Free Five to Twelve by Edmund Cooper Page B

hadn’t been much of a party.
    It hadn’t even been much of anything at all, he reflected as he soared above the megaliths and switched his headlight on to full power. The best happenings had happened before the event. He remembered vividly his few frozen minutes on the ceiling when the stars danced and then went dark. He remembered also Juno’s oddly submissive reactions afterwards.
    He savoured the recollections. Then he thrust forward at full power and swept away from Stonehenge, rising slowly in ever-increasing spirals. The night—what was left of it—was still crystal clear. The stars were now dancing a saraband.

Fifteen

    D ION had lost all sense of time. He might have been in the air minutes, hours or since the beginning of the world—if, in fact, there ever had been any world. If it had all not been some grotty fragment of a figment, some loose connection in the solitary nocturnal hysteria of a landlocked, airborne flying fish.
    He tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing. Assuming always that there was something he was supposed to be doing. Which was a big assumption…
    He tried to send himself a message. Finally, he made it. He spoke very quietly and distinctly to his brain; and his brain patiently unscrambled the message, considered it for a while, then reluctantly relayed it to the eye muscles.
    Dion looked at his wrist altimeter. It was a monumental achievement. The wrist altimeter said six thousand feet.
    He was cold and he was short of air, and the combination—after his previous experience—was worse than drinking surgical spirit.
    There was some further debate with his brain. The discussion was a shade metaphysical; but both parties were fairly reasonable. In the end, they decided to issue a joint communiqué. It was directed to Dion’s semi-frozen hands.
    They were rebellious. But, eventually, they acquiesced. Fingers closed stiffly on the jet control. Dion drifted obliquely and crazily down to seven hundred feet.
    And recovered his wits.
    It took time, but he recovered his wits. And while he was recovering them he jetted gently along on a collision course with destiny.
    God, or whatever blank-faced computer runs the fancy fading programme of the cosmos, must have displayed a great sense of humour and/or a total disregard for the laws of probability. Or maybe He/She/It was simply intrigued by Dion Quern.
    At seven hundred feet the English countryside was an almost featureless sea of shadows. Except for one flickering point of light about a mile ahead. Dion gazed at it, fascinated.
    There was nothing else to aim for, and he was automatically homing on the target. He reduced altitude to two hundred feet, and let himself be carried sedately along at a speed no greater than that of a man walking.
    He had time to think. He had time to think about how he disliked everything in this dom-dominated non-world and how, most of all, he disliked Juno Locke. Which, of course, was why he was looking for her. And which, of course, was why he found her.
    She was dancing naked round a bonfire; and the bonfire was consuming what was left of the European Proconsul who, in the finest tradition of English bloody-mindedness, had been burnt at the stake.
    Both the dance and the cremation ceremony were being observed with some enthusiasm by a group of perhaps a dozen sports who, still wearing their dark sky suits, prompted Juno whenever she showed signs of weariness by a non-lethal volley of laser beams.
    Dion was too high to see the burns on her body and too far away to hear the screams of pain. But he was now sober enough to imagine.
    What to do? He had no weapons. There were too many sports—even assuming they were loaded with Happyland. There were far too many sports. And he had no weapons. Except himself.
    At two hundred feet still, he circled wide and thought hard. But thinking was not much use. In fact, it was a definite liability. Meanwhile, the remains of Josephine burned, the remains of Juno danced,