Time Rocks

Chapter Eight

  My dad was delighted when I told him about my meeting with Sir Mackenzie Carmichael. The magic words, student grant, had him purring like a pussy-cat. The fact that I could have been white slaved, or sold off for body parts didn’t seem to occur to him. For a week, he was grinning and telling me what a clever girl I was. It was spooky.

  I kept out of the house as much as possible, and soon realised I was being followed. I went to the police station and complained. They denied having anything to do with it and promised to look into it for me. I didn't hear from them again. It was just the same as with Jack, they had nothing to say.

  Waiting for me on my PC one morning was an email from Professor Baldwin, but still nothing from Chloe. The professor wanted to meet me at Devizes Museum that very day. I had to cycle like crazy to make it on time.

  The museum is an intimate, friendly place, staffed by a team of eager volunteers and employees. They are always delighted to see you, and keen to make sure that you see what you came for. Frankly, it’s not ideal for a secret rendezvous, unless you have the nerve for lying to sweet ladies of a certain age.

  Looking like a miniature gothic cathedral, the museum's entrance is sandwiched between Georgian houses in a street that has probably not changed in two hundred years. Trying to appear casual, I approached the reception desk.

  ‘Can I help you, dear?’ This from a steely eyed Miss Marple clone.

  ‘No thanks – err – thanks no.’

  ‘What would you like to see, dear; the bronze age jewellery? It’s the finest outside London you know.’

  ‘No, it’s OK thanks.’ If I told her I'd come to meet a fifty year old man whose T-shirt proclaims that he does it in the dust, I was sure I would never give her the slip. I almost ran down the corridor to escape her. In his email, the professor had said he would be waiting in the Stonehenge gallery. Unfortunately, I had run off in the wrong direction and had to slink back past the receptionist to find him. The Miss Marple clone smiled at me, and had the good grace not to look smug.

  The professor was waiting, pretending to peer closely at a display of flint axe heads. He looked fraught and weary. ‘I should have told you when you came down to Stonehenge last week,’ he gasped, greeting me shiftily, as if he expected spies to leap out of my shoulder bag. ‘Thanks for coming. I think I’m going mad. I keep imagining that people are following me everywhere. It's ridiculous.’

  There was plenty I could have told him about that, but I kept quiet. He led me to a small writing table, drew two chairs up to it and set his briefcase down on the floor. ‘Sit. Did I thank you for coming? Yes, oh good. I’ve not been back to my camper van since I last saw you. I just walked away - abandoned it. It’s still at Stonehenge. I saw a bus and jumped on. It took me to Swindon. I got a train home from there.’ He leaned back in his chair and gazed miserably around the display gallery. ‘I live in Bristol, not - err - Swindon. I’m – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be going on like this to you, but you’re the only one who might believe me.’

  ‘What is it?’ I felt sorry for him. I wanted to hug him or something. He looked terrible. I supposed that his life so far would never have contained such moments of stress and worry. He was a long way from academia and seemed quite out of his depth.

  ‘I am not being very rational I’m afraid,’ he said, pulling himself up in his chair. ‘My wife asked me why I'd caught the train and where was the camper van. Do you know what I did? I lied to her. Why would I lie about it? I told her it was in the garage for repair. Later, she rang the University purser’s office to ask if we could charge the van’s repair to the project. Mona’s very careful about money. Now they all want to know what’s wrong with it, and am I going mad?’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Picking up his battered briefcase, he set it on his knee and patted it like a puppy, as if to calm it before unbuckling its fastenings. ‘I found something. I’ve been hiding it for days. I should have shown it to you when you came.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Binoculars!’ He paused, studying my reaction then went on. ‘Binoculars in the late Mesolithic layer, just like the thing Jack found. It’s genuine. I’ve done soil tests. It’s not a trick or anything, I’d swear to it. They were deliberately buried there five thousand years ago. The layer was Mesolithic, but it had been disturbed and had Neolithic ingressions.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It means somebody in the early Neolithic period dug a hole that went into a Mesolithic layer and buried a pair of twenty-first century binoculars.’

  He groaned and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘I haven’t slept. How do you think this will look at the Royal Archaeological Institute? Can you see it written up in the journal?’

  ‘Did you really find them there?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they were actually there - in the ground. I mean they really do exist - you haven’t made it up?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t.’

  ‘Then it doesn’t matter what The Royal Archaeological Institute says. I bet they're a bunch of old ruins anyway. Let 'em do all the tests they like. Load 'em with an embarrassment of facts. They won’t change facts – they're scientists.’

  ‘You don’t imagine that I'd put my name to such a discovery?’

  ‘Why not? Of course you must. You’re exactly like Jack. That’s what he was like when he found that thing, only it was you that he was scared of. Now it's your turn and you're scared of some old archaeology institute. Truth is truth, science is science. Surely, you of all people carry the weight and authority to face up to it. Besides, look what happened to Jack when he didn’t.’

  Gosh, I don’t know where all that came from, but I told him straight. He just took it too, without a whimper. He sat there nodding and staring gloomily at the table. I patted the back of his hand. ‘Can I see them?’

  ‘Only the lenses survived, and some oxidised conglomerate – mainly aluminium and some sort of plastic.’ He fished in his briefcase and pulled out a photographic enlargement about A4 size. It showed misty looking lenses, some fabric impressions in the chalky earth, and what was clearly a brass belt buckle made in the image of a snake. I recognised it immediately, and threw up over the museum’s polished floor.

  The receptionist lady appeared in an instant with a glass of water and a box of tissues. A scholarly gentleman followed moments later with a mop and bucket. Normality was quickly restored. I glanced at the pair feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself, but they could not possibly understand my shock at seeing that buckle in the photograph. It belonged to the strap on Jack’s binoculars. Even the fabric impression was recognisable.

  The pair smiled at me and left without recrimination.

  The professor took my arm and led me away on the pretext of giving me some fresh air. On my way out I apologised seven million times to the receptionist.

  Outside in the quiet street we walked towards the town centre looking for a cafe or pub. Even so close to the town centre there was little activity in the street. We eventually found a teashop. It was empty. The professor chose a table at the back of the room and ordered two teas.

  ‘What was that? Are you sickening for something? You look OK now.’

  ‘Are you ready for this?’ I said, hardly able to say the words.

  ‘What is it? Tell me, and believe me after the last couple of weeks I’m ready to believe almost anything.’

  ‘I recognise it. I know that buckle. I recognise it - even with all that chalky mud on it. I’d know it anywhere. It’s Jack’s.’

  Professor Baldwin raised his hands and ran them over his mop of white hair. He blew a sigh through gritted teeth. ‘Oh my God. How? It can’t ... Are you sure? How?’

  I peered at the photograph and allowed my imagination to fill in the colours of Jack’s tatty old green and purple fabric strap on his binoculars. ‘There’s no doubt about it. The design of the buckle, the width of the strap, and the weave of the fabric, it all fits. It’s Jack’s. It's a mes
sage – a cry for help. He wants us to help him.

  The professor sighed and lowered his head into his hands. ‘Oh my God, I knew it – from the moment I unearthed them. This is terrible.’ He looked about the cafe and tilted his head trying to get a view passed an open door into a kitchen. ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Yes, look at the fabric impressions.’ I placed the photograph on the table between us. ‘I see this sort of tape every day at school. I’m certain this impression was made by binding tape. We get it at school for tying hockey and cricket equipment grips. Jack had pinched a bit for his binoculars.’

  The professor looked around, becoming more edgy by the second. ‘What do you make of it? I mean, I quite realise that we both know exactly what this indicates, impossible as it might seem. The thing is - for some inexplicable reason I cannot bring myself to utter the actual words.’

  ‘You mean time travel.’

  ‘Oh my God, I knew it,’ he spluttered, clutching his forehead. He stared in silence at the teacup before him, and I wondered for a moment if he had stopped breathing. ‘Do you realise what this means?’ he asked, in an angry whisper, as though it was my fault.

  ‘Yes, it’s time travel. It’s good news. It means that if we can get some really clever physics boffins to work out what happened we can get Jack back.‘

  ‘If only it were that simple,’ he said. ‘No, think about it, Tori. Think what time travel would actually mean to the world. It’s a disaster, an absolute disaster. World order will crumble. People will lose what little freedom they have, because the - err – the authorities will do what they want for their own benefit – and claim it's for our own good.’

  ‘But you could stop wars before they start, you could go to the future and get the cure for cancer, you could make sure that we’re doing the right things about global warming, or better still go back and stop it happening in the first place …’

  ‘No no, that’s all idealistic nonsense, Tori. It won’t be like that. Governments will fight over this more than anything – even religion. Do you realise that time travel makes whoever controls it incredibly powerful – invincible even? Oh sure they could stop wars, but only the ones they want to stop. They would manipulate outcomes, destroy regimes, expunge any ethnic group, religion or political view they didn’t happen to like, and worst of all, none of us would ever know about it. It would be as if it never happened. We would all go on doing what we believe we have always done, even though perhaps only a split second before – things were entirely different.’

  ‘But professor, we now know that it does exist. We both know it. The photograph and your soil tests prove it. We can’t change that. We can’t make it not exist. It’s happened, it’s a fact, and it’s here right now.’

  ‘We have to kill it off.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The professor was a nice man, a mild man, a scholar for whom history and its lessons were real and vital. ‘Why? What are you suggesting?’

  He hunched over the table, his face close to mine. ‘We have to forget all about it. Get rid of the evidence. Clean it all away and never tell a soul.’

  ‘But what about Jack? This could be his chance to come home. But apart from that this is far too important. This is for the world, for the millions who are suffering. This could stop all that. Why does it have to be a bad thing? Maybe the world can handle it. It’s up to us to make sure no single authority or nation owns the secret. We could announce it on the internet. Give it to the United Nations or something. You can’t just bury it and pretend it never happened.’

  I was on the edge of tears. I felt all wound up and scared, but excited and lots of other things too. I don’t know what I felt like, but I felt like it, and it was making me crazy. He was making me crazy. It seems that whatever happens it always ends up shoving Jack further into the background. This was his chance to come back, but the professor was saying ditch it, bury it, hide it.

  ‘We must tell the police,’ I said. ‘But first we should tell as many scientists as we can before the police or the Government can shut us up, like they did about Jack and the silver thing. We could post it on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and all of them. We can blog it all over the internet. Thousands will see it - millions. The Government won’t be able to stop them. They’ll have to come clean. They’ll have to help to get Jack back home. Time travel will be handled properly, for everybody’s benefit – worldwide.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry Tori. It sounds utopian, and how I wish it would work, but it won’t. I’m older than you. I know about human nature – and believe me, it’s the darkest thing on the planet. It would simply never happen like you say. Greed, fear, and the hunger for power, will crush your fine ideas along with anyone who tried to implement them. We can’t take that risk. It’ll cause chaos if this gets out. Somebody must already have this technology and they're using it. That’s what happened to Jack.’ He gathered up his briefcase. ‘Come with me. My car is round the back. I want to show you something.’ He leapt up from his seat and rushed out of the tea shop without paying. I followed dumbly. The perplexed café owner came after us from her kitchen, demanding payment. The professor, too agitated to hear her, rushed blindly across the quiet street.

  A van parked at the kerbside revved its engine and pulled out sharply. It accelerated down the road gathering speed. I recognised it. It was the same dark green van that had tried to run me off the road.

  Again the café owner shouted to the professor, louder this time, protesting that he hadn’t paid. The professor stopped and turned to face her, flustered and apologetic. Reaching into his pockets he searched for the coins to pay her, oblivious to the van bearing down on him. I shouted a warning, so did the café owner, but he just stood there in the middle of the empty road looking at coins in his palm. The van hit him full on, sending him up into the air. It swerved and screeched to a stop, then reversed at speed, bouncing over the professor’s prostrate body. It crashed into parked cars. The driver scrambled out and ran past me towards a parked motorcycle. His face was hidden behind a ski mask. He reached the bike leapt astride it and started it up. For a split second I saw his face as he ripped off the ski mask and pulled on a black visored crash helmet. It was the merest glimpse, but it was all I needed. I had seen that face twice before; once as a young, fresh faced student photographed at some Mackenzie Carmichael Foundation project in Africa, and in the flesh as I had pushed Jack’s little brother on the swings in Devizes’ park. The motorbike roared by me at top speed heading for the main road and escape. I felt the driver’s eyes burning into me from behind the black visor.

  I turned back to look at the professor’s crushed and bloody corpse. A woman carrying a red and yellow haversack was screaming madly. She leapt at the driver’s door of the van, her arms reaching out as if to embrace it. As she touched it the green van exploded in a ball of flame. The blast picked up the café owner and flung her into me with brutal force, sending us both flying backwards in a shower of hot metal and glass splinters. We hit the pavement and rolled like rags to crash into the café's shattering frontage. My first reaction was to drag myself across the pavement to reach the professor’s briefcase. Inside it was the evidence he had died for.