She was shoved roughly aside. “Don’t touch it, you fool!” Robert cried in a voice that was choked with fear. “The door is filled with electricity.” He pulled her away with enough force to knock her down again. She was up almost at once. By then, he was already standing before the tube. He looked at it for a moment. Then he stepped back. “God give me strength and preserve me!” he said calmly in Old French. He picked up the metal bench with both hands, and swung it and let go. As it struck against the lower part of the tube, he gave a wild and agonised bellow and flew backwards, blue sparks playing over the exposed area of his chainmail. There was a simultaneous loud smashing of glass, and a louder flash of burned out circuitry.
No longer caring if the door would hold, Jennifer ran forward and pulled at Michael. His heavy jerkin saved him from the shards of glass that lay round him. She pulled him harder, and he came properly free just as the upper part of the tube gave way and, with a flash of circuitry that hadn’t gone in the general burn out, fell like a jagged guillotine. The room was filled with smoke and the smell of unextinquished electrical fires.
There was a single and very loud smack of something against the glass wall. It was easy to guess what this might be. But Jennifer was pulling madly at the straps that held smoking, fizzing wires to Michael’s head. Careless of the guns that would surely soon be jammed into her body, she got Michael onto his back and patted his face. “Michael! Michael!” she wept. “Come back to me.”
He opened his eyes and blinked. He tried to sit up, but failed. He moved his lips in what might have been Greek, and smiled. “I saw things,” he whispered, “that I remembered from the dreams I had last year. They made no sense the first time, but a little more now.”
Jennifer put her arms about Michael and pulled him over beside Robert, who was sitting up and looking at hands that wouldn’t stop trembling. “Did I really see God?” he asked, still in Old French. “Or was it the Virgin who saved us?” He stroked Michael’s hair. “Someone told me the boy would live.” There was another and much louder smack on the glass, after which angry shouting could be heard from the main room. Somehow, Michael was getting to his feet. She got up with him and took his arm, and looked over at what had been a glass wall, but that was now a cobweb of cracks with a small hole in its middle. She helped Michael across the floor to see through a hole that, with a continual popping and jumping away of glass cubes, widened by the second. If they were both to die, they might as well see how the end would come.
How to take in the changes of the previous two minutes? She’d already seen that the bigger Gateway was dead. Her first clear sight was of the two guards. They both lay face down on the floor, one of them still moving his legs, the other in a pool of blood. Clutching at a darker patch on the right shoulder of his uniform, Rockville twisted like an agonised worm a few yards beyond them. Still beyond connected thought, Jennifer felt that the shrill cries of pain and fear must be his. Her main sight, though, was of two Abigail Hoopers. As if thrown far away from the one Gateway still in operation, they were getting to their feet beside the door from the room. Not speaking, they stared at each other.
“Take your friends back against the far wall,” a voice warned. “You’re in the firing line, and I don’t know how precious General Rockville is to his President.” A cigarette dangling between his lips, Radleigh had squeezed himself into a corner of the room where he couldn’t be seen from the other side of the Gateway. In both hands he held Robert’s gun—the big revolver she’d grabbed in Tenterden, and that Michael had carried in so much hope all the way to Ulm. She’d have recognised its shape anywhere. How Radleigh had guessed he’d not be put through the body scanners here was only one mystery to add to the others.
It was Rockville who brought her to her senses. “In God’s name, Bill,” he gasped—“get me out of here. It’s all a Goddam Limey double cross.” He tried to crawl towards a Gateway that was already turning dull. He got eighteen inches, before the movement of his wounded shoulder sent him into a screaming, curled up ball of pain.
Radleigh took out his cigarette. “I’d stand away from that lever, dear boy,” he said to Sweeting. “Or would you like to feel your bladder shot away?”
The Hooper Jennifer had known was on her feet. “Have you gone mad, Basil?” She stood away from her counterpart, who, opening and closing her mouth, remained crouching. She walked into the centre of the room. She pulled her jacket and skirt into order, and tried for the voice she used on television. “Get her back through while you can. Do you want to get us all killed?”
“She’s right,” Sweeting added. Ignoring Radleigh’s gun, he hurried across to the Gateway, and pushed his hand through. It was beginning to set. Gun still in his hand, the President backed away with a shouted warning. Sweeting turned to Radleigh. “Get her through while you still can,” he urged. “Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”
He spoke again, about timings and repairs. But his words were covered by a savage roar. Perhaps thirty seconds had passed since he’d sat, shocked as a child who’s survived pushing a fork into an electrical socket. Now, Robert pushed Jennifer and Michael aside to leap through the shattered glass wall and lay hold of Mike Wapping.
“Oh, no—please!” Wapping squealed, as he was carried in one hand towards the Gateway. On the other side, the President snarled an obscenity and took aim at Robert. But, like an insect dropped into pond water, Wapping struck against the Gateway just in front of Hagen. Screaming and twisting, he was held there, one arm and his lower body dangling free on the other side. Slowly, his weight carried him downward on both sides of the fast-dulling Gateway. Robert laughed and gave a hard push. Excepting his left forearm, Wapping’s whole body went through. Too late, Hagen fired at Robert. The first bullet struck against the Gateway with a dull, plopping sound. It worked its way through, to fall uselessly at Robert’s feet. The next shot recoiled, and Jennifer dimly saw O’Halloran jerk backwards, his chest spurting blood. Watching the reflection of Robert’s grinning face take shape, she heard a cry of pain and incredulity though the voice contact speaker, and saw Wapping’s left arm drop twitching to the floor.
“Rot in hell, bag of stinking filth!” Robert chuckled. He looked down and stamped on the fingers of the severed arm. He turned and bowed to Jennifer. “Call that my wedding gift, O Little Bear,” he said with one of his nastier laughs. He stamped again, and sent one of the bullets skipping across the floor.
Radleigh walked over to the speaker and switched it off. The rising chaos of shouts and the sound of sound of more gunfire went off abruptly, and everyone stood in a silence broken only by strange but distant clattering noises from outside the room.
The main Hooper was first to speak. “Why?” she asked. She tried to say more, but her voice was shaking too much. “Why?” she whispered.
Radleigh sat down, and flicked the ash that had accumulated on his cigarette. “Oh,” he said easily, “I’ve been working towards this moment ever since Brother Lawrence told me about the Gateway.” He pointed at Robert, who was still breathing like a steam engine. “I don’t imagine this oaf understood what he was doing. But he took things a stage further than I’d thought possible.” He smiled at Hooper and tightened his grip on the gun. “Did you ever trouble yourself during PPE at Oxford with a reading of Paradise Lost?” He laughed at the dead look on her face. “Probably not,” he sneered. “I’ve only ever heard you quote from John Rawls.” Bending his arm to keep the gun trained from an easier position, he quoted: