Chapter One

The Prime Historian frowned as he read the flatpanel display, his fingers drumming nervously on the desk.

To: Thomas Many-thoughts, Prime Historian
From: Jonathan Strong-tree, Research Analyst
Subj: Current assignment, Section II, Mid-21st Century American history

Thomas,

Research on subject has proven exceedingly difficult. Evidence suggests a fundamentalist anti-technology movement existed at that time. This movement may have been short-lived, or might have continued through to the Diaspora, but a dearth of historical records was the result. This part of our country's history may have been lost forever.

I am continuing my search, but expect a three-week delay on your original request.

J.S.

Thomas Many-thoughts regarded his colleague's memo for some time. Finally, his fingers stopped drumming. He sighed, and settled back in the expansive chair.

****

Chicago, 2039

Sam Collier pushed open the door to his Temporal Dynamics laboratory... and blinked. The room was completely empty, except for Tony!

For a moment, Collier thought he was in the wrong room. He craned his neck outside the door and looked up. The placard read "204 TD LAB", as it should have. It was the second floor, as it should be. This was Northwestern University Technological Institute, and Tony was... well, Tony. The graduate assistant sat perched on a lab stool, right where the electronics bay had been. The floor showed depressions from the cabinet feet.

What the hell?

He stopped in the center of the barren room, glared at the dark-haired man, and raised his arms, palms up.

"Tony. For chrissake. What... where's the lab?"

"Look, Professor... Sam." He machine-gunned his words, almost inaudibly. "We have to talk. I can fill you in, but not here. It's not safe."

"Not safe? Not... who did this, Tony? Was it Harrington?" He grabbed the boyish-looking student by the shoulders and shook him. "Dammit, where... is... my... lab?"

"Sam, please, take it easy. It's been my project too. I have answers. Be patient and follow me."

As they strode south along Sheridan Road in the gray January gloom, Collier tried mightily to calm himself. He shook his head, disgusted. All possibilities pointed back to his boss, Stuart Harrington, the Physics department chairman. Previous events now seemed to make more sense.

"The bastard never did approve of me, or my projects."

"Harrington?"

"Yeah." Sam looked up at Tony, a little surprised with himself for snapping. Hardly makes any difference now, he thought. Go for it.

"My anonymous funding's driven him nuts from the day I set up the lab. So he sends me to the U.K. to present his obsolete paper. Said it was outside my specialty, but I'd do fine with a little review. Review, hell. A rehash on unified field theory details that have been cleared up for fifteen years--crap the brightest kids used to handle in high school. Besides, he said, the trip will be a welcome vacation. You've been working too hard, Sam, he said. You deserve it, Sam, he said. And I fell for it." Sam grimaced and pounded his palm with a clenched fist. "And while I was gone, the sonuvabitch let the NoTechs steal my lab!"

"Take it easy. We're just about there."

"Where?"

"A dorm room down in Foster-Walker. I borrowed it from a pre-med lady friend of mine. Ken's there, and some other people for you to meet. We've already swept it and surrounding rooms for bugs. We think it's secure enough for a meeting."

Collier stared at him. "Bugs? Secure? You make it sound like we're in some kind of clandestine war."

Tony turned, his face expressionless. "You're closer to the truth than you think."

The Foster-Walker complex, located at the south end of the Northwestern University campus, was a relatively modern dorm when it was built in the 1970s--a brick outer structure containing single-occupancy rooms separated by plasterboard walls. An interesting mode of construction, when the occupants next door insisted on making love at all hours. Sam lived there as an undergraduate, but hadn't set foot inside since completing his undergrad work. He smiled wryly to himself and wondered if the walls were still as thin.

The dorm was still set up as he remembered it... co-ed, with women on one end of each hall and men on the other. Occupants quickly discovered it was like living with siblings. Sam remembered it as a sort of therapy: young, highly intelligent, sex-crazed twenty-year-old Americans learning to see each other without their lust-colored glasses. Not that there was less hanky-panky--no one kept any secrets behind those paper walls--it just wasn't between floor members. They all looked out for each other. Like brothers and sisters.

The two men climbed the south quad stairs to the second floor. Tony stopped at 212 and knocked: two short, two long, and two short.

International Morse for question mark, thought Sam. Di-di-dah-dah-didit.

He heard a rustling from within, and the door opened slightly. A young man with his smiles all packed away ushered them inside quickly and locked the door. Sam nodded at his other grad assistant, Ken Triplett, who threw him a stylized salute. The remaining two quickly folded in half what looked like some sort of large blueprint. They were familiar in a vaguely unsettling way--especially the woman, with her lustrous jet-black hair and large, dark eyes. Intuitively he placed her at the center of whatever was going on.

"Hi, Professor. Glad you could make it." Her smile carried a twinge of irony. "I know you have a lot of questions after this morning." She glanced at Tony. "So we'll introduce ourselves and do our best to explain what happened while you were in London. You already know Tony and Ken." She took a step forward and held out her hand. "I'm Natasha Gareyevich Kovarov."

Sam stared openly, suddenly remembering. Her handshake was firm, sincere, as from an equal.

"Everybody calls me Natalie, mostly because they can't handle the rest. Neither can I, actually. You may not remember me--I was a student of yours my freshman year. Your very first class, I think."

"I try to forget those first classes. But I do remember you brought Kat Wilkins to the open house last month. I spent the whole time with her. Sorry about that."

She smiled. "We'll talk about that later."

Someone else chuckled.

"Last couple of years," she continued, with a hint of bitterness, "I've used a Masters in Comp Sci to design propaganda video games for a company in Morton Grove. In fact, all my friends here share the distinction of having been students in one of your physics classes, or worked with you in some way."

She nodded at the powerfully built man who'd let them in, and he stepped forward. About Sam's age and good looking in an understated way, he sported crew-cut sandy hair, a strong jawline and ice-blue eyes. He seemed somewhat embarrassed.

"Professor Collier, I'm Ron MacKenzie. We met freshman year; you helped me out with computer languages. The science and math was easy--it was the programming that drove me up a tree. But I didn't get much out of my other courses that year, so instead of coming back to Northwestern I joined the Marines. After I got out, I started an investigative security company. That's about it."

"Well, good to meet you--again, Ron." Sam's puzzlement grew.

"Ronnie, that's a lot of crap, and you know it," the girl said. "Professor, Ron is a quiet one. We had to pound on him incessantly to get even that short introduction out of him. The truth is...."

"Oh, brother," MacKenzie sighed. "Here we go."

"...the truth is that Ron dropped out because he's brilliant, and the courses bored him to tears. He also neglected to say that he served two tours in Antarctica during which, through battlefield commissions, he became the second-youngest lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps. Ron, tell the professor what happened to the youngest."

MacKenzie frowned. "He... didn't make it."

"Right," she continued. "Ron also conveniently left out that his security business has done rather well. What, six million in business last year?" He grinned and shrugged.

"Point is, Professor....

"Nobody calls me professor," Sam interrupted her. "Makes me feel like an old geezer with one foot in the equation grave. It's Sam."

Of average build, five-eleven if he stretched, Collier gave the impression of being a little on the bookish side even without glasses. At thirty-two, he could still run with his students in Friday evening pick-up basketball games. His clear gray-blue eyes and full head of very dark hair seemed little suggestive of a physics professor. He despised the label "professor" only slightly less than "doctor", and no one who knew him well used either.

"Okay, Sam." She smiled as her intense, dark eyes flashed at him. "The point is Tony and Ken have been working with you for months and they know which equipment is critical to your project work, and which can be refabricated. Ron has certain special skills that have already proven invaluable, and I've provided the team organization."

Sam shook his head. "I still don't get it."

She held up a finger. "We've determined that no one in the university had anything to do with the actual dismantling of your lab, although your boss did nothing to prevent it once it started." She nodded at Tony.

"She's right, Sam," Tony agreed. "The day after you left for London, a bunch of government goons showed up, flashed NoTech badges and started moving stuff out. Just like that. They knew exactly what to grab first to put the lab out of commission. Of course, I went straight to Dr. Harrington and screamed bloody murder. He tried to fake the indignant bit, but the guy's a crappy actor. He knew what was going to happen ahead of time--we think that's why he sent you to London."

"That's what I figure, too," agreed Sam.

"When I realized the scumbag was just going to sit in his office, I mobilized the group to make damn sure we knew where the goons took your lab. The power supplies, compressors and heavier mechanical stuff got hauled away right off, in a big landcruiser. Ended up downtown at a guarded warehouse."

"Shit." Collier hung his head. Hundreds of hours of setup work shot.

"Hang on." Tony gestured to Natalie. "Your turn."

She unfolded the blueprint again. The legend box identified it as an architectural drawing of the Tech Institute. It didn't look like any part of the building Sam knew.

"We've determined they're storing the electronics and some of the more fragile equipment in a sub-basement room, right in the Institute. Tony pointed at a spot on the print, and the group crowded around. "Here in SB-03, guarded 'round the clock. We know the computer is there."

"How?" asked Collier. Natalie gave MacKenzie a nod.

"I've been down there." The dangerous-looking young man pulled a folded paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to Sam. "That's a list of numbers I got off NU property stickers. Sorry it's not more complete. I didn't want to hang around any longer than necessary on a recon trip."

Impressed, Sam scanned the list. "No way I can match numbers against equipment without the records I keep in my office." He seemed to go blank for an instant, then focused on MacKenzie again. "Listen, Ron, everybody, this is critical. Did you see the Dewar flasks?"

The Dewars were essentially fancy thermos bottles used to store liquid nitrogen that cooled critical parts of the lab apparatus. Any sort of scientific glassware had become extremely hard to find in recent years. Dewars were literally worth their weight in gold.

"No. Sorry about that. Ken and Tony both said you'd ask about them first thing. They were my priority targets."

"Blast! The Dewars and the computer were the only irreplaceable items."

"Easy, Professor... Sam," Ron countered. "You've got to understand I was only in the area for a few minutes. It was tough to pick out specific equipment in near-total darkness, even with the starlight gear. I certainly could have missed them."

After an awkward silence, Sam finally realized they were all waiting for him. He shrugged helplessly.

"Okay. I give up. What the hell does it all mean?"

Natalie grinned and hopped down from her perch on the desk. "It means, Sam, that we all think you've gotten the royal stinking shaft from what's passing for the United States government this month. It means that my friends and I are incredibly tired of the way the NoTechs have trashed the scientific heritage of this country. It means that if you give the Wrecking Crew here the go-ahead, we'll break into the sub-basement of the Tech Institute in, uh...." she checked her watch, "...thirty-six hours or so, and steal back your lab."

Collier opened his mouth, closed it again. Tony and Ken stood quietly. MacKenzie deadpanned.

Natalie's eyebrows disappeared under the bangs on her satiny-black page-boy "But we have to know what you intend to do next."

Sam swallowed. Jesus, these people mean business. The whole situation began to take on a surreal, appealing craziness.

"Go for it," he decided. "What the hell. I'll never get the lab space back--maybe I can set up somewhere else. Besides, I've spent a good part of the last hour imagining how good it'll feel when I tell Harrington to blow it out his ass."

Chuckles and guffaws. Natalie motioned sharply for silence. "Okay, Sam. Now that we have your undivided attention, see what you think of our plan."

They bent over the print, quitting an hour later. On the way out, Natalie cornered him, her grin impish.

"Kat's wondering why she hasn't heard from you. She hasn't really said so, but I can tell. We're pretty close, so when I say she likes you, it's no shit. So call her, huh?"

"Sure." He smiled sheepishly. "But not until I resolve a small matter up north."

In the excitement, he'd forgotten all about the meeting with his boss.