There was, Auger realised, a more troubling possibility: the project Susan White had uncovered might not have anything to do with the locals at all.
In which case, who was running it? And what were they planning to do? She didn’t have an answer yet, or even the beginnings of one, but she did have the sense that she was on the right track. She could almost feel Susan White’s ghost nodding in frustrated encouragement, desperately willing her to make the next—and incredibly obvious—deductive leap.
But Auger couldn’t do that; not yet.
She looked at her watch. It was nearly eleven, which gave her just over an hour to make it to the Métro tunnel before the juice was cut.
Hastily, but with care, she gathered the documents, wrapped them in a sheet of writing paper from the desk and returned them to her handbag. She would have liked the time to look at all the other things in detail, but she didn’t have that luxury. And with Aveling’s warnings about the unreliability of the link, Auger was more than anxious to make a safe return to the other side. As much as this living memory of Paris entranced her, as much as she longed for all the time in the world to explore it, she did not want to become its prisoner.
Auger pulled aside the filmy net curtains covering the window. Since she had returned to the hotel, it had started raining: a soft October rain that muffled the city’s sounds to a muted hiss of late-morning traffic. She stood there for a moment and watched the pedestrians below, scurrying along under dark umbrellas and glossy raincoats. It was impossible not to see them as living beings, with their own interior lives. Yet their very existence was still a kind of sham.
Skellsgard had spoken of this world being like a photographic exposure, a snapshot of a moment in time that had, for reasons unclear, continued to evolve forward in time from that instant, while preserved in the armoured shell of the ALS. There was no guessing the means by which that snapshot had been taken, or whether anyone alive on the real Earth had felt the slightest hint that it was happening… the smallest interruption in their thoughts, the merest instant of collective déjà vu. Perhaps the event had gone completely unnoticed.
But thereafter the two histories had diverged. The real counterparts of the people moving around in E2 had gone on to live out genuine flesh-and-blood lives in the historical timeline of the real E1. The snapshot could not have been taken later than May 1940, nor could it have been taken very much earlier than that, for events in E2 leading up to the Ardennes advance seemed more or less to follow the E1 timeline. The real world, E1, had shortly thereafter been plunged into a catastrophic war. Many of those who had been alive at the instant the snapshot was taken would certainly have died during that war, or during the miserable conflict-filled decades that followed. Even if they had somehow slipped through the historical cracks and avoided death by war, or famine, or political oppression, then many of them would have lived lives blighted and lessened by the brutal circumstances of those years.
And yet, as grim as those lives might have been, as squalid and miserable and tragic, they had been played out according to the right script. It was the lives of their counterparts on E2 that had followed a deviant path. And almost everyone born on E2 since the timelines diverged would either not have existed at all on E1, or would have been very different people. In every sense they were living on borrowed time. And not just “on” it, but “in” it.
For a moment, a repugnant idea flashed through Auger’s mind. How much simpler would it be, how much neater, if these lives had never happened? If the snapshot had preserved only Paris and the rest of the world, but not the people in it. If it had been like one of those nineteenth-century photographs of the city, the exposure necessarily so long that the people blurred themselves out of existence, leaving only spectral traces.
The thought made her shiver, but she could not quite erase it from her mind.
Glancing at her watch, she gathered her coat and left the hotel room. As she teetered out through the lobby, still not quite steady on her heels, the concierge raised an eyebrow. But the telephone on his desk chose that moment to ring, and by the time he answered it he had forgotten all about the awkward American woman, and the hurry she seemed to be in.
SEVENTEEN
At the Métro station on rue Cardinal Lemoine, Auger bought a one-way ticket and entered the midday crush of passengers. People took lunch seriously in Paris, and thought nothing of crossing half the city to meet with a colleague, partner or lover in some well-regarded brasserie or restaurant. Auger could not be certain whether or not she had been tailed from the hotel on Emile Zola, but she took every advantage of the flood of travellers to make herself difficult to follow, jostling her way through the crowds and racing up and down stairs and escalators in an effort to shake off any pursuer. Even so, when she reached the underground platform, she slowed her progress and let the waiting train whisk away without her. The platform was not quite deserted once the train had left, but that would be too much to hope for. There were always people who seemed to have nothing better to do than loiter in Métro stations, oblivious to the passage of the trains and the urgent schedules of the other commuters. A young man in a checked jacket and flat cap was reading the racing news, a cigarette balanced on the edge of his lower lip. A plump but pretty young woman was attending to her make-up with the aid of a little brass mirror, her expression a pout of absolute concentration.
Auger looked at her watch again, anxious to get the next part over with. But it was still a couple of minutes to noon, and the electricity in the rails would not yet have been turned off. She pressed her handbag closer to her, observing the slow drift of new passengers on to the platform. She had moved to the very limit of the platform, where the rails disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. At one minute to noon, she saw the lights of another train pick out the rails snaking out of the tunnel at the other end of the platform, and then the train arrived in a commotion of brakes and wheels. She looked at her watch again, willing the train to depart. The last thing she needed was for the train to get stuck in the tunnel between the station and her entry point.
The train moved off. It was very nearly noon. A few more people arrived on the platform, and then the hand on her watch said it was time to go. There was no visible change in the condition of the rails, but she had no intention of touching them to test Aveling’s attentiveness. She would know soon enough if he had done his job.
Auger made her move as quickly as she dared. In one fluid movement, she knelt on the edge of the platform, swung her legs over and then lowered herself on to the grimy concrete upon which the rails were laid. Her hands were already filthy with soot and oil, and doubtless her rump was covered in the same black dirt. It didn’t matter: if all went according to plan, she would never emerge from this tunnel again, and there would be no one to wonder why a smartly dressed young woman had allowed herself to get into such a state.
Someone cried out. She looked back in time to see the man with the racing paper raise a hand towards her, the cigarette dropping from his lip, while the plump girl lowered her mirror to see what all the fuss was about. But by then Auger had slipped into the concealing darkness of the tunnel, keeping the wall to her left and the closest rail to her right. Once she had gone more than a few metres into the tunnel, she knew that no one would be able to see her. Unfortunately, she could also see very little ahead of her, and this time she didn’t have the brightness of the station to guide her. Moving as quickly as she could, Auger kept her back to the wall for support and walked crab-fashion into the blackness, trying not to think about the mice and rats that were undoubtedly scurrying near her feet, or the lethal voltage that might still be coursing through the rails. She had about a hundred metres to cover, and rather less than two minutes in which to do it.