by Mark Jeffrey
"In fact, Benjamin, on more than one occasion, you and Rachelle walked right past me! We brushed shoulders twice. Oh, how I ached to say hello. But I could not risk the possibility that more Nazis were present that had yet to be routed out.
"When at last that fateful day came, the day of the battle on the base, Hoermann told me of the plan that Rachelle had conceived. I had no argument: we were desperate and I also believed that the plan would work. Volzstrang also told me of the clever box he had devised to deliver the notebook to you, and how it would preserve it from the effects of timeline propagation: the book would not be rewritten -- although history all around it would be.
"And he revealed to me that had another such box. He had meant for it to preserve more things, as it was the size of a trunk. It was too small for a normal sized man ... but it was not too small for me. He bade me to enter it. I contemplated this, and realized that I would know no one in an alternate 1944. But I would know something of the inhabitants of the year from which Benjamin Bantam came. Perhaps even Benjamin himself! But did we know which year? What date? Why yes, Hoermann replied. The capsule clearly indicated the exact date and time of departure.
"And so I took Hoermann's box back to my lab, for I had another invention that I did not have a practical use for until now: a chemical that would cause a human to hibernate indefinitely. There would be some aging, but very slowly: every two years would equal a single day to the human body.
"Quickly, I prepared a timer device that would automatically administer intravenously the perfect amount of the solution over a period of decades. As you know, Benjamin, we of my world are quite adept at clockworks and the material sciences -- more adept, I daresay, that you in the here and now! So I was able to set the timer to wake me precisely one week before your departure into the past.
"Into the Volzstrang’s box I went, and closed its lid down upon me. And I administered the solution that would cause me sleep for decades upon end ..."
"But you were underground," Bantam interrupted. "How did you know that box wouldn't become your coffin?"
"I didn't," Hardin shrugged. "But I also could not be sure if I would not be erased from time or not if I did not take this risk. And in any event, I had very good reason to believe that I would be found and dug up." Hardin chuckled.
"What?" Bantam asked.
"You yourself told me of the plan to leave the cure for the Shadow buried somewhere on the base, in case you failed to return to the future. That meant a search would be conducted just prior to your departure. Any strange object would be unearthed. And my box was certainly strange."
"Oh, we found him alright," Kovington said. "Metal detectors went all haywire the second we were on top of him. Dug up a weird little crate, looked like a Victorian music box. Didn't look like there was any way to open it, and we never guessed someone was inside. We figured it was junk from the 1800's or something -- some settler tossed it off a wagon and it got buried over time in a landfill or whatever. It didn't look dangerous, or even something from modern times, so we tagged it and stored it.
"Then one day, out comes him. The duty guard almost has a heart attack. He explain who he is and mentions Benjamin Bantam. Well that got our attention. So we --"
"Wait," Bantam said. "When was this, exactly?"
"Almost a full week ago," Hardin said in nearly a whisper.
Bantam's eyebrows shot up. A week?
"I saw the young you," Hardin said. "Several times. And then again, just this morning. You didn't see me, of course."
"There was to be no interaction," Kovington said. "Doctor Hardin made that clear when we spoke for the first time. Benjamin Bantam had not yet met him when he first appeared."
"So you knew ... " Bantam rasped at Kovington. "You knew this whole time, even before you sent me back, you knew exactly what would happen!"
Kovington nodded. "That is correct. I also knew what had been prevented from happening: a new Nazi empire -- and so I knew I couldn't tell you or anyone else. Doctor Hardin and I kept this information strictly to ourselves -- until now. And since your mission to retrieve a cure for the Shadow succeeded, it seems that this was correct course of action."
Bantam stared at his feet and let this sink in. They knew! Hardin had been wandering around on the base for an entire week in the future ....
"Why did you believe him?" Bantam asked Kovington.
Hardin chuckled and held up his arm, causing it to buzz and whirr louder than usual. "This alone was enough. Once they'd got a gander at my mechanical arm, they knew I could not be from their world. It was the equivalent of you showing me an iPad."
"But now I'm afraid we have a new problem," Kovington said.
That got the room's attention. Everyone had assumed the crisis was over, this was simply a tie-up-the-loose-ends sort of meeting.
"Bring it in!" Kovington barked.
Two guards carried in a large bedside alarm clock, handling it with gloved hands. It was a big flat-panel digital clock, with large backlit LCD numbers ticking along. With a sleek, silver design and a curved base, it was like the sort of over-the-top thing one would get at The Sharper Image.
Hardin stared at the clock as if it were a viper. What could be possibly be dangerous about it?
The clock was set on the table. The men stepped back.
"Watch," Hardin replied to everyone's unasked question.
After a few second, the clock started to melt like a Dali painting. The room gasped. It seemed to be self-destructing at first. But then the melting took on a different quality, a morphing quality. It was not collapsing into sludge; rather, it was transforming. New colors, wooden colors mixed with ink black, entered the blob of silver that it had become. The new colors overpowered the old.
And the blob began to take on organization again, purpose. It righted itself and finished its transformation.
Simply as that, an elegant, ornate wooden clock sat on the desk. A small arm swung and made it tick gracefully.
"What — what is that?" one of the Generals shouted.
"This clock is an object from my world," Hardin replied. "I recognize it. I've seen it before, here on this very base."
"But why did it do that?" Bantam asked. “Why did … change?”
"It would seem," Hardin said quietly, "for some reason that as yet eludes me ... that your world is, by degrees, slowly transforming into my world."
HERE ENDS ‘TIMEWARDEN’
(This time for real)
Afterword
If you have enjoyed this Rollicking and Improbable tale, then we would ask that you kindly avail yourself of giving it five stars on
Amazon and Goodreads
And, of course, please Socialize your enjoyment thereof in Society-at-Large! (By this, we mean the ‘real world’, not the simulacra of hydrologic multi-way telekinematics. Go outside in the sun!)
You may also deign to follow the Author of this Humble Tome on the PneumaNet salon known as Twitter forthwith: @markjeffrey
Please do tell your friends about us! If enough of THEM come with us on this first journey to the Age of Aether, well, there MAY be a way — concocted via various viable contraptions and electrocutions — to return to the Age of Aether!
Do take care! My
most fervent wish
is that you and I may see each other again!
Your Humble Narrator
Mark Jeffrey
About The Author
Mark Jeffrey is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and author. He has co-founded five internet companies and written eight books, including the Max Quick series (Harper Collins).
His companies include The Palace (backed by Time Warner, Intel and SoftBank; sold to Communities.com in 1998 with 10 million users), ZeroDegrees (sold to InterActiveCorp / IAC in 2004 with 1 million users), ThisWeekIn (co-founded with Kevin Pollak and Jason Calacanis), and Mahalo / Inside.com (backed by Elon Musk, Sequoia, Mark Cuban and others).
Most recently, Mark founded Guardian Circle, an app th
at lets friends family and neighbors protect each other. Guardiancircle.com
Mark also consulted for several years directly for Travis Kalanick, now CEO of Uber, on his first company Red Swoosh.
His first novel, MAX QUICK: THE POCKET AND THE PENDANT, was published in hardcover and ebook by HarperCollins in May, 2011. The book was initially podcast as a series of episodic mp3's and received over 2.5 million downloads.
Mark Jeffrey holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire.