Switchers (17 page)

‘Well, what about when there really was an ice age? There were animals that lived in those times, weren’t there?’

‘What, like dinosaurs?’

‘Yes. Except that the dinosaurs didn’t make it. They didn’t adapt. But some other creatures did.’

Kevin let out his breath with a gasp. ‘Mammoths!’ he said.

‘Exactly! I saw them, Kevin, just now in a sort of dream. Walking through the snow. And why shouldn’t we? I’m sure we could. We know what they looked like. I’m positive we could get a feel for them.’

‘Of course we could. It’d be a lot easier than a whale.’

There was no more to be said, and they fell silent, their minds full of new hope. After a while, Tess said: ‘Kevin?’

‘Yes?’

‘We ought to be bears again. Until the morning. It’s too cold in here. It’s dangerous.’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said, but he didn’t Switch, and Tess had a feeling that he was waiting for something. ‘Don’t go to sleep again,’ she said.

‘No. I’m not. I was just thinking.’

‘What?’

‘Well, if I got stuck as a mammoth. If my birthday came.’

Tess said nothing, thinking about it, and he went on: ‘I know there’s nothing you could do about it. I wouldn’t ask you to stay with me or anything. But maybe you could … I don’t know, just keep an eye on me somehow. So I wouldn’t be completely alone.’

‘Of course I would, Kevin. I’d do anything. I’d go to the ends of the earth if I had to.’

‘I know you would,’ he said, and then he laughed. ‘You already have, in a way, haven’t you?’

Tess’s pride reared up. ‘I didn’t come here just because of you, you know,’ she said.

‘I know that,’ said Kevin. ‘But you’re still the only friend I ever had.’

Before she could answer, he was a bear again and, with a sigh, she joined him.

T
HE TWO MAMMOTHS MOVED
slowly but solidly across the snowfields. Their long, woolly coats provided perfect insulation against the blizzards, and their shaggy eyebrows and whiskery nostrils protected them from the effects of the freezing air. So little heat escaped through all that insulation that snow landing on their backs didn’t melt, and even provided a further layer of protection.

It also provided a partial shield against the sensitive infra-red scanners in the planes that passed from time to time above their heads.

‘Anything new, Jake?’

‘Naa.’

They were flying low this time, through the white heart of the blizzard. There was little or no danger of encountering anything in the air. The high points in the pack ice were well charted, and their radar screens would give warning well in advance of anything that might be in their path, but even so, Scud found it nerve-wracking to be flying so totally blind.

‘That freighter out of the way?’

‘What freighter?’

‘You said there was a freighter.’

‘Hell,’ said Jake, ‘that was an hour ago. He’ll be over Stockholm by now.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No. Wait a minute, though.’

‘What?’

Even Hadders put down his book for a moment.

‘Nothing. Infra-red’s just picking up a couple of animals down below. Small ones. I don’t know how they can survive down there.’

‘Poor suckers,’ said Hadders.

‘Poor suckers?’ said Scud. ‘
They’re
poor suckers? What about us?’

The only danger that the mammoths were aware of was hunger. There was no source of food for miles around, not even the rough Arctic vegetation on which they had learned to survive in the past. Their reserves of fat would keep them going for a while, but for how long they didn’t know. It took a lot of energy to keep those massive bodies warm, and a lot more to keep them moving.

But keep moving they did. Tess and Kevin had passed another test. Kevin’s faith had held, even if Tess’s hadn’t, and circumstances had proved him right. The mammoths were slow but they were comfortable, and they were making steady progress towards the north.

The hours passed. The human parts of their minds chafed at the tedium of the changeless landscape, but the mammoths had learnt patience over the generations, and plodded along tirelessly.

The krool sensed them coming long before they were able to see it, and its small, uncomplicated brain went into a momentary seizure. For although it was a poor thinker, its memory was as long and as ancient as its life, and it was well acquainted with mammoths. The prospect of encountering these two was not a pleasant one.

A dead mammoth is an agreeable snack for a krool, but a live one is a different proposition entirely. This particular krool had once had the experience of swallowing a whale which had been trapped beneath the ice, unable to breathe and dying. Its phenomenal internal temperature had crippled the krool, and it had never forgotten the agonizing days that followed as it battled with the heat the way a person battles with infection. Even two live mammoths would not be as bad as that, but they would nevertheless create a considerable disturbance in its system, and it would have to lie up for a while until they were digested.

In the normal course of events, a krool would not even consider eating a mammoth, which was one of the reasons why the mammoths had come to survive their last colonisation of the earth. A krool encountering a mammoth in the usual course of events would flatten the leading edge of its mantle so that the mammoth wouldn’t know it was there and would merely continue on its way, traversing the krool’s back until, after a few hours, it reached the other side. If this particular krool had not been so hungry, it would have left the two mammoths to go along their way. But it could not allow any source of food to escape, even if it caused a belly-ache. It lay still and waited.

Some miles away, Scud Morgan’s bomber had completed an in-flight refuelling operation and started its return journey. In a few more hours it would make a radio-controlled landing on the salted runway of an air base in central England and its crew would get out of their air-bound prison.

Jake was dozing. Hadders was reading. Scud was flying as low as he dared, for the sake of producing adrenalin.

Tess and Kevin blundered straight into the waiting krool. One moment there was nothing ahead of them except untrodden snow and the next, a whole section of it lifted and towered above them, and they were gazing with horror at the black underbelly of the krool. For an instant, Tess thought that the world had collapsed and she was staring into nothingness, a gaping abyss. Then she saw the eye. A single, huge, unblinking eye, gelid and green, looking straight at her.

If Lizzie had been wrong, it would have been the end, not only of the two mammoths, but of Tess and Kevin as well. For the mantle was above them now and the huge, cavernous maw was opening as the krool pushed forward to swallow its prey. But if Lizzie had been wrong she would not have sent the two young Switchers out to test their strength against the krools. Lizzie knew, and quicker than thought, Tess knew too, that they did indeed have powers beyond their wildest dreams. Kevin had been right. If they hadn’t been faced with the ultimate test of their skills, they might never have learned them. Because, if there had been time for thought, Tess would never have believed that what happened next was possible. The krool’s mantle was dropping like a monstrous fly swatter. Not even a bird would have had the speed to dodge out from under it. But Tess Switched, quicker than she had ever Switched before, and suddenly the krool was rearing away again and backing off.

For Tess’s heart had understood even more clearly than her mind what Lizzie meant by being what isn’t. And it had acted before her mind had been able to doubt, and to stop it. In front of the krool’s retreating underbelly was a huge and magnificent dragon, and then there were two of them, blasting flame at the hideous eye, which shrivelled and melted and dripped like warm treacle into the snow. The krool reared as high as it could go, a mile into the sky, but the dragons took to the wing and continued their pursuit until it collapsed and doubled back on itself like a monstrous, black pancake.

The two dragons leapt for the skies in a delirium of delight. They were faster, cleverer, more powerful than any creature on earth, and they swooped and soared, chased each other’s tails and tumbled in the air in sheer elation. This was the feeling that their premonitions had promised them, the certainty of power beyond human imagination, the sensation of absolute freedom. For all the elements were theirs to enjoy. They were equally at home in water, earth and air, but they were not bound by any of them. They carried the secret of fire within them, and even the great ice wastes all around them could cause them no discomfort. They were the rulers of all they surveyed, and there was no creature on earth that could defeat them.

In the midst of their celebrations, they heard the plane passing above them in the clouds. Heard it first, and then saw it, with their infra-red vision.

Just as it saw them. The scanner beeped, warning of a strong signal. Jake sat bolt upright and stared at the screen.

‘You got something, Jake?’ said Scud.

‘Holy God,’ said Jake. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘What is it, Jake, what is it? You got something?’

Hadders sat up and turned around in his seat.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Jake, his eyes filled with wonder.

‘What the hell is it, Jake?’ Scud yelled.

Jake moved into military mode, sharp and efficient. ‘We got hotspots, boys. Two of them. I don’t know what they are and I don’t know where they came from, but they’re like nothing I ever saw before.’

Hadders had left his seat and was standing in the small space beside Jake, looking over his shoulder at the screen. ‘Swing around, Scud,’ he said. ‘We’re losing them.’

‘Who’s giving the orders around here?’ screamed Scud. ‘What the hell are you doing, standing back there telling me what to do?’

‘You should see this, sir. We should get a better look before we go past.’

Scud gritted his teeth and swore, but he dipped his wings and swung around in the tightest circle the plane could handle. ‘Come in, base,’ he said into the radio mike. ‘This is Delta Zero Five, are you reading me?’

General Wolfe was sitting at his desk in Mission Control when one of the technical assistants called him over to the computer terminal which was receiving Scud Morgan’s pictures. ‘God damn,’ he said. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Damned if I know,’ said the aide. ‘There’s no plane in the world that flies like that.’

The shapes on the screen were descending in rapid circles, leaving a residue of heat in their wake that showed up on the monitor like the tail of a comet. The plane was passing above them and moving away again.

‘Get on to the guys in that plane,’ said Wolfe. ‘Tell them to stay above those things and keep sending back pictures.’

‘Yes, sir.’

By now there was quite a gathering around the terminal, watching the screens. ‘I knew it,’ said Wolfe. ‘Didn’t I tell you, huh? I knew there was something in there.’

T
HE PLANE ABOVE THEIR
heads was unsettling, but dragons are not easily intimidated. When they realised that it was not going to go away, they agreed to ignore it and go in search of more krools. They split up, one going east and the other west, flying low enough to be able to see the ground beneath them.

The plane above circled one last time, then followed Kevin. For a while he allowed it to drone along behind him, but then he grew irritated by it, and doubled back on himself, too rapidly for the plane to follow. Then he flew south at top speed for a while, and did not turn back to his original course until he was sure that the skies around him were clear.

Scud Morgan swore. Jake shook his head. Mark Hadders went back to his seat and his book.

A krool in a snowstorm is not easy to find, even for a dragon. Kevin scanned the ground as he flew, but it was only by chance that he came across his second krool. It was sliding southwards across Norway, more slowly now than in the preceding weeks, but still making good progress. It had fed well recently, cutting a great swathe through the forested regions in its path, and had grown to enormous dimensions.

Krools do not reproduce like most of the other creatures of the earth. They don’t mate with others of their kind, and they produce neither eggs nor young. When they reach a certain critical mass, however, they divide, simply split down the middle and become two, like amoebae. Kevin was able to spot this krool from the air because it was in the process of doing just that.

Where it was splitting into two the camouflage of snow was shifting and revealing patches of the glutinous black flesh beneath. Kevin slowed, wheeled round and returned, spitting flame. But by the time he reached it, the krool had become aware of the hot little presence above and glued itself firmly to the ground.

The first krool had been so easy to dispose of that Kevin wasn’t prepared for the battle which followed. The krool did nothing, merely sat tight, knowing that as long as it didn’t reveal its underneath to the attacker it was almost invulnerable. Almost, but not quite. Kevin came in time after time, throwing flame constantly. Wherever he attacked the krool, it melted into black, oily liquid, but it was so huge that his best efforts made little impression on its bulk.

He stopped for a while, trying to work out a plan. It was tiring, the way he was acting, and he realised that he was using too much energy. If he became exhausted, he would have to rest, and then feed, and when he thought about feeding his mind became filled with pictures of what dragons best like to eat, which is people. And when he thought of people, he could think of only people that he knew, and he wondered if any Switchers before him had experienced the weird sensation of imagining a slap-up meal consisting of their relatives and friends.

To take his mind off these unpleasant thoughts, he returned to the krool and flew up the gradual contour of its body until he reached the highest point. Then he burned away in one spot, calmly and consistently, until he had produced a hollow full of bubbling black liquid like a cauldron. Still he carried on, until at last the heat melted a hole right through the krool and the liquid flowed away on to the ground beneath it. The beast began to convulse, flapping its skirts and heaving its great body so that the snow which covered it flew up in a thick cloud. Kevin hovered in the air and waited until the krool gave a final shudder and lay still.