Free Chronospace by Allen Steele Page B

would be the point if the intended victim was a complete stranger? And for another, Jim Benford wouldn’t have made the mistakes that had gradually tipped him off: not knowing that c was the common variable for the speed of light, for instance, or being unaware that his brother had written a time-machine novel.
    He could always call Greg Benford again, once he had returned to the office. Yeah, sure; Murphy could imagine how that conversation would go. Hello, Dr. Benford? You don’t know me, but my name’s David Murphy and I work for NASA Headquarters in Washington, and I just had lunch with someone who looks exactly like you . . . well, yes, I know there’s a lot of guys who kinda look like you, but this guy said he was you, and . . . anyway, can you tell me where your brother is right now, and if he has a weird sense of humor? Right. And if he was Greg Benford, he’d call someone at NASA to say that some wacko named Murphy was asking bizarre questions about him and his brother Jim.
    The sky had begun to spit snow again. Glancing up, Murphy could make out the Capitol, obscured behind a milk white haze beyond the Reflecting Pool. He lowered his gaze again, began making his way back up Independence toward the Air and Space. No, better leave the real Gregory Benford out of this. Yet whoever the impostor was, he knew enough about Murphy to know that he would havebeen impressed enough with Benford’s reputation to meet with him for lunch to discuss . . .
    An article in Analog about time travel.
    Murphy stopped. That was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? Forget for a moment whom he had met; it was the subject of their conversation that mattered.
    This was the second time today that someone had paid undue attention to a piece he had written.
    Despite the warmth of his parka, Murphy felt a chill run down his spine. First, a meeting with a senior NASA administrator, who had expressed concern that Murphy might somehow embarrass the agency by writing about UFOs and time travel, and then requested. . . no, mandated, really . . . that any future articles he wrote be submitted in advance to the Public Affairs Office. Then, less than an hour after that meeting, a phone call from someone pretending to be a noted physicist and author, who in turn wanted to know where he had gained the inspiration to write the same article . . .
    How much of a coincidence could that be?
    Murphy pulled up the parka’s hood and tucked his hands deep in its pockets. For some reason, his article had attracted someone’s attention. Yet all he had done was taken a few available facts, tied them to possible explanations, and come up with a plausible scenario, however unlikely it might be. Yet his piece hadn’t appeared in Nature or in the science section of the New York Times, but in a science fiction magazine. Hardly a venue guaranteed to gain a lot of attention.
    Only . . . hadn’t this sort of thing happened once before?
    Yes, it had. Back in 1944, at the height of World War II, when a writer . . . who was it again? Digging at his memory, Murphy absently snapped his fingers. Heinlein? Asimov? Maybe Hal Clement or Jack Williamson . . . ?
    No. Now he remembered. It was Cleve Cartmell, awriter almost completely forgotten today were it not for one particular story he had written for Astounding.
    Titled “Deadline,” it was otherwise negligible save for one important detail: in it, Cartmell accurately described an atomic weapon, one which used U-235 as its reactive mass. He even went so far as to say that two such bombs, if dropped on enemy cities, could end the fictional war depicted in his story. An innocuous novelette in the back of a pulp SF magazine, yet within a few days of its publication in Astounding, its editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., was visited at his New York office by a military intelligence officer, who inquired who Cartmell was and how he might have come by his information. Yet Cartmell hadn’t worked for the