We are evenly matched—my people and the Others—but our strengths are as different as our basic natures. They have superior mastery of space; our true domain is time …
There are standing waves in time … all presents are not equal … the ‘now’ which you experience is known as the Prime Present, and has greater potential than any other. You are bound to it, just as the Others are bound to it … but the mental disciplines of my people enabled us to break free and migrate to another crest in the distant past … to safety …
Occasionally, Gregg was aware of the dressings on his chest being changed, and of his lips and brow being moistened with cool water. A beautiful young face hovered above his own, the grey eyes watchful and concerned, and he tried to remember the name he associated with it. Martha? Mary?
To a woman of my race, the time of greatest danger is the last week of pregnancy … especially if the child is male and destined to have a certain cast of mind … in those circumstances the child can be drawn to your ‘now’, the home time of all humanity, and the mother is drawn with it … usually she can assert control soon after the child is born and return with it to the time of refuge … but there have been rare examples in which the male child resisted all attempts to influence its mental processes, and lived out its life in the Prime Present …
Happily for me, my son is almost ready to travel … for the Prince has grown clever and would soon return …
His enjoyment of the taste of the soup was Gregg’s first indication that his body was making up its losses of blood, that his strength was returning, that he was not going to die. As the nourishing liquid was spooned into his mouth, he filled his eyes with the fresh young beauty of his daughter-wife, and was thankful for her kindness and grace. He forced into the deepest caverns of his mind all thoughts of the dreadful dark hunter who had menaced her.
I’m sorry … my poor, brave Billy … my son and I must travel now. The longer we remain, the more strongly he will be linked to the Prime Present … and my people will be anxious until they learn that we are safe …
I have been schooled to survive in your ‘now’, though in less hazardous parts of it … which is why I am able to speak to you in English … but my ship came down in the wrong part of the world, all those thousands of years ago, and they will fear I have been lost …
A moment of lucidity. Gregg turned his head and looked through the open door of the bedroom into the house’s main living space. Morna was standing at the table, her head surrounded by a vibrant golden halo of hair. She stooped to rest her forehead against that of her child.
They both became hazy, then transparent—then they were gone.
Gregg pushed himself upright in the bed, shaking his head, reaching for them with his free hand. The pain of the re-opening wound burned across his chest and he fell back on to the pillows, gasping for breath as the darkness closed in on him again. An indeterminate time later he felt the coolness of a moist cloth being pressed against his forehead, and his crushing sense of loss abated.
He smiled and said, “I was afraid you had left.”
“How could I leave you like this?” Ruth Jefferson replied. “What in God’s name has been going on out here, Billy Gregg? I find you lying in bed with a bullet hole in you, and the place outside looking like a battleground. Sam and some of his friends are out there cleaning up the mess the buzzards left, and they say they haven’t seen anything like it since the war.”
Gregg opened his eyes and chose to give the sort of answer she would expect of him. “You missed a good fight, Ruth.”
“Good fight!” Ruth clucked with exasperation. “You’re more of an old fool than I took you for, Billy Gregg. What happened? Did the Portfield mob fall out with each other?”
“Something like that.”
“Lucky for you,” Ruth scolded. “And where were Morna and the baby when all this was going on? Where are they now?”
Gregg sorted through his memories, trying to separate dream and reality. “I don’t know, Ruth. They … left.”
“How?”
“They went with friends.”
Ruth looked at him suspiciously, then gave a deep sigh. “I still think you’ve been up to something, but I’ve got a feeling I’ll never find out what it was.”
Gregg remained in bed for a further three days, being nursed to fitness by Ruth, and it seemed to him a perfectly natural outcome that they should revive their plans to be married. During that time there was a fairly steady stream of callers, men who were pleased that he was alive and that Josh Portfield was dead. All of them were curious about the details of the gun battle, which was fast becoming legendary, but he said nothing to dispel the notion that Portfield and his men had annihilated themselves in a sudden quarrel.
As soon as he had the house to himself, he searched it from one end to the other and found, tucked in behind his whisky jar, six slim gold bars neatly wrapped in a scrap of cloth. In keeping with his expectations, however, the big revolver—the black engine of death—was missing. He knew that Morna had decided he should not have it, and for a while he thought he might understand her reasons. There were words, half-remembered from his delirium, which seemed as though they might explain all that had happened. It was only necessary to recall them properly, to get them into sharp focus in his mind. And at first the task appeared simple—the main requirement being a breathing space, time in which to think.
Gregg got his breathing space, but it was a long time before he could accept that, like the heat of summer, dreams can only fade.