City of Shadows

Chapter 43

3 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio

‘It may look a bit random,’ said Maddy, ‘but, trust me, it all works.’

Liam cast another wary glance at the cables snaking across the classroom floor. The displacement machine at the moment was nothing more than an array of circuit boards placed on a row of orange plastic bucket chairs, all of them linked by dangling loops of electrical flex, blobs of solder holding the whole fragile thing together.

The computer system controlling the displacement machine looked very like it had back in Brooklyn: a dozen base units and half a dozen monitors hooked up together and occupying a cluster of school desks pushed together.

They didn’t have their own version of a displacement ‘tube’ filled with freezing cold water. According to Maddy, they didn’t need one of those any more. Since their mission was now a different one — no longer the rigid preservation of one particular timeline with all the necessary strict measures to ensure no unwanted contaminants came back into the past with them — there was no longer the need for a ‘wet drop’. If a minor contaminant, for example a chunk of modern-day linoleum floor, went back into the past, it might possibly result in some minor contamination. But, as far as Maddy was concerned, that was OK; that was an acceptable risk. The rules were different now. And anyway, a minor change, a minor time wave, might just be the thing that ultimately

deflected the course of history and resulted in there not being an engineered super-virus known as Kosong-ni in the year 2070.

Totally unlikely that a chunk of classroom floor could alter history that much. But you never know.

‘Don’t worry, Mads,’ said Liam, looking at the guts of the machine spread along the row of plastic chairs. ‘I trust you.’ He hoped his voice sounded as confident as he was trying to look.

Rashim pointed to one of two squares marked out on the floor with lengths of masking tape. ‘That’s where you stand, Liam. It’s a metre square, wide enough for comfortable clearance just as long as you’re not waving your arms around. Each square has its own departure software that controls the distribution of energy and channelling of the field. I enter the precise mass figure into each entry field… with an acceptable nine per cent margin of error, of course,’ said Rashim. He pointed at the square in front of Liam. ‘The left square has your stats, the right one has Bob’s.’

Rashim had made his mass calculations several days ago using a rather old-school method. He’d filled a plastic drum with water — cold, of course, straight from a bathroom tap — right to the very top, then asked Liam to climb in and completely submerge himself. The water had spilled out as he’d displaced it. The displaced water was caught in a tray beneath the drum. And that water was then measured carefully to determine Liam’s mass. The process was repeated for Bob, then the girls, then Rashim and SpongeBubba. Provided none of them lost too much weight or put too much weight on in the meantime, the figures were good enough. Comfortably within the nine per cent margin for error.

‘So it’s squares now?’ Liam arched his brows and looked at Maddy. ‘Not one big circle any more?’

She shrugged. ‘Rashim’s deployment method. That’s how they did it with Exodus, separate displacement volumes.’

‘It’s safer. There’s a much lower risk of mass convergence. Plus I’ve calculated for an additional amount of mass. Each time we use the same square, we’ll take a half inch of the floor with us, no more than — ’

‘Mass convergence?’ Liam could guess what that harmless-sounding phrase meant. He’d seen ‘mass convergence’ before and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant sight.

He grimaced. ‘You’re telling me that kind of thing happened with your lot often enough that you had a proper technical term for it?’

‘We had thirteen mis-translations in phase alpha!’ piped up SpongeBubba. ‘What came back was real gooey!’

‘Yes, thanks, SpongeBubba. Certainly, we had… uh… a few failed trials. But look — ’ Rashim pushed his glasses up his nose — ‘this system, Waldstein’s particle-projection system, is way more elegant than ours. I mean… quite incredible! The man was… is… a genius! It’s the simplicity of the calculation pipeline that amazes me — the way he’s truncated the whole process into a basic two-step process…’ He stopped himself. ‘Sorry… the more I’ve worked on this machine, the bigger a fanboy I’ve become. The point is, Liam, this is a much more reliable system than ours was. Plus we’re dealing with a much smaller mass conversion. Two departure squares at a time. And they’re separate. Which means if one square happens to malfunction in some way, the other person won’t be involved.’ Rashim shrugged. ‘Only one person gets turned inside out, not two. Relax, Liam… you and I will be fine.’

Liam looked at Maddy for reassurance. She nodded. ‘Separate’s not a bad idea. It is actually a lot safer than the spherical portal we used to share.’

‘All right, then.’ Liam buttoned up his waistcoat. ‘If you say so. Remind me, what year are we going back to exactly?’

‘I decided on 1888. That puts you at several years after the viaduct and its generator were built. Time enough for any gremlins to have worked their way out of the system.’

Liam frowned. For some particular reason the year rang a bell with him. ‘1888? Didn’t something big happen that year?’

‘I’m sure a lot of things happened in that year, Liam.’

‘No… I read something recently. Something pretty big in London.’

Bob scowled as he trawled through the data uploaded into his head. ‘The Whitechapel murders happened in that year,’ he said.

‘Murders!’ Liam snapped his fingers. ‘That was it! Wasn’t it that Jack the Ripper fella? He did those murders.’

‘Affirmative. The murders occurred in Whitechapel, east London. Five female victims over several months. The last victim, Mary Kelly, was murdered on the ninth of November 1888.’

‘Aye! That’s it!’ He turned to Maddy. ‘It was all a big mystery, so it was. No one ever found out who did it.’ Liam had an idea. ‘We could find out who did it! You know, while we’re back there looking around for a new home?’

‘No, Liam. We aren’t the police. We’re not a homicide squad. Just concentrate on the job at hand, OK?’

He huffed. ‘Just an idea.’

‘And that’s all it will remain. We’ve got more important things to worry about.’

Sal finished dressing Bob. She’d visited a men’s clothing store in the retail park. Liam and Rashim were now wearing modern polyester slacks and smart shirts with collars that were clearly not Victorian, but the grey flannel waistcoats helped date them both a little. If no one inspected their clothes too closely, they’d be OK. Once again, though, Sal had struggled to find clothes to fit Bob. She’d had to resort to shopping at a branch of X-tra-MAN, ‘the store for gentle giants’, and the choices were pretty limited. Dungarees again for Bob and a loose striped shirt. With a flat cap perched on his coarse hair, he could just about pass as some lumbering navvy.

‘So, I’ve set up a time-stamp for half a dozen years after the setting up of that Holborn Viaduct generator.’ Maddy stepped towards the row of computer screens, and studied one. There was the image of an old parish map. ‘The location is about a third of a mile south of the viaduct, right next to the River of London.’

‘Ah… I think you’ll find it’s called the Thames, Mads,’ said Liam.

She squinted at the screen. ‘Oh yeah, of course. Yeah… the Thames. We did a bunch of pinhole tests on the arrival location, looks like a small shingle bank, brick wall on one side and what look like some steps leading up the side of it. There’s very little spatial disruption. Small stuff, occasional pigeon or something I’m guessing. So, it looks like a pretty quiet spot.’

‘Grand.’

‘So… remember this is just a quick look, OK? Go check out that viaduct, see if there’s someplace we can make ourselves at home. Then come back to the river.’

‘How long have we got?’

‘As long as you want really. I can set up a scheduled return window if you want, or we can just monitor the location for a regular rhythmic spatial displacement signature. Remember? Like you did back in dinosaur-land? Just wave your arms in a regular rhythmic fashion… we’ll pick it up just fine.’

‘Hmm… I think I’d like the scheduled return window, to be sure.’

‘OK,’ she said, tapping it into a keyboard. ‘Three hours? More?’

‘Aye, three hours sounds like enough.’ Liam looked across at Bob. ‘You ready for another jaunt, big fella?’

He nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Well, all right, then,’ said Liam, clapping his hands together. ‘Shall we?’

‘Be careful,’ said Sal.

‘That I most certainly will.’

‘Have a nice trip, skippa!’ SpongeBubba called out. ‘Bring me flowers!’

Rashim turned to Liam. ‘I need to change his programming sometime soon. It’s beginning to get annoying.’

‘The order of departure is Bob and Rashim first,’ said Maddy. ‘Then you, Liam, on the left square.’

Bob and Rashim took their places in the two taped-out squares.

‘Uh, guys… one minute countdown. Mark!’

A single LED flickered on one of the circuit boards — clocking the energy being drawn in and stored on the capacitor. A single diode that would wink out when there was enough on-board energy to discharge. Maddy told Rashim it would do for now. When they were properly settled, she’d build something a little more elaborate.

She counted the minute down and, with a hum of discharged energy, they both vanished, along with the scuffed linoleum floor they’d been standing on.

‘You’re next,’ she said, ushering Liam on to his square. He was standing on freshly exposed wooden floor. The displacement volume had dug down two inches into the ground.

‘Thirty seconds. Stand still now!’

Liam put his hands down by his side. It felt a little unsettling, looking down at the tape on the floor surrounding him, and not knowing for sure if the tip of an elbow, the heel of a foot, might be too close, or even overhanging the tape. At least bobbing around in that perspex tube he knew for certain he was wholly ‘in’ the displacement envelope.

The capacitor was beginning to hum.

‘Fifteen seconds!’ called out Maddy. ‘No more fidgeting now, please!’

‘I’m not!’

‘Yes, you are! Hold still!’

Liam sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes.

Ah dear, here we go again.

So much seemed to have happened since the last time he’d done this. It seemed like a whole lifetime ago. In many ways it was a different life. Someone else’s. The last time he’d volunteered to have his body discharged through chaos space into unknowable danger he’d been certain of who he was and why he was doing what he was doing. This time around… it was so very different.

‘Ten seconds!’

This time he understood why his body could take such punishment. It was engineered specifically to take it. This time around he knew if he took a bullet, or the stab of a sword or a knife, it might well hurt, but he’d live. That meant there was less to be scared of. Right?

‘Five seconds!’

Nope. He was starting to tremble like he always did as Maddy counted down the last few seconds.

Liam, ya big wuss. You’re meant to be some kind of support unit, aren’t you?

He was just about to start wondering whether Bob actually ever experienced fear when he felt the floor beneath his feet suddenly give way like a hangman’s trap, and that awful sensation of falling.