Time Riders

CHAPTER 78

1957, New York

Bob and Liam took the steps up and found the museum worker, Sam, dutifully standingguard at the top of the stairs, just as they’d asked him to.

‘We’re all done down there,’ said Liam quietly. ‘Thanks for lookingout for us.’

‘Look — ’ the man eyed them both — ‘you said something abouteverything changing to how it should be?’

There really wasn’t time for a full explanation, although Liam would have liked to havegiven the man that for helping them out.

‘Time is going to correct itself.’ Liam smiled. ‘And everything is going tobe all right once more. I promise you.’ He reached out and patted Sam’s arm.‘And guess what?’

‘What?’

‘Sometime in the future, I reckon I’ll be seeing you again, so I will.’

Sam Penney watched them go, scratching his head, dumbfounded, trying to make sense of thenonsensical things the young lad had just said, and beginning to conclude that he must bequite out of his mind, when a guard barked at him to help some of the other workers lift aheavy display case down the hallway to be stacked ready for burning.

Liam and Bob stepped out through the double doors on to the museum’smain entrance floor, busy with workmen in boiler suits toiling under the gaze of stern-facedsoldiers. Bob dutifully returned the clipped salute from the guard standing in the mainentrance with a barked ‘Heil Kramer’.

Outside, the bonfire had already started and tongues of orange flame chased dancing flakes ofash up into the overcast sky. Liam could feel the searing heat on his face as they made theirway down the grand front steps across the forecourt towards the street. Amid theheat-shimmering pile of burning antiquities he spotted the end of the Egyptian sarcophagussticking out of the pile, the dry wood blackening and paint work, four millennia old,smouldering and peeling off the side.

The workers stood in a pitifully sad group watching the exhibits burn. Beyond the forecourt,on the street, citizens were gathering, sombrely witnessing the valuable relics of history andtheir national heritage disappear in a column of acrid smoke.

On the skyline, Liam noticed the pall of other plumes of smoke drifting up into the coldwinter sky, and guessed that across the city books were burning, priceless paintings wereburning, historical documents, journals and records were all burning, pulled from publiclibraries and private galleries. He imagined the very same spectacle being duplicated inAmerica’s other main cities in the next few days. And duplicated across the cities ofKramer’s Reich over the next few weeks. History being wiped clean, purged wholesale fromthe face of the earth.

He felt physically sick.

They stepped on to the street, pushing past silent faces filled with hatred as they glared athis and Bob’s black uniforms.

Liam was relieved to see the Kubelwagen still parked up outside and no soldiers standingaround it on the lookout for the culprits who’d stolen it.

Bob climbed in quickly and turned on the engine.

‘Do you think they’ll find our message?’ asked Liam as hesettled into the passenger’s seat and Bob eased the vehicle through the crowd back on tothe street. ‘I mean, we’ve hidden it away pretty good… maybe too good.’

‘We will know this in approximately seventy-nine minutes.’

They proceeded south down an orderly Central Park West, on one side of them the city’spark, all winter-bare trees and drab ochre grass, on the other endless office blocks andtraffic nudging forward between red traffic lights. It started to rain. Joyless greasy dropsspattered against the windscreen and soaked dispirited, plodding pedestrians outside.

Liam truly wouldn’t be sorry to leave this drab brow-beaten world behind.

We’re on our way home now… hopefully.

He wondered what the archway looked like, who might be occupying it here in 1957, if indeedanyone was. More to the point — he wondered what the girls and Foster were up to rightnow.