SATURDAY NIGHT

Tane’s watch said twenty minutes to go, and he was sure the hands were standing still. But as he watched, the second hand inexorably flicked over. From where he was sitting, on the soft leather sofa in the middle lounge of his parents’ house, the lights of the city blazed up into the clear night sky. The flashing lights of an airplane made a staccato string of pearls through the sky above the city. He barely noticed it. The second hand ticked over again.

Rebecca’s program had already decoded a second message from the future and was busy working on the third. The second message was just as cryptic as the first.

PROFVICGRNCHMRAPRJCTSTOPIT.

BUYSUBEONTLS.DNTGOMST.DNTTLNE1.

Rebecca was clicking her fingers in front of Tane’s face to get his attention.

“Concentrate,” Rebecca said. “This is important.”

Tane didn’t think it was all that important, but it was taking Rebecca’s mind off the last twenty minutes, so he tried to concentrate, for her sake.

It was hard. His hands were shaking and he wanted to vomit. If the numbers were right, then Rebecca would be able to pay all their bills, and they wouldn’t have to move to Masterton. Everything would be all right.

“It’s called the grandfather paradox, and it goes like this. What if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather?”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would I go back in time and kill Grandad? He’s nice. I’ve got nothing against Grandad.”

“Tane! Focus! That doesn’t matter. We’re just saying if. Okay. If you went back in time and killed your grandfather when he was just a boy, then you would have never been born. Therefore, you could not have gone back in time to kill your grandfather. And so you would have been born, and so you could go back and kill him, but then you wouldn’t have been born…and around and around it goes.”

“Grandad takes me fishing,” Tane said, but quickly added, when he saw that he was about to get thumped, “But I get it, I get it!”

“Some people say that time is like a Möbius strip. An endless loop with no start, no end, and a single surface, called the present.”

Tane just shook his head. This science stuff was elementary to Rebecca, but it was way beyond him. His watch said nineteen minutes to go. What if the numbers were wrong! What if they weren’t Lotto numbers at all?

“What’s a Möbius strip?” he asked.

“Oh, come on! Do you ever stay awake in math?” Rebecca cried, and jumped up. She disappeared into Tane’s room for a second and reemerged with paper, scissors, tape, and a pen. Tane watched intently as she cut a long strip from the paper and held the ends together in a loop.

“A Möbius strip is a piece of paper with only one side and one edge.”

Tane tried to imagine that. “No way. If a piece of paper has a top, then it has to have a bottom. How can a piece of paper have only one side?”

“Watch.”

Rebecca took one end of the strip of paper and twisted it over, just once. She taped it to the other end. “There you go. A piece of paper with only one side.”

Tane took it and examined it. “Nope. Look, a top and a bottom. Or I suppose you’d say an inside and an outside.” He knew he wasn’t going to win this argument, but it was always fun to try.

Rebecca offered him the pen. “Draw a line longways, around the strip. Don’t lift your pen off the surface. Stay on one side of the paper only.”

Tane shook his head but took the pen and started drawing.

What if there was no Lotto win? No great scientific discovery? And Rebecca would still go to Masterton.

After a few seconds of drawing, he found himself right back where he started, joining up with the start of his line.

“So?”

“So you drew on only one side of the paper, right?”

“Yeah?” He looked at the Möbius strip. He had drawn around both the inside and the outside of the loop.

“See, it has only one side.”

Tane frowned and forgot about his watch for the first time that day.

“But what has this got to do with us?”

“It’s like we’re on that loop. And when someone in the future sends a message to the past—”

“When we send a message to ourselves…”

“Whoever. But it’s like they have made a hole in the paper and passed the message through to where we are in the past. But instead of paper, it’s quantum foam, and the message is the gamma-ray burst.”

“And what has my grandfather got to do with all this?”

“Well, they sent the Lotto numbers, right? But when we win—”

“If.”

“Okay. Just suppose for a moment that it is us sending the messages.”

“It is!” Tane insisted. “Think about it. Who else would know that we had thought of analyzing the BATSE data just at that precise time. Only us!”

“All right, us. If we win the Lotto but then forget to send the numbers to ourselves, then we won’t win the Lotto, and around and around it goes!”

“Wow.” Tane could think of nothing else to say, really.

Rebecca held up a notebook. “So I’ve got this notebook, and I have recorded the exact dates and times of the gamma-ray messages. Along with what the messages said, of course. Sometime in the future we have to send the messages, and any others that arrive, exactly as we received them. Otherwise, kaboom, the grandfather paradox.”

“Leave my grandad out of this,” Tane muttered. “And where are we even going to get the gamma-ray time-messaging-machine thingy from anyway?”

“That part I’m not sure of. In the meantime, let’s see that new message again.”

Rebecca opened the notebook and they pored over it together. Rebecca lightly drew some lines in pencil to separate what she thought were the words.

PROF VIC GRN CHMRA PRJCT STOP IT. BUY SUB EON TLS. DNT GO MST. DNT TL NE1

She said, “I think it’s like text-messaging. That kind of truncated English.”

Tane picked up the rest of the paper that Rebecca had made the Möbius strip from. “So what have we got?”

“I think the first part is easy. PROF VIC GRN has to be Professor Vic Green. I don’t know who he is, but we can Google him or check with the universities later.”

“What about CHMRA PRJCT?”

“Something project. Chim, cham, chem, chom, chum. Where’s your dictionary?”

It was five to eight by the time they found the word.

“Chimera! That’s the only word that fits.” Rebecca pronounced it slowly. “Ky–mere–rah.”

“What does it mean?”

Rebecca looked, and frowned. “In Greek mythology, it’s a monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail.”

Tane blanched, remembering the SOS. “I don’t like the sound of that!”

“Wait, in biology, it means an organism formed by grafting tissues or splicing genes from two or more different organisms.”

“Chimera Project. Stop it. We are supposed to stop the Chimera Project. That’s what this whole thing is about.” Tane frowned. “I’m starting to wish they’d sent the message to someone else.”

“We sent the message, according to you. Who else were we going to send it to?”

Tane’s watch said seven fifty-seven. “Better turn the TV on,” he said, and did so.

Rebecca was still examining the message. “We have to buy a ‘SUB EON TLS,’ whatever that is, and don’t go to the ‘MST.’ Mast, mest, mist, most, must. Don’t go in the…”

“Masterton,” said Tane brightly. “Don’t go to Masterton!”

“Okay,” Rebecca said, “and the last bit is easy. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’”

The live, televised Lotto draw came on the TV, and Tane turned the sound up. He could hardly breathe. If the numbers were the same…What if they weren’t? Then again, from the cryptic clues in the last message, maybe they’d be better off if they weren’t!

Rebecca and Tane sat on the couch to watch the short program, the original crumpled piece of paper on the coffee table in front of them. The numbers stared back at them: 8, 11, 22, 32, 39, 40, 3.

“What time is your mum coming home tonight?” Rebecca asked idly during the theme tune and preamble.

“Not till after eleven. Why?”

His dad was away in the bush, and his mum was out at some community council meeting.

“No reason,” Rebecca said quietly.

Tane dragged his attention away from the screen and looked at her. He asked thoughtfully, “How’s your mum? Will she be okay on her own tonight?”

“She’s fine. Stop worrying.”

Tane stopped worrying, but only because the Lotto hostess, elegant and sophisticated in a long blue gown, came on and started talking. Her blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her smile was wide and toothy.

After an interminable introduction, the overly effusive hostess started the barrel rolling, and the Lotto balls began to tumble.

He barely felt Rebecca’s hand slip into his. She was scarcely breathing.

The first number out was thirty-two.

“We’ve got that! We’ve got that!” Tane yelled.

Rebecca still wasn’t breathing.

The second number was eleven.

“We’ve got that too! It is this week’s draw! It is this week’s draw!”

The next number rolled down the slope from the barrel and Tane froze.

“Thirty-six? Thirty-six?” He screamed, “It can’t be thirty-six!”

The ball stopped rolling. The Lotto hostess announced, “Thirty-nine.”

Rebecca collapsed against Tane.

He said, “Thirty-nine. It looked funny when it was rolling. It was a thirty-nine.”

Rebecca didn’t reply. She hadn’t breathed since the start of the show. She finally took a breath after the next number, though. Eight. By that stage it was just a formality.

Forty. Twenty-two.

He didn’t even bother watching the bonus numbers and found to his great surprise that he was hugging Rebecca, and she was hugging him.

The Powerball Jackpot had been sitting at $6,325,450 by the time the Lotto booths had closed at seven o’clock that evening.

It was almost anticlimactic seeing the three ball come wobbling up the little tube.

“We proved it. Messages through time. It’s the scientific discovery of the century!” Rebecca breathed out slowly, and added almost as an afterthought, “And we’re rich!”

“No.” Tane shook his head. “Not yet. At the moment, we’ve got nothing. Fatboy is the rich one. Let’s see if he does the right thing.”

Rebecca nodded. “He will. But now that we know it really works, we’ve got the important stuff to discuss.”

Tane knew what she meant. That was one thing his mind kept coming back to again and again. This wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme.

It was a cry for help.