sorry. I had to see someone. It’s important. I thought of you—I knew you’d listen.” She stared at me, as if challenging me to deny her access.
“Of course, come in.”
Bemused, I led her through the house to my study and sat her in the leather chair behind my desk. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Something stronger?”
“You don’t happen to have a brandy?”
“On its way.”
I fixed a double Remi Martin in the lounge, and one for myself, and ferried them back to the study.
Sally was drying her face with a tissue. She took a breath, composing herself.
I sat on the armchair beside the desk and said, “Now, how can I help?”
“I can’t confide in friends. They’d hardly believe me if l told them about what’s going on at Sigma Research. Then I thought of you—Cauldwell’s trying to recruit you, right?”
“He did ask if I’d like to join his team, yes.”
“Don’t!” Her vehemence was surprising. “I mean, you don’t know what it’s like. Cauldwell isn’t sane—”
“Sally, slow down. Take it easy. Now, what do you mean?”
She took a deep breath. “I’ve been back with him on two sorties now, to 1050 and 1052. They were mainly reconnaissance, observation.”
I nodded, amazed at my calm reaction to something so amazing as this casual talk of time travel.…
“And?”
“He wants to conduct an experiment. He has a theory—something to do with causality. Quantum physics. String theory. I don’t honestly understand, but he thinks that there’s more to existence than just this reality. He thinks that this world is one of an infinite number of similar worlds, and that every event in history somehow creates new, divergent time-lines—in effect, new realities, new worlds.”
I vaguely recalled watching an episode of Horizon on TV about something similar, though it had gone way over my head at the time.
“And Simon intends…?” I began.
Sally nodded. “He wants to do something back there that would prove the theory one way or another. Maybe introduce an invention, something the Anglo Saxons didn’t have back then. I don’t know.… But you see, I’m afraid that if he does go through with it.…” She paused there, staring at me.
“If he did this, and it changed things.… Christ, I can’t work it out. If he did change things, would that mean we’d be changed, this reality? Or would it mean that we’d simply go on as before, but that another reality would spring into existence, diverging from his intervention in the eleventh century?”
l stared at her, my head spinning. “If his theory of multiple realities is correct, then his intervention would merely create just another reality. But if he’s wrong, if there’s only one reality.…” I pressed my temple, trying to work through the logic, “then wouldn’t that mean that if he did make a change, then things would change here, too?”
Sally smiled. “But if his intervention back then changed the future, our present—then possibly Sigma Research might never come into being. But then how would he have been able to travel back to make the change!”
“The irresolvable paradox,” I murmured.
She nodded. “But do you see why he has to be stopped? If there is only one reality, and he changes it…then who knows what chaos he might wreak on our time!”
I said, “Tell the high-ups at Sigma, okay? They won’t let him go through with it.”
“Yes. Yes, I’ll do that. We’re activating the interface to 1054 tonight, at midnight. I’ll talk to someone before we go.”
I fetched Sally another brandy, and we went through the mind-bending complexities of the situation once again. Towards ten o’clock, as she made to leave, I urged her again to confide in her superiors at Sigma.
At the door she gave me a quick hug, and ran out into the rain.
I watched her scarlet Renault speed into the night, then made my way back to the study. I fixed myself another brandy and sat for an hour, going over what Sally had said and trying to untangle the convoluted skein of paradox with which she had presented me.
I should have made the connection earlier, of course, Perhaps the alcohol had dulled my senses.
Belatedly, I stood and crossed to the bookshelf where, next to the skull, I had kept the pistol.
It was not there, of course. In the time I had taken to fetch Sally a brandy, she had seen the pistol…the answer to her dilemma.
I hurried from the house and drove away at speed, though I knew the pursuit was futile. Sally had more than an hour on me, and, anyway, wasn’t Simon Cauldwell’s death pre-ordained, a fact ineluctably woven into the tapestry of time?
I reached the Sigma Research station at twenty minutes after midnight.
I flashed the ID Cauldwell had given me at the bored security guard on reception and made my way into the chamber.
The scene through the interface stopped me in my tracks.
The portal framed a vivid sunrise over rolling hills, with a wattle-and-daub village in the middle-ground. As I watched, transfixed, the scene shimmered like a heat haze.
“They should be back by now!” a technician called.
I walked forward, unnoticed by the white-coated staff who had their attention on more pressing matters. We gazed up at the shimmering scene as if in awe.
“Communication’s down!” someone called. “We’ve lost contact. If they don’t get back.…” She left the sentence unfinished.
“I can’t hold it any longer! It’s going!”
“They knew how long they had out there!” someone cried in despair.
The scene flickered, then. It stuttered like the image on a silent movie. It stabilized for a few seconds, showing the pristine, bucolic scene. Then the image winked out, to be replaced by the stained-glass effect of the interface in its deactivated phase.
The scene returned again—and I saw two small figures in the distance. They were standing face to face on a hillside perhaps a hundred metres away, and I judged that if they had moved themselves to sprint towards the interface they might have reached safety before the final shutdown.
But it appeared that they had other concerns. They faced each other in obvious confrontation, gesticulating: one figure moved forward, attempted to grab the other. Sally backed away, gesturing.
She reached for something in her jacket—
And the interface closed for the very last time.
The aperture could not be opened to exactly the same period, of course: no miraculous rescue of the time-travelers could be affected, for now.
A technician tried to calm his colleagues. He said that in the morning they would attempt to open the portal to the closest time possible to 1054, which would be 1056.
He was confident that Cauldwell and Reichs would be awaiting salvation.…
Only I knew that only Reichs would be waiting.
* * * *
I was wrong, as it happened.
Sally Reichs never returned to the twenty-first century. The disappearance of Cauldwell and Reichs was reported in the Oxford papers, briefly picked up by the national dailies, and then quietly forgotten.
Later that year I read that Sigma Research was closing its British base and relocating to the States, and I assumed that that would be the end of the affair.
A year