We brewed some coffee and sat in a circle around the compact fire expertly made by Jarvis while McCloud and Rogers tried to remove the plate from the back of Sol's head.
The sun struggled to get through an overcast sky, and it had become very cold.
"Does that air conditioner in your jacket work in reverse and blow out warm air, Joe?" asked Jarvis jokingly.
I watched Joe's reaction with interest.
"No, worse luck," said Joe. "Always hot down on the aluminium Savannah."
"Not even at night?" I asked.
"Yes, the temperature does drop at night, but we rarely venture out," said Joe, "and if we do, our cold-weather gear works well enough."
I stirred the ailing fire with a stick and pulled my parka hood further down my face.
"Still, you may as well be prepared for the unexpected. You should get Jock to look at that air conditioner of yours and see if he can adjust it to give out heat."
"Not worth the trouble," said Joe.
He looked at me curiously and got up to check how McCloud and Rogers were doing. Jarvis looked over at me. He said nothing, but I could see that he sensed something was going on.
The wind had picked up in strength, whistling through the gaps and significantly increasing the chill factor. Jarvis had brought down some slow-burning peat material, and I built a cairn of rock around the fire to stop it from blowing away. The shelter was working well for McCloud, and he had yet to turn on the internal heating system, although his hands were blue with cold. I tried to build another small fire at the entrance to the shelter, but the wind was blowing in the wrong direction.
"Turn on the heat, Jock," I shouted. "You won't be able to work if you get frostbite. I will close the outside flap to keep in the warmth."
I heard the hum from the system; Rogers had turned it on, and he turned and gave me the thumbs up as I laced up the flap. Joe and Jarvis had started to build up a rough wall of rocks as a windbreak, and I went back to join them. We managed to get it to be about three feet high and long enough to allow the three of us to sit side by side as close to the fire as we could get with our backs wedged against the wall. It was not even mid-morning, but the light had gone down so that it was more like dusk.
"Is this usual up here?" Joe asked.
"No," I said, "not usual at all. It could be a storm brewing, but the sky was as clear as a bell at first light."
We heated some of the water we carried and made more coffee. Jarvis struggled back to the tent and pushed a couple of mugs through the flap for Rogers and McCloud. We sat with our backs to the wall and stretched out our legs. We all wore heavy-duty cold-weather clothing, and with a mug of coffee and the fire burning well, it was almost cosy.
It was time for me to speak.
"Do you remember, Joe, when you first explained to us that your mission was to delay the ruling council's decision to destroy the human species until this alternative reality self-destructed and so neutralised the threat?"
"Yes, I remember. Why do you ask?"
"Just a small point, Joe. How did you know that this reality was about to implode? At that stage, we hadn't told you, and with all the time it must have taken you to set up the hoax at the airfield, you must have already known, possibly before it even happened."
Joe froze and stared at me blankly.
"Well, Joe?" Jarvis asked and stood up.
Joe jolted back into life.
"We detected the split immediately and took the action that I explained. I am not sure about the time-lapse. It is possible that an effect of the split was that time temporarily ran slower up here on the base than down on the surface, but I don't know. We did set up the airfield pretty fast, come to think of it, and maybe there was no time difference."
"When you say 'we,' Joe," I asked. "Who are we talking about, exactly?"
"My bosses at La Resistencia Centrale a la Ocupación. Who else?"
"Not The Supreme Council?" Jarvis said. He understood what I was saying and had gotten ahead of me.
"Are you crazy?" He said. "I am human."
"Would you care to open your leather jacket, Joe?" I asked.
"I have got my heavy parka on top," he said. "I can't get undressed out here."
"That is an order, not a request," I said.
Jarvis was ahead of me again.
"Just do it," he said.
"Joe looked at each of us in turn and began to remove his parka. When he had it off, he opened his leather jacket. I pointed to the air conditioning unit attached to the lining.
"Open it," I said.
"I can't," said Joe. "It is a sealed unit."
"Just press down that clip at the side," I said. "It opens easily enough. I took a look before you shot Sol."
Joe bowed his head but said nothing. He pressed down the clip, and the box opened.
It was empty.
"How do you account for an empty box keeping you nice and cool, Joe?" I asked.
"It was the best I could produce in the short time I had," said Joe calmly. "I saw that Sol had noticed that I wasn't sweating when we first met, and it would not be long before he asked me for an explanation. It was only a minor deception. I would have told you the truth in the end."
"You are an android, said Jarvis.
It was a statement, not a question.
"No," said Joe vehemently. "I am human, but given the number of artificial organs I possess, it is possible that I theoretically qualify as a hybrid. However, I am predominantly human. My brain and mind are human, and all my loyalties are to my species. Further to that, I am an agent for the resistance, actively fighting for human liberation from machine rule.
"Our plan to delay the Supreme Council is working, but we could not implement it without taking a huge risk; the simulation and the original action had to be exactly synchronised. I had received the same wounds as my original choice of pilot, and we were afraid the imitation process would work in reverse. For a fundamental reason, we had to ensure that the Android version of Flight Lieutenant Nigel Braddock suffered the same injury as the original Braddock when he dropped a fire extinguisher on his foot at a rowdy party.
"The replacement pilot who took over from Braddock during his incapacity in 1940 also took over his aircraft. During a routine flight the next day, the engine shut down without warning, and the stand-in pilot died when his plane hit the ground. An investigation found that the propeller shaft had snapped due to metal fatigue, and the crash was unavoidable. Flight Lieutenant Braddock would have suffered the same fate. His flying skills could not have saved him, and it was only his foot injury that had prevented him from flying.
"Why was Braddock's life more important than that of the replacement pilot? The answer is that had Braddock died in 1940, the free world would have suffered the most disastrous consequences.
"In 1943, two years later, Braddock was destined to lead a mission to shoot down an aircraft that was flying to Germany from neutral Portugal. On the plane was an embassy official who had stolen top-secret documents concerning the building of an atomic bomb. The thief was an American scientist turned traitor who had destroyed all the other vital research documents before he left. Allied agents captured him after he fled to Portugal, but not before he had handed the documents over to the German Embassy in Lisbon. . . . . .