It transpired that Gibson was not alone. He shouldered his rifle, turned and made a beckoning gesture towards the shadows of the jungle.
Two soldiers emerged from that gloom. Sweat had soaked through the shirts of these laden fellows, and, as they stepped into the growing light of the day, they seemed altogether more suspicious of us, and generally uncomfortable, than had the Wing Commander. These two were Indians, I thought – sepoys, soldiers of the Empire – their eyes glittered black and fierce, and each had a turban and clipped beard. They wore khaki drill shirts and shorts; one of them carried a heavy mechanical gun at his back, and bore two heavy leather pouches, evidently holding ammunition for this weapon. Their heavy, silvery epaulettes glittered in the Palaeocene sunlight; they scowled at the corpse of Pristichampus with undisguised ferocity.
Gibson told us that he and these two fellows had been involved on a scouting expedition; they had travelled perhaps a mile from a main base camp, which was situated inland from the Sea. (It struck me as odd that Gibson did not introduce the two soldiers by name. This little incivility – brought on by an unspoken recognition, by Gibson, of differences of rank – seemed to me altogether absurd, there on that isolated beach in the Palaeocene, with only a handful of humans anywhere in the world!)
I thanked Gibson again for rescuing the Morlock, and invited him to join us for some breakfast at our shelter. ‘It’s just along the beach,’ I said, pointing; and Gibson peaked his hand over his eyes to see.
‘Well, that looks – ah – as if it’s going to be a jolly solid construction.’
‘Solid? I should say so,’ I replied, and began a long and rather rambling discourse on the details of our incomplete shelter, of which I felt inordinately proud, and of how we had survived in the Palaeocene.
Guy Gibson folded his hands behind his back and listened, with a set, polite expression on his face. The sepoys watched me, puzzled and suspicious, their hands never far from their weapons.
After some minutes of this, I became aware, rather belatedly, of Gibson’s detachment. I let my prattle slow to a halt.
Gibson glanced around brightly at the beach. ‘I think you’ve done remarkably well here. Remarkably. I should have thought that a few weeks of this Robinson Crusoe stuff would pretty much have driven me batty with loneliness. I mean, opening time at the pub won’t be for another fifty million years!’
I smiled at this joke – which I failed to follow – and I felt rather embarrassed at my exaggerated pride at such mean achievements, before this vision of dapper competence.
‘But look here,’ Gibson went on gently, ‘don’t you think you’d be better off coming back with us to the Expeditionary Force? We have travelled here to find you, after all. And we’ve some decent provisions there – and modern tools, and so forth.’ He glanced at Nebogipfel, and added, a little more dubiously, ‘And the doc might be able to do something for this poor chap as well. Is there anything you need here? We can always come back later.’
Of course there was not – I had no need to return through those few hundred yards along the beach ever again! – but I knew that, with the arrival of Gibson and his people, my brief idyll was done. I looked into Gibson’s frank, practical face, and knew that I could never find the words to express such a sense of loss to him.
With the sepoys leading the way, and with the Morlock supporting himself against my arm, we set off into the interior of the jungle.
Away from the coast, the air was hot and clammy. We moved in single file, with the sepoys at front and back, and Gibson, the Morlock, and myself sandwiched between; I carried the frail Morlock in my arms for much of the journey. The two sepoys kept up their suspicious, hooded glares at us, although after a time they allowed their hands to stray from their webbing holsters. They said not a single word to Nebogipfel or me, in the whole time we travelled together.
Gibson’s expedition had come from 1944 – six years after our own departure, during the German assault on the London Dome.
‘And the War is still continuing?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ he said, sounding grim. ‘Of course we responded for that brutal attack on London. Paid them back in spades.’
‘You were involved in such actions yourself?’
As he walked, he glanced down – apparently involuntarily – at the service ribbons sewn to the chest of his tunic. I did not recognize these at the time – I am no military buff, and in any case some of these awards hadn’t even been devised in my day – but I learned later that they constituted the Distinguished Service Order, and the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar: high awards indeed, especially for one so young. Gibson said without drama, ‘I saw a bit of action, yes. A good few sorties. Pretty lucky to be here to talk about it – plenty of good chaps who aren’t.’
‘And these sorties were effective?’
‘I’ll say. We broke open their Domes for them, without much of a delay after they did us the same favour!’
‘And the cities underneath?’
He eyed me. ‘What do you think? Without its Dome, a city is pretty much defenceless against attack from the air. Oh, you can throw up a barrage from your eighty-eights –’
‘“Eighty-eights”?’
‘The Germans have an eight-point-eight centimetre Flat 36 anti-aircraft gun – pretty useful as a field gun and anti –’Naut, as well as its main purpose: good bit of design … Anyway, if your bomber pilot can get in under such flak he can pretty much dump what he likes into the guts of an unDomed city.’
‘And the results – after six more years of all this?’
He shrugged. ‘There’s not much in the way of cities left, I suppose. Not in Europe, anyway.’
We reached the vicinity of South Hampstead, I estimated. Here, we broke through a line of trees into a clearing. This was a circular space perhaps a quarter-mile across, but it was not natural: the tree-stumps at its edge showed how the forest had been blasted back, or cut away. Even as we approached, I could see squads of bare-chested infantrymen hacking their way further into the undergrowth with saws and machetes, extending the space. The earth in the clearing was stripped of undergrowth and hardened by several layers of palm fronds, all stamped down into the mud.
At the heart of this clearing sat four of the great Juggernaut machines which I had encountered before, in 1873 and 1938. These beasts sat at four sides of a square a hundred feet across, immobile, their ports gaping like the mouths of thirsty animals; their anti-mine flails hung limp and useless from the drums held out before them, and the mottled green and black coloration of their metal hides was encrusted with guano and fallen leaves. There were a series of other vehicles and items of materiel scattered around the encampment, including light armoured cars, and small artillery pieces mounted on thick-wheeled trolleys.
This, Gibson gave me to understand, would be the site of a sort of graving-yard for time-travelling Juggernauts, in 1944.
Soldiers worked everywhere, and when I walked into the clearing beside Gibson, and with the limping Nebogipfel leaning against me, to a man the troopers ceased their labouring and stared at us with undiluted curiosity.
We reached the courtyard enclosed by the four ’Nauts. At the centre of this square there was a white-painted flag-pole; and from this a Union Flag dangled, gaudy, limp and incongruous. A series of tents had been set up in this yard; Gibson invited us to sit on canvas stools beside the grandest of these. A soldier – thin, pale and evidently uncomfortable in the heat – emerged from one of the ’Nauts. I took this fellow to be Gibson’s batman, for the Wing Commander ordered him to bring us some refreshment.
The work of the camp proceeded all around us as we sat there; it was a hive of activity, as military sites always seem endlessly to be. Most of the soldiers wore a full kit of a jungle-green twill shirt and trousers with anklets; on their heads they had soft felt hats with puggrees of light khaki, or else bush hats of (Gibson said) an Australian design. They wore their divisional insignia sewn into their shirts or hats, and most of them carried weaponry: leather bandoliers for small-arms ammunition, web pouches, and the like. They all bore the heavy epaulettes I remembered from 1938. In the heat and moisture, most of these troopers were fairly dishevelled.
I saw one chap in a suit of pure white which enclosed him head to foot; he wore thick gloves, and a soft helmet which enclosed his head, with an inset visor through which he peered. He worked at the opened side-panels of one of the Juggernauts. The poor fellow must have been melting of the heat in such an enclosure, I surmised; Gibson explained that the suit was of asbestos, to protect him from engine fires.
Not all the soldiers were men – I should think two-fifths of the hundred or so personnel were female – and many of the soldiers bore wounds of one sort or another: burn scars and the like, and even, here and there, prosthetic sections of limb. I realized that the dreadful attrition of the youth of Europe had continued since 1938, necessitating the call-up of those wounded already, and more of the young women.
Gibson took off his heavy boots and massaged his cramped feet with a rueful grin at me. Nebogipfel sipped from a glass of water, while the batman provided Gibson and me with a cup of traditional English breakfast tea – tea, there in the Palaeocene!
‘You have made quite a little colony,’ I said to Gibson.
‘I suppose so. It’s just the drill, you know.’ He put down his boots and sipped his tea. ‘Of course we’re a jumble of Services here – I expect you noticed.’
‘No,’ I said frankly.
‘Well, most of the chaps are Army, of course.’ He pointed to a slim young trooper who wore a khaki tag at the shoulders of his Tropical shirt. ‘But a few of us, like him and myself, are RAF.’
‘RAF?’
‘Royal Air Force. The men in grey suits have finally worked out that we’re the best chaps to drive these great iron brutes, you see.’ A trooper of the Army passed by, goggling at Nebogipfel, and Gibson favoured him with an easy grin. ‘Of course we don’t mind giving these foot-sloggers a lift. Better than leaving you to do it yourselves, eh, Stubbins?’
The man Stubbins – slim, red-haired, with an open, friendly face – grinned back, almost shyly, but evidently pleased at Gibson’s attention: all this despite the fact that he must have been a good foot taller than the diminutive Gibson, and some years older. I recognized in Gibson’s relaxed manner something of the poise of the natural leader.
‘We’ve been here a week already,’ Gibson said to me. ‘Surprising we didn’t stumble on you earlier, I suppose.’
‘We weren’t expecting visitors,’ I said drily. ‘If we had been, I suppose I would have lit fires, or found some other way of signalling our presence.’
He favoured me with a wink. ‘We have been occupied ourselves. We had the devil’s own work to do in the first day or two here. We have good kit, of course – the boffins made it pretty clear to us before we left that the climate of dear old England is pretty variable, if you take a long enough view of it – and so we’ve come prepared with an issue of everything from greatcoats to Bombay bloomers. But we weren’t expecting quite these Tropical conditions: not here, in the middle of London! Our clothes seem to be falling apart – literally rotting off our backs – and the metal fittings are rusting, and our boots won’t grip in this slime: even my bally socks have shrunk! And the whole lot is being gnawed away by rats.’ He frowned. ‘At least I think they are rats.’
‘Probably not, in fact,’ I remarked. ‘And the Juggernauts? Kitchener class, are they?’
Gibson cocked an eyebrow at me, evidently surprised at my display of this fragment of knowledge. ‘Actually we can barely move the ’Nauts: those wretched elephants’ feet sink into this endless mud …’
And now a clear, familiar voice called out from behind me: ‘I’m afraid you’re a little out of date, sir. The Kitchener class – including the dear old Raglan – has been discarded for a number of years now …’
I turned in my chair. Approaching me was a figure dressed in a crisp Juggernaut crew beret and coverall; this soldier walked with a pronounced limp, and a hand was proffered for shaking. I took the hand; it was small but strong.
‘Captain Hilary Bond,’ I said, and smiled.
She looked me up and down, taking in my beard and animal-skin clothes. ‘You’re a little more ragged, sir, but quite unmistakeable. Surprised to see me?’
‘After a few doses of this time travelling, nothing much surprises me any more, Hilary!’