by Lance Parkin
Radford became aware that Lechasseur was seeing him, slumped on the pavement, with Emily asking him a question, and he broke off contact.
Lechasseur smiled up at him. ‘Emily’s three doors down from here. You tried to kiss her, but she fought you off.’
He should have anticipated this. Radford scowled at himself.
‘I’ve never been to 1949,’ he said instead. ‘Yet there I am.’
‘I can’t help you,’ Lechasseur said. ‘I have no idea how we got here.’
Radford found himself grinning. ‘You’ve already told me quite enough.’
‘You don’t know, either,’ Lechasseur said. ‘I’d have seen it.’
‘I’ve only just worked it out,’ Radford told him. ‘But I’m sure I have it, now. We’ll find out, soon enough.’
Lechasseur looked confused.
‘I don’t need you any more. I’ll let Ned and his son ask you a few questions. Remember Ned? You nearly broke his back just now? I’m sure they’ll remind you.’
7
Radford sat behind his desk. Two of the boffins he’d called over from the airstrip were thinking the problem over.
‘So, this Emily has some sort of ability? And this isn’t the same as the trick you and the Negro can do?’ This was the fat one, the radio expert.
‘No. Her mind is different.’
‘Different?’ The thin one was more practical. He designed new aircraft, or at least he adapted the existing ones.
‘Yes, just talking to her – she’s highly intelligent, she learns fast. But I think there’s something more important than that. She’s got an instinct. Lechasseur was confused when he arrived. I think he barely believes it now. He copes, he adapts, but it’s bloody-mindedness. He doesn’t understand.’
‘This Blandish woman does?’
Radford nodded.
‘She can will herself to different time periods?’
‘Not on her own. There needs to be two of us.’
The fat one paused to consider this. ‘One of you is the machine, the other is the battery?’
The thin one shook his head. ‘No... it’s more that he’s the navigator, she’s the pilot. I don’t understand Radford’s abilities. None of us does. But it’s like that. No point flying if you don’t know where you’re going. He can navigate.’
‘I already have,’ Radford confirmed.
The two men looked up at him.
‘You’ve time travelled?’
‘Five minutes and fifty metres.’
‘How?’
Radford grinned at them. ‘I touched her, and we both thought about being somewhere else. And we were there. And that’s how he and she ended up here. They saw me and she touched him, and one of them said they’d like to know where I came from. Then they were here. They were a hundred metres out, at most. But Lechasseur could trace me across time and space. And I will travel in time again. They’ve seen me. It’s already happened.’
The fat man held up his hand. ‘Wait, wait. What do you mean it’s happened?’
Radford explained what he’d seen.
‘Pity you have to kill her,’ the fat one said.
‘It’s what happens,’ Radford said, without regret.
The thin man was smiling to himself.
‘Share,’ Radford warned.
The thin man looked nervous for a moment, then collected his thoughts. ‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ he said. ‘It’s a loop in time. You could kill this Emily, then find the other one, the one who’s already in 1949. Then bring her here, a moment before you left. Then you’d have two Emilys.’
Radford held up his hand. ‘Wait...’
The fat man was warming to the theme. ‘This is good.’
‘How can there be two Emilys?’
‘You wouldn’t need to take the original one back any more.’
Radford thought about this. ‘Wait...’
‘Think of it this way. When you go back to 1949, what happens?’
‘I don’t know yet. I arrive. It seems I kill Emily, then I don’t know what else I’m meant to do.’
‘Lechasseur sneaks up behind you and knocks you out. At the very least – he may even have killed you.’
‘Yes.’
‘But don’t you see? He can’t. Not now. Even if you’re happy to play your part in history and meekly let him hit you, you can’t possibly be surprised when that happens.’
Radford had seen what Lechasseur had seen. Surprise. ‘It must be more complicated than that. If I don’t take her back, how could I have gone back to get the other one? There are other things – what if I went back and killed my father before he met my mother? I wouldn’t be born, so I wouldn’t be able to go back.’
‘Doublethink,’ the fat man said, simply. And that was that. Of course it was. Simply hold the two ideas in your head simultaneously.
‘Doublegirl,’ the thin man laughed. ‘Perhaps if you were to have children, they would combine the two talents.’
The fat one nodded. ‘Certainly worth a try.’
Radford wasn’t prepared to move on to that just yet, attractive though the proposition was.
‘We can rewrite the past,’ Radford said.
‘We can rewrite any part of it we like,’ the fat man said. ‘Then, if we don’t like it, we can rewrite it again.’
Radford glanced down at the ashtray, and the fragments of charred newspaper.
‘Kill our enemies before they are a threat.’
‘Pass on information to forewarn our armies.’
‘Can you take anyone else with you?’ the thin man asked.
Radford shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Shame – you could have led a platoon anywhere in history.’
‘You can wear things,’ the fat man said, glancing at the mud-encrusted shoes bagged on Radford’s desk. ‘You could carry weapons.’
‘An atomic weapon,’ the thin man suggested.
‘You could deliver an atomic weapon anywhere on Earth, to any point in history.’
Radford gasped. ‘1949.’
The two men looked over the desk at him.
‘Have either of you gentlemen heard of Simon Brown? No, I thought not. Gentlemen... I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. In my dreams I see another world. No... that’s not quite true. I see this world, but with a different history. Always the same history. There’s no Party there.’
The two men made worried glances at the screen.
‘This is just your dream? What do you see?’
‘I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody’s looking for something.’
‘Pardon?’ the thin man asked finally.
‘Something from that other history. A song. The world is very different. Sometimes –’ and now it was Radford’s turn to look at the screen ‘– sometimes I wonder if that world is how it was meant to be. How it should be: the Apple Macintosh, the Olympics in Los Angeles, the –’
The two men were shuffling their feet.
‘We owe everything to the Party.’
‘A world without the Party is unthinkable.’ The fat man looked concerned saying that – to even have to voice something so self-evident was tantamount to treason. All red apples are red. It never needed iterating.
Radford nodded. ‘I agree. But I think we might need to convince history of this. Lechasseur and Emily were investigating Simon Brown. It was a critical time – a word in a different place, a slightly different decision, slightly different timing, and events would be so very different. This can’t be a coincidence. This is destiny – a black circle drawn around a moment, with an arrow pointing at it.’
‘Scheduled for revision.’
‘Exactly. We need to plan this carefully. We need to shut down that other version of history
entirely. At the moment... at the moment, there are two sets of events. We must eliminate one of them. He who controls the past commands the future. We have the power here to conquer the past.’
The two scientists looked at each other.
‘We already control the past...’
‘Not enough,’ Radford countered. ‘Not enough. We control history. But by this method, we control the events, not just the telling of them.’
‘There’s no practical difference.’
Radford shook his head. ‘There is.’ He paused, grinned crookedly, in a manner that disconcerted the two scientists. ‘There was,’ he corrected himself.
Emily was making a game of it.
The soup had been cold when it came in, and so it would be no more unpalatable in an hour. So she took her time. Emily glanced occasionally at her watch, and about forty minutes passed before the girl began to get a little uncomfortable. Emily smiled at her, pretended to be cheerful – a process that, itself, made her feel happier – and would occasionally say something upbeat. The girl said nothing at all, and seemed disconcerted.
Once every five minutes or so, Emily would take a spoonful or two of the soup.
The game continued for two hours. The girl was beginning to shift around a bit. Emily suspected she needed the lavatory. But it wasn’t difficult to see that the girl had been given very specific orders: serve Emily soup, watch her as she eats it, clear up when she finishes. She was obeying those instructions, unable to resist. It was rather sad, and reminded Emily of a fly batting against a window, following its urge to fly towards light, being caught out by the glass every time it clumped into it.
She’d almost finished the soup and, truth be told, she’d got bored of the game. The girl watched her still. Emily had come to hate her, with her bored expression and bovine eyes.
She dropped the bowl on the floor, and it broke into about a dozen pieces.
The girl’s instructions covered this and she was down on the floor, collecting the bits faster than Emily would have given her credit for.
Emily had already selected one of the larger shards and slipped it into the single pocket of her overalls.
‘Destiny,’ Amanda told Radford, who was unhappy with the answer.
‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ he told her. ‘You living here now, in London back in 1949. What are you really doing here?’
She smiled up at him. ‘It’s not a coincidence. It’s the way things are, the way they have to be. The real question for you isn’t what I’m doing here, it’s what I will do in London, in your future.’
‘The future?’
‘Your future,’ she corrected him.
Radford was flicking through her file. ‘You were never a Party member. You fled London just before the purges started. You’ve led a charmed life.’
‘I was told they were coming.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘A friend in the government? Simon Brown?’
‘He lost his job before then.’
‘So who tipped you off?’
Amanda smiled at him. ‘You did. Back in 1949.’ She reached into her overalls and handed Radford a faded envelope.
‘What’s this?’
‘Open it.’
Radford did so.
‘It’s a letter. You gave it to me in 1949.
‘It’s in my handwriting. It’s a mission briefing.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I never opened it. You told me to deliver it to you today.’
Radford watched her warily. ‘You remember me back in 1949?’
‘Yes. Like you said. It’s not a coincidence I am here.’
‘At first we thought you’d retreated here to organise resistance. But you never contacted anyone, you never associated with anyone.’
Amanda looked pained. ‘I was political once. It didn’t work out the way I planned.’ She hesitated. ‘No, that’s not true. We saw all this coming, you know. The revolution, the single party, the end of the class struggle. It was inevitable. The only question was precisely when and how, and if there was anything we could do to change the pace of that progress. We wished the revolution would come. Can you believe that? We wished the world would be like this.’
Radford wasn’t listening, he was reading the mission briefing.
Lechasseur sat alone, strapped to the chair.
He’d been alone for a long time. He had no idea what the time was – and knew from a long convalescence a few years before how futile it was to guess. In circumstances like this, you measured time by when meals were served, when curtains were drawn, faint noises from outside. This room was windowless, and soundproof. No-one had been to see him since Ned and his son had left. The leather straps holding him to the chair weren’t going anywhere, and – unlike the detectives in the movies – Lechasseur had lacked the foresight to conceal a knife on his person to hack them open.
He’d got a split lip, a black eye and (for the first time for a while) his old wounds were beginning to itch and ache. Ned had had no intention of killing Lechasseur, he had just wanted to hurt him. After only about three of four minutes he’d realised there was no sport in punching a man who was strapped down and couldn’t lift his hand, let alone put up a fight.
The pain didn’t bother Lechasseur. Not his own, anyway. Hands flat against the arms of the chair, he could see them all – every previous person who’d sat in this chair. Men and women of all ages. No children, but at least one lad who was barely an adult. There was only one type of pain, here. The beating, the cosh, with only the occasional stabbing pain from a cigarette butt or knife. The same pain, repeated, not a unique torture. Lechasseur was merely the latest in a long line. Only three people had died here, and two of them had been very old. Like background noise or a foul smell, he was soon used to the landscape of pain he found himself in, and could block it out with little effort.
What was worrying him was that his mind was playing tricks. He was seeing the other reality again. Light streamed through non-existent windows. A fat man behind a desk was lecturing a Yorkshireman in a flat cap about efficient farming methods. They couldn’t see the large, bloody, black man sitting within a few feet of them. Or if they could, they didn’t mention it.
He found himself wishing Amanda was here. He liked her, he’d decided. Her crime had been naivety, and the wish to be a bit daring. It had, admittedly, resulted in the ruthless elimination of every aspect of life worth living, but he knew that deep down, she was a link to the old world. If he got away from here – which he wouldn’t, he accepted – he’d make contact with her again.
Was Emily dead? The answer to that, of course, was that she was. He’d seen the body with his own eyes, and what more evidence did you need? By the same logic, Lechasseur realised he was probably dead, too. He’d be in his mid-sixties, so might be walking around somewhere in this future, but the wounds he’d got in Normandy must have shortened his life expectancy. If they hadn’t, then a line of work that seemed increasingly to involve beatings and injuries would have done for him. Would a black foreigner really be allowed to exist in a future like this?
He found himself wondering how and when he’d died, rather than if he’d lived.
He’d not slept for a long time. Lechasseur found his eyelids were heavy. It was dark here, quiet, and there was nothing here but the pain and fear and hopelessness of those who’d come before him.
They cried out all around him, but not to him; they were oblivious to his presence. His head dipped to his chest, and he rested.
Radford tried to grab Emily. He was wearing a cheap suit, not his overalls. Why?
‘We’re going to 1949,’ he told her.
‘I don’t understand.’ She was cowering in the corner, now. The suit was his attempt to blend in, she realised. It couldn’t possibly work, but neither would it draw attention to itsel
f the way overalls would have. Radford was huge.
‘It takes the two of us,’ he explained. ‘We think of somewhere, we go there. It’s as simple as that. And it isn’t a coincidence that you’ve been delivered here to me. It’s the weight of history. It’s inevitability.’
He handed her a piece of paper.
‘I’m to contact Amanda, a woman I believe you’re already acquainted with and –’
‘Lechasseur met her, but –’
‘I hand her an envelope. Money. She gives me some documents. State secrets. I then make sure they are delivered to some friends of hers. You’re going to help me make history, Blandish.’
‘But it doesn’t work! We saw you... fighting in the street...’
Radford smiled. ‘That’s another thing to look forward to then... I wonder whether that was before or after I delivered the mail?’
He could snap her in two, she was sure of that.
He already had. The mere fact that she’d not been made to change out of her overalls and back into her 1949 clothes led to one conclusion – she wouldn’t be blending in. She saw herself lying in the mud under Hammersmith Bridge.
‘When I tell you to think of London, 1949, what do you think of?’ he asked.
Emily opened her mouth to reply... and Radford grabbed her shoulder.
And then, on a cool, crisp, December night – for the merest moment – something happened that had been seen only twice before.
Emily and Radford were suddenly there, with just the faintest crackle of blue light.
After that, there was nothing unusual to see. She was dressed in thin, drab overalls that were too large, and overwhelmed her slight figure. She had long, chestnut hair. Her name was Emily Blandish. He was broad, shaven-headed; his suit had been made for him, and it just about looked like it. He was Radford.
