Ginger Awakes

In which the crew of the Uchronie work together with the unconscious Ginger and learn something rather bewildering about Nate.

Unknown to Nate, who was spending Monday afternoon languishing in a prison cell in 1926, Ginger, had already passed through Bechtsgaden earlier that same Monday 3 of May.

He had arrived in the darkest hour before dawn, gliding his triplane to a silent landing out on the smooth lake. Then he had swum ashore and spent several hours searching for the Wave pistol that DeBlanc’s Chronological Order Detector had detected.

A Wave gun should not have existed in 1926 but, as we already know, Ginger was wasting his valuable time searching for the rogue gun, because Nate had not yet arrived in 1926 and Wayne had not yet attempted to assassinate Hitler with the misplaced pistol. So the Wave gun still lay hidden in the undergrowth, where it had been shot out of Wayne’s hand by the bodyguards.

Wayne, as we know, had already returned to the Uchronie and the safety of 1937, where Ginger still lay in the coma he had been in since his spectacular, and violent, return during the St Arwar’s Ball.

Ever since the massive Corporal Price had carried Ginger from the bullet ravaged dance hall, Biffo and Doctor Mentor had been attempting to piece together what had happened to him, using their latest steam powered devices and Victorian medical expertise.

Biffo claimed he had accessed Ginger’s comatose brain and displayed the rather disappointing, blurry, results on the large tachyscreen.

Doctor Mentor had taken a simpler, more scientific, approach and sat quietly at Ginger’s bedside recording his vital signs. There was a graze on his left temple and Ginger was talking in his sleep. The good doctor recorded every mumbled word and phrase of the long night with his quill pen and parchment.

At first the unwitting whispers and insentient information made no sense. The Doctor’s notes for the early hours of Sunday morning consisted of the word ‘racecar’ repeated over and over.
The sleep deprived Doctor formed a fantastic scenario in which Ginger’s triplane had been hit by a racecar during his take off from Germany in 1926.

He researched this possibility and discovered that steam powered cars had indeed existed in Germany in 1926. Since airplanes were such clumsy things to control he speculated that it would have been possible that Ginger had been caught out in this way.

To test his supposition, Doctor Mentor had whispered ‘racecar’ into Ginger’s ear and the sleeping airman, still dead to the real world, had mumbled, ‘Was it a car or a cat I saw.’

Dr Mentor prowled the archives of the Uchronie, searching for information about time traveling cats, and nearly went mad trying to force his scant information into a coherent theory that would explain Ginger’s catastrophe. He clung on to the memory that Commander DeBlanc had once described the Uchronie as a ‘cat that could walk among the clouds.’

But, by dawn on Sunday, as the cold light of day dawned over Europe and the Uchronie, Doctor Mentor realized that the word ‘racecar’ and the mumbled sentence read the same forwards and backwards and were merely psychosomatic echoes from Ginger’s frozen mind.

Corporal Price arrived to tell the dog-tired Doctor Mentor that Commander DeBlanc required his assistance in recovering Nate from the mirror world he had become trapped in. (see Chapter 20).

At midday, Biffo came on shift, scoffing at the inadequacy of Doctor Mentor’s pen and ink, and continued probing Ginger‘s unconsciousness with his scanning steam laser.
Doctor Mentor returned, after a short catnap, and between them they began to piece together what had happened to Ginger.

It appeared that one of the soldiers guarding the camp of black uniformed soldiers had heard Ginger’s triplane taxiing for take off and had fired a single warning shot across the dark waters of the Triassic Age lake.

This single bullet had hit Ginger, causing him to lose control at the crucial moment that he entered temporal flight and had sent him spinning into the angled spaces outside of time.

‘My goodness! What are the odds against that?’ said Lolly, when her father brought her to the secure medical area. ‘We have just discovered that the Uchronie has also come adrift in time.’

‘Well, it is just a fiction.’ said Doctor Mentor. ‘I won’t try to pretend that it is anything more.’

Biffo conjectured that Ginger had gone so far back in time that the seven day week and calendars had not yet been invented and, accordingly, he had been sucked into some sort of prehistoric time vacuum. But it took them many hours to find out how Ginger had managed to get back to the Uchronie and why he had arrived on the Saturday night instead of the Tuesday morning when he had been expected to return.

They knew that Ginger would have tried everything possible to escape and Biffo accessed the depths of his reserves in a desperate attempt to find the answer before anyone else. However, it was Doctor Mentor who revealed that it was an explosion that had thrown Ginger forward in time again.

‘Which explains his burnt flying jacket and subsequent coma.’ said Lolly.

‘What actually happened in this… um…big bang?’ asked Commander DeBlanc, getting more and more concerned that he was completely losing control of the Chronological Order.

‘It's hard to explain.‘ said Doctor Mentor, picking up his quill pen and drawing a line on a blank sheet of paper. ‘This line represents the main time stream. If I add branches to the line they symbolize the split time lines that can occur.’

‘Yes, yes. Alternate time streams.’ said DeBlanc, impatiently. ‘We are trapped in one and, up to now, we have been blaming Nate for causing it.’

‘Yes.’ said Doctor Mentor, picking up his glass of water and pouring it over the ink drawing. ‘This is what happens to the time lines when a time machine explodes!’

‘I see.’ said DeBlanc, watching the lines spread in a formless mess as the ink ran in all directions. ‘What has Biffo found?’

‘Access in his dreams… n‘that.’ said Biffo, displaying his recovered images on the tachyscreen. ‘An… conch… us mind tell us, but…’

‘That’s preposterous said DeBlanc, ‘Dreams are nothing more than the illusions or delusions of a sleeping brain.’

‘Not so, daddy.’ said Lolly, taking of the white circular hat that she had worn to church. ‘Angels use dreams to communicate with us.’

‘How so, my dear?’ asked DeBlanc, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

‘Well, for example.’ said Lolly, taking hold of Ginger‘s hand. ‘An angel came to Joseph in a dream to tell him of the forthcoming birth and later returned to warn that Herod was going to kill the child.’

‘Yes, yes. I know the narrative my dear.’ said DeBlanc. ‘But Ginger is not an angel.’

‘He flies.’ said Lolly, stroking Ginger’s back.

‘Ginger is an anachronaut.’ said Commander DeBlanc. ‘He flies with his heart, his brains and his entire being. He is a Bushwhacker, a cunning devious pilot who is in complete empathy with his machine. The steamchavs say he tried to repair his triplane while he was trapped in limbo.’

‘Yes, he did.’ said Doctor Mentor. ‘And I believe that Ginger’s attempts to repair his plane with primitive tools represent his mind’s attempts to repair itself and return to normality. What Ginger does in his dream world is critical to whether he will awake safely in the real world.’

‘The harder he tried to escape the more the clockwork return mechanism would have overheated.’ said Corporal Price.’

‘The steamchavs have found no evidence that the return mechanism has been used at all.’ said Doctor Mentor.

‘Hmm.’ said DeBlanc. ‘But Ginger would not have given up... surely he would have tried to…’
~~~~~~~~~~~
So they argued, discussed and speculated about what had happened to Ginger for several more hours. Wayne arrived to help them but no one was able to confirm what had actually happened until the sleeper awoke.

Although his body had returned at Saturday nights St Arwar’s Ball, Ginger’s consciousness did not return until two days later, at the very moment that Monday May 3 became Tuesday May 4...  St Arwar’s day. At the stroke of midnight, as the fourth and final hour of Jupiter on Monday became the first hour of Mars on Tuesday, Ginger woke up.

‘Where am I?’ he asked, putting his hands over his eyes to block out the bright lights that surrounded him.

‘You’re aboard the Uchronie.’ said Lolly, soothingly.

‘I know that I haven’t just overslept.’ said Ginger, trying to shake off the shadows of a long unpleasant dream that still blurred the edges of his mind. ‘What is wrong with my ceiling… and what are all these wires and pipes that I’m connected too?’

‘Do not concern yourself about them.’ said Doctor Mentor. ‘You are in the medical quarters.’

‘I would offer a diamond mine for a glass of water.’ croaked Ginger, as Lolly clasped his hand. ‘What happened? How long have I been in this state of abstraction?’

‘You collapsed the moment you came aboard.’ said Lolly, handing him Doctor Mentor’s glass of water. ‘You've been out for two days.’

‘Two days! You… did you say… TWO days?!’ groaned Ginger, breathing irregularly as he tried to sit up. ‘This is a disaster! I have urgent news.’

'Oh dear.’ sighed Lolly, turning to Doctor Mentor. ‘I seem to have upset him. Should I have told him it was only two hours?’

‘No! Don’t confuse him, my dear.’ said Commander DeBlanc, sitting down beside her. ‘Ginger, everyone is overjoyed that you have returned. The steamchavs still talk about your flying skills as you navigated through that squadron of enemy planes. Can you tell us what happened to you?’

‘Something hit me while I was time travelling.’ said Ginger, trying to focus on the blurry figures around him. ‘I was thrown into a dream world. Nothing was solid or real… but I was trapped as securely as if I had been thrown into a jail cell with iron bars. I did not know how long I could survive there, but I was determined that I would not die there.’

‘How long do you think you were there?’ asked Doctor Mentor, frantically scribbling notes.

‘I slept in my cockpit for seven nights.’ said Ginger, grimacing and covering his face again. ‘If indeed the darkness’s I experienced were nights…and each night I dreamt that I was a butterfly… a butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, happy with myself, doing as I pleased until I tried to fly away and discovered that I couldn’t.’

‘You poor dear.’ said Lolly, passionately ‘You were trying to get to me. I am your flower. We need each other.’

‘I battled to escape but each attempt weakened me.’ said Ginger, focusing on Doctor Mentor. ‘Then one day I awoke to find my cockpit covered in diagrams and notes. I had concocted a dream plan, drastic measures that I would use to escape from my limbo. For seven hours I jammed myself, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, into whatever lay in my way until it caused a profound chemical reaction. A detonation that blew me out of my lost dimension and returned me to the Uchronie.’

‘Yes, we thought there had been an explosion.’ said Doctor Mentor, rather smugly.

‘When I found myself aboard the Uchronie at the St Arwar’s Ball, burnt and injured,’ said Ginger, rubbing his moustache with his fingers, ‘I still believed I was flying, fluttering… escaping through an exit door. Suddenly I regained consciousness and there I was… solid and unmistakably myself. I fell to the floor not knowing if I had dreamt I was a butterfly, or if I was a butterfly dreaming that I was attending a… fancy dress ball…. aboard a steam…. powered, time travelling…. air… ship.’

Ginger stopped and sighed.

‘Ginger has overextended himself and passed out.’ whispered Doctor Mentor. ‘I could see that he was experiencing blurriness and overly-bright lights. He must have been pleased that the first thing he saw was his beloved Lolly.’

‘At least ‘e didn’t fink ‘e were dead or in ’eaven.’ said Wayne, taking off his Burberry baseball cap.
‘Wayne.’ gasped Ginger, pulling himself upright as soon as he heard the sound of the steamchav’s voice. ‘Wayne…I have news… urgent news… for the observer I brought to you… Nate! Where is he?’

‘He’s not here.’ said Commander DeBlanc. ‘Don’t worry. We know that he did something aboard the Hindenburg that changed the main course of history so we are keeping him well out of the way. The time streams are slowly returning to normal.’

‘NO!’ said Ginger. ‘No… there’s more… in 1926... on… racecar, no… on……’

Ginger closed his eyes and sighed deeply.

‘Can you tell us more?’ asked Commander DeBlanc, turning to Doctor Mentor. ‘Can he still speak?’

‘Ginger needs to rest.’ said Doctor Mentor. ‘We are over-exerting him. He has had a bad trip.’
That then is how Ginger broke through the fourth wall that had been holding him back for so long. What do you think? Would such a maneuver be possible? Surely it is simply a question of suspending your disbelief and accepting the fact that Ginger has now returned safely to the Uchronie.
In fact, Ginger’s story could end here quite happily... if we assume he makes a full recovery. There is no need to read the next episode at all… unless you want to find out more about Nate.

Next Episode:  Aftermath.