The Time Keeper Part 10

"Under the law, I must be legally dead before the freezing process can begin, correct?"

"That's right," Jed answered.

"But you agree-science agrees-that if the freezing could start before the heart and brain gave out, the chances of preservation would be that much better."

"In theory ... yes." Jed palmed the gla.s.s. He seemed leery.

"I want to test that theory," Victor said.

"Mr. Delamonte-"

"Hear me out."

Victor explained his plan. Dialysis was the only thing keeping him alive. The big machine that washed his blood and removed the toxins. If he stopped treatment, he would die in a short time. Days, perhaps. A week or two at most.

"The moment I died, a doctor would confirm system failure, a coroner would confirm death, and the freezing would begin, right?"

"Yes," Jed said, "but-"

"I know. We would all have to be at your site when it happened."

"Right."

"Or before it happened."

"I don't follow."

"Before it happened ..." He let the words sink in. "To say it already had happened."

"But to do that, they would have to ..."

Jed stopped. Victor jiggled his jaw. He believed the man was beginning to understand.

"When you have a lot of money," Victor said, "you can get people to do things." He crossed his hands. "n.o.body has to know."

Jed stayed quiet.

"I've seen your facility. It's pretty-don't take this the wrong way-bare bones?"

Jed shrugged.

"You could use a few million dollars, no? A bequeathal from a satisfied customer?" Jed swallowed.

"Look," Victor said, lowering his voice to a friendlier tone. "I'll already be near death. What difference could a few hours make?

"And let's be honest." He leaned in. "Wouldn't you like to see your chances of success improve?"

Jed nodded.

"So would I."

Victor steered his wheelchair over to his desk. He opened a drawer.

"I've had my legal guys draw something up," he said, lifting an envelope. "I'm hoping this helps you make up your mind."

38.

With his trimmed hair and modern clothes, Dor looked more like he belonged in this century, and as he studied the world, he manipulated the hourgla.s.s to allow short bursts of real-time interaction. He used these mostly for essential stepping stones-like learning the alphabet, which he accomplished in the back of an adult education language cla.s.s. The alphabet led to spelling, the spelling to words, and since Father Time could already understand any tongue on Earth, his mind did the rest.

Once he could read, all knowledge was within reach.

He immersed himself in a library in Madrid, reading more than a third of the volumes. He read history and literature, studied maps and oversized photo books. With the hourgla.s.s turned, this took mere minutes, although in real time, decades would have pa.s.sed.

When he emerged from the library, Dor turned the hourgla.s.s again to see the night fall. He watched in awe at how electricity-which he had read about-elongated man's waking hours. Dor had only known lighting from oil lamps or fire. Now streetlights kept towns awash in illumination, and Dor walked beneath them in their pools of yellowish-white. He stayed up all night, staring at the bulbs in utter fascination.

In the morning, he paused the sun once again and wandered across the Spanish plains, along the largest river in France, and through the forests of Belgium and Germany. He saw ancient ruins and modern stadiums, explored skysc.r.a.pers, churches, shopping centers.

Wherever he went, Dor sought out timepieces. The old man had been right. Dor may have been the world's first time keeper, but humanity had taken his simple stick and bowl concepts and developed them into an endless array of devices.

Dor familiarized himself with all of them. In a Dusseldorf museum on the Hutterstra.s.se, he took apart every antique clock in the exhibit, studying the springs and coils while the frozen security guard stood a few feet away. In a Frankfurt flea market, he found a clock radio that, when you held down b.u.t.tons, allowed time to flip forward or back. Dor pressed the backward b.u.t.ton, watching time diminish, Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday, thinking how nice it would be if he could just hold it down until he landed back home.

You are the father of earthly time.

Could he really be responsible for all this? Dor thought about the centuries he had been made to suffer in the cave. He wondered if every clock watcher pays some kind of price.

Finally, Dor reached the coast.

He came upon a lighthouse in Westerhever, Germany. He had read about lighthouses and the great North Sea. He turned his hourgla.s.s to watch the waves break. Then he turned it back.

His education concerning the modern world was complete. Dor had spent one hundred years observing a single day.

He listened to the wind. He heard what he needed to hear.

"Another lifetime."

"Make it stop."

He waded into the still water.

And began to swim.

39.

Dor swam the Atlantic Ocean. He did it in a minute.

When he left Germany, it was 7:02 P.M. When he reached Manhattan, it was 1:03 P.M. He had technically, on our clocks, swum back in time.

As he churned through the water-unaffected by cold or fatigue-he let his mind wander through all he had seen and the people from his life to whom he had never said good-bye, people now gone for thousands of years. His father. His mother. His children. His beloved wife.

Finish your journey and you will know.

He wondered when that would be. He wondered what he had to learn. Mostly he wondered, as he crossed the ocean one stroke at a time, when he would get to die like everyone else.

Upon reaching land, Dor pulled himself up the side of a shipping dock.

A dockworker with a cap and thick stubble spotted him. "Hey, pal, what the h.e.l.l-"

He got no further.

Dor turned the hourgla.s.s. He gazed up at a ma.s.sive skyline and realized he was in the strangest place yet.

New York City loomed as an unimaginable metropolis, even after all Dor had seen in his one hundred years of study in Europe. The buildings were taller, with barely a breathing s.p.a.ce between them. And the people. The sheer number of them! Bunched at street corners. Spilling out of storefronts. Even with the entire city slowed by his power, Dor had trouble weaving through the bodies.

He needed clothes, so he took pants and a black turtleneck from a shop named Bravo! He found a coat that suited him on a hanger in a j.a.panese restaurant.

As he walked between the ma.s.sive skysc.r.a.pers, he was reminded of Nim's tower. He wondered if there were no end to man's ambitions.

CITY.

40.

The hands of a clock will find their way home.

This was true the moment Dor marked his first sun shadow.

As a child sitting in the sand, he had predicted that tomorrow would contain a moment like today, and the next day a moment like tomorrow. Every generation after Dor was determined to sharpen his concept, counting ever more precisely the measure of their lives.

Sundials were placed in doorways. Giant water clocks were constructed in city squares. The move to mechanical designs-weight-driven, verge and foliot models-led to tower clocks and grandfather clocks and eventually clocks that fit on a shelf.

Then a French mathematician tied a string to a timepiece, put it around his wrist, and man began to wear time on his body.

Accuracy improved at a startling rate. Although it took until the sixteenth century for the minute hand to be invented, by the seventeenth century, the pendulum clock was accurate to within a minute a day. Less than one hundred years later, it was within a second.

Time became an industry. Man divided the world into zones so that transportation could be accurately scheduled. Trains pulled away at precise moments; ships pushed their engines to ensure on-time arrivals.

People awoke to clanging alarms. Businesses adhered to "hours of operation." Every factory had a whistle. Every cla.s.sroom had a clock.

"What time is it?" became one of the world's most common questions, found on page one of every foreign-language instruction book. What time is it? Que hora es? Skol'ko syejchas vryemyeni?

No surprise then that when Dor, the first man to truly ask that question, reached the city of his destiny-where the voices behind "Another lifetime" and "Make it stop" wafted in the wind-he used his knowledge to secure work in the one place time would always be around him.

A clock shop.

And he waited for two hands to come home.

41.

Victor's limo eased through lower Manhattan.

It turned down a cobblestone street, where, tucked into a curve, was a narrow storefront. A strawberry-colored awning carried the street address, but there was no name on the place, only a sun and a moon carved into the front door.

"One Forty-Three Orchard," the driver announced.

Two of his workers exited first and lifted Victor into his wheelchair. One held the door open as the other pushed him through. He heard the hinges creak.

Inside the air felt stale and preserved, as if from another era. Behind the counter stood a pale, elderly, white-haired man with a plaid vest and blue shirt, a pair of wire-rim gla.s.ses halfway down his nose. Victor figured him for German. He had a good eye for nationalities, with all the traveling he had done.

"Guten tag," Victor offered.

The man smiled. "You are from Germany?"

"No, just guessed that you were."

"Ah." He lifted his eyebrows. "What can we find for you?"

Victor rolled closer, observing the inventory. He saw every kind of clock-grandfather clocks, mantel clocks, kitchen clocks with swinging gla.s.s doors, lamp clocks, school clocks, clocks with chimes and alarms, clocks in the shape of baseb.a.l.l.s and guitars, even a cat clock with a pendulum tail. And the pendulums! On the wall, on the ceiling, behind gla.s.s, swaying back and forth, tick tock, tick tock, as if every second of the place moved to the left or the right. A cuckoo bird emerged, whirring levers announcing its arrival, followed by eleven cuckoos over eleven bells. Victor watched the bird slide back behind its door.