Nestor waited until the guards and the three people on the raised dais had left, and then collapsed with laughter. He didn't stop laughing for a good minute, by which time his face was beetroot red and tears were streaming down his face. The other man, who had stayed behind, was also chuckling, though not quite so hard. At one point, Nestor's guffaws began to subside, but he caught the man's eye, and started them both off afresh.
Finally, the two of them composed themselves. "Right. Time for some introductions," began Nestor. "Max, my name is Nestor, Alex already knows me. And this," he indicated the man beside him, "is Argus, a colleague."
"How did you tell them what to do?" asked Alex.
"Well, I kind of run them," Nestor replied. This was met by a stunned silence.
"Why didn't I know this about you?"
"There are a lot of things you don't know about me," answered Nestor, with a wink.
"I don't mean to be rude," said Argus, "but we should get moving if you're going to show them around before the squad is ready."
Nestor cracked his knuckles. "Follow me, kids, and keep your wits about you!" He led the way out through a side door, and Alex and Max followed, leaving Argus behind.
They wandered through several corridors after Nestor, who seemed in no rush, whistling a little tune to himself as he walked. Nestor began to explain as they went.
"This place is my base of operations, or at least, it's one of them. Basically, I realised that even though I can go to any place and time to sort it out, I only have so much time to do it in. I'm not immortal. Anyway, I decided to set up an organisation to do some of the work for me. They call themselves the Achronals. They go around bringing in time travellers that are about to try to mess up the timeline. It's not about preventing damage; it's about apprehending them for the other crimes they've committed that conventional police aren't able to handle. And then we sentence them."
They had reached a corridor with transparent walls revealing the rooms behind. Each room was small, with wildly varying heights, though all were extremely tall. At the top and bottom of each was a hole. Looking down into one, Alex saw the room through the hole in the ceiling, through which he could see the hole in the bottom of the floor, through which he looked to see the hole in the bottom of the floor...
He staggered backwards, barely able to keep the contents of his stomach in their proper place. Glancing to the side, he saw Max looking pale as well.
"Yeah, those things do tend to do that," said Nestor, grinning in his strange way. "The holes are actually the entrance and exit of a wormhole. Falling through the bottom one sends you back a carefully calibrated time into the past. You'll see in just a second what it's used for."
A pair of Achronals appeared, dragging a young man of about twenty-five between them. He struggled against his restraints, but the grip of the Achronals was as iron. The man was strapped into a scanner, which brought up all his biometrics. Lines of code scrolled down a screen, and then a large letter C flashed up. One of the Achronals punched a few buttons, and then waited.
Suddenly, in the chamber marked C, a man in perhaps his forties fell through the ceiling, high above. Following after him was an identical man, then another, and another, a pile of men with long hair and beards. As more and more of the men fell through the hole, Alex realised that they were each subtly different. The ones now falling from the ceiling were slightly younger than the earlier ones. Hundreds, thousands of men had now fallen through the ceiling, and past the now-shorter beards, it was possible to see the face of the man currently strapped down in the scanner. The first man to fall was about to reach the bottom of the chamber and fall through the hole, when a robotic arm plucked him out of the way and into a side passage, miraculously without breaking any bones. The rest of the men fell through the hole. The man in the scanner was unstrapped and once again grabbed by the Achronals, who led him over to a door set into the wall. As the final version of the man passed by, the Achronals heaved the first man through it. He landed at the top of the pile, and then fell through the hole at the bottom of the chamber with the rest of them.
"This is what they meant by time accumulation," said Nestor, his face unexpectedly grim. "They would have looped you through this wormhole thousands of times in the space of a few minutes making you live your life in no time at all."
"That's terrible!" exclaimed Max. "They're taking away someone's life!"
"Really, it's no different from a prison sentence, except that when you emerge, barely any time has passed for anyone else." Nestor moved off, and Alex and Max followed him.
They passed through a maze of passages, past other cells, different rooms where Achronals trained and other rooms where hundreds of them stood in front of holographic displays, directing other Achronals to apprehend people at certain times.
Eventually, they reached a large room, where Argus, and the three people who's been about to sentence them, were standing together, talking earnestly. They looked up when the three of them approached.
"Everything's ready, Nestor, we're just about to send in the team." Argus walked over to them, and started to reactivate Alex and Max's headsets.
"Excellent. Send them in."
A tube from the ceiling spewed a large ball of some kind of gel onto the floor, and Alex and Max recoiled in disgust. The gel separated into five smaller blobs, which changed shape and colour, moulding themselves into humanoid shapes. Each one stood up and grabbed clothes and Warpers from a rack in the corner. Looking at them now, nobody could guess that they weren't humans.
Nestor picked up two bags from the floor. Walking over to one of the gel humans, he handed them the bags.
"Is the link fully operational?"
"Yes, sir," the gel human answered, its voice a passable facsimile of a normal voice. "Do you have further instructions?"
"Yes. You know your entry point. Place the conventional nuke," Nestor indicated the bag in the gel human's right hand, "behind the column. Place the Protactinium one in front of the column. Make it visible, but not too easy to spot."
"But sir, the Protactinium nuke will not create the desired explosion."
"That all depends on what the desired explosion is," replied Nestor, his mouth twisting into its familiar downwards grin.
"Understood, sir." With a familiar flash of blue light, all five gel humans activated their Warpers and disappeared.
"Umm, what did I just see?" Max was frowning.
"You just saw the beginning of the solution," answered Nestor. "Those were what we call GelBabies. They're controlled by an Achronal who stays here, linked by the same system we use for headset messaging. Basically, they're there so that Achronals don't get harmed."
Alex was about to ask why they were using them, but then remembered that Max had shot four of the agents in the square in Kiev. Presumably they didn't want to be sending agents to their deaths, but Alex wondered how Nestor knew about this. Had he been watching from somewhere the entire time?
Nestor continued. "We've already sent off two agents to sort out issues with Galileo and Copernicus, so that's that sorted."
1509
Nicolaus ran from the burning room, screaming for assistance. He was halfway down the stairs when he heard a whooshing noise behind him, and the crackling sound of the fire stopped immediately. Stopping, one foot raised in the air, he turned back around and listened intently. The only sound now was that of paper rustling.
Starting back up the steps, he was just about to reach the door back into his study, when he saw a bright blue flash, just like the one before those two men had appeared before. Cautiously, he looked into the room, and gasped.
The room was spotless, with not a single scorch mark. But his own notes, written on scraps of slightly dog-eared paper, were gone. In their place were neat notes, carefully arranged in piles. Nicolaus stooped to look at them, but then frowned. The notes were written in his own handwriting, using his own style of writing, and yet he knew that he had never written these words. This was clearly preposterous! Whomever had written these notes was outlining why the Earth went around the Sun, a ridiculous notion. And yet, as he continued to read, seeing all the evidence that the writer had brought to play, Nicolaus had the nagging feeling that they were onto something...
1589
Galileo held the two cannonballs over the edge of the Tower. Taking a deep breath, he dropped both, and instantly knew he had made a mess of the experiment. He'd managed to drop the heavier one slightly earlier, and now the crowd watching below would see the balls hit the ground at different times. His reputation would be tarnished, and all because he fumbled a drop.
Glancing down, he happened to catch a blue flash in the corner of his eye, followed in quick succession by several more. Then all of a sudden, he heard a great cheer below him. Peering over the edge, he saw a bunch of his supporters, who had gathered to watch, grinning and waving back up at him. Against all the odds, the experiment had worked. He had done it.
2103
"But what was that other bomb about, the "protactinium nuke"?" Alex was intrigued. Last time he'd checked, Protactinium was both extremely rare, and wasn't used in normal nukes at all.
"That's to get the correct signature in the ash layer. The decay chain of Protactinium leads to Iridium, and as you may know the reason that many scientists believed that the extinction of the dinosaurs was due to an extraterrestrial impact was due to the high levels of iridium found in the ash layer formed around that time."
"Wait a minute!" Max's expression was incredulous. "You mean to say that we caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?"
"That does seem to be what I'm saying, yes." Nestor smirked.
Max didn't seem to know what to do with this information.
"But now, it's time to sort the pair of you."
"What do you mean, sort?" Alex had the feeling that Nestor was going to make him put his life in danger. Again.
"There are still some things for the two of you to sort out, and now is the time to do them. First of all, we're going to save Max's parents."
Alex was aghast. "But you just ensured that the bomb in Kiev would explode!"
"Yes. The explosion was inevitable. The history books documented it, but," he grinned in his strange way, "the bodies of the Lucas family were never found."
Max's eyes widened. "You mean-?"
"Yes. We're going to save your parents."