98.4

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  I thought this was my cue, at last, to send her home. I was about to make a carefully worded speech: ‘Louise —’

  She stopped me right there, pointing to the car in the hangar. ‘You left the lights on.’

  I looked across the incriminating tail lights. Certainly they couldn’t be left on. On the other hand it was high time Louise went home. I jangled my keys at her. ‘You’ll need these,’ I said. ‘It’s time you went.’

  She said brightly: ‘We’ll argue about that later.’

  ‘Don’t argue.’

  ‘Don’t you be pompous. You go. Be chivalrous and remember why you switched them on!’

  I fell for it because I was loveblind.

  When I got back to the control tower I called softly: ‘Louise?’ — no reply. Obviously she’d gone inside. I sauntered in there and called again.

  Nothing.

  The ghosts whose existence I had so recently denied came up behind me and brushed my spine with terrorizing intimacy. Again I shouted ‘Louise!’ — Nothing.

  I dashed through to check the entrance ramp.

  The mechanism stood open.

  Dim light came from within. There was the faint rumble of continuous machinery. I scrambled through the hatch whose operating gear Louise had so carefully studied all the time I’d been forcing an electronic entrance.

  There was a short flight of steel runged steps. I was down them in less than three seconds, the clatter echoing off many surfaces like a stampede, mocking me. This was a short leg of tunnel forming a ‘T’ with the main shaft a hundred feet ahead. It had a definite musical pitch and the hollow sounds thumping off my feet played it like an organ pipe. But in this section nothing moved. Water dripped from the roughly shored roof. No technological wonder this, but a temporary inlet for workmen to give access to the real McCoy further on.

  I ran sploshing through the mud towards the junction formed with the main tunnel. The sound of machinery grew into a smooth, regular swish. Louise must be in sight.

  But nothing.

  A twin endless-belt travelator system offered the choice of two directions, left or right around the curve. You couldn’t see more than fifty yards either way. The travelator ran fast and there was nothing to stop you running along it. An unfinished indicator panel failed to indicate which way would Louise have gone, and why the blazes she’d gone there.

  A few hundred yards on there was a further electric sign and this one was finished and illuminated: TO GROUP THREE, ELSTREE. I craned around when I’d slid under it and read the reverse side. TO LINK TUNNEL & HOVER-RAIL. Which way? ...

  Ahead, I thought I heard running feet. So I kept going, reached the terminal for the travelator, stopped, listened.

  Here was something of a city centre. Yet never had a city been so conspicuously devoid of citizens. Like an airport closed by fog, the sumptuous, multi-layered complex, tunnelled out of solid rock, offered signposts promising comprehensive facilities which nobody was around to enjoy. Where were they? The Somerset end? That in itself was ominous.

  I waited a few seconds, trying to make up my mind which way Louise could have gone. Too late I heard rapid footsteps that could only have been hers. But where?

  They stopped and there was the faint whoosh! of an elevator.

  In a panic you can never find lifts. They’re always too accessible to see. When I got to them a virgin car offered its doors indulgently. I had no idea which floor to stop at. I chose the button marked Fluidics. This might have reflected some light of thought at the back of my mind but owed nothing to logic. The door slid open on a scene that defies description. What I couldn’t accept was the vast scale. In this hall at least, Group Three had hardly gone out of their way to miniaturize.

  ‘Fluidics’ uses the flow of liquids as a means of switching. Normally the units take the form of small plastic slats the size of a postcard, in which are sandwiched hollowed-out veins and capillaries permitting a fluid to move along definite channels that are opened or closed by tiny valves. In effect, the units behave like computers ... aping the electrical conduct of equivalent circuits with rather bovine lassitude.

  But here the whole idea had been blown up into a new technology of bewildering dimensions. I had stumbled on to a transparent, plastic structure whose coloured liquids glowed in brilliant light as if they were interweaving roads on some crazy traffic map for outer space. It was as if the paths taken by stellar fireworks had remained imprinted in the sky, like the interweave of car headlights recorded for hours on a single photographic plate. But the liquids pulsed and flowed in fluorescent rivulets, in every possible direction.

  If a mammal’s greatly magnified arteries, each carrying blood of a different colour, could somehow be viewed from the inside without being obscured by the organs they served, the effect would be first cousin to what I saw now.

  Looking up you could see to the top of the building through successively aligning holes in the plastic, down through which stainless steel hoists were dropped — clearly for the purpose of gaining engineering access vertically to the decks containing the fluidic control units. Horizontally the service men could traverse each deck of perspex by using electric trucks with great thick rubber tyres. These would not damage the polished surface of the transparent wadges of plastic inside which the tubes ran.

  I felt a growing conviction that Louise had been heading for this department and though unsubstantiated the feeling was sure as it was ugly and terrifying in its implications.

  I summoned one of the hoists on the button. It turned out to be a small canister, just big enough in diameter to take one person. It had perspex windows all around and moved in deathly silence.

  It contained the unmistakable tang of Louise’s perfume. It sent my pulse up like a machine gun and now I stopped the hoist at each level, searching desperately through the wafers of brilliant colours for some sign of her retreat.

  At Level 09 I thought I heard something. One of those trucks with bulbous tyres stood at the far exit when it should have been next to the hoist. I didn’t know what I’d be damaging if I ran in heavy shoes across the plastic. For all I knew some accidental puncturing of the tubes might announce my presence somewhere, or even trigger one of their repulsive weapons into orbit.

  I carried my shoes across and stepped carefully in my socks across the intervening space. But the sliding door where the truck stood was securely locked. I wouldn’t get to Louise that way.

  There was a neat bank of instruments inset in the wall. They baffled me, but for some reason I failed to register the significance of the one piece of vital information I could actually interpret. For the dial was calibrated in Fahrenheit.

  It said: 98.4.

  FOURTEEN

  I might have stood there for ever. The hermetically sealed door nearby hid something profane. I knew. And if brutal force had been of any use at any point in a six year saga this was the time to use it.

  But it never had been and it wasn’t now. Louise had entered of her own accord. She’d known about it and sought it and intended it. You can’t change a woman s mind with your fists pounding the door down.

  I turned and glanced again at that horrible, globbing computer, this massive club-sandwich in perspex and seeping coloured liquid. A bright green column of fluid had appeared now. It originated somewhere on the wall containing the hermetic door, then branched, luminous and volatile, horizontally across the wafer I was standing on, dividing and forking like slow-motion lighting.

  Knowing something new.

  I shuddered, turned, forced myself to think of my job while I still had a mind intact. To help in this, I tapped the bulge in my pocket, felt the shape inside it. Not of a gun. But of a harmonica ... switch-key to the main electricity supply of Great Britain.

  Which I proposed to black out.

  *

  First, I must get the measure of Group Three’s communications. They had a massive complex to co-ordinate — ranging from nuclear subs carrying NCBMS to radar dishes and radio-tel
escopes. Some of these I’d already seen at Bishops Bight — Tom Tiddler’s Ground for the children of hate.

  How did Group Three mastermind the whole operation? Could the answer to this be found here? — in the strategic headquarters at Elstree? — the wrong end of the tunnel?

  I left the Fluidic section and followed signs promising a Communications Centre.

  But the place was dead, out of use, something to fall back on — no doubt — if the forward position at the Bight demanded a sudden withdrawal.

  Then I saw the racks. They contained what I thought to be electric torches. But each one was meticulously numbered.

  An odd thing to do with cheap flashlights.

  I took one out.

  It wasn’t a torch. In place of the lens was a small aperture, rectangular in shape, of very familiar proportions.

  I pressed the switch.

  A blurred raster of mingling colours showed up in the rectangle, flashing colour-blobs indiscriminately — like a colour TV set after the show is over.

  It was colour TV! Was this the answer? — was this how they kept in touch? I pulled out a concealed telescopic aerial to find out.

  The picture was ‘coded’ ... scrambled electronically so as to be indiscernible on a normal set. Hence the garbled image.

  I found the decoding button and then there it all was — a clear picture of a huge control room. You could even see Stergen, some way from camera at present, as he merged with a group of uniformed men, over at a conference table.

  Among the faces there were several I associated with extreme right-wing factions prominent in the United States. One of these, an ex-Governor from the South, had been a candidate for the presidency. Even on my own files there was evidence of his association with the Ku Klux Klan. Now, he said something terse but Stergen interrupted: ‘Group Three Washington are having trouble in receiving our pictures ...’ He turned to an engineer who was out of camera range. Quietly he asked: ‘Is there satellite trouble?’

  A pause while some monosyllabic phrases were exchanged out-of-vision. ‘It seems we’re all right now ... Yes, Washington now state that communications are AOK. Let’s have the maps on the screen, please ...’

  I had to lose the picture for a while, My clear course of action was to find that hover-rail and get to the scene of action. I had no idea where the conference room, as depicted on the miniscreen, would turn out to be. But that didn’t greatly matter. I knew where the NCBM launch would take place. Let’s for God’s sake get there and hope that Duncan could be found.

  The hover-rail terminus was such a mundane piece of engineering that by comparison with all this it looked archaic, like the Paris metro but stripped of all trimmings. The train itself turned out to be a single car that squatted low on the ground, as if hunched from shame. Drab grey paint and general dankness from the tunnel deglamorized the machinery to the point of squalor.

  Nevertheless the engineering was sound and ingenious. The mouth of the transit tunnel itself — immediately beyond the nose of the craft — was of a diameter about two feet greater than the machine that would slide into it. Thus the air-cushion would form a sheath all the way around.

  The car itself was air-sealed, and I had a bit of a job trying to get in. For one thing I was so exhausted I couldn’t think clearly. It took me ten valuable minutes to learn the mechanism, but once in the rest wasn’t difficult. Fully automated, the control panel boasted only one main control with several possible positions. I selected ‘Forward — fast’ — and waited for action.

  And I got it. With a terrific whining noise the blowers started up and the car began to bullet violently, then lift a couple of feet from the ground. Slowly it began to glide forward; but once inserted into the tunnel it got going in earnest. Centering within the sheath of air it swayed a moment, stabilized, and with a mighty roar accelerated so that I stumbled clumsily into the nearest seat. Within a few minutes it was doing well over a hundred miles an hour.

  The cabin became a sweat-box and I couldn’t find the controls for the air-conditioning — though I could see from the ventilator system that provision for this was built-in.

  I was sweating in more ways than one. Forced to abandon my search for Louise I had made that choice between duty and personal life that you pray in this business you’ll never have to face. Now I squirmed from the aftermath of so impossible a decision.

  While the hover-train tore down the encasing tunnel like a droplet of oil in some crazy spirit level I tried to work out a coherent plan of action. But I was so tired my mind simply would not work. The odds seemed so enormous that nothing I could think up could possibly affect the issue — or so it seemed to me then. I kept nodding off to sleep, only to experience a nightmare that threw me back sharply on the nightmare I was already living.

  I managed to examine the miniature TV. One thing about it was promising. You could switch it over so as to receive domestic television broadcasts. That was a break. It might help me time my own actions. With that frail hair to cling to I switched off to save the fuel cell and fell asleep.

  I awoke suddenly and violently with that feeling of falling through space. For a few moments I couldn’t think where I was. When I did, I realized the craft had stopped mid-tunnel.

  There was absolute silence; and I figured that what had woken me was the crunk! as the craft had abruptly settled on its belly when the wind went from under it.

  Now, I walked up to the nose, Ahead, only blackness. Just how far short of the Somerset terminal I actually was I had no means of gauging. But here I was effectively trapped.

  I was just about to go back to the cabin when I thought I heard something ahead. A kind of clanking.

  The agony of not knowing ... the awareness of the prodigious cost of my blunders ... the high-speed soul-searching — What should I have done, rather than this?

  Then the faint glimmer of light. The clang of feet on rungs. And a voice calling — calm, sober. ‘Nigel?’

  It was Commander Duncan.

  There were no amateur dramatics. Quietly he got me out of the pressure-tight hull and led the way up through an air-lock in the roof of the tunnel. This vent was one of those (he explained) spaced at twenty-five mile intervals; and we were just that distance from Bishops Bight.

  Suddenly there were stars overhead. We were outside, near a side lane remote from anywhere. The Chevrolet was parked without lights and we clamped ourselves in. We headed rapidly west. As we drove Duncan gave me a clearcut briefing in plain language — simple enough and concise enough to get through to my exhausted brain. Soon we emerged at the main road near Sparkford. The headlights showed the lazy night scene of quiescent country areas untroubled in sleep. Only the occasional long-distance lorry and nocturnal milk tanker shared the main roads with us.

  Sporadically the luminescent eyes of roadside rabbits were caught in the headlights while I smoked and the car purred and Duncan talked:

  ‘I was waiting for some sign of you. Then there was the alarm-signal indicating that one of the flashlight-televisors had been taken from the rack. I managed a diversion to cover this. Each of those things is accounted for and they’re holy. I don’t even have one myself.’

  He flashed his lights to overtake an articulated transporter, We got past with nothing to spare. ‘I was certain it was you, but I was hoping you would stay put. The hover-train sends out a bleep every ten miles. I was in the westbound control room and had to think fast. I managed to fake up a plan. I set the switches for a service-halt at vent Alpha and just hoped they wouldn’t get wise to it.’

  I said ‘You must be about due for court-martial.’

  ‘Yes. My association with Taggard has been investigated He’s up before the Senate Committee and the panic is really on.’

  ‘Where are we heading?’

  ‘A cottage. It’s three miles from the Bight.’ He grinned. ‘You can shave and make use of the bath. You stink,’ he added, swinging off towards Weston Zoyland, ‘like a British bagful of last week’s fis
h and chips.’

  ‘And talking of food?’

  ‘Sure, Mrs Zopie will get you one of her great breakfasts, soon as we arrive.’

  ‘Mrs Zopie? I don’t believe it.’

  Mrs Zopie, like so many west country women, possessed high colour — almost scarlet — in a pair of well-fed cheeks. Her coffee and eggs were superfine. She said pointedly: ‘I’ve turned on the bath water. He is ready when you wants he.’

  I’d set up the mini-TV conveniently on top of the loaf of home-baked bread. The picture quality was faint. Only occasionally did the dots and lines fit together to show the conference room. The sound was only the roaring hiss of UHF. Duncan explained: ‘For obvious reasons they use only very low-power transmitters. We’re just outside their operations area. Nearer the sea you’ll receive it clearly. Get your mind off it while you can. While you clean up we can go over the schedule. Now relax and enjoy Mrs Zopie’s cooking.’

  Outside, an impeccable dawn — curtains, of blue-grey cloud in foreground as a means of contrast with the rich orange beyond. The last of the stars had faded; and the long horizon to the east included part of the bay as far off as Bristol and a whole stretch of some thirty miles of sea. The inland greenery of thick woods and wide-span fields completed the painting.

  At the marmalade stage Duncan talked. ‘... My family has been Navy for generations. And my father did brilliantly in the Second World War: Rear-Admiral Duncan.’

  ‘Iowa Jima,’ I said,

  ‘Sure. After the war he got to know some of his Japanese opposite numbers — even those who had planned against him in naval battles.

  ‘Then he began to take exception to American politics in the Far East. You know what eventually happened? ... Well, they couldn’t spring one of those charges under the Fourteenth Amendment — even the Fourteenth Amendment couldn’t be bent that far. They had to pay my father for doing less than nothing for several years — then finally retire him on a full admiral’s pay.

  ‘Do you know, I think for him that was worse than being hung by one of those sinister little Senate committees? My father was a truthful man, a simple man, a nice man. The one thing he couldn’t face was being deprived of command for insufficient reason. Had he wrecked his ship against some reef through his negligence, he would have faced court-martial and even got some pride out of his conduct ... sounds perverse but you know what I mean? — he wanted reasons, this caused that, therefore. That way a man can plan things, know what to do, know where he stands’