by Colin Kapp
‘Stay?’ For a moment Manalone missed the implication of the phrase, then his confusion threw him into a gulf of embarrassment. ‘That wasn’t what I came here for, Kitten. Especially with Paul … so recently gone.’
‘Listen to me, Manalone. I’ve a big bed, and without Paul it’s the loneliest place on earth. I couldn’t stand for being lonely tonight, lying there knowing Paul wasn’t ever going to come. For one last night I need somebody real.’
Manalone shook his head firmly.
‘I appreciate the gesture, Kitten. I wish these were other times and other circumstances. But I’m caught in a whirlpool of things I don’t begin to understand. I’ve the feeling of being on the edge of a catastrophe – but I don’t know if I’m running from it or towards it. Nor even what sort of disaster it might be. I’m not even sure if it engulfed Paul – or if it’s about to overwhelm the rest of us and he was the lucky one.’
‘You’re talking in riddles, Manalone.’
‘Riddles is all I have. Riddles stacked so high I can’t see the sun any more. But with all this on my mind, I doubt if you’d find me a very attentive lover.’
She seemed prepared to contradict, then stopped, suddenly listening to faraway sounds which had more than a casual meaning for her. She turned back to Manalone in alarm.
‘There’s a warning out for this section of the raft. The police are invading in force. I don’t know what the hell they’re after, but it’s safer if we get you out of here.’
16
Manalone and the Under-raft
‘Wait here.’ Kitten ran hurriedly out of the door and returned a few minutes later with a scowling, thickset, stranger. ‘Go with him, Manalone. He’ll get you away if he can.’
Manalone bit his lip. He was not convinced that the coming of the police was in any way connected with himself, but he accepted her assurance that it was a possibility. Apparently such a massive raid was indicative of something very unusual, and it was obviously highly unwelcome. He could expect full co-operation in his escape, from occupants of the raft anxious not to have a wanted man found in their vicinity. Police enquiries had a way of expanding their scope into other areas; and since Manalone was an unknown quantity, he was going to be escorted off the raft whether he needed to go or not.
‘Thanks, Kitten! I’ll be in touch.’ Manalone shrugged and followed his guide, who was impatient to be away. Already the sound of police whistles was plain even to Manalone’s untutored ear. His guide led him along a tortuous path across the raft parallel to the shore. In the absence of any well defined alleys, they had constantly to make detours around shacks and corrugated hovels. Ever underfoot dangerous discontinuities in the haphazard decking offered traps which had to be avoided, and their progress was necessarily slow.
Now they could hear the sound of whistles from several points, growing nearer. The indications were that the police were advancing across the raft on a far broader front than Manalone had at first thought. The route his guide had chosen had presumably been designed to carry them clear of the end of the police penetration, but this was now seen to be an impractical approach. Finally the fellow stopped and shook his head.
‘This is bad! They’ve never covered the raft from end to end before. Whatever fish they’re after, it must be a big one.’
He looked at Manalone curiously, wondering if the quiet stranger he was hustling from the raft could really be a major criminal. From his expression it appeared that the idea seemed doubtful. Nevertheless he shrugged.
‘We can’t get you off the easy way, so we’ll have to do it the hard way. Can you swim?’
Manalone nodded doubtfully. ‘Only a little.’
‘It’ll have to do.’
The guide then chose a new course which took them nearer to the shore, making for a specific point which he appeared to know well, and which he was anxious to reach before it was cut off by the police advance. The occupants of a particularly tumbledown shack showed no great surprise when Manalone and the guide forced their way through the door. They instantly divined the intention, and were probably prepared for it. Though not a word was spoken, they scrambled to draw back the sacking and rough mats from the floor and then to take away several pieces of planking. Beneath this was a hole. Deeper still, down in the near-darkness, evil waters rose and fell under the impetus of an insidious swell.
The guide turned to Manalone. ‘This is as far as I go. Down there’s your only chance. There’s continuous airspace in a corridor right through to the shore. All you have to do is follow the chains.’
Manalone viewed the prospect with considerable apprehension. Now he thought about it, the idea was obvious. Between the floating drums there was water, and between the water and the decking there was necessarily an airspace. The difficulties of using this as an escape route lay mainly in the haphazard disposition of the drums, which had almost nowhere been laid out in regular array. It was possible that here had been one of the limits of an earlier raft edge, and that a reasonably regular corridor existed through to the shore. Finding the theory, however, in no way increased Manalone’s enthusiasm for the proposal. He turned away, considering taking his chances with the police.
A police whistle sounding near, took the decision away from him. Several hands stripped the cloak from his back and threw it into the hole. Then he was lifted bodily and dropped in also. When he rose to the surface again, coughing the bitter, filthy water out of his throat, the hole in the decking had already been repaired, and in the dimness of the random light he could no longer even determine where it had been. Whether he lived or died was now a matter of importance only to himself. The occupants of the raft had achieved their object of removing possible trouble from their midst. The question of individual survival was something he must now secure for himself.
‘How the hell did you get yourself talked into this situation, Manalone? Talk about an innocent abroad!’
Through random discontinuities in the decking a meagre amount of light penetrated to the surface of the water. As his eyes adapted to the grey dimness of the airspace he was relieved to be able to discern a rusty chain looped along a series of the heaving drums with which he was surrounded. He struck out and managed to grasp the chain at one of its lower points, and tried to estimate the prospects for survival. They were not good. The chain continued in both directions: one way would lead towards the shore, the other, to the open sea. There was no way in which he could now determine which was the right direction. He could only hope that he had not lost orientation when he had been flung into the water.
His best chance seemed to be to continue in the direction he was now facing. The water was cold but not unbearable, and if he had chosen his direction correctly, the total distance he had to go was not too formidable. Fortunately, divested of his cloak, his lightweight clothing was not an impediment, and he decided to retain even his shoes. He began to swim then, but carefully, catching the chain at every opportunity and resting as frequently as he could.
The journey seemed interminable. He had originally estimated his distance as being not more than a kilometre from the shore; but this, measured metre by metre in the dim world of the under-raft, was a spirit-sapping distance, and his spasmodic mode of swimming from handhold to handhold made his progress slow. The steady dimming of the available light warned him that evening was approaching and that speed was becoming of paramount importance. The journey was difficult enough in the uncertain dimness: in the darkness it could easily be fatal.
To add to his troubles, the relatively clear run of the corridor of drums through which he swam soon became broken. Extra drums had been added in the corridor, and finally the pattern was completely gone and he was in a bewildering maze of heaving drums with frequently very little space to pass between. Trustingly he continued to follow the chain, but even this was becoming difficult because of the diminishing light and the increasing number of other chains and cables with which his route was becoming littered. A new factor which worried him also was the force of the damped
waves, which drew strong currents to and fro between the tangle of drums, occasionally halting his progress then seizing him and thrusting him rapidly through apertures he would have preferred to negotiate more carefully.
He was sure now that he was approaching the beach, and he put his feet down experimentally. It was a joyful shock to find that he could stand quite easily with the water well below his shoulders. But this was not the end of his troubles. As yet he could still not see the beach through the random mass of drums ahead. The thrust of the waves became more forceful as the seafloor sloped upwards, yet the airspace remained a constant height above the water.
Soon he was forced to stoop to keep his head clear of the ragged decking, and in this position he was subjected to the full force of the ebb and flow of the damped waves. Frequently losing his handholds, he was flung bodily about in the underwater cavities and pressed mercilessly by the surging water into spaces between drums through which his body could not pass. Dazed and bruised, and bleeding from a dozen minor cuts, he grimly continued to fight his way through. The light was now totally gone but he had the assurance of the sloping beach beneath him to guide his feet. His main hazards were the chains and cables and submerged junk through which he had to fight his way by numbed touch alone.
Finally he thought he detected the movement of lights ahead, and he knew the edge of the raft must be near. He hastened ahead and was cruelly intercepted by a submerged girder. The wash seized him and carried him up and over the obstruction, then pressed him face downwards into the coarse gravel. When attempting to rise he was again caught by the thrust, which carried him forward. His head was thrown against a projecting overhang, and this was the last thing Manalone remembered.
17
Manalone and the Prior Warning
‘Idiot! Pig! You smell like a sewer. Oh, you filthy, horrible brute!’
Manalone woke up, staring up at his own ceiling with a scowl of non-comprehension.
‘Animal … animal … rotten slimy animal!’
He had a pain in his forehead which felt as though his skull had been split right across, and a burning sensation which seemed as though it was consuming his skin with slow fire. When he lifted his hand to explore his damaged temple he raised it no higher than his eyes before it was arrested in horror. The skin had been stained a disfiguring yellow-brown.
‘God, Manalone, this is the end … this is the end!’ Sandra’s voice was edged with sheer hatred.
In other circumstances the scene could have been funny. Coated with oil and filth from the beach, Manalone found he was lying on his own bed. The sleepspace was littered with soiled linen with which Sandra had been trying very ineffectually to clean him up. She herself was alternately crying with vexation and cursing with anger. Behind all her emotion there was more than a hint of genuine fright.
Manalone managed to sit up and view the mess. Sandra had cut away most of his clothes and had been using a household cleaning fluid to try and remove the tars from his body. Lacking method, she had spread the contamination broadly around the room, and even her own arms and face were blotchily irregular with yellow-brown patches.
‘How did I get here?’ asked Manalone, struggling to see himself in the mirror.
‘Get here? Get here?’ The question touched a vein of hysterical rage. ‘How the hell do you think you got here? The police fetched you. Brought you wrapped in sacking, and dumped you on the bed. Seemed to think it rather funny. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. I’ll never forgive you for this, Manalone – never.’
Alarm-bells were ringing in Manalone’s head as he dragged himself to the bathspace.
‘Questions, Manalone. Always questions. Was it you the police wanted on the raft? If the answer is yes, then what are you doing home? And if the answer is no, what are you doing home? If you find a body washed up on the beach, half-drowned and with obvious concussion, you send him to hospital for a check-over. You don’t wrap him in sacking and laughingly leave him on a bed.
‘Not unless … unless … it’s all part of the same scheme of punishment … of harassment … the police and the MIPS working together …’
There was no answer to this.
Manalone found some cleansing cream and managed to remove the more gross contamination before he had a bath. The final result was scarcely an improvement. His skin remained considerably and variously dyed, but at least he smelt less obnoxious. He returned to the wreck of the sleepspace where Sandra was still bitching as she tried to clean the rugs and the floor. Her eyes were full of hatred and loathing.
‘How the hell could you do this to me, Manalone?’
‘I didn’t do it to you. I did it to me.’ Manalone viewed the considerable mess she had made through her own ineptitude, and found himself unable to raise any sympathy for her. Her concern was not for his plight but for the plight of the bed-linen and carpets and clothes and for an abstraction called dignity. He honestly believed she would have been happier if the police had merely brought news of his death by drowning.
‘I suppose you were stinking drunk again? Is that how you came to fall in? Pig!’
‘Something like that.’ Manalone decided not to labour the point.
Sandra was on her knees on the floor, her hair awry, her face and hands streaked with tarry residues. Her exertions seemed to have cracked her customary brittle veneer, and suddenly she appeared soft and fragile and worth caring about. On impulse he dropped to his knees, and made to console her. But the impression she gave was external only; inside she remained the gloss-hard product of her times. She repulsed his advance and drew away without establishing any sort of rapport.
‘Vic Blackman called round here earlier. He still wants you to do that job for him. He’s that desperate he says you can name your own price. A blank cheque. I told him you’d do it.’
‘Then you can untell him, San. I want nothing to do with Blackman or his shoddy and vicious manufacturing enterprises. And it isn’t a question of price.’
Sandra looked at him, and there was animal desperation in her attitude – a total inability to accept the importance of a principle other than monetary gain. She uttered a low cry, which might have been anger or might have been anguish, and fled from the sleepspace in despair.
‘Adam wants to see you right away.’
Maurine van Holt maintained a remarkably straight face considering the extent of the bruises and discolouration which Manalone had been unable to conceal on his hands and face. Her eyes, however, mirrored an appreciation of the situation.
Manalone shrugged and put down the work he was doing.
‘What’s the score, Mau?’
‘You’d better ask Adam. It’s serious for sure.’
Adam Vickers, Comptroller of Automated Mills, was obviously in a state of high agitation. His condition was not improved by his viewing of Manalone’s change of skin hue to an irregular khaki colour. However, he let the point pass without comment.
‘Manalone – we all appreciate that you’re the king pin of our operations here. You put this complex together, and you’re probably the only man alive who can comprehend it as a working whole. I intend to fight to see that nothing affects your situation at Automated Mills. But it’s only fair to warn you that you’ve gained some very powerful enemies.’
‘Enemies?’ Manalone scowled. ‘What sort of enemies?’
‘That’s for you to decide. Your private life’s no affair of mine. But the board of directors has instructed me that you should be dismissed immediately and replaced by a board appointee. They can’t hope to get away with it, of course.
Both they and I know they haven’t the slightest chance of finding anyone who can handle the job as competently as you. It would effectively close the Mills within three months, and then there wouldn’t be anything for them to be directors of. But I quote the point to show you the extreme pressure to which they themselves have been subjected.’
‘What’s behind all this?’ asked Manalone.
‘I d
on’t know – but someone up in the corridors of power must be very displeased with you. But that’s your affair. My concern is that a lot of people’s jobs depend on your expertise, Manalone. So for God’s sake consider the consequences of whatever it is you’re doing. You may have very good reasons, but it’s the innocents who’re going to get hurt.’
Manalone shrugged. ‘I suppose it doesn’t do any good to say I’m not doing anything? I’m not a political animal, I’m a technical one. I solve problems for a living. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s that I’ve not solved a problem which somebody doesn’t want solved anyway.’
Vickers looked at Manalone’s bruised temple and discoloured skin and volunteered no further comment. His expression spoke for itself. Any senior technologist who managed to get himself in that condition overnight was obviously programmed for disaster.
‘Just watch it, Manalone! We can’t afford to lose you.’
Manalone left then, frustrated by an inability to explain his actions more explicitly. He sensed he would have a hard time trying to get the finer points of the matter over to Adam Vickers. As he passed through Maurine’s office she looked up from her desk and met his eyes quietly. The light behind the smile was not one of victory but of enjoyment of the game.
‘Well, are you going to give up, Manalone? Or is it like you told Kitten, you don’t even know what to give up?
‘The truth is, you’re trapped. You never know now, when you pick up a computer printout or a technical journal, whether you’ll find some other inconsistency glaring back at you from the face of the paper. You wouldn’t be human if you found the value of Planck’s constant had altered overnight and you didn’t wonder about it. If they repealed Ohm’s law you’d always be watching for the little man to come and rewind every coil and motor and rewire every damn circuit in the place. And you couldn’t rest until you’d found out what the hell was the nature of the alterations he had to make.
