“You’re being windy, Bowden.”
“True. Do you know what will happen if we fail?”
“We won’t. It’s a doddle. Dad was in the ChronoGuard; he told me all about this sort of thing. The secret is in the spheres. In four hours we could be seeing a major global disaster occurring right in front of our eyes. A rent in time so large we won’t know for sure that the here-and-now isn’t the there-and-then. The rout of civilization, panic in the streets, the end of the world as we know it. Hey, kid!—”
I had seen a young lad bouncing a basketball on the road. The boy reluctantly gave it to me and I returned to Bowden, who was waiting uneasily by the car. We put the hood down and Bowden sat in the passenger seat, clutching the basketball grimly.
“A basketball?”
“It’s a sphere, isn’t it?” I replied, remembering Dad’s advice all those years ago. “Are you ready?”
“Ready,” replied Bowden in a slightly shaky voice.
I started the car and rolled slowly up to where the traffic police stood in shocked amazement.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” asked the young officer.
“Sort of,” I replied, truthfully enough. “Does anyone have a watch with a second hand?”
The youngest traffic cop took his watch off and handed it over. I noted the real time—5:30 A.M.—and then reset the hands to twelve o’clock. I strapped the watch onto the rear-view mirror.
The sergeant wished us good luck as we drove off, yet his thoughts were more along the lines of “sooner you than me.”
Around us the sky was lightening into dawn, yet the area around the vehicles was still night. Time for the trapped cars had stood still, but only to observers from the outside. To the occupants, everything was happening as normal, except that if they looked behind them they would witness the dawn breaking rapidly.
The first fifty yards seemed plain enough to Bowden and me, but as we drove closer the car and bike seemed to speed up and by the time we had drawn level with the green car we were both moving at about sixty miles per hour. I glanced at the watch on the rear-view mirror and noted that precisely three minutes had elapsed.
Bowden had been watching what was going on behind us. As he and I drove toward the instability the officers’ movements seemed to accelerate until they were just a blur. The cars that had been blocking the carriageway were turned around and directed swiftly back down the hard shoulder at a furious rate. Bowden also noticed the sun rising rapidly behind us and wondered quite what he had let himself in for.
The green sedan had two occupants; a man and a woman. The woman was asleep and the driver was looking at the dark hole that had opened up in front of them. I shouted to him to stop. He wound down his window and I repeated myself, added “SpecOps!” and waved my ID. He dutifully applied his brakes and his stoplights came on, puncturing the darkness. Three minutes and twenty-six seconds had elapsed since we had begun our journey.
From where the ChronoGuard were standing, they could just see the brake lights on the green sedan come languidly on in the funnel of darkness that was the event’s influence. They watched the progress of the green sedan over the next ten minutes as it made an almost imperceptible turn toward the hard shoulder. It was nearly 10 A.M. and an advance ChronoGuard outfit had arrived direct from Wareham. Their equipment and operatives were being airlifted in an SO-12 Chinook helicopter, and Colonel Rutter had flown ahead to see what needed to be done. He had been surprised that two ordinary officers had volunteered for this hazardous duty, especially as nobody could tell him who we were. Even a check of my car registration didn’t help, as it was still listed as belonging to the garage I had bought it from. The only positive thing about the whole damn mess, he noted, was the fact that the passenger seemed to be holding a sphere of some sort. If the hole grew any bigger and time slowed down even more it might take them several months to reach us, even in the fastest vehicle they had. He lowered the binoculars and sighed. It was a stinking, lousy, lonely job. He had been working in the ChronoGuard for almost forty years, Standard Earth Time. In logged work time he was 209. In his own personal physiological time he was barely
28. His children were older than him and his wife was in a nursing home. He had thought the higher rates of pay would compensate him for any problems, but they didn’t.
As the green sedan fell quickly away behind us, Bowden again looked back and saw the sun rising faster and higher. A helicopter arrived in a flash with the distinctive “CG” motif of the ChronoGuard. Ahead of us now there was only the motorcyclist, who seemed to be perilously close to the dark, swirling hole. He wore red leathers and was driving a top-of-the-range Triumph motorcycle, ironically enough about the only bike capable of escape from the vortex if he had known what the problem was. We had taken another six minutes to catch up with him and as we approached a roaring sound started to rise above the wind noise; the sort of scream a typhoon might make as it passed over the top of you. We were still about twelve feet behind and finding it difficult to keep up. The speedometer needle on the Porsche touched ninety as we roared along together. I blew my horn but the screaming drowned it out.
“Get ready!” I shouted to Bowden as the wind whipped our hair and the air tugged at our clothes. I flashed my lights at the bike again and at last he saw us. He turned around and waved, mistook our intent for a desire to initiate a race, kicked down a gear and accelerated away. The vortex caught him in an instant and he seemed to stretch out and around and inside out as he flowed rapidly into the instability; within what appeared to be a second he had gone. As soon as I thought we could get no closer I stamped on the brakes and yelled:
“Now!”
Smoke poured off the tires as we careened across the tarmac; Bowden threw the basketball, which seemed to swell in size with the hole, the ball flattening to a disc and the hole stretching out to a line. We saw the basketball hit the hole, bounce once and let us through. I glanced at the watch as we tipped through into the abyss, the basketball shutting out the last glimpse of the world we had left behind as we dropped through to Elsewhere. Up until the point we passed the event, twelve minutes and forty-one seconds had elapsed. Outside it had been closer to seven hours.
“Motorcycle’s gone,” remarked Colonel Rutter. His second-in-command grunted in reply. He didn’t approve of non-Chronos attempting his work. They had managed to maintain the job’s mysticism for over five decades with the wages to suit; have-a-go heroes could only serve to weaken people’s undying trust in what they did. It wasn’t a difficult job; it just took a long time. He had mended a similar rent in spacetime that had opened up in Weybridge’s municipal park just between the floral clock and the bandstand. The job itself had taken ten minutes; he had simply walked in and stuck a tennis ball across the hole while outside seven months flashed by—seven months on double pay plus privileges, thank you very much.
The ChronoGuard operatives set up a large clock facing inward so any operatives within the field’s influence would know what was happening. A similar clock on the back of the helicopter gave the officers outside a good idea of how slow time was running within.
After the motorcycle disappeared they waited another half-an-hour to see what would happen. They watched Bowden slowly rise and throw what appeared to be a basketball.
“Too late,” murmured Rutter, having seen this sort of thing before. He ordered his men into action, and they were just starting to crank up the rotors of the helicopter when the darkness around the hole evaporated. The night slid back and a clear road confronted them. They could see the people in the green sedan get out and look around in amazement at the sudden day. A hundred yards farther on, the basketball had neatly blocked the tear and now stood trembling slightly in midair as the vortex behind the rip sucked at the ball. Within a minute the tear healed and the basketball dropped harmlessly to the asphalt, bouncing a few times before rolling to the side of the road. The sky was clear and there was no evidence that time wasn’t the same as it had always been. But of the Datsun, the motorcyclist and the brightly painted sports car, there was no trace at all.
My car slid on and on. The motorway had been replaced by a swirling mass of light and color that had no meaning to either of us. Occasionally a coherent image would emerge from the murk and on several occasions we thought we had arrived back in a stable time, but were soon whisked back into the vortex, the typhoon raging in our ears. The first occasion was on a road somewhere in the Home Counties. It looked like winter, and ahead of us a lime-green Austin Allegro estate pulled out from a slip road. I swerved and drove past at great speed, sounding my horn angrily. That image collapsed abruptly and fragmented itself into the dirty hold of a ship. The car was wedged between two packing cases, the closest of which was bound for Shanghai. The howl of the vortex had diminished, but we could hear a new roar, the roar of a storm at sea. The ship wallowed and Bowden and I looked at one another, unsure as to whether this was the end of the journey or not. The roaring sound grew as the dank hold folded back into itself and vanished, only to be replaced by a white hospital ward. The tempest subsided, the car’s engine ticking over happily. In the only occupied bed there was a drowsy and confused woman with her arm in a sling. I knew what I had to say.
“Thursday—!” I shouted excitedly.
The woman in the bed frowned. She looked across at Bowden, who waved back cheerily.
“He didn’t die!” I continued, saying now what I knew to be the truth. I could hear the tempest starting to howl again. It wouldn’t be long before we were taken away.