It is involuntary, this ejaculation of adrenalin. You mean to keep your emotions at a subliminal level, but you can’t control your glands. The needle was flickering on a suicidal hundred when a change in the character of the streets made me glance down.
The houses were less dense. Older. I eased my foot off the pedal before I missed my target. None too soon. Another couple of seconds and I would have swept past the long, low, one-storeyed decrepit arrangement of masonry that proclaimed itself in faded letters to be an inn. It looked more like a string of stables that had been converted from equine to human stowage. Later I found this idle guess was correct.
The inn and the Berlinetta, battered and filthy as it was, were as compatible as two feet in the same sock. The sight of the car would have made the most incurious of men stop and wonder. So I swung the wheel and tucked the sportster round the back of the building.
Before getting out I stuffed my pockets with an assortment of artillery. Theoretically this place was safe. But you never can tell. The other thing I remembered to do was indulge in a few moments of pre-disembarkation callisthenics. More than once after a long drive I had fallen flat on my face due to cramp. That had been in open country. I couldn’t afford to take the same chance here.
The inn was no example of modern architecture, but at least it was a tribute to the way men used to build. There was no bell. The door was locked. When I pounded my knuckles on it there was only a flat padding sound as if the vibrations of my knock had been disseminated through four or five inches of timber. I switched from hand to foot.
For a moment it was a question of who would shoot first. The old man who creaked the door open might have been harmless enough in himself. Which was more than could be said about the shotgun he had aimed at my belly. Reaction, as always, outpaced the threat. I swung the Schmeisser sideways, spun the shotgun out of his hands and into the doorway. Maybe I should have stopped there. I can only blame habit for planting the boot that had kicked at the door into his groin. It struck me as illogical that he should scream. A young man and I could have understood it. But him? Then I was jumping over his body and spewing the room with death.
Nobody was around to die. I hauled the old man to his feet, held him in front of me while I made for the racked bottles. He roused when he had half a bottle of brandy inside him. He had to. Or drown.
“Who’s here besides you?”
He coughed. Tried his voice. Vomited. Tried again. “My wife and my daughter. Are you him?”
“Don’t be stupid.” I cuffed him. “Don’t even give me that much recognition. I’m a passer-by. I want accommodation. What can you offer?”
He was scared to hell, but he got hold of himself and went into the proscribed routine. “It is a small place, sir. We can give a traveller refreshment and no more. It is many years since we were able to offer accommodation.”
“It looks big enough to me. Surely you have a room.”
“Nothing. We are too far out of the city to receive many callers. It became uneconomical to operate as a guest house. The beds and furniture are gone. Some of the rooms are used for storage. The rest are empty—except for mildew and dampness.”
“You’ve got a room.”
“With only one bed. I would gladly give it up to you. But my wife...”
“What about your wife?”
“An invalid. For many years. She cannot leave the bed.”
“She could if I kicked her out. What else? Your daughter —where does she sleep?”
“She has a room.”
“Put her into yours. You can all sleep together.”
He shook his head. “It’s the disease. My wife has great pain. She needs the whole bed. Even I have to sleep on the floor.” He anticipated my next suggestion. “And it is not possible for my daughter to do the same. There are no more mattresses or bedclothes. Unless...”
I followed the script and finished the sentence. “Unless I bundle up with your daughter.”
He hung his head. It could have been a nod or it could have been a gesture of shame.
Maybe I should have done the same. But shame was just one more emotion the coming of the Barbarians had diluted. This was the situation and I was stuck with it. A charade on a dirty joke. With me as the principal actor.
“I’ll bring some food from the car,” I told the old man.
“We have enough to go round. Nothing elaborate. But enough.”
“I prefer what comes out of a can. I know it isn’t doctored.”
The inn-keeper blinked. “You are quite safe here.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
I tipped the brandy bottle, drained what was left in it into myself. “We’ll see about food later. I’m too tired to be hungry right now. Show me my room.”
He shuffled out of the bar. Anyone watching us would have been hard pressed to tell which of us was the elder. I couldn’t lift my feet any higher than he could. I hadn’t been exaggerating when I had said I was tired.
After twice ducking under low-hung beams in the connecting corridor we stopped at the door the old man indicated. I gave him back the shotgun.
“Don’t be tempted,” I warned. “I want four hours’ rest. This is to make sure I get it. If anybody—or anything— looks like interrupting, use it. As for you—the door will be locked. And I sleep lightly, tired or not. If I hear the slightest sound I’ll rake the door with this Schmeisser. You wouldn’t stand a chance. Understood?”
It wasn’t necessary to wait for an answer. The old man was still gripping himself where he had been kicked. Our introduction would keep him scared for a considerable time. Maybe later he would start wondering how expendable he was and whether he would come out of this alive. He wouldn’t need too much calculation to arrive at the only possible conclusion. Hence the warning. But he would be harmless for a while. He wasn’t the only one who could calculate. This balancing of fear against the instinct for self-preservation was a familiar equation. The factor I knew and he didn’t was that I didn’t intend to spend anything like as much as four hours in bed with his daughter.
* * * *
She sat on the edge of the bed. Her face, pretty enough—not that it mattered—was arranged in an expression of wary anticipation. But she sat quite loosely and I guessed the look she wore was more for the old man’s benefit than mine. I gave her full, marks for professionalism: few people in her situation would have been so relaxed. And her eyes ran me over with the fluent efficiency of an accountant vetting a suspect balance sheet.
“The wrong responses,” she said, “and you’ll leave this room faster than you entered it. I’d have to go with you and we’d both be in finely shredded pieces, but the thought of it doesn’t worry me.” “I’ll try to remember that.” “That’s good. Anything else?”
“Just that I have a very good and a very long memory. How do you find me?”
“Same way I would find anything. By looking.” “And do you always find what you’re looking for?” “I find what needs to be found.”
We both grinned. Without giving anything away to unseen ears we had established our identities. This was the girl I had been sent to meet. The girl who knew where the big bomb was hidden. She was the last of a long chain of Finders. Some of them were Finders of people—people with special talents I had made use of. Some of them had dug out the information I had needed. A few, like this one, had been Finders of places and things hidden in places.
“I’m Elke,” she said. “I suppose it’s a waste of time asking your name.”
“The less you know the less you can tell if you ever get caught.”
She was still smiling. “I thought people like you had ways of making sure nobody talked. You know—tchk!” She drew a finger across her throat.
“You don’t sound too scared at the prospect.” She shrugged. “What’s so good about living? Life expectancy is the interval between now and the moment a Barb decides you’re in his way.” She squirmed her bottom on the bed and said, “Excuse me.”<
br />
When she was resting all her weight on one cheek she prised her fingers between herself and the bedcovers. Slowly, but with sure deliberation, she drew out a contrivance that looked like a shallow metal jar with its lid not quite properly screwed down.
“Simple but nasty,” she said. “It’s got a fifty-pound spring between the top and the bottom. If you hadn’t said the right words I only had to shift my weight a little. End of you and me.” She lifted two side clips and pressed them down to anchor the two parts of the bomb together. “Now,” she said. “Let’s talk.” A real professional, as I had already classed her. You would have thought I was back in England and my hostess had just poured the afternoon tea.
“It’s safe? What about the old man and his wife?”
“Them! They’re only part of the set-up. They’re not my parents, of course. In fact they’re not even married. They didn’t meet until I got word of your coming. This place is his but his real wife died more than twenty years ago. The woman is really an invalid—we try to use part truths to give an image of total truth. But they’re just... actors, you could say.”
“Like us?”
“Except that they’re only bit players. They’re safe. I saw to that. Got them so scared that he pussyfoots around and she daren’t leave the bed if she could. They think I’ve got the whole place booby-trapped.”
“And have you?”
“I’ll tell you later. You gave me the right passwords. But the real you could be dead and you could be a Barb wearing his human make-up kit. It’s up to you. Maybe early morning is a funny time to be going to bed, but the sooner you get stripped off and into bed with me the sooner I’ll know you really are a Memory and not a Barb.”
“If I don’t come up to expectations?”
“That’ll be when you find out about the booby-traps.”
“You know,” I said as I started to strip off, “this identification business isn’t foolproof. I’ve been thirty hours on the road. I could get myself killed just because I was too tired to function.”
She laughed. “Why do you think I got this job ? I used to be in another line of business. In Berlin. A business that happens to provide the qualifications needed for this one. With me, mister, nobody is too tired to function. I guarantee it.”
The least she could have done was turn her head. I guess it didn’t occur to her that some men are modest. Even at the moments when modesty would appear to be uncalled far. She watched until I was skin naked.
“You certainly look human,” she conceded. “Very much so if you don’t mind a compliment. But I’ve heard they can fake even that. There’s only one thing they can’t fake.” She did that womanish contortion that allows them to undo a full length back zipper in one movement.
“You’re pretty human yourself,” I returned the compliment.
She crooked a coquettish finger. “Let’s see if you are or aren’t.”
* * * *
Precisely one hour and fifteen minutes later she woke me as I had asked. We got dressed immediately. Nothing to do with modesty now. Modesty was a forgotten luxury. But there’s something about being naked that makes you feel defenceless. You can be armed to the teeth as they say, but without your clothes you can’t convince yourself you’re not more vulnerable than you would be dressed. And we were vulnerable enough as it was without being psychologically hampered in any way.
“How long have we got?” I asked the girl.
“Not long. They’re generally out and about around eight every morning. It’s almost that now.”
“Where do they hang out?”
“In the university. Took the building over soon after they landed. You know what I mean by soon ?”
“I know. As long as it took them to destroy every source of electricity with an orgy of mass atrocities thrown in just to hammer home the impression of how futile it would be to organize any resistance. You seem to have fared better than some cities I’ve seen. If it wasn’t that I’ve learned how thorough they are I would have been surprised to find them this far north. Cold seems to be the only thing that gets them.”
Elke said, “January and February, when the estuary was iced over, they never left the university. That’s how I managed to dig up the information you want.”
“Even then,” I admired, “it couldn’t have been easy. Their Eyes are everywhere.”
She nodded. “We were worried about them at first.” She didn’t explain, but I guessed she meant the local resistance group. “We couldn’t understand how they worked. The Barbs had robbed us of electrical power; we couldn’t communicate, we couldn’t fabricate. And, as you well know, any sort of transmission—radio, television, what-have-you —is lethal to them after a few minutes’ exposure. So we couldn’t tally this with the Eyes. Not until we found they were alive.”
I executed my party piece as a Memory. “Uni-functional laboratory grown protoplasm. Non-sentient. Capable only of aerial motion, pseudo-ocular observation and of reporting its findings to its masters by what Montilla of Madrid believed to have been telepathic means.”
“Believed? Past tense? One of yours?”
“Montilla? No. They got him. Inevitable. He couldn’t dissect the Eyes quick enough. Not before they reported he was taking hostile action. Got to admire him. He must have known what would happen.”
“Oh, sure. Everybody’s a hero.”
I could have asked about the flat cynicism in her voice. But I didn’t have to. There was nothing especially heroic about fighting for your very existence. Maybe you could say not everybody did it, but then the world always was made up of those who accept the boot of oppression on the neck and those who kick back. And because the kickers brought down even sterner oppression they were no more loved than the enemy. Elke and myself, we were kickers. We were two out of many. Or if you took it globally we were two out of a very small proportion of the human race.
We survived—and most of us had a pitifully ephemeral span—by one simple stratagem: we licked the boot of oppression. We were latter day stool pigeons. Finks incorporated. What the Barbarians couldn’t discover with their Eyes they got from us. An Eye can’t see into a man’s mind and read the insurrection bubbling there. We could. And did. Which is the reason they let me use a car, steal petrol and food, carry weapons, scour the globe for potential rebels.
So far I had been lucky. They pulled their spies in regularly for questioning. For questioning read inquisition. Nobody told them lies. Extreme pain has this effect. Monstrous inflictions on the body and the mental agony of watching your body melt away under the beams of their modified lasers. Hence glazers. You talk. Oh, yes, you talk. There’s a man inside you who thought he had self-respect and would tell them nothing. You know that even if you blab your end off you’re still going to end up as two kilos of vitreous slag. But you talk.
Insurance is the thing. You get in first. Survival of the fastest. You make your contact. Get your information. Then destroy your informant. They can’t ask questions of a dead man. Trust no one. Except a corpse. And we all know this. So we even hate each other.
“Well,” said Elke, “if you didn’t kill Montilla, you would have. Lucky for me that this is the end of the line. I suppose if it hadn’t been, if you had had another stage to go, you would have removed me too ?”
“Naturally.”
“No regrets?”
“When did you last have regrets? Anyhow, you were telling me about the Eyes.”
“Simple. Aerosol flykillers. Don’t ask me why, but it works.”
“The propellant gas. It’s a fairly universal weapon. Some use hair sprays. Perfumes sometimes. That’s how they found it was the propellant and not the other constituents. Of course it’s only a matter of time before an Eye manages to report back before its protoplasm curdles. Then ...”
She laughed. “Stop worrying. It’s too late now. For the Barbs. Or is it? When’s the big bang?”
“Tonight.”
“Then we’re safe.”
“Proba
bly. You found the right location?”
“Sorry?”
“The bomb. We know the area is well seeded with bombs and missile warheads laid down by the Russians, ready to be used in the event of hostilities. Not the sort of hostility that turned up, of course. We also know that most of them were far from being in a state of readiness. They were simply being stored. These it would take a team of scientists to prepare for use. But there were two-—it might have been three—laid down in this region, precisely sited some half a mile deep near a weak spot in the crust; they were primed, fully wired to long-life storage cells, set to detonate at the touch of a button.”
“I found one.”
“How far from here?”
“No distance at all. Right here. In the cellar. Not the bomb, of course. The activating panel.”
New Writings in SF 6 - [Anthology] Page 10
