Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  As if I were a detective in a movie trying to preserve fingerprint evidence, I turned the cover with a biro. It fell open on the publication page. The subtitle was A New Theory of Parallels, and it had been published in 1888. It meant nothing to me. With a sigh I reached to pick it up. The jolt that ran through my arm threw me back onto the bed. Yard-long sparks arced between my hand and the pages of the book as I fell. Time fractured around me but every path led to the same end. I hit the bed, it folded itself around me and darkness swallowed me whole.

  CHAPTER 9

  I woke, jolted by a gasp as if I’d been lying under water and had only now found the air. Casting about I discovered myself still in my room, still fully dressed. Sunlight lanced between the curtains to illuminate a bright band across my waist. The book lay on the desk, presumably where it fell.

  ‘What the . . .’ Raising both hands into my line of sight I expected to see flesh charred to the bone, scorch marks at the very least. But no, there was nothing.

  ‘Jesus H.’ I sat up. I had aches, but they were the kind of aches you get from sleeping ten hours with your legs dangling over the edge of the bed rather than from being electrocuted. I stood, shook my head, yawned and reached cautiously for the book.

  My fingers refused to make contact. Sometimes when common sense fails to stop you repeating an action that pain has taught you is a very bad idea, it’s your muscles that step in to prevent the foolishness. They’re good at learning simple lessons. Fire hot. Knife sharp.

  ‘Okaaaay . . .’ I had a rethink and slid the thing into my D&D bag using a biro.

  The train I needed to catch left for Cambridge at ten past eleven. And first I had to walk to Richmond tube station and then go halfway across London to Liverpool Street. I didn’t need to look at the clock to tell I was unlikely to make it.

  Mother had very new-fangled ideas about nutrition and refused to buy me Golden Nuggets, on the grounds that they were 96 per cent sugar. Which, oddly, was my main argument in favour of them. Instead she bought joyless boxes of Shredded Wheat, the contents of which I conducted mechanical stress tests on by loading them with as much sugar as they could bear.

  ‘Do leave some milk in the bottle, dear!’ Mother admonished as I attempted to drown the evidence.

  I grunted and began devouring the contents of my bowl as swiftly as possible. I really did need to catch the 11:10 to Cambridge. Mia and the others had all finished their O-level exams, and although term wasn’t officially over until the end of the month, the next few weeks were basically free time for them. As such they’d arranged D&D practically every other day, much to Simon’s consternation. He wanted it every day.

  Negotiating with Halligan over time spent on project was about as easy as negotiating with Simon over time spent on quest. Neither seemed able to imagine a world in which their particular interest wasn’t up there with curing cancer and global peace when it came to worthy endeavours. I liked both pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and playing silly games where I got to roll polyhedral dice and be a mage, but I didn’t want to be doing either 24/7. Eventually I’d wrangled a deal that saw me spending a small fortune on train fares and dividing the week between London and Cambridge. I even had a day off from both so I could mope about and listen to New Order while pretending I didn’t care what Mia was up to.

  ‘Mother . . .’ I spooned up the last of the heavily sugared milk from my bowl.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  My mother taught science, and although she was well qualified she certainly wasn’t a leading light in any particular field. What she was was as near to an expert on pretty much every subject as most people are ever going to need.

  ‘Tell me about . . .’ I struggled to remember the name even though I had seen it less than twenty minutes ago, ‘. . . Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.’

  ‘What would you like to know?’ She took another bite of her toast. Rye bread with a thin scraping of marmalade.

  ‘Well, first I want to know how come you’ve heard of him and I haven’t. I’m supposed to be the mathematician around here. If he’s famous I find it impossible to believe you know about him and I don’t.’

  Mother arched an eyebrow at me and crunched. ‘Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m quoting the man,’ she said.

  ‘Uh.’ I glanced at the clock and stood to go. ‘Did he come up with anything famous?’

  ‘He also said, “I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.” If that helps?’

  A cold finger ran down my spine at that. A time traveller? I grabbed my bags. ‘Not really . . . I’ve got to go.’

  ‘And he wrote an essay titled “What the tortoise said to Achilles”.’ Mother had a smile playing around the corners of her mouth, but was trying to hide it.

  ‘I’m so late . . .’ I started for the door.

  ‘Better late than never or better never than late?’ She sipped her tea. ‘That was one of his too.’

  I reached the front door.

  ‘The essay title alludes to Zeno’s paradox of motion,’ she called after me.

  ‘Paradox?’ I stamped back. ‘He’s some big name in the mathematics of paradoxes? Is that why he’s famous?’

  ‘Well, no, I don’t think so.’ Mother frowned. ‘He did some work on them. But he is famous because . . . he wrote Alice in Wonderland. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is Lewis Carroll.’

  ‘You could have just said that!’ I ran for the door again.

  ‘Where would the fun be?’ Mother called. Her last words snuck out the front door with me. ‘Don’t go falling down any rabbit holes.’

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  I jolted along on the overcrowded tube train, my face practically jammed into the armpit of the next person hanging on the support straps. It wasn’t even rush hour. Demus didn’t have to put up with this sort of thing in 2011, I bet. Maybe it wasn’t all hoverboards and jetpacks, but I could hardly imagine they were still packed like cattle into slow and noisy boxes.

  The book lay in the kitbag wedged between my feet. Only the pressure of it between my ankles reassured me it was still there. Rattling along hundreds of yards beneath Earl’s Court, the carriage grew too crowded even to look down, let alone see my feet.

  By Sloane Square I became uncomfortably aware that the man pressed against my other shoulder was studying me with undisguised interest. There is an unwritten rule of tube travel, understood instinctively by every Londoner from young schoolboy to doddering ancient. You pretend it’s not happening. You pretend that half a dozen strangers are not squeezing against you to a degree that is usually reserved for orgies. You pretend that your nose is not inches from the unwashed armpit of a beefy man, that a young woman’s hair is not tickling your face, that you did not step on that person’s foot. And yet here I had found someone who clearly had not read the unwritten rule. A madman. The sort statistical outliers attract.

  Even the most seasoned tube traveller occasionally makes accidental eye contact, and when someone is staring at you from a distance of eight inches it’s hard not to. As soon as I caught the slightly manic eyes of my new companion he began speaking.

  ‘Most people think they’re safe in a crowd,’ he said without preamble. ‘When it comes to intimidation it’s important to let your subject know just how vulnerable they are.’ He spoke in a gentle voice, just loud enough to be comprehensible above the tube train’s chatter and roar, but made no effort to direct his words just at me. Half a dozen others crowding with me in front of the double doors could hear him at least as well as I could.

  The man didn’t look particularly intimidating. He was shorter than me, a little under six foot perhaps, wiry rather than broad, with a sharp, rather snake-like face and dark eyes that were as close to black as eyes get.

  ‘A lot of people in this line of business like to introduce themselves to their targets in the target’s bedroom or bathroom. Somewhere the t
arget traditionally feels safe. They like to take that away from them. But what happens next is that the target makes an effort never to be alone. And by doing that they get back some of that lost feeling of security. Which is why we’re meeting here for the first time, Nick. You’re not safe anywhere. Not in company, not in a crowd, not at home on the toilet. I can reach out and touch you—’ The train jolted us into even closer intimacy as if to make his point. ‘Any time I want.’

  Whether the man’s monologue was washing over our neighbouring passengers without being noticed, an integral part of the background noise, or whether each of them had made a deliberate and sensible decision not to notice, I couldn’t tell. The real test would be how many of them decided to leave at the next stop. Though some of them might actually consider the company of a dangerous lunatic preferable to having to wait for the next train and then having to fight their way onto that one.

  ‘Don’t look at them, Nick. Look at me. Look at this.’ He jabbed me in the stomach with two fingers. ‘Good lad.’

  ‘What do you want?’ The pressure of his fingers against my belly was rapidly becoming painful, though he could be holding a knife there for all the people packed around us seemed to care.

  ‘I already told you that,’ he said. ‘I want to intimidate you.’

  ‘But what do—’

  He leaned in with the swaying of the carriage, our foreheads practically touching. ‘It’s best to leave a gap after the first meeting.’ He kept to his conversational, almost friendly tone. ‘That way you can get any of that kneejerk defiance out of your system. Let the fear soak in a bit. It works better that way.’

  The train began to slow for the next station, then stutter to a halt in a series of violent lurches.

  ‘I can tell you, though, that I live my life to a strict code. Rules are all we have to separate us from the animals, Nick. If you break my rules, then I’ll break you. Stick by them, however, and I’ll be your guardian angel. And you’ll certainly need guarding. Before long it won’t just be my employer who wants hold of your strings.’ He offered a narrow smile. ‘I’ll be seeing you later, Nick.’ He drew back his hand as the doors opened with a pneumatic sigh. ‘I left you a present.’ The rat-faced man glanced down, though we were still too cramped to see the floor.

  Passengers began to spill out, some simply to make room for others to disembark. I saw a sturdy plastic shopping bag beside my feet with Harrods written across it in gold on green.

  He pushed past me to leave. On gaining the platform he called back over the heads of the passengers cramming into the carriage. ‘This whole thing is incremental. What’s in the bag is step one. Be thinking about step two next time we—’

  The doors closed on the rest of what he had to say and the train jerked into motion. I stood there, heart pounding, wedged vertical between strangers, with the unwanted bag resting against my leg. Unwillingly, I struggled to snag the handles and drew it level with my chest. Peering down into it, at first I could make little sense of the contents. They appeared to be a collection of everyday objects. A hairbrush, a bedside clock, a small plate, a toothbrush . . . It was the toothbrush that gave me pause. A cold fear started to prickle across my skin. I hadn’t been able to find my toothbrush that morning. And suddenly I recognised all the stuff. Each object came from my house. An item from every room. My mother’s hairbrush . . . Had she been in the house when he took it? Had the girl taken it for him? I found my hands trembling as I lowered the bag.

  The programme of intimidation that the man subscribed to was clearly designed for people with less imagination than me. I already understood how vulnerable I was. My work was valuable. Someone powerful had seen that. They had seen that I was the source of it and decided to own me. The man left standing on Victoria platform might be just one of many, though he was probably all they would need. There’d been no compassion in those beady black eyes. He would do whatever his employer’s goals required, and I really didn’t see any way of stopping him.

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘So, how does this all work then?’ Miles Guilder stood a little shy of six foot, broad-shouldered and tending to fat. The suit he wore had been expensively tailored to accommodate him and showed no signs of strain. He had one of those bullish faces full of barely repressed energy that might escape as a booming laugh or a murder threat, with even odds on either one. Eyes like grey stones watched me intensely above florid cheeks. ‘Go easy, though. Pretend I know nothing.’

  That last part wasn’t hard. Guilder was a businessman, and although he specialised in high tech start-ups he wasn’t in any way ready for the mathematics. What was hard was looking at him without snarling. A large part of me thought it was his money that had set the man on the train loose on me to protect his investment. The man who had been prowling through every room of my mother’s house. I’d spent most of the journey from London alternately feeling furious then terrified about the whole thing.

  ‘Nick?’ Professor Halligan prompted at my shoulder.

  We were standing in the Winston Laboratory. Workmen were already labouring to fix the lighting while others lugged away some of the burned-out equipment.

  I drew a deep breath. ‘On TV science shows when they try to explain about relativity they pretend space-time is a rubber sheet and demonstrate how a heavy object makes a dent. Other objects roll into that dent or orbit around inside it, and that’s gravity for you. Right?’

  Guilder nodded. I breathed a sigh. A lot of people didn’t even have the kiddy version to hand, but given that he had seen the shows this would be a little easier.

  ‘So Einstein showed mathematically that objects moving through space-time create ripples that spread rather like they would if you bounced on a big trampoline. Scientists have been hoping to detect these gravitational waves, but it may take them a while yet. They’re tricky measurements to make.

  ‘What the mathematics I’ve been working on shows is how to repeatedly hit that rubber sheet, space-time, so as to create a resonance. Like a kid on a swing moving their legs in the right rhythm so they swing higher each time. And also how to do that at multiple spots so that the effects combine at one focus where the oscillations become very large.

  ‘Now, for this bit it helps if you think of that rubber sheet not as rubber, but the surface of a pond. I’ve shown that under the right conditions in the focus point where all the oscillations combine, we can throw up a spike of space-time, and if it goes high enough, then the tip of that spike breaks away and becomes a droplet; a localised sphere of space-time. That’s our time machine.’

  Guilder’s slow smile became a grin. Perhaps relieved that it all sounded so simple. It sounded simple because I’d turned the creation of new mathematics for high dimensional topology into a baby story for him. ‘How do you hit it? You know, to make the ripples.’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s the hands-on side of things. I stick to pencil and paper.’ I gestured to Dr Creed who stood at my other shoulder, barely reaching it.

  Creed coughed and rustled the papers in his hands. He looked the part in his white lab coat, black beard bristling. ‘We hit it with magnetic energy. It’s the safest way to pack energy into a space you are ultimately going to want a person in. And I use “safest” comparatively. We need enormous currents to generate huge localised magnetic fields in very complex, very fast changing patterns. It’s the details of those patterns that Bob and Nick’s work provide us with.’

  I blinked. If I’d ever been told Halligan’s first name it hadn’t stuck. I was almost surprised to discover he had one, though of course he must. Bob. Professor Robert Halligan. I had to stop thinking of him as if he’d been thirty-eight forever. He’d been my age once, and a mathematical prodigy in his own right. And currently he was perhaps the only person on the planet who could understand the progress I’d made over the last few months. His main role, though it would pain him to admit it, was to translate my work into something that Dr Creed, himself an extraordinarily gifted experimental physicist, could
grapple with and try to put to work in a laboratory setting.

  Dr Creed walked Guilder around some of the burned-out equipment and the first of the replacement capacitors that were being forklifted into place as part of the new, larger bank that would deliver the vast current we required. I noticed that for all his apparent robustness, Guilder walked with a limp, pausing whenever a chance presented itself.

  If it weren’t for my conviction that Guilder had set his man on me, I would have considered him the ideal benefactor. He had deep pockets, was eager to move things on swiftly, and seemed determined not to share. That last part was important to me. If I let the government get their hands on my work it would be very hard to approach actual time travel without an enormous amount of red tape, and once we got there it would immediately be world news with all manner of rules and regulation and oversight already waiting for us.

  Dr Creed stopped next to one of the new capacitors. It towered above him.

  ‘It’s the efficiency of those resonances that mean we don’t have to explode the sun into a supernova in order to get the energy we need. Each time Nick finds a new solution to the Hayes equations we’re able to get more for less.’

  Guilder nodded. ‘We’re going to need to press on with these experiments and delay some of the technical publication. Don’t want the theory getting into the public domain before the patents are secured. I want to see a stage two cycle soon, then a three-stage attempt.’ Clearly the man had read and absorbed more of the technical detail than I had credited him with. ‘I’m going to need that stage two cycle run tomorrow.’