Dr. David Schelling gazed nervously at the two men sitting in his office in front of him.
“How have you been since the accident?” asked the older of the two men, who wore a slightly ridiculous long beige raincoat and possessed a rather avuncular air, with his fringe of grey hair and hawk-like nose.
But behind this amiable front, Schelling sensed, was something altogether more dangerous.
“OK more or less.” said Schelling.
“That’s not what we’ve heard.” said the younger man, who wore a dark grey suit with a blue shirt and could almost have passed for an accountant were it not for his unusual accent.
“What’ve you heard?” Schelling asked.
Neither of the two men replied. They only regarded him steadily and expectantly.
“I’ve had some memory issues.” said Schelling. “There are things I can’t remember.”
He laughed nervously, but neither of the two men opposite him even displayed as much as a hint of a smile.
“Sometimes I think I remember things that I can’t possibly remember. It’s strange. But none of this affects my work, nor my ability to keep secrets.”
“We wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t absolute vital for national security.” said the older man.
“We are winning the war against Russia,” said the younger man, “but victory is not yet assured. If your work were to fall into Russian hands …”
He let the sentence trail off, and the older man finished his thought.
“Let’s just say, the consequences could be significant.”
“I quite understand.” said Schelling.
“After the war, we can revisit the situation.” said the older man. “We’re only asking you to keep your lips sealed until then.”
“I want to ask you something.”
“Anything.” said the older man, with a good effort at a pleasant smile.
“The only reason I was able to develop the module alone, without Dr. Asgrove’s oversight, is Simon Quint stepped in and funded my private laboratory. Now I’m wondering if this isn’t exactly why he funded it. People in your organisations saw this coming and persuaded him to step in.”
The two men laughed jocularly and exchanged knowing glances.
“I’m afraid we can’t comment on that.” said the older man.
“There’s one last thing I’m obliged to mention.” said the younger man, suddenly serious. “It gives me no pleasure to say this, but, well, let’s say I’m contractually obliged.”
“Yes?” said Schelling, somewhat alarmed by the man’s tone.
“If you were to share the secret of how the module works, that would be considered a treasonable offence.”
“Death sentence, I’m afraid.” said the older man.
They stared at him intently, as if gauging his reaction.
“I quite understand.” said Schelling. “On that score, you’ve nothing to fear.”
The older man smiled.
“Splendid.” he said.
After the men left, Schelling spent some time staring blankly after them, at the closed door.
“Weirdos.” he said, quietly to himself.
Then, when he was sure they had left the building, he got up and went to Lab C, to resume his work and to see what Dr. Bill Asgrove was up to.
Bill was tinkering with the the Ark as usual. He had Tchaikovsky playing on a small pair of underpowered speakers on a bench at the side of the room.
“I take it they’re finished with you?” he asked, without looking up.
“Apparently.” said Schelling.
“You’re not allowed to tell me how your power module works, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Well, I daresay I can live without knowing.”
“After the war, I can probably tell you.”
Asgrove stood up to face him, holding a screwdriver in one hand and a mini-probe in the other.
“Something to look forward to.” he said, with a brief, professional smile.
Next to him, the Ark stood open, revealing the inner cavity—big enough to hold ten people. The machine towered over the men.
“We should probably conduct another stability test.” said Schelling. “Give it one final check.”
“Yes, probably.” said Asgrove, turning to face the machine. “Hopefully it’ll never actually get used anyway.”
“If it is ever used, it might be the only thing that protects the top brass from nuclear destruction.”
“Personally I think we’d be better off without them.” said Asgrove. “They got us into this stupid war.”
“Turn that rubbish off.” said a voice.
The voice belonged to the Administrator, who was traversing Lab C on his way to somewhere else.
“Not a fan of classical music?” said Asgrove.
The Administrator stopped and then approached them.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re at war with Russia.” he said. “Show a bit of patriotism for once.”
Asgrove glared at him for a moment, then went over to the speakers and turned them off.
“Happy now?” he said.
The Administrator continued to glare at him for some seconds, then hurried off out of the exit.
“What an idiot.” said Asgrove.
“He’s just doing his job.” said Schelling.
“Just following orders.” said Asgrove, dryly.
“Forget about him.” said Schelling.
Asgrove took a deep breath, then clapped his hands together.
“Right.” he said. “Forgotten. How about you double-check the module while I tune the primary?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
For several hours they worked patiently, tweaking and testing.
It was almost evening when Asgrove spotted Schelling out of the corner of his eye, staggering into the middle of the largely-empty space between the front of the vast laboratory and the machine.
“You all right?” he asked.
Schelling clutched his head, swaying slightly.
“I think so.” he said.
Asgrove hurried over to him.
“Come and sit down, old boy.” he said, and he gently led Schelling to one of the chairs arranged around a cheap plastic table over at the side of the room.
“Just got a bit dizzy.” said Schelling.
“I keep telling you, you shouldn’t have come back so quickly after the accident.” said Asgrove. “If we have to delay the launch, so be it. Whoever heard of scientists having launches anyway? It’s ridiculous. In my view, we should let them know when it’s working and they ought to be happy with whenever that is.”
He looked at Schelling, expecting a response, but Schelling only opened his mouth as though about to say something, then shut it again.
“What?” said Asgrove.
“Nothing.” said Schelling. “Just … I’ve got the most incredible sense of deja-vu.”
“You need to be at home.” said Asgrove. “I’ll drive you.”
“No, I’ll be fine.” said Schelling. “I just need a few minutes.”
“Well, take however long you need and then get the hell out of here. You’ve done more than enough for today.
“I’ve still got work to do. Honestly, I’m OK.”
“David,” said Asgrove, “go home. I insist.”
Schelling glanced at Asgrove’s serious expression, then at the machine, then back at Asgrove.
“All right.” he said, finally. “One hour. I’ll just finish what I’m doing first.”
“Now, David.” said Asgrove. “Don’t make me go and fetch that idiot.”
He was referring to the Administrator.
Schelling sighed.
“OK, I’m going.” he said. “I just need ten minutes.”
“Can I get you a tea or some water or something?” said Asgrove.
“No, really, I’m fine.”
Fifteen minutes later, Schelling walked home. Once home, he took a frozen ready meal from the freezer and put it in the microwave.
When he took it out, the lasagna was still slightly frozen in the middle, but he ate it anyway, absent-mindedly.
After that he flicked through science periodicals for a bit, then he went to bed.
He was already half asleep when he had an idea.
He hurried down to the basement and fired up the little test device he’d put together the previous weekend. As before, it failed to reach a steady resonant frequency. He took a screwdriver and began to tweak the little variable capacitors and resistors.
“I might just be on the right track.” he muttered to himself.
It was three hours before he was finally somewhat satisfied, and he turned the machine off and went to bed, still carrying the screwdriver, unable to decide whether or not to go back again and have one final go at tweaking the machine into full stability.
At a certain point, while lying on top of the bedsheets, still making calculations in his head, he simply passed out, falling abruptly into a deep sleep.
When he awoke, it was dark except for a flashlight, and a dark figure was standing over him holding a hypodermic needle. He lashed out wildly at the figure, panicking, forgetting the screwdriver was still in his hand. The screwdriver embedded itself in the man’s eye. The man fell back, shouting something in Russian, dropping the syringe. Schelling bolted out of bed and switched on the light.
Two unknown men were in his bedroom, wearing ski masks. The one who’d been standing at the far side of his bed was suddenly running towards him.
Schelling wasn’t sure why he did it—it was as though some unconscious part of his brain outpaced the conscious parts—but he dove towards the syringe. When the second man fell on him, he stabbed the syringe into the man’s ankle, emptying it.
The second man crumpled to the floor.
The first man, still howling pitifully, pulled a gun out of a holster at his side. Schelling yanked it out of his hand—the man was in so much pain that he offered little resistance—and pointed it at him, staggering backwards. When the man suddenly lurched at him with a howl he fired the gun, and the man dropped to the ground.
Schelling’s heart was threatening to explode out of his chest. He sat down heavily on the bed.
When he’d managed to fractionally calm down he went to the kitchen and poured himself a stiff gin. Then he went back to the bedroom and surveyed the scene.
One man was dead on the floor, quite a lot of blood seeping out of him, a screwdriver still stuck in his eye. The other man seemed in much better shape but he was absolutely unconscious.
“Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my bedroom?” muttered Schelling.
There could only be one answer. These men were Russian spies, and they had intended to kidnap him and extract information from him. A horrible thought occurred to him and he went to the window.
A nondescript van was parked on the street.
He watched it for a bit but could see no sign of anyone moving about inside it. He got dressed and then went out to examine it more closely.
Indeed, the van was empty, and unlocked. In the back were some ropes and handcuffs. He took them back into the house with him. If the substance in the syringe was a tranquilliser, it was only a matter of time before the man he’d injected woke up again.
He was in the kitchen, nervous but somewhat off his guard, when the man in question lunged at him drunkenly out of seemingly nowhere, conscious but still full of tranquilliser. The two men collapsed together on the floor. Schelling managed to scrabble to his feet first; he grabbed a kitchen knife.
The man was up on his feet again faster than he expected, and without meaning to, he practically threw himself on the knife. For a second it seemed he hadn’t realised he’d been stabbed, and he tried to grapple Schelling onto the floor, but then he sank to his knees, swearing in Russian.
“I-I’ll get you an ambulance.” stammered Schelling, but then the man keeled over completely.
Schelling felt for the pulse in his neck, but no sooner had he successfully located it than he felt it turn irregular and then stop, the man’s heart emitting two final slow heavy pulses, and then no more.
He pulled the man’s mask off and was shocked to see that the man appeared quite young; still in his twenties.
“You didn’t leave me with any choice.” said Schelling. “I’m so sorry. This could all have been avoided.”
He put the knife down and washed his hands. Then he went to look for his phone.
He was on the verge of dialling emergency services when a new unsettling idea shaped itself in his mind.
Obviously, he couldn’t tell the police exactly what he was working on. He would have to give a statement about the whole thing, omitting what was clearly the central motive behind the appearance of the men in his house, and he’d be lucky if they didn’t lock him up. He hadn’t intended to kill either of the two men, but the police would definitely consider his actions to represent excessive force.
It appeared, from an external perspective, as if a maniac had launched an unprovoked attack on a pair of half-witted burglars. That was undoubtedly what the police would think.
He ran his fingers through his hair and paced back and forth.
“Dear God!” he said to himself. “What a mess.”
Asgrove. He would have to discuss the matter with Asgrove. Obviously the bodies, meanwhile, would have to be stashed somewhere temporarily. But where?
He considered putting them in the van. The problem was, someone might conceivably see him, dragging two corpses down his driveway, even at this hour.
Then the solution hit him. He would put them in the cold room.
In his basement was a room he used for performing experiments involving supercooled liquids. The entire room was chilled to below the freezing point of water, for the purpose of reducing ambient heating of the apparatus. He hadn’t been in there since the accident, but he had kept the power on, to avoid unwanted thermal expansion in his finely-tuned apparatus.
He began to drag the corpse in his kitchen down the cellar stairs. Once the body was next to the cold room door in his cellar, he fetched the other man from upstairs, the man’s head bumping unpleasantly on every step as Schelling pulled him down feet first.
The process left an enormous bloody trail all the way down the stairs. Fortunately the stairs were uncarpeted—Schelling had always hated carpets, considering them unhygienic—so the the inevitable cleanup operation wouldn’t be too taxing.
Once the two bodies were laid out neatly next to each other, he unlocked the cold room and swung open the heavy metal door with its layers of internal insulation.
There, a sight greeted him that caused him to stumble backwards in horror.
The room was filled with frozen bodies.
He stared at them in disbelief. Dozens of them, heaped up around the edges of the room.
In a state of shock he dragged the two new corpses on top of the others, then slammed the door shut and leaned back against it, shaking. What did this mean?
He abruptly vomited onto the floor. Then he staggered out of the room, clutching the walls for support.
Lying on the sofa, half-formed memories seemed to flood into his mind, like fragments of dreams.
He had killed those men. All of them. He was sure of it.
Now that he thought of it, the killing of the two spies had seemed surprisingly easy, as though he was used to killing. For that matter, why had he really fallen asleep with a screwdriver in his hand, a potential weapon?
Was it possible that he, David, was a serial killer? A man who murdered not only when necessary, but for pleasure?
He found himself shouting: “No! No!”
Then he clutched his head.
There were things in there from before the accident that he hadn’t wanted to remember. He knew that now.
What if someone came to his house? It was possible that some friend or acquaintance would stop by to check on him at some point in the next few days.
He jumped to his feet and began to look for cleaning equipment. He located some cloths, gloves, bleach, and a bucket, and began to scrub at the blood that was now practically everywhere between the bedroom and the cellar.
When he was finished, he went back to the cold room and, avoiding looking at the mountain of corpses as much as possible, located the key to the van in one of the men’s pockets.
He drove the van only a few blocks and left it in the street, with the door slightly open and the keys in the ignition, then he walked home.
Back at his house, he took the blister pack of pills the doctors had given him for headaches from the bathroom cabinet and swallowed three of them.
He spent what little was left of the night lying on his bed gazing at the ceiling in the dark, thoughts racing through his mind.
When the morning arrived, he went into work early, staring blankly around him like a zombie.
His subsequent actions were carried out on auto-pilot, in a kind of fugue, a mixture of horror and guilt having obliterated all possibility of true rational thought from his brain. He flicked open the cover of the power module, turned all the faders up to maximum and shorted out all the fuses.
The Ark was supposed to create swirling magnetic fields so powerful that they could deflect light itself, even gamma rays, but when supplied suddenly with all the power his module could muster, it ought to disintegrate him in a nanosecond. A painless death. Instant oblivion.
He stood for a moment staring up at the Ark towering above him, his eyes moist but blank. Then he opened the doors, stepped inside, and pulled the doors shut.
He entered the activation code in the keypad and pressed the red button.
There was a noise, distant at first, like the engine of some great spacecraft starting up, rising in pitch until almost a roar.
He closed his eyes.
White light. Voices. A faint smell of disinfectant.
He opened his eyes suddenly to see a ceiling tiled with polystyrene. With a start he realised there was a tube down his throat, forcing him to breathe. A machine beeped out his heart rate, suddenly quickening.
At the side of the room, a nurse in blue overalls was attending to something. He looked over at her with frightened eyes, but he couldn’t call her.
He slapped his hand on the bed on which he lay. She turned around, her eyes widened, then she hurried off.
Soon a doctor appeared.
“Dr. Schelling.” he said. “Good to have you back with us. I’m afraid there was an accident, but you’re in one piece. You seem to be breathing well so we’ll get this tube out of your throat. OK?”
He could do nothing but blink and give the slightest of nods.
Schelling’s subsequent recovery was rapid. Only three days later he was able to use a phone to connect to the internet and catch up on his messages. Even so, the accident he had been involved in—which had apparently involved a rogue magnetic pulse of stupendous power—had brought about a partial amnesia and other psychological symptoms which, while comparatively mild, were disconcerting nonetheless.
A week and a half later he was back at work, and two weeks after that, Asgrove informed him there was two government men who wanted to talk to him in his office.
He went there immediately, somewhat nervously, and found a man with the nose of a hawk and a fringe of grey hair waiting for him, and another younger man in a dark grey suit and a blue shirt with an accent that he couldn’t quite place.
“Dr. Schelling?” said the older man.
“Yes.” said Schelling.
“Please sit down. We need to ask you … well, let’s call it a favour.”
After the men had departed, Schelling went to Lab C. Bill was tinkering with the Ark and playing Tchiakovsky on a pair of tinny computer speakers. Schelling experienced a strong sense of deja-vu.
He went home a little early that evening, feeling dizzy. Even so, he found himself unable to sleep that night, and he went down to the basement to work on a test device he’d begun to construct.
He finally fell asleep several hours later with a screwdriver in his hand.
He awoke suddenly at some point during the night to find a figure looming over him. He scrambled to the other side of the bed in a panic, then he realised there was a strange dark shape on the other side of the bed also. He lashed out at it, and before he could gather his wits, he realised he’d stuck the screwdriver in someone’s neck. The man slumped against him and he felt warm blood gushing over him.
The first man scrambled towards him across the double bed and Schelling saw dimly in the near-complete darkness that there was something in the man’s hand. He grabbed the man’s wrist, pulled the screwdriver—of which he’d never actually let go—out of the other man’s neck and stabbed it frantically at the other dark shape.
The man let out a horrible gurgling howl.
Schelling jumped forwards off the end of the bed and ran to switch on the light.
He saw one man slumped over his bed, blood spurting out of his neck, and another man howling due to a screwdriver stuck in his eye, holding a hypodermic needle.
The scene was shocking and yet, somehow familiar.
Acting on a kind of curious instinct, Schelling grabbed the syringe from the man and injected him with it. The man fell to the ground head first, landing on the screwdriver and driving it further into his head. His body convulsed for a while, then the spasms gradually slowed.
“Who the hell are you?” said Schelling frantically, tearing at his hair.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew exactly who they were, even though he could consciously articulate neither their names nor their purpose for being in his bedroom and attacking him.
After drinking two glasses of wine from a bottle in his fridge he arrived at a decision. He would put the bodies in the cold room while he decided what best to do next.
He dragged the bodies down the stairs to the door of the cold room, and opened the cold room door.
It was then that he observed the shocking fact that the cold room was already full of bodies.
It took Schelling a while to get a grip on himself again, and when he finally did so, it was at best a partial grip. Perhaps the only thing that really kept him functioning was the unshakeable feeling that everything now happening to him was inevitable, and therefore the correct course of action.
After dragging the bodies into the cold room he located a bottle of bleach and began to scrub the bloodstains off the floor and stairs.
He had progressed only halfway down the stairs when he ran out of bleach.
Schelling held the bottle of bleach up to the light, and it was then that he noticed the fingerprints adhering to the white container. He looked at his hands and then again at the bottle. His hands were covered in blood mixed with water, but the bottle seemed to have dried bloody fingerprints on it.
After driving the van parked outside around the block and leaving it there, he lay awake the whole rest of the night, thinking. Was it possible that the machine … but no, that couldn’t be.
At five in the morning he went back to the cellar and checked the bodies in the cold room.
As he had feared and suspected, all of them were identical copies of the two men, differing only in their precise injuries. The bodies furthest to the back, undoubtedly the oldest, showed the greatest variety of injuries, some having even been bludgeoned to death.
Later, he was to discover dried blood on the base of his bedside lamp.
Gradually the injuries had converged, the more recent of the deaths all involving a screwdriver.
At seven o’clock he went to the lab and waited for Asgrove to turn up. He was going to need Asgrove’s help.
Dr. Asgrove appeared at half-past seven. Schelling had intended to explain the whole thing to him, but the expression on Asgrove’s face was unmistakable and shook him to his core.
Asgrove had not expected him to return.
He faked ordinary civility, explaining that he had been unable to sleep and so had decided to get started early. On impulse, since Asgrove was clearly attempting to process something mentally and drawing a blank, he told Asgrove that he’d slept at his sister’s house, because she had asked him to take care of her dog while she was away visiting other relatives.
He meant, and Asgrove would assume, that that was why he wasn’t currently being interrogated by Russian spies. The men hadn’t been able to locate him.
Then it occurred to him that Asgrove would undoubtedly relay this information to the Russians, and they might well turn up at his sister’s house the following night.
There was nothing to be done but to explain everything to the Administrator immediately. He went directly to the Administrator’s office, telling Asgrove he needed to discuss a draught coming from the window in his office.
The Administrator listened gravely, and expressed only mild surprise at the miraculous powers Schelling now imputed to the Ark. Asgrove even took Schelling’s attempted self-dissolution in his stride.
“What are we going to do?” said Schelling, at the end of it. “Asgrove’s working for the Russians. I’m convinced of it.”
“I’ve suspected this for a while.” said the Administrator. “Here’s what I propose. We’ll get a van and load the bodies into it. All of them except those last two, which we’ll show to the authorities. We’ll make several trips if necessary. We’ll incinerate them in the furnace attached to Lab E. I’ll simply tell them we’ve been experimenting on pig carcasses. At night there’s no-one there. And I suggest we keep the whole thing to ourselves for a while.”
“You believe me?” said Schelling.
“Why wouldn’t I?” said the Administrator.
Later that night, an exhausted Shellling made three trips to and from the incinerator with Administrator.
“Do you really hate Russians?” Schelling asked, as they carried the last of the bodies up the cellar stairs to the waiting van outside.
“No.” said the Administrator, laughing. “This war, it’s just a thing between the politicians. Like every stupid war. You see, my wife’s Russian and she plays Tchaikovsky incessantly. That’s why I can’t bear to hear it at work as well.”
Schelling burst into uncontrollable laughter, and so did the Administrator. They were forced to temporarily rest the body on the cellar steps while they wiped tears from their eyes.
After a couple of minutes, the Administrator forced himself to be serious again.
“Tomorrow I’ll inform the authorities and they’ll arrest that worthless traitor Asgrove.” he said.
“And the phenomenon?” asked Schelling.
“The world’s not ready for a time machine.” said the Administrator. “Continue with your normal work. With a bit of luck no-one will ever figure out what it can do. And please don’t try to kill yourself again.”
“Don’t worry.” said Schelling. “I feel much better now.”
