got to the M5 motorway, known locally since the Times of Malthus as the Big Road, which was the quickest route until they were very close to Cheltenham. The going was pretty easy as there was a continuous, generally smooth surface for the first long stretch.
The entire width of the road had been washed away by flooding in two sections, the first after the nearby old Cam and Dursley railway station, and then another four kilometres north at the River Frome. Walking their bikes past these obstacles added some time. The first one in particular took more than half an hour to bypass. A fifty-metre section of the entire embanked roadway was missing, so they had to descend, cross the rough gap and climb back up on the other side of the fissure. In twenty-eight degree heat, and with their legs tired from the cycling, the climbing back up went particularly slowly.
Beyond the second flood destruction, the road again proceeded with a continuously navigable route to the point where it met the smaller road leading into Cheltenham.
This was only two kilometres from Jack’s home, and Jane navigated them with aplomb using the small street map. They parked up the bicycles in front of the house a little before 3pm.
‘Wait here,’ Halthrop instructed.
‘What if he’s in there?’ asked Terry, still breathing hard from his exertions. ‘What if… ’
The major shot him a look and Terry fell silent. ‘Wait for my order,’ he told them all, then turned to Jane. ‘Jane, make sure no one enters until I tell you.’
As with most places, the door was unlocked, so the major slipped through silently. Frank Halthrop had only ever read about booby traps and was not experienced at searching for them. When he was convinced that the place was empty, he called for the other three to join him. They boisterously entered, pushing and shoving through the doorway, vying to be the first to find a clue.
‘He’s a messy one, isn’t he?’ said Jane, pointing towards open drawers and objects scattered all around.
After a quick look through three doorways, Halthrop responded. ‘This isn’t how he lives, another posse has been here already.’
She picked up a photo of an older woman with a strong smile. ‘Why doesn’t he just have this on his armulet?’
‘Good point.’ Halthrop nodded, looking at the old woman’s framed picture. ‘She must be pretty important to him. Probably the grandmother with the farm in Highnam.’
‘There’s no writing to identify her.’
Darren appeared from a bedroom with a pair of boots, encased in dried mud. Terry and Jane looked at him and the boots. Frank held up his palms in a questioning gesture but said nothing. Darren looked at each of them in turn, and then to the boots. He turned and threw them back in the room. ‘Nothing of use in there,’ he said.
Terry had pulled a paper map from the wall of the other bedroom, which appeared more used as a study. It covered a region about fifty kilometres on each side, centred on Cheltenham. There was nothing marked on the map beyond what had been printed by the cartographers years before – no escape routes or hideouts annotated. Terry commented, ‘How many people have paper maps? You’d kind of have to be expecting the armulet connections to go down.’
Jane replied, ‘My mum and dad have got two maps on the wall in our hallway. One’s around Bristol, and the other’s London, and they’re quite a bit older than that one.’ The map Terry held was likely to have predated the Times of Malthus. He shrugged and turned to follow Darren’s lead in throwing it back in the study room.
Halthrop interrupted, ‘But Jane, I bet your parents’ maps are framed and mounted with pride, aren’t they? How did you find that one, Terry?’
‘Yeah, it was just pinned up on the wall. No frame; and I don’t think it was even straight.’
The major continued by showing his search evidence: he took two textstories at random from a narrow but tall bookcase in the main living room they were standing in. He held the paperbacks aloft. ‘I’m sure you all know what these are, but have any of you ever seen a real one?’
Darren jumped in first. ‘They’re books, and you’re usually carrying one.’
Halthrop nodded, looking at the floor with a smile. ‘Well spotted, Darren. Anybody seen any other than the ones I have?’
Jane and Terry looked at each other briefly, his eyes wide. She turned back to the boss and replied, ‘My parents have maybe ten on a shelf at home. I don’t think they’ve ever taken any of them down, but my mum’s very proud of them.’
‘These have been well read, the page corners are all worn and creased.’ Halthrop flicked the pages, showing them to other three, and then replaced the books. ‘And yet this is the home of a sifter who is, by trade, an electronic researcher. The man obviously likes to make connections with the old days. Anybody got anything else?’
There was a shaking of heads and mumbled negative answers. Terry piped up, ‘Actually, look at this place. I know it’s an old house, but everything’s old. All this furniture must be antique. It’s like it was frozen when the Times started.’ Each of them stared around, absorbing the history. Terry was quite correct, it was as if they had stepped into a museum exhibit, ‘Life in 2025’. Any recent objects remained hidden in cupboards, and the posse left the house quite sure that it even smelt old and musty.
They mounted their bikes, intent on making Highnam before dark.
It was a small detour to travel to the Doughnut, before turning due west out of Cheltenham for Highnam. An infotech was at what remained of the entrance to the building nearest the main route from the town.
‘Good to see you, Major. There’s half a dozen more infotechs down in the basement working full steam to bring the network back into action.’
‘How long do you think it will take?’
The man shook his head. ‘Given that all the Kangaroos work separately, we’ve never really had to deal with the entire network together. We’re not even sure we actually know how to make the whole lot work together.’
He showed them along a ground floor corridor and into a small office. Halthrop quivered when the man produced conclusive evidence that Jack Smith was the bomber they wanted. The infotech handed over a printed greyscale picture of a man: light skin, dark hair, and wearing a black blindfold.
‘How did you get this?’ Halthrop asked. ‘Is some part of the infonetwork working?’
‘No. Quite bizarre, actually. Although we don’t monitor them, the Doughnut has always been protected by closed circuit cameras. As with everything on the site, they’re powered by solar panels cladding the upper surfaces of the circular building. With the audiopts online, nobody ever considered watching the camera feeds. This is the first security incident here since it was reconfigured for use by the sifters. I’ve never even been in the CCTV monitoring room in my whole life, until yesterday.’
There were more photos showing the bombs being placed in the basement. However, as they ran entirely separately from the main infonetwork, the servers for the camera system were in this upstairs office. He leant against the chest-high computer and said, ‘These beauties have been overwriting their own data on a seven-day rolling recording, unwatched, for fifty years.’
The footage showed Jack installing the bombs during a four-hour period
