He wondered how old she was. How long she had been here. If he would one time far from now be like her. If it was all over and if he would wander in shadows forever.
He wondered if people died here.
Before he met Catherine, a long time before he met her, he met the lunatic who told him where he was, what had happened to him, and why it had happened.
They saw each other standing on opposite sides of a particularly vivid phantom of the Battle of Waterloo. The battle raged past them, and through the clash and slaughter of Napoleon's and Wellington's forces they waved to each other.
When the sliding vision had rushed by, leaving emptiness between them, the lunatic rushed forward, clapping his hands as if preparing himself for a long, arduous, but pleasurable chore. He was of indeterminate age but clearly past his middle years. His hair was long and wild, he wore a pair of rimless antique spectacles, and his suit was turn-of the eighteenth-century. "Well, well, well," he
called, across the narrowing space between
them, "so good to see you, sir!"
Ian Ross was startled. In the timeless time he had wandered through this limbo, he had encountered coolies and Berbers and Thracian traders and silent Goths . . . an endless stream of hurrying humanity that would neither speak nor stop. This man was something different. Immediately, Ian knew he was insane. But he wanted to talk!
The older man reached Ian and extended his hand. "Cowper, sir. Justinian Cowper. Alchemist, metaphysician, consultant to the forces of time and space, ah yes, time! Do I perceive in you, sir, one only recently come to our little Valhalla, one in need of illumination? Certainly! Definitely. I can see that is the case."
Ian began to say something, almost anything, in response, but the wildly gesticulating old man pressed on without drawing a breath. "This most recent manifestation, the one we were both privileged to witness was, I'm certain you're aware, the pivotal moment at Waterloo in which the Little Corporal had his fat chewed good and proper. Fascinating piece of recent history, wouldn't you say?"
Recent history? Ian started to ask him how long he had been in this gray place, but the old man barely paused before a fresh torrent of words spilled out.
"Stunningly reminiscent of that marvelous scene in Stendahl's Charterhouse of Parma in which Fabrizio, young, innocent, fresh to that environ, found himself walking across a large
meadow on which men were running in all directions, noise, shouts, confusion . . . and he knew not what was happening, and not till several chapters later do we learn-ah, marvelous!-that it was, in fact, the Battle of Waterloo through which he moved, totally unaware of history in the shaping all around him. He was there, while not there. Precisely our situation, wouldn't you say?"
He had run out of breath. He stopped, and Ian plunged into the gap. "That's what I'd like to know, Mr. Cowper: What's happened to me? I've lost everything, but I can remember everything, too. I know I should be going crazy or frightened, and I am scared, but not out of my mind with it . . . I seem to accept this, whatever it is. I-I don't know how to take it, but I know I'm not feeling it yet. And I've been here a long time!"
The old man slipped his arm around Ian's back and began walking with him, two gentlemen strolling in confidence on a summer afternoon by the edge of a cool park. "Quite correct, sir, quite correct. Dissociative behavior; mark of the man unable to accept his destiny. Accept it, sir. I urge you; and fascination follows. Perhaps even obsession, but we must run that risk, mustn't we?"
Ian wrenched away from him, turned to face him. "Look, mister, I don't want to hear all that craziness! I want to know where I am and how I get out of here. And if you can't tell me, then leave me alone!"
"Nothing easier, my good man. Explanation
is the least of it. Observation of phenomena, ah, that's the key. You can follow? Well, then: we are victims of the law of conservation of time. Precisely and exactly linked to the law of the conservation of matter; matter, which can neither be created nor destroyed. Time exists without end. But there is an ineluctable entropic balance, absolutely necessary to maintain order in the universe. Keeps events discrete, you see. As matter approaches universal distribution, there is a counterbalancing, how shall I put it, a counterbalancing `leaching out' of time. Unused time is not wasted in places where nothing happens. It goes somewhere. It goes here, to be precise. In measurable units-which I've decided, after considerable thought, to call `chronons'."
He paused, perhaps hoping Ian would compliment him on his choice of nomenclature. Ian put a hand to his forehead: his brain was swimming.
"That's insane. It doesn't make sense."
"Makes perfectly good sense. I assure you. I was a top savant in my time; what I've told you is the only theory that fits the facts. Time unused is not wasted; it is leached out, drained through the normal space-time continuum and recycled. All this history you see shooting past us is that part of the time-flow that was wasted. Entropic balance. I assure you."
"But what am I doing here?"
"You force me to hurt your feelings, sir."
"What am I doing here?!"
"You wasted your life. Wasted time. All
around you, throughout your life, unused chronons were being leached out, drawn away from the contiguous universe, until their pull on you was irresistible. Then you went on through, pulled loose like a piece of wood in a rushing torrent, a bit of chaff whirled away on the wind. Like Fabrizio, you were never really there. You wandered through, never seeing, never participating and so there was nothing to moor you solidly in your own time."
