A Time To Every Purpose

by Ian Andrew

  Heinrich chuckled, “A cheese sandwich, seriously?”

  “Yes seriously,” Leigh giggled with him, “I know it sounds pathetic now, but it was early days and we’d very limited funding. Remember this is back in Toronto and we were only a Research and Development project working on theoretical subjects. I have a bigger budget for stationery now than we did in total back then. We also didn’t know what was going to happen, so the idea of using a BMW was out and we wanted to test the life state of an object. If it aged or grew younger. We weren’t prepared to use a puppy when we could test the freshness of a sandwich.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Everyone on the team agreed to run the test and Bushy, I mean Jerome, have you met Jerome?”

  Heinrich nodded, “He’s the Irish one, yes?”

  “That’s right. Well he volunteered. So we put the sandwich in place and we isolated Bushy for the day.”

  “Bushy?” Heinrich asked.

  “Just a nickname for Jerome. Anyway, I can show you what happened.” She stood up and turned on the large touch screen display on the wall. Pulling a directory across she expanded a video set and chose one of the files. As it opened and came into focus Leigh made it full screen. Heinrich was looking at a four-quadrant display. In the top half there were two rooms. Both appeared to be identical room layouts with a table, a fridge and a single bunk. The only difference he could see was in the top left room Jerome was stretched out on the bunk. The top right room bunk was empty. On the table in both rooms was what he guessed was ‘the’ sandwich. In the bottom left screen was what looked like a control room with a number of people in it and in the bottom right screen was a close up of Jerome sitting in a chair full-face onto the camera. Leigh paused the display.

  “On the top left is the test room being viewed through the Time Window Projection. You’re looking at the room but twenty-four hours in the past, hence why Bushy is lying on the bunk. The top right is the live feed CCTV from the room. As you can see it’s empty of Bushy and he is now in the bottom right about to be interviewed by Franci. Bottom left is the old Toronto control room. Make sense?”

  Heinrich nodded and said, “By Franci I assume you mean Francine Xu?”

  “Yep. We set up an experiment where one of the team would be isolated for twenty-four hours. We sent him into the room and he had no interactions with the rest of us in any way. He had food and water in the fridge and that was all. No radio, no TV no anything else. We wanted as little interaction with the world as possible. We also put the star of the show, the sandwich, on the table and he was told not to touch it. That was it.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. He came out of the room after twenty-four hours and joined us back in the main lab. We put him into an isolation booth and Franci asked him questions. That’s what you are looking at on this screen.”

  “Forgive me but that doesn’t seem like the most startling experiment.”

  “Well no, but the next bit was. When I play the video you’ll hear Konrad, Franci, Bushy, various others and me. There’s a bit of experiment explanation of what the feeds are and then it begins. You ready?”

  He nodded and she touched the screen.

  The voice was deep, resonate and dispassionate, “Experiment 402H/2, Arcand Institute. Test Feed-1 subject room T-24hours via the TOW Projection. Test Feed-2 is subject room T-0 via live CCTV. Test Feed-3 isolation interview response. Test Feed-4 control room environment. Initiate baseline response.”

  “Jerome, in the last twenty-four hours did you have any interaction with any members of the team?” Heinrich recognised Francine’s voice asking the question.

  “No.” Jerome answered casually and without emotion.

  “Do you remember any of us talking to you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you move the sandwich from its place on the table?”

  “No.”

  Heinrich saw Konrad lean forward in the control room display and key a microphone.

  “Initiate command sequence.”

  “Bushy?” It was Leigh’s voice in the control room.

  The man on the bunk in the TOW Projection sat up and looked around.

  “Jerome, in the last twenty-four hours did you have any interaction with any members of the team?” It was Francine repeating her earlier question.

  “Yes.” Jerome looked puzzled. His voice was hesitant.

  “Do you remember any of us talking to you?”

  “Yes. I do. It’s like… It’s like a strong sense of Déjà Vu. But I remember it. It was Leigh. She spoke to me. She just said my name. Or rather, she called me by my nickname. That was all. I’m sorry. I, I didn’t mean to lie to you earlier. I just remembered it there now.”

  “How did her voice sound, was it clear, which direction did you hear it from?”

  “It was clear, distinct,” he hesitated. “But it didn’t come from anywhere. Or rather, it came from everywhere. It was,” he was looking increasing confused, “like she was in my head. Like when you listen to music through headphones. It’s not in your ears; it’s a spot inside you?”

  “Did you move the sandwich from its place on the table?”

  “No.” Jerome was looking concerned.

  “Initiate sequence 2.”

  Leigh’s voice in the control room, “Bushy, can you please stand up for me and turn toward the table.”

  The Jerome on the bunk got up and turned toward the table.

  Leigh’s voice again, “Now, can you please move the sandwich from where it currently is to the other end of the table.”

  Heinrich watched as Jerome carried out the simple instruction.

  As Jerome set the sandwich back down in its new spot a number of things happened on the screens. In the TOW Projection room the lights seemed to flicker and Jerome flinched and covered his ears. In the interview room Jerome had brought his hands up to cover his mouth and looked surprised, in the control room people were standing up and looking towards one another in an almost comedic double-take and the screen in the top right of the quadrant had gone blank.

  “Jerome, in the last twenty-four hours did you have any interaction with any members of the team?” It was Francine again repeating her earlier question.

  “Yes.” Jerome’s face registered surprise.

  “Do you remember any of us talking to you?”

  “Yes. Leigh asked me to stand up and move the sandwich.”

  “Did you move the sandwich from its place on the table?”

  “Yes.”

  “And from your memory what occurred when you did?”

  “When I set the sandwich back down on the bench there was an incredibly loud noise and the lights seemed to go off momentarily before coming straight back on. The noise was like a crack of thunder right overhead. I remember covering my ears it was that loud and then it rumbled for a short while until it faded.” Jerome paused, and looked into the camera.

  “But Franci, I remember this now and I also remember telling you not two minutes ago that I didn’t touch the thing. I wasn’t lying. I know what I’m saying now is the truth but…” he just shook his head. “I also feel sick…” and with that he bent forward and began to vomit. The screen went blank.

  “What just happened?” asked Heinrich.

  “Bushy threw up,” Leigh said.

  “Uh, yeah I saw that. I meant...”

  Leigh cut him off by tapping on the upper left display. “We asked him to move the sandwich and he did. He describes hearing a loud noise that rumbled and faded but otherwise that was it. We didn’t interact with him anymore and as you saw he remembered everything he had done as soon as we made him do it. He had no memory of the original day’s events and his reality was what we had him do. Short term he suffered shock, confusion, physical nausea and vomiting but he survived. Longer term he had unnerving feelings of Déjà Vu that persisted for a while. It took about three weeks of clinical discussions with our resident psychs to get him squared away but, as I said, he survived.r />
  “And the room in the top right?” Heinrich asked her.

  “Ah. Well. Watch.” Leigh collapsed the original quadrant displays and double-tapped on a new file. It expanded and was a close up of the table.

  “This is a super slow-mo, frame by frame playback of what happened.”

  Heinrich leaned forward and watched intently. The sandwich instantly disappeared from one end of the table and appeared at the other. In the place where it had been was a shimmering, translucent, almost after-image of the sandwich. The next frame showed the outline around the shimmer intensify in brightness and the next showed that the outline had collapsed to a single, radiant point of light. Then the screen went white, then black.”

  “What happened?”

  “The sandwich moved.”

  “I saw. That was truly amazing. But after that?”

  “It took us quite a while to figure that out. When it disappeared from one end of the table it really disappeared. It left nothing. No molecular structure at all. The very space it had occupied was ripped out of our existence. It created a true vacuum. It turns out that nature really does abhor a vacuum and when she decided to fill this one she did it with enough energy and resultant force to blow the sandwich, the table and everything else that was in the room into very tiny little shards.”

  “Oh!” Heinrich didn’t really know what else to say.

  “We ran the experiment over and over and changed the parameters but in general we replicated the same results. We increased the number of people in the room and that was interesting. They could all hear the audio signal in the same way Bushy described but after the experiment their disorientation was more severe. It was like they all had subtly different memories of the same thing but in a terribly disjointed way. Some suffered hallucinations; some became severely depressed whilst others were fine. It was weird and we never really got an adequate explanation for it.” Leigh frowned, obviously still concerned at the lack of a proven outcome. “We increased and decreased the time delay and increased the size of the object being manipulated. In the end we stopped because it was always the same.” She added almost as an afterthought, “And we couldn’t control the size of the effect.”

  Heinrich just frowned at her. “The size?”

  She returned to her seat and swivelled it toward him. “We had an isolated experimentation facility within a wooded area in the north of Ontario. We decided to use it because Bushy had been nearly deafened by moving a small object and we reckoned things might escalate. We were half right. We slewed the Time Observation Window and instructed the test candidates to push a trolley with a 50Kg weight from one end of a room to the other. The resultant explosion in the live-feed room was tiny. It didn’t even splinter the table but there was a ten second blackout in the Projection room accompanied by a noise that actually incapacitated the test subjects. Almost deafened them permanently. The next one we ran we increased the weight to 100Kg, thinking bigger was obviously better and the resultant explosion blew the whole live-feed room apart. Literally, not a shred of anything left. We even cleared the trees in the surrounding woods out to a 50-metre radius and yet the test subjects in the Projection room hardly noticed a thing. Then on a notable occasion, that we never managed to replicate, we moved a remote control model vehicle around the room and there was no damage whatsoever. Nothing. It just arrived at the new spot and that was that. The bright image outline appeared for a second but other than that, nothing. We tried it again and it produced so much heat the room looked like it had been airbrushed with a welding rod. After three weeks we had seen enough. If we went back in time and manipulated physical things then the results were unpredictable at best and could be cataclysmic at worst.”

  “So, if we go back and alter anything, we lose everything here?” asked Heinrich.

  “That’s just it. We don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. I know that doesn’t explain much. You see we ran another set of tests where we just changed a person’s behaviour. We got them to do things differently. Simple stuff, like read a different chapter in a book to the one they had read or do a different set of exercises, push-ups instead of sit-ups, that sort of thing.”

  “And?”

  She shook her head, “Much like the other results. Very inconsistent. Some were not good at all and produced a lot of confusion and distress. A lot. Some took weeks to readjust. Other test subjects were fine. Couldn’t actually recall any effects. And on one occasion the person could clearly remember both sets of events. Said it was like being able to see two things happening at the same time in her memory. She didn’t need counselling, she just commented that it was an interesting phenomenon.”

  “So you stopped?”

  “Yeah. We had quite a lot of seminars, with some very impressive theoretical physicists and to be perfectly honest, we’re still not really sure. Some reckon if we were to go back far enough and alter something then it would be like ripples on ponds. By the time they would catch up to us they wouldn’t be noticeable. Others argue that they would build like waves and swamp us in a tsunami of change. Mind you, most of these theorists don’t actually know we have Thule. Most thought it was a purely theoretical exercise.”

  “But the Führer determined for the cautious approach?” Heinrich asked.

  “Didn’t so much determine as absolutely ordered it. He was first briefed on this after the big Toronto accident, just before we all relocated here. He’d read the reports of the various seminars and said that the future of the Reich would be placed in jeopardy if so much as one of these eminent scientists was even slightly off in their theories. He said his grandfather had instigated the Nuclear Weapons Project and explained how the scientists involved with that had wondered if by setting off the first bomb they would rip the world apart. I remember him being really passionate when he said that the nuclear program was a necessary gamble. I’d never realised that the Reich felt they needed to have the nukes to force the rapid capitulation of the unoccupied territories. But he said now was different. Hence the direct order that Project Thule was only to be used for intelligence and investigative purposes. He even reiterated it when he signed us into provisional-live use last month.”

  “What do you think?” asked Heinrich.

  Leigh gave a rather whimsical look. “I think the tsunami approach. If, for example, we go back and make my mum and dad never meet, then everything they ever did, including me ceases to be. Even though I was here to make the discovery which allowed me to go back, as soon as I do it I would be removed from the timeline. I can’t just be if they never met, but I was. Imagine it like a snake eating itself from the tail up. The head exists right up to the point when the mouth catches up with it. Oh, and if you think about it for long enough, your head starts to hurt and you take up smoking.” She got up.

  “Speaking of which.”

  Chapter 21

  The smoking area was around the south side of the main Todt administration building. Someone had provided a half dozen uncomfortable, formed-concrete chairs and a few metal ashtrays fixed to plinths. As an afterthought they had added a very small bus-shelter-like frame that could squeeze two people in and would allow a modicum of protection in the normal event of rain in London. Leigh had said she always went up for a smoke near to midday and it was close enough.

  Heinrich sat in one of the chairs and watched her as she stood profile on to him, looking out to the surrounding fields that separated the labs from the old dockyards. He realised that he had changed his mind slightly from the previous evening. Her prettiness hadn’t matured into beauty, it was more than that. She was truly, stunningly beautiful. He looked at her porcelain pale skin with the high cheek bones, the straight nose, proportioned mouth and full lips. He watched as she took a draw of the smoke. He saw the slight tensing of her neck muscles and watched as her hand moved away from her mouth. He slowly let his gaze traverse her body. Her breasts were full and her slim waist accentuated the curves. She wore a simple white blouse and a black knee-length skirt with flat, yet no
t drab, black shoes. He found himself wondering if her legs were covered in tights or stockings. He had noticed her legs the night before and now as she stood in front of him, he found them to be even more attractive than he had remembered. He realised he was staring and looked down at the ground.

  “Are you finished?”

  Heinrich’s head snapped back up.

  “Um, p... Pardon?” he managed to stumble out.

  “Asking questions? Have you finished or do you still want to know more about the project?” she was still looking out at the fields.

  “Right,” he recovered and continued, “the bits you gave me to read. I have questions about them.”

  Leigh looked around and said, “Well we’re on our own so fire away.” She took a long draw on the cigarette.

  “You said you all relocated here after some big accident in the Toronto lab. Was that the last of the experiments you were running?”

  “Oh no. We finished the experiments when we had flattened enough trees. The big accident as we all call it wasn’t really an accident,” Leigh looked wistfully at him, “more a complete aberration by one of the junior researchers.” She looked back out to the fields and shook her head a little.

  “Can I ask what happened?”

  “This young researcher had a theory that light is matter and it was causing the Window to open because of its effect on gravity. We were all intrigued with her theory and thought it certainly had merit. But she was young and impatient and had decided that if light and sound waves could pass through the Window then other matter could pass through and arrive at the time scene currently in focus.”

  “Okay, I think you lost me there, but you’re saying time travel. Sending something back into time?”