Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times) Read online

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Nothing good.’ My best efforts at analysis indicated that the effect would either fade away or grow without limit until it tore the world apart. Well, actually it would tear the universe apart, though only at the speed of light, so it would be a slow end. And frankly I wasn’t that bothered about the universe past the borders of our solar system. In fact, my compassion didn’t really extend beyond the atmosphere.

  While unable to calculate whether we were safe this time or not, I was able to show that the effect was cumulative, so that each hit of paradox took us all closer to that tipping point where it became a chain reaction.

  We climbed the spiral stairs back up into the departure lounge within the castle, not trusting the electrics of the elevator. Ellery seemed almost pleased with himself, as though he had just dodged a bullet. I guess some decisions are balanced on such a sharp edge that you just don’t know until that very last moment what you are going to end up doing.

  I left him to witter on earnestly to Mia about how it was all for the best, and that he was sorry to have wasted our time and was still sworn to secrecy, of course. I wasn’t setting any store by his promises of discretion. I was going to get my memory erasing device. My friend from Cambridge, Helen Wilson, had worked with me and Ian Creed to develop the idea. That particular secret hadn’t lasted long, and the government soon impounded the technology, making Helen and Ian rich in the process. I guessed that, by now, MI5, the CIA and a whole bunch of other agencies had their own versions, and that state secrets were better kept these days than they had been for quite a while. But the important thing was that I had mine.

  By the time I reached the end of the corridor I felt sick to my stomach. For the few minutes since that detonation deep below us when the time trail vanished without its passenger, I had been experiencing that same disorienting nausea I used to feel when Eva or Demus were trying to approach me for the first time.

  I reached my study door and stopped. Ghosts bled from me, dozens of them, scores, replicas of me, turning back, striding on, opening the door, pausing, coughing, looking around . . . All of them might have been me’s streaming away into alternate futures, separated one from another by hundreds of small choices, each of them branching out into new timelines on which I would live alternative lives, many very similar, some spiralling away to wholly different ends.

  Suddenly the whole castle shook as if struck a blow. Plaster dust sifted down, and from my odd new perspective I deduced that somehow I was on my back, lying on the floor. I rolled over and scrambled to my feet, ricocheting from the walls as I made an uncoordinated dash back to the room I’d left Mia in.

  ‘Nick!’ She rose from behind a toppled sofa as I burst in.

  ‘Mia!’ I reached her side in five quick strides, catching her as she stumbled. The room was a mess, mirrors fallen from the walls, furniture thrown left and right, parts of the ceiling down and the dust making it hard to see from one doorway to the other. ‘Are you alright?’ Her hair was in disarray and blood trickled from one nostril.

  ‘I . . . I think so.’ She looked around. ‘Where’s Ellery?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I coughed, then lifted my T-shirt over my mouth to keep the dust from my lungs.

  ‘He was right here!’ She looked around. ‘Help m—’ And she froze. ‘Oh.’

  The chunk of ceiling moulding that had struck Ellery Elmwood was no larger than my fist, but it would have hit him considerably harder than any fist ever could, and the side of his head had a bloody dent in it of the kind that says you should call a funeral director rather than an ambulance.

  ‘What just happened?’ Mia looked more bewildered than upset. I guessed she was in shock. Perhaps I was, too.

  ‘I think the universe just killed him.’ That had been the universe’s go-to response when I was the cause of a paradox. That paradox, like Ellery’s, had been a minor one, nowhere in the league of killing your own father before he meets your mother; more of an accounting error, really. Not many people had ever seen Ellery’s time trail back through the years to 1979, but the point was how had they seen it at all, given that Ellery did in fact opt not to go at the last moment? Or to put it another way, how was Ellery still here when he had gone back to redirect his younger self into pop stardom? That was the accounting error that had been eased by a lump of plaster that set us passing on into a future that Ellery was no longer active in.

  Sam Robson was the next traveller to come to our doors, early in the new year. I’d known his face for years and wondered many times who he was. We knew all the rest of them now. They were wealthy, famous, easy enough to track down in the information age. But not Sam Robson. He remained a mystery until the moment he pressed our doorbell button and caused the automaton in the main courtyard to strike the huge gong that you see in the introduction to Rank films. Simon had insisted on that one.

  Sam wasn’t rich. He was a hacker. He seemed a nice enough guy, about my age, fortyish, solid build; he looked the sporty type rather than the bedroom-haunting teenage nerd usually associated with the hacking fraternity, at least in the papers. He’d pieced together what was going on, or at least the bones of it, from small mentions in the email accounts of several of our previous clients who had been less careful in what they said to their friends than they should have been.

  Surprisingly, Sam hadn’t come to blackmail us. At least not for money. What he wanted was to go back nineteen years in order to tell a series of whopping lies. It turned out that Sam’s mother had died when he was in his early twenties and that, wrapped in the selfishness of the young, he had missed the chance to say his goodbyes. I felt there might have been more to that story, but since he had us on the back foot I didn’t press him.

  What he wanted to do was go back, visit her at the hospice where she died, and make her happy by telling her about the fabulous, and fictitious, success he’d had in the future.

  ‘You think she’ll believe you’ve come back through time?’ Mia wanted to know.

  ‘I do. She wasn’t thinking too clearly on those painkillers at the end. And, if need be, I’ll find the younger me and haul him over there to make my point. I just want her to die happy. I want to see her. To have her believe her boy got all the good things she wanted for him. After that I can use what I know now to make millions and live the life of Riley, so I won’t even be lying to her really, because I will be rich just a few months after her death.’

  Sam’s plan was perfectly sound. He could fork into a new timeline in which he would be wealthy beyond measure if he played his cards right. It was, however, the sort of thing Mia and I had decided was the main argument against travelling to the past. We had thus far sent only those who already had wealth and power and had grown tired of it, wanting instead to revisit deeply personal moments in their past for the kind of catharsis we never usually get to have. Sam’s ambitions, though, could put into his hands the lives of millions, and we really didn’t know anything about him. He could turn out to be a new Hitler for all we knew. The mother story could be entirely fake.

  On the other hand, his time trail was there in the cave, and if we didn’t let him go then reality would have to withstand a second paradox bomb, plus the universe would try to kill him even if space-time withstood the shock and the rest of us got to carry on living. Finally, if we rejected him and sent him back into the world, he might make good on his threats, expose our work and possibly end the process, leading to another seven paradox explosions as the remaining travellers failed to meet their schedules.

  We made the right noises and sent him on his way, saying we had to get things ready for him. ‘I can tell you one thing for certain, Sam,’ I said at the castle gates, ‘if you don’t keep this to yourself there is no way you’ll get what you want. There’s no profit in this for you in the here and now.’

  He turned back at that, still smiling, still pleasant. ‘I wouldn’t say that was strictly true, Nick. I mean, you’re clearly a wealthy man. How much would you p
ay to keep this quiet?’

  I had no answer to that and stood frozen at my gates, seeing him as if he were something new, though he had been extorting us from the first moment we met.

  ‘So really, I get paid whether I take your trip or not. But I do want to see my old mum, so sort it out, Doctor Who, there’s a good chap.’ He clapped a hand to my shoulder as if we were best buddies, then strode off towards the visitors’ parking.

  I went back to the reception room where Mia was lifting Sam’s DNA from the glass he’d had a Coke in. She was quite the expert at it by now.

  ‘He’s going to blackmail us either way,’ I announced. ‘Either he travels or we pay him to stay.’

  Mia shrugged and bagged her sample. ‘You want I should kill him, boss?’

  I grinned. ‘It would be quite easy to turn into Guilder, wouldn’t it, if we had no morals?’

  ‘Life’s simpler without them. But if we didn’t have morals, we wouldn’t care about whatever timeline we were going to saddle with a Sam Robson – if that’s even his name – who knows the future.’ Mia pressed her lips together in a flat line. ‘I’d better send this to the lab.’

  A horrible thought occurred to me. Mia was sending Sam’s DNA to be tested against the DNA taken from the bones we’d discovered wedged in one of the tunnels connected to the cave. ‘We have to find the one who didn’t make it out of there soon,’ I said. ‘We know it isn’t you or me, and there are only six other possibilities.’

  ‘If it really is one of the travellers. It’s always possible someone else—’

  ‘You don’t believe that for a moment.’ The bones weren’t old and yet there hadn’t been a shred of clothing found with them. No shoes, no spare change, nothing. ‘And if it has to be someone, then maybe we are the reason it was whoever it was.’

  ‘I don’t . . .’ But she did. I could see it in her face.

  ‘Maybe we didn’t train him how to get out. Maybe we only showed him once, with a torch. Or just said, “Follow this tunnel and it’s a straight shot.” Maybe—’

  ‘Don’t, just don’t.’ Mia turned away.

  So I didn’t. I still remembered my own nightmare in those tunnels and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Even though it had to be someone. Instead I sat back and waited for the results.

  Mia brought them to the breakfast table two days later. Not in an envelope – she’d received them by email – but written in her expression.

  ‘So it’s him,’ I said.

  And she nodded.

  I took a deep breath and asked the question I had never expected to find on my lips outside of a D&D game. ‘How are we going to kill him?’

  CHAPTER 14

  2010

  Whatever we did, it seemed very likely that we were going to end up killing the man who had introduced himself as Sam Robson. If we sent him back to 1991, he was going to die alone in the dark, lost in the tunnels. If we told him and he didn’t go, then the resulting paradox would set the universe to trying to kill him and might very well rip the planet apart, too. Along with all the other planets, in due course.

  It seemed strange and rather abstract to hold in my hands the power of life and death not only over one man, but all humanity, and not only over humanity but potentially over distant alien races who had never even looked twice at our star in their night sky. Establishing the barrier to further travel was clearly a moral imperative. Without it, anyone with a time-rig could imperil existence.

  I wondered how many foolish scientists had already triggered the end of time and space in separate incidents across the cloth of our expanding universe. Each would be a hole in the fabric of reality, racing out in all directions at the speed of light. Clearly it didn’t happen often or we wouldn’t be here, but the universe is a big enough place for these things to have happened many times and still to have left us with millions or billions of years before we suddenly find out and simultaneously cease to care.

  In the end, we did kill him.

  We gave him the full training and sent him back. I felt sick about it, but I did it anyway. He didn’t look the sort to panic and lose his way where so many others had not, but even so the evidence said that he did, and I watched him as he stepped back into the timeline that had been waiting for him all these years, and I said nothing.

  I think that was the point at which I first realised that whether I ended up going back to 1986 or not, I was no longer the Nick Hayes who first met Demus a few streets from Simon’s mum’s house. I had left that boy behind in my wake, just as we all abandon the children we were. Slow or fast, the years pull us apart from them, sometimes in one savage yank, sometimes by degrees, like the hour hand of the clock, too stealthy for us to perceive its motion and yet when you look again it is no longer where you left it. That night I looked in the mirror, not wanting to meet my own gaze, and it was Demus who looked back at me and smiled a bitter little smile.

  It wasn’t until a year later, over another breakfast, that Mia stopped with a piece of toast raised halfway to her mouth and said, ‘1992!’

  ‘What about it?’ I looked up from my laptop and sipped my coffee.

  ‘We’ve sent six travellers back to the years between 1992 and this one.’ She looked slightly sick.

  ‘Something like that. One of them was Anna, who we have yet to send back and who we need to have warn me about Natasha. None of them were Sam.’ I winced as I always did when I said his name. ‘He went to 1991.’

  ‘For the cleverest man in the world you can be very stupid,’ she said softly.

  I frowned. ‘So help me out.’

  ‘When did Guilder discover the cave?’

  ‘1992. You and I both went to see it.’

  ‘And then he sealed the exit at the base of the cliff to stop anyone discovering it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And have you arranged the hiding of that crowbar down by the exit yet? The one Anna is going to need to break her way out shortly before you run from Rust in the traveller cavern?’ Mia asked.

  ‘Not yet. There’s still plenty of time.’ I brushed the question off with the casual defensiveness I normally reserved for questions about whether I had put the rubbish out or loaded the dishwasher, but a cold finger ran up my spine. ‘All I need to do is get one of the travellers we saw when we first went into the cave to promise to come back to the tunnel later and place a crowbar for Anna. They’re all headed pre-1992 so they won’t have any issue with blocked exits.’

  ‘And you’ll need to tell Anna that the crowbar is there and where to look for it.’ Mia spoke slowly as if leading me through a mathematical proof.

  ‘Of course. And we know it all works because the crowbar was there and we got out. I’ve told all the travellers to 1992 onwards about the crowbar just in case they need it, even though they won’t, because by then Anna will already have worked the corner of the grill free.’

  Mia kept looking at me but said nothing.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘The next traveller . . . Angus McDonald . . . I’ll get him to do it.’

  ‘But Guilder didn’t discover the cave in 1992. His men found it in November ’91 and he just didn’t tell us about it for months.’

  ‘So?’

  Mia kept looking, mouth closed.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. We had killed Sam Robson, after all. It hadn’t just been some random moment of panic. When we sent Sam back to December 1991, I’d forgotten that Guilder’s metal grill might already be in place. In my mind, any date before ’92 was safe. The crowbar had been there, hidden by the exit, but I hadn’t told him about it. He must have exhausted himself at the metal grill and finally gone back, looking for some other way out. He must have died hating me. ‘Oh.’

  From then on, we improved security both online and off. The months came and went, bringing the remaining travellers to our gates just as fate dictated, and we sent them on their way. Angus McDonald came, and when I sent him back to his childhood in 1959 I explained that part of the price of his ticket was that he return
to the exit tunnel and hide a crowbar on the ledge high on the right side. I took him there and showed him the crowbar and how to place it. I explained the consequences of not doing so and he shuddered and swore that he would. I explained that he must do this swiftly and before pursuing the reason for his journey, or time would branch and the crowbar would never reach the woman for whom it was intended.

  Anna Mazur came, and I told her that the price for her included punching a Russian called Natasha and explaining to a young Nick Hayes that he was being fooled by a beautiful woman, something which on this particular occasion he should avoid. I let her know that the way would be blocked, told her how to escape, and let her know that I remembered that she already had.

  Slowly the cavern emptied, its travellers all departed with only two remaining. Mia and me. We both stood there in the winter of 2010, gazing at our dimly warped reflections on the two silvery tubes that hid our trails. By our feet lay the clothes of a rich old man, our last customer, piled before us on the shoes he had so recently stood in.

  ‘So that’s that then,’ I said.

  ‘Seems to be,’ she said.

  I took her hand. ‘I don’t want to go back.’

  ‘I don’t want you to.’ She made a smile for me. ‘I forbid it.’

  We had run around the circles of this conversation too often. It made us both sad. ‘By this time next year we’ll only be a few weeks from being free of all this. You just have to stay safe until then.’ Without the accident, there would be no point in going back. I wouldn’t need the recordings of Mia’s memories in order to restore her.

  ‘If we don’t go,’ Mia said, ‘then the paradox might destroy, well, everything.’

  I said nothing as we made a slow retreat towards the elevator.

  ‘And the universe will try to kill us if we don’t go,’ Mia said. ‘Us personally. Like it did that man who didn’t want to go back and be a singer.’

  ‘Ellery,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, him. Killed in the room above us with a lump of the ceiling!’