According to Verity, detectives weren’t required to go anywhere or do anything. They could sit in an easy chair (or a dungeon) and solve the mystery just by using “the little gray cells.” And I had more than enough mysteries to occupy me: Who on earth would have wanted to steal the bishop’s bird stump? Who was Mr. C and why the bloody hell hadn’t he shown up yet? What was Finch up to? What was I doing in the middle of the Middle Ages?
But the answer to that one was obvious. Verity and I had failed, and the continuum was starting to collapse. Carruthers trapped in Coventry and then the slippage on the return drops and then Verity — I should never have let her go through. I should have realized what was happening when the net wouldn’t open. I should have realized what was going to happen when Tossie didn’t meet Mr. C.
It was one of T.J.’s worst-case Waterloo scenarios, an incongruity too devastating for the continuum to be able to fix it. “See here,” T.J. had said, pointing at the formless gray image, “and here, you have radically increased slippage, but it can’t contain the incongruity, and you can see here where the backups start to fail, and the net begins to malfunction as the course of history starts to alter.”
The course of history. Terence marries Tossie instead of Maud, and a different pilot flies the mission to Berlin, and he miscalculates the target or is hit by flak, or he thinks he hears something wrong with the engine and turns back, and the other planes, thinking he’s received orders, follow him, or because of him they get lost, the way the German pilots had two nights before, or somehow the lack of their grandson’s presence in the world affects the history of airplane development or the amount of gasoline in England or the weather. And the raid never happens.
The Luftwaffe doesn’t retaliate by bombing London. It doesn’t bomb Coventry. So there is no restoration project. And no Lady Schrapnell to send Verity back to 1888. And the paradoxes multiply and reach critical mass and the net begins to break down, trapping Carruthers in Coventry, sending me farther and farther afield. This is the cat that dropped the bomb that brought down the house that Jack built.
It was getting colder. I pulled the lapels of my blazer together, wishing it was the tweed.
But if it was a worst-case scenario, why hadn’t there been any increased slippage on Verity’s drop? “See here,” T.J. had said, bringing up sim after sim after sim, “every single incongruity has this area of radically increased slippage around the focus.” Except ours.
Nine minutes’ slippage on that first drop, between two and thirty on all the others, an average of fourteen for all drops to the Victorian era. Only two areas of increased slippage, and one of those was due to Ultra.
I took my coat off and wrapped it around me like a blanket, shivering and thinking about Ultra.
Ultra had had a system of backups, too. The first line of defense was secrecy. But if there was a breach, they put their secondary system of defenses into action, like they had done in North Africa.
They’d been using Ultra to locate and sink convoys carrying fuel oil to Rommel, which could have roused suspicions that codes were being broken, so a spotter plane had been sent up each time to be seen by the convoy, so the Nazis could blame the sinking on having been spotted.
Except once, when heavy fog kept the plane from finding the convoy, and, in their panic to make certain the oil didn’t make it to Rommel, the RAF and the Royal Navy had both shown up to sink it, and nearly blown the cover.
So the head of Ultra put a backup plan into operation, planting rumors in the port of Malta, sending an easily decodable message to a nonexistent agent, arranging for it to be intercepted. The message thanked the agent for his information on the convoy and gave him a raise. And the Nazis had spent the next six months tracking down rumors and looking for the agent. And not suspecting we had Ultra.
And if that plan had failed, they would have tried something else. And even if all the plans had failed, they would have failed after, not during the breach.
No matter how bad the incongruity was, the continuum should have tried to prevent it. Instead, it had added nine minutes’ slippage, nine minutes that had sent Verity through at the exact moment to save the cat, when five minutes either way would have prevented it from happening at all. It was as if the continuum had taken one look at the incongruity and fainted dead away, like Mrs. Mering.
Verity had said to look for the one little fact that didn’t fit, but none of it fit: Why, if the continuum was trying to repair itself, hadn’t it sent me through at Muchings End so I could have returned the cat before Mrs. Mering went off to consult Madame Iritosky? Why had it sent me through three days late and just in time to prevent Terence from meeting Maud? And the biggest little fact of all, why had the net allowed the incongruity at all when it was supposed to shut down automatically?
“You understand these are all hypothetical scenarios,” TJ. had said. “In all these cases, the net refused to open.”
It was impossible to get anywhere near Waterloo. Or Ford’s Theater. Or Franz-Joseph Street. If the cat was so pivotal to the course of history, why wasn’t it impossible to get anywhere near Muchings End? Why wasn’t there increased slippage on Verity’s drop, where it was needed, and so much in Oxford in April, 2018? And how, if the slippage was keeping everything away, had I gotten through?
It would have been nice if the answer had been there, in the lab in 2018, but it was obvious that, whatever had caused the slippage, it wasn’t anything Jim Dunworthy or Shoji Fujisaki had done. They weren’t doing any drops.
Doubtless, if Hercule Poirot were here, he’d have come up with a neat solution not only to the Mystery of the Baffling Incongruity, but also that of the Little Princes in the Tower, Jack the Ripper, and who blew up St. Paul’s. But he wasn’t, and neither was the dapper Lord Peter Wimsey, and if they were, I’d have taken their coats away from them and put them over my knees.
Somehow, during that reverie, I had realized I was staring at an unevenness in the pitch-blackness opposite that might be the mortar between the stones, and that it meant light was coming from somewhere.
I flattened myself against the wall, but the light, or, rather, very slight absence of darkness, didn’t flicker or grow, like a torch coming down from somewhere above.
And it wasn’t the reddish-yellow of a lantern. It was only a grayer shade of black. And I must really be time-lagged, because it took another five minutes for the other possibility to occur to me: that the reason for the pitch-blackness was that it was night and I was in a tower, after all. And the way out was down.
And a near-fall and scraping of my right hand catching myself to realize that if I waited another half hour I’d be able to see where I was going and get out of here without killing myself.
I sat back down on the step, leaned my head against the wall, and watched the grayness grow.
I had made an assumption that darkness meant a dungeon, and as a consequence, I had been looking at things all wrong. Was that what we were doing in regard to the incongruity, too? Had we assumed something we shouldn’t have?
History was full of mistaken assumptions — Napoleon’s assuming Ney had taken Quatre Bras, Hitler’s assuming the invasion would come at Calais, King Harold’s Saxons’ assuming William the Conqueror’s men were retreating instead of leading them into a trap.
Had we made a mistaken assumption about the incongruity? Was there some way of looking at it which explained everything — from the lack of slippage on Verity’s drop to the excess of it in 2018? Some way of looking at it in which everything fit — Princess Arjumand and Carruthers and the bishop’s bird stump and all those bloody jumble sales and curates, to say nothing of the dog — and it all made sense?