‘It’s jibberish. Here’s a sample:
My views are known to you. They have always been ‘defensive’ in all theatres but the west. But the difficulty is to prove the wisdom of this now that Russia is out. I confess I stick to it more because my instinct prompts me to stick to it, than because of any good argument by which I can support it.
‘Where the devil did this stuff come from?’
The Chief of Staff handed the Prime Minister another sheet. The Prime Minister went on:
‘Apparently a man in uniform approached the Dover dock authorities this morning. He was in a distraught frame of mind. He insisted on being provided with transport to take him to London, to the War Office. Police took him in custody and found this letter on him. That all?’
‘That’s all I have here.’
‘Why the hell should we be bothered by some lunatic? There must be thousands of them around just at the moment.’
This point of view commended itself to me for every crackpot in the country would now be at work. I could see the ranters in Hyde Park predicting the end of the world.
‘There’s something very familiar about that passage,’ said the Minister of Defence in a puzzled voice.
‘Yes,’ nodded the Chief of Staff, ‘and I think I know where it comes from.’ He turned to the Prime Minister, ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’d like to take a look in the library.’
We all followed him to the library. He looked at the shelves, here and there, for a while. Then with a satisfied grunt he pulled out a volume. He flicked through the pages until at last he came to what he wanted.
‘Here it is, the exact passage. You can see for yourselves.’
He held the book down on the table. It was indeed there, exactly as I remembered the Prime Minister reading out a few moments before. It was part of a letter, the rest of which I supposed the Prime Minister hadn’t bothered with. Then I noticed the volume was an official war history.
‘It’s part of a letter from Sir Douglas Haig to Sir William Robertson, written September 27th, 1917.’
Coffee was served in the library. We sipped it silently until John said:
‘I wouldn’t take this as a hoax.’
‘How would you take it?’ asked the Prime Minister.
‘That’s another matter. What I mean is our natural impulse is to take it as a hoax because that’s the way we’d like to see it.’
‘You’re not suggesting we should take it literally?’
‘I think we ought to know more about it. What about the man they got the letter from? You say he was dressed in uniform. What was the uniform? Surely the people in Dover can tell us. And where did he come from? Did he come from the sea? Why not find out before we get into an argument?’
The Chief of Staff went away. He came back half an hour later, his face ashen grey.
‘The man was dressed in a sergeant’s uniform, exactly as he would be in 1917. He did come from the sea. They found the boat. There were more than a hundred other passengers. They’re all dressed in the uniforms of 1917, or rather they were before they were moved en bloc to the local mental hospital. Every one of them swears we are in the year 1917.’
John banged his hands together for a few seconds, ‘That’s what I expected was going to happen. On a small scale it’s the only explanation that makes sense. There’s one thing I’d like to find out before coming to the point though.’
There was a phone in the library. In a bemused state of mind I heard John’s voice—apparently involved in a technical discussion. After the call was finished, he said:
‘Yes, there’s been a lot of Earth movement here too, not much below subjective threshold. The noise level is much higher than it was in Hawaii. Normally this is one of the quietest parts of the Earth.’
‘What do you get out of that?’
‘Nothing in itself. But that was the way it had to be for consistency. I think I know now what has happened, although I haven’t the slightest idea of how or why. In fact it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’
We were leaning forward in our chairs. John went on:
‘I’ll put it as crudely as I can. We’ve got ourselves into some kind of time-machine. Remember the old Wells story?’
The Chancellor smiled wryly, ‘You mean about the fellow who invented a black box in which you could travel either forwards or backwards in time?’
‘That’s right, a remarkable black box it was. But our time-machine is much more singular. It’s not just a case of our being precipitated into other moments of time. And I don’t think anybody else has been either. I think everybody, all over the Earth, will have the impression they’re living quite normally in the present, as they understand the present. Nobody has noticed any sudden shift of time and nobody will do so, except in the way Dick here did while we were at lunch.’
The Prime Minister pulled a face and threw out his arms in a wide gesture, ‘Let’s try to see through a glass a little less darkly. Is there any reality in the discrepancy of a month, or are you under some hallucination, or are we under an hallucination?’
‘Neither. We’re both right. There is no inconsistency in its being September 19th here in Britain, and the year being 1966. And there would have been no inconsistency to us in the time being the middle of August if we had stayed in Hawaii. It was only when we got together that the discrepancy came out.’
This touched them all off into animated comment. The Chancellor’s voice stood out above the rest, ‘You mean there are different times in different places on the Earth?’
‘That’s right. That’s the way it must be. In Hawaii it is the middle of August 1966, in Britain it is September 19th, 1966, on the American mainland I would guess it is somewhere before the year 1750, in France it is the end of September 1917.’
This was enough for the Prime Minister. ‘If there’s any possibility you’re right we’ve got a lot of things to do, and without delay. I’m going to suggest we meet back here in four hours, shall we say?’ There were nods around the room. Without further ado the Chief of Staff got up and went out. He was followed by the other officers. It was clear the Chief of Staff, the Chancellor, and the Minister of Defence, also felt the need for action, so John and I went out into the garden. After pacing around for a while we decided to go for a walk.
‘I see everything fits together, that way. But every instinct, every emotion I’ve got, rebels against it,’ I said with some warmth as we strode out along a country lane.
‘Because, like all of us in our daily lives, you’re stuck with a grotesque and absurd illusion.’
‘How’s that?’
‘The idea of time as an ever-rolling stream. The thing which is supposed to bear all its sons away. There’s one thing quite certain in this business: the idea of time as a steady progression from past to future is wrong. I know very well we feel this way about it subjectively. But we’re the victims of a confidence trick. If there’s one thing we can be sure about in physics it is that all times exist with equal reality. If you consider the motion of the Earth around the Sun, it is a spiral in four dimensional space-time. There’s absolutely no question of singling out a special point on the spiral and saying that particular point is the present position of the Earth. Not so far as physics is concerned.’
‘But there certainly is such a thing as the present. Without the ideas of the past, the present, and the future we could make no sense at all out of life. If you were aware of your whole life at once it would be like playing a sonata simply by pushing down all the notes on the keyboard. The essential thing about a sonata is the notes are played in turn, not all at once.’