Time Rocks

by Brian Sellars

Chapter Nineteen

  The crackling white haze around us faded leaving a hint of ozone on the air. I gripped Jack’s hand steadying myself and looked around. We had arrived under a vast domed roof. Above us, an astronomical telescope pointed at the closed dome. Beneath it, an iron grey, rubber floor seethed with seemingly chaotic activity. Sounds and movement swirled around the room like water in a gold miner’s pan. People dashed from desk to desk. A forklift truck whined, threading through eddying currants of people at computer stations and panels of flickering diodes. It had no wheels and appeared to be running, a few centimetres above the floor, on nothing more substantial than light. High in its dome above our heads the dreaming telescope averted it eye.

  A smiling nurse stepped up smartly and cut the bindings from our ankles. Jack released my hand and ran to the guy on the horse. The rider dismounted and handed the reins to a tall young man who was wearing flip flops, shorts and a beach vest. I watched Jack and the cowboy guy embracing like long lost buddies. There was lots of that back slapping and phoney punching that men do. Feeling nervous and out of place I joined them, wondering who the cowboy was, and how did Jack know him? I was just about to learn when a large, bearded man, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, rushed in and dropped gloom on us like an avalanche.

  ‘Sindra got away,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t hold the trace on her. Power is down and your leap blocked everything.’ Other technicians joined him as he went on gravely. ‘What about the other Time Wands?’

  ‘There wasn’t time to get them,’ explained the cowboy. ‘The event was decaying. I only just got Tori and Jack out before it collapsed.’

  ‘Yeah, you had only four point eight seconds left,‘ volunteered a white coated technician. ‘I’d already started emergency retrieval.’

  The big man turned to Jack and beamed broadly. ‘So, you’re Jack,’ he said, grabbing his hand and shaking it. He turned quickly to me. ‘And you must be Tori. Welcome to Haleakala. I’m delighted to see you. I’m Rommy Becks, director of this palace of wonders.’

  ‘Vart, why don’t we go straight back now and get the Wands before they know what’s happening?’ Jack queried. ‘They must still be in a mess back there.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that Jack I’m afraid. We don’t have power right now. It took a massive amount of energy to set up that leap …’

  ‘Well that’s because of your equestrian antics,‘ grumbled Rommy Becks.

  ‘You know that was necessary,’ Vart reminded his colleague. ‘The horse was a distraction. It bought me the time I needed. It worked exactly as predicted. The guards were gob-smacked. If they hadn’t been they would have shot me while I was still in TM. And don't forget, you approved the strategy.’

  The big man sniffed and turned away eschewing further argument. He waved at a video screen, which responded by turning on. A graphic appeared showing a series of peaks and troughs of electrical and magnetic activity. ‘This here is our leap,’ he said. ‘Nothing else shows. The only reason we know, or can assume, there was another leap, is because of this aberrant deviation in the trace.’ He pointed to the graph, but no matter how I peered at it, I could not see whatever he was seeing.

  Vart stepped up to the screen. ‘So that little blip is because something interfered with it for a second.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Can we get anything from that?’

  A young man with green dreadlocks pushed through his crowding colleagues and stepped up to the screen. ‘Such as? This isn’t a positive you’re looking at here. It’s not even a negative positive. It’s the absence of something. There’s nothing there to analyse.’

  Vart scratched his head, shoving his cowboy hat around on top of his mop of coppery hair. ‘If you can determine how much energy is needed to create such an absence in the trace wouldn't that give us a clue?’

  Beside me, Jack was looking increasingly impatient. He folded his muddy arms petulantly across his chest sending a blast of body odour round the group. ‘What does it matter?’ he demanded. ‘We know she got away. She was holding a Time Wand when Vart leapt in. She would surely have used it to TM out of there as fast as she could.’ He gazed round the silent group. ‘She’s got to go back eventually. She can’t stay anywhere else for long. She needs secrecy and the technical back up that MCF provides. I think she’ll go back to the old man – and soon.'

  'I agree,' said Vart. 'They’ll strengthen their defences immediately. They now know that we can decrypt their event cage. They'll have to change everything.'

  'But that will take time – won't it,' asked Jack. 'I say we go back now and grab the rest of the Time Wands. If we don’t it could be too late.’

  Rommy rested a hand on Jack’s grubby shoulder. ‘The trouble is Jack, we don’t have the power for another for leap. It takes massive amounts of energy to create an event, and when we need to go over our reserve we have to requisition power from the Federal Generation Board. They insist on twenty-four hours notice.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s so they can redirect power from the national grid and the space solar fields,’ Vart explained.

  Shaking his head Rommy shot Vart a disapproving glance. ‘I’m afraid Vart’s equestrian jaunt required all our additional power. We had to lasso and quell your ice-age leap, as well as hold the event open at both ends for over two minutes.’

  ‘That was the maximum we had power for,’ Vart put in. ‘Otherwise you and Tori would be popsicles by now.’

  Rommy stalked around eyeing Vart like a disgruntled schoolmaster. ‘We have strict rules about maintaining a reserve of power in case of emergencies. I was persuaded to overrule them this time. Under the circumstances it was the right thing to do of course, but we now find ourselves with an emergency that we can’t respond to - for - err - I don’t know how long.’

  ‘Sixteen hours fifty-two minutes and seven seconds,’ volunteered the green haired technician, nervously wiping the screen of a palm pilot on his T-shirt.

  ‘So, almost seventeen hours, that’s plenty of time for Mackenzie Carmichael to pull the plug on all our lives. And he’s bound to do something now. Sindra has made too many mistakes lately. The old man will want to tighten things up. The trouble is, he’s insane. If he thinks he needs to he'll wipe out billions of people without a thought.’

  ‘Worse still, he’ll probably want to clip Sindra's wings after the trouble she’s caused him. She won’t like that.’ Vart spoke softly, his expression grave. ‘There could be a power struggle between them. Anything could happen. And while they’re annihilating each other we could all be destroyed in the shock waves. At best they could change things, or make it so we never existed.’

  ‘There’s no time to waste,’ Jack said. ‘If we don’t act now, we’re finished.’

  ‘They're already manipulating you,’ I said, my voice squeaking like an old gate.

  Everybody looked at me, some shocked, others doubtful.

  ‘Sindra bragged about it to me,’ I told them.

  Vart moved closer, showing alarm. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Mackenzie Carmichael is already manipulating you all. Sindra told me.’

  The entire group was gaping at me. I felt crushed by their astonished disbelief. Jack slipped his arm round my waist. ‘What do you mean, Tori?’

  ‘She told me MCF takes technicians from here to work on his projects.’

  ‘But that’s impossible - he can’t. There’s nobody missing,’ said Vart.

  ‘They return them a second or so after they were taken. They’re drugged and put into a hypnotic trance so that they can’t sort out their memories from their dreams. She told me all about it. I met somebody – a Doctor Anwar.’

  ‘Well yes, but we know about that. He escaped with Vart,’ said Rommy Becks. ‘He was missing for six months. The trouble is he’s a mystic. He does things like that. We searched for him, but we thought he’d just gone to some monastery or something.’

  ‘But he hadn’t, and he wasn’t returned drugged like all the others are,
’ I said. ‘That’s the only reason that you knew he was missing.’

  Doctor George Paliana, an older man, wearing a white laboratory coat over a smart suit and tie stepped forward. ‘Time slip syndrome,’ he said, a look of horrified realisation on his face. ‘This would explain an awful lot. We thought it was some sort of field effect. It’s been giving us problems for months – years even. No wonder we haven’t been able to isolate it.’

  ‘What are talking about, George?’ asked Rommy.

  ‘The suicides, and perhaps the stress related depressive conditions we see so often here. You know the rates have been rising, Rommy. I thought we were dealing with a side effect of TM that we just hadn’t seen before. Some sort of delirium brought on by magnetic flux leakage. We’ve seen a steadily rising incidence of depression and suicide. More than half of the recorded sick days at this TEP are related to depression. This doesn’t happen at the other TEPs – it’s only here. We get insomnia, anxiety, forgetfulness, stress, high blood pressure; these are all symptoms suggesting depression, but our tests don’t support it.’

  ‘What did you test?’

  ‘Full blood count, C-reactive protein, calcium, renal function, electrolytes, you know, the whole works. In most cases, even with severe depressives, the results fall within acceptable limits. After six months, if they haven‘t committed suicide, they’re fine.’

  ‘So, this’s even worse than we thought. At any second we could all cease to exist, or become somebody we presently are not.’

  ‘Have we got enough power for normal TMs?’ asked Jack.

  ‘No, not for getting into MCF’s time vault underground. In a few hours we might be able to send two or three people to a surface location.’

  ‘Why can’t you go back to the moment just before Mackenzie Carmichael stole the first Time Wand that started all this trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘If only we could, Tori,’ Rommy said, with a weary chuckle. ‘The problem is we know that some of our technology was reinvented back in your time, but we can’t tell precisely how much of it, so we can’t predict the dependencies.’

  ‘Dependencies?’ I queried.

  ‘Yes, it means, what results from what, and what would happen to the technology as it is today, if we unknowingly took out some of those earlier bits.’

  Jack was looking at me as if he was still chewing over some earlier point he had heard. ‘There is only one way to deal with this,’ he said quietly, bringing silence to the group. ‘What you’re saying, Rommy, is we have to decommission Mackenzie Carmichael’s operation in an orderly, systematic way, or we could break your present day technology and bring it all crashing down because of this dependencies thing?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So even if we did have a squad of Navy SEALs handy and the electrical power to leap back there in force, we daren’t risk it anyway?’

  ‘Well – err – yes, but we will have to go back there in large numbers at some stage to run a decommissioning programme. That could take several weeks, and we’ll need scientists for that, not assault troops.’

  ‘Right, and we can’t do that until we’ve got all MCF’s Time Wands, and the old man and Sindra are safely locked up?’ Jack asked rhetorically.

  Rommy frowned questioningly. ‘Yeah, so what are you driving at?’

  ‘Well, I think the only thing that might work is a small, discreet operation to sneak in there and get the Time Wands without a big stink,’ said Jack.

  ‘Correct,’ agreed Vart. ‘But you can’t go Jack.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Have you smelled yourself lately? You are a big stink!’