“I think it does,” Tegan was squinting through her frown of earnest effort, but it was all crystalizing for her.
“Great!”
He actually smiled.
“It’s, of course, imperative to distinguish regions of spacetime that are catastrophic and not. Catastrophic regions are composed of catastrophic points where the proximity is located adversely to singularities so that every time-like geodesic through it runs into a region of infinite curvature at some time in the future. Do you follow?”
“No… I wish I did, but, no.”
“Alright. Not important.” His hand waved dismissively.
Tegan saw through his eyes to the buffer of information he had stored, ready for release to her. She saw his effort to wipe it.
“It… it’s the long way of saying that’s what the test was for. To see if we could circumvent a bad area of spacetime. Make more sense?”
“A little.”
“Good.” He sipped his water again and looked slightly startled as a man with a newspaper filled the open seat between himself and the couple who’d just settled.
He dropped his voice as if the man might take an interest.
“You came to ask me if The Incident was real? If it was and is connected to all the global events? To the aircraft I believe you and your man, Pete, were on? Yes. I would say, yes—they are. And to… to the recent attacks in Newfoundland? That… that one, I’m not sure. I sense they are, but I have no idea how. I could speculate, but it’s too outrageous.”
He was staring without seeing, his eyes lost in the convolutions of his own mind. His elbows pointed to the ceiling as the backs of his fingernails dragged back and forth over the tattered thatch that used to be hair atop his head.
“I have been pondering it, though,” he said, leaning in with a conspiratorial, hushed voice, “and it’s outrageous.”
The ghosts moving behind Daxton’s eyes could so easily be insanity, Tegan thought. But she reminded herself that Pete had told her he was simply brilliant and very far out on a limb of his own.
“What I keep asking myself is, if we successfully violated causality and somehow omitted to pinch off the throat of a Schwarzschild wormhole. It’s not inconceivable.”
“Sorry, but I have no idea what that means,” Tegan probed gently. Letting the man sink into his own mind was one thing, but listening to him evidently babble seemed pointless.
“What I’m saying is, that event we created within a region of collapsed space could have had… to avoid technical terms… blowback. The lasers could have provided something of a lightning rod. After all, it caused spin in that instantaneous region of imploded space. The Earth itself would be no impediment to an energy pulse of that magnitude. It would go right through the Earth at causality speed… at light speed… as if the planet wasn’t there. It would explain the aurora witnessed, the missing boats and planes, it would explain weather phenomena, would explain what you experienced, would explain the state of the rig. It could even move… well… the Grand Banks. Because, that’s all over the news, I don’t know if you’ve seen it… the sudden restoration of sea life?”
“Yes. My father’s packing to fish there as we speak. You think even that’s connected?”
“I’m certain,” Daxton chuckled quietly. “Quite convinced. I think we did it. Made a vortex, an eddy in spacetime—pulled a chunk of Earth through the keyhole of time.”
“Are you saying you have somehow created a time warp?”
“In a narrow band… in layman’s terms… well, yes.”
“So, we got a reef from our past pulled into our present?”
“Or from our future… Yes. That’s what it looks like.”
“And the planes and boats? They’re somewhere else now?”
“Sometime else now, yes.”
“In the past?”
“Or future.”
“This is…” Tegan knitted her hands behind her head and squeezed her temples with forearms as her elbows came together before her. “I’m….”
Her head felt like it was going to explode.
Back in the mundane world of a New York deli lunch, their pastrami sandwiches arrived and Daxton went at them like a starved man.
“So, if I’ve got this right,” Tegan puzzled, “you’re saying that there was a corridor of time that warped.”
“A corridor, exactly,” his mouth was still working on the sandwich as he replied. “Yes.”
“But, hang on. If we got a reef-load of fish, they got a sky full of planes?”
“Possibly. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a literal swap. I don’t know if we’ve disrupted just two epochs or pushed a whole range of time zones out of sync.”
Tegan saw in her mind a fracture in time carrying with it whatever was in that time stratum into another plane.
“You mean like how an earthquake causes different strata to realign. A discontinuity?”
“Well… yes. Not a bad illustration. Yes.”
“So if the fish and the reef moved a century or two from the past into this time zone, the planes could be a century or two into our future?”
“Possibly. Just possibly. We really don’t know. It’s wild speculation. But the movement seems to be greater than a century. The rig, you see—”
He took another yawning bite out of the sandwich. It plugged his mouth for a dozen chews before there was space enough for words to begin appearing between chomps.
“…I told you it had acquired a forest of growth? And that’s what first got me to thinking that Bandit warped time instead of space. Like I said, I’m fired, an untouchable… But, I still have friends on the inside who value my opinion. They sampled the rig. Brought up a spar…”
“You mind if I sit here?” a lanky woman in a pencil skirt asked, touching Tegan on her shoulder, indicating the seat opposite the man now using his newspaper to dominate his little turf and much of Daxton’s airspace between himself and Tegan.
“No, go ahead,” Tegan invited absently, trying to cover her irritation at the interruption in this critical moment.
“Your friends, you were saying?” she prompted Daxton.
“The spar was extremely corroded. Generations of crustaceans had made it their home so that they could sample subsequent generations in distinct layers. Radiocarbon dating on the earliest of these generations hard against the metal put their epoch at nearly a millennium ago—ten centuries. The steel had life from a thousand years ago. Staggering.”
Tegan’s eyes were wide open, her brow furrowed into a scowl of confusion.
“And it was definitely from your rig? How do you know?”
“A thousand years ago, nobody was building rigs in the Southern Ocean. Nobody had a laser generator with all the paraphernalia. And the radium-226 separation at smelting when this thing was built a year ago would have left it effectively radium free, but the radium-226 derived from traces of uranium-238 were consistent with steel a thousand years old. That thousand-year marker perfectly matches the thousand years of sea life and fouling. Make sense?”
“Well… yes…. Yes and no.”
“We pushed the rig back through time and then re-discovered it a thousand years later.”
He said it as a matter of fact.
“And pulled a reef full of fish through time and lost two planes and some ships to another moment in history.”
“It seems that way.”
“But if something from long ago is here, then what is in its place?”
“Nothing. The time continuum wouldn’t be a void. If we received the volume of space and all it contains from that time, it would be filled with whatever was in that region from another time.”
“Dinosaurs?” A crazy thought struck Tegan.
“Possible.”
“Terrifying.”
“Exhilarating!”
“You say it’s a core of time?”
“Seems like it, yes.”
“What if something was at the boundary?”
; “The anchor chain we found went from our epoch to that epoch across the boundary—it was very sharply delineated.”
“But a living thing… A whale? Its head in the warp, its tail out of it.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Would it be ripped apart?”
“In a most unpleasant way—undoubtedly.”
“Nice!”
“There are lots of bad ways to die.”
Daxton’s phone pinged and he fished for it as he went on.
“It’s my best guess, educated as it is, by the very sharp boundary we saw between the pristine new anchor chain and the apparently time-shifted rest of its length connected to the ri—”
As he read the screen he suddenly looked ill and Tegan saw drops of sweat appear on his brow.
He mopped at them with the table serviette.
“You okay?”
“Fine… I… I’m fine,” there was a stammer in his voice and his eyes were darting about the room again, defaulting toward the door as if someone or something menacing might come through it at any time.
“What about the grid search? Is there anything coming to light? Officially there’s nothing, but I’m thinking perhaps… rumors?”
“Rumors?” Daxton squinted with a frown as if she were fishing in deep dark waters close to facts he was uncomfortable disclosing.
“I know there’s a grid search underway for all the missing planes and boats…?”
With Daxton so spooked, Tegan sensed he was clamming up. Clearly, he was dealing with issues and his phone had just served bad news.
For all her sympathy, he was the best lead that she had to get quickly to the core, and she had no idea when she’d next have such an opportunity to fast track directly to the nub of The Incident.
Her instinct as a reporter told her to keep driving at it hard now or go bust without a prayer.
“What rumors could I hear?” he responded cagily.
“You’re an insider.”
“Was,” he corrected her.
He hadn’t looked at her since he’d read his mobile, so obsessed was he with his vigil of the doorway.
“You’ll have friends,” she suggested gingerly.
“Yes, they’ve found—” he hesitated. “Look, I’m really not sure I can offer more help.”
“I’ll treat it very confidentially.”
They were talking softly, conspiratorially and their immediate neighbors had picked up on their demeanor and seemed inquisitive.
Perhaps it’s just paranoia, Tegan thought, but she could see Daxton had noticed it too and had clammed up.
“Please… without you, I really don’t know where to start,” she prompted.
“There’s much I shouldn’t know.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“Then why do you want to know?”
“Good point,” Tegan agreed.
“You’re a reporter.”
“Not in the traditional sense,” she asserted. “And I promised; we’re off the record.”
“I trust you, but if it leaks it’ll find its way back to me. My life’s already… This, this would…”
He left it unsaid, but Tegan understood perfectly well.
This was in a league that Pete had painted for her, where people go missing or commit suicide in the most improbable ways at well above average rates.
“They think they have two of the wrecks, both boats… Both the same thing as our rig, modern design, modern materials, isotopes correlating perfectly with the known origins of the construction materials source. Dating… yes, a thousand years into the past.”
“Jezzzus Christ on a stick!”
Tegan said it louder than she intended, and the man looked over his newspaper at her and then at the professor.
“No sign of the planes?” she hushed her voice to nearly a whisper.
“Some serious hardware was deployed. Obviously, there are now two searches…. The official one searching the surface, the confidential one looking a lot deeper under snow, ice and deep deposit.”
“You know they found an axe… of unusual design it seems. That much was on the news. Any insider track on that?”
“No.”
The remaining color had drained from his face at the mention of the weapon.
“You sure?”
Tegan could kick herself for pushing that last point too far.
He knew alright. She read it written on his face.
He was gathering his belongings; glasses, wallet and mobile.
“Absolutely no idea.” He took a ten- and twenty-dollar bill and dropped them on the table. “I’d better get a move on. I’m speaking out of turn.”
Then he was gone into the throng of the chaotic deli’s lunch hour.
The man looked at Tegan over his newspaper again and at the cash on the table.
“Strange man, honey. Men are odd in this city.” The woman seated next to Tegan nodded knowingly and offered a sympathetic face.
Chapter 14
Viking Encampment, near Biscayan Cove
Latitude: 47°48'08"N
Longitude: 52°48'21"W
Tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk, came the sound.
So many new sounds, so many strange smells. Such strange flotsam and jetsam collected and puzzled over in the past weeks.
… tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk ….
Closer and closer, yet still out of sight.
The men needed no order, they evaporated into the thicket that lined the gulley where they had made their camp.
This was a variation on all of the other puzzling and terrifying sounds that had entered their world—the howl of those giant birds or dragons that traveled fast overhead, the clatter of the slower ones, the thunder from the woman’s stick that ate Gansi’s arm and the grumbling beast in the belly of large vessels seen both close and afar.
...tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk… It came slowly into sight at the throat of the bay, an arrow’s shot distant.
Three men were standing aboard her, motionless, not rowing and not under sail in these calm conditions. Yet, the boat moved steadily onward at the pace of a walking man… tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk—tuk.
With an exclamation that conveyed shock, the tuk—tuk gurgled into a clattering sound and the boil at the stern of the vessel halted, while the two strange contraptions still alive there kept urinating a thin stream of water from their sides.
Raol squinted, puzzled at this, and the strange appearance of the craft. It was a bright orange in color with extremely wide and rounded gunwales, appearing as though they were constructed of giant inflated bladders.
The gunwales aside, this was like the boat he’d seen that first raiding night, mounted as it had been up on a cart. And these urinating crates at the boat’s stern that he’d thought might be a battering ram with a steel star that turned freely… these seemed to be doing the work of an oar.
The curiosity of it almost drew him, mesmerized as he was, from his hide.
Only his brother Ótta’s voice snapped him out of that dangerous folly.
“What kind of magic is this, Raol?”
“Another trick.” It was no answer but there was no answer to give.
The men watched every movement of the three aboard.
These three men on the small boat with the clucking creatures propelling behind them had seen their longboat and were surveying it and squinting into these backwoods where they hid.
They held their breaths, as well as their swords and axes.
The bush screening them was a mere a stone’s throw away from the shale shore where their longboat lay beached, and it was another stone’s throw from there on to this oncoming boat still riding in on its momentum.
Half a stone’s throw.
A quarter.
One of the three men said something and the trio laughed. It was a nervous laugh that carried in the buzzing stillness.
Then one of the men retorted and they laughed quite heartily,
gaining confidence.
A protracted zeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeing carried on the still air and the two grumbling, urinating rams at the stern of the vessel canted up until their stars were free of the water.
The grumbling and urinating stream cut out.
There was silence.
The bow of the boat sighed as it touched the shale beach and one of the men jumped ashore wearing an outfit with a peculiar sheen, the likes of which Raol had never before seen. The men’s clothing so similar in the sheen of the material to the boat’s gunwales.
They’d beached their craft about the longboat’s length distant from the Norsemen’s pride.
For the Norse, their longboat was an invaluable lifeline, precious beyond measure. It was their only connection to a world they knew and could control.
Fists tightened on the shafts and hafts of well-worn weapons.
“Careful!!” Raol said quietly but emphatically.
It seemed that the collective breathing of his men and drumming of their hearts might carry across the distance.
“What do we do?” Ótta asked in a hoarse whisper on behalf of all the men.
“Wait,” Raol instructed, “…and watch.”
The second man came ashore, and the last man standing behind a small raised box in the boat called something to him. He doubled back, reached in, took what was clearly an anchor and brought it ashore, dropping it on dry land.
The first man was at the longboat and whistling through his teeth.
The whistling was universal. It said he was impressed. Evidently, by his body language, impressed and bewildered at the size and design of the longboat.
He slapped the gunwale as if disbelieving his own eyes.
He shouted something back to the other men and then peered into the bush right where the Norsemen lay.
Not seeing them, his eyes went up the cliffs on all sides, scouting. His head swiveling to and fro, searching for clues and a crew.
The second man arrived and slapped the gunwale two or three times, harder and harder, then went through the same search ritual.
These were not skræling. They were men of the north—of the Norse—and the Norsemen recognized them in stature, in hair growth, in skin tone, feature and build.
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