‘My dear fellow! How troubled you are! Surely you don’t think that Group Three Intelligence are incapable of finding out what’s happening here?’
‘So it’s true?’
‘Yes, it’s true. So what?’
‘Can’t you see that if Stergen doesn’t attempt to stop it, you have nothing personally to gain by going on the air? He doesn’t care any more, Michael. Can’t you see that?’
He nodded sardonically. ‘And you think that means there’s no point in what I’m doing! ... May I speak now? ... Thank you. You think my motive is spite. We’ll come to motives in a minute. Your own are worthy of attention. But just suppose mine merely involve Truth?’
‘Without regard to its context?’
He laughed outright. ‘Truth for its own sake, Yenn! That which concerns an artist fundamentally! What do you think Truth is all about? Do you imagine that truth alone starts wars? People like you want truth only when it suits you; and in the end you get such a muddle that people really do start throwing things. To you, and to every other committed Establishment misery like you, philosophy has to be timed like a press release from some batty ministry ... This must happen before that, or that before this, otherwise you reach for the blue pencil.
‘Well, that isn’t how my mind works. What do I owe to Established society? What do I care if they kill themselves? Nothing they believe makes any sense at all. What I believe, does. No ...’ He glanced up at the canteen clock, as if to ascertain whether he’d got any more time to waste on such irrelevant matters as war and destruction. ‘No, you’ll have to find some other way, Yenn. If you think you’ve got something worth acting for, you’ll have to act. Don’t ask me to join your gang. You may be surprised to know I got speeches from Eustace Stergen once ... all about the miracles of technology and where they would lead. I found out where they led. I got speeches from the pathetic Seale — the ultimate slump in father figures — who amused himself on a train just long enough to bring me into this great big wonderful world, then remembered a few minutes ago to tell me why. Your speeches are just as long, just as dreary, just as meaningless. Why should I choose yours? Go away, Mr Yenn. Please go away. There’s a pet.’
I tried just once more ... feeling, I remember, a flicker of respect for this strange creature who no longer belonged to the three-dimensional world. ‘Michael, give me a chance. I’m only asking for time. Time to allow —’ ... I nearly gave Chindale away ... ‘— to allow my associates to go to the top with the facts now we’ve got them. I think there’s a chance of delaying what Stergen has in mind, long enough for that. But he’s a paranoic. That means that if you don’t give him a loophole he won’t be shifted. A public exposure by you will mean only one thing: certain death. I know it sounds unbelievable. It did in the days of Hitler. But you have no excuse not to believe it, because you know it’s true.’ I met those science fiction eyes. ‘Well, Michael? How about it?’
For a moment I thought I’d won. He blew a column of pot smoke while he considered his show as the hinge it really was. Then the orchestra came through the speakers on playback — a recording they must have made earlier and were now testing. It was a passage from the sombre, death-like section denoting Saturn. Something mad showed in Michael’s face. The tape ran down and stopped. There was silence. Someone clattered some cups. Michael said: ‘It’s gone ... too far. Sorry.’ He got up and left, taking the corridor towards the dressing rooms.
I left the canteen swiftly for the lifts. I had to wait, and from the studio entrance came the plea of a softly played piano. The tune was I Should Care. I remembered it from wartime and recently Louise and I had it filtering through the speakers in the Awful Hotel, so it really meant something.
I was drawn in.
A couple of bare-bulb working lights stood on pedestals and dully illuminated an area of the studio. Cameras, their flickering viewfinders glowing surreptitiously within hoods, stood unattended. One of them had a red light glowing on top. Bric-a-brac rehearsal gear lay around among little heaps of minuscule wardrobe. Beyond this a man was gently caressing the keyboard of the Steinway. He looked up as he played and smiled a little. ‘Great number,’ he said. What he meant was he liked it better than the screamware of Michael’s Planetarians. I said something friendly and he quietly sang the lyric.
As I went towards the pit where the piano was I found myself near the loudspeaker of a monitor. Nothing was coming through it except the faint hum of main electricity. But I noticed that the pitch of the drone note — standard frequency of the main supply — corresponded with the key in which the pianist was playing the song. I didn’t know why but it seemed important.
Now he enriched the harmonies, conscious that he had an appreciative audience. He seemed to sense the living, breathing Affair on which the music was a comment. I could think of friends of mine who would have found the words embarrassingly trite. But I thought also that they wouldn’t have begun to understand the potential sense of loss my instincts detected in the pianist’s uncanny choice of number ...
Maybe I won’t find someone
As lovely as you,
But I should care —
And I do.
He continued with an elaboration of the melody and said:
‘Funny how these old songs get you.’
‘Yes ... What key is it in?’
‘I’m playing it in A flat. Why?’
‘Just keep playing. It sounds great.’
*
And great it was. For it inspired an idea which was to be the zenith of my effort. Even then I began my preparations.
The test room was excellently stocked with electronic equipment. I burgled the place lavishly; then checked my mouth organ against the hum of the electricity supply.
To play an A flat you press the chromatic button on the end of the instrument.
It checked.
THIRTEEN
‘It’s as if,’ said Louise, ‘someone has drawn a sort of invisible circle round the place. Everything inside it is dead.’
We were parked on the lay-by near the main gates,, not so very far from the place I had parked that first night when the ambulances had come rushing out. But there were differences.
Overhead a baking sun heated the car-roof so that we sweated inside it like lumps of braised steak. Brilliantly the sunshine alighted and remained on pinprick items of metal, some near, some distant ... like the tower top of the tall building in which I had met Michael, like the chrome surround of the high lamp three streetlights away, like the glaze on a distant factory building further to the north. The road thrummed with heat. And nothing moved.
An hour before. Louise had gone straight back to the Awful Hotel for her appointment. I should have noticed then — but did not notice — a new edge on Louise’s personality, a certain fatalistic freedom from doubt She seemed simply more alive than ever, more decisive and quick-witted and brief in her manner of speech.
I’d checked over the very special tools I’d collected from the studios, then we’d left for Elstree fast. It was still only four-fifteen when we swung around Hyde Park Corner and headed north through the park towards the Edgware Road.
People were lounging on the grass. I remember, feeling the heat and dressed for it. But we raced past the picnics and transistors and children and ultra-violet flesh, took the stewpot of Oxford Street and jumped lights at Blomfield Road and scorched good rubber on the sticky tar of the Edgware Road.
Now, we were dwarfed by those inscrutable main gates which themselves appeared to vibrate in the heat. Later we would dodge round the back; but I wanted the inmates to think we were having a try here only to give up later.
Louise’s voice sounded unnaturally loud and close in my ear. ‘Where’s the guard?’
‘I don’t know. But the gates are locked. That’s not normal.’
I gestured for Louise to stay put, then climbed out and crossed the heat-softened road.
I watched through the gates. An odd thought struck me — the place lo
oked too closed to be closed.
I could somehow feel it must be bristling with concealed television cameras, that it had suddenly contracted within itself ... breathing steadily enough, but in a state of high-tensile immobility. Like an animal on the alert, it crouched but did not sleep. And as if in proof that this was no siesta, despite the belting heat of the sun, I actually heard the sound of human breathing. It was jerky, expectant, tense.
It came from the rusting loudspeaker outside the guardhouse — part of the loudhailing system for calling nomad executives to the telephone.
The little rivulets of tingles that travelled along my spine testified to my very real sense of fear. What could be more unnatural than a whole campus of buildings in a state of suspended animation? ... I had to glance back for a moment at the car. I had to see someone normal and alive and sane amid this chokingly hot silence.
Louise’s high colour, the set of her head, the pride — almost arrogance — in her lip-expression was breathtaking at this time. I wanted to run back and be succoured, to bury my head in her breasts and obtain a higher life-content for my blanching blood. I craved to undress her and selfishly derive absolute reassurance from some special act of coitus that would leave in its wake an indestructible sense of contact.
Realizing that there must be sensitive microphones within earshot I shouted to her ‘The place is shut. Let’s go.’
— An almost imperceptible click from the loudspeakers and the breathing ceased.
The thump of the doorslam when I got back in the car was echo-less, dry as a bone. The hot summer air was thick like a wad of cotton wool. Not a bird sang; only the hum of flies signified life around us.
For some nonsensical reason I kept my voice down. ‘So where’s this back entrance?’
‘You’re mad to go in.’
I lit a cigarette and turned to her. ‘We mustn’t waste time.’
‘All right. You go up to the next roundabout and turn left.’
‘Taking us round to the north of the factory?’ I started up. ‘And the disused RAF station?’
‘Yes ... That’s where they’re still engineering.’
‘There’s nothing visible.’
‘I mean underneath.’
I drove off. ‘Engineering what?’ — And I remembered that deep down, thunderous noise that had baffled me earlier. Some nerve in the pit of my stomach tightened one notch. ‘Wait a minute! ... I’ve heard underground machinery twice.’
‘Go on.’
‘Two different places.’
‘Yes?’
Another notch, and I swerved dangerously towards an oncoming lorry, received an angry snarl from his horn, then recovered. ‘Your brother. Jack. What did he say? Christ yes! Electric cable. Enough cable for a hundred and seventy miles! A tunnel!’
She looked at me urgently. ‘From where to where?’
We were on the roundabout. I slammed downgear and the tyres screeched as we selected the minor road to the left. ‘Elstree to? ...’ — I couldn’t believe it. A tunnel that long? What was the cost per mile? Yet their methods were new, fast, economical. I told Louise; not excitably, but quietly, because this time I knew I was right.
‘But —’ She stopped, glanced, wondered.
I said ‘I know. They used the main roads.’ She was thinking of the ambulances. That meant they hadn’t finished the tunnel. But suppose they have now?’
The sign I’d seen in the Helical ‘Link Tunnel. Phase E. Completion Imminent’ ... Of course completion had been imminent! — Group Three were now mobilized and ready for war: a spontaneous war, running up on its own flywheel, creating its own sales demand.
Like we couldn’t stop ourselves pulverizing Hiroshima, flywheel without brakes; like we couldn’t resist testing and testing and testing the ‘Dirty Bomb’ at Bikini, flywheel without brakes, rocketing the fallout level, escalating international nuclear budgets to astronomical billions ... America, Russia, China, France.
Flywheel without brakes, obsession without cause, war without motive ...
We reached the pitted, forgotten runways. Once, from here, Liberators had trundled into the night-sky to bomb Essen, Berlin, the marshalling yards in the Ruhr. The crumbling remains of the squat control tower sprawled in the brilliant sun and blankly denied their memory. ‘Nine of our aircraft failed to return ...’
Ghosts did not haunt these ugly hangars here. Few remembered and fewer cared.
No one learned.
‘That shed, there!’ — suddenly. Louise’s voice. The note was strange and urgent.
The hangar was in the wrong direction.
‘No! That’s not —’
‘Nigel!’
I glanced at her from the wheel as I skidded the car around on the oily tarmac.
Her expression astonished me. Lithe, frenetic from untethered eroticism she was sheer animal from compulsory lust. But it was more than that, even.
It was as if she’d come to some profound decision.
But I was totally carried along, did not think, could not.
We drove into the darkened hangar and I snapped on the lights, while her lips parted and did not wait. Her articulate body, breathtaking scandal to behold, demanded that which I had no conscious choice but to provide. Only the tyres protested as I braked somehow madly, oblivious to all except the two-unit that was us.
*
Access to the tunnel workings could be gained, Louise told me, via a shaft that had been drilled from inside the old control tower — the octagonal single-decker ruin which stood in the desolate wilderness of discarded building materials which betrayed recent engineering works. It was an appropriate setting for the unknown: scraggy grass and weeds grew out of the joins in the original concrete slabs of the airfield; rusting girders and broken scaffolding and forgotten oil lanterns formed a hotch-potch in the failing light of a summer evening. Now, the tower looked like a stone-age carousel thrown up with the junk of a bygone age by some subterranean shift.
As I looked, I cross-examined Louise about the night she had gone to see Thorne. ‘But how did you get in?’
‘Philip had to do something the far end.’
‘You don’t know what?’
‘No.’
We collected up the electronic gear I’d got from the car, walked slowly towards the tower. Louise said: ‘When you first went down into Stergen’s place off the Bight, you said —’
‘— I said they’d copied some of my original security arrangements. They won’t have done, here. It’s too vital to them.’
I looked at Louise anxiously. She stood in her most characteristic stance — straight and relaxed, hands in her loosened coat pockets — but I was sure she was hiding something from me now ... not about the means of entry so much as what went with it in her mind.
As if she was plotting something.
I’d have to tell her to go soon but I was hardly looking forward to it. When she did she could take the car back to London. But I needed her help with the entrance, so together we went into that musty old place and very carefully searched around for the tunnel entrance. Her voice echoed as she said: ‘They must have concealed it since —’
I cut her off with a motion for silence. Then I found them — a television-eye and a microphone bug. These were planted so that it was impossible to reach the tunnel hatch without being seen or heard. The only way around the problem was to dress up another part of the floor area so that it looked the same, then to shift the camera on to that.
The mike had to be shifted too. So I looped an extension lead on without breaking the circuit; then pulled the loop open to give me enough line to remove the mike altogether from the tower and shove it outside, well out of earshot. This delicate manoeuvre took a long time — one crackle on the circuit and suspicion would be aroused. But ... ‘I’ve made it — I think.’
Louise was making a rough sketch of the set-up we had to duplicate. She looked up and said: ‘Can we talk now?’
‘Yes. Help me with this, will you? ...
’ To disable the camera I first had to search for the light source — they wouldn’t be depending on daylight as obviously this couldn’t be used at night. I found an infra-red emitter.
We completed our attempt at scenic design; got round behind the camera, then swung it, easing the lens through a right angle so that it now viewed out dummy entrance. It was a very makeshift experiment and there was no viewfinder so I couldn’t tell how well, if at all, the decoy worked.
The electronic lock on the tunnel hatch itself was far more complicated than anything I’d reckoned on and taxed my ingenuity to the limit. If you’re technically minded you might like to know that it was a line-echo system using pulses. Any change or d.c. resistance altered the line loading and changed the resulting wave form. I hooked up the oscilloscope I’d swiped, then simulated the pulses exactly with the signal generator, which I had to modify on the spot for the purpose. Not till midnight did the two pictorial waves on the cathode ray tube look anything like the same. But it had to do and I changed over. Then broke the input circuit of the warning system and waited.
Nothing happened. Apparently they were buying it.
‘How long do we give them?’ — Louise’s voice down low, the words scarcely breathed into the depressing, musty air.
I checked my watch. Twelve-thirty now. I’d give it another half hour. To go in and get caught would throw away too valuable an opportunity. It wouldn’t be repeated.
We went out into the summer night and smoked. I discerned Mars out there, up in the galaxy. I wondered for how long the planet could expect to go on enjoying its privacy. Another five years — or less — and Man would show up uninvited, unreasonably expecting a welcome.
Louise’s cigarette glowed bright, then trajectoried down as she chucked it. ‘Darling?’
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