“That’s a relief,” said Josh. “All we need to do now is toput everything back here to how it was before she went on the rampage, and allour worries will be over.”
“And what about me?” asked Henry. “If we do manage to fixthings and bring back the other Henry, then there will be two of us runningaround.”
“That’s alright,” replied Josh, “we’ll just pass you off asyour own long-lost twin brother. It’s been done before.”
“Do you think the other Henry will mind?” asked hiscounterpart. “It will be a bit weird for him, knowing he’s got a duplicate.”
“Would you mind?”
“No, I don’t think I would,” replied Henry, with a thoughtfullook on his face as he considered the possibility.
“There’s your answer, then,” concluded Josh.
Later that evening, after shutting down all the equipment inthe bunker for good, they returned to the villa to eat. Henry proved to be adab hand in the kitchen and was rustling up their evening meal.
“There’s not a lot of fresh food left in the fridge up here,but I managed to knock us up a couple of omelettes,” he said.
“I noticed plenty of provisions down in the bunker,” saidJosh.
“Yeah, we made sure we were well stocked down there withfood that would never go off,” said Henry. “It was mostly canned stuff butenough to feed a community for a good few years in the event of catastrophe.”
“But not much in the way of fresh food?” asked Josh.
“The plan was to grow it. We had all sorts of advancedhydroponic centres set up down there.”
“I noticed,” said Josh. “So here’s an odd thing. All thetime I was living here with Vanessa she was serving me up plenty of fresh food.She claimed it was being made by replicators, but I was a bit sceptical aboutthat even with my memory loss. Yes, we can 3D print pretty much anything thesedays, but fresh food?”
“She must have been travelling through time to get stuff,”replied Henry. “This island’s uninhabited but it’s only half an hour by boat tothe nearest populated island so she could have gone there in the past, beforethe virus.”
“How did she get there?” asked Josh. “There are no boats onthis island.”
“She probably had a yacht stashed in the past and sailed offto the supermarket there to stock up once a week. Either that or she just stolefood out of the fridge from this very villa when other people were staying init.”
“Well, regardless of how the eggs got here, I’m quite happywith omelettes,” said Josh. “And I also took the liberty of bringing these upfrom the bunker earlier.”
He presented Henry with a couple of bottles of the same 2028claret that Vanessa had plied him with a few evenings ago.
“She’s got a fantastic wine cellar down there,” explainedJosh. “Apparently she brought a load with her on her yacht when she sailedhere. That yacht’s got to still be around here somewhere.”
“That’s another thing that would be tricky to do, if we everdeveloped the technology,” said Henry. “Making staple foods, I can envisagethat. But the subtleties and nuances of wine that varies from year to year?You’d need some seriously sophisticated algorithms to re-create those.”
“We could really do with finding that,” said Henry.
“Plenty of time for that tomorrow,” said Josh. “For now, Isuggest we uncork these and discuss how we’re going to put the world backtogether.”
After their omelettes, they did just that, sitting out onthe decking watching the sun set.
“I must say I find this company infinitely preferable tobefore,” said Josh. “Even when I was suffering from amnesia and didn’t know thetruth about Vanessa, I felt uneasy in her presence.”
“At least neither of us will ever have to see her again oncethis is all sorted,” said Henry.
“Let’s hope so,” replied Josh. “But we are going to have tothink extremely carefully about how we handle this. We may have got rid of herin the present, but the past is another matter. If we are going to go back intime to try and stop her doing what she did then we cannot risk giving her eventhe slightest hint of what we’re doing.”
“Absolutely,” said Henry. “If we did, then all the workwe’ve done here today could be completely wiped out. It’s too risky going backto try and stop her releasing the virus or running the other me over. We needto go much further back in time than that, to before any of this even gotstarted.”
“How far are you suggesting?” asked Josh. “To when she was ateenager? Or even younger? Surely you can’t be talking about killing her as achild?”
“Would you kill Hitler as a child?” asked Henry.
“I’m not getting into that debate again. I’ve discussed itat length with Peter and Charlie before, and we concluded that it would changehistory so much as to make the current world unrecognisable.”
“We don’t have to kill her as a child. We just have toprevent her from ever being born.”
“Won’t that make massive changes to the timeline, too?” saidJosh.
“Not to the extent killing Hitler would. It will changethings locally in Australia, and the Henry from this universe will never meet her.But in the wider scheme of world events, I don’t think it will have a hugeimpact – except on things that she directly caused, like the virus.”
“How do you propose preventing her birth?” asked Josh.
“It’s pretty straightforward, to be honest,” said Henry.“And the good news is, nobody needs to get hurt. A few lives go in differentdirections, but hey, I had to break a few eggs to make those omelettes earlier,didn’t I?”
“I’m not sure that’s a relevant analogy, but go on,” saidJosh.
“OK, well, the good news is that being married to her, Iknow plenty about her family history,” replied Henry. “Her mother died a fewyears ago and was very forgetful in her later years. She only had one topic ofconversation and that was about how she and Vanessa’s father met. She used torepeat it over and over again to everyone she spoke to.”
“That’s handy,” said Josh. “I think I know where
