Time Out of Mind

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

As a young boy, Laurie Linton encountered a strange apparition: a ghostly man who urgently mouthed a message: KILL MAGOBION! Years later, as a member of the UN Narcotics Security Agency, Linton and the beautiful Carol Kennedy were assigned a special duty: investigation of a mysterious drug which endowed its addicts with superhuman powers. Now, that investigation leads Linton and Carol into a bewildering maze where past and future slide by each other at terrifying speed...where international peace teeters in the balance...and where all blues point to the top-secret Ministry of Internal Security and its prestigious, powerful leader - COLONEL PIERS MAGOBION.

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 174

Sample

The boy picked his way among the water-worn rocks at the river’s edge, the scarlet-tipped float tap-tapping against the mottled cane shaft of the fishing rod he gripped in his right hand. Although dawn was already some two hours past the sun had only just thrust itself above the eastern mountains and frail cobwebs of mist were still rising among the branches of the riverside trees.

He knew exactly where he was going—the bend where the current had scoured out a long dark overhang among the oak roots and where, the previous year, he had hooked and lost the biggest trout he had ever seen. For ten months now that monstrous fish had haunted his day-dreams and he knew, as only the born fisherman can know, that it was still there, waiting for him.

He scrambled over a granite slab, slid gingerly down to a ridge of pebbles, skipped over a swirling, peat-stained pool and gained the shoulder of firm sand that sloped away into the bight of the bend. He stood still for a moment while his brown eyes flickered from point to point, noting the differences a winter had brought—a tangle of dead grass and twigs hooked high up in the trailing branches of the oak; some new holes burrowed into the subsoil by the water’s edge; a bristling spruce trunk, bleached bone-white by the June sun, which must have been dragged down from the forestry plantations at the head of the valley by the spring floods.

He now became very cool and methodical. So often had he rehearsed this moment in his imagination that he was able to contain his mounting excitement and was aware of it only as a sort of hollow feeling in his stomach, a tenseness in his chest. Keeping well back from the hurrying water he made his way stealthily across the sand bank and scrambled up into a shallow depression in the rocks. This hollow was, in fact, the lip of a gulley, overgrown with brambles and elder down which, during the winter storms, flash water from the hills drained into the main stream. Now it was a dry and shady tunnel, carpeted with a drifting of dead leaves, and it offered him excellent cover.

He unlooped the sling bag from his shoulder, set it down beside him, and unwound the nylon trace by the simple expedient of twitching the rod so that the float twirled round and did the job for him. Then he laid the rod carefully on the rocks, unbuckled the bag and took out the perforated tin which contained the worms he had brought for bait. Having selected one he snicked it on to the hook, thumbed off the ratchet on the reel, and taking hold of the trace in his left hand, swung out the rod tip, at the same moment releasing the trace.

The float swooped out, the black monofil line whispering off the spool, and he saw the cast drop precisely at the point he had intended. As the bait vanished beneath the scurrying, bubble-laced water, the boy let out his pent breath in a faint ecstatic sigh.

The float had travelled downstream no more than a dozen feet before it bobbed and plunged under. He struck sharply and felt the immediate, heart-stopping shock that told him he had hooked a fish. He checked its first panic rush and turned it so that it drove upstream away from the roots of the oak, then he reeled it in and hoisted it up on to the ledge. It rose, wriggling frenziedly and scattering glittering water-drops over the cold rocks. A trout but not the trout. About half a pound. Three more like it and his mother could revise their supper menu. Frowning with concentration he grasped the fish firmly and banged its head against the rock. It twitched once and its rosy gills fluttered and folded like petals against its speckled flanks. Then he removed the hook, laid the fish on one side, wiped his hands on a rag and prepared to re-bait.

He had just reached out towards the bait tin when he sensed that he was no longer alone. Years later, trying to recall what it was that had first alerted him, he wondered whether he had not heard some sound—the click of a breaking twig, the rasp of a bramble—but could recall nothing. Yet at that moment it was as if a cold hand had brushed across the nape of his neck. He felt the skin on his back and shoulders cringe; his hair stir. Very, very slowly he turned his head and peered over his right shoulder.

The man was half-squatting, half-kneeling in the shadowy tunnel of the gulley. He was dressed in a tightly fitting overall that looked black but might have been dark blue. There was a strip about an inch wide of some bright yellow metal banded across his forehead ending in two small gold spirals just above his temples. Two similar bands braceleted his wrists. As soon as the boy’s eyes alighted upon his, the man’s lips moved, but no sound emerged.

The boy gaped, poised on the razor edge between terror and curiosity. There was something about the man, some quality of yearning so intense that it held his fear in check. “Who are you?” he whispered.

Again the dark eyes pleaded, the lips moved. But the boy heard nothing, no sound at all. And suddenly he noticed something else, something utterly incredible. A single thin shaft of the morning sunlight, probing through the tangled undergrowth, was striking the man’s right shoulder and was apparently passing right through him! It fell like a tarnished sovereign on the dry, drifted leaves beyond his bent left knee.

At that same instant the trout gave a sudden galvanic shudder, flapped twice and lay still. The imperative reflex fear of losing his catch momentarily twitched the boy’s attention away from the man. When he glanced back a second later his mysterious visitant was gone.

The boy peered around apprehensively. The sunbeam was still there, so where then was the man? Very slowly and cautiously he rose to his feet and gazed about him. Nothing was changed in any way. He looked down at the rod lying by his feet and then back to the gulley. Impossible for anyone to have got out without being seen or heard: impossible for anyone to have got in either! Could he have imagined it? He squatted down again and squinted into the tunnel, then, with his heart racing madly, he shuffled gingerly forward for the four yards that separated him from the sunbeam and peered down at the ground. The dead leaves lay undisturbed where they had drifted. How could anyone have knelt there and left no trace? So what had he seen? A ghost? He scurried back to the rock ledge and, partly to reassure himself and partly because he was a child with a methodical mind, he pushed back the cuff of his sweater and consulted the wrist chronometer which had been given to him on his thirteenth birthday a fortnight before. “Six twenty-seven,” he said out aloud. “July the seventeenth, 1987.” And then, unaccountably, he shivered.

The dark blue hovertruck with the silver lightning-bolt insignia edged its way up out of the concrete channel and skittered off up the valley toward the high dam. The man at the controls glanced back over his shoulder and said: “How is he, Doc?”

“Still out cold,” replied the girl.

“He’s O.K., though?”

“Pulse and respiration are both steady. Temperature’s down a bit.”

“Do you think it worked?”

“How do I know, Steve?”

“You know what I think, Billie? I think the whole idea’s completely lunatic. But crazy! Shall I tell you why?”

The girl said nothing, seemingly preoccupied with removing the metal bracelets from the wrists of the unconscious man who lay slumped in a tilt chair at the back of the truck.

“For one thing your co-ordinates.”

“What about them?”

“Well, they’re relative not absolute.”

“I’m not with you.”

“It’s the old flaw in all the time-travel stories. Nothing stands still. We’re careering through space at 300 kilometers a second. Jump backward or forward even ten minutes and you’ll likely find yourself in the void.”

“No one’s jumping anywhere,” said the girl. “It’s just a psychic energy field projection.”

“You believe that?”

The hovertruck slid crabwise on to the macadamized highway, settled and went into wheel drive. The girl succeeded in unfastening the second bracelet and slotted it alongside its companion in the purpose-molded foam lining of a plastic container. Then she set about detaching the band from the man’s forehead. By the time that too had been stowed away and the container clipped shut the truck was rolling on to the roadway which traversed the top of the dam. At once the full stature of the engineering feat became apparent. The twin arms of the sail-dotted lake could be seen reaching out into the mountains northward till they vanished from sight in the blue distance.

The man called Steve took one hand off the controls and gestured across the water. “This must have been quite a place.”

“What do you mean, ‘Must have been?’” said the girl.

“When Laurie was a kid.”

Hearing his name spoken the man in the chair groaned faintly and opened his eyes.

The girl bent over him solicitously. “Laurie? Are you feeling all right?”

The man’s eyelids fluttered down and then up again. “Billie?”

“Here. Drink this.” She dropped a pink tablet into a plastic cup, slopped some water on to it from a flask and swirled it round watching the tablet disintegrate in bubbles. The man lay passive, watching her, saying nothing.

“How do you feel?” she asked. “Numb?”

He nodded and ran his tongue along his lower lip.

“It’ll wear off in a minute or two,” she said. “How about the head?”

“Aches like hell,” he whispered.

“What did you expect?” She grinned and held the cup to his lips.

He took a couple of sips, swallowed and closed his eyes again.

“No,” she said firmly. “Finish it. Come on.”

Steve called out: “I hate to be the bearer of unwelcome tidings but I have a sneaky suspicion someone’s on to us.”

The girl stretched her arm across the man in the chair, prised apart two slats of the venetian blind that shuttered the rear window and peered out. “You’re dreaming, Steve,” she said. “There’s no one.”

For answer Steve lifted the index finger and jerked it toward the truck’s metal roof. “Look up there.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s just a feeling.”

The girl lifted one of the man’s hands and pressed his fingers around the cup. “Go on,” she urged. “Finish it. You’ll feel better.”

“I feel lousy,” he mumbled.

“That’s what I mean.”

The man groaned, raised the cup to his lips and drained it off.

“Good,” she said and scrambled up to the front of the truck. “Now show me, Steve.”

The driver leaned forward and glanced upward through the domed perspex. “There.”

She craned her neck and stared up at the little red and white craft which was floating like a seed of thistledown about a thousand feet above them. “How do you know it isn’t an amenity patrol?” she said. “There must be hundreds of boats out there today.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Like I said it’s just a feeling.”

“Is it M.I.S.?”

“You tell me.”

Again she squinted upward and then shrugged. “Well, it’s too late now.”

“What’s up?” The man called Laurie had climbed off the chair and was making his way unsteadily up to the front of the truck.

“Nothing,” said the girl, glancing around at him. “A false alarm.”

The truck was approaching the end of the curved dam traverse. To the left a sliproad dropped away to join the twin-tracked highway which wound along the margin of the lake past the hotels, the waterfront restaurants and the marinas to where, among the out-of-sight creeks, the wealthy had their private houses. To the right looped the access road to the Snowdonia Motorway which had been officially opened by the King as recently as March, 2005. As Steve slowed, preparatory to swinging right, a black-uniformed M.I.S. guard emerged from a blockhouse and waved them to a halt.

“What now?” muttered the girl.

Steve drew in alongside the guard and slid back the transparent canopy. “Salutations, friend,” he said amicably. “What can we do for you?”

The man leaned forward and squinted into the truck. “NARCOS?” he grunted.

Steve nodded.

“I haven’t seen you around here before.”

“We haven’t been around here before,” replied Steve.

“Was it you down at the culvert?”

“That’s right.”

“Doing what?”

“Oh, just sniffing about,” said Steve blandly.

The guard eyed him suspiciously. “Where you from then?”

“South west. We’re based in Bristol.”

“Going back there now?”

“That’s right.”

“O.K.” said the man, stepping back. “On your way.”

“You could do us a favor,” said Steve. “If you see anyone else snooping around that culvert get a description of them and radio me at Bristol. Lieutenant Rowlands. O.K.?”

The guard nodded.

Steve lifted his right hand in token acknowledgement of the man’s perfunctory salute and at the same time released the clutch. The truck rolled forward, negotiated the roundabout and gathered speed down the long slope of the access road.

The girl let out her breath in a profound sigh and turned to the man she had called Laurie. “Well?” she said.

“Oh yes, Billie,” he responded with a pale smile. “Henri was right. It worked.”

The girl’s gray eyes gleamed. “How do you know it did?”

“How? Because I remember it, of course.”

“Tell me.”

“That day I caught the three-pounder. That’s when I saw him.”

“He spoke to you?”

Laurie shook his head. “He tried to, but I couldn’t hear anything. I saw his lips moving.”

“Who did you think he was?”

Laurie shrugged. “Some sort of ghost, I think—except that I didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“But it did happen,” she insisted. “You’re sure of that?”

“Oh yes,” he said, “it happened all right. It’s as though I’ve always known it did and I’ve only just remembered it. Is that what you expected?”

“It’s what we hoped,” she said. “I can’t honestly say I expecte. . .