Future Tense (18 page)

“Emma-Stephen-please,” said Tree. “We must not allow personal rivalries to cloud our judgement. It's plain what must be done. We must go to the Castle and—and rescue whoever needs rescuing, if anyone does need rescuing—I mean, if we can find the place, which I very much doubt. Stephen and I will purchase some more suitable clothing and leave as soon as we work out where it is we're going.”

“Hang about!” said Emma. “You're not leaving me here—I'm going with you.”

“And me,” said Emily, taking Emma's hand, in an act of sisterhood.

“Don't be daft,” I said. “You're both pregnant!”

“Oh shut up!” said Emma. “We're only a few months gone—we're not invalids!”

“Yeah!” said Emily.

Tree and I looked at each other in dismay.

“Well,” said Tree. “It's probably all academic anyway—it's highly unlikely we'll ever find the place. It'll be like looking for a needle in every haystack in England.”

“Then let's get started,” said Emma.

I folded my arms, leaned back, and smiled at her. “Go on then—what's your plan?” I said.

Emma turned to Tree. “Tree, you said the Castle is in the Ice Age—do you have any idea which one?”

“Which one?” said Tree. “Well, I don't know.”

“Then what made you think it was in an Ice Age?” she asked.

“There were woolly mammoths—”

“Mammoths?” I said.

“Big hairy elephants, dear,” said Emma. She turned her attention back to Tree. “That does sound like the last Ice Age. The woolly mammoth is believed to have died out some eight thousand years ago, though the last Arctic incursion had receded by about twenty thousand years ago and lasted around ten thousand years. So that means the Castle is almost certainly situated in a time window somewhere between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. The Late Pleistocene.”

“How do you know all this?” I said.

“Saw a Discovery Channel programme about it,” said Emma. She turned back to Tree. “Do you think, with your artistic training, that you and Emily could look at the drawings Stephen picked out—and this one I found of what looks like another view of the ice sheet—and visualize a map?”

“Let me see that,” I said.

Emma ignored me and passed the sheet to Emily.

“We can try, can't we, Daddy?” said Emily, taking the drawing from Emma. “I know how to transcribe perspective drawings into plans—Mr Wren showed me.”

“Sir Christopher Wren?” I said.

“Who else, silly?” said Emily.

* * *

Emma had taken charge and I knew from that moment on I would be taking a backseat. It was my own fault. I'd been trying to be sarcastic when I asked her if she had a plan, not relinquish any control I might have had! She had us all organised within minutes. She quickly sussed that Emily had more idea about technical drawing than her father and got her to work alone on the rough map. Meanwhile, she had Tree drawing her a plan from memory of the Castle, on which she herself worked intensively and sensitively with him. I was detailed to make coffee, but once I'd done that, I was just standing around with my hands in my pockets. I watched Emma as she talked to Tree or checked on Emily's progress, encouraging them with a word of praise here, a smile there.

It started off innocently—I was admiring her—but it developed into something a bit more voyeuristic, when I fixated on the way her calf muscle curved into the neat scroll of her heel, or the way her sweater tautened each time she twisted round to speak to Emily, or the way her hair fell across her face and she let it stay there for a few moments before lazily pushing it aside with her hand, which, to me, was, uh, very attractive. And then, of course, there was her mouth—I loved Emma's mouth—and her eyes, but especially her mouth. She had perfect, smooth, full lips—in fact, she had actually modelled an entire range of lipsticks, from red through to blue—I still had the magazines with the adverts hidden behind my wardrobe—believe me, I have spent hours poring over those close-ups. I find it extremely erotic the way her lower lip pouts, while the upper lip sort of juts up proudly and you just get this glimpse of her teeth through the very suggestive gap between her—

“—Sloane!”

“What? Oh—Em.”

“Stop leching,” she said. “Can't you find something useful to do?”

“I wasn't leching. Leching.”

“Why don't you go and clean the time machine or something?” she suggested.

“Clean the time machine?” I said. “It's not a car—no one sees it, it's in another dimension.”

“I know—” she said, suddenly having another idea, “why don't you go and buy up as many Ordinance Survey maps as you can find?”

“We just need the coasts, Emma,” said Tree.

“Only the ones with coastlines,” added Emma.

“Uh, and what do I use for money?” I said.

“Here, take my credit card.” She dug in her jacket pocket and passed it to me. “Give me your hand.” I gave her my hand and she wrote her PIN number on my palm. “This is the number. Oh, and get some more cigarettes—you know my brand. Anyone else need anything?”

“I'd like some pistachio ice cream please,” said Emily.

“Tree?” prompted Emma.

“We need tobacco and papers, Stephen,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “There aren't any cash machines yet—this is 1960. You haven't got a bank account!”

“Oh. Well, can't you use the time machine?”

“You want me to use the time machine to go shopping?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Of course it's a problem,” I said. “I can't just jump in and—”

“Oh, please don't make a fuss, darling,” she sighed.

The word “darling” shut me up instantly. I smiled sweetly at her.

“All right, I'll go.” I stooped down and kissed her cheek. “I'm doing this for you,
darling
,” I said.

She inclined her head towards me and we exchanged one of those intimate looks only those who have had something going would understand.

“We have got to have a long chat,” I mouthed.

“Not now,” she mouthed back, and turned away.

Chapter 10

It wasn't such a big deal using the time machine to go forward to the third millennium to use Emma's cash card. I deliberately arrived at night with Jemmons's machine in default mode and found myself floating on the river aboard an old sloop. She was called
La Belle
and she was Jemmons's pride and joy.

* * *

I had to wait around till morning for the shops to open, but I used some of the time up by walking into the city centre and withdrawing two hundred pounds from Emma's bank account. I was walking on air. I had that nice warm feeling inside me again. Things were looking up. All because—well, I don't want to talk about it… Then I found an early morning café and had a full, greasy, English breakfast. I started wondering how much Ordinance Survey maps cost and how many I'd need, and decided I might need more than the amount I'd taken out, so I went back to the cashpoint and withdrew another hundred. I was just walking up the High Street, to see if there were any stationery or bookshops opening early, when a police car screeched out of a side street and skidded up to the kerb, quite close to me. As I was looking round to see who they were after, I saw a second police car coming up the other way, and suddenly twigged—they were after me! It was the damn credit card—I'd forgotten the police were still looking for me in the third millennium—they wanted to question me about Emma's disappearance. Now, here I was using her plastic. No way was I going to stick around and try to explain the truth to them—they'd put me in an asylum!

I legged it past the first police car and made it to the corner—I could hear them reversing at high speed behind me. I kept running, desperately looking for somewhere to run to—and then I spotted a big department store just opening its doors across the street. It was my only chance. If I could get inside I might just be able to hide or lose them. I didn't hesitate. I put everything into reaching the entrance—pumping my arms and legs like pistons. And then I was pushing open the heavy glass door and running on carpet past hundreds of hanging handbags and glass counters full of cosmetics, past the elevators, rails of shirts and sweaters, socks and ties—someone shouted at me—I just kept running—and then I saw double glass doors. I had run straight through the ground floor of the store and was exiting it. It wasn't my original idea, but I never stopped to look around or think about what I was doing. And then I was in another street and running across that into a pedestrian walkway. On and on I ran, until I was in the next street over. I still didn't stop or look round. I was straight across the road and looking for another cut-through to the next street. I found the first one and darted down it.

Then I saw a multi-storey car park and the back of a restaurant with three wheelie-bins outside and an alleyway leading off somewhere else. I got behind the bins and threw my back against one. My chest was heaving and wheezing. My breath sounded like one of those old steam engines—thumping out a powerful panting noise. The sweat was pouring off me. I knew that I only had to get back down to the river and I'd be safe, so I didn't think my situation was hopeless. I just thought that for a twenty-six year old I was really out of condition. I vowed never to eat another breakfast like that again. It was bran and juice for me in future.

* * *

I realized the police had been just waiting for someone to use Emma's credit card, and when I took that money out in the middle of the night I must have alerted them. And when I used it again later that morning, they probably couldn't believe their luck. They simply got a mugshot of me from the ATM and the rest was down to the CCTV cameras Big Brother has in every city centre up and down the land. Well, I didn't take any chances after that scare, I worked my way back down to the quays using backstreets only and took the sloop back a few days, then I returned to the city centre to do my shopping. But I couldn't resist going up to a police car I saw parked in the high street and asking the driver if he knew where I could buy an Ordinance Survey map. He directed me to W H Smith's.

* * *

For the return trip I was careful to switch the holographic matrix over to the clock again, and also made sure I didn't arrive too soon and meet myself. Meeting yourself is dangerous—it's like standing between two mirrors and seeing infinite images of yourself, only the images are real and multiply, and some can even evolve into clones like that one of Jemmons in the attic—so I set the time control for the middle of the afternoon. We had stored the machine in an empty forward cabin, so the co-ordinates were already locked in. I arrived back on board precisely where I had departed from and headed excitedly along the central passageway to the living quarters, in the stern of the barge.

I had all the maps covering the coastlines of England, Scotland, and Wales—and I had also bought detailed maps of Ireland, just in case. And, of course, I hadn't forgotten everybody's goodies, so I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I burst through the door.

“I'm back!” I shouted. “Emma? What's wrong with her?”

Emma was lying on the cushioned bench seat in the lounge half naked and Tree and Emily were holding her down. I threw down the shopping bags and rushed to her side, skidding along the floor on my knees to bring my face in line with hers.

“Emma? What's the matter? What the hell's happened?”

“Steve—there's something in my back,” she sobbed.

“Where? What?” I knelt up straight and looked down her body. “Where?”

“It's on her other side,” said Tree.

I leaned over and saw to my horror a pulsing green light about the size of a shirt button, under her skin. There was no visible scar—but it had actually got inside her somehow.

“Emily noticed it when I was in the shower,” said Emma.

“Stay calm, Em,” I said.

“Can't you take it out?”

“How? No, we have to leave it there—I think I know what it is.”

“What?” said Emma.

“I don't think it's anything to worry about.”

“That's easy for you to say! How did it get in there?”

“I don't know.”

“Then how do you know what the damn thing is?” said Emma. “Tree, take me to a hospital—I want it removed right now!”

“We can't go to a hospital, Em, they'll just ask a lot of awkward questions and call the police or, even worse, the military,” I said. “Remember I told you about that gadget on my arm? Well, I think this is something similar.”

“It's nothing like that thing you described!” cried Emma. “Yours was just a bloody catheter! This is inside my body!”

“Em, I left something out,” I sighed. I looked at Tree and Emily and then back at Emma. “I was also drugged. They slipped me something in that private clinic—I lost about three days and—and I thought I was in love with Miss Parker.”

“So you screwed the nurse—what's that got to do with this?” said Emma.

I could see she was becoming highly stressed. And kept my voice calm.

“I didn't screw the nurse. What I said was I became infatuated with her—just like you have become obsessed with Travis De Quipp—”

“Oh, for God's sake!” exclaimed Emma. “Not that again—you're the one who's obsessed! Tree, Emily, please call me an ambulance.”

“You're an ambulance,” blurted Emily, and quickly covered her mouth with her hand. “Sorry—it just slipped out.”

Tree looked to me. I shook my head.

“Stephen's right, Emma,” said Tree. “This looks like another implant—it's too much of a co-incidence.”

“Oh, not you as well!” she cried.

She tried to raise herself up but we all held her down.

“Let go of me! I'm going to Casualty—I want this thing removed! Get off me!”

“Emma—listen to me—is it hurting you?” I said.

“No.”

“Then just leave it. It's just one more reason for us to find the Duck as soon as possible. He knows about these things. He'll know what to do,” I said. And then under my breath I added, “He probably put it there.”

“All right!” she snapped. “Now let me up!”

“You won't go to hospital?” I said.

“No. Now get off me—all of you!”

We let her go. She jumped up, pushed me out of the way and rushed to her cabin, crying. Emily hurried after her, closing the door quietly behind her.

I went over and got the bags and brought them back to the coffee table.

“I got all the OS maps—how did Emily get on?”

Tree shuffled through some papers on the floor and handed me a neatly drawn map, depicting the Castle island, the two islands in the bay, and the horseshoe-shaped coastline. A simple arrow indicated north. She had even drawn a cute cartoon of a family of mammoths crossing the bottom of the page.

“This is the best she could do,” he said. “She's made four copies. I estimate the distance from the Castle to the coast to be no more than fifteen miles east—the islands are a little less again—though the one on the right is the farthest away. This is taking the curvature of the earth and a rough idea of the Castle's height into account.”

“That narrows it down a bit. You see, this layout—the land shape—this pattern of three islands can't be that common, can it?” I said. “It's just going to take a shedload of patience to find somewhere that looks like it on one of these maps.”

“Then we'd best get started,” said Tree.

We took a map each and I went over to work on the dining table, while Tree laid his out on the coffee table. Later Emily came out to make Emma a coffee and get her cigarettes. I gave her the two remaining copies of the map she had made and a bundle of the ones I'd bought. She took them back with her, saying that she thought Emma would prefer to work in her cabin.

We worked all the rest of that afternoon and into the early evening. I went to see how the girls were doing a couple of times, but they had only turned up a couple of possibles, though neither of them quite fitted in with the direction of north on Emily's map, so they were dismissed. The map-checking continued into the night. Every time one of us found somewhere we thought might be the place, the others pointed out something that excluded it—either the distances were out—the compass bearing off—the presence of other prominent landmarks that would have been visible—something was always wrong. Eventually, we ran out of maps. Everyone wanted to go to bed, but I produced my less detailed Irish maps and we carried on for another hour or so. We drew another blank. Finally, disappointed and beaten, we all turned in.

But I couldn't sleep. As I lay there I suddenly thought about the Somerset Levels. Somerset was once encroached by the sea. I didn't really know how, but I knew the landscape and coastline must have looked very different back in the Ice Age. What if Glastonbury were one of the islands in the bay? And the other was flat-topped Cadbury! The idea excited me—I leapt from my bed and rushed back into the lounge to get out the map of Somerset. That would mean that the Castle was Brent Knoll! It had to be—everything was spot on. The coastline was the Mendips to the north, the Quantocks and Blackdown Hills to the west, and the Dorset Downs to the south.

I woke Tree, dragged him out of bed, and showed him.

“Somerset? It can't be,” he said.

“Compare Emily's map,” I said. “See, there—and there—the islands—one pointed and one flattish. It all fits.”

“It seems to fit,” he yawned. “But how come we couldn't see the coast of Wales to the north? There was just an ice sheet. We, we were looking at it for seven years—you're hardly likely to forget a thing like that.”

“You haven't,” I said. “What you were looking at was the edge of the Great Ice Sheet itself, beyond the frozen Bristol Channel. It's an optical illusion—because you were looking at white on white, you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.”

“It's possible I suppose,” he said. “Show Emma and Emily in the morning. Now can I get back to sleep?”

I could hardly wait till morning, got impatient and went into Emma's cabin to wake her up at seven a.m. Emily had crashed out in there with her. They were both only half awake as I launched into my brilliant theory.

Halfway in, Emily muttered, “I thought Cadbury was a man-made hill. It was flattened off much later.”

“It wasn't, was it?” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Emily. “Would you be a dear and make us a cup of coffee?”

“Yeah, sure. But let's just think about this first—how certain are you about Cadbury?”

Emma butted in, “The sea-level would have been about four hundred feet below what it is today, anyway.”

“You're kidding!” I said. “There was tons of water about—it was the bloody Ice Age!”

“Yes, but it was all locked up inside the ice sheet—it was thousands of feet thick,” she yawned. “The sea-level sank—you could walk to France, Stephen. Now, about that coffee.”

* * *

I walked back to the galley, where Tree, who had heard me moving about, was already up and making a pot of coffee.

“The theory's blown,” I said, slumping down on a stool.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Cadbury's an ancient earthwork—but not as old as the late Pleistocene. I remembered when I got back to bed.”

“Well, I wish you'd come and told me,” I said. “I've just made myself look a right pillock in there. Also, the water-level would have been—”

“—Yes, way too low,” nodded Tree. “So, I got to thinking—your landscape fits so well—why couldn't it be in the future—a New Ice Age, though not as severe—a thinner ice sheet—higher water levels?”

“Is that possible?”

“I don't see why not—what with global warming—maybe the thing was just getting started,” said Tree, pouring four coffees.

“Ah, but what about the mammoths? You said there were woolly mammoths.”