suit leading a shuffling gaggle of teenagers.
‘Yes, we’re in the correct place all right,’ whispered Liam. He watched them coming towards them, the man turning to talk to the group, gesturing emphatically with his hands. Liam gently closed the door until it clicked. ‘They’re just coming up now. We can tag along on the end,’ he whispered.
He waited until the muted sound of the man’s droning voice and the shuffle and slap of trainers on the polished linoleum floor passed them by before he cracked the door open again and peeked out. The last kids in the school party were just ahead, three blonde-haired girls deeply involved in a mumbled conversation, clearly too interested in chatting to each other to even pretend to be listening to the guide up front.
‘Now!’ Liam mouthed, and stepped out behind them, Becks swiftly following.
He fell in step at the back of the group and when one of the girls casually glanced back over her shoulder he quickly managed to mimic the laid-back swagger of one of the boys up ahead.
‘Oh,’ said the girl. ‘Thought we were, like, you know, the last.’
Liam shrugged and smiled. ‘Guess, like, not,’ he replied, doing his best to bury the Irish in his voice.
Her gaze lingered a moment longer, a flickering smile for him. Then she turned back round and was back to gossiping in a conspiratorial murmur with the other two again.
Liam puffed out a silent gasp of relief. It looked like they’d jumped the first hurdle — successfully sneaking on to the back of the tour party and managing to pass themselves off as yet two more kids who might actually have preferred a trip to Disneyland or Universal Studios than wandering around a bunch of clinically clean corridors. He grinned at Becks and then almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The smile she returned gave him that weird flip- flopping sensation in his stomach again.
Liam, you daft idiot… It’s just Bob in a dress, for crying out loud!
He wished Sal could have found some other clothes for the support unit, something baggy, drab and unflattering. And why a wig with hair like that? Why that colour? He’d always loved that copper red. His first crush at school, Mary O’Donnell, she’d had hair that bewitching colour of fiery red.
Oh, saints preserve me… she’s just a meat robot, so she is.
CHAPTER 17
2015, Texas
‘And here we are!’ announced Mr Kelly to the group. ‘We’re about to enter the central reactor containment area. The whole experimental chamber is surrounded by an electro-magnetic field to filter out possible interference from all manner of electronic devices. Basically, we’re going to be walking inside a giant electro-magnet. So if you kids have any iPods, laptops, iPhones or memory cards with data on you’d rather not lose, may I suggest you place them on the table here before we step through?’ he said, indicating a table beside a pair of thick metal doors.
Liam watched with amusement as virtually every student sighed and then proceeded to reach into their rucksacks to pull out all manner of shiny metal and plastic gadgets and gizmos.
Eventually done, Mr Kelly tapped an entry code on to the large metal doors and he smiled expectantly as they swung slowly inwards.
At last, the gaggle of teenagers in his charge seemed to be shaken out of their torpid state of disinterest. A shared gasp rippled among them as their eyes swept up to take in the large spherical chamber, seemingly constructed entirely out of football-sized ball-bearings.
‘As you can see, the entire chamber is lined with charged magnets, which act as a completely impenetrable barrier for any sort of FM radio signals, WiFi signals, electrical currents, atmospheric static and so on, the sort of things that can affect our readings from the test runs.’
He led them into the spherical chamber along a raised walkway, towards a platform thirty feet in diameter. Mr Kelly pointed towards a rather less impressive-looking structure, what appeared to be a polished metal witch’s cauldron with a lid on, six feet across. Wires and cables and broad cylinders of metal descended through the lid into whatever witches’ brew was bubbling away inside.
‘Now that, kids… that’s what this is all about. That metal sphere contains tens of billions of dollars’ worth of investment, and quite possibly represents mankind’s energy future.’
‘That’s the reactor?’ asked Mr Whitmore.
‘Yup. That’s it, the zero-point energy test reactor.’ Kelly smiled and shook his head. ‘You know, it still amazes me that something so small, something the size of a… of a small car could, in theory, provide more than enough energy for every last person on this planet.’
Liam found his jaw sagging open, just like everyone else’s.
‘The tests we’ve run in there have so far produced really quite staggering amounts of energy out of the space-time vacuum pinholes that we’ve opened. The trick is sustaining and controlling the pinhole
… and, of course, containing such huge amounts of energy.’
‘That sounds a little, like… a little dangerous,’ said the blonde girl who’d glanced back at Liam.
Mr Kelly looked at her. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Laura Whitely.’
‘Well, Laura… I guess it does sound a little dangerous. Dr Brohm, one of our leading scientists working on this, likened it to opening a very small peephole and looking on to the face of God himself.’ Mr Kelly forced a laugh at that comment. ‘A little fanciful, I think, but it gives you an idea of how much energy we’re talking about…’
Howard Goodall felt the first bead of sweat trickle down the small of his back as he discreetly eased his rucksack off his shoulder on to the floor. He slowly opened the zip just a little and sneaked his hand inside. His fingers quickly found the screw cap of his thermos flask and he gently began twisting it off.
He could see Edward Chan at the front of the small knot of students gazing in silent awe at the glistening metal container.
Howard wondered how they could all be so incredibly stupid, how mankind was happy to play dice with technology it had no way of understanding. He remembered a lecture at university. His tutor had talked about the Americans’ Manhattan project during the Second World War — their attempt to build the world’s first atom bomb. How, when they first did a test detonation in the deserts of New Mexico, the scientists hadn’t been certain whether the bomb would destroy several square miles of desert or, indeed, the entire planet. But still the reckless, silly fools went ahead and tested it anyway, played dice with mankind’s future.
Just like time travel — a technology mankind was woefully unprepared to be in possession of. He stepped forward, a little closer to Chan, his eyes darting to the heavy doorway of the chamber slowly being swung back into place.
His hand felt the tube-shaped carbon-fibre weapon. It was small, tiny, with a magazine containing six toxin- tipped projectiles. He only had to wound Chan, just get one shot on target and wound the boy — the neurotoxin would finish him in minutes.
This is it, Howard, he told himself. This is the end of time travel.
CHAPTER 18
2001, New York
‘What? Jealous?’ Maddy shook her head emphatically. ‘Jealous of Bob Version Two?’
Sal had a mischievous look on her face. ‘Just asking.’
‘Oh, come on, of course not! It’s not even human… it’s just… it’s just a clone. It’s not even a genuine copy of a human — it doesn’t have a proper human brain!’
‘But she looks very human.’
‘And so does a storefront mannequin, or a GI Joe action figure or a Barbie doll.’
Sal shrugged and grinned mischievously. ‘Liam seemed impressed.’
Maddy had noticed. His eyes had been out on stalks. ‘No different to any other boy, I guess… one thing on their minds all the time.’
