‘Die?’
‘We’ll be dead to this world, anyway,’ he said.
They chose expensive clothes willynilly, and an expensive leather suitcase in which to pack them. Then, as the store’s alarms began to clamour, they moved on.
It had been 9:00 p.m. local time when they left the beach; it was 11:30 in the store they robbed; moving east they got dressed on another beach (Long Beach) at 5 a.m. in the first light of dawn, and started a champagne breakfast in New York a little after 8 a.m. – and all in the space of thirty or so minutes!
Penny ate her steak barbecued, medium rare; Harry’s was so rare it dripped blood, just the way he’d ordered it. They drank three bottles of champagne. When presented with the bill the Necroscope laughed, snatched Penny into his lap, tilted his chair over backwards . . . and the pair of them out of this world into the Möbius Continuum.
Minutes later (at 10:30 p.m. local time) and some three and a half thousand miles north of where they’d started out, they robbed the innermost security vaults of the Bank of Hong Kong; and by midnight they’d lost a million Hong Kong Dollars on the gaming tables in Macau. A few minutes later (at 6:30 in the evening, local), still ordering and drinking champagne, Harry bundled an entirely tipsy Penny into a hotel bed in Nicosia, and left her there to sleep it off. She dripped pearls and diamonds and her skin smelled of a fine haze of alcohol. Most women (were they truthful) would give an entire world for the things she had seen and done and experienced in the last half-day of her life on Earth. So had Penny given a world. That’s why Harry had arranged and executed it.
Their binge had taken a little over three hours: the locators at E-Branch HQ in London – and others in Moscow – were quite dizzy. But the Necroscope knew that Penny was as yet too weak a source for them to track as a single entity. On her own, they probably wouldn’t be able to find her. Even if they could, he doubted if they’d have a man in Cyprus. She’d be safe there. For a little while, anyway.
And now it was time he made their Starside reservations . . .
Part Four
1
Faéthor – Zek – Perchorsk
In the Möbius Continuum, Harry opened a future-time door and went looking for Faéthor Ferenczy. Faéthor was long dead and gone, and had been incorporeal – which is to say bodiless – for a very long time. So long that by now he was probably mindless, too. But there were things of great importance which the Necroscope wanted to ask him. About Harry’s ‘disease’ and how he’d come by it; maybe even about how he could cure it, though that possibility seemed almost as remote as Faéthor himself.
Möbius time was awesome as ever. Before launching himself down the ever-expanding time-stream, Harry paused, framed in the doorway, and looked out on humanity as few flesh-and-blood men had ever seen it -and then only on his authority. He saw it as blue light -the near-neon blue of all human life – rushing out and away with an interminable sigh, an orchestrated angelic Ahhhhhhhhh, into forever and ever. But the sigh was all in his mind (indeed he knew that it was his mind sighing), for time is quite silent. Which was just as well. For if all the sound in all the years of all the LIFE he witnessed had been present, then it would have been an utterly unbearable cacophony.
He stood or floated in the metaphysical doorway and gazed on all those lines of blue light streaming out and away – the myriad life-lines of the human race – and thought: It’s like a blue star gone nova, and these are its atoms fleeing for their lives! And he knew that indeed every dazzling line was a life, which he could trace from birth to death across the tractless heavens of Möbius time: for even now his own life-line unwound out of him, like a thread unwinding from a bobbin, to cross the threshold and shoot away into the future. But where the rest were pure blue, his own thread carried a strong crimson taint.