‘Were you tempted to not send it back?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Were you tempted to let 2:00 p.m. pass by without firing up the machine and sending the watch back to 12:00 p.m.?’
‘That would have been impossible, Mr Hartfield. The effect of the cause had already occurred. You can’t have an effect without a cause.’
‘What if you tried?’
Jennifer frowned. ‘I’m not making myself clear. The watch had already been sent; it just so happened that the sending had not yet occurred. Do you see what I mean? It’s no different from firing a gun at a target. You can, as the shooter, wish that travelling bullet should not reach the target after the gun has been fired, but the bullet doesn’t care what you think. It will always hit. Always.’
Hartfield listened to the watch. He closed his eyes. ‘It’s running fine.’
‘No, each tick is marginally slower than the last. The error was three nanoseconds per second on Tuesday. Now it’s three microseconds, an order of magnitude greater.’
‘Is that why you can’t send a living person?’
‘You’re asking Wilbur Wright how to put a man on the moon.’ She took the watch and let the chain spiral into her left palm. ‘The two things are entirely different.’
She stopped to pass him a hard hat. They moved into the zigzagged canyon that bisected the sand barrier. The walls of the passage were twenty feet high.
‘Jennifer,’ he said, ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I don’t know how much Gerald has told you, but more than twenty years ago now, I was a businessman shopping for a thoroughbred in Kentucky. That life ended when I fell unexpectedly from my mount. The diagnosis, made some days later, was that I was suffering from a malignant brain tumour. In the years that followed, I underwent many treatments, from the medical to the medieval. Ultimately, I went public. I offered half of my empire to anyone who could cure me. As you would expect, I was approached by several con-artists and idiots. But one e-mail, from an Argentine medical student, intrigued me. He had an idea for a non-surgical procedure that I’m sure you’re familiar with.’
‘Orza’s nano-treatment,’ she replied, nodding to the door in the fence. They passed through.
‘In its initial runs, non-cancerous cells were also attacked, particularly neurons associated with higher brain function. In that respect, it was as blunt an instrument as chemotherapy. But I took the treatment with only weeks to live and, as you see, twenty years later I’m not yet dead.’
They walked on. Jennifer gestured to the smaller centrifuge that had been built at the edge of the larger one. She explained how the two formed a transmitter-receiver arrangement. Hartfield nodded, but his eyes were elsewhere, and he touched her elbow to interrupt her explanation.
‘Jennifer, I made Orza a famous man. One day, you too will be renowned. People will want your money and your time. Are you prepared?’
‘I’ll get used to it.’
‘How old was Einstein when he published his Special Theory of Relativity?’
‘Twenty-six.’
‘And Newton his advances in physics?’
‘Not forgetting mathematics and optics. Twenty-two.’
‘And you your time machine, Jennifer?’
She felt the tension that gathered in her muscles when people probed her background, tried to divine her wellspring. ‘Twenty-one.’
Hartfield stared. ‘You’ve beaten them both.’
Jennifer met his gaze. ‘But I had Einstein, and Einstein had Newton.’
‘And you had your father. We should not forget him. Did you know that he once worked for me?’
Jennifer could not conceal her surprise. ‘You ran the West Lothian Centre?’
‘I owned it, and others. These were investments I was happy to make. I owe my life to science.’
‘But you owed nothing to my father,’ Jennifer said. She surprised herself with the old anger. ‘I remember the problems he had when I was growing up. Doors closing, friends not returning his calls. Was that your doing, letting him go from the Centre? Because of the bombing?’
‘Your father returned to academia, eventually. He was found not guilty. He recovered his career.’
‘And my mother?’
Hartfield rested against a wall-like baffle. Behind it, an electrical plant hummed.
‘Jennifer, I do hope I haven’t offended you. I came here to offer congratulations. And, because your father and I were once friends, I need you to warn him. He is in danger.’
‘What kind of danger?’
‘I can’t be certain. Talk to him.’
‘You talk to him.’
‘He wouldn’t listen.’
Jennifer looked at this man: his blank, closed face; his unnatural body language; his clumsy threat. ‘What should I say?’
‘Tell him to stay in Oxford.’
‘Oxford.’
‘Every…’
‘Every what?’
‘Every effect has a cause,’ he said.
Jennifer folded her arms. ‘What goes around comes around.’
‘That too. Thank you, Jennifer. I’m glad we met. Congratulations once more. I will study your reports carefully. Goodbye.’
The frown did not leave her face until Hartfield had closed the air-tight door to the cavern. The radial arm of the centrifuge began to move. With each revolution, Jennifer felt her headache throb. The last of her drunkenness had gone.
West Lothian, Scotland
Professor David Proctor forced himself to breathe with tidal ease, to wax air, to wane. He counted the blown specks on the taxi’s windscreen as it idled. The hotel seemed to watch him. Twenty years ago, David had worked beneath its vast grounds in a research centre whose entrances were now capped and dead. He thought about the cut plumbing, the emptied kitchens, the barge-long conference tables splintered, the coffee pots emptied and the conversation silenced. He thought about it all. The young David Proctor was gone. The older impostor remained: a professor, a single parent, and burned out academic not far from retirement. His belly was larger. His head was balding. But he still wore a tailored suit. The aftershave was same brand as the younger man’s, probably.
He opened his briefcase, took a brush, and tidied his hair.
Now or never, Proctor.
He opened the door and, without emerging, breathed the Scottish air. Nodding firs. A cloud-shot sky. For a moment, he was inside his memories of twenty years before.
‘Professor,’ whispered a voice in his ear, ‘you have a call.’
‘I’m supposed to be stealthed, Ego.’
‘It is your daughter.’
David looked at his flat shoe on the gravel. Now or never. He put his leg back in the car and closed the door. He took Ego, a metallic computer the size of a credit card, from his wallet. ‘Go on, Ego.’
‘I am having difficulty. Might it be encrypted?’
‘Use my Oxford PGP private key.’
‘I already tried that.’
‘Oh. Are there any clues to the encryption method in the caller ID?’
‘None.’
David’s frown turned into a smile. He could feel his daughter’s presence already.
‘Access my medical records, please.’
‘Just a moment.’
David told Ego which data to use as a key, and, shortly, an image of his daughter appeared on Ego’s exterior. Her skin was puffy and her eyes were ringed with the sediment of hard work. A sickening fancy: that Jennifer had inherited a filament of decay from her late mother, whose head David had cradled in the last moments of her life not far beneath his taxi.