Chapter 11
"This is ridiculous!" Kate cried, throwing her hands up in the air and storming over towards Becker. "Why am I the one stuck with redirecting traffic?"
"Because, Miss Barratt," Lester drawled, "you are the least experienced member of the team when it comes to anomalies, your field of expertise is the marine world, of which I'm sure you will agree there is very little in the immediate vicinity, and lastly, with the possible exception of Professor Cutter here, you are the most indiscriminately bossy person I have ever met! Unfortunately for you this still does not put you in charge, therefore I believe you have some angry, lost tourists to deal with."
Lester turned away, signalling that the interview was finished. Kate glared at Becker, daring him to say something, but the soldier merely stared at an indiscriminate spot on the horizon and refused to comment. Kate sighed and turned away, trudging back down the hill toward the base they had set up in the tourist centre. Had she looked back, she might have seen an amused grin creep across Becker's features.
XXXX
Connor stared blankly at the computer screen in front of him. He was bored. Across the room, the anomaly glittered. It was the fourth time they had opened the anomaly that day. First, just for a few seconds. Then a minute. Then ten minutes. Now half an hour. Each time they measured how long it took the anomaly to open, then to close, once they had initiated the electromagnet sequence. It should have been something he was interested in. Nigel and Peta were certainly enthusiastic enough about it. They filled the time between sequences with animated discussions about what might happen next, the tests they could run, the improvements they could make and all manner of other possibilities. Even now, he could hear their excited chatter from the next room.
Connor rubbed a hand across his eyes and let his view wander around the anomaly room. The ceiling had been raised and domed. The floor had been lowered in the middle, with steps rising to a platform a few inches below the imploder and the anomaly itself in the absolute centre of the room. The original walls were long gone and the room itself was now double the width and breadth that it had been. Around the sides of the room, on balcony style viewing platforms, were the computers that controlled and monitored different aspects of the anomaly and imploder. Connor himself sat at the master system that linked to all the others. From here, he could, if he chose, control and monitor every other computer in the room, as well as initiate an emergence shutdown of the anomaly if necessary. It was more a way of monitoring possible problems with the other computers than anything else, but Lester seemed to believe it made a statement that Connor was in charge. Between each computer, a military clad guard stood, watching the anomaly for any incursions. Each guard was a silent sentinel that made Connor feel even more uneasy in the room.
Still fifteen minutes to go.
Connor sighed and slumped back in the chair. The other computers were buzzing away happily, recording masses of information, while their attendants scoffed tea and chocolate biscuits in the next room, which had once been the kitchen. Now and again, the muffled sound of their conversations drifted through to Connor. He could have joined them, of course, but he wasn't in the mood. Instead he sighed and stared at the curving ceiling above him. He closed his eyes and tried to catch up on some of the sleep he'd missed since their arrival.
Suddenly, his phone buzzed, making him sit upright with a start. He shook his head and pulled the phone out of his pocket. Another message. He frowned and opened the text.
"Hey there, sleepy head. Better wake up. You don't want to miss the show!"
Connor blinked, shook his head and squinted at the screen. It didn't make sense. What show? And how did they know he had been dozing? He looked around, scrutinising each of the guards in turn. They hadn't moved. Not as far as he could see, anyway. Not while his eyes had been open, anyway. Any he hadn't really been a sleep, had he? So he would have heard them moving, wouldn't he?
He looked at the text details. It had been sent from a computer, from an internet site. One that anyone could access. Just like the other weird messages he'd received in London. But nobody had been anywhere near the computers in the room. Surely he would have heard them. He glanced at the timer on his screen. Twelve minutes to go. Not long enough to fall into a deep sleep. In fact, once you counted up the time he'd spent reading the message and trying to work it out, barely a minute could have passed from when he closed his eyes to his receiving the text. That was barely long enough for someone to log in, type a message and his details and send it.
Connor frowned. The more he thought about it, the weirder it got. Perhaps it was all just a case of mistaken identity, he thought. Just a coincidence that he'd had his eyes closed when the text arrived. Perhaps it was meant for someone else. Someone completely unrelated to him but with a similar mobile number. That would be it. Just a coincidence.
Connor closed the phone and slumped back in the chair, rubbing a hand over his eyes again. When he opened them, he looked at the screen in front of him. It showed the countdown timer for the sequence and a graph of anomaly activity from the start of the time. Just past the half-way point, there was a spike in the activity level. Connor sat forward and looked at the exact time of the spike. He frowned and opened his phone again, pulling up the message he had just received and scrolling down to the sender details. Suddenly he felt as if everything around him had ground to a halt. He stared at the time on the phone screen, then back at the one on the computer screen.
They were exactly the same.
That was too much of a coincidence.
XXXX
"Are we nearly there yet?"
"Just a few more miles," Helen replied, running her eyes over the man at her side. He was too busy driving to notice. That didn't bother her. "You should see a farm on the left with a large barn in the next field. You can pull in at the farm. We're expected."
"I thought you said the house was in a gully?"
"It is, but we'll be staying in the farmhouse. We don't know how long this will take, and we might not be welcome at the anomaly station."
"Are you sure we're doing the right thing?"
This time he turned to look at her. Helen smiled. Those clear blue eyes had always been one of his best features.
"Absolutely," she said. "Remember, we have history. They don't. They don't know what damage they might do with their experiments. We do."
"And you think they'll listen to me, rather than you?"
"Oh, most definitely. After our early... disagreements, they always treated me with suspicion. You, on the other hand, were someone they... looked up to."
The farm appeared on the left, just as Helen had said, and they drove into the yard. A military clad man opened the door before they reached it and Helen paused.
"This, my love," she said, turning to the blue-eyed man at her side, "is Bob. I hope you get on. You'll be seeing a lot of him now."
XXXX
"What ARE you doing?" Becker called, striding down the hill towards Kate.
"What does it look like?" Kate replied, vehemently scraping at an A-frame chalkboard with the stub of a piece of chalk. "I'm making a sign."
"Actually it looks like you're demolishing their supply of chalk," Becker quipped, stooping to pick up a handful of broken chalks that lay around Kate's feet. She was wearing sandals. "You're feet must be freezing."
"What?" Kate looked down, confused by the change of conversation. "Oh. No. I'm used to it. I never wear socks. Well, maybe if I have to wear wellies or something."
"What if there's snow?"
"Point one: that's when I'd be wearing wellies. Point two: I try to spend my winters somewhere snow free. The diving's great in the Med. at that time of year."
Becker rolled his eyes and stood up, depositing his collection of chalks on the tray under the chalkboard. He took in Kate's appearance. It was such a contradiction to his own: sandals instead of boots, pale blue pedal-pushers and a brightly coloured lace-up top instead of heavy black military uniform. Long, curly black hair that bounced freely in the breeze instead of the short, immobile crop that he wore. She was rash, impulsive, fiery and free-spirited. A complete and utter opposite to himself.
Eventually she finished scratching the sign on the board and stood back. Becker turned his gaze from Kate to the board and read the sign.
"What do you think?" Kate asked, oblivious to his previous scrutiny.
"Yep," Becker nodded, "that should do the trick."
"Good," Kate smiled.
"Only one problem."
"What?"
"That's not how you spell emergency."
XXXX
"Well?" Lester demanded as Abby entered the marquee that was serving as their temporary base.
"Well, it's another Ordovician one, we think," Abby replied. "At least that means we're not likely to be invaded by herds of anything large and dangerous."
"I thought that was what we said about the Silurian anomaly!"
"True, but we haven't found anything with legs here yet, or any sign of them. Just this weird, blue-green sludgy stuff growing on the altar stone below the actual anomaly."
"Is it dangerous?"
"Not as far as we know, no," Abby shrugged, "but I've never seen anything like it and we don't exactly have a botanist in our ranks."
"What? You want me to hire more staff? To do what, exactly: Start up the Chelsea Garden Show of the archaeological ages?" Lester snapped.
"It'll just take us a bit longer to work out what it is. We've taken some samples and they're on their way back to London. There are others being looked at in the field lab, but there's only so much we can do here."
"What do you expect them to find?" Lester threw up his hands. "It's green sludge. It's not the Day of the Triffids!"
XXXX
"And you're absolutely sure none of you sent this?" Connor waved the mobile phone, the offending text message still apparent on its screen.
"Absolutely," said Peta. "I'm the only one with your mobile number and I've been serving up tea and biscuits to this lot. We've all been in here. None of us have left the room."
"That means it has to be one of the guards."
"Hardly. The computers are all locked onto the monitoring program. You'd need one of our passes to access a site like that."
"Then what? Somebody sent me this text message at exactly the same time as the anomaly spiked without being in the same room as either me or the anomaly? That's way too much of a coincidence!"
"Not if they knew in advance that the anomaly was going to spike, and that you would be sleeping," Nigel cut in.
"I wasn't asleep," Connor said, defensively.
"Dozing then, whatever," Peta shrugged. "Nigel has a point though: we spend all day messing about with what is, in effect, a time machine. We should consider the possibility of other people doing the same."
"Other people, like who?" Connor asked, closing the phone. "The only other person, outside the ARC, who knows anything about these things is..." Connor's shoulders slumped. "Helen," he finished. "That woman turns up everywhere! She was after something when we were in Seahouses: the computer program for the imploder. Or me. That cleaner dude wanted me to switch sides and join them."
"Presumably for the same reason they wanted the imploder program," said Peta. "They're trying to control the anomalies, just like we are. Maybe they've succeeded."
"Or maybe someone will, anyway," said Nigel.
"What?" Peta and Connor asked in unison.
"It's a time machine," Nigel explained. "A naturally occurring one maybe, but still a time machine. Who's to say you didn't send that message yourself: a future you coming back in time to draw your attention to the spike in the anomaly activity. Maybe it's important."
Connor groaned.
"That sounds horribly like a paradox," he said. "And they make my head hurt!"
XXXX
"What does our resident Professor say about this sludge?" Lester asked Abby as he stared at the gloopy sample clinging to the sides of the glass tube and glowing faintly.
"He's taken a team through to see if he can find any more sample in their natural habitat."
"Ah, the joys. A team of armed and highly trained, not to mention highly paid, government soldiers hunting gunk. When will the excitement ever end?"
"He wanted to have a look around the environment the sludge came from. Mainly to see if there were any signs of land animals around the anomaly site."
"Well, I can't argue with that, I suppose. When will he be back?"
"He said he'd be no more than an hour."
"Oh goody."
XXXX
"The spike definitely came in at exactly the same time as the message," Nigel called. "All the other activity monitors confirm it. There was nothing else that changed at the same time, though."
"So we're still no further forward," Connor sighed.
"Not this time, no," said Peta. "But we run the closedown sequence in two minutes. After that, we can open the anomaly again and see if the same thing happens."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then... I don't know. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
"Please tell me you've checked what's actually on the other side of that thing," said a voice.
Connor spun round. Nick Cutter was standing on the other side of the room, next to the external door.
"Professor!" Connor sputtered. "Wh-what are you doing here?"
"Lester seems to have everything under control, so I thought I'd come and see how you were doing."
"What did you mean about the anomaly?" Peta asked, frowning. "It's the Triassic one. The same one we went through with the nothosaurus, then had to reopen to try and Get Ms Lewis back. We've opened it numerous times and checked, it's always been the same on the other side. Why should it change now?"
"Well, something has, obviously," Nigel nodded. "The spike tells us that."
"Yeah, but that could even just have been the message arriving that caused that."
"No, we tried that: it didn't have the same effect."
Nick Cutter crossed the room and came to a stop next Connor.
"You're playing with fire with that thing," he said, pointing at the anomaly. "You have no idea what effect you're have, either on this world or the world it leads through to. You could be making these rips in time even worse, destabilising everything around us, every time you open and close that thing."
"Where is this coming from?" Connor stepped back, looking at Nick strangely.
"I just don't think we should be blithely playing with something we know so little about. One day it will turn round a bite us in the backside and we won't have a clue what to do about it!"
Turning on his heel, Nick Cutter stormed out of the room. Connor stood absolutely still for a few moments, shell-shocked.
"Well, I knew he wasn't keen on this project," said Peta, "but I didn't think he felt that strongly about it."
Outside the building, Nick Cutter walked away from Darwin House in the direction of the old bridge. When he got to the middle of the bridge, he turned to look back at the expensive, modern building.
"What was their reaction?" Helen asked, walking up to stand beside him on the bridge.
"The boy in charge seemed quite shocked, but the other one wasn't. The girl was somewhere in between. The one in charge seemed more shocked to see me there though. What did you say his name was? Connor, or something?"
"He looks up to you, my love," said Helen, nodding in answer to Nick's question. "That's important. We need him on our side if our plan is going to work."
"To save the future," Nick nodded.
"And save it from ourselves," added Helen.
~Fini~
(The story continues in part 4: "Oh, You Pretty Things". Coming soon!)