It was a source of constant amazement to him that these people seemed incapable of peace.
John Fastolf sat quietly in the corner of a bustling café and watched with weary wonderment, the folk around him. Stillness; modesty; calm; tacit comfort; all these things seemed beyond the chill-ruddied faces as they gabbled and bellowed at each other, a stream of inanities to fill the silence.
To John, the fact that it was freezing outside seemed so self-evident as to be not worthy of comment. Yet every new entrant that struggled through the door, stamping the wet from their shoes and rubbing heat in through their gloves, found it necessary to comment on the chill. At an adjacent table two burly men at the turn of their youth, clothed in paint-spattered garments, grunted at each other across their greasy plates. Apparently, something notably sporting had been achieved the saturday before.
Other grimey folk argued about ‘murderous bog-trotters’, chatted about their empty weekends, grumbled about the weather. Again. And stood at the counter, a huge bearded man flirted clumsily with the café owner as he devoured a limp bacon sandwich. The woman, her wrinkled face over-painted with shocking blues and reds, responded with disinterest as she attended fresh customers.
So it was that John Fastolf spent the early morning of Monday 16th December 1971. He knew that was the date as he’d bought a copy of ‘The Times’ only twenty one minutes before. The title had struck him as apt. He wiped his sleeve on the steamed window and peered though the smear at the world rushing by outside. The hot milky tea had cooled enough to drink now and he marvelled at its sweet taste. Somehow, late 20th century English café ceramic mugs always added to the flavour. Shifting back, he checked his pocket watch. Twelve minutes. He slurped down the remains of his tea and wrestled the paper back into a tight bundle, before heading silently into the roar of the street outside.
London filled his senses in a blast that rocked him back. After six months on the steppe, such a civilised cacophany was still a shock to him. Four hours was so little time to acclimatise from the serenity of the endless grasslands. He ducked back into a recessed doorway, partly to conceal himself but mostly to try and deaden the roar. John pulled the pen-sized explosive awl from his breast pocket and armed the tiny blast-head. Pulling his lapels up around his ears and scanning the traffic he headed through the pedestrian melee to a nearby junction.
He stood under the traffic light and waited. As it blinked to red, his target rolled up. In the far lane, a black taxi squealed to a halt. He recognised the driver from the preparation images in the briefing and as the mass of humanity poured from the pavement over the crossing, John joined the overspill flowing between the vehicles like water across a rocky ford. He dropped The Times from his armpit and it fell by the back tyre of the taxi. As he bent down to retreive it, he jabbed the explosive awl into the tough rubber and with a small flash, a puncture was born. John hurried off across the street, found a recessed vantage point and watched the taxi pull over at the end of the street.
Checking his pocket watch again, he pressed the retrieval button and waited.
The taxi was delayed by twenty four minutes. Three hours and sixteen minutes later it wasn’t where it had been before and Jennifer Atwood wasn’t knocked over and killed. She would make a fine mother.
***
He loved this place. John sat on the low ridge and basked in the warm sunlight as the morning turned. The long steppe grasses hissed in the dancing wind. Only this and his dark thoughts disturbed the calm. Civilisation would rarely come here. He liked that. Here and now, time had not touched the people. So spread out, so mobile, they measured life in summers. They measured time in the grazing seasons and life cycles of their horses. He longed to be that free. John checked his pocket watch. The time had come. Snatching his fur cap, he crawled up to the crest of the ridge where his Romakov .505 rifle rested on its bipod. He nestled the Cedar-wood stock into his shoulder and shifted to a comfortable firing position. His cap shielded his eyes from the sun’s glare and his buff coat protected him from the cold ground. Laying on his belly, his legs astride for stability, John flicked up the scope caps and spent several minutes setting his eye into the lense.
2860 yards away across the steppe, two figures resolved into view. The furthest, a young Mongol boy, red faced and narrow-eyed, stalked slowly through the grasses, an arrow nocked in his bow and ready to strike the unseen animal he was hunting. Dressed in simple leather and black felt, with a fur-trimmed cape, his only evident possessions were a hunting bow and a small knife. John rested the crosshairs on the boy's chest and regarded young Temuchin with fascination.
Slowly, he moved the rifle the slightest rotation and into view came another Asian. This time a man, dressed in leather and dark silk crawled through the steppe grass towards the hunting boy. Unseen, he slowly drew his bow and nocked an arrow. The weapon hovered at the youth, unaware of his death waiting 50 yards away.
John settled his aim on the prone figure’s head, slowed his breathing, shut out the world around him until his whole being existed in that scope. Then as the figure rolled slightly and began to draw the bowstring for a kill, John gently, tenderly squeezed his trigger. The silence broke with a soft, suppressed ‘thokk’ and the target’s brain burst from beneath his leather cap.
John returned his scoped gaze to the boy and watched for another hour or so. Temuchin failed to catch anything despite firing three arrows and, unaware of the dead assassin lying nearby, eventually he returned to his shaggy horse. Temuchin rode off into history.
John packed the rifle into it’s ebony case, checked his pocket watch, pressed the retrieval button and waited.
***
He sat quietly at the base of the war memorial. Behind him, Winchester cathedral loomed into the sky. A warm autumn glow filled him with joy as he rested and ate a spicey pasty. Such simple pleasures revitalised him and he was looking forward to seeing her. ‘The Independent’ newspaper, fluttering in the breeze before him, marked the date as 2nd October 1998. For some reason, there were no copies of The Times.
The uniformed statue above him and the verdigris-stained wreaths surrounding it had turned his mind to sacrifice. Civilised societies are for the most part blessed with peace. Internal predators may disturb or even kill, but the constant threat of warfare and death doesn’t readily touch the civilised. They are safe behind their proxy defenders, those young men thrown into harm’s way to provide the security that allows liberal reflection.
The soldier sacrifices the liberty and freedom that he provides to others. His liberty is to sleep in a wet ditch, to stand in the mouth of Hell, to risk his life because he lacks the education or financial power to avoid such a sacrifice. Of course, some times in some places, civilisations demand and enforce this sacrifice. Conscription it is often called, to mask the sheer uncivilised nature of forcing others to give up their freedom and stand at the edge of life.
Soldiers justify their sacrifices by telling themsleves that they do it for a noble reason. Loyalty to their masters. Patriotism for their community. Defending their home. Protecting their loved ones. Or they rationalise the sacrifice by seeking personal gain; travelling the world or learning a trade. All these justifications will make a man happy to give up a soft bed for a hard fight. The recruiting masters do not make clear to these men that this sacrifice is irreversable. To protect civilisation, you must step outside of it. Once you do, you become separate from it. Another form of man.
If you add to that the further dislocation of a justification that is not linked to an ideal that it is possible for one mind to comprehend, this separation becomes ever more acute. No longer do you become another form of man, but another form of life.
Thus John had become a soldier of sorts, mainly because he had little other choice. Had he known what this meant, he would have volunteered for the mines.
People, he had learned, can endure any hardship. Even those hardships that push them to death. He had seen it all too often. Of all the possible sufferings the hardest thing to bear, he had concluded, was loneliness. To be alone, to be isolated, to have no connections that bind and nurture; this is that hardest thing of all and the mind often cracks under such weight. John was so very lonely.
Then she came, striding by the memorial towards the town centre. His gaze followed as if it were part of her. Her hair, wild and tangled, bounced from it’s restraining band. Her striped bag exploded in a burst of colour from her shoulder, framed against her ruffled brown cordouroy jacket. Her deep green dress flowed and flapped behind her, small silver beads flashing from the ragged hem above her purple boots. Beneath this mock-Bohemian covering, her body traced a perfect form with flesh that filled her skin and wobbled slightly more than she’d like. It seemed to John that she rolled with earthy grace.
John’s heart raced just to be in the same time and space as her. He came here often to breathe in her sheer majesty. He wondered whether women really understand the absolute power they wield and surrendered to his fantasies of uncovering her curves.
Of course he was sure she was a good and vital person. It exuded from her. But for all the times he’d watched her, he had nothing but the visual to imagine. There had been a time he’d almost approrached her. But what would he say? How would he impress such a goddess? What could she possibly see in his oafish, graceless form, badly wrapped in a grubby trenchcoat? He’d imagined so much for them, so far ahead, how could he return to the very beginning with her? After all, he already knew her in his mind. And that, perhaps more than all insecurities stopped him. She was, in his mind, the perfect woman and no reality he’d seen was as unspotted as his mental Heaven. So he sat and watched as she walked away from him. Again.
The pigeons gathered and cooed and pecked at the flakes of pasty that had fallen between his feet.
***
The background filled with crackling gunfire, the screams and shouts of wounding and wounded. A shell screeched and sputtered close overhead, falling into a concussive crack. Wet clay spattered down onto John as he crouched and scrambled along the shallow trench. Harrowed faces stared out of the mud wall at him, their eyes wide with exhaustion and resigned, relentless terror as another shell raked down, blasting into the trench some thirty yards away. John pulled himself out of the sucking slurry that swamped the duckboard and stumbled on. Each step was an effort as the filth alternately slipped away beneath him and then tried to suck him under. Ahead, at a loophole, squinting down his rifle through a grey cloth cover into the hell beyond knelt Private Archibald Merchant. Without breaking aim, the muck-coated sniper, wiped his nose on his shoulder and nestled in for the kill.
Just as the assassin squeezed his trigger, Private John Fastolf barrelled into him. The bullet fired high as they both tumbled into the yellow stink.
‘You bloody idiot! Hissed Marchant. ‘I ‘ad that bastard in me sights then!’
‘Sorry’, mumbled John as he clambered off and continued his scramble along the trench. He glanced back as Merchant dragged himself up, scowling at his assailant. As he rounded into the next section, John flattened into the trench side and peered gingerly over the parapet.
Merchant’s target bobbed occasionally above the German parapet, and John watched Corporal Hitler head off to deliver another message.
John slumped back down into the mud, checked his pocket watch, pressed the retrieval button and waited.
***
He hated Ireland. Nothing good had ever happened to him here. He pitied the people, bashed and brutalised by each other and a succession of occupiers for countless generations. But he still hated the place. Today was no different. Time was pressing as there had been an administrative error and he arrived late.
He wasn’t sure wether it was actually raining or wether he just thought is was as he hasilty screwed in the barrel of his Romakov .505. He didn’t attach the suppressor. Quickly he flipped open the scope caps, slotted in the magazine and rested on the ledge of the housing block roof. Even through his jacket, the asphalt stabbed into his elbows. In the streets below, a throng of Irish rebellion screamed abuse at the British and proclaimed pride at a barely remembered heritage. British vehicles, menacing and grey, crept into the perimeters of the Irish people, disgorging groups of heavily armed troops.
John watched with disinterest as preliminary clashes erupted with stone-throwing. He aimed down a narrow side street where he could see troops advancing and gently squeezed. The bullet ricocheted off some brickwork sending the soldiers into a panic. Their radios rippled with reports that they were taking fire.
The Irish civilians bore the brunt of their response.
John packed away his rifle, checked his pocket watch, pressed the retrieval button and waited.
***
Climate controlled air blew softly across his face as John stared idly out through the vaulting glass. Great white marble buttresses held the candela-reactive wall like the side of some rigid pavillion. As clouds rolled across the sky, the glass responded to the patchwork of light, darkening to meet the uneven glare and to maintain a constant illumination. It made his heart sink.. So bland. The grey slate canteen stretched out of sight as the building curved away in each direction. It was as busy as he’d seen it. John usually lunched out in the Japanese Garden when he was at the Ministry, but today he’d agreed to meet an old friend, just back from field operations.
The Times dataslate rested on his knee as John pondered the crossword. He usually struggled with it and today was no exception. Sanskrit never was his strong point. The news was equally baffling, filled with dry reports of the financial instabilities of the outer colonies. He sipped his steaming tea. The glass cup seemed to deaden the sweet taste. He muched down the last of his marinated tofu.
Thom was late.
Suddenly his friend was there and the pair embraced as lost brothers.
‘Good to see you again’, beamed Thom Bradshaw, his crisp black coat whirling off onto the seat-back.
‘And you’, replied John, ‘it’s been too long my friend. I was worried you weren’t coming’.
‘Yes, sorry about that. Damned strategy meetings always overrun’. The lithe figure beckoned over a servant and ordered a black coffee with salad before continuing, ‘so how are you? You’re looking well at least. How’s things in Capillary Monitoring?’
‘I moved out of there two years ago’, John replied flatly.
‘Good for you! I never understood how you stuck it for so long. It’s really the arse-end of Temporal Management. So where are you now?’ He continued, ignoring the young woman who placed his order on the table before him.
‘Historical Directorate’, John replied.
‘Sterling stuff! You keeping us on the straght and narrow then? How do you find it? It must be more interesting than monitoring eh, and the promotional opportunities are there for the taking’.
John stared out the window, past the cityscape to the highlands beyond. He studied the trees that had just appeared on the slopes.
‘Yes, very interesting. I guess it fits the degree too. Always knew I’d do something with it. So how are you Thom? How’s Futures treating you? I heard Ito got the Director’s role?’
‘That’s right. It’s really kicked the nest as well, Harland was bloody livid. She’d been promised the big chair when Ito came in from Logisitics. Apparently it came from the Executive, but I heard the Government were involved. Harland had really ticked off the President about something. I think it was the right decision in the long run but its been bloody vicious lately. Ito reigned in a lot of budgets and the old guard resisted hard. Did you hear about the Canberra Intervention? That was Ito pulling the plug on Al-Banda's spending. The whole thing went balls-up and Crisis Management had to step in. Heads rolled big-time, but it looks like things are calming down a bit now. Ito’s pulled up some supporters from the lower orders, displaced and fragmented the old guard. Still, looks like I’m up for Department Head at the next review so it hasn’t been all bad’.
They both chuckled politely and an uncomfortable silence descended as they sipped their drinks.
‘So’, Thom continued, ‘have you heard from the gang lately?’
‘Not really’, John responded, rubbing his knees, ‘except Alice. We spoke a few months back. She’s gone into teaching, can you believe? Infants as well! I’d never have thought it. How about you?;
‘I’ve not heard from anyone. Mind you, I’ve been out on operations for the last few months, Paris mostly’.
‘It survives then?’ John commented, somewhat disappointed.
A soft bleeping interrupted the lunch and Thom drew his pocket watch. It flashed with green light.
‘****! Sorry mate, I’ve got to go’, he said, already on his feet and struggling into his coat. ‘It was great to catch up though, give me a call and we’ll get together one evening’.
John rose and they embraced before Thom half-jogged away. He sat back down slowly and finished his tea. Strange, he thought; they’d been so close at University. Shared time. Been like brothers. Now time had passed, he barely knew the man at all. Even the reminiscences were clipped and increasingly irrelevant. Thom had been such a radical. They’d protested together on many issues. Thom had wanted to change things, right what they’d thought was wrong. Here he was climbing over the debris of his work companions to step up the ladder. John has seen real leaders. Spent time with real kings, those who ruled by personal loyalties. Real leaders inspire their followers and stand in the open, exposed and principled. Real leaders cry, ‘here I stand and there I go, follow me or oppose me!’ They do not wait in the wings to pick up the crown someone else had struck off. He pitied the people who would work under Thom.
The servant girl approached the table with a tray and cleared away the detritus of lunch. John smiled politely and thanked her. Feeble he thought, to offer such scant interaction, but at least he acknowledged her presence.
The great clock struck 13:00 and John rose to return to work. He was having ‘Archaic Dutch language skills - Intermediate’ implanted this afternoon ready for the Hanseatic League Engagement.
***
The bar was thick with noise and smoke as Peter returned to the table with a tray full of golden liquid. Stepping into the crowded circle, he placed the tray with a slop of frothy lager, squinted and took the dying roll-up stub from his lips. People rippled away beside him as he squeezed back into the gaggle crowded around the table too small by half. John watched the young buck out the corner of his eye as Jennifer continued her tirade against him.
‘You’re so wrong!’ She implored, desparate to convince John, who she knew as Al. ‘It’s not the soldiers that make the sacrifice! They choose the life they lead. They accept the risks. Most of them today, go in to get free training. Before Blair invaded Iraq, I don’t think most people who joined up even considered they might have to fight’. She slapped her slender hand onto his burly forearm and John resisted the urge to jerk away. ‘It’s not even the wives. Most of them marry men who are already soldiers so they’ve accepted the situation. The real military sacrifice is made by the kids. They’re born into a life of instability; moving house and even country every few years, never sure their dad will come home alive. They’re the real victims!’
John rocked back, jostled by the overly animated ginger-haired youth beside him and sipped his foul, mass-produced lager.
‘Well?!’ pressed Jennifer, shifting subtley closer and fixing her glare on him. John flicked a glance at her , returned his pint to the table and responded, ‘yes, I see your point. Its certainly valid but I don’t think it discounts all soldiery from ever making sacrifices’.
The evening continued and John observed steadily, a communal haze of alcohol dull and brutalise the youngsters around him. Jennifer became increasingly tactile, making him more uncomfortable. As the concensus became less aware, John became more focussed upon Peter. As the babble continued about him, he reflected again. How could such an evident waster, an unquestioning product of an education system that neither informed nor educated, be so significant? How could this Peter, rise to be vital in the course of history? Of course he’d read the files. This imbecile was going to get a job and rot in the pointless drudgery of an office. Inherently unstable he’d fail to hold a mature relationship together, damaging the lives of seven good women in the process, but would rise to middle management. New Year’s Eve 2017, he’d get drunk at a party and on the drive home, run down and kill Maria Ellis before she had her children. Her third daughter, Ciara was too important to lose like this.
John checked his pocket watch, 10:38pm. Jennifer recoiled in surprise as John sprang from his seat, smoothly drawing a steak knife from his boot. The table crashed away amid a shower of glass, lager and shocked students as John grabbed Peter by his burst of frizzy hair. Peter twisted under John’s grasp, wrenching his head back and thrusting his neck up. With one calm, butcher’s stroke, John sliced Peter’s throat through to his spine. As the blood gouted and spattered in frothy chokes from Peter onto all around him, John plunged the knife up to it’s wooden handle into the boy’s heart and ripped it out in a single efficient stab. He then sat calmly back down and screaming bedlam erupted around him. The boy bled quickly to death in a choking thrash.
The bar cleared and before the doormen or police fully reacted he strode into the nearby toilets. John checked his pocket watch, pressed the retrieval button and waited.
***
The room hummed with the constant drone of small talk, punctuated only be the occasional roar of polite laughter. John, dressed in a pin-stripe from Saville Row and accented with a light blue silk tie, circulated quietly, nodding greetings to acquainted faces. The great and the good of the local Conservative association milled and puffed, engaged in the brutal battle of social climbing.
John came upon his quarry, a slim, hawkish woman attired in a horribly expensive and horribly patterened green and white polyester dress. Apparently alone she was chatting intently with a short, rather portly, red-faced man. Dressed in a navy-blue blazer, he had the bearing of a weekend sailor. John approached and interrupted the conversation, cutting across the blazer, who scowled politely.
‘Good evening, I’m Richard Askew’, John opened, offering his hand for the woman to shake. She accepted with a limp, white-gloved grasp, ‘Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher. I don’t believe we’ve met before Mr Askew?’
‘No’, responded John, ‘I’m new to the area. Recently moved up from Somerset. My business has recently expanded and we’ve relocated the factory to Slough. I didn’t like the look of the area to live so we moved here’.
‘Ahhh, just the sort of chap we need! What line of business are you in?’ She enquired, craning and tilting in, to shut out the now purple-faced yatchsman.
‘Light industry. My company manufactures aluminium sheeting, bracketing, rods and so on; the kind of thing you’d make a greenhouse out of, you know’.
The two continued an animated conversation concerning John’s imaginary life and Margaret’s recent marriage. Eventually the talk turned to politics and the seeds of a new Conservative ideology found a fertile bed.
‘You know’, Margaret proposed, ‘you should stand for parliament Richard’.
‘No, no’, riposted John, ‘I don’t have the time. The business is in a period of growth, I couldn’t change horses mid-stream. Maybe you could’. They both laughed at the unthinkable prospect of a female candidate. Four million British citizens would not die in Gulags. Britain would not become a Soviet Republic.
John left the party at midnight, wandering out into the freezing night. He strolled loose-legged along the pavement, kicking at silver weeds and staring at the frost-clear stars above. Rasping in the mist of his breath, he took out his pocket watch, pressed the retrieval button and waited.
***
The stark, bleached sky was empty, even of clouds as a blinding sun stabbed down into the frost. A lone bird circled above a nearby rock outcrop. John watched in awe as the silent and graceful raptor played in the hoary morning light. Birds had never enthralled him as they seemed to for so many people he’d met but this one appeared somehow majestic, framed against the flat lemon-grey vista. As the black shape soared into the distance, John’s attentions turned to the task at hand.
All around him the landscape stood in monotonous relief. A patchy staining of old snow blighted the permafrost. Prickly trees, jabbed up like black barbs, frozen solid and long dead. Pale grasses strained and swirled in the ground winds, and lichen-covered granite steamed beneath it all as the night frost burned off in the morning sun. All he could focus on was the stale, oily odour of the furs that wrapped about him and the biting cold that cracked his exposed face.
Eight days he’d been here now, south of the glacier-front. His patience had long since gone and his mood was foul. Transport was supposed to place him close to a settlement or roaming band, but there’d been no sign of either since he arrived. Normally, he’d welcome this chance to wander the wilderness, so pure and free from error, but the cold had soured him quickly and he was sure frostbite was taking his toes.
As he squinted into the middle distance, he finally spied a promising movement. Quickly he took up his short, fire-hardened spear and hopped off arcoss the snow. Agitated, he crouched behind a stoney bluff and peeked through granite cracks at the small group some hundreds of meters beyond. There stood two men, both of them young and tall. With them, five women and at least four children. One of the women carried a well-wrapped bundle that could be a fifth. All were clad in furs and uncured leather and both men carried black spears. John watched the group as they huddled into a craggy shelter, the women setting a fire from a birchbark pot that evidently carried smouldering embers. Effortlessly, they heaped tinder, then sticks and finally small logs until a crackling smokey oasis of warmth glowed among them. Another of the women, crowded by swirling satellite children, efficiently skinned and gutted four small snow hares, spread the carcasses on a simple wooden frame and stacked them round the blaze to cook. The men wandered up to a nearby rock promontory and crouched silently back to back. In calm stillness they watched over the low murmur of the women below who were conversing and laughing softly together. The children tumbled in the scree nearby and hunted one of their number, who growled and loped like an animal.
John lost track of time as he watched this family group make a temporary home in the ice hell about them. How remarkable, he thought, that even here the human spirit, made so powerful by the links of family, held the terrible majesty of nature at bay. That even here among the frost, eking life from the bitter landscape, existing at the margins, humans could tame the wild, abate the terror and build a domestic comfort around a single fire.
He’d have to be careful. These early people were unpredictable and the linguistics programs of their speech were patchy at best. This could go very wrong.
He’d had bad feelings about this assignment as soon as it had come through. Normally this would go to the Pre-Arable Specialists, but there was a major incident at Boxgrove and they were stretched for manpower. John had been seconded along with Henrietta Culshaw for the Early Geographical Guidance program. Hence he was here in Northern Romania at the edge of the ice-sheet, staring across the frozen wastes at the most northerly Cro Magnon family in Europe. The ice was currently receeding at about a yard each month as the world began to warm up.
John checked his fur-wrapped package, took a deep breath and leapt up to the crest of the stoney bluff. The group froze. The icey wind whipped at them all as they regarded each other across the divide. Suddenly, both men dropped from their rock perch and ran towards him, separating wide as if John were their prey. As they approached, both men threatened with their spears and began to shout. Much of their speech remained incomprehensible, but John did understand, ‘you go now!’
He dropped to one knee dropped his head and raised his hands as he’d been taught and repeatedly screamed, ‘me friend, got food, we share!’ At least that’s what he thought he was shouting.
Their speartips brushed in his face as the men continued threatening, ‘you go or you die! Go now!’ Even from the end of a spear, he could smell their ripe breath thick with starved keytones and vestigial meat. This close, he could see the men were emaciated beneath their filth-crusted black hair.
Carefully from beneath his furs, John pulled out a raw, semi-frozen haunch of elk-meat. Both men backed off slightly and calmed perceptably, still levelling their crooked spears. Behind them, John glanced the women who had gathered up the children and were cowering under the rock beyond the fire. John held forth the meat feast and in broken tongue said, ‘me share. You cook. We eat. Me say where Elk is’.
Tentatively, one of the men lowered his spear and stretched forward to take the leg. Cautiously he grasped before finally snatching out the last few inches and running back to the fire with his prize. His companion jabbed again and grunted, ‘you stay’. John rose to a squat and sat watching the family until his knees ached so much that he stood and wandered to and fro. The thought that his mission was nearly done filled him with impatience. His frustration insulated him from the frost for the first time since he’d arrived.
Hours passed as the family huddled, staring at him. His meat gift crackled over the fire, stoked and maintained by the women. The men squatted between the fire and John, murmuring occasionally to each other, their eyes never leaving him.
Finally the meat was ready and the men ripped off their share. What they left, the women first shared among the children, then hungrily ripped at themselves. Finally, one of the men grunted at what John had guessed was the eldest woman. She took up the bone, still hanging with shreds of meat and struck it sharply against a nearby rock. The haft shattered, exposing the fleshy marrow within. Flanked by the man, this woman crept forward and threw the offering at John’s feet. Both sprung back a couple of hops and squatted expentantly. He picked out the marrow and slurped it down, feigning enjoyment, before scraping the outer meat-shreds off with his teeth. He’d been a vegetarian all his life, but often found it necessary to consume meat on these missions. He’d purge his stomach later. Wide eyes glared at him as he wiped the grease from his unkempt beard. He pointed north-west and said, ‘Elk six days walk that way. Ice not bad’.
The woman eyed him carefully. Although he’d lost some fill over the previous eight days here, he was still apparently well-fed. She considered him obviously successful and a prime father. ‘You come?’ She asked, tilted her head expectantly. The man with her looked uncertain and John could sense his rising aggression.
‘No’, replied John, backing away. ‘My family there’, he continued pointing away west. ‘You go now’. With that, John jumped up and ran back to the rocky bluff, crouching at its crest. The family group gathered themselves up and began to head northwest, towards the Neander Valley.
John took out his pocket watch, pressed the retrieval button and waited.
***
John zipped his fly and rebuckled his belt as he paced loosely towards the window. Sweat welled on his brow threatening to flood into his eyes. He pulled his soggy shirt loose from his sticky midriff. The young girl wiped her chin and adjusted her grubby green sari. As he pulled open the battered wooden shutters, treacle light oozed in; an Indian summer illuminated the gloom. The dust and noise of the city returned once again. John took up his wallet from a side table, leafed out a handful of Rupees for the girl. Taking them between her palms, she nodded and left the small hotel room without a word. John watched her departure in silence and returned to the view. From the third floor he could see out beyond the narrow streets below, across the surrounding rooftops and out to the crop fields beyond. The sky pulsed a deep orange and shimmered in the stifling evening heat. A salty bead tickled him as it broke free and rolled down his cheek.
John could feel time ticking away as his watched the sun flatten on the horizon. Events had passed more quickly than anticipated. The subject was gone and now he found himself killing time in a dank hotel. The retrieval window was still eleven hours and fifty-two minutes away. His stomach churned, exhausted and shuddering with an extended adrenalin overload. Things always go to plan. This time they didn’t and John couldn’t see why. His confusion had long since turned to terror, then to quiet desparation. One hundred and fifty-seven hours and thirty-three minutes had dragged by in this room. He’d left only to eat in the dining room, where he’d taken the services offered by the local women. Drunken laughter suddenly filled the hall outside his room and French voices slurred at each other. He tensed and flattened slightly into the window frame.
Suddenly the air ripped, where his throat had just been and a plume of plaster erupted from the back wall. John stared in shock as the bullet strike registered across his brain and as he fell to the floor, another shreiked over him, bursting the feather mattress.
He scrambled under the sill and raked his pistol down from the table. The heavy Webley service revolver filled his clammy hand as he cocked the hammer with his thumb. His eyes bulged and sweat spattered from his hair as he elbowed slowly back towards the window. Breathing deeply, he looked across the room to the bullet holes. Their trajectories were downwards. There were no higher buildings in that direction. His mind raced as he peeked quickly over the sill, looking for a vantage point. The only heights he could see were some hills in the middle distance. He estimated the range to be around five to seven miles. The wall above his head exploded, showering him with plaster and cloying dust. With a yelp he ducked back down and scrambled to the door, flinging it open and barrelling into the dingy brown hallway beyond. The party of Frenchmen were fumbling with their room keys and didn’t notice John level his pistol as he heaved against the wall. Swiftly he turned and fled down the stairs, lumbered through the tiled lobby before flattening against the open entranceway. He scanned the street beyond, pistol ready, before hurrying out into the bustling crowd.
John found himself in a stinking alleyway as he ducked out of the street. Soaked with sweat and wheezing in the evening heat, he slumped to his haunches against a wall, his pistol hanging loosely. A small boy swivelled on one foot nearby, clinging to a doorframe and watching the damp, flabby figure intently. John stared back wearily and became suddenly aware of his surroundings. A dirty woman peered out and shielded her boy. John concealed the large pistol as best he could.
His mind raced. The rebellion had been delayed. Conflict wasn’t supposed to break out now for eight months. This couldn’t be a random shooting; he’d been targeted. In any case there was no obvious firing platform, except the nearby hills and they were a far too far away. Then it struck him; his pocket watch was still in the hotel room.
Eight hours and thirty one minutes remained until the retreival window opened. He didn’t know how long before it shut again. Turbaned and bearded police in damp khaki and armed with long sticks milled about outside the hotel. Red-faced British soldiers in shorts and socks stood neaby, their hands nestled calmly on their Lee Enfield rifles. A tall, slender British officer with a stiff Imperial accent was evidently in charge, talking quietly to his subordinates and barking the occasional order to the locals. The hotel was sealed off from the curious crowds milling about as a body, covered by dirty hessian sacking was stretchered to a nearby cart. The evening was finally dimming and insects danced in the fading light. John worked his way over to the cart and lifted the covering. A middle-aged Indian man, well groomed and dressed, but obviously dead, lay festering on the stretcher. His chest was an open wound, the size of two fists, but with a strange rectangluar aspect. John, lifted the man’s shoulder and stroked around his back. He felt a small rectangular entry wound among the congealed blood. John had seen such wounds before, caused by the 5x2mm hyper-velocity rail-rifles developed in China in the late 2060’s. Here, apparently, one had been fired at him in India. In 1937. His eyes darted around the crowd as, like a battered child, he shrunk back into a recess. He needed his watch and his fear that it’d been stolen was gone. With the police controlling access, his fear was now that he’d not be able to get back in. He noticed a bored looking Indian officer, chatting with the locals nearby, and approached quietly.
‘Officer’, he whispered. The fellow seemed skeletal in the sharp relief of the night lights, as he turned to regard John’s flabby, pallid face. The policeman didn’t speak. John had emptied his wallet of the money and handed the officer a bundle of Rupees. There was more than a year’s salary sat in his hands and the dark fellow’s eyes widened as his mouth gaped.
‘It’s yours’, John encouraged, ‘I just need you to do something for me’.
John watched from the shadows as the policeman emerged from the hotel lobby. One hour forty seven minutes had passed and the crowds had lessened. The British soldiers had left and only a handful of Indian police remained. Lakhshmi spotted John and casually approached. He passed by without stopping, palming a pocket watch into John’s waiting hand. John walked swiftly away, feeling the familiar shape in his palm. Finding a dark alley, he slumped down behind a pile of rotten wood, his watch in one hand, the Webley revolver in the other.
At 6.25am he pressed the retrieval button on the watch and waited.
***
John was late. He was always a little late, sometimes on purpose. He resented the tyranny of the clock and would often delay himself, deliberately avoid his timepeice and end up rushing to meet appointments. But today he was genuinely late. The morning transit tube had a brown-out and had come to a halt for twenty minutes out near Salisbury. He’d had to rush from the Salle terminus and was now flustered and sweaty. He’d bustled into the toilets, relieved himself, wiped the sweat from his brow and neck and reapplied deodorant before making his way to Room 311. As he knocked, he could feel the sweat beading again, despite the controlled ambient temperatures. He took a deep breath to compose himself and entered the room.
‘Good morning John’, Xavier Vermantheer greeted him as he entered. The large man, greying at the temples and with pockmarked jowls shook John’s hand vigorously before returning to his seat around the horse-shoe table. John hung his overcoat and hat on the coatstand by the door and unbuttoned his jacket as he sat down. Embarrassed, he was forced to wipe sweat from his brow with a kerchief.
‘Good journey John?’ Xavier continued.
‘It was fine, thanks. A little delay at Salisbury, but nothing serious’. John took his datapad from his jacket pocket and placed it into the link-port on the desk.
Xavier continued, ‘John, I’d like to introduce Hideyoshi Kastuo from Meta-Temporal Extrapolation’. The young Japanese woman, with thick black hair and a slender neck nodded politely. John responded. She reminded him of a woman he met recently in North Hokkaido. She seemed strangely dwrafed by her crisp business jacket.
‘And this is Nikolai Smith from Crisis Monitoring’. A middle-aged man with a powerful Slavic jaw and piercing green eyes, rolled back in his chair and nodded curtly to John.
‘Pleased to meet you both’, replied John, decanting a glass of cool water and taking a sip. He made no response to Nikolai’s presence but Crisis Management involvement was not a good sign. This was supposed to be a simple review breifing of his recent trip to London.
‘Fine, let’s press on shall we’, urged Xavier, ‘we’re hear to review the Atwood case that you recently completed. I trust we’ve all fully reviewed John’s report? I think it was a textbook short-contact incursion and I’ve no negative issues to raise in respect to his actions. The target was identified and the intervention completed smoothly’.
The assembled panel nodded in agreement and in a soft, gentle Japanese accent, Katsuo added, ‘I think it appropriate to have it minuted that Mr Fastolf seems to have integrated well into his new role in the Historical Directorate. I have read highly encouraging reports from his manager. This operation would seem to represent the usual efficient manner in which he is able to operate. His socio-cerebral evaluations also show that he seems to be coping with the phyiscal and mental pressures of field operations quite well’. The minute-dome on the central plinth flickered quitely as it recorded proceedings. John didn’t respond, but frowned politely, wondering wy she had felt it necessary to make that statement. Her directness also surprised him as in his previous dealings with Japanese people, he’d found their circumspection rather frustrating.
‘Agreed’, concurred Xavier, ‘however, in the Atwood case there have been subsequent problems. The corrective intervention should have restored events. Jennifer Atwood should have lived a full life and given birth to four children. James Atwood, her second son is the important subject in this temporal string of course. However, records now show that she was killed in a hit and run accident on Wednesday, 18th December 1971, two days after our intervention. The driver was never identified’.
He paused to allow the observation some thinking time and Katsuo continued, ‘Meta-temporal extrapolation assessments conclude that this should not have happened. The temporal node for intervention was specifically identified as outside the ‘cause-effect’ streamline. It’s possible we missed a contributor, but highly unlikely in this case’. She stroked her datapad softly and the assessment report transferred to the v-table.
Nikolai, leaned into the table. Turning to John, he asked, ‘did you see anything out of the ordinary on the operation?’
John sat back as his mind raced. He wanted to say that everything he saw on operations seemed out of the ordinary but Nikolai didn’t look the sort to appreciate such flippancy. After a time, he simply stated, ‘no’. Nikolai looked incredulous and started to reply. John cut him off, ‘Frankly I wasn’t expecting to see anything unusual, so wasn’t really looking. The operation lasted five hours, twelve minutes and in that time I saw nothing I’d consider noteworthy in this context. Aside from purchasing exchanges with local vendors, I spoke to nobody. I kept peripheral interactions to a minimum, enough to blend into the background, to not mark anybody’s memory, as per standard operational training. To my knowledge, the sabotage event was unobserved. It’s all in the report’.
‘Yes, the operation was conducted successfully’, Xavier interjected, ‘you’re performance isn’t in question John, we’re just taking this debrief as an opportunity to give you some context that might jog some overlooked memory. We obviously have a problem that could be extremely serious but we’re still gathering information for assessment. If anything else comes to mind about this incident, please let us know’.
Katsuo nodded sympathetically and continued, ‘there is a briefing session this afternoon to raise field operatives awareness concerning these issues. We’ve presumed to put you onto the attendance list as this will help you to assess possible incidences in future operations. The details are in your calendar’.
John checked his datapad casually as events proceeded. ‘So what are you saying’? He enquired. John’s mind raced. He’d always been suspicious of the transport. Every time he travelled he was tense, concerned, sometimes even frightened that something would go wrong. All he could think about was that there was a problem that might kill him on the next operation, or worse still, strand him in some alternate timestream.
‘We’re saying nothing’, Nikolai responded, ‘we’re not sure what’s going on but it is unusual for these interventions to generate errors subsequent to their completion’. He turned for reassurance from Katsuo, who nodded agreement as he continued, ‘it’s entirely possible, the timestream is reasserting a corrective reality of its own here. The alternatives are impossible to speculate’.
Everyone present knew that a set of alternatives was entirely possible to speculate, but far too significant to contemplate. The great horror of an adersarial intervention agency remained unspoken.