would keep me in the loop, and that will be all for the best. I have just one more question before we retire to more civil matters and sit down to dinner. Do tell me you have no plans to vanish any time soon.”
“None that we know of, sir,” said Elena with a smile.
“Good,” said Tovey. “I do also understand how difficult all this must be for your crew. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. In the meantime, let us go and have a bit to eat, and consider what this American fellow might want our ear for on the first of August.”
“Don’t be surprised, Admiral,” said Elena. “But I think it may have something to do with that key. The man claimed he once had it in his possession, until it pulled the same trick the Russians seem to play about with, and just vanished. Then he disappeared for good measure, and right before my own eyes. I haven’t any idea what he’s really up to, but yes, I think this appointment in the Azores will prove to be very interesting.”
Part V
Nothing Is Written
“Nothing Is Written, and Everything is Permitted.”
- Ismaili Saying
Chapter 13
He emerged in a white mist, effused with glimmering light, with only the reassuring strength of the hard concrete floor beneath him as any point of physical reference. Weak from the sudden return to another time, Paul stooped to his knees, one hand on the concrete floor to steady himself, beset with a queasy sensation of lightness, his mind still a whirl.
The last time he had done this, he was returning from this very same mission, his clandestine infiltration on the battleship Rodney in the assumed identity of Lieutenant Commander Wellings. He had gone to see to the sinking of the Bismarck, feeding crucial information to the Captain of the battleship Rodney to assure he could get that ship into the hunt, for it was Rodney that drew first blood against the German warship, scoring a serious hit on her third salvo. The action then had seen him thrown from the ship into the sea, tossed in the wild waves in the heat of the battle, and only just barely extracted from the scene in time. He had returned out of phase, eventually manifesting, wet and bedraggled, yet with a strange souvenir in his pocket, something he had found in the cargo hold when he went below decks to aid a wounded man.
His return shift had been very difficult, as he had emerged in the Berkeley Arch complex, yet strangely out of synch, there but not there, the barest fraction of a second ahead of them in time, and therefore completely invisible to the others until his own clock slowed enough for him to find harmony with them.
They had come to call it “Attenuation,” a property of an incomplete time shift, where the traveler manifests across a range of several milliseconds, slightly out of sync or phase with his correct target point in time. He was simply out of tune with everything else, and the effects had also been reported by others who moved in time, the walkers from the future who had been striving with one another in the long, deadly time war.
Now Paul was relieved to hear someone calling his name, though the voice seemed strained and distant. The sound slowly resolved, and the sensation of dizziness faded with the mist around him. There, standing a few feet from the thick painted yellow line that marked the event horizon of the Arch, stood his good friend and fellow team member, Robert Nordhausen.
“Ah,” said Nordhausen. “Back in one piece this time. Did you find it?”
“Paul was still a bit dazed from the shift, and for a moment he seemed to have no idea what Nordhausen was talking about. “Find it?” he said haltingly. Then his memory solidified and he remembered why he had taken this risk again, exposing his very being to the strange effects of a time shift—the key.
“I couldn’t get to it,” he said bitterly. “But my god, Robert, you’ll be amazed at what’s going on there now. There’s a goddamned British destroyer there—a Type 45!”
“What’s that?” Nordhausen knew the history inside out—ancient history being his forte, but when it came to military matters he seemed at a loss, particularly concerning anything newer than the 20th Century.”
“A modern warship—from our time!”
“What? In the middle of World War Two?”
“I was aboard the damn thing, and even spoke to