‘So, with that demonstration … you went forward in time? Not back? You came to this year? To 2070? That’s how you found out what was going to happen?’
Waldstein wafted his hand in front of a sensor on a wall, and with a soft hum a section of the smooth granite slid gracefully open. He led them into a small elevator, then touched a screen. Doors closed them inside and then they felt a gentle tug as it began to ascend.
‘No,’ he replied after a few moments. ‘My first demonstration … I was the guinea pig, of course. But I didn’t go forward; I programmed the displacement machine to send me back into the past.’ Waldstein smiled at Maddy. ‘Travelling forward through time is an impressive demonstration, but not half as impressive as travelling backwards. I intended to go back in time to say goodbye to my wife and my son, Gabriel.’
The elevator door slid smoothly open and they found themselves staring out across a small lobby at a plate-glass, floor-to-ceiling window. Through the window she could see the bare trunks and branches of Douglas firs receding downhill towards a river valley, a breathtaking and heartbreaking view. Across the valley, in the distance, she could see the far slope of another peak cloaked in a swirling embrace of clouds.
‘But, unfortunately … I never got a chance to see them.’
He led them out of the elevator. They turned left through frosted-glass doors into an office. There was another receptionist’s desk, a dark green leather couch, a coffee table. Framed paintings hung on the wall. Maddy thought she vaguely recognized one of them: the childlike brushstrokes of a cluster of bright yellow flowers stuffed into a jug.
‘Yes,’ said Waldstein. ‘That’s a Picasso. And, yes, before you ask … it is the original.’ He led them across the office towards mahogany doors on the far side. ‘My personal assistant, Margaret, she was rather fond of his work and wanted something to brighten up her office.’ He made a face. ‘I can’t see the appeal of it myself. Very primitive and naive, if you ask me. But … still, a good investment, I was reliably informed.’
He pushed the mahogany doors inwards and they entered a much grander space beyond. ‘And this is my personal office, my inner sanctum,’ he announced. ‘I hope you’ll excuse the mess. My cleaners and my personal staff … I let them all go home too.’
The room was large. Until recently it had just been his office. But it seemed he was now using it as his makeshift home. A bed lay unmade in one corner, blankets and sheets kicked aside at the end. There were several dirty plates stacked unevenly beside it. An enormous dark mahogany desk sat in front of another floor-to-ceiling window that looked out across what must have once been a spectacular panorama of the sprawling evergreens sweeping down from the mountain peaks. The desk was covered with a mess of dirty clothes, tinned food and more unwashed crockery. Waldstein slowly unzipped his anorak and struggled his way out of the sleeves.
‘I’ve been alone up here in these mountains for the last three weeks. Waiting for the end to finally come.’ He tossed the anorak carelessly on to the desk. ‘And waiting for you to come home to me.’ He looked at her, then at Becks. ‘I was hoping all three of my prodigal children might come. Not just one of you.’
‘Home?’ Maddy looked at him sharply. ‘This isn’t my home. I did have a home … kind of. Back in New York. Before you sent those support units out there to murder all of us!’
Waldstein glanced at Becks. ‘I see you managed to tame one of them.’
‘Yeah. She’s been house-trained. She follows me … not you now. Just in case you’re thinking of giving her any orders.’
He pulled a chair out from beneath the desk and eased himself wearily down on to it. ‘I’m so very sorry, my dear,’ he said. ‘So very sorry that this unpleasantness happened.’
His head dipped and he rubbed his tired face with wrinkled, liver-spotted hands. She realized for the first time how frail and old he looked. It felt like she was looking at Foster’s identical twin. His voice sounded much the same, that soft, cultured, neutral voice. But this was the ‘final-days’ version of Foster, the frail old man that she’d grabbed from the duck pond in Central Park and forced to come with them as they went on the run, heading north to Boston. The man who’d just wanted a few days, maybe a few weeks, of peace before his body finally gave out on him.
‘I got things all wrong. I admit I reacted too hastily.’ He looked down at his hands, rueful and chastened. ‘I regret that I acted pre-emptively … I panicked.’
‘Why the hell did you want to kill us? Why? I thought we were on the same side!’
He sighed. ‘It was your message. You asked about Pandora. No, dammit – you demanded to know what Pandora was. You threatened to not do your job.’ He looked up at her. ‘And that’s when you became a … a problem for me.’
‘A problem?!’ Maddy cried. ‘A problem?!’
‘A risk, then.’ He sat back in the seat slowly, tiredly. ‘You were back there in 2001. You had a working displacement machine. You communicated a message forward in time to me. The next message could have been a tachyon signal! Beamed forward without any thought of caution, right here to me!’
‘We had a right to know what was going on!’
‘Your next communication could have led the international commission right here! Right to my front door. Right to me!’ He shook his head. ‘Roald Waldstein … the famous campaigner against time-travel technology, the man who worked tirelessly to ensure no government agency, no corporation, no tinpot Third-World dictator ever invested resources in developing time-travel technology … and oh, look … ladies and gentlemen, it appears the old man has been secretly meddling with time travel all along!’
‘What else were we supposed to do?’ Maddy retorted. ‘You had us acting blindly. You had us preserving history – a history by the way that has led to this … the end of everything! The least you could have done was tell us why! Why the hell we should be ensuring our own doom!’
‘You had no need to know why. You had a clear brief. I kept it simple. You –’
‘What?’ She thumped her hand down on the desk. ‘My God! You arrogant son of a … Do you know how many times we’ve risked our lives for you? Do you have any idea what we’ve been through? We had every right, from the very beginning, to know why we were frikkin’ well doing all this!’
‘At the time I thought … I decided it would be simpler that way. A very clear and simple mission statement.’ He sighed. ‘With hindsight, yes, perhaps I should have told you more.’
‘Perhaps?!’ She turned away from him. Frustrated. Angry. Tearful. She wandered round the end of the desk over towards the window and watched the last stain of light in the sky disappear. She let her head rest against the plate glass with a soft bump. ‘Jesus,’ she muttered. ‘You ask someone to lay down their life … the least you can frikkin’ well do is tell them why.’
She wiped at her eyes. ‘You handed us the job of ensuring the destruction of all of mankind,’ she uttered. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that it might be a good idea to tell us why?’
‘I never thought that you’d find out that our history ends in this horrific way. I assumed you and Liam and Sal would follow Foster’s guidelines. That you would never travel forward to this time. I assumed … hoped … that your focus would remain entirely on the past, on preserving history as it is.’ He sucked in a long breath and let out a wheezing sigh. ‘You would never have known an end was coming if my work hadn’t been sabotaged.’
Waldstein sighed. ‘One of my trusted assistants, a young man I completely trusted … found out about the end.’
‘And he left me a note in that San Francisco bank vault. Left it for me to find?’
‘Ahhh.’ Waldstein nodded. ‘So … that’s how you found out?’ He closed his eyes. ‘I had my doubts about setting up that resupply location. That was Griggs’s idea. Not mine.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘It was Joseph Olivera, our junior partner in this agency, who attempted to sabotage the project. I don’t know how he found out that the world was going to come to an end in
2070, but he did. The young man should have come to me; he should have asked me why we were making sure that was our fate. I could have tried to explain it to him. But no … he just assumed I was a crazy old man. So, he acted on his own. He decided to let you know … with a note, it seems.’
‘Pandora … the note told us to look out for Pandora.’
‘Pandora, eh?’ Waldstein nodded. ‘A good enough codename for the truth, I suppose: the end of everything. Kosong-ni. He compromised the whole project by doing that. He made you suspect the agency, me …’
‘So you decided to murder us all? Just like that?’
Waldstein looked down at his hands.
‘You could’ve come back and talked to us. Explained yourself,’ said Maddy. ‘Surely talking to us would have been easier?’
‘You don’t understand. Olivera betrayed me back in 2055. Fifteen years ago the situation was very different. The world wasn’t falling apart. There were dozens of monitoring outposts being built around the world. All of them designed to sniff out time travel. And yes … the world was looking very closely at me. I couldn’t just vanish into the past to explain myself to you.’
‘You could.’
Waldstein shook his head. ‘Joseph made his decision. When I found out, I wanted to talk to him. To explain to him … but then the stupid young man stepped into an unverified portal. No density check … the poor fool didn’t even bother to verify if he was transporting into an empty space.’
Maddy had listened to Liam and Sal describe the horrific mess of a man they’d encountered back in 1831. ‘Yes. Liam and Sal came across him. He didn’t live for very long.’
‘You actually met Joseph?’
‘Liam and Sal did. Briefly.’ Without too much detail, she described what they’d come across: the young man fused with the body of a teamster’s horse. An appalling corrupted creation that managed to live for just a few moments.
Waldstein closed his eyes tightly; tears spilled out on to his dry, wrinkled cheeks. ‘Joseph … Joseph … Joseph … you poor fool.’
‘I think it was only a few seconds. He died quickly.’ According to Liam and Sal, the wretched, mangled remains of Olivera must have been alive for five or ten minutes. But she wasn’t going to share that with him. She watched him drop his face into his hands again and sob softly. ‘I’m sorry.’
Maddy gazed listlessly out of the now-dark window. She could see just one pinprick of light, the halogen spotlight that was aimed at the corporate logo. She imagined, a few weeks ago, the chrome-and-glass research buildings, the whole campus, must have glowed with lights.
She broke the silence. ‘So then … things went all wrong when Joseph found out that the world was going to end. And that was back in 2055?’
Waldstein nodded.
‘That was fifteen years ago. So why’ve you waited until now to contact us?’
The old man looked up at her. ‘I don’t know. I was afraid. I panicked. Things had quickly got out of control. I didn’t know if those support units had been successful or not. I just … walked away from it all.’
‘But then you sent this message. When did you send that?’
‘A few days ago.’
‘Why?’
‘Because … no one’s watching any more. Pandora had finally happened. The job was done. Just as they wanted.’
‘They?’ She turned her back to the window. ‘Who’s “they”?’
Waldstein’s wrinkled face suddenly creased with the faintest hint of a smile. It looked like relief. Like the shedding of a long-shouldered burden.
‘Maddy, my dear girl, you won’t believe how long I’ve waited to be able to share this with someone else. How much I’ve wanted to share this with someone … anyone.’
‘Share what?’
‘The answer … the answer to the biggest question of all.’
She shrugged, inviting him to elaborate.
‘Since the discovery of frequency wave-forms, since the invention of radio, for God’s sake … the big question we have been asking ourselves for the last two centuries … are we really all alone?’
‘Are we alone? You mean …?’
‘Maddy, why don’t you sit down? Let me tell you what happened on that very first trip I took in 2044 …’
CHAPTER 48
Roald Waldstein stared at the being that was impersonating his wife, Eleanor. It … she … was standing there before him in this perfect re-creation of their home. Their small kitchenette was bathed with morning sunlight streaming in through a venetian blind, his baby son, Gabriel, burbled in his high chair.
‘… you have to do what?!’
‘We have to act pre-emptively, Roald.’
‘Act pre-emptively? What do you mean?’
‘Complete sterilization of your world.’ She reached out and touched his arm. ‘There is no room for pity or mercy in this matter. Or favouritism. This sanction is absolute. This particular technology is the one science, the ONLY science that cannot be permitted.’
He looked at the apparition of his wife with suspicion. ‘Who … who are you?’
‘As we have said, you can refer to us as the Caretakers … guardians of a kind. Carers. Perhaps it might make it easier for you to think of us as parents. And you – humanity – you are just children, children meddling with powers you can’t possibly begin to comprehend. Tapping into spatial dimensions above the cardinal three in order to move forwards or backwards through time, you don’t yet see that you’re inviting disaster, not just for yourself but the entire universe.’
‘Time displacement?’
Eleanor nodded. ‘A thin and very fragile barrier protects your existence and the existence of countless other inhabited worlds … this entire universe … from higher dimensions. You can think of this barrier as being like a tissue-thin membrane. Every time you pass through it, every time you open a window through it, you are leaving a puncture wound in this membrane that never heals … You are weakening it.’
She squeezed his arm gently. ‘You have to understand, Roald, one day, one too many of these holes will have been punched through it … and the membrane will collapse and tear and everything on this side will be consumed. Absolutely everything!’
‘My God!’
‘That’s why we have to be so strict … so harsh … so brutal, my love. If a civilization stumbles across this obscure science, then they can’t simply undiscover it. It’s a Pandora’s box; once opened it can’t be closed.’
He was staring with growing, wide-eyed horror at her. ‘You’re saying … there are other intelligent –’
‘Yes, Roald. Humanity is far from alone.’
She smiled sadly. ‘And a few … a very small number of civilizations have stumbled across this science. It’s inevitable. And on those rare occasions we have no choice but to intervene.’
‘Intervene?’
He could see a tear glistening on the rim of one of her eyes. ‘There can be no exceptions, Roald. Absolutely no exceptions. There is just too much at stake. We have to remove them.’
‘Remove? You … you mean …’
‘There is no kind word for it. Genocide. Complete erasure. Complete annihilation.’
He suddenly felt light-headed and nauseous. He reached for a chair, pulled it out from under the table and sat down heavily on it. ‘My God … w-what have I done?!’
‘We’re not monsters. If we could, if there was any other path, we would take it … but I’m afraid in this situation this is the only way.’
Waldstein lowered his head into his hands. ‘What have I done? Oh God, Ellie, what the hell have I done?!’ He started to sob.
‘Listen to me, Roald …’ He felt her arm rest across his shoulders, holding him, comforting him. ‘Listen carefully to me, Roald,’ she whispered into his ear, ‘this time round, there is a ray of hope. There is a way that something can be salvaged.’
He looked up at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We have glimpsed into your world’s near future,
and that’s all we dare do … the smallest pinprick through the membrane … and we’ve seen what happens. In just twenty-six years’ time – in the cosmic scale of things, that is just the blink of an eye.’
‘What? What happens?’
‘You will destroy yourselves. In just a few years’ time, humanity will engineer its own Extinction Level Event.’ She stepped round him, pulled out another chair and sat down beside him. ‘And it’s not a complete extinction. Some – a very, very small number – will survive. And they will struggle; trust me, they will struggle in the aftermath. Struggle to rebuild. Just like the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome … after the bubonic plague, you’ll be set back by hundreds of years. And quite possibly someone on Earth may one day, like you, Roald, stumble upon this dangerous science. But we believe we can give you this chance for now. But … we need your help.’
‘Help?’
‘Twenty-six years, Roald. A lot can happen in such a small blink of time. You are the only human who’s done this. You are the father of this technology. We need you to steer things. To ensure the science you’ve discovered doesn’t spread, doesn’t proliferate. The membrane can take some damage, but only a little. Do you understand? A pinprick here … a pinprick there … but, God help us, not mass migrations of people forwards and backwards.’
‘I … I can destroy what I –’
‘No, you can’t. The groundwork is already accessible. The theoretical seeds were out there before you made your prototype. But you’re the first to make it work. There’ll be others coming in the next two decades. Others following in your footsteps, building their own prototypes. You won’t be able to stop that happening. But … you can work to preserve this timeline. Make sure it isn’t derailed. Just for these few years – keep things on track.’ She smiled. ‘I’m sorry, my love, that’s the one small chance we can give you. The alternative is absolute and complete.’
Waldstein looked up at Maddy. She was staring back at him, ashen-faced.
‘So,’ he continued, ‘that’s why I set up this little agency. That’s why you, Liam and Sal had to keep us on this track.’ He rubbed his tired, aching hands together in his lap. ‘And they’re watching us. If you hadn’t corrected all the contaminations that you had, put things back on the right course … then they’d have had no choice. They would have stepped in and wiped out this world, erased every last trace of our existence from this universe. Forever.’