“You’re the best, I told you that.”
“Yeah, thanks, appreciate it. But the fact is, this thing is still under warranty, right? You could have just taken it into the dealer. God, you could have just looked up the answer yourself!”
James listened to all this, nodded at all the right places, and agreed with everything Spider said. “All true.”
“More to the point, aren’t you, as part of DOTAS, not exactly allowed to talk to me because of the embargo on the murder of the woman in the time machine business? Are you, somehow, for whatever reason, asking for trouble here?”
“The embargo is down to Section Ten. It’s their problem, not mine.” James looked strangely unconcerned by the very serious possible consequences of his actions. It gave Spider the chills.
“Why are you here, James?”
“I—”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, James. Okay? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” James said, putting the Umbra on the floor. “It’s just, I’m not made of money, Spider. You know what the Toshiba dealership wanted to charge me to fix this thing? It’s bloody criminal! So can you blame me for wanting to send a bit of business to a mate, and avoid paying through the nose into the bargain?”
Spider wasn’t buying it. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Bullshit.”
James stared at Spider, hesitated a long moment, thinking hard, then looked away. He said, “What do you know about the Kronos Project?”
This was unexpected, and all the more disturbing for it. He thought for a moment, then hit the tubes and looked it up. “Oh, right. The time probe thing. Is that still going?”
“I consulted on the mission nav package. This was years ago. Very hush-hush.”
“Didn’t know that,” Spider said, wondering how this fit in with everything else, and almost not wanting to find out. Almost.
James nodded. “Yeah. And it is still going. The latest time-fix from it said it was more than three hundred thousand years off in the future. In cruise mode. Going well.”
Spider was amazed at the vast gulf of years. “Found anything interesting?”
James shifted in his seat, his face darkened, and began to look deeply troubled. “I, um, I can’t actually say, Spider.”
Spider felt tingles up his spine; the hairs on the back of his neck stood up straight. “I see,” he said. “The Umbra thing here. That was just an excuse, like I said, right?”
James hunched forward, his eyes closed, his mouth closed tight, and nodded. “Sorry,” he said, mumbling, and stared at the Umbra on the floor as if it were the source of all his troubles. “Things right now… It’s difficult. Really difficult. You have no idea.”
This was a side of James Spider had never seen, and in some ways hoped never to see. He had been comfortable with the way their relationship had been. Not close, but friendly. Mates, but not really friends. It was hard to think about, let alone explain. Still, all that had changed, apparently. Now he found himself sitting with a man who looked like the most troubled man Spider had ever seen. Spider knew James had spent some time in a private psychiatric hospital in the wake of his wife’s death. James had mentioned it once, a long time ago, when they were first getting to know each other. It had been a jarring thing to learn about the man — and so very surprising, too: somehow Spider had always assumed that if you were incredibly smart and capable, an expert in your chosen field, then you were protected, somehow, from mental disorder. Spider’s father had had a history of mental illness; Spider had always worried that he would inherit it. Sometimes, like during those years after he lost everything, he wondered if it had turned up and he never noticed, what with all the other misery in his life.
He wondered what to say to James. “It’s okay, James. If you want to talk…”
“That’s just it,” he said to Spider, and now he showed his true face, a mask of anguish and fear. “I can’t talk about it!”
“Okay,” Spider said, at a loss, worried, wondering what to do. “Can I get you another coffee, maybe?”
“How about just some water?”
Spider was up out of his chair, out of his office, into the break room, in the fridge, grabbing a bottle of cold water, and back in his office again so fast it surprised him. He handed the water to James, who sighed and set it to one side, unopened. Spider sank back into his seat, breathing hard. He offered to open the water for him, and James handed it over, more, Spider thought, to give Spider something to do, to help him feel useful in a confounding situation. As he opened the bottle and handed it back to James, Spider felt a strange urge to thank him.
“So. James.”
He was slumped down in the chair, staring at the Umbra, wretched. “Spider.”
Spider had thousands of questions, but did he dare ask any of them? Did he have any business asking James anything other than, well, would you like me to call you a taxi to go home? There was, after all, no “case”. James was not a suspect, and Spider was not a cop, or an investigator of any kind. Yet the urges, the patterns of thought, the approaches to dealing with people in situations like this, were hard to fight. It was hard, in the end, to simply be a civilian. “Is there, um, anything I can do for you?” he ended up asking.
James said, “I thought, I’ve been thinking, these past few days, I needed to talk to someone. Someone who’d understand. There’s a doctor I see every few months, he’s pretty good, but I can’t talk about work at all. It’s difficult, to say the least. Things at work are, well, you could say they’re a bit tense right now. They’ve got a bit of a witch-hunt going on, the proverbial search for the guilty, a scapegoat, someone whose fault it all is. There are meetings, and meetings about meetings, and quiet, informal ‘chats’, one on one, trying to tease out chains of events, clarifying who did what and when. The whole department, Spider, all of DOTAS, across the country, is caught up in a mad whirl of recrimination, desperately seeking the one officer at whose feet the whole mess can be laid, like a vast electrical storm looking for a good place to discharge. Nothing’s getting done. It’s a madhouse, do you see?”
Stunned, but increasingly worried, Spider took all this in, put it together with the way James looked, the way he was talking, and didn’t like the possible answer. “Are they looking for you, James?” His voice the merest whisper.
James nodded minutely, and his face seemed to crumple, as if under a heavy impact. His eyes filled with tears.
“What did you do?”
There was a long, shuddering silence. Spider felt like he was intruding. James said, “A tiny piece of code, it looked innocent enough, a minor software patch, got included in the Kronos flight management subsystem. It went unnoticed.”
“Oh God, James. What did you do?”
“The probe moves in jumps. Five hundred to a thousand years per jump.”
“So it can spend time at each point, gathering data, making observations. I’ve seen stuff about it on the news.”
James nodded. “Exactly.”
“What does the code do?”
“In the original timeline, Kronos stumbled on something after a particular jump.”
“It found something?” Spider’s pulse quickened.
He nodded. “Something that didn’t want to be found.”
“Shit. What happened?”
James shook his head, not wanting to go any further. He covered his face, took several big gulping breaths. “The timeline had to be altered. The probe’s course had to be changed. It was a simple thing, like I said.”
“The software update patch you mentioned.”
“That’s right.”
“So someone told you to do this?”
“Mmm.”
“And this someone gave you the code?”
James
said nothing. He sat there, face in his hands, weeping silently. “I’m so sorry,” he said, over and over, and it sounded like he meant it.
Spider said, “Look, I’ll call your daughter, she can come and—”
At this, James stared at Spider. “No. Absolutely not. I’m fine.”
“You’re a mess, James. Look at you!”
“Leave Electra out of it. I have no desire for her to see me like this. She’s been through enough.”
Spider leaned back in his chair, his hands up, and said, “Okay. No worries. Sorry. I was just—”
“I’ll be fine, Spider.”
Yeah, sure you will, he thought. “Right. Sorry.”
“Listen,” James said, sniffing and mopping his eyes and face, “there was talk of a fresh coffee?”
“Absolutely. Give me a minute.” He got up and left James to it, which was probably James’s plan all along, the poor bastard. He went into the break room and started up the coffee droid. He called out to Malaria to see if she wanted anything, but she said she was good, thanks.
Fumbling absently with the coffee droid, Spider thought about his options. It appeared James was confessing to sabotaging the Kronos probe’s mission, in order to make it avoid whatever it was it had stumbled across somewhere out in the future, in a “previous timeline”. Someone told him to do it, and gave him the means to make it happen. Suppose for a moment, he thought, that James was telling the truth. This was huge. James had to go to the authorities. At minimum he would have to tell DOTAS.
And yet, Spider was also thinking, it was all pretty far-fetched. James, he was sorry to think, might not be telling the truth. Maybe he wasn’t aware he was lying. Could this be attention-seeking behavior? Was he trying to overcome the grim reality that for all his engineering prowess and expertise in the field of time machines, these days he was a boring public servant in a government department? He hated thinking about James this way.
Then again, he thought, we are living in strange times. All manner of weird stuff does go on. Spider could testify to that personally.
So what Spider needed, he thought, was a way to verify James’s extraordinary story. He did know a few other people at the Perth DOTAS office. He could make some calls.
At this point Spider stopped himself. You’re not a copper anymore, Spider, he told himself, again. It’s not your job to find out whether James is or isn’t lying, or whether he’s a saboteur. The fact is that James has a bulletproof reputation for integrity. For God’s sake, the man was in on the legendary construction of Time Machine 2.0, nearly twenty years ago! So what makes more sense: that James sabotaged the Kronos Project at the behest of mysterious others from the future, or that the man’s still messed up, years after his wife killed herself? Spider had heard about families where one parent had taken their own life; the rest of the family, confused, hurt, shocked, and angry, sometimes never recovered.
Spider finished making the coffees. These ones turned out far better than he expected. Maybe, he thought, he was getting the hang of the damn thing.
Then Spider heard something happening just outside. He caught a glimpse of James through the break room doorway, on the move. He heard Malaria call out to him, “Mr. Rutherford?” Spider went out to the front office, saw James outside, getting into his car. Spider went after him. “James!” James shot him a stricken look through the windscreen of his car, then drove off, tires squealing. “James!”
Malaria joined Spider outside. “What happened?”
Spider checked his phone patch, popped his watchtop, and called James’s number. Nothing. No reply. “Shit!”
“Spider?” Malaria asked. “Is everything…”
He shook his head, feeling tired and sad, wishing he could help his friend. “I wish I knew,” he said.
CHAPTER 11
All the rest of that day, Spider tried to concentrate on work — doing his best to lift those droopy KPIs — but all he could think about was that meeting with James. He’d tried now several times to reach him by phone without result. He’d left messages on the system at James’s apartment. Once, late in the day, he got a call back from Electra, James’s daughter. “Dad’s not in. Take the bloody hint.” That was all she said, and went away.
“That was odd,” Spider said, more to himself than to anybody else.
Charlie, working in the next service bay, called over to him, “What’s up?”
Spider had told Charlie an edited version of James’s visit — that James wasn’t well. Work troubles. Charlie had nodded his head, understanding, and commented that James had looked “pretty rough” the other day, when they were taking the Tempo apart in the Bat Cave.
“Just trying to reach James again. Got his daughter instead. Strange girl.”
“Never had the pleasure,” Charlie said.
“I’ve only met her a few times. Years ago you would have called her a goth, but even that wouldn’t cover the full catastrophe that is Electra Rutherford.”
“My mum used to be a goth,” Charlie said, laughing. “I’ve seen pictures. Very moody, all in black. Now she laughs and says she has no idea what she was thinking at the time.”
Spider only half-heard what Charlie said. He was going over and over the things James had told him, trying to see if at any point he, Spider, could have handled things better. As a policeman, years ago, he’d been expected to help people in distress if necessary, if no other more qualified personnel were around. It was tough work, and he’d always felt out of his depth, trying to talk to guys wasted on meth beating up their girlfriends or wives, or depressed kids trying to kill themselves. What do you say to someone who just wants you to go away so they can get on with their self-destruction? James wasn’t quite like that: Spider had a clear sense that James wanted to tell Spider everything, that he’d been carrying this awful burden around for so long he was exhausted, and just wanted to put it down, or better, give it to someone, and Spider looked like just the guy.
Spider had had one crazy thought, during the course of the afternoon, as he tried to make sense of James’s confessions. The man had gone to some trouble to wrap the whole confession in passive voice, to leave out all trace of responsibility and agency, of who did what when and to whom, but as far as Spider could see, at some point during the pre-launch phase of the Kronos Project, James had met someone — Spider was betting it had been a woman — who had convinced him to do this one little favor for her, in return for, what? Sex? Money? Good times? All so the probe would not stumble across something or someone way off in the future getting up to, he was guessing, no good.
Spider wondered what the name “Zeropoint” might mean to James. Even standing there, up to his waist in disassembled time machine componentry, tools, and system manuals, Spider felt chills up and down his spine at the mere thought of that name. It was spooky, irrational. How could a name evoke such a reaction? Particularly a name he’d never heard before that night with his ill-fated Future Self.
Yeah, and you saw what happened to him, didn’t you, Spider? he thought, shuddering.
Spider was so preoccupied with his concerns that he never noticed when close of business arrived for the day. When Charlie knocked off and said good night, Spider hardly heard him. In the end, Malaria had to come down to his service bay and tap him on the shoulder — which caused Spider to jump, startled, his heart racing, and drop his multi-tool. “Oh, Malaria, hi.”
“Hi yourself, boss. Thought you’d like to know it’s time to go home?”
Home? Spider thought, then remembered he was staying at Iris’s apartment. The prospect of another restless, sleepless night stretched before him. “Right,” he said to Malaria, and started packing up his tools and gear, securing all the bits and pieces of this particular time machine. “Thanks. God, I’ve been away with the fairies today!” He shook his head, smiling ruefully. “Need to get some decent sleep.”
Malaria nodded, shrugged, and said good night, see you tomorrow, and was off. Soon he heard her electric scooter boot up and she was gone, leaving him to lock up for the night.
Later, full of nasty indigestion after something cheap and crappy he’d eaten for dinner on the way home, Spider let himself into Iris’s apartment. A video message on the wall informed him that she was out at another incident, and didn’t know what time she’d be back. He wondered if even now she still remembered Clea Fassbinder. There was another video message, autoforwarded from the shop, from Dickhead McMahon, who in typical fashion managed to fill the entire wall with his face. McMahon was in his enormous SUV, tooling along a freeway somewhere, talking to the camera on the dashboard. “Spider, ah, something’s come up, we need to talk ASAP, when you’ve got a moment. Um, oh yeah, it’s not your key-point indicator thing. Something else. Kinda worried about you, mate. Police asking all kinds of weird questions — can you do something about that since you’re sleeping with that inspector woman? That’d be great. Okay, thanks. Cheers!” The message ended, to be replaced by the service logo, which then vanished also, and was replaced by the usual clutter of Iris’s display wall.
Spider was furious. “I’m not sleeping with Iris Street!” he shouted at the wall, too late. He muttered and ranted and kicked the couch — Iris’s couch, he remembered, again, too late. The couch survived, but Spider was still pissed off. He put in a call to Dickhead. The boss was unavailable, but if Spider would like to leave a message…
Spider left a message. It took several minutes. When he ran it back on preview, he thought he looked like a crazy person ranting about UFOs or some damn thing, so he deleted it and tried again, more calmly. “Hey Dickhead. Look, um, I’m not actually, er, contrary to your suggestion, I’m not actually sleeping with Inspector Street, all right? Have you got that? She’s just letting me crash here ’cause my own place, well, you know about that, huh? My future self got killed the other night? Anyway, I’ll be at the shop tomorrow. Any time you want to stop by for a chat, fine. See you then.” He signed off and sent the message, still angry. The idea that he and Iris were involved, and that Dickhead could somehow use that relationship to subvert some investigation? He shook his head, trying to clear it. It had been a long, strange day. He went to bed early, feeling tired.
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 13