Authors: Matthew Johnson
The timer on the delay switch flashed to life, started counting down from 30:00. That would make a half-hour buffer between when the alarm system signalled that it had been breached and when the signal was received. Long enough for them to get in, find what they needed, and get out. The switch was one of the basic tools of Short duty; Jacob hadn’t held one in years, but as soon as Rachael had handed it to him he recognized the shape and weight of it in his hand, and his fingers remembered how to program it.
Jacob glanced around. In both his line and hers this building was a bolt hole, a repository of equipment and information where a forecaster could get help without risking contact with the local line men and the cross-contamination that would follow. Of course, if this line’s forecasters were the ones hiding its history, it probably wasn’t a good idea to let them know he and Rachael were here; that was why they had settled on the discreet approach. With a satisfying click Jacob’s pick sprung the last, most overt lock, and he opened the door and waved Rachael in. Inside, a hallway led into the darkness. Rachael switched on her UV lamp and, to their eyes, the room lit up. It looked positively low-tech: wooden baseboards ran along the wall, and a path of linoleum tiles led to a door at the end of the hallway, with three more doors on either side. Only the tiny cameras planted in a line along the ceiling showed that any value was placed on this building, and those were very nearly hidden between fluorescent light panels.
If Jacob were trying to protect a building without making it look protected, he thought, he would eschew active sensors like electric eyes. Better to use passive devices, like pressure plates, so that intruders would not know they had been detected. Yes: when he crouched, played the UV light over the floor, he could see them spaced at irregular intervals, a lip of little more than a millimetre betraying them. He pointed them out to Rachael and they made their careful way down the hall. They had a half-hour’s grace if the alarms went off, yes, but pride as much as practicality told him it was better not to need the time. He had been doing this before they had invented the switch, before any of the machines except for the very first cages that tore rough holes in time. He knew how it was done.
The door at the end of the hall was unlocked, but alarmed; a fail-safe, in case everything else failed, to make any intruders who got this far give themselves away. Rachael bridged the alarm circuit with a span of conduction cable, and the way to the bolthole—and, he hoped, the secrets this line was keeping from them—was clear. Taking a breath, Jacob opened the door. Beyond was a confused mess of grey filing cabinets, shoved together with barely enough room to squeeze between them.
This didn’t make sense. Jacob looked over at Rachael, spread his hands: what now? She looked back and forth frantically, opened one of the cabinets and started rifling through the files inside. She stopped, eyes widened, and handed the folder to Jacob. It was full of paper, a dozen pages. Every one was blank.
Jacob frowned, then noticed his datapad monitoring the alarm system, flashing UV-red. He looked at its screen, saw that a motion detector somewhere in the building was sending its signal. Though that rankled, it was fine; thanks to the delay, they still had more than twenty minutes before the signal got out of the building.
At least, they were supposed to. According to the ’pad, though, the signal was away. They had been made. Jacob reached over to tap Rachael, spun his index finger upwards to signal a bug-out. She looked at him curiously for a moment, then headed back out into the corridor.
Running down the hallway—the motion detectors couldn’t do them any harm now—Jacob wondered how fast the alarm response would be. This line looked harmless, but on the other hand they had gone to a lot of trouble to hide this place. He pushed the front door, half-expecting it to have re-locked, but it swung open, and as it did Jacob could hear sirens nearby.
Jacob had spotted one of the small parks nearby earlier, logged it as the best spot to hide out if things went sour. They ran for it now, trying to keep out of sight as the oddly small and bulbous police cruisers arrived, and dug themselves under a thick hedge, sharp branches cutting into their clothes and skin. They could hear the cruisers’ doors opening and closing, and the cops talking amongst themselves; no dogs, to Jacob’s relief. So long as the people hunting them relied on hearing and sight they were safe. For a long time they did nothing but crouch there and breathe as quietly as they could; finally, when the lights and sounds of pursuit had gone, Jacob relaxed his cramping legs and sat down on the ground. A slight breeze blew through the hedge and the smell of damp earth and greenery made him lightheaded.
Rachael tapped him on the shoulder, cocked her head. He nodded and they rose, wordlessly heading for the hotel room where Rachael had been staying. Jacob stood at the window, watching to see if they had been followed, as Rachael sat on one of the beds and stared ahead.
“I don’t understand,” she said finally, her eyes not meeting Jacob’s. “That was—it should have—”
“It was obviously something,” Jacob said, quietly. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to protect it.”
“But why?” Rachael said, her voice breaking slightly. “There was—nothing. No answers, no . . .” She stopped herself, took a breath. “Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was some kind of decoy.”
Jacob nodded slowly. “Your decoy,” he said; still quiet, but a note of anger slipping through. “And I think I’ve played your game long enough.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jacob held up a finger. “One. We deactivate the alarm, but it goes off anyway. Two, the delay switch fails nearly twenty minutes early.”
“I don’t know why—”
Another finger. “Three, you attract my attention and lead me on a wild goose chase, so that I’m left with less than a day left before I have to trigger the relay, and no way to find out anything useful about this line. Four—”
“No. No, Jacob, you’re wrong.”
He took a deep breath. “Four, you claim to be a Short, but are working without a partner. More importantly, Shorts only go forward a matter of days, sometimes hours—certainly not long enough for things to have changed so much from your time, and yet you claim to have no more knowledge of this time than I have. I don’t see more than one logical conclusion.”
He sat on the bed, waiting for her response; finally she laughed.
“As the butt of the joke, I’m afraid I don’t find it so—”
“No. You don’t get it.” She shook her head. “If the joke is on anyone, it’s on me. You’re right; I am a Short, and my Now is just two days ago. That’s what’s so funny: my time is nothing like this. This is as much an Outline to me as it is to you.”
“That’s impossible.”
She laughed, bitterly. “Tell me about it. I was supposed to go just two days ahead, check on the first test of battery algae, and instead I got—this.” She did not move, but something in her posture collapsed. “Why do you think I even spoke to you? I knew the risks; I might not even exist after all this—this me, I mean.”
Jacob sat, looked at her. Either story, he supposed, was equally plausible. “What about the delay switch, then?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been a Short for two years now, and that’s never happened before.”
“This line’s forecasters could have cancelled it,” he said thoughtfully, “but only if they knew how to. And—assuming for a moment that you didn’t inform them—” He was interrupted by a knock on the door, three hard raps. Turning to Rachael he made a phone with his left hand, thumb and pinkie extended, to signal
Did you call anyone?
She shook her head, made the twirling bug-out signal with her index finger, and readied a finger over the control pad on her belt. When they arrived they had prepared a timelock field in the room, in case they needed to get out quickly; thirty seconds of frozen time to give them a head start on anyone who came after them.
The door opened, and two men came into view, blocking the doorway. Jacob tensed, keeping an eye on Rachael; she would trigger the timelock as soon as they were far enough in to open a space to get past them.
“This is a private room,” Jacob said calmly. “Are you with the police?”
Neither man looked like a police officer. They both wore the bright clothing of this line, though they looked uncomfortable in it; each had pinkish-red skin, burnt by too much light in unfamiliar wavelengths. “No,” the first man said. He was the taller of the two, but skinny, with Cassius’s lean and hungry look. “But you’re coming with me.”
Jacob nodded, watched Rachael out of the corner of his eye as the two men took another step inside. She gave him a tiny nod, triggered the timelock. A shimmering wall, the edge of the timelock field, appeared around the edges of the room. Inside it the world would be frozen for thirty seconds. Jacob began to rise.
The two men were still moving.
“Don’t,” the second man said. He was shorter than the other, with a mess of red hair that fell nearly over his eyes and a pair of thick round glasses. “We’re in the field too; keyed in before we opened the door.” He lifted the broad hem of his shirt, revealed a belt with a control pad like they each wore.
Jacob looked over at Rachael, who looked as surprised as he was. “Who are you?” she said, backing away slowly.
“Easy,” the taller man said. “We’re not here to hurt you, just make sure you don’t go anywhere. Mike, how long do they have?”
The red-haired man, Mike, unhooked an instrument from his belt. “Just over an hour. She’s got the switch.”
The taller man moved nearer to Rachael, held out a hand; after a moment she nodded, handed over her relay switch. “There. Two hours from now you’ll be free to enjoy this world for the rest of your lives. Until then, let’s just sit tight.”
“What’s this about?” Jacob asked. He heard footsteps in the hall—if he could occupy the men’s attention, he thought, the arrival of a cleaner or something might distract them enough to open a chance for escape. “I mean, you obviously know who we are, but you don’t look like you’re native to this line.”
“Very true,” a voice said from the hall. A woman entered, standing behind the first two. Like the two men, she was sunburnt, and looked uncomfortable in this line’s fashions. Unlike them, though, her face was familiar.
“Davidson,” Jacob said. “Jan.”
Rachael looked over at him. “So they are—”
“As you are,” Jan said. She was not an imposing woman, just over five feet tall, with brown hair worn in a bun and a face full of freckles; her voice, though, had a tone of iron certainty.
“So it’s true,” Jacob said. “This is what happens to the ones that don’t come back.” He swallowed. “Like you.”
“Not all of them,” Jan said. “But some. I’m sorry I couldn’t let you know I was safe.”
“What happened? Miss your relay window?”
“No.” She signalled to the two men, who each moved to more comfortable but still watchful positions on either side of her. “I tested this line for flaws till I nearly went crazy, and then when I was convinced it really was the Good One I tried to figure out how it had gotten that way. I expect that’s what you two’ve gone through the last few days.”
“Pretty much,” Jacob said before Rachael could speak.
“Then you know what I found: nothing. No chain of events that could explain how to get from Now to now. Then, when I met Mike here, I thought I was in luck: I had come as a Long, but he was a Short, and would be able to explain to me how to get to his time, at least. Except that he told me his time was just as far from this as mine.”
Jacob glanced over at Rachael, but her face showed nothing. “So why did you stay, Jan? Why make me—us—think you had just vanished?”
“You’re not stupid, Jacob,” she said, anger coming into her voice. “You know what that means as well as I do. They don’t need us in this line. Things are stable enough that they can afford to take risks, not worry about what catastrophe each action might cause. But there’s no path that leads to it, no sequence of actions that goes from our line to this one. You can’t get there from here.”
“So you decided to stay, rather than give it up,” Rachael said. “You knew you’d never find it again if you left.”
“You’ve already been thinking about it, haven’t you?” Jan smiled. “Good girl. I knew he’d be the only one I’d have to convince.” She turned back to him. “Because you won’t give up, will you? You never did. You’re so sure you’re smarter than the rest of us, you’ll take your data back and spend the rest of your life trying to find the key we couldn’t.”
“I’ll stay,” Rachael said, “by choice. But why do you have to keep him at all?”
“The same reason Pyotr here had to stay, though he didn’t take much convincing once we found him. This line exists; so long as nobody in the past knows that, those of us that made it here will be able to enjoy it. But if actions are taken in the knowledge of its existence, they might keep it from having happened, and we—temporally native to it, now that we missed our relay windows—really would just disappear.”
“So the rest of humanity suffers, while you three get to enjoy paradise?” Jacob asked.
“Five, actually—there’s two more of us outside—and now it will be seven. And who’s to say this line is any less real than Now? The people outside, do you think they’ll listen when you tell them they’re just a probability, and an outside one at that?”
“You said you’d had a good run, Jacob,” Rachael said. He listened to her carefully, listening for truth in her tone. “Don’t you deserve a reward? Just let time run out.”
He looked at her a moment, nodded. “I guess I don’t have a choice,” he said, looking at Mike and Pyotr, who were still standing in the way of any escape attempt.
“You’re so stubborn,” Jan said. “I couldn’t possibly be right, could I?”
“Looks like you’ll have a lot of time to convince me.”
Jan stood and stretched, still keeping a watchful eye on Jacob. “How much longer?” she asked Mike.
“Four minutes,” he said after a glance at the instrument in his hand, yawned.
“All right, then. Four minutes, Jacob; then you’ll start to see what I mean.”
He shrugged. There was no point in arguing. “Fine,” he said, glanced over at Rachael. She gave him a nervous smile. “So how are you going to fit us in as natives here?”