The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (6 page)

I had to leave.

The feeling had been growing upon me for a while, and now it reached its ultimate proof. I could see no good outcome of remaining and had to go. It would not be as simple as walking out of the front door, but then sometimes the best escape plans are the simplest.

Why, in all my years in the east, had I not bothered to learn even a little kung fu?

The question seemed ridiculous now as I sat in my room and waited for dusk. There were guards–not dressed as guards clearly, but in my time I had learned enough of the rhythms of that place to recognise no fewer than five men on duty at any given moment, loitering quietly in the background waiting for a command. At seven every evening they swapped shifts, and the new team was usually still digesting its evening meal. That made them sloppy, slower and a little too relaxed. The land beyond my window was a mix of gorse and heather, and the milkman when he made his delivery had the thick accent of the North. I didn’t need much more than that. I had been a groundsman raised in these parts; I had lived and died by this soil in my first life and
knew how to survive on a moor. Phearson, for all his resources and his men, struck me as a city boy not used to the wild hunt. All I needed was to get beyond the walls.

As the land began to turn to a faded grey and 7 p.m. approached, I gathered up what resources I could. A kitchen knife I had stolen from dinner, a metal cup and a small metal plate purloined from the kitchen, a box of matches, bar of soap, toothbrush, toothpaste and a couple of candles. Phearson had been careful: there was little else readily available to an eager thief. He had given me paper to write down my recollections; on it I wrote two letters ready for my departing. I wrapped everything in my blanket and tied it to my back with strips of the sheet from my bed. At five minutes past seven, as the last light began to fade across the moor, I eased open my bedroom door, feeling every bit a ridiculous child, and headed downstairs.

There would be guards on the main and kitchen doors, but several slept on site and no one bothered to guard the bedrooms of the guards themselves. I found a heavy-duty coat and several pairs of socks in one of them, and a few precious shillings on the dresser, then headed towards the rear of the house to where a window opened on to a low coal-shed roof. I eased myself out feet first, balancing precariously on the edge, then dropped with a metal thud that rattled me to my very bones, and waited for retribution.

No retribution came, so I slipped further down, easing on to the gravel path that snaked around the house. To run was to declare my escape, so I walked at an easy swagger as I had heard the guards do, heart racing with every step, until I was finally behind the yew hedges and ready to run, which at last I did.

I was out of shape, having never been in much of a shape to get out of, and my confinement had hardly aided the process. But I wasn’t hugely burdened, and an odd exhilaration, a recollection of the sounds and smells of childhood and the moor, a liberation in the length of my own stride, powered me on. There was a wall all around the grounds, which I had noticed on my supervised walks in the garden, but it was a wall designed more for keeping strangers out than prisoners in, and it was a minimal challenge to find an old
oak tree whose lowest branch dangled over the yellow brick like a pirate’s gangplank. I climbed up, fingers brushing aside insects feeding on rotting wood, slipped along the branch as I had so many times as a boy, and dropped down the other side. And, like that, I was free.

If it had been that simple.

I had a plan, within which there were other plans which could end a number of different ways, depending on how the overall plan proceeded. I considered the prospect of my recapture to be highly likely, in light of how inexperienced I was at evading authorities and how much of myself I had given away, but the intermediate time was mine.

Whatever happened, I needed to find where I was, to determine how hard the rest of my scheme would be. A tatty road ran between great banks of untamed trees; I followed it to the west, hiding in the forest at the sound of the three cars that passed by in all the hours of my walking. Creatures rustled in the woods beside me, wondering what I was doing; it would have been romantic to say an owl hooted, but it had more common sense and kept clear of me as I passed. I estimated that, at the outside, I would have three hours before the alarm was raised back in the house. It could be a lot less, if I was unlucky.

A T-junction stood just beyond a stream crowned with a tiny brick bridge. It offered two choices–Hoxley in five miles, or West Hill in seven. I chose Hoxley, knowing it to be the more obvious decision but also the fastest, and set out parallel to the road. My forest covering quickly gave way to more open fields framed with low stone walls; I hopped on to the muddy side of these and ducked down behind whenever I heard the rumble of an engine, no matter how far off. The moon was half full–optimum in terms of providing just enough light to see, but not so much to expose me. The air, so hot in the day, now turned cold enough for my breath to steam. The ground was still muddy from the rain, my trousers splattered and my socks soaked through to a ubiquitous squelch. I found the North Star, Orion’s Belt, Cassiopeia and the Great Bear. Cassiopeia was high, the Bear was low, which made
the first car that tore by me at the speed of urgency a little past midnight. I had got lucky: they’d taken several hours to notice my absence and now they had little choice but to drive around the countryside with headlights on full in search of me while I could navigate by starlight.

Hoxley was a little stone village on the edge of a little stone hill where once they’d mined and now they declined. I crept in sideways between the houses, down the little back streets that ran out at fields and fences. Though it could not have held more than four hundred souls, Hoxley had a war memorial in a tiny centre square, bearing the lists of names of those who’d died in two wars. A silver car was parked beside it, lights on, a figure lost inside. It had stopped by the one pub and clearly disturbed the landlord, who stood in the doorway arguing with a second man, indignant at his night being broken. I crawled away from the square up what had to be called the High Street, with its one little grocer selling fresh tomatoes and lamb, and the post office, proudly painted in chipped bright red. Now I knew where it was, I slunk again to the edge of town and crawled between the loose planks of a lopsided barn, to hide among the rusted wheelbarrow, bundled stacks of hay and dusty chicken feathers lost in a fight.

I did not sleep, and that was not a problem.

I had timed sunrise during my stay at the house and knew exactly when it came.

I waited what I estimated to be an hour after before crawling out of my den, and was the first, mud-stained, feather-brushed man to walk up to Hoxley post office even as the postmistress, a sour woman with a flushed round face, unlocked the door. With the shillings I had stolen from my guards I bought two envelopes and a couple of stamps, and pressed my letters into her hand.

“You’re very kind,” I said in my best Scottish accent, and she raised her eyebrows to hear a stranger.

It was a poor attempt at disguise, but if my would-be captors were to ask, I wished to confuse the matter of my presence there as far as possible. I watched her slip my two letters into her bag and left.

The day was hot, bright and beautiful.

Rather reluctantly, I abandoned my stolen coat, which had done sterling service in the coldest parts of the night. It was, I felt, too easily recognisable and marked too heavily with my night’s
trudging. Without it, underneath, I was an almost respectable, if rather muddy gentleman.

The silver car I had seen in the night was prowling the edge of Hoxley. I ducked down behind a tenement wall smelling of soap and the outdoor privy that it protected as the over-expensive, over-fuelled vehicle rumbled by. The time had come to strike out overland again, away from the daylight danger of the roads.

I headed north, on a largely arbitrary whim, and for a few brief hours felt liberated by the daylight and the warmth, until thirst, hunger and the fuzzy quality of my own teeth began to distract annoyingly. I looked for a dip in the land, or a place where trees grew despite human carving, and by these signs found my way to a shallow stream aspiring to be a river, slippy fat round rocks pressed along its bed. I washed my face, my hands, my neck, and drank deep. I brushed my teeth and watched the white foam of my spit drift busily downstream. I counted the pennies I had left from my night’s theft, and wondered how far to the next town and how heavily patrolled it would be. I was too old to set snares for rabbits, so I gathered up my goods and walked on.

I reached the next village in the early afternoon.

Phearson’s men stood out like flies crawling in the wild horse’s eye. There was a baker, the smell of yeast almost unbearable. I watched for Phearson’s men to move on, then strode confidently in and declared, this time in my most received pronunciation, “A loaf and any butter you may have, please.”

The baker moved with glacial speed as he considered the question of butter. “Well, sir,” he concluded at last, “will lard do you now?”

Lard would do me fine, as long as it came soon.

“You not from here, sir?” he asked.

No, I wasn’t from here; I was out walking and needed to join my friends.

“Beautiful weather for it, sir.”

Yes, wasn’t it just. Let’s hope it holds.

“Would it be your friends what came into town this morning, sir? They said they were looking for someone?”

He talked so slowly, so amiably, that it was almost tragic to perceive the sound of suspicion, the quiet accusation in his voice.

Did they look like they were here for the hunting?

No, no, they didn’t.

Ah well then. They couldn’t be my friends. Thank you for the bread, thank you for the lard and now—

“Harry!” Phearson too, it turned out, could do RP when he needed to. I stood frozen in the door, bread under one arm, bundle of lard half-unwrapped and ready to smear. Phearson walked right up to me and threw his arms around me with gigantic affection. “I was so worried we were going to miss you!” he exclaimed, voice bouncing hugely down the quiet stone street. “Thank God you made it in time.”

His car was parked not twenty yards away, a roaring beast in a fairy-tale forest. The rear passenger door was already open, one of my anonymous guards–quite possibly the one I’d stolen the coat from–holding it open. I looked at it, looked at Phearson, and then, not feeling particularly confident about the gesture but feeling it needed to be made, dropped the bread and hit him as hard as I could in the face with the sharp end of my elbow.

I am pleased to say something went crack, and when I drew my arm back, there were flecks of blood staining the sleeve.

Regrettably I got no more than ten yards before the baker, moving with surprising speed for such a sedentary man, took me down with a well-placed rugby tackle and sat on my head.

Drugs.

More drugs.

They strapped me to my bed, just like Dr Abel had, but unlike Dr Abel they didn’t have the medical instruments so fell back on a mixture of ties and belts. They didn’t beat me more than was necessary to achieve submission, merely enough to make it clear that submission was the only option. Then Phearson said, “I’m really sorry it came to this, Harry, I really am. I hoped you would understand.”

Scopolamine made me laugh; temazepam made me sleep. They tried sodium amytal and I couldn’t stop crying, though I didn’t feel very sad. They misjudged the first dose of barbiturates and my heart nearly popped out of my ears. They modified the dose and Phearson sat as I drooled nonsensical nothings.

He said, “We don’t want to hurt you, Harry. Christ, I’m not that guy, I’m just not; I’m one of the good guys. I’m a good guy trying to do the best. We don’t want to hurt you, but you gotta understand this is bigger than you or me, much, much bigger.”

Then they brought up the jump leads from the garage downstairs and he pressed his face close to mine and said, “Harry, don’t
make me do it. Come on, we can do this. We can make things better, you and me. We can make this world a better place!”

When I didn’t answer, they pumped me full of antipsychotics and stuck the leads into a socket on the wall. But one of the guys got it wrong and touched the wrong bit, and shocked himself, yowling like a cartoon character and jumping a foot in the air. They had to take him downstairs to put ice on his hand and didn’t try anything else electric that night.

“Come on, Harry,” whispered Phearson. “Do the right thing. Make a difference, damn it! Make a difference!”

I laughed and rode on the warmth of the temazepam wave.

Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.

This was ever the mantra of the Cronus Club, and I say it to you now. It is not noble, it is not bold, it is not righteous, it is not ambitious, but when you are dabbling with the sweep of history, with time itself, it is a sacred vow which should be pinned above every Cronus Clubhouse door. I had said as much to Phearson, and he could not understand.

I have said before of the passage of our lives, that there are three stages. Rejection of what we are, I think I had fairly well covered by the time Phearson came to pump me full of psychotropic hallucinogens. My situation held me a long way from acceptance, but I believe I was, in my own way, attempting to explore my nature to the best of my abilities. In my third life I tried God; in my fourth biology. My fifth we shall return to, but in my sixth life I attempted to explore the mysteries of what we are, albeit rather late in the day, through physics.

You have to understand that I was a boy in the 1930s. Not merely a boy, but a child growing up the bastard son of a man who had about as much interest in scientific development as I could muster in the pedigree of his favourite horses. I had no notion of
the revolution that was overtaking scientific thought, of relativity and nuclear physics, of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Hubble and Heisenberg. I had some loose concept of the notion that the world was round and an apple that falls from the tree will descend towards the mass below, but for many centuries of my early lives time itself was a concept as linear and uninteresting as a metal ruler in a builder’s yard. It took me to the 1990s to begin to understand the concepts of the 1930s, and how they impacted not merely on the world around me, but possibly the very question of who and what I was.

In my sixth life I had my first doctorate by the age of twenty-three–not because I was especially talented in the realms of science, but because I was able to skip so much of the tedious general knowledge phase of my education and jump straight into the areas that interested me. I was invited to work on the Manhattan Project, the youngest member of the team, and agonised for many long nights about whether to accept. Ethics were of no concern–the bomb would be built and the bomb would be dropped, regardless of my personal feelings. Rather the project offered an exciting opportunity to meet some of the greatest minds of the day, locked together in the same room. In the end, the idea of being locked, and of my background being explored too deeply, combined with a reluctance to expose myself to unnecessary danger in those days when radiation was poorly controlled and criticality not yet understood, held me back, and I worked the most part of the war developing surprisingly plausible hypotheses on Nazi technology, ranging from bomb mechanisms and rocket engines, through to heavy water and their own nuclear reactor plant.

I met Vincent in late 1945. The war was won, but rationing still cast its pall over my dinner table. It is petty, I know, to still find oneself frustrated by how bland the food is for so much of my early life, or how long it takes for central heating to become ubiquitous. I was a lecturer at Cambridge, and was in bitter competition for a professorship that I was far too young to take and which I deserved to a far higher degree than my fifty-three-year-old rival,
P. L. George, a man distinguished mainly for the complexities of his mathematical errors. I would not get the professorship in the end; my unfashionable dedication to the notion of the Big Bang over steady state and my unreasonable insistences on the nature of wave-particle duality, combined with my highly unfashionable youth, made me less than popular at the high table. Indeed, I was justly rebuked for my views on both, since to a large degree they were formed on the basis of evidence which hadn’t yet been uncovered, and required technology which had not yet been invented to justify.

It was, in fact, this very same fallacy that brought Vincent to my door.

“Dr August,” he said firmly, “I wish to discuss the multiverse.”

As opening statements go, this was rather unexpected, and I was painfully aware that every second Vincent stood in my doorway was another in which the warmth of my carefully nurtured fire would be expended in true entropic principle for no one else to enjoy. Seeing, however, that he was not about to move, and in light of the thickening snow falling outside, I invited him in, though I was hardly in the mood.

Vincent Rankis. The first time we met, he was young, barely eighteen years old, but already he had the physicality of the perpetually middle-aged. Somehow, despite rationing, he was chubby without being fat, rounded without being particularly overweight, though he would never be described as muscle-bound. His mouse-brown hair was already thinning at the crown, the promise of a bald patch to come, and a pair of grey-green eyes looked out from within a face moulded by a busy sculptor from rather wet clay. His trouser legs were even then rolled up in a manner designed to disencourage social enquiry, and he wore a tweed jacket that I was never to see him out of regardless of the time of year. His claims that the jacket would last a thousand years I can perhaps tolerate; his insistence that the rolled trousers were in aid of cycling I would rebuff, as nothing wheeled was getting through the blocked Cambridge streets on that night. He sat down in the more tattered armchair by the fire with a great huff of effort, and
before I had even settled opposite him, attempting to drag my brain out of silent warmth and back into the realms of modern science, he exclaimed,

“To permit the philosophers to apply their banal arguments to the theory of the multiverse is to undermine the integrity of modern scientific theory.”

I reached for the nearest glass and bottle of Scotch, buying time to answer. The teacher within me was tempted to play devil’s advocate; the teacher lost.

“Yes,” I said. “I agree.”

“A multiverse has no relevance to individual responsibility for action; it merely extends into a rather simplified paradigm the Newtonian concept that for every action there is an opposite action, and the concept that where there can be no state of absolute rest there cannot be understanding of a particle’s nature without changing the thing observed!”

He seemed very indignant on the subject so once again, I said, “Yes.”

His eyebrows waggled furiously. He had an uncanny knack of talking with his eyebrows and chin, while the rest of him remained to a good degree static. “Then why did you waste fifteen pages of your last paper discussing the ethical implications of a quantum theory?!”

I sipped my drink and waited for the eyebrows to descend to their natural–but not absolute–state of rest. “Your name,” I said at last, “is Vincent Rankis, and I am only aware of this fact because when the beadle challenged you for cutting the corner of the grass you gave him this same name while informing him that in this changing society his role would soon be not merely redundant, but mocked by the imminently approaching future generations. You were wearing that very same olive shirt, if I recall, and I—”

“Blue shirt, grey socks, dress robe, heading at high speed towards the gate in a manner which I can only assume meant you were late for a lecture, it being five minutes to the hour and most of your lectures occurring more than ten minutes away.”

I looked at Vincent once again, and this time made conscious
note of all the characteristics I had already unconsciously perceived. Then, “Very well, Vincent, let’s discuss ethical musings and the scientific method—”

“One is subjective, the other valid.”

“If your view is so absolute, I hardly see what good my view will serve.”

A flicker of a smile occurred in the corner of his mouth, and he had the grace to look, briefly, ashamed. “Forgive me,” he said at last. “I may have had a little something to drink on my way over here. I know I can come across as… firm.”

“A man travels back in time…” I began, and at Vincent’s immediate flinch of distaste I raised my hand and said placatingly, “Hypothetically speaking, a thought experiment if you like. A man travels back in time and sees the events of the past unfolding like a future before his eyes. He steps out of his time machine–”

“Immediately altering the past!”

“–and his very first act is to post his younger self the winning riders at Newmarket. Result?”

“Paradox,” declared Vincent firmly. “He has no memory of having been posted these numbers; he never won at Newmarket. If he had, he may not have built the time machine and gone back in time to post the numbers to himself to begin with–logical impossibility.”

“Result?”

“Impossibility!”

“Indulge the hypothesis.”

He huffed furiously, then exclaimed, “Three possible outcomes! One: at the very instant that he makes the decision to send himself the winning numbers, he remembers receiving them and his personal timeline changes, thus he self-perpetuates his own existence as without the winning numbers he could not have built his time machine. Paradox within that being that nothing can come from nothing, and his initiative, his causal event, is in fact an effect, effect preceding cause, but I don’t suppose we’re dealing with logic in this scenario. Two: the whole universe collapses. Rather melodramatic, I know, but if we consider time as a scalar concept with
no negative value then I really see no other way, which seems a shame if all we’re discussing here is a little bet at Newmarket. Three: at the very instant he makes the decision to send himself the numbers, a parallel universe is created. In his universe, his linear timeline, he returns home having not won anything at Newmarket in his life, while in a parallel universe his younger self is rather surprised to discover that he’s a millionaire and carries on quite happily thank you. Implications?”

“I have no idea,” I replied brightly. “I merely wished to see if you were capable of lateral thinking.”

He gave another great huff of exasperation and stared fuming into the fire. Then, “I enjoyed your paper. Ignoring the wishy-washy, namby-pamby philosophical stuff, which, I personally thought, verged on the almost theological, I thought your paper was marginally more interesting than the usual journal matter. That’s what I wished to say.”

“I am honoured. But if your complaint is that ethics have no place in pure science, I’m afraid I must be forced to disagree with you.”

“Of course they don’t! Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers.”

“Would you shoot Hitler?” I asked.

He scowled. “I thought we had just determined a likelihood of the universe being destroyed by such temporal tampering.”

“We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the trials of war,” I replied. “We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself could experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside.”

He drummed his fingers along the edge of his chair then blurted, “There are socio-economic forces that must be considered too. Was Hitler the sole cause of war? I would argue no.”

“But the direction the war took…?”

“But there’s the thing!” he exclaimed, the eyebrows back into full swing. “If I make the decision to shoot Hitler, how do I not know that someone less willing to fight in Russia in the dead of winter, or to besiege cities with minimal strategic value at the cost of hundreds of thousands of men, or start bombing London and not her airfields–how do I know that this other, saner warmonger will not emerge from the conditions already in place?”

“You argue complexity as an excuse for inaction?”

“I argue… I argue…” He groaned, throwing his hands off the arms of his chair in frustration. “I argue that it is precisely these hypothetical dabblings with philosophy that undermined the otherwise sound integrity of your paper!”

He fell silent and I, already tired before he came, enjoyed it a while. He stared into the fire and looked for all the world like he had been in my armchair his whole life, as much a piece of furniture as it. “Would you like a drink?” I asked at last.

“What are you drinking?”

“Scotch.”

“I’ve already had a bit much…”

“I won’t tell the beadle.”

A brief hesitation then, “Thank you.”

I poured him a glass, and as he took it I said, “So tell me, Mr Rankis, what brings you to our hallowed halls?”

“Answers,” he replied firmly. “Measurable, objective. What lies beneath this reality, what is going on in the world we cannot perceive, deeper than protons and neutrons, bigger than galaxies and suns. If time is relative then light speed has become the measuring stick of the universe, but is that all time is? An inconstant factor in the equations of speed?”

“And here I thought the young were only interested in sex and music.”

He grinned, the first genuine flash of humour I’d seen. Then, “I hear you’re up for a professorship.”

“I won’t get it.”

“Of course not,” he answered amiably. “You’re far too young. It wouldn’t be just.”

“Thank you for your vote of confidence.”

“You can’t say you’re not expecting to achieve a thing, then express resentment that others agree with you.”

“You’re right, it is irrational. You seem very… forthright… for an undergraduate.”

He shrugged. “I can’t waste time with being young, there’s far too much to do which society will not permit to the under-thirties.”

His words produced an instant and inevitable tug within me; I had spent twenty-five tedious years living them. “You’re interested in time?”

“Complexity and simplicity,” he replied. “Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to a child–in simple language which is not deceit, of course–we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it.”