FTBY DNT GO

Fatboy went around to Goony’s house to pick up a pair of overalls, and while he was gone, Rebecca came and sat next to Tane. She put her hand on his arm.

“What have we got ourselves into?” she asked.

Tane didn’t answer. There was no answer to give.

He covered her hand with his own, and she leaned forward, touching her forehead to his.

“We’ll always be mates,” she said. “Whatever happens.”

“I hope so,” Tane said.

Rebecca leaned back a little and nodded. “I know so. I just wanted to make sure you knew too.”

“I never doubted it,” Tane lied, thinking about the argument on the submarine and feeling more and more guilty about it.

“Friends forever,” she said, and sat with him silently for a while before moving off into the kitchen to get herself a drink, leaving Tane with such a warm feeling that it was as if she was still sitting next to him.

Friends forever. Friends since forever.

The feeling was still there when Fatboy came back with a pair of clean, white overalls, emblazoned with Telstra-Clear across the front and back.

“The genuine article,” Fatboy said proudly. “Goony once worked for them.”

Tane asked, “Didn’t he ask any questions about why you wanted them?”

Fatboy nodded. “He did. The answer was a thousand bucks.”

Tane laughed.

“When do we do it?” Rebecca asked. “When do we install the Chronophone?”

“Security is going to be a real problem,” Fatboy said. “It’s a casino, so they have tight security anyway. These days with terrorist alerts all the time, they are going to look pretty suspiciously at anyone wandering around the Skytower with a suitcase.”

“Even in your lovely new overalls?” Tane asked.

“Even in my overalls.”

The satellite dish they were going to use belonged to Telstra-Clear.

Tane had carefully stenciled the name of the company on the side of the aluminium briefcase also, so it would look like a toolbox.

“Are you sure you should be doing this alone?” Rebecca asked. “Wouldn’t it be safer with two?”

Fatboy shook his head. “We talked about this already. Neither of you looks old enough to be a Telstra-Clear technician.”

In some ways, Tane wished he was going. This was the climax of the creation of the Chronophone, the greatest invention since the telephone, or the airplane, or maybe just the greatest invention ever. And he, Tane Williams, had thought of the idea that had started it all. And nobody knew. Maybe nobody would ever know. It seemed wrong not to be there at the critical moment.

In other ways, though, he was glad he was not going. Fatboy would have to take an elevator over two hundred yards straight up, to the main observation deck, then another elevator up another fifty yards to the Sky Deck. Then it was a climb up the internal ladders to the crow’s nest, a tiny platform on the outside of the Skytower, three hundred yards high. But even that wasn’t the end of it. The Telstra-Clear satellite dish, one of many atop the tower, was another fifteen yards above the crow’s nest, accessible only via a ladder up the side of the topmost spike of the tower.

He would have to do all this lugging a heavy metal suitcase. It would take steady nerves and a fair bit of strength.

“Better get on with it,” Fatboy said determinedly. Tane sensed that he was more nervous about the climb than he was letting on.

“Good luck,” he said as Fatboy climbed into the overalls.

“Final test?” Rebecca suggested.

“Suppose we’d better,” Fatboy replied.

They had been testing and testing the Chronophone. The last thing they wanted was for it to fail, once it was high above the ground.

“I’ll do it.” Tane disappeared into Rebecca’s room, where her laptop was sitting on a small study desk.

He opened the small program that Rebecca had written and typed in “good luck Fatboy,” then clicked SEND.

The small radio transmitter attached to the laptop would now be sending the message to the receiver built into the Chronophone. Inside the case, a small digital readout would be displaying the characters he had just typed, as it encoded it into the gamma-ray disruptor signal. Right now, that was as far as the signal would go. It needed the big satellite dish on the Skytower to be able to transmit the signal to the gamma-ray bursts.

There was no “Okay” from the kitchen to acknowledge the receipt of the message, so he tried again. “Don’t look down,” he typed, and sent it.

Still silence from the kitchen, which was a little odd. All the previous tests had worked fine.

He was just about to wander out to see for himself what the problem was, when a flashing light caught his eye on the side of the screen.

Another message!

Rebecca’s software now checked the NASA site hourly for new BATSE messages and automatically decoded them.

He clicked on the flashing light and it opened the BATSE message window. As usual, it was a cryptic jumble of letters and numbers that they would have to try and figure out as quickly as they could.

FTBYDNTGO.WTRBLSTMPS.DSVLETHM.

SLTABS.DNTABSRB.

There were still some parts of previous messages that they hadn’t fully understood.

WTRWKS for example.

He printed a couple of copies of the message on the inkjet, to show it to the others, and as he was doing so, the first nine characters caught his eye.

FTBYDNTGO.

He caught his breath and tried to make any other interpretation from it, other than the obvious. FTBY DNT GO. Fatboy don’t go!

“Oh crap!” He grabbed the printout, knocking the chair over in his haste to get out to the kitchen. The second copy whirred swiftly out of the printer behind him.

He rushed down the short hallway and in through the swing door.

The Chronophone was open on the kitchen table, and even from the doorway he could read the words DON’T LOOK DOWN visible on the display.

Fatboy couldn’t see them, though. Neither could Rebecca. He had his arms around her, and she had her arms around him, lost in each other’s world. As Tane entered, her lips met his.

Friends forever!

Any remnants of the earlier warm feeling died a sudden cold, jagged death. His breath caught in his throat, and a black rage that he hadn’t known existed inside him welled up from deep within his belly. He forced it back down and coughed, loudly. They both looked up, startled.

“What is it, Tane?” Rebecca asked in alarm, taking a quick step away from Fatboy.

Tane stared at them, breathing heavily through his nose.

“What is it?” Fatboy asked.

He looked at them both for a moment longer. “Nothing,” he said tightly. There was a ringing in his ears and spots dancing across his vision. He folded the piece of paper discreetly behind his back and slipped it casually into a pocket. “Nothing.” He laughed. “I thought the Chronophone had stopped working, because I didn’t hear anything from you two, but I see that it’s all okay.” He gestured at the message on the readout.

Fatboy looked at the message and laughed.

Rebecca just looked at Tane, in a rather strange way, and said, “We were just saying goodbye.”

“Yep,” Tane said, “I could see.”