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People really are disappearing.'
'Into nothingness,' Frances Margaret agreed.
Eventually they reached a point where the path forked. Frances Margaret knew perfectly well
the way she'd come, so when the President took the other fork, she said:
'I wouldn't go that way if I were you.'
'Why not, this is the way I came?' the President stated in surprise. Of course, in a real
situation there could indeed be a number of routes back to the Theatre, but in this situation
Frances Haroldsen knew that any deviation at all from the one route could lead almost
anywhere, into the middle of London or Cambridge or New York, or anywhere. Determined
she wasn't going to be tricked again, she kept to the path by which she'd walked with the
imaginary Isaac Newton, calling out to the President:
'Go your own way, Mr President, by all means. But once you round that next corner over
there, you'll be done for.'
Determinedly now, Frances Margaret kept to the remembered path, expecting it would only
too likely lead her to Timbuktu - but not through any carelessness on her part. Nobody was
around now. Of all the previous crowd - nobody, just the way it always was in a dream. Her
court shoes rang out on flagstones, which at least was consistent and logical. She tried to
guess where she might be going, to anticipate the next big surprise, only to find, to her
disappointment, as she rounded a corner that what lay ahead seemed, on the face of it, to
indeed be the Palace of Versailles.
Then the obvious hit her. It wasn't that she was walking into some other place like Timbuktu
or onto the top of Mount Everest. She was walking into another time, probably the
seventeenth century, when thousands of people thronged the Palace here. Pulsating
scenes, pulsating bedrooms, pulsating kitchens. Come to think of it, why was the present
moment of time any more real than the seventeenth century? No reason she could think of
consistent with the laws of physics. So the seventeenth century it must be, she decided.
She'd wondered how so much that was illicit had managed to go on at Versailles, because
the layout of the Palace didn't seem to favour privacy. Maybe in the seventeenth century they
just didn't bother about privacy. Maybe they just stood around and watched it all.
The Theatre of the Palace came into sight. At once she realised the dream had tricked her
yet again, but that thankfully she was too clever for it. The dream was storing up its big
moment, a big moment of horror. When she went into the Theatre of the Palace she would
find what? Cobwebs. Empty, except for cobwebs.
There were attendants on the door of the Theatre of the Palace - examining the tickets of
day visitors no doubt. They accepted the badge
I
r
pinned to her coat without comment, and in a moment she was inside the Theatre.
Immediately there was the same queer shock she'd experienced an hour before. With it, the
strange state of mind was gone, and she could see the Theatre really was full of people, not
cobwebs. She could also see Isaac Newton among the delegates in the British box. It was
an instantaneous jerk back to normality. Apparently so. Yet her entrance into the Theatre
coincided exactly, as if in simultaneous response to the pressing of a switch, with a
devastating interruption in the proceedings.
The interruption came from the French President, whose face in large close-up suddenly
appeared on the screens throughout the hall, displacing the speaker at the podium, and
whose voice suddenly boomed out over the erratic loudspeaker system:
'Pardon this interruption, please, but I have an unwelcome announcement to make. News
has been received from the Observatory at Meudon informing the French Government that
an object with a diameter of nearly two kilometres will hit the Earth tomorrow morning
between two a.m. and four a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Unfortunately the damage will be
extensive. The point of impact of the object is said to be uncertain, so it is unknown which
places will be safe and which places will be unsafe. It is clearly understood that many people
will wish to return immediately to their countries, and I wish to tell you that the French
Government will take all steps to arrange such matters smoothly.'
Chapter 71
Frances Haroldsen pushed her way through the severely shocked crowd towards the British
box. Isaac Newton said as she approached:
'I was wondering where you'd gone. Have you the car keys? Yes, good. Then I'll join you at
the car in a few minutes. I just want to make one or two enquiries about this information from
Meudon.'
It was more than a few minutes, perhaps twenty, before Isaac Newton appeared at the car to
find Frances Margaret in the passenger seat.
'Will you drive?' he asked.
I
I t
'I'd rather not. I came over with a turn.'
As Isaac Newton manoeuvred the car out of the parking lot and into the long avenue which
led towards the town of Versailles, Frances Margaret described the peculiar hallucinations
she'd experienced.
'So you didn't escape after all,' Isaac Newton then remarked.
'Escape what?'
'Remember the cottage on the Norfolk coast? Something was there that night.'
'I didn't see anything.'
'You mean you don't remember seeing anything, which isn't the same thing. I don't
remember seeing much myself, but I've had these turns twice now. You were lucky you could
still keep walking around. I was knocked right out.'
'What does it mean?'
'Well, coming just before this announcement from Meudon it obviously means something. As
if you were emitting blips as well.'
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