Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 34

Harvey glanced in the rearview mirror to see if Domino was keeping a straight face.

"They've been coming over here from Stonehenge since last Wednesday," I said. "The fields between here and there are full of them."

Harvey looked bemused. "My goodness," he said. "Has there been any action at Stonehenge?" "Not a peep," Domino said.

I closed my eyes and leaned back until my head was against the seat's rest. "Imagine their disappointment."

"It's a very localised phenomenon," said Domino.

"It's starting to get on my t.i.ts," Harvey said. "You know, this morning, while we were clearing frogs, this s.p.a.ce Cruiser pulled up with all these guys with video cameras in it."

I nodded. s.p.a.ce Cruisers containing guys with video cameras had become about as unusual in Seldon as Springheel Jack.

"None of them spoke more than a couple of words of English," Harvey went on. "Turned out they were Uzbeks. Uzbeks. I mean, do Uzbeks even have television?"

"Of course they do," said Domino.

"Yeah, other people's television. I meant television of their own."

"Uzbekistan has quite a muscular little press a.s.sociation these days, actually," Domino told him.

I opened my eyes. In front of us, the thirteen-strong Polish television contingent had somehow crammed themselves and all their equipment into their rented Es.p.a.ce. Through their rear window, I could see what appeared to be a heated argument going on.

"They wanted rooms," Harvey said, voice rising indignantly. "They thought the House was a hotel. Imagine that."

There was a brief silence in the Range Rover, while we all imagined it. Finally, Domino said, "It does look a little like an hotel, you have to admit."

"Yeah," Harvey grumped. "Well." He honked the horn a couple of times, and the Poles in the back seat of the Es.p.a.ce turned round and flipped us the finger. Harvey shook his head. "That's the Polacks, right?" Harvey had inherited, from the Czech side of his family, a congenital dislike of Poles.

At Three-Mile Post we left Seldon territory and briefly found ourselves driving across Jim Dawes's land. On either side of the road Jim's cornfields dipped and rose towards a shimmering tree-and-hedge-lined horizon arched over by a white-hot sky.

At the crest of Sefton Hill a small riot of people was spilling out across the road. Harvey drove us past the dozens of parked vehicles and down the other side of the hill until there was s.p.a.ce to park. Then we walked back up to the crowd.

Sefton Hill was said to command the most aesthetic vista in the area, a great even expanse of gently rolling fields and hills that vanished into an uncertain and vaguely mystical heat-distorted distance peppered with tumuli and standing stones and the occasional long barrow. It was so popular with tourists that every summer Jim Dawes strategically positioned a little van in the layby selling strawberries and pots of honey.

"I love this," said Harvey when we reached the top of the hill, looking at the view he had inherited from the English side of his family.

All around us, the World's Press were aiming their cameras into the middle distance. In the middle of one of Jim's cornfields the crop had been crushed down to form a complex geometrical shape, like a deformed star.

"It wasn't here last night," I heard one of the CNN team say behind us. "We were out here till ten, eleven o'clock shooting the Evening Show, and I swear it wasn't there then."

Harvey was looking at the star-shape and shaking his head. "That's amazing, you have to admit," he said.

"It's a fake," someone said beside me.

I turned my head and saw that, without my noticing, a short young woman with very long brown hair had moved in between Domino and me. "Beg pardon?"

"It's a hoax," she said. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a baggy washed-out Harlequins rugby shirt.

She wasn't a villager because I'd never seen her before, which these days would have suggested she was either a journalist or a sightseer, but she didn't seem to be carrying any journalistic equipment and she didn't have the blissed-out look of so many sightseers. "Some students from the London School of Economics came down here last night and did it with some bits of wood and a couple of lengths of clothesline."

Domino looked down at her and frowned. "Why would they do that?" he asked politely.

"Because I paid them to," she said without looking at either of us.

"That's very interesting," Domino said gravely.

She nodded. "Any idiot can make those things." She looked up at me. "I'm Pauline Niven. You're Karen Baxter's husband, aren't you."

"I wanted to prove that you can't believe everything you see," she said. "You can't look at a crop circle and just a.s.sume it was made by little green men."

"We have Green Men here too," Domino put in. I nudged him to be quiet.

I said to Pauline, "Unless you really want to be lynched by a couple of hundred journalists and scientistsand a.s.sorted sightseers, I wouldn't mention this to anybody else."

"That's the problem, you see?" she asked. "Everybody's just gone completely crazy over this place."

Crop circles-real and fake-were two a penny around Seldon; we had left Sefton Hill before the press pack got bored and caused a mini rush-hour, and Harvey had driven us back to The Black Bull, where we had been able to get a table and something to eat in the snug. Pauline was sitting opposite me, virtually vibrating with nervous energy, a gla.s.s of orange juice clasped in her fist.

"The food in here's getting real strange," Harvey commented, returning from the food counter and sitting down at our table. He put down his plate of chicken tikka and wild rice and poked it suspiciously with his fork.

"When I first came here, the only thing Betty served was steak sandwiches and fries-sorry," he added for our benefit. "Chips." He thought about it for a moment. "And fried onion rings." He looked at us. "You know, I miss fried onion rings." I glanced at Pauline. She was staring at Harvey with a bemused expression on her face.

"It's the journalists," Domino said. "Betty thinks she should have something a bit more exotic than chips and steak sandwiches and onion rings for her new clientele."

Harvey nodded sadly. "These do not appear to be people who would be impressed by a Ploughman's Lunch, it is true. And your apology is accepted," he added to me.

"What apology?"

"Your apology for not introducing me to your friend while I drove you all back here."

Oh, for heaven's sake... "Harvey Menzel, Pauline Niven. Pauline Niven, Harvey Menzel, Baronet, Fourteenth Earl Seldon."

Pauline raised her eyebrows. Harvey leaned across the table, delicately lifted her hand, kissed it, and said, "Enchanted," in his best Donald Sinden voice.

Synchronicity does some pretty weird things. Six years ago, on the very afternoon that I was signing my life away in return for the world's most unprofitable garage, some miles to the East Sir James Dawson-Fairleigh, Thirteenth Earl Seldon, was riding to hounds.

At a little after two o'clock that afternoon, Sir James's horse abruptly refused to jump a hedge, hurling Sir James into the air, over the hedge, and piledriving him headfirst into the field on the other side. Alex Saxon, the local GP, was riding in the same hunt, so he was on the scene immediately, but Sir James was dead the moment he hit the ground. One drunken evening a couple of years later, Alex confided to me that the Thirteenth Earl's head had been driven so far down between his shoulders that he looked as if he had been killed by a single catastrophic shrug.

Five months after the accident, on the same day that Karen and I were moving into our new home in Seldon, a student named Harvey Menzel was called out of his cla.s.s at Harvard Medical School and told that, as the only living-if astonishingly remote-relative of Sir James Dawson-Fairleigh, he had inherited a large house and a small village in Wiltshire.

"So I had to ask myself," Harvey said, "did I want a career in medicine, saving lives and that kind of thing?

Or did I want to spend the rest of my life as a feudal warlord with the power of life and death over my tenants?"

Pauline was sitting with her chin propped up on her fist, her eyes wide. "So which did you choose?" she asked innocently, and I decided I liked her.

Harvey looked crestfallen. It was rare to see the famous Menzel charm-inherited, according to Harvey, from his great-great grandfather, who was a full-blood Menominee-fail. But to give him his due, he recovered quickly and fought his way across the now-crowded snug to get us some more drinks.

"He's got a good heart," I said when he was out of earshot.

Pauline raised an eyebrow.

"He's very lonely," I told her. "Most of what you see is just a front. How do you think you'd react if you were suddenly told you'd inherited Kodak or Chase Manhattan?"

She made a rude noise. "I'd turn cartwheels."

"Well, Harvey's different. He wasn't entirely kidding about the power of life and death, you know. The whole village belongs to him, and ultimately the responsibility for it ends with him. That must have been pretty scary for a twenty-four-year-old medical student."

"I thought the National Trust owned this place."

"Only the Gardens. They were laid out by the Seventh Earl, but he was the only Dawson-Fairleigh who was remotely interested in them. The rest were only interested in making money. The Twelfth Earl turned them over to the Trust in the Sixties in his will. Everything else belongs to the family. To Harvey."

She looked across the snug. "What does he think of this... invasion?"

"I think he's quite tickled by it, to be honest. He hangs out with the CNN and NBC people quite a lot. I think he likes having people around he can talk to about the Superbowl."

Pauline turned back to look at me. "Tell me about your wife."

I sighed. "It's private, Pauline." "How does your wife feel about it?"

"She feels the same way."

"Does she?"

By this time, we were leaning slightly across the table towards each other. "Yes, she does."

"Are you sure about that, Geoff?"

"Yes."

"Have you asked her?"

"No," I admitted. "I haven't."

She sat back, a self-satisfied look on her face. "Well," she said. "There you are, then."

"There's what?" Harvey asked, returning with our drinks.

"Geoff won't let me talk to his wife," said Pauline.

He looked at me. "Why not?"

"Because it's private," I said wearily, wondering why apparently intelligent people were unable to understand what I was talking about.

"Oh, h.e.l.l," Harvey said to me, while beaming his best smile at Pauline. "It's no big thing, is it?"

"It is to me," I said.

Harvey sat down. "Surely what Karen wants is more important, yes?"

I glared at him. He was only taking Pauline's side because he wanted to get her into bed, and under normal circ.u.mstances I would have let it pa.s.s. But these were not normal circ.u.mstances.

"No," I told them both.

"Ask Karen," Harvey suggested. "How can it hurt?"

"How can it hurt?" I shouted at him. "Are you insane?"

"Hey," he said mildly. "Get a grip." He took a swallow of beer and shook his head. "Good grief."

"Do you think I'm over-reacting?" I demanded. "Is that it?"

"You just think about it," he told me in that lazy-eyed I'm-the-Lord-of-the-Manor way he adopted when handing down judgements his tenants didn't like.

"No way," I said, shaking my head. "Absolutely not."

In the wee small hours of the next morning, I was woken by a thump and a desperate scrabbling noise on the tiles above my head. There was a moment of absolute silence, then the sound of a large object sliding down the slope of the roof, at first quite slowly, then with increasing speed. A tiny little voice, pitched inhumanly high, p.r.o.nounced a couple of syllables, then there was a b.u.mp, followed by a sort of thrashing thud on the front lawn.

I got out of bed and lifted back the curtains in time to see an impossibly long-legged figure with arms that reached down past its knees lift itself from the lawn, hop over the hedge, and stagger unevenly away down the street.

I went back to bed. I always knew it was going to turn out to be a mistake, leaving beer out for Springheel Jack.

3.

The doorbell woke me at half past eight. I put on my dressing gown and took my hangover downstairs to yell at whoever was on my doorstep, but when I opened the door Harvey and Pauline were standing there shoulder to shoulder with identical looks of determination on their faces.

"Don't," I warned them.

"The little s.h.i.t's doing it again," Harvey said. He looked furious; in all the time I had known him, there was only one person who could make him look like that. My heart sank.

"It's important," Pauline told me.

I looked at them, trying as hard as I could to remember the tail end of yesterday evening. "Did you two wind up sleeping with each other last night?" I asked.

Harvey looked embarra.s.sed. Pauline stared at me. "So what?"

"I have a hangover," I told her. "Go away."

"No," she said.