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Low above them flew the guardian of this human line. The flier exhibited a degree of majesty as his great wings beat their way slowly through the viscous air. He was as much a creature of custom as the six men below him, his duty being merely to see that they returned to the warrens of the Bastion.
Before their fighting spirit was eroded, these six had often in the past plotted escape. It was rumoured that somewhere ruinous cities still stood, inhabited by tribes of men and women who had managed to hold out against the Fleet Ones as the centuries declined: that somewhere those virtues by which humans had once set great store were still preserved, against the onslaught of night.
But no one incarcerated in the Bastion knew how to reach the legendary cities. Few had stamina enough to endure long journeys overland.
All the six desired at present was to return to their prison. Their shift as cleaners in the Mechanism was over for the day. Soup and rest awaited them. The horror of their situation had long since dulled their senses. In the underground stabling, where humans and animals were indifferently herded together, the myrmidons of the Fleet Ones would bring round their rations. Then they could sleep.
As for the weekly levy of blood to be paid while they slept … even that nightmare had become mere routine.
So they negotiated the path through the bloodthirsty-plants and came with some relief to the stoma gaping at the base of the Bastion, waiting to swallow them. The guardian alighted, tucked away his wings, and directed them through the aperture. Hot and foetid air came up to meet them like a diseased breath.
The concretion into which they disappeared rose high into the saffron-tinted atmosphere, dominating the landscape in which it stood. It resembled a huge anthill. No conceptions of symmetry or elegance of any kind had entered the limited minds of its architects. It had reared itself upwards on a random basis. Its highest central point resembled a rounded tower, reinforcing the impression that the whole structure was a kind of brute phallus which had thrust its way through the body of the planet.
Here and there on the flanks of the Bastion, side features obtruded. Some resembled malformed limbs. Some twisted upwards, or sideways. Some turned down and burrowed again into the ravaged soil, serving as buttresses to the main structure.
The main portions of the Bastion lay below ground, in its unending warrens, stables, and crypts. The structure above ground was blind. Not a window showed. The Fleet Ones were no friends of light.
Yet on higher levels orifices showed, crudely shaped. Much coming and going was in evidence at these vents. Here the Fleet Ones could conveniently launch themselves into flight: as they had done at the beginning of time, so now at its end.
Only the orifice at the top of the pile, larger than all the others, was free of sinister traffic. It was reserved for the Prince of Darkness himself, Lord Dracula. This was his castle. He would launch himself from this great height whenever he was about to go on a mission into the world – as even now he was preparing to do.
As the shift of six began its winding descent into underground levels, to rest in the joyless inanition of slaves, four other men of different calibre were preparing to leave the Mechanism.
These four, in luckier days, had been scientists. Captive, they remained free of shackles, so that they could move without impediment in the building. The genetically non-scientific species who held them in captivity had abducted them from various epochs of past history. They were guarded. But because they were necessary for the maintenance of the Mechanism, their well-being within the Bastion was assured. They merely had to work until they died.
The leader of the quartet came down from the observatory, checking the time on his watch.
This leader, elected by common consent, was a tall man in his late thirties. The Fleet Ones had captured him from the Obsidianal Century. His brilliant mind and indomitable spirit were such that others took courage from him. Someone once claimed that his brain represented the flowering of the sapient Homo sapiens. The plan about to be transformed from theory to action was a product of his thought.
‘We have two minutes to go, friends,’ he said now, as they were closing down their instruments.
The Mechanism – ignorantly so called by the Fleet Ones – was a combined solar observatory and power house. All space observatories had long been destroyed by the deteriorating sun.
It was the power function which was all important. From the platforms of the Mechanism, shelving out like giant fungi, the solar satellites were controlled which drained the energies of the sun. These energies were redirected to meet the needs of the Fleet Ones. And in particular the needs of the Fleet Ones’ single innovatory form of transportation.
The scientists were forced to work for their hated enemies. They ran everything as inefficiently as possible. Because the Mechanism was lighted brilliantly to allow the humans to work, the Fleet Ones would not enter. They posted their guardians outside, continually circling the immense structure.
‘Delay here,’ said the leader, sharply. The four of them were in the foyer, preparing to go off shift and be returned to the Bastion. He glanced again at his watch.
‘According to our predictions, there’s now a minute to go.’
Beyond the glass doors, they could see the familiar tarnished landscape like a furrowed brow. In the distance, failed hills, shattered river beds, all lost in an origami of light and shade. Nearer at hand, the prodigious thrust of the Bastion, circled by leathery fliers. As a sudden stormy wind buffeted them, the fliers resembled dead leaves blowing at autumn’s call. Shunning the light, they had no knowledge of the phenomenon approaching from space.
Just outside the doors, fluttering like a bat, the lead guardian on duty came down to an unsteady landing. He braced himself against the wind.
Lifting a hand to shield his brow, he stared in at the scientists, his red eyes set amid the dark skin and fur of the sharp-fanged visage. He beckoned to them.
They made some pretence of moving towards the doors, heading instead for a metal reception counter.
Thirty seconds to go.
The lower western sky was filled with a sun like an enormous blossom. It was the flower which had already destroyed all the flowers of Earth. Imperfectly round, its crimson heart crackled with stamens of lightning. The solar wind blew its malevolent pollens about the planets. Round it orbiced the four solar stations which were leaching it of its energies, sucking them down into the subterranean storehouses of the Mechanism. On the face of this great helium-burner moved vortices which could swallow worlds. They showed like rashes of a disease, as if they worked at the débridement of an immense bloated organ.
In the midst of this solar turmoil – as those in the observatory had discovered – a magnesium-white eruption flowered.
‘Now,’ cried the leader. The thirty seconds were up.
They flung themselves down on the floor behind the metal barrier, burying their heads in their arms, closing their eyes.
Precisely on the time they had estimated, the shell flash ejected from the sun. It illuminated the world with floods of light and fury. Screaming wind followed it in a shock wave, travelling along down the throat of the system until, many hours later, it punched itself out beyond the heliopause and far into outer space. As it radiated outwards, it licked with its scorching tongue much of the atmosphere from the vulnerable worlds in its path.
Only the four scientists were prepared for the event.
They lay behind their shelter while the world smouldered outside. Their guardian had fallen like a cinder.
They rose cautiously at last. They stood. They stared at each other, stared at the blackened landscape outside, where the Bastion remained intact. Then, according to plan, they headed for the stairs leading to the upper floors.
Their hair sparkled and sang as they moved. Electrostatic action in the tormented air rendered the elevators inoperative.
Oxygen was scarce. Yet they forced themselves on, knowing they must act now, while the Fleet Ones were stunned.
Through waves of heat they climbed, dragging the vitiated air into their lungs. On one landing they collected a wing from a store cupboard, on another landing another wing. Sections of body structure, improvised from dismantled parts of the Mechanism, were also gathered as they climbed. By the time they reached the observatory on the highest level, they needed merely to secure the various parts together and they had a glider large enough to carry a man.
The landscape they surveyed was covered in fast-moving smoke. The pall washed against the two edifices of Bastion and Mechanism like a spring tide.
One detail they did observe. The bloodthirst-plants were cautiously poking their muzzles from the ground again. They were intelligent enough, yet part of nature enough, to sense when the shell flash was coming, and to retreat underground from it. But the men wasted little time in observing the phenomenon.
‘Is the air calm enough for flight?’ a small bearded man asked the leader. ‘Suppose all the cities containing men have just been destroyed by fire?’
‘We’ve no alternative but to try,’ said the leader. ‘This is our one chance. The next shell flash is many lifetimes away.’ Yet he paused before climbing into the glider, as if to hear what his friends had to say at this solemn moment.
The bearded man perhaps regretted his hesitations in the face of the other’s courage.
‘Yes, of course you must go,’ he said. ‘Somehow we have to get word of what is happening here back to the far past. Stoker has to be informed.’
The scientist standing next to him said, in sorrowful disagreement, ‘Yet all the old legends say that Dracula destroyed Stoker.’
The leader answered firmly, addressing them all, with the sense of parting heavy upon them. ‘We have argued the situation through sufficiently. Those old legends may be wrong, for we well understand how history can be changed. Our given three-dimensional space is only one dimension within the universe’s four-dimensional space. Time is a flexible element within it. No particle has a definite path, as the uncertainty principle states. We have been enslaved here at the end of the world in order to help generate the colossal voltages the Fleet Ones require to regiment those paths. I shall seek out the other end of their trail – and there I believe the legendary Stoker is to be found. It is Stoker after all who is one of Earth’s heroes, the stoker – as his name implies – who brought fire with which to burn out a great chance for all mankind.’
‘So he did,’ agreed the others, almost in chorus. And one of them, the youngest, added, ‘After all, this horrendous present, according to the laws of chaos, is a probability only, not an actuality. History can be changed.’
The leader made to step into the glider. Again the bearded man detained him.
‘Just wait till these winds have died. The glider will have a better chance then.’
‘And then the Fleet Ones will be back on the attack. It’s necessary that I go now.’
He looked searchingly into their faces. ‘I know you will suffer for this. My regret is that we were unable to fashion a plane large enough to carry all four of us. Always remember – I shall succeed or die in the attempt.’
‘There are states far worse than death where the Fleet Ones are concerned,’ said the bearded man, mustering a smile. He made to shake the leader’s hand, changed his mind, and embraced him warmly instead.
‘Farewell, Alwyn. God’s grace guide you.’
The leader stepped into the machine.
The others, as prearranged, pushed it to the edge of the drop – and over. The glider fell until its wings bit into the air. It steadied. It began to fly. It circled, it even gained height. It began heading towards the east.
The scientists left behind stood watching until the glider was faint in the murk.
Their voices too went with the wind.
‘Farewell, Alwyn!’
1 (#ulink_c620b1cd-4ad5-5e3a-823f-d3afc19e09c3)
State Route 18 runs north from St George, through the Iron Mountains, to the Escalante Desert. One day in 1999, it also ran into a past so distant nobody had ever dared visualize it.
Bernard Clift had worked in this part of Utah before, often assisted by students from Dixie College with a leaning towards palaeontology. This summer, Clift’s instincts had led him to dig on the faulty stretch of rock the students called Old John, after the lumber-built jakes near the site, set up by a forgotten nineteenth-century prospector.
Clift was a thin, spare man, deeply tanned, medium height, his sharp features and penetrating grey eyes famous well beyond the limits of his own profession. There was a tenseness about him today, as if he knew that under his hand lay a discovery that was to bring him even greater fame, and to release on the world new perspectives and new terror.
Over the dig, a spread of blue canvas, of a deeper blue than the Utah sky, had been erected, to shade Clift and his fellow-workers from the sun. Clustered below the brow of rock where they worked were a dozen miscellaneous vehicles – Clift’s trailer, a trailer from Enterprise which served food and drink all day, and the automobiles and campers belonging to students and helpers.
A dirt road led from this encampment into the desert. All was solitude and stillness, apart from the activity centred on Old John. There Clift knelt in his dusty jeans, brushing soil and crumbs of rock from the fossilized wooden lid they had uncovered.
Scattered bones of a dinosaur of the aurischian order had been extracted from the rock, labelled, temporarily identified as belonging to a large theropod, and packed into crates. Now, in a stratum below the dinosaur grave, the new find was revealed.
Several people crowded round the freshly excavated hole in which Clift worked with one assistant. Cautious digging had revealed fossil wood, which slowly emerged in the shape of a coffin. On the lid of the coffin, a sign had been carved:
Overhead, a vulture wheeled, settling on a pinnacle of rock near the dig. It waited.
Clift levered at the ancient lid. Suddenly, it split along the middle and broke. The palaeontologist lifted the shard away. A smell, too ancient to be called the scent of death, drifted out into the hot dry air.
A girl student with the Dixie College insignia on her T-shirt yelped and ran from the group as she saw what lay in the coffin.
Using his brush, Clift swept away a layer of red ochre. His assistant collected fragile remains of dead blossom, placing them reverently in a plastic bag. A skeleton in human form was revealed, lying on its side. Tenderly, Clift uncovered the upper plates of the skull. It was twisted round so that it appeared to stare upwards at the world of light with round ochred eyes.
The head offices and laboratories of the thriving Bodenland Corporation were encompassed in bronzed-glass curtain walls, shaped in neo-cubist form and disposed so that they dominated one road approach into Dallas, Texas.
At this hour of the morning the facade reflected the sun into the eyes of anyone approaching the corporation from the airport – as was the case with the imposing lady now disembarking from a government craft in which she had flown from Washington. She was sheathed in a fabric which reflected back something of the lustre from the corporation.
Her name was Elsa Schatzman, three times divorced daughter of Eliah Schatzman. She was First Secretary at the Washington Department of the Environment. She looked as if she wielded power, and did.
Joe Bodenland knew that Elsa Schatzman was in the offing. At present, however, he had little thought for her, being involved in an argument with his life’s companion, Mina Legrand. While they talked, Bodenland’s secretary continued discreetly to work at her desk.
‘First things first, Birdie,’ said Bodenland, with a patience that was calculated to vex Mina.
Mina Legrand was another powerful lady, although the genial lines of her face did not proclaim that fact. She was tall and still graceful, and currently having weight problems, despite an active life. Friends said of her, affectionately, that she put up with a lot of hassle from Joe; still closer friends observed that of late he was putting up with plenty from Mina.
‘Joe, your priorities are all screwed up. You must make time for your family,’ she said.
‘I’ll make time, but first things first,’ he repeated.
‘The first thing is it’s your son’s wedding day,’ Mina said. ‘I warn you, Joe, I’m going to fly down to Gondwana without you. One of these days, I’ll leave you for good, I swear I will.’
Joe played a tune on his desk top with the fingers of his left hand. They were long blunt fingers with wide spade-like nails, ridged and hard. Bodenland himself resembled his fingers. He too was long and blunt, with an element of hardness in him that had enabled him to lead an adventurous life as well as succeeding in the competitive international world of selling scientific research. He set his head towards his right shoulder with a characteristic gesture, as he asked: ‘How long has Larry been engaged to Kylie? Under a year. How long have we been pursuing the idea of inertial disposal? Over five years. Millions of dollars hang on today’s favourable reception of our demonstration by Washington. I just have to be here, Birdie, and that’s that.’
‘Larry will never forgive you. Nor will I.’
‘You will, Mina. So will Larry. Because you two are human. Washington ain’t.’
‘All right, Joe – you have the last word as usual. But you’re in deep trouble as of now.’ With that, Mina turned and marched from the office. The door closed silently behind her; its suction arm prevented it from slamming.
‘I’ll be down there just as soon as I can,’ Bodenland called, having a last-minute twinge of anxiety.
He turned to his secretary, Rose Gladwin, who had sat silently at her desk, eyes down, while this heated conversation was going on.
‘Birth, death, the great spirit of scientific enquiry – which of those is most important to a human being, Rose?’
She looked up with a slight smile.
‘The great spirit of scientific enquiry, Joe,’ she said.
‘You always have the right answer.’
‘I’m just informed that Miss Schatzman is en route from the airport right now.’
‘Let me know as soon as she arrives. I’ll be with Waldgrave.’
He glanced at his watch as he went out, and walked briskly down the corridor, cursing Washington and himself. It annoyed him to think that Larry was getting married at all. Marriage was so old-fashioned, yet now, on the turn of the century, it was coming back into fashion.
Bodenland and his senior research scientist, Waldgrave, were in reception to welcome Miss Schatzman when she arrived with her entourage. She was paraded through the technical floor, where everyone had been instructed to continue working as usual, to the laboratory with the notice in gilt on its glass door, INERTIAL RESEARCH.
Bodenland’s judicious answers in response to her questions indicated that Schatzman had been properly briefed. He liked that, and her slightly plump forties-ish figure in a tailored suit which signalled to him that human nature survived under the official exterior.
Various important figures were gathered in the lab for the demonstration, including a backer from the Bull-Brunswick Bank. Bodenland introduced Schatzman to some of them while technicians made everything finally ready. As she was shaking hands with the Bank, one of Bodenland’s aides came up and spoke softly in Bodenland’s ear.
‘There’s an urgent call for you from Utah, Joe. Bernard Clift, the archaeologist. Says he has an important discovery.’
‘Okay, Mike. Tell Bernard I’ll call him back when possible.’
In the centre of the lab stood a glass cabinet much resembling a shower enclosure. Cables ran into it from computers and other machines, where two assistants stood by a switchboard. The hum of power filled the air, lending extra tension to the meeting.
‘You have all the technical specifications of the inertial disposal principle in our press and video pack, Miss Schatzman,’ Bodenland said. ‘If you have no questions there, we’ll move straight into the demonstration.’
As he spoke, he gave a sign and an assistant in a lab coat dragged forward a black plastic bag large enough to contain a man.
Waldgrave explained, ‘The bag is full of sand, nothing more. It represents a consignment of nuclear or toxic waste.’
