My dear Anne,
Thank you for your letters. They put me on the right track, although I don't quite understand them all. Their contents differ here and there, but Marie-Anne III's letter has been very helpful indeed in solving the problems of time travel. Now I've reached the point where we can leave if you still want to assist me. Do come soon, together with Lisabeth.
Friendly Greetings,
Govert Gosseling
"He's ready for it", said Anne-Christine, assuming that this small phrase would enable Lisabeth to understand what she meant.
"And he probably expects us to join him?" her table companion asked, putting down her coffee cup.
"Would you like to?" Anne wanted to know.
"Why, of course, there isn't much to do here", was Lisabeth's frank answer.
Two days later, Anne-Christine and Lisabeth arrived at the scientist's little house, where they had been once before in mysterious circumstances. They were greeted cordially by Govert Gosseling, who showed them into his study at once. There, they could hear the strange apparatus, which they had seen before, make its humming noise in the next room.
"You certainly would like to know what makes such a strange noise", Gosseling stated, with a twinkle in his eyes.
"Yes" and "Indeed" Anne and Lisabeth said simultaneously, while they still remembered their burglary five years ago.
"It's a time base", the scientist said. "And I need it to travel through time".
"Where can we put our coats?" asked Anne feeling very warm.
Gosseling saw that he had been over-enthusiastic in showing his new project to both girls.
"Oh, I beg your pardon"", he said, trying to rectify his mistake.
He soon recovered the main line of his explanation, as if there were only one thing in the world that really mattered.
"Do you recall the image I made?" he asked, "that transformation of reality onto a sheet of glass?"
Both girls nodded.
"I can make that kind of image rather simply now, and also one rapidly after the other. I now have a machine in which those sheets dash along. After that, I intend to project them, by sending a ray of light through them.
"And you need your time..., whatever that buzz-thing is called..., for that?" Lisabeth asked.
"Time-base", Gosseling said, appreciating that he was understood properly.
"Certainly, it converts the power of Volta's column to a constant rotation. But now, we are going to eat and if, tomorrow, the weather is good, we'll make the images we need", Gosseling said cheerfully.
Next day was a fine day indeed and, early in the morning, Gosseling was already busy placing his apparatus in his little garden. When everything was ready, Anne-Christine and Lisabeth came to look at it all. Gosseling was happy with this interest.
"This drum is the most important part of it", he said. "A long chain of glass sheets is stocked in it."
"And what do you expect us to do?" Anne-Christine asked when Gosseling lifted the huge drum. He put it down again and looked from one girl to the other.
"I will make some images of you, which we can review at any moment we choose. We will always be able to return to today."
This explanation seemed to satisfy the two friends and they went in, to avoid disturbing him any more.
About an hour later, Gosseling stood behind his machinery and beneath a weak autumn sun. He started the humming object which dtove the big drum and produced in infernal clatter of glass sheets. Despite this noise, Anne-Christine and Lisabeth behaved like experienced actresses and picked some weeds and flowers which they placed in their hair. Before they realized, everything was finished. The machinery was silent again and Gosseling looked around with a proud smile.
"Everything went fine", he said pressing both girls close to him. "I still was afraid that one of the sheets might break because this would have blocked the whole machine. Luckily, that didn't happen. Time for some coffee!"
Right after the coffe, Gosseling locked himself with his drum in a dark room and re-appeared on;y after a very long while. It was almost time for dinner, which both girls had prepared.
"That is nice of you!", said Gosseling, reknotting his tie and putting on his jacket. "I hope you don't mind my appearance, ladies, but I've been busy, and if everything goes well tonight we may already see the results of our work".
"You'd better start eating, professor", said Lisabeth, forcing him to sit on a chair and filling a glass with an aperitive which she had chosen for him.
"You are right", Gosseling admitted, "but I'm so eager to find out if I can finally manage to travel through time. Until now, I only made it with deep concentration, and you always wonder whether or not you are fooling yourself".
As soon as he had swallowed his last mouthful, Gosseling sprang up to install his machines in the room. It was some time before everything was connected. As he worked, he stumbled more than once over the many copper wires which criss-crossed the floor.
"Do sit down! You'll really see something in a moment!" the scientist finally said.
Not only did Gosseling start his time base, he also activated a scource of blinding white light, which seemed to bathe the room in sunlight until he closed a little shutter. The sliding chain of glass sheets certainly produced moving pictures but one couldn't say more than that. One certainly couldn't distnguish two straw-picking girls in the moving pattern of vertical lines on the wall.
"It doesn't work properly yet!" Gosseling shouted above the noise of his rattling machinery. He waited in vain for something to change for the better.
By the time the last glass sheet had fallen out of the apparatus and the scientist had turned off his machine, he could not hide the depressed state he was in. Lisabeth was the first to comfort him.
"Things don't have to work at the first try, do they?" she asked, pulling his head onto her shoulder, but the scientist didn't answer. He was too upset by the failure of his experiment.
The rest of the evening passed without much conversation, until Anne-Christine asked:
"Are you certain that your experiment is based on the explanation which Marie-Anne III wrote down?"
Gosseling, who had been in deep thoughts ever since Lisabeth had comforted him, was shaken by Anne-Christine's question.
"I followed the explanation as well as I could", he said. "For most of those letters weren't very clear. They were written a long time ago. The handwriting raised no problems, for I am an historian, but the terms she used did. I couldn't cope with them. They gave me the feeling that Marie-Anne III had to explain something of which she herself knew nothing, but whose importance she appreciated. She did as well as she could in the circumstances. Her duty wasn't very simple. Some of the objects, like the light-sensitive materials, she describes exactly. But other parts are explained rather poorly. Probably, those things had still to be invented. Besides, she lists a great number of qualities possessed by the phenomenon of time, about which I thought very carefully. Despite my efforts, I don't fully understand those paragraphs, perhaps not even ten per cent of them."
"That letter of Marie-Anne III was one of a kind, don't you agree? Anne asked, happy to have persuaded Gosseling to talk again.
"Yes", he said quietly. "She certainly made the strangest contribution. Was I correct in understanding that all women whose name is Anne experience a vision once in their lives?"
"That's the way it is", Anne-Christine said, "and that vision always has something to do with time. The prediction said that I would be the one to collect a Crystal Treasure, and it came true. But, with the exception of Marie-Anne's letter, nowhere is it explained how one can recover the properties of this Crystal. All the other letters concern predictions which came true a long time ago or which contain ordinary events out of the past, when the Annes and the Gosselings were chasing one another."
These words gave Gosseling mixed feelings.
"It's a long time since I heard anything about Alex", he said.
Anne-Christine understood from these words that this subject was important in his life.
"I haven't heard either", she said, and then kept silent for a long while to avoid making things more difficult for Gosseling.
"Did you have your vision yet?" Gosseling asked Anne- Christine after a pause.
"I had been waiting for this question", she said. "And the answer is yes, but that will not help you with your investigations. That is something we have to do with our own ingenuity".
"What was that vision about?" Gosseling wanted to know.
"You can't ask me that, Govert", she said. "You're already very lucky that I gave you those letters. Even that is already against the rules!"
"To hell with it", Gosseling cried. "You and your damned rules! You know what you cause by sticking to them? Please act normally and tell me what you know! I am working so hard to archieve the impossible but you, you just do as you please!"
He stood up and gesticulated wildly with both arms, a kind of behaviour from him they were not accustomed to see.
"Lisabeth, what is your opinion?" he asked, already calmer. "Is it better to continue or to stop?"
Lisabeth quickly found her answer.
"Of course we'll continue. If Anne tells us that she didn't experience something useful, then we have to believe her. Tomorrow is another day and we can make a fresh start."
Next morning, Lisabeth and Anne-Christine were already up when Gosseling appeared. It was clear that he hadn't had a good night's sleep. A light breakfast was waiting for him, which he ate silently.
It was Lisabeth who started the conversation.
"Anne", she asked, "is there a clear hint in those letters how one can make a fluent movement out of individual pictures?"
"In a way there is but as Govert has already said, it isn't altogether quite clear. There is something about sampling in discrete steps, filtering and low-frequency components. That is correct, isn't it Govert?"
"Those descriptions are used", Gosseling sighed. "But don't ask me what they mean".
"I think I do understand them", Lisabeth said. "You can't just place a series of images in front of a light source. The images have to remain there for a while when you lay them down and also when you make them reappear. We have to invent a new apparatus which can hold them for as long as possible and then change them from one to the other, in the shortest possible time. They must change position so swiftly that your eye can't follow".
"You may be right!", Gosseling cried out. "Maybe that is the missing transformation. In fact, we have to pass from a moving domain to a frozen one. And if you don't take the proper measures you'll upset the proces. The transformation has to be moving and standing still at the same time!"
He looked at Lisabeth with a hint of love for her in his eyes.
"You are my lifebuoy", was all he could say.
"It doesn't impress me much", Anne-Christine said. "After all, it is a rather trivial approach".
"Once you know a theory, it's always simpler than you could even have imagined beforehand. If it is a good theory, then you always wonder why you didn't invent it yourself", Gosseling replied conceitedly. Now in a good mood, he walked to his study, where his machinery was still in place.
"I hate that man", said Anne-Christine when she was certain he couldn't hear her any more. "I wonder why I always take his proposals seriously".
"It must be your destiny", Lisabeth offered.
"That's certain", Anne-Christine declared. "And there is nothing I can do to stop it".
"Don't worry, just trust him, that's all. After all, he's doing the best he can. Things will go wrong, from the moment you expect them to go wrong", was Lisabeths opinion before she joined Gosseling, leaving Anne-Christine in a confused state of mind.
All day long, Anne-Christine listened to Gosseling and Lisabeth talking about springs and levers which should go up and down or to and fro. From time to time, this discussion was interrupted by another noise, when one of them used a saw or a file. It reminded Anne-Christine of the day when Lisabeth and Gosseling had deciphered the inscription on her cups. Once again, she didn't feel quite happy about this co-operation.
"And once more, I'll have to pepare our meal, all by myself", she grumbled, starting to arrange the table for dinner.
"Tomorrow, we'll give it another try, and then we'll succeed!" predicted Gosseling during the meal and Lisabeth nodded, very confident.
The following day, the picture-taking device made even a louder noise than the first time when Gosseling had used it, for it had become more complicated. Lisabeth and Anne- Chrisitne didn't pay any attention at all to that noise but moved inside a limited area which Gosseling had indicated.
"Thank you very much", he said, after he'd run out of glass sheets. "I'm retiring to my dark room. I won't bother you any more until tonight, when we'll see if we did reach our goal, today".
"Then we can take a stroll", said Anne-Christine. "I want to bring back some memories".
"Me, too", said Lisabeth.
As soon as they had locked the front door, Anne-Christine said:
"You seem to know a great deal about time, even more then I do, and I am supposed to be an expert."
"I can't help it," Lisabeth defended herself. "Perhaps I've a talent for it. We are related anyway and I find this topic as interesting as you do".
"What do you think: is Gosseling on the right track?' Anne-Christine asked after a long pause.
"It depends on what you want. We'll certainly move nearer his viewpoint tonight, but that's far from time-travelling. One certainly needs something quite different for that".
"Like..?", Anne asked, gazing at Lisabeth in wonder.
"Selectivity", Lisabeth said. "The transformation is all right. Gosseling is very clever at that. He seemed ashamed when he found out he had forgotten one. But if you consider his work in terms of selectivity, it is rather clumsy. For instance, he doesn't use the different colours contained in light; his lightsource generates only white light, which contains literally all colours. It would make more sense to take every colour seperately instead of mixing them all up. And then ther's his time base. It is so primitive. Because of its complicated mechanics it generates an infernal noise. If you have to change something and if a time base is inevitable, then you should try something more sophisticated".
"Colours?" Anne-Christine asked.
"That's what I was thinking", Lisabeth laughed. "And that will certainly solve the noise problem".
"Then we have to transfer the time domain to the colour domain!" Anne-Christine cried out and, with her fingers on her nose, she imitated the shape of Gosselings glasses. Lisabeth exploded into laughter.
Late that evening, when they returned, they found Gosseling installing his projector.
"The pictures are good", he said. "They are very clear and they all differ slightly. Nothing can go wrong any more".
"Let's hope" Lisabeth said. "Are we going to look right now?"
"I expect so", Gosseling replied. "Everything is ready".
He closed the curtains at once, so that Anne-Christine and Lisabeth hardly had time enough to find a chair. As soon as he started his time base, the three of them saw exactly what had happened earlier that day. In black and white pictures, the girls walked over the wall, which was really a garden.
"It works!" Gosseling cried, beyond himself. The two friends thought this was the most marvellous miracle they had ever witnessed, apart from the images created by the Muscovite Glassware.
Right after the performance, Gosseling put the series of plates into the apparatus one more time. Once again, the spectators saw the moving pictures on the wall. But Gosseling still hadn't had enough. Time after time, he ran his little glass sheets through the apparatus, mostly in the right order, but also upside down or inverted as in a mirror, until Anne- Christine said:
"The game is over now. You are very clever, but the things won't run away and I feel hungry."
Govert Gosseling realized she was right and cancelled the other performances.
"Before long, we'll be able to travel through time!" Govert stated, drinking his coffee after dinner.
"No", said Anne-Christine.
"Why not?" Gosseling asked, surprised by this self-assured answer.
"This way will never work, Govert. This is fairgroud- stuff. It isn't a proper way to travel through the ages. It needs something far more sophisticated and Aardewerk agrees with us on that."
"Aardewerk, that porcelain-seller?" Gosseling retorted. "What does he know about it?"
"He is a connoisseur of porcelain and crystal and the latter is the most important aspect", she said. "Today, we haven't been idle and we paid him a visit. Tomorrow, we'll explain to you everything we've found out."
In bed at night, Anne-Christine told her story to Lisabeth in a subdued voice:
"It isn't quite accurate what I'm telling you but it's so important that I want you to know it, too. Do you recall that evening we broke into this house?"
"Why of course I do!", said Lisabeth, and Anne-Christine saw her smiling in the candlelight.
"Do you also remember a newspaper-article cutting, which we found then?"
Anne-Christine looked at Lisabeth to be really sure she did.
"It was about a fire in the Crystal Palace, where you have been", Lisabeth said after a while. "And it was an article from the coming century."
"That's right", said Anne-Christine. "To be precise, it was stated that the Palace would burn down in 1936 and that is exactly what is going to happen."
"How can you be so certain?" Lisabeth asked. But at the same moment, she realized that Anne-Christine had revealed her dearest secret to her. And Anne-Christine saw how she jumped at the news.
"Yes", she said. "That has been my visionary revelation. I was there, watching the whole Crystal Palace going up in flames, and that was in 1936. I am conviced it was. That's all I know, but it shows that the newspaper was real. Gosseling is thus able to travel through time by means of his concentrated thoughts, and what's more important, he can take things like newspaper articles back to our own time!"
Lisabeth couldn't believe her ears and took some time to realize the meaning of those last words.
"So why is he giving himself so much trouble with those glass sheets if he's already able to do so?" she wondered.
"For quite some time, I too was wondering, but I think I now know the answer", Anne-Christine said. "He probably can travel, but he can never see where he will land. He may encounter some very unpleasant surprises. What he's looking for is a little helper, to see beforehand if the time and place of his destiny is of any interest. Gosseling can travel but I have the secret of how to reconnoitre time and so we complement each other, he and I as well as his ancestors and mine. That secret is pretty well described by Marie-Anne III but, for one reason or another, we can understand her better than he can. At least you, too, could instantaneously see what she meant, whereas Govert couldn't cope with it."
"Or he just pretended he couldn't" Lisabeth ventured.
"That's a possibility too, but I don't think so. He really needs us to go any further, otherwise he wouldn't have invited us."
"So you know how to see images from other eras?" Lisabeth asked, very surprised.
"Oh yes, but it's not something I invented myself, you know. You need glass with a high concentration of silver in it. And the silver must be spread evenly through the glass. And that's where Gosseling goes wrong. He smears the silver on a flat plate and thus can recover only flat images. And, as you presumed already, his time-base is not adequate. Therefore you'd better take the sun. The sun rotates very smoothly. Once you split up sunlight by means of a prism or a sphere, you can expose the glass containing the silver to all the resultant colours. The first time you do this, the image is stored and the following times they are displayed again, just like Gosseling does in his own way. But he uses plain white light and that's not very economical, for you can store a new image with every new colour. In this way, you can stock a very large number of images in a very small piece of glass."
"That's why you were so anxious to know the amount of silver in the glass, yesterday at Aardewerk's," Lisabeth understood.
"Exactly, and I was very glad to hear him confirm the presence of a high degree of silver in the crystal", said Anne-Christine.
"Anne, aren't you afraid that Gosseling will go back in time again, in order to regain his control over your inheritance?"
"I certainly am", Anne-Christine declared frankly.
"Perhaps he already did manage to control it in the future, or however you may say that. It all depends on what is going to happen in the days to come. The past can be defined in the next few hours", she said with obvious great pleasure.
"Is that really possible?" Lisabeth doubted. "For, if so, didn't it already happen by now?"
"Perhaps the Gosseling we saw digging in our garden five years ago, was the same Gosseling who will leave in a moment", Anne-Christine said. "You never know!"
"Anyway, he didn't find anything then", Lisabeth was convinced. "So he won't have much success with his experiments, even in the future."
"That's why I took the risk in handing over my letters to him", Anne-Chritine said. "My inheritance was in my possession all the time and I have seen it disappear before my very eyes. So I completed my duty, as was predicted. That's what made the ancient images disappear for ever. New crystal can only store new images".
"If you see it that way, it won't harm us to let Gosseling continue his work," said Lisabeth. "He can only recall what he stores from now on. He cannot travel back to an era in which your inheritance still existed".
"Let's hope we didn't miss a link in our chain of thought", Anne-Christine laughed. "For if we did we've really put ourselves into a nice mess".
Next morning, both girls rose late. The host had just finished breakfast but stayed at the table to hear what Anne- Christine and Lisabeth had found out at Aardewerk's.
"You promised me to tell something about Adrian Aardwerk", he said, even before they sat down.
"I'll certainly do that", Anne-Christine answered. "As I told you yesterday, I had a brief conversation with this expert, but before I enlighten you with the results, I would like to ask how you fix your images on those glass sheets." Gosseleing was puzzled.
"Just as Marie-Anne III has written, with combinations of silver nitrates and silver halogenides. And that works really well, as you witnessed yourself. But why are you asking?"
"Because I asked Aardewerk if my ancestor's crystal was of a particular composition", Anne-Christine said truthfully.
"And he confirmed that it was. That was why he could recognize it instantaneously. The percentage of silver and silver combinations was extremely high."
"That can't be a coincidence!" Gosseling said. "What I deliberately stored on my sheets happened automatically in the Crystal. Incredible!" the scientist sighed.
"And in full colour!" Lisabeth added.
"Oh, that I'll manage to do, too. It's just a matter of time", Gosseling replied. "There are a lot of combinations of silver and there certainly will be some that, under the influence of light, will turn to red or yellow instead of black."
"Furthermore, Aardewerk told us that this variety of crystal without any exception comes from Upper Mongolia. The quartz sand you need for it is a by-product of the gold and silver mines over there."
"One can find gold and silver in the same vicinity quite often," Lisabeth affirmed. "Almost every goldmine produces silver as well, but in Mongolia the silver is embedded in the quartz and that is rare".
"You did a fine job and it is very kind of you to tell me this", Gosseling said, obviously moved. "But does that mean that we have to travel to Upper Mongolia to fetch some sand before we can travel?"
"I am afraid so, or we'll have to find something that already contains the Mongolian sand" Anne-Christine suggested.
"Aardewerk told us, that crystal of this composition is very rare", Lisabeth said. "Most of the time, you only find small quantities of it. He knew of a chandelier made from this particular crystal which belonged to the Czar."
"That will be the chandelier in which Anne-Lise once hid the Muscovite Glassware", Anne-Christine laughed but in a split second she saw how true her words were and, at the same time, she became aware of the great disaster that was building up.
"I'm afraid I'm not quite well at the moment", she said. "And I think I've done something very foolish".