âShut up, Nandru,' she growled.
Polly concentrated on relaxing her control of that internal tension generated by the scale, and she felt a tug into the ineffable.
âPolly! My pretty Polly!' Berthold gasped. âWe must drink together and toast our union!'
Berthold was staggering closer clutching a beer jug in his right hand, yet still, somehow, she found herself unable to leave this time. She drew the automatic earlier secreted in her coat pocket.
âCome no closer, Berthold!' she warned.
The man who shot at her during the Second World War had not been
dragged through time with her, but
he
had been at least ten paces away from her. But the killer, Tack, from her own time, had been much closer.
âStop where you are!'
Berthold ignored her, for how could he possibly realize what she was pointing at him? Aiming to one side, she pulled the trigger, and whatever fates existed were on her side in that moment. Her shot went closer to him than expected, smashing the beer jug. Knocked off balance, Berthold staggered and fell on his backside. But that humiliating position was still more inviting than where Polly now fell.
âPolly!' his cry echoed after her, and died away. Moving through chill blackness, Polly pocketed her gun and kept a firm hold on the food sack. As the scale pulled her through a void without dimension, she gazed down at the roiling of an impossible sea in all shades of non-colour. Her mind strained to breaking point as it sought to encompass something outside the scope of its natural evolution. Her breath burst from her in a groanâthen she was sucking on nothing. There seemed some sensation of movement this time, of actually travelling, rather than the brief black hiatus she had previously experienced. Soon it must end, surely soon ⦠but it went on interminably and Polly discovered how horrible it was to asphyxiate. And even this dark world went away as she blacked out.
Â
COLLECTING THE WATER CONTAINER from where he had abandoned it, Tack then headed for the tributary to which Traveller had directed him. The andrewsarchus was now, according to Traveller's instruments, somewhere over on the other side of the estuary. Tack knew that when he did finally attain his freedom, he wanted it to be accompanied with a shitload of the technology these strangers used.
Finally coming to the stream, he expanded the water container and filled it, then headed back to the beach as quickly as he could. Already he had been gone for longer than he should have been, and though he had a plausible explanationâlike climbing a tree to save his lifeâhe wondered if Coptic would allow him time to explain. Building up a sweat as he lugged the heavy container, he soon spotted Coptic jogging down the beach towards him, his weapon drawn.
âYou took too long,' Coptic said. âPut down the water container.'
Tack held onto it firmly, knowing this was all that might stop Coptic attacking him. But Coptic stepped forwards and backhanded him, the blow lifting
Tack off the ground so hard he felt sure his neck had snapped. He thumped down backwards on the sand in a daze, and coming to he saw that somehow Coptic had rescued the container from spilling its contents.
âI think you have disobeyed me.' He adjusted the controls on his weapon. âNow, tell me why I should not cut off your limbs, leaving only the arm we require.'
âI'll die of shock,' Tack managed, crawling backwards.
âNo, we can keep you alive in that condition, and you'll not be a burden to us safely strapped inside the mantisal. Once at Pig City your arm can be removed to be preserved in a nutrient tank, and the rest discarded.'
Tack looked wildly about himself, to try and find some way out of this. Then he saw it. He pointed up the beach. âThere, you can see the tracks it left.'
Coptic glanced up the beach with a look of bored irritation, then he abruptly did a double take. âRemain exactly where you are,' he said, walking up to inspect the trail left by the andrewsarchus. After a moment he returned. âGet up.' Tack obeyed. âPick up the water container and proceed.'
Walking ahead of him, Tack was thoroughly aware that though multiple amputation might not be imminent, there could still be further punishments for disobedience.
Shortly they regained the encampment, where they found Meelan crouching by a fire over which a large fish was spitted. After a brief exchange between her and Coptic, she stood and stepped forwards, glancing up and down the beach. Then she took out an instrument similar to the one Traveller had been using. Tack set the water container down by the fire, and when Meelan returned to her previous position, he presumed andrewsarchus was no danger to them at present.
After Meelan and Coptic had eaten their fill of the roasted fish, Tack was allowed the remains. Such was the sheer size of the thing that he found plenty of flesh left on the bones, and inside the armoured head, which he managed to crack open with a stone. While Tack snacked on parboiled brains, Coptic unrolled his sleeping bag and lay on top of it, while Meelan prowled, keeping half an eye on Tack, but mostly her attention was focused on the instrument she held. Coptic was asleep in an instant, snoring gently. Feeling revived by a full stomach, Tack stood and walked down to the shore, strolling up and down a section of beach that did not take him out of Meelan's view.
As well as the debris left by the feeding andrewsarchus, the remains of the shark and the piles of seaweed, he saw other things that apprised him of how
very far from home he was. Here were green mussel shells like the split horns of cattle, scallop shells the size of dinner plates, and a multitude of spiral shells decorated with Mandelbrot patterns in primary colours. He found a shark's tooth that covered the entire palm of his hand, and pocketed it in case it might provide a handy substitute for the knife Meelan had taken from himâthough he doubted he had the proficiency to use it against her.
âThere are bivalves buried in the shallows. They will serve as bait.'
Tack whipped round to see Meelan standing right behind him. Observing her closely now, he noticed that the dressing over the stump of her arm looked inflated and oddly distorted. Seeing the direction of his gaze she merely glared at him, then tossed him the fishing rod Coptic had been using earlier. Catching it, he inspected it more closely. The rod itself was telescopic, and the short length of line extending from its tip was as fine as a hair and terminated in a barbed hook, which was intrinsic to it rather than attached separately. Halfway along the line were a slidable bubble float and two weights. The reel itself was a cube with curved edges and no winding arm, only a small console on one side.
âYou will now catch more fish for us to eat before we depart.' She turned away.
Tack was damned if he was going to ask her how to operate the console, so began pressing at random. After a while he found the button for extending the rodâin an eye blinkâto its full three-metre length. He next found the button to release line from the reelâsliding frictionlessly from the far end of the rod into a tangle on the groundâthen the button to wind it in again. Contenting himself with using only these three controls, for there were many others, plus a small screen displaying pictographic script, he laid the rod down and went to dig up some bait. Quite soon he found himself fishing on a prehistoric shore, hauling in an armour-headed fish with broad scales as bright as mercury. And for that brief time he realized he had never before enjoyed himself so muchânot once in his entire life. But it ended all too soon, when Meelan announced that he had caught enough.
After Coptic had slept for a straight six hours into twilight, Meelan woke him up and took her turn on the sleeping bag. Without a word Coptic cooked and ate one of the three fish Tack had caught, then sat down in the lotus position to keep watch over the instrument Meelan had used earlier. Tack, weariness catching up with him, and on receiving no contrary instructions, curled up on a mound of pine needles in the bowl of a tree, and fell asleep. It seemed only an instant before Coptic was kicking him awake. But already it was dawn
and, checking his watch, Tack discovered he had been oblivious to the world for a full eight hours.
âPack up the supplies. We're moving on,' ordered Coptic.
Looking around, Tack saw Meelan down on the beach gazing out to sea. Gathering their equipment, he followed Coptic down to join her. Both of them, he saw, were well rested now, for their eyes glowed like embers. He did not see how they summoned it, but instantly the mantisal folded out of the air ahead of them, cold mist pouring off it to dissipate above the warm sand. Tack followed the two of them aboard and took up his accustomed position. Again they shifted.
Â
ONE HAS TO WONDER if it matters at all to that thing on your arm whether you arrive at your eventual destination alive or dead. It seems parasiticâso perhaps it will continue feeding on your corpse as it drags it back through time.
Polly's head was aching abominably, her mouth felt terracotta dry, and her body felt battered. Her hands and face were stung all over, not as a result of time travel but of landing in a patch of nettles. Still gasping on welcome air, she rolled over and sat upright, then wished she had not been so hasty as her vision darkened and a wave of nausea washed through her. After a moment this was supplanted by that familiar gnawing hunger. Glancing down at her hand clenched white around the neck of the food bag, she eased her grip and delved inside it, retrieving a large pork pie, but it was frozen as solid as granite.
You have to wonder if you have an eventual destination, or if there is any purpose at all to your journey. Maybe you're just a piece of temporal flotsam?
âNandru, I don't suppose you could tell me where to find your OFF button?'
Touchy. I was only trying to make conversation.
After staring at the inedible pie for a moment longer, Polly cursed, returned it to the sack, then sat upright. She was sitting in a patch of vegetation at the edge of woodland, and it all looked little different from the countryside of Henry VIII's time. Getting unsteadily to her feet, she gazed around.
The nettles grew in a band along the edge of forest, separating it from grassy heath scattered with patches of teasel and thistle and dotted with wild flowers. This open heath extended some hundreds of metres to a wall of parsleys, displaying glimpses of reeds and more forest beyond. Nowhere visible was there any sign she recognized as from the hand of man.
âHow far back have we gone now?' she wondered aloud.
Oh, speaking to me again are you?
âYes, I'm speaking to you,' she snarled.
That's good, for after a few more of these jumps back through time, I'll be the only one left you can speak to.
âWhat do you mean?' Polly carefully trod a path through the nettles, as she made her way out into the open.
Well, your time-jumps are getting longer and longer, and remember human history isn't that long, relatively speaking.
âGo on,' Polly snapped, acutely aware of how little history she knew.
OK, like it was once explained to me at school: if you compared the whole sweep of Earth's history to one day, then human history occupies about the last two minutes of that.
âDon't be ridiculous.' Polly suddenly felt very cold.
I'm serious. Earth is four billion years old, and modern humans have only been around for about one thousandth part of that. Dinosaurs, which I'm sure you've heard of, existed for about a hundred and sixty million years, yet died out some sixty million years before we appeared.
Even as he said it, Polly recalled with painful clarity the small facts she herself had picked up almost by osmosis while watching films and taking part in interactives. She recited, âAnd before the dinosaurs, hundreds of millions of years of life on land and in sea, and before that only in the sea, then even more time without life at all.'
You're now getting it. Seems your brain is waking up.
âYeah, seems like it.'
Polly trudged towards the reeds where she assumed she would find a river, as that seemed as good a destination as any. Upon reaching the high parsleys, she reached out to brush them aside.
Stop right there.
âWhat?'
Those plants are hemlock, so don't get their juice on your skinâthey're poisonous.
Polly veered around the stand of hemlock and headed for a gap through to the reeds. Soon she found herself alongside a fast-flowing river, its bottom sandy and pebbled, underneath a slow ballet of strands of waterweed. Soon she found a shallow part, the water's surface broken by a pebbled prominence, where she crossed and began to walk upstream. Eventually she found a fallen log to sit on. Her hunger had become a constant gnawing in her gut, so she took out her tobacco and made a roll-up, in the hope that it might still the
pangs. Staring down into the debris caught where the fallen tree's branches penetrated the river bottom, she froze suddenly and found her hunger the last thing on her mind.