A Window into Time (Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page A

BusSplash Road. Important places always get named after the events that happened there, and this was going to be the most major event of the twenty-first century. The memory had to be some kind of timequake. You can alter the fabric of spacetime with exotic matter, which is what physicists call negative energy. There’s a lot of Internet sites on the subject. I mean, really: A Lot.
    I worked out that someone in the future must have experimented with exotic matter and caused a crack in time that I saw through. I’m not quite sure how I saw through someone else’s eyes, but:
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Everyone knows that. It’s one of the most famous quotes ever, right up there along with:
I am your father.
    See, I thought about it for days. And if you used Sherlock Holmes logic, there was no other explanation. For a few seconds, I was a really weird kind of time traveler.
    That was why the road would be renamed. Because it’s the most important thing that happened in Islington. Ever.
    Now I just had to work out how it happened.
    One thing I thought, which was my favorite theory: Maybe it was me up there in the future, experimenting with exotic matter, because I know it will work. That’s not quite a temporal paradox—I think. Supersmart people like Stephen Hawking always say time travel isn’t possible because what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather—you wouldn’t get born so you can’t exist to travel back to murder him. Paradox, see? So, time travel can’t happen.
    I don’t understand why that’s the example they give. Why would anyone
want
to kill their own grandfather? Unless he was Hitler, I suppose.
    Whatever. In the future I could be like this amazing scientist with a cool laboratory, same as Tony Stark. If I am, the smart thing to do would be to send now-me a list of share prices from the future, so I could invest money in start-ups that are tiny today but grow into the next Google or Apple in ten years’ time. That way I’ll have enough money to pay for the experiments.
    The only flaw with that was that I didn’t have any money to invest in start-ups. Future-me would have to send now-me a winning lottery number instead. Which I’ll definitely remember I’ll have to do—which isn’t a paradox. So it could work.
    I walked up and down BusSplash Road, waiting for it to happen again. That was okay for a couple of days. I’d do it three or four times a day, taking it slow. There were differences apart from the number plates that I checked out. Simple ones, like the trees were smaller back in the not-me memory. The shops had changed, too; several in the memory must have shut down, like the big video rental store, which was an organic bakery now. It was strange seeing the ones that were still there. I stared in through the windows, checking if they’d grown shabby since or if they’d prospered. Some of the shopkeepers started to stare back, and I’d move on. I don’t think they were suspicious.
    On the third day I got hit by a random positioning factor. Kenan Abbot was walking down BusSplash Road and saw me. He was with his crew—a whole bunch of stupids who crowded around me. Sharp facing. Which is just a dumb name for standing in front of someone and acting all tough and shouting things like: “What ’choo at, bruv?”
    “It’s a
Julian,
look.”
    “Julian—kinda handle is that?”
    “Ain’t you’s street, ’dis. Woz you doin’ here?”
    I didn’t answer. It wouldn’t have mattered what I’d said. They were standing so close they were jostling into me.
    “Dem is right kak treaders, man. You poor?”
    They laughed at each other every time one of them sneered at me, to show they were all solid—a real dim-witted loud false laugh. It was as fake as their gangsta-speak. They don’t talk like that when they’re at St. George’s.
    I knew all that—that they’re bullies, that they’re