by Tim Richards
‘If … If my husband sees us together, he’ll …’
James considered the nervous woman beautiful, but he couldn’t imagine that she and he were together in a way that could provoke even the most jealous spouse. When pressed further, the woman became hysterical.
‘He’ll … He’ll swallow his tongue, and he’ll fall to the ground convulsing, and he’ll make growling noises, terrible growls, and he’ll become magnetic … Cars and metal things will slide across the road and clunk against his skin … And then, when he’s magnetic, the sky will open above him, and he’ll see angel choirs, and … And the sky will open above him. With angels clunking against his skin, convulsing magnetic angels.’
Taking the woman by the hand, James rubbed her palm with his thumb, before asking, ‘So?’
Grasping his meaning, she protested. ‘But … convulsions, magnetic convulsions and sliding cars … Angels, growling angels, and my husband magnetic …’
Looking deep into the woman’s eyes, James asked if she’d want any of that to obstruct the course of love.
Her fear now passing, the woman said she wouldn’t want that. Nothing should obstruct the course of love. Clasping James’s hand, she led him up the street in the direction of the railway station.
As this dreamy couple set out on their shared adventure, neither saw that their departure had been witnessed by a man whose legs turned to jelly as his long pursuit faltered. Nearly breathless, his voice strained to call, ‘M-Marny! … No! Please don’t! … M-Marny!’
With this plea, the man fell to the bitumen and began to quiver in a way that would have terrified onlookers, had there been any. His unheeded calls soon gave way to fitful growling, only for these snarls to be swamped by a column of sound directed at the prostrate man’s hyper-kinetic body, this sound an ineffable marriage of celestial voices.
Then, almost imperceptibly, a blue Honda Civic parked at the curb began to creep sideways across the cambered road, slowly gathering pace until it struck the man’s raised arm with a shuddering clunk.
QUEUE JUMPING
Big Skies (Bob Higgs)
No matter how often calls came in – and through March there’d be ten a night – someone had to be sent out to investigate the sighting and collect particulars. All the high-ranked Bendigo detectives refused to deal with alien business. No one got promoted by locking up Blobs, or pissing them back off to Planet Wank. That’s what Connies were for.
If something really interesting came up, you were better off bringing in a specialist from the city. Jack Carr would get on the blower to Bob Higgs, a big bloke who had a reputation for getting to the crux of things.
Higgs lived by the motto that the most obvious explanation is never the correct one. Aliens are nifty at covering their tracks. The trick was to find the obvious answer and go lateral as buggery. After seeing Higgs in action, the police in Clonard and Koorook sharpened up their left-brain thinking about alien motives, but they still deferred to an expert.
Once the boy from the future made his presence felt at Mintook Secondary, it was only a matter of time before the administration contacted Bendigo, and Jack Carr had Big Bob choofing up the Calder Highway in his green Statesman to see what the fuss was about.
Rooting Out the Beginning of the End (Raymond)
When Mrs Peng asked Raymond where his parents lived, she was told her question couldn’t be answered. He’d been sleeping rough at the cemetery, and would be comfortable enough there till his job was done. While he appreciated the difficult situation the principal was in – no school wanted kids that didn’t have a home address or legal guardians – he asked her to make a special exception. The sooner she let Ray get on with whatever he had to do, the sooner he’d be out of her hair.
Life at a small country high school can get very samey, so new kids become overnight celebrities. Not only did Ray have a sophistication of manner that other kids from the city didn’t have, he had no fear of sleeping in the cemetery. If Ray had claimed to be a vampire, he couldn’t have raised more of a stir than he had by claiming to be a visitor from the future.
Departmental guidelines weren’t clear. When Mrs Peng was vice-principal at Kerang several years earlier, there’d been a minor outbreak of this kind. Two girls and a boy, third-formers, claimed to be from the future. Each was running a separate errand intended to redress a genetic fuck-up. They’d given home addresses, telephone numbers, all the usual details, but their nearest and dearest were fictions. In that instance, the school council chose to be tolerant and let the matter run its course. Though the trio vanished after a few months, they’d caused a shitload of disruption, and Peng – Killer Penguin to her students – wasn’t keen to repeat that with Ray.
Ray could stay till someone came from Melbourne to sort it out, but he couldn’t assume that he’d be going the distance at Mintook. In the meantime, he’d board with Kim and Narelle Tyler, a young couple from Adelaide who taught upper-school maths and science.
The boy from the future gazed at Narelle’s spare toothbrush as if he’d never seen one. Even the idea that teeth decayed frightened him. Narelle was also in the habit of flouncing through the house in a blouse and panties, and Kim saw Ray’s eyes testing their sockets. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ the boy apologised, ‘where I come from, women are more demure.’
Kim was shocked that a fourteen-year-old could use a word like demure in ordinary conversation. It added weight to the boy’s claims. He was not like them.
As Ray tackled his quiche and mixed vegetables, Kim asked whether he could state the precise nature of his mission. If the plan involved extracting brains during the night, they’d like to know about it.
Although Ray wished to be polite, there wasn’t a lot he could say. Agents were seldom given assignments. They were chosen as types. Ray’s behavioural inclinations would make the necessary intervention inevitable. According to Ray’s understanding, interventions tended to be undramatic and imperceptible. By engineering a small change, the agent forestalled a cataclysm further down the line. In all likelihood, Ray would disappear as soon as his mission was accomplished, possibly to return to his own time, possibly to become one of the annulled.
The annulled were destiny’s martyrs. They were agents whose very agency had the effect of rendering themselves superfluous.
‘Wouldn’t you be better off making sure you fucked up?’ Narelle asked.
‘Everything’s factored in,’ Raymond told her, before requesting advice on how to eat quiche.
The Age of Specialisation (Bob Higgs)
After settling in to room 5 at the Railway,After settling in to room 5 at the Railway, Bob Higgs arranged to meet Mrs Peng and Inspector Carr in the downstairs lounge.Higgs wanted to hold off interviewing the boy till he had a clearer understanding of the stranger’s disposition.
The expert was already pissed off with the inspector. Carr had given Higgs to believe that this was uncomplicated alien business. Higgs now saw that it was nothing of the sort. Aliens were annoying, but few were so devious as time-travellers.
But Jack Carr hadn’t become inspector without knowing how to rationalise a stuff-up. Sure, this kid claimed to be from the future, but that was just an alien swifty. And not even the expert could dismiss that possibility.
Though Higgs promised to do what he could, he didn’t like the sound of it. He had no sympathy for time-travellers. Selfsatisfied bastards. He’d nearly chosen to take his work down that line when there’d been an explosion of demand a few years back, but everything he’d heard about ‘slingshot investigations’ promised job dissatisfaction.
‘When blobs wander in from space, it’s just a matter of working out what they’re after, and whether you can spare it. If it’s dirty books or a few gallons of sperm, big deal. If it’s something like human brain cells, you might have to get rough. Cause, effect, intervention … These mongrels from the future are slippery. They can’t tell you what they’re after because they don’t know. And then they vanish without you
ever knowing what they’ve done, or whether it’s something you should have stopped.’
Mrs Peng was keen to state the boy’s case. So far as Raymond knew, he was here to make an intervention crucial to the future of civilisation.
The Melbourne man wouldn’t have a bar of it. The future couldn’t be trusted. Higgs swigged the last of his gin and tonic, and asked Stan the barman for another.
‘That’s what they all say. They’re here to stop X meeting Y, or to prevent someone’s death. It’s always some huge fuckin’ deal for the future of the planet,’ the big man growled. ‘And maybe that’s what scientists hoped for when they first discovered time travel – Shit, this’ll let us take control … But ten, fifteen years down the line, all the classified stuff is so public domain that virtually any cowboy can use it. Suddenly you’ve got ordinary fuckwits zooming through time, selling this bullshit about having the planet’s destiny in their hands, when they’re just a bunch of motherfuckers and grandmotherfuckers.’
Pausing to compose herself, Mrs Peng asked Big Bob exactly what he meant by motherfucker.
Higgs was being literal. These blokes were acting out the last taboo.
‘No one really knows if these guys come from twenty years down the track, or two thousand. It’s all on their say-so. What if it’s only thirty years? You’ve got some pervert thirty years from now getting his hands on a machine that lets him meet his mother when she was fourteen. You don’t need Sigmund to figure what’s going on. Skip Dad, and go straight to Go. Not so much Oedipus eat your heart out, as Oedipus eat your mo—’
Always ahead of the game, Jack interrupted Bob before he further offended Mrs Peng. ‘I’m not sure that I get your argument,’ he told his consultant. ‘Surely, if you do something that stops your mother meeting your father, you run the risk of annulling yourself.’
Higgs agreed. Logic said that’d be the case. ‘The thing is, Jack, these motherfuckers don’t see things the way we do. Maybe they’ll annul themselves. But maybe they get away with the sick shit they do, and just keep doing it on a loop.’
Whether or not she followed the intricacies of this, the school principal looked distressed.
‘If what you say is true, Mr Higgs … If this capacity for ordinary people to zoom back in time becomes a possibility, then we wouldn’t be able to trust anyone. Some of our friends could be sleepers, or motherfuckers, as you call them. I couldn’t be certain that Mr Peng wasn’t one of these depraved men.’
Higgs nodded. ‘Give me an alien any time. You know where you stand with an alien.’
The Future Lies in Education (Raymond)
As Mrs Peng discussed Raymond’s future with Bob Higgs in the lounge of the Railway, the boy from the future sat in the back of Miss Murray’s Year Ten English class, doing his best to fit in. This meant staring out the window when his class was required to follow the text the teacher read out loud. When the teacher asked if she was doing this for her own benefit, none of the dreamers could answer.
‘Ray, since you come from the future, maybe you can tell this lot how To Kill a Mockingbird ends?’
While the more studious girls objected to this invitation to ruin the end for them, young Ray pointed out that he’d never read the book. In the future, no one carried knowledge about with them in a way that might tax their memory. You slipped a chip in whenever you needed to know something specific. Ray was struggling to make sense of the deficient Boo Radley, figuring that scientists must have found a way to genetically correct Boo-ism. Or else the future had worked a more sinister solution.
Having erred by turning her class’s attention to Ray’s predicament, Miss Murray now had little hope of shifting their focus back to Atticus and Scout.
Karen Bolitho was sobbing. She dreaded a time when everyone she loved, Pony especially, would be dead. Ray was someone’s idea of a sick prank. Why send people back into the past if they hadn’t got the whole mortality thing sorted? Even in the future, they were still making ad hoc repairs. The fuck-ups would just go on forever.
Many classmates refused to buy Ray’s sketchy story. If he were really from the future, he wouldn’t be fart-arsing around at Mintook Secondary. He’d be making contact with a kid destined to become President of the United States.
A hand went up at the rear of the classroom. Melissa Torok wanted to remind the class that she was born in Minnesota and had presidential ambitions. She had no idea how she’d get back to America to realise them. Maybe that’s where Ray came in.
Ray would disappoint her. In the future, America would be no big deal. Things were going to get a lot more complicated. Kids didn’t get much chance to be adventurous, and when authorities suggested that he might be of some use, he volunteered for their mission. Ray was selected from more than ten thousand volunteers. All knew that there was a real chance they’d annul themselves, or return to the future as mutant entities with no idea who they were or what they’d done. But adventure was worth the gamble.
When Gavin McGibbon said Ray wasn’t his idea of Vasco da Gama, the visitor conceded that in most respects he was unexceptional. It was likely that he’d been chosen for a disposition, or reflex, rather than a talent. When the time came for Ray to do whatever he was expected to do, he wouldn’t have a choice. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand he’d go whatever way the boffins predicted. His choices were factored in.
Amy Williams was troubled by a more general issue. Biology taught them that most people chose their partners for subconscious reasons that have nothing to do with romantic love. We’re pre-programmed. You might never know that you were drawn to a boy because his smell identified him as an immuno-opposite.Women almost invariably chose taller men who looked like they’d be faithful hunter-providers, while boys drawn to women with big breasts or broad hips were unaware of the part that fertility-assessment played in their selection. Darwinism was all about giving your offspring the best chance to carry your attributes into the future, to secure an ongoing role for your own genetic inheritance.
Amy’s concern was simple. If Ray came from a distant time in the future, he had to constitute the best bet. Even if Ray was annulled, the future had an investment in seeing your issue get through.
The new boy then noticed the class appraising him in a very calculated way. It was difficult to believe Ray’s superhumanity, but maybe the young man had qualities that any bright girl should want. This troubled the sensitive boys quite as much as it excited the girls.
Jodi Everett was a bright, pretty girl who drew a lot of male attention. She’d clearly given the whole matter of Ray, partner selection and genetic transmission serious consideration.
‘Ray’s got it all over us,’ Jodi observed. ‘I mean, I’d find it flattering to think that I had a special purpose by virtue of the man I mated with … Virgin Mary and all that. But you’d never know if Ray was taking advantage of his situation to have it off willy-nilly, or whether the future was choosing you. You specifically.’
Again, this struck the class hard, and they fell silent. Jack Hunter saw the teacher lost in her own suppositions.
‘Maybe it’s not just girls his age,’ Jack said. ‘Ray might be here to have it off with Miss Murray.’
‘Here to get ravished by her more likely,’ Gavin added.
The teacher halted this new line of thought with ‘I think that’s enough,’ but the hint of a smile said that Jack and Gavin had read her mind.
‘Perhaps we should go back to using old-fashioned terms like the Will of God,’ Miss Murray said by way of restoring balance.
‘The Will of Allah,’ Ray corrected.
Big Higgsy Meets the Boy from the Future
The boy from the future had no idea what to expect from Bob Higgs. Mrs Peng told a white lie to the effect that Mr Higgs was from the Education Department, and Ray would need to speak to him regarding his continuing participation in class. A small staffroom was set aside for the interview.
Bob Higgs was an obese, greasy-skinned man of a type
Raymond hadn’t seen before. Intensely suspicious, Higgs stared at him as if he was a spy from another planet. Ray’s problem, so far as Ray saw it, was not knowing how to act instinctively in an abnormal situation. Was he allowed to be tetchy? Could he tell people they were dicks if they treated him badly, or should he try to act discreetly and behave like a ‘local’? Ray now lamented his lack of specific instruction.
When Bob Higgs asked Ray why he was here, the boy said he didn’t know. He was on an important assignment, but as for the whys and hows, Bob’s guess was as good as his. The boy trusted that the people who sent him knew their job.
The consultant wanted to know if the boy was acting alone. Maybe Ray had some fellow agents, or was about to be put in contact with sleepers.
Once again, Ray couldn’t rule out those possibilities. So far as he knew, he was acting alone. He couldn’t see the benefit in creating a situation where two operatives might fall over each other. But it wasn’t for him to know these things, he was just a kid.
‘You don’t like your father, do you?’ the fat man asserted, apropos of nothing.
‘How do you mean?’
‘A kid like you. Leaving your folks behind. Taking the risk that you might damage yourself and your family irreversibly.’
Ray saw harm to his family as an outside chance. The only big risk was to himself. He and his father got along fine. Ray’s dad was proud that his son had volunteered to make things better.
Higgs asked why he should believe the boy. After all, Ray’s interests weren’t necessarily the interests of the Mintook community.
‘This is a lark of yours, isn’t it? I reckon your family would be devastated if they knew what you were up to.’
Raymond didn’t know how to respond. Having guessed that Higgs wasn’t what Mrs Peng said he was, he now felt like strangling him. But, if Ray had a powerful impulse to strangle the man, maybe he had that for a reason … No, surely the officials would have sought his permission if they expected him to kill someone like Bob Higgs.