by Peter Ward
“Well, they can,” Eric interjected, “if we keep sending the same Time Reps back in time to conduct tours of the fire over the same few days. But we’d risk them being spotted in two places at once. Not the best scenario if you’re trying to keep the whole thing a secret.”
“It isn’t fair on them either,” Tim added. “It would be like Groundhog Day. Can you imagine living through the same day for years of your life?”
Geoff could imagine this actually. Sounded a bit like the last seven years of his life, watching the same daytime chat shows every afternoon.
“So how does time travel actually work?” Geoff said.
Eric looked up.
“What do you mean, ‘How does it work?’” he said.
“I mean, is it complicated?”
Eric shut his eyes and sighed.
“You could say that,” he said. “Do you know much about the quantum physics? How the whole universe is actually a complex type of hologram?”
“Not really. Can you explain it to me?”
“Not a chance,” Eric said. “It would take me two years of continuous talking just to explain how to manipulate quantum entanglement to send a photon back in time by one nanosecond, let alone organic matter. Forget it.”
“Oh go on,” Geoff said. “Can’t you just sum it up?”
“Sum it up?” Eric said. “Sum it up? The founding theories behind what makes time travel possible aren’t something I can just ‘sum up!’”
“Keep your voice down,” Tim said, putting a hand on Eric’s shoulder.
“But I’ve travelled through time now,” Geoff said. “Surely I’m entitled to know something?”
“No!”
“Just a little bit?”
Eric shut his eyes again and let out a deep breath.
“Can you drive?” he said.
“Erm … I’ve got a licence.”
“And do you know how to build an internal combustion engine?”
“No.”
“Well there you go, then. This is the same thing, only a hundred billion times more complicated. Trust me—explaining the rules of time travel to a time traveler would be like explaining the rules of golf to a golf ball.”
Geoff got the feeling that if he continued to pursue this line of questioning much longer, Eric would most likely take the analogy one step further and hit him with the nearest club-like object. He looked aimlessly up and down the street and tried to think of some way of changing the subject.
“Ah,” Tim said, pointing toward a young man heading towards them. “Here’s William.”
Geoff watched intently as William approached, curious to see what another Time Rep looked like. As it happened, William looked like a perfectly average guy—he had no real distinguishing features, wasn’t particularly handsome, and had all the mod cons you would normally expect to come with your standard human being: hair, eyes, arms, legs—everything about him was just … normal. He was short: maybe two or three years younger than Geoff. The only thing remotely unusual about him was the fact that he was dressed as a peasant, but Geoff guessed this was probably due to the fact that he was a peasant. His face was little bit grubby, his lips were chapped, and his thick hair had a few bits of straw stuck in it, as though he’d been rolling around in a barn earlier in the day.
“Good evening everyone,” he whispered, looking cautiously over his shoulder and motioning the group to huddle round. “Greetings, and welcome to the seventeenth century. My name is William Boyle and I will be your Time Rep for the duration of your stay in London.”
“Watch and learn,” Tim whispered to Geoff. “William is very good.”
“The year is 1666,” William continued, his voice crackling with anticipation as if he was telling a story around a campfire, “and the time has just gone ten o’clock at night. In just over two hours, a fire will start down Pudding Lane in the bakery of Thomas Farynor. At first, the threat of this fire will be ignored by senior authorities, but over the next four days, it will spread across the whole of London: tearing through the Royal Exchange, devastating St. Paul’s Cathedral, and stopping just short of the court of Charles II, who is the King of England at this present time.”
“My goodness,” one of the tourists said. “Will we be in any danger?”
“None whatsoever,” William replied. “There were actually very few recorded deaths from the Great Fire—the main casualties came in the aftermath, with tens of thousands of people left starving and homeless. As long we all stay together, you’ll all be able to experience the fire in a safe, educational, and exciting way.”
“He’s very well-spoken,” Geoff said. “He should be on the radio.”
“Some of the earlier Time Reps required a little coaching,” Tim said. “William responded very successfully.”
William looked over the group and noticed Tim and Geoff talking.
“Will you all please excuse me for one moment?” he said, walking over to speak to them. “Why Tim, my good friend,” he said, shaking Tim’s hand. “Good to see you again!”
“William, I’d like you to meet Geoffrey Stamp,” Tim said, slapping Geoff on the back. “He’s the guy I told you about a few weeks ago, remember?”
“Ah yes—this is the one you were hoping they’d pick to be the rep for the twenty-first century?”
“That’s right.”
“Then I take it he was successful?”
“Yes, he was. In fact, it’s his first day today, so I thought I’d bring him here today to see a good Time Rep in action. Kind of like an induction. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not at all,” William smiled. “After everything you’ve done for me, how can I say no?”
“Hey—I didn’t do anything,” Tim said, looking like he was about to blush.
“Nonsense—Tim was the man who helped get me this job,” William explained to Geoff. “Without him, I don’t know what I’d be doing now.”
“I do,” Tim said. “That’s exactly why I chose you.”
“So you recruited this guy too?” Geoff said.
“Not recruited,” Tim corrected him. “I told you—I don’t hire people. I only hunt out potential Time Rep candidates, make them ready for the role, and then put them forward for consideration. Whether or not they actually get the job is entirely up to them.”
“So how many Time Reps have you found in the past?”
“Twelve, including you,” Tim said.
“Twelve?” Geoff said. “But … isn’t that quite a lot considering how many years it takes before we’re ready? I mean, you were looking after me for how long? Seven years?”
“That’s true, but I’m usually taking care of at least two or three at any one time, at various points in history. That’s why I always had to leave home for a few days now and again—if I wasn’t with you, I was usually with one of my other candidates in another time period.”
“I see …” Geoff said. “So all those times when you came home dressed as a Victorian, you told me you had a friend who kept holding these weird fancy dress parties. Had you actually been back in time to visit one of your other candidates?”
“You got it,” Tim replied.
“And all those boring charts,” Geoff said. “Were they …”
“Space-time continuum analytics,” Tim said. “I use them to keep track of any paradoxes or loopholes that might emerge in the timeline as a result of making contact.”
“Huh.” Geoff smiled. “Sounds like quite an interesting job when you think about it.”
“Oh I love it,” Tim said. “I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to see a Time Rep candidate grow over time. To see someone considered to be useless by society proving that they are capable of so much more. It’s extremely satisfying.”
“Well, I suppose we’d better get a move on,” William said, turning his attention back to the group. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the fire is due to start just after midnight, and I suppose you’re all ea
ger to see a bit of the old London before it goes up in flames. Just a final word of caution—please be mindful of your conversations when we’re out in public. I don’t want to hear anyone talking about last night’s Hoverball game for instance, OK?”
The group let off a quiet laugh and followed William as he led them out of the alleyway.
“Great costume by the way, Mr. Stamp,” William whispered as they stepped onto the main street. “Nice to see someone did their research.”
Most of seventeenth-century London looked as though it had been inspired by a badly played game of Jenga. Indeed, Geoff found himself nervously looking up at the tall wooden tenements to either side of him as he followed the tourists down a series of narrow streets, unsure as to how safe these structures really were. Most of the buildings were made entirely of wood and were so top-heavy and haphazard in their design that he was amazed they weren’t already collapsing around him. One thing was for sure: the impending fire would certainly succeed in bringing these buildings down to the ground, where gravity had obviously failed.
“Now, this is a typical London street,” William said, turning to face the group. “Notice how all the buildings have a very narrow footprint at ground level but gradually increase in size towards the upper stories. In the seventeenth century, overcrowding was a real problem, and as you can see, some people would go to any means necessary to give themselves more space to live in.” He pointed up in the air. The two timbered houses to either side of the street were so wide at the top that they were practically touching, as if the owners were having a competition with each other to see who’s structure could be the most dangerous.
“Shall we move on?” William said, turning on his heels and leading the way through a bustle of pedestrians towards Pudding Lane.
In the absence of cars, buses, cyclists and overzealous people working for charities, Geoff was somehow expecting seventeenth-century London to be a much quieter place than the city he was used to. But this was not the case. Even though it was nearly midnight, the streets were still filled with merchants, prostitutes, peasants, noblemen, and many more people. Some were dressed in such a strange way that Geoff found himself unable to guess what they really did for a living, a bit like people who worked in PR.
He was curious to find out from William what it was like to be a Time Rep, so he walked ahead of the tourists and caught up with him.
“Erm … hello,” Geoff said.
“Ah! Mr. Stamp,” William said. “What do you think of London? Magnificent place, don’t you think? Pity it won’t be here much longer.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” Geoff replied, not knowing whether he found William’s overenthusiasm for everything a little irritating. “I’m from London as well, actually.”
“Really? What’s it like? Has it changed much?”
Given the entire place was about to burn down, Geoff didn’t think this was a particularly intelligent question. Did William expect it to still be on fire or something?
“I think they’ve made a few improvements here and there,” he said, stepping over a large pile of horse manure. “Electric lighting, proper drainage, wider streets, an underground railway system—little things, really.”
“Sounds delightful,” William said. “I might go and visit it one day.”
“You’re allowed to visit other places?”
“Oh yes. I’ve been on plenty of holidays to different time periods. The Wild West is my favorite—late nineteenth-century America.”
“So I take it you enjoy being a Time Rep?” Geoff said.
“Oh, it’s marvelous,” William replied, looking over his shoulder to make sure the group were still following him. “Simply marvellous. Before I became a Time Rep, I had no food, no money, and no home. But now …”
“…now you’re rich with a beautiful wife and a massive house in the country?” Geoff said optimistically.
“No, no,” William said, leading the group round a corner. “I can’t ever get married because I was never supposed to get married in the first place. If I did, I’d be interfering with someone else’s destiny. And I’m not allowed to have a home either because I’d be living somewhere that would have belonged to someone else. The same goes for money—if I had any, I’d be buying things someone else should have been buying.”
“Whoa,” Geoff said. “You’re telling me we don’t get paid?”
William shook his head. “Did they not explain that to you?”
“No.” Geoff narrowed his eyes. “For some reason they decided to leave that part out …”
“Don’t worry,” William said. “It’s really not so bad.”
“Are you sure?” Geoff asked. “Isn’t the fact we don’t get paid … actually a bit shit?”
“You’ve got to understand—before I became a Time Rep, I had absolutely nothing.”
“But you’ve still got absolutely nothing!”
William shook his head as if Geoff was somehow missing the point.
“You should have seen me back then, Mr. Stamp. I was riddled with disease, barely able to walk—the only way I managed to stay alive was by eating any dead rats I could find in the street. Then Tim found me. Now, I’m given food whenever I need it, and I can travel to different time periods whenever I wish. They even inoculated me against last year’s outbreak of bubonic plague. This job might not pay me anything, but it’s a damn sight better than the way I used to live. It saved my life.”
“Yeah—that’s great and everything,” Geoff said. “But I still don’t like the idea of doing all this for free.”
“Think of it this way,” William said. “Your payment may not be in the form of gold or silver, but you do get the satisfaction of being part of something special: of meeting all these fantastic people, teaching them about their past. Given what you might have been doing with your life otherwise, isn’t that payment enough?”
“Not really,” Geoff said. “I can’t exactly go into a shop and say, ‘Listen, I don’t actually have any real money, but I do have a very satisfying and worthwhile job. Please can I have a new television?’”
“What’s a television?” William asked.
“A television is something you can use to dry your clothes on,” Geoff replied. “They’re really handy.”
It wasn’t long before they arrived at the bakery of Thomas Farynor, which looked so rickety and unstable in its construction that you’d be forgiven for thinking the architect designed it on an Etch A Sketch. It reminded Geoff of one of those crooked houses you sometimes got at funfairs: the ones where you go in, stagger along some sloping corridors, fall down some disproportionately sized stairs, look at yourself in a bendy mirror, and walk out again feeling as though you could have got more value for money just by walking around your own house drunk.
William had huddled all the tourists together in a dark corner of the street. From here, they were out of sight but had a perfect view of the building. Geoff looked around. Unless he was mistaken, there was another group of tourists with their own Time Rep hiding across the road and another group gathered on a balcony overlooking the street. He remembered what Tim had said about the number of Time Reps they had covering the Great Fire of London and wondered how many other tourists from the future were hiding nearby.
“Here we are,” William whispered. “The bakery of Thomas Farynor. At this moment, the Farynor family is fast asleep upstairs. But in a few seconds, a single burning ember will fall out of the fireplace downstairs and set fire to a stack of papers on the floor. The burning paper will drift around the whole room, spreading the fire to the rug, the curtains, the furniture, and eventually the whole house. I’m sure you know the rest—within days, this fire will destroy the whole of Central London, even leaping over the River Fleet to threaten the adjacent town of Westminster.”
“Is there any chance I could grab a loaf of bread from there before this all kicks off?” Geoff said. “I’m a bit hungry.”
“Absolut
ely not,” Tim said, placing a firm hand on Geoff’s shoulder.
“You’re too late anyway,” William said, pointing at the building.
Geoff looked up. A bright glow had begun to emanate from the window.
“I don’t mind if it’s toasted,” he said.
Geoff was surprised at just how quickly the fire was able to spread—within a couple of hours, the whole street was burning, as if the blaze had somehow convinced all the nearby buildings that it was terribly fashionable to be on fire these days and that they should join in. Thomas Farynor and his family had been trapped upstairs in their house but had managed to escape from their bedroom window to the building next door. Unfortunately, their maid had been too scared to follow them, and the tourists watched uncomfortably as she became the first victim of the flames.
By now, a large crowd had gathered to witness the blaze, which had also caught the attention of London’s fire authorities. They arrived at the scene on several wooden carts with water tanks in the middle and two long pumping handles to either side.
“What are those things?” Geoff whispered to William.
“That’s the very latest firefighting contraption,” William replied. “They use it to pump water out through a hose to put fires out.”
Geoff thought about this. Essentially, what he was looking at was a seventeenth-century fire engine. There was, however, one fundamental design flaw to these machines: a flaw you would have expected to be ironed out in the conceptual stage—these ‘fire engines’ were made of wood, and if Geoff remembered correctly, wood was particularly good at catching fire. If the inventor of these machines was up for an award for using the most inappropriate building material, the only way he could have lost was if he was up against someone who had chosen to make a space shuttle out of asparagus.
Some of the firemen were arguing with a group of homeowners on the adjacent streets about something. Geoff tried to listen through the loud roar of the flames.
“Don’t you understand?” One of the firemen shouted at a blacksmith, “The fire will continue to spread unless we pull your house down! Grab everything of value from inside and get out of our way!”
