Part Twenty-one

‘You can't hide, Horowitz!’ screamed Haxes as he chased Terry down the concrete corridor.

Terry Horowitz just kept running and hoped that something would stop this insanity. He was still trying to sort out everything that had happened to him in a short period of time. Actually he didn't have a clue exactly how long it had been since all this madness had started - he'd left his watch at home when he'd stepped out of his front door, what felt like aeons ago.

Strips of light above his head whizzed by as he ran down the extraordinarily long corridor. Sooner or later it would come to an end and he would be in trouble. There was no way, he knew, that he would be able to fight this half-humanoid, half-beast creature that was chasing him.

Somehow the creature behind Terry, which was desperately trying to kill him, was also simultaneously responsible for his very existence. Terry came to the conclusion that perhaps the less he thought about that the better for his sanity.

Maybe his newfound allies in the Callack Organisation would come to rescue him in time, Terry thought, but at that moment he felt his right foot collide awkwardly with his left leg, and he knew what it meant.

The ground flew up towards him, almost in slow motion. He landed right shoulder first, and head next, onto the concrete surface. The shock shot through his body, as his whole body scraped along the floor. His head swam, and he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. His run for freedom was failing. No, Terry corrected himself, it had failed.

Terry lay still for a moment that felt like an eternity as he recovered from the shock. He then realised he needed to get up quickly, but as soon as he tried to another force quickly threw him back to the floor. It was Haxes.

‘ ---- off!’,yelled Terry at Haxes, unprintably.

‘Not yet,’ said Haxes calmly. ‘I need to kill you first.’

Terry attempted to say something else, but Haxes’ humanoid fist connected with the corner of Terry's head, and threw him into unconsciousness.

The last thing Terry heard him say was, ‘And you will die very soon.’ Which was probably not something that anyone looks forward to hearing. However there is a small exception with a small tribe that descended from the Greek space colonists of the planet Mercury. They arrived a number of millenia on from Terry Horowitz's time, and believed that the sentence ‘And you will die very soon,’ was a very lucky sentence. Unfortunately, they didn't actually understand what it meant, not speaking much - if any - English.

It was actually a piece of graffiti written on the space craft by descendants of the Anglo-Saxon civilisations, which suggested that they didn't have much confidence in the Greek space agency to colonise a planet as dangerous as Mercury. And so when they landed they took the symbols of the message to be a good luck message. Unfortunately it did tend to put off visitors when they would send the message to visiting parties.

Still while not completely irrelevant to the current situation, it is probably best forgotten for the moment, as Terry is currently being carried, unconscious, back to the room where his death has been planned.

A sizeable group of people stormed in through the recently blasted-open doors of the Scavengers’ base and took out the first two automated tracking cannons of the defence system. Talia, Turk and Recma went in first, and then stopped and waited for their next move. At the moment Recma and Turk were the most senior members of the organisation there.

‘Over there,’ stated Turk as he pointed out their route.

The group moved a little haphazardly, as if its members were unaccustomed to moving en masse. Amongst the membership were two Dark Age Britons, Aelric and Erthgi. There was also an Egyptian from the 4th century BC, but no one else knew that, so his story is probably best ignored for the moment.

‘What is going on?’ asked Erthgi, who had been unable to understand a word anyone had said since he had left the ship, with its in-built translation systems.

‘I wish I knew. But I'm sticking with these guys until we get back into the enormous flying metal sky-beast,’ replied Aelric, who was blessed with a flair for colorful descriptions.

They followed down the corridor as the group broke down another set of strong doors in this virtual labyrinth of concrete.

‘Erthgi! Where are you going?’, yelled Aelric to Erthgi, as Erthgi stopped and started walking down another corridor which the group had passed.

‘I don't want to go any further. We agreed to follow these people when we could understand them, now I don't have a clue what is going on. You can follow on if you want, but I'm going to see if I can find a way out of this building and maybe back to our village, and I don't care what that green devil creature does to me.’

Aelric stopped himself and let the other members of the group run past him, and then followed Erthgi.

‘What was this place 'Space' the green devil-creature mentioned?’, enquired Aelric as he followed Erthgi.

Haxes threw the unconscious Terry Horowitz into a new chair.

‘This won’t be as precise as I'd have liked, but it will be good enough,’ proclaimed Haxes. ‘Have you stopped them yet Hraeh?’

‘Not yet, Haxes. They still proceed to break through our defences,’ replied Hraeh.

‘Another minute and it won’t matter,’ grinned Haxes.

The Precogiotee had prepared her whole life for this moment. She knew what she must do. It was risky, but she had no choice - she was dying anyway. She took off a small silver necklace from around her neck, which had a small spherical locket attached to the bottom.

‘I must be left alone!’ she yelled at her protectors, who looked shocked, but agreed.

She slowly opened the locket. She knew what it would do to anyone from the universe she knew who was in close proximity. She had sent her people to save Terry Horowitz from any automated technology that the Scavengers might have in place, which would set the whole thing in motion again.

In the locket was an object like a crimson-stained pearl. She toyed with it for a second. She said one word - ‘Friend,’ - and the pearl appeared to ripple, like a globule of liquid.

The entire room was illuminated with a red glow, and reverberated with a ‘voom’ sound. Only people who have studied objects that make ‘voom’ noises would probably respect the significance of this, and since I have no idea how many people that encompasses, just take it as read that that was the sound it made.

The light faded and all in the room was returned to normal, except Emily Horowitz - the Precogoitee - who fell to the floor.

She gasped to no one, ‘All can now be well,’ and smiled as she struggled to hold on to life.

A single Scavenger now existed. He was not within the white protection barrier, he had left a lot earlier. But he knew what had happened. He felt it. The other surviving members of his race were dead. His ancestors the Blieg would go on. But he knew now he was completely alone in the universe. He went into hiding.

‘What happened here?’ yelled a member of the Callack organisation as they walked with surprisng ease into the room they’d been seeking. There was only one person in the room, and four dwindling piles of dust. That person was Terry Horowitz.

There was no automated device to kill him. It was not re-attached in time. Terry, by trying to escape, had still managed to save himself. They took him on board the ship again, where he was woken, and the news of the Precogiotee's slip into unconsciousness had been discovered.

‘Terry, we found this note for you,’ said Turk. He sighed. ‘She's almost left us. She wants me to succeed her as leader.’

Terry didn't know what to say, given that by his reckoning he should be dead by now. He looked down at the letter and it read like this:

‘Dear Terry,

I know you will find this very difficult to believe, and that this is all very traumatic at the moment, but I have to explain some things to you. The reason I know you is because I was your wife. Or should I say I was the wife of another version of you. Somewhere my Terry Horowitz exists. And I shall be joining him very soon, or perhaps I already have joined him by now given my poor state of health.

‘Please forgive the way I acted and spoke before, I was not myself. When I took control of the Callack organisation, I did it so that I could seek you out, and allow you to continue your life in this reality - I did not expect to find my husband again. You are free now, to live out your existence in safety.

‘You have already seen so much that you would not expect to see. I know how that affects someone, because it affected me in the same way. Please take comfort from the burden you now carry, with the knowledge that you are now safe. I know you have a strong mind, much stronger than I, and you will live on and make a legacy of your own.’

Please do not forget me Terry, Love

Emily’

Terry did not have much time to take this in, because as soon as he went to speak to Turk, Terry noticed Turk had a shocked look on his face and the Universe around him shifted and changed. And, as per usual, he had no idea why…

‘Why did you have to press that light Erthgi?’ asked Aleric, furiously, shivered in the Himalayan cold.

Erthgi didn't answer. He just shivered and sulked.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’, asked the Ukrainian ringmaster as Terry lay in the middle of the Big Top. He had only just noticed him, and hadn't seen him appear from nowhere in the darkness of the tent.

Terry looked around and saw the staring eyes of the audience looking at him. He slowly got up. ‘Where am I?’ asked Terry.

The ringmaster just looked stared at him. ‘Get out of here. You trying to get in without ticket, are you? Get out!’

‘But… I've just been…’

‘I don't care. Write book about it - yes? But just get out of here!’

‘Well there was a book involved….’

‘Get out!’, yelled the ringmaster who looked as though his previous job had been as the circus strongman, and so Terry decided to leave.

In a daze he ran outside into the light of the English countryside, and bumped straight into Talia. Both of them fell to the ground. They looked at each other sitting up outside this tent, and both were thinking at the same time ‘What is going on?’

Terry wouldn't discover where he was for a little while. But he was two miles from Browborough, about a week and a half after he had left. A lot of things had happened in that time, but the one Terry would be most happy about was that the cricket season was over, which would make his street a lot quieter on what had been practice night.

Talia and Terry would find a lot of time for each other. And Terry probably would write a book. A Tribute perhaps?

The foreword from the autobiography of Terry Horowitz, by Beiphlat:

As I set out on this expedition to find out about the great Terry Horowitz, I go with both excitement and fear. But my hope to find out more about the origins of this great race, give me more a sense of duty more than anything else.

My main concern was that I will change the future by doing this, but I have been assured by our leading scientists that the cloaking device around me will not disturb any of the surrounding world which I will inhabit.

So I have nothing left to do here now that I have finally managed to get my sandwich, after my foolish assistant had managed to eat it. I will leave this foreword as a reminder to me of the world I knew before, and the world I will see again with new understanding when I return. I hope you can appreciate what this means to me. I'm sure you will.