The Master of Time: Roads to Moscow: Book Three

by David Wingrove

  I look down, unable to speak, and the big Russian squeezes my arm gently again, as one might comfort a child.

  For a moment there I’d thought them dead.

  My words are barely a whisper. ‘What am I to do, Arkadi?’

  ‘I don’t know, dear friend. I really don’t. But we won’t give up. I promise you that. Until the very last, we’ll keep on looking.’

  When he’s gone, I stand there, knowing that I can’t go back, can’t face the veche. Not yet, anyway. And so I jump, back to Four-Oh, back to Hecht’s room and seal the door, lying there in the half-dark, waiting for the medication to kick in, tears rolling down my cheeks.

  ‘Gods of my father’s father, help me now,’ I whisper. ‘Make me strong, Father Odin. And keep my sweet girls safe until we meet again.’

  Only the gods surely aren’t listening. If anything, it feels like they’ve abandoned me. That here, in my hour of need, they’ve turned their backs on me and mine. And, wiping away the tears, I turn and, sitting on the edge of the bed, curse the two men who have spoiled my life, and vow, there and then, that I will one day slit their throats. For all they’ve done.

  And all they’re yet to do.

  350

  I shower and dress, then go to the observation room, where I find Ernst and Old Schnorr, seated on the far side of the one-way glass, taking notes.

  ‘Galileo?’ I ask, staring at the man seated in the room beyond, impressed by the aura that he gives out.

  Ernst looks across at me and smiles. ‘The same.’

  I turn my attention to the man, knowing that in our time he’s been dead thirteen and a half centuries.

  Galileo is in his early forties subjectively, and has already faced the kind of adversity no scientist should ever have to face, his theories attacked and ridiculed, his ideas on heliocentrism banned by the Catholic Church as heretical.

  And now he sits there, dressed as he was on the day he was picked up by our team back in 1620, not quite sure where he is or why, his expression a mixture of bemusement and frank annoyance. He looks very much like the figure in Giusto Sustermans’ portrait, wearing the same black cloak with a frilled white collar, his beard and moustache well groomed, his hair receding.

  He looks tired, soul-weary and beaten.

  I take a seat next to Old Schnorr, and watch.

  ‘What’s that language he’s speaking?’

  ‘Italian. A very old dialect of it, from Pisa, where he was born.’

  ‘Ah … and what are we telling him?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘No wonder he looks bemused. You think he’s going to believe it?’

  ‘He’ll have to,’ Ernst says, and laughs.

  ‘We’ve made him a book,’ Schnorr says. ‘A history of astronomy from our perspective, here at the tail end of the third millennium. I’ve had it translated into Latin.’

  ‘And has he seen that?’

  ‘Not yet. Kurt and Maxim are trying to explain things to him first. Just the basics. More than that and he’d probably have a stroke …’

  ‘Or think he’s bewitched …’

  I study our two de-briefers a moment. Kurt Muller I know. I taught him, several years back, but Maxim is new to me, a young Russian agent from Up River. Both seem to be taking a gentle attitude towards their captive, but alarm bells sound in my head just watching it.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ I say, ‘how much this must be like being interrogated again, by the Inquisition?’

  ‘There might be similarities …’ Schnorr begins, but I cut him off.

  ‘No. Let’s stop it right there. We’re going about this in totally the wrong way. Let’s back off and give him that book of yours, Master Schnorr. He’s got an imagination – yes? – so let’s feed that. Let’s make him ask us questions. Then give him one of our slates. Nothing special. Just a standard machine, like our students use, and let him play with it. Then tell him where he is and why.’

  Old Schnorr looks to Ernst, who nods, then touches a panel in front of him.

  ‘Kurt … Maxim … come out of there for now. We’ll take this up in a while, but Otto wants to try something first.’

  The two figures turn and nod their acknowledgement, then, their chairs scraping back, come out of there, leaving Galileo alone in that plain, undecorated cell.

  ‘The book?’ I ask, putting my hand out to Master Schnorr.

  ‘I’ll have it brought. We were going to leave it in his room. We’ve been ferrying some of his stuff here, you understand. DNA copies from his rooms in Tuscany, including the desk he works at. I was going to leave it there, for him to find—’

  ‘Which would have been good. Only we need to convince him from the start. And what better than to give him another fourteen centuries of astronomical speculation?’

  ‘What if he doesn’t believe it?’ Ernst asks.

  ‘Then we’ll have kidnapped the wrong man. No. The real Galileo will digest this like the finest caviar. He’ll lap it all up and ask for more, I bet you.’

  ‘You bet me?’

  ‘No. This is our way in, Master Schnorr. Can you have other such books made up for each of our … helpers? Not necessarily in Latin, but in accessible linguistic form for each of them.’

  ‘It can be done.’

  ‘Then do so. And let’s make the first room they experience in Four-Oh a bit more comfortable, eh? A bit more welcoming. Because that’s what it reminds me of. The Inquisition.’

  Ernst looks to Old Schnorr and then back to me. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Good. Then give me the book and I’ll start again. Do we have a translation device for a form of Italian he’ll understand?’

  ‘We should have,’ Ernst says, standing now, keen to get to work.

  ‘Then bring me that, too … and a slate. Oh … and maybe we can get someone to sketch out a working notion of what Four-Oh actually is, with diagrams … and without relying on Gehlen’s equations. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘It shall be done,’ Old Schnorr answers me, then, chuckling to himself, he hurries away, an eagerness in his ancient eyes that hasn’t been there for years.

  351

  Galileo Galilei is a soft-spoken man, but his words have an authority I’ve rarely come across. He is that rarest of birds, a man who believes despite the whole age he lives in being against him. It is why most scientists revere him, because to them he represents the scientific spirit in its purest form. Like all of those we propose to extract from Time, he is a rationalist. And in that past age, where the Catholic Church reigned supreme, to be a rationalist was equivalent to being a God-denier, and therefore a worshipper of the devil.

  ‘What is this?’ he asks, touching the large-format book as if it were unclean.

  I wait a second for the translation to whisper in my ear, then answer him, the Italian translation following only moments later. ‘Why don’t you look inside?’

  He starts, like someone has just pricked him with a needle, his eyes staring at my own, as if I were about to change my form.

  ‘Seriously,’ I say, the Italian like an echo. ‘I think you’ll find it interesting.’

  He hesitates, then reaches out and slowly lifts the cover. Inside, I know, is the title page, and the date of publication …

  He reads those words, then looks up at me again, his eyes much fiercer than before.

  ‘Are you mocking me?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I answer. ‘Look through it. You of all people will understand.’

  ‘Understand?’

  ‘The truth of what’s written there. It’s all built upon your work. Or rather, on the foundations that you built.’

  There’s the slightest change in his expression, a look of doubt mixed with hope, and then he looks back at it, hesitates once more, and then plunges in, turning to a page almost halfway through the book, hefting the thick weight of it over and down, then studying the pages – strewn with diagrams and photos that ca
n be accessed at the touch of a fingertip.

  ‘Lord Jesus Christ preserve us!’ he says, staring at it like it’s the devil’s own writing. ‘Who are you people?’

  I lean forward, trying to see what he’s looking at, and smile. He’s looking at the Galilean moons.

  ‘You are here,’ I tell him. ‘Now. In the last days of the third millennium. We are from the future, and that’s where you are, at our platform, which is called Four-Oh, and …’

  ‘Stop,’ he says quietly, but with immense authority. ‘Four-Oh? Like 0 and 0 and 0 and 0.’

  Once more I smile. ‘Precisely that. Like a coordinate …’

  And I see that he’s seen what I mean, and that even if he hasn’t taken everything I’ve just said on board, he’s taken the first step towards understanding it all.

  ‘And these … on the page here?’

  ‘Are Jupiter’s moons … named the Galilean moons, after you.’

  He nods, almost as if he hasn’t heard that last part, then reaches out to touch one of the panels, and jerks his finger back as it comes alive beneath his touch.

  And then, unexpectedly, he laughs, and then bursts into tears.

  ‘This is … Heaven, is it not?’

  It is not, I want to say, recalling my own situation, but instead I nod and smile, watching in wonder as he turns the pages of the hefty book, his eyes as wide as a child’s, as one after another new fact touches and connects with his mind.

  352

  I don’t look or feel much like an angel, yet that is what he takes me for. I try to explain what it is I’ve spent most of my life doing, fighting wars throughout Time, but he seems not to connect with that part of it. As he sees it, he has been gathered up by one of God’s angels and brought to Heaven itself. And nothing I can do or say will alter that for him.

  Even so, I am encouraged. Perhaps our scheme might work. That is, if Kolya doesn’t act to spoil it all. And maybe, from wherever he is right now in Time, he is planning just that. Only this time I’m not going to let him. We are going to make this work, see if we don’t!

  Two more have arrived in the past hour. One – Einstein – I know. I’ve met him in the past. The other – Leibniz – I’ve never met before today.

  Wherever ‘today’ actually is.

  I’ve read the two-page ‘prompt’ on Leibniz, and understand from that just how important he was in the field of mathematics, not to speak of his role as a philosopher, but from first impressions he’s a somewhat vain man, given to moods. A rationalist, but also a professional diplomat; a man much dependent on patronage. Oh, and I know that that was how it was, in his time, his era, but I can’t help but see him as a creature of compromise, not another Galileo.

  And there’s also the matter of his wig. In the struggle to extract him, Leibniz lost his wig – and what a creation it was! Look at any picture of the man and you’ll see what I mean. Without it, he seems a much less imposing fellow. His shaved and powdered head is almost comically unimpressive. So we have promised him a wig to match his own. Oh, we have them in our stores, for use by our agents, but the man is incredibly fussy, and, after having tried on more than twenty different models, tempers – both his and ours – are close to fraying.

  ‘Send him back,’ Ernst says, watching the man storm across the room for the dozenth time.

  ‘I would,’ I say. ‘Only Gehlen was insistent. Leibniz was his idol when he was young, and he must be part of the team.’

  Ernst grimaces. ‘More trouble than he’s worth,’ he murmurs, and I have to agree. There’s no humility to the man. No give and take. He is full of his own self-importance. But what Gehlen wants …

  Einstein, by comparison, is charm itself. He takes his new situation in in an instant and, accepting where he is and why, is a font of enthusiasm for our project.

  That said, of all these great men, he is the one we are most familiar with, and so, hearing that he’s been extracted, a small crowd gathers in the corridors nearby to greet him.

  Anyone who has ever travelled in Time will know of Einstein. It was his challenging of classic Newtonian physics that was the first step on the road to Gehlen’s equations; his thinking that, via the general theory of relativity, allowed all this to happen.

  Like Galileo, he is revered.

  Big men and little men, I think, as the three men meet each other for the first time in their awkward fashion, their first exchanges stiltedly translated.

  Which, I can see already, is going to be a problem. We are going to have to choose a lingua franca for these men to use, if they’re to be of any use at all.

  Even as they make to bring the next of them – Wolfgang Pauli – through, so the three who are already here are taken to their quarters.

  It’s all been rather hastily prepared. Rooms have been created for each of them around a central hub; beds and desks and chairs and shelves installed, brought in from our stores.

  The hub itself is a large lecture theatre with desks and computers and screens. Commonplace stuff for us, but for them this is something else entirely.

  The best moment of them all is when Ernst gives Galileo a slate. It’s a standard-issue machine, the kind our young trainees use. But to Galileo …

  He presses the pad at the foot of the page, as he’s told to, and then gasps and almost drops the thing as it lights up, his eyes staring out of his head.

  ‘Satan’s balls!’

  There’s a gust of laughter at that.

  Even as he says that, he’s drawn to the machine that’s in his hands. It fascinates him, and his whole being craves to know more. And I know there and then that this will work, for there is not one of them who won’t react the way he is reacting now. Who won’t be sucked in by this. Knowledge. It’s what they live for. More than sex or power or money. They long to know new things.

  Both Einstein and Leibniz look to me, as if to ask where their magic boxes are, and, smiling, I hand each of them one of the wafer-thin machines, then let them get on with it. If they’ve questions I’m sure they’ll ask.

  Only they don’t ask me. No, for I’m still their enemy in some fashion, still the one who had them abducted from Time, and quickly – very quickly, and despite the language difficulties – the three men form a bond, using their slates to make their way about this strange world they’ve found themselves in, sharing their discoveries, until, with a laugh that slowly changes to something more serious, all three of them look to me.

  ‘We’re in the future, yes?’ Einstein asks, speaking for all three of them. ‘We’re actually deep into the future.’

  And then the three men laugh again, looking to each other, sharing a delight at this magical transformation of their lives.

  353

  Only there are snags.

  Old Schnorr sits there, going through the figures for the third time, then looks up at me and shakes his head.

  ‘It won’t work, Otto. We’re putting too great a strain on things. The sheer amount of manpower we’re having to divert to service this project and look after our “guests” … the cooks and cleaners and the like, the linguists, the copyists and the service staff to give them whatever books or resources they need … all of that alone makes it difficult.’

  ‘But we can do this, no?’

  ‘Well, yes, but it stretches us thin.’

  There’s a knock. A moment later, Ernst steps into the shadowed room.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he says. ‘We have a problem.’

  ‘Leibniz?’ Schnorr asks, but Ernst shakes his head. ‘It’s the women. They’re up in arms about Gehlen’s selection. Six men and not a single woman.’

  ‘So what are we supposed to do?’

  Ernst grins, then hands me a list he’s taken from the pocket of his tunic. I study it a while then hand it to Master Schnorr, who snorts, then shakes his head again.

  ‘Two more?’ he groans. ‘How will we ever cope?’

  ‘Well, for a start we could make them cook for themselves. Yes, and clean up after thems
elves, too.’

  Schnorr looks dubious. He looks back at the list and frowns. ‘It’s not even as if they’re that well known …’

  ‘It’s a man’s world,’ Ernst says.

  Only I can see the women’s point. If we’re really going to build this new world we’ve been talking of, then they ought to be represented on a project like this. They’ve been our brood cows far too long.

  ‘Agree to it,’ I say. Then, curious, I look to Ernst. ‘Who drafted this?’

  ‘Zarah, and Urte …’

  ‘Then give them the job of extracting these from history. If they want them, they can bring them in. But as far as Gehlen’s list is concerned … I’ll go see him again. See if some of these can’t prove … dispensable. Feynman, for instance … Oh, and there’s one here I don’t even know. Moseley. Does anyone know him?’

  Ernst shrugs. ‘Well, there’s one off the list.’

  ‘If Gehlen will agree.’

  ‘He’ll still have five names … seven if we include the women’s choices.’

  ‘Okay. Get moving on it.’

  Ernst nods. ‘I shall. Oh, and just to let you know. Two more were brought through about half an hour back. I thought you might want to go and welcome them.’

  I raise an eyebrow in query.

  ‘Pauli … and da Vinci.’

  ‘Da Vinci…? You’ve seen him, Ernst?’

  ‘Not yet. But it rather gives you goose bumps, no? To think just what we’re doing here. Gathering them all in one place at one time.’

  354

  We finish off what we were doing, then hurry across to the Welcoming Suite. To find the Great Man himself – dressed in the flowing robes of his time – holding court, everyone hanging on his translated words.

  Even Wolfgang Pauli, considered by many to be the father of quantum physics, looks in awe, unable to quite believe he’s there in da Vinci’s presence. Mind you, physically there’s a quantum leap between da Vinci’s godlike aura and Pauli’s movie-villain looks. No. Pauli looks like an ordinary Jewish man of his time and place, complete with shabby suit, whereas da Vinci …