‘Wrong?’
‘About this. It isn’t a dream. It’s real. Those are your books, Phil. From the future.’
Only I’m thinking –
How did Matteus get them back here? He’d have had to have had them copied. Made from his own DNA.
And why would Hecht permit that?
Phil, however, is still bemused. ‘But this can’t …’
‘Can’t be real? Why not? The platform, the beards we grew … the tri-vi, Matt’s form guide for ’53, and now these. What more have we got to show you, Phil?’
Phil has been crouching on his haunches, now he stands, wiping dust off his hands, the dust, perhaps more than the books themselves, convincing him with its detail.
‘It’s just, well, there might be other explanations. I mean this …’ He looks from me to Matteus, then back to me. ‘Well, it’s a bit far-fetched, wouldn’t you say?’
‘What have we got to do, Phil?’ Matteus says. ‘Take you there?’
His voice comes almost as a whisper. ‘Could you?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘You’d need one of these.’ And I open my shirt and show him the neat, long-healed scar, and explain to him about the focus, and how it works, and that, more than anything, finally convinces him.
I pour him a Scotch, then sit there, watching him sip from his glass and chuckle to himself, picking up one book after another and shaking his head in amazement.
Then, suddenly, an idea occurs to him, and he looks to me. ‘Hey, do you think, well, do you think I could show these to Kleo? I mean … if it’s all going to be changed back anyhow …’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But not now. Later, maybe.’
Phil nods and looks down. Then, speaking slowly, he asks. ‘So what happens to me? I mean, apart from writing all of this shit. Do Kleo and I have kids? Do we …?’
He looks up and finds me staring back at him. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not telling you. Even if we’re going to change it all back, it isn’t good for you to know.’
‘But—’
‘No. End of discussion.’
And I stand and leave the room before he can read anything in my face, because I know things – things that Matteus has told me about Phil’s future, and especially about his four wives – that I don’t want Phil to even guess at.
Besides, it’s late now – gone two – and I’m feeling tired.
‘You’d better go, Phil,’ I say, coming back into the room. ‘Kleo will be worried.’
He chuckles. ‘Kleo will be asleep.’
I look to Matteus. ‘You okay to drive?’
‘Sure. I’ll take him.’
But Phil seems anxious suddenly. ‘Otto?’
‘Yes, Phil?’
‘How long have I got? I mean, knowing all this stuff? How long before you change it all back?’
‘A couple of days?’ I shrug. ‘I don’t know, Phil. Until we’ve worked things out.’
‘But what if you
don’t
work things out?’
I smile. ‘Don’t worry. It’s what we do. What we’re good at.’
Only this once I’m not so sure. This once I wonder whether we’ve jumped ourselves into a corner.
Sleep comes, with dreams of Katerina – not, this once, of Katerina as a lover, but as the mother of my children. In the dream I watch her from close by, yet it is as if she doesn’t see me there. She is dressed in white, a bright red cloth beneath her, in a field of grass so green it almost hurts the eyes, while about her our children dance and play, carefree and happy, their long dark hair flying out in billowing clouds.
In the dream I laugh delightedly, then grow conscious of someone standing just off to my right. I turn, and there’s Phil, an art pad under his arm. He smiles at me, then walks across and settles next to Katerina. She smiles at him as if she knows him, and as he opens up the pad, so my eldest, Natalya, sits down next to him, on the other side to her mother, and asks him what he’s doing. Taking a pen from his pocket, he begins to draw, holding the pad so she can see. From where I’m standing, I can’t see what he’s doing, but I know what it is anyway.
Of course
, I say, or think I say, then wake, a sheen of sweat covering me.
The owl calls.
Ta-woo
, it says. I lay there silently, looking to the window, and once again it calls, with a low, clear
Ta-woo
.
I have Matteus stop outside the art shop near the campus and go inside, returning a moment later with a large art pad, like the one in the dream. We’re on our way to Phil’s, and this is something of a detour, but not much. Besides, it’s a fine morning, and it’s nice to be out, nice to feel the warm breeze flowing in through the open windows of the Tucker.
I am feeling better than I have for weeks. Happier. More confident. Why? I don’t know why. I just am.
As we pull up outside of Phil and Kleo’s, I turn to Matteus and, even before he’s switched off the engine, say, ‘Leave the talking to me, okay? There’s something I want Phil to help me with, and it might take a little while.’
Matteus gives me a strange look. ‘Why?’
Should I tell him? I decide not to. ‘Trust me,’ I say. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
It’s what I’ve said to Ernst before now, and Hecht. The same kind of thing that’s got me into trouble several times. Only this once I’ve a hunch that if anyone can come up with an answer, it’s Phil. That – I’m sure – is what the dream was trying to tell me. That was why it connected my family with Phil. And what was Phil doing? He was drawing diagrams on the art pad. Lines and loops. Time diagrams, I’m sure of it.
When we knock, Kleo answers the door. Phil’s still in bed, sleeping off last night.
We tell her not to wake him, and settle in the kitchen with coffee.
I like Kleo, and I’m sad that Phil isn’t going to stay with her too long. She’s the best of his women. The only one he could have made a real go of it with. But I don’t tell her that. I simply smile a lot and gently flirt with her in the way a woman likes – nothing aggressive, but enough to flatter her ego a little. I’m not used to it much, but Kleo’s warmth makes it easy, and I can tell she likes me. In the end she cooks both of us breakfast, and we’re busy eating it when Phil finally emerges, yawning and stretching and looking even more like he could do with a good shave.
‘Hi,’ he says in his ‘just-come-wide-awake’ fashion. ‘You been here long?’
‘Twenty minutes,’ Matteus says through a mouthful of hash browns. ‘Otto’s got a job for you.’
It’s not how I wanted to introduce things, and I have asked Matteus to let me do the talking, but what’s done is done.
‘A job?’ Phil asks, taking a seat, then smiling up at Kleo as she places a steaming cup of coffee in front of him.
‘Yes,’ I say, giving Matteus a sharp look. ‘I need you to help me plot something out. A storyline, you might call it.’
‘Uh-huh?’ Phil looks interested. ‘Anything particular?’
I look down, take a sip of my coffee, then meet Phil’s eyes. He’s watching me very intently now.
‘I thought we might go to the park. Talk there.’
Phil waits for more, but I’m silent, watching him, and after a while he shrugs. ‘Sure. Whatever …’
I look to Kleo. ‘Are you okay with this, Kleo? I mean, we’re taking your husband away from you a lot …’
‘S’fine,’ she says, giving me one of her special smiles. ‘You all be back for supper?’
I look to Phil, then to Matteus, and nod. ‘Sure. About seven, if that’s okay? We’ll bring back some wine. Make an evening of it. Just the four of us.’
She likes that, and as if to show that perhaps she’d like to kiss us all, gives Phil an especially sweet kiss on the top of his head, and momentarily lays her hand across the top of his shoulders.
Phil smiles up at her. ‘Thanks, hun …’
And, seeing it, part of me aches to take them both aside and tell them never to give up on each other, never to let go. But for them, the future mustn’t change. It has to be. To make him what he is. To bring us here. For he, I’m sure now, has the answers. He, if anyone, can tell me how to get outside the loop.
Phil is staring at me, shaking his head.
‘Christ!’ he says. ‘So you just raised the gun and shot him?’
‘Between the eyes,’ I say. ‘Burned a hole right through his skull. To pay him back for what he did to her. For what I’d
seen
him do.’
We are sitting on a bench in the middle of the local park, talking about Kravchuk.
Matteus is silent. This is all new to him, too, but I can see how he’s looking at me differently now. Not disapprovingly. Or, at least, I don’t think so. If anything, it’s with sudden understanding. As if he knows now why I’m sad. Why I’ve
been
sad.
But he’s not said a word yet, critical or otherwise, just listened.
I’ve been talking for the best part of six hours now, spelling it all out, telling it, if not in direct chronological order, then certainly in a way that makes best sense of it all. I’ve told him about the Teuton Knights and about Seydlitz’s scheme to change the outcome of the Second World War. I’ve spoken of Frederick and the DNA-based snuff box that saved his life, and of the defection of our agents to the Russians. And then – because it is integral to all else – I’ve told him about Katerina and our times together, of how I fell in love with her and broke every rule in the book simply to keep her, and I can see that he likes that. But I tell him also of Reichenau and Kolya, and of Ernst suspended like a tormented angel in the glade in the forest, trapped by the time-anchor. Of the mile-high battlements of Asgard, and of the great physicist, Gehlen, and of King Manfred and his gigantic kin, oh and many other things.
And when I’ve done, he questions me, making me expand my story, or clarify this point or that, and still we haven’t done. ‘I need to write it all down,’ Phil says. ‘I need …’ And then he grins, sudden understanding coming to him. ‘The art pad …’
I nod. ‘But you mustn’t tell Kleo. Or if you do, say it’s part of a book we’re planning to write together.’
‘So what exactly do you want from me?’
I glance at Matteus, who has been silent longer than I’ve ever known him be, then look back at Phil. ‘There’s one other thing I haven’t told you. We’re going to die. Katerina and I. Kolya is going to capture us and kill us. I know because I’ve seen it. He showed us our own corpses. It’s foreordained. In a loop, if you see what I mean. Only, maybe there’s a way round it. Some way of circumventing the loop.’
‘Looping the loop,’ Phil says and gives a little laugh before he turns serious again.
‘Sorry …’
But I smile. ‘No need.
You
didn’t kill us. But you might – just might – be able to save us.’
That evening I move in with Phil and Kleo, Kleo making up a bed in the spare room Phil uses as a study. Matteus wants to stay, but I tell him to go back to the club and see if he can find out anything more about who owns it and what goes on there – apart from the jazz, that is. He doesn’t like it. He thinks he’s being sent on a fool’s errand, but I need some time alone with Phil.
Kleo makes us sandwiches and brings us beers, but otherwise she leaves us alone, and slowly Phil begins to make sense of what I’ve told him, asking me question after question until he’s got the sequence of events right, writing down events on the big art pad and linking them with arrows. It takes him three or four attempts, but finally, some two or three hours into the process, he looks up at me and smiles.
‘There,’ he says. ‘Those are the intrusion points. Wherever I’ve put an event in a circle, that’s where it links off into the future – to some further event which has yet to happen.’
I study them, one after another, then nod, impressed by Phil’s grasp of things. I’ve not had to tell him twice how it works. And when I tell him that, he laughs and stands up and, going over to his shelves, searches about for a while, then comes back with a dog-eared copy of a magazine called
Astounding
. On its predominantly green cover is a picture of a man, standing in front of a great blue hoop of air, from which two identical copies of himself emerge, one to either side of him. Above the central figure’s head, over the date – October 1941 – is the story’s title, ‘By His Bootstraps’ by Anson MacDonald.
‘Read it,’ Phil says. ‘It might surprise you.’
MacDonald, it turns out, is a guy called Robert Heinlein – another science-fiction writer and one of Phil’s heroes – and the story deals with time paradoxes. I learn that Heinlein also wrote a story called ‘All You Zombies’, about someone creating copies of himself in time, but before Phil can give me the complete history, I stop him and make him attend to the problem in hand.
My
problem.
‘Well,’ Phil says, grinning now. ‘The solution’s easy. The problem is knowing precisely
when
to use it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, you can die and not die, simply by copying yourself along a single timeline. Have two of you and two of Katerina go into the situation that kills one of each of you.’
‘So we have to die?’
‘Sure. That’s already happened. It’s in the loop. But you can come out of it and move on
after
that, and this is how …’
And Phil proceeds to draw me a diagram. In it, Katerina and I jump in to join up with ourselves at a point we’ve already been to, somewhere in my future, but in a timeline that approaches the moment when Kolya captures us and kills us. Two of us are captured and killed, the other two
see
us being captured and killed. We – the surviving couple – then move on to an instant beyond the moment where our other selves are killed, and then jump back, to the precise moment we jumped into this mini-loop, only at a slight distance, so, as Phil says ‘you can observe your other two pairs of selves moving forward into the timestream that leads to Kolya.’ Which means, in effect, that there are three of each of us at that single point in time: two already there, two jumping in, and two observing the process. And there need to be six, Phil explains, for the maths of it to work – because otherwise we get stuck in the loop in an infinite regression. Four have to move on down the line to encounter Kolya. But two must be left to jump right out of there, having witnessed it. Two
have
to move forward, otherwise we keep going back to the moment we began in an eternal, unbreakable cycle.