Permafrost(11)

The printer in the corner of Cho’s office clicked and whirred to life. A sheet of paper went through it and then slid into the out-tray. Cho wheeled his chair to the printer, collected the paper by his fingertips and returned it to his desk. The paper curled and twitched like some dying marine organism. Cho smoothed it down, using one of his dismantled gadgets, a piece of dial-like instrumentation, as a makeshift paperweight. I leaned over to examine the paper, seeing it upside-down from my perspective.

It was the plan of a hospital, extracted from some civic or architectural database within the Brothers’ collective memory.

“That’s it,” I said, with a giddy sense of recognition. “No doubt about it. I can even see the courtyard and the pond, and the car park beyond the service road. I must have been—must be—in that main block, between the first two wings, looking due north.”

“The Izhevsk facility was always a high-likelihood target,” Cho said. “But it is good to have this confirmed. Do you have more for us, Brothers?”

“May we assume that the host is present in the Izhevsk facility?” asked Dmitri.

“You may,” Cho said.

“Then the injection window must lie between 2022 and 2037, the period in which time-probe eighteen was installed and active in Izhevsk,” Dmitri replied. “We are retrieving patient records for that hospital, as well as civil documents for the greater Izhevsk region.”

“Who is she?” I asked, prickling with anticipation. I knew it wouldn’t take them long to sift their memories.

“We have identified Tatiana Dinova,” said Ivan. “Would you like a biographical summary, Director Cho?”

Cho nodded. “Send it through.”

His printer began again. The life of a woman, almost certainly long dead, began to spool into the out-tray. Tatiana Dinova, whoever she was. My Tatiana Dinova.

My host: my means of altering the past.

“You’ll have to convince them you’re well enough to be discharged,” Abramik said, stroking the tip of his beard. “I can help you with some neurological pointers, if you start being questioned. But in the meantime, we’ll need a contingency plan—a fallback in case they try to bring you back to the radiology section.” He turned to Cho. “Could we risk limited sabotage of the probe, if Valentina got close enough to it?”

“Provided it was limited. If she damages the machine beyond repair, we’ll be in quite a lot of trouble.”

“It wouldn’t need to be that bad,” Abramik said. “There’ll be an emergency control somewhere nearby, probably on a wall or under a hinged cover. It’s what they’d use if there was a problem during a scan: dumps the helium from the magnets, lets them warm up and lose their superconducting current. It’s quicker and safer than just cutting the power. All she’d need to do is reach that control, and she’d have the element of surprise. The one thing they won’t be expecting is that.”

“We could risk erasing the probe’s quantum memory,” Margaret countered. “Those magnets can’t go through too many warm-up cycles before they cease being traversable by Luba Pairs.”

“Then something not quite as drastic,” Abramik said, flashing an irritated look at the physicist, as if she were being deliberately obstructive, rather than raising an entirely reasonable concern. “Smuggle a metal object into the room, something ferromagnetic, keep it hidden until the last moment. If we’re lucky, it’ll be attracted to the machine before the field has a chance to do any lasting damage to the control structure.”

“If Tatiana’s lucky, you mean,” I said.

*

My first evening at Permafrost was like any first time at a large, unfamiliar institution. I’d been wrenched from the small, settled world of a provincial teacher and thrown into a busy, complex environment full of new faces and protocols. In a well-meaning way, Cho was trying to spoon as much information as possible into me as we went to my quarters, up a couple of flights of stairs inside the icebreaker Vaymyr. He was explaining emergency drills, power cuts, medical arrangements, mealtimes, social gatherings, pointing this way and that as if I could see through grey metal walls to the rooms and ships beyond, and as if I had a hope of remembering half of it. Eventually I stopped listening, knowing that it would all fall into place in its own time.

“You may well wish to unwind after our journey,” Cho was saying as we reached my room. “But if I could impose on you a little longer, it would be very good to meet the pilots as soon as possible.” He lifted a sleeve to glance at his watch. “If we are lucky, they will still be in the canteen.”

“Give me a minute,” I said.

While Cho waited at the door to my room I tidied away my bag then stripped down to a sweater and a shirt, much as I would have worn during classroom hours. I went to the basin and splashed some water on my face, a token effort at freshening up after the helicopter flight. I looked tired, old. Not ready for a new adventure, but rather someone who’d already been through too many in one life.

I stepped out of the room, locking it with the key I’d been given.

“Tell me about the pilots.”

“Our four prospective time travellers. You’ll be working closely with them as we deal with the remaining obstacles.”

I thought of the scale and probable expense of this operation.