Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [22]
He looked hurt. ‘I’ve got to learn all these modern words, right? I mean, I’m still really just a lad from Cork who’s running to catch up on the last century, so I am.’
Maddy sighed. ‘It’s sort of like energy that’s supposed to exist at a sub-atomic level. It was still just theoretical mumbo … jumbo in my time.’
‘I think they started building something to do with that in India in my time,’ said Sal. ‘Experimental reactor or something, because we were running out of oil and stuff.’
Maddy scooped up some fries from her box. ‘Anyway, if I can continue, Liam? Chan set out to do a paper on zero-point energy and ended up changing course. Instead he wrote a paper on the theoretical possibility of time travel. The main point he was making in his work was that the theoretical energy that was assumed to be there in normal space-time, the sub-atomic energy-soup that was meant to be everywhere, was in fact a form of “leakage” from other dimensions. He writes this science paper and does nothing else notable until his death from cancer a few years later at the age of twenty-seven.’
‘So, like Foster told us,’ said Liam, ‘this Chan lad is the true inventor of time travel, not the Waldstein fella?’
‘Well, he did the theoretical work that led to Waldstein’s machine, so I guess they’re both responsible for inventing it.’
‘The message from the agency said he’d been assassinated,’ said Sal.
Maddy nodded. ‘Which means … what?’ She looked at both of them. ‘I’m guessing it means someone is trying to prevent time travel being invented?’
Liam reached for a ketchup sachet. ‘So … hold on. Isn’t that what the Waldstein fella wanted in the first place? To make sure time travel never got invented. Isn’t that why this agency thing exists, why the three of us’re here instead of dead?’
‘So why would the agency want us to save Chan?’ asked Sal. ‘I mean … no Chan means no time travel, right? That means no more time problems.’
‘S’right.’ Liam raised a finger. ‘The message didn’t actually tell us to save him.’
Maddy leaned forward. ‘It was an incomplete message. Maybe that’s the bit we missed at the end?’
‘But we don’t know that for sure,’ replied Sal. ‘Maybe it was someone from the future letting us know that time up ahead was changing and that there was now no more need for the agency … for us?’
Maddy shook her head and pointed to the message printed out on paper. ‘Look … it begins with “contamination event”. I’d say that suggests they considered this to be a bad thing. And they’re not too happy about it.’
They were silent for a moment, all three of them staring at the printed words on the page, trying to determine the intent of the message.
‘Foster was very, very specific about this,’ said Maddy after a while. ‘History must go a certain way, for good or bad. Even if the history yet to happen features some kid called Chan who makes time travel possible … that’s the way it has to be. And if it changes from that, the agency has to fix it.’
Liam nodded after a few moments. ‘I suppose you’re right. So … do we know where his death is going to happen?’
‘The date in the message is August eighteenth. In our database it mentions Chan was one of a class of high-school students who were on a field trip to the Texas Advanced Energy Research Institute, on this date. This is biographical data on Chan taken from 2056. If this really is an assassination attempt by somebody, the chances are they have access to the same data as us. In other words, they looked at Chan’s biography and noted he was going to be at a particular place at a particular time …’
‘And sent themselves back in time to be there waiting with a gun,’ added Liam.
Maddy nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘Well …’ Liam bit his lip anxiously. ‘You can see now why I’m so bleedin’ keen to have big ol’ Bob by my side. Seems these bad guys have got guns with them and Bob’s a dab hand at dealing with people like that, so he is.’
Maddy glanced at her watch. ‘We should probably get back to the arch. The time bubble is due to flip over in a few hours and we could all