HE CAME OUT OF TERRIFYING DARKNESS INTO the bright summer afternoon. The ground tilted, so that he stumbled and fell. For a moment or two he stayed pressed against the crisp grass, trying to steady the earth, and all the time clutching that small metal disc which had brought him here.
Then, carefully, he got up and looked around.
Apparently nobody had observed his arrival. That was just as well: it would have taken a great deal of explaining.
The house had changed. Or, rather, it would change. The full implications of this thought struck him, and he felt dizzy. The experiment had succeeded: here he was, and it was utterly incredible. He looked up at the windows of the house, and blankly they returned his gaze.
He must move. On this wide lawn below the terrace he was exposed to the view of anyone who might pass those windows.
The shed. His father had predicted (or established from records) that there would be a shed some ten yards away from his point of arrival. And there it was. Under a dark hedge, its windows grey and festooned with cobwebs, it waited for him.
The door creaked as he pushed it carefully open. Old garden tools were propped in corners. A new spade looked out of place in the gloom. There were several shelves, coated in dust and marked by trickles of solidified glue from a pot which had leaked.
This would do. This was the best place. At last he relaxed his grip on the metal disc, and slid it into a crack in the planking, behind a stack of flower-pots that did not seem to have been disturbed for years.
The smell in here was disgusting. But this, he thought ruefully, was an unhygienic world. He had known when he set off that he wasn’t going to like the place.
He emerged from the shed and stood in the shadow of the hedge. It was dank and grey down here. Up there at the head of the slope the house glowed deep red. Its roof sprouted absurd white turrets, one of them with incongruous leaded windows. Beyond the house were more trees. Not the courtyard that he knew, and not the spires and towers of the magnificent city, but trees.
He felt more remote from home and his known world than if he had been on another planet.
It was no good waiting here. He had a job to do, and the sooner it was done the sooner he would be on his way home.
He took a quick glance at the staring windows, then walked briskly up the path. It climbed beside the terrace and swung in towards the house. He would have liked to abandon it and make a dash across the lawn to the front gate; but some instinct, some feeling that one must be caught—if caught at all—behaving normally, kept him to the path.
He came round the end of the building on to the sweep of gravel before the porch.
And the girl said:
“Hello. Where did you spring from?”
He stopped.
“Good afternoon,” he said carefully, apologetically. “I’m afraid I——”
“There isn’t anyone in but me. Did you want my father?”
She was a few inches shorter than he was, but still tall for a woman. Her mouth was full and generous, but not too wide for beauty. His sudden appearance did not seem to have startled her: she was very self-possessed, and there was something disconcerting in the challenging directness of her voice.
As he had not replied, she went on:
“Where’ve you come from?”
“I was … trying to find someone. There wasn’t any answer at the front, so I went round to see …” He thought quickly. “I think, after all, I must have come to the wrong place.”
She continued to regard him penetratingly. He cursed his luck. If only she had not appeared at that moment, he could have been away.
She said quizzically: “Who was it you were trying to find?”
“It’s just that I’m interested in a certain youth organisation. I’m trying to get in touch with the leader, but as I’ve only just come back to London——”
“You must be looking for Simon,” she said.
The name was startling, unexpected. He had hardly anticipated making such an immediate contact. He said tentatively:
“Simon Lemuel?”
“Who else?”
The question was a dreadful echo—two words echoed back from the future, two words that his father would speak in years to come. “Who else?” his father had said, long ago in the future.
“So you do know him,” he said.
“There aren’t many people of our age who don’t know him, are there?”
“I suppose not,” he said.
“But who suggested you should come here?”
He spoke quickly, with deliberate vagueness. “I’ve been away quite a time—visiting friends round here, they said I ought to enquire at this address. At least, they said there was someone up here connected with the group, and I thought this was the house. But I may have got it all wrong. Still, if you do know where I can get in touch with him …”
“Everyone knows that,” she said. “It’s been widely publicised.”
He wished she did not look so alert. It was as though she guessed his whole story and was merely leading him on until he had been trapped into making some admission. Yet that was ridiculous. She could not possibly know. He was seeing danger where there was none.
“I’m afraid I’m rather out of touch,” he said.
“So it seems. You must have been to the far ends of the earth. Perhaps”—her voice was light and mocking—“you’re some famous explorer. Or you’ve been drifting across the Atlantic on a plank for six months. That’s very fashionable nowadays. Would I know your name?”
His name.
They had not discussed the question of what name he should give. There had been too many other urgent matters. He invented on the spur of the moment: “Clifford Western.” His own surname could have meant nothing to Lemuel—not yet—but instinctively he shied away from the idea of committing himself.
“I’m Naomi Cardew,” she said.
They shook hands. Her hand was cool and slender. The cool clarity of her eyes was both disturbing and refreshing. Her clothes were strange—as strange, in Clifford’s view, as the uncomfortable garments he himself had put on for this journey—but they did not disguise her beauty or the grace of her movements.
“Naomi.” He tried the name over. It was new to him. It must be one of those names which had somehow fallen out of use in the intervening decades. Then he said: “And you—you belong to the Young Adventurers yourself?”
“I do indeed.” Her smile was enchanting now. He was disturbed by her obvious enthusiasm. But then, he had been told what the Young Adventurers were to become during the following years, and she had no such foreknowledge. “I hope we’re going to enrol you?”
“I hope so,” he said.
A noise like a low-flying sports model of the old-fashioned kind boomed nearby. Through the trees at the bottom of the garden he glimpsed a green lurching mass swinging round a curve below. A train. Of course. He had read about the noisy old style of train, and seen models in museums.
Naomi’s quiet laugh recalled him.
“You’re very odd,” she said. He was relieved that she sounded amused rather than suspicious. “I don’t know what to make of you. But then, we get all sorts of odd people in the group.”
“Thank you.”
They both laughed this time, and he felt more at ease.
“I suppose it is a bit queer, just walking in on you like this,” he extemporised.
“I’m not at all sure that I approve of being regarded as a recruiting centre,” she said. “I don’t really see why you were sent here.”
He could hardly tell her that there had been no alternative; could hardly tell her that this was only a starting-place, that he was here only because a scientific concept demanded that he should arrive here.
“Anyway,” she said, “you want to be taken to Simon?”
“If you can possibly arrange it.”
“There’s a meeting in an hour’s time. You’ve probably seen the notices.”
“Er—yes, I think I have.”
She seemed to make up her mind. “All right. I must go in and get ready. Would you like to come in and wait for a few minutes? Then we can go over together.”
“It’s very kind of you,” he said.
He was thankful for this stroke of luck. At the same time, he knew he must be wary. There was a streak he recognised in this girl—an impulsiveness rather like his own. She had offered to help him because she was curious about him, and her curiosity was the sort that had to be satisfied.
He was taken into a large room which was cool and dark after the brightness outside. While he waited he smiled over the strange furniture and the incredibly bulky magazines that lay on a small table near his chair. At the end of five minutes he got up and stood looking out of the window. Between the gateposts at the far end of the drive he could catch glimpses of traffic passing—fascinating glimpses. Such strange objects on four wheels; and a man pushing a metal two-wheeled affair up the hill.
Naomi came in behind him.
“Ready?” she said.
“It’s kind of you to go to so much trouble.”
“I’m a great worker for the cause,” she said with a laugh that was gay and yet, at the same time, sincere and terribly in earnest.
They walked down the hill. He flinched suddenly as a car came shuddering in close to the low pavement, and then laughed to himself. The roads of tomorrow were quieter than this, but he had not expected to be so startled by such primitive surface traffic.
At the foot of the hill a flight of steps took them to a building beside the railway lines.
Naomi glanced at him as they passed into a small room with a wooden floor. He paused irresolutely, trying to get his bearings. He must assess all this and fit it in, if possible, with what he had been told. There were no automatic fare chargers. By the time he had located the small window in the wall, Naomi had already reached it and was saying: “Two to Charing Cross, please.”
He fumbled in the awkward, unfamiliar pocket for the money with which he had been provided.
“You can pay for us on the Tube,” said Naomi, leading the way on to the platform.
He must keep his wits about him. He must watch and imitate, and learn. In many ways he was as much at a disadvantage as a savage would have been. He had not expected to feel quite so lost. It was no easier to adapt oneself to primitive things than it would be to cope with things beyond one’s scientific comprehension. The rocking train alarmed him. The world beyond the train window was foreign. He was horrified by the tangle of buildings. Crude boards of tattered paper advertisements rushed in towards the railway line, then were cut off to reveal piles of metal below—scrap metal scarred with rust and smeared with fading colour. Shapes of what might once have been wheeled vehicles huddled in metal cemeteries with sagging wooden walls. The early evening sun, trapped on roofs and chimneys, leaked only fitfully down into the dark chasms between houses. There were none of the great boulevards yet. He could not get his bearings. There was none of that magnificent convergence of avenues and gardens on the south bank of the river which he knew so well. Even the sky offered no freedom: it was blocked by a dark haze, manufactured by chimneys pouring their enmity into the blue. New blocks of red brick buildings were as raw as scalded flesh; but they would darken, as everything else in this dispiriting London had darkened.
They got out of the train, walked down a slope through a jostling crowd, and descended into the earth. Red trains roared out of a tunnel. They could not speak until they were out again in a wide street overlooked by grimy, heavy buildings. Shop windows shouted their crude messages at him. He longed to stop and read, to study these inept exhortations, to marvel over such enormities; but Naomi was hurrying now, and he had no wish to draw attention to his unfamiliarity with these phenomena.
They entered a square, crossed it, and mounted a short flight of steps into an entrance hall.
In another moment he was shaking hands with a dark-featured young man a year or two older than himself. The last time he had seen this face, it had been older: Simon Lemuel had then had grey hair and his cheeks had filled out slightly, sagged very slightly. But the difference was not a striking one. The face had been as smooth and oddly dispassionate as it was now; and the assurance, the terrible self-assurance, was the same.
“Glad to know you,” Lemuel was saying with a slight frown, and a hint of a question in his bleak eyes.
Their hands relaxed and parted. The contact had been made. Clifford had come back across almost half a century to meet this young man; and now they had met, and the contest could begin.
IT HAD REALLY BEGUN ALREADY. THE CHALLENGE had been thrown down on that afternoon in 1996 when those shots were fired.
Clifford had come back to earth that afternoon—literally back to earth—with the greatest reluctance. The ground reclaimed him: he was once more a prisoner of gravity, and it needed a conscious effort to walk across the courtyard and into the house. Walls closed in around him. The ceilings weighed down on him.
He went up to the lounge on the first floor and stood by the window, peering up nostalgically into the sky. A few bright specks flitted across the blue canvas and dropped towards the air terminal. He wanted to be back up there, free, weightless, practising the vertiginous tricks that were possible in his new sports model. In the sky you were alive. Nothing down here could compare with it.
Beyond the main gate a hovercar fell silently and swiftly. For a moment or two he watched the gate, expecting a visitor. But nobody appeared.
He was too restless to settle to anything. The blankness of the courtyard and the feeling of constriction he got from the houses, spires and towers of the surrounding city drove him away from the window. Automatically his finger flicked the wall switch. The visipanel glowed, flowered into a splash of colour, and then threw up shapes in bright relief. A three-dimensional world formed itself within the wall. Clifford looked into a swirl of dancing figures.
He was not fond of ballet, but for a moment he stood watching. At least there was something here which he could vaguely associate with his own gyrations in the limitless heavens. But the illusion did not last. He saw the feet of the dancers touching the floor, saw them dragged back to earth, and after a while their movements became meaningless.
He spun the knob. Alternative programmes flashed and dissolved. Then he heard a familiar voice.
The screen was filled with a mellow green light. It was soothing yet not too restful: the modulating hues had been nicely calculated to put the listener in a rece. . .
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