TimeSplash (6 page)

Patty ran for her life.

Sniper was right, she realised. When their time was up, they would be snatched back through time to the cage at the splashparty. Someone told her that a lob was like throwing a sealed but empty bottle off a bridge into a river. It hit the river, made a splash and disappeared under the surface, but after a while it would bob right back up again. The bottle didn’t jump back up to the bridge, but the metaphor still captured something true about the lob. The bricks didn’t belong where they landed, and pretty soon the timestream spat them out again.

No one ever talked to her about the physics of it all. They just talked in metaphors and similes. Maybe they thought she was too dumb to understand. Maybe they were right. She found herself in a field outside the town. She must have run a couple of kilometres or more. She was so exhausted she was almost falling down. There was a low wall nearby and she made herself jog over to it and flop down behind it before she felt safe enough to stop. She was sure Sniper wasn’t chasing her any more.

This far out from the splashtarget, the effects of the splash were weaker. The ground still shifted, perspectives changed randomly, and trees and animals moved oddly, but the spontaneous self-destruction of buildings, the wild changes in gravity and light, and the horror of seeing people caught in frantic oscillations had been left behind.

She didn’t know where she was and had no idea how to get back to the park with the castle. It didn’t matter. In about an hour she would be pulled back there anyway. Just one hour, before Sniper had her in the cage again. She’d seen him kill a man. What would he do about it? Would he kill her too?

He was armed. Even if he couldn’t bring the shotgun back from 1982—and she had no idea if he could—he had a pistol with him: the one he had used to shoot the little girl. Maybe if she could find a weapon—a rock, a branch of a tree, anything—she might be able to strike him first, incapacitate him, give herself some chance to get away. Maybe she could break into one of the houses across the field and steal a knife or a gun.

But the thought of seeing Sniper again was terrifying to her. She knew she wouldn’t have the courage to attack him. She could imagine how easily he would deflect her blows, his contemptuous laugh as he struck back.

And for the first time since she met him, Patty saw how frightened she had always been of Sniper.

“Jesus!” she said aloud. “You’re one sick chick!”

“
Wie is dat
?” came a tremulous, male voice from the other side of the wall. “
Wie is er
?”

Patty tried to keep still, tried not to breathe, but she could hear footsteps approaching. Not wanting to be discovered from behind by a stranger, she got to her feet and stepped back from the wall. A man of about fifty was at the other side. His weathered face and grimy clothes suggested a labourer or a farm worker. He recoiled from her as she appeared, raising a metal rod he was carrying in a defensive gesture. After an instant, the shock in his eyes gave way to amazement and she saw his gaze move down her body and back up to her face.

She held up her hands, palms outward. “It’s all right. I’m just passing through. I’m on my way.”

He lowered the rod a little, relaxing. “You are English?” he asked in a broad Dutch accent.

“Yes. English.” She remembered what Hal had said about a big market that would happen tomorrow. “I’m a tourist. Yes? Tourist? I’ve come for the market. The—er—”

“
De Bissing, ja
?”

“That’s it. The Bissing. I was just…” It sounded lame but she said it anyway. “I was just taking a walk.”

The man looked around, at the shimmering trees, the undulating ground, the strange lights over the town, and the aircraft still shifting back and forth along its fall to Earth. Then he looked again at Patty, tall and beautiful and outlandishly dressed. She could see his mind working toward an inevitable conclusion.

“I must go,” she said, firmly. “My friends are expecting me. They will be worried if I’m delayed.” She tried to adopt an imperious attitude, the one she had often used to repel the advances of hopeful men.

The stranger didn’t look sufficiently cowed for Patty’s liking.

“What is happening?” he asked. “You have done something?” A sudden anger flared in his eyes and he gripped his rod more firmly. “
Is de magie
? ” he demanded, fiercely.

“What?” Patty was getting ready to run.

“
Bent u een duivel? Een heks
? ”

Patty had no idea what she was being accused of, but she was pretty sure the guy had decided the splash was all her fault. He raised his rod at her, crossing himself and shouting what might have been some kind of curse or exorcism. She turned and fled.

The walk from his new house in Pentonville to the British Museum in Great Russell Street was barely a mile and a half, but Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was beginning to regret not taking an omnibus. The English spring may not have the bitter chill of a Siberian one, but it made up for it in dampness and greyness.

He was still learning his way around the great metropolis and still finding surprises in every street name. There on his left was Hatton Garden and, as he turned into the blustery wind that blew straight at him along Theobold’s Road, Gray’s Inn Field presented itself, with the red brick of Gray’s Inn beyond, huddled grimly against the cold. He considered taking a detour to explore the city, but the miserable weather argued against it. There would be warmer days for such adventures. Pulling his scarf tight around his neck, he pressed on toward Bloomsbury and the Round Reading Room.

* * * *

Patty kept still. Crouching under a bush, in a forest, far from the craziness of Ommen, she tried not to disturb anything that might blur or twitch or jiggle its way back to how it should be. She had run as far as she could and then had walked until she found shelter among the trees. Hiding and waiting for the yankback was her only plan, and she prayed she could make it without discovery. A good half-hour before it was due to happen, she put on her helmet, fastening the neck seal but opening the visor so as not to waste her air supply. She didn’t want to be caught unawares. She didn’t want to face lobspace unprepared as she had done before. In fact, remembering the fear and confusion of that first trip, she didn’t want to face lobspace at all.

* * * *

“Mr. Jacob Richter?” the librarian asked, peering at Lenin above his spectacles. Lenin gave a small nod of confirmation, despite the man’s execrable pronunciation. Lenin had adopted the name Richter some time ago to throw off the Tsar’s secret police. It seemed like a reasonable precaution to use it again.

The librarian riffled through a tray in which a number of documents were stacked. “Ah, here we are. ” He handed it over. Lenin glanced at it. Ticket number A72453. “It is valid for three months, and must then be renewed if you wish to continue to use the reading room. Now, if I may, there are just one or two rules our new readers need to be aware of.”

The man began listing the library’s regulations in a polite, slightly pompous tone. But Lenin was barely listening. From where he stood, the magnificent interior of the Round Reading Room wrapped itself around him in all its glory, from the highly polished reading tables, to the stuffed shelves curving beneath the splendid, domed roof. He admired it with the eye of a serious scholar, eager to explore this Aladdin’s cave of intellectual riches.

The librarian was just wishing him welcome to the library when there was a commotion from the door behind him. The librarian looked past him, and Lenin turned to see what it was.

* * * *

The door to the intensive care unit opened again and yet another nurse came hurrying through. Jay had given up jumping to his feet each time it happened. Then he’d given up even looking expectantly. He gave this one a cursory glance and his heart leapt to see she was coming straight toward him.

“Mr. Kennedy?”

“Yes!” He stood up and the policeman stood too.

The woman was smiling. “We’ve managed to stabilise your friend. It should just be a matter of time—”

She screamed and clutched at Jay as the floor heaved under them. Jay, completely disoriented, didn’t realise he had fallen until a chair smacked him on the head. He pushed himself up, squinting through the pain, to find the waiting room in chaos. Walls rippled and bulged, perspectives changed alarmingly, lights flickered and went out. People crawled on the floor, or staggered around looking for a way out. The big drinks machine near the exit seemed to sag on one side and then toppled over with a crash and a spray of sparks. The young policeman looked wildly about, clearly scared to death. The man suddenly began to move at a frantic rate, as if he had been selectively fast-forwarded. Then, almost as soon as he started, he stopped, standing on the buckled floor, looking dazed and distressed.

“It’s all right,” Jay called. “It’ll be over soon. It’s the backwash from the jump.” He raised his voice to address the whole room. “Just stay still. Don’t move around. It will all be over soon.”

But it wasn’t. It went on and on. It was unlike any backwash he’d ever seen. Similar, in that there were changes in time and space, weird shifts in causality, but the size of the effects, the damage they were causing, and the time they persisted were all new to Jay. He had never even heard of a backwash like this one. Usually they lasted thirty seconds, a minute at the most. The revellers at a splashparty looked forward to them. The slight shifts in time and distance, interacting with a tempus high, gave people the kind of experience that would normally require them to take something much, much stronger. But this, Jay realised, this could be lethal. A window exploded nearby as its frame buckled, showering glass over a screaming woman in a dressing gown. Jay got to his feet and grabbed the nurse. “Where’s Spock?” he shouted. “Where’s my friend?”

The nurse shouted something at him in Dutch and pulled away from him as if he were attacking her. She ran for the exit, but barely made it halfway before she tripped and fell on the undulating floor. Jay moved to help her but she seemed fine, just scared, so he turned back to the door leading to the ICU and headed that way instead. All he could think about was getting to Spock, making sure he was all right.

The building conspired to stop him. The floors shook. It was impossible to judge distances. For an insane moment, everything around him went into high-speed fast-forward, people blurring into smears, the ground and walls vibrating like sheets in a gale. He had barely time to realise that it was he who had slowed, not the world that had speeded up, before he was back in sync with his surroundings. And then the craziness stopped. The last chair toppled, the last bit of glass tinkled from the windows.

He looked around, hardly daring to believe it was over. The woman in the dressing gown lay on the floor against a wall, crying and covered in blood. The young policeman stood stock-still, bewildered and hyperventilating. Distant cries for help came from other parts of the building.

* * * *

When the yankback took her, Patty was just as surprised as the first time. One moment she was hiding in a forest, watching the time on her helmet display, the next she was in total blackness, falling through time.

In a breathless panic, she sealed her visor against the cold, hard vacuum. She breathed in short, shallow breaths until she was convinced there really was air flowing and she wouldn’t suffocate. Only then did she start looking around for Sniper and the others. She craned her neck side to side, down and up, trying to make her body rotate so she could see behind and above her. Whether she succeeded, she could not tell. The blackness was uniform in all directions. She could see nobody and nothing and, this time, there was no tether to tell her there was any living soul nearby. The possibility that she might be spinning, weightless and out of control, made her feel giddy and sick. The empty blackness began to feel like a solid weight pressing in on her. Instead of being in an infinite, open space, she could just as easily be buried alive in that impenetrable black stuff.

Breathing became difficult. She felt as if there really was a weight on her chest. It’s panic, she told herself. Just calm down. It’s all right. You’ll be there soon. But it wasn’t panic, she realised, sucking in lungfuls of useless, oxygen-depleted air. She had run out of air. She was going to suffocate. In a moment of light-headedness, she began to giggle. She’d be dead before Sniper got a chance to kill her. The irony was just so funny!

She smashed into the wire mesh of the cage wall and fell with a bone-jarring crash to the floor. Noise and light hit her as hard as the cage had, blinding and deafening her as she broke the seals on her helmet and tore it off. She lay for a moment gasping for air, pummelled by the commotion around her, before she thought to look around.

Hal’s body lay on the cage floor nearby and, beyond him, T-800 struggled to his feet, removing his helmet. She turned to see Sniper standing behind her, glaring down at her. Behind him, the crowd seemed strangely still and subdued. A wide path was visible in it from the outer fringes to a point about halfway in. Across the field, the unmistakable red and blue lights of police vehicles flickered.