‘So he designed the time machine?’ I said.
Beatrix shook her head. ‘No, there is no way he could have designed this himself. My theory is that he stole it from the Chronological Protection Agency.’
‘The what?’ I shook my head. Could this get any weirder? A Chronological Protection Agency sounded to me like some kind of secret government organisation dedicated to preventing time travel causing the end of the world. That, according to Beatrix, was because that was exactly what the CPA was: a bunch of scientists, cops and government officials all working together to stop people like Stubbins Crick from making a time machine. Like the CIA and the FBI crossed with AM and PM. Only the CPA were allowed to make time machines. And even then, they were only allowed to use them to stop other time travellers.
‘I knew it was highly dangerous for these plans to be in Crick’s hands. I decided if anyone could help it would be the CPA. They had an anonymous hotline so you could report anyone you thought might be trying to travel through time. So I called them. I figured that would be the end of it: he’d be arrested and I’d have to find a new job. I didn’t even know if he had actually built the machine. It turns out, he had.’
Beatrix stopped talking for a second, resting her chin on her hand and sighing. ‘But when the CPA got to his lab, he tried to escape in his time machine and the whole place blew up. Amazingly, no one else was hurt, but Dr Crick had vanished.’
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Where did he go?’
‘The CPA concluded that he probably died in the explosion. His time machine wasn’t ready when he pushed the button and he blew himself up. Case closed.’
‘But you didn’t believe that?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Because of the gravitational fluctuations. For me, it started as that weird feeling in my stomach you experienced too. But then other strange things would happen. I dropped my coffee cup one morning and it slowly floated to the ground, without spilling a drop. Plus my hair just wouldn’t stay down.’
I looked at her wild, wavy hair and wondered how she could tell when it was acting up.
‘I took some measurements and found there were faint gravitational waves coming through space-time from the past. It was Dr Crick. He hadn’t blown himself up, he’d blown himself into the past. Seventy years into the past, to be exact.’
Trixie paused while she waited for my brain to catch up. It was a long pause.
‘So, he came back to . . . now?’
‘He’s trapped here and now, in the past,’ Beatrix said. ‘In fact, you’ve already met him. He’s been using a fake name.’
She told me the name but she didn’t have to. I already knew.
‘Mr E.’14
The three of us sat around the table in silence while it all soaked in. Mr E wasn’t a bumbling magician. He was a time traveller from the future who’d found himself trapped in the past.
Eventually, I spoke.
‘So what did you do?’
‘I tried to tell the CPA what I’d discovered but they told me their readings said it was impossible and that I shouldn’t worry about it. They’re all bureaucrats. They’d rather let the whole universe get sucked into a wormhole than cut a little red tape. So I started working on my own time machine. I knew it was illegal but I had to do something. I had to stop Dr Crick from changing the past.’
‘Your own time machine,’ I repeated. ‘That is so cool.’
‘My first attempt melted a hole in the floor of my apartment and right through the floors of the three apartments below me down into the basement. I told my neighbours my curling iron had overheated. I thought that my second attempt had worked but it could only move forward in time one hour. Also, it took an hour to work, which I quickly figured out is not really time travel but just waiting around for an hour.
‘Finally, after fifteen attempts, it was ready. And I have to admit I am pretty proud of the end result. I only saw the plans once and I built the whole thing from memory.’
She held up her wrist, and the light from the lantern flickered across her silver watch.
‘When I found Dr Crick, he was hiding in the suburbs, pretending to be a professional magician named Mr E. I followed him, trying to figure out what he was up to. It wasn’t until I saw him at the library trying to get that book off you that I worked it out. He wanted to stop you from becoming a magician.’
‘Me?’
‘All of this, everything that has happened,’ Beatrix continued, ‘is because of you.’
This was big news. Bigger than any one person should have to handle. They wanted me to believe Mr E was really a time-travelling evil genius called Dr Crick who was trying to stop me from becoming a magician. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t that.
‘But why me?’ I asked. ‘Why does he want to stop me from becoming a magician?’
‘Because you taught me magic,’ Trixie said. ‘You gave me my first magic trick and got me excited about inventing my own. If it wasn’t for you, I never would have discovered magic in the first place.’
‘So if I never become a magician,’ I said slowly, ‘then I’ll never grow up to teach you how to be a magician—’
‘—and I’ll never grow up to be an inventor—’ Trixie put in.
‘—which means I’ll never get hired by Crick and he won’t get in trouble with the CPA,’ Beatrix finished.
My brain felt like it was going to explode. Or maybe it already had?
If I didn’t become a magician, then Mr E, aka Dr Stubbins Crick, was going to tear a hole in the space-time continuum. That was a big responsibility for a kid. Also, up until a few months ago I was planning to be either a teacher or an actor when I grew up. Now, it turns out I was destined to be a universe-saving magician.
I wish I’d had a bit more time to think about it.
‘Crick doesn’t have any other choice,’ Beatrix says. ‘I haven’t even been born yet. He knows that I learned magic from you because I told him my life story. Stopping you from becoming a magician is all he’s got.’
‘But isn’t he worried about black holes and the whole not-existing thing?’
‘He’s not smart enough to understand the quantum physics. And he’s too hubristic to ask for help.’
I look confused. Trixie leaned over. ‘Hubristic means overconfident.’
They explained that Mr E must have been watching me for months. He’d infiltrated the magic club and staked out the library. The young Trixie thought he might even have bugged my house, listening to all my conversations, making sure he was one step ahead of me. That’s how he knew that I was heading to the library. If the magic books were burnt, I couldn’t learn from them.
It was the same at the joke shop. If he refused to sell me any tricks, I was bound to lose interest pretty quickly. That’s why Trixie was so insistent that I buy that thumb tip, in particular. Every step of the way he had been there, trying to stop me.
‘But why did he invite me to the magic club in the first place?’ I said. ‘I thought he was trying to stop me from doing magic.’
‘What were you thinking when you left the meeting that night?’ Trixie asked.
I tried to remember. ‘That it was all a bit lame,’ I said. ‘That maybe I didn’t want to be a magician after all.’
‘Exactly! He was making sure he had put you off. But it backfired on him, because he spent months attending those meetings and I don’t think he ever realised that the only other copy of the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic was right under his nose in the club’s library.’
‘So, what do you think?’ Beatrix said. ‘Technically, I’m a fugitive as well, since I made my own time machine, so I can’t go to the CPA. It’s up to us to stop Dr Crick.’
There are some ideas that seem too crazy to ever believe. Like how Gary refused to believe people had been to the moon. He just couldn’t get his mind
around it. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you see or how convincing a story is, your brain just refuses to accept the truth. Especially if that truth is that time travellers wanted me to become a magician to prevent cosmic destruction.
‘I think you guys are nuts,’ I said finally, standing up. ‘I’m going home.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Beatrix said. ‘Do you have anything in your pockets?’
‘No, I—’ I said.
‘That’s good. Loose objects can really mess up the targeting system.’
Suddenly Beatrix leapt up, reached across the table and grabbed hold of my wrist as though she was about to steal my watch.
‘I really am sorry,’ she said, pressing a button on the time machine with her free hand. ‘But I’m all out of options.’
The holographic display sprang up in front of us. Her fingers danced through the air, poking at the display. ‘Hang on,’ she said.
There was a familiar popping sound like a balloon exploding in the distance and the whole world disappeared.
12Spoiler alert. It’s Mr E. In case that isn’t obvious yet.
13Seriously, it’s Mr E. I can’t get any more obvious here.
14GASP! (Come on, you totally saw that coming, right?)
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Mystery of Mr E
I have thrown up exactly three times in my life.
The first time was when I was three years old. I accidentally ate a yellow crayon because my mother read out the name on the label, ‘Banana Mania’. I assumed it was edible and gobbled it up. The crayon touched the little dangly bit at the back of my throat and I hurled in Mum’s lap.
The second time was when I was at Gary’s seventh birthday party and had four slices of cake, eight sausage rolls, nine Burger Rings, six frankfurts and a bucketload of creaming soda. I hit the piñata at the exact same moment as I threw up, covering the ground in mini Mars Bars and spew.
The third time was when I travelled through time. It felt like I was a giant rubber band, my whole body stretched almost to breaking point and then—SNAP—I was flung through space so fast I swear I could see the back of my head. It was like every carnival ride I’d ever been on rolled into one and turned up to ten.
‘Oh dear,’ Beatrix said, putting her hand on my back as I bent over and spilled the contents of my stomach all over the ground. ‘Are you okay?’
I opened my eyes and noticed two things. One, a big chunk of pizza from dinner had landed on my foot. Two, even though seconds earlier it had been the dead of night, it was now the middle of the day, and the sun was shining brightly. I looked around and saw that we were no longer at the Funshine Caravan Park. We were surrounded by a handful of pine trees, and there was grass under our feet.
‘Where are we?’ I gasped. ‘What happened?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Beatrix said. ‘But you didn’t seem to believe us. I thought it best to just show you.’
‘Show me what?’
‘The past.’
As she spoke, there was the sound of fire engine sirens blaring. I stepped out of the trees into a wide-open park. On the other side of the park, fire trucks were pulling up outside a familiar building. It was small, white and rectangular, with a single door and a row of windows high on the wall. A group of people were standing outside looking annoyed.
‘That’s the library!’ I almost shouted. ‘We’re at the library. How did we get here?’
Beatrix tapped the watch on her wrist. ‘We can travel through time and space with this. This is the public library on the day you met Mr E for the first time. The day he started the fire.’
The firefighters leapt from their trucks and ran into the library. Even from this distance, you could hear the fire alarm inside squealing. I had the weirdest feeling of déjà vu.15
‘I timed our arrival so that the fire engines would drown out the noise of the machine,’ Beatrix explained as she fiddled with her watch. ‘It is almost completely silent when we leave, but boy does it make a racket when we arrive!’
A few seconds later, the firefighters exited the library with the bald librarian who pointed at the gathered crowd. I couldn’t hear him from this far away or even make out his face but I could tell he was angry. The firefighters walked over to talk to an old man who was standing by the fire engine. Even from this distance I knew it was Mr E.
‘Can’t we just stop him now?’ I asked. ‘Run over there and hit him over the head or something before he even has a chance to cause any trouble?’
Beatrix shook her head. ‘We can’t change history, we’d only make the timeline more confusing, create more paradoxes and make the singularity more likely. We either have to beat him to the punch or minimise the damage he’s already done.’
Mr E was showing the firefighters the smouldering remains of his wallet. One of them took it from him and slowly turned it over in her hands.
As she was speaking to Mr E, I saw a young boy about my age leave the library with a woman I assumed was his mother. He looked over at us, a quizzical look on his face and, without thinking, I waved. He waved back.
Then I began to shake. I knew that boy. It was . . .
‘Is that . . . me?’
‘It is,’ Beatrix said.16
I was staring at my past self. You know how weird it is to look at yourself in old photos? Or hear the sound of your own voice played back to you? Well, imagine how it felt to see myself, staring back at . . . myself.
‘I remember a boy waving at me that day at the library,’ I said, my voice a whisper.
‘And that day is today,’ Beatrix said.
‘If I can remember seeing myself,’ I said slowly, ‘does that mean you remember when you used to be Trixie?’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I can only remember things after they’ve happened. My memories all seem to shift and melt together. And even then, you and I first met a very long time ago. Back when I was Trixie.’
‘I see,’17 I said.
‘So, do you believe us now?’
I did, but I couldn’t say it out loud. ‘What do we do next?’
‘Remember the school fete next Saturday that your dad told you about?’ Beatrix said. ‘There’s a magician coming to visit. You need to be there for that show.’
‘And if I’m not?’
Beatrix’s face turned dark. ‘I honestly don’t know. Maybe it will be just another problem we have to fix. Or maybe it will be enough to throw the timeline off completely. We just can’t take that chance.’
‘Can’t I just become a magician anyway?’ I asked. ‘Now that I know how important it is?’
Beatrix shook her head. ‘Not if you get spaghettified out of existence before you get a chance to.’
I took a deep breath. ‘We’d better get home then.’
Beatrix turned on the time machine and the holographic display popped up. She entered the date and time we’d left and pressed the large green button marked GO.
There was the same popping sound but, this time, I didn’t vomit. My head spun and my stomach felt like it was trying to escape my body through my nose, but I didn’t hurl.
Trixie was waiting right where we’d left her as we stepped out of the caravan. She had her fingers in her ears. The light bulbs were dimming.
‘Is he on board?’ she asked her older self.
I was. ‘What’s the plan?’
Beatrix looked at her watch. ‘For now, you’d better go home. And just carry on as usual until we get in contact, okay?’
And then she did something weird. This strange woman I’d only just met grabbed me and gave me the biggest hug you can imagine. She squeezed me as tight as she could and pushed her cheek against mine. Then she pulled back and held out her hand to Trixie, who took it. With her free hand Beatrix turned on the time machine one more time, pushed GO,
and they both vanished with a pop, leaving me alone in the dark.
I tried to get my thoughts together on the way home. All I had to do was keep everything normal. Don’t make changes to my routine. Don’t do anything weird. Keep my head down at school. Who knew when Mr E, aka Dr Stubbins Crick, was going to show up next, or what changes he’d try to make to the timeline?
I dropped my bike by the front door and slowly opened it, trying not to let it squeak. I snuck inside, my shoes in my hand. As I passed Mum and Dad’s room the door suddenly opened and Mum was standing there.
She stared at me blankly and said, ‘Who are you?’
15Déjà vu is French for ‘I feel like I’ve seen this before.’ Which made sense because I HAD seen this before.
16Remember when I mentioned foreshadowing way back at the start of the story? This is the pay-off. I am very clever. Look at my big clever face.
17I totally didn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY
High and dry
‘Who are you?’ Mum repeated, blinking twice.
‘Who am I?’ I asked, confused.
‘Who is that?’ Dad’s sleepy voice said from the bedroom.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Mum replied.
I felt the blood drain from my face and my hands went clammy. I looked at Mum in horror.
Somehow, Stubbins Crick had wiped my parents’ memory of me. Had he brought some kind of device from the future with him? A mind-blanker? An amnesia ray? Or had he travelled back to before I was born and stopped me from ever being born? But if he had, why was I still here? And why did Mum look so angry?
‘It’s certainly not my son,’ Mum continued. ‘Because no son of mine WOULD EVER SNEAK OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!’
She was shouting now but I didn’t care. I let out a huge sigh of relief.
‘WHERE WERE YOU?’ she shouted.
Before I could answer, Dad stumbled from the bedroom. ‘What is going on?’
‘Nick has been out somewhere and is just sneaking home now,’ she snapped.
Tricky Nick Page 10
