Another War

Chapter Four

He watched Henbury and Adams very carefully after that. The seed had been planted in his mind, and he was sure he would never look at them in the same way again. That was Dickson’s skill as a civil servant◦– to brush aside the seemingly obvious to reveal an insidious menace that could ruin everything. That was how he worked, warping trusting souls into suspicious minds. Thacker could only assume that Dickson thought it kept the country safe, the price of freedom being eternal vigilance.

All Thacker knew was that tiny actions now carried enormous significance. The way they continually picked at the all-in-one coveralls given to them after their clothes had been bagged as high-grade biological waste and shipped post haste to Porton Down. The way they ate, like starved dogs wary of another random kicking. The way they examined every item that looked new and unusual, from the guns the soldiers carried to the nylon rope fixing the tent down.

Most of all, the way they talked to each other in low, urgent whispers, using only a pared-down version of English, as if the very words they used were rationed.

It was now entirely Dickson’s show. Somewhere along the line it had turned into an MI5 operation. Thacker was just there to assist, and shoot something or someone if it was deemed necessary.

But rather than freezing him out, Dickson took him into his confidence. Thacker was one of the few people on site who had a security clearance as high as he did.

Just before they entered the isolation tent, they put on the gauze masks used by surgeons. Henbury and Adams had missed eighty years of pandemics, and in their weakened state, a common cold could carry them off. Dickson was carrying a small tape recorder in his hand.

Thacker let Dickson go first. He followed closely behind, his hand resting on his webbing belt, just behind his sidearm. Henbury looked up from his scraped clean plate and backed away fractionally.

Dickson took a chair opposite. Thacker declined to sit, and stood at ease slightly behind and to the right. It afforded him a clear shot.

‘Is the food all right?’ asked Dickson.

Henbury dropped his spoon onto the crockery. ‘Not enough salt.’

‘Apparently too much salt gives you hypertension.’ When his comment was met by blank incomprehension, he added: ‘High blood pressure. Bad for the heart.’

‘Who are you?’ grunted Adams, pugnacious and wiry. Once, he’d been solidly built, muscle on his yeoman’s frame. Now he was gaunt, but still bellicose.

‘My name’s Dickson. I’m part of the, er, Secret Service. Major Thacker, you met in the hall. He’s regular army, like you were.’ Dickson placed the tape recorder on the table between them. ‘Do you know what that is?’

Henbury started to reach forward, and Adams caught his wrist. They looked at each other, and after a book’s worth of unspoken words, put their hands back in their laps.

‘It’s a tape recorder,’ said Dickson, faintly annoyed. ‘It records soundwaves on magnetic tape, which can be played back over and over again. I want to sit it on the table between us so that it can record this and subsequent interviews. It’s just a machine.’ He pressed the record button with his thumb and laid the whirring thing down. ‘Would you both like to state your names and your dates of birth?’

‘No,’ said Henbury.

‘This is getting stale already. We can keep you here for as long as we want. Forever, in fact. We can do to you whatever we want, up to and including killing you, if we think it’ll serve the national interest. Neither of you legally exist, and until we get some answers from you, you won’t be legally dead, either.’

Thacker frowned, and cleared his throat. The surgeon’s mask was a minor irritation compared with the full army respirator. ‘You both scare us. You’ve been somewhere unimaginable, and now you’ve returned. It’s Mr Dickson’s job to make sure you, or anything else that might have come with you, doesn’t pose a threat to the country. If you cooperate with us now, we can reach an informed decision, and sooner rather than later.’

Henbury seemed to slump even further back in his seat. ‘What’s your job, then?’

‘To make sure Dickson gets what he wants from you. Look, this isn’t going to be some good cop, bad cop shtick.’

Dickson smiled. ‘Shall we start again? Names, please.’

There was silence, then Henbury’s quiet, defeated voice: ‘Robert Arthur Geoffrey Leslie Henbury, born eighteenth of February, 1893. Now you, Adams.’

Adams grunted, then said: ‘George James Adams, twenty-first of April, 1886.’

‘Thank you, gentlemen. For the record, I’m handing to Robert Henbury the front page of today’s Times.’ Dickson shook the broadsheet out and pushed it across the table.

Henbury took it warily. His first reaction was to dismiss it. ‘This isn’t The Times.’

‘Not as you recognise it. It’s still The Times. Still printed in London.’

Henbury flattened out a crease with the palm of his hand. Adams, despite himself, leaned over.

‘Who are these people? I’ve never heard of any of them.’ Henbury was bewildered, and then he followed Adams’ quaking finger to the dateline at the top of the page.

‘It’s a lie. A trick. You’re trying to trick us!’ Adams was on his feet, unsteady, fingers gripping the tabletop.

Thacker’s fingers wandered to the butt of his pistol. ‘You’ve travelled, not in space but in time. Eighty years into the future. Now you’re here, and we have to deal with this whole extraordinary situation. Will you tell us where you’ve been, and what happened to you while you were there? If you like, you can start by explaining what that contraption is on the first floor of the west wing.’

Both men were too agitated to continue. Henbury crumpled the news sheet in his fist and gaped at Dickson, then at Thacker, and back again. Adams started to swear, using damn and blast and bloody like they were going out of fashion.

‘We’ll try again in the morning,’ said Dickson, and clicked the tape recorder off.

Outside, Dickson searched furiously for a cigarette, and didn’t stop his frenetic activity until the first rush of smoke had been sucked deep into his lungs.

‘That went well,’ said Thacker.

‘Bollocks it did. We both lost our rag. Too eager to prove that Little Lord Henbury and his sidekick are either homicidal lunatics or impostors from the ninth dimension bent on world domination.’

‘You know, you have a turn of phrase that’s almost poetic.’

Dickson laughed. ‘And you’re too phlegmatic.’

‘When I was down in that house, I was crapping myself every step of the way.’

‘Yes, but you did the job. Henbury should recognise your type: the Empire was built on people like you.’ Dickson chain-lit another cigarette and stubbed out the old one on a tent pole.

Thacker flipped off his face mask. ‘Do you want to take a look at the device in the house? There’s still enough light left.’

‘Don’t want to go poking around in the dark? Can’t blame you. Sure, why not. Do I have to wear that ridiculous NBC suit?’

‘Not if you don’t mind some rogue pathogen coagulating your blood in an instant, or rupturing every cell in your body.’ Thacker scratched his ear. ‘We’ve got things like that back in the lab, all safely locked up.’

Dickson pursed his lips. His cigarette nodded up and down. ‘They’ve some civvy getup at the portable lab. I’ll borrow one of those.’

They met back at the main gate, Thacker in his green coveralls and respirator, Dickson in his shiny white spaceman’s suit and plastic-fronted helmet.

‘I suppose getting a lift’s out of the question?’ asked Dickson.

‘It’s not far,’ said Thacker, and started walking. Again, he’d traded his sidearm for a rifle.

They crunched along the gravel drive, and watched as zephyrs of wind caught the grey ash and sent it drifting across the dead ground.

‘Wind’s picking up,’ said Dickson. ‘Front coming in from the south-west. It’ll be raining by tomorrow morning.’

‘The dust’s inert.’

‘I hope that’s the case. It’s what I told the Prime Minister this morning. I even mentioned your name, so that when three-eyed fish start invading the capital, he knows who to blame.’

Thacker half-smiled, but the situation was too serious. They were approaching the heavy front doors, sealed with fluttering biohazard tape. The two bio-suited guards on duty were edgy. ‘We’re going in to take a look. Shut the doors up behind us and make certain it’s us coming out. We’ll give the password of the day.’

The guards stood aside, and as Thacker pushed the door inwards, they levelled their guns at the shade inside. Dickson stepped through and Thacker nodded to the soldiers.

The door clanged shut, making Dickson start.

‘It’s not haunted, you know.’

‘Did I ever say it was? Where’s this thing kept?’

‘Up the stairs, left at the top.’ Thacker led the way through the ageing house. ‘Strange. For a building built in 1840, it should only be eighty years old according to its own internal clock. It feels so much older, older than the hundred and sixty years it really is. Like it’s tired of being Henbury Hall, and wants to be a pile of rubble instead.’

Dickson, close behind, said: ‘You’re anthropomorphizing. Buildings don’t feel.’

‘I was in Germany at one of the old concentration camps. You’ll never convince me that bricks and mortar can’t remember.’

The corridor had changed from his last visit. All the open doors along its length were pools of darkness, but the passage itself was basking in late sunlight. It made everything look different, but it still felt unutterably sad all the same. He breezed down its length, gaze flicking into each empty room, but there was none of the close-quarter searching of earlier.

It was odd. He had the sensation that he ought to take more care, but there was nothing concrete to pin it on.

‘It’s in here. Through the connecting door.’

Dickson peeked in, took in the desk and chair, and the spilled papers on the floor.

‘Sorry about the mess. My fault,’ said Thacker. He shuffled the closely-written sheets back into a semblance of order and put them back on the desk.

Dickson was standing at the second doorway, hands on the frame, staring at the impossible machine in front of him. ‘You know what these symbols are, don’t you?’

‘Hieroglyphs. See? A Classics degree from Oxford does have some use.’

‘Where the hell did this thing come from?’ He stalked around it, much like Thacker had done. ‘Before or after the disappearance?’

‘I think,’ said Thacker, ‘this might give us some of the answers.’ He held up a book covered with faded red leather. He flicked through the pages, stopping at random. ‘This seems to be a diary, a journal. Everything here needs to be bagged, checked and catalogued. I found some plans earlier. At least, that’s what they looked like.’ He interrupted himself. ‘Dickson, don’t touch those.’

Dickson’s hand was resting on one of the three levers. He lifted it away. ‘Sorry. Curiosity.’

‘Good job you’re not a cat, then.’ Thacker looked at the last entry in the journal and found it written in a different style. He leafed back until the handwriting changed again. He could make out 31st July, 1919. Subsequent pages were undated. He looked back at the very front. ‘Jack Henbury. We’ve got Jack Henbury’s diary, but no Jack. What do you reckon?’

Dickson was on his belly, inspecting the base of the machine. ‘Can’t see any power supply. It must have some sort of engine. Perhaps the forcefield collapsed because it ran out of juice.’

‘It’s still puttering along. You can feel it humming.’

Dickson got up and brushed himself down. ‘We need to get this somewhere safe. Aldermaston?’

‘It’s close, and they’ve got good containment facilities. I don’t fancy trying to move it before we know how it works.’

‘We may not know until we move it.’

‘I, for one, am not vanishing for the next eight decades and getting back in time to see my grandchildren get married.’ Thacker started to stack up all the papers and books on the desk. ‘I would strongly recommend we don’t shift that thing until we know a lot more about it.’

Dickson circled it again. ‘It’s not secure here. It makes me nervous. Though I’m rather assuming that this is the origin of the forcefield, and as such is of unimaginable importance, rather than being a heap of ancient Egyptian junk.’

‘The light’s starting to go. If you’ll carry the papers, we’ll be out of here.’

‘Why am I doing the donkey work?’

‘Because I have the rifle, and I’d like to be able to shoot someone without asking politely for them to wait while I free my hands.’

Dickson gathered up the neat pile Thacker had made. ‘Can you imagine London protected by a forcefield like that? It could vanish off the map. Nothing could touch it, no bomb or missile, nothing. It could reappear a minute later and no-one inside would even notice it had happened.’

‘Interesting hypothesis, Dickson. Of course, twenty million mad Londoners might just burn the whole city down in an orgy of self-destruction, if Henbury and Adams are anything to go by.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That pile of wood in the banqueting hall isn’t some interesting piece of modern art. It’s a bonfire, and it seems I got there just in time to stop them lighting it. It says so in that journal you’re carrying. Amongst other interesting things. We really do need to have a proper chat with our returnees. They didn’t seem to have the energy to walk, but plenty enough to smash furniture into kindling.’

Once out of the house, Thacker shouldered his rifle and took a fair share of the paperwork.

‘Look, Dickson, I don’t mean be a damp squib. A forcefield that’ll stop cannon fire but lets air through is going to be of real interest to everyone. Especially the Pentagon. I’m sure there are more applications for it than we can dream of. But I’ve been inside it when it was up and running, and it felt all wrong. Clearly Henbury and Adams thought so…’

‘If they are who they say they are.’

‘So we’ll send photographs to Emily Foster.’

‘And what about on the inside?’

‘CAT scan them both. If they don’t die of future shock, we’ll know. But you’re missing the point. That machine shouldn’t exist. Do you really think if the ancient Egyptians possessed such power, we wouldn’t be celebrating the enthronement of Rameses the eight hundredth as Emperor of the world? Or if we had access to that sort of technology, the Great War would have lasted five minutes. Or five hundred years, depending on who had it.’

Dickson tried to scratch his nose, but had forgotten he was wearing an air-tight bubble around his head. ‘Damn it, I want a cigarette.’

‘And where’s Jack Henbury?’

‘Do you think they might have killed him?’

‘If Jack had the machine first, they might well have done. I think it backfired on them. They didn’t know how to work it. Instead of going away for five minutes, they were away for eighty years.’

‘And the earlier deaths? The horse, and the maid?’

Thacker shrugged. ‘Experiments?’

‘You’re just guessing now, Thacker.’

‘All I’m trying to do is curb your enthusiasm for something that has no right to be here and is clearly dangerous. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.’

They walked the rest of the way in uneasy silence. At the main gate, they deposited the papers in big hazmat containers, then showered and scrubbed the outsides of their suits.

When the process had been completed, Dickson was the first to break the silence.

‘I know what you’re trying to do. I’m the one who’s supposed to turn everything around so that it looks evil. I’m the Cassandra, warning everyone of impending doom. But think of it. A shield against everything. I could retire, and sleep easy at night knowing that nothing could go wrong even though I wasn’t on watch.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ said Thacker, unstrapping his respirator, ‘and it’s never that easy. Let’s go and prod Henbury and Adams again. See what they have to say for themselves.’