Locations for the field generators were chosen for the length of time their locales had remained unchanged. The alley they traveled through had remained virtually unchanged for centuries. They were safe as long as the target date was kept within the time frame in which the unnamed alley existed as they found it. If not safe, then at least within an acceptable level of risk.
“That sounds like shooting blind,” she said. “What if we came out in broad daylight in the middle of a garden party?”
“The mist helps to mask any sudden arrivals,” he said with a bland expression.
“Then it’s all fast talking and a hasty exit?”
“That is what it often comes to.”
She coaxed him into showing her the calibration device. It was a smooth metal band that covered his right wrist below his bandaged forearm and above the leather gloves that he never removed. It was perhaps four inches at its longest point and fit snugly to the skin. Frankly, she found it a letdown. There were no details on the surface, no visible controls, no displays, no way to discern how it operated. He told it worked on touch and was directly keyed into his own physiognomy.
“Each calibrator is customized to the individual user,” he said.
“How can you make such complex calculations by touch alone?”
“I did not say touch alone.”
“Is there a telepathic component?” she said, aching to touch the mysterious metal wristlet. “You think about your temporal destination?”
“It is more complicated than that, more of a symbiosis. The device reads the chronal patterns created by my unique physical structure. There’s really no language to articulate it. It just seems to happen.”
She wasn’t sure if he was humoring her because he thought she was out of her scientific depth or if she really was out of her scientific depth. Or perhaps the technology was so intuitive for him that there was simply no way to explain it to her. Like a five-year-old who can use a pad device but cannot convey how what does it to grandpa, who didn’t grow up with such devices.
“The future you come from, the world you were raised in, is different from ours,” she said.
“It doesn’t do to talk about it,” he said without expression. “If our work succeeds that world may not exist. Nothing is written in stone, and nothing is inevitable.”
“But what is it like? You can’t blame me for my curiosity, Samuel.”
He sat a moment regarding the baby cooing and squirming gently in her arms.
“It is a bleak place without choice. It is an anthill where each day and each year marches by without change, without love and with nothing to look forward to. Some are mollified by simple comforts and enforced stability. Others live out their lives as drudges, slaves—drones in a hive. It is a place where the flame in the human heart has been exchanged for a cold light.”
“That’s beautiful in its own way. Horrible words but well-spoken,” she said and fought the urge to reach for his hand.
“They’re not mine. They belong to my mentor. He did not write them down. I committed them to memory. He was executed for his thoughts but they live on in all he met.”
He stood up from the table. A bar of sunlight was reaching across the floorboards from the street windows.
“The shops will be open. I will take your list. Do not answer the door. I will be back with food then find the other items you will need to enable you to leave this room.”
He left the suite without a farewell.
Caroline rested her head against the lace antimacassar draped over the high seat back. She closed her eyes. She was exhausted, but her thoughts kept turning back to Samuel’s words.
The man was a living paradox and, if what he said was true, her son shared the same qualities. And how those qualities would manifest themselves, she had no idea. She feared for her child even as she realized that every parent fears for their child. Only their fears were more than unfocused worries of the unknown.
Caroline felt her anxieties were sharpened to a degree by the scant amount of knowledge she had about Stephen’s unique condition. The empty look in Samuel’s eyes as he recited those words about his world frightened her. She could only hope that the Rangers’ latest operation would alter conditions enough to prevent that eventual future from occurring. That by their actions, they would spare her child the fate that Samuel Renzi suffered.
Here, alone in a Parisian hotel, she was overcome by a sense of isolation every bit as painful as what she suffered in a cave as a captive of man-eating primitives an epoch ago. At least, stranded though she was in prehistory, someone knew where she was, knew and cared and could come to retrieve her or, failing that, mourn for her loss.
But here her only lifeline was a man she barely knew, who was unknowable. If something happened, if he never returned to this room, she and her child would be trapped here with no one aware of where and when they were. They would be left to lead their lives in a time that was not their own and die many years before their birthdates.
Merciful sleep overcame her at last. With the baby breathing softly in her arms, she slipped from consciousness into a dreamless void.
Samuel returned to the room with a sack of food. Bread, butter, cheese, a jug of milk, a slab of smoked meat, and a bottle of white wine. Also a bar of soap and a comb. He had three or four newspapers as well, one in English.
