The Time Traveller, Part Two

They would never calm down, and he would be hounded throughout his life for the key to time-travel.

Robbers would torture him to get his powers out of him and world leaders would drug him and play with his mind. Scientists would try to analyse him in lots of different ways.

From start to finish, he would be no better than a guinea pig in a perspex box.

Also, Jason hadn’t understood that, no matter how much he told them that it was ‘just about prayer’, they would never be spiritually capable enough to grasp the truth, such was the strangling lack of integrity in the world.

Perhaps it was because the powerful people who wanted his powers wanted them to gain power from enemies that they would never be able to ‘get it’.

This, in turn, would frustrate the world leaders and force them to ‘do away with the terror, one way or another’. What they can’t have, they don’t want around.

Perhaps this gift had been bestowed upon Jason alone, a one-in-a-zillion unidentifiable DNA compound, or perhaps it was that no other human being prayed ‘properly’, as he put it.

‘All you have to do is pray for a long time over a period of years for something particularly good to happen, always knowing that it will take time to come to fruition, like learning to play the guitar,’ he had once told MI5, shortly after arriving at the mansion. They continued to sit there scratching their heads with their dictaphones on the table.
‘It has to be a tangible wish,’ Jason went on, ‘one that is clearly achievable in your mind’s eye and only for good reason, and it has to be fun.’

The experts chewed on these words for days, weeks even, but, in the end, they knew that they were lost. It would take years (and God knew how many) to actually test his method for time-travel, which would be a costly affair for all nations interested in a slice of the pie. The search to find someone willing to pray for the good of a single dream, such as time-travel, would also be problematic.

They’d watched him pray at his bed on CCTV for hours, but nothing seemed weird or different about that, although he did seem to do it for a very long time and also noted that he never complained about his knees.

With the media now clearly in the picture, and as the governments shied away because of his disappearance and ‘a lack of conclusive evidence to his method’, the newspapers would, in time to come, hook all types of people to prayer in the hope of discovering time-travel.

Over the next few weeks, The Sun would issue a red and white plastic prayer mat with Jason’s face in the middle for the World Cup and the Mail On Sunday would have an exclusive reader-offer on proper prayer mats shipped in from Egypt.

Sat watching telly at the cottage, still blissfully unaware of the life that lay ahead of him, Jason ate more food from the kitchen in the afternoon and wondered whether to risk getting in touch with the butcher and grocer.

He would soon run out of food and needed more, but he couldn’t risk them raising questions, especially if they’d been given arrival times by the owner.
He decided not to use the cottage’s phone when the dreaded thought of MI5 listening in came to mind.
If he elected to walk to the nearest town or village, he would be spotted in seconds, what with his face splashed across the nation’s TVs. The newspapers would have him all over their front pages tomorrow morning, so he felt it wise to get his shopping done that day.

On all search engines worldwide, Jason Nozzle would remain at Number One for the weeks ahead of the race with Bolt, beating holocausts and revolutions, other sports events and celebrities.

The car seemed a plausible idea until he attempted, unsuccessfully, to drive it out of the garage, and so he was faced with the thought of dressing up to look different, but this was swiftly quashed when he found no items of clothing anywhere in the cottage.

The idea of time-travelling from visible place to place until he found a supermarket went out of the window when he realised that the moment someone saw him in the supermarket, he was finished.

Checking the kitchen cupboards, he reckoned he had enough food for the remaining four days, so he began to relax again, knowing that he had at least that long to think about what to do next.
But the next three days dragged on.

Jason prayed as always for his race to take place, but he couldn’t find a way to get out of the cottage without having to go back to the mansion.

His Mum had made more televised statements pleading for him to come ‘home’, but he saw the mansion as hell on earth and sadly came to the conclusion that she’d been sucked in to the government’s stomach, dressed as she was in a lilac Prada blouse and matching flannels.

His sisters preened themselves and played with their newly coiffured hair behind their mother, each impeccably turned out, trying to appear awfully overwhelmed with grief as wily security guards spoke silently into walkie-talkies in the background.

Jason couldn’t blame his family. They’d always wanted fame and all the things that go with it, as had all their friends.

‘Life’s hard. You have to deal with it before it deals with you,’ his Dad had once told him on a rare visit, trying to explain why he had had to leave four years previously.

In the end, Jason walked out of the cottage and gave himself up to a gentleman walking a dog.

They had a fine conversation about prayer as they walked towards the mansion together, and it appeared that the gentleman knew a bit about it, too, having contacted his wife many times since her death.

As security guards noticed Jason approaching, his Mum and sisters were quickly informed and they came bounding out to greet him.

It felt good to be back in a way. He felt like a war hero returning from a battle.

But it soon dawned upon him that he was not a war hero at all. He was, as his Mum put it to him, ‘a very naughty boy’.

By this time, human rights experts and legal firms had been drafted in to the mansion to supervise Jason’s legal rights, but these people just made matters worse for the lad.

He was shunted from one office to the next to sign papers as to his legal position and for his human rights to be preserved, with the Secret Service constantly tagging the human rights and legal teams with Jason in the middle of the melee.

Once all the paperwork had been signed and resigned, the media were asked to abandon the story until further notice, and Jason began to focus again on prayer and his coming race with destiny.

He had a much nicer room that was kitted out with a computer and a massive TV. What’s more, it had its own bathroom and kitchen, which meant he wouldn’t need to be disturbed by anyone apart from his Mum and sisters, who were on the same floor in similar luxury.

After a week or so, the prime minister came to see Jason and they had some lunch together with his family at the local pub. That had been the first time he’d stepped outside the mansion’s estate since returning from the cottage, and he’d enjoyed talking to the man, even if he had no interest in prayer and only wished to talk about time-travel, which seemed to be a means to an end to Jason.
With the media back in the picture for the week’s lead-up to the greatest race on earth, Jason gave not one interview.

Usain Bolt expressed an interest to meet Jason before the race but this was declined for legal reasons, and also because world leaders needed to protect their investment by letting the race happen without hindrance of any kind.

It was after the race that they would be able to ask Jason more questions, and that was all that mattered to these people.

Jason’s DNA could be explored, his mind could be read, his biorhythms could be recorded and his cells could be manipulated.
The world was their oyster, so long as the race was run.

When tickets for the race went on sale over the internet, they’d been sold and resold seventeen times in the course of the day. The last of them were finally sold for over five thousand pounds each.

Such was the promise of time-travelling spectacle within the human body, the mere thought of it struck fear into many but brought light into many others’ lives.

The TV rights for this ten-second contest were the highest paid for any one single sporting event in the history of mankind, and as the whole world waited for the day when books would be rewritten, Jason Nozzle could be seen playing backgammon with the computer or praying at his bed in this room at the mansion.

On the day of the race, Jason was escorted in a fanfare of security the likes of which had not been seen in a generation. The entire motorway system required to reach Wembley was closed off for his safe journey and every member of the Royal Family was present.

The Secret Service made sure that no one came within ten yards of Jason as he was marched into the stadium and directly onto the field.

The crowd stood up and cheered as he walked onto the pitch with his arms at his sides and his mop of hair hiding most of his face.

At the starting line, Jason shook hands with Usain Bolt and told him how proud he was to finally meet him and that, whatever the outcome, Mr Bolt would still be the fastest man on the planet.

As the gun fired, Usain Bolt leapt from the stalls like a leopard and eased into cruise-control for the line.

Jason closed his eyes for a few moments and then transported himself to the finishing line, crossing the tape just before Bolt could get there.

The entire crowd could not believe their eyes and stood in silence.

Half of them came out of their trance feeling cheated by their own conception of reality and were quick to see Jason’s victory as an elaborate new scam, while the other half stayed in a state of shock, sure that they’d witnessed the birth of a new world.

TV crews clambered to get a word from Jason but he was whisked away in an armoured vehicle and taken to a waiting car.

From there, he was returned to the mansion and given a special celebratory dinner with his Mum and sisters, who were so shocked by his victory that they were already very drunk, along with various members of staff.

A good time was had by all and, for the first time, Jason let it sink that he’d finally broken the world record for the 100 metres by a whole second.

The next day, Jason was asked to time-travel in a large room in front of various heads of state who had all flown considerable lengths to be present.

‘But, sir,’ said Jason. ‘I told you that it was by prayer that I was able to time-travel, and that it was by praying for this to happen to me, to break the world record for the 100 metres, that it happened. Now that my prayer has been answered, I have no more the power to time-travel than you do.’

The room remained silent for several seconds.

Then, ‘What?’ barked a very upstanding gentleman. ‘You mean to say that you can’t time-travel any more?’

‘That’s what I said,’ replied Jason. ‘It would take me at least another eight, maybe ten years of prayer for something special like that to happen to me again.’

The world leaders looked extremely upset, but what could they do?

All the legal teams were present and there were sure to be a few media taps in the room.

The world leaders stomped off, as if they’d just lost a bundle in Monte Carlo.

Jason and his family left the mansion days afterwards, and decided to emigrate to Australia, where they enjoyed the good life from the fruits of Jason’s antics with time-travel.