Weaver Read Free

wanted some time to verify some aspects of Rory’s ‘account’ for herself, and she had arrived today with a slim briefcase, presumably containing the fruits of that research. Ben found himself gazing at the briefcase with dread.
    And he felt uncomfortable at how Rory was opening up his soul, and Ben’s, to Julia’s interrogation.
    He said sharply, ‘You don’t have to talk to her if you don’t want to, Rory. I mean, who is she?’
    Rory looked at him bleakly. ‘Don’t you know?’
    Julia just smiled.
    ‘I’ll tell you who she is,’ Rory said. ‘She’s an officer in the fucking SS. That’s who she is. She’s done more than shake Hitler’s hand.’
    Ben stared at her, appalled.
    Julia extracted a fresh cigarette from the silver box she carried. ‘Oh, don’t look so shocked, Benjamin. I apologise for keeping it from you. But you’d hardly have slept with me if you’d known, would you? Let’s get on with it. You met in Spain, during the Civil War.’
    Hesitantly, uncomfortable, Rory spoke.
    When only twenty-two, Rory had moved to New York from his native Dublin, ostensibly to study. But, a strong-minded idealist, he had quickly made a name for himself as an outspoken columnist. Then he had gone to Spain to work on a book on the seven-centuries-long history of coexistence and conflict between Christianity and Islam in the peninsula.
    ‘I was in Seville when it all kicked off. The Civil War. The city fell to Franco’s Nationalists within days. The bloodshed was worse after the cities fell, as the Nationalists took reprisals. So I fled north, to the Republican areas.’
    ‘And there he met you?’ Julia asked Ben.
    Ben said reluctantly, ‘I had already seen enough of the fascists in Germany. I went out to fight in the International Brigades. I never went back to Austria after that. I got some help from the Americans in my brigade, and they eventually got me into the country, and a place here at Princeton to continue my studies.’
    Julia said briskly, ‘I’ve never been terribly impressed by the Spaniards. They had all that wealth, a global empire, gold from the Incas andthe Aztecs. And they blew the lot on dynastic wars within a century of Columbus. As for their Civil War, what a pointless conflict that was!’
    ‘Three hundred and fifty thousand died,’ Rory said angrily. ‘Many of them to German and Italian bombs and bullets.’
    ‘New ways of fighting wars were rehearsed. An imperial nation was reduced to a testing ground for the weapons of superior powers. So much for Spain!’
    Ben snapped, ‘You’re damn cold, Julia.’
    Julia laughed. ‘No. Just realistic. Were you lovers?’
    They spoke at the same time. ‘No,’ said Rory, and, ‘Only once,’ said Ben, more wistfully.
    ‘And it was in pillow talk in Spain, I suppose, that you began to dream of time machines.’
    ‘It was a pooling of interests,’ Ben said.
    Rory said, ‘Studying history, I had come to feel a vast dissatisfaction. It need not have been this way! All the suffering, all the blood spilled - especially that provoked by religions, by prophets of peace. I wondered if it need be so - I longed for it not to be so.’ He glanced at Ben. ‘Then there was Ben’s idle talk of Godel, this eccentric mathematical genius who twisted Einstein’s equations and imagined it might be possible to reach out, around what he called “closed timelike curves, to touch the past...’
    ‘That and my dreams,’ Ben said.
    Julia eyed him. ‘What dreams?’
    ‘I have always had intense dreams. Often they are like memories of visits to scenes in the past - and the future. Once or twice—’
    ‘Go on.’
    Rory said, ‘There was one dream, of the bullet which nearly killed me.’ He touched his neck.
    ‘You are precognitive,’ Julia said to Ben.
    ‘So John William Dunne might say. He might speak of my animus floating free in a multidimensional spacetime.’
    ‘Is that what you believe?’
    ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I’m one of the most