Splinters In Time (The Time Bubble Book 4)

by Jason Ayres

  “A soldering iron?” asked Josh in disbelief. “What is this, the 20th century? There’s no way we can go hacking about at it like that. At the moment I’ve got it just barely working. I can’t control where it takes me anymore, but even at this low level of functionality, I’ve got a remote chance of getting home. Hacking about at it with primitive tools isn’t going to do it any good.”

  “Alright, I was only trying to help,” said the Professor. “You did say that was why you had come here. But clearly there is not a lot I can do with my prehistoric equipment.”

  “Just do what you did before. Take the young Josh under your wing, support him in his time travel experiments and help him develop the technology needed to come and rescue me.”

  “That’s all very well, but I’ve already told you, I don’t know your younger self,” he replied. “There is no one called Josh in any of my classes and he certainly doesn’t hang out here in the lab. None of my students do. If he does exist, you’re far more likely to find him in The Lamb and Flag with the others.”

  “But you must know him,” protested Josh, getting seriously concerned by Hamilton’s denial of his existence.

  “I can assure you I don’t,” replied Hamilton. “Look, this is easily settled, we’ll look him up. What did you say your surname was again?”

  “Gardner,” replied Josh.

  The Professor turned to a touch screen set into the wall and called up a list of the students registered at the university. Scrolling to the letter G, he started to read down the list of names.

  “Let’s see now. Gale, Gascoigne, Geary. Hmm. It seems we don’t have a Gardner.”

  Josh was getting a disturbing sense of déjà vu. This was just like before. Why couldn’t his other selves stick to what they should be doing? Why wasn’t he here?

  “Clearly I’m not a student here in this timeline, then,” said Josh. “So where am I?”

  “At another university?” suggested the Professor. “You had better not be at Cambridge working with Garfunkel. It wouldn’t be the first time that scoundrel has poached the cream of the crop from under my nose.”

  Ignoring the Professor’s paranoia, Josh knew that, whatever the reason, this was a serious setback. If he wasn’t at Oxford, then he wouldn’t be inventing the tachyometer in this room or possibly anywhere else.

  “Well, wherever he is, I’m going to have to try and track him down,” replied Josh. “Thanks for your time, Professor. It’s been good to see you again.”

  “Come back and see me and let me know how it all goes, won’t you?” asked the Professor.

  “I’ll try,” said Josh.

  “It’s been a pleasure to meet you,” added Hamilton. “Not least because I now know for certain that time travel truly is possible. I’m only sorry your younger self isn’t here. From what you’ve told me, I’m sure I would have loved working with him.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I certainly enjoyed working with your alter ego,” replied Josh. “Without your help, I probably wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

  Leaving the college, Josh headed for a quiet restaurant down Little Clarendon Street that he used to frequent in this era. It was exactly as he remembered it. This universe seemed identical in every respect to his own, so why wasn’t Josh where he was supposed to be?

  Settling down at a table, he pulled out his tablet and hooked up to the Wi-Fi. The next step in finding his elusive other self was to track him down on social media.

  He hadn’t realised how much Facebook had changed over the years, but he soon managed to find his way around it. By the time the waiter came to take his order, he was looking at his old profile page. As he looked through it, his heart sank. It was looking as if this Josh wasn’t going to be able to help him at all.

  His occupation was listed as builder at Gardner & Sons. The subtle change from Son to Sons didn’t go unnoticed. His relationship status was even more startling. It seemed he was married in this timeline, not to Alice, but to Lauren. The cover picture on his profile page showed the two of them standing outside his home town’s registry office. To top it all, in the picture Lauren was clearly heavily pregnant. It was a classic shotgun wedding pose.

  He sat for a while and mulled it over while he waited for his food to come. So, he was a father here, something he had never achieved in his own timeline. But married to Lauren? How had that happened? Sure, he had gone out with her for a few months when they were teenagers, but she wasn’t the settling down type. She had been rather too flirty with other men for his liking, and he hadn’t been in any rush to settle down either. His sights had been firmly set on getting to Oxford – but not here, apparently.

  Even though help from this Josh seemed unlikely, he couldn’t just move on. He had to find out why he was living such a different life in a world that was seemingly otherwise identical.

  Finding his address wasn’t difficult. All he had to do was look at the electoral roll, which was freely available online via his tablet. By 2pm, with a solid lunch inside him, he was once again on the train bound for his home town.

  The address was somewhere he had never lived in his own life, but he knew where it was. It was in a 1980s estate to the north of the town where all the streets were named after types of trees. As he approached the house on Sycamore Drive, he could see that it was tiny, just a one-bedroomed starter home. It was also looking seriously run-down.

  The window frames were grimy and rotting. There were cobwebs around the front door, upon which the faded yellow paint was peeling. It looked like it was the only house in the street that still had its original front door from forty years ago. It didn’t look as if any work had been done on the whole house since it was built.

  As he pressed the doorbell, he wondered whether his younger self would be in. If he was, how would he be likely to react to Josh’s arrival? Would he be as amenable as the Professor had been once he had explained everything?

  After a few seconds with no signs of life, he wondered if the doorbell was working. He hadn’t heard it chime when he had pressed it. Was it broken, or was it one of those that couldn’t be heard from outside? There was a panel of clear glass in the top half of the front door, but he couldn’t see a lot, as the sun was reflecting directly back from the pane.

  He moved closer, using his body to shield the window from the sun, and peered through the glass, trying to see more of what was inside.

  What he saw was a mess. The house was open-plan with a kitchen at the front and he could see piles of crockery on the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. There were toys scattered around on the floor and he could see that it all looked in need of a good hoovering, even from where he was standing.

  Deciding that the doorbell was probably in the same state of repair as the rest of the house, he banged on the door. That caused a baby to start crying followed swiftly by a woman shouting out, “For fuck’s sake, who’s that?” It was unmistakeably Lauren’s voice.

  Thirty seconds later, she appeared, wearing a grubby-looking, white dressing gown and clasping her baby to her chest. The child, who couldn’t have been more than about six months old, was screaming its head off.

  She flung open the door aggressively, immediately assailing him with, “Who are you and what do you want? You’ve just woken my baby up, banging on the door like that.”

  Josh had never seen Lauren looking like this before. Motherhood didn’t seem to be suiting her at all. She looked worn out and it was impossible not to notice how big she was – at least four dress sizes larger than he had ever seen her.

  He could tell that the baby was a boy. He looked at the child, still crying uncontrollably, a strange and melancholy feeling washing over him as he met the son he had never had.

  There was no sign of his younger self, so he would have to try and see what he could find out from Lauren. He didn’t imagine he was going to get long before she closed the door on him, so there was no point skirting around the issue. He would just have to
come right out with it.

  “Don’t you recognise me?” he asked.

  She looked closely at him. “No,” she replied. “Should I?”

  “It’s me, Josh,” he said, “your husband.” It felt weird saying it, but not nearly as weird as it probably sounded to her.

  “My husband?” she said incredulously. “I don’t think so. My husband’s out at work, earning the money to keep this roof over our heads. Are you some sort of weirdo?”

  “Look closely at me,” said Josh. “I am him, just older.”

  She examined his face closely. “OK, I’ll admit, you do look a little bit like him. But get real, will you. My husband is twenty-three years old. You’re an old man!”

  He was getting fed up with people telling him how old he looked. He guessed that was something he was going to have to get used to.

  “It is me, Lauren. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve time-travelled here from the future. That’s not difficult to believe, is it, when you consider all the adventures we had with the time bubble?”

  “What’s the time bubble?” she asked.

  “You must remember the time bubble,” said Josh. “In the tunnel, under the railway line, transports people forward in time?”

  He looked at her hopefully, but the blank look on her face said it all.

  “I’m sorry but I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You’re obviously wrong in the head. Now get off my doorstep or I’ll call the police.”

  The door was firmly slammed in his face, as he had been expecting, causing the baby, who had calmed down during the conversation, to start screaming again.

  There was no point trying again. She couldn’t help him and may well carry out her threat to call the police if he kept pestering her. He was pretty sure by now that young Josh wouldn’t be able to help him either, so there was no point waiting around for him. If she had never heard of the time bubble, then it was highly likely he hadn’t either.

  As he walked back towards town, he went over the conversation he had just had. How had things ended up like they had in this universe? Weighing up the evidence, he tried to come up with a theory as to how these changes had come about.

  If the time bubble didn’t exist here, or had not been discovered by him and Charlie, then that could explain how his life had followed the route it had. He would not have derived any inspiration from the adventures when he was seventeen if they hadn’t happened here.

  Subsequently, he hadn’t developed a desire to investigate time travel and hadn’t gone to university at all. Instead he had followed his brother into the family business.

  That had led him to be stuck in the town, and seemingly stuck with Lauren. He would never meet Alice. Was this life what this Josh would have really wanted? He had enjoyed what he and Lauren had got up to in their younger years, but he had never considered her marriage material. She was hardly the marrying type, either.

  What had been blatantly obvious in their brief encounter was that she wasn’t happy. Everything about her, from her demeanour, appearance and surroundings, hardly painted a picture of domestic bliss and joyful motherhood.

  Was his other self equally unhappy? Had they just settled for each other due to having no other ambition in life? Would they have married if it had not been for the sake of the child? He was sorely tempted to find out by looking for the other Josh and asking him, but was that really a good idea? How would his counterpart feel, having another version turn up from a universe?

  “Hey, my life turned out to be so much more interesting than yours!” was probably not something he would want to hear.

  Would this Josh and Lauren even last? A few months going out with her had been more than enough in his universe. He couldn’t imagine it was any better in this one.

  He thought about the baby again, feelings of regret flooding through him once more. He had come to terms some years ago with the realisation he would never become a father, but seeing in flesh and blood what might have been filled him with sadness.

  How different would his life have been if he really had had a son? That son would be grown up by now, giving him a legacy and passing on his genes. Instead, he was leaving nothing behind.

  Was this Josh here better off after all? Maybe he was living in a run-down house in what was possibly an unhappy relationship. But he did have the one thing that he didn’t – a child. And he knew nothing of the other life he could have led. Maybe ignorance was bliss after all. At least this Josh wasn’t going to end up trapped in the past in the multiverse, unable to find his way home.

  Thinking about all of this was quite upsetting. He had to try and put it out of his mind and focus on his next move. Trying to find any further help in this universe was clearly a lost cause, but there was one more thing he wanted to do before he left. He began to make his way towards the railway tunnel, to where all of this had begun.

  It was just possible that there might be a way back to the future using the time bubble, if he could possibly gain access to it. It wouldn’t be back to his own universe, but if he could get back to the 2050s, even in another universe, he might be able to acquire the technology he needed to repair the tachyometer.

  He had all the dates that Peter had originally jumped when he was using the time bubble permanently committed to memory. He knew that in his universe he wouldn’t be able to use the bubble now as Peter was inside and would be for at least another five years.

  But that had been in his universe, not this one. In this one, it was fair to assume that Peter wasn’t in the bubble. He had only found out about its existence through Josh, and since this Josh seemingly didn’t know about it, how would Peter?

  Perhaps the time bubble didn’t even exist here, hence why they hadn’t found it, but he may as well go and have a look. There was a tiny chance that if he went to the tunnel now, he might be able to make a jump. It was a very slender chance, but he wasn’t going to lose anything by trying.

  Predictably enough, after walking up and down the tunnel a few times, absolutely nothing happened. While he was doing this, a few other pedestrians passed through as well, and none of them vanished.

  Had the tachyometer had been functioning properly, it would have been able to detect the bubble and tell him all he needed to know about it in an instant, but without this information, he was blind. He hadn’t expected any miracles here, but it had been worth a try.

  He thought about Peter’s jump in 2024 and the ones before that. In theory, if he could find a universe where those jumps still happened, he could intercept Peter before he jumped. Maybe he would let him take his place to travel forward.

  It was a sound idea in principle, but not one he could really bring himself to utilise. Peter had been using the tunnel to get far enough forward in time to find a cure for his disease – a goal he ultimately achieved.

  If Josh were to take Peter’s place in the tunnel he would be condemning an innocent man, and a friend, to death. Offering to come back in time later to help him would be a promise he couldn’t be sure he could keep. No, he was going to have to find another way.

  Leaving the tunnel, he decided there was no point going back to Oxford tonight. Other than a few dirty clothes, he had all the possessions he needed for the next jump right there. He would stay in the town overnight and make the jump first thing in the morning. He had seen all he needed to of this universe. It was time to move on.

  Early the next morning, he made his way to a park on the outskirts of town. He didn’t imagine there would be anyone around at 8am on a cold December morning. It would be a safe place to jump.

  The light on the tachyometer was glowing green. How much longer would it keep working? If it gave up the ghost on him, he would be stuck for good. Holding it out in the gathering gloom, a feeling of apprehension washed over him as he wondered what the next world would have in store.

  His feeling of apprehension was well placed. He was completely unprepared for what was to happen next. As soon as he stepped through, the entire
landscape around him was utterly transformed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  November 2024

  Josh had seen many subtle changes during his travels through other universes, but they were still fundamentally the same world. Nothing so far had been anywhere near the scale of change in the scene that now lay before him.

  Seconds before, he had been standing on the grassy field where he and Charlie used to play football as kids.

  Now he was standing in a clearing in a large wood. Great oak and horse chestnut trees towered all around him, half-covered in golden, autumn leaves. Here and there, chinks of sunlight penetrated through gaps where the branches were already bare, as a steady stream of leaves broke off and fluttered downwards in the breeze.

  Underfoot, the mown grass of the football pitch had been replaced by rough, uneven ground which was covered with a carpet of open acorn and conker shells, their fruits scattered liberally across the area.

  A crow began cawing harshly overhead, a sound Josh often heard during the colder months. He wasn’t sure where he was, but in terms of time, it looked very much like late autumn. He had been expecting to arrive in early November, which fitted the conditions, so why wasn’t he where he was supposed to be?

  The tachyometer may have been able to transport him through time and between universes, but the one thing it didn’t do was move his physical location. It wasn’t something he had ever programmed into the device. Now it seemed as if it had inexplicably transported him to an unknown location – or had it?

  What if he was in the same place, but rather than thirty-two days earlier in time, he had been transported back centuries to the era when England was still covered in forests? The consequences of that were extremely troubling to contemplate.

  Whilst some people might harbour romantic ideals of a pre-industrial golden age, the reality of poverty, disease and medieval brutality were not things he had any desire to experience. With his modern clothing and backpack, he would be more likely to get burned at the stake as a witch than get any help from the locals.