The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(69)

“There are theoretical implications for the quantum mirror in your ideas. What if—”

“What if, what if, what if!” he snapped, spinning on the spot to change the direction of his pacing. “What if we are causing harm in the future? What if our actions are changing lives? What if, what if, what if! I thought you were the level-headed one, for whom ‘what if’ was a theoretical anathema.” His scowl deepened into his face, and suddenly he turned, slamming the palm of his hand against the wall. There he stayed for a moment, waiting for the shock of the noise to fade to deepest silence. Without looking at me he said, “I need you on this, Harry. You’re more than just an asset, more than just a friend. You’re brilliant. Your knowledge, your ideas, your support… I could unlock the secrets of existence, of our existence, in just a few more lives. I need you to stay with me.”

“Working on this,” I admitted, “has been the single most exciting time of my lives. And it may be so again. But here, now, until we fully understand the consequences, I think we should stop.” He didn’t answer so, rashly, I pushed on. “If we talk to the Cronus Club…” a grunt of contempt, fury at the idea “… we can send questions further forward in time, to members whose understanding of the technology may be more advanced. We can see what effect, if any, our research has on time, on people—”

“The Cronus Club are stagnant!” he snarled. “They will never change, never consider developing because it threatens their comfort! They would suppress us in a shot, Harry, maybe even try to wipe us out. People like you and me, we are a threat to them, because we cannot be content with wine and sun and endless, pointless, questionless repetition!”

“Then we don’t tell the Club,” I replied. “We leave a message in stone, requesting information, ask that the answer is whispered back through time. We can stay anonymous, and once we know—”

“Thousands of years!” he spat. “Hundreds of generations! Are you prepared to wait?”

“I know you’ve been working on this longer than I—”

“Dozens of lives, centuries of my life, from the first stirring of consciousness in my father’s arms to the day I die, this, Harry, this is my purpose.” Now he turned and fixed me with a stare from which I refused to flinch. “You won’t stop me, will you, Harry?”

A plea and a threat?

Perhaps.

Something tightened inside.

“I will always be your friend, Vincent,” I replied. “Nothing less.”

Did that part of my soul which curled up in knowledge of the lie curl up inside him too? Did we both recognise our own deceptions in that deep part of our beings that had no need for rational thought?

If he did, he moved straight through the second, waving it by like a casual acquaintance seen on the other side of a busy street. He slipped back into his chair, picked up the empty whisky glass, scowled to see it drained, laid it down again. “Can I ask you to take some time to think?” he said at last. “A week, maybe? If at the end of it you still feel the same…”

“Of course.”

“… we’ll work something out. I would be heartbroken if you went, Harry, truly I would, but I understand if… conscience… stands between us.”

“Let’s see how it is in a week,” I replied with a shrug. “After all this, it would be hypocritical to rush into things.”


Half an hour later I was back in my room, and not ten seconds after the door snapped shut was reaching for my travel bag and warmest clothes, and wondering about the best way to escape.





Chapter 53


Did I ever tell you about the time I was kidnapped by Argentinian bandits? I was a businessman, which was to say I was taking the profits from a company while other people did the legwork and feeding most of my resources into the Cronus Club, as befitted the basic tenets of the institution. I was living in Argentina and, rather na?vely, had assumed that I was keeping my head down and causing very little trouble.

I was kidnapped while driving to market. They were rather unprofessional about it, taking my car out with a sideswipe that overturned it and could well have killed me then and there. As it was, I dislocated my shoulder and cracked a couple of ribs, and considered myself lucky to have done no worse.

As I crawled from the wreckage of my car, two men in ski masks came barrelling out of the pickup which had swiped me on the potholed road, grabbed me by an arm each and, screaming, “Shut up, shut up!” in heavily accented English, dragged me into the rear of their vehicle. The whole escapade can’t have taken more than twenty-five seconds.

I was too groggy and confused to do anything other than obey, and lay face down with my hands above my head for the duration of the journey, where under more prepared or kinder circumstances I might well have made a better strategic assessment of my kidnappers. I was aware by the increasingly poor roads and rapidly rising humidity that we were heading into forest and felt no particular surprise when we finally came to a stop in a small round clearing of no discernible merit and I was pushed to a mud floor shimmering with larvae. They bound my hands with rope and covered my head with a cloth that stank heavily of roasted coffee, and dragged me through the forest. As will happen when you have a bewildered, injured, blindfolded prisoner on rough paths, I only made it a few miles before I tripped and sprained my ankle. A row ensued as to what to do with me next, and eventually a rough stretcher was cobbled together from crooked branches that stuck into my spine as they pulled me to their camp. There, to my great disappointment, the ski masks came off, and I was crudely shackled with a rusted chain to a post set in the ground. A newspaper carrying the day’s date was laid at my feet, a photo taken and, eavesdropping on to the gabble of my hosts, I discovered that a ransom for some $300,000 was to be demanded.