'I think so,' Mary said. 'Something to do with J.B. Priestley?'
Dunne was British, an aeronautical designer. He had served as a soldier, and was invalided out of the Boer war. He had become interested in the perception of time, having had, he believed, a glimpse of the future through a dream.
Mackie waved a hand, a bit dismissively. 'Sort of half-baked stuff that becomes fashionable from time to time in certain arty circles, playwrights and novelists and that sort of crew. That's why you connect him with Priestley, I imagine. But what gives Dunne's work credibility is a patina of science. He was an engineer. So he is methodical even about his dreams; he derives statistics about them; he couches his ideas in language that sounds almost Einsteinian. Dunne says essentially that when we sleep we come untethered in time. He imagines time as an extra dimension, a landscape you can go exploring. Some remember what they see during their dream journeys, some don't. And some may be able to direct where their dreaming selves travel.'
It felt very strange to Mary to hear these ideas expressed by a serious middle-aged man in a sober Navy uniform.
Mackie ploughed on, 'It was Rory O'Malley who introduced these ideas of Dunne's to Ben Kamen. Now, Ben may have such a facility, this "dream precognition. Or he may not – interestingly he seems to deny it himself.' He looked at her. 'Perhaps you can see where I'm going with this.'
She nodded. 'If you put it together – Godel shows that paths from the present to the past may exist. And Dunne argues that it might be possible to explore such paths.'
'To dream yourself from present to past – and perhaps to do a bit of mucking about when you get there. We don't think it would be possible with this method to travel to the past, but you could perhaps send back information – perhaps in the form of a dream or a vision implanted in another wandering soul.'
Which, she reflected with growing excitement and dread, was exactly how many of the historical 'deflections' in the testimony of Geoffrey Cotesford were supposed to have originated.
'But it would take a Ben Kamen to do it, perhaps,' Mackie said. 'A man who has, or may have, both this peculiar precognitive facility, and the brains to understand Godel's mathematical solutions.' Mackie smiled. 'It's a wonderful idea, isn't it, to be able to run around in future and past, as freely as one runs as a child loose in a meadow of grass?'
'Wonderful, yes,' Mary said. 'But is it true?'
'We have reason to believe the Nazis take it seriously. Indeed they killed for it.'
Mary was shocked. 'Who was responsible?'
'Actually not a German. A British woman called Julia Fiveash. Holds a rank in the SS. Took part in the invasion – on the German side.'
'I know,' Mary said. 'I met her.'
'Did you, by God?' Mackie listened as she told him the story of how she had run into Fiveash at Battle, with her accomplice Josef Trojan. 'Well, that could be useful. Very nasty piece of work, that young lady. And now,' he said, 'we believe they are at a Nazi research centre at Richborough. And that's where they've taken Ben. He managed to hide away in the POW camp for the best part of a year, it seems. But at last they flushed him out.'
'And that's why you say the situation is becoming urgent – why you contacted me now.'
'Yes. For, you see, if they have Ben, they may have everything they need to make their wretched scheme work – if there's anything in it at all.' He stood up, holding his pipe. 'I feel a bit stale, do you? I could do with a walk, I think. And there's something else I should show you of what we're doing here…'
He led her to what appeared to be a converted barn; it was stone-built, and she wondered if this was the building with the Roman god built into its wall, but Mackie didn't mention it. Inside, the barn seemed to have been converted into a workshop, the walls panelled with whitewashed wood, and a bright light glowed from bulbs suspended from the ceiling; Mary surmised the fort must have its own generator, for no mains electricity bulb burned so bright these days. 'We do try to keep this place clean,' murmured Mackie. 'All the small parts, you know…'
The centrepiece of the room was a table bearing an elaborate mechanical device, a rectangular array screwed together from fine strips of green-painted metal, with tiny pulleys and gears and motors and threads of string – and, in one corner, two discs of what looked like ground glass. Elaborate graphs had been prepared on drafting tables, set up under the lights for visibility. It was all very complicated, but toy-like, like a model of something else rather than anything significant in itself. But it was being taken very seriously, Mary realised. Around the walls were shelves bearing spare parts, and racks of tiny screwdrivers and spanners.
Mackie asked, 'Any idea what you're looking at?'
Mary shrugged. 'Some kind of game?'
'Not exactly, but you're close. Mary, we live in a mathematical age – indeed, this is a mathematical war. And we need new mathematical techniques to cope with it all. There is a class of analyses based on differential equations, which-'
'Please, Captain. Godel and his undecidability are enough for me for one day.'
'Quite so. Look – let's suppose you want to compute the trajectory of a shell from a new breed of gun. Very necessary for firing tables, as you can imagine. Now you can list the impulse of the propellant, the angle of the barrel, gravity, air resistance and so forth. But to work out how the shell will fly you must put all that together, step by step, mapping the trajectory as a whole.'
'And that's what this thing does, right?'
'We call it a differential analyser. It's a sort of mechanical brain, if you will. You can input your requirements by using this stylus – you see, you manually push it along the curves, here. The motion is transmitted through these levers and gears and so forth to the glass discs; roughly speaking the spinning of those discs is a model of the variables of interest – I mean, the numbers that describe the shell trajectory, or whatever.'
'All right. So what's it doing here?'
'Well, Einstein's equations of general relativity are just another example of a set of differential equations. It's fiendishly difficult to extract any kind of analytical solution from them. And if you do need to extract solutions of Godel's kind, describing trajectories from present to past-'
'Oh. You'd need a machine like this.'
'We know that Kamen and O'Malley had access to an analyser in Princeton. And we believe, though we aren't sure, that Fiveash and her Nazi companions are building such a device at Richborough. We, or the mathematical boffins I recruited to work on this, thought we should study Godel's solutions ourselves, if we were to try to make sense of it all. Hence the beast you see before you.'
'Kind of Rube Goldberg, isn't it?' Mary longed to touch the gadget, to pull the little levers and turn the pulleys. 'Did you have to get these teeny tiny parts specially made?'
'Actually no. They come from a kit called Meccano.'
'A kit?'
'A construction kit for boys.'
'A toy? You made your calculating machine from a toy?'
He coughed. 'Rather embarrassing to have to admit that to an American – but, yes, afraid so. Rather British, don't you think? Of course it will make it all the more satisfying if we were to beat the bad guys with it.' He rubbed his hands together. 'Let's go back to the office, and you can tell me all about the history you've dug up.'
XII
Back in Mackie's kitchen-study she opened her briefcase and spread the contents over the table.
'It begins again with Ben Kamen. When he arrived in England he did a bit of research himself – he is a bright boy – and came up with a medieval study of historical anomalies.'
'You're kidding.'
'Nope. He got to know Gary, and found out that his mother was a specialist in the period, and as soon as he met me he got me started on it.'
Kamen had found a memoir by a fifteenth-century monk called Geoffrey Cotesford. She raised a scrap of paper and read out: "'Time's Tapestry: As mapped by myself, that is Cotesford. "In which the long warp threads are the
history of the whole world; and the wefts which run from selvedge to selvedge are distortions of that history, deflected by a Weaver unknown; be he human, divine or satanic…"'
'Deflections of history,' murmured Mackie.
'Yes. Suggestive, isn't it? Cotesford believed he had lived through one such attempted deflection himself, and had been made aware of others. He did some research – he was a Franciscan monk, a scholar, and he knew what he was doing. Plus he had access to sources, such as from the Muslim libraries in Spain, which have now been lost to us. This is a sound piece of work, considering.
'In all he found evidence of six deflections. He went right back to a prophecy supposedly intoned right here at Birdoswald by a Briton some decades before the Roman invasion of the country. It's called the Prophecy of Nectovelin. That's the one I've concentrated on first. Nectovelin itself is lost, at least the original. But Geoffrey was able to find extracts from it, in an old Moorish library in Toledo. Just a few lines – here.' She passed him a paper.
Mackie read:
Ah child! Bound in time's tapestry, and yet you are born free Come, let me sing to you of what there is and what will be, Of all men and all gods, and of the mighty emperors three…
'We don't know how much was lost, and how much has been garbled in the repeated transcriptions. We don't even know the purpose of the deflection, if it was a deflection. Geoffrey speculated it had something to do with the Emperor Constantine.'
'Constantine? He was centuries later. What's he got to do with the price of fish?' He glanced down the lines again.
Remember this: We hold these truths self-evident to be -
I say to you that all men are created equal, free
Rights inalienable assured by the Maker's attribute
Endowed with Life and Liberty and Happiness' pursuit.
O child! thou tapestried in time, strike home! Strike at the root!
Hmm. I'm blowed if that doesn't sound familiar.'
She smiled. 'An American would recognise the reference straight away.'
'Ah. Let me see if I can remember. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The Declaration of Independence.'
'Right-'
'Good Lord.' The implications seemed to hit him then, and he sat silently for a heartbeat. 'I think I'm going to have something eke to keep me awake at night, apart from Godel's banishment of time… So a modern figure sent this back to pre-Roman Britain? Why? To establish democratic values back in the Iron Age?'
'Maybe. But, Tom, the important question is not why but who.'
'Ben's friend Rory O'Malley, perhaps.'
'Yes. O'Malley was an idealistic Irishman who was a great admirer of the US. And he was a lapsed Catholic. He had grown up amid a lot of religious sectarian tension. In the US, before he went to Spain, where he met Ben, he wrote a whole series of articles attacking the Church's oppressive nature, and the evils done in the name of organised religion.'
'Hmm. Wasn't Constantine responsible for the establishment of Christianity as the Roman state religion?'
'He was indeed. You can see there's a tenuous case to be made that the Nectovelin document was authored by O'Malley, in order to deflect Constantine's establishment of the Church. He even sent it back to 4BC, the year Christ was born, to establish the link with Christianity.'
'But O'Malley is dead. And if there was ever a record of any material he tried to transmit to the past, that's lost too. We've had agents go over everything O'Malley left behind at Princeton. Like all Nazis, Julia Fiveash is nothing if not thorough…' Mackie snapped his fingers. 'But then there's Kamen. If Rory used him he ought to know what was sent.'
'Yes,' Mary said. 'Precisely. Ben knew what had been crammed into his head. And it was following up that that led him to Geoffrey Cotesford's research.'
'Well, well. So we've another reason to get hold of this young man, if we can.'
'I do wish we had a more complete copy of the Prophecy,' Mary said. 'There could be more internal evidence. For instance, an acrostic.'
'A what?'
'A feature that appealed to classical and medieval scholars. You take the first letter of each line, or the last maybe, and put them together to make a new word or phrase. But this document isn't nearly complete enough to tell…'
He fingered the papers. So what else did your chum Geoffrey dig up?'
'A lot of material. I'm still exploring it. Not all of it may be relevant. But I think this is.' She produced another document, another prophecy. It was in Old English, with a modern translation. It was called the Menologium of Isolde. 'It's reasonably complete.'
Mackie read a bit.
These the Great Years /of the Comet of God
Whose awe and beauty / in the roof of the world
Lights step by step the / road to empire…
'Who was Isolde?'
'Apparently a relation of Nectovelin, generations later. The family link may be significant – an inherited susceptibility.'
'And what is a Menologium?'
'A kind of medieval calendar. According to Geoffrey this is another product of Birdoswald, this one produced some time towards the end of the Roman period, the early fifth century. You can see it is organised around the return of a comet to the skies, every seventy or eighty years. It traces through events fated to occur in these years – I've made guesses about some of them. And, it's a little tricky, but you can reconstruct the dates by adding up these "months of the Great Years. And they match to the events they describe – the Vikings sacking Lindisfarne, a terrible fire in Rome.' She paused for effect. 'The ninth verse seems to relate to the year 1066.'
He was startled, and he laughed. '1066? Harold and the Normans, and all of that? Well, you've come on an appropriate day to talk about it, haven't you? And – wait a minute – didn't a comet turn up in that year and frighten everybody to death?'
'So it did. It was Halley's comet. It returns on average every seventy-six years. But the intervals differ a bit each time.'
'Should think they would,' he muttered. 'Deflections by the planets' gravity and so forth…' He ran his finger down the text of the Menologium. 'Don't tell me. The dates of these verses map onto what the astronomers say about Halley's returns.'
'As far as I can tell. But if the text did originate in the fifth century – look, Halley's motion is well understood now, but it wasn't in 1066, or any time earlier. A fifth-century author couldn't have known these dates.'
'Well, well, well. And you think this has something to do with our German chums?'
'Look at the Epilogue.'
He glanced down and read:
Across ocean to east / and ocean to west
Men of new Rome sail / from the womb of the boar.
Empire of Aryans / blood pure from the north.
New world of the strong / a ten-thousand year rule.
'Well, bugger me sideways.'
'That crucial word "Aryan – it comes from a bit of Latin in with the Old English, "Imperium Aryanes… I'm still working on the interpretation of the rest of it, but-'
'So the suggestion this time is that some Nazi has sent this back – perhaps to deflect the events of 1066? – in order, somehow, to establish an Aryan empire, a thousand years earlier.'
'Something like that.' She didn't feel confident enough to tell him of Josef Trojan's boasting at Battle of putting right the defeat of Harold Godwineson. 'The suggestion is that the English King Harold should have made peace with the Danish invaders, and cooperated with them to drive out the Normans. If he had, all subsequent history might have been different. But he didn't take the advice, evidently.'
'Well, it's completely bonkers. But Himmler would love it, wouldn't he?' Mackie laughed, and laced his fingers behind his head and lay back in his chair. 'Funny – the second time we've come across evidence that somebody is tampering with history seems a l
ot less startling than the first, doesn't it? The mind can get used to anything, I suppose. Well, we're getting somewhere, aren't we, Mary? The question is what we do about it. I believe the objective is clear: we get into Richborough, we find out what these beggars are up to, disrupt it if we can – and we bring Ben Kamen out.'
Mary said, 'You keep saying "we".'
He smiled. 'You spotted that. I think I'm having a bit of a brain wave. Look here, Mary, suddenly you're a jolly useful asset. The fact is, a citizen of a neutral country has a much better chance of passing through the Winston Line, and of travelling reasonably freely once he or she is in the protectorate itself. And we do believe Kamen was held in the same camp as your son, at Richborough. So you have a reason to go to that part of the world, don't you?'
Mary tried to imagine such a journey, coming so close to Gary a full year after seeing him, and all for a lie.
'But even if you do make it to Richborough, you'll need some reason to get close to Fiveash and Trojan and their Ahnenerbe loonies. You say you've met them, but you're a bit notorious among the Nazis because of your piece on the Peter's Well incident. We need something for you to bluff your way in with. Hmm. I expect we'll come up with something.' He glanced at the Roman spear on the wall behind him. 'We have some thinking to do. Come! Shall we walk again?'
She stood. 'A restless type, aren't you?'
'Spent too long on ships to waste the opportunity to stretch my legs… Do bring your papers with you.'
XIII
They walked across the heart of the Roman camp, heading south. The sun had climbed, but there was scattered cloud around and a bit of dampness in the air. It felt autumnal, in that lovely English word. As they walked he glanced over her papers and scribbled with a stub of pencil on a notepad.
At the camp's southern perimeter the land fell away spectacularly to reveal a river wending through its valley, and a folded landscape beyond. 'On a good day you can make out the hills of the Lake District,' Mackie said. 'Bit too murky today. Autumn mist and whatnot.'
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