The Tomorrow Code (25 page)

FTBY DNT GO

Fatboy went around to Goony’s
house to pick up a pair of overalls, and while he was gone, Rebecca came and sat next to Tane. She put her hand on his arm.

“What have we got ourselves into?” she asked.

Tane didn’t answer. There was no answer to give.

He covered her hand with his own, and she leaned forward, touching her forehead to his.

“We’ll always be mates,” she said. “Whatever happens.”

“I hope so,” Tane said.

Rebecca leaned back a little and nodded. “I know so. I just wanted to make sure you knew too.”

“I never doubted it,” Tane lied, thinking about the argument on the submarine and feeling more and more guilty about it.

“Friends forever,” she said, and sat with him silently for a while before moving off into the kitchen to get herself a drink, leaving Tane with such a warm feeling that it was as if she was still sitting next to him.

Friends forever. Friends since forever.

The feeling was still there when Fatboy came back with a pair of clean, white overalls, emblazoned with
Telstra-Clear
across the front and back.

“The genuine article,” Fatboy said proudly. “Goony once worked for them.”

Tane asked, “Didn’t he ask any questions about why you wanted them?”

Fatboy nodded. “He did. The answer was a thousand bucks.”

Tane laughed.

“When do we do it?” Rebecca asked. “When do we install the Chronophone?”

“Security is going to be a real problem,” Fatboy said. “It’s a casino, so they have tight security anyway. These days with terrorist alerts all the time, they are going to look pretty suspiciously at anyone wandering around the Skytower with a suitcase.”

“Even in your lovely new overalls?” Tane asked.

“Even in my overalls.”

The satellite dish they were going to use belonged to Telstra-Clear.

Tane had carefully stenciled the name of the company on the side of the aluminium briefcase also, so it would look like a toolbox.

“Are you sure you should be doing this alone?” Rebecca asked. “Wouldn’t it be safer with two?”

Fatboy shook his head. “We talked about this already. Neither of you looks old enough to be a Telstra-Clear technician.”

In some ways, Tane wished he was going. This was the climax of the creation of the Chronophone, the greatest invention since the telephone, or the airplane, or maybe just the greatest invention ever. And he, Tane Williams, had thought of the idea that had started it all. And nobody knew. Maybe nobody would ever know. It seemed wrong not to be there at the critical moment.

In other ways, though, he was glad he was not going. Fatboy would have to take an elevator over two hundred yards straight up, to the main observation deck, then another elevator up another fifty yards to the Sky Deck. Then it was a climb up the internal ladders to the crow’s nest, a tiny platform on the
outside
of the Skytower, three hundred yards high. But even that wasn’t the end of it. The Telstra-Clear satellite dish, one of many atop the tower, was another fifteen yards above the crow’s nest, accessible only via a ladder up the side of the topmost spike of the tower.

He would have to do all this lugging a heavy metal suitcase. It would take steady nerves and a fair bit of strength.

“Better get on with it,” Fatboy said determinedly. Tane sensed that he was more nervous about the climb than he was letting on.

“Good luck,” he said as Fatboy climbed into the overalls.

“Final test?” Rebecca suggested.

“Suppose we’d better,” Fatboy replied.

They had been testing and testing the Chronophone. The last thing they wanted was for it to fail, once it was high above the ground.

“I’ll do it.” Tane disappeared into Rebecca’s room, where her laptop was sitting on a small study desk.

He opened the small program that Rebecca had written and typed in “good luck Fatboy,” then clicked
SEND
.

The small radio transmitter attached to the laptop would now be sending the message to the receiver built into the Chronophone. Inside the case, a small digital readout would be displaying the characters he had just typed, as it encoded it into the gamma-ray disruptor signal. Right now, that was as far as the signal would go. It needed the big satellite dish on the Skytower to be able to transmit the signal to the gamma-ray bursts.

There was no “Okay” from the kitchen to acknowledge the receipt of the message, so he tried again. “Don’t look down,” he typed, and sent it.

Still silence from the kitchen, which was a little odd. All the previous tests had worked fine.

He was just about to wander out to see for himself what the problem was, when a flashing light caught his eye on the side of the screen.

Another message!

Rebecca’s software now checked the NASA site hourly for new BATSE messages and automatically decoded them.

He clicked on the flashing light and it opened the BATSE message window. As usual, it was a cryptic jumble of letters and numbers that they would have to try and figure out as quickly as they could.

FTBYDNTGO.WTRBLSTMPS.DSVLETHM.

SLTABS.DNTABSRB.

There were still some parts of previous messages that they hadn’t fully understood.

WTRWKS
for example.

He printed a couple of copies of the message on the inkjet, to show it to the others, and as he was doing so, the first nine characters caught his eye.

FTBYDNTGO.

He caught his breath and tried to make any other interpretation from it, other than the obvious.
FTBY DNT GO.
Fatboy don’t go!

“Oh crap!” He grabbed the printout, knocking the chair over in his haste to get out to the kitchen. The second copy whirred swiftly out of the printer behind him.

He rushed down the short hallway and in through the swing door.

The Chronophone was open on the kitchen table, and even from the doorway he could read the words
DON’T LOOK DOWN
visible on the display.

Fatboy couldn’t see them, though. Neither could Rebecca. He had his arms around her, and she had her arms around him, lost in each other’s world. As Tane entered, her lips met his.

Friends forever!

Any remnants of the earlier warm feeling died a sudden cold, jagged death. His breath caught in his throat, and a black rage that he hadn’t known existed inside him welled up from deep within his belly. He forced it back down and coughed, loudly. They both looked up, startled.

“What is it, Tane?” Rebecca asked in alarm, taking a quick step away from Fatboy.

Tane stared at them, breathing heavily through his nose.

“What is it?” Fatboy asked.

He looked at them both for a moment longer. “Nothing,” he said tightly. There was a ringing in his ears and spots dancing across his vision. He folded the piece of paper discreetly behind his back and slipped it casually into a pocket. “Nothing.” He laughed. “I thought the Chronophone had stopped working, because I didn’t hear anything from you two, but I see that it’s all okay.” He gestured at the message on the readout.

Fatboy looked at the message and laughed.

Rebecca just looked at Tane, in a rather strange way, and said, “We were just saying goodbye.”

“Yep,” Tane said, “I could see.”

C
ANDID
C
AMERA

When Fatboy left, Tane and
Rebecca busied themselves with the supply barge. They called it a barge, but it was really more of a cage. A large plastic-coated wire box with floats attached.

When loaded with supplies, it was just buoyant enough for the
Möbius
to tow, without dragging the little submarine to the bottom or floating up to the surface.

Fully loaded, it had room for twelve crates.

The crates themselves were watertight plastic boxes, with a rubber seal around the rim, purchased from a local plastics shop. They would not be able to withstand pressure, but they were being stored in shallow water, so that wasn’t a problem.

This was the last load. There were already over a hundred crates stacked neatly in rows on the bottom of Rangitoto Cave, as they had come to call it. By Rebecca’s careful calculations, there was enough food and fresh water there to last four people for over a year, or six people for at least nine months. Rebecca’s mum didn’t know it, but she had a berth booked on the submarine. So did Tane’s mum and dad, but they didn’t know it either.

How do you explain to your parents that the country you live in is about to be devastated and that the only hope of survival is to live in a submarine in an underwater cave for the conceivable future?

This last load was probably the most important. Oxygen cylinders and Sofnolime cartridges. The oxygen cylinders replenished the air in the sub, and the Sofnolime cartridges removed the carbon dioxide that they breathed out.

While they had the air hose up to the surface, they wouldn’t use either, but they had planned for a long period of time when they would not be able to draw in air from above the waves.

They would only do that when they were sure the air was safe and clean, and there was no real way of knowing that, so they planned for at least the first few months to be entirely sealed off from the rest of the world.

They worked as a team in the small wooden boatshed but said little. Rebecca loaded the cylinders and cartridges into the plastic boxes, and Tane stacked them onto the barge. He wanted to talk but found that there was little to say. There was a strangeness about Rebecca that hadn’t been there before he had walked in on them in the kitchen. It was as if she had something to say but was afraid to.

He thought about showing Rebecca the message, but was too embarrassed. Instead, he tried to ring Fatboy after a while, feeling guilty about letting him go, when the message said not to. Maybe it wasn’t too late. But Fatboy’s phone rang and rang, then went to the answering service.

It took them over an hour to load up the barge. There were a few spare cylinders that would not fit in the last few plastic crates, so they just loaded them on board the
Möbius.
You never knew when you might need them.

Rebecca flopped, exhausted, into one of the lawn chairs in the backyard of the house and stared silently out over the water toward the city. Tane looked around to make sure they had everything and noticed the laptop still sitting on the outdoor table.

He packed it up and took it down to the
Möbius,
holding it carefully as he negotiated the wooden staircases that led down to the boatshed.

Halfway back up the staircase he heard the phone ring. He hurried to the top in case it was Fatboy. Rebecca was waiting for him, the phone in her hand.

“It’s for you,” she said.

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged.

So it wasn’t Fatboy.

Tane put the phone to his ear but heard only the
pip, pip, pip
of a disconnected line.

They walked back to the house together silently, uncomfortably. Rebecca’s mum popped her head out of the open window of her room.

“There you are!” she called. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“Are you okay, Mum?” Rebecca called back, but her mother interrupted her.

“You’re on the TV! You and Tane and um…Tane’s brother.”

Tane looked at Rebecca. Surely she meant the police sketches. But there hadn’t been a picture of Fatboy.

Simultaneously, they broke into a run, hurtling through the ranch slider of the lounge to the big TV in the corner.

No more indentikits. The police now had photos. Photos of all three of them. Not sharp, but clear and easily recognizable.

“Where the hell did they get those from?” Rebecca breathed.