Walking Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “Not bad,” said Dreiser. “Might be something there. Look what I got.”

  He held up by its tail a tubby, poutmouthed fish, ten inches long, banded olive and orange.

  “Mother will be pleased,” he said. “That’s one of her favourites—grills a treat. Now it’s your turn.”

  “I imagine the Company weren’t as happy with Doctor Trotter as they’d been with President Afenziah,” said Foxe.

  “It wasn’t only the good Doctor. He was Prime Minister, his half-wit brother was President, five more of his cousins were in the cabinet, and his mother was Life Chairman of the League of Island Women. D’you think they’d have opened a drugstall on the Islands, even, if there’d been a set-up like that?”

  “But they didn’t decide to cut their losses?”

  “No. There was quite an investment here, and there wasn’t anywhere quite right to go with some of the more sensitive stuff. They decided to give it a year and see how it all panned out. At the end of that time I flew back to Europe to report, and it seemed pretty clear that we’d better start getting ready to pull out. They told me to come back here and take care of closing down this end. I arrived to find that my mother had disappeared. I was frantic. Everybody was friendly, very helpful and sympathetic. That was the first time I met up with the Prime Minister, when he paid a call to tell me that Mother had been kidnapped by the Khandhars (they exist when there is a need for them, you understand?). He’d just had a law passed making it a criminal offence to pay ransoms, but he said this would be relaxed for Mother. The Company gave me the money, and a few days later Mother was found tied up in the porch of a church. She hadn’t had too rough a time, thank God.”

  “And you let her go on living here!”

  “She loves it here, David. It’s going to take a lot more than a kidnapping to shift her. We have fourteen senile donkeys in our corral right now—do you think she’d abandon them because of a few mountain thugs? I never told her who really snatched her, of course.”

  “Anyway, I’d have thought that an incident like that would only encourage the Company to pull out.”

  “Me too. I got another call to Head Office. The PM put a special guard on Mother while I was away. I flew to Europe sure that the nightmare would soon be over—but you see, David, it’s still going on.”

  “What happened?”

  “Taking my mother was only a warning shot. We’d underestimated Doctor Trotter, underestimated him very badly. I think I told you that he had his own ideas about the development of Hog’s Cay as a tourist centre? He’d been Minister of Tourism, remember, and he’d used his time making contacts. There are a lot of big American interests who would like a piece of a new Caribbean holiday centre, and some of them aren’t too careful to keep their hands clean …”

  Oh no, thought Foxe, not the Mafia. The kidnapping of Dreiser’s mother had a certain solidity about it—had probably actually happened—so that for a couple of minutes Dreiser’s rigmarole seemed to deal with creatures solider than mere mist. The introduction of this antique bogeyman dragged the story back to dream.

  “The Mafia?” Foxe asked politely.

  “I don’t know. But somebody had supplied a few very sophisticated technicians from the American underworld. I found Head Office very shaken indeed, and looking for a scape-goat, but Doctor Trotter wouldn’t let them touch me. He had the whip hand now. All he had to do was to threaten to release a few documents …”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “David, you aren’t that naïve. For instance, you can’t believe that the aerospace industry is the only one that has been handing out bribes in countries where the politicians have itchy palms. Or that there aren’t areas where the big drug companies have done a carve-up—surface competition, but never at the cost of thousand per cent profits all round. Or even in your own field, bits of inconvenient research which had better not get known about in case half a million people find they’ve got a lawsuit against us.”

  “It’s not the sort of thing I think about much,” said Foxe. He managed to keep the amusement out of his voice, but had to hide his expression by concentrating on his rod.

  “You are in too much of a hurry,” said Dreiser. “Wind in half that fast. Give the fish a chance … hi! I’m into something fat.”

  The excitement and life in his voice confirmed Foxe’s belief that his story of the Company’s dealings with Doctor Trotter was mostly fantasy. He’d recounted it all in a harsh, flat drone, hypnotic—or rather self-hypnotic. But now he was wide awake, concentrating, teasing at the frothy water where the invisible fish bent his rod almost double with its weight. Foxe watched him for a while, then looked round the bay. The orange cruiser still lay outside the reefs, but only one of its crew was visible, crouched at the camera on the deck. It looked as though he was waiting to take a picture of Dreiser catching his fish.

  “It’s not the sort of thing you think much about?” said Dreiser suddenly. “I think you should, David, because now it affects you. You may ask why Doctor Trotter didn’t simply blackmail the Company, why he was so anxious for us to stay. The answer is, I don’t know. His is a difficult mind to read. The economy of the Islands needs us, of course—but he wouldn’t bother too much about that. We’re prestige, and that he likes. And we’re power. He likes to make a world-wide company wriggle when he tickles it. You know, he always sends Mother a bunch of flowers on the anniversary of her kidnap. Not the day she got free, the day she got taken. That’s his style.”

  “And the Company just sit still and let this happen?”

  “No. They’re getting ready to go. It hasn’t been easy. You see, Doctor Trotter’s a smart man, mad but smart, and he saw that his hold on the Company would grow stale. A bribe paid last year is much more of a scandal than a bribe paid five years back. So part of his deal was that he should continue to know what was doing. He wanted fresh leverage. We’ve had to feed him secrets all the time.”

  “Not real secrets, presumably.”

  “He’s not an easy man to cheat. First we moved away from what you might call political secrets to industrial ones, which have a shorter life-span. You’re not often much more than a year ahead of your competitors in the research field. Naturally that didn’t interest him so much, but he’s been selling some of the stuff to outfits like …”

  “Is that worth his while?” said Foxe. “Financially, I mean?”

  Dreiser paused, seeming to consider what he should do next about his fish. All the time he had been talking his arms had continued to wrestle with the bucking rod, but now, though the rod itself was still sharply curved, the line reached straight down to the side of the boat and the weight at the end of it seemed inert. Dreiser picked up a short pole with a wire noose at the end, and manoeuvred it over the thwart. The fish that he eventually hauled out was almost three feet long, blunt-headed, silver below and blue-black above.

  “Now, that’s quite something with this tackle,” he said.

  “What were you saying, Dave?”

  “I was surprised that Doctor Trotter would get paid enough for selling industrial secrets. I mean, it might be useful money for somebody like you or me …”

  “Right. Perhaps for him it’s an exercise of power. He likes to show he can do it. Perhaps … Anyway, stuff has been getting out, and it must have gone through him. So the next stage …”

  “Was to give him a lot of stuff which wasn’t worth knowing.” snapped Foxe. “To send poor sods like me here to waste a couple of months on meaningless work! Why me?”

  “Because learning enhancement would be a big thing if ever it came,” said Dreiser calmly. “Commercially big—biggest thing since DDT, perhaps. Have you thought of that? No? But it’s the kind of thing Doctor Trotter thinks about, and it’s the kind of thing he understands. It’s got to be somebody of your calibre, so he thinks we think it’s important. Only I guess they should have told you—any
thing to do with Hog’s Cay and they screw themselves rigid with security.”

  “What’s wrong with Galdi’s work? He seems to believe in it all right.”

  “Carcinogenous. Yeah, he believes in it—he’s the only one who does. Him and Doctor Trotter.”

  “And now they’re asking me—telling me—to go and work for this maniac on Main Island! Do they say what he wants me to do? Experiment with the effect of nine drops of tree-toad blood on melon seedlings?”

  “No, David, they don’t say. But I got a consignment note about a batch of stuff which I was to ship on to Main Island. Old Mrs Trotter has a regular order for a few things—sulphur’s one of them. But this batch included a kilo of a stuff called SG 19. Mean anything to you?”

  “Yes,” said Foxe flatly. “It’s a very mild sedative which never reached commercial production. I told the Prime Minister that it affected the stress behaviour of some of my rats. I never said it made them virtuous, for God’s sake! I only used it as an example!”

  Furious, but unable to express his fury, he wound his line in, waggled the rod to and fro and cast again. The timing was all wrong. The line looped soggily through the air, flicking just clear of Dreiser’s rapidly ducked head, and finally as if with a will of its own plopping down into the water behind him, only a few yards from the bows of the boat.

  “Wind in and try again,” said Dreiser. “You were too … strike, man! You’ve got a bite!”

  Foxe whipped the tip of his rod towards the falls. The wood bowed as the hidden hook bit flesh, and at the same time what had been a yielding resistance became a savage pull. The rod almost sprang from his hands. Dreiser reached across and flicked the catch of the reel, letting the line whistle out.

  “What’s happening?” said Foxe, caught, despite his anger, in the rush of action.

  “Little fish took your bait, then big fish took little fish. David, you’re into the stomach of a shark!”

  There was a moment when nothing happened. The line slacked and the rod stood straight. Foxe began to turn gingerly at the reel, still without meeting any resistance, twisting stiffly round to watch his line. Just below the smooth surface a dark shadow loitered, then rose, black and glistening. Not for one glance was it any kind of fish. Goggles flashed. A wet-suited arm shook a raging fist.

  They helped the man aboard and Dreiser removed Foxe’s hook from just below his shoulder-blade. Apparently it had caught in the cranny between the oxygen-tank and the wet-suit and Foxe’s attempt to strike had then wedged it further in, driving the barb through the rubber into the flesh. The man was too sore and angry to make much pretence at being anything except a policeman, and his fishing equipment seemed to consist of an unmistakable microphone with a lead running to a waterproofed pouch at his belt. It was Dreiser who kept the pretence up, making brief brother-of-the-angler-type remarks as he worked first with his pen-knife and then with antiseptic cream and tape. The man—one of the blacker Islanders—merely grunted in reply and when the job was done flopped overboard without thanks. They watched his shadowy course until the angle became too small and it was hidden in the brilliant reflections of the bay.

  “That settles it,” said Foxe. “I’m not going to Main Island.”

  “And I thought you were into a shark,” said Dreiser, chuckling.

  6

  For a while they fished in silence, Dreiser because fishing was what he’d come to do, and the intrusions of policemen were a nuisance to which he was accustomed, no more of a problem to the serious angler than mosquitoes might be; and Foxe because he wanted to leave Hog’s Cay next morning and he guessed that if he started making obvious preparations to go he might be stopped. The sensible thing was to behave as though they’d thought the policeman had only been in the bay to record the bubble and squeak of fish-talk. Beyond that he found it difficult to make plans. Everything had changed. It was like walking from one viewpoint to another, from one world to another, almost. You see the same things, but you see that they are not what you had supposed.

  Dreiser had changed for a start. Half comic and half pitiable until ten minutes ago, with his clumsinesses and his persecution neurosis, he was now something almost like a hero, sane in a crazy world, balanced amid turmoil. Foxe didn’t quite accept that all Dreiser’s imaginings were now real, but those that weren’t were at least excusable—necessary, even. If you have a lot in your life to suspect, it saves trouble to suspect everything.

  And Hog’s Cay had changed.

  And the Company had changed.

  And Foxe?

  His plans had changed, certainly. No silken, starreflecting waters tonight, no exploration of flesh spiced with salt and prickly with sand, not even the amusement of beginning the hunt, let alone its consummation. Instead he found himself thinking of a conversation with Lisa Anna—his last, almost. “You are an empty man, David. You will not allow anything to matter to you, except your work.” “Your work is just as important to you, darling, and quite right too. I don’t want you to go to Copenhagen, but I’d think less of you if you didn’t.” “Yes, you are not selfish, not in that way. But I am not talking about our relationship—that has not been as deep as I had hoped, but it has been good. And I would not want you to give up your rats and your monkeys for me. I will tell you why. If you did not have them, what would you consist of? Nothing. No, don’t laugh at me like that. I am serious, and you do not understand what it is to be serious. You are amusing, you are a good companion, a kind lover, but you are somehow empty. Nobody should be like that. If you are not careful, David, you will become one of the walking dead.” “If you want to know, darling, I feel very much alive. Sad but alive. I don’t know what you’re talking about really—but perhaps when this Copenhagen job is over we’ll meet up again, and then you can be serious for both of us.” “I will not weep for you, David! I will not! Go away, now at once, before you make me weep!” Foxe had gone, embarrassed as much as sad, but he hadn’t understood what she meant and still didn’t. The words ran through and through his head, meaningless, like a fever-dream. Perhaps, he thought, he was in mild shock after the appearance of the skin diver, and his mind was automatically harking back to the last time he’d been really shaken, by Lisa-Anna’s outburst. That, after all, is the way the mind works. Like a rat in a maze, confronted with a new experience, it seeks for comparisons among its past experiences, and Foxe hadn’t had many shocks in his life, because he’d taken trouble not to let them happen.

  Or perhaps he was changing too, and not liking it, and was reaching back to Lisa-Anna, the strongest anchorage in his old world. The way to escape from this new world of altered things was, literally, to fly; back to Europe, back to the Vienna laboratories, back to Lisa-Anna. If she would have him … If they would let him …

  He glanced over his shoulder at the orange cruiser and saw the man in the wet-suit climbing aboard. The two policemen began to gesticulate at each other.

  “How much do you think he heard?” said Foxe.

  “Nothing,” said Dreiser calmly. “Judging by the way your hook caught he was still coming towards us.”

  “You don’t think he heard me saying I wouldn’t go to Main Island? Or the other chap? I said it pretty loud, I think. I was angry.”

  “I doubt it, David.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “You still think that way?”

  “Yes. I’m getting out of Hog’s Cay first thing tomorrow.”

  “I think the Company would prefer you to take the posting.”

  “Screw them.”

  Dreiser sat silent, twitching meditatively at his rod.

  “What about your report, David?” he said at last.

  “What’s the point?”

  “The Company wouldn’t have sent you here if they didn’t want that report done.”

  “To keep that crazy bully happy! Screw him! If he expects me to go to his island and wast
e my time working with SG 19 he’s going to be unhappy anyway.”

  “Yes. But I think they would like the report in his hands, and perhaps passed on to other hands.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Possibly to mislead them about the value of the drug you are working with.”

  “Not a hope. Almost anyone would spot what’s wrong with it. They might waste a couple of weeks of one man’s time …”

  “In that case to discredit him as a source of information … yes … or else … No matter. They want the report done, here.”

  “Well they won’t get it done by me. Look, I’d be going to the labs tonight anyway—check on the rats, and so on. And if I’m off tomorrow I’ll have to leave instructions about them. Their food hoppers will last four days, and the Company can bloody well get somebody out to take over by then. While I’m there I’ll set the computer up to do a printout of all my stuff and leave it ready. Anybody competent will be able to do the report from that—it’s almost self-explanatory.”

  “They’ll fire you, David.”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  Foxe considered. He had once or twice talked to Lisa Anna about leaving the Company, and had discovered then that he disliked the idea very much, not just because they paid him well and let him do work that interested him, nor because he’d got a lot of good will invested by having been a useful Company servant, but because the Company was a controlled environment, safe from trauma and drama.

  He looked round the bay, calm, enclosed, beautiful, a sewer; beyond its sheltering arms the orange cruiser waited for the next move. It seemed an absurd context in which to consider his future, but …

  The Company had changed. It had deliberately opened a breach in his defences and was pushing him through, out, away. Or at least that was how Dreiser and this strange place and the morning’s events made it seem. Perhaps back in Europe all would return to normal.