Overtime. Part 49

Which was reasonable enough; you don't need a doorframe on a cave, and a cave was quite definitely what Blondel had just come out of. A cave opening directly on to the sheer side of a cliff. Oh well.

Four seconds later he was relieved to find himself in water. It could just as easily have been rock, or sun-baked earth, or a thick brown bush, but it wasn't. Having thrashed his way to the surface again and spat out a newt, Blondel trod water for a moment and tried to work out what was going on.

He was still, he gathered, in a cave; a cave inside a cave; a cavern. High above him he could see the roof, with a tasteful display of stalact.i.tes. The entrance he had fallen out of was one of several. There were crudely-made ladders tied to the walls, which led down to the narrow strip of beach, or whatever you liked to call it, that ran round the edge of the pool he was currently bobbing about in.

It was perishing cold, too.

With slow strokes he swam to the edge and pulled himself out. As he did so, he noticed a pair of feet directly in front of him. He stayed where he was.

It was hard for feet to look menacing, but these ones seemed to have the knack. It wasn't so much the size of them or the inordinately bizarre cut of the toenails. It wasn't even the context. The feeling of being in deep trouble was a purely intuitive one, but Blondel had always had an excellent working relationship with intuition. He looked up.

The owner of the feet stood about five foot four and was distinctly hairy. What little of his face was visible through the undergrowth had a simian look, mostly to do with the jaw, which looked as if it had been carelessly left out in the sun and had melted. As if that wasn't off-putting enough, there was a heavy-looking rock in the stranger's hands, and he probably wasn't lifting it over his head like that simply to exercise his pectoral muscles. For one thing, they didn't look like they needed it. Blondel ducked, and a moment later the rock hit the patch of beach he'd just been using.

'Steady on,' Blondel said, resurfacing a few feet out into the pond. The stranger grunted irritably and picked the rock up. It looked unpleasantly as if what he lacked in intellectual stature he made up for in dogged persistence.

Out of the corner of his eye, Blondel saw another, similar figure approaching. This one was carrying a stone axe, and gave every indication of having been woken up from a badly needed sleep. There were others following. Bad news.

'Excuse me,' Blondel said, in the most nonchalant voice he could find, 'but could any of you gentlemen direct me to the nearest -There was a loud and disconcerting splash in the water about a foot from where he was standing, and a wave hit him in the face. The rock, probably. That one or one just like it. Blondel dived down again and resurfaced some way further out.

It was difficult to know what to do for the best. If these were, as Blondel suspected, cavemen, there was a fair chance that if he stayed there long enough they would probably catch some disease or other from him to which they had not yet had a chance to build up an immunity, and die. On the other hand, that might well take some time, and the water was quite distressingly cold. So Blondel decided to try his other option. He sang L'Amours Dont Sui Epris.

With hindsight, Blondel realised, he'd been expecting a bit much there. The romance tradition of chansons and trouveres, though considerably more accessible than many other musical genres, isn't entirely suited for absolute novices. He might have done better, he felt, with something a bit more basic, such as Baa Baa Black Sheep. That might have had them standing in the aisles. As it as, they threw rocks.

Having resurfaced ten yards further out, Blondel decided to try a little lateral thinking. On the one hand, there were rather a lot more of them now, and some of them seemed to have grasped the principle of the slingshot. If one chose to look on the bright side, though, one couldn't help noticing that they weren't terribly good marksmen. It might be worth giving it another ten minutes to see if there was any chance of them wiping themselves out with stray missiles.

A feeling of acute numbness in his toes argued against that, and Blondel came to the conclusion that getting cramp and drowning wasn't exactly the most positive step he could think of at this juncture; so he chose the least inhabited part of the beach and started to swim towards it. He was just about to come within easy boulder range and was wondering if this was the best he could do when an idea struck him, with a number of small, fast-moving stones.

It might justifiably be said that leaving it until now to reveal that Blondel had had a small, high-volume, waterproof personal stereo in his jacket pocket from the outset smacks of rather meretricious storytelling; however, since Blondel had only just remembered it himself, the omission is probably justifiable. He hadn't given the thing a second thought since he'd acquired it, as his introductory free gift on taking out a Galeazzo Brothers With Profits Ten Year Endowment Policy, just before the concert. Now he realised that even the things you get given for free can sometimes come in very handy. He trod water, fished the thing out, removed the headphones, turned the volume to maximum and switched it on.

It was an added bonus that the machine contained a tape of the ma.s.sed bands of the Royal Marines playing The Ride of the Valkyries, although since all tapes for which one does not have to pay money have exactly the same thing on them, it probably was only to be expected. At any rate, it worked. The cavemen dropped their improvised weapons and fled. All except one, who reacted rather like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a fleet of oncoming lorries. The noise seemed to paralyse him, his knees gave way and he sat down heavily on a short, thick log. Perhaps, Blondel said to himself, the poor chap isn't a music lover. Or perhaps, rather more likely, he is a music lover.

He clambered out of the water, shook himself and started to squelch up the beach, trying not to startle the dazed caveman, who was sitting with his head between his knees, whimpering. Unfortunately the band chose that moment to launch into the Soldier's Chorus from Faust, and that seemed to do it for the caveman. He lurched violently and disturbed the log, which started to roll slowly towards the water.

Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, Blondel switched the music off and helped the caveman to his feet. He tried to apologise in sign language, but he didn't seem to be getting through, somehow.

'Come on, old chap,' he said. 'You run along and we'll say no more about it...'

The log rolled to the edge of the water and fell in. Blondel realised that the caveman, far from being paralysed with fear, was concentrating single-mindedly on the log and what it was doing.

'We'll,' the caveman repeated. 'We'll!'

He scampered to the water, fished the log out, lugged it back up the beach and set it rolling again. 'We'll!' he yelled.

'Oh bother!' said Blondel to himself, 'I've done it again.' Then he trudged off to find the tunnel.

Back in the tunnel, Blondel felt simultaneously relieved, dry and very, very lost. The last feeling was the worst, and it wasn't helped by the discovery that the water in the cave pool had turned his map to sticky and illegible porridge. It would have to be intuition again. He turned left and ran down the tunnel.

Fifty yards or so further on, he discovered the flaw in his basic strategy. A squad of heavily armed men were coming down the tunnel towards him. They seemed pleased to see him, a feeling he found it hard to reciprocate. He skidded to a halt, turned athletically, and ran back the way he'd come. Mistake number two.

If he hadn't been so preoccupied he'd have seen himself coming; as it was, he collided with such tremendous terminal velocity that both of him were thrown backwards. For a moment, he was both stunned.

'You clumsy idiot!' he panted, simultaneously.

'Look who's talking.'

'Why don't you look where you're going?'

'I like that, coming from you.'

'Look,' said his later self, 'I'm being chased by a platoon of Time and Motion, I haven't got time...'

'So am I,' replied his earlier self.

'But they're not behind you,' replied the later self, 'they're behind me. You're heading straight for them.'

'I am?'

'Yes.'

The earlier Blondel gave his later self a funny look. 'How do you know?' he said.

'Because I nearly ran straight into them, idiot,' replied the later Blondel, 'that's how. Now, if you don't mind...'

'Before or after you ran into me?'

'Before. No, after. Look, does it matter?'

'But that's crazy,' replied Mark I. 'It's impossible.'

'Is it?'

'Must be,' said Mark I, backing away slightly. 'Because I -we - can't be just about to run into them, because you've just warned me they're coming.'

Mark II tried, very briefly, to think about this, and then came to the conclusion that now wasn't the time. So to speak.

'Look,' he said, 'will you just ..

Mark I shook his head. 'Oh no you don't,' he said. 'If one of us is going to turn round and carry on running in the safe direction it might as well be me.'

Mark II stared. 'How do you make that out?' he said. 'Well,' Mark I replied, 'I'm not the one who went blundering into them in the first place letting them know where I was, am I? No, I reckon the best thing would be for them to catch you, so's I can get away.'

'Look ...' Mark II said angrily, and then tailed off. 'Why don't we both...'

Mark I gave him a look. 'Don't be silly,' he said.

Down the tunnel came the sound of heavy boots running. 'But if they catch you,' said Mark II frantically, 'they'll catch me too.

'And vice versa.