Twenty-one seconds down. Khan had only another nine seconds before the volts shooting through Halley’s system completed their cycle. He nudged her onto her belly and tied her wrists together as well, completing the task more swiftly the second time.
By the time Khan had secured the girl’s wrists, the young man was mumbling, albeit incoherently. Next came a tricky bit. After expending two precious seconds to turn on the overhead lights, Khan then used his foot to roll the young man onto a throw rug, enabling him to slide the boy to the far side of the room, beside the singularity device. Then, snaking an extra-long cable tie through the boy’s PlastiCuffs, Khan secured his victim to a heavy equipment rack, which he reasoned would prevent the boy from running.
By the time the professor had run back to retrieve Halley, she was groaning and trying to roll onto her side again, possibly with the intention of rising and running. Khan reached her in time to prevent this. She was small enough that he didn’t need the assistance of a smooth-gliding rug underneath her. Grasping her feet, Khan dragged her back beside the boy and secured another tie through her cuffs to the same rack.
They weren’t going anywhere, which was fortunate, as Khan felt as though he’d just run a marathon. A consummate planner, he had even anticipated his present need for water and grasped a bottle that was waiting for him on the podium.
After assuaging his thirst, the professor stepped onto the podium’s transport platform and began to prepare the singularity device for use. By the time he’d begun that task, the two detainees were whispering to one another. Khan didn’t bother shushing them—they were helpless, and talking wasn’t going to change that. In some ways, this wasn’t so different from proctoring an exam.
He was on a schedule, however, so he interrupted them as soon as he had completed preparing the machine.
“I have a few questions,” he said.
Aware of the adrenaline coursing through his veins, Khan was surprised by how calm his voice sounded, as though he were only discussing an experiment with a pair of grad students.
“Let’s start with the most important question. Edmund Aldwyssen, in what year were you born?”
63
• HALLEY •
Before Halley could caution him, Edmund answered the professor, who gave a nervous nod and thanked him.
“Your candor makes things much more straightforward,” added Khan. “Now then, Edmund, since joining this century, have you experienced any physical irregularities? Headaches? Nausea? Loss of consciousness? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“I have not,” Edmund replied, his brow dark and murderous.
“What do you want from us?” asked Halley.
She watched as the professor tapped a pen to his lips. Once, twice. He seemed to have developed a twitch in one of his eyes. Was he anxious? Why would he be anxious? He wasn’t the one cable-tied to a massive metal shelving unit. How could she have been so stupid? So trusting? Of course Khan had been onto them. She’d been such an idiot!
“Ideally, I would run diagnostic testing on you, Master Aldwyssen—”
“It’s Aldwych,” said Halley. “And he’s an earl. He’s important.” This might be an exaggeration, but Khan didn’t need to know that.
“Hmm. Yes. I wasn’t able to find the surname ‘Aldwyssen’ in any lists of Danish family names. Thank you.”
Was that sarcasm? Halley couldn’t tell. It had seemed genuine. Or maybe just automatic.
The professor returned his attention to Edmund. “Unfortunately, I will not be running any diagnostics on you. There isn’t time. Not to mention, with the shock your nervous system has just sustained, results would be highly inaccurate.”
“What do you want from us?” Halley repeated.
“Just a few answers,” said the professor. “I’m afraid you have nothing else to offer me, other than the tangible evidence provided by Edmund that it is possible to survive a journey such as his.”
“Let us go,” said Halley. “We’re not going to tell anyone about your . . . experiments.”
“I have a few questions for you, Halley,” said the professor, avoiding her gaze and her request. “Plainly, you tampered with my equipment. Could you tell me everything you remember from the moment you broke into my lab?”
Halley was tempted to say nothing unless he released them. If she was any judge, the professor was very uncomfortable with what he was doing. She might as well see how far cooperation got her, for now. She glanced to see what Edmund thought, but he had grown inattentive and withdrawn.
Turning back to the professor, Halley told him everything that had happened, from the open basement door to Edmund’s accidental journey into the twenty-first century. The professor took copious notes, nodding and prompting on occasion. When Halley had finished her narrative, he asked for clarification.
“You are certain your length of stay in 1598 was not more than fifteen minutes?”
“Pretty certain. I mean, my cell wasn’t working, obviously—”
“Quite. But you weren’t there for, say, thirty-five minutes, were you?”
“Definitely not,” said Halley.
He murmured to himself, staring at his notes. At last he looked up with something of a triumphant expression.
“What?” asked Halley. “Why do you looked so pleased with yourself?”
He gave a small shrug and answered. “I have posited that the singularity device might be capable of managing separate, distinctly programmed journeys at the same time. Now I have proof. Despite your . . . interference, the experimental program guiding my journey functioned properly. Well, always excepting the earthquake.”
“The earthquake?” asked Halley, her eyes widening. “You don’t mean . . . Did you have something to do with the earthquake on Friday?”
Without looking up from his note taking, he said, “Believe me, I find the earthquakes troubling.” And then, as if to himself, he added, “But I don’t see any alternative to extending the length of stay beyond the allotted pocket . . .”
“Allotted pocket?” asked Halley.
“Ah. Yes. The temporal singularity device—my time machine—is normally limited to opening what I call a ‘temporal pocket’ for only five hours divided by the square root of the total number of years traveled. Which makes travel to the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt highly inconvenient. Unfortunately, when I have attempted to extend the allotted pocket . . .” The professor shrugged.
“Earthquakes?” demanded Halley.
“Mmm,” agreed Khan, his nose once again in his notes.
Halley felt her stomach twist at his calm demeanor. “Someone could have died from that!”
Khan looked up. “As we’ve already established, I find the earthquakes most troubling.”
Halley, her mouth shrinking in disgust, looked away from the professor. Her gaze fell on one of the several Egyptian sarcophagi in the room. Although she didn’t know her Old Kingdom from her New Kingdom, Halley couldn’t help wondering if the professor had “extended the temporal pocket” to retrieve these items. Were his activities—his selfishness—responsible for the spate of earthquakes in the past six months?
The thought was sobering. Halley was pretty sure someone had died during last April’s quake. People needed to know about this. She and Edmund had to get out of there.
“Have we answered all your questions?” Halley asked. At her side, Edmund remained silent and still. He seemed eerily focused on something, but she had no idea what.
“What was that?” asked the professor, looking up from his notes.
“Have we answered all your questions?”
“Yes. Yes, I believe so.”
“So let us go.” Her heart was pounding as she spoke. “We won’t tell anyone anything.” Could he tell she was lying? She felt the plastic bite into her wrists as she clenched her hands into fists.
“I’m afraid I can’t take that risk,” replied Khan. Eyes off his notes, he turned in her direction but did not meet her eye.
&n
bsp; Her chest felt like it might explode. If he wasn’t going to release them . . . what was he going to do?
“Let us go,” Halley said softly. “You don’t want us on your conscience.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say, “You don’t want to kill us,” but she noticed Khan flinching as if she had.
“Regrettably, I cannot allow you to go.”
Which meant what? They weren’t getting out of this alive? Or they weren’t getting out of this in this century? Her gaze shifted to the machine, to the slight flickers of color reflected from the podium screen onto the professor’s face.
“My work is too important to me,” said the professor. “To me and to the world.”
For several seconds after this, Halley was silent as despair threatened to choke her breathing. But then something inside her snapped.
“You’re saying you’re prepared to make us disappear for the sake of your work?” Halley spat the words out. “Your so-called work of stealing valuable artifacts from the past so you can live in a mansion?”
The professor’s lips thinned as he pressed them together. “Not that I owe you an explanation, but I do not steal things from the past.”
“Buy them. Whatever. It’s still fraudulent. And what about the . . . the butterfly effect? You’re playing God. You have no right—”
“I have every right,” said Khan, his voice rising. “I have the right of the mind that seizes opportunity rather than shiver on the sidelines. I have risked more than you can imagine to achieve breakthroughs that will change the way humanity conceives of space–time.”
Halley felt her stomach churn with revulsion. The professor was just like her mother—always prepared to justify whatever had been done “for the greater good,” which in her mother’s case meant “personal financial gain” and in the professor’s case meant “scientific advancement.” Halley looked to Edmund to demand some support, but he had slumped forward and his eyes were closed.
“Edmund?”
“He’s praying,” murmured the professor. “It is a marvelous thing, the human capacity for hope.”
Halley examined Edmund, who did appear to be praying. His lips were moving slightly. So were his hands. Halley felt a wave of pity: Edmund, who clearly didn’t understand the first thing about plastic cable ties, was trying to free his hands. But then she realized he was doing more than wriggling his hands.
Fortunately for Halley, her hair fell forward at that moment, shielding her shocked expression from the professor’s view. Edmund had a knife. At some point in the confusion of being tased and confined, the professor had taken Edmund’s sword, but he hadn’t remembered to search for Edmund’s small folding knife, and now Edmund was using it to slice his hands free. The angle at which Edmund was forced to grip the knife was awkward, and the plastic wasn’t giving up easily, but Halley could tell Edmund would cut himself free within a few minutes, as long as he didn’t drop his knife first.
She had to be ready.
And she had to keep talking—to keep Khan’s focus on her and off Edmund.
“You can talk about the advancement of science all you want,” said Halley, “but if that’s all you cared about, you wouldn’t be driving a fancy car.”
The professor’s eyes narrowed.
“Not to mention maintaining that private collection upstairs. You’re nothing more than a thief.”
Khan stood, but instead of shouting at her, Halley thought she detected a tiny smile. He clasped his hands behind his back and began pacing back and forth beside his desk. He was smiling.
“Am I entertaining you?” she asked dryly.
He looked up, an amused expression on his face. “Hmm . . . Yes, I suppose you are. You see, Miss Mikkelsen, I am in possession of information of which you are ignorant. Would you like to know one of the universe’s little secrets?”
Halley shrugged. The universe could keep its dirty little secrets for all she cared. All she wanted was to keep Khan talking so Edmund could cut himself loose. She was dying to risk a glance at Edmund.
“Think of it this way,” began the professor. “The temporal continuum resists change, much like a large mass—a train, say—resists a change in motion. As it turns out, temporal inertia is far greater than has been thus far proposed—proposed prior to my work, that is. In fact, I may have proven that permanent changes to past time lines are impossible. I call this Khan’s first law of temporal inertia.”
“Of course you do,” Halley muttered under her breath. The professor was too caught up in his explanation to overhear her.
“Inertia, of course, is resistance to change, with ‘temporal inertia’ describing space–time’s resistance to change. Thus far, I have only been able to rupture the temporal continuum in small ‘pockets’ for an allotted, specified period. When the temporal pocket closes, and I return to my own time, all objects that were there in that other time necessarily remain in that time due to temporal inertia. However, all objects within my temporal pocket—including a sort of envelope surrounding me and what touches my skin—necessarily return to my own time; once again, temporal inertia is at work preventing the rupture of space–time. This results in what you might call a duplication of objects. This duplication is the necessary result of space–time healing itself.”
Halley sat dumbfounded. When she spoke at last, she said, “You’re kidding.”
The professor’s smile disappeared. “I never joke about my work.”
Frowning, Halley tried to remember something from her Physics for Poets class. “Isn’t there some law of conservation of mass or energy or . . . something?”
“America’s public education at work,” the professor commented dryly. Then, seeming to gather himself, he continued, “The law of conservation of mass and energy expresses what is true in an isolated space–time region. This law of conservation has proved inadequate to describe the space–time continuum, hence my law of temporal inertia, which describes what I have observed through the use of the singularity device.”
“So the machine is like a . . . photocopier?”
The professor frowned. “The crudeness of your explanation is appalling, but if we make allowances for your limited knowledge and comprehension, then yes, we might say the singularity device causes space–time to function in a manner similar to a photocopier.”
“You’re saying you could steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London, but the crown jewels would still . . . be there? In history?”
“And in the present, yes. They are conserved in their original position, but because I hold them as I journey through space–time, they are conserved with me as well.”
Halley shook her head. “Unbelievable.”
“As I said, I am no thief.”
Halley glowered at him. “But you have no problem poking space–time with a stick to see if it can fix itself.”
Khan’s face remained unperturbed.
Halley thought of something else. “Are things, er, duplicate things, left behind, too? In the past?”
“No,” said the professor, with the air of someone speaking to an ignoramus. “As I’ve already indicated, anything that travels within the protected temporal pocket created by the singularity device is duly returned where it belongs.”
The computer on the podium made three shrill peeps.
“Ah,” said the professor. “It is, as they say, showtime at last.”
He reached for one of his Tasers and loaded a new cartridge.
“What are you doing?” Halley asked with rising panic.
“I’m tidying up the mess you made,” murmured the professor. He seemed to be having trouble loading the Taser cartridge. Crossing to his desk, he picked up a sheet of instructions, examining them carefully. Then, with an audible, “Ah,” he turned the cartridge upside down and reloaded it.
Swallowing, she noted that there were another half-dozen cartridges stacked neatly on the professor’s desk. “Are you planning to kill us with the Tasers?”
Khan p
ursed his lips in distaste. “No.”
But when Halley prodded him for more, he ignored her, suddenly preoccupied with the time machine.
This preoccupation provided Edmund, who had opened his eyes and was looking earnestly at Halley, with the opportunity to do two things. First, Edmund passed her his knife, indicating with a glance she should start cutting herself free. Then, weaponless, he rose and charged the professor.
64
• EDMUND •
Edmund delivered a solid blow to Khan’s midsection, smiling to himself when he heard Khan struggling to draw breath. Next, Edmund had to reach the pistol-like weapons. The professor was in no position to pursue him, and he dashed to the far side of Khan’s desk, sweeping the boxes of additional weaponry away.
Next, Edmund grasped the pistol itself and attempted to understand the controls. The professor was still having difficulty breathing. Edmund did not consider this likely to be feigned, considering the strength of the blow he had delivered to Khan’s belly.
Unfortunately, Edmund had cause to regret this appraisal when Khan hurled himself forward, holding a writing instrument in his hand.
Edmund felt a moment’s confusion, wondering just what his assailant meant to accomplish with the small pen, but his confusion came to an unhappy end when the professor succeeded in driving the pointed end of the instrument into the base of Edmund’s neck. Now gasping in pain himself, Edmund raised the professor’s pistol-like weapon, to use it as a bludgeon if nothing else, but the professor brutally tugged the writing instrument from Edmund’s neck before raising his hand as if to strike again.
Edmund saw Halley’s eyes fly wide, heard her cry out a warning, but it was too late. The expected second blow with the pen never came—it had been a feint. The professor turned the pistol in Edmund’s grasp and fired a shot.
Edmund fell to the ground, shaking once more, unable to think or see or speak.
65
• HALLEY •
Halley screamed.
The professor was already dragging Edmund’s inert and bleeding body toward the machine and then up onto its platform.
A Thief in Time (Thief in Time Series Book 1) Page 22
