BACK AND FORTH-I

CHAPTER 2

                                                   CHAPTER TWO 

                                                       THE WALL

  The sun's warm beams of light shone through the inn's bedroom window and across my face. I pulled the covers over my head and tried to return to the deep slumber that kept me safe from the world. Alas, I needed the bathroom. I am up and that is the end of my dreams. I washed my face, shaved and preparing to shower when my ears suffered a seriously annoying knock at my door. I felt the sudden shift in air pressure as the door opened, and the heavy footsteps of someone not so light on their feet approach the bed.

       "The time is ten minutes past eleven. What's more, you have missed breakfast" said Peter, wondering where I am.

      He sat on the bedside chair and began an excited tirade of gibberish that, for one who is about as alive as a dead walrus, my comprehension is on par.

     "I've not a clue what you're talking about, Peter. Now please, bugger off and let me shower in peace." I retort, downing an Alka-Seltzer in an attempt to alleviate my hangover.

   "You look a dreadful sight, Anton. However, never mind that. I have some interesting news about our good Doctor Sprig." He said in an excited tone. "Are you listening? This is hot off the press, so pin back your ears and get listening. I have a story to tell that you will not want to miss."

   I gazed at my mentor, blearily, and took a sitting position on the bed, when a knock came at the door. I called to the door that, whoever, it is that they should enter. After all, I am now awake, and if the world is to attack me, at least it could get me whilst I had a witness.

   In walked a pretty, dark-haired, girl of about twenty-two years, carrying a breakfast tray. She placed the tray on aside table, smiled then left the room.

   "While you eat, I need to tell you what I've been up to," said Peter, hardly stopping to take a breath. "Back in the early 1950s, our Doctor Sprig was a whiz-kid.

  As for university, he entered Hilda Baker's College, Oxford, at the tender age of twelve years. He studied theoretical physics including elementary particle theory. He gained quite a reputation for himself, too. Often he would stand up during lectures and inform the lecturer that the lecturer was wrong, then he went on to correct the professor! As an adult, he became reclusive, he had few, if any, friends."

   I listened intently to what Peter is relaying to me, but I could not see any connection with Peter's enthusiasm, other than the mad doctor lived, at one time, at my new home.

   "What's your point?" I asked as I mopped up the last of my beans with a tasty home-made bread roll.

   "Well, Sprig was eventually thrown out of the Royal Society. He made claims that one could go back and forth in time, in a time machine. What is more, he claimed to have made such a machine. The society politely gave the mad doctor a hearing, then banished him, so to speak; never more to enter their portals or mix with the great potentates of science."

   "So what became of doctor Sprig?"

   "This is the time of the Cold War with the USSR, and Sprig found his way to Russia. For years, no one heard anything from the man until one day he turned up at an engineering firm in Birmingham. He asked them to build him some rather bizarre equipment. Then, apparently, he contacted someone he knew at the electronics company of Marconi, in the village of Writtle, near Chelmsford, Essex. It turns out that this chap Sprig knew were school buddies. They had often kept in contact, especially when Sprig was in the USSR."