Peter Hamilton - If at First...

Now I understand, I told him: time machine. Jenson gave me this look, like he was pitying me. “But Marcus was twelve, just like me,” he said. “We’d been at prep school together since we were eight, and he already possessed the kind of suavity men don’t normally get until they’re over thirty, damnit he even unnerved the teachers. So how did an eight-year-old get to go time traveling? That was in 1967, NASA hadn’t even reached the moon then, we’d only just gotten transistors. Nobody in ’67 could build a time machine.”

But that’s the thing with time machines, I told him. They travel back from the future. I knew I’d get stick from Paul and Carmen for that one, but I couldn’t help it. Something about Jenson’s attitude was bothering me, that old policeman’s instinct. He didn’t present himself as delusional. Okay, that’s not a professional shrink’s opinion, but I knew what I was seeing. Jenson was an ordinary nerdish programmer, a self-employed contractor working from home, more recently from his laptop as he chased Orthew ’round the world. Something was powering this obsession, and the more I heard the more I wanted to get to the root of it. “Exactly,” Jenson said. His expression changed to tentative suspicion as he gazed at me. “At first I thought an older Marcus had come back in time and given his young self a 2010 encyclopedia. It’s the classic solution, after all, even though it completely violates causality. But knowledge alone doesn’t explain Marcus’s attitude; something changed an ordinary little boy into a charismatic, confident, wise fifty-year-old trapped in an eight-year-old body.”

And you worked out the answer, I guessed. Jenson produced a secretive smile. “Information,” he said. “That’s how he does it. That’s how he’s always done it. This is how it must have been first time ’round: Marcus grows up naturally and becomes a quantum theorist, a cosmologist, whatever … He’s a genius, we know that. We also know you can’t send mass back through time, wormhole theory disallows it. You can’t open a rift through time big enough to take an atom back a split second, the amount of energy to do that simply doesn’t exist in the universe. So Marcus must have worked out how to send raw information instead, something that has zero mass. Do you see? He sent his own mind back to the 1960s. All his memories, all his knowledge packaged up and delivered to his earlier self; no wonder his confidence was off the scale.”

I had to send Paul out then. He couldn’t stop laughing, which drew a hurt pout from Jenson. Carmen stayed, though she was grinning broadly; Jenson beat any of the current sitcoms on TV for chuckles. All right then, I said, so Orthew sent his grown-up memory back to his kid self, and you’re trying to find the machine that does it. Why is that, Toby?

“Are you kidding?” he grunted. “I want to go back myself.”

Seems reasonable, I admitted. Is that why you broke into the Richmond lab?

“Richmond was one of two possibles,” he said. “I’ve been monitoring the kind of equipment he’s been buying for the last few years. After all, he’s approaching fifty.”

“What’s the relevance of that?” Carmen interjected.

“He’s a bloke,” Jenson said. “You must have read the gossip about him and girls. There have been hundreds: models, actresses, society types.”

“That always happens with rich men,” she told him, “you can’t base an allegation on that, especially not the one you’re making.”

“Yes but that first time ’round he was just a physicist,” Jenson said. “There’s no glamour or money in that. Now, though, he knows how to build every post-2000 consumer item at age eight. He can’t not be a billionaire. This time ’round he was worth a hundred million by the time he was twenty. With that kind of money you can do anything you want. And I think I know what that is. You only have to look at his genetics division. His electronics are well in advance of anything else on the planet, but what his labs are accomplishing with DNA sequencing and stem cell research is phenomenal. They have to have started with a baseline of knowledge decades ahead of anybody else. Next time he goes back he’ll introduce into the 1970s the techniques he’s developed this time ’round. We’ll probably have rejuvenation by 1990. Think what that’ll make him, a time-traveling immortal. I’m not going to miss out on that if I can help it.”

I don’t get it, I told him. If Orthew goes back and gives us all immortality in the ’90s, you’ll be a part of it, we all will. Why go to these criminal lengths?

“I don’t know if it is time travel,” Jenson said forlornly. “Not actual traveling backward, I still don’t see how that gets around causality. It’s more likely he kicks sideways.”

I don’t get that, I said. What do you mean?

“A parallel universe,” Jenson explained. “Almost identical to this one. Generating the wormhole might actually allow for total information transfer, the act of opening it creates a xerox copy of this universe as it was in 1967. Maybe. I’m not certain what theory his machine is based on, and he certainly isn’t telling anyone.”

I looked at Carmen. She just shrugged. Okay, thank you for your statement, I told Jenson, we’ll talk again later.

“You don’t believe me,” he accused me.

Obviously we’ll have to run some checks, I replied. “Tape 83-7B,” he growled at me. “That’s your proof. And if it isn’t at the Richmond Center, then he’s building it at Ealing. Check there if you want the truth.”

Which I did. Not immediately. While Carmen and Paul sorted out Jenson’s next interview with the criminal psychologist, I went down to forensics. They found the videotape labeled 83-7B for me, which had a big red star on the label. It was the recording of a kids’ show from ’83: Saturday Breakfast with Bernie . Marcus Orthew was on it to promote his Nanox computer, which was tied in to a national school computer learning syllabus for which Orthanics had just won the contract. It was the usual zany rubbish, with minor celebrities being dunked in blue and purple goo at the end of their slot. Marcus Orthew played along like a good sport. But it was what happened when he came out from under the dripping nozzle that sent a shiver down my spine. Wiping the goo off his face he grinned and said: “That’s got to be the start of reality TV.” In 1983? It was Orthew’s satellite channel that inflicted Big Brother on us in 1995.

Toby Jenson’s computer contained a vast section on the Orthanics Ealing facility. Eight months ago, it had taken delivery of twelve specialist cryogenic superconductor cells, the power rating higher than the ones used by Boeing’s shiny new electroramjet spaceplane. I spent a day thinking about it while the interview with Toby Jenson played over and over in my mind. In the end it was my gut police instinct I went with. Toby Jenson had convinced me. I put my whole so-called career on the line and applied for a warrant. I figured out later that was where I went wrong. Guess which company supplied and maintained the Home Office IT system? The request must have triggered red rockets in Orthew’s house. According to the security guards at the gate, Marcus Orthew arrived twelve minutes before us. Toby Jenson had thoughtfully indicated in his files the section he believed most suitable to be used for the construction of a time machine.

He was right, and I’d been right about him. The machine was like the core of the CERN accelerator, a warehouse packed full of high-energy physics equipment. Right at the center, with all the fat wires and conduits and ducts focusing on it, was a dark spherical chamber with a single oval opening. The noise screeching out from the hardware set my teeth on edge, Paul and Carmen clamped their hands over their ears. Then Carmen pointed and screamed. I saw a giant brick of plastic explosives strapped to an electronics cabinet. Now I knew what to look for, I saw others. Some were sitting on the superconductor cells. So that’s what it’s like being caught inside an atom bomb.