The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11)

by Philip McCutchan

  But I had heard something and I was pretty sure it was Harry Carzac, somewhere behind me in a big area of scrub that lay behind where the helicopters had landed. And I knew that if only I could get my hands on Harry, I was home and dry. If anything was evidence, he was, poor bastard. Not wanting to exacerbate the general and the psychiatrist more than was absolutely necessary, I didn’t say anything till I was one hundred per cent certain. I just listened and looked and waited while the men piled aboard the helicopters for home. They were mostly aboard when I heard Harry’s voice again, calling to me to come and get him, and I looked where the voice was, not so far off as a matter of fact, and I saw him plain on the jungle fringe.

  I yelled out, “Hold it, I’m going to get Harry,” and I belted towards the trees. The moment I was on the move, Harry Carzac vanished. And a moment after that, so did I, into the jungle. I just had time to hear that general bellow out, “The bloke’s as crazy as a coot, he’s seeing ghosts now,” when I felt myself being brought down by something around my feet and I looked down as I kicked out and I saw I was surrounded by a whole posse of compomen. I hadn’t even time in which to yell a warning, a plea to come and get me, to the military. I was tipped violently forward and found myself sliding down a concrete shaft, sliding in darkness right down into the earth, back again, presumably, to High’s foul research unit.

  16

  I slid for a good long way, painfully, down that rough concrete. The shaft was much too steep for me to be able to stop myself, if indeed there had been any real point in my trying to do so. There wouldn’t have been much future in hanging suspended in a concrete tube which I guessed would by now be sealed in at the top as anonymously as the main tunnel entry. As I slid on down my mind was working away like a cinema screen, but one that projected into the not-far-distant future. I could see the general and the psychiatrist having a real field day in Canberra at my expense. If they hadn’t written me off as a complete nut already, they certainly were going to now. Last seen yelling out that I was going to get Harry … There would be a search, of course; it would be going on right now over my helpless head, but they would never find a thing. Harry would have been whisked right out of sight. And there hadn’t been the smallest sign of the place I’d said existed, no sign even of an entry. The search wouldn’t be kept up all that long and they would fly off to Canberra and my name would be mud. All I could hope for was that Flair would somehow talk them into coming back, but I didn’t really see it happening.

  I reached the end of the slide.

  I could tell I’d done that because my feet met solid rock rather suddenly and my body more or less collapsed on to them, but I couldn’t see anything. I was still in pitch blackness. This, however, didn’t last too long. As I sat up and began to get to my feet a light came on and I saw, once I’d stopped blinking in the glare, that I was in some kind of power-house. When I could see a little more clearly I recognized the place as an air induction unit. I had come down an air duct and they must have switched off the machinery for my reception. A moment later I saw I was being watched by three of the compomen, all armed to the teeth.

  One of them said in the usual expressionless voice, “Come,” and the other two closed in on me. I was pushed through a door into a filthy stink and then through another door, a heavy one with a steel-barred aperture set in it, and into a dank, smelly cell. It seemed I wasn’t getting the hospital-bedroom treatment this time round.

  The men pushed me in and slammed the door on me and I was left to brood. I was also left to take in the meaning of the terrible stench, a smell that I could practically taste each time I drew breath: I wasn’t so far off that charnel-house area, the place where I’d touched the corpse through the crumbling wall the time I’d fallen through Doctor High’s signal-vision screen. In fact when I could make out, in the rays of the cell fight as they filtered through the grille in the door, the corpses lying in rows on tiers of rock ledges, I realized I wasn’t only near the charnel house, I was damned well in it.

  The significance of that didn’t seem too bright to me.

  *

  High came down to see me, accompanied by a strong-arm squad, if such a term could be applied to the baby-limbed men. He seemed cheerful enough, glad — naturally — to have me back. “It was a damn stupid thing to do,” he reproached me. “You might easily have been killed, trying to get away.”

  “Let’s cut the sob stuff,” I said. “How come I couldn’t find my way in again?”

  He laughed, and leaned back against the wall, folding his arms. He was still in his white coat. “Rapid-growth chemicals dealt with the cleared paths,” he said, confirming what I’d thought. “As to the tunnel entry, I had it temporarily earthed in with a kind of mound and then spread the scrub over it by using the chemical agent. As well as hiding the entry, that automatically altered the contours of the land. Simple, eh? It certainly fooled you and the soldiers.” He blew his nose, while I nursed my bitter feelings. “All in all, I don’t think much has been lost as it’s turned out, do you?”

  I asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He started to answer but his words were drowned by a sudden clatter of machinery and a kind of roaring, rushing noise. High frowned and raised his voice at one of the guards, who turned and moved away, and soon after that the racket stopped as suddenly as it had started.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  High said irritably, “It’s the refuse disposal unit. A crushing unit, you know the sort of thing I dare say. For obvious reasons we don’t want our refuse just chucked around the island, so we pulverize it.”

  “Where is the unit?”

  High gestured, flipping a hand over his shoulder. “The other side of the wall over there. Why d’you ask, Shaw?”

  I shrugged. “It’s just its proximity to the corpses that aroused my curiosity, that’s all. Do I take it you also feed the failed experiments into the crusher?”

  “When we’ve completely finished with them, yes. It’s the best way, you know, clean, efficient, and quick.”

  “How long do you go on needing them?”

  High said, “Oh, it varies.” He didn’t seem particularly interested. Evidently he had other things on his mind just then, for he said, “Listen, Shaw, I have some questions to ask you. I want to know exactly what went on in Canberra when you flew in. What, exactly, did you tell the authorities?”

  “What d’you imagine I told them?” I snapped. “I told them the lot, all about your bloody so-called hospital, your filthy experiments, your plans in regard to Lifeforce, and what you and WUSWIPP meant to do to Australia afterwards. I don’t think I left anything out.”

  He was smiling broadly. “Did they believe you?”

  I sidestepped that one. I said, “They sent a force in — as you well know.”

  “And it wasn’t very successful, was it, old chap? If you asked me to make a guess at what happened in Canberra, I’d say they didn’t believe a word of it. And they never will, before it’s too late, either. It’s still exactly as I predicted.”

  I said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t bank on that, Doctor. They’ll be going back without me, remember. They’re certainly not going to sit back in Canberra and assume I just vanished into thin air, are they?”

  He laughed again. He was perfectly at ease, utterly confident, quite unshakable in his belief that this whole thing was going to be pulled off exactly as planned. Frankly, I felt he was going to be proved right. I didn’t see any way at all of stopping him now. Because of the way my own mind had been working I was right with him when he said, “Oh, aren’t they, my dear chap? For my money, they’re going to assume something very like it. They’re going to assume you’re right off your head. Indeed, the general commanding that abortive little airdrop was overheard to say that very thing. I gather he was in a pretty filthy temper, actually.”

  “Have they gone?” I asked.

  High nodded. “Yes. They searched around, just to say they’d done all they could I
suppose. They didn’t find anything, I need hardly say. There’s a fissure that’s virtually bottomless. You could have gone down there. After an hour or so, the general called it off and they all went home.”

  I said, “They’ll be back. With reinforcements.”

  “I won’t argue that point,” High said gently. “They may be back, I agree, but if so it’ll only be to look for you — for you, my dear old chap, not for me or my base. They’re very convinced now that it simply doesn’t exist except in your imagination —”

  “And Mrs Dunwoodie’s, don’t forget.”

  “And don’t you forget something,” High said happily. “I’ve got Dunwoodie himself on my side — haven’t I? Through that little control capsule, he’s going to block any suggestions from any quarter that anything’s up anywhere — remember?”

  I remembered, all right. I’d never forgotten it. And I went on remembering after High had gone and left me locked in that cell, alone again in the stink of the charnel house. After he’d gone the refuse disposal unit was set in motion again and it went on and on, clattering and grinding and swilling all the crushed muck away in torrents of water. After it had been in operation for a while two men came into my line of sight and lifted down a corpse from one of the rock shelves, after checking a label fixed to an arm. They carried it away. A few minutes after that the note of the crusher changed, as though something heavier was giving it more work, so I assumed the stiff had been fed into it. The noise got on my nerves after an hour or so, but when it stopped I couldn’t make up my mind whether or not the subsequent dead silence was worse. It was the most profound silence I’d ever known, with nothing whatever to break it except any small sounds I made myself. I tried to fix my thoughts on Canberra, on Flair Dunwoodie, on something being done to get Tracy Learoyd and the other brain-fixed key personnel out of Lifeforce, on something being done to find me, but it didn’t give me any joy at all. And absolutely no hope whatever.

  *

  After a long while I dropped off into a nightmarish kind of sleep in which I saw the whole thing happening, the WUSWIPP plan coming to complete success — Lifeforce blown, the whole area from Cape Scott to Darwin and points south and east lying under a mushroom cloud and all life extinct. The forces coming down from the north for the ultimate takeover, the confusion in the world’s capitals, the death blow to the free world being given down here in the Southern Hemisphere where no-one would have expected it. I even saw my own vindication, saw floating misty blobs that were the nuclearized politicians and the military chiefs telling me I’d been right after all. Even in my nightmare, that didn’t give me any satisfaction.

  The nightmare was broken when High’s boys came to get me. I heard them calling through the grille, heard a gun bang on the steel bars. I sat up. I was still half in that ghastly dream of the future. Hoarsely I said, “It’s too late now to hand out the medals, you stupid bastards,” and then I saw the horrible expressionless faces of the compo-men and I crashed back into the present. “What is it this time?” I asked.

  “Doctor High wants you,” one of them said. “Get up, and come with us.”

  The door was opened up and I went through and a gun barrel was pushed into my spine. I moved ahead of the guards, through the corpse-filled compartment outside, through a door that led me past the crushing unit, now lying inactive, its great blade-fined jaws wide and gaping. Passing through another door, we emerged into a short passage terminating in a lift-shaft. The lift stood there ready for us. I was prodded in and the doors slid shut and we went up, to the top passage and High’s control room. High was sitting at his desk, writing. After a minute or so he looked up and smiled at me. “Morning, Shaw,” he said. “Sorry to keep you.” He pushed his work aside and motioned me to a chair and I sat. The orderlies moved back and stood by the door. I noticed that the signal-vision screen had been repaired. I didn’t suppose I would get another chance to go through it and there wouldn’t have been any point if I had; it wasn’t essential to the operation, though it would provide the visual evidence of the blow-up. High went on, with his chin resting on the backs of his hands, “I thought you’d like to know we’re almost ready. Orders have come through from WUSWIPP.”

  I said, “So what’s this, then? The training session?”

  High looked puzzled. “I beg your pardon?”

  I said, “You did once say you’d train me in the use of your brain controller.”

  “Oh — so I did, so I did! There’s really hardly time now, though. Later on — well, we’ll see.” He looked at me searchingly. “You know, you’re likely to become something of a problem, aren’t you, old chap? I mean, what do we do with you once this thing’s gone through?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought,” I said, “that you’d have had much difficulty making up your mind. If you can’t think of anything else, you can always use me in an experiment, I suppose.”

  “There’s always that, of course,” High said musingly. “It seems a waste in a way, though.” He frowned. “You know, you’d do much better to see things along my lines …”

  “Meaning?”

  He said, “Well, in roughly another forty-eight hours the beginning of the end comes for the political West, you know that. You’ll never be going back to where you came from, because for one thing it won’t be there any more. You may as well face it, old man. If you made up your mind to take it, and to string along with us … well, you’d be sitting pretty. You could be very useful to us, in the early stages, with your special knowledge of the West’s security set-up and so on. Don’t you see?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “I see all right. But it’s a little early to think about all that, isn’t it? I mean, you haven’t in actual fact succeeded yet, have you? Things could go badly wrong in the next — what was it you said? — the next forty-eight hours.”

  “They could,” High agreed smoothly, “but I don’t think for one moment they will. Or have you,” he asked with a curious expression on his face, “anything particular in mind?”

  I snapped, “You know quite well what I have in mind.”

  “Yes, I believe I do. A further search for you — wasn’t that one of your hopes?”

  “Yes, it was. And if you —”

  High lifted a hand and the smile broadened. “But my dear old fellow, you were absolutely right! As a matter of fact, they’re here now. They’re right above our heads, but just as I said, it’s only you they’re looking for. They’ve already tried to probe that fissure. Would you like to see them?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like that very much.”

  “Then you shall.” The doctor got up and went over to the television receiver opposite his desk. He switched the set on and we waited and then the picture came up. A number of troops were poking around with sticks; it was like a police search for a body. My general was there, looking thoroughly fed-up. He was accompanied by another general. I couldn’t see the psychiatrist, but I did see Flair. It made my heart turn over to see her again, to know she was so near. I was glad she wasn’t with me but I wished like hell I was with her. I noted, when she moved into close-up, that she looked desperately tired and worried. She looked as if she’d had a long and frustrating argument with that clot-headed general. I almost felt as if I could make her hear if I raised my voice and called to her, but I felt that even then the military mind would write it off as something to be referred to the psychiatric department.

  I asked, “Where, for God’s sake, do you position your cameras?”

  High grinned and said, “Where they’ll certainly never be found, if that’s what you’re hoping.”

  I said, “I give you credit for ensuring that. I’m just curious, that’s all.”

  “They’re inside the base,” High said with smug satisfaction. “It’s a system of telescopic lenses and periscope reflectors, and it covers the top of the rock and the parts of the valley lying nearest the entrance. But don’t worry about that for now. Just watch those hopeful searchers.”

  I cou
ld see that they weren’t in the least hopeful and guessed that the search was simply a yardarm-clearer for someone back in Canberra, and would have resulted from pressure applied by Flair. This, authority would be saying, will satisfy the woman. And when it didn’t, she could damn well whistle for another attempt.

  So I sat there and watched that search, feeling more and more despairingly helpless, trembling with the frustration of it. While High got on with his work I sat and watched for almost three hours as those men moved around, in and out of the range of the hidden cameras, and then I saw one of the generals put a whistle to his lips and blow, and I saw the searchers hurrying back to form up and climb aboard the helicopters, and then I saw them fly away with Flair.

  “And that,” High said, “is that. They won’t be coming back.”

  And I knew how dead right he was. He got up and switched off the set, stretched and yawned, and went back to his desk. He looked at his watch and said, “I shall start the transmissions in precisely … forty-five hours, twenty-six minutes from now. When I do so, Learoyd and his key technicians will start to run up the Lifeforce reactors to the point at which, after a slight and unexplained accident has taken place, they will blow. And after that — well, it’s goodbye Australia and a good deal else, isn’t it, old man?” He looked away from me and snapped an order to the guards. He spoke in Russian, abruptly, sharply. They reacted with instant promptness, like the automatons that to some extent they were, and they closed in on me, thrust the gun into my back again, and marched me out of the room and along to the lift and back to the stinking cell in that God-awful death pit, while the rescue force beat it beneath bright blue skies for Canberra.