Apocalypse

15

‘What does it say?’

Lopez tried to look at the diary that Ethan held in his hands, and he turned it to face her.

‘Holy crap,’ she muttered.

By now Ryker, Hannah and Jarvis were all craning their heads to see the diary. Ethan turned it to them and Mitch Hannah read the message scrawled on the open page.

‘Who the hell is Ivy Mike? And how the hell could Purcell have known that we would be here?’ Lopez asked.

It was Thomas Ryker who replied.

‘Because he has seen the future.’

Mitch Hannah ran a hand through his hair in disbelief. Ethan looked at Ryker.

‘How? You said yourself that time travel is impossible.’

Ryker searched the air above his head and stroked his feeble beard, as though hoping a suitable response would fall from the ceiling.

‘We don’t have enough time for a physics lesson here, Mr. Warner, so this is going to have to be brief. Have you ever looked into the past?’

Ethan shook his head. ‘No, of course not.’

Ryker grinned.

‘Yes, you have. We all have. Every human being on earth has looked into the past, back in time. We do it every minute of every day.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Lopez snapped impatiently.

Ryker gestured to one of the windows, through which shafts of sunlight passed from outside.

‘Light, is what I’m talking about,’ he replied. ‘The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant across our universe — its velocity never changes. What’s important here is that the speed of light’s velocity can be measured: it doesn’t cross vast distances instantaneously, but over periods of time.’

Jarvis, standing with his hands in his pockets, frowned at the young physicist.

‘How fast does it go?’

‘Three hundred thousand kilometers per second. ‘Fast enough,’ Ryker said, ‘for a photon of light to zip around our planet’s equator seven times in one second. Fast enough that the human eye cannot detect the movement of light.’ The kid jumped up and walked across to a blackboard, picking up a piece of chalk and drawing three circles: a big one on the left, a little one in the middle, and then a large oval disc on the right side of the board.

‘What’s important, though,’ Ryker continued, as he pointed at the nearby window, ‘is that it’s still a measurable velocity. The photons of light coming in through that window have to bounce off me and reach your eyes before you can see me. Even though I’m only a couple of yards away, you’re still looking into the past.’

Ethan blinked in surprise.

‘So wherever we look, we’re looking into the past.’

‘Exactly,’ Ryker smiled. ‘What I meant when I said that Purcell could see the future wasn’t that he’d travelled in time, only that he’d perhaps found a way to see through time.’

Lopez glanced at the window.

‘But if it takes light to be reflected off something in order to see it, then how can he have seen events that haven’t happened yet? The light won’t have been able to reach him.’

Ryker raised an eyebrow in surprise.

‘That’s incredibly astute of you, Miss Lopez,’ he said, as he gestured to the diagram he’d drawn on the blackboard, ‘and entirely correct. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Look at these circles: the one on the left is the sun, the one in the middle is the earth, and the egg-shaped one on the right is our nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy.’

Ryker turned to face them.

‘It takes light from the sun eight minutes to reach us, so we see the sun as it was eight minutes ago. If the sun vanished from the center of our solar system right now, we wouldn’t know about it for eight minutes. In comparison, the light from the Andromeda galaxy takes about two million years to get here, so we see that galaxy as it was two million years ago.’

Jarvis nodded as he got the message. ‘The further away you’re looking, the further back in time you can see.’

‘That’s right,’ Ryker agreed. ‘And if someone in the Andromeda galaxy had a big enough telescope and they zoomed in to this very spot here, what do you think they would see?’

‘Not this office,’ Lopez guessed.

‘They’d probably see saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths,’ Ryker confirmed. ‘Whatever was living on this spot two million years ago.’

‘Okay,’ Ethan said, ‘I’ve got that much, but how does all of it translate into Charles Purcell being able to see into the future?’

Ryker stepped away from the blackboard.

‘Well, the simplest way to put it is that time and space are effectively the same thing. You need space in order for light to be able to travel from one place to another, and how long it takes light to cross that space gives you the definition of time. Each needs the other in order to exist, and what affects one will affect the other. This relationship is known as the space-time continuum.’

Lopez nodded.

‘I’ve heard of that before,’ she said. ‘You reckon that Purcell has somehow worked out how to alter the continuum?’

Ryker shook his head.

‘I’m not sure. What I do know for sure is that time does not always run at the same speed across the universe, or even here on earth.’

Ethan frowned. ‘How can that be true, if the speed of light’s velocity is fixed?’

Mitch Hannah spoke up.

‘It’s a fact of physics,’ he explained. ‘It’s not the velocity of light that changes. If an object starts moving at high velocity, then time begins to run more slowly compared to another object that remains stationary. The discrepancy was predicted by Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity. The Air Force ran tests using a Boeing 747 with an atomic clock on board, and another synchronized atomic clock that stayed on the ground. The aircraft flew around the world, and when it landed again the clocks were compared: the clock from the aircraft showed a slightly different time as a result of its sustained velocity.’

‘So the clock on the airplane had travelled through time?’ Lopez asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Hannah corrected her. ‘Time had flowed at a different rate for the travelling clock than the one that stayed on the ground. The same effect occurs for satellites orbiting our planet at seventeen thousand miles per hour, especially the ones that provide Global Positioning data. If the different rates in the flow of time for the satellites compared to us on the ground were not accounted for, then GPS systems would be wildly inaccurate.’

‘That’s not all,’ Ryker said. ‘It’s not just velocity that affects the flow of time. If you’re close to an object of great mass, like a planet or a star, then time slows down for you compared to another observer out in space, well away from any gravitational fields.’

‘How can mass make a difference?’ Jarvis asked.

‘Because a large object like a star warps the field of space-time around it,’ Ryker explained. ‘This results in the effect we know as gravity. Light follows this gravitational curve, as do other objects around the star or whatever object is warping space-time. That’s why planets like the earth orbit the sun: they follow this bend in the field of space-time like a ball rolling around a casino wheel. Point is, when the planet or star warps space it’s also warping time along with it.’

Mitch Hannah spoke up again.

‘This was also predicted by Einstein, and was proven in the last century when his equations were used to explain why Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity perfectly predicted the orbits of all the planets around the sun, except Mercury. Mercury orbits very close to the sun and always seemed to appear slightly out of place. It turned out that the sun’s mass curved the light reflected from Mercury’s surface when seen from the earth, making it appear in a different place to where it actually was. Newton’s laws were correct — Mercury just looked like it was in a different place.’

Ryker nodded, picking up from Mitch.

‘The bottom line is that time is relative to the observer, and can flow at different rates depending on how fast we’re moving and how close we are to planets and stars. The effect of these phenomena on time is known as time dilation.’ Ryker gestured up to the sky outside the window. ‘The world record for what some people might call time travel is held by cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev, who orbited the earth almost twelve thousand times over 750 days whilst aboard the Mir space station. At such velocity, and farther from the mass of the earth than those of us on the ground, the time dilation he experienced sent him 0.02 seconds into the future, because time passed slower for him than for the rest of us.’

Ethan thought about this for a moment.

‘So I take it that unless Charles Purcell has spent the last two years sprinting faster than the space shuttle, he must have found some other way of achieving time dilation.’

Hannah shrugged.

‘So you’d suppose, but I’m not aware of a single way that he could have done that.’

Ethan looked at Ryker. ‘Can you?’

Ryker held Ethan’s gaze for a few moments. ‘There’s a great deal of evidence suggesting that we can see into the future, albeit in a basic and somewhat nebulous way,’ Ryker said. ‘Virtually all the great scientific formulae which explain how the world works allow information to flow both backwards and forward through time. For many years the CIA funded a secretive project called “Stargate”, which investigated everything from psychics to remote viewing in an attempt to turn such skills into defense initiatives for the military. More recent experiments have repeatedly shown that people have the ability to respond emotionally to images shown them on television screens some three seconds before they occur, with those results confirmed by replication in laboratories as far afield as Edinburgh University and Cornell, and that this ability shows parallels in real-life events. Trains and aircraft that crash are consistently found to be unusually empty, suggesting that people due to travel on them decide not to at the last minute for reasons they cannot define and probably aren’t even aware of.’

‘That’s not enough for Purcell to have predicted what he saw in such detail,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘He can’t have done so much on the basis of a psychic vision.’

‘I guess,’ Ryker replied. ‘What else is in the book?’

Ethan looked down, having almost forgotten he was holding Charles Purcell’s diary. He opened the pages and flicked through them. There were contact details for almost a hundred people: names, addresses and telephone numbers. Ethan shook his head.

‘Looks like a normal address book,’ he said with a shrug.

‘There’s nothing normal about Purcell,’ Lopez said, as she tapped the pages of the book with a finger. ‘You cracked his last code. Ten bucks says this one beats you.’

Ethan flipped through the diary one page at a time, as Jarvis moved to stand alongside him.

… Barker. Carson, Devereux, Elliot, Forbes, Griffiths…

‘I could send this to the DIA, have them call the numbers and find out who’s on the other end,’ Jarvis suggested. ‘But there might not be an actual code in there that can be deciphered by computers.’

‘Not enough time then,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘We need to figure this out, right now.’

Ethan frowned as he scanned through the alphabetically arranged list of surnames, none showing any sign of hidden codes.

… Hillier, Innes, Jackson, Kellerman, Lamont, Marchant, Nancy, Osborne, Peterson…

Ryker stared down at the pages as Ethan flipped them.

‘See anything?’ Ethan asked, flipping the pages as he went.

… Thompson, Ustanov, Vernoux, William, Wilkinson…

Ryker shook his head.

‘Looks normal enough to me.’

Ethan scanned down the pages and shook his head.

‘Maybe you’re not quite the sleuth you thought you were,’ Lopez said, as she leaned back on the table and folded her arms. ‘Ten bucks it is.’

Ethan stopped reading and flicked back a few pages. All at once, it leapt out at him as clear as the sunlight streaming into the room.

‘The code’s not in the names,’ he said. ‘It is the names.’