Ian Hocking - Déjà Vu

She felt her jaw unlock and understood that she had been given the power to speak. ‘Yes,’ she said.

Beckmann waited. He looked at her grubby T-shirt and cheap flip-flops, both souvenirs of a holiday she had never taken. ‘Good.’

The spell broke. Saskia collapsed into her chair. It spun with a clicking sound that recalled the revolver’s cylinder.

‘My assistant will arrive in two minutes. She will give you a suit, some money, and the keys to an apartment. I suggest you go there and calm down. Embrace your new life. A second chance. Here is your badge.’ He put a leather wallet on the table. ‘You should deal with that awful smell and…’

Beckmann stopped. Saskia was pointing the revolver at him. She pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. On the sixth click, Beckman shook his head.

‘…you’ll find live ammunition in the armoury, second floor.’

She regarded him blankly.

‘Oh, Saskia?’

‘What.’

‘Here is your first assignment.’ A sheaf of documents landed on her desk. They looked ink-based. ‘The first thief I want you to catch is an Englishman called David Proctor. Don’t worry about the jurisdictional issues—I’ll handle those. Orient yourself, but don’t take too long about it. And remember you’re on probation. If you fail, you die, and at length. There will be another like you. There always is. Good morning.’

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.’