It was mid 1998. The London CIB was in an uproar. Detective Jeff Slade had been missing for two days, and Nicky had disappeared overnight. Kate Grisham looked at the letter which had arrived that morning.
Kate Grisham,
By now you must have noticed the disappearance of your young graduate trainee CID officer Nicky Robson. He will be executed in 24 hours if you have not authorised and implemented the release of Prisoner Alex Crouch.
"He's a convicted political multiple arsonist!" said Kate, "We knew he had an organisation backing him, when we put him away, but I never thought they'd go this far. I just don't understand why they didn't mention Jeff in the letter."
"Maybe they're planning to threaten him as well if we don't give in after they've … after the 24 hours," said Maurice.
"We don't know that Slade was taken by the same people," said Holly, with a faint hint of agitation in her voice.
She was already thinking, planning out how to use her time machine to find out who had taken Nicky Robson and where. She had to remember where she had been the night before, and avoid those places after time travelling, in order to avoid meeting her earlier self. She had almost lost the use of the machine altogether, after the crystal (an essential part of the time machine) had burnt out. Then Jeff Slade had taken a fresh crystal from her old boyfriend Stephen Marlowe's time machine. Her boyfriend had not made it back to his machine in time to prevent being caught in the same loop of infinity. He was reliving the same seconds of time again and again. From his perspective, Marlowe probably wasn't even aware of it, if his memory was constantly reset every time he restarted his loop in time.
Holly didn't even wait for the end of the day. Feigning illness combined with her genuine stress over Jeff Slade's disappearance, Holly went home on 'sick' leave, and closed all of the doors of her apartment, which were wired to complete one of the circuits of her time machine when closed. She put on the watch that counted down the time that she had available, as well as neutralizing the machine's loop of infinity effect. The only catch was that she had to arrive back before the time that she time travelled.
Holly set the machine, and four waves of vertical light ran up the four walls of her apartment, as display screens lit up, showing vector grids and other ways of somehow measuring time travel, which were intelligible only to Holly Turner herself. Her father Frederick Turner had pioneered time travel, and gotten caught in the loop of infinity too.
The machine took Holly into the past. She was still in her apartment, but when she looked at her watch, she realised it was now four pm the day before. She would be leaving work at five pm. She remembered which route she usually took out of the building, and would make sure not to be seen (as a time traveller) on that route now. She was unable to drive there, as her car was already there, waiting for her other self to use it to get home. So Holly quickly hailed a taxi and was taken to the London CIB building. Now all she had to do was watch Nicky Robson leave, and follow him until she witnessed his abduction.
She would never be able to prevent the abduction, but she could learn enough to do something about it. Time would not allow her to change history. Jeff Slade had tried a few times, and failed each time. The principle concerned was called the Chronology Protection Hypothesis.
Holly's adventures in time with Jeff had actually proved that time's law of causality was circular, not linear, as far as the periods affected by time travel were concerned. For example, a man called the CIB one morning, complaining that he had just encountered a madman. Shortly afterwards, they learned that he was dead. Later that day Jeff Slade used the time machine without Holly's permission to go back to that morning and investigate the death. While talking to the man, he learned that Jeff himself (while time travelling) was the man referred to as the madman. This aspect of time would always exist, even though real time Jeff had not known that he would time travel at the time when he'd heard the victim describing the madman.
It was a strange concept to get used to. On television shows and in movies, Holly and Jeff had both remembered the idea that the past wasn't affected in the original timeline. That is, a timeline went one way. Then, if someone subsequently time travelled into the past, they could change it, and create a new timeline. Holly and Jeff had discovered that there was only one timeline, which took account of any time travelling activity. As Holly had once said to Jeff, "I WAS the past."
Holly soon reached the building, and saw Nicky drive out in his car. She followed him to his apartment, and waited. It was the middle of the night, before she saw him being led out of his apartment and into the back of a van by armed men. She followed the van at a safe distance, until it reached a warehouse. She stopped, took out a pair of infrared binoculars she'd brought for the occasion, and watched Nicky Robson being led into the warehouse.
"I have to help him, have to make Grisham believe how I know of it," she thought, "But I can't tell them about the machine."
She had once taken a chance on Jeff Slade, welcomed him into her apartment as a friend, and showed him the secrets of time travel. Since then he had repeatedly persuaded her to use her machine to help him solve cases, not by doing detective work, but simply by going back in time to the scene of the crime and watching the crime being committed. He had taken the credit for several arrests, and her machine had needed frequent part replacement. Just when she thought she'd replaced all of the parts that had burnt out since the machine had been built, the crystal had gone too, and she'd been lucky to get another one.
She had never been that enamoured of Jeff Slade. He was large, rugged, violent, unorthodox, selfish in his attempted misuse of time travel, and there was something untrustworthy about him in relationships too. He had told her he was divorced, yet he showed no sign of grief nor of being emotionally damaged. It seemed clear to Holly, that Jeff Slade had just casually discarded his marriage vows. Marriage was a commitment for life, and Jeff and his wife had not honoured that commitment. The last thing Holly wanted was to involve herself with someone who would not be her husband forever, someone who might leave her in a broken state. Too often she had heard divorcees speak not of wife bashing, not of infidelity which would at least have made one party the victim divorcee, but just of 'drifting apart'. This was wrong, and she believed that the institution of marriage was something worth preserving.
There was one man who seemed softer, gentler, more sincere, intelligent, shy and committed to anything he undertook. That man was Nicky. Yet she knew that so many things would probably put him off her. When they had first met, Nicky had been a graduate trainee officer of the CIB. He was 24 now. Holly Turner was 27. Would he really have cared for her, when his handsome youthful features could easily have endeared him to dozens of teenage girls? To make matters worse, she had physically injured him. While time travelling back a few hours to either prevent or solve her Aunt Mary Chandler's murder, Holly had been mistaken for the killer, arrested and locked in the CIB cell block. When Nicky had brought her supper, she had tried to talk him into letting her go, only hinting at her desperate need to be somewhere in a hurry, as a matter of life and death, without mentioning that the somewhere was her apartment time machine. Nicky had wanted to help her, but begun to explain the legal reasons he couldn't, when she had suddenly kneed him in the groin.
He had later passed it off as a mild 'testicular blow'. Yet the guilt had remained with Holly. Nicky knew nothing of the fact that he was really being attacked by the time travelling Holly Turner, rather than the real time one. After that incident, she had lost all hope of ever being asked out by Nicky. Then her life had been further complicated by her corrupt former boyfriend and Jeff Slade competing for her affections. She wondered if either of those men had ever really loved her at all, or had just been interested in using her to facilitate time travel.
There was still one way to save him. Yet she knew it couldn't begin until the next morning. Grisham had not been given any other news or help prior to her announcement of the letter being dropped off at CIB. So Holly couldn't have contacted Grisham in the past.
Holly lived the same night over. She could not return to her apartment, as she was sleeping there at that time. So she spent the night walking the streets of London. She had slept all night in real time, and was not tired. Besides, when she came out in the present again, she would be in exactly the same state of health as when she'd gone in. It would once again be 10:07 in the morning, a little over an hour after hearing Kate Grisham read out the threatening letter.
From a safe distance, she watched her real time self leaving the apartment block and driving off to work. Then she waited until 9:55, and then ran up, and made it back to the machine in time.
Now she had to convince Kate Grisham. There was only one way to do it, without explaining the existence of the time machine. She called Grisham's office.
"Not now Turner, just get your rest," said Grisham, "I've got Maurice out questioning Robson's neighbours, and with you, Robson and Jeff all not here, I'm flat out taking police business calls on these phones."
"But I know where he is," said Holly, "Slade couldn't explain where he's been, and I still haven't seen him in person, but I now know where Nicky was taken."
The words were not a lie. Grisham would assume that Jeff had been kidnapped too, escaped his abductors and called Holly. She gave Grisham the address of the warehouse. Grisham raided the place with a squad of uniformed policemen, freed Nicky and arrested the abductors.
Holly could only pretend to still be sick, or she would raise suspicion.
In the middle of the afternoon, she got a knock on her door, and opened it to Nicky Robson.
"Nicky!" she said, "I'm so glad you're OK."
"I told Grisham I was fine, but she insisted I take the rest of the day off. I wanted to thank you," he said, and brought his hand around from behind his back, to present her with a nicely bunched collection of white roses.
"They're beautiful, but what did I do?"
"You called Grisham, and told her where I was."
"Maybe you should be thanking Slade," said Holly.
"It's an interesting hypothesis," said Nicky, "But I don't believe Slade had anything to do with it. Grisham thought he was kidnapped with me and escaped. I haven't told her otherwise, but the truth is I know he was never involved. He disappeared days before me, and he was last seen with you. So you must have saved me yourself last night. Did you do it by travelling in time?"
"How? Are you serious?"
"I know you've somehow mastered time travel," said Nicky, "And I won't tell anyone. Without it I might not be here now."
She wanted to tell him, far more than she'd ever wanted to tell Jeff Slade.
"Come in, and see for yourself," she said.
She showed him inside, shut the doors, and let him look at the time machine.
"How did you know?" she asked.
"I kept my interest in science a secret, from the moment I made the choice to get into police work instead of science," said Nicky, "But I read papers on time travel theories, and I began to wonder about some of the things that had happened to us. The way Jeff Slade solved cases could only have been done with extraordinary deductive powers … or with time travel."
"So could guessing that about him," said Holly, "What really got you thinking?"
"Well, since I'm pretty sure you must have time travelled back to learn my whereabouts when I was kidnapped, I should come clean with you about everything too," said Nicky, "There was a day when I visited a place where Slade had been and found an unusual watch. I gave it back to you, remember?"
'The day Slade used the machine after I'd told him not to," said Holly.
"I never told you that I examined it closely first. I was sure it was a component of some system of time travel. I began watching both of you closely after that, sometimes even following you and listening into your conversations. I could swear that on some of the occasions I saw you or Slade, you were actually reported to be simultaneously somewhere else. Then one day I heard you say something about having only a few hours until you had to be back at the machine. Does that have anything to do with Slade's going missing?"
"It has everything to do with it," she said, "He took too many risks when we time travelled, cut our returns to the machine too fine. One day we were using the new crystal. It made him overconfident because it was the first piece of the machine that he'd replaced himself, and the most vital piece. We split up while time travelling. I made it back to the machine with fifteen minutes to spare. I waited and waited for Slade, but he never got back. In the end, I had to go back to the real present and avoid the loop of infinity without him. I've left him in a permanent time loop. His memory keeps resetting and living the same five hours over again. To the people he met in the first cycle of the loop, it's always happening for the first time. In his mind it is too, but it's repeating over and over again, a five hour period from days ago, which Slade can't get out of."
"Why not build an infinity buffer?" asked Nicky.
