Just like this little foray, thought Elena. Yes, the Grey Friars never found the key in the remains of old Rodney, and I was told why by this professor Dorland. He claimed he found it, and Mack thinks that means we will fail to recover it here.
“Dorland found the key, but only in one version of these events,” she explained. “Then he claimed it vanished! He had it on a chain about his neck, and it disappeared.”
“You mean he lost the damn thing?”
“No, this was something a little more mysterious. He claims it simply vanished. That is clear evidence that some variation in time occurred prior to his initial discovery of the key. It’s the only explanation. He was trying to find a way to recover it himself, talking about visiting the Tubes in London where the Marbles were stored at one time, and then even suggested it might be found here. That’s where I got the idea for this mission when we learned the rift under Saint Michaels Cave led to the 1800’s.”
“Visiting the Tubes won’t work,” said Morgan, “because we know—in both these Bismarck engagements—that the key was loaded aboard Rodney. So no one got to it in the Tubes, or any time before that. See my point? We’ve no reason to be here unless the key does get loaded aboard Rodney, and lost with her sinking. Yet if that is true, then there’s no way we could find the key here. That would prevent it from ever getting to Rodney. This whole thing goes ‘round and round in a circle!”
“Yet Dorland claims he had the key and it vanished. He went back to try and get aboard Rodney to fetch it again, but that mission failed too—perhaps because we find it here.” She smiled.
Each one seized upon the same reason to justify their arguments. Morgan asserted that if Dorland found the key, then they could not get to it here. Elena believed that the fact that Dorland’s key vanished meant that they did get to it here. Yet there was still the tinge of Paradox in the heart of their argument. Morgan did have one good point. If they did recover the key here, then it would never get to Rodney, nor would Dorland ever find it, or lose it. They would have no reason to ever come here, because the sinking of Rodney would not matter. The key would never be there….
She realized now that if they were successful, the first of Morgan’s objections to this mission would come into play—they would change things. She had taken great care to walk softly here. The talk of seizing a ship in Gibraltar’s harbor ended early on. Instead They had simply talked their way aboard the Lady Shaw Stewart, and here they were. No one had been harmed, and as far as she could see, no life line of anyone local to this time had been affected.
Yet the instant any of them set their hand upon this mysterious key, they would change things. This year antedated every other alteration made to the time continuum. It was 1804! This was all playing out well before Kirov ever made its first appearance and started knifing its way through the history of WWII.
We were told about that ship, she knew—Kirov —and that warning came from the future. Yet here I am about to do something that will introduce a major variation in time. I’m out to find and take this key, which means everything I did in my quest to find and save Rodney simply cannot happen. All those long conversations I had with Fedorov, and Admiral Tovey… They cannot occur. There will be no reason for those words to ever be spoken.
Then it struck her like a thunderclap. If I take this key, then we’ll never get back to the time line we left. We’ll be resetting it to an entirely new meridian, one where the urgency of our quest to find the key aboard Rodney never happens… and yet… it must happen. Otherwise, I could not be sitting here on this ship, in the year 1804.
Which one was correct? Was the sinking of Rodney and the loss of the key a mandatory event underpinning her mission here? If so, then Morgan was correct—they would never find the key here. This was all a fanciful jaunt through time, and a dangerous one as well. They were going to fail.
“Damn it, Mack,” she swore. “Now you’ve gone and spoiled my day.” Yet at soon as she said that, her mind was already trying to find another reason that would permit their success here. She didn’t want these thorny wrinkles in time to dampen her ardor for the mission, determined as ever to find this key, and by so doing, get one step closer to solving the mystery they presented.
We could find the key, she thought, but then we might become the means it finds its way aboard Rodney. It was thin. She could not see that as happening, because she thought they would return to 1943, well after Rodney was sunk. I’m playing with fire here. I’m tiptoeing around the edges of Paradox, and by god, that’s dangerous…. Oh, Lord Elgin, you’ve no idea what your plunder may bring home to the Kingdom. But then again, neither do I.
As fate would have it, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, would have his hand deep in the jar of time, and grasp more than he could fathom. Perhaps it was family lineage, heritage, or some arcane quality of the blood that would also make that strangely true of his son, James Bruce, the 8th Earl of Elgin, who would become both the Viceroy of India and High Commissioner and Plenipotentiary in China and the Far East. In that capacity, the 8th Earl would take part in yet another desecration of the arts, this time the so called ‘Summer Palace’ of the Qing Emperor of China, in the year 1860.
While the 7th Earl might rightly claim that his acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles was an act of conservation, the same cannot be claimed by the son. For it was James Bruce who delivered the final blow to the sprawling grounds and buildings of the Qing Palace in Peking. After three days of maniacal looting by French troops, and some British as well, the 8th Earl of Elgin ordered the entire place put to the torch, seeing hundreds of cedar buildings, reception halls, galleries, residences, museums, the whole lot go up in a pall of smoke that would hang over Peking for days.
It is a story that has its origins in British Imperialism, and the inevitable clash of cultures that often rose from it. The Western Powers had been attempting to further their interests in the Far East, which led to demands for freer trade with China, the opening of ports, and more rights and privileges for British citizens engaged in those activities. Some of that trade, however, was the exchange of British cultivated opium for Chinese tea, silk, porcelain, and taels of silver, and as the opium addictions began to spread like a dark weed through Chinese society, conflict resulted that became known as the “Opium Wars.”
One such war had already been fought, concluded by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, an agreement the Qing Dynasty believed was “unequal.” It had been enforced by “gunboat diplomacy,” and so in 1856, when Britain began to clamor for a complete opening of China to free trade, a full legalization of the opium trade as well, conflict blossomed again from those weeds.
As always, big things have small beginnings, and it was a very small cargo ship, the Arrow, that would threaten to destroy the famous ‘Arrow of Time’ in a way no one then alive might fathom. The Arrow was a Lorcha, which was a small ship rigged out with sails like a Chinese Junk, but having a European built hull. She had been registered to fly the British flag, and was anchored in the harbor at Canton, on October 8, 1856.