Allergic To Time

by Crystal Gables

  “Unless...”I cut in. “The person on the other side survives, and wakes up and tells everyone what happened to them.”

  He gave me a nod. “So there has to be doctors and nurses, entire hospitals in on it, just in case. Secret wards. Staffed by people like Joh Raymond, who do the dirty work of disposing of time travellers.”

  “Who is John Raymond?” I asked.

  “He’s always been the person in charge of making sure time travellers never speak. Now that your father has gone he would have stepped up, taken over.”

  “But he’s working out of your office! He has access to all of your files now, all the people you were trying to protect!”

  “That’s why we have to take care of him-“ Martin started to say, but I interrupted him.

  “So my father wanted you to gather information about all of these other time machines for him, to what, eliminate the competition?” I was still not entirely clear about that part. Why had he needed any other method of time travel, if he already had a perfectly flawed one that suited his purposes?

  “Not exactly,” Martin went on, shoving his hands back in his pockets. “He still wanted a time travel method that worked. A business thing, I think. He knew that a machine that sent people through time successfully would fetch him a billion dollars on the black market, just like you said. Or so I figured. I could never tell entirely what he was up to. But before I could figure any of this out I had already passed on information to him that I wished I hadn’t.”

  He shook his head. “By the time I realised that he didn’t have anything resembling good intentions, I switched my focus on helping the people I’d met, the poor souls who were trapped in a time they didn’t belong in. At first I wanted to protect them from your father, so I started to publish articles where I disputed their claims of time travel, where I wrote that I thought they were making it up, pulling a hoax. It was so he didn’t come after them.”

  “Why did you stop doing that?” I asked. “When did you start writing the opposite, in the Nick Cooper articles? Where you support their claims that they were telling the truth?”

  He sighed. “When I realised there was something more important at stake. Their dignity, maybe, if that’s what you wanted to call it. They were always so hurt when my articles would get published. They would get upset at me, angry that I had only pretended to believe them, and then basically ridiculed them in public. So I had to change my angle. Under a pen name though, so that your father wouldn’t know about it.”

  So that had been the real reason for the pen name then. “And what, in the meantime you just kept pretending you were working for him?” I still, despite everything, wanted to believe the best in Martin. But I needed to know that he wasn’t just a hypocritical liar. I needed to know he hadn’t been working for a murderer all this time.

  “Pretended to work for him…actually was working for him, I don’t know.” He let out let another heavy sigh and rubbed his hands with his eyes.

  “Huh,” I scoffed. “I see. Meanwhile, you were supervising my thesis and lying to me, as well. You know, this is all becoming clear actually...”

  “I wasn’t lying to you, honestly.” Martin marched over to me so that our faces were only a foot or so apart. “In some ways I was trying to kill two birds with one stone, almost. I thought if I helped your father with whatever it was he was working on, then it could only serve to help you and your PhD. I thought it would be some sort of justice for you. As in, he’d almost killed you as a child by sending you through time, but then you would grow up and use him for your own success. I thought there might be a nice ending to it all.”

  “How would that be a nice ending,” I asked, fuming. “Why would I want to use anything from him?”

  “You wouldn’t have known it had anything to do with him. You wouldn’t have found out. You weren’t supposed to know any of this. I was trying to protect you Anna, honestly.” His voice was pleading.

  I studied his face, not entirely sure I believed him. “So you never thought to tell me the truth, that I was a time traveller myself?”

  He shook his head. He looked sad. “I couldn’t. I thought he would kill you if you got involved.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine.

  We were on a tram, heading back from Darling Harbour towards Martin’s house in Glebe. It was the only operating tramline that still remained in Sydney, servicing a very short straight line from Central Station to the Inner West suburb of Lilydale. It was one of the least affective means of public transportation in Sydney – and that was really saying something. But it did the job of getting to Glebe from Darling Harbour.

  We rode along in silence for the first couple of stops, one at the Casino where tourists got on and off, and the next one at Pyrmont Bridge, where no one got either off or on. A ticket collector walked passed and asked to see our tickets, which we dutifully produced. She put a metal gun through each of the tabs and handed them back to us.

  “Why didn’t they kill Robert as soon as he woke up that day, at the start of semester?” I finally asked. “Why did they let us go? They could have killed us.” I thought back to Bianca and the gun. She could have easily overpowered me.

  Martin glanced around the carriage to make sure there was no one within earshot of this delicate conversation. The nearest passenger was three seats back, a teenaged Goth-looking girl with headphones in. He turned back toward me and answered.

  “Maybe because Robert didn’t actually travel through time.”

  I turned my entire body to face him, my mouth wide open in shock. “Martin. You. Cannot. Be. Serious. Not this again.” I sat back and crossed my arms. “I know you don’t like Robert, but after everything you’ve told me — and everything you’ve seen yourself — you have to believe he’s telling the truth!” I ran my hands through my hair, in frustration. “And anyway,” I added, forcefully. “He wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “I am entirely serious,” he hissed at me, still checking behind us to make sure no one was listening. “And he would lie to you.”

  I sat up again. “You just don’t like him, that’s your problem. Well, maybe you should look past your personal feelings towards him and consider things objectively.”

  “Why wouldn’t I like him?” Martin shook his head and looked annoyed with me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I dared to look at him in the eye and said, “Maybe because you’re jealous of him.”

  “Jealous of him? That is absurd. Jealous of what, exactly? His awful fashion sense? His complete ignorance of everything around him? His disgusting smoking habit…”

  “Ah, you see?” I cut in. “He is only ‘ignorant’ of things because he is from 1974,” I pointed out. I wanted to quickly move away from the topic of why Martin might really be jealous of Robert. I already wished I hadn’t said anything.

  “Come on Anna,” he said, sitting back in his seat. The tram was flying over the top of Balmain by that stage. The fish market and foreshore passed us on our right, with the setting evening sun glistening off the top of the water. “Do you really think things add up with that guy?”

  I thought about that. I had to admit, there’d been a few things I hadn’t really wanted to admit, and had maybe been ignoring. But I had never really doubted Robert’s story, not really. I was still certain he wouldn’t lie to me. But there had been a few red flags.

  “Like what?” I asked, wanting Martin to be the bad guy in the situation. I wasn’t about to be disloyal to Rob, by admitting to any of my doubts I had out loud. If Martin had doubts, then he could voice them and I would simply see if I agreed with any of them. “Martin, what is it that you think doesn’t ad up?”

  “Well,” he began quietly, lowering his voice as the ticket collector passed by us again. “For one, he doesn’t act the way people typically do in this...situation. It usually takes a person days — weeks sometimes — to even realise, process the fact that they have travelled through time. Take Fanny as an example. She couldn’t even comprehend what had happe
ned to her for years. But Robert seemed to know he had travelled through time from his hospital bed? Come on, how could he have possibly even have known that?”

  “Because he caught a glimpse of the world before he became unconscious!” I said, leaping to my friend’s defence. I had to admit I’d asked myself the same question, but my own answer had seemed reasonable enough to me.

  Martin shot me a look. “Come on, really? He might have thought — for a split second — that things looked a little strange, maybe, but he can’t have had any idea he’d travelled through time. It didn’t make any sense.”

  “Well, explain the not being able to breathe thing then,” I demanded. “How did he fake that? How would he even have known to?”

  He sighed. “I can’t explain that,” he admitted. “I don’t know. But there are other things. The ridiculous outfit for one thing. It is too over-the-top. Too clichéd.”

  “Well, he is from the 70s,” I said, still refusing to believe what Martin was claiming. “What do you expect him to wear?”

  “Something that people in the 70s actually wore, not something that characters from a movie set in the 70s wore,” he shot back at me.

  We were only one stop away from the main Glebe tram stop, where I knew we would be getting off. I looked beside me to make sure I had all my belongings in my bag and hooked the strap up over my shoulder. I began to stand up, preparing to head for the exit. Martin looked around, realised where we were and followed suit. As we stood up together and began to walk down the aisle, I turned around and noticed that somewhere along the way a student I recognised from one of Martin’s undergrad classes — one I had tutored — must have gotten on the tram. He was eyeing us suspiciously, looking back and forth between us and raising an eyebrow.

  “Oh great,” Martin muttered and turned away toward the door. “I know what he is thinking.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “The...err...rumours. About us,” I said, nervously, and looked away without making eye contact. We had still not exactly talked about any of that. There was an uncomfortable silence between us, but thankfully the tram stopped and the doors swung open, forcing us to hurry towards them before they closed again and we were forced to wait for the next stop. We made it out just before the doors shut and made our way down the tram stop steps up towards the exit onto Glebe Point Rd. We had to walk up an incredibly step hill to get there, and I had to stop halfway to catch my breath. Martin kept walking at a slow pace ahead of me, but after a couple of seconds he had to stop for breath as well.

  “This hill’s pretty tough,” he said, doubling over and panting slightly.

  “Yeah,” I said, pausing again and panting for breath myself. “But you’re old.”

  “Thanks!”

  “Well you are,” I said, in a teasing tone. “I’m still in my 20s. I should be able to climb this thing no hassles.”

  “Your lungs,” Martin said, his breathing settling down a bit. “They’re not healthy. They must have been affected by your trip when you were so young…”

  That explained why I was in the hospital for so much longer than Martin had been the week before. Why the trip had hit me so hard, despite it being only a relatively short trip through time: barely three months. I nodded, standing up straight. “I thought I just had asthma.”

  We continued up the hill at a snail’s pace, with Martin ahead of me just slightly. I looked at the back of his head and I allowed myself to smile, pleased that, for the first time in a long time, I felt like I could trust him again.

  ***

  Martin’s house was much the same as it had been months — weeks? — earlier. Same old fuddy-duddy brown leather lounge chairs, same old bizarre war memorabilia hanging off the walls.

  “Ohhh...” I said, as a thought occurring to me. I sat my bag down and made myself as comfortable as I possibly could on one of his hideous arm chairs. “Do they give this stuff to you? As souvenirs?”

  He looked confused. “Give what to me?”

  “All this crap in your house,” I said gesturing to the walls. “Do the time travellers give it to you? I thought you just had terrible taste! But —“

  “...No. I collect it.”

  “Oh.” I shut up.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “I just didn’t know you were so into...warfare.”

  “I’m not, really. It’s history. Not just wars. War just happens to be a big part of history.”

  “Ah, so it is sort of a time travel thing.” I raised my eyes at him. Maybe, during all these years we had been on the same side all along: we’d both been obsessed with time travel.

  He shrugged and half nodded. “Yeah, I guess maybe it is.”

  “So,” I said, “What time is Fanny meant to be meeting us here?” Even though Fanny had told us she would see us in the morning, she had called the hotel later that evening, saying she needed to meet up with us as soon as possible, that there had been a change of plans. Martin had told her we would meet her back in Glebe, since she was familiar with where he lived.

  Martin glanced at the time on the wall behind him. “In about twenty minutes.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, in a tone which came out far more sarcastically than I had intended it to.

  Martin looked at me quizzically. “Don’t you like her?”

  I shrugged. “I see that you do,” I said, looking down at the floor.

  “Yeah, of course I do. We’ve been really close ever since I investigated her case.”

  I played with the strap of my handbag, still not looking up. “So are the two of you...?” I managed to glance up at the end of my question to read the look on his face.

  “Are we, what?”

  I gave him a suggestive look. “Are the two of you, you know, ‘extra close’?”

  “Oh,” he said, recoiling a bit. “No. No, I wouldn’t want you to think that.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want me to think that?”

  He shifted uncomfortably, and even reached automatically for his collar, pulling at it a bit. “I don’t...well, I don’t know, I just wouldn’t want you to think I was…acting unprofessionally or anything. I suppose.” He stood up. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  “Sure,” I replied, watching his back turn as he left for the kitchen. I lay back in my seat and sighed. I thought back to what Robert had said, about Martin having feelings for me. I was starting to think that it was all based on this weird obsession Martin had developed with my time travel case: nothing more, nothing less. And anyway! As if anything could ever, ever, happen between the two of us. For one thing: relationships between students and their supervisors were strictly forbidden. Not that we had jobs anymore, mind. But there were other factors as well. I mean, Martin was not even my type. He was so serious, and he collected antique war memorabilia, and he was far too old for me, and regardless of that: I mean, he didn’t even like me. He probably just put up with me because he felt some kind of responsibility for me after getting involved with my father all those years earlier. Guilt, or something.

  He came back into the living room with two cups of tea. I would have preferred coffee, but I took a swig from my cup anyway. It hit my still uneasy stomach, calmly it slightly. Martin cradled his cup between both hands and looked down into the steamy liquid. “You still haven’t heard from Robert?”

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t even if he tried to get in contact: no mobile phones, remember? I mean, even if I hadn’t lost mine, Robert doesn’t know how they work, anyway.”

  Martin pulled a face. “Sure…” he muttered.

  “What?” I asked. Even though I hadn’t been eager to linger on the subject of Robert now that we were finally getting along, I was unable to let it go altogether.

  “Nothing...”

  “No, what?” I put my cup down on the table and leaned forward. “Is this still about Rob lying?”

  Martin sat up and sighed, frustrated. “Yes it is still about Robert lying!”

  “Unbeliev
able.”

  He scoffed. “I would be willing to put good money on that guy being able to use a smart phone.”

  I stood up abruptly, knocking my full tea cup off the table and spilling it all over Martin’s hideous rug. “Crap, I’m sorry,” I said, kneeling down to pick the empty cup up but not really sure what to do about the brown liquid pooling onto the carpet. At least it matched the ugly pattern.

  “It’s okay,” he said, leaving to get something to wipe up the spill. By the time he returned my anger had subsided a bit. As he leant down to mop up the tea, I grabbed him by the arm. “Martin. Just be straight with me okay. About Rob. Do you really have any actual reason for thinking he is lying to us, or is this really just because you don’t like him? Because I have to know.” I was still on my hands and knees on the rug, my head bent over and my jet black hair hanging in a mop over my face. “I can’t stand any more lies.” I sat up and rested on my ankles. Our faces were inches apart from each other.

  Martin leant back slightly and put the cloth down on the table. “Look, I can’t be certain. I just have a feeling about him,” he said, pronouncing the word ‘feeling’ like he was embarrassed about it. Which he should have been.

  “Well, that’s scientific,” I replied dryly.

  “Come on, don’t you suspect he’s lying, at least a little bit?”

  I sat there silently for a moment. Then I took a deep breath and began with, “Well...maybe...”

  “See!” Martin exclaimed. Boy, he’d really jumped all over that. I didn’t appreciate that fact that he was taking such glee in the slightest sign that I might distrust Robert.

  “It’s not that I think he is lying,” I hastened to add. “Really. I don’t. But I will admit that a few things he has said to me have been a bit off, I suppose.” I thought back to some of our conversations in Nelson Bay, a couple of moments where I remembered I’d taken pause at the time, thought that something was not quite right.