Oh, yes, this could only be Harry Keogh’s baby, and Brenda was glad she’d had him. If only she could still have Harry, too. But in a way she did have him, right here in little Harry. In fact she had him in a bigger way than she might ever have suspected.
Just what the baby’s father’s work had been with British Intelligence (she assumed it was them) Brenda didn’t know. She only knew that he had paid for it with his life. There had been no recognition of his sacrifice, not officially, anyway. But cheques arrived every month in plain envelopes, with brief little covering notes that specified the money as ‘widow’s benefit’. Brenda never failed to be surprised: they must have thought very highly of Harry. The cheques were rather large, twice as much as she could ever have earned in any mundane sort of work. And that was wonderful, for she could give all of her time to Harry.
‘Poor little Harry,’ she crooned at him in her soft northern dialect, an old, old ditty she’d learned from her own mother, who’d probably learned it from hers. ‘Got no Mammy, got no Daddy, born in a coal hole.’
Well, not quite as bad as all that, but bad enough, without Harry. And yet – . – occasionally Brenda felt pangs of guilt. It was less than nine months since she’d last seen him, and already she was over it. It all seemed so wrong, somehow. Wrong that she no longer cried, wrong that she never had cried a great deal, entirely wrong that he had gone to join that great majority who so loved him. The dead, long fallen into decay and dissolution.
Not necessarily morally wrong, but wrong conceptually, definitely. She didn’t feel that he was dead. Perhaps if she’d seen his body it would be different. But she was glad that she hadn’t seen it. Dead, it wouldn’t have been Harry at all.
Enough of morbid thinking! She touched the baby’s tiny button nose with the knuckle of her index finger.
‘Bonk!’ she said, but very, very softly. For little Harry Keogh was asleep – –
Harry felt the infant’s whirlpool suction ebb, felt the tiny mind relax its constraint, aimed himself into and through a trans-dimensional ‘door’ and found himself adrift once more in the Ultimate Darkness of the Möbius continuum. Pure mind, he floated in the flux of the metaphysical, free of the distortions of mass and gravity, heat and cold. He revelled like a swimmer in that great black ocean which stretched from never to forever and nowhere to everywhere, where he could move into the past no less rapidly than into the future.
Harry could go any and everywhere — and everywhen —from here. It was simply a matter of knowing the right direction, of using the right ‘door’. He opened a time-door and saw the blue light of all Earth’s living billions streaming into unimagined, ever-expanding futures. No, not that one. Harry selected another door. This time the myriad blue life-threads streamed away from him and contracted, narrowing down to a far-distant, dazzling, single blue point. It was the door to time past, to the very beginning of human life on Earth. And that wasn’t what he wanted either. Actually, he had known that neither of these doors was the right one; he was simply exercising his talents, his powers, that was all.
For the fact was that if he didn’t have a mission. . . but he did have one. It was almost identical with the mission which had cost him his corporeal life, and it was still unfinished. Harry put all other thoughts and considerations aside, used his unerring intuition to point himself in the right direction, calling out to that one he knew he would find there.
‘Thibor?’ His call raced out into the black void. ‘Only answer me and I’ll find you, and we can-talk.’
A moment passed. A second or a million years, it was all the same in the Möbius continuum. And it made no difference at all to the dead. Then:
Ahhhh! came back the answer. Is it you, Haarrry?
The mental voice of the old Thing in the ground was his beacon: he homed in on it, came up against a Mobius door, and passed through it.