The Needle

A Willerby Story

The Needle ’s dashboard had been glitching since leaving the ice fields of Ross 154, but without the tech team Amelia couldn’t know whether the cold had caused a sensor fault or whether it was something more serious.

A pilot not an engineer, she had neither the expertise or tools to investigate or fix either problem and nor did Fred, her navigator. There was no choice but to jump the waypoints and hope whatever was wrong wouldn’t stop them getting home.

Everything held until the last jump then – in the angles between the years and miles – all the warning lights went amber and then red. The alarm began screaming. Amelia pulled the manual break, lurching them out of the in-between and into the closest available reality.

The boom of the Needle manifesting over Willerby – a ripping pop-pop-pop - woke Sammy, who was awake and listening to stories on his little podcast radio. Part of his way of being meant needing less sleep than his parents, and this was how he occupied himself in the hours before they stirred.

From his window in the pre-dawn light, he saw a trail of perfect white concentric circles plunging downwards from the sky until they were hidden by a growth of trees at the top of the hill at the base of the old Roman fort.

He woke Dan and Sally who had slept through the noise but knew he hadn’t dreamed or imagined it by the already dissolving rings of cloud that were weird even for Willerby.

Sally went to investigate, leaving Dan and Sammy to Saturday morning cartoons and to cook breakfast.

Guided by a rising column of white steam, she huffed and puffed her way up the hill, reminding herself she was middle aged and needed to get more exercise.

At the top, she paused to catch her breath and thoughts and to have a closer look before going on.

There, visible between early November leafless skeletal trees, was a craft she - for want of a better term - could only describe as a spaceship.

Sleek, cigar-tapered at each of its ends and about the length of a train carriage, it was made of dull silver metal scarred with scuff marks and pockmark small dents. It had two huge filament wings, which spread from its sides, reminding Sally of a resting dragonfly.

The wings appeared to pass through the trees.

Sally found if she focused on the wings the trees disappeared, but if she focused on the trees the wings vanished, as if they were somehow both there and not there at the same time.

There was no obvious threat, so Sally carried on for a closer look.

As she neared the craft an oval appeared in its side.

The oval shimmered for a moment, as if it were behind very hot air and then evaporated, revealing a woman in a leather pilot’s jacket. She was slender, slightly taller than average and had halo of short curly hair.

She stepped out, leading a taller man in his mid-forties.

“Hello!” Amelia called, smiling and waving. “I’m Amelia and this is Fred. Where and when are we?”

“Hello,” said Sally, grinning and waving back. “I’m Sally and you’re in Willerby, in England.”

Amelia walked to Sally and shook her hand, her grip firm, meeting Sally’s gaze with flint-grey eyes. “Thank you,” she said, “and what’s the date?”

“Saturday the 9^th November,” Sally told her.

“And the year?”

“2024.”

Amelia turned to Fred “We’re back a fair way then,” she said.

“Way off course,” he said.

“You sound like you’ve come a long way and must be hungry,” said Sally. “I’ve left my husband and son getting breakfast ready. Would you like to join us?”

Amelia grinned at her.

“We’ll need to at least try and fix whatever’s wrong but that can wait for a bit. Breakfast would be swell,” she said. “We’ve got rations, but they’re pretty bland.”

“Do you have coffee?” Fred asked. “As in real coffee?”

Sally laughed. “In our house we run on it. There’ll be some in the pot right now. Follow me – it’s not far.”

…

Amelia and Fred turned down the bacon and black pudding but ate almost a loaf of bread between them with platefuls of a hash of tomato, potato and scrambled eggs, washing it all down with orange juice and three cups of coffee each.

“There’s many great things about where we’ come from now,” said Amelia, “but the food isn’t one of them. This is the best meal we’ve had for years.”

“Officially..”. Fred began.

“Oh Fred,” said Amelia, cutting him off, but warmly and with affection, “enough of the officially. We’re shipwreck survivors. Castaways! I think it’s OK to use our initiative. If we get back nobody needs to know. The reasons for all those rules don’t make sense anyway – we’re all sprouting new timelines every instant wherever or whenever we are. This will just be a different one. That’s the paradox right? What we’re doing isn’t really different to what everyone is doing ever moment.”

“Who are you both?” Dan asked, “and where are you from?”

“I know who they are,” Sally said before Amelia had time to reply, “and so do you. Amelia. Dan, have a think about it.”

Dan looked at the two guests for a moment and frowned.

“South Pacific,” Sally hinted.

“Earhart!” Dan said.

Amelia broke into applause. “The same,” she said, “and Fred Noonan, my navigator.”

Sally bounced up and turned the radio off, hardly able to contain her excitement.

“I did a history project about you at school!” She said, “We had to choose an inspirational figure – everyone else chose people like Winston Churchill, William Wilberforce, Brunel, Darwin. You know, all men.”

Amelia snorted. “Of course,” she said.

“I was going to do Florence Nightingale,” Sally went on, “but my mum told me I should do someone a bit wilder and told me about you. She sent me off to the library. I got quite carried away – I won a prize for it.”

“A bit wilder than Florence Nightingale,” Amelia said, “I like that.”

“Did you know what happened to you is a big mystery?” Sally asked, “Your plane vanished.”

“My Elektra,” said Amelia. “The first ever all metal surface design. I could write poetry about that plane. It’s in a museum now. They won’t let us fly it even for fun will they Fred? They say it’s too dangerous. Which is damn silly given here we are lost in the Needle, whereas with our Elektra we always knew exactly where we were.”

“People think you got lost, ran out of fuel and crashed in the sea after you couldn’t find Howland Island,” said Sally.

Amelia laughed.

“Yes, I know,” she said, “I’ve read some of the histories. A few loonies think we were abducted by the Japanese and a few slightly saner ones that we ended up as real-life castaways on some tiny rock named Gardener Island. The truth is much stranger than any of the theories though and you might not believe it.”

 “Try us,” said Dan, “I don’t know if you know much at all about where you are, but here we’ve learnt to be more sensibly credulous than you might expect.”

Fred frowned and began to say something and again Amelia cut him off.

“Oh Fred,” she said, “it’s fine. If we’re here we’re somewhere thin and it sounds like Dan and Sally can cope. Stop being a wet blanket.”

“If we have to make a report..,” said Fred.

“Then we’ll write what they want to hear,” Amelia said. “We had to make a forced manifestation, met some locals, resupplied, etcetera etcetera. And who knows maybe we won’t make it back anyway in which case it’s all moot.”

“I think it’s just sensors,” Fred said, “whenever this happened in the simulations it was sensors.”

“Me too but part of me hopes it isn’t – marooned in time – what an adventure! How romantic! Anyway, I’m going to fill them in. If we ever get told off, I’ll say you objected if you like.”

Fred laughed at that. “You wouldn’t need to,” he said. “They’ll know whatever we did was your decision. I’ll say it was mine too. I’d rather they thought I was on your team than some officious naysayer.”

“You’re a brick, Fred,” said Amelia, “chip in if I miss anything important.”

“They needed test pilots for the first Needle” she began proudly “and in all the timelines I was top of the list – above even Percy, Peng Jiamu and Manfred – although I’m not supposed to know that.”

“This Needle is your,” Sally said, then paused, feeling faintly silly, “spaceship?”

“Yes,” said Amelia. “No. Sort of. It’s called the Needle for good reason. The name is a good way to begin feeling you understand although the boffins tell me it’s still not quite right. Imagine time and space as a folded piece of cloth, thinner in some places than others, and needles can pierce their way through into different realities. That’s what Needles do.”

“This is a thin place?” Dan asked.

“It must be,” Fred said, “all the waypoints are. The philosophers, theologians scientists and engineers think there’s no technical reason we couldn’t punch through into thicker realities with enough energy, but all of this is so new we haven’t got there yet, and for all practical purposes we think there’s an infinite number of thin places anyway. Plenty to get on with.”

“It’s early science,” Amelia said, “but strong. It won’t be too long before hundreds, thousands, even millions of people will be able to do this. Soon all this will be routine but there has to be a first of everything, and that’s us. It’ll be a new dawn – imagine being able to get in a Needle and go anywhere, anytime. To be able to walk the streets of Ancient Rome – stand on the deck of a caravel, ride a horse on a buffalo hunt, have a drink in a Victorian pub.”

“Why here then?” Sally said.

“This wasn’t planned,” Fred said. “We’re off the line. We were in-between when the alarm sounded so we dumped into the closest spot to us – here.”

“In-between sounds like our shortcuts,” said Dan to Sally, who nodded. “This isn’t surprising to us,” he went on, then told Amelia and Fred some of the easier to explain reasons it wasn’t.

“Yes,” Amelia said, after Dan had finished. “A lot of the places – most, probably all if we knew how to look properly, are like here in the most important ways. The waypoints are places where it’s easier for things and people from other places to slip through – whatever it is The Needle does is part of that, but I don’t understand how it works. That’s not my job.”

…

After the breakfast dishes were washed up and put away Sally, Dan and Sammy shrugged on autumn coats and kicked their way through the fallen gold and brown leaves back to the Needle with Amelia and Fred.

Sammy, riding Dan piggy-back, began whooping as they crested the hill got first sight of the Needle.

“Spaceship!” He called, “It’s a spaceship!”

“Near enough,” Amelia said to him over her shoulder, “but this one can go many whens as well as many wheres.”

Then, as if an unexpected thought had come to her mind, she paused and looked at Sammy closely.

“Your son, he’s called Sammy, right?”

“Well, Samuel, but nobody calls him that,” Dan said.

Amelia and Fred exchanged a brief raised eyebrow look but said nothing about why.

Then they carried on until they reached the Needle.

“Do you want to see inside?” Amelia asked.

And, of course, they all did.

…

“It’s quite cramped,” said Amelia leading the way through the dissolving door, “most of the hull is the engine – they think over time they’ll be able to make that much smaller so there’ll be more room for the first paying passengers. Gazillionaries to begin with but later, I hope, everyone will be able to do it. For us there’s just the cockpit, galley and bunks.”

Dan and Sally expected the cockpit to be filled with dials and switches and were both struck by its simplicity. Two swivel chairs were mounted side-by-side in the middle of a herringbone wooden floor in front of a curving wraparound window that went all the way round the cockpit.

“Let’s power up,” said Amelia. She stepped forward and put her palm and fingers on a featureless and off-centre spot just below the window. “Amelia” she said.

There was a soft humming sound. The window went black and then, slowly at first but at increasing speed, tiny points of coloured light began appearing in the darkness. Dozens. Then hundreds. Then thousands and then far too many to count. Some were brighter than others and – although it was impossible to be sure – some of these seemed to be behind the brighter points as if the display were showing three dimensions. Sally turned her head round, then looked up and saw the entire cockpit was studded with them, shimmering and drifting, winking in and out of sight.

Not three dimensions, thought Sally, but many – perhaps – probably – an infinity of dimensions.

Behind her Sammy was hooting his joy as he clapped his hands and jumped up and down, pulling at Dan’s shirt and shouting “Stars! Stars! Stars!”

Fred took one of the chairs and raised both his hands above his head, twisting and pinching with his hands as if he were casting a spell. The window shimmied in response and then, slowly and steadily, one of the coloured points grew as Fred’s careful, neat movements pulled it towards him; a marble, then a tennis ball, a football then a beachball that he took hold of carefully and placed just above his knees.

“This is home,” he said. “Everything seems to be working fine.”

Amelia, who had been watching closely, turned to Sally, Dan and Sammy. “Time for us to go,” she said. “Thank you for breakfast and it’s been lovely to meet you.”

“Will you get safely back?” Sally asked.

“I think we will,” said Fred, “there’s nothing wrong with the engine according to the tests I did when we landed – and guidance is working fine for now. I’m sure she’ll leap – I’m less sure she’ll hold the line. We might be jumping blind.”

“I rather like the idea of that,” said Amelia, “of not having a choice about where to go, but having to keep on going and going. Freedom in dreams without boundaries.”

“If sounds too lonely to me,” said Sally, looking at Dan and Sammy. “What you do is beautiful, but I don’t understand it.”

“That’s OK,” said Amelia, “most people don’t, but they don’t need to. It makes sense to me. I’ve never wanted anything all the time. I’ve always wanted new. It was something I never grew out of, the need to go faster and further.”

“Is that why then?” Dan asked.

“I’ve been asked why my whole life,” said Amelia, I could give lots of complicated worthy sounding answers, but I don’t. My answer is always the same. I do it because I want to. I do it for the fun of it.”

“Good luck then and thank you for coming” said Sally, shaking Amelia’s hand and waving to Fred who had his hands full. 

…

Sally, Dan and Sammy waved goodbye to the Needle from the top of the hill.

It lifted and hovered over the trees silently.

There was intensifying whine and its edges blurred. Then with a final pop-pop-pop it was gone so fast Sally wasn’t sure she’d even seen it move.

...

“Did you notice the way they looked at Sammy?” Dan asked her after he’d gone to sleep.

“Yes,” Sally replied. “I was going to ask them about it, but they were gone before I had a chance.”

“What do you think it was about?”

“Probably nothing,” said Sally, “they probably just noticed he’s a bit different looking.”

“Yeah,” said Dan. “It was probably that.”

Then a minute or so later.

“It was probably that, but something about it made me think of his train ticket.”

“Yeah,” said Sally. “I thought of that too.”