“When did you notice your boy was gone?”
“It was late, after a bad day. I got home, and I knew I had hours more work, three live videoconferences with my own bosses, and my wife, Parminder — well, she is the light of my existence, Spider,” he deadpanned, “was waiting at the door, suitcase in hand, leaving to catch the midnight flight to India.
Spider raised one eye-brow.
Patel went on. “The trip had been planned weeks ago, Spider.”
“Okay.”
“So I kiss her goodbye and told her I’d say goodnight to Vijay, but Parminder told me not to bother: ‘Your son is gone’, she said, like it’s nothing, like we’ve run out of milk.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I said, ‘what do you mean?’ And she said he is just gone. That he took Kali. That he was gone by the time she got home from shopping. I asked when that was, and she said about four in the afternoon. I pointed out, not unreasonably, that it was now almost ten p.m. Why had she not called me? I asked her if she called the rest of the family — we have a few cousins and such here in Perth that we visit socially — to ask if he might be with them? ‘No’, she said. She figured I would do it, it being my problem.”
“I have to say, sir, and I’m sorry to say it, but Parminder does not strike me as overly concerned about her missing child.”
“That is because Vijay, um, is not her son. As such. Biologically.”
“Oh,” Spider said, blinking, thinking about it. “I see.”
“It is a long story.”
Spider pressed on. “She said that Vijay took Kali? That would be the time machine?”
“Kali, yes. My pride and joy.”
“You said you kept the starter unit in your home office.”
“In a safe, yes.”
Spider nodded. “So how—”
“He knew the code.”
“He knew the code?”
“Once, some time ago, I told him to go and put the starter unit away for me. I gave him the code. It was a trust thing. And he was eight years old at the time. I had spent many hours of my life telling Vijay, over and over, drumming it into his head, that he must never, never, ever, touch Kali when I was not around. That he was not even to trespass in the garage itself without my permission, without my actually being there to open the time-locks for him. I went over this many times. No one needed to tell me that Kali was dangerous, Spider. Parminder — she had never understood. She told me Vijay would get past all my security one day, she had seen how clever he is, and that he was getting more and more clever as he got older. She told me, ‘If the boy does take off in your time machine, it will be entirely your problem. It is not my problem. He is not my flesh. This will be your mess, and you will be responsible for it.’”
“Parminder plays for sheep stations,” Spider said, mostly to himself, shocked at how Mrs. Patel could be so cold.
“She is difficult.”
“Difficult. Right. Go on.”
“I had to do something. The boy could be anytime, as you say, and he had a six-hour lead on me. So I got back in the car, and headed out to the dealership.” The Bharat Time Machine Company of Mumbai sold highly desirable new time machines and related gear from a huge showroom in the Wangara commercial estate, alongside showrooms for cars and boats. “I finally got out there after eleven that night. Bad traffic. I spend two days a week at the dealership, supervising things, I’m sure you can imagine, so I have a key. I get in, have a quiet word with the night security staff, and head to the workshop, where we have plenty of time machines in for warranty maintenance checks. I ‘borrowed’ one, setting the coordinates for the driveway in front of my garage.”
“So you could blip back to catch Vijay before he—”
“Exactly so, Spider. This is also probably why Parminder was less than concerned about the boy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, there I am, in the cabin of the machine, running pre-flight checks. Everything checks out. Funny cat smell I could do without, but otherwise, all green lights. I punch in a destination time that should catch Vijay in plenty of time, and I go — and arrive. No problem. Only it turns out to be a big problem. A very big problem indeed. Let me try to describe the situation, as I found it: my time machine, Kali, is there in the garage. Vijay — and a young girl, a friend from school, are there, too—”
“There’s a girl as well?”
“In good time, Spider. They are both there. As of when I come through the side-door, the children are standing there, their backs to the wall of the garage, arms up, like this.” He gestured. Spider had already sussed it. “Their hands are up because there is a team of men, wearing black, their faces hidden behind, what is the word? Balaclavas?” Spider nodded. “Yes. And they have guns. Assault rifles, pistols. Vijay is standing there with the keys to Kali. The general idea is for Vijay to hand these gentlemen the keys, so that they might take the machine.”
“Oh. Shit,” Spider said, starting to see what was going on.
“So I beat a hasty retreat, raced for the borrowed time machine, setting up a quick jump on my watchtop, so I could whack the go button and arrive one hour earlier — before Vijay arrived home from school and while Parminder was still out shopping. I check the garage: Kali was secure. So, I set up new security protocols for the garage, and for Kali herself — and I went to my firearms locker—”
“Shit,” Spider said, shaking his head. Guns are not good. Not good at all.
“I had to take precautions, Spider. Anyway, I got the shotgun, and all the spare ammunition I could carry; pockets bulging, cartridges down my shirt and in a courier bag over my shoulder…”
“What sort of shotty you got?” This was professional interest, Spider’s police-head talking, but also wondering just how much damage this guy could have dished out.
“Remington 870, twelve gauge. Double-ought buckshot. Fourteen-inch barrel,” Patel said.
Spider whistled, hearing that. “Yikes.” He thought Patel was acting altogether too much like an excited kid, talking about the best Christmas present he ever got.
“When I was a kid, I was in the Boy Scouts, you know,” he added.
“I believe you.” Spider had been in the Scouts, too, but didn’t remember it as a fun experience.
Patel went on. “At last, I’m ready.”
“You don’t look like the shotgun type, if you’ll pardon my saying so, sir.”
“I got it during Kali’s construction. I realized very early on that she would be a highly desirable machine, and that one day, no matter how careful I was, word could get out, and that word would spread like a wildfire. Yes, shotgun.”
“Sorry to interrupt, but I need to know. Why do it in the first place? Why—” It was a question that fascinated Spider, and always had done, going back to his time in WAPOL. What makes a man go to the dark side? How does corruption start? Is there such a thing as only very slight corruption, or is it more like pregnancy: you either are or you’re not.
“Go illegal?”
“Yeah. I’m curious.”
“Ah. Well.” He fiddled with his watch-band as he spoke. “I did not set out to do so. It happened, as one might imagine, gradually, over a long time. I wanted the best components. The best. I was prepared to source parts from anywhere in the world. I found myself facing situations where I would set out, having consulted catalogues and online reviews, to purchase top-spec component X, for argument’s sake. Very high-end, bleeding edge technology, and just barely legal, DOTAS-compliant. But sometimes the vendors would say to me, ‘Good sir, you are prepared to pay a great deal of money for this part. How would you feel about paying, perhaps, two percent more for the military version of that part?’ The amounts of extra cost were tiny, Spider. Tiny! In some cases we were only talking about a few dollars here, and a few dollars there. For a long
time I refused, insisted on paying for legal parts, a good boy in all respects. But these dealers, over time, they kept calling me, telling me that for a few lousy dollars I was denying myself ‘the good stuff’. Denying myself ‘the best’. ‘Do you want to be the cool guy, or just a wannabe?’ I told them I was not interested, not at any price, and that I would take my business elsewhere if they persisted. They would go away, I would go on my way, building my machine with legal parts — and then one fine day I was in the garage — this was a Saturday afternoon; I was listening to cricket: India was pasting the Australians — I found myself installing a Fenniak 3000GTi carbon separation buffer—”
Spider blinked. He’d never seen anything more impressive than the Fenniak 2000, long thought to be the gold-standard.
“There, you see! Yes, very nice. But that last guy had shown me a F4000XXXp.”
“Holy crap!”
“Only five percent more.”
“He must have been offering a stolen military unit,” Spider said, astonished to hear first-hand about something he’d previously only heard rumors about.
“Oh, yes. But it was enough. Parminder had been giving me grief about how I was neglecting the garden, the grass was dying, her precious bloody roses were parched, and if I lifted my nose out of the stupid time machine I would see that the house was falling apart. Truly, we were looking at either moving or renovating, a prospect I did not relish, believe me, because Parminder would not hear of hiring qualified tradesmen. ‘It is nothing you cannot manage yourself, surely,’ she would say, having watched too many renovation shows, with their easy, smiling reassurances that ‘you and a mate and a weekend, you’ll knock it up in no time at all.’ You have seen these programs?”
“Yes, indeedy,” Spider said. “My ex-wife loved the idea of me ripping out the old kitchen and installing a lovely new one for her, but I always turned out to be busy that weekend, pulling lots of overtime at the shop, don’t you know.”
Patel nodded, and pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Yes, well, then. You see how it works. I cannot tell you, Spider, how much I hate gardening. I am not at all an outdoorsy sort of man.”
“Me, neither, really.”
“Working on the time machine, it was like I was in another — well, you get the idea.”
“You spent the extra money, and you got one illegal part, and then another, and then another still…”
“I swore, I told myself, that I would just get one more piece, something no DOTAS inspector would ever find.”
“It’s like eating potato chips, eh?”
Patel hesitated, then smiled. “Yes, yes, precisely. Next thing I knew…”
“Did it concern you, at all, that those shipments of illegal time machine parts were likely monitored by customs services around the world? By Interpol, even? That DOTAS very likely was getting reports from Australian Customs about what you were doing, and were just waiting until they could bust not just you but all your dodgy suppliers as well?”
“It crossed my mind, yes…”
“But you … just kept on doing it.”
“Spider, I was building the best time machine ever!”
“Yeah. And look where it’s left you. No time machine. No son. Even worse: no son’s friend!”
“I know. I know. I do. That’s … that’s why we’re here. You and I. We are going to fix this. I’ve figured it all out, Spider. I’ve isolated the correct nodal-point. I have a transient fix on Kali’s TPIRB. I—”
Spider was so busy shaking his head, trying to keep his anger under control, lost in his astonishment at just how stupid Patel had been that he almost failed to hear this crucial detail. “You, sorry, you what? Did you say you had a TPIRB bearing?” The TPIRB was a government-mandated emergency rescue beacon. The original EPIRBs were waterproof, floating GPS receiver/transmitters used by survivors of boat-sinkings to help direct rescuers to the survivors. When the technology was adapted for use by time travelers, it required a means to communicate across time, rather than space, but the principle was the same, transmitting the stricken unit’s Temporal Positioning System coordinates back to the present.
“Kali has a TPIRB, yes, of course. I’m not completely stupid, Spider.” He sounded a little snippy, saying that.
“Okay, good. And?”
“They are out of range.”
Spider closed his eyes and sighed, his moment of hope shattered. A fully-charged TPIRB beacon had an effective transmission range of ten thousand years, which, for typical time travelers, was usually more than enough capacity. “You said you had a bearing, though.”
“The last known bearing, before the signal faded, was futureward.”
Spider knew it, he bloody knew it. The future. God, but he hated the future. Not that there was anything particularly cosy and reassuring about the actual past (far more confusing and dangerous than any history documentary would have you believe), but the future, by its very unknowability, its vulnerability to constant change from the ever-changing past, was terrifying. It was the darkest of dark woods, full of peril, particularly the sort of peril that would feed on children.
“Right. So we know they’re more than ten thousand years out that-a-way,” he said, gesturing forwards, ahead of where he stood. Now for the hard part.”
“Finding them?”
“No, before that.”
“Before that?”
“How did they end up inside your incredibly well-secured time machine?”
“I was trying to tell you…”
“You said you had your fancy shotty.”
“Yes. So I pulled up a picnic chair, and sat there, me and my Remington, watching the time pass. But then I thought: wait a minute. If the machine wasn’t here, it couldn’t be stolen!”
“Good thinking.”
“So, I jumped into the cockpit. But I still needed the starter unit, which was in the house. In the safe. But the starter unit wasn’t in the safe. So, back to the borrowed time machine where I traveled back to early that morning. Snuck through the house — no one was up yet — opened the safe in my office, retrieved the starter unit—”
“You were crazy letting Vijay know the code, you know that.”
“—And dashed back to the time machine outside. Blipped back to where I was before, and noticed a white van out on the street that had not been there previously.”
“A van, huh? What sort? Logo on the side?”
“Appeared to be a van belonging to some home maintenance service, you know the sort. It was parked out front of the house next door, nobody in it that I could see. It looked perfectly harmless, but I couldn’t remember it being there before I went back to that morning. Was I imagining things? I decide not to chance it, and head for the garage—”
“Kali still there?”
“Kali still there. I climb up into the cockpit, plugged in the starter unit, got green lights, and set up a quick jump. While I tried to decide which way to jump, the windows on either side shattered — rifle butts — and next thing I’m at gunpoint, no time to go for my own shotgun.”
“They anticipated your move.”
“Clearly.”
“Damn.”
“They pulled me out of the machine, shotgun cartridges spilling everywhere, pushed me to the ground and stood over me, guns pointed at my head. The man with the balaclava over his face asked if Kali was ready to go. I said ‘no, no, it’s not. You’ll need the starter unit’. But one of the other men said ‘it’s already in the machine, showing green’. At that point I was sunk. Game over. The balaclava man said, ‘Thanks, mate, sorry about this—’ but just as he was about to hit me, another time machine appeared in the driveway.”
“Another machine,” Spider said, astonished. “And let me guess. Vijay and Phoebe?”
“Indeed so, Spider.”
“Good grief.”
“Vijay leapt out of this new machine, and yelled out to the thieves, waving the starter unit.”
“Vijay’s got the starter unit now?” Spider was trying to think his way around this whole thing. He figured that Phoebe’s parents must have had a time machine, and the kids used it, in ghost mode, to blip back to the garage and snatched the starter unit while the thieves were concentrating on Mr. Patel. If that’s what had happened, he thought, it was an incredibly ballsy and stupidly dangerous thing to try.
Mr. Patel went on. “So Vijay’s standing in the pilot’s door of this new time machine—”
“So there are now three time machines,” Spider said, trying to keep up.
“That’s right. And Vijay’s waving the starter unit, calling out to the thieves to leave me alone. I’m on my knees, but look up when I hear Vijay. The thieves are startled and two of them head for Vijay and Phoebe, but—”
“They vanish.”
“Quite so, Spider. Only they pop up inside Kali’s cockpit, plug in the starter, and they’re gone before the thieves know what the hell is going on.”
“I know the feeling.”
“The leader of the gang, the one who was about to hit me, wants me to tell him where the kids have gone, but I don’t know. I really don’t know. There’s the emergency exit button on Kali’s dashboard that blips the machine off on a random futureward jump, no setup required. I told them Vijay might have done that, but otherwise I didn’t know, and couldn’t say. I was just damned proud of my boy. And ashamed, Spider. My boy and his friend were exposed to all this, because of me. Proud and so ashamed, I cannot even tell you.”
Spider nodded. “I’m guessing that’s when they hit you.”
“Oh yes. The leader bashed me quite thoroughly in the side of the head with the butt of his rifle.”
“Good grief,” Spider said.
“When I came ‘round Kali was gone, and so was the time machine the children had borrowed.”
Spider nodded. “What time of day was this again?”
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