“You realize, I suppose,” he said, “that we’re heading straight into the middle of the Map Country?”
“I had noticed.”
“So?”
“That’s where Allan is likely to be. You can knock out those clanking beasts, tanks or whatever they are, with your grenades. You’ve done it once. You can do it again.”
And that, he reflected with due solemnity, was Polly Gould to the life.
Around them as the car fled along the naked strip of road the country unfolded, green dales merging gradually into a broad and monotonously flat plain, dotted with clumps of trees and threaded by the glint of lazy rivers. Distant purple and silver mountains marched forever just on the edge of vision, hurling their peaks against the sky, a wickedly beautiful frieze of spears.
Aloof, the sky remained high and blue and distant, speckled with drifting cotton-wool clouds, and in the air mingled scents told of wild thyme and fragrant herbs and heavy-headed flowers sensually filling the world with a bouquet to relish. This was a country in which a man’s spirit could expand unconfined by pressing walls of concrete and steel and his lungs could breathe a pure air uncontaminated by carbon monoxide and diesel fumes. In other circumstances the scene would have been peaceful and enchanting. But not now, not in the wild and misty bog-lands of Ireland, not where it should be dark with night and hazed with mist and rain and the shredding scurry of the storm-wrack above.
The sun did not look to be at the right declination for this time of year. Crane took out his pocket compass — without which no map-enthusiast is correctly dressed — and flicked open the cover. After a moment he took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and then opened them and looked again at the compass.
“For your information, Polly,” he said carefully, “the north magnetic pole is now situated somewhere around the south pole. I thought you might be interested.”
“How can you be sure? Oh, yes, I know the north should be on our left; but we might have got twisted around—”
“No soap, Polly. For two reasons. One is the boastful one that like a number of people I have map-sense, natural orientation. Lead me around the maze and I know — but how I know I don’t know, if you follow — just which way is the right way to get out.”
“Lucky you.”
“Don’t mention it. The other reason is hanging up there in the sky. We might just have become twisted about enough to be traveling west instead of east, and I might be wrong in imagining my map-sense has stuck with me into the Map Country. But the sun shows we’re traveling east. The norm magnetic pole is now down deep south.”
The look on Polly’s face surprised Crane. He had expected incredulity, perhaps, after that first remonstrance, or a girlish indifference to odd scientific facts. Instead she nodded with certainty, and said: “Wasn’t the north magnetic pole in the Antarctic about a million years ago, last time?”
“Last time?”
“Well, even I know it has changed poles from time to time in the course of Earth’s development. I believe the last time compasses would have pointed south was a million years ago. Wasn’t that one of the results from I.G.Y.?”
“So you’re suggesting that the Map Country exists a million years ago, that we’ve gone through into the past?”
“Could be.”
She was damned matter-of-fact about it, Crane grumbled to himself. Far too contained and perky — or was it merely that he was the old woman of the party, the chicken-hearted, the frightened?
The tank had now dropped behind them, lost along the road beyond the gentle undulations that appeared so slight and yet were enough to hide the clanking monster’s metallic vermilion body. The flat plain was in reality like a petrified ocean, ridged with long rollers athwart their line of passage.
“And still only one damned road.”
“We can’t go back,” Crane agreed. “That’s certain. Not, that is, unless we knock out that second tank.” He was stubbornly determined to think of the clanking monsters not as that but as mere tanks. They were probably robotic or remote-controlled; he didn’t care to dwell on who or what might be driving them otherwise.
The car slid gently across the crown of the road, skimmed the offside verge and then, as Polly turned the wheel, surged back onto the left-hand lane again. Crane looked at her. “I don’t suppose they obey the Highway Code here,” he said. “And you needn’t bother about driving on the left; but what was that swerve for?”
He hadn’t yet sorted out an acceptable formula to enable him to suggest he take over the driving without upsetting her or running the risk of a blazing barrage of scorn.
Polly bit her lip. “I don’t know, Rolley. The car just went by itself — whoops — here we go again.”
The car snaked up the road. Crane gripped the door strap and held on anxiously. “I know we’ve had a hectic day, followed by a bizarre night and I should feel tired. But I don’t. Perhaps it’s the air here; but I feel more alive than I have in ages.”
“Me too.”
Polly wrested with the wheel, spinning this way and then, as the car skittered across the road, spinning that. The frown of concentration on her face, the grim set to her jaw, all added to Crane’s fear.
“Maybe the steering’s gone haywire…. Slow down!”
He was looking hard at her; yet a movement beyond her profile attracted his attention. Out there on the plain the trees thrashed in wild motion. He saw a clump with their strange towering trunks and feathery clumped heads bending and bowing, lashing down until they brushed the ground and then whipping back the other way like giant stockmen’s whips so rapidity he felt sure their trunks must snap.
“Slow down!” he shouted again, stricken with unreasoning panic.
Out there the whole plain was moving: the long rollers of grass were rolling in reality, were surging forward and up and down like the monstrous waves of a blasphemous sea. His mouth open in horror and his eyes staring, Crane saw that maelstrom of solid earth, and he cowered down on the seat of the car.
“Good God!” Polly screamed. She stamped on the brake.
The Austin slid to a halt. Now they could clearly see the sinuous writhings of the road; like a rippling length of white rope it gyrated away before them.
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. But anything can happen here — and it evidently does!”
“I feel sick, Rolley.”
“This is just about the most basic fear a man or a woman has to face, Polly. The ground beneath your feet is a part of everyday life, so natural and permanent a thing you don’t even think of it at all. But when you’re caught in an earthquake and the whole ground begins to move beneath your feet, then you’re faced with the destruction of sanity itself. You can hide from thunder and lightning, take shelter from rain and hail, fight free from a flood and even escape a volcano. But an earthquake when the very ground shivers in fear… there’s nowhere to hide then, Polly, nowhere to hide at all. And your mind can’t accept that. If you just let your unconscious instincts take over, you’re finished, old girl. You have to think and reason your way through — it’s the only way….”
Crane had been desperately wondering just how long he would have to keep up this pretentious line of talk before Polly caught the spark, hit back, regained her blend of scorn and cockiness towards him. She sat back, pressing her slender shoulders back into the leather coat, breathing deeply.
“Look, Rolley,” she said at last. “The road remains firm. It goes up and down and around; but it is nowhere broken. It stays there all the time.”
And Crane knew she had conquered her basic fears.
“Reminds me of those fantastic inventions the wheezes boys got up to during the war. They built a road from links and slats across the sea ready for D-Day. They sent a truck across it and then a motor torpedo boat sailed past at full knots. The road waved around just like the road we’re on now.” Crane smiled; but he didn’t reach across and touch Polly reassuringly. “But the truck stuck on as though glued; it looked somehow impossible, to see a truck chugging along a road swashing up and down in the sea.”