Alex Scarrow - Time Riders

Foster was too winded to answer. ‘Bob, would you…?’

The support unit nodded obediently. ‘Information: on the sixth floor of this buildingis a man called Lee Harvey Oswald. He will shoot at the thirty-fifth president of the UnitedStates of America in precisely one minute and twenty-seven seconds. Now, one minute andtwenty-six seconds…’

‘Uh… thanks, Bob,’ said Liam.

The thing managed a cumbersome approximation of a smile. ‘You are welcome, LiamO’Connor.’

As they reached the top of the stairs, Foster slowed down and put a finger to his lips. Hepointed through an open door into what appeared to be a storage room.

‘This is it,’ he whispered. ‘Through here, on the left, is a row of windowslooking down on to Dealey Plaza. Oswald, right now, has his gun resting on the sill of thesecond window along. In about thirty seconds — ’

‘Thirty-nine seconds, precisely,’ Bob cut in.

‘Bob, be quiet.’

Bob nodded meekly.

‘In about thirty seconds the president’s car will swing round a corner and intoview. The car will approach this building and when it’s virtually beneath him Oswaldwill fire the first shot as it passes. But this first shot,’ Fostercontinued quietly, ‘we’re actually going to prevent. Follow me.’

Foster walked through the door into the storeroom, Liam and Bob following cautiously. Theystepped between stacks of school textbooks, precariously piled on top of each other, coated ina fine layer of dust.

Liam glimpsed, between teetering piles, the hairy tuft of the top of a head framed by a tallwindow. He turned to Foster and Foster nodded.

That’s him.

They stepped across the floor quietly until they were standing over him.

‘Excuse me,’ said Foster.

Lee Harvey Oswald spun round. His eyes widened at the sight of three tramps calmly watchinghim. One huge and muscular, one looked very old and the third was little more than a boy.

His mouth flapped open.

The muscular man wrenched the rifle from his hands.

‘Lee Harvey Oswald,’ said the old man calmly, ‘you’d better startrunning. Run as fast as you can,’ he said, offering the slightest sympathetic smile.‘I suggest you head home.’

‘Who… who are you?’

Foster smiled. ‘Hmm, let’s see. Oh, I know,’ he said, grinning,‘we’re the CIA. Anyway… you’d better get going or my man here willtoss you out of the window head first.’

Oswald nodded uncertainly as he got to his feet, looking Bob up and down. He pushed past themand disappeared out of the storage room, casting one last frightened and puzzled glance atthem as he descended the first flight of stairs, three steps at a time.

‘Time violation,’ cautioned Bob flatly. ‘This timeline has now beenaltered.’

Liam shook his head. ‘But… but have we not just done the thingwe’re never meant to do?’

Foster nodded. ‘Correct. As we speak, time is already shifting, rippling forwardthrough the years. The decades are adjusting themselves, making room for a new reality: thatPresident Kennedy survived today.’

The old man looked out of the window and watched the open-top limousine, escorted by a stringof motorbike cops, sweep sedately up the street towards an overpass… and a grassyhill.

2001, New York

Sal was beginning to feel a little foolish now, standing at the intersection ofBroadway and West 44th Street watching the world go by. A sweet old woman had stopped onlymoments ago to ask whether she’d lost her mommy and daddy and needed to be taken to apoliceman.

Very embarrassing. I’m thirteen, for jahulla’ssake!

She was about to head for somewhere a little less busy to stand, away from the steady flow ofpedestrians, when she felt it… a passing moment of dizziness, disorientation, as if theworld was a giant tablecloth and someone, somewhere, had just given the corner a very gentletug. She reached out for a litter bin to steady herself. Then, recovering her balance, hereyes registered something very subtly different about Times Square long before her braindid.

Something was different.

Her eyes flickered around the busy triangular convergence of streets, thick withMonday-morning traffic.

‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘What is it?’

Then her shifting scrutiny rested on something that hadn’t been there before… anew thing. Above the entrance to the PrimeTime cinema the billboard that had been announcingthe arrival of Planet of the Apes had instead been replaced by alarge flickering screen showing some kind of news programme. There was textat the bottom: CNN: MISSION UPDATE — Day 346.

She watched a grainy image of several men in crumpled orange boiler suits holding clipboardsand chatting amicably within the cramped confines of some sort of capsule…

Subtitles ticker-taped on to the screen: +++Cmdr Jerry Hammond and crewcelebrate Anton Puchov’s thirty-fifth birthday+++

Sal noticed that few, if any, of the pedestrians on the pavement around her seemedparticularly interested in the broadcast, as if it was something commonplace — old newsfor them.

The image of the men manoeuvring awkwardly in the cramped interior changed to a picture of arust-coloured sphere floating against an ink-black backdrop. A new ticker-tape subtitleappeared:

+++ Mission to Mars: 80 days to Mars orbit +++

+++ CNN warmly wishes Anton a happy birthday +++

‘Oh my,’ she gasped, and pulled the mobile phone out of her pocket.

The phone buzzed in Maddy’s hand. ‘Sal?’

‘Did you feel it? The dizziness?’

‘I felt sort of nauseous about a minute ago. Thought it was my asthma,’ she said,glancing down at her inhaler.

‘I think… I think… that was a… that was IT.’

Maddy sat up. ‘What?… You mean a shift?’

Sal hesitated. ‘Yeah… there’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘On the big screen here…’

‘What?’

‘There’s a rocket on its way to Mars… I think.’

Maddy nearly splashed some coffee on to the keyboard. ‘You serious?’

‘I’m watching it right now… on CNN.’

Maddy looked up at the row of monitors in front of her. At first glance none of them appearedto be showing anything out of the ordinary. One showed Fox News and some dull political story,the second was tuned into MSNBC and a weatherman promising a warm sunny day tomorrow, the nextwas tapped into the stock exchange, another showed BBC News 24 and was running a story aboutthe Spice Girls’ forthcoming world tour and the tickets selling out within anhour…

‘Oh my God,’ she wheezed, suddenly short of breath.

Didn’t they split up in the nineties?

But here they were promoting their seventh album!

‘You’re right! Something’s changed, Sal.’

She felt the burden of responsibility beginning to settle on her shoulders, rememberingFoster’s quiet pep talk, that it was down to her to pull the strings together, to makesense of the data…

… to locate the source of the change, Maddy… that’syour job, to find where the shift is coming from.

She looked at the wall of screens in front of her and wondered where exactly she was supposedto make a start.

‘Thanks, Sal. I’ll call you back,’ she said quickly, and snapped her phoneshut. She tapped the keyboard and pulled up the CNN news feed. And there it was, a grainyimage of the crew inside some cramped vehicle broadcast from God knows how many hundreds ofthousands of miles away, and a computer graphic showing how far they’d gone, and howmuch further they’d yet to go.

A mission to Mars… that’s got to be the biggest changehere.

‘Bigger than a freaking Spice Girls tour,’ she muttered.