Simon Clark - The Fall

But who by?

Whoever’s at the controls of the time machine, of course .

Just for a moment, the mental image of a scientist in the distant future shone as bright and clear as a summer’s day. A human being with a massively evolved brain yet an atrophied body: he pictured it there, looking like some kind of man-sized foetus, two dot-like eyes beneath a huge, bulging forehead, staring at a TV screen that carried images of what he, Sam Baker, was doing now: standing there in his chinos, lemon cotton shirt and loafers, running his hand thoughtfully over the stone slab.

Then futurity’s scientists with those tiny, atrophied hands, nothing more than fleshy buds for fingers, would stretch out to key another day and year into their time machine.

Then, zip! Before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’ this band of travellers would be catapulted back through time again. When then? 1923? Or 1903? So he could read in the newspapers that the Wright Brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk? Or why not back to the English Civil War so they could be butchered by the Roundheads or Cavaliers? Or even farther back, into the depths of the Ice Age, when glaciers were grinding mountain ranges to paste and this little bunch of refugees from 1999 could freeze to death in some shrieking blizzard.

Sam made a coughing sound. But it was no cough as such. It was something like a laugh – the madcap laugh of someone pushed dangerously close to the edge.

He glared at the stone slab.

Perhaps that foetus-like creature of his imagination in distant futurity was conducting an experiment. Perhaps he, Sam Baker, and his fellow travellers were nothing more than laboratory rats engaged in finding their way through some temporal maze.

Again he thought of them being examined by those two chilling eyes that were no larger than dots on a page. Maybe their performance, their reactions to death, to arrest, to their out-and-out confusion were being monitored by that cold intelligence.

Hey, Sam, but what would really be hilarious would be if we were all taking part in some future game show. Where contestants drop their characters into all kinds of zany, zany situations in the funky past. Then they guess the outcome, place their bets. Woweee… what a ratings-puller that would be.

Bastard . Sam kicked the slab of stone. The blow sounded like a gunshot.

The impact must have bruised his toes. But he felt nothing. Nothing physically, anyway.

But at that moment he experienced such a burning rage. He’d never felt like this before, not even when he’d realised his boyhood friends had been cooked alive by the force of that lightning strike.

Bastard…

The force of the emotion winded him.

He’d just allowed his imagination to run a little with that idea. The idea that they were being manipulated by some intelligence, either for fun or research. Okay, he didn’t know for sure, but he sure as hell felt he was on the right lines.

It couldn’t be coincidence that he’d been dropped back in time just a couple of hours or so before the murder.

Like Lee Burton before him, Sam had decided that all this was deliberate; that he’d become part of someone else’s plan; that he was being tested.

But for what purpose?

And by whom?

Christ Almighty, if he ever got his hands around their necks he’d twist… and twist…

‘You look a little off-colour, Sam, old boy,’ Carswell murmured as he sat on the altar stone. ‘And if I may go so far, a little wild around the eyes.’

‘Shut up.’ Sam realised he was leaning forward, his clenched fists resting on the slab; rage flowed like electricity through him.

‘What if I don’t? You’ll kill me?’

Sam expelled the air from his lungs in a rush. ‘We’re being used. Some bastard’s doing this.’ He looked up at the sky, half expecting to see some tiny spy camera floating there. ‘They’re watching us.’

‘That smacks of paranoia, but I have to say I suspect the same. So what will we do – Sam?’

Sam had turned to march furiously away up the steps of the amphitheatre.

‘Where are you going, Sam?’

Sam fired back over his shoulder, ‘I’m going to give them what they want. Action! ’

The controllers of this time machine were sitting at arm’s length.

Sam told himself this as he drove into town through the gathering dusk. Perhaps if he behaved in a way they found intriguing enough it might lure them out and make them show themselves.

For one near-insane moment he entertained the notion that they might actually be inside the stone slab in the amphitheatre. That somehow they were sitting hunched there like astronauts inside their tiny time capsule, pulling levers, turning dials, keying in new coordinates. Again he thought of them as foetus-like creatures: tiny, wasted legs, their bodies no bigger than a baby’s, yet topped with huge bulging heads; the tiny pinprick eyes and nearly nonexistent jaw and mouth.

And yes, God damn it, couldn’t you just see that big pulse beating away there in their big bald heads?

Right at that moment he was ready to seize a hammer and bludgeon his way into the stone slab.

But no, they must be more sophisticated than that. Surely this must be a remote operation. They would be sitting in a control centre, directing the project from there, every so often deciding to turn that dial and send him, Jud, Zita, Nicole and the rest rolling back through time to another year.

Of course it was purely imagination. He had no real way of knowing the truth, but, nevertheless, he pictured those time-shifters sitting in something like a TV director’s control room, just as he himself had done hundreds of times before, mixing live TV transmissions and directing his camera operators to zoom in on one particular player or to cut to a long-shot of the spectators.

But how to coax them out of that control room; how to trick them into revealing themselves? That was the real problem.

The road was deserted in front of him. He pushed the car faster until the needle touched 70.

Above him barrage balloons hung in the air, looking like huge silver whales dozing in the depths of the sea.

He drove, knowing that he must do something to save that innocent family. But how? That was the question.

Nicole found herself staring into the wood once more.

By now it was almost dark. A moon like a silver fingernail-clipping shone high in the sky.

Someone in there was watching her. She was sure of it.

With her left hand holding her right elbow, she paced slowly backwards and forwards along the edge of the car park, hoping that the watcher would show himself.

Himself?

Yes, she was certain. It must be the blond-haired man dressed in medieval clothes. The man with the pair of eyes in his stomach. She remembered how he’d stood guard over the dying birdman, saying, ‘He’s one of us now.’

One of us?

That suggested that there were more of them. What unusual physical attributes did they have?

‘Nicole… Nicole.’ Startled she turned

Jud was hurrying towards her. In his hand he carried a book. Breathlessly he said, ‘I’m not trying to alarm people but I thought everyone should be forewarned.’

‘Forewarned about what?’

‘I’ve been checking this.’ He showed her a paperback book entitled Casterton: A Pictorial History . ‘I remembered Casterton was bombed half a dozen times in the Second World War and… well, tonight’s the night of one of the worst attacks.’

Nicole felt her eyes go wide. ‘Do you know where the bombs fell?’

‘The Nazi bombers were aiming for the airbase just outside town; however, a number of bombs fell wide. Some of the town buildings were hit.’