“Jesus,” he said aloud, still panting from the effort of trying to get to the booth, still tense from the fear he’d felt for Patty’s safety. “Jesus.” He kept staring at the empty cage, telling himself to calm down, the only still figure in that ocean of dancing, screaming people. It would be a while—an hour maybe—before the yankback happened and the bricks reappeared in the cage. A long time to wait to see if she would be all right.
He pushed his way back through the dancers to where he’d left Spock. He didn’t feel like getting high now. He didn’t feel like being at a party. He just wanted to be somewhere quiet where he could wait for the girl to get back.
There was a commotion ahead of him, a dense knot in the crowd where people had stopped dancing and were pressed together to see something. He supposed it was someone splashdancing or maybe an impromptu sex act. There was always something going on at these parties. Some kids made quite a name for themselves by putting on shows like that. He tried to push past whatever it was, but got pulled in as more people came crowding in to see what was going on. The quietness at the centre of the group gave him a bad feeling and, reluctantly, he let himself be pressed forward toward whatever it was. Soon he could hear shouting from the centre, people crying, calling for help. If this was an accident, everyone was so stoned they were unlikely to be of much use to the victim. He pushed forward roughly, hoping it wasn’t anything gruesome.
When he finally broke through the crowd, he found himself in a small clearing. In front of him, Spock lay on his back on the ground, twitching violently. People were fussing around him, shouting for doctors and help. Some of them were just shouting. Froth was coming out from between Spock’s clenched jaws. His eyes were wide open, staring up at the sky and at all the faces staring down at him.
Chapter 2: The Lob
Lobspace was dark and cold, so dark that Patty could see nothing at all, so cold that the unsealed gap between her helmet and her jumpgear stung like a band of fire. All she could hear was her own rapid breathing and the steady hiss of air escaping from her helmet. Frantically, with clumsy, gloved fingers, she scrabbled at the seal until she had it closed right around her neck. Only then did she really begin to take in her situation. She was weightless, but seemed to be moving forward. Or falling forward. Her heart leapt into her throat at the possibility, and she had to force herself to dismiss the idea. The black airless void around her gave her no sense of direction or speed. Her sense of movement, she realised, was due to a steady, even pull from her harness, as though someone was dragging her along by the tether. She felt for the thick cord that bound her to Sniper and found it pulled taut, disappearing into the blackness. At first she thought Sniper must somehow be reeling her in, but that didn’t make any sense. She called out to him but there was no reply. Was she alone? If she was, who was pulling her along?
Minutes, they had said. It would take a couple of minutes of “flight” before the lob was over, and they landed. Some kind of free fall, she remembered them saying. No gravity. No stars. Like being in space, only worse. And then she realised why the tether was pulling her. She and Sniper must be rotating, orbiting one another about their common centre of gravity, held together by the tether. That’s what the tether was for, of course, to stop them being separated during the lob. But the idea that she was spinning in empty space didn’t help calm her at all. Instead it filled her with the dread that the tether might break, sending her hurtling off into the void, away from the others, helpless and alone.
They’d gone on at her about it, what to do, how to survive, but she could hardly remember a thing. At the time, she’d just let it wash over her, thinking, I’ll be all right as long as Sniper’s with me. But Sniper had been such a bastard in the cage. He could see how scared she was and he’d just ignored her. He’d wanted his stupid splash to go on, no matter what. She had seen it in his eyes. He thought she was a stupid, whining child and he was damned if he was going to let her spoil his fun. It made her angry to think about how much she had trusted him, and how much he had let her down. More than that, it humiliated her when she thought of how she had adored him, and of all the things she had done for him.
And where did it leave her. She had been Sniper’s bitch. God! She’d been proud to be called that! But without that, what was she? What was there for her now? It was almost a full year since she’d run away from that shitty care centre in Bristol and, by sheer luck, fallen in with a bunch of bricks. She’d found the head guy and become his bitch. When her group met Sniper’s, she traded up. She’d thought she was doing well for herself.
The light, when it came, blasted away her thoughts. Light and sound, gravity and pressure, rushed in on her. Something enormous smashed into her from the side, crushing her shoulder, her hip, slamming into her head. If it hadn’t been for the helmet…
Gasping, winded, she gaped at the great slab of green that had hit her, and her mind wheeled and lurched. It was the ground. It hadn’t hit her, she had hit it. She had fallen—not very far, thank goodness!—onto a huge empty pasture. Sniper was there, close by, already bounding to his feet and looking around. Patty pushed herself up, shakily, looking for the others. They were there too, about twenty metres away, also getting to their feet. Sniper took off his helmet and surveyed the area. Then with a few deft flicks of the catches, he threw off his harness and strode across the field to where Hal and T-800 were unfastening themselves.
Miserably, Patty struggled to her knees, bruised and shaken, and took off her helmet. Sniper hadn’t even glanced her way. She might have been dead for all he cared. They were in a large field. It had a rough, agricultural look about it. Could it be the same manicured and planned parkland Patty had seen earlier in the day? There were no people about, but the big house, Eerde Castle, was clearly visible, just about where it ought to be. There was the sound of traffic somewhere—not the whine and rattle of normal traffic but the growl and roar of old-fashioned petrol engines. Even in the middle of a field, she could smell exhaust gasses.
She was back in the 1980s! For a moment the fact drove all resentment and misery from her mind. If the lob had gone as planned, they would be spatially close to where they had been lobbed from, but temporally shifted sixty-five years into the past. She tried to get a better look at the far-off mansion, but she couldn’t see anything different about it.
“Are you okay?” It was Hal, standing over her, offering her his big hand and smiling. She took his hand and stood up.
“Yes, I think so.” She rubbed her shoulder. “A bit bruised.”
Hal grinned. “You get used to that.” He stepped close to her. For a moment she thought he was going to try to kiss her, but instead he started opening her harness catches. “It’s all a bit of a shock at first. You’ll get your bearings in a minute.”
“Is this really the past?”
“It sure is. The twelfth of July, nineteen eighty-two.” He looked up at the sun. “About ten in the morning, at a guess.”
Sniper, arriving with T-800, looked coldly at Patty but addressed himself to Hal. “Stop fussing with her. She’ll be all right. We need you to get us to the house. We only get a few hours, you know.”
“Right,” Hal agreed. He and T-800 stuffed the harnesses into backpacks, and then he nodded across the field toward the castle. “The road’s that way.”
They picked up their helmets and set off. Patty limped a little from the pain in her hip, but everyone else seemed okay. No one spoke much, taking their cue from Sniper, which suited Patty just fine. She watched his broad back with growing resentment, trudging along in a sulk in which her own pains and grievances gradually overwhelmed any sense of wonder she might have felt at being back in the twentieth century.
In fact, Patty had seen enough old vids from this era for none of it to be very surprising, yet when they left the grounds of the castle and walked into the road, little things began to catch her attention, like the number of telegraph poles, the quaint, old-fashioned cars that made such an appalling racket, and t
he huge, colourful signs that seemed to be directions for drivers. More and more, the fact that she really was in the time of her grandparents impressed itself upon her.
“Hey, watch this,” Hal called to her. They were passing an abandoned pile of builder’s sand beside the road. He ran across the pile of sand, kicking it around as he went. Patty thought he was just showing off, like young men often did around her, but then she noticed what was happening to the sand in his wake. It seemed to be jumping, vibrating, squirming. She screwed shut her eyes and looked again, as if they were the source of the strange blurriness she saw. Hal stopped at the far side of the pile and looked back at it proudly. With strange shifts of colour and position, the deep prints of his feet were slowly being erased. The weird, shifting of shape and colour spread briefly to the road surface around the heap, causing Patty to jump back in alarm as the effect rippled out toward her feet. In thirty dizzying seconds, the pile restored itself.
“Now do you believe we’re back in time?” Hal shouted.
“Stop pissing about,” Sniper snapped.
Hal gave Patty a grin and turned back to the road. Patty stared for a long time at the sand. It was a small splash, she realised. The little anomaly that Hal had caused—disturbing a pile of sand that should never have been disturbed—had righted itself. But for those few seconds before the restoration was complete, there had been a shake-up in spacetime around the sandpile. Causality had been thrown into disarray and it had taken a while for it to settle back to how it should have been.
She set off again, hurrying to catch up with the others, noticing for the first time that their footsteps left faint, blurry marks on the road that quickly faded behind them.
* * * *
The small town of Ommen was just five kilometres or so from where the lob had taken place. They were going to walk to it. Sniper didn’t want to risk causing any paradoxes before the big one they had planned, the one that would cause the splash. Hal was still their guide and he set a fast pace, west along Hammerweg, a forest-lined road that eventually turned north. Patty was beginning to think she was doomed to trudge forever in the July heat when they began to see houses and signs of life around them. By the time Hammerweg became Stationsweg, the street was busy and lined with buildings. The air stank of petrol fumes, and the traffic noise made it necessary for Patty to raise her voice to be heard.
“So what’s so special about Ommen?” she asked Hal. Ahead she could see a bridge that would take them across the broad, flat River Vecht and into the town proper. It was a pretty place with flat fields all around, and cute old buildings visible on the far bank. There was even a windmill, beautifully preserved and picturesque, right near the town centre. Nice place for a holiday, Patty thought. If you were ninety. Definitely not the spot she would have picked for a time trip.
“It’s the home of my ancestors,” said Hal, looking benignly on the placid river and the quaint town beyond.
“You don’t sound Dutch.” In fact, he sounded American, like one of those Bible-thumping preachers she saw whenever she accidentally watched an American vid channel.
“My great-granddaddy moved the family stateside back in nineteen eighty-six. Took a research job with a computer company in Palo Alto and settled there. His daughter, my grandma, married a guy down in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s where I grew up.”
“So it’s your family we’re going to…”
Hal smiled. “Sure is! I’m looking forward to meeting them.”
“But—”
“Don’t you worry now. It all smooths over like nothing ever happened. Like the sandpile. You know how this works.”
Patty nodded, feeling a bit queasy. On top of all the other things about this lob she didn’t want any part of, she now added the splash itself. Until that moment, she hadn’t really thought about what it actually took to make a splash. Not really. With a shake of her head, she realised what a stupid child she’d been about the whole thing. Talking to Sniper and the others, it had seemed like a big game. The ultimate extreme sport. All glamour and fun. One big rush. Now she had to face the hard reality of what was going to happen. Fear grabbed again at her innards. The sunny fields, the placid river, and the sleepy little town just made what was about to happen seem more sinister.
“Look,” said Sniper, as they negotiated the narrow streets at the heart of the old market town.
“Food.”
They took a table at a small street café and ordered lunch from a waiter who spoke fluent English. All around them, people stared.
“They think we’re bikers.” Sniper laughed, enjoying the attention.
“Bikers?” Patty asked, but Sniper just pulled a face at her ignorance.
“The town’s full of foreign tourists for the Bissing tomorrow,” Hal said, shrugging. “Some kind of big deal market day that kicks off a few weeks of events and stuff. A few more weirdos coming to town won’t cause too much of a stir just now.”
Sniper leant across the table like a big cat, his body strong and lazily sinuous. “So Hal, we’ll hang here for a while—an hour or so maybe—then we go on to your great-granddad’s place, okay?”
He checked his watch. “We’ve only got about three more hours, but I don’t want us to have too much time after the splash. We don’t know how big this one will be.” He grinned fiercely and his grey eyes shone with anticipation. He swivelled around to face Patty. “You’re gonna love it, baby.”
Patty felt the fear surge but, with Sniper deliberately trying to goad her, she was angry too. She pointedly turned away from him and spoke to Hal. “How come our time’s so short? Don’t these things usually last longer?”
This caused Hal to grin too and his own eyes to light up. “That’s ’cause we’re breaking a world record, honey. This is only the longest fucking lob in the history of the world! Sixty-five years! It’s never been done before. It’s right there at the edge of what’s theoretically possible. That Klaatu guy is a genuine, grade one, certified genius!”
Patty thought of Klaatu as a scrawny, shifty-eyed kid with personal hygiene problems and the manners of a rat, but she let it pass. “So the further back we go, the less time we have?”
“And the bigger the splash we make.”
“It’s like we get thrown higher,” T-800 said. “You know how they talk about ‘lobbing’ us
‘bricks’ back into the timestream? Well it’s a really good metaphor. The harder we get lobbed, the farther we go and the bigger the splash we make.”
“Thank you, Professor Frink,” Sniper said.
“That’s why everything we do is causing ripples,” Hal chimed in. He moved a pepper pot on the table and let it go. A faint, jittery blurring began to engulf it. “You don’t get that on a short lob.” For a while the pot seemed to be in two places at once and then it was back where it started.
“Cool, ain’t it? Why, I bet if I stood up, my chair would put itself right back under the table. Things we‘re touching get kind of tangled up with us and our time line, but once we let them go...”
“This is too weird,” Patty complained. “We shouldn’t do this.”
Suddenly Sniper’s finger was in her face. “Just shut the fuck up, bitch! If I hear one more whining word from you, you’ll really have something to whine about.”
There was an uneasy silence around the table. The waiter, arriving with drinks, looked at them with a worried frown. Sniper sat back languorously in his chair and smiled at them all. “About time,” he told the waiter.
When the drinks had been placed on the table and the waiter had gone, Sniper turned to Hal.
“They’d better be in.”
“They will be. Don’t worry.”
“Who?” Patty asked.
“Jesus!” Sniper grabbed his drink and sat back in exasperation. Hal explained. “My great-grandma and my grandma.”
“Oh.”
“Great-grandma kept a diary, you see. Grandma is at home recovering from some old-time illness today. They go out to the Biss
ing together tomorrow.”
Patty looked at the table, not wanting to look into Hal’s cheerful eyes. “Did you know her?”
TimeSplash Page 2
