52. Arrow of Time

A year. Nigel wasn’t such an optimist that he thought the war would be over by then, at least not how he wanted it to be over. He also wasn’t such an optimist as to feel too confident with the Post Office Engineers’ estimation that they could finish it so quickly. He wanted to work with such an electric machine — Mateo called it ‘programable’ — it must be as beautifully adaptable as a living thing. But the lure of the puzzle and the beauty of the design weren’t quite enough to win him over. The stakes were too high and it was a machine without precedent.

He wasn’t the only one with that attitude, to his and — surprisingly, Mateo’s — relief. Work would continue on the two-tape monster as the main event even as they started the build for Flowers’ machine.

Things were going to heat up and ... heaven help him, he was excited. Both for the technology and for the terrifying hope that either machine might actually work. Before the maelstrom sucked him in, he’d better go visit his parents and see how they were getting on before he got so busy he wouldn’t see anyone outside Station X for months.

Mateo had wished him a nice trip and gone back to trying, with the Wrens and the Post Office Engineers, to make valves fail to learn how to stop them failing. Good to see him all settled in nicely, and panicking just like a local.

Getting on the train, Nigel was glad, as always, that his parents were well out of any big population centers. Even Bletchley would be hit long before they were, if the intensive bombing resumed again. They’d taken some arguing with, but he and his sister at last convinced them to take his sister and her husband’s country house for the duration of the war while they did war-essential work closer in to London.

The route took him past generally what he thought of now as Mateo’s field. Mathew’s Field, what a biblical ring it had to it. Complete with its own bizarre secular miracle. He still wanted to understand that, someday, when he didn’t have more pressing concerns. He was glad he’d disassembled and reassembled the cell ‘phone and the M.P.3. player with his own hands, such a privilege.

***

The visit was pleasant enough, as usual. His father had been dismayed at first that his only son had showed no interest in a military career, or even in sport that supposedly led to it. Nigel had surprised him — and maybe pleased him — by only joining the army when actual war broke out, and then dismayed him again by having no gentlemanly officer training and enlisting as a common soldier. A common soldier with little athletic skill and several degrees in maths and formal logic — he and Station X had been equally pleased to discover each other. Nigel was willing to fight and die in the streets if it came to that — everyone died in the end, and in these days, so many people also killed first — but he would rather wile away the however short days remaining to him on computers rather than marching around being shouted at by red-faced little men with bristly hair.

He couldn’t tell his father exactly what it was he did these days, but to his surprise, he had been mollified and genuinely respectful of his secret army maths. He was convinced (rightly) that it was something vital, and seemed to take it as an explanation from the universe as to why he’d somehow managed to produce such a boffin of a son. Someday these apparent flaws would allow him to render service to the Empire. Nigel secretly didn’t care overly much about the Empire — India could do as they pleased and good luck to them, he supposed — but he’d found within himself a surprisingly fierce fondness for the little Island itself.

His mother had less lofty goals. She wanted him to have some honorable and valuable duty in life and (if possible) to like it reasonably well. His secret army maths counted well enough to her.

He found himself missing them more now, when he left them as an adult, than he ever had leaving as a child or an awkward youngster. Perhaps it was that they actually liked each other now rather than seeing each other as a tiresome problem to solve.

The fields and woods rolled by, so peaceful. He wondered if he could calculate an average of wood vs. field for the line by keeping count of the time it took for each to pass his window.

He woke up a few hours later to sun in his eyes. It seemed counting sheep pastures was as soporific as counting sheep. They were well into the Cotswolds now, at a bunch of little stops that meant the train had dropped quite a bit in practical speed. It looked much the same as the previous spring when he and Mateo had come, the same new greens and the solid yellow pastures — why did flowers only grow in some of them? Was it something the landowners did, or some quality of the soil? He remembered the yellow pollen painting their shoes by the time they arrived at their field.

He found himself, to his own mild and helpless surprise, collecting his hat and suitcase and getting off at that stop.

***

It was late afternoon when he arrived at the field. It would cost him money to take another train back to Station X, but oh no, how sad. He wouldn’t be made late or absent without leave, he would just arrive and have to work without sleep, as he often did anyway.

The hills rolled away just as he remembered them, glowing gold in the last light of the day. The little buttery flowers nodded underfoot. So it was that a deeply unnatural shade of yellow arrested his attention.

There was an arrow standing at a shallow angle amidst the grass of the field, and a section of its shaft had been painted — no, a piece of paper of a brilliant odd greenish-yellow had been wrapped around it. He hurried over and tugged it out of the turf to give it a better look.

It was fletched with grey feathers and had a simple head apparently designed with aerodynamics in mind, and an unremarkable wooden shaft. Unremarkable to him, in any event — an archer might make something of it. A snapped length of cotton twine trailed from the back. Someone had wrapped the yellow paper thoroughly in selotape to keep the damp out, and had mostly succeeded. It was stained darker with damp along the seams of its improvised wrapping, as though it had stood in the field for a few days at least.

He looked at it a minute more, then started peeling off the selotape. It came off in a sheet, for the most part, and he was able to unroll the paper. It turned out to be a note, with writing on the inside.

He read it, then read it again. Then another time, for good measure. Then again.

“Hang in there,” it read. “We’re trying to open the wormhole. Write the most exact time and date and location you can on this paper and tape it back on. Will help us calibrate.”

It was the same dark blue sticky gelatinous ink that Mateo’s pen confiscated at 020 had used.

Nigel stood there for a moment, then reached frantically and fumblingly into his pocket for a pencil.

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