‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Don’t say anything. I’m going to tell you a story.’
He nodded. A good start.
‘All right. Troy is burning.’
He nodded again, but this time not looking at me. He was looking back down the years. Back to another time and another place. We both were.
I relived the scene. Again.
‘I’ve just been rescued by Guthrie. You know I got dragged off with the other Trojan women?’
I was back on the beach again, shuffling towards the ships and surrounded by crying women.
‘Guthrie brought me back to the pod.’ I had a thought. ‘Does he know who you are?’
He shook his head.
‘Does anyone know who you are?’
He shook his head again. I know I’d said don’t speak, but I don’t think he was capable of speech anyway.
‘So Guthrie and I are back in the pod. Peterson’s waiting for us, fretting as usual. We’re getting ourselves together, ready to jump, the door opens, and there’s Leon. With you. Do you remember what happens next?’
Not knowing what was the right thing to say, he said nothing. Now that I knew, I could easily see traces of the boy Helios in the man Joe Nelson. The boy I had played jacks with. And dusty hopscotch. I pushed all that aside.
‘Well, I’ll tell you. I told Chief Farrell to take you back outside and leave you there.’
Silence. On the other side of the door, the world carried on as usual. In here – who knew what was going to happen in here?
‘I told him, as his mission commander, that under no circumstances would I permit you to be taken back with us. I assume that now you know why not. That you know why that was such a dangerous thing for him to do. What the consequences could be?’
He nodded. I don’t know if he’d taken my instruction to heart or whether he genuinely was too scared to speak.
‘He pleaded for you.’ I said, without emotion, hearing Leon’s voice again in my head. Again. ‘He begged. He shouted. Do you remember?’
He nodded again and swallowed hard.
‘He refused to leave you behind. At one point, I wondered if I was going to have to shoot him. Or you.’
He sat, too frozen now even to nod.
‘In the end, he asked for twenty minutes to hide you somewhere. We both knew that was worse than useless. That after the lions had finished with it, Troy would be picked over by the jackals for years afterwards. That it might even be kinder to hand you over to the Greeks. Or kill you there and then.’
I stopped for a moment, because now even I was finding it hard going.
‘He took you outside. I watched on the screen. You both disappeared. Twenty minutes later, he was back. Without you.’
But, now I came to think of it, exhausted and with a two-day stubble.
‘Shall I tell you what I think happened next?’
No response whatsoever. I carried on anyway.
‘I think he had a pod remote control. I think he called up his own pod, bundled you inside, and took you back to the future. To his own St Mary’s. I think it wasn’t such a risk as I originally thought. I think he was able to remove you from your own time because, if you had stayed, you would have been killed.’
Yes, he would. Probably within minutes. We can remove things from their own time, but only if they’re about to be destroyed. Only if they have no future existence in which to influence the timeline. I didn’t know we could do it with people. I wished I didn’t know we could do it with people. If this ever got out … This might be one of the most dangerous pieces of knowledge ever.
Imagine if a bunch of fanatics tried to lift Hitler in his last hours. Or Caligula. Or the poster boy for compassion and mercy, the Abbot (Kill them all – God will know his own) of Citeaux. Of course, people being what they are, no one would ever want to lift Mother Theresa. Or Francis of Assisi.
I forged on.
‘You should be very clear about this. What Chief Farrell did was incredibly dangerous. If you were destined to survive – and he had no way of knowing that – his attempt to remove you could have brought the entire timeline crashing down around us. As it turned out, he got away with it.
‘But, if I had had my way, I would have left you in Troy. To die. Quickly, if you were lucky, but you probably wouldn’t have been. You need to know this. I would have let you die. To preserve the timeline. I might even have killed you myself. Even now, I’m not sure what damage has been done. What damage you’ve done just by surviving. Do you have any children?’
He shook his head, white to the lips, eyes huge and dark, just as he’d looked three and a half thousand years ago, back in Troy.