Timeline - Michael Crichton [66]
The men also had more trouble keeping their work secret. It was easier for women, but the men all wanted to brag about going back to the past. Of course, they were forbidden by all sorts of contractual arrangements, but contracts could be forgotten after a few drinks in a bar. That was why Kramer had informed them all about the existence of several specially burned nav wafers. These wafers had entered the mythology of the company, including their names: Tunguska, Vesuvius, Tokyo. The Vesuvius wafer put you on the Bay of Naples at 7:00 a.m. on August 24, A.D. 79, just before burning ash killed everyone. Tunguska left you in Siberia in 1908, just before the giant meteor struck, causing a shock wave that killed every living thing for hundreds of miles. Tokyo put you in that city in 1923, just before the earthquake flattened it. The idea was if word of the project became public, you might end up with the wrong wafer on your next trip out. None of the military types were quite sure whether any of this was true, or just company mythology.
Which was just how Kramer liked it.
“This is a new mission,” Baretto said again, as if she hadn’t heard him before. “You’re asking us to go into the world—to go behind enemy lines, so to speak—without weapons.”
“But you’re all trained in hand-to-hand. You, Gomez, all of you.”
“I don’t think that’s sufficient.”
“Victor—”
“With all due respect, Ms. Kramer, you’re not facing up to the situation here,” Baretto said stubbornly. “You’ve already lost two people. Three, if you count Traub.”
“No, Victor. We’ve never lost anybody.”
“You certainly lost Traub.”
“We didn’t lose Dr. Traub,” she said. “Traub volunteered, and Traub was depressed.”
“You assume he was depressed.”
“We know he was, Victor. After his wife died, he was severely depressed, and suicidal. Even though he had passed his trip limit, he wanted to go back, to see if he could improve the technology. He had an idea that he could modify the machines to have fewer transcription errors. But apparently, his idea was wrong. That’s why he ended up in the Arizona desert. Personally, I don’t think he ever really intended to come back at all. I think it was suicide.”
“And you lost Rob,” Baretto said. “He wasn’t any damn suicide.”
Kramer sighed. Rob Deckard was one of the first of the observers to go back, almost two years earlier. And he was one of the first to show transcription errors. “That was much earlier in the project, Victor. The technology was less refined. And you know what happened. After he’d made several trips, Rob began to show minor effects. He insisted on continuing. But we didn’t lose him.”
“He went out, and he never came back,” Baretto said. “That’s the bottom line.”
“Rob knew exactly what he was doing.”
“And now the Professor.”
“We haven’t lost the Professor,” she said. “He’s still alive.”
“You hope. And you don’t know why he didn’t come back in the first place.”
“Victor—”
“I’m just saying,” Baretto said, “in this case the logistics don’t fit the mission profile. You’re asking us to take an unnecessary risk.”
“You don’t have to go,” Kramer said mildly.
“No, hell. I never said that.”
“You don’t have to.”
“No. I’m going.”
“Well, then, those are the rules. No modern technology goes into the world. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“And none of this gets mentioned to the academics.”
“No, no. Hell no. I’m professional.”
“Okay,” Kramer said.
She watched him leave. He was sulking, but he was going to go along with it. They always did, in the end. And the rule was important,