“These are all the monitoring devices.” Wycliffe had already pulled back the rotted tarpaulins that had covered the gauges and dials. Spiders and larger creatures scurried away, across the circles of broken or dust-clouded glass.
He tapped a finger against one device, and a thin black needle jumped and quivered; a row of blue LEDs blinked and ran out a row of numbers, a date twenty years in the past. “They’re not on the generator—they’re kept charged by the field polarity, out in the Flow.”
It struck Sarah as odd that a place of such stillness should be called that.
The correct name being Scapa Flow—the body of North Sea water encircled by the Orkney Islands. North to the Shetlands, south to the Scottish mainland, all depopulated as here; a long way to reach any of the densely imploding, expanding urban centers that had sucked up everything that moved on two legs.
Or on wheels; the cobbled streets of Kirkwall, the little town at the Flow’s edge, were littered with motorized wheelchairs, toppled onto their sides and left to rust, toggle switches and control sticks mired in the grey, puddling rain. Sad relics, as if the feeblest of Time’s carriages had ceased functioning, their spoked wheels frozen by the same non-Time that brooded beneath the water’s surface.
The diehards’ ship, at the end of its journey from the Martian emigrant colony, had come in low to the west. From the wall-sized viewscreen in the lounge, Sarah had been able to see the broken cliffs at the islands’ rim, the rock columns standing as mute sentinels. Abandon all motion—that was what she would have carved into their sides. All things come to a halt here. Hence, probably, the abandoned wheelchairs. Their owners just hadn’t needed them any longer.
“Do you know how this works?” Wycliffe’s voice broke into her dark reverie.
“What’s going on here?”
She said nothing. Better to let him talk, so as to delay the moment she knew was coming. Even in places of stopped time, the bad things still approached and then arrived, inevitable. Just my luck, thought Sarah glumly. Christmas gets canceled, the oral surgery appointment’s still on.
“This location—not the cathedral, I mean; I’m referring to the Orkneys in general and Scapa Flow in particular—has become a temporal anomaly.” Wycliffe slipped into a lecturer’s dry, efficient tone. “Indications are that it was that way to begin with, even before it started being used as a dump zone for time-depleted stellar drives.”
“That’s why,” said Zwingli, “these islands have such a high concentration of neolithic monuments. Stone circles, megaliths, standing stones, burial mounds—that sort of thing.” The eyes behind the square-rimmed glasses grew brighter, as if the topic were some special enthusiasm for him, artifacts of the dead being more interesting than anything to do with the living. “The highest concentration in Europe, and thus in the whole world. Primitive tribespeople must have recognized the area’s . . . umm . . . unique qualities.”
“Whatever.” Wycliffe looked annoyed at his partner’s speech. He turned an identical owlish gaze back toward Sarah. “All that’s possible, I suppose.
Though I personally believe that the Flow’s suitability for its present use was triggered by the scrapping of the Imperial German Navy at the end of the First World War.”
“The word, I think, is scuttling.” Zwingli again. “The Imperial German fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow.”
A pulse of irritation ticked at the corner of Wycliffe’s brow. “The battleships were deliberately sunk and sent to the bottom. Out there.” He gestured with one hand, heavily gloved against the cold. At the great wooden doors of St. Magnus, the ravens peering in, black and glitter-eyed, took flight with wings blotting out whole sections of the cloudroiled sky. “So they form the bottom layer, at least as far as modern history is concerned—there’s no telling what might have been sunk and buried, for whatever reasons, before then. Viking boats, perhaps.” His gaze grew distant, as though focussed on a scene not visible in present time. “Hollowed-out logs, woven coracles . . . who knows? But if the Flow hadn’t been a temporal anomaly before then, the insertion of such potentiality-laden material might well have created one, or exacerbated an already existing situation past a certain critical threshold. So that the first signs of the field’s presence were picked up shortly after the turn of the millennium. Then, when the problem arose of the safe disposal of the early depleted stellar drives, this solution was acted upon.” Wycliffe peered more closely at her. “Is any of this making sense?”
Sarah nodded. “More than.” She knew what the two men were talking about; she had been briefed on the history of Scapa Flow, and the details of its present use, back when she had assumed control of the Tyrell Corporation. The company, while under the directorship of her late uncle, had bought a controlling share in the consortium running the facility—or dump, a more appropriate word. And as had been the usual mode with Eldon Tyrell’s business operations, the other partners had been squeezed out one by one, or had wisely abandoned their interests in whatever went out beneath the grey surface of the Flow. Why worry about the dead—and dead machines, at that; nothing more—in their watery cemetery? Better to let the Tyrell Corporation be the keepers of whatever secrets might still be trying to swim up to the light.
“It’s not as if anybody had wanted to do it this way.” Wycliffe sounded apologetic. His hand brushed across the dials, clearing some of the dust.
“There was just nothing else that could be done. It’s always better to forget, to destroy the past—”
“Oh, you’re right.” She regarded the man as though some beam of light had broken through the clouds and the cathedral’s roof, revealing some previously unseen aspect of him. Perhaps he was wiser than she had thought. “You’re absolutely right.”
A moment of hesitation, then Wycliffe slowly shook his head. “I just meant . . . technologically; that’s all. If there had been a better way of dismantling the old, first-generation interstellar transports, and of getting rid of their depleted drive units . . . but there wasn’t. The consortium, before it settled on abandoning and scuttling the transports here, had even contemplated firing them off-planet and into the sun. But there was no guarantee of the results with that method; the sheer amount and nature of the energy lodged in the drives might have triggered some cataclysmic solar reaction; there was just no way of telling.”
“Better to be safe.” Zwingli nodded sagely. “Bad P.R. if the sun had gotten blown up.”
Wycliffe ignored the comment. “Sinking the old interstellar transports in Scapa Flow was undoubtedly intended just as a stopgap measure, until a means of safely disposing of the depleted drive units had been found. The temporal anomaly that had been found here kept the drives’ unwanted effects safely bottled up, at least for the time being. But as we know, what starts out as temporary has a way of becoming permanent. Especially after the new drives were invented, the ones in use now, that can operate without the buildup of toxic aberrational effects. The old drive technology was abandoned; no more of those first-generation interstellar transports were built and put into service, so there was no need to find another way of disposing of them. The dump here at Scapa Flow hadn’t reached its limit. So why invest any further research funds into a less—than-critical situation?”
“That was my uncle’s decision.” Sarah had read the memoranda in the Tyrell Corporation files, the nonpublic areas. Typical of his thinking. Skinflint bastard, she mused grimly. Even when the company had been in the trillion-dollar-profits level, Eldon Tyrell wouldn’t have spent a nickel on anything that hadn’t brought another dime into his pockets. “He didn’t care whether it was critical or not,” she spoke aloud. “That was part of the research he canceled.” The memos had had his initials at the bottom; she had touched the scrawled letters with her fingertip. “The crews working out here had still been in the process of determining whether it was safe to leave all those transports underwater, or whether the drives’ toxic effects were still building to an explosive level.”