Richard staggered over to the wingback and collapsed into its embrace, letting the club shaft fall from his grip. The pain in his arm and complementary nausea started to recede. When his rods and cones adjusted to the basement’s dinge-yellow semi-illumination, everything looked as it had before. Except that the sphere was gone.

Out of habit, he switched on the Zenith. The same furrow-browed cable-news insta-pundit was still pontificating about the dire economy in the same admonishing tones. The clock graphic read “12:02 p.m.”

Wait, what? 12:02. What did this mean? That he’d been gone for … five minutes? No … no. Impossible. The first cave, the snowfield, the second cave, the business with the fire … All told, it had consumed a decent part of an hour. Had Richard blacked out? No, he assured himself, absolutely not. His gearwork was sound, all senses accounted for and functioning at capacity.

He flipped to a local affiliate. It showed the same: 12:02. He wanted to get up and do some serious pacing but his legs would not cooperate. So he sat there, head in hands, fumbling with the improbable.

Let’s assume for the moment that Richard was not losing his mind—not as ludicrous as it might sound, considering the magnitude of job-related goofiness to which he’d already been exposed through the Arrangements fiasco just that day alone, coupled with the impending fallout that will surely blister everyone involved with the project once the full extent Otto’s idiocy was made known; assuming that he’d been 100% lucid during his cave-to-cave sojourn, would that not mean that Time, Chronos Himself, Dimension #4, had been, ostensibly, given the preponderance of evidence, manipulated?

If this were true, it meant one of the following had logically occurred: Either time had been stretched out in Ice World (Richard had begun to refer to this place as “Hoth”), so that an hour there translated to five minutes here, in This World; or the reverse was the case, and time had been condensed in This World, allowing events in Ice World/Hoth to progress in what had felt like real time. He supposed it didn’t matter one way or the other. The important thing was that—again, on the presumption of sanity—time itself had been compromised.

Richard scoured his databases for any facts or impressions he may have osmosed from Scientific American articles, a book by Neil deGrasse Tyson he’d recently read, PBS specials, and even grossly erroneous science-fiction films that delved into relativity, spacetime, wormholes, and the like. Most of it had receded without a trace, or was jumbled together with immaterial rubbish. The one thing he did remember—sort of—was that in Einstein’s famous thought experiments, the time dimension got all wonky the closer a hypothetical traveler approached the speed of light. Okay, well and good. But teleportation, chrono-manipulation, and re-teleportation, all at once, localized in some guy’s basement? Choke on that one, Albert.

He patted the back pocket of his corduroys and was surprised and relieved to feel the bulge of the parchment. Hard proof: he had not been delusional. But however grateful he might have been that his wits had not decamped, the alternative was far from reassuring: a teleportation and time-warp twofer. And, in an even stranger development, though his head thundered with questions—What was the nature of the sphere? Where was it he had gone? Why had he arrived at the precise moment to rescue a scrap of parchment from self-sustaining sapphire-blue flames anchored to a bed of ice? How had said scrap come to have Bertha’s introduction written on it? What did it all mean? Why him?—he was somehow able to set it all aside for later pondering. He was exhausted.

And oh, one more thing. Richard had to laugh, having almost forgotten. His presence was “required” (Otto’s word) at the office for an early morning meeting. After Richard had cut short the conversation with Otto that afternoon, Bertha had phoned her editor to demand a progress report on Arrangements, and insisted that Richard be present (apparently, she had mentioned him by name, which was only slightly less frightening than glowing white spheres that could tear the space-time continuum a new one). Otto had immediately obliged and scheduled an emergency 8 a.m. conference call. When Richard saw Otto’s invite pop up in his Outlook calendar, he’d had to restrain himself from smashing his Samsung monitor against a wall.

Richard reminded himself to set the alarm. Nothing ever ends.

He ascended the stairs, and so to bed.

Next Chapter: Part Two, The Second Sphere: Chapter I