by Tim Neilson
It occurred to James that he was being excessively critical of someone who may well have saved his life with extraordinary initiative and skill. He ceased carping and looked closely at Tina, who was now fixedly concentrating on the road ahead. James wasn’t a genius at reading people’s emotions, but he thought it possible Tina was feeling slightly defensive and dejected at the way he was behaving. He pondered some way of lightly making amends, without any dishonest withdrawing of his critique.
“If we’re ever going for the same parking spot back home, I’ll let you have it,” he told her. It seemed to do the trick. A self-congratulatory smile appeared on her face as she continued driving.
Another thought occurred to James.
“I thought Anna told you not to come,” he ventured, slightly nervous in case that remark, too, appeared ungrateful.
“No, she didn’t,” Tina responded triumphantly. “She said ‘don’t argue’. As soon as you started to walk away, she said ‘What are you waiting for? Follow him’.”
James decided that in future he would just let Anna and Tina have their own way about things. It’ll be a lot easier, he thought. And probably a lot more sensible, too.
Anna had spotted one of the jewelled heavies at the Crick Institute, and successfully evaded him to get in, but her search had also proved fruitless. When she left the Crick she was somewhat nervous when she could no longer find him, so it was, in one sense, a relief to learn from James – when they were all back at the British Library cafeteria – that the villain had appeared at the Lister, no doubt having been summoned as a reinforcement for his colleague. She wondered what the suits had been doing but gave up trying to guess. It didn’t matter, anyway. As she and James swapped stories of failure, it seemed to spell an end to their hopes of vindicating Cam’s challenge to his big business foe. They sat despondent for a few seconds, until Anna remembered she had some better news. She told the others she’d managed to get in touch with Claudia, who had told her Cam was somewhat concussed and shaken, but not seriously damaged.
“Did she say what happened to him?” James asked.
According to Claudia, Anna informed him, late the previous evening Cam’s car had been forced off the road by a vehicle, which Cam had noticed was occupied by two men heavily decked out in gold jewellery.
“Well, there’s one bit of good news then,” James exclaimed in satisfaction. Anna asked what he meant. He started to explain how he had made it into the Lister without trouble but had sighted the two stalkers as he was leaving, and how Tina had taken the wheel, and that they had then been followed on the road …
He glanced at Tina and noticed a certain tense expression. He recalled Anna hadn’t always been exactly lavish in her praise of Tina’s more melodramatic exploits.
“… and then they had an accident,” he finished lamely.
Anna stared at him. His attempt to appear nonchalant was not highly successful. She turned her gaze towards Tina. Tina’s charade of innocence was much more skilful than James’s attempt at dissembling had been, but Anna had years of practise in interpreting Tina’s facial expressions and wasn’t fooled for a nanosecond.
Anna reflected, though, no harm had been done. She decided that she’d interrogate James later but let the issue go for the present.
“It’s strange they were in Cambridge if they only knew about the places in London we were visiting,” she pondered. “I’d have thought that they’d be too busy staking out those places to make an excursion up there. Have we been too hasty assuming they don’t know what we’ve been doing before today?”
“No, I don’t think so,” James replied. “Surely they’d have had a go at us there if they did. Cambridge is only an hour away,” he pointed out. “Unfortunately, they twigged we were keeping Cam’s search going. Even though their main game might have been to stop us, they could wait till after everywhere had closed in London for the day and drive up to see if they could catch him in an isolated place. You’d assume if they’ve been harassing Cam in the past, they’d know his routine and be able to predict he’d sometimes be driving out that way late in the evening. Sooner or later they’d intercept him on a deserted stretch of road and teach him a lesson, hoping he’d give it all away. Then it would be back to London to resume the watch the next day.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Anna remarked. “If they’d known that we’d both come up empty handed they could have saved themselves all that trouble. Come on. We might as well head back to Cambridge. Keep your eyes open,” she instructed Tina. “Even if those two in the car are out of action, that still leaves the suits.”
Chapter 13
Conrad’s Bell
James knew he could rely on Tina and Anna to keep a competent lookout, so he hadn’t felt any perceptible level of anxiety while the three of them were touring around the sights during the morning. They decided to abandon any further searching, after James had received a reply from the Champ about Asimov’s fiction.
There’s no story he wrote that I know of which anyone would use to recommend time travel as a way of improving things, the message had begun.
In ‘Gimmicks Three’ someone sells his soul to the devil, has earthly success, and then uses time travel to get to the past and renege on the sale. But the point is the time travel doesn’t actually change any events, it just lets the protagonist off the hook spiritually. Same as in ‘The Ugly Little Boy’ where the scientists say that where the past gets altered, somehow events always revert towards what reality would have been if the alteration didn’t ever happen. I assume that’s not the kind of thing you mean. Or, in ‘The End of Eternity’, the Eternals use time travel to go to the past to try to influence events for the better, but eventually the hero goes back and alters the past so the Eternals never come into existence and so the past can’t be altered – and that’s implied to be a good thing …
And so on.
James had replied, thanking the Champ for his advice and had reported back, dolefully, to the others.
“It’s not entirely hopeless,” he had suggested tentatively. “Maybe we should check the records after 1959 just in case.”
“It’s not far off being hopeless,” Anna had replied. “I’d be in favour of finishing the job, just on the one-in-a-million chance there is something to find, except for what’s happened to Cam. We’re under suspicion now. If we keep searching then it’s probable we’ll just attract more trouble for him. If there were any reason to think we’d find something useful, I’d vote to keep going – and I hate giving in to the kind of thuggery that’s been happening – but we can’t ask for trouble just so we can feel good about being defiant, when we know there’s no real reason to expect it would do any good.”
James had come to the same conclusion, but he had suspected his own motives, wondering whether he was happy to call off the hunt just to avoid any more danger. He’d been glad, in a way, that Anna had made the decision.
However, he still felt, like Anna and Tina, a residual disappointment that they hadn’t found what Cam needed. In Tina’s case, those low spirits were tempered with a degree of pride at being the only one of the three to have caused real damage to their adversaries, but she was careful not to show it. She knew her sister’s perceptive skills too well to make that mistake.
In any case, the day was a glorious one and their spirits started to revive as they traversed the magnificent stretch of riverside greenery known locally as ‘the Backs’ running behind a number of colleges. Anna had vetoed the longer walk out to Grantchester, on the grounds the trek would take them through some isolated areas of the countryside, where it would be difficult to evade any possible assailants. By contrast, along the Backs there were plenty of other sightseers and routes that would get them quickly into the town centre if necessary. The others accepted the wisdom of the decision. There was, in any event, plenty to keep them occupied. That included visiting Cam. There seemed no point in maintaining the charade that they were unacquainted.
“I was driving
out past Grantchester,” Cam told them. “Have you been that way yet? No? No great loss perhaps. Once you get there it’s crowded with busloads of tourists. The quaint old teahouse that Rupert Brooke wrote the poem about runs like a machine with laminated trays, pre-packaged portions of butter …”
“Yes, I remember from the last time I visited you,” James intervened gently, “but you were saying that you were driving near there?”
“Oh, yes,” Cam said, gathering his still-muddled thoughts. “This car accelerated up beside me then suddenly rammed me from the side. I can picture the bloke in the passenger seat staring at me, all covered in gold jewellery. I spun off the road and rolled into a ditch. I’m not sure whether I lost consciousness, but I remember seeing the other car parked at the top a little way back and the two blokes coming along the road towards me. I wouldn’t have thought that Derwent & Graham would have people like that working for them,” he pondered. “Probably they don’t. Maybe they just paid a gang of thugs to do it …”
“Whether or not they were on the payroll, they were there,” James remarked. “Then what did they do?”
“When they saw another car pull up just behind them, they turned around and raced back to their car and drove off. There were two tourists in the other car who came and helped me. At least I suppose they were tourists …” Cam mused, still very foggy. Soon, though, he gave up that train of thought and asked them about the results of their research.
“Nothing to apologise about,” he insisted after they’d expressed regret for their failure. “I’d like to be able to keep pushing it, especially after what happened the night before last, but there’s a part of me that’s actually quite relieved to drop it.”
Cam was clearly still not fully well so they left him to recuperate and resumed their wanderings before adjourning for lunch at a small café. While they were there, Anna made an announcement that chilled James’s blood.
“We’re going shopping,” she declared. “Oh, it’s alright,” she laughed, seeing James’s horror. “You don’t have to come.”
“But if you don’t, you have to stay at the hotel till we get back,” Tina commanded.
James wondered whether it was against the code of duty to let two women go out unaccompanied when there was a distinct possibility of danger. He reflected that, of the three of them, he was in fact the least likely to be of any use in evading trouble, but he didn’t feel he should duck out of his responsibilities.
“We’ll be fine,” Anna reassured him after having read his thoughts written large on his face. “We’re not going anywhere quiet. There’ll be loads of people around. And …” she added, “… we’ll try not to be too long. We’re just looking around. We’ll do the serious buying when we get back to London.”
Having been safely escorted back to the hotel and spared the trauma of accompanying two women with credit cards into a shopping mall, James reclined lazily in a chair in the hotel lounge. As he took in the view of the street beyond the front window, he thought over their failure to find out what had ultimately happened to Crick’s project.
Cam was content to abandon the matter, but James found himself speculating as to whether they had overlooked something. He always found it easier to think while walking, so he stood up and began pacing up and down.
Is there a legal angle we’ve missed? Back in Melbourne, Slim hadn’t thought so, but James wondered if he had failed to tap into Slim’s expertise adequately. Had he asked the right questions? James was well aware from his own professional experience that questions can be too precise, or can be based on some assumption. In such cases the answer may be correct but misleading because the questioner inadvertently led the discussion away from the real point.
He didn’t think it had happened with Slim. He was confident Slim was too skilled and experienced as an intellectual property lawyer to be led astray by any deficiencies in the way he’d phrased his enquiries.
The maze of chairs and other hotel guests in the lounge interrupted his walking and his thoughts. The footpath outside was better. Perhaps the expansive green lawns of the public recreation area were easier to traverse, but there was still a lot of racket from people playing games. James struck out down the footpath.
As he walked, he racked his brains thinking of other angles they could, and perhaps should, pursue. He knew Crick’s great colleague Maurice Wilkins had once worked on atomic energy. Perhaps we should chase down leads on him.
The small streets were much quieter and more conducive to thought, so it was a pity he was now emerging back onto a main street. No matter, he’d turn off again when a suitable side street appeared.
Was there some other way of pressuring Derwent & Graham that they hadn’t thought of? Maybe some sort of public relations push. Social media campaigns sometimes went viral and produced results.
He was meandering along the winding footpath on Trumpington Street. The stolid neoclassical façade of the Fitzwilliam Museum loomed to his left. It was inevitable, James thought, that the problems of the present so often had their origins in the past. It was a pity that in this case the debris of history hadn’t also been the source of a solution.
“He would have texted or left us a message,” Tina insisted.
Anna was trying to think quickly, but thoroughly. Neither Cam nor Claudia have any idea where he is. It’s no use Tina and me charging off. What if James reappeared here while we’re traipsing the streets? Presumably he would phone or text. Unless his phone is broken or lost. Of course, the hotel has phones, but James probably hasn’t memorised Tina’s or my number. In which case we could be wandering around for hours while James is back here wondering where we are. At least James would have the sense not to charge out to try to find us. Or would he? Yes. he would, but then again …
She tried ringing once more, then she texted again.
“Alright, you can go out and look,” she told Tina. “But let me know every ten minutes where you are. I’ll let you know if he comes back here.”
He was now walking past Peterhouse College with, he supposed, the easternmost parts of Pembroke behind the high wall to his right. Somewhere to his left a bell clanged to mark the hour. He glanced towards the sound. He could see some lawn and some stone walls, but he couldn’t detect exactly where the sound had come from.
A bell in an old quadrangle. An associated thought struggled to emerge from the depths of his memories.
“Clang,” the bell sounded, again, in James’s imagination. What was that thought. Oh, yes, the old ‘Otago’. Conrad’s bell, back at school in Australia. But …
He stopped. Had they, perhaps, been acting all along on the basis of a mistaken preconception?
He reoriented himself and realised he wasn’t far from Pembroke’s main gates. He strode purposefully towards them, oblivious to the abuse from an aggrieved motorist who had to brake to avoid hitting him. He proceeded swiftly through the vaulted stone passage behind the gate, passed the porter’s office, turned hard right on the footpath on the south side of the lawn, then up a flight of stairs.
Tina saw James heading intently towards the Pembroke gate and disappearing through it. She had no great concern that he would be in danger inside the College grounds, but she quickened her own steps to follow him. Remaining slightly behind him she saw, not unexpectedly, but still with a sinking heart, that he was heading up the stairs to Claudia’s rooms.
She said her rooms are on the same stair as Cam’s, she told herself hopefully. Yes, but isn’t Cam still in hospital?
Should I? She stood on the footpath, hesitating.
James knocked.
“Come in.” Good, she’s there. He pushed open the door.
“Oh, James,” Claudia said, surprised but smiling. “Were we meant to be meeting?” she asked, concerned an appointment may have slipped her mind.
“No,” James assured her, “but I’ve just thought of something and I wanted to see what you thought about it.”
He hadn’t had time to gather his thought
s fully. His disjointed references to Conrad, the bell, and their present-day quest wouldn’t have been easy for most people to interpret. But Dr Claudia Naismith, historian, quickly grasped what he meant. While he was still speaking a flash of understanding crossed her face. She darted across to her computer and began swirling the mouse and tapping the keyboard.
“Asimov,” read James aloud, “was an American writer and PROFESSOR OF BIOCHEMISTRY,” he yelled. They both eagerly read on until they reached what they had been looking for.
It wasn’t what James had envisaged, but it had proved astonishingly easy to find. They leapt up. Claudia grabbed James’s arms and they stood staring at each other in triumph, grinning with exhilaration, eyes shining with delight. Just at that moment Tina appeared in the doorway.
“Tina,” exclaimed Claudia happily, “come in. We’re just …”
“No,” Tina shot back, slowly retreating. “I, um … I … I’ll see you later, James.” She scurried away.
Claudia had a conventional upper middle-class English reticence about commenting to anyone on the behaviour of a personal friend, but curiosity got the better of her.
“Is everything alright with her? I didn’t notice anything unusual when we first met at the hotel, but ever since then she’s been acting, well, a little strangely.”
“I don’t know,” James admitted. “She has been a bit odd at times, now that you mention it. But with Tina, strange is actually normal, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, never mind about that,” Claudia responded after an uncomfortable pause. “We’d better tell Cam and Anna about this.”
Tina scuttled down the stairs and fled from the College. She felt like escaping from the scene entirely, but she knew she should make sure James got safely back to the hotel. While she was waiting for James to appear, she phoned Anna to let her know the situation.
