In the midst of this solar turmoil – as those in the observatory had discovered – a magnesium-white eruption flowered.
‘Now,’ cried the leader. The thirty seconds were up.
They flung themselves down on the floor behind the metal barrier, burying their heads in their arms, closing their eyes.
Precisely on the time they had estimated, the shell flash ejected from the sun. It illuminated the world with floods of light and fury. Screaming wind followed it in a shock wave, travelling along down the throat of the system until, many hours later, it punched itself out beyond the heliopause and far into outer space. As it radiated outwards, it licked with its scorching tongue much of the atmosphere from the vulnerable worlds in its path.
Only the four scientists were prepared for the event.
They lay behind their shelter while the world smouldered outside. Their guardian had fallen like a cinder.
They rose cautiously at last. They stood. They stared at each other, stared at the blackened landscape outside, where the Bastion remained intact. Then, according to plan, they headed for the stairs leading to the upper floors.
Their hair sparkled and sang as they moved. Electrostatic action in the tormented air rendered the elevators inoperative.
Oxygen was scarce. Yet they forced themselves on, knowing they must act now, while the Fleet Ones were stunned.
Through waves of heat they climbed, dragging the vitiated air into their lungs. On one landing they collected a wing from a store cupboard, on another landing another wing. Sections of body structure, improvised from dismantled parts of the Mechanism, were also gathered as they climbed. By the time they reached the observatory on the highest level, they needed merely to secure the various parts together and they had a glider large enough to carry a man.
The landscape they surveyed was covered in fast-moving smoke. The pall washed against the two edifices of Bastion and Mechanism like a spring tide.
One detail they did observe. The bloodthirst-plants were cautiously poking their muzzles from the ground again. They were intelligent enough, yet part of nature enough, to sense when the shell flash was coming, and to retreat underground from it. But the men wasted little time in observing the phenomenon.
‘Is the air calm enough for flight?’ a small bearded man asked the leader. ‘Suppose all the cities containing men have just been destroyed by fire?’
‘We’ve no alternative but to try,’ said the leader. ‘This is our one chance. The next shell flash is many lifetimes away.’ Yet he paused before climbing into the glider, as if to hear what his friends had to say at this solemn moment.
The bearded man perhaps regretted his hesitations in the face of the other’s courage.
‘Yes, of course you must go,’ he said. ‘Somehow we have to get word of what is happening here back to the far past. Stoker has to be informed.’
The scientist standing next to him said, in sorrowful disagreement, ‘Yet all the old legends say that Dracula destroyed Stoker.’
The leader answered firmly, addressing them all, with the sense of parting heavy upon them. ‘We have argued the situation through sufficiently. Those old legends may be wrong, for we well understand how history can be changed. Our given three-dimensional space is only one dimension within the universe’s four-dimensional space. Time is a flexible element within it. No particle has a definite path, as the uncertainty principle states. We have been enslaved here at the end of the world in order to help generate the colossal voltages the Fleet Ones require to regiment those paths. I shall seek out the other end of their trail – and there I believe the legendary Stoker is to be found. It is Stoker after all who is one of Earth’s heroes, the stoker – as his name implies – who brought fire with which to burn out a great chance for all mankind.’
‘So he did,’ agreed the others, almost in chorus. And one of them, the youngest, added, ‘After all, this horrendous present, according to the laws of chaos, is a probability only, not an actuality. History can be changed.’
The leader made to step into the glider. Again the bearded man detained him.
‘Just wait till these winds have died. The glider will have a better chance then.’
‘And then the Fleet Ones will be back on the attack. It’s necessary that I go now.’
He looked searchingly into their faces. ‘I know you will suffer for this. My regret is that we were unable to fashion a plane large enough to carry all four of us. Always remember – I shall succeed or die in the attempt.’
‘There are states far worse than death where the Fleet Ones are concerned,’ said the bearded man, mustering a smile. He made to shake the leader’s hand, changed his mind, and embraced him warmly instead.
‘Farewell, Alwyn. God’s grace guide you.’
The leader stepped into the machine.
The others, as prearranged, pushed it to the edge of the drop – and over. The glider fell until its wings bit into the air. It steadied. It began to fly. It circled, it even gained height. It began heading towards the east.
The scientists left behind stood watching until the glider was faint in the murk.
Their voices too went with the wind.
‘Farewell, Alwyn!’
State Route 18 runs north from St George, through the Iron Mountains, to the Escalante Desert. One day in 1999, it also ran into a past so distant nobody had ever dared visualize it.
Bernard Clift had worked in this part of Utah before, often assisted by students from Dixie College with a leaning towards palaeontology. This summer, Clift’s instincts had led him to dig on the faulty stretch of rock the students called Old John, after the lumber-built jakes near the site, set up by a forgotten nineteenth-century prospector.
Clift was a thin, spare man, deeply tanned, medium height, his sharp features and penetrating grey eyes famous well beyond the limits of his own profession. There was a tenseness about him today, as if he knew that under his hand lay a discovery that was to bring him even greater fame, and to release on the world new perspectives and new terror.
Over the dig, a spread of blue canvas, of a deeper blue than the Utah sky, had been erected, to shade Clift and his fellow-workers from the sun. Clustered below the brow of rock where they worked were a dozen miscellaneous vehicles – Clift’s trailer, a trailer from Enterprise which served food and drink all day, and the automobiles and campers belonging to students and helpers.
A dirt road led from this encampment into the desert. All was solitude and stillness, apart from the activity centred on Old John. There Clift knelt in his dusty jeans, brushing soil and crumbs of rock from the fossilized wooden lid they had uncovered.
Scattered bones of a dinosaur of the aurischian order had been extracted from the rock, labelled, temporarily identified as belonging to a large theropod, and packed into crates. Now, in a stratum below the dinosaur grave, the new find was revealed.
Several people crowded round the freshly excavated hole in which Clift worked with one assistant. Cautious digging had revealed fossil wood, which slowly emerged in the shape of a coffin. On the lid of the coffin, a sign had been carved: