This program was not well received but I believe that captains give orders and the rest stop from wondering about possible catastrophes by resenting the captain. Basic army psychology which Mike was working out when he and I walked circumspectly around the perimeter of the clearing. "Why a clearing here?" He asked the question I was wondering about. "I saw it when I came here. I was thinking I'd have to put the load on the beach, you see, it's a hell of good beach, hundreds of yards of nearly flat sand but this looked too good to miss."
"Maybe it's old Calais." I said, staring around me. "See those lumps? Once there may have been buildings, this could have been the loading area for the docks."
He nodded gloomily. Centuries, millennia of storms and frosts had buried or just disintegrated the original town. Here, where we were standing, people may have sat in their cars, waiting to board the ferries for England. People sunburnt and tired with happy children coming back from holiday in sunny France. I shook my head. It didn't do to let the ghosts of the past take over.
"I don't see any tracks." I said. "There's a few fruit trees in the forest, mostly apple, I think."
"Too early up here, they won't be ripe yet." He replied. I waved to our group in the distance, telling them it was all clear to start our fire and set up camp. Mike poked his rifle barrel through the dense undergrowth near the forest edge, but it seemed that no animals frequented this spot or if they did they were small ones. We circled round, finding that the open glade reached the sea through tall grasses, head high banks of green stems waving gently in the breeze. Beyond these, across dunes of tall grass, lay the shore, a wide expanse of yellow sand ending in white foam as waves pushed against the land. The air was warm but fresh with the salty tang of the sea. We stood in silence, staring at the scene, somehow gaining mental energy and refreshment. The sea! How my subconscious had been longing to see it after endless vistas of green caverns and closely packed tree trunks. Mike, like me, came from that island over there which we couldn't quite see in the haze. Suddenly, I knew I wanted to go home.
"It's going to hit us harder over there." He said quietly.
I nodded. Here, in France, the land was familiar, but it was not home and we had not been treated to sights of well-loved towns reduced to green carpets. "London?" I muttered. "There must be something."
"A hundred centuries?" He shook his head and walked slowly down the windswept sand, his feet making tracks in the pristine surface. Rustling behind me turned out to be Mary and Melanee, their faces showing mingled delight and surprise. The surprise was Melanee's, she had never seen the sea, but she watched as Mary took Mike's arm and led him down to the water's edge where she discarded her clothes, stretched her arms out to a warm sky and ran into the waves with a flurry of spray. Mike seemed less inclined to immerse himself in freezing water and cradled his rifle as she swam about before emerging, shaking her hair, her white teeth visible even from where we were standing.
Melanee shifted her feet, glanced at me and grinned, the meaning unmistakable. She wanted to have a go, so we wandered gently down the fine sand, hot sun on our backs, me with memories from long ago warring with present realities. Mary had put back some of her clothes but looked sparkling and exhilarated as we came up. Melanee, with no feelings of civilised propriety, peeled off her shirt and skirt with abandon, grabbed my arm and pulled. I only just had time to dump the rifle and discard my shirt before we were covered in spray and cold, bracing salt water when a wave thumped heartily on the shore.
Laughter penetrated my washed-out ears. Mary and Mike were chortling at Melanee's amazement at the cold and the way she folded herself round me apprehensively every time a wave approached. "We'll be back at the car." He yelled, grinning the best grin he'd let go for a long time. "Teach her to swim!"
I tried, but the distraction of holding her naked in the swimming posture made me lose all concentration, so I contented myself with hauling her out, puffing and blowing, goose pimples all over her. A blood heating race across the empty sands restored her temperature but mine was too high so I told her to put her shirt on which she did with a half-smile and sidelong glances.
Walking her back, we passed Jules and Marie coming the other way, the understanding smiles on their faces telling me Mike had been at work with lurid descriptions of my swimming lessons with Melanee. It was all very morale boosting, this empty shore and blue sea but I couldn't help thinking we were about a tenth of the population of France and we had better take some precautions.
I set up the motion sensors before nightfall as the light faded and the fire brightened in contrast. Insects took to dancing in the firelight, the odd birds making an appearance for a while until they flew off to roost in the trees somewhere. It could have been a scene from some medieval painting, the surrounding forest, brightly coloured birds, fire sending sparks up to a deep blue sky with stars just visible and three good looking women lounging in the warmth with little or no clothes on.
We'd eaten the food we brought with us, leaning up against the aircar landing gear, the wings over us. Slowly, the day died in silence. Melanee was fiddling with her long hair, having found a freshwater stream to wash the salt away with Mary's help, her long fingers twisting the shining coil into a long, thick pigtail. She looked at me, continual sidelong glances.
"How wide is sea?" She asked, breaking our introspection. Jules immediately undertook her education in geography, stimulated I think because she had left her shirt off. Marie munched at fruit, watched Jules and said nothing while Mike and Mary rested against each other. The place had that effect, it was so peaceful, so idyllic, we all felt at home here, even Melanee who had absorbed our thinking patterns with remarkable speed.
The data box was sitting in Marie's lap. She had been asking the ship questions about weather predictions for our proposed course when it suddenly bleeped in alarm, the red warning light of override coming on. She sat up and Jules paused in mid sentence.
"Aircraft!" She cried. "The ship says one hour thirteen minutes!"
"Christ!" I yelled. "Everybody in the car!" I leapt in without further ceremony, with Melanee hot on my heels. Marie had thought up the bright idea of using the ship as an early warning system, good all the time it was over us which it was now. "Starting up!" I shouted. Clatters came from aft as the rest threw our stores in, but a hand clutched my shoulder before any further excitement occurred.
"Wait!" Mike cried. "The fuel!"
I cursed savagely for not thinking of it myself. We had not refuelled, deciding to leave it until the morning when we were fresh. "It'll take an hour at least!" I yelled in frustration but we had to do it. Without that fuel we were dead. The circle of faces stared at me as my brain went into top gear. "Hand pumps only." I said. "Too many eggs."
Melanee wrinkled her brow but Jules nodded. "Marie, Mary, Melanee." He pointed at them. "You go to the forest, you run for many minutes, eh?"
I was tethered to the aircar, no one else knew the systems. Mike I needed because he could fly and we had to have two men to work the pumps. I cut the argument short ruthlessly. "Jules, you take Marie and Mary with Melanee. Scatter in the forest. We'll refuel and take off."
"What if they use homers?" Mary cried.
"I stay." Melanee announced with iron determination. There was no time for discussion. Mary gave Mike an agonised look and kissed him hard before running out into the darkness with Jules and Marie. Mike was already running the fuel hoses and setting up the pump while I set the internal tank sequence. Seeing the figures showing the right numbers I jumped out and joined Mike at the pumps. We had to work the things by hand, endlessly pushing up and down, sweat running down us after minutes. Every so often I had to climb back in and check the tanks. We had tanks in the wings, the lower fuselage and the rear body and they all had to be filled in sequence, but this was not the problem. We could do that in less than thirty minutes with two of us but we had to have a reserve. Coming down here, we had not filled the cargo tanks which we had fitted back at Quissac. It lightened t
he load and we knew we had reserves sitting on the beach here but now if Marie's warning was good, nothing was going to be left in this clearing when Max's visitor had finished with it and that included the fuel store. We had to take enough as cargo to get us back here. There were other problems but I didn't mention them to Mike as he didn't ask.
Melanee proved a bonus. She was fit and energetic and caught on to the rhythm of the pumps, allowing us to take turns and keep the flow at maximum. I don't think we could have done it without her.
"Fourteen minutes." Mike gasped, leaning exhausted against the hull as I checked the fuel gauges.
"Get in!" I said hoarsely, waving them to strap themselves in. With the engines started hastily with no check list, we lifted off slowly, threading our way in the darkness to where the sea met the beach.
"Where do we go?" Mike muttered wearily. "Mary's right, they could have homers."
"Sure they do." I agreed, "But the fire is what they're looking for." I didn't believe that homing missiles programmed for moving vehicles would be worth their while. They needed a whole lot of correction equipment and running that from four thousand miles off was too complicated, or so I reasoned, Melanee flicking her eyes from me to Mike in mystification. The puzzlement grew as I plonked us down half a mile away on the sand and switched off the engines.
"Yeah." Mike nodded, he knew the idea. "No contrast," he explained to Melanee. "No hot engines for some missile brain to find." She stared at him while I peered out of the front screen. It wasn't quite so easy as he said, residual heat from our engine wash could be picked up if they had sensitive enough receivers but I had put us right in the shallows where the heat dissipated in the sea. The landing gear was awash.
We waited in tense silence but not for long. I had us all get out of the car and stand well away on the sand just in case, but we'd only been standing there for seconds when a rising whistle turned itself into a supersonic shriek and a glowing streak came down with fearsome speed. Melanee held
onto my arm as the warhead detonated back in our camp, the concussion washing over us, making us stagger as the blast wave hit our ear drums. A tall column of fire rose like a giant obscene fir tree, turned black and slowly died.
Clouds of birds rose from the trees inland, chirping alarm at a sound they had never heard before. A large animal ran past on the sand, grunting furiously. "Go back?" Mike gasped.
"Not yet." I told him. We waited. The roar of the fire from the missile head receded, the red glow turning to a flickering amber in the distance. Only one hit didn't seem enough for all that effort, but we had no way of telling, that damned drone was ten miles or more over our heads. Minutes turned into an hour and Melanee started to relax while Mike started to fidget thinking of Mary, I could tell. But then the whistle came to us again, the rising pitch of a supersonic vehicle that shrieked down almost in the same spot, producing another earth-shaking blast and fire. Seconds after that two more arrived, impacting within yards of the first, the fireball rising to hundreds of feet in the night sky.
We watched the display of firepower, Melanee stunned and afraid, really afraid, the first time I had seen her truly terrified. Her face reflected in the red flame was drawn with fear and she needed the arm I put round her. She was seeing what clever chaps we all were ten millennia ago and now she understood perhaps why we exterminated ourselves.
"Bastards." Mike whispered. "Bastards." He said again. "You knew, didn't you? They send one down and they wait for a bit. They wait for us to come back and see the damage."
I nodded silently. It was what I had been expecting. "I'm going to kill them." I told him conversationally. "May take a time but you can count on it."
Melanee shivered as we stood around on that empty shore. Absently I stroked her hair and kept her close. She was learning all the time but if she learned enough she would hate me in the end, hate all of us. At last, after two hours had passed, I thought it was time to move.
"How do we find them?" Mike asked huskily.
"We can talk to Marie on the car's comm set." I said as we climbed back in. "I don't think we'd better go back to where we were, we'll put this tub up the beach beyond the tide line and wait."
Marie's voice was small and shaken but Mary's was strong with fury and the wish for retribution. Jules didn't say anything but he seemed subdued when they all appeared three hours later, just as the midsummer dawn was throwing a steely blue across the Eastern sky. They had pushed their way through heavy growth, startling things that thrashed away through the forest but the flash from the warhead had penetrated even deep in the woodland, the ground shaking concussion making the trees shiver.
"What sort of people are they?" Jules asked gloomily but no one answered, not even Marie who seemed disillusioned and listless.
The car was safe enough where it was, jammed up against the dunes at the back of the beach and besides sleep and refreshment were in order but the feeling of enchantment with this place was gone, replaced by apprehension and bitterness. Moodily pacing along the shore in the early morning sun, I thought bad thoughts. How did they know where we were? Point one. Did the ship tell them? Marie said she had told the ship to keep our movements on the secret list. Marie. She worried me because I thought she knew something she wasn't telling us and did Jules know it as well? Were they waiting for some opportunity that hadn't arrived yet? No. I shook my head. They would have been fried like the rest of us last night if that missile had been earlier.
Soft feet along the sand behind me belonged to Melanee, looking tired and bewildered. She came up and walked alongside me, kicking the sand with her toes. "I do not understand why people try and kill us." She stared at her feet. "Aircraft come from across the world, yes? Why do they want to kill us? What can we do to them?" She looked up with piercing intelligence.
"Good question." I agreed, scratching my chin in thought mode. "They track us and they see we go to Old England but so what? What does it matter to them where we go?"
Selena and her crowd of disciples plus Max the martinet were all deep down some Montana mountain so far as we knew. OK, they know where we landed, the ship told them, and it was no big secret anyway. But then they roust out intercontinental remote missile carriers from some damned American deep freeze and they set them up to kill us, not once but twice. Why? Simple vindictiveness? I didn't buy it. So we were doing something or about to do something they didn't want, something that represented a threat. But what, for God's sake?
I stared round at the empty shore, the sand moving slightly under the influence of a fresh breeze off the sea, Melanee looking up at my frowning face. We had one aircar with six refugees and enough fuel to get to Scotland and back here and that was all. No planet busting weapon and even if we had we would need to be insane to use it after what we had found here, so what did we have?
"Mm, we know things." Melanee said, showing me she was well ahead of me despite not understanding any of the obscene politics of old Earth or Max's mental repressions. Her figure was still, the wind blowing her long hair away from her face, revealing the slender neck and well-shaped shoulders. Her lips, sensitive and moist, were parted slightly and gazing down on her as we stood on that familiar yet almost alien beach it came to me that she was more than a prop and a companion. Linda was still with me but this girl, this woman was as bright a flame as Linda and she loved me with far less excuse. Putting a hand lightly on her shoulder, I sat her down on the warm sand and told her everything, about Linda and me, about our incredible journey and Max and Selena and about what the world had really been like. It took a time during which she listened with attention and a slowly growing expression that I recognised after a time as revulsion mixed with relief. Her English was now so good after weeks with us that she spoke almost as well as Marie with a faint accent. Long minutes after I had given her the potted history of a civilisation that could either go to another star or destroy itself with equal facility and didn't seem to know which was more important, she gathered up a handful of sand and wa
tched the grains trickle through her fingers.
"David." She was so quiet I leaned near to hear. "Most of what you tell me, I think I understand and Jules, he tell me much from the mm screens? Yes. You know I am different? Yes, you understand but I do not know why and I have been thinking. You all tell me so much that I did not know before it is difficult."
She was struggling to catch up thousands of years but she had the genes. "We're not better than you, we're just older." I told her gently.
She smiled, a brilliant smile. "David, you are better than you think. But me, I am trying to see why I am not like my people and it can be that I do not take the tablet you all worry about. Yes?" She cocked her head, bird like and stared at me.
"Doesn't solve it." I muttered, remembering Jules morose analysis. "The restriction on brain development and breeding would have carried on down the genetic line so it doesn't matter if you don't get to take the magic pill."
She nodded thoughtfully. "Mm, yes, I think so but then it can only mean I am not on the mm genetic line?" She gazed at me with a calm face as I took in the meaning of her remark. My God, this was a clever brain which was busy telling me something that should have been obvious to us long ago.
"Christ." I whispered. "You came from the gene banks downstairs." I stared at her dark hair and level gaze, her beauty and intelligence and suddenly understood. "It's you they want to kill."
For seconds we stared at each other before the meaning of my comment penetrated and she put her hands on her cheeks in dismay. "Oh, oh David!" She cried, distressed. "I understand, perhaps, maybe Marie tell me more but I am mm target?"
"Yeah." I breathed, thinking hard. "Got to be. Somehow they know. There's something in you, in your genes, your DNA, I don't know but..." I tailed off seeing fright coming into her eyes, real fear generated by not knowing who she was or what she was and more, knowing that over the other side of the world someone was willing to kill all of us because of her. Her shoulder shivered under my hand so I gathered her in and hugged her close, feeling her hands holding me.
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