Kill The Monster, Chapter 8

VI. MIXING WITH THE SMART SET

The rooftop was silent in that eerie, deathly way that landscapes are when soundproofed with a billion tonnes of snow. It was now the seventh consecutive day of 'Arctic chaos', as newspapers were uniformly calling it. In Sweden, Denmark or Norway, such a winter would scarcely have registered on the national radar, but in Britain, snow that stuck around for more than five minutes qualified as Icy Polar Conditions - at least, as long as no major page three stunna was having her breasts enlarged that week.

In Sweden and Denmark, however, really cold weather was being had. Mercury was freezing in thermometers, HEP station turbines weren't turning, and electricity was not reaching over a million homes. This was what happened, so men in white coats claimed, when the Gulf Stream failed to circulate. This cold weather - this was the part with which Sean was having difficulty - was supposedly part and parcel of global warming. Mickey had attempted to explain it to him one day on one of his visits home. The ones that felt increasingly like parental visits conducted by a divorcee.

The roof was quiet, but not deserted. Up here, sixteen storeys above the petty concerns of humankind, he was sharing the chaotic Arctic sky with one other man. The block of flats was not the tallest in England, but it stood on a windswept hilltop that towered over the city to begin with. The doors and windows at the base of the building had all been boarded up, and there had been a painted line around the building informing passers-by how close it was safe to walk by it without bits of it dropping off and falling on their heads. Sean had spent ten minutes watching the other man pry back the plywood boards and slip into the building, before pulling the board back into place to conceal the evidence of his entrance. It had taken Sean considerably longer to reach the roof than the other man; the other man had used a torch. Sean had had a torch, but if he'd turned it on, he would have been spotted. He'd already made the pleasant discovery, in the pitch dark, that the lift shafts in the building had had their doors removed.

Now, on the roof, the other man was bent intently over a complex piece of equipment vaguely resembling a theodolite, though it clearly seemed to have been patched in to the building's power supply with a wandering cable.

In the city far below, sodium light glowed. Cars were picking their ways urgently along streets. People were hurrying home, arms filled with last-minute present purchases, for Christmas. It was Christmas Eve, and Sean was supposed to be at home with his wife and child.

He'd bought his own presents in an internet café in Leeds. If all went well they'd be delivered to the house pre-wrapped. He knew it wouldn't be enough anyway.

He'd been tailing the other man on the roof for over a week now. He'd had to invent a string of job interviews in northern England to be able to do it; he'd even set up a real one and failed it this very morning. All the time, his tailing activities were driving him deeper into the red. The amount of red he was building up would shortly be the size of Dad's Jaguar. The Jag might escape from the garage without Sam noticing. Soon, it would be the size of the Toyota. That would not.

This must be how drug addicts feel.

He'd switched off the mobile phone. He was too close to the quarry.

The theodolite still seemed to be under construction. A tripod surrounded by a heavy, boxlike assembly had already been erected. Now, however, the theodoliteer was manhandling a new component into place, a component Sean was surprised to recognize.

The man was squinting into what looked like a viewfinder on the theodolite with the fussy precision of a surgeon, seeming to be angling the component Sean recognized downhill into the maze of suburban streets visible from the tower. Somewhere down there was a house, a flat, that that viewfinder was trained on. The scope on the front of the theodolite was binocular; each eye contained a small circle of colour, the left and right components of the image the other man was interested in. The circles were clearly, even from this distance, grass green and concrete yellow.

"What day is it you're looking at?" said Sean out loud.

The other man stiffened, but did not turn round. "What are you doing up here?"

"Watching you. What day is it you're looking at?"

Still he didn't look up. "I'm doing an area survey for the City Council. I have permission to be on the roof. Do you?"

Sean cleared the snow from an airvent and sat down on it, making sure he had a wall to his back. "What on earth is a millionaire shareholder at Hirondelle's doing surveying the centre of Sheffield in the dark, Mr. Wilson?" He was sitting in a crook of the wall. If anyone came out of nowhere onto the roof, he'd be able to see their approach on either side.

The other man stood so quietly and stiffly for so long that Sean feared for his health.

Then, he said:

"Are you Committee?"

Sean could make no sense of this. "Pardon?"

"Committee. Don't worry, if you don't understand it then you just don't. Who are you?" His hand was travelling down his coat toward his left hand pocket, slower than a melting glacier, but Sean noticed it anyway.

"The most important thing to realize about me at this moment is that I have a loaded gun pointed at the back of your head. It is a silenced gun, and nobody will hear the shot. If you're really, really good at skydiving, you might be able to get your own back by hitting my car on the way down. It's a blue Toyota."

The hands rose away from the pockets, very slowly.

"I say again: who are you?"

"I believe that's my question. Who or what, at any rate." Sean looked at the darkened building on the valley floor below. "Who was in that building one hundred and eight hours ago?"

***

Three days earlier.

He parked the Toyota in the corner of the car park Mahar's car had been in. He was unimpressed to note that it was still there, plastered in POLICE AWARE and POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS stickers. Did the Avon and Somerset forensics department have a backlog at the moment?

He killed the lights inside and out and sat in the car, screwing the silencer into the Glock. The gun was unlicensed and highly illegal. It had entered the UK stripped down to its component parts, in his baggage on a return trip from Africa. The components, with very few exceptions, were all either plastic or ceramic, and did not show up on metal detectors. He'd smuggled the gun into the UK on a bet with his own father. Bet security's not got any better since 911, Dad.

Once the silencer was on, he stood up, checked his watch - two forty-two a.m. precisely - and crunched across the snow out of the car park round the edge of the building.

As expected, this side of the building was now covered by a yellow awning printed with the letters AVON COUNTY COUNCIL, and surrounded by official-looking vehicles. The vehicles, he was satisfied to note, bore London congestion charge stickers in their windows. One vehicle looked like a mobile electric generator - a big one, with mobile cables snaking from it away beneath the awning. Disturbingly, the vehicle didn't seem to have a tailpipe of any kind. However, even now, in the wee small hours, the vehicle was still humming, melting snow around it.

How far away from the point of entry to wait? Would it be safe to stand six feet away? Would there be any outpouring of invisible but deadly radiation when It happened? The council workers fussing around the awning didn't seem worried, but maybe they were wearing special protective clothing. He settled on closer to ten feet, took the safety off the gun, looked in the direction out towards the car park, and waited.

Two forty-three. He heard the fizz and crackle of spent electricity, accompanied by a flash of light from within the awning which would have blinded him if he'd been looking in that direction. He could smell burnt aluminium.

He took two steps sideways, and pushed right through the awning into a weird, hot space filled with mysterious equipment, took aim at the backs of three men's heads and fired three shots in quick succession. Blood flew liberally. Luckily the coat he was wearing would wipe clean, and he would be able to burn it afterwards. A woman, the waitress from the service station four and a half days ago, looked round, wide-eyed.

The gate he'd expected was still open, a shimmering oval with edges made of rainbows. It was daytime inside the gate. Snow was blowing through it.

He stepped through the gate, taking aim with infinite care at the centre of the waitress's forehead. She dropped to her knees - possibly, he imagined, in a plea for clemency, though rather overdoing it in his opinion. Her forehead actually hit the ground, almost headbutting it. Her arms were spread wide. He felt like a mediaeval archbishop confronted by a novice nun.

The single word she said before the gun went off was Lord. He'd been told they were religious.

And then he was back in the first few flakes of snow from over four days ago, listening to his own footsteps coming round the building. Watching the gate shrink unsteadily to a prismatic blob like a TV set going off in three dimensions, and finally vanish. Concealing himself in an angle of the wall for several seconds, before stepping out to face himself, gun in hand. The gun had been useful in dissuading him from beating up on himself.

He explained the situation to himself, calmly and carefully. He told himself that he had to be here in one hundred and eight hours' time. Exactly one hundred and eight hours' time. He told himself he had to synchronise his watch, that Mahar's suspicions of 'four and a half days' had been right. He nodded to himself. He saw the logic of his arguments. He saw the look of pathetic relief on his face as he realized he would survive for another one hundred and eight hours without an employee of Hirondelle shooting, stabbing or poisoning him as he slept.

Then he hung back around the corner of the building, waited until he'd run back into the building to find Mahar's body, and walked off up behind the Days Inn to ring himself a taxi.

***

The other man turned. "Look, I realize all this looks bad to the untutored eye -"

"What, murder? Bad? My word, when did this happen?" Sean tucked the gun into the crook of his arm as he flipped out a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter. He hadn't smoked for years, not even in Kosovo. "I'll tell you what. Right now I have even more of an interest in knowing what the fuck's going on than in shooting you. Perhaps you can exploit this opportunity."

"Perhaps I can", said Wilson, but made no further move to.

"Let me disabuse you of a notion first of all", said Sean. "I will kill you. I have already killed three of your Hirondelle staff, in one day's time."

Sean had never before seen another man's blood actually freeze in his veins until that moment.

"In one day's time, huh?" Shit. He knows about the In One Day's Time thing.

"You heard right. Now, I don't really know what the front end of your gizmo there does, but I'm pretty sure I know what the back end's for, what with it having a trigger, a barrel, a stock and all. Am I right in assuming that the front end whizzes whatever the back end fires into it one hundred and eight hours back into the past?"

Wilson was neutrally-dressed, like a man who had carefully observed the people on the street around him and carefully constructed his wardrobe to look likewise. His hair was millimetrically short, his shoulders powerful. Military, thought Sean. No civilian looks like that who doesn't carry bricks up a ladder for a living. But there was also a spareness about him, an unhealthy lack of fat on the bone, and a pallour of the skin that showed despite the melanin that was his birthright.

"That's about the long and the short of it. Can I put my hands down yet?"

"You can wander across to that wall and lean forward till you fall onto it, palms out. This will allow me to search you for weapons. Make no mistake, I did not win this gun in a raffle. I know how to use it."

"All right, all right, you make you point." The hands went onto the wall, the legs moved back. "You people are such barbarians, it's hardly worth trying to save you."

There seemed to be no unseemly bulges. "Save us from what? Take off your jacket."

"Why?"

"Because I have a gun and you don't. You can wear my jacket. It's a nice jacket. Save us from what?"

"Your goddamned selves."

"Who is it in your sights down there?"

Wilson sighed wearily. "Richard Robert Marcus. Head of the Committee, 2034 to '35. Responsible for the forcible Advancement of over two hundred million people on the Eurasian continent, with a fifty per cent Failure To Take Up ratio."

"Never heard of him."

A shrug. "You wouldn't. He's five years old."

"He did all of that, whatever it is, to two hundred million people, and he's only five years old? The front of the jacket zips up here, see."

"Thanks. We don't have these things, these zippers. I draw your attention back to the 2034 to '35 part of my sentence."

"Yes, I heard it, I just wanted you to say it again in case I'd misheard. Are you asking me to believe you come from 2035?"

The other man shrugged sullenly inside Sean's jacket, which didn't entirely fit him. "Believe what you like."

"Okay. So you were about to shoot a five year old kid through the head."

"I've been watching him through the scope. He already punches girls and steals other kids' todays. Take a peek if you don't believe me." Wilson turned to follow Sean's movements as he moved towards the theodolite. "And I was going to go for a body shot, not a head. More likely to get a kill. The five days in between tends to throw off the aim a tad, and kids' heads are so tiny OW -"

Sean's hand, still holding the Glock, on which Wilson's blood now glistened, stood poised in mid-air for another blow at Wilson's scalp.

"I have a little boy myself, you know", said Sean conversationally.

"Point taken", said Wilson from his new position crouching in the snow, hands cupped round his head.

Sean strolled round the theodolite, examining it minutely. "A Walther 2000 sniper rifle", he said. "Best in the world if you believe their press releases. Expensive."

"Look, I know Marcus is only a little boy now. But you really have no idea what he will grow up to be. If I try to explain that, perhaps you'll understand."

"Explain away." The Walther was a perfectly normal infantry weapon, slotted into a purpose-built cradle. Rubber-tipped mounts gripped it on all sides, locking it in place. The barrel of the gun pointed into a swirl of rainbows deep within the structure. Daylight could be seen within the rainbows. The daylight of another day.

"This time", said Wilson, "is remembered by people like me as if it were a golden age. I know, I know, you find it difficult to believe. We see this time through rose-tinted glasses. Now that I've actually been here personally and experienced Network Rail, the Black Eyed Peas, and reality TV for myself, I must admit to being slightly disillusioned. But you have unlimited power, unlimited food, unlimited freedom. You choose your own leaders. You can get into your own personal oil-powered car and drive anywhere in the world with the possible exception of North Korea. You can choose to worship any one of a thousand gods. Any citizen, no matter how lowly, can aspire to be President of the United States -"

"- if he has a few million dollars in his back pocket", finished Sean. "I take it things aren't like that where you're from."

Wilson shook his head violently. "No, no, no sir. Not for many years. One state. One leader. One religion. One god." It sounded almost like a catechism.

"But you only come from thirty years in the future", said Sean. "How has that happened in such a short space of time?"

"It's happening now", said Wilson. "Helotonovirus first begins spreading in the year 2006, disseminated by Church functionaries in selected populations. It takes a variety of forms - the vector can be aerial, sexual, even animal -"

"Did you say helotone?" said Sean.

"YES!" Wilson sounded pathetically grateful that Sean had at least some grip on the stick, even if on the shitty end. "Helotone is developed by Church laboratories in the year 2012. Researchers think they've only just discovered its natural occurrence when they first notice it in 2006. The truth is that it didn't exist until then. It's a magic formula for making entire populations of human beings subservient. Helotonovirus is just the vector -"

"Wait up, wait up." Sean sat down on the safety rail at the edge of the building, uncaring that one hundred feet of icy emptiness lay at his back. "Slow down a second. Helotone is a pheromone produced in the, uh, vomeronasal organ, yes?"

"Yes. But helotonovirus is a virus of a particular type, what biologists call a jumping gene. It's a delivery mechanism for the genes that produce helotone. Once you get infected with it, you produce helotone. Anyone whose body manufactures turannone can then give you orders that are very difficult to resist. You know about turannone?"

"I know about turannone. And I presume turannone is dispensed using some sort of...turannonovirus?"

Wilson shook his head. "Nothing so random. The Church administers it solely to those they consider worthy. Genetic material needs to be injected directly into the bloodstream."

Sean nodded. "So the Church controls the flow of leaders, but anyone can be a follower."

"Precisely. The first batches were, obviously, members of the Church itself. They secrete quantities of turannone great enough to be considered almost divine. Acolytes have been known to orgasm in their presence."

Sean grew queasy at the thought. "How much do you secrete?"

Oddly, this seemed not to be a question Wilson was not offended by. Perhaps it was common dinner party conversation where he came from. How much are you secreting these days, old boy? "Not much. Only about a milligramme a day. I'm only a grade three. Selected for physical and moral fitness and the exceptional religious devotion of my parents."

"For what? Leadership?"

Wilson shook his head. "Colonization. I was selected to colonize other planets."

Sean stared at Wilson. Wilson cringed. "Okay, if you don't like that answer, I can lie. I can tell you I was selected as a temple bull-leaper if you like. Do you want the truth, or a truth?"

Sean laid the gun down in the snow and massaged the back of his neck. Driving was forging it into one solid lump. "Okay, okay. So you're an astronaut. That figures. They need to be physically fit."

"Not an astronaut. Not in the way you mean. Haven't you figured that out? If you can travel in time, you can travel in space. And you can travel in space faster than light." He stopped for a second. "Do you have Einstein yet? I always get Einstein and Hawking confused." Wilson seemed to be getting nervous. His fingers were playing with the fabric of Sean's jacket. His eyes could not keep still.

"Uh, yeah, yeah, we've had both of them. And I have an engineering degree."

"Well, then, you'll surely understand. Space and time are tied together. It's impossible for a human being to reach the speed of light, because the amount of energy required to drive any given mass increases asymptotically towards lightspeed. And time also slows down towards lightspeed in the same manner, so that if a man ever actually managed to reach C, time would cease to have any meaning. Anyone travelling faster than light has to be able to travel in time too. The one ability implies the other. Time travel was discovered as a by-product of man's eforts to reach the stars like", he searched for a suitable analogy, "velcro. Time and space are both measured in years, as far as travel at lightspeed is concerned. Changing between time and space travel is only a matter of switching axes."

"So I'd imagine the planet you were colonizing is pretty far away", said Sean. "What with the need for lightspeed and all. I mean, we can get to Mars and Venus pretty easily now, without having to go nearly that fast."

"Yes. Mars and Venus were started as colonies by the Americans and Chinese, but they weren't really fit for the purpose. As planets, I mean. It takes a lot of effort to take a superoxidising environment with a barometric pressure one thousandth that of Earth and turn it into green pastures. But there are other worlds out there that are Earth-sized, that already have surface water. In a few years' time, once their atmospheres are swept clean of radionuclides by GM bacteria, we'll be walking about in the open there without helmets." Wilson was delivering information like a small child told to recite his homework before being allowed out to play. His eyes were no longer on Sean's. Occasionally they even closed altogether while his teeth chattered gently. This was hardly surprising, considering the temperature on the roof.

Sean strove to be more controlled. "Which one were you going to?"

Wilson looked up in vain into a sky stained with sodium yellow. "Little place orbiting a sun you'll never have heard of out in Tucana. Precisely twenty-eight light years from Earth."

"Switching of axes", said Sean. "I think I'm beginning to understand. You're from around twenty-eight years in the future."

Wilson grinned humourlessly without opening his eyes. His dentition was perfect. "You've got it. Déscartes realized that any point in space can be defined in terms of x, y, and z coordinates, right? But if we're considering points in space-time, with time as a fourth dimension, then time becomes a fourth axis, let's call it t. Let's also say that I want to go from one point to another in a space ship, from point x=2, y=2, z=2 to x=0, y=2, z=2. So I feed into my navigation system a vector that transforms my current position by minus 2 for x, leaving y and z unchanged. And of course, if I want to get there instantaneously, I leave t unchanged, right?"

Sean's eyes boggled at this casual introduction of the concept of instantaneous travel, but he sought to control their boggling. "Right."

"But what if my navigation system has a bug in it? What if, every few million times I use it, a bad piece of math causes the axial values to switch? What if I end up subtracting 2 from t, leaving x, y, and z unchanged?"

Sean nodded. "You end up staying exactly where you are, but travelling backwards in time." The cold was beginning to numb his gun hand. For millionaire's clothing, Wilson's jacket was surprisingly flimsy.

Wilson nodded back. "I was supposed to end up in a receiver station on Zeta Tucanae Three, in a temporary colony carved into the permanent icecap. The transmitting station I was sent from back in 2035 is near Kokoda in Papua New Guinea, in territory that was virgin jungle before the facility was built; the Church likes to preserve maximum security for FTL transmitters. I was wearing a transmit suit tuned for temperatures of 25 below, and I walked out into one hundred per cent humidity and twenty-five in the shade...look, I have stuff I have to do. Important stuff. Like, uh, I got to go to the bathroom -"

"Tie a knot in it. Bet you got that suit off pretty damn quick once you hit the jungle, huh?"

Wilson ground his teeth and grimaced. "The suit could have been adjusted, but I had to ditch it and most of the other gear as soon as I got anywhere near civilization. The standard suit contains self destruct gear, a very hot-burning incendiary wired into the lining. Even burns underwater. In fact, we were told to scuttle our kit underwater, in case we caused a forest fire in the past and wiped out some future statesman or Church official, or species."

"So you ended up here by accident. All of you? All of Hirondelle?"

Wilson shook his head. "An accident in my case only. Though it's an accident my people have been waiting for for over ten years, ever since we found out about the Axial Shift Bug. The Church won't write it out of the nav routines, is the rumour. It was written by a High Primate back in the day, and what High Primates write cannot be unwritten. They don't use Primates for programming any more." He was stepping from foot to foot as if about to piss himself. Sean ignored him.

"They won't get rid of the bug?"

Wilson shrugged. "It's a church, not a corporation. One man in a million ending up in the past is an acceptable ratio of Failure to Take Up."

"What if they end up in the future?"

Wilson shook his head. "The bug doesn't work that way. So the Transmission Office compromised and planted rescue stations all the way back into the past, ending at about sixteen hundred AD, which is about as far out in light years as missions currently go -"

Sean held up a finger. "Hang on. Does that mean you're currently travelling out four hundred light years?"

"Certainly. And getting further out every year. The Hirondelle staff, the Cosmic Force bless 'em, are simply rescue station components. Planted in history to provide aid to travellers who get transmitted to the wrong time."

Sean's teeth worked on each other. "Now, you see, I have a problem with that, in that the Hirondelle staff are human beings, not components -"

"Preaching to the converted there, my man. Like I say, my people have been trying to get someone into a rescue station for quite some, uh, time. We estimated the hit rate would be about a million to one. I was about number four hundred thousand. I was very lucky to get here."

"Wait a minute. Who are your people, exactly?"

Wilson's face was as earnest as if carved by angels out of tablets of stone. "We are the Resistance. The Catholics, the Atheists, the secret Moslems, Jews, and Hindus, the White Supremacists, the Black Panthers, the Democrats, Republicans, and homosexuals; the freethinkers, Flat Earthers, Intelligent Designers, Communists, Monotheists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Everyone and anyone who does not believe absolutely in what the Church tells us to believe in, and is still in a position to fight back."

"But you're still one of the Church's faithful, right? I mean, you have all those lovely chromosomes that let you produce turannone and make the friendly gnomes from Hirondelle obey you."

Wilson's teeth set in fury. "I knew you wouldn't understand! I knew you'd try to judge me by your own yardstick!" He stamped around the concrete quadrangle of the roof, possibly out of a need to keep warm, possibly out of sheer anger. Possibly also in an attempt to distract his interlocutor? Sean watched him carefully, hugging the gunbarrel tight in his armpit. "You have no idea what the world thirty years in the future is like!"

"Tell me what it's like, then. Who runs the world? Is there enough to eat? What's the life expectancy? Are the people happy?"

"Oh, the people are happy." Wilson spat the word out like a gobbet of vomit. "Happy as beef cattle. It wouldn't do the meat any good for the livestock to live in fear, after all. Which was the reason why our benevolent all-loving Church first developed helotonovirus. Glory to the Church. Blessed be the name of the Church."

During his time in the Army, Sean had once been trained to resist and conduct interrogation. He'd personally questioned a man, a volunteer, before and after the man had been starved for forty-eight hours and thrown into a frozen stream. The difference between the levels of resistance put up had been surprising. Wilson reminded him of that volunteer right now. Rather than pleasing Sean, this worried him. The volunteer had needed medical treatment after his ordeal, and Sean needed Wilson alive.

It wasn't that cold up here, was it?

"This Church of yours. What sort of Church is it? Where did it come from?"

Wilson stared sorrowfully out into the electric eyes of the city. "That's the real kicker. The official date of foundation of the Church is 2007. I was sent back in time with the opportunity to change Church history forever, but with only three years to do so. Oh, I've been doing what I can...I have a list of names to eliminate, along with what they'll be responsible for in my time....but if I'd only transmitted to eighteen hundred instead of 2004..."

Sean picked up on one of the points. "You have a list of names, together with what they'll do in the future? You mean you don't know?"

Wilson nodded. "I haven't even heard of most of the names on the list. Certainly all the ones I've ticked off so far, at any rate."

"Doesn't that worry you at all?"

"No." Wilson stared in puzzlement. "Why? Should it?"

This is irritating - having to explain time travel theory to a man from the future who ought to understand it. "Well, think about it in causal terms. If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before you're born, the classic paradox. Who's going to go back in time and kill your grandfather now?"

Wilson nodded. "Yes, I'm familiar with that one. But I'm not sure it applies in this case."

"Of course it does! It applies in every case in which a person goes back in time with intent to affect the future. Who was that guy you were about to shoot while he was five, now, what was his name - " Sean clicked his fingers impatiently.

Wilson looked genuinely alarmed now. "Richard Robert Marcus."

"Marcus, yes. You decide to go back in time because Marcus is an evil man in your time, who murders millions of innocent people. So you go back in time and do it. Marcus dies. Never existed in your time as the great dictator. So what now prompts you to go back in time and kill him?"

Wilson thought hard, making a muscular effort to do so with his forehead. "Ah, but that's taken care of. I've told myself to kill him. I mailed myself instructions to mail myself instructions to. And told myself why."

"Ouch. That hurts the head. You mean you're alive in the here and now? As a kid?"

Wilson nodded. "As a kid. Living in Wilmington, Illinois. That's how the Resistance knew I would be the ideal man to send into the past to kill the Church. The mail I'd been getting since I was three years old proved I'd already done it."

Sean rubbed his head with his hands, trying to massage his brain into increased comprehension. "Your parents have been receiving this sort of stuff since you were three years old, and didn't just chuck it in the trash?"

"It wasn't like that. The letters were stored in a bank, who were given instructions to forward them on to me when I came of age." Wilson looked up at Sean sorrowfully, casting his hands at the darkened city around him. "I grew up in this wonderful world where anyone could do anything and be anything just by hard work and willpower, and then I got a set of letters telling me the world would be run as a religious dictatorship within ten years. And telling me there'd be nothing I could do to stop it until 2035. I didn't believe it, of course - thought it was some sort of incredibly creepy and elaborate practical joke. But then it started happening, right before my eyes. It's like being told your mom has one of those diseases that waste you, bit by bit, and then having to watch it happen. Bit by bit.

"In the beginning, the Church had very few followers outside of England. It was some sort of whacko cult that believed the existence of God could be proved by mathematics -"

Sean would hardly have believed it possible, but his blood was running colder than before. "Hang on. I know these people."

Despite the cold, Wilson looked at him with intense interest. Sean seemed to have breathed fresh life into him. "You know who they are? Who their leader is?"

What was the guy's name again? He could find it on the Web. It didn't matter. "I might."

"Okay, that's good, we'll talk later on that, later." Wilson now seemed to be assuming he was going to live to have another conversation, which irked Sean, despite the fact that it was probably true. "In any case, the whole thing didn't really take off till it crossed the Atlantic and got the support of a millionaire industrialist. Then, with money behind it, it captured the hearts of America's religious right, Jews, Christians and Moslems alike. By 2010, it had enough financial backing to begin research into turannone. By 2015, Prester Lamb was the sixty-first President of the United States of America. It was 2020 by the time any other nations knew what was going on, and by that time it was too late. The Consolidation Wars started in 2020, and were declared officially over in 2030. The world has been at peace for five harmonious years."

"Who's Pastor Lamb?"

Wilson grimaced. "That's the thing. No-one knows. The Committee for Truth and Beauty, the Church's executive branch, have erased his early life from written history. There are huddled masses growing up shivering in lean-to's in radioactive wastelands in India and China who believe Lamb was born of a magic egg sent down to Earth from Heaven by the Galactic Umma."

"Galactic what?"

"Umma. It's an Arabic term used to denote all the faithful, as a body. emember, Church doctrine incorporates Christian, Moslem, and Jewish teaching. We suspect that Lamb knows we will try to send people back in time to wipe him out, and has had all trace of his early life eradicated in order to prevent us from doing so."

Sean mulled this over. "Have you considered that he might actually have been sent down in an egg by the Galactic whatever?"

"To edify the collective soul of man and do only good to the world? That's what it says in official church doctrine. Tell that to the hundred million who were vapourised in China. The attack was of sufficient force to cause massive tsunamis in the Chinese antipodes, as a result of which Easter Island is no longer inhabited. You know that if you kick a geodesic sphere, the shock will travel right through it and cause damage on the exact opposite side? The United States, UK and Israel expended half their nuclear arsenals in one afternoon. The flash floods caused by the dust clouds alone filled the Hwang Ho and Yangtze valleys and drowned millions."

"Okay. Okay. So he's a horrible, awful man. But the fact that you've never heard of this Marcus, the head of this Committee, and had to send yourself a mail down-time to tell yourself who he is - doesn't that imply that you knew you'd already killed him? That he never really existed beyond the age of five, except in somebody's imagination? And that, whatever you're doing here and now, it didn't change the future, can't change the future, and won't work?"

Wilson looked as if he might burst into tears.

"In any case", said Sean, "I think we should continue this conversation somewhere warmer, with food, and a lavatory. I'm freezing my bum off up here. I also think we ought to get your temporal assassination kit packed up and stowed in the back of your car. If it makes you feel any better, I think I see ways round this."

Wilson looked at the gun nervously. "My car's in the visitors' parking downstairs. Outside the red line."

"Okay. Tell me more about this Church of yours while we shift this stuff. Don't worry about anyone hearing you talk - they won't believe me if they do."

The gun went back into Sean's pocket. Sean walked round the assassination device, trying to figure out how it might be taken apart.

He looked back at Wilson.

"Well, come on, then."