'Gingery hair, dirty hands?'
'That's him! Did you see him leave?'
'No.'
'Are you certain? You haven't taken any breaks?'
'Now 1 know who you mean, 1'd know if he'd gone.'
'Then he must still be here in the building.'
All through this Teresa had been holding her new membership application form, and now she gave it to Paula. For good measure she threw down her GM MasterCard beside it.
'That makes me a member, right?'
'Yes, 1 suppose '
'You'll find the credit card has already been recorded. I'll. pick it up in a moment.
She pushed through the door before Paula could answer, and went into the main part of the building. lt took her only a minute or two to establish that Grove was indeed no longer there.
Few members of the staff had been aware of his presence while he was using the equipment; no one had seen him leave.
Teresa hurried outside into the bright sunshine, and went across to where his stolen car was parked.
She stood next to it for a while, staring at the view, the blueandsilver sea, the distant roofs, the quiet streets, the weather in France. Her identity had crossed over into Grove's; she had entered the building with him, and he had left when she did. Where was he now?
A few moments later, she heard the sound of police sirens, in the distance among the houses, down in the quiet streets of Bulverton's Old Town.
She picked up her MasterCard from the reception desk, together with her ExEx membership startup pack, an introductory pamphlet, her airmile certificate, discount vouchers for the first ten hours of ExEx runtime use, a free pen and a complimentary canvas tote bag emblazoned with the GunHo corporate logo. She gave a smile of acknowledgement to Paula and walked into the main part of the building to find a terminal she could use.
The computers looked slightly different from the ones she was used to, but they displayed the familiar GunHo logo. Of the three machines currently not in use she chose the one furthest from the corridor that ran through the openplan office. She sat down and entered the new membership number she found in the promotional material Paula had given to her. No use entering her old number, the one she had learned by heart, so often had she typed it in, After a perceptible pause, the program went into its startUP routine.
Teresa watched the display screens flick from one to the next, and she realized that between this day and the time some eight months in the future when she had been regularly using this system, there must have been a round of upgrades. The software looked much the same as the program she was used to, but it was obviously running at about half the speed. The keyboard and monitor also looked slightly different from the ones she remembered. She had always felt intimidated by the ferocious speed with which the software responded, and this earlier version actually suited her rather better.
The program paused, displaying the principal menu of options. Teresa glanced over it, and felt, without being able to be certain, that there were not as many options as she was used to.
No matter.
Now then. She had to think.
She was faced with two explanations of her present dilemma, both based on impossibility.
All the evidence was that she was now living eight months in the past. Even as she stared blankly at the monitor, yet another piece of evidence for this swam into her awareness: the program always displayed the day's date in a tiny box at the bottom right of the display, and according to this the date now was June 3. The day of Grove's massacre.
To accept this would mean accepting that she had moved back through time. There were the dates on her credit card, the change in weather, the many small differences at the ExEx building. In the February of her real life, Paula Willson had told her that membership of the Bulverton ExEx facility was almost at capacity, and that they were planning to close the place to new members. A few minutes ago, the same Paula had pressed on her all the paraphernalia of a sales or membership drive.
But the whole concept of travelling back through time was, for Teresa, almost impossible to accept. She had never understood it on a philosophical level, and anyway she felt that all around her was practical disproof
If entering the Grove scenario, then leaving it, had taken her eight months into the past via the medium of Gerry Grove's disgusting consciousness, how come she had turned up here in the same clothes she was wearing when she left
the hotel this morning? How come she had the same shoulder-bag? Carried the same credit cards? Had the same tissue in her pocket when she needed to mop her face, the first time to wipe away the rain of a freezing day, the second time the perspiration of a heatwave?
More to the point, how had she lost her ExEx identification card, if Grove had not taken it when he needed to?
That wasn't consistent, though. The cards were electronically coded: when Grove gave his (or hers) to Paula, the receptionist had found records of Grove on her computer.
Teresa gave up that line of thought.
Her rental car had also disappeared, and she gave up on that too. All scenarios had inconsistencies, brick walls where you expected an Underground station to be.
lt must mean she was in extreme experience, not living this as part of her own life. But it was no longer the scenario of Grove's day of murder: that was the scenario she had consciously entered, the one that had
