All the same, looking down at the sprawling city and the harbor full of ships, it was hard not to feel omnipotent and humble at the same time. The thing Bartlett seemed to be getting at, though, was that nature could not be told what to do. And he seemed to be on the verge of declaring himself a part of that unbridled natural force, also powerful enough to do whatever he pleased.
Now they were heading up the Hudson, teeming with early bird tourist cruises and small single‑masted sailboats. Bartlett paused to take in the view with satisfaction. Finally he continued his monologue.
"I know we've had our differences, but I'm prepared to try to get past that. I want to talk to you about something I always think of when I fly across this river. Time. I call my obsession Time and the River. Physicists will tell you that time should be thought of as a kind of fourth dimension. Things are always at a certain place in three dimensions, but when you describe the location of a subatomic particle, for example, you also have to say when it was there. To locate it accurately, you need four dimensions. We think of them all as rigid but what if one of them could be made fluid? What if you could alter the character of time?"
In spite of himself, Stone took the bait. "I don't know what this has to do with anything. Nobody can alter the pace of time." He found himself recalling a snippet of verse by John Donne:
O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall!
"Strictly speaking, that's true," Bartlett said gravely, turning away again to stare out the Plexiglas window, down into the morning space below them. The Hudson was now a giant ribbon of blue heading north into the mist. "But what if we could alter the clocks in our body to make them run slower?" He smiled then pointed off to his left. "All this below us has happened in a couple of hundred years. What will it look like down there in another hundred years? Will we still need these puny machines to fly, or will there be teleportation? Whatever it is, what would you give to be around to see that? To have your own time slow down while the world around you went on?"
Stone was looking out into space, wondering. . . not whether Winston Bartlett was an egomaniacal madman but rather how truly mad he really was.