TimeSplash Read Free Page B

off, like young men often did around her, but then she noticed what was happening to the sand in his wake. It seemed to be jumping, vibrating, squirming. She screwed shut her eyes and looked again, as if they were the source of the strange blurriness she saw. Hal stopped at the far side of the pile and looked back at it proudly. With strange shifts of colour and position, the deep prints of his feet were slowly being erased. The weird, shifting of shape and colour spread briefly to the road surface around the heap, causing Patty to jump back in alarm as the effect rippled out toward her feet. In thirty dizzying seconds, the pile restored itself.
     
    “Now do you believe we’re back in time?” Hal shouted.
     
    “Stop pissing about,” Sniper snapped.
     
    Hal gave Patty a grin and turned back to the road. Patty stared for a long time at the sand. It was a small splash, she realised. The little anomaly that Hal had caused—disturbing a pile of sand that should never have been disturbed—had righted itself. But for those few seconds before the restoration was complete, there had been a shake-up in spacetime around the sandpile. Causality had been thrown into disarray and it had taken a while for it to settle back to how it should have been.
     
    She set off again, hurrying to catch up with the others, noticing for the first time that their footsteps left faint, blurry marks on the road that quickly faded behind them.
     
    * * * *
     
    The small town of Ommen was just five kilometres or so from where the lob had taken place. They were going to walk to it. Sniper didn’t want to risk causing any paradoxes before the big one they had planned, the one that would cause the splash. Hal was still their guide and he set a fast pace, west along Hammerweg, a forest-lined road that eventually turned north. Patty was beginning to think she was doomed to trudge forever in the July heat when they began to see houses and signs of life around them. By the time Hammerweg became Stationsweg, the street was busy and lined with buildings. The air stank of petrol fumes, and the traffic noise made it necessary for Patty to raise her voice to be heard.
     
    “So what’s so special about Ommen?” she asked Hal. Ahead she could see a bridge that would take them across the broad, flat River Vecht and into the town proper. It was a pretty place with flat fields all around, and cute old buildings visible on the far bank. There was even a windmill, beautifully preserved and picturesque, right near the town centre. Nice place for a holiday, Patty thought. If you were ninety. Definitely not the spot she would have picked for a time trip.
     
    “It’s the home of my ancestors,” said Hal, looking benignly on the placid river and the quaint town beyond.
     
    “You don’t sound Dutch.” In fact, he sounded American, like one of those Bible-thumping preachers she saw whenever she accidentally watched an American vid channel.
     
    “My great-granddaddy moved the family stateside back in nineteen eighty-six. Took a research job with a computer company in Palo Alto and settled there. His daughter, my grandma, married a guy down in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s where I grew up.”
     
    “So it’s your family we’re going to…”
     
    Hal smiled. “Sure is! I’m looking forward to meeting them.”
     
    “But—”
     
    “Don’t you worry now. It all smooths over like nothing ever happened. Like the sandpile. You know how this works.”
     
    Patty nodded, feeling a bit queasy. On top of all the other things about this lob she didn’t want any part of, she now added the splash itself. Until that moment, she hadn’t really thought about what it actually took to make a splash. Not really. With a shake of her head, she realised what a stupid child she’d been about the whole thing. Talking to Sniper and the others, it had seemed like a big game. The ultimate extreme sport. All glamour and fun. One big rush. Now she had to face the hard reality