“There are quite a few Oscars in town today,” Miz Harley said comfortably. “I’ll bet they get here first.”
“Hope they do—the police is too soft.” Peace’s captor gave him another shake. “We should’ve thrown all these Earthie Blue-asses off the planet altogether in ‘83. I blame the Government, of course. What was the point in us beating the tripes out of them in the war, and then letting them walk all over the place terrifying innocent kiddies?”
“Innocent kiddy!” Peace was stung to protest, although the mention of Oscars had chilled his blood. “That little swine was… Wait a minute! We won the war in ‘83.”
“Oh, yeah?” The big man gave a rumbling laugh. “It looks that way, doesn’t it? You don’t see our boys going about with no shoes. You don’t see our boys going around dressed in trampy fourth-rate gear.” Warming to his subject, he transferred his hold to the shoulders of Peace’s jacket. “Look at this stuff, Miz Harley. Why it’s no better than … paper!”
The break in the big man’s rhetoric was occasioned by the fact that Peace, on the instant of feeling the restraints transferred from his person to his clothing, had begun to run for the cinema exit. There was a loud ripping sound and his jacket, already seriously weakened by the day’s escapades, disintegrated entirely. Clad in only a half-sleeved shirt and lightweight hose, he darted out into the street and, with a curious feeling that all this had happened to him before, turned left and ran like a gazelle, scarcely feeling the ground beneath his feet. He made ready to fend off busy-bodies who might try to interfere with his escape, but his progress along the narrow thoroughfare was strangely unimpeded. The late afternoon shoppers, who would normally have been intrigued by the sight of a partially clad man fleeing through the city had drawn close to the walls and were staring at something further along the street in the direction in which Peace was running. He narrowed his eyes against the low-slanting rays of the sun, and promptly skidded to a standstill, his mouth contorted by shock.
Coming towards him, the light glinting on the enormous bronze muscles of their shoulders, were two Oscars.
Peace had no recollection of having seen similar beings in the past, but neither had he any difficulty in matching them to Dinkle’s description. The hairless domes of their heads and overall metallic sheen of their nude bodies were unmistakable, as were the massive torsos which tapered down to lean hips and powerful thighs. They paused in their effortless loping run, appeared to confer for a second or two, and then—as if they truly were telepathic and could see into Peace’s soul—ran towards him, glaring with terrible ruby eyes.
“Oh, God,” Peace quavered. He remained transfixed with terror for what seemed an eternity before leaping sideways into an alley which emerged between two stores. The adrenalin-boosted fleetness he had shown earlier was as nothing compared to the superhuman speed he now developed within a few windmilling strides. Aware that he had to be breaking the galactic sprint records, Peace risked a backwards glance and saw that the long stretch of alley was still deserted. He was beginning to feel a glow of self-congratulation when the wall just behind him burst asunder in a shower of bricks and the two Oscars, who had cheated by taking a diagonal shortcut through the building, appeared at his heels.
Peace emitted a falsetto scream and went into a kind of athletic overdrive which took him beyond the reach of grasping metallic fingers. He caromed around a corner and saw, a short distance ahead of him, an oddly familiar doorway above which was a faded sign reading: ACME RAINCOAT CO. He flew to it, burst open the door and ran up a dark flight of stairs.
He paused on a shabby landing and saw before him yet another door which was labelled in barely decipherable letters, “Female Toilets— Acme Employees Only”.
I refuse to hide in any more lavatories, he thought, but at that instant the outer door to the building crashed open with a splintering sound and the two bronze figures came pounding up the stairs, their eyes glowing redly in the dimness.
Peace shouldered his way into the toilets, and realized at once that he was trapped. The tiny room in which he found himself was filthy and disused, obviously a century old or more, and had no other exits. Its sole illumination came from a cobwebbed skylight which, even had he been able to reach it, was too small to clamber through. He turned, clutching at a last straw, to bolt the door—but discovered he was too late.
The Oscars were already standing in the doorway, stooping to peer at him below the lintel.
Peace backed away from them, dumbly shaking his head. His heels encountered a projection on the floor and he sat down with bone-jarring force on the ancient toilet seat.
A curious humming noise filled the room and— before Peace’s petrified, disbelieving eyes—the menacing figures of the Oscars became transparent and faded into thin air.
7
Peace ogled the empty doorway for several pounding seconds, wondering what had happened to the bronze giants. It seemed impossible for such massive figures to become insubstantial and then vanish entirely, but there was no denying the evidence of his own eyes.
Or was there?
As the shock of his strange reprieve began to wear off, Peace’s awareness of his surroundings grew more acute and he realized that peculiar things were happening all around him in the little room. The walls and ceiling were beginning to look cleaner and fresher, cracks were disappearing from the plaster, and the paintwork—contrary to the natural order of things—was renewing itself, and even changing colour.
There was a pervasive energetic humming noise and the light from the overhead window was flickering in a disturbing way. Peace gnawed his lower lip as he tried to connect the last two effects with something in his previous experience. A picture of a baby Aspatrian lobster scooting around in a tank sprang into his mind, and he gave a moan of dismay as a full understanding of his predicament swiftly followed.
The two Oscars had not faded into nothingness. They had remained solid, securely anchored in the year 2386, while he—Warren Peace—had faded out of their sight.
He was adrift in a runaway time machine! “This can’t happen to me,” Peace said aloud, obstinately shaking his head, but his brain was dredging up other pertinent memories. The waiter in the Blue Toad had described his portable time machine as a single-acting introverter, which implied the existence of other types, among which might be a double-acting extroverter—whatever that was. If an introverter altered the rate of time within its framework and left the outside world unaffected, an extroverter might—Peace struggled with unfamiliar concepts—maintain a normal time flow internally and cause the external universe to age or grow younger. The phrase “double-acting” suggested that an operator had the choice of going backwards or forwards in time, but Peace was not operating the machine he had blundered into. He had no idea of where its controls were, nor of the temporal direction in which he was travelling, nor why anybody should have been crazy enough to secrete a time machine in a raincoat factory toilet in the first place.