Percival had always known that this was a futile hope; and so, perhaps, had I.
It is one thing to contemplate in serene equanimity the sacrifice of oneself and all that one loves. It is another matter altogether to be forced to watch while the same thing happens to others. My spiritual conviction still insisted that whatever occurred would serve the purposes of what I am afraid I still think of at times by the old, discredited name of ‘God’; yet at the knowledge of it my humanity rose up within me and cried out, ‘No more!’
I realised, blinking through my tears, that Emily had noticed my distress. I would, I sincerely believe, have explained to her my feelings, even though it meant admitting my complicity in all the horror that surrounded us. I would have done so, if for no other reason then merely to avoid her reaching the otherwise inevitable conclusion that I was weeping from terror for my own life.
However, I cannot be certain even of this, for I was not permitted the luxury of opportunity for such a confession. Quite suddenly and shockingly, as the three of us sat there in the kitchen, inwardly mortified, angry or smug according to our respective natures, there was a crackling noise, a flash like lightning; and we each turned to behold the sweat-slicked, breathless faces of Honoré Lechasseur and Percival.
The Time-Travellers
A Philosophical Issue
Our reactions to this unexpected apparition were several. Gideon Beech, who knew Percival but was unaware of the phenomenon of time-channelling, gaped and spluttered. I exclaimed something idiotic like ‘My God – Percival! Thank Heavens you’re safe! And I suppose this must be Mr Lechasseur.’
The smile which Emily gave to her friend spoke of her very sincere relief at seeing him safe and well, but her first words were: ‘Honoré, there are armed soldiers holding these poor children prisoner. We have to help them.’
‘Wait just a moment,’ Percival said. ‘It’s no use our going off at half-cock.’ From the authority in his voice I would never have believed that Lechasseur had seen him so recently in such a wretched state. Seating himself gratefully on one of the hard kitchen chairs, he continued: ‘We’ve had a very long journey (thank Heaven we had the light of your inner genius to guide us here, Clever-clogs), and there’s an awful lot at stake – maybe the survival of both our species. You’d better bring us up to speed before we do anything else.’
Such was his calmness of manner that we all acceded to his request. Emily and I sat down once more, and were joined by Lechasseur. Beech had not moved, and was unable to disguise his apprehension. He looked his age for the first time since he and I had met.
A few minutes sufficed for us to explain most of what had occurred, beginning with the matter of Beech’s betrayal (‘Well, never mind that now,’ Percival said lightly), and continuing with the fall of the Retreat, the incarceration of the supernormals, and Spears’ special interest in Violet. Emily also gave a concise summary of the small-arms carried by the soldiers, which I had not had the presence of mind to have observed in any detail. Percival listened intently, his expression becoming grimmer by increments. When we had finished he asked us a few pertinent questions relating to what little Spears had told us of the history of the assault, and of the conditions of the children’s imprisonment. Then he said, ‘Our first job has to be breaking ourselves out of here.’
From this point onward, incidents progressed with a rapidity which would shortly become bewildering to me. The zeal with which Percival had returned from the future was intense, and the facility with which he took command of the events and lives at the Retreat was really quite alarming.
In service of his first objective, Percival immediately commenced battering at the hinges of the farmhouse door with one of the heavy chairs. Our guard, believing that the room held only two frail men and a recalcitrant young woman, came in to admonish us: he stopped dead at the sight of Lechasseur (Beech cried, ‘Look out, fool!’, but too late), and Percival knocked the soldier senseless with the chair.
Our young friend spent a moment or two in studying the fallen man’s head-piece, then nodded in satisfaction. Releasing the buckles on the device and lifting it from the slack face, he told us, ‘Now for Violet,’ and led us out onto the hillside, into the streaming morning light.
Before we followed the young man, Lechasseur made a brief examination of our erstwhile guard, concluding, ‘He’s alive.’ The American sounded as surprised as I: I well recalled certain discussions with Percival, during the phase of his adolescence when his emerging philosophy had made some talk upon the morality of killing others more than imperative. In the end, to my discomfiture, I had had to agree that we should differ on the matter.
The four of us followed cautiously in Percival’s wake, but apart from a few distant soldiers patrolling the perimeter there seemed to be nobody about. The insensible guard we locked inside the farmhouse with his own keys. Lechasseur strode ahead to join Percival, while Emily and I held back to keep a close watch on Beech, who the American had insisted should accompany us despite my own reservations on the matter.
Our friends made for one of the outbuildings, where another soldier stood on guard. He failed to observe their approach, and between them they were able quickly to incapacitate him. I saw Percival leap on to the man’s back like a tiger, stuffing a fist into his mouth to prevent him from raising the alarm, while Lechasseur felled him with a blow to the head. The Negro would later admit that, after the burdensome gravity of Sanfeil’s time, his body felt ‘airy, as if I was made of cotton wool’. He had no trouble in operating physically, despite the exertion of his recent arduous time-journey: instead, he felt light-headed and mildly delirious.
From the recumbent guard Percival took the head-set and a bunch of keys, with which he opened up the building and vanished inside. Lechasseur carried the fallen man indoors, and the rest of us followed. By the time we had caught up with Percival, the lad had released Violet both from her shackles and from the shrieking ear-pieces which Spears’ men had forced on her, and whose workings were now spread across the floor.
‘Freia’s in one of the store-rooms,’ Violet said as soon as she saw us, and at the same moment Percival tossed the keys to Lechasseur. The American and Emily set off to find the German girl, leaving Beech and me alone with the two young people.
They were staring at one another, silently and intently. It was clear that they were involved in telepathic communication at a profound level.
After some moments their silence began to make me feel uneasy, and I felt that I could hardly strike up a conversation with Beech. ‘You’re turning things around awfully quickly,’ I observed to Percival. After our many hours interned immobile in the kitchen at the cottage, I felt genuinely befuddled by the succession of fights and escapes which had filled the past few minutes. It had indeed occurred to me to wonder whether I might not have inadvertently fallen asleep beside the warm stove.
My friend’s engrossed expression did not alter appreciably as he answered: ‘Of course I am, Clever-clogs. I’m “strangely gifted”, remember?’
‘But after all,’ I said, ‘you’re only one supernormal. Your friends have been here all this while. Why haven’t they done anything equally inspired?’
‘Well,’ Percival said, ‘we don’t know for sure that they haven’t. I’d imagine not, though.’ Violet nodded suddenly at him, and broke into a charming smile, as my young friend turned his intent eyes toward me.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it’s the very thing that I’ve just been explaining to Violet. It’s a philosophical issue really, as you of all people should have supposed. That principle you’ve heard me expound so many times – that evolution’s will must needs be done, and that the higher type must prevail over the lower – tends to breed a certain fatalism. You get to thinking that, if someone can get the better of you, that means that they should. For now, the others (excepting Vi) still believe in that, but I’ve grown beyond it. Don’t worry, I’ll so
on set them right.’
Despite the fact that I had recently arrived at similar conclusions myself, I felt obscurely disappointed. ‘I had supposed you wedded to that principle,’ I said, ‘for good or ill.’
‘In sickness and in health, eh?’ He grinned. ‘Well, so had I. That was before I met people who really were, and saw what it had made of them. I’ve changed my mind on a number of points, Clever-sticks, the first of them being that old notion of mine that only one or the other of our species can emerge from a crisis like this intact. And on that matter, old man, there’s something I need to tell you.’
An awful apprehension gripped me suddenly, but before I could respond little Freia arrived, with Lechasseur and Emily, her arms angrily crossed. Believing the children of the Mannheim project to be the most dangerous of the supernormals, Spears had ordered that the German girl be kept apart from the others with a guard to herself, and this man Lechasseur had once again been obliged to incapacitate.
Freia appeared surprisingly little affected by her experiences. This had not, of course, been the first time in her short life when adversity had sent forth arms and fighting-men to seek her out. She handed her still-screeching ear-pieces to Percival, and said, ‘You and Honoré must have come a very long way, Percival. Your shapes are stretched out extremely thinly.’
As Violet took the child aside, Emily said indignantly to Percival: ‘Freia tells me you have some kind of doomsday weapon, here at the Retreat. And that it’s primed and ready to be let off.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Percival. ‘I was just about to talk to Erik about that. We don’t have much time to address the matter, though,’ he said, ‘so please try not to fly off the handle when I tell you about it.’
The Terminal
We listened in appalled fascination as Percival explained to us the function and the purpose of ‘the terminal’: a function and a purpose quite in keeping with the philosophy upon which the Retreat had been founded. As Percival described it, the terminal was quite simply a weapon of unprecedented apocalyptic power, designed with one sole end in mind, which was the extinction of Homo sapiens.
When active, the terminal would generate a psychic ‘wave-form’, carefully chosen so as to be susceptible to propagation through the medium of the Earth itself. This wave would resonate with certain characteristic vibrations in the normal human brain, and would do so with such catastrophic violence as to strip the contents of that brain clean away. Across the globe, mankind (always excepting the supernormals, whose brains vibrated at much higher frequencies) would lose all power of speech, of understanding, of perception and even of independent movement. Those members of the species who did not expire instantly from shock would starve within a week, blind, incontinent and mindless.
‘I don’t mean any of you chaps, of course,’ Percival added hastily. ‘We can use our own minds to protect the few of you, if it should come to it. That’s the theory, at least: of course we haven’t tried it out. Now please,’ he protested, ‘didn’t I ask you not to make a song and dance of this? It won’t come to that if we can help it.
‘The trouble is... well, Jimmie got a general telepathic message out just before he disappeared, saying that he’d managed to get the dratted machine all ready to go. It wasn’t really finished, but Jimmie’s dashed clever. He evidently managed to lash it up somehow.’
The instant that anybody lacking the appropriate codes (which only Jimmie, having set the machine, would know, and which for prudence’s sake he had not communicated to his companions) attempted to interfere with the device’s controls, it would become active, and its sickening effects begin to resonate their way around the globe. Violet understood from overheard conversations between Spears’ men that a squad of Royal Engineers was already en route from Monmouth to examine the machine-shed. None of the supernormals had the slightest idea of where their own mechanic might be now, ‘which leaves us,’ Percival concluded, ‘with a bit of a disaster on our hands if we don’t buck our ideas up sharpish.’
There was a silence, as we each digested this horrifying news. After a few seconds, Emily declared, ‘This is appalling, Percival. We have to stop it, any way we can.’ Her voice betrayed no tremor of fear or self-doubt, and of all her excellent qualities I never admired any more than I did her resolve at that instant.
‘You’re game for that, then?’ Percival grinned. ‘Good-o – I hoped you would be. And you, kid?’ he asked Freia, giving her a brotherly smile. ‘Can you see what you need to do?’
The little blonde girl rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘Of course I can,’ she said, taking Emily’s hand in her own. ‘Emily, look at Mr Beech.’
The playwright had been doing nothing unusual: indeed, it seemed to me that he had been attempting, with some success, to mimic Violet’s trick of effacing himself from all our consciousnesses. He looked highly alarmed at this sudden uncalled-for attention. As Emily turned towards him with a frown, however, she and Freia vanished in a crackle of blue fire.
‘Splendid,’ said Percival. ‘That’s that taken care of. Now let’s get even with that devil St John Spears.’
It had, I estimated, been scarcely twenty minutes between my first becoming a knowing witness to an act of time-travel and my second. Within that span I had watched two men being knocked unconscious, and discovered that additionally the survival of my species hung in the balance. It was becoming an eventful day, to say the least of it.
Once again Percival set to work with a will, dismantling and cross-wiring the four head-pieces which he had accumulated, both those worn for protection by the soldiers and those imposed by them upon their prisoners. His twelve fingers were intent and deft, and for a while I found it calming just to watch him work. Violet went to sit a short distance away, stubby legs crossed, domed head nodding in concentration. She was attempting to communicate to her fellows in the meeting-hall that they should expect our imminent arrival: forcing the messages through their psychic baffles would be no easy task, she had said, but she believed that she could convey to the brightest of them an inkling of her message.
Lechasseur went to lock Beech and the supine guards inside the store-room which had previously held Freia. The black man had protested when he realised that Emily had been taken on a journey through time, without prior discussion and with only a small child for protection. However, Percival had assured him that her mission was to be a brief one, and Freia’s presence on it indispensable, and Lechasseur could hardly dispute the urgency of the matter.
I asked Percival what he was trying to achieve with his tinkering. He said: ‘It’s obvious enough, to me at least, that this is Homo peculiar engineering. Mechanical manipulation of the psychic wavelengths is a long way beyond your people’s abilities at present. That wretched Spears must have forced some earlier victim to put together a prototype for him – and bless that supernormal, whoever he was, because he’s put one big flaw into the design. It’s much too subtle for the likes of Spears’ mechanics to spot, but I think, with these four units, I can rig up something that will knock these soldiers altogether for six.’
‘Assuming that the terminal doesn’t achieve that first,’ I said, and Percival grunted in annoyed assent. ‘You know, Percival, I really did admire your moral system, and your adherence to it. You were no hypocrite – you would have watched a rational species die at your own hand rather than have betrayed the cause of human progress.’
He said: ‘Yes, well. I’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of thinking now, and it’s a chilly place to be.’
I snorted with laughter. ‘And yet for a decade I have been in exactly that chilly place, and I’ve gloried in it! I have idolised you for your unselfishness, your altruism and integrity.’
‘My pig-headedness, you mean,’ said Percival, and gave a harsh laugh of his own. ‘Well, perhaps that’s where I really am your better, Erik. I can recognise cant when I hear it, if not (unfortunately) when I spout it myself. If
being the “higher type” means anything, it’s that we don’t any longer have to be subject to the will of evolution. We can be better than that. What’s so noble about evolution, after all? She’s cruel, she’s arbitrary, she’s no respecter of intellect or of compassion – and those who profess to follow her, like poor old Giddy, end up behaving in exactly the same way.
‘I’ve been a very long way away, Clever-clogs, and there’s nothing like it for giving you perspective. I saw our present choices quite clearly: to continue to follow evolution’s plan in the same old way, or to transcend it. Eradicating the whole species of Homo sapiens might seem pretty appealing (and I know you’ve felt the same at times, so don’t you deny it), but it would just be recapitulating all your own errors on a more lavish scale. Those internecine struggles that have held you back for centuries, the brutality, the predatorial behaviour – we can dispense with all of those. And when I say “we”, I mean your people as well: all of us who, for now at least, retain our humanity.’
‘And sacrifice?’ I said, realising how badly I had missed these talks of ours, these miniature symposia where there was scant doubt in either of our minds which of us was the teacher and which the pupil. ‘Is that still a noble aspiration?’
He scowled. ‘It’s necessary sometimes, of course. But to snuff out a unique human spirit for an abstraction, like “progress” or “humanity”? To die or kill for an empty formula would be a shocking waste – never mind the fact that a devotion to one’s species is no less self-centred than those absurd loyalties to the tribe that you people profess. Each human life is sacred, Erik.’
Peculiar Lives Page 12
