Read Ides of March (Time Patrol) for Free Online

turned to Dane. “Humor me. What’s the date of the upcoming mission?”
    “Fifteen March.”
    Doc whistled. “The Ides. Okay.” He drew a box directly below the Black Tuesday box, labeling it 15 Mar/Ides. Then he wrote one through six. Then below he did the same below it labeling it Day 3. “I could keep drawing more days, but you get the idea.”
     

     
    “What if the Shadow’s goal,” Doc said, “is to keep attacking, trying to succeed in all six on the same, but satisfied if it gets one or two. Because each one also goes linearly through time, in addition to sideways?”
    Dane was nodding. “All right. You’re saying each Cascade is possibly connected to a Cascade on another date.”
    “Right.” Doc quickly drew an arrow from one box to another on the line below, then one to the third line, crossing some of the arrows. Then again, from first to second to third. “Now envision more dates. They have three-hundred-and-sixty-five to work with. All they need is the right combination of Cascades and they win.”
    Dane looked at the drawing in silence for a few moments. “It’s possible you’re right. All six are real attack, but not just connected to each other laterally but linearly to other dates.”
    Doc nodded. “Yes. Like a Turing Machine. They’re dialing in attacks until they get six Cascades that line up. Maybe the Shadow doesn’t even know what the right combination is.” Doc put the chalk down. “It’s just a theory.”
    “True,” Dane said. “And the more likely possibility, and more imminent threat, is if they succeed on all six missions on one date.”
    “Let’s assume the probability of winning or losing is even,” Doc said, “between our Team and the Shadow. Fifty-fifty. Mathematically, it’s like flipping a coin. This is why Turing used zeroes and ones to break Enigma. Fifty-fifty chance, multiplied out. The odds of six heads, or tails, in a row, six wins, is point five times point five, six times. Which comes out to less than one percent. Point zero-seven-eight percent, to be exact.”
    “The odds of us succeeding on all six were the same,” Dane noted.
    “That’s the odd thing,” Doc said. “The data from Black Tuesday means the odds are in our favor on every one. Somehow.”
    “It’s our timeline,” Dane said. “Home field advantage.”
    “True.”
    “Or—” Dane paused. He shook his head. “Nothing.”
    Doc knew it wasn’t noting but didn’t press it. Dane was not a man to be pressed.
    “If we do have the advantage,” Doc said, “and the numbers indicate that is so, then the Shadow’s odds are infinitely less to get six on a single date. But increase the number of dates and . . .” He left the rest unsaid.
    “That’s why this is called the Possibility Palace,” Dane said. “But, again, our most immediate problem is to make sure the Shadow doesn’t win any of the attacks they’re making on this mission.”
    “I agree absolutely,” Doc said. “But I think we need to build our own version of the Turing Machine. A Time Turing Machine. We need to research this further.”
    “Could you do that with what you have right now?” Dane asked.
    “Of course not,” Doc said. “I don’t have anywhere enough data.”
    “You’re going to get a chance to gather more data,” Dane said.
    “How so?”
    “The best possible way,” Dane said. “You’re going back on this next mission.”
     
    New York City, The Present
     
     
    AS WAS HER HABIT, AND SHE was a woman of habit, Edith Frobish halted briefly at Cleopatra’s Needle, located in Central Park, right behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A psychiatrist might have told her that the needle was her subconscious anchor in the present. Since she dealt with history for the Time Patrol and actually traveled to the Possibility Palace as required, she needed an anchor, since her brain, never mind her body, was rarely in the present.
    But she could never tell a psychiatrist about the Time Patrol, because