Jota and I were striding into the camp. For a moment we faltered and stared at each other. Then Greg, enjoying himself, was saying: "No argument, please. Just get out."
Grinning at me in a not unfriendly way was Wesley. And I knew from his expression that the duels were something more than a figment of imagination. He looked exactly as if I had beaten him, fair and square, in any contest, and he was ready to admit it.
But there was no blood. He was unscratched, as I was.
It wasn't quite the same as the last time we had entered the camp. This time they were expecting us, lined up. The sunbathers were there too, on their feet. The shy girl had fastened her bra.
In a second sense, Jota came to life.
"No," he said. "I'd like to stay here with you. In fact, I will."
Greg frowned. "That was meant as a warning. If you -- "
"I'm warned," said Jota easily. "Now I'd like to stay with you for a while. I'll be no bother -- I've camped out often."
All the giants seemed taken aback.
"I'll even promise not to ask questions," Jota said. "Gosh, it's hot." He started taking off his jacket.
"We'll throw you out," said Greg.
"And I'll come back," Jota said. "I came back from the dead, didn't I?"
"We arranged that," said Greg ominously. "Next time we won't loop you back."
Jota had his jacket off and was unbuttoning his shirt. "Can someone lend me a pair of shorts?" he asked.
Greg suddenly laughed -- the bellow that had rattled the windows of my office. "I like you," he said.
"Most people do," said Jota.
"You're a bit like me," said Greg.
"In more ways than one," said Jota softly. And now he was speaking with significance.
There was a sudden silence. Jota knew something he wasn't supposed to know.
I was out of this, yet not entirely out of it, not without some clue. I had known Jota a long time . . .
"Remember," Greg said, "I killed you."
"Remember," Jota said, "I let you."
They suddenly all decided by common consent that if Jota was halfway one of them, I certainly wasn't. " He can't stay," Greg told Jota.
"That's all right," said Jota calmly. "I don't need anyone to hold my hand."
They were going to let him stay. He was going to have his way, as usual. And I knew he'd had this idea in his head all along.
Jota, despite a wide variety of personal contacts that were fleeting or lasting, was a lone wolf. He didn't want me with him. He wanted to do this his way.
"What's your name?" he asked one of the girls, the prettiest next to Miranda.
"Irwina," she said.
"Let's go and dangle our toes in the water -- after somebody lends me a pair of shorts."
Greg looked at me. "Get out," he said briefly.
I didn't argue. Jota, living in the camp, was bound to learn a lot -- perhaps everything there was to learn.
I walked away and left them.
It was quicker to walk back along the river bank than it would have been to cut across country to the road into town.
There was no point in going back to the office. I knew I couldn't do anything useful that afternoon. Fighting for your life, even if you win, doesn't leave you cool, calm and collected.
To say I was shaken was an understatement. Unharmed, unscratched though I was, I had lived the nightmare. Jota had died, and yet he had experienced less than I had. I could still feel the pain in my wrist, the warm dripping of blood. I would never forget what it was like to fight for my life, knowing the only choice was to kill or be killed. Nor would I forget what it was like to be a killer.
If I ever killed again, there would have to be a reason, a stronger reason even than self-defense. Until then I had not realized there could be a stronger reason. Yet if you kill merely to avoid being killed, you don't want to kill. If you kill in anger or hate, you mean it . . .
I was going home to have a stiff whisky, or two, or three. Sheila was out. And Dina would have gone to the Carswells.
I was glad Sheila wouldn't be at home. If a man and woman are close, married or not, everything that happens has to be shared, and as soon as possible. Once I'd have been running home to tell Sheila what had happened, to talk it out with her. As it was I was impatient to get into a cool, darkened room, out of the sun, with a glass and a bottle of Glen Grant.
I meant to get drunk. Yet I don't drink a lot, and seldom alone.
Ahead of me, I saw a swimmer in the river. And what a swimmer! She was moving away, gaining on me. She must therefore have slipped into the water, unnoticed, just in front of me.
Although I could see only her dark head, she must be Miranda. Nobody in Shuteley could swim like that.
I guessed at once where she was going.
When three or six or a dozen out of the ordinary things happen at more or less the same time, the chances of a connection between them are overwhelming. Miranda was swimming downriver. She wasn't swimming lazily, as anyone might on a hot day. She was swimming with a purpose, to get somewhere.
About half a mile downriver, on the south side, was the copse where I had seen the unexplained, inexplicable radiance. And short of going all the way to Shuteley, crossing there, coming back on the other side and then walking up our drive, past the house and through the garden, the only way to reach it from the giants' camp was to swim or use a boat.
I started to run. I wanted to be in the copse before Miranda, to hide and see what happened. Unless I ran I had no chance of beating her there, because I had to run past the copse to where Jota and I had left the dinghy, row myself over and get myself established in the copse before Miranda arrived.
I made it. I was across the river and well hidden at the bottom of the garden just before Miranda swam up the first inside leg of the W bend.
I saw her climb onto the bank, shaking the water from her hair . . . then she said, not loudly: "Come out, Val."
There was no point in going on pretending. I stood up, pushed my way through the bushes, and joined her on the small strip of grass at the edge of the river.
"You saw me?" I said.
"I saw your boat."
At the point where I crossed, only a tiny stretch of river past the bends was visible. By a piece of bad luck, Miranda must have been exactly at that point when I was rowing myself across.
She sat down on the grass. Her swimsuit was a brief white two-piece, and I had never seen anything so lovely as her in it. Not sexy -- that, too, of course, but she was genuinely beautiful rather than provocative.
"Where were you?" she asked.
I sat down too. "At the camp. With Jota."
"What happened?"
I told her.
For a moment she was furiously angry, though silent -- the first time I had seen her really alive. But all she said was: "That Greg . . . Of course he'll ruin everything. We knew that. Everybody knew that."
"Ruin what?" I asked.
She ignored that. "And in this crazy duel, Jota just died?"
"He fired his gun in the air."
She nodded. "That figures."
"He said -- and everybody seemed to make sense of it but me -- he let Greg kill him."
She nodded.
"But . . . that's ridiculous. I mean, Jota didn't know the clock was going to be put back. He didn't, I'm certain. So why would he . . . ?"
"That's not what he meant."
"Greg used the word 'loop' . . . 'Next time we won't loop you back.' "
She sighed.
"Ifs some kind of time warp, obviously," I said. "The same thing that enables you to be here, when anyone can see you were born in some other century."
Miranda said: "Val, please give up. I've told you a few unimportant things. There aren't many unimportant things left that I can tell you. But if you promise to stop fishing, we can talk if you like."
An idea stirred in my mind as I noticed that even in a bikini she managed to be more elegant than a Paris model.
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I had, of course, no intention of stopping fishing. What I wanted to do was pull this beautiful fish so far out of water that, gasping for breath, she'd tell me what I wanted to know before I let her off the hook. It might not be possible, but I meant to try.
Her white two-piece was already quite dry. Her pale, creamy skin had already stopped steaming and only her damp hair showed that she had been in the water a few minutes ago.
Until that moment I had thought a bikinl was just a bikini, and a girl wearing one was not so much dressed as censored. But Miranda's two-piece was subtle . . . the bra, with shaped straps, not too small, concealed and revealed her thoughtfully and tastefully, as if a talented artist had painstakingly drawn and re-drawn the lines until his critical eye was satisfied. The briefs, not too tiny either, harmonized with and complemented muscles and curves. Superficially similar, the white two-piece was actually in a completely different class from the brutally utilitarian kind of bikini which is merely insurance against arrest.
"Well?" she said. "Shall I turn round so that you can inspect the other side too?"
"I'm thinking," I said. "Suppose a girl from the seventeenth century were here now. Just an ordinary pretty girl, not the daughter of a duke. She probably wouldn't be very clean. She would have bad teeth. Her face would be marked with smallpox and maybe worse things. Makeup, if any, would be crude. Scars, not properly treated, would mar her skin."
Miranda was listening so intently that I was encouraged.
"Her clothes would be old, imperfectly washed with poor soap, or no soap at all. They'd fit only approximately. If there was a bit of cleavage, it would be unsubtle, almost as if she'd forgotten to put something on. Am I making sense?"
"I'm listening," said Miranda.
"A girl of today," I said, "can make far more of herself without really trying. There's plenty of clean water and good soap, and in this part of the world we've beaten the insect problem. She wears new or nearly new clothes, and they fit. Underneath she can wear lightweight machinery that does a marvelous job on what Nature forgot to do. All kinds of makeup are available, if she happens to know how to use it, and she doesn't have to have bad teeth. However . . . "
I paused. But Miranda Said nothing.
"After another century or two," I said, "purely technical things like better materials and seamless joins will be taken for granted. As well as that, though, experience in design should count for something. Oh, I know none of you would wear the clothes you've been wearing here back where you came from, any more than a girl from my office would go around in 1666 dressed as she is now. But if she went back -- "
"Don't labor it," said Miranda. "You've made your point."
"What puzzles me," I said, "is your curious compromise. I mean, everything I saw in the camp looked right. You've all got your hair cut the right way. Yet just this morning, when you wore a pink suit that would otherwise have been perfectly all right for Shuteley High Street, it was made of luxon."
"Well . . . that was a mistake."
"I thought only Greg made mistakes."
Rather sharply she said: "It's not mistakes Greg makes. Some of the things he does he means. Others he just doesn't care about. A mistake is something you'd take back if you had the chance. Greg wouldn't take anything back."
"But he just did. He looped Jota back."
She decided to surrender on that, yielding on one more thing that didn't matter too much.
"Loop equipment is small and light and the effect is purely local," she said. "There isn't supposed to be a set at the camp, but apparently someone's got one. I'll have to do something about that . . . "
"Just minor gadgetry," I said. "Like luxon. Nothing most."
She looked at me sharply, wondering, as she seemed to have done once or twice, if I was possibly not as primitively moronic as I was supposed to be.
She told me a little more about the loop technique, and I realized that I'd been pretty near the mark. To her, it was minor, unremarkable, which was why she told me about it. In much the same way I might have tried to explain a zip-fastener to a girl of the seventeenth century.
When small, local disaster occurred, you snuffed it out of existence. If an axe slipped and slashed your leg, you snapped back a few seconds and avoided the accident. If a car, carelessly reversed at a harbor, plunged into the dock, you took the careless moments back and braked before the car went over the edge. If you dropped a precious vase and it shattered in a thousand fragments, you turned the second hand back and didn't drop the vase.
It was a useful but very ordinary technique, possibly more significant than paper-clips, zip-fasteners, safety-pins and cigarette lighters, but not to be classed with things like the transistor radio, television or atomic energy . . . she thought.
And it occurred to me for the first time that Miranda was no genius, merely an ordinary girl of her time, fairly intelligent but no deep thinker.
"Another thing," I said. "Food is just food. The quality doesn't matter. Now that's a real surprise. All the indications are that people will become more choosy, not less. But the expected doesn't always come about. I could make a guess . . . Expanding world population makes food supply more and more difficult. And maybe synthetic food isn't practical, at any rate not in your time. So people are conditioned, treated, drugged, trained to regard food as merely fuel. To eat enough but not too much. To be healthy, to avoid anything grossing, never to get fat and never to regard food as an end in itself."
Miranda refused to react, so I prodded her again. "So you do come from the future. Despite all protestations."
She lay right back on the grass. "We're from the present," she said with finality.
"That means we're in the past. Your time is the real time. We're ancient, ignorant, dead savages. That's why we're not real. That's why our problems, our lives, don't matter. That's why the disaster that's going to happen in the next few hours is going to be merely an interesting spectacle. That's why, though you give as little as possible away, you talk with us as I might talk to some ignorant civilian Trojan, not even a soldier, who hasn't the faintest suspicion that the great wooden horse is full of men. If we're not too unimportant to talk to, we're too stupid."
She was sitting up again, starfled. She was breathing deeply and suddenly flushed.
What I had done I didn't know. But whatever it was, it took effect -- as if I, a foreigner, had suddenly spoken to her in her own language; or as if I'd kissed her the way Jota, no doubt, could have done.
She didn't say anything, yet I knew that I had got through to her. And I knew that Miranda was no longer a thousand miles or years out of my reach.
I leaned over and kissed her lightly. She did nothing. I kissed her again, more insistently, more demandingly.
"Let's go up to the house," she said, pushing me away. "Sheila can't be there, or you wouldn't be acting this way. I'm thirsty."
"So," I said, "am I . . . You might as well come up to the house, since you can't do what you were going to do here with me around, can you?"
"No," she admitted, and smiled.
It was the first real smile I'd had from her.
In the house, I tried to make her drink whisky, from ancient motives. But she wanted lemonade. It seemed to startle her when I put ice in it. Evidently this prehistoric method of chilling drinks was strange to her.
Standing in bare feet and a white bikini on the deep carpet of the lounge, she was out of place in a dozen ways. Although I had drawn the curtains in case anyone happened to look through the window, I was uneasy. "Would you like to borrow a dress?" I said. "If Sheila's things are too big for you, Dina's might fit."
"No, thanks," she said. "I'll swim back." A thought struck her. "Who's she?"
"My sister."
I wasn't telling her, I was reminding her. She must know about Dina.
But she didn't. It showed.
And I was startled. How could she know what she knew and not know about Dina?
I started asking questions a
gain. "You didn't know about Dina? You didn't even know she existed? Yet you knew Jota would meet me at 3:10 this afternoon."
"Did I?"
"Greg did. And you wanted to meet him . . . you arrived precisely on cue."
"Tell me about Dina."
"Do you know about my mother?"
"Something . . . she's sick, isn't she?"
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