Thomas said, ‘There’s a saying: Come the hour, come the man.’
‘You have to admit he’s a bit… brittle.’
‘You are right, of course.’ Thomas returned to the workbench and experimentally flexed one of the cables that connected the battery terminal with Carswell’s impromptu rocket triggers. ‘But although my name might be Thomas, I am no doubter. I believe that, when Man is in crisis, the Lord God does send help. Even if at times it is in a perplexing form.’ He picked up the loose cable and looked at it thoughtfully for a moment. ‘And I do believe that, however difficult and challenging Mr Carswell’s personality might be, he is heaven-sent.’
‘Heaven-sent?’
Thomas lightly brushed the frayed end of the wire against the terminal. Instantly there was a loud pffft. With a brilliant flash, a perfect smoke ring rose from the bowl towards the ceiling of the barn.
‘You were right, Jud,’ Thomas said. ‘The wire was cracked in the casing, after all.’
Jud gave a wry smile. ‘Come on, Sam, it’s time we cultivated an appetite for humble pie.’
44
Wednesday morning, 22nd December 1865.
Jud and Sam worked on the king post. This was the vertical pole that protruded through the centre of the bus’s roof. Rigging cables ran down to the stumpy ‘wings’ at either side of the bus that carried the rocket-launcher tubes. Each ‘wing’ was probably around ten feet long, four feet wide and consisted of wooden spars held together with glue and nails. Lashed by cord to the wing spars were the rocket-launcher tubes themselves. They looked like lengths of drainpipe around five feet long, and they pointed forward in line with the body of the bus. If anything, the criss-cross effect of spars resembled what lay beneath the canvas skin of an old-time aeroplane. A skeleton of wood that, to Jud, looked far too fragile.
Sam and Jud slithered across the slippery roof of the bus, tying rigging cables to the king post.
‘Get them good and tight,’ Carswell called from his platform in the hayloft. ‘The rocket tubes must be in alignment when they’re fired.’
Jud gave a kind of salute and smiled.
Then, under his breath, he said, ‘If I keep sweet-talking him much longer it’s going to send me barking mad.’
‘Just keep smiling as you work; it was a miracle we got him back here again… Jud, catch hold of the rope. It’s slipping from the post. Damn.’
The line already tied to the tip of the wing assembly slipped off the bus’s roof and onto the barn floor.
‘I’ll get it,’ Jud sighed. ‘I need a sharper knife to trim these lines anyway.’
Sam watched the others at work for a moment.
His description of the activity he saw would have been that it was a kind of symphony of endeavour. Every one of those accidental time travellers was working. Sometimes there were quieter periods when there was hardly any noise as people attended to small-scale detailed jobs: plaiting string, threading wiring through the wings, fixing small screws, or just talking in whispers. Then, as if they were in some kind of mystical harmony with each other, they turned to work of a larger scale: hammering metal plates, furiously sawing timber while workers whistled and people shouted for more tools. The sounds would rise to a crescendo, becoming the fortissimo movement of that symphony of endeavour. Then the whole barn would be a swarm of movement as a hundred different sounds rose to a near-deafening, teeth-vibrating climax.
And above it all, Carswell worked at his pieces of paper, calculating, sketching, pondering, occasionally breaking off to watch his people labouring.
‘Sam… Sam. Catch the line.’ Jud threw the line back up onto the bus’s roof.
Sam caught it deftly enough and began feeding it through one of the iron rings set into the top of the king post. The post itself ran down through a hole in the bus’s metal roof, down again through into the floor of the passenger compartment, then on down farther into the luggage hold beneath, where it was secured to a hefty baulk of timber bolted to the chassis of the bus.
Good God, at least we’re making progress.
What they didn’t need now was to hit some fundamental flaw in Carswell’s plans. Not for the first time, it occurred to Sam that it would be touch and go whether they could even get the king post under the frame of the barn door, high though it was.
Jud’s brain worked in a similar direction. ‘Not that I want to pour cold water on Carswell’s plans at this stage, but…’
‘Go on.’
‘But he’s been making some basic practical errors.’
‘I know. I still wouldn’t like to bet my life on those light bulb fuses firing the rockets.’
‘And he had me box in the bus driver’s compartment with the wooden doors before he told me I had to cut slots so the driver could see out. It seems obvious now, but at the time he was keeping us in the dark.’
‘That’s deliberate,’ Sam said. ‘He likes to keep us ignorant of his master plan so it shows him up as some kind of genius.’
‘Which will cause problems. It might not seem a major difficulty, but if I could have chiselled those view-slots while I had the doors out there on the ground it would have taken me half the time that it did after they were in place.’ He held up a hand with three fingers bound in sticking plaster. ‘Cost me a drop or two of blood, trying to chop the wood out at a difficult angle. If only he’d explained what he wanted earlier it would have saved time as well as blood and effort.’
‘He sees himself as the grand architect.’ Sam heaved the line tight through the iron ring on the king post. ‘He’s not going to welcome us suggesting we form a committee to oversee his plans.’
‘I know, but I wish he’d have the sense to agree to some kind of consultation before we actually begin the next job. I was a carpenter for 25 years, surely that experience counts for something?’
‘Not in his eyes, Jud. If you grab that end of the line I’ll cut it… There, got it. No, if anything the human element is going to be the weak link. After all, he’s expecting 19th Century soldiers to man the guns on this bus – a machine they’ve never seen before – and perhaps fire the guns as the damn thing charges across a field at maybe 40 miles an hour. Rather than loading and firing they’re going to be hanging on for dear life.’
‘Then maybe we should be talking our concerns through with Carswell?’
‘Yeah,’ Sam said doubtfully. ‘But who’s going to break it to him that he’s going to have stop playing the dictator and start accepting advice from others?’
‘Well, it certainly won’t be now. Here come the cavalry.’
At that moment troops arrived on horseback. They were dressed in bright red coats and wore brass helmets from which crests of green feathers caught the still-falling snowflakes. A moment later field guns, hauled by sturdy ponies, arrived in the farmyard. The gun barrels were a silvery-gold in colour and perhaps seven inches in diameter and five feet in length.
Sam grinned. ‘It looks as if the Reverend Thomas Hather has a silver tongue after all. He’s persuaded the military to join us.’
‘Hell. Take a look at those cannon. They’re solid-looking brutes, aren’t they? It’s going to take some sweat hauling them on board here.’
‘As Carswell might say, there’s no time like the present.’
Carswell, after gentle persuasion by Jud and Sam, agreed to introduce a shift system of working to allow the exhausted men and women to sleep. Even so, he stipulated that these rest periods would be limited to five hours.
However, with the arrival of the troops the conversion work did become easier – once the men had overcome their surprise at the bizarre machines taking shape there in the barn. Strange devices like the bus, with its mast, rigging lines and stumpy wings. Then there was the Range Rover with its own wing-like rocket launchers sprouting either side at its roof level. And there also were the other motley vehicles, from the ice-cream van (still garishly painted with pictures of comets and lollies) to the domestic cars. The cars would be used as support vehicles for the bus and Range Rover gunships.