Chapter Six

When you try to burn damp garden refuse, you have to create fierce heat before the green twigs, sappy cuttings and weeds begin to smoke, smolder and finally burn. Yet no matter how wet everything is, the greedy maw of a roaring fire will in the end swallow everything.

In Shuteley that summer night, everything inflammable or uninflammable was as dry as tinder. Everything that would burn was ready to do so at the first touch of flame; everything that wouldn't was neutral in the onslaught, neither helping nor hindering.

All along the river on the other side, buildings blazed as if they'd been prepared for a fire display and then touched off at a dozen points. Orange flame painted the gaunt shells of buildings which were all that was left along the riverside. Every few seconds, above the crackling roar of burning wood, there was a crash as somewhere masonry collapsed.

Nothing could be alive across the river from us. If anyone by some mirade escaped alive from any of those blazing buildings, there was no sanctuary in narrow streets swept with flame. I could only hope that the people who had been in these houses, the most densely populated part of the town, had already managed to get out.

Nothing could be alive. In such a furnace, even a fireman in full protective clothing would collapse and melt like a tallow candle.

"The whole town," Sheila whispered beside me. "Everything's burning. There's nothing left."

She was right: the fire stretched on both sides to the limits of the town, and although we could see practically nothing through the wall of fire, the flames and smoke which gushed into the red sky showed that behind what we could see the fire was just as intense.

Where we were, a hundred yards from the river and looking across it to a strip of scorched earth and stone and concrete that could burn no more -- perhaps three hundred yards from the nearest flame -- we were facing a blast of heat that would have killed us in time and must already have been toasting us, although we were protected by the car's body and were looking through glass. But we were too fascinated to draw back.

Only after we had seen all there was to be seen on the other side of the river did we look closer.

Sheila gasped. The Suspension Bridge was buckled, twisted, still spanning the river but with its metals glowing and a huge pile of rubble in the river bed below it.

The river was practically dry. Only thin crimson trickles ran through the mud and stones and weeds.

To the left, the New Bridge was piled high with masonry and still-burning timber. The warehouses across the river had collapsed into the dry bed.

There were people and machines this side of the New Bridge, a few hundred yards along from where we stood, but I had little attention to spare yet for this side of the river, where there were few buildings and those not on fire.

Instead I looked the other way -- and saw that the Old Bridge was down. It lay shattered in the bed of the river, an astonishingly vast pile of rubble, apparently the blockage that was holding back the river. But that way I couldn't see distinctly, because something close to the Old Bridge on the opposite side was shooting out dense clouds of smoke.

And I began to realize the full horror of the situation, which I had scarcely thought, a moment ago, could be worse.

There were two footbridges beyond the bridges I could see, but both were partly wooden and it could be taken for granted they were impassable. And the next nearest bridge was twenty miles away.

Shuteley was a backwater at the best of times. Yet in the middle of a well-populated country, the town could never have been described as isolated -- until now.

The main road, the big Midland towns, the rest of England were reached from this side. On the other, lanes meandered through villages, brooks, farms, woods. Of course help could reach the town that way, but it would take hours. And this was a lightning fire.

Sheila was pulling at my arm, trying to make me reverse back over the hill. But before I did anything else, I looked back at the New Bridge.

It was hard to see exactly what was going on there, because sheds and warehouses cut off the view and at this point there was no road along the bank. But I saw two fire engines and men in gleaming helmets.

And they were on this side of the river.



I tried to start the car, and only after several seconds did I realize I'd never killed the motor. I put the car in reverse . . .

There were two faint pops and the front settled. At the same time, I noticed steam rising from the front of the car. Above all the other burning smells, I smelt burning rubber.

Protected by the car, I hadn't realized that the fierce heat from across the river was capable of melting the tires and boiling the water in the radiator. However, the car did move jerkily, and in a few seconds we were back over the brow of the hill, protected by it.

"What can we do?" Sheila said.

Well, what could we do? Nothing, probably. Nobody could do anything that I could see -- it was too late for any measures that I could imagine.

It was ironic and symbolic, rather than really important, that the firemen were trapped this side of the river. Certainly they could do nothing if they crossed the bridge -- if it were possible to cross the bridge. The fire engines were rubber-shod, like my car, and there was water in the radiators. Anyway, firemen in conventional uniform couldn't get near a conflagration like that.

Since the only sign of life we had seen had been at this end of the New Bridge, I turned the car, and running on the rims, with a steaming radiator, drove along the lane behind the warehouses.

I stopped.

Here in the semi-gloom, lit by the blaze in the sky but unaffected by the outbreak as yet, were old huts, sheds, stores. And in the lane in front of us, blazing fiercely, was a wood brand a foot thick and three feet long.

We got out of the car and looked at the blazing balk rather helplessly. Thrown into the sky from the other side of the river, no doubt, it had fallen precisely in the middle of the lane and was spluttering harmlessly. Even a small spark, falling on a tarred felt roof, would have started a blaze on this side of the river too. A fire on this side would never rival the destruction of Shuteley itself, but would make this night of destruction appallingly complete.

I found a spade in a shed and covered the balk with earth and stones. Without much of a struggle, the fire went out. But I was almost certainly wasting my time. If a great blazing balk of timber could be thrown a quarter of a mile, millions of equally dangerous sparks must be coming over all the time. Indeed, I could see them flying across the sky.

Sheila caught my ann. "Val, please," she said. "Let's go back."

"Back?" I echoed blankly, wondering whether she meant to the place just over the hill where we had watched our town being burned to death, or to the roadhouse, or to our home a quarter of a mile along the river on the side we were on.

"Anywhere," she said. "We can't do anything here. No one can."

It was true, of course. The firemen we were trying to join couldn't do anything. Fires differ in kind rather than merely in degree. You can spit on a tiny fire and put it out. A fire in a long-unused grate won't go, despite all your efforts and the fact that you're using specially selected combustible material.

But when the temperature goes up, when water boils, when rubber smolders, when wood, untouched by flame, gradually glows and blazes through the effect of high temperature alone, when human beings simply can't go near . . . that's a fire that simply has to be left alone.

As if to reinforce what Sheila was saying, a flying spark dropped and imbedded itself in her fur wrap. She threw it off, and I stamped on, it. And then, startlingly, we were drenched in a shower of water.

"Rain!" I exclaimed. "If it would only pour -- "

Sheila, in her green dress which was short top and bottom, soaked, didn't shiver. "Hot rain?" she murmured, puzzled.

I took her arm. She wanted to escape, to leave the fire to burn itself out, which was sensible but impossible. With the other arm I picked up her wrap, and pushed it rather roughly around her. Then we went on.

The men at this end of the New Bridge were nearly all firemen. There were a few children, a few old men.

The firemen, protected from the direct blast of the heat by the very obstruction which kept them from attempting to cross the bridge, were spraying water this side of the river, which was sensible. Jets directed across the river would not even land. Anyway, the jets they were directing were more like trickles, possibly of some value on this side of the river, of none if directed the other way.

I recognized Fire Officer Sayell, brother of the wit of my office.

"How did it start?" I asked.

His face twitched in annoyance, and I realized how silly my question was. Undoubtedly later there would be an investigation, and it might even be possible to establish the original cause of the fire. Meantime there were a million things that mattered more.

"Excuse me, Mr. Mathers," he said, and I recognized the carefully controlled tone of a man near the end of his tether, impotent, with an impossible job on his hands. "There's not much I can do, but I've got to get on with it anyway."

"There's help coming?"

"Lots of it. Mostly to the other side. Nobody can do anything much here. We've tried the ladders. They don't reach the other side, not from any place we can put the tenders."

It would not, I thought, have made much difference if the ladders had spanned the bed. Nobody could go across there and live. Anyway, the steel ladders would buckle in the heat.

Sayell swore as one of the jets failed, closely followed by the other.

"Everything's wrong," he said bitterly. "The river's dried up. Blocked higher up."

"How about the Winshell brook?" Sheila suggested.

"Dry before this happened. Dry yesterday."

"Have you looked?" I demanded.

He stared at me with desperation in his eyes. The interference of local VIPs was another penultimate straw.

"No, I haven't bloody looked," he snapped. "The bloody brook was dry when the river was still -- "

"Send somebody," I said.

Suddenly quiet, he said: "Do you want me to hit you, Mr. Mathers? Do you want me to cleave your skull with my axe? Because so help me -- "

"Send somebody to look," I said, and turned slightly away. If I tried to outface him, maybe he would cleave my skull with his axe. Many men with impossible jobs on their hands get like Sayell then. A breath of opposition sends them into spontaneous combustion.

But if someone says casually "Do so-and-so," and moves on, they've got something to try, something that isn't likely to make the situation any worse and might improve it. And if it fails utterly, it's not their fault.

Behind me, Sayell shouted: "Horner! Take a look over the hill and try the Winshell brook. And look lively!"

The Winshell brook was a tiny tributary of the Shute. It went the wrong way, meeting the river head on rather than quietly trickling into it. The meeting place, called not unexpectedly The Meeting of the Waters, was only a short distance downriver from where we stood.

I had remembered the water running across the road.

At the giants' camp, at our house, probably even just beyond the mound of debris at the Old Bridge which I had glimpsed through the smoke, the river was still running. It was only in Shuteley itself, at the moment when it was most needed, that it had run dry. But all that water was still flowing somewhere; some of it, though not nearly enough, was still getting through along the old river bed. Some of it was perhaps going on the other side of the river, doing something to limit the blaze. That was unlikely, however, because it would have to get round Castle Hill.

The rest of it must be flowing along the other side of the hill which for so many miles had cut off our view of Shuteley. And the Winshell brook was there.

The human animal has survived, and will continue to survive, because of its enormous talent for adaptation -- and rapid adaptation at that.

We were living in a world of smoke which stung our eyes and made breathing always difficult, sometimes painful and occasionally impossible.

We were living in a world of heat which made sweat run from us continuously. We were all so thirsty that we would have drunk anything, even the muddy crimson trickles that were still meandering down the river bed.

We were living in a world where thirst, pain, hunger and comfort had to be set apart. All of us had small burns where sparks had landed. Several of us had small smoldering spots in our clothes which we beat out absently. We were hungry from our exertions, at least I was, but that didn't mean the thought of eating was present. Drinking was different. All of us, given the chance, would have knocked down a pint or two of water, milk, lemonade, beer, anything. We couldn't say drinking no longer mattered. We'd have drunk greedily if we could. But if we couldn't, it would have to wait.

We were living in a nightmare world where only one thing could be held in the mind at one time. At the moment it was the Winshell brook. Even Sayell, who had wanted to kill me for bothering him, was waiting, praying.

If there was water, something could be done. Without water, stuck across the river from the fire (which nobody for the moment was looking at) we could do nothing but watch this side of Shuteley, such as it was, burn with the rest.

It was no use thinking of what had happened and was still happening across the river. Apparently these firemen knew little more than I did about that.

Our wives, children, parents, friends and lovers were over there, dead or alive. Either they'd escaped when the fire started (whenever that was) or they were still there, forever, unrecognizable.

I suppose I was the luckiest of all those people there. Sheila was with me, and Sheila, despite everything, was the human being I cared most about. Sheila and I were going to live. If necessary we could run from the holocaust and save ourselves.

We had no children, and at that moment I had never been more glad of anything. Sheila's parents were dead, and the remaining parent I had was far from Shuteley.

There was only Dina to worry about. And Gil, perhaps.

As for others . . . Well, through being faithful to Sheila and her alone, I had become unconcerned with most of the people in Shuteley. In the office, I was concerned chiefly about Sally Henrey, and she was on holiday, out of this altogether. Of course I'd be sorry about many others, but they weren't close, apart from Gil. And was he close any more?

Somebody screamed, and I turned. As if thrown by an ancient catapult, a blazing mass of timber was flying in a leisurely parabola across the dry river, straight for us.

I grabbed Sheila and pulled her to the left. But we bumped into two very solid firemen and bounced the other way. The timber crashed on the ground twenty yards from us.

Nobody was near it. Everybody had had plenty of time to get clear. But when it hit the ground it flew asunder into a thousand blazing sparks which exploded in all directions, and the curses and screams of those hit by the sparks temporarily drowned the noises from across the river.

A couple of brands dug into my clothes, and obstinately stuck. I was trying to brush them off when a scream from Sheila made me look at her and see that a spark was clinging like a leech to the front of her dress. I tore off my jacket, still with a smoldering patch in it, and plucked away the spark and some of her dress, whereupon Sheila. promptly fainted.

I could have sworn she had her fur wrap on, but either it had slipped off unnoticed or she had thrown it away in the broiling heat. Picking her up, I carried her behind the shelter of one of the sheds. The spark on my leg had fallen off, though not before burning through to the skin. The pain was sharp and more like a stab wound than a burn.

I put Sheila down. She'd been lucky. There was no sign of a burn.

I pulled up a leg of my pants and saw to my astonishment that the considerable pain in my leg was caused by a tiny burn no larger than a pinprick.

Sheila opened her eyes. She didn't move. "Val," she said, "am I badly burned?"

"You aren't burned at all," I said bluntly. Reassured, she jumped up, and wailed when she saw that the left top half of her dress was torn away.

"Where's your wrap?" I demanded.

"I can't wear it in this heat. It's -- "

"Find it, put it on and keep it on."

"Sparks stick in it."

"I know, but . . . "

I was beginning to realize that though it was reassuring to have your wife with you in such a situation, and many men who found themselves alone at this moment would have given their right arms to be as fortunate as I was, a fully feminine girl like Sheila kept your hands full and you'd scarcely time even to see what was going on.

So I said: "Look, Sheila, the best thing you can do is gather all the kids and old folk together and take them back over the hill, where it's safe, and just stay there. A lot of people were burned and injured unnecessarily just now. They needn't have been here."

"And what are you going to do?" she demanded.

I shrugged. I didn't know. If the firemen were helpless, it wasn't likely I'd be able to do anything useful. But I had to try. I had to be there. If I could do nothing else, I had to stand and watch.

"What will this mean to your job?" Sheila said.

Trust a woman to be practical. The thought seemed to come from a thousand miles away.

But I was responsible for practically all the insurance in Shuteley -- and the San Francisco disaster that wrecked insurance companies among other things was a minor affair compared with this. True, Shuteley wasn't a big town. But never in history, save by act of war, had any town been so completely destroyed as Shuteley obviously would be before this was over.

Behind us there was a shout. And we ran back, for at such a time the last thing we expected to hear was a shout of excitement and delight.

When we saw the firemen talking to Sayell and gesticulating, we didn't have to hear what they were saying. There was water in the Winshell brook, and plenty of it.

It was remarkable how merely having something they could do transformed the firemen from a dispirited, cursing, demoralized mob no more useful than the children and old people who still stood around into an efficient well-drilled team.

A squad raced up the hill with their equipment, and Sayell turned to me; his face alight. "Thanks, Mr. Mathers," he said. "If it hadn't been for you, we might never have looked at the brook. I never guessed it would be . . . anyway, we're in business again."

Significantly he turned to look at the fire on the other side of the river, which for some time he had been ignoring. Then he turned back, shouting orders.

I sent Sheila to do as I'd suggested, and saw that she too became efficient once she had something useful to do. She waved to me as she shepherded the children and old people over the hill . . . and that was the last I saw of her while the Great Fire raged.



Soon the firemen had a water supply again. Wisely they first doused our own side of the river. The powerful jets of the two engines could reach practically every building on this side without having to move.

For the first time I had a good look at the blocked New Bridge. It was badly damaged and twisted, yet after the fire it might remain serviceable as a bridge, once the debris on it had been cleared. It was all too clear, however, that there was no chance of clearing it while the fire still raged. Some of the stones were still glowing red, and there was smoldering wood in the pile. In any case, I estimated that without bulldozers it would take a hundred men two days to clear the bridge.

Without bulldozers . . . We were in farming country, and although all the resources of Shuteley itself were on the other side of the river, there ware plenty of farms this side.

I raced to a callbox. There was one among the sheds not a hundred yards away. I picked up the receiver . . .

As I might have guessed, it was dead. The exchange was in Shuteley. In any case, water, debris and heat must have put the overhead wires to the box out of service long since.

There was a callbox about a mile back, and it might be working. Sayell should know about communications. Probably, I realized, he was in constant radio contact with his headquarters.

I ran back and tried to talk to him, But he was busy and waved me away. My suggestion about the brook had enabled him to be busy; he was quite certain, however, that I could not repeat the triumph.

The jets had been turned across the river, and rather unexpectedly they had made some impression. On the other side a fairly large semicircular area was free of fire, partly because nearly everything that would burn was already consumed, certainly everything highly inflammable, and partly because, being next to the river, its mean temperature was not as high as areas in the center of the holocaust. The water as it fell still rose in clouds of steam in places, but as the cooling jets played everywhere, the glow of heat was fading and the redness of everything visible was now a reflection of the flames still leaping farther back.

Indeed, the eye had now become used to the overall redness and canceled it out, just as, when one wears dark glasses, it is possible after a while to see colors as they really are. Everything was red. But blue-red didn't look the same as green-red.

There was less smoke than I'd have imagined. Although my eyes stung and watered all the time, that too could be ignored, like the various smells, and for a long time I had not choked, coughed, or been out of breath. I suspected that there must, after all, be a slight breath of air away from us. Perhaps it was a breeze created only by the fire, sucking air from our side.

The firemen were now attempting a desperate enterprise. Now that there was an apparent toehold across in the blazing town, one of the engines was going to attempt to cross the dry river bed.

Personally I thought the attempt was several kinds of a mistake. The last few minutes had shown that the two engines, given an adequate supply of water, could accomplish something from this side of the river. They had won back a little from the fire. And even if it was scorched earth that they gained, an area that the fire had finished with and no longer wanted, even if the area represented only a fraction of one per cent of the total area of Shuteley, the process could be repeated. Unfortunately there was no road along this side of the bank, but the engines could travel along the lanes and reach the bank from other vantage points, the one from which we had first seen the fire, for example, and do what they had done here.

The ladders could be used to enable water to be sprayed over a wide area on the other side. Of course it would turn to steam, but that was all right: it took about six times as much heat to convert water to steam as it did to raise it to boiling point.

Also I thought, that it was too soon to attempt to cross to an area which had so recently been red with inner heat. Water falling on hot stone or metal draws off surface heat, but the glow wells up again to the surface. I doubted that even the firemen in their asbestos boots could stand anywhere across the river yet, and I was quite certain that the rubber tires of the machines would be burned off them in seconds. And although the heat here was just bearable (because we had to bear it), we had been insulated all along by the breadth of the river, which, though dry, had never burned. Across the river the firemen would be on ground which had only recently been surrendered by the flames, and that much nearer the heart of the blaze and its fierce, searing heat.

Besides, I didn't think the vehicles had one chance in a hundred of making the crossing. They were ordinary fire tenders, designed rather for getting to the scene of an outbreak at top speed than crossing impossible terrain. They might cross grass or rough country, but they weren't tanks or tractors. They had four rubber-shod wheels (intact, true, because someone had had the sense to shield the vehicles with wet tarpaulins) and they were heavy.

The bed of the river was a U -- not a deep U, for the Shute was never deep, not even where it ran into the much larger river that flowed on to the sea. Yet the Shute was no brook. It had flowed steadily along the same course for thousands of years, millions for all anyone knew, and the bed had gradually deepened, silted in the middle, perhaps, but with ever-steepening outer walls.

Even if a tender could drive down one side of the bank and cross the swampy bed, could it ever get up the incline on the other side?

I was certain it couldn't.

Sayell, however, was determined. He wasn't going to wait, either. A dozen men were stamping along the bank, grassy here, trying to establish where best to make the attempt.

A fleeting thought occurred to me. Sayell was probably no fool, even if his brother was. He was probably reasonably well trained in fire-fighting techniques. But he was no genius, and the situation which faced him had never faced anybody before.

Fires don't wait for the experts, the bosses, the generals, politicians and scientists to turn up. In an hour or two this area wonid be swarming with people -- all of whom could have handled the situation better than any of us, between cups of tea. I remembered, irreverently but not irrelevantly, how Gulliver put out the Lilliputians' fire. Some man-mountain could have done the same for us, if only he happened to be there.

Unfortunately, we were right out of man-mountains at the present time. Chance had elected poor honest not-too-bright John Sayell as the man in charge. And I knew already, he'd be pilloried. Whatever he did, he should have done better. If Shuteley was annihilated -- and anyone from this side of the river could see it already was -- well, he couldn't have done worse.

But he still didn't have to commit the criminal irresponsibility of staking all on the impossible, thus abandoning the small, yet important, things which were possible.

I strode through his crew. "Sayell . . . " I said.

The look he turned on me was that of a tortured man. "Mr. Mathers," he said, being civil with an enormous effort, "you've done two good things tonight. You found a water supply, and you got your wife to clear the bystanders out of our way. But now we have to -- "

"Now you have to do the right thing," I said, "because there's nobody else to do anything. Have you checked the foot-bridges?"

He said a coarse, derisive word. "They're wooden," he said. "What chance . . . for God's sake, man, get out of my way."

"For God's sake, man," I said, "remember that you didn't think it worth while looking at the Winshell brook."

That didn't reach him: Debating points don't register when you're in the glare of disaster, when you only have to turn your head to see it.

"There's the fire," he said. His voice, I noticed for the first time, was raw. He had been shouting. "We're going to put it out. Please let me get on with it, Mathers."

As he dropped the "Mr." for the first time, his self-control broke again and he added: "Out of my way, man, or by God I'll knock you senseless with my axe."

I stood back. Perhaps I should have fought with him, tried to depose him as overlord of the tiny, laughable army which was the only weapon with which the Great Fire of Shuteley could be fought, at the only time when it mattered, when something still might be done.

But what was the use? He knew something about fighting fires, and I, apart from fire risk, knew nothing. I had failed long before Sayell had a chance to fail. It was up to me, indirectly and yet significantly, to do all I could to see that something like this could never happen in Shuteley. A few years ago, a few months ago, even a few hours ago, I could have saved hundreds of lives which had now ended . . .

My thoughts stopped there. In a disaster such as this, there comes a time when you have to count the cost, but it's only natural to delay it as long as possible.

In the back of my mind I had thought all along: I wasn't here. I don't know what happened. Maybe there was a small fire among the timbered houses on the green. Maybe people stood around watching it, until it spread and they had to move away. Maybe it was gradual, quick but steady, and every area was cleared as the fire took over. Maybe nobody died in the fire. If it was steady enough in growing, that could happen.

There must have been a lot of noise. People couldn't have missed what was happening watching TV, became quite early on the electricity must have gone and all the TVs must have gone off.

Dina would have been one of the first to know what was going on. She must have enjoyed it -- a magnificent bonfire, the greatest spectacle she had ever seen.

Dina, I suddenly realized with utter certainty, had escaped the disaster. Despite her feeble-mlndedness (I used the brutal expression for almost the first time because at such a time the natural tendency was to print everything bold and clear) she had the kind of abilities, physical and mental, which would make her The Most Likely Person To Survive. She would enjoy a fire, untouched by tragedy, uninterested in its wider significance . . . but the moment the fire seemed to be getting out of hand, she would know, with animal cunning (after all, compared with any animal, even the most sagacious, she was a genius) that now was the time to go somewhere else. And she was supremely capable of doing it. She didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't overeat or take drugs, and had never been ill in her life. Nobody in the whole of Shuteley could get from one place to another quicker than Dina once she had made up her mind.

Dina was alive and well (even if Miranda couldn't be trusted).

Sheila, I knew, was alive, well, and not even scorched.

Gil, Jota, Miranda -- the other people I cared about -- were probably all right too. Miranda would certainly be all right. She was with the giants. I hadn't had time to think much about the giants since I was driving back from the roadhouse, but I took it for granted that none of them had suffered in the slightest degree in the fire. It was our affair, not theirs. Somewhere, they were standing outside it, watching, enjoying the fun.

So, selfishly, I tried to put the disaster in proper perspective -- for me, it could have been a lot worse.

Yet Sayell was sending the first of his tenders across the river -- and that bothered me. To do the man justice, he leaped on it as it reached the bank at the selected place. Irrationally, like all good commanders, he wouldn't send his men where he wouldn't go himself.

The tender rushed down the incline. Still, the spot had been chosen carefully and sensibly. The vehicle stayed upright, it managed to slow (by gears, not brakes, I guessed) at the bottom and started the crossing.

There was irony and tragedy in what happened to it then. Comic tragedy, I guess, if a town had not been burning to death only a short distance away.

What looked like reasonably solid mud on the left side of the engine was merely earth mixed with water in misleading proportions, if you judged simply by the eye.

The tender keeled over on its side and commenced to sink in the mud.









Chapter Seven

Nobody was hurt, except in spirit. The firemen, mud-covered scarecrows, clambered back up the dry river bank. Sayell saw me and set a course that would take him as far as possible from where I was standing. I could do him a big favor by ceasing to exist.

The tender in the river bed, of some value just a few seconds earlier, was now so much junk. And the other tender could accomplish just half what had been possible a couple of minutes ago.

I knew how Sayell felt. In the face of disaster, continuing disaster, you had to do something. You had to try anything that might do some good. If it failed . . . well, you'd tried.

I left the group of firemen, knowing that if there was somewhere where I could be useful, it wasn't there. Sayell wouldn't listen to me. He was on a razor's edge. The fact that I had been right two or three times and he had been wrong would make it utterly impossible for me even to get him to listen to me again.

Sheila wouldn't need help with the children and old people over the hill. She was young and strong and didn't dither, and in emergency anyone old or young would be glad to obey such a leader. It was when people hadn't a leader, or only a quasi force-of-circumstance unconfident leader like Sayell, that everybody ran about like frightened hens.

I moved back the way I had come, along the river behind the huts. Since there was nothing particularly useful I could do this side of the river, I should get across to the other side. Although I couldn't cross where I was, and would die if I did, it would be necessary to go only a few hundred yards in either direction to be able to cross either the bed of the river or the river above the obstruction.

There might, I thought, be a chance of clearing the blockage which had dammed the river. That would certainly help, if it could be done. A river running past a fire like this was better than a dry bed. At the very least, it was a firebreak.

I wasn't really thinking, merely reacting as a human animal. Most other animals would have put as much distance as possible between them and the fire, but as a human being I had to sniff round the conflagration and see if there was anything to be done.

Some events are numbing, like a blow on the head which doesn't put you out but leaves you staggering through pain and nausea and dizziness and momentary blackouts. This was one. If you stared at the fire . . . well, you couldn't do it for long, and there was really nothing to see but glare and smoke and flame and horror, if you let your mind analyze what you were seeing. But anyway, after you'd had a glance or two across the river, you realized that you couldn't afford to watch the fire.

It was hypnotic as well as terrifying. There was flame motion, smoke pattern, that caught you and held you like the one movement in an utterly still scene. Your eyes could water and smart, but a second would grow to a minute, ten minutes, and it would be an instant.

To retain the power of movement, the power of action, you stopped looking across the river.

I knew perfectly well that if I wanted to find people who had escaped from the blazing town, if I wanted to know how it happened, I should go the other way, downriver. Practically all the roads and lanes and other escape routes came out that way. Upriver on this side there was nothing but the track that led to my house and then curved away from the river to a few farms, and on the other, Castle Hill and a rubbish dump.

But the giants were upriver.

In retrospect it's strange that the giants and their part in what was going on could be practically ignored for so long.

Obviously, as I'd said to Sheila on that mad drive back to Shuteley, they were in this business up to their necks. At the least, they had known what was going to happen. At most, they were entirely responsible for it.

Yet if somebody starts a fire, a little fire that can destroy only a single house or a farm, if somebody standing beside you strikes the match and fires the hay, you don't go for him. Your first move, instinctive and correct, is to deal with the fire. Coldly, logically, it might be valid to go for the fire-raiser, to make sure he does no more damage.

But the fire-raiser might do no more damage anyway -- and the fire already exists.

The giants were still at the back of my mind, with what might well become known as the Great Fire of Shuteley taking all my attention.

Then, as I passed a gap through which the scene across the river could be glimpsed, I saw something that brought the giants right back into the picture.

It was one of those snapshot impressions you get as you pass the end of a lane, or a window, or a gap in a hedge. The brain takes the snapshot like a camera, the picture remaining often sharper and clearer than a scene you've viewed for ten minutes.

Between me and the dull embers of a building across the river which could burn no more, I had seen one of the giants -- over there. He was tall and blond, but he was not Greg. He wore what looked like a plastic coverall over a hump on his back. His eyes were hidden behind thick dark glasses.

The whole thing was so much like something in a horror film that I paused for a few seconds before going back, refusing to believe I had really seen him.

No one could live over there. No one could breathe. Certainly no one could walk in any kind of footwear I could imagine, because the ground was red-hot. And a plastic spacesuit would shrivel up instantly like a fertilizer bag thrown into an open fire.

I jumped back after that moment of disbelief, but of course the giant, even if real, was past my narrow angle of view. I burst through to the riverside, and there was nobody to be seen.

Yet I had seen him. The clear picture in my mind had beaten back the disbelief. He was neither Greg nor any of the giants I had consciously looked at. The picture didn't fade. I could still see it. Shutting my eyes, I could even notice things I hadn't noticed before.

What had looked like a hump must be the breathing apparatus which made it possible to walk through fire. The giant had been hurrying, not quite running, carrying nothing in his hands, under his arms or on his shoulders. He had worn a transparent plastic covering, enclosing his head and all the rest of him. Under the covering he seemed to have nothing but the hump. He was either naked or nearly so. Colors of things seen in such a setting could be anything at all, since yellow-orange-crimson flame filled the sky.

And one thing more -- he had not meant to be seen. You only have to glimpse an incompetent amateur sneak-thief for a moment to realize he's up to something and doesn't want to be observed. There had been something similar in the way the giant was hurrying. Possibly an obstruction had forced him to skirt the river for a few yards, visible from the other side. Deeper in the blazing town, he could not have been seen. Flames and smoke, if nothing else, would have swallowed him from view.

Although he had been hurrying downriver, back the way I had come, I didn't change my mind and go that way. If he really existed, if his incredible fire-suit really worked, no doubt he could walk through the middle of the fire as easily as he could skirt the edges. The people downriver would not see him, if he didn't want to be seen.

I went on. If one of the giants was wandering alone through the blazing town, the rest of them might be doing the same.

Including Miranda. "I think I'll be. seeing Dina," she had said. "We'll do something . . . "

She had also said: "No, I shan't see you again, Val."

Maybe she was wrong.



When I saw the blockage it was clear that explosives were going to be needed before the river returned to its usual course.

Shuteley Castle had stood on Castle Hill, the one piece of high ground on the north side of the river, just above the Old Bridge. A ridge ran along the south side, but on the north, only at the eastern extremity of the town did the ground rise to any height. There the castle stood -- or had stood.

It had glowered across the town from a curious round mound which looked so artificial that historians argued about the possibility that Saxon serfs had piled Castle Hill high with nothing more than picks and shovels.

Anyway, the fire had spread round the bracken which fringed the hill. It seemed that the bracken itself had held up the hill, for when it was gone, the castle and most of Castle Hill had collapsed into the river, taking the Old Bridge with it.

Above the obstruction the river tumbled into a hole which had not been there before, making a small but quite impressive waterfall before dashing itself against the huge mound of rubble which was all that remained of the castle and the hill on which it had stood. The river tried to climb over the mound, which was ten feet too high, and then took the path of considerable, but least resistance and streamed off southwards in about a dozen rivulets through a gap in the south ridge.

Until then I had not worked out that I'd either have to cross this side of the obstruction or cross twice, first the diverted river and then the river itself.

I didn't like the look of the streams rushing behind the ridge. They were shallow but very fast. It would be impossible to keep my feet if I tried to wade through, and when water flings you about you're liable to crack your head on a stone.

It would be hazardous to try to cross the river bed on the west side of the mount of rubble, because it was steep and very loose. And back the way I had come the heat across the river was too fierce. Only close to the blockage, where what remained of Castle Hill afforded some protection from the heat, and where there was nothing left to burn on the other side, crossing might be possible.

So I started picking my way across the obstruction itself.

After I'd gone about ten yards, climbing toward the top of the mound, I found I couldn't go back. Loose earth and stones were sliding down the slope under my feet, and the best I could do was slip two feet back and gain three. If I tried to go back, I stood an excellent chance of being buried alive.

I had a moment of sheer panic as I neared the peak of the mound and the rubble sliding beneath me threatened to sweep me off on the dry side of the blockage. I saw myself falling about fifty feet over rubble which would come with me, almost certainly burying me beyond any hope of rescue (if I happened to be alive when I reached the bottom) and far beyond any possibility of digging myself out.

I fought against the slide, running against it like a man on a treadmill over a precipice. The light was tricky and my sense of direction was not all it might have been. The glare of the fire cast long moving shadows, smoke stung my eyes, and on the other side of the mount the darkness was so intense that I couldn't even see the white water.

I overdid it.

One moment I was fighting clear of the drop into the dry bed. The next I was teetering over blackness, flicked by spray from the blocked river below. And all the time the rubble beneath me cascaded this way and that, now into the dry bed, now down the slope to the south bank, now into the foaming river.

Suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet at all. Then I was in water. Then the whole world exploded.

I came to soaked, cold, shivering, with an aching head and the rush of water in my ears. For a moment I was blind.

Dazed and deafened, I nevertheless realized where I was. I was somewhere in the middle of the delta of streams rushing into the blackness of the south side of Shuteley. The water rushing past me was not more than a few inches deep.

It seemed to take a long time before I worked out what to do and where to go. The huge mound of debris in the river bed cut off all heat and so much light that I found it hard to recover any sense of direction. And after being toasted for so long I could have sworn the water all round me was only one degree above freezing point.

At last I realized that if I forced my way through streams flowing from left to right I must come to dry land. Then all I'd have to do was cross a normal river that didn't know what trouble it was going to run into farther on.

I got across the streams somehow -- and then couldn't find the river. I seemed to be in a kind of marsh with rivulets running in all directions. Only the glow of the fire, cut off by the pile of rubble which had stopped a river, enabled me to find my way back to the bank of a more or less normal Shute.

I made my way along the bank.

Dizzy and with a head which seemed to be cloven in two, I shied away from the very thought of attempting to swim across the river. I'd probably be swept down to the whirlpool which had already knocked me silly. The Shute had always been a placid river, and in this hot summer it had been more placid than ever. But any river becomes angry if it's balked and not allowed to follow the course it has taken for centuries.

Presently, stumbling upriver, I became aware that one of my discomforts had gone. I was still soaked, but I was no longer shivering. It was, as usual, a hot night.

My house ought to be visible in the reflected glow. Yet it wasn't. Ahead of me, nothing was visible.

This was very strange. By comparison with the glare behind me, I was walking into darkness. Nevertheless, the red glow, the heat of which I could still feel on the back of my neck and through my wet clothes, should have lit up the river ahead at least as far as my house.

And ahead there was nothing.

I sniffed, and not because I smelled something. Quite the reverse. There was a sudden startling absence of smell. I was puzzled as a sleeper awakening to silence is puzzled, before he realizes that a clock has stopped.

Voices upriver gave me a clue. I had moved into a region of odorless vapor which didn't sting the eyes, had no smell, and cut visibility. I moved on. The voices grew louder.

Then I stopped,

I had almost reached my house. It was invisible, but it could be no more than a hundred yards away. I had followed the river to the copse -- and there, just in front of me, was a bridge where there had never been a bridge. And there were people on it, crossing from the other side to the copse.

Not for the first time that night I acted without thought. I went closer, but along the bank, stealthily. I slipped silently into the water. Cautiously, carefully, I paddled under the bridge.

The people I had seen on the bridge were giants, in plastic suits with the hump I had already noticed, and baffled, bedraggled, frightened people who could only be refugees from the Great Fire of Shuteley.



The bridge was as startling in its way as luxon.

It was only a catwalk perhaps a foot wide with two rails three feet apart. There were no supports and no reinforcements of any kind. It lay across the river like a plank, but I felt it, pushed against it, and it was solid as a rock.

There was little or no risk that I'd be seen under the bridge. The smokescreen, or whatever it was, that the giants were using as cover cut visibility very effectively. It was not like fog or mist. You could see ten yards very distinctly, twenty to thirty yards vaguely, and beyond that was blackness. Sound, too, was muffled.

All the giants wore plastic suits and small, quite neat boots. Underneath they all wore as little as possible, and nevertheless seemed to be bathed in sweat.

The dark goggles their eyes would need in the center of a conflagration were folded down across their chests. Wearing them, out of the fire, they would be blind.

The others, the people who had come from Shuteley, wore a simpler sort of plastic suit, loose pants and tunics which, unlike those of the giants, were thrown open. Instead of the hump the giants had, they had merely a small black box apparently stuck to the inside of the plastic.

I thought suddenly of Jota and his part in all this. Had the giants recruited him, or was he lying drugged in one of the tents at the camp?

Miranda was not among those I saw.

Vague recollections of time stories I had read raced through my mind. Of course, I had never taken time travel seriously . . . it was the kind of thing which, if it ever happened, was never likely to impinge on me and affect my life.

One of the assumptions made in such stories suddenly assumed significance. You couldn't steal a man from the past, because of the effect his disappearance would have in his future, your past and present. But a man whose life was over, through accident -- a man about to be destroyed in an explosion, buried forever by an avalanche, engulfed in a mine disaster . . . such a man, on the point of ceasing to exist, could be plucked from his time without affecting subsequent events significantly.

Was that what the giants were doing?

I wanted to hear what was being said, and that posed a problem. In the river I was too near the flowing water to be able to make anything out, and if I crawled up the bank, the giants coming along the other side and crossing the bridge might see me.

So I drew back a little and swam across the river far enough downstream to be invisible from the bridge. As I neared the other side, the bank, though not high, hid me.

Then I crawled along the bank until I was under the north end of the bridge, still hidden by the bank, and pulled myself partly out of the water.

I heard: " Well, you'd be dead otherwise."

"But what are you going to do with us? Where are we going?"

" You'll be safe."

"This is the Mathers place. Where's Mr. Mathers?"

" In his house asleep."

"My wife . . . what about my wife? I haven't seen her since . . . "

" She'll be all right."

"I don't want to go. I want to go back and . . . "

The giants' voices were slightly muffled by their suits, but on the whole easier to make out than those of the frightened, anxious, shocked refugees. I could hear only snatches, of course, as people passed over my head.

"We'll never get back?"

" You'll be well looked after. Think of it this way -- you're going to heaven. "

"Heaven?"

" To you it'll be heaven. Nobody with a choice would stay here."

"What do you want us for? Did you start the fire?"

" No, we didn't start the fire."

"Why did you take us past Castle Hill and the dump? There was nobody there -- "

" We didn't want to be seen. If it meant being seen, we couldn't help you. "

"My Moira . . . I saw her catch fire. I'll never forget her scream. She blazed like . . . "

" We saved you, didn't we?"

"Why couldn't you save Moira?"

" Others were looking. People who aren't here. We couldn't let them see us. "

"If you can walk through the fire, why don't you . . . "

And then again: "This must be the Mathers place. Where the insurance manager lives. Is he in this somehow?"

" He couldn't be more out of it."

"You mean he's dead?"

" Just dead to the world."

The conversation went on, and I strained my ears to hear it, but the two who were talking were halfway across the bridge now and it was another snatch of talk I heard.

"What happened to the fire brigade? Why didn't they . . . "

A very common word on the lips of these poor bewildered survivors was "why." If they didn't ask why God had permitted such a disaster, they asked why they had escaped, why others hadn't escaped, why the strangers, if they could do so much, couldn't do even more, like putting out the fire.

From the giants' replies it was obvious that to them, as to Miranda before I managed to get through to her, the people of Shuteley were little more than characters in a play. The answers were quiet, soothing, apparently truthful as far as they went, which wasn't far.

"Where did you come from?"

" You'll see."

"You're the kids that I saw in town yesterday, aren't you?"

" Yes."

"If I thought you had anything to do with the fire. . . " A stream of invective followed, empty, hopeless obscenity, for the man who was speaking knew perfectly well he could do nothing but curse. He couldn't even fight the giants or resist them -- the giants, girls and boys, had spread themselves out among these refugees to prevent protest or rebellion.

I realized that there were a great many more of the giants than I had ever seen, far more than there could have been at the camp. I had not known of more than about a score of them. There must have been at least forty crossing the bridge, not counting any who might have crossed before I arrived on the scene.

I knew from the snatches of conversation I heard that the giants had been careful to be observed by no one who was going to live through the fire. They had led these people through the fire, in their simpler fire-suits (probably simpler so that they could be put on quickly and with no risk of mistake), and by a route chosen to avoid being seen. The crowds of people who must have escaped the fire would not gather about the north-east end of town at the rubbish dump, but at the other end, where the roads were, and the straggling cottages which must have escaped the fire, and the nearest farms. That could have been confidently predicted.

Presently the procession ended. There was a gap, and then three more figures appeared, two huge, one small. They were Greg, Wesley and Miranda.

Wesley reached the bridge, just above me, and spoke.

Oddly enough, it still surprised me, after all that had happened, that the giants' language, when they were speaking to each other and not to us, was not the English of the mid-20th century. It was English, and I could understand most of it by listening to the sense rather than the sound. But many of the words were not quite right, several of the vowels had changed, and since the speech was colloquial there were many phrases that were hard to figure out.

What Wesley said, roughly, was: "That's . . . (the lot?) now. We've left nothing but the stasis and the two . . . (?) in it. Who's going back?"

"I am," said Greg.

"We're both going back," said Miranda.

I couldn't see Wesley, but I sensed his uncertainty. "Okay," he said, after a pause. "I'll go on and tell them to . . . (?) everything but the stasis, is that right?"

"And the stasis just before dawn," said Miranda.

"Sure. You've got to be there then. If you're not -- "

Greg said a word which was entirely new to me, and yet the meaning couldn't have been more obvious. The politest translation would be "Go away."

Wesley went away, crossing the bridge and disappearing into the copse.

Moving slightly, I could see Greg and Miranda quite well, for they had stopped short of the bridge and were not looking at it. Keeping my eyes on them, I could duck out of sight at any moment before I could be seen, if they turned their heads.

They wore suits exactly like the others. The briefs they wore underneath seemed to be pink or gray. Seeing them both running with sweat, I wondered why they didn't take off their plastic suits or at least open them up. I also wondered why a technology capable of constructing flimsy suits which could withstand the highest temperatures couldn't go a step farther and make them comfortable as well.

Miranda said: "Let's go back, then."

And wait till dawn?"

"Yes."

Greg laughed. "So that you can keep your eye on me, darling. Waiting for a wrong move."

"The next wrong move," said Miranda steadily.

He laughed again. "You idiot," he said. "You're all idiots, you and the others behind this . . . (?). When you found you couldn't keep me out of it, you should have canceled it. You knew I'd kill it."

"We knew," said Miranda, and I heard the defeat in her voice. "But you might fail. Lots of things might have happened. Maybe they still will. Jota might have -- "

For the third time, irritatingly, Greg bellowed with laughter. It was the laughter of a vandal, a spoiled kid with an inflated idea of his own value in the world. It was the laughter of a bully.

"Jota," Greg said, "has a little talent. I have the Gift. Nevertheless, Jota may be as important as you think. I think he is. That's why I had to see that your plans for Jota didn't work out."

"Greg," said Miranda quietly, "listen to me for a minute. Please listen."

"Go ahead. There's plenty of time. I'll listen."

"You're not necessarily bad. You never had a chance. That sounds trite, and it is. You were not only bigger and . . . (?) and better-looking than anybody else, as far back as you can remember, but when girls began to interest you, you didn't have to bother to be nice to them or even go to the trouble of deceiving them. You had it all . . . You've often thought about how you're different from ordinary people, Greg. Have you ever thought about how ordinary people are different from you?"

This time Greg didn't laugh. He was interested enough to let her go on.

And as I waited, rather chilled by the water in which I was partly immersed. I felt for a stone or a stick.

Whether Miranda was on my side or not, I couldn't be on Greg's side. It couldn't be a mistake to take Greg if I could.



"People who haven't the Gift," Miranda said, "have to learn to coexist. When they're babies they know instinctively that they have to get and keep their parents on their side. As children they know that other children may sometimes be rivals, but they have to be allies too. So what you never learned was -- "

Greg bellowed again. "Is that all? I thought for a moment you had something to say. Now listen to me. First, take off that suit."

"I can't, I have to go back and -- "

"You're not going back, darling. Not to the stasis. Not across the bridge. Not anywhere."

I might have moved then, but with a silent suddenness which startled me so much I almost cried out, the bridge above me winked out.

It just wasn't there. It didn't burn or fade or shimmer or flash. It simply ceased to exist.

Although probably both Greg and Miranda noticed this out of the corner of their eyes, neither bothered to look -- which was just as well, because I might have been slow in ducking out of sight.

Miranda took a step back and turned as if to run. Greg reached out casually with his long arm and tumbled her to the ground.

Standing over her, he said: "But before I kill you, darling, I want to tell you that things couldn't have been arranged better if you'd let me plan them all myself. The stasis goes just before dawn, right? Just before dawn you've got to get those two out and get back in yourself, right? They're left alive, here, and you're safe back home, right?"

"Yes," said Miranda.

"There are two spare suits in the stasis so that you can get those two out, right?"

"Yes."

"Wrong. They're gone."

Miranda sat up quickly. "I watched you all the time -- "

He laughed. "I know you did. So I got Wesley to shift them. He wasn't keen, but he didn't want to die. So he . . . (?) for me."

"He'll know . . . " Miranda began, and stopped.

"He won't know anything. He has no idea what the suits are for. But that's not all. Suppose I just kill you here and now, swim across and tell everybody you went back by yourself . . . "

I didn't fully understand all this, but from her startled gasp it was obvious that Miranda did. It was as if she had allowed herself to be locked in a dungeon of death, as part of a plan, and then felt in her pocket and discovered she didn't have the key.

Greg couldn't let it go -- he had to savor his cleverness to the full. "They'll believe me. They'll have to. You know that anything I say is the truth -- always has been the truth. All I've ever had to do is go into any . . . (?) office and make a statement. Whatever I say, it has to be the truth. Otherwise -- "

She leaped from under him and ran like a deer. Greg lunged after her. My hand forced, I scrambled up the bank and went after them. In my right hand I held a heavy stone.

They could both run much faster than I could. I'd have lost them in the strange mist that hid the bridge . . . but only a hundred yards away, it ceased to exist. And I came on Greg and Miranda, only six feet from the river, with Greg again standing over Miranda.

I let fly with my stone. It caught Greg full on the back of the head, and he staggered. His legs collapsed under him. He pitched right over Miranda and landed on the other side of her.

We could have escaped if we'd been quick enough. But Miranda stared up at me in surprise, astonished to see anyone at all, more astonished to see me. And I coughed as a cloud of smoke swirled round me -- out of the giants' protective mist, I had forgotten to be careful how I breathed.

Greg was up. He lashed out at my head, and although I escaped the full force of the blow, I went down heavily. The next second Greg had Miranda in his grasp. Holding her, he made a quick pass at me, and something stung my eyes.

I couldn't move. I could see and hear, I could move my eyes and, with an effort, my head. But that was all.

"What went wrong, Miranda?" Greg asked, looking down at me. "Why is he here?"

"I don't know. I left the . . . (?) in the house, below the bottom shelf in a cupboard. It was set slow-to-limit, short of death. Anybody in the house should have got sleepy very gradually, and then -- "

"So it didn't work. Or he went out too soon. It doesn't matter. Take off your suit, Miranda."

"No."

"Take it off. I'm going to take him into Shuteley, in your suit. Then I'll open it."

I didn't shudder, because I couldn't.

Picturing what was going to happen to me (walking through an inferno, unharmed, and then a wrench as the plastic suit was torn, then . . . ) I must have missed something. A moment later Greg was saying:

"I want you, darling."

"Don't try to be funny."

"I'm very serious. There's nothing more important in the world to me. I want you, here and now."

Incredibly, Miranda, who had been standing up to him, opposing him, arguing with him, was as weak and pliable as if under hypnosis.

Well, was that it? Hypnosis?

"I thought . . . " she said, visibly struggling.

"You thought after that one time, when you resisted, and I let it go, that you could stand against me. That I didn't want you. That you still had some authority over me. That for some reason, any reason, I was never going to claim you."

He laughed. It was a forced laugh. There was no mirth in it. And I realized now that Greg's laugh was always forced, completely lacking in real enjoyment.

At once, as if he had never laughed, he went on fiercely, malevolently: "I set you up, darling. For when I wanted you. And the time is now."

There was a brief pause. Then, slowly, reluctantly Miranda touched her plastic suit at several points, at the throat, at her waist, at her knees. It split and fell off her, and the box at the back came with it. So did the boots, which were part of the suit. So did the dark goggles.

Like an automaton she stepped closer to Greg.

And he hit her.

I'd never seen such a blow. At the very least he was twice her weight. He hit her as a very large man could have hit a rather small child, but perhaps never had in human history; surely even a human beast would find it impossible to hit someone so much smaller so hard.

Her feet left the ground. She would have been thrown several yards anyway. As it was, she sailed far out over the river, unconscious before she touched the water, and was swept away.

She was possibly dead before she landed. In the river, unconscious, she would drown.

Greg was satisfied. He scarcely glanced at the river. Instead, he bent to pick up her suit.

Straightening, he looked down at me. Greg must be used to looking down on people. Yet he still seemed to enjoy it immensely.

"I'm a little sorry for you, Val," he said, in ordinary English. "You didn't know what you were up against -- despite knowing Jota. Miranda knew. Wesley and all the others knew -- especially the girls, of course. You didn't, you poor fool. If you'd stayed quietly at home tonight, you'd at least have lived. Miranda left a sleep cylinder in the house to make quite sure, because of what we had to do here."

He shrugged. "You needn't worry -- I won't open your suit until we're right in the middle. You'll scarcely feel a thing. It'll be over in a second."









Chapter Eight

I don't think Greg hit me again.

I had been drinking at the roadhouse, not enough to show, but enough to know I'd been drinking. What had happened since would have made me stone cold sober if I'd had ten times as much, yet the residual alcohol in my system was one thing. The shock of what had happened was another. Then, the constant blast of heat from the blaze across the river must have done something to all of us, though since it was constant we soon ignored it. I had fallen into the river, hit my head and got water in my lungs. Greg had hit me and thrown a paralyzer of some kind at me.

It could have been all that which had suddenly caught up with me. In any case, the next I knew I was being led through the fire. Dazed, I hardly knew whether I was dreaming or not. Certainly only in dreams could I ever have experienced anything remotely like this before.

In spite of the goggles over my eyes, the flames were still blinding until the eyes adjusted. Greg, at my left side, grasped my arm tightly, half leading me, half carrying me. And we moved through a vast furnace.

The suits were totally efficient. They completely screened all heat, and the air I breathed was pure. No smoke stung my eyes or throat.

Yet it was an ordeal of terror.

There was nothing to be seen but living flame and smoke. Frequently the ground writhed with liquid fire -- blazing oil, tar or anything which liquified in extreme heat. The confidence I soon acquired in my suit and boots -- which fitted surprisingly well -- did very little to still terror of the unknown.

I was lucky, I suppose, that I was too dazed to think properly. I had that "this can't be real" feeling that makes people capable of things otherwise utterly beyond them.

It also prevented me from having to fight or at least resist Greg. He had just murdered Miranda and had every intention of murdering me at any moment in a particularly horrible way. I should have done something, though Greg could kill me quite easily simply by abandoning me.

But the feeling that this wasn't really happening made it possible to play along with it. At the moment Greg was helping me.

The vagueness did not prevent me from remembering afterwards the horror of a fire that consumed not a building but a whole town.

I saw only some of what the fire had done, and I was glad of it.

One single impression summed it up.

The damage to property was nothing. Houses could be built again. Cars in the street had melted into red puddles. That was unimportant. But too often, no longer in the cars, because the cars no longer possessed any "in," there were relics of human beings, who had not, even in presumably efficient vehicles, been able to escape what was happening round them.

In a way it was all clean and antiseptic. Fires are clean. A fire like this was cleanest of all fires. There was no blood to be seen, no skin, no guts, nothing unpleasantly animal like that. The fire had taken care of all such things. There would be no plague after the Great Fire of Shuteley. The fire had been too efficient for that. Anything organic within the inner area had perished forever.

The crowning horror was the mound of blackened bones.

I wouldn't have seen it if it hadn't been in an area (where in the town I hadn't the slightest idea, for nothing was recognizable) which must have burned early and was therefore totally consumed. Around it the fire still raged, but here there was near blackness. Even the tar in the streets had been burned, and the stone merely glowed darkly.

And in the wreckage of a collapsed building was a vast mound of skeletons. There seemed to be thousands of them, but there were probably only hundreds.

For one wild moment I wondered if the giants had collected all the victims they could find and dumped them all together in one refuse heap of human remains. I almost hoped this was so. But it couldn't be. These were the victims of a single disastrous incident in the general horror. This was not the total toll, only a single part of it.

A large number of people must have been together somewhere in the town when the fire caught them. They must have died quite quickly, or the pile of bones would not have been so neat and compact.

Only the impression, the picture, registered at the time -- but it registered for life. It was something I'd never forget.

It was only then that I started to hate the giants. What kind of beings could have known this was going to happen, and not tried to avert it?



Awareness came back gradually, but rapidly, and it was to some extent retrospective.

I knew I had reached a haven of peace and coolness in the heart of the fire, which was still blazing all around me, but as if behind glass.

But what was I doing in a haven?

Greg had brought me through the fire: I knew that. He had meant to tear my fire-suit at a spot where the temperature was instantly lethal: I knew that too. Yet I had come through the fire, with Greg.

I became aware, with some surprise, that I wore only my underpants. The fire-suit I had been wearing had been removed. It lay on the ground beside me. I now understood why the giants wore little or nothing under the suits. The suits, light and not elaborate, could be effective only if they were utterly impervious to heat, a complete barrier to it. If they let any heat through at all, they'd be useless in such a fire.

It was beyond even the giants to construct a suit which would stop heat coming in and let body heat out. So you stewed in your own juice.

Greg was with me, he was talking to me, but the sense didn't register yet. Apparently realizing this, he stopped.

He had thrown a gas capsule at me, or something which had a similar effect. Apart from that moment when my eyes smarted, there were no painful effects. But although I could move, although my mind could register some things, it couldn't sort them out.

I glanced around.

We were in a huge hemisphere of no-fire, entirely surrounded by fire, in an area in the town which I couldn't place. It was flat, and the ground was plain, scorched earth, with few stones and no debris. In the center was a dome, a curious obiect. It was a plain hemisphere 15 feet high, as smooth as ice but of no material I knew. The faint silveriness suggested metal, the translucency glass, the milky opaqueness plastic. One thing was clear: since it stood in the exact center of the cleared space, and since the dome of no-fire was exactly the same shape, one followed from the other.

The air was cool and fresh, with no smell of burning. A faint breeze from the center of the stasis -- there was no doubt that this was the mysterious stasis I'd heard about -- confirmed that the machine there was air-conditioning the sanctuary.

Above the hemisphere, as well as around it, flames and smoke swirled up into the night sky. Indeed, there was no sky to be seen at any point. The flames were so fierce that they completely submerged the dome.

"The village green," Greg was saying. The effect of the capsule, or whatever it was, was wearing off. "Incidentally, there are a couple of people you know here -- "

"Why didn't you kill me?" I croaked. I wasn't grateful. You don't have to be grateful to a man for not killing you. Yet through the haze I was curious.

"You'll die anyway," he said. "Without this you'll die." He picked up the suit. "Without it you can't get out of here."

Yet he had suddenly become less certain, less confident.

And as I recovered further, I said: "I'm not down on fate's list, is that it? You couldn't kill me? It's not on the cards?"

"There isn't any such thing as fate's list," he retorted, not laughing any more. "If I decide you're to die, you're dead."

He no longer wanted to talk. He turned and walked to the edge of the stasis, not looking back. As I watched, he passed through the edge. The invisible wall flared, but seemed to offer him no resistance. I was perfectly prepared to believe, however, without experiment, that for me the stasis was a prison. Either there was some kind of wall which I couldn't get through (which seemed likely, since the air wasn't being sucked out by the oxygen-greedy flames), or I'd die, frizzled to a cinder, before I'd completed a single step out of the stasis.

I didn't immediately walk round to the other side of the machine. I was still coming to myself. Vivid as my recollection of the mountain of skeletons was, I wondered if it was part of a dream, and hoped it was.

The last thing to come right was my hearing. Stupidly I'd been wondering why, if there were two other people here, I couldn't hear them and they hadn't heard Greg and me talking. Were they bound and gagged? If so, why, when I wasn't?

Then I realized that though in the stasis there, was no blistering heat and no smoke, all the sounds of the fire came through, the crackling, hissing, boiling, crashing, popping, fizzing, sizzling, roaring . . .

Anyway, I knew who the other two were. They were Jota and Dina.

Yet although I knew, I hesitated a moment longer. Several times earlier I'd had a rather theoretical thought that if Dina perished, my own life might be simpler and better. But that's the kind of thing you think only when you don't believe it can happen. When you know it can happen, when you know it's more than likely, you discover what you really want.

Dina had to be there. I was hesitating because I was afraid I was wrong, afraid the other two might be Gil and Barbara, or Barbara and Garry, or Jota and Gil, or some other two from the four.

I might have waited much longer. But as my hearing returned to normal, I heard Jota's voice over the medley of fire sounds. I moved closer, started to go round the stasis machine, and paused incredulously.

"Wake up, damn you," Jota was saying. "Wake up, little cousin. What use are you lying there; while we're stuck in the middle of all this? Wake up, you little darling, and become useful . . . "

He didn't say exactly this. He used all the available oaths, particularly the sexual ones.

I moved further round so that I could see what was going on. Dina was lying on her back, sound asleep, and Jota was kneeling beside her, his back to me.

He shook her, gently at first and then more insistently. He was saying: "There's nothing wrong with you, apart from the thing nobody is supposed to speak about. Wake up, then. Wake up and . . . "

His words then became shockingly obscene. The kind of mindless idiot from whom deliberate coarseness usually comes, who expresses the most earthy ideas in his earthy experience in the most earthy way, doesn't have the intelligence or imagination to make much of a job of it. Indeed, the more earthy he becomes, the less he would shock anybody except elderly spinsters, who never hear such effusions anyway.

But Jota was a master of obscenity.

I might have quite admired his performance in uncommitted wonder if I'd happened to be uncommitted. But the girl was Dina. The fact that Jota was her cousin didn't particularly bother me -- if the law allows cousins to marry, consanguinity ceases to be an issue in all such matters.

What did bother me was that Jota cared for absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was here, and Dina was here, and she wouldn't wake up. He even made it perfectly plain, several times, that in the last resort he didn't care much whether she woke up or not.

That Dina was a child mentally was nothing to him. That there was something unnatural about her sleep was also nothing.

Jota was single-minded.



Why I waited, listening, watching, doing nothing, would have been hard to explain at the time, but not difficult to explain afterwards.

I hadn't forgotten the case of Jota and Sheila.

I had admired Jota, I had envied him, and always I'd been a little afraid of him. What it was about him that I feared I didn't know then, though I could have guessed that the knowledge that nobody had ever stood up to Jota and bested him had a lot to do with it.

If at the first moment when I knew that Jota was trying to seduce my feeble-minded sister I had gone round and shown myself, the incident might have fizzled out completely. Jota would have laughed, I would have cooperated with him in laughing the whole thing off, and that would have been that.

Why I waited was partly to give him enough rope to hang himself, mainly to let myself get so angry that Jota wouldn't be able to make me laugh the whole thing off as we'd done in Sheila's case (except Sheila herself).

Well, that's what it amounted to. I had thrashed Jota, but after that, instead of just contemptuously kicking him out, I had made him promise to be a good boy . . . and if Sheila had been willing, we'd all have pretended to be friends again.

I remembered Dina coming down the stairs that afternoon, and wondered if it was at that moment that Jota decided the conquest of his fair cousin must be delayed no longer.

I got more and more angry.

I moved only when Jota lost his temper, started slapping Dina's face and punched her in the ribs.

"Jota," I said, "if you touch her again, I'll kill you."

He turned his head. And when I saw his face, I knew he was an animal.

Lust makes some of us cheat. But it turns only some of us into animals like Jota. I knew by his face at that moment that when he reached this state -- as he must have done many times -- he had ceased to be anything resembling a human being.

If he had to kill, that was all right.

If the woman died, now or later, that was unimportant.

If she was married, if her life and those of others were going to be altered irrevocably in the next few seconds -- well, what had that to do with Jota?

If she was a feeble-minded kid, his cousin, sleeping peacefully through disaster -- what right had she to sleep when he wanted her?

"Val," was all he said, but his thoughts and emotions showed in his face. At first he had no intention of being diverted. Then anger followed when he realized the difference my presence was bound to make. Then . . . fear?

The fist I planted in his face, rather inexpertly but with considerable force, made up his mind for him. This was neither a love scene nor a conversation piece. It was a fight. He had no choice.

He made a further effort nevertheless. He jumped to his feet and backed away, saying: "Val, let's be reasonable about this -- "

I leaped on him and hit him on the mouth, which spurted blood. Jota ceased attempting to be reasonable and swung at me. I caught his arm and threw him, with no trouble at all.

There had been a wrestling bill at Shuteley one night when I was about fifteen, and someone gave me a ticket. I'd been fascinated, not by wrestling as an entertainment, but by the revelation that if you knew how you could throw people far heavier than yourself all over the place. So I found out about it.

I certainly never became an expert wrestler. As far as Jota was concerned, however, I might have been a world champion. I could throw him with very little effort, and he had no idea how to fall. Instead of rolling with the throw, he came down untidily with a crash each time, even on the fairly soft ground.

I threw him every time he got up, and never followed him down, because this wasn't a sporting contest that would be settled by a body press or a submission. I didn't want to hurt him, exactly; instinctively I was trying to beat him, to humble him, to teach him a lesson, so that he would never make a pass at Dina or Sheila again.

He kept backing, though he didn't actually run away, and to his credit he got up every time when he could. And he kept trying to talk to me. "Val, you and I shouldn't be . . . " "I wasn't going to . . . " "Will you listen to me . . . " and then, rather ludicrously: "I'm warning you, Val . . . "

We were close. to the edge of the stasis, and when I threw him again I simply didn't think about it at all. What the stasis was I had no idea. To me it was simply a wall. Greg had walked through it, but Greg was in a special suit.

When I threw Jota and he rolled towards the edge, I expected him to stop against it as he'd have done at any other wall.

But he didn't.

There was a sudden roar, and I was sucked toward the barrier myself as air rushed from the stasis into the inferno beyond. Despite the brightness of the flames, the sudden glare as Jota rolled through made everything else seem dull.

He had no time to scream.

Outside the stasis the flames were dying a little, but the temperature had not begun to drop. Out there, things that would burn didn't catch fire, they simply dissolved in the heat.

Five seconds after I threw him out of the stasis, Jota was not identifiable even as a cinder.



As Jota died, there was a gasp behind me, a feminine half-checked moan of horror. Horrified myself, I didn't turn at once. I assumed that Dina had wakened up.

It was only when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dina lying on the ground, peacefully, comfortably, breathing deeply and regularly, that I realized someone else had joined us.

I turned and saw Miranda.

I had not expected to see her again. It had seemed likely that she was dead. Even if she had survived what Greg had done to her, it was not in the cards that she'd be moving around any more that night; and then, lacking a suit, she couldn't get into the stasis through the blazing town.

But she did have a suit. And although she reeled a bit and her hair was over one eye, she was in better shape than could have been expected.

She got in first. "Didn't you know?" she whispered. "Val, didn't you know what would happen when he hit the stasis? Or did you try to kill him . . . murder him?"

I had certainly not tried to kill Jota, and I was shocked at the manner of his death and my responsibility for it. Yet Miranda's obvious horror at what she had seen filled me with incredulity, rallied me, and made me temporarily cease to wonder that she was here at all.

"Whatever I did," I said in sudden anger, "are you to be the judge? You, who knew exactly what was going to happen, and let it happen? You came here to watch a gala performance, to extract the last ounce of vicarious enjoyment out of the Great Fire of Shuteley. But was that all -- or did you start the fire?"

My outburst didn't bother her. In fact, she calmed down. "You didn't know," she said. "Anyway, what's remarkable is that you and Jota fought, and he died, and you didn't . . . Why did you fight?"

I said nothing, merely glanced down at Dina.

She was still sleeping like a baby. She looked so happy she must be happy, having wonderful dreams.

"What about Dina?" I said.

"She's been . . . treated. She may be different when she wakes up. That'll be in about three hours. I can't promise -- "

"And you left her," I said, "with Jota."

Miranda's eyes widened. "You don't mean he . . . So that was it. Don't say anything for a minute. Let me think."

"You seem remarkably concerned about Jota -- and remarkably unconcerned about the ten thousand people you allowed to burn to death."

"Not ten thousand. Not a thousand. We saved many who would have died -- you know that, don't you? Only we couldn't leave them here, we had to take them with us. We couldn't leave here, alive, anyone who should have died. Except Jota. Saving him, leaving him here alive, was one of the main purposes of the operation."

"It would have been easier to avert the fire."

She shook her head impatiently. "Could you eradicate the French Revolution? Could you negate the First World War, even if technically the means were in your grasp? No, the Shuteley fire had to happen. All we could do was make certain small changes -- saving Jota, for one."

"He died in the fire? Before you intervened?"

"Yes."

"Well, looks like fate had it in for him. But why should a little thing like being burned to a crisp prevent Jota from living to the age of ninety? You can loop him back. It's been done before."

"We'll have to try to do something like that," she said thoughtfully. "The question is, how? I don't have any apparatus. Greg won't let me return through the copse. I can't return from here until near dawn. When I do, it's pretty certain that -- "

"For God's sake, Miranda, tell me what's going on," I exclaimed. "From the beginning, you've been saying too much and not enough. Either you should have been a perfectly ordinary party of campers who knew nothing about anything, or you should have concealed nothing."

"Both Greg and I told you too much, Val," she said quietly. "But only you. Nothing that anyone else knows matters."

"Gil? Jota? Sheila? Dina?"

"Gil is with us and you'll never see him again. He's supposed to have died in the fire, with Barbara and Garry. They're all with us -- elsewhere. Jota, at the moment, isn't in the picture. Sheila knows nothing except at second hand, what you tell her. And Dina will know less. Or rather, the little bit that will remain with her will be so improbable that she won't tell anyone but you."

As she spoke, I realized that whatever the reasons, I really was the one person still breathing and still in Shuteley who knew anything important about Snow White and the giants. Nobody but me had paid any particular attention to them in The Copper Beech. Gil had noticed the peculiarity about the coins, but he'd kept it to himself and now it would be impossible to prove anything. The luxon suits had made people stare, but by this time everybody but me -- and Tommy -- must have decided they'd been seeing things.

Apart from that, Greg had talked only to me, and Miranda had talked only to me. If I were suddenly transported to Parliament or Scotland Yard or the FLAG head office, I couldn't hope to convince the people there that the giants were anything but a party of kids in a summer camp. Of course there would be oddities to excite curiosity, even official curiosity. None of the campers would ever be traced -- they'd disappear, with their camp, into thin air. Other witnesses would confirm the giants' abnormal proportions. And surely I couldn't be the only person to glimpse a giant in a fire suit? But these would be only enigmas. There would be enough to make it appear there must be something in my story. Not enough to prove any significant part of it.

"Yes, I see," I said. "But why me? Because I'm not going to be around, is that it?"

"That's not the reason," she said, "though just now I can't see how you and Dina can survive. One of you, yes. There's one suit. Not both, any way I can figure . . . "

We had time to work out something about that. It was still a long time to dawn.

"Why me?" I insisted.



We had been standing talking, Miranda still in her suit, the goggles at her neck, the hood over her head. Now she started to take it off, turning away.

But almost at once she turned back. She had made up her mind.

"Val," she said, "remember the first time I saw you? I knew you. I'd seen photographs of you. And I was careless enough to show it. After that, I spoke to you. So did Greg. We both wanted to meet you, to make up our minds about you."

"So I'm famous?" I said. "Important?"

"Not important, Val. Not famous. Infamous. You're the villain of the Shuteley fire."

The calm, factual statement shook me. I must have gone white. "I -- I started it?"

"No, no, not that. History didn't need that to make you the villain. The scapegoat, if you like. After this there's going to be a new word in the language -- mather. Not a capital Mather -- you don't talk of a capital Boycott either. Just mather -- meaning a catastrophe following the most incredible incompetence."

"Me?" I said stupidly.

"Oh, it isn't fair, of course. I know that. But history often isn't fair. An inhuman monster becomes a national hero. A clever man who made one wrong decision goes down as a jackass, a blunderer. A fool who did one right thing by mistake is held up for all time as the personification of wisdom. You . . . "

"Well, what did I do?"

"Nothing," she said gently. "I said it isn't fair. You'll be blamed for what you did do, what you didn't do, and history will accept wild accusations as truth. You'll even be confused with old Amos What's-his-name, who died long before you were born, and blamed for what he did. He started a fire or two, you know. The general impression of Val Mathers is going to be that he was completely heartless and unscrupulous, and stupid as well. He bribed and lied his way to control of all insurance in Shuteley and then he set fire to the town -- "

"But this is absolutely impossible!" I exclaimed. "History can't -- "

"Well, there I misled you. Real history, the history of the historians, will get things much straighter. Real history is fairer to Captain Bligh, too, than the legend. The historians know you're not old Amos and didn't start the fire and lots of other facts like that. It's a fact, too, that it would hardly be to your advantage to be head of insurance and then start the fire. But it's not facts that go into legend."

She smiled slightly. "You may, now that I've warned you, be able to do something to protect yourself. That's if you do get out . . . "

"I most certainly will," I said warmly. "If what you say is true, there must be some villain in the piece, and if it's not me -- "

"Oh, there you're wrong again, Val. It is you."

"I thought you said -- "

She sighed and said: "We're in the same boat, you and I. You're going to be a scapegoat, and so am I. You're partly to blame, and I'm partly to blame. You for the fire, I for the failure of my mission here . . . Wait till I get this suit off, and I'll tell you the whole story."

She took off her fire-suit with obvious relief. It was cool in the stasis, but until she took off the suit she was insulated from coolness as well as heat. There were beads of moisture on her smooth midriff and her bare abdomen glittered with droplets.

A large multicolored bruise under her right breast showed where Greg had hit her -- carelessly, mistakenly, for there was scarcely any other part of her body where such a blow would have done less damage.

I wanted to ask what had happened to her and where she got the suit, but I refrained. I'd hear in due course.

She was going to tell me about herself and the giants and Jota and the fire.

She told me.









Chapter Nine

The fire started in the stack room of the public library over an hour after the library was closed and shuttered for the night. This was (would be?) established later from evidence pieced together too late to be of more than academic interest. Presumably an assistant who wasn't supposed to be smoking at all had thrown down the butt. It was going to be assumed that this assistant was one Maggie Hobson, an elderly library assistant who smoked furtively and incessantly, and it was a convenient assumption -- because Maggie Hobson, who lived alone in a single room near the library, did not survive the fire.

The stack room, with just enough ventilation to act as an efficient furnace, generated such heat that when at last the fire burst its prison, it was an explosion of flame. The whole library was soon an inferno.

The fire grew gross in secret by one of the many quirks of chance that enabled the Shuteley fire to become what it did. Most public libraries are in the town's main street; they have huge uncurtained windows and a fire inside would be spotted as soon as books started to blaze.

But this library, though in the center of town, was just off High Street and presented a blank Victorian-quasi-Greek pillared facade to the world. The interior lighting was by skylights facing the other way.

And the warehouse next door, with the court behind, was in process of changing hands. It was blank, shuttered, empty. There was little in the warehouse to help the fire -- and nothing to hinder it.

So fingers of flame sped covertly through the warehouse to the timbered houses beyond, through the silent court to the rear of the shops in High Street, through a church hall to a tire store.

There were automatic fire alarms in the library, connected to the fire station and set to go off at a certain temperature. Something went wrong; the connection was broken without setting off the alarm. Even fire alarms are not always wholly fireproof.

Never before had a fire in the middle of an inhabited town, and not even a sleeping town, for all this was around 9:30, gained such a hold unknown to anybody. At other times and places something would have been seen -- but this blaze, grew behind blank stone and shuttered doors.

Of course it wasn't long anyway before the secret was out -- but by that time the library, the tire store, six shops, four or five houses, the inner court, the church hall, the warehouse and a filling station announced the news simultaneously with leaping, roaring flame almost beyond hope of control.

If there had been firemen on the spot within five minutes, they wouldn't have known where to start.

But that was another of the-laughable tricks fate played that night . . . At 9:35, a matter of minutes before Shuteley knew it had a fire of its own, the fire units were dashing to a farm blaze three miles south of the town. Not all of them -- not for another couple of minutes. Then a barn blaze was reported, also south of the town, and Shuteley was denuded of all official fire-fighting potential.

The irony was that the last tender crossed the New Bridge seconds after the discovery of the Shuteley fire . . . and it left from the fire station across the road from the library.

Mere seconds after the first shouts of "Fire! Fire!" the blaze had swallowed the town's telephone exchange and the fire station radio.

So far there was not a single human casualty. And perhaps, if everybody had stayed calm and collected, there might not have been any. Well, perhaps a few people in the nearest houses, those which were pretty comprehensively on fire before the first alarm, must inevitably have been trapped. But others, some distance and several minutes from the heart of the blaze, should have lived, and didn't . . .

Wood smoke swept the streets. People coughed and ran. A few brave souls went the wrong way, trying to save wives, children, parents who might or might not have already escaped. Heat struck them down, for this was the hottest of fires. It wasn't a creeping, insidious fire. It was a roaring, searing, all-engulfing tiger of a fire. A man took three steps towards it and never had a chance to retrace them. Heat lashed him, blinded him, struck him down and boiled him.

Most people had the sense to go the right way. And they lived. Fierce as it was, this fire couldn't race like a prairie fire. It had to leap from house to house, taking hold -- taking hold, true, in about a quarter of the usual time, yet still needing time.

And the people in the streets could outrun it with no trouble at all. They could even give the alarm as they went, if it didn't take too long . . .



Children died because they were too slow. Most of the younger children were asleep, which put them at a big initial disadvantage. They were difficult to rouse; blazing towns were outwith their experience; they were inclined to waste time over such luxuries as screaming for parents, putting on clothes, going in search of favorite toys.

Old people died because they wouldn't go without savings, mementos, insurance policies, pension books, framed photographs -- and often because they wouldn't leave without locking the front door. If they'd forgotten the keys, they'd go back for them.

Others died because they couldn't believe it. Fires in towns are put out. You watch them as you watch workmen excavating. It's safe across the road. Other people are nearer than you are. These people couldn't believe that this was something different, something that was going to go down in the history books. They had the chance to run for their lives, and they didn't take it.

They thought other chances would come, and they didn't.

The fire waited for nobody. Given such a splendid start, it spread out rapidly in all directions, reaching the river very quickly, because High Street was only about a hundred yards from the river.

Hardly anybody, as it happened, fled across any of the bridges. They were forced east or west by the fire's dash to the river, or, if they had a chance, north. And the fire, reaching the river, proceeded to spread all the way along it.

That the firemen weren't even there was an irony, after the first few minutes, rather than a significant factor. They might certainly have helped in giving the warning and in the withdrawal from the town. They could not have done anything that mattered in putting the fire out.

Every man, woman and child who looked into the yellow maw of the blaze and decided at once to get the hell out of this lived to tell the tale. Those who died were the people who for one reason or another never had a chance; those who made up their minds, erroneously, that there was no desperate rush; the heroes and heroines; and those who thought that there might be an opportunity of making something out of the disaster. It was a grim night for looters, who gambled on having time that they didn't get.

In addition, there was Trinity Hall.

I should have known at once when I came on the mounds of skeletons that this must be the site of Trinity Hall. Shuteley had various other hails, but only one with two upstairs assembly rooms where hundreds of people could gather.

On the first of the upper floors a pensioners' party was being held. Above, a school dance was in full swing.

The stairway, though narrow and wooden, was adequate. The trouble was, by mutual agreement the old and the young people had shut themselves off from each other. Neither wanted to have anything to do with the other. Everyone who was coming was present, and both halls were firmly barred to gatecrashers or others who weren't wanted.

The fire raced past the hall on two sides and closed in. Nobody escaped -- the whole thing was too quick. The fire-escape, ancient as it was, was sound enough. But if anyone ever got to it (and perhaps nobody did), it would have offered a grim, hopeless choice -- the fire inside, the fire outside, the fire all around, the fire beyond the fire.

Because of the noise in both halls and those two barred, Keep Out doors, in the few vital minutes when escape would have been possible, nobody knew there was anything to escape from. People running before the fire in the streets outside were shouting, screaming, banging on doors -- but not bursting in, dashing upstairs and battering on inside doors.

Brave, foolhardly people elsewhere took heroic chances to spread the alarm. But no one happened to think of Trinity Hall . . . no one who was in the right place at the right time to do anything about it.

The fire cut the telephones almost at once, but the electricity failed in only a few places early on. Perhaps it was a blessing that lights stayed on; their failure would have added to the panic of old and young people.

Yet if the lights had gone out when all phones ceased to operate, people who got no warning until it was too late would have been alerted. At the least, television and radio would have gone off.

In Trinity Hall, in particular, the sudden failure of all lights would have brought both parties to a sudden halt. But the lights stayed on.

So 61 pensioners and 139 boys and girls between thirteen and nineteen died in Trinity Hall. Exacty two hundred. And that grisly piece of the disaster more than anything else, Miranda told me, was the thing which was going to make my name stink forever.



I didn't attempt to interrupt as she told me what she knew, which was less than I'd have expected. The giants didn't really know everything; their remarkable knowledge which had so impressed me on severai occasions was merely a small collection of isolated bits of exact information. Miranda, who knew so much about me, hadn't known of the existence of Dina. Perhaps, in the world in which the giants played no part, Dina became worse, had to go into a home, and was not mentioned in any accounts that survived.

Miranda did not, after all, have to do much explaining to show me how I could become the villain of the Shuteley fire. As she spoke, I oouid see this for myself. And I felt cold horror at the partial justice of it.

I wasn't really a villain. I had done nothing stupid, immoral or illegal. And yet . . .

FLAG was to all intents and purposes the only insurance company in Shuteley. Practically all pressure exerted on traders, farmers, firms, factories and ordinary householders to make fire less likely was exerted by FLAG -- by me. I didn't personally inspect anything, of course. But I was responsible. If there was blame, it was laid at my door.

And there was going to be blame. After such a catastrophe, millions of people all over the world were going to feel that such a thing couldn't happen unless someone had been criminally irresponsible.

There were fire prevention officers, too, but not one based in Shuteley. Anyway, Shuteley didn't have a bad fire record. Advice on fire prevention and official pressure for better standards usually followed incidents which showed the need for them.

We were the people most responsible for fire prevention. And we were slack . . .

FLAG head office was pleased with Shuteley. The directors liked having a town in their pocket, insurance-wise. As local manager, I was expected to carry on the good work. Shuteley made more money for the firm than any other town four times its size, simply because of the volume of business. And the claims record was highly satisfactory. The office ran smoothly. But after all, the directors liked Shuteley first and foremost became it was the one place where the company was supreme. Shuteley made them feel good. It was unique.

There was no actual directive, but I was well aware that I must not lose business, must not allow any other insurance company a toehold. This meant that I wasn't supposed to be too hard to please. It would never do if we wouldn't insure a property and some other company would; if we insisted on certain fire safeguards and the other company waived them; if we set a higher premium than the other company.

So, while our methods in Shuteley were not exactly bent, they had always been yielding. No doubt some of the town's smarter business men knew our position and cunningly took advantage of it. We wanted to insure them, and prestige mattered even more than profit. We could easily be maneuvered into giving a better deal than anyone else. We could also be persuaded to be satisfied with lower standards of safety than anyone else.

No, I hadn't been careless, I hadn't been crooked. I had merely been more easily satisfied than any insurance manager anywhere else would have been, with full backing from my firm.

But my firm's backing was going to fade away after this, after the staggering claims that would be made. FLAG would have to pay, in effect, the cost of the town, plus the insured value of the lives lost. Although the bill wouldn't kill the firm, it would make it very sick indeed. And instead of being the blue-eyed boy who kept a whole town in the company's pocket, I'd be the crass idiot whose incompetent methods were partly or even wholly responsible for the biggest pay-out ever made by any single insurance company in the world.

Also the firm's backing would fade away the moment there was a hint of public concern about the branch's methods.

Naturally the firm had known what I was doing, and approved. But that was before the Great Fire of Shuteley.

Oh, I could see it all. People like to have someone to blame. And I was just sufficiently involved to be a perfect choice.

"The most unfair bit," Miranda said quietly, "is the way Trinity Hall will be blamed on you. A fire officer called Christie inspected it a year ago and reported . . . "

I groaned. I hadn't exactly forgotten the incident, I had merely failed to fit it in place. I knew what was coming. "You saw Christie and showed him your own inspector's report on Trinity Hall. This said that although the building wasn't up to the highest fire-prevention standards, and had a big proportion of wood in the structure, and old wood at that, although the situation left a great deal to be desired, all fire-safety conditions were fully met -- "

"That's enough," I said. It was more than that: it was too much.

I wanted to hear about other things, no longer that.

"What happened to you?" I asked.



"Greg hit hard," she said, "but not hard enough. I'm small, yet I'm pretty tough. I came to in the river, choking, and let it carry me almost to the blockage. Then I swam ashore. I had a suit hidden in some bushes as a safeguard -- it wasn't entirely a surprise to me, what Greg did."

"What I can't understand," I began, and stopped. I'd been going to say I couldn't understand why Greg was allowed to sabotage everything that the others were trying to do, whatever that was, why Miranda and the rest of the giants had ever thought for a moment it was worth going ahead with their scheme while Greg was along with them, wrecking every move they made, and in the end trying to kill Miranda and failing only because in his vicious anger he preferred to lash out rather than make quite sure of her.

But that was only one of the things I couldn't understand. The others rose up and silenced me, tongue-tying me because I couldn't make up my mind which to press first.

Miranda, not surprisingly, was no longer immaculate. The two minute pink garments she wore were merely utilitarian, totally dissimilar from the subtle, carefully designed bikini she had worn that afternoon. It was probable that she and the giants had worn the briefs under their suits simply to avoid startling too much the Shuteley people who were to see them.

She was scratched and bruised, apart from the huge discoloration where Greg had hit her. And seeing her as she was then reminded me of the impossible glossiness of all the giants.

"You do come from the future," I said.

"What you call the future," she agreed. "What we know is the present."

"That's a play on words."

"No. Time doesn't happen all at once. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on . . . The date is 2097."

" Your date."

"No. The date. At this moment, it's April 17, 2097 -- a Wednesday, if you care to check. What comes after April 17, 2097, is the future, completely inaccessible. Before 2097 is the partly accessible past."

Her certainty irritated me. "This is what makes all you people cruel, inhuman -- the delusion that your own period is the only one that matters."

She was as certain as the torturers of the Inquisition. "It's April 17, 2097."

"Then I was born to no real existence? I live out my life in the shadows, dead from the moment I was born?"

That made her pause for a moment. "The metaphysical problems," she said at last, "are far beyond me. Perhaps you lived out your life in the second half of the twentieth century . . . perhaps you're restored to play it out again at the end of the twenty-first. I can't tell you the truth from your angle. All I know is that the pointer of time stands at 2097 . . . "

When I tried to argue, she went on: "Val, just think. I was born in 2067, and I'm here. Time must have reached . . . "

So she was thirty. It was surprising, in a way disappointing. She could have been eighteen or eighty, from what I had known, guessed and imagined. Thirty seemed an indeterminate age for Miranda. It seemed an anticlimax.

She went on trying to convince me that time had always reached a definite point, just as a clock had to register something, even if it had stopped. The date, the vital date, the only date that had any life or meaning, was April 17, 2097. Anything before that was the past, anything in front of it was the future.

Presently she realized she was wasting her time trying to convince me, and abandoned the attempt.

"It doesn't matter," she sighed, sitting down and leaning back against the stasis machine. "You want to know, but you don't want to know. You think you want the truth. All you want, of course, is what you want to hear."

"I do want the truth," I retorted. "What is it? You're a history class? At a college?"

Her eyes widened. "That's near enough true," she admitted. "I'm the teacher. The rest are pupils. But we're more than just a class. There are changes to be made."

"Changes? You're committing suicide, then? Change the past -- your past, if you insist -- and you change everything."

"No," she said patiently. "Time can't be changed, though bits of it can. Think of time as a river. It's an old idea, the river of time. But the analogy can be taken a good deal farther. Time is a river. And it's April 17, 2097 -- remember that, assume that, as a hypothesis, even if you're not convinced. Suppose we of 2097 interfere in the past, what happens?"

"You cease to exist," I said. "You wink out as if you never were."

"No," she said. "Remember the past is a river. Block a river, and what happens? Except in one case in a million, just what happened here. The river flows to the sea. Block it, and it takes another course. It still flows to the sea -- can you even imagine anything else? And except in the most unusual circumstances, the contour of the land forces the river to return to its original course rather quickly, and flow on as if it had never left it. Just think -- the very fact that a river exists means that gravity is forcing all the surplus water in the area to collect and flow in a certain direction. Stop the flow, and the water makes a detour, and then returns to the original direction, the original bed."

What she said made sense, but only in a limited way. Arguing by analogy proved nothing. She was saying, in effect, that because a river would act in a certain way, time must act in the same way.

I said so.

She agreed. "It doesn't always happen. A river flows one side of a hill. Divert it even a few yards at a certain point, and it must flow the other side of the hill. And then it's possible that it never gets back to the original course. Well, that can happen in time, too, but even more rarely than it does with a river. Make minor changes in the past, and your own time is certainly affected . . . but not in a catastrophic way. The river makes a detour, and returns to its original course."

She paused and then said quietly: "I ought to know, because I've done it more than once."

"You've done it? Changed the past?"

She stood up and began to walk about. The flames were dying, I saw, for the firelight flickering on her skin, making it yellow and orange and red but mainly a deep bronze, was far less bright than it had been when Jota and I fought.

"About twenty-five years ago it was discovered that it was possible to alter the past, for a purpose, without making vast, indiscriminate chaos of time. At this moment, all the force and life of time is in Wednesday, April 17, 2097. Any time diversion made anywhere has its effect, perhaps a vast effect on 2097, but in the changed world I still exist, I'm still a teacher, I still do the same things at the same time.

"The paradoxes of time travel have always fascinated some people, but I'd never been one of them. I had assumed, as most people did, that if you somehow managed to change even the tiniest event in the past, the consequences which must result would multiply, square and cube themselves with every passing millisecond, producing even in a few years a totally different world.

"If a girl were delayed ten seconds and consequently never met the man she would have married, never had the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren she would have had, naturally the future must be quite different. Yet far tinier changes must, I had believed and still believed, be just as significant."

"What sort of changes have you made?" I demanded. "And how do you know you've made them?"

She smiled and sat down again. But she was very restless. Something was bothering her, something that to her was far more important than the Great Fire of Shuteley -- which, after all, was only history.

"Anyone who moves in time," she said, "remembers everything. You were in a loop, so you know what happens. You experience and remember the entire loop -- the previous track, what happened, the return, the change in events, the consequence."

Jota and I had entered the camp, fought, Jota had been killed and I had killed. Then we'd been pushed back a few minutes and lived through a different version of the incident. And we remembered everything.

Miranda went on: "What have we changed? Sorry, Val, I can't tell you. It's better not -- they're all in your future. This is the farthest-back point where a change has been sanctioned -- "

"So it's sanctioned, is it?" I demanded. "Your parliament or senate or whatever you've got calmly decides to monkey with -- "

"Wait, please." She laid her hand on my arm. "Cool down. You know nearly enough now for me to tell you plainly and simply why we're here, what we intended to do, and how the operation is going."

She was, however, in no hurry to start. And now that it had come to the point, I felt no urge to hurry her.

We all like a safe, ordered world. Me more than most. The idea of people watching you, interfering with you, manipulating you makes the flesh creep. And yet, in this case, this very special case, if the giants had come to do the obvious thing and did it, if even now they could be persuaded to do it, I for one would have been delighted they came. Though afterwards, I wouldn't want any such interference again.

"We're here to save two people," she said. "One is Garry Carswell . . . not that he died in the original fire. If he had, we wouldn't have known his importance -- he wouldn't have had any importance. What did happen was that he lived, horribly scarred and mutilated, with the mind of a genius, but a traumatic genius who never really escaped the Fire of Shuteley. We believe that by saving him, which we've done -- letting him die might have been another way -- we can avert . . . "

She stopped. "No, I won't tell you about our time, your future," she said. "Nobody should ever want to know that, for certain. It's enough to say that our world may be a better place if Garry Carswell never grows up to be a brilliant diabolist. We've also saved his parents, Gil and Barbara, to live in our world. They died in the original fire, and that fact didn't help Garry . . . You won't see any of them again."

This didn't bother me: most people who had the choice of living in 2097 or dying in 1966 would find the choice easy. Many would even be glad to make the change.

"And the other you came to save was Jota," I said. "Well, that shouldn't cause you any trouble. Make one of your loops, as you call them, and give him a third life, or a fourth or fifth, or whatever it is. I've lost count."

"That might be possible, but for Greg."

"Yes, it all comes back to Greg, doesn't it?"

She shivered, probably partly at the thought of Greg and what he had done and what he still might do, and partly because it was rather cool and airy in the stasis, in comparison with the various kinds and degrees of heat we had all been experiencing. Jumping up, she pulled at her two-piece and with no trouble at all the scraps of material became a leotard, knitting at her waist with no apparent join. It was only a trivial miracle, hardly worth mentioning.

"The loops," she said,' "are legal. They're allowed. Only minimal apparatus is required, and the effect is extremely local. A few people are affected; the rest of the world is quite unaffected."

"Legal?" I said. "Allowed?"

"The moment time-molding became possible, there was immediate, irresistible public pressure for loops."

Sitting down again, she snuggled close to me, quite impersonally, merely for warmth. I had been nothing, then a lover; now I was a friend, if that.

"Think how the very possibility of loops instantly transfigures the world. Most accidents can be averted up to five seconds before they happen. A precious vase is dropped . . . turn back the clock, undrop the vase, and it lasts another thousand years. More important . . . a driver is careless for a fraction of a second, and a car plunges into a river. Regain the last five seconds, and drowned people are undrowned -- "

"As Jota and Wesley were unkilled," I murmured.

"Exactly. The permitted technique works only over a short period, a few minutes at most, and a tiny area. But it's saved thousands of lives, a lot of valuable property and prevented many disasters. Now, you want to know about Greg -- "

"Yes, Greg," I said. "Tell me about Greg. Explain the inexplicable."

"Why he's here? Well, he's got the Gift."

"The gift?"

"He's a witchdoctor. Only his magic works."

The introduction of further gobbledegook irritated me. I was just beginning to figure out how this business made sense. And then she introduced something fantastic which could never make sense.

Before I could speak, she said sharply: "Don't say it. Val, you haven't been very bright. You could tell me far more about the Gift than I can tell you. You know all about it. Or you would, if you'd ever opened your eyes."

I could think of only one explanation. " I've got it?" I exclaimed.

"No, not you -- Jota."

Step by step she made me remember, and interpret. And I lived through years of my life with her, prompted by her.









Chapter Ten

Although Jota was my cousin, I didn't know him until he was three. His mother was my father's sister, but they had never been close and the two people they married disliked each other.

When the Mulliners came to live next door to us, I was three too. Family feeling had nothing to do with the move. The house was available and convenient, that was all.

I never knew Mrs. Mulliner as Aunt Jean. There was no contact between the two families, but Jota and I, being only children of the same age, almost inevitably played together.

We used to be put out together in one back garden or the other, and allowed to run wild in ours (because neither my father nor my mother had any interest in gardens, and ours was a jungle), but had to be very careful in Jota's, because Jota's father was an amateur horticulturalist. He called himself that, and even at three Jota and I were trying to say the word, without much success, and with no idea what it meant except that because Jota's father was a horticulturalist we had much more fun in my garden.

(Miranda led me through memory quite fairly, not explaining although she did direct. She reminded me of very little, and never forced her sometimes more accurate information on me. All she did, really, was direct my attention to facts which I had never considered particularly significant, because if I had, I'd have had to believe the unbelievable. The unbelievable then . Anyway, sometimes, quite often, indeed, my memory contained important things of which she knew nothing whatever.)

We must have been about four and nearly ready to go to school when we had contact for the first time with the nastiness of the outside world. What happened in my own house I naturally took for granted, and anyway it was never nasty, merely baffling at times. I loved my mother and depended on her like any child, and ninety-five percent of the time she was like anybody else's mother. It was only occasionally that the world turned upside-down, that there was screaming and rushing about and slammed doors and sobbing, and I knew then to keep quiet and pretend not to exist.

The garden behind ours belonged to Mr. Sylvester, who was a fat red-faced man whom I used to like quite well. He used to give us aniseed bails, always throwing them and laughing all over his fat body when we failed to catch them, as we always did.

Later, however, Mr. Sylvester changed. Jota (who was Clarence then -- the name didn't seem strange to either of us until we went to school) and I didn't understand why he had changed. Until Miranda made me think about it, I didn't realize that he was simply a gardener jealous of Jota's father's achievements. He didn't throw aniseed balls to us any more. Over the fence, he asked at times why we didn't run about in Jota's garden the way we did in mine.

Then he started complaining about our garden, saying the weeds were coming through the fence. To Jota and me this was manifest nonsense, because we had never seen a plant walk.

Anyway, there was constant trouble between Mr. Sylvester and Jota's father, and between Mr. Sylvester and my father, and even between my father and Jota's father, because Jota's father said weeds did go through fences and it was time my father did something about the jungle.

Jota and I never understood the situation, but what we did know was that we could never play in either garden any more without being shouted at by Jota's father or my father or Mr. Sylvester. And we both managed to work out, without the slightest trouble, that the whole thing was Mr. Sylvester's fault.

Really, it was quite a crisis in the life of a couple of four-year-olds. We were not allowed to wander about the town, to play in the streets, to disappear for hours. In the back gardens, until Mr. Sylvester spoiled everything, we'd spent whole days of childish delight every time it didn't rain. We needed our sanctuary, because although I didn't think about it at the time, Jota's home too, where there was a perpetual tug-of-war for power, was also a place he was instinctively glad to escape from, and nobody had ever bothered us in my garden at least until Mr. Sylvester started making a nuisance of himself.

One day Mr. Sylvester ceased bothering us. He was dead. Neither Jota nor I had any clear idea what that meant, except that we were free again to play in my garden as we liked, and in Jota's garden with circumspection. We were honestly delighted that Mr. Sylvester was gone, and there was no shadow on either of our lives until we went to school.

It was the day we went to school that Jota and I fell out for the first time. Of course we had argued and sulked, but until then we had both been too dependent upon each other ever to cut off our nose to spite our face. My parents and Jota's parents both accepted our friendship as something that caused them less trouble than any other acquaintance, and if we fought we suffered for it, and we knew it. Other kids either of us brought home were not welcome. Neither Jota's parents nor mine wanted outsiders poking their noses in, even children -- behind children were adults, usually.

So Jota and I, fairly intelligent kids, had realized long since that fighting with each other didn't pay.

At school, a maelstrom of noise, high laughter, peculiar smells, unaccustomed regimentation, girls (neither Jota nor I had ever had anything to do with girls and had quite made up our minds we never would), harsh-voiced adults pretending to be on our side, huge windows, endless corridors, electric light in the daytime, stairs, frightening large boys and girls, even more frightening people in black coats and square hats, one thing stood out in my memory -- the howl of laughter when Jota said his name was Clarence.

The teacher laughed too, though she tried to pretend she hadn't.

They laughed again, twice as loudly, when he added the second half, Mulliner.

I wanted to jump up and hit the whole lot of them. They hadn't laughed when, just before, I had said I was Val Mathers. My real Christian name was Valentine, but I'd always been called Val, so that's what I said. Now everybody was laughing at Clarence Mulliner, my pal.

I didn't jump up because . . . well, I didn't jump up.

The funny thing was that as we were going home, free for the rest of the day -- the first day was a half day -- I giggled myself at the recollection of the childish laughter when Clarence, all unwittingly, gave his name. It was childlike -- when they laughed at Clarence, my friend, I wanted to fight them all (though I didn't). But afterwards . . . well, I laughed so much I could hardly walk.

Clarence -- I called him Clarence then, and went on doing so until he became, for all time, Jota -- didn't lose his temper at once. He waited for me to return to normal. But I couldn't. The more I laughed the funnier it all became.

And then he hit me once, on the chest, and ran away.

My laughter slowly died, not because I'd been hurt, not really because I was sorry I'd laughed, but mainly because I had, after all, been laughing at Jota. So long as he stayed to be laughed at I went on doing it. But there's no point in laughing at someone who doesn't hang around to be laughed at.

I went home. I tried to see Jota, but nobody answered the door.

At tea-time I wasn't hungry. Later I was sick. My father, even my mother, began to get concerned. I went to bed with a hot-water bottle.

Next morning I was no better and the doctor was sent for. He examined me thoroughly, and then he and my father talked at the foot of the bed in low tones. Later my father came and sat on the bed and talked quietly. to me.

At the time I didn't understand, didn't realize there was anything to understand except that I was ill.

But many years later it was easy to guess what the doctor had said and what my father thought about it, and what must have been in his mind when he talked to me.

The doctor had been unable to find anything wrong with me, yet obviously I was quite seriously ill. Being a young, up-to-date doctor, he immediately thought of psychosomatic illness. It figured. I lived in a strange home -- he knew that, being the doctor for the whole family. I had just gone to school. He had found a case, a quite interesting case, of a child of five, otherwise apparently normal, prostrated by psychosomatic illness.

Jota came to see me at lunch-time (the first school day had been a morning only, but on the second there was a short period of afternoon school too). He was quiet, puzzled, and very contrite. He seemed to think he was responsible for my illness because he had punched me on the chest.

I told him that was silly, there wasn't even a mark, and I was sorry I'd laughed at him.

I was ill for three weeks, and never fully recovered that first school term.



There was a very small incident about two years later . . .

It was the next time Jota and I really quarreled. Miranda didn't seem to know anything about this. I was quite unable to remember what the quarrel was about, or any details, except that Jota finally grew cold, stared at me, and said: "I'll fix you . . . " in a tone of menace quite startling coming from a seven-year-old boy.

And that was all. Nothing happened . . .



Miranda was puzzled. She had been making me remember things, not as I might have expected, by being in possession of all the facts and prompting my flagging memory, but by directing my attention to certain types of incident in my relations with Jota.

And this incident had her beat. She tried to make me remember that Jota had not really been in a cold fury with me, or that he got over it at once.

In fact, Jota and I ceased to be friends for fully three months, and during that time he made no secret of the fact that he hated me.

I was, after all, a much more normal boy than Jota, and I made other friends. He stayed solitary, walking home alone, standing in the playground alone.

And it was because of this that we finally became friends again.

One of my new friends was Gil Carswell, who was studious but not always quiet. In those days he was a sort of juvenile Jekyll and Hyde, usually the best boy in the school from the point of view of authority, intelligent, polite, hard-working, good at games, a paragon of schoolboy virtues. But now and then he'd kick over the traces . . .

However, this incident had very little to do with Gil, not until it was over, anyway.

It was the morning interval. I was with Gil. Across the playground, beside the bush which divided the junior boys' section from the girls', Jota was standing alone, as usual, staring into space, his mind far away.

About a dozen boys were kicking a ball around near him. Inevitably the bail went near him and one of the boys chasing it came close to Jota.

They didn't come in contact, and across the playground I had no idea what was said. I was watching only idly, until the group began to gather round Jota, and I began to have a vague, though fundamentally correct, idea of what was happening.

No wild animals are as cruel as children. They don't know how.

Jota, by standing alone, had set himself apart as a target, as a victim. The boys (bigger than us, from a higher class) were taunting him, trying to outdo each other in the wit and the virulence of their insults.

Automatically Gil and I moved across the playground. Nothing draws boys more surely and quickly than a fight, and it was obvious there was going to be a fight.

We weren't the only ones. Everyone in the playground was crowding to the same spot. Even some of the girls behind the hedge and fence were beginning to take notice, the bigger girls looking over, the smaller ones jumping up to take a quick look.

There were three playgrounds at the old Grammar School. Everything was old, dingy and overcrowded, and the playgrounds were far too small. Round at the back, completely cut off from us, were the senior boys. But all the girls, from five to eighteen, were in the same section. The idea was, presumably, that big boys might bully small boys, but girls didn't do things like that.

One of the boys baiting Jota began to jump at him and touch him, leaping back immediately. Two or three others followed suit.

Jota tried to pick one of them and fight him, to turn the affair into a simple playground brawl. Nineteen times out of twenty this would have worked and the incident would not have developed further. This time, however, the boy he picked tore himself away, electing to go on with the game, and his pals tacitly agreed on the same course. Every time Jota lunged, he was pushed back, kept at bay.

Now every boy in the playground was crowded round Jota. I caught only occasional glimpses of him. His face was white and he had gone beyond anger into sheer terror. Half a dozen boys ganging up on one can swiftly reduce him to blubbering misery. Jota was alone against the whole junior school. And it was too late to change the pattern of events.

Bolstering each other up, the tormentors were becoming bolder. At first they merely touched Jota lightly when they leaped at him. Then they punched him. Then they started pulling his tie, grabbing his shirt, clawing at his buttons.

Still a few feet of space was left between Jota and the heaving mass of boys, tacitly maintained to keep Jota the quarry and everyone else a hunter.

His nose was bleeding and blood was running down his chin from a cut at the corner of his mouth. Most of us were howling -- I believe I was howling with the rest. We were huntsmen, and we had cornered the fox. We were out for the kill.

When his shirt came out of his pants, we shrieked with laughter. Now he was not merely an object of derision, he was an object of fun. He was comic (like a fat, naked old Jew being beaten along a ghetto with gun barrels). Some quick-witted tormentor grabbed a handful of earth from under the bushes and managed to get most of it inside the top of Jota's pants.

It was about then that I ceased enjoying myself. I was as mindlessly cruel as most boys of seven or eight, I suppose. But even then I knew there were limits, that even a mob has to retain some grasp on common humanity, or the human race is done for.

I didn't realize until years and years later that there must have been scores among us who felt the same way. What did we do? Nothing; of course. Principally we were afraid that if we did anything we might find ourselves in Jota's place.

He was near the end of his tether. His shirt, minus all buttons, was now hanging open under his jacket, and his thin white chest was heaving at frightening speed.

There was no sign of any let-up. On the contrary, the immediate ring of boy-baiters, encouraged by those behind, kept searching for further torments. The time for mere taunts was long since gone -- the noise was such that only screams could be heard over it.

One boy took out a small pocket-knife, opened it and made passes at Jota with it. He never went very near him: yet if there had been a roar of encouragement, he'd have been emboldened to go in with the knife.

Flight had never seemed possible for Jota, since from the beginning he had been hemmed in against the bush and fence. But in his extremity he suddenly did something that none of us expected.

He leaped back, seized the top of the fence and somehow drew himself over. The next moment he was in the girls' playground.

For a moment the shouts died as if we'd all been struck dumb. Then the whole mass of boys charged the fence, ignoring the bushes, and although none of us got over as Jota had done, we were all hanging over the fence, watching, if not chasing, our quarry, hunting him with our eyes and our shouts.

The little girls all ran away, screaming. Boys were not supposed to be in the girls' playground. It was a rule, and not one of the hundreds of rules made to be broken. Nobody had expected Jota even to try to get into the girls' playground.

One massive woman of seventeen or eighteen caught Jota by the collar and lifted him. There was a scream of laughter on both sides of the fence. She did it again . . .

He fell out of his jacket and she was left holding it. He darted for the gate.

We rushed to our gate. He was on the other side of the road, panting desperately. Habit was so strong that he wanted to come back (the interval must be nearly over). But scores of boys were hanging over the gate.

I didn't think. I jumped over the gate and ran across the road. Jota flinched and turned, evidently thinking that even the school boundary couldn't stop the chase.

But I caught his arm. "Come on back, Clarence," I said.

Once again the shouting and howling died.

Suddenly sanity was restored. I had done quite a bit to restore it, but could take little credit for it. By standing with Jota, by allying myself with him, I had reminded everybody that he was one of us, not an outlaw to be taken dead or alive, not a fox to be slaughtered as bloodily as possible, not a mouse to be tortured and broken and perhaps left, mercilessly, still alive.

I could take very little credit because I should have done this long before, because instead of doing it when I might have turned the entire incident I had been howling with the rest.

Anyway, as the shouting died, the whistle to end the break shrilled, and we all trooped back into school, including Jota and me.

The fun was over.



Gil, Jota and I became friends after that. Curiously, Jota's fifteen-minute ordeal was ignored and forgotten and canceled as if it had never happened.

The teachers must have known something had happened. Signs of the damage to bushes and fences were still visible six months later. Jota could not have looked anything like his usual self in class, although his nose had stopped bleeding, his face had been washed, and his jacket -- thrown over the fence by one of the girls -- hid the ruin of his shirt.

In any event, nothing was done. And the boys at the school, too, scarcely remembered the episode. One or two of them, I knew, tried to taunt Jota later -- but they were unwise enough to do it individually, and in such circumstances Jota was perfectly capable of looking after himself.

Looking after himself . . .

Two weeks later, there was a special assembly. The Head was very grave. Two boys, close friends, had died in one day, one of hitherto unsuspected heart trouble, and the other in a road accident. A special service was held: all the good things the boys had ever done were detailed, and everything else quietly forgotten.

I knew, of course, that these two had been the ringleaders in the humiliation of Jota. But no significance in that fact, beyond the obvious coincidence, occurred to me. Jota could hardly have any control over road accidents, especially since at the time it happened he was with Gil and me and clearly had nothing in his mind beyond our search for birds' nests. I might, at that age, have believed that God had punished them for their wickedness. It didn't cross my mind that Jota had.



Miranda didn't make me remember subsequent events in any detail, except one -- one which introduced an entirely new concept.

There had been the case of Squire Badgeley . . . He wasn't a squire at all, but he looked like one and he owned an orchard. Probably for every apple that he got, the boys of Shuteley Grammar School got two. In my earliest recollections of the squire, he seemed quite philosophical about this.

But now it was wartime. We were too young to take much note of the war; the restrictions and shortages we accepted as we accepted the rain and the wind, and our memories of a time when there was no need to pull curtains at night and when unlimited good things were obtainable merely on production of cash were dim and vague.

But Squire Badgeley took note of the war. He had three sons in the RAF, and his one daughter worked with him, a Land Girl as we called them then. In addition to apples, he grew raspberries, blackcurrants and a wide range of vegetables. And we boys not only stole his fruit, but damaged and destroyed his carrots, turnips, cabbages and lettuces.

He became an ogre (from our angle). He guarded his orchard, chased us, and reported us to the Head. The Head, whom we dimly remembered being as philosophical as the squire had once been about our depredations, now became astonishingly harsh.

Jota was caught once, and the squire beat him.

Two weeks later the squire died. But that wasn't the end of the Badgeley story.

It was not until long after the war that we broke our vows about girls. Jota broke his first. One week he obviously didn't know any more than we did about the birds and the bees, though we were all becoming hotly interested: the next, he was able to tell us, in remarkable detail, everything we could possibly want to know.

We didn't really believe his stories at first. But soon it was impossible not to believe them. Girls of all ages swarmed around Jota. (He was Jota now, duly having been christened by Mr. Samuel, the science master.) In juvenile masculine arrogance he used to induce us to deride his chances with a particular girl, often four or five years older than he was, and then make the conquest, and prove it.

This was before the days of widespread promiscuity at mixed schools. Shuteley was an old-fashioned town, too, well behind the times. Senior girls did not then wear yellow golliwogs to claim loss of virginity. If Jota had not existed, only one or two of the most forward senior girls would have had furtive nocturnal adventures, mainly with boys of the town who had left school. Fewer still of the senior boys would have had such experiences, and they would have been with willing farm girls rather than the supposedly pure senior girls.

Jota, on his own, created an unprecedented situation. Every apple ripe enough to pluck, he plucked. He collected girls like stamps. It made not the slightest difference what form they were in, from Third to Sixth. He knew enough, of course, not to leave a trail of illegitimate babies behind him. I believe that throughout his life, only when he was too impatient for a particular girl did he ever take chances.

It was not long after Dina was born that Gil, goaded by Jota's fantastic success and the fact that Gil and I were still virgins, and likely to remain so for some time, hit on a challenge that was to reduce Jota to size.

He brought up the name of Anne Badgeley.

All three of Squire Badgeley's sons had been killed in the war. Anne, left alone, ran the orchard herself, with hired hands to help her. Although she could hardly be said to be fortunate, money was not one of her problems. She was certainly the richest girl in Shuteley.

At the time when Gil made his outrageous suggestion, she was probably one of the most desirable girls in the town, and undoubtedly the most desired. There wasn't much doubt that the reason why she hadn't married was tied up with her wealth. Whether the average young man in town wanted Anne, her orchard or her money most was a matter for conjecture. But he certainly wanted all three.

She was still in the first half of her twenties, and Jota was not less than ten years younger. She didn't exactly seem old to us, being younger than Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner, whose pin-up photographs we were beginning to stick up in our bachelor bedrooms. Indeed, with her habit of working in the summer in her orchard dressed like our pin-up girls, she was the nearest real thing to the gorgeous creatures of our adolescent dreams.

She worked in the orchard behind a fence and a high hedge, but peepholes could always be found, and the summer working clothes of Anne Badgeley were a daily topic of inflamed speculation among us. When she wore slacks we lost interest, or some interest, but when she wore shorts and particularly one day when above her tight shorts she made do with a flimsy chiffon scarf, carelessly tied, she rocked the male half of the Grammar School to its foundations.

But she was as much out of reach as Betty, Rita and Lana. The very idea of Jota and Anne, Anne and Jota, was ridiculous, which was why Gil made the suggestion.

Jota took the challenge. And a week later, he made us hide in the orchard to watch.

Late on a hot summer evening, he and Anne came out . . .

Gil and I were part shocked, part disgusted, but mainly wildly envious. Why had Jota been singled out to be able to do such things? The girl was head over heels in love with him; he could do anything he liked with her, even we could see that.

In the autumn, Anne died. She fell off a ladder and broke her back.









Chapter Eleven

Dina was still asleep. She changed her position easily, regularly, without fuss and without making a noise.

Around us now, beyond the stasis, was a red glow. It would be many hours yet before it would be possible for Dina and I, unless wearing one of the giants' suits, to leave the spot. But the fire had consumed nearly all there was to consume.

The Great Fire of London had burned for days. Wartime fires started by incendiaries had often been blazing still when the bombers returned the following night. Shuteley, however, was annihilated in a relatively small, exceedingly fierce, shockingly rapid fire. What remained would glow for a long time, but little or nothing remained to blaze.

And there was one suit in the stasis. As I understood it, just before dawn the stasis would disappear and Miranda would be plucked back to her own time. But anyone not of her party would simply be left suddenly without the protection of the stasis, to die.

Certainly to die. There would be enough heat left to char the ground, to burn Dina and me apparently as all the other victims had been burned -- more slowly but no less surely, so that when people from outside first reached the village green (that afternoon? Next day?) there would be no indication that the stasis had ever existed, or of the identity of the two blackened skeletons in it.

But I was still oddly unconcerned about this. There was one suit, and there was still plenty of time. Anyway, I did not believe I was going to die. Dina could have the suit. Dina, whom I expected to recover consciousness soon, could make her escape . . . and I wouldn't die.



"What are you telling me?" I asked Miranda.

She shrugged. "I've been careful not to tell you anything. You're telling me."

"But I'm remembering what you tell me to remember. That Mr. Sylvester was a nuisance to Jota, and he died. That Jota quarreled with me, and I nearly died. That the two boys who led the mob against Jota died. That Squire Badgeley beat Jota, and he died. That Anne Badgeley -- "

"You're missing out some very important things. About all those girls, schoolgirls mostly, but older girls too. Particularly Anne. She could have had anyone in Shuteley, you said. Why did she pick a kid barely into his teens?"

"You're saying Jota did all this. Any man he wants out of the way dies? Any girl he wants says yes?"

She nodded. "He has the Gift. And you're wrong to say any man . What about Anne? When he'd finished with her, he made her die."

"Why would he want rid of her?"

"The oldest reason, probably. She was pregnant. With others he was more careful. With her he was too impatient, too reckless. And it seemed to Jota that it would be better for him if Anne died."

"You're saying he condemned all these people to death?"

"No," she said thoughtfully. "Not that. I imagine that at first, he simply thought, perhaps not even consciously: 'Everything would be fine but for Mr. Sylvester.' And soon Mr. Sylvester wasn't there. But after this had happened a few times, Jota must have begun to realize . . . There's another thing he obviously has found out by this time -- with the ability to attack goes defense. Nobody can kill Jota. No person can kill Jota. Of course he could die by accident, like anyone else -- his power is over people. Originally he died in this fire -- "

"Wait," I said. "That doesn't jell. I just killed him. Yesterday Greg killed him. You say that before you intervened, the fire killed him. Seems that for an indestructible character he gets destroyed a hell of a lot."

Miranda was following her own train of thought, not mine. "Later, in adolescence, he found out something else. After any girl refused him -- "

"No girl ever refused him," I said.

"Oh, yes. Time after time. You weren't there. Neither was I, but I can tell you what happened. The first meeting was always as you'd expect. But later -- a girl who sneered at Jota would come crawling to him, She'd beg him, as I -- "

She flushed. "I think you heard what Greg and I were saying at the bridge. You're wrong if you've any idea that people with the Gift are smooth, practiced lovers. They don't have to be. It's crude, it's bestial. They say: 'I want. you,' and that's it. Not the first time. The Gift needs time to work. When Jota or Greg wants a man dead, he doesn't drop on the spot. It takes time to happen."

The paradoxes and inconsistencies that had bothered me were gradually melting away.

I could see how Greg could have killed Jota. If two people had this Gift, presumably it was canceled out. Greg had no special power over Jota, but then Jota had no special defense against Greg. So the matter was settled simply with pistols. There was also the cryptic exchange between them which I now understood better:

GREG: You're a bit like me. JOTA: In more ways than one. GREG: Remember . . . I killed you. JOTA: Remember . . . I let you.

Yes . . . I understood and accepted that. I also understood and accepted this new explanation of Jota's power over women. He approached them, they reacted exactly as they wished, free to do as they wished (I now remembered I had never been privileged to see any of the preliminaries, only the consequences). Later, when something had worked on them, they became possessed, clay in Jota's hands.

More of the inconsistencies dissolved when I looked at them. Jota had been brutish toward both Sheila and Dina. That was how it started. Later, if he persisted, things would be very different. But instinctively wise in the case of Sheila, I had sent Jota away, unconsciously knowing what Sheila hated me for thinking, that what she thought or wanted or said didn't count, only what Jota wanted . . . And as for Dina, there had not been an Act Two and there never would be.

Then, having prepared the way, Miranda told me about the Gift in her own world.



I don't remember her words. She spoke for a long time. A lot of what she said I didn't believe at first, but gradually disbelief was borne down.

Greg and Jota and three percent of the population in 2097 had a Gift which was quite simply ability to make people die or surrender sexually. It was nothing else.

It was fundamentally a masculine phenomenon. So few women possessed it that they were freaks, usually choosing to conceal, abandon, deny their possession of the Gift.

Those with the Gift, then, were men, and if they didn't rule the world, they prevented anyone else from ruling it effectively.

Most of them, fortunately, were law-abiding . . . but what could be done about the rogues like Greg? Virtually nothing. That was why Greg was present on an expedition aimed at the limitation or even destruction of his kind, able to sabotage it at will, because nobody could stop him.

Miranda conldn't stop him. If Greg cared to decide at any moment that she should die, and simply decided it instead of crudely, impulsively and rashly trying to break her body with one blow, then she would die in less than two weeks. And the cause of death could not legally be connected with Greg.

I protested at this. Had no murder charge ever been brought against one of these people? When the Gift was known to exist, when threats had been made, when a death duly took place exactly as forecast, surely . . . ?

"Think, Val," said Miranda wearily. "Take the clearest possible case . . . imagine the clearest possible case, and then think about it. The detectives who built up the case would have to be immune. The cops who arrested the accused would have to be immune. The jailers, judge, jury, and lawyers would have to be immune. And in common justice they'd have to prove that the accused had the Gift, and had used it deliberately to end another person's life."

She shook her head. "It can't be done. Especially since the actual cause of death is always natural -- illness, accident or suicide, with no physical intervention by the real killer."

So Greg was with the Shuteley party. Some of those who had tried to stop him had died. Threats were enough to silence the others. Miranda's attitude, a perfectly reasonable one after all, was that she could at least keep an eye on him and try to defeat him.

In addition to ordinary people and those who had the Gift, there were some who were simply immune. They did not possess the Gift; but those who did could accomplish nothing against them. Unfortunately there were fewer of these than those who had the Gift.

The Gift, and immunity, were hereditary. This did not mean that the Gift was often passed on. It merely meant that it could be passed on.

Miranda's world, the world of the giants (women of five feet four were as rare in her world, she told me, as women of four feet eleven in ours) was a good world on the surface, and a seething cesspool of fear and chaos and self-destruction underneath.

And all because of the Gift.

The sexual side of it, she pointed out, was virtually unimportant. That was merely a by-product, a side issue. It existed, probably, because sex as well as survival was basic. Anyone who could control life and death could also control the sex impulse.

That was nothing. A small minority of Casanovas could be a nuisance, but they couldn't push a whole world over a precipice.

The threat of death was another matter altogether. There was no need for any Greg to be educated, clever, handsome, careful, obliging, efficient or self-respecting. Anyone who said or did anything a Greg didn't like could be rubbed out and forgotten. It was senseless to be brave when faced with a Greg. After he had eradicated you, he could quite easily, on the merest whim, eradicate your wife and family as well.

As far as anyone knew, the Gift was a chance mutation. Immunity was probably allied to it, though no one could be sure. Immunity might have existed always, unrecognized, purposeless, until the Gift emerged.

Twisting of time was only one of the desperate measures tried in an attempt to restore sanity to the world of 2097. Miranda hinted at others, refused to tell me about any, and said that anyway, they had all failed miserably, sometimes tragically.

I started to suggest one angle that occurred to me, the arrangement of accidents, since Gregs could be killed in accidents like anybody else, and she cut me off rather impatiently. Such attempts were the most disastrous of all. They made all people who possessed the Gift, including those who steadfastly refused to use it, band together for their own survival.

So we came to the purpose of the Shuteley operation.

Clearly if everybody possessed the Gift, or if everybody was immune, or if everybody was one or the other, the problem would cease to exist.

According to the river-of-time theory, the people of 2097 would continue to exist no matter what was done to the past, short of a major diversion which would force the flow into a completely different course. But their capacities might be changed. Miranda might, after certain changes had been made, find herself immune. Or she might have the Gift. Or nobody might have the Gift.

It was a desperate scheme, born of desperation. It was carried out in a manner little short of insanity, in a completely useless attempt to get the whole thing done under cover.

It was entrusted to an ordinary history class in an ordinary school under an ordinary teacher.

A history class would go back and see the Great Fire of Shuteley, 1966 A.D. They would do nothing to alter the flow of events except remove Garry Carswell . . .

That was the cover: a minor operation like many others (none of them directed against possessors of the Gift), of no particular interest to anyone not directly concerned. Miranda knew all about it, but none of the students did. As far as they were concerned, the rescue of Garry Carswell, and a few others, was all that was involved, apart from the opportunity to see the Great Fire.

It might possibly have worked.

But three percent possession of the Gift meant that one in thirty-three adults, teenagers or children had it. So no school was free of it.

Greg was in another class, a lower class. He applied to join the expedition to 1966. The headmaster, the far more important people behind the headmaster and the less important people below, all knew that the inclusion of Greg would ruin everything.

But Greg had made up his mind, and nothing else mattered. It wasn't even possible to cancel the scheme. Greg, if he felt like it, could easily block the cancelation.

Greg went with the party.



"Now Jota," I said. "Tell me why you want Jota."

She hesitated. "It's only a theory that if we saved Jota the situation might improve. Perhaps it would be worse . . . You've been baffled in the last twenty-four hours by what we know and what we don't know, Val. We knew that Jota would arrive at your office at 3:10 this afternoon, but I didn't know Dina existed. We had pictures of you, so I knew you when I saw you in the bar, but we had no picture of Jota, and that's why I came to your office -- to see him, to be able to recognize him, so that there would be no possibility of mistaken identity later. We didn't know, of course, that you and he would go to the camp, because that was a new train of events altogether."

"Why didn't you do some preliminary scouting?"

"For several reasons, but the main one was to try to rush this through without attracting the attention of people like Greg. It wasn't supposed to be a big, important operation, just -- "

"Just a sight-seeing tour," I said.

"Well, yes. Anyway, one thing we do know for certain is that around you here in Shuteley in 1966 there were important elements in the Gift-immunity hereditary lines. Some were strong, some weak . . . it's possible that the whole situation developed from a single latent mutant who lived here thirty or fifty or eighty years ago. But we haven't been able to trace any such person."

"You hoped saving Jota would give more people in your time the Gift. Or better still, immunity without the effect."

"That's it exactly. Leaving Jota to die, as he did originally, obviously didn't stop the spread of the mutation. Historiaus believe that saving his strain may do what you just said. One thing we are sure of is that the immunity strain is here too, if we can somehow develop it. But all we can do, all we know about to try, is to save Jota. He was the first, by far the first, to possess the Gift complete. Decades were to pass before anyone appeared with the power so fully developed -- "

"And he really had no children?"

"We think not. We're almost sure that . . . "

She stopped suddenly.

I followed the direction of her eyes and saw Greg.



He was carrying a spare suit, which he dropped when he saw Miranda. His expression answered one question. He had meant to kill her, and thought he had.

Yet he didn't say "How did you get here?" He demanded: " What have you done? "

She stood up. "What could I do?" There was a slight emphasis on the "I."

"I've lost it," he said hoarsely. "Something's taken it away from me. I felt it go . . . I couldn't test it with death, that takes too long, And I wanted to know. I tested it with girls. With Harrie, Wendy, Mary, Chloe. They couldn't understand it either . . . But they all hate me, can you understand that?"

Miranda seemed to grow as tall as Greg. A great joy flooded her. "You've lost it?" she said. "Maybe there is natural justice after all. You're just a kid now, a great overgrown kid. And helpless."

"Helpless?" he almost shouted, drawing himself up to his enormous height. Yet he was almost blubbering. Curiously enough, I could understand him. I'd known Jota for a long time. Jota had a strange Gift, and, I now believed, very little else. His power, his personality, his success had all come from something he couldn't help. He had Something; he wasn't Somebody.

It's not necessarily true, as you're always told when you're a kid, that a bully must be a coward. Yet there is a weakness, if not necessarily in courage. A strong, brave, whole man or boy doesn't have to prove himself at the expense of the weak. He may trample carelessly on the weak, as strong men do. But he doesn't seek out the weak to torture and humillate them. He'd rather engage in a real contest with someone his own size.

Jota and Greg had this in common, I now saw, that the thing that set them apart was important to them, vital to them. They weren't like a banker who happened to be a talented violinist, enjoying playing the violin for his own pleasure and that of others, but with no compulsion to tell every new bank client at once that he was a brilliant violinist. As far as I knew Jota hadn't used his Gift to kill more than half a dozen people. But he'd had to go on making amatory conquests -- he'd been forced to go on. Now that I had the key I could see his Don Juan activities in a different light, and no longer envied him in the slightest. Every girl who didn't want him had to be made to want him . . .

Greg, however, was the problem of the moment. As he and Miranda faced each other, I knew that the way this whole thing would go depended on what happened now between Greg and Miranda -- and me. Because I mattered, too.

"Yes, helpless," I said. "But you knew that quite a while ago, Greg, didn't you? You just didn't want to believe it."

He looked at me as if astonished to see me there. Then, remembering, he looked around. His gaze passed over the sleeping Dina without stopping. "Where's Jota?" he said.

I had become strong and confident. I felt it, as Greg had felt his reduction to size, but the opposite way. I didn't even have to stand up. I was still sitting on the burnt earth.

"I killed him, Greg," I said. "He was trying to add Dina to his list. I didn't mean to kill him, but I'm not sorry he's dead. I'm beginning to think his death was necessary."

"You killed him," Greg murmured. " You killed him."

"Why pretend to be surprised? You wanted to kill me, and couldn't. You had to save me instead. I guess you managed to convince yourself that you didn't need to kill me in the fire, that it was neater and cleverer and just as efficient to bring me here to die when the stasis was removed. But the truth was, you couldn't kill me. The most you could do was place me in circumstances where I might die."

It was Miranda's turn not to be able to follow what was going on. She had a glimmering of understanding, but there was still a lot she couldn't fit into place.

Greg understood. He stared at me with naked hate, and clothed fear. "Who are you, Val Mathers?" he whispered.

"Nobody in particular," I said. "But once Jota wanted to get rid of me. He nearly got rid of me, and I came back. And the next time he wanted to get rid of me, I didn't feel a thing. And an hour or two ago, you tried to kill me. But you couldn't, could you? You had to bring me here instead, and just hope I'd die. And when Jota and I fought, he died."

Miranda was standing quite still. "You're immune, Val," she whispered. "You were the first neutral. Only your life had no effect, because you never had children. But after what I told you . . . "

I understood now. I understood what had changed, and why.

Jota was an irrelevance anyway. In the first run of these few days, he had died; in the second, he still died. So he was unimportant. He was a red herring.

I was different. In the first fire, I hadn't died, evidently (or I'd never have become the scapegoat). In the fire altered by the intervention of the giants, I was certain I wasn't going to die either. But one thing differed: but for Miranda, I'd never have had children. Now (I trusted her -- on the whole I trusted her) I certainly would.

And Greg became impotent.



Yet not, perhaps, entirely impotent, in all senses.

His attention was all on me now. "You," he muttered. "It must be you. By intervening, we mixed you up in this thing in a way you never were before. Before we took a hand, you and Sheila and Dina stayed at home and never knew a thing was happening until it was over. Your curtains were drawn, nobody phoned you, the lights didn't fail, you heard no noise. You went to bed and slept, the three of you, and it wasn't until the next day that you discovered Shuteley had deen burned to the ground. But we intervened, and . . . "

"And Jota still died," I said. "That was what you, Greg, wanted -- until a little while ago. When you lost your precious Gift you realized that somehow what was happening here tonight had snuffed the Gift out. It never developed. It was beaten here . . . or else, who knows, the elements that enabled it to be beaten between your time and mine were brought together."

"Yes," Miranda murmured.

"And you changed your mind completely," I said to Greg. "Miranda was here to save Jota, you to make sure he stayed dead -- because both of you believed that that would weaken the Gift in your time. A little while ago, when you found you'd lost it, you decided, and perhaps you were right, that Jota had to be saved. Save him, and maybe you saved the Gift after all. So you came back for him. But you're too late, Greg -- I killed Jota."

He leaped at me.

I was on the ground. The advantage wasn't all with Greg; already on the ground, I could move faster there than he could. He landed heavily where I had recently been. Knowing I was not involved in a cheerful, sporting contest, I kicked him in the kidney as I got up. After that, his movements were slower. I also managed to hit him in the groin before he got his bearings.

Yet when he was up, hurt badly and slowed down, I was instantly in trouble. Miranda tried to help, and was canceled out in two seconds. A single backhand swipe that caught her on the shoulder, with most of Greg's 250 pounds behind it, finished her interest in the contest at the moment it began.

Greg had not taken time to take off his suit. The fact, on the whole, favored me. The plastic afforded him some protection, and he was hard to grasp properly. But the heat his efforts generated was trapped in the suit. I also guessed that the air supply from the tank at the back was constant, not enough to sustain continued desperate activity.

Coming to the same conclusion as me, Greg tried to win grace to remove his suit. And I kept at him so that he couldn't. Soon he was gasping like a grassed fish.

He hit me once, and although it was only a glancing blow on my right breast, the pain and numbness that went through me showed me my only chance was either to hit Greg without being hit myself, or to fight him as I had fought Jota.

Using his weight, I brought off a knee-drop which hurt him badly. Nevertheless, it was perhaps a mistake, for he got up so mad that I knew I was engaged in not much less than a fight to the death, perhaps nothing less at all.

He couldn't get his suit off. Every time he tried, I hit him or butted him or threw him.

My tactics paid off, for when suddenly he caught me a stinging blow on the side of the head and I reeled, defenseless for a moment, he chose to use the moment gained to get the suit off rather than to follow up his advantage. And that was a life for me.

By the time he had stripped to his briefs I was able to go on.

The trend of the struggle changed. While he'd been wearing his suit there had been no point in trying to throw him through the stasis wall. Now there was.

I was deliberately trying to do what I had done quite accidentally in Jota's case -- burn Greg to death. The blaze outside our bubble of coolness was dying now, and yet the embers were so hot that if Greg rolled out into them, he'd die as surely as Jota had.

Unlike Jota, however, Greg knew what would happen. And he was trying to do the same to me.

He threw me once, by brute strength, and then launched himself at me, intending to wind me with his weight. I rolled partly clear, but he grabbed me and held me. He was on top, and I could do nothing about his weight. He started to swing at my head a blow which would have ended my interest in the fight.

Then he fell on top of me, limp.



I extricated myself. Dina was standing over us. She had picked up a stone and hit Greg with it.

"Have I killed him?" she asked anxiously.

"I don't care if you have," I gasped.

"I didn't mean to kill him. But if I didn't knock him out, he'd have taken the stone from me. So I had to hit pretty hard."

"You haven't killed him, Dina," I said, moving from Greg to Miranda, who was dazedly picking herself up. I offered her a hand, but she shook her head and sat down again, taking a breather. Greg had been pretty rough with her that night.

I turned back to Dina, who was a singularly attractive stranger. She wore a crisp white blouse which in the middle of all this was spotless, a short black skirt with a wide belt, nylons and stiletto shoes. She must have been fully protected from the beginning.

I asked her what had happened.

"I was watching television with Barbara and Gil," she said. "We heard shouting first. Then the television suddenly went off. And there was a glow at the window. The next thing, there was a glow at the other window. Gil shouted: 'Get Garry and we'll go to the cellar.' "

So that was how it had happened . . . Before the giants intervened, when Barbara and Gil were alone in the house with Garry, Gil's first reaction had been to seek refuge in the cellar. A very reasonable idea, really . . . the trouble was, he thought the fire that apparently surrounded them was an ordinary fire, and it wasn't. In an ordinary fire, the cellar of Gil's house would have been a perfect funkhole. But in the fire that was to come, any cellar would become an oven, and anyone within would be baked slowly and very painfully to death.

They had just reached the cellar when two big youths in plastic suits appeared and practically dragged them back into the hall of the house. Barbara, frightened, did exactly as she was told; Dina, curious, was glad to get out of the dingy cellar and have a chance of seeing what was happening; Gll, dazed, had to be shouted at before anything registered; and Garry slept peacefully through the whole thing.

There had been a curious wait while people screamed outside, while crowds ran past the house, while the red glow became bright enough to replace the lights which had gone out. The youths in plastic suits didn't speak, didn't answer Barbara's hysterical questions. Yet they had a comforting air of knowing exactly what they were doing.

Unhurriedly they unwrapped a bundle and made Gil, Barbara, Dina and Garry put on fire-suits -- the simpler version I had seen. And still they all waited.

Then, quite suddenly, it was time to move. The giants gave the baby to Barbara, opened the door, and they moved out.

It was indescribable -- at any rate, Dina entirely failed to describe it.

They walked along a street of fire. No one saw them because nobody not wearing a suit could be there to see them. They felt no heat, breathed easily and their eyes did not smart.

They had, after all, only a few hundred yards to go. Before they realized it, they were in an area of comparative silence, completely calm, and cool, fresh air.

The suits were at once taken from them. They would be used again and again that night.

There were others in the stasis, many others -- frightened, bewildered people. More were brought in every moment, in plastic suits which were removed as they arrived.

Beyond this point Dina knew little or nothing more, because then Miranda had appeared and taken her aside.

"She gave me a pill," said Dina. "And I fell asleep."

I looked past her at Miranda. That the giants had powers that were remarkable to us was undeniable: that these powers were, after all, limited was equally clear.

I could understand that Miranda's powers had been able to make of Dina a whole person for the first time in her life. But that this could be achieved merely by giving her a pill I could not believe.

Unseen by Dina, Miranda made a gesture. Its meaning was plain: she was telling me not to pursue this.

Maybe she was right. I knew all I had to know.

Looking at Dina, I marveled. She didn't have any words she hadn't had before; she didn't have any experience she had before.

But . . . Dina was normal. She couldn't have explained things as she had, understanding in retrospect, unless she'd become something much nearer an ordinary seventeen-year-old than she'd ever been.

Dina had never before told me a long and fairly complicated story which I could understand. "She made me," referring to Sheila, was about the most I could expect.

"I'm grateful," I said to Miranda, and I meant it.



Feeling better, Miranda stood up. There was pain in her face, but only physical pain, and that was nothing. She glowed with happiness, relief, satisfaction.

"Success by mistake," she said. "It often happens. History is like that. We made dozens of mistakes and got the right answer. You matter, Val, not Jota. Greg . . . "

She shrugged, looking down at him. "I can handle him now."

"I wouldn't be too sure," I said.

She was completely confident. "He knows now. He'll be a disgruntled, dazed child when he comes round. He won't give me any trouble. But now we have two suits -- three suits. Val, take Dina and get out now. Greg and I will be all right We'll be snapped back with the stasis."

She smiled. "And have many, many children. You and Sheila -- and Dina. She may be involved, too. She may even be the one that matters . . . no, it must be you. Yet Dina, too, didn't have children before, presumably, and will now -- "

For Miranda it was over. Mission accomplished. She hadn't failed after all, although, as she'd admitted, she had suceeedded through luck and not much else.

But for me it wasn't over. I had still failed. I'd still get the lion's share of the blame for the Great Fire of Shuteley. I'd still deserve a lot of it. The word "mathe:r would still go into the language.

The kids Miranda wanted Sheila and me to have would grow up in an atmosphere of scorn. "Your old man's a murderer . . . " They'd be chased out of their playground at the break as Jota had once been chased. And not just once. And some teachers would turn a blind eye.

"No" I said.

"What do you mean, no?"

"I'm not going to face a future like that. I'm not going to have kids to be picked on by the whole world."

The happiness died out of Miranda's face, to be replaced by an anxious look.

"Val, you must . . . My world needs you and what you can do for it."

"Your world," I said grimly, "is, less to me than the destruction of Shuteley was to you. Far, far less."

Dina was looking from Miranda to me, and back again, comprehending very little of what was happening, and yet comprehending surprisingly much.

"I mean a lot to you," I said. "You know it."

"More than you know."

"I've got a price."

"A price?"

"Trinity Hall," I said.

She didn't understand.

"You told me yourself," I said. "If it weren't for the Trinity Hall bit of the disaster, I'd have a chance. My kids would have a chance. Without Trinity Hall, the death toll in this terrible fire would be astonishingly light. The fire safety arrangements, if not fire prevention, would come out of it rather well. It's facts that count after anything like this. Without the Trinity Hall tragedy it would be a shocking fire, sure, nobody would get any credit, but I wouldn't be thrown to the lions. A few score people would have died in a fire that might have killed thousands. On the whole, I wouldn't have done too badly. I might even keep my job."

"That's all you're thinking of--yourself?" Miranda said. "For all you've said, the fire is no more than a setback to yourself?"

I laughed without humor. "Myself, Sheila, Dina, our kids, and far more. The two hundred who were burned to death in Trinity Hall. If they're not saved . . . I don't want to be saved either."

"You're bluffing. You won't stay here to die."

"I will," I said quietly. "I can't speak for Dina. She can make up her own mind."

Dina said: "Val's all I have. I think I understand what this is about. There are two hundred people you could save -- "

"I can't," Miranda insisted.

"Val thinks you can . . . I haven't had much of a life. My memories are hazy -- but I know Val's always done all he should for me, and maybe more. I'm grateful, too, for what you've done for me. I could have a wonderful life now. But it would be spoiled if I backed down here. This wasn't my idea . . . I'd never have thought of it and I wouldn't have done anything if I had. Now -- if I saved myself, I'd be trading two hundred lives for mine."

"That's nonsense," Miranda said sharply. "Val, you know you don't die. The river of time -- "

"I'm sick to the back teeth of the river of time. I wanted explanations. Now I've had enough. Unless you save the kids and old folk in Trinity Hall, I'm staying here."

"In a suit," said Miranda. "There are suits here. You're bluffing. You'll put them on, stay here and . . . "

She stopped as I picked up the three suits and walked to the wall of the stasis. She didn't protest. She still thought I was bluffing.

But when I threw the first one through, she screamed.

The plastic was fireproof, but the breathing abparatus was not. And the suit was not sealed.









Chapter Twelve

Miranda pulled urgently at me. "Val, wait," she begged. "You don't understand -- if you destroy the suits, you destroy all chance of getting what you want. Even if I did try to get something done about Trinity Hall . . . To do that I'd have to get back to the copse and speak to . . . to the people in charge. I couldn't leave here without a suit. So if you -- "

I threw a second suit at the invisible wall. It passed limply through and flared only slightly, because the material wouldn't burn. But then the heat got at the oxygen in the breathing apparatus, and there was a minor explosion.

I moved back from the stasis wall with Miranda. "Now we're back where we started," I said. "There's one suit. Dina and I can't both get out. You want to save us. If what you say is true, you have to save us. And the only way you can do that is save the people in Trinity Hall."

"They'll never agree," she said.

"But you have agreed. You're going to try."

"All right," she said quietly. "I'll try."

There was sudden frantic urgency after the long hours of inaction. In the army, you hurry up and wait. Or, sometimes, Wait and hurry up.

I didn't know what time dawn was, but it must be very soon now.

While there had been nothing we could do, time had not mattered much. But suddenly it was of vital importance. Miranda tugged at the remaining fire-suit, fumbling in her haste. When she had it on, she didn't waste time in talk. She almost ran through the stasis wall.

"I don't suppose you can explain this to me, Val?" said Dina.

"I don't suppose I can."

"But you meant all that about Trinity Hall? Two hundred people are dying there, and she can save them?"

Dina had been sound asleep for hours. Her misconception of the situation was understandable. She didn't know enough, understand enough, to realize that what I was demanding of Miranda was a change of history, an alteration in what had already happened. Dina took it for granted that if two hundred people could be saved, they must still be alive.

"Yes," I said.

Greg had not moved. I took a cursory glance at him; he was breathing, and the injury on his head was merely a bruise, though a large one. He would recover all right. If he took his time about doing it, so much the better. Miranda believed that now she could handle him easily. I wasn't so sure.

"And all we can do is wait?" Dina saicL

"All we can do is wait."

By this time the town must be surrounded by half the firemen in England, and no doubt some progress in fighting the dying fire was being made. Water turned to steam would be drawing off a lot of heat from the scorched ground.

Was there a chance, I wondered, that we'd be saved anyway? If the firemen were able to fight their way into the ravaged town, if they got anywhere near the stasis, we might live, independent of Miranda and the giants.

I found myself hoping desperately. I wanted to live. I wanted Dina to live, now that she had something to live for.

My grandstanding had been sincere enough. For selfish and unselfish reasons, the issue for me had come down to the fate of Trinity Hall and the people in it. I at least half believed that the giants couldn't afford to avert the fire, that they couldn't openly fight it, showing themselves fighting it, that perhaps they really had done all they could by secretly saving a few score of people whose bodies would not be missed.

But somebody could easily have given the alarm at Trinity Hall. A stone through a window -- failure of lights -- smoke through the ventilation -- a tap on a door -- and all those people could be saved. I didn't think Miranda's river of time would be too much disturbed.

I hadn't told Miranda, perhaps I didn't know then, all my own reasons for digging in my heels on this one thing. The really fundamental one was my own feeling of responsibility.

No, I hadn't started the fire. I hadn't been careless or inefficient or venal. I had simply done my job the way I was told and expected to do my job. Nothing had been falsified, nothing hidden. Even on Trinity Hall itself my conscience wes clear. Fire officers want to make sure, whatever the cost -- that's their job. Insurance managers don't want fires, don't want to have to pay out, but they have to accept. a calculated risk -- that's theirs. If there's no fire risk, there can be no fire insurance.

Yet accident conceives and gives birth to blame. 'We know it happened: why did it happen?' Millions of stable doors have been slammed after horses have bolted. What really happened in the library, anyway? In detail, Miranda didn't know. Were the alarms severed or switched off -- or were the wires which operated them burned or shorted by the fire itself? Nobody knew better than me that ultimately every additional safety device meant something more that could go wrong.

Trinity Hall represented my hope of mental peace. If that didn't happen, if because of me that didn't happen, I believed I could live with the rest. I could be blamed, and feel in my heart that blame was unjust. A car driver who kills a child may never be able to get it out of his mind -- but if he knows he was not at fault, he can live with it.

If I'd been able to say to Miranda "save those people," and she'd said "why of course, Val," it would have been nothing.

But I had to put up my own life. I valued it. I wanted it. I put up my stake, and I made sure I couldn't welch.

If the Trinity Hall youngsters and old folks were saved, I could be saved.

"That's funny," said Dina.

I paid no attention, still wrapped in my thoughts.

"It's getting light," she said.

She was right and she was wrong. It was getting light, but it wasn't funny. Not when the stasis disappeared.

It was Hell.

Fierce heat swept across the village green. The fire outside, by comparison with what it had been, was a mere glow of dying embers.

And yet . . .

My bare flesh withstood the heat for a moment, until it dried and cracked. I could feel, or thought I could feel, my blood beginning to boil. My hair crawled and I felt it singeing.

In those long seconds of burning to death we looked around, while we could still see, in instinctive search for an avenue of escape. Men have found themselves in front of oven doors opened by mistake . . . for them, even if they die, the chance of flight, of saving themselves, at least exists. The fire has a source and a direction. If the heat is lethal at seven feet it may not be at fourteen, fifty, two hundred. Escape is a possibility.

But there was nowhere for us to go. The heat was all round us, The coolest place was and would continue to be where we were, practically in the center of what had recently been a haven in the conflagration.

Dina's white blouse slowly, steadily, went brown.

Greg, without regaining consciousness, writhed and twisted like a plastic doll thrown into an open fire.

We screamed.

We couldn't breathe. The fire was using up all the oxygen.

Long before we died, we couldn't see.

We could still feel.

I'd have been lucky, after all, to die on my way through the flames with Greg. Jota had been lucky. Then, in the blinding heat of the fire at its height, death came instantly.

Now it was slow, though no less sure.

Slowly, but inexorably, I died.



And came to life again. Of course. It was only to be expected. With Miranda and the giants around, death wasn't death and you could never be sure of life.

I still knew all that had happened. I knew and would always know what it was like to burn to death in the mere backwash of a great fire.

Now I was unburned, as I had once before been unkilled. The stasis was still in position. Dina's blouse was still white. And Greg was quietly snoring.

Standing over me was Miranda, once more taking off her fire-suit. She had dropped another at her feet.

"Loops," I said drunkenly, "are enough to make a man loop the loop."

"I was ten minutes too late," Miranda said. "But this time I could do something about it." She had a small machine in her hand, like a transistor radio.

"Thank you very much," I said. "Now we can go through the whole thing again. Became I'm still as determined -- "

"It's done," said Miranda.

It took me several seconds to realize what she meant.

"Trinity Hail?" I said at last.

She nodded. "They agreed . . . Your life is necessary, Val. Perhaps Dina's too, we don't know. You had to be saved, far more than Jota had to be saved. In his case we guessed, in yours we know . . . "

"The people in the hall?" I said.

She shrugged. "We cut the electric current. There was panic. One girl and one old man have broken arms. But they all got out. Now -- you have fifteen minutes."

She could be lying, of course. She could be bluffing to get Dina and me away safely, quite powerless, once the giants removed themselves, to take the kind of action which could change the world. Once we saved ourselves, the chance of bargaining was gone.

I didn't think Miranda herself would lie. But she might easily have been told to return and do what she was doing, say what she was saying.

I started putting on one of the suits. Dina, with a slight shrug, did the same. Miranda sighed in relief.

"We're going past Trinity Hail," I said. "If the bodies are still there, I'm coming right back."

This didn't worry Miranda. "As you like."

"You've got what you want?" I said. "You're satisfied?"

"Yes."

"You're sure?" I looked down at Greg, who had not moved.

"Yes. In my world there's already a big change. The Gift has disappeared. We don't know about the neutrals -- maybe they're not needed any more. Now hurry up and -- "

The suits were on and sealed. "We'll hurry," I said. "Because I need time to get back here and take off my suit if necessary."

"Goodby, Val," said Miranda.

She turned away. She didn't speak to Dina.

I think at the last she was afraid, more afraid than she had ever been before, that something would happen to wrest success from her grasp. She had never really expected success, not with Greg a member of the party. Now she was a big winner, dazed, with the ticket in her hand, waiting for the result of an objection.

I looked down at Greg thoughtfully. Though he had never done a thing to endear himself to me, I found myself rather sorry for him. I said so.

"He'll have psychiatric treatment," Miranda said. "Before, he'd have refused it. Now he can't."

"You think he'll adjust?"

"Why not? He's only fourteen."

I blinked. I had never directly asked how old the giants were. I knew Miranda was thirty, but she was their teacher.

"And the others?" I said. "You said Greg was in a younger class, didn't you?"

"No. I said he was in a lower class. He's not very bright, you know. The others are . . . they're twelve." She had not looked at me since she said goodby.

And that was how I left her -- terrified to speak to me again, to meet my eyes, in case I should say or do something that would bring everything tumbling about her ears.

She even forgot to tell me to bury the suits afterwards.

Dina and I made our way back through the dying fire. Trinity Hall was not easy to find: there was no pile of charred skeletons there any more. But we found it. I was satisfied.

We went past the castle and the dump. It was still pretty dark. Clear of the fire we took off our suits and buried them iu a piece of dirty sacking I found in the dump, beyond the fire area.

Knowing something of the progress of the fire, the giants had chosen a quite perfect base for their doorway in time, the copse, and an equally perfect route to it. Even now, when there must be thousands of people round the ashpit that was Shuteley, we were able to walk out of the town and along the river to the copse without being seen . . . the only roads or tracks were from the town, and they petered out at the dump and at Castle Hill. We did see a small party of men in blue suits examining the blockage of the river, but we were easily able to keep out of their sight.

So they were all little giants of twelve, I thought. Well, it wasn't really astonishing. Already in 1966 girls were developing at eleven instead of fourteen or fifteen, and at twelve they could be five feet six, 150 pounds and 39-24-37. Boys were slower, but that was coming too.

Dina didn't talk, and I was glad. I'd been bludgeoned physically and mentally for forty hours or so, I'd killed a couple of people and been killed once myself. I'd been shaken figuratively until my teeth rattled.

I had felt too much or too little in the last forty hours. I hadn't been a hero, I hadn't been a villain. I hadn't been very clever and I hadn't been very stupid.

But I was, I hoped and believed, ending up rather better than I had started. I was far more the master of my fate.

We took the route along the bank that the giants must have taken. But there was no longer a bridge, and the boat was on the other side.

"We'll have to swim," I said.

Dina started taking off her clothes.

"No," I said. "We don't want to leave anything here."

"I didn't mean to leave my clothes. I'll carry them."

"Just swim across as you are, Dina," I said wearily.

She paid no attention. She took off her blouse, skirt, nylons and shoes and folded them into a neat bundle which she held clear of the water as she slipped into the river.

In my exhausted state I came very close to an angry outburst, but managed to check it. This was the new Dina. She used to do exactly as I told her. Now I'd have to get used to her thinking for herself.

I had a bundle, too, the fire-suits.

I should have buried them that night. I should have done a lot of other things too.

I didn't do any of them. I simply took off my pants, dried myself and went to bed, not even bothering to find out what, if anything, Dina was doing, not thinking about Sheila beyond taking note that she hadn't been back at the house.



An arm shook me firmly, insistently. I opened my eyes reluctantly. It was 10:30 on the bedside dock.

Sitting on my bed was a large, middie-aged man I didn't know. Yet his face wasn't entirely unfamiliar.

"Mr. Mathers," he said, "I'm Chief Constable Wilson.

Sorry to disturb you like this, but it's important."

"Sheila?" I exclaimed, sitting up quickly.

"Your wife is quite all right, Mr. Mathers. Doing a grand job, in fact. And I've seen your sister. She didn't want to let me in, but I persuaded her."

I swung my legs out of bed.

My nakedness in some other summer might have slightly surprised Wilson. As it was, it was nothing out of the ordinary.

I put on a dressing-gown. "What do you want?" I asked bluntly.

"Forgive the intrusion," he said. "There isn't time to do things the usual way -- "

"Never mind that," I said. "What do you want?"

"I'm just getting the picture, Mr. Mathers. You know about the fire, of course?"

"Yes."

He pantomimed surprise, and I thought: This man knows something.

"You did?" he said. "You might have slept right through it, out here. I've seen one or two fire service people, the police, of course, some of the people who escaped . . . "

"And now you're seeing me."

"Yes. You haven't been in touch with your company yet, have you?"

"No."

He didn't say anything about the fire being tragic, fantastic, incredible -- these things were said in the first few minutes and then the situation was taken for granted.

"Well, first . . . I gather you were out of town at a roadhouse when the fire began. You returned and found some firemen at the New Bridge. You gave them some advice -- good advice, I believe -- and then your wife did some very useful work with homeless people. After that you disappeared for the rest of the night. What happened, Mr. Mathers?"

Without warning I was faced with a choice I hadn't foreseen.

All through I had believed Miranda, on the whole.

And now I faced the beginning of a situation which might mean ruin for Sheila and me and our children. Miranda said it did. I was going to be blamed for everything. My kids were going to grow up wanting to pretend I wasn't their father.

I'd saved two hundred people at the Trinity Hall, but nobody knew I had saved them.

Chief Constable Wilson was not here to cast the first stone. He was simply, as he said, getting a first impression of what had happened. He had heard what happened at the New Bridge, and perhaps that was all he had heard. He might easily have called on me merely because I had shown some presence of mind, had given Sheila a useful job to do, and had then gone off on my own, possibly with a purpose . . .

But this was the start.

I did not, however, have to let things simply take their course. I could take events by the scruff of the neck. If I did, it might mean ruin for Miranda's world. Her river of time might be blasted into an entirely different course. It might not be the best thing for me either. Nevertheless . . .

I opened a cupboard and took out the fire-suits. "Ever seen anything like these before?" I asked.



The die was cast. After I showed Chief Constable Wilson the fire-suits, I couldn't have retreated if I'd wanted to. Certainly they were not impressive to look at, though the baffling way they adjusted to any human body and the still more baffling way in which they sealed and unsealed themselves without buttons or zips or adhesive would make anyone sit up and take notice. But sooner or later somebody would have tested them in a fire, and then a bigger fire, and would finally have discovered that in such suits, people could walk through a furnace.

I didn't want to draw back. Neither did I make any effort to advance.

In the next few hectic hours I talked to a lot of people, of increasing importance -- and I started with the chief constable of the county. I didn't see Sheila or Dina. Too many people wanted to ask me questions.

I told them about Maggie Hobson, and was the first to tell them she was dead. (It took days, of course, before even a preliminary casualty list could be drawn up.) I wasn't really shifting blame from me to her; I was telling them what they were going to decide for themselves.

I told them a few more things about the fire, things I could not possibly have known in any way they considered "rational." I did not admit, nor did I deny, that I had been in Shuteley while the blaze was at its height. They could hardly make me tell them anything they refused to believe . . .

About Miranda and the giants I preserved a reticence which ensured that the most improbable facts were reluctantly accepted instead of rejected out of hand. I told them nothing; I admitted a few things under pressure.

But I did claim credit for Trinity Hall. I told them how the alarm was given, and hinted . . .

And before I saw Sheila, in the evening of the day after the Great Fire of Shuteley, I knew that I'd made the right choice -- for us.

You can't make a scapegoat of a man who knows more of the facts than anyone else. A man who knows things and you can't figure out how he could possibly know them. A man who knows more than he will tell, unless you've worked out three-quarters of the answer first.

Yes, for us I'd made the right choice. And perhaps for Shuteley, for my world. The knowledge, the unwilling certainty, that there had been something supernatural about the fire made the whole thing easier to bear, to accept. For those who had lost people they loved, too, there was hope.

They might still be alive, somewhere.

But had I done the right thing for Snow White and the giants? Had they all ceased to exist -- or had they found the Gift back among them, worse than ever before? Had I dropped a biliion hydrogen bombs on the world of 2097?

Well, my attitude proved that I'd been doing Miranda and the giants an injustice all along in finding them inhuman about our world.

About their world, I couldn't care less.









[back cover blurb]



SHE WAS
THE FAIREST
IN THE LAND

NO MATTER WHERE
SHE CAME FROM -- OR WHEN!

VAL CALLED HER SNOW WHITE
BECAUSE OF HER GLOWING PALE SKIN
AND HER BLUE-BLACK HAIR.
BUT HER FRIENDS FRIGHTENED HIM.
THEY WERE TOO PERFECT
TO BE QUITE HUMAN.
THEY WERE TOO CALM, TOO DETACHED.

WHEN HE DISCOVERED
THEIR POWERS, AND THE USES
TO WHICH THEY MEANT TO PUT THEM,
VAL KNEW THE MOST AWFUL
OF HIS FEARS HAD BEEN
MORE THAN JUSTIFIED!