CHAPTER 83
AD 54, outside Rome
‘I… I am not going in there. I am not going with you!’
Maddy looked at the old man. She’d expected they’d have to get Bob to wrestle the young Rashim through the portal, but not the old one. ‘What? Why?’
He shook his head. ‘Want… want to die right here.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Here… this place. This hilltop. Open space…’ He closed his eyes, sniffed the air as the gentle breeze made the long grass before them and the leaves above them whisper together.
‘Shadd-yah! You don’t have to die,’ said Sal. ‘We can get you some help back home! Decent food. Get you looked at by some doctors or something! You’re going to be just fine!’
‘Already dead,’ he rasped. He looked at his younger self. ‘Don’t become this…’ he said, touching his own cheek with a claw of a finger. He smiled and closed his eyes. ‘I found you. These people must stop you… stop us.’
‘None of you understand, do you?’ said young Rashim. ‘The world’s pretty much finished in my time. We’ve poisoned everything. The world’s a garbage pit. What’s left that isn’t flooded is… is landfill. There’s no hope for us any more!’
‘Whatever mess we made of earth… we can’t toy around with time like this,’ said Maddy. ‘We’re all going back and leaving this history as it’s meant to be.’
‘No!’ The old Rashim’s eyes opened. ‘God… He’s in there.’ He nodded towards the strobing beacon that Bob was holding in his fist. ‘In that place… is chaos!’
Young Rashim shook his head with mild disgust at the rambling old man. ‘There’s no way that crazy old fool’s me.’
‘… if I he finds me… me and Mr Muzzy,’ he gabbled, ‘… if he finds us in there, we’ll be sent straight to Hell for what we did. Straight to Hell! Straight to Hell… ’
‘Why don’t we let him stay?’ said Liam.
Maddy turned round. ‘What?’
‘Let him stay.’ Liam looked at the old man with pity. ‘Look at him
… the poor man’s completely terrified.’
‘We can’t just leave him here! He’ll starve or — ’
‘He won’t survive, Maddy. He won’t make it through. Look at him.’
Maddy did. And she could see Liam was probably right. It looked like a strong gust of wind would kill him, let alone being bombarded with cell-rupturing tachyons. ‘All right, then.’ She squatted down beside the old man and put a hand on his arm. His wild rambling stopped.
‘Is this what you want, Rashim?’
He turned to look at her with milky madness in his wet eyes. She wondered if he was even seeing her.
‘Rashim? Can you hear me? Do you want to stay here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll be on your own? We all have to go.’
He nodded, smiled. ‘Have Mr Muzzy with me.’
Maddy shook her head. It felt wrong leaving him out here. His mind was mush. She wasn’t even sure he knew where he was, even who he was any more.
Then there seemed to be some purpose in his eyes. He smiled. ‘You go. I want this…’
‘What? What is it you want?’
He spread his arms. ‘ This. Let me have this.’
She looked around at the flat hilltop. The soft hiss through the dry grass, the unbroken blue sky above. A horizon of distant lavender-tipped mountain peaks. And peace.
Peace and almost infinite space.
Maddy got it. She totally got it.
‘All right,’ she whispered softly to him. ‘All right…’ She smiled, squeezed his arm gently. ‘Savour it, Rashim. Savour every moment of it.’
He looked at her with a glimmer of sanity. ‘Thank you.’
She stood up and beckoned the others away, leaving the old man sitting hunched in the middle of the tall grass, his head cocked, listening to the gentle whisper of the wind.
‘Fill up that jug for him. Let’s at least leave him some water.’
‘He’s not coming?’ asked Sal.
‘Nope.’
CHAPTER 84
2069, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs
‘Still nothing?’
The technician shook his head solemnly.
Dr Yatsushita watched the proxy density display on the main holo-screen. It was flatlining. The density equivalent of white noise. Just an interdimensional soup. He took his glasses off and rubbed weary eyes. It was return-time plus over three hours. Even at one minute past due, the implication had been pretty clear. Just as there was no such thing as being ‘slightly pregnant’, there was no such thing as being nearly successful with time translation.
We lost them. Dr Anwar and that ridiculous customized lab unit of his.
He sat back down in his chair. The other technicians in their monitor-high cubicles sat up to get a look at the project leader, wondering how to read his body language. Their heads bobbed above partitions like a coterie of meerkats.
Yatsushita balled his fists. He’d just lost the brightest mind on his team and in a limited field like this… where do you go to recruit a replacement?
‘Dr Yatsushita?’
He looked up. One of the beacon deployment team was standing over him. ‘We uh… we picked up a faint signal. One of the beacons squawked a signal for about a minute, but that’s all we got.’
‘Nothing now?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s like it just got switched off.’
‘Or it malfunctioned?’
The man shrugged. That was probably a more likely answer. The translation of Dr Anwar and his armful of beacon markers and that stupid yellow robot probably ended up with them being fused into a layer of rock in the middle of some mountain range or simply lost in that horrific subatomic broth that reduced the calculations of the world’s best particle physicists to little more than eeny-meeny-miney-mo guesses.
Their system was still far too unreliable for human transmission. It appeared that Dr Anwar had been too confident with his own calculations. Yes, their system could send an apple fifty minutes, fifty hours… fifty days, even fifty years into the past. But once every two or three times, they lost it; that or they brought back apple puree.
‘All right, shut it all down.’ He sighed. They were burning gigawatts of power that couldn’t be wasted endlessly. Not in this resource-poor time anyway. ‘Shut it down!’ he snapped louder. The deployment team technician nodded and turned away quickly.
A few moments later, the deafening hum of power surging through the giant Faraday cage running across the roof of the hangar died away, leaving a hollow echo behind.
Losing Rashim was going to set them back months. Maybe even years. If they couldn’t even reliably send a single human test subject there and back without losing him, they certainly weren’t even close to ready for the proposed party of three hundred.
‘Let’s get the diagnostics running!’ he called out. Overall the system had been powered up for a total of three
