Day of Deliverance

“Gentlemen, please escort these two through Entrance B to the Situation Room. We will join you shortly.”

“An escort? Good.” Angus replied. “You two should have blue flashing lights on your heads.”

“That’s funny, Mr Jud. Look,” Gordon clutched his stomach with both hands, “I’m in stitches.”

The Rector scowled. “Gentlemen, I would advise less levity. We have an extremely serious situation here. Do I make myself clear?”

Gordon looked at his toes, sheepishly. “Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”

Jack and Angus followed Tony and Gordon into the old Victorian part of the school.

“Right, here we are,” Tony announced.

They had reached a store cupboard halfway along one of the main corridors and Tony proceeded to take a large set of keys from his belt, jangling them loudly as he searched for the right one.

“Isn’t that a bit low tech for VIGIL?”

“Now, son,” Tony replied in a hushed voice, “you know better than to mention that name in an open corridor, even if no one else is here. Anyway, it’s all part of our image. You’re not supposed to see all the high-tech stuff.”

Tony located the key, inserted it into the lock and opened the door. The cupboard smelled of, well… school. That stale, dusty smell of textbooks, old bits of computer equipment and stationery. Tony reached inside his pocket and pulled out a thin piece of plastic, a bit like a pocket calculator. He gently pressed a button on the device and the cupboard door closed automatically.

“That looks more like it,” Angus said, knowingly.

“I think this procedure will be familiar to you all. Step to the back, please,” Tony said, pressing the device in his hand a second time. Without warning, an aperture formed in the floor. Soon the entrance had opened completely and a steep spiral staircase appeared, leading downwards. It was lit by a ghostly blue glow, just bright enough to make out the position of the steps.

“Okay — all clear — on you go.”

One by one, they stepped onto the spiral staircase. The steps began to descend automatically. As they dropped beneath floor level, the aperture above them closed silently and after a couple of minutes they came to a gentle halt. Ahead of them was a door. Tony pressed the device again and it opened onto a short metal-clad corridor illuminated by the same dim blue light. At the end of the corridor was a circular door like the entrance to a bank vault. It had five letters etched on it: ‘V I G I L’.

The door opened without a sound, revealing a tubular passageway that curved off symmetrically both to the left and to the right. Jack noticed that there were no markings on the passage walls — no rivets, no seams — it was perfectly smooth.

“Round to your left, please,” Tony said. They followed obediently and as they walked, the passageway bent away from the entrance, which resealed itself silently behind them. They had only taken twenty or thirty paces when Jack noticed a strange marking on the wall at about head height. It appeared like the outline of a figure — a stylised hominid figure of some sort. There was something other-worldly about it. Jack stopped and turned to Tony.

“What does that symbol mean, Mr Smith?”

Tony approached the figure on the wall. He turned to Gordon. “Have you seen this, MacFarlane?” he said apprehensively.

Gordon moved closer and inspected the strange marking, running his fingers tentatively over it. “Mmmm — the latest experiments must be more advanced than we thought.”

Tony turned back to Jack and Angus. “VIGIL have been using their wormhole technology to experiment on new applications…”

The boys’ eyes widened.

“Yes — the figure on the door is indeed a symbol…”

“The alien symbol,” Gordon added reverentially.

“Signifying a portal to a whole new universe.”

Angus’s eyes were on sticks, “You mean… space travel?”

Tony put them out of their misery, “No, you plonker, that’s the Gents toilet — and the Ladies is opposite — look. Do either of you need to go?”

Gordon laughed raucously and the boys shuffled on their feet self-consciously.

“We’re fine, thanks.”

The party moved on, Tony and Gordon buoyed by their joke at the boys’ expense.

Finally Tony announced, “Right, here we are.”

The passageway had continued to curve round and they had reached a point where the grooving on the wall indicated another doorway. Jack reckoned that if they continued on they would eventually arrive back at the point where they had originally entered the underground complex. Essentially, they were in a giant subterranean doughnut from which all the various VIGIL control rooms and annexes could be accessed.

Jack read the lettering on the door:

‘Situation Room’.

He felt his heartbeat tick up a notch. This was it.

Tony pressed the device in his hand and the door slid open.

On each wall of the large underground room there were screens — some showed maps, some complex- looking historical timelines and others just row upon row of computer programming language that Jack could not even begin to understand. Some of the VIGIL team were already seated around a large central board table. They looked like a war council. Others manned computer terminals, or scientific equipment, at pods in separate areas of the room.

Jack spotted a number of familiar faces: Miss Beattie, their English teacher, was involved in an animated conversation with, of all people, Gino Turinelli, from the cafe in the High Street. Jim De Raillar, who ran the mountain bike shop two doors down from Gino’s, was also there and, finally, Jack’s mother, Carole, was sitting at one of the computer terminals. In fact, as Jack looked around, he recognised everyone. They all either worked at the school or in the local village of Soonhope. Since their inauguration into VIGIL, Jack had learned that VIGIL’s network was quite pervasive. It made sense. Clearly, you would need a lot of different skills to create and maintain a working time machine — especially if you ever happened to need to use it. Each member of VIGIL had their everyday persona: teacher, shopkeeper, janitor and so on. Then they had their other, secret, role in the VIGIL organisation — scientist, analyst, technician or security guard. For example, Jack had learned that Miss Beattie was not only an expert on Shakespeare, but also had a first class degree from Cambridge and had done stints at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European Organisation for Nuclear Research — CERN. Gino — actually Professor Turinelli — was a computer expert, and Jim De Raillar and Jack’s mother were analysts.

Just then, the Rector and Inchquin came into the room through a separate entrance. Soon a tense discussion was under way, facilitated by Inchquin who sat gravely at the head of the table.

“Jim, can you give us an update on the analysis of the message Tom Christie sent to us a couple of hours ago, please?”

“Certainly. To recap, the message confirms that Christie and Dr Pendelshape have fallen out. It also explains that following their failure to stop the First World War they started to work on a new timeline simulation some months ago…”

“What period does the simulation focus on?”

“Late Elizabethan.”

“Interesting…” Theo Joplin, the historical analyst, interjected, and the Rector flashed him an angry glance for interrupting.

Jim De Raillar ignored the comment and continued. “Anyway, it appears that the Revisionist team have refined the computer simulation software so they can make much more precise recreations of the interventions they plan to make in history, and the potential consequences of the action. Christie’s message referred to it as ‘surgical’ historical modelling. It seems that the Revisionist team were very excited about these advances… but then Christie