The Watch in the Time Slip or the Story of Thrax, Pt.1 (Ch8)

Chapter 8 in THEDA'S TIME MACHINE. Dr. Andersen is dying. Can he tell Conlin all he needs to know before it's too late?

Oct 29, 2023

“At first, we only wanted to change the course of time. For the better, we said. All for the betterment of humanity. But then people began to die. And I realized that much of good has a putrid core.”

Patrick Conlin gazed out a street-facing window in a tiny room that smelled of new wood in a boarding house in Army City. It was one of the last ones before the makeshift entertainment area dropped off into nothingness. Conlin looked over his shoulder at Dr. Michael Andersen laying in the bed, his breathing tattered and labored, head propped up by two pillows. Conlin had spent the last hour in an uncomfortable wooden chair set off-center from the window so he wasn’t visible from the street, watching the men in a sea of khaki coast in and out of the shops and cinema, trying to quell the panic that clouded his thoughts and pushed out logical thinking. If he were ever going to get home, he’d have to remain cool.

Conlin picked up the bowl of tomato soup that by now had to be cold, and spooned a little into Andersen’s mouth. This time he was able to get it down without coughing it right back at him.

Christ, he looks dead already. Andersen’s cough, which only three days ago sounded like a mere cold, now had the tone and depth of a death rattle. It was the sound coming out of his great-grandaddy when he was fading from the world, the guttural choke of the body shutting down bit by bit. Conlin held the once stark white handkercheif to the doctor’s mouth. The starched cloth now resembled a butcher’s rag. The crimson lips against a face drained of all color gave Andersen the appearance of a clown Conlin once saw in a traveling circus, a lanky man whose yellowed-tooth grin in the clown white grease makeup had terrified him.

“We should go to a hospital,” Conlin began.

“No hospital. Listen.”

“Doc, I…”

“Listen!” He rasped, struggling to sit up, but sinking deeper into the pillow. “There’s no time. Listen. Promise me.” Andersen laid those long pale fingers on Conlin’s forearm and gave a powerless squeeze.

Conlin replaced the soup and gently took Andersen’s fingers in his own. Memories of his great-grandaddy surfaced: the same seat on the edge of the bed, holding the left hand with his own hand that wasn’t as scarred and rough then. Who wants to die like this? No family. Only present someone who amounts to a stranger. In a time that you don’t belong. A time not your own.

“His name wasn’t always Thrax. And he wasn’t always evil. At any rate, I didn’t think he was. Perhaps like many evil men he was able to hide it well until the time came for him to commit his crimes. The man I knew in the beginning was an intelligent, if quiet, man. Always had his head in a book, always asking questions. Learning. Having to know everything about everyone. An endless curiosity that we had in common. His real name is Benjamin Smith.” He laughed then and it turned into a cough. “Such a common, drab name. That’s why he changed it, you see. Read about a Roman emperor named Thrax and thought that instead of being plain old Ben Smith, he’d be Benjamin Thrax.”

A rectangle of tangerine sunset spilled over the dying doctor’s midsection, the dust motes over his body like a departing soul. “We entered the army directly after medical school. In 1936. Surgeons, both of us. Both of us from families with no money, no connections, just getting by on wits and brains.

“One thing was for certain, he knew his medicine. He had these thin hands, almost like a boy’s. I assisted once when he performed an emergency appendectomy and he showed the assurance of a doctor a lot older, one who had been at the job for much longer. I was in awe of him. He had another interest, aside from performing surgery. He was interested in disease, especially viruses. He had a trove of stories he kept in his mind, presumably from the hundreds of books he read. His nose was always in a book. He told me the stories about populations being wiped out by disease, such as the Incas and Aztecs when the Spanish arrived. Or the Indians when the whites set foot on the shores. Those were the stories that we all knew, but he had other stories. Stories of disease being deliberately brought into a community for the same desired effect. I listened, fascinated, even in the horror of man’s inhumanity to man. This was before the war, of course. There were far worse events on the way.

“We didn’t just discuss medicine. We discussed philosophy. The nature of humanity. Of consciousness. Long discussions aimed at unraveling the complexities of life.

“One night we were with a few of the other men in the canteen, and got to discussing strange things that had happened to us. The subject of ghosts came up, and we all swore we didn’t believe in that nonsense. We were men of science, after all. To admit such things was to sound the fool, but like all people, we liked to tell stories and enjoyed ourselves.

“I told an offhand story of something that had happened to me right when I returned home from medical school and was awaiting my military orders. On a pleasantly sunny afternoon, I had been walking to the library in my hometown, and a thought I wonder what time it is? whispered in my mind. I raised my left hand to check my watch…forgetting that I wasn’t even wearing a watch…and as I was raising my left arm and lowering my head, I suddenly saw my arm as it was when I had gotten my first wristwatch, when I was fifteen years old. I saw the brown wool trousers I wore then, the sleeve of my raggedy old coat, the worn shoes that needed resoling. All of it.

“I stopped in my tracks. It was as if I had, at that exact same moment but many years before had walked in the exact same spot and wondered the time, and checked it.

“Ben listened to this story with his normal undivided attention. It’s funny, he said after a while. But the same type of incident had happened to him, only he was sitting in a chair in his parent’s house, rereading a book he had read years prior, and a breeze kicked up and blew the curtains in a nearby window. He raised his head to look out the window and he saw outside an ancient, gnarled maple tree that had been felled years before. After a moment, the vision cleared and the scene outside the window was nothing but clouds and sky…no tree. But, you see, it was the same as what happened to me. The book he read, the chair, the breeze through the window. All mundane, not a gesture out of the ordinary but somehow it mirrored exactly another time in his life, and that time mimicked itself in the present. It was the same experience as I had.

“The other men laughed, of course, and one named Bart said we were nutcases and the talk moved on to the broads who worked over at the sewing factory and how to wrangle a date with them. But someone there, I don’t know who it was, repeated that conversation because a few days later, Ben and I received letters that we were requested to participate in a top-secret research project. We weren’t to tell anyone. We just had to show up at a what had looked like an abandoned building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We were stationed out of Fort Tilden at the time, in Queens.”

Andersen shifted in the bed, coughing weakly. That slight cough was almost worse than the full-on, blood producing throttle. It felt like the worst had passed, and now the final decent. Don’t go. Jesus, not yet. Conlin raised a glass of water to the frail man’s lips and he drank, painfully swallowing three gulps. “Who were the men who requested you to meet?” Conlin asked.

“We never saw them,” he almost laughed but it turned to a sigh. “Never saw their faces. We were sat in a dark room and told not to turn around. I was scared. At first, I thought I had done something wrong, although what that was, I couldn’t imagine. I was a perfect student. Perfect doctor with the best bedside manner of all of us.

“The voice was vaguely familiar, but I was so scared that I wasn’t able to place who it was. I had a strange feeling that I knew the voice not from my time with the army but from somewhere else.

“’You know why you’ve been selected?’ The voice was low and rough, but it spoke to us in the way that an interrogator would calmly speak to a hostage, trying to get information before administering pain.

“I couldn’t even speak, but Ben said, ‘It’s because of the time slip.’

“I was confused. I had never heard of that phrase. But then the conversation from a few days prior came back to me and all at once I understood. But why would anyone care about that?

“’You’ve both experienced an event that only the tiniest fraction of people experience, ever, in their lives. It’s an interesting coincidence that you are both here, at the same time, and that you’re familiar with each other. We’ve taken to interpreting strange signs like this as positive.’

“Then it went on to say that there were men in that building, men who were scientists and engineers. Men who we would know their names someday but right then they were hidden from the world, because the thing they were working on was impossible. That’s the way the man said the word. Impossible. Like he himself couldn’t believe it. If you accept this mission, he said, the world may never know your names, either, but even if you die in service, you’ll have saved the world from the worst tyranny imaginable.

“I still couldn’t speak, but Ben said, ‘What is the mission?’

“’One of you will kill Adolph Hitler.’

“We were silent. Don’t forget, the atrocities Hitler committed were still relatively unknown to common people like Ben and me. Everyone knew Europe would have another war soon, and that Germany was going to be the aggressor.

“Then Ben said, ‘And we need scientists and engineers to kill Hitler? Seems as if all you need is a sniper who is willing to sacrifice his own life. Andersen and I are mere doctors. Doesn’t seem like the mission for us.’

“’Then, another voice answered Ben, a woman’s voice.” Andersen coughed, and a single tear rolled from his right eye and slid from his cheek to the pillow.

“What did she say?”

“She said, You’re going to kill Hitler, but not now. You’re going to kill him in 1917.”

READ CHAPTER 9 HERE: