› Insufficient data. The residue signal suggests a sudden and violent enlargement of a dimensional pinhole, releasing a vast amount of energy.
‘Like a bomb?’
› Correct. Just like a bomb.
She slumped down in the office chair. ‘So, dead, then,’ she uttered, looking down at her lap and suddenly beginning to feel the stab of pain. The equivalent, in days, of almost three months had passed since Foster had pulled her from a falling building. So much had happened in that time, a world almost conquered by Nazis and then in the blink of an eye reduced to a radioactive wasteland. Their trip to the basement of the Museum of Natural History, finding the clues… Liam’s message in the guest book. And all the clean-up and fix-up after that whole nightmare. It almost felt like another life: Mumbai, Mum and Dad, the burning building.
This place, this scruffy archway criss-crossed with cables, had begun to feel like a home, and Liam and Maddy… even Bob, like an odd new family. Now, in one moment, with one simple mistake, she wondered if that was all gone. She looked up from her hands, wrestling each other in her lap, to see Bob’s silent blinking response on the screen.
› Not necessarily.
‘What? What do you mean “not necessarily”? Do you mean not necessarily dead?’
› Affirmative. They may have been transported.
‘You mean like one of our time windows?’
› Correct. The sudden dilation of a dimensional pinhole being used to extract zero-point energy may have functioned in a similar way to a portal.
‘Where? Do you know where? Could we find them?’
› Negative. I have no possible way of knowing when they would have been transported to. It would be random.
‘But… but they could be alive, right? Alive, somewhere?’
› Affirmative, Sal. But in the same geographic location.
‘Is there anything we could do to try to find them?’
› Negative. We are in the same situation as before we sent the tachyon signal. If the explosion did not kill them, then they are sometime in the past or future.
The rising hope she was feeling that there might be a way to find them and bring them back in one piece began to falter.
› My AI duplicate and Liam may attempt to establish contact with the field office, provided it can be done with a minimum of time contamination.
‘You mean like Liam did with the museum guest book? A message in history?’
› Correct. If they have not been transported too far in time, it may be possible for them to find a way to communicate without causing a dangerous level of contamination.
‘So what… we wait? We wait and hope for a signal?’
› Affirmative. We must wait and we must observe. There is no other viable course of action.
CHAPTER 23
65 million years BC, jungle
‘Excuse me?’ said Laura. ‘ When did you say?’
Franklyn finished wiping his glasses dry and put them back on again. He took his time savouring the silent, rapt attention of the others sitting together in the clearing. ‘I said sixty-five million years ago.’
The others shared a stunned silence. Eyes meeting eyes and all of them wide. The enormity of the fact taking a long while to sink in for all of them.
It was Whitmore who broke the silence. ‘Sixty-five million years… so that definitely takes us to near the end of the Cretaceous period.’ He looked at the boy, whose glasses were already beginning to fog up again from the humidity. ‘It is the Cretaceous, isn’t it?’
Franklyn nodded. ‘Correct. Late Cretaceous, to be precise.’
‘We’ve travelled in time?’ uttered Kelly. ‘That’s… that’s not possible!’
‘Whoa!’ one of the other kids cried.
Whitmore and Franklyn were looking at each other warily, a gesture not missed by Liam.
‘What? Either of you gentlemen going to tell us what a bleedin’ late crustation is?’ Liam studied them suspiciously. ‘You two fellas looked at each other all funny just then. That means something, right?’
Whitmore pursed his lips, his eyebrows arched as if in disbelief at what he was about to utter. ‘If Franklyn here is right,’ he said, watching the foot-long dragonflies hover and drop among a cluster of ferns nearby, ‘then this is dinosaur times. We’re in dinosaur times.’
Laura gasped. ‘Oh God.’ She took two or three deep breaths that hooted like a steam train coming down a tunnel, like a woman in labour. ‘Oh my God! I was watching Jurassic Park last night! I don’t want to be eaten by a rex. I don’t want to be eaten by a — ’
Several of the other students, not all of them girls, began to whimper at the prospect; the rest began to talk at once. Liam watched Whitmore struggling with the situation himself, shaking his head incredulously and balling his fists in silence. Kelly meanwhile was gazing up at the blue sky and the slightly odd-coloured sun as if hoping to find an answer up there.
Somebody needs to take charge, thought Liam. Or they’re all going to die.
He was damned if he was going to volunteer, though — to be responsible for this lot. He and Becks were probably going to fare much better on their own. One of the three men was going to have to step up and take care of these kids. But, as it happened, as Liam was beginning to wonder how the pair of them were going to discreetly extract themselves — with Edward Chan in their possession — the decision was made for him.
‘You!’ said Whitmore, his lost expression wiped away, all of a sudden remembering there was an issue as yet unresolved. His voice cut across the clamour of all the others’. ‘Yes, you! The goth girl,’ he said, pointing at Becks. He looked at Liam. ‘And you. You know what happened, don’t you? The pair of you weren’t in my party. And you knew that explosion was going to happen. So you’d better start telling us who the heck you are!’
There was an instant silence as all eyes swivelled to him and Becks.
Liam grinned self-consciously. ‘Uh, we… that’s to say me and Becks here, we’re not er… students as such. We’re sort of agents from another time.’
Fourteen pairs of eyes on him and none of them seemed to have anything close to a grasp on what he’d just said.
‘See, we’re time travellers and we came along today to try to protect him,’ he said, pointing at Edward Chan who was sitting on the grass, arms wrapped round his huddled knees.
Edward Chan’s eyes widened. ‘Uh? Am I in trouble?’
‘You, Edward. We came to find out how we were going to protect you from an attempt on your life.’
The others looked at the small Chinese boy then back at Liam.
‘You better explain about him, Becks,’ said Liam. ‘You’ve got all the facts in your head.’
Becks nodded. ‘Listen carefully,’ she began. ‘Time travel will become a viable technology in the year 2044 when a Professor Roald Waldstein will build the world’s first time machine and successfully transport himself into the past and return safely to his time. The practical technology developed by Waldstein in 2044 is largely based on the theories developed and published in Scientific American by the Department of Physics, University of Texas in 2031. The article is entitled “Zero-point Energy: energy from space-time vacuum, or inter-dimensional leakage?”.’
Kelly’s tired face lit up. ‘You gotta be kidding?’
Whitmore looked at the bewildered young boy hugging his own knees on the ground in front of him. ‘So how does this affect this boy?’
Becks’s cool grey eyes panned smoothly across to Chan. ‘The article published in Scientific American is a reproduction of a maths thesis presented by one Edward Aaron Chan. An act of academic plagiarism by his supervising professor.’
