The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(93)

Did he know who he was?

No, he did not, but…

“Do you still have this letter?”

“Sure! Kept in a drawer. I’ve always been open about this to anyone who asked, because I sure as hell don’t wanna get sued if this guy ever comes after me or something, but the faculty, they wanted it done real quiet.”

So here it was, here was the big moment…

“Can I see it?”


He had, as promised, kept it in a drawer, in an envelope marked “Dr A. Schofield”. His office was an attempt at wood-panelled antiquity that the building could not sustain. The light on the desk was low, covered with a green shade. I sat and read through the five pieces of double-sided thick yellowish paper on which were scrawled a series of diagrams, numbers and equations which would be in first-year chemistry classes across universities everywhere–in 1991. We kalachakra can change a lot about ourselves, but oddly enough we rarely consider changing our handwriting, and Vincent’s headlong scrawl was recognisable anywhere.

I examined the paper, looked for a watermark, found none. Examined the ink, the envelope, for anything–anything at all–which might suggest a point of origin. Nothing. I was many, many years too late. I tried to work out how old Vincent would be now–mid-twenties, at a pinch. Able to blend into any campus in any college in the US. Then again, if this was his method of accelerating technological development, by stimulating the minds of those at its present-day forefront, perhaps he’d struck again elsewhere?

Harvard, Berkeley, Caltech. It took persuasion and on more than one occasion copious amounts of rather pricey alcohol, but there they were, letters on yellow paper several years old. In one or two faculties the professors who received the documents had ignored them, treated them as pranks. Now, as they watched their rivals forge ahead in the field, they kicked themselves and drank a little deeper of their academic sorrows.

But Vincent’s method was still only a means to an end. He wished to accelerate modern technology to reach a point where he could recommence his work, find his answers and build his quantum mirror, presumably using technology from some time in the early twenty-first century. I knew now how he was going to achieve this, but I was far too late to the chase to be able to prevent the dissemination of technology which he had begun. Now I needed to discover where the next step was happening, for there Vincent would be. And all the while, as I searched, the technology moved on with frightening speed. In 1959 the first personal computer–rather optimistically dubbed the Future Machine by an inventor so dazzled with his own brilliance he couldn’t think of anything better–was on sale. It was the size of a small wardrobe and had a life of approximately four months before the internal parts melted under the strain, but it was nevertheless a sign of things to come. If I’d been less preoccupied with finding Vincent, I might have appreciated the role technology was playing in politics a little further. I’d never noticed Israel invade Syria and Jordan before, although I was hardly surprised when furious local resistance drove even the technologically superior IDF back to more defensible borders. The declaration of holy war in the Middle East toppled the Iranian shah several years earlier than average, but secular strongmen seemed to be the power of the moment, leaping into the vacuum left behind with a new generation of military equipment that put the 1980s to shame. Armies tend to exploit science faster than civilians, if only because their need tends to be more urgent.

By 1964 the Soviets were winding up the Warsaw Pact, and the US declared another great triumph for capitalism, consumerism and commerce, and still technology surged and surged ahead. I’d got myself a position as science editor on a magazine based in Washington DC, in which capacity I also quietly reported to the FBI on the developing crimes of the age, including telephone fraud and the world’s first ever computer hack, dated 1965. Had my editor ever learned of my duplicity, I would probably have been sacked on principle, and re-hired for the quality of my scoops and the quirky range of my contacts.

All this I watched with an apparently disinterested awareness, even as the Cronus Club seethed and raged about me. The future was being destroyed before our very eyes, the effects of the twentieth century rippling forward through time. Billions of lives were going to be changed, and possibly billions of kalachakra no longer born or their worlds torn beyond all recognition. We, the children of the twentieth century, were doing this, as blithe and oblivious as a whale to the writhing of plankton in the sea.

“Harry, we have to do something!”

Akinleye.

“Too late.”

“How did this happen?”

“Some letters were sent with some bright ideas in them. That’s all.”

“There has to be something…”

“Too late, Akinleye. Much, much too late.”

Find Vincent.

That was all there was.

Forget consequences, forget time.

Find Vincent.

I scoured every technology company, every university, interrogated every contact, investigated every rumour and leak. I trawled through shipping manifests in search of the components which I knew would be on anyone’s shopping list for a quantum mirror, investigated every scientist and scholar who might be of service to Vincent, who had the appropriate knowledge, and all the time quietly wrote articles on the changing world and the prowess of American technological development.

I was careful too. I operated behind a great range of guises, very rarely revealing my true identity when investigating a story. If I wrote an article on agricultural fertilisers in Arizona, then I would be Harry August–but if a man phoned a nuclear scientist in the night to ask about the latest developments in electron microscopes, he did so under any name, and with any voice, that was not mine. By Vincent’s reckoning, I should have forgotten all my past lives save the one immediately after my Forgetting, and this existence should only be my second on the earth. If I were to stumble on Vincent through my research, it had to appear by chance, not intent. My perceived ignorance and weakness were my greatest weapons, to be cherished for a final blow.