by Jason Ayres
There was a large, middle-aged woman, surrounded by shopping bags, taking up the first two seats on the kerbside of the bus. “What’s the hold-up?” she enquired.
“This bloody machine’s asking for euros. What’s happened to the good old British pound?”
“Where have you been hiding, son?” replied the woman. “We went over to the euro about fifteen years ago.”
“I’ve not been hiding anywhere,” shouted Dan in frustration. “I’ve travelled here from the past.” He could feel his anger building. Political opinions aside, he was now acutely aware that he was now not only destitute, but penniless as well. The notes he was carrying with the image of King Charles on the front were now worthless.
“Please pay 15 euros or exit the vehicle,” stated the irritating robotic voice.
“If you haven’t got any money, you’ll have to get off,” said the woman, fussily. This enraged Dan who hated being told what to do.
“Shut up!” he shouted, and he punched the touch screen in a rage. An alarm began sounding. He looked down the bus. Apart from the woman, the only other passengers were a group of teenagers sitting right at the back. They were messing about making a fair amount of noise themselves, and were oblivious to what was going on at the front.
This was no good. He couldn’t do much without money. What was it that his grandfather used to say to him? May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb? Suddenly that seemed very appropriate. The woman had annoyed him sufficiently for him to want to get his own back. He got right in her face and shouted out “Give me your purse – now.”
Petrified by the sudden turn of events, the woman complied. As she was reaching into her bag to retrieve her purse, one of the carrier bags of shopping fell open and out fell a four pack of a brand of chocolate that Dan recognised immediately.
The familiar-looking confectionery was the most reassuring thing Dan had seen since he had arrived in this crazy future world. At least some things were still sacred.
“Good girl,” he said, grabbing the purse. “And I’m taking these as well,” he added, grabbing the chocolate. “I haven’t had any lunch yet.” Then, leaving the woman screaming hysterically as the teenagers at last looked up to see what was going on, he ran out through the doors and back along the pavement.
His plan to get out of town had gone horribly wrong. He was in serious need of a plan B, but how could he plan anything in a world where the rules had changed and nothing could be taken for granted? He was a man out of time, and a man who seriously needed to find some sanctuary.
The police would be on to him again now as soon as the woman phoned them, which she was bound to do. He had to get away from the road; he would be way too conspicuous there. The advantage that the change of clothes had given him had also now been negated. The yellow and black team shirt of Wasps RFC was extremely conspicuous.
He was close to the outskirts of town, and he remembered that there used to be a small park just off the edge of the road he was walking along. He desperately hoped it would still be there and it hadn’t been turned into a spaceport or something. Thankfully, it was still there, complete with the same old rusting swings and slide.
The sky had been clouding over for some time and, as he walked through the gap in the wall that led into the park, it started to drizzle. There were only two people there, a man in his early thirties pushing a small boy on a swing. As the rain began to fall, the man picked up the child and put him into his pushchair, pulling a rain cover over it.
The man quickly hurried away, as the rain began to pour down, Dan walked across to the slide. Beneath the steps there was a small hut for children to play in. Grateful to get out of the rain, Dan squeezed his ample frame through the narrow doorway and sat down.
Safe for the time being at least, he ripped open the pack of chocolate and devoured the lot in about two minutes flat. Chocolate had never tasted so wonderful. Casting the empty wrappers onto the floor of the hut, he got on to the more serious business of opening the woman’s purse. He was pleased to see that there were over 300 euros inside.
That seemed a lot for her to be carrying around, not that he was complaining. He wasn’t sure how much 300 euros was worth now, but it was probably not as much as it was in his time, allowing for inflation. He knew that the bus ride to Oxford was 15 euros, so it ought to be enough to at least get him through the next day or so.
He thought back to the survival course he had gone on with some of the other members of the Fascist political party he had once belonged to. It had stood him in good stead when the Black Winter had descended, and as far as he was concerned, he was in another survival situation now.
The first thing he had to do was meet his basic needs, the most pressing of which was shelter. He may have been temporarily out of the rain, but he couldn’t live in the hut underneath the slide. He needed to find somewhere for the night and he needed to find it fast. He also desperately needed a drink and to go to the toilet.
The second of those, he could deal with right now. With great difficulty, in the cramped confines of the children’s hut, he managed to pull out his member and urinate prolifically over the floor. He didn’t give a thought for the kids, but that was Dan all over.
Having relieved his bladder, he looked through the remaining contents of the woman’s purse. There was nothing further of use inside. Amusing himself by discarding it in the puddle he’d left on the floor, he waited for the rain to stop and then cautiously made his way out of the hut. It was time to think about his next move.
He didn’t want to risk going near the main roads any more than was absolutely necessary. Striking out across the field, away from the direction of the bus stop from where he’d come, he headed for the edge of town, where there used to be a travel tavern.
There weren’t many more anonymous places than those. If he could get in, and they let him pay cash, he should be safe for the night. At least he knew they still used money in the future, as the bus had given him the option to pay by cash. If the cashless society that had so often been talked about in his day had become a reality, he would have been seriously stuck.
Just as he reached the edge of the field, he stepped in a dog turd. It just about summed up his day.
Chapter Nine
September 2049
Alice was feeding Maisie, the time-travelling mouse, in the lab, when Josh triumphantly flung open the door and announced: “I’m back.”
She turned, the late afternoon sunshine pouring through the gaps in the window blinds onto the various pieces of high-tech machinery scattered around the room. “How did it go?” she asked.
“Is that all?” asked Josh. “Don’t I even get a hug? I haven’t seen you for nearly two weeks!”
“You only left this morning,” replied Alice.
“Ah, that’s true,” replied Josh. “Perhaps I should have set the timer to bring me back later, to reflect the actual amount of time I was gone. I don’t want to end up looking old before my time.”
“Speaking of looking old,” replied Alice. “I don’t feel too great myself today, bearing in mind you’ve been away in France playing with my younger self.”
“Hey, I didn’t do anything with her,” protested Josh.
“Only because I didn’t let you, if I remember rightly. I’m pretty sure you tried it on at the time – as if I’d even have considered it with the state my leg was in.”
“I think your memory must be playing tricks on you,” replied Josh, sheepishly. “It was twenty years ago, after all. Anyway, even if I did, I’m pretty sure cheating on you with yourself doesn’t count as cheating – does it?”
“That’s a whole can of worms I don’t want to get into,” said Alice, smiling. “Just give me a kiss now to show me you still fancy this version of the old bird.”
They hugged, and kissed deeply. After a few seconds, Josh pulled away and remarked “Do you fancy going for a drink? I could certainly do with one; it’s been quite an eventful couple of weeks.”
; “Sure, why not?” she replied.
They walked out of the college, through the town centre and into the narrow streets, steeped in history, that ran behind Oxford’s main High Street.
They stopped when they reached The Bear, a pub which could date its origins back to medieval times. Sitting outside on the wooden tables enjoying a couple of pints of traditional real ale, Alice was keen to hear more about Josh’s adventure back in time.
“So, fill me in on the details,” replied Alice. “Apart from the bits I already know, of course.”
“Well, it was all pretty straightforward, really. After I rang you from France, I…”
Alice interrupted him. “You didn’t ring me from France.”
“I did. It was the night I got there,” replied Josh. “Oh hang on, that will be tonight, won’t it? It hasn’t happened yet. This is going to get confusing. Hey, that means my other me is on my way to France right now. Maybe I should ring and warn myself not to have that dodgy tuna sandwich on the ferry. I’m sure that’s what made me sick.”
“Perhaps you’re just a poor sailor,” remarked Alice. “Do you remember you ringing yourself?”
“No. That’s interesting. Let’s give it a go and see if it works. Call it an experiment into whether we can alter history.”
He pulled out his phone and dialled his own number. “It’s engaged,” he said.
“Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?” she said. “You’re trying to ring your own number. Let me try.” She pulled out her phone and dialled Josh’s number. Immediately his phone, the one he had with him, rang.
“Well, you’ve got through alright, but to this one, not the identical one on its way to France. We’re not getting very far with this experiment, are we?”
“I think you were right, you should have set the tachyometer to bring you back in line with the amount of time you were away,” said Alice. “We won’t know if you’re coming or going if you carry on like this.”
“Fair enough,” said Josh. “That’s a new rule then – make sure time passes while I’m away travelling in time at the same rate it does here. We are going to have to start writing down all these rules. Hey, I could end up being as famous as Isaac Newton one day. Imagine it – Gardner’s First Law of Time Travel.”
“I think you’re getting a bit carried away with all this again,” said Alice. “Come on: let’s get back to the story. Tell me what happened when you got to France. You can leave out the gory details about being sick; I don’t need to know all of that.”
“OK. Well, I got as close as I could to where the helicopter place was in 2029. Then I found a nice, open space out in the countryside and made the jump. I set it to three days before I picked you up in the helicopter.”
“Were the money and the cards OK?” asked Alice.
“Yes, that was good thinking on your part,” remarked Josh, remembering how they’d researched the currency and discovered that new euro notes had been issued during the two decades that had passed.
Getting hold of the out-of-date notes hadn’t been too difficult. Forging a twenty-year-old credit card had been a little trickier, but there were some very resourceful students at the university who had helped with that one. Josh had passed it off as part of a project.
“So what did you do with your three days?” asked Alice.
“Well, the first night, I stopped at a little village close to the helicopter place and found a guest house. It’s a lovely, traditional and unspoilt area so I wandered into the village, found a bar, had something to eat and enjoyed some red wine.”
“No wonder you went three days early,” said Alice, “You saw an opportunity for a bit of a jolly. What then, soaking up the French sunshine?”
“There wasn’t a lot of that. This was the start of the Black Winter, remember. It was bloody freezing, but the snow had not arrived in France at that point, thankfully. So, the next day I went off to the helicopter place to hire the chopper. That all went reasonably smoothly, apart from one worrying moment when I showed them my pilot’s licence and realised in horror that it read: ‘Issued in 2048’. Fortunately they either didn’t notice or assumed it was a misprint.”
“I can’t believe we overlooked such a basic error, not after we thought we’d covered every possible detail,” said Alice.
“Well, luckily we got away with it. Perhaps we were destined to. After that everything was pretty straightforward up until the point where I landed on the beach and picked you up.”
“Agreed, like we’ve always said, we knew you’d get there because it had already happened,” said Alice.
“We still don’t know that for certain, do we? Maybe we will never know.”
“Well, when you tried to ring yourself just now to try and warn yourself about the tuna sandwich, you couldn’t get through. Doesn’t that prove things are predestined?” asked Alice.
“I’m still not convinced that everything is set in stone,” said Josh. “I need to think of a way to properly test this out.”
“Well, the important thing for now is that everything seems to have happened as we remembered, and you’re back safe and sound. We couldn’t ask for any more than that.”
“We certainly couldn’t,” agreed Josh, draining his pint. “I’ve certainly missed English beer while I’ve been in France, that’s for sure, not to mention the sunny weather. Fancy another?”
“Absolutely,” replied Alice.
When Josh got back with the drinks he was full of enthusiasm. “As soon as possible, I want to get started on my next project,” he said.
“Are we talking about going back to investigate Lauren’s death?” asked Alice.
“Not just yet,” replied Josh. “There’s something else I want to check out first. Do you remember I told you about that strange encounter I had with that man at Cheltenham races years ago – the one who tipped me all the winners?”
“Yeah, I do – the man who claimed to be living his life backwards? I thought he sounded like a bit of a weirdo.”
“Well, maybe he did,” remarked Josh. “But if I went around telling people that I just travelled back in time to twenty years ago they would probably say the same thing about me.”
“That’s a fair point,” conceded Alice. “So what are you planning this time?”
“Well, he gave me some details about himself, and also about what happened to him in his own future. He claimed that he was going to die from cancer in 2025 and that his wife had been killed in a traffic accident in 2017. Then he left me his address. So, a few weeks ago, I went to look him up.”
“How come you didn’t tell me any of this before?” asked Alice.
“I was concentrating most of my efforts on the trip to France and wanted to get that out of the way first,” replied Josh. “But one day, I fancied taking a break from that and doing something different. So off I went to North Oxford to check him out. And it turns out that both he and his wife are still alive and living in the same house. They are both quite elderly now, but still going strong.”
“So he was lying about the car crash and the cancer, then?” asked Alice.
“Not necessarily. If what he was saying was true originally, maybe he has managed to change history and we’ve all become a part of it.”
“We’re back to that again. I have to say it all sounds a bit far-fetched to me,” replied Alice. “Even by our standards.”
“Maybe it is,” said Josh. “But there’s an easy way to find out.” He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his wallet. He popped open the button on a small pocket that Alice had never seen him open before and pulled out a faded piece of paper.
Looking more closely, Alice could see that it looked like some sort of old-fashioned betting slip. It was the sort she remembered seeing when she was a kid. Her grandfather used to leave them on the arm of the sofa when he was watching the races on Saturday afternoons.
“What’s that?” she enquired. “Are you using your newfound gambling skills to defraud the bookies now?”
“Hardly,” he replied. “Though perhaps we should try that sometime. This did in fact come from a betting shop, though. It was from the betting shop on Cheltenham Racecourse where I met him, nearly thirty years ago. Take a look.”
Josh passed the note across to Alice and she read:
Thomas Scott. 6th August 1990, 5pm, Radcliffe Camera.
“Mysterious, huh?” asked Josh. “He said that if I ever discovered the secret of time travel, I should travel back in time to that specific place and time. He would be travelling back in time through his own life, one day at a time, until that day when he’d make sure that he was there at that time. He said he was trying to make some changes to his life and he wanted me to find out if they had made a difference. In particular, he wanted to know if he’d avoided dying of cancer. If it’s all true, this is our best chance of finding out if the future can be changed. What I’ve seen so far certainly seems to suggest it can, but I won’t know for sure unless I go back.”
“So, that’s what you’re planning to do then. Go back and tell him?”
“Oh, I’m going to do much more than that,” replied Josh. “I’ve got two working tachyometers. I am going to take him to see his own future.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” asked Alice. “You’ve barely got the hang of travelling through time yourself, and now you’re bringing passengers on-board?”
“Trust me,” grinned Josh. “I owe this guy. If it hadn’t been for the inspiration he gave me all those years ago, I might never have done any of this in the first place.”
“Next stop 1990, then,” said Alice.
“Absolutely,” replied Josh.
Chapter Ten
August 1990
Three weeks later, Josh was standing close to the river bank on one side of Christ Church Meadow. It was after dark and there were few people around.
This was his favourite place for time-travelling in Oxford. It was a timeless location that had barely changed in decades. He could guarantee that wherever he was travelling in time, forwards or backwards, he would arrive safely in the same spot.
