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And where are we going to find a lobotomized monkey at this time of night?
You re being windy, Bowden.
True. Do you know what will happen if we fail?
We won t. It s a doddle. Dad was in the ChronoGuard; he told me all about
this sort of thing. The secret is in the spheres. In four hours we could be
seeing a major global disaster occurring right in front of our eyes. A rent in
time so large we won t know for sure that the here-and-now isn t the
there-and-then. The rout of civilization, panic in the streets, the end of the
world as we know it. Hey, kid!
I had seen a young lad bouncing a basketball on the road. The boy reluctantly
gave it to me and I returned to Bowden, who was waiting uneasily by the car.
We put the hood down and Bowden sat in the passenger seat, clutching the
basketball grimly.
A basketball?
It s a sphere, isn t it? I replied, remembering Dad s advice all those
years ago. Are you ready?
Ready, replied Bowden in a slightly shaky voice.
I started the car and rolled slowly up to where the traffic police stood in
shocked amazement.
Are you sure you know what you re doing? asked the young officer.
Sort of, I replied, truthfully enough. Does anyone have a watch with a
second hand?
The youngest traffic cop took his watch off and handed it over. I noted
thereal time 5:30 A.M. and then reset the hands to twelve o clock. I
strapped the watch onto the rear-view mirror.
The sergeant wished us good luck as we drove off, yet his thoughts were more
along the lines of sooner you than me.
****
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Around us the sky was lightening into dawn, yet the area around the vehicles
was still night. Time for the trapped cars had stood still, but only to
observers from the outside. To the occupants, everything was happening as
normal, except that if they looked behind them they would witness the dawn
breaking rapidly.
The first fifty yards seemed plain enough to Bowden and me, but as we drove
closer the car and bike seemed to speed up and by the time we had drawn level
with the green car we were both moving at about sixty miles per hour. I
glanced at the watch on the rear-view mirror and noted that precisely three
minutes had elapsed.
Bowden had been watching what was going on behind us. As he and I drove
toward the instability the officers movements seemed to accelerate until they
were just a blur. The cars that had been blocking the carriageway were turned
around and directed swiftly back down the hard shoulder at a furious rate.
Bowden also noticed the sun rising rapidly behind us and wondered quite what
he had let himself in for.
The green sedan had two occupants; a man and a woman. The woman was asleep
and the driver was looking at the dark hole that had opened up in front of
them. I shouted to him to stop. He wound down his window and I repeated
myself, added Spec-Ops! and waved my ID. He dutifully applied his brakes and
his stoplights came on, puncturing the darkness. Three minutes and twenty-six
seconds had elapsed since we had begun our journey.
From where the ChronoGuard were standing, they could just see the brake
lights on the green sedan come languidly on in the funnel of darkness that was
the event s influence. They watched the progress of the green sedan over the
next ten minutes as it made an almost imperceptible turn toward the hard
shoulder. It was nearly 10 A.M. and an advance ChronoGuard outfit had arrived
direct fromWareham . Their equipment and operatives were being airlifted in an
SO-12 Chinook helicopter, and Colonel Rutter had flown ahead to see what
needed to be done. He had been surprised that two ordinary officers had
volunteered for this hazardous duty, especially as nobody could tell him who
we were. Even a check of my car registration didn t help, as it was still
listed as belonging to the garage I had bought it from. The only positive
thing about the whole damn mess, he noted, was the fact that the passenger
seemed to be holding a sphere of some sort. If the hole grew any bigger and
time slowed down even more it might take them several months to reach us, even
in the fastest vehicle they had. He lowered the binoculars and sighed. It was
a stinking, lousy, lonely job. He had been working in the ChronoGuard for
almost forty years, Standard Earth Time. In logged work time he was 209. In
his own personal physiological time he was barely 28. His children were older
than him and his wife was in a nursing home. He had thought the higher rates
of pay would compensate him for any problems, but they didn t.
****
As the green sedan fell quickly away behind us, Bowden again looked back and
saw the sun rising faster and higher. A helicopter arrived in a flash with the
distinctive CG motif of the ChronoGuard. Ahead of us now there was only the
motorcyclist, who seemed to be perilously close to the dark, swirling hole. He
wore red leathers and was driving a top-of-the-range Triumph motorcycle,
ironically enough about the only bike capable of escape from the vortex if he
had known what the problem was. We had taken another six minutes to catch up
with him and as we approached a roaring sound started to rise above the wind
noise; the sort of scream a typhoon might make as it passed over the top of
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