by Peter Ward
Tim sat down in a squeaky, high-backed leather chair and looked up at a huge painting of the Defence Minister, which hung above a large open fireplace on the far wall of the office. It depicted the Minister in full robes, standing in the middle of the House of Commons with an ornamental mace in his right hand. The attention to detail in the picture was quite magnificent—you could make out every individual hair on his head, every crease in his clothing, and even get a feel for the texture of his skin. In the bottom corner it was signed Adobe Photoshop version 145.7b. Geoff’s eyes wandered down from the painting to the fireplace below. Unless he was mistaken, it looked as though someone had been burning some papers recently—the crumbly black remains of some sort of document lay smouldering across the glowing pile of logs.
Before Geoff had a chance to look at the papers any closer, the doors to the Defence Minister’s private office opened, and Mr. Knight walked in, followed closely by Ruth. They were both dressed a little more casually than Geoff had seen them in the past, with Ruth wearing blue jeans and a gray sweater and Mr. Knight dressed in brown corduroy trousers and a shirt.
“We got here as quick as we could,” Mr. Knight huffed, taking off his coat and throwing it over the arm of the nearest chair. “Are you going to tell us what’s going on?”
“We’d better wait for the Defence Minister,” Tim said, picking nervously at the leather stitching on his seat. “I think he should hear this as well.”
As if on cue, the Defence Minister suddenly burst into the room carrying a large folder under his arm.
“Right, what’s all this about?” he said, sitting down behind his desk and tossing the folder to one side. “I’m supposed to be on Holovision in half an hour to give an interview about this bloody Time Rep fiasco, and the Prime Minister’s just bawled me out over my defence budget for the next year. This better be good.”
“I’m afraid it’s not good actually,” Tim said, getting to his feet.
“What the hell is he doing here!?” the Defence Minister said, suddenly noticing Geoff standing by the window. “I thought I told you to send all Time Reps back to their native time periods!”
“Geoff’s the reason we’re here,” Tim said quietly, walking over to the desk. “Listen Minister—I think we may have a bit of a problem.”
“Problem?” the Defence Minister said, snapping his head back in Tim’s direction. “What sort of problem?”
“Well, there’s no easy way of saying this,” Tim said, “but we think someone has succeeded in cheating Eric’s algorithm.”
“What?”
“We think someone has changed the space-time continuum.”
“But … but …” the Defence Minister stammered, looking at Mr. Knight, “you told me it was impossible to cheat that computer! You told me the chances were one in a googolplex!”
“David, I …”
The Defence Minister held his hand up to silence Mr. Knight.
“How bad are we talking?”
“How bad?”
“Yes. Quite bad? Reasonably bad?”
“I’d say this is disastrously bad,” Tim said. “This is so bad that we might all disappear from existence any minute.”
“In that case, you won’t mind if I pour myself a drink,” the Defence Minister said, reaching into his bottom desk drawer and pulling out a bottle of brandy. “Start from the beginning.”
Geoff sighed. The beginning? That was going to take ages …
The Defence Minister unscrewed the bottle cap and poured himself a large glass of brown liquid. Geoff could smell the drink from where he was standing—it was so strong he was surprised the paint on the windowsill next to him wasn’t starting to peel.
“Tell me what’s happened,” the Minister said.
It took Tim quite a while to successfully explain everything to the Defence Minister: how the loophole had been exploited, how Geoff had unwittingly brought an invasion forward by two hundred years, and how a Varsarian called “Tringrall” was possibly behind it all, secretly hiding in human form.
“There’s still something I don’t understand,” the Defence Minister said, taking another small sip of his drink. “You’re telling me that if we send Geoffrey back in time with a broken hand, the Varsarians invade two hundred years early?”
“Correct,” Tim sighed.
“And yet if we don’t send him back at all, they still invade two hundred years early?”
“That’s … what the computer thinks.”
“But how is that possible?” Mr. Knight interjected. “If Geoff is somehow responsible for bringing forward the date of an alien invasion, why do they still invade the Earth even if we don’t send him back? Surely he won’t be there to change anything! Shouldn’t everything go back to normal?”
“I think I might have an explanation, sir,” Ruth said, closing her eyes in concentration. The rest of the room looked at her in silence, or at least, the people in the room did.
“Well, let’s hear it,” Mr. Knight said impatiently.
Ruth opened her eyes again.
“It’s simple,” she said. “We must be looking at this the wrong way round.”
“The wrong way round?”
“Think about it. Up until now, we’ve all been talking about Geoff changing something that brought forward the date of the invasion. Isn’t that right, Geoff?”
“That’s right,” Geoff said.
“But what if it’s the other way round?” Ruth continued. “What if the Varsarians had always planned to invade Earth in the twenty-first century, and that Geoff was originally responsible for somehow delaying them?”
“But how?” Mr. Knight said, scrunching his face up like he’d just eaten a fly. He didn’t seem to buy this theory.
“You’d have to ask ‘Tringrall’,” Ruth said, “but I’m guessing he worked out that it had something to do with Geoff’s right hand.”
Geoff looked down at his injured hand in the hope that something would click in the back of his mind. It baffled him how this simple appendage could be responsible for postponing the invasion plans of an entire alien race. How on Earth could his hand have been involved in changing the course of history, when he had enough trouble using it to change his pillow covers?
“So let me get this straight,” the Defence Minister said, finishing his drink and placing the glass down on the desk. “You’re saying that this ‘Tringrall’ character discovered that Geoff was responsible for postponing the Varsarian invasion, which was originally planned for the twenty-first century?”
“Correct,” Ruth said. “And more than that, he must have discovered that it had something to do with Geoff’s hand. That’s why he stabbed Geoff while he was unconscious—he wanted us to send him back to the twenty-first century in a state where he was unable to do whatever it was he originally did that stopped them.”
“It’s a good theory,” Mr. Knight said. “But it still doesn’t really help us, does it? I mean, without details, how are we supposed to know how to change things back?”
“It does make a lot of sense though,” Tim said, stepping forward in Ruth’s defense. “If what she’s saying is true, it would explain why the computer is predicting an invasion even if we don’t send Geoff back. After all, if Geoff was the only reason the aliens delayed their invasion by two hundred years, not sending him back would be just as bad as sending him back with an injured hand—on the one hand, he’s not going to be able to stop them, and on the other hand, he won’t even be there to stop them.”
“Stop talking about hands!” Geoff said.
“OK, so answer me this,” Mr. Knight said. “Why didn’t this ‘Tringrall’ just kill Geoffrey?” His voice used the word ‘kill’ a little too casually for Geoff’s liking. “Wouldn’t that have been easier?”
“Not at all,” Tim said. “Killing Geoff was the last thing he could do.”
“And why’s that exactly?”
“Because the key to this whole pl
ot has been to prevent any changes from registering on the supercomputer, from the moment we were considering Geoff as a Time Rep candidate seven years ago, to the moment we were supposed to send him back to the twenty-first century this afternoon. Tringrall needed to make sure that the computer wouldn’t alert us to Geoff’s true significance, and for that to happen, he needed to exploit the loophole in Eric’s algorithm and keep the final nanosecond looking exactly the same. That’s why he couldn’t kill Geoff—his whole plan hinged on Geoff delivering the message about ‘reverting’ the Earth back to normal at a certain point in time. If that message didn’t get through to the aliens, his plot to change history would have been unraveled the moment the computer calculated the consequences of making Geoff a Time Rep.”
Everyone looked at Geoff for a reaction.
“Told you I wasn’t insignificant,” he winked.
“Tringrall must have worked out how to cheat the algorithm a long time ago,” Ruth continued, turning back to the group, “and if that’s true, we have to consider the possibility that he’s quite a senior figure in this organization, someone with access to the supercomputer, and someone who has successfully concealed his true identity for years. I hate to say it, but it could even be someone in this room.”
Everyone fell silent and looked awkwardly at each other.
Tim looked at Ruth.
Ruth looked at Mr. Knight.
Mr. Knight looked at the Defence Minister.
The Defence Minister looked at Ruth.
Geoff could sense an air of tension in the room, even worse than the time he last went to a board game convention and someone announced that they thought Settlers of Catan was rubbish. He decided to step forward to see if he could diffuse the situation.
“Hey guys,” he said, holding his hands up, “let’s not jump to any conclusions about each other, OK? Right now, we need to be working together, not fighting. After all, for all we know—this ‘Tringrall’ could be someone else, OK?”
Mr. Knight looked round and raised his eyebrows.
“Have you had some sort of brain transplant?” he said.
“No,” Geoff replied. “I’ve just … woken up.”
“Geoff’s right,” Tim said, bringing them back on the subject. “We have to trust each other, but we also need to be very careful. Tringrall is obviously a very dangerous person and obviously very smart. As far as the computer’s concerned, he’s already succeeded in changing the course of history, so whether he’s standing in this room or not as we speak, we’re still in a very precarious situation.”
“So why are we still here?” the Defence Minister said, looking around as if he was suddenly going to disappear. “If history has changed, shouldn’t we be dead?”
“That’s what I asked him earlier!” Geoff said, feeling rather pleased with himself for a moment before questioning why he was congratulating himself for not understanding the same thing as someone else.
“The reason we are all still standing here talking to each other is because there is still a chance to change things back,” Tim said. “You see, two paradoxical timelines can exist alongside each other as long as there is a way to correct things, but if we miss the opportunity to undo whatever it is Tringrall did, the timelines will instantly converge, we will cease to exist, and the Varsarians will win.”
“So what do you suggest we do?” the Defence Minister said, leaning back in his chair.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Me?”
“You’re the Defence Minister,” Tim said. “Since it’s now inevitable that the aliens are going to invade Earth in the twenty-first century whether we choose to send Geoff back or not, I think we’ve got to take the military option.”
“The … military option?”
“Think about it. Our only hope is for you to send Earth’s battle cruisers back in time to confront the Varsarian fleet before they get a chance to attack. We need to go back to the twenty-first century and destroy them before they get a chance to begin their invasion.”
“Are you insane?” the Defence Minister said, standing up out of his chair. “I can’t just mobilize the battle fleet with a click of my fingers! I’d need to run it by the Prime Minister, consult Parliament, hold a ballot …”
“There’s no time for a fucking ballot!” Tim shouted. “Don’t you have some sort of emergency powers for situations like this?”
The Defence Minister slumped back down in his chair and rested his head in his hands.
“What you’re asking of me is very difficult,” he said.
Tim said nothing. Presumably he felt it was best to give the Defence Minister a quiet moment to think.
“Call me stupid,” Geoff chirped, “but couldn’t we just wait for my hand to get better and then send me back?”
The Defence Minister looked up.
“That’s a pretty good idea, actually,” he said.
“Yes, but it’s still a risk,” Tim said. “Even if we send Geoff back in time once his hand has healed, there’s no guarantee that he’ll behave in the same way. We still don’t know exactly what he did to delay the invasion, and for all we know, he might do things differently this time. Besides, this is our chance to wipe the aliens out once and for all. And even if Geoff did succeed in postponing the invasion again, we’ll just be back to square one—Tringrall will live to try and change history some other time, and we may never find out who was really behind all this. We’ve got to go back and destroy them.”
“You’re right,” the Defence Minister sighed. He stood up and walked over to the doorway. “This is our chance to end this, isn’t it?”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” Tim said.
“And it certainly helps me justify my defense budget to the PM,” he added. “When I tell him I needed the cash to help prevent the human race from being erased from existence, he’s hardly going to ask me how much it will cost, is he?”
“That all depends on whether you can convince him we couldn’t have thwarted the invasion by a cheaper means, like running an aggressive leaflet campaign,” Geoff said. “Politicians love a good leaflet campaign …”
“We’re not going to defeat an alien invasion by running a leaflet campaign,” Tim said.
“I know that,” Geoff replied. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”
“Right—follow me,” the Defence Minister said, leading everyone out into the corridor. “We’ll need to take the Ministerial space shuttle into orbit and rendezvous with the fleet.”
Geoff looked at Tim uneasily.
“Did he say ‘space shuttle’?”
Nineteen
Much to Geoff’s amazement, the Ministerial space shuttle was housed vertically inside the clock tower of Big Ben, which looked as though it had been reconstructed to conceal some sort of launch chamber. From the outside, a casual observer wouldn’t have been able to tell any difference to the Houses of Parliament of the twenty-first century, but nonetheless, Geoff assumed that this was probably a new addition to the building, unless the government of the twenty-first century was in the habit of keeping secrets from the general public, perish the thought.
The shuttle itself was quite a remarkable piece of engineering, no bigger than two double-decker buses placed side by side. It had a sleek metallic exterior, a cluster of engines at the base, and a row of windows dotted along either side, leading towards a rounded cockpit at the front. Plumes of steam were being discharged from two smaller engines on the wings, which stuck out like little fins at the rear.
Geoff hesitantly joined the others on an elevation platform and gripped the safety rail as tightly as he could as they hovered up to a hatchway on the side of the shuttle. He didn’t like heights. Down below, various people in brightly colored overalls were preparing for takeoff A few engineers were making adjustments to the engines, others were running through diagnostics on a huge bank of monitors, and some were snaking across the launch chamber with a
large refueling pipe cradled in their arms. In many ways, Geoff felt like he was watching an IndyCar pit stop team in action, except this was hardly comparable to the sensation of watching a race from the comfort of his living room sofa. And even if he had been watching this from the comfort of his living room sofa, he still would have been a bit disturbed by the fact that he was hovering thirty feet in the air, wondering what on Earth a piece of furniture from his house was doing here in the first place.
They were greeted at the hatchway by the ship’s pilot—a middle-aged woman with short blonde hair, thin lips, and a no-nonsense look in her eyes. She stood at just over six feet tall, wore no makeup, and her brilliant white uniform was so pristine it looked as though it was dry-cleaned every six hours. With her in it.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” she said, saluting the Defence Minister as he stepped inside the shuttle. “I have to say this is most unexpected—I didn’t think we had any trips scheduled for today …”
“We didn’t,” the Defence Minister said, climbing into his seat. “An emergency situation has developed. I need you to take us into orbit to rendezvous with the battle fleet immediately.”
“Very good,” the pilot said, offering her hand to the others and helping them into the craft. “We should be ready to launch in a few minutes.”
Everyone had a little difficulty getting into their seats, as the shuttle was pointing up in the air, and by the time Geoff had finally managed to lay back in his seat with his legs in the air, he couldn’t help but feel that he looked like someone who had just fallen down the stairs after a heavy night out.