by Ian McDonald
“No,” I said. “Time travelers.”
Shingle Street
A moment of beauty, now we are back in our separate worlds, separate corners of the pub. Ben and his Uncertainty Squad in Boffins Corner, me out on my window bench, writing, watching another autumn arrive hot and high. Thinking about him.
The bombers have shifted, the radar girls tell me; to night raids and the great cities of the North. Manchester has been badly blitzed. Ben is the scientist in a line of haberdashers and textile wholesalers: Seligman’s warehouse in Salford was reduced to ashes. His family is unharmed. This in a few clipped exchanges at the bar as we buy fresh pints.
And Lizzie raises her eyebrows and swivels her eyes towards Boffins Corner when she comes out of the snug to order a new tray or drinks, and I smile, and dip my head, and she beams.
The Bawdsey Players are casting for a Murder Mystery. I’ve gone for a role, but if one is offered I shall decline. Ben Seligman will not be running the lights. The Uncertainty Squad works every hour on their experiment. There’s to be a demonstration, on a grain of salt. Men are up from London, men from the Ministry. If it goes well they’ll move to a full field test.
“Explain it to me again.”
We dawdle back to Bawdsey, a straggle of beery souls strung out along for half a mile along the street. We share cigarettes. This was the celebratory pint: tomorrow the Ministry men come to watch a grain of salt vanish.
“We place an object in a state of quantum superposition,” Ben says. “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle sets a fundamental limit on what we may observe about physical systems. The more precisely an object’s momentum is known, the less accurately we can measure its position. Its location becomes statistically uncertain—to all intents and purposes unobservable.”
Ben has explained to me many times the principles of his work. His life is dedicated to the infinitesimal, the fragments of time, distance, matter. At the smallest levels, the universe operates according to very different rules from those of the sensual world. There are contradictions and impossibilities, paradoxes and strangenesses, a Lewis Carroll logic; yet this is the most accurate description of how reality works. There is nothing for me to hold to—no concrete truths, no sensory evidence, no inner visualization by which I might construct a meaning—but he appreciates my intrigue. I shared my world; he shares his. What I understand is that he sees a beauty—a sublime, something awesome and terrifying—that I do not.
I don’t have the soul of a scientist. But I feel his excitement, his anxiety, his pride, his love.
The Uncertainty Squad waits by the guard hut; I go a different way from here.
* * *
He comes bounding into the dispatch room, white coat flapping. His glee is evident as he casts around through the fug of cigarette smoke. His eyes light on me, sprawled on the tattered sofa.
“Um, yes, you. I need you to take a message.” He beckons me out to the where the bikes are parked. He keeps talking until we are clear of the building. “Sensitive stuff. Highest priority. Have to deliver it personally. Room on the back?”
I strap on my helmet and pull down my goggles.
“Where to, sir?”
“Just ride,” Ben whispers in my ear. And we are off, his arms around my waist, the tails of his lab coat streaming out behind him. The MPs barely raise the pole in time as I swing onto Ferry Road.
“You should have gone for the Murder Mystery!” I shout back into the slipstream. “That was a first-rate piece of acting.”
I pull up at a field gate in a twin-rutted lane, under hawthorns, far from eyes. Ben fidgets, paces, can’t keep still.
“We did it!” he shouts, throwing his arms up in an artless, unknowing hallelujah. “We achieved uncertainty for three minutes twenty-seven seconds. Three minutes twenty-seven!”
“All the lights dimmed,” I say. “I felt the ground shake.”
Ben is too excited to hear any words of mine. Suddenly, with the thrill of abandon, he takes my face between his hands and pulls me to him. We kiss.
Fenland
Looking back, I can see it began with the Nanking letter. We had stolen more than a letter. We had stolen a secret no one else knew, that no one else could know, for no one would understand. Shared secrets become shared madnesses. Shared madnesses become slow cancers.
The evidence was clear, in the accounts, the letters, the book that seemed to tie everything together. The conclusion was insane. No other conclusion was possible. We had intercepted the secret communications of two time travelers. Immortals I could have accepted—I argued my terms of belief the night of the Old Year storm—but time travelers outraged all my theories. If such creatures were actual, then we lived in a world of unscience. Miracles might be true. God might exist.
Through the late winter I hibernated in research like a dormouse curled in its nest. When the weather was bad, and it was that year, often—five times Doverhirne Drain over-topped the height gauge—I would not venture out of the house for days, hardly even stirring from Leland’s study. Now that the old man confined his world to a well-worn track between bedroom, kitchen and toilet, I had colonized the Teu study—low ceilinged, small windowed, smelly—with my own books, fitted a Wi-Fi extender and bought a small electric oil heater from Spalding Poundland to supplement the ineffectual heating. Thorn brought me tea and bacon sandwiches when she remembered and I would usually remember to switch off the heater before sliding into bed beside her and nuzzling up to her round, solid warmth.
One week of stormy rain, I wandered among the stacks of great bookshops: La Sauterelle, Paris. Bertrand in Lisbon: the world’s oldest, founded in 1732. Argosy in New York. Candide in Brussels. Vivalibri in Rome. All stocked copies of Time Was. Some held multiple copies. There had been more shops, I was certain—I had stumbled into the dying moments of The Golden Page and by accident intercepted a subtle network of dead drops and interleaved messages. Bookstores—book collectors, bookdealers—are stable, conservative, rooted creatures. Fashions and trends break around them; neighborhoods change, populations ebb and flow, but the bookshops and the books they hold close, these endure.
Until this post-literate age.
Time Was. A singular book. Eighty-eight pages. A list of contents: sixty-five numbered poems. No author biography, no foreword, no afterword, no index or notes. No publisher’s address, no publication date. No print information, no edition number. It had never been filed with any of the receiving libraries. No other works by the author, no clue as to who the author might be. No reviews, no scholarly works, no exegesis, no references in any academic papers. A book that existed solely in the inventories of five bookshops.
It was the kind of private, esoteric code I might have devised myself.
For a short time I thought about asking my bibliophile friends to help me search for the book. There is Internet knowledge and there is private knowledge. I thought again. I didn’t want them opening up my casket of secrets and peering inside. I loathed the idea of them taking my information and finding my time travelers. My time travelers.
Late snow came to the fen country, driving down hard across the North Sea, piling up along the hedge lines and turning the drains to ice. Leland stood for hours on end looking out of the kitchen window at the grey blizzarding across the back field. Thorn recalled stories her gram had told of winters when the rivers would freeze foot thick every year and Fenlanders held speed-skating contests. Leland was a four-times champion. He had been a strong, great-winded man then. One night the police in Pinchbeck picked Leland up from outside Tiffin’s Cafe three minutes from hypothermia. He had walked the two miles from Hirne House to Pinchbeck in dressing gown and slippers. It took a week in drafty, inconsistently heated Hirne House to bring him back to warmth.
While Leland recovered and Thorn managed work on the house—Elder Würm had time off from gigging to get back to construction—I wrapped myself in a duvet and speculation. The careful, secret network of bookshops and literary dead drops left over
decades seemed to indicate that my time travelers could not go home again. It also seemed to indicate that when they moved across time they did not always do so together. The mechanism would drop them in the same time period, give or take a few months—years—but often continents apart. That in turn suggested that their time traveling was not under their full control. Might, in fact, be involuntary. Lost in time.
I became an armchair time traveler. What I understood from my books and online chat was that the laws of physics held no theoretical bar to time travel, but in practice it required Big Stuff: the event horizons of black holes, space-time wormholes or piles of exotic matter somewhere in the region of the mass of Jupiter. Then there was the question of where—or rather when—Seligman and Chappell came from. Were they researchers from the future? Were they refugees? Were they visiting and returning, time and again? Were they time lost, unable to go home? Had there been an accident at the Department of Time Travel?
The thaw came suddenly; twelve degrees in one night, and by morning Doverhirne Drain was running an inch beneath our front door. The brown water receded leaving a pristine film of ocher mud through which the tips of the crocuses rose in small green nibs, and I realized spring was here and I had lost an entire season. I was pale and weak and cursed with a never-ending low-grade cold thanks to my depressed immune system. Thorn tried to get me out, get me into the light, get me with people, but I had nothing to talk about to her bike and rock friends Friday nights at the pub and I resigned from the Tuesday quiz nights before I was barred for being a fucking London smartarse. I walked during the day when no one else was around, and when Thorn was shuttling rehomed animals around the county in the Volvo I visited the pool in Spalding for laps and Jacuzzi, but my thoughts were lost in time, with Seligman and Chappell.
Site by site, Facebook group by Facebook group, history by history I filled in the gaps in my timeline. Chappell and Seligman were stitched through nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Through the St. Petersburg Museum of Artillery I found a trace of them in the Russian Civil War of 1919, trapped in a winter-struck dacha with the remnants of the White Army retreating in disarray from St. Petersburg. From the Imperial War Museum in the North I found a possible sighting of Tom Chappell in the Crimea, bundled up for the Ukraine winter. Beards and furs made identification tentative. The photograph was dated 1856. I found them on the bridge of HMS Jamaica at Inchon; I came across them again at a table outside a hotel in Saigon.
Quantum theory holds that the physical reality of the electron is a wave function, a range of probabilities of the particle’s energy and position. There are locations where the probability of the electron existing is small but still non-zero; there are locations where the probability is almost 100 percent. The probabilities follow the bell-shaped normal distribution curve. Chappell and Seligman’s trajectory through time followed a similar distribution, I surmised. You can tell how far I had wandered from world and humanity that I was spinning quasi-mystical quantum-magical theories out of my head. I plotted my data; I drew up probabilities. If 1856 and Crimea were the lower lower third sigma, then I could find the upper limit on my timeline.
Riddled with holes, weak data, assumptions and wishful thinking, I did the sums.
The upper three-sigma limit was approximately 2,030.
Obsession is a soft, creeping dementia. As with the loss of the mind, you always believe that everything is well, everything is good and right, everything is normal. Wonderful. At the start. It was only reasonable that I could move back to the Frig room—I was keeping strange, troubling hours and Thorn had work. Never a stout Fens yeoman, I was losing weight I could not afford: I skipped meals, grazed from the fridge, lived for days on weak milky tea. Thorn stopped me from eating a three-day-moldy loaf I found in the back of the bread bin. When I caught what I thought was a spring flu in that damp, drafty room, I still insisted on working through it, even when it steepened sharply into pneumonia and I was taken to Peterborough City Hospital with a tap in my chest. My temperature peaked at 39.5 degrees, I hallucinated I was shattered into a thousand mirror shards of myself and had to search through my parallel faces to find the one that wore a star-shaped bindi of cosmic consciousness called the Sai-wism. I returned to Hirne House to find spring unfolding into early summer. Thorn’s metal friends were making good time on the extension; I sat in a folding chair in the sun looking across the scraggy lawn to Leland in his chair and felt as old and insane as he. I blinked in the sun and thought myself well. I had been a long way, to a strange place, and I had returned. When I first noticed, then commented, then shouted that the construction noise was stopping my concentrating on my work—my work! I had travelers to hunt down through the crannies of time!—I realized that what had returned to Hirne House was not what had departed.
One day the sun was neither so high nor so long that I could sit in it anymore. Leaves blew into the corners of the garden. I checked the date. I had been over a year on the fen country, this flat, open land where nothing could hide yet which seemed more full of secrets than any place in London.
The shift indoors prodded my mind out of its rut. I returned to the Emmett Leigh theory of time travel. The lowest points of probability on my carefully constructed distribution curve were 1840 and 2030. The thing I had not realized, the thing I could not see until it came out of the sun, like a blinding solar god revealing himself to me, was the peak of maximum probability. My records and researches showed the highest incidence of traces of Chappell and Seligman between 1935 and 1949.
They were not time travelers from the future. They were time travelers from the past.
* * *
To celebrate the completion of the new extension—headachy with fresh gloss paint, carpet so fresh you could sign your name in the pile—Thorn had desecrated its pristine plaster with a new seventy-two-inch 4K television. Full surround sound. She had bought it from a mate down the pub. Rural economics.
I insisted we christen it by watching the documentary again.
‘”All of it?” Thorn asked.
“Just the bit,” I conceded.
The 4K did little for the low-def picture, but the sound was magnificent. For the first time I could make out Chappell’s words clearly. I could discern that he had an accent.
“He’s an East Anglia boy,” Thorn said.
I had been long enough in the flat country to understand that a slew of dialects was voiced from Boston to Chelmsford to Cambridge, but I would never be local enough to identify the micro-accents.
“Leland would know,” Thorn said. “Talk six words to him and he can pinpoint the parish.”
It took the better part of the morning to get Leland in a seat, with the DVD, watching, listening and comprehending my questions.
“What? Who is that person? I don’t know him.”
“For the love of fuck,” I exploded for the twentieth time.
“He’s an old man, Emmett,” Thorn said with frost in her voice. “You’re scaring him.”
I played the DVD again.
“East Suffolk,” Leland declared with a sudden strength and sonority that made me appreciate how he could have led a coven of his own private paganism. “Ipswich, Woodbridge. Play it again.”
I did.
“Seaside. The Sandings.”
It took me the better part of a week to summon up the courage to break my hermeticism, so soon after London, and arrange for a pint with Lee, Elder Würm’s sometimes sound engineer, village esotericist and self-proclaimed Aelder Kin of Hilderwic. We sat in the snug over pints of terrible lager. He could not have been more uncomfortable had he been up in front of a judge.
“Good job on the extension,” I said. “The paint’s finally stopped giving me headaches.”
“Cool,” Lee said. “Um. Good. Good.”
He still looked as if he wanted to run.
“There’s something I want to ask you,” I said.
He froze. His hand shook so badly he had to set his pint down to keep from spilling
it.
“Are you all right?”
He nodded, terrified.
“You know about myths and weird shit,” I said. “Down Ipswich, Woodbridge way, are there any strange local legends? Recent?”
Relief spread over his face. He downed half his pint in one swallow.”
“Are you fucking kidding? Rendlesham, hello?”
He had an afternoon: I had a lifetime. He took me.
* * *
Woods have always disquieted me. I may have been overexposed to fairy tales in my early years—I was a sickness-prone kid, my education came as much from the books I read as from school, but I have never lost the belief in the eyes that watch from between the roots. The trees rearrange themselves when your back is turned. Even in a new Forestry Commission plantation. If anything, the rows of regularly spaced, identical pulpwood conifers are more sinister.
Lee told me the story on the drive down. Rendlesham was the site of the UK’s major UFO incident.
“Britain’s Roswell, man,” Lee said. It all seemed the standard mix of the inconsequential and the conspiratorial: US Air Force base, farm animals in a frenzy, lights in the wood, one uncorroborated witness. Rendlesham true believers had marked out a UFO trail. Despite the friendly signposts—marked with the standard oval-eyed grey alien—I became increasingly uncomfortable as we worked along the forest paths deeper into the wood, partly from my innate sense of the uncanny, partly from the growing evidence of the things people do when they are far from the gaze of others. Mountain bikers had created a complete network of tracks, jumps, log bounces, berms, plank walks despite the terrain being flat as a sheet of paper. We came across scorched remnants of campfires, beer cans, WKD bottles, condoms. Needles. Totems woven from twigs. A burned-out car.
“Did you ever do a ritual down here?” I asked Lee. “In your Aelder of Hilderwic capacity?”
“In Rendlesham? You fucking kidding, man?”
Lights in the night. Isolated, suggestible people. I understood the power of the wild wood. If I had not been looking for something other—time travel, not space—I could have believed. I wanted to believe. I did not, until we came to the high point of the expedition, the clearing where the object had touched our Earth. The enthusiasts who had set the trail had marked the point with three wooden poles. Lee had saved the photographs to his phone and showed me the original markings. I stood in the center of the triangle of posts. I felt . . . something.