Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times) Read online

  Ever since we had lost Mia’s old character, Sharia, during our escape from The University years ago, my mage, Nicodemus, had been obsessed with undoing her death. We had seen her lose her grip on the serpent that carried us up one of the alchemist’s towering chimneys and fall hundreds of feet to her death in the great hearth. Death, however, isn’t always the final word in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. High-level clerics can call on their gods to raise the recently dead, and still more powerful clerics can even resurrect someone from a single dry bone. We, however, didn’t have so much as a hair from Sharia’s head and, even if The University had kept hold of her corpse, it would be suicide for us to go back there having seriously pissed off two of the handful of guilds that controlled the place.

  In any event, my mage would much sooner fix the problem himself with magic based on human ingenuity, cleverness and the occasional eye of newt than go crawling to the gods and their overly smug representatives. Unfortunately, ‘fixing the problem’ had taken the best part of six years so far.

  ‘I still say,’ said John, leaning back in his gaming chair, ‘that getting Sharia back by using time travel seems like a really unimaginative solution given, y’know, your day job.’

  ‘And I still say that hitting every enemy repeatedly with your sword until they die is a pretty unimaginative solution to every combat you’ve ever entered.’ I picked up the lead figure representing John’s warrior, Sir Hacknslay, and tested its sword for sharpness against my fingertip.

  ‘Touché.’ John grinned.

  ‘And before you start complaining, Fineous . . .’ I forestalled Simon with a raised hand. ‘. . . we are definitely stealing this time crystal. It’s going to take a master thief, so it’s going to be all about you.’

  Simon pursed his lips and nodded. ‘Good.’

  ‘So all we need is to break into the Tower of Illusion, steal the time crystal from the great Hoodeeny, go back in time, save Sharia and we’re done.’ John rubbed his hands together. ‘Easy.’

  CHAPTER 2

  1992

  Mia rented a room in a rather grotty house-share in Wandsworth. The back garden surged against the kitchen windows in a green sea of bramble and saplings that made it next to impossible to open the door. Rumour had it that there was a decaying Ford Fiesta out there, but even in winter the vegetation hadn’t died back enough for me to have ever verified the fact.

  ‘Tea?’ She rooted around in the fridge, hunting for her own milk among the sour-smelling bottles labelled for various of her housemates. Three of the four of them were actors, the other two ‘resting’, while Mia with her understudy-understudy gig and the occasional call to be a background figure in an advert for peanuts or some new line of clothes came the closest to actual employment.

  ‘Coffee, please.’ I sniffed and wrinkled my nose. ‘Black.’

  We retired to her bedroom with our drinks. It was a lot cleaner than the kitchen, which seemed to be a place where they only acted at housekeeping. ‘Nice posters!’

  ‘Max let me have them. He’s the floor manager.’

  Mia had put up three large posters advertising stage plays from last year’s season. I wouldn’t have wanted them in my room, but then again, the walls in my Cambridge flat weren’t peeling and mouldy. I sipped my coffee and said no more. Mia had strong views about making her own way and past attempts to help her financially had ended poorly.

  Mia turned the TV on and joined me on the mountain of cushions heaped upon her bed. The news burbled at us from her black and white while we reclined, shoulder to shoulder, in a comfortable silence. John had sent us all packing at eight when his latest girlfriend, Carly, had arrived. Carly was a model, apparently, but I think by that she meant she had paid to have a photographer make her a portfolio rather than that she walked the catwalk with Naomi Campbell. Mia was prettier, though admittedly not nearly as tall.

  I’d been happy to call it a day for the same kinds of reasons as John, I suspected. I was eager for my night with Mia to begin. Simon sulked, of course. He missed the days when it was the dawn chorus breaking in through the curtains that let us know our D&D session might have gone on a little too long.

  ‘You did a good job today,’ I said, and laid my hand on her leg.

  ‘It was fun.’ Mia nodded and sipped her tea.

  ‘No, I mean you did a great job. Not just acting out the city folk and whatnot, but you told a great story. You made it all hang together.’

  Mia smiled, glanced my way, then returned her attention to the weatherman.

  ‘I mean you should think about writing plays, not just acting in them. You have a real talent for both.’ I kissed her hair. ‘Turn it off. I want you under the covers where the weather doesn’t matter.’

  Mia turned to meet my lips with hers. ‘We can leave it on. In case I get bored.’ She pulled away with a grin before I could grab her.

  Out in the hall, the phone began its annoying electronic chirping. Fortunately, in a house where would-be actors are always waiting to hear from their agents, no phone is left to ring for long. Someone thundered down the stairs, clattered against the phone table and snatched up the receiver. A moment later they banged on Mia’s door and a rather sullen voice announced, ‘It’s for Nick.’

  ‘Crap. It’s probably Simon wanting to discuss D&D strategy.’ Mia had finished the game with all our characters trapped in an underground cave. I rolled off the bed. ‘Hold that thought. I’ll get rid of him.’

  ‘What thought?’ Mia called after me. ‘I was thinking about the chance of rain in the southern counties . . .’

  I reached the phone in time to see Mia’s housemate Melany retreating up the stairs in her threadbare nightie and enormous fluffy slippers. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Nick! You have to get here! Now!’

  ‘Ian?’ It sounded like Ian Creed from the laboratory. ‘How did you get this—’

  ‘Just get in a car and get here!’

  ‘I don’t have a car. Has something happened? I told Guilder if he pushed things after Dave died I was going to—’

  ‘We’ve had a breakthrough! Nobody is hurt. Just get yourself down here. You’ll want to see it.’

  ‘You could just tell me . . .’

  ‘Has to be seen!’ And, annoyingly, he hung up on me.

  It takes a lot to distract a twenty-two-year-old from sex with his girlfriend, but I couldn’t leave it hanging. Ian had sounded excited and he wasn’t a man given to excitement. The word at the lab was that when his wife of nearly twenty years told him she was having an affair, he said it was a ‘poor show’ and went back to reading his newspaper. Someone probably made that one up, but the fact that it was so widely believed gives you a measure of the man.

  ‘So, I have to go . . .’ I told Mia, finishing off my remaining coffee in two gulps.

  ‘Sure.’ She surrendered with so little fight that I felt slightly insulted. ‘I’m coming too.’

  ‘You are?’ I blinked.

  ‘You’re working on time travel, Nick. If Dr Roboto is losing his shit then it must be something awesome. I want to see!’

  ‘I guess. Sure.’ I warmed to the idea. ‘Do you think we can get a train this late?’

  ‘John will drive us.’

  ‘John? But Cindy—’

  ‘Call him. They’re probably on to the cuddling by now and he’ll be glad of an excuse to leave. Tell him it’s a historic moment. Also . . . isn’t she called Carly?’

  ‘Hmmm.’ I still remembered Dr Creed and Professor Halligan freaking out because they’d managed to create a discrepancy of seven nanoseconds between two clocks. That was six years ago, though, and things had moved on since then. ‘I’ll try him, but I don’t think he’ll go for it.’

  It turned out that Mia knew John better than I did. Within thirty minutes we were in his brand-new Mondeo heading north towards Cambridge considerably in excess of the speed limit.

  ‘Take it easy, Boy Racer.’ I braced myself to keep from sliding around on the back seat, Mia having call
ed shotgun. ‘It’s not like rushing a pregnant woman to the delivery suite. The police won’t let you off when you explain that the emergency is a scientific breakthrough.’

  ‘I’m going to try it anyway!’ John accelerated. ‘Aren’t you excited? You’ve been at this forever. It’s about time you got something properly science-fictiony out of it all.’

  ‘You mean better than my forty-year-old self popping up out of nowhere?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t actually get to see him do the popping – he just rang the doorbell. And he just looked like . . . some guy. You’ve no idea how boring merchant banking is. I want to see something cool like that explosion you were telling us about.’

  ‘You really don’t.’

  ‘Well, OK, not that. But something space age!’

  Cambridge was mostly asleep when we arrived; the pubs had turned out, the drunks had ambled off into the night. We pulled into the brightly lit visitor parking bay outside the Winston Laboratory just before midnight and presented ourselves at the security gate.

  ‘You know I can’t let those two in, Dr Hayes.’ The security guard wasn’t one of the ones whose names I’d memorised. I didn’t know the night staff. Most of my work was done at home with pencil and paper, or sometimes in the university computer lab running simulations on a Sun Workstation. I very rarely came to see the mechanical side of things. We theoreticians don’t like to get our hands dirty.

  I frowned at the guard. ‘You know I can go back in time and beat you up when you were a kid, right?’

  The man gave me a blank stare. He had a bland, humourless face and a look that said the world had yet to impress him.

  I sighed. ‘Tell Dr Creed I’m at the gate and that I’m not coming in without John and Mia.’

  I went back to join the others while the guard telephoned the lab. Overhead, a handful of stars were outshining the urban glow in a clear sky and the day’s heat had retreated, leaving a cool edge to the breeze. It took a couple of minutes, but soon enough Dr Creed came bustling out across the tarmac to join us.

  ‘Nick! Glad you could make it!’

  ‘Ian.’ I shook his hand. The years had put a touch of grey in his thick black hair, but he was still the same serious, barrel-chested little man who I’d met when I first came to the lab at sixteen. The broad grin trying to escape his beard was most unlike him. ‘You know Mia? And this is John: the only reason we could get here so fast. I promised them they could both come in.’

  ‘Guilder won’t like it . . .’ Creed frowned. Then he grinned again. ‘But who cares!’ He waved us through. Again, most unlike him. I’d been gearing myself up for a fight. As the ‘talent’, I got to act like a prima donna quite often, though if it got in the way of the experimental progress that Miles Guilder was so set on, he would have Charles Rust pay me a social call. The last visit had been two years ago and I’d been careful since then not to push things far enough to get another one. There wasn’t much that made it worth having that grinning one-eyed psychopath turning up on my doorstep.

  We followed Dr Creed into the lab, finding the large warehouse space fully lit, though there appeared to be nobody at work on any of the equipment. Glancing at the ceiling, I could see the patches over the holes where shrapnel from the last explosion had punched through.

  The place had its own unique scent: a mix of stale coffee, burned plastic, solder and more astringent components, most likely toxic. It felt to me like a laboratory should feel – large but crowded with dangerous-looking equipment. The whole place was a hulking behemoth, pregnant with experiments, now dedicated to trying to squeeze out a single invention.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ Creed waved us along. Normally his short legs had him trailing me, but tonight he was practically running.

  The original bank of computers had been upgraded several times, and the capacitors whose current they controlled now occupied a third of the lab’s acreage. They looked like great white oil drums on metal legs, a forest of them gently humming. Get within ten feet of one and the hair on your arms would begin to stand on end. Each one cost as much as a three-bedroom house.

  ‘Through here!’ Creed led us through the chain-link fence enclosing the inner ‘secret laboratory’ and into the area cordoned from view with office partitions.

  ‘There!’ he announced with pride. He gestured at the equipment looming before him, then put on his glasses and bent to examine the readout on some dials.

  In front of us were six huge electromagnets arranged in the same pattern as the ones that had exploded four days ago, killing Dave Weston. Each of the magnets weighed well over three tons, and the forest of cables around them made it hard to see into the space they enclosed. The cables allowed for precise control of the magnetic field at the centre of the array. The various solutions to my equations yielded ever more efficient ways to pulse current through the set-up, thereby building the necessary resonances that allowed us to dump enough energy into the target area to vibrate space-time. And, if everything went right, that pulsation of the space-time membrane would grow so large as to break off a self-contained bubble, thus making our own time machine from the very stuff of the universe.

  ‘There’s someone in there!’ Mia said.

  Through the tangles of cables, some thicker than both my thumbs together, I could see she was correct. The back of someone’s head could just be made out. It looked as if they were sitting on a chair. Dr Creed beckoned us round to a place where the cables had been tied back to allow a clearer view.

  ‘Professor Halligan?’ Mia seemed unsure. It was definitely him, though. His face was peculiarly immobile and twisted into a disturbing grimace.

  ‘Professor?’ I pushed in alongside Mia and called again, but Halligan didn’t so much as blink.

  ‘He’s time travelling!’ Dr Creed declared triumphantly. ‘Travelling through time!’

  ‘Shouldn’t he just vanish, then, and appear in the future?’ John asked.

  Dr Creed peered up at John over the top of his glasses. ‘Why on earth would he vanish?’

  ‘Well . . . I . . .’ John fished for an answer better than because he had seen it like that in a film once.

  ‘He’s moving forward in time,’ Mia said, rather more thoughtfully, ‘but so are all the rest of us. So’s the chair he’s sitting on. If he’s going into the future faster than we are, then . . .’

  Dr Creed came to watch the professor with us. ‘He’s going forward twelve hours. So he should be back with us at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Until then, no time will have passed for him. To the professor it will be exactly as if he has just ‘popped’ forward half a day. But of course, his body still exists in the meantime. And there it is. After all, forward time travel is just an advanced form of waiting.’

  ‘I’m surprised he isn’t naked,’ I said. The others gave slightly repulsed looks. ‘Well, Demus said . . .’ I trailed off, remembering that Dr Creed had no idea who Demus was and should certainly not be told that I had already come back from the future to visit myself. But Demus hadn’t brought back the technology he needed with him, which implied that he couldn’t bring anything but himself. And although I had wiped most of his visit from my memory, Simon, who forgot nothing ever, had since repeated back to me some of what I’d told him about what Demus had said. Simon reported that Demus said he had returned buck-naked, Terminator-style, in front of a police station on Watkins Street at three in the morning of 1 January 1986. So, while I was grateful to find Professor Halligan fully clothed, I was also surprised to see it. Maybe non-living things were easier to bring forward in time than backward.

  ‘Can we touch him?’ Mia asked.

  ‘You can try.’ Dr Creed seemed to be enjoying himself. He hauled back on one of the bands that held the cables apart, widening the gap enough for us to slip through one by one.

  Halligan looked so unnatural that I didn’t really want to touch him. Part of me wondered if he’d been replaced with some kind of wax replica. Close up, the light seemed to do weird things
where it reflected off his skin, a bizarre kind of shimmer as if he wasn’t quite there. The others sensed it too, and hesitated.

  ‘Is he safe?’ asked Mia.

  ‘He is.’ Creed nodded. ‘Check his watch, too.’

  Halligan had both his hands raised as if in horror, or possibly to signal that he had changed his mind. On his right wrist three watches were visible above the cuff of his jacket, one digital and two clockwork. All three showed two minutes past eight. I reached out to touch his left hand. The air seemed to thicken around my fingers until at some fraction of an inch from his skin my fingertips met a smooth barrier they couldn’t push past. Oddly, I could touch the watches and even move them slightly.

  ‘Ha!’ Creed barked. ‘See? The time differential won’t allow matter to reach him. Or light. What you’re seeing are reflections from the surface created around him. That’s why he looks a bit . . . shiny. The watches aren’t frozen in time; the magnetic flux just broke them when I threw the switch. His clothes aren’t travelling with him, either – they’re just hanging on him. You could set fire to them and they’d burn away but it wouldn’t hurt Halligan! You could hit him with a hammer, shoot an artillery shell at him. Wouldn’t do a thing. I tried with a diamond drill just—’

  ‘You shouldn’t be able to do this,’ I said. ‘Not with just the power you have here.’

  ‘I know!’ Creed beamed. ‘The experimentalist proves his worth! I mean, we knew that it would take less power to send someone forward than backward, and we knew that shorter trips would be easier again, but even so it’s a huge breakthrough!’