In hindsight, the most significant event during my first year at Naughtenny Moore did not happen in the past, but in the present. Though we made little of it at the time, it was a reminder of how dangerous the TDD is, and what some people might do to use it or exploit it. There can now be little doubt that, even then, some were plotting how to use the time machine for their own gain.

We went on four expeditions our first year, an average we have maintained ever since. Besides Cretaceous Mongolia, we went to Late Permian Russia, Jurassic Colorado, and Pleistocene Mauritius. It was between the third and fourth missions that we had our first encounter with the legendary “Keystone Kommies.”

After the Jurassic trip (otherwise known as the Morrison expedition), the company was in dire straits. We returned from that grim adventure with $100,000 in damages to our vehicles, a brachiosaur heart, enough carnosaur heads and carcasses to glut the market, a video of Carlos using his “modified” shotgun, and one dead scientist. All this resulted in several lawsuits, including a wrongful death suit and a “breach of contract” suit from the museum that funded the expedition, and the indictment of Carlos for violating international firearms laws. To keep the company solvent, Carlos and I did advertisements for outdoor gear and vehicles. Our most lucrative contract was as spokesmen for International Composites windshield glass, in which we showed off a windshield with an allosaur footprint in it.

It was a dark time in our personal lives, too, especially for Dianna. Shortly after our return from the Permian, her fiancé broke off their engagement. One day, she came into work with no ring on her finger and a distant look on her face. It was a week before she talked to anyone about it, and she never did tell us much. Three weeks into the planning stages of the Morrison expedition, she went on sabbatical. She thus missed the fun and games of a Jurassic sauropod kill. Lucky for her!

On a fateful night in November, 2063, Carlos and I were going through a crate load of newly acquired equipment. “Ah, the new windshield for the Ora,” Carlos exclaimed. He hit it experimentally with a rock hammer. “They reinforced it. Good.” He then used the pointed end of the hammer to open a crate. When he saw what was inside, he looked ready to take the hammer to the contents. “Boing sticks. Bloody boing sticks,” he said murderously.

I looked at the clipboard. “Would these be the ‘underwater defensive devices’? It says here they were donated by the Army of El Salvador.”

“Figures. Even those dumb f*s in requisitions would know better than to pay money for this s*.” He took out something that looked like a giant dart gun and screwed on a shiny aluminum barrel with a 15 mm grenade protruding from the bore. “Officially, these are ‘defensive devices,’ not weapons. Everybody who’s had the occasion to use one of these says that’s at least half-right.”

With considerable effort, he cocked the weapon’s massive spring, but not quite enough for it to lock in place. “See, the barrel, cartridge and projectile are all combined into one air-tight unit. It gets set off by a spring-loaded firing pin. The grenade gets blown out of the barrel, and when the pointy tip sticks in something, the grenade goes off. Official effective range is 30 meters, but it’s general knowledge that one’ll be lucky to score a direct hit at 10. Then screw for your life, and repeat as necessary, if possible. Or, just throw the f*in’ thing at the shark, and hope the shiny barrel looks more edible than you.”

Right about then, they came.

The only warning we had was the sound of approaching footsteps. I might not even have looked up, if they had not been running. When I did look, I saw four complete strangers, all armed with some item or another. One had a small but wicked-looking axe. Another carried an old assault rifle, modified into a .50 suppressed weapon and fitted with a bulky electronic sight. A third, who kept to the rear, bore an improvised weapon commonly called a potato gun. Such weapons use some kind of propellant charge (usually commercially available aerosols) to launch a projectile from a plastic tube. This one appeared to be designed to release a blast at both ends for recoilless action. Duct tape figured prominently in the weapons’ construction. The fourth, clearly the leader, carried a .25 pistol. Carlos frankly appraised the threat. “Don’t let the duct tape fool you; that rifle is sniper grade. Way better than any of these guys could use. An’ if I am not mistaken, that potato gun is made from the liner of a jet nozzle,” he said. Glancing at the leader, he continued, “That guy, on the other hand, would be better off with the axe.”

The four abruptly started shouting, at us and each other. There was a polyglot of accents and dialects. “That’s not Spanish, is it?” Carlos said. For a moment, I was confused myself.

“No, it’s Portuguese,” I said. “They’re speaking at least two different dialects, and the one with the potato gun isn’t a native speaker.”

Then the leader was in my face, shaking his pistol at me. “Quiet! You give us guns!”

Carlos and I exchanged glances. “This isn’t where we keep our guns,” Carlos said. “This is a hazardous materials storage area. The gun shed is up an’ across the road.”

There was an outburst of incomprehensible dialect from the leader. From what little I could understand, he thought Carlos was pretending not to speak English. I tried to repeat what Carlos had said in Portuguese, but that only made him angrier. He waved his gun in an attempt to menace us. All this accomplished was to convince me that if he tried to use it, actually hitting something would be a matter of random chance.

Meanwhile, the potato gunner detached himself from the rest of the group. Two more figures came out of the shadows after him. Carlos’s face twitched. I finally made the leader understand that this was not the gun shed. Rather than take our word for it, he ordered the man with the axe to go inside and check. Then he was in my face again, shouting more threats. That was when, in what seemed like a quantum leap, Carlos hit him with the hammer.

The leader staggered back, leaning against the wall. Carlos grabbed him and hauled him forward, using him as a shield. The rifleman fired a short, hesitant burst. I dived behind a cart of diving equipment, and found a flare. I lit this and tossed it into the shed. This set off the fire alarm, which automatically lowered a series of fireproof bulkheads. The man with the axe, who would barely have had time to realize what was happening, was trapped inside. The slamming bulkheads did not quite drown out the sound of Carlos’s hammer fracturing the leader’s skull.

The rifleman closed in, spraying the front of the shed. Carlos grabbed the boing stick and fired a shot that was exceptionally wild even by his standards. The rifleman poured in more fire…until he hit a compressed air tank. Contrary to popular imagination, ruptured air tanks do not explode (though an explosion is a likely result if any flame is present). What they will do is fly through the air with considerable force, which is just what this one did. It leapt into the air like a salmon, throwing three more tanks into the air with it. Two of them hit the rifleman in the chest. “Holy s*!” Carlos said. “Who the hell are these guys?”

Across the way, there was an explosion. “The potato gunner just shot at the control tower!” I exclaimed. “Should we go after them?”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” Carlos said. “You do whatever you want. I’m going to teach these guys about effective automatic fire!” He pried the rifle from the hands of its stunned owner and ran for the hangar. After a moment of hesitation, I went after him.

As we ran, someone shouted to us to stop. Carlos spun around, dropping to a crouch in the process. He held his fire when he recognized the approaching man. “Lou! Where have you been?!” he shouted.

“Whoever is doing this has triggered false alarms all over the complex,” Lou Tanaka said. “Pretty much everywhere except where they actually came in. Sorry I left you in a lurch—though you seem to have dealt with it well enough on your own. I’m going in through the side entrance. You can go in the front.” He handed me his .45. “If you’re coming in with us, take this. I can do better without it.”

As we approached the hangar, there was an explosion. Body panels from a Thing rained out of the hangar door. “Bloody ‘ell, we just replaced the ones we lost in the Morrison,” Carlos said. We arrived at the left side of the hangar. I glimpsed two figures retreating deeper into the hangar. Carlos paused, surveying his options. “I go right, you go left.” Then he darted inside.

Carlos had given me the best route, with cover all the way. I made my way through a maze of crates and parked vehicles, trying to imitate the furtive movements I had seen from Carlos. I kept that up until I came within one step of walking into a potato gun blast. I tried to retreat around the other side of a Thing, only to be greeted by a burst of rifle fire. I heard the potato gunner reloading his weapon, and knew with sickening certainty that I would be dead with the next shot. Then Carlos came rushing out of his own meager cover, driving back the rifleman with a stream of continuous automatic fire. “You bloody idiot,” he said. “Even these jokers could blow your head off. If you had gone just a few more seconds without almost getting killed, I could have taken both of ‘em down. If you still want to do some good, head for the Ora. That seems to be their objective.”

I reached the Ora and found Lou. He was crouched by the front wheel. A few meters away, a gunman lay dead with a throwing knife in his heart. “He’s on the rear observation deck,” he whispered. “He seems to be looking for a way in. I’m going after him. Get inside just in case he does manage to get in.” I went to the main door, while Lou darted toward the rear. I absent-mindedly grabbed the handle before getting out my electronic key. The door swung open in my hand. I felt a chill and ran up the stairs where I reached a landing, halfway up the first deck. From there, one short stairway went down to the first deck, another up into the cab, and a full-sized stair led to the second deck. I heard a scrape in the darkness. The intruder was prying up the cover of a below-deck cargo compartment. I saw him by the hangar lights shining in the window, and drew a bead on him. “There’s nothing in there,” I said. “Now put your hands up!”

The cover loudly popped open, and the intruder reached for something in his jacket. I emptied the clip. A round object rolled out of his hands—a grenade. At that moment, Lou came in the back. Seeing the grenade, he lunged for it and grabbed it, just before it fell into the compartment. “Open a window! Quick!” he yelled. I loaded the spare clip and emptied it into a triangular pane, then kicked it until it peeled halfway out of the frame. Lou tossed the grenade out the window. It bounced twice and rolled under a Thing. A terrific flash filled the hangar, and the windows groaned from the heat. I jumped to my feet and looked out. The Thing was a pile of melted aluminum and fractured body panels. “That storage compartment is right next to the diesel tanks,” Lou said breathlessly. He pointed to a support column on the other side of the Ora. “If it had gone off in there, the Ora would have been destroyed, and the heat alone could have destroyed that column. Half the roof could have caved in.”

Across the hangar, there was another explosion, followed up by a volley of gunfire that ended with the emptying of a magazine. Lou and I rushed to the rear observation deck, just in time to be greeted by Carlos. “The potato gunner got away through a hole in the wall,” he said. “I don’t expect he’ll be back. What the hell just happened?”

We sat down numbly on the observation deck while we waited for police to arrive. Dr. Werner joined us as the police were leaving. The attack had taken a grim toll. Only the rifleman had lived to go into police custody, and it was doubtful whether he would live through the night. The one we trapped in the shed had killed himself. Another attacker and one of Lou’s men had been killed in skirmishes along the fence. “They were rank amateurs,” Lou fumed, “but damn it, they killed Jorge!”

Only then did I ask the obvious question: “Who were they? And what did they think they were doing?” There was long, empty silence. Then Carlos spoke.

“That doesn’t necessarily matter…Have you ever heard of the Keystone Kommies?”

I frowned. Lou laughed. “Yes. The legendary Keystone Kommies…the most active non-existent terrorist organization in the world.” I had heard the phrase before, and recalled the gist of the stories. The name was applied to various marginal, left-wing terrorist groups with no apparent connection to each other. It was mostly used as an inside joke among law enforcement and paramilitary personnel. But some openly insisted that there was more to it, that this menagerie of local extremists was really connected by an international central body. This was most commonly reputed to be a small but extremely wealthy cadre of communist hold-overs in China. (An international coalition of Jewish businessmen were the next most popular suggestion, and remnants of the South American drug cartels were a distant third.)

“Sure, the ‘KK’ don’t officially exist,” Carlos said. “And officially, winged monkeys could come out of my butt. But let’s just look at the facts. The people who attacked us tonight were from outside the country. Once the authorities come up with their background, they’re going to find that they were recent migrants with no local connections or acquaintances. It’s already pretty well certain that they had no lengthy acquaintance with each other. Ted says that they spoke different dialects, and that one of them—the one that got away—was from a different country. Those things, right there, meet all the proposed characteristics of a ‘KK’ attack. Am I right, Lou?”

Lou nodded.

“And then there’s the sophistication of their equipment. Untraceable, mostly old, and way better than that level of operation could get hold of. Those rifles were modified M16s, old but good, done with professional-grade conversion kits. And the sights! Also old but high quality, and well-maintained. O’course, it will turn out that they came up with everything themselves, or could have. But that’s saying nothing at all. Even if they bought and assembled those guns all by themselves, where did they get the specifications? The know-how? The money? Then there’s the potato gun. The cartridges were target practice rounds for an Atlatl missile launcher. I got a look at one of them. It’s a recoilless charge, originally designed to launch a missile before rocket ignition, but nasty in its own right. The shells: plastic explosives, also military grade. The tube: aerospace composites. Then there was the grenade. That was military issue, no question, though we’re in no position to prove it. On top of that, there’s the way they got in. Lou, I know you aren’t at leisure to discuss details, but how did they manage to get through?”

“It appears that they used improvised electronic-warfare equipment to disable a key checkpoint, as well as the Ora electronics,” he said guardedly. “They could have done it by firing low-grade radioactive material from a shotgun. The one Ted shot had a .410 gauge in addition to his rifle. The impact would create a momentary pulse of radiation, enough to disable unshielded electronics. It appears that they also compromised my communications system. We found nothing on the dead that would be adequate.”

“That means resources beyond what they could normally access or use—another characteristic of a ‘KK’ attack. Finally, there’s the sheer illogic of it. Anyone with a reliable source of the kind of equipment they were carrying would not need to rob our gun shed. I’m sure they intended to steal company weapons, but that would only have been an added incentive. They certainly had no motive to try to destroy the hangar, let alone attempt it after there was no chance of escape. Firing on the control tower was the most senseless act of all. Maybe they thought that was the center for our security system—but whoever set up the security breach should have known better. There really is no question: They were out to destroy the company, and they were not acting alone.”

Dr. Werner spoke: “I fear you are right, Dr. Wrzniewski, and I do see a motive for this attack. I will tell you this in strict confidence. The TDD has aroused great interest from a number of governments. Though no one will ever say as much, the main reason for this interest lies in the potential for nuclear applications. A time bell offers a perfect means for disposing of nuclear waste. Instead of building an expensive and controversial storage facility, one need only transport it into the very distant past—and by the time humans are around to be harmed, the waste will have naturally decomposed. It also offers a perfect loophole around restrictions on nuclear research. Some parties would undoubtedly prefer to destroy the time bell rather than see this come about.”

“How could anyone do that without the program being recognized?” I said.

“They would not do it—not themselves,” Carlos said. “Haven’t you ever heard of ‘Nth nation’ studies? Or Potemkin labs? Here’s how it works. Scientific research has always been a risky proposition, just from a practical perspective. Granting the bare physical possibility of a thing, it is a foregone conclusion that it can be done, with the proper application of time and resources. Problem is, one never knows in advance how much it will take, and the biggest, bitchiest problems are almost always practical, not theoretical. With sensitive and potentially dangerous technologies like nuclear technology, there is the additional obstacle of politics. If you try to do something, a dozen parties will gladly line up to stop you. That makes it impossible to secure long-term funding. The only practical solution is, very discreetly, to get someone else to do it for you.

“That’s where the ‘Nth nation’ comes in. The original ‘Nth nation’ study was conducted in the Cold War, to determine how easy it would be for a country to develop nuclear weapons. What happened was, a group of college students got a lump sum to design a nuclear weapon, using only what information they could find themselves. They accomplished it in 6 months. With all the hurdles UNCOST has thrown up, it’s more practical than ever to use the same approach for unresolved research problems. Just hand it off to a think-tank, or a corporation, or a real ‘Nth nation’—one of the so-called ‘rogue states’.

I stared, aghast. “Don’t act so shocked! Look at the Serbo-Albanian War. Both sides developed some serious s*, and used it,” Carlos continued. “It was the deadliest exchange of WMDs since the nuclear bombing of Japan. But, anyone familiar with the logistics of science and the state of both nations could see that, left to their own devices, the Serbos and the Albies couldn’t have bred so much as a bigger, badder potato bug. Sure, they had their own factories, and some research labs. Those were what we—the UN-EU troops, I mean—called the ‘Potemkin labs’: WMD research and manufacture facilities with first-rate equipment, first-rate staff—almost always foreign—but no infrastructure, no administrative paper trail, not so much as a plausible budget! The reports would always read, ‘Facility abandoned, administrative records destroyed.’ But everyone who was there knew better. They would have found something, if there had been anything to find to begin with. The only explanation is that the labs were supported by parties outside the country; and anything they found out would have been relayed back to those parties.”

Soon after, Carlos said an inarticulate good-bye and left. Lou walked me to my car. “What was that about?” I said. The question on my mind did not need to be asked.

“Only Carlos knows,” Lou said. “I am not at liberty to discuss it. But there’s one thing I can tell you. I’ve seen Carlos’ file. He joined the military in 2043. He resumed civilian life in 2048, until he was called up 6 years later for the Indonesia campaign. An interval of 6 months during his first stint is a blank. Classified.”