Taking a calming breath, Spider swung into the cockpit and sank down into the seat. Nothing bad happened. There was an iffy smell, as they’d noticed before, but nothing dramatically wrong. He saw that all the instruments were in the off position. The unit’s power plant was properly shut down.
He frowned, baffled, as he inspected the entire cockpit, the storage bins, the system-access panels.
“It’s a dead parrot,” Charlie said, right behind him.
Spider jumped and let out an embarrassing squeak.
“Oh, God, sorry. You okay?”
Spider sat there, a hand pressed to his chest, feeling the booming of his heart. “Never better. Never better.”
“It’s just — I finished with the phone, and I saw you were having a look round.”
“I’m fine, Charlie. Just fine. You just—”
“It is kinda spooky, huh?”
And then Spider began to feel it. “Oh,” he said, suddenly feeling not at all right. “Oh, no.” He put a hand to his forehead, and discovered he was clammy. He asked Charlie to move out of the way so he could get out before he spewed everywhere. Cleaning vomit out of time machine interiors was deeply unpleasant, and Spider had done more than his share over the years.
He jumped down from the trailer and stood, leaning against a bench for a long moment, breathing carefully, feeling awful.
Charlie said, “It’s not just me, then?”
“No, mate. Not just you.” He turned and stared at the unit. “Bloody thing’s haunted, I reckon.”
Charlie said, “That was James on the phone.”
“Let me guess. Problem getting the Bat Cave here on time?”
“Stuck in traffic somewhere in North Perth.”
“Shit,” Spider said, still monitoring his stomach.
“And there’s something else, too.”
“There’s more?”
“It’s probably nothing, okay? Looks like there was a guy in a car sitting outside for a few hours last night.”
“What?”
“It’s true. Malaria noticed it when she checked the shop’s surveillance video this morning.”
They moved into the office and Malaria cued up and played the file.
Charlie fiddled with the video controls, hoping to get a better look at the face of the guy, but no amount of photoshopping helped.
“If he starts making a pest of himself,” Spider said to Malaria, “it might be worth letting the coppers know.”
“Got it,” she said, scribbling a note on her screen.
Spider knew that the trade in stolen time machines was driven by: (a), people too cheap to buy one legitimately: (b), would-be time hackers; and (c), folks who just wanted to strip the units for parts. The most valuable component of a time machine was its translation engine, the thing that actually made the unit move from point A to point B in space-time.
He wondered if he was possibly looking at a member of group (c). A broken time machine still had at least some working parts, after all.
It was too hard to say. There was something disconcerting about it, though. Something that bothered the part of him that had once been, and would always be, a policeman.
CHAPTER 4
The Bat Cave was a large, inflatable structure which looked, when it wasn’t inflated, like a sinister, black hot-air balloon. It came with a support van, an air compressor, and a pair of technicians in charge of setting it up and monitoring its operation. Spider and Charlie left them to their work while they chatted with James, who was very interested in the spooky Tempo.
James Rutherford, a worn-down guy in his late 50s who looked like someone had killed his favorite dog, was a chronosystems engineer with DOTAS Perth. Spider liked him. Or maybe he just felt sorry for him: six years ago James’s wife Sky had killed herself. It wasn’t something he and Spider talked about, if Spider could avoid it. God, he always thought, what do you say to someone in that situation?
James took some readings with his own handheld diagnostic gadget, and even though he’d been fully briefed about the unit, he still stopped dead, staring at the readings. “That’s just not right,” he said. “Look at the bloody Fenniak Transform!” he said, pointing at an alarming curve with a pinky finger that bore a gold signet ring.
“Uh-huh,” Spider said, not grinning at all.
“It’s gone asymptotic!” James was staring at that curve as if it was the most surprising thing he’d seen in years.
“We did say,” Charlie said.
“And this, look, the Leong Standard Curvature is an error message — one I’ve never seen before, lads.”
Spider looked at the error message. “Oh. I see. Shit.” The situation was worse than Spider had first thought.
At length, James pulled his astonished eyes away from the meter, and he stood looking up at the unit, in a kind of religious awe. “What the hell have you got here?”
“We’d like to know,” Spider said.
“But you can see why we wanted the Bat Cave, huh?” Charlie added.
“Oh my, yes,” James said, nodding.
The Bat Cave techs came over and told James the Cave was finally ready. James thanked them, and led Spider and Charlie out into the parking lot to have a look at it. Considering that the Bat Cave, once fully activated, would create its very own universe, its appearance was hugely disappointing. Spider always thought it really needed to have some cool mad scientist-type gadgets all over it, complete with great arcs of brilliant, eye-searing electricity and so forth. Instead, it was a big black bag with an opening just large enough to let them wheel in the unit and its trailer. James gave Spider and Charlie a hand with it, telling them, “Just don’t tell the union I’m doing this, okay? They’d fry my nuts if they knew.” There were all kinds of byzantine rules imposed by the Public Service Union governing what public servants were allowed and not allowed to do, and moving “third-party” machinery around was strictly forbidden, on pain of serious penalty.
Inside the Bat Cave there was a faint smell of ozone and outgassing of complex non-rational plastics. The sense of immense power just waiting to manifest itself was palpable, and deeply worrying. Spider and Charlie couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Once outside, James signaled the techs that the opening could be sealed, and the device enabled. Spider watched the techs working their screens, checking the cables connecting the Bat Cave to the van, and carrying on as if they did this kind of thing — creating a tiny pocket universe — every day and it was no big deal. They worked through a checklist, calling to each other, confirming that they had green lights on each major and minor subsystem. Spider felt his guts clench with apprehension.
When the moment of activation came, it was so quiet and undramatic that Spider almost missed it. Suddenly the Bat Cave was a big sealed plastic shell, like a strangely menacing black beach ball, and the technicians, watching their screens, called out, “All systems nominal.”
Charlie said, “Oh, God.”
Spider said, “No time like the present,” and they went over to the technicians.
James ran a hand over the outer surface of the shell. It was cold, terribly cold, and rigid. “So you’ve got separation?” he asked the lead technician, who told him the system was indeed ready. A tiny, self-contained, and entirely separate region of space-time existed inside the shell, cut off from the universe outside.
Spider, feeling extremely nervous around such energy and weirdness, cleared his throat and said, “Better get to work, then, huh?”
“Er, yeah,” Charlie said. “You first.”
The pair of technicians gave Spider and Charlie a quick briefing on how to operate the manipulator arms and the various toolsets from their screens. Then it was time to get to work.
James said, “Hope you don’t mind if I just lurk here next to you, just to keep
an eye on the government’s very expensive property.”
“Yeah, sure,” Spider said, concentrating on the screen. “Go nuts.”
They started by removing the Tempo’s doors and external hull panels, which they stacked on either side of the unit. The seats came out next, then Charlie started stripping the interior while Spider concentrated on removing the engines and power plant. He was sweating, taking his time over every wire, every connection, wishing he’d taken more training on this gear. More difficult was shutting out that part of his brain that found the whole idea of quantum entanglement — the way his interface out here was connected to the tools in there — fundamentally hard to accept. When he’d first been told about the Bat Cave and its uses, Spider had just stared at the guy, and said, “That’s bullshit!” The guy had explained again and again that quantum stuff was like this. Action at a distance. It made no bloody sense, and here, again, Spider was seeing that for himself. He fiddled with a joystick here, and inside the Cave, which might as well have been light-years away, robotic arms and power-tools did the rest. Then, as he worked on the screws holding down an access panel on the engine compartment, his sweaty hands on the joystick caused the tool head to slip off the screw and skitter away. He managed, with his thumping heart in his mouth, to save the tool from dropping down into the guts of the engine compartment where he’d never find it. He swore under his breath, paused, and wiped his forehead with a sleeve.
It took more than an hour, and a lot of sweat and swearing, but eventually Spider was able to separate the seemingly billions of cables linking the scanning engine to the translation engine. Disconnecting both of these components from the power plant was another story. Surely, he thought, it’s all just electronics and machinery and hardware and crap. It shouldn’t be this hard, and normally it wasn’t hard. It was simply the thought of the Bat Cave itself looming huge and black and unearthly next to him, and the conviction that if the unit inside did explode, the Cave would not save them. It would all turn out to be a big hoax, and they’d all be fried in a white-hot blast of unthinkable energies.
Slowly, with enormous care, he and Charlie worked the controls together to lift out each component from the engine compartment and set them down next to the unit. He didn’t know about Charlie, but he felt like his guts were knotted up tight; the pain was distracting.
Then it was time to confront the power plant. Spider and Charlie, when they had talked about this job, agreed that it was likely that the power plant would be the thing to give them trouble, if there was going to be trouble at all. And they were not disappointed.
The power plant, a monster fuel cell squeezed into a casing as big as two archival boxes, sat at the bottom of the engine compartment. Any number of cables, and any number of types of cable, spread out from its white shell to all parts of the time machine. Many of these cables had already been neutralized. There were still other cables linking the thing into the frame of the unit, to the control interface, and elsewhere. Disconnecting each one would take time and great patience. James offered to stand in for Spider, to help spread the tension around. Spider told him DOTAS or the PSU would be bound to find out, and he’d be out of a job.
So, one at a time, and working in sequence, Spider and Charlie started unplugging the power-plant from the rest of the machine. It was at this point that a time machine mechanic typically felt most weirded out, even in situations where the machine was not expected to explode. There were so many cables disappearing into the guts of the unit, and you could trace them all down to where they connected to this and that, but the next time you looked, half of those connection points were no longer there. There were certain parts in the guts of a time machine that appeared only sometimes to exist, and which appeared subject to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Cats were notorious for disappearing inside units this way. You could smell the unique odor of the dead cat, but you could never find the actual corpse, no matter what. You could strip the entire machine down to bare metal and carbon fiber, but it wouldn’t help. Your coworker, on the other hand, would find the dead cat without any trouble, in a place you were pretty sure you had checked, and had found nothing. This was one of the many things Spider hated about time machines. At a certain level, they just stopped making any bloody sense.
At last, with sweat dripping from their faces, Spider and Charlie succeeded in removing the last cables from the fuel cell.
They paused, and looked at each other.
Nothing happened.
Spider let out his breath. Charlie started to smile. They turned back to their screens, switched tools and went to undo the screws fastening the fuel cell to the frame of the unit. There were six such Phillips-head screws. With the last one removed and set aside, they were able to begin to contemplate lifting out the power plant.
“No pressure, then,” Charlie said.
“I think, if it was going to blow, it would’ve—”
It blew. The screens went to static. The joysticks went loose and useless, all haptics lost.
There was no sound from within the Bat Cave. Spider felt sick. Charlie said, “What happened?”
The technicians eased Spider and Charlie aside and ran diagnostic routines. This took longer than either Spider, Charlie or even James expected. One of the techs suggested they might like to go and have a break, and maybe a coffee.
“Excellent plan!” James said, smiling, not looking all that creeped out. Spider and Charlie stared at him, then stared at the Bat Cave, silent and black and cold.
Spider shivered. “Coffee sounds good.”
They went inside. Malaria ducked under a doorframe to tell Spider that the phones were going nuts. People experiencing weird problems with their time machines. “Uh-huh,” Spider said, trying to persuade the coffee droid to produce the brew he wanted. “Tell ’em I’ll call them back first chance I get.”
“If we’re not dead,” Charlie said, giggling.
Spider giggled, too, and the two of them stood there, giggling away, and their giggles turned to laughter. James finished organizing the coffees, but said over his shoulder, “Aren’t you glad I let you use the Bat Cave?”
“Oh, yeah, do please thank the government for us,” Spider said, still laughing.
James handed round the coffees. “You know,” he said, deadpanning, “if there’s any damage in there, you guys are liable, right?”
Spider grinned, but Charlie did a spit-take, spraying coffee at the floor. “Oh God, I’ve got coffee coming out my nose now. Shit!”
One of the technicians appeared at the doorway, out of breath, wide-eyed. “Uh, you guys really ought to come and have a look at something.”
“Let me guess,” Spider said, “we’ve discovered a gateway to another universe?”
“No,” the tech said, rather pale. “Kind of worse than that.”
James said, “We haven’t woken up Great Cthulhu, have we?”
Spider said, “No, that’s Thursday.”
James nodded, but kept looking at the tech. “So what’s the trouble?”
“It’d be best if you’d just come and…” He trailed off.
“You’ve got picture back?”
“Yeah. Just. The radiation’s died down quite a bit.”
Charlie was fixing himself a new coffee, and glanced up at that. “Radiation?”
“That’s not right,” Spider said, heading for the door.
They went back outside. It was starting to rain again; thunder rumbled in the black and forbidding cloudscape to the west. The Bat Cave looked no different. The other tech was walking around it, holding a wireless handheld device, watching the screen intently. He turned to talk to the first tech when he came over, and showed him her readings. “Oh,” he said, pointing at something. To Spider he said, “Looks like we can power down the Cave.”
“Let’s just see what’s going on in there firs
t,” Spider said, going to the screens, and working the in-Cave cameras that were still intermittently working. Then he saw the problem. “Damn,” he said in a reasonable tone, and invited Charlie and James to have a look, too.
They crowded round, and Spider pointed out the problem.
“That’s not right,” Charlie said at last.
Inside the Bat Cave, the original time machine, its hull panels and interior components, its trailer and the articulated tool-arms lay in scorched and twisted bits and pieces on the floor. The tires from the trailer were still burning, filling the universe in there with thick, black smoke. Where that unit had stood, however, there was now another time machine. It looked to be in reasonable condition, considering.
“I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in this time machine repair caper over the years,” Spider said, “but I’ve never seen that.”
James stood there, staring at the image on the screen. He’d gone even more pale than usual. “Good God”, he said, shaken.
Charlie asked, “Could someone have sent a unit into the Bat Cave from out here?”
James shook his head. “Not possible. Not remotely possible.”
Charlie said, pointing at the image of the new machine, “There’s something in the passenger seat.”
James bit his lip, and leaned in for a better look. “It looks like blue plastic.”
Spider, too astonished to say much of anything, zoomed in on the blue plastic object in the passenger seat. It was large, and bent over. He felt a wave of shivers up and down his spine. He knew what it looked like, but that made even less sense than everything else. Attempting to stay calm, he pointed. “Is that duct tape?”
Charlie nodded. “Think so, boss.”
James said, “I think I need to sit down for a minute.”
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 4