‘Do you know what will happen if we’re not successful?’
I glanced at Ryan again.
‘Look at me,’ said Ben.
‘Billions of people will die. The planet might die.’
Ben nodded thoughtfully. ‘Is there anything else he’s told you?’
I shook my head.
‘Ry?’ Ben asked.
‘I think that’s everything,’ he said quietly.
Ben turned back to me. ‘How long have you known?’
I concentrated. It seemed a long time ago now. ‘About six or seven weeks,’ I said.
‘And how long have you known that she knows?’ he asked Ryan.
‘About six weeks.’
‘Six weeks!’ said Ben, raising his voice for the first time. ‘You’ve known we have a serious problem for six weeks and you didn’t tell me.’
‘She won’t say anything. You can trust her.’
‘Maybe I can. But can I trust you? This isn’t a game, Ryan. This isn’t a little vacation to the past where you get to meet a celebrity and pick up a pretty girl before heading home to your old life. This is everything. This is the past and the present and the future.’
‘I know I screwed up.’
‘You’re so immature,’ Cassie said. ‘You couldn’t keep your eye on the prize. You allowed yourself to become infatuated by a twenty-first century girl and then spent half your days hanging out with her instead of working on Connor, which is what you should have been doing.’
‘It’s not like that,’ Ryan said, his voice rising. ‘I know I messed up! I shouldn’t have brought her home and let her find the book. But I did and she did. I’m not wasting my time with her. She’s important.’
‘Is that right?’ said Cassie. ‘I thought your brief was rather straightforward: make friends with Connor Penrose and make sure he doesn’t discover Eden. I don’t remember the part that instructed you to fool around with a high-school girl.’
‘I’m not fooling around with her.’
Cassie’s laugh was razor-sharp. I could sense a pounding on the periphery of my senses. It pulsed to the beat of my heart. Bang-bang thump. Bang-bang thump. I gulped a mouthful of cold water.
‘What would you call it, Ryan?’ asked Cassie. ‘Falling in love?’
‘Eden isn’t just some random high-school girl. She’s the girl Connor falls in love with. His best friend. The one who breaks his heart. The one he argues with just before he discovers Eden.’
Cassie looked at me and then back to Ryan. ‘And how exactly does you falling in love with her help us?’
Ryan’s jaw clenched and he glanced at me. I was waiting for him to announce that he wasn’t in love with me. ‘She’s helping me.’ He went on to explain how we had plotted together to get Connor to the ball and to spend his money on a games console.
‘And you never thought to include this information in your daily debrief?’ asked Ben.
Ryan frowned. ‘Of course I thought about it. But I worried that if I said anything she’d be vulnerable in the clean-up mission.’
Cassie and Ben looked at each other.
‘He’s broken the First Law of Temporal Integrity,’ she said. ‘You know what that means.’
The clock on the wall chimed eight.
‘Could we finish this conversation another time?’ I asked, standing up. ‘I really should get going.’
‘Sit down again, Eden,’ said Ben. ‘I think you’re going to need the whole story.’
Ben made a fresh pot of coffee and ordered in pizza. The headache that had been sprouting deep within my skull for a couple of hours was now beginning to bloom. Privately I promised myself I would never again touch raspberry Juiska – or any alcohol – if the pain would go away now and let me think. Ryan poured me glasses of cold water and encouraged me to eat lots of pizza.
Ben began by going over the stuff that Ryan had already told me. Connor would discover a habitable planet on the twenty-third of June. Thirty-two years later Nathaniel Westland would discover a method of travelling great distances through space and time. One of the first places was Eden. But I knew this already. I knew from the pictures in Connor’s autobiography that it was a pink-rock planet with a lush jungle of green plants under a clear blue sky. By the time he had reached the part about Earth’s habitats dying out and billions of people dying, the dusk was deepening from blue into purple and the shimmering moon was a hard, white scar in the sky.
‘Fast forward to 2122,’ said Ben, ‘and you get to our timeline. Do you know the population of Earth today?’
‘Over six and a half billion?’ I offered.
‘That’s close enough. In our timeline there’s less than one billion. Some people think that’s a good thing. No overpopulation, more space and resources for everyone. Of course, they’re not the people who watched their own children dying from starvation.’
‘It’s even more serious than the deaths of billions of people,’ said Cassie. ‘The way things are going, many scientists believe the human race won’t survive another fifty years. So you see, we can’t fail.’
‘So you had to travel back in time,’ I said.
‘Not everyone saw it that way,’ said Ben. ‘Some people felt strongly that there is never a good enough reason for backwards time travel.’
‘But surely, if the human race is dying out, if the planet is dying, you have to? How could anyone oppose that?’
‘It’s gone terribly wrong before,’ said Ben. He hesitated. ‘Do you know why the dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago?’
‘A meteor in Mexico?’
Ben laughed. ‘Is that the current theory?’
‘I think so.’
‘There will be many theories. But it was time travellers from the late twenty-first century. One of the travellers had influenza. He was symptom-free when he left his timeline, but began to get sick after returning. The flu virus wiped out the dinosaurs.’
‘I need a moment,’ I said, pouring myself a mug of coffee. ‘You mean to tell me that there was no meteor?’
‘There were several, actually,’ said Ben. ‘But the dinosaurs were already dying out long before any meteors crashed to Earth.’
‘The dinosaurs died of flu,’ I said to myself. I began to laugh. More in disbelief than anything.
‘I know it’s a lot to grasp,’ said Ben gently. ‘And because you’ve always been told something else, this must seem absurd. But it’s important for you to understand why our mission protocols are so strict. The extinction of the dinosaurs isn’t the only massive disaster caused by time travel.’
‘What else?’ I whispered.
‘The Black Death which wiped out one third of the population of Europe,’ Ben continued.
‘The bubonic plague,’ I said.
Ben shook his head. ‘A different bacteria altogether. A bacteria that is well tolerated in humans in the twenty-second century, but was deadly in the fourteenth.’
‘How many of these disastrous missions have taken place?’ I asked.
‘Those two are the worst,’ said Ben. ‘They happened in the early days of four-dimensional travel. Very few time missions have been approved since then. But this one was allowed because so much is at stake.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘But if it’s so important that Connor doesn’t discover Eden, why not kill him? Surely that would be a safer bet.’
‘We’re not assassins,’ said Cassie. ‘We’re here to do a job, which is to prevent Connor discovering Eden. We don’t have to kill him to do that.’
‘But wouldn’t it be easier?’
‘It would be easier,’ said Ben. ‘And perhaps if Connor went on to become a nobody who did nothing with his
