The Fourth Kind of Time

by Tim Neilson

  “What are you going to do now that you’ve seen him?” interjected Daniel, excitedly.

  Derwent held up his hand as a signal to Daniel to calm down. “That was always going to depend on what I found out. At first, I envisaged finding some rationale for telling the rest of the Board and senior management that it’s in our best interests to cut some deal. We’d need to get something, but Dr Fletcher could go doorknocking for funding and legitimately tell potential funders that we wouldn’t stop him. Initially, the last thing on my mind was the company should put up any money. But then, here in Cambridge, I was sitting in a café and I inadvertently overheard Dr Naismith and Mr Bentley talking.”

  “So that’s where I’ve seen you before,” exclaimed Claudia.

  “No doubt, Ma’am,” Derwent confirmed.

  “I’ve seen your picture before, but I didn’t spot you,” James added.

  “Yeah, well, most of the time I wasn’t in your line of sight, and when I was, I wasn’t actually looking at you,” Derwent told him. “Anyway, I was most interested in what you were saying. Especially something that you said about the world needing cooperation as much as it needed competition. I reckon the guy who said that – what was his name, Frank Rolland? – was right on the money.”

  “He usually was,” James observed.

  “So I started to think about whether the project was a suitable investment. It’s the kind of thing that Jimmy would have told me to pour our money into in the old days, that’s for sure,” Derwent reminisced, his eyes briefly ceasing to survey his surroundings with his usual vigilance.

  “That’s great,” Daniel yelled, leaping to his feet.

  “Not so fast,” Derwent admonished him, his gaze refocusing sharply. “Dr Fletcher, we didn’t speak for very long before your friends got here. Is there anything else you think I should know about what you’ve been doing?”

  “No,” Cam replied nervously.

  “Then technically the whole thing is still just an idea, just like it was when Crick dropped it,” Derwent asserted. Cam nodded his assent glumly.

  “That in itself isn’t the end of the story,” Derwent continued, at which his audience brightened up slightly. “There’s a big issue, though, and that’s commercial viability. The drug lords obviously thought someone might run with it. And whether or not they thought it was likely, for them it was a pretty cheap investment to try to persuade you to drop it. So they did. But the investment to make it work – that’s a whole different story. When you look at it as closely as I have, you’ll see the economics don’t stack up. It would be colossally expensive to produce the product even if it does turn out to be viable. And, of course, the price would have to cover the costs. That’s going to make an expensive product if anyone’s hoping to turn a profit on it.”

  “But if it’s a big improvement …” Daniel began; Derwent forestalled him.

  “The average Joe isn’t going to shell out big bucks for something to cure a simple headache, which in most cases he can cure with the regular stuff. Same as doctors won’t want to push their patients into something costing a lot more than the existing products that relieve pain pretty efficiently already. So where’s the big market that would justify the costs? It would have to be for something like major pain and for large numbers of patients – like in hospitals. But hospitals are mostly on tight budgets. If they are getting by with cheaper drugs they won’t use much expensive stuff.

  “One area it might work is in drug rehabilitation. There are new drugs coming onto the streets all the time, and if we had a highly flexible substitute that could do for lots of different narcotics what methadone does for heroin, that would be useful. But you see,” he explained, “drug users are mostly very poor by the time they’re ready to attend some programme to quit, or are forced into one. They’re not going to be able to pay much for something to make it less painful. So who will? Governments? Can you imagine them telling voters that they’re spending huge amounts of taxpayers’ money just to make life easier for a bunch of drug addicts? I don’t think so. And sure, there are some rich drug addicts, but hardly any of them really want to give up. Most of them just want to spend a few weeks in a five-star resort masquerading as a ‘clinic’ so their attorneys or PR agents can say they’ve ‘done rehab’. There’s no money there either.”

  He shook his head slowly. “We’ve got public shareholders now. I can’t go to our Board and pretend that spending the shareholders’ money on this is a good investment.”

  All but one of his listeners dropped their heads at Derwent’s pronouncement. Only Tina remained focused on him. She was used to finding it difficult to keep up with what she was hearing when people like Daniel and James were discussing things, and to compensate for that deficiency she operated with an acute sensitivity to non-verbal clues. Something told her that Derwent hadn’t finished.

  “But that’s the shareholders’ money,” Derwent announced. “The Chester Derwent and James Graham Philanthropic Foundation, well that’s a different story. Dr Fletcher, you and I have got to talk.”

  Chapter 17

  Old Acquaintance

  “Derwent here. You guys close by? See you outside Dr Fletcher’s rooms straight away.” Derwent snapped his phone shut, and looked around at the assembly, who were all waiting as if under his orders.

  “It’s too nice a day to hang around inside,” he told them. “Is there anywhere you’d recommend we can go, Dr Fletcher?”

  They trooped downstairs feeling much happier than they had since well before Anna, James and Tina had arrived in Britain. They emerged blinking into the sunlight and pulled up suddenly at the sight of two men with conservative haircuts dressed in neat business suits.

  “You,” exclaimed Anna, Tina, Daniel and Cam simultaneously.

  “Oh, allow me to introduce you to my security detail, Richie Martinez and Steven Reichenberg,” Derwent explained. “I’d known about Dr Fletcher’s problems with the drug heavies before I came across the Atlantic. The company likes senior executives having protection when travelling abroad, so I thought I’d bring them along just in case.”

  Greetings were exchanged slightly warily.

  “But why did you need security?” asked Anna.

  “Not so much to protect me but to keep an eye on Dr Fletcher. Before I met him I thought I had better have these guys check whether there was anyone watching who might take exception to him getting acquainted with the company that’s doing his kind of subatomic work. I know that Steve and Richie managed to help Dr Fletcher when those thugs ran him off the road, and I guess that Dr Rischelli and Miss Tina recognise them from when they gave them the slip in London, but how did you know about them?” he asked Daniel.

  “Anna gave me a description of them,” Daniel explained. “I saw them just around here not long ago when I was walking out of College.”

  “So it was them you saw,” Anna exclaimed. “I didn’t believe it when you texted me. Tina and I hadn’t seen anything suspicious when we left so I was sure you must’ve been wrong.”

  “I didn’t see them when I walked out of Cam’s room,” Daniel elaborated, “only a bit later when I came out of the chapel.”

  “Well they only arrived with me when I got here to see Dr Fletcher, so probably they weren’t on the beat when you left,” Derwent assured Tina.

  “But what about just before when we came back to Cam’s rooms?” Anna challenged, still feeling a residue of suspicion about the two men she thought of as antagonists.

  “We were taking a look at the chapel ourselves,” Richie interposed. “Mr Derwent told us that as long as we didn’t go too far away, we didn’t need to stand guard the whole time.”

  “You see,” Derwent explained, “once those two goons were put out of action by that car crash – and that was a piece of luck, wasn’t it?” he asked, rhetorically, surveying Tina shrewdly, causing her to assume her most innocent expression, and causing James to look tactfully in another direction.

  “Anyway,” Derwent
went on, “guys like that don’t always find it easy to travel on passports in their real names. Right now they’re having some trouble with the British immigration authorities, as well as with law enforcement agencies from quite a few countries that want to have a conversation with them. So, although they weren’t a threat anymore, I figured I’d keep the boys on the job in case reinforcements arrived, but I was pretty confident that there wouldn’t be more trouble. We managed to find out who Mr Bentley is, and I got the impression that he would be alright, what with Dr Rischelli and Miss Tina looking after him. So Steve and Richie haven’t been on twenty-four hour alert, but they’ve still been keeping an eye on Dr Fletcher.

  “I hope the whole trip hasn’t been too much of a chore for you,” he remarked to his two guards.

  “Not at all, sir,” replied Steve.

  “Actually, it’s been fun,” Richie said, adding quickly, “I’m sorry Dr Fletcher, I didn’t mean that it was, you know, alright that you got attacked or anything …”

  “No need to apologise,” Cam assured him. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your work.”

  Chapter 18

  Revelations

  The grass glowed in the midsummer sun. The stream ambled lazily across the flat green fields. One could justifiably criticise the pub’s modern pergola as an incongruent disruption to its ancient stonework, but it provided welcome shade to those seated at the plastic tables resting on the well-worn flagstones.

  “Oh, my. I’m terribly sorry,” Claudia gasped to Anna, striving to control a mixture of consternation and mirth, as she glanced across at Tina.

  “It’s not your fault,” Anna assured her. “You weren’t to know. I didn’t find out myself till just a few minutes ago when I managed to get a private word with her about what she was doing back in the square. Remember way back that first time we met you at the hotel? When we arranged for you and James to pretend to be a couple so that you could meet with him and then relay messages to Cam in private back at Pembroke, Tina had her earpieces in. She jumped to the wrong conclusion and somehow never caught up with what was really happening. All this time she thought you and James really were getting involved with each other.”

  “In hindsight we were probably a bit theatrical,” Claudia mused.

  “I suppose so, but Cam knew his emails were being hacked so he had to assume that any other way he was communicating with people was monitored as well. And he may have been right. We still don’t know how they worked out so quickly that James was here to help Cam. We think that they tracked Cam’s email to Daniel and then followed that trail when Daniel forwarded it to James. That would explain why James’s house suddenly became a crime hotspot.”

  “I didn’t know James and Tina were an item,” Claudia said, “and if I had …”

  “They weren’t until now,” Anna corrected her. “It looks like you were the catalyst!”

  Claudia continued to take surreptitious, curious glances at Tina. Anna let her attention wander around the various conversations that were occurring.

  “We’ll make sure your rights are protected,” Derwent was saying to Cam. “Not just the academic rights but commercial ones as well. I’ll get it through our Board, just leave that to me. The Philanthropic Foundation will pay the company something for a licence over its patent rights, so the company won’t look like it’s going soft on protecting its property. Then we’ll stitch up a deal with your University ...”

  Anna thought it sounded promising, but she hoped the others were able to enjoy the occasion socially rather than purely as a business discussion.

  “I was almost on to it fairly soon after we got here,” James was saying to Daniel. “I thought that maybe Asimov had written something about time travel, which Burnet referred to. But the Champ said that none of Asimov’s novels or short stories fitted the bill. In Asimov’s early fiction, time travel either didn’t alter the physical past much at all, or it was portrayed as being undesirable. After that I assumed that Asimov was a dead end for us. It would have been ridiculous to think that a precise thinker like Burnet would use such a bad analogy if he wanted to encourage Crick.”

  “On our way here, Tina still seemed a bit evasive around me,” Claudia said, breaking in on Anna’s attention to James’s narrative.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Anna counselled her. “She’s not hostile to you now,” she added, as they both contemplated Tina.

  Anna stared thoughtfully for a while. In a sisterly conversation, Tina had revealed her attempt at diplomacy in her text to Alex. In one sense, that effort had been an abject failure. Tina had, apparently, not been subservient enough and Alex had reverted to type – his default setting of belligerent assertiveness. So in another way Tina’s text had been a resounding success. It had resolved in Tina’s mind the choice she wanted to make. Subsequent events proved that choice was open to her.

  “You guys must be good,” Tina was saying to Steve and Richie.

  “We haven’t done too well on this trip,” Steve admitted. “Those thugs got the jump on us when they took off suddenly and ran Dr Fletcher off the road. We’d worked out that they were stalking him. Instead of tailing them a long way back we should have got our car between them and him – even if it meant blowing our cover.”

  “And then we got caught on the wrong side of the road when you did that trick at the bus,” Richie added.

  Tina asked what he meant.

  “Well, even though those guys drove off while we were helping Dr Fletcher, we noted their car registration number. It took some doing, but we called in a few favours from some people we know, if you get my drift …”

  “Secret agents you mean?” asked Tina.

  “Something like that,” Richie admitted evasively. “Anyway, we traced those guys to a hotel in London.”

  Computer hacking, I suppose, thought Anna. Trace the registration number to a hire car company, hack the company to get full details of the hirer’s identity – the identity he was using, anyway – and once he’s known to be foreign start trawling passport control, hotel registers, credit card usage … it would be very difficult, but presumably possible for a really big organisation that’s into surveillance.

  “It seemed strange,” Richie told Tina, “that they’d been staying in London if they were just after Dr Fletcher, so we thought we’d better visit London to investigate. Which is why we were shadowing them the next morning when they staked out the British Library and that scientific institute. When they linked up at the Library, we worked out that they were following Mr Bentley, though we didn’t know why, or even who he was. Then at University College, when Mr Bentley started heading for the gate, we saw you were along for the ride for some reason, as well.”

  “So up to that point you weren’t actually following me and Anna?” Tina inferred. “That’s a relief. I thought our skills must be deteriorating.”

  “No, we weren’t,” Richie confirmed. “Anyway, we didn’t want to stand right in the gate, because the goons would probably have recognised us from the previous evening at the car crash scene, but we didn’t want to get left behind. And we didn’t want to go out and head way down the footpath out of sight in case we missed something.”

  “So I had the bright idea that we’d skip across the road and keep watch from there,” Steve intervened.

  “And then when Mr Bentley suddenly jumped into the bus we couldn’t get back across quickly because of some traffic. Boy, were we relieved when we saw Mr Bentley run past leaving those guys still on the bus.”

  “And that’s when we made a quick decision. We had enough intel on those thugs to be confident of tracking them down, but we had no idea who you were – friends of Dr Fletcher, or maybe just rivals of those other guys trying to beat them to something you were both after, or who knew what. So we decided to follow you rather than chase straight after them.”

  “We’ll also hire facilities and staff from the company,” Derwent was saying. “Don’t worry, that’s not a plan to cut you out.
I’m sure you’ve got great resources here. But the upside of doing things via the company is the crime syndicates aren’t going to take on an organisation as big, influential and wealthy as us. Hey, maybe the company will even donate some assets as a PR stunt.”

  Better and better, Anna thought, turning her attention elsewhere.

  “Yes, I see,” Daniel said thoughtfully. “Everyone assumed that it couldn’t be Conrad’s bell, because if it was, then all along people would have associated it with ‘Conrad’ the famous writer, and valued it because of that. But, of course, they were wrong. Early on, people wouldn’t have thought of it as ‘Conrad’s bell’, because until well after the time Conrad left the ship he was just an itinerant sailor. By the time he became famous, back in those pre-internet days, it was perfectly understandable no one thought the grimy tramp steamer near the end of its useful life had anything to do with him. So Conrad’s bell had never been known as Conrad’s bell in the past, but there was no reason at all why it should have been, so it was a mistake to assume that it wasn’t Conrad’s bell. But what does that have to do with Crick and Burnet?”