If at First

based on, and he certainly isn’t telling anyone.”
    I looked at Carmen. She just shrugged. Okay, thank you for your statement, I told Jenson, we’ll talk again later.
    “You don’t believe me,” he accused me.
    Obviously we’ll have to run some checks, I replied. “Tape 83-7B,” he growled at me. “That’s your proof. And if it isn’t at the Richmond Center, then he’s building it at Ealing. Check there if you want the truth.”
    Which I did. Not immediately. While Carmen and Paul sorted out Jenson’s next interview with the criminal psychologist, I went down to forensics. They found the videotape labeled 83-7B for me, which had a big red star on the label. It was the recording of a kids’ show from ’83:
Saturday Breakfast with Bernie
. Marcus Orthew was on it to promote his Nanox computer, which was tied in to a national school computer learning syllabus for which Orthanics had just won the contract. It was the usual zany rubbish, with minor celebrities being dunked in blue and purple goo at the end of their slot. Marcus Orthew played along like a good sport. But it was what happened when he came out from under the dripping nozzle that sent a shiver down my spine. Wiping the goo off his face he grinned and said: “That’s got to be the start of reality TV.”
In 1983?
It was Orthew’s satellite channel that inflicted
Big Brother
on us in 1995.
    Toby Jenson’s computer contained a vast section on the Orthanics Ealing facility. Eight months ago, it had taken delivery of twelve specialist cryogenic superconductor cells, the power rating higher than the ones used by Boeing’s shiny new electroramjet spaceplane. I spent a day thinking about it while the interview with Toby Jenson played over and over in my mind. In the end it was my gut police instinct I went with. Toby Jenson had convinced me. I put my whole so-called career on the line and applied for a warrant. I figured out later that was where I went wrong. Guess which company supplied and maintained the Home Office IT system? The request must have triggered red rockets in Orthew’s house. According to the security guards at the gate, Marcus Orthew arrived twelve minutes before us. Toby Jenson had thoughtfully indicated in his files the section he believed most suitable to be used for the construction of a time machine.
    He was right, and I’d been right about him. The machine was like the core of the CERN accelerator, a warehouse packed full of high-energy physics equipment. Right at the center, with all the fat wires and conduits and ducts focusing on it, was a dark spherical chamber with a single oval opening. The noise screeching out from the hardware set my teeth on edge, Paul and Carmen clamped their hands over their ears. Then Carmen pointed and screamed. I saw a giant brick of plastic explosives strapped to an electronics cabinet. Now I knew what to look for, I saw others. Some were sitting on the superconductor cells. So that’s what it’s like being caught inside an atom bomb.
    Marcus Orthew was standing inside the central chamber. Sort of. He was becoming translucent. I yelled at the others to get out, and ran for the chamber. I reached it as he faded from sight. Then I was inside. My memories started to unwind, playing back my life.
Very
fast. I only recognized tiny sections amid the blur of color and emotion: the high-speed chase that nearly killed me, the birth of my son, Dad’s funeral, the church where I got married, university. Then the playback started to slow, and I remembered that day when I was about eleven, in the park, when Kenny Mattox, our local bully, sat on my chest and made me eat the grass cuttings.
    I spluttered as the soggy mass was pushed down past my teeth, crying out in shock and fear. Kenny laughed and stuffed some more grass in. I gagged and started to puke violently. Then he was scrambling off in disgust. I lay there for a while, getting my breath back and spitting out grass. I was eleven years old, and it was 1968. It wasn’t the way I would’ve chosen to arrive in the past, but in a few months Neil Armstrong would set foot on the moon, then the Beatles would break up.
    What I should have done, of course, was patented something. But what? I wasn’t a scientist or even an engineer, I can’t tell you the chemical formula for Viagra, I didn’t know the mechanical details of an air bag. There were everyday things I knew about, icons that we can’t survive without, the kind that rake in millions; but