“Right. Step One. Grind the damn beans. How hard can it be to grind beans?” he said, as if his life depended on it, and dumped fresh beans in the grinding hopper. The automatic grinder started up with a loud shriek, which was over almost as soon as it started. Spider thought he must have done something wrong, but no. The beans were done. They smelled wonderful. “What else did she have to say?”
He glanced behind him to look at Dickhead, and just as he expected, the idiot was enjoying Spider’s discomfiture. He was also rocking back on his chair. These chairs were cheap plastic lawn furniture, all the office budget could afford, and Spider knew from his own embarrassing experience that they would crumple under you without any warning and leave you sprawled on the floor. So far Dickhead, as huge as he was, had managed to find some magical balance point that supported his entire mass without collapsing. It was the luck of the oblivious.
Spider followed the onscreen help, triggered the next stage in the cycle, and hoped for the best. He thought he might be on the right track this time.
Dickhead said, “She wanted to know where I found you, what you were doing at the time.”
“Where you found me? What am I, a lost kitten?”
“Worry not, son. I’ve told her nothing but the truth, and the truth is good.”
“The truth? You told her the truth?” This was not good news.
Dickhead laughed, and his great bulk jiggled. “No, not the actual, you know, biblical truth. God, no, Spider. I bullshitted her, told her what she wanted to hear, and you mark my words, you won’t have any more trouble from her, you can take it from me. I told her you’re my ace technician, that you have a unique gift for fixing busted time machines, and that I should probably pay you more than I do.”
“You really did bullshit her,” Spider said, surprised at this unexpected loyalty from his boss. The coffee droid produced a cardboard cup and slotted it under the nozzle. A peculiar whirring occurred deep within the machine, followed by a very wet sound, and plumes of steam rose from vents. The steam smelled good.
“Reading between the lines, Spider, I kind of had the feeling she was thinking about you as maybe a suspect, or at least a person of interest, as they say. That kind of thing de rigeur with your lot?”
“I wouldn’t know, Dickhead,” he said, not wanting to talk about it.
Spider’s career in the Western Australian Police Service had not gone the way he wanted. The first decade, as he worked his way up from constable to senior constable to sergeant, had been fine. His evaluations stated that he was well regarded by his peers, that he had a good attitude, and that he was detail-oriented. It was an interesting life, with a fair amount of variety, and, once he entered the realm of merit-based promotions, he found himself doing well. He made detective senior sergeant at thirty-seven years of age, and was seen as a capable officer with a bright future.
But his competence led him into the problem: two officers from the Internal Affairs Center approached him one day with a job offer — they were mounting an operation investigating the unauthorized use of the then-new technology of time travel by certain members of the WAPOL. Was he interested? Spider was interested — in those days the idea of time travel seemed very exciting and interesting, even a bit glamorous. They told him that he had been recommended for this job by his current boss, Inspector Christopher “Dracula” Lee, who spoke highly of Spider’s abilities, particularly his capacity for impartial investigation.
Flattered, Spider had asked what he would have to do. The job involved following designated target personnel in what was known as “ghost mode.” The officers in question, informants had told them, were conducting various activities via time travel, and it was now time to see if these claims were true. The idea was not to arrest these officers so much as to document their activities. All Spider had to do was follow along, invisible, armed with high-tech vid recording gear, going wherever — and whenever — his targets went.
In the course of this work, Spider had learned the following things:
(a) that he had to follow his boss’s boss, Superintendent Sharp;
(b) Superintendent Sharp was traveling back in time to various points around the turn of the nineteenth-to-twentieth centuries, and meeting up with certain fellow officers;
(c) these senior officers, in period costume, and not in any way pretending to be police officers, were molesting small children.
Spider got it all on video. It was hideous, terrifying, sickening work. He nearly quit the investigation. Molly told him that no matter what he’d learned, he had a duty to keep going, so he did.
Soon enough, the Internal Affairs officers told him they could let him go back to regular duties, but that he had done well enough that if an opening should appear in IAC, Spider should consider applying. More important, though, no one would ever know it had been Detective Senior Sergeant Webb who had followed Sharp and his mates around with a camera. Spider asked about this a lot. While the Service had a stated policy of protecting whistleblowers, and a determination to investigate all claims of corruption and impropriety by its officers in a thorough fashion, Spider was still terrified that his role in the operation would leak out. Molly told him he was being silly and paranoid.
His name leaked. He never found out who leaked it, but the whole thing became public knowledge within the WAPOL. Superintendent Sharp and his buddies resigned in disgrace, were put on trial, were convicted, and were sent to prison for their crimes. They did not do well in prison. Spider started getting letters in the mail. They were not direct threats, but they felt like threats. One contained a detailed breakdown of Molly’s movements over one day, with photos. Another contained photos of Spider’s mum and dad going about their daily business. It turned out, one letter told him, that Superintendent Sharp was appealing his conviction. Spider should think about his priorities, the letter said.
He talked to Inspector Lee, who sent him back to the Internal Affairs Center. They told him he should hold firm. His work on the operation was first-rate, as they told him before. If he resigned over these veiled threats, Sharp would likely win his appeal, and might even consider suing Spider for anything Sharp’s high-powered lawyer could think of. He’d be ruined. So Spider hung on. It wasn’t easy. His marriage got a bit rocky. Nobody touched Molly or his parents, but he worried himself into an ulcer. He slept poorly. Every odd sound outside, every unusual observation his parents reported, made him jumpy and fearful.
The crisis passed in time. Sharp’s conviction was upheld. He died in prison; it was messy.
Spider was sent to work in the Traffic Warden State Management Unit. They told him he was the man best qualified for the position, but nobody there wanted him, he could tell from the distinctly chilly manner of every single person he met. Spider resolved to tough it out, to do the best damn job he could do, and if that meant making sure the state’s traffic-warden-controlled crosswalks were as safe as humanly possible, then that’s what he would do. Yet nothing he tried, no initiatives, no ideas, no suggestions, ever made it into policy. It was frustrating, knowing he was being punished, but unable to prove it. Everyone treated him professionally, but no one wanted to be his friend. No one wanted to have lunch together, or to have a drink after work on Friday evenings. They destroyed Spider slowly, bit by bit, the death of a thousand small cuts. He never rose higher than his current rank, no matter how well he performed.
“But I did the right thing!” he told Molly.
“Maybe you should have said no, did you think of that?” she said to him.
He resigned from the Service six months later. The only written references he could get were the sort that stated Spider had worked in the following capacities and positions at these times. There was never any comment about how well he had performed, the quality of his character, no recommendations to future employers that Spider would make a model employee.
A year late
r, unemployed and unemployable, as if the entire city of Perth somehow knew that Spider was a traitor, a rat, just waiting to screw over anyone who hired him, he found himself in that Northbridge pub one night, nursing the one beer he could afford that day. He was a wreck, and looked it. He met a guy who insisted Spider call him “Dickhead,” and who offered him a job. It would mean going to TAFE to get qualified, but Dickhead would pay for that. Spider would just have to do the three years, then a year as an apprentice. It was good work, technical, well-paying, and plenty of it. Spider asked this strange man, “Doing what exactly?”
“Time machines, Spider. Time machines are the future.”
“Cool,” he said, and that was that.
It was the kind of thing, he often reflected these days, that anybody else would try to fix using a time machine. All he’d have to do was go back to when those two Internal Affairs guys approached him, and make sure his earlier, eager-beaver self refused the offer. “Just tell them you’re very happy working homicides, but thanks for the offer.” It would be easy. Except, of course, nothing about time travel is easy. Worse, Spider knew that all of Superintendent Sharp’s former minions — and yes, he did have minions, men and women who did what Sharp told them to do, who had looked the other way while he and his mates had jaunted about in the past, destroying children’s lives — now also had access to time machines. If Spider even thought about trying to give his earlier self a little help, he could quite possibly be erased from history, all of history.
Meanwhile, back in the present, quite outside Spider’s awareness, actual, good coffee was quietly dripping into the cup. He’d done it. He’d really done it! “Oh,” he said, surprised, finding himself back in the break room, standing in front of a coffee machine. This was a triumphant moment, and at any other time it would have been something to celebrate, but not right now. The memory of his final days in the Police Service, even after all this time, was still bitter, so bitter he could hardly talk about it.
Dickhead, drawn by the heavenly vapors, got up and came over to the coffee droid to inspect Spider’s handiwork. “Good man,” he said, squeezing Spider aside.
Spider raged and stopped short of hitting the man. Instead he left the room, and walked out of the workshop and filled his lungs with fresh air. It felt good. He would not go back in there. Dealing with Dickhead was too much to ask, at least right now. He wasn’t up to it.
Dickhead, who was called that for a reason, appeared at the front door behind Spider, and called out. “Hey, this is fucking decaf! You trying to poison me, Spider?”
At that very moment Malaria pulled up on her electric scooter. Her towering frame made the scooter look tiny, a toy, something a clown in a circus would ride for laughs. Dickhead spotted Malaria, said, “Oooh,” tipped out his coffee and went to put the moves on her. “Well, hello!” he said in the tone he used on “the ladies.”
He said to her, “We’ve not previously met. I’m Dickhead McMahon, kind of the big cheese around here, you might say. I take it you’re Malaria, is that right?”
Spider, meanwhile, felt wretched. He wanted to call Iris Street and find out just what the hell was going on, and if he was indeed a suspect in the dead woman’s murder. He wanted to tell her a few choice things, some home truths, things he knew but was forbidden to talk about. Maybe she should watch her own back, he thought.
He reached into his pocket for his packet of phone patches; he was down to his last three. It would be the easiest thing in the world to stick one under his ear and call Street, and have a quiet word. His hand curled around the packet, and he pulled it out. There they were, the three adhesive patches, each no bigger than a ten-cent coin, and each bristling with more computing power than the big desktop computers he remembered from his childhood. He peeled one off, stuck it under his ear, got a dial tone, then popped his watchtop open and found Street’s phone address. Spider could hardly stand, he was so nervous and angry. With a stylus in his shaking hand he touched Street’s address on the screen of his watch, and heard her phone ringing. A voice in his head was screaming at him to hang up, hang up now, this won’t get you anywhere, it’ll only make you look guilty — and then that same voice saying that maybe he wanted to be guilty, maybe he’d had enough, maybe—
Street picked up, “Street, hello.” Her voice was brisk, all-business, no time to waste chatting. He could hear jingling bike traffic and car horns blaring in the background. She was outside, walking somewhere.
He closed his eyes, but said nothing, hating himself.
Street said, “Hello? Is that you, Spider?” She sounded astonished.
He’d forgotten that she would know who was calling. He flapped his mouth, dumbstruck.
“Spider, is that you? Are you okay?”
It was like a kick in the guts. She sounded actually concerned, as if she cared how he might be doing.
He killed the link, and stood there, breathing hard.
Behind him, Dickhead had employed his zone-of-control powers again to block Malaria from going into the office. He was trying to get her to agree to a date.
Malaria told him, “No, I don’t think so, I’m sorry, um, sir.” She managed to squeeze past him into the office. Spider saw her through a window, shuddering in disgust.
Dickhead laughed, genuinely amused, and followed her inside. Spider watched them. Malaria had done well in her first encounter with him, but he had a hunch he would have to keep an eye on his boss.
Spider went around to the rear of the workshop where Charlie was stripping the engine compartment from a Tempo that belonged to a certain Mr. Thwait. “Need a hand?” Spider said.
“Nah, I think I got it. Looks like blown circuit-breakers, after all that.”
“You’re kidding,” Spider said, amazed despite himself.
“We can probably send her back this afternoon. What do you reckon?”
Spider did not relish the prospect. It would mean either time-traveling the unit back to just after Spider and Charlie had towed it away, and then driving it to Mr. Thwaite’s home, or driving it there first, and then time-traveling it while sitting in his driveway or his garage. Either way, it meant a jump of, he thought, eight days there and eight days back again. It would be great if he could just get Charlie to handle it, but he knew Dickhead’s policy: it made a better impression on the client if the senior technician brought the unit back. It was good for repeat business, and good word-of-mouth. Even better if Spider wore his official monogrammed white lab coat. Dickhead told him to think of the lab coat as a theatrical costume, that it was all part of delivering the right user experience to the client.
Spider didn’t see why Mr. Thwaite couldn’t come and pick up his own bloody time machine, but he knew what Dickhead would say.
He chatted with Charlie a while, and told him about Dickhead being a dickhead. Charlie said, grinning, “Better you than me, boss.”
Spider was starting to feel a bit better. In that respect, Charlie was a great guy to have around.
Charlie said at one point as he was rebuilding the circuit-breaker panel, “You going to call that Vincent guy about how we blew up his Tempo?”
Spider muttered under his breath, but he knew Charlie was right. He’d been putting it off. The thing was, though, now that he thought about it, the way the police had taken everything away with them for forensic examination and so forth, they would almost certainly have already called Mr. Vincent to tell him about the state of his time machine, the technical term being “smithereens.” In a logical universe, Spider thought, pursuing a dangerous line of thought, that meant that Mr. Vincent should have been on the phone to him already, furious about his smithereened Tempo, and threatening not to pay up. But Malaria had told him of no such calls.
So, the thing’s a significant financial investment for the guy, and he’s not hopping mad about it blowing up? Sure, he might have insurance, which
would ease the sting a little — assuming the insurance company would pay up over such unique circumstances — hell, the more he thought about it, the more he came to believe that any insurance company worth their weight in policy jargon would say that what had been done with that particular Tempo was very much in the realm of “not covered by this policy.” Spider imagined Mr. Vincent’s grinning-idiot face on learning about all of this.
Hmm. Spider certainly knew how he would feel if told that his many-thousand-dollar time machine had been smithereened and his insurance would not cover it.
So why had Mr. Vincent not called? Where was the threat of a lawsuit? For that matter, where was the shoebox full of dogshit?
Charlie noticed Spider looking troubled. “Okay there, boss?”
“I need to call a man about a time machine.”
CHAPTER 7
The rest of that week at the workshop dragged on like a toothache. Every morning when Spider arrived at the workshop, he stood there in the doorway, looking at the service bays, each one occupied by a time machine needing some damn thing done with it, and he felt himself die a little. There was no satisfaction in this line of work, no glory, no real sense of accomplishment, as if you were making some kind of difference to things. Busted time machines came in, and fixed ones went out. Average workshop time-per-unit was eight working days. Bouncing back and forth through time, delivering fixed units, apparently immediately after taking them away, gave Spider headaches and weird dreams that freaked him out in the depths of the night. Too many times, he’d woken up screaming with frustration. Too many times, guys in adjacent capsules would bang on the sides or yell at him to Shut the fuck up we’re trying to sleep over here! and he’d yell back that he was sorry, and he was sorry, though he could never remember a single detail about those dreams. That was time travel bullshit all over, though, wasn’t it? Stuff happened, and then it didn’t happen, or something else happened instead. Your memories were constantly sorting and re-sorting themselves behind your consciousness. What you remembered and believed about your past on Tuesday you no longer believed on Wednesday, and you had no memory of believing anything else.
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 7