Land Beyond the Map

His childhood remembrance had not played him false, then. Maybe the distant fire and smoke and towers he had seen as a child were not visible now — they must be on the far side of this fantastic country, accessible if you held the other portion of the torn master map — but the monsters were real enough. Real, and clanking and flailing prehensile arms — real, and charging straight for him.

There were two of them. Critically, with the experience of the years and his training in antitank techniques draining away much of that enervating supernatural fear, he recognized the tank tracks, the prehensile jointed arms and the tentacular coiling arms, the ruddy flare of some inner power source vomiting through venturi-styled exhausts, the low-domed turret-type excresence riding the main body of the vehicle, and he could rationalize the whole into a vehicle of war, made by — and then smart rationalization broke down. These charging tanks had never been made by the hand of man.

His own hand reached for and found the familiar pineapple feel of a grenade, an old World War Two Mills Thirty Six, and his brain was in the middle of wondering if the thing would still work as his body went through the motions of pin extraction, of checking and of hurling with muscle wrenching force. Then he was diving into the car and Polly’s foot was pressing the accelerator to the floor and the engine was threshing in agony as the tires spun.

“Come on, you brute!” Polly was yelling.

Crane remembered his father and the way the big old red tourer had roared with spinning tires. He sweated. The grenade fell beautifully.

The leading tank reared to one side like a hamstrung horse, a track blasted from a sprocket wheel and flailing into smaller and smaller whippings as it coiled around the driver. The banging sound of metal on metal reached him clearly over the Austin’s engine noise. Bad design, Crane thought fleetingly, as he watched the second clanking monster gain with every yard.

For a few seconds it was touch and go.

Then the gallant Austin showed her speed and the clanking and fire-vomiting venturis lagged, faltered, and dropped away.

“That was a near thing,” Polly said quite calmly. She held onto the wheel and her trim body was firm and without a tremor. She’d probably had the shakes when Crane had been jumping about outside.

“Too near.” He looked back through the leering eye of the smashed back window. The clanking monster was still coming on along the white ribbon of road. The sun struck errant gleams of gold from its hide. For the first time he realized the things had been painted red, a bright, garish, out-of-place vermilion daubed against the serene rolling green countryside. The red dot followed on remorselessly along the winding white road.

“You realize, I suppose,” he said, “that we’re heading straight into the middle of the Map Country?”

“I had noticed.”

“So?”

“That’s where Allan is likely to be. You can knock out those clanking beasts, tanks or whatever they are, with your grenades. You’ve done it once. You can do it again.”

And that, he reflected with due solemnity, was Polly Gould to the life.

Around them as the car fled along the naked strip of road the country unfolded, green dales merging gradually into a broad and monotonously flat plain, dotted with clumps of trees and threaded by the glint of lazy rivers. Distant purple and silver mountains marched forever just on the edge of vision, hurling their peaks against the sky, a wickedly beautiful frieze of spears.

Aloof, the sky remained high and blue and distant, speckled with drifting cotton-wool clouds, and in the air mingled scents told of wild thyme and fragrant herbs and heavy-headed flowers sensually filling the world with a bouquet to relish. This was a country in which a man’s spirit could expand unconfined by pressing walls of concrete and steel and his lungs could breathe a pure air uncontaminated by carbon monoxide and diesel fumes. In other circumstances the scene would have been peaceful and enchanting. But not now, not in the wild and misty bog-lands of Ireland, not where it should be dark with night and hazed with mist and rain and the shredding scurry of the storm-wrack above.

The sun did not look to be at the right declination for this time of year. Crane took out his pocket compass — without which no map-enthusiast is correctly dressed — and flicked open the cover. After a moment he took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and then opened them and looked again at the compass.

“For your information, Polly,” he said carefully, “the north magnetic pole is now situated somewhere around the south pole. I thought you might be interested.”

“How can you be sure? Oh, yes, I know the north should be on our left; but we might have got twisted around—”