They met back at the main gate, Thacker in his green coveralls and respirator, Dickson in his shiny white spaceman’s suit and plastic-fronted helmet.
‘I suppose getting a lift’s out of the question?’ asked Dickson.
‘It’s not far,’ said Thacker, and started walking. Again, he’d traded his sidearm for a rifle.
They crunched along the gravel drive, and watched as zephyrs of wind caught the grey ash and sent it drifting across the dead ground.
‘Wind’s picking up,’ said Dickson. ‘Front coming in from the south-west. It’ll be raining by tomorrow morning.’
‘The dust’s inert.’
‘I hope that’s the case. It’s what I told the Prime Minister this morning. I even mentioned your name, so that when three-eyed fish start invading the capital, he knows who to blame.’
Thacker half-smiled, but the situation was too serious. They were approaching the heavy front doors, sealed with fluttering biohazard tape. The two bio-suited guards on duty were edgy. ‘We’re going in to take a look. Shut the doors up behind us and make certain it’s us coming out. We’ll give the password of the day.’
The guards stood aside, and as Thacker pushed the door inwards, they levelled their guns at the shade inside. Dickson stepped through and Thacker nodded to the soldiers.
The door clanged shut, making Dickson start.
‘It’s not haunted, you know.’
‘Did I ever say it was? Where’s this thing kept?’
‘Up the stairs, left at the top.’ Thacker led the way through the ageing house. ‘Strange. For a building built in 1840, it should only be eighty years old according to its own internal clock. It feels so much older, older than the hundred and sixty years it really is. Like it’s tired of being Henbury Hall, and wants to be a pile of rubble instead.’
Dickson, close behind, said: ‘You’re anthropomorphizing. Buildings don’t feel.’
‘I was in Germany at one of the old concentration camps. You’ll never convince me that bricks and mortar can’t remember.’
The corridor had changed from his last visit. All the open doors along its length were pools of darkness, but the passage itself was basking in late sunlight. It made everything look different, but it still felt unutterably sad all the same. He breezed down its length, gaze flicking into each empty room, but there was none of the close-quarter searching of earlier.
It was odd. He had the sensation that he ought to take more care, but there was nothing concrete to pin it on.
‘It’s in here. Through the connecting door.’
Dickson peeked in, took in the desk and chair, and the spilled papers on the floor.
‘Sorry about the mess. My fault,’ said Thacker. He shuffled the closely-written sheets back into a semblance of order and put them back on the desk.
Dickson was standing at the second doorway, hands on the frame, staring at the impossible machine in front of him. ‘You know what these symbols are, don’t you?’
‘Hieroglyphs. See? A Classics degree from Oxford does have some use.’
‘Where the hell did this thing come from?’ He stalked around it, much like Thacker had done. ‘Before or after the disappearance?’
‘I think,’ said Thacker, ‘this might give us some of the answers.’ He held up a book covered with faded red leather. He flicked through the pages, stopping at random. ‘This seems to be a diary, a journal. Everything here needs to be bagged, checked and catalogued. I found some plans earlier. At least, that’s what they looked like.’ He interrupted himself. ‘Dickson, don’t touch those.’
Dickson’s hand was resting on one of the three levers. He lifted it away. ‘Sorry. Curiosity.’
‘Good job you’re not a cat, then.’ Thacker looked at the last entry in the journal and found it written in a different style. He leafed back until the handwriting changed again. He could make out 31st July, 1919. Subsequent pages were undated. He looked back at the very front. ‘Jack Henbury. We’ve got Jack Henbury’s diary, but no Jack. What do you reckon?’
Dickson was on his belly, inspecting the base of the machine. ‘Can’t see any power supply. It must have some sort of engine. Perhaps the forcefield collapsed because it ran out of juice.’
‘It’s still puttering along. You can feel it humming.’
Dickson got up and brushed himself down. ‘We need to get this somewhere safe. Aldermaston?’
‘It’s close, and they’ve got good containment facilities. I don’t fancy trying to move it before we know how it works.’
‘We may not know until we move it.’
‘I, for one, am not vanishing for the next eight decades and getting back in time to see my grandchildren get married.’ Thacker started to stack up all the papers and books on the desk. ‘I would strongly recommend we don’t shift that thing until we know a lot more about it.’
Dickson circled it again. ‘It’s not secure here. It makes me nervous. Though I’m rather assuming that this is the origin of the forcefield, and as such is of unimaginable importance, rather than being a heap of ancient Egyptian junk.’
‘The light’s starting to go. If you’ll carry the papers, we’ll be out of here.’
‘Why am I doing the donkey work?’
‘Because I have the rifle, and I’d like to be able to shoot someone without asking politely for them to wait while I free my hands.’
Dickson gathered up the neat pile Thacker had made. ‘Can you imagine London protected by a forcefield like that? It could vanish off the map. Nothing could touch it, no bomb or missile, nothing. It could reappear a minute later and no-one inside would even notice it had happened.’
‘Interesting hypothesis, Dickson. Of course, twenty million mad Londoners might just burn the whole city down in an orgy of self-destruction, if Henbury and Adams are anything to go by.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That pile of wood in the banqueting hall isn’t some interesting piece of modern art. It’s a bonfire, and it seems I got there just in time to stop them lighting it. It says so in that journal you’re carrying. Amongst other interesting things. We really do need to have a proper chat with our returnees. They didn’t seem to have the energy to walk, but plenty enough to smash furniture into kindling.’
Once out of the house, Thacker shouldered his rifle and took a fair share of the paperwork.
‘Look, Dickson, I don’t mean be a damp squib. A forcefield that’ll stop cannon fire but lets air through is going to be of real interest to everyone. Especially the Pentagon. I’m sure there are more applications for it than we can dream of. But I’ve been inside it when it was up and running, and it felt all wrong. Clearly Henbury and Adams thought so…’
‘If they are who they say they are.’
‘So we’ll send photographs to Emily Foster.’
‘And what about on the inside?’
‘CAT scan them both. If they don’t die of future shock, we’ll know. But you’re missing the point. That machine shouldn’t exist. Do you really think if the ancient Egyptians possessed such power, we wouldn’t be celebrating the enthronement of Rameses the eight hundredth as Emperor of the world? Or if we had access to that sort of technology, the Great War would have lasted five minutes. Or five hundred years, depending on who had it.’
Dickson tried to scratch his nose, but had forgotten he was wearing an air-tight bubble around his head. ‘Damn it, I want a cigarette.’
‘And where’s Jack Henbury?’
‘Do you think they might have killed him?’
‘If Jack had the machine first, they might well have done. I think it backfired on them. They didn’t know how to work it. Instead of going away for five minutes, they were away for eighty years.’