When Delacroix returned to the recorder, his voice was heavier, slower, leaden, as though he had fallen past fear, dropped below grief, and was speaking from a pit of despair.
“Thought I heard something in one of the bedrooms. Imagination. The bodies are…where I left them. Very still. Very still. Just my imagination. And now I realize you don’t even know what this is about. I started this all wrong. There’s so much to tell you, if you’re going to be able to blow this wide open, but there’s so little time. Okay. What you’ve got to know, the bones of it, is that there was a secret project at Fort Wyvern. The code name was Mystery Train. Because they thought they were making a magical mystery tour. Morons. Megalomaniacs. Me among them. Nightmare Train would have been a better name for it. Hellbound Train — that would’ve been better yet. And me happy to climb on board with the rest of’em. I don’t deserve any praise, big brother. Not me. So…here are the key personnel. Not everyone. Just the ones I knew, or as many as I remember right now. Several are dead. Many are alive. Maybe one of the living will talk, one of the upper-tier bastards who would know a lot more than I do. They all must be scared, and some of them must have guilty consciences. You’re good at finding the whistle- blowers.”
Delacroix proceeded to list over thirty people, identifying each man or woman as either a civilian scientist or a military officer: Dr. Randolph Josephson, Dr. Sarabjit Sanathra, Dr. Miles Bennell, General Deke Kettleman….
My mother was not among them.
I recognized only two names. The first was William Hodgson, who was no doubt the poor devil we encountered in the bizarre episode in the egg room. The second was Dr. Roger Stanwyk, who lived with his wife, Marie, on my street, just seven houses east of mine. Dr. Stanwyk, a biochemist, had been one of my mother’s many colleagues, associated with the genetic experiments at Wyvern. If the Mystery Train wasn’t the project that grew from my mother’s work, then Dr. Stanwyk had been collecting more than one paycheck and had done more than his fair share to destroy the world.
Delacroix’s voice grew softer and his speech slower during recitation of the last six or eight names, and the final name almost seemed as though it would stick to his tongue and remain unrevealed. I wasn’t sure if he had reached the end of his list or had stopped without finishing it.
He was silent for half a minute. Then, with his voice abruptly energized, he rattled out what seemed to be a few sentences in a foreign language before switching off the recorder.
I stopped the tape and looked at Bobby. “What was that?”
“Wasn’t pig Latin.”
I reversed the tape, and we listened again.
This wasn’t any language I could identify, and though, for all I knew, Delacroix might have been spewing gibberish, I was convinced that it had meaning. It had the cadence of speech, and although no word was recognizable, I found it curiously familiar.
After the thick, slow, depressed voice in which Delacroix had recited the names of people involved in the Mystery Train project, he imbued these sentences with evident emotion, perhaps even passion, which seemed a further indication that he was speaking with purpose and meaning. On the other hand, those in seizures of religious joy, who speak in tongues, also exhibit great emotion, but there is no evident meaning in the tongues they speak.
When Leland Delacroix began to record again, his voice revealed a numbing and dangerous depression: so flat as to be virtually devoid of inflection, so soft that it was barely more than a whisper, the essence of hopelessness.
“There’s no point in making this tape. You can’t do anything to change what’s happened. There’s no going back. Everything’s out of balance now. Veils ripped. Realities intersecting.”
Delacroix fell silent, and there was only the faint background hiss and pop of the tape.
Veils ripped. Realities intersecting.
I glanced at Bobby. He seemed as clueless as I was.
“Temporal relocator. That’s what they called it.”
I looked at Bobby again, and he said, with grim satisfaction, “Time machine.”
“We sent test modules through, instrument packages. Some came back. Some didn’t. Intriguing but mysterious data. Data so strange the argument was for a far future terminus, a lot farther than anyone expected. How far forward these packages went, no one could say or wanted to guess. Videocams were included in later tests, but when they came back, the tape counters were still at zero. Maybe they taped…then, coming back, they rewound, erased. But finally we got visuals. The instrument package was supposed to be mobile. Like the Mars rovers. This one must’ve been hung up on something. The package itself didn’t move, but the videocam panned back and forth across the same narrow wedge of sky, framed by overhanging trees. There were eight hours of tape, back and forth, eight hours and not one cloud. The sky was red. Not streaky red like a sky at sunset. An even shade of red, as the sky we know is an even shade of blue, but with no increase or diminishment of light, none at all, over eight hours.”
Delacroix’s low, leaden voice faded to silence, but he didn’t turn off the recorder.
After a long pause, there was the sound of chair legs scraping-stuttering across a tile floor, probably a kitchen floor, followed by heavy footsteps fading as Delacroix left the room. He dragged his feet slightly, physically weighed down by his extreme depression.
“Red sky,” Bobby said thoughtfully.
We listened to the silence on the tape for a while, and then we could hear Delacroix’s voice in the distance, evidently coming from another room.
I cranked up the volume, but I still couldn’t make out what the man was saying.
“Who’s he talking to?” Bobby wondered.
“Himself, maybe.”
“Maybe to his family.”
His dead family.
Delacroix must have been roaming, because his voice rose and fell independent of my use of the volume control.
At one point he cruised past or through the kitchen, and we could hear him clearly enough to determine that he was speaking in that strange language again. He was ranting with considerable emotion, not in the flat dead voice he had last used when sitting at the recorder.
Eventually he fell silent, and a short while later, he came back to the recorder. He switched it off, and I suspected that he rewound it to see where he had interrupted himself. When he began to record again, his voice was low, sluggish, once more crushed flat by depression.
“Computer analysis revealed that the red sky was an accurate color. Not an error in the video system. And the trees that framed the view of the sky…they were gray and black. Not in shadow. That was the true color. Of the bark. The leaves. Mostly black mottled with gray. We called them trees not because they looked like trees as we know them, but because they were more analogous to trees than to anything else. They were sleek…succulent… less like vegetation than like flesh. Maybe some form of fungus. I don’t know. Nobody knew. Eight hours of unchanging red sky and the same black trees — and then something in the sky. Flying. This thing. Flying low. So fast. Only a few frames of it, the image blurred because of its speed. Enhanced it, of course. With the computers. It still wasn’t entirely clear. Clear enough. There were lots of opinions. Lots of interpretations. Arguments. Debates. I
