A few years ago, apparently, Spider had started keeping a diary, using an old-fashioned pen and paper, jotting down things each day. Nothing important, just random details, things he heard, or read in the media. It was strange, reading back through previous pages, recognizing his handwriting, such as it was, but often not remembering writing down those things. Once, he discovered he’d written, “I’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” and only later did he remember that he had once read 1984.
There was no news about the dead woman. He’d tried to call James at DOTAS every day, and found that James was always away from his desk, or out in the field, or in a meeting, or consulting with colleagues from the future, and so on. Nobody would ever put him through to James’s personal phone. Nobody would ever pass on a message. Okay, he thought. He and James weren’t close friends. They were colleagues in related lines of work who got on very well. They’d had drinks together on Friday nights. One time Spider picked James up at the airport. A couple of times they’d tried to play time-travel chess, but James had a galling way of winning without Spider having moved a single piece, and he’d be left sputtering, “What? What just happened?” while James just laughed and told him how he’d used the time-travel dice like so, and Spider decided time-travel chess wasn’t such a fun game. Mostly it was just nice getting together and bullshitting about their troubles.
All the same, Spider thought James should have returned at least one of his calls. He wanted to know what was going on with the investigation. Sometimes Spider would go and stand out in the parking lot on the spot where the Bat Cave had stood, remembering his first sight of the body in the second time machine, the Dolphin — a bizarre sensation, both blank puzzlement giving way to gasping horror, and then an electric shock sizzling through his hindbrain as he realized what this was: a case, an actual case!
It was disgusting, he knew it was, getting excited because a woman had been murdered. It’s just, he told himself, it’s been so long. I miss it.
He told Charlie at one point about the difficulty of getting hold of James for a chat about the investigation. Charlie said, “You could call Inspector Street.”
Yes, yes, he could indeed call Iris Street, he told himself, remembering that day last week when he actually had called her, then hung up immediately. She hadn’t called him back, either, and that was good, he thought. If they were interested in fitting him up as the guilty party in the case, they would have been in touch by now, right? They wouldn’t just leave him dangling in the breeze, would they?
And then there was the puzzling matter of Mr. Vincent, who still had not called about his smithereened Tempo, and who Spider had not gotten around to calling to ask why he, Vincent, hadn’t called. Spider commented on this to Charlie every day, and Charlie told him not to worry so much about it. The guy was obviously prepared to cut his losses, and was probably just keeping his own head down in case the cops decided to take a nice long look at him as a possible murderer. Spider thought the kid had a point, but all the same the question ate at him, particularly on those long, long afternoons in the workshop, up to his waist in bits of some malfunctioning unit, only too aware that someone had thrown up on one of the seats and it hadn’t been cleaned up too well. Why had Vincent gone so quiet? It made no sense. None of it made any sense at all.
So that Friday afternoon, not long before close of business, Spider got Malaria to give Mr. Vincent a call, just a courtesy thing, a follow-up, you might say. She asked him, “What if he asks about his unit?”
“At the moment I just want to know if he’s even still alive,” he said to her, telling more of the truth than he had meant to. Maybe the guy hadn’t been bitching at them about his machine because he was dead.
Malaria called, and got no response. Vincent didn’t have his phone switched on, but she was free to leave a message. “What should I tell it?”
“Just ask him to give us a call during business hours next week,” Spider said, scowling. He chewed at his lip. I should go over there and have a look around, he thought. After work, of course. Completely unofficial, just stopping by, seeing if the lights were on, that kind of thing. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Nobody could say anything. I was just riding along that street, right?
Spider’s guts were in knots, just thinking about it. If the guy was still in the land of the living, but was merely, for example, away from home on business, surely he’d have his messaging system explain about that. That’s what he would do, Spider thought, telling himself he was being entirely reasonable. Telling himself that he was simply concerned about customer follow-up. He could hear Dickhead telling him that customer care was number one!
“Hmm,” he said, and went back out into the workshop.
By close of business, Spider had decided he would take a spin out past Mr. Vincent’s place. He had no intention of actually stopping and looking around, or even getting off of his bike at all. Just a straightforward ride-by.
Until, just as he was pulling on his wet-weather gear, his phone rang.
It was Molly. Spider stared at his watchtop, seeing her flashing name. “Now what?” He was tempted to shunt her call through to his messaging service. He stood there, eyes closed, trying to breathe slowly. He answered. “Molly. What a lovely surprise,” he said.
“Al?”
“What’s happened, Molly?”
“The toilet’s stopped talking to me. God, I cannot believe I just actually said that.”
Spider sighed. “It’s broken down again?”
“No. Not ‘again.’ This time it’s something different. It won’t recognize me, won’t open. Nothing but bloody error messages. Can you come by and have a look?”
He winced, and looked outside. The forecast rain was going strong; he shivered, just thinking about how much fun it would be pedaling all the way over to Molly’s place, and then back to the motel. “Can’t you get an on-call plumber?”
“You, of all people,” Molly said, voice dripping contempt, “should know what plumbers cost these days.”
“Yeah, true,” he admitted. “Okay, so how long’s it been?”
“Al, I need the toilet now,” she said, biting off each word. She sounded as if she was in a lot of pain.
“I take it the neighbors are no help?”
“After last time, do you blame them?”
He remembered. The case was still working its way through the courts. “It’s just, I had plans for tonight—”
“Al! I neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed you now!”
He swore to himself, knowing he was going to cave. “Okay. I’ll be right there. Uh, sit tight.” He killed the link, swore out loud, and kicked a chair across the room. He made sure his wet-weather gear was correctly sealed up, told the building alarms to arm themselves, and left. The door clunked closed behind him, and he heard the alarms chime. It was nearly seven p.m., fully dark, and the rain was bucketing down. It looked like it had settled in for the foreseeable future. Thinking dark thoughts about Molly, he splashed his way out to where his bike was parked, got in, and headed out into the night.
As he left the property, he glanced both ways along the road to see if the Sony was parked anywhere nearby, and didn’t see it.
Almost an hour later he pulled into the driveway of Molly’s place. He got out of the bike and carried it up to the porch.
“Spider! Spider — wait!” called a male voice.
That was odd. The bike slung over his shoulder, he turned to peer out into the wet darkness. “What?”
A familiar-looking figure appeared at the end of the path leading to the mailbox. Draped in shadows and rain, the guy wore regular clothes rather than wet-weather gear, his hair plastered down over his head and face. He looked awful, and not because of the weather. He looked grievously upset. Taking a few steps closer, so Spider could get a better look at him, he called out, “Get back on your bike and leave ri
ght now!”
Spider stared at him, puzzled but feeling all tingly-weird about it. Something was deeply not right here. The figure looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Spider said, “Come and get out of the rain, you’ll catch your bloody death out there like that.”
He came closer, and Spider could see more of him. The man said, “Forget about me, Spider. Just get on your bike and go. Don’t come back. Stay here and you’ll — look, just go. Go now, while you can.”
Spider was intrigued despite himself. “It’s just, I have to fix my wife’s toilet.”
The man came closer still, and pulled sodden hair out of his eyes. In the light spilling from Molly’s porch, Spider could see who it was. “Oh, crap,” he said. Ever since the advent of time machines, and despite his own deep reservations about using the things, he’d always imagined that one day, in some circumstance, something like this would happen to him. It seemed you couldn’t have a world with ubiquitous time travel and not have a situation where you met some other version of yourself. It was like a rule, he thought. And, sure enough, on this wretched evening, here was his double. “Oh, ah, well,” he said, not at all sure what to say. He was distracted, too, by how fat and old his other self looked. “Do I really look like that?” he said.
Then the other Spider was there, on the porch with him, looking him up and down. “I’m telling you, Spider. In about one minute, the cops will be here. They’re already on their way.”
“What?” This was making no sense. “What’s going on?” He turned to look at Molly’s door — and saw that it stood ajar, light spilling out. He could hear her media wall going full blast, and that in itself was strange. Molly liked to work in silence — and she was always working. He started feeling cold inside. He put the bike down and glanced at his other self. “What’s wrong?”
“Spider, it’s—” He stared off into the dark, looking pale and wretched. “We have to go, right now.” He tried to grab Spider’s arm to drag him away.
Spider pulled free. “I have to see her!”
“If you go in there, you’ll wind up as me!”
Spider protested. “I can’t just take your word for it!”
“I told you, we have to go right now.”
He stood there, staring — first at his other self, then at Molly’s door — and tried to imagine the scene, and imagined nothing but the worst. “She’s dead?”
The other Spider grabbed for Spider’s bike in one hand, and hauled him down the steps and along the path with his other hand. Spider went along, starting to feel numb, unaware of the cold rain beating down on his wet-weather gear and trickling down his back. He needed to see her. This other guy must be lying, surely, but the other guy was obviously himself, and why would he lie to himself?
The other Spider had a car with a big cargo space at the back. He popped the back door, flung the bike in there and shut the door. “Get in. It’s open.”
Spider stared at him as his other self went around to the driver’s side and climbed in. He stood there in the dark, in the rain, cold all the way through, confused, thinking that somewhere along the way his life had broken, and he was only now becoming aware of it. The light from Molly’s porch, and the booming music coming from inside the house, seemed to call him back. The other Spider was already in the car and powering it up, and he was just standing here. He could go back, he thought. He could see her, see for himself. She couldn’t be dead. She was that kind of person, someone who’d outlive everybody she knew, if for no other reason than just because she was cussed, because it would piss people off. Because, most of all, it would piss him off.
Then someone appeared out of the darkness and clobbered Spider in the face, and he collapsed into a more private darkness.
Later, when he woke, he was in a lot of pain, had lost a lot of blood from his broken nose and missing teeth, and he was in the other Spider’s car. They were going somewhere. He recognized the area: it was one of the sprawling northern enclaves, all towering apartment complexes and monster homes and malls so big they had their own weather, permanent residents, and airfields on their roofs.
His face — his whole head — hurt like hell, and for a while he just sat there, holding himself, breathing through his mouth while blood dripped down the back of his throat.
The other Spider, watching the head-up display, keeping an eye on the autopilot as the car wove through flocks of cyclists, said, “Ah, you’re back.”
“Did you have to fucking hit me?”
“Yeah, about that. Sorry.”
“So it was you.” Spider was trying not to let his tongue touch his teeth on the side of his face where he’d been hit.
“I had to get you out of there. Another thirty—”
“Yeah,” Spider said, clutching his aching face, “I heard.”
They drove in silence a long while, the rain beating on the shell of the car, the wipers squeegeeing back and forth, back and forth.
At length, clearly upset, the other Spider produced a handheld with a luminous screen, and handed it to him. “Here. I took photos.”
Spider took the unit, frowned for a moment, confused, then realized what he was seeing. He gave an involuntary moan of pain and shock, but then flipped to the next image, and this was worse than the previous, like a knife to his own heart.
Later, much later, that night, when Spider thought he might at last be able to speak without pain, and while he and his future self sat in the car outside a garishly lit fast-food place, he said to him, “How do I know you didn’t kill her?” He’d been rehearsing the question in his head for some time, thinking that the most likely situation here was that he was sitting next to his wife’s murderer. Why he — or at least this future version of himself — would kill Molly, he couldn’t say. Yes, she was infuriating. Yes, she took him for granted. Yes, she expected things of him he could never provide, and yes, their relationship was and had always been deeply messed up. But why would he kill her? He had always thought that one day they’d get back together somehow, that she’d finally see that he was, if not the man of her dreams, then at least a good man in his own right.
“You don’t know, Spider — but I didn’t do it.”
Spider said nothing. Inside his head, he was still screaming. He thought he would be screaming the rest of his life.
The other Spider said, “Yeah, I know. I still feel that way.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me you know how I feel,” he said.
His other self went to say something, then looked at Spider, and thought better of it. He nodded. They sat there a long while, saying nothing, listening to the rain, watching kids coming and going from the fast-food place. It was well after two in the morning.
“Have you ever heard,” his future self said, “of an organization called ‘Zeropoint?’”
He had not. He shook his head, gently. The combination of facial trauma and acute shock was making him wish he were dead.
“Right. Okay. Where to start?” He looked stricken, lost for words for a long moment. “Um, Zeropoint is an organization deeply interested in the End of Time.”
“Of course they are,” Spider said, humoring the guy.
“No. Seriously. Listen to me. This is important.”
“Sorry. I’m all ears.”
His future self was irritated, but kept at it. “You will be tested on this later, so listen to me. It’s all about the End of Time, okay? It’s about being the last man standing at the end of the universe.”
“Mmmm,” Spider said, barely interested.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “I have to admit, when I was you, I felt the same way you do now, only I got my butt kicked later on. You’ll enjoy that.”
Spider looked at the other guy. “Hmm, okay, and I suppose, somehow, you’re going to segue from all this ‘End of Time’ bullshit to Molly’s death,
and that it’s all connected up somehow, right?”
“I think so, yes.”
Spider slumped against the closed window. “Uh-huh.”
“If you’d gone inside at Molly’s place, you’d never have gotten out before the cops turned up.”
“Let me guess. They caught you?”
“I did fifteen years, Spider.”
This got his attention. “Fifteen years?”
“Hard time.”
“Shit,” he said.
“When I got out, I wanted to save her.”
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t. The fix was in.” I was framed.
Thinking about frame jobs, Spider asked, “What about the woman in the Dolphin?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
Spider glared at him. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that woman, the dead woman, worked for Zeropoint.”
“So what the hell was she doing—?”
“No idea.”
“What, you come back in time all this way to save me from your wretched fate,” he said, speaking as carefully as he could to avoid aggravating his loosened teeth, “and you can’t even tell me that?”
“I had to do something, Spider.”
He was exhausted but knew he’d never sleep even if he went “home” now. Another thought bothered him. “Okay,” he said, “you saved me from your horrible fate. Woo. So why are you still here? Why haven’t you—?”
“New timeline. Old timelines never die, Spider. They just spawn new ones. Like bloody rabbits that way.”
“Okay. Fine,” he said, his whole face throbbing with pain. “Whatever.” But this Future Spider told him he had a lot of stuff to tell him, and he only had a limited time to do it. Spider sagged in his seat, feeling wretched in so many ways, and let it all wash over him.
“So,” Spider managed to say, “how did you find out about this Zeropoint outfit in the first place?”
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 8
