"Hello," he said. "My name is Templeton."
"Mine's David," I said, "and this is Zap."
"Hello, Zap. Short for Zaphod, I presume? Yes."
We weren't here by choice. Fred had gone all disappeary on us, and the next thing we know he had us by our collars in this hellhole of a basement. Then he up and left us here. Yeah, things officially couldn't get much worse.
Heh. I chuckled at that. It could always get worse. Hell, it could be raining.
I'm such a sarcastic bastard sometimes.
"So," said Templeton. "Why are you here in the first place?"
"Well," said Zap, "I suppose we're not quite sure."
I piped in. "Um, where exactly is 'here'?"
"Why, you're at the processing center for the newly compounded."
Excuse me? It was a basement. And a rather leaky one at that. There wasn't even anything down here. It was empty.
"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me! What is this bullshit, anyway? I'm sick and fucking tired of being taking places and sent places and assigned things that I didn't consent to!"
I raged on and on at Templeton, because he was there. Because he was something to take out my pent-up anger on. I didn't even know the guy. Was he in the same position as me? I didn't even care. But he just stood there, taking it. As if he'd dealt with this sort of thing before.
"I have fucking rights, you know! I didn't ask for this! I didn't say, 'yeah, sure, give me some futuristic drug that will make me responsible for the entire future of the world'! Did I say that? Zap, did I say that? Because if I did, I sure as fuck don't remember. Ten minutes after I first took it, I was trying to shoot some girl in the head! After that I was shot at twice, Zap actually was hit, and this all within forty-eight hours mind you. Then, your stupid messenger teleports us to nineteen twenty-something, with no food and just a couple bucks, and you tell us to find this guy after months of searching, and when we find him he takes us to this hellhole, which is a processing center that's actually a fucked up basement! Did I miss anything?"
We all just stood there for a minute.
He pulled out an altoids tin. Something in it rattled as he did so. He peeled off the cap and tossed something to each of us. A little capsule, like the kind you'd take vitamins in.
It was black.
Of course, the light didn't help the color at all. The light... which, by the way, seemed to have no source.
"Relax," said Templeton. Ha ha. Fucking relax. Like I was going to actually do it. "It'll allow you to see what you need to see."
Aw, jeez. More cryptic bullshit.
But I took it anyway. I'd gotten used to taking drugs at this point.
Then I saw it. The entire history of time stretching out in front of me.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
old time is still a-flying
and this same flower that smiles today
tomorrow will be dying.
I don't know, it just came to me. That's sort of what time is like, it inspires poetry.
But I finally figured it out. Time isn't a line. It's a circle. But it's not that simple. It's like a cirlce made up of other, smaller circles. Like a choker, the king that used to be popular way back when. You know how they say that fashion is a cycle? It's true.
"Pick," Templeton said. I turned and saw that he was right there with me, on a platform inside the ring of time. "You know what you have to do. You know who you're looking for. The rest is up to you. Pick where you step off, and when."
Too easy. I closed my eyes and focused on Ezekiel Perrenian. Where is he, I thought. When is he? And all of a sudden, there he was. I'd moved in closer to one fo the larger rings. ANd that was when I noticed something very strange. You could call it having a Heroes moment. But I saw that some rings were connected to more than their two neighbors, if you ca envision that. This ring was connected to almost every other ring in time.
If I cut the ring, time to could take on a very different course. A new direction altogether.
It all made sense.
Well, not everything. Just a lot of it.
"Here," I said.
And there we were.
It was a full two minutes before he even noticed we were there.