Allergic To Time (23 page)

I hadn’t, no. Like he said it was such a crowded lecture theatre. The only thing I had noticed about him at the time was that he had grown more and more serious, and that his lectures and classes had grown drier and drier, and class numbers had dropped off.
 

“Anyway, I did at some point start becoming a little... I guess you could say obsessed with it,” he said slowly, looking back out the window. “Only because it was so strange.”
 

“At first I couldn’t even be sure it was you, of course. It could have been another Anna Black. The dates all added up though. And do you remember one time you stopped to ask me a question after class and I asked you where had grown up?”

“Not really,” I replied, searching my brain for the memory. “Vaguely, maybe.”

“You said Nelson Bay. That’s when I knew for sure. So I started investigating: not just you, but other cases as well. I didn’t really believe any of it at first: I thought I had just stumbled on this weird phenomenon of time travel hoaxes, which I thought was interesting enough in itself. I thought I might even write a paper on it at one stage.”

“You did,” I pointed out.

“Under my real name, I mean,” he said, raising his brow.
 

“But then what happened?”
 

“I went to Nelson Bay.”

“To see my dad?” I was freaked out that this whole thing happening behind my back, the two of them - Martin and my father — colluding somehow. Hiding this information from me all of these years, while I remained blissfully unaware, sitting in class like a good little student, dutifully applying myself to my studies and my stupid little obsession with time travel.
 

Martin nodded. “When I got there he said he had been expecting me. Which I didn’t understand.”

“Well, he’s an underworld criminal, isn’t ” I replied. “He knows everything.”

“Yeah, well, if I had realised that at the time, I never would have gotten involved in any of it.”

“So you were at my house?” I asked, still in shock. “Five years ago?”

“Roughly, yeah. I didn’t see much of it though.” He raised an eyebrow again, thinking back to it. “It was about as short a trip as our most recent one.”

“Did he send you through time?” I asked, my voice hushed. I quickly thought back to five years ago, searching my memory for any time that Martin had been mysteriously absent from classes. But nope: in all the years I had had him for a teacher, he had never missed a lecture, or a tutorial, or even a single meeting.
 

Martin confirmed this. “No, he didn’t send me through time, on that occasion. He gave me a list though. A list of names of people who had claimed they’d travelled through time. He said, since I had done such a good job of tracking him down, that I shouldn’t have any trouble working on these other cases.”

I started walking slowly towards him, confused. “Why on Earth did he want you to do that?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’. Well, there’s more than one way to time travel. Well, actually, there’s one basic principle behind it, but numerous methods. Your father wanted to be in control of them all. I was supposed to — on his orders — track all of these people down and determine whether or not they were telling the truth, first of all. And then I was supposed to investigate the way they had travelled through time, the method or equipment they had used, and then pass that information back to him.”

“He thinks time travel is the ultimate money making machine…” I muttered. “He’d be able to make a fortune off it if he controlled it.”
 

Martin turned away from the window and leant his back against the frame to look at me. Blinding light was coming in behind him so he just looked like a silhouette. I couldn’t make out his face. “Besides the original machine he’d used to travel though time — with you —
 
originally, he couldn’t get any of his own experiments to work.” He stopped and took a breath before continuing on slowly. “Everyone he tried to send through time...died.”
 

He stood up and walked toward the sink to run himself a glass of water, which he gulped down. “I thought that was, you know, the problem. I thought he wanted to solve the issues he was coming up against, so that he could succeed in sending people through time without them dying.”

“As if he cared about people dying,” I murmured.

“Exactly,” Martin said, bitterly. “So I thought I was doing a good thing, maybe, tracking down these time travellers who had survived, so I could learn something from them. It was fun, too, doing this secret work. It took my mind off things at least.” He took a swig of water. “But then I realised that he was using time travel as the means to an end: as a murder weapon. It was the best, easiest, cleanest way to dispose of someone. It conveniently disposes of the evidence like no other form of murder.”

“Unless...”I cut in. “The person on the other side survives, and wakes up and tells everyone what happened to them.”

He gave me a nod. “So there has to be doctors and nurses, entire hospitals in on it, just in case. Secret wards. Staffed by people like Joh Raymond, who do the dirty work of disposing of time travellers.”
 

“Who is John Raymond?” I asked.

“He’s always been the person in charge of making sure time travellers never speak. Now that your father has gone he would have stepped up, taken over.”

“But he’s working out of your office! He has access to all of your files now, all the people you were trying to protect!”

“That’s why we have to take care of him-“ Martin started to say, but I interrupted him.

“So my father wanted you to gather information about all of these other time machines for him, to what, eliminate the competition?” I was still not entirely clear about that part. Why had he needed any other method of time travel, if he already had a perfectly flawed one that suited his purposes?

“Not exactly,” Martin went on, shoving his hands back in his pockets. “He still wanted a time travel method that worked. A business thing, I think. He knew that a machine that sent people through time successfully would fetch him a billion dollars on the black market, just like you said. Or so I figured. I could never tell entirely what he was up to. But before I could figure any of this out I had already passed on information to him that I wished I hadn’t.”
 

He shook his head. “By the time I realised that he didn’t have anything resembling good intentions, I switched my focus on helping the people I’d met, the poor souls who were trapped in a time they didn’t belong in. At first I wanted to protect them from your father, so I started to publish articles where I disputed their claims of time travel, where I wrote that I thought they were making it up, pulling a hoax. It was so he didn’t come after them.”

“Why did you stop doing that?” I asked. “When did you start writing the opposite, in the Nick Cooper articles? Where you support their claims that they were telling the truth?”

He sighed. “When I realised there was something more important at stake. Their dignity, maybe, if that’s what you wanted to call it. They were always so hurt when my articles would get published. They would get upset at me, angry that I had only pretended to believe them, and then basically ridiculed them in public. So I had to change my angle. Under a pen name though, so that your father wouldn’t know about it.”

So
that
had been the real reason for the pen name then. “And what, in the meantime you just kept pretending you were working for him?” I still, despite everything, wanted to believe the best in Martin. But I needed to know that he wasn’t just a hypocritical liar. I needed to know he hadn’t been working for a murderer all this time.
 

“Pretended to work for him…actually was working for him, I don’t know.” He let out let another heavy sigh and rubbed his hands with his eyes.
 

“Huh,” I scoffed. “I see. Meanwhile, you were supervising my thesis and lying to me, as well. You know, this is all becoming clear actually...”
 

“I wasn’t lying to you, honestly.” Martin marched over to me so that our faces were only a foot or so apart. “In some ways I was trying to kill two birds with one stone, almost. I thought if I helped your father with whatever it was he was working on, then it could only serve to help you and your PhD. I thought it would be some sort of justice for you. As in, he’d almost killed you as a child by sending you through time, but then you would grow up and use him for your own success. I thought there might be a nice ending to it all.”

“How would that be a nice ending,” I asked, fuming. “Why would I want to use anything from him?”

“You wouldn’t have known it had anything to do with him. You wouldn’t have found out. You weren’t supposed to know any of this. I was trying to protect you Anna, honestly.” His voice was pleading.
 

I studied his face, not entirely sure I believed him. “So you never thought to tell me the
truth,
that I was a time traveller myself?”

He shook his head. He looked sad. “I couldn’t. I thought he would kill you if you got involved.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine.
 

We were on a tram, heading back from Darling Harbour towards Martin’s house in Glebe. It was the only operating tramline that still remained in Sydney, servicing a very short straight line from Central Station to the Inner West suburb of Lilydale. It was one of the least affective means of public transportation in Sydney – and that was really saying something. But it did the job of getting to Glebe from Darling Harbour.
 

We rode along in silence for the first couple of stops, one at the Casino where tourists got on and off, and the next one at Pyrmont Bridge, where no one got either off or on. A ticket collector walked passed and asked to see our tickets, which we dutifully produced. She put a metal gun through each of the tabs and handed them back to us.
 

“Why didn’t they kill Robert as soon as he woke up that day, at the start of semester?” I finally asked. “Why did they let us go? They could have killed us.” I thought back to Bianca and the gun. She could have easily overpowered me.

Martin glanced around the carriage to make sure there was no one within earshot of this delicate conversation. The nearest passenger was three seats back, a teenaged Goth-looking girl with headphones in. He turned back toward me and answered.
 

“Maybe because Robert didn’t actually travel through time.”

I turned my entire body to face him, my mouth wide open in shock. “Martin. You. Cannot. Be. Serious. Not this again.” I sat back and crossed my arms. “I know you don’t like Robert, but after everything you’ve told me — and everything you’ve seen yourself — you have to believe he’s telling the truth!” I ran my hands through my hair, in frustration. “And anyway,” I added, forcefully. “He wouldn’t lie to me.”

“I am entirely serious,” he hissed at me, still checking behind us to make sure no one was listening. “And he would lie to you.”

I sat up again.
 
“You just don’t
like
him, that’s your problem. Well, maybe you should look past your personal feelings towards him and consider things objectively.”
“Why wouldn’t I like him?” Martin shook his head and looked annoyed with me.
 

“I don’t know,” I said. I dared to look at him in the eye and said, “Maybe because you’re jealous of him.”

“Jealous of him? That is absurd. Jealous of what, exactly? His awful fashion sense? His complete ignorance of everything around him? His disgusting smoking habit…”

“Ah, you see?” I cut in. “He is only ‘ignorant’ of things because he is from 1974,” I pointed out. I wanted to quickly move away from the topic of why Martin might really be jealous of Robert. I already wished I hadn’t said anything.

“Come on Anna,” he said, sitting back in his seat. The tram was flying over the top of Balmain by that stage. The fish market and foreshore passed us on our right, with the setting evening sun glistening off the top of the water. “Do you
 
really think things add up with that guy?”

I thought about that. I had to admit, there’d been a few things I hadn’t really wanted to admit, and had maybe been ignoring. But I had never really doubted Robert’s story, not really. I was still certain he wouldn’t lie to me. But there had been a few red flags.

“Like what?” I asked, wanting Martin to be the bad guy in the situation. I wasn’t about to be disloyal to Rob, by admitting to any of my doubts I had out loud. If Martin had doubts, then he could voice them and I would simply see if I agreed with any of them. “Martin, what is it that you think doesn’t ad up?”

“Well,” he began quietly, lowering his voice as the ticket collector passed by us again. “For one, he doesn’t act the way people typically do in this...situation. It usually takes a person days — weeks sometimes — to even realise, process the fact that they have travelled through time. Take Fanny as an example. She couldn’t even comprehend what had happened to her for years. But Robert seemed to know he had travelled through time from his
hospital bed?
Come on, how could he have possibly even have known that?”

“Because he caught a glimpse of the world before he became unconscious!” I said, leaping to my friend’s defence. I had to admit I’d asked myself the same question, but my own answer had seemed reasonable enough to me.
 

Martin shot me a look. “Come on, really? He might have thought — for a split second — that things looked a little strange, maybe, but he can’t have had any idea he’d travelled through time. It didn’t make any sense.”

“Well, explain the not being able to breathe thing then,” I demanded. “How did he fake that? How would he even have known to?”

He sighed. “I can’t explain that,” he admitted. “I don’t know. But there are other things. The ridiculous outfit for one thing. It is too over-the-top. Too clichéd.”

“Well, he is from the 70s,” I said, still refusing to believe what Martin was claiming. “What do you expect him to wear?”