The Doomsday Box (29 page)

If Mr. Carradine wasn't here, who had worked the time gate to bring them back? “You weren't fiddling with the machinery by any chance?” she asked the soldier.

His grin disappeared at once. “Not permitted, miss,” he told her stiffly. “In fact, I'm supposed to arrest anybody who goes near it without permission. Now, if you'll follow me . . .”

Danny slipped beside her as they fell in behind the soldier. “Looks as if we managed it,” he whispered. His eyes were bright and excited.

“I think we must have,” Opal agreed cautiously. The corridors were bustling with service personnel, and there was no sign at all of plague. All the same, she could hardly believe it.

But her doubts vanished when the soldier showed them into a familiar office where Mr. Carradine was chatting to a hale and hearty Colonel Saltzman. “Where the hell have you four been?” demanded Mr. Carradine. “Your flight home leaves in a couple of hours.”

As the seat-belt sign went off, Opal said, “It was scary the way Mr. Carradine didn't remember anything about what happened.” She'd decided things had changed only
after
he triggered the time gate to bring them back, and then everything had switched instantly. If it hadn't worked that way, he would have forgotten before he brought them home, and they'd still be stuck in 1962.

“Well, he wouldn't, would he?” Michael said reasonably. “It's what we were talking about in the coffee shop. If the plague never got through, nobody died and he wouldn't have any need to send us on the mission.” He hesitated. “It was weird seeing Colonel Saltzman again, though. Like he'd come back from the dead.”

Opal was thinking about the coffee shop discussion as well. “Do you think we're dealing with a different Mr. Carradine now?”

“Only slightly.” Michael didn't seem particularly concerned.

“I'm still not sure about all this,” Opal said. “I think we should look out for small inconsistencies—things that are just a little bit different. I know Fuchsia says we're on the same time line, but we've obviously changed it.”

Michael shrugged. “Okay.” After a moment he added, “Nothing we can do about it if we have.”

“No,” Opal agreed, “but it would be nice to know.” She stared thoughtfully out of the plane window.

After a long moment, Michael said hesitantly, “Opal . . .”

Opal turned back to smile at him. “Yes, Michael?”

“There's something sort of . . . personal I want to ask you about. I tried to talk to Danny about it, but . . .” He trailed off, an embarrassed look on his face.

“What is it?” Opal asked.

Michael took a deep breath and blurted, “I'm an epileptic.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It's quite well controlled by the drugs I take, but every so often—what did you just say?”

“I said,
Yes, I know
.”

Michael's jaw dropped. “How?” he asked. “How do you know?”

“It was discussed by the team before you joined the Project.”

“But I didn't mention it at the medical,” Michael protested.

“This was long before your medical,” Opal said. “There's a full preliminary check on every operative before they're even approached to join. Any health problems are considered at that stage. The medical is just to confirm nothing new has turned up.”

“So I'm not going to be kicked out of the Project?”

Opal looked at him blankly. “What on earth for?” she asked.

With the terrorist threat index at its lowest for nearly seven months, their security restrictions on the plane were relaxed to some degree, but not abandoned altogether. Opal and Michael were seated together in first class. Danny and Fuchsia, to Danny's immense irritation, shared adjacent seats in economy. “I think I'll lodge a diplomatic protest when we're back in London,” he muttered darkly.

Fuchsia had her nose in a book. “What was that?” she asked absently.

“Nothing.” Danny stared out the window, wondering if the wing might break off.

T
he residents of Manor House Meadows seemed a lot sharper and more fit than the usual population of an old folks' home. Of course, the CIA training might have had something to do with that: all the residents were former agents.

“Bishop to d-seven,” Opal murmured. She glanced fondly at the man seated opposite. He had the sort of blue-eyed granite face of Paul Newman. Somehow he'd managed to retain almost all of his hair, although it had turned snow white.

“Could be a mistake,” he told her, fingering his rook. She knew better than to take either the remark or the gesture seriously. He was big into psychological chess, using every opportunity to throw her off her game.

Opal moved the bishop and sat back. As he considered his own move, she decided on a little psychological warfare of her own. “Remember the first time we met, Sam?”

“In Moscow? Sure I do. I'm not that senile.”

“What was your code name then? Snake-in-the-Grass or something?”

“Cobra,” he said. “You know damn well.”

Opal hung her head so he wouldn't see the grin. After a moment she looked up again. “Remember when we were in your apartment and I still thought you were Colonel Menshikov?”

He stopped fingering the rook and grunted without taking his eyes off the board.

Opal said thoughtfully, “You handed me your gun and told me to shoot you so I would start to trust you. You remember that too?”

“Like it was yesterday.” He tilted his head to one side. “I'll let you take back that move if you want.”

“No, thank you,” Opal said. “I was wondering . . .”

He looked up. “What were you wondering, Ms. Harrington?”

“I was wondering what you'd have done if I
had
shot you,” Opal said. “In the leg or the shoulder or somewhere.”

He looked at her for a long time, then gave a slow grin. “Don't be stupid, Opal. You think I'd risk handing you a
loaded
gun?” He picked up the rook again and moved it one square forward.

Opal responded with her king's knight. “So you didn't trust us?”

“Not then.”

“When did you decide? Can you remember?”

“To trust you? Course I can. It was when Danny showed me the poison ring.” His eyes took on a distant look. “That ring belonged to my grandfather. Passed it down to my father, who passed it on to me. Always knew I'd give it to my own son one day.” He reached down to move his queen. “Checkmate,” he said.

T
he stories told in this novel about the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project reflect two widespread rumors about the secret activities of the United States government. The question is: are they true?

The Philadelphia rumor doesn't seem to be, at least not the way it's told—and there are several different versions circulating. U.S. naval records show the
Eldridge
wasn't even in Philadelphia on May 23, 1944, the day the incident was supposed to have taken place. According to the ship's log, it was on convoy duty at the time, acting as a destroyer escort, and was seen by several other ships.

And when it comes to the Montauk Project, I think we're dealing with pure urban myth. Although I've listened to what purports to be a firsthand account of what happened in an underground base at Montauk, there are too many inconsistencies for it to be believable.

But time travel itself is something else. I am convinced that time travel is possible, and that there is evidence for its having taken place.

Einstein's relativity theory clearly shows there are circumstances in which time travel can—indeed must—occur. Einstein spelled it out in his famous Twins Paradox.

You begin with identical twins, one of whom joins the crew of a spaceship traveling close to the speed of light. The other twin stays home.

Assume both twins were thirty years of age when they separated. Imagine the space voyage lasted five years. On the ship, the astronaut twin ages five years according to every measure he can apply. But if the spaceship is traveling at 99 percent the speed of light, Einstein's theory of relativity shows that time is moving
seven times slower
on board than it is on the ground. That means the twin who stayed home has aged thirty-five years—he is now sixty-five years old.

In other words, just because the astronaut raced at breakneck speed around the galaxy, he's now thirty years younger than his twin brother. Or put another way, when he lands again, he discovers he has voyaged thirty years into the future so far as life on Earth is concerned. And that, by any reasonable criterion, is time travel.

While time travel to order using marvelous machines is still well beyond our current technology, there is evidence that spontaneous time travel also can happen. One of the most striking case studies involves a place named Kersey.

Kersey is a charming little English village in the Suffolk countryside. You can see the church tower for miles, and the church itself—first built sometime in the tenth century A.D.—is visible from just about everywhere in the village.

When I visited the place, I found a well-made tarmacadam road running through the village and admired its picturesque stream—locals call it the Water-Splash—spanned by an ornamental footbridge. There is a scattering of thatched cottages, a couple of pleasant pubs and stores. It's one of those places that changes very slowly, and the way it looks today isn't all that different from the way it looked in 1957 when three teenage cadets with HMS
Ganges,
a Royal Navy shore-training establishment at Shotley, were sent off to survey it as part of an orientation exercise.

The survival exercise was carried out over a cold weekend in October. The boys, Cadets William Lang, Michael Crowley, and Ray Baker (all fifteen years old) were assigned to find the village and report back on everything they saw.

They followed a road for a time, then cut across some fields. Shortly afterward, they came across a gray stone cottage surrounded by large oak trees. A farm laborer pointed them in the direction of Kersey. Ten minutes later, they came in sight of the village. From their vantage point, they could see the roofs of the houses and the high tower of Kersey's church. They also clearly heard the sound of church bells as they left the fields to take the lane down into the village. But as they approached within a hundred yards of the church itself, the bells abruptly stopped.

The church, which had been visible from the fields above the village, was now hidden behind trees growing on the mound on which the building stands. The boys walked in an eerie silence until, turning a corner of the lane, they had their first sight of the village itself. What they saw was quite different from the Kersey of modern times.

The stream was still there, running down the center of the village, but the tarmacadam road was gone, as were most of the houses. In their place was a dirt track with two or three miserable-looking dwellings widely scattered on its left-hand side. There were no houses or cottages at all on the right, just tall forest trees.

The track ran down to the stream, then rose beyond it to the northern end of the village, where there were a few more houses, all of them dirty, small, and old. The stream was crossed by a bridge, but nothing like the bridge that's there today: it was no more than two wooden planks with four posts and a handrail. The only living things in the place were some motionless ducks on the waters of the stream. There were no parked cars, no telephone lines, no radio aerials—nothing at all, in fact, to suggest a modern lifestyle.

Both village pubs and all but one of Kersey's shops had disappeared. The boys jumped the stream and went to examine the one shop remaining, a butcher's in which skinned ox carcasses were hanging. But the meat was green with age, and the whole place was covered in filthy cobwebs, as if it had been left derelict for months. Other buildings were equally strange. Not one seemed to have furniture, or even curtains.

The boys had the eerie feeling of being watched, although there was not so much as a dog on the street, and their unease increased. Their slow progress up the village street got faster and faster until suddenly they were running for their lives. They turned a corner at the top of the street and stopped, breathless, to look back. Suddenly the church bells chimed, the church itself was clearly visible, the village was repopulated. Normality had returned.

The boys' story was thoroughly investigated by Andrew MacKenzie, then the vice president of the
Society for Psychical Research, London. He concluded that the three boys had somehow traveled back to medieval times, when Kersey was hurriedly abandoned after an outbreak of the Black Death.

Finally, Fuchsia's precognitive talent is a documented phenomenon in the real world—it accounts for some 80 percent of all reported examples of psychic ability. The annals of psychical research provide an almost endless stream of predictive case histories, from the dreams of John Dunne, an engineer who proved capable of seeing the future in his sleep, to the premonitions of dozens of people throughout the British Isles who foresaw the coal-slip disaster at Aberfan, South Wales, that cost the lives of 116 schoolchildren.