by Alex Scarrow
Both shook their heads. ‘Not really,’ said Whitmore. ‘How could we know that?’ He gestured around at the jungle. ‘It’s an entirely different landscape.’ He laughed. ‘Hell, it’s out there somewhere!’
‘I know where it is in relation to the TERI labs,’ said Kelly. The others looked at him. ‘Well, I drive in to work from Glen Rose. It’s where I live. I pass the signs for Dinosaur Valley Park every day on the way up to the interstate. It’s just outside Glen Rose, about a mile north of the town.’
‘I have geo-coordinates for the town of Glen Rose,’ said Becks.
Liam looked at her. ‘You do?’
‘Of course. It was part of the data package Maddy Carter uploaded prior to departure. I have the complete set of US Geological Survey maps for the State of Texas.’
Liam’s eyes glistened by the light of the campfire. ‘We could actually do this!’ He looked at them all, piecing together on the fly something that was beginning to resemble a plan. ‘Then, in theory, Becks, you could lead us right to this place that will one day become this dinosaur park?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘And if we know some fossil-hunting fellas find a whole load of fossils, as you said, Mr Whitmore, sometime in the 1900s, then could we not place some fossils of our own right there?’
‘I suppose we — ’
‘Negative,’ cut in Becks. She understood now where Liam was going with this. ‘That would represent a significant contamination risk.’
Liam clenched his teeth in frustration. ‘Come on, Becks, we have to break a few eggs, so we do.’
She cocked her head. ‘Break eggs?’
‘You know… how does it go? To make an omelette. We leave a message to be found. So, all right, it causes a new load of contamination problems. But then we have a chance at being rescued, getting these people back home where they should be, and then… then we go and fix that little problem.’
‘This action introduces a third independent source of contamination.’ She looked coolly at the group gathered around the campfire. ‘Already there are two potential sources of time corruption. One in 2015 — the absence of Edward Chan. The second, this time, the presence of humans where there should not be any. Either or both contamination sources have a high probability of already causing significant time waves in the future.’
‘What if…’ started Jonah, but he almost stopped when every pair of eyes swung on to him. Clearly now wasn’t the time for some flippant wisecrack. But he continued anyway. It seemed like a smart idea to him. ‘What if… like… we left a message that was, you know, like, too important to become common knowledge.’
They stared at him in silence. No one was telling him to shut up, so he elaborated. ‘I mean, like hushed up. Like, say, Roswell.’
Liam shrugged. ‘Roswell?’
Kelly snorted a dry laugh. ‘The supposed sight of a crashed UFO in 1947. Conspiracy nuts love that story. According to them it was a real flying saucer from outer space with real live LGM onboard.’
Laura saw Liam purse his lips in confusion. ‘Little Green Men,’ she said helpfully.
‘Anyway,’ continued Kelly, ‘despite the fact it was most probably just a crashed test jet of some kind, you still get nut-jobs going on about wanting to free the little green men from their years of medical testing and enforced imprisonment.’
Jonah made a face. ‘Yeah… but how do we know for sure it ain’t true, Mr Kelly, eh? Point is, it could’ve been just a test jet, it could’ve been an alien spaceship, but the world will never know ’cause the government being, like, totally paranoid douche bags, hushed it all up. Kept the secret to themselves.’
‘Oh, come on, kid,’ said Kelly, ‘that’s a load of — ’
Liam waved him silent. ‘Hang on! No, wait! Jonah has a point… I think.’ He scratched his cheek, deep in thought for a moment. ‘Look, the point is people like the government… Your American government, right, if someone, some everyday person discovered a fossil that suggested something as amazing as the invention of time travel and they told the government, what would they do?’
‘You kiddin’?’ said Juan. ‘They’d end up all over it like a rash, man. Secret service, Homeland stiffs in black suits an’ dark glasses an’ stuff.’
‘I’ll tell you, dude. Whoever found it would end up having an unfortunate accident,’ said Jonah, looking at Kelly. ‘Always happens, like… always. In fact, anybody who knew about it, was related to somebody who knew about it, would end up dead or in Guantanamo or someplace. Either way, there wouldn’t be anyone walking around talking about it.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Liam. ‘It would remain a secret.’ He looked at Becks. ‘And so nothing major would be changed by it. The world wouldn’t be talking about it. The world wouldn’t know about it.’
Behind her narrowing eyes he guessed her computer was hard at work processing that notion. Looking for a percentage probability figure.
Whitmore nodded. ‘That’s how the intelligence agencies work, by putting up a poker face. Give nothing away. You know something? You keep it to yourself. You know something about the enemy, say the Russians… you don’t change a thing about the way you behave. You act normal so the enemy don’t know you’ve got something on them.’
Liam nodded. ‘Exactly! Just like in the Second World War. I read something about those Enigma codes and all. And how the Americans and British couldn’t sometimes react to the German messages they’d intercepted, otherwise the Germans would have figured out they’d cracked their secret codes.’ He looked down at the muddy ground at his feet. Subconsciously the toe of his left shoe drew spirals in the dirt. ‘So I don’t know yet what kind of a message we could write. But we’d want something we know they’d have to keep secret. But, more importantly, we want a message they’d need to take directly to our field office.’
‘That will compromise the agency’s secrecy,’ warned Becks.
Liam shrugged. ‘I know… but another problem to fix later, huh?’
She scowled silently at that. ‘It is another protocol conflict.’
‘So you can blame it on me when we get back,’ he said with a grin.
The group considered Liam’s plan in silence for a while as the fire crackled and hissed between them.
‘I reckon your idea sounds cool,’ said Lam. ‘I’m in.’
Liam noticed a couple of heads nod.
‘All right, then,’ he said finally. ‘All right, then.’ This felt good, having something at least half-figured out, something for them all to work towards. ‘Becks, we’d need for them to know when we are, you know? As close as you can get it. So you do what maths in your head you need to do.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Affirmative.’
‘And maybe we’ll need some sort of device erected exactly where we landed, right? So that if — ’ he corrected himself — ‘ when they get our message and have an approximate time period to start density probing, we need something that’s constantly moving to and fro in that space. Creating some sort of a movement, a disturbance?’
‘Correct.’
‘You mean like a windmill or somethin’?’ asked Ranjit.
Becks nodded. ‘Affirmative. A device of that kind would be suitable.’
‘And we’ll need to make some preparations for a long hike. Food, water, weapons, those sorts of things.’ Liam looked around at them. ‘And we’ll need to leave someone behind to man the camp and lift the bridge after we’re gone.’
‘Also to maintain the density interference device. It must function constantly. All the time,’ said Becks.
Liam looked over his shoulder out towards the darkness, towards the middle of the clearing where they’d landed over a week ago. ‘Yes, you’re right. It’d be bad news for us if a density probe passed through here once, found nothing and moved on.’
Liam’s grin was infectious and began to spread among the others.
He looked at Becks. ‘Is this acceptable?’
She nodded slowly. ‘The
plan has a low probability of success.’ She smiled, quite nicely this time. ‘But it is possible, Liam O’Connor.’
CHAPTER 34
2001, New York
Sal watched the world go by. Her world, that’s how she thought about it: Times Square, New York, eight thirty in the morning, Tuesday 11 September 2001.
She knew it so well now. She knew everything that existed in this thoroughfare and everything that was meant to happen at this very moment in time. For instance… she looked around… and there they were: the old couple in matching jogging pants, huffing slowly side by side; the FedEx guy with an armful of packages, dropping one of them on the pavement and looking around to see whether anyone had noticed his hamfistedness; two blonde girls sharing headphones and giggling at something they were listening to.
Sal smiled.
All normal so far.
And there was the flustered-looking huddle of Japanese tourists standing outside TGI Friday’s on the corner of 192 West and 46th Street, flipping anxiously through their phrase books to work out how to ask for a coffee and salt-beef and mustard bagels times nine.
Her eyes drifted up to the billboards overlooking Times Square; there was Shrek and Donkey, Mikey and Sully. There was the billboard for Mamma Mia… and walking slowly up the pavement towards her favourite bench, checking in every bin along the way and pushing a loaded shopping trolley in front of him, was the cheerful old tramp she saw this time every morning.
She sniffed the warm morning air; it smelled of car fumes and faintly of sizzling bacon and sausage meat. Again, quite normal — the smell of a city in a hurry and on its way to work.
‘My world,’ she whispered to herself. Her world… and all was well.
Only that was little consolation. If her world was still unaltered, if there weren’t even the tiniest of differences to see here, it could only mean that Liam and the others had as yet to make any impact on whatever piece of history they’d landed in. There were two conclusions to draw from that, weren’t there? Either they were being incredibly careful and had managed to avoid any kind of contamination at all… or…
‘Or they arrived nowhere,’ she muttered.
Dead. Torn to pieces by a wall of energy, by the explosion they’d caused. Or perhaps lost in chaos space. Foster had once ominously told her it was a place you’d never ever want — not in your wildest nightmares — to loiter around in.
Maddy was back from her trip to locate Foster. She’d not managed to find him. Sal had thought it was a long shot. But she seemed to have cheered up a little, seemed hopeful that they were going to get them back home yet. For some reason she’d been gabbling on about expecting, when the bubble reset at twelve o’clock tonight and they were ‘reset’ back to Monday morning, the first thing they’d hear would be a knock on the archway’s door, and somebody standing outside, perhaps feeling silly, uncertain, and holding in their hand some sort of artefact from history with Liam’s scruffy handwriting scrawled across it.
Sal wondered why Maddy was so sure that was going to happen, that the answer to this little mess they were in was actually going to deliver itself to their front door like the morning post.
Maddy slurped on her third Dr Pepper and placed it back on the desk beside the other two, now forming an orderly queue of crumpled cans. She could feel the sugar kick building up inside and the office chair twisted one way then the other as she pulled on the edge of the desk.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘What do you think, Bob?’
› Your thinking is logical. However, my AI duplicate would offer Liam caution against this course of action.
‘Of course you would, Bob… because that’s a hard-coded protocol.’
The cursor blinked for a few seconds.
› Also because of the danger of revealing the location of this field office.
‘But Liam would still go and do something like that, right? He’d override your warning?’
› I am unable to answer that, Maddy.
‘But, come on, you know him better than me or Sal.’
› He has broken protocols before. He is capable of impulsive decisions.
Maddy smiled. ‘That he is.’
She picked up her can again and tossed another fizzy mouthful down. ‘So, like, if somebody in history does find a message from him… I guess we’re going to have to do a lot of tidying up after ourselves.’
› It will depend on who discovers the message. And when in history that person comes from.
‘Well, it would be dropped somewhere, some time in the state of Texas. It could be anyone from some Apache Indian, or maybe a cowboy to… I dunno, maybe a civil-war soldier or an oil driller, or some college kids goofing around off the main highway. It could be anyone.’
› You presume they have only travelled back in time a hundred or two hundred years. It is equally possible they exist in what will one day be Texas long before the arrival of colonials. It is equally possible they exist in a time before the arrival of Native Americans.
‘Isn’t there a way you could at least best-guess how far back in time they’ve gone?’
› Negative. However, it might be possible for my AI duplicate to compare the density of tachyon particles in the vicinity of the explosion and the arrival point. The decay attrition is constant and this would give a fairly precise indication of when they are.
She stared at the screen. ‘Really?’
› Affirmative. It will depend on how accurate the reading was.
If Bob was right, if that was true and they had a time-stamp, then getting some sort of message through time to her was the only course they could take. And Liam and the version of Bob’s AI that was with him were smart enough to come to the exact same conclusion.
‘I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be all right, I really do.’
› I hope you are correct, Maddy.
She nodded, wishing she had just a little of Liam’s laid-back devil-may-care attitude. She tilted her can and swilled another mouthful. ‘Let’s have some music… It’s like a freakin’ graveyard in here.’
› I have an extensive database of music. What would you like for your listening pleasure?
‘Something heavy… something rocky.’
› Clarify ‘heavy’, ‘rocky’.
‘Bob… just give me something lively, then.’
› I can analyse the audio files in my database for variables such as beats-per-minute, wave-form, volume, number of times played.
‘Do that,’ she cut in. ‘Do that… number of times played. Give me something the previous team liked to listen to.’
› Affirmative.
She heard his hard drive whirring softly, then a moment later the speakers on the desk either side of the main monitor began to chug with a heavy drum beat.
› Is this acceptable?
She sat back in her chair and put her feet up on the desk. It sounded pretty good to her, a bit like Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson
… a bit like Chilli Peppers. ‘Yeah, cool… I like it.’
The music echoed around the archway, bouncing off the cool brick walls, making the place feel a little more alive.
CHAPTER 35
65 million years BC, jungle
Liam watched Becks and the men lowering the bridge between them. He was surprised at the strength of the vine rope, showing no signs yet of fraying and snapping despite the tree trunk having been raised and lowered a dozen times already. It thudded down on the boulders on the far side of the river, bouncing and flexing as it settled into place.
‘All right,’ he shouted over the roar of the river. ‘Everyone who’s not staying… let’s go.’
The first of those that were going along on the trip began to carefully bum-shuffle their way along the log, getting damp with spray from below. Twelve of them in total, leaving four behind to man the camp: Joseph Lam and Jonah Middleton, Sophia Yip and Keisha Jackson. Lam, as the only adult, was in charge, and Becks had made sure he fully understood how important it was to k
eep the ‘windmill’ rotating its arms.
The contraption was a post with a balanced crossbar like a pair of scales and someone’s rucksack on one side slowly leaking — one at a time — pebbles on to the ground. As the weight adjusted and the ‘scales’ slowly tilted, it turned a simple windmill: a long, thin spar of wood that swung through the air with a regular rhythm. Every few hours the rucksack needed to be topped up again to maintain the blade’s swinging action. It couldn’t be allowed to stop.
Lam understood enough of its purpose already — maintaining a regular metronome-like signature of movement. Becks also briefed him on the warning signs that the area in the immediate vicinity was being probed: heat, a momentary localized jump in temperature of about ten degrees and a slight visual shimmering. If a probe actually did occur while they were gone, she’d continued, there would almost certainly be another one directly afterwards to ‘double-check’ the rhythmic interference. And, provided the windmill was still waving and duplicating the same unnatural pattern, he could expect a two-yard-wide time window to open and for someone to emerge from it, looking for them.
Lam assured them he’d set up a rota to keep the contraption turning and then wished them all luck.
They’d spent a few days preparing to set off on the trip. Sixty miles heading north-east, with no idea at all what sort of terrain they were going to have to cross. It could be jungle all the way. It could turn to desert for all they knew. Which was why they each carried in their school rucksacks as many plastic bottles as had come through with them full of drinking water. They had some food too, parcels of grilled fish meat wrapped in broad waxy leaves and tied up with vine rope. Enough food and water to last them a few days and hopefully they could forage for more along the way.
Kelly was first across and waited for the next with a helping hand extended.
Everyone also had a weapon now, either a spear or metal-shard hatchet, or both. Juan had even managed to produce three surprisingly good bows from suitably sturdy branches and a quiver full of arrows from sharpened bamboo canes, with fletching made from thin strips of bark. The arrows had proved to be rubbish against the hard wood of a tree trunk, splintering on impact. But, tested on the long bulky carcass of one of those huge fish, the arrows had gone almost entirely through.