Tricky Nick

by Nicholas J. Johnson

  ‘Sorry,’ they said, again in unison, ‘that happens a lot.’

  Beatrix smiled at Trixie before turning back to me. ‘You should sit down.’

  We all sat down at a rotting picnic table and Beatrix switched on an electric lantern in front of us.

  ‘This is going to be hard for you to understand,’ Beatrix said, leaning into the dim light of the lantern. ‘But I need you to try.’

  Would it be more difficult to understand than the fact that Trixie was probably from the future?

  ‘Trixie explained who she is, didn’t she?’

  ‘She says she’s from the future,’ I said. ‘Thirty-five years from now.’

  Beatrix smiled. ‘Yes, that’s right. So am I.’

  ‘You’re from the future too?’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman agreed. ‘But the more distant future. As you know, Trixie is from thirty-five years into the future. But I’m . . .’ She paused, looking at Trixie for a moment. ‘I’m from seventy years in the future.’

  My mouth dropped open.

  But there was more.

  ‘In fact,’ said Trixie, looking at me intently. ‘We’re the same person. From two different times.’

  ‘You’re what?’ I said, struggling to find words. It almost sounded like she had said they were the same person.

  ‘So she’s me . . .’ Trixie said.

  ‘. . . and she’s me,’ the older woman added.

  ‘Beatrix is who I grow up to be,’ Trixie said, as if that explained everything. ‘And she’s the one who built the time machine.’

  I pointed to the caravan covered in lights. ‘That thing is a time machine?’

  ‘No,’ Beatrix said. ‘That’s just the landing pad. All the lights give the machine something to aim for. We need it for big jumps. We can hop around a few days or weeks without much trouble. But when it gets into months and years, we need a little help.’

  My mouth was opening and closing but no words were coming. She had broken my brain.

  The woman pulled up her sleeve to reveal a large silver watch. ‘This is the time machine.’ She pushed a button on the side. A large holographic display covered in dates, times and other numbers appeared in front of her face like a movie projected onto an invisible screen.

  ‘This controls where we go and when. It also measures temporal and gravitational fluctuations to make sure we’re not damaging space-time.’

  ‘Gravitational fluctuations?’ I repeated slowly. I had heard that expression before.

  She pushed the button on the side of the watch again and the display disappeared.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come and see you myself straight away,’ Beatrix said. ‘But I knew there was absolutely no way you’d trust a batty middle-aged woman who came out of nowhere claiming to be from the future.’

  Batty. That was a very good word to describe the woman in front of me.

  ‘You were never going to trust any adult,’ Trixie explained. ‘But Beatrix knew you would trust another kid.’

  ‘And I knew I had to send someone I trusted,’ Beatrix added. ‘And who do I trust more than myself? Besides, if he knew I was here, it could put us all in danger.’

  Beatrix looked at the shocked and confused expression on my face and gave me a reassuring smile.

  ‘This is going to take some explaining . . .’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Pasta point of no return

  Beatrix turned up the lantern on the picnic table in front of us. The bright light cast weird shadows across her face. It felt like she was going to tell us a ghost story. Maybe she was?

  ‘Let me start at the beginning,’ she said. ‘Although, unlike in most stories, it’s a tad difficult to know where the beginning is. I suppose that the beginning is at the end, seventy years from now. In my time, in the distant future, I am a great inventor. Well, maybe not a great inventor but—’

  ‘You were fine?’ I asked.

  Beatrix scowled a little while Trixie gave me a small, sharp shake of the head. Beatrix continued.

  ‘I was “fine” enough to build this,’ she said, shaking the time machine on her wrist.

  ‘I’m sorry. Designing a time machine is pretty cool.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t design it,’ she admitted. ‘I just followed the plans. But it was still very difficult. And dangerous. Time travel is not something just anyone can mess around with.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I know all about that,’ I said. ‘I saw a movie once where a guy went back in time and accidentally stopped his parents from falling in love. That meant that he was never born and so he just started fading away to nothing. I love that movie!’

  ‘The second one is better,’ Trixie said.

  ‘Second one?’

  ‘Forget about changing the past and messing with the future,’ interrupted Beatrix. ‘None of that is possible. You can’t change the future by going back in time to the past.’

  I stared at her blankly.

  ‘Okay, I’ll make it simple. Most people think that time travel is impossible because of the grandfather paradox, but what most people don’t consider is the effects of closed time-like curves, world-lines in the Lorentzian manifold. I mean sure, originally it was only considered viable with an object of infinite mass travelling at light speed but that was before the discovery of Lassig’s Proof and, as you probably know, that totally disproved everything Hawking said about the Trans-Planckian problem.’

  I think that’s what she said, anyway. I didn’t understand any of it. Some people, like Mr E, use long words to appear clever. Other people, like Beatrix, use long words because they actually are clever. Either way, I had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Let me explain,’ said Trixie, seeing my confusion. ‘It took me ages to get it too.’

  Trixie leaned forward into the lantern light. She really was the spitting image of the older woman.

  ‘Imagine that time is like a river,’ she said. ‘It all flows in one direction and anyone on the river is just along for the ride. If you try to change the flow of time by doing something small in the past, it’s like throwing a stone in a river. The river just flows around it. The future always just ends up the same.’

  ‘Everything we thought we knew about deterministic nonlinear systems and the butterfly effect is completely wrong,’ Beatrix said.

  ‘Beatrix,’ said Trixie. ‘Nick doesn’t understand a word of what you’re saying. Do you, Nick?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’ll be quiet,’ said Beatrix.

  ‘The important thing is that little changes won’t change anything,’ Trixie continued.

  ‘But if you can’t change the future, why is time travel such a bad idea?’ I said. ‘If I could travel through time and not do any harm, I would be going all over the place.’

  Up until that point, if you’d asked me where I’d go with a time machine, I would have said that I wanted to go back to 1969 and watch the moon landing. Firstly, it would have been cool to see it live, but secondly, it was because Gary had this crazy theory that the whole thing was a hoax and people never landed on the moon at all. I would have loved to prove him wrong.

  ‘Just because you can’t change the future,’ Trixie said, ‘doesn’t mean you can’t do any harm.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you make enough small changes, then the timeline can’t fix itself. If you keep throwing stones into a river, eventually the river is going to flood.’

  ‘What happens?’

  ‘This thing called a singularity. Basically, it’s like a black hole, but right where you’re standing. Everything nearby gets sucked into it and stretched out infinitely like a giant noodle.’

  ‘The technical term is spaghettification,’ Beatrix added. ‘So, for example, you can travel back in time and have dinner with Winst
on Churchill and nothing will happen. But if you travel back in time and convince him to quit politics and take up tap-dancing, then . . .’

  ‘Everyone gets turned into spaghetti?’ I finished. That made sense. I liked spaghetti.

  They both nodded.

  ‘I mean, not everyone,’ Beatrix said. ‘It’s usually isolated to a specific area. It would probably only destroy a city or two.’

  I stared at her in horror.

  ‘Destroy is too strong a word,’ said Beatrix, noting my alarm. ‘It is more like they’d be stretched out of existence at the centre of a black hole. Almost like they were never there.’

  Well, if that wasn’t destruction, I wasn’t sure what was. Everything I thought I knew about time travel was wrong. I mean, I didn’t know very much about time travel to begin with so it wasn’t too much of an adjustment. According to the two time travellers in front of me, time travel could lead to being turned into a non-existent bowl of noodles. I couldn’t imagine my house, my school, the library, all being turned into nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to even think about what would happen to my friends and my parents.

  ‘But should you even be here then? What if you talking to me right now turns me into spaghetti? I don’t want to be pastified!’

  ‘You know you won’t turn into actual spaghetti, right?’ Beatrix said. ‘It’s more of a horizontal compression.’

  ‘You’re not helping,’ Trixie said. She turned to me. ‘Okay, when a moment in time is under strain from someone messing around with the timeline, it affects gravity in weird ways.’

  ‘Gravitational fluctuations,’ added Beatrix.

  ‘You’ll barely notice it at first,’ Trixie continued. ‘Your stomach might feel weird or maybe you’ll get a little dizzy.’

  ‘Wait, that happened to me!’ I almost shouted. Every time something weird had happened in the past few weeks my stomach had started doing backflips. It had started that day at the library. Then it had come back at the magic club and at school and at the joke shop. ‘I thought I was just freaking out.’

  Trixie shook her head. ‘No, it was gravity being warped and stretched. You might also notice things moving by themselves—’

  ‘There was a coin!’ I did shout this time. ‘And all those balloons and stuff at the joke shop!’

  ‘Gravitational fluctuations,’ Beatrix said again. ‘If the timeline isn’t returned to normal, they’ll eventually lead to a singularity.’

  ‘So that wasn’t me feeling nervous? It was me starting to turn into spaghetti?’

  Neither Trixie nor Beatrix said anything for a moment. We just sat in silence in the darkness.

  ‘It’s more of a warning sign,’ Beatrix said eventually. ‘That feeling in your gut is like an alarm that your timeline has altered in too big a way. That’s how we know we’re not making too big a change by being here. Do you feel okay?’

  I did not feel okay. I felt like I might scream or burst into tears or faint. But, I had to admit, my stomach felt fine. There was no floating feeling.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But all those other times . . . Doesn’t it mean that there is someone out there messing with my timeline? Trying to turn me into spaghetti?’

  Beatrix nodded her head gravely.

  ‘And if we don’t stop him, all three of us are headed for total and permanent spaghettification.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Previously, on Tricky Nick gets his mind blown

  You know how sometimes when you’re watching a TV show they have that bit at the beginning where they recap what happened in the last episode? I love that bit. Because it doesn’t matter how complicated the previous episode was, they always seem to explain it.

  If there was ever a good time for a recap, this is it. Hold on:

  I had just learned from the two time travellers in front of me (who also happened to be the same person—news I was still digesting) that time travel was possible and that if too many things got changed in the past (which was my present) it would create a giant black hole that would turn me and everyone I loved into spaghetti.

  I’d also learned that the strange feeling I’d been having the last few weeks wasn’t a stomach bug or a panic attack but a shift in gravity that meant that total annihilation was more likely to happen.

  I didn’t know what the correct reaction to news like this was, so all I could do was sit there at the picnic table in the abandoned caravan park with my mouth open and listen to Beatrix explaining who was behind all of this.12

  ‘So a few months ago—which, from your perspective is about seventy years from now—I got my dream job,’ Beatrix was saying, completely unaware of how my mind was doing backflips. ‘One of the greatest inventors in the country needed help on a new project, and he chose me.

  ‘His name was Dr Stubbins Crick and he had created some of the most revolutionary inventions in the world. He discovered a cure for hiccups and ice-cream headaches. The shoelaces he developed never came undone but also couldn’t be tangled. And he wanted to work with me! It was just going to be me and him working in his lab on the outskirts of town. I thought it was going to change my life. And it did. Just not in the way I’d imagined.

  ‘Some people say you shouldn’t meet your heroes and that was totally true of Dr Crick. Within a few weeks of working with him I realised he wasn’t a genius at all. He was a fraud and a thief and a . . . and a . . .’

  Beatrix searched for the words.

  ‘A jerk?’ suggested Trixie.

  ‘Yes! A jerk! That is exactly the word I was looking for,’ Beatrix exclaimed. ‘He didn’t invent anything. He just stole other people’s ideas and passed them off as his own. All his ideas were terrible. Sneakers that gave you warts that only he had the cure for. A chocolate bar flavoured to taste like carob. Every idea was worse than the last. He knew it, too. That’s why he had to steal everyone else’s ideas.’

  I thought about what Beatrix was saying. I knew this happened all the time with inventors. Thomas Edison, the guy who is supposed to have invented the light bulb, actually took the design from other inventors. It’s like Edison was sitting in his workshop one day when a light bulb went off above his head and he looked up and said, ‘Hey, I should steal that idea.’

  ‘He was mean, too,’ said Beatrix. ‘Yelling at me every time an idea didn’t work or he misplaced his tools. I should have quit, but this was my dream job. I figured I’d give it one more week and try really hard to get Dr Crick on my side.

  ‘Then one day I was looking through his library of books when I found an old copy of the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic. The cover was falling off and the pages were yellow and dog-eared but I recognised it straight away. I had a copy of it when I was kid; I still have it somewhere. I ran over to where Crick was looking at some plans, waving the book around. I said, “Is this yours? I love this book!” He turned around on his little stool and peered over his glasses. “Oh, that,” he said. “Yes, I did partake in the illusory arts as a small boy.”’

  As she spoke, Beatrix put on the inventor’s voice, making him sound posh and stuffy. Hearing that voice and the words ‘illusory arts’, I knew who she was talking about straight away.13

  ‘I told him I had loved magic as a kid too but I hadn’t done any in ages. I asked him if he still performed and he just scoffed and said, “It was a mindless hobby and I am glad to be done with it.”’

  Beatrix was on her feet now, doing his walk, her hands joined behind her back, her nose in the air. Trixie giggled.

  ‘I told him about my childhood and how if it hadn’t been for magic, I would never have become an inventor.’

  ‘How does learning magic make you an inventor?’ I asked.

  ‘I like making my own magic tricks,’ said Trixie. ‘A colour-changing umbrella. A set of multiplying telephones. A radio-controlled, animatronic rabbit.’

  ‘Oh, I remember that,�
� said Beatrix. ‘I almost set fire to the house with that one.’

  The two versions of Trixie laughed together. I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that this girl and the grown woman were the same person. Also, why were they laughing? This was serious.

  ‘I started by making my own magic tricks,’ Beatrix continued, ‘and that led to all sorts of other inventions. I told Dr Crick all about it. The books I read, the people who taught me. But Stubbins Crick really wasn’t interested in any of that at all. He just grunted and tried to get back to work.’

  Suddenly the lights above us flicked on, bathing the whole caravan park in a bright white light. For a second, I thought another time traveller was about to arrive. But this light was coming from the halogen lights mounted on the poles above us. Beatrix flicked off the lantern.

  ‘Quick,’ she hissed, ‘in here.’

  Beatrix and Trixie leapt up and ran into the caravan. I scurried after them, scrambling up the stairs and through the low doorway. Trixie shut the door quietly behind me then held a finger up to her lips. Outside I could hear the sound of footsteps on gravel accompanied by the sound of heavy breathing.

  ‘Security,’ mouthed Beatrix.

  Why an abandoned caravan park would need a security guard was beyond me. I held my breath as the sound of footsteps slowly faded into the night. A few minutes later the lights outside blinked back out and the caravan fell into total darkness.

  Beatrix let out a sigh of relief. ‘Where was I?’ the older woman said from the darkness.

  ‘You were telling Dr Crick about being a magician,’ Trixie replied, pushing open the caravan door and letting the moonlight in.

  ‘I figured I’d done all I could to win him over and I should just quit,’ Beatrix said as we stepped out into the night air and sat back down at the picnic table. She flicked the lantern on again. ‘But that’s when I found them. They were hidden in a bottom drawer of his workbench.’

  ‘What did you find?’ I said.

  ‘Plans,’ said Beatrix. ‘Plans . . . for a time machine.’