Out of Time Read online

  The orphanage had a name, though not many noticed it or remembered it: the Maria Torreon Home. It had been endowed by an Army General who had lost his wife years before, and still dolefully mourned for her.

  Most of the nuns were Mexican, though there were a few outsiders – Nicaraguans mostly, and an Italian-English nun named Sister Agnes, who had been there forever. Occasionally someone from North America would come for a short term on an exchange program, while one of the Mexican sisters went to Los Angeles to take her place. The only member of the community to look forward to these exchanges was the one going to California.

  Sister Josephine from the Hospice of the Sacred Heart in Oakland, California had been at the orphanage several days before the children began to take on individual form for her. Until then they had been a confusion of black-haired dark-skinned bodies, some quick and darting, some ponderous and heavy.

  Not surprisingly, one of the first children to become a recognisable being for her was the only child in the orphanage of Anglo-Saxon appearance. A boy of about ten, he had the blond hair and lightly tanned skin of the young nun’s little brother at home in the States. Yet this boy was different. He had a disconcerting way of looking through people. He looked right into their eyes but appeared to see nothing. He did not respond to the friendly greetings Sister Josephine began to offer whenever their paths crossed, and some instinct told her not to press for an answer. At the first opportunity, however, she started asking other nuns about the boy. The answers were hardly satisfactory. He was named Grigor; he had been plucked off the streets where he had been living the usual life of a child-beggar; he kept to himself, communicating with no-one; he ‘could be’ North American, but was more likely to be half-caste; he was obsessed with aeroplanes.

  Sister Josephine had the opportunity herself to witness this last idiosyncracy. Whenever the small silver wedge of an aeroplane appeared in the sky, Grigor became agitated and excited, pointing to it and jumping up and down. It was hard to tell what emotion he was expressing, as the sounds he emitted belonged to no recognisable language. Grigor spent much of his time drawing in the dirt; when the American nun knelt beside him one day to look at his drawings, she realised that they were all drawings of aircraft. She supplied him with paper and a pencil and watched, curious, as he transferred his dirt drawings to the paper. Something that had not been clear in the dust of the Mexican orphanage became apparent on the new surface: his aeroplanes were all shown in a wrecked state. They were all crashed upon the ground, with bodies strewn around them.

  As she watched Grigor, a terrible theory began to form in Sister Josephine’s mind. Supposing this was an American boy? Supposing he had been in a plane crash, surviving where others had not? Supposing he had wandered away from the wreckage before the rescuers came, so that he was presumed to have died along with his fellow-travellers? And, too young and too shocked to explain his predicament, had ended up in the streets, struggling to stay alive? The scenario was plausible; it did not require a leap of the imagination, just a few hops.

  The young nun put her theory to her supervisor. Sister Angelique heard her through, her only expression a little smile. The smile grew as the American talked, but never became mocking.

  ‘You Americans,’ she said at last, ‘you are so romantic.’

  ‘But,’ Sister Josephine argued, ‘it is possible.’

  ‘Oh yes, it is possible.’

  ‘Would you mind if I tried to find out a little more?’

  Sister Angelique considered for a long time.

  ‘You may do so,’ she at last conceded, ‘as long as the child’s stability is not affected. And as long as you do not become distracted from your other duties. There is only room for one obsession in the Church.’

  Armed with this licence, Josephine began her search for Grigor’s past. She conducted it with as much energy as she could muster in the slow humidity of Mexico. But her energy was not matched by anyone else whom she tried to enlist. Her efforts were met with indifference or amusement. ‘Crazy gringo’ seemed to be the unspoken attitude. One street kid, what does it matter? American, Mexican, Eskimo, who cares?’ No-one seemed to have a particular memory of Grigor, nor of his antecedents.

  In desperation, as her stay in Mexico drew to a close, the sister visited the U.S. Consulate and explained the case to the Consul. The Consul listened indulgently, then threw back her head and laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘That’s a new one! They didn’t brief us on that at the State Department! But you must forgive me if I say that your story, though wonderfully seductive, is a bit thin. And too far-fetched for the Diplomatic Corps!’ But she was curious enough to come out to the Maria Torreon Home to visit Grigor, who was as indifferent to her as he was to everyone else. ‘Surely,’ the Consul asked, ‘if he was American, he would respond more enthusiastically to you and me?’ Sister Josephine was forced to agree that this was a weakness in her case.

  On her last day the nun bought a present for the perplexing little boy. She chose the obvious gift, one that was sure to delight, a model of a jet, painted white with a red stripe. As she walked to the car that was waiting to take her to the airport she detoured to give the model to the child. He saw it in her hand, stared, grabbed at it. Then he said, in urgent, perfect English: ‘Fasten your safety belts. Put your head between your knees.’ He ran away, through the dust, across the yard, away from the astonished face of the young Californian sister.

  JAMES CAME UP the steps after school, zigzagging from side to side and missing every third step. The cockatoo’s cage was swinging on the verandah, as though it had been given a push by a passer-by. A leaf dropping lazily from an elm tree reached something – a gap in the air? – and skidded downwards in a quick and sudden spiral. James slipped around it and continued along the verandah, to enter the house by a side door.

  He visited the kitchen before going upstairs to his room. The woman there turned around when he came in.

  ‘Oh, James,’ she said. ‘Do you want a sandwich? I’ve made myself a late lunch.’

  James waited for his sandwich, then took it, on its plate, along with a glass of milk and his schoolbag, upstairs: a journey that was a triumph of balance and coordination. He ate the sandwich at his desk, watching the oak tree with practised eyes. Its green was too green, its brown too brown for him to believe in it, but he liked its daytime softness and colour, so different from the silver and grey of night.

  A fragment of music drifted up the stairs and slipped into the room like steam. James cocked his head, mouth open, the half-eaten sandwich stuck in the air.

  ‘Coming to the signpost,’ the husky voice on the tape sang,

  ‘Coming to the signpost

  I can’t look where I’m going to,

  I can’t see where I’m going,

  Till I first see where I’ve been.’

  The tape was abruptly turned off, there was a clatter of laughter, loud voices and footsteps. A door slammed. James reached out over the windowsill, almost past his centre of balance, and touched the branch of the tree. He ran his warm hand along it, prodding at the little bumps and buds. The surface looked rough but felt smooth. Through the crowds of leaves he could see people moving across the square: tiny snapshots of black or pinkish-white skin, a cap, a moustache, a pair of boots, a smiling mouth, a Security badge on a grey-green lapel. Framed in the widest gap was the portico and door of the main Administration building. As James scanned the square, the door of the big white building opened, and the Director came out. He paused on the top step for a moment, and stood glancing around him. James became very still. The Director, perfectly groomed, trim in his light-grey suit, nodded as one of the Americans passed him, then continued his perusal of the quadrangle. Suddenly his face tilted up a little until he seemed to be looking right at James’ window. James stood back in the shadows, his mouth slightly open, not daring to move. After a moment the Director’s mood changed: as though a button had been pressed he set off briskly towards the new lab, Building H. But for s
ome minutes after he had gone from sight, James still stood aside, the shadows of the leaves dappling his body.

  JAMES SLIPPED SILENTLY into Mr Woodforde’s lab. A metre inside the door he braked, waiting, then tiptoed forward. Mr Woodforde, old and tired and overdone, was asleep, head down on the front desk, glasses slanting across his nose. James stopped again and watched. Then something about the stillness of the man caused him to wait on his breath, to open his mouth, and prickle all over. Nothing moved in the lab, not the fly on the window, not the electric fan overhead, not the eyes or mouth or chest of the still man. His stillness was not sleep. His stillness was suddenly reflected in James, who himself went into a kind of death, that lasted. . . how long? Perhaps only two or three minutes.

  James moved forward, directly for once, his usual wanderings cut off by the power of death. He did not touch Mr Woodforde, but stared at him closely, his face just centimetres away from the man’s. There was a kind of dullness about the skin that he intensely disliked. He looked away, along the bench. He saw the familiar notebooks, a couple of calculators, a pile of books, and there, in the middle of it all, surrounded by pens and tools and pieces of chalk, the calculator-sized piece of equipment that Mr Woodforde had been making.

  James picked it up. It looked finished. He examined it closely. He had a good understanding of what Mr Woodforde had been building and of what the scientist had believed this machine could do. It never occurred to James to doubt the concept but he did not know whether his friend had completed the task. He turned it over curiously in his hand. It looked complex, but robust. He inspected it closely. Each of the four panels contained all the numbers from 0 to 9. James set himself to remember some details. Top panel, latitude, second, longitude, third, date and fourth, time. Or was it time, then date? James carefully pressed in the coordinates that Mr Woodforde had written on the blackboard that day: 150° 50’ 51”, 34° 15’ 21”. Then he keyed in the date. He didn’t know whether to put the 19 in front of the year so he left it out. Then, with a pale sidelong glance at Mr Woodforde’s body, he keyed in 3.44, not the correct time, but two minutes earlier.

  There were two more keys at the bottom, one marked ‘Enter’ and the other ‘Return’. Greatly daring, James pressed ‘Enter’. There was a pause. Then the little screen flashed up the words: INSUFFICIENT INTEGERS ENTERED.

  James was now in a quandary. He thought the message on the screen might refer to the missing prefix of 19, but he wasn’t sure what integers were. He also didn’t like being in the lab with a dead body. He had loved Mr Woodforde but he hated his body. And finally, although he had never heard of anyone but himself and occasional cleaners visiting Lab 17, he did not want to risk being caught there. He had already made up his mind to take the machine with him; if he was caught in the room the opportunity would be lost.

  He squeezed the machine into his pocket, grabbed a few pieces of paper that Mr Woodforde had been writing on, and sidled around the room to the door. Without a backward glance he left the lab and ran anticlockwise around the square. He reached his bedroom by shinnying up the oak tree and crawling precariously along the branch. At last, sitting at his desk, panting with fear and excitement and tiredness, he pulled out the papers from Mr Woodforde’s workbench.

  He was hoping to find instructions for the use of the machine on the sheets. Nervously he started reading:

  The work of Roy P Kerr (1963) on the structures of black holes, and the contributions of Martin Kruskal of Princeton on the consequences of the black hole/white hole relationship, led to the hypothesis that Wheeler and Faynman’s single particle theory and Kruskal’s theory of a parallel universe were the key to escaping from the linear sequential model of time. It was further hypothesised that an extraordinary energy source, enabling the subject to jump through the ring singularity of the rotating black hole, would enable the subject to pass at will between the parallel universes.

  Work commenced in December, 1988 at the National Defence Forces’ Research Centre, with the first object of discovering or developing a means to facilitate travel faster than light and hence to control the transfer of matter to antimatter. I can now state that such a means has been devised, which has passed all tests and opened remarkable possibilities to physicists as well as members of other disciplines.

  There was much more of this, punctuated by comments in the margin by Mr Woodforde that seemed to be little jokes he was making with himself, like ‘pause for gasps of wonder’ next to the second paragraph and ‘beware of overkill’. James read the margin comments and the first two paragraphs of the text, but even those he did not understand. The article stopped abruptly, apparently in the middle of a paragraph, on the fourth page.

  James sighed, put the notes aside, and picked up the machine. It did not look like a machine but he did not know what else to call it. He started to press in numbers again, and although he kept doing so until he was too tired to continue, he had no success. Nothing seemed to happen.

  *

  IN THE MORNING while James was passing the window to reach his wardrobe, he became dimly aware of a faint clamour across the square. He stopped and looked out. He saw a sight that, for him, was unprecedented. People were coming in and out of Lab 17. As he watched, two security officers came out of the lab and walked towards the main Administration building. On their way they passed a woman in a white coat, someone whom James hadn’t seen before. A few minutes later, a grey station wagon backed in near the lab.

  James’ first instinct was to rush into his clothes and leave the house to insinuate himself in whatever was happening. But his second thoughts were wiser. He realised that he had to keep away from Lab 17. Any appearance he made there now might cause someone to make connections. The sight of him in the area might trigger off a series of speculations: ‘He’s been around here a few times, hasn’t he?. . . I think he even went into the lab occasionally. . . Woodforde was pretty good with him, didn’t mind him hanging around. . . wonder if he’s been in there since Woodforde died? Shouldn’t there have been more of Woodforde’s work in that lab?. . . Grab that kid for a sec, ask him a few questions. He understands what you say to him well enough. . .’

  James stayed where he was. He kept watching. Nothing much happened for quite a time. Just before lunch, a stretcher with a covered body-shape on it was carried out and loaded into the station wagon. A few passers-by glanced at it with curiosity but kept walking. The station wagon drove away.

  James went downstairs to get some lunch, then returned to his room, stuffed the device in his pocket, and left the house. He went to the entrance of the complex, passed through the security barriers, went past the big white sign saying ‘Between 1800 and 0900 all vehicles must use Gate 3’, and through the line of pine trees into the Toyne Paddock.

  It was not an attractive paddock. It was on the road to the tip, so plastic bags and sheets of newspaper were always scattered across it, flitting towards other destinations. The field was bare and clodded, with scruffy patches of grass. James squatted near the middle of the field, behind a mound of earth that provided a windbreak. With some difficulty he extricated the machine from his pocket and sat looking at it. He had tried, he thought, every possible variation, with no result. Perhaps after all Mr Woodforde had been old and stupid and had been wrong about the whole thing.

  A large piece of paper blew towards him, almost into his face. Suddenly James’ mind cleared. He remembered the sign at the entrance to the Centre. ‘Between 1800 and 0900. . .’ Wasn’t it likely that Mr Woodforde would use military time? Feverishly he started pushing numbers into the calculator. . . 150° 50’ 51”, 34° 15’ 21”. . . Again he paused at the date, finally resolving on the compromise of a zero in front of the month, but no century in front of the year. And then the time, going back four minutes, and pressing 1327. And, with mouth as dry as corn chips, he pressed ‘Enter’.

  Still nothing. He started again, undeterred, confident. 150° 50’ 51”, 34° 15’ 21”, and this time the date with the century prefix.
The time, 1328. Enter.

  Suddenly, for the briefest instant of time, for a blink, James saw nothing. Not a blankness, not a greyness or blackness, not a wall, not a vast open space, but nothing. He felt disgustingly sick in the stomach. Then, at enormous speed, waves of dizziness pulsated through his body, as though he was being rocked by all the storms in all the ships in all the seas of the world. He realised he had shut his eyes at some stage and that they were still shut, but that was the only coherent thought he had. He had no inclination to open them, did not even think of it, could not form intentions. He felt that he was coming apart, ceasing to be. Until, with equally dazzling sudden speed, he felt his body tingling together again, stinging into a kind of giddy, staggering unity. He was on his feet, lurching a little, then stable, settled, with nothing worse than a ringing in his ears. His legs started to move, his senses to operate. He was just a few steps from the mound in the middle of the paddock. He went to it and squatted behind it, then extricated the machine from his pocket and looked at it. A large sheet of newspaper blew towards him, almost into his face. Suddenly he was filled with a tearing panic. Gritting his teeth he pressed ‘Return’ on the machine. Again there was the shocking glimpse of nothing before the disgusting sickness rocked through him, and the dizziness, the fuzziness, the sense that he had become empty inside and out.

  And there he was, standing on a street corner. He looked blankly around him, failing to recognise the scene. It took several seconds before he slowly identified it as the corner of Handbury Road and Wilson Street, about two blocks from the Centre, about three blocks from the Toyne Paddock. He looked at his watch. It said 1.33. He assumed that he was back in the present. Then he realised that he would never know.

  MOST OF THAT afternoon James wandered restlessly around his room, picking the machine up and fingering it, putting it down again. He felt confused and shaky, and he thought he had a headache. Several times he felt an overwhelming desire to go and hang around Mr Woodforde’s lab, and twice he actually started getting out the window to go there. It was only then that this death, the death of his friend, began to have meaning for him. He realised that it meant ‘never again’, it meant ‘an end’, it meant changes forced upon him. Now when he swung a leg out of the window he might as well swing it right back in. Once again, a slice of his life had been cut out: it had not been replaced and in its stead was nothing. Eventually some sand might dribble in and occupy the same space, but sand was always and only sand.