by Alex Scarrow
Liam grinned self-consciously. ‘Uh, we… that’s to say me and Becks here, we’re not er… students as such. We’re sort of agents from another time.’
Fourteen pairs of eyes on him and none of them seemed to have anything close to a grasp on what he’d just said.
‘See, we’re time travellers and we came along today to try to protect him,’ he said, pointing at Edward Chan who was sitting on the grass, arms wrapped round his huddled knees.
Edward Chan’s eyes widened. ‘Uh? Am I in trouble?’
‘You, Edward. We came to find out how we were going to protect you from an attempt on your life.’
The others looked at the small Chinese boy then back at Liam.
‘You better explain about him, Becks,’ said Liam. ‘You’ve got all the facts in your head.’
Becks nodded. ‘Listen carefully,’ she began. ‘Time travel will become a viable technology in the year 2044 when a Professor Roald Waldstein will build the world’s first time machine and successfully transport himself into the past and return safely to his time. The practical technology developed by Waldstein in 2044 is largely based on the theories developed and published in Scientific American by the Department of Physics, University of Texas in 2031. The article is entitled “Zero-point Energy: energy from space-time vacuum, or inter-dimensional leakage?”.’
Kelly’s tired face lit up. ‘You gotta be kidding?’
Whitmore looked at the bewildered young boy hugging his own knees on the ground in front of him. ‘So how does this affect this boy?’
Becks’s cool grey eyes panned smoothly across to Chan. ‘The article published in Scientific American is a reproduction of a maths thesis presented by one Edward Aaron Chan. An act of academic plagiarism by his supervising professor.’
Edward looked up at her. ‘Me? Really?’
‘Correct. You will submit your dissertation to the Department of Physics for evaluation with an almost identical title in the summer of 2029, when you are twenty-six years of age. The department head, Professor Miles Jackson, will attempt to take credit for your work when it is approved for publication several months later, but he will be exposed as a plagiarist shortly after the article’s publication.’
‘But you said you’d come to protect him from an attempt on his life… why would someone want to kill Chan?’ asked Whitmore.
‘Edward Chan is the true originator of time travel,’ replied Becks. ‘In the future, 2051, time-travel technology becomes forbidden under international law because of the danger it poses to all mankind. This law is a result of years of campaigning by Roald Waldstein, the inventor of the first viable time machine, to prevent any further development of the technology.’
‘Wald-… the man who builds this first machine?’ said one of the students, a tough-looking Hispanic boy. Liam noticed his name tag was still on his chest: JUAN HERNANDEZ.
Becks’s gaze panned across to him. She waited silently for him to continue.
‘Why?’ asked Juan. ‘Why build the thing, then, you know, campaign against usin’ it? Don’t make any sense.’
Liam answered. ‘Waldstein never ever revealed what he saw on his first and only trip into the past… never talked to anyone about it. It was a big secret what he saw. But he was once heard to say that he’d looked upon the very bowels of Hell itself.’ Liam could have added more, could have added that maybe he’d glimpsed, for a few seconds, something of that himself.
Becks continued. ‘Waldstein’s campaign gained popular support. It is logical to presume that it may be one of his more fanatical supporters who has somehow managed to travel back in time to find Chan and attempt to kill him, to retroactively prevent him writing his thesis, and thus prevent or forestall the invention of time travel.’
A long silence followed filled only with the gentle rustle of the jungle’s trees and the far-off high-pitched squawk of some jungle creature. It was Whitmore who cut it short. ‘Well, OK… that’s all very fascinating, but what just happened? Where are we and how do we get back?’
Becks’s eyelids fluttered for a moment. ‘The geopositional coordinates will not have changed. We are exactly where we were.’
‘Yeah, right, man!’ snapped Juan. ‘There ain’t no jungle like this. Not in Texas!’
‘We’re still in the same place,’ said Liam, ‘but it’s when we are that’s changed. Right?’
‘Affirmative.’ Liam nudged Becks. ‘Yes…’ Becks corrected herself.
‘Which, if Franklyn is correct, is sixty-five million years ago,’ said Whitmore, loosening his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his sky-blue shirt, already stained with dark underarm patches of sweat.
Liam smiled thinly. ‘Yup, that’s about it.’
The technician who’d survived and come through with them dipped his head and shook it. ‘Then we really are totally, totally in trouble, man.’
Liam wanted to say something like he’d been in this kind of mess before, that there might possibly be a way out of here for them, that at the very least they had a genetically enhanced and very lethal combat unit, with an embedded supercomputer, disguised as an oversized gothic Barbie doll, here to help them all out. But he figured right now that would probably be one detail too many for them to have to cope with.
Kelly removed his linen jacket, no longer looking smooth and groomed and, like Whitmore, sweating large dark patches in the hot and humid air. ‘So what are we going to do now?’
And, once more, all eyes rested on Liam.
Aw, Jay-zus… What? I’m in charge now?
It looked like he and Becks weren’t going to be able to sidle away, that they were lumbered with the others. Liam sighed. ‘Survival,’ he said eventually. ‘I suppose we’d better start thinking about that. You know? Water, food, weapons, some sort of a camp. The rest… if there is a rest… well, I suppose that can come later.’
CHAPTER 24
65 million years BC, jungle
Howard took a break from the work of hacking at the vines and bamboo canes with his improvised machete: a jagged strip of metal — part of the reactor’s shell — with a handle made of coarse leaves wrapped round one end and secured with shoelaces. As a machete it worked surprisingly well and, from the other jagged strips of reinforced alloy that had materialized in the past with them, they’d managed to produce nine very useful cutting implements like this one.
The Hispanic boy, Juan, was working alongside him while across the clearing, shimmering with the heat of the midday sun, he could see some of the others fashioning simple spears out of the thicker bamboo canes they’d cut down.
‘That’s bull, man,’ muttered Juan, following his gaze. ‘We ain’t gonna kill anything with these pointy sticks.’
Howard nodded wearily and grunted something back, but his eyes were on Chan, standing next to that weird red-haired girl, as he ham-fistedly attempted to whittle a sharp end on a three-foot cane. She and the odd Irish boy… they’d given their names as Becks and Liam, but if they were covert agency operatives from the year 2001, they were probably aliases.
Which agency, though? Who sent them?
As far as Howard knew, no government, anywhere, was meant to have functioning time-travel technology. Although obviously the most powerful nations — the Chinese Federation, the European Bloc, the United States — must secretly have been developing it. And those two presumably must be field operatives working for one of them, here to protect Chan.
The Irish boy seemed to be calling the shots, with Whitmore, Kelly and the technician, Lam, happy for him to do so. Howard was content to go along with the status quo for now. Happy to carry on playing the role of timid young Lenny Baumgardner, a high-school student with straight As and a perfect school attendance record. It kept things simple for the moment. After all, the presiding question now was one of survival — the basics: food, water, shelter.
But his focus had to remain, whatever happened, on the mission, on what he’d set out to do: to end young Chan’s life and absolutely gua
rantee that the uniquely brilliant theoretical concepts his older, twenty-six-year-old mathematician’s mind would one day produce would never see the light of day. Brilliance like Chan’s was rare; the kind of genius and intuition that comes along once in a generation, once in a century even.
Chan’s work was going to end up being as life-changing as Einstein’s once was. More so, in fact.
Without that published thesis the famous Waldstein would perhaps never have been anything more than an anonymous hobbyist inventor working in his garage. While the world of 2055 might be facing a dark time ahead with water, food and energy shortages, global warming and catastrophic levels of over-population, at the very least, history, as it was, would still be safe; at the very least, mankind would not be meddling with dimensions it had no possibility of understanding, dimensions that could contain anything.
Just because a door can be opened… doesn’t mean it should be opened.
But Chan was here now… and not in the year 2029, sixty-five million years away from helping mankind make its biggest-ever mistake. Howard wondered whether that meant his mission was as good as done. Did he still need to kill him? After all, the explosion, presumably caused by something to do with those two agents, perhaps some side effect of time travel and the fields of energy it radiates, had propelled them far back in time. Surely further back in time than any prototype time machine currently in development could ever reach. And how would they know when they were, anyway? Sixty-five million years to choose from. Like a needle in a haystack. Like a needle in a whole barn full of hay, in fact.
Go ahead, pick a year… see if you get lucky.
He smiled.
It’s done. The world’s safe now. It’s done.
Which was a relief, because now all he had to think about was the business of survival, here in this jungle with nothing for company but over-large dragonflies and whatever other giant creepy-crawlies and Cretaceous creatures lurked in the jungle. And, of course, a bunch of frightened kids and several men who ought to be showing a little more backbone.
Howard had done his bit for mankind… now, just surviving in this wilderness for the foreseeable future — he wasn’t ready yet to be a dino dinner — that was for him.
He looked up at the thick edge of the jungle ahead of him: a ribbon of dark green foliage and tall canopy trees that wrapped itself all the way round the clearing.
And God knows what big hungry things are wandering around in there.?
‘Oh, that’s just great. That’s just bloody great.’ Liam stared at the swiftly surging river: a tumbling torrent of white suds that swirled around and over a bed of worn boulders.
‘So, it runs all the way around us,’ said Kelly. His smart linen business suit was smudged with dirt and sweat. Not the most practical clothing for jungle trekking. He’d tied off the jacket round his waist and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. The tie was still on, though, Liam noticed. A token that Kelly was not quite ready to abandon hope that help might arrive at any moment and he’d want to look his best for it.
‘I think we’re on a sort of island,’ Kelly continued.
They’d spent the morning exploring the immediate surroundings beyond the clearing. Whichever direction they’d taken they’d soon come across the energetic roar of water and glimpsed the glinting, fast-moving river through the thinning jungle.
Island was about right. Approximately three or four acres of jungle with a central clearing, shaped roughly like a tear drop. The pointed tip of the island was where they stood now staring at the rolling water. The river split in two around their spit of land; to the right of them it broadened out into a wide, slower-moving channel. Slower-moving, but still brisk enough so that Liam wouldn’t dare chance trying to cross it. But then he couldn’t swim. More than that… water scared the bejeezus out of him. Not that he needed the others to know anything about his pet fears right now.
To their left the river compressed into a narrower channel thirty feet across, lined with boulders, and became a violent roaring ribbon of snow-white froth and energy. A fool might try to swim the wider channel, but only a completely mad fool would attempt a crossing on this side.
‘We’re trapped on here,’ said Laura, looking around at the others. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘At least we’ve got drinking water.’ Liam shrugged. He gave them all a cheery smile. ‘So it’s not all bad news.’
Becks took a couple of steps down the wet shingle towards the raging river and silently appraised their surroundings. After a while she turned round. ‘The island is a suitable defensive position.’
‘Defensive?’ called out one of the students. Liam turned round. It was a large boy, whose cheeks glistened with sweat beneath a mop of dark frizzy hair and he was still wearing his name tag: JONAH MIDDLETON. ‘Defensible against what, dude?’
‘Dinosaurs,’ uttered Laura, her voice shuddering slightly.
Whitmore nodded. ‘Yes, dinosaurs.’ He turned to Franklyn. ‘How good’s your knowledge of the late Cretaceous?’
‘Pretty good,’ he replied. ‘You want to know what species we can expect to encounter?’
‘Please, tell me we don’t get the T-rex,’ blurted Laura. ‘Not that.’
‘Oh, we got those all right.’ Franklyn put his hands on his hips. ‘But they’re more likely found on open terrain. Not jungle like this.’
‘It’s the velociraptors that scared me,’ said Lam. His head bobbed energetically as he talked, his dark ponytail wagging like a dog’s tail as he looked from one person to another. ‘Seriously scary things, those.’ He nodded sombrely. ‘I seen all three Jurassic movies, guys… and it’s those smart little ones you got to watch out for.’
‘There are no raptors.’ Franklyn shook his head. ‘They’re Asian and died out eighty-five million years ago. We should expect to see… lemmesee… ankylosaurus, that’s the tank-shaped one with a spiky club for a tail. Pachycephalosaurus, that’s the upright one with, like, a cyclist’s safety helmet on his head. Triceratops… you all know that one, right?’
Heads nodded.
‘Parasaurolophus… the duck-billed one with that Elvis-quiff bone sticking out backwards.’
‘But those are all herbivores, aren’t they?’ said Whitmore. ‘What about the carnivores?’
Franklyn pursed his lips. ‘We got rex, of course, but no raptors. That’s the good news.’
‘Oh, great,’ sighed Laura. ‘That means there’s bad news.’
‘Well… I’m afraid there are several varieties of the smaller therapods,’ he said, by way of explanation.
Liam shrugged at him. ‘And those are what?’
‘Therapods — same genus as the raptor,’ Franklyn continued. ‘Small predators, three to six foot tall. They walk on their back legs and have poorly developed front arms. They’re pack hunters.’
‘Three to six foot?’ said Liam. ‘That doesn’t sound so bad, then.’
‘Yo, dude,’ said Jonah. ‘You actually, like, seen the Jurassic Park movies?’
Liam shook his head. ‘No. I presume it’s one of them talkie motion pictures?’
Several of the students glanced at each other.
‘ Talkie motion pictures? You did say you were from the future, didn’t you?’ said Kelly.
‘Well, not as such. Not directly… no. Actually I’m fro-’
‘Caution!’ said Becks, striding back up the shingle towards them. ‘Confidential information.’ Her glare silenced the stirring murmur of voices. ‘That is unnecessary data. You do not need to know anything about the operative, Liam O’Connor.’
‘Actually, I think I’d like to know a little more about you as well,’ said Whitmore. ‘I mean who the h-?’
‘Stop!’ barked Becks. ‘This conversation will now cease!’
Laura made a face. She stepped forward and planted herself in front of Becks. Both girls about the same height, eyes locked in a silent challenge of each other. ‘Oh? And who exactly made you the boss?’
Becks sile
ntly appraised her. ‘You are a contaminant and a mission liability.’
‘What? What’s that supposed to mean?’
Becks’s cold glare remained on the girl. For an unsettling moment Liam wondered whether she might just reach out and snap Laura’s neck like a dry twig. He’d seen Bob effortlessly do far worse to countless grown combat-fit men.
‘Becks!’ he called out. ‘Leave her alone!’
The support unit finally spoke. ‘Liam O’Connor is… boss. I am just the support unit.’
‘Support unit?’ Laura’s face creased with a look of bemusement. She turned to Liam. ‘Sheesh, what exactly is the problem with your sister? She got some kind of behavioural problem?’
‘She talks like some kind of robot,’ said Keisha.
‘Well now, since you — ’ Liam was about to explain, but Becks cut him off again. ‘Irrelevant data.’ She took a step away from Laura towards him, Laura’s challenge instantly dismissed and forgotten. ‘Recommendation, Liam.’
Liam nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘A bridging device can be constructed.’ She turned her gaze towards the roaring river to their left. ‘The narrowest width is precisely thirty-two feet, seven inches.’ Her eyes then scanned the tall and straight trunks of the nearest deciduous trees along the riverbank. ‘These trees are all of suitable length.’
‘And just how are we supposed to fell a tree!’ said Lam. ‘All we’ve got is Mr Kelly’s penknife, some bamboo spears and a bunch of freakin’ useless hatchets.’
Liam decided he’d better start sounding decisive and leader-like. ‘Well now, listen. Me and Becks’ll figure something out, so we will. Right… Becks?… Sis?’
She looked at him. ‘Question.’
‘What?’
‘Are we still pretending to be brother and sister?’
The others stared at them.
Liam sighed. ‘Not any more.’
CHAPTER 25
2001, New York
Sal spun round in the chair at the sound of the roller shutter rattling up. ‘Maddy?’
