‘You’re gay!’ I said. It all made sense. Suddenly the pieces fit together.

‘No way.’ John backed off a yard, laughing nervously. I could see all the thoughts crowding behind his eyes. Rock Hudson had died of AIDS a few months back. The newspapers were full of ‘The Gay Plague’. At our school, nobody would ever come out and admit they were gay. Social suicide. It just wouldn’t happen. Ever.

Simon just sat there looking slightly bored, as if we were talking about the weather.

‘I needed to get that out there,’ Elton said. ‘That’s how it is.’ He slumped, but kept his chin up, eyes bright. ‘I was going to say it. Demus just helped, is all.’ He kept the crumpled paper tight in his fist as if it held a promise he wasn’t going to let go of.

‘I’m easy,’ I said. ‘Not that you were asking my permission.’ A hasty addition, remembering quite how much even his ‘play’ punches hurt. At Maylert, we had the ‘you’re gay’ jokes honed to a razor-edge. Perhaps it was the same at all boys’ schools, a constant parade of protesting too much, all of us policing each other to a ridiculous degree in some kind of heartless dance of denial. I had to admit to taking part, and for all the hundreds of casual insults and accusations I’d flung, I had never truly thought any single one of them to be true, never believed a single one of my targets really gay. It was just part of the barbed and vicious banter of our existence. Some reflex part of me still wanted to riposte that it was good of him to leave more of the women to share around us real men. I bit back on it, knowing it to be small and petty. And realising with a breath of relief that saying something so stupid would have likely crashed any chances I had with Mia, who was watching me with unusual intensity. ‘It . . . uh . . . can’t have been easy to say. Thanks for trusting us.’

‘Uh . . . yeah.’ John nodded, his mouth twisting as he doubtless swallowed some of the same shit our school life had conditioned us with. ‘You don’t . . .’ He looked around at Simon and me. ‘You know?’

Elton sighed, and Mia rolled her eyes. ‘You’re a good-looking fellow, John, but you’re really not my type.’

A silence drew out between us. Elton ended it. ‘Questions?’

Another moment of silence, then Simon cleared his throat. ‘I have one.’ He eyed Elton up and down, speculatively. ‘How are we going to get into this laboratory? Don’t they have alarms and guard dogs and things? I’m not good with dogs.’

CHAPTER 16

I took a taxi to hospital for my last chemo session. Or, at least, the last one of this batch. The doctors said they would give me some time off to recover, then blast me with another course. I felt like an old tree in one of those late autumn gales. The chemo’s job was to strip my leaves and keep them gone. My job was not to get uprooted while the gale blew.

Mother allowed me to go alone but promised to visit, despite my saying that she didn’t have to. I wouldn’t even be staying overnight. The doctors had had their fill of watching me puke and were ready to let me go home an hour after they’d filled my veins with their toxic waste.

I arrived to find Demus waiting for me on the steps outside, a cigarette in hand.

‘You sure you’re me? Didn’t think I’d ever be stupid enough to smoke.’ I went to join him, sitting upwind. Of course, the breeze changed immediately, swirling his fumes around me.

‘Just trying new things, Nick.’ He drew a lungful. ‘It’s not what it’s cracked up to be . . . I wonder if crack is?’

‘What?’

‘I wonder if crack is what it’s cracked up to be.’

‘What’s crack?’

‘Never mind.’ He waved the question away. ‘So, are they up for this little robbery?’

‘I think so. John wasn’t happy about it. Or Elton. But they’ll do it.’

‘Good. Sunday is the time to aim for. Sunday night, or very early in the morning.’ He reached for a supermarket bag at his feet and pulled out one of his headbands. ‘The chip slots in here. I’m just using the databus and some core functions. And I’ve included a little instruction manual. Do break what will become the habit of our lifetime and actually read it.’ He fished out a stapled pamphlet, then dropped it back in and took another drag on his cigarette. ‘I mean, it’s not awful or anything. I guess I just expected more from tobacco than it had to give . . . There’s a lesson somewhere in there for you.’

‘Except I’m not going to remember any lessons,’ I said. ‘Because you tell me that pretty soon I’m going to wipe out the memory of the last week. Come to think of it, if I wipe my memory, how did you remember to find me here or at John’s the other day?’

Demus laughed. ‘I don’t remember the events, but I sure as hell remember the place and day of the week I had my chemo. And the guys are going to be talking for years to come about the dance lesson at John’s on the day Demus predicted the Challenger disaster.’

I grunted my acknowledgment that he was right. ‘Even so, I’m going to forget this lesson about smoking. You certainly did.’

‘Well, yeah. There is that.’ Demus nodded. He tapped the bag with his foot. ‘The instructions for erasing are in the manual, too. It’s a simpler process based around the application of powerful magnetic fields. No MiB shit here.’

‘Em eye bee?’

‘You know, Men in Black! Will Smith! What you think you saw, you did not see . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Sorry . . . Wrong decade. Anyway. Magnetic fields. A memory eraser. That’s something you’re going to have to develop in the next quarter-century, by the way.’

‘Me? I don’t do brains! Mathematics is—’

‘You do brains. Trust me. I’ve included the basics at the back to start you off. Some time travel stuff, too.’

‘That sounds a lot like cheating . . . Like cheating the universe!’

Demus shrugged. ‘Meh. How do you think the universe got here? It pulled itself out of nothing by its own bootstraps. Happens all the time. Think of this as a little payback.’ He straightened his leg and winced. ‘I suspect that the self-seeding we’re doing here accelerates science across a bunch of related areas. It’s quite possible that the 2011 I’ve come back from is technologically a few decades ahead of where it would have been if I hadn’t come back.’

‘So we’re literally changing the course of history?’

Demus shrugged.

‘Over a girl?’

‘There’s a better reason?’ He stubbed out his cigarette and smiled a slow smile. I found myself echoing it.

After a short silence, he continued, ‘Anyway, technically we’re changing the course of your future rather than my history. My history is fixed and unchangeable.’ Demus tapped the bag again. ‘These memory things raise almost as many questions as the time travelling, you know.’ He handed me the carrier. It was far heavier than expected and I almost dropped it. ‘I don’t remember this last chemo session. Next month, you won’t either. So, did the Nick who is going to suffer through it truly matter? Take it to a logical extreme. If I offered you a million pounds to endure a night of horrific but non-injuring torture, in the knowledge that the next day you could wipe out all memory of it . . . then Nick tomorrow would presumably be all for it. He would be a million pounds richer and perfectly happy. And the Nick who suffered so terribly . . . Where has he gone? The memories were just electro-chemical patterns that have been erased. The pain was just nerve impulses that have finished. And the Nick who screamed and begged for it to stop? Does he matter anymore? Did his agony matter? And if you say “yes”, then repeat the question, but instead of a night of torture, reduce it to an hour, then a minute, then a second, then a quarter second. Does your opinion change?’

‘I don’t know.’ I gripped the bag. The sheer weight of it felt important. As if it were telling me something.

‘I don’t know either, kid.’ Demus got up to go.

‘Wait.’ I still had too many questions to know where to start, so I started with what scared me most and it wasn’t the cancer. ‘This psycho, Rust. If you’re so keen to protect Mia, then shouldn’t you do something about him? Somehow I don’t think he’s going to let this thing with her go.’

Demus winced as though just hearing the name hurt him. ‘As soon as you get the chip, your Rust problem will go away.’

I blinked. ‘You’re going to wipe his memory, too?’

A half-smile. ‘Just trust me.’ He set a hand to my shoulder. ‘Stay safe. And remember we’re on a clock with this chip thing.’

‘We are?’ I shook my head. ‘We need time to plan the raid. Scout the place out. Watch the guards. All that sort of thing. It’s not like any of us are experts. There’s no need to rush it.’