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Chapter 3: Seven Days That Had Already Happened

Chapter 3: Seven Days That Had Already Happened

His team spread out without making the lobby of the Hotel Kronen look like a hostage negotiation. One man went inside. Another photographed the street sweeper, its plate and its driver. Leon stayed under the awning across the road with a coffee he did not drink.

The sweeper moved normally for three seconds.

Then the engine roared and the whole yellow mass jumped backward over the kerb. A porter threw himself flat against the planters. The rear brush assembly hit the entrance, took out two panes of glass, and stopped a metre short of a man who had been holding a suitcase and was now holding nothing at all.

15:17.

"Is anyone hurt?"

Nobody was.

Across the road the driver sat in the cab staring at an umbrella as though he had never seen one before. It belonged to his granddaughter. She had left it in the vehicle two days ago and he had reached down for it and put his foot somewhere it should not have been.

Not one of those facts cleared Marek. What they did was make the amount of preparation required steadily more absurd, until the conspiracy needed to explain the event was harder to believe than the machine.

It could still have been staged.

Leon wrote that down, because it was true, and because writing down the thing you would prefer not to be true is most of what verification is.

He did not sleep much that week.

On the second day, a football match. Rhein Adler led, collapsed, and equalised at ninety minutes and four seconds, with eleven men against ten, in added time nobody had predicted the length of. The envelope had given the minute and the second and the scorer.

Leon did not place a bet. He was aware that this made him unusual and did not care. The moment money moved on the strength of the envelope, the envelope stopped being evidence and became a motive.

On the third day, a merger announcement went out at 11:40 with a typographical error in the second paragraph. The shares closed eighteen point six percent higher. His analyst in Frankfurt called him twice.

"Who gave you this?"

"A man selling a time machine."

She hung up on him, which he thought was fair.

On the fourth afternoon the federal finance minister put down his prepared remarks after a reporter asked about an emergency industrial subsidy, rubbed his forehead, and said a sentence that cost him his position within a month. The envelope had it verbatim, including the pause.

On the fifth evening, lightning came out of a clear sky over the eastern industrial park. Forty-six seconds later it began to rain, in a corridor less than half a kilometre wide, for eleven minutes. The rest of the city stayed dry. Leon stood at the edge of it with one shoulder wet and one shoulder dry and had a brief, unwelcome sensation of being a smaller object than he had previously assumed.

By dawn on the sixth day the surviving fraud scenarios required a national intelligence service, weather-control technology more impressive than the time machine itself, or a conspiracy whose only apparent objective was to irritate one bored man in a hotel.

On the sixth morning a fox came out of the embankment scrub at 06:22 with something blue in its mouth, put it down on the rail, thought about it, and left. The signal changed. A regional train stopped for nineteen minutes.

Leon had sent three cameras an hour early. He watched the recording four times.

The seventh strip he had not opened. It was the only one with no place attached, and the only one addressed to a time rather than an event.

He put both his parents under discreet protection without telling them why. Their calls went through a clean system. The house was swept. Deliveries were inspected. Nobody connected to Marek Weiss had gone anywhere near either of them in nineteen years, which he confirmed twice, and which reassured him for approximately an hour at a time.

He called his mother on the fifth night.

"Has anyone contacted you about me?"

"Only the newspapers, and only badly."

"Anyone unusual?"

"Define unusual, in a village where a man once telephoned the council about my hedge."

He asked his father the same questions. His father answered each one precisely, and then said, "What are you testing?"

"A probability."

"Probabilities don’t require armed men near my tomatoes."

"This one has an expensive personality."

His father sighed down the line. "Your mother says you sound happy."

Leon considered lying, and did not. "I sound interested."

"That’s the same thing, in you. It’s been a while."

He slept fifty-three minutes on the last night.

At 08:40 nothing happened. At 08:41 nothing happened, and he noticed, with some interest, that he was hoping it would fail. Not because he wanted Marek to be a fraud. Because if a single line came out wrong, the world could go back to being the size it had been last month, and he could go back to being bored in it, and boredom was at least survivable.

At 08:42 the phone rang.

It was his mother, and she was crying, and it took him four seconds of pure vertical panic to work out that she was not crying about anything bad.

A radiator pipe in the storage room under the stairs had begun leaking overnight. His father had taken off an old wooden cover to reach the joint. Folded behind the panel, dry, flat, and out of the light for the better part of two decades, was a single sheet of paper that had gone missing when Leon’s grandmother died.

A red crayon bridge over a blue crayon river. Drawn when he was eight.

Underneath it, in her handwriting:

FOR THE BOY WHO THINKS EVERY RIVER IS A PROBLEM.

"Your bridge would have collapsed," his father said, somewhere behind her.

"I was eight."

"That is why I did not fail the inspection."

His mother started laughing while she was still crying, and Leon sat down on the edge of the bed in a hotel in a town with three restaurants, and held the phone, and did not say anything for a while.

Then he opened the final envelope with one hand.

It gave the exact time of the call. His mother’s exact first sentence. The red bridge. The blue river. His grandmother’s note, word for word, including the fact that she had underlined every.

He looked at the paper for a long time.

There was no mechanism. There was no bribe, no arrangement, no plant, no accomplice. A pipe had corroded on a schedule set in 1986, and a man in a turbine hall had known the hour and the sentence and the underline.

Leon’s security chief came in with the morning report and found him at the window.

"Sir?"

"We’re going back."

"To the yacht?"

"To the man selling a time machine."

"Do you believe him now?"

Leon folded the sheet along its old crease and put it in his inside pocket, where it stayed for the next eleven weeks and then travelled two hundred million years.

"No," he said. "But I finally have better questions."