She was relaxed. She stood strongly: her legs slightly apart, the gun in her right hand, her left cupping the handle for stability. She was utterly comfortable. She could turn in any direction with the confidence that her eyes and the barrel of gun would aim at the same object. Time would slow. She would react faster than her adversary because she was relaxed.
“Hel-,” said a voice behind her, and Saskia jumped, turned, and fired before the man had completed his second syllable.
Snip.
Too fast. The moment shot straight into his memory. It bypassed his mind. He remembered seeing the woman turn. She had a gun. She fired. He remembered the heat of the bullet across his shoulder. His muscles pulled themselves taut. He held his breath.
Now, afterwards, he let the breath escape.
The woman was trembling. She smiled. “Sorry about that.”
Michaels opened his mouth to ask a question, but he was too preoccupied to draw air. His eyes rolled up and he fainted.
When, as a teenager, Jack Michaels fell asleep, he would contemplate nothing less than the universe. He started with the Earth, zoomed out beyond the Moon, then beyond the Solar System, beyond the arm of the galaxy, beyond the galaxy itself until his mind was stretched to nothing. He watched the turning Milky Way. It obeyed the same law that made his blanket feel heavy. Behind closed eyes, galaxies rushed into the vista. They became a pin-point. Finally, he was in darkness, in the zone. He was outside the universe. He could feel it, ask questions.
Snip. His enlightenment would vanish.
He had been forbidden.
Half a century later, Michaels felt that presence again.
His eyes opened. The pin-point of the universe remained like an afterimage. He jumped to his feet. “Hello,” he said preemptively.
A pretty young woman – the one who had just tried to kill him
– reached over and shook his hand. “Hello, Professor Michaels. I’m Saskia.” She shrugged. “I thought you were Hartfield.” Michaels felt his collar. It was torn. “I understand your enthusiasm. Hartfield was just here.” “Where is he?” asked a middle-aged man to his right.
Michaels squinted. He looked a little like Jennifer.
“David Proctor?”
“Yes,” said the man. He smiled. “I’m glad you remember me.”
“Very well,” Michaels said. “I believe I subjected you to a rather drunken discussion about time travel some years ago.” He smiled. “I was looking for funding.”
Jennifer said, “Professor, did Hartfield go back in time?”
“You bet.”
Saskia groaned. “Then we’re too late.”
Michaels put his hands in his pockets. He asked, “Too late for what?” David said, “Hartfield has been developing these technologies for one reason only. To cure himself.”
“Ah, yes. He said as much. However, using people can work in more than one direction. I consider that I have been using him. After all, the time machine works.”
“But Hartfield will change time,” Saskia said. “He went back.”
“I doubt that time can be changed, my dear.”
“What do you mean?”
“Take that bullet as an example. You fired the weapon a yard from my chest. You were aiming at my chest, weren’t you?”
Saskia nodded. “Yes.”
“But you missed.”
“My aim was off,” she said. “It was a thousand-to-one chance, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”
Michaels said, “I agree with you. If the odds are a thousand-to-one, then we should be surprised if it didn’t happen once every thousand times. But I have another, more crazy explanation. Want to hear it?”
Nobody objected.
“OK. Let’s say I’m a crucial component in a process that has already happened, but has already happened in the future. In other words, I cannot be killed because I’m required to help with something that has already taken place; if I were to be killed, then I would not be able to play this role. Understand? I am a cause. The effect has already happened. Any effect must have a cause that triggers it. It is a law that cannot be violated. Killing me would violate the law. Therefore I cannot yet be killed.”
David nodded. He said, “If the cause and the effect have been swapped around as you suggest, then it must mean that your time machine in involved.”
“Agreed,” Michaels said. “Any ideas what I’m going to do?”
Saskia reached into her shoulder bag. She took out a sheet of paper and handed it Michaels. She explained that she was destined to travel backwards in time to stop Hartfield. That this was a message from her older self. That the paper had been found in Scotland in a similar research centre. “The West Lothian Centre?” asked Michaels.
“Yes, why?”
“That’s where Hartfield has gone.”
David Proctor fixed him a stare. “I beg your pardon?”
Michaels nodded. “That’s right. My calculations were set for the year 1999, but the computer relocated the time insertion to 2003. I have no idea why. You used to work at the West Lothian Centre, didn’t you, David?”
“Indeed I did. Until it was bombed back in 2003.”
Michaels nodded again. “Guess what date Hartfield went back to?”
David was frowning. “14th May 2003?”
“Yes.”
“The day of the bombing.” David turned to Saskia. “Could it be that Hartfield bombed the place?”
“Why would he?” she replied. “It makes no sense. 2003 is four years after the young Harmon received his nano-treatment. It’s too late.”
“What might have made the computer change the date?” he asked Michaels.
Michaels ignored him. Instead, he took Saskia by the hand. “My dear, you must come with me immediately.”
David trailed behind. A pad of pink paper caught his eye. He snapped his fingers. “Of course,” he said, and took it.
Pliny, the chimpanzee, looked up from his cage as the buggy approached. He wore a black flight suit. Outside his cage was a screen that showed his heart rate, blood oxygenation and brain activity. The humans arrived. Pliny leaned on his knuckles to watch them.
“We don’t need to be concerned, Saskia,” Michaels was saying. Saskia agreed. He didn’t need to be concerned with very much; only one person would be going back in time: her. “Hartfield’s plan has not worked. If it had, then there
