INTERVAL TWO:
"I have to stop," Harry Moradian told his strange visitor. He put down his pencil, massaged his cramped wrist. The desk was littered with the curled shavings of five pencils, all of them whittled down to nothing. This was Harry's sixth and his arm felt mangled from the frantic scribbling.
A thin sheaf of papers was stacked before Moradian, with penciled notes and jottings covering each sheet top to bottom and left margin to right margin. When he had started to write all of this down (how long ago? Four and a half, five hours?) the notes had been fairly detailed. Within an hour they'd become jottings, barely legible scrawl. Now even Moradian himself could barely read them, and they were reduced to a listing of dates alongside brief headlines.
Now, for a moment resting his wrist and mind both, Moradian glanced at the dates again and shook his head. He still believed, instinctively knew---that all of this was the absolute truth, but there was one massively glaring anomaly here. An ambiguity he couldn't ignore. Moradian frowned, looked up at the shapely apparition where it floated upright on the other side of the desk, blinked his eyes at this shimmering specter of a woman and said: "There's something I don't quite understand." Then he laughed, and not a little hysterically. "I mean, there are a good many things here that I don't understand---but until now I've at least believed them. This is harder to believe."
"Oh?" said the apparition.
Moradian nodded. "Today's Monday," he said. "Sir Gerrard is to be cremated tomorrow. The police have discovered nothing as yet and it seems almost blasphemous to keep his body, well, lying in that condition."
"Yes," the other nodded her agreement.
"Well," Moradian continued, "the point is I know a lot of what you've told me to be the truth, and I suspect that the rest of it is too. You've told me things no one else outside myself and Sir Gerrard should ever have known. But...."
"But?"
"But your story," Moradian suddenly blurted, "has already outstripped us! I've been keeping a record of your timescale and you've just been telling me about the coming Wednesday, two days from now. According to you, Thago Benedek isn't yet dead, won't be until Wednesday night!"
After a moment the other said, "I can see how that must seem strange to you, yes. Time is relative, Harry, the same as space. Indeed, the two go hand in glove. I'll go further than that: everything is relative. There is a Scheme Supreme to things...."
Some of that escaped Moradian. For the moment he saw only what he wanted to see. "You can read the future? That well?" His face was a mask of awe. "And I thought I had a talent! But to be able to see the future so clearly is almost unbel....." and he stopped short and gasped. As if things weren't incredible enough, a new, even more incredible thought had crossed his mind.
Maybe his visitor saw it written in his face. At any rate he smiled a smile transparent as smoke from a cigarette, a smile the reflected not all the light from the window but allowed it to pass right through. "Is there something, Harry?" she asked.
"Where---where are you?" Moradian asked. "I mean, where are you----the real, physical you---right now? Where are you speaking from? Or rather, when are you speaking from?"
"Time is relative," the ghost said again, still smiling seductively.
"You're speaking to me from the future, aren't you?" Moradian breathed. It was the only logical answer. It was the only way the ghost could know all of this, the only way she could do all of this.
"You'll be very useful to me," said the other, slowly nodding. "It seems you have a sharp intuitive ability to match your precognition, Harry Moradian. Or maybe it's all part of the same talent. But now, shall we continue?"
Still gaping, Harry again took up the pencil. "I think you better had continue," he whispered. "You'd better tell me all of it, right to the end."
ns 15.158.61.23da2
