minute trip into town on the bicycle he’d found in the schoolyard. But… yes, if he was being honest, it was a chance to pop into the diner — always quiet at this time in the morning — and talk to Kaydee-Lee. Over the last few weeks they’d graduated from ‘how ya doing today’ niceties to talking about the weather, to really talking, to finally, politely exchanging their names.
‘Why do you stay here, Kaydee-Lee?’
She filled the silence with getting on with finishing up his take-out order, busy spreading a thick layer of cream cheese on to one of the bagels. She looked up at his question. ‘Harcourt?’
‘Aye.’
She hunched her shoulders. ‘Where else am I gonna go? I got a job and it’s OK, I guess. It’s not like I go home at night all stressed out or anything. I’m bored… but at least I’m not stressed.’
‘But you don’t intend to work in here forever, right? You’ve got a plan, a dream… a goal, so to speak?’
‘Jeeez! I’m, like, seventeen. I don’t even know what I’m gonna cook up for dinner tonight, let alone know where I wanna be when I’m your age.’
‘My age?’
She nodded. ‘You’re what? Like, twenty-five, twenty-six or something?’
Liam stifled an urge to gasp. Twenty-five? I’m sixteen! Sixteen!! But then he reminded himself he wasn’t any particular age. Not really. His false memory calmly tried to reassure him he was a sixteen-year-old boy from Cork, Ireland. But that was all meaningless claptrap now. Someone else’s fiction.
Kaydee-Lee looked up from her work, studied his troubled face. ‘Oh my God, did I just say something wrong?’
‘No… I just, I’m not that old.’
‘Oh God, you don’t have some kinda awful ageing sickness or something? Did I just put my foot in my mouth?’
Liam laughed. ‘No, don’t worry.’ He ruffled the scruffy mop of hair on his head. ‘It’s my grey bit of hair. Some people think I’m older than I am.’ He offered her a disarming smirk: an assurance that he hadn’t taken offence, that she hadn’t clumsily blundered on to uncomfortable ground.
‘Ahh, don’t you worry now. I’ve always had this little bit of grey. Me lucky silver streak, so it is.’
She nodded. ‘Well, I really like it.’ Her cheeks suddenly coloured a mottled pink once more. ‘I mean, you know… it looks cool. Kinda gothic.’
‘Gothic? What the devil does that mean?’
She smiled suspiciously at him. ‘Gothic? Sort of Sabbath-grungy-rocky? Kind of the whole steam-punky thing?’
‘You know,’ he shrugged. ‘I haven’t the first idea what any of that means.’
She laughed at that. ‘You’re so funny. The way you, like, talk… like a sort of young-old man — ’
‘ Old? Did I hear you just use the word “old”?’ The look of horror on his face was mock-serious.
‘No!’ she yelped. ‘No, I don’t mean that! I meant… I dunno, it’s like you’ve got old-style manners. If you know what I mean? Like you just stepped out of one of ’em ancient black and white movies.’
He spread his hands. ‘Well now, you’re never too young or too old for a dose of good manners, my dear.’
She chuckled behind the counter as she finished fixing the salt beef and cream cheese bagel, wrapped it up in greaseproof paper and put it in the plastic bag with the others. She tossed in some napkins and plastic forks and passed the bag over the counter to him. ‘I know an old-fashioned word that I can use to describe you.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Enigma? That’s how you say it, right? You’re en-ig-mat-ic?’
‘You mean, a puzzle?’
She nodded. ‘Oh, you’re that all right, Liam. Exactly that. You’re a puzzle.’
Chapter 43
3 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
‘It may look a bit random,’ said Maddy, ‘but, trust me, it all works.’
Liam cast another wary glance at the cables snaking across the classroom floor. The displacement machine at the moment was nothing more than an array of circuit boards placed on a row of orange plastic bucket chairs, all of them linked by dangling loops of electrical flex, blobs of solder holding the whole fragile thing together.
The computer system controlling the displacement machine looked very like it had back in Brooklyn: a dozen base units and half a dozen monitors hooked up together and occupying a cluster of school desks pushed together.
They didn’t have their own version of a displacement ‘tube’ filled with freezing cold water. According to Maddy, they didn’t need one of those any more. Since their mission was now a different one — no longer the rigid preservation of one particular timeline with all the necessary strict measures to ensure no unwanted contaminants came back into the past with them — there was no longer the need for a ‘wet drop’. If a minor contaminant, for example a chunk of modern-day linoleum floor, went back into the past, it might possibly result in some minor contamination. But, as far as Maddy was concerned, that was OK; that was an acceptable risk. The rules were different now. And anyway, a minor change, a minor time wave, might just be the thing that ultimately
deflected the course of history and resulted in there not being an engineered super-virus known as Kosong-ni in the year 2070.
Totally unlikely that a chunk of classroom floor could alter history that much. But you never know.
‘Don’t worry, Mads,’ said Liam, looking at the guts of the machine spread along the row of plastic chairs. ‘I trust you.’ He hoped his voice sounded as confident as he was trying to look.
Rashim pointed to one of two squares marked out on the floor with lengths of masking tape. ‘That’s where you stand, Liam. It’s a metre square, wide enough for comfortable clearance just as long as you’re not waving your arms around. Each square has its own departure software that controls the distribution of energy and channelling of the field. I enter the precise mass figure into each entry field… with an acceptable nine per cent margin of error, of course,’ said Rashim. He pointed at the square in front of Liam. ‘The left square has your stats, the right one has Bob’s.’
Rashim had made his mass calculations several days ago using a rather old-school method. He’d filled a plastic drum with water — cold, of course, straight from a bathroom tap — right to the very top, then asked Liam to climb in and completely submerge himself. The water had spilled out as he’d displaced it. The displaced water was caught in a tray beneath the drum. And that water was then measured carefully to determine Liam’s mass. The process was repeated for Bob, then the girls, then Rashim and SpongeBubba. Provided none of them lost too much weight or put too much weight on in the meantime, the figures were good enough. Comfortably within the nine per cent margin for error.
‘So it’s squares now?’ Liam arched his brows and looked at Maddy. ‘Not one big circle any more?’
She shrugged. ‘Rashim’s deployment method. That’s how they did it with Exodus, separate displacement volumes.’
‘It’s safer. There’s a much lower risk of mass convergence. Plus I’ve calculated for an additional amount of mass. Each time we use the same square, we’ll take a half inch of the floor with us, no more than — ’
‘Mass convergence?’ Liam could guess what that harmless-sounding phrase meant. He’d seen ‘mass convergence’ before and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant sight.
He grimaced. ‘You’re telling me that kind of thing happened with your lot often enough that you had a proper technical term for it?’
‘We had thirteen mis-translations in phase alpha!’ piped up SpongeBubba. ‘What came back was real gooey!’
‘Yes, thanks, SpongeBubba. Certainly, we had… uh… a few failed trials. But look — ’ Rashim pushed his glasses up his nose — ‘this system, Waldstein’s particle-projection system, is way more elegant than ours. I mean… quite incredible! The man was… is… a genius! It’s the simplicity of the calculation pipeline that amazes me — the way he’s truncated the whole process into a basic two-step process…’ He stopped himself. ‘Sorry… the more I’ve worked on this machine, the bigger a fanboy I’ve become. The point is, Liam, this is a much more reliable system
