The Terminus (20 page)

“‘He’s quite
remarkable,’ the maths teacher said, and the physics teacher told me they’d
never
had a student as bright as Gary.
Said he’d be surprised if my son didn’t get the Nobel Prize one
day.”

Beetie
remained silent, as if nothing good about him could undo the harm caused by his
moment of rage in the mini-cab. He knew he had a temper.
Everyone
did.
Mike most of all, and yet Mike would simply wait till things blew over.
Besides, Gary still thought he’d
done right in trying to strangle the driver who’d been sent to return Beetie to
the Hatcheries.

“He cares
about you, Beetie. He
really
does!”

Gary
felt his own eyes dampen as he heard his mother speak up for him.

‘Care about
Beetie’? What a bloody understatement!

His heart
ached
for her all the time. She was all he could think about… and protecting her from
The Agenda, keeping her away from the clutches of Mr Homo atlanticus.

Chairman?
I’ll give him bloody ‘chairman’!

The boy
couldn’t understand
why
his feelings for Beetie were so strong, or make
sense of the changes that had happened over a mere few hours of twenty-first
century time. In the morning, when he met Mike at Regent’s Park for football
practice, he was a typical schoolboy, wondering whether he’d ever get a chance
to see a little more of Emma Pearson than would be allowed at school. Now he’d
twice kissed a girl a thousand times prettier, had risked his life for her, as
she had for him, had already killed a man to save her, yet it was all falling
apart. She was rejecting him, and this seemed like the worst thing that could
ever happen; worse than having a giant gee-rat chew him alive limb by limb.
Sure, other things were going on – Mike, the Hatcheries and the Terminus – but
all of this now seemed so distant, almost of trivial importance, compared with
what was happening between him and Beetie. Besides, as his Mum had said, Mike
could get himself out of any scrape. The boy was a verbal Houdini.

Mrs O’Driscoll
and Beetie got off at Golders Green and Gary
followed sheepishly, racking his brains for something to say to the girl…
anything that might make her speak to him again and perhaps ‘like’ him a
little. He’d be more than willing to forget the ‘love’ business for now!

Maybe the
stinking suit of Seamus O’Malley was beginning to put her off. ‘
To be sure
now, dat must be it!
’ he tried to reassure himself. After an industrial
wash and scrub at the B & B, he’d get down on his knees in front of her and
beg forgiveness.

But why the
heck should I? For trying to save to her, sod it? I’m no killer! Rescuer, yeah,
but no murderer.

They turned
into a street off the

“You’re back,
Mrs O’Driscoll! Oh, what a pretty wee thing! But… oh, who’s
that
?”

Engulfed by
the lingering smell of Seamus O’Malley, she took a step backwards. Gary
sensed an almost tangible revulsion as she stared at him in disgust.

“My son,” Mrs
O’Driscoll said proudly.

“And your
daughter?”

The woman’s eyes
darted between Gary and Beetie as if following a ball at Wimbledon.

“She’s…
erm...”

“Yes!”
interrupted Beetie. “I like being Mum’s daughter!”

Beetie, who
had stopped crying, entered. Mrs O’Driscoll turned to Gary,
her eyebrows raised.

“I think she’s
still in state of shock,” she whispered as they followed the girl into the
house.

“They’re all
in the sitting room,” announced the proprietress. “‘I can hardly wait to see
her,’ the man said.”

Gary
gripped his mum’s arm.

“It’s them!
Stop her, Mum!” he cried out. “She’ll not listen to me any more!”

“WAIT!” Mrs
O’Driscoll called out, but too late. Beetie opened the door and walked
resolutely into the room, determined to get everything over with, including
quite possibly her own death.

“BEETIE!” a
deep voice called out.

An old man’s
voice, shaky, its owner tired by centuries of time-travel, but one that seemed
to distil peace, purpose... and love.

“God?” Beetie
questioned.

“NO, BEETIE! DON’T!”
yelled
Gary.

He ran to the
door but it got slammed in his face.

“Those needle marks really
are
pretty fresh, Shruggie!” Mike stood staring at Cathy’s slender arm. “And her
eyes… they’ve gone more sort of glazed over. Not like that before.”

“Dunno what
you’re talking about!”

Mike struggled
within himself. So used to having a straight-down-the-middle friend who only
ever told the truth, he was lost for words.

Blinker’s hand
moved towards his pocket. No time for words. Blinker had been playing a game.
He was with the bastards all along. Well, Mike, too, could play games – soccer
especially – and in a game he could not afford to lose he ran at Blinker and
kicked the surprised boy full in the face, snapping his head back. Whisking out
his mag-stunner, he froze Blinker with a single
ZING
then dragged the
semi-stuporous girl from the bed. Swaying, she grinned inanely. He removed
Blinker’s mag-stunner and left the blue building with Cathy, pulling her
towards the only way in and out of the Hatcheries without time-specs: the
shuttle-bus stop.

“For God’s
sake, Cathy, help me,” he pleaded.

Her eyes told
him she was
trying. Despite that idiotic grin, she seemed to be
struggling with her brain, trying to make sense of what was happening
,
fighting to discard the chemical blanket Blinker had used
to smother her mind.

She staggered
along beside Mike.  Soon, they reached the spot where the pod would always
stop on its shuttle-cock journeys between the city and the Terminus.

“We’ll do this
together, Cathy. And I’m as clever as Gary,
any day. Honest I am! The shuttle-bus goes to the Terminus, right? So... how do
we stop the thing?”

The girl
stared at him, her smile faded, as she attempted to think with her brain. In
her eyes he saw a battle – an inner battle for memory – and he patted her hand
affectionately.

“Keep trying,
Miss United Kingdom! I’ll have to do the Poirot stuff for the two of us. So…
um… we stand here and wait, eh?”

He looked at
the shuttle-bus run in both directions: one way, a deserted perpendicular city,
the other, a tunnel disappearing into the wall surrounding the Terminus. Soon,
a silver fleck appeared on the horizon from the direction of the city and
rapidly grew until the large, silent, lozenge-pod stopped abruptly beside him
and Cathy. A circular diaphragm door flicked open. Mike peered in; rows of
empty seats with aeroplane straps. No driver. He boarded, pulling Cathy behind
him, helping her into a seat and fastening her seat-belt before buckling his
own. The door snapped shut and the metallic pod shot forwards like a bolt from
a crossbow. Almost immediately, it stopped and the door sprang open.

Strangely dim
outside, Mike heard voices. Cautiously, he unfastened both belts.

“Wait!” he
whispered.

Again, the
girl’s expression informed him she so desperately wanted to comprehend.

“Stay!” he
instructed.

He crept
soundlessly towards the open shuttle-bus door. With his face at the edge of the
opening, praying his nose wouldn’t get sliced off should the thing snap shut,
he gazed at the vast, poorly-lit space beyond.

The ceiling
must have been two to three hundred feet up and the high grey walls were
criss-crossed by metallic tubes and pipes similar to those he’d seen in the
grey building, but it was what filled most of the enormous hangar, several
foot-ball pitches across, that had Mike spellbound. It was so huge he could
only see a fraction of the silvery grey object studded with two tiers of
circular windows and raised up about thirty feet above the glistening grey
ground on great slanting metallic legs, broad at the top and narrowing towards
the bottom where they rested upon ten-metre wide circular supports. From the
extreme edge, above the windows, the saucer space-ship sloped upwards, but its
lofty top remained hidden.

Hundreds of
surfacers were crowded into an area in front of the giant craft. A few, nearby,
and smeared with blood, may have been the ones Mike had seen attacking heavies
with machetes in the grey building; if so, they’d transformed back into passive
zombies, fiddling with bits of machinery, dials and adjusting switches and
levers... or just standing doing nothing. Chairman-clones were scattered
amongst the surfacers: short men with big heads, pop-eyes and goofy teeth,
dressed in long, grey coats and giving out orders in machine-gun bursts of
high-pitched, clipped cockney. They reminded Mike of small terriers snapping at
Alsatians.  He scanned the crowd for the other girls. Nothing! Perhaps
they were already inside that thing which was so clearly the clue to the
mystery of the Terminus.

“Quick!” he
whispered to Cathy. “Here!”

She jumped from
her seat, ran to him and took his hand.

“Don’t look
out of the windows,” she repeated. Too loudly! Mike covered her mouth.

“Shhh!”

One of the
little Chairman-look-alikes swivelled his ugly head in their direction but
thankfully a surfacer stopped right in front of him, obscuring his view.
Not
so dumb, after all
? The shuttle-bus hummed softly, as if about to take off
again. Split second decision-making. Blinker must have recovered. Either he’d
be waiting for him to reappear in the Hatcheries or planning to take the next
shuttle-bus to the Terminus. Mike jumped out, with Cathy, moments before the
door snapped shut. The vehicle sped off in reverse. Crouching, he concealed
himself and the girl behind the large surfacer.

“Over there!” he
whispered to Cathy, pointing to a metal ladder fixed to the wall where a large
silver tube entered the Terminus... the other end of the tube into which he and
Blinker had crawled in the grey building.

“I fought ya
told me they was all inside,” Mike overheard the Atlantean complain. “Ya bloody
forgotten one of ’em. I ’eard ’er squeal.”

Mike whispered
to the doped surfacer blocking his view:

“She went that
way! Tell him! You might get an extra ration of rat meat, chum!” The surfacer
turned his head and peered down at them as Mike pointed away from the ladder.

“SHE WENT THAT
WAY!” bellowed the surfacer, indicating the opposite end of the hangar.

“She ran round
the corner,” whispered Mike.

“SHE RAN ROUND
THE CORNER!”

“’Urry!”

“’
Urry
?”
queried the dimmer of the two Atlanteans.

“Find ’er! An’
don’t ya bloody lose ’er,” shouted his boss. “The Chairman’ll be back wiv
Belinda any minute now. ’E’ll boil ya in rat piss if there’s one missin’.”

Mike seized
the opportunity. Amidst the ensuing commotion, he grabbed Cathy’s hand again,
and, staying low, they ran together to the ladder, climbed up onto the pipe and
crawled along on hands and knees to where it entered the space-ship. Obscured
from view by a flange projecting below the portholes, Mike stretched himself
lengthways along the pipe. Cathy copied him, her face inches away... and still
smiling.

“If you were
Veronica I’d kiss you but your permanent grin turns me off,” he whispered,
tiring of her grimace.

Immediately he
regretted what he’d said. Her smile was without a vestige of happiness. She
clearly struggled with her confusion at his remark, trying to figure out why
he’d spoken so unkindly, her furrowed brow exposed her ongoing battle against
the molecules of dope invading her brain. The boy realised what he’d said was
totally crass. He stroked her hair.

“I… I’m sorry,
Cathy. I’m a right arsehole at times. Gary
will tell you! Actually, I think your face is a lot nicer than Veronica’s. I
only wish…”

He went quiet.
The bigheads had returned with their high-pitched, grating voices.

“Go an’ count
’em. I’m sure I ’eard one out ’ere. Should all be inside by now, but if one’s
missin’...”

“P’raps
Blinker kept one for ’imself. Finks ’e’s gonna get a little reward, maybe? Good
one, ay! ’Im expectin’ a reward?”

“Well,
you’re
the one what’s gonna do wivout, Zygol.”

“Bleedin’
ain’t! Been practisin’, ain’t I!”

“Watcha mean,
practisin’, you rat ’ead? Practisin’ what?”

“All that
stuff the Chairman told us. What we’re supposed to do wiv ’em when we gets
there?

“Practisin’?”

“Yeah… well,
in me ’ead, like. Like im
ang
inin’!”

“
Imanginin
?
Im
ag
inin’, ya rat prick! Ain’t no good imaginin’ girl stuff. Gotta
do
it! Anyway, your ’ead’s too fulla shit to imaginin’ fings. Better off finkin’
what y’er gonna say to the Chairman if ya’ve lost one.”

“I’ll tell ’im
we’ll suck out the Life-Force from Blinker before we feed ’im to the rats. If
’e ’as foughts of keeping one of ’em in that little ‘uman ’ead of ’is she’ll go
whooshy up the tube an’ I’ll catch ’er at the other end.
I
fancy the one
with the black ’air an’ the white dress.”

“Chairman
decides. But ’e’ll still prob’ly feed ya to the rats if one’s missin’ ’cos
your
job was to collect ’em from the ’Atcheries. ’E’ll be ’ere any minute. When ’e’s
got ’is own one back.”

“Belinda? The
one with the yellow ’air? ’E’s welcome to
’er
! Weird, she is. Like a
wild fing when little… in the ’Atcheries. Never did nuffink she got told. They
’ad to put gallons of stuff into ’er to clear out
’er
mem’ries. Dunno
why the Chairman bovvered. An’ to fink we’ve all ’ad to wait ’cos of ’er.”

“Not that
easy, Zygol. Not after what ’appened in the’ Atcheries. As for Blinker, well
looks like ’is prisoner’s gone an’ done ’im in before runnin’ amok an’
ex-scapin’. Oh… too fick to understand, ain’tchya! That’s why y’er still where
ya are!”

“Watcha mean,
shit face?”

“Oh, ya
wouldn’t understand nuffink. Not with yer piddlin’ little brain.”

“Try me!”

“God! All
about God! The
old
God. She ’ad an ’old over God is what. When ’e liked to
fink of ‘imself as Chairman before Zaman took over. God always said Belinda was
special. Different, like! Till we started cleanin’ out their bleedin’ little
minds after Zaman got the stuff from the old place to do this. Cleaned all the
pretty girls’ brains out so as none could remind Belinda about the other God,
and the new Chairman sent the girl to the city to keep ’er away from ’im. Could
never tell when ’e might show up in the ’Atcheries with those friggin’
time-specs of ’is, the stupid old shit. Mind you, we
are
’ere ourselves
’cos
of God’s bleedin’ specs, I s’pose… but that’s another matter! Anyway, God ’ad
’is spies too. That’s ’ow the girl ended up in the Retreat instead of the place
where she was s’posed to go to. Bloody good job the Chairman sent Blinker out
wiv ’er, or we might never ’ave tracked ’er down. But the boy’s lettin’ us down
badly now. Still, not to worry. Not
me
, at least, you poor bugger. We’ve
got the tablet, prob’ly enough Life-Force for lift off… and when the fussy
Chairman’s got ’is bloody girl back then ‘bye-bye’ little ole London.
So long as God don’t frow
no
spanner in the works.
This is why Arfry came back for the Chairman. ‘Somefink ’appenin’, Arfry said.
Mind you, ’e could easily kill the old God wiv ’is bare ’ands if ’e needed to.
Now, is there anyfink else ya want me to squeeze into yer tiny little brain,
Zygol?”

“Nope!”
replied Zygol. “I’ll start countin’ an’ I’ll cut one in ’alf if numbers don’t
add up. The young ’uns can ’ave ’alf a one each.”

“Ya jus’ dunno
what this is all about, do ya! I should’ve turned ya into rat food as soon as
they assigned ya to me as an ’elper.”

Mike peered
over the edge of the pipe. The moronic one called Zygol pushed his way past the
surfacers and disappeared from view. The other, his immediate boss, sauntered
over to chat with two more of his kind then the three set about bullying
surfacers, verbally and physically.

“I’ve seen
friendlier things in the snake house at the zoo,” Mike whispered, “but I’m
thinking we’re not in a particularly clever place if this bloody great silver
contraption lifts off with those dolly birds inside. Do your job, Gary
boy! Hold on to your girl… for all our sakes,
please
!”

“Wind–… mmmm!”

Mike slapped
his hand over Cathy’s mouth again. He tried to read her eyes; tried to work out
whether, from her expression, she might be winning her struggle against the
drug Blinker had stuck into her. After overhearing the Atlanteans’ conversation
he hated the boy even more, for at least he and Blinker belonged to the same
species. The prehistoric big-heads, with their shrunken bodies, could almost be
forgiven for being long-extinct time-aliens. Sure, they spoke in funny, clipped
English − an odd foreign-sounding cockney − but this was the
closest they got to being human. From what he’d gathered, an idiot called God
had brought them to this future London.
What a prick! He’d a good mind to strangle God himself should he ever meet the
man!

With his hand
held firmly over Cathy’s mouth, Mike waited. He had no idea what for, or how
this whole wretched thing would end, but he waited and he thought of his mate,
Gary; thought of all the times they’d had, the bust-ups and the making-ups, the
laughter and the anger, and how, in different ways, they needed and supported
each other. And he did something he’d never before done, or even considered; he
prayed to another God − the
real
God − for Gary.

***

“Why should I
flipping trust you? Tell me!” Gary
asked Redfor when the man emerged from the room into which Beetie had
disappeared only moments earlier. Redfor turned to face Mrs O’Driscoll who
stood at the foot of the stairs, her mouth agape. He extended his hand in
greeting.

“Redfor!” he
warmly introduced himself. “A friend of Gary’s and God’s.”