Futuretrack 5

by Robert Westall

  I reached out a feeble hand.

  “Don’t touch me. DON’T TOUCH ME.”

  I touched her. She lashed out like an unleashed spring.

  I had to fall over backward, or she’d have broken my nose.

  “How can I help?”

  “Give me Mitzi.”

  “Okay.” Then I grasped what she meant. “To race? To race again?”

  “To get back the Championship before… I’ve still got a few months riding before… it… starts to show. On Mitzi, I could set a lap record they’d never break. They’d never forget me… Even when I was dead.”

  “No,” I said.

  Her face turned white; her eyes deep-sunk. She bit on the scar where she always bit when she was racing. The little trickle of blood ran down her chin.

  “Keri, I can’t … it would be murder … I don’t want …”

  “You don’t want me wrecking your precious bike. Well, you’ve ridden me often enough. Night after night. Wasn’t that better than riding your rotten electric toaster? You’ve ridden me to death. You owe me that bike.”

  “But Joan… wants kids.”

  “Joan lives here—Joan’s got a good house. What’d we do in the winter with a kid, when the water butt’s frozen an’ we can’t even wash? I’d have to have a doctor an’ he’d register the birth and that would bring in the inspectors an’ they’d put me back on one of the estates. Or do you want me to have the kid in the corner of some field? Deliver the kid with your own hands, Supertech? I’m not some rotten gadget you can fix.”

  “Keri, I’ll think of something. Give me time. …”

  No reply, except the distant noise of a helicopter, faint as the chirr of a cricket.

  “Keri, please. Look at me.”

  “If you don’t give me Mitzi, I’ll drown myself. What d’you think I’ve been sitting here for, staring at the water for hours? Only I haven’t got the guts—yet.”

  I became aware of a faint ping, ping, ping inside my head. I’d been feeling it for some time; not paying it any attention…

  We were close to the Wire here. Too close to be having feelings like Keri’s. They could be onto her. Psycho-radar always picked up the suicidal, clearest of all. The biggest blips on the radar screen were always the suicidal…

  “Keri—they’re on to you.”

  “See if I care. Maybe after the lobo-farm it doesn’t hurt at all.”

  I, in turn, looked up into the glorious cloudscape. I could see the psychopter now; a tiny black speck in a purple and gold canyon of cloud, beautiful with sunbeams streaming down like searchlights. The psychopter was heading straight for us.

  “Keri, suppose I told you I was going to smash all this—psychopters, Paramils, Wires, the lot. …”

  “Cripes.” She turned on me a face of total disgust. “You and who’s army?”

  “I smashed the Arcdos for you. …”

  “This is a bit bigger than a rotten Arcdos. …”

  “I’m going to blow up Laura, when we go to Cambridge next month.”

  That made her look at me. “You mean you’re going to try.” But there was a flicker of interest: her white, bony look was starting to fade.

  I glanced up at the psychopter. I could see the pods on its undercarriage. In five minutes, Keri would be inside; in an hour, no longer human.

  “Keri, I know Laura. I worked with her. I know how she’s defended.”

  “You’ll get yourself killed, you mad bastard.” But there was color in her cheeks.

  “Come and get killed with me. I need your help.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me? Oh, you bastard, you lovely, mad bastard.” She flung her arms round me. “Can I ride

  Mitzi when we do it?” Tears were streaming down her face. “What do we do now?”

  The psychopter roared in low, the waves of air from its blades beating through my hair.

  “We make love,” I shouted. “Make love, or they’ll have us.” Desperately I fumbled with the zips of her leathers, the zips of my own.

  “In front of them?” she shouted.

  “Especially in front of them.” We must look, from up there, like two wriggling white maggots, naked on the waving grass of the bankside… But lovers’ quarrels, even rape, were not a crime in the Paramil’s book. Especially in the Fens, where fertility is at all times to be encouraged…

  “If I blow up Laura,” I shouted, “there’ll be chaos.”

  “Oh, God, give me chaos,” she screamed, and writhed into her ecstasy.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the psychopter zoom away angrily at zero feet. The observer was thumping the screen of his psycho-radar.

  They always had trouble filtering out sexual frenzy.

  Chapter 21

  Once you’ve made up your mind to do something, it’s only a matter of working out techniques. Techniques, to a Tech, are like nuts to a monkey. I stayed very cool throughout. Why you’re doing something is what gets you het up. How is as soothing as a crossroad puzzle.

  “Hey, Pete?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I been thinking. We can’t take the play to Cambridge with that tatty old proscenium. Least puff of wind will knock it over. We’ll look right idiots. …”

  “Look, if you think I’ve got the time, with all these roofs needing mending. …”

  “No sweat—leave it to me. I’ll knock you up a solid job with light steel scaffolding—steel guy ropes and everything. Stand up to a hurricane.”

  “All on your own?”

  “Razzer and Tommo will help—they’re slack after harvest.”

  “Get on with it, then. None of your fancy ideas, mind.”

  “Just one, Pete. At the end of the play, I thought it’d be nice to have two steel flagpoles rising up out of the proscenium, carrying Union Jacks. Worked by pulleys.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I pulled on the pulleys. Out of the vertical tubes of the proscenium rose two thinner steel tubes. They doubled the height of the proscenium. I pulled another rope, and Union Jacks broke out at the top and fluttered bravely in the evening Fen breeze.

  “Smart that,” said Pete. “Who pulls the pulleys on the night?”

  “Me—I’m offstage at the end.”

  Pete walked across and tugged at the whole proscenium. It was rock solid, didn’t even sway, held by guy ropes spreading out on either side.

  “Good piece of craftsmanship. But heavy… Think the old truck’ll take the weight?”

  “I’m going to reinforce the front of the truck with a lot of scaffolding round the cab. That’ll hold her.”

  “Yeah,” said Pete wearily. “Just as long as you take it off afterward.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said. Knowing there wasn’t going to be any afterward.

  I rode into the middle of the spinney, deep among the fir trees, out of sight of the road. I took the hinged plastic board off the Velocette and opened it out. A life-size cutout of a Paramil, not very well painted. Still, there was the painted blaster hand, the crash helmet, and visor. It looked nasty enough. I set it up against a tree, rode the Velocette back to the edge of the spinney. Walked about a bit till I was thoroughly lost, then took the Smith and Wesson from my pocket.

  Pete wouldn’t miss it. I’d carved a wooden replica to hang on his front room wall. He never touched the Smith and Wesson from one year’s end to another. It had been thick with dust. I loaded it now: six brass shells, seventy year-old relics. Then I slipped deeper into the wood, hunting my Paramil.

  Tricky: afternoon sun was falling through the branches, dappling the trunks and breaking up their shapes. It’d be doing the same to my Paramil. If I could hit him first time, I could hit any of them. Funny, hunting something you’d made yourself. I wondered if the ammo would work; I’d better find out now. I wondered how out of practice I was. Pistol club at college was two years ago…

  You don’t forget, though. Like swimming, or riding a bike—once you’ve learned, you never forget.

  The image
flicked on my eye suddenly, out of the light and shade. My feet leaped apart, straddled. My arms came up together, both hands on the gun. My neck retracted into my shoulders like an old tortoise and I pulled the trigger twice. Perfect, my old instructor would have said.

  Except there’d only been one bang. One bullet was dud. I broke the gun and emptied out the shells. One fired shell, with a hollow, black smoking end. One dud, with the little dent the firing pin had made. Four unused shells, looking as good as the dud.

  I walked across to my Paramil. The plastic board was smashed right in the middle of the chest. Not bad, at twenty meters among foliage. But it still didn’t console me for the dud.

  I settled down to wait for quarter of an hour. The bangs coming out of the spinney must sound like a Fen-man shooting pigeons, bang, bang, both barrels. Not like Custer’s last stand…

  It’s hard to find a bit of wasteland anywhere in the Fens. The soil’s so fertile, Fenmen use every inch. Often rent out ten square yards to each other for a henhouse, a garage, or a cabbage patch. Fenland’s like a patchwork quilt, with stitches of temporary fencing. A big, bright square of yellow mustard here; a smaller square of white crysanthemums there, for sale at roadside tables (“Take what you want and put the money in the bowl—beware of the dog”).

  But I found a patch of wasteland eventually—a corner where the field drains had clogged and the ground gone marshy. Willows grew in dense clumps; in the middle was a disused hen hut, sodden black with damp. Into that I placed my trial bomb, German incendiaries dropped into the Forty-foot seventy years before; thin grey cylinders, casings corroded with pale dust. The triggering device was another Fenlistener, acquired in a Chatteris junk shop. The old man had the decency to tell me the radio didn’t work, except for boring plays, and not even those at night… The technicalities of the detonator I won’t bore you with.

  It was a bright, sunny day, about noon, when the tractors stop for two hours, and every Fenman puts up his feet after a heavy dinner before groaning back to work. I retired to a safe distance, took a blue flypaper from its wrapping, and shouted into it.

  For a second, nothing happened. Then there was a tinkle, as the hut window blew out; a puff of solid white smoke; then the whole hut dissolved into a raging blue-white firework, brighter than the sun. After two minutes there was nothing left to burn, only a slight haze where the grass was smouldering.

  Good craftsmen, those old Germans; better than the Yanks who made the ammo for the Smith and Wesson.

  This bomb had used two incendiaries. I had eight in my second bomb, a leather satchel hanging in a cupboard at home. A leather satchel that was a careful replica of the electronic test kits that some Techs carried round the Centre, to test for faults in the wiring.

  I imagined the satchel hung round Laura’s neck by a thick steel wire; imagined the blue-white fire burning into her stainless-steel casing, turning it white hot, melting her marvellous brain into dribbles of metal and glass. And as she slowly distorted, melted, and died, she might send out strange, garbled signals that would ruin the programs of her sisters, those other computers she had long ago burgled and dominated at Idris’s command. Maybe she could blow their minds, too; wreck the whole national control system. Techs hammering away at the keyboards and getting nothing back but garbage…

  It left me weak-kneed with excitement, which I promptly crushed.

  Emotion makes bad Techs.

  “All loaded, Kit?”

  “All aboard, Pete!”

  “Let her roll, boy!” He and Joan scrambled up beside me in the cab, already dressed for the play, bubbly as kids on a day out. Joan wound down the window, ready to wave to her mother, six sisters, five aunts, and twenty-two cousins, who would be clustered at their garden gates, ready to give us the big send-off as we passed.

  I swung out of Pete’s yard cautiously; it wasn’t easy to see ahead, because of the big framework of welded girders that covered the front of the cab.

  “You certainly built that to last,” said Pete. “Must weigh a ton. You could knock down a barn with this old lorry now and never get a scratch.”

  Oh, Pete, Pete, if you only knew.

  I’d hung a lot of flags and bunting over every inch of that framework, to hide it from prying Paramil eyes; we looked infinitely festive, and I kept the speed down to thirty, in case it all blew away.

  Through my rearview mirror, I saw Keri close up on Mitzi. Mitzi, too—was hung with rosettes, a glory of Fenland folk art. She could have been an old AJS, except she ran so silently. Then Razzer joined her on his Norton Commando, and that made noise enough for two. Tommo and the rest of the actors joined in, as we passed their cottage gates. Soon Mitzi was safely lost in the middle of a roaring, blue-smoking mob.

  We passed over the Old Bedford River at Welney. Timing was crucial. Brightly festooned lorries were joining the main road all the time, all heading for Cambridge. If we got too near the front of the procession, the Paramils’ eyes would still be sharp when we tried to pass the Cambridge gate. If we were trapped too far back, we wouldn’t get our choice of site on the recreation field.

  Passing through cheering, waving, frantic Littleborough, I thought we were just about right: quarter of the way back down the line.

  I’d better explain how Laura defended herself. She lay like a princess in a medieval castle, within five concentric rings of defence. First came the Cambridge Wire, the most terrible in Britain, set inside a hundred-yard-wide belt of bare earth on which nothing was built, grew, or walked alive. That earth was scanned by radar, infrared cameras, listening devices. Buried in that earth were people-sniffers, pressure pads, and live wires which electrocuted anything passing over. It was always littered with dead birds and cats. Heads of Cambridge colleges were constantly complaining about the smell of decomposing bodies.

  Within Cambridge, the Centre, married quarters, and recreation field were cut off by a Wire of near-equal ferocity.

  The Centre and Techs’ Hostel were surrounded by an old obsolete Wire electrified to 20,000 volts, with floodlights, TV scans, and Arcdos towers.

  The Centre itself had doors of two-inch armoured glass that only opened in response to the correct code, dialled on a Tech’s clipboard.

  Lastly, Laura lay buried in her own maze of lifts, passages, and false doors that I knew so well.

  She was safe as computer logic could make her. It wasn’t her fault that today computer logic had gone by the board, because the Ests wanted to have fun.

  We approached the gate in the first Wire. The Paramils on duty could hardly see our lorries for the Est mayor of Cambridge, grand in his chain of office; the Est masters of colleges, gay in scarlet robes and black floppy hats; and a consort of viols and krumhorns sawing and tootling merrily away. One psycho-radar was also pinging merrily away. I was frightened it might pick up Keri, but she was dicing with death again, on her beloved bike: in my rearview mirror, she looked blooming.

  We processed down King’s Parade in bottom gear. I kid you not, dons were dancing in the streets; lusty, young graduate morris men slapping their thighs, waving their ribbons and tinkling their little bells like Santa’s sleigh. Their wives, sprightly in wimple and cloth-of-gold, plastic variety, were busy throwing basketfuls of rose petals over our lorries. And no doubt weighing up the lustier Fenmen for a night of the old Lady Chatterley.

  We waved back, laughed gaily, blew kisses, and approached the second Wire. The Paramils there looked bemused, embarrassed, as if afraid their lords and masters might suddenly land them a smacking great hug. You could tell their disciplined little Gurkha minds hated the whole business; were just dying to have it over.

  We burst onto the recreation field. The first lorries were just turning and backing up. I picked out the spot I wanted, smack up against the third Wire. Got it, but I had to fight for it. The other guy gave way, but not till our wings had touched with a crunch of breaking glass. Still, the other guy knew me, was in a holiday mood.

  “You’d better come down a
n’ fix that, Monday morning, young Kit!”

  “I’ll do that small thing!”

  Ha, ha. What Monday morning?

  But I threw myself into getting the proscenium erected, facing the field, back to the Wire. When we nearly had it finished, a Paramil strolled up and measured its height with his eye.

  Then he measured its distance to the Wire…

  My heart was in my mouth. But he only made us move it a foot further forward, and he didn’t make a great fuss about it. I assured him the steel guy ropes would hold it safely erect. I even hammered in one peg within a foot of his patrol car.

  That car was hung about with loudspeakers and spotlights; it was obviously going to be a permanent feature of the fair. A control point with radio; a place for weary Paramils to rest their legs.

  As an afterthought, I let the end of the steel guy rope curl along the grass till it rested on the back wheel of the car. We wouldn’t have much bother from that source, once the balloon went up. The Paramil didn’t seem to notice anything amiss; by that time there were coils of rope and stuff lying all over the place.

  Pete bustled up and again pronounced the proscenium a good piece of craftsmanship. But what were those oil drums full of oily rags and pitch for?

  “A special effect,” I said. “A surprise.”

  He looked worried, but calmed down when I told him the special surprise wasn’t till after the play.

  “Oh, well, I suppose you’re entitled to your bit of fun. Just as long as it don’t spoil the play.”

  “I promise.”

  He wandered off again, having still a lot of things to do—like sampling the medieval mulled wine. I drove the lorry away, down the grass access road. Parked it a hundred yards back from the Wire, where I could get to it quickly. The lads parked their bikes beside it, Keri keeping Mitzi to the middle, where she wouldn’t attract attention.

  Then all we had to do was wait till dark. And enjoy ourselves.

  Oddly enough, we did at first. That medieval fair was quite a thing. The Fenmen’s big day, and they’re still medieval peasants at heart. They were staying the night, had erected rough little tents behind their booths, lit wood-fires to cook on. So you walked down grass alleyways through blue sweet-smelling hazes of cooking and wood-smoke. The men worked stripped to the waist. Their children wandered about near-naked, sucking their thumbs, flaxen-haired and big-eyed with wonder. Sacking-hooded wives stirred bubbling stews in huge iron pots, and their dogs roved, barked, and peed just like they must have done a thousand years ago.