“Wait,” Floyd said. “There’s something I need to get straight here. A few hours ago you told me you were not a time-traveller.”
“That’s right,” Auger said, tight-lipped.
“But you keep on telling me you’re from the future,” he said, “born in the year twenty-two-whatever. You’ve even given me a history lesson about some of the events that have occurred between my time and yours. Mad weather… mad machines… people living in space…”
“Yes,” Auger said helpfully, raising an eyebrow.
“Then you must have travelled back to the present. Why pretend otherwise? This ship must be your time machine, or whatever you want to call it. Are you taking me back to the future?”
She looked at him hard. “What year is it, Floyd?”
“It’s nineteen fifty-nine,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t. It’s twenty-two sixty-six—more than three hundred years into what you think of as the future.”
“You mean it will be when we come out of the other end of this thing. Or have we somehow already entered the future?”
“No,” she said, with an infinite and alarming patience. “It isn’t nineteen fifty-nine now. It wasn’t nineteen fifty-nine yesterday and it wasn’t nineteen fifty-nine when we met last week.”
“Now you’re making even less sense than usual.”
“I’m saying that your whole existence is…” She grasped for words that would make sense to him. “Something other than what you think it is. On one level, it’s not even true to say that you are Wendell Floyd.”
“Maybe the robot should have put you under after all. You’re starting to sound feverish.”
“I wish it was a fever. That would make life a lot easier for all concerned.”
“Not least for me.” Floyd scratched at his bandage, wondering if the delusional one was himself. His arm floated free, light as a balloon. It was as if they were falling, as if in a dream. He was going to wake up back in his room in rue du Dragon and laugh all this off with Custine over bad coffee and burnt toast. One bump on the head too many, that was his problem.
But he kept on not waking up.
“So let’s start with me,” he said. “Start with this poor sap named Wendell Floyd. Explain how it is that I might not even be who I think I am.”
“Wendell Floyd is dead,” Auger said. “He died hundreds of years ago.”
That was when an alarm started buzzing somewhere in the cabin. Floyd’s hand reached for the joystick, ready to nudge the ship back on course. But Auger shook her head, holding up three fingers in warning. “This is different,” she said. “The guidance system is still on-line.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I’m not sure. They only gave me the idiot’s guide to flying this thing.” Auger threw banks of switches, making the screens light up with different numbers and diagrams. Nothing she did made the audible alarm turn off.
“Any clues?” Floyd asked.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the ship,” she said. “Everything looks good—or at least acceptable—on all boards. And it doesn’t look as though it has anything to do with the tunnel geometry ahead of us.”
“What, then?”
She threw more toggles, tapping the nail of an index finger against one of the screens and frowning at the avalanche of tiny digits and letters. “Not good,” she said. “Not good at all.”
“Just tell me,” Floyd said, frustration beginning to well up in his voice.
“Something’s coming up behind us. That’s what this alarm is telling us. The proximity system is picking up some kind of rearward echo. I can’t read the numbers well enough to work out what it is, but it could be another ship.”
“How could there be another ship?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Believe me, I wish I did. The tunnel is vacuum-sealed at the Paris end. Even if it was somehow possible to get two ships into it at the same time—and I’m not even sure the mathematics allows that—then it still can’t have happened. There is no other ship in the E2 recovery bubble. We should be the only rat in this drainpipe.”
“Something else then? Another machine, but not necessarily a ship?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s some debris we dropped behind us. It was a bumpy insertion, and some stuff probably got knocked off the ship. It might be following us, sucked along in our wake. If we have a wake.”
“But why would we not have seen it until now, in that case?”
“That’s a damned good question,” she said under her breath, as if he was the last person in the world she wanted to know it.
TWENTY-NINE
Presently, Auger found a way to turn off the audible alarm. Floyd breathed a sigh of relief when the din ended and they were left with the usual churn of cabin background sounds. There was something soothingly maritime about those noises. They made him think of engine rooms: the distant, reassuring throb of diesel power.
“I wish they’d told me how to interpret this junk,” Auger said, lines of concentration furrowing her forehead as she stared at the streaming numbers. “It’s almost as if the damned echo is getting closer. But that can’t be the case, can it?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Floyd said, shrugging helplessly.
“If it was debris, it wouldn’t be getting any nearer. We should have lost most of it when we slid through the interchange cavern. And given all the uncontrolled collisions it would be experiencing against the tunnel walls, it should be losing ground on us, not gaining it. There also shouldn’t be a lot left of it by now.”
“So scratch the debris theory. Maybe you’re misreading those numbers,” Floyd offered. “Or maybe there’s something wrong with the ship, making it imagine there’s something behind it when there isn’t.”
“I’d really like to believe that,” she said.
“You might be getting worked up over nothing. Fact is, from the little that you’ve told me, there isn’t a whole lot we can do except sit back and enjoy the ride. That’s more or less the case, isn’t it?”
“Somehow, that doesn’t make it any easier to live with.”
“Then I’ll try to take your mind off things until you can make some more sense of those numbers. We were talking about me, I think: specifically about how I didn’t actually happen to exist.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t go there, Floyd.” Auger could not snap her attention from the puzzling barrage of numbers. She kept staring at them with a poised alertness, like someone expecting a flash of gold in a mountain stream. “It was a mistake to tell you what I did.”
“Sorry, kid, but you already opened that particular can of worms. It kind of gives a fellow the creeps to hear someone talking as if he died years ago. Are you going to elaborate, or do I have to turn on the charm?”
“Not the charm, Floyd. I’m not sure I could take it.”
“Then tell me about these rumours of my death. When, exactly, did they nail me into a box?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t even know for sure that you rated a box. I’m afraid Wendell Floyd simply didn’t make enough of a dent in history for that detail to have survived. Remind me how old you are, Floyd—forty, forty-one?”
“Thirty-nine. You really know how to flatter a guy.”
“So you were born—when? Some time around nineteen twenty?”
“Spot on,” Floyd said.
“Which would have made Floyd eighty by the end of the century. But chances are he didn’t get to see the year two thousand. He might well have died during the Second World War, or perhaps he lived a happy and peaceful life into old age and passed on surrounded by loving family members. Or maybe he ended his days as some crabby, antisocial bastard everyone couldn’t wait to see the back of.”