Caltraps of Time (27 page)

The tracker-dogs found nothing, but two disappeared, their lines neatly cut. The helicopter only discovered fields empty of all but birds; but two locals (Midgley and the squat man) who were persuaded to go up in it, averred that (so far as they could tell since they had never flown before) the country had changed quite a lot. The area was closed off now with rolls of barbed wire, military posts established round it, and a desultory watch was kept up, with an occasional searchlight at night. ‘I’d sooner run straight acrost a bleedin’ minefield ‘n gow in theer,’ Roydon heard one soldier say to another.

‘Reckon it is a minefield — only the other sort. I reckon it’s holes in it, bloody great pits, all camouflaged up,’ said the other.

Roydon flew up to London. He meant to resign. The city seemed to him meaningless, like an undubbed film in a foreign language. Its noise and bustle seemed to be all on the other side of an invisible barrier.

‘Look here, Royo,’ said Vic, taking him aside near the studio. ‘A team of investigators is going up there; why not join them as a reporter? Panset’ll recommend you, he says.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Scientists of some sort. You know they got some anomalies with their lidar probe when Ken was there — or perhaps you don’t? Some of them think there’s something odd about the spacetime geometry of the region. That’s the line they’re working on now.’

May was adopted by her aunt and uncle. Roydon was attached to the group of scientists, shut up the house, and returned to that accursed green countryside to which he was now bound, as with the thongs of a rack, by ties of fear, hatred, memory and love. He came gradually to follow, in a hazy way, the investigators’ reasoning and the drift of their experiments with masers and charged particles. So it was that six months later Roydon himself, carrying out a prepared ‘interview’ of the group’s spokesman on TV, gave the public its first picture of what was happening.

‘A set of anachronistic cells or domains has come into being on the landscape, covering a wide area. Each cell has reverted to an earlier point in time — we are not at present sure exactly what point — and its neighbour cells have similarly reverted, but apparently with no discernible pattern. We have a patchwork quilt of time-levels.’

‘How far back are these time-levels from ours?’

‘We don’t know. Some may be only a few seconds or even microseconds. Others may be a few weeks, years, even centuries. Some are certainly many years back. The change in visible landmarks fits that, according to early tithe maps.’

‘But if we can see the country, how is it we can’t see the persons and animals that have disappeared?’

‘We think they have moved out of the area, but in the time of the cell in which they found themselves.’

‘Does the first cell you meet fix your time-level, then?’

‘We don’t know. It may — or it may not.’

One day Roydon, allowed past the army posts as one of the team, slipped quietly away towards the spot where he had last seen his wife. He was certain now that she had run off further into the area and believed he might have caught a glimpse of her running and not of some bird flying. But the landscape was confusing, was difficult to identify. Where he thought to have found the field corner below the hill there seemed to be a long stone dyke with stone steps jutting out of it, and a fence to one side. He climbed over the dyke, keeping bent low in case he was spotted from outside. He was determined to follow Miriel and search, if need be for years, in this past world. The atmosphere was serene, with a slight intellectual drive in it. He combed the copse, returned, walked along the fence, slithered down some rocks which he never remembered seeing before, ran into a richly cordial atmosphere, skirted a round dewpond, and past a gnarled old thorn came face to face with a stinking old man in tatters, who touched his forehead and sank on one knee.

‘Where do you come from?’

Roydon had to repeat this three times before the man answered: ‘Scrootton, ant plaze thee, serr.’

‘Have you even see a young woman in strange dress in these parts?’

‘?’

‘Have — you — seen — a young — woman — near here — ever — wearing — strange — dress?’

Roydon had to repeat this once more, then: ‘Noo, serr, hant niwer seen noo witch, serr!’ and the creature took to his heels. As Roydon stared after him he vanished in mid-stride. Much shaken, Roydon walked slowly onward, stumbled over some gravel, was pushing through some lush undergrowth, and found himself on a sheep track among tussocks of grass. A grotesque sight met his eyes a few yards further on down the track. A thin man in a sort of sacking hood, ragged hose like ill-fitting tights and bare feet, was perched on a short ladder leaning crazily in towards the track. The ladder was leaning on nothing, and indeed its poles ended at their tops in a curious vertical chopped cut, which kept changing its pattern, yet this ladder stood still and only rocked slightly with the man’s movements. It was some time before Roydon realized that the changing texture at the tops of the poles coincided with their growing slightly shorter or longer as they rocked. The man kept descending and coming up again with bundles of what looked to Roydon (who had seen a museum of antiquities) like thatching straw, and thrusting them above the ladder, where, together with his hands, they disappeared. His handless arms, each obscenely terminated by a fluctuating blue-white and crimson cross-section, would ply about for a time, then the hands would reappear, but not the bundles. A great heap of these bundles lay on the ground. The place was thick with flies and gnats. The ladder-man was humming an endless, eerie, plaintive chant. Behind him was the rim of a forest clearing. Two lean dogs like lurchers, but with longish pointed ears, were slinking about near it. The trees of the forest seemed to be chopped short at about ten feet up. The ladder-man and his dogs were all totally oblivious of Roydon’s shouting and gesticulating. Something, however, held Roydon back from passing under or beyond the ladder. Perhaps it was that only ten feet on the far side of the man the forest clearing swung in abruptly to march right up to the sheep track. This part of the beheaded forest, moreover, was frost-laden, from the boughs to the ground, and devoid of undergrowth, and a light snow shower was scudding down from nowhere. Through this wintry woodscape, lit by a ruddy glow from the east, a pack of huge savage hounds presently broke, baying fiercely, and plunged obliquely towards the still oblivious ladder-man and his dogs. Instead of overwhelming them the pack vanished one by one in the still air of the clearing, and the silence returned piecemeal hound by hound.

A last hound, a straggler, was still bounding up, when the man called out, as if to someone well beyond Roydon’s shoulder: ‘Pest taak they, Will, maak hast, ‘tis aal boott nohn!’ He paused, apparently listening, then broke into a snort of laughter and resumed his whistling and humming.

An obscure trumpeting, mingled with cries, broke out deep in the frosty wood; crackling branches and rhythmical thuds intervened.

Seized with a kind of panic, Roydon turned down the track, thrust through a dark thicket, and found himself without warning in the middle of a curious wide tunnel or cave apparently made of blackish glass, and dimly lit from nowhere in particular. There was a marked cheerfulness and a strong organizing drive in the air. Coming out into the daylight he saw a wide flat level strip, like the track of a gigantic snail a hundred yards across, made of the same material, stretching out from his feet. On its edges a number of glassy boxes and tubes, on spring legs or spikes, were standing, some winking and clicking busily. The strip looked rather as if it had been sprayed on.

‘What kind of a past era is this?’ he thought. Beyond the strip were banks of rich shrubs powdered with exotic butterflies. The growl of a helicopter came from the west, and Roydon took cover beneath a shrub, disturbing the butterflies somewhat. When the helicopter appeared it had an unfamiliar look, and most of it was formed of greenish and blackish glassy material. After it had gone Roydon walked on above the shrubs. Then he took cover beneath the shrub, disturbing the butterflies, hearing the machine. When it had gone he began to walk on. Then he took cover under the butterfly-laden shrub, keeping the helicopter under observation. When it had departed he walked on, shaking his head uncertainly. There was something he could not quite remember. A deja vu sensation. Odd. He recalled the tunnel and the strip. What an odd strip! What kind of past age could this be? And what peculiar gadgets these are down its edges. Why do they click and blink like that? ... He found himself walking about the shrubs, feeling unaccountably odd and dazed. Then he saw Parker’s Knoll or what should have been Parker’s Knoll, miles ahead. It was topped by a device like a glass water-tower. The entire landscape between seemed to be dotted with tallish block buildings of greenish opaque glass, with banks of shrubs between. Men, women and children, in closely clinging clothing with a dull whitish lustre, were moving about. The sound of their voices came to him. The sky was pullulating with aircraft like a swarm of insects, and droned and screamed with them, but the voices could be heard quite clearly nevertheless. Only the strip and its neighbourhood seemed deserted. Then he saw a sort of Parker’s Knoll, but decorated with a glassy tower, and the people in their clinging clothes, and the aircraft overhead. He shook his head to clear it, and saw Parker’s Knoll, topped with a tower, and the population, and the crowded skies, and heard the noises. Roydon sat down, and in between the first bending of his knees and being seated had a visionary flash of millions upon millions of — what? Of the same event, which he instantly forgot. He sat down and tried to collect his thoughts. Could it be that he was somewhere in the future, not the past? Could the helicopter have come out of the world of that future? The machine came back and for the second time (was it the second time?) Roydon took cover, but he was astonished to hear a loudhailer of sorts address him:

‘We can detect you under that growth. Who are you? Can we help you? ... Who are you? Are you Roydon Greenback? Please come out from under. Please come out from under. We would like to help you.’ There was something peculiarly vulgar and sprawling about the accents of the speaker, and his vowels were difficult to recognize.

Roydon clambered out and waved. After a moment he called out, ‘Yes, I am Roydon Greenback. Who are you? Where am I?’

The helicopter descended some way and a rope ladder was lowered. ‘Please climb in.’

‘I am looking for my wife.’

‘We don’t know where she is, but perhaps we can help you. Will you come with us first?’

Silently, Roydon climbed up the ladder, which was at once extraordinarily smooth and very easy to hold on to. As he went up there was a sort of blink, and looking down by the helicopter hatch he was astonished to see that the landscape was once more deserted and green, indeed rather lush, except that the glassy strip and a few of the shrub-banks up to a little past where he had sat down were still there below him. A big gloved hand hauled him in.

‘Roydon Greenback. Well. You are something of a legend to us, the man who entered the poikilochronistic jungle to search for the woman he loved. Well, well. As luck would have it, you got into a domain that started at plus-sixty-one years and has been running a cog-slipper static ever since. So you levelled up with our time. You are sixty-one years behind us in source. We shall take you to our world of sixty-one years ahead.’

The voice was no longer sprawling, but the same slipshod quality seemed to slur its vowels, and what with this and the unfamiliar vocabulary Roydon could hardly comprehend two words in three. He looked at its owner, a tall red-headed man of middle age with shaggy locks and a long beard. His clothes, like those of his companions, seemed to consist of a translucent skin-diving suit with pockets, but without mask or oxygen, and, encasing the hands and upper arms, long translucent gloves. There were half a dozen persons in the cabin, two of them women.

‘I am Paul Sattern, chronismologist in chief. This is Fenn Vaughan, chronismologist-maturator; Mary Scarrick, entomologist; Richard Metcalfe, chronistic metrologist; Elizabeth Raine, air chemist; Morris Ekwall, transitional diathesiologist; Zen Haddock, botanist, who also takes soil samples for the podologists; and at the controls, Peter Datch.’

The correct response to an introduction seemed to be a nod. It appeared that Morris Ekwall was concerned, in some esoteric way, with the violent local changes in mood-weather that accompanied the area’s time-shifts, while Richard Metcalfe spent most of his time dumping gadgets on the terrain and reading their messages on instruments in the helicopter. What Vaughan and Sattern actually did Roydon never discovered, but the others were concerned with the insects, plants, soil and atmosphere itself. At intervals one or more of them would go down the ladder and come up again rather swiftly.

‘Teams of chronismologists,’ Sattern told Roydon, ‘are engaged in mapping the poikilochronism and its changes; the domains are constantly altering.’

‘How do you mean? Do they change their time-level?’

‘Usually a domain divides into several quite independent domains, especially if it’s a big one; or a whole set of bounds and domains is replaced by new unrelated ones, in one part of the poik. There’s not always much visible sign — you have to instrumentate to discern.’

‘And Richard here,’ said Vaughan, ‘is trying just now to catch them at it. He thinks they don’t just go click, they go whoosh — eh Richard?’ and he sang, softly:

‘Micro, nano, pico, femto,

it’s all the same to metro Met;