TIME QUAKE (24 page)

‘These people aren’t about to help us! Please, Miss Anjali, let us leave while we can!’

‘You’re all right,’ Anjali said to him, motioning at him to calm down. ‘No harm done. He’s only a kid.’ She turned to Sam who was still staring, glassy-eyed, at Tom. ‘I ain’t seen the Tar Man in months. He disappeared – right after he’d hired a helicopter to come to this place. I was hoping you was going to tell
us
where he was.’

‘I think it best,’ said Montfaron, ‘that I take you to see Kate’s parents and Dr Pirretti without delay.’

‘You
are
from the eighteenth century, ain’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Montfaron. ‘As you have been so open with us, I shall not deny it.’

Anjali nodded, satisfied. ‘Thought as much. So, do you know Vega Riaza, then? You know, the Tar Man?’

Montfaron raised his eyebrows. ‘The Tar Man and I shared neither the same decade, nor the same country, nor, I am relieved to say, the same acquaintances . . .’

‘Only asking,’ Anjali grinned. ‘Vega’s all right once you get to know him . . .’

While the children played hide and seek and gathered more dry kindling for the bonfire, the grown-ups talked in earnest. Mrs Dyer was listening with one ear but kept looking anxiously back towards the farmhouse, hoping to see that Montfaron had persuaded Sam to come and join them.

‘Has Tim admitted leaking the story to the US press?’ asked Dr Dyer.

‘No,’ Dr Pirretti replied, ‘and I’m still hoping it might blow over. Even if Tim
has
approached journalists directly, the serious papers aren’t going to be fool enough to print the story without proof and confirmation from NASA. All we’ve got to do is to continue to deny everything.’

Mrs Dyer pulled a face. ‘Anita! What newspaper editor would show restraint if there’s even a remote possibility that someone’s discovered time travel? And after what the whole world has just witnessed, how long do you think it’ll be before people start putting two and two together? Sooner or later all hell is going to break loose, you know it will.’

Dr Dyer and Dr Pirretti exchanged glances. Dr Pirretti tore up a handful of grass and scattered it in front of her. ‘In which case we’d better get moving while we still can.’

‘How long do you think it will take you both to build another anti-gravity machine?’ asked Mrs Dyer.

‘Two weeks?’ said Dr Pirretti. ‘Maybe.’

‘At least,’ said Dr Dyer. ‘But with both of us suspended from
duties, the biggest problem will be getting hold of the materials. I might have to resort to breaking into my own lab.’

‘Ah.
That
, at least, we don’t have to worry about,’ said Dr Pirretti.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that Inspector Wheeler is going to lend us a hand.’

‘Inspector Wheeler! You’ve been in contact with him?’

‘Yes. He’s been looking into something for me. I got an email, the same day that the
New York Post
published a piece entitled
Is time travel possible?
The writer preferred to remain anonymous. They had contacted the journalist who wrote the piece. He told them, in turn, that it was
our
anti-gravity project that was implicated in the rumours . . .’

‘You mean Tim actually told them it was
us
?’ exclaimed Dr Dyer.

‘How else would the journalist have known?’

‘But what was the email about, Anita?’ asked Mrs Dyer.

‘They suspect that a man they’ve recently got to know actually comes from the past. They’ve even attached a couple of photographs of some guy in New York.’

‘How strange!’ said Mrs Dyer.

‘It’s bound to turn out to be a hoax – but in the circumstances I asked Dan Wheeler if it would be possible for him to check the identity of the sender.’

‘Dan?’ said Dr Dyer. ‘So you’re on first name terms now!’

Dr Pirretti laughed. ‘He’s kind of sweet – in a gruff, Scottish, don’t-mess-with-me sort of way. But the point is, while I was talking to him about the email, I told him about our decision to build a second replica of Tim’s machine. I also mentioned how tough it was going to be to getting hold of the materials. And straight away he offered us his support.’

‘That’s excellent news!’ exclaimed Dr Dyer. ‘It makes a change to have a policeman on our side!’

‘I know. He even said that if necessary he’d go to the NCRDM management and confiscate laboratory equipment “for analysis”.’

Mrs Dyer smiled at Dr Pirretti. ‘Well done, Anita!’

As the summer afternoon wore on, long fingers of violet shadow started to creep down one side of the valley. Crickets chirruped, feathery grasses rippled in waves across the fields, whilst, overhead, larks called anxiously as the children strayed too near their nests, picking blue harebells and scarlet poppies. Unseen as yet by the three adults sitting in a circle around the growing pile of logs and twigs, four figures were approaching them from the farmhouse and an unmarked police car had just drawn to a halt in the drive.

Mrs Dyer stared absently at the beauty that surrounded her. But she saw none of it. Her shoulders hunched and her eyebrows were knotted together in a little frown.

Dr Dyer leaned towards her. ‘Penny for them,’ he whispered.

Suddenly Mrs Dyer sat up straight and looked up at her two companions. She looked as if she had finally come to some kind of decision. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you ever since Kate came back the first time – but there’s been so much else to worry about that I haven’t wanted to add to it. And in any case, I’m still not sure whether it was my imagination or not . . .’

Dr Dyer looked sharply at his wife. ‘What is it? Is it to do with Kate?’

Mrs Dyer described how she thought she had seen Kate moving faster than a human being could possibly move and how Kate had been entirely unaware of what was happening to her.

‘We’d just done the milking. It was beginning to snow – you know how much Kate loves snow. One minute she was behaving perfectly normally and the next she was flitting about as fast as a
bat. No faster than that, a humming bird . . . Far faster, at any rate, than is normal.’

‘Now that
is
weird,’ said Dr Pirretti. ‘Are you sure it couldn’t have been a trick of the light – something flickering perhaps?’

‘Well, exactly, it’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself. I wondered if I was just imagining things – after all we’d been under so much stress. But you see, Kate then asked me why I’d been staying still for so long – but I
hadn’t
. I realised that relative to the speed at which
she
was travelling, it must have seemed like
I
was standing still. Of course, I didn’t tell Kate what I was thinking.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me, for goodness’ sake?’ cried her husband.

‘What could you have done about it? Look, I suppose I doubted the evidence of my own eyes. It was like she’d been . . . disconnected from normal time. She was moving so quickly she was blurred – any faster and I think she would have disappeared altogether.’

‘And she didn’t notice anything?’

‘No, nothing. And am I the only one who noticed a change in Kate before the Tar Man carried them both off? There was something about her appearance that reminded me of a colour photograph that is beginning to fade – even the red of her hair seemed less intense. Oh, I don’t know . . . it was all very subtle, nothing dramatic.’

‘I didn’t notice anything,’ said Dr Dyer.

Mrs Dyer looked relieved. ‘Oh, I hope you’re right. The imagination can play such strange tricks.’

‘I noticed it, too,’ said Dr Pirretti.

Dr Dyer looked crestfallen.

‘What could be happening to her to cause such a thing?’ cried Mrs Dyer.

‘I suspect it means that time travel is having a physical effect on her . . .’ replied her husband.

‘My – alternative self – has a theory,’ said Dr Pirretti.

Dr Dyer gave her a sharp look which made Dr Pirretti hesitate.

‘A theory about Kate? How does she know about Kate if she’s in a parallel world?’ asked Mrs Dyer.

‘In the same way that she can sense me, she can sense Kate. If you accept the possibility that parallel worlds exist, it doesn’t require a great leap of faith to believe that there might be some kind of link between them. She believes that Kate is
pivotal
to finding a solution to all this. The first time event happened in our world. Change things here and the rest follows.’

‘And because Kate belongs to the original world, she has the power to change things?’ asked Mrs Dyer.

‘That’s my
alter ego’s
theory . . .’

‘And can she talk with Kate?’

‘She tells me she is trying to.’

‘So she’s definitely alive?’ cried Mrs Dyer joyfully.

Dr Dyer opened and closed his mouth, torn between conflicting emotions.

‘I know, I know,’ said Dr Pirretti. ‘Beware of false hopes. But for what it’s worth, Andrew, I am a hundred per cent certain that – no matter how ludicrous it seems -I
am
able to communicate with an alternative me in a parallel world which would not have existed were it not for our little fiasco with an anti-gravity machine. And this other Anita Pirretti is equally convinced that she is on the verge of being able to communicate with Kate.’

‘All right, I agree to suspend my disbelief for a minute,’ said Dr Dyer. ‘Tell us about her/your theory about what is happening to Kate.’

‘She compares what is happening to the universe to what is happening to the atoms in Kate’s body . . .’

Mrs Dyer’s face creased into anxious lines. ‘Kate’s
atoms
?’

Dr Dyer took hold of her hand. ‘Remember that this is to be taken with a large pinch of salt . . .’

Mrs Dyer withdrew her hand. ‘I’m fine! Go on, Anita! I’m listening.’

‘Okay. We know that left to its own devices gravity would slow and then reverse the expansion of the universe, ultimately squeezing everything down to a single point where even time itself would stop. But this isn’t happening. It seems that something is countering it. And that something is pushing the stars and galaxies apart so that rather than the expansion of the universe slowing down, in fact the expansion is
accelerating
, with the distances between galaxies becoming greater and greater . . .’

‘And although we don’t yet understand what that something is, we’re calling it dark energy,’ said Dr Dyer.

‘Exactly. And dark energy appears to be acting as a counter-force to gravity. This battle of the forces seems to be shaping the way the Universe expands, the way galaxies and stars move –
and
, according my alternative self, how the atoms in our bodies behave.’

Suddenly Dr Dyer stood up and started to pace around. ‘Of course!’ He turned to his wife. ‘You know how I always said that what puzzled me in all of this was why the anti-gravity machine chose the precise moment that Kate and Peter bumped into it to become a time machine? And I said that it must be something akin to oxygen making a flame burn more brightly?’

Dr Pirretti started to nod her head. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘Could it be possible that there are circumstances in which
people
can act as a kind of conduit – a kind of
conductor
– for dark energy . . .’

‘Precisely the conclusion my alter ego came to,’ said Dr Pirretti. ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it?’

‘And if that
is
the case,’ continued Dr Dyer, ‘it would be more accurate to say that people are powering the anti-gravity machine than it would be to say that the anti-gravity machine is transporting passengers across time . . .’

Squeals of laughter suddenly carried over to them on the warm breeze and they all turned to watch the children chasing each other in the meadow.

‘My alternative self has another theory,’ said Dr Pirretti. ‘She believes that some people are better conductors of dark energy than others. Using her logic, Kate, for instance, is a particularly good conductor. She likens it to copper being a better conductor of electricity than rubber. Kate is copper – and my instincts tell me that the Tar Man is, too. Peter, on the other hand, seems to be less sensitive to the side effects of time travel which makes me think he could be a much poorer conductor.’

‘I can see her reasoning,’ said Dr Dyer. ‘She would argue that in Kate, the balance between gravity and dark energy has become unstable – dark energy is getting the upper hand. And it’s the excess of dark energy in Kate that makes her susceptible to slipping out of the normal flow of time.’

Dr Pirretti spread out her hands in agreement. ‘Exactly – although we can’t yet prove any of this, of course. And I am beginning to suspect that the reason I am able to communicate with a parallel world is that I, too, am a good conductor of dark energy. Perhaps we all have the capacity to do this.’

‘You’re seriously suggesting that we can all communicate with our alternative selves in parallel worlds!’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know! But think of it this way – and there’s been a lot of speculation about this: imagine parallel worlds as a
series of ponds. While we are stuck in our own pond we are convinced that there is nothing else – until, one day, we stick our heads above the surface and we realise that our pond is just one of many. And what if all these ponds are linked in so far as they sit in the same earth? Would it be such a crazy idea to think that communication between ponds ought to be possible?’