Doppelganger (13 page)

“Quite right,” said Wellings, deciding to drop the guise and identity he had assumed and do a little digging here himself. “Forgive the uniform, but it was necessary, as was the subterfuge. To answer your question, Madame, my name is Dorland—Professor Paul Dorland, of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs in the United States. And since you seem to be well out of place in this milieu, you may not be all that surprised to hear what I say next. I have come here from the year 2021, and to retrieve that very key,” he pointed. “How you managed to come by it is a mystery to me, as was my own discovery of that artifact, embedded in the base of the Selene Horse, right there aboard the battleship
Rodney
, on May 21st, 1941.”

Morgan gave the man a frown now. “21st of May you say? Well the last time I checked, and that was this morning, it was the 8th of May, Mister Wellings. Or is it Professor now?”

“Correct,” said Dorland. “On this meridian. When I found the key things were… different. You see, this was not the first time I’ve used this uniform to get aboard that ship out there. I had other business, which there’s no time to discuss, and I found that key by pure happenstance.”

“You found it?” said Elena. “Aboard
Rodney
?”

“Where else?” said Dorland. “Look, we both know the marbles were being shipped to Boston aboard
Rodney
. Well, you may be gratified to know that they actually got there once. This time things appear to have turned out quite different, but at least you’ve recovered it. How did you manage it?”

“We didn’t manage a thing,” said Elena. “In fact this whole operation has been a train wreck as far as I’m concerned. This isn’t the key you may be looking for, Professor Dorland, or whoever you are. Now… I want to know how you got here, what you intended to do, and how you even know of this matter in the first place. And I want it straight and narrow—right now.”

She folded her arms, waiting.

Chapter 11

“How
did I get here? That is another long story,” said Dorland, “and I suppose it will be as difficult and convoluted as the one you will tell me to explain how a 21st century warship is found here sailing about in the middle of the Second World War! Yet here we are. Let’s leave it at that for the moment, as my time is running thin. The real concern now is that key. Believe it or not, I was aboard
Rodney
once before, in another telling of these events, and I believed they had reached a successful conclusion, that is until the final alert came in, and that key went missing.”

“Missing?” Elena had a firm grasp on her key now, as though she were suddenly afraid it might go the way of Russian battlecruisers and submarines.

“After I discovered it aboard
Rodney
,” said Dorland, “I took it with me, back to my own time—to
our
time, if I may venture a guess. You are also from that future?”

“There was a mishap,” said Elena. “Yes, and it was in 2021, right at the outbreak of the war. We were returning from the Black Sea, a business venture involving oil. Yet I have other business as well, and I received certain instructions. Yes, you are correct. It will be a long story, but suffice it to say that it eventually led me, and my ship, here. This key had a very great deal to do with that, and so you can therefore understand my interest in the one aboard
Rodney
. You say you took it with you. Explain.”

“The one aboard
Rodney
?” Dorland stumbled a bit. “Are you intimating that is not the same key? There are more than one?”

“Yes. The key aboard
Rodney
vanished, just as you say it did, on the 21st of May, 1941. And yes, that was in another history of these events. We’ve both seen that the story presently underway is just a little deviant.”

“That is an understatement,” said Dorland. “We had alerts all over the band, red lines everywhere. At first we traced it all to an incident on the 28th of July, 1941, and then we realized the significance of that date.”

Elena held up a hand. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Alerts? Red lines?”

Dorland looked at his watch again, his eyes darkening. “We are a research team established in the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. On the surface the operation appears to be nothing more than a physics lab, yet its real purpose was to investigate something else—the possibility of moving through time.” The professor let that sink in a moment before he pressed on.

“You don’t seem impressed,” he said. “I suppose your presence here is enough of an explanation for that. So let us get round the elephant and grant that both of us know time travel is a very real phenomenon.”

“Go on,” said Elena, waiting patiently.

“Well we tested our little theory, my theory actually, and discovered a good deal more than we expected. Once the cork was out of the bottle, everybody seemed to be pouring the champagne! You’re just the latest wrinkle in this business. How you managed it is astounding. In any case, what we found was somewhat disturbing. If we pulled off the trick, then it was an easy jump to say that others in the future would do so as well.”

“You mean they were traveling in time?”

“Exactly, and the sad thing is that there seemed to be a disagreement underway. Oh, let’s be plain about it—it was war—time war, and it was getting most uncomfortable. Since we believed our own project pre-dated their operations, we decided to do something about it.”

“Aye?” said MacRae. “What was that?”

“Put a stop to it.” Dorland took a deep breath, realizing he had too much to convey here, and too little time to do it. “Something happened, and it was somewhat catastrophic. We tried to reverse that outcome, and thankfully, we were successful.”

“Catastrophic? What are you speaking of.”

“Never mind that now. We prevented it, so there’s no use discussing that. Then we found certain individuals in the future were not pleased with what we had done. This event was a deliberate act, which is the only reason we were able to reverse it. Then we found out there was a great deal more to that operation, and we had to get more directly involved.”

“Involved in what?”

“In the war,” Dorland hurried on. “We figured out a way to keep an eye on things—the history. When things went awry, when we learned of aberrations and deviations from the history we knew, then we set our minds to correcting them. Believe me, this was no small task, but in the course of events we were quite successful—even in persuading these individuals to cease their little time war, and to stop meddling with things. We
forced
them to negotiate a peace.”

“These individuals you speak of,” said Elena. “They were not from our day, 2021?”

“No, they were from a future time, though we never really determined how far off that was.”

“Then the war was not fatal. It wasn’t the cause of the calamity.”

“What are you speaking of?” Dorland leaned in intently.

“Grand Finality,” said Elena. “It’s a term I was given, though I can’t really say what it means.”

“Yes, I’m very familiar with it,” said Dorland. “I was the man who first coined the phrase.”

“You?”

“Quite so,” said Dorland. “We were the first, you see—the first to open the continuum. At least this was what we once thought. Then I discovered that key, on a mission I was undertaking to set right a little aberration in the history. For an artifact of that nature to be found embedded in the Selene Horse was most alarming. I examined that key very closely, and found it had… properties that could not have been engineered in the past. So what was it doing there in that ancient Greek sculpture?”

“You say you took it with you? After finding it aboard
Rodney
?”

“Correct.”

“Took it back to the United States?”

“Yes, to the year 2021… July of 2021, to be a little more precise. Just a few weeks before the final alert came in on the 28th of that month.”

“So you’ve just been flying about like a banshee?” said MacRae. “Traveling through time?” He rolled his eyes, incredulous.

“Yes, we can move in time. That’s what our project tested and achieved. My presence here should be argument enough. How
you
pulled it off is the real question I have. You say it had something to do with that key? Well this is what I came to suspect as well. Then a very strange thing happened—on the 28th of July, 2021. I had that key in my possession for some weeks before that, and then it vanished.”

“It was stolen?” asked Elena, finally realizing how the key had disappeared in May of 1941. This man claimed he was right there, aboard
Rodney
, and most likely in this very same costume. He claimed he discovered the key in the Selene Horse, and then took it with him. No wonder it was never found again in all the years between that date and 2021.

“Not stolen,” said Dorland. “It literally vanished. I kept it on a chain, just as you have that one there, but it vanished. Naturally I wanted to know why, so I came back here to look for it at a time and place I was reasonably certain to find it—the place where I first discovered it.”

“I see…” Elena thought deeply now, taking all of this in, somewhat amazed. “Well, Professor Dorland, I do not wish to disappoint you, but as you have determined, this is not the key you discovered aboard
Rodney
.”

Dorland smiled. “There are more than one,” he said, realization evident on his face, his dark eyes alight.

“Apparently,” said Elena.

“How did you come by this one?”

“It was entrusted to me, and that is another very long story.”

Now Dorland put two and two together, his eyes narrowing. “Then you came here to look for it too. You were here to find the key in the Selene Horse?”

“In point of fact, we were, but things slipped a bit, and we weren’t quick enough. I’m afraid it’s lost now, and I wish I knew what the consequences of that will be. Yes, Professor, there are more than one of these keys about, and they all seem to be associated with movement in time. We came to believe they were engineered in the future, and used to secure, or grant access to fissures in time.”

“Fissures?”

“Physical rifts in time, at certain locations. Our mission was to secure every one we could find, but it seems this one has given us both the slip. We’ll never recover it now—not unless we get back to our own time and that war settles down enough for us to mount a deep sea salvage operation on the wreck of the
Rodney
.”

Now Dorland’s eyes brightened. “Salvage operation… Yes… Nordhausen could run that down for me…”

“I don’t understand. Nordhausen?”

“Another of our research team members. Professor Nordhausen is our chief historical researcher. Well… You are quite correct that this key will be very difficult to recover in 2021. It might be much easier to look for it elsewhere….” Now Dorland had a strange expression on his face, as though he were experiencing some discomfort.

“Are you alright, Laddie?” said MacRae. “You might fetch the man that drink you promised, Elena. He’s white as a sheet!”

“I’m afraid my time is up,” said Dorland quickly. Then his eyes widened. “My pattern signature is wearing thin, and they’re pulling me out. But I’ll be back! The Azores… Look for me on the first of August, 1941. I’ll meet you there…”

He smiled, and then, to their utter amazement, it seemed as though he simply dissolved, his image quavering like a hologram going in and out of focus. There came a sudden chill, icy cold, and the sharp tinge of ozone in the air, with a crackle of static electricity. Then this man, like the key he had come looking for, like the Russian ship and submarine, simply vanished.

Mack Morgan stood there, dumfounded. Then he realized that this very ship, and the entire crew, had pulled this same magic trick in 2021, and here they were.

“Well I’ll be…” He ran his hand through the air where Dorland had been standing, feeling the palpable cold. “Looks like he was telling the truth!”

Even though Elena had done the very same thing, she still found the evidence of her eyes difficult to believe. Was this man ever really here? It looked as though he was just a digital image! What was that he said about his pattern signature? Clearly there was more to all of this than she had come to learn.

“Everybody started pouring the champagne,” she said softly. “The Russians, then we got in on the act, and now this fellow here—to say nothing of those individuals in the future he mentioned. Time war? My god, weren’t two world wars enough?”

“Three,” said MacRae. “We were just shooting missiles at the Russian Black Sea Fleet before we found ourselves here in this mess.”

“What did he mean when he said we might look for that key elsewhere?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Elena nodded. “Mack, get busy. Check the ship’s computers and see if you can dig anything up on our recently departed Professor Dorland.”

“Right,” said Morgan. “If his story checks out, I’ll find evidence of that in the database.”

“Good… Gordon, get hold of Admiral Tovey and see what he’s planning.”

“I’ve already done that,” said MacRae. “It’s just as this fellow had it.” He thumbed the place where Dorland had been standing. “He’s consolidating the fleet at the new British base in the Azores. These battleships are thirsty buggers, and the fleet has tankers and fuel depots there.”

“Alright, then we’ll join them. We wouldn’t want to miss our next appointment with the good professor.”

“You mean to say you think he’s going to just re-appear there?”

“That’s what he seemed to imply. Let’s get there and see whether he turns up. In the meantime, Mack, you can also do a little digging on the Elgin Marbles. Find out when they were first recovered from the Parthenon and taken to England. It will be in the early 1800s. That little remark he made about looking elsewhere may be the cat’s tail here, and we’ll need to get hold of it.”

“Alright,” said MacRae, “so we make for the Azores. But suppose this fellow never shows up again?”

“Oh I think we’ll see Professor Dorland again, just as he says. Did you follow that business about keeping watch on the history? In a way, that is exactly what I was doing, only my watch was on that damn Russian ship. And did you hear what he said about July 28th? That was the day
Kirov
went missing in that accident in the Norwegian Sea.”