I was being bumped about by all the other people in the corridor, and I had to keep shifting while Dad and Mr. Hyde were shaking hands. I was right off at one side of them when Mr. Hyde said, “Ted Mallory? Demons, isn’t it?”
Just then one of the people bumping me—I didn’t see who, except that it was a man—said quietly, “Off you go, then.” I stepped sideways again out of his way.
This was when I thought it was a dream.
I was outside, on an airfield of some kind. It must have been early morning, because it was chilly and dark, but getting lighter all the time, and there was pink mist across the stretch of grass I could see. But I couldn’t see much, because there were things I thought were helicopters blocking my view one way—tall, dark brown things—and the other way was a crowd of men who all seemed pretty impatient about something. I was sort of squashed between the men and the helicopters. The man nearest me, who was wearing a dirty pale suede jacket and trousers and smoking a cigarette in long, impatient drags, turned round to throw his cigarette down on the grass and saw me.
“Oh, there you are!” he said. “Why didn’t you say you’d got here?” He turned back to the rest of them and called out, “It’s all right, messieurs! The novice finally got here. We can go.”
They all sort of groaned with relief and one of them began talking into a cell phone. “This is Perimeter Security, monsieur,” I heard him say, “reporting that our numbers are now complete. You can tell the Prince that it’s safe to embark now.” And after the phone had done some angry quacking, he said, “Very good, monsieur. I’ll pass that on to the culprit,” and then he waved at the rest of us.
Everyone began crowding up the ladder into the nearest helicopter-thing. The man who had spoken to me pushed me up ahead of him and swung onto the ladder after me. This must have put his face up against my legs, because he said angrily, “Didn’t the academy tell you to wear your leathers for this?”
I thought I knew then. I was sure this was one of my dreams about getting into another world and that it had got mixed up with the sort of dream where you’re on a bus with no clothes on, or talking to a girl you fancy with the front of your trousers missing. So I wasn’t particularly bothered. I just said, “No, they didn’t tell me anything.”
He made an irritated noise. “You’re supposed to be skyclad for official workings. They should know that!” he said. “You didn’t eat before you came, did you?” He sounded quite scandalized about it.
“No,” I said. Dad and I had been going to have supper after we’d listened to Maxwell Hyde. I was quite hungry, now I thought of it.
“Well, that’s a relief!” he said, pushing me forward into the inside of the flier. “You have to be fasting for a major working like this. Yours is the pull-down seat at the back there.”
It would be! I thought. There were nice padded seats all round under the windows, but the one at the back was just a kind of slab. Everyone else was settling into the good seats and snapping seat belts around them, so I found the belts that went with the slab and did them up. I’d just got the buckles sussed when I looked up to find the man with the cell phone leaning over me.
“You,” he said, “were late. Top brass is not pleased. You kept the Prince waiting for nearly twenty minutes, and HRH is not a patient man.”
“Sorry,” I said. But he went on and on, leaning over me and bawling me out. I didn’t need to listen to it much because the engines started then, roaring and clattering, and everything shook. Some of the noise was from the other fliers. I could see them sideways beyond his angry face, rising up into the air one after another, about six of them, and I wondered what made them fly. They didn’t have wings or rotors.
Eventually a warning ping sounded. The bawling man gave me a menacing look and went to strap himself in beside his mates. They were all wearing some kind of uniform, sort of like soldiers, and the one who had bawled at me had colored stripes round his sleeves. I supposed he was the officer. The men nearest me, four of them, were all dressed in dirty pale suede. Skyclad, I thought. Whatever that meant.
Then we were rising into the air and roaring after the other fliers. I leaned over to the window and looked down, trying to see where this was. I saw the Thames winding underneath among crowds of houses, so I knew we were over London, but in a dreamlike way there was no London Eye, though I spotted the Tower and Tower Bridge, and where I thought St. Paul’s ought to be there was a huge white church with three square towers and a steeple. After that we went tilting away southward, and I was looking down on misty green fields. Not long after that we were over the sea.
About then the noise seemed to get less—or maybe I got used to it—and I could hear what the men in suede were saying. Mostly it was just grumbles about having to get up so early and how they were hungry already, along with jokes I didn’t understand, but I gathered that the one who had talked to me was Dave, and the big one with the foreign accent was Arnold. The other two were Chick and Pierre. None of them took any notice of me.
Dave was still irritated. He said angrily, “I can sympathize with his passion for cricket, but why does he have to play it in Marseilles, for the powers’ sake?”
Pierre said, slightly shocked, “That’s where England are playing. HRH is a world-class batsman, you know.”
“But,” Dave said, “until last night he wasn’t going to be in the team.”
“He changed his mind. Royal privilege,” said Arnold with the foreign accent.
“That’s our Geoff for you!” Chick said, laughing.
“I know. That worries me,” Dave answered. “What’s he going to be like when he’s King?”
“Oh, give him the right advisers, and he’ll be all right,” Chick said soothingly. “His royal dad was just the same when he was Crown Prince, they say.”
This is a really mad dream, I thought. Cricket in France!
We droned on for ages. The sun came up and glared in through the left-hand windows. Pretty soon all the soldiers down the other end had their jackets off and were playing some sort of card game, in a slow, bored way. The men in suede didn’t seem to be allowed to take their jackets off. They sweated. It got quite niffy down my end. And I’d been assuming that they weren’t allowed to smoke in the flier, but that turned out to be wrong. The soldiers all lit up, and so did Dave. The air soon became thick with smoke on top of the smell of sweat. It got worse when Arnold lit up a thin, black thing that smelt like a wet bonfire.
“Yik!” said Pierre. “Where did you get hold of that?”
“Aztec Empire,” Arnold said, peacefully puffing out brown clouds.
I shall wake up from this dream with cancer! I thought. The slab seat was hard. I shifted about and ached. Most of the people fell asleep after an hour or so, but I couldn’t. I supposed at the time that it was because I was asleep already. I know that seems silly, but it was all so strange, and I’d been so used to dreaming, for months now, that I had found my way into another world that I really and truly believed that this was just another of those dreams. I sat and sweated while we droned on, and even that didn’t alert me to the fact that this might be real. Dreams usually sort of fast-forward long journeys and things like that, but I didn’t think of that. I just thought the journey was the dream.
At last there was another of those warning pings. The officer reached into his jacket for his phone and talked to it for a short while. Then he put the jacket on and came toward the men in suede, who were all stretching and yawning and looking bleary.