On the shingle spit of Orford Ness, ten seconds after the three-year-old chimpanzee vanished from the concrete floor of Building 7, the storm over the North Sea gave one final, convulsive shudder.
Inside the shattered bunker, the emergency batteries had kicked in, bathing the olive-drab racks in a dim, smoky red glow. Yet on the central console, the circular glass of the long-range radar scope had not cleared.
‘Terry, look at the gain…’ Dan whispered, backing slowly toward the bulkhead door with both hands raised as though to ward off a blow. ‘It isn’t sweeping. It’s layering.’
The green phosphor tube had become a deep, luminous pool of emerald light. Instead of fading behind the rotating trace, the afterglow was thickening, coalescing into distinct human contours that defied every law of the Ministry of Defence.
They were faces—fleeting, translucent, and ancient—pressing outward from the depth of the cathode glass as the thirty-thousand-year wave collapsed across the ionosphere.
‘They aren’t ghosts, Dan,’ Terry breathed, rising from his knees beside the vitrified scar on the concrete floor, his face six inches from the screen. ‘They’re witnesses.’ In the emerald radiance, the faces of every soul caught in the crystal’s long circuit flickered past in silent procession.
There was Raahi Shah, the monsoon rain of 13 AD glistening on his dark cheeks as he looked down at his empty, unburned palms. Beside him appeared a slight, thirteen-year-old London apprentice in an eighteenth-century waistcoat, holding a silent gold watch whose glass dome had gone clear as rainwater.
Behind them, drifting through the static like reflections in a dark river, passed the others: a bewildered seventeenth-century shopkeeper in spectacles brushing red-furred mammoth hair from his cuffs; a bearded Portuguese sailor with a silver cross at his throat, his bony finger finally dropping to his side in peace; an ancient Indian merchant smiling beside a Deptford brazier; a tall Slavonic commando lowering his pistol in a sunlit Athens corridor; and last of all, the hollow, dissolving visage of an old man with white hair whose fierce eyes softened into relief as he faded into the snow.
‘The whole bloody lot of them,’ Terry whispered, his voice cracking. ‘Everyone who ever touched that stone. The loop’s unwinding right through our array.’
‘Shut it down!’ Dan shouted, lunging across the broken glass gauges toward the master circuit-breaker on the wall. ‘Before it blows the transformers!’
Before Dan’s hand could reach the heavy bakelite lever, the image of the thirteen-year-old boy on the radar screen looked straight out through the phosphor glass at Terry—and touched the crown of his silent gold watch to the lens.
Behind the wire mesh of the tall equipment racks, the remaining glass vacuum valves popped in a crisp, rhythmic sequence—tick, tack, tick, tack, pop—sounding for all the world like a gargantuan pendulum clock gently exhausting the last turn of its weight.
For one extraordinary heartbeat, the concrete bunker was filled not with the hum of alternating current, but with the rushing, unmistakable sound of a thousand strong wings beating upward into an open sky. Then the cathode screen flashed pure gold—and went dark.
The hum of the racks died away. Outside the cracked concrete walls, the rhythmic wash of the North Sea rolling up the grey flint shingle returned, steady, ancient, and completely unhurried.
Dan and Terry sat side by side on the cold concrete floor in the dark, breathing in the fading scent of scorched copper and salt water, staring at an empty grey screen. When Terry looked down between his boots at the spot where the blue sphere had grazed the concrete minutes earlier, even the circle of fused black glass had vanished—leaving only ordinary, rain-damp Suffolk stone.
The gallery was closed. The witnesses had been released.
