A Tale of Time City (29 page)

“It’s in the Baltic Sea,” Jonathan admitted. “Leon said Sixty–four Century was the best time, because the sea’s dry for a hundred years on both sides of then.” And he told them a map reference which meant nothing to Vivian.

Elio seemed to understand. He looked dubious. “I hope Master Hardy told you right,” he said. “That is certainly a war-zone in that century, however history runs, and, as I told you, I found that era
very disturbed. However,” he added, looking more cheerful, “I shall be there to make sure you are safe, and I have taken care to provide us all with protective clothing. This way.”

He led the way towards the display-cases at the far end of the gallery. Vivian stopped in front of the one that held her own luggage. It looked dusty and foreign to her now, and not at all useful. “Elio,” she said. “If we do get the Silver Casket and Time City’s all right, I’m going to need this for when I go home.”

Elio stopped with his head twisted round, staring at the luggage with obvious regret. “I have never had anything from Twenty Century before,” he said. “But of course you must have it when you need it.” Vivian could tell that it cost him a real wrench to say it.

But it
is
mine! she thought as Elio went on to the case that had held the Martian boots. There were now four flat silver packets in it instead. The label said,
Twenty-four Century Nylon Stockings (for men)
. Elio opened the case, took the packets out and turned the label over. That side read,
Display Removed for Repairs
. He handed them a packet each as he led the way to the chained door.

Vivian’s stomach wobbled, and seemed to wobble worse every step of the way down to the underground room. Her fingers shook when she opened her packet by Elio’s belt-light. Odd-shaped filmy silver cloth spilled out.

“These are mind-shield suits from Fifty-six Century,” Elio told them. “I procured them from then because Mind War suits have never been bettered. Put them on over your heads and faces and let the rest spill down to your feet.”

“Why does it have to go all over?” asked Sam. “
My
mind’s in my head.”

“Ah, but there are nerves all over your body that lead to your head. A mind-warrior only has to find an unprotected nerve,” Elio explained. “These suits will stop that. They will also stop other weapons to some extent, provided you are not at close range.”

This made Vivian feel more wobbly than ever. It did not help to feel the ground still gently shaking, even down here. She pulled the strange cloth over her head. It was easy to breathe through, and it fell across her shoulders and down over the rest of her with the gentlest of touches. She spread her arms to look down at herself all covered in flowing silvery folds. We’re not going to be able to walk far, trailing around in this stuff! she thought. But after a pause, in which the cloth must have been adjusting to her, it suddenly shrank around her.

“Lift your feet, one after the other,” Elio said.

Vivian did so and the silvery stuff promptly shrank itself round the underside of each of her shoes. And she was wearing an all-over suit of filmy silver. The others were silver all over too. Sam’s face and Jonathan’s looked at her through the film, squashed and whitish.

“I can’t see too well,” Jonathan said. “It seems to be cancelling out my optical-function.”

“Then keep close to me,” said Elio. The belt-light coming from under his suit made him look like a luminous ghost. “You must all keep close to me. I shall do my utmost to ensure our safety and, as you are aware, my utmost is more than twice that of a born human.” He raised his hand with the red egg-shaped control in it, filmy under the suit, and pointed it at the flickering slate.

The slate vanished into a door opening on dazzling brightness.
White, white sand stretched away to a distant pale blue sky. They stepped through it and their suited feet crunched and slipped on what felt like frost. Probably it’s salt from the dried-up sea, Vivian thought. But the place felt cold too. Her suit did not do much to stop a keen icy wind. She turned her head away from the wind and the white glare and realised that the white land was not a level desert at all. Blue shadows showed that it was a mass of hummocks and holes. Some of them were regular-looking ditches that reminded Vivian of the trenches in World War One.

Jonathan’s eye-function had darkened in the glare. He turned his face rather blindly from side to side. “What’s happened? It was flat when I came here this morning.”

“Someone’s dug a lot of holes,” Sam told him.

A voice spoke. It rapped out words in a foreign language from overhead.

“
Down
!” said Elio, and threw himself flat on the white ground.

They all threw themselves down beside him. The whiteness was icy cold. The place where Vivian fell turned out to be on a slope, so that she rolled as she went down, and then slid. She ended flat on her back some way from the others, staring into the cloudless sky. The sky almost above her was filled by a half-transparent thing like a raft, which was floating in the air about fifty feet up. Leon Hardy told us wrong! she thought. He meant us to get killed! She did not dare move. The raft was bluish and she could see the bottoms of people’s feet through it. The faces of the people were peering down through paler bubbles at the edges of the raft. They were blank, squashed faces, covered in something yellowish, which must have been mind-suits rather like her own.

The voice rapped out again and the raft fired on them. Whatever it was came down in whitish ripples. Vivian screamed. For just an instant, before her suit cancelled the weapon out, something seemed to be tearing the inside of her head away. Then she just lay and watched the white ripples and hoped that the others’ suits were working properly too.

The firing stopped, but not because the people in the raft had finished. Another raft, a slightly greenish one, was coming in from higher up to attack the first one, moving very fast with a small whistle of wind. The first raft rose another fifty feet and sheered away sideways. As soon as it moved, Vivian saw a third raft, different again, with a mauve tinge, plummetting out of the high sky at the first two. Both the lower rafts shot away sideways, and then shot back again to attack the mauve one. They circled the sky, all three, up and down and around one another, fighting furiously without any sound except the thin whistling of the wind. Vivian had never imagined this kind of warfare. Since it was not aimed at her, her suit did not block very much of it out. Ripples sped sideways across her, bringing calm voices of madness, giggles of rage, hymns of nastiness, screams of exhaustion, tinkles of death, whistles of despair, and loud songs of horror. And none of it made a sound. Vivian had to lie on the cold ground and bear it, in all its back-to-front wrongness.

Then, in the part of the sky that she could see between her own silvery feet, Vivian noticed a cloud of blue-grey smoke. It drifted nearer, fast and high, streaming this way and that and groping about as if it were looking for something, until it located the three fighting rafts. Then it came snaking in, grabbing for them like
some enormous greyish glove. All three rafts tried frantically to get out of its way. One hurtled straight up into the air and a man fell off it. Vivian heard him give a real scream as he crashed to the ground. The second raft went low and hurtled past a few feet above Vivian, wobbling and weaving and spraying out ripples as if something was wrong with it. The last raft put on speed and raced away in the opposite direction. The cloud dived round and went after it. Two seconds later, the blue sky and the glittering white desert were completely empty.

Sam rolled over on the slope above Vivian. “How many sides
are
there in this war?” he said.

“Time alone knows!” said Jonathan, crawling to his hands and knees. “That was nasty!” He stood up, shivering.

Vivian got up, with her teeth chattering, and helped Sam to his feet. Elio was the last to stand up. He raised himself slowly and painfully and, to their horror, most of the suit under his right arm had gone blue and melted-looking.

“It is nothing,” he said. “Just something from that low-flying raft. I am all right. I was made to withstand adversity. Let us find that Casket before any more warriors appear.” He tore open his suit on the side opposite to the melted blueness and fetched out a small gleaming gadget. The suit sealed itself up behind it.

Sam forgot his fright. “Hey!” he said. “That’s a Hundred and Ten Century metal detector! My dad’s got one. He says you can’t get one for love nor money these days. How did you get hold of it? Can I work it?”

Sam got his way because Elio was limping and swaying and
Jonathan was stumbling about with his hands out like a sleepwalker. With his eye-function dark in the glare and the veil of the suit in front of it, he could barely see at all. He switched it off disgustedly in the end.

Sam confidently turned the metal detector to detect silver and went stumping off in widening circles. “My dad says there’s nothing to beat these,” he called out. “You can find needles in haystacks. Keep close. It’s showing something already!”

They tried to keep up with Sam as he tramped off in the direction the cloud had come from, but it was hard going. The salty sand was a mass of holes and frozen hummocks, ditches, and mounds. One moment they would be sliding down a glittering slope, and the next, they would be having to jump a deep blue trench. Vivian had to help Jonathan most of the time. She tried to help Elio too, but he waved her away.

“I am fine,” he panted. “My efficiency is in no way impaired.”

Vivian did not believe him. Elio’s face, mistily showing through the suit, seemed to be twisted with pain. What will Sempitern Walker do if Elio’s badly hurt? she was wondering, when Sam pointed the detector at the side of a tall white mound ahead and it gave out a strong, clear cheeping sound.

“
Got it!
” Sam bawled. “It’s here! Did you bring something to dig with, Elio?”

“You won’t need to do any digging,” said a soft voice from the top of the mound.

Their heads all jerked up to look at the silvery person standing there. It was a woman, as far as they could see. She was not easy to
see, because she seemed to be made of masses and masses of trailing silvery whitenesses. All in silver, Vivian thought, which befits an Age where men create and kill in marvellous ways. She’s made of layers of mind suit! Under the silvery layers, Vivian could just pick out what seemed to be a lovely face.

“Are you the Guardian of the Silver Casket?” Sam asked.

“That is right,” said the woman. Her voice had a lilt to it, or a trace of a foreign accent. Vivian could just see very red lips move, smilingly, as the Guardian said, “And why do you come seeking me and my Casket two days before the proper time?”

“A thief is trying to steal it, madam,” Elio said. His voice sounded forced and scratchy. Vivian was sure he was in a lot of pain. “This will bring about the destruction of Time City and possibly also render all history violently unstable. We therefore think you should take the Casket to the safety of Time City at once, where it will enable us to discover the mechanism of all the other Caskets, particularly the Lead.”

Jonathan was shading his eyes with both hands in an effort to see the Guardian. “We need it urgently,” he said. “You see, we think the Caskets attract one another, and if they do, the Silver will help us to find the Lead before it’s too late to do any good.”

“You do not have the Lead Casket?” said the Guardian. She sounded quite surprised.

“Not yet, madam, but we know it is in Time City,” Elio said.

“The Lead Casket is in Time City,” the Guardian declared. Her voice rang out, strong and comforting. “It can be found by using the Silver to attract it. Very well. As you need the Silver so badly, I
will break the injunctions that were laid on me and give you the Casket now.” And to their great relief and surprise, her hand came forward among the floating draperies around her, a long silvery hand, holding a large shiny egg-shaped thing. As Elio hobbled awkwardly up the mound and took the Casket, Vivian saw that it was wonderfully ornamented, in lacy shapes. She was rather ashamed that it reminded her so much of an Easter egg.

But she forgot that the next moment. A white flash of movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked round just in time to see a small silvery figure slide along the blue shadow of a nearby ditch and scramble among the hummocks beyond. “
The thief!
” she yelled and dashed off after him.

As she raced along the ditch and leaped among the hummocks, someone screamed “
Vivian!
” after her. She took no notice. She had the silver figure in sight now, with the sun glinting off it. The boy was running for his life across the uneven ground and she knew she could run faster than he could. She had nearly caught him last time. He had somehow got himself a mind-suit, but he was not carrying the Iron Casket and Vivian was sure that this meant he would not be able to escape by time-travelling this time. It’s the Caskets that time-travel! she thought, in a surge of understanding. Her frozen feet warmed up and the cold air hurt in her chest. She shut her mouth and pelted joyfully across the jumbled, pitted ground. The thief glanced round, saw she was gaining and swerved away desperately.

Then the ground gave way under Vivian. Something the same colour as the white sand tore under her running feet, and then came
apart all round her with a soggy ripping noise. She was pitching down into a deep hole. Much to her own surprise, her finger went to the low-weight stud on the belt under the mind-suit and pressed it in time to save her from breaking a bone. She went light as she hit the grey rocks at the bottom of the hole, and bounced, and came down again, where she lay staring up at a torn shape of blue sky high above.

“Oh bother and
damn
!” she said. The thief had tricked her and got away again.

“Are you badly hurt?” someone asked. It was a man’s voice, but it was high and quavering and nervous.

Vivian lay quite still and turned her eyes carefully sideways. There was a mind-warrior in a silver suit like her own huddled at the other side of the hole. She remembered the man who had fallen screaming out of the raft. I shall pretend to be dead, she decided. Perhaps he’ll climb out and go away.