"The issue was getting back into the chamber after we loaded all that junk," Rich said excitedly, still high on adrenaline from the adventure.

"I thought we might have to ride in the back container with the poo," Nik said with a grimace.

"You were only getting a computer, what's all this other stuff?" Colin asked as they passed coils of cable and random components out to him.

"We found their notes, this thing works! We decided it wasn't bolted down-"

"Not enough to stop us anyway." Nik piped in.

"-so we just took it." Rich finished, looking immensely pleased with himself.

"Good work!" Colin said as he accepted a battered metal sheet that he barely recognised as one of the large arrays he had seen on the warehouse floor. It was truly amazing that they had fit all the equipment and themselves into the tank. "We need to get all this downstairs quickly." He said, looking at the mess behind him.

It only took a few minutes, passing the parts down to Colin to stack in the underground corridor before they felt safe again, with everything hidden away from prying eyes.

"So, I guess we are building a time machine?" Colin asked as they sat in the now tidy back garden drinking tea.

"Not yet." Nik replied with a thoughtful look on his face, "I need to read the instruction manual first."

"And we still have two of the arrays in the poo," Rich interjected, "and I am not helping you get them out."

Colin groaned, eyeing the back of the truck as if it might explode.

"We skimmed through some of these notes." He waved almost a ream of spiral bound paper, "Although it worked, they could only send people and things forwards and the bigger the item the more dangerous the trip."

"I don't think that's true, they sent a bunch of things and one person back successfully, they just didn't seem to arrive," Nik said slowly.

"So, where did they go?" Colin asked.

Nik shrugged, "Paradox theory and alternate timelines? Who knows."

"Okay, we can't have any of this stuff out where it can be found but we do need a backup of the computer data, I don't want to risk a raid and the government agents finding this stuff," Colin warned them. "Most of it should stay down here."

"You seem very confident they won't find your tunnels. I'm not sure I would be after the mess they made searching our house." Rich said, finishing his tea. "Anyway, it's time we were off. Remember to wash those overalls, they're my Thursday ones so I need them back by next week."

"You have different overalls for each day?" Colin asked incredulously.

Nik rolled his eyes, "We both do, he even sewed tags with the days on into the necks." He showed the tag to Colin. "It's actually quite sensible once you get over the insanity, it provides wear levelling."

"Meaning all your overalls wear out around the same time? What use is that?" Colin asked, walking them down the cold steel corridor and out of the bunker. "Do you save all your clothing rations and spend them in one hit?"

"It means I can buy him new overalls for Christmas," Rich said, annoyed at Colin's tone. He was not happy that his OCD tendencies were being questioned. "Anyway, other than overalls all Nik's clothes were bought when he was sixteen."

"Hey, I bought quality and don't overeat, chunky." Nik ducked Rich's retaliatory swipe.

"You only wear overalls! Anyway, you were the one borrowing my shirt for that date a couple of weeks ago!" Rich said, quite insulted by the chunky comment, he was big boned and powerfully built. It had nothing to do with enjoying biscuits.

Nik shrugged and shook Colin's hand, "Well done today, I'm impressed your ridiculous plan worked. Just, keep your head down eh? Perhaps stay out of the cellar for a week and make sure you keep your routine the same. They are bound to question the man who fixed the pipes an hour before the place went boom."

"Ah, yes. I need to call the guard hut, I'm going to try to stop the young lad wandering into the middle of the old timers' target practice." He said, rushing into his house.

The boys snuck out the back, wandering slowly through the allotments and back alleys, basking in the feeling of excitement and occasionally bursting out laughing for no apparent reason. When they reached the swing park they stopped, wordlessly agreeing that a play on the swings would be a fitting end to the evening.

Feeling more confident in the security of the old swings after their last experience with them they swung hard and high, whooping as the chains slackened and clunked at the top of each swing.

“Oh man, that was fun,” Rich said panting as their swings synchronised briefly, not really referring to their use of the playground equipment.

Nik looked at Rich with a smile and without replying launched himself off the swing at the top of the parabola, he landed a good distance away and turned to see Rich flying through the air, beating his distance by a couple of feet.

He laughed and punched his friend in the shoulder, “Yeah, dangerous though. We could have died!”

“I suppose so, I guess we’re both just adrenaline junkies.” They walked home with the smile still on their faces

***

The next few days were nerve wracking, unless he dropped by in his downtime they normally only saw Colin on the weekends so they had decided not to break with routine. This of course meant they had no idea if the government stooges had questioned him, for all they knew the Jacks could have been breaking their doors down any second after torturing the information from Colin.

The tank was almost back together though, allowing them to throw themselves into their work as a distraction. They were all putting long hours into the project and it was starting to show, it actually almost looked like a tank on the inside now too.

"I really want to get the last sponson attached," Guy said, standing back and admiring their work.

"Lots of stuff we need to do before that can happen." Nik reminded him, "The whole drive chain needs to be in before we can even get the tracks properly tensioned up."

"Yeah, but we are super close to a final fit of the engine," Rich said, his eyes wide and his smile threatening to leak tea around the edge of his mug.

"It might take a bit to get the tuning right, the rebuild we did will have changed all the timing and carburettor settings." Nik loved that part of the job so he was itching to get it done.

"That paint job is absolutely perfect. When we pulled this hulk into the yard you never would have dreamed it would look so good." Guy was glad of that, it had cost him enough.

"That's mostly the welding, don't tell Dave it was his paint job that made it look good! We spent blood, sweat and tears making the finish smooth enough that it didn't need bucket loads of filler. Also, he’s smug enough already." Rich told him, deadly serious. "It helped that the tin worm was only on the surface, if it had been made with modern steel it would have looked like a lace handkerchief!"

As they were putting their mugs away a harassed looking Colin burst through the door, waving as he spun the chain to open the large roller door which would let him park his van inside. This wasn't unusual but they had agreed previously that they wouldn't see him until the weekend.

"Hey." He said, breathless after operating the chain. "Need a favour. Can you look after the computer? That and the two panels you put in the sewage." He tugged the items from his van, "You have somewhere to hide them?"

Nik looked questioningly at Colin, "Sure, are we in trouble?" He asked, his concern plain to see on his face.

"No, but I can't get time to get the computer copied and those panels are stinking out my workshop. You guys have a pressure washer right?" Colin went over to the new scrap pile and pulled a number of random pieces out, "I'm taking these as an excuse for being here, you don't mind?" Guy glanced at the items to ensure they were not restricted and nodded. "Great, see you guys at the weekend then." He said, again spinning the chain and causing the three men to scramble to hide the three pieces of equipment he had dropped off.

He drove his van away leaving the door wide open, "Well, that was rude." Nik said, pulling the chain through the mechanism much slower than Colin had.

Guy hid the panels in plain sight amongst other battered and bent sheets of metal and Nik removed a hatch from one of the bench seats in their tank which revealed a large storage space, one which had not existed in the original design but that Nik had felt would be sensible. They inserted the computer into the space after removing the storage drive and fastened the bolts tight.

"You think our computer can take this thing? Rich asked, looking at the military grade storage in his hand. "Looks like the right plug but it's a totally different size drive."

Nik shrugged, "That's more your thing than mine."

The drive was huge, both in physical size and storage capacity, they were going to have to spend all their savings just to buy the two spare drives that they had agreed on.

"Can we write it to tape instead?" Nik suggested, feeling the pain in his wallet already.

"Good plan! We still need one drive so we can both read it though. Tape is cheap though so we can give that to the guys in the resistance!" They had agreed that they wouldn't mention the equipment they got and instead would just deliver the hard drive and research notes to Colin's old soldiers.

"I hope the old geezers got away okay, it was a fairly risky mortar attack and it sounded like they had three tubes going at the same time." Nik had heard the explosions on their way home, they had stopped the car to listen, it certainly sounded like Colin's explosives had done the trick. Guy had told them he felt the ground shake all the way over at his house.

They had driven past on their way to pick up supplies a few days later, the compound was flat and every single building had been destroyed down to its foundations.

***

Colin had provided them with a bug detector and the paranoia was setting in. They couldn't discuss important matters at home because they had a bug in the living room and had no idea how sensitive it was. At work they were safe, for now, they still did a sweep every morning. They were trying to explain their understanding of the machine to Guy.

“It uses a special tri-metal plate which you pass a high-frequency current through, that forms what the Germans call a geste wave, I think it's something to do with faster than light particles which are like light and are both particles and waves? It's really beyond me. Anyway, when it interacts with another wave it causes what they are calling a zeitbereich, which translated just means time field. That's a bit boring though and I think this thing is pure magic so I wanted to call it a thaumaturgy field, but unfortunately, Rich vetoed my idea so I guess we are calling it a temporal field.” The sneer on his face showed how much he liked the name. Nik had been reading the documents on the hard drive every moment he could, he was starting to think he had a handle on it.

“They could send people and objects but they had issues with reliability, most of the smaller objects they tested on worked fine but some, including most of the people they tried it on, got cut in half.” he smiled, "it's like focusing a magnifying glass, you need everything you want to burn to be in the bright bit," Rich explained.

“I think the focusing problem is related to the curved field modulation, caused by an unconfined temporal field. I think it needs to be a standing wave so it needs to be inside a fairly well-sealed box, like a faraday cage, so that the waves bounce and interact instead of losing power as they spread. They had the right idea with the emitters pointing at each other but that big warehouse just didn't allow them to reflect. I think if we did that we could modulate it with a simple magnetic field.” He flipped through his notes, "There is even a mathematical formula to work out the effect the magnetic field will have on the wave. It looks like they scrapped that early on though because they thought it caused some kind of feedback. I'm fairly sure if you point two panels in the same direction and modulate the back one to amplify the front one it would solve that though." Guy was nodding along, almost following the theory. "I really wanted to call it a mathemagical formula but... Rich won't let me." He trailed off looking at Rich with a pout.

"So, you want to scrap the stuff that works and retry the stuff that doesn't?" Guy knew that this was Nik to a tea, he loved solving a problem by doing something unexpected. "And once you have it working we can go back and stop the war?"

“No… I don't think backwards travel is impossible, I think you can go back but it's the multiverse theory, you change the past and it just branches a new version of the universe, a new ‘brain’ the scientists call it. I think we could happily go back and stop the war but it would only shunt us off to another alternate universe, leaving everyone here continuing along the same path as before just... without us.” Rich coughed, pointedly, "Well, that's best case scenario, worst case you just cease to exist." Nik added.

“So if you didn't change anything then you might be able to go back? You could observe but not change the past?” Guy asked,

“Yes, you could possibly have a building with no windows that you knew was completely empty, make sure nobody enters it for an hour, go back an hour into the building and wait until after your departure time before coming out. That would probably work but it would be totally pointless.”

“Schrodinger's building!” Guy's eyes widened and the edges of his mouth twitched upwards.

“Exactly, apparently some of his theories and formulae were used as the basis of this technology,” Rich informed him, slightly ruining the humour Guy saw in the scenario.

“I still have no idea why travel through time dissociates you from space as well, some of this stuff is so over my head it might as well be on the moon.” He pointed at the computer screen, "For example, I know that the computer works out some maths and decides what signals go down the big wires but the theory behind those signals is double Dutch."

"Yeah, Colin has a man who he claims will be able to understand it. I'm hoping he's right." Rich paused, his brows furrowing, "And I really hope this guy is trustworthy."

***

"Ah, Colin old chap." Adrian greeted him at the door to the club. "Come in! The folks upstairs have been asking after you."

The heavy door swung shut behind Colin and he gave the old man a pat on the shoulder, "It went well then?"

"Oh yes, the old boys have decided you are their new favourite person." They walked up the sweeping stairs, the dark wood and rich red carpet seeming to soak up the lights shining from above. As they entered the stag room there was a cheer and raised glasses from the old soldiers, and a few of the other patrons Colin didn't know which worried him.

"To our newest member!" Adrian said, raising a glass from the bar, "Hip hip -HOORAY- hip hip -HOORAY- hip hip -HOORAY-!"

Colin looked around in bafflement, "Member?" He asked Adrian in a whisper.

"Yes, the committee accepted your application yesterday and I took the liberty of paying for this year's membership. Congratulations." He handed Colin a drink and clinked his glass. "Now, how about a game of billiards?"

Colin followed the elderly procession back down the stairs, he was still taken aback by the cheers and by the fact he hadn't actually submitted an application! When they reached the room the Brigadier announced, "Snooker today! I'm bored of only having three balls on this big table." He grabbed a container from a cupboard and started placing balls on the table.

"So, did you get it?" The field Marshall asked.

"Yeah, it's all on here," Colin said, pulling a bulky square cassette from his bag. "We've had a look and their research notes suggest that both time travel and teleportation is a very risky endeavour."

"Well, hopefully, we put them back a few years with that attack, they still have the men who thought it up but we have been working to relieve that particular problem." The Field Marshall opened a cupboard at the end of the room and placed the tape inside, Colin couldn't see but got the impression that there was a secret compartment. "We will get copies of that off to the boffins we have left, with any luck, they can make use of it."

***

“You think we can trust this guy?” Rich asked as he nervously waited at the front door.

“Sure, he’s a top notch bloke. He’s helped me with all sorts of things. You remember him surely, geeky kid with glasses, speaks funny? He was in the class below us at school.” Colin said, not believing that Rich would have forgotten him.

The door opened and realisation hit, “Oh! James!” He exclaimed, “Yeah, I get it now!”

James looked at him in puzzlement, “Hello Richard.” His voice still lilted in a strange inflection, as it always had in school.

Rich shook his hand and clapped him on the shoulder, “James! Wow, it's been a while.” They hadn’t been friends in school but Rich was glad he was at least cordial with him, he knew there had been a considerable amount of bullying happening at school. Although the man had mainly grown into his body you could still see the gangly, ungainly youth beneath the surface. It had not helped that James was the epitome of a geek, a maths loving, chess playing socially inept child.

James invited them in and brought them through the house to his workshop. “Oh wow, this is a beautiful house. It's huge!” Two small children sped past, almost bowling the men over. James ignored them and Rich gave Colin a surprised look. “So, how many children do you have, James?” He asked, trying not to let his amazement show in his voice.

“Three. Twin girls and a new baby boy.” He said, dismissively.

The workshop was filled with electronics projects and mechanical gadgets. “I can see why you two get along,” Rich said, peering into a box filled with electric motors.

"We help each other out on occasion," Colin admitted, sitting down at a workbench which held an intricate web of wires. "He's very good at the electronics and controller side of things and sometimes I weld stuff for him."

"So, Colin gave you the hard drive?" Rich asked, getting straight to the point. "Any thoughts on how we could do the same thing without the computer?"

"Yes, it's very interesting. Their control program dynamically calculates the frequency, polarity, gain, modulation and a few other variables for the controller based on the coordinates and times you enter. The maths is fairly easy if you have a computer. A little more complicated with the addition of electromagnetic modulation." He replied. "The theory seems to be that the entropy contained within the time field is transported and inserted elsewhere."

"So, what? It breaks you down to constituent atoms and rebuilds you elsewhere?" Rich asked, cringing at the thought.

"Not exactly, it treats the universe as a collection of information, like a computer stores data, it just repoints the bit that is you, or rather whatever is inside the field, to a new location and time. It poses difficult theological questions, people have suggested already that the world might just be a simulation running on the most complex computer imaginable. This technology lends a lot of weight to that theory." James' words were dire but his delivery suggested he didn't care one bit. "So, the mathematical formulas simply work out the end pointer for that data, something a reasonable computer can do in a few minutes."

"Yes, but we are assuming we may not have a computer." Rich was concerned that the AC input needed for the computer was fairly high current, they were making the assumption that wherever or whenever they were, there may not be power. "Is there any way we can input the coordinates manually?"

"There are three options that I see. First, you could program fixed points and select a destination from a list. Second, you use the computer initially to set the destinations, either into memory or onto a programmable card. Third, a little bit trickier, you have a fixed point in space and time where you integrate and then differentiate the difference in settings." James paused, "That takes a lot of maths to work out manually but if you have a computer to use wherever you are going, or I guess coming from, then it would be nice and easy to get the settings beforehand. You could calculate as many as you wanted before you left."

"Okay, how do we do that? I think it might be essential that we can pick locations on a whim and having a backup in case we have no computer or no electricity sounds good."

"Oh, that's a shame. I had hoped you wouldn't take the last option. Okay, I still need to work out how to do that, it may take a while." He removed a pen and a large piece of paper from his desk. "There are only about six values you need for it to work but you have an almost infinite range for most of those depending on your granularity."

Colin had switched off already and was spinning on his chair, the large screw thread raising him to the top with a thunk and lowering him when he switched directions, over and over. Rich was still listening but felt that much of the information was going over his head.

"So, we need to work out how granular we need the inputs?" He asked, hoping that he understood.

"Yes, that will in the main part be derived from the equipment, times and dates, however, you may find the apparatus can get you to any split second anywhere in time in which case, your inputs would need to be far more granular to allow that." James pushed his glasses up. "Got me?"

"Erm, we could save switches and dials by making it only point at noon each day?" He tried gingerly.

"Exactly!" James said enthusiastically. At this point, Colin fell off the chair, when he got up he fell over again as soon as he let go of the workbench.

"Anyway...Yes, perhaps not one a day, that may limit usefulness. I think three or four would be good enough. So, I have a simple way to work that out from measured values." He proceeded to draw a complex equation and an even more complex diagram which was meant to explain it. Rich didn't understand any of it.

"So, multimeter, oscilloscope twiddle knobs, write down minimum value changes?" He asked.

"Yes, then throw them in the equation and there you have it. Four numbers first pertains to the dipole switches, second the four position three pole rotary switches and third is the tunable sixty-four detent rheostats. Couldn't be simpler. I use this for my remote controls for all my robots."

"Ah," Rich said, slack jawed and glassy eyed. "So, buy some switches…what was the fourth number?"

Colin groaned from where he was lying on the floor, "Can someone please stop the world? I want to get off."

"The fourth number suggests the drop point where the number of controls starts getting silly. In your case, it will be how far forward or back you can go. I'm hoping it doesn't come out to a value lower than a minute. That would be bad."

***

"You want to do what?" Nik asked again, not believing his ears.

"I want to use the tank, turn it into a time machine," Guy repeated. "I've been thinking, we don't really have ties. No friends or family other than the people in this basement. If we did go back and change the past, there would be no one to miss us, no one who we might regret leaving behind. Nik thinks the universe would go on without us and we would branch some alternate world, it seems to me that we could change our own past, make things better."

"Better for us, we would be leaving this world to the mercy of the super powers." Rich reminded him.

"Yeah, but nothing we do in the here and now would change that. Even if we had some kind of hit and run, or hit and never be seen, tactic. We could never affect global politics enough to fix things." He gave the other three his best smile, "But we do know what we could change in the past to stop it ever getting that bad." He held up a school textbook, "I know it was written by the winners, but even this must have some things that are true." The book was certainly pro Second Reich but it was filled with dates and locations of glorious, war changing victories.

"He has a point, Nik," Colin said reluctantly.

"Oh, I'm not disputing that. My question was more, why the tank? There must be more useful, less conspicuous, steel boxes which we can use." Nik asked incredulously.

"Yeah, but we put so much time and effort into that thing. It's the one single belonging I would like to bring with me." Guy told him, admitting his attachment to the machine.

"I would just like to point out, I realise you might have no friends but I just started going out with Arinder." Nik reminded him, "Also, Colin may seem like an awkward, weird, antisocial pretty thief but he has loads of friends."

"Hey! That… is kind of sweet in a hurtful, insensitive way." Colin said, his brow furrowed, "Though none of them would hold me here."

Nik sighed, "Yeah, to be honest things are not that great between Arinder and I either. She wants more from the relationship than I'm willing to give." At the other three men's probing looks he continued, "She wants children. I'm not good with children."

"Good luck finding a woman our age who doesn't want kids," Guy muttered.

"I wouldn't mind kids," Rich admitted, causing Nik's head to turn sharply.

"Hey, if I met someone I would actually quite like children," Colin said to back him up.

"You just want someone your own mental age to play with." Guy laughed.

"Exactly, they would be fun." Colin said, "I really don't have any friends that would keep me here though, no one I share my life with, it's just passing acquaintances really. Anyway, I would have you lot, my actual friends."

"Aww! Sweet." Rich said, rubbing his knuckles on Colin's head causing him to flail his arms defensively.

"So, do you think we can do it? Shoe horn an entire warehouse worth of equipment which ran on three phase power into a tank running an ancient sixteen-litre sleeve valve engine with no electrics. I mean, all that petrol and it only has a hundred house power." Guy asked, gazing lovingly at the green machine behind them.

"Well, it will have a few more ponies. You left it with me and Rich after all. There are a few other things we can do to give it some oomph too." Nik said proudly, imagining the shiny supercharger he could fit.

"And an engine is four-fifths of the way to being a generator. I can make it produce three phase power if we need to. Also, we have that dodgy supercapacitor that you didn't declare." Rich reminded him.

"I knew we would find a use for that thing! It's buried in the yard, I should go dig it up." It was probably the one piece of equipment he would have gotten locked up for keeping, it hadn't been on the manifest though and it had been a few years since he had hidden it. At the time he had planned to sell it, it was probably worth a year's wage, unfortunately, he didn't have anyone to sell it to who he trusted and that had that kind of cash.

"Well, this is my sort of project. We have about two cubic meters of space under the two benches at either end of the cabin to use for the bit which could get us arrested and shot, and limited space for the electrics and engine mods." Nik's eyes were glazing over, "We have to calibrate to possibly micrometre accuracy. It's going to be so much fun."

"So, how do we fit the four plates in? They wouldn't even fit in the main cabin, let alone those little steel boxes." Colin asked, thinking of the issues he'd had removing the two from the septic tank. "Also, they are pretty beat up."

"I think we don't need them that big. You can get this James person to check my maths but I think in an enclosed space and doubling the signal on top of each other we can manage with half sized emitters and still have about double the gain we need." Nik sometimes surprised them, he could sound dim at times but then come out with profoundly intelligent solutions.

"This is your electromagnet theory?" Rich asked, he had spoken to James at length about it and they agreed it should work. Or at least, it fit the theory as they understood it. At Nik's nod, he asked, "And you are sure about the field extending out past the steel enclosure?"

"Nope. Just a theory. We can only test if we build it." He was only giving them half an ear, already submerged in ideas of how it might fit together.

"So we need a test rig? You say those panels are twice the size you need? Well how about we use the ones in my workshop to build our test machine." Colin suggested.

"How do we do that without an identical tank?" Guy asked, dreading the answer.

"We can weld together a steel box. It doesn't need to be identical." Rich scratched his head, "I don't think."

"So, more steel? You are seriously eroding my profit margin, Colin." Guy said, beckoning the man out into the yard to look for suitably thick plates. "We will need to cut them here so they will fit down the hatch." They busied themselves in the yard whilst the other two made plans. It was nice to have a purpose for once.