by Roger Ley
“That’s okay Doc, we’re both men of the world,” said Doug. “Who knows, I might need a favor off a you, one day.”
They got out of the elevator, walked across the atrium and swiped out of the building.
“Thanks Doug, I appreciate it.” They shook hands and set off in different directions across the near empty car park.
“Let me know if ya make a killing Doc,” Doug shouted across to him. “Those bookies deserve a shaftin’.”
Chapter Seventeen
USA the 2000s
It was a Monday, and Riley had arrived at the laboratory at eight o’clock that morning. Doug had been on weekend call, staying in the staff quarters, and he was keen to escape home. He came into Riley’s office looking, disheveled and unshaven, he placed his handover sheet on the desk, another of the Colonel’s bureaucratic novelties.
“Did ya hear about the earthquake yet?” he asked. He was chewing gum as usual.
“No, what earthquake?”
“The one that’s gonna happen in Haiti in two weeks. It’s gonna kill a lotta people, about a quarter of a mill.” Doug left, as emotionally unaffected as ever.
Riley read the report, carried it through to the Colonel’s office, and placed it on top of his keyboard. The Colonel looked at Riley over his reading glasses then, after a pause and a small sigh, he picked it up and read it.
“Okay Martin, this looks serious, I’ll pass it on to the Committee,” he said when he’d finished. But, as with the Tsunami, two weeks passed, and the Government didn’t give a warning.
On the day after the quake, the Colonel asked Riley into his office. He wants to get the inevitable confrontation over as soon as possible, thought Riley. The Colonel was standing behind his desk as Martin entered.
“I don’t make policy Martin, I’m sorry that we didn’t warn those poor people in Haiti,” he said, “but we have to keep this technology secret. The same way you Limeys protected your code breaking in World War Two. Alan Turing, Bletchley Park, the Enigma code, all that good stuff. The Government has to take painful decisions for the greater good. Sacrifices have to be made.”
Riley was furious. He placed his hands on the desk and, leaned forward into the Colonel’s face.
“They’ve counted 170,000 bodies so far, and they estimate there’ll be a quarter of a million.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “Do you know what 250,000 casualties means? Men, women, children, mothers, fathers, babies. Even now hundreds of people are lying trapped and dying with broken limbs in the darkness of cellars under collapsed buildings, calling out for water, calling for their God. You could have warned them, it wouldn’t have cost you anything, you and your precious Committee, you could have easily warned them?” He was shouting, his hands were shaking, he stepped back.
“I refuse to work with you people any longer. You are mass murderers, I quit.” He heard the slight break in his voice. “Oh, and by the way, I know about you and Estella. You, are a man without honor,” he said slowly and carefully, before he turned and left the office. He would always regret that his inhibitions stopped him from punching the Colonel in his stupid face and then kicking fuck out of him while he lay curled up on the floor. He wanted to stamp on his head.
Riley walked into the main laboratory looking for Estella; the embers of a dangerous, violent anger fanned into flame. It mixed with his feeling of class inadequacy, and the injustice of his anonymity. Estella was sitting at one of the work stations; he leaned down close to her ear.
“Come with me,” he hissed. She looked up in surprise, and then followed him into the conference room. He shut the door and tried to drop the blind on the laboratory side.
“What’s the matter Martin?” she asked, as he pulled ineffectually at the draw strings. He threw them down, leaving the blind high on one side.
He turned and looked at her. “I know about you and him,” he said.
“Me and who? What do you mean?”
He noticed that her blink rate didn’t increase; it was normally a sure sign of tension with her, one of those useful indicators that a spouse notices but never discloses. A separate, logical part of him, found her personal control interesting, almost admirable. She was going to try to deny this thing.
“You and the Colonel.”
“You’re imagining things Martin.”
“He’s been leaving his car parked at the back of the house, on the nights he stayed with you, nights when the boys and I have been away.”
“How would you know if you were out on the Bay sailing your fucking boat?” she asked, hands on hips.
“Our home security cameras, I cut into their data loop, they store the last week’s images. He parked near one at the back of the house, careless, probably overeager to see you. I watched him come to the back door with his wine and his flowers.”
Estella stood staring at him, her mouth clamped shut, her face reddening with anger or embarrassment, he didn’t know which.
“It makes sense to me now. He knew even better than you what my movements were, when I had to go away for meetings, when I was taking the late or weekend shift. The sneaky fucker, the two of you have been running rings around me for months, years. How long has it been going on? How many others have there been? Who fathered the children for Christ’s sake?” he was shouting by this time.
He took several deep calming breaths and spoke more quietly. “You’ve put so much at risk. Our jobs, our family, everything, just for a bit of excitement.”
“What did you expect? Always worrying about ‘ripples in the Timestream’ or out on the Bay with the boys, you never had any time for me. He loves me Martin, he’s going to leave Pauline and make a life with me, Hank and Cliff.”
Riley laughed derisively. “The only way he’ll leave Pauline is with her boot up his arse when she finds out what he’s been up to with you. He wants an affair, he wants sexual variety, and married women are safest, you’re just his bit on the side. Wait until the chips are down, do you think he’ll swap his daughter for our boys, not unless he’s pushed? Even if you both try to make a go of it, how can you ever trust him? If he’ll do this to his own family, he’ll do it to you when he meets somebody else. You’ll never be sure he isn’t cheating, and he’ll feel the same about you, because he knows you cheated on me, the father of your children. What a pair you’ll make, watching each other’s every move, checking each other’s cell phones, hiring detectives.” He laughed mirthlessly.
He moved towards the door. “I can’t work here anymore, not with you, not with him, not with the Committee, I’ve quit. I need to get away. I’m going home now, to prepare a statement to the press. Bollocks to the disclosure restrictions. The world should know about our achievements here.”
Estella stood rigidly, her arms by her sides, hands clenched, face red as he walked out of the room. The pneumatic closer denied him the satisfaction of slamming the door so he punched the water cooler hard as he passed it in the corridor. It fell over, the plastic bottle detached and rolled across the floor spilling water. Riley was aware of surprised looks from the staff sitting at nearby work stations.
“It’s only a fucking water cooler,” he shouted at them. “It’s water, not blood.”
He turned and shouted back at Estella, “He loves Pauline, they were childhood sweethearts and even if she kicks him out, he’ll always love her more than he loves you. You’ll always be second best.”
He went back to his office, picked up his briefcase, and walked out of the building. He was upset, but the anger was mixed with relief, he had lanced the boil, it had hurt, but it was done, what would happen next was anybody’s guess. As he walked to the car park, Riley decided he would spend the night on the boat. He needed time alone, time to get his thoughts in order. He wanted to feel the Punter’s gentle rocking beneath his feet, to hear the slap of water on her hull, take melancholy comfort in the sun setting over the Bay. He needed a drink, he wanted peace. He drove the Jaguar out of the complex for the last time.
The Col
onel watched from his office window as Riley drove through the main gate. He picked up his phone and tapped a number, it was answered at the first ring.
He sighed, “Colonel Wilson here, we have a problem, the one we discussed two weeks ago.”
Chapter Eighteen
USA the 2000s
Riley gunned the engine as he joined the main road and headed for the Interstate. Even though he was driving too fast, his pulse rate fell, as he left the Langley complex further and further behind. He would never go back, he’d said too much. The members of the Committee would never trust him again, and he couldn’t work with the Colonel. He called Estella, he wanted her to know where he would be sleeping, her cell phone went straight to voice mail. On second thoughts, he wouldn’t be safe until he’d spoken to the press. He should disappear until he’d published his statement. He threw the cell phone out of the window. Track that, he thought, as he continued on towards the Potomac River and the Punter’s mooring on the other side.
A few miles later, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge soared majestically on concrete stilts a dozen stories above the water. He drove onto it, but as he reached the central span, an explosion under his car flipped it upside-down and flung it over the low parapet.
Strapped in his seat, gripping the steering wheel he began the long screaming fall to oblivion, but the fall became slower, as if he was plunging into treacle. At first, he thought his brain was working faster than events, that any moment his life would flash before his eyes, an upload to the CosmicCloud. Still clutching the wheel in a white knuckled grip, he watched as airbags slowly inflated all around him, partly obscuring his vision and grazing his face. Surely airbags should inflate instantaneously. Time was truly running more and more slowly, and finally it stopped altogether. The car was suspended in space and time. Groggily he looked at the Potomac River twenty meters below him, there was no movement in the water, everything was still. He realized that he was weightless.
“Sorry to have to leave it until the last moment Dr Riley,” a female voice said from behind him. “Please unbuckle your seat belt and make your way back here to the portal.”
Riley sat frozen in place, he could move, but this situation was so far from his normal experience that he had no idea how to respond to it. He wasn’t frightened, he found that he was unexpectedly calm, but he felt unreal, disassociated from the situation. Was he dreaming, or in a hospital anaesthetized and hallucinating? Leaning forward he looked in the driving mirror of his inverted car and saw that a flexible, many colored membrane replaced the whole of its rear section. It was like a thick soap bubble, strange polychromatic patterns shifted over its surface. A woman sat on the other side in what appeared to be another vehicle. She wore a close-fitting suit of pastel colors which changed and sparkled in the dimly lit interior.
“Are you from the future?” he asked. He couldn’t think of any other explanation.
“Yes Martin? Just climb back here as fast as you can.”
He sat rigidly, and tried to think what to do. How could he regain control of the situation? He wanted more time to think.
“Was the explosion an assassination attempt?” he asked.
“Yes Martin. Please unbuckle your seat belt, now.”
He saw the membrane fluctuate and a burst of new colors splashed across it.
“We can’t hold this configuration indefinitely Martin, let’s get moving.” Her voice had become harder.
“Won’t this have repercussions, ripples in the Timestream?” he asked.
She sighed, “No, your involvement here was about to end a few seconds from now. We can extract you with no temporal reverberations. Come on Dr Riley, no more questions, we’re on the clock here.”
“Why are you saving me?” Riley was still uncertain what to do, he was playing for time, the situation was out of his control. He still hoped for a way out, a way back to normality.
“The Commonwealth has a job for you.”
Riley still hadn’t moved. “The Commonwealth, what fucking Commonwealth?”
The woman became exasperated, “If you don’t come right now, I will have to disengage and leave you falling. You will die about three seconds later.”
Realizing that he had no choice, he unbuckled his seat belt, grabbed his briefcase, and pulled himself towards the rear. Mixed with his feelings of confusion was an intense disappointment that the Colonel and his masters would think they’d won.
Fuck them all anyway, he thought, as he slid through the membrane and into the future.
Chapter Nineteen
In transit
Riley looked around, he was inside a spherical space several meters across. The extremities of the sphere were insubstantial, misty and it was dimly lit. He turned to look back through the portal which covered part of the wall behind him. He watched as his now empty car finished its fall and smashed, upside-down, onto the water. Fragments of glass burst out all around it as the roof collapsed. The beams from its headlights slowly dimmed as it slid into the murky depths.
The portal shrank to a point and disappeared, the light level increased and he could see the interior more clearly. There were two seats set facing one another and no sign of any controls. The interior was grey and almost featureless. His skin was tight, it felt sunburned nearly to the point of pain. He wondered if it was something to do with passing through the membrane. Might it be radioactive? He rubbed his forearms trying to take away the burning sensation. His rescuer sat looking at him, hands placed on her thighs. Her suit no longer sparkled, she appeared relaxed, he guessed that she was about thirty and attractive in an understated way. Somehow, she reminded him of a librarian, well groomed, bobbed hair, minimal makeup, slim, almost athletic looking.
“Take a seat Martin,” she smiled and gestured towards the one opposite her. “The decontamination process has caused the strange sensation in your skin; the discomfort will fade shortly. I’m going to turn off the neuro-suppression field now. It has been damping your emotional responses, like a tranquillizer. You might feel panicky at first, as your defensive responses kick back in, but it will pass after a few minutes.”
Suddenly Riley’s heart began to race, he started to tremble and sweat, his legs felt hollow, he was terrified. He collapsed into the seat and the woman reached across with a beaker.
“Drink this, it will help calm you.”
He could hardly hold the beaker, he was shaking so much. Gradually, he gained control of himself as he sipped the drink. Thank God, he hadn’t thrown up, that would have been even more difficult to cope with. The woman sat quietly, allowing him time to calm down.
His emotional control began to return, he looked up. “I think you’d better tell me who the fuck you are and what the fuck just happened,” he said.
“My name is Farina, I am a time traveler.”
“Well who just tried to kill me?”
“Think about it Martin. The Committee received a message about your outburst two weeks ago, through the secure feed. They decided to stage an accident. The charges were aligned to blow your car off the Bridge rather than into bits. They’ve been in place, hidden under the wheel arches, for over a week.”
“But I didn’t see anything about my accident in the press reports from the future.”
“No, the Colonel made sure of that Martin.”
“Bastards, how will they explain what happened?”
“They’ll say you were overwrought, driving erratically, your car clipped the parapet and somersaulted over into the River. Your friends will be shocked and sorry. The car is recovered later, they assume your body has been washed out into the Bay.”
“So, the Government shuts me up, you capture me, Estella is free to break up the Colonel’s marriage. Everybody wins a prize except me,” he was shouting again. He felt the suppression field come on and dampen his emotions.
“We have saved you from certain death Martin, remember that. I can show you your funeral if you like, but you might find it a macabre experience.” Riley was too num
b to speak, he wondered how Estella would feel about his apparent death, he regretted that their last words had been so hostile.
His mind seethed with questions, but one was uppermost.
“What about Cliff and Hank?” he asked. “I can’t protect them anymore.”
“They’ll miss you, but the Colonel treats them well; Estella sees to that, a mother’s loyalty is to her children first and to her partner second.”
“I hope she remembers that he was willing to let one of them drown,” he said bitterly.
“Let’s go slowly Martin, and try not to get overwhelmed. This is a lot for you to cope with. I’m sorry, I should have removed the field gradually, I’ve re-established it at low level.”
“So, you’re a time traveler, what do you do as you travel through time?”
“I am a historian, I specialize in your era, your customs, languages and politics. I discovered your progress in time manipulation by accident, it was a great surprise, but we’ll talk of that later.”
“Okay,” he said, “why don’t you tell me where we’re going and why you need me.” He lay back in the seat with his eyes closed. He felt drained.
“We are travelling up to what I call the present, but you think of as the future.
“But why are you taking me there?”
“I work for the ‘Commonwealth,’ the world government. Their representatives want to speak with you about Temporal Messaging.”
Riley sat up and looked around him. “Why haven’t we already arrived? I’m surprised the transition isn’t instantaneous.”
“It is a matter of manipulating the wormhole we’re going through now.” She sat back looking at him, her head tilted.