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 round 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 spoilt 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 round 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 towards them again, then away.