It was just 6:30 p.m. East European time when he started to ride the Mobius strip from Zhukovka to the Chateau Bronnitsy. Along the way he became aware that someone rode the strip with him, knew he wasn’t alone in the Mobius continuum. ‘Who’s there?’ he called out with his mind in the ultimate darkness of the journey.
‘Just another dead man,’ came the answer, but in a
voice wry and humourless. ‘In my life I read the future, but I had to die to understand and finally realise the full extent of my talent. Strangely, in your “now” I am still alive, but I shall be dead shortly.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Harry.
‘I didn’t expect you to understand immediately. I’m here to explain. My name is Igor Vlady. I worked for Borowitz. I made the mistake of reading my own future, my own death. That will happen two days from your “now”, as a result of Boris Dragosani’s ordering it. But after death I will go on to explore my own potential. What I did in life I will do even better in death. If I wanted to I could see backward to the beginning of time, or go forward to its end – if time had a beginning and an end. But of course it has not; it is all a part of the Mobius continuum, an endlessly twisting loop containing all space and time. Let me show you:’
And he showed Harry the doors into the future and the past, and Harry stood on their thresholds and viewed time that had been and time still to come; except that he could not understand what he saw. For beyond the future-time door all was a chaos of millions of lines of blue light, and one of these streamed from his own being out through the door and into the future – his future. Likewise beyond the past-time door: the same blue light pouring out of him and fading into the past – his past – along with the light of countless millions of others. And such was the dazzling blue brilliance of all those life-threads that he was almost blinded by it.
‘But no light shines from you,’ he said to Igor Vlady. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because my light has been extinguished. Now I am like Mobius: pure mind. And where space holds no secrets for him, time holds none for me.’
Harry thought about it, said: ‘I want to see my life-thread again.’ And again he stood on the threshold of the door to the future. He looked into the bright blue furnace of the future and saw his life-thread shimmering into it like a neon ribbon, and he could see it clearly where it curved away into future time. But even as he watched, so the end of his thread of life came into view; and then it seemed to him that the blue life-light of his body was not flowing out of him but flowing in! The thread was being eaten up by him as he approached his own end! And now that end was plainly visible, speeding towards him like a meteor out of the future!
Quickly, in terror of the Unknown, he stepped back from the door and once more into darkness. ‘Am I going to die?’ he asked then. ‘Is that what you’re telling me, showing me?’
‘Yes – ‘ said the time-travelling mind of Igor Vlady ‘ -and no.’
Again Harry failed to understand. ‘I’m about to pass through a Mobius door to the Chateau Bronnitsy,’ he said. ‘If I’m going to die there I’d like to know it. The Witch of Endor told me that I would lose “something” of myself. Now I’ve seen the end of my life-thread.’ He gave a nervous mental shrug. ‘It seems I’m coming to the end of my tether . . .’
In answer he sensed a nod. ‘But if you were to use the future-time door,’ said Vlady, ‘you could go on beyond the end of your thread – to where it begins again!’
‘Begins again?’ Harry was baffled. ‘Are you saying I’m to live again?’
‘There’s a second thread which is also you, Harry. It lives even now. All it lacks is mind.’ And Vlady explained his meaning; he read Harry’s future for him, just as he once read Boris Dragosani’s. Except that where Harry had a future, Dragosani had only a past. And now, at last, Harry had all the answers.