by Sharon Sant
A guard came to fetch him. He left without protest. He did not look at his friends. The last thing he needed now was emotional contact; one sorrowful look would have him buckle.
His fears were realised. He found himself before the rippling slit in reality, the surface dancing like a heat haze. Stein gave him a terse instruction as he shoved him unceremoniously forwards. ‘After an hour we will assume you lost. If at all possible you must come straight back.’
‘What if I don’t feel like it?’
Stein glanced back at the section of the camp where he knew Elijah’s friends waited. ‘Depends how much you care about that little girl we found you with – doesn’t it?’
Elijah heard his pulse roaring in his ears, his chest barely strong enough to contain his frenzied heart. Perhaps he would be crushed instantly to nothing like the theoretical astronaut being thrown into a black hole. At least it would be quick. Dizzy from shallow breaths he stepped forward, and was swallowed into the void.
Thirty-Six: Second Chances and Accidents
Elijah blinked in the dazzling sunlight and took a deep breath. The sweet-pepper scent of meadow grass told him immediately where he was. Winded, he had skidded to a halt on his back as the portal spat him out. Above him stretched skies of cornflower blue, dotted with threadbare white clouds sailing over like cotton galleons on the summer breeze.
He lay where he landed and roared with joy at the sky. Then, wheeling round, he recognised Grace’s equipment. After the spontaneous celebration of his survival had calmed down, the second thought that occurred to him, as he picked himself up and rubbed his bruised lower back, was that he ought to tell Grace not to send any breakables into her transportation system until she sorted out the re-entry. Excitement, mingled with trepidation now prickled all over his body. His first ordeal was over.
Now that the enveloping fear had left him, he felt almost foolish that it had been so real. A galvanising sense of purpose took over. One hour. He had to find Grace, and fast. He sprinted across the field to the scar where the oak trees grew, scrambled over the top and down the steep slope, half rolling and half skidding. He had no idea what he would do when he found her, but he needed help; alone he was worse than useless.
At the perimeter of the compound, Elijah made a noisy show of scaling a fence, which he could have quite easily negotiated with more stealth, in a deliberate attempt to gain attention. Two soldiers challenged him immediately. One of them recognised him. ‘It’s you! Where did you get to, then?’
‘Can you take me to Dr McKee?’ Elijah gasped. His head ached and he felt he could vomit from his exertions, but he swallowed it back, he needed to stay focused.
The soldier that had recognised Elijah turned to his colleague. ‘I think she’s left, hasn’t she?’
Elijah’s mouth dropped open stupidly. ‘What…? Can you get her?’
‘The project has been packed up, funding suspended. They’re all moving out today.’
Elijah gawped from one to another. Of all the possibilities he had considered, this wasn’t one of them.
‘I suppose we will have to find out what to do with you…’ The soldier said, looking at Elijah thoughtfully and not unkindly. ‘We’ll have a walk to the offices and see who is still here. Come on.’
Elijah followed impatiently, frustrated at their lack of urgency. Every second was precious, yet the two men dawdled. Their military efficiency had seemingly evaporated along with the funding for Grace’s project. They knocked on four different doors, pausing for a quick chat with the occupant of every room, whilst Elijah stamped and cracked his knuckles, huffing fretfully. At the point where Elijah felt ready to scream with frustration, to his unutterable relief, they found Grace. She was apparently still engrossed in work, despite the fact that other departments were winding up. When one of the soldiers knocked and entered, she didn’t even look up.
‘Yes?’ she called, her soft voice, distant and distracted, and eyes still glued to the screen of her computer. Open notebooks and graphs littered the desk, an impressive looking calculator sat at her fingertips.
‘Sorry, Dr McKee. We seem to have our little problem back again.’
Grace looked up from her work with a vexed frown which slid off her face, giving way to astonishment as Elijah was ushered into the room.
‘What the… how did…’
‘They made me come back,’ Elijah began quickly, but she held up her hand to stop him.
She spoke to the soldier who was still waiting at the door of her tiny cabin. ‘I can get Elijah home, there’s no need for you to wait.’ He nodded and left them. Grace turned back to Elijah, her tired features suddenly alive. ‘Sit down,’ she invited. ‘What happened? Who sent you back?’
‘Stein… he’s working for Braithwaite who practically owns everything…’ Elijah took a seat across the desk from her, aware that he was not making any sense but unable to prevent himself from babbling. ‘I have to get back and you have to come with me this time. They’ve got a device… it’s just like yours. You need to speak to them; you know what you’re talking about. They might listen to you.’ An idea suddenly occurred to him and he voiced it without consideration. ‘We could bring my friends back with us. We could live here… you said before you could get homes for us…’
‘Things have changed since then. When I said that, I didn’t have all the facts. It’s not possible, Elijah. And I can’t come with you.’
‘You have to!’ Elijah rose in frustration. Why couldn’t anyone see the predicament they were in? Why did no-one want to help?
‘I can’t!’ Grace leaned across the desk and looked him squarely in the eye, her voice urgent. ‘Don’t you see? Everything we do here and now affects your world. The less I tamper the better. Maybe we’ve already done too much.’ She paused. ‘How much like our device is theirs?’
Elijah ran his hands through his hair with a bewildered expression. ‘I don’t know. It does the same thing. It looks like yours.’
More to herself than Elijah, Grace murmured, ‘Seems like a huge coincidence to have struck upon the same idea and design. Unless –’
‘What are we going to do?’ Elijah interrupted.
Grace seemed to remember he was there. She now addressed him slowly and deliberately. ‘There are all sorts of reasons why coming with you is a bad idea. I have realised, since meeting you the first time, that there is so much about all this that we don’t understand, in terms of physics and the broader consequences. Have you ever heard of the chaos theory?’
Elijah nodded, he had a vague recollection of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing all sorts of trouble, but it seemed an abstract notion. Why was she telling him about this nonsense when he needed to get back to the others?
Grace continued: ‘The most innocuous action here can have far reaching consequences for you and your world. What we’ve already done may have affected your time. Perhaps the things that are happening there are already as a direct consequence of what passed between us the last time our paths crossed. And the more times the future collides with the past, or one dimension with another, the more damage it will do. Do you understand?’
Elijah nodded impatiently. Then an argument occurred to him and he seized on it. ‘If Stein comes through with his people – and he will come through, no matter what I give him or say to him – won’t that make things even worse than if just you and I do it? They want money. Everyone wants money. And they see this as a way to get it. But you can talk to him, put him and Braithwaite right. They’ll listen to you.’ He looked at her hopefully.
Grace seemed to consider. ‘It’s not just that, though… there’s something else.’ She looked as if she was wondering how much she could tell him. ‘The technology holding the channel open isn’t working. The rupture is unstable, stretched to breaking point. Just then, when you came in, I was working on the readings. They had picked up something which must have been your arrival – it went berserk. Every time it’s used the cracks get worse. Do you realise
you got through without us opening the channel at this end? Do you know what that means?’
‘No. But maybe Stein hasn’t realised. You could tell him.’
Grace waved an impatient hand. ‘Don’t you understand? We didn’t have it open at this end. We closed it. You walked through a gap in reality that is now just there! It’s not supposed to be there. I can’t come back with you.’
‘No,’ Elijah interrupted, ‘that’s what I’m trying to tell you, Stein has opened the channel. Even if you don’t open it here, there’s no way to stop them coming through. It can be closed if you convince them, I’m sure. You have to come back and talk to them.’
Grace seemed to look through him. ‘The portal is already out of hand,’ she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘the balance is so delicate. It’s a very theoretical area of physics and I don’t really know what will happen if it collapses…. it could be catastrophic… not just for us.’
A chilling snapshot of Sky’s vision flashed unbidden into his mind, images of creation disappearing into a hellish abyss. What if Grace was right, what if it was already out of control? ‘Exactly,’ he pressed. Grace only seemed to be strengthening his conviction that she needed to come back with him. ‘You have to come back and tell Stein this.’
‘Any scientist worth his salt will be able to work it out,’ Grace said firmly.
‘But he doesn’t care!’ Elijah shouted.
‘Raising your voice is not going to help.’ Grace folded her arms.
Elijah pouted, staring at her pointedly, but did not reply. There was nothing else to say. Deep down he knew she was right. Stein or Braithwaite wouldn’t listen to her any more than they would listen to a fourteen-year-old boy. But now he realised he had clung on to his only hope stubbornly because there was nothing else to cling on to.
Grace observed him with increasing pity. ‘Maybe you could stay. I could help you get settled here. How unstable that is right now, I don’t think you should go back.’
Elijah shook his head. ‘I can’t leave the others. You said you couldn’t help us all.’
She paused with a distant look in her eyes. ‘I wish I could come with you. You have no idea how sorry I am that I can’t. To see the future…’
‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’
She snapped back to her immediate surroundings. ‘It’s not safe, Elijah, and I cannot let you go.’
‘I have to.’
Grace leaned over the desk towards him. ‘I could have you arrested.’
‘Please, Grace. I don’t know what they’ll do with my friends if I don’t.’
Elijah and Grace walked back to the portal together in silence. The metallic markers indicating the spot where it stood had been dismantled. The field was quiet, other than the distant rushing sounds of traffic on a far away road and the low, lazy humming of insects on the breeze. Elijah began to panic at the sight of the empty field, but the portal wasn’t difficult to find. Straining their eyes, Grace spotted it first, a section of disturbed, shimmering air that seemed to ripple in the sunlight. Only, now it seemed more agitated than it had been before, and the boundaries not so clearly defined. It bore a halo of translucent cracks, as if it had begun to bleed into the atmosphere surrounding it, drawing it in and absorbing energy, growing bigger.
‘Oh God,’ Grace whispered. ‘That’s very worrying… I’m not sure you can go back… one more trip may be enough to rip it open.’
‘I have to! If I don’t, Stein will send others. At least I can try to stop him.’
Grace seemed to be weighing up the risks. ‘You need to get them to stop whatever it is they’re doing there. However you do it, you have to.’ She fiddled with her hair anxiously, talking more to herself than Elijah. ‘I won’t be able to keep this under wraps for much longer. We’re going to have to do something about it… I’m going to need help.’
Elijah looked at her steadily. ‘You do whatever you need to here. I’ll do my bit… somehow.’ He spoke with a conviction that sounded far greater than it felt. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. No clue, no plan, not a hope.
Elijah couldn’t shake the fear that the portal had become so unstable that, this time, it must surely collapse with him inside, or else drop him somewhere completely unknown. So, when he saw two CMO men lunge towards him as he landed with a thud, it was with a feeling of perverse relief.
Stein was nowhere to be seen and his uncommunicative captors would not listen to him try to explain that he needed to see Stein with important information. As he was frogmarched across the encampment, he saw the others sitting by the wide base of a gnarled ancient tree with their hands tied behind their backs watching him being led away. He tried to smile so that they would know he was alright, but his face was stiff and it looked more like a painful grimace. Why were they tied up? They hadn’t been tied up before. They had been guarded carefully, but allowed the liberty to move around as they pleased. What had changed?
Elijah expected to be taken to see Dr Stein. Instead, he was driven to a soulless hotel room a short distance away from the camp. Waiting for him was the intimidating figure of Maxwell Braithwaite. Elijah was pushed into the room and his chaperone left them.
Tessa was busy taking notes on a chair as Braithwaite prowled up and down with an air of superiority. She noted Elijah’s arrival by looking up, but her fixed expression betrayed no inkling of sympathy or recognition. The only hint of emotion Elijah thought he saw was the merest flicker of relief. He stood waiting for Braithwaite to address him, every sense heightened, his nerves taut; wondering what was going to happen next. He would have to act now; there was no time to dither.
‘Mr Braithwaite,’ he blurted, ‘the portal, it’s not safe… it’s breaking down…’
‘What do you know?’ Braithwaite spoke with sarcasm.
‘I know where it goes… at least sometimes. But it’s breaking down –’
‘Yet you returned unscathed.’ Braithwaite looked at him greedily. ‘Did you visit Dr Mckee?’
‘Yes, but how –’
‘That is where we set the coordinates for. How was she?’ Elijah’s mouth fell open. ‘I should very much like to meet her. Her blueprints and theories are fascinating. I think she has much to offer the Braithwaite Corporation, despite being a hundred or so years behind the times, as it were.’
‘How did you…?’ Elijah thought quickly. The only conclusion he could draw was that, somehow, Braithwaite had got hold of Grace’s research. Which meant that he had to destroy it, somehow, either in her time or theirs. The idea was ludicrous, but there it was.
Braithwaite interrupted his thoughts. ‘In the most beautiful symmetry, she mentioned you in her notes, you and your little girlfriend. How does it feel to be noted down for posterity?’ Braithwaite fixed him with a calm gaze. ‘And I found you, amongst all those children, you were the one who came to me, and so, I already knew I had succeeded. I do not believe in fate, but even I have to admit the neatness of her design in this instance.’
Elijah shook his head to clear it. ‘But the portal can’t take the strain… I saw it myself –’
‘Young man, how can you possibly understand something so complex? I have the research and I have read it thoroughly. You are mistaken.’
‘But –’
‘Tessa. Leave us.’ Tessa turned her back on Braithwaite to leave.
Elijah tried to read her face, to catch her eye, but she remained impassive, careful not to look at him as she left the room.
When she had closed the door, Braithwaite continued. ‘Any instability can be controlled and we will be operating the device, if only to take what is rightfully ours. It is their waste, our ancestors, that has caused the intolerable conditions that we find ourselves in today. And when we do succeed, Grace McKee will help us willingly even more than she has unknowingly. What scientist out there could resist such an invitation? The possibilities for this invention are enormous, far beyond your tiny comprehension.’ He looked at Elijah with an obsessive
and cruel ruthlessness.
‘But… if we go back and disrupt... Dr McKee said… the chaos theory…’ In the face of Braithwaite’s fierce gaze, he seemed to have lost the faculty of coherent speech. The argument he had constructed so carefully in his head had crumbled into an idiotic string of half-formed sentences.
Braithwaite filled the ensuing silence with a hollow laugh. ‘Not that you’ll have any need to worry about anything after today. Your name has been erased from all records, including Dr McKee’s journal.’
Elijah stood on the spot, now paralysed by a fearful realisation. He understood everything now. They were orphans, feral children - expendable, plentiful, children with no one to miss them. They all knew too much. How stupid he had been not to have worked it out before. Let the kids take all the risks then get rid of them.
Maybe this was the reason why the world was all wrong. In some alternative playing of this sequence of events, Braithwaite had won; he had plundered the past and set into motion a whole chaotic chain of events to plunge the future into misery. Elijah saw it plainly, to change anything in the here and now, the past would have to be saved. But was he merely a constant repeat of himself, playing the scene over and over again throughout time? And perhaps this was the way it would play out every time, because Braithwaite was too powerful. The abstraction dizzied him and trying to make sense of it tied his numb brain up in knots.
These bewildering thoughts ran through his mind in seconds, like a sudden, scattered explosion of knowledge. Then, a more pressing idea flashed into his mind as he focused on Braithwaite. He’s going to kill me. Braithwaite swiftly moved towards the door and locked it, Elijah instinctively began to back away as he advanced, but there was nowhere to run.
‘I am sorry about this. It’s so irksome that I have to do it myself, but, you see, the fewer people who know the better.’ Braithwaite’s face was emotionless; he could have been studying a financial report. ‘Please don’t struggle; it will only make it worse. This way is nice and quiet, and I promise I’ll make it as quick and painless as possible.’