98.4

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  The craft was still tilted slightly down. We couldn’t have been diving for more than a few seconds because the Channel at this depth off the coast wouldn’t permit a deep run, yet we were still descending. There was the smooth sound of electrical machinery and the swash of tubular structure sliding through the medium of water.

  I bound my head with a torn-off shirtsleeve and took stock. In both directions along the tube there were bulkhead doors — standing open — with no one in view in either direction. Inset lights were mounted at intervals but there was no machinery visible, so I guessed I was on an accommodation deck.

  The ship levelled off and I picked myself up, lurching uncertainly in a direction I judged to be aft. This was soon confirmed; there were banks of illuminated signs at intervals and these showed escape facilities. They were red, so I was on the port side. Arrows — not at this time illuminated but just visible under the ground glass panel — were there to direct crew to emergency stations according to which bulkheads were opened and which closed.

  I was increasingly perplexed by the absence of crew. The ship was comprehensively automated, no doubt, but why no people? ... The mess-deck was deserted. But I saw a recess in the partition containing a television camera. I was being watched by someone. Or by something.

  Odd that I’d been able to enter the sub under such adverse conditions. I had the impression that the craft was not entirely hostile towards me.

  This very thought seemed so absurd I wondered if I were still unconscious and dreaming. But no, the plastic finish and the metal structure was solid enough for any man. The thought — however bizarre — made sense.

  That hatch had been left open for me.

  Stranger yet were the impressions to follow. Was this some kind of transporter? Yet the thing was built with aggressive, high-speed lines worthy of combat or at least a strategic role. The upper hull had been armour-plated; the hydroplanes more massive than manoeuvrability alone would dictate. Was this a dual-purpose craft? ... Able to make war and yet carry freight or personnel?

  For this wasn’t a crew deck. The dining and recreational facilities were altogether too juvenile. There was evidence of recent occupation by the excessively young.

  I explored some more.

  There were the usual amenities: but the record-player was a high-grade stereo job and the records were still in the charts. There was even an anachronistic flower or two lying about. Flower Power! ... The teenagers! Michael! How the hell did this add up? A sub-load of Beatleware? ... conveyed across the Atlantic to Group Three underground? Why? Why? Why?

  I left this netherworld of The Scene and went one deck up. Here the warlike purpose of the huge craft was predominant. Heavy machinery and electronic control consoles banked the narrow corridors between. Further aft was a heavy door, fully shielded against blast. I was shrugging off the impossibility of entering when there came a click and a thump and the whirr of servos actuated.

  I was being shown what lay within!

  I stood there and gawked. All the horror of four initials uttered in the darkened cabin at St Tropez leapt into final fact. Now, I read off:

  DANGER! KEEP OUT!

  NCBM LAUNCHING BAY. AUTHORIZED

  PERSONNEL ONLY. GROUP THREE

  Here it was in terms of shining steel and slickly finished operations equipment. Thinkbombs — fully operational! Further out was the extendible structure for sky-launching; a rocketry exhaust stump below gaped in readiness for white heat. Overhead domed the sliding segments — like those of an observatory — which would part and roll aside. Hydraulically the enormous assembly tower would stand erect and lock into a rigid configuration for lift-off.

  I got out of there and started searching the deck on the double for signs of life. I descended a deck, leaving a clang and clatter of footsteps on companionways. The hollow echo of my tread belched up and down the hull tube — my sense of urgency translated into the percussive clatter of shoe nails on sheet metal.

  I found him: Vince Halliard, Ponce-In-Chief of the soul-selling brigade. I burst in on him because his was the first cabin I came to. He was sitting on the edge of a comfortable bunk in a boxframe cabin. Something had numbed him there from fright.

  For a few moments we just stared at each other, while tinny loudspeakers uttered distorted commands perfunctorily outside.

  Six years had failed to make him middle-aged — I’ll say that for him. He still looked like a shagged tennis player after three hard sets. True, the complexion had mottled, the eyes had sunk further, the mouth was a little bit slack. But basically the cad’s role would still serve.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he managed shakily, ‘what a time to call! I’m afraid we’re going to die. And I don’t much like the idea.’

  ‘Everything seems quite normal to me,’ I said.

  ‘Normal,’ he repeated it as if it was a new word I’d just invented. ‘This thing has a mind of its own.’ He stood up, went to a cabinet, got out two glasses and poured. ‘Not Perriet this time, I trust?’

  ‘No. Not Perriet.’ I took the glass from him. ‘What’s happened?’

  He gave an ugly little giggle which didn’t quite go with the he-man moustache. ‘It seems you can’t quite make a brain think the way it should. Odd, but it doesn’t seem to work.’ He bolted his drink and instantly poured another. ‘You hear that voice on the Tannoy? — It’s the captain. Giving orders.’

  ‘Well? ...’

  ‘The Thing has somehow managed to trap the crew — between two watertight doors, old boy. Feel that?’

  The sub had lurched. More orders spattered from the speakers. And all the time the switched-on fear in Vince’s eyes pierced through mine until registering on my own exposed nerve. ‘We’d better get out,’ I said.

  ‘I tried that,’ he shrugged.

  The sub pitched violently, knocking the bottles flying. The metallic rasp of an amplified voice screamed something. Then all hell broke out. The cabin door slid shut and jammed behind me, as rapidly walls and ceilings were twisting in an effort to change places.

  Vince lunged towards the door and tried to force it. We both tried. It wouldn’t budge.

  You could hear the roar of water as something gave with a great tank-like crash below.

  Then the ship started dropping from under us in earnest. From its recoil I managed to slam the door hard open and more water gushed in from there.

  But Vince couldn’t make the entrance. He was pinioned to the opposite wall which was now underneath me.

  Then, in an awful catapulting manoeuvre that bent the hull in a rivet-snapping twist, the sub responded to a deep explosion from its own guts. I got a last look at Vince’s face as I hurled myself through the buckled doorway.

  His expression was that of a pleading child, asking a parent for mercy. A bulkhead burst near his pinned torso. From this a solid mass of water burst on him. He screamed until the swirl stifled it. Then he was carried with the flood like a shrivelling spider dissolving in an acid bath. His head blew open against a steel member and red hell poured among the scuttles of what a moment before had been one corner of the cabin and yet was now the drain at the bottom of a well.

  I hadn’t the faintest interest in Vince’s unprecious skin but was phenomenally interested in preserving my own.

  All the claustrophobic horrors of being trapped in a submerged submarine — which all my life and yours has struck home whenever the code word SUBSMASH screams over radio circuits the world over — leapt at my nervous system out of every darkened nightmare and became true.

  The overpowering instinct to panic, to cave in to basic flight reflexes and seek to smash my head through two inches of steel and fathoms of water beyond, was something I had to wrestle with as if it were a living enemy at my throat.

  I fell somewhere and can’t remember the next few seconds.

  Then, confused, I came round to find that the sub had for a minute righted itself. But though we were in a horizontal alignment you could feel the thing going down flat. S
oon there would be the bone-smashing impact of unbending steel on the sea bed ... and I wondered how long there was left to live.

  I somehow got down the companionway into the next section.

  Here the lethal destruction to the sub’s carcass showed like a crunched body on an X-ray plate. Split away out of alignment were the two halves of the inner structure and they catastrophically failed to meet. Severed cables and broken tubes presented naked holes from which already there poured vast quantities of roaring water, changing air pressures so violently my eardrums deadened. Only dimly could I hear the shouts of panicked men and the shrieking speaker system and the hissing of compressed air.

  A watertight door ahead of me was sliding rapidly across and I jumped through it. Half a second later it had clamped tight behind me with a horribly final thump. Back there, nothing was going to live. I was now in the less damaged section. Ironically, illuminated flashing arrows purporting to show the line of escape were still indicating back the way I came. So even the elaborate exit arrangements had got snarled up.

  The main lighting blew out then and a few emergency bulbs glowed dimly amid a chaos of bent steel pipes and ruptured frame members. It was impossible to believe so fundamental a change in my environment had occurred in so few seconds, but even as I looked a torque was applied to the whole structure of the craft, twisting it out of true as if some huge power were wringing it out in mechanical hands. There were no straight lines, yet for these seconds the bulkheads held. In these seconds I frantically tried to remember what I could of the principle of the Davies Escape. Was there a hatch in this section at all? Was American escape equipment the same in principle as ours? Was the double-trap intact? Were we too deep for it to be any good anyhow? — My body could have been crushed to pulp by the pressure if we were.

  I was suddenly outside the computer room. Here was what was left of the cerebral centre of the submarine. The door was open. I could see in. There was an acrid smell I could not place. All I knew was it didn’t belong in a computer room.

  The ship was now violently starboard up. It was hard to keep my balance in here because a wide, shallow stream of water sloshed around a long scuttle to my right, carrying an oily substance with it. It was from this that the odour came.

  I hadn’t much time to find the banks of switches I hoped would open the way to the escape chamber. There was none. Then I looked at the metal boxes containing equipment.

  They didn’t seem to make sense. To make things more difficult still, steam was rising from a great crack in the floor, obliterating the view.

  A red liquid was now oozing from one of the metal boxes. Without thinking, I wiped my finger along it and tasted it.

  Blood.

  Near at hand was the smallest box of all. It measured about six inches across by two inches down by four inches deep. I thought I saw something flickering on the front ... the first sign of activity.

  Through the rapidly thickening smoke I now saw that this box was linked by plastic strip to the other units mounted at intervals below. These were already flooded with water.

  Then the fumes cleared for a second and I saw what it was that had moved on the little box.

  It was a pair of human eyes.

  Then there came a voice. It came from a tinny loudspeaker overhead. In a few crisp words this voice which I recognized explained to me precisely what I must do to get out. The tone was highly controlled and disciplined and economical with words. It was rather cool and reserved, like the eyes in the box; offering no warmth or emotion — only factual advice.

  When the water reached a certain depth I could see that the central box — the one which all the plastic tapes connected with — became submerged.

  The voicebox faltered as sea water tinged with blood stained the organic tape. The eyebox, pupils horrendously human despite their electronic setting, stared in pain and horror.

  And as I watched this hideous remnant of a man, distributed around racks like so many units of communications equipment, I grieved for the naïvety which had blinded him to all that had gone before. ‘Stergen is the only man in the Western world who can put my ideas into practice.’ — Here was the terrible evidence of just such a practice.

  I don’t know how long I stood. But two things happened simultaneously, when the end came. There was a deep-throbbing series of explosions from the punctured guts of the ship. With this, and as a few bubbles globbed out of this ghastly mutilated mind, agony gave place to a fleeting peace, in the eye-unit of Philip Thorne.

  Until they closed.

  ELEVEN

  Delirium in a yellow dinghy ... a tiny rubber world afloat. Consciousness sometimes returning, and with it the clammy slopping of water around me, soaking me through.

  My head throbbing and vomit stinking and blood congealing on my torn shirt.

  Then fantasy once more ... the clamour of crowd-panic and the wail of sirens; and teenagers at a drug-in grossly unaware of their plight.

  Then the Martian climax of The Planets, as some amassed orchestra plays from the bottom of hell and the teenagers, too late, arrest their ritual dance and stare back.

  But they have been too long sleeping. Deadly flame-throwers remind them of who’s boss now. Senile men seize the excuse to punish the young and the beautiful.

  In the dream I saw the faceless troops, marching into the arena to truncheon Youth under banners of Law and Order. I saw the sizzling gasoline spray squirted by men in asbestos suits, torching at the bared legs of ecstasy.

  Menacing tanks rolled on their caterpillar tracks and absorbed the garlands into their encrusted mud. Lacerated limbs paid in the currency of the invaders’ own justice for the ignorance of sin manifested by the guiltless. Jelly petroleum bombs, supplied by law-abiding taxpayers, re-introduced conventional awe of force and obedience, by igniting the gossamer clothes of idyllists and baking their skins until they had learned.

  The war machine then loudspeakered its moral message, feeding live pages of the Bible into howitzers and aiming them like Molotov cocktails at the new converts ... Christian ideals, scrubbed clean of human meaning by the obsessive paranoids and dipped into the foul disinfectant of mechanical morality, were wrapped chapter by chapter in polythene and pressed against alert young faces which suffocated from plastic religion. Dutifully, the great military leaders of all nations took the grand salute, while the survivors of the ballet, incarcerated in uniform, marched until, falling rank by rank off the end of the earth, they plunged obediently into infinity.

  The music screamed to an end and left a frightful stillness. Water lapped unctuously at the rubber bulb of a dinghy, throwing into relief the depth and extent of the immense silence. Time and space had cheated me. If this was dawn, then on which day? I tried to work this out, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter.

  *

  By the time Simmonds spotted me from the aircraft it definitely did matter. It was six o’clock Monday morning. The Little Man was due at my flat to inspect Henry Bleeper between nine and ten. And I wasn’t there.

  The tide had carried me in almost to the shore and I waded the last bit. I found myself some way west of Tyrant’s Bay and Simmonds had been searching — he told me — since first light on Sunday. He’d made three excursions to Exeter for refuelling and had gone almost without sleep. But the short landing he executed on the tiny stretch of sand was a classic piece of stunt flying. The only trouble being just how the blazes he thought he’d get us off again. ‘This,’ he admitted, ‘is going to be close.’

  I agreed, then held the starboard wingtip so that he could turn around with a burst of engine in order to view the sudden death thoughtfully offered by nature at the far end, where the cliff swept around in a half-basin, neatly arranged so as to catch us just where we needed the straight climb out. A few seagulls were gathered there to see the fun. To me they were vultures.

  As prey, I felt we had excellent qualifications. Simmonds was exhausted; and the brief résumé of the overall situation, which I had given
him while footprinting the sand upon our mutually groggy arrival, had indeed a determination to get off somehow which I now regretted. Now, as Simmonds lined up, bumping over pebbles until the Cessna was headed exactly upwind towards the high cliffs sweeping in at the end of the crescent bay, I watched him through the window as he made a quick assessment of the fuel position. With any luck the tanks were dry. They weren’t. The fool was actually going to attempt it. He signalled to me to climb aboard.

  Like a coward I complied, with a curdled stomach, instead of standing up to him and letting him commit suicide unencumbered by me.

  The only thing that stopped me quietly walking away was a fair knowledge of aerodynamics: I knew he would have stood a better chance on his own — without the additional weight of my waterlogged body — and I thought it would be, on balance, even more humiliating to watch him live through it. So I explained with dignity that my jellied condition was due to my courageous actions of the night.

  Simmonds smiled politely but didn’t comment. ‘If we don’t make it I’ll bank down to the right — out to sea — and with luck we’ll still get off.’

  I said: ‘If you have to bank to the right and you’re still too low you’ll remove the starboard wing under water.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  He took his time. Methodically, almost drearily, he went through the cockpit checks ... Trim ... Throttle ... Mixture ... on it went. While he felt around the cockpit for the various switches, I stared straight through the windscreen at the curve of the cliff.

  I could see what he meant to do: we were in a lens-shaped lagoon, narrow at both ends. You couldn’t run on the pebbles, so you had to cling close in all the time, almost following the curve instead of running straight. But this couldn’t go on for too long. An excellent reason against extending the process unnecessarily was provided by the outer rim of the cliff itself. It was solid, and exactly on a line drawn from my right eye, through the centre of the propeller, and onward into infinity.