Instead he flailed back and through a solid object and then through the wall and back and back and he realised that whatever he was falling through it wasn’t physical space, and he thought about what he had been supposed to steal. There had been no mention of this sort of thing at all, just some basic housebreaking and a moderate payoff.
“Go to Lab 5,” Grimmel had said, “and bring us everything you can. All the results, all the theories, every scrap. Paper, too, if there is any. And then set it all on fire.” Grimmel had been very clear the building would be empty, so Morris had agreed to this plan. He was a burglar and an insurance arsonist, not a thug.
So now here was Morris flying back through the air and trying to retro-engineer some highfalutin’ gizmo he’d never heard of and he thought it must be an anti-gravity gun because he was flying, and then he realised he was flying sideways and that meant it was a neutral buoyancy gun and surely no one would bother with one of those. And then he realised that it was some sort of phase thingummajig because he wasn’t physical any more, so maybe it was a brane-gun or an M-theory gun, because he’d seen about those on TV, and then he looked at his watch and it had stopped and when he tapped it the little hand went from three to twelve to nine and he realised that he was flying backwards through time.
A movie star had once told him this was possible, a real movie star, back when he had worked at Pinewood as a carpenter. This guy had said “time travel is real, boy! I’ve seen it! The Prime Minister showed me, because we were buddies before he was shot, they got it out of an alien spaceship in the twenties, long before bloody Roswell, that’s just bollocks, that is, they never had one of those in America.” Morris had always assumed it was a shitload of cocaine talking, but here he was now flying head first through physical objects and his watch was going in reverse and – now that he’d flown through the wall and into the street – the rain was going up into the clouds, and that made for a compelling case. He had to acknowledge that the movie star’s testimony still wasn’t all that likely to be true. He did not believe the British Government had obtained temporal displacement technology from an alien spacecraft and then done nothing with it between the arrival of women’s suffrage and the collapse of the Euro. Although perhaps that sort of time-based calculation no longer made sense to the owners of such technology. It would certainly explain a lot about the way laws got made if parliament was functioning at right angles to time. He wasn’t into that sort of crazy talk as a rule, but the idea seemed to fit the facts.
Morris Ruddle, petty larcenist, watched the world spin back along its orbit all around him. It seemed that his speed – his speed through time – was not constant. Sometimes the people around him looked like people and sometimes they looked a bit carroty, their movements all taking place at once so that they were interwoven strands or worms with a person face at the back (the front, from their perspective).
He wondered if he was getting physically younger. The old man had been yelling some pretty intense language back there, all replete with rage and so on, so Morris felt that whatever he had chosen to do would be fairly unpleasant, but maybe there was a chance that the device he had used was just the first thing to hand and Morris would bounce off, say, 1989 and fall into the world again. He could get really rich, that would be cool, and sleep with sexy people. Much of Morris’s life until now had revolved around the attempt to achieve coitus with people he considered sexy, especially since Maria had left him, but the results were somewhat disappointing. Maybe he’d give his younger self a job, will himself his own fortune, and then jump off a cliff, and the whole shenanigan would never happen – he’d just be Morris Ruddle, rich young dude. That would be cool.
He had noticed that he was not zinging off the Earth into space, which he should have done almost immediately. He assumed that he was either still affected by gravity or by some other attractive force which linked his journey back through time to his own physical life until the moment in the lab. He was therefore unsurprised when he fell into his own house fifteen years ago and saw himself as a poor young dude getting smacked around the head. He reached out and tried to stop it, but he still wasn’t physical, so he floated and fumed at the injustice and the basic, grotty meanness of the beating. It didn’t matter that it was all in reverse, that the hand flew back off his face and arms, that the split lip was brushed away. He knew every moment of it, of every encounter like this. Forwards or backwards made no odds.
“When I’m king,” boy Morris said out loud, and got smacked again. “I’ll have your head cut off,” retrotemporal Morris finished for him, and then shouted it. And then the scene was gone, and he was somewhere else. A supermarket. The kid at the checkout counted items into the bag and said something unintelligible and reversed, and the customer wandered into the aisles to shelve the goods.
Morris wondered if he might just fall back as far as his own birth. Maybe he’d be reborn as himself but with all his memories and he could go through school again but with all the knowledge he had now. He’d still fail his exams, probably, but he’d be very cool and he’d know the future, so that wouldn’t really matter. He’d either shop his parents to the law or cut some sort of deal with them, blackmail them. Deal drugs and get money to hire men to sort them out. There were options, once you knew you didn’t have to take that sort of thing.
But why birth? That was sort of arbitrary, when he considered it. Conception was probably more like it. Maybe when he reached the moment of his conception (yuck!) he’d just fade away, sort of spool himself up and never have existed at all. He considered whether this would count as dying and decided it was somehow worse.
Shit.
He struggled for a while, trying to figure out what he could hold onto which would let him claw his way forwards. He pictured himself climbing up a deep well of time back to the lab. He made pitons in his mind, hammered them into the walls and struggled against the current. It didn’t help.
He passed the moment in question and nothing happened. That was slightly anticlimactic, and also a bit good because it meant he hadn’t vanished into his own past self or disintegrated, but it was also a bit alarming because now there was really nothing to stop him falling and falling. Would he just run out of steam and get bumped out of time in the Middle Ages? The Cretaceous? Into space before there was a planet? The Middle Ages would be okay, he was up to date on his vaccinations and he knew cool stuff about engineering which would seem a little bit magical. A lot magical. He could set himself up as Merlin and live a pretty good life. Maybe he could start a school, find some real genius peasants and one of them could work out how to unstrand him. Maybe being sent back through time like this would give him miraculous powers. He’d be a god back here, a superman, he could joust and throw fire with his hands and rule the world and change everything so that Morris Ruddle would be the inheritor of the entire planet.
He fell through the time of Henry VIII, William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar. He fell on and on back through people who didn’t have names because they didn’t have language. He fell through dinosaurs and fish and amoebae and fire and then sat in space for a really, really, really, really, really, really long time. Or whatever it was when he was flying backwards through time. It couldn’t be time, really, could it, because that was going the other way? Subjective time, for sure. He wondered if he was aging. Would he get hungry or thirsty? Could he starve while he was falling like this? His watch was broken again, which was probably not surprising. It was negative several billion years old, and it hadn’t been an expensive watch to begin with.
He sat there and waited. He got very bored indeed. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he was probably bored for longer than he’d been alive, longer than the entire human race had been alive, longer than every individual member of the human race put together, every animal, ever, had been alive, in total.
But maybe that was just how it felt because he had literally no points of reference at all.
And then he saw the beginning, and wondered if he was going to die now, hitting the beginning of time. He was aware that he might be going a bit mad, because he was so bored, and he was also aware that for the first time ever he wondered whether it would be so bad to stop existing, because he didn’t know what else to do.
He saw the beginning coming at him: the biggest frying pan ever, a slap for being insolent, a car crash. He flinched, and fell and fell and fell. And fell.
He hit it.
The beginning of time was bouncy, like a giant, frictionless bouncy castle or a bouncy bed like the one in the hotel he had been to with Maria before she told him he wasn’t the man for her. He hit the strange, springy surface again and again and bounced again and again. And again and again and again. Now he was bored and jostled by hitting the beginning of time and the universe and matter and all that, and a bit nauseous. Very nauseous.
Great. You could get motion sick from hitting the beginning of time. It was a little bit typical: Morris had never really gotten motion sick except a few times when he was trying to kiss Maria in a taxi, and once on a boat in Spain, also kissing. That seemed to be the only time his brain got confused about motorised travel. Which sucked.
But now, now, here he was, shot with a Time Gun, hitting the beginning of time and bouncing off it and of course he was going to feel like throwing up. He wondered what would happen if he did. Would he bounce around in atemporal vomit for ever? Would an angel come and give him a stern talking-to for messing up the Creation? Where was God, exactly, in all this? Was God behind the squishy meniscus of time? Was that why he couldn’t get through it? Bounce, lurch, bounce, lurch, is God in there? Hello? Bounce, lurch. Bounce. Lurch. Oh, oh, oh, no.
He threw up.
Absolutely nothing happened at all.
And then it did.
It was like dancing rock and roll at your fourteenth birthday party when you spin around and then you accidentally let go and your sister flies across the room and lands on the goldfish bowl and the goldfish lands on the back of the TV and the TV blows up and the goldfish dies and you get hit really hard with a shoe for messing up the house and costing us a fortune but you sort of feel you deserved it because wow but really you didn’t mean to and you never really knew what right and wrong was after that because it all seemed so totally capricious and a bit strange.
Which... is the first thing he sees when he slows down. He sees that whole unhappy business and for a moment he knows, absolutely knows in his heart of hearts that he’s going to bounce off the end of time, the opposite end, and then go back, and then forward, until he is misshapen and exhausted and then the final act of the Time Gun is going to be to put his soul inside that goldfish and he’s going to explode himself accidentally and wouldn’t that make it an Irony Gun?
And then he thinks, no, thank God, that’s just crazy talk. And flies forward through time.
Morris Ruddle flies forward through time. It’s better in this direction because everything makes sense and words aren’t backwards. It’s also worse because he can see every crappy choice he ever made and a whole bunch of the ones other people made and he’s sort of getting an education here, getting a bit wise. It occurs to him that maybe with this newfound wisdom he will solve some of the world’s problems. He wanders around a bit checking out how governments work and reckons they don’t. They’re just a room full of confused people making it up as they go along, which is a bit scary. He watches sub-prime loans get out of control and frankly isn’t impressed. It’s as if no one’s paying attention at all except him. He sees wars and executions and a great number of other people having sex and he passes through the moment when he gets hired to steal the Time Gun and he thinks for a moment that he might be slowing down.
He is slowing down.
He is, he’s definitely not going to make it to the far end of time at this rate. He’s going to stall out any moment now. He feels strange and papery and he looks at his hands. They are very, very, very, very, very old.
The universe goes: “pop”.
And he stands in the lab again, staring at his ancient, wrinkled old hands and thinking that it is very unlikely that he will ever have any sort of sex again. And then Morris Ruddle comes in, young Morris, and like an incredible arsehole he goes right for the place where he got shot with the Time Gun and Morris realises that unless he can stop this from happening young Morris will get shot and end up as old Morris, but if he can prevent the whole thing something else can happen, even if it’s just a little different it could be so much better, and his heart is fluttering and maybe giving up and he says “no, no, no,” and lunges forward with the nearest thing to his hand.
Which is the Time Gun, and he realises this just as he pulls the trigger and thinks “oh, sod it” because now he’s created a recursion or maybe there always was one and he’s going to go around and around in this loop for ever, so he turns the gun around and shoots himself, too, goes zinging back along the same loop to intercept young Morris somehow, tell him to do things differently, and around and around and around they go, more and more Morrises making the loop tighter and tighter and tighter and getting shot more and more often with the Time Gun and he starts to wonder if there can possibly be enough energy in the greater universe to sustain this many iterations. And then he finds he is face to face with the many many iterations, perfectly balanced all along the endless line of himself, and out of sheer amazement he does the last thing in the world he ought to do.
He pulls the trigger on the Time Gun.
All of him.
And thinks: “this can’t be good.”
P
ROFESSOR
M
ORRIS
R
UDDLE
stares down at the dead burglar and wishes he had thought to pick up almost any other device from his workbench. The heavy battery pack would have made a quite excellent bludgeon, for example.