Timeline

"That’s it," he said. "That’ll send them a message."

It was now night in the lab; the glass windows were dark. He said, "What time is it, back there?"

Gordon counted on his fingers. "They arrived about eight in the morning. It’s been twenty-seven hours elapsed time. So it’s now eleven in the morning, the following day."

"Okay. That should be okay."

Stern had managed to build this electronic communications device, despite Gordon’s two strong arguments that such a thing could not be done. Gordon said that you couldn’t send a message back there because you didn’t know where the machine would land. Statistically, the chances were overwhelming that the machine would land where the team wasn’t. So they would never see a message. The second problem was that you had no way of knowing whether they had received the message or not.

But Stern had solved both those objections in an extremely simple way. His bundle contained an earpiece transmitter/receiver, identical to the ones the team was already wearing, and two small tape recorders. The first tape recorder transmitted a message. The second recorded any incoming message to the earpiece transmitter. The whole contraption was, as Gordon admiringly termed it, a multiverse answering machine.

Stern recorded a message that said, "This is David. You have now been out for twenty-seven hours. Don’t try to come back until thirty-two hours. Then we’ll be ready for you at this end. Meanwhile, tell us if you’re all right. Just speak and it’ll be recorded. Good-bye for now. See you soon."

Stern listened to the message one final time, then said, "Okay, let’s send it back."

Gordon pushed buttons on the control panel. The machine began to hum and was bathed in blue light.

Hours earlier, when he had begun working on this message machine, Stern’s only concern was that his friends back there might not know they couldn’t return. As a result, he could imagine them getting into a jam, perhaps being attacked from all sides, and calling for the machine at the last instant, assuming they could come home at once. So Stern thought they should be told that, for the moment, they couldn’t come back.

That had been his original concern. But now there was a second, even greater concern. The air in the cave had been cleared for about sixteen hours now. Teams of workers were back inside, rebuilding the transit pad. The control booth had been continuously monitored for many hours.

And there had been no field bucks.

Which meant there had been no attempt to come back. And Stern had the feeling  –  of course, nobody would say anything outright, least of all Gordon  –  but he had the feeling that people in ITC thought that to go more than twenty hours without a field buck was a bad sign. He sensed that a large faction inside ITC believed the team was already dead.

So interest in Stern’s machine was not so much about whether a message could be sent as whether one would be received. Because that would be evidence that the team was still alive.

Stern had rigged the machine with an antenna, and he had made a little ratchet device that turned the flexible antenna to different angles and repeated the outgoing message three times. So there would be three chances for the team to respond. After that, the entire machine would automatically return to the present, just as it had when they were using the camera.

"Here we go," Gordon said.

With flashes of laser light, the machine began to shrink into the floor.

It was an uncomfortable wait. Ten minutes later, the machine returned. Cold vapor whispered across the floor as Stern removed his electronic bundle, tore the tape away, and started to play back.

The outgoing message was played.

There was no response.

The outgoing message was played again.

Again, there was no response. The crackle of static, but nothing.

Gordon was staring at Stern, his face expressionless. Stern said, "There could be a lot of explanations. . . ."

"Of course there could, David."

The outgoing message was played a third time.

Stern held his breath.

More static crackling, and then, in the quiet of the laboratory, he heard Kate’s voice say, "Did you guys just hear something?"

Marek: "What are you talking about?"

Chris: "Jeez, Kate, turn your earpiece off."

Kate: "But – "

Marek: "Turn it off."

More static. No more voices.

But the point was made.

"They’re alive," Stern said.

"They certainly are," Gordon said. "Let’s go see how they’re doing at the transit pad."

Doniger was walking around in his office, mouthing the words to his speech, practicing his hand gestures, his turns. He had a reputation as a compelling, even charismatic speaker, but Kramer knew that it didn’t come naturally. Rather, it was the result of long preparation, the moves, the phrasing, the gestures. Doniger left nothing to chance.

At one time, Kramer had been perplexed by this behavior: his endless, obsessive rehearsal for any public appearances seemed odd for a man who, in most situations, didn’t give a damn how he came across to others. Eventually, she realized that Doniger enjoyed public speaking because it was so overtly manipulative. He was convinced he was smarter than anyone else, and a persuasive speech  –  "They’ll never know what hit ’em"  –  was another way to prove it.

Now Doniger paced, using Kramer as an audience of one. "We are all ruled by the past, although no one understands it. No one recognizes the power of the past," he said, with a sweep of his hand.

"But if you think about it, the past has always been more important than the present. The present is like a coral island that sticks above the water, but is built upon millions of dead corals under the surface, that no one sees. In the same way, our everyday world is built upon millions and millions of events and decisions that occurred in the past. And what we add in the present is trivial.