CHAPTER FIVE – THE INSTITUTE
The following day, Tom’s dad took him to see the family’s doctor at Parklands Medical Centre. Their GP was a red–haired Cornishman who spoke with a strong West Country accent. Tom’s father explained that he was worried about this business of Tom falling over at the race and then the disorientated behaviour he had shown during the night that followed. He also told the GP about the odd events of the previous summer, at Christmas and the New Year. The doctor asked Tom’s dad a lot of questions, examined Tom and took a blood sample, but said he could find nothing wrong. He pointed out that the boy was almost a teenager and going through changes in his life, which night account for the fainting fits.
“But,” he said, “there are other explanations we must consider. All these symptoms might be nerves and anxiety and I think it would be best to get a child psychologist to have a look at him.”
The doctor turned to peer at Tom. “I must ask you, Tom; is there anything you are worried about right now, anything at all – School perhaps?”
There were plenty of things on Tom's mind but he was not about to tell the doctor! He just shook his head. The doctor gave him a look that suggested he was not fooled for one minute, but in the end he just nodded.
“You said there were other explanations, Doctor ...” Tom’s dad prompted.
“Well, if there is nothing worrying the lad then we must consider that during these times you have seen Tom collapse, it is just possible he was having a fit. So I am going to suggest that we send him to see a neurologist. They can arrange a brain scan and an E.E.G. – that’s a special test to check for epilepsy. May I go ahead with the referral, Mr Oakley?”
After thinking for a moment, Tom’s dad said he would talk to his wife and get back to the doctor if they wanted to take it further. All this time, Tom sat there wondering if he was going to be sent away or locked up, just as he had feared through all of last year. On the one hand, he believed he was not going mad and all these strange events were due to him being one of those people Septimus Mason had called a ‘Walker’. But he couldn’t tell his parents, or the doctor for that matter, about that – could he? They would certainly think he was going crazy then. Mind you, Tom thought, on the other hand, if this was just an illness and that whole thing with Septimus was just a hallucination, maybe it would be curable with some tablets. That being so, in a way, he hoped Septimus was wrong after all; or that he had in fact dreamt up the strange Welshman and that entire trip back in time. ‘And he woke up and it was all a dream,’ had a nice ring to it, Tom thought to himself. Yes, if he had dreamt all that, then all that remained were these odd occurrences. They might, after all, be due to some illness which tablets could make better. Perhaps he would ask his mum and dad to take him to see the specialist the doctor suggested. Then, he could take his pills, be well again and get back to being ordinary Tom Oakley.
For the time being, Tom ignored the little voice that nagged at the back of his mind, ‘But you didn’t know much at all about the Great Fire of London, and you’d never even heard of Farriner and his maid, Mary, the girl who died, and yet it actually happened. Ordinary? I don’t think so!’
They left the room and went out to the car. Whilst his dad fumbled with the keys, Tom decided that he was going to ask to go and see a specialist, but he was definitely not going to tell his dad about Walking, Septimus, the dinosaurs, the dreams and all that. That would surely convince his father to go back into the doctor and ask him to refer Tom to the psychologist after all. He didn’t want that – he didn’t want word going round at school that he had a mental illness and had to see a ‘shrink’. He opened his mouth to speak, but his father beat him to it and looking across the top of the car, spoke first.
“You know, Thomas, maybe you are suffering from stress. Maybe you should see a psychologist. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, you know. We can keep it quiet from your school.”
Just then there was a snort behind Tom and he turned round, with a growing feeling of dread, to spot the one face that he least wanted to see at this precise moment: Kyle Rogers, climbing out of a car not ten feet away. He fixed Tom with an evil stare, his face wearing a look of triumphant discovery.
“Hi Tom,” he said, followed by a horrible moment’s pause and then, “See you in school tomorrow ... we will have lots to discuss with everyone, won’t we ...?” Then, Rogers went into the surgery with his own father, leaving Tom standing red–faced on the pavement.
They got into the car and drove part way home, stopping at a supermarket. Tom stayed in the car while his dad, leaving the keys in the ignition, got out, said, “I won’t be long, Thomas, just got to get something for dinner,” and disappeared into the shop.
Alone now and thinking back to that embarrassing moment outside the medical centre, Tom screwed up his face and closed his eyes in horror, trying not to think that by this time tomorrow he would be well and truly labelled the ‘Nutter’ of Parklands comp. Suddenly, he became aware that he was not alone in the car. He opened his eyes and then jumped when he saw Septimus sitting in the driving seat. Tom felt his hopes begin to fade: unless he was hallucinating, the man was real after all. He looked real and – Tom put out a hand and grasped Septimus’s arm, squeezing it hard – he felt real. So he was not mad then, but neither would a pill make everything normal again. With a nasty sinking feeling, Tom knew he would never be ‘ordinary.’
Septimus laughed, “Hello again, boyo! Fancy going for a spin?”
Before Tom could answer, the Welshman reached down and turned on the ignition, reversed out of the parking bay and was heading towards the road.
“This is not a good time, Septimus! Besides, my dad’s going to go ballistic if he comes back and the car’s gone with me in it!”
The Welshman grinned and then gave a wink, and as he did, Tom felt that they had just ‘Walked’. The supermarket car park was gone and they had appeared on another road and were travelling past tall, white, Victorian town houses that had wrought iron railings outside, all painted black. Septimus had just parked outside one of these, when a bright red double–decker bus went past them, followed by a black taxi cab. So then, they were in London, somewhere.
Septimus got out of the car. He then went round and opened Tom’s door.
“Septimus – the car ...” Tom began.
“…will be returned to the supermarket just after the moment we left, you know that ...”
Tom nodded slowly, remembering the New Year trip to the past that had seemed to take almost no time at all.
“So, what are we doing here, then?” He looked up at the building they were parked outside. It was just an ordinary house with three stories. A tall, panelled wooden door painted green stood at the top of a flight of pristine white stone steps. A large brass knocker hung in the centre of the door. To the right of the door was a brass plate. Tom squinted at it. On it he could read the polished letters:
Head Office of the Hourglass Institute
Professor Neoptolemas (Secretary)
Underneath were written words Tom did not understand:
Custos crastinos
He was about to ask what it meant, but before he could, Septimus stepped up to the door and used the knocker with a rattattat. A few moments later, a young man dressed in a smart suit opened the door a short way and peered out. Then, seeing Tom’s companion, he flung the door wide open.
“Ah, Mr Mason, come in immediately.”
“Thank you, Matthews,” muttered Septimus.
The young man led them down a passageway, passing several closed doors on either side. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with hundreds of antique maps. Tom saw one entitled A True Mappe of the Ancient Countye of Kente. That title seemed to have far too many e’s, Tom thought. Further along, there were paintings and prints of scenes from battles. One showed men with red jackets on horses charging past cannons. The caption read, The Royal Scots Greys charge the French guns at Waterloo. Interspersed amongst all these were technical drawing
s. Some depicted flying machines; others, submarines or clocks; whilst still more showed circles, arcs and spirals labelled with confusing scientific symbols, which reminded Tom of algebra. Finally, they came to a heavy oak door at the end of the corridor.
Just in front of the door was a desk, which showed evidence of a fastidious mind. It was well–ordered and kept perhaps a little too tidy with neat piles of papers in trays marked ‘IN’ and ‘OUT’. A man in his fifties, wearing a rather old–fashioned, long–tailed jacket and a high stiff collar, sat at the desk with an open diary in front of him. As they approached he looked at them rather suspiciously.
“Name and purpose?” he demanded.
The Welshman grinned and said, “It’s me.”
The man looked at Septimus and in a slightly over–exaggerated way consulted his diary.
“I’m afraid,” he said, in a supercilious voice, “that we do not have a Mr ‘It’s Me’ down as having an appointment. Perhaps you would like to arrange one on another day?”
Septimus sighed. “Come on, Phelps, it’s me, Septimus. We spoke only an hour ago. I have Tommy here with me, to see the Prof.”
“Rules exist for a reason, Mr Mason. Now state your name and purpose.”
“Oh, very well! Septimus Mason here to see Professor Neoptolemas and accompanied by Thomas Oakley,” the Welshman said in a resigned voice.
Mr Phelps looked down again and reaching for a fountain pen on his desk ticked off an appointment in the diary. With a brief glance at Tom, he said, “You can go in, immediately.”
Matthews knocked on the heavy wooden door and from behind it, loud and clear, a voice called them into the room. Gesturing to the visitors to enter, Matthews opened the door and stood back whilst Septimus, followed by Tom, stepped into the room beyond. It was furnished as a study: shelved books lined three walls; hundreds of them on many subjects, but Tom noticed there was a heavy emphasis on history and he also saw a number of old atlases. A large section, near the door, appeared to consist of physics text books. There was an open fireplace, although with the hot summer weather outside no fire burned in the grate. The wall opposite the door contained a set of French windows through which Tom could see a walled garden complete with a sundial mounted on a low pillar, and beyond this an iron gate that led out through a high brick wall to what looked like an alleyway at the rear.
In the middle of the room stood a desk; behind it sat an old man. He was mostly bald, except for small dashes of shock white hair over his ears. Startling blue eyes behind a pair of steel–rimmed spectacles studied Tom as he walked in. The old man looked quite fit for his age, which must, Tom estimated, be a little over seventy. He did not look surprised to see them.
“Thomas Oakley, I assume. I’ve been expecting you! Come over and please sit down.”
In front of the desk were two antique chairs and Tom went over and sat down carefully. He felt strangely nervous in front of this man; it was a bit like being called in to a meeting with his head teacher.
The old man’s eyes turned now to Septimus. “Thank you for your services, Mr Mason. You are as efficient as ever.”
“There’s proud, I am,” responded the Welshman, “and pleased I’ll be too, when you pay me.”
The Professor’s expression changed and he looked slightly disappointed. After a moment, he sighed. Then he reached into his desk, took out an envelope and tapped it on his other hand. “I see it is money first, as always, Mr Mason. You’re a talented man: the Institute could use you ...” said the Professor, pausing to look over his spectacles at Septimus, “... should you ever want to join in the struggle.”
Septimus smiled wryly and reached out to take the envelope. Then he gave a chuckle, not unkind, but gently mocking. “You fight your good fight, Prof. I’m happy to help where there is payment involved, but I’m not the heroic type. Good day to you. Oh, Tom, I’ll be outside when you and the Prof have talked,” said Septimus, strolling to the door and closing it as he left.
For a moment, the Professor stared after him. The room was silent, save for the ticking of a brass carriage clock on the mantelpiece.
“Sir ... er, why am I here?” Tom asked, breaking the silence.
The Professor glanced down at him and then smiled. “Thomas Oakley, you are a rare individual. There are not many of us who have powers to transcend the normal boundaries that time puts round us. Such powers can be dangerous, but if used well can help to protect our world from those who would change it for their own gain. There is also a need to police their use in case individuals with an eye on opportunities for wealth go too far,” he added, looking again towards the door through which Septimus had disappeared.
“Sir, I don’t understand. What are these ‘powers’ as you call them? How can I travel through time? I mean I’ve seen it in the movies, but you don’t really get time travel in real life, do you?”
“Yet your experience runs contrary to your statement, does it not?” said the Professor, whilst peering over the top of his glasses.
“Yes, I suppose it does,” Tom nodded thoughtfully.
“So then, if we accept for the moment the premise that time travel is possible, then the rest of your question is – as I understand it – how is it possible? Am I correct?”
Tom frowned for a moment as he tried to catch up then nodded. The Professor spoke formally and sometimes he found it hard to understand. It reminded him of the time he had been taken to see a Shakespeare play: to begin with the language had been hard to follow even though it had been adapted for children, but after a while he kind of got into it.
“Well, that is complicated,” the Professor went on. “There have been many theories about how an actual time machine might be made. Einstein, in his theories of relativity, showed that if you go really fast, time will travel more slowly for you than it does for others. So, get in a rocket and accelerate to almost the speed of light and a small time for you can be a long time for those left behind. You would come back to earth years later to find they had aged, while you had not – or not a lot.”
Tom thought about the old movie, Planet of the Apes, in which just that kind of thing had happened. The character played by Charlton Heston had come back to a world overrun by apes, which had evolved speech and had humans as slaves. Moments for him had been millennia for the rest of the world. Tom grunted. “Ok I get that, but ...”
“But we don’t have a rocket, you were going to say. Also that method would take you forward in time, but not back. Well, other physicists have taken Einstein further. They now know that energy, such as a laser beam, moving round and round in a spiral can also affect the flow of time.”
The Professor patted several magazines on his desk. Tom now saw that they were actually papers from academic journals with titles like Foundations of Physics. He caught a glimpse of a heading, The Gravitational Field of a Rotating Light Beam. The Professor picked that one up and flicked through it. Tom saw strange symbols and equations that made no sense to him.
“We study these and other works to try to understand what happens to us. In these, you can read of work being done in America to build a time machine using lasers. But again, there is a problem,” he shrugged.
“Er... that we don’t seem to be trapped in the middle of a cylinder of laser beams?” Tom suggested.
The Professor looked nonplussed for a moment, but recovered quickly. He tossed the journal back onto the table. “Very well then, there are two problems. As you say, we don’t seem to be trapped in the middle of a cylinder of lasers. That is the first problem. The next is that if you build such a machine, you can use it to travel back in time only as far as when you turned it on. It creates a loop of time between the future and when you switch it on, you see.”
Tom was not sure that he did, but he nodded anyway.
“So, Thomas, how is it that we – by which I mean you – seem to be able to travel without a visible machine and without any obvious limit to how far back we can go? Why also are only some people able to
do this and not others?”
Not sure what he was expected to say, Tom shook his head: he had no idea.
The Professor took off his glasses and polished them on a handkerchief, which he then folded neatly back into his pocket. Then, putting the glasses back on his nose, he focused on Tom.
“Well, we believe that it is to do with biology as much as physics. Darwin. Evolution. Do you understand what genes are?”
Tempted to make the obvious joke about denims, Tom saw from the Professor’s expression that he was waiting for just such a comment, had heard it all before and would not find it amusing. So he nodded and mentioned they had done it in biology. “It’s what we all have inside us that tell us how tall to be and what colour our eyes are,” he answered.
“Indeed,” the Professor nodded, “that – and far more besides. In fact genes are blueprints for our bodies. So, something happened in history. Some genes got altered. Biologists don’t really know what most of the genome...” he paused, seeing Tom’s mystified expression. “That’s the collective name for the complete set of our genes, yes?”
“Yes, if you say so.”
“Well, we don’t know what most of the genome actually does, but what we think is that some of it controls, in some individuals, the production of a certain type of energy – some as yet undiscovered force: a time energy or 'temporal' energy, to use the correct term. These individuals can manipulate this energy and then, just as the cylinder of lasers creates a time loop with laser energy, they can create a loop or tunnel back and forth in time. They gain the powers to create time loops or fold space by themselves, without any machinery.”
Frowning in concentration, Tom said nothing for a moment then he smiled, “Wow. That’s erm ... that’s quite a jump from rotating lasers, Professor, if you don’t mind me saying! Can bodies really produce energy?”
“Oh, definitely; bodies actually do emit an electromagnetic field. Electro–cardio–grams or E.C.G.s as we call them, which are used to do a heart tracing, actually measure the currents inside the heart. E.E.Gs: Electro–encephalograms do the same with brain waves. Your whole body is basically a battery.
“Oh, I see... ” mumbled Tom, not certain that he did.
“So then, we think that this ‘temporal’ energy source is emitted by us ‘Walkers’ and if so, it can be used to manipulate space and time. This is the key to the power that we all have.” He now pointed at Tom, “Indeed, which you have.”
This neatly brought the conversation round to the important part – from Tom’s point of view at least. So, something built into his genes – his blueprint in fact – was behind all that had been going on. That was a bit frightening really. Once he had realised that he was not going mad, or was ill, Tom had assumed that what had been happening was outside him: some external force that maybe he could find a way to block out. Now, however, it transpired that it was all a part of him. If so, what could he do about that? Maybe, there was nothing he could do. Maybe there was no escape. Feeling a sense of gloom and desperation, he asked another question.
“I’m not certain I want these powers,” he said quietly. “Is there nothing I can do to be rid of them?”