The Silent Vulcan Page 16

  "They say we can't stop," said Vikki. "We have to carry on."

  "We have to go back," Ellen declared. "Christ knows what they'll do if they go to the cave and find we're not there."

  "They say we can't!" Vikki insisted.

  "They! They! How come they can talk to you but no one else?"

  "I've asked them that," said Vikki. "They didn't answer. I don't think they know."

  The spyder made an impatient clicking noise with a manipulator -- the first deliberate sound it had ever made.

  "We can't go back," said Claire. "Whatever the Visitors have got planned for us, it's got to be better than being dug out of that cave like a trapped fox."

  Ellen shook her head in exasperation and gave in. "Come on, Rin Tin Tin," she said to the spyder. "Walkies."

  The group resumed their trek.

  After an hour they came to a road, glowing eerily in the light strange pool of light around the spyder.

  "We're heading in the direction of my place," said Vikki. She added with a catch of excitement in her voice. "Do you think I'll be able see mum?"

  "You're the one with the direct line to Rin Tin Tin," said Ellen sourly.

  "They say it's not possible," said Vikki sadly a moment later.

  "Tough," Ellen muttered, and immediately regretted the remark. She put her arm around the girl as they walked along the road. "Sorry, Viks... I shouldn't have said that. It was cruel of me and I'm sorry."

  "It's all right, Ellen -- really." Vikki was pleased with herself for holding back her tears. To change the subject she commented that it was strange that they hadn't encountered any morris police patrols.

  "Well, if we do come across one," said Ellen, "we'll say we're taking Rin Tin Tin here for a walk."

  Claire giggled.

  They trudged on. They crossed another field of potatoes that were nearly ready for lifting. Ellen paused briefly to dig into the soft ground and quickly fill her pockets with tubers. At one point they took a direct line across a nurseryman's field that had been harrowed to fine tilth for late sowing. They could easily have avoided the soft soil but the spyder seemed intent on sticking to a straight line so they had to follow it. When they reached the fork that led to her house, Vikki desperately wanted to break away and to run home, to be back with her mother, snug and secure in her little bedroom.

  "It can't much further now," she said. "Sister Mary Thomas's cottage is at the end of this lane, and that's where the Wall is. It chops her front room in half."

  A dog barked nearby and the spyder stopped abruptly. It extended a whip-like sensor from its clam-shell back which reached to a height of about three metres and seemed to be probing the neighbourhood. After a few seconds the spyder seemed satisfied, the sensor telescoped into the machine's back, and they resumed walking.

  "Rin Tin Tin doesn't seem to like dogs," said Ellen. "I don't think the Visitors understand them yet," Vikki replied.

  "Do they understand us?"

  "I think that's why they're here. They say we're privileged."

  "Just us, you, or everyone?"

  "I don't know," said Vikki. "It's not always easy understanding them but they don't talk in words. They use..." She struggled to think of the right term. "...thought shapes. But I think they mean that we're all special."

  Ellen snorted. "How does that fit in with them using you when you went out?"

  "They didn't use me!" Vikki responded heatedly. "They've never done that. I can shut them out if I want to and they can't reach me. I have to open my mind to hear them and even then I've never had to what they ask. What happened between me and Dario happened because I wanted it to happen."

  "And your new left hand? Did they consult with you on that?"

  Vikki remained silent. Ellen wanted to press her for an answer but she decided it could wait because their route was taking them past a few dimly lit houses where they could hear the faint strains of Radio Pentworth's late night concert programme. She noticed that the spyder's gait was a little slower and that the cone of light it provided had lost some of its brightness.

  "That's Sister Mary Thomas's place," Vikki whispered, pointing to a nearby cottage alongside a field. The building was in darkness. The spyder paused briefly at the entrance to the field as if listening, and then they followed it single file into the pasture. The nun's solar cooker dish shone above the low hedge, catching the light of the moon. A pair of sinister orbs glowed at them from the darkness and seemed to draw nearer. The spyder stopped.

  "Himmler!" Vikki cried in loud whisper. And then she seemed to be talking urgently to herself. "No! It's all right! It's my cat! Himmler!"

  There was a blur of movement and the tinkle of a collar bell as the siamese streaked out of the darkness and raced up Vikki's jeans to land in her arms. Delighted, she cuddled the cat to her breast, crooning to it while it purred like a train and subjected her chin to a sustained head butting, ignoring her scolds for wandering so far from home.

  The spyder made that strange rattling noise to signify impatience and they followed it obediently across the field.

  "We'll walk into the Wall any minute," Vikki whispered above Himmler's insistent purring. "It goes right through Sister Mary's cottage and across her garden. So it must cross this field."

  Their route took them past a clump of trees.

  "So where is it?" asked Claire. "Oh." She broke off when she saw the striped Wall markers and that were almost abreast.

  They slowed their pace, to the spyder's annoyance, expecting to walk into the Wall.

  "We must be on top of it now," said Ellen, holding her hand out before her.

  Vikki was about to answer when something extraordinary happened: the temperature plummeted with a speed that had the three women gasping in shock, and a northerly wind keened into them with the unremitting savagery of flailing machetes. This was a cold that that had not been known in southern England for many millennia; this was the desiccated cold of a wind that had had every last vestige of moisture sucked from it by the mighty ice sheet that lay to the north. Even the moon shone with increased clinical brightness in that humidity-free air.

  The Wall had opened.

  And the Wall had closed.

  They wheeled around but there was no sign of the dark shape of Sister Mary's cottage or the gleam of her solar cooker. Instead the moon threw an ethereal light on a landscape cowering under the onslaught of that terrible wind that permitted nothing other than sedge grasses to gain a foothold in the frozen loess that made up the impoverished soil. The Milky Way was an impossible blaze of glory that was never seen from earth now save in mountainous regions.

  "What's happened?" Claire whimpered, clutching her arms around herself. The moisture-starved wind snatched a great cloud of rapidly dissipating vapour from her throat.

  "Just keep following Rin Tin Tin," ordered Ellen. "And keep your mouth closed. Breath slowly through your nose." Even as she spoke, Ellen could feel the saliva evaporating from her lips and tongue as though she had stuffed a handful of tissues in her mouth.

  Himmler leapt from Vikki's arms to escape the biting cold that seemed to be sawing his nose off. His feet encountered even worse paw-searing conditions that prompted him to race up Vikki's jeans again and thrust his nose under her armpit to reconsider his attitude to his staff and wonder whether or not he had just made a bad choice in accompanying them.

  The terrible cold would've have shocked anyone out of their senses but the three women had become accustomed to six months of an agreeable Mediterranean climate in which the night time temperatures rarely fell below 17 degrees Celsius. There was so little moisture that the grass didn't even crunch under their trainers as they trailed down a steep slope but, after 200 metres, not even the thick soles of their footwear was insufficient to insulate their feet from the numbness that was stealing insidiously into them. They heard a nearby stream and wondered how water could remain liquid in that terrible cold.

  "They say that we mustn't go up the slope," said Vikki. "We're
to stay away from the Wall."

  A dark, humped shape appeared before them. It resembled a long, rounded-top tent because that was more or less exactly what it was. The spyder's gesture with a manipulator was unmistakable: they were to enter the tent. Ellen was almost blinded by the cold. Her numbed fingers fiddled frantically with what felt like bone toggles fastened through leather loops. In her keenness to escape the wind she didn't stop to consider what she was entering. She pulled the heavy hide flap aside and stumbled into the darkness. There was a steep step down that sent her sprawling, banging her head painfully on a stone. Her cry warned Vikki and Claire who entered more cautiously. Vikki took particular care because Himmler had burrowed under her T-shirt and between her breasts to keep warm. Ellen fumbled with her kitbag and switched on her torch.

  The three women forgot the cold as they took in their extraordinary spacious surroundings that seemed much larger on the inside than on the outside. It was more than a tent but a definite structure framed with pairs of massive tusks set deep into the ground in pairs, the tips of each pair of ivories were lashed together at the top with stout leather thongs so that they formed an arch with a span at the level of the sunken floor of about four metres. Their clouds of breath outlined the torch's beam as Ellen shone it towards the hidden depths. There were ten pairs of tusks at intervals of one metre with the intervening gaps cross-braced with bones and lengths of ash or hazel saplings. The whole structure was covered with thick hide. It was slack yet felt rigid and unyielding with the cold when Ellen touched it. Claire took advantage of the torchlight and shut out the marrow-chilling wind by closing the flap which could be held in place by bone toggles and thong loops that matched those on the outside.

  "Rin Tin Tin's gone," she announced. She gazed at the two rows of knee high large squares whose tops were at the level of the original ground. "What on earth is this place?" she asked.

  Ellen didn't answer. She was staring at a ring of roughly shaped stones that she had struck her head on. They formed a circle around a shallow pit that was filled with fine ash.

  "Looks like some sort of fireplace," said Vikki.

  "That's exactly what it is," Ellen breathed. There was an icy draught blowing from the pit. She moved the torch closer and saw the opening in the side of pit. It had been formed by digging out a gully which the draught told her led to the outside. It had been bridged with wide, flat stones and then covered with packed earth flush with the floor.

  "Ladies," said Ellen softly, her voice filled with wonder. "You are looking at mankind's earliest and greatest invention: the forced draught hearth." The beam of her torch alighted on a small bale of dried moss and a pile of sticks. Beside it was a tall stack of assorted bones and skulls of foxes, antelopes and even antlers. "And what is more," said Ellen with rising excitement as she plucked moss from the bale, "we are going to have a fire!"

  It proved astonishingly easy to light. One match was sufficient to get the moss burning, followed by several handfuls of the sticks. The three women's spirits rose with the warm flames that flared up rapidly, fuelled by the strong draught blowing through the underfloor duct. Himmler emerged from under Vikki's clothes and regarded the fire with approval. The hut filled with smoke that stung their eyes, but it was warm smoke that soon found its way out through a vent in the roof. Ellen added bones, gradually building up a hot but slow burning fire that could be controlled thanks to Vikki discovering the purpose of a heat-blackened flat, round stone that could be rolled back and forth in front of the duct's opening to regulate the flow of air.

  There was sufficient light from the fire now for them to explore the hut's interior without the torch. Vikki found a piece of limestone that had been roughly hollowed out and filled with what looked like lard. She lit the twist of flax-like material because it had to be a wick and was pleased when her surmise that it was some sort of lamp proved correct. The smell of burning animal fat was bad but tolerable.

  "What I don't understand," said Claire, struggling out of some clothes because it was getting quite warm in the hut. "If the Visitors are so advanced, you'd think they could build something a little less crude than this place."

  "They didn't build it," said Ellen cryptically. "We did. Or rather, our ancestors did. And, if you look closely, you'll see that there's nothing crude about it. Simple, maybe -- but not crude." She was examining several rolls of what looked like furs that were hanging from thongs. A tug on one of the thongs resulted in a heavy roll of the furs dropping into her arms. She unrolled them on one of the raised squares of soil. The furs were still stiff with cold but separated easily. "Antelope or deer," she muttered. "And look at this! My God, it's beautiful!" She brought the huge bearskin nearer the fire so that Vikki and Claire could examine it. Himmler deemed it worthy of attack. Ellen shooed him away. The trio admired the fur and way that the hide backing had been carefully scraped and worked to make it supple. Ellen's find prompted Vikki and Claire to do some exploring.

  "Look," said Vikki.

  Claire and Ellen gaped. The girl was holding a shaped yoke across her shoulders, padded with strips of fur. From each end dangled the complete skin of a small animal that had been tied and knotted at the anus, legs and feet leaving the neck open. There was no mistaking the contraption's purpose.

  "Right," said Ellen, taking it from Vikki and thrusting the torch into her pocket. "I'm going to find that stream and we're going to cook something and have a decent wash."

  She was gone ten minutes and returned staggering under the weight of the filled skins. Claire closed and secured the flap while Vikki and Ellen hoisted the bulging skins onto antler hooks, lashed to the tusks, that seemed to be made for the job.

  An hour later they had eaten a meal consisting of jacket potatoes cooked in the fire's ashes and strips of dried beef that Claire had thought to bring. A hand-moulded clay pot served for boiling water. Ellen had packed some nettle teabags and they were contentedly sipping tea, sitting around the hearth on piles of comfortable furs. Himmler had ventured out for a brief foray and returned with a baby rabbit that he was now sleeping off, stretched out on the best place near the hearth.

  Claire's gaze wandered around the interior of the long hut, lit by the yellow flames of the simple oil lamps they had found. "You said that our ancestors built this," she said to Ellen. "Who were they?"

  "Cro-Magnon," said Ellen. "The same people that painted the hunting scenes in the cave. They lived about 40,000 years ago."

  "You mean now, don't you?" Claire ventured. "We're Farside and Farside is in the past."

  Ellen smiled and nodded. "Now," she confirmed.

  "Supposing the owners come back and find us? Won't they be somewhat cross?"

  "Imagine Neanderthals having their wicked way with us," said Vikki.

  "They most certainly aren't Neaderthalers," Ellen replied. "And I doubt if they'll return for another three months or so." She added, "I saw four more huts like this one further down the slope. All unoccupied. This was the only one making smoke."

  "Why not build them in a circle?" Claire asked.

  "From what little I could see, they were all aligned to offer the least resistance to the prevailing wind. I think this village is the winter quarters for a clan of about 100 Cro-Magnon. They've probably moved north to hunt mammoth. They were hunter-gatherers so their movements were dictated by the annual migrations of game." Ellen paused and looked around the hut's interior. She wished she had a pad and pencils to sketch every detail of this remarkable place but knew she would have to depend on memory. "40,000 years ago puts them at a transitional period when they were changing from a nomadic existence to becoming settlers. This place is evidence of that. A nomadic life cramps innovation and invention because everything you make, you have to carry with you. Nomads can't build communities, and without settled communities, you can't build towns and cities and civilizations."

  "Didn't they have horses?" Vikki asked. She was interested because Ellen was a good talker. Palaeontology had always been Ellen's
favourite conversational topic during quiet moments when they worked together in the shop.

  "Not until around 8,000 BC. So these people compromised and built camps along their nomadic routes. To do that required a great, innovative leap that we can hardly understand because it seems so logical. It's worth remembering that everything that seems simple and obvious to us had to be invented. If the Neanderthal clans couldn't find a cave, they perished. And, as we know, they became extinct. Whereas our ingenious forefathers, solved the problem by building their own caves like this where they wanted them."

  "They hadn't invented doors and locks," Claire observed. "Weren't they worried about people stealing their things? There's a tremendous amount of work gone into this place. All these skins..."

  Ellen smiled. "David Weir collected a lot of papers on Palaeolithic populations. Most of the universities have used computer modelling to calculate past populations by working backwards from the present. The general consensus is that there were tiny numbers of Cro-Magnon living in this part of Europe." She grinned and added. "They seemed to prefer living in Spain and the South of France."

  Claire laughed. "And nothing has changed. Sensible people."

  "Also they probably had a culture of respecting the property of others. Just as we must do with this place. As the saying goes: we must take away only memories and leave only footprints."

  "How long must we wait before we can take away any memories?" Claire wondered.

  "God knows," said Ellen. She annoyed Himmler by banking up the fire. "Time for bed. We might have a busy day tomorrow."

  As the three women and a cat were settling down for the night, warm under a selection of furs, three miles to the north the spyder was moving slowly through the reeds towards Pentworth Lake. Its energy cells were nearly exhausted and it could have done without the wide detour around the beach to miss the men camped near their pontoon. In its present state it could hardly have evaded capture if it were spotted without having to call upon its formidable armory of self-defence devices. There was much that its controllers wanted done but that would have to wait until the following night.