As the young intern scuttled off down the corridor, George said: “Have there been any new developments, Peter?”

  “The three of them were picked up by some soldiers down on the quay,” said Klorner. “They’ve been brought in to a sort of fort and locked up in a cell. The light’s very dim.”

  “Mrs. Huddlestone won’t be able to help us much either,” said lan. “They’ve all been gagged.”

  “Good Lord! Really?” George peered into the screen. “Still no sign of any R.E.M. from Mike, I suppose?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “How about aberration?”

  “Just that same trace on the girl.”

  Dr. Richards nodded. “I’m going to try out something which occurred to me last night,” he said. “Rachel, I want you to go through and touch Mike-take hold of his hand or something. Careful you don’t dislodge the drip.”

  Rachel entered the second ward and walked across to the bed. “Now?” she asked. “Now,” said George.

  She lifted Michael’s wrist and held it lightly in her hand.

  “Right,” called George. “Now let go.”

  “I’ve done that.”

  “Again.”

  She picked up the inert hand for the second time and heard George say: “Am I imagining it, or is that trace .aberration fluctuating?”

  “Yes, I think you could well be right,” said Ian. “Can you try it once more, Rachel?”

  The action was repeated and this time everybody who was watching the screen agreed that the faint, hazy aura around the image of the girl’s head dimmed perceptibly for as long as Rachel was in direct physical contact with the unconscious man. Before they had a chance to discuss the significance of the effect the ward door opened and the young intern reappeared. Simultaneously Klorner said: “Hello. It looks as if something’s happening at last. Who’s this?”

  Mrs. Huddlestone did her best to enlighten them, but with Francis talking to the prisoners in a whisper and the light so dim in the cell, she was unable to do more than offer a few speculative words and phrases. However, it soon became clear that at least one of her guesses was correct, for no sooner had Francis left the cell than they all saw the instrument in Thomas’s hands.

  “Yes, those are pipes right enough,” said George. “But what on earth are they all so excited about?”

  They watched fascinated as Thomas freed first the girl and then the other man and then sat down cross-legged on the floor directly facing the cell door and set the pipes to his lips. Fascination turned to utter incomprehension as the picture suddenly flicked to one side to show them Jane and the Magpie squatting down with their fingers apparently jammed into their ears.

  For a minute or two nothing happened then.they saw the cell door swing open to reveal Captain Arnold standing at the top of the cell steps. His lips moved.

  “Come out here, you three,” relayed Mrs. Huddlestone distinctly.

  They saw the Captain turn to one side, apparently addressing someone who was invisible to them. Mrs. Huddlestone was beginning to apologize for being unable to read what he was saying when the whole surface of the screen began to tremble as though they were viewing it through a heat haze. At the same instant the figure of the Captain seemed to flick from positive to negative as if all the shadows and the highlights had suddenly transposed themselves. The screen itself brightened precipitately and then blacked out almost completely, though they were still able to make out the dim figure of the Captain in the doorway. As they stared at him the man appeared to buckle slowly at the knees and slide to the floor.

  “What’s happening, Peter?”

  “I’m absolutely baffled,” said Klorner. “But we’re picking up strong traces of p.k. Nothing the torus can’t handle though.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Rachel. “Are you sure Mike’s all right?”

  “Nothing unusual registering anywhere,” Kenneth assured her.

  “Then why’s the screen gone so dark?”

  “It must be something to do with the contact’s own physical perception,” said, George. “Yes. Look. It’s changing back again.”

  As he spoke the picture brightened, reverted to normal and swung around. They saw the two crouching figures rise to their feet and make for the steps. As the scene transposed into Thomas’s vision of the guardroom Ian said: “I’m pretty sure those two by the fireplace are the ones who brought them in, Doc.”

  “What’s the matter with them?” asked George. “Are they drunk?”

  No one was in a position to enlighten him. They watched Jane and the Magpie reviving Francis, but whatever words passed between them were too far away for Mrs. Huddlestone to interpret. Suddenly the door flew open and another soldier strode into the room. Immediately the same extraordinary transposition effect took place on the screen. This time it lasted less than a minute. As the picture cleared they observed that a second figure had emerged from the shadows. Dressed in a gray monk’s habit he was standing just inside the doorway and in his hands he was holding what appeared to be a crossbow. It was pointed directly at them.

  Thomas heard the cold command to cease piping and glanced up to find himself looking directly along the shaft of the talon which Brother Andrew held trained upon him. The fifth Falcon was already standing as still as if he had become one stone with the flags beneath his boots.

  “Release them from this spell, mage.”

  “They are your birds, priest, not mine. ‘Tis for you to whistle them home.”

  The monk took a pace further into the room and caught sight of Francis. “Well, well,” he said. “I might have guessed what brought you scampering to Blackdown. Your master never did choose his epithets lightly.”

  Francis stared at him blankly. “Epithets?” he echoed. “I do not follow.”

  “No? Then let me enlighten you. Constant penned one word across that report you sent him from Cumberland. Apostata!” The word dripped like venom from the monk’s lips and hissed among the shadowy corners of the room. “Indeed you have much to answer for, Francis.”

  “That may be,” returned Francis calmly. “But not to you or Lord Simon.”

  “We shall see. We shall see,” said the monk. “These are friends of yours, I take it?”

  “They are.”

  “Devil’s spawn!”

  “Nay, Andrew, as Christ is our judge you wrong them utterly.”

  “I do? Then how, pray, do you explain this?” The monk gestured round with his bow at the mesmerized Falcons. “Is that not the devil’s own handiwork, Francis? Or has he offered you some other plausible explanation?”

  “The only devil here is within you, Andrew. This sacred mission of yours is but a compensation for your own infirmity.”

  The monk’s lips tightened into a thin, pale line. “Ah, but you shall pay dearly for that, Francis,” he whispered.

  “Do you fear the truth so much, Brother? Look into your own heart, man. What nourishes it if not the morbid pleasure you derive from inflicting pain upon the innocent?”

  The monk had begun to tremble as though he were afflicted with a sudden palsy. “Have a care,” he chattered. “Have a care.”

  But Francis was relentless. “You are sick, Andrew. Sick unto death. The plague rages in you not in the Kinsfolk. Can you not see that it is yourself you are striving to destroy?”

  The monk’s face had contorted itself into a truly horrifying grimace of pure hatred. He leveled his bow at Francis then, even as his knuckles were whitening on the trigger, he half turned. There was a sharp, metallic twang; a flicker like a trace of black thread on the air; and a cry of anguish from Jane. Before anyone else could move a muscle the Magpie had launched himself full length across the room. He struck the monk just above the knees and brought him crashing to the ground. A knife blade glinted briefly in the shadows; there was a choking cough, and then nothing more.

  Francis struggled to his feet, found himself once again in effective command of his own body, and turned to the Kinsman. He saw that he was leaning back against the wall with Jane beside him. His eyes were closed and his right hand was clasped across the left side of his chest. “Are you hurt, Thomas?”

  “Aye. Sorely. I fear he’s just writ amen to a prayer he penned in Newbury.”

  “His black soul smokes in hell for it,” said the Magpie. “We’ll get you aboard ship, Thomas, and doctor you there.”

  “I’m past all doctoring, friend. I durst not draw the bolt.” Thomas groaned in sudden, wrenching agony and gasped: “Ah, Jane, love. Has it come to this after all?”

  “No, no,” she whispered passionately. “Carver will save you, Thomas. Only let me reach him.”

  Thomas let go of the feathered shaft, gazed down ruefully at his blood bright fingers and muttered: “Your knife, Magpie,”

  “Nay, man!” The Magpie was aghast. “I cannot do it. Do not ask me.”

  “In this shoulder,” panted Thomas. “The Testament is sewn here. Quick, man! Cut!”

  The Magpie stepped close and pricked the knife point along the seam of wax-toughened threads till the stitching on the shoulder of the leather jerkin gaped apart. Thomas fumbled inside the rent and with scarlet fingers drew out a slim packet sealed in oilskin. His eyes sought for Francis. “Speed you to Corlay with Jane,” he panted, thrusting the packet into the priest’s hand. “Take Tom’s pipes and the Testament and guard all three with your life. Away now, all of you.”

  “I’ll not go!” cried Jane. “You cannot make me!”

  The Kinsman’s life tide was ebbing fast, the color draining visibly from his face as he turned his pain-darkened eyes to hers. “Did you not huesh it, little witch?” he whispered with a ghost of a smile. “What will be, will be.”

  She took his face between her hands. “All I beg is that you let me try to reach him,” she pleaded. “Oh, my love, my own love, let me try.”

  Thomas looked down upon the face that was so dear to him, saw through the fast-gathering shadows that her eyes were aswim with tears and could not find it in his heart to deny her anything. He nodded. “Help me, friends,” he muttered. “Lay my head in her lap.”

  Francis and the Magpie managed it between them, wincing inwardly as they saw the Kinsman’s face go ashen gray with pain.

  Jane stroked the lank hair back from a forehead already chill with the cold dew of hurrying death and, leaning over him, cried soundlessly into the shadow-filled depths with all the force of her terrified spirit: Help us, Michael! Help us! Do not let him die!

  The ward was so silent that the faint hum of the video-recorder sounded almost intolerably intrusive as the E-V.C. screen became filled with the brilliant image of Jane’s face and the wonderstrack watchers found themselves seemingly drifting upwards imperceptibly into her eyes. As the pupils grew ever more huge and lustrous Rachel suddenly cried out: “Stop her! Stop her!” and wrenching herself away stumbled through into the ward where Michael lay and flung herself across his unconscious body moaning: “Don’t, Mike! Don’t! Don’t!”

  In a second the surface of the screen had dissolved into a slowly swirling vortex which deepened and darkened until it was reaching upwards and outwards -a weird, interminable tunnel of shifting shadows among which faint points of light could be perceived twinkling like far-off stars in some remote and unfamiliar heaven. Around these points drifting wraiths of cloudy shade seemed to coagulate, forming and dissolving like figures in a fevered dream: faces became animals became mountains became castles became ships became birds, but none held their shape for more than a moment. They formed and reformed with no apparent purpose, no real substance, and drifted past and away like ragged tatters of dark mist.

  At last all sense of movement ceased; the light dimmed to an almost total blackness apart from one minute needlepoint of brightness far off in the upper right hand corner of the screen. The stillness became a pregnant moment of trembling, rocking indecision, and then, quick as a fish darting, they were flickering off toward the solitary light point. An instant later there was a concerted gasp of astonishment as he observers perceived in the depths of the screen before them a nebulous shape distilling itself into the spectral outlines of the face of the man who was at that very moment lying unconscious on a bed ten feet away in the adjoining ward.

  -Michael? Michael?

  -Rachel?

  -Help us, Michael! Help us!

  -You’re not Rachel.

  -I am! I am!

  -You are The Bride of Time.

  -Save him, Michael. Don’t let him die.

  -I cannot save him.

  -You can. You did before.

  -I had no choice then. The Bird …

  -Oh, Michael, you must help. I need him so,

  -You already have him.

  -I need him alive, Michael.

  -He is alive within you.

  -No, no. Not like that.

  -He’s in the child. I have done what I had to do.

  -I love him, Michael.

  -I know.

  -Must he die?

  -We must all die. Even you.

  -And you?

  Silence. Darkness. Her heart bled like a wound.

  The Kinsman’s eyelids fluttered like weary wings. Overcome with despair Jane let her forehead sink until it was resting upon his. Through her sobs she heard him whisper faintly: “Nay, love, it’s right we let him be. We owe him a death. I’ll not cheat him now.”

  He shivered violently in her cradling arms, opened his eyes for the last time and murmured: “Sweet bride … Our song is sung,” and lay still.

  Chapter Sixteen

  AT TEN MINUTES past seven in the evening, Michael Carver opened his eyes to find Rachel bending over him. As he did so the E-V.C. screen next door became filled with the image of her own face.

  “Mike?”

  The screen flickered and for a bewildering moment Rachel’s face seemed to merge into Jane’s and then slowly resolved into her own again.

  “Mike?”

  “Hi, there,” he whispered. “It really is you, isn’t it? We finally made it.”

  She bent down and kissed him on the mouth. At the same moment she felt the child in her womb kick lustily and she cried out in sudden ecstatic delight: “Oh God, God, I thought I’d never see you look at me again!”

  The others came crowding in and clustered round the bed. Dr. Carver blinked up at their smiling faces until gradually it dawned upon him that he was not lying on the trolley in the lab. He dragged himself up on to his elbows and gave a yelp as the taped drip needle pulled itself free from his arm. “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded hoarsely. “Where am I?”

  “In the General Hospital,” said George. “You’ve been out a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “The best part of a fortnight.”

  “A fortnight!”

  “Just about.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Some O.O.B.E., eh?”

  “You know that?”

  George turned to Peter. “Mike,” he said. “Let me be the first to introduce you to a genius-Peter Klorner.”

  “Klorner? Klorner from Stanford?”

  “How do you do, Doctor?” said Peter, reaching out and shaking the bewildered man by the hand. “May I say that it’s a unique experience to meet a bona fide time traveller in the flesh.”

  Michael gaped at him. “Then you do know?”

  “Let’s just say we know enough to have guessed some of the rest,” said Klorner. “But there’s still a whole lot more for you to tell us.”

  “But how …?”

  “We picked up your O.O.B. contact, Mike,” said George. “We’ve got the whole thing on video.”

  “On video? I don’t get it.”

  “Nor will you till you see the E-V.C.”

  “E-V. C.?”

  “Encephalo-Visual Converter,” said lan. “It’s out of this world, Doctor! Fantastic!”

  Mike flopped back on to the pillow and closed his eyes. “Are you telling me it really did happen? That it wasn’t just an incredible Y-d. trip?”

  “All we’ve got is what we took off your P. points,” said George. “But just wait till you see it, Mike. If that’s a Y-d. hallucination, what’s reality?”

  “You mean you know about Jane? And the Kinsmen? And the Drowning?”

  “We’ve pieced some of it together. But not much.”

  The young intern who had been hovering on the fringes of the crowd said: “I think we ought to let him get some rest. He looks just about all in to me.”

  There were immediate murmurs of contrition and they all backed away from the bed leaving Rachel isolated.

  Michael opened his haunted eyes and looked up at her. “So who the hell am I?” he whispered. “Do you know?”

  “You’re Mike Carver,” she said. “And I love you.”

  As the rain clouds drew away eastwards from the high moors they left behind them a swathe of sky as clear as golden wine. Standing at the helm of the “Kingdom Come” young Napper glanced back over his shoulder at the purpling hills of Blackdown and raised his right fist in a tuneless gesture of silent defiance. The waves slapped against the heeling hull and fell back in a hush of spray. The wake became a long glimmering line drawn further and further backwards till it melted and was lost in the shifting currents of the channel. The boy drew a deep breath and began to sing one of the songs which it was no longer prudent to sing when ashore:

  “Oh, white wings, strong white wings,

  Ye’ll bear my heart across the sea …”

  The sound of his cheerful voice carried down into the hold where his brother Jonsey sat with Francis and Jane. “He can sing all he likes out here,” said Jonsey. “We’re well clear of Blackdown now.” And he called out: “How’s that sky, boy?”

  “Sweet and coming up clear from the west!” cried Napper.

  “Seems like luck is starting to favor us all again,” observed Jonsey. “We’ll have a star to steer by, and if this wind holds up we might even count on a sight of the French coast by dawn.”

  “You hear that, Jane?”