Story: The Disappearance (IX)

(Part VIII , X)

It was a long cream corridor. Suspiciously normal strip lights were hanging from a ceiling, and certain thoughts were speckling through my ever suspicious brain. It was a not unexpected corridor at all.

Agnes McGonagle of the ever surprising name was creeping down the corridor away from our arrival room, having chosen for some reason to go to the right. I took a moment to memorise the door and glance in the other direction before following her with all the sneakiness at my disposal. So many years of police work and before that in the halls of the university had left me with a certain nimbleness and sense of stealth.

At the end of the corridor we reached a set of double doors which were mostly transparent glass. Through those doors a large work space was visible, where dozens of routinely garbed workers were supervising biscuit production of what appeared to be plain chocolate digestives. Plainly this was the source of all that was wrong in our own present. Apart from the biscuit manufacturing there didn't seem to be anything else of interest. We retreated and started checking each side door.

The first side door was an office with a map of the world on one wall and an array of stars shared out across some of the more prosperous cities. At a glance the correlation with PCD-linked incidents was plain. There was no computer or technology visible beyond the light switch. The second room was a factory library, and this too was deserted. I pinched some very specifically selected. technical manuals and moved on. The third was our arrival chamber and the fourth was the jackpot. A large and complicated gizmo sat in the middle of the floor, quietly running on what was probably standby. On an old-fashioned clipboard hanging on a hook on the wall there was a list of coordinates, dates and times. Some of them were initialled and checked off, all of them in mine and McGonagle's pasts. I wasn't familiar enough longitudes and latitudes or other coordinate systems so the locations were meaningless. In three days time on the clipboard there were three assignments in the space of one hour.

"Those three deliveries could be linked to the cataclysm.", Agnes prompted me.

"I know. It's looking mighty fishy."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at the list. There's one date and one time for each shipment. Either they push out the product as soon as they finish it or this thing is not a time machine at all. Look around you. If this is the future then I'm Rodney the King of Hats. This is a teleporter and we're in the same timestream we've always been in."

"Not time travel?"

"No, this is not time travel." Then I was reminded of something. "But if not time travel, then who were the other you and the other me?"

From the doorway a familiar voice said the following: "They were the bait." A mock sinister laugh followed and then, "My name is Rolf McGonagle, and this is something quite, quite unexpected."

To be continued...


NOTE: No more Quirky Muffins planned until next weekend due to family holiday in Burnham upon Sea. OB.