Incredible. There was one, final, image of the thing, with Mr. Patel and young Vijay standing in front of it, Patel in filthy overalls, eye-plugs, with his data-glasses pushed up on his forehead; Vijay lost in tracksuit pants and a brand-name-printed sweatshirt, and his own pair of data-glasses, too big for his face, also pushed up on his forehead. Both Patels stood there, arms folded, doing their geeky best to look tough and masculine. It made Spider smile despite himself. As for the machine? It looked, with its tripodal articulated and jointed legs, like an exotic, tropical insect, packing more than a mere sting.
Spider stood there a long time, staring at that final image, man and boy and the beast they had built together. He could well believe that Vijay could pilot the thing, and that he would be sufficiently excited about working on it that he would inevitably tell someone at school, maybe even show them an image, who knows? No kid on Earth could keep a secret like that, Spider believed. Patel had been a naïve fool, at best, and, at worst, might end up being responsible for the destruction of the universe.
But wait, he thought. Mr. Patel had told him that Kali had gone beyond the range of its onboard TPIRB, beyond ten thousand years. Patel had also told him he had managed to get a brief, transient TPIRB signal from Kali as it blipped out, and that it was heading futurewards. It was hard to think about the idea of two children stuck more than ten thousand years away in an utterly alien, terrifying future. How cool a customer might Vijay be as a time machine pilot? Spider wondered. All things considered, particularly since the boy had a girl with him, Spider reckoned there was a very good chance Vijay had simply launched Kali on some crazy trajectory across the great gulfs of the future, headed who knows how far away. Yikes, he thought, trying to wrap his mind around it. Although it was true that he had been to the actual End of Time itself — so far uptime that numbers no longer bore any relevance and matter itself was long gone, other than weird things brought there by time travelers — the only time machines Spider had ever used himself either belonged to customers, were borrowed, or were the short-jump Jiffy booths at the airport. Spider’s travels to the End of Time itself were not his choice, and he, even now, had terrible dreams about that void, where he fell and fell, unable to tell in which direction he was heading. It was so far in “the future” that it was hardly futuristic at all. But ten thousand years? Now that was a number you could maybe begin to deal with. You could start to get your brain around it. Ten thousand years? You could be looking at a new Ice Age, maybe. Or maybe global warming gone gonzo, drying up the oceans, baking the land, humanity barely hanging on, living on not much more than dirt. And even with that, Spider knew, the truth was that the children could be way, way beyond that point.
Would they try to come back? There was a fresh thought he could have done without. Suppose the idea was just to take the machine out of the garage for, say, a day or two; blip off to the unimaginable future and come straight back — arriving a few days after leaving. Or perhaps do a stupid little two-week jump, point to point, boom, and right back.
Except there was that TPIRB signal. They’d gone far, far away. What if the plan was to come straight back, but they got stuck wherever they wound up? Or, oh God, he didn’t need this thought, captured, somehow, by whatever locals or others who might be there. For some reason whenever Spider thought of “people of the far future”, he always thought of them as “Morlocks”. He never imagined such people as the peace-loving, soporific “Eloi”, living their attenuated, blissy lives. No, it was always Morlocks, tough mofos, built to persist and struggle, no matter what. When reading Wells’ The Time Machine as a child, Spider had always liked the Morlocks way more than the pointless bloody Eloi.
Not that such thoughts filled him with any hope for the missing children. Any kind of self-respecting Morlock-type residents of the far-future would eat children like Vijay and Phoebe for lunch.
Furious at finding himself dropped in this latest mess, Spider called Patel again. “You bloody moron!” he said without preamble.
“And a very good evening to you, too, Spider.”
“Do you have any idea what might be happening to Vijay and Phoebe right now? I mean, do you? Did you stop to think, even once, when you were building your deathtrap, that maybe it was too dangerous, that it really shouldn’t be allowed to exist—”
“Spider, I was able to finish the machine. Nothing stopped me. The universe and the gods let me do it.”
Spider rolled his eyes and tried to control his temper. “So because nobody stopped you, including no time travelers from the future coming back to stop you doing it, you figured it must be okay to continue and finish the bloody thing.”
“Correct, yes, of course.”
“Even so, the thought that your own child might be in danger from it never crossed your mind?”
“Yes, of course it did, Spider,” Patel told him, clearly nettled. “I told you, I gave Vijay the strictest instruction in safety and security!”
“Yet you let him know the access code for your safe.”
“A son must feel like his father trusts him, Spider. This is a fundamental thing, do you not agree?”
“A son, surely, must also be protected from his own impulsive urges to fiddle with things he has no business fiddling with.”
“I took every precaution. Every care. I had the best security.”
“Yeah, and look where that’s got you.”
Patel had nothing to say to that. Spider was right. Then he said, “I have of course attempted to go back, to warn myself, my earlier self, you understand, about the children and everything that happened that day.”
This was something new. “Yeah, and what did your earlier self tell you?”
“He—”
“Let me guess. He told you to bugger off. He knew what he was doing. He had the very best security money could buy. Everything was going to be fine. I bet he told you that until you got fed up and left. I bet you went back again and again, taking all this documentary evidence with you, to show yourself what happened, and what past you would have to guard against, and still you ignored you, appreciated the warning, and would beef up security in the garage, but otherwise told you to go the hell away and let yourself finish. Right?”
Patel hesitated, and Spider could hear him breathing. He said, “You are broadly correct, yes.” His voice was very small.
“Christ, I hate time travel,” Spider said.
“I am swiftly coming to share that view.”
“You could still go back, you could get some of your dodgy mates to fit you up with some simple explosives, nothing special, just something easy to use. Blip back to the recent past, and blow Kali to bits. Destroy the file. You could do the universe a favor. Might even save your marriage.”
“Oh, nothing can save that, Spider,” Patel said in a low voice.
“Anyway, what do you reckon? You tee up some explosives, and I’ll come with you. It’ll be great. You, me, a bomb, and we can sort out this whole mess, once and for all, before it even happens. It’ll be brilliant.”
There was a long, tense silence. “I cannot do it. I’m sorry, but it simply … no, Spider. I can’t.”
“Okay, fine. She’s your pride and joy, and clearly much more important to you than your son, which is fair enough. I mean, yeah, children are expendable, and there’s probably too many around the place as it is, taking up resources, getting in the way, growing up into teenagers, being all sullen and bored, and who needs that sort of grief, right?”
“Are you quite finished, Mr. Webb?”
“I don’t know. Am I? You’re the one who thinks your bloody time machine is more precious than your own flesh and blood, not me.”
“It is an outrageous lie. How dare you suggest I do not love Vijay!”
“You said it yourself, in your own words, just then.”
“Vijay is my son. I went throug
h a very great deal of, of, shit, yes, shit, to make sure he was brought up properly, to give him the opportunities he deserved. The things I—”
“Still, given a choice of giving up either your machine or your son, you picked the machine ahead of your son.”
“For gods’ sake, Spider!”
Spider found, to his great surprise, that he was quite enjoying this. “You love Vijay?”
“Yes, of course! What a—”
“Then destroy the machine. Or let me do it.”
“You don’t understand. It is more—”
“More complex? Yes? I don’t understand? How can I possibly understand, I’m a simple Australian bloke?”
“It is, yes, more complicated than you imagine.”
“Destroy Kali. Give the order. You told me yourself, just today at your office, to destroy it, you even used the word, ‘whatever’.”
“That was the heat of the moment. I have had time to reflect, you might say.”
“You complete bastard,” Spider said, stunned.
Spider could hear Patel trying not to cry. It was a dreadful thing to hear. He understood only too well what the guy was going through. The thing that shocked him was that, for whatever murky reasons he didn’t want to go into, he still wouldn’t destroy his stupid time machine if it meant saving his son. Spider remembered the time Dickhead McMahon wanted him to do something he did not want to do, until he found the one thing Spider cared about more than life itself, and used that against him. Spider caved instantly, and had been hating himself ever since. That was the thing, though. Spider would do anything for Molly. He would lay down his life, if it would help her. Yes, she didn’t want him. Yes, he probably would sign those bloody papers, fine. But even though he had lost her, she was still his Molly, the love of his life, he would always love her, and he would die for her. Spider saw this as only natural. It was honorable. It was damned crazy, and Molly would not thank him, but it was, he thought, the right thing. This attitude of Patel’s? Now that was crazy. He didn’t understand it. How could you sit there and allow what had happened to actually happen, considering what was at stake — his own son? What kind of man would think that way? He didn’t think it was some weird Indian ethnic thing, either. He believed that Indian people, like people everywhere, loved their children like nothing else. No, Mr. Patel was something different. Something was wrong. It was at once fascinating to see it in action, but also utterly revolting, loathsome. He could not get away from it fast enough.
“So,” Spider said at last. “You’re prepared to sacrifice your son in order to save your machine. Yes?”
“No, it is a false choice! You are misrepresenting—”
“No, no, you stop right there. I’m out. I’m done with you. I quit. I resign. I refuse to help you. I’m not getting involved with all this, and if you attempt to smear me, harm me, or use recordings of our conversations against me in a court of law, be aware that I have my own evidence, my own resources. I want nothing further to do with you, with time machines, with your company or any of its designated subsidiary properties. I am done. I’m gone. I’m getting the hell out of here. I would also draw your attention to the fact that I have your file, the whole thing, the entire history of your precious Kali project. I will waste no time in giving that to DOTAS, to the Federal Police, to the State Police. I—”
“Are you quite finished?”
“No, just getting up a good head of steam.”
“Fine. Now listen to me. That file?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is deleting itself as we speak.”
“It’s … what?”
It was true. The image up on Molly’s wall showed FILE NOT FOUND. TRY AGAIN. Spider worked the interface from his watchtop. The file was gone. File recovery. Nothing. Nothing at all. “Shit,” he said, cold all through, staring at the wall. He was counting on showing the file to Iris.
“I accept your resignation, Mr. Webb. Effective immediately. I will make sure you receive your outstanding entitlements forthwith, minus whatever liabilities are appropriate.”
Vast forces swept and whooshed around Spider. This, he knew, was bad. He’d been sort-of bluffing. Patel was meant to cave in and see things Spider’s way, do the right thing, and give Spider his blessing to go back and destroy Kali. He hadn’t been expecting this. He hadn’t prepared for this.
“Fine,” he said, feeling unsteady on his feet. “Good.”
“Thank you for your service. Good-bye.”
Mr. Patel killed the link. Spider stood there, his knees weak, feeling cold and ill, clutching the edge of the sink with white-knuckle hands.
Then his phone went off. Spider figured it was Patel again, calling to warn him off trying some kind of private operation of his own. It wasn’t. When he tapped his patch he heard, “Spider! Listen. Change of plan for tonight.” It was Iris.
“Okay,” he said, hardly listening.
“Something’s come up. I need to see you right away, so I’m sending a car to pick you up. You’re at Molly’s, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, absently.
“You all right, Spider?”
He could hear traffic noises, people yelling, police radio squeals, in the background. “I’ll be waiting outside.”
Chapter 10
An unmarked cop car, a late-model Holden, big fuel-cell engine, rims, bland paint job, swept into Molly’s driveway. Spider saw a young Chinese-Australian woman in the driver seat, in uniform, no cap. She smiled and waved at him as he approached and slid into the front passenger seat. He smiled back, said hi, felt numb, and then felt a firehose torrent of memories blasting through his mind as he glanced around the car’s interior, but it was that smell, that unique and distinctive cop car smell that just about did him in. How he remembered that! That mélange of body odor, hints of leather, industrial vacuuming, the outgassing of synthetic carpet — it was like being in a taxi, only there was a vague subliminal vibe of authority about it.
“Mr. Webb?”
He started, blinking. “Sorry, what? Yes?”
“You don’t look well, sir. Can I get you anything? Some water, maybe?” She was young enough to be his daughter, pretty but with a serious face, narrow data glasses, and her black hair, glossy under the overhead light, pulled back in a bun. She smelled faintly of something a little exotic that he couldn’t place. Just looking at her; the uniform, all those patches and pins, the symbols and markings, her badge number, the crisply pressed folds in the blue fabric, the utility belt and sidearm. How that took him back, took him back to such an extent that he nearly forgot all about that row with Mr. Patel, and how Patel had left him washed up, shipwrecked, on a rocky coast.
“Oh. Right. Okay, sorry. No, I’m fine. Just … fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Let’s just go.”
So they went. The young officer driving, whose name was Wu, expertly handled the car, and dealt with radio chatter with a level of banter and directness that Spider remembered well. Then, during a quiet lull as they sped down Tonkin Highway, she said, “It’s quite an honor to meet you, Mr. Webb, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, getting over the worst of the contact high from finding himself in a cop car after all these years and starting to feel more like his usual self, which was to say, a decent guy up shit creek. “Thanks.” He wondered what game the girl might be playing with him, but didn’t care much. He didn’t care much about anything at the moment.
Wu went on. “We studied your case, at the Academy, actually.”
This got his attention. “What?”
“The Sharp case, and the aftermath. The way you were frozen out.”
“You,” he said, starting to say something, then stopped, confused. “You studied me?”
“Yes, sir. Strategies and Tactics for Figh
ting Internal Corruption.”
There was a course, at the Academy, about internal corruption? In his day, everyone was assumed to be clean and virginal going in, and the in-service training courses only touched on corruption in the workplace. And, if Spider remembered correctly, many of those that he attended were run by several of Superintendent Sharp’s oily minions, which rendered the entire business laughable at best. Ah, the good old days. “Okay,” Spider said, not knowing what else to say. “So what do you do when you’re the only officer not actually in on the ‘joke’?”
“Sir?”
“Suppose you find that every copper you know, or even know of, everybody’s in on it, they’re all getting their payoffs, and everybody’s happy about it — all except you. You find an envelope full of cash in your locker, just like everyone else, only you decide to burn it, to make a point. Suppose further this renders your position, to use a polite term, ‘untenable’? Then what?” Spider could feel himself getting angry. It felt to him like it was never over, never finished. Like a dead body thrown in a lake, weighted down with cinderblocks, yet bubbling back to the surface, stinking up the whole world.
Paradox Resolution Page 10
