I walked back to him, and as I drew closer, I could hear his speech once more creep back into sync with his mouth.

“It’s a simple demonstration of instantaneous communication across a dilation gradient. A lot of the ChronoGuard’s work was done using that very effect. I saw the picture of the elephant after you drew it but spoke to you before you had.”

We stepped inside the main admin block as the sun set, and the internal lights flickered on in the rapidly gathering dusk. Two years before, there had been a staff of over six thousand working here, and everything had been left as it was when the building was abandoned. In one room we saw a map of Stalingrad, and in another was a pile of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Everything was old, decayed, dusty and corroded.

We pushed open some swinging doors marked MAINTENANCE and entered a vast hangar full of large machine parts with overhead cranes. I’d seen something similar in a power station. The C-90 time engines had been a major engineering project.

“I know the time industry was shut down because it was deemed impossible,” said Friday as he looked around at the long abandoned building, “but it seems pretty credible from where I’m standing right now.”

“I don’t think anyone ever truly understood it,” I replied. “What’s all this furniture doing here?”

A large section of the maintenance hangar was filled with old furniture loaded onto pallets. We walked on and came across about two dozen motorcars, all vintage and all aging quickly. The paint was beginning to crackle, and light corrosion marks were appearing on the chrome. As we stood there, we saw a strange, misshapen figure stand momentarily in front of me, shaking and buzzing like one of those accelerated films of a plant growing. The next moment I felt a tug at my sleeve, and my whiteboard was suddenly propped on a reproduction Regency sideboard close by. It had writing on it:

What are you doing here?

I saw the odd-looking person flit past us, and one of the cars vanished, only to be replaced by another. I rubbed the board clean and wrote:

Can we talk about stuff?

In an instant the whiteboard had been wiped and replaced by another message:

I’ll be with you in twenty minutes.

And we saw the figure dash off again.

“He’s running about four times faster than we are,” said Friday, “so about five minutes.”

“How did you figure that?” I asked. “Comparing clocks or an extrapolation of the dilation gradient?”

“Neither,” he replied. “He just looks like the VCR at home running at the ‘4X’ fast-forward feature.”

“Very technical.”