Even so, Spider knew, he was practically begging to come to a bad end with this thing. Where were the safety systems? Where was the TPIRB? Where were the pressure suits in case he really did wind up in a howling freezing vacuum? He thought about all those other time travelers who’d set off on voyages into the future, intending to find solutions to all their troubles, whatever they may be, and never returned. Some had likely wound up in this Colditz facility, he figured, but most, just about all, would have died, whether from sheer exposure, from hostile locals, from God knows what. And here he was proposing to head out into that great void in this thing? A souped-up movie prop?
Yes, all of that was true, he said to himself, now climbing up onto the wheel of the trailer so he could have a closer look at the Machine. Patel had taken the liberty, in the interests of saving time, of getting it powered up for him. The disc was starting to spin. The power was building. There was a crackling, ozone-scented hum in the air, with electricity snapping and causing static discharges along the Machine’s framework. The great unlikely contraption was now starting to vibrate, Spider noted. This was unlike all other time machines he’d ever encountered. None of them had ever had this tremendous sense of nigh-unlimited thrumming power. The hair on his forearms was a-tingle, standing on end. It was the most uncanny, even uncomfortable, sensation. He felt weird in his guts, and it belatedly occurred to him this might not be good for him. But just look at it! Look at the workmanship, the intricate craftsmanship, the artistry of it, the touches that were there purely for aesthetic appeal rather than functionality.
Yes, but it will get you killed, you stupid man!
This is where Spider remembered something his dad would say, whenever he was warned about eating too much cake. “What a way to go!” he would say, beaming, shoving a great huge chunk of cake into his mouth. “What a way to go!” And, frankly, Spider thought, his life, as of this evening, was going to shit. He thought of the way he and Iris had made fun of that restaurant, and the kids working there, and the teenage manager who’d ejected them. At least those kids had actual paying jobs, he thought, feeling a pang of shame. They had more than he did, he’d have to give them that. Maybe Patel could fix things up, and maybe right now, this minute, was the right nodal point to change the future. The fact was, Spider was screwed regardless of what he did. He looked back at Iris, who was talking to Patel, who was waving his arms a lot, looking very animated, defensive, and then he saw Patel signing something on Iris’ handheld, which she examined, nodded once, and shook the man’s hand, apparently satisfied. Then, before Spider knew it, Iris was climbing up the other side of the trailer. “Are you really thinking about doing this? For real?” She was shouting over the rising howl of energy; her own short blonde hair swirled around her head. A crowd started to gather around them.
“Yes,” he said, shouting, back at her.
Iris stood, staring at him, and he was astonished to see that she looked achingly sad; she was even, if it wasn’t a trick of the light and the thundering energy, on the point of tears. “I can’t let you go, not like this,” she said, her eyes shining.
“I haven’t got a choice!”
“Yes, you have got a choice! Stay…” She didn’t complete the thought, and looked down at the ground, where stray bits of napkins, plastic drink containers, empty phone-patch rolls, tumbled and churned. Nearby, car alarms were sounding off. One of the floodlights blew. When she looked back at Spider, he could see tears in her grey eyes. “Please, stay!”
Spider faltered, seeing her that way. His heart turned over. His mouth went dry. He’d never seen Iris like this. When they’d had that brief but intense affair, once things reached the point where they were wracked with guilt and recriminations, she’d always looked at him like he repulsed her, like the thought that they had, only a few days earlier, desperately wanted each other, made her sick. She had not been able to get away from him fast enough, even as something treacherous inside her still, despite everything, still wanted him. Spider, looking at her now, did not know what to think or how to feel. Of all the times for a moment like this! he thought.
Mr. Patel was behind him, on the ground, checking something on his watchtop, shouting up at him. “Now! You’ve got to go now, Spider!”
“Promise me you’ll make everything right,” he shouted down at him. “Promise!”
“I will do my best, Spider. I give you my word as a time machine engineer.”
Then, Spider looked at Iris, who was climbing up onto the framework of the Time Machine itself. She had pulled on her leather driving gloves. “Iris, what the fuck—”
“If you won’t stay here with me, then I’m coming with you!”
He was speechless. He found he was shaking, nervous in a way he had never been before, or at least since he was fifteen, and managed, accidentally, to sleep with a girl. He remembered shaking so much he could barely control himself. This was like that. “But—”
She cut him off. “Come on!”
It was one thing to risk his own useless life on a crazy adventure, but Iris? Who was the sensible one of the two of them? Who had a career? Who had, God, a future? A home to go to? A cat? A whole life, in fact? “Iris!”
They were both clinging to the frame of the Time Machine now, standing on the polished wooden platform that formed the Machine’s floor. The static zaps were driving Spider crazy, but he had to hang on. Someone had to get in the pilot’s chair. “What?” she screamed at him, tilting her head, indicating, as the great disk spun so fast you could no longer make out the detailed markings, as the world beyond the Machine seemed to get a little blurry around the edges, as he felt himself getting a little blurry around the edges, his skin tingling all over.
“You’ll have to sit on the front rail there.”
“You can’t give me a dink?” she said, smiling at him.
God, that was something he hadn’t heard since he was a kid, where you could carry friends around on your bike by having them sit on the handlebars, trying not to get their legs caught in the spokes of the front wheel.
Spider climbed into the plush red control chair. It was firmer than he expected. He remembered Patel telling him that the fuel-cell was under the seat. Iris was having trouble getting properly settled, and wound up with her backside propped against the front of the control panel, just in front of the three domed status lights. He admired her sheer crazy gutsiness.
The controls were simple. The target date and coordinates from the TPIRB had already been entered; it surprised him that the registers went as high as dates in the millions. The original Time Traveler in Wells’ story “only” went as far as 802,701 AD. Here, he was proposing to beat that by an order of magnitude. And there was the direction lever, forward for Future, and backward for Past, all beautifully engraved in the brasswork. A flare of light overhead made him glance up, and he saw the great blinding spotlight of a police helicopter searchlight swinging towards him.
Patel was up on the trailer, hanging onto the framework of the Machine. “Travel safe, Spider.”
Spider said, “I can’t make any promises about Kali, you understand that, right? It’s just the two children I’m interested in.”
“Yes, Spider, of course!” he said, watching the helicopter. “You have to go now!”
Spider couldn’t see a thing with Iris right there in front of him. “You okay up there, Iris?”
She flashed him a thumbs-up.
Spider pushed the direction lever hard forward, and saw for himself the whole world beyond the framework of the Time Machine flicker and blur, then—
Chapter 18
Then Spider dreamed, or thought it was a dream. It was hard to say. First there was a jarring sense that something in the Time Machine had gone catastrophically wrong. How exactly he knew this, he could not have said, since he was something other than conscious, perhaps perpendicular to consciousness. Something,
though, was wrong. He felt the Machine lurch to one side. He thought he heard Iris cry out, “Spider!”
Then, he had this dream about Dickhead McMahon. It was the strangest thing, and the first he knew about it was the smell of a cold winter’s night in the French countryside, late at night: rich soil, bugs, a waft of lavender on the wind — and he was sitting, alone — where the hell was Iris? Wasn’t Iris with him just a moment ago? — in a familiar chair at a familiar desk in the middle of an empty pasture. There was a chill wind, and he thought he heard sheep bleating, off in the distance. Up in the sky, the stars looked all wrong; there were very few visible, and those burned so far into the red, he knew they were close to death. Much of the night sky was awash with luminous reddish cobwebs. The end of the visible universe was at hand, he thought, but did not know how he knew that. “What the fuck?” He got up, took a few steps, his Doc Martens sinking into the rich soil.
“Hello!” he said, calling out into the night, trying to rise above the sound of the crickets and frogs. “Hey! What’s going on? Iris?” Of more concern: where was the Time Machine? He peered into the darkness: no Machine. No Iris. He knew what this was: this was the Display Room on Dickhead’s command vessel, the timeship Destiny, at the actual, for-real, End of Time. This was where Dickhead took his VIP guests to overwhelm them with his extraordinary power, to show off, as Spider’s mum would have put it. And if Spider was here, then things, in a word, had gone to shit, and he, Spider, was standing at the very hypocentre of it, about to be blown to smithereens. Where the hell was Iris? If he was here, why wasn’t she here with him? He had a faint echo of a memory of something happening to the Time Machine in the instant between pushing the lever forward, and the landing.
As if on cue, Spider heard heavy footsteps, labored breathing, faint under-breath muttering, somewhere behind him. He turned, and yes, there he was, the man, the mass-murderer, the legend in his own lunchbox, the one and hopefully only, Dickhead McMahon. Spider was used to seeing him in a cheap K-Mart suit, heavy on the synthetic fibers, but here Dickhead was in a grubby old t-shirt; tattered, dirty tracksuit pants; and what looked to Spider like surfer thongs on enormous feet. Dickhead was having a hard time making his way through the soft soil, but once he saw Spider, he yelled out, “Spider! You made it, mate! So good to see you!” He came up to Spider, his arms spread, hoping to go for the big friendly embrace. Spider stepped back to avoid him. Dickhead noticed. He stopped, looked at Spider, for a moment shame-faced. “Yeah, well,” he said, and lowered his arms and managed a vague wave. “Hi, Spider.”
“Dickhead.”
“Look. Thanks for coming. Know you’re in a bit of a rush. Things to do, places to go, yeah, I know how that goes, been there, done that, got the t-shirt, know just what you mean, oh yes I do, I haven’t fallen quite that far yet, I have my pride, you mark my words I do—”
“Dickhead? What am I doing here? I was travelling with a friend. Where’s she gone? And where’s—”
“Look, I won’t keep you. I’ve rigged up a thing. It’ll get you back to where you were—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
It’s on a timer, you see. Pretty clever, if I do say so, considering what I’ve—”
“Dickhead!”
“Look, I just wanted a quick word, all right?”
Spider, dismayed, even embarrassed for the guy, could see he wasn’t going to get any satisfaction from this ragged, aged version of his former boss, so he went back to the desk and resumed his seat. “This is your meeting.”
“Yeah, well,” Dickhead said, non-plussed, unsure of himself, looking at the desk, taking in the scene around them. He sighed, and sank into the chair across from Spider. “Well,” he said.
“Got a hot date with a time machine, Dickhead. Make it brief.”
Dickhead nodded. “Yeah. Got that. Um, look. It’s um…”
“By the way,” Spider said, interrupting. “Sarah says hello, and are you ever coming home? She’s been a bit worried, you might say.”
“Ah. Yeah. Sarah. Hmm. Okay. Fair comment. I’m on it. It’s on my to-do list, I’ve got it down right here, you mark my words. I know the poor thing must be out of her mind—”
“I’ve nearly told her about your adventures, you know—”
“You didn’t.”
“Not yet, no. She’d never believe me, anyway, would she?”
“Yeah, point. Yeah.” Dickhead managed a weak smile. God, but he looked rough, Spider thought.
“You know the shop’s gone, right? New owners wound it up. Things are pretty bad back home.”
“So I hear. Damn shame. It really is, it really really is.”
“You could have tweaked things a bit, couldn’t you? Made all that come out differently? Save the day?”
“You have to kill John Stapleton,” Dickhead blurted all at once. “I’ve tried, like you told me, but he’s using the ship’s systems against me, and now he’s personally trying to take me down, Spider. It’s a mutiny! Can you believe it? A mutiny, against me? I’m a good boss, aren’t I? Tell me I’m a good boss. Who’d want to take me down, after all I’ve done for everyone! I’m on the run here, I’ve been on the run for years now. Been some tight scrapes, some near-misses. Stapleton’s goons are good, Spider, damned good, my word they are. They nearly got me a few months back, and I barely got away in time. For now I’ve looped back here, to the old flagship, the last place and time they’d think to look for me. It’s all I have left.”
“Dickhead?”
“You can only crash on the couches of your friends while you’ve got friends, eh?”
“That’s true.”
“Still,” he said, shifting in his seat, glancing about, “They’re bound to find me. So, it’s either this or abandon Zeropoint altogether, and I can’t do that, Spider. Not when there’s still work to do.” He was babbling, watching for enemies real and imagined, mopping his brow. It looked like it had been at least a week since Dickhead had shaved last. Spider could smell the man from where he sat, and it wasn’t pleasant. He’d always known Dickhead’s personal discretionary fragrance to be bold, assertive, just this side of offensive, a cologne he liked called Thrust, but there was nothing at all cologne-like about the odor coming off his former boss now. Nothing too discretionary, either, for that matter.
“Like I told you? What?” Spider said, sitting back, arms crossed, studying Dickhead. “I don’t—”
Dickhead planted his huge hands on the table surface and leaned forward, his eyes huge. “For God’s sake, man, he’s out to get me! You have to stop him. You understand? You have to stop him.”
“You? Who’d want to kill you?” Spider deadpanned.
Not getting the gag, Dickhead proceeded in all seriousness. “John was one of my people, my crew, in Zeropoint. Back when. Years ago now. My right-hand man. He had the job you should have had, Spider! If only you’d said yes. If you’d said yes, and joined us here at the End of Time, everything would have been different, it really would, you mark my words, everything would have been brilliant!”
“But, um, surely you could’ve just tweaked things a bit, and got me here regardless — if it was that important. I mean, you saved my life — and thanks for that, by the way, very decent of you, much appreciated — so why couldn’t you just flip me over to where you wanted me to be? I don’t see the problem. Man with your godlike power, ruling over the whole of history, all of Time itself, well, and of course, staying so modest all the while never letting all that power go to your head. That’s what I’ve always admired about you, Dickhead. You never believed your own publicity. Very impressive. A role-model, that’s what you are, mate. A role-model!”
Paradox Resolution Page 23