both parents and the baby in the same room. We can take it from there.”

“Lanae is perfectly capable of refusing to believe the evidence of her own eyes,” said Young Wheaton.

“But Arnold can bring her around,” said Old Wheaton. “And she’s superstitious, as I recall. Tell her it’s bad luck to make the trip.”

“Not my job,” said Young Wheaton. “I’ll get you into the house. You take it from there.” He looked at Deborah. “I assume you have the same fingerprints as are on the birth certificate.”

“A little bigger now,” said Deborah.

“You’ll do fine,” said Young Wheaton.

“And then, after we’ve all saved their lives together,” said Old Wheaton, “we’ll go away and come back in about twenty years so we can live with you while we figure out how to prevent ­planetary genocide.”

That led to another explanation, but in the end, everything went according to plan. It took a couple of hours to get Lanae Wheaton to stop yelling and demanding that they leave the house, then weeping over Deborah’s missing eyes while murmuring, “My baby, my beautiful baby.” Then Noxon had Old Wheaton, Ram Odin, and grown-up Deborah hold hands and he jumped them back into the future.

A different future now. One in which Young Wheaton lived in a different city, because he was a professor of ancient languages at a different university. “My vids of the Erectids!” cried Old Wheaton. “I left them in the house! They’re gone forever!”

Deborah opened her purse and showed him the memory chips. “I thought of that and took them with us.”

“You see why I couldn’t part with her?” Wheaton said. “She’s my brain.”

“External storage,” said Ram Odin.

“Nice to be needed,” said Deborah.

They had a little money with them, but not enough for airfare. Wheaton’s credit cards were for accounts that had never been opened, with numbers that belonged either to no one or to somebody he’d never heard of. Again, Deborah’s purse was their salvation, but she only had about a thousand dollars. “I took it from your stash,” she told Wheaton.

“My stash?” he asked.

“Remember I had you put a thousand dollars into a hiding place so we’d have emergency cash?”

“No.”

“Well, I did, and you did, and this is it,” she said. “Busfare, maybe?”

“A plane ticket for one, and the rest of us slice time?” asked Noxon.

“Better than two days on a bus,” said Ram Odin.

“I’ve walked farther,” said Noxon. “It’s not as hard as you might think.”

“We’d get arrested,” said Wheaton. “It’s very suspicious to be cross-country pedestrians wearing civilian clothes.”

“And we can’t live off the land,” said Ram Odin. “All the land belongs to somebody, and there are still plenty of people who shoot trespassers.”

“What an unfriendly country,” said Noxon.

“Different time, different place,” said Wheaton. “We think we’re a very welcoming country. Generous and kind. Unless we don’t like your language or the way you look.”

Noxon knew he had the language right, so it had to be the facemask.

They reached Young Wheaton’s apartment in Ithaca, New York, rather late at night. Not having cabfare, they had walked for more than an hour from the airport. At least they had no luggage. And they refused to let Noxon snare and cook food along the way. “Not legal here,” said Ram Odin. “Not without a license.”

“Well,” said Deborah, “you can take small animals without a license.”

“Possum,” said Wheaton. “Coon. Squirrel.”

“But we wouldn’t eat those,” said Deborah.

They talked for a while about why they would disdain perfectly good meat, until they got so tired from walking it stopped being fun to argue about nothing.

Philologist Wheaton was exactly Anthropologist Wheaton’s age now, of course, but they looked different. Philologist Wheaton was a little plumper. Softer. Paler. No outdoor life. Nobody looking after him. Noxon realized that Deborah really had made a difference in her adoptive father’s life.

“You knew we were coming,” complained Anthropologist Wheaton. “This is all the room you arranged for?”

“I have beds for everybody,” said Philologist Wheaton patiently, “and I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“No,” said Noxon. “I’ll sleep on the floor. I prefer it.”

“The couch is softer,” said Ram Odin.

“Soft beds give me a backache,” said Noxon.

“The old house was completely paid for,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “I grew up there.”

“It was also in another state,” said Philologist Wheaton. “The commute would have killed me.”

“Do you have enough money to feed us all? We aren’t sure how long we’ll be here,” said Ram Odin.

“I have plenty of money—I saved the amount I would have spent raising a blind daughter,” said Philologist Wheaton dryly. “And if I start running low, you can skip into the future, avoid a few meals, right?”

“Not with any precision,” said Noxon. “And we need time to assess the situation here in order to figure out how to prevent the destruction of my world.”

“I wonder if I’m going to have trouble deciding whose side I’m on,” said Philologist Wheaton. “I mean, maybe they have a good reason for attacking your world.”

“Not attacking,” said Noxon. “Garden has no defenses whatsoever. It’s global destruction of an unresisting enemy.”

“Except here you are, resisting.”

“Right of self-defense,” said Ram Odin.

“You aren’t defending yourself,” said Philologist Wheaton to Ram. “You’re from here.”

“But the planet Garden is full of my family,” said Ram Odin. “Descended from my twin brothers.”

“Defense of family,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “A basic principle of anthrope survival from the beginning.”

“I’m against genocide in principle,” said Philologist Wheaton. “I’m just saying, there might be two sides to the story.”

“That’s why we didn’t send Earth a one-hundred-percent-fatal plague,” said Noxon cheerfully. “That’s why I came in person. To find out the other side.”

“You have the toxins to wipe out life on Earth?” asked Philologist Wheaton.

“Not with me,” said Noxon. “But I do know where to find a couple of dozen sentient mice who I’m sure know exactly how to re-engineer the virus.”

“So you’re the most dangerous person in the world,” said Philologist Wheaton.

“I come to bring peace, not the sword,” said Noxon. “I believe the reason for colonizing Garden was so the human race would be on two separate worlds. That way a single asteroid strike couldn’t wipe out the species. But the first thing Earth does is wipe out the spare world. I certainly don’t want to return the favor. I want to understand what it is about us humans that we can’t stand to ­coexist. Especially when there are so many lightyears between us.”

“Built into the anthrope genome,” said Anthropologist Wheaton.

“Can you say anything that doesn’t refer to your expertise in anthropology?” asked Philologist Wheaton.

“It always seems appropriate,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “It enlightens every moral discussion.”

“I wish that saving young Deborah and her parents hadn’t wiped out your entire career as an anthropologist,” said Philologist Wheaton. “I doubt you’d think my many publications in linguistics and mythology are sufficient compensation.”

“Nor would his publications in anthropology make up for the loss of yours,” said Deborah, interrupting before her adoptive father could answer in what would certainly have been a non­conciliatory tone.

Anthropologist Wheaton smiled benignly. “I do have some vids you might like to see, completely vindicating some of my more speculative articles.”

“I’d like to read the articles first,” said Philologist Wheaton. “That way I’ll understand better what I’m seeing.”

“And I did love philology in my youth. Influenced by Tolkien, I’m afraid—didn’t need more orcs and elves, just wanted more Old Mercian than we got from the Riders of Rohan.”

Deborah explained to Noxon about Tolkien. “Some consider his Lord of the Rings to be the greatest work of fiction in the English language. I think there are a couple of worthier contenders, but Lord of the Rings is certainly the greatest work of fiction by a philologist.”

Both her father and his twin laughed uproariously at that.

“For a blind girl you sure see clearly,” said Anthropologist Wheaton.

“And for an anthropologist, you’re sure insensitive to other people’s feelings,” said Deborah, just as cheerfully.

“Oh, I’m deeply sensitive to every nuance,” said her father.

“You just don’t care?” asked Noxon.

“I just want to get a reaction I can learn from,” said Anthropologist Wheaton.

“I think Professor Wheaton here,” as Noxon indicated their host, “has a good suggestion. Why don’t we skip ahead to when the ship we call the Visitors departs from Earth, and then wait out the time till they return? If we can’t learn what we need to at that time, we can always come back. And in the meantime, I can make some jaunts back in time and compile a decent fortune by buying a few shares of Xerox, Microsoft, Apple, a few others. Or even earlier, in the heyday of untaxed capitalism. We don’t need a huge amount—just enough in a Swiss account that no matter what time period we need to visit, we’ll have contemporary funds we can draw on.”

“Deborah’s been briefing you,” said Anthropologist Wheaton.

“He’s so ignorant,” said Deborah. “It seemed the least I could do.”

Philologist Wheaton took Deborah’s shopping list to the grocery store, while Noxon, Ram, Deborah, and Anthropologist Wheaton busied themselves with glancing through the bookshelves and scanning their host’s publications. “He writes very well,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “Clear prose, opinionated but with plenty of grounding in sources.”

“Why does this sound like self-praise?” asked Ram.

“It’s not,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “And if I had chosen to pursue philology, I can’t help but hope I would have refrained from some of his stranger speculations.”

“Because you never speculated in your anthropological work,” said Deborah.

“Ah, but I can prove myself right, now. At least to my own satisfaction. Basketweaving Erectids! Ropes and twines! Deliberately planted and cultivated yams! Continuing communication between the alpha-centered forest group and the monogamous savannah group.”

“Not monogamous,” said Deborah. “We weren’t there long enough to know that.”

“Monogamy-ready, then,” said her father.

“Don’t you have a memory card with all your publications on it?” asked Ram.

“I do,” said Anthropologist Wheaton.

“As do I,” said Deborah. “I didn’t think he’d be happy to leave all those behind.”

“My darling girl,” said her father.

“You are a darling,” said Noxon, allowing no trace of irony to enter his tone. “I need a blind clerk with a good memory.”

“And I need a facemask,” said Deborah. “Maybe we can work out a trade.”

“Let’s see what the future brings,” said Ram Odin.

After a few days, Noxon and Ram followed their host’s suggestion, skipping ahead a few months at a time. Deborah and her father stayed behind, ostensibly to research worldwide public opinion and government actions, but mostly, Noxon believed, for the professors Wheaton to read each other’s work and criticize it in a most friendly, collegial, and sarcastic manner.

Noxon and Ram lingered for a while after Ram’s ship launched, and then again when the Visitors’ ship took off. Ram was fascinated to study what scientists learned from his first passage through the fold. They had no idea of the split into nineteen forward ships and one backward one—though one mathematician did speculate that microdifferences among the onboard computers might cause a division of outcomes. To avoid any chance of that, the Visitors’ ship was designed to use only one computer for navigation and guidance, and all other computers were switched off during the leap across the fold.

For a couple of months after the Visitors’ ship was launched, Noxon and Ram skipped ahead only a few days at a time. Then Noxon stopped blind-jumping entirely. He only moved forward by very rapid time-slicing, so that they caught a glimpse of the intervening days.

Thus it was that they were time-slicing in the back bedroom of Wheaton’s apartment when there was a blinding flash of light and searing heat. The floor disappeared beneath them; the whole house disappeared. They plunged downward, but Noxon kept on time-slicing, so the fires were out for days before they landed.

The building was gone.

In the midst of time-slicing, they couldn’t converse about what just happened, but it was soon obvious that the event had flattened all the buildings in their vicinity. Forest fires had raged on the nearby hills, and here and there they were still smoldering, giving off a red glow at night.

Noxon increased the gaps in his time-slicing, so they raced forward, spending less time in any one minute or hour. The forest fires died out completely. Everything seemed calm. Noxon was about to bring them out of time-slicing mode when he saw several aircraft of strange, wingless design come hurtling by in the near distance, not very high above the ground. Only when they had passed by did he take Ram back to the regular flow of time.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Ram immediately. “I think that was a nuclear blast and we’re going to be eaten alive by radiation.”

“Let’s get to a place where there weren’t any buildings or parked cars, so we can jump back safely.” Noxon began scanning for paths so he could pick an appropriate moment to return unobserved. He tried to avoid noticing where all the paths ended abruptly with the blast.

“I didn’t know anybody was on the brink of war,” said Noxon as they walked.

“Nobody was,” said Ram. “Nobody on Earth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those aircraft that just went by. They clearly don’t operate by any technological system I’ve heard of. And I’ve heard of them all.”

“Not of human origin? Or some country had a secret program?”

“Not made by Homo sapiens. And I’m betting they weren’t Erectid ships.”

It still took a moment for Noxon to be sure what Ram meant. Not anthropes. Not from Earth. “What do we do?”

“Get back into the past right now.”

“This radiation exposure,” said Noxon. “You know we took a lot of it while we were time-slicing, too. Only a small fraction of what it could have been, but it looks like we weren’t all that far from the center of the blast.”

“So we’re probably dying already,” said Ram.

“Any cures?” asked Noxon. “Any effective treatments?”

“Well, if your facemask can’t cure it, I doubt anything my body can do will be of much help.”

“So we need to go back and warn ourselves in person,” said Noxon.

Ram understood at once. “Which will duplicate us.”

“If you and I are going to die,” said Noxon, “our copies need to go on. At the moment, I think we’re more indispensable to the survival of the human race than ever.”

“And if we don’t die?” asked Ram.

“The more the merrier.”

They could learn nothing. The next time they reached that point in time, at least they were out of town, well to the south. They had communications equipment, but there were no signals to pick up.

The third time, Ram and Noxon visited one of Ram’s friends from the space program. They made their explanations and demonstrations and were given a connection so they could look in on the communications of the international space exploration authority. This time there was a little warning. A ship of some kind spotted just outside the orbit of Jupiter. And then a complete loss of control over all computers and communications for only a few minutes, and a near-simultaneous launch of all missiles from all nations.

Armed with this data, Ram and Noxon visited the same friend, played the recordings and showed the data from the near future. With a lot of “never mind how I got it,” this data provoked some serious alerts and this time the spacecraft was tracked. It seemed to have come from a direction similar to the route taken by one of the exploratory drones sent out prior to Ram Odin’s colonizing mission, when the space authority was searching for planets likely to be habitable. And this time, given some warning, some of the communications systems were uncoupled from the worldwide networks, so they remained under human control.

What Noxon and Ram took back with them this last time was a much clearer picture. The best guess was that the drone sent out more than two decades before had discovered, not just a habitable world, but an inhabited one. A world with space travel and a keen sense of umbrage, or paranoia about what a follow-up visit from humans might bring.

“Given what Ram Odin’s expedition did to the planet Garden to get it ready for human habitation,” said Noxon, “I can’t say they were wrong to determine on a preemptive strike.”

“We would never have attacked a planet with sentient life,” said Ram Odin. “We would have moved on to the next prospective colony world.”

“You would never have attacked,” said Noxon. “But who knows what the expendables would have done while you were in stasis?”

Speculation was all they had to go on, when it came to causes and motives. Results were a different matter. The aliens had such advanced tech that, virtually unnoticed, they were able to infiltrate our computers and communications from a distance, read enough data to know our weapons capabilities and what targets to hit, and then activate the surviving nuclear arsenals of two dozen former nation-states. The killoff was nearly complete. Then the alien ship reached Earth orbit at incredible speed, and those aircraft sought out every source of radio signals and then every sign of body heat.

“There weren’t going to be any survivors,” said Ram Odin.

“So by the time the Visitors come back to Earth from their voyage to Garden,” said Noxon, “they’re going to find that they’re the last human beings left in the solar system.”

“Then why would they go back and destroy the surviving humans on Garden?” asked Deborah. Immediately she shook her head, answering her own question. “Right. It wasn’t humans.”

“They got inside our computer systems,” said Ram Odin. “They knew all about my voyage and then the Visitors’ trip, including all the data they collected. So it was the aliens who went to Garden and activated the built-in self-destruct system orbiting the planet. It was never humans from Earth at all. It didn’t matter what the Visitors saw. Their ship’s log would show the aliens that there was another clump of humans. They found us completely defenseless and wiped us out.”

“I’m so glad we didn’t let the mice come back and infect the human race,” said Noxon. “But—no, the mice were going to sneak back with the Visitors. So they would have reached an uninhabited Earth no matter what.”

“What now?” asked Anthropologist Wheaton. “You’re the timeshapers.”

“I think our mission just broadened,” said Noxon. “Our job now is to save the whole human race. On both worlds.”

“Even though this alien attack on us was not completely irrational?” asked Philologist Wheaton. “We have a history of wiping out other flora and fauna to make way for our own biota.”

“This isn’t about justice,” said Ram Odin. “It isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about us and them. And I choose us.”

“All in favor?” asked Deborah.

They all raised their hands.

“We can philosophize to our hearts’ content after we’ve saved humanity,” said Ram.

“Now all we need is a plan,” said Noxon.

“I think I have another voyage ahead of me,” said Ram Odin. “But with a different destination. How long do you think since these aliens first developed space flight?”

Meanwhile, the original Noxon and Ram Odin had both developed radiation poisoning. Noxon’s facemask helped his body recover. Now there were two copies of him, though one was still in bed, sleeping almost constantly as his body’s cells were rebuilt and cancers were eliminated.

There was only one Ram Odin, though. Only one person in their group who could pilot the starship they had stashed in Antarctic ice in the remote past. This time the mice would be given the freedom of the ship. This time, they would be turned loose on an alien world.