“So now, when I go back, I just go back to hang out with them. They know it’s me, now, and that we’ve got these time machines and all that. I took them for a spin this one time into the future.”
“You went to the future?”
“Yeah, it was something like the 22nd century?”
“But nobody goes to the future.” It was true. The only people who even thought about visiting the future were grizzled old science fiction fans and writers, and they were generally disappointed with what they found. Polls taken to discover the reason for the general lack of interest in the future as a destination showed that nobody expected there to be much future to speak of. One way or another, the results showed, people imagined the future as being just a black void of nothingness, the Earth long since wrecked beyond habitation, and humanity either wiped out somehow, or existing in such a miserable state it would not be worth visiting. The future was too depressing to contemplate.
Malaria got up. “You want a coffee? I’m getting one, and you look like you could use one, if you’ll excuse me saying.”
“Um, sure. Yeah. Thanks,” he said, and told her how he liked his coffee.
Then Charlie and James came in, talking about football. James, Spider thought, sounded somehow too bright and cheery. Strange. Malaria offered to make them coffees, too, if they wanted. “It’s been a pretty bad night, huh?” she said.
Charlie sat on the table, stretching his neck. “They’ve just taken the body.”
James, pulling up a chair, said, “Stabbed something like twenty times, the Inspector said. A woman, wrapped in plastic. Very Laura Palmer.”
Charlie looked blank for a moment. Spider explained about Twin Peaks. Charlie said he kept meaning to download that show.
James said, “Skip the second season.”
They talked idly about Twin Peaks, and classic pre-millennium TV generally, for a while. It helped defuse some of the tension Spider had been feeling. He started to relax a little. Considering the coffee droid Malaria had to work with, her coffee was sublime. “Where did you learn to make coffee like that?” he said, amazed.
James and Charlie were likewise astonished. Charlie said, “We paid a hundred and fifty bucks for that piece of crap, and its never made anything but crap coffee.”
Malaria bashfully owned up to having been trained as a barista, but then she added in stern tones, “Don’t you think this means I’m making coffee for you all the time, either. This is just a favor, ’cause of tonight, and all the…” She waved her hands. “All the fuss.”
Spider said he really appreciated it. Especially tonight. His head was hurting less. He felt as if he could breathe again, and the rock-hard tension in his guts was easing.
Charlie said, “So what’s the skinny with you and Inspector Street, boss?”
“There’s no skinny. No scuttlebutt. No loose talk, no rumors, no idle stories or tales told out of school, Charlie. We knew each other way back when, and that’s it.”
Charlie said, “The way you guys looked at each other, though—”
James, who was starting to look better under the healing influence of good coffee, observed, “I thought you could power a small city with that much juice.”
Spider rubbed his face, wanting to change the subject. “That woman was stabbed how many times?”
James and Charlie exchanged amused looks, and decided to play along. Charlie said, “Maybe twenty times or so. It was pretty bad. Lots of blood.”
“Who’d hide a murder victim like that?” Spider said, thinking aloud.
Charlie said, “Somebody bloody clever, I reckon.”
Spider asked, “How clever?”
Charlie, who hung out on tech exploits forums on the tubes, reading about crazy things people did with time machines, said, “Genius clever, I’d say. I mean, it’s not meant to be possible, for starters. You have to align the two machines’ time fields, just so.”
James, who had been very quiet, said, “So, a criminal mastermind, yes?”
Charlie said, “Cool!”
Spider, staring into his coffee, trying to think his way around the whole thing, said, “A woman was brutally murdered, Charlie. It’s not ‘cool’.”
“Sorry, boss. I was just thinking about the way—”
“I know, I get it. It’s devilishly clever. She could have been hidden away like that indefinitely.”
“The explosion in the Bat Cave, by the way,” James said, looking at Spider. “Roughly equivalent to about two hundred kilos of high explosive.”
Spider blinked, stunned. “Two hundred kilos?”
Charlie swore. Malaria, listening closely, said, “I don’t mean to sound stupid here, but what exactly is high explosive?”
“Bad news on a stick,” Spider said. “Military-level explosive. Packs a massive wallop. The upshot is that these two time machines, stuck together in the same space and time like that, were a touch unstable.”
Malaria said, “A touch?”
Spider was thinking as he sipped his coffee. “The second time machine,” he said, staring at the floor. “It wasn’t damaged, or at least not that much.”
James said, “Yeah, I’d noticed that, too. Odd. Makes you wonder where all the explosive energy went to.”
“Could it be that the second machine was stuck inside its own private little bubble of space-time, and the first machine, the Tempo, was superposed around it?”
“Could be. We won’t know for sure until DOTAS finishes giving the whole thing a good going over. Maybe by the end of the week?”
“Any chance you could get me a copy of their report?”
James smiled. “You know that’s really not kosher, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but could you do it?”
“No chance, mate. No chance in hell.”
Spider bit his lip and nodded. “Damn,” he said.
Once they finished with their coffee, Malaria announced that she’d better get home or it’d be time to get up again before she went to sleep. She rose to her full gangly height, grabbed her coat and bag, and headed out. This cued the others, too.
James took Spider aside once Charlie and Malaria had left the room. “I can get you a copy of the report by Friday at the latest.”
“I don’t want you compromising your job there, James.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as eggs. Sure as eggs.”
Spider did want to see that report. He knew it was technically illegal, and that James would be taking a serious risk by making a copy of it and letting Spider read it. He wanted to know what the hell was going on with this dead woman, and how she came to be stuck like that, maybe in her own tiny bubble of space-time, or whatever the hell it would turn out to be. A murdered woman on his turf, such as it was, was something that spoke to his hindbrain, and stirred up entire old ways of thinking about things. But he’d hate himself if James wound up losing his job over it — or worse, if he, Spider, wound up losing his own job, and prosecuted by the DOTAS Time Crime Unit.
He said, “It’s all right, mate. Don’t do it. It’s okay.”
“It’s no trouble,” James said, sounding utterly reasonable.
“It bloody is trouble, James. It’s too much risk.”
James looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Fair enough. Fair enough.”
Spider managed a smile. “Hope you understand.”
“Oh yeah. Sure. No worries.”
“You’ve got a family and all.”
“Appreciate the thought,” James said.
“Well. Better go.”
James clapped him on the shoulder, turned and left. After a bit Spider heard James’s car starting up, pulling out, driving off into the dismal night.
Spider walked around his tiny fiefdom, torn up inside. In the workshop he looked at the three other time machines in their service bays, each waiting on some damn thing or other to get them going again. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, he’d be back here, fixing them, just like any other day. He and Charlie would swap jokes and try not to think about just what a shitty job this really was.
He stood at the workshop entrance, looking out into the parking lot where the Bat Cave had been set up. It was all gone now, taken as evidence, as if it had never been. Something deeply strange happened out there today, he thought. Something puzzling. It called to him; he could feel it, like a tidal pull. He hated puzzles. Puzzles needed solving. He was helpless against them, and always had been.
Standing here, feeling the buzzing in his head from the coffee, and from the sheer weirdness of the day in general, he knew that even when he got back to the capsule motel he wouldn’t be able to sleep. The dead woman in the hidden time machine was going to call to him all night long, wanting him to help her.
Resigned to the prospect of a sleepless night, and to riding home in the rain, he pulled his still-damp wet-weather gear on and went out to where his bike was parked. Damn, it was cold. He could hear the rain spattering on his hood. Folded down into his recumbent bike, the canopy pulled down tight overhead, he set off, pedaling steadily, out through the main gate and onto Inverness Road.
Then he spotted the small nondescript car, a late-model Sony, parked just up the road. “What?” he muttered, and remembered the images of this very car. “Two nights running?” Once was a random occurrence. Twice was starting to look like a pattern. He thought about riding past the car, to get a better look at the occupant, but decided against it, and instead he rode off the other way, into the wind and rain.
CHAPTER 6
Dickhead McMahon was a big man who managed to take up more room than the space he actually occupied. Spider was always reminded of the old wargaming concept of “zone-of-control.” Dickhead McMahon physically occupied his own hex on the map, but he somehow managed to dominate all six hexes around him, and stopped anyone or anything else from passing him. Whenever Spider had to talk to his boss, which he was thankful wasn’t too often, he always did his best to stand well back, as far away as he could get, just to keep out of Dickhead’s zone of control. It wasn’t that the man lacked hygiene, or even that he was all that obnoxious. He was just the kind of large man who filled entire rooms, squeezing people out, by his sheer presence. He had a loud voice, and he had a great many opinions, all of which he was only too keen to tell you about at length and in detail, without any regard for your interest in said opinions. Spider had heard, he thought, all of them.
Dickhead McMahon was not pleased to have the federal government bothering him about the whole “dead woman in the time machine” thing. “What you should have done, Spider, and mark my words this is gold, this is, pure gold, what you should have done in the first instance, when you met the client, is refuse to take his machine. First sign of any fruity weirdness in the machine, you say, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re absolutely snowed under with work right now.’ Right? Easy to do, it’s not rude, and it’s only slightly lying.
“Then, when the guy says the usual, ‘Oh, but what do I do now?’ you tell him you’d be delighted to recommend another reputable time machine repair firm. Nothing but polite and friendly, right? It’s not brain science, Spider, and we’re not a charity. We do quick, simple straightforward repair work. Component out, component in, give everything a nice polish, and get the unit out the door so we can take another unit.
“Your key-point indicators, Spider, your key-point indicators are in the absolute toilet lately, you know that? And this business yesterday, that’s not going to help. We can’t have that kind of thing getting in the way and taking up valuable company resources, now can we?”
Spider said, “Yes, Dickhead. How wrong I was to get all concerned about a dead person.”
Dickhead beamed, even his smile seemed to take up a lot of room. It was as if he hadn’t heard a word of Spider’s remark. Spider found this fascinating. You could say anything at all to Dickhead McMahon, and if it wasn’t a response he was expecting, he’d somehow pretend that it was. Spider had a theory that this was because Dickhead believed that he was the only real human being in the world, and everyone else, including Spider, was a machine of some sort. Anything that appeared to conflict with this view of things was discarded without Dickhead’s having to think about it. Spider thought it must be a marvelous way to live your life.
“Good. Excellent,” Dickhead said. “You’re a top bloke, Spider. One of my best. I’ve got big plans for you, my boy. Big plans.”
“Is that right?” Spider said, not that interested, but playing along.
“Oh yes, Spider. The biggest.” A strange gleam shone in Dickhead’s eyes. He said, appropos of not much, “Listen, what’s your thinking about angels, hmm?”
“Um, what?”
“You heard me. Angels. Thoughts? Views?”
Spider stared and stared at his boss, deeply troubled. This wasn’t the first time Dickhead had talked to him about angels. Even that night, years ago now, when Spider first met Dickhead in a pub in Northbridge, a night when Spider had been at rock bottom, even then, now he thought about it, Dickhead had talked about angels, describing himself as an “angel of redemption”. At the time Spider thought the big bastard was crazy, but since he was being friendly, and buying him a drink, he didn’t mention it. He glanced around the front office, looking at the huge motivational posters — and noticed for the first time that they all featured angels, looking all luminous and fierce, performing great deeds, smiting heathens left and right. Why have I never noticed this before? he asked himself. Feeling more than a little uncertain, a little anxious, he looked back at his boss, and said, “You know, angels good. Real good. Why?”
Dickhead, perhaps seeing that Spider wasn’t reacting quite as favorably as he might wish, nodded and smiled, clapped his hands together, as if breaking a spell, and changed the subject, saying, “Now then, I could murder a coffee. Where’s your new receptionist, what did you say her name was?”
“Malaria doesn’t make coffee, Dickhead,” Spider said, distracted from all of Dickhead’s angel nonsense as his mind filled with the rapturous memory of the coffee Malaria made last night with their crap little coffee droid.
“Of course she makes coffee. Don’t be foolish, Spider. Now where is the little minx?”
It was currently Malaria’s lunch break. She’d taken off to wherever it was she went — Spider didn’t know, and didn’t think it was his business to know — and would be back in due course. He could imagine what Malaria might say on being referred to as a “little minx,” and decided it was a good thing she was out at the moment.
Dickhead, seeing that Malaria was out, turned to Spider. “Well, you’re not doing anything important right now…” he said, a suggestive curl to his lip.
“You want coffee, Dickhead, you make it yourself. I’ve got three units needing work.” When Dickhead shot him a sour look, Spider added, “And you did tell me my KPIs were in the toilet, right?”
And yet, even as he said this, he was aware that Dickhead was using his eerie zone-of-control powers to force Spider into the break room. He swore under his breath, hated himself, and decided it was easier to go along with Dickhead, make him a bloody coffee, and then get back to work, where he could seethe all afternoon about his spinelessness. While it was true that you could tell Dickhead he was a dickhead to his face, and he would hardly notice, it was also true that if he didn’t get what he wanted, he could fire you.
He tried to get the coffee droid to produce the same caffeinated miracles Malaria had coaxed out of it last night, without success. It was making a worrying buzzing, gurgling sound, and the only liquid he could get it to produce was a nasty thick sludge that did not resemble coffee.
“Fuck-a-bloody-duck!” he muttered under his breath, wishing Malaria would hurry back, so she could at least tell him what to do.
“Problems, Spider?”
Spider ignored him.
Dickhead said, “Listen. About that whole ‘dead woman’ business.”
“What about it?” Spider was reading the prompts on the droid’s screen, but he wasn’t getting the predicted results. What had Malaria done last night? he wondered.
Dickhead said, “Yeah. Had a bit of a word this morning with that detective lady, what’s-her-name, Street? Is that it?” He checked the screen of his watch for verification. “Yeah, that’s it. Bit of all right, she is, I thought. A go-getter. Very Type-A — do people still talk about Type-A personalities these days? I get so caught up in running things I lose track of all the management voodoo. Anyway. Inspector Street.”
Spider had a bad feeling about where this might be going. He focused on the animated instructions the droid showed him, but it wasn’t helping. “Yeah, what about her?”
Dickhead said, “Mmm, yeah. So just what did you tell her last night, Spider?”
He sighed and felt his neck muscles starting to bunch up. His stomach hurt, and he wondered if he wasn’t getting another ulcer. “I just told her what happened. Why, what did she tell you?” Spider, fed up with the coffee droid’s nonsense, decided to start fresh, and for good measure he ran a cycle of clean, bottled water through the machine to try to clean it out. He’d heard that that was sometimes a good idea.
“Not much, actually. Wanted to know all about you.”
“Is that right?” he said, trying to remain calm.
“She seemed to think it very odd that a murder victim should turn up on the premises of a former copper.”
Grinding his teeth now, Spider tried to concentrate on operating the coffee droid. Even with cutesy animated instructions, he knew he was somehow getting it wrong, and Dickhead, typically, wasn’t helping. Concentrate, he told himself.
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 6