Snow White and the Giants
Read Snow White and the Giants Online
Authors: J. T. McIntosh
J.T. McIntosh
(1966)
THE BEAUTIFUL
STRANGERS WERE BENT
ON RESHAPING HISTORY!
SNOW WHITE
AND
THE GIANTS
J.T. McINTOSH'S
TERRIFYING NOVEL OF
THE TIMELOOPERS
THE TIMELOOPERS
Val's friend Jota had been killed in a
"duel" with the strangers. But there he
stood, as if nothing had ever happened
to him. "They did it with the loops," he
said. "They looped me back into exist-
ence."
Why were the strangers so concerned
with Jota? And why with Val? The two
men were to be kept alive at all costs.
They would be among the few to survive
The Catastrophe, an exercise for the
"giants," who were playing with history
and creating havoc in the lives of the two
unwitting and unwilling stars of this
fiery drama.
SNOW WHITE
AND
THE GIANTS
J.T. McIntosh
AN AVON BOOK
This Avon edition is the first
publication in volume form of
"Snow White and the Giants," which
was previously serialized in
Worlds
of If Science Fiction
.
AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10019
Copyright © 1966, 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.
Published by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved, which includes the right
to reproduce this book or portions thereof in
any form whatsoever. For information address
Lurton Blassingame, 60 East 42 Street,
New York, New York 10017.
First Avon Printing, May, 1968
Cover illustration by Carl Cassler
AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND
FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK --
MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.
Printed in the U.S.A.
SNOW WHITE
and
THE GIANTS
Chapter One
Lunching at the Red Lion on roast beef of Old England, I glanced out of
the upstairs window and saw, across the road, a girl in a pink suit.
A moment later I choked, a morsel of meat went down the wrong way, and
for a second or two, fighting for breath, eyes streaming, I couldn't
see anything.
When I could see again she was just a girl in a pink suit walking along
a narrow street in a quiet town, possibly the quietest country town in
England. I went back to the roast beef. What I had thought I saw was a
trick of the sunlight, obviously.
Many remarkable and some impossible things had been attributed to the
sun in the last month or two, since a preternaturally hot summer took
England by surprise. A hot summer always took England by surprise. When
Byron wrote of the English winter ending in July to recommence in August,
he wasn't coining an epigram. He was merely stating the obvious.
But this year . . .
In Shuteley we weren't concerned with things that happened in London,
Liverpool or Leeds. In places like that anything could happen. When we
heard that three Socialist M.P.s had turned up at the House of Commons
dressed in sandals and shorts, we sniffed and decided to vote Tory next
time (as we always did anyway).
In Shuteley, however:
The river was so low that about four miles upstream you could walk across,
something which had never happened before in the history of Shuteley,
which went back to the Ark.
We had the first-ever traffic jam in the center of town, and it was
caused by a mini-car sticking in melted and churned-up tar.
After a school strike, all classes at the Grammar School were held
outside, every day, and all regulations about the wearing of school
uniform were suspended, with sometimes startling results.
A poacher claimed in court that the trout he took from a pool was not
only dead, but already cooked. Although this was agreed to be the tale
to beat all anglers' tales, he was discharged without a stain on his
character (except those which were there already).
The hot summer was not, we were told, caused by anything of any permanent
significance, and next year the temperature would probably be normal. A
combination of factors, said the meteorologists (and they'd go into
a wealth of detail if you gave them half a chance) was keeping the
temperature up and the rainfall down. Such conditions might not recur
for two hundred years.
Every year I could remember, and I could remember about thirty, plus a few
more about which I had vague childhood impressions, people had complained
about the poor summer. Now they complained about the hot summer, probably
more in Shuteley than in most places, because we were right in the middle
of an agricultural area. This kind of weather was fine for growing grapes,
but the farmers in the area weren't growing grapes.
I finished my meal unenthusiastically. In the midday heat no one was
hungry. Yet habit was too strong for us to go over to the Continental
routine of light lunches and heavy late dinners. So even though the Red
Lion, at best, didn't claim to serve anything more ambitious than good
plain meals, I still went there every day for lunch.
There were several convenient reasons for not going home for lunch --
pressure of business, the uncertainty of my lunch hour, saving Sheila
the trouble of having to prepare a proper meal for me when neither she
nor Dina ever ate more at midday in the summer than a few scraps of
lettuce and a tomato.
But the real reason for not going home was the atmosphere there. If I
didn't get French cooking at the Red Lion, at least, with my slice of
history and Old English apple pie, I got some Old English peace and quiet.
The dining room at the Red Lion, directly above the bar, was the
pleasantest room in Shuteley, and that was probably why I nearly always
lunched there, in spite of the food. It had windows on three sides, a high
roof, oak stalls which ensured quiet as well as privacy, spotless linen,
and middle-aged waitresses who afforded no possible distraction. It was
the kind of room you often find in a very old town, not aggressively
modern, not dating back to Magna Carta -- a room which had been many
things in its time, which had been modified and renovated and redecorated
time and again, but never until it cried out for it, which had been left
alone apart from cleaning and painting for at least thirty years.
Also, it was never too hot. You had to say this for solid old buildings
-- there wasn't much they couldn't keep out. I sighed as I finished the
apple tart. And I wished . . .
I wasn't old. I was thirty-three. I was married to a pretty girl nine
years younger. As manager of an important insurance office, I was probably
one of the three most important men in Shuteley. I had no money worries,
no health worries; no children to worry about, no relatives to worry
about, except Dina and a mother in a mental home -- and by the time people
are in a mental home and so far gone that the medical staff advise you
not to visit them, there's certainly no point in worrying about them.
I was probably envied. I couldn't he sure, because a young boss has to
be careful. He can't be too friendly, or people take advantage.
I was pretty solitary and old before my time.
And I wished something would happen.
I'd heard a story about the two-year-old son of the principal English
master at the Grammar School. The infant had been at his first kids'
party, and he didn't like it. He was found under the Christmas tree,
crying his eyes out. Asked why, in the middle of all the fun and games,
he wasn't happy like everybody else, he said: "I'm so terribly, terribly
bored."
Well, a kid like that was only repeating what he'd heard
at home. Poor kid, he thought it was impressively grownup to be bored.
I wasn't two. I wasn't bored, exactly. I just wanted something to happen,
sure that when things settled down afterwards they couldn't be worse
and might easily be better.
And something happened.
When the waitress said there was a phone call for me I was neither
surprised nor interested, even when she said it was long-distance.
But when I picked up the phone in the office and found the call was from
Cologne, I certainly wondered. No senior executive of FLAG was likely
to call me from Cologne, in such a hurry that the call had to he put
through to the Red Lion.
And when I heard Jota's voice, all sorts of feelings hit me all at once.
I hadn't seen him for two years, not since the row. I'd been quite glad
not to see him, naturally enough, and yet I had missed him. He was my
cousin. He had also been, perhaps still was, my best friend. I wasn't
entirely sure I liked him: but you don't have to like your best friend.
"Val," he announced, "I'm Coming back." i
"Permanently?" I asked, without wild enthusiasm.
"Hell, no. But there's been trouble here."
"The usual trouble, I suppose."
"Well, apart from that, her husband's dead. No, nothing to do with me,
of course. But
she
thinks . . . Anyway, I'm coming home for a while. Can
I stay with you?"
"As to that, Jota," I said cautiously, stalling, "I'm not altogether
. . . I mean -- "
"Oh, that business is finished," said Jota airily. "Never began,
really. Still, maybe . . . I do see your point. I could go to Gil
instead. Not much risk of trouble there." And he chuckled.
Then he said: "I suppose it's hot in Shuteley too?"
"As Hades."
"Anyway, it must be cooler than it is here. I'll fly home. Expect me
some time tomorrow."
And he hung up.
Jota and Gil Carswell and I had been the Terrible Three of the Third at
the Grammar School. In the Fourth, Fifth and Six we remained inseparable
but only one of us remained Terrible. Maturity had made Gil morose,
engulfed me in respectability, and made Jota more Terrible than ever,
especially after he invented sex.
Once Jota had been Clarence Mulliner, but the name was abandoned, unwept
and unsung, from the day a science master dubbed him J.O.A.T.A.M.O.N.,
for Jack of all trades and master of none. For about a week he had been
Joatamon, and then in the way of nicknames, convenience had made him Jota.
I paid my bill, crossed the road to the office, and there I found a
crowd around old Tommy Hardcastle, who was trying desperately to explain
something and getting nowhere.
"Break it up," I said coldly.
Nobody budged.
"But Mr. Mathers," said Wilma Shelly, "he says he saw -- "
"I did see her," Tommy said eagerly. "As clear as I'm seeing you,
Mr. Mathers. She was walking along the street, right past the front
door. Not six feet from me. She had a pink suit on -- "
"And she didn't have it on," said Sayell, who fancied himself as a wit
and was half right. "She was walking along the street in the nude with
a pink suit on,"
"That's right," said Tommy, relieved to be understood at last, and the
sniggers swelled.
A tall thin youth from the accounts department, who always tried to
settle everything to the last decimal part of a penny, said: "She was
wearing a see-through dress, Tommy? Lace, maybe?"
"No, it was an ordinary pink suit, but sometimes it wasn't there. I mean
. . . " He floundered on, and the boys and girls chuckled and giggled,
and for the time being I didn't stop them.
I had seen the girl too. And I had thought, just for a moment, as she
turned and glanced across the street, that she was wearing a pink skirt
and giving away everything above her waistband free. The impression had
been strong enough to make me choke.
Of course in such a summer there had been some startling sartorial
spectacles. I wouldn't have turned a hair if the girl had been wearing
a bikini, because all over, that summer, even in Shuteley, conventional
ideas about when and where to wear what had been tacitly dropped. Even
policemen were allowed to wear shorts, and sometimes only shorts.
But long before this remarkable summer, the world had decided it wasn't
ready for the topless dress. And that wasn't all. If the girl had been
casually strolling along the street in a topless dress, I'd have goggled
but I wouldn't have choked. It was the abrupt change before my eyes,
like a piece of montage in a movie, that hit me.
"Now you see it, now you don't," Sayell was saying, working hard for
more laughs.
Although that was exactly what I was thinking myself, I came down sharply
on Sayell and the rest of them, sending them all back to their desks
except Tommy, who went to the door.
"I did see her, Mr. Mathers," Tommy insisted.
"Of course you did, Tommy."
I went to my private office, thought for a moment, shrugged, and
started work.
The Shuteley branch of the Fire, Life and General Insurance Company --
usually known as FLAG -- was unique in its way. Shuteley, situated in
the approximate middle of England, was a fair-sized old-world town,
yet there was only one insurance office that counted -- ours.
This was almost entirely due to the cunning and villainy of one Amos
Hardy, an old rogue who died in 1913 at the age of 108. As a young man,
he set up his own insurance company in the town, with no capital and
no connections, and, it was said, had not been above fire-raising in
the early days when insurance was a more adventurous business than it
is now. After 1909 every fire insurance company had to deposit Ł20,000
with the Board of Trade before it could do business -- but by that time,
having made hay while the sun shone, the wily old scoundrel was making
the law, and not obeying it more than he ever did.
He got such a hold on insurance in the town, did old Amos, that by the
time he died nobody for miles around knew that other insurance companies
existed. Of course, his business was eventually taken over by FLAG,
a big national firm, but Amos had done his work so well that even in
the sixties any agent of any other firm trying to drum up business in
Shuteley was wasting good expense money.
That was why, in a sleepy country town that had more of Old England left
in it than most -- we still had a village green with a pump, surrounded
by timbered houses in which Queen Elizabeth might have slept, but had
not -- there was an insurance office the size of a young factory.
One of the girls had to go to the bank, and I gave her a message for
Gil Carswell, who worked in the local branch of the Midland Bank, merely
telling him that Mr. Mulliner would be arriving the next day.
She had just left the room when the phone rang. My calls were vetted:
this was one I had to take. I announced myself.
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