TimeSplash (3 page)

“Are you okay?” It was Hal, standing over her, offering her his big hand and smiling. She took his hand and stood up.

“Yes, I think so.” She rubbed her shoulder. “A bit bruised.”

Hal grinned. “You get used to that.” He stepped close to her. For a moment she thought he was going to try to kiss her, but instead he started opening her harness catches. “It’s all a bit of a shock at first. You’ll get your bearings in a minute.”

“Is this really the past?”

“It sure is. The twelfth of July, nineteen eighty-two.” He looked up at the sun. “About ten in the morning, at a guess.”

Sniper, arriving with T-800, looked coldly at Patty but addressed himself to Hal. “Stop fussing with her. She’ll be all right. We need you to get us to the house. We only get a few hours, you know.”

“Right,” Hal agreed. He and T-800 stuffed the harnesses into backpacks, and then he nodded across the field toward the castle. “The road’s that way.”

They picked up their helmets and set off. Patty limped a little from the pain in her hip, but everyone else seemed okay. No one spoke much, taking their cue from Sniper, which suited Patty just fine. She watched his broad back with growing resentment, trudging along in a sulk in which her own pains and grievances gradually overwhelmed any sense of wonder she might have felt at being back in the twentieth century.

In fact, Patty had seen enough old vids from this era for none of it to be very surprising, yet when they left the grounds of the castle and walked into the road, little things began to catch her attention, like the number of telegraph poles, the quaint, old-fashioned cars that made such an appalling racket, and the huge, colourful signs that seemed to be directions for drivers. More and more, the fact that she really was in the time of her grandparents impressed itself upon her.

“Hey, watch this,” Hal called to her. They were passing an abandoned pile of builder’s sand beside the road. He ran across the pile of sand, kicking it around as he went. Patty thought he was just showing off, like young men often did around her, but then she noticed what was happening to the sand in his wake. It seemed to be jumping, vibrating, squirming. She screwed shut her eyes and looked again, as if they were the source of the strange blurriness she saw. Hal stopped at the far side of the pile and looked back at it proudly. With strange shifts of colour and position, the deep prints of his feet were slowly being erased. The weird, shifting of shape and colour spread briefly to the road surface around the heap, causing Patty to jump back in alarm as the effect rippled out toward her feet. In thirty dizzying seconds, the pile restored itself.

“Now do you believe we’re back in time?” Hal shouted.

“Stop pissing about,” Sniper snapped.

Hal gave Patty a grin and turned back to the road. Patty stared for a long time at the sand. It was a small splash, she realised. The little anomaly that Hal had caused—disturbing a pile of sand that should never have been disturbed—had righted itself. But for those few seconds before the restoration was complete, there had been a shake-up in spacetime around the sandpile. Causality had been thrown into disarray and it had taken a while for it to settle back to how it should have been.

She set off again, hurrying to catch up with the others, noticing for the first time that their footsteps left faint, blurry marks on the road that quickly faded behind them.

* * * *

The small town of Ommen was just five kilometres or so from where the lob had taken place. They were going to walk to it. Sniper didn’t want to risk causing any paradoxes before the big one they had planned, the one that would cause the splash. Hal was still their guide and he set a fast pace, west along Hammerweg, a forest-lined road that eventually turned north. Patty was beginning to think she was doomed to trudge forever in the July heat when they began to see houses and signs of life around them. By the time Hammerweg became Stationsweg, the street was busy and lined with buildings. The air stank of petrol fumes, and the traffic noise made it necessary for Patty to raise her voice to be heard.

“So what’s so special about Ommen?” she asked Hal. Ahead she could see a bridge that would take them across the broad, flat River Vecht and into the town proper. It was a pretty place with flat fields all around, and cute old buildings visible on the far bank. There was even a windmill, beautifully preserved and picturesque, right near the town centre. Nice place for a holiday, Patty thought. If you were ninety. Definitely not the spot she would have picked for a time trip.

“It’s the home of my ancestors,” said Hal, looking benignly on the placid river and the quaint town beyond.

“You don’t sound Dutch.” In fact, he sounded American, like one of those Bible-thumping preachers she saw whenever she accidentally watched an American vid channel.

“My great-granddaddy moved the family stateside back in nineteen eighty-six. Took a research job with a computer company in Palo Alto and settled there. His daughter, my grandma, married a guy down in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s where I grew up.”

“So it’s your family we’re going to…”

Hal smiled. “Sure is! I’m looking forward to meeting them.”

“But—”

“Don’t you worry now. It all smooths over like nothing ever happened. Like the sandpile. You know how this works.”

Patty nodded, feeling a bit queasy. On top of all the other things about this lob she didn’t want any part of, she now added the splash itself. Until that moment, she hadn’t really thought about what it actually took to make a splash. Not really. With a shake of her head, she realised what a stupid child she’d been about the whole thing. Talking to Sniper and the others, it had seemed like a big game. The ultimate extreme sport. All glamour and fun. One big rush. Now she had to face the hard reality of what was going to happen. Fear grabbed again at her innards. The sunny fields, the placid river, and the sleepy little town just made what was about to happen seem more sinister.

“Look,” said Sniper, as they negotiated the narrow streets at the heart of the old market town.

“Food.”

They took a table at a small street café and ordered lunch from a waiter who spoke fluent English. All around them, people stared.

“They think we’re bikers.” Sniper laughed, enjoying the attention.

“Bikers?” Patty asked, but Sniper just pulled a face at her ignorance.

“The town’s full of foreign tourists for the Bissing tomorrow,” Hal said, shrugging. “Some kind of big deal market day that kicks off a few weeks of events and stuff. A few more weirdos coming to town won’t cause too much of a stir just now.”

Sniper leant across the table like a big cat, his body strong and lazily sinuous. “So Hal, we’ll hang here for a while—an hour or so maybe—then we go on to your great-granddad’s place, okay?”

He checked his watch. “We’ve only got about three more hours, but I don’t want us to have too much time after the splash. We don’t know how big this one will be.” He grinned fiercely and his grey eyes shone with anticipation. He swivelled around to face Patty. “You’re gonna love it, baby.”

Patty felt the fear surge but, with Sniper deliberately trying to goad her, she was angry too. She pointedly turned away from him and spoke to Hal. “How come our time’s so short? Don’t these things usually last longer?”

This caused Hal to grin too and his own eyes to light up. “That’s ’cause we’re breaking a world record, honey. This is only the longest fucking lob in the history of the world! Sixty-five years! It’s never been done before. It’s right there at the edge of what’s theoretically possible. That Klaatu guy is a genuine, grade one, certified genius!”

Patty thought of Klaatu as a scrawny, shifty-eyed kid with personal hygiene problems and the manners of a rat, but she let it pass. “So the further back we go, the less time we have?”

“And the bigger the splash we make.”

“It’s like we get thrown higher,” T-800 said. “You know how they talk about ‘lobbing’ us

‘bricks’ back into the timestream? Well it’s a really good metaphor. The harder we get lobbed, the farther we go and the bigger the splash we make.”

“Thank you, Professor Frink,” Sniper said.

“That’s why everything we do is causing ripples,” Hal chimed in. He moved a pepper pot on the table and let it go. A faint, jittery blurring began to engulf it. “You don’t get that on a short lob.” For a while the pot seemed to be in two places at once and then it was back where it started.

“Cool, ain’t it? Why, I bet if I stood up, my chair would put itself right back under the table. Things we‘re touching get kind of tangled up with us and our time line, but once we let them go...”

“This is too weird,” Patty complained. “We shouldn’t do this.”

Suddenly Sniper’s finger was in her face. “Just shut the fuck up, bitch! If I hear one more whining word from you, you’ll really have something to whine about.”

There was an uneasy silence around the table. The waiter, arriving with drinks, looked at them with a worried frown. Sniper sat back languorously in his chair and smiled at them all. “About time,” he told the waiter.

When the drinks had been placed on the table and the waiter had gone, Sniper turned to Hal.

“They’d better be in.”

“They will be. Don’t worry.”

“Who?” Patty asked.

“Jesus!” Sniper grabbed his drink and sat back in exasperation. Hal explained. “My great-grandma and my grandma.”

“Oh.”

“Great-grandma kept a diary, you see. Grandma is at home recovering from some old-time illness today. They go out to the Bissing together tomorrow.”

Patty looked at the table, not wanting to look into Hal’s cheerful eyes. “Did you know her?”

“Who, grandma?”

“Yes.”

“Sure! The old bird’s still going strong. Shit, it’s only sixty-five years ago!”

“Do you like her?”

Sniper slammed his hand down on the table, leaning forward to glare at Patty. “Just shut the f—”

He stopped. The waiter, stepping up to the table, began setting plates down. There was something odd about the waiter’s movements, something jittery and unnatural. Patty looked around. It was happening to other people nearby too.

Looking to see what Patty had seen, Sniper noticed it too and his scowl turned into a big, handsome smile.

“This is gonna be so good!” he shouted.

“There is a new batch of your pamphlets from the printer.” Nadya Krupskaya led the printer’s worker into her husband’s study and instructed the man to set the heavy parcel down on the edge of the desk. It was a cloudy April day in 1902 and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin smiled as he watched the man put down his package and go.

“Our friends back home say it is already being widely read,” he told his wife, who lingered in the doorway.

“It is an excellent piece,” she agreed, looking at him through her over-large intelligent eyes.

“If that doesn’t shake up the party, nothing will. You deserve to be proud.”

His birthday had been celebrated just a few days ago, right there in Holford Square in the London borough of Pentonville. The big brick terrace was yet another stop in their years of wandering about Europe. Lenin was now thirty-two years old. Nadya, a year older. His wife of just four years was one of his greatest admirers. They had married during their exile in Siberia. Some said that they had married for the cause, and there was some truth in that, but it was a long way from the whole truth.

She stepped forward and, taking a knife from the desktop, cut the string and folded back the wrapping paper to reveal the pamphlet, the title, “What Is to Be Done?” in thick black ink on the cover. They were both confident it would be hugely influential in the Party, pushing his followers closer to Lenin’s vision of the revolutionary vanguard he dreamed they could become.

“I thought I’d go over to the British Museum later on, my dear,” he said, picking up a copy and turning it over in his hands, checking the quality. He held it to his nose and sniffed. “I finally had a reply from that overly officious Museum Director, granting me a ticket.”

Nadya smiled indulgently. The British Museum had one of the most respected library collections in the whole of Europe. Her husband had heard much about the famous Round Reading Room and was eager to visit it. She watched him turning the pages of his brilliant pamphlet and admired his broad brows and sensuous lips. That such a bookish, scholarly man should also be so handsome and passionate was her secret delight.

“What will you do there?” she asked, just to hear him speak.

He looked at her. “Oh, I shall finish my comments on the programme of the Northern League, but that won’t take long. There is much work to do on Iskra of course, but…” He smiled impishly.

“Today I wish to spend my time coming to grips with the size and extent of this fabled collection.”

He turned to look out of the window at the grey skies and the leafless trees in the gardens. “I expect I shall be disappointed. Nothing could be so splendid as to live up to the reports I have been hearing. But if nothing else, I shall have a good walk in the mild English spring.”