Acme Time Travel Incorporated - Volume 2

SEG002

“How are you feeling, love?” Gabriel said.

“No pain or itching for two days,” Ginny said.

“That’s good.”

They sat looking out of the cockpit visor. The starship was circling the area where the mining outpost would be, from a height of 100 yards. As Ship had advised, the starship was perfectly controllable with its remaining Ramstat engine, if not for travelling great distances in space. They were looking for somewhere safe to land the ship. Somewhere where it wouldn’t be detected as the mining settlement was built.

“I wonder how Barney and Monica got on?” Gabriel said.

“It would be nice to think that they got together, wouldn’t it?” Ginny said.

“I miss him,” Gabriel said.

“He will probably have been dead for many years.”

“I know.”

“Vicky?” Gabriel said

“Yes, Gabriel?”

“Did Barney ever call us again ... you know ... on the phone?”

“Yes, he did, Gabriel. He left a message. Would you like to hear it?”

Gabriel looked over at Ginny.

“No, thank you, Vicky,” Gabriel said. “Maybe some other time. I don’t think that I could bear to hear it right now.”

. . . . . . . .

“This site should be fine, guys,” Vicky said. “It’s outside of the area of the extraction site, and it’s only a short journey to the teleport when you wake up.”

“Won’t they detect us?” Ginny asked.

“No. We will enable the cloaking device. They won’t know we are here,” Vicky said.

“So, ok then, Vicky. Do we need to do anything else to prepare?” Gabriel said.

“Everything is ready, Gabriel. If you wish, you can get yourselves into the CrYO-PODS, and you will awaken at the precise time to get to the SEG002 teleport terminal and use it to go back to the ACME-HUB.”

“At the time just after whatever caused the teleport problem at ACME INC ?” said Ginny.

“Exactly,” replied Vicky.

“Vicky?” said Ginny.

“Yes?”

“Am I missing something here? Why don’t we wake up just before the coordinates database gets corrupted? That way you could just transport us to Earth in the same way that you did with any of your clients. The coordinates that you use would be fine. We wouldn’t need to use the teleport facility in the mining plant at all.”

Gabriel looked at Ginny. He couldn’t believe that they had not spotted such an obvious thing until now.

“I understand what you are saying,” Vicky said, “but, sadly, that isn’t the way it works. When I initiate a teleport request, the request process doesn’t look up the coordinates as they are at the time of the request. The request process always looks up the most recent set of coordinates. That means that if the coordinates database has been corrupted ... but never fixed ... then whenever a teleport request is issued, it will always pull back the corrupted coordinate information.”

“And that’s why you don’t want to teleport us until you know for sure that the coordinates are ok?” said Ginny.

“That’s true, Ginny,” Vicky said.

“But,” said Ginny, “if we get back to Earth, back to ACME INC, after the teleport coordinates database gets corrupted, and if it is not possible to fix it, doesn’t that mean that, even if we talked to ACME and they agreed to give us another STU for John, that we might never be able to get back to our original time anyway?”

“That should be considered to be a possibility,” agreed Vicky.

“Ah well,” Gabriel said. “We knew this was never going to be easy, didn’t we?”

. . . . . . . .

Gabriel and Ginny stood in front of the CrYO-PODS. Vicky had told them that no-one had ever died whilst using a pod, but Gabriel didn’t wholly trust Vicky. No, it wasn’t that he didn’t trust her. It was that he felt that sometimes Vicky cared so much for them that she wouldn’t want to worry them.

“You nervous, love?” Gabriel asked. He was hugging her tightly, like he might never get the chance again.

“Always,” Ginny said, giving Gabriel a quick peck on the cheek. “And you?”

“Brave as a lion,” Gabriel said, smiling wryly.

“Come on then,” she said, “before either of us chickens out.”

BOOK THREE