Permafrost(20)

But a glitch at this stage could be all the excuse Cho needed for pulling me off the team. The pressure was on him, this man who had already given so much. It had been controversial, moving me up after the problem with Christos. Cho’s only justification had been that I was technically competent, had a good understanding of the protocol, and already had a neural system that could be adapted to work with the Permafrost technology.

There was some justifiable resentment. No one blamed me for Christos, but I knew there was irritation that, of all of us, I had been the one who jumped the queue, the one who ended up going back in time before the others—even though there’d been no predicting which of us would be the first.

Still, faced with a complication, Cho might decide to abandon Tatiana. I couldn’t abandon her like that.

“It was all right,” I said. “But I have to get back.”

Cho rubbed at his forehead. “This is very bad. If you were committed to a course of action then you may have completed it, even in the absence of a fully functioning link. A helium quench is a very serious business.”

Cho vanished: so did the technicians and the rest of the room.

Just a flash came through, similar in duration to that first glimpse of Tatiana’s timeline. The room looked odd. The desk was at right angles, going up toward the ceiling. The swivel chair was sticking out sideways. The technician was slumped over on the desk, just as impossibly. A geometric surface stretched away from me, with a moundlike form not far off. Everything was slightly out of focus, tonally diffuse. I concentrated, trying to mesh my perceptions with Tatiana’s viewpoint. She was on the floor, and the moundlike form was someone else lying near me.

Tatiana?

No answer.

I moved. A crawl was the best I could do. It was like fighting through thickening fluid, each action harder than the one that had preceded it. It must have taken ten or twelve seconds just to inch my way to the door, and then I had to reach high enough to tug down on the handle, using my weight to attempt to swing the door inward. It didn’t want to open against the helium pressure in the room. My vision was starting to darken. I put all my force into the door. I only had to open it a crack, and the helium would flood out and equalise the pressure on either side.

The door gave. I crawled through the widening gap, half in and half out of the MRI room, and then I was done. I had exhausted the last reserves of energy from Tatiana’s body; she could give no more. As my vision faded to tunnel darkness I had just a glimpse of figures approaching along the hallway, moving with the crouched caution of men and women not sure what they are getting themselves into.

The last thing I sensed was some stiff, masklike thing being pressed against my face.

*

Dr. Abramik gave me a brief but thorough physical before agreeing to send me in again. There was no possibility of anything that had happened to Tatiana affecting me physically, but I’d still spent many hours in the dental chair, and with that enforced immobility came a risk of pressure sores and deep vein thrombosis. I had the kind of deep, lingering stiffness that only came after sleeping in an awkward position. After I’d walked around on the deck of the Vaymyr for a quarter of an hour, though, flapping my arms and stomping my feet, and taken in some of the cold but invigorating air, I felt I could cope with going back in again.

I wanted to, as well. I’d made something bad happen in the MRI theatre and I felt I owed it to myself, as well as those who’d been caught up in the helium quench, to understand the consequences. That meant going back into Tatiana’s world.

Had I done any real harm? It was hard to say.

She’d had follow-up appointments stretching between early July and early August, and there was a note about a civil case involving criminal damage to hospital property—occurring in the same time frame—being dropped due to expert medical opinion holding that she couldn’t be held accountable for her actions.

I squinted, slightly puzzled that I’d missed that detail the first time around. Or had I? Perhaps I had read it, but had been focussing more on the medical history.

No; that was definitely what had happened.

It all made sense, at least. Cho had even showed me the service record of time-probe eighteen, which was recorded on a metal plate near the base of the chassis. In June 2028, engineers from the manufacturer had carried out an otherwise routine helium recharge and recalibration, proving that no lasting harm had been done by the quench operation. Tatiana would have had her follow-up appointments sooner after discharge, but she’d had to wait for the machine to be put back into service.

I dealt with the strangeness of that. I felt that I’d caused the helium quench, but according to Cho it was already baked into the history of the time-probe.

“I have examined that service plate many times,” he said. “And you have my categorical assurance that there has been no change.”

My head was hurting with all this. “Then why were we so concerned that I’d screw things up by triggering the quench?”

Cho looked at me with a frown of his own, as if I was the one making headaches. “No—our concern was completely the opposite; that your interventions would somehow delay or impede the quench that we knew was obliged to happen.”

I nodded slowly, feeling as if the gentle force of his words, so calmly uttered, was pushing me into an acceptance of one version of the facts over another. For a moment I clung onto a different narrative, one in which the helium quench had been viewed as a very damaging act, something to be avoided except as a last resort, but already I could feel that version becoming thinner, less persuasive, a counterfactual daydream that no longer had the conviction of reality.