David Wingrove - The Empire of Time

‘ Pions ,’ he says quietly, musing aloud. ‘It has to be something to do with the pion emission rate.’

I know what pions are. That’s something all of us at Four-Oh learned in our studies. They’re particles that travel faster than the speed of light.

I turn and look at him, but I can’t make out his features through the doubled thicknesses of glass.

‘How is it actually used?’

Gehlen turns and points through the wall. ‘There are catchment spheres — huge great things — in separate chambers surrounding us on all sides. Above, below, all around us. It’s complex, but essentially we use the accelerator to fire particles into it, and they “jump” — that is, they disappear in one position and reappear in another — over there, within one of the spheres. And this is happening all the time. Every nano-second. Huge amounts of energy jumping from here to there through … well, through nowhere really.’

‘And the spheres …?’

‘Feed energy — huge amounts of energy — into the grid. There are dozens of them in all, so if one of them fails …’

‘And do they?’

‘No. Not until now, that is.’ He smiles. ‘It’s all switched off at present, otherwise we couldn’t have come in here. We’d have been bathed in Cerenkov radiation …’

I wait for an explanation and — of a kind — it comes.

‘ Not a good thing.’

‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask. ‘Just how are you going to get inside that … thing ?’

Gehlen laughs. ‘You know … for once, I haven’t a clue.’

‘You haven’t …?’

I fall silent as the ‘absence’ at the centre of the room swells momentarily, and then seems to vanish to the tiniest point.

‘What’s happening?’

But Gehlen’s not listening. He’s staring at the singularity, unable to believe his eyes, for it has begun to burn an intense golden colour, like the darkness at its pinpoint centre has caught fire.

‘Out!’ Gehlen says, as if having a wall between us and that thing will make any difference. ‘Out of here now!’

For the next hour, Gehlen sits in the gallery, watching the screen as the singularity goes through a terrifying series of metamorphoses. I sit there next to him, dry-mouthed, wondering just what’s going on, and whether this is the end. But Gehlen is silent, pondering the significance of what he’s seeing — as if he reads each change as a set of figures.

Which is perhaps the truth. After all, he does see things differently from the rest of us. But time’s passing, and Ernst is still trapped, and if even Gehlen can’t see a solution, then maybe there isn’t one.

Maybe Ernst has to be trapped for it all to work .

It’s a dreadful thought, but I’m forced now to consider it.

Yet even as I do, something else occurs to me. There’s nothing in the histories about what happened to the singularity during the coming conflict. Nothing that survived, anyway. Within the next fifteen hours everything on the surface of the planet will be destroyed, but we’re deep down here, just like the command bunkers in Moscow and Berlin, and there’s the possibility that this too survived the general devastation. Only … there’s no record of it.

From the perspective of Four-Oh — anchored up the line in 2999 — this doesn’t exist, and therefore didn’t survive.

But is that so?

If the black hole had been destroyed, or even freed from its restraints, then surely it would have taken the Earth with it? I mean … something this powerful …

I look to Gehlen, meaning to ask him what would happen, but he raises a hand, as if to deflect my question, and I can see from the intensity of his manner that he’s thinking something through.

And then he smiles.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I should have thought of that before.’

And so it happens. As simply as that. Gehlen stands and nods, the smile remaining on his lips. Yet if he realises just how significant the moment is, he doesn’t show it.

Time travel. Pions and Q-balls and energy that appears and disappears contrary to the laws of normal physics, that jumps from ‘now’ to ‘then’ and back again. Oh, he hasn’t got it all. Far from it. But I can see he has enough. Enough to keep a smile on his lips that don’t often deign to register amusement. And he’ll work on that, these next few hours, until it’s there, complete — ready for us to use …

He looks across at me and shrugs. ‘I guess I’d better write it down.’

I frown, as if I don’t understand, and he laughs.

‘I’m sorry. Just that it’s come to me. What was wrong, that is. Or not wrong …’

Yet even then he keeps it to himself. He doesn’t want to say — not explicitly — what it is he’s seen.

‘Can you stop it?’

‘The leakage?’

‘Yes.’

‘I guess so. If I wanted.’

‘Then …?’

I don’t understand what he’s waiting for. If he can , then why doesn’t he?

You think, perhaps, that I should just tell him the truth — about Ernst, that is — and be done with it. But I can’t. It’s a paradox too many. Gehlen has to get there all by himself. There is no other way, and believe me we’ve tried a few. It’s like there’s some cosmic watcher, waiting to whip the magic carpet out from under our feet should we open our mouths to Gehlen, or slip him a note, or …

And now it’s my turn to smile, because I realise that I’ve done, in effect, what others have failed to do. I’ve already jogged Gehlen’s mind on to the right track, and I’ve done it with a toy yellow giraffe named George.

Or Hecht has, to be more accurate. After all, I was only the link-man. The messenger boy.

‘Otto …’ Gehlen says quietly, handing me Tief’s pass, which has been in his custody all this while. ‘Forgive me, but I have to work. Take the lift back to the first level. There’s a sun room there. I’ll join you in a while.’

I look to him, meaning to argue, but I can see at a glance that it’ll do no good. He has already dismissed me from his mind.

I turn away, meaning to walk over to the lift, then stop dead, realising where I am.

Reichenau’s map. This is it! This room, not the one in which the singularity is kept. It’s here .

Again it makes no sense, for the map was supposed to indicate where the singularity was. Only I’ve seen that. I know now where that is and it doesn’t help. But this … this correlates perfectly to the map. And where the singularity should be …

I turn and stare at the point in space where, on Reichenau’s map, the black hole was marked. Only it’s not a black hole, it’s a simple, old-fashioned computer screen, the word ‘ Werktafel’ prominently displayed across the top surface, while on the screen itself …

… is the singularity. Or a detailed graphic representation of it.

I wonder what that means. I take a step towards it and Gehlen looks up.

‘Otto, please . Go now.’

I glance at him, then nod and leave. Nothing — and I mean nothing — is more important right now than letting Gehlen work through the equations.

The lift, as I observed earlier, has no camera in it. Thus, as the doors hiss shut, I jump, back to Four-Oh.

It’s quiet about the platform, the lights dimmed. There’s no sign of Hecht, but the women are there. The women are always there.

‘Where’s Hecht?’

‘Sleeping,’ Kathe says, coming across.

‘I need to see him.’

‘You can’t.’

‘What?’