The Empire of Time

by David Wingrove

  Gehlen stares back at me and shakes his head slowly, but his eyes say yes.

  His wife returns to the room, their little girl in tow, a bundle of clothes in her arms. Placing the clothes down beside the trunk, she begins to pack while the child stares sullenly at me.

  Gehlen turns away. His chest rises and falls, as if he’s been running. This whole business has agitated him greatly. He turns back, as if about to say something, when his three-year-old son, Manfred, runs into the room. Seeing him, Gehlen smiles; a very different Gehlen suddenly there before me. Crouching, he hugs the boy, then listens attentively as this son says something to his ear.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But three things only. That’s all you can take.’

  And Manfred runs off, back into his room.

  Gehlen straightens, then looks at me again. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Things get out …’

  He nods. After all, this is a society of spies. Then, as if he’s remembered something, he goes over to the shelves and takes something down. Stepping across, he hands it to me.

  I stare at the label on the package. It’s Hecht’s handwriting but it’s addressed to me, care of Gehlen, and I wonder why. This is what Burckel delivered two days ago, when he went AWOL. The same package that Dankevich sent his men back to get, when they, for some reason, failed to return.

  As I begin to pick at the wrapping, so young Manfred runs in again, saying something about a missing toy. Gehlen, watching me, makes to turn and go with the boy, to search for it in his room, and it’s then, as he takes the first step across the room, that I see what’s in the package and call out to Gehlen, my voice urgent, telling him to stay exactly where he is.

  Gehlen turns, surprised, then laughs, seeing what I’m holding. ‘There he is,’ he says to his son. ‘There’s George …’

  And he takes a step towards me, his son’s tiny hand in his own, both of them smiling …

  The explosion in the bedroom is deafening. It knocks us all off of our feet. The room is filled suddenly with smoke and dust. But as I get up, I see that no one’s badly hurt. The bomb has failed. Gehlen is still alive, and as I stand, brushing the dust off my clothes, I notice how he’s staring at me like I’ve been transformed.

  Neighbours come running, asking if we’re okay. Both children are crying, and Gehlen’s wife just sits there, badly shaken. An alarm is going off somewhere now, its repetitive drone shredding the nerves, but no one’s hurt.

  I let out a long, sighing breath, then look down at the object I’m holding and shake my head. It’s a child’s toy. A small, yellow giraffe, twelve inches long and made of soft rubber.

  Gehlen comes across and takes it from me, staring at it in wonder. ‘George,’ he says. Then, looking up into my face, he asks: ‘How did you …?’

  Loops, I want to say, but I just shrug.

  Only he’s too intelligent not to make connections. Too clever not to unpick this conundrum stitch by stitch and put it back together. Oh, and I know what you’re thinking: that Hecht could simply have sent him the equations, only that isn’t how it works. Not for something as essential as this. This once the ‘fallacy of inaction theory’ doesn’t apply. We know, because we’ve tried.

  But maybe this is enough. After all, Gehlen has been working on Q-balls for some time now – trying to fit them into the general picture – and though thus far he’s failed, maybe this will give him the jolt that will allow him to think the unthinkable.

  A toy giraffe named George …

  I stare at it in his hands and laugh, and he looks up at me.

  ‘Hetty,’ he says, speaking to his wife, his eyes never leaving me. ‘Leave that now. Just take the children and go to the safe haven. I’ll join you later. There’s something I have to do.’

  136

  It is happening, even as we’re in the air. It is ten past two and the Russians, reeling under the first massive, five-pronged assault, have withdrawn their forces to a line that runs from Riga in the north to Odessa in the south. They are regrouping, ready to push the Germans back after this latest feint in the Great Game. Only they’re mistaken, for the rules of the game have changed.

  They have yet to realise that, this time, Manfred is in earnest.

  Vast fists of heavy cloud dominate the sky outside, their sculpted shapes so dark and bruised they’re almost purple, yet between them I can see great swathes of sunlit meadow. Indeed, the whole landscape has a brooding, unnatural look to it. The great world of field and wood and stream looks super-real in these, its final moments.

  Soon – not long now – the first of the bombs will fall.

  I look across at Gehlen. His face looks strange, mask-like, in the golden light from the portal just beyond him. I study him a moment, as one might study any natural phenomenon.

  Gehlen is lightning. Gehlen is pure electricity, fallen to the Earth. He is a sun, throwing out energy and ideas – enough for a hundred thousand lesser men. And yet he is also a man, flawed and mortal.

  Conscious of my attention, he turns to me.

  ‘I don’t know why you need to know any of this, but you get one shot, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  I have been mulling things over on the way down. Wondering why, for instance, there were no guards on Gehlen’s apartment, and why, other than his importance to Manfred, they should want to bomb him, and whether it was Russian agents who did it. Time agents, that is.

  Only time agents would have monitored the results and jumped back in again just as soon as they saw they’d failed. And then … but that gets complicated, so it can’t have been that.

  Reichenau?

  More than anything, I want to know what Reichenau’s part in this is, because if anyone’s setting off these bombs – and from the news reports we’ve heard, there’s been a whole spate of them – it’s Reichenau’s Unbeachtat, his revolutionaries.

  But why should Reichenau put me in a position where I could save Gehlen, if it was he who planted the bomb in the first place? Or is there something glaringly simple that I’ve overlooked?

  I look to Gehlen once again. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Because I owe you a life.’

  I gesture towards the cameras. ‘You aren’t afraid of …?’

  ‘Of being watched? I don’t think anyone’s being watched right now. It’s chaos out there. But if you must know, I’ve permission to show you round.’

  ‘Permission?’ That surprises me more than anything he’s said. ‘From whom?’

  ‘From Tief. He has instructed me to show you whatever you need to see.’

  And he hands me a sealed document, from Tief’s office, granting me access to the facility at Orhdruf.

  Which makes no sense at all.

  Or rather, it makes me want to jump back, right there and then, and present it all to Hecht; to let his cool reason play over everything I’ve seen and heard like a searchlight, making sense of it all.

  ‘I see,’ I say, although I don’t. ‘I see.’

  137

  Rain is falling, spotting the soft, pale stone of the battlements as we step down from the ship. Orhdruf, I note with some surprise, is another castle; a fact I completely overlooked last time, distracted possibly by Manfred’s cruisers, waiting to arrest me.

  Gehlen takes Tief’s pass from me and, waving it overhead for the security cameras, walks across the pad and through the gate, leaving me to hurry after.

  We make our way down several dark twists of steps and along dank, dimly lit corridors until, at the bottom of one last twist of steps, we come out into the most curious of laboratories.

  It was a chapel once, I’m sure. Two long lines of slender stone pillars form walks to left and right. Between them are several huge work-benches, piled high with electrical equipment. Two assistants – one young, one surprisingly ancient – look up as Gehlen approaches, surprise registering on their faces as they see me there.

  ‘This is Otto,’ Gehlen says, looking about him for something. �
��He’s come to see how we do things here.’

  It’s a strange thing to say, and almost humorous, only the two assistants don’t laugh. They simply stare at me suspiciously.

  I look about me, surprised by how chaotic everything appears. It looks more like a dump than a workplace. Notebooks lie open everywhere you look, their pages filled with strange diagrams and scrawled figures, many of which are crossed through. It makes me think – not for the first time – that Hecht ought to have sent someone with a better scientific grasp. Then again …

  ‘Okay,’ Gehlen says, pocketing a small, round object. ‘You want to see? Then let’s see. We’ll take the lift down to the seventh level.’

  138

  We step into the room and there it is, spinning slowly in the darkness, so dark it almost seems bright. You can’t actually see it, of course, but then again you can’t fail not to see it. The brain registers it somehow as an absence.

  We are wearing protective clothes, and dark visors, and I wonder how we can stand only a metre or so away from a black hole and not be sucked in … only we can. It might seem like magic, but as Gehlen himself has said: ‘It’s not magic, it’s physics. If the maths works, it works.’

  I don’t claim to even begin to understand this; the equations are so far beyond my comprehension that my mind simply rejects them. It was hard enough memorising them to do my party trick. Only they work. And because they do, Gehlen has been able to create a ‘field’ in this room that contains the singularity.

  ‘Where is it?’ I ask, expecting some visual sign of the fluctuation, of the ‘drainage’ which, I know, is linked directly to Ernst back across the centuries.

  ‘It’s inside,’ Gehlen says. ‘Just within what we call the Cauchy Horizon.’

  I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about, but I’m disappointed that I can’t see anything I can ‘switch off’ to end Ernst’s misery.

  ‘Pions,’ he says quietly, musing aloud. ‘It has to be something to do with the pion emission rate.’

  I know what pions are. That’s something all of us at Four-Oh learned in our studies. They’re particles that travel faster than the speed of light.

  I turn and look at him, but I can’t make out his features through the doubled thicknesses of glass.

  ‘How is it actually used?’

  Gehlen turns and points through the wall. ‘There are catchment spheres – huge great things – in separate chambers surrounding us on all sides. Above, below, all around us. It’s complex, but essentially we use the accelerator to fire particles into it, and they “jump” – that is, they disappear in one position and reappear in another – over there, within one of the spheres. And this is happening all the time. Every nano-second. Huge amounts of energy jumping from here to there through … well, through nowhere really.’

  ‘And the spheres …?’

  ‘Feed energy – huge amounts of energy – into the grid. There are dozens of them in all, so if one of them fails …’

  ‘And do they?’

  ‘No. Not until now, that is.’ He smiles. ‘It’s all switched off at present, otherwise we couldn’t have come in here. We’d have been bathed in Cerenkov radiation …’

  I wait for an explanation and – of a kind – it comes.

  ‘Not a good thing.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask. ‘Just how are you going to get inside that … thing?’

  Gehlen laughs. ‘You know … for once, I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘You haven’t …?’

  I fall silent as the ‘absence’ at the centre of the room swells momentarily, and then seems to vanish to the tiniest point.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  But Gehlen’s not listening. He’s staring at the singularity, unable to believe his eyes, for it has begun to burn an intense golden colour, like the darkness at its pinpoint centre has caught fire.

  ‘Out!’ Gehlen says, as if having a wall between us and that thing will make any difference. ‘Out of here now!’

  139

  For the next hour, Gehlen sits in the gallery, watching the screen as the singularity goes through a terrifying series of metamorphoses. I sit there next to him, dry-mouthed, wondering just what’s going on, and whether this is the end. But Gehlen is silent, pondering the significance of what he’s seeing – as if he reads each change as a set of figures.

  Which is perhaps the truth. After all, he does see things differently from the rest of us. But time’s passing, and Ernst is still trapped, and if even Gehlen can’t see a solution, then maybe there isn’t one.

  Maybe Ernst has to be trapped for it all to work.

  It’s a dreadful thought, but I’m forced now to consider it.

  Yet even as I do, something else occurs to me. There’s nothing in the histories about what happened to the singularity during the coming conflict. Nothing that survived, anyway. Within the next fifteen hours everything on the surface of the planet will be destroyed, but we’re deep down here, just like the command bunkers in Moscow and Berlin, and there’s the possibility that this too survived the general devastation. Only … there’s no record of it.

  From the perspective of Four-Oh – anchored up the line in 2999 – this doesn’t exist, and therefore didn’t survive.

  But is that so?

  If the black hole had been destroyed, or even freed from its restraints, then surely it would have taken the Earth with it? I mean … something this powerful …

  I look to Gehlen, meaning to ask him what would happen, but he raises a hand, as if to deflect my question, and I can see from the intensity of his manner that he’s thinking something through.

  And then he smiles.

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I should have thought of that before.’

  140

  And so it happens. As simply as that. Gehlen stands and nods, the smile remaining on his lips. Yet if he realises just how significant the moment is, he doesn’t show it.

  Time travel. Pions and Q-balls and energy that appears and disappears contrary to the laws of normal physics, that jumps from ‘now’ to ‘then’ and back again. Oh, he hasn’t got it all. Far from it. But I can see he has enough. Enough to keep a smile on his lips that don’t often deign to register amusement. And he’ll work on that, these next few hours, until it’s there, complete – ready for us to use …

  He looks across at me and shrugs. ‘I guess I’d better write it down.’

  I frown, as if I don’t understand, and he laughs.

  ‘I’m sorry. Just that it’s come to me. What was wrong, that is. Or not wrong …’

  Yet even then he keeps it to himself. He doesn’t want to say – not explicitly – what it is he’s seen.

  ‘Can you stop it?’

  ‘The leakage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guess so. If I wanted.’

  ‘Then …?’

  I don’t understand what he’s waiting for. If he can, then why doesn’t he?

  You think, perhaps, that I should just tell him the truth – about Ernst, that is – and be done with it. But I can’t. It’s a paradox too many. Gehlen has to get there all by himself. There is no other way, and believe me we’ve tried a few. It’s like there’s some cosmic watcher, waiting to whip the magic carpet out from under our feet should we open our mouths to Gehlen, or slip him a note, or …

  And now it’s my turn to smile, because I realise that I’ve done, in effect, what others have failed to do. I’ve already jogged Gehlen’s mind on to the right track, and I’ve done it with a toy yellow giraffe named George.

  Or Hecht has, to be more accurate. After all, I was only the link-man. The messenger boy.

  ‘Otto …’ Gehlen says quietly, handing me Tief’s pass, which has been in his custody all this while. ‘Forgive me, but I have to work. Take the lift back to the first level. There’s a sun room there. I’ll join you in a while.’

  I look to him, meaning to argue, but I can see at a glance that it’ll do no good. He has alread
y dismissed me from his mind.

  I turn away, meaning to walk over to the lift, then stop dead, realising where I am.

  Reichenau’s map. This is it! This room, not the one in which the singularity is kept. It’s here.

  Again it makes no sense, for the map was supposed to indicate where the singularity was. Only I’ve seen that. I know now where that is and it doesn’t help. But this … this correlates perfectly to the map. And where the singularity should be …

  I turn and stare at the point in space where, on Reichenau’s map, the black hole was marked. Only it’s not a black hole, it’s a simple, old-fashioned computer screen, the word ‘Werktafel’ prominently displayed across the top surface, while on the screen itself …

  … is the singularity. Or a detailed graphic representation of it.

  I wonder what that means. I take a step towards it and Gehlen looks up.

  ‘Otto, please. Go now.’

  I glance at him, then nod and leave. Nothing – and I mean nothing – is more important right now than letting Gehlen work through the equations.

  141

  The lift, as I observed earlier, has no camera in it. Thus, as the doors hiss shut, I jump, back to Four-Oh.

  It’s quiet about the platform, the lights dimmed. There’s no sign of Hecht, but the women are there. The women are always there.

  ‘Where’s Hecht?’

  ‘Sleeping,’ Kathe says, coming across.

  ‘I need to see him.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ Urte adds, stepping alongside.

  ‘I …’

  She hands me something, and I stare at it and laugh. And then I jump. Back again. Back into the lift, a second later.

  142

  The lift doors hiss open. I step out, looking about me for a sign, but even as I do, a guard approaches, gun raised, and demands my ID.

  I show him Tief’s pass, and he takes a long while staring at it through the dark glass of his visor. There’s a delay as he mumbles something into his lip-mike, and then his head jerks up and he steps back, snapping smartly to attention, his head bowed, the pass held out to me.