by Dave Stone
Inside, over some method of gramophonic reproduction, a rather frightening-sounding man was shouting angrily about how he wanted to shoot his bitch with his mother’s funny gun to the accompaniment of what sounded like people hitting a number of galvanised rubbish bins. Victoria knew enough to realise that this was probably a variety of music around these parts, but found herself wondering what the dog had done to need shooting, and just what it was about the matriarchal weapon that was so particularly humorous.
Victoria steeled herself to tell the shopkeeper that she was merely browsing rather than intending to purchase, but the wares of GAP were displayed on serried racks from which you seemed to be expected to help yourself. The clothing on display seemed to be of a sort suitable for a labourer, and all of it in a grand total of three colours. All the same, by comparison, Victoria was becoming uncomfortably aware that her own clothes, after her recent exertions and a night spent in them, were not exactly fresh. She was also in dire need of new footwear
- preferably, she thought, without heels.
She noticed, at the counter, that a young woman was paying tor her purchases with an oblong card reminiscent of the credit-chip she had amongst the personal possessions in her pockets - acquired during a visit to the NovaLon Hypercities In the twenty-second century several weeks ago, if that actually made any sense. Victoria decided it was worth a try, and walked over to the counter. ‘Can I use this to pay for something?’
The shopgirl, a rather rough-looking young lady with a shaven head, a ring through one nostril and a contraption in her ear which buzzed tinnily, examined the card dubiously. ‘We don’t take, uh, New Fiduciary Treasury of the PractiBrantic Apostates.’ She thought for a moment. ‘You can use it as photo ID, though, maybe.’
‘Photoidee?’ said Victoria. The word was unfamiliar to her.
‘For sure.’ The girl slid a card and a ballpoint pen across the counter. ‘Fill that in, yeah? We can run a credit-check right now.’
Victoria filled in the card, using the address of an aunt, twice removed, who had lived in Boston almost a century before. The girl took it and began typing on a sleek-looking item reminiscent of a mechanical typewriter, humming tunelessly, though whether it was along to the sound in her ear or the angry man who didn’t like dogs it was difficult to say. After a while she turned back to Victoria with a smile. ‘You’re cleared for up to five hundred dollars store credit. Bring your stuff back here when you’re done, yeah?’
Victoria was surprised at how easy it had been. She had a shrewd idea that, had this been anywhere but here where interactions between people seemed to involve a large degree of play-acting, it would have been rather harder to acquire credit of such an astronomical sum. Then again, looking at the big pasteboard price tags, now that actually buying what they were affixed to was a possibility, the sum didn’t seem quite so astronomical after all. Either the GAP emporium was extortionately expensive or the currency extremely inflated.
In the end, Victoria selected a pair of heavy khaki trousers and a yellow vest, a bulky padded jacket in bright orange and a pair of brightly coloured, thick-soled plimsolls. She took her potential purchases into a changing cubicle to try them on -
feeling rather daring even though she knew that, here and now, doing so was seen as unremarkable in spite of such public surroundings where there were even men around.
As she was pulling on the trousers something twitched at the curtain hanging across the cubicle door. There was a little strangled sound, as though somebody had been meaning to shout something and had bitten the exclamation back.
‘Ah, hello?’ Victoria said, as the first seeds of apprehension planted themselves in her mind. ‘Is there anybody...?’
The curtain was torn back, partially ripped from the rod that supported it. Standing in front of Victoria was a woman, possibly in her mid-twenties and rather overweight. She wore panties and a vest on which was printed the words Hard Rock Cafe. Around her ankles hung a new pair of short trousers with a price tag still attached - she had obviously been in the process of putting them on when she had suddenly and simply forgotten all about them.
The features of the woman’s face were slack. Her eyes were dead and blank, nothing living inside them, so far as human beings define life.
Jamie, strangely enough, did not find crowds frightening although for the most part of his life he had never experienced them. In fact, that was a large part of why he wasn’t frightened; where somebody like Victoria had fundamental expectations of what life in a city was supposed to be like, to Jamie it was just something new. He didn’t feel the kind of vertiginous culture shock that is similar to putting your foot on a step and finding it isn’t there, or, indeed, that it Is moving.
Instead he had become diverted by, and lost in, the new sights: the wonderful colours, impossible to produce in his own time, that still fascinated him; the fantastical contraptions, even the purposes of which he could sometimes barely guess, leave alone the processes by which they operated; the mysterious smells of food made from the flesh of beasts and fruits that might as well have been the hypogriffs and mandrakes of myth and legend for all they related to his world.
The Doctor had explained to him, once, the difference between magical and physical matters, and Jamie had nodded intelligently; he could see the distinction - but deep inside he always found the later eras to which the Doctor had taken him magical, in feeling if not in fact.
Jamie didn’t mind that he had become separated from the Doctor. He had absolute confidence, borne of long experience, that should some life-threatening event occur the man would come running to the rescue before you could say Jack Robinson. For the moment he decided to continue with the Doctor’s plan, if it could be called such, and search for anything that might denote some invisible murdering fiend living nearby.
Of course, though, the distinguishing feature of an invisible fiend was that you couldn’t see the laddie in the first place.
On the other hand, the best place to start looking for anything in a strange place, anything the locals themselves might find out of the ordinary, was to ask around in a tavern.
The Doctor had given him some of the remaining money he had received from selling vast quantities of blood, and the sums printed on the promissory notes seemed more than enough for a round of drinks that might loosen a few tongues.
Besides, thought Jamie, at this point a small dram for himself would be welcome indeed. He looked about him and spotted an establishment that seemed to fit the bill nicely - if the sign outside, showing a collection of happy men with tall hats and tankards was any indication.
Steps led down into a room of oak panelling, the grain too regular and repetitive to be natural, and brass fixtures. The dim and flickering lighting was not candlelight, as Jamie had first thought, but came from a number of galvanistical contrivances in the shape of candles that mimicked it. A few afternoon patrons sat around the bar counter or in little booths, all of them drinking some kind of yellow liquid that Jamie assumed was the local beer - anything else it might be didn’t bear thinking about, at least not without a stiff drink inside you beforehand.
The atmosphere seemed not exactly sullen, but subdued; people about drinking at this time of day, here, seemed to be keep themselves to themselves. This did not bode well for the purposes of eliciting information.
Mindful of the fact that he should be keeping a clear head, Jamie put down his collection of promissory notes and asked the landlord for a flagon of small ale.
‘We got Heineken or Schlitz,’ said the landlord, who seemed dressed rather splendidly for a tavern, in a bow tie and waistcoat.
All things considered, Jamie decided to go with the Heineken.
‘You English?’ asked the landlord, pulling what appeared to be an imperial pint of the yellow stuff from an engine that gurgled and hissed quite alarmingly.
‘I’m a Celt,’ said Jamie shortly, with a depth of feeling seldom heard in the twentieth century even at a football match.
‘I like the English,’ said the landlord, all oblivious. very polite and thenkyew-very-much.’ The nasal tone he used had Jamie actually siding, momentarily, with the English - if the other side were Americans saying thenkyew-very-much ‘Always wanted to go to, uh, England,’ the landlord continued. ‘For a... you know...’ His voice trailed off, as though his mind had completely forgotten what his mouth was saying.
It was at that point that a portly man walked down the steps. The landlord and patrons, every single one of them, turned their faces to him and shouted, ‘Dan!’
‘What would you say to a beer, Dan?’ the landlord said, already sliding a full glass over to the portly man.
‘I’d say, have you brought a friend?’ said Dan, downing the liquid with a single swallow.
‘And how’s the wife?’ asked the landlord, pulling him another.
‘Don’t talk to me about the wife,’ said Dan, gloomily. ‘I had to brutally murder her last night.’
‘Women, eh?’ said one of the patrons, a distinguished-looking gentleman with a balding pate. had one argument with my wife about the maid overstarching my socks, and she stormed off back to brutally murder her mother, stepfather, half-sister and a neighbour who happened to be calling. I had to brutally murder the maid myself.’
‘It’s the same all over,’ agreed the landlord, refilling a bowl with salted nuts. ‘You remember how I had to brutally murder my fiancée, Father Grobegobbler, the organist and half the choir on our wedding day...?’
All of a sudden, the conversation stopped. Every eye in the room, two to a face, now turned towards Jamie who - not being born yesterday by quite some while - had been very quietly making his way towards the door.
Chapter Eighteen
The Best Laid Plans
The Tollsham USAF airbase, situated some sixty miles north-east of London, was originally the base of operations for Tornados and
F-111s set and ready to beat off the godless Soviet hordes if they ever, somehow, made it past the buffer zone of half the European continent and tried to make the UK a first-strike staging post for any possible attack on the US. Conventional warfare on the European continent being notable by its absence, the Tollsham base had been more or less restricted to manoeuvres, sonic booms that wrecked the sleep of those for miles around and the occasional summer open day and air display when base personnel sold cans of badly iced Budweiser, let schoolchildren sit in cockpits and a Tornado, or possibly an F-111, occasionally crashed.
Then certain people in Her Majesty’s Government got the idea in their heads that, far from being a post-manufacturing banana economy without the bananas, that was functionally distinct from a tinpot Third World nation state only by way of having not so nice a climate, Great Britain was still in fact a world power and a force to be reckoned with in international affairs. One hasty re-cementing of a ‘special relationship’ later, the UK’s rickety old submarine-based Polaris nuclear deterrent was in the process of being dismantled, orders were in for a spanky set of Tridents and, at some point, they would arrive. For the moment, though, the practical upshot was that US Tomahawk self-guiding, fission-armed missiles were allowed in bases like Tollsham.
This had two main effects. The first was that any number of extra Soviet guidance-control systems were locked solidly on to heavy population centres, as opposed to the North Sea, a patch of the Atlantic or a collection of relatively isolated submarine pens in the Scottish Hebrides. The secondary effect was that the proximity of these population centres made it not too uncomfortable for politically aware Britons to go to the bases, camp outside them and protest.
Lieutenant Major Ernest Derricks didn’t think in terms of cause and effect at all. He just thought that the women outside were ungrateful bitches, spitting on the protection he and his fellow countrymen were providing from the forces of Communism. It was an insult to the US of A and, by extension, a direct insult to himself. Well, he’d show them, one of these days. One of these days he’d show them all.
In fact, in the past, he already had.
There were a number of unsolved bar-girl murders from Saigon more than fifteen years ago, when Ernie had been in the business of airlifting troops before his reassignment into Air America and then Security - the US Military Police had other things on their mind at the time. Since then, such easy opportunities had not presented themselves and he had sublimated furiously, but the fact remained that Lieutenant Major Ernest Derricks was a man with certain Issues’ - which might or might not have stemmed back to a mother, in his native Maryland, who liked the occasional bottle of Jack Daniels and administered punishment by way of a cheese-grater.
Now he had taken it upon himself to question the girl brought in by the Section Eight intruders on the base that was his responsibility. He had been told by Haasterman to simply hold her and the other detainees, to just keep them incommunicado, but this whole set-up stank to the Lord God Almighty in his Heaven. Neither Derricks nor his men had been allowed to set foot in the hangar that the Section Eight people had taken over, and this rankled him. He was determined to find out something of what was going on.
If you had asked him why he had chosen the girl to interrogate, rather than any of the men - particularly the senior British officer who might be expected to have the most information to be extracted - Derricks would have told you that it was simple procedure to pick the subject who was most likely to crack in the minimum amount of time, and would have been puzzled that you even felt the need to ask.
‘And the purpose of this is supposed to be?’ the girl said as Derricks’s men handcuffed her to a chair bolted to the floor of what, with some slight degree of euphemism, was called the debriefing room. Her accent and attitude were what Derricks thought of as quintessentially English, which is to say snotty and oh-so-superior in a way that set his teeth on edge. He remembered the retainer he had worn as a child to prevent him from grinding them together, before he had learned to control himself.
He controlled himself now, without thinking about it, intent on preparing the pentathol needle; Derricks made a point of carefully administering such things himself.
‘Just relax,’ he told her. ‘I just want answers. If you give them to me, you won’t be hurt.’
In Hangar 18, amongst the now-installed sensor and display consoles, Haasterman was once again in contact with Dr Sohn in Lychburg.
‘It’s building exponentially,’ she was saying, over a line that hazed in and out through static underlain with a kind of half-heard gabbling that put Haasterman in mind of the voices of the damned, screaming and pleading in Hell.
‘The flares are starting to run together and there’s...’
Another burst of static. ‘...behind it, if you get what I mean, Colonel. Something forming. It’s like the feeling you get when you see and recognise something - just the feeling, without actually seeing anything.’
This was not the sort of statement that would look good in a congressional report come budget time - assuming anyone or anything survived the next few hours to have an interest in a report. And from the sense of fear in Sohn’s voice, and the sounds in the background, Haasterman had the idea that the operational lifetime of the Lychburg Installation could be judged in minutes, if that, rather than hours.
‘I think it’s time you fell back,’ he told Sohn. ‘Can you send across your latest data before you do?’
‘We could do a modem-to-modem transfer,’ Sohn said, her relief at being given permission to withdraw evident.
Haasterman found himself strangely pleased that, given their not particularly friendly working relationship, it had not occurred to her to pack up and move without his say-so.
‘Problem is,’ Sohn continued, ‘with the level of redundancy we’d have to use because of the scrambling protocols, it would take more than an hour.’ She paused for a moment. could simply upload the raw data to an unsecured BBS...’
‘What the hell,’ said Haasterman. ‘Somebody intercepts it and can make any sense of it i
n the time we have, that somebody could probably solve all our problems by waving a magic wand or time-travelling. Do it.’
He dropped the handset in its cradle and cast his eye across the technicians as they operated their consoles. The overall effect was reminiscent of the ground-control facilities used in the NASA space shuttle and rather more classified HOTOL
programmes. The difference was this equipment registered something other than space and, like the installation back in Lychburg, contained a rather more esoteric mix of basic technologies. An ancient stock-ticker linked to Lloyds of London chattered away, for example, while an operator fed the figures into her console verbatim. Another operator seemed to be doing nothing more than playing a computerised game of poker.
Another threw hand after hand of yarrow stalks, transcribing the interpreted results.
It was the closest they could come to gauging the fluctuations of reality and even this far from Lychburg those fluctuations were evident. It was an ugly feeling, thought Haasterman, to know that the world was invisibly changing around him, elements of one order of reality supplanting another, on levels that those who would be affected were unequipped to perceive.
Oh well, he thought, at least it meant that if all else failed, the world wouldn’t feel the final change that simply switched reality off.
He hoped to God that the Section’s man here was right - not in this solution being the only one viable, but in it being a solution at all. Coming here to Britain and setting long-laid plans in motion seemed to... well, they seemed increasingly to Haasterman to be acts of desperation. Clutching madly at yarrow straws, the signs you read within them merely leading you further to the darkness.
