The Changes Trilogy (56 page)

“Would you like some more morphine, sir?”

“No, thank you. Aspirin will be adequate now. There is some on the second shelf behind my desk. What has happened?”

“The tower fell down.”

“Ah.”

There was a long pause before he spoke again.

“I thought it was beautiful. Strange that we are the only three who ever saw it.”

Geoffrey fetched the aspirin and took some himself. Then he tried to free the hound with the trapped leg, but it slashed with its teeth whenever he came close. In the end he threw a fur over its head and twisted the corners, making a sort of tough sack which Sally held tight while he unwedged the stones. They'd been loosened by the earthquake and gave easily. The dog limped away. The children lay down in piles of furs and slept.

They were woken by sunlight and hunger. Geoffrey's leg was very sore, so he took more aspirin and sat while Sally fetched bread and apples; there wasn't much left when they'd finished breakfast.

It was only then that Geoffrey noticed what had happened to the rockpile made by the ruins of the tower. It had contracted into a single solid ridge of unhewn rock, like the cliffs on the higher ground; small stonecrops and grasses already grew from its crannies. Merlin must still be alive, then, deep underground, and had drawn the whole ruin of his tower over him to keep him safe from any future Furbelows. Geoffrey tried to picture him, asleep in the greenish light, cold as solid carbon dioxide, waiting, waiting.… He spoke his thought aloud.

“What do you think he's waiting for?”

It was Mr. Furbelow who answered.

“I've thought about that a lot. I think he's waiting until there are more people like him. I think he became bored with people in his own time, galloping about and thumping each other, so he just put himself to sleep, until there were people he could talk to as equals.”

“But there
can't
be anyone else like him,” said Sally.

“Not yet, my dear, but one day, perhaps. You know, even after all this I still cannot believe in magic. Abracadabra and so on. I think he is a mutant.”

“A what?”

“A mutant. I read about mutants in
Reader's Digest
, which my late wife regularly subscribed to. It said that we all have, laid up inside us, a pattern of molecules which dictates what we are like—brown hair, blue eyes, that sort of thing, the features we inherit from our parents. And the patterns of molecules govern other things, it said, such as having two arms and two legs because we belong to the species
homo sapiens
. A monkey is a monkey, with a tail, because of the pattern it inherits, and a fly is a fly, with faceted eyes, for the same reason. But apparently the pattern can be upset, by cosmic rays and atom bombs and such, and then you get a new kind of creature, with things about it which it didn't inherit from its parents and its species, and that's called a mutant.”

“He was very big,” said Sally, “and a funny rusty color.”

“Yes, and he had hair on his palms,” said Geoffrey.

“It appears,” said Mr. Furbelow, “that most mutations are of that order, not mattering much one way or the other. Or else they are positively bad, such as not having a proper stomach, which means that the mutation dies out. But every now and then you get one which is really an improvement on the existing species, and then you get the process called evolution. I think I've got that right.”

“It makes sense,” said Geoffrey. “But we've got to think about how we're going to get out of here. He won't make any more food for us now. And we must decide what we're going to tell people when we do get out.”

“But where did he get all that strength from?” said Sally. “Did he just have a bigger mind?”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Furbelow. “But that would not be necessary. Did you know there was a great big bit of your mind you don't use at all? Nobody knows what it's for. I read that somewhere else, in another
Reader's Digest
I expect. I've wondered about all this a lot, you know, and I think perhaps that Man's next bit of evolution might be to learn to use that part of his brain, and that would give him powers he doesn't have now. And I cannot see why this jump should not occur from time to time in just one case but fail to start a new evolutionary chain. There have been other marvelous men besides Merlin, you know, if you read the stories. Perhaps some of them put themselves to sleep in the same way, and are waiting. Quite often they did not die—they just disappeared.”

“I suppose,” said Geoffrey, “it was the delirium which made him change England back to the Dark Ages. He was muddled, and wanted everything to be just as he was used to it. So he made everyone think machines were wicked, and forget how to work them.”

“Do you think there were people who could change the weather in his day?” asked Sally. “Like you can, Jeff. He must have given you the power for some reason. Or perhaps there were just people who
said
they could, and he forgot. He must have been very muddled between what was dream and what was real.”

“Did you make the ice on the steps?” asked Mr. Furbelow.

Geoffrey felt like a thief caught stealing, but nodded. Mr. Furbelow was silent.

“You were justified,” he said at last, “taking one thing with another. I thought about myself a lot in the night, when it seemed as if I were shortly to meet my Creator, and I discovered I had been blind and selfish. I tried to use him, you know—like a genie in a bottle. But he was too strong for me, and I let him lie there in his cave, lost and sick, lost and sick. It was a sinful thing to do.”

“Do you think England will start being ordinary again now?” said Sally.

“Yes,” said Geoffrey. “And we really must decide what we are going to tell people—the General, for instance. He'll start digging if we tell him Merlin's down there.”

“General?” asked Mr. Furbelow.

They explained, Geoffrey feeling more like a thief than ever. Mr. Furbelow looked to and fro between them with sharp, glistening eyes.

“Goodness me,” he said when they'd finished, “I never heard of anything more gallant in all my born days. Fancy their sending two children on a journey like that! And your carrying it off so! Do you mean that all the tale of the leech, your guardian, was an invention? It quite took me in, I must confess. Well, that
has
given me something to think about! Where were we?”

“Trying to decide what to tell the General,” said Sally. “If we ever see him again. We must go before the wolves get hungry.”

“Does everyone agree that we cannot tell the truth?” asked Mr. Furbelow.

“Yes,” said the children together.

“Then we must have a story,” said Mr. Furbelow. “You had best work one out, Geoffrey, as you seem to have the knack.”

“Simple and mysterious,” said Sally. “Then we needn't pretend to understand it either.”

“Have you got any horse bait left, Sal?” said Geoffrey. “We've got to make a sort of litter for Mr. Furbelow, and Maddox will have to carry it.”

“I've got four bits. Two to get him up this side, and two down the other. Then we can go and get help.”

They worked out the story while Geoffrey labored and contrived: there had been no tower; the outer wall had been built by a big man with a beard, who had simply appeared one day, had sat down in front of Mr. Furbelow's house and begun to meditate. He had never spoken a word, but the walls and the forest had grown around him, and the dogs had appeared. He had produced food out of thin air, and Mr. Furbelow had felt constrained to wait on him. When the children came he had become enraged, wrecked the place and left, stalking off down the valley. That was all they knew.

“What about our clothes?” said Sally.

“We'll have to hide them,” said Geoffrey. “And Mr. Furbelow's medicines.”

By some miracle the true well had not caved in. Sally threw down it anything that spoiled the story, and then piled hundreds of cobblestones on top. They found some old clothes in chests of drawers in the cottage, mothy but wearable. The litter was a horrible problem, as most of the usable materials had been destroyed by fire or earthquake, and Geoffrey's ankle seemed to be hurting more and more. He was still hobbling around looking for lashings when the first jet came over, in the early afternoon.

It was very high, trailing a feathery line of vapor, and curved down out of sight beyond the hills. Ten minutes later it came back again, squealing down the valley at a few hundred feet. Sally waved a piece of the sheet which Geoffrey had been tearing into strips for the litter.

“He'll never see that,” he said. The pain in his leg made him snarly. “We ought to try and make a smoke signal or something. Damp straw would do it.”

“What can we light it with?” asked Sally.

“Oh hell. There might be some hot embers in the stables if you went and blew on them. You'd need something to scoop them up with, and—”

“He's coming back.”

The jet came up the valley, even lower, flaps down, engine full of the breathy roar of a machine not going its natural pace. Sally waved her sheet again. The wings tilted, and they could see the pilot's head, but so small that they couldn't be sure whether he was looking at them or not. The wings tilted the other way, then toward them again, then away.

“He's seen us,” said Geoffrey. “He's waggling his wings.”

The engine note rose to its proper whine, the nose tilted up and up until the plane was in a roaring vertical climb. It twisted its path again and whistled southward. In less than a minute it was a dot over the southern horizon, trailing its streak of vapor.

“He was looking for
us
,” said Sally.

“Yes,” said Geoffrey. “We'd better stay. The litter wasn't going to work anyway.”

“I hope they come soon,” said Sally. “I'm hungry.”

“I have just remembered,” said Mr. Furbelow, “there might be some cans in the cupboard in the kitchen. I haven't thought about them for five years. It was not the sort of thing he would have cared for.”

There was some stewing steak and the trick with the embers worked, so they supped by a crackling fire in the open, like boy scouts, and slept under the stars.

Five helicopters came next morning, clattering along below a gray sky. A group of very tough-looking men jumped out of each machine and ran to the outer wall, where they trained their automatic weapons on the silent forest. Sally ran to warn them not to shoot the wolfhounds, who, restless with hunger, had gone hunting. One of the men aimed a gun at her as she talked, and she came back. Officers snapped orders, pointed out arcs of fire and doubled onto the next group. Three men stood in the middle of the courtyard in soldierly, commanding attitudes. They watched the activity for a while and then strolled over toward the cottage. The one in the middle was the General.

Geoffrey stood up, forgetting about his ankle. Ambushed by the pain he sprawled sideways, and stayed sitting as the three approached.

“Aha!” barked the General. “You do not obey the orders, young man. I say to you to make a
reconnaissance
(he pronounced the word the French way) and you defeat the enemy, you alone. That is no path to promotion. But this is the enemy, then?”

He pointed at Mr. Furbelow. He seemed very pleased.

“No,” said Geoffrey. “This is Mr. Furbelow. He broke his leg in the storm, and I tried to set it, but I think he ought to go to hospital as soon as possible.”

“But the enemy?” snapped the General. He didn't seem interested in Mr. Furbelow's leg.

“You mean the Necromancer,” said Sally. “We only just saw him. He got angry when we came and he went away. Mr. Furbelow can tell you far more about him than we can.”

The General turned again to the old man on the ground, and stared at him in silence.

“How did you find out so quickly?” said Geoffrey.

One of the other men answered, an Englishman.

“Half a dozen radio hams suddenly came on the air. They hadn't a clue what was up, but the fact that they could work their sets at all encouraged us to send reconnaissance planes over. One of them spotted this place—we knew where you were heading for, of course—and here we are.”

“Tour Necromancer,” said the General, “what is he?”

“Honestly we don't know. He just sat and thought, Mr. Furbelow says. He's been living with him for five years, but he's really much too tired to tell you anything now. Why don't you send him off to hospital, let him have a good rest, and then I'm sure he'll tell you all he knows?”

The Englishman spoke to the General in French, and the General grunted. The third man yelled an order, and two soldiers doubled over from one of the gun positions. They ran to the helicopters and ran back with a stretcher, onto which they quickly and tenderly eased Mr. Furbelow. They must have practiced the job a hundred times in their training.

“Where will you take him to?” said Sally.

“Paris,” said the Englishman. “I expect you will be coming too, young lady.”

“No thank you,” said Sally. “I want to take Maddox to Weymouth as soon as Geoffrey's foot is better. If you could find us another horse, we could ride down. And we'll need some money. The weatherman stole all ours.”

The General grunted and sucked his lower lip over the little moustache.

“We had expected Mr. Tinker to come to Paris to make a report,” said the Englishman.

“Can you
make
me?” said Geoffrey. “I'll come if I have to, but I'd much rather not. We don't know anything, Sally and I. He went when we came. I'll write to Lord Montagu and explain about the Rolls. It was struck by lightning.”

“You have already one horse?” barked the General.

Geoffrey pointed. Maddox was coming disconsolately around the courtyard looking for tender fragments of green weed and finding nothing. Some he'd eaten already, and the rest the earthquake had obliterated. He was in a bitter temper, but stumped over toward the steps to see if Sally had any horse bait left. The General was in the way. Maddox plodded toward him, snarling, then stopped. For a moment these two manifestations of absolute willpower gazed at each other; then the General laughed his yapping laugh and stepped aside.