John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

Waldemar nodded soberly, as he’d seen diplomats and statesmen do in films.

Once the Standartenführer assumed his post, it was emphasized, responsibility for the detainees in his custody would be his alone. The facility, recently given the name of Äschenwald but still known locally as Czas, was not (unlike, for example, Theresienstadt or Buchenwald) intended as a way station , but as a terminus. This distinction was repeated twice. Was the Standartenführer aware of the policy of the Führer, and of the party as an organ of his will, and of the will of the Great Germanic Race, with regard to the Ultimate Answer to the Racial Dilemma?

The Standartenführer submitted, humbly, that he was.

The little man said nothing for a moment. His eyes were pinkish, vestigial, the eyes of a cave-dwelling prawn. The resemblance to the Reichsführer-SS was nearly perfect. His uniform rasped and crackled as he breathed.

“Very good,” he said finally. “I have no doubt, Facility Director von Toula, that you shall do your work well. Your Slavic blood may actually be to your advantage in this case.” He took off his wire-rimmed spectacles and began to polish them with a greasy scrap of silk. “Do you have any questions?”

My great-uncle reflected a moment, biting his lip, then saluted and turned on his heels. He had no questions at all, as it happened: not one. He knew exactly what he had to do.

* * *

Few records of the Äschenwald camp have survived: the Waffen-SS set fire to the compound in the war’s final hours, and the Red Army leveled what little remained. The Black Timekeeper might have been blessedly lost to history if not for a forest-green ledger, wrapped first in oilskin, then in fireproof asbestos cloth, found in the cast-iron reservoir of the latrines.

Much has been made of this text, and of what it might mean. Proof as it is of the crimes perpetrated at Czas, the care that was taken to preserve the ledger is generally interpreted as evidence that someone — some never-identified assistant to the facility director, perhaps; someone with access to the most restricted precincts of the camp — wanted the Timekeeper’s crimes to come to light, and must therefore have felt some stirrings of remorse, however primitive. I’d very much like to believe that, Mrs. Haven, but my guess is that Waldemar hid the ledger himself, confident that it would be exhumed and studied. My great-uncle feared nothing, ultimately, as much as the indifference of posterity. He was still a man of science, after all.

* * *

Over the years since he’d confessed his ideas to his brother in the garret of the Brown Widow’s villa, the seed of Waldemar’s theory of rotary time — the notion that chronology is an illusion, if not a deliberate lie; that the steady, one-way current we seem to be suspended in is actually a jumble of spherical “chronocosms” that can be moved through in any direction, if some great force manages to knock one’s consciousness out of its preconditioned circuit — had grown progressively more elaborate, attaching itself to random scraps of knowledge in the course of its creator’s wanderings, like a peach pit rolled across a dirty floor. The eugenic theories of Sir Francis Galton were among these bits of litter, as were The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and, of course, Mein Kampf ; but the single largest and most ponderous addition was the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin’s great Gallic rival, the chevalier Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Lamarck, a pioneer in the fields of zoology and genetics, is now best remembered — if he’s remembered at all — for his concept of “soft inheritance,” which was famously exploited (and rapidly eclipsed) by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Lamarck believed that the traits an animal acquires in the course of its life can be transmitted to the next generation, the most notorious example being the neck of the giraffe. His hypothesis — that giraffes strain their necks to reach leaves, stretching them in the process, and that each generation is therefore born with slightly longer necks than the one preceding — sounds like something out of Kipling’s Just So Stories now, and science instructors the world over (my own eighth grade biology teacher, Leon J. Forehand, included) know that the chevalier’s theory can always be relied on for a chuckle. My great-uncle, however, saw nothing funny about Lamarck’s ideas at all — and Äschenwald-Czas itself stands as the proof.

Here are the final four entries in Waldemar’s log, as reproduced in Höhne’s ghoulish survey:

12 MARCH 1943, 07:57:07—

Having been dogged & delayed by a legion of Trifles I now finally set forth on the Course proposed in my entry of 23 February. This gap of 19 days (automatically, I find myself doing the arithmetic: 456 wasted hours!) has reduced me to a condition of nervous exhaustion. Such is the vicious Wheel of Circumstance, the cercle diabolique the Chevalier describes in his monograph “Trials of the Researcher,” adding that those of a visionary bent, in particular, are liable to be plagued by les intrusions banales.

It is tempting, considering the Breach — half my earthly duration! — between my original Breakthrough & this long-awaited chance to put my Theory to the test, to suspect that the same super-national Cabal of Semites that perpetrates & maintains the Illusion of Chronology has been using Time Itself as a weapon against me; but I have no such exalted notions of my importance to the Cause. The indignities I have suffered at the hands of mono-directional Time are shared by every mortal Soul on Earth. Sic Gloriam Orbes.

In the four thousand Years since the Jew slithered forth from the turgid Cunt of necrophilic Asia, the human Species has subsided into Decadence. What are Moses & Christ Jesus & Constantine & Pius XII & Martin Luther & even Kaiser Friedrich himself but Iterations of the same Passion play of Self-Aggrandizement & Miscarriage & Degradation, played out ceaselessly across the most corrupt of Stages? The Age of Epics — of Freya & Odin, of Yggdrasil the World-Tree, & of the pale-eyed Saints & Warriors who defend it — lies not, as any Child knows, in our purported Future, but entirely in our Past. The Cardinal Sin of Science is precisely that for which Science is most slaveringly praised: its dread & unrelenting Forward Motion.

What great good Fortune, then! that this infamous Forward Motion is a myth.

In the 17 years since my eyes became Opened I have been nurturing my Vision patiently — sheltering it, fattening it, developing it into a unified & coherent Theory, a foundation for future Research; & as a result I feel, despite a lack of Evidence, a new man entirely. More in fact than a man, because my New Self encompasses both the male & the female. I am the mother, after all, of an Idea.

12 MARCH 1943, 09:57:07—

Three things are required, the Chevalier writes, to conduct an Experiment successfully:

1 * A Laboratory (or some equivalently controlled Environment) whose conditions can be altered to suit the Needs of the Experiment.

2 * An isolated Population of potential Subjects. &, finally

3 * Clarity of Purpose: a hypothesis whose proof (or disproof) is the stated Goal of the experimental Trials.

I address these three points in ascending Order. My purpose, in initio, is to demonstrate the Kinship between the Chevalier’s principles of “soft” Inheritance — the heritability of acquired Characteristics—& my own Ideas concerning spontaneous adaptation — or Evolution — under extremes of environmental Stress.

This, however, is only the preliminary phase of my Research. The second phase, the Culmination of 17 years of arse-sniffing & subterfuge, the Reason I’ve allowed myself to be deported by my rivals to this godforsaken Polish abattoir (as if I myself were an Israelite) is neither more nor less than This: