I might have waited much longer. But as my hearing returned to normal, I heard Jota's voice over the medley of fire sounds. I moved closer, started to go round the stasis machine, and paused incredulously.
"Wake up, damn you," Jota was saying. "Wake up, little cousin. What use are you lying there; while we're stuck in the middle of all this? Wake up, you little darling, and become useful . . . "
He didn't say exactly this. He used all the available oaths, particularly the sexual ones.
I moved further round so that I could see what was going on. Dina was lying on her back, sound asleep, and Jota was kneeling beside her, his back to me.
He shook her, gently at first and then more insistently. He was saying: "There's nothing wrong with you, apart from the thing nobody is supposed to speak about. Wake up, then. Wake up and . . . "
His words then became shockingly obscene. The kind of mindless idiot from whom deliberate coarseness usually comes, who expresses the most earthy ideas in his earthy experience in the most earthy way, doesn't have the intelligence or imagination to make much of a job of it. Indeed, the more earthy he becomes, the less he would shock anybody except elderly spinsters, who never hear such effusions anyway.
But Jota was a master of obscenity.
I might have quite admired his performance in uncommitted wonder if I'd happened to be uncommitted. But the girl was Dina. The fact that Jota was her cousin didn't particularly bother me -- if the law allows cousins to marry, consanguinity ceases to be an issue in all such matters.
What did bother me was that Jota cared for absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was here, and Dina was here, and she wouldn't wake up. He even made it perfectly plain, several times, that in the last resort he didn't care much whether she woke up or not.
That Dina was a child mentally was nothing to him. That there was something unnatural about her sleep was also nothing.
Jota was single-minded.
Why I waited, listening, watching, doing nothing, would have been hard to explain at the time, but not difficult to explain afterwards.
I hadn't forgotten the case of Jota and Sheila.
I had admired Jota, I had envied him, and always I'd been a little afraid of him. What it was about him that I feared I didn't know then, though I could have guessed that the knowledge that nobody had ever stood up to Jota and bested him had a lot to do with it.
If at the first moment when I knew that Jota was trying to seduce my feeble-minded sister I had gone round and shown myself, the incident might have fizzled out completely. Jota would have laughed, I would have cooperated with him in laughing the whole thing off, and that would have been that.
Why I waited was partly to give him enough rope to hang himself, mainly to let myself get so angry that Jota wouldn't be able to make me laugh the whole thing off as we'd done in Sheila's case (except Sheila herself).
Well, that's what it amounted to. I had thrashed Jota, but after that, instead of just contemptuously kicking him out, I had made him promise to be a good boy . . . and if Sheila had been willing, we'd all have pretended to be friends again.
I remembered Dina coming down the stairs that afternoon, and wondered if it was at that moment that Jota decided the conquest of his fair cousin must be delayed no longer.
I got more and more angry.
I moved only when Jota lost his temper, started slapping Dina's face and punched her in the ribs.
"Jota," I said, "if you touch her again, I'll kill you."
He turned his head. And when I saw his face, I knew he was an animal.
Lust makes some of us cheat. But it turns only some of us into animals like Jota. I knew by his face at that moment that when he reached this state -- as he must have done many times -- he had ceased to be anything resembling a human being.
If he had to kill, that was all right.
If the woman died, now or later, that was unimportant.
If she was married, if her life and those of others were going to be altered irrevocably in the next few seconds -- well, what had that to do with Jota?
If she was a feeble-minded kid, his cousin, sleeping peacefully through disaster -- what right had she to sleep when he wanted her?
"Val," was all he said, but his thoughts and emotions showed in his face. At first he had no intention of being diverted. Then anger followed when he realized the difference my presence was bound to make. Then . . . fear?
The fist I planted in his face, rather inexpertly but with considerable force, made up his mind for him. This was neither a love scene nor a conversation piece. It was a fight. He had no choice.
He made a further effort nevertheless. He jumped to his feet and backed away, saying: "Val, let's be reasonable about this -- "
I leaped on him and hit him on the mouth, which spurted blood. Jota ceased attempting to be reasonable and swung at me. I caught his arm and threw him, with no trouble at all.
There had been a wrestling bill at Shuteley one night when I was about fifteen, and someone gave me a ticket. I'd been fascinated, not by wrestling as an entertainment, but by the revelation that if you knew how you could throw people far heavier than yourself all over the place. So I found out about it.
I certainly never became an expert wrestler. As far as Jota was concerned, however, I might have been a world champion. I could throw him with very little effort, and he had no idea how to fall. Instead of rolling with the throw, he came down untidily with a crash each time, even on the fairly soft ground.
I threw him every time he got up, and never followed him down, because this wasn't a sporting contest that would be settled by a body press or a submission. I didn't want to hurt him, exactly; instinctively I was trying to beat him, to humble him, to teach him a lesson, so that he would never make a pass at Dina or Sheila again.
He kept backing, though he didn't actually run away, and to his credit he got up every time when he could. And he kept trying to talk to me. "Val, you and I shouldn't be . . . " "I wasn't going to . . . " "Will you listen to me . . . " and then, rather ludicrously: "I'm warning you, Val . . . "
We were close. to the edge of the stasis, and when I threw him again I simply didn't think about it at all. What the stasis was I had no idea. To me it was simply a wall. Greg had walked through it, but Greg was in a special suit.
When I threw Jota and he rolled towards the edge, I expected him to stop against it as he'd have done at any other wall.
But he didn't.
There was a sudden roar, and I was sucked toward the barrier myself as air rushed from the stasis into the inferno beyond. Despite the brightness of the flames, the sudden glare as Jota rolled through made everything else seem dull.
He had no time to scream.
Outside the stasis the flames were dying a little, but the temperature had not begun to drop. Out there, things that would burn didn't catch fire, they simply dissolved in the heat.
Five seconds after I threw him out of the stasis, Jota was not identifiable even as a cinder.
As Jota died, there was a gasp behind me, a feminine half-checked moan of horror. Horrified myself, I didn't turn at once. I assumed that Dina had wakened up.
It was only when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dina lying on the ground, peacefully, comfortably, breathing deeply and regularly, that I realized someone else had joined us.
I turned and saw Miranda.
I had not expected to see her again. It had seemed likely that she was dead. Even if she had survived what Greg had done to her, it was not in the cards that she'd be moving around any more that night; and then, lacking a suit, she couldn't get into the stasis through the blazing town.
But she did have a suit. And although she reeled a bit and her hair was over one eye, she was in better shape than could have been expected.
She got in first. "Didn't you know?" she whispered. "Val, didn't you know what would happen when he hit the stasis? Or did you try to kill him . . . murder him?"
I had certainly not tried to kill
Jota, and I was shocked at the manner of his death and my responsibility for it. Yet Miranda's obvious horror at what she had seen filled me with incredulity, rallied me, and made me temporarily cease to wonder that she was here at all.
"Whatever I did," I said in sudden anger, "are you to be the judge? You, who knew exactly what was going to happen, and let it happen? You came here to watch a gala performance, to extract the last ounce of vicarious enjoyment out of the Great Fire of Shuteley. But was that all -- or did you start the fire?"
My outburst didn't bother her. In fact, she calmed down. "You didn't know," she said. "Anyway, what's remarkable is that you and Jota fought, and he died, and you didn't . . . Why did you fight?"
I said nothing, merely glanced down at Dina.
She was still sleeping like a baby. She looked so happy she must be happy, having wonderful dreams.
"What about Dina?" I said.
"She's been . . . treated. She may be different when she wakes up. That'll be in about three hours. I can't promise -- "
"And you left her," I said, "with Jota."
Miranda's eyes widened. "You don't mean he . . . So that was it. Don't say anything for a minute. Let me think."
"You seem remarkably concerned about Jota -- and remarkably unconcerned about the ten thousand people you allowed to burn to death."
"Not ten thousand. Not a thousand. We saved many who would have died -- you know that, don't you? Only we couldn't leave them here, we had to take them with us. We couldn't leave here, alive, anyone who should have died. Except Jota. Saving him, leaving him here alive, was one of the main purposes of the operation."
"It would have been easier to avert the fire."
She shook her head impatiently. "Could you eradicate the French Revolution? Could you negate the First World War, even if technically the means were in your grasp? No, the Shuteley fire had to happen. All we could do was make certain small changes -- saving Jota, for one."
"He died in the fire? Before you intervened?"
"Yes."
"Well, looks like fate had it in for him. But why should a little thing like being burned to a crisp prevent Jota from living to the age of ninety? You can loop him back. It's been done before."
"We'll have to try to do something like that," she said thoughtfully. "The question is, how? I don't have any apparatus. Greg won't let me return through the copse. I can't return from here until near dawn. When I do, it's pretty certain that -- "
"For God's sake, Miranda, tell me what's going on," I exclaimed. "From the beginning, you've been saying too much and not enough. Either you should have been a perfectly ordinary party of campers who knew nothing about anything, or you should have concealed nothing."
"Both Greg and I told you too much, Val," she said quietly. "But only you. Nothing that anyone else knows matters."
"Gil? Jota? Sheila? Dina?"
"Gil is with us and you'll never see him again. He's supposed to have died in the fire, with Barbara and Garry. They're all with us -- elsewhere. Jota, at the moment, isn't in the picture. Sheila knows nothing except at second hand, what you tell her. And Dina will know less. Or rather, the little bit that will remain with her will be so improbable that she won't tell anyone but you."
As she spoke, I realized that whatever the reasons, I really was the one person still breathing and still in Shuteley who knew anything important about Snow White and the giants. Nobody but me had paid any particular attention to them in The Copper Beech. Gil had noticed the peculiarity about the coins, but he'd kept it to himself and now it would be impossible to prove anything. The luxon suits had made people stare, but by this time everybody but me -- and Tommy -- must have decided they'd been seeing things.
Apart from that, Greg had talked only to me, and Miranda had talked only to me. If I were suddenly transported to Parliament or Scotland Yard or the FLAG head office, I couldn't hope to convince the people there that the giants were anything but a party of kids in a summer camp. Of course there would be oddities to excite curiosity, even official curiosity. None of the campers would ever be traced -- they'd disappear, with their camp, into thin air. Other witnesses would confirm the giants' abnormal proportions. And surely I couldn't be the only person to glimpse a giant in a fire suit? But these would be only enigmas. There would be enough to make it appear there must be something in my story. Not enough to prove any significant part of it.
"Yes, I see," I said. "But why me? Because I'm not going to be around, is that it?"
"That's not the reason," she said, "though just now I can't see how you and Dina can survive. One of you, yes. There's one suit. Not both, any way I can figure . . . "
We had time to work out something about that. It was still a long time to dawn.
"Why me?" I insisted.
We had been standing talking, Miranda still in her suit, the goggles at her neck, the hood over her head. Now she started to take it off, turning away.
But almost at once she turned back. She had made up her mind.
"Val," she said, "remember the first time I saw you? I knew you. I'd seen photographs of you. And I was careless enough to show it. After that, I spoke to you. So did Greg. We both wanted to meet you, to make up our minds about you."
"So I'm famous?" I said. "Important?"
"Not important, Val. Not famous. Infamous. You're the villain of the Shuteley fire."
The calm, factual statement shook me. I must have gone white. "I -- I started it?"
"No, no, not that. History didn't need that to make you the villain. The scapegoat, if you like. After this there's going to be a new word in the language -- mather. Not a capital Mather -- you don't talk of a capital Boycott either. Just mather -- meaning a catastrophe following the most incredible incompetence."
"Me?" I said stupidly.
"Oh, it isn't fair, of course. I know that. But history often isn't fair. An inhuman monster becomes a national hero. A clever man who made one wrong decision goes down as a jackass, a blunderer. A fool who did one right thing by mistake is held up for all time as the personification of wisdom. You . . . "
"Well, what did I do?"
"Nothing," she said gently. "I said it isn't fair. You'll be blamed for what you did do, what you didn't do, and history will accept wild accusations as truth. You'll even be confused with old Amos What's-his-name, who died long before you were born, and blamed for what he did. He started a fire or two, you know. The general impression of Val Mathers is going to be that he was completely heartless and unscrupulous, and stupid as well. He bribed and lied his way to control of all insurance in Shuteley and then he set fire to the town -- "
"But this is absolutely impossible!" I exclaimed. "History can't -- "
"Well, there I misled you. Real history, the history of the historians, will get things much straighter. Real history is fairer to Captain Bligh, too, than the legend. The historians know you're not old Amos and didn't start the fire and lots of other facts like that. It's a fact, too, that it would hardly be to your advantage to be head of insurance and then start the fire. But it's not facts that go into legend."
She smiled slightly. "You may, now that I've warned you, be able to do something to protect yourself. That's if you do get out . . . "
"I most certainly will," I said warmly. "If what you say is true, there must be some villain in the piece, and if it's not me -- "
"Oh, there you're wrong again, Val. It is you."
"I thought you said -- "
She sighed and said: "We're in the same boat, you and I. You're going to be a scapegoat, and so am I. You're partly to blame, and I'm partly to blame. You for the fire, I for the failure of my mission here . . . Wait till I get this suit off, and I'll tell you the whole story."
She took off her fire-suit with obvious relief. It was cool in the stasis, but until she took off the suit she was insulated from coolness as well as heat. There were beads of moisture on her smooth midriff and her bare abdomen glittered with droplets.
A large multicolo
red bruise under her right breast showed where Greg had hit her -- carelessly, mistakenly, for there was scarcely any other part of her body where such a blow would have done less damage.
I wanted to ask what had happened to her and where she got the suit, but I refrained. I'd hear in due course.
She was going to tell me about herself and the giants and Jota and the fire.
She told me.
Chapter Nine
The fire started in the stack room of the public library over an hour after the library was closed and shuttered for the night. This was (would be?) established later from evidence pieced together too late to be of more than academic interest. Presumably an assistant who wasn't supposed to be smoking at all had thrown down the butt. It was going to be assumed that this assistant was one Maggie Hobson, an elderly library assistant who smoked furtively and incessantly, and it was a convenient assumption -- because Maggie Hobson, who lived alone in a single room near the library, did not survive the fire.
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