R. Salvatore - Echoes of the Fourth Magic

“First of all, let me assure you that conditions here are normal and within the framework of our laws and calculations. There are no preservatives in the water, no special oxygen or chemical balance to keep a cadaver fresh, and my own examination of a water sample shows it teeming with the expected bacteria.” Brady shook his head insistently and Reinheiser held up his hand to block any interruptions. “I understand your doubts, Doctor, but there is another explanation. I believe the key to this riddle lies not in abnormal physiological conditions, but in the fourth dimension, time.”

“Are you saying that we were thrown back in time?” Doc Brady demanded, his tone echoed perfectly in the incredulous stares that fell over Reinheiser from every direction.

Idiots, Reinheiser thought. I knew that this was beyond them. “No,” he calmly countered, though his shrill voice took on a knifelike edge. “Not pushed back, but pushed into a different frame of reference.”

They didn’t seem to understand.

“Our concepts view time as relative,” he explained. “An hour to a man on a rocket approaching the speed of light would be days, weeks, even years to a man on Earth.”

“I haven’t been on any rockets lately,” remarked an obviously doubting Mitchell.

“Yet this illustrates what I believe has happened to us,” Reinheiser went on. “We have been pushed into a time frame where one hundred fifty years of our history has been condensed into twelve to fifteen hours, judging from the doctor’s report on the cadaver taken from the Bella.”

“I said that the body was in the water for about twenty-four hours,” Doc Brady corrected.

“Yes, Doctor, but we were in this frame for approximately ten hours before the body was recovered.”

“Wait a minute,” Del demanded, looking hard at the physicist. “If what you’re saying is true, and we’ve been down here about fifteen hours, then…”

“Then one hundred and fifty years have passed on the surface,” Reinheiser finished. “And everyone we ever knew is dead and buried.”

With the unreality of everything that had already happened to them, they found it hard to summarily dismiss Reinheiser’s conclusions. Shaking their heads and muttering denials, they looked around at each other, searching for confirmations to the absurdity of the explanation. This angered Reinheiser even more, not because they didn’t believe him-he hadn’t expected them to-but because of their outright trepidation, even horror, at his suggestion. Could they be so inane as to disregard the incredible implications?

“Think of it, gentlemen!” the physicist exclaimed. “A new world awaits us. Think of the advancements in science! In medicine, Doctor!” He was almost pleading with them, holding out hope that they weren’t as small-minded as they appeared.

“Bullshit!” Mitchell blurted. He towered over the seated physicist, not even trying to conceal his disappointment. “Is this the best you’ve got for me?”

“I assure you, I intend to prove my theory,” Reinheiser replied, knowing full well what Mitchell needed from him.

“And how can you do that while we’re still down here?”

“That shouldn’t be hard,” Del answered. Startled, both Reinheiser and Mitchell looked over at him. “Tomorrow morning we send out divers to recover two bodies, one from our ship and another one from the Bella. If the theory is right, Doc’s autopsy should show our crewman to have been dead in the water for about thirty-four hours and the body from the Bella for forty-six to forty-nine hours.”

Reinheiser’s surprised look turned icy. He was amazed at Del’s show of reasoning, but mostly he was angry, preferring to explain his own theories without any help from a layman. “Precisely,” he snarled at Del, narrow-eyed.

“Whether or not my theory is correct, I believe that we can escape from here,” the physicist went on. “If we can patch the holes and get the sub up, magnetic influences should force us to the funnel. A storm might push us out, just as one pushed us in.”

“It won’t work,” Thompson said, immediately stifling the hopeful looks of the others. “No way can I make the patches strong enough to handle the kind of pressure that’s on the other side of that hole.”

“Our hull couldn’t sustain that kind of pressure if it were intact,” Reinheiser retorted. “The hydraulic system was destroyed.”

“Then how?” Corbin asked.

“I’m gambling that we won’t have to worry about the pressure.”

Mitchell huffed sarcastically, the tone itself refuting Reinheiser’s assertions.

“Look around you!” Reinheiser fumed, fed up with being ridiculed by his inferiors. “Do I have to spell it out to the letter? Why wasn’t the hull of the Wasp crushed under the pressure of twenty-seven thousand feet of water? That corpse still had its top hat and cane!” His voice mellowed as he perceived that the puzzled expressions of the others no longer held any hint of protest, only intrigue. “The only possible explanation is that the electromagnetic storms which brought these ships and planes here, somehow shielded them from the ocean pressure.”

“But we didn’t have anything protecting us when we went through,” Del pointed out.

“We didn’t get caught in the storm,” Reinheiser explained. “We got hit by the storm, outside its bubble, merely in the way of devastation’s chosen path.”

The men looked around to each other with hopeful shrugs. Perhaps they didn’t believe Reinheiser on a rational level, but they had a desperate need for some sliver of hope.

“But we don’t have the supplies to just float around and wait for a storm,” Del said. His voice wasn’t hostile; he was asking, not arguing.

“We shan’t wait long,” Reinheiser replied. “That portal is the barrier between two very different magnetic fields. The interaction of those fields constantly produces violent electrical storms.”

“But how often?” Mitchell argued, disgruntled at the second apparent flaw in Reinheiser’s plans. “Every couple of months? Or years apart? We don’t have that much time.”

“Again you are looking at things from the wrong point of view, Captain,” the physicist said with a superior smile, truly enjoying having an answer for every doubt. “The storms occur every few weeks or so on the other side of the barrier, the other frame of reference. Down here that translates to hours or even minutes.”

The physicist looked around at the others, noting the slight, hesitant glimmer of hope on their faces. Give them what they need to hear, he reminded himself, and he looked straight into each set of pleading eyes.

“We can escape.”

WONDERMENT OVERWHELMED HIM. Every escapist instinct within Del told him to swim away from the Unicorn and lose himself in history. He had thrust himself into the heart of an untainted legacy. So much more than a museum, this place held unfabricated, unbiased testimony to the world’s past in ways and with a purity that books, models, even exacting restorations could not begin to approach. He could spend a lifetime swimming among these snapshots of different times; he thought of the many history classes he’d taken in college, of the dry lectures, or even the good ones from the rare, animated professor with a passion for the subject. Yet even those superb teachers and their impassioned recounting could not begin to approach the sense of marvelous reality that Del felt out here. He wanted to stay and to swim and to learn.

His first order of business was a bit more grim, though. He had to remove the bodies of his dead shipmates who’d been drowned in the sub and select one for Brady’s test of Reinheiser’s time theory. He moved to the jagged tear in the Unicorn’s hull and peeked inside.