The Terminus (21 page)

“Pleased to
meet you, I’m sure,” the woman replied, too stunned by the day’s events to know
how else to respond.

“
Friend
?
Mum, he’s one of
them
. They’ve come to take Beetie away forever. Don’t
you understand?”

“Dad’s with
them.
He
won’t let any harm come to her, believe me.”

“He’s flipping
clueless! You too! They’re bloody animals, these people. Beetie’s the only one
we can trust. Even that God bloke, Mr Invention himself, he…”

Redfor
glowered at Gary.

“Gary,
get a grip! It’s
you
who understands nothing,” he interrupted.

“Oh no?
Prove to me you’re not one of them!”

Redfor
chuckled.

“Sort of thing
Arthry would say! He’s another one who…”

“Yeah!
He’s
with them and all! Him and Teeth. In the Retreat. Almost had me and Mike fed to
the gee-rats. And it was
you
who told me to take the Pentatron tablet to
the bastard!”

“What
nonsense! Gary, we
must
talk. I told God we should’ve filled you in a bit more. Mrs O’Driscoll, may we
use your bedroom?”

“I’m not
flipping leaving this spot whilst Beetie’s in there with… with a geriatric
creep called God.”

“Okay! We’ll
sit on the stairs here, but you listen to what I have to say. Hear me out if
you want to save the girl.”

“Gary…?”

It was Gary’s
Mum.

“Gary,
I’ll go in there with Beetie. I’ll stay with her. Don’t worry. I already think of
her as, you know…” Her eyes began to fill with tears. “Never mind!” she
continued. “She’ll be all right, I promise. You listen to this nice man, here.”

“Nice? Pfff!”

Mrs O’Driscoll
opened the door and once again Gary
heard the drone of an old man before she closed it behind her.

“Sit!”

Gary
reluctantly joined Redfor at the foot of the stairs, not taking his eyes off
the door beyond which anything might be happening to the girl who refused to
leave his mind.

“God has good
reason to keep you out of the conversation,” Redfor said, “but believe me, he,
of all people, is aware of how you feel. You see, she’s special to him as well.
Very
special! He knew the girl’s mother.”

Gary
looked sharply at Redfor.

“He’s her
father?”

Redfor shook
his head.

“I thought
they don’t have mothers in the future. The Hatcheries and all that. Assumed
Beetie had been born a test-tube baby.”

“Like I said, Gary,
you’ve a lot to learn. When God first arrived from the past, when he was a
young man, he fell in love with a girl called Belinda.”

“That’s what
the Chairman calls Beetie!”

Redfor nodded.

“Beetie looks
so
much like her mother.”

“So who’s her
father?”

“Dunno! As I
was saying, in the future, when God arrived from the past, he met up with
Belinda. She worked in the Terminus Laboratory God himself had started up over
a hundred and eighty years previously. Used to be beside the Stanmore
Scientific Laboratories. He’d invented these time-specs and wanted to use them
to reshape the future… because of what had happened. His parents getting killed
in a terrorist bomb blast, global warming then all those natural disasters
starting with the Great Pandemic of 2022. When he arrived in the future the
world was worse than he could ever have imagined. The sea level had risen,
great cities abandoned, uninhabitable… people dying everywhere from new
diseases that swept across the planet. God saved London,
Gary, and by saving London
he rescued what was left of humanity.
Truly remarkable!”

“Beetie told
me about the defences… his inventions… SAME, Self-Adjusting-Matter-Expansion…
APUS, the Air-Purification-System.
I guess that shuttle-bus
thing was one of his jobs, too.”

“Mankind
survived in London
because
of God. Of course, he forever travelled backwards and forwards in time with
those specs of his. There were many stories about him as a young man, too. So
he became a sort of legend.
His energy, his genius… but most
of all his love for the city and his people.”

“
His
people?”

“No leadership
at the time. Only anarchy. Every man for himself, if you get my meaning. God
changed that. People looked up to him. And he and Belinda were so very happy
together.”

“Then how come
Beetie’s dad…?”

“Complicated, Gary.
Very few children being born in those times.
Maybe radiation from the nuclear wars or loss of the ozone layer.
Whatever, God and Belinda were devastated they had no offspring. His dream had
been to start the world afresh, in London.
Like humanity being reborn, he said. He worked hard on the global infertility
project. Stored thousands of women’s eggs, frozen, though most of the men’s
sperms didn’t seem to work with IVF.
Including God’s.”

Gary’s
eyebrows flickered.

“Bum
do
if not even God’s sperms work!”

“Like they’d
‘lost heart’, he said.”

“Poor little
blighters!”

“Of course we
had a few successes. Some men proved lucky, and one got called ‘Supersperm’.
Treated like gold-dust,
his
sperm was! Stored in a secret place in the
Terminus Laboratories.”

“Didn’t keep
God’s, obviously.”

“Correct!
Anyway, when God’s super-telescope discovered an asteroid hurtling towards earth
he turned his attention to the defences. Worked hard on the SAME project...”

“Can’t think
how matter can be created out of thin air! Fascinating!”

“…and
everything else to save London,
and… well, the beauty of time-travel is that you can work on things in the past
and return to the present or the future and speed up the process. Get so much
more done in a short interval.”

“The asteroid?”

“Landed in the
Atlantic… only days after London
got sealed off. God reckoned the tsunami would have been a mile high.”

“One thing.
How come he got called ‘God’. Seems kinda weird.
Okay, there’s no religion in the future… pretty obvious… but the word must have
some meaning for you lot.”

“He never
liked the name. He told me. Used to have a different one once, but… well, a
bloke turns up from another time, does all sorts of miraculous things, and like
you said… no religion in the future. Those awful wars, the disease and famine…
you can hardly blame people for not believing before he changed all of this.
God and I both knew how things used to be... about his own religion when he was
a kid... but it didn’t take long for folk to start thinking God was divine.
Sent to save
London
when nothing else was left of our human world.
After being
made Chairman of the Agenda Committee he’d sign reports as ‘G O D’. Word got
around that he
was
God. Frankly he deserved the title, whatever you say.
Everything he did was for our good, and the city worked… until
they
appeared.”

“The Atlanteans?”

“Took over the
running from God. You know, God’s got one fault. Only one, but his… what do you
lot call it? God gets fed up with my ignorance. That ‘heel’ thing?”

“Achilles
Heel?”

“Yep! It’s
been so long! Achilles Heel! Sometimes he’s too kind. Went right back in time
because he thought mankind had been through similar periods in the past. Always
looking for clues from previous civilisations he might use to help us in our
own plight. Somehow he seemed convinced the Atlantis Legend had some truth. In Africa
and Latin America the evidence was overwhelming, he
said, but he had to travel back a lot further than he’d ever imagined.”

“He went to
Atlantis? Yeah... explains everything! Pretty cool, though”

“
More
than cool,
Gary
.
Unbelievable! He discovered a totally different race of humans, now labelled
Homo
atlanticus
.”

“Revolting
little creatures if they’re all like Teeth!”

“Good ones and
bad ones, Gary, as with the rest of us. Look different, sure, but they
are
sort of human and their civilisation had become incredibly advanced. He made
friends with them... particularly the one you call ‘Teeth’.”

“The wanker!”

“Wait, Gary.
At first God wanted to help them. They couldn’t believe him when he said their
civilisation would be doomed by catastrophe… a combination of a super-volcanic
eruption and massive earthquake, the like of which has never occurred on our
planet either before or since the destruction of Atlantis. See, the Atlanteans
had come up with a macabre discovery. A mysterious energy called ‘Life-Force’
can be extracted from the brains of living people. This was being used by them
as a punishment for murderers and other serious offenders. Oh yes, they had
rulers, laws, a policing system… everything. God hated the way they obtained
the stuff, though he reckoned as a form of energy it must be the most powerful in
the universe.
Concentrated, a trillion-fold more powerful
than electricity or any kind of fossil fuel derived-energy.”

“Wow! So he
brought Life-Force back here? I mean, forwards.”

“Wrong. God’s
not that stupid!”

Gary
frowned.

“But…?”

“He’ll never
use the time-specs to change the course of history.”

Gary
thought of how he’d returned to the future and prevented Arthry from killing
Beetie. Not history, though! More like an unreal dream.

“No telling
what
Homo sapiens
would’ve done if we’d got our grubby hands on
‘Life-Force’. Give
Homo atlanticus
his due. They only used this to power
their city’s lighting, heating, transport and other essentials. No wars,
either!”

“So?”

“God brought
Zaman, the current Chairman, to London.
To the future… to long after the Great Flood of Atlantis.
And to the city God so loved and wished to save from further catastrophe. He
wanted to show Zaman what could be done. He offered to go back and help the
Atlanteans. Maybe take SAME back, help them preserve their wonderful
civilisation.”

“But you said
he refused to change history.”

“Also said God
had his Achilles Heel. Get the drift?”

“What
happened?”

“Belinda!
That’s what happened. Zaman stayed with God and Belinda. They put him up, fed and
entertained him. You couldn’t have asked for better hosts than God and his
beautiful wife. At first Zaman just seemed to be paying Belinda compliments.
Saying how lovely she was, how ugly women back home were in comparison.
Gradually he changed. He wouldn’t leave God’s apartment. He always sat close to
Belinda and began to touch her, stroke her. She hated this, of course. She told
God, but he didn’t want to believe her… lived with denial until the day he
found Zaman in the bedroom with her after coming home early. Belinda was
cowering under the bed-clothes, terrified, and God realised how right his wife
had been about the man from Atlantis... the man whom he’d so proudly shown off
to his friends and others in The Agenda.”

“Beetie…
surely she isn’t… you know, Teeth’s daughter.”

“No, no! God
arrived back in the nick of time.”

“Why didn’t he
just kill the filthy sod?”

“Like I keep
saying… God has his Achilles Heel. Anyhow, I don’t think God is able to kill.”

“Shit! I
would’ve if that had been Beetie instead of her mum and I’d been God. I’d
have…”

Gary
paused and Redfor chuckled again.

“Not so easy,
ay?”

“I killed a
man with a machete in the Hatcheries…
and
tried to strangle the taxi
driver who threatened to take her back, only she wouldn’t let me. She…”

“Glad to hear
she remembers some of what God taught her as a child. Or maybe it’s not in her
nature not to kill. God says Belinda changed him. Before he met her he’d have
killed under pressure like anyone else.”

“So what
happened next? After that?”

“He became angry
with himself for not listening to Belinda and being so naïve as to trust his
friend. Zaman disappeared for many years. Together with others of his kind he’d
gone back for before the Belinda business blew up. Over twenty of them, there
were. All went into hiding with Zaman. Not a difficult thing to do in London
in those days before the security cameras got installed. Zaman had been taught
standard
English by God, but the others learnt our language
from locals. Hence they’ve got a rather strange accent.
Atlantean
cockney.
Belinda, meanwhile, fell seriously ill. The horror of what
Zaman tried to do to her may’ve played a part, and God always blamed the
Atlantean. After she died, God was so grief stricken he could barely keep
going, but he did, and finally only lived for his work. His inventive output
became incredible and he soon forgot all about his old friend from Atlantis.”

“If that had
been me and Beetie, I’d have hunted down the bastard.”

“Seventeen or
so years ago he decided to use Belinda’s ova to produce a baby. They’d…”

“I thought
so!” interrupted Gary.

“They’d
already converted the Hatcheries
into a children’s
home for test-tube babies who had no parents. Older people had died off, the
population was declining and The Agenda, under God’s chairmanship, wanted to
boost the population as I told you. This gave him the opportunity to give the
world a child of his beloved late wife. Her ova had been stored deep frozen for
years, like many other women’s. He said it was a way of making it up to her.
Not the same as having one of his own, but he vowed he’d always treat the child
as his.”

“The dad? Was
it Supersperm Man?”