Déjà Vu

Chapter Four

Met Four Research Center, Nevada, USA: The day before

A sound woke Jennifer Proctor. She raised her head from the desk, allowed an eddy of vertigo to pass, and looked about. Richardo’s chair was empty. She scanned the tiered banks of consoles behind her. The two-hundred-or-so seats were empty too. Maybe someone was sleeping under a desk. If not, she was alone but for party streamers and mugs of flat champagne. By the mission clock on the wall, it was hardly dawn. The transparent screen at the front of the amphitheatre was dark. The lights in the cavernous chamber were out. She thought about black coffee. And water. No; something isotonic. She stood. Too soon, surely, for a hangover. She stepped into her clogs and prepared to initiate a full shutdown of the amphitheatre systems, but there was a man standing in the doorway, far to her right.

‘Who the Christ are you?’ she asked, closing her lab-coat. The man was tall and still. By his silhouette, she could see he wore a cowboy hat.

‘My name is John Hartfield.’

The moment grew long.

Damn it, Proctor, she thought. Hold your shit together.

She licked her dry lips. She felt like a teenager at a dinner party.

‘I’m Jennifer, sir. Jennifer Proctor, head of Project N25. Head of a subsection, rather.’

His face in darkness, he said, ‘N25? Gerald will have given the programme a more memorable name, surely.’

‘Déjà Vu.’

‘The psychological phenomenon. Well chosen.’

‘He says that what goes around comes around.’ She forced a smile. ‘Mr Hartfield, on behalf of the team, I’d like to express our gratitude for your financial support.’

Hartfield stepped into the room. Below the cowboy hat, he was wearing a blazer, shirt, and jeans. Jennifer thought that he was almost handsome in a middle-aged playboy way, but his eyes lacked something.

‘No, it is we who are grateful to you,’ he said. His boots double-clicked on the linoleum as he approached. ‘I’d like to talk about the project. Perhaps we could do that in the context of a tour?’

‘A tour at 5:00 a.m.?’

Hartfield smiled. There was an odd quality about it: On-off. Digital. Jennifer wondered whether she should ask this man for identification. After all, she had only seen the true John Hartfield in pictures. But nobody had ever infiltrated Met Four Base. It was deep beneath the sandstone some miles to the north east of Las Vegas, and protected by formidable security forces.

‘It’s quiet now,’ he said. ‘I like it that way.’

‘I’m not sure where everyone has gone. Usually there are technicians around the clock.’

‘I had Déjà Vu emptied.’

‘You had it emptied?’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘I’m acting like I own the place.’

Jennifer took the cue and chuckled. But she thought, Yes, actually, you bloody are.

‘Why do you want me to give you the tour? Gerald—Professor Jablonsky, I mean—would be the best person.’

That on-off smile again.

‘I wanted to meet the wunderkind. Do you forgive me?’

Jennifer hated to be reminded of her age. When the topic was introduced in conversation, it was typically followed by exasperated comments from the white, middle-aged scientists nearby that they owned shoes older than her. They found that funny. She did not.

She forced a smile and said, ‘Shall we begin?’

‘Thank you.’

Outside the control room, Jennifer covered her eyes preemptively and touched the relay to activate the ceiling lights. The cavern was one closed section of an enormous, spiral cavity excavated from the rock by a nuclear subterrene tunneller, and its convex roof and walls had been melted to a glass finish, wet-looking with reflected light as the LEDs created a starfield. The floor of the cavern had been terraced to create three level sections, each eighty yards long and about fifty feet beneath the tunnel roof. The amphitheatre control room, where Jennifer and Hartfield stood, filled the highest terrace. The middle contained a reservoir of sand, large enough to protect the scientists in the control room from catastrophic failure of the two centrifuges in the third, lowest terrace. Scattered throughout the chamber were equipment crates, vehicles, work cabins, and construction materials. The air was dry, dusty and hot.

Looking down the cavern at the floor-to-ceiling bulkhead that separated Project Déjà Vu from whatever existed in the next chamber, Jennifer thought of the nuclear subterrene tunneller at the terminus. Its plant could power the complex for another twenty-five years, or, should the need arise, destroy it with an inferno that would roll up the spiral excavation in a fraction of an instant.

Jennifer always shuddered when she considered this, and she was glad when Hartfield interrupted her.

‘I wonder if you could explain the significance of the first experiment, which you described in your report.’

‘Here,’ Jennifer said, producing the savonette pocket watch. ‘It’s the star of the show.’

She put the watch into Hartfield’s hand. He read the words that Jennifer had written on the case in magic marker. His thumb rubbed them. Slowly, the two began to walk down the steps to the middle terrace.

‘It happened on Tuesday,’ she said. Her throat was drier than usual. ‘One hour before we received presidential authority, the re-injection alarms sounded. These alarms are designed to respond to certain gravitational anomalies that correlate with the re-injection of matter. They’re automatic.’

‘But you hadn’t sent anything through time.’

‘Not at that point. The reception centrifuge began to spin up at 11:52 a.m. At precisely noon, with the rotation arm at full speed, our cameras captured the materialisation of a plastic box. It struck the reception container at the perfect angle. Splashdown. Turn the watch. You see the time and date?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wrote that at 2:00 p.m., two hours after the watch materialised.’

‘What did you do after it appeared?’

‘I couldn’t believe it. I ran to the office, opened a drawer, and took it out. The same watch, that is.’ Jennifer laughed. The rush of success reddened her ears, but she knew the machine was an emphatic screw you to all those who had questioned her youth, her worth. ‘There was…there was a moment when I held both watches. In my left hand, the original watch showed the correct time. In my right, the duplicate showed two hours’ hence. The same watch. We had done it. But we had only two hours to prep the machine.’

‘Were you tempted to not send it back?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Were you tempted to let 2:00 p.m. pass by without firing up the machine and sending the watch back to 12:00 p.m.?’

‘That would have been impossible, Mr Hartfield. The effect of the cause had already occurred. You can’t have an effect without a cause.’

‘What if you tried?’

Jennifer frowned. ‘I’m not making myself clear. The watch had already been sent; it just so happened that the sending had not yet occurred. Do you see what I mean? It’s no different from firing a gun at a target. You can, as the shooter, wish that travelling bullet should not reach the target after the gun has been fired, but the bullet doesn’t care what you think. It will always hit. Always.’

Hartfield listened to the watch. He closed his eyes. ‘It’s running fine.’

‘No, each tick is marginally slower than the last. The error was three nanoseconds per second on Tuesday. Now it’s three microseconds, an order of magnitude greater.’

‘Is that why you can’t send a living person?’

‘You’re asking Wilbur Wright how to put a man on the moon.’ She took the watch and let the chain spiral into her left palm. ‘The two things are entirely different.’

She stopped to pass him a hard hat. They moved into the zigzagged canyon that bisected the sand barrier. The walls of the passage were twenty feet high.

‘Jennifer,’ he said, ‘I need to tell you something.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I don’t know how much Gerald has told you, but more than twenty years ago now, I was a businessman shopping for a thoroughbred in Kentucky. That life ended when I fell unexpectedly from my mount. The diagnosis, made some days later, was that I was suffering from a malignant brain tumour. In the years that followed, I underwent many treatments, from the medical to the medieval. Ultimately, I went public. I offered half of my empire to anyone who could cure me. As you would expect, I was approached by several con-artists and idiots. But one e-mail, from an Argentine medical student, intrigued me. He had an idea for a non-surgical procedure that I’m sure you’re familiar with.’

‘Orza’s nano-treatment,’ she replied, nodding to the door in the fence. They passed through.

‘In its initial runs, non-cancerous cells were also attacked, particularly neurons associated with higher brain function. In that respect, it was as blunt an instrument as chemotherapy. But I took the treatment with only weeks to live and, as you see, twenty years later I’m not yet dead.’

They walked on. Jennifer gestured to the smaller centrifuge that had been built at the edge of the larger one. She explained how the two formed a transmitter-receiver arrangement. Hartfield nodded, but his eyes were elsewhere, and he touched her elbow to interrupt her explanation.

‘Jennifer, I made Orza a famous man. One day, you too will be renowned. People will want your money and your time. Are you prepared?’

‘I’ll get used to it.’

‘How old was Einstein when he published his Special Theory of Relativity?’

‘Twenty-six.’

‘And Newton his advances in physics?’

‘Not forgetting mathematics and optics. Twenty-two.’

‘And you your time machine, Jennifer?’

She felt the tension that gathered in her muscles when people probed her background, tried to divine her wellspring. ‘Twenty-one.’

Hartfield stared. ‘You’ve beaten them both.’

Jennifer met his gaze. ‘But I had Einstein, and Einstein had Newton.’

‘And you had your father. We should not forget him. Did you know that he once worked for me?’

Jennifer could not conceal her surprise. ‘You ran the West Lothian Centre?’

‘I owned it, and others. These were investments I was happy to make. I owe my life to science.’

‘But you owed nothing to my father,’ Jennifer said. She surprised herself with the old anger. ‘I remember the problems he had when I was growing up. Doors closing, friends not returning his calls. Was that your doing, letting him go from the Centre? Because of the bombing?’

‘Your father returned to academia, eventually. He was found not guilty. He recovered his career.’

‘And my mother?’

Hartfield rested against a wall-like baffle. Behind it, an electrical plant hummed.

‘Jennifer, I do hope I haven’t offended you. I came here to offer congratulations. And, because your father and I were once friends, I need you to warn him. He is in danger.’

‘What kind of danger?’

‘I can’t be certain. Talk to him.’

‘You talk to him.’

‘He wouldn’t listen.’

Jennifer looked at this man: his blank, closed face; his unnatural body language; his clumsy threat. ‘What should I say?’

‘Tell him to stay in Oxford.’

‘Oxford.’

‘Every…’

‘Every what?’

‘Every effect has a cause,’ he said.

Jennifer folded her arms. ‘What goes around comes around.’

‘That too. Thank you, Jennifer. I’m glad we met. Congratulations once more. I will study your reports carefully. Goodbye.’

The frown did not leave her face until Hartfield had closed the air-tight door to the cavern. The radial arm of the centrifuge began to move. With each revolution, Jennifer felt her headache throb. The last of her drunkenness had gone.

West Lothian, Scotland

Professor David Proctor forced himself to breathe with tidal ease, to wax air, to wane. He counted the blown specks on the taxi’s windscreen as it idled. The hotel seemed to watch him. Twenty years ago, David had worked beneath its vast grounds in a research centre whose entrances were now capped and dead. He thought about the cut plumbing, the emptied kitchens, the barge-long conference tables splintered, the coffee pots emptied and the conversation silenced. He thought about it all. The young David Proctor was gone. The older impostor remained: a professor, a single parent, and burned out academic not far from retirement. His belly was larger. His head was balding. But he still wore a tailored suit. The aftershave was same brand as the younger man’s, probably.

He opened his briefcase, took a brush, and tidied his hair.

Now or never, Proctor.

He opened the door and, without emerging, breathed the Scottish air. Nodding firs. A cloud-shot sky. For a moment, he was inside his memories of twenty years before.

‘Professor,’ whispered a voice in his ear, ‘you have a call.’

‘I’m supposed to be stealthed, Ego.’

‘It is your daughter.’

David looked at his flat shoe on the gravel. Now or never. He put his leg back in the car and closed the door. He took Ego, a metallic computer the size of a credit card, from his wallet. ‘Go on, Ego.’

‘I am having difficulty. Might it be encrypted?’

‘Use my Oxford PGP private key.’

‘I already tried that.’

‘Oh. Are there any clues to the encryption method in the caller ID?’

‘None.’

David’s frown turned into a smile. He could feel his daughter’s presence already.

‘Access my medical records, please.’

‘Just a moment.’

David told Ego which data to use as a key, and, shortly, an image of his daughter appeared on Ego’s exterior. Her skin was puffy and her eyes were ringed with the sediment of hard work. A sickening fancy: that Jennifer had inherited a filament of decay from her late mother, whose head David had cradled in the last moments of her life not far beneath his taxi.

‘Hey, Jennifer,’ he said, unsettled by his thoughts.

‘Dad. You’re not easy to find.’

‘Jennifer, I’m really glad you called. Really.’

‘You seem shocked.’

‘It’s your accent.’

‘You sound as British as ever.’

David feared this conversation would skim the surface of their hurt when it needed to plunge. ‘Jesus,’ he blurted, ‘we need to talk.’

‘Go on.’

‘I sent you to New York too soon.’

‘You sent me away, Dad.’ Jennifer spoke without intonation. David wondered if she had rehearsed the statement with a psychiatrist. ‘You sent the freak to the freaks, then skipped the country.’

‘You couldn’t stay in Oxford any more. You wouldn’t have realised your potential.’ David rubbed his sore neck. ‘We’ve been through this.’

‘I was the one who had to go through it, not you. Do you know what it was like in that school?’

‘I got your e-mails.’

‘I didn’t get yours.’

Now his anger threatened to match hers. ‘Jennifer, why did you call?’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at the old research centre in West Lothian.’

‘Crap, already? What are you doing there?’

‘I can’t tell you that on the phone.’

‘This isn’t a phone, Dad.’ The tone: amusement that the old duffer could even check his email.

‘OK, I can tell you it’s a matter of national security. Now you know as much as me.’ There was one fact, however, that David omitted. That morning, before the official summons to West Lothian had come through, a mysterious, female caller had instructed him to carry out an act so extraordinary that he had laughed into the telephone. But, as her credibility built with each minute, his humour had died away. He had agreed to her plan. And here he was.

These thoughts flickered through his mind in the time it took to smile, and say, ‘Well, I figured out your encryption.’

‘You mean your Ego unit did. Sounds like a nice toy.’

‘He’s clever, but a bit buggy. A prototype.’

David reached into his jacket. ‘Do you know what I brought with me, Jenny?’

‘Dad, listen for second. Go back.’

He froze. ‘Has someone been talking to you?’

‘Dad? Go back to Oxford. Go home.’ She might have been five years old again. ‘Please now.’