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. Video cams 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 video cam 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.
A still and awful red, I thought uneasily, remembering the line from
Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a favorite poem of mine