Above the hemisphere, as well as around it, flames and smoke swirled up
into the night sky. Indeed, there was no sky to be seen at any point. The
flames were so fierce that they completely submerged the dome.
"The village green," Greg was saying. The effect of the capsule, or
whatever it was, was wearing off. "Incidentally, there are a couple of
people you know here -- "
"Why didn't you kill me?" I croaked. I wasn't grateful. You don't have
to be grateful to a man for not killing you. Yet through the haze I
was curious.
"You'll die anyway," he said. "Without this you'll die." He picked up
the suit. "Without it you can't get out of here."
Yet he had suddenly become less certain, less confident.
And as I recovered further, I said: "I'm not down on fate's list, is
that it? You couldn't kill me? It's not on the cards?"
"There isn't any such thing as fate's list," he retorted, not laughing
any more. "If I decide you're to die, you're dead."
He no longer wanted to talk. He turned and walked to the edge of the
stasis, not looking back. As I watched, he passed through the edge. The
invisible wall flared, but seemed to offer him no resistance. I was
perfectly prepared to believe, however, without experiment, that for
me the stasis was a prison. Either there was some kind of wall which
I couldn't get through (which seemed likely, since the air wasn't being
sucked out by the oxygen-greedy flames), or I'd die, frizzled to a cinder,
before I'd completed a single step out of the stasis.
I didn't immediately walk round to the other side of the machine. I
was still coming to myself. Vivid as my recollection of the mountain of
skeletons was, I wondered if it was part of a dream, and hoped it was.
The last thing to come right was my hearing. Stupidly I'd been wondering
why, if there were two other people here, I couldn't hear them and they
hadn't heard Greg and me talking. Were they bound and gagged? If so,
why, when I wasn't?
Then I realized that though in the stasis there, was no blistering heat
and no smoke, all the sounds of the fire came through, the crackling,
hissing, boiling, crashing, popping, fizzing, sizzling, roaring . . .
Anyway, I knew who the other two were. They were Jota and Dina.
Yet although I knew, I hesitated a moment longer. Several times earlier
I'd had a rather theoretical thought that if Dina perished, my own life
might be simpler and better. But that's the kind of thing you think
only when you don't believe it can happen. When you know it can happen,
when you know it's more than likely, you discover what you really want.
Dina had to be there. I was hesitating because I was afraid I was wrong,
afraid the other two might be Gil and Barbara, or Barbara and Garry,
or Jota and Gil, or some other two from the four.
I might have waited much longer. But as my hearing returned to normal,
I heard Jota's voice over the medley of fire sounds. I moved closer,
started to go round the stasis machine, and paused incredulously.
"Wake up, damn you," Jota was saying. "Wake up, little cousin. What use
are you lying there; while we're stuck in the middle of all this? Wake
up, you little darling, and become useful . . . "
He didn't say exactly this. He used all the available oaths, particularly
the sexual ones.
I moved further round so that I could see what was going on. Dina was
lying on her back, sound asleep, and Jota was kneeling beside her,
his back to me.
He shook her, gently at first and then more insistently. He was saying:
"There's nothing wrong with you, apart from the thing nobody is supposed
to speak about. Wake up, then. Wake up and . . . "
His words then became shockingly obscene. The kind of mindless idiot from
whom deliberate coarseness usually comes, who expresses the most earthy
ideas in his earthy experience in the most earthy way, doesn't have the
intelligence or imagination to make much of a job of it. Indeed, the
more earthy he becomes, the less he would shock anybody except elderly
spinsters, who never hear such effusions anyway.
But Jota was a master of obscenity.
I might have quite admired his performance in uncommitted wonder if
I'd happened to be uncommitted. But the girl was Dina. The fact that
Jota was her cousin didn't particularly bother me -- if the law allows
cousins to marry, consanguinity ceases to be an issue in all such matters.
What did bother me was that Jota cared for absolutely nothing beyond the
fact that he was here, and Dina was here, and she wouldn't wake up. He
even made it perfectly plain, several times, that in the last resort he
didn't care much whether she woke up or not.
That Dina was a child mentally was nothing to him. That there was
something unnatural about her sleep was also nothing.
Jota was single-minded.
Why I waited, listening, watching, doing nothing, would have been hard
to explain at the time, but not difficult to explain afterwards.
I hadn't forgotten the case of Jota and Sheila.
I had admired Jota, I had envied him, and always I'd been a little afraid
of him. What it was about him that I feared I didn't know then, though
I could have guessed that the knowledge that nobody had ever stood up
to Jota and bested him had a lot to do with it.
If at the first moment when I knew that Jota was trying to seduce my
feeble-minded sister I had gone round and shown myself, the incident
might have fizzled out completely. Jota would have laughed, I would have
cooperated with him in laughing the whole thing off, and that would have
been that.
Why I waited was partly to give him enough rope to hang himself, mainly
to let myself get so angry that Jota wouldn't be able to make me laugh
the whole thing off as we'd done in Sheila's case (except Sheila herself).
Well, that's what it amounted to. I had thrashed Jota, but after that,
instead of just contemptuously kicking him out, I had made him promise
to be a good boy . . . and if Sheila had been willing, we'd all have
pretended to be friends again.
I remembered Dina coming down the stairs that afternoon, and wondered if
it was at that moment that Jota decided the conquest of his fair cousin
must be delayed no longer.
I got more and more angry.
I moved only when Jota lost his temper, started slapping Dina's face
and punched her in the ribs.
"Jota," I said, "if you touch her again, I'll kill you."
He turned his head. And when I saw his face, I knew he was an animal.
Lust makes some of us cheat. But it turns only some of us into animals
like Jota. I knew by his face at that moment that when he reached this
state -- as he must have done many times -- he had ceased to be anything
resembling a human being.
If he had to kill, that was all right.
If the woman died, now or later, that was unimportant.
If she was married, if her life and those of others were going to be
altered irrevocably in the next few seconds -- well, what had that to
do with Jota?
If she was a feeble-minded kid, his cousin, sleeping peacefully through
disaster -- what right had she to sleep when he wanted her?
"Val," was all he said, but his thoughts and emotions showed in his face.
At first he had no intention of being diverted. Then anger followed when
he realized the difference my presence was bound to make. Then . . . fear?
The fist I planted in his face, rather inexpertly but with considerable
force, made up his mind for him. This was neither a love scene nor a
conversation piece. It was a fight. He had no choice.
He made a further effort nevertheless. He jumped to his feet and backed
away, saying: "Val, let's be reasonable about this -- "
I leaped on him and hit him on the mouth, which spurted blood. Jota
ceased attempting to be reasonable and swung at me. I caught his arm
and threw him, with no trouble at all.
There had been a wrestling bill at Shuteley one night when I was about
fifteen, and someone gave me a ticket. I'd been fascinated, not by
wrestling as an entertainment, but by the revelation that if you knew how
you could throw people far heavier than yourself all over the place. So
I found out about it.
I certainly never became an expert wrestler. As far as Jota was concerned,
however, I might have been a world champion. I could throw him with very
little effort, and he had no idea how to fall. Instead of rolling with
the throw, he came down untidily with a crash each time, even on the
fairly soft ground.
I threw him every time he got up, and never followed him down, because
this wasn't a sporting contest that would be settled by a body press or
a submission. I didn't want to hurt him, exactly; instinctively I was
trying to beat him, to humble him, to teach him a lesson, so that he
would never make a pass at Dina or Sheila again.
He kept backing, though he didn't actually run away, and to his credit he
got up every time when he could. And he kept trying to talk to me. "Val,
you and I shouldn't be . . . " "I wasn't going to . . . " "Will you listen
to me . . . " and then, rather ludicrously: "I'm warning you, Val . . . "
We were close. to the edge of the stasis, and when I threw him again
I simply didn't think about it at all. What the stasis was I had no
idea. To me it was simply a wall. Greg had walked through it, but Greg
was in a special suit.
When I threw Jota and he rolled towards the edge, I expected him to stop
against it as he'd have done at any other wall.
But he didn't.
There was a sudden roar, and I was sucked toward the barrier myself as air
rushed from the stasis into the inferno beyond. Despite the brightness
of the flames, the sudden glare as Jota rolled through made everything
else seem dull.
He had no time to scream.
Outside the stasis the flames were dying a little, but the temperature
had not begun to drop. Out there, things that would burn didn't catch
fire, they simply dissolved in the heat.
Five seconds after I threw him out of the stasis, Jota was not
identifiable even as a cinder.
As Jota died, there was a gasp behind me, a feminine half-checked moan
of horror. Horrified myself, I didn't turn at once. I assumed that Dina
had wakened up.
It was only when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dina lying on the
ground, peacefully, comfortably, breathing deeply and regularly, that
I realized someone else had joined us.
I turned and saw Miranda.
I had not expected to see her again. It had seemed likely that she was
dead. Even if she had survived what Greg had done to her, it was not
in the cards that she'd be moving around any more that night; and then,
lacking a suit, she couldn't get into the stasis through the blazing town.
But she did have a suit. And although she reeled a bit and her hair was
over one eye, she was in better shape than could have been expected.
She got in first. "Didn't you know?" she whispered. "Val, didn't you
know what would happen when he hit the stasis? Or did you
try
to kill
him . . . murder him?"
I had certainly not tried to kill Jota, and I was shocked at the manner
of his death and my responsibility for it. Yet Miranda's obvious horror
at what she had seen filled me with incredulity, rallied me, and made
me temporarily cease to wonder that she was here at all.
"Whatever I did," I said in sudden anger, "are you to be the judge? You,
who knew exactly what was going to happen, and let it happen? You came
here to watch a gala performance, to extract the last ounce of vicarious
enjoyment out of the Great Fire of Shuteley. But was that all -- or did
you
start
the fire?"
My outburst didn't bother her. In fact, she calmed down. "You didn't
know," she said. "Anyway, what's remarkable is that you and Jota fought,
and he died, and you didn't . . . Why did you fight?"
I said nothing, merely glanced down at Dina.
She was still sleeping like a baby. She looked so happy she must be happy,
having wonderful dreams.
"What about Dina?" I said.
"She's been . . . treated. She may be different when she wakes up. That'll
be in about three hours. I can't promise -- "
"And you left her," I said, "with Jota."
Miranda's eyes widened. "You don't mean he . . . So that was it. Don't
say anything for a minute. Let me think."
"You seem remarkably concerned about Jota -- and remarkably unconcerned
about the ten thousand people you allowed to burn to death."
"Not ten thousand. Not a thousand. We saved many who would have died --
you know that, don't you? Only we couldn't leave them here, we had to
take them with us. We couldn't leave here, alive, anyone who should have
died. Except Jota. Saving him, leaving him here alive, was one of the
main purposes of the operation."
"It would have been easier to avert the fire."
She shook her head impatiently. "Could you eradicate the French
Revolution? Could you negate the First World War, even if technically
the means were in your grasp? No, the Shuteley fire had to happen. All
we could do was make certain small changes -- saving Jota, for one."
"He died in the fire? Before you intervened?"
"Yes."
"Well, looks like fate had it in for him. But why should a little thing
like being burned to a crisp prevent Jota from living to the age of
ninety? You can loop him back. It's been done before."
"We'll have to try to do something like that," she said thoughtfully.
"The question is, how? I don't have any apparatus. Greg won't let me
return through the copse. I can't return from here until near dawn.
When I do, it's pretty certain that -- "
"For God's sake, Miranda, tell me what's going on," I exclaimed. "From
the beginning, you've been saying too much and not enough. Either you
should have been a perfectly ordinary party of campers who knew nothing
about anything, or you should have concealed nothing."
"Both Greg and I told you too much, Val," she said quietly. "But only
you. Nothing that anyone else knows matters."
"Gil? Jota? Sheila? Dina?"
"Gil is with us and you'll never see him again. He's supposed to have
died in the fire, with Barbara and Garry. They're all with us --
elsewhere. Jota, at the moment, isn't in the picture. Sheila knows
nothing except at second hand, what you tell her. And Dina will know
less. Or rather, the little bit that will remain with her will be so
improbable that she won't tell anyone but you."