Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times) Read online

  CHAPTER 10

  2007

  I had, over the years since Guilder vanished into the future, made extensive efforts to find out where he had hidden himself to do it. His instinct in finding that first cave was a sound one. His enemies would have worked against him if they knew where his time trail was. If I found him, I was just going to seal him in with a motion sensor to alert me to his arrival if it happened to fall within my lifetime. I guess less charitable souls would have entombed him in concrete and left him to a short, painful life in whatever future he arrived at.

  My efforts to find Guilder’s hideaway had been unsuccessful, but my work in dismantling his business affairs, using all the legal avenues available to me and a few less savoury ones, mainly involving hacking, had borne considerable fruit. And when the land under which the traveller-filled cave hid came back on the open market, I bought it. I say I bought it, but scientists are never well paid, so I did depend on a little help from a moderately successful merchant banker and a very successful accountant who I happened to know from way back when.

  Friendship is one thing, but to sink a considerable fraction of one’s wealth into a Somerset field usually requires rather better motivation than merely being asked to by a mad scientist. John especially had other calls on his money, having three children all of whom his wife expected to be sent to private schools, and rather more expensive schools than the one we had gone to. And Simon, of course, had his extensive hoard of Star Wars collectables to enlarge. He also had his eyes on a bigger house to allow expansion of his model railway, which now comprised over five scale miles of track.

  I gave them the Field of Dreams speech. I told them, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ And when asked how I was so sure, I pointed out that in many senses our customers were already there, down in that cave. Furthermore, I noted that if they didn’t come, then the paradox shock to the timeline would probably tear the fabric of time and space apart, rendering the issue of whether or not the scheme made its money back somewhat moot. And so, I concluded, it was our duty as responsible citizens to facilitate the passage of these various billionaires back into the year, month and day of their choosing. And if we happened to grow fabulously rich in the process, then so be it.

  Since Guilder’s disappearance back in 1992, forward time travel had become common knowledge. The public were perhaps less impressed with it than the science merited, most seeing it only as an incremental advance on cryogenics. I really think that if the subjects had just vanished and reappeared in the future then the public would have been far more wowed by it all. In any event, Halligan, Creed and I had shared the Nobel Prize in physics for the work. In my humble opinion it was me who did 99% of the heavy lifting, but the Nobel Prize has always been about experimental discovery, and to be fair to Ian Creed, he was the one who got his hands dirty and made it happen. Also, my willingness to share the credit and to keep feeding them the breadcrumbs they needed to continue making progress was the unspoken price for their silence concerning the cave of travellers heading back into the past. They were both clever men – they understood that my presence among that crowd of time trails was significant, and potentially granted me boundless power over them. I think that knowledge damaged our friendship, but it also proved remarkably effective at sealing lips.

  In consequence, there were now government-regulated warehouses all across the world where the terminally ill or the merely curious stood frozen in time, bound for the future.

  I continued my own work into unlocking the secrets of travelling back in time largely in secret while earning my living as director of the National Institute for Temporal Studies, where I leaked out old results at as slow a rate as I felt I could get away with.

  Once the whole world’s scientific community saw the early results – especially in forward travel – and began to focus on the problem, they started to catch up with me at an alarming speed. I’d been arrogant to assume that without my genius there would be no progress for decades to come. Though, to be fair, that was the impression I’d had from Demus.

  Using some of my Noble Prize money and contributions from John, Simon and Mia, who was now a fairly successful actress with significant parts in several quite big movies, I built a house over the cave.

  The house started small but with grand designs. Getting planning permission was the hardest part, but by parcelling the development up with plans to build an extensive solar and wind farm where until now the main crop had been wheat, I was able to get away with murder.

  In February of 2000 I solved the theoretical side of traveling backward in time. It took another seven years of secret experimentation in the caves below the new house before, with the aid of a vast reservoir of power from the wind and solar energy farms above, I was able to turn that theory into practice. I did this on my own, employing contractors who had no idea what they were building. My fifteen years watching Ian Creed at work had furnished me with the technical skills needed, though I still counted myself a theoretician despite the best part of a decade spent cursing electromagnets and capacitor banks just yards from 113 silent witnesses to the fact that I must ultimately succeed.

  Since I knew the names of most of the travellers by now, having been hunting the internet for them for years, I made discreet overtures to the first few, hinting at the possibility of returning to the past. I entreated them to secrecy, and of course my reputation and position ensured that I was taken seriously.

  It might seem like a rather weak plan, but these were people I had seen in the cave for nearly twenty years now. They clearly had strong reasons for wanting to go back. The fact that others in the cave went back after they did strongly implied that everyone managed to keep the secret, or at least not spread it to anyone the world would take seriously. There had, of course, been rumours and conspiracy theories about me and my work for decades. Many of them were started by me, so that when the time eventually came where I actually did start to clandestinely send people back into the past, nobody would give credence to any fresh round of rumours.

  Melissa Reede was the first to approach me, which was a good thing because she was the first in line. At my invitation she came to the house where Mia and I lived on the edge of Cambridge. I opened the door to an immaculately groomed middle-aged woman who I of course recognised immediately. She was in fact fifty-four, but money made her look under forty. She stood about five six, her hair descending in a thick black sheath over one shoulder; a broad, generous mouth, eyes dark and guarded. To her credit, she managed to hide most of her astonishment at how small our modest suburban home was: nothing like the mansions she and her friends inhabited in California.

  ‘Please, come in,’ I said, taking her coat.

  ‘Can I get you tea?’ Mia asked. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Thank you, no.’ She followed us to the living room.

  Melissa Reede had made her hundreds of millions in the dot-com bubble, securing lucrative domain names, starting retail websites and selling them on for silly money before the world realised that plenty of hard work and luck were required after that stage and that profits might be longer in coming than first thought.

  She sat on our sofa, uncomfortable despite the mounds of superfluous cushions. Mia soon unwound her, though. Mia had a rare talent for that, and I, sadly, had none. Within a few minutes of small talk, she cracked a filthy joke and had Melissa and me smirking. After that it wasn’t too hard to get to the point.

  ‘I want to go back in time. To the summer of 1980,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about the cost.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Because it’s going to be expensive! Just remember that you can’t take anything with you. So whatever money you don’t spend on this will be left behind.’

  ‘Are you sure it will work?’ She frowned. ‘And why is this secret?’

  ‘Two good questions. If we proceed then I have something to show you which should convince you that it works. And the secrecy is because if the government knew about this, I believe they w
ould swiftly pass laws prohibiting it for a variety of reasons, one being fear – a groundless fear I should point out – of being somehow manipulated by what you might do “upstream” in the timeline.’ I bit my lip and studied her. She sat calmly, hands folded over knees that were hidden beneath a cashmere skirt. Everything about her was tastefully understated. The silver bracelet and necklace had a slight dullness to them that suggested they were platinum rather than silver. Her watch looked merely elegant, but doubtless cost more than our house. ‘I have to ask why you want to do this, Ms Reede. You need to understand that if you try to change anything in 1980 or do so inadvertently, then you will create a new fork in the timeline and make no difference to the reality you’ve left behind.’

  ‘I understand.’ She nodded. She sipped at the black coffee I’d brought her despite her declining the offer. Sipped again, as if buying time to gather herself before plunging in. And then she told us.

  Like many very rich people, Melissa had come to understand that her wants were actually fairly simple, and while yachts and helicopters were fun, they were not in fact the stuff that happiness is made of.

  ‘I had a child when I was very young. A son. Julian.’ Her expression hardly changed through the Botox and the make-up, but her eyes grew bright, and in her lap one hand wrestled the other. ‘He drowned in the neighbour’s pool when he was three years old. Found a way through the fence. I’ve missed him every day for twenty-seven years. I never had another baby. If I could go back, it would be so easy to stop him.’

  ‘You understand that the Julian you knew would still drown? If you stop him, the timeline forks and the child you save goes on to lead a different life.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve done my homework, Dr Hayes. But I will carry back from that yard a Julian who was mine until that very instant and who will still have his whole life ahead of him.’

  ‘You’ll carry him back to a mother who may not let you share in that life,’ Mia said.

  ‘Oh, I think I know how to deal with myself.’ Melissa smiled. ‘I hope the young me will understand what I’ve done for her and let me be a part of Julian’s future. My own parents were dead by 1980 so perhaps I can stand in as a second grandma.’

  We agreed to send Melissa Reede back. If we didn’t send back someone who already stood in the cave there were dangers of paradox fields growing out of control, but even so it still wasn’t a clear-cut decision. Yes, the new timelines that would be started if anyone we sent back changed history felt abstract and less important than our own, but we had to remind ourselves that they were in fact just as real as ours and filled with real people. If we sent back someone who wanted to exploit their future knowledge to harm others, then we were complicit. With knowledge of the market trends, anyone we sent back could become vastly rich. A sadistic murderer with unlimited funds could inflict untold horror on the world. They could literally build a torture palace in some suitable nation and spend their life killing innocents. Thus, some measure of vetting was required, if only so we could sleep at night.

  Having our travellers try to change their pasts, and thereby splitting off new timelines where different pasts unfolded, was not a problem. New timelines are a billion a penny. Every choice makes them.

  What had happened with my almost-daughter Eva concerned a choice that should have created two timelines from one. Special circumstances had led to those two timelines not separating properly and building up a growing contradiction between them, such that the mounting paradox energy threatened to destroy both. My understanding of Eva’s analysis was that the chances of that happening again were incredibly remote, and that the effect was linked to both me and her. In science it is unwise to think of yourself as the centre of the universe. We once thought Earth was the centre, then the sun. But in this case, it really did seem that both Eva and I had become important temporal nexuses: the foci of the weird event that had given our timelines their almost unique properties. Most likely it was because we had invented the technology, and as such all other travel was inextricably linked to us.

  In short, I could send back the 113 travellers without worrying that saving this child or marrying that man would doom the Earth, or several Earths.

  We took Melissa to the house in Somerset and accessed the cave from the spiral staircase that led through all three storeys and down into the traveller cave. There was an elevator, too, but the stairs felt more reliable and I had never quite recovered from my own brief experience of being lost in the dark.

  Melissa had set her affairs in order and said her goodbyes. She understood that the dreams of those who might follow her were as precious to them as hers were to her, and that any failure to keep this secret could ruin them.

  She came incognito, following the numerous steps that I had prescribed in order to prevent her disappearance leading the police to our doorstep with a search warrant. She knew that she would arrive naked in 1980, standing in an undiscovered cave, and that she would have to extricate herself from it before somehow establishing herself in the UK and eventually flying to California to save her boy.

  Before she left, I insisted that she make the escape five times. I remembered how terrifying it was. The first three times, she did it in suitable clothing with a powerful torch; the last two times in a thin jumpsuit and bare feet with no light at all. I made sure she could orient herself in the dark and locate the correct exit tunnel.

  ‘We’ve found no human remains in the cave system, so it seems pretty sure that everyone gets out,’ I told her.

  That was a lie. We had found one partial skeleton half a mile from the cave in completely the wrong direction, wedged in a narrow fissure. But we’d taken Melissa’s DNA from her coffee cup and knew it wasn’t her. If we did find a match among our travellers then we would have a thorny decision to make. We would have to weigh the certainty of that person’s unpleasant death against the small but significant possibility that the paradox damage caused by them not going would kill everyone in our timeline, including them. The mathematics of it suggested that sending them to their doom was by far the best option, but if I came face to face with the person I just didn’t think I could do it. My own terror in those tunnels had been fifteen years ago, but I still had nightmares.

  Mia and I led the way down into the cave of travellers for the final show, all rehearsals complete. Until that point, all the travellers had been standing within the plastic tubes we had set over them, both for their privacy in their state of undress and to keep any one traveller from knowing the identities of their fellow travellers. I’d chosen to have the tubes silver. It just made things seem more space age. Mia had sighed the first time she saw them and shaken her head sadly. ‘You could have just thrown sheets over them, you know?’

  This time we had already removed the tube from around Melissa’s time trail so she could access it. The electromagnet array almost completely hid the trail it had been erected around. It was larger than that used for forward travel and was held on a robust titanium framework. The power cables were thick copper rods descending along conduits through the rock that led to the main capacitor banks up by the energy storage facility for the solar and wind farms. For a few seconds, I could pump as much electricity into the cave as a state-of-the-art nuclear power station could manage. I really wanted to have a big lever to throw, like Dr Frankenstein bringing his monster to life, but that might freak out the travellers; so instead I had a button. A button that caused a big lever somewhere upstairs to be thrown!

  Mia led Melissa around to the narrow slot clear of cables and magnets through which she would be able to approach her waiting time trail, now fully revealed.

  ‘So, I guess I really have nothing to hide from you two.’ She glanced from her time trail to Mia and then a flick of her eyes at me. We had warned her, but there’s warning and there’s seeing.

  ‘I’ve been looking at all of them for years and years,’ I said. ‘You’re all still life to me, Melissa. Impersonal works of art.’

  She approached
her trail, frowning. ‘Do I have to . . .’ She mimed taking her clothes off.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘And when should I?’ She took another step towards her motionless doppelganger. ‘You know. Do the deed?’

  ‘At the time you choose,’ Mia said, setting a hand to Melissa’s shoulder. ‘We don’t know when the trails start but we assume everything works out so that the moment you choose is the right moment.’ A smile. ‘Take your time. Just not so much that you start looking older than she does.’

  ‘Well.’ Melissa looked around again, her poise eroding at last as she faced the finality of her decision. ‘I guess I should get on with it then. Bite the bullet, as it were.’

  ‘It won’t hurt.’ At least I didn’t think it would.

  ‘Go, then.’ A hug from Mia. ‘You’ve got a little boy to save.’

  She had six months to make it to her old home in California. Hopefully long enough to establish herself, but not so long that some random disaster might befall her.

  ‘Good luck,’ I said. ‘Enjoy your second chance together.’

  Melissa nodded, wiped at her eyes with both knuckles and stepped back into her time trail. It looked as if the solid and immovable figure behind her just became a projection and that she stepped into it, mascara smeared, hands lowering, and suddenly froze into exactly the same pose it had held for all these years. In the next heartbeat she was gone, simply vanished into nothing. Her jewellery hit the ground first, followed by her clothes, falling down to cover her shoes.

  ‘That’s more like it!’ I said.

  With the many millions that Melissa Reede paid for her ticket to the past we began to build the castle in earnest. Described as an English folly, the castle was aimed squarely at that faux-medieval style generations of fantasy artists had refined on the covers of books, D&D modules and album covers. Ours, having to comply with the laws of physics and local building regulations, was somewhat more conservative in design, but still damn cool. Over the great stone arch of the gatehouse the legend ‘The Tower of Tricks’ was carved beneath a set of gargoyle heads loosely modelled on all the members of our D&D group over the years. Elton was the centrepiece, the founding father of our group. The Tower of Tricks had been his invention, after all, rising about us deep in that wilderness all those years ago in our hour of need. A double-edged sword that could cut us free or cut our throats with equal ease.