I had a moment of sheer panic as I neared the peak of the mound and the
rubble sliding beneath me threatened to sweep me off on the dry side of
the blockage. I saw myself falling about fifty feet over rubble which
would come with me, almost certainly burying me beyond any hope of rescue
(if I happened to be alive when I reached the bottom) and far beyond
any possibility of digging myself out.
I fought against the slide, running against it like a man on a treadmill
over a precipice. The light was tricky and my sense of direction was not
all it might have been. The glare of the fire cast long moving shadows,
smoke stung my eyes, and on the other side of the mount the darkness
was so intense that I couldn't even see the white water.
I overdid it.
One moment I was fighting clear of the drop into the dry bed. The next
I was teetering over blackness, flicked by spray from the blocked river
below. And all the time the rubble beneath me cascaded this way and that,
now into the dry bed, now down the slope to the south bank, now into
the foaming river.
Suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet at all. Then I was in
water. Then the whole world exploded.
I came to soaked, cold, shivering, with an aching head and the rush of
water in my ears. For a moment I was blind.
Dazed and deafened, I nevertheless realized where I was. I was somewhere
in the middle of the delta of streams rushing into the blackness of the
south side of Shuteley. The water rushing past me was not more than a
few inches deep.
It seemed to take a long time before I worked out what to do and where
to go. The huge mound of debris in the river bed cut off all heat and so
much light that I found it hard to recover any sense of direction. And
after being toasted for so long I could have sworn the water all round
me was only one degree above freezing point.
At last I realized that if I forced my way through streams flowing from
left to right I must come to dry land. Then all I'd have to do was cross
a normal river that didn't know what trouble it was going to run into
farther on.
I got across the streams somehow -- and then couldn't find the
river. I seemed to be in a kind of marsh with rivulets running in all
directions. Only the glow of the fire, cut off by the pile of rubble
which had stopped a river, enabled me to find my way back to the bank
of a more or less normal Shute.
I made my way along the bank.
Dizzy and with a head which seemed to be cloven in two, I shied away from
the very thought of attempting to swim across the river. I'd probably
be swept down to the whirlpool which had already knocked me silly. The
Shute had always been a placid river, and in this hot summer it had been
more placid than ever. But any river becomes angry if it's balked and
not allowed to follow the course it has taken for centuries.
Presently, stumbling upriver, I became aware that one of my discomforts
had gone. I was still soaked, but I was no longer shivering. It was,
as usual, a hot night.
My house ought to be visible in the reflected glow. Yet it wasn't. Ahead
of me, nothing was visible.
This was very strange. By comparison with the glare behind me, I was
walking into darkness. Nevertheless, the red glow, the heat of which
I could still feel on the back of my neck and through my wet clothes,
should have lit up the river ahead at least as far as my house.
And ahead there was nothing.
I sniffed, and not because I smelled something. Quite the reverse. There
was a sudden startling absence of smell. I was puzzled as a sleeper
awakening to silence is puzzled, before he realizes that a clock has
stopped.
Voices upriver gave me a clue. I had moved into a region of odorless
vapor which didn't sting the eyes, had no smell, and cut visibility. I
moved on. The voices grew louder.
Then I stopped,
I had almost reached my house. It was invisible, but it could be no
more than a hundred yards away. I had followed the river to the copse --
and there, just in front of me, was a bridge where there had never been
a bridge. And there were people on it, crossing from the other side to
the copse.
Not for the first time that night I acted without thought. I went
closer, but along the bank, stealthily. I slipped silently into the
water. Cautiously, carefully, I paddled under the bridge.
The people I had seen on the bridge were giants, in plastic suits with
the hump I had already noticed, and baffled, bedraggled, frightened
people who could only be refugees from the Great Fire of Shuteley.
The bridge was as startling in its way as luxon.
It was only a catwalk perhaps a foot wide with two rails three feet
apart. There were no supports and no reinforcements of any kind. It
lay across the river like a plank, but I felt it, pushed against it,
and it was solid as a rock.
There was little or no risk that I'd be seen under the bridge. The
smokescreen, or whatever it was, that the giants were using as cover cut
visibility very effectively. It was not like fog or mist. You could see
ten yards very distinctly, twenty to thirty yards vaguely, and beyond
that was blackness. Sound, too, was muffled.
All the giants wore plastic suits and small, quite neat boots. Underneath
they all wore as little as possible, and nevertheless seemed to be bathed
in sweat.
The dark goggles their eyes would need in the center of a conflagration
were folded down across their chests. Wearing them, out of the fire,
they would be blind.
The others, the people who had come from Shuteley, wore a simpler sort of
plastic suit, loose pants and tunics which, unlike those of the giants,
were thrown open. Instead of the hump the giants had, they had merely
a small black box apparently stuck to the inside of the plastic.
I thought suddenly of Jota and his part in all this. Had the giants
recruited him, or was he lying drugged in one of the tents at the camp?
Miranda was not among those I saw.
Vague recollections of time stories I had read raced through my mind. Of
course, I had never taken time travel seriously . . . it was the kind
of thing which, if it ever happened, was never likely to impinge on me
and affect my life.
One of the assumptions made in such stories suddenly assumed significance.
You couldn't steal a man from the past, because of the effect his
disappearance would have in his future, your past and present. But a man
whose life was over, through accident -- a man about to be destroyed
in an explosion, buried forever by an avalanche, engulfed in a mine
disaster . . . such a man, on the point of ceasing to exist, could be
plucked from his time without affecting subsequent events significantly.
Was that what the giants were doing?
I wanted to hear what was being said, and that posed a problem. In the
river I was too near the flowing water to be able to make anything out,
and if I crawled up the bank, the giants coming along the other side
and crossing the bridge might see me.
So I drew back a little and swam across the river far enough downstream
to be invisible from the bridge. As I neared the other side, the bank,
though not high, hid me.
Then I crawled along the bank until I was under the north end of the
bridge, still hidden by the bank, and pulled myself partly out of
the water.
I heard: " Well, you'd be dead otherwise."
"But what are you going to do with us? Where are we going?"
" You'll be safe."
"This is the Mathers place. Where's Mr. Mathers?"
" In his house asleep."
"My wife . . . what about my wife? I haven't seen her since . . . "
" She'll be all right."
"I don't want to go. I want to go back and . . . "
The giants' voices were slightly muffled by their suits, but on the
whole easier to make out than those of the frightened, anxious, shocked
refugees. I could hear only snatches, of course, as people passed over
my head.
"We'll never get back?"
" You'll be well looked after. Think of it this way -- you're going
to heaven. "
"Heaven?"
" To you it'll be heaven. Nobody with a choice would stay here."
"What do you want us for? Did you start the fire?"
" No, we didn't start the fire."
"Why did you take us past Castle Hill and the dump? There was nobody
there -- "
" We didn't want to be seen. If it meant being seen, we couldn't help
you. "
"My Moira . . . I saw her catch fire. I'll never forget her scream. She
blazed like . . . "
" We saved you, didn't we?"
"Why couldn't you save Moira?"
" Others were looking. People who aren't here. We couldn't let them
see us. "
"If you can walk through the fire, why don't you . . . "
And then again: "This must be the Mathers place. Where the insurance
manager lives. Is he in this somehow?"
" He couldn't be more out of it."
"You mean he's dead?"
" Just dead to the world."
The conversation went on, and I strained my ears to hear it, but the two
who were talking were halfway across the bridge now and it was another
snatch of talk I heard.
"What happened to the fire brigade? Why didn't they . . . "
A very common word on the lips of these poor bewildered survivors was
"why." If they didn't ask why God had permitted such a disaster, they
asked why they had escaped, why others hadn't escaped, why the strangers,
if they could do so much, couldn't do even more, like putting out
the fire.
From the giants' replies it was obvious that to them, as to Miranda
before I managed to get through to her, the people of Shuteley were
little more than characters in a play. The answers were quiet, soothing,
apparently truthful as far as they went, which wasn't far.
"Where did you come from?"
" You'll see."
"You're the kids that I saw in town yesterday, aren't you?"
" Yes."
"If I thought you had anything to do with the fire. . . " A stream
of invective followed, empty, hopeless obscenity, for the man who was
speaking knew perfectly well he could do nothing but curse. He couldn't
even fight the giants or resist them -- the giants, girls and boys,
had spread themselves out among these refugees to prevent protest or
rebellion.
I realized that there were a great many more of the giants than I had
ever seen, far more than there could have been at the camp. I had not
known of more than about a score of them. There must have been at least
forty crossing the bridge, not counting any who might have crossed before
I arrived on the scene.
I knew from the snatches of conversation I heard that the giants had
been careful to be observed by no one who was going to live through the
fire. They had led these people
through
the fire, in their simpler
fire-suits (probably simpler so that they could be put on quickly and
with no risk of mistake), and by a route chosen to avoid being seen. The
crowds of people who must have escaped the fire would not gather about the
north-east end of town at the rubbish dump, but at the other end, where
the roads were, and the straggling cottages which must have escaped the
fire, and the nearest farms. That could have been confidently predicted.
Presently the procession ended. There was a gap, and then three more
figures appeared, two huge, one small. They were Greg, Wesley and Miranda.
Wesley reached the bridge, just above me, and spoke.
Oddly enough, it still surprised me, after all that had happened,
that the giants' language, when they were speaking to each other and
not to us, was not the English of the mid-20th century. It was English,
and I could understand most of it by listening to the sense rather than
the sound. But many of the words were not quite right, several of the
vowels had changed, and since the speech was colloquial there were many
phrases that were hard to figure out.
What Wesley said, roughly, was: "That's . . . (the lot?) now. We've left
nothing but the stasis and the two . . . (?) in it. Who's going back?"
"I am," said Greg.
"We're both going back," said Miranda.
I couldn't see Wesley, but I sensed his uncertainty. "Okay," he said,
after a pause. "I'll go on and tell them to . . . (?) everything but
the stasis, is that right?"
"And the stasis just before dawn," said Miranda.
"Sure. You've got to be there then. If you're not -- "
Greg said a word which was entirely new to me, and yet the meaning
couldn't have been more obvious. The politest translation would be
"Go away."
Wesley went away, crossing the bridge and disappearing into the copse.
Moving slightly, I could see Greg and Miranda quite well, for they had
stopped short of the bridge and were not looking at it. Keeping my eyes
on them, I could duck out of sight at any moment before I could be seen,
if they turned their heads.
They wore suits exactly like the others. The briefs they wore underneath
seemed to be pink or gray. Seeing them both running with sweat, I wondered
why they didn't take off their plastic suits or at least open them up. I
also wondered why a technology capable of constructing flimsy suits which
could withstand the highest temperatures couldn't go a step farther and
make them comfortable as well.
Miranda said: "Let's go back, then."
And wait till dawn?"
"Yes."
Greg laughed. "So that you can keep your eye on me, darling. Waiting
for a wrong move."
"The next wrong move," said Miranda steadily.
He laughed again. "You idiot," he said. "You're all idiots, you and the
others behind this . . . (?). When you found you couldn't keep me out
of it, you should have canceled it. You knew I'd kill it."
"We knew," said Miranda, and I heard the defeat in her voice. "But
you might fail. Lots of things might have happened. Maybe they still
will. Jota might have -- "
For the third time, irritatingly, Greg bellowed with laughter. It was
the laughter of a vandal, a spoiled kid with an inflated idea of his
own value in the world. It was the laughter of a bully.
"Jota," Greg said, "has a little talent. I have the Gift. Nevertheless,
Jota may be as important as you think. I think he is. That's why I had
to see that your plans for Jota didn't work out."
"Greg," said Miranda quietly, "listen to me for a minute. Please listen."
"Go ahead. There's plenty of time. I'll listen."
"You're not necessarily bad. You never had a chance. That sounds trite,
and it is. You were not only bigger and . . . (?) and better-looking
than anybody else, as far back as you can remember, but when girls began
to interest you, you didn't have to bother to be nice to them or even
go to the trouble of deceiving them. You had it all . . . You've often
thought about how you're different from ordinary people, Greg. Have you
ever thought about how ordinary people are different from you?"