A Stitch in Time

An Attractive Piece of Evening Wear

Glade thought about the proposition his colleague had just placed before him. "A party, huh?" He'd never been to a party. Having never been much of a party animal he'd never been bothered to go to one. "Alright, I'll have to try and find her again." He made to leave.

"What you didn't get her number?"

Glade stopped, "I'm not even sure she has a mobile."

"Oh, well you've already seen her twice today, from one ladies' man to another..." Davis said with a grin, "you can't spend too much time with the girl. You’ve gotta give her some space."

"Alright, I'll find her tomorrow and tell her about it, I have no idea where she'd be now." Glade walked back to his desk, spun on his chair to face his colleague and cocked one eyebrow. "So, you said we got access to the Hadron Collider, correct?"

"Yeah," Davis said, suddenly adopting the serious face he had when he was working. "As I said, in 6 days we've gotten permission from CERN to use the LHC. I managed to convince the higher ups in the university science faculty and they agreed to assist the project. They even managed to pull some strings and convince the French and Belgian governments to provide us with all the power from the two countries' power grids. They've allowed us five minutes at around 3pm, we'll have to make sure everything's ready by then. Apart from that, CERN insisted that they'd handle the execution of the experiment with scientific input from us."

"Sounds good to me," Glade turned to face the papers on his desk. Even as he worked, images of Macey's face continued to play through his head.

-

"Things are going well, so far I've managed to avoid suspicion from him." Macey spoke into her wrist device. "He appears to be coming to trust me as well, if I hurry I may actually be able to pull this off."

"That's good to hear," the elderly man's voice crackled. "Things have gotten much worse. We lost 2 operatives this morning. One lost contact around an hour ago; we don't know what happened to him. The other attempted to return before contact was lost entirely. Unfortunately, the distortion only allowed for part of his body to be safely recreated in this time period and as such there wasn't much left. You’re confident you can get this done, yes?"

"Yes sir, I'm making enough progress that it's grown from borderline impossible to possible in a very short space of time." She glanced around the phone booth she currently occupied; she enjoyed the inside of these old phone booths.

"Yes dear!" The old man yelled away from the microphone. "Macey, Lee wants a word." Macey felt uneased by that statement, she far preferred dealing with the old man than that woman.

"Macey, are you there." The elderly woman's voice crackled through the device, getting ever scratchier. "Whatever you're doing it isn't enough, you really need to hurry up."

"Yes Ma'am." She knew better than to question Lee. As painful as she could be, she knew what she was doing. "As I was explaining to Delga, I've been making progress."

"Macey, it isn't good enough, as you can probably tell, the link between this time and every other is already starting to fray." Macey could tell the old lady was getting a little panicked.

"It's alright Lee, I'll get it done, it's not just your arse that's on the line here."

"I understand that," she sounded calmer and far more pleasant now. "But we really are in trouble here, we've had to suspend all operations until further notice, and we have at least 12 operatives, including yourself, currently employed in missions."

Macey suddenly saw a brown jacket flutter past the window of the phone booth, by now it was already dark so she wondered how she noticed something like that. Still, she wasn't going to miss this opportunity. "Sorry Lee, if you want this done I'm afraid I'll have to talk later." With that she instantly silenced the device, tucked it under her sleeve and left the booth.