Then, of course, he went and ruined that sentimental moment of reunion by grunting emotionlessly: ‘Target successfully acquired.’
‘Good to see you too, Bob,’ replied Liam weakly, choking back his own tears and grinning as best he could.
CHAPTER 61
2001, New York
‘It really smells bad back here,’ complained Sal. ‘Phew. Smells like something’s gone off.’
Foster panned his torch around. They’d not been in the back room of the archway since the power had failed them several days ago. His torch flickered across the row of large plastic birthing tubes along the back wall.
‘It’s them,’ he said, ‘the embryos inside have died.’
Sal stepped across the floor towards them. She stared in through the murky plastic at the dark forms inside – the foetus, the baby, the small boy, the teenage boy.
‘They’re all dead?’
Foster nodded. ‘Filtration system stopped running. Their own effluence must have backed up and poisoned the nourishment solution.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘They choked on their own poop,’ said Maddy helpfully as she poured a jerry can of diesel into the generator. ‘Hey, Foster, you sure this is the right kind of fuel I’m pouring into this thing? How do we know it runs on diesel and not, like, gasolene?’
He stepped over towards her. ‘It’s diesel. Although whether this is the right kind we’ll know soon enough.’
‘My grandad used to have a generator in his basement,’ said Maddy, ‘and he was very particular about the kind of fuel you poured into it… two-stroke or whatever. He said you pour the wrong kind of fuel in and it eventually clogs up the carburettor or something. Costs a bunch of money to fix.’
Foster shook his head. ‘Just as long as this generator keeps working long enough to get us out of this fix, then I’ll be happy. If it clogs it up and we need to replace it, then we’ll worry about that later, OK?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘OK.’
Foster finished emptying the last can and screwed the cap back on the generator’s tank. ‘Right,’ he said, licking his lips, ‘right then… Fingers crossed.’
He worked a manual lever on the side of the generator several times, grunting with the effort of pulling it down. With one last look at Maddy, he punched a red button on the front. The generator coughed to life and turned reluctantly over several times before spluttering and dying.
‘Well, that didn’t sound too good,’ uttered Maddy.
‘She’s just clearing her throat, that’s all,’ he said with a less than convincing nod. He pumped the lever several times, his breath catching from the effort, before hitting the button once more. The generator thudded to life again, this time with far more enthusiasm. After a few perilous seconds, it found a slow chugging rhythm, then began to pick up the pace. The slow thudding, at first like a giant heartbeat, became a rapid stabbing, then a clattering purr that filled the back room with its deafening volume.
Foster stepped to the side of the vibrating machine and flipped some circuit breakers on a fuse board. A cobweb-covered light bulb in the ceiling glowed to life, bathing the room with a flickering red light.
‘Yeah!’ yelped Maddy. ‘We did it!’
Foster nodded and grinned, clearly relieved. ‘So now we’ve got power again,’ he barked loudly, struggling to compete with the generator’s noisy chug.
He turned to Sal, still staring at the dead bodies in the tubes. ‘Hey, Sal, cheer up! We’re well on the way to getting the others back!’
She turned round to look at him, eyes red-rimmed and wet. ‘But too late for them, though.’
He shook his head firmly. ‘Although they look human, you must try not to think of them as such. They’re nothing more than meat robots, Sal, nothing more. Come on,’ he said, gesturing towards the sliding metal door leading back into the archway, ‘let’s get the displacement machine charging up.’
He ushered them out, Sal craning her neck one last time to look at the tubes as they stepped out.
‘What will you do with them?’ she asked.
‘I’ll deal with them, don’t you worry about that.’
‘But what will you do with them?’
Foster shook his head. ‘We’ve got far more important matters to be thinking about right now.’
He closed the door on the smell and the noisy rattle of the generator and made a mental note to dispose of the clone bodies when Sal was fast asleep. The last thing she needed to see right now was him carrying their bodies out.
He stepped over towards the machine beside the large perspex cylinder, and flipped a switch. A long row of small red LED lights winked on. The first of them almost immediately flickered and turned from red to green.
‘OK, it’s charging,’ he said.
He joined the girls slumped in chairs around their mess table. ‘We’ve been through a lot. And there’s still a lot more we’re going to have to do. When the machinery is charged up enough, we’ll need to get that message through to Bob. And, of course, we’ll need to decide exactly where and when we’re opening the return window. But for now,’ he said, sighing, ‘right now… I could murder a cup of coffee.’
The girls, both grimy and tired, looked up at him. ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ said Maddy.
Foster settled back in his chair, suddenly feeling as old as the hills. ‘Come on, then, whose turn is it to brew up?’
CHAPTER 62
2001, New York
‘The shorter the message we try to send, the less energy we’ll use,’ said Foster. ‘We need to keep it precise and to the point. That way we can spend more of the energy of the tachyon burst on creating a wider spread of particles.’
Sal pulled a face. ‘I still don’t get it.’
Foster scratched a chin thick with several days of white and grey bristles. The first thing he planned to do once things had returned to normal was to get a nice clean wet shave.
The idea of beams of sub-atomic particles that could be fired backwards through time had been a hard concept for him to get his head round back when he’d first been recruited as a TimeRider. In fact, a lot of the concepts, the technology, the gadgets had been alien to him. His young mind had struggled hard to absorb it all. But he’d managed.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s like this. What we’re doing, in effect, is spraying an area of America in the past, fifty years ago, with a shower of tiny particles – these tachyons. Now, if we knew precisely where Bob was standing at a certain time, then we could aim our transmitter right at that point and fire off a message using very little energy, needing to send only a small number of these tachyon particles. However, we don’t know where Bob is right now. We just have a general direction.’
‘But why don’t we aim the beam to the location and the point in time that we sent them back to? You know… the White House front lawn, say… thirty seconds after they’d arrived there. They won’t have been able to wander too far in, like, half a minute,’ said Maddy.
‘True,’ said Foster, ‘but then they won’t have had time to gather any useful intelligence in just thirty seconds. We’d be right back where we started, none the wiser and with no information to work from.’
He looked across at the machine beside the perspex tube. The winking row of red lights showed the displacement machinery was still a long way off from being charged up enough to use.
‘Look, I’ll be honest. I really don’t know yet whether we’re even going to be able to get one of them back, let alone both of them. The point is – and this is really important – we have to hope they’ve found out enough in the past to be able to tell us exactly when and where this wrong history diverged from our own. Because,’ he said, looking up at bo
th of them with a stern expression, ‘we may only have enough power left to get one shot at sending someone back. One last shot.’
He sipped from his mug.
‘Just one shot to put things right.’
‘Right,’ said Maddy quietly.
‘So, we know they missed the return window, and the back-up window an hour later… and the last back-up twenty-four hours later. Which means they must have run into trouble. But that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.’
Sal made a face. ‘It’s not?’
‘No. From my many years’ experience as an operative, running into trouble is inevitably how you end up learning things.’ Foster smiled. ‘The more trouble they’ve been in, the more they’ve probably learned about the world in 1956.’
‘If they’re still alive, that is,’ added Maddy.
‘Liam is a very resourceful young lad. He’s a quick learner. And the support unit with him, well… they’re very tough things. Takes quite a lot of effort to kill one of those. Between them, I’m sure they will have managed a way to lie low, to gather information and await a message from us.’
‘So then… what message are we going to send them?’ asked Sal.
Foster looked at her. ‘We send them a time-stamp: a location and moment in time for them to make their way to.’
‘Right.’
‘We can assume they have remained in the area of Washington.’
‘You sure?’ cut in Maddy. ‘Can we assume that?’
‘Yes, because it makes sense. Bob will assume we’ll pick them up from roughly the same area. So he’ll have kept as close to the White House as is safe to do.’
‘We’re doing a lot of guessing here,’ said Maddy, a note of scepticism in her voice.
‘Guessing is all we’ve got, I’m afraid.’
Neither girl looked too happy with that.
‘Look, here’s the plan,’ he said. ‘We’re going to turn on the computer system, pull up a street map for Washington and try to find some quiet backstreet not too far from the White House… say within a mile or two. That’ll be where we’ll open the return window. We’ll write down the co-ordinates, turn the computers back off since they’re drawing power from the generator and we’ll have what we want.’
‘OK.’
‘So the other part of the message is the when. That’s the part of this we’ve got to guess right.’
‘How about the day after the twenty-four-hour back-up?’ suggested Sal.
‘Could do… but if they failed that, then something must have prevented them getting there. I’d say we need to give them more time.’
‘Something prevented them?’
Foster shrugged. ‘Many things. Bob or Liam might have been wounded, incapacitated somehow… unable to move. They might have been arrested. The area might have been sealed off or hazardous.’
‘So, how long after that, then?’ asked Sal. ‘Two days? Three days?’
His lips tightened. ‘As long as we possibly can. We don’t know what their situation is, how much planning or recovering they might need to get to this location.’
‘How much time are we talking about?’ asked Maddy. ‘A week?’
‘The maximum mission time possible. Six months,’ he replied.
Maddy pulled off her glasses and absent-mindedly wiped the lenses. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Maximum mission time? You mentioned that once before.’
‘Maximum mission time,’ repeated Foster. ‘Twenty-six weeks. Six months. That’s the support unit’s expiry point.’
‘Expiry point?’ said Maddy. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
‘The support unit, Bob, is programmed to destroy himself if he’s not been returned to the present after a period of six months.’
‘Why?’ asked Sal.
‘To prevent him falling into the wrong hands… to prevent him becoming a dangerous weapon.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘His mind is adaptive AI. It’s software that learns. Imagine if Bob fell into the wrong hands. Imagine if Bob’s software began to learn about the world from someone evil, or mad. Imagine if Bob learned about the world from someone utterly insane like the Roman Emperor Caligula. Or was used as a weapon by Napoleon, or Genghis Khan.’
The girls considered that prospect in silence.
‘Worse still,’ Foster continued, ‘since his organic body doesn’t age, and provided he’s able to eat, he could live indefinitely. A strong man, almost impossible to kill, who never ages. Think about it. Something like that could end up – particularly back in a superstitious time – being worshipped as a… well, as a god.’
‘Sheesh,’ whispered Maddy, ‘I bet ol’ dumb-nuts would love that.’
‘Point is that it’s a particularly bad idea leaving a support unit behind in history. So they’re programmed to self-terminate after six months.’
Sal frowned. ‘So what will Bob do? Blow up?’
‘Nothing quite so dramatic. The computer brain short-circuits and burns itself out. You’re left with nothing but a nugget of metal that’s useful to no one.’
‘And the computer burning itself,’ said Maddy, finishing off her coffee, ‘that, like, that’ll kill Bob?’
‘Not exactly. With no computer in his head, the support unit will be nothing more than a large, able-bodied adult male with the undeveloped mind of a newborn baby.’
‘He’s left a gibbering idiot for the rest of time,’ said Maddy. ‘Nice.’
‘No. He’d most probably die eventually. Being unable to actually think, he’d be unable to care for himself, feed himself. The body would die of starvation after a few weeks, just like any other human body. In fact, unable to figure out he needs a drink, he’d die within just a few days.’
‘Poor Bob,’ said Sal.
Foster leaned forward and rested a hand on her shoulder. ‘Meat robot… OK? That’s all he is. Just a meat robot.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Meat robot,’ she repeated to herself, ‘meat robot.’
‘So,’ said Maddy, putting her glasses back on, ‘that’s the time-stamp we’re gonna send back to them? That they gotta shift their butts to somewhere in the neighbourhood of the White House for a portal that opens six months after they first arrived there?’
‘Maybe a couple or more days before the termination date. Just so we’re not cutting it too fine. But yes,’ he replied. ‘I think that’s our best shot.’
‘Right.’ Maddy nodded towards the computer monitors. ‘I guess I better boot up the computer, see if the thing still works an’ rustle up a map of Washington.’
‘Good girl.’
CHAPTER 63
1957, woods outside Baltimore
‘So, er… who are all these guys, Bob?’ asked Liam as he struggled to keep up with him, striding across the snow-covered field towards the woods. There were men in their wake, dozens of them, waving their guns in the air, discharging them, cheering triumphantly.
‘They keep following me,’ answered Bob flatly.
Liam looked back over his shoulder at them: a grimy ragtag army of soldiers and civilians. Beyond them he could see the crisp white field was dotted with grubby prisoners fleeing the camp in all directions.
‘The captain did it again!’ cheered one of the fighters.
‘Let’s hear it for Captain Bob… hip hip…’
The men chorused ‘hooray!’, several of them firing their guns again in support.
Liam leaned closer, lowering his voice. ‘Captain Bob? You told them you were an army officer? Jay-zus… that was clever.’ He was genuinely impressed with the initiative Bob had shown. ‘I’m proud of you,’ he said, slapping him on his broad back.
‘I have told them nothing,’ Bob replied. �
��They have decided to call me this name.’
‘Hey! You!’
Liam turned round. A dozen yards behind, catching up with them, was a small weaselly-looking man, who looked like the sort of dodgy debt dealer his mum had once warned him about.
‘Hey, kid! Don’t be crowdin’ the captain like that. You want face-time with him, you come talk to me first, all right? He don’t need to be troubled by no pesky little kid wantin’ an autograph.’
Liam looked at the other fighters behind him, their eyes still glazed with the exhilaration of battle, panting plumes of winter breath and gazing at Bob with an intense… fierce…
What? Fondness? Love? No, it wasn’t that… It was much, much more. It was awe.
‘Hey, kid!’ said the weasel in the suit. He jogged over. ‘You wanna join Captain Bob’s Freedom Force? Is that what you want? Then come talk to me back at the camp. The name’s Panelli, Vice-captain Panelli. I’m the second-in-command around here. I’ll sort you out with some food and a gun –’
‘Uh… no, that’s OK. I don’t want to join your Freedom Force. I’m just –’
‘Then if you ain’t joinin’ the force, kid, you better scram. We got us some more raids to plan, a war to fight. An’ Captain Bob needs time to rest up before he leads us against them Krauties again.’
Liam looked up at Bob. ‘This isn’t what we’re here for, is it? To fight Kramer’s army?’ he asked, ignoring Panelli.
‘You are correct,’ replied Bob. ‘Mission priority now is to return home with acquired data.’
‘So, how are we going to do that?’
Bob considered the question for a moment. ‘I have no available plan. Suggestion: we await a signal from the agency giving us further instructions.’
‘We just wait for them to call us?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Hey!’ cut in Panelli, grabbing Liam’s arm. ‘Hey, stop that! What sorta weird talk is that yer saying to the captain?’
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