TimeSplash

by Storrs, Graham

  She made her way along the inside of the loft, staying close to the edge of the roof, having to move doubled up to avoid the joists. She could barely make out where the rafters ran, buried as they were under all that insulation, but she knew she must step only where they were. If she stood on the plasterboard ceiling between them she could fall straight through. Several times she had to stop and push aside the paper granules, digging through them with her hands to find the wooden beam that would take her next step.

  As she moved, she counted the rafters. She had carefully measured the distance between rafters by examining her own ceiling. Then she had paced out the distance on the ground outside between her own window and the point she needed to reach. Crouching and creeping through the dark loft, she hadn’t expected it to take her so long to get to where she was going, but then she hadn’t realised how hard it would be to move around in the chilly blackness of the roof space. When she arrived, she looked back at the patch of light that marked the hole in the ceiling of her room. It didn’t seem far away at all and she counted the roof joists between the hole and where she stood twice more before she could convince herself she was in the right place. She took out the craft knife again and cut away a big section of the tarred paper, revealing a series of wooden strips running horizontally between the joists, on the outside of which the tiles had been hung. Carefully, dreading that someone might hear the noise she was making, she pushed and twisted and eased one of the tiles until it came loose. Holding it as firmly as she could with her cold fingertips, she turned it and pulled it in, then set it down gently beside her. Through the small rectangular hole, she saw nothing but blackness. No stars. No moon. It’s cloudy, she told herself. Yet she poked a hand up through the hole into the unobstructed space beyond, just to make sure.

  One by one, she removed more tiles until she had made a hole wide enough to get her shoulders through. The thin wooden laths were still in place, running across the hole, but they broke easily and she soon had them out of the way. The whole process could have taken five minutes, but it took Sandra more than half an hour as she strove to minimise the sound she had to make. Gingerly, she poked her head out of the hole and looked around. It was hard to make out much of the lawns and the walls of the Institute, but the street beyond had orange streetlamps, and beyond that were other streets and a handful of houses. Her hole in the roof was at the back of the building. To the front, there were lights around the porch and down the long gravel drive. There would also be the lights of the village and the main road beyond. She could hear no sounds at all except a gentle sighing of the wind in the big elms that dotted the lawns. Below her, a metre and a half away, the roof ended abruptly, and she could just make out the edge of a black iron gutter. She was about nine metres above the ground and a brief vertiginous awareness of all that empty space beyond the gutter made her catch her breath. Come on, girl, she told herself. Let’s get this over with.

  She tied one end of the string to the handles of the plastic bags with a slipknot and the other end she tied securely to the wire hook. She lowered the bags out of the hole onto the roof, letting them slide along as she fed out the string. They hung down close to the gutter and lay there white and glistening, obvious to anyone who happened to be outside who might glance up. She suffered a moment of profound self-doubt. She should have thought of that. She should have made sure her bags were a dark colour. She should have used cloth bags that weren’t so reflective. If she could make such a stupid mistake as this in her planning, what other mistakes might she have made?

  But it was too late. She was committed. Besides, she had to go tonight. She couldn’t just sit there at the Institute while the world went to pieces. The very idea of being trapped there spurred her into motion.

  She writhed up through the hole, carefully avoiding touching the slates around the edges, any of which could come loose and slide, clattering down the roof, bouncing off the gutter with a clang and sailing into the air to crash to earth like a bomb. She took a deep breath, steadying herself. Stepping out onto the roof was an agony of anticipated failure. She had planned for this, too, spending hours in the gym working on her flexibility and strength, studying tai chi chuan until she could move like a hunting cat, with slow precision and unwavering balance. Even so, and despite the icy wind, sweat trickled inside her clothes by the time she had extracted her legs and was crouching safely on the roof.

  She moved silently down to the gutter and peered over, relief surging through her as she saw the fire escape, just three metres below. Exactly where it should be. And, for the first time that night, she felt a curl of excitement. She was out. Soon she would be down on the ground. There would be a nerve-racking run from the back of the building to the wall but, once there, it would be an easy climb to reach the street and freedom.

  Pulling on the slipknot to release her bags, she flattened herself along the gutter and swung a leg out. Slowly, carefully, she let her body swing down. Gripping the cold, slimy gutter with halfnumb fingers, she lowered herself toward the metal floor at the top of the fire escape, dropping the last half metre to a near-silent landing.

  Chapter 8: The TCU

  He walked from the plane into a cold and miserable night but, even so, Klaatu was glad to be off the aircraft that had brought him in from London. He hated flying. The big Airbus Electroprop 320 whined and rumbled on the wet concrete as if it were keen to get back into the air, while Klaatu and his fellow passengers queued to board the coaches that would take them to the warmth of the terminal building.

  It had been a wasted trip. Those idiots in London hadn’t a clue how to run a timesplash—

  especially one of the magnitude they wanted. Yes, he could have helped them, but why should he?

  He had plans of his own, right here in Berlin.

  Their lead brick—a tall, handsome Brit called Flash—had taken him aside when the negotiations were clearly getting nowhere.

  “So why did you even bother to come over here then, man?” Flash challenged him, smiling.

  “You invited me.”

  “Why aye, to talk about you setting us up for a big ’un. But you don’t seem all that interested.”

  “What is that accent of yours?”

  “What, have you never heard a Geordie before? And what’s yours then? Czechoslovakian, I’d guess.”

  “I don’t think your team is ready.”

  “Aye, and that’s why we need you, man. My tekniks can’t get their heads round the new gigarange formulas. They’ll screw it up. But you… Well, you’re the best, right? And I’ve told you already, money is no object. We’re well connected.”

  Klaatu had looked the big Brit in the eye and said flatly, “None of your team is good enough. You won’t make it.”

  At that the Geordie’s smile had switched off and Klaatu had left him and gone back to Berlin. Even at ten o’clock at night, Berlin-Brandenburg International airport was crowded, with hundreds of people swarming around the check-ins and milling aimlessly in the concourse. Klaatu had only hand luggage so he marched straight past the luggage carousels and out into the main concourse. A driver he recognised took his bags without a word, and they walked together out into the cold November air. A large black limo was waiting and Klaatu quickly got into the back while the driver stowed his luggage.

  “Good flight?” asked Sniper, grinning maliciously.

  “Wonderful.”

  “Drink?” Sniper was sprawled across the back seat with a large whisky in his hand. Klaatu ignored the question. He didn’t drink. Most of Sniper’s politeness was designed to irritate, and Klaatu had long since learned to let it run off him without effect.

  “The London gig’s going nowhere,” he told Sniper. Small talk, for whatever purpose, was not something Klaatu indulged in. “Their main guy’s a dick. Their tekniks don’t know their arses from their elbows.”

  “So you weren’t tempted to stay over there?”

  Klaatu eyed him carefully. “What do you think?”

 
Sniper’s tone was breezy and light. “I like London. It’s so decadent. Berlin is so prissy these days. Maybe we should go and show them how it’s done?”

  Klaatu fought down his irritation and stifled the angry response that sprang to his lips. Ommen had changed everything. Until then, timesplashing had been on the fringes of legality, against the law in most places but not rigorously suppressed as it was now. Bricks were considered glamorous cult heroes then. Now they were seen as dangerous criminals. The whole splashparty scene had died out and the money had dried up. Sniper cursed the kids that had once idolised him, calling them cowards and traitors. It had made him bitter and hard but also fickle and moody. Dangerously so. But why would kids go to a splashparty when there was a good chance they could be arrested? What would be so attractive about an event where people could be killed in the backwash?

  It was that damned exponent in the displacement function! The further back you went, the bigger the anomaly you could cause and the bigger the backwash. The past righted itself. Nothing could change that. However hard the splash hit the timestream it would flow back and set itself right eventually. It was just the backwash—where the disturbed timeflow hit the present—that caused any permanent damage. And that was where the exponential effect of going back farther caused all the problems. Go back thirty, forty, even fifty years and you were okay. The backwash was trippy but not deadly. But go back sixty or more years—as they’d demonstrated at Ommen—and the backwash could destroy buildings and kill people.

  And now there were the new gigarange formulae, brilliant work that had extended the length of a lob indefinitely—as long as you had the huge energies required to create the displacement field. Now every brick they knew wanted to go back a hundred years, break the record set at Ommen that night, push Sniper and Klaatu off that pedestal they’d been on for over two years now. But a gigarange splash was a guaranteed nightmare when the backwash hit. Klaatu’s own calculations predicted exactly what the world had just witnessed in Beijing. If he and Sniper were going to pull this off in Berlin, it would require meticulous planning and a lot of money.

  “Fucking Chinese!” Sniper’s thoughts had obviously been running along similar lines to Klaatu’s.

  “No one survived,” Klaatu pointed out.

  Sniper’s eyes narrowed as he focused on Klaatu. “Yeah, but that Korean bastard was the first to do it! His fucking teknik got him there, didn’t she? While you’re still pissing about doing your sums.”

  Klaatu didn’t rise to the bait. He was well used to Sniper’s tantrums. In the end, he knew, Sniper trusted him. In the end, they both knew they’d pull it off, while other teams rushed at it and got themselves killed.

  “Kuem Dong-Min was a good brick,” Klaatu said, remembering the young man’s quick smile and intelligent eyes. They’d met him about a year ago in Singapore just after the gigarange formulae had first hit the net. Dong-Min’s tag had been Jimmy—after James Dean. His uberteknik was a Chinese girl, Wu Yanmei, who was even younger than Klaatu but who had a mind that had thrilled him more than her pert, young body. Klaatu had fantasised about Yanmei ever since that meeting, believing that she might be the only woman on Earth who would understand the loneliness and isolation that went with such an intellect as his. But she too had died in Beijing.

  “I wish people would shut up about fucking Beijing,” Sniper said. Klaatu could only sympathise with that statement. Every vidlog, every netsheet, every conversation in every bar was about Beijing. It had shocked the world far, far more than Ommen had, and now every cop on the planet would be hunting every brick who might stand even a remote chance of doing the same to some other major capital. He and Sniper had probably been bumped up to public enemies one and two by now. Beijing had made the world a very dangerous place for both of them.

  “You want to give up on Berlin?” Klaatu asked. “Go dark for a while? Let things settle down?”

  Sniper frowned heavily. Obviously the idea had occurred to him. Obviously he didn’t like it. “And let some creep like Flash do London first?”

  “So we’re still on?”

  “Of course we are. You think I’m scared of the cops?” He brightened suddenly, grinning like a shark. “They got our shipment of F-Twos at Dover.”

  Klaatu smiled too. “They must think they are such clever little policemen. And the real shipment?”

  “Delivered right on time. It’s in the warehouse at Neukölln-Südring. Twenty top-of-the-range reactors. Four hundred megawatts of mayhem just waiting to be unleashed!”

  Klaatu’s smile brightened. “There, you see? It is all coming together. You are going to blow this town off the map, my friend! Be sure to say hello to Herr Hitler for me when you get to 1936.”

  * * * *

  Jay looked again at his watch. He had had too much to drink, he was bored, and he wasn’t at all sure what part of town he was in or how to get back to his new lodgings. Joe, his new best friend, was missing in action, having disappeared onto the dance floor with a beautiful young woman fifteen minutes ago. All in all, it looked like time to be on his way.

  It wasn’t as if he really knew the bloke. Joe had been there in the office when Jay arrived yesterday—a young man of about Jay’s age and build. In a manic display of extraversion, Joe had embraced Jay as if he had found a long-lost brother. Self-importantly, the strange fellow had led Jay around the building introducing him to people who seemed confused and alarmed by the honour, and showing him where to find essential services.

  Eventually, his head spinning from the constant flow of chatter, Jay had stopped him and said, “Look, I don’t mean to be funny, but who are you?”

  Taken aback, the young man had declared, “I am José María Alejandro García de la Peña y del Bosque. We are in the same unit. I will be your friend and guide.” He winked. “You can call me Joe. It makes it easier for you, eh?”

  Jay was still confused. “This is a new unit, right? They just formed it like last week, yeah?”

  “Sí!” Joe seemed pleased that Jay knew so much. “I arrived yesterday from the Servicio de Información de la Guardia Civil.”

  Jay blinked in astonishment, not because this seriously over-friendly nuisance was part of Spain’s national intelligence service, but because he’d let himself be so easily swept along by him.

  “You only got here yesterday?” he had demanded, temper rising.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Joe had said, airily. “You’ll soon learn the ropes. You won’t feel like the new boy forever. Not with me to help you.”

  And now Jay was out on the town with him. Definitely time to go. But Joe miraculously appeared out of the crowd just in time to forestall Jay’s departure.

  “Hey, Jay-Kay!” Joe shouted. Another annoying trait. He grinned from ear to ear and leaned in to speak privately. Even so, he had to raise his voice above the dance music.

  “I’m sorry I was so long, man,” Joe yelled. Their brief acquaintance made the apology sound less than sincere. “Some chicas like to play hard to get. You know? But this…” He held up a hand so Jay could see the netID written on his palm. “This will be worth the effort. Eh?”

  Jay didn’t doubt it. “Look, Joe, I’ve got to go find my digs and get some sleep. The boss is in tomorrow and I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.”

  Joe waved a hand. “Ah, you worry too much. I, José María Alejandro García de la Peña y del Bosque, will look after you. Are you not my friend? Shall we not stand together against the forces of evil, shoulder to shoulder, protecting the weak and needy?”

  Jay sighed. He was beginning to see why the Guardia Civil had wanted Joe out of the country. Joe had also had too much to drink. But, unlike Jay, the young Spaniard seemed to be enjoying the sensation. It was time to act decisively.

  “Joe, my new and enigmatic friend,” he said. It irritated him that the crazy guy’s speaking style seemed to be rubbing off on him. He made an effort to sound normal. “I’ve gotta go, mate. Good night and good luck with the—” He fl
ashed his palm at Joe. “— señorita.”

  Joe protested in grandiose terms, emphasising his arguments with a great deal of arm-waving, but Jay turned his face to the exit and made his way carefully through the dancing throng. Unfortunately, Joe was equally determined and followed him, keeping up a continuous stream of persuasion in his wake.