A quantum circuit was completed and information exchanged on every level. Knowledge, secrets, and the very essence of being—all whipped between the two men, locked in grim combat. Garrick struggled to hold on to himself in this blizzard of awareness. He saw and understood everything, from amoebas to microwaves. He felt his own self as a collection of jittering neutrons and understood the concept. He saw the surface of the moon, an earth ruled by dinosaurs, matchbox-sized computers, the Scottish man of science, the little Shawnee lass, and the boy Riley.

Riley, he thought, and the thought skittered away from him on a tide of quantum foam. He cocked his head to follow it, and the Scotsman used the distraction to press the red button on his belt.

Garrick felt mercury shift and smelled the explosives and knew that there was only one way to perhaps escape death. He crushed Felix Smart’s barely solid windpipe in his fist, then tumbled them both into the tiny pulsing circle of light that lay in the center of the mattress.

It did not seem possible that two grown men could fit into that tiny space, but the wormhole was pure physics and so did its work, dematerializing the battling pair just as the tiny suitbomb exploded.

Charles Smart, the godfather of time travel, had speculated in his famous Columbia lecture that if a spontaneous energy shift were to be introduced into the quantum stream, then the effects on local travelers could be spectacular, producing, in theory, a being imbued with all the powers not yet granted to humanity by evolution. Or, as he put it, Clark Kent could indeed become Superman.

The world could see superheroes.

Or supervillains.

BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. NOW

Chevie Savano plugged Charles Smart’s Timekey into the weirdly pronged socket on the bank of antique computers in the pod room.

A message appeared on the screen: warming up. Warming up? What was this? A photocopier?

Alt-tech was a term Felix liked to bandy about. Alternative technology. What he meant was old junk that didn’t work properly anymore.

Warming up? The next thing you knew, this contraption would ask for more gas.

Eventually a menu shuddered into life on the small convex screen. The kind of screen nerd grandpas collected to play Pac-Man. The operating system was unfamiliar to her, a set of consecutive menus that reminded her of a family tree.

Well, I guess even Apple and Microsoft can’t control the past, she thought, smiling.

It did seem as though everything was on this Timekey. The entire history of the project, including previous jumps, personnel files, pod locations, and, of course, Professor Smart’s video diary.

Chevie selected the proximity-alert recordings with an honest-to-God wooden mouse, and scrolled through to the last couple of minutes.