by Ann Halam
“Oh sure,” said Miranda. “Ants. They carried three full-sized wild bananas away. And buried the peel behind the big boulder. You are such a pitiful liar, Arnie.”
A patch of the whiteness blurred, took on color: and there he was.
Arnie!
There was Arnie Pullman, our castaway friend, sitting on the white cloudy “floor,” wearing the salt-stained remains of his black, baggy “happy face” Nirvana T-shirt and his baggy jeans, exactly the way he’d looked when we last saw him on the beach; his dark hair bristle short, though not quite as shorn as it had been at Miami airport. He stared at us, totally amazed.
We stood there, grinning in triumph.
“What’s going on?” he croaked.
“I haven’t spent all my time flying up in the sky,” said Miranda to me, ignoring Arnie. “I’ve been exploring the compound and watching the orderlies. I hop around pretending to be a dumb-animal bird, and nobody takes any notice. They must have been told to leave me alone. I spotted that the prison-hospital building was being kept locked up, and nobody was getting in there except Skinner or Dr. Franklin. I thought about it, and I knew who the prisoner had to be. I put that together with the way we’ve been feeling, Semi, and I decided this might work.”
Arnie was holding up his hands, and staring at them. He peered down at his body, and wailed, “Where am I? What is this?”
“I don’t know,” said Miranda, turning on him fiercely. “You tell me, you traitor. Dr. Franklin told us he couldn’t eavesdrop on our radio telepathy. We didn’t believe him, but it’s true, isn’t it? That’s why he’s using you. You’ve got one of those microchips in your brain. You’re listening to us, and reporting everything to him. Am I right?”
“Miranda.” I tried to calm her. “We don’t know he’s a traitor yet—”
“Am I dreaming?” whispered Arnie. He stretched out his arms, he lifted his legs and looked at his bare feet. He looked as if he might be going to faint—if a mental image can faint. “Have I been asleep in bed, all this time? What if it’s all been a nightmare ?”
I saw that he looked different, the same as Miranda had looked different to me the first time we met here (we didn’t notice that effect much, by now). The real Arnie, apparently, was not so nasty and cynical as all that. In the white place, you could see through the annoying I-know-you-don’t-like-me front, to the lonely, misfit person underneath. His mental-image body didn’t look chunky and solid. He was still big, but squashy and soft, like a crab without its shell. His mouth was trembling, as if he was going to cry. I said, “Miranda, you’d better back off. He’s going to flip out.”
“What have you done to me?” demanded Arnie, in a bewildered moan.
“It’s all right, Arnie,” I said. “It’s only a stronger signal. Usually, it’s voices. But if you kind of mentally shout you end up here, and visible. Like a sort of videophone.”
“Voices in my head,” muttered Arnie. “Cap full of wires. Brainwaves on a screen.” Then he seemed to pull himself together. He stared around. “This . . . This is unbelievable. How did you make me appear?”
“We didn’t do anything, Arnie,” said Miranda. “You did it yourself. Like Semi said, you shouted, you turned up the volume. Strong emotions, like anger or fear or a guilty conscience, make the radio telepathy into a video link. I don’t know how to describe it scientifically, but that’s what seems to happen. I mean, you did take the bananas, didn’t you? Out of pure greed. And obviously you feel guilty about it.”
Arnie tried to put on his old, annoying grin. “Well, yeah, I took ’em. . . . Course I did. But I didn’t feel guilty. Not me. I didn’t really want ’em, I did it to wind you up.”
It didn’t work. We could see exactly how ashamed and stupid he felt about having taken the bananas and then lied about it. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t have to. He knew. He scowled, and shrugged. “Okay, okay. All right. You smoked me out. Can we forget the stupid bananas? We’re back in contact. Now what?”
Slowly, the three of us sat down, staring at each other.
Miranda said, “Tell us what’s going on.”
Arnie gave a sort of choked laugh. “Well, you guessed it, Marvelous Miranda. The Doc, Dr. Franklin, genuinely can’t spy on you. No one can, unless they have the implant. Radio telepathy isn’t like ordinary radio. They can’t tune in and hear what we’re saying, they can only tell when the chips are active. They’d need to have you in the lab, wired up, to listen in on your conversations directly, and that wouldn’t be convenient, the way you are now. He’s going to improve the system, but that’s the way it works so far.”
“So Miranda’s right,” I said. “You’ve had the same kind of implant put into your brain. You can pick up our signals as speech the way we can, and you can talk so you can tell him what we’re saying. You’re his spy.”
Arnie shuddered. “No! It isn’t like that!”
“Then what is it like?” demanded Miranda.
Arnie’s tongue came out and licked his dry lips. The Arnie we’d known on the beach would have jeered at us and kept on lying, but the white place made lying difficult. Or maybe Arnie had changed since we’d last met him.
“All right, I give in. Yeah, it’s true. That’s about it. He’s using me. I’m spying.”
We’d told him that we knew what he was doing, but it was a shock to hear him say it. We couldn’t speak. We stared at him in horror. Arnie cowered, as if we were hitting him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he pleaded. “Let me explain. Let me tell you—”
It was Day Eighty-five. We hadn’t seen him since Day Eleven, when he’d vanished along with his raft. Back then Miranda and I had thought he was food for the sharks.
“That’s a good idea,” said Miranda coldly. “We’d like to hear your explanation. You know what happened to us. Your friends Dr. Skinner and Dr. Franklin have told you everything, I’m sure. So tell us what happened to you. Tell us the whole story, from the day you disappeared. How did you get caught?”
“From the day I disappeared? That seems like a long, long time ago. I’ll try. Don’t blame me if I don’t remember all the details.”
“We two went off foraging,” I prompted him, “early in the morning. Then what?”
It was like old times, like being on the beach again, the three of us sitting together.
“I was going to work on my raft,” said Arnie. “But I’d run out of rope, and I wanted to think about redesigning it anyway. I took the twine ball, you know, the remains of the salvaged twine you two had picked up, and went up to the waterfall.”
Miranda and I glanced at each other. Typical! He’d been supposed to stay at the camp.
“I had a swim. Then I started knotting bits of twine together, sitting there in the cool. I got bored of that, so I decided to have another go at climbing the cliff.”
“You found the passage,” said Miranda.
“That’s right. I found the passage. I got through into the crater valley. I was in the trees outside the cave, staring down at the buildings. Then there were these goons in uniform, crashing around in the undergrowth. They seemed to be searching for something.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I bet they were looking for the piglet!”
“What piglet?”
“One of Dr. Franklin’s animals,” said Miranda. “It had escaped. It got down into our bay somehow. Semi saw a wild pig mutant when we were in the woods up to the north. But she couldn’t believe her eyes. Go on, what next?”
“I suppose that explains it. I thought they were looking for me. I thought I must have triggered some kind of alarm. I’d dropped my machete. That’s how I got caught. I was searching around for it, when suddenly the goons were all over me. The weird thing was, they didn’t seem surprised. They didn’t go, ‘Who are you and how did you get here,’ or anything like that. I can speak a bit of Spanish. I tried to talk to them, but they weren’t interested. They stuck me in their Jeep. The guy who seemed to be the captain of the crew talke
d to someone on a mobile phone. Then he sent some of his men off up the track. The rest of us waited around for a long time; and no one would talk to me, and they wouldn’t let me out of the Jeep. In the end the men came back, with my raft. I couldn’t understand how they’d done that. . . . Skinner told me later, there’s a place where you can get through the rim of the crater easily, but you can’t see the cleft from below, and that’s why we never found it. Anyway, they’d been down to the beach, to our camp, and brought it back. I didn’t understand what was going on at all, but when they started to break up my raft, I was angry and I sort of, well, started a fight. That’s when I was knocked out.”
“Sounds familiar,” said Miranda.
“They had to take the raft,” I pointed out. “It was too soon to be sure we wouldn’t be rescued. It was only eleven days since the crash. They didn’t want me and Miranda telling anyone about another castaway, who had mysteriously disappeared. With the raft gone, there was no mystery. We had an explanation.”
“Yeah . . . the sharks. I worked that out, later on. But getting back to my story, the next thing I knew I was in a bed, in a prison ward with bars all around me, and nutty Dr. Skinner was peering into my cage. That’s when . . . it’s true, I told him about you two. But I didn’t betray you! The goons already knew about the camp on the beach, before they picked me up. I was only telling Skinner what he already knew.”
“That’s what he said to us,” I said. “They knew we were there all along.”
“Yeah. They were watching us, and we never guessed. They knew about the plane crash the night it happened. I asked Skinner once, what about the other survivors, the ones in the life rafts. Did Dr. Franklin know they were there and let them die? Skinner said there weren’t any. No one survived the explosion, except us. I suppose that could be true.”
“He told us the same thing,” said Miranda. “Go on, what happened next?”
“I didn’t know anything was wrong. I thought Skinner was a strange character, but everything was going to be okay, and it was only the security staff who had been overenthusiastic, knocking me out like that. Skinner did some medical tests, gave me some IQ tests, and said they were going to ‘keep me under observation’; and I still thought it was okay. I thought I was going to be sent home, and I couldn’t understand why you hadn’t been brought in. I realize now they were waiting for some kind of ‘all clear.’ Something to make them sure no one would ever come looking for three teenage castaways.”
Miranda and I nodded.
“All three of us are missing, believed dead,” I agreed, bitterly. “We don’t exist.”
“Yeah,” said Arnie. “That’s what Skinner told me, in the end. That was the main message of the pep talk, after he’d taken me to see the big doc. You’re officially dead. We can do what we like, don’t try to resist. But I don’t know how long I was kept in the ward before that happened. My memory is fuzzy. I was ill for a few days. It could be that they drugged me to make me ill, I don’t know. Then one fine day he told me I was going to meet the boss. He took me to see Dr. Franklin . . . and I finally found out what kind of hellhole place I’d landed in. Yeah, what a hellhole. There’ve been times, there’ve been plenty of times in the past weeks, when I’ve wished the sharks could have had me—”
“So what then?” said Miranda, sternly. “What happened after the pep talk?”
“You know what? I escaped, once. They were moving me between the ward and the science block and I was left alone for a few minutes, in a room with an unlocked window. I got out. I hid in the back of a Jeep and got driven into the farmland. I thought if I could get away from headquarters, away from Franklin and Skinner, I’d find someone who would help. I hid in the fields until dark, out there where the staff families live, and I went and knocked on a door. A woman let me in. I tried to tell her what had happened, with my bit of Spanish. She gave me some chicken soup . . . shut me in her kids’ bedroom, and called the labs. The uniformed branch came and took me away.”
He broke off and looked at us earnestly. “I don’t blame her. I was a crazy foreign kid, babbling about torture and monsters, and Dr. Franklin is the big kind boss who can do no wrong. But remember this. Don’t trust them! Don’t trust any of them! Everyone on this island is working for Dr. Franklin, and if they say they’ll help you, they’re lying.”
We didn’t say anything. I’m sure Miranda was thinking the same as I was.
He was warning us against himself. We couldn’t trust Arnie, either.
Arnie resumed his story. “Then they wasted no more time. A few hours after they got me back I was in the operating room, having a microchip stuck into my brain. They kept me out of sight when you two turned up. It was part of the plot, one of Dr. Franklin’s games, that you weren’t to know I was still around, or what had happened to me. When you were out of the way they moved me back to the prison ward. I’ve been there ever since. When you were, um, ready, they activated my chip. They tuned me in to Radio Mutant and started monitoring your calls. . . . And that’s about it.”
We looked at him in silence. Something was missing from his story. For a moment (sitting there in my mental-image human body), I couldn’t think what it was.
“You had a microchip stuck in your brain,” repeated Miranda. “That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean you are still human?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
Suddenly I could feel the water around me. I could feel the big, slimy delta shape that was the real Semi now. I stared at Arnie. I tried to imagine what it was like to be him. Was he lying on his bed? Was he sitting on the floor? What was he doing with his hands?
“But you claim you’re a prisoner,” said Miranda, softly.
“Of course I am! You don’t think I’m sticking around of my own free will?”
“What kind of a person are you, Arnie?”
“My name’s Arnie Pullman. I used to live in Surrey, until the lucky day I was in a plane crash. Now I live on a desert island with a mad scientist. When I grow up, I want to be—”
“Cut that out. You know what I’m asking. How can you work for him?”
“I have no choice! Do you think I want to spy on you? They keep me locked up. I’m helpless! Look, I can tell you things. And I can keep secrets, some of the time. He . . . He doesn’t hear every word we say. He doesn’t know about this ‘white place’ effect, and I won’t tell him. Not if I can help it, I swear—”
“Semi thought you were dead,” said Miranda viciously. “But you know what? I was never sure. Somehow I knew you’d have squirmed out of trouble. You always managed to sneak out of the dirty jobs.”
“Listen to me, will you? There’s something you’ve got to know. You mustn’t escape.”
Miranda and I looked at each other.
“Oh yeah?” said Miranda, dangerously calm. “Why not? Not that we have any plans. We’re about as trapped and hopeless as we could possibly be.”
“I’m not asking you to tell me anything. I don’t want to know your plans. But you have to stay in the cage. You haven’t had the other half of the treatment.”
“What are you talking about?” said Miranda, after a stunned silence.
“The antidote. The infusion that turns you back into human beings.”
I don’t think there was anything crueler he could have said.
He looked at our faces, our expressions of misery and despair—
“I’m not lying. You think I’d lie to you about something like that?”
“You slimy creep,” snarled Miranda. “You’d lie about anything.”
Arnie bristled. He was getting used to the white place effect, I could tell, and getting back to his normal annoying self. “Hey, Wonder Girl, get a grip on that temper. What happened to you is not my fault. I’m trying to help. I’m telling you, you have to stay put, for all our sakes—”
“You snake!”
Miranda hated snakes more than anything.
She’d jumped to her feet. S
he looked so strange, and the whole white place felt so full of her anger. . . . I knew what was going to happen before it happened, but it was still a shock. All the cloudy stuff suddenly started moving, whirling around. Miranda vanished, and then out of that spinning tornado of mental energy came Miranda-the-bird, bigger than in life. She leaped into the air, talons outstretched, her great wings beating—
“You think I’d leave!” she screeched, her red hooked beak savagely wide open. “You think I’d escape, when Semi can’t get out! You think I’d leave her behind?”
One of her wings swiped at him. He fell on his back and sprawled, frantically trying to squirm out of reach, yelling in terror, and she plunged down, grabbing at him furiously. As her talons grasped him, I couldn’t see the teenage boy any longer. I saw a snake, a writhing limbless thing, as if Miranda had taken control of this whole mental space, and was making him appear in the form she hated. She was shaking him like a rag; and the most terrifying thing was, I could feel Miranda slipping away. I could feel her human presence vanishing, so there was nothing left but this nightmarish creature, with the mind of a bird of prey—
I was trying to yell, Stop it, stop it—
But something was happening to me too. My breath was coming in gasps.
I was choking, my lungs were burning!
I couldn’t breathe!
Miranda’s rage had overwhelmed me too. I was losing my ability to hold on to this illusion of human form. I was still in the white place, but there was no water and I couldn’t breathe! I couldn’t breathe!
I blacked out. I fell back into my fish body. There was water around me, my gills filled with blessed breathableness. I heard Miranda calling my name.
I flipped the mental switches as hard and fast as I could. I was back with them in the white place, flat on my back, my head spinning. Two worried faces peered down at me.
“Please, Miranda,” I said, sitting up, coughing. “ Don’t do that again. If you have to fight with Arnie, imagine yourself as an all-in wrestler or something.”
“I’m sorry,” said Miranda. She was looking very shaken.
