I saw a naked wretch crouching like a trapped animal on the black metal hide of the submarine, glaring helplessly up at the camera’s eye. I heard the distorted mechanical blare of the horn again; saw the naked man crumpling, face contorted and hands clapped over his ears as he passed out in shock and terror. I heard Lubick apologise to me for the man who’d bellowed with the bullhorn, who apparently had been reprimanded for such lack of consideration. Next I was fascinated to see how three white-suited monsters put my unconscious body into a suit like theirs. A sling was lowered. I was hoisted up into the snout of the monster, and carried into its guts.
I was carried down levels and along passages to a bed in a tiny room with curving walls that were packed with machines and closets.
Still wearing their suits, they took me out of mine, then washed and shaved me, and attached me to wires and tubes connected with the machines, then drew blankets up to my neck and left me to sleep.
“You slept for forty-eight hours,” the historian demon told me, “It shows next what happened when you woke up. Can you interpret what you see? Do you remember?” And he flinched at my glare.
Bright light brought me around, and sharp-smelling stuff.
No doubt this videofilm still exists, in some file, or coded in a computer—DTI 15, GILBERT, H., SIR, M, CAUC., ENG., C16AD, etc.
Memory? I gasped as the sharp odour went to my head, as the light pierced through my closed eyelids. I heard a man’s voice:
“Lie—still. All—is—well. I—am—a—doctor.”
Thus began my association with the American medical profession. What I saw on the video compounded the madness of my memory, which I had thought a dream. Cold, I saw the man in the bed shake his head wildly. His eyes opened wide, but immediately shut again to escape the light glaring from a spot in the low white ceiling. He began to struggle, his expression uncomprehending and terrified. One of the two white-suited doctors held him down with a firm hand. “Can—you—speak—English?” asked the other doctor, “Francáis? Español?”
“The light!” croaked the man, “The light!”
Those were my first words. The light was dimmed. The man opened his eyes and uneasily stared at the machines with their dials and multicoloured cables. He could not remember.
Surely it was but a dream… the fiery abyss, the sea-monster, the… throbbing of…
Then it struck him! The terrible truth!
“I’m in the monster! Fm buried under the sea!” Panic swept him. He tried to struggle out of the bed. Hands held him down. A needle pricked. They held him until his fear and rage went flat.
“You—are—safe,” they said, “We—are—your—friends!”
“You are demons,” I mumbled, “and this is hell.”
In fact I was not the only scared one.
I did believe I’d been seized by demons. It seemed the only logical explanation. Now I know that most men on the Slocum were as reluctant to pluck us from the sea as we were to be plucked. It’s not every day that living people from other ages, probably all carrying deadly diseases, start dropping out of nowhere. It’s not every day you feel a tingling fire run through your body, nor every day that your officers order you into an area where you might suddenly vanish, where anything might happen. It’s not every day you must open communication with a new category of Social Problem invented by your own error—the “Distressed Temporal Immigrant.”
Yet was it an error as Tari claimed?
The response was so prompt and efficient. Within forty minutes of the invisible flash the Slocum and other submarines were moving into the danger-area, making for locations where large amounts of organic and inorganic materialisations were already reported.
So it is said, so it is denied. “An unfortunate accident,” they always called it to my face. “We’re very sorry.”
Yes. But it is strange, how you saw us at all. And you could have left us to drown. And how wonderful, that by “accident” you had such thorough quarantine preparations on your vessels, so that we did not infect you and you did not infect us.
The crew of the Slocum nearly mutinied. They knew well what was happening and did not like it at all. I have proof of this.
One evening two years ago, before I went to Reno and hit the jackpot that bought me the Loomiss ID and my ticket to Heathrow, I was in Chaunticleer’s, a bar on Polk Street in San Francisco, and my eye was caught by a thin dark man. He was staring at me from a nearby table. He seemed nervous and shocked. When I met his gaze he turned hurriedly away. I decided to find out what this was about, so got up and started towards him, coming on him quickly enough so that he could not leave. And there was sweat on his brow.
“You look at me as if you know me,” I said, leaning close to him. “But I don’t know you—do I?”
He leaned away from me, and gestured jerkily that I should sit down. “Yes!” he hissed quickly. “Yes, I’ve seen you. I was… on the Slocum. Don’t be alarmed… I’m not going to…”
I relaxed a little. I got my Scotch, sat softly down.
“Who am I?” I met his eye. “What’s my name?”
He licked his lips. There was a trace of desperation in his look.
“Don’t know it,” he muttered. “You only woke up once before we put you ashore, but later I heard you were the brother of somebody famous like Sir Walter Raleigh. You see…”—he met my glare with more determination—“…I couldn’t ever forget you. I was the guy filming you when we fished you out of the sea! You’re the same man for sure! But… I don’t understand how… I mean, you…”
His voice trailed off. He was scared.
“Have a drink,” I said. “What’ll it be?”
“No,” he said. “That’s kind but, uh, I really got to be…”
“Pleasure’s mine,” said I, leaning closer at him.
“Listen!” he snapped, “Just, uh, DON’T BREATHE ON ME!”
I leaned back as one or two heads briefly turned. “Don’t worry, cameraman,” I told him quietly. “They stuffed us full of drugs and quarantined us for a year. Most of us died anyway. Several of us escaped with enough Interferon to buy a poor country. That was three years ago. Now I breathe the same air as you, and I haven’t given anyone plague. What will you drink?”
Uneasily he accepted a whisky, but in fact he wished to talk, which he did, though nervously. I was curious. You can be lynched in many places if you don’t sound right, but the Bay Area is different, full of so many chronic mystic come-to-naughts that all you have to do to be ignored is to gabble ridiculous theories loudly in public. But this man would not even give a name, and spoke as if he feared the FBI would pounce on him at any minute.
He told me that the Slocum and five other submarines had combed the flashpoint region for forty-eight hours.
“…and there were these weird rumours even before we went in,” he told me, his eyes darting about. “Before we knew anything for sure guys were talking about timeslips and the Triangle, and how Vulcan was a repetition of the Philadelphia Experiment the Navy did in World War II, when apparently they generated a magnetic field round a ship so strong that it vanished and reappeared somewhere else. A lot of men on that ship died, or burst into flame, or… just vanished. That’s the story. We waited on the Slocum two days before we went in, and when we did we all felt… crazy and electric, like we had fire in our bones. By the time we started picking you people up we were close to hysteria. We were briefed that the web had been generated in the form of a Moebius Loop, but it had fucked up the continuum, but… well, we had these people on board, like doctors and stuff, who wouldn’t say why they were there, so to most of us it looked like the whole thing was set up to grab the DTIs. We were scared as hell, and pissed that nobody would tell us the truth. And when we started locating you lot, boy!”—he shook his head—“that really did us!”
He said I was the second DTI picked up by the Slocum. The first was a furious Seminole brave who tried to spear the first of the white-suited monsters who approached him. Af
ter me they found two Phoenicians from Tyre, in the time of King Solomon, who carried an unknown strain of malaria. Then a black man from a slaveship, who had yellow fever and soon died, followed by three Japanese crewmen from a freighter, the Raifaku Maru, lost in January 1921.
“Those Japs got us really uptight,” my informant told me. “They were almost modern. I guess that’s when I realised the personal implications, if you understand me. Murder and abduction on the grand scale. Washington was gonna have to keep us all quiet!” He stared at me. “The DTIs weren’t the only victims, you know!”
I know. I sympathise. There’s prohibition on every tongue. “Accidents” have happened to those who wagged at home, while those who have spoken out from foreign lands have been denounced as alarmists, lunatics, communists, cultists, and frauds. I’m by no means the first to try telling this tale. And my faith in the truth of the cameraman’s tale was fortified when, encouraged by another-shot (myself too) he described the near-mutiny on the Slocum when an angry American rumrunner from 1931 was picked up.
“Guy’s name was Herbie Pond,” my nervous friend told me. “He’d been flying one of those old monoplanes, a Curtiss Robin, from Palm Beach to West End. He was loaded with booze when the Vulcan thing hit him. He said first the compass went crazy then the engine cut out, then it was like he was diving straight down into a sea of fire. He jumped, and pulled the ripcord, then blacked out. Next thing he knew he was in the sea all tangled in his chute and drowning. He got out from under the chute and found pieces of his plane afloat. He managed to hang on for over twenty-four hours until we got to him. We sent out three guys in a dinghy. They found him roaring tight and singing songs you’d never want your mother to hear. He’d salvaged some booze. He should have been jabbed right away but wasn’t, our guys being so freaked when they got to him. The first thing they saw was this hand sticking apparently up out of the sea and waving a bottle. “Hey you guys, have a drink.” They brought him in just as he was, reeling and mouthing off about, “Jeeze, the Maf laid a big one on me this time!” and “What kind of scientifiction shit is this anyway?” And I guess it was too much, him being American and almost one of us after all you—excuse me—crazies from crazy times; because some idiot goes and tells him the Big Truth we’d all been warned to keep tight—about it being 1983. And he went nuts. He believed it. He started gabbling how his kid’s thirty years older than he is, it’s an offence against God, he’s gonna sue the Government. Then he caught on fast he wasn’t about to sue anyone, or talk to anyone, or ever walk free again. He tried to grab a gun. He was jabbed to sleep pretty fast, but it got everyone real upset. A bunch of guys went to the Captain and said, No more of this shit! A lot of us wanted to throw you right back, you poor bastards. I did too!”
Now his eyes were fixed on mine, his face was flushed.
“It would certainly have solved our problems,” I agreed. “How about you. You have… left the Navy?”
He went very tense. He bit his lip.
“Yeah, sure… and you, uh… you left where you were… too…?”
“Nine of us,” I said bleakly. “Herbie was one. I wouldn’t be here today without what he did.”
The memory still hurt. I tossed back my third shot.
“Guess you’ve had a hard time of it,” said the cameraman.
“Most interesting,” I said. “As in the Chinese curse.” I stood. “Thank you. I must go now. Will you shake me by the hand?”
“Uh… um,” muttered the man who’d filmed me from behind a white-suit, “you know how it is but, um, I can’t take that risk, but maybe we could meet here, uh, later, and…”
I left. I never went back to Chaunticleer’s. Eighteen months or so later, in York, on TV, I learned what became of that man.
13. In Which Sir Humfrey Meets Psychohistory
If Ignorance were Bliss, then I was in a blessed state during those first weeks I spent in the modern world. Of course I was kept tranquillised, and any attempt to penetrate the haze as to where and when I was brought ashore in the U.S.A. Is doomed to failure. Of my new life I first remember floating, like an uncaring infant, in bed in a sunny warm room, looking through tight-shut windows at a peach tree in blossom against the high brick walls of a courtyard outside.
This was at a Navy base in Florida. So they told me. It is where I went through “DTI Debriefing” before being transferred to Horsfield in New Jersey. It is where they told me I could never go home again and must stay locked up the rest of my life, for my own good. They were very apologetic and gentle, all of them, and all smelled most clean, with no hint of brimstone or sulphur about them at all. They watched me continually, videotaping my every move, and were concerned that I should think of them as good Christians, my true friends and not my imprisoners.
This I found truly remarkable.
For some time there is no clear picture. Faces come and go. It is a fog. But day by day the fog clears.
It was Chaplain Weil who broke the ice.
Vaguely I recall a diffident white-suited figure who sat quietly by my bed, waiting for me to notice him and speak. He sat with a Bible on his lap. It was bound in black with a large gilt cross on the cover, and the words in gilt, HOLY BIBLE. These were the words that attracted my attention, curiosity, suspicion, and fear. At last I must have mumbled something. Then he spoke to me, slowly and very carefully and many times over until I understood. He said that the crew of the Slocum had plucked two other bodies, both dead, from the sea at the same time and place as myself. They had been my shipmates, he assumed. He wished me to know that he was a minister of Jesus Christ and that he’d prayed for their immortal souls. He asked if I had any Christian need he might satisfy, for he had heard I spoke English, and assumed I was Christian. Dreamily I told him to take off his suit and show me if he were man or devil. He said sadly he could not, because of the risk of sickness. In confusion I asked him what he was. He said he was John Weil, and Lutheran by denomination. He asked me my name, and where I was from. I told him, fearfully. His hooded head nodded, slowly. Then he asked me, his voice strained, what year I had sailed.
All this was videotaped. I did not know it then. I knew only that something was very wrong.
“1583… of course…” I said hoarsely, and through the glass that covered his face I saw the nervous pity of his expression. I sat up with difficulty. I was weak… “Sir… if you are Christian, and not a demon… you will help me to… return to England!”
“Sir Humphrey”—his voice was quiet and unhappy—“this cannot be done. If you trust in Jesus Christ, then seek His strength now. You can never go back to the England you knew. It is lost to you forever. You have been… taken by accident into… another age. It is now nearly… two thousand years… since Christ was born…”
I stared at the lunatic. The unseen camera stared at me.
“Ha-ha,” I said unsteadily. “For hell this is merry humour!”
“Before God it is true! Sir Humphrey, you will not believe or understand me now, but you are in the United States of America, and today is the tenth day of this new Year of our Lord, 1984! Now hear me! When you fully understand, you may feel despair as great as Our Lord felt in the Wilderness! Yet essentially this is the same world that you knew. Men and women go through the same trials and temptations. Seek the help of Jesus Christ, Sir Humphrey! You can never go back. The shape of this world will be strange and alien to you, but Christ is common to every age! Let Him be your bridge and sanity!”
…the gulf… the fiery vortex…
I was swept by angry lightheaded panic. The cameraman caught my terrified look with great clarity, as I later saw. “You demon!” I gasped. “You ape God’s Word too well! Yet explain, if you can: how is it that when I was a boy the wizard told me that from the sea I’d be snatched to my doom by a power not of Christ! Explain it!”
He could not. Of course not. Soon afterwards he left, shaking his head, through the double doors that airlocked my sterile room. The doctors came with their efficient h
ands and stopped me worrying about it.
But the demon Weil left me his Bible.
It nearly drove me mad (or more mad) when I looked at it. It was the King James Authorised Version of 1611. On the flyleaf (such fine light paper) was this date: AD MDCXI! Also this date, of most recent printing: AD MCMLXXXIII! 1983! When I read this my hand trembled so much I tore the page. 1983? Impossible! Such infernal trickery! Such madness! I threw the Bible at the window but the glass was unbreakable. It was the beginning of my hate for much that masquerades as Christian now. When Weil came again I raved and tried to tear his helmet off. After that I did not see him, ever.
Now I thank you, Chaplain Weil. I think you did your best. For years I’ve associated you with the first great shock and horror. How could I see you but as a demon, my hypocritical enemy? But would I have done better, had our positions been reversed? You told me truth and tried to give me connection, though I wanted neither. You gave me sound advice, and if you served Caesar as well as God, well, that is reasonable.
You began my awakening. The doctors continued the process with their tubes and needles, their mush-food and the drugs they said kept me alive. These doctors now know as much of the body as the ancient Pharaohs knew of the soul. It’s a pity so few can unite the spiritual with the empiric in their practise. They meant well and did well but they treated me as a thing, and they seemed like things to me, in their white-suits, with their gloved hands. Their gloved hands. This is all I recall of them. Big Hands and Small Hands—my two chief doctors. They tried to joke with me sometimes, but they were clearly nervous of my humanity, and did not know what to say. Yet every day I grew stronger and more clearheaded, though still I spent long hours floating or sleeping. The few dreams I had were dull.
They brought me books. Histories, the Plays of Shakespeare, the Constitution of the United States. It was too soon.
I could read the words but my mind avoided the meaning. The same was true of the many minor miracles around me. Electric light. Zips. Plastics. The alcove with shower-stall and water-closet. It took me time to learn how to control the hot and cold water from the faucets. It was hard for me to comprehend the photographs of landscapes on the wall. In one of them a lot of men rode two-wheeled machines through rolling countryside. Big Hands said this was the Tour de France. He said the men chased each other a long way to see who had most strength and endurance. I asked him if he looked like these men under his white-suit. He said he did. I said I did not believe him. Next day a man came in wearing a transparent version of the white-suit. He was naked but for briefs. I asked sardonically if men still had prick and balls but he would not show me. I laughed, and later Small Hands, my woman doctor, said it was the first time I’d laughed, and that I was adapting “very well.” For the first time I walked round the room without assistance. They gave me lightweight clothes that would have been comfortable but for their strange capacity to trap natural magnetism, and electricity, so that when I wore them I felt my skin was buzzing. They were made of “artificial fibre.” I asked for linen. They gave me a shirt of linen and a cotton suit, also briefs for the privates, that I refused to wear, not wanting such construction. I demanded food fit for a man. They said my body would “reject” it, and that I must wait. And they brought me a copy of Hakluyt’s Voyages.
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