Wednesday, 21 October 2020

Escape In Time

There Will Be Time, XIII.

Jack Havig, his Eyrie captors and his rescuer, Leonce, can all time travel by an act of will so how do they restrain him and how does she effect a rescue?

His ankle is chained to the wall in a room in a tower. First, Leonce spends some days in the Eyrie after Jack's escape so that she will not seem to have been involved with it. She sees the confusion and plants the idea that Jack had been helped by a time traveler that he had met in the past. She already knows that the escape will not be reported to the younger Wallis on his next inspection visit years later presumably because there had been no bad consequences in the meantime.

Next, she travels downtime to when the room was empty and uptime to the night of Jack's imprisonment. She has a pencil flashlight and a hacksaw. Freed, Havig jumps ahead to the beginning of sunrise and waits, still apparently tethered to the wall, until a guard brings his breakfast and leaves it with him. After gulping coffee, he returns to the previous night, arriving in the dark just before his younger self jumps ahead to the beginning of sunrise. Holding hands to stay together, they travel downtime until a night when the room is empty and unlocked. Still time traveling, they walk downstairs, across the courtyard and through the gates, left open in this period of peaceful Eyrie reign. They stop for air in the dark. They do not immediately time travel to before the castle was built because there were too many hunters in the forest back then. The escape is successful.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

It seems so complicated, altho I can follow the sequence of events when read carefully.

Ad astra! Sean