by Alex Scarrow
Then the monitors ickered back on and the ceiling light zzed, blinked and bathed the archway in its cold blue glare once more.
Cartwright giggled joyously. ‘Good God! That was it?
Wasn’t it?’
Maddy nodded slowly. ‘Yeah … I think it was.’ She looked at him accusingly. ‘You should’ve been outside our eld. You should have been out there with your people. This messes things up. This –’
‘But I wasn’t outside,’ he said calmly. ‘So why don’t you just get over it?’
‘You don’t understand … you’ve been writ en out of the present. I’ve got no idea what that means to you or –’
‘That suits me ne,’ he smiled.
Sal noticed the blinking cursor was back on-screen and al of a sudden it occurred to her what Bob was al of a sudden it occurred to her what Bob was desperately trying to tel Maddy.
‘Maddy!’ she cried, pointing at the monitors. ‘You need to look!’
Maddy turned to glance over her shoulder. ‘Oh no!’ She turned back to Cartwright. ‘GET OUT OF THERE!’
His wiry brow furrowed. ‘Uh? What’s up?’
‘MOVE!’ she screamed.
The displacement machine’s hum changed in tone as stored-up energy prepared to be released.
‘LOOK!’ shouted Maddy, pointing to the ground at Cartwright’s feet. He looked down, wondering what was so special about a chalk circle and, within, a smal irregular section of the grubby concrete oor scooped out and …
‘OH GOD, CARTWRIGHT, GET OUT!’
It happened in nanoseconds, the instant appearance of a sphere of energy around the old man. Most of him was inside, al but his left hand.
Sal thought she saw in that eeting moment dark shapes swirling around him like demons or ghosts, a window on to some world that an uneducated person, a superstitious person, someone from the Dark Ages, might have cal ed Hel .
Then he was swept away. Gone.
The sphere pulsed and shimmered, and now she could see what appeared to be an undulating Texas-blue sky, and an arid and drab landscape … and the wavering outline of a shape stepping through. Liam staggered into view with a distinct look of nausea on his face, and a moment later the distinct look of nausea on his face, and a moment later the sphere of supercharged tachyon particles vanished with a soft pop of rushing air.
‘Jeez, that was an odd one,’ he said queasily, bending over, nauseous and heaving.
‘Liam!’ yelped Maddy. ‘Oh my God … I thought you were going to get al mushed up with Cartwright! I …’
He raised a hand to hush her. ‘Just a second, just a second … I’m gonna –’
He threw up on the oor and on to the stil -twitching hand Cartwright had left behind.
Sal rushed over to him. ‘Liam? You OK?’
He wiped his mouth and looked up at her with his bloodshot eye. ‘I … I just … I’m al right now.’ He straightened up and looked down in disgust at the hand and the acrid-smel ing puddle at his feet. ‘That wasn’t like I’m used to. That one felt real y odd, so it did.’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I’m not sure what happened. Cartwright was standing in the circle. I forgot the countdown was due.’ There were tears in her eyes, running down her cheeks. ‘Oh God, Liam, I thought you were going to end up a twisted mess with him and …’
‘Wel …’ Liam rubbed his mouth dry and grinned. ‘I’m al right now, aren’t I?’ He spread his hands and looked down at himself. ‘Or have I got an extra arm or something stuck on the back of me head?’
She nodded, wiped her eyes and laughed. ‘No … no, you’re just ne as you are.’
‘Did it work?’ asked Liam. ‘Has anyone looked outside?’
‘Did it work?’ asked Liam. ‘Has anyone looked outside?’
‘I think a time wave came,’ said Laura, looking at Sal for con rmation.
‘That’s right.’ Sal nodded. ‘I’l go see.’
She turned back to the entrance, hit the but on and the shut er slowly began to crank up. They gathered around the rising corrugated shut er and as it lurched to a halt they stepped outside into the dark night.
Manhat an glistened brightly across the Hudson, a towering wedding cake of lights. A commuter train rumbled overhead along the Wil iamsburg Bridge, and the evening was l ed with the soothing white noise of far-o tra c and the echoing wail of a police siren.
‘Normal New York,’ said Liam. He pu ed out a weary sigh. ‘That was a bleedin’ mess and a half we got out of, so it was.’
Sal reached out and hugged him tightly, embarrassed by the tears rol ing down her cheeks. She squeezed him in a self-conscious way, just like anyone might a big brother, and then let him go.
‘But here we are again,’ she whispered.
They watched New York in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts for a long while.
Maddy stirred. ‘I bet er go and sort out the return window for the support –’ she corrected herself – ‘for Becks.’ She turned and headed back inside.
The rest of them savoured the evening panorama, watching beads of car headlights edging forward along FDR Drive across the river, and a ferry cut ing the mirrored FDR Drive across the river, and a ferry cut ing the mirrored re ection of Manhat an with its wake. Final y, it was Edward who stated the obvious as-yet-un nished business.
‘Me and Laura, we got to go back, don’t we? To get things back to the way they were?’
‘Yes,’ Liam nodded. ‘But I don’t suppose it has to be tonight.’
‘Good,’ whispered Laura, ‘I’m not feeling so good.’
‘We’ve got some beds back inside,’ said Sal. She looked at the girl and the Chinese boy. Both looked pale and il , their faces smudged with a fortnight’s worth of grime. And Liam … She realized he looked disconcertingly old and young at the same time with that streak of white hair at his temple.
‘I’l go make some co ee,’ she said.
CHAPTER 79
65 mil ion years BC, jungle
Becks watched the pyre of logs and branches burn. Amid curling tongues of ame she could just about make out the outline of the several dozen bodies she’d stacked on top. The log bridge was gone now, its counterweight device dismantled like their windmil and tossed on the re as kindling. The palisade, the lean-tos, al gone as wel . The assorted rucksacks, basebal caps, jackets, mobile phones that had own back into the past, al of them tossed on the re.By morning those things would be nothing more than soot or contorted puddles of plastic that would eventual y break down over tens of thousands of years into minute untraceable contaminants.
Her computer mind took a moment to make a detailed audit of al the other items of forensic evidence that marked their two-week stay here. The human bodies she’d been unable to retrieve: Franklyn, Ranjit and Kel y. Of those, only Franklyn had died in a location that would one day yield fossils, and even then it was statistical y unlikely that his body was going to be preserved in a way that would produce anything. A corpse needed to be almost immediately covered by a layer of sediment to stand a immediately covered by a layer of sediment to stand a chance of that. Those three bodies, wherever they lay, were exposed to the elements, to scavengers. Bul ets and casings lit ered the clearing. But they too would soon become unidenti able nuggets of rust in this humid jungle. Perhaps, a hundred years from now, no more than stains of oxidized soil on the jungle oor. She was satis ed that the sheer weight of time and natural processes would wipe their presence clean. There was always the remote possibility that a footprint or the unnatural scar of an axe blade on a tree trunk might just, somehow, become an immortalized impression on a fragment of rock. But the probability factors she crunched yielded an acceptable contamination risk.
Her partial y healed stomach wound had ripped open as she’d laboured on the funeral pyre, but a dark plug of congealing scab prevented any further valuable blood leaking out of her. The dressing on her arm had also unwound earlier, revealing red-raw muscle tissue and bone. A layer of skin over the top of that
would have o ered her damaged limb some protection – instead the fragile workings of her arm were now clogged with dirt and twigs and leaves and al manner of bugs. An infection advisory ashed quietly in the background of her mind, along with several others that warned her that her biological combat chassis had su ered enough damage to warrant immediate medical at ention. As she watched tongues of orange lash up into the Cretaceous night sky towards a moon a hat size too big, she detected the rst towards a moon a hat size too big, she detected the rst precursor particles of the scheduled window and stepped towards the open ground where it was due to open. She looked back one last time at the re and picked out the dark twisted limbs of the hominid species amid the ames. For a moment she felt something she couldn’t identify: sadness, was it? Guilt? Al she knew was that it came from a part of her mind that didn’t organize thoughts into mission priorities and strategic options. A sphere of churning air suddenly winked into existence in front of her and calmly, impassively, she stepped forward through sixty-ve mil ion years into a dimly lit brick archway.
The rst face her eyes registered through the shimmering was Liam O’Connor’s. He smiled tiredly and she momentarily wondered if his mind was ashing the human equivalent set of damage advisory warnings.
‘Welcome home, Becks,’ he said softly and then, without any warning, he clasped his arms around her. ‘We did it!’
he mut ered into her ear.
She processed the curious gesture and her silicon swiftly came back with the recommendation that returning the demonstration of a ection would be an acceptably appropriate response. Her good arm closed around his narrow shoulders.
‘A rmative, Liam … we did it.’
CHAPTER 80
2001, New York
Monday (time cycle 50)
They stayed for a few days, Edward and Laura. Maddy said they were probably su ering some sort of radiation sickness from the lab explosion and needed some rest and recuperation. It was nice to have some new faces around here for a while, anyway. But Maddy said they had to go. She was right, of course. They had things to do, lives to go and lead.
But not long lives … not Edward, anyway.
I read his le on our computer. This is so sad. He wil write his great maths paper in 2029 that wil change the world, and he’l be just twenty-two when he does that. But then he’l be dead from cancer before his twenty-seventh birthday.
Cancer at twenty-seven?
That seems so unfair. Twenty-seven years isn’t a life. It’s just a taster of life, isn’t it? I know I couldn’t have told him that and, even if I could, would it have been fair to tel him? Would anyone want to know the exact day they were going to die? I know I wouldn’t.
We were going to send them back to 2015; that was the original plan. But Maddy gured that wasn’t going to original plan. But Maddy gured that wasn’t going to work: they’ve both seen too much; they both know too much. Maybe that’s not so important for the girl Laura. Maybe her life isn’t ever going to a ect the world that much. But Chan … he’s everything the future’s going to be. It al kind of starts with what he’s going to one day write in a paper.
So what did we do? We left them outside when the eld reset. We watched with the shut er open. We watched time come and take them away. Reality just erased them, like someone deleting les o a computer. Maddy says she’s pret y sure that’s going to make things al right again. Reality wil bring them back. They’l be born once more, like al the other kids who died; they’l be born … be babies, toddlers, kids, teenagers a second time. Only this time they’l visit some energy lab in 2015 and then get to go home and tel their mums and dads what a total y boring day trip they had.
Wel , at least that’s what we’re hoping.
And what about the person, whoever that was, who tried to kil Edward? I suppose we’l know whether history’s been changed enough that he or she makes some di erent choices. If we get the same message again from the future … then, wel , we’l have to deal with this al over again, won’t we? Hopeful y not.
We just have to wait and see if this xes everything. Nothing’s certain. Nothing’s nal.
‘Everything’s uid’… that’s Maddy’s phrase. What does that real y mean?
that real y mean?
So, the female support unit, Becks (stil trying to get used to that name), is stil healing. Those creatures real y messed her arm up by the look of it. Bob says the regrown skin wil probably show a lot of scarring, and the muscles and tendons may never be ful y functional again. Which led to an argument between Maddy and Liam.
Maddy suggested ushing the body and growing a new support unit, one of the big tough male ones. But Liam got angry. He said ‘she deserves bet er’.
I don’t know what I think. After al , they’re just organic robots, aren’t they? And whatever knowledge her AI picked up would be saved, right?
But Liam says there’s more to them than just the computer … there’s something else in there, something human-like in their heads. So maybe he’s right. It does seem unfair to do that to her. After al , it seems she did real y wel .
Anyway, she’s got a name … I mean, how can you just ush something away that’s got, like, a name? It’s wrong, isn’t it?
Seems like the argument’s al set led now, though. Looks like we’re keeping her but also growing another Bob. Maddy said there seemed to be nothing in the ‘how to’ manual that says we can’t have two support units. So why not?
CHAPTER 81
2001, New York
The old man was sit ing on the park bench and throwing nuggets of dough from the crusty end of a hot-dog bun to a strut ing pack of impatient pigeons.
‘I knew I’d nd you here,’ said Maddy.
He looked up at her and smiled a greeting. She closed her eyes and turned her face up towards the clear blue September sky and for a moment savoured the warmth of the sun on her pal id cheeks.
‘Unobscured sun and a good hot dog … that’s what you said,’ she added, ‘and where else in Manhat an’s forest of skyscrapers are you going to get that?’
Foster laughed drily. ‘Clever girl.’
She opped down on the park bench next to him.
‘We’ve real y missed you. I’ve missed you.’
‘It’s only been a few hours,’ he said, tossing another doughy nugget out among the birds.
‘What? It’s been months –’
‘Yes, but for me,’ he said, ‘just a few hours.’ He looked at her. ‘Remember, I’m out of the loop now. I’m out of the time bubble. I said goodbye to you on a Monday morning.’
He looked down at his watch. ‘And now it’s nearly one o’clock on the very same Monday.’
o’clock on the very same Monday.’
She shook her head. ‘Yes, of course. Stupid of me. I knew that.’
They sat in silence for a while and watched a toddler on reins at empt to scare away the pigeons by stamping her lit le feet. The birds merely gave her a wide berth as she ambled through and then returned, to hungrily resume pecking at the crumbs of bread on the ground in her wake.
‘You hinted you’d be here, didn’t you? When we parted?’
Foster nodded. ‘I suppose I felt a lit le guilty leaving you so soon.’ He pu ed out his sal ow cheeks. ‘But I’m dying, Maddy. I won’t last very much longer.’
‘The tachyon corruption?’
‘Yes. It plays merry havoc at a genetic level. It’s like a computer virus, rewriting lines of code with gibberish. Out here,’ he sighed, ‘outside the time bubble, I might get a lit le longer to live. I might get a week or two more. Maybe a month if I’m lucky. That would be nice.’
She thought about that for a moment. ‘But … you’l always be …?’
‘That’s right, Madelaine. From your point of view, I’l always be found here in Central Park, at twelve fty-two a.m. on Monday the tenth of September. Like al these other people,’ he said, gesturing at the busy park, the queue of people standing beside the hot-dog vendor across the grass, ‘like them,
I’ve become part of the furniture of here and now … part of the wal paper. That’s the other reason why I left.’
reason why I left.’
She frowned, not get ing that.
‘If I’d stayed with you and the others … I’d be long gone by now. This way, I can stil help you. Someone to talk to.’
‘Ah.’ She nodded.
‘But each time you come and nd me, Madelaine, remember, each time you come and nd me … it’l be the rst time for me. Do you see what I mean?’
Of course it would. She realized, for the old man, Monday had been a co ee and a bagel and a goodbye. And now, three hours later, a momentary reunion in Central Park. Each time the eld o ce reset itself, any conversation he had with her … never happened. For Foster there’d be no memory of it.
He laughed. ‘It’l be like visiting some senile old fogey in a madhouse. You’l have to get used to repeating yourself.’
She shared his chuckle. ‘I had a boyfriend like that once. He never listened to me.’
He sni ed. ‘You came here, I presume, because you need help?’
‘Wel , we did have a problem, but it’s al xed now, I think.’
He pat ed her arm. ‘See? I knew you lot were ready.’
‘Hardly. We scraped through this one, Foster. It was a close-run thing.’
She gave him the bare bones of their story. Foster shook his head. ‘Dinosaur times?’ he whispered. ‘I … I never thought the machine could take us so far back.’
thought the machine could take us so far back.’
‘You never did that?’
‘No. Never that far. How’s Liam?’
‘Wel , that’s just it. I don’t know how much damage that did to him. It’s de nitely done something to him, aged him in some ways. He has …’ She looked at Foster, and for the rst time, she noticed the rheumy whites of his eyes were faintly laced with the scars of old burst blood vessels. ‘Like you, haemorrhaging. And a streak of white hair. Who knows what’s been damaged inside him. I mean, that’s just what I can see. Foster, how long can he take this kind of punishment? How long do you think he wil live?’