Harry hung his head, shuffled his feet, and looked sneakily guilty. “Yes,” he admitted.
“Off with you, then,” High said, lunging playfully at the bald man. Harry skipped away, walked aimlessly round and round a chair for a few moments, then flopped into it, pulled a comic from his pocket, and stuffed some bubble gum into his mouth. High said to me, “Yes, it really is going to be awfully interesting, I think. He has lessons, you know, to suit his age. It’ll be interesting to see which way he develops — mind or hands. My money’s on the latter. After all, the brain, you know! We shall see, though. The effect of a fresh environment on a brain already attuned to a car worker’s household may be much greater than I suspect. Meanwhile,” he added, looking at Harry Carzac, “we do our best to humour him and keep him happy. He’s our youngest patient by some years — in his new mental age, I mean — and is very devoted to the staff. He certainly doesn’t want to leave us. This is home to him. That’s why we’re able to allow him more freedom than the others.”
“In what way?” I asked. “Do you let him out?”
“Well — no.” High shrugged. “But apart from that, he has complete freedom of movement — within the building, you see. It’s quite safe. And he loves playing aeroplanes. Boys do, don’t they?”
I felt nauseated again. “Yes,” I snapped. “They do. By the way, I believe I’ve heard him in die passage outside my room.”
“Doing what?”
“Going zrrrm, zrrrm,” I said irritably.
High nodded. “That’s Harry,” he said. Then he went off into a discourse about some of the other patients, giving us their past histories and future prospects so far as he could forecast them. Clearly he was absorbed in his work; equally clearly the blow at Lifeforce, devastating as it would be in its effect on the whole world, was only a small part of this man’s interests. To him in his cold-blooded detachment it would be no more than a very practical test of his medico-scientific achievements. And, I dare say, at the back of his mind was the thought and the hope that he would be able to make a shattered Australia into his own private hunting ground for patients, that he might, in return for services rendered, be allowed by his political masters, when they took over, to practise his revolting profession in the open and with full academic dignity and honour.
As we went towards the door Harry Carzac called out, “Mister, wait a minute,” and scrambled hurriedly out of his chair to run over to me.
“Yes, Harry?” High asked.
Harry ignored him and spoke to me. “I want to play jets,” he said. “With you.” He said this in a loud voice, a spoilt voice, and several of the patients looked up irritably. High saw this. He frowned at Harry.
“Commander Shaw can scarcely play noisy games in here,” he reproved. “We must think of others, Harry. This is an important lesson in life. Not that I wish to be harsh.”
“Where can I play, then?”
High looked at me and clicked his tongue. Harry looked at me. There was an appeal in his eyes and the look was quite genuinely that of a six-year-old who wanted someone to play with, someone younger than the old cows and the silly nits … I looked away, but High evidently wasn’t going to let me off the hook. With a sly grin he said, “I’m sure the Commander will be only too happy to play jets with you, Harry, and I’ll give him permission to play in the corridor outside his room.”
*
Playtime came after lunch. I discarded my hospital pyjamas and resumed my shorts and Harry and I zoomed up and down that long corridor, making jet noises, arms outstretched. One of the stunted men watched over us, carrying a sub-machine gun. He seemed quite interested in our game; I don’t know what his intelligence level was, but at a guess I’d have said, not high. He watched us without a flicker, trotting along on those little thin legs until he couldn’t keep up with us, then stopping to meet us on the return zoom. Zrrrm, zrrrm we went. I don’t say I enjoyed it; but I tolerated it because of Harry. And because I’d already got an idea in my mind, an idea that I just might be able to use playtime as escape-time, that Harry might be the one-way ticket out from High’s private heaven. Harry really was enjoying it, badly out of breath but managing to utter little squeals of delight as we ran up and down, up and down. He just didn’t seem to tire of it at all and was vocally indignant when the stunted orderly indicated that time was up. I was locked into my room again and Harry, I supposed, was led back to the nursery or wherever it was they kept him. We’d made a date, subject to the good doctor’s approval, for another crack at jet planes that evening after supper and I filled in the intervening hours with much detailed thought and staff work, all on my own.
*
“All set, Harry?” I asked when my playmate appeared with the same orderly as before and he said, “Yes, mister, just you watch,” and he was away down the corridor before I could say another word. I followed, arms at full stretch, head down, doing my bit. I did it six times up, six times down, and on the sixth and last run I got a lovely grip on the stunted man’s sub-machine gun and my other arm round the back of his neck so that his face was squeezed right into my shoulder. Harry laughed excitedly, which was no bad thing, for if there were any bugs around out here the childish joy would effectively drown the more sombre sounds of battle. I dragged the orderly into the open outer door leading into the lobby and I gave him a quick, chopping karate blow that broke his neck nice and clean. Then I dragged him into my room and shoved him on the bed and I went for his belt and unshackled the finger-shaped key. Going outside I pushed this into the hole in my door and, acting I think as a kind of circuit-maker, it caused the door to slide shut on contact. Then I opened Flair’s door. She looked startled to see me on the loose without an escort and there was no time to explain in detail. With my lips close to her ear I gave her an urgent whisper: “Come on out but stay inside the lobby till I tell you different,” and while she did this I looked at Harry, who was keeping close to me but had stopped laughing now. I said, “Sorry, chum,” and then I clobbered him good and hard and shoved him in Flair’s room and locked the door on him. I hated hurting Harry but I owed it to him to make it quite clear to High and the boys that he was an innocent victim of the wicked escapees. It had crossed my mind that I might take him along but the thought didn’t last because what I had to do now was too urgent to admit of any distractions like Harry, who would be certain to slow us down. Maybe his turn would come when I could return to Kimbau with the RAAF and some airborne troops. Once Harry was locked in I got close up to Flair again and whispered, “Right, here we go — playing jet planes, just like Harry was in that lounge place. Make for the lift. Okay?”
She nodded. She was scared all right but she looked braced and dependable. Out into that corridor we went and out went our arms, and we ran. “Zrrrm, zrrrm,” we yelled as we ran, and Flair’s voice was near enough to Harry’s when mixed in with mine to keep the bugs happy enough. We made the lift-shaft and I pressed the button and the lift came down. We got in. We stopped the skylarking then and I kept that orderly’s sub-machine gun ready for action, action that would probably come when the lift reached the ground floor. And when it did do that, and the door opened and we stepped out, the action came sure enough. What looked like the Bank of England night guard was marching up the tunnel from the open air. But we had surprise right on our side and I just came out from the lift with my finger squeezing the trigger hard and amid a tremendous racket I weaved that gun around so I got the lot of them, the whole lot. Then I told Flair to move ahead of me and grab herself a gun on the way. She stumbled over the corpses, her face white, over the blood and the guts of those sub-human monstrosities slowly sunk into their various attitudes of death. At least High hadn’t achieved everlasting life. We reached the end of the tunnel and came out into the valley, into that maze of paths, under a darkening sky. I believed we were going to make it, even though the moon was going to be bright and would help the search parties. But nothing is ever quite that easy in life, so I wasn’t too astonished when I heard the
loud, deep blare of a siren behind us, a siren that boomed through the massive structure of the galleried rock and echoed out over the valley, warning all and sundry that something untoward had happened. One couldn’t really open up with a sub-machine gun in an enclosed space and expect to get away with it, anyhow.
We ran along that path flat out and we made quite a good distance before I heard the voices and the rattle of guns and equipment that told me the guards were coming out from the tunnel mouth. A few shots told me they were probing blind into the jungle. I dragged Flair into the smelly, close-growing tangle and we crawled into soft mushy ground under a low branch and we kept dead still and quiet and we waited. We heard the men coming along the path we had just left and a moment later we saw two of them, the moon glinting on metal and bringing up the dead-white flesh of those horrible little baby legs. On top of those legs the bodies looked like those of evil, bloated, giant-size spiders.
14
That was a very nasty night one way and another. We moved on with considerable difficulty whenever the armed men took themselves off sufficiently far, and my sense of direction enabled me to keep heading direct through the jungle thickness for the side of the valley where the path was. This enforced process was in fact more accurate direction-wise than trying to thread our way through the maze of paths would have been. Nevertheless it was still highly dangerous because every now and again a trigger-happy guard would use his gun and a spray of viciously humming bullets would spatter through the jungle. Sometimes those bullets were not too far off their target, but none of them actually hit us. After a while the shooting stopped and we didn’t hear any more sounds and it seemed as though the men had given up and gone home. But I knew this was highly unlikely and that it was much more probable that the search parties were being withdrawn to that upward-climbing path out of the valley. To reach it could be suicidal now. A battalion of baby-legs would be waiting there for us behind their weapons. The fact that I knew of no other short way out had to be regarded as immaterial, in the circumstances.
I stopped battering my way through the jungle growth and put a hand on Flair’s arm. I said, “Sorry, but we’re going the wrong way. It’s no good heading for the side of the valley. We’ll have to try to get right along it instead.” I explained why.
She said when I’d finished, “Yes, and there’s another point, isn’t there?”
I sighed. There was. I’d been keeping off it and hoping she would too, but of course it had to be faced sooner or later. “You mean the boat, don’t you. I’m bound to agree she’s hardly likely to be intact even if she’s there at all.”
“Right,” she said, “and I’m wondering what we can do, even supposing we can get out of this valley in the first place.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Flair,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I felt rather than saw her look. She said flatly, “You mean you’re just hoping something’ll turn up.”
A branch flipped back and hit me in the face. I cursed savagely. “You’re dead right I am!” I snapped. “And I’ll tell you something else you can chew on quite profitably: it’s all part and parcel of my job to hope that. I spend half my time doing it. Just because I’m an agent, doesn’t mean I have any access to magic, you know.”
“How lucky your public doesn’t know that,” she sneered.
“Lucky for them, yes. They’ll be sleeping tight tonight, all right,” I said angrily, “little realizing what inept hands their future expectation of life is in. Some proud mum in Wagga Wagga’ll be planning little Jimmy’s future, full of confidence he’s going to have one, poor little sod. As a matter of fact I’d rather like to think of him having one, so just shut up, darling, and let’s push on, shall we?”
“You started it,” she snapped back. “And push is the word all right.” It was; we pushed and thrust, broke branches, slithered beneath lush green fronds, sank into swamps, and hauled ourselves out again. We went on doing this all night, with as few rests as we could get away with, feeling ill from the sickly stench, filthy and stinking ourselves. And next morning’s dawn showed us, dismally, that we hadn’t in fact moved far. But it showed us something else as well after a while. It showed us that our current resting place was close to one of the cleared paths and that along that path was coming one of our pursuers.
“Keep dead still and quiet,” I whispered to Flair. I let that man come up level with us, and then a little way past us, and I edged closer to the path and glanced back along it. There were no more men in sight. The man who had gone on past had looked dead tired, just as any normal person might after all night on the move, and though he was carrying his sub-machine gun ready for action I felt he wasn’t perhaps as alert as he should have been. Neither was I, probably, but at least I was sharpened up by my concern to get us both clear and away from Kimbau. I moved out on to the path behind the man and padded up to him and he didn’t hear me till it was much too late. I jumped him and he gave a sort of half strangled, grunting cry as I landed on him heavily and my weight buckled the baby legs so that he toppled over helplessly. I wondered those pathetic matchsticks didn’t snap. I almost felt sorry, as if I were unkindly crushing a grotesquely large beetle.
I got to my feet and stood there looking down at him, with the gun pointing at his guts as he turned over. I asked him if he spoke English but he just looked blankly dazed, so I tried Russian and that worked. He gave a slow, puzzled nod — he wasn’t too bright, I fancied. High’s electronic-brain men, his compomen, walked and talked all right, and no doubt had other human functions, but I suspected they were fairly cabbage-like. In Russian I said, “You’re coming with us and the first time you do anything I don’t like, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”
“I understand.” The voice came out like a very old gramophone record, kind of hollow and without much resonance. The skin round the mouth was horny and crinkled like a tortoise. He seemed pretty elderly. It was horrible to look at.
“Good,” I said. “Then just listen very carefully. Is the path up the cliff-face being watched?”
There was a ponderous nod.
“Is there another way out, a way that won’t be watched?”
“I do not know.”
“Then you’d better have a bloody good think,” I said, “because we’re getting out of here and I repeat you’re coming with us to show us the way. If we don’t get out, you’re going to die just as surely as if you yelled out now for your mates. Has that sunk in, Comrade?”
The blank expression was still in the eyes and I could make no judgment of the effect of what I’d said. I had to take a chance. I went on, “Now listen again. Your mob knows I know the cliff route out, since that’s the way we were brought in. They know I don’t know of any other route, so I reckon they won’t be keeping much of an eye anywhere than on the cliff path. If we don’t show up there, they’ll hope to starve us out. I want you to tell me about one of those other ways out, and don’t tell me there aren’t any or that you still don’t know them because I’ll not be believing you. All right?”
There was no answer and I pushed the snout of the sub-machine gun forward and sunk it in that massive soft gut. I said, “Hurry up, Comrade.”
The expressionless eyes looked blankly into mine and the man said with a revoltingly mechanical obedience, “There is a way. This way is not of itself being watched.”
“What does that mean?”
There was a pause. “Me, I was sent this way to look for you. That is all that is being done this way.”
“I get it,” I said. “So another way out is — right along this path ahead?”
“To start, yes, is one way out. The way is not straight.”
“I didn’t really think it would be,” I said sourly. “But that won’t matter, will it, now we have you to guide us.” Then I added, “How do you communicate with your mates? Do you have a two-way radio?”
“Yes.”
“Bring it out.”
He hesitated and the blank eyes stared
again into mine as if he were trying to assess my determination. He must have seen enough of it there, for the spindly arms moved and the pale, female-looking hands delved into a flapped pocket in the shirt. He produced a flat, plastic object rather like a cigar case with two milled knobs on the top and a gauze-covered central hole for speaking into. I said, “Right. Now you’re going to call up your HQ and tell them you’ve checked along this way and it’s all clear. You don’t say anything other than that, and keep on remembering I speak Russian and I’ll be listening very, very carefully.”
I let him sit up but I kept the gun in his stomach and just to remind him it was there I poked it in harder. He moved one of the milled knobs in the radio and called up his control point. He obeyed orders with precision; I dare say he was well used to doing that. I had a feeling the compomen obeyed whoever was around and in undoubted charge. I was delighted when a reply came back, telling him to continue with his patrol and report in at half-hourly intervals. That suited me nicely. When he switched off the set I took charge of it myself and told the man to get on his feet and without any more delay we went off along the path, moving fast now behind the guard with my gun in his back. We made good progress after that and the guard did just as he was told throughout, reporting as ordered when I passed the radio to him each half hour. We picked up a few return reports indicating, not to our great surprise, that nothing had been found anywhere else. And we were out of that valley inside the next couple of hours and on a track that our guide said would join up with the one that led from the native village to High’s rock hospital, the one we had been taken along originally.
It did.
We kept the man with us. We kept him all the way back to the bay where we had left the motor-cruiser and this time it was easier going than on our first trip, because we used the same track which we’d partially cleared on that earlier expedition. As soon as we came to the fringe of the jungle I saw that my original fear had been only too right and Gay Venturer had gone. Not only that, but somebody was waiting for us. I’d been more or less expecting that might be the case and I was ready, but even so I doubt if I’d have seen him if he hadn’t jumped the gun. I mean that almost literally, because the moment I thrust my face through the screen of jungle green a spray of bullets took away bunches of leaves above and around me. I jerked Flair to the ground and went down on top of her and our so-far tame guide took the opportunity to get the hell out, his little thin legs twinkling in the sun and moving with extreme rapidity. When I had recovered some of my breath I edged closer to the golden sand again and I waited with my gun aiming through the growth. Our escaped guide was making at high speed towards the spot in the trees to the left where the gunfire had come from, leaping along like a mountain goat, and I heard someone yelling at him to run for some other spot for Christ’s sake, but he didn’t seem to be switched on, which was unfortunate for him, because he was right in the fine of fire and when the next burst came down he caught it and keeled over. I dare say an electronic brain is even more sensitive to gunfire than a normal human one, or maybe the spray had got him through some of his various other transplants. He collapsed on to the sand and then, because I’d seen a figure skimming down a tall tree, I fired myself and there was a long-drawn-out scream and a body fell outwards and crashed just about where my guide lay. After that I waited a nice long time but nothing more happened. I decided I had either to take a chance or stay bushed till I died of cramp or reinforcements came up, so I told Flair to remain where she was unless and until I called her out, and I came out into the open at the rush behind my gun, all ready to blast off a wide swath from the hip.
The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11) Page 14
