It was cold down here—very cold—and she was glad of the travelling clothes she’d been made to put on when dragged from her bed in Ulm. She stood beside Hooper with her back to the glass wall. On her other side, Radleigh, still smoking in defiance of anyone who dared frown at him, was staring into a dull mirror that almost covered the opposite wall. This looked decidedly makeshift in construction, and had been set up as if by afterthought. It was the smaller though still substantial mirror elsewhere in the room on which every piece of computer and other equipment seemed to have been focussed. It was beside this other mirror that Michael and Count Robert were listening as Tarquin did his best to put Sweeting’s lecture into Latin. If she’d already worked its basics out for herself, the mathematical digressions were almost as obscure in English as in Tarquin’s Latin.
“Because it was already switched on,” Sweeting said in answer to a question from Radleigh, “it was left on.” He was standing beside a grey steel box that looked, on first inspection, like part of an old telephone exchange. He tapped it gently and smiled. “When orders were finally given to shut everything down, I gave it one last spin. I don’t need explain how surprised we all were when, almost at once, we detected a burst of energy as big as a supernova, and found we’d locked onto the Pentagon six months before our own date—our date before The Break, that is.” He went into a rambling explanation of how, once the connection had been made across a void that no one had known to exist, every nuclear power station in the country had been set working at full burn to keep the connection open—even if, for the most part, only plaintext messages could be exchanged.
He fell silent at another impatient sigh from Hooper. She’d been looking through a sheaf of reports. Jennifer could, from the corner of her eye, see words and sentences that suggested a gathering loss of control in the north of England. Sweeting bowed and went to sit at a computer terminal. He typed for a long time, answering a scrolling text that was white on a blue background. At last, he sat back and reached for a microphone. “Come in, Washington,” he called. “This is London. Are you receiving us?”
“Coming across loud and clear, London!” an American voice replied with minor distortion through a loudspeaker beside the terminal. “We thought we’d lost you after voice contact went down.” Sweeting spoke briefly about an interruption from the northern sector of the National Grid. Was Lawrence trying to close the Gateway by cutting its power supply?
The American voice faded for a moment before stabilising. “We have the President here beside us, and your own Home Secretary, come over from our London.” Jennifer saw a flash of wonder on Hooper’s face. It was followed by a look of alarm.
But Rockville had taken the microphone. He carried it as far as its wire would reach and stood before the smaller mirror. “Are you there, Bill?” he asked urgently. “You’ve read my report on the problems we’re facing on this side?”
There was a long silence, during which Sweeting muttered anxiously to himself while typing and retyping numbers at the terminal. Rockville put the microphone down and looked about. He took it up again. “Are you there, Mr President?” he shouted, a nervous edge to his voice.
Another pause, and then: “Thank God you’re there, Madison,” a man said in a voice as sharp as any razor. “I’ve got the Congressional Chiefs with me. I think a few words from you would be most helpful.” Though she’d paid little enough attention to the news before The Break, Jennifer knew the voice of Bill Hagen, forty sixth President of the United States. The last Jennifer had seen of him was just before the Great Storm, when he’d made a televised appeal to the Russian and Chinese peoples. His plea for calm might have been more effective if the missiles shot down over Mecca hadn’t been launched on his orders, and if his face hadn’t looked as sharp and cruel as his voice.
Rockville closed his eyes and swallowed. “Mr President,” he said dramatically, “now that voice contact is renewed, I can confirm that everything you’ve been told is the truth. We are in possession of the ultimate power in the universe.” He put the microphone down and grinned at Sweeting. “Isn’t that so, Professor?”
“Oh, yes,” he said airily—“the ultimate power in this or any other universe, I have no doubt. The difficulties we’re facing in the streets are nothing by comparison.”
There was a murmur of American voices on the other side. Hagen laughed gloatingly. “Then you’d better get the Gateway open again. Seeing is believing.” He laughed again. “Yes, my friends,” he added in a faintly triumphant voice that seemed more distant from the microphone, “seeing is believing.” Rockville looked at Sweeting, who nodded. He looked at his watch, and drank from the paper cup of coffee he’d brought down with him.
Hooper pushed herself close to the microphone. “Hello, Abigail,” she said in a strained voice. “This is Abigail! Can you hear me?”
There was a strangled cry, then—“Have you kept your weight off,” the other Hooper asked. “You must remember the sweat I’ve been raising on that treadmill!” They let out a simultaneous and strained giggle.
Michael coughed for Tarquin’s attention. “Can you ask Hooper if she remembers having had this conversation with herself?” Tarquin’s mouth fell open, and he stammered slightly before relaying the question. Hooper’s answer was a look of confusion and fear. But Sweeting laughed and slapped Michael on the back.
“Bravo, bravo—not bad for an Outsider!” he said with another of his disconcerting smiles. “You’re the first who’s ever asked that question of me. The answer is that the Home Secretary doesn’t recall this conversation with herself, because the universe on the other side of the Gateway isn’t the one we left. We have no idea how many universes there are. The best I can say is that, while time is an absolute constant, and cannot be traversed, there’s an indefinite number of universes running parallel with our own, all at slightly different times.”
Since he’d already got this much by himself, Michael began his next question before his first had been properly answered. “This being so, do you suppose The Break will happen on the other side of your gateway?”
Sweeting shrugged. “Who knows? There are structural anomalies in this present universe, compared with the one we left.” He stared at the microphone and then at the speaker. “There are different anomalies over there. They are all at the sub-atomic level, and don’t seem to make any practical difference to our calculations. But, if there is a Break in the universe beyond the Gateway, I assume that everyone on this island on the day in question will vanish into another eleventh century. If so, this will allow us to step across without violating the rules.”
Radleigh interrupted. “If that isn’t our own universe over there,” he asked while Tarquin was wobbling between Latin and Greek, “why can’t I go across now? The Basil Radleigh on the other side isn’t me. It can’t matter if two similar people share the same universe.”
Sweeting’s face tightened. Not welcoming the drift of these questions, he pushed his hands into the pockets of his white coat. “It’s early days yet,” he said quickly. “We don’t fully understand the rules. But we have experimental evidence that, in whatever universe there was another version of you, your own presence there would be a fatal breach of the rules.”
“Many bodies, one soul,” Michael said in Latin once Tarquin had interpreted.
Sweeting got the meaning without help, and muttered something about the avoidance of metaphysical theories. “Hypotheses non fingo,” he added, quoting Newton.