“I must go,” she said, firmly. “My friends are expecting me. They will be worried if I’m delayed.” She tried to adopt an imperious attitude, the one she had often used to repel the advances of hopeful men.
The stranger didn’t look sufficiently cowed for Patty’s liking.
“What is happening?” he asked. “You have done something?” A sudden anger flared in his eyes and he gripped his rod more firmly. “Is de magie? ” he demanded, fiercely.
“What?” Patty was getting ready to run.
“Bent u een duivel? Een heks? ”
Patty had no idea what she was being accused of, but she was pretty sure the guy had decided the splash was all her fault. He raised his rod at her, crossing himself and shouting what might have been some kind of curse or exorcism. She turned and fled.
Chapter 5: Arrivals
The walk from his new house in Pentonville to the British Museum in Great Russell Street was barely a mile and a half, but Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was beginning to regret not taking an omnibus. The English spring may not have the bitter chill of a Siberian one, but it made up for it in dampness and greyness.
He was still learning his way around the great metropolis and still finding surprises in every street name. There on his left was Hatton Garden and, as he turned into the blustery wind that blew straight at him along Theobold’s Road, Gray’s Inn Field presented itself, with the red brick of Gray’s Inn beyond, huddled grimly against the cold. He considered taking a detour to explore the city, but the miserable weather argued against it. There would be warmer days for such adventures. Pulling his scarf tight around his neck, he pressed on toward Bloomsbury and the Round Reading Room.
* * * *
Patty kept still. Crouching under a bush, in a forest, far from the craziness of Ommen, she tried not to disturb anything that might blur or twitch or jiggle its way back to how it should be. She had run as far as she could and then had walked until she found shelter among the trees. Hiding and waiting for the yankback was her only plan, and she prayed she could make it without discovery. A good half-hour before it was due to happen, she put on her helmet, fastening the neck seal but opening the visor so as not to waste her air supply. She didn’t want to be caught unawares. She didn’t want to face lobspace unprepared as she had done before. In fact, remembering the fear and confusion of that first trip, she didn’t want to face lobspace at all.
* * * *
“Mr. Jacob Richter?” the librarian asked, peering at Lenin above his spectacles. Lenin gave a small nod of confirmation, despite the man’s execrable pronunciation. Lenin had adopted the name Richter some time ago to throw off the Tsar’s secret police. It seemed like a reasonable precaution to use it again.
The librarian riffled through a tray in which a number of documents were stacked. “Ah, here we are. ” He handed it over. Lenin glanced at it. Ticket number A72453. “It is valid for three months, and must then be renewed if you wish to continue to use the reading room. Now, if I may, there are just one or two rules our new readers need to be aware of.”
The man began listing the library’s regulations in a polite, slightly pompous tone. But Lenin was barely listening. From where he stood, the magnificent interior of the Round Reading Room wrapped itself around him in all its glory, from the highly polished reading tables, to the stuffed shelves curving beneath the splendid, domed roof. He admired it with the eye of a serious scholar, eager to explore this Aladdin’s cave of intellectual riches.
The librarian was just wishing him welcome to the library when there was a commotion from the door behind him. The librarian looked past him, and Lenin turned to see what it was.
* * * *
The door to the intensive care unit opened again and yet another nurse came hurrying through. Jay had given up jumping to his feet each time it happened. Then he’d given up even looking expectantly. He gave this one a cursory glance and his heart leapt to see she was coming straight toward him.
“Mr. Kennedy?”
“Yes!” He stood up and the policeman stood too.
The woman was smiling. “We’ve managed to stabilise your friend. It should just be a matter of time—”
She screamed and clutched at Jay as the floor heaved under them. Jay, completely disoriented, didn’t realise he had fallen until a chair smacked him on the head. He pushed himself up, squinting through the pain, to find the waiting room in chaos. Walls rippled and bulged, perspectives changed alarmingly, lights flickered and went out. People crawled on the floor, or staggered around looking for a way out. The big drinks machine near the exit seemed to sag on one side and then toppled over with a crash and a spray of sparks. The young policeman looked wildly about, clearly scared to death. The man suddenly began to move at a frantic rate, as if he had been selectively fast-forwarded. Then, almost as soon as he started, he stopped, standing on the buckled floor, looking dazed and distressed.
“It’s all right,” Jay called. “It’ll be over soon. It’s the backwash from the jump.” He raised his voice to address the whole room. “Just stay still. Don’t move around. It will all be over soon.”
But it wasn’t. It went on and on. It was unlike any backwash he’d ever seen. Similar, in that there were changes in time and space, weird shifts in causality, but the size of the effects, the damage they were causing, and the time they persisted were all new to Jay. He had never even heard of a backwash like this one. Usually they lasted thirty seconds, a minute at the most. The revellers at a splashparty looked forward to them. The slight shifts in time and distance, interacting with a tempus high, gave people the kind of experience that would normally require them to take something much, much stronger. But this, Jay realised, this could be lethal. A window exploded nearby as its frame buckled, showering glass over a screaming woman in a dressing gown. Jay got to his feet and grabbed the nurse. “Where’s Spock?” he shouted. “Where’s my friend?”
The nurse shouted something at him in Dutch and pulled away from him as if he were attacking her. She ran for the exit, but barely made it halfway before she tripped and fell on the undulating floor. Jay moved to help her but she seemed fine, just scared, so he turned back to the door leading to the ICU and headed that way instead. All he could think about was getting to Spock, making sure he was all right.
The building conspired to stop him. The floors shook. It was impossible to judge distances. For an insane moment, everything around him went into high-speed fast-forward, people blurring into smears, the ground and walls vibrating like sheets in a gale. He had barely time to realise that it was he who had slowed, not the world that had speeded up, before he was back in sync with his surroundings. And then the craziness stopped. The last chair toppled, the last bit of glass tinkled from the windows.
He looked around, hardly daring to believe it was over. The woman in the dressing gown lay on the floor against a wall, crying and covered in blood. The young policeman stood stock-still, bewildered and hyperventilating. Distant cries for help came from other parts of the building.
* * * *
When the yankback took her, Patty was just as surprised as the first time. One moment she was hiding in a forest, watching the time on her helmet display, the next she was in total blackness, falling through time.
In a breathless panic, she sealed her visor against the cold, hard vacuum. She breathed in short, shallow breaths until she was convinced there really was air flowing and she wouldn’t suffocate. Only then did she start looking around for Sniper and the others. She craned her neck side to side, down and up, trying to make her body rotate so she could see behind and above her. Whether she succeeded, she could not tell. The blackness was uniform in all directions. She could see nobody and nothing and, this time, there was no tether to tell her there was any living soul nearby. The possibility that she might be spinning, weightless and out of control, made her feel giddy and sick. The empty blackness began to feel like a solid weight pressing in on her. Instead of being in an infinite, open space, she could just as easily be buried alive
in that impenetrable black stuff.
Breathing became difficult. She felt as if there really was a weight on her chest. It’s panic, she told herself. Just calm down. It’s all right. You’ll be there soon. But it wasn’t panic, she realised, sucking in lungfuls of useless, oxygen-depleted air. She had run out of air. She was going to suffocate. In a moment of light-headedness, she began to giggle. She’d be dead before Sniper got a chance to kill her. The irony was just so funny!
She smashed into the wire mesh of the cage wall and fell with a bone-jarring crash to the floor. Noise and light hit her as hard as the cage had, blinding and deafening her as she broke the seals on her helmet and tore it off. She lay for a moment gasping for air, pummelled by the commotion around her, before she thought to look around.
Hal’s body lay on the cage floor nearby and, beyond him, T-800 struggled to his feet, removing his helmet. She turned to see Sniper standing behind her, glaring down at her. Behind him, the crowd seemed strangely still and subdued. A wide path was visible in it from the outer fringes to a point about halfway in. Across the field, the unmistakable red and blue lights of police vehicles flickered.
“Now here’s my problem, bitch,” Sniper said, kneeling down beside her and putting the barrel of his pistol against her ribs. “I can’t shoot you with all those police around, and you and me up on the silver screen like this.” She glanced up at the screens. The gigantic images showed what could easily have been Sniper compassionately checking that she was okay after her ordeal. “And I can’t trust you to keep your story straight. So I’ll make it easy for you. You weren’t there when Hal had his terrible accident. You didn’t see what happened. We got separated. You say anything other than that, and I will give you the longest, slowest, most horrible death you can possibly imagine.”
He smiled as if pleased to see she was all right. “Got that, bitch?”
Not daring to speak, she nodded mutely.
The music stopped mid-beat, leaving her ears ringing. The police had reached the control booth. The crowd groaned in protest.
“This is the police.” Howls of feedback from the PA system almost drowned out the speaker’s voice. “Nobody leaves here without our permission. We believe there are prohibited drugs being sold in this area. And we have a warrant to stop and search anyone we choose.”
More police had reached the platform and were clambering up toward the cage.
“We also believe there has been an unauthorised time jump in contravention of the European Temporal Displacement Regulation Act of 2045. Please remain where you are and we will process you as quickly as possible. Thank you.”
The message began to repeat itself in Dutch.
Patty could see only half a dozen police cars on the grounds of Eerde Castle. Perhaps there were more at the gates. Even so, there were nowhere near enough police to contain a crowd this big. Realising this, people started to run for the darkness beyond the lights of the party. She saw the crowd streaming away in all directions, flowing away into the night. The police had obviously acted too soon. More police cars were arriving from the direction of the big house, called in from more distant towns, no doubt, but there would never be enough of them. The police gave chase to anyone within reach and several were caught and dragged over to the waiting vans. Out of all those hundreds, only the three young people in the cage were absolutely guaranteed to be arrested.
* * * *
It took Jay several anxious minutes to locate the ICU and his friend. Throughout the hospital, people were being helped from under wreckage and treated for cuts and broken bones. Nurses and doctors had suffered along with the patients.
The young policeman caught up with him just as he entered the room where Spock was being treated. The place was a wreck. Medical equipment was strewn on the floor and a tall steel locker had toppled over and crashed through some monitoring equipment. Jay recognised the doctor standing beside Spock. She had a cut on her forehead and, he noticed, her hands were trembling. She looked up as he and the policeman came toward her.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news about your friend.”
Even before she said it, Jay had known from the look on her face.
“Mr. Lyle passed away without regaining consciousness. He did not suffer, I think. I am sorry.” She looked around the room, helplessly. “He was on life support. He should have been all right but…”
Jay’s legs quivered and he sat down abruptly in a tubular-steel chair. “I should call his family,” he said, vaguely.
“Mr. Lyle,” the doctor had called him. Jay barely recognised his friend’s real name. It was as if in death he had become someone else, had joined a new crowd, had lost all his personality, his quirkiness and excitement, and was now someone more ordinary and mundane. In death, his thoughts echoed. No longer in life but elsewhere, in another place, among strangers. Tears rolled down his cheeks, surprising him. The nurse touched his shoulder tenderly from behind, having followed him and his escort in from the waiting room. Jay ignored her.
The doctor said something to the nurse in Dutch. “I must go and see who I may help,” she told the policeman, in English, for Jay’s benefit.
Jay reached out a hand and laid it on Spock’s, wishing the doctor would remove all the tubes and wires from his friend’s face and hands.
The nurse took the policeman aside and they talked together quickly in quiet voices. Making arrangements perhaps, working out what to do about it, where to send the body, who would do what and when. Jay felt resentment that these people should take it on themselves to look after Spock’s body. Spock was Jay’s friend. Jay should decide what was best for him, should have the responsibility of looking after him.
But the reality of Spock lying there, cold, on a hospital bed, heavy and lifeless, made him quail. What would he do, put the body in his car and drive him home to England? He thought about going through customs at the tunnel with a dead body in his car and then saw how Spock himself would see it. It made him smile. Spock would think it was an enormous joke, a great caper. Jay almost thought it would be worth doing as a final tribute to his crazy friend. He chortled to himself, imagining it, and the nurse and policeman turned to look at him. Not long after that, the policeman told Jay he was taking him to the Ommen police station. They left the hospital in the middle of the night. There was chaos in the streets, traffic accidents, cracked roads, tumbled buildings. It looked as if an earthquake had hit the town. But they reached the station without too much trouble, and the police let him make whatever calls he wanted to. When he called, his parents were angry, appalled, and concerned in equal measures. Spock’s father sounded stunned and said almost nothing. They were all coming to Ommen as fast as they could get there.
He was formally charged with being in possession of banned drugs. They put him in a comfortable cell. It was a smart, new police station and had survived the backwash almost unscathed. Jay didn’t want to think about what tomorrow might be like. He curled up into a tight ball on his cot and cried himself to sleep.
Part II
Winter 2049-2050
Chapter 6: Rumours
The storm rattled against the windows and buffeted the car. It was a black sedan, Paris registration, hunkered down in the quiet side street with its lights out. Jacques Bauchet sat behind the wheel, holding a cup of coffee in his large hands, staring intently at the rain-lashed windscreen. His hawk-like profile was almost invisible in the dark. By the clock on his compatch it was already two in the morning.
A lone street lamp stood in a bubble of whirling orange flecks, throwing little illumination on the doorway Bauchet was studying. But sensors mounted on the car watched the alley through infrared eyes and the inside of the windscreen displayed a clear image of the wet road and the old brick buildings, superimposed perfectly on the murky scene outside and adjusted and filtered to remove the driving rain.
“Maybe we got it wrong,” Colbert said.
“Meaning, maybe I got it wrong, eh?” Bauchet regretted saying it immedia
tely; he wasn’t usually so touchy.
Colbert looked at his boss. “I just meant…”
“They’ll be here. Don’t be so impatient, Sergeant.” A bright light appeared in the main street beyond, grew and stopped just out of sight around the corner. “Speak of the devil,” said Bauchet, softly.
“It’s them,” a voice from Bauchet’s compatch said. There were other watchers across the street.
“You’ve confirmed that?” he asked.
“Sending,” said the compatch, and a moment later a still image of three men emerging from a car appeared in a viewer in the windscreen. The faces were indistinct and grainy, but the captions beside them gave their names and other personal details. The software analysis that had provided the facial recognition would be admissible as evidence in any court in the Union. Bauchet allowed himself to relax just a little.
“Give them a minute to get inside and meet up with the others,” he said. Beside him, Detective Sergeant Colbert drew his stunner and flicked off the safety. Bauchet turned and looked at him. “The sweepers are pretty good, you know.”
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