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

by Philip McCutchan

  Summers said briefly, “Report in, over.”

  Learoyd’s voice came in as clear and as strong and as normal as before: “Reactor readings showing overcharge, over.”

  Summers said, “Obey previous instructions, that is all, over and out.” He met High’s eye and took off his headphones. High reached out and flicked a switch and the lights on his control panel faded and died. There was a sudden and surprising silence. I hadn’t really been aware of the faint hum coming from the panel, but now that it had stopped I noticed its absence. High flicked a lighter and lit a cigarette. He seemed quite relaxed. He smiled across at me. He said, “Well, that’s all. The programme’s in automatic operation and that’s it.”

  “What does ‘overcharge’ mean?” I asked.

  “It’s our own word,” he said, taking a deep lungful of smoke. “It means the point of no return. The process can’t be reversed now. The reactors’ll go on building up till they blow. The only way to stop the thing now is to cut the power supply.” He laughed. “No-one’s going to do that.”

  “How long before the point of explosion is reached?”

  “We’re not quite sure,” he said. “It could be as much as twelve hours — even more — but we don’t expect it to be as long as that. It doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s all set up now.”

  “Oh, is it,” I said. Suddenly a wave of the murder wish flooded me and I knew that if it was the last thing I did I had to get that fish-cold bastard who was still smiling at me. Quick as light I bent down to the floor and heaved the chair over my head, at the same time somersaulting my body towards High so that chair and all were hurled towards him. It must have hurt like hell but I wasn’t feeling anything just then, nothing but that insane desire to kill High. In fact I thought I’d missed him, because the legs of the chair took the control panel and glass flew in splinters. Summers lunged for me and I twisted away and lashed out with my legs and got him on the point of the chin. It was a cracking kick with all my fury behind it and it sent his head back so fast you could hear the neck break. Summers crashed backwards into the control panel and more glass flew, and then he went down in a heap, without even the time to groan before he died. I rolled over and contacted High, who must after all have been caught by some part of me or the chair and was sitting groggily on the floor. I heaved my body on top of him and pinned him down hard and stuffed an elbow into his gaping mouth to stop his yapping at the compomen. Then I caught the eyes of all those horrible men. They were all looking at me, as though dumbly hoping for a lead now that High was down and Summers dead.

  They got it.

  I snapped out in Russian, “Get these handcuffs off me and be quick about it.” I kept my elbow in High’s mouth to stop him giving tongue before the compomen had done as they’d been told — by me. I was the master now, the only man in a position to regulate those mechanical intelligences that needed something to which to respond. High had created his own fall, had made a monster that could be turned against him. The compomen responded beautifully, just as the one in the cell below had done. When I was free I got up and then bent down and grabbed Doctor High.

  “Now, you unutterable bastard,” I said, “you’re going where your failures went, which is a pretty appropriate place if you ask me,” and, feeling as if I had the strength of ten, I lifted him right up and crossed the room with him and dropped him slap down the wall cavity to the charnel house.

  One of the compomen asked haltingly, “What is to happen to the doctor?”

  Savagely, unthinkingly, I snapped back at him: “The crusher’s the place for refuse, isn’t it?”

  After that everything happened at breakneck speed. It damn well had to, if I was to save Lifeforce.

  18

  I had stopped just for a few seconds, no more than that, to peer down the cavity after High, to watch him slither and scrape his flesh on the concrete walls and then disappear into the depths beyond the bend; and when I turned back into the control room, those compomen had all beaten it out into the corridor. After a quick look at the broken control panel — something must have shorted, because there was a lick of flame coming from it — I went out fast.

  There was no sign of the compomen and I ran for the lift at the end. The indicator showed it was descending. I pressed the button to recall it, but it went on. When it reached the end of the shaft I still had my finger on the button and it began to come up again. It seemed an age before it reached my floor and the door opened. I went down, right down to the level of the charnel house and my cell and the refuse disposal unit. I’d ticked over, of course, by this time and I could only pray I’d be in time, because I still had a need for Doctor High. I’d let that temporary near-insane fury get the better of my judgment when I’d dropped him down the cavity; I should never have done it, though in fact I knew the slow drop wouldn’t kill him or even damage him to the point of incapacitation. After all, I’d survived it myself.

  I was too late.

  I heard the screams as I raced towards the refuse disposal unit, horrible screams that echoed off the bare walls, and I heard the whine and felt the hum of the crusher in operation. The compomen had taken me at my word, had obeyed with their odd mechanical instinct what they had taken to be my expressed wish. As I ran into the compartment where the unit was housed and came into the stink of the corpse repository once again, the moaning screams, though beginning to die now, dinned into my ears like the supplications of a million lost souls. I reached the great gaping mouth of the crusher just as High’s body vanished. It was sucked down through a surface that was half liquid, half sludgy muck, a surface that churned over and over slowly as though hidden screw-blades were moving beneath so that every now and then a portion of the mangled body, silent at last, was thrust up and then again withdrawn. Gradually, as I watched in fascinated horror, the surface began to sink, there was a loud sucking noise and a gurgle, and a vortex appeared at the bottom. High’s remains were whirled away to disappear finally down the sump-hole from which, mangled finally into liquid, he would be discharged down the pipes of the disposal system, presumably into some kind of cesspit below the rock.

  Feeling violently ill, I turned away. I saw the compomen cringe back from me; maybe I looked insane. I know I was revolted, even though there was a certain justice in the way High had died. I was also furiously angry that the one man who could possibly have been made to save Lifeforce was now gone for ever. I snarled at those men to take me at once to a radio transmitter — I hadn’t seen an ordinary set in High’s control room, but of course there had to be one around somewhere. The compomen led me back again to the lift and we stopped at the top floor. There was no-one else around; as I’d noticed on those earlier occasions, there was none of the bustle and comings and goings of a normal hospital. We could have had the whole place to ourselves. When I reached the radio room I gave the equipment a quick once-over, saw that I could operate it okay, sat at the transmission key and began bashing out a general call on a frequency that I knew someone, somewhere reasonably close at hand, would be keeping a guard on. When I raised the first acknowledgment I sent out a message that read: MOST URGENT FROM COMMANDER SHAW ON KIMBAU TO DEFENCE MINISTRY CANBERRA STOP LIFEFORCE COMPLEX LIKELY TO BLOW ANY TIME REPEAT ANY TIME STOP CUT POWER SUPPLY TO REACTORS IMMEDIATELY STOP REQUEST IMMEDIATE PICKUP BY FASTEST MEANS KIMBAU ENDS. I added a recall frequency for their answer, and I kept right on transmitting that same message until the acknowledgment came through.

  The reply read simply: MESSAGE RECEIVED AWAIT FURTHER ADVICE ENDS. And it came from Dunwoodie. Canberra must have passed it to him to be dealt with.

  I damn nearly wept when I read that over the air.

  Dunwoodie. Dunwoodie who was already on the complex, Dunwoodie who, with Tracy Learoyd, was High’s agent. High, in effect, lived on through that diabolical agency. Or maybe he didn’t. I just didn’t know, and had no means now of finding out. The brain-control units planted in Learoyd and Dunwoodie and the others could be projecting their already programmed
actions along High’s path still, and now I’d smashed the control panel I had no way of sending out impulses that might — just might — have interrupted the process. If I’d had the knowhow, and if I’d been able to use it, I would have sent out those impulses blind even if they’d caused the controlled brains on Lifeforce to burst out of the heads of the men who possessed them.

  I beat at my forehead with clenched fists and I swore luridly. I sweated. I thought of the tragic explosion that was to come, and I thought of Flair on Lifeforce. Then I got my coherence back and I sent out another message, again with the urgency prefix: DUNWOODIE LEAROYD NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS STOP OVERRIDINGLY VITAL LIFEFORCE BE ENTERED FROM OUTSIDE TO CUT POWER SUPPLY IMMEDIATELY AND DUNWOODIE LEAROYD ALL KEY MEN REMOVED STOP REQUEST AGAIN IMMEDIATE LIFT OF SELF FROM KIMBAU ENDS.

  After that there was a long, long silence — or at any rate it seemed long to me. Tragically long. I could only hope and pray that someone in Canberra was taking me seriously at last, was fighting the incredulous brass and the blockhead politicians. I had no means of estimating how much weight anyone was going to attach to anything I said now; I accepted the fact they’d still believe I was a first-class nut case, but I hoped that even so they would get into Lifeforce and throw the reactors off the beam just in case. I hoped they’d have enough self-protective instinct to do that at least.

  I sat and waited, I got up and walked up and down while the compomen watched me expressionlessly and disinterestedly, and I sat down again. Then up again and walking, and biting my nails down to the quick. And then at last the signal, the response. My fingers shook as I wrote the words, forming them from the Morse symbols.

  MESSAGE RECEIVED STOP MATTER UNDER INVESTIGATION STOP AIRCRAFT CARRIER HMAS WOLLONGONG OFF BELLONA REEFS ORDERED TO DESPATCH HELICOPTER TO POSITION KIMBAU WHERE TROOP INVESTIGATION LANDED EXPECT IN ONE HOUR ENDS.

  I sat back for a moment feeling deadly weary inside, a kind of hollow feeling as though I’d been sucked dry of all vital force so that I was utterly spent. But I fought against it and got unsteadily to my feet. There was something else I had to do — if I could — before I left Kimbau. I formed up the compomen and we went back to High’s control room, where Summers’s body still lay by the main control panel, which was burned out now. I went for the banked computers in their heavy metal casings and I tried, uselessly of course, to batter them into submission with the gun-butts. I tried to pump bullets into them, but all I got were dangerous ricochets. Sweating, I searched everywhere for the power input, but I couldn’t find it; and this was far too technical a matter for the compomen. They were almost more lost than I was. I got them to guide me down to the generating plant and that was no help either. Everything was gleaming, silent — and as totally cased-in as the computers themselves. Bullets were just as useless here as in the control room, and I just couldn’t find the output leads. No doubt High had had the keys that would open up the casings, but they would have gone down the crusher with him. So all I could do was to spray a few bullets round such exposed dials and gauges as I could find, and then I had to leave it and trust in hope and prayer. I looked at the compomen and said, “Right, that’s it. Lead me to the outside — to the top of the valley, right above this place.”

  Once again, in their mechanical fashion, they obeyed. I followed along the corridor and into the lift, which moved only to the next floor up. One of those odd men pressed the flat of his hand hard against a section of the lift’s side when it stopped and the back panel slid away and I saw that it opened into another passage leading out the other way. Again I followed and we went up a short flight of steps at the end, and into a low, narrow, climbing tunnel along which I had to move bent double. We came to a door, which one of the men opened with a pass-key, and, moving on through this, I saw the daylight far ahead. We emerged eventually from a rough, bush-covered cave mouth like the one down in the valley, and went along a climbing stretch of jungle towards the flat ground on top of High’s base, approaching it as it were from the back. It was a long, long climb, but at last I was standing where the helicopters from Canberra had come in, where that psychiatrist had so clearly written me off as hopelessly insane.

  And there we waited, and just over the hour I saw the carrier’s helicopter coining in and I waved frantically and shouted.

  The machine touched down and I grabbed one of the compomen. I said, “I want you as evidence.” As the pilot climbed out we ran for the chopper. My captive compoman got into the machine without protest; I saw the look in the naval pilot’s eye. I said crisply, “All right, it’ll keep. I’ll explain once we’re in the air. And for Christ’s sake let’s get up there fast!”

  We did. I watched the valley fade away behind as we turned and headed north-east for the carrier. Then I asked, “D’you know what’s happening, what all this is about?”

  The pilot looked at me curiously. He said, “Reckon I do, yes, but —”

  “What action’s been taken so far?”

  He gave me another look. He seemed scared of me, I thought. He said slowly, “Well, all I know is, they’re waiting for you.”

  That chilled me. I said, “Oh, my God, don’t the bloody politicians ever learn?”

  *

  Aboard the Wollongong the captain was waiting for me. We had a longish session in his cabin while I silently cursed the delay and the surgeon-commander was brought in to examine my compoman. It was that weirdy, of course, that brought things to a much faster conclusion than would, I think, have been the case otherwise. The captain seemed convinced, anyway. He said he would signal the proper authorities right away to set all systems to go. He meant what he said. He sent for his communications officer at once and dictated the message.

  I said, “What about me?”

  “We’ll feed you and bed you,” he said. “You look as if you could do with it.”

  I shook my head. “I’m on my feet and I still have my job to finish and —”

  “So what d’you want, Shaw?”

  “I want to go to Lifeforce.” I waved a hand in the direction of the hangar. “You’ve got some fast aircraft in there, right?”

  “Right,” the captain said. “Jets.” He smiled. “Want one, do you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and as fast as possible.”

  “It’s yours,” he said.

  Once again he was as good as his word and his crew had that jet up and ready on the angled flight deck in double-quick time. The pilot reckoned he could make Cape Scott within three hours. He said, and I agreed, that was probably a damn sight faster than Canberra could move. Red tape was still red tape. So it looked like being still mainly up to me, and three hours, for all I knew, could be just three hours too late.

  19

  High had talked about a likely outside limit of twelve hours but he’d been somewhat vague about it really and that couldn’t be relied on. Within his limit he’d said Lifeforce could blow at any time and that statement was the one I was primarily concerned with. Meanwhile a few minutes over three hours had elapsed since the reactors on Lifeforce had reached overcharge and it would be another three hours give or take a little before I could get there.

  It was very far from reassuring and the whole thing was on a knife-edge. And Dunwoodie might very well have me arrested the moment I reached the complex.

  I wondered, as we flew west for Cape Scott, whether or not Flair had been given the news of my frantic reports from Kimbau. And what she would do if she had.

  *

  My pilot could perhaps have found a spot to bring the jet down somewhere in the Cape Scott area but for all we knew it could be a long way out and there wouldn’t be any transport available on the ground. So there was just the one way down: I had to bale out.

  It was in fact three hours forty-three minutes after clearing the Wollongong’s flight deck that we came over the great complex, still intact at the end of its ten-mile-long causeway. It looked perfectly peaceful down there; too peaceful in fact, for there was no sign of anything moving
in by land, sea, or air. Well, no authorities anywhere have ever earned the name of greased lightning, of course; but I’d expected better than this.

  However, it couldn’t be helped.

  I baled out seven thousand feet up and a few miles to the westward of Lifeforce as the naval pilot, who had gone well past the complex to make his turn for me, zoomed off to the north-east to come down on the airfield at Darwin to re-fuel. I pulled the cord when I was still a little west of the complex and I floated down more or less gently, ready to face the sharks if I had to, hoping to God I’d miss those electrified wires on the boundaries. As I floated I saw the faces staring up at me, the crowds of workers gathering to watch the fun. There didn’t appear to be any panic down there, so it seemed the word hadn’t yet spread. That would mean Dunwoodie and Learoyd were making damn sure it didn’t.

  Not far to go now, but I knew I would have to ditch in the sea. I wasn’t quite going to make the metal. I ditched around fifty yards from the piers and I made all the racket and kerfuffle I could as I slipped my harness and then struck out madly for the supports of the complex. I beat the sharks to it, indeed I never saw one at all. I dragged myself on to the metal legs and hauled myself clear of the water and then, feeling a wateriness in my guts, I started climbing. I felt an ominous vibration running through the frames. Sounds, distant sounds, indicated that they were coming down from above to get me. A hatch had opened way up and men were coming down a ladder. I met them halfway and I said, “I have to see Mr Learoyd at once.”

  There was a laugh from a big, bearded Australian. “Oh, do drop in sometime, mate,” he roared. “Reckon this isn’t quite the way to Learoyd’s flaming heart. That bastard sticks to the appointments system, but then maybe you have one, eh?”

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t. Look, this is so urgent I can’t tell you just how urgent, but maybe you’ll get the point when I tell you the reactors are due to blow. Both of them.”