David Wingrove - The Empire of Time

I smile. ‘Yes.’

‘Then you can get me out of here.’

‘I …’

I am about to say no, but I stop dead, my heart racing suddenly. Why not? After all, all we have to do is get a team back here and fit a focus into Gehlen’s chest. Even this late, there’s time. Time for the graft to take, that is.

But it would mean leaving his wife and children to their fate, because there’d be no time to get them done. And besides it isn’t always safe — not on children their age.

I’m quite certain that I wouldn’t want to make such a decision. But Gehlen might think differently.

‘Wait here,’ I say, meaning to jump. Yet even as I say the words, I notice a movement in the air beyond Gehlen, then hear laughter. Familiar laughter.

Reichenau steps out and points the laser directly at my head. He’s grinning, like this is the ultimate joke.

Gehlen whirls about. ‘Michael …?’

‘My name is Reichenau,’ he says, introducing himself to Gudrun, ‘Michael Reichenau.’ And, stepping forward smartly, he rips Gehlen’s shirt open and, with what’s clearly a practised move, slaps a small, flesh-coloured circle against his chest.

‘There,’ he says, smiling across at me. ‘ Mine .’

‘ Yours? ’ And then I realise. It’s the same kind of ‘plug’ as was used on Ernst. Coded to Gehlen’s genes, no doubt.

I’m about to say something, when Reichenau turns and gestures to the steward.

‘You! More drinks! A Lahmung for me, and make it a large one!’

He gestures towards the settees with the gun.

‘Come now. Sit down everybody … We’ve so much to talk about.’

Gehlen sits there, deeply uncomfortable. The plug on his chest is itching, only he can’t get beneath it to scratch it and he can’t remove it. Reichenau, sitting across from him, looks on, gun in one hand, drink in the other, amused.

Gudrun stares at him angrily. ‘What manner of creature are you?’

‘I am a Doppelgehirn ,’ Reichenau answers coldly. ‘I was made thus, in the laboratories of the Konigsturm itself.’ He smiles icily. ‘You might say I am a king’s man.’

‘And that?’ Gudrun asks, indicating the plug.

‘It’s as I said. It makes him mine. Ask Otto. He knows.’

Both Gehlen and Gudrun look to me, but I can’t answer them.

Reichenau turns to me, waving the gun idly before him. ‘Work it out. I’m sure you can. Only don’t take too long. I know you won’t.’

He’s right. In fact, I’ve worked it out already. He needed me to save Gehlen, so that Gehlen might have the chance to ‘discover’ the time equations. But now that’s done, he wants Gehlen for himself. Or — to be precise — for the equations that are in Gehlen’s head.

‘Why are you still here?’ I ask. ‘You have what you want.’

Reichenau raises his glass. ‘I thought it would be pleasant to share a glass or two … to toast our success.’ Again he smiles, his over-large mouth stretched thin. ‘That was some maze, huh?’

‘Yes.’ Only I sense that I haven’t even got to the edges of this maze. Not yet.

I stand. If I can’t do anything here, then I can at least jump back and change things earlier. But Reichenau is smiling again.

‘No point,’ he says. ‘I only change it back … And here we sit.’

I sit again, sip at my Beck’s, and stare out at the sunlit mountains. Why is he waiting? Why hasn’t he just jumped? And then it hits me.

The ‘plug’ is like a focus. It needs time to interact with the body. Maybe not as much time as an actual focus, but … Reichenau finishes his drink, then throws the glass aside and stands. ‘Wrong,’ he says to me. ‘It’s immediate. But you’d have found that out.’

He reaches out, placing a hand on Gehlen’s shoulder, then looks to me and smiles. ‘Until the next time, eh?’

And they’re gone. Like they were never there. I look to Gudrun, but she’s looking down, into her lap, and I see — now that I’ve freed myself of my obsession with Reichenau — that she’s been crying.

I walk over to her and take her hand once more. ‘What?’ I say gently. ‘What is it?’

She looks up, her big blue eyes staring back at mine moistly. ‘It’s nothing. Really, it’s nothing.’ She sniffs deeply, then, forcing herself to smile, points past me.

‘The cup,’ she says. ‘It has to be placed in Gehlen’s trunk, doesn’t it?’

I nod.

‘Then let’s do that. Let’s at least get that right.’

‘Okay …’ And as I think where Gehlen’s trunk is, I remember what else is in that room, and what Gehlen said to me no more than fifteen minutes back.

I’ve finished now … I’ve left it on the board. If you’re interested. Which I think you may be …

Interested? I laugh, and Gudrun stares at me, astonished.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Stay here,’ I say, grabbing up the cup. ‘I promise I’ll be back.’ And I hurry from the room, heading for the lift.

Diederich stares at the screen a moment longer, then looks up, giving me a beaming smile.

‘It’s all here. Everything we need. And more.’

‘More?’

‘Yes. He worked it out. Look.’ And Diederich flicks through several pages until he comes to what might as well, to my eyes, be ancient Babylonian.

‘What is that?’

‘It’s Ernst’s position in Space-Time,’ Hecht says, coming into the room. ‘Gehlen pinpointed exactly where it is, and thus where the leakage was going to. That’s the equation for it.’

‘I thought we’d lost Gehlen.’

‘We did. But now we’ve snatched him back. Or part of him …’

‘You’ve …’

‘No time,’ Hecht says. ‘We need to get a team back there to Orhdruf straight away. If we can plug the leak …’

Ernst will go free .

‘A team?’ I ask.

‘Three of us,’ Hecht says, and looks to me meaningfully, as if to ask ‘Do you want to come?’

‘Why, yes …’

‘Then let’s go. Horst … make a copy of that. We’ll need it when we’re there.’

We jump back in — Hecht and Diederich and I — directly into the room where the singularity’s kept.

We’re suited up, of course, even though it’s switched off right now.

‘So what are we going to do?’ I ask, staring at that dark absence that’s at the centre of it all.

‘We’re going to flood it with energy, that’s what,’ Diederich says enthusiastically. ‘In fact, we’re going to push so much energy through it that it’s going to overload.’

‘And what good will that do?’

‘No good at all,’ Hecht answers, ‘ here .’

‘But if we’re right,’ Diederich adds. ‘That is, if Gehlen’s figures are correct …’

I don’t understand it at all. Least of all why we’re inside here if we’re going to flood the black hole with energy — presumably its own.

‘But how do we …?’

In answer, Diederich takes something from his pocket and holds it up. It looks like a pebble. A tiny, silver pebble. ‘This here. We just toss it in like so …’

And, like a child playing a game, he casually casts the tiny, silver pebble into the heart of the singularity where it vanishes.

I’m about to say something when I hear voices from the room next door. Gehlen’s voice, and then my own.

‘But …’

‘Now out,’ Hecht says, placing his hand to his chest. And like ghosts, he, and then Diederich, and finally I, vanish.

‘No wonder,’ I say, back at Four-Oh, as I step out of my suit, thinking of the way the singularity changed colour so spectacularly while Gehlen and I were in the room with it. ‘But what was that?’