Terminator 2_Hour of the Wolf Page 17
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“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I will be,” he said. “Damn, that son-of-a-bitch had a grip like steel.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Bobby said.
He seemed more frightened than she had ever seen him, even after Cojensis had revealed to him that he knew about Bobby’s fraud and intended to use him.
“Who was that chasing us?” Deirdre asked.
“Guy named Gant,” Patterson said after a time. “Head of security at…” He raised his head, wincing. “Doesn’t make sense. But—well, maybe it does.” He twisted around to look behind them. “Take a roundabout path, don’t go straight there.”
Deirdre turned off the highway. She glanced at Bobby and saw that his eyes were closed.
“So,” she asked, trying to sound casual, “did you get the job?”
He looked at her, surprised and angry. Then he laughed.
“What the hell are you doing, following me?”
“It turned out the right thing to do. Hmm?”
Bobby straightened in the seat. “Yeah…thanks.” He shook his head. “It was amazing, Dee. The guy knew his stuff.
Right out of Hawking or something.”
“What guy?”
“Casse. I don’t get it. We started off talking math and theory and then he tried to kill me. Tried. I got the impression he couldn’t.”
“Yeah,” Deirdre said, “it would be a shame to waste such a brilliant mind.”
“I wish I could have talked to him a little more. He—it was my problem, Dee. He had the answer. I know he did.
We were thinking along the same lines.”
“I don’t fucking believe this! They nearly killed you—us—and you’re upset you didn’t get to talk theory for longer?”
“You always knew I was crazy.”
“What kind of theory?” Patterson asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
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“Has to do with time,” Bobby said. He waved a hand.
“Partly. It’s an extension of string theory. I’ve been playing with the idea of time as a field rather than a dimension. Of course, it’s a dimension, too, but you can express it mathematically like a magnetic field. They seem to be related even, at least in the numbers—”
“That’s enough,” Patterson said. “I just wondered if it was as crazy as everything else.”
Deirdre drove on in silence for a time. Then: “What do you mean he had the answer?”
“He was leading me to a conclusion I’ve been trying to get to for months.” He leaned forward. “Ever since Kaluza tried to explain how we needed a fifth dimension to account for electromagnetic fields, it’s been a puzzle how an entire dimension could fit unseen inside our own. When string theory came out and gave us ten dimensions, the scoffers simply pointed out the obvious—we can’t find them. There’s no physical proof. But the math always worked out, so it seemed to be more fundamental than just tearing a few particles apart to see what they’re made of and where they came from.”
Deirdre knew he was relaxing, he felt comfortable doing this. She had helped him with a lot of it, she knew his ideas almost as well as he did. Right now, she did not mind hearing it all again.
He treated time as something akin to a magnetic field—recursive, permeating the physical dimensions—and because it was recursive it seemed to have direction. But as Feynman had shown, there was no mathematical reason time could not flow both ways. Bobby hit upon the idea of demonstrating that time travel would constitute a condition very like a magnetic monopole. But it required access to the theoretical “extra” dimensions predicted by string theory. He had been playing with it since she had known him.
The pursuit had produced a lot of spin-off work which he used—hoped to use—for his graduate thesis, but which Cojensis had been stealing.
“Where I’ve been running into trouble,” he continued, 163
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“is where field equations have to become a description of a dimension. The field kind of ‘necks’ off and opens an access into a dimension, but…and this guy seemed to know that. He seemed to be heading in that direction and I just have a hunch he knows!”
“Knows what?” Patterson asked suddenly. “How to travel in time?”
Deirdre heard the skepticism in Patterson’s voice. She understood it, the concept was hard to swallow, but she wished he would keep it to himself just now.
“The monopoles, then?” Deirdre prodded.
“They’d be what I expect. Space-time gets squeezed in the process, funneled down to a singularity. Along with it the magnetic field dimension—Kaluza-Klein space—and then the lines get twisted inside out. It’d pinch off a segment and toss it loose into normal space. The whole thread, both poles, would still be there, but one end would be wrapped up in the singularity and the other acting like just one pole…like a pair of virtual particles…”
“Whoa, whoa,” Deirdre said. “Virtual particles. That’s—”
She glanced back again. For an instant she thought she saw a familiar form, a block behind, but it vanished.
“This is too much,” Deirdre said.
“Yeah,” Bobby agreed. “Too much. The only thing I don’t understand…”
“What?”
“Why’d he want to kill me?”
Dennis McMillin’s home occupied five acres in the hills.
Deirdre had taken a tortured route, arriving two hours after fleeing the industrial court. Deirdre gave the surveillance monitor at the gate a full frontal view of her face. The heavy steel rolled back and she drove in.
Patterson climbed out first. “Get inside. I want to check the road. Do you know where Mr. McMillin keeps his weapons?”
“Yes,” Deirdre said, ushering Bobby out of the car.
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“I’ll be back,” Patterson promised and sprinted down the long driveway.
“Weapons?” Bobby asked.
“Inside.”
Deirdre ignored Bobby’s dismayed expression. She took his hand and led him into the house. In her stepfather’s den, all modernist aluminum and glass with bookshelves and an enormous video screen, desk, chaise longue, and liquor cabinet, she deposited Bobby on a chair. The central drawer of the desk contained a .9mm and a spare magazine.
She tucked it into her waistband, magazine in her back pocket. She caught Bobby’s frown.
“We’re rich,” she said matter-of-factly. “It can be a problem socially.”
“I bet.”
“Don’t.”
“Why don’t you live here?”
“Because I prefer to live on my on, which allows a bit more freedom. And lately I prefer to live with you. Besides, I didn’t think this would be very much to your taste.”
Bobby shrugged.
Deirdre opened a set of tall metal doors between two ceiling-high bookcases. She took out a twelve-gauge shotgun and a box of shells.
“We’re miles away from them,” Bobby said. “Don’t you think that’s a little paranoid?”
“Better to be prepared.” She loaded the gun, set it on the desk, and picked up the phone. “Just so you know, now I’m calling daddy.”
“Dee—”
“I thought something was wrong when I caught our apartment being watched.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t want to freak you out.” The phone connected.
“Hello, Monica? Is my father in? I’ll hold.” She spoke to Bobby. “I asked Paul to do a little checking. Cyberdyne is into some less-than-legal things right now. But the surveil-165
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lance bothered him more. So we decided to follow you to this interview and see what we could find out.”
“My my, you sound like a professional little spy.”
“Don’t laugh,” Patterson said as he entered the room.
“She saved y
our butt today. Who are you calling?”
“Dad.”
“I already called him. He’s on his way with some people.”
“Oh.” Deirdre hung up. “Now what?”
Patterson hefted the shotgun, wincing. “We wait.”
“How bad is that? Let’s see.”
Deirdre made Patterson take off his jacket and shirt. On his left upper arm an ugly bruise enveloped the bicep, purpling badly. The shapes of long fingers were clearly visible.
“My god,” she said. “You said he had a grip—”
“I told you,” Bobby said, “you don’t know the half of it.”
“Yes, I do,” Patterson said. “I shot him. In the face. This close. I never saw anything like it.”
“He lived?” Deirdre asked.
“If he was alive to begin with.”
“His hand turned into a sword or something,” Bobby said.
“He tried to slice me up.”
Deirdre looked from one to the other of them. “You’re both—”
“What?” Patterson and Bobby said simultaneously.
“There were stories,” Patterson said, pulling his shirt back on. “About Cyberdyne, way back when they still did government work. Wild stuff, I heard about it from some old security guys. Black projects—that’s what I put it down to.
But…”
“This guy’s hand became a knife,” Bobby insisted.
“His face opened up,” Patterson added. “Like liquid metal.
No blood.”
Deirdre remembered then seeing the man Patterson called Gant running after them, legs scissoring impossibly fast, gaining on a speeding car.
“This is too weird,” she said. “I just thought they were doing something illegal.”
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“At a minimum,” Patterson said. He looked at Bobby.
“Did he say anything else to you? Other than the math?”
“No, not really. He suggested I didn’t want to teach because I’d be wasting myself.” He frowned thoughtfully.
“He did say something strange right before you came charging in. He was trying to kill me. He chased me all over the room and kept missing. It would’ve been funny if…anyway, he stopped and looked at me kind of funny and said ‘It’s true, then.’”
“What’s true?” Deirdre asked.
“I don’t know. That’s when things got really exciting.”
Patterson grunted. “Do you have any experience with firearms?”
“None.”
“Might be better then if you didn’t have one.”
“How long before Dad said he’d be here?” Deirdre asked.
“He said he wanted to pick someone up on the way.
Maybe half an hour.”
167
FIFTEEN
John spent the morning overseeing the final coding of the communications system. Passwords, security software, dedicated lines, and the all the annoying details that a complex system brings with it occupied his entire attention from dawn till almost noon. The process calmed him. Despite the complications and bugs, he felt more in control doing this kind of work than at almost any other time.
Sarah came through at mid-morning, silently checking each monitor, watching while John and Lash’s chief programmer, a talkative man named Wyler, worked. She disappeared upstairs then, till almost eleven. When she reappeared, she wore a loose jacket over a dark T-shirt and black pants.
“Where are you going?” John asked. “We could use some help here.”
“You’re far better at that than I’ll ever be,” she said without stopping. “I’m going to see if Mr. Porter is home.”
“Alone?”
“Is there anyone else here? You’re busy, I’m not.”
And she was out the door. John hated it when she did that, picking the time he was most indisposed to do something all on her own. He resented being left behind, ever since she went to prison for attempting to dynamite a computer lab when he was a child. She did it too often.
Just when I thought we had an understanding…
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“How much more do we have on this?” he asked Wyler, more edge in his voice than he intended.
“Another hour maybe. If you want to do it right, that is.
Of course, if you don’t care—”
“There’s only one way to do it,” John cut him off.
“We’ll have you connected and running under full pro-phylactic protocols soon enough, don’t you worry.”
“I’m getting hungry. How about you?”
“Sure. But we’re this close—”
“After. My treat.”
Only two of Ken Lash’s vans remained now. The bulletproof windows had been installed last night. Today all that remained was trim and finish. Tomorrow the armory would arrive in a separate truck and the L.A. branch of PPS
Security and Investigation would be open for business. A courier had delivered all the County and State licenses and federal documents early that morning. Reed had come through again.
Then they could begin another round of observations, watching for the signs and portents of Skynet’s resurrec-tion—or first coming, depending on which timeline you believed this one to be—and hoping to find nothing.
Hopeless hope. They had already stumbled on evidence of Cyberdyne’s revived interest in the project. And John still did not know quite what to make of McMillin and the message John had sent himself from the future.
It was 2007. In one timeline—a stream that had been circumvented already and probably had not happened—this was the year he would be successfully assassinated by Skynet’s Terminators. Nothing else in this particular timeline had happened the way it had in that one, so it was a safe bet he would survive to 2008.
Then what? The one question he wanted answered more than any other in this insane war was, how do we know when we win?
The phone chirped.
“PPS Security, this is Sean Philicos.”
“John, this is McMillin.”
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“It’s ‘Sean’ on any line, sir. If you don’t mind.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I need you. Can you get away?”
“I’m in the middle of some pretty delicate—”
“I’ve just gotten a call from Paul Patterson. He’s had an encounter with Cyberdyne. I think you should be in on this.”
“Right. Where?”
“My house. I can pick you up on the way.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Let me guess,” Wyler said as John hung up. “I’m on my own.”
“Can you handle it?”
“We’re mostly done, sure. I mainly need someone to push buttons now to make sure all the networking is up. I can get one of the other guys to do that.”
“Great.”
John laid a ten-dollar bill on the desk. “I said I’d buy lunch. Don’t forget to eat.”
He went upstairs and quickly made a ham sandwich. He phoned Sarah as he wolfed down his lunch, but her cell phone was off.
Twenty minutes later, a long midnight blue sedan pulled up in front of the building. John checked his weapons and climbed into the back seat with McMillin.
“Jack Reed says hello, by the way,” John said.
McMillin’s eyebrows cocked, then he laughed. “You checked me out. Good.”
“So where are we going and what happened.”
McMillin repeated the report Patterson had given him over the phone.
“Bobby Porter…he goes to Caltech?”
“Yes. Bright boy. My daughter shares an apartment with him. More than that, in fact, but…she tells me he’s something of a genius. I’d love to hire him, but he wants to prove himself before accepting any favors. I can understand that.”
“And this interview with Cyberdyne was part of proving 170
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himself?” John pulled out his cell phone and punched in his mother’s number. He studied the screen, annoyed. Her phone was still off.
“It’s complicated.” McMillin said. “So says my daughter.
It sounds stupid to me, but that’s a prerogative of youth.
Anyway, it seems to have gone wrong. They’re all at my house. I told them to wait there for us.”
Three other men shared the car, including the driver.
They all exhibited the alert posture of security people.
“So what do you think this is?” McMillin asked. “One of your Terminators?”
“If it is,” John said, “then I hope you have a rocket launcher in the trunk.”
One of the other men glanced at him, frowning.
“Judging from Patterson’s description,” John continued,
“it may well be. Gant, head of security at Pioneer, had the look. And he threatened us, pretty openly. Not the actions of a normal man.”
“He didn’t recognize you?”
“He wouldn’t necessarily have been programmed to.”
“They’re capable of operating at that level of sophistication?”
“Human mimicry? Within limits. Gant didn’t strike me as loquacious. Bare minimum of social skills, sufficient vocabulary and response cues to pass if you didn’t press too hard. I’m much more interested in this other man Patterson described.”
“You don’t think he was exaggerating?”
“Let me tell you about the T1000s and TX-A models.
Liquid metal, capable of assuming any shape. They learn frighteningly fast and they can pass as human, completely.
Do you keep dogs?”
“Yes, I have four shepherds.”
“Good. Dogs can tell. You cannot kill these things with bullets. Enough explosives over enough time, sure. Extreme heat will have the most effect.”
“Lasers?”
“Wide beam. The T-800s can be killed with a penetrating 171
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strike to their CPU, in the skull, or they can be blown apart, but they’re pretty tough.”
“What about an electromagnetic field?”
“What about it?”
“Well, if they’re metal—”
“I’m not sure this kind of metal responds to magnetism.”
“Hmm. Liquid metal, you say? Like in a superfluid state?”
“You’re beyond me, sir. I wouldn’t know.”