Renegades from the Time War

Chapter 2: Probationary Status

Chapter 2: Probationary Status

Seated at one of the tables in the large refectory, Tom paused before eating to study Carl.

“What?” Carl said defensively.

Tom shrugged and looked away. It was not his nature to interfere, Carl knew. But it was his nature to observe—and Tom saw, as far as Carl could tell—virtually everything.

Carl began to eat, but put his fork down after one bite and turned to his friend.

“No,” he said. “What?”

Tom looked at him, chewing with that placid motion that always made Carl think of a contented cow. He shrugged and swallowed.

“Since you insist,” he said. “It’s my distinct impression that something is bothering you.”

“Really!”

“Really.”

Carl looked down at his lunch, appetite gone. When he resumed eating, it was with an effort. After several mouthfuls he said, “I’m Conditional.”

Tom looked at him. “Conditional? You mean probationary status?”

Carl nodded, his face hot. Tom seemed unimpressed. He shrugged and went back to eating. Carl was both reassured and irritated by this. He had never actually seen Tom upset about anything, and envied and slightly resented his friend for that.

“Did you count how many were in the morning class?” Tom said.

“Yeah. Fourteen.”

“That’s right.”

Again, Carl felt a mixture of emotions: amusement, for this was Tom’s way again: leaving conclusions to the listener; and irritation, for the same reason.

Carl considered. There had been fifty-two cadets in their first year, of whom thirty-three had passed. That meant that nineteen had not been accepted this fall. It was about what he had been told about other years. What Carl didn’t know was how many were on Conditional status. It wasn’t something that was talked about.

“I would say, don’t let it get you down,” Tom commented. “Take it as a challenge.”

These were almost the exact words of Carl’s tutor, Major Holmes, with whom he had met only the previous day.

“It’s your emotional lability,” the major had told him. “Not so very uncommon in the more gifted cadets, but can be a nuisance if not dealt with.” He had given Carl the prescribed practices of meditation and self-examination by which cadets generally solidified their psychological self-control. Carl had not felt bad when he’d left the man’s office. It was only later in the day and during the night, that doubts and fears—and self-loathing—harrowed him.

Tom, apparently wanting to move away from this topic, said, “You still seeing Clarice?”

“Miss Peel, you mean?” Carl said stiffly.

“What? Aren’t you on a first-name basis yet?” Tom asked this with a straight face.

“Yes, actually, I am.” Carl said even more stiffly. “I just didn’t know you were.”

Tom gave a chuckle. “Well?” he said. “Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Great! A senator’s daughter; quite a step up, socially speaking.”

Carl felt a stab of irritation, but he also felt a sense of guilty pleasure. Tom was right. Carl had been, after all, a foundling after the Insurrection, raised in a state orphanage. He didn’t even remember his parents. So, in spite of himself, he grinned.

“I proposed.”

“What?” Tom almost yelped the world. “I mean—what did she say?”

Carl’s grin broadened. “She said yes.”

Tom considered this. “Well,” he said at last, “I suppose that’s great.” Then he frowned. “But—are you planning for an admin job?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I can’t imagine Clarice Peel would like being married to an active Corpsman, someone who might be late for dinner, or, even worse, turn up dead.”

Carl’s face flushed with annoyance, but Tom just stared at him, eyebrows raised. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

It was true, of course, only Carl hadn’t thought of it as a problem.

“Well,” he said, “anyway, it’s not right away. We thought of getting married maybe after the end of this year, or next year, when I graduate.”

Two of their classmates, Susan and Philip, now arrived to sit with them, carrying their trays. The moment she was seated, Susan burst out, “Wow! How cool is that math? I mean, that’s exactly how they generate their pirate ships!”

“Crèches,” Philip corrected her. “And anyway, they’re not ships. They don’t really move—do they?” he added, turning to Tom, who was now munching placidly on a salad. Tom only shrugged.

Susan seemed to find this offensive. She glared at him. “Tom!” she said sharply, adding, “We would understand—if you gave us a chance!”

Tom rolled his eyes, swallowed.

“Okay,” he said. “But what is movement?”

There was a definite rise in alertness among the members of the group. This was going to be interesting.

“It’s the change of some object’s position relative to other objects,” said a deep voice behind Carl. It was so unexpected that he started. Heads turned, and Carl felt a big hand on his shoulder, gently pushing him sideways.

“Scooch over.” A large young man insinuated himself between Carl and Tom on the bench. Carl felt oddly irritated by this. Todd Berkeley, of course, he thought, who was not a cadet in the Corps, but a final-year trainee in the OS Marines—quite a different career stream. But he was a friend of Tom’s, and tended to hang out with the Corps cadets.

This offended Carl’s sense of the distinctness of the Time Corps itself, a breach of etiquette. Sometimes he even wondered whether it rose to the level of being some sort of breach of security. But everyone else, possibly due to the fact that Tom was involved, accepted Todd totally. He was friendly, if slightly overbearing. The latter was not just his behavior, but his mere presence. There was something oversized about the man; he seemed to take up more space—and he kept pushing in, as he just had, where there wasn’t enough room.

Behind his back he was sometimes called the Blond Gorilla, not maliciously, but merely in acknowledgment of his six-feet-seven, three-hundred-pound build—not an ounce of which was fat. In fact, he was a perfect poster boy for the OS Marines, which focused on physical strength and resourcefulness.

Carl was slightly intimidated by Todd, but he had to put up with the man because he valued his own friendship with Tom, the “brain” of their class. He had sometimes consoled himself with the idea that Todd wasn’t that bright. Yet now, here he was, intruding into an intellectual conversation by making—Carl had to admit it—a well-put statement on the topic.

When Todd had settled himself, his broad shoulders contiguous with Carl and Tom, the latter nodded.

“Yes, but with pirate crèches, the interface with ordinary space, the point of contact, only occurs through the space-time portal.

“You mean ‘time portal’?” Todd asked.

“It’s only called ‘time portal’ for short,” Susan said. “The proper name is ‘space-time portal’, because it connects across all four dimensions of space-time.”

“Oh.”

Carl frowned. “So, you mean there’s no natural point of connection between an anti-space bubble—crèche,” he added, nodding to Philip, “and ordinary space, and therefore no ‘position’ for the crèche?”

Tom smiled and pointed at Carl. “And that’s why you’ll make a great Corpsman,” he said, grinning. “You’ve got the math in your blood.”

Carl felt his face heat up, not from the compliment as much as from the juxtaposition of his making a “great Corpsman” with the major telling him only yesterday of his “Conditional” status. Perhaps it was Tom’s way of pushing back against Carl’s own mortification.

“Actually,” Tom continued. “There is something like a natural connective point—it’s called ‘the point of incipient connection.’ It’s where the spatial energies line up in all four dimensions.”

“Spatial energies? Oh, but we didn’t cover that yet,” said Susan. She sighed and shook her head. “You’ve been reading ahead again, Tom.”

Tom looked sheepish, then shrugged. “Well, I couldn’t help it. It’s just so darned interesting. And I have a special dispensation for it, Susan, before you ask.”

For dispensation was necessary, because of the highly sensitive nature of what they were learning: restricted or even top secret. It was one of the reasons they all lived in barracks on the base, and had to get passes for any visits outside.

Carl was focusing on the math. “But if there’s a natural—insipient—point of contact, what does that mean? Potential in some sense? But if there is such a connection point—” He paused and shook his head. “No. My head’s starting to hurt. I’ll wait till we cover that. But the engineering side of all this, we’re taking that next year, yes?”

Susan shook her head. “No, we start that later this year—the basics anyway. I read the syllabus.”

“And did you get dispensation for that?” Tom asked.

Susan made a face at him. “You don’t need one for that, Tom. As you well know.”

“Neat!” Todd murmured. “You guys get to study how the portals are generated. Cool!”

“Yeah, well you get to learn a hundred ways to hurt people,” Susan countered, adding with a sigh, “Our stuff is all math.” She glared at Tom and then Carl. “And, unlike these two math wizards, the rest of us have to work at it.”

Carl shook his head. “It’s not that easy for me either. But it will be neat to understand the technology underlying the portals.”

“Speaking of portals,” Philip said, “we’re going to see some real probe field stuff this afternoon, isn’t that right?”

“Well, the class is in the Power Building,” Susan agreed. “And I can’t imagine what else it would be.” She looked at her watch. “And it’s almost time. We should get going.” The group got to their feet, and waving good-bye to Todd, who looked after them a little wistfully, they headed toward the door.

“Apparently it’s going to be an actual temporal crime,” Susan continued as they walked to the Power Building along one of the straight-as-an-arrow walkways that crisscrossed the campus between manicured swards of grass and occasional shrubs and well-tended flower beds.

Carl always felt happy walking along like this. It had been Carl’s dream, as long as he could remember, to become a Corpsman. The Time Corps, after all, was the guardian of the time stream, protector of the Ordered Society.

They approached the Power Building which, like all the other massive buildings of the Academy, was a simple cube in shape, beautiful in a stark way. Like everything else on campus, it vaguely reassured Carl. It was so—ordered.

Emotional lability—he repeated the term in his mind. He had taken the basic psychology course in first year; he knew what that meant: that he sometimes evaluated things with his heart rather than his head, more feelings than was good in a Corpsman.

Remember, it was constantly hammered into them, that the center of the Corps is values and principles. Carl preferred principles to emotions; the former were solid and reassuring, the latter illogical and changeable—labile, as the major had put it. In fact, Carl revered the Code of the Corps rather more than anyone in his year at the Academy, in an ardor approaching devotion, even love.

It was his road to salvation—and the revelation of probationary status had threatened to cast him from that road. Which terrified him. He resolved to follow the instructions of the major to the tee, repeating some elements of the Practice as he walked with the others. There was the Code, the precepts, and the oath of allegiance to the Corps and the OS, the Ordered Society itself.

This helped calm him, and when they entered the large doors and ascended the broad steps to the Power Room, he felt as calm as all the others—which, admittedly, was not all that calm.