Chronospace by Allen Steele

Manhattan Project; his bomb was strictly the product of his imagination, his sources no more classified than textbooks found in any well-stocked public library. Nonetheless, he had stumbled upon the closest-kept secret of World War II; little more than eighteen months later, Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
    If this sort of thing had happened before, why couldn’t it happen again?
    Murphy found his hands were trembling, but not from the cold.
    He glanced over his shoulder, saw someone walking up the sidewalk a couple of dozen feet behind him. He quickened his pace . . . then, on impulse, he crossed the street, putting a little more distance between himself and the man following him. At the end of the block, he turned another corner, taking an unanticipated detour on his route back to the office. When he looked back again, he no longer saw the other pedestrian.
    Get a grip, he told himself. You’re jumping at shadows.
    What he had written was fantasy. Sure, it possessed a certain air of verisimilitude—a handful of footnotes, some well-turned bits of technobabble—but it had no more basisin reality than the average Star Trek episode. There was no way that UFOs could actually be time machines. . . .
    Could they?
    Suddenly, it seemed as if the city itself was watching him, the windows of the government office buildings peering down at him like great, unblinking eyes.
    He began to walk a little faster.

Tues, Oct 16, 2314—0550Z
     
    “ T hank you, Traffic. Oberon ready for departure.” Metz tapped the lobe of his headset, then glanced over his shoulder at Franc. “If you want to take your seat . . .”
    “Thanks, but I’d like to watch.” Holding on to the back of Vasili’s chair, Franc gazed through the control room porthole. “If you don’t mind, that is.”
    Metz seemed ready to object, then he shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just as long as you and your people are strapped down in ten minutes, you can watch all you want.” He turned back to his console. “Traffic, take us out, please.”
    A pair of spiderlike tugs began moving away from the timeship. The slender cables they dragged behind them uncoiled and became taut, then there was an almost imperceptible jolt as they began to haul Oberon out of spacedock. Spotlights passed across the timeship’s hull as it was slowly pulled toward the hangar door; off to one side, Franc caught a glimpse of a tiny figure in a hardsuit, holding a pair of luminescent wands above his head. The Oberon was on full internal power, of course, and capable of leaving spacedock without the assistance, yet for safetyreasons it was customary not to activate the negmass drive until the vessel was clear of the station.
    There really should be a band playing, Franc mused. Back in the early twentieth century, when a ship left port on a long voyage, it was a ceremonial occasion. A brass band performing “God Save the Queen,” colored ribbons tossed from the decks, the bellow of foghorns, cheering crowds gathered on the wharf. Now, there were only images flashing across flatscreens, the faint murmur of voices over the comlink. Logical, perfect, and utterly without soul.
    The hangar door disappeared behind them; now they saw the blue-green expanse of Earth’s horizon. “All right, we’re clear.” Metz leaned forward against his straps, began tapping commands into the keypad. “T-minus six minutes to warp. Dr. Lu . . .”
    “You don’t have to remind me.” Yet he lingered for another moment, observing the tugs as they detached their lines and peeled away to either side. In the far distance, above the limb of the earth, he caught a glimpse of a tiny spacecraft: a chase-ship positioned to observe Oberon’ s passage into chronospace. “You’re sure you’ve got the right coordinates?”
    Wrong question. “You want to go back and have the AI rechecked?” Vasili murmured, gesturing to the dense columns of algorithms scrolling down