Permafrost(29)

I walked to the very edge of the icebreaker, holding the rail that circled the deck, looking inward to the dark, lightless slab of the Admiral Nerva.

I thought of the time Cho had first taken me there, three weeks after my arrival at the station. Inside the larger ship it was very silent, very dark and cold. A small part of me, perhaps the wiser part, felt a strong urge to turn back. A prickling intuition told me that something strange was going on inside the aircraft carrier. Something strange and wrong and yet also necessary.

We’d gone far inside.

The ship could have been deserted apart from the two of us, as far as I was concerned. Our footsteps, and my cane, made an echoing impression against the carrier’s metal fabric, hinting at the many decks above and below, the endless corridors and connecting staircases. Eventually we emerged into the dark of what I sensed was a huge unlit space, a single chamber which must have taken up almost the whole of the present deck.

It wasn’t entirely dark, now that my eyes were adjusting. Off in the distance—a few hundred metres away, easily—were faint signs of activity. A puddle of light, still quite dim, and muted voices, as low and serious as the surgeons in an operating theatre.

Cho touched an intercom panel. “This is the director. Miss Lidova is with me. May I bring up the main lights?”

There was an interval, then a voice crackled back: “Please go ahead, Mr. Cho. We’re about done with the new unit.”

“Very good. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Cho made the lights come on. They activated in two parallel strips running the enormous length of the ceiling, flicking on one after the other so that the room came into clarity in distinct blocks. We were up on an elevated platform, about one storey above the floor of the main chamber.

“We call it the gallery,” Cho confided. “Originally, it was the hangar for the aircraft that would have come and gone from the flight deck over our heads. They were brought up and down via massive elevators. We use the space for something quite different now, as you can see. In fact it’s rare for us to land on the Nerva at all, with the equipment being so sensitive. Even when we have some heavy cargo, as we did with your flight, it’s better to land on one of the outlying ships and then tractor the payload over the ice, in through one of the low-level doors.”

I stared at what I was seeing, my eyes feeding information to my brain, and my brain insisting that there had to be an error in that information.

There were two parallel rows of time-probes, stretching off into the distance. I knew instantly that I was looking at them, even though Cho had made no comment and no two of the devices were exactly alike.

I knew what they were, and just as crucially what they had been.

“I see how you do it now,” I said, in little more than a whisper.

“Finding them in a workable condition has been challenging,” Cho replied in the same low voice. “More so as we run out of candidate sites. You’ll have gathered by now that it was a time-probe we were bringing back in the helicopter, under all that sheeting. It was the reason I had to go south. We’d located one in our records, inside an abandoned hospital. It’s the machine they’re working with over there—number eighteen—a replacement for a failed unit.”

Each time-probe was in an area of its own, a yellow rectangle marked on the floor and labelled with a number. Machines one to nineteen on the left, machines two to twenty on the right. There was clear space between them, and a wide promenade running the length of the gallery. Pieces of equipment were gathered around the machines: pallets, trolleys, wheeled tenders and so on, laden with technology, but all spotless and very neatly arranged, nothing that looked as if it had been left there indiscriminately, or did not fulfil some immediate function. Not an empty trolley or greasy rag anywhere to be seen. Even the numerous cables and pipes which ran between the time-probes and their support equipment—and farther, out to the walls—had an organised look, colour-coded by function and fixed to the floor, with ramps to enable trolleys and pallets to be driven over the pipes.

The time-probes were truck-sized machines. The magnets and beds were still present, but in most cases the machines had been stripped of their external casings, revealing the complicated electrical and cryogenic guts that would normally have been hidden. A few areas of white plastic still remained here and there, with dents and discolouration showing. The machines were the only things in the gallery that were not pristine.

“Scanners,” I said, quietly and reverently. “Medical scanners. Magnetic resonance imagers. That’s how you do it. That’s how you send things back to the past. By using machines that already exist in the past.”

“How else, given that we can only send back into the lifespan of a preexisting time machine? Fourteen months was the limit for the test apparatus in the Vaymyr. But that would never have suited our needs.”

“They made your time-probes for you,” I said, shaking my head in wonder and revulsion. “Without even realising it. These machines were always primed to receive a message from the future. Always waiting. Always there, windows into the past. Whenever anyone in the world ever went into one of these, for any reason, there was a chance that we’d be drilling back into their heads from the future.”

“Not all machines,” Cho countered. “Only the very few that managed to survive into the present.”

“You think that makes it any less troubling?”