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Site content may offend. Content includes horror, murder, torture, lawlessness, military carnage, Anglo Saxon crudities, occasional adult incidents and George Bush |
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"But I'm not going to kill anyone!" said Marion defiantly.
"Kill them," said Terry, speaking to himself in his sleep. "Kill them, Tiger." The siren drew nearer, became louder. Then it was right outside. Then passing ... passing ... past. "Tiger," murmered Terry again, adoringly. Who the hell was this "Tiger" he kept talking about? Marion had heard the name spoken by her sleeping husband at least three times in the last six months, once with a surname attached. Tiger Woods. Certainly nobody she had ever heard of. She had checked the student roster - the university had no student by that name. So what should she check next? She had no idea. But she had to admit she was worried about it. "Vincent did not betray me," said Marion to herself, softly. "And the cops are not coming." The cops had no reason to come. She was not going to kill anyone. She was just going to ... to go back and have a look. And .... Even if inspection was destruction ... well ... if I don't don't then someone else will. Right? For sure. All the academic institutions had declared a moratorium on jaunts back into the past. Whitby Bucks, the Director of the Institute, and other wimps like him, they didn't want to run the risk of some day being accused of being guilty of crimes against humanity. But. Face facts. The design for the Chronoclick is out there in the world. You can download it from the Internet. And it only costs ten million bucks to build one. So the illegals are multiplying like crazy - the shot-of-a-lifetime photographers, the buzz-of-a-lifetime tour companies, the out-and-out grab-the-gold-and-run pirates and looters. The past is a limited resource, and pretty soon it'll be all strip-mined, gone. "We are the good guys," said Marion, firmly, "and we can't let the bad guys have it all their own way." "You are my hero," murmered Terry, softly, rapturously. Marion glared at him. Whoever he was talking about, it most certainly was not her. Marion Varhelm dreamt that night that the mountains dissolved. Became ghosts. The ghosts of mountains walked through her dreams. When she woke, Terry was gone from her bed, and for a moment she panicked. Then she heard him in the shower, and was temporarily reassured. "Wide awake already?" said Terry, when he came back and found her dressed. "Sure," said Marion. That was when her alarm clock went off, signalling that it was two in the morning, and time for her to rouse. But she was already wide awake and ready for action. "Are you really sure that white jeans are the thing to wear on a trip like this?" said Terry. "Hey," said Marion, "I don't tell you what to wear on the golf course. Come on, let's get going." The university cafeteria. Four in the morning. Terry was smoking, disregarding the sign which said NO SMOKING. Apart from his wife, there was nobody else in the cafeteria to get uptight about it. "They're late," said Marion. Luke Ozlam and Suzy Birenda should have showed up half an hour before. But there was no sign of them. "But what if it does, you know," said Terry, as if he had not heard her. "Destroy the whole world." Terry was the kind of guy who worried. What if they did destroy the world of 500 BC by the simple act of visiting it? That would be genocide on a horrific scale. Hiroshima, Dresden and Auschwitz rolled into one. The four of them would be mass murderers. "There's no evidence," said Marion, impatiently, annoyed to be tracking back over the same old ground yet again. "There's the missing machines," said Terry, reminding him. "Pete was on Valkyrie Seven. Or had you forgotten?" Marion had not forgotten. But did not like to think about it. Their old friend Peter Helbrick had been the captain of Valkyrie Seven, the time machine which had rendevoused with Valkyrie Six in the Cretaceous in the year 75,426,991 BC. Valkyrie Six had returned but Seven had not. And subsequence expeditions had found that the year 75,426,991 BC no longer existed. If you visit the past, you ... make it impossible to subsequently access. That's all. Marion was sure of it. Destroy the past? Just by looking at it? How could you possibly do that? Even so, some people insisted that you did. The departure of your time machine supposedly pulled the plug, as it were, and the days you'd visited were flushed out of existence. And any other time travellers unfortunate enough to be left behind would get flushed away simultaneously. But there was no evidence. Marion said as much. "The big problem with all this is that we've left the whole field to the pirates," said Marion. "It's an abdication of responsbility. The leading experts in the whole field are now a bunch of smash and grab artists. It's an abdication of responsibility." Plug the responsibility line. Her husband liked to think that he was a responsible person. That, he said, was why he played golf. It was a sport in which you were totally responsible for your own performance. "Hi, you guys," said Luke, entering the cafeteria with Suzy. Luke Ozlam and Suzy Birenda were dressed for a safari back to the far past. The Four were now together. They were ready to go. They were a team. And are we bank robbers? Grave robbers? Marion, tried to think about it as they filed down the corridor toward the elevator which would take them down to Level Nine. But the cumulative stress of the last several days was making it harder and harder to compute anything. In any case, the time for thinking was over. They were on their way. They were committed. Down on Level Nine, they hit a problem with Vinny Jump, the security guard. "I can't do it," said Vinny, an old man's quaver in his voice, which was barely audible through the grille in the bulletproof window of his security booth. "No documents, no entry." "Look," said Marion. "I've told you. The Director has approved this personally. You don't believe me? Okay, get on the phone and wake him up. You want to wake up Whitby Bucks, feel free. You want to look for a new job, feel free to do that, too." And Vinny gave it, and keyed in the code which opened the portal which admitted them into the jump chamber. Inside, the Chronoclick was waiting. Marion was the first to step inside the time machine. As always, she was offended by the dull lighting and by the muted pink carpet which uniformly covered the floor, walls and ceilings. It was like being trapped inside one of the dreams of a heavily sedated but mentally disturbed roadside motel. A middle-aged motel suffering a motel's equivalent of suburban neurosis, sick of seeing too much fumbling adultery, of hosting too many wearily alcoholic travelling salesmen. Okay, the machine had portholes, so it didn't really look exactly like a motel. Even so, you didn't get any sense of the glamor of time, not from this interior decorating disaster area. It needed to be jazzed up - chrome bright as Christmas baubles, flashing lights and emergency ward bleepers. Instead, there was this fading comfort carpet, still stained in places by the illicit paintball fight which had caused Whitby Bucks to kick Newt and Hillary off the project. "It smells," said Terry, joining Marion. "Biocides," said Marion, as the others came trooping in. Yes: the interior of the ship was still contaminated with the faint, rankling odor of the biocides which had been used on it after that accidental jump back to the time of the Black Death. "What's more," said Terry, "it hasn't been cleaned." In proof of this, he held up an empty yoghurt carton, a gaudy cream and gold creation labelled in English, Arabic and Vietnamese. "Maybe I should go find a vacuum cleaner." "Terry!" said Marion. "No!" But Terry did persuade them to at least take the time for the basic sixty-feature safety check. This alerted them to the fact that all the fire extinguishers had gone missing. On Terry's insistence, they scavenged replacements. Only then did the crew members buckle up and begin the spin backwards. Suzy was the last to buckle herself in. She hit the "go" button and the ship began its countdown. "Ten. And. Nine. And. Eight." And, finally, zero. The ship began to vibrate ferociously. It vibrated its way back through the first minute, the notorious "temporal turbulence barrier", then it began to spin. The plan was to spin all the way back in one big eight-hour hit. Once the backwards spin was underway, all of them very shortly drifted off to sleep, totally exhausted by the unaccustomed psychological stresses of lawbreaking piracy. Five hours into the backward spin, Marion woke. The ship was humming quietly, rhythmically. It vibrated, ever so faintly, as the suppressors fought against the Rimbold effect. If the suppressors failed, then the ship would become a wildly spinning centrifuge, and everyone inside would be mashed against the walls by bone-breaking g-forces. But let's not think about that. Marion unbuckled her safety harness and stood up. A faint unsticking sound alerted her to a problem - she realised she had been sitting on the smeared deposit of someone's old chewing gum, which had amalgamated itself with her jeans. Her brand new white jeans. The others were sleeping, all peaceful but for Terry. "Madarosis," said Terry, blurting the word in his sleep, giving a terrible import to the unknown phonemes. Madarosis? Say what? That's not in my lexicon .... And now Terry was grinding his teeth. Incredibly noisy! Marion put her hand against the carpeted wall of the ship. Stood there, absorbing the vibrations. Steel rope. Her father had been an astronaut. He had died in the explosion aboard the Longship Red. Killed outright, in an instant, while orbiting high above the planet Mars. And this Chronoclick, despite its slightly shabby and reasuringly homey interior decorating, was just as dangerous. At any time, this mission could end as abruptly, technical failure killing them all. "The glamor of time," said Marion to herself, very softly. Right now, she had as much of that glamor as she wanted, even minus chrome and flashing lights. It was another half hour before Marion was able to settle to sleep again. And, when she woke, along with the rest of the crew, the ship was parked in the mistiness of limbo. Beyond the portholes, a grey nothing. According to the ship's Absolute Clock, it was the year 500 BC - exactly. "Someone's been here," said Marion. And felt an extreme bitterness. "Well, it's kind of logical," said Luke, a cheerful pirate. "Round about now, the Romans are just starting to get their act together. They're setting up a little itty bitty R#txtlic in the Seven Hills area. You know - it's a natural time to come to. Let's jump back." So they did. 505 BC. Gone. 511 BC. Gone. 517 BC. Gone. Then 527 BC, and - outside, daylight. The time machine was on a hillside with a view of a wet green world all around. It was raining, dismally. "We've arrived," said Marion. Outside, it was cold and grey. The time machine was parked on a slope amidst a clutch of jumbled hills. The world was incredibly green. "Is this the escape you were looking for?" said Terry. "I keep telling you," said Marion. "I'm not escaping." "Is this really the Pyrennes?" said Luke. "Where else could it be?" said Marion. All going well, the Chronoclick had made slight adjustments to its course as it followed the Earth's complicated orbital pattern backwards through time, depositing them in ancient Spain. But, since there were no satellites overhead, their GPS was useless. And, without a view of the sun - which was hidden by the clouds - they could not work out their location by more primitive means. "It sure isn't Africa," said Terry, and opened the hatch. For safety, Marion and Terry stayed in the Chronoclick while Luke and Suzy went scouting. An hour later, they were back. "We've found a motorbike," said Suzy. "And there's a village in the middle of it." "A village, she means," said Luke. "With this motorbike - " " - right in the middle of it," said Suzy. "You're kidding," said Marion. "I'm telling you," said Luke. "There's a motorbike parked down there." "A motorbike!" said Terry. "But there can't be!" |
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