“ HR-6984.”
“Precisely. Everything you would have been, everything you would have done, everything that made you what you were—it will all be erased. The eventline is frozen. You’re not allowed to send yourself a message, and worst of all, the disaster that made you is now going to happen because you weren’t there to stop it. A single event with a potential seven billion lives at risk, all on your shoulders. What would you do?”
“Yell? Kick some furniture? Get seriously shit-faced?”
“Mum, I’m serious.”
“Sorry.”
“Yes, to begin with, you could do all those things. But then I got to thinking: What if there was a way to help the young me change the eventline? How could I find a way to deliver a purposefully obscure message so I could do something about HR-6984?
I smiled at my future son’s resourcefulness. “Let me guess: You made totally outrageous union demands.”
He nodded. “I’m assuming this is the way it went: As chairman of the Swindon Branch of the Union of Federated Timeworkers, I insisted on the Letters of Destiny. I probably had to pout a lot, get annoyed and chuck stuff around—even threaten strike action, but I got my way. The eventlines were compared, the letters compiled and arranged to be sent.”
“Even if true,” I said, “what were you trying to tell yourself?”
“I don’t know, but muse on this: None of us live beyond the asteroid strike. Of the fifteen who die, seven are definitely murdered, five meet with accidents that might be murder, and only three die of natural causes. Someone is disposing of ex-ChronoGuard before the strike.”
I stared at the list of murders. The first one wasn’t to happen until 2040, almost thirty-six years from now.
“Makes it tricky to solve, doesn’t it?” said Friday with a sigh. “Crimes that haven’t happened, motive that’s not yet apparent and by someone who may have no idea he’s going to do it.”
“So what do you know?”
“I know three things for certain: I kill Gavin Watkins on Friday morning, and a cold-blooded killer is murdering ex-ChronoGuard thirty-six years from now. We know nothing about him except that he might be driving a Vauxhall KP-16, a car that hasn’t been designed yet, and he’s handy with a baseball bat.”
“And the third?”
Friday smiled. “I know that someone posted these letters from a Kemble mailbox only recently. Why wait until now to send the letters? The thing is that someone sent these letters— and whoever that might be could have an idea about what’s going on.”
“Okay,” I said, “I kind of understood that.”
Which was unusual, given the complex nature of the time industry.
We passed the Bad Time warning signs seven miles from Kemble Timepark and drove slowly into the Mild Distortion zone, where a certain temporal lumpiness punctuated the countryside. For the most part, everything appeared normal, but the odd hot spot of temporal fallout showed up as a patch of spring foliage when the rest was late summer and even on occasion an isolated patch of snow. We noted that in several places the road had been diverted around hastily fenced-off anomalies. The hot spots were quite obvious to the time-savvy—the shadows cast by the sun were bent either forward or back, depending on whether the anomaly was running fast or slow. We also noticed that the land within the zone was cultivated, but in a unique way: The emerging science of agritemporal farming used the dilation gradients to ensure a rolling supply of ripe produce as well as nonseasonal growth. In one field we saw a farmer driving a tractor while wearing a clumsy gravity suit. We waved, and he waved back seven seconds later.
We entered the village of Kemble soon afterward. The township was neat and tidy, but several abandoned houses suggested that living here was not without its risks and frustrations. The school was long closed and fenced off, the children now bused to Cirencester when a particularly steep gradient had seeped into the school one Friday afternoon, extending Mrs. Auberge’s French lesson from forty minutes to six days.
We stopped at the main gates of the abandoned facili
ty. A small group of a dozen or so campaigners was camped out with several shabby-looking caravans, and placards had been tied to the fence. The first read PLEASE, WOULD IT BE TOO MUCH TROUBLE TO ASK YOU TO CLEAN UP OUR TOWN? and the next, VILLAGERS WANT ASSURANCES OVER REAL TIME IF THAT’S OKAY WITH YOU. I’d seen these guys before and knew of the protest. It was by local middle-class residents—hence the polite placards—who despite assurances that the decommissioned time engines were “perfectly safe within the broad definitions of ‘safe’ as outlined by the Environmental Agency,” had been collecting evidence of their own to the contrary. We parked the Sportina and climbed out.
We greeted the protesters, who were friendly and unthreatening, and listened to their complaints with interest. It seemed that the engines were leaking flux at an increasing rate and that “no one was interested in doing anything about it.”
“What time do you have?” asked one of the group.
I told him, and he showed me his watch. It was a six minutes slow. Five others showed me their watches, too, and they all displayed errors between two minutes to six hours.
“Have you spoken to the decommissioning agents?” I asked.
“They ignore us,” he replied, “or tacitly suggest that we should be grateful for living longer according to an outside observer.”
We listened to their grievances after that, which were long and tedious—mostly about a little-understood phenomenon called dilation lag that caused cell phones and other transmission signals to be unable to mesh.
“If we want to watch TV,” grumbled one, “we have to go to Oaksey. The only radio stations we can pick up are those on AM, and the pitch of that is noticeably high.”
“Yes,” said another, “I know for a fact that they’re thinking of moving the Stroud-Swindon rail line six miles to the east. I understand that the train is now always three minutes late—it has to slow down when traveling past here to stay on schedule.”