by Martyn Ford
‘Police,’ Dee said.
‘What is the nature of your emergency?’ the voice asked.
‘Right, yeah,’ Dee began. ‘Um, I think I saw someone trying to steal sheep in the fields by Cedar Woods, in Glassbridge.’
‘Sheep?’ Tim whispered, squinting in confusion.
Dee placed her hand over the mobile’s microphone. ‘It can’t be too serious or they’ll send proper police, we just need one drone.’
‘Sorry, is this a prank call?’
‘No, seriously, someone—’
‘Young lady, calling the police is a serious matter. This is not a joke—’
‘Listen, some nutbag is up here mucking about with sheep – you’ll get in trouble if they find out you ignored this call. I know they’re recorded.’
The controller sighed. ‘Fine, a drone has been dispatched to conduct a sweep of Cedar Woods. But if this turns out to be—’
‘Yeah, great, whatever,’ Tim said, pressing the red button to hang up. He grabbed his heart, relieved the call was over.
‘Now,’ Dee said, ‘we wait.’
Ten minutes passed and they both ended up sitting, with their legs dangling, on a large outcrop of rocks they’d found. Phil waited on Tim’s knee.
‘You think Granddad’s all right?’ Dee asked.
‘He seems pretty overwhelmed about everything.’
‘Feels responsible, I guess.’
‘I am reminded of Alfred Nobel’s fabled and nuanced relationship with his own work,’ Phil said.
Tim nodded in agreement. Dee frowned.
‘He invented dynamite and thought it would be great for mining,’ Tim explained. ‘Which it is – it’s well good for that sort of thing. But it’s also brilliant for killing people. Made old Nobel proper sad.’
‘He shouldn’t have been surprised – people will always find a way to do bad stuff,’ Dee said. ‘Even a stick can be a weapon. Hang on, hear that?’
There was a faint buzzing and, beyond the hedgerows, a little red dot lifted and flew smoothly along the line of the field. Halfway up, its searchlight came on – a cone of white spread out in front of it.
‘Here we go,’ Dee said, rising to her feet. Phil leapt back to Tim’s pocket.
Tim had suggested all kinds of innovative ways to bring the drone down – EMP grenades, net traps, even a bow and arrow (admittedly not the best idea). However Dee had said, with a casual shrug, ‘I’m gonna throw a rock at it.’
So that’s why, at their feet, they had collected a small pyramid of stones – some wonky flints with nasty angles, some perfectly round tennis-ball-sized ones and even some smaller gravelly types that could jam up its systems.
The metal orb’s searchlight sent the tree shadows long into the woods, sweeping across quickly one by one, each like a sundial on fast forward.
‘Right, here it comes,’ Dee said, rolling the balaclava Tim made earlier down on her face. He did the same. He could only see her mouth and her white eyes. She looked appropriately like a criminal in her leather jacket and black woollen mask.
A vague pulsing noise came around them as the drone approached. When it was about twenty metres away, Dee threw a rock but completely missed.
‘Damn.’
However, it seemed to notice and slowed to a stop, spinning its searchlight – it appeared almost as though it was in a panic.
Tim took two steps forward and threw a cold, weighty stone with all his might. There was a loud, hollow clonk and the drone wiggled, dipped a little, but stayed airborne. Then, as though it just somehow knew where they were, its search beam swung round and locked firmly on them both. The glare hurt Tim’s eyes, but he shielded his face and threw more rocks.
‘Cease your activities at once,’ a deep voice echoed from the machine. Tim could hear Dee huffing with each throw. ‘Damage to police property is an offence which carries a charge of—’
With a spark, the searchlight disappeared and, somewhere in the fresh dark, there was a heavy, clattering thud as it landed. Tim’s vision readjusted to see the drone on the grass. Dee swooped in and knelt by its side. She pulled open the laptop, grabbed the plug and then shook her head at the complicated machine. Tim arrived. Up close it was much larger and more substantial than he’d guessed – there was a desperate, electrical fizz coming from its megaphone and a buckled antenna on top was ticking left to right, sounding like a car’s indicator.
‘Aw, I kind of feel sorry for it,’ Tim said.
However, Dee clearly did not. Without a word she lifted a flint above her head and proceeded to smash the metal casing with repeated blows. Eventually, the thing was silent and its electronic innards exposed. It looked like the inside of a computer – it even had USB plug sockets, which they swiftly connected to the small, custom-made laptop.
Tim stopped when he saw, on one of the drone’s many chips, the words ‘Whitelock Industries’. He read it aloud.
‘Yeah, Bernard Whitelock?’ Dee looked up, clicking the laptop. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘He … he was part of Clarice’s plan – she married him, he built the teleporter. He helped make the imagination box too. Your granddad knew him well.’
‘Seriously?’ Dee said. ‘Well, not any more. He’s a megafamous inventor now – top bloke. He’s the reason we have AI drones like this, and cloning, electric cars, fusion power – you know, clean, free energy and all that stuff. People say he saved the world. He’s a big deal.’
‘He didn’t used to be,’ Tim said. ‘Clarice basically kept him prisoner. Are they married?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Huh, Clarice must have actually loved him – at least enough to make him a success,’ Tim said.
‘But not enough to stay married to him?’ Dee asked.
‘I guess she works in mysterious ways.’
They left the broken police drone there in that field and ran back to the Dawn Star Hotel. Inside room ninety-eight they investigated the downloaded plans – they had the complete layout of Crowfield Tower in an interactive document. On the fifty-fifth floor there was something marked as ‘The Vault’.
‘Clever,’ Dee said. ‘Top floor could be accessed from the roof, basement could be accessed from the ground floor. Hide the imagination station right in the heart of the building. Makes sense.’
‘Now,’ Tim said, ‘the hard bit.’
Chapter 12
Tim, Dee, Eisenstone and Phil left room ninety-eight – now known as ‘base camp’. After a couple of attempts, Tim managed to create a key so they could take a car from the Dawn Star Hotel’s car park. This was stealing – there were no two ways about it – but Tim used the word ‘commandeered’ which sounded somehow less wrong. Plus, they targeted an expensive-looking one, reasoning that a rich person could afford such a loss.
‘Also, comfortable,’ Dee said, stroking the seat.
Each time Tim did something illegal he inwardly blamed Clarice – she had forced him into this position. Still, he felt a little niggle with every crime. He really hoped karma wasn’t real. Or, if it was, somehow it could take into account all the background reasons for his wrongdoing.
After they’d inspected the floor plans for Crowfield Tower, Tim had used the imagination box prototype to create his own imagination box. Like his last version had always been, this device was stowed away in his rucksack. And, again like the last model, the reader was a straightforward black beanie. A remotely operated, sleek, strong and portable imagination box – just what they needed for the outlandish burglary they had planned. The only real flaw he could see was that it was slightly warped in shape. Otherwise it was perfect – he had really concentrated on it, after all.
Of course, Dee and Eisenstone were completely astonished. In fact, when the professor saw the new one working he almost fainted. But, having done exactly this once before, Tim shrugged it off and said, ‘Come on, it’s obvious. Wishing for more wishes? It’s gonna happen eventually.’
Eisenstone drove them up to Lond
on, where some of the sights and tourist spots were familiar, but others slightly different, slightly wrong. And, without exhaust fumes polluting the air, everywhere seemed to be much cleaner. One thing stuck out: Trafalgar Square’s famous bronze lion statues were now crows – just as big, just as proud, just as black.
They arrived at their destination but couldn’t find anywhere to park. Eventually, Tim suggested they just leave it on double yellow lines.
‘Yeah.’ Dee shrugged. ‘Who cares, it’s not our car.’ She found breaking the rules far easier than Tim did.
‘But, but the poor owner will and they’ll get a ticket,’ the professor said.
They were being quite reckless about all this – they had, over the course of the last days, meticulously outlined how they were going to break into Crowfield Tower, but they had absolutely no escape planned.
‘We won’t need a route out,’ Tim had explained. ‘Once we’re inside, we’ll find the imagination station and use it to return everything to how it was.’
‘Besides, there’s no way we’ll be able to escape anyway,’ Dee added. ‘Not with all the security and alarms that’ll be going off.’
‘Precisely,’ Tim said. ‘This trip is one-way.’
The professor seemed uncomfortable with it all, but stayed silent.
So, parking the car on double yellow lines would be – like all these crimes – completely irrelevant when everything was reset back to normal with the imagination station. Eisenstone pulled up the handbrake and checked his face in the mirror.
This evening had been chosen specifically. Tonight there was a charity fundraising event, an auction – to be attended by none other than Clarice Crowfield – in the Green Hall Gallery. This huge building sat right next to Crowfield Tower and was connected to it by a vast garden, like a park, enclosed in glass. It looked like a massive greenhouse – the transparent roof was twenty or so storeys high, with tall, exotic plants growing below. Crucially for their purposes, there was a crane conducting works on it which they could use to break into Crowfield Tower.
So their plan was:
Go to the dinner in the Green Hall Gallery. Sneak off and head upstairs to the roof. Then climb up and along the arm of the crane to a window on about the thirtieth floor of Crowfield Tower, and smash their way inside. Once there they could run upstairs to the fifty-fifth floor, break into the vault, use the imagination station and be back in the old universe in, as Phil said, ‘two shakes of a dingo’s bingo’ – whatever that meant. What could possibly go wrong?
‘Loads of things,’ Dee had said.
Obviously though, as they were wanted for murder, they needed disguises. This is why Eisenstone was wearing a shaggy brown wig, a fake beard and thick black glasses – as well as a smart tuxedo for the dinner event. Of course he looked ridiculous, but the new hair and its colour did give him a certain youth which Tim reckoned the professor quite liked.
Dee and Tim also had suitable disguises. They were both dressed in smart clothes – Tim in a chequered maroon shirt, grey waistcoat and black trousers. Dee was in a polka-dotted gown, which she had explicitly demanded – but she was also wearing short jeans and a top beneath, which could be changed into for ‘increased manoeuvrability’. As for their faces, a little make-up, putty and latex can go a long way when you’ve got an imagination box to hand. The glue on Tim’s fake nose pulled on his skin and he could see the stuck-on eyebrows if he glanced up, but besides all that they looked great.
And, even though it was completely unnecessary as he would be in the top pocket of Tim’s waistcoat the whole time, Phil was wearing a miniature tuxedo and a trilby hat.
‘I wish my appearance to be that of a medium-ranking Italian-American gangster,’ the monkey had said. ‘Albeit a small one.’
From the car Tim could see people queuing to get inside the gallery at the end of the road. There was a red carpet and velvet ropes lining the pavement. Beyond, a huge historic building glowed orange thanks to up-pointing lamps on the front. And to the left of that – connected by the glass atrium – was Crowfield Tower. It seemed to disappear into the night sky – odd lights on the top floor could well be mistaken for stars. About a quarter of the way up, running right to left like a bridge, was the crane.
The tower’s entrance was fenced off with a gate, tyre spikes and a few armed Grey Guards. Tim also counted three police drones circling the building itself – luckily they seemed to be staying low.
‘Good job we’re not going in the front door,’ Tim said, shaking his head at all that security. Not for the first time, he felt suddenly unsure about what they were doing, about how utterly insane they would seem if they were captured. It’d be embarrassing as much as anything else.
‘So, we’ve got everything all lined up,’ Dee said, looking at Crowfield Tower’s floor plan on her mobile phone. ‘Except for one thing: the vault door. It’s about a foot thick and, I assume, made of metal.’
Tim nodded. ‘Yeah. That’s why I created this.’ He pulled a block of plastic explosives from his rucksack – it was wrapped in cling film. It looked just like a big lump of mustard-coloured plasticine.
‘What the hell is that?’ Dee asked.
‘Semtex,’ Tim said, wiggling it. ‘Or my version of it at least. Timtex.’
‘Like, a bomb?’ Dee’s eyes were wide.
‘Yeah. How did you think we were going to get through the vault door?’
‘Oh, delightful,’ Phil said, tilting his hat back with his thumb. ‘High time we had some explosions.’
‘It’s … I don’t know,’ Dee said. ‘Taking explosives in a rucksack to a charity dinner – it just sounds bad. It sounds like we’re the baddies.’
‘Well, of course, if you say it like that, it does,’ Tim admitted.
Eisenstone was shaking his head. ‘I really … I really think it best if you don’t imagine bombs with the machine,’ he said. ‘How do you know it’s stable? Indeed, what if it goes off in your hand?’
‘Relax. I haven’t even made a detonator yet. It’s completely safe.’ Tim banged it a few times on the inside of the car door, to show how confident he was.
‘Stop it,’ Dee said, snatching it from him. She shoved it back in his rucksack. ‘You haven’t exactly got a perfect track record with your creations.’
As before, Tim noticed Eisenstone’s slightly glazed, distant expression. The professor seemed lost in his own thoughts, even at a time like this.
It was a black-tie event. The gallery was full of fine-dining tables, all laid out with expensive cutlery and arrangements, crystal glasses and thick cloth napkins. It looked more like a glitzy award ceremony. Using fake invites and confusing the metal detectors with an EMP disrupter Tim had invented and created, they successfully entered and were seated at the back of the room. Dee whispered that it was a good job they weren’t wrong’uns, as it had been quite easy to smuggle the bomb and the new imagination box into this place.
Before they could leap into action, the lights dimmed and ambient, orchestral music came from speakers near the stage.
Tim turned in his chair to see the doors at the side of the grand hall open and Clarice Crowfield swoop in – people stood and applauded. Not wanting to draw attention to themselves, Tim, Dee and Eisenstone did so too.
Just the sight of her sent Tim’s heart rate up – he was sweating, hardly breathing now. He was so afraid that he couldn’t clap his limp hands, so he just cupped them at his chest and watched on. Clarice looked just like the portrait painting he’d once seen of her – her long, straight black hair hanging down, her sharp cheekbones and her proud, surveying gaze. Her dark laced dress was almost Gothic in style, slightly weird like everyone else’s clothes, with a high collar and squared shoulders.
The one main difference was that she appeared, well, nice for want of a better word. Kind. Tim couldn’t really explain what it was, but she seemed to have warmth in her eyes and her wrinkles looked as though they were from years of smiling, not years of snarling. It was in
credibly unsettling and completely the opposite of what he had expected to see, much like the impossible horror of Elisa not recognising him. Like so much in this universe, it was just wrong.
‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the annual Crowfield Foundation Fundraiser,’ Clarice said at the lectern on stage. ‘Please, as always, give generously as this year we are raising money for disadvantaged children living in poverty around the world.’
‘You’re right,’ Dee whispered to Tim, with a slight smile. ‘We have to stop this monster.’
He had to admit, Clarice was different. But he didn’t let all the questions he had cloud his judgement – they still had to go ahead with the plan.
Later in the evening there was a guided tour of the gallery itself, which seemed a great opportunity to sneak off. They left the crowd in the portrait hall, where they were being shown various head and shoulder paintings of historic figures. Tim wondered which were real and which imagined. And, of course, there was an entire wing dedicated to portraits of Clarice – this was a feature of her fantasy that seemed to fit perfectly.
They rounded a corner – the stairwell was just up ahead. Tim and Dee were chatting as they strode along the polished, chequered marble floor.
‘Everyone does seem to love her,’ he said.
‘I guess this is maybe how she perceives herself?’ Dee wondered. ‘In my fantasies I am a little bit taller, my hair is a little bit cooler. You said Clarice always wanted power, wanted to be a popular politician – her dream has come true.’
‘I dunno. When the Clarice I remember used her giant imagination box, she accidently created a demonic creature and it destroyed her house and tried to kill her.’
‘This shines some light on her self-esteem,’ Phil added.
‘Anyway, the imagination station – what does it look like?’ Dee asked. ‘What exactly are we searching for?’
‘Not sure really,’ Tim said.
‘What?’ She grabbed his arm and slowed to a stop.
‘Well, I’ve never actually seen it,’ Tim said. ‘Only a drawing. But I suspect it’ll probably have a square bit with all the computer stuff in it, then another glassy bit on top which, I guess, will have a brain inside – a copy of my brain, to be precise. Then a reader. Also, I’m fairly sure I saw a wire, so it needs to be plugged in? Charged up maybe?’
