Behind his closed lids he imagined a white mare, stepping slowly in the fields towards the horizon, raising its exquisite slender knees. Regal force was flowing from every fiber of its sculptured body.
The white mare was alone in the field. Suddenly it turned back its head, moved its ears and snorted, having smelled the approaching storm. In the distance a whole herd of horses were galloping in terror towards it.
The bodies of the horses were as numerous as the blades of grass in the prairie. They were all in different colors, but there was not even one white among them. They approached the white mare and stopped breathless. It raised itself on its hind legs, whined victoriously and smelled each one’s snout and mane. Then it turned, neighed with a war cry and dashed towards the bright and cloudless horizon, galloping faster than ever. The rest of the horses followed it in a group, leaving the storm behind to breathe the dust, raised by their wild unshod hoofs…
Norman woke up startled, he saw the same dream, that the doctor had put into his head, over and over again. He liked it, because it always managed to relax him, to overcome his fears and worries…
He got up and went to the bathroom, where he splashed water on his face and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He was getting old. He needed to eat better and start exercising again… And call his family, they were probably starting to worry.
Suddenly he saw a silhouette, standing right behind his back. He pulled himself abruptly from the sink and looked back.
There was nobody!
He was probably hallucinating… Maybe he was too tired and overexcited of what was going on.
No, the man behind him was real. And his face was exactly like his own in the mirror. Only his glance seemed strange. Scary, glassy, with red pupils and goggled eyes.
Norman took his jacket from the chair, put it on and left the room. He needed to speak urgently to the scientists and find out what was going on.
Hans lifted abruptly his hands from the computer, pushed his chair back with force and cried: “Ready!”
After that he rapidly altered the energy of his movements, slumped slowly in the chair, leaned back, locking his hands behind the back of his head and said self-complacently:
“I know what happened to the ship.” His voice sounded perfectly calm, as if he were announcing that he passed by the 24-hour kiosk and bought alcohol free beer.
There was not a trace of his feverish anxiousness from minutes ago. He crossed his legs like a diligent student, who had delivered early his term test to the teacher and was now going to cast arrogant glances at the rest of the class.
“Hans, you really are a genius, who knows everything about everyone”, Alan said, stressing viciously on the last word.
“I definitely discovered what went on with the submarine and how it appeared amidst nothingness.”
“We are listening to you”. Norman was just entering the room, then he released the top button of his jacket and sat comfortably on a chair.
Hans stood in front of them, as if giving a lecture, took a marker and started drawing on the board.
“Look, the ship was constructed in 2020, wasn’t it?”
“Hopefully, in 2019”, Sergey corrected timidly.
“Let’s assume it was made in 2020. The ship was not designed for missile attacks against the USA, since it is not your ordinary submarine, but has a different mission. The core is a hypertemporal engine that bends the space-time continuum, creating an artificial small black hole, through which the submarine sneaked like through a needle’s eye in another universe. That’s it, yes?” Hans winked at Sergey.
Everybody was listening to him intently, even Alan did not argue.
“What have you got to say about this, Ivanov?” Norman turned to both Russians, who were sitting aside from the group. He had talked to them privately and had received their secret revealing information. Of course, he had sent an email to Washington on the safe line right away. His report was most probably already in the Oval office.
Sergey sighed, looked at Ivanov, then said:
“Colleagues, I must inform you about the real mission of that ship. Or rather the task we suppose it would be assigned when it is built after two years.”
“I knew there was something fishy and that they hide it from us.” – Alan slumped deeper in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest and prepared to hear the whole story and the truth. At last, he told himself.
“There is a top-secret team, that has worked at the Russian Centre for Nuclear Physics for ten years, dealing mostly with temporal chains and achieving singularity in the conditions of the earth surface. The other vein of research is directed towards studying the behavior of biological systems in the conditions of extreme pressures and parameters, close to singularity.”
“Whoa, Seriozha, please, pal, let’s talk in plain good English.” Michael was absolutely lost about the babbling of the Russian.
“Simply put, our team is on the verge of crucial discovery, that will very soon alter the ideas of mankind about space travel. I mean, even to the most distant stars in galaxies at the end of the visible Universe. And we will be able to conquer not only space, but time as well. The team, led by Professor Andrey Michailovich, in which I myself am honored to take part, found a way to pass living organisms through time and space, artificially creating miniature black holes. The passage of matter and, correspondingly, information, was successfully executed on multiple occasions.”
“Can I ask, how does this happen?” Alan just could not believe it.
“I cannot tell you all the details about the project itself, but I’ll just explain that upon generating a great quantity of energy, focused on minimum space like a cone in one point, a tunnel is created, through which we managed to pass multicellular organisms three years ago. Then, a year ago, we successfully used vertebrates, and I suppose, a chimpanzee next month would have given us the final assurance that we move in the right direction.”
“Wait, you mean you haven’t yet created this method of travelling through time?” Michael interrupted him.
“Yes, actually the Eye of the ship, or as we used to call it, the Core, is not completed yet, but as you could see yourselves on board of the submarine, we have obviously managed…”
“And you have not only completed it, but it worked.”
“Successfully, that’s right!” Sergey was obviously very proud of their discovery which formally had not happened yet.
“I would not choose exactly the word ‘successfully’. It was hardly that for the seamen on board.” Marcela did not particularly share the enthusiasm of the young scientist.
“One way or another, the ship had been… or rather will be completed successfully and has realized the trans-temporal dislocation.”
“Who knows where you might have sent it and what it has brought back with itself.” Alan also found it hard to regard a dead ship in the middle of the desert as ‘success’.
“I have no idea where they sent it in two years’ time and where it was, but I can tell you for sure, that this is the engine that we work on at the moment. Otherwise we don’t have a clue what happened to the crew or even who was in that crew.”
“Let’s hear what Hans has to say, he said he knew…” Norman waved to the German to continue.
“A very interesting theory, no doubt”, Alan teased again.
“Thank you for your keenness, Alan”, the Professor nodded ironically. “The last message from the submarine was ‘1986’, right? This is really a year, but if a ship has passed through space and time, must it confine to some standard dimensions? If we write this year in a two-dimensional plain” – Hans took from the table a blank sheet of paper and wrote with big figures ‘1986’ – “What can you see, my dear fellows?”