Departure

by A. G. Riddle

  Bodies. There must be a dozen of them, long dead, their bones protruding from tattered clothes.

  Mike steps off the path toward them, but I catch his arm. “Be careful.”

  The computer booms warnings about staying on the path, but we ignore it, which isn’t hard—the rain’s so loud now it almost drowns it out.

  Mike creeps the last few feet to the bodies, kneels, and begins sifting through them.

  “No IDs,” he calls.

  “Doubt they’d have them in the future,” Bob says.

  He’s probably right. A printed, laminated ID would look archaic to the people who created this structure. They’ve probably moved to embedded chips, fingerprints, or even retinal scans.

  Mike shakes his head. “No watches, phones, nothing. Just bones and clothes.”

  Bob and I walk across the grass to join him. “They could have been picked clean by vandals.” Bob coughs. He’s looking rough. Haggard.

  I nod. Mentally, I try to organize my questions. How does this help us? What do this ruin and these bones tell us?

  “Gentlemen,” Bob says, his voice weak but formal, “I believe we’ve just obtained a crucial piece of information.” He pauses, apparently awaiting guesses from his two favorite pupils.

  I raise my eyebrows, prompting him.

  He points to the bones. “This tells us that organized, effective government no longer exists in England. And hasn’t for many years. Stonehenge is a World Heritage Site, but it’s especially important to the British. If the government were still functioning, if civilization existed here, they wouldn’t leave bones at Stonehenge. Not for a day, not for a week. These bones have been here for many years—decades, I would guess.”

  Mike and I nod. That makes sense.

  “What’s next, Nick?” Bob asks.

  “The farmhouse we saw on the way in. It’s our only shot.” I glance up at the glass roof. The rain is really coming down now. I’m famished; we didn’t stop to eat on the way in, and I’m sure Bob and Mike are hungry, too, though neither has said a word.

  “Let’s get a bite to eat, see if the rain lets up some.”

  The three of us move away from the bones into a grassy area, sit Indian style, and have our late-afternoon picnic at Stonehenge. Surreal only begins to describe it. We consider sitting on an overturned pillar nearby, but it seems wrong somehow, whether there are any people left in this world or not. As I eat, I’m still preoccupied by the mysteries, even the small ones. The grass is better kept than on any golf course I’ve ever seen, for one thing. The structure must maintain the climate and grounds, too, somehow.

  If we’re in the future and a massive catastrophe has occurred, that would explain the lack of roads—or any sign of civilization, for that matter.

  Mike shoves the last bit of his sandwich in his mouth and, still chewing, gets at the real mystery. “Can’t get my head around the idea that we’re in the future,” he says to no one in particular.

  Bob clears his throat. Poor guy is struggling even to keep up with our eating pace. I set my sandwich down. The rain is pouring down; we have some time. “Time travel is scientifically possible—actually, it happens every day,” he says. “Einstein theorized it with relativity, and we’ve been measuring it for decades. In fact, every person who has ever flown on a plane has traveled in time.”

  Mike squints at me with a “Here we go” look, but I glance over at Bob, interested.

  “The rate at which time passes changes throughout the universe, depending on gravity and velocity. Let me give you an example. Let’s say twins were born today. One is placed on a spaceship and launched into space. The ship simply orbits our solar system, but it does it at an incredible speed—say ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light. That’s what Einstein correctly identified as the speed limit for mass in our universe, though we’re pretty sure some particles are capable of faster-than-light travel—which, by the way, opens all sorts of possibilities: quantum entanglement that enables data to travel faster than light, for one. But Einstein’s limit, at least for particles with mass, may still hold.” Bob stops and scans our blank expressions. I’m really starting to like this guy, but he does get carried away sometimes.

  “Anyway,” he continues, “back to the twins: one on Earth, one in a ship in space, going really, really fast. In fifty years the ship returns. The twin who stayed on Earth is fifty—a middle-aged man. The one on the spaceship? Still a baby, though he’s aged a little, since the ship couldn’t reach the speed of light without transforming into energy, and it takes some time to get up to speed. Bottom line: moving fast slows down time. So does gravity.”

  “It’s interesting, Bob.” I pause. “But you’re talking about spaceships—pretty far removed from what we’re dealing with here.”

  “Okay, here’s a real-life example: GPS. GPS was developed by the Department of Defense in the seventies to help get military assets exactly where they needed to be. It currently consists of twenty-four satellites in high orbit, around twenty thousand kilometers from Earth’s surface. That’s so far up there that Earth’s gravity doesn’t exert the same influence on the curvature of space-time. As I said, gravity slows time down. The stronger the gravity, the slower time passes. So the closer to Earth you are, the slower time goes. If you get close enough to very, very strong gravity, say a black hole, time almost stands still. If you crossed the event horizon of a black hole in a spaceship, you would watch the entire fate of the universe unfold in the seconds before you were sucked into the center.

  “But away from gravity, time goes faster—you experience more time, like a video on fast-forward. That’s what happens to GPS satellites. General relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by forty-five microseconds each day. So for every day that passes here on Earth, up there, twenty thousand kilometers away from the gravity we experience, the GPS satellites experience one day and forty-five microseconds. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s time travel. The satellites are moving into our future. But that’s only half of what’s going on up there.”

  Mike rubs his eyelids. “You’re making my brain hurt, Bob.”

  “Stay with me here, Mike. There’s another part of the GPS time travel puzzle: velocity. Remember our example with the twins?”

  Bob waits, but neither Mike nor I volunteer an answer. It doesn’t deter him at all.

  “Right. So like our spaceship, these GPS satellites are flying really fast. They’re not in geosynchronous orbit, like many people think. They circle the globe roughly every twelve hours, and they have to move at about fourteen thousand kilometers per hour to do that. That’s fast. The speed of light is around a billion kilometers per hour, so it’s only a fraction of that, but still fast enough to dilate time. But in this instance, instead of speeding up time, the velocity actually slows it down. Remember our twin on the spaceship? Time flowed slower for him. Gravity and velocity both slow time down. Special relativity predicts that, based on their velocity of fourteen thousand kilometers per hour, we should see these GPS clocks ticking more slowly by about seven microseconds per day—and they do. So the satellites’ velocity slows time down for them by seven microseconds, while the lower gravity up there speeds it up by forty-five. When you put the effects predicted by special and general relativity together, each satellite should travel forward in time by about thirty-eight microseconds per day. And that’s exactly what they do: clocks on the GPS satellites record thirty-eight microseconds each day that we don’t observe here on Earth.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, what does this have to do with our flight?” Mike asks.

  “Everything. In fact, if we had landed at Heathrow, we would have traveled slightly back in time. JFK to Heathrow is a seven-hour flight, most of it at about thirty to forty thousand feet, flying at around six hundred miles per hour. We would have landed slightly younger than everyone who stayed on the ground. The time difference would have been insubstantial—a fraction of a second, maybe
a hundred nanoseconds—but nevertheless, less time would have passed for us than them. And it gets even stranger: if we’d flown westward, against Earth’s rotation—say, from JFK to Honolulu—we would have had a lower velocity than clocks on the ground, and landed slightly older.

  “Bottom line: the closer you are to strong gravity, and the faster you move, the slower time goes. If you go fast enough, you can almost stop the flow of time, though you experience it as normal—from your point of view, the world outside you progresses at a faster rate.”

  “Interesting,” I murmur, still taking it in. “But you’re talking about fractions of a second.” I motion to the structure around us. “It seems like a lot more time has passed than that.”

  “True. My working theory, Nick, is that our plane passed through a patch of space-time where gravity was distorted. It’s the only reasonable explanation, given current scientific understanding. A gravimetric distortion would dilate space-time, making time flow slower or, in our case, faster. Say this distortion created a bubble in space-time, and our plane was in this bubble, where time passed at an incredible rate. If the bubble popped, it would dump us out at whatever time the clock stopped. There are only two possibilities: the gravimetric distortion was a natural occurrence—”

  “Natural?” I ask.

  “It’s conceivable. We’re pretty sure black holes exist—in fact, there may be one at the center of our galaxy. As I mentioned, they distort time, making it flow slower as objects approach. There could be other sorts of gravity depressions throughout the universe, some working in reverse, making time flow faster. We could have just gotten caught in a gravity storm—some natural phenomenon we don’t yet understand. To be honest, we’re still in the dark ages of aerospace science.”

  I’m with Mike now: this stuff is making my brain hurt. “You said there were two possibilities?”

  “The other, which I actually find more likely, is that this wasn’t a natural occurrence. Someone brought us here, with a technology beyond our comprehension—possibly with the help of someone on the plane.”

  “Very interesting.” I don’t know why, but my mind flashes to Yul Tan, the quiet man in business class, obsessed with his laptop. There’s something there, I think. I’ll have a long talk with him when we get back.

  We sit in silence for a while, Bob coughing, the rain coming harder and faster, the clouds overhead a dark slate gray, far-off thunder rumbling. Mike stretches out on the grass like a college kid on a lazy day.

  “What sort of work do you do, Nick?” Bob asks me between coughs.

  I tell him, and he seems impressed, asking a lot of questions. He asks Mike the same thing. Mike races sailboats and isn’t all that interested in talking about it. He was on his way to his sister’s wedding outside London, at the family home of his future brother-in-law, who’s “in banking or something.” He expresses no remorse at having missed the wedding.

  After a few moments, Bob’s tone turns grandfatherly. “You should never retire,” he advises us. “Retiring ruined me. Worst decision I ever made. Should have kept something to do.”

  His second wife recently left him, he says, and he was on his way to London for a job interview, though he quickly adds that he’s under an airtight NDA and can’t talk about it at all. Neither Mike nor I press for details, which seems to mildly disappoint him.

  I feel a little sorry for Bob Ward. I understand him now, somewhat, in the way I began to understand my father during our visit to Stonehenge so long ago. Bob still has a lot of fight in him, a lot of life left to live, and he never knew it until he retired. The crash of Flight 305 might be the best thing that’s happened to him for a while. It’s given him a purpose, a way to apply himself. And if I’m to be completely honest with myself, it’s done the same for me. I was in my own rut when Flight 305 took off from JFK, and though I would rather our flight had landed at Heathrow, every single one of those passengers alive, the crash has revealed a side of me that I never knew existed. It’s shown me what I’m made of in a way the world never did until now.

  Bob coughs again, violently, and stops, staring at his fist. He quickly wipes it on the inside of his shirt, but I glimpse the blood. Our eyes meet. He looks so much older, and for the first time I realize something: he is older. His face is lined, his eyes are slightly jaundiced, and even his movements are less coordinated. What’s happening to him?

  For a moment the only sound is the relentless tapping of rain on the glass dome above us, the din like static on an untuned TV, filling the cavernous space. It’s dark out now, either from the storm or nightfall.

  Through the frosted glass wall, I think I see lightning, but the flash doesn’t subside. It grows, getting wider, raking over the ground. A searchlight, from above, moving toward us.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Nick

  THE SEARCHLIGHT SWEEPS OVER THE TALL GRASS AROUND us, barely missing the structure that surrounds Stonehenge. I jump up, Mike at my heels.

  Bob tries to push up, but collapses back to the manicured grass.

  “Stay here, Bob!” I yell.

  Mike and I rush to the glass wall, to the partition that opened, allowing us in. We stand impatiently as the glass slowly rises from the bottom, the computer voice barely audible above the rain and the engine in the distance. “Thank you for visiting the Stonehenge interactive exhibit . . .”

  Outside I spot the searchlight’s source: an airship, or that’s what I would call it. It’s shaped roughly like a helicopter but much larger, and it has no rotors on top or on the tail. Yet it hovers somehow, moving slowly forward. I’m not even sure how it hangs in the air.

  I step forward, shouting and waving my arms, but it’s already moving past us, back toward the crash site.

  I start through the field, still waving. “Stay here,” I call over my shoulder to Mike. “They could circle back.”

  Behind me, he begins shouting and waving his arms, too.

  I run flat-out through the damp green grass, wind-driven rain pelting me. At the top of the ridge, I stop. The airship is almost out of sight, and it’s making good speed. I scan in every direction with the binoculars, but I can’t see another searchlight. The sun has set, and it’s getting darker by the minute.

  I jog back to the structure, where Mike’s standing, his short hair and Celtics T-shirt drenched.

  We walk back into the glass octagon in silence. Inside, Bob is hunched over, coughing. He looks up at us eagerly, but I shake my head as I try to squeeze some of the water out of my clothes.

  “Looked like it was headed for the crash site,” he says.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “You have to leave me,” Bob says. “You promised you would, Nick.”

  He’s probably right. If the wind and rain have extinguished the fire by the lake, those airships could miss the crash site. On the other hand, if another ship is close behind that one, we won’t make it to camp to restart the fire in time. Staying here is our best shot at being seen and maybe Bob’s only chance of survival.

  “You promised, Nick,” Bob says, his voice growing weaker by the second.

  “Another ship could be searching the area. This landmark and field are our best chance of getting spotted. What if they miss the crash site? Besides, marching back in this storm would be foolish—it would slow us down and we might be covered by the tree canopy when the next ship passes. We’ll wait here for a break in the storm or another ship, whichever comes first.”

  “You need to get back, Nick. If it’s scenario two—if somebody brought us here—that may not be the rescue we’re hoping for. They may be hostile.” Bob coughs again, wiping the blood away quickly.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We have to assume it. Those people will be taken by surprise. You and Mike have the upper hand. You have to move now.”

  “We wait. That’s the decision.”

  BOB IS DEAD. MIKE AND I were napping in short shifts, trying to conserve energy for the hike ahead. I awoke to cough
s, and looked over at Bob in the dim light. His breathing was shallow, his face even more wrinkled, eyes sunken and yellow. His hands trembled slightly as he drew one last breath, shuddered, and went still.

  It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, the way he deteriorated over only a few hours. He’d been fit enough for a twenty-mile hike twelve hours before. Something is very wrong here. What could have killed him that quickly? A contagion? A bug he caught here at Stonehenge when the glass parted? Could the structure have sealed a virus or bacteria inside for all these years? I glance at the bones in the short, manicured grass. Is that what killed these people? Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to have affected either Mike or me—at least, not yet.

  Looking down at Bob’s still body, I can’t help but think he would have liked passing away here, in a place devoted to science, technology, and history, a monument that has represented those things for thousands of years.

  We feel we should do something with Bob’s body, give him some kind of ceremony, but the reality is, we don’t have the time or the tools for a proper burial. In the end we lay him close to the other bodies and fold his arms over his chest.

  At the edge of the structure, I pause. “We’ll have to move fast, for our sake and the camp’s. We only stop to rest when absolutely necessary.” Mike nods, and we step under the glass door into the field.

  WE’VE MARCHED ALL NIGHT THROUGH the wind, rain, and cold, but we have to stop, try to warm up and rest, to prepare ourselves for whatever awaits at camp. We’re exhausted, hungry, and freezing, but we’re almost there.

  We’ve seen no sign of the airship, but we’ll know soon whether it found the crash site. And whether it’s a friend or foe.

  AS THE FIRST FAINT RAYS of sunrise paint the treetops, I climb a ridge a mile from the crash site, draw the binoculars from my jacket, and scan the distance until I find the camp by the lake. The fire’s long extinguished; I can’t see the faintest trace of smoke. Blue blankets dot the muddy bank, all empty, not a soul in sight. That’s either very good or very bad.