innovate-issue-005

The Library – Chapter ThreeThe main road was a revelation. If this was a busy thoroughfare in whatever decade I found myself in,the 1930s, or 40s, then truly it was a golden age of motoring, especially for the pedestrian! Only anoccasional vehicle passed, all of them to my mind vintage and none of them familiar, except for theoccasional PIC runabout that was only familiar due to my having seen one in the carpark. None of themakes and models that my father and grandfather had painstakingly taught me about seemed to pass,but then the volume of traffic was so low that it would not hold up in any sort of statistical survey. Avan passed, painted maroon with the words "Hart's Butchers" stencilled on the side. For a moment Ithought of my teacher, Dr Hart and whether the owner of that company, maybe even the driver of thatvan, could be a relative, maybe an ancestor, of his, but it was a pointless thought, and I banished it.I stood some several minutes beside the golden gates, just watching the traffic before I came back tomyself. Somebody would start to get suspicious if I just stood there, and I had no reasonable answer toany questions that they might ask. I could see the sign of a pub down the hill in the distance and it wasluring me on with the enticing idea of a nice cold pint of lager... But this was the past - didn't theydrink warm beer here, or had John Major just been an arse? More to the point I now realised why mymoney had caused such consternation in the dining room! If this was the past, then my coins with theearliest date on them being the 1980s must have come as a serious shock! All the coins in my backpocket were worthless here, I could not go to the pub even if I wanted to drink warm beer...But I could not just stand here, that was for sure. I decided that a walk was always good for thesynapses, and headed off in the direction of the pub, down the hill away from the golden gates. Therewas enough pleasant warmth from the sun on my face to begin to revive my thought processes. Thelibrary had gone completely out of my head with my experiences in the dining room, and then theconfusion as to where, and latterly when, I was around the university building. But if the library wasentered into the equation...then at what point had the past been rewritten? Had the true vintage vehiclesof the past been somehow replaced with convincing replicas under other names, other marques? Didany of that even make the slightest bit of sense?I was now level with the pub and was not too shocked to discover it was called "The Frederick II". Ifthere had been one King Frederick of Great Britain, then it was no great surprise if there had beenanother...and the bin! It came back to me now, F III R, Frederick III Rex or whatever Frederick was inLatin. So there had been three King Fredericks...at least, my brain added as a counterpoise.If it was the 1940s, then the enumeration would probably work. If George IV's brother, the Duke ofYork, had had a son it was probably in the 1790s, maybe the early 1800s but certainly no later given hewas born, I thought, in the 1760s, his wife not that much younger than he. King Frederick I hadapparently been old enough to inherit the crown in his own right at his uncle, George IV's, death in1830. Well, that made sense - he would have been at least in his mid twenties, maybe even his midthirties by that date. A King Frederick II would presumably have been born in the period somewherebetween the 1820s and the 1840s, a King Frederick III again somewhere between the 1850s and the1870s... If this was the 1940s, King Frederick III could indeed still be alive, if this was the 1930salmost certainly he could be, even if born at the earlier end of the spectrum. He might not be, but if nothe would be recently dead, the bins on the campus from his recent reign.But was I making the right deductions from the bin? There was nothing to say that there was anunbroken line of Fredericks, without monarchs of another name occurring in between. The availableevidence seemed to point to that, but what if, say, Frederick II only had a daughter, Queen whoevershe would be, and that it was her son who was now Frederick III, a relatively young man in the gloryyears of his reign?"Or what if this is all complete bullshit!" I said aloud