Departure (9 page)

SABRINA MARCHES PAST ME LIKE NOTHING'S AMISS, HEADING
down the aisle to the right, where she begins to work feverishly, treating the injured passengers coming in.

I stand there, frozen to the spot. Yul—that must be the trim Asian guy's name—moves out cautiously and faces me, as if he's waiting for me to comment.

My first instinct is to say, “I didn't hear anything,” but I bite off the words in time, thank God. Nothing says “I heard every word” more loudly and clearly—I might as well say, “Hey, so I hear you might be connected to whatever caused the crash, and part of an ongoing conspiracy. Care to comment?”

I settle for looking guilty and a barely audible “Hiya.”

Yul walks down the left-hand aisle without a word. When he gets to his row in business, he glances back at me for just a little too long before sliding into his seat.

I slump against the cockpit wall, taking the weight off my right
leg, and press my burning forehead against the cool surface. It feels good. So does the cold wind blowing in through the door. Since they moved me to the plane I've swung between chills and fever, but now it's only fever, burning relentlessly inside me. I know what my decision has to be, if I want to live. And I do want to live.

When I glance up, the shock of what I see consumes me. Am I hallucinating? Sabrina's gotten the first few incoming patients cleaned off. They're . . . old. I recognize some of these people, from the lakeside, but they seem to have aged decades in a single day. Their faces are wrinkled and hollow, but it's more than that. These people are really old, all over, not just starved and exhausted.

I'm not the only one unnerved by this. Sabrina's losing control. Her eyes are wild, her motions quick and sloppy. Something very, very strange is happening here. Does she know what it is? Or is she finally losing it? Either way, it's not good news for any of us.

Pushing away from the wall, I step forward into the first-class galley, ready to lunge into my seat in the first row. There's a brief flash in my peripheral vision to the right—a man running through the door, carrying a woman. They collide with me before I can turn, the woman landing on my right leg.

AWARENESS. PAIN. I'M IN MY
seat again, my legs outstretched. It's pitch-black outside now, night for sure. Still raining.

A woman I don't know sits on the floor in front of me, her back flat against the wall. She rises and holds out her open hand, on which rests a large white pill. “Sabrina said to take this.”

I take the pill and toss it back. My throat's so dry it takes half a bottle of water to get it down.

I let my drenched head fall back to the headrest and watch as passengers drag three limp bodies past me toward the exit. All dead.

I focus on the faces. Nate isn't among them. Neither is the Indian girl in the Disney World shirt. It's the new arrivals, the people that just came in from the lake. Two more go by. How many have died? Another body passes. The faces are even older than when they arrived. What's happening here?

Behind me I hear Sabrina's voice. Her droning monotone has
turned to a sharp bark, harsh and urgent. She's interrogating passengers, barely waiting for their responses: “Where do you reside? Have you visited any of these clinics: King Street Medical in New York City, Bayside Primary Care in San Francisco, or Victoria Station Clinic in London? Did you get a flu shot at any of these locations? Do you take a multivitamin? What brand? Do you use an air freshener at home? Do you have any chronic medical conditions?”

Then she's at my side, no preamble, hammering me with the same list of questions, barely waiting for answers. The only doctor I've seen in years is my gynecologist, I tell her. I didn't get a flu shot this year, and I take a women's multivitamin. When I fumble for the brand name, she leans in and grills me like a murder suspect at Scotland Yard. I finally come up with the brand, and she scribbles it down, nodding, like it's the clue that will nab Jack the Ripper. Then she's gone.

I sit up, glance out of the pod. They're hauling two more people out.

The pain moves down a notch, mellows. I know this feeling, know what she gave me: a pain pill.

Sleep comes in seconds.

I AWAKE TO DARKNESS AND
silence. The pain is back. I turn, looking back down the aisle, but I can't make anything out. There's almost no moonlight filtering through the small windows. It's still raining, but not as hard, just a steady pitter-patter now.

I lie there, letting my eyes adjust.

On my right, a slim figure slips by. Yul.

Faint footsteps behind me. A woman, black hair, about my height. Mechanical walk. Sabrina.

Three seconds later I hear the click of a thick metal door closing.

I stretch my good leg out into the aisle, test the other. Not good. I limp, hop, and drag myself through the galley, keeping as quiet as I can.

They're being more careful this time, and I have to stand close to the door to hear anything.

“We did this,” Sabrina insists.

“You don't know that.”

“I do.”

“Correlation is not causation, Sabrina. You ask every passenger the right questions, and eventually you'll discover that they all know somebody who knows Kevin Bacon.”

“Who's Kevin Bacon?” Sabrina asks urgently. “Another agent? A passenger?”

“No—”

“How does Bacon figure into this?”

“Christ, Sabrina. Forget Kevin Bacon.”

“I want to know everything they had you do, every move you made before we boarded the flight.”

“All right.” Yul sounds exasperated. “What are they dying of?”

“Old age.”

“What?”

“They're dying from different diseases, conditions that I assume would have developed in time as they aged,” Sabrina says. “But it's happening to them all at once.”

“Why aren't we affected?”

“I don't know. Only half the passengers seem to have the condition.”

The voices begin to fade, and I lean closer, trying to hear them. A sound, a low rumble, is blotting them out. It's not coming from the cockpit. It's outside.

As I step back from the door, a bright spotlight breaks through the small oval windows, running quickly along the length of the plane. Through the rain, the roar grows louder. Then the light blinks off, and the sound recedes.

The cockpit door flies open, and Yul and Sabrina rush out. They don't stop to interrogate me with their eyes this time. Yul jerks the exit door open and peers into the dark, dense forest, where rain drips unevenly down through the trees.

He glances back at me.

I nod. “I saw it, too: a beam of light ran over the plane.”

Yul looks at Sabrina, opening his mouth to say something, but a crunching sound outside the plane stops him. Boots, grinding the fallen underbrush into the forest floor. Someone is running straight toward us, though I can't make out who.

Someone from the lake? A rescue team? Or . . .

Yul jerks a phone from his pocket, activates the flashlight app, and holds it out. The light is weak, but it's just enough to reveal shapes moving out there. At first it looks like rain catching on invisible, maybe human forms—three of them, barreling toward the plane.

Before we can react, the first form charges up the rickety stairs and stops on the landing. It stands over six feet, glittering in the cold glow of Yul's phone, like a glass figurine.

It raises its right arm toward Yul, then Sabrina, then me, firing three rapid shots, almost silent pops of air with no flash of light. My chest explodes in pain.

FOR SEVERAL SECONDS MIKE, BOB, AND I STAND
there, staring at the tall stone columns of Stonehenge, perfectly formed and aligned. How? No,
how
isn't the right word. When? There are only two possibilities: we're in the past (a past we don't understand at all), or we're in the future—a future in which this huge monolithic monument has been rebuilt.

I scan the octagonal glass and metal structure for clues but find none—no writing, no symbols, no hints of what the year might be.

The glass panel reseals behind us with a soft click, breaking the silence. Bob opens his mouth to speak, but a neutral, computerized voice drowns him out.

“Welcome to the interactive Stonehenge exhibit. To begin your tour, follow the path to your right. For your safety and the preservation of this historic monument, please do not leave the path.”

Tour. I look down, realizing for the first time that there's a glass-tile pathway around the perimeter. It lights up, flashing green arrows that
end at a pulsing red target, a bull's-eye where it wants us to stop. Without a word, the three of us follow the path, stopping at the red circle.

“What you see now is how scientists believe Stonehenge would have appeared approximately four to five thousand years ago, when it was completed. Follow the path to continue your journey into the past, exploring the stages of Stonehenge's construction.”

The glass tiles once again glow green, guiding us to another red bull's-eye twenty feet away.

“Structure's probably solar-powered,” Bob whispers as we shuffle toward the red beacon waiting in the path. I glance over at him, noticing that he looks even older now. The hike must have really taken a lot out of him.

The computer's voice changes slightly. “Would you like to hear about Stonehenge's connection to the solar calendar?”

We glance around at each other, confused, for a moment. “Maybe it can help us figure out what's happened here,” Bob says. “What year we're in.”

So he's made the leap, too.

“Let's try it.”

For the next fifteen minutes we pepper the computerized voice with questions. But it doesn't know anything, save for every possible thing there is to know about Stonehenge. Off-topic questions like “What year is it, by the way?” receive a curt, stock response: “Unfortunately, I cannot answer questions unrelated to Stonehenge. We need to keep your tour moving so that other visitors will have ample time to enjoy the exhibit.”

Clearly its programming doesn't include checking the line outside.

Mike, Bob, and I pace to the next red bull's-eye, lost in thought, wondering what to do next. Before us, the tall stone columns dissolve, leaving a vast green field that seems to extend beyond the far glass walls. Oxen pull giant stones through the field. Looking closer, I notice wooden tracks shaped like a trough below the stones. The tracks hold carved wooden roller balls that move the giant pillars along. Ingenious. For the time, anyway. Groups of people wearing animal furs direct the oxen through the field to the monument area, moving the tracks and balls to stay ahead.

“What you see now is the early construction of Stonehenge. Scientists believe Stonehenge was built over the course of a thousand years . . .”

It's a simulation. The whole structure is a hologram. Projectors of some kind must be recessed into the frame.

“End tour,” I say.

“Would you like to switch to the self-guided tour?”

“Yes.”

“Enjoy your tour of Stonehenge, brought to you through the generous support of the Titan Foundation.”

The field, oxen, and prehistoric workers dissolve, leaving only the crumbling stone ruin I saw twenty-eight years ago—or however long ago it was now. The glass enclosure must have been built to protect Stonehenge from the elements and vandals, to preserve this little piece of history for future generations.

Above us rain begins to pelt the glass ceiling, providing a sound track for this bizarre moment.

Mike points to the center of the green field. “Nick, look.”

Bodies. There must be a dozen of them, long dead, their bones protruding from tattered clothes.

Mike steps off the path toward them, but I catch his arm. “Be careful.”

The computer booms warnings about staying on the path, but we ignore it, which isn't hard—the rain's so loud now it almost drowns it out.

Mike creeps the last few feet to the bodies, kneels, and begins sifting through them.

“No IDs,” he calls.

“Doubt they'd have them in the future,” Bob says.

He's probably right. A printed, laminated ID would look archaic to the people who created this structure. They've probably moved to embedded chips, fingerprints, or even retinal scans.

Mike shakes his head. “No watches, phones, nothing. Just bones and clothes.”

Bob and I walk across the grass to join him. “They could have been picked clean by vandals.” Bob coughs. He's looking rough. Haggard.

I nod. Mentally, I try to organize my questions. How does this help us? What do this ruin and these bones tell us?

“Gentlemen,” Bob says, his voice weak but formal, “I believe we've just obtained a crucial piece of information.” He pauses, apparently awaiting guesses from his two favorite pupils.

I raise my eyebrows, prompting him.

He points to the bones. “This tells us that organized, effective government no longer exists in England. And hasn't for many years. Stonehenge is a World Heritage Site, but it's especially important to the British. If the government were still functioning, if civilization existed here, they wouldn't leave bones at Stonehenge. Not for a day, not for a week. These bones have been here for many years—decades, I would guess.”

Mike and I nod. That makes sense.

“What's next, Nick?” Bob asks.

“The farmhouse we saw on the way in. It's our only shot.” I glance up at the glass roof. The rain is really coming down now. I'm famished; we didn't stop to eat on the way in, and I'm sure Bob and Mike are hungry, too, though neither has said a word.

“Let's get a bite to eat, see if the rain lets up some.”

The three of us move away from the bones into a grassy area, sit Indian style, and have our late-afternoon picnic at Stonehenge. Surreal only begins to describe it. We consider sitting on an overturned pillar nearby, but it seems wrong somehow, whether there are any people left in this world or not. As I eat, I'm still preoccupied by the mysteries, even the small ones. The grass is better kept than on any golf course I've ever seen, for one thing. The structure must maintain the climate and grounds, too, somehow.

If we're in the future and a massive catastrophe has occurred, that would explain the lack of roads—or any sign of civilization, for that matter.

Mike shoves the last bit of his sandwich in his mouth and, still chewing, gets at the real mystery. “Can't get my head around the idea that we're in the future,” he says to no one in particular.

Bob clears his throat. Poor guy is struggling even to keep up with our eating pace. I set my sandwich down. The rain is pouring down;
we have some time. “Time travel is scientifically possible—actually, it happens every day,” he says. “Einstein theorized it with relativity, and we've been measuring it for decades. In fact, every person who has ever flown on a plane has traveled in time.”

Mike squints at me with a “Here we go” look, but I glance over at Bob, interested.

“The rate at which time passes changes throughout the universe, depending on gravity and velocity. Let me give you an example. Let's say twins were born today. One is placed on a spaceship and launched into space. The ship simply orbits our solar system, but it does it at an incredible speed—say ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light. That's what Einstein correctly identified as the speed limit for mass in our universe, though we're pretty sure some particles are capable of faster-than-light travel—which, by the way, opens all sorts of possibilities: quantum entanglement that enables data to travel faster than light, for one. But Einstein's limit, at least for particles with mass, may still hold.” Bob stops and scans our blank expressions. I'm really starting to like this guy, but he does get carried away sometimes.

“Anyway,” he continues, “back to the twins: one on Earth, one in a ship in space, going really, really fast. In fifty years the ship returns. The twin who stayed on Earth is fifty—a middle-aged man. The one on the spaceship? Still a baby, though he's aged a little, since the ship couldn't reach the speed of light without transforming into energy, and it takes some time to get up to speed. Bottom line: moving fast slows down time. So does gravity.”

“It's interesting, Bob.” I pause. “But you're talking about spaceships—pretty far removed from what we're dealing with here.”

“Okay, here's a real-life example: GPS. GPS was developed by the Department of Defense in the seventies to help get military assets exactly where they needed to be. It currently consists of twenty-four satellites in high orbit, around twenty thousand kilometers from Earth's surface. That's so far up there that Earth's gravity doesn't exert the same influence on the curvature of space-time. As I said, gravity slows time down. The stronger the gravity, the slower time passes. So the closer to Earth you are, the slower time goes. If you
get close enough to very, very strong gravity, say a black hole, time almost stands still. If you crossed the event horizon of a black hole in a spaceship, you would watch the entire fate of the universe unfold in the seconds before you were sucked into the center.

“But away from gravity, time goes faster—you experience more time, like a video on fast-forward. That's what happens to GPS satellites. General relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by forty-five microseconds each day. So for every day that passes here on Earth, up there, twenty thousand kilometers away from the gravity we experience, the GPS satellites experience one day and forty-five microseconds. Doesn't sound like much, but it's time travel. The satellites are moving into our future. But that's only half of what's going on up there.”

Mike rubs his eyelids. “You're making my brain hurt, Bob.”

“Stay with me here, Mike. There's another part of the GPS time travel puzzle: velocity. Remember our example with the twins?”

Bob waits, but neither Mike nor I volunteer an answer. It doesn't deter him at all.

“Right. So like our spaceship, these GPS satellites are flying really fast. They're not in geosynchronous orbit, like many people think. They circle the globe roughly every twelve hours, and they have to move at about fourteen thousand kilometers per hour to do that. That's fast. The speed of light is around a billion kilometers per hour, so it's only a fraction of that, but still fast enough to dilate time. But in this instance, instead of speeding up time, the velocity actually slows it down. Remember our twin on the spaceship? Time flowed slower for him. Gravity and velocity both slow time down. Special relativity predicts that, based on their velocity of fourteen thousand kilometers per hour, we should see these GPS clocks ticking more slowly by about seven microseconds per day—and they do. So the satellites' velocity slows time down for them by seven microseconds, while the lower gravity up there speeds it up by forty-five. When you put the effects predicted by special and general relativity together, each satellite should travel forward in time by about thirty-eight microseconds per day. And that's exactly what they do: clocks on the GPS satellites record thirty-eight microseconds each day that we don't observe here on Earth.”

“Yeah, but I mean, what does this have to do with our flight?” Mike asks.

“Everything. In fact, if we had landed at Heathrow, we would have traveled slightly back in time. JFK to Heathrow is a seven-hour flight, most of it at about thirty to forty thousand feet, flying at around six hundred miles per hour. We would have landed slightly younger than everyone who stayed on the ground. The time difference would have been insubstantial—a fraction of a second, maybe a hundred nanoseconds—but nevertheless, less time would have passed for us than them. And it gets even stranger: if we'd flown westward, against Earth's rotation—say, from JFK to Honolulu—we would have had a lower velocity than clocks on the ground, and landed slightly older.

“Bottom line: the closer you are to strong gravity, and the faster you move, the slower time goes. If you go fast enough, you can almost stop the flow of time, though you experience it as normal—from your point of view, the world outside you progresses at a faster rate.”

“Interesting,” I murmur, still taking it in. “But you're talking about fractions of a second.” I motion to the structure around us. “It seems like a lot more time has passed than that.”

“True. My working theory, Nick, is that our plane passed through a patch of space-time where gravity was distorted. It's the only reasonable explanation, given current scientific understanding. A gravimetric distortion would dilate space-time, making time flow slower or, in our case, faster. Say this distortion created a bubble in space-time, and our plane was in this bubble, where time passed at an incredible rate. If the bubble popped, it would dump us out at whatever time the clock stopped. There are only two possibilities: the gravimetric distortion was a natural occurrence—”

“Natural?” I ask.

“It's conceivable. We're pretty sure black holes exist—in fact, there may be one at the center of our galaxy. As I mentioned, they distort time, making it flow slower as objects approach. There could be other sorts of gravity depressions throughout the universe, some working in reverse, making time flow faster. We could have just gotten caught in a gravity storm—some natural phenomenon we don't yet understand. To be honest, we're still in the dark ages of aerospace science.”