Killing Time (32 page)

Mutesa's bravery took on a
bewildered quality as the ship slowly descended in our direction until the
bottom of the hull brushed the tips of the waving grass. Then the little green
lights began to flash amidships and the hatch flew open, revealing Fouché and,
behind him, Larissa. My heart leapt at the sight of her, terrified though I
was: she seemed more beautiful than ever, so beautiful that I didn't at first
notice that she was screaming to me over the din of the ship's engines in a
voice filled with desperation. It took several more minutes to make out just
what she was saying, and when at last I did my smiling face went utterly
straight:

Malcolm, she was saying, had
vanished.

As Larissa and Fouché continued
to wave me aboard the ship, I tried to make some kind of sense out of the
situation. But sense was waiting on board the vessel, not out there on that
grassland. I turned to Mutesa to say good-bye and found him already smiling: I
had told him about Larissa (though not about the ship), and, having now seen
her, he had apparently reached the conclusion that I was going to be all right.
I hugged him tightly, and he told me that I mustn't feel at all bad about
returning to my world, for his really wasn't any better—a fact that he
suspected I had already learned. I smiled and nodded, then ran for the ship,
leaping inside and into those arms that had for so long formed the stuff of my
waking and sleeping heartaches.

After getting an additional hug
and nearly as many kisses from Fouché, I headed with the pair of them to the
nose of the ship, where Colonel Slayton and the Kupermans were waiting. More
warm greetings were exchanged, my relief that my suspicions about them had been
so wrong growing by leaps and bounds. But before we could enter into any
serious discussion of what had happened, we needed to hide ourselves where we
would be safe from the weapons of the various tribes of whom my friends had
inadvertently been making enemies in their efforts to find me. Lake Albert
seemed the obvious spot for such asylum, and soon we were beneath its surface, surrounded
by all the military, human, industrial, and animal wastes that had been
discarded there during the long years of Africa's decline. Night soon fell,
mercifully taking this dismal panorama away; and we did not turn on the ship's
exterior illumination as we talked at the conference table, partly for fear of
being detected and partly to avoid the ugliness around us.

With Larissa's arm tightly
entwined in my own, I began to listen to the story of Malcolm's disappearance,
though the telling did not take long. The success of the Washington scheme had
apparently driven him into a deep depression. Convinced that the hoax would be
quickly exposed and finally force widespread acknowledgment of the dangerous
unreliability of modern information systems, he had been stunned to watch it
become, throughout the winter and spring, just another source of media fluff
and academic revisionism. During the summer he had first stopped eating
regularly, then at all, and he had come out of his laboratory so rarely that
the others had begun to wonder how he was surviving. Finally, after he'd been
locked away for three solid days, Larissa had taken her rail pistol and shot
the door down.

Inside the lab was an apparatus
such as none of the rest of the team had ever seen. It was impossible to tell
what the original design might have been, for it was badly mangled: the result
of either a furious destructive rampage or some kind of explosive malfunction.
Whatever the case, there was no sign of Malcolm, nor of his body nor indeed of
any blood; and this fact brought my warning about the possibility of Malcolm's
attempting suicide back into Larissa's thoughts. For the next few days she and
the others used the ship and the jetcopter to search the sea for any sign of
him, and for several more days they wore out their wits trying to think where
else he could have gone and how. Finally accepting their inability to solve the
mystery, Larissa decided it was time to find me (a task that took them all of a
week) and see if I might have any ideas as to where her brother's desperate
mental state could have led him.

Shocked but not entirely
surprised by all this, I tried my best to come up with some alternatives to the
blackest option. But the attempt was hopeless from the start, and as this
became increasingly apparent the others began, one by one, to beg off and go to
their quarters to absorb what seemed the only possible conclusion: that
Malcolm, despondent over not only the Washington hoax but also the failure of
his last technological creation, had smashed the device to pieces and then
thrown himself into the sea. That no evidence of the suicide had been found was
not surprising: the waters of the North Atlantic were vast, so vast that even
the elaborate detection equipment on Malcolm's remarkable ship might have
failed to find his body before it was torn up by predators or simply drifted
down into some abyss.

Larissa, of course, had suspected
that this worst possible conclusion was unavoidable; but given the unique and
poignant nature of her shared background with her brother, that suspicion did
little to ease the blow when it finally fell, and I was grateful that I could
be there to soften it, if only a little. Such was perhaps not the romantic
reunion that I had spent so many months unsuccessfully trying to keep out of my
thoughts—indeed, we never left the conference table throughout the entire
night—but as she drew steadily closer to me, I at least began to sense that she
would survive the loss intact and that we did indeed have a future together.
The approach of dawn found us both in that hazy, tearful state of exhaustion
that often accompanies grief; and then, before either of us was really aware
of it, something very strange began to happen:

The sun came gleaming clearly
into the ship.

The waters of Lake Albert had
been somehow cleansed of the filth that had been horribly evident the night
before; and the sight was so miraculous that both Larissa and I could do little
more than stand up, move to the transparent hull, and smile in wonder for several
minutes. Then the others came barreling in, not one by one but in a noisy herd,
shouting the news and asking—rather dimly, I remember taunting—if we'd seen
what had happened. There was absolutely no rational explanation for the event:
we had heard no sounds of machinery at work during the night, and besides, the
technology to do such a thing didn't exist anywhere in Africa—quite probably in
all the world. It really did seem nothing short of a miracle; but the shocks
were just beginning.

After engaging the holographic
projector, we rose back up above the surface to see that the western shore of
the lake was utterly free of any signs of conflict. Moreover, animals were
visible: the same species of wildlife that I'd read and then observed to be
extinct in Africa were everywhere, making the area look much like the yellowed
old poster I'd seen in the miserable bar in Naples. None of us could find
anything to say, though this was not our usual horrified shipboard silence:
this was, for once, a quiet delight, occasionally broken by laughter and quick,
astonished cheers.

The question of what to do next
arose comparatively slowly. I offered the suggestion that we make for the coast
to see if, along the way, we couldn't find some clue as to what was going on.
But the journey that followed was only more bewildering. Prosperous villages
and towns now dotted the landscape where days before there had been only
ghostly ruins left by war and plague. Still more wildlife abounded, along with
an occasional luxury bus full of tourists. As we neared the coast, the signs of
prosperous civilization grew thicker and more impressive, until finally we
broke through to the sea to behold:

Zanzibar. The impoverished island
of Zanzibar, in bygone eras a center of the slave trade and in more recent
times a decrepit, disease-ridden relic of that evil past. But now? Now what
loomed before us looked more like Hong Kong, or rather what Hong Kong would
look like had it been designed by people with not only money but taste. A
gleaming city stood at the center of the beautifully landscaped island, made
up of high-rise buildings that accented the colors of the sea, the mainland
jungle, and Zanzibar's pristine white coral beaches. It was, in short, an oasis
of enlightened industry and beauty—one whose existence was impossible to
explain.

Our ship now lies beneath the
waves off that oasis. We still have no definite answers, of course, nor have
the ship's communications and monitoring systems been of much help. We seem to
be having trouble establishing and maintaining satellite links, and even when
we do, we hear strange reports from around the world that make as little sense
as what we've seen in East Africa. There are occasional tales of conflicts in parts
of the world where there should be none, along with even more frequent and
remarkable stories that indicate many previously war-torn parts of the world
are enjoying peace and prosperity. All of it supports a seemingly impossible
but no less obvious theory:

That Malcolm has actually
succeeded in his quest to conquer time.

If this is indeed so, then his
mechanism must have self-destructed after completing its task—indeed, it may
have been designed to do so—and we therefore have no idea where, or rather
when, he has gone. The list of possibilities is infinite, as we discovered when
we tried over dinner this evening to determine precisely what place and point
in history one would have had to reach, and what one would have had to do once
there, in order to produce the effects we have witnessed and heard about. Nor
have we yet determined the full range of those effects; assuming that the
incomprehensible has in fact happened, we must now travel the world as Larissa
once proposed to me that we do, living by our own law and observing what may
well be the many signs of our departed friend and brother's handiwork in a
further effort to unravel the riddle of his destination. But time and history
are infinite webs, and the slightest touch on any of their innumerable
filaments can provoke change beyond imagining; thus the truth may ever elude
us.

If he
has
managed it, did
he leave any clues? Notes? The others could find none, but certainly we must
return to St. Kilda to search again. Yet even if we should discover such
documentation, will any of us be able to understand it enough to repeat his
experiment? Would we want to? More questions without answers. The one thing we
can be sure of is that, whatever has happened, Malcolm will never come back.
Nor do I think that he would wish to—even if he were dead. Improved as this new
modern world may be, it is still the modern world, and it would likely suit
Malcolm no better than it did before. Throughout his life, his terrible
physical and emotional wounds made him a man to whom Time could offer no
comfortable moment. Perhaps now he has returned the favor by destroying the
very concept of Time; and perhaps in so doing he has experienced, if only for a
fleeting instant, the kind of ordinary human contentment that so consistently
and tragically eluded him in this reality.

As for the rest of us, we have
all taken heart from even the possibility that Malcolm has achieved his final
dream—no one more so than Larissa. She will of course miss the brother with
whom she shared more secrets and sorrows than anyone should ever have to bear.
But she knows that whether he has broken Time or been broken by it, he is
finally at peace; and the torments that seemed to him so unending have been
revealed as the transitory vexations of a troubled world—one that he may, in
the end, have helped to make less mad.

This book has been dedicated to
my literary agent, Suzanne Gluck, not simply because she has handled my career
with enormous skill and compassion, but because, when asked by Walter Isaacson
and Jim Kelly of
Time
magazine if she could suggest an author to write a
serialized novella about the near future, she put my name forward. During a
remarkable meeting that followed, many of the ideas that were eventually
embodied in
Killing Time
were worked out, and as the first parts of the
story were being written for
Time,
Walter and Jim provided much insight
and encouragement, for which I am deeply grateful. Also of great help at
Time
were Teresa Sedlak and Barbara Maddux. But Suzanne remained the person who
ultimately made everything work, as she always does; and this book is truly almost
as much her doing as it is mine.

Despite the appearance of its
first chapters in
Time,
publication of the book remained a gamble, one
that I am thankful that my editor and publisher, Ann Godoff, was willing to
take. Ann remains the most daring single person in her business: the extent of
her success should surprise no one.

I am also indebted to Hilary Hale
for her friendship, advice, and stewardship of my work in the rest of the
English-speaking world.

Many authors' ideas about what
the future will be like have affected my own opinions, either by challenging
or reinforcing them.

In the realm of scientific
speculation I must mention Michio Kaku, Lawrence M. Krauss, and Clifford Stoll.
Books and articles by Robert Kaplan, Benjamin Schwartz, and David Rieff helped
me refine my thoughts on what world politics and society will be like in the
years to come, as did conversations with my good friend and mentor, James
Chace, who took the time to study the manuscript. I learned a great deal about
the history and impact of hoaxes from the work of Adolf Rieth and Ian Haywood.
And my ever-incisive friend David Fromkin helped me speculate as to just what
historical frauds would have the most impact on the world.

Thoughts on the story itself, as
well as personal support, came from Hilary Galanoy, Joe Martino, and Tim
Haldeman. For helping to keep me going I must thank my parents; my brothers,
Simon and Ethan, and their wives, Cristina and Sara; Gabriella, Lydia, Sam, and
Ben (the last three especially for their creative input early on); my cousin
Maria and her husband, Jay (and Nicholas); John, Kathy, and William von Hartz;
Dana Wheeler-Nicholson; Jim Turner and Lynn Freer (and Otto, of course); Bill
and Diane Medsker; Ellen Blain; Lindsey Dold; Michelle McLaughlin; Jennifer
Maguire; Ezequiel Vinao; everyone who "survived" at Oren Jacoby and
Betsy West's house; and Perrin Wright.