John Varley - Millennium

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MILLENNIUM

John Varley

Just in time for the new millennium ... the time-travel classic from "the best writer in

America." (Tom Clancy) In the skies over Oakland, California, a DC-10 and a 747 are about

to collide. But in the far distant future, a time travel team is preparing to snatch the

passengers, leaving prefabricated smoking bodies behind for the rescue teams to find. And

in Washington D.C., an air disaster investigator named Smith is about to get a phone call

that will change his life ... and end the world as we know it.

Author's note

The time-travel story has a long history in science fiction. The theme has been so

extensively explored, in fact, that I found it no trouble to write a book with chapter titles

borrowed almost exclusively from the long list of stories that served, in one way or another,

as ancestors to this one.

I would like to acknowledge my debt to these writers by listing them here. If you are at

all interested in the possibilities presented by time travel, you would do well to read these

stories: "A Sound of Thunder," by Ray Bradbury; " "All You Zombies -- " by Robert A.

Heinlein; "Let's Go to Golgotha," by Garry Kilworth; The Time Machine, by Herbert George

Wells; "As Never Was," by P. Schuyler Miller; Guardians of Time, by Poul Anderson; "Me,

Myself, and I," by William Tenn; The Shadow Girl, by Ray Cummings; "The Man Who Came

Early," by Poul Anderson; Behold the Man, by Michael Moorcock; The Productions of Time,

by John Brunner; "Poor Little Warrior!" by Brian W. Aldiss; "Compounded Interest," by Mack

Reynolds; "When We Went to See the End of the World," by Robert Silverberg; "The

Twonky," by Henry Kuttner; Lest Darkness Fall, by l.. Sprague de Camp; The Night Land, by

William Hope Hodgson; "All the Time in the World," by Arthur C. Clarke; and The End of

Eternity, by Isaac Asimov.

The chapter entitled "Famous Last Words" is a play on the title "Famous First Words," by

Harry Harrison; in this case, first had to become last.

"As Time Goes By" is, of course, the name of the song Humphrey Bogart asked Sam to

play in Casablanca. It was written by Herman Hupfeld.

And A Night to Remember was a 1958 film about the sinking of the Titanic, by "The Rank

Organisation, screenplay by Eric Ambler, produced by William MacQuitty, directed by Roy

Baker, One final acknowledgement: The title of this novel, Millennium, is also the title of an

excellent novel written by Ben Bova, and published in 1976. Mister Bova's novel had nothing

to do with rime travel.

John Varley

EUGENE, OREGON

Prologue

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

The DC-10 never had a chance. It was a fine aircraft, even though at that point in time it

was still under a cloud of controversy resulting from incidents in Paris and Chicago. But

when you lose that much wing you're no longer in a flying machine, you're in an aluminum

rock.

That's how the Ten came in: straight down and spiraling.

But the 747, as I was telling Wilbur Wright just the other day, ranks up there with the

DC-3 Gooney Bird and the Fokker-Aerospatiale HST as one of the most reliable hunks of

airframe ever designed.. It's true that this one came out of the collision in better shape than

the DC-10, and there is no doubt it was mortally wounded. But the grand old whale

managed to pull up into straight and level flight and maintain it. Who knows what might

have been possible if that mountain hadn't got in the way? And it retained a surprising

amount of structural integrity as it belly-flopped and rolled over -- a maneuver no one at

Boeing had envisioned in their design parameters. The proof of this could be seen in the

state of the passengers: there were upwards of thirty bodies without a single limb detached.

If it hadn't caught fire, there might even have been some faces intact.

I've always thought it would be a spectacular show to witness in your final seconds.

Would you really rather die in bed? Well, maybe so. One way of dying is probably much

like any other.

1 "A Sound of Thunder"

Testimony of Bill Smith

My phone rang just before one o'clock on the morning of December 10.

I could leave it there, just say my phone rang, but it wouldn't convey the actual

magnitude of the event.

I once spent seven hundred dollars for an alarm clock. It wasn't an alarm clock when I

bought it and it was a lot more than that when I got through with it. The heart of the thing

was a World War Two surplus air-raid siren. I added items here and there and, when I was

through, it would have given the San Francisco earthquake stiff competition as a means of

getting somebody out of bed.

Later, I connected my second telephone to this doomsday machine.

I got the second phone when I found myself jumping every time the first one rang. Only

six people at the office knew the number of the new phone, and it solved two problems very

neatly. I stopped twitching at the sound of telephone bells, and I never again was awakened

by somebody who came to the house to tell me that the alarm had come in, I had been

called and failed to answer, and I had been replaced on the go-team.

I'm one of those people who sleep like the dead. Always have; my mother used to tumble

me out of bed to get me to school. Even in the Navy, while all around me were losing sleep

thinking about the flight deck in the morning, I could stack Z's all night and have to be

rousted out by the C.O.

Also, I do drink a bit.

You know how it is. First it's just at parties. Then it's a couple at the end of the day. After

the divorce I started drinking alone, because for the first time in my life I was having trouble

getting to sleep. And I know that's one of the signs, but it's miles short of alcoholism.

But a pattern had developed of arriving late at the office and I figured I'd better do

something about it before somebody higher up did. Tom Stanley recommended counseling,

but I think my alarm clock worked just as well. There's always a way to work out your

problems if you'll only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done.

For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and

gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffee-maker. When

you're up and have the coffee perking, it's too late to go back to sleep.

We all laughed about it at the office. Everybody thought it was cute. Okay, maybe rats

running through a maze are cute, too. And maybe you're perfectly well adjusted, without a

single gear that squeaks or spring that's wound too tight, and if so, I don't want to hear

about it. Tell it to your analyst.

So my phone rang.

So I sat up, looked around, realized it was still dark and knew this wasn't the beginning of

another routine day at the office. Then I grabbed the receiver before the phone could peel

the second layer of paint off the walls.

I guess I took a while getting it to my car. There had been a few drinks not too many

hours before, and I'm not at my best when I wake up, even on a go-team call. I heard a

hissing silence, then a hesitant voice.

"Mr. Smith?" It was the night-shift operator at the Board, a woman I'd never met.

"Yeah, you got him."

"Please hold for Mr. Petcher."

Then even the hiss was gone and l found myself in that twentieth-century version of

purgatory, 'on hold,' before I had a chance to protest.

Actually, I didn't mind. It gave me a chance to wake up. I yawned and scratched, put on

my glasses, and peered at the dart tacked to the wall above the nightstand. There he was,

C. Gordon Petcher, just below the chairman and the line that read "GO-TEAM MEMBERS --

Notify the following for all catastrophic accidents." The chart is changed every Thursday at

the end of the work day. The Chairman, Roger Ryan, is the only name that appears on every

one. No matter what happens, at any time of the day, Ryan is the first to hear about it.

My own name was a little further down the list in the space marked 'Aviation Duty

Officer/IIC,' followed by my beeper number and the number of my second home phone.

'IIC,' by the way, is not to be read as 'two-C,' but as 'Investigator In Charge.'

C. Gordon Petcher was the newest of the five members of the National Transportation

Safety Board. As such, he was naturally a little suspect. Those of us hired for our expertise

always wonder about new Board members, who are appointed for five-year terms. Each has

to go through a trial period during which we decide if this one is to be trusted or endured.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, Bill."

"That's okay, Gordy." He wanted us to call him Gordy.

"I was just talking to Roger. We have a very bad one in California. Since it's so late and

the accident is so big, we've decided not to wait for available transport. The JetStar is

waiting for the go-team to assemble. I'm hoping it can take off within an hour. If you -- "

"How big, Gordy? Chicago? Everglades? San Diego?"

He sounded apologetic. That can happen. Breaking really bad news, you can feel that

somehow you're responsible for it.

"It could be bigger than Canary Islands," he said.

Part of me resented this new guy speaking to me in agency shorthand, while the rest of

me was trying to digest an accident bigger than Tenerife.

Outsiders might think we're talking about places when we mention Chicago, Paris,

Everglades, and so forth. We're not. Chicago is a DC-10 losing an engine on take-off, killing

all aboard. Everglades was an L-1011, a survivor crash, bellying into the swamp while the

crew was troubleshooting a nose-gear light. San Diego was a big, grinning PSA 727 getting

tangled up with a Cessna in Indian Country -- the low elevations swarming with Navajos,

Cherokees, and Piper Cubs. And Canary Islands ...

In 1978, at the Tenerife Airport, Canary islands, an unthinkable thing happened. A fully-

fueled, loaded Boeing 747 began its take-off while another 747 was still on the runway

ahead of it, invisible in thick fog. The two planes collided and burned on the ground, as if

they'd been lumbering city buses in rush-hour traffic instead of sleek, lovely, sophisticated

flying machines.

It was, or had been until I got the phone call, the worst disaster in the history of aviation.

"Where in California, Gordy?"

"Oakland, east of Oakland, in the hills."

"Who was involved?"

"A Pan Am 747 and a United DC-10."

"Mid-air?"

"Yes. Both planes fully loaded. I don't have any definite numbers yet -- "

"Don't worry about it. I think I've got all I need right now. I'll meet you at the airport in

about -- "

"I'll be taking a morning flight out of Dulles," he said. "Mr Ryan suggested I remain here a

few more hours to coordinate the public affairs side of things while -- "

"Sure, sure. Okay. See you around noon."

I was out of the house no more than twenty minutes after I hung up. In that time I had

shaved, dressed, packed, and had a cup of coffee and a Swanson's breakfast of scrambled

eggs and sausage. It was a source of some pride to me that I had never done it faster, even

before the divorce.

The secret is preparation, establishing habits and never varying from them. You plan your

moves, do what you can beforehand, and when the call comes in you're ready.

So I showered in the downstairs bath instead of the one by the master bedroom, because

that took me through the kitchen where I could punch the pre-programmed button on the

microwave and flip the switch on the Mr Coffee, both of which had been loaded the night

before, drunk or sober. Out of the shower, electric razor in hand, I ate standing up while I

shaved, then carried the razor upstairs and tossed it into the suitcase, which already was full

of underwear, shirts, pants, and toiletries. It was only at that point I had to make my first

decisions of the day, based on where I was going. I have been sent on short notice to the

Mojave Desert and to Mount Erebus, in Antarctica. Obviously you bring different clothes.

The big yellow poncho was already packed; you always prepare for rain at a crash site.

The Oakland hills in December presented no big challenges.

Close and lock the suitcase, pick up the stack of papers on the desk and shove them in

the smaller case which held the items I always had ready for a go-team call: camera, lots of

film, notebook, magnifying glass, flashlight and fresh batteries, tape recorder, cassettes,

calculator, compass. Then down the stairs again, pour a second cup of coffee and carry

everything through the door to the garage -- left open the night before -- hit the garage-

door button with my elbow on the way out, kick the door shut and locked behind me, toss

the suitcase and briefcase into the open trunk, hop in the car, back out, hit the button on

the Genie garage-door picker-upper and watch to make sure it closes all the way.

Aside from picking a few items of clothes, it was all automatic. I didn't have to think again

until I was on Connecticut Avenue, driving south. The house was all battened down because

I kept it that way. Thank God I didn't have a dog. Anyway, Sam Horowitz next door would

keep an eye on the place for me when he read about the crash in tomorrow's Post.

All in all, I felt I had adjusted pretty well to bachelor living.

I live out in Kensington, Maryland. The house is way too big for me, since the divorce,

and it costs a lot to heat, but I can't seem to leave it. I could have moved into the city, but I

hate apartment living.

I took the Beltway in to National. That time of night Connecticut Avenue is almost

deserted, but the lights slow you down. You'd think the Investigator In Charge of a National

Transportation Safety Board Go-Team on his way to the biggest aviation disaster in history

would have a red light he could mount on top of his car and just zip through the

intersections.

Sad to say, the D.C. police would take a dim view of that.

Most of the team lived in Virginia and would get to the airport before me, whatever route

I took. But the plane wouldn't leave without me.

I hate National Airport. It's an affront to everything the NTSB stands for. A few years

back, when the news of the Air Florida hitting the 14th Street bridge first came in, a couple

of us hoped (but not out loud) we might finally be able to shut it down It didn't turn out that

way, but I still hoped.

As it was, National was just too damn convenient. To most Washingtonians, Dulles

International might as well be in Dakota. As for Baltimore ...

Even the Board bases its planes at National. We have a few, the biggest being a Lockheed

JetStar that can take us anywhere in the continental U.S. without refueling. Normally we

take commercial flights, but that doesn't always work. This time it was too early in the

morning to find enough seats going west. There was also the possibility, if this really was as

big as Gordy said, that a second team would follow us as soon as the sun came up. We

might have to treat this as two crashes.

Everybody but George Sheppard was already there by the time I boarded the JetStar.

Tom Stanley had been in contact with Gordy Petcher. While I stowed my gear Tom filled me

in on the things Petcher either had not known or could not bring himself to tell me when we

talked.

No survivors. We didn't have an exact count yet from either airline, but it was sure to be

over six hundred dead.

It had happened at five thousand feet. The DC-10 had gone almost straight down. The

747 flew a little, but the end result was the same. The Ten was not far from a major

highway; local police and fire units were at the scene. The Pan Am Boeing was up in the hills

somewhere. Rescue workers had reached it, but the only word back was that there were no

survivors.

Roger Keane, the head of the NTSB field office in Los Angeles, was still on his way to the

Bay Area and should be landing soon. Roger had been in contact with the Contra Costa and

Alameda County Sheriff's offices, advising them on crash site procedures.

"Who's running the show at LAX?" I asked.

"His name's Kevin Briley," said Tom. "I don't know him. Do you?"

"I think I shook his hand once. I'll feel better when Rog Keane gets to the site."

"Briley said he was told to grab the next flight to Oakland and meet us there. He'll be in

L.A. a little bit longer, if you want to talk to him."

I glanced at my watch.

"In a minute. Where's George?"

"I don't know. He got the call. We tried him five minutes ago and there was no answer."

George Sheppard is the weather specialist. We could take off without him, since his

presence at the crash site wasn't absolutely necessary.

And I was ready to go. More: I was aching to go, like a skittish race horse in the starting

gate. I could feel it building all around me, and all around the nation. The interior of the

JetStar was dark and calm, but from Washington to Los Angeles and Seattle, and soon all

around the world, forces were gathering that would produce the goddamdest electronic

circus anyone ever saw. The nation slept, but the wire services and the coaxial cables and

synchronous satellites were humming with the news. A thousand reporters and editors were

being roused from bed, booking flights to Oakland. A hundred government agencies were

going to be involved before this thing was over. Foreign governments would send

representatives. Everyone from Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas to the manufacturer of the

smallest rivet in an airframe would be on edge, wondering if their factory had turned out the

offending part or written the fatal directive, and they'd all want to be on hand to hear the

bad news as it happened. By the time the sun came up in California a billion people would be

clamoring for answers. How did this happen? Whose fault is it? What should be done about

it? And I was the guy who had to provide those answers. Every nerve in my body was crying

out to get in the air, get there, and start looking.

I was about to order the take-off when a call came in from George, sparing me a decision

that he'd surely have resented. He was having car trouble. He'd called a taxi, but suggested

we'd better take off without him and he'd catch up later. I heaved a sigh of relief and told

the pilot to get us out of here.

What's it like on your way to a major airline disaster? Fairly quiet, for the most part.

During the first hour I made a few calls to Los Angeles, spoke briefly to Kevin Briley. I

learned that Roger Keane had boarded a helicopter and was surely at the DC-10 site by

now.

Briley was about to leave to catch his own flight to Oakland, where he would meet me at

the airport. I told him to set up security.

Then some of the others made calls to Seattle, Oakland, Schenectady, Denver, Los

Angeles. Each of the go-team members would be forming his own team to look into one

aspect of the crash, and each wanted to get the best possible people. Usually that was no

problem. The grapevine operates quickly in a crash this size. Almost everyone we called had

already heard; many were already on their way. These were people we knew and trusted.

But none of that took very long. After that first hour we were alone in the sky on the five-

hour flight to Oakland. So what did we do? Do you have any idea how much paper work is

involved in an accident investigation? Each of us had half a dozen reports in progress. There

were reports to read and reports to write, and endless items to review. My own briefcase

bulged with pending work. I did some of it for an hour or so.

Finally I wasn't understanding what I was reading. I yawned, stretched, and looked

around me. Half the team was asleep. That struck me as a fine idea. It was 4:30 in the

morning, Eastern time, three hours earlier on the West Coast, and none of us were likely to

get any sleep until well past midnight.

Across the aisle was Jerry Bannister, in charge of structures. He's the oldest of us: a big

man with a huge head and thick gray hair, an aeronautical engineer who got his start on the

Douglas assembly line building Gooney Birds because the Army recruiter rejected him. He's

deaf in one ear and wears a hearing aid in the other. Looking at him, you'd think he was the

biggest mistake the Army ever made. I'd put him up against a platoon of German soldiers

any day, even at age sixty. He's got one of those craggy faces and a pair of those giant

hands that would make him look right at home in a machine shop. It's hard to picture him at

a drawing board or putting a model through wind-tunnel tests, but that's what he's good at.

After the war he put himself through college. He worked on the DC-6 and the DC-8, among

many others.

He was sound asleep, head back, mouth open. The guy is almost nerveless; nothing

rattles him. He collects stamps, of all things. He's nutty about philately; once he starts

talking about it it's impossible to shut him off.

Behind him, his bald head gleaming in the cone of light from overhead, was Craig

Haubner, my systems specialist. He would spend the rest of the flight filling page after page

of his yellow legal tablet, bounce off the plane and out to the crash site and spend all day

and into the night poking and peering into the wreckage, and return to the temporary

headquarters still neat, alert, and full of energy. It was impossible to like Haubner -- he

wasn't very good with people, and sometimes didn't even seem to be human -- but we all

respected him. His ability to examine a bit of charred wire or bent hydraulic tubing and tell

exactly what happened to it is little short of the occult.

Then there was Eli Seibel, also awake, pawing through the matchbook covers, paper

napkins, torn envelopes and crumpled papers he is pleased to call his working notes. I never

complain to him about it, though I grit my teeth when I see him at work. Out of the chaos

he manages to turn in very good work. He's overweight and allergic to just about everything

and the only one of us without a pilot's license, but he's cheerful, popular with the

secretaries at the office, and competent at his specialty, which is powerplants.

In the seats behind me was Tom Stanley, with his feet out in the aisle and the rest of him

vainly trying to curl up and get comfortable. At twenty-seven, he's the youngest member of

the team. He'd never been in the service -- I suspected he'd have been a draft-dodger if

he'd been old enough for Viet-Nam -- and the only aviation-related job he'd held before

coming to work for the Board was as an Air Traffic Controller. His family has a lot of money.

He started out at Harvard, of all places, before switching to M.I.T., and his dad paid every

penny.

He lives in a house that's worth five times what mine would sell for. All in all, I could

hardly imagine a biography more calculated to bring out hostility from the likes of old pros

like Jerry, Craig ... and myself. And that's pretty much how Haubner and Bannister felt

about him. Eli Seibel tolerates him, and Levitsky more or less tolerates all of us.

But I get along with Tom quite well. If there was such a thing as a second-in-command of

an NTSB investigation (which there is not), I would choose Tom Stanley for the post. As it is,

I confer with him a lot.

The secret is probably his love of flying. He's been doing it since he was about eight, and

I love flying so much myself that I can't find it in myself to resent the money that made it

possible for him. I own a wonderful old Stearman biplane that swallows too much of my

salary and probably will never be paid for. Tom owns a mint-condition Spitfire. And he lets

me fly it. What can you say about a man like that? Tom would be chairing two sub-groups in

the investigation: Air Traffic Control and Operations. The other person who would wear two

hats was asleep in the back of the plane.

She was Carole Levitsky, in charge of Human Factors and Witnesses. She'd only been

with the Board six months. This would be her second major crash. Originally a research

psychologist with experience in forensics and, industrial stress factors, she had managed to

more or less win over us hard-technology types. I suspect she knew what made us all tick a

lot better than we did ourselves; she had a way of looking at you that pretty soon had you

thinking "I wonder what I really meant by that?" The one thing that still made us all nervous

was a lingering suspicion that she spent as much time studying the effects of stress on us as

she did on the pilots and ATC's who figured in the crashes we investigated. As I already

mentioned, there were things about myself I'd just as soon keep away from a psychologist,

and the rest of us were all fertile ground for job stress syndrome as well. Carole is a small

woman with short, dark hair and a rather plain face. She works well with the overwhelmingly

male groups that assemble for an investigation.

There were three team members not present. George Sheppard would look into the

weather as a factor leading up to the crash. Then there was Ed Parrish, who normally wasn't

called up to the crash site since his function was Maintenance and Records. He'd be going to

Seattle and Los Angeles, where the airframes were built, and to the Maintenance facilities of

Pan Am and United, where he would pore through the mountains of papers filled out every

time a commercial jet is worked on. And not even on the go-team list was Victor Thomkins,

in charge of the Washington labs where the Cockpit Voice Recorders and Flight Data

Recorders would be analyzed.

It was a good team. The only glaring absence was C. Gordon Petcher, who really should

have been on the plane with us. Not that he was necessary; I was in charge, whether he

was there or not. The field phase of the investigation was my responsibility. But it looked

better to have a Board Member present to handle the press. I wondered why he'd elected to

wait until morning to fly to the coast? But I didn't wonder for long. I was asleep almost as

soon as I leaned back in my seat.

I stepped off the plane, glassy-eyed, into the glare of television lights. They were at the

foot of the stairs, crews from as far away as Portland and Santa Barbara. All the bright

young men and women were holding mikes out toward us and asking stupid questions.

It's a ritual; the death-dance of our times. Television news is nothing without pictures,

and it hardly matters what the pictures are so long as there's something to back up the

narration. A plane crash presents them with special problems. What they'd have for their

next newscast would be some indistinct night-shots of the crash sites -- nothing more than

twisted wreckage, with an intact wing or tail if they were lucky -- some aerial shots of

plowed-up ground that didn't look like much of anything, and shots of the people who flew in

from Washington to sort it all out. Of those, a news editor would choose the shots with

people in them, so there we were, shuffling between the plane and the helicopter, cameras

before us and cameras behind us, wearing artificial smiles and saying nothing.

I got into the copter without even noticing who it belonged to. Inside was a man who

stretched out his hand. I looked at it, then took it without any enthusiasm.

"Mr Smith? I'm Kevin Briley. Roger Keane said I should take you out to the Mount Diablo

site as soon as you got here."

"Okay, Briley," I said, shouting to be heard over the noise of the chopper. "One, I'm your

boss right now, not Keane. Two, I said I wanted security here, and by that I meant keeping

the press away from us until we had something to say. You fucked up on that. So three,

you're staying right here. I want you to talk to whoever runs this airport, then look up Sarah

Hacker from United and call somebody at Pan Am in New York and tell them what you need,

which is some meeting space here in the terminal building, some hangar space somewhere

to put what's left of those two aircraft, and a place to pen up these vultures and keep them

out of my hair. Then get us some hotel rooms, rent a couple of cars ... hell, Briley, talk to

Sarah Hacker. She'll know what needs to be done. She's been through this before."

"I haven't, Mr Smith." Briley managed to look belligerent and chagrined at the same time.

"What should I tell the reporters? They want to know when they can expect a press

conference."

"Tell them noon today. I doubt like hell there'll be one by then, but tell 'em anyway. And

guess what? You get to catch the flak when it gets postponed." I grinned at him, and he

managed a tired smile and shrug. Maybe he'd hate my guts, and maybe he'd get things

done just to spite me. I didn't mind. He hopped out, and we closed the sliding door on the

helicopter. Almost immediately the pilot started up. I looked around. It was a good old

Huey, owned and operated by the U.S. Army. Hueys are great, but they tend to be drafty.

The pilot wore a sergeant's stripes.

"How far apart are the two planes?" I asked him.

"About twenty miles, sir."

"Do you know which one Roger Keane is at? He's the guy from -- "

"I know him, sir. I just took him to the one on Mount Diablo. He said I should bring you

there."

"That's fine. What's it like? On the ground."

"Muddy. It stopped raining about a half hour ago. The trucks are having a lot of trouble

getting to it. There's nothing up there but fire trails."

When I found out the DC-10 was not too far out of the route to the 747 crash site, I told

the sergeant to detour and fly over it. It wasn't hard to find.

The DC-10 had made an impact about half a mile north of Interstate 580, not far from

Livermore. In what looked m be open fields, hundreds of red and blue lights flashed. Some

flame was visible, but the fuel had by then burnt itself out and the damp ground wasn't

going to present any problems. All the pinpoints of light were more or less centered on a

dark, circular area.

Obviously, I had known what to expect, but some part of me is still surprised, still asks

the stupid question. I was out here to see a plane crash, but where was the plane? The pilot

brought us down lower, nervously eyeing the myriad lights of other aircraft hovering,

landing, or taking off from the vicinity. Still, there was no plane. There were spotlights down

there. All they showed was churned up ground and a meaningless confetti of small,

shapeless objects, nothing that looked bigger than a hubcap or a car door.

I got a bad feeling looking down at it. Part of it was because it was an unusual site;

generally the imprint is a long, messy streak. There will be some recognizable objects

strewn along the way, some of them quite large, like engine cowlings, big hunks of wing,

part- of a fuselage. The mark Flight 35 had left on the ground looked very much like what a

bullet would make hitting thick glass: a crater and rays of disturbance.

Flight 35 had literally splashed into the ground.

2 "All You Zombies -- "

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

Tell everything, he said.

Fine, but where do I start? The order of events is, at best, a convenient fiction. Seen from

another vantage point, things happened very differently. I can hear the universe laughing at

me as I try to envision a beginning. However, even us highly evolved mutant-type critters

from the seventeenth dimension are, when you get down to it, time-binding apes who live in

the eternal Now. No matter how many knots I tie in my lifeline I still move down it the old-

fashioned way, in only one direction, taking it one subjective second at a time.

Seen from that perspective, the story begins like this:

I was jerked awake by the silent alarm vibrating my skull It won't shut off until you sit

up, so I did.

Mornings had been getting both better and worse than they used to be. Better because I

didn't have that many of them left and valued each new one more. Worse because it was

harder to get out of bed.

It would have been easier if I'd allowed myself to sleep plugged in. But you start doing

that and before you know it you're plugged into more things than you want, so I didn't.

Instead I kept the revitalizer console on the other side of the room and forced myself to

make that long walk every morning.

Ten meters.

This time I made the last two meters on my hands and knees. I sat on the floor and

plugged the circulator tube into my navel.

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MILLENNIUMJohnVarleyJustintimeforthenewmillennium...thetime-travelclassicfrom"thebestwriterinAmerica."(TomClancy)IntheskiesoverOakland,California,aDC-10anda747areabouttocollide.Butinthefardistantfuture,atimetravelteamispreparingtosnatchthepassengers,leavingprefabricatedsmokingbodiesbehindfortherescu...

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John Varley - Millennium

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