Anachronist

by Andrew Hastie

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There are many factors. Your time is seen as a hostile territory: electricity, nuclear weapons, intrusive technologies, social injustice, terrorism and of course you’re very close to the Frontier.’

  ‘Frontier?’

  ‘The point at which the future and the present meet — where the known meets the unknown. We call it the Frontier. The younger members of the Order seem to be drawn to it, but many of my generation are scared of getting too close. They prefer staying further back in a nice safe posting in the past — they’re a bit chicken shy.’

  ‘Chicken shit,’ Josh corrected.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Josh imagined what it must be like to be posted to the other end of history, just hanging out in caves and hunting with spears. He couldn’t remember if the dinosaurs had died out before there were humans — he wished he’d paid more attention in his history lessons.

  ‘So we need to get to the twelfth of December 11.866,’ the colonel said, leafing through the encyclopaedia.

  ‘You mean 1866?’ Josh corrected him.

  ‘Yes, but the Order work to a longer timeframe, one that starts at the end of the last Ice Age, over twelve millennia ago — so our years have an extra digit. It is more commonly known as the holocene calendar.’

  The London Underground in 1866 was very different to the dirty, overcrowded, outdated version that Josh was used to. The train carriage was more like a decadent dining room than a commuter train: the seats were covered in a sumptuous velvet pinned in place with brass buttons, the electric lights were ornate brass lamps with glass shades — there were even curtains at the windows.

  The colonel had made himself comfortable in one of the seats. He was pretending to read today’s edition of The Times while puffing happily on a pipe. The very thought of smoking on the tube was so alien to Josh that he found it hard to believe it was allowed — yet nobody seemed to care. In truth, the colonel’s smoke was nothing in comparison to the grey, soot-stained clouds pumping out of the steam engine and filtering through the vents in the windows.

  Josh blinked back the sweat from his eyes. It was sweltering inside the tunnels. He couldn’t understand how the other passengers, who were mostly men in black coats and bowler hats, were able to stand it. There were a few women in heavy-looking dresses delicately wafting themselves with Japanese paper fans.

  It was a surreal feeling to be standing in a carriage with a crowd of people that you knew would most probably be dead in the next few minutes. Someone within this group was a terrorist, their suitcase full of explosives, waiting for the right moment to detonate.

  Josh studied their faces, looking for a sign of guilt or a facial tic that would give them away, but found that most people looked pretty pensive on this train. He had to remind himself that in this time people bought tickets just for the novelty of taking a ride — rather than actually going to a destination. It was a carnival attraction for many, or so the colonel had told him when they’d appeared at Farringdon.

  While they had been waiting for the train, the colonel had briefed him on the ‘Fenians’ — Irish freedom fighters who were planning to attack the railways as a protest over the occupation of Northern Ireland. The fact that Josh was standing less than ten metres away from a real terrorist was making him nervous. He’d contemplated testing the button on his new watch, but the colonel caught his eye and given him a reassuring wink. Josh could see the pistol handle nestling inside his jacket, as if to say he had it all under control. He assumed that bombs needed fuses and timers in this era; there was no such thing as remote detonators, so the Fenian had to be on this carriage.

  His first suspects had been a couple of navvies standing at the far end of the compartment. According to their coats they worked for the Thames Ironwork Company. Rough-looking men, their hands were like sledgehammers, scarred and solid from years of manual labour. Each of them carried a canvas bag, the cords of which were wound round their wrists so tightly he could see the red welts where they’d cut into their skin. He ruled them out when they got off at Smithfields, taking all their possessions with them. This left him with what appeared to be a respectable bunch of potentials with very little to separate them. Josh knew they would have to have a case, virtually every one of them did, and he assumed that they would leave it behind and get off at the next stop. The netted luggage racks were full of various valises and leather Gladstone bags, so knowing out whose was whose would be impossible.

  The colonel looked at his watch again. He had been doing it every couple of minutes, like the white rabbit out of Alice in Wonderland. Suddenly there was a loud crash from the next carriage and the screeching of metal against metal as the engineer applied the brakes. Everyone was thrown forward, and Josh found himself in the lap of a young gentleman with a very odd looking moustache. When Josh put his hand out to steady himself, he touched the man’s case.

  His mind caught the image of something odd, a memory of a mineshaft and gunpowder. Josh apologised and pushed himself back up, trying not to be too obvious as he studied him more closely. The man was no more than twenty years old, with a chequered brown suit and derby hat, and he was looking around nervously now, trying to avoid eye contact. He put his hand into the bag.

  Josh nodded to the colonel to indicate that he was sure this person was the one they were looking for, and the colonel smiled as if he already knew.

  The train wasn’t moving, and the other passengers were getting frustrated. There was a general murmur growing among the more disgruntled ones about ‘inconveniences’ and ‘infernal machines’. The colonel stood up and came over to Josh.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked, folding up the newspaper.

  Josh nodded even though he’d no idea what he was going to do next. His heart began to race inside his chest.

  Something happened to the young man’s case as the colonel grabbed Josh by the arm and clicked a button on the side of his watch. Time slowed down. He watched an orange ball of fire blossom from the bag when the bomb detonated inside it. Josh gaped as he watched the destructive force tear apart the body of the man, his body slowly scattering across the confined carriage. The pressure wave blasted the other passengers like dolls caught in a hurricane, and then, just when he felt the heat hit his chest, the world started to vibrate and flicker as time went into reverse.

  [<<]

  In a blink of an eye, they were back in the carriage of two minutes before. The navvies were still on board and the train was gently rocking along the rails. It took Josh a minute to register that they had just jumped back from the explosion, but he didn’t have time to take that in before the colonel nudged him and walked over to the young man in the brown suit.

  The punch completely threw the Fenian off his guard. Josh hadn’t expected something so brutal either. The colonel hit the man square on the jaw, which caused the other passengers to stand back in amazement. It gave the colonel enough time to grab the case and throw it to Josh, who caught it instinctively without even thinking about what it contained. The colonel produced his revolver and waved it at the others, shouting something about being from Scotland Yard. He took the man by the arm and bent it behind his back as the train pulled into Smithfields Station.

  The two navvies, who’d taken a great deal of interest in the commotion, picked up their bags and got off as they had before. The colonel pushed his prisoner out of the carriage and Josh followed with the case. As the train pulled away, the colonel released the man, who immediately ran off down the platform. Josh dropped the bag and began after him, but the colonel caught his arm and pulled him back. Josh turned, half expecting the colonel to be taking aim with his pistol, but the gun was back in its holster. The colonel simply nodded toward the escapee and whispered ‘watch’ under his breath.

  As the man reached the gate near the end of the platform, his body shimmered as if going out of focus and then faded away. Josh scanned the crowd for the man, but he was gone. He looked back at where he had dropped the bag, but th
at too had vanished.

  ‘What the —’

  ‘The paradox of time,’ said the colonel rather smugly. ‘The real mission objective was to find out exactly who carried the bomb onto the train; there were no real leads from the historical data. Once we had identified the culprit, someone — probably me, would go back and stop him from ever being on the train or even involved with the Fenians. Quite neat really.’

  ‘But didn’t this happen, like, a hundred and fifty years ago? How come it is suddenly a crisis?’

  ‘Takes a while to process. Copernicans are thorough if not a little slow.’

  There was a scream of metal on metal again from inside the tunnel.

  ‘Unfortunately we couldn’t stop the other disaster,’ he sighed as he began to walk away from the dust and smoke that came swirling out of the mouth of the tunnel. ‘The first accident recorded on the London Metropolitan Railway. Workmen dropped a load of steel girders onto the tracks. The driver wasn’t able to stop. The train derailed and crushed three people on the train coming in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Can’t we go back and save them too?’ asked Josh as a panic-stricken stationmaster ran past them towards the disaster.

  ‘Not authorised, I’m afraid.’ The colonel tapped where his notebook sat in his jacket. ‘I think we have overstayed our welcome as it is. Time to try out your tachyon.’ He pointed towards Josh’s watch.

  Josh pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to see the dials whirring under the glass. He had no idea what they represented, although one pointer had now moved to a different number. He pressed the button on the side, and the Victorian station twisted away.

  21

  The River

  The study was a strange and wonderful collection of seventies memorabilia. Interspersed between the impressive array of books were photos of space launches and collections of Apollo mission badges in neat frames. Hanging from the ceiling on short lengths of fishing line were meticulously painted model aircraft. A half-finished Concorde was resting on the upturned box at the edge of his desk and in an alcove was an ancient-looking turntable with a huge collection of old vinyl records stacked carefully underneath.

  The colonel was sitting behind a large desk, struggling with an antiquated typewriter. He’d brought Josh into the study for a debrief on the mission. Apparently, this was all part of ‘normal procedures’.

  It was only now they were safe that Josh realised how late the colonel had left it to pull them back from the detonation. He’d actually witnessed the bomb ignite, saw its devastation in slow motion — the colonel had cut it fine, a little too fine, now he thought about it. It was a different experience to a jump. Time had slowed down and then rewound like a movie. He had felt something like it before, in the graveyard with Caitlin and the posh twat.

  ‘The rollback — a very useful defence mechanism,’ the colonel explained when Josh asked him how they had survived the blast. He was struggling to feed three sheets of paper into the typewriter.

  ‘It gives one a few minutes’ grace to avert, avoid or rectify a bad situation.’ The paper jammed as he cranked a wheel on the side of the machine. ‘It’s a simple panic button. The Mark IV gives you about two minutes. The official term is “induced temporal retrogradation” — most of us refer to it as a rollback, rewind or even déja vu.’

  ‘So I hit this and go back two minutes?’ Josh asked, pointing at the topmost of the two brass buttons on the side of the watch.

  ‘Yes. As I explained before, the other one is set to bring you back to the present, thirty seconds after you left — to ensure you don’t bump into yourself.’ He thumped the typewriter until it released the pages. ‘Damn triplicate forms! What do they take me for? A bloody filing clerk?’ He pulled a paperclip out from between two of the sheets and threw the ruined document in the bin.

  Josh pressed the rewind button and the room flickered as he watched last two minutes roll back.

  [<<]

  ‘So, how come I remember our conversation?’

  ‘Which conversation?’ The colonel went to put the form in the typewriter once more. Josh stayed his hand and pulled out the hidden paperclip from between the sheets.

  ‘The one about déja vu,’ he said, handing back the paper and throwing the clip in the bin.

  ‘Ah. We’ve had that chat, have we? You just tried the Mark IV out I suppose. Fair enough, I would’ve done the same. You’re still travelling forward in your own timeline. It’s a little hard to grasp — Eddington would be able to explain it better.’ He took a fountain pen from his pocket and began to draw a series of lines on the back of one of the forms. ‘I always think it’s best to imagine time as a river, flowing ever forward.’

  Josh could just about make out that the sketch was of a winding river with dots drifting down it.

  ‘Now linears — normal people — are in their own personal boats, floating along with the current. Some sink, others misplace their oars, all eventually fall away.’ He scratched little Xs over some of the dots. ‘But members of the Order experience time in an entirely non-linear way. They have their own streams, which can be diverted away from the main flow: the Continuum.’ He wrote the word along the middle of the river, and then drew lines that looped away to join early bends in the stream. ‘Yet we are still travelling along our own timeline, even when we go back, so we remember everything we experience, at least in most cases.’

  ‘And you can control the direction of this Continuum?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he scowled. ‘I may have over simplified the analogy. It’s more like we’re trying to keep it flowing in the right direction.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘Towards the best possible future of course! Which is a conversation for another day. Now back to the report.’ He turned back to the typewriter.

  ‘So how would you describe the young Fenian’s moustache?’ the colonel asked.

  ‘Fake?’

  At the end of the day, as he lay back on Mrs B’s sofa, Josh was still coming to terms with this new reality. The fact that he’d spent twenty-four hours in 1866 and come back to the same day he’d finished his community service made him appreciate what the colonel meant by tomorrow being a lifetime away. Josh knew that the future was waiting for him somewhere ahead — down the river — but he could deal with it when he was ready, and that gave him a great feeling of relief.

  22

  A Better Life

  His mum was looking more like her old self when Josh went to visit her the next day. He still hadn’t come to terms with the fact that the present was only one day older — even though he’d spent more than forty-eight hours in the past. The colonel had paid him in used banknotes, some of which Josh had to give back as they weren’t legal tender, or at least not since decimalisation. There was also a ‘bonus’ — a guest room where he could stay whilst they continued his training. The cash came to just over £600, and it was burning a hole in his pocket when he turned up for visiting hours.

  ‘Hi, Josh,’ his mother said weakly.

  He could see how drained she was and it made his heart ache to see how fragile she’d become. He’d bought her a box of her favourite chocolates — Malik had a deal going on them; they were fire-damaged stock from one of the shops on the high street which had suspiciously gone up in smoke the week before.

  Her face beamed as she dug through the contents looking for the most precious of them all — the hazelnut cluster. If Josh was lucky, he might be able to get a couple of toffee fudges, but it was always a bit of a gamble.

  ‘So how have you been keeping? Is Mrs B looking after you?’ she asked before popping a whole cluster into her mouth.

  ‘Great. She’s a legend,’ Josh replied. ‘I have some good news.’

  ‘Really, love? Have we won the lottery?’ she asked with a broad smile.

  ‘No, Mum, better than the lottery. I got a job — pays three hundred quid a day.’

  She stopped chewing and looked at him with wide eyes. There were tears for
ming in the corners.

  ‘You’re not working for that bad boy are you?’

  ‘No, Mum. It’s legit.’ Well kind of, he thought. He wasn’t quite sure what to tell his mother that would sound convincing. ‘I’m helping out this antiques dealer. House clearances and stuff.’

  She smiled and went back to her quest for another sweet. He wasn’t sure if she believed him.

  ‘The lady over in bed four told me that her son has a job in the city. Something to do with computers. She says they can earn up to five hundred a day.’

  ‘You know I’m not good with technology, Mum. This is proper work. Look.’ He took out an envelope full of notes.

  ‘Put it away. You never know who is watching.’ She waved her hand at the money. ‘I just want the best for you. I know it’s not been easy.’

  Here we go, he thought to himself. This was always the prelude to the monologue about how they ‘never had any luck’ and wasn’t it about time they ‘got a break’ or the classic: ‘if only their numbers would come in’ they would be able to ‘buy that house on the corner of Chamberlain Street’.

  As she talked, he collected the growing pile of discarded wrappers off the bed, his mind wandering as he helped himself to another of the chocolates. The fire had melted them into strange shapes, and there was a white bloom on them from the heat. Still, they tasted the same, and his mother wasn’t stopping to inspect them before they went into her mouth.

  She always finished with some variation of ‘if only I had never got ill’, and how ‘she should have married Mr Timmins when he’d asked’. Mr Timmins was a parasite who lived a few doors away. He was very welcoming when they moved in, making all the right moves and saying all the right things. Flattering a single mother with a young child wasn’t hard, and he did a good job of pretending to care about them until his mother got ill and then he disappeared without trace.