Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times)

by Mark Lawrence

  I blinked and backed out through the gap, leaving Mia and John to poke the professor. ‘Why on earth did Halligan let you do this to him? You’re lucky the whole lot didn’t blow again! And you know it wasn’t the explosion I was really worried about.’ My main concern had been that an imbalanced attempt could cause a lasting discontinuity in space-time. A crack. And if that happened, I hadn’t the mathematics to predict what might leak through. ‘It was a crazy risk. And who knows how he’s going to be tomorrow morning, assuming he comes out of it at all?’

  ‘Guilder.’ Creed said the man’s name as though it explained everything.

  ‘He’s an old man in a wheelchair.’ Actually, he wasn’t much older than Creed, but I wasn’t feeling particularly diplomatic. ‘I know he’s good at making threats, but he’s hardly going to have you killed, and this, this right here, very well might.’ I waved my hand back at the looming magnets.

  Creed looked guilty. ‘He’s using the carrot and the stick now. You know he’s dying. I think he just wants to see the project realised before he goes. He offered us both a quarter of a million pounds to make this work. We knew we were close. I didn’t expect to be this close, though!’

  ‘Well, congratulations.’ I said it through gritted teeth. I’ll admit some part of me was wondering where my quarter of a million pounds was. ‘Let’s hope Halligan comes through unscathed. At least he volunteered to test it himself.’

  ‘Well, there were a few guinea pigs first.’ Creed looked guilty again.

  ‘What! You’re telling me that—’

  ‘Actual guinea pigs! Not undergraduates.’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  ‘Guinea pigs? Where?’ Mia emerged, followed by John, having grown bored of the frozen professor.

  ‘They, uh, scampered off.’ Creed glanced out the way we’d come in.

  ‘So, it’s done then?’ John asked. ‘We can all zip off to the future and claim our jet cars?’

  Creed shrugged and began to lead us out towards the main lab. ‘It needs scaling up and testing. We need to be very sure that the subject stays locked to the planetary spatial trajectory.’

  ‘The what now?’ John asked.

  ‘He means that if we just sent someone a day into the future, then when they resumed experiencing normal time they would find themselves floating in the vacuum of space,’ I said. ‘The Earth would have moved on, following its orbit around the sun. Clearly Halligan is moving with the rotation of the Earth about its axis, the sun and the galactic core, but if there are even tiny discrepancies they could accumulate to a significant error over the course of years or centuries.’

  ‘Oh,’ said John. He glanced back at Halligan. ‘You know, I wasn’t very impressed to start with, but I have to admit it was pretty cool when we took the chair away.’

  ‘You did what?’ I looked back in. They’d pulled the chair out from under Halligan and left him sitting on nothing. ‘Oh, come on! This is like the moon landing. You can’t have him fall on his arse when he arrives.’ I had to force a smile from my lips, though. Halligan did look pretty funny.

  Creed just shook his head. ‘I’ll take care of it. And you, Nick, should get on with working out how we did this. I can show you the adjustments I made, but you’re right, according to the current theory our power supply shouldn’t be able to advance him more than a second at most.’

  I agreed to get on the case as soon as I’d had some sleep. I hardly needed encouragement. It was the biggest advance we’d had in years.

  I emerged from the wall of partitions, leading John and Mia, and approached the gate in the chain-link enclosure with Creed escorting us.

  ‘You’re right about the reappearing in space bit,’ John agreed as we headed for the exit. ‘That sounds bad. Sign me up for the spatial coordinates thingy when I go to collect my robot slaves.’

  I grinned. ‘The future folk might give you a hot cybernetic girlfriend . . . or they might cook you on their post-apocalyptic barbeque, but either way you won’t be coming back with your bounty. The coming back problem is rather more difficult and requires a lot more power!’

  ‘I thought you said that the universe doesn’t care about now,’ Mia said. ‘Time is just a number in the equations.’

  I nodded. ‘I did say that.’ John may have scraped into Oxford and Mia might have gone to a performing arts college, but there really was no mistaking who was the clever one. ‘But sadly there’s something called entropy and if you try to run time backward then entropy really doesn’t like that.’ I paused at the exit and looked around at the empty workbenches. ‘We should go get some sleep if we want to be back here for eight. You can resume your affair with my couch, John.’

  ‘Halligan really needs to be watched,’ Creed said. ‘I was hoping . . .’

  ‘Nothing doing, my good doctor,’ I said. ‘You’re getting paid two hundred and fifty thousand quid for this. The least you can do to earn it is stay up and keep an eye on Professor H.’

  CHAPTER 3

  1992

  John woke us the next morning, banging on the bedroom door. ‘Wakey, wakey! We’ve got important science to go and see!’

  ‘Uh?’ Mia groaned and rolled over next to me.

  I sat up, yawning. John had never been so keen on science up till now, but I guess since we had torn him from the lovely Carly the night before he was making sure Mia and I didn’t get to roll around in my bed while he languished on the sofa.

  ‘Wakey, wakey!’

  ‘OK! OK!’ I yawned again and stretched, looking down at Mia and wondering whether I really did want to go and see an old professor unfreeze. Mia looked very tempting with one slim arm reaching out across my pillow. The black shock of her hair seemed to beg my fingers to run through it, and traces of yesterday’s make-up had given her panda eyes. ‘Time to get up.’

  Mia was a deep sleeper. Removing the duvet was the first stage in waking her off-schedule. If you didn’t take it beyond arms’ reach she would assure you she was awake and in the process of getting up, then drag it back and fall asleep again in the space of five seconds while your back was turned.

  I bundled the duvet into the chair and stood to see the view. ‘The things I do for science.’

  Mia patted ineffectually around the bed for the duvet, then cracked open one grumpy eye.

  ‘Up and at them!’ I said.

  ‘I can see you’re already up.’ She spoiled a seductive smile by yawning hugely halfway through it. ‘Come back to bed and cuddle me.’

  I almost did, but John banged the door again. ‘Breakfast’s on fire. Little help?’

  We arrived at the laboratory full of tea and burnt toast and with five minutes to spare. John had been very proud of his breakfast efforts. There had also been something that was allegedly scrambled egg but seemed to be made of rubber and eggshell. We’d choked down some of the least inedible parts to spare his feelings. I patted my trousers for my pass and found a triangle of the least carbonised toast instead. I’d been throwing it in the bin when John came back from the loo and I’d slipped it into my pocket to hide the fact. The daytime security guard knew me well enough, but still wouldn’t let me in without a pass. He said that John or Mia wouldn’t get in even if I’d had my ID. I made a fuss until he called through for confirmation. With the deadline for unfreezing fast approaching, the small shouty voice on the other end directed him to ‘Open the damn gate.’ I hurried through apologetically with the others on my heels.

  ‘Whoa, nice Roller!’ John whistled at a gleaming Rolls Royce in the car park – not the typical commuter choice for graduate students and researchers. The chauffeur stared at us over gloved hands, gripping the wheel as if daring us to smudge the wax job.

  ‘It means Guilder’s here,’ I said.

  Sure enough, we found Guilder waiting with Dr Creed in the inner laboratory where Professor Halligan was still motionless, though his chair was back underneath him now.

  When I first met him, Guilder had been a big man with an intimidating physical
ity to him. He’d had that kind of restless energy that makes you think someone is never far from violence. But over the last few years he’d been brought low by some unspecified neurological condition that had gradually robbed him of his strength, wasted the flesh from his bones and sat him slack-jawed in a wheelchair. You only had to look at those stony grey eyes, though, to be reminded that Miles Guilder was still a man to be feared. The fact that Charles Rust stood behind him in a tailored suit, his thin hands on the handles of the chair, only served to underscore the threat that always accompanied the man, even when alone and chair-bound.

  ‘Late to the show,’ Guilder greeted me, his voice weak and breathy where once it had boomed.

  ‘Slightly early by my watch.’ I moved to get a view of the space between the towering magnets. ‘Are we expecting any flashover, Dr Creed?’

  Guilder narrowed his eyes. ‘Flashover?’

  Creed waved the idea away, glancing at his watch. ‘Spare energies released when the subject returns to our timeline. They should be minimal, though this is the longest journey we’ve made so far.’

  ‘And the first human one.’ I was going to elaborate, but Creed looked at his watch again and shushed me.

  ‘We’re expecting him back in twenty seconds.’

  We all looked at Halligan, frozen in his slightly comical horror.

  ‘T-minus five, four, three, two, one!’

  We all looked that bit harder.

  ‘See, now that’s what being late looks like,’ I said. Despite the joke, I was worried. In real life, when you miss a target you tend to be able to assume that you will at least get somewhere near what you were aiming at. If I aim at the bullseye I may miss, but I can be fairly sure my dart will hit somewhere on the board, and even if I’m having a particularly off day I can still pretty much guarantee that it will at least hit something in the pub. When mathematics goes wrong the consequences can be more severe, rather like the dart missing the bullseye, the board and the pub, and hitting a three-toed sloth instead, somewhere in the Bolivian jungle. Or perhaps drifting away through interstellar space off the shoulder of Orion. I had to hope that the error here lay with the experimental side: a calibration a percentage point out, the power surge a touch too high, that sort of thing.

  We watched in silence for what felt like a long time. John wandered off and started poking at abandoned equipment. He picked up some kind of helmet.

  ‘Well?’ Guilder demanded.

  ‘I . . . uh . . . well.’ Creed flipped through his lab book as if a good answer might appear before him.

  ‘What’s the longest this might take?’ Rust asked me. Apparently he had been authorised to ask obvious questions on his employer’s behalf.

  ‘Well, on the assumption that protons decay, we can expect the heat death of the universe to occur in around . . . well, it’s a one followed by about a hundred zeros years. And after that the concept of time becomes somewhat problematic. So before then.’

  With effort, Guilder turned his head. ‘Dr Creed?’

  Creed had retreated behind his workstation monitor. He glanced across at John. ‘Put that down!’

  John, now wearing the helmet he’d picked up, looked rather sheepish. ‘Sorry . . .’

  But Creed was already tapping his keyboard energetically, looking for an answer for Guilder. ‘I—’

  A flash of bluish light, a shockwave and a scream interrupted him.

  Turning, we found ourselves being stared at by a very surprised-looking Professor Halligan, the surprised look enhanced by his hair standing up as if full of static. He looked dishevelled and somewhat disoriented, like a man who’s been through a full cycle in a tumble drier.

  ‘Did . . . did it work?’ he asked.

  ‘It did!’ Dr Creed pushed through us to reach the professor. ‘We did it, Bob! We made history!’ He took hold of the professor’s hand, ostensibly to shake it, but perhaps also to convince himself it was touchable once more. ‘You were one minute and eleven seconds later than expected, though.’

  ‘Hmmm. Have to work on that.’ Halligan got to his feet. ‘Nick! Good to see you. And . . .’ He blinked. ‘You’ve brought friends.’

  John guiltily put the helmet back on the table.

  Creed and I helped Halligan out from the cradling grip of the magnets. We ducked beneath and stepped above the mass of cables to where Guilder waited in his wheelchair, watching with a strange kind of hunger in his eyes.

  We retired to one of the workbenches and a graduate student brought coffees. Guilder whispered something to Rust, who elaborated for our benefit.

  ‘Mr Featherstonhaugh and Miss Jones here will have to sign non-disclosure agreements and then they will have to leave.’ His singular snake-like eye slithered across John, then Mia. The use of their surnames was to leave us in no doubt that he knew who they were and where to find them. He drew out the first multi-page document and offered a pen to John, indicating where to make his mark. ‘Sign here.’

  ‘And don’t come back,’ Guilder gasped. Despite his frailty he still managed to give me a hard stare.

  John and Mia knew better than to argue. They signed their names on the dotted line while the rest of us looked on in stony silence. Well, my bit of it wasn’t stony, but it was silent.

  ‘I’ll be out of here in ten minutes,’ I said when the paperwork was being folded into the inner pocket of Rust’s jacket. ‘I’ll catch you guys at the flat, yeah?’

  Mia gave my hand a squeeze and went on tiptoes to peck a kiss on my cheek. ‘Don’t be long!’

  And off they went.

  A flash of bluish light, a shockwave and a scream.

  Turning, we found ourselves being stared at by a very surprised-looking Professor Halligan, the surprised look enhanced by his hair standing up as if full of static. He looked dishevelled and somewhat disoriented, like a man who’s been through a full cycle in a tumble drier.

  ‘Did . . . did it work?’ he asked.

  Dr Creed pushed forward. ‘It d—’

  ‘Never mind about any of that!’ John, still wearing that stupid helmet, grabbed my shoulder and dragged me around to face him. ‘We’ve been through this at least seventeen times already.’

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ I spoke an unconvincing laugh, annoyed that John couldn’t see how big a deal this was.

  He sighed. ‘You have a piece of toast in your left pocket. Dr Creed was about to say, “Bob, we made history!” And Guilder out there has instructed his pet killer to get Mia and me to sign non-disclosure forms that I guess he must always carry around in his inside jacket pocket. He offers us the use of his pen – it’s blue with gold bands.’

  ‘I . . .’ I blinked. ‘You saw me trying to hide that toast.’

  ‘I didn’t. But I couldn’t know about the other stuff, could I?’

  ‘You could guess them . . . if they’re even correct. You—’

  ‘We go through this every time,’ John said desperately. ‘We have five and a half minutes until it repeats. I’m the only one who remembers anything. We don’t know why. This, maybe.’ He rapped his knuckles on the helmet. ‘It’s got . . .’ He glanced at Creed, ‘. . . field dampeners in it?’ A shrug. ‘Anyway. You’ve been working on a solution using another set of pulses through the magnets.’ John swivelled towards Professor Halligan, who had staggered out to join us. ‘You always ask, “Was it the flashover?” at this point. The answer is “Yes” and Nick gets more done if you don’t make any more interruptions.’ Turning back to me, John continued. ‘You asked me to memorise a set of equations and numbers to get you up to speed with your thoughts so far. Not sure I’ve got them all straight, but here goes.’ He took a deep breath and began to recite.

  It seemed that John had made some errors in his recital, but it wasn’t gibberish and I made sense of it. With practised efficiency he furnished me with paper, pens, a calculator and a workstation, which he unlocked using Dr Creed’s password. I didn’t have time to write any code but the machine linked into the World Wide Web and the Lynx
browser enabled me to navigate through literally hundreds of pages of information held on computers all across the planet. Well, mainly in America. Most of the pages were either academic or pornographic. If you had the time to wait, then all manner of naked women would appear line by line on your screen as if a blind were slowly being lifted.

  ‘Nick! We’re on a clock here!’ John clicked his fingers between me and the computer screen.

  I set to work, knowing that if I didn’t also find time to impress any progress on to John’s mind in an easily conveyed manner, I would have utterly wasted my efforts. I raised my head from the equations John had dictated and gazed across at Mia and the others, who stood in hot debate back by the magnet array.

  ‘About now,’ said John, still at my shoulder, ‘you’re thinking that if this is just going to repeat over and over you could take some time out and experiment. You’re thinking that this is consequence-free play time.’ He tapped the page before me. ‘While that’s true, you told me to tell you that without this reminder you would “take the time to play” on every cycle and never find a solution.’

  I sighed and returned to the sums. Quite what the others did with their five minutes I’m not sure. I was wholly focused on the problem.

  ‘A minute to go,’ John said.

  ‘That was never four minutes!’ I looked up from my page of squiggles.

  ‘You always say that. Now hit me with what I have to remember for next time.’

  ‘OK. Listen carefully.’ And, forcing myself to go slowly, I began to tell him.

  A flash of bluish light, a shockwave and a scream.

  Turning, we found ourselves being stared at by a very surprised-looking Professor Halligan, the surprised look enhanced by his hair standing up as if full of static. He looked dishevelled and somewhat disoriented.

  Halligan opened his mouth. ‘D—’

  ‘Don’t care.’ A wild-eyed John, still wearing that stupid helmet, grabbed my shoulder and dragged me around to face him. ‘We’re in a fucking loop and this is like the hundredth cycle. Shut up and listen.’