The Terminus Page 6

  “What the…?”

  “No time for ‘whats’!” the man said. “Hurry! Three minutes at the most before the mag-stunner wears off.”

  “But Beetie? I can’t leave her… I must…” protested Gary as he was shoved backwards into a side-street.

  “Quick! The specs! I’ll explain later.” How could Gary trust this stranger? Beetie was the only person he truly trusted here. “We’ll have to try to save her from the past,” the red guy added, grabbing Gary’s arm. “She’s as important to God as she is to the Agenda. Believe me. I’m Redfor and I’m with Arthry. He sent me to guard over you.”

  “Didn’t help Beetie, ay?” Gary glowered at the man whose rampant pudding-basin red hair was badly in need of Beetie’s attention. “I said you, Gary! Beetie realised the risk she was taking. She understood about going back to the Hatcheries and relying on you from now on. All planned... but she couldn’t tell you everything!”

  Confused, Gary relaxed his grip on the second pair of time-specs when Redfor held out his hand for them. Blinker’s eyelids began to twitch. The mag-stunner was already beginning to wear off.

  “NOW!” cried the man.

  Together they ran and, as Redfor slipped on one pair of time-specs whilst Gary removed the other, both leapt from the pavement onto the shuttle-bus run and landed in the middle of

  Baker Street. A car swerved to avoid them, skidding into the kerb.

  “Wankers!” shouted the driver, shaking his fist as they took off again, running.

  For the second time in one morning, Gary had returned to the present and the world he loved so much, though more heavy-hearted and more desperate than ever to return to a nightmare future… and to Beetie.

  “Mike should...” began Gary.

  “Yeah!” interrupted Redfor. “We know. Soccer practice in Regent’s Park. Right?”

  Gary raised his eyebrows but said nothing. They hurried on to Regent’s Park in silence. After so much to-ing and fro-ing between the present and the future, he had no idea whether he’d find his friend still beside the bench or whether the boy hadn’t yet arrived. Perhaps Mike would already be at soccer practice… their friendship in tatters!

  No Mike, but the bench was there... now with a flyer on it.

  Funny, he thought, that wasn’t here before.

  Gary checked the trees, half-expecting Teeth to appear despite Redfor wearing the bastard’s only means of transport back to his past. He picked up the flyer... an advert for an exhibition at the British Museum. He shrugged his shoulders, flicked it with irritation to ground and slumped onto the bench. In his tight-fitting, shiny, green tracksuit, with Beetie’s pudding-basin haircut, and his mind in future, somehow he no longer belonged to his own world. Redfor sat beside him.

  “Gary, I’ll do what I can to help, but God’s chosen you and Beetie for what he has in mind and Beetie’s done her bit.”

  “Crap!” Gary snapped. “She’s got mixed up in all of this, yeah, but not out of her own choice. It’s all my bloody fault! And what the hell’s happening to her now, anyway?”

  “Nothing’s happened yet, here in the past. Beetie doesn’t even exist.”

  Gary couldn’t bear to think of Beetie not existing. Almost worse than her existing and being tortured for information about the Retreat, as would be likely to happen in the Hatcheries of the future.

  Christ, what a mess!

  “Gary, Beetie’s gonna have to rely on you. And God must believe in you or he wouldn’t have left those time-specs on the bench.”

  Gary glanced at the specs in his hand, returned them to their sparkly case and stuffed this into his pocket, his mind dancing like a scalded spider.

  “Hey... Gary!”

  He glanced up. Mike stood, feet apart, swinging a sports bag from which dangled a pair of soccer boots and gawping at Gary and Redfor. What a strange pair they must have seemed in their gaudy tracksuits with weirdo haircuts.

  “Shit, Gary! No need to turn gay because Emma Pearson’s boobs are out of reach!”

  Gary could find no space for his friend’s humour.

  “You’d never believe me if I told you the truth, Mike, so there’s no point in trying.”

  He was staring at the flyer on the ground... a British Museum exhibition about some archaeological find in Africa? Not his thing at all, ancient history, yet the image there both teased and fascinated him.

  “Try me!” said Mike.

  “What?” responded Gary, distracted by the picture on the flyer.

  “Explain why you’re dressed up like an alien fairy... and why you weren’t at the station like you said you’d be when I called you this morning... and why you’re sitting here with some poncey freak who doesn’t speak a word.”

  “I’ve travelled to the future and come back. Nothing, really! Get the drift? London submerged, the Retreat in the Underground where giant genetically-modified rats lurk, The Agenda, a hideous bastard called Teeth and… oh God, Mike, they’ve gone and taken Beetie to the Hatcheries. They’re gonna torture her and I can’t bear it. Her memory’ll get wiped out again! And it’s all my flipping fault!”

  Mike’s smile faded.

  “Gary?”

  “I tried you and you don’t believe me… so!” He managed to stop himself saying ‘piss off, can’t you?’ before adding, quietly, “please... leave us alone.”

  His words sounded hollow, for an inner voice told him he was going to need Mike big time in the future. Mike, annoying though he might be, had people skills Gary could only dream of.

  “Jesus, Gary, this is serious. I mean, I’d better get you help. You don’t need to take things so badly. Plenty of other girls around apart from Emma… with boobs just as luscious. We could watch the girls in the park playing hockey, for a start. In fact…”

  Gary wasn’t listening. He picked up the flyer. The picture was trying to communicate something. A five-sided tile showing a geometric pattern and strange script made up of varying triangles and circles.

  The Pentatron Tablet Exhibition, the caption read. A unique tablet discovered by divers off the African Gold Coast. Over one hundred thousand years old. This, together with fossilised jaw and skull bones found on the shore, challenges all theories of human evolution to date.

  “Like I’m trying to tell you, mate,” continued Mike, “the hockey pitch. A redhead with amazing legs… and…”

  “God put this here for a purpose! Makes sense, now!” Gary said to Redfor, ignoring Mike.

  “…boobs pretty cool, too!” Mike burbled on. “Wow! If only she didn’t have to wear that awful hockey gear. Oh, come on, Gary. Shall I call an ambulance? Maybe they’ll find you a girl in hospital. An inflatable one. Part of your emergency treatment, ay?”

  A duck waddled into view on its way to the lake. Mike eyed Gary with suspicion as his friend fumbled in his pocket and took out what appeared to be a mobile phone. Gary pointed it, pressed with his thumb, there was a high-pitched whining ‘ZING!’ and the duck froze mid-waddle. Gary turned to Mike.

  “Three minutes!” he announced. “Then it’ll carry on as if nothing happened. Mike stood silent, his mouth open. “And this is Redfor. He’s one of Arthry’s guys. From the Retreat.”

  Mike smiled weakly and nodded without saying a word.

  “Pleased to meet you too, Mike,” said Redfor, his face giving away nothing.

  “Fashionable specs, mate,” Mike added, nervously.

  “And this is a message from God!” Gary held up the flyer.

  “Sure, Gary! God! Message from God. Cool one!” responded Mike, half-smiling, his voice faint and squeaky.

  “God the Man, Mike. You with us?”

  Mike cast a nervous glance at the duck.

  “Yeah, Gary, I’m with you… sort of… God the Man. Good one!”

  “This Pentatron Tablet thing… God must’ve left the flyer about it here. He’s trying to tell us something. About what The Agenda’s after, maybe? And himself, of course! A hundred thousand years old… but somehow this hol
ds the key to the future.”

  “The future?” echoed Mike, still staring at the duck as its feet began to twitch.

  “Sit down, Mike. I’m gonna show you something else.”

  “Sit down. Yeah! Sounds good!” agreed Mike, eyeing the bird with apprehension when it continued on towards the lake as if nothing had happened. He sat not too near Gary, leaving what he felt was a safe space between them. His friend took the spectacles case from his pocket.

  “Those specs on Redfor... they’re the same as these,” he said, opening it and removing the time-specs. On seeing a thousand tiny eyes peering up at him, Mike’s own eyes widened. He reached out, as if drawn by a magnet.

  “NO!” warned Gary. “Sorry, but don’t touch... unless…” He was thinking about Beetie. “Not unless I let you. They’re for her, Mike. Wearing these is the only way I can...”

  “Her?”

  “Beetie. Only way I can get to her! Like I told you last time I returned… but time’s gone a bit different now, I guess. So what I said then hasn’t yet happened. May never happen! God willing!”

  “Oh, you Catholics!”

  Gary paused.

  “Yeah! I swear to the real God Beetie’s the loveliest girl that’s ever been!” he said, staring at the ground.

  Mike grinned.

  “Perfect boobs?”

  Gary nearly said ‘piss off’ again, but he remembered and controlled his anger.

  “She’s not cheap ’n’ pretty, like the Pearson girl.” He stared at Mike for a few moments. “Nope! You wouldn’t understand. Not yet.” His eyes returned to the flyer.

  The British Museum? Not a fortress!

  “Know of any thieves, Mike?” he asked.

  “Only Danny. He stole Emma Pearson from Eyeballs Dave! Remember?”

  “Forget bloody Emma Pearson! Grow up, for a change.”

  “Okay, Professor Brainbox! So you plan to rob the British Museum, land us both in clink… and you can say bye-bye to your pretty little tomato girl! Is she dressed in red like this dude?”

  “Beetie? Hell, Mike, I’ll never say good-bye to her! And she wears blue, not red, thick-head!”

  “Okay… keep your weirdo shirt on!”

  “A hundred thousand years old, Mike! An advanced human artefact! Found with those fossilised bones. You realise what this means?”

  “People were playing soccer long before Spurs got promoted to the first division, right?”

  Mike winked at Redfor, but the man failed to respond.

  “What’s with Mr Happy here?” Mike asked his friend.

  “Mike, if you had any idea…” Gary began.

  “Take him, Gary!” interrupted Redfor. “You’ll need someone like Mike when you go to the Hatcheries. I’ll be spending some time here in the past, anyway. For a start I’ve gotta track down God. Funny how he said he must never meet up with you but wouldn’t explain why. Big mystery, that man. Damned clever, though. You’d understand what I mean if you were to meet him.”

  “But surely you can’t just take off the specs? Won’t you vanish into the future?”

  “Give God a little credit, Gary. He wasn’t completely daft when he invented these things.”

  He fiddled with something behind his ear and removed the specs without disappearing.

  “We never showed you in the Retreat how they work. See, yours were pre-set by God, so you and Beetie would meet up. Allow me!”

  Mike, too, stared in silent disbelief as he listened to Redfor explain the workings of the extraordinary specs. On each limb was a minute switch. With both set in neutral, the wearer, upon removing the specs, would remain in whatever time he or she had travelled to. One side had an option to push the switch forwards, taking the person to the future at a defined point of entry into the ‘timeless dimension’ (“Christ, man, you’ve lost me!” muttered Mike.). Backwards on the other side, and they would return in a flash to the past… whenever the past last visited happened to be. Mike appeared even more confused as Redfor tried to explain how God had pre-set the default on Gary’s specs to arrive earlier, and Gary understood why the man did that: in case he might cause something in the future that would need fixing as had happened with Beetie. Around each lens was a thin diaphragm from ‘zero’ to ’infinity’, one side for forward travel, the other for going back in time.

  “They’re not to play with!” warned Redfor. “No one’s ever travelled forwards to infinity... to the empty universe, as God calls it. As for backwards… well, you don’t wanna find out what this place was like before the Big Bang, do you?”

  The diaphragms controlling the spectacles’ travel through time intrigued Gary… rings within rings. Mike stood gawping, speechless, but Gary absorbed everything as Redfor explained the science, for he had to get things right when the time came.

  “But with Beetie… I… I can’t afford to make a mistake in the Hatcheries. Not a second too late. Can I be that certain? I mean from where we are, now…”

  He couldn’t bear to think of the ordeal the girl might be going through, despite what Redfor had said about the future not yet happening.

  “Remember this, Gary. You alone can save her. Yes, the time-specs are accurate to the nearest trillionth of a second, if you find this reassuring. It all came about in an underground place straddling France and Switzerland. In the present.”

  “Like ‘now’ present?” Mike queried.

  “Research into the micro-cosmos by busting elementary particles in something called the Large Hadron Collider,” continued Redfor. “God loses me most of the time, but…”

  “Hey, I read about the LHC!” interrupted Gary. “In Popular Science. Where they found the Higgs boson. The God particle! Place called CERN. They’re trying to explain dark energy and why the universe exists at all.”

  “Here we go! Welcome back, Professor Brainbox!”

  “No, Mike! Be serious for a change. The sorts of energies they’re using might, in theory, open up wormholes causing closed time-like curves. Don’t you see?”

  “All I see is a couple of weirdos in shiny, poncey suits. But the duck business was impressive.”

  “It’s the start of something, Mike. Perhaps they find a way of trapping those wormholes… joining them together… wow! Awesome!”

  Gary quickly learned all he needed to about the time-specs, though the science both troubled and fascinated him: truths way beyond the laws of physics they taught at school, and he was determined to one day uncover them.

  He stared at the specs in his hand.

  “And meanwhile, dude?” asked Mike.

  Gary remained pensive.

  “You’re right, Mike. Gotta get on. Beetie’s relying on me. I understand now. Shall we decamp to my place?”

  “What about your soccer boots?” Mike asked on setting off. “Gone and left ’em under the bench, you dozy sod.”

  Sure enough, they were where he’d put them in another time… dimension… whatever. Made no sense to him they should be there if he’d recently returned to relive the same past. Retrieving his boots, he shrugged his shoulders and logged a mental note of the phenomenon.

  “Oh… via the playing fields, please, Gary. The hockey pitch. See, I’m still trying to get Emma Pearson out of my head, and that redhead… I’m not kidding about her legs. They’re a-a-a-awe... some! Okay for you now with that Beastie girl...”

  “Beetie!” snapped Gary. “Not okay, anyway. She might be getting tortured… in the future.”

  “Did she let you kiss her?” persisted Mike as they headed for

  Baker Street station. “And did you get a hard-on the first time like they say?”

  “Shut-up, Mike! We’re trying to bloody save what’s left of the world. Redfor, I’m not so sure this is such a good idea taking Mike with me?”

  Redfor said nothing, and Gary refused to admit to the hard-on he’d experienced whilst kissing Beetie. Surely he was allowed some secrets from a best friend.

  “Afraid she’ll go for my irresistibly superior Ital
ian looks, mate?” teased Mike.

  “Nope! More afraid I’ll be tempted to feed you to the gee-rats, Mikey boy!”

  “There! He can’t take competition,” Mike announced to Redor. “Like he’s always dodging soccer practice. Not the same with science or maths at school when he leaves us all way behind counting on our fingers. So how about going for the redhead first, Gary? The future hasn’t happened yet, anyway! I bet you a fiver her legs are better than Beetie’s!”

  Gary’s mind returned to the night he shared a cell with Beetie, to his fantasies of her wearing a flimsy, see-through nightie. Nothing wrong with her legs then... or in her tight-fitting tracksuit.

  “Mike, please stop distracting me! Think ‘greatest archaeological robbery of all time’ can’t you? That’s what we’ll need to pull off with this British Museum exhibition thing. You started thinking yet?”

  He stopped and grabbed Mike’s arm.

  “I’m warning you, Mike. Don’t let me down or I really will feed you to those rats! Okay?”

  Mike nodded and, unseen by Gary, raised his eyebrows in mock desperation. They took the Jubilee line train bound for Swiss Cottage and sat in silence, attracting curious stares. Gary no longer cared. All he could think about was Beetie and the seemingly impossible task between him sitting on an Underground train in London in 2013 and ever seeing her again at some unknown time in the nightmare of a distant future.

  Chapter 4: The Hatcheries

  The circular door flipped open as soon as the shuttle-pod came to a standstill. A strong arm belonging to a large surfacer reached in, grabbed the net ensnaring Beetie, as if she weighed no more than a bag of sugar, and flung her to the ground. The door snapped shut and the pod sped off as the ogre ogled the girl, amused by her futile attempts to punch and kick herself free.

  “Hey, this B32968’s a bit frisky!” he chuckled to his over-muscled colleague. “Should give us a bit of sport, huh?”

  “Get me out of this thing, you oaf!” shouted Beetie, fighting the net.

  “Will do, but only when we’ve got you to the right block,” the man replied, his thick lips stretching into an ugly grin. “Don’t you remember your old home, Belinda?”