Transcription errors. He now understood what that meant.
The cat banged again and again; its face was starting to bleed with the repeated impacts. Gordon said, "He'll do that until we leave."
"Then we better leave," Stern said.
They walked back in silence for a while. Then Gordon said, "It's not just what you can see. There are mental changes, too. That was the first noticeable change, in the person who was split."
"This is the person you were telling me about? The one who stayed back?"
"Yes," Gordon said. "Deckard. Rob Deckard. He was one of our marines. Long before we saw physical changes in his body, there were mental changes. But we only understood later that transcription errors were the cause."
"What kind of mental changes?"
"Originally, Rob was a cheerful guy, very good athlete, extremely gifted with languages. He would sit around having a beer with somebody foreign, and by the end of the beer he'd have started to pick up the language. You know, a phrase here, a sentence there. He'd just start speaking. Always with a perfect accent. After a few weeks, he could speak like a native. The marines spotted it first, and had sent him to one of their language schools. But as time went by, and Rob accumulated more damage, he wasn't so cheerful anymore. He turned mean," Gordon said. "Really mean."
"Yes?"
"He beat the hell out of the gate guard here, because the guard took too long checking his ID. And he practically killed a guy in an Albuquerque bar. That was when we started to realize that Deckard had permanent damage to his brain, and it wasn't going to get better, that if anything, it would get worse."
Back in the control room, they found Kramer hunched over the monitor, staring at the screen, which showed the field fluctuations. They were coming more strongly now. And the technicians were saying that at least three were coming back, and maybe four or five. From her expression, it was clear Kramer was torn; she wanted to see them all come back.
"I still think the computer is wrong, and the panels will hold," Gordon said. "We certainly can fill the tanks now and see if they hold."
Kramer nodded. "Yes, we can do that. But even if they fill without breaking, we can't be certain they won't blow out later, in the middle of the transit. And that would be a disaster."
Stern shifted in his seat. He felt suddenly uneasy. Something was nagging at him, tickling the back of his mind. When Kramer said "blow out," he once more saw automobiles in his mind - the same succession of images, all over again. Car races. Huge truck tires. Michelin Man. A big nail in the road, and a tire driving over it.
Blowout.
The water tanks would blow out. The tires would blow out. What was it about blowouts?
"To pull this off," Kramer said, "we somehow need to strengthen the tanks."
"Yes, but we've been over that," Gordon said. "There's just no way to do it."
Stern sighed. "How much time left?"
The technician said, "Fifty-one minutes, and counting."
00:54:00
To Kate's astonishment, she heard applause from the floor below. She had made the jump; she swung back and forth, dangling beneath the beam. And down on the floor, they were applauding, as if this were a circus act.
She quickly kicked her legs up and clambered onto the beam.
On the rafter behind her, Guy Malegant was hurrying back to the centerline beam. He clearly intended to try to block her return from her present rafter.
She ran down the beam, back to the center of the ceiling. She was more agile than Guy, and she arrived at the wide central rafter well before he did. She had a moment to collect herself, to decide what to do.
What was she going to do?
She was standing in the middle of the open roof, holding on to a thick vertical strut, about twice the diameter of a telephone pole. The strut had supporting braces that angled out diagonally on both sides, starting midway up the shaft and then connecting to the roof. These braces were so low that if Sir Guy intended to get to her, he would have to crouch down as he made his way around the strut.
Kate crouched down now, seeing what it felt like to move around under the brace. It was awkward, and it would be slow. She got to her feet again. As she did so, her hand brushed her dagger. She'd forgotten she had it. She drew it out now, held it in front of her.
Guy saw her, and laughed. His laughter was picked up by the watching crowd on the floor below. Guy shouted something down to them, which made them laugh all the harder.
She watched him come toward her, and she backed away. She was allowing him room to move around the vertical strut. She tried to look terrified - it wasn't difficult - and she cowered, her knife trembling in her hand.
It's all going to be timing, she thought.
Sir Guy paused on the far side of the strut, watching her for a moment. Then he crouched down and started to make his way around the strut. His hand was wrapped around the wood, the sword in his right hand temporarily pressed against the strut.
She ran forward and stabbed his hand with the dagger, pinning it to the strut. Then she swung around to the opposite side of the strut and kicked his feet off the central beam. Guy fell into space, dangling from his pinned hand. He clenched his teeth but didn't make a sound. Jesus, these guys were tough!
Still clutching his sword, he tried to get back up on the beam. But by then she had swung back to her original position, on the other side of the beam. His eyes met hers.
He knew what she was going to do.
"Rot in hell," he snarled.
"You first," she said.
She pulled her dagger free from the wood. Guy fell silently to the ground below, his body growing smaller. Halfway down, he struck a pole from which a banner hung; his body caught on the wrought-iron point, and for a moment he hung there; then the pole snapped and he slammed onto a table, sending crockery flying. The guests jumped back. Guy lay among the broken crockery. He didn't move.