Chapter 6

Tom shrugged, as he decided to tell the truth about the card.

“Well, it’s so I can use the buses and trains in Brisbane. I had misplaced my old one and had to get a replacement. Then I found my old card again, and I used it until it ran out of credit and then swapped back to this one.”

“The date, Tom, the date,” Victoria said with a shrill tone as she waved the card at him.

“Well, that was when I was issued it,” he tried rather lamely.

“How could you be issued a card in forty-years-time and be here now?” she then asked with her hands now firmly planted on her very shapely hips.

Tom shrugged, with his hands spread in a placating manner. “To be honest, I have no bloody idea. I left work and got on the bus at my usual stop. It wasn’t until I realised that the bus hadn’t stopped in a while that I got up to go see the bus driver.”

“Buggar me, he sure was ugly. His skin was all grey with brown and red streaks, and it resembled rocks that been heated and then fractured. The left side of his face sat higher than his right. The right side looked like he had stuck his face into a lava pool, and it didn’t move when he spoke.”

“His great hook nose was bent in two places, and his ears must have been the biggest and pointiest that I’ve ever seen on such a tiny person. His hands were all gnarled and the right one, looked like it had been coated in gravel. His fingers and the black nails were really long. He was damn scary; I can tell you.”

“He said to me, in a voice that sounded like rocks being crushed that I had wished for a holiday, so here I was. Victoria, I can’t get home unless I have that card.”

Victoria scoffed, “Do you honestly expect me to believe that bull? What sort of girl do you take me for?”

“Fine, then you explain to me why my Go-Card has that date and how I got here?” Tom shot back crossly.

Victoria frowned at the card for nearly a minute, as she turned it over and over in her hands. It looked as if she stopped to read it on each flip. She couldn’t have shocked Tom more if she tried when she said, “Can I go back with you?”

Tom’s shocked look turned into a frown. Then he shook his head sadly, “No, I don’t think you can. I don’t believe me being here will change the timeline drastically, as time will smooth over any small bumps.”

“However, a common thought in my time is that if we go back in time, we can’t really change anything. It would have already happened before we went. Suppose we found that things were vastly different in that timeline to our memories or our recordings of its histories in our time. In that case, we have to fix it, or we are in an alternate reality.”

“But that is another issue, and it is probably why a time traveller will feel compelled to change things to create the future that we know happened, even if we didn’t want to or mean to. I’m sorry, but no. I don’t believe that I was sent here to get you.”

Victoria looked at Tom with sadness and held out the card to him. He took it and made sure it went back into his wallet in the card pocket it belonged in before putting the wallet back into his pack.

Neither of them said a word as they put their packs back on and made their way back to the path.

“So is the world a better place in forty years?” Vitoria asked after they had been quiet for some time.

“Not really. Different countries are still at war with each other and trying to get others on their sides. We still have racism, greed, and corruption. Terrorism is a real pain in the arse, and we still haven’t been back to the moon.”

“Every time the medical people find a cure for one virus, another more insidious one comes along. They have a new flu-type virus in China at the moment, and it’s a killer. It will spread across the world and will be in Australia before we know it, even if it isn’t already.”

“That’s not good, maybe it’s a good thing that I can’t go with you,” Victoria said and gave him a slight smile as she took his hand.

Tom gently squeezed her hand as it felt nice to hold it. “Yeah, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d lose my job I wouldn’t go back for a while. The ghoul didn’t say how long I could or couldn’t stay. The thing is, I get this feeling that I have to go back on Sunday. He did warn me that I’d know what felt right to do and what didn’t.”