Time Riders

CHAPTER 27

2001, New York

Sal was beginning to feel a little foolish now, standing at the intersection ofBroadway and West 44th Street watching the world go by. A sweet old woman had stopped onlymoments ago to ask whether she’d lost her mommy and daddy and needed to be taken to apoliceman.

Very embarrassing. I’m thirteen, for jahulla’ssake!

She was about to head for somewhere a little less busy to stand, away from the steady flow ofpedestrians, when she felt it… a passing moment of dizziness, disorientation, as if theworld was a giant tablecloth and someone, somewhere, had just given the corner a very gentletug. She reached out for a litter bin to steady herself. Then, recovering her balance, hereyes registered something very subtly different about Times Square long before her braindid.

Something was different.

Her eyes flickered around the busy triangular convergence of streets, thick withMonday-morning traffic.

‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘What is it?’

Then her shifting scrutiny rested on something that hadn’t been there before… anew thing. Above the entrance to the PrimeTime cinema the billboard that had been announcingthe arrival of Planet of the Apes had instead been replaced by alarge flickering screen showing some kind of news programme. There was textat the bottom: CNN: MISSION UPDATE — Day 346.

She watched a grainy image of several men in crumpled orange boiler suits holding clipboardsand chatting amicably within the cramped confines of some sort of capsule…

Subtitles ticker-taped on to the screen: +++Cmdr Jerry Hammond and crewcelebrate Anton Puchov’s thirty-fifth birthday+++

Sal noticed that few, if any, of the pedestrians on the pavement around her seemedparticularly interested in the broadcast, as if it was something commonplace — old newsfor them.

The image of the men manoeuvring awkwardly in the cramped interior changed to a picture of arust-coloured sphere floating against an ink-black backdrop. A new ticker-tape subtitleappeared:

+++Mission to Mars: 80 days to Mars orbit+++

+++CNN warmly wishes Anton a happy birthday+++

‘Oh my,’ she gasped, and pulled the mobile phone out of her pocket.

The phone buzzed in Maddy’s hand. ‘Sal?’

‘Did you feel it? The dizziness?’

‘I felt sort of nauseous about a minute ago. Thought it was my asthma,’ she said,glancing down at her inhaler.

‘I think… I think… that was a… that was IT.’

Maddy sat up. ‘What?… You mean a shift?’

Sal hesitated. ‘Yeah… there’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘On the big screen here…’

‘What?’

‘There’s a rocket on its way to Mars… I think.’

Maddy nearly splashed some coffee on to the keyboard. ‘You serious?’

‘I’m watching it right now… on CNN.’

Maddy looked up at the row of monitors in front of her. At first glance none of them appearedto be showing anything out of the ordinary. One showed Fox News and some dull political story,the second was tuned into MSNBC and a weatherman promising a warm sunny day tomorrow, the nextwas tapped into the stock exchange, another showed BBC News 24 and was running a story aboutthe Spice Girls’ forthcoming world tour and the tickets selling out within anhour…

‘Oh my God,’ she wheezed, suddenly short of breath.

Didn’t they split up in the nineties?

But here they were promoting their seventh album!

‘You’re right! Something’s changed, Sal.’

She felt the burden of responsibility beginning to settle on her shoulders, rememberingFoster’s quiet pep talk, that it was down to her to pull the strings together, to makesense of the data…

… to locate the source of the change, Maddy… that’syour job, to find where the shift is coming from.

She looked at the wall of screens in front of her and wondered where exactly she was supposedto make a start.

‘Thanks, Sal. I’ll call you back,’ she said quickly, and snapped her phoneshut. She tapped the keyboard and pulled up the CNN news feed. And there it was, a grainyimage of the crew inside some cramped vehicle broadcast from God knows how many hundreds ofthousands of miles away, and a computer graphic showing how far they’d gone, and howmuch further they’d yet to go.

A mission to Mars… that’s got to be the biggest changehere.

‘Bigger than a freaking Spice Girls tour,’ she muttered.

She did a Google search on the Mars mission, quickly reading the results before her. Not forthe first time in recent days her jaw slackened and dropped open.

There was an enormous space programme inoperation, co-operatively funded by the Chinese, the Russians and America. A small scientificoutpost existed on the moon, a ‘cartwheel’ space station hung in geo-stationaryorbit of Earth, a number of supply shuttles had already been landed on Mars ahead of the menen route there. The world — this world — seemedobsessed with space exploration, driven to reach out toneighbouring planets.

She dug deeper into the history of the programme.

Archived newspaper articles from 1983 described a conference of nations discussing thefunding of a ‘permanent lunar outpost’, to build an ‘orbiting missionplatform’ for ‘future projects further afield’.

She found even older newspaper articles, dating from the 1970s, a meeting of minds betweenthe Russian Premier Brezhnev and NASA’s goodwill ambassador John F. Kennedy…

Kennedy?

She looked at the name again.

Not… that… Kennedy? The one whogot shot? The president?

Her history wasn’t great. But she’d seen enough movies and read enough books tobe certain the guy died back in the sixties sometime.

She saw Kennedy’s name suddenly flash up on the CNN ticker-tape feed. A moment later anold man appeared on the screen, a very old man, frail and snowy-haired.

‘No way,’ she whispered, ‘that’s not him… is it?’

+++Ex-president and goodwill ambassador John Kennedy extends hiscongratulations and best wishes to the Mars crew+++

Maddy stared at the old man on the screen. ‘Hang on. You should be dead,’ shesaid. ‘You should’ve died ages ago.’

But when?

She was almost certain it had happened sometime in the sixties. She vaguelyrecalled old news footage of an open-topped car, his wife wearing a pink dress in the backseat and Kennedy in a suit sitting beside her, both of them waving to crowds gathered at theroadside.

Where was that? When was that?

She remembered seeing old news footage from a shaky hand-held cine-camera…

The president’s head snaps forward suddenly, then back.There’s a puff of blood. The man slumps. The woman, his wife, panics. She’sscreaming. What’s left of Kennedy’s head is cradled in her lap. The woman looksaround desperately for help. Men in dark suits clamber aboard the car. It speeds up. Thecrowd on the roadside look confused. Some are ducking to the ground. Some are screaming likethe lady in pink… some seem to be crying…

The name of the place where this happened came to her out of the blue.

‘Dallas, Texas,’ she uttered.

She typed a search phrase into Google:

[+Kennedy +Dallas +assassination]

The search returned only one link that featured all three words. It was from a newspaperarticle dated 22 November 1963. It was an article about a ‘suspected aborted attempt onthe president’s life’. She clicked the link and a newspaper article appeared onscreen.

… a.41 calibre rifle found abandoned on the sixth floor of the School BookDepository overlooking Dealey Plaza. The man suspected of owning the gun, a Mr Lee Oswald,was later arrested at his home. He claimed to have made plans to kill the president duringhis visit to Dallas, but said he changed his mind at the very last moment. The story isfurther complicated by sightings of three strangers in the same building at the time the president’s motorcade was passing, who staff described as‘being dressed like vagrants’ and were certain had no reason to be inthere…

Maddy slapped the bench and yelped. ‘Yes!’

She knew exactly where and when Foster and the others had gone back to.

‘Found you!’ she screamed triumphantly.

1963, Dallas, Texas

The three of them watched the president’s car slowly roll past them and uptowards the overpass in the distance.

‘Information: time contamination is increasing,’ announced Bob in a calmemotionless voice. ‘Mission priority: correct time violation.’

Liam looked at Bob. ‘Um… how are we going to do that?’

‘Recommendation: kill John F. Kennedy.’

‘What?’ gasped Liam. ‘We’ve got to killthe man now?’

Foster shook his head. ‘Not this time, Liam. Relax.’

Bob’s deep voice chimed again with an increasingly insistent tone.‘Recommendation: kill John F. Kennedy immediately.’

The old man watched the car drift slowly away from them. ‘There’ll be times,Liam,’ he said wistfully, ‘that you’ll wish time could be changed, thatthings “down river” — in the future — could be made better thanthey’ve turned out.’

‘But,’ Liam replied, puzzled, ‘we just didchange things, didn’t we?’

Foster nodded. ‘Yes, but on this occasion, history corrects itself after about thirtyseconds.’

‘It does?’ Liam cocked his head. ‘How?’

They heard the distant crack of a rifle.

One shot, followed quickly by another.

Liam leaned forward, poking his head out of the window. He craned his neck to look down theroad as the vehicle swung left and headed beneath the underpass. He saw a fading plume ofsmoke coming from a wooden picket fence at the top of a grassy slope. The president’slimousine swerved. He saw the lady in the back seat, the lady in pink, scrambling over theseat to cradle her husband’s head.

‘In this training scenario, we’ve let history veer off track for less than aminute.’ Foster sighed sadly. ‘But, on this occasion, history does quitesuccessfully manage to correct itself.’ He turned to Liam. ‘Many people believedit was Oswald on his own who killed Kennedy. But there were othermen… hired contract killers ready to fire in case he missed or chickened out at the lastmoment.’

‘Information: time violation has been corrected,’ Bob announced formally.‘Mission priority: return without causing further contamination.’

Liam watched the chaotic scene down below. The panic among the gathered crowd, thepresident’s bodyguards clustering around the car.

‘Was he a good man? A good president?’

Foster shrugged. ‘If he’d been given more time, from what I’ve read inhistory books, perhaps he might have been a greatpresident.’

Liam nodded. ‘Pity.’

‘Yes.’

‘Information: extraction window approaching,’ said Bob, closing his eyes andretrieving data from his embedded computer. ‘In exactly fifty-nine seconds.’

‘We’re going to leave now,’ said Foster. ‘Soon every building alongthis road will be crawling with police and federal agents. Bob,’ hesaid, turning to the support unit, ‘place the gun on the floor.’

He did so.

The old man led them away from the window of the sixth floor.

‘So, how do we get back, Mr Foster?’ asked Liam.

‘Any second now.’

‘Nine seconds to be precise,’ offered Bob.

Liam looked about, but couldn’t see any large cylinders of water for them to climbinto. Then, all of a sudden, he felt a puff of displaced air on his face. A yard ahead of himhe could just about make out a shimmering circular outline.

‘Automated return window is now activated,’ said Bob.

‘Say goodbye to 1963, Liam.’

Liam looked around at the storage room, the dusty stacks of school books, and heard thetearful commotion of women’s voices coming from the floor below.

‘Goodbye, 1963,’ he uttered obediently, and then followed the other two into theshimmering air, holding his nose and his breath as he stepped forward.

2001, New York

Liam felt that horrendous familiar falling sensation. Worse still, he anticipatedfinding himself floundering around submerged underwater.

But instead he found himself standing in the middle of their field office, his feet on hardcold concrete.

‘Uh?… I thought we…?’ he blurted.

Foster slapped his back gently. ‘We go out wet, we come back dry. I’ll explainwhy some other time.’

Liam spotted the girls sitting at the breakfast table, both holding red andwhite cans of a fizzy sugary drink called Dr Pepper that they seemed to like drinking copiousamounts of. Spontaneously they clinked their cans together and cheered the return of theboys.

‘We know exactly where you went, fellas!’ shouted Maddy. ‘Being the pair ofcomplete freakin’ geniuses we are.’

Foster spread his hands. ‘And?’

She grinned triumphantly. ‘So, how was Dallas?’

‘Well done.’ He smiled.

‘I’m guessing you interfered in some way with the assassination of John F.Kennedy. You saved him maybe? But then you must have put it all right again.’ Her facedropped a little. ‘Unfortunately. I’d have liked us to have a mission to Mars onthe go.’

Sal cocked her head curiously. ‘You managed to stop an assassination attempt and thenmade it happen again… and also found some really disgusting clothes to wear… andyou did all that in just under an hour?’

Foster opened his mouth to answer.

‘An hour?’ cut in Liam. ‘We’ve not been gone that long, have we? Tenminutes at the most maybe — ’

Foster chuckled. ‘Time travel isn’t symmetrical,Liam. I could send you to one time location and arrange a return window for fifty years later.As far as you’d be concerned, fifty years would have passed… a whole lifetime. Andyet to someone standing here you’d have disappeared as a young lad and returned againjust moments later as an old man.’

Liam shook his head and grinned. ‘Jay-zus, this timeriding thing is making my headhurt, so it is.’