by Ross Welford
She marches along, arms folded in front of her, practically steaming with indignation.
“Anything else?” she says, sniffily.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. Some moonlit earth from the location where the deceased, er … deceased.” Can you tell I’m trying to make it sound sort of magicky? It’s the kind of thing they have in the books that Carly reads. That, and spelling ‘magic’ with a ‘k’.
“So, like, how are you going to do that?”
“I’m going back to Culvercot tonight. By taxi.” Now this is risky, but I figure that I have sucked Carly in far enough that she isn’t going to tell anyone now.
All she says is: “Wow! Frea-key!”
So it’s half-past midnight and I’m in a taxi going to Culvercot. In my hand is a carrier bag containing Alan Shearer, the hamster. Well, he’s in a little stiff cardboard box that Steve’s smartphone came in, with holes punched in the ends with a pencil so that he can breathe.
He’s going to go in the time machine first. My hamster, as it were, will be my guinea pig.
Grandpa Byron’s moped is still chained to the drainpipe and he has not yet got round to hanging a spare key to the padlock on the kitchen hook, as I discovered after school when I came up with the new plan. Besides, I was feeling pretty nervous about risking a second moped ride. What if the same cops were on duty?
In my moneybox there was eight pounds in change I’d been saving – plus the forty I got from Grandpa Byron for my birthday.
My mobile phone is supposed to be strictly for emergencies only. This, I figure, counts as an emergency, so I went online and booked a cab from a taxi company in Ashington, which is the next small town up the coast, as I didn’t want to use the local company. I arranged a pick-up at the corner of our street, and I felt my stomach flutter when I saw the yellow light approaching and I stepped out from the shadows to flag it down. The driver’s window came down and he looked me up and down.
“You book a taxi, son?”
“Yeah,” I said as casually as I could and reached for the rear-door handle.
“Ha’d on, ha’d on,” he said and I heard the thunk of the central locking system. “You’re a bit young to be tekkin’ cabs in the middle of the night, aren’t ya?”
I was ready for this. Carly and I had gone over just about every query and hitch we could think of.
“I’m fifteen,” I lied. “And besides, my money’s as good as anyone else’s. And there’s a tip.” I held up a twenty-pound note. The quoted fare had only been fifteen pounds. Greed got the better of him.
“Gan on, then. Gerrin quick,” he said. The door unlocked.
The next bit we’d got planned too. I dial Carly’s mobile number from inside the cab and she picks it up straight away. I hold my phone so that the driver can hear Carly’s voice.
“Hi, Mum, it’s me, Freddie … yeah, I’m in the cab now … no, don’t, I’ll let myself in by the garage … yeah … uh-huh … only an hour? … well, if you say so, Mum … I’ll ask if he can take me back.”
And this is where I speak to the driver, who has been watching me in the rear-view mirror. “Can you take me back in an hour? I’m going to my dad’s but my mum wants me home soon.”
Now, I’m figuring that two easy twenty-pound fares an hour apart is worth more to him than pootling around trying to pick up little fares in Culvercot past midnight, and that he’ll wait. It’s a gamble, though, and I haven’t really worked out what to do if he says no.
“I’ll wait for ’alf an hour but norran hour,” he says.
“He says half an hour, Mum,” I say to Carly, and then to the driver, “She says OK.”
He gives me another long look in the mirror, but says nothing. And even if he had, I was prepared with a story about my mum and dad being separated and my dad living with Aunty Ellie and this being the only time I could visit him, or … something. To be honest, Carly and I didn’t quite put the finishing touches to this story, which we were hoping – correctly as it turned out – we wouldn’t have to use.
Twenty minutes later, we’re outside 40 Chesterton Road. I’ve handed over the money as we turn into the street, as I want to be out quickly. I thought about asking him to drop me at the end of the street, but it seemed suspicious, and besides – a cab driver with a passenger my age is going to make sure the kid gets safely indoors.
So here I am: the taxi is in the middle of the road, with its engine idling as I nip up the driveway towards the garage doors. The taxi door had shut with a louder noise than I had hoped, and just as I’m squeezing through the gap in the garage doors, it happens: the light goes on in the front bedroom and my stomach lurches.
By poking my head round the gap in the doors, I can see the taxi, and the curtains parting in the bay window above.
It gets worse. The taxi driver gives a wave to whoever is peering through the curtains, points at the garage and gives a thumbs-up. It’s easy to guess what he means: “I’ve delivered your son safely, and he’s comin’ in now.”
The taxi pulls away to the parking spot down the road where he said he’d meet me in half an hour. The light’s still on upstairs and the curtain flicks open in the side bay window as the lady looks to where the taxi driver was pointing. As the shaft of light hits the garage door, I pull my head back. Has she seen me? Will she notice that the garage door is ajar?
So I’m waiting until I get the courage to move again when I hear the key in the lock of the door that connects the garage to the house. The door bursts open, the garage light goes on and whoever opened it sees … nothing. For by this stage, I’ve snuck back out of the garage, and I’m crouching down between the Skoda and the hedge. If they decide to look outside I’m done for.
A woman’s voice comes from inside the house.
“You’ve got to sort that garage door out, Graham!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and Graham pulls the door shut again.
I hear the key in the connecting door and a minute later the light upstairs goes out. I decide to wait at least ten minutes before going in again, so now I’m going to have to work double quick.
It’s amazing what you can do under pressure, when you don’t have time to dither.
I’m quick and I’m quiet, getting into the old cellar – under the old planks, through the circular metal submarine door, down the stairs, and I’m sitting at the desk, looking at the wall and taking deep breaths, trying to stop my heart from racing, but I can’t – it’s just going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa in my chest. I’ve still got Alan Shearer in the box inside the bag, and I take him out and let him have a little run around on the desk: he seems fine.
So there’s the tin tub with the old MacBook laptop computer in it. There’s a cable coming out of the back of the laptop leading to a black metal box about the size of a book, and coming out of that are two cords with the strange hand grips – more like huge metal bolts, really – on the end.
There is a metal clasp on the side of the black box and I flip it open and lift the lid. Inside is a circuit board like I once had in a home electronics kit and two tiny gold-coloured rectangles. A long cable is attached to the circuit board and at the end of the cable is a bare wire with a blob of Blu-tack attached to it.
It all looks as though a six-year-old has made it.
My hands are trembling as I plug in the laptop to a wall socket and there’s a slight hum and a delay of a minute or two as it runs through its start-up programs, and then the screen comes to life, and the desktop picture appears of Dr Who and his Tardis, only not the guy who’s Dr Who at the moment but the one from a few years ago whose name I can’t remember because I’ve never really been into Dr Who.
And there’s one folder on the screen desktop, just the one, a little blue square labelled ‘Al’. With my hand on the touchpad I click on the folder. There are two sub folders inside: one labelled ‘map’, and another labelled ‘Al’. I click on the ‘map’ one first: it’s like a simplified version of Google Earth with a grid laid over it and a box for e
ntering map coordinates. There’s a look about it that says “don’t mess”.
So I quickly close it before I can hit anything accidentally and open up the one marked ‘Al’ instead. There is a single document inside it, and a dialogue box appears, asking me for a password, with the question:
Name a well-known homemade go-kart
I smile and type in The Lean Mean Green Machine, and the document opens.
Hello Al and welcome to your Time Machine.
I know it doesn’t look like much but what were you expecting – a spaceship?
(Well – yeah, sort of.)
Now that you’ve come this far, I expect you have a few questions.
That’s one way of putting it.
Have I tried it? Answer: Yes, and that is why you are here now.
I am writing this on May 14th, 2010. You had your eighth birthday two days ago, and we went bowling – you, me, your mum and Campbell from your class. Is he still your friend?
(No. I was never all that keen on Campbell Macross, to be honest, but he formed part of mum’s ongoing ‘Al Needs Friends’ campaign. He’d been bowling loads, and insisted that we didn’t use the rails at the sides of the lanes. Consequently all my bowls ended up in the gutter and he won every game and I had to pretend that I didn’t mind. Anyway …)
Yesterday, I experimented with my time device for the first time. The first thing I did was to place a clock in the zinc tub, attached to the wires. I set the program on the laptop for one hour in the future and pressed ‘enter’.
Everything – the zinc tub, the laptop, the clock, melted away before my eyes like a magic trick.
And then I waited an hour.
Exactly on time, it reappeared.
I filmed it on my phone. Have a look.
There was a break in the text and a little embedded QuickTime icon. I click on it.
And there’s Dad. He’s sitting in the same chair I’m in now, and his phone is propped up on the desk filming him. It starts the same way all these selfie films start, with the person being filmed moving away from the device as they’ve just pressed ‘record’.
I give a small gasp, and then stare at the box on screen. “Hi, Al,” he says. He gives a little wave and smiles his crooked smile. “Check this out.” His hand moves forward and picks up the phone and the picture swings around towards the zinc tub, losing focus for a second or two, then sharpening up on the clock in the bottom of the tub.
“Look at the time,” says Dad. It’s an analogue clock, and the hands point to quarter past ten. “Now watch.” His hand comes into shot and presses ‘enter’ on the laptop. I can’t really see what happens on the screen because it’s flickering the way computer screens do on video film, but then the picture zooms out as my dad stands up and moves a little bit further away from the desk, and then it happens – the tub and everything in it just melts away in about a second. It really is like watching a special effect.
Dad turns the camera round to face him and his head fills the little screen. He’s grinning like mad. “Crazy, eh? Now I’m going to wait an hour.”
The picture cuts suddenly to Dad in the desk chair again.
“OK, it’s been fifty-nine minutes and forty-five seconds,” he says. “Watch what happens now,” and he focuses again on the desk. Out of vision his voice counts down: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one …” And just as the zinc tub and its contents had dematerialised, so they reappear on the desk. Dad goes forward with the camera to show the clock face, which still reads quarter past ten.
That’s the end of the QuickTime clip, and I immediately replay it. After the third time, I close it down and discover that I’m breathing really fast, whether from the shock of seeing my dad and hearing him talk to me, or – apparently – seeing time travel in action (well, I can’t be sure).
I read on.
Obviously, I wanted to do it again, so I repeated the whole process, except this time … it didn’t work.
I tried again and again to send that clock one hour into the future, and again and again I failed. Just nothing happened.
After about the third or fourth go, I changed the coordinates on the laptop to TWO hours into the future. And then I waited, just as before. This time it worked. I then repeated the experiment a few more times, each time with the same result: I couldn’t send the clock twice to the same ‘time’.
My conclusion is quite logical when you think about it, but it has pretty profound implications for what I am about to ask you to do.
An object (or person) may occupy the same dimension of spacetime ONLY ONCE.
Of course this makes perfect sense. Otherwise, there may be two, three or any number of identical people or objects occupying the same space and time.
There would be universal, cosmological chaos.
Think about it: you could (theoretically) time travel (say) Big Ben to its existing location one year ago. But where is it going to go? The space occupied by Big Ben is already occupied by Big Ben!
The laws of spacetime – even though we may not yet fully understand them – seem to be beautifully arranged to prevent such chaos.
But it means you may only travel to any particular location in time and space ONCE.
But would it work with a human? There was only one way to find out, Al. I put the zinc tub on the floor and stepped into it. I set the program for an hour ahead and pressed ‘enter’.
Now I’m writing this like it was the most normal thing in the world. It wasn’t. I was conducting a massive and dangerous experiment and I was very, very scared indeed. But this was the culmination of six years’ secret work. I had to know.
And what happened when I pressed ‘enter’? Nothing.
I checked the numbers on the program and tried again. Still nothing. Warily, I reset the program for two hours ahead instead of one. Nothing again. A day ahead? Nope.
Checking and rechecking, I was about to give up when I tried one more time, this time programming the time coordinates for 200 hours into the future – eight days more or less.
And it worked.
I was paying no attention to the real time – the time on my watch. My dad’s words had me spellbound and I read on, transfixed.
It doesn’t hurt, Al. You don’t feel anything, really, though your vision blurs a little.
In fact, I wasn’t even certain that it had happened at all, until I stepped out of the tub and checked the date on my phone: eight days had passed.
I wanted to see more – I wanted more proof. So I came out of the cellar and headed into the house.
I really had no idea what to expect, but in my most vivid imaginings I did not anticipate that I had died.
It was early evening when I came from the garage into the kitchen. I heard voices in the living room – your mum, and a man’s voice I didn’t recognise. Something made me hold back on my urge to rush through and tell your mum, “Hi – I’m from the past!”
I was also very scared of bumping into myself. My future self. I wasn’t aware at that stage that such a thing was not possible – but I’ll get to that.
The Whitley Bay Advertiser was on the kitchen table, and I wanted to double-check the date. That’s when I saw it. In that moment, everything changed.
The headline on the open page: “Local Man’s Tragic Sudden Death: ‘Walking time bomb’ says Coroner”.
The newspaper was open at the page where there was a picture of my dad, one I hadn’t seen before. He looked nice. He had a tie on.
That hit me pretty hard, I can tell you, Al. Not many people get to read their own death notices.
I was in a bit of a daze when I wandered through to where the voices were.
Your mum was talking to Dennis Harrison, the funeral director. I backed out of the room, and I don’t think she saw me.
“No, Dad: she did,” I said out loud to no one, and the sound of my voice made me jump.
I kind of panicked. I grabbed the newspaper from the kitchen table, hurried back to
the cellar, and reprogrammed the laptop to return me to where – and when – I had begun – that is, eight days ago.
And then I sat, in the seat you’re in now, in a stunned stupor. I wanted to know more about my death, and – obviously – if it was preventable.
You’ll remember that occasionally I suffered excruciating headaches? I just thought they were normal: everyone had headaches now and then, right? I had no way of comparing mine with anyone else’s, no way of knowing that mine were a symptom of something much worse. I would take painkillers, and I once consulted my doctor after a particularly bad one that had lasted a couple of days, and left me weak and exhausted. But he just prescribed some extra-strength painkillers, which I put in the bathroom cabinet because the pain had gone by then.
That piece of metal in my brain has been moving since it first got there – on August 1st, 1984, the day I came off The Lean Mean Green Machine and smashed my face up. Do you remember the story I told about the spike that went up my nose, which someone pulled out? A small piece was left in, and that’s the piece that will kill me in few days’ time.
This is where you come in, Al.
I need you to use my device – follow the instructions incredibly carefully – and prevent me from having that accident.
Remove the brick from the path – the one that caused the accident.
Remove the mangled-up metal trolley from the side of the path.
And Al – come back safely. Remember to keep the laptop with you at all times.
Whatever is with you in the zinc tub will travel with you to the spacetime dimension that is your destination.
Without it you are, to put it bluntly, stuffed.
I’ll bet you have some questions. Let me try to anticipate them.
Why me, why now? As I discovered when I tried to travel an hour into the future, you cannot be in the same place as yourself. This we will call Dad’s Law of Doppelgangers. A doppelganger is a double of yourself. They have existed in stories forever, but for a reason I have yet to discover – but which we might, when we continue my research – the laws of the universe prevent you from encountering your own self. So you cannot go forward in time, or back, to meet yourself.
