Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

‘GOOD GOD!’ Lincoln suddenly exclaimed. ‘A DISASTER!’

‘What now?’ Maddy pulled away from Liam and rushed forward. ‘What is it?’

Lincoln’s pointed finger was shaking. ‘A calamity , Miss Carter, a calamity I tell you! Right there through this window! Look!’

She followed his goggle-eyed gaze and saw he was watching the looping footage of tomorrow’s trade towers disaster.

‘No … no, see, relax, this isn’t live .’ She shook her head, wondering how she was going to explain the difference between live footage and recorded footage to a man who’d never seen a moving image before.

‘Are there people living in that structure? That tall tower?’ He turned to her. ‘In what city is that explosion happening?’

‘New York.’

‘Tarnation! You mean here ? This very place?’ Lincoln turned to the others. ‘Is this future of yours in the middle of some war ?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘Well, sort of …’

‘Then we must join the fight!’ Lincoln turned and rushed into the gloom towards the far end of the archway.

‘Mr Lincoln!’ called Maddy. There was no answer. But she could hear the corrugated-iron shutters rattling under the impact of his fists. ‘Oh crud … he’s a real pain,’ she groaned, and made her way across the floor to join him.

‘Mr Lincoln?’

‘Where is the door, Miss Carter? We must join this fight and defend our — ’

‘Mr Lincoln … will you please calm down!’ She pressed the green button to one side of the shutter door and with the whine of the motor and the clank of chains, the shutter lifted, spilling evening light across the archway’s floor through the slowly widening crack.

‘There’s no war going on right now! No invasion of America!’

‘But I saw it just then, Miss Carter, with my own eyes! A vast explosion !’

‘It’s just an image of something that’s going to happen. That’s all. Nothing you need to get all upset about! OK? Look … everything’s fine outside right now!’

The shutter rattled to a halt. For a moment she was unsure whether to show Lincoln the world outside. The more details he learned of the future, the more contaminated his mind was going to be. For an anonymous man with little or no influence on history, that might be an acceptable contamination. But for a man destined to be president …? Well, like she’d said, he already knew too much. A little more wasn’t going to make any difference either way.

‘Take a look … everything’s just fine.’

She gently ushered Lincoln forward, stepping into the cobbled alley. She grabbed his shoulders and turned him to his left, so that he faced the end of their backstreet and the dirty, rubbish-strewn quayside beyond. Above them the Williamsburg Bridge swept across the East River towards the glowing lights of Manhattan. It boomed and rumbled as a train went over above, drowning out the tooting of bridge-borne traffic above and the distant wail of a police siren.

‘See now? Nothing’s going on. There’s no war!’

‘God help me! This … is … quite … rem-’

‘Let me guess. Remarkable?’ she finished for him.

Lincoln didn’t reply. Instead she heard a gurgling sound. She turned in time to see Lincoln’s eyes rolling drunkenly until she could see only the whites. His head lolled to one side; his body slackened like a rag doll, but remained upright and standing. It was then she noticed the thick fingers of Bob’s hand round his throat, and Bob standing behind.

‘My God! You just killed him! You just snapped Abraham Lincoln’s neck!’

‘Negative,’ said Bob. ‘He is unharmed and unconscious. I have compressed a nerve cluster in his neck.’

Sal, Liam and Becks emerged into the flickering amber lamplight of the backstreet. ‘I’m sorry. It was my suggestion,’ said Liam. ‘I gave Bob the order to do that.’

Maddy looked anxiously at Lincoln’s body slumped in Bob’s arms. ‘You sure he’s not … you know, dead ?’

‘He will be fine,’ said Becks. ‘Information: he will experience some bruising and some minor swelling only.’

Maddy pulled on her bottom lip for a moment, then finally nodded. ‘Right … yeah, in that case, good idea, Liam. With any luck he’ll wake up back in New Orleans thinking this was all some sort of a drunken dream. He’ll blame it on the whisky.’ She stepped back inside the arch. ‘Quick, let’s get the displacement machine charged up before he comes round.’

2001, New York

It took ten minutes to get three-quarters of the LEDs on the charge display lit up. Maddy was certain that was going to be enough. She only needed to send the unconscious form of Lincoln and Bob, perhaps Liam too, back to 1831. She turned round to check Bob and Sal were still keeping an eye on the man, curled up on one of the armchairs.

‘How is he?’

‘Still out,’ replied Sal, looking up from reading something on the table.

‘OK, computer-Bob, we’ll use the same drop-location data as the last trip. Punch them in to just before they rescued Lincoln from that wagon.’

› Affirmative, Maddy.

‘When he wakes up, he’ll think he passed out right outside that inn you mentioned, Liam.’

‘Right. Then me an’ Bob need to sniff out what caused that wagon to go hammer and tongs.’

‘You got it.’ She turned to the webcam. ‘Oh, and get a density probe running.’

Last thing they needed was a dock worker in there witnessing the arrival of Lincoln and heralding him as some kind of prophet from God.

› Density probe is activated.

Liam was standing beside her. ‘He’s a character, so. That Lincoln fella.’

‘A regular firebrand,’ she tutted. ‘Too much energy for his own good, like a freakin’ toddler on a sugar rush.’ She pulled up the density-probe display bar and nodded with satisfaction that nothing so far had stepped through their drop space. ‘If he’d been alive in my time, I guess he’d make a pretty good children’s TV presenter … except for the fact he’d scare the kids with that monobrow.’

Liam laughed. He got the gist of that. ‘Still … I suppose it’s energy like that that makes a poor farmer’s son a president?’

She nodded. ‘I guess so. I’d like to think that — ’

The MSNBC news feed flickered. Both of them caught the sudden change out of the corner of their eyes — the news reporter standing outside the White House and reporting on President Bush’s sliding approval ratings had been wearing a pale blue shirt and a black tie … all of a sudden he was now wearing a white shirt with a dark red tie.

‘Did you see that?’ said Maddy.

More than the shirt and tie, a second ago his skin had been a coffee colour, now it was white. The same face, the same dark hair slicked back, but the skin had lightened a tone, as if some studio engineer had adjusted the contrast setting on a camera.

Maddy turned in her chair. ‘Sal … I think we just had another wave. Bigger one, this time.’

Sal was on her feet. ‘I’ll go look outside.’ They’d left the five-dollar note just outside the shutter, hidden beneath a discarded McDonald’s carton. On one side was the Abraham Lincoln image. She wondered if this time wave would have wiped his face off the note and replaced it with another scowling president.

Maddy turned in her seat back to Liam. ‘OK, I think we need to put Abe back pretty fast.’ She winced at the sight of the empty perspex tube. It would take too long filling it up again. ‘You guys are going back dry.’ She looked at Liam, still wearing his morning coat and cravat … and Bob, still dressed like a dock worker. ‘And you’re still all dressed right … so we’re good to go.’