The Terminus (8 page)

“I’ll stay with you, Gary,”
announced Mike when the unlikely trio emerged from Swiss Cottage tube station.
“I can distract your parents while Redfor nips round to the shed at the back.
I’m good at distracting people!”

“Cool, Mike!
And start thinking how you’re gonna help me nick the Pentatron tablet for God.”

“Make use of
these,” suggested Redfor handing Mike the other spectacles case. “My mag-stunner
too. We’ll swop clothes. Like I told you, God and I have work to do back here.
I’ll stay behind.”

“Man, I’d so
like to meet God!”

“He’s the last
person on Earth you’d ever want to meet, Gary.”

“Why? He
sounds interesting. I’m mad about science.”

Redfor seized Gary’s
arm.

“Don’t you
understand? He’s trying to avoid you! He needs you, but you must
never
meet
up. He sent me to keep an eye on you. Through Arthry.”

“Hey, dude,
don’t get shirty.”

Redfor relaxed
his hand.

“Sorry! I’ve a
lot on my mind. Okay, me and Mike, we’ll exchange clothes at your place.
Right?”

“Yeah... about
the same size,” replied Gary
glancing from one to the other. “I can chuck Mike’s stuff out the bedroom
window... and you take yours off in the garden shed. Could be your base, eh?
There’s a cabinet there with a missing leg. Some of my junk in it... like the
old microscope I used to use for looking at plants and insects with. No one
else touches my stuff. We can keep in touch by leaving messages in it.”

They walked
on.

“No messages, Gary!
Spies all over the place! Just concentrate on getting that Pentatron Tablet to
Arthry. Your priority! And knowing what I do about The Agenda, it all begins to
make sense.
This Beetie business, too.”

“
My
priority
is to get Beetie outa the flipping Hatcheries.”

“All of us are
doomed in the future if you don’t get this right. Remember, Beetie would gladly
sacrifice herself to save the human race.”

“How can you
be so certain? Anyway, I won’t bloody let her.”

“Gary,
in the Retreat we’ve all taken a vow to save mankind from extinction whatever
the cost. It’ll be the only thing on Beetie’s mind now... in the future! She’s
probably forgotten all about you, anyway, if they’ve cleansed her brain.”

God, please
no
!
prayed
Gary.

“I’ll not let
those bastards touch her. I won’t… I won’t... I bloody
won’t
!” he
repeated.

“He’s got it
bad, Redfor,” interjected Mike.

“The best
thing
you
can do for Beetie is to keep focussed, Gary.
At least she won’t have suffered in vain.”

Gary
swung round and held a clenched fist inches from his face.

“‘Suffered in
vain’? What the heck are you saying?”

“Cool it, Gary!”
cautioned Mike, holding his friend back.

“Like I said,
Mike,” chuckled Redfor, “you’d better keep an eye on him. Can’t have
him
dying
as well.”

“As well?”

Gary
looked anxiously from Redfor to Mike.

“Get the
Pentatron Tablet safely into Arthry’s hands, Gary,”
continued Redfor. “At least you owe the girl this much.”

Gary’s
mind seemed to spin in jerky pirouettes. There was something about Redfor that
bothered him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Perhaps the man wasn’t
being truthful and had more knowledge than he wished to reveal.

“Where are the
Hatcheries
now
?” Gary asked
Redfor. “Like here, in the past… or, rather, the
present.”

“Where God’s
gonna work one day.”

“No help! How
do I find the place?”

“Stanmore
Scientific Laboratories. At the end of the Jubilee line. They recently bought
an adjacent plot of land where God’ll build his new Research Institute. Linked
in with what’s already going on at CERN. In London
of the future we call the place ‘The Terminus’.”

Gary
glanced at Mike.

“Yeah!
Collaborative science. Makes sense, I guess.”

“Why
am
I telling you all this?” asked Redfor. “I’m not joking, Gary.
God doesn’t want you near him! He can’t trust anyone who’s been to the future.
You might be followed... and sooner or later someone
will
kill him.
Unless he…”

Redfor checked
himself.

“So if
Stanmore Scientific Laboratories becomes the Hatcheries, this place God’s got
in mind, the Terminus, is where The Agenda are gonna hide out. Correct?”

“Gary,
you’ll destroy
everything
if you’re planning to do what I think’s
hatching inside your immature skull.”

“Nothing, Redfor!
Just need a handle on the layout. That’s
all.”

“You’d become
instant gee-rat food. As for Beetie… you’ll only make things worse for her if
you try to get into the Hatcheries… assuming she’s
still alive.”

Gary
probed Redfor with his usual bulldog determination:

“You
told
me she hasn’t been born, yet, dude! Anyway, what’ll you and God be doing here
exactly? And why should he trust you and not me?”

“Doing?
Our
bit, of course! Before God returns to the future… when he and Arthry plan to
find out why The Agenda needs the tablet so urgently. And uncover what’s going
on in the Terminus. I’ve told you more than God would want me to, Gary!
Remember, you’re just a small cog in the grand scheme of things.
Beetie too!”

“My house is
across the road there,” Gary
announced after they turned a corner, ignoring Redfor’s last remark.
“The one with the white door and rose bushes in the garden.
Wait in the shed round the back and watch out for me at my bedroom window
upstairs.”

“You
will
understand one day, Gary. Think of
the Beetie business as just a little blip. Believe
me,
God has every confidence in you.”

Redfor slipped
round the side of the house leaving Gary and Mike at the gate.

“Pretty bad,
ay?” Mike questioned on seeing his friend motionless with both fists clenched.

“The wanker!”
muttered Gary.
“A
‘little blip’ indeed!
I’ll give him a little blip.
As
for God...
I’m telling you, Mike, if anything happens to Beetie again,
I’ll… I’ll… oh, damn it! No wonder God’s shit scared to meet me!”

Still
seething, Gary rang the bell. With
his dad at work, this being Saturday,
he reckoned only Mum would be at home.

“Where’s
your
…?”
began
Mrs
O’Driscoll on opening the door, but stopped
short. The corners of her mouth dropped. “Oh my God!”

The woman and
her son stared at each other for what seemed an age, though in truth only a few
seconds. Gary, who’d left home with his football kit two hours earlier, had now
returned as a stranger before his own mother. He’d travelled twice to an
unspecified time in the distant future, had experienced his first kiss, fallen
in love, prevented the girl’s death, as she had his, slept in the same room as
her, had lost her for a second time, and was now involved in a bid to steal
something of civilisation-saving importance. Little wonder he appeared
hesitant.

“Your… erm…
key?” she finished, gazing at the boy. She glanced briefly at Mike.

“Um…
I
can explain, Mrs O’Driscoll,” Mike chipped in. “Perfectly simple. New soccer
practice gear. Silicon-activated, energy-efficient tracksuits! Being all shiny
makes ’em less wind resistant.  Like what Olympic cyclists wear. We’re
trialling them for the team. They asked for volunteers. Gary and I thought we’d
help out. No one else offered. Gary
was told to keep his on and they want us back for special tests later on.”

“
Special
tests
?” queried Gary’s mum, her
expression a blend of despair and disbelief.

“Yeah!
A place near the
British
Museum
where
tests are carried out.”

“
British
Museum
?”

“Sure, Mrs O’Driscoll!
Dead important, they told us.” She
didn’t appear to be listening. “Dead! Ha ha! Like the British
Museum itself, ay?”

“Your hair,
Gary
?
What on earth have you done to it?”

Gary’s
mind was elsewhere.

“Beetie cut…”

He was about
to say ‘Beattie cut it’ but checked himself. Mike baled him out:

“A Beetie-cut,
it’s called! Reduces drag on the head when you’re running fast. So you can beat
the crap outa the other team. Ay, Gary?
We’ll all look like that soon. Be able to spot a soccer player from a mile off,
right?”

Gary
ruffled his hair in confused embarrassment.

“Big photo
shoot today, Mrs O’Driscoll! Gary
with his Beetie-cut especially,” continued Mike.

Gary’s
mum eyed her son with suspicion.

“Whatever
you’re up to, boys, please don’t bring half the garden into the house,” she
pleaded before retreating inside. Gary
quickly transferred dust of the future from shoes to trouser legs and he and
Mike ran upstairs to the privacy of his room. Together, they peered out of the
window. No sign of Redfor.

“Shit!”
exclaimed Mike. “Where’s the nutcase gone.” Gary
leaned out further then pointed downwards, aghast.

“Oh, my God!”
they muttered in unison.

There was
Redfor, naked, holding up his shiny, red tracksuit.

“He
is
weird!
Get your clothes off quick!” Gary
said.

Mike fell over
his feet in his haste to remove his jeans.

“Gary,
what
are
you doing? Why are you crashing around?” Mrs O’Driscoll called
out from downstairs. Mike hurriedly chucked his clothes out from the open
window.

“Some string…
rope… anything for him to tie the tracksuit to?” asked Mike standing in his
underpants. Gary searched the room
as Mike stared at Redfor waving his tracksuit.

“Computer
cable?” suggested Gary.

“What?”

“COMPUTER
CABLE!” shouted Gary.

“GARY?
WHAT ARE YOU GOING ON ABOUT A COMPUTER CABLE
FOR?” yelled Mrs
O’Driscoll
.
They heard her coming up the stairs.

“Computer… um…
get her to turn on your Dad’s computer,” Mike suggested.

“MY COMPUTER’S
GONE ON THE BLINK, MUM. COULD YOU START UP DAD’S FOR ME? IT’S URGENT.”

“I’m so busy, Gary.
Can’t you…?”

“Say yours is
doing a cybernetic flip-over and might implode and go bang if you leave the
room, Gary,” whispered Mike,
dangling the computer lead out of the window.

“CAN’T MUM!
MINE MIGHT DO A CYBERNETIC FLIP-OVER IF I LEAVE
IT!”

“Goodness, I
wish I understood these things. How do I…?”

“THE BUTTON,
MUM! PRESS THE BUTTON ON DAD’S COMPUTER AND
WAIT. DON’T LEAVE THE ROOM.
AND FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE DON’T
COME UPSTAIRS. EXTRA STATIC UP HERE MIGHT CAUSE AN EXPLOSION.”

“Tell her your
dad’s might go bang if she leaves your Dad’s office before she’s logged on,”
whispered Mike, pulling up the tracksuit.

“DAD’S COULD
GO BANG AS WELL
IF YOU LEAVE HIS STUDY BEFORE YOU’RE LOGGED ON!”

“Such a
nuisance!” bemoaned Gary’s mum. A
few minutes later, when Mike was puzzling over how to get into the shiny red
tracksuit, she called out again:

“It’s doing
funny things!”

Mike gave his
friend the thumbs up and hurriedly slipped into the strange red garment of the
future.

“KEEP WATCHING
THE SCREEN TILL THE ICONS APPEAR, MUM!”

“No icons, Gary.”

“Put her out
of her misery,” suggested Mike, grinning.

Gary
went downstairs. His mother stood in his Dad’s study across the landing staring
at the monitor.

“No religious
things at all,” she said. “Not even a cross!”

“
Religious
?
Oh, it’s okay, Mum. Thanks. I’ll take over.”

Gary
went straight to the British Museum
website. On the screen was a picture of the Pentatron tablet and the
reconstructed skull of Homo atlanticus – the most important archaeological find
ever – and it seemed the two objects were linked not only by their location,
off the Gold Coast of West Africa, but through carbon-dating. A hundred
thousand years old, some thirty thousand years before primitive Homo sapiens
had spread out from Africa in search of food and water
for its growing population. DNA studies had
already confirmed the new species of human was as distinct from us as was Homo
neandertalis. Strangely, the cranium size of the newly-discovered skull was
significantly larger than modern man’s, and the precision of the Pentatron
Tablet, with its complex markings, spoke of a highly advanced civilisation. The
website didn’t state exactly what the tablet was made from. ‘Unspecified
material’, he was informed. For Gary,
most puzzling of all was why God, and presumably The Agenda, wanted the object
so badly.
Something to do with the goings on in The Terminus
of the future?
How on earth he and Mike would steal the thing he
couldn’t begin to work out. Using the time-specs, perhaps? If so, he’d need to
control the specs’ temporal function with pin-point accuracy.

Mike was
already proving indispensable. Sure, his friend often got on his nerves and had
no interest whatsoever in the mysteries of science, but he had a real gift with
people. He could talk the hind legs off an elephant, let alone a donkey, and
his charm would seduce the most hardened of sceptics, but most of all he had a
knack of pulling rabbits out of hats in the very worst back-to-the-wall
situations.

Like when they
were set upon by a gang from Camden Town
some months back. Mike told the would-be leader, holding a knife to his neck,
that he had a duty to inform the dude about something important. He whispered
into guy’s ear causing his face to fall like a brick from a high-rise. Within
minutes the leader and the second-in-command were at each other, transformed
into a pair of fighting dogs, slashing, snarling, punching and kicking... after
which the whole gang erupted into a free-for-all as allegiance for one of the
two top guys surfaced. Unnoticed and unharmed, Mike and Gary escaped.