New Pompeii Read online

  “I thought you said you didn’t go in for conspiracy theories.”

  “She was in King’s Cross when the terrorists attacked it. No bodies were ever found.” Nick paused. Swallowed. “I just want to know.”

  “That was twelve years ago, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m not sure how I can answer you. We can’t transport objects or people in the last thirty years. We’ve been pretty transparent with everyone on that issue, even if some people don’t believe us. Near-past transports are inherently risky. The odds of survival, pretty mediocre. We can’t even grab particles from those sorts of horizons.”

  “I just needed to ask before I made my decision.”

  “I didn’t mean to be insensitive,” continued Whelan. “But there are lots of incidents like the one that killed your mother every year. Lots of accidents in which bodies are never found.”

  “I know,” said Nick, again. “But if she was transported…”

  “Then we wouldn’t know about it until a few years down the line.”

  “But could you rescue her? If you wanted to?”

  Whelan paused. “Do you know how many requests we get from people who want us to save their relatives? Do you think we would be able to save them all?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because despite what the crackpots might tell you, people only have one chance to live. Which is a good thing, Nick, because the world doesn’t have the resources to provide for two. And it would be cruel, wouldn’t it? To be zapped into the future, only to find your baby boy a full-grown man? Maybe it would be different if we could reach back a few hours. But thirty years? Isn’t that too much for people to pick up where they’d left off? Didn’t Flight 391 prove that? Isn’t that why we’ve gone to such lengths to create our Roman bubble?”

  Nick suddenly felt a lump in his throat. It made it difficult to swallow, or speak. “Yes.”

  “So, this opportunity of a lifetime we’re offering you: what are you going to say?”

  It was time. And he had his answer ready. He took a deep breath. Tried not to think of what his father would say. “I’m in.”

  “Good. We’ll be in touch.”

  The phone went dead. Nick continued to hold the phone as if Whelan might call back. Finally he headed for the hallway. “Ronnie!”

  No answer. He rapped on the bedroom door, then pushed it open.

  The room was empty. The bedcovers were thrown back, the mattress and pillows still showing the impression of a sleeping form. Nick looked about, confused. A cup of coffee sat steaming on the bedside cabinet.

  Which meant he hadn’t been gone long.

  Nick hurried out of the flat and moved down the steps at speed. How much of his conversation with Whelan had Ronnie overheard?

  When he opened the front door, he realised he’d made a mistake. There was a man waiting on the pavement. No, there were three. And Ronnie wasn’t among them.

  The man in the centre of the group spoke first. “Mr Houghton,” he said. “We’d like a word.”

  14

  “CHICKEN OR FISH?”

  Nick couldn’t help but be disappointed by the question. For one thing, it didn’t fit with the plush interior of the private jet. The stewardess smiled amiably and waited for his answer. If he’d been on a commercial flight, her eyes would have already been filled with impatience but, given how few people were on board, she probably had more than enough time to deal with indecisive passengers.

  “Just water,” said Nick, feeling his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He’d forgotten how much he hated flying. The drone of the engines and the dry atmosphere of the cabin always seemed to give him a headache. He could feel a new one starting to drill into his temples, and it hadn’t been helped by the requirement to give a blood sample before they’d taken off.

  He rubbed at the crook of his arm. “How long until we land?”

  “Not long now, sir.” It was the same answer he’d been given half an hour ago; the same vagueness with which she’d answered his question about where they were heading. He let his head fall back into the soft beige leather of his seat.

  Six weeks. He’d potentially given everything up for just six weeks of gainful employment. Nick rapped his fingers gently against the armrest. The throbbing in his temples seemed to turn up a notch as he went back over the last argument he’d had with his father. After all, if it all went wrong, he’d have to crawl back home. And hope everything else fell into place rather than smashing to the ground.

  Six weeks. Nick massaged the back of his neck, trying to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. No, all things considered, he needed to make this move permanent. Whatever he found when the plane landed, he needed to impress McMahon. Needed to impress Whelan.

  Not that either of the two NovusPart bosses were travelling with him. He glanced around, casting his eye over the four other passengers: two men, a woman and a small child. Most of the seats – about twenty in total – were empty. The aircraft wasn’t laid out as generously as he’d seen in some magazines, but it was clearly expensive. About a third the size of a jumbo, the interior had a single column of seats running down each wall. They were more like easy chairs than normal airline seats.

  “Put that down!”

  Nick glanced over his shoulder. The woman and child were sitting in the rear of the cabin. From the sound of it, the boy’s patience with the flight had finally run out. He was maybe eight or so, and had been remarkably quiet up until this point. The woman – probably his mother – looked to be in her late thirties. She was thin, almost gaunt. Her blonde hair was tied back into a tight bun, perhaps in an effort to keep herself looking young.

  Nick turned back towards the front of the plane. The two men flying with them looked like NovusPart security. Both were thick-set, and hadn’t moved since they’d sat down.

  “Sir?”

  The stewardess had returned with his water. It was in a short, thick-rimmed glass more suited to holding liquor than anything softer. A couple of pills were set down beside it. Nick took them to be another round of antibiotics. The third since he’d been picked up from home. A quick flush of his system, they’d said, while they checked his blood sample. Which was all fine, given the risks involved. He swallowed the pills with a quick gulp, turned back to the window and looked down over the sea.

  The thought of going to a foreign country had been enough to trigger his latest headache. He’d only realised after they’d passed three or four road signs that they were heading towards an aerodrome, and he’d be expected to board a plane. Which should have been obvious, if he’d stopped to think about it. After all, NovusPart couldn’t exactly build the new Pompeii in Britain. Not where every little bit of gossip made the local news.

  Nick reached into his pocket for his phone and glanced briefly at the screen before pushing it back. The display confirmed they’d been airborne for three hours, and he had no messages. Not even any reception. Of course not, he thought. They were thousands of feet in the air. The realisation caused another twinge of pain through his right eyeball.

  “Sir?”

  The stewardess again. She was holding out a slimline media player. Nick glanced at it, but years of avoiding campus leaflets meant he didn’t bite.

  “Sir, this is your inflight entertainment.”

  “I have a bit of a headache coming on.”

  “It’s a present from Mr Whelan.”

  Six weeks to make an impression. Nick grunted and took the device. As soon as he did, the stewardess disappeared back up the aisle. Confused, he pressed the headphones into his ears. The player had several audio files loaded on to it, and Nick half expected to find some cheesy briefing from McMahon or Whelan. He selected the first track. There was a hiss of static, and then a voice started to speak. In Latin.

  His initial reaction was to laugh. Although he recognised the words, the pronunciation was off; like someone reading aloud without any background in the Classics. But then it clicked. The voi
ces belonged to Romans. Real Romans.

  Brief snatches of dialogue, the voices those of men, women and children. They were saying their names, where they were from, what they did for a living. It didn’t sound much like the Latin he’d been taught at school, or the vulgar idiom of the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. No, this was an earthy vernacular. Latin spoken as a man from the East End of London might speak Cockney.

  Nick listened to the tracks several times. On the first pass, he was just happy to hear the voices. On the second, he noticed the strange use of inflection and rhythms. On the third, he started to pick out common phrases.

  He suddenly needed another drink. A real one. Because it was true. McMahon had done it. And he was on his way to a place where there were real Romans. And not just any Romans. People from the heyday of the Empire. Nick searched for the stewardess.

  Where the hell was she?

  “I’m going to be a Roman soldier!”

  Nick looked round. The young boy had come to stand by his seat. He held a short foam sword in front of him. Nick leant forward. “That’s great,” he said. “Do you think they’d let me join the army too?”

  “Noah!”

  The boy’s mother was out of her seat. Her pale features were drawn tightly together. She didn’t even look at Nick. Instead, she took hold of the young boy’s shoulders, and started to pull him away.

  “Hi,” said Nick, trying to make eye contact. “Your boy seems quite excited about our trip.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “You’re going to New Pompeii?”

  Nick raised his eyebrow slightly. The blood in his temples continued to thump. “Nick Houghton.” He held out his hand. The woman ignored it.

  “Maggie Astridge,” she said. “And this is Noah.”

  Nick smiled at the boy, letting his arm drop. “You’ve been listening to the recordings too?”

  The woman shook her head. “No – we don’t speak Latin. Robert and I will have interpreters.”

  “Robert?”

  “My husband,” she said, as if the fact was obvious. “The project architect.” She looked like she was about to say something more, but caught sight of his media player. “If you’re listening to those recordings you must be Professor Samson’s replacement?”

  Replacement? Nick shook his head. “I’m going to join Professor Samson’s team,” he said, suddenly uncertain. He needed to change the subject. “Do you know how much longer we’re going to be in the air?”

  “We should be almost there!” piped up Noah. He lifted his foam sword and pushed it into Nick’s shoulder. The action was too quick for his mother to prevent, but there was no force behind the blow.

  “Have you been there before?” asked Nick, smiling at the boy.

  “I had a preview before the rabble moved in,” Maggie replied, “but this is Noah’s first time. We were meant to arrive two weeks ago, but someone got a cold, didn’t he?”

  Noah suddenly looked as proud as his mother looked irritated. “Yes, he did!”

  Nick’s smile wavered as he tried to ignore the possibility that his own blood test might delay his arrival. Maggie started to look a little embarrassed. Like she wanted to stop talking and get back to her seat. Behind her, the stewardess reappeared.

  “Okay, everyone – can we all get back into our seats for landing, please!”

  15

  “THE INTERESTING THING, therefore, is that the Big Bang provided the first temporal momentum.”

  It was about ten minutes into the lecture, and Kirsten was already lost. As soon as her eyes had fluttered open, she’d left the bathroom and headed for the lecture theatre. Just as she had so many times before.

  She never knew how many months had passed between visits. If she’d be early, or years late. Every time she woke up she was in a different – well – time. But on this occasion, as she’d stepped into the quad, she’d seen the lights burning in the auditorium and had known she would make it.

  Yet she didn’t even know why she wanted to be there.

  Maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was just the promise of seeing some familiar faces. As it was, Octo Arlen was doing most of the talking.

  Kirsten smiled. Arlen looked uncomfortably at the large audience, his cheeks drained of colour. But whatever the reason for him taking the lead, he now stood before an audience of about fifty people explaining his theory of virtual particles. Whelan and McMahon both sat to one side. Whelan looked stern and attentive, almost like he was on the verge of giving a salute. McMahon, on the other hand, didn’t seem to want to be there. He was slumped in his seat and appeared distracted.

  “Okay,” continued Arlen. “I’ll try to summarise.” He paused, before reaching for some water. His hand was clearly shaking. “I’m sure you’re all aware that you cannot empty a glass jar.”

  Kirsten felt her eyebrows rise, and she glanced at the rest of the spectators. Quite a lot of them looked as confused as she felt. Then again, few of them appeared to be scientists. This was an audience drawn from the great and good of the college. Some were maybe in charge of funding. Perhaps a lot was at stake.

  “Sure, you can tip out anything you’ve put in the jar,” continued Arlen, his voice cracking and uncertain. “You can suck all the air out and create a vacuum. But the jar still won’t be empty. All you’ll have is a jar of empty space. And space isn’t empty. It’s like a pond, teeming with life.” He paused. Swallowed. “What we have, in fact, is a jar that at any one time is full of ‘particle pairs’, which appear from the vacuum, and then annihilate each other before we have opportunity to measure them.”

  Kirsten blinked. Now she was really lost.

  “This theory of ‘particle pairs’ was first hypothesised in the twentieth century during the heyday of quantum physics. Hawking theorised that you’d only see these ‘particle pairs’ at the boundaries of black holes where they’re created on either side of the event horizon – meaning one is sucked into the singularity whereas the other escapes. You will all have read the news stories when this was first observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. But the real mystery remained.” Arlen seemed to be finally finding his rhythm. “Where do these particle pairs come from?” He waved his hand towards Whelan and McMahon. Neither man acknowledged his gesture. “All matter was created during the Big Bang. Novus Particles promotes the theory that this matter wasn’t just ejected outwards in space, but was also propelled forward in time. The matter we see is only that which is travelling forward in time at the same rate. The particle pairs we observe in the vacuum are those travelling either more slowly, or more quickly, than our native matter. We zip past them – or they zip past us – just long enough for us to theorise about their existence. The black-hole effect identified by Hawking is merely the impact of a gravitational singularity slowing down a particle’s forward temporal movement to a speed that we can observe.”

  Arlen was about to continue, but a loud cough at the back of the theatre stopped him. “Okay, Octo. If all matter is just simply stuff travelling forward through time, how does it all stay together in one place? Why doesn’t it just fly apart?”

  Arlen took another mouthful of water. A look of irritation passed over his face. “I’m sure you’ll agree that two spacecraft travelling at twenty thousand miles an hour are still able to gradually come together and dock.”

  “I think I can see where this is going,” said another voice from the crowd. Kirsten tried to locate it, but the source was lost among a sea of greying hair. “The conclusion of your theory is that time travel becomes possible… but you fall foul of the same logical test as everyone else. If time travel is possible, where are all the time travellers?”

  A ripple of laughter. Whelan and McMahon shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Arlen’s face, however, flashed with a mix of embarrassment and anger. Kirsten remembered him as quite a nervous youth; it was clear he wasn’t ready to deal with hecklers. “The Big Bang threw particles forward in time,” he repeated. “I think it’s perfectly possible for a part
icle pair to be taken from the past – or the present – and taken into what we perceive to be the future. But a particle pair existing in the future cannot move into the past. They would be swimming against the tide.”

  “So no time travellers?”

  “No. Not moving backwards anyway.”

  “But you’d still end up with paradoxes,” the voice persisted. “Therefore, the question still holds. If you take someone from the past, you will alter history. And, if you’re right, it would already have been altered, and we would probably know about it. So where are all the time travellers, Octo?”

  Arlen glanced behind him for help but neither Whelan nor McMahon responded. But then he smiled. Almost as if a new thought had sparked in the recesses of his mind. “There could be exceptions,” he said, finally relaxing. “For instance, what if you only took people with no futures. Say those about to die and whose bodies would never be found? How could they impact on history?” He paused. The room had fallen silent. “After all, they’d already be dead.”

  Kirsten started to shake. A white mist had started to thicken in front of her eyes. Which meant her time here was running out. But she could still see enough of the theatre to notice that McMahon was suddenly alert. He was leaning forward in his seat – mouth slightly open. They’d already be dead.

  “I was speaking hypothetically, of course,” Arlen continued, suddenly breaking into nervous laughter. His voice became distant as Kirsten felt herself floating away. “That isn’t what NovusPart are proposing. But as the great Roman philosopher Seneca once wrote, ‘There is no genius without some touch of madness.’”

  There was silence. Finally, a single voice called out: “And what are you proposing?”

  “Power, gentlemen.” Whelan got to his feet. “If you can slow particles from a faster temporal stream into our own, then we can effectively create matter. And from matter flows energy. We’re basically looking to solve the world’s energy crisis. Let Dr Arlen continue, please. We’ll take questions at the end.”