“Exactly. Imagine if we could go back and take out terrorists while they were still in high school. My father did not like that idea and, no matter how much I tried to reassure him, he grew more and more paranoid. He saw conspiracies everywhere and was convinced that his research was being stolen, so one morning he simply disappeared into the past, taking all programmed Timekeys and the access codes with him. Father could come back if he wanted to, but we couldn’t go after him. Not without the precise algorithms and codes that my father kept in his brain. He invented the language that the pods speak, so without him WARP was finished. My father was the key, and even after all this time we haven’t been able to hack his machines. We lost Terrence Carter, the key witness in a huge corruption case. And his bodyguard was stranded with him. Not to mention the fact that there are millions of dollars’ worth of WARP pods lying around wormhole hotspots like so much scrap. The irony was that Colonel Box and his entire team disappeared during an operation a few weeks later, so the threat to WARP was neutralized.”

Chevie took a long moment to absorb this deluge of information, then asked a sensitive question. “So the yellow blood and the simian arm were two of your aberrations?”

Felix Smart answered calmly, as though having a dead father with ape parts were an everyday occurrence. “The odds against two aberrations were steep. Wormhole mutations happened a few times with some of the prisoners. Father’s theory was that the time tunnels had memory, and sometimes the quantum foam got muddled. Molecules were mixed up. Our test subjects made it through without any significant mutations over ninety-nine percent of the time. But we saw extra limbs, extrasensory perception, a dinosaur head once.”

Chevie found it a struggle to keep a straight face. “A dinosaur head?”

“I know—insane, isn’t it? Velociraptor, I think. We never found out for sure.”

“The dinosaur died?”

Felix Smart frowned. “Technically the velociraptor committed suicide. There was enough of the scientist still inside there to realize what had happened, so he grabbed a gun and shot himself in the head. Terrible mess.”

Chevie felt a sensation something like jet lag settling around her mind.

It’s mild shock, she realized. My brain doesn’t believe a word it’s hearing. Still, might as well play along; it will all be over soon.

“So, what’s next, Orange... Professor?”