Leading Edge

Copyright © 2003

A traveller through time discovers that getting back to where he started from is not as easy as he thought, but that meeting yourself and paradoxes are not as bad as everyone thinks they should be.



He sat in the dark, sipping at the glass of scotch in his hand, staring into the flames of the coal fire across the room as they danced and skipped in their now familiar pattern. It was the fourth or fifth glass, he did not much care, and he had ceased to bother corking the bottle or fetching ice from the freezer. It had actually happened and he could not believe it; all these many hours later, and he still could not take it in. He topped up the glass with the last drops from the bottle and sipped some more. A bird sang in the tree outside the window. Distracted by it, he looked out at the sky where the faintest glimmer of light skimmed the horizon; the balance was tipped and soon it would be day. He was struck by the metaphor; for years he had struggled in the darkness with only the barest hope glowing dimly beyond his reach but soon it would be day.

A red light on the metal box beside him changed to green and blinked for several seconds before settling to a steady glow. He placed the bottle and glass as far away as he could reach without leaving his elaborately constructed chair then closed his eyes and once more pressed the button below the green light. The hum from the machinery directly below him in the basement increased in intensity. The flames of the fire jolted and stuttered once more and the humming returned to its normal level. He reached for the bottle and poured a full measure over the ice cube in the glass. Outside, the sky was dark with no sign of the dawn. All was quiet. Yes, it really had happened…

For the first time, he wondered what the power company would charge him for the energy he had consumed throughout the night. He lifted the glass, and it suggested to him that his discovery was its own answer to its exorbitant running costs; never again would his work be delayed by having to put in extra hours at the factory to pay the bills, even with the vastly increased power storage capacity that his plans required. It amused him that he had never thought of the solution before.

He looked out of the window in anticipation of birdsong. The faintest glimmer of dawn graced the horizon and he watched as the sun burst into the sky to banish the darkness. Feeling suddenly exhausted, he made a note on the pad on his knee, turned off the box beside him, drained the glass, then stood and made his way down the stairs into the basement. Half an hour later, with the equipment closed down after the longest night in history, at least in his history, he climbed wearily back to ground level then groped his way along the gloomy passage to the bedroom and sat on the bed. His shoulders slumped and he felt his head dropping. He blinked himself awake enough to stand and undress. Wearing only his shorts, he crawled under the duvet and drew it tight around him until he was secure and warm in his cocoon, then sank quickly into a deep, refreshing sleep.



It was late afternoon when the sound of torrential rain hammering at the window awoke him. Dark, rain-laden clouds had rolled in from the sea and were busy emptying themselves the better to scale the heights behind the coastal plain. He rubbed a lazy hand over his unshaven face and smiled because of the longer than normal overnight growth. Comparing his watch with the clock on the other side of the room, he saw there was a full eight hours difference. He turned on the TV and scanned the channels for news. Satisfyingly, nothing unusual was reported and the station’s clock agreed with the one in his bedroom to within a minute. He wondered when they would improve their timekeeping.

After shaving and showering, and a celebratory feast of ham and eggs and hot tea, he went to the front door to collect the day’s post. There was the usual junk mail, loan offers, and a final demand from the power company giving him one week to pay before cutting off the supply. He laughed softly to himself as he tore up the mail and dropped it into the nearest wastepaper basket.

The electricity bill did, however, provide him with incentive. He spent the next three days reworking the calculations for scaling up his experiment to the major back-shifts he had in mind and did a specific calculation to determine what was needed to produce a twenty-four hour back-shift. Once the theory had been processed, he placed an order via the Internet for delivery the next day of enough power components for the lesser back-shift, then set about adapting his experimental rig to accommodate the full set of components. Having done all he could, and with his money problems over, he went into town to indulge himself at its most lavish restaurant.



He had no desire to share his discovery with the world; he distrusted his peers entirely and could not face their feigned friendship and falsified knowledge all along that he had been onto something. The only person he considered worthy of sharing it was himself, specifically his younger self. The potential consequences of such a meeting had often taxed his mental powers. Popular fiction postulated that contact with oneself would be untenable and result in mutual annihilation, rather as nature is said to abhor a vacuum, or as matter cannot exist in contact with anti-matter. He knew from the Pauli Exclusion Principal that no two particles could possess the same wave-function, which could cause problems for the constituent parts of two apparently identical objects such as himself and his younger self. However, the normal replenishment of body tissues over time meant he would have fewer atoms in common with his earlier self the further back he went, and the confusion that such shared atoms may feel about which body they belonged in would be insignificant given the large number of atoms he comprised in total. In any case, normal electrostatic forces, which worked at a distance, would keep everything nicely separated. Furthermore, he reasoned, if one were annihilated in one’s past one could hardly have a future to return from in order to meet oneself, or even in which to formulate the intention.

Despite these reassuring thoughts, he still wondered if it were possible to meet himself, never having done so in experiments confined entirely within his home when his previous self most certainly would have been present, and he had no recollection of encountering his older self in his younger days. His own theory was that one’s timeline was unique and that what will happen has happened, or what has happened will happen, depending on one’s temporal perspective. Even if things are changed, he believed that the changes would be part of the natural unravelling of his timeline and so were probably indiscernible; in a quantum universe governed by probabilities, what actually happens eliminates all other possibilities, Schrödinger’s cat is only dead – or alive – if one opens the box and looks in. He had yet to develop a mathematical notation to express the complexity of his ideas. In truth, he struggled even to begin contemplating it, beyond its likelihood of involving hyper-dimensional space-time and the timelines of every atom that has been, is, or will be part of his physical being.

Never having been visited by himself was the one thing that worried him. There were two possible pitfalls: either his experiment was doomed to fail and he would not meet his younger self and likewise his older self had never been able to meet him, or his natural time was the leading edge of all time and there was no future self who could have visited him. The former point he dismissed for the unscientific reason that it negated everything he had done for the last ten years. He dismissed the latter because the universe had existed for eons before any sentient being had emerged to observe it, so how could he possibly be at the leading edge? Whatever the theory, he found himself enormously advantaged over mere philosophy and supposition; he was a scientist, and he now had the means to test his theory…



The next morning saw the arrival of his order. A van pulled up outside and an anxious-looking driver rang the doorbell. ‘Name of Davis?’ the driver asked through a thick veil of weariness.

‘Yes.’

‘Had a dickens of a job tracking you down. Been all over the place. Never been anywhere so remote.’

‘Yes, it is quite hard to find, I must admit.’

‘The folks in the town say this place is haunted, y’know. They say that’s why it was empty for years.’

‘Really? What a strange idea.’ He paid the driver the required cash and signed for the delivery. He moved the new components down to the basement then held himself in check, carefully fitting each part into its place in the rig, suppressing the urge to rush the job and so risk damaging the fragile equipment.

Breaking off briefly from his work at midday, he visited the bank to withdraw the full month’s salary that had just been paid in. Mrs Stephenson, a lady nearing retirement, served him, greeting him with a cheery, ‘Good afternoon, Dr Davis.’ He returned her greeting and smiled as he pushed his withdrawal slip and his passport for identification to her side of the counter’s glass barrier. She picked up the slip and raised her eyebrows at the amount requested. ‘That’s a very large sum,’ she commented, ‘I’ll have to speak to the manager and check there are sufficient funds available.’ She added, with a smile, ‘It’s just a formality.’ He nodded his understanding. Sprightly for her age, she swept up the passport and hopped down from her chair in one movement, then walked briskly over to the manager’s office into which she disappeared for around two minutes.

On returning, she began typing at the keyboard in front of her to call up his account details onto her computer monitor. He noticed that she cocked her head ever so slightly to one side and frowned almost imperceptibly as if trying to remember something. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked, a little nervous at what she may be thinking despite his knowledge that there was absolutely nothing wrong.

‘No…’ she said, hesitantly, ‘just a strange sense of Déjà vu. You know, like I’ve done this before.’ He nodded sagely, attaching no rational significance at all to the event, but nevertheless having a mildly disturbed sense that something may be out of kilter. ‘It’s a very large amount to encash,’ she continued, dismissing her musings and returning to the job in hand, ‘Is there something we can help you with? Would a banker’s draft be better for your needs?’

He suspected the manager’s influence in her suggestion, and declined it, his mind racing to catch a plausible explanation. ‘I…have a rather large debt to pay, and I need to pay in cash before my electricity is cut off,’ he said, settling for the truth.

‘A banker’s draft would be ad–’

‘No, really, I’d sooner take the cash,’ he interrupted, a little too abruptly, he thought, ‘I only have to go two doors down to pay the bill and a banker’s draft would cost me money.’

She smiled at him and asked, ‘How would you like the cash?’

‘Well,’ he mused, ‘the largest denomination notes available, please.’

She counted out the money and passed it to him. He dropped it into his briefcase, which he locked pointlessly, then exchanged farewells with Mrs Stephenson and left the bank. He walked right past the power company’s office, returned directly home, and locked the thick wads of money in a small compartment in the machine.

At the end of the day, his work complete, he turned the machine on and adjusted the power feed to produce a slow, overnight charging of the massive batteries he had installed. Darkness had fallen, so he ate, set an alarm for 9 a.m., and then went to bed. Sleep evaded him for several hours because of the excitement he felt but, eventually, he slept.



The alarm rang out and he became quickly awake and active. He dressed hurriedly and ate a hasty breakfast before installing himself in the chair, connecting himself to the box beside it, and checking the readings that the latter displayed. Satisfied that all levels were within normal ranges, he looked at the digital clock on the opposite wall before drawing a deep breath and pressing the button. The hum from the basement increased in intensity and he was slightly alarmed at the different tone it emitted with the extra power modules installed. The clock apparently stepped forward five seconds and the humming subsided.

Hearing the throb of the delivery van’s diesel engine, he disconnected himself from the machine and rushed to the front door where he had the same conversation with same weary driver, paid him the same cash, and signed the same signature in the same box on the same delivery sheet. He moved the new components down to the basement then, this time much more calmly, fitted each one carefully into place in the rig, breaking off briefly at midday to visit the bank and withdraw the same month’s salary that had just been paid in. On returning home, he turned the machine on and adjusted the power feed to produce a slow, overnight charge of the massive batteries he had installed.

Out of curiosity, he found two corresponding and therefore absolutely identical boxes from the two deliveries and gingerly placed them in intimate contact. Nothing happened, encouraging his firm belief that he could meet himself without danger. He played with the boxes, and realised that it was very difficult in any case for two copies of the same atom to be placed in contact because the boxes were duplicates, not mirror images. Meanwhile, darkness had fallen, so he ate, set an alarm for 9 a.m., and then went to bed where, weary from his sustained effort, he fell instantly asleep.

When the alarm next rang, he went through the whole procedure again, paying the driver, installing the new components, and once more waiting his turn in the queue at the bank.

After one week of his time and one day and a few seconds of the van driver’s and Mrs Stephenson’s, by this repetitive process he built the time machine to its full capacity and filled the small compartment until he could hardly close its door. The driver had been consistently dull and, on each visit to the bank, Mrs Stephenson had mentioned her ‘Déjà vu’. He had found the repetition of the same events quite amusing, and he played with the incidents, steering their discourses in different directions, even adopting a rude manner with the driver, just to see what might happen, and what difference it might make. The outcome had always been the same. He could not bring himself to treat Mrs Stephenson, whom he had known for many years, with anything but kindness.



He was troubled by the changed tone of the machine and spent the next three days fine-tuning it, re-running his trip to the bank, storing the surplus components as spares, and revisiting the maths. He had previously discovered a minor term in one of the equations that became dominant at a certain power output. Since he could allow himself little time to investigate its implications, he limited the machine to run at a reasonable safety margin below that level and now satisfied himself that the term would have no impact beyond necessitating a slower transition through time. Finally, he took a day off, paid the equivalent of ten month’s salary into a different bank – he could not bring himself to attempt an explanation to poor Mrs Stephenson – and arranged the immediate transfer of a large sum to the power company and of the residue, after meeting the bank’s charges, back to his own account. He returned to the lavish restaurant, apparently much sooner than its customers normally returned and therefore surprising the Maitre d’, although the only expression shown was one of delight.



He chose a time 25 years earlier when he was a university student reading Theoretical Physics, and when his mind had been its most open. That his younger self would believe the revelation that he was from the future he had no doubt; after all, he knew himself quite well and the notion of time-travel had intrigued him since university days.

The practical difficulties of a time-traveller are many and great. For a start, depending on the era to which one travels, one’s normal clothing could be completely out of keeping. Then there is language. Even travelling back a hundred years in one’s own country could make communication tricky; there are new words to avoid, disused words to understand, surviving words to reinterpret, sentence structure and pronunciation to consider. Then there is money. How does one subsist without money? There is no point in taking one’s own currency, which, to make life difficult for counterfeiters, is reprinted in a different design every so often, rendering the modern version unrecognisable to shops and banks of one’s target era. Credit cards are similarly limited or even uninvented. He had a solitary five-pound note from the period he intended to visit. He had found it down the back of a skirting board removed during some alterations needed to accommodate the chair in the room above the basement. He decided that would be enough, since with a few visits to the bank, he could generate enough to fund his trip in next to no time at all…

He collected together various items of memorabilia from his university days and a photocopy of his calculations. All these he placed in his briefcase, and filled another bag with enough food, albeit not very varied, for twelve days. With all preparations made, he sat in the chair, made the necessary connections and pressed the button. The world before him shimmered and took solid form once again.



He was surprised at the differences he saw on his first walk into town, the steady progress and development he had lived with for the last ten years having been wiped out, or, rather, not yet even planned. He was amused at the clothing and hairstyles that everyone wore, and was reminded of his former fondness for the miniskirt... The bank stood in its expected position half way down the high street, although its neighbours, he noticed, were different in his own time. He entered the bank and approached its yet-to-be-modernised counter, behind which he saw and recognised an attractive woman in her mid-thirties. ‘Good morning, Mrs Stephenson,’ he said with a friendly smile, glad that her name was emblazoned in plastic at the front of her position, ruling out any question why this total stranger would know her name.

She looked up at him and returned his smile, ‘Good morning, sir, how can I help you?’

‘I’d like to open a savings account,’ he said, and offered her his five-pound note. She asked for and wrote down on a paper form the information she needed and issued him with a small book in which his opening deposit was recorded in indelible ink. Once his business was concluded, he wished her good day and began wandering around the town. It was dreamlike to be surrounded by familiar sights that were not quite as they should be. After a couple of hours, the eeriness got to him and so he walked back home.

He spent the rest of that day and the next checking the machine and the maths, trying unsuccessfully to find an alternative solution to the problem of the dominant term. The day after that, he walked into town, withdrew his five pounds from the bank, assisted by a puzzled-looking Mrs Stephenson, then walked back home again. He ran a 24-hour back-shift then, once again returning to the bank, explained to Mrs Stephenson that he wanted to pay another five pounds into his account, that he had carelessly lost his account book, and asked if she could issue a duplicate. She obliged him, and he walked home with ten twenty-five year old pounds to his credit. The day after that, he closed the account, ran another 24-hour back-shift, and returned to the bank to pay his money into the as yet unclosed account. By the end of twelve of his days he had £5120 in his briefcase, an appreciable sum for the decade, and he went to the railway station to book a return ticket to his old University town, and then to a decent restaurant for a change of diet.



The university campus was just as he had remembered it. He caught himself thinking that the place had not changed very much since he left, then laughed at himself when he remembered that, actually, he had not yet left. He even recognised many of the faces he saw as he walked about, although not many belonged to people he could claim to know; there was just a familiarity with the surroundings into which the people that one saw everyday fitted as integral parts. He took care to avoid those who had known him, although he would have delighted in renewing acquaintance with people with whom he had long ago lost contact.

He rounded a corner and suddenly, with a jolting shock, there she was, the girl he should have married… She was engrossed in conversation with a male friend and so did not spot him, which was fortunate because the expression of fond longing on his face would have frightened her. She and her companion, as they stood in the warm sunlight, talked and laughed easily together, and it was clear from the expression on her face and her body language that she liked the young man. Turning his attention to her friend, he received a second jolt to his nervous system – she was talking to him! In a panic, he turned and walked briskly back round the corner where he sat on a low wall, wondering what to do next. This was not the way he had imagined meeting himself. He had planned to arrive at his old room in halls and knock on the door and calmly make his introduction to his younger self. At least he now had some idea of the shock he was about to deliver. He looked back towards the corner and saw the girl hurrying off to her next maths lecture, her notebook clasped in folded arms against her breast. The wistful smile on her face gratified him enormously. He found that he had a vague recollection of the conversation he had just witnessed, and tried to remember the detail of it. His younger self, he realised, had gone off in the other direction and therefore most likely back to his room. Departing his reverie, he stood up and followed on, not needing to keep in visual contact, knowing exactly where to go.

It was surprising how claustrophobic the students’ residence now seemed to him as he navigated its labyrinthine corridors. He had remembered it differently, as a place of freedom and excitement. He was beginning to realise how much his perspective on life had changed with age and experience. Soon the familiar door, with his name in the brass cardholder on the wall beside it, stood before him. He could hear the faint strumming of his old guitar from inside. His heart quickened and a lump came into his throat. He heard three raps like the sound of knuckles on wood and realised that he had lifted a hand to knock. The music stopped and he caught his breath as he realised that his younger self was about to meet the future; he wondered if he was doing the right thing and had almost decided to leave when the door opened…

‘Dad? What are you doing here?’ the younger said, suddenly smiling, then frowning, ‘Is anything wrong? What have you done to your hair?’

‘Well? Are you going to ask me in?’ said the elder.

‘Of course, come in, come in.’

The younger looked more closely at the elder and a suspicion came into his eyes which prompted the elder, who had been surprised at being mistaken for his own father, into making his true identity known as quickly as possible. He knew his resemblance with his father was remarkable apart from his having dark hair and his father fair, and that, in this time, they were of similar age. It had never occurred to him to masquerade behind his father’s identity. How much easier that would have been... ‘You’d better shut the door and sit down,’ he blurted, striding towards the far end of the room where he would present the minimum threat to the young man by leaving him easy access to the door if he wished to escape. At the window, he turned and faced the younger. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he began, ‘but I am not my–’, he struggled for the right word, ‘our– your father.’

‘What?’

‘I know I look like dad – your dad, that is – but then, so do you.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ The younger man began to look angry and his tone was becoming aggressive.

‘There’s nothing to worry about. In fact, this is about to be the most exciting thing that’s so far happened to you – me – us…Oh, how am I going to explain this?’

‘I don’t know, but you’d better try quickly,’ the younger said with unveiled threat.

The elder decided that a direct approach would be the simplest, ‘I’m not your father. Twenty-five years from now, you will finally develop a working time machine…and come back to tell yourself about it. You’re already interested in it, aren’t you? Fiddling about with gravity equations, looking for clues…’

‘And you expect me to believe that?’ the younger exclaimed in clear disbelief. The elder bent down, opened the flap of his briefcase and retrieved from it a battered red file which he offered to the younger. ‘Recognise this?’ he asked, with raised eyebrows and a wry smile.

The younger took it from him and opened it. He turned the yellowed pages of his own handwriting. Fascinated, he placed the old file on the desk beside his own so that he could see the pages of both at the same time. He turned them to the beginning and moved through the pages in each, one by one. Apart from the obvious difference in age, each page had its identical twin; every accidental mark with the pen, each coffee stain, was faithfully reproduced. He found a pair of pages with writing on one side only and removed them from their respective files. Overlaying them, he held them up to the light. As much as the thickness of the paper would allow, he discerned absolutely no difference between them. ‘How did you do this?’ he asked.

‘I sat in the lectures and wrote down what the lecturer said,’ the elder replied then, after a short pause for effect, continued, ‘Only, for me, it was twenty-five years ago.’

‘So…you really think you are…me?’

‘Of course I am. How else would I have the file?’

‘That could be an elaborate hoax, although I admit I can’t see how you might have done it, at the moment.’

‘How about if I told you something about yourself that I know you have never told anyone and there is no way that anyone could have found out about it?’

‘That would be fairly impressive, I must admit, except I may talk in my sleep.’

‘The barn.’

The younger blinked, and it was obvious that he was trying to hide his recognition of the reference. ‘What barn?’

‘The one you burnt down when you were twelve. You were all alone with a box of matches. You wondered what would happen if you lit one blade of straw. You were quite surprised by the result, as I remember, but then it had been a long, hot, dry summer that year. No-one saw you light it. No-one saw you run. No-one saw you hiding in the tree two fields away. But you watched the farmer trying to put the fire out, and the fire brigade arrive too late to save anything. No-one saw you leave the tree after dark, or Dad giving you a thick ear for coming home so late. “Spontaneous combustion” they called it. But you and I know differently, don’t we?’

‘…Someone must have seen. You couldn’t know.’

‘Unless I was there! Unless I was you! And just look at me. Who else could I be?’

The younger fell silent and sat on the bed, struck dumb by the guilt of being found out. He lifted his face to the elder and said, ‘So it’s possible, then? Time-travel?’

‘No, it’s much more than possible,’ replied the elder, ‘I’ve done it!’

‘So…you…you really are…me?’ The younger was an effigy of bewilderment.

The elder beamed at him and nodded furiously. ‘Yes, yes,’ he stated, ‘I hope it’s not too much of a shock.’

‘I think I’d better make some tea,’ the younger muttered, ‘Do I still take sugar?’

‘No, you gave that up in about three years from now,’ said the elder, mischievously. The younger turned on his heels and headed off to the communal kitchen. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he called with excitement as he passed through the doorway, ‘In fact, don’t even move from that spot.’

Of course, he could not stay on the same spot. The fascination of being here again was too much for him. It was like a dream but real, solid. He walked over to the bookcase and took down one of his favourite undergraduate texts, and flicked through its crisp, white pages; the pages in the copy in his own time were yellow and age-worn. He put it back in its place and ran his fingers over the personal items on the bottom shelf, memories flooding back with each contact. The door opened and his younger self returned carrying two familiar mugs and the old brown teapot, new, and minus the crack in the lid and the chip missing from the spout.

‘What are you doing?’ the younger asked, his tone permeated with suspicion.

‘Just renewing my acquaintance with some old friends,’ the elder replied, replacing the photograph he had taken from the shelf.

The younger sat in silence for what seemed an age. His mind raced behind the mask of consternation he wore. His head was filled with questions. What would his future be? Did he really want to know? Were there things he should avoid? What effect might it have if he were to avoid them? The list seemed endless. ‘I don’t know how to respond to this,’ he said eventually, ‘or even if I should be talking to you at all. Goodness knows what problems our meeting may cause.’ He drank his tea, which by now was almost cold, in one go.

‘I don’t believe there to be a problem,’ the elder responded, and he outlined his theories and described his experiences so far. The younger listened intently as the other talked, and interjected with questions and objections, all of which the elder, having thought of them already, had answers for.

‘OK,’ the younger said, finally convinced that the elder’s ideas were basically sound, ‘So why have you come back to visit me? Nostalgia?’

‘No,’ replied the elder, ‘to give you a head start. I won’t live forever and there’s a limit to how far I can push the technology in the time I have left. If you can start sooner you’ll go further. And there are some things I’d like to have avoided…’ He outlined his life after his first degree. He had qualified well and gone on to study for his PhD. After that, he had secured a lectureship and continued his research into gravitational theories. He had maintained his interest in time-travel and had found a clue in his work that made him believe it was possible. The subject had become something of an obsession with him, to the extent that his peers had ceased to take him seriously; scientific journals rejected his papers and colleagues shunned him, not wishing to be tarred with the same brush. Eventually, he had found himself discredited in academic circles and felt obliged to resign. He turned his skills to good use in working for a scientific component manufacturer, a position that paid him well and gave him easy access to the equipment he needed to continue his research at home. He told the younger about the cottage, and how he had back-shifted himself out of debt; the younger, feeling the pinch of impoverished student life, was impressed. He wound up his discourse with a statement that sparked intrigue in the younger, ‘There’s one thing I particularly wanted to tell you, something that has caused me no end of regret and will do the same for you if you get it wrong.’

The younger looked intently at the elder, still questioning in his mind if such knowledge were not dangerous, while the elder stared back at him, his expression begging and pleading with the younger to ask.

‘Go on,’ said the younger.

‘Forget the blonde,’ said the elder, pointing at the photograph on the shelf, ‘She’s not interested in anything more than friendship. I wasted years mooning about after her.’

The younger’s face fell and he sagged a little. ‘You mean Kathryn?’ He turned again to face the elder, who nodded. ‘But I love her,’ he continued, ‘I’m still hoping she may be interested.’

‘She isn’t, and won’t be. But there is someone else who thinks a great deal of you, is hoping for much more than friendship, in fact. And you really like her, although you’re not fully aware of it yet. I realised it when it was too late. She decided she was getting nowhere with me and started seeing someone else. By the time I realised what I was missing she was engaged and out of reach. Marry the brunette, forget the blonde.’

‘You mean Lauren?’

‘I mean Lauren. At least give her a chance…’

The younger sat as though dead while he sorted through the new turmoil in his mind. Eventually, he stirred. ‘OK…’ he said, then shuffled himself upright and addressed the elder, ‘there’s one thing I just don’t get. If, according to your theory, we can’t change anything, why do I get the impression that you never had this meeting? If this is happening for me, and I’m convinced that it is, why didn’t it happen for you when you were my age?’

‘I don’t know,’ the elder replied, ‘but I’m ninety-nine percent certain that all this is meant to be. Maybe something happened that erased my memory of this event... I’ve tried to remember but there’s nothing there. Maybe memory loss is a hazard of meeting yourself… Who knows? But I wasn’t always obsessed with time-travel; the fascination began around this time in my life, so something must have happened to spark it off.’

‘But you didn’t marry Lauren. By your theory, that means I won’t either.’

‘It’s an interesting experiment, isn’t it? Theories have to be able to withstand tests that would prove them wrong, if they are to hold up. If you do marry her, I’ll have to rethink my theory…’

‘I can’t marry her for the sake of an experiment!’

‘That’s not what I’m suggesting. Marry her because you love each other.’



The elder took a room in town so that he could spend time with his younger self and impart as much information about his discoveries as possible. He found himself frustrated at the amount of time the younger began to spend with Lauren, jealous even. His younger self found his clandestine visits to town more and more difficult to live with, and he especially despised the necessity to keep his secret from Lauren. Finally, he gave the elder an ultimatum; one of them had to leave. And so the elder made his way back to the cottage and the younger made his way deeply into Lauren’s affections…



Back at home, he wondered what to do with himself. He had taught his younger self as much as he could grasp and had left a copy of all his workings so that he would be able to understand the theory and construct a machine as his skills grew. Would he do it? Would his relationship with Lauren help or hinder? In the anti-climactic wake of meeting his younger self, he seriously wondered if he should go back to his own time. Despite his theories, he was wary of what he might discover. Actually, he had little option but to go forward. The machine was a huge construction in a building that had been vacant for about fifty years before he had found it. He would have great difficulty explaining things to the former occupants if he materialised in their sitting room and filled their basement with his equipment. The thought of them intrigued him. He decided to pay them a brief visit.

He climbed into the chair and set the machine to visit the time of the previous occupants and, almost instantaneously, to return to its present time, giving him a fleeting look at his predecessors without materialising. He pushed the button and the room shimmered. After what was for him a few seconds, the machine’s rate of regression slowed and reversed until he was almost stationary relative to the normal passage of time. The room quivered into a not quite fully resolved solidity. He cast his eyes around the room until he saw two people, a man and a woman, sitting on a sofa and listening to a wireless set. The man supported his head with one arm, drooped his other around the woman’s shoulders, and had his eyes intently fixed on the speaker of the wireless. The woman, however, was looking straight at Davis with eyes set wide open in a mask of terror.

‘John,’ Davis heard her say tremblingly, ‘it’s happening again…’ She dug her husband in the ribs with the point of her elbow and the man turned his head to see what she was talking about.

‘Oh no,’ he said, leaping up and backing away across the room, ‘What the hell is it?’ Davis realised that they had seen his shimmering apparition and he had terrified them.

The timer on the control box beside him reached its predetermined setting and the machine accelerated. The room shimmered again and the terrified couple dwindled into the past. Davis became aware of the unusual tone of the machine, which seemed to be labouring hard to make the forward transition. The temperature indicator on his console climbed alarmingly and had almost reached the danger level when the room around him took on solid form once more and the machine stopped.

He ran some checks. The machine had functioned exactly as programmed, despite the overheating, although he was relieved that the program had lasted no longer. He was startled by the figures displayed on the console; the month and day that he had returned to were as expected but the year was five years prior to the date on which he had left. He checked his notes to make sure he was not mistaken. Everything pointed to an error on the return leg of his journey. He wondered what had caused it and rechecked the settings. There were no mistakes in the parameters and so he could only conclude that an operational problem had occurred.

He ran down to the basement and played through the recordings of the machine’s behaviour. He discovered a massive power drain on his forward journey, hence the increased noise and the reduced amount of time displacement that the machine had been able to make. He looked over the equations again, and revisited the dominant term. He found nothing wrong in his workings.

Factoring in the extra power needed, he decided to run the experiment again to check his ideas. His appearance in the couple’s home this time resulted in an ear-splitting scream, the crash of a dropped tray laden with teapot, cups and saucers, milk jug and sugar bowl, and a terrified cry of ‘John! John! Come and look at this! I think we have a ghost!’ John had rushed into the room in time to see Davis’s apparition shimmer into nothingness and his wife drop unconscious to the floor. The machine grudgingly retraced its steps through time.

He had lost almost another five years. All the figures were as expected and the power drain had been comparable with the previous trip, allowing for the compensation he had made for the re-run. Puzzled, he ran through the maths yet again and realisation hit him like a sledgehammer. He had a sign wrong in his algebra and an effect of the dominant term that he thought cancelled out had doubled instead; a stupid, schoolboy error – how on Earth had he done that? Once he had seen and understood the problem, which led to positive feedback and an ever-increasing demand for power, he knew exactly how to fix it. He dropped his face into his hands. The device he needed and the technology necessary for its manufacture would not be invented for another thirty years. He was trapped. He opened a fresh bottle of scotch and filled a large tumbler…



He spent much of the next week semi-intoxicated. In his more lucid moments, he turned his mind to the inconsistencies he had encountered on his travels. His older self had not visited him when he had been at university, yet he had visited his younger self. He had not encountered himself at all during his series of one-day back-shifts at the beginning when he used the machine to generate cash. Mrs Stephenson, however, had had a déjà vu on his very first and every subsequent visit to the bank during that episode but had not mentioned anything of the sort during his repeated visits to her younger self for similar purposes. And then there was Mr and Mrs Predecessor. His first visit had generated the statement, ‘It’s happening again,’ and his second visit gave every appearance of being their first encounter with him; indeed, this second visit did predate the first when seen from their perspective. Were his appearances the hauntings the van driver had mentioned? Had he been the reason for the cottage being abandoned?

The puzzles had the beneficial effect of reintroducing sobriety into his life, having given his mind something to grapple with. His theory that what has happened will happen and vice versa explained the Stephenson Paradox, as he called it; her older self’s déjà vu was a rekindling of memories laid down by his visits to her younger self. The Predecessor Paradox reinforced this explanation; they too were reacting to their second visitation in the light of their first. The van driver’s remark about the cottage being haunted he interpreted as an extension of this; at the time of his encounter with the van driver his visits to the Predecessors were already accounted for in the time dimension. So, to some extent at least, what has happened will happen, what will happen has happened. Time had somehow unravelled itself to keep cause and effect consistent; he had not altered the later time by visiting the earlier.

He was derailed by the apparent determinism of it all – the fact that his proximal back-shifts in someway predetermined his distal transitions. He found a comforting analogue in the rather baffling ‘action at a distance’ in the field of quantum physics. Certain collisions of elementary particles produce photons in pairs that fly apart in opposite directions, the conservation laws governing the complementarity of the quantum states available to them. Experiment had shown that subsequently altering the state of one photon in the pair induced the complementary state in the other, even though they were relatively vast distances apart with no apparent link between them. He postulated a similar ‘action at a temporal separation’ whereby an event that selected a probability state at one point in time induced the apparently causal or resultant state at another. His fundamental belief that one could not alter the present by changing the past began to waver…

His own singular experiences, however, none of which seemed to have a complement, he could not explain to his satisfaction. He half-recognised a complementarity in his hauntings, which required the existence of his time machine, resulting in the cottage being vacated and available for him to build the machine, and so be able to haunt its previous occupants… His head began to spin again and wished he would wake up. The only explanation for his older self not having visited him was that his normal time was, in fact, on the very leading edge of time, that the future had no existence except perhaps as a jumble of unresolved probabilities, that he could never discover what will be; his generation could only move forward along the time axis at the normal rate of one second per second and define the present…

His mind turned to more basic drives: food, shelter – survival. Everything depended on his retaining the machine and keeping it working. If he had the machine he could generate money; with money he could buy food, acquire and renovate the cottage – for in this time he did not own it and the floor in the room above the basement had long ago collapsed – and procure spares for the machine. If he generated enough money and invested it wisely, he need not use the machine again, if he chose not to, or if it stopped working.

Large quantities of cash always drew suspicion, and so his first priority was to make himself plausible. He travelled to London and found an agency for a Bermudan bank in which he opened an account using an assumed name and half of the considerable sum he still had left from his earlier efforts in this age. The other half he used to take rooms in the town near the cottage and to prime his cash pump. His cover story for the locals was that he had lived overseas for some time where he had enjoyed a small piece of luck that had given him enough money to retire on. He was looking for a property in the area and was very interested in the cottage. He was not, he told all who felt the need to acquaint him with its history, a great believer in ghosts. As soon as he had enough money, he bought the cottage and began living there, renovating the place around himself. For five years he worked on the cottage and engendered by his infrequent visits to town the notion among the locals that he was somewhat of a recluse, an idea that suited him well.

One warm day, having returned from a shopping trip to town, he emptied the cash he had in his pockets onto a small table in the lounge. A gust of wind from an open window picked up a five pound note and pinned it to the wall. The banknote skittered down the wall and disappeared out of sight behind a length of badly-fitted skirting board. He went to the kitchen to find something narrow enough to use as a probe but stopped short on his return with a bread knife. He put the knife back in the kitchen drawer and left the banknote behind the skirting board where he knew it would be safe for many years to come…

He spent the next four years buried in his theories, revisiting and redeveloping the maths and exploring the consequences of every nuance of its formulation. He devised essential modifications to the machine in readiness for when contemporary technology would allow him to overcome the obstacles he faced. He made the changes that were possible, even though, as a result, it meant he could not use the machine until the new components were in place but that bothered him little; he had no heart for travelling further from his own time, troubled as he was by the kind of home-sickness that mediaeval mariners marooned in some far-flung backwash of the globe must have felt.



Few came to see him in his remote outpost. There was the occasional visit from the postman, who brought him bills or letters from his Bermudan banker’s agent, but the conversation rarely, if ever, strayed from the state of the weather. Whoever did come came on an entirely predictable schedule and left as soon as their business permitted. It was with some surprise, therefore, that he heard an unexpected diesel-engined vehicle labouring up the short, steep hill onto the small plateau overlooking the sea on which the cottage stood. Thinking it must be tourists off course, he ignored it and carried on painting a window-frame without looking round. A van pulled up in front of the cottage and its engine fall silent. Two doors opened and closed and two sets of footsteps crunched their way along the dry gravel path leading to the rear of the house. He noticed that the feet were not in step but had a rhythm suggesting that of one of his visitors was somewhat shorter than the other. He set down his paint pot and brush and turned to receive them.

‘We thought we’d find you here,’ the younger Davis said, ‘We’ve brought some things you might need.’ The younger held out his hand and grinned; the elder snapped out of his stunned shock and grasped the other’s hand with both of his own and pumped it up and down until the younger’s shoulder almost dislocated. Uncontrollable tears of joy flowed down his cheeks. He turned his attention to the woman, to Lauren, and hugged her, crying into her shoulder. Breaking off his contact, he took a couple of steps back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m forgetting my manners. Please come in.’ Wiping his cheeks dry with the rolled cuff of his shirt as he went, he led the way into the cottage and into the small lounge where he waved them towards the sofa. He fetched himself a stool from the kitchen.

He sat opposite them and looked them up and down, grinning from ear to ear. He noticed that they looked older than he thought they should. The younger began the explanations. ‘We spent some time going over the theories you left me. Lauren, being a mathematician of course, was a fantastic help. We, well she, found a few things you’d overlooked or had wrong and we deduced what must have happened to you when you tried to return to your own time.’

‘The dominant term,’ the elder interjected. ‘I had no idea what a problem it would be when I started all this. I’ve had plenty of time to work it out, though.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Lauren, ‘and I’m also sure that you don’t have the wherewithal to put the machine right.’

‘Right again,’ said the elder, ‘but I’ve spent my time getting ready for when the technology became available.’

‘We’ve everything you need in our machine outside,’ said the younger, ‘It’s taken us ages to track you down. We’ve had some fun along the way, though. Do you have a bible here?

‘There’s one here somewhere. Why?’

‘Get it for me, please.’

The elder rose from his stool and went over to the bookcase and returned with an old bible that had been in his family for generations. The younger took it from him, blew off the dust, and opened its dry, fragile pages at Mark, chapter fourteen. He passed it to the elder and said, ‘Verses 51 and 52, read them out loud.’

The elder read, ‘And there followed Him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.’

He looked at the younger who winked mischievously and announced, ‘That was me! Which explains why the Turin Shroud failed the radiocarbon dating test…’

‘You mean…’

‘Yes,’ Lauren contributed, ‘it was a sheet we picked up in mediaeval Europe.’

‘You didn’t…use a time machine to bring Him back from…’

‘No,’ said Lauren, ‘that was nothing to do with us; He did that all by Himself. Not that we waited to see what happened, mind you. We fled to where we had our machine hidden and left the scene before the guards could catch us. There was no Human Rights movement in those days…’

‘So, your machine is mobile?’

‘Yes,’ said the younger, ‘The wonders of micro-miniaturisation. It’s parked out the front. We’d like to take you home in it but you really can’t leave that here,’ he pointed towards the chair of the elder’s machine, ‘where someone might find it.’ The elder nodded slowly in sage understanding and the younger continued, ‘So we’ve brought you the components you need.’

The elder, almost overcome with excitement, asked, ‘Have you visited my time? Do you know if I make it back?’ The younger shook his head, ‘We’ve no certain knowledge of that but we believe you will. We can’t visit any time ahead of our own. There’s another term in the equation that dominates if we try to get ahead of ourselves and the power needed is phenomenal – it would blow the planet apart. And in any case, you’re obviously not there, are you…?’

‘No, you’re right,’ said the elder, ‘My timeline is somewhat displaced.’

‘But it is important that you get back there,’ Lauren stated, clearly having more to say.

‘Go on,’ prompted the elder.

She shuffled forward in her seat as if to make herself more commanding, ‘We know you think this is absurd because you said so before, but your time really is the leading edge of time, at least as far as humanity is concerned. I know it sounds unreasonable,’ she said raising her voice slightly, and rebutting his objections with the flat of her hand, ‘but the inconsistencies of your experiences should be enough to prove that. We have had nothing but consistent paradoxes. All we have done has related clearly to things that have already happened. What is more disconcerting is the seeming fact that things from the past appear to draw us into concert with them, as if our lives were somehow subject to some externally imposed fate – as in the Turin Shroud example, for instance – but we realise that’s just because of our perception of what for us is the normal passage of time; a bit like the apparent handedness of mirrors, which is merely a superposition of the subjectivity of the observer. But the point is, there is always, without fail, a complementary pair of events in all our experiences.

‘In your case, complementarity only became the norm when you left your own time. You are, or were, on the very boundary of time. You represent the starting conditions of time-travel, we are in an equilibrium state. What we do is only a complement of what has been done, and what will be done is only the complement of what we do now. Your theory, what will happen has happened, or what has happened will happen, is perfectly correct – but only in an equilibrium state. Do you see that?’

The elder frowned and leant forward on his stool, voicing his thoughts, ‘So the fact that I never experienced a visit from myself was because there was no future me to visit me…’

‘Exactly,’ said the younger.

‘And Mrs Stephenson’s déjà vu and the five pound note and all the other things are because I’d reached equilibrium…’

‘There’s a complementary action to the five pound note?’

‘Yes, I lost one down the skirting board four years ago. It’s still there…what would happen if I retrieved it?’

‘I dread to think…perhaps someone else would lose one. But the reason you didn’t encounter yourself in your early back-shifts is also explained. You were so close to the boundary that the probability function was still incompletely collapsed. In effect, you changed the probabilities of who you were – or which one of you was there, if you like. The reason you didn’t meet yourself is because you were yourself – all of yourselves – that near to the boundary, but my probability state was well-defined by the time you got back to me.

Lauren continued, ‘We can also explain why you couldn’t get back to your own time. In your own time, you and all your contemporaries are riding the front face of a wave like a surfer. As you travelled back, you got nearer to the crest. You could have gone forward again after your early experiments but you did one too many. You got behind the crest. By the time you came to our time you were so far behind that you didn’t have enough energy to move up the wave and back over the crest, and, because of the temporal gradient, you slipped further back with each journey you made.’

‘That’s exactly what’s happened,’ said the elder, transfixed by the growing realisation of his true and unique position in time.

‘Our problem in finding you was in knowing how far back you may have slipped. From the work you left with us, we knew what your machine was capable of but we didn’t know how you would apply it.’

‘But how can you move about so freely?’

‘Because we’ve different technology at our disposal and, thanks to you, had more time to work on the equations. Our machine works differently, and the wave looks much flatter from our point of view. We still can’t get ahead of our own time though, and there’s no technology on earth that can better what we now have. There are some clues in the maths that improvements are possible but not without access to space travel.’

The elder looked at her with a puzzled expression.

She explained, ‘We need a massive source of gravitational distortion. Jupiter would do for starters, if we could get close enough, but what we really need is black hole. We don’t have one…’

They fell silent, and the elder’s mind raced as he considered the implications of the information he had just been given. ‘You said it was important that I get back to my own time…’ he said, fixing the woman with a probing stare.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is. Your visit to yourself is not the only reason we were able to make such great strides forward. There are other events that helped us out along the way. As we’ve already implied, everything we’ve done has had its complementary action, however, there are a few apparent exceptions…’

‘So you may be wrong about my being on the leading edge!’

‘No. The exceptions can only be complementary actions of future events and, we think, ahead of the time you left. They’re exclusively to do with technology in advance of our own time, all of which we’ve incorporated into our machine. It’s as though someone was leaving us clues to their discoveries.’

‘So I do get back, then?’

‘We think so…but you may not be the only one in your age working on time-travel. As I said, we’ve no certain knowledge of your return…’

They talked well into the night, sharing experiences and discussing modifications to the elder’s machine, and breaking off briefly to unload equipment from the younger’s. It was just before dawn when they eventually retired to bed. The visitors went upstairs while the elder watched the sun rise from the sea as he had done one fateful morning many years ago in the future…

He awoke late into the next day, and was deeply disappointed to find himself alone again. Peering through his bedroom window, he noticed the terminated tracks of their vehicle in the gravel; his visitors had left but along a different dimension from the one on which they arrived. Never before had he appreciated his own company so much and he wished he still had it. Breakfast was a miserable affair and he felt lonelier than ever. He found himself longing for the familiarity of his own time again, and old Mrs Stephenson’s happy disposition.

Down in the basement, he set about installing the equipment they had brought him. Everything they had supplied was in keeping with his machine; they had deduced correctly the exact components he would need and, he thought rather cleverly, anticipated the manner in which he would incorporate them. Noticing that they had supplied several items in duplicate, he presumed they were fragile and that they thought he might break one. He took great care during the assembly process and stowed all the spares, for none proved necessary, in the machine’s stowage compartment in case of failure during travel.

That night, in his favourite restaurant, the most expensive restaurant in town, he ordered his favourite food and the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. The Maitre d’ enquired if Sir was celebrating a special occasion, and was deeply gratified on being told that Sir was going on a long journey for quite some time and wanted to take with him a lasting memory of this wonderful establishment. His complement ensured the personal attention of the Maitre d’ for the rest of the evening, and a second complementary bottle of the same wine shared with him over cheese at the end of his meal. The copious quantity of wine Davis consumed that night, a heady, full-bodied vintage, loosened his tongue, and he rattled away to the Maitre d’ about his woes, his travels, and his intended return to his own time. The Maitre d’ tolerated all in anticipation of a generous tip and of the mirth he would cause with the latest stories about the mad recluse from the cottage by the sea.

The Maitre d’ was somewhat surprised by the nature of his tip. Davis first presented him with his car keys. Sir was, of course, very wise not to drive having so fully enjoyed the delights of the vineyard. Davis then presented him with the vehicle documents, with the ownership already signed over whilst under the influence of stone-cold sobriety. Sir was decidedly very strange, although his beneficiary expressed nothing but surprise and gushing gratitude. A taxi was called for, on the house, and the drunken customer helped first into his coat and then into his transport before being waved off by the restaurant’s entire staff. The taxi driver was more than happy to take advantage of his inebriated passenger’s mistake with the large denomination banknote presented as a tip, and laughed all the way home at his incessant ramblings about time-machines.

Davis fell into the chair and the room shimmered before him. He was surprised at that, because he had yet to turn the machine on, but he chuckled to himself on realising that the visual disturbance resulted from the alcoholic haze that was wrapping itself more tightly around his head. He reached over the side of the chair and dialled in the objective of his journey – his home time – and was suddenly swamped by overwhelming joy and desperate longing. He strapped himself in, fumbling for an age with the buckles. The red indicator light flashed green then settled to its steady glow. He pressed the button below it. The machine throbbed and hummed as he passed out of consciousness and out of time…



The darkness around him shimmered unperceived into solid form and the machine went through its automatic shutdown procedure then waited several hours for further instructions. Eventually, something reached through the blackness into the inner recesses of Davis’s stupefied mind and pulled him painfully into sensibility. He groaned at the throbbing in his head and blinked his eyes open and shut until they adjusted to the brilliant morning sunshine that stabbed into the room. He stared without seeing at the clock on the wall opposite. The machine hummed its way gently into his consciousness, and he responded by throwing the power switch to off and unbuckling himself from its seat. He stood, and, steadying himself against the swaying walls, staggered to the kitchen where he gulped down several glasses of water to re-inflate his shrunken brain. The bedroom beckoned, and he resumed his unsteady gait until he was near enough to the bed to flop down onto it and thence to slither back into welcome oblivion and freedom from pain. A patch of sunshine in the lounge crept down the wall, across the floor, and back out of the window.



Someone was hammering at the door. A voice was calling out. Consciousness once more invaded his nirvana and he stirred to push it away. Voices and hammering. Footsteps in the gravel. Faces at the window. Voices shouting.

‘Dr Davis? This is the police. Will you come to the door, please?’

He went to the door, still staggering somewhat, and opened it, his mind still feeling as though it had been packed in cotton wool, his senses somehow remote from his being. ‘Hello?’ he heard himself say to the stranger who stood before him and held out a small plastic wallet for him to see. The wallet disappeared as he looked at it and the voice made sounds like some sort of introduction then came into focus.

‘…and we would like you to come to the station to assist with our enquiries…’

‘What?’

‘Dr Davis?’ The owner of the voice frowned and reeled from the stench of stale alcohol on his victim’s breath.

‘I’m sorry,’ Davis said, ‘I guess I must look pretty awful.’

‘Dr Davis, I’m arresting you on suspicion of passing forged banknotes.’ A hand reached inside the door and applied a painful grip to his elbow.

‘What?’

The voice went on as he was dragged into the open air and led to an awaiting car, ‘You are not obliged to say anything but it may harm your defence if, when questioned, you fail to mention something that you later rely on in court.’ A dozen or so uniformed policeman entered the house as he spoke.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Davis, twisting his neck to look back over his shoulder, emerging rapidly from his semi-comatose state.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the man breaking his arm, ‘we have a search warrant.’

‘What’s going on? What’s this all about?’

‘We’ll explain it all to you at the station,’ said his assailant, ‘and then you can explain it all to us.’

Bundled indecorously into the back of the car, Davis found himself locked in and sitting next to a large man in uniform, to whom he appeared to be attached by handcuffs. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked once more. No reply was given, and they continued their journey in silence as they bounced along the unmetalled track that led away from his home and then sped along the road into town.

At the station, he was stripped of shoelaces, belt, and other personal effects and then installed in a cell. He sat on the small cot at the end of the room and looked around at the gloss-painted, windowless brick walls, and at the steel door opposite in which a small trap opened to reveal part of an inquisitive face and then snapped shut again. Sunlight filtered in through the opaque skylight high above his head and made on the dull grey vinyl flooring a bright square that slithered imperceptibly, shrinking as it went, towards a wall and began to climb it. It summed up his mood exactly. They fed him, at least he thought it may have been food, and watered him through the trap in the door; they made no effort to communicate with him other than this acknowledgement of his bodily requirements. The lidded bucket in the corner was, he presumed, for any output required to balance the equation. He refrained from using it, choosing instead to hammer on the door and demand to be taken to a proper toilet and to be given an explanation for his confinement. They told him, in no uncertain terms, not to make things worse for himself by causing an affray, and to use the bucket. He lay on the cot and tried to sleep but its hardness and a nagging from his bladder conspired against his efforts. Eventually, he used the bucket.

A key turned in the lock and the door swung open to reveal the full figure of the man who had arrested him at the house. ‘Dr Davis,’ the man said, ‘if you would care to come with me, we have a few questions to ask you.’

‘I don’t,’ said Davis, turning over to face the wall.

‘Sorry?’

‘I don’t care to come with you. Why should I? You’ve dragged me here against my will, violated my home – heaven help you if you’ve damaged anything – and left me in this hole for hours without so much as an explanation. You’ve fed me swill and robbed me of my dignity, and now you want to ask me questions! Stuff your questions. Get me your superior officer so I can make a formal complaint.’

‘Dr Davis,’ the man said in the tone of someone struggling to show patience with a perverse child, ‘I am here to give you an explanation, and to hear yours. You will only be held here as long as is necessary. Please follow me to the interview room, there’s a good gentleman.’

A second policeman joined them in the interview room. They made their introductions with the tape rolling and dragged one out of Davis. The first man began the interview proper. ‘We’ve arrested you on suspicion of passing forged banknotes, Dr Davis –’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Davis interrupted.

‘– and here is a copy of the warrant to search your house –‘

‘If you’ve done any damage, I warn you, I will sue.’

‘– signed by a magistrate this morning –’

Davis opened his mouth to interrupt again but was cut off before he could speak.

‘Dr Davis,’ went the patronisingly patient tone once more, ‘if you would just let me finish we’d get through this unpleasant business a whole lot quicker.’ Davis held his tongue, nodded, and looked daggers at his inquisitor who went on, ‘We found nothing incriminating at your home. We shall, however, require you to explain the purpose of the large contraption in your basement. We have reason to believe it may be used for the production of forged notes.’

Davis, smiling wryly, said, ‘I assure you, I have never used it to produce forged banknotes.’ The Inquisitor failed to pick up on the emphasis and Davis became suddenly agitated at a thought that occurred to him. ‘You didn’t tamper with the machine, did you? It’s extremely sensitive and fragile and has taken years of painstaking research to develop.’

‘No cause for concern, Dr Davis,’ said the Inquisitor, ‘We’re very health and safety conscious here. We’ve looked it over, cursory like. As we couldn’t make head nor tail of it we decided you needed to come along and explain it to us.’ Davis breathed a sigh of relief. ‘However, we do have these to ask you about,’ said the Inquisitor, laying two plastic envelopes on the table and pushing them towards Davis, ‘What d’you make of them?’

Davis looked at the bags and saw that they each contained a banknote. He said so.

The Inquisitor continued, ‘Absolutely perfect banknotes, Dr Davis, perfect in every way. However, the interesting thing, Dr Davis, is that they are also absolutely identical. The obvious problem is the fact that they have identical serial numbers – that’s what first brought them to the bank’s attention yesterday. One that is not so obvious is that they have the same fingerprints on them in exactly the same places. They are more like identical twins than identical twins are. Actually, they are not twins. They are decuplets. Yes, Dr Davis, I see you raise your eyebrows in surprise, but it’s quite true, we have eight more notes that match these two perfectly. What’s more, we have many decuplets of banknotes, all with the same complications. How do you explain that?’

‘I have no plausible explanation for that, officer,’ was all that Davis said.

‘It doesn’t end there, you know,’ the Inquisitor went on, ‘the similarities, I mean. Our boffins tell us that they appear to be identical right down to the imperfections in the paper. We’re still awaiting their detailed analysis, of course. Intriguing, isn’t it?’

‘Quite.’

‘And we ask ourselves, “Now how would anyone make something like that?” And straight away we answer, “It would take some pretty sophisticated machinery.” And so we ask the next obvious question, “Who would be doing such a thing?” And we find out from the bank who paid the notes in, and we find out that it’s a very clever man with a PhD and all sorts of qualifications who has been spending lots of money on ingenious pieces of equipment. And then we call at his house and find that he has the most amazingly sophisticated machinery we’ve ever seen, right there in his basement!’

The Inquisitor placed another plastic envelope on the table. ‘We only have one of these, though,’ he said. ‘Can you verify that that is your signature, please?’

Davis picked up the envelope and looked at the paying-in slip that it contained. The signature was his. ‘It looks very similar to mine,’ he said, screwing up his face and slowly shaking his head, apparently in disbelief at what he saw, ‘but you are dealing with a very clever forger. You say this was paid in yesterday?’

‘Yes,’ said the Inquisitor, ‘as the date shows.’ The date had been the cause of Davis’s disbelief. His mind raced. He had been drunk, or at least seriously merry. What date had he set on the machine’s dial? His memory was vague, and he would confirm it when he got home, but he thought it had been the date he left, the day after he had paid the proceeds of his original cash-generating scheme into the bank. With a startling jolt, he realised his mistake! He had forgotten to add on the lapsed time of his travels and, instead of returning to the leading edge of time, he had returned to almost the exact moment at which he had left to visit his younger self. His eyes widened with his realisation.

‘We’ve taken the trouble of arranging an identity parade, Dr Davis, so as to rule out the problem you just mentioned.’

‘What problem?’

‘That your signature may have been forged. The bank teller is waiting to see if she can pick out the gentleman who paid in all that money. Please follow me.’

The little group left the room. Davis was led to another room in which a line of men of similar appearance to himself was arrayed against one wall facing a mirror that stretched the length of the wall opposite. ‘Stand anywhere you like in the line-up,’ he was told. He took his place near one end, and the policemen left the room.

A young woman was led into the room behind the mirror and instructed what to do. She walked along the window becoming increasingly puzzled, and speeding up as she went. ‘No,’ she said as she reached the end of the row, ‘it’s none of these. The man I saw was much younger.’ They encouraged her to look again, which she did, more nervously this time in view of the obvious irritation of the policemen. She reported the same verdict. They broke the rules and drew her attention to Davis. ‘No, I told you,’ she said, becoming quite annoyed with them, ‘he’s like him but much too old. The man I dealt with was much younger.’

Davis was released for lack of evidence but told in no uncertain terms that the investigation was not yet over and that he could be called again for questioning. They transported him back home in silence. On entering the cottage, he was dismayed at the mess the police had made. He rushed down to the basement to see what they had done to the machine. He picked his way laboriously through every detail of its construction and was not surprised to find that a small amount of damage had been done. All of it was significant however, and each discovery hit him like a hammer blow. He sat dejectedly on the floor in the corner of the room, wondering how he would get his hands on the money to buy replacements for the parts that were damaged. He looked between his knees at the machine and his eyes lighted on the small door to a compartment on its side. His misery turned instantly to elation. He sprang to his feet, opened the compartment, and took out the parcel of spare parts that his younger self had left with him. Another paradox had played out its hand. He went exhausted to bed, setting the alarm early so that he would have a full day to affect repairs then leave before the police showed up with more questions to be answered…



Davis sat in the chair and adjusted the settings for his journey. He double-checked the destination time and added on a little extra. As far as he understood, the machine could only take him to the leading edge of time. The extra was just to ensure that he definitely reached it, and to allow for the advance of time in the short duration of his journey. Of course, time had moved on without him and he wondered at what he might find; what technological changes had occurred in his absence, what changes in society? Mostly, he wondered if he had been missed, although he realised it was unlikely. He supposed that Mrs Stephenson may have noticed his absence but wondered if she would still be alive to remark on his unexpected return. He had decided to try and track Lauren down. He would value her friendship, even if she were still married. He hoped she would feel the same… He pushed the button and watched the scene shimmer and fade and crystallise before him.

The cottage was darkened by the boards nailed up at its windows. Dust lay on the horizontal surfaces and cobwebs hung from walls and ceiling. The air smelled cold and damp and stale. What light there was came through holes in the roof where slates had been torn away by numerous winter gales unobstructed by the sea. Corresponding puddles lay on the floor beneath the holes. The clock on the wall opposite the chair had ceased to tick many years ago. Somewhere at the back of the cottage, a loose board flapped in the wind and banged repetitively against a window frame. Davis closed the machine down and unstrapped himself. He left the chair and wandered about the cottage and began to feel depressed about its condition. Twice he had renovated the place, and now it looked like he would have to do it again…



‘Good morning, Mrs Stephenson!’

Mrs Stephenson, whom Davis had encountered in the street, she having retired from the bank some years ago, frowned and reached back into the dim recesses of her mind to find a match for the face of the man who accosted her. ‘Is it…? Yes, it’s Dr Davis, isn’t it?’

‘Indeed it is,’ he exclaimed, ‘and may I say what a joy it is to see you after all this time.’ She smiled and said, ‘Yes, it has been a long time, hasn’t it. You went away very suddenly and no one has been expecting your return for quite some time now. Did you emigrate, or something?’

He offered little explanation. ‘Something like that, but I’m back now.’

They parted company, and Davis walked to the bank with a smile on his face. The smile did not last, however, because the bank was not there. He ran back to where he had met Mrs Stephenson and searched around the nearby shops until he found her. Explaining his quandary, he asked her to tell him what had happened to the bank. She became agitated, disturbed at his insistent questioning. She wondered privately about the state of his mind, and if the rumours surrounding his disappearance had been true and if, all this time, he had been locked away somewhere. The bank, it seemed, and she had explained it as though to someone in an advanced state of dementure, had overstretched itself and, when the depression came on the heels of a war in the Middle East, had gone under. Everything had been lost and many, many people had been left penniless, herself included. Her anticipated comfortable pension had gone in the collapse and she had to get by on what the state, and her late husband’s meagre pension, provided. Realising her distress at his questioning, Davis thanked her politely, and left her alone.

He was not overly concerned about being penniless himself, having a sure-fire way of becoming rich; he was loath to resort to it, however, in the light of his experience with the Law in an earlier time. He made enquiries about his cottage and found that the mortgage lender had repossessed it because the mortgagee had not kept up his repayments, hardly surprising since he had been away for so long. Since the cottage was in such a dilapidated state, the purchase price was very low, the estimated cost of repair very high. He left the mortgage lender’s office in a low ebb and wandered aimlessly about the town until, because of his inattention, he collided with a telephone stand. Having almost decided that he would have to pump his funds again, he picked up the handset on a whim and asked to be connected to a certain Bermudan Bank agent’s office. A man answered the call and began to proceed through the usual series of questions, each of which Davis answered in the expectation that it would be the last. ‘And how can I help you, sir?’ said the agent, eventually.

‘Could you tell me the balance of the account, please?’ He struggled to convince himself that complementarity could be experienced on the leading edge of time, and hoped, against his certain knowledge, that it would.

‘Certainly, sir.’ There was a long pause, at the end of which the man cleared his throat. ‘One moment, sir,’ he said and prolonged the pause. Davis expected to be cut off. ‘Right, sir, your balance at close of banking yesterday, including interest added, is fourteen million, seven hundred an sixty-two thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven euros and twenty-four cents.’

Davis stood in shocked silence.

‘Sir? Are you there?’

‘Uh, yes. Where is the nearest place I can draw some cash, please?’



Davis took a suite in the best hotel in town from which to conduct his affairs. He bought the cottage outright, dismantled the machine so that it could be stored out of harm’s way, then paid contractors to renovate the property, not having the heart to do the job himself yet again nor, with so much money available, the need. Once reinstalled in his old home, he brought the machine back from storage and stowed it, unassembled, in the basement. He could not bring himself to rebuild it, in part because he knew from his younger self’s experience that the machine was obsolete, and in part because he was weary of his travels. He was comfortable, had fulfilled his dream, and had Lauren to find…



It did not take him long to find Lauren. She had not recognised him at first, having not seen him since University. She had three grown daughters, all married and with children of their own. When her children had reached school age, she had returned to her work as a mathematician on the first successful fusion reactor project until her husband had become ill with cancer. Then, she had left her job to nurse him until he died, and she had not worked in the six years since.

Friendship rekindled and blossomed once more into love. He told her of his travels. At first she had not believed him but had become convinced when he walked her through the theories and showed her the dismantled machine in the basement. Her mathematical insight was profound, and she suggested a number of refinements, all of which he acknowledged and incorporated. They talked about her life and the events that he had missed because of his absence. She told him of the war, depression, poverty, and the recovery in the economy as a result of some staggering technologies that had emerged, one of which drove him back to his research. Together, they turned their discoveries into a new design. ‘You know,’ he said to her, ‘with this, I think we could break the time-barrier.’

On the second anniversary of their wedding day, they sat aboard a new machine. Holding hands, they left the leading edge of time behind them, and found a place, if that is the right word, where neither time nor space had any meaning…