Liam took a shuffling step forward, clutching his head. ‘Bob … Jeeez, I … don’t know what … I just …’
Bob lurched to his feet, closed the gap between them, and before his computer brain could cringe with disapproval, distaste and embarrassment at the behaviour of its host body, Bob’s huge muscular arms were wrapped round Liam’s narrow frame and squeezing him hard.
‘You are alive!’ he rumbled unnecessarily.
‘Bob … I … think they took Sal … and Lincoln.’
‘They are alive?’
Liam was struggling to breathe, his nose and mouth crushed against the wall of Bob’s sweaty shoulder. He pushed the support unit back and Bob loosened his hug.
‘I think so. I think they took them –’
His words were suddenly drowned out by a deafening roar that made the landing, the whole farmhouse, vibrate like the head of a snare drum. White light flickered into the building, dazzlingly bright, finding holes and cracks in the ceiling above them, sending pin-sharp blades of light down on to them that swept across their skin, across the wooden floor.
Light from above … the roar too. Directly above them. They tumbled down the stairs before either of them had discussed whether it might be a good idea to actually remain hidden somewhere inside. They stepped through the shattered remains of the front door and out on to the porch, looking up at the brilliant white light. Liam shaded his eyes; it was as intense and uncomfortable as looking directly at the sun. A false dawn of artificial sunlight trained down on them.
‘What is it?’ he all but screamed. He couldn’t even hear himself, let alone hear whether Bob managed to answer.
An icy blast of air swept down on them and he felt something cold and wet settle on his cheeks. In the light he could see a million white fluffy flakes of something slowly descending, swirling in the downdraught, seesawing like feathers, like ash from a forest fire. But they were neither.
My God … it’s snowing!
That’s exactly what it was.
Snow?
The deafening roar that had filled the air, making talking, shouting, an utterly pointless endeavour for the best part of the last minute, suddenly ceased. It left them in a silence filled only with Liam’s rasping breath and the soft whisper of snow falling and settling on the ground around them.
‘What the …?’ uttered Liam, feeling more and more flakes landing on his upturned face, on the back of the hand shading his eyes.
The blinding light swept off Liam and Bob and back on to the farmhouse, then across the other buildings in the small rural hamlet, like a probing eye trying to make quick sense of the scene.
Liam tracked the thick beam of the spotlight all the way up into a dark and completely starless sky. He thought he was looking at a dense bank of snow-laden cloud above them; that might be the best explanation for the unseasonal and surprising arrival of snow. But then a row of smaller lights suddenly appeared. A row of spotlights trained upwards, casting fans of light across a smooth, burnished copper hull.
His mouth was useless, slack and open and doing little more than making a gurgling note of surprise.
CHAPTER 39
2001, New York
Colonel Bill Devereau stared at the images on the computer screens: a slideshow of pictures pulled by computer-Bob off the system’s database at Maddy’s request. Photographs of New York, busy and vibrant. Times Square packed with yellow cabs and tourists, a giant billboard with Shrek’s green face leering out over milling pedestrians. A cowboy in his underpants and stetson and boots busking with acoustic guitar surrounded by grinning Japanese girls. A picture of the Spice Girls posing together in front of the Empire State Building.
‘My God!’ he whispered.
A picture of Lady Liberty, mint-green and undamaged by bombs and small-arms fire, standing proud and tall, holding aloft her beacon of hope.
‘I forgot what she looked like,’ he said.
‘Is the statue damaged in this timeline, Colonel Devereau?’ asked Becks.
‘Bill,’ he said softly. ‘I guess you two ladies can call me Bill.’
‘Affirmative, Bill.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘She’s no more than a rusting stump. Bombed by the South back in 1926 during the Second Siege of New York. They blew her up … then used Liberty Island to deploy several artillery batteries. From there they pounded Manhattan to rubble.’
‘Where – when – we come from, Bill,’ said Maddy, ‘I mean … it’s today’s date, September the