Liam nodded. ‘Exactly! Just like in the Second World War. I read something about those Enigma codes and all. And how the Americans and British couldn’t sometimes react to the German messages they’d intercepted, otherwise the Germans would have figured out they’d cracked their secret codes.’ He looked down at the muddy ground at his feet. Subconsciously the toe of his left shoe drew spirals in the dirt. ‘So I don’t know yet what kind of a message we could write. But we’d want something we know they’d have to keep secret. But, more importantly, we want a message they’d need to take directly to our field office.’
‘That will compromise the agency’s secrecy,’ warned Becks.
Liam shrugged. ‘I know… but another problem to fix later, huh?’
She scowled silently at that. ‘It is another protocol conflict.’
‘So you can blame it on me when we get back,’ he said with a grin.
The group considered Liam’s plan in silence for a while as the fire crackled and hissed between them.
‘I reckon your idea sounds cool,’ said Lam. ‘I’m in.’
Liam noticed a couple of heads nod.
‘All right, then,’ he said finally. ‘All right, then.’ This felt good, having something at least half-figured out, something for them all to work towards. ‘Becks, we’d need for them to know when we are, you know? As close as you can get it. So you do what maths in your head you need to do.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Affirmative.’
‘And maybe we’ll need some sort of device erected exactly where we landed, right? So that if — ’ he corrected himself — ‘ when they get our message and have an approximate time period to start density probing, we need something that’s constantly moving to and fro in that space. Creating some sort of a movement, a disturbance?’
‘Correct.’
‘You mean like a windmill or somethin’?’ asked Ranjit.
Becks nodded. ‘Affirmative. A device of that kind would be suitable.’
‘And we’ll need to make some preparations for a long hike. Food, water, weapons, those sorts of things.’ Liam looked around at them. ‘And we’ll need to leave someone behind to man the camp and lift the bridge after we’re gone.’
‘Also to maintain the density interference device. It must function constantly. All the time,’ said Becks.
Liam looked over his shoulder out towards the darkness, towards the middle of the clearing where they’d landed over a week ago. ‘Yes, you’re right. It’d be bad news for us if a density probe passed through here once, found nothing and moved on.’
Liam’s grin was infectious and began to spread among the others.
He looked at Becks. ‘Is this acceptable?’
She nodded slowly. ‘The plan has a low probability of success.’ She smiled, quite nicely this time. ‘But it is possible, Liam O’Connor.’
CHAPTER 34
2001, New York
Sal watched the world go by. Her world, that’s how she thought about it: Times Square, New York, eight thirty in the morning, Tuesday 11 September 2001.
She knew it so well now. She knew everything that existed in this thoroughfare and everything that was meant to happen at this very moment in time. For instance… she looked around… and there they were: the old couple in matching jogging pants, huffing slowly side by side; the FedEx guy with an armful of packages, dropping one of them on the pavement and looking around to see whether anyone had noticed his hamfistedness; two blonde girls sharing headphones and giggling at something they were listening to.
Sal smiled.
All normal so far.
And there was the flustered-looking huddle of Japanese tourists standing outside TGI Friday’s on the corner of 192 West and 46th Street, flipping anxiously through their phrase books to work out how to ask for a coffee and salt-beef and mustard bagels times nine.
Her eyes drifted up to the billboards overlooking Times Square; there was Shrek and Donkey, Mikey and Sully. There was the billboard for Mamma Mia… and walking slowly up the pavement towards her favourite bench, checking in every bin along the way and pushing a loaded shopping trolley in front of him, was the cheerful old tramp she saw this time every morning.
She sniffed the warm morning air; it smelled of car fumes and faintly of sizzling bacon and sausage meat. Again, quite normal — the smell of a city in a hurry and on its way to work.
‘My world,’ she whispered to herself. Her world… and all was well.
Only that was little consolation. If her world was still unaltered, if there weren’t even the tiniest of differences to see here, it could only mean that Liam and the others had as yet to make any impact on whatever piece of history they’d landed in. There were two conclusions to draw from that, weren’t there? Either they were being incredibly careful and had managed to avoid any kind of contamination at all… or…
‘Or they arrived nowhere,’ she muttered.
Dead. Torn to pieces by a wall of energy, by the explosion they’d caused. Or perhaps lost in chaos space. Foster had once ominously told her it was a place you’d never ever want — not in your wildest nightmares — to loiter around in.
Maddy was back from her trip to locate Foster. She’d not managed to find him. Sal had thought it was a long shot. But she seemed to have cheered up a little, seemed hopeful that they were going to get them back home yet. For some reason she’d been gabbling on about expecting, when the bubble reset at twelve o’clock tonight and they were ‘reset’ back to Monday morning, the first thing they’d hear would be a knock on the archway’s door, and somebody standing outside, perhaps feeling silly, uncertain, and holding in their hand some sort of artefact from history with Liam’s scruffy handwriting scrawled across it.
Sal wondered why Maddy was so sure that was going to happen, that the answer to this little mess they were in was actually going to deliver itself to their front door like the morning post.
Maddy slurped on her third Dr Pepper and placed it back on the desk beside the other two, now forming an orderly queue of crumpled cans. She could feel the sugar kick building up inside and the office chair twisted one way then the other as she pulled on the edge of the desk.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘What do you think, Bob?’
› Your thinking is logical. However, my AI duplicate would offer Liam caution against this course of action.
‘Of course you would, Bob… because that’s a hard-coded protocol.’
The cursor blinked for a few seconds.
› Also because of the danger of revealing the location of this field office.
‘But Liam would still go and do something like that, right? He’d override your warning?’
› I am unable to answer that, Maddy.
‘But, come on, you know him better than me or Sal.’
› He has broken protocols before. He is capable of impulsive decisions.
Maddy smiled. ‘That he is.’
She picked up her can again and tossed another fizzy mouthful down. ‘So, like, if somebody in history does find a message from him… I guess we’re going to have to do a lot of tidying up after ourselves.’
› It will depend on who discovers the message. And when in history that person comes from.
‘Well, it would be dropped somewhere, some time in the state of Texas. It could be anyone from some Apache Indian, or maybe a cowboy to… I dunno, maybe a civil-war soldier or an oil driller, or some college kids goofing around off the main highway. It could be anyone.’
› You presume they have only travelled back in time a hundred or two hundred years. It is equally possible they exist in what will one day be Texas long before the arrival of colonials. It is equally possible they exist in a time before the arrival of Native Americans.
