brilliantly lit hall leads up to a door. As Chiron watches, little bright white flashes flicker over the door.
“What the hell is that?”
“Keep watching,” the Chief Archivist says.
From the opposite side of the door dart sharp black flashes like tiny ebony daggers piercing the white. A doctor gingerly takes the door handle and cracks open the door, from the left to the right. Suddenly the doctor is thrown back by some invisible force ramming against her waist. She doubles over in pain, is flung across the hall, and staggers into the arms of her staff. Now all of them tumble back, pushed by the force. The focus goes wild for a moment—shots of the ceiling, of the walls, of the terrified faces whirling by in confusion.
The focus reestablishes on the door. Now the handle is on the right.
“See that?” whispers the Chief Archivist.
“It’s switched!” Chiron says. “Wasn’t the handle on the left?”
“Yeah.”
Before their astonished eyes, the door handle appears and disappears like the illusion of a stage magician, now on the left, now on the right, once even protruding from the middle.
As Chiron watches, the intrepid doctor darts forward and tries again. She manages to seize the handle, kicks open the door.
The room—just an ordinary hospital room with a cot, IV apparatus, a monitor beeping softly—swirls with a grainy gray fog, and the doctor cries out. On the cot lies the child. Now so badly bruised, Chiron can bearly look at his disfigured little face. And then he’s healed as if he’d never been pistol-whipped. And then he’s lying in a pool of coagulated blood, his green eyes wide open, dead. Clearly dead, a flat line on the monitor.
And yet again, the child stirs and cries, blinking up at the monitor. Or laughs, waving his tiny fists, reaching for a toy stuffed panda.
The doctor’s distraught face fills the monitor. “What can we do for him? Please help us! We don’t know what to do!”
“Oh, man,” Chiron says. “It’s a Prime Probability, isn’t it?”
“A Prime Probability that won’t collapse,” says the Chief Archivist, clicking the holoid off. “It just won’t freakin’ collapse, into or out of our timeline. We’re not even sure which way we want the probability to collapse.”
“Hey, I’m sorry I screwed up. But we are talking about a little boy’s life.”
“We are talking about another Crisis.”
“I’m really, really sorry.”
“Yeah, you should be. The LISA techs are calling the child a Quantum Probability.”
“Why won’t it collapse?” Chiron says miserably.
“Well! You know the discredited Schrodinger’s Cat metaphor used to demonstrate the probable nature of reality. A cat is placed in a gas chamber, and is alive and dead at the same time till the experimenter opens the chamber and observes the result.”
“I despise that metaphor.”
“Yeah, well, this Quantum Probability won’t collapse one way or the other because some event connected to that child has become unresolved, uncertain, jeopardized in the past. And there’s only one way that could happen, Chiron. It must be an event connected to tachyportation.”
“But the Institute had never t-ported to that Now!”
“Hah. Not yet.”
Chiron stands and paces across the conference room. “So you’re saying that the fact the companion gave me the aurelia is directly connected to my Summer of Love Project. But what does the aurelia have to do with that little boy?”
“Like Cameron’s companion, the boy is probably a descendant of an old San Franciscan family, Chinese mixed with Caucasian. Cameron’s anonymous companion was Chinese mixed with Caucasian, too, and it’s likely she was born in the late 1890s. The aurelia itself is in the style and workmanship of that period.” The Chief Archivist shrugs. “All we have is a theory. That’s all we ever have when we undertake a t-port project. That’s why we shut t-porting down decades ago. Too risky. Too tricky. Too damn theoretical.”
“And your theory is now?”
The Chief Archivist glares at him. “The little boy has become a Quantum Probability because the birth of his probable ancestor, Cameron’s companion, is in jeopardy. In the past, okay? If that green-eyed woman is never born, she won’t be able to give you the aurelia. Period. And then all bets are off when it comes to our spacetime. Total annihilation? Could be.” The Chief Archivist looks around the conference room so warily that a chill crawls down Chiron’s spine.
“But the aurelia was never a part of my project! I never meant to take it. I certainly never meant to bring it to our Now. I put it in my pocket and forgot all