3-3

Everybody, that had any idea of what was going on, started at once. "Crivvens! Help ma boab! One at a time, one at a time."

It took them almost an hour to put the whole story together. Finally they brought the Professor up to date. He sat rubbing his bearded jaw. "That explains a phone call Ah got last night from an old friend down in Edinburgh. Told me to keep an eye oot for oany unexplained X-Files type activity. I wondered what she was on aboot. She said no to forget how the old man used to handle things. She meant aul' Bernie Quatermass of course."

He got up and unlocked a large, metal cabinet. Inside lay a number of electrical gadgets and meters. Some of them were home made breadboard affairs. He pulled out a couple of pices of equipment. One, Shona recognised, was a sophisticated geiger counter. The other was definitely homemade and included a number of old fashioned vacuum tubes. He started to make some adjustments to it.

"Ye say The whole room seemed to be affected just before Johnny here flaked oot last night?" He checked the geiger counter against the background radiation. "Could you stand up do you think Johnny? I'll run these things over you and see what we get." The geiger counter's click increased to a chitter. Aye! You're hotter than background alright. Mind you if you've just been back in the fifties, working oot in the desert in America that's no very surprising. Been in the near vicinity o' any A bomb tests recently?"

Johnny smiled wryly. "Yeah! I spent a hot weekend furlough in Vegas, about a week after an atmospheric test, a couple of months ago, my time. I ran a geiger counter over myself when I got back to base. That count would be about right."

"Right, well that's no the culprit. I wasn't really expecting anything there. Now we'll see if this wee gadget can come up with something. I call it a TTG: Tachyon TachyGraph. The general idea is that these specially adapted Soviet space programme vacuum valves create a nice warm, spray of electrons in an electromagnetic field that sets up standing waves so sensitive they can even detect tachyons. Exotic particles that travel backwards in time."

He smiled. "Rumour has it the US has something that does a similiar job. Maybe Teddy and Frank, here, saw something like it last night. Anyway, it's warmed up by now." He passed it, double handed over Johnny. "Damn! Aff the scale. Sometime in the near future you're going to become a major source o' tachyon emissions Johny me boy! I'll have to recalibrate it."

He fiddled with dials and pulled out a couple of resistors quickly soldering new ones into place. He mumbled an explanation, partly to himself. "Ye see, the general principle o' an exotic particle like the `chronon' is that it would have an affinty for some source of quite dense matter. I don't know maybe you're body's water content. Don't know though. We should get an idea of how long you've got before the next emission event. If we could get a position for the chronon we could maybe isolate it in a really powerful spinning electromagnetic field. There it's fixed."

He switched the detector back on. "Crivvens! Still nearly off the scale. Close to an emission. I'd say we've only got about four hours before the next event!"

Jo had been standing by the window. She twitched aside the net curtain. "There's a couple of big black vans stopping in the street! There's a guy with a gadget jumping out the back!"

"That'll be your men in black then, kids!" The Professor put down the TTG. "We'd better go oot the back. Good thing I've got a Landrover, I hope ye'll all fit in."

They hurried out the back door and headed down the long thin garden into a narrow wynd. "I don't always park down here, but I couldn't find a space yesterday. Jist as well, eh?"

It was an old fifties model, built like a tank. They crammed in. The Professor put the key in the ignition. "What's it to be North, South, or, West?"

"Jist away oot o' here, Wullie!" Said Teddy.

"Aye, Right ye are, lad. I think I ken jist the place."

© copyright, AndroMan 2003.