Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

He created Alpha Red Alpha after the Chinese tried to nuke the Hall back in 1964. Bit of an overreaction, I always thought. . . . Anyway, Francis talked the then Matriarch into setting the engine up for a trial run. We moved most of the family out into the grounds, just in case. . . . We were all very interested to see what would happen, but preferably from a safe distance. Your uncle James came home specially from East Germany, I came back from Nepal and your parents came back from Peru. Then the Matriarch asked for volunteers from among the field agents to accompany and protect the Hall wherever it went, just in case. We tended to use those three words quite a lot, whenever Francis was involved. . . . So the four of us, and four more, volunteered, and we were all there inside the Hall when Francis fired up Alpha Red Alpha for the first time. We had no idea where we were going, where we’d end up. All Francis had was a whole bunch of mathematics that made sense only to him, and assurance that his engine would most definitely send the Hall away. . . .

At first, everything seemed to go fine. The actual transition was a bit . . . disturbing when the Hall dropped out of the world, but it did very definitely reappear Somewhere Else. Not an alternate Earth, or even another reality, but an entirely alien world. Once we came up from the basement and looked out the front windows, the first thing we saw was two suns, blazing impossibly bright in a sick green sky, and when we opened the front door, the air was so packed with excess oxygen and really nasty trace gases that we couldn’t breathe it. We had to armour up to survive in the strange new world that Francis’s engine had brought us to. We’d been dropped right into the middle of an alien jungle full of plants and animals and . . . creatures we’d never seen before. Some of them so different and disturbing they hurt your head to look at them. Everything was wrong . . . a living nightmare packed with horrible things everywhere we looked.

And while we were still getting our heads round that, the whole jungle rose up at once and attacked us. Not only the awful things that lived in the jungle, but the plants themselves. Raging, thrashing, whipping long tendrils at us . . . Everything was alive and angry and utterly antagonistic. Thousands of creatures hit the Hall at once, from every direction, smashing through the windows, hammering against the closed doors, rising up to try to break in through the roof. We fought them off as best we could, sending Francis back down to fire up the engine and get us all home again. It couldn’t have taken him long, but it seemed to take forever. It was like fighting in a nightmare against horrible things that keep coming at you, no matter how hard you fight. I saw young Alice fall with a hundred thorns blasted through her armour. I saw Oliver pulled down and ripped apart by thrashing plants that crawled all him, his armour no more protection than tinfoil. I saw plants eat them both, and drink their blood.

I still have nightmares sometimes. . . .

“But finally Alpha Red Alpha kicked in again and we came home. The Hall was a mess: battered and broken and infested with all kinds of alien life-forms that had forced their way in. Luckily they couldn’t live in our air, so we stood well back and watched them die. They didn’t understand what was happening to them, but they still tried to kill the few Droods who tried to help. There’re always a few who do the ‘if only we can communicate with them’ thing. . . . I would have taken a flamethrower to the lot of them. We waited till we were sure everything was dead, and then Droods in their armour dragged them all out of the Hall, chopped them up fine, to make sure, burned them in great piles and then buried what was left in a far corner of the grounds. To this day nothing else will grow there.

“It took weeks to reopen the Hall. And fumigate it, because some of the little bastards had left spores to be breathed in by the unsuspecting. . . . After the Matriarch got a good look at what had come back with us, and listened to our story, she told Francis to his face that he was never to use the engine again until he could be sure of where he was sending the Hall. And that Alpha Red Alpha was only ever to be used as a very last resort, after we’d tried everything else, including prayer and closing our eyes and hoping it would all go away. Francis spent the rest of his life, as Armourer and after, in retirement, trying to figure out how to control what he’d created, but he never did. The family buried the engine deep under the Hall, called it Francis’s Folly and wiped it from the official records.

“For everyone’s peace of mind.”

“But,” I said, “could it get us into the Timeless Moment?”

“Somehow I knew you were going to say that,” said the Armourer. “I tell you the most cautionary story I know that doesn’t involve sex, and it didn’t even slow you down. Technically, yes, I suppose it’s possible. But . . . all I could do would be to turn the bloody thing on. And hopefully off again. I have absolutely no idea of how to steer the damned thing, and neither does anyone else.”

“But I can help with that!” said Molly. “My link with Isabella will point us in the right direction. . . .”

“And I can focus that link through the Merlin Glass to take us where we need to go!” I said. “You start the engine up, Uncle Jack; Molly will aim it, and I will steer it. Right into the Timeless Moment.”

The Armourer smiled suddenly. “You know, it’s a crazy idea, but it just might work!”

I looked at Molly. “It always sounds so much worse when he says it.”

The Armourer looked at Molly. “If all you Metcalf sisters are linked to one another . . . does that mean the dreaded Louisa knows what’s happening?”

“Almost certainly,” said Molly. “But don’t worry; it’ll take even her a long time to get back from Mars.”

The Armourer’s face twitched. “I’m not even going to ask what she’s doing on Mars.”

“Best not to,” I said. “Now, where is Alpha Red Alpha, exactly? You said you buried it under the Hall?”

The Armourer’s mouth winced, as though he’d tasted something bitter. “I had hoped I’d never have to go down there again. Or at the very least, that I’d be very old and safely retired before some other poor bastard had to do it . . . Come with me.”

He got up out of his chair with a certain amount of effort and the usual pained noises, and led Molly and me to the very back of the Armoury, out beyond the firing range and the corrupt-spell dumps. Three lab assistants were standing around the sparkling watercooler, commenting excitedly on the miniature mermaid they’d dropped into it. The Armourer drove them back to their workstations with barked commands and harsh language. He finally stopped before a large, hulking piece of machinery of no immediate significance. It didn’t even have a nameplate.

“Armour up, Eddie,” said the Armourer. “I need you to move this machine two feet to the left. My left, not yours. And be careful. It’s heavier than it looks.”

“What is it?” I asked after I’d armoured up. Molly was already poking and prodding and kicking at the machine’s solid steel sides in an experimental sort of way.

“It was supposed to be a food synthesiser,” said the Armourer. “The idea was all the rage back in the seventies. And it would have helped to take the strain off feeding a family of our size. But we never could get it to work right. Francis tried, I tried, and now and again one of the more than usually ambitious lab assistants will take a crack at it, but even though the theory works out to a thousand decimal places . . . no matter what settings we try, all the machine ever produces is a kind of glowing green porridge that looks bad and smells worse.”