‘Who are you?’ he said, cocking his head and staring at the Deep Time Mariner.
‘He’s a Mariner,’ Einstein said, creeping forward to sniff at the ghost. He caught the smell of the cold Atlantic, Super-Executive cologne and burning aviation fuel.
‘Hello! A talking dog!’ Fat Harry said. He beamed with pleasure. ‘I hope he doesn’t want breakfast.’ And he raised his arm slightly, curling his fingers, searching for the call button in his phantom seat.
‘Don’t speak,’ Charlie said, with his eyes blinded by tears. ‘There’s been a terrible…’
‘It’s a real tonic to see you again!’ the ghost said, grinning at Charlie. ‘I wanted to talk to you before I left. I’m flying to New York - all expenses paid. They’re going to hang me in the Andy Warhol Museum of Whatsit. You’ve got to laugh. They think I’m a sodding genius.’
‘You deserve it, Harry,’ Charlie said gently. ‘You worked hard for it.’
‘Why don’t you come with me?’ Harry prattled. ‘I heard about your troubles with Baxter. Bad business. Why don’t you come aboard? They’re just serving breakfast. I’m having the deluxe special…’
‘Don’t speak.’
‘We had some fun, didn’t we, Charlie?’
‘We had some fun,’ Charlie said.
Harry fell silent and frowned suspiciously at his shoes. ’That’s funny,’ he said. ‘I can’t feel my legs…’
Charlie reached out for him but Harry was peacefully fading away. It began with his hands and feet, spreading rapidly through his limbs until there was nothing left of him but his teeth and buttonhole, hanging in the air for a moment, until they also disappeared.
Charlie knelt on the floor and pressed his hands against the carpet.
‘Harry,’ he whispered. ‘Harry.’
The Deep Time Mariner grunted, turned on his heel and vanished through the door.
‘He’s gone!’ Einstein whistled, tilting his ears.
Charlie stood up and looked around him. The room was empty. He was alone.
A moment later the Mariner burst back into the room and waved his pistol at Charlie. ‘Blast your eyes!’ he shouted. ‘Bring the dog and I’ll take you with me!’
Damn the paperwork! Damn his instructions! What could they do to him? They could send him on a frog hunt to Ursa Major—that’s what they could do to him. He wasn’t going to think about it. He didn’t care about the risks. He’d grown fond of Charlie. He was a monkey-man, it was true, but he also had spirit and a love for the Ancient Gardeners. They could find him some work on the ark. What harm could there be in it? What danger was a single specimen without the prospect of a mate? They weren’t criminals. The text books were wrong. They were clowns. That was their strength and their tragedy.
‘There’s no future for you!’ he bellowed, above the roar of a gas explosion. The windows bulged and finally shattered, covering Einstein with fragments of glass and thick, wet cactus slices. The curtains blew out to embrace the rain.
‘I don’t care,’ Charlie said, wiping his eyes and scrambling to his feet. ‘We’ll take our chances.’
‘You’re such a fool!’ Einstein growled scornfully, shaking the glass from his coat. ‘Think what you’re doing!’
‘I’m trying to keep us alive.’
‘Why?’ Einstein demanded. ‘Do you want us to finish our lives in a cage in some god-forsaken zoo?’
‘We can’t stay here!’
‘We’ll finish as prisoners in a freak show beyond the stars,’ Einstein grumbled.
‘We’ll be corpses in the rubble if we stay here arguing about it, you stupid stubborn animal!’
‘Shut up and get moving!’ the Mariner roared.
63.
They followed the Mariner from the apartment, along the narrow passage to a door marked Emergency Exit. A broken padlock hung from a chain. The Mariner kicked the door open, bowed his head against the storm and clambered onto the fire escape.
‘Follow!’ he shouted as Charlie and Einstein watched him ascend the spiral of iron stairs.
The little dog whimpered and looked at Charlie. The treacherous staircase was rocked by wind and slippery with rain.
‘I can’t do it!’ he barked.
Charlie gathered him into his arms and staggered after the Mariner. The rain stung his face. His bare feet were chilled on the iron rungs.
As they climbed towards the roof they saw fires burning across the city, the cords of black smoke strung between heaven and earth like fantastic mooring ropes. The wind bore a mad cacophony of alarm bells, whistles and air raid sirens.
‘Follow!’ the Mariner bellowed as Charlie sank beneath the dog’s weight and he grasped at the railings for support.
When he reached the top of the fire escape he paused, fighting for breath, and stared out across the concrete roof towards the chimney stacks and the whipping television masts. There, partly sheltered by the stacks, was the Deep Time Mariner’s spacecraft.
At a distance, the main body of the craft looked like a stranded submarine, some nine or ten metres in length and three metres high with a strange, translucent blister, like a conning tower, amidships. The hull was wrapped in a sheath of polished blue scales that reflected the ship’s surroundings as perfectly as mirrored glass.
As Charlie drew closer he saw that the ship was supported on eight hydraulic legs which had clawed themselves against the roof of the building and gave the machine the attitude of a crouching spider, preparing to pounce on her prey. Between her legs. protruding from the polished belly, was a pod of surveillance equipment and navigation lights.
She was a primitive vehicle, by the standards of the Deep Time Mariners, a Swordfish class freighter designed for coastal work among the moons of the Cyclops Cluster and refitted for the emergency evacuation of Earth. She had already completed fifteen missions and was responsible for the future survival of several species of antelope, two giant lizards, the elk and the polar bear.
When the Mariner approached the ship the cargo doors swung open and he beckoned Charlie and Einstein aboard.
The flight cabin was dark and stifling. At the back of the cabin, confirming Einstein’s worst suspicions, was a large and heavily armoured cage equipped with harnesses and hammocks and still smelling strongly of polar bears.
The Mariner settled down in the pilot’s seat, sighed and peeled off his gloves. He flexed his graceful green fingers and studied the instrument panels, murmuring to himself in a strange language and gently shaking his huge head.
‘Is there something wrong?’ Charlie whispered.
The silence was startling. The ship had locked out the noise of the storm, the screeching wind and rain. They were locked in an airtight cocoon. Buried in a vampire’s coffin.
‘Shut up!’ Einstein snapped, as he tried to worm his way under a seat. ‘It’s bad enough with you looking for trouble.’
‘It feels warm in here,’ the Mariner replied frowning at Charlie. ‘Does it feel warm in here?’
‘Yes,’ Charlie said, through chattering teeth. The sudden change in temperature was making his wet hair steam.
‘There must be a snag in the air conditioning lines,’ the Mariner said. He shrugged. ‘I suppose it will sort itself out.’
‘Is there anything I should know?’ Charlie said nervously. ‘Do I have to strap myself down?’
‘No,’ the Mariner said, ‘just make yourselves comfortable, keep quiet and don’t touch anything.’
‘Right!’ Charlie said. He sank deeper into his seat and sat motionless, clutching his knees.
‘Are you ready?’ the Mariner said.
Charlie nodded grimly, his face as white as starch. Einstein whimpered and folded his ears.
The Mariner tapped a tune on a keyboard and the flight deck computers stirred in their sleep, yawned and opened their beautiful eyes. At once the dark cabin was transformed into a dome of glittering lights. A monitor in the overhead switch panel shuffled through all the maps of the heavens, selected the relev
ant galaxy, found Charlie’s little solar system and drew up a plan of the Earth.
‘This is it,’ the Mariner said, smiling softly to himself.
Charlie rolled into a ball, clenched his hands around his head and screwed up his eyes, waiting for the thrust of huge engines to thump him into the cabin floor. He expected a roll of thunder, a belch of dragons’ fire, the crunching and grinding of metal bones.
But nothing seemed to happen. They were already two hundred feet above the rooftops before Charlie knew they were launched into space. He glanced down at the city as it retreated beneath them. There was a slight shudder as the legs of the Swordfish retracted and locked themselves away. The ship pitched to starboard, hung motionless for a moment, and then catapulted into the eye of the storm.
64.
They broke through the darkness into a dazzling sunlit haze where millions of fragments of human wreckage were hanging suspended like flotsam in a crystal sea. They were flying through great drifts of handbags, walking sticks, saucepans, library books, lampshades and shoes. Beside them a twisted bicycle was performing a series of somersaults for an audience of spanners. Above them, thousands of empty hamburger boxes circled like flocks of scavenging gulls.
Charlie cupped his hands around his face, shielding his eyes from the sun and searched for the world that had disappeared beneath the poisonous layers of cloud.
‘Can you see anything?’ Einstein said, perching on Charlie’s knees to gain a better view from the windows.
‘Nothing,’ Charlie said. The storms had buried Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic. He turned to the Mariner but found him absorbed in conversation with one of the ship’s computers, planning the height of their orbit and the speed of their final descent.
For a few minutes they continued to sail towards the fun, the Earth shrinking and curving beneath them, until they had passed beyond the storms and the clouds began to evaporate. Then Charlie looked down and saw the Nile, like a serpent glittering in the light, twisting towards the sulphurous smog that shrouded the city of Cairo. He was so excited that he cried out and hauled Einstein forward by his collar but the river had gone, they had crossed the Red Sea, and now they were looking down on the deserts of Arabia, set like splashes of molten silver in the folds of ancient mountains.
As they watched, the Himalayas came into view on the port bow, that great wall of terror reduced to a shimmering bracelet of bronze, gilded with snowfields and glaciers. The ship tilted, turned south, south east, over the smoking plains of India towards the Bay of Bengal and Charlie, who had seen no greater natural wonder than the mudbanks of the Thames, was bent to the window, astonished.
London might have been lost in a whirlpool of fire and rain and, for all he knew, half of Europe was engulfed but here was the rest of the planet drenched in sunlight, unfolding like a magic atlas of mountains, rivers and forests.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Charlie whispered. ‘I never imagined how beautiful!’
‘You sound surprised,’ the Mariner said.
‘But I never saw it from here… ’ Charlie said.
‘It’s not a very big planet,’ the Mariner said. ‘You could have walked around it in your time. You were never more than a visitor. You should have gone out and seen the sights.’
‘I wanted to travel. I never had the opportunity,’ Charlie said. ‘I had to find work and earn a living and keep my house in order. I had to play my part.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Einstein snorted. But he was a dog.
‘I never knew a planet that didn’t look good when you were waving it goodbye,’ the Mariner said to comfort him.
And then Charlie remembered one perfect summer morning, years before, when he’d woken early and gone down from the summerhouse into the stillness of the garden and walked, barefoot, through the prickling grass, with the air still sweet with the smell of night flowers and the sunlight gleaming through the trees like the first morning in the world and then the blackbirds had started singing as if they were trying to break his heart. He had felt himself tremble with laughter, with pleasure, with fear at the terrible beauty of life.
‘I can’t leave,’ he said softly. ‘I must have been mad. It’s impossible. I don’t belong on Mars.’
‘We’re not staying on Mars,' Einstein said impatiently. He felt sick and his ears were ringing. Space travel didn’t agree with him. ‘We’re on a voyage beyond the stars.’
‘It’s too late,’ the Mariner said, glancing at the rows of monitors on the overhead switch panel. ‘I’ve programmed the master computer.’
‘I need you to set me down!’ Charlie cried. He was a fool to have thought that he could ever want to escape the Earth or not be a part of its ultimate fate. He would rather suffer the catastrophes that threatened to overwhelm the world than live with the knowledge that the world was gone.
Why should he alone survive to mourn the Earth? If he stayed with the Deep Time Mariner he would shrink away through the cold and lonely wastes of space until he was nothing more than a fragment of bone a crystal of ice, an echo of an echo from a distant, dead planet. He knew he could not endure it.
‘Think!’ the Deep Time Mariner shouted. ‘I’m offering you survival. I’m saving your life. You are the final paragraph on the last page of history. Imagine that. After you there is only darkness.’
‘No!’ Charlie shouted. ‘I belong down there on Earth. I don’ t want to survive if it means nothing more than becoming a freak show attraction.’
‘You won’t be seen as a freak,’ the Mariner said indignantly. ‘We’re a very superior civilisation. When we’ve sorted out the paperwork and squeezed you through quarantine regulations perhaps I’ll take you home with me. My father once kept a monkey. I think it was a Yellow Cyclops Howler.’
‘I want to go back to Earth!’ Charlie insisted.
‘You’ll die if you return,’ the Mariner warned.
‘I’ll die if I leave.’
‘That’s true,' the Mariner said. ‘But you’ll finish your days in comfort and civilised company. We could even extend your life. You’d live for another two hundred years with a little corrective surgery. You’d have time to write an account of your species for the Cyclops Library of Natural Science. You’d be a celebrity.’
Charlie didn’t hear him. He stared down from his armchair in the sky and he thought of those who were turned to ghosts and those who were ghosts to come: the few brief weeks of happiness in the attic over the barber’s shop and all those long and dreary years of quiet desperation; and if he could have his time again he would have none of it, he would have none of its smothering ugliness and monstrous cruelties, but go out into the precious world, or what was left of it, and plant his feet against the earth and turn his face towards the sun and feel the cool rain against his skin and the wind pulling his hair and be glad, for one moment, to be alive.
‘And you?’ the Mariner said, turning to Einstein. ‘Will you crawl back to your hole in the ground or will you come with me and fly to the stars?’
The sun was already behind them now and the night was stealing over the curve of the planet.
‘I have to stay with Charlie,’ Einstein said, slapping his nose with his tongue. ‘I have to stay with him. I’m a dog.’
The Mariner sighed and then, without warning, began to take them down towards the jungles of Borneo, clipping the coast of Vietnam and gliding over the South China Sea towards the islands of the Pacific. It grew darker as they descended until the night was all around them and the ocean shone with a ghostly phosphorescence.
They flew over a string of islands that seemed at first no more than outcrops of coral breaking the surface of the deep until, as the Swordfish swooped, they began to assume the fantastic shapes of childhood maps of treasure islands. Here, behind their shipwrecking reefs, were small lost worlds of beach and forest, waterfalls and sleeping volcanoes.
As they circled the largest of the islands Charlie caught a glimpse of a deep lagoon, canoes drawn under a cluster
of palms, the flash of lights from a fishing village.
The spacecraft stretched out its legs and gently came to rest on the beach. The computers muttered to themselves and rolled their jewelled eyes. The monitors bickered as they ransacked themselves for charts of the planet’s oceans.
The Mariner threw a switch to release the cargo doors and the cabin was filled with the perfumed warmth of a tropical night. The air was spiced with woodsmoke, incense and jungle flowers. They heard music and laughter from the village and the booming of breakers on the reef.
The clambered down from the ship and stood together on the moonlit sand and above their heads, in the vast darkness, swirled millions and millions of sparkling stars.
Einstein sneezed and ran in circles about the beach, barking for joy and snapping at all the crumpled beer cans and twisted polythene bottles and knots of coloured plastic rope that came tumbling at him through the surf.
Charlie looked at the Mariner and wanted to say what he felt in his heart but found that he could not speak for tears.
‘How much time do you think you have left?’ the Mariner asked him. He would not look at Charlie but turned his huge head and pretended to study the moon. ‘Do you suppose even here, in this last acre of paradise, that the storms will not destroy you, that the parakeets will continue to fly, the dolphins to swim, that everything will continue?’
‘I must believe it,’ Charlie said.
‘And what will you do here?’
‘I’ll plant a garden,’ Charlie said gently. He sat down on an old tractor tyre, half-buried in the coral sand, and looked towards the lights of the village and the shadow of the forest beyond. ‘I’ll plant a garden if I have time.’
‘Choose the high ground,’ the Mariner said.
He turned then, without another word between them and walked quickly back to his ship. Charlie and Einstein stood on the shore and watched him take the Swordfish from the beach and over the luminous sea. They watched him sailing into the night, a fleeting shadow against the moon. They stood and watched until there was nothing left of him but a small bead of light that flickered briefly and was gone in the cold eternity of stars.
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