The Forever Man (W.A.R.P. 3)

Chevie closed her eyes, took several deep breaths, tried to think about flowing water and gentle breezes, then opened her eyes again. The dog and the ghost were still there. That was OK because, if they were still there, they were probably real and she wasn’t losing whatever mind she had left. Maybe. After all, she had seen some weird stuff since her FBI special-consultant days in Los Angeles.

But nothing this weird.

‘ OK, there’s a reasonable explanation for all of this,’ she said with a depth of calm to her voice that only Tibetans and Californians can achieve. ‘It’s all wormhole-connected, I’m pretty sure about that.’

‘You got that right, kitty,’ said Pointer.

Chevie kept her focus on Charles Smart. ‘My strategy is to ignore the dog because he really bugs me for some reason, so what I would like is for you to tell me where I am, why I’m here and what the hell is going on. In your own time, so long as it’s right now.’

Smart settled into a lotus position, hovering before Chevie. ‘You are here because there is a tear in the wormhole. A rift, if you will –’

Chevie interrupted after only two sentences, which was doing well for her. ‘Yeah? Let me guess. You tore it.’

Smart’s miserable expression deepened. ‘Yes. Yes, I did, heaven forgive me. I thought it was science, you know. I thought that if I followed Einstein’s quantum theory then I could stabilize a transversable wormhole through space–time.’

‘Maybe you should dumb that down for the dog,’ suggested Chevie.

Pointer growled. ‘Maybe I should dumb you down, kitty.’

‘That doesn’t even make any sense,’ snapped Chevie.

‘And so I built a time pod that opened a negative energy hole,’ continued Smart, moving his hands rapidly so they created a ball of energy that hung in the air. ‘And I thought that when we pulled the plug the energy would dissipate or be absorbed by the wormhole.’ The glowing orb dissolved slowly, strands floating upward like a cobweb in a chimney. ‘But …’

‘But the energy wasn’t absorbed?’ Chevie guessed.

‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Smart miserably. ‘It was anomalous and so couldn’t mix with the wormhole’s dark matter.’

‘Oh,’ said Chevie. ‘I hate it when that happens.’

Pointer raised a bandaged paw. ‘Let me take over, Professor. I’ll make it simple for the kitty cat.’ He turned his long face to Chevie. ‘Imagine the wormhole is like a big toilet and all the plumbing that goes with it.’

Chevie nodded. She was prepared to swallow a few insults for the sake of clarity.

‘ OK, puppy dog. A big toilet, got it.’

‘Right. So if you flush a jug of heavy acid down the bowl, where’s it gonna collect?’

As it happened, Chevie had once flushed her phone down the toilet and so knew the correct answer to this question. ‘In the U-bend. That’s where all the blockages end up.’

‘Ten points for the kitty cat,’ said Pointer. ‘In the U-bend is right. So all this exotic matter the professor was using to open doors in the wormhole ended up in the U-bend and bored right through to the world underneath.’

‘Which is here,’ said Chevie.

‘Right again. So now all these quantum mutations, which have been floating around for who knows how long, are being pooped out in seventeenth-century England.’

‘I was so wrong about everything,’ Smart wailed. ‘So wrong. I thought the tunnel was a tunnel. It’s not a tunnel; it’s an inter-dimension. I thought it could be calibrated and controlled but it can’t. It has a consciousness, for heaven’s sake. Now I’m not saying it’s sentient – it would be premature to say that – but it can interact with time travellers. It seduces them.’

‘Seduces them?’ said Chevie. ‘Like with dinner and a movie?’

Pointer chuckled. ‘That’s funny, for a cat.’

‘No, missy,’ said Smart. ‘Not with dinner and a movie. With dreams of immortality. With promises of understanding beyond the dreams of man.’

Pointer actually winked at Chevie. ‘Which is catnip for a scientist.’

‘I was in the wormhole more often than anyone, even Albert Garrick,’ Smart continued.

Chevie forgot all about the cat–dog repartee. ‘You know Garrick?’

‘I was aware of him,’ replied Smart. ‘I felt his evil spirit. He has more dark matter in him than I have. There is no telling what he might do.’

Professor Smart was silent for a moment but for the cracklings of small sparks in his innards, then he continued his story.

‘So, yes, I know Albert Garrick. And I hate to say it but he is a stronger man than me. Garrick’s core was so solid, so bright, that he was a beacon to all souls adrift in the quantum foam. He took what it had to offer but would not give of himself.’ Smart drooped mournfully so that half his torso disappeared through the floorboards. ‘Which is more than I can say for myself.’

Chevie reached out gingerly and stroked the professor’s arm, and felt pins and needles at the contact.

‘What happened to you, Professor?’

‘I was weak,’ muttered Smart. ‘On the surface I held fast to my mission, but underneath my subconscious couldn’t resist. I had to know, to be made aware. And so on my last trip back from Victorian London my unconscious mind peeled away, like a pale shadow, and the wormhole showed me everything.’

Chevie was fascinated. ‘What did it show you?’

Smart sank even lower. ‘It showed me what I had done. How my tamperings had ruptured the inter-dimension, creating a dumping ground here in this time. All these splicings that come through are my fault, or the fault of a version of me from some other reality. My body continued on into twentieth-century London but my subconscious was sucked down through the rift and it brought my FBI escorts, Special Agent Pointer and Special Agent Isles, and our field kit along with me.’

The dog saluted. ‘Special Agent Donald Pointer, ma’am. Fidelity, bravery and –’

‘Integrity,’ completed Chevie.

‘I imagine the rest of me wrote the agents off as casualties,’ said Smart, and his expression perfectly suited his voice.

‘No,’ said Chevie. ‘You shut down the programme shortly after. Then you disappeared into the tunnel and took all your secrets with you.’

Smart levitated above the floorboards and brightened considerably. ‘That’s right. Of course I did. Well done, me. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish other people’s memories from their dreams.’

Now that Chevie was as up to speed as she was likely to get, given her limited understanding of quantum science, she felt it was time to summarize so they could press on with the business of rescuing Riley.

‘ OK, so the time tunnel isn’t a tunnel and there’s a hole –’

‘Rift,’ said Smart.

‘Rift. Got it. There’s a rift in it so that anything floating around in the tunnel –’

‘Inter-dimension,’ corrected the professor.

‘Anything floating in the inter-dimension gets dumped –’

‘Pooped.’ This from Pointer.

Chevie expected Smart to correct the correction but he simply shrugged. ‘Pooped is pretty accurate.’

‘So anyone or anything or any mutation floating around in the inter-dimension gets pooped out here in –’

‘The infamous decade of witch-born monstrosities.’

Chevie knew she should probably know about this from social-studies class but after all the trips through the inter-dimension she wasn’t even sure which history was the real one.

‘Except they aren’t witch-born monstrosities,’ she said. ‘They’re mutations from the wormhole.’

Smart opened his ghostly mouth to correct her but Chevie cut him off.

‘I’m used to saying “wormhole”, OK? Or “time tunnel”. Those are catchy phrases. So let’s just take it that I mean “inter-dimension” and not correct me every single time.’

‘Yeah,’ said Pointer. ‘Kitty has a point. You do that a lot, Prof. That wh

ole correcting bit. It’s getting old, man.’

Smart smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry. I’m an educator. It’s in my nature.’

‘And this has been going on for how long?’ Chevie asked.

‘Years,’ said Pointer. ‘Decades, actually. Which proves I am still part Donald Pointer. If I was really one hundred per cent dog, I wouldn’t be alive any more. I’m just a dog-shaped guy.’

The professor drew another spark-shape in the air, which reminded Chevie of the zip on her old book bag that had split in the middle. ‘But recently it’s got much worse. The rift is open almost continuously now and is expanding as more and more energy collects; soon it will be visible to the human eye. If it opens permanently and I can’t figure out how to close it, then …’ The zip split wider and wider until a tumult of sparks spilled out and exploded in the air.

‘I get the zip and the sparks, but what does the explosion mean?’ asked Chevie, afraid that she already knew.

‘Oh, that’s the earth,’ said Pointer conversationally. ‘End-of-the-world kind of thing. We all get absorbed by the inter-dimension.’