It began in the middle of the night. He had a vague memory of waking up in a panic, unable to breathe. He'd had dreams like that before, but this time it turned out to be true. He had a brief glimpse of a face blackened with soot, big white staring eyes and grinning teeth above him in the darkness, a sharp smell, the taste of a rag in his mouth.
Later, he figured it was good old chloroform. The old ways are the best.
When he woke up he might have been a few miles down the road or he might have been in Patagonia. He didn't know how long he had been out. He was in a sparsely furnished room—cot, steel sink with tin cup and a bar of soap, steel toilet, table with three chairs bolted to the floor, no windows to the outside, a steel door with a six-by-six mesh-reinforced window at eye level, a long mirror set into another wall.
A cell, no getting around it. Larger than most cells, he supposed, never having seen one except in the movies, maybe thirty feet square, room for some serious pacing. Only someone who had never seen a television cop show would fail to realize that the big mirror was partially silvered—the infamous one-way mirror. The ceiling was at least twelve feet high. A small camera was mounted in each of the four corners. It wasn't particularly clean. The linoleum floor was cracked and peeling in a few places, scuffed here and there, in need of mopping. Dust kitties had accumulated in the floor corners, and there were cobwebs in the ceiling corners. There were smudges on the walls that looked like they had been made by hands, as high as hands could reach. Overhead an ordinary fluorescent light fixture flickered and clicked maddeningly. Exploring the entire place, seeing absolutely everything there was to be seen, took a total of ten minutes.
He took encouragement from what was not there. No car batteries or generators with genital clamps attached. No manacles, ropes, whips, thumbscrews, vats of boiling oil, rubber hoses, or billy clubs. Any of those things could be brought in, of course.
Only one feature of the room worried him, and that was a dark brown stain on the floor near the table. He tried to convince himself it was spilled food or drink. As the hours went by he kept looking at it, wondering if it was the source of the smell that tickled at his nostrils, over the sourness of the sheets and blanket and the gathering odor of his own fear. Was it blood?
He later estimated they held him there for twenty-four hours before anyone came to question him. He couldn't be sure. The lights never went off. It could have been as little as twelve hours, or as many as forty-eight, he supposed.
They fed him three times. It was the same each time: the door opened and a man in white coveralls and wearing a white bandanna over the lower part of his face entered with a steel tray and set it on the table.
The first time Matt sat up from his reclining position on the cot.
"I want to speak to a lawyer," he said.
The man didn't even glance at him. He slammed the door behind him, and Matt heard a key turning in a lock.
The food was a hamburger steak with gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, bread and butter, a slice of melon, and a cup of coffee. He ate it with the only utensil provided, a plastic spoon. The next two meals were pretty much the same.
THE second time he woke up it was to find two men in suits sitting at the table.
They were fairly unremarkable, with more of the bureaucrat than the cop or the torturer in their appearance and demeanor, perfect FBI types. One was blond, midthirties, tall and clean-cut, the only thing out of place about him being the argyle socks Matt could see above his black wingtips. The other was sixtyish, short and rather portly, with a rim of feathery white hair around a shiny pink dome of baldness, thick glasses, and a look of perpetual puzzlement on his smooth baby face. Matt felt somehow that he should know him. Later, when the questioning began, it was clear he was conversant with the higher mathematics needed to ask intelligent questions about time travel, so it was entirely possible Matt did know him; it was a small world. But he could never place the face with a name, and he finally put it down to a slight resemblance to Albert Einstein.
Argyle went first.
He started by emptying a box he had brought with him. It contained the things that had been in Matt's possession when he was abducted. He spread out the change, took every card and scrap of paper and dollar bill from the wallet, then opened the Swiss Army knife and meticulously opened all the seams of the wallet, searching for things that might be concealed there—a small display of arrogance and power that was not lost on Matt. He dumped the banded stacks of money from the canvas bag, riffled idly through them, and tossed them aside. He set out the three computers and turned them on.
The last item to emerge from the box was an ordinary glass marble, red in color, in a tiny square cage. He held it up to the flickering overhead light and squinted at it, turning it this way and that. At last he put it down and pushed it toward Matt with his index finger, and for the first time looked Matt in the eye.
"What is this?" he said.
"It's a marble in a steel cage," Matt said.
Neither Albert nor Argyle said anything for almost a minute, both of them looking down at the object on the table. Then Argyle looked up again.
"What is this?" he said.
Matt sighed. It was looking like it would be a long day. He had done nothing wrong, but he knew somehow that that would not matter to these people. He didn't really have a lot to hide, either.
Just one small thing. But, of course, that was what they were after.
"It is a component of a device I was hired to re-create for Howard Christian. He believed it would make it possible to travel backward in time. So to speak."
Albert jumped in.
"Explain that last sentence."
"It's hard to. I mean, the phrase 'travel backward in time' is an attempt to put into language a concept that the language is not equipped to describe. 'Travel' is almost certainly not the correct verb, 'backward' may or may not be a useful modifier to the concept of traveling, and 'time' is a concept that I've come to realize is far from adequately defined." "But you did go somewhere."
Albert was nodding. Argyle was gazing fixedly at Matt, mouth slightly open, apparently about as
sentient as a cow. Argyle took over again.
"Where is the time machine?"
"I don't know." Truth.
There was another pause.
"Where is the time machine?"
"It went somewhere I can't follow." Truth.
"Or somewhen?" Albert asked.
"Possibly."
Another long silence. Matt had never been interrogated before. But no literate human in America could be totally unaware of a few interrogation techniques. He supposed he was meant to feel a kinship to Albert, who at least seemed to know a little math and was conversant with some of the quantum dichotomies present in the idea of time traveling, and it was plain as could be that Argyle intended to be menacing with his silent contempt and simple, repeated questions.
Matt found he was indeed frightened of Argyle, very frightened. The man stank of suppressed violence and Matt felt sure that, if orders came from his superiors, Argyle would do absolutely anything to obtain the location of the missing time machine.
If he was supposed to like Albert, though, the man wasn't doing his job.
Albert spoke again.
"Matthew, are you aware that it is no longer necessary to hook a man up to a lot of wires and
clamps and springs to run a polygraph test on him?" "No, I wasn't, but I'm not surprised. Everything's high-tech these days, isn't it? I don't guess you
need rubber hoses or thumbscrews or anything so primitive to torture a man today, either, do you?"
Albert looked elaborately around the room, as if searching for instruments of torture.