* * *
Appleton climbed the ladder, with Mr. Charles behind him. Appleton pushed on the trap door, and was relieved to find that it still opened. An oversight on Thomas's part, an error in a hasty calibration, or part of his plan?
Appleton was less happy that there was nothing in the room except daylight from the sky portals. He would have loved to have shown and explained the sleek chair to Charles. He would have loved to have seen and sat in it again...
But Mr. Charles was impressed with the room, nonetheless. "Quite an attic," he said. "The Club has no end to surprise places."
Appleton nodded. "This may be the attic to Attica."
"You think this is where Thomas discovered the manuscript?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes." But there was little point in being coy, at this juncture. "This may be where Thomas travelled back to ancient Athens to retrieve the manuscript, or--"
Charles looked around the room. "What?"
Appleton started to talk about the chair--
"Come now," Charles interrupted. "Even if that were possible, how on Earth would Thomas, anyone, be able to get from here to Athens in the time of Pericles and Plato? Surely there were no sea vessels here capable of such an expedition -- our city was inhabited by savage red men, back then. No mere canoe could have made such a voyage!"
"I have no good answer," Appleton admitted.
"But do tell me more about this chair," Charles requested.
Appleton told Mr. Charles everything that he knew about the room and the chair.
"Hmmm...," Charles considered. "So you did not actually see Thomas leave, disappear, in that chair."
"No," Appleton acknowledged, "but then how do I account for my seeing him up here, and then downstairs in the bar -- with you and Jonah -- immediately after? And you say the two were with you in the bar while I was up here with Thomas."
Charles considered. "I have no good answer to that, either. Perhaps Thomas has a twin."
Appleton chuckled, drily. "You mean like what the Andros character was saying about Socrates in the dialog?"
"I'm not necessarily saying someone created a twin of Thomas," Charles replied. "Maybe Thomas has been a twin all along .... Look, that is certainly less preposterous than traveling through time!"
"That is true," Appleton said. "But then we still have the problem of the manuscript -- how it came to be, how Thomas got it in his possession--"
"I'll tell you what I think," Charles said, quietly, so as to not let anyone hidden in the woodwork overhear the charges he was about to lodge. "I think Mr. O'Leary is our writer. Mind you, I don't know what he hopes to gain by doing this. Or, perhaps he did discover it somewhere, or someone gave it him -- they are digging up all kinds of things out of Egypt, these days. I'm willing to grant him that - have you heard about the recovery of Aristotle's treatise on the Athenian constitution? - but whatever the explanation, I rather doubt that your traveling chair is--"
Appleton held up his hand, then pointed to the center of the room. "See that?" he asked.
Charles squinted. "It may be just be an odd cloud over the sun."
"I don't think so," Appleton said, staring. He was looking at air, through air, he realized, but there seemed to be something in the air, coalescing from the air, like a swelling crystal of clear ice in a pool of transparent water.
"I think we best leave," he said to Charles, shakily.
"Why?" Charles said, eyes fixed on the center of the room. "I am beginning to see something now, too..."
"I want to stay as much as you, but Thomas told me it may not be safe-- Look, let's just go down the ladder -- we can wait there, listen for sounds of anyone walking around, and then back come up and see just who they are."
* * *
The two men huddled, ears cocked upward, at the foot of the spiral steps.
"I can't hear a thing," Charles complained.
"Nor I. But let's not talk," Appleton said.
"How do we know we are even safe down here," Charles whispered, loudly. "If that mysterious force is dangerous, maybe it goes through walls."
Appleton glared at him. Now he believes it, Appleton thought.
The two waited.
Charles started to talk-- "Wait," he said, excitedly. "Did you hear that?"
Appleton nodded. The sound was muffled, but it reminded him of a freight train's echo, after it had hurtled by his home on the Hudson in the quiet night.... Different from the wine bottle uncorking, but that chair had been leaving, and this one was presumably arriving....
And then the echo was gone.
The two men stood still, breathing heavily.
"Should we climb up and investigate?" Charles asked, this time in a genuine whisper.
"No harm in waiting a little longer. I saw no other exit, when I was up there with Thomas."
"You have the patience of a saint!"
"Comes from being a publisher."
Charles rolled his eyes.
But Appleton knew that, clever retorts aside, he could not be one-hundred percent sure that there was indeed no other mode of egress from the attic, as he had concluded before .... After all, he had not even known that there was an attic at the top of these stairs, before today. "You may be right," he said to Charles. "Let's proceed."
They started up the winding ladder.
They heard footsteps above as they reached the ceiling.
Appleton signaled that they should back down the steps.
"Whoever it is," he said quietly, "we'll get a better look, and from firmer ground, when we're off of these stairs."
They reached the bottom, and looked back up.
The door opened.
Appleton's eyes widened in involuntary admiration of the legs and backside that came into view.
Mr. Charles gasped. "Young ladies unaccompanied are not allowed in the Club."
Chapter Four
[New York City, 2042 AD]
"There's got to be a rational explanation," Max said, sipping white tea at Sierra's teak table in the kitchen.
There was a cup of tea on the table for Sierra, too, but she was pacing. "He told me he was in Wilmington, he's vanished in the Aegean, his picture was apparently taken more than a century and a half ago -- the only thing rational I can get from out of that is he flat-out lied to me, and likely more than once. The only thing I know for sure about him now is he's been missing for a week -- or, at least, out of touch with me."
"Ok, he lied," Max said. "Professors lie to students all the time -- the recommendation was sent out last week, I'd love to let you in my course but the dean won't let me, I like students who ask difficult questions.... So he lied to you about his whereabouts. Maybe he likes his privacy. That's not what you're really upset about."
"I'm worried about him. What the hell's he doing in the Aegean? What the hell is someone with his face doing in the past?"
"Searching for Socrates?"
"If you're joking, I'm not in the mood."
Max put down his tea, stood up slowly, and opened his arms. "Come over here," he said, softly.
Sierra shook her head, paced a moment more, then came to Max. He wrapped his arms around her, stroked her hair, kissed her gently on the forehead. "Let's try to start with what we know. We can leave the impossible, the paradoxical, till later. That photo on the Web isn't going anywhere."
Sierra nodded. "Ok."
They both sat at the table. Sierra tried her tea. "This is good -- thank you."
"That tea room on the corner is great," Max replied. "All right, look, I did a little research -- before you called about Thomas."
"Yeah?"
"And I came across an old book by I. F. Stone -- The Trial of Socrates -- do you know it?"
Sierra shook her head no.
"Well, it doesn't say anything about 'Andros' or a visitor from the future who tried to rescue Socrates, but it puts Socrates and his death sentence in an interesting light. According to Stone -- who taught himself to read the original Greek --
Socrates hated democracy almost as much as Plato did."
"Hmmm... the usual rendition is Socrates had it in for all kinds of governments, and Plato had the real animus for democracy," Sierra reflected. "Karl Popper considers Plato the godfather of all the totalitarian monsters of the twentieth century -- a bit tough on Plato, I always thought. Stalin and Hitler had plenty to draw upon without Plato. "
"Well, Stone agrees with Popper. He just thinks Plato got a lot of that from Socrates. He also thinks that kind of hatred would give Socrates another reason not to want to escape. Not because Socrates doesn't want to put himself above the Athenian government, but because he wants the Athenian government -- the democratic government -- to look especially bad, to all of posterity, by killing him."
"When was Stone's book published?" Sierra asked.
"1988," Max replied.
"Any chance he's still alive? We've got plenty of people walking around in their hundred and teens these days, with the gentherapy--"
"Stone died in 1989. He was already in his eighties when he wrote the book."
Sierra shook her head glumly, and drank more tea. "Andros is saying there would be a clone of Socrates to take his place and die. In that scenario, the Athenian democracy would still have the death of Socrates as a blot on its record. But Socrates seems to be rejecting this incredible escape offer, anyway. So he must be rejecting it for another reason."
Max nodded ... "All right, one more thing, then. And this may be the best or it may be nothing."
"Tell me."
"I was able to get into the British Open University Online Holdings -- you know, they're very restrictive, been that way ever since the pirates hijacked their system in the 20s. But I, ah, know some people with clearance at my school -- one of the perks of being faculty not student."
"And what did you find on the OU-OH?"
"I did an extensive search on Benjamin Jowett. The OU-OH has a listing of all of Jowett's papers and writings. Most are at Oxford. A few are at the British Museum. What do you make of this?"
Max gave Sierra a single sheet, a print out of part of the Museum's Jowett holdings. These were dated 1889. One near the top had been circled by Max.
Sierra read it, aloud. "Rec'd from C. Charles, NYC, 27 September, Platonic dialogue, likely apocryphal."
"It's probably just that -- another apocryphal dialog -- Jowett no doubt received tons of those, some even written by his Victorian friends," Max said. "Still--"
"No, this may be more," Sierra said.
"What makes you think that?" Max asked.
"Cyril Charles is the librarian at the Millennium Club who gave the fragment to Thomas," Sierra replied. "I tried to see him there today."
"Charles is a common-enough last name," Max said. "That part is probably just coincidence."
Sierra looked at him.
Max smiled. "On the other hand, there may be one 'C' too many in that 'C. Charles' for just coincidence."
* * *
Max accompanied Sierra to the airport the next morning.
"You sure you want to do this?" she asked.
Max shrugged. "I have no classes or appointments today. If we stay in London any longer, I can get someone to cover... This is more important ... You're more important."
She squeezed his hand.
They walked over to the HST desk. The hypersonic flight would get them to London in an hour and a half.
"Another promotion special?" she asked.
"Frequent flyer miles. My rich brother earned them on his moon flight, and gave them to me as a birthday present."
They were on the plane half an hour later. Sierra promptly fell asleep on Max's shoulder. Neither had gotten much sleep the night before, and Sierra had also had an exhausting day.
Max checked on his phone for any additional news about the missing boat in the Aegean. He and Sierra had been checking just about every hour.
No further news. Just that same initial report in the Athenian Global Village that Sierra had come across last night.
She shifted her head and moaned softly.
* * *
[London, 2042 AD]
"The British Museum, Great Russell Street," Max instructed the cabbie. The hydrogen car zipped out of Blair, the new HST annex. "I love these London cabs," Max said, "especially the way they make turns."
They pulled up to the Museum 30 minutes later. "Almost as long to get from Blair to the Museum as across the Atlantic," the cabbie commented in a sing-song subcontinental accent.
They walked up the wide flight of stairs. "You think they'll let us in to see the Jowett papers?" Sierra asked. "I know, now's a nice time to ask."
Max smiled. "The web page says they honor all university faculty IDs. I could have called them to confirm, but I might have been told yes, incorrectly, or no, incorrectly. We're better off being here and seeing for ourselves."
They entered the Museum. A rippling holographic arrow pointed them to the Library. Fortunately, just about everyone else seemed to be headed to the recently confirmed Ikhnaton mummy.
Max and Sierra approached the reference table. Max introduced himself, showed his ID, and explained his need.
"I'll check for you, Sir." The red-headed woman, about 25, walked off to a glass-enclosed room. In the revival of 2020s style that was currently sweeping London, one complete cheek of her backside was visible in the see-through jeans she was wearing.
Max grinned. "England swings."
Sierra shook her head.
The red-head returned, all apologies. "I'm terribly sorry, Sir, but we don't have the Jowett papers now. They're on loan."
"On loan? But I checked your webpage just this morning, and--"
"I know, Sir. We get complaints like that all the time. I'm afraid we're a bit behind in updating the page. I can chase the manager for you if--"
"No, not necessary." Max took a breath. "Do your records say where the papers are now -- where they were loaned?"
"I can check on that for you, Sir." She walked again to the glass-enclosed room.
Max was upset, but he enjoyed the second viewing.
Sierra just shook her head.
The red-head came back, with a big smile this time. "The Jowett papers are on loan to the Parthenon Library," she said, brightly.
"I don't believe it." Max nearly cursed. Sierra did curse. "In Athens?" Max asked.
The red-head gave Sierra a look, and then smiled at Max. "Oh no. 'Course not. They're right down the street."
"The Parthenon Library?" Max asked.
She nodded. "It's part of the Parthenon Club."
Max thought. "Do you know if they let in the public, or professors visiting from America?"
"I doubt it, Sir. The Club is very restricted. Shall I ring ahead for you, just to be sure?"
"No thanks. If you could just give me their address, we'll walk over and check."
* * *
The two walked out into a cloudburst.
"It's refreshing," Max said. But the two went for cover under a green canopy on the sidewalk in front of the Museum.
"These goddamn prehistoric Clubs are going to drive me crazy," Sierra said. "What do you suggest we do?"
Max considered, then spoke to his phone. "Samuel Goldshine."
Sierra looked at him.
"It's a worth a shot," Max said.... "Sam ... Maxwell Marcus here." Max smiled and nodded. "Well, Sierra Waters and I are in London, right in front of the British Museum .... Yes, she very much appreciated your help yesterday, she had a wonderful time.... But, strange as it may sound, we now need to get into the Parthenon Club here in London, and I thought .... Yes? Spectacular! That's just what I was hoping .... Ok, I really appreciate that. I'll wait to hear from you."
He finished the call and looked at Sierra. "Many of these clubs have reciprocal arrangements with clubs in other cities. I remembered Sam told me that, when he took me to the Millennium. He said there were at least half a dozen just in London. We lucked out with the Parthenon."
&nbs
p; "He's going to see if he can get us in as his guests?"
"Yes."
"Sweet man," Sierra said.
The phone hummed. "Sam? Yes? Thank you! Much appreciated! Sure ... I'll tell her. Thank you. Thanks again!"
He put the phone in his pocket and looked at Sierra. "He says the doorman at Parthenon will be expecting us. Should we wait out the downpour? Oh, and he said to tell you that he'll be having lunch at the Millennium Club later, and he'll see if Mr. Charles is in today, and he'll also try to find out anything more he can for you about the manuscript. I think he likes you."
They hurried in the rain along Southampton Row to the Parthenon.
* * *
The doorman was indeed expecting them.
"He looks even older than those hundred-and-teenagers you were talking about," Max whispered in Sierra's ear.
But the doorman not only welcomed them, but escorted them up a steep flight of stairs and across an elegantly furnished room to the librarian's office. "Mr. Gleason should be back here in a moment," the doorman informed them.
And Mr. Gleason, argyle vest and tweed trousers, was indeed in front of them in a moment.
Max explained the purpose of their visit.
"I believe someone else is looking at them," Gleason said about the Jowett papers.
Max's mouth hung open.
"It's not quite the coincidence you might suppose," Gleason explained, in a lilting Irish accent. "He has been looking at those papers for several days now. Indeed, we borrowed the papers from the British Museum at his request."
"Can you tell us where he is now?" Sierra asked, as casually as possible. But she turned around and tried to make out who was seated in the large, dimly lit room.
"I'm sorry," Gleason replied. "I have no doubt told you too much about him already. I can tell you, however, that he is not in this room, which our members use only for casual readings of newspapers, periodicals, and like such."
"Any chance at all you could tell us his name?" Max gave it one more try.
Gleason shook his head no. "Sorry. I wish I could be of more help."
"All right, thanks then, we appreciate your taking the time to talk to us." Max took Sierra's arm, and turned to walk away. "Oh, one more thing." He turned back to Gleason. "Do you suppose we might, ah, avail ourselves of the Club's dining facilities for lunch? We've come all the way from America, and we're famished."
The Plot to Save Socrates (Sierra Waters Book 1) Page 9