Time's Chariot

going on but, no, they don’t know where I am or what it is.’

‘I suppose you used the duplicate controls to come here?’ Daiho said.

‘And destroyed them. That’s right. We can’t go back that way, but then, they can’t come for us either.’

‘You said Ario knew,’ Scott said. ‘They could get it from him.’

‘He knows the gist of it. Not the details. Not where we are.’

Scott was beginning to sound desperate. ‘So when it comes to getting back to the Home Time…’

‘We use the fallback plan,’ said Asaldra. ‘Inconvenient, but that’s life. Why do you think I came here now, not when you first arrived?’

‘You’re joking!’ Scott sounded aghast. ‘That’s—’

‘We all knew there might be costs.’ For the first time, Asaldra looked as if he were standing up to Scott. ‘This is one of them.’

‘That’s easy for you to say, when all you have to go back to is that woman…’ Scott began.

Asaldra bridled. ‘Don’t speak about my wife that way, Scott.’

‘That will do, Phenuel,’ Daiho said. ‘Hossein is right. Sacrifices were to be expected.’

And Jontan and Sarai glanced at each other. Sacrifices?

Matthew Carradine nodded his head slowly as he studied the picture.

‘Well, well, well,’ he murmured. ‘My old friend.’

‘He’s the one you made the arrangements with?’ said Alan.

‘He’s the one. When did he turn up?’

‘Oh-nine thirty-three.’ Alan handed him a dataslate. ‘And we have a transcript of their conversation.’

‘You’ve broken through the bug jammers?’ Carradine said hopefully.

‘Still using the lip readers with binos.’

‘Oh well.’ Carradine read the slate and his eyebrows rose higher. ‘We have dissent in the ranks,’ he said. He read further…

‘Yes!’ He slammed the slate down on his desk and jumped to his feet. He paced about the room in his excitement. ‘I knew it! I knew it!’

‘Matthew?’

‘They are doing something illegal! I got the vibes, I had my suspicions, but I couldn’t prove anything and they weren’t saying. But now! Look! This man, Asaldra, he was responsible for bringing them back but now something’s gone wrong at his end and the Home Time don’t know where he is, Alan. They don’t know where he is.’

‘There’s this fallback plan of theirs,’ Alan said quietly.

‘That’s how they plan to return. But look at this! This line here!’ He picked the slate up again and jabbed a finger at a line of text. ‘Oh-nine thirty-seven, fifty-two seconds. Asaldra, quote, we can’t go back that way but then they can’t come for us either, unquote.’

‘That is interesting,’ Alan said, even more quietly but now with a very faint smile.

‘And if we keep a suitably close eye on them then they won’t be able to implement this fallback plan,’ said Carradine. ‘I take it you have something set up for this contingency?’

‘It just needs your say-so, Matthew.’

‘You have it.’ Carradine thumped a control pad on his desk. ‘Get me the security chief and Holliss from the hotel. Priority one.’

Jontan was leaning over the mixture regulators when the doors flew open and armed men poured into the lounge.

‘Move away from the equipment!’ Jontan was too surprised to notice that the man was shouting in badly- accented Home Time. ‘Stand up! Move away from the equipment!’

They shoved him against a wall and held him there at gunpoint. Two of the others grabbed hold of Mr Daiho and lifted him off his couch. He shouted angrily but a second later he too was pinned against a wall.

Another thug thrust Sarai into the room. Jontan took a step forward and a gun barrel jabbed into him just below the ribs. Mr Scott and Mr Asaldra were herded in after her. The five Home Timers were spaced around the room, each with their own personal bygoner thug pointing a gun at them.

The kit chose that moment to symb an alarm signal at Jontan. A valve needed closing or the whole mixture would be rendered non-viable. Sarai heard it too and they both instinctively took a step towards the regulator. They collapsed, wheezing, as two fists caught them hard in the stomachs.

‘Move away from the equipment!’

‘Please,’ Jontan gasped, ‘the mixture’s going critical.’

‘Move away from the equipment!’

‘I think you’ve exhausted their grasp of our language,’ said Mr Daiho from across the room. The man guarding him raised his gun. Mr Daiho looked calmly back at him.

‘Sir,’ Jontan pleaded, ‘you can talk like them, tell them I’ve got to adjust the mixture…’

‘I don’t think they care.’

‘We care.’ Two more bygoners had come into the room. The speaker was small and slight; his accent was imperfect and he spoke slowly, but he could be understood. ‘What is the problem?’

‘I have to adjust a valve,’ Jontan said. The small man spoke to his companion, a broader man with confident, appraising eyes. This other man nodded and said something; Jontan’s guard stepped back.

‘Mr Carradine says you can do what you have to do,’ said the small man. Jontan gratefully hurried over to the regulator, picked up a phase adjuster and switched the flow over to a backup valve.

‘Can you shut all this down?’ the small man asked.

‘Not without ruining the mixtures and killing the cultures,’ said Jontan.

‘What do you do at night? When you go to bed?’

‘Well, we put it on standby.’

‘Then do that now.’

‘I…’ said Jontan, with a glance at Mr Daiho. Yes, these people were now in control; yes, they had guns; and yes, they didn’t have social preparation and would no doubt use them if necessary. But sheer instinct made Jontan seek Mr Daiho’s approval for any course of action.

‘Do it,’ Mr Daiho said, and Jontan symbed the appropriate commands to the control module. The action also had the automatic effect of activating the forcefield that protected the gear from the wandering hands of bygoners.

The other man, the one who seemed to be in charge, walked into the centre of the room and gazed longingly at the gear. Then he spoke again.

‘Mr Carradine says that you two journeymen are to be put under guard for the time being,’ said the interpreter. The guards shouldered their weapons; hands like vices grabbed hold of the journeymen’s arms; and Sarai and Jontan were frog-marched from the room.

Scott, Daiho and Asaldra were shown into one of the hotel’s meeting rooms and, finally, things were a little more civilized. They were allowed to sit down and drinks were served. Guards still stood around the room.

Matthew Carradine sat facing the three Home Timers as if they were an interview panel.

‘We’ve played around enough,’ he said.

‘This wasn’t the agreement,’ Asaldra protested. ‘We arranged—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Scott murmured in their own language. Carradine speared him with a glance and Scott interpreted his comment into twenty-first century English.

‘And kindly keep it that way,’ Carradine said. ‘Mr… Asaldra, wasn’t it? Yes, of course. No, it wasn’t the agreement. However, as things have obviously changed at your end, I don’t see why they shouldn’t change at this end too. Tell me, gentlemen, what should I do with you?’

It wasn’t the question they had expected.

‘I thought you already had ideas along those lines,’ Daiho said. Carradine chuckled.

‘Interrogate you, get the secret of time travel, perhaps?’ He shook his head. ‘No. We might pump you for everything you know, yes, but we’d be very selective about what we used and time travel wouldn’t be part of it. It would be wonderful to be able to travel back and forth like you do, but your people are obviously far more advanced than we are and I can imagine what I would do in their place, if a bunch of primitives started monkeying about with my prize technology. They’d be on me like a ton of bricks. No, what I’m after is your more elementary tech. Your