by Ben Elton
In the middle of this place, a place of ancient peace; a place which had slept almost undisturbed since the waters of prehistory subsided: a place untouched by human hand, save for those few souls who had scratched out a meagre living on its barren surface. In the midst of all this, boring deep and spreading wide, lay the Stark construction site. Hissing, steaming and glaring into the still desert night.
It wasn’t that the area covered was particularly huge, it was more the intensity of the activity that struck the little group of conspirators dumb. Stretched out below them were six burning bright areas of weaving lights and towering cranes or at least they seemed like cranes, perhaps they were towers of some kind. These hellish patches on the desert floor were arranged not in a circle but in an asymmetric, almost haphazard way, like great fluorescent lilies spread across a pond. From each of these six places came constant blasts and explosions; first an eerie silent flash and then, moments later, a dull crump that could be felt deep in the belly. The exploding lilies were connected by snakes of orange light, along which travelled other lights, some white, some red. Above it all hovered helicopters throwing their own beams downwards in a seemingly futile effort to add to the orgy of illumination. All light soon blended and was lost in the great and terrible glow. A glow that had a strange, translucent quality, induced by the clouds of dust and steam that were constantly being thrust upwards into the shuddering air.
It was like Hell’s kitchen on the day that all seven deadly sins had come to dinner and the Devil was trying to do a complex Taiwanese banquet that he’d never attempted before. In silence they began to descend down the long, shallow, featureless slope. It took a lot to shut up CD and Mrs Culboon, but for once neither of them had anything to say. They were all thinking much the same thing; which was that any group of people who could organize the Devil’s kitchen that they were now approaching, could probably handle four ecologically concerned individuals.
‘Still think that Chrissy’s paranoid, Walter?’ said Rachel.
A moment later the little group finally met up with the outer limits of the expanding search for Zimmerman. The phoney war was over. It all seemed to happen at once. Above the general roar, the gutteral rat-a-tat-tat of a helicopter emerged as a single and definitive sound; and it was getting louder. Soon they could see it, in the distance, its searchlights scanning the ground below.
‘Take cover!!’ snapped Rachel.
‘Where?’ replied Walter, and he had a point.
161: THE GREAT SANDY DESERT
The Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia is not known for its prominent features. If it were, perhaps it might have had a slightly more interesting name. It might have been called ‘The great, sandy and with lots of interesting little nooks and crannies and rocks and caves and great places to hide in Desert.’
But it wasn’t called that because there are virtually no nooks, crannies, rocks or caves. All there is, across 99 per cent of its surface, is space and sand. It is a great and sandy desert. Never was a place more aptly named.
162: BATTLE AND CAPTURE
The four frightened fugitives stared around them looking for somewhere to hide and there was nowhere. Or at least there was nowhere that they could see. Had Zimmerman been with them he would have calmly told them to crouch stock still and think like a bush, or lie flat along one of the tiny creases of land caused by the soft desert wind.
‘Stillness is the essence of camouflage,’ he would have told them, ‘it is very difficult to pick out something that doesn’t move.’
That is what Zimmerman would have told them had he been there, but of course he wasn’t. And so his four friends ran around in circles flapping their arms in panic shouting, ‘What the fuck are we going to do!! What the fuck are we going to do!!’
There was literally nowhere to run to. The chopper was approaching fast, making great sweeping arcs with its horrifyingly powerful search-light, covering hundreds of square metres of flat, featureless terrain and subjecting it to careful scrutiny.
Suddenly, for the four terrified commandos on the ground, it was day, bright bright day as they were swathed in the harsh light. Their shadows stretched out like deep black ditches behind them. They stared, blinking into the beam, frozen into momentary petrification. Four skittles waiting to be knocked down.
Then CD had a thought.
‘Scatter! I’m going to take out the light!!’ he shouted, and raising the automatic weapon to his shoulder, squeezed the trigger.
Considering that CD had never fired any form of gun before, and that he was starting out on a state-of-the-art machine gun that could have cut the front off a house, it wasn’t a bad effort. He missed the light but he was very close. As it happened, he hit the fuel tank, causing the helicopter to burst into a horrifyingly brilliant fireball.
The machines that Stark employed were police-designed craft, hence they were not armoured. Contrary to what cop shows would have us believe, most police helicopters are used for traffic surveillance and it takes a pretty vicious contra-flow system to provoke the average motorist to dig out an automatic rifle. The instant inferno hung in the air with its spinning blades hurling burning debris into the night. Strangely, and rather eerily, the search-light which emanated from the helicopter’s nose cone, remained on, although it no longer bobbed and weaved about. For a little while nothing further happened. The helicopter burnt in the sky and the four figures on the ground remained motionless, transfixed by what they had done, still casting their long black shadows in the light that shone from the dead aircraft. Then it crashed to the ground with the sort of noise that only a burning helicopter crashing into the ground can make, and gloom descended once more.
Still the four of them did not move. They just stood, trying to get their heads around the enormity of developments. The stakes had suddenly got a very great deal higher. Now they were killers, murderers. CD was vaguely surprised to note that the old cliche that ‘it didn’t seem real’ was true. It didn’t.
‘You should have let me do it, CD,’ said Mrs Culboon. ‘I’m the one who can shoot, remember?’
‘I forgot,’ said CD lamely.
‘You had to do something,’ said Rachel, her voice hard. ‘It was us or them.’
‘We hope it was us or them,’ corrected Walter. ‘Man, all I can say is that this whole situation had better be as serious as the paranoid Yank chick says it is, because if that chopper was just patrolling a building site we’re going to prison for ever.’
The terrible thing that had happened seemed to have driven the memory of their recent and stunning sight of the construction site from his mind.
‘Oh come on,’ shouted Rachel, ‘we know it’s serious, for God’s sake, Walter, they were shooting at you the other night with these very guns. They’ve taken Zimmerman and the police claim there wasn’t even a fight at the airport. And anyway Walter, what the fuck is that!! A retirement village!’ She pointed down towards the site. Now that the burning helicopter had ceased to light up the sky, the construction site had regained something of its awesome brilliance.
‘Chrissy has got to be right,’ Rachel urged. ‘Something utterly terrible is going on and CD was absolutely right to do what he did.’
‘Well, right or wrong, we’re in the shit now,’ said Mrs Culboon, ‘so I say we press on as fast as we can and get away from that cemetery over there.’ She pointed at the wreck of the helicopter and CD wished that she had chosen a different phrase. He did not know how many people it took to crew a small helicopter, but however many it was, that was how many people he had killed.
They began to run; Mrs Culboon, as the slowest, setting the pace. They ran towards the glow of the building site, each pondering their own confused thoughts. They did not know what they were running towards, what they would find, or what they would do when they found it. They were just running away from a burning helicopter full of dead men.
As it happened, what they were running towards was, in their case, even worse than a burning helicopter
full of dead men; it was a not burning helicopter full of live men. Men who did not take kindly to the sort of shock that CD had just given them. On the whole, people take jobs in private security firms in order to throw their weight about, not in order to get shot out of the sky.
After a minute CD, Rachel, Walter and Mrs Culboon stopped running. They could hear the helicopter coming, they could see the headlamps of the trucks and jeeps which were also hurtling across the sand towards them. There was absolutely nowhere to hide.
Mrs Culboon cocked her rifle.
‘Oh man,’ said Walter wearily, ‘I think we’ve done enough of that, you know? I mean, we are in a no-win situation here, you dig? Like, they are going to get us for definite, no way can we fight them all so I think maybe it would be wrong to just kill people for no reason, even if they are the bastards who are after us.’
As it happened Mrs Culboon had not really wanted to fight. She was just thinking of trying to defend her friends; acting instinctively that was all. None of them wanted to fight, they all wanted to go home to their mothers and be tucked up in bed with warm milk and vegamite soldiers. But they couldn’t, they would have to face the music.
‘Drop the weapons,’ a voice barked.
They dropped them and with a fair degree of unnecessary force, were bound and thrown in the back of a truck.
Mrs Culboon and Walter lived on the fringes of society, this was not for either of them their first experience of brutality and danger. They didn’t like it but they recognized it. For CD and Rachel, it was unknown territory, and hence utterly terrifying. All people who live in well-ordered societies harbour a secret dread of what would happen if order was removed. If suddenly they found themselves in a brutal human jungle without the protection of the social rules on which we all rely. It was happening to CD and Rachel. It seemed to them, lying face down in the back of a three ton lorry, that they were beyond action and beyond help.
CD would have given anything to see a copper. It wouldn’t have mattered how young or arrogant; seventeen-years-old and a face like a plate of rhubarb and custard, CD wouldn’t have minded. But there’s never one there when you want one.
163: IMPRISONMENT AND INTERROGATION
164: THE CENTRE OF CREATION
Sly and Tyron were in the project control building when they got the news regarding the capture of four intruders. At first Sly thought that this might wrap the problem up. If necessary they would simply hold the fugitives until after Domesday.
Unfortunately, he quickly discovered, to his extreme frustration, the original fugitive, the highly dangerous nose- biting hippy had not been recaptured.
For the first time Sly began to feel a twinge of doubt about the whole bloody business in which he was involved. These little human intrusions on their vast and inhuman project made him vaguely aware of how small he was himself. That, coupled with the continuing and irritating presence of Ocker Tyron, a genuinely small man, despite his size, made Sly feel uncomfortably impotent in the midst of all his power.
The project control building was a depressing place in which to experience doubt and humility, containing, as it did, an awe inspiring array of high-tech equipment, most of which was going blip blip blip in what seemed to Sly to be an unnecessarily irritating manner. The stuff had been assembled by Nagasyu at various collation points all over the Far East and so efficient had his administration been that when all the gear arrived, there was little more to do than to plug it in. Incredibly it had even had a plug on it.
The whole thing certainly looked cool; a quarter of an acre of chrome, plastic, glass and brushed stainless steel, all bleeping, spinning and flashing. Almost as complex as the dashboard on a BMW. Yard after yard of console covered in monitors and buttons, walls of tapes, sometimes spinning one way, then, no doubt for some reason, spinning another. It was an exhilarating and terrifying sight. And so it should have been. There was, after all, only slightly less equipment in the room than it takes to record a Pink Floyd album.
Twenty-five or so white-coated technicians bustled about flicking switches and looking intelligent. Tyron had been impressed, despite himself.
‘Now all it needs is something to shoot,’ he had said.
‘What’s your hurry, mate! Anyone would think you’re looking forward to this bloody awful thing…this…‘ Sly searched for a word, ‘…Apocalypse. Christ Almighty, let’s enjoy what time is left.’
‘I just don’t want any fuck-ups when the time is right, we’re only going to get one chance at this, Moorcock, one chance at life or death, right! I want us to be ready.’
In fact in a strange way Ocker Tyron was looking forward to it. Utterly horrible though the prospect was, its hugeness still gave him a strange exhilaration. He had had the power of life and death over virtually everybody in his life for so many years that Tyron was definitely a hard man to thrill. Stark, however, made his very trousers tingle. Despite its irreversible horror, Tyron still felt a pretty considerable buzz at the prospect of playing God, even if it was a multi-headed corporate God. He relished the prospect of being one of the chosen ones, one of those chosen to survive. Besides this, there was the eerie potency he felt about his part in choosing who should die. In a way it’s not surprising he was a little excited, it is quite something to be a father of creation. Only God had made a world before.
165: MINOR IRRITATIONS
Tyron’s delicious little fantasies were cut short when one of Du Pont’s security men entered and announced the capture of the prisoners. Suddenly Sly found himself wondering about the girl.
‘Look, Ocker,’ said Sly. ‘I can handle this, all right? Why don’t you just sod off back to Perth, eh? It’s just a minor irritation, some hippies who think we’re destroying precious natural flora. I’ll talk to them.’
The security man knew he had a chance to make a big impact and he grabbed it.
‘They shot down a helicopter,’ he said.
There was a pretty stunned silence, apart from all the blipping going on that is.
‘Shot down a fucking helicopter!’ said Tyron incredulously. ‘What the hell is going on? Christ first a guy disarms our security chief with his teeth, then one of our choppers get shot down.’
‘Look, will you cool it, Tyron,’ said Sly, not really knowing what to say. ‘We have to think.’
‘Too fucking right, mate!’ Someone’s found out what we’re up to and they want in. This is only the beginning.’ Tyron was pretty badly shaken. It always gives a person cause for thought when he’s just been having a God fantasy and somebody shoots down his helicopter.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sly replied. ‘These people are just dumb meddlers. It’s an ecological thing, we know that from the hippy who bit Du Pont.’ Sly was still thinking about the girl. ‘Mind you, they certainly know how to meddle…We won’t tell Durf about this, or the others, it’s not necessary. I intend to deal with this situation right now.’
166: FANCYING THE ENEMY
Sly could not kid himself, he was pleased to see her. There was no doubt about it. As he walked towards the room where the captives were being kept he had been hoping that she would be there and when it turned out that she was, he was pleased. This was an entirely new experience for Sly. Occasionally in the past he had developed ‘things’ about girls, but never on so short an acquaintance and certainly never with such immediate force. After all, he knew nothing about the girl apart from the fact that she seemed to be firmly against absolutely everything that he stood for. There was no getting round it though, he was pleased to see her. She seemed even more pretty than when they had met in his office. Action and adventure had lent a highly attractive flush to her cheek and her eyes sparkled with defiance and fear. She was also firmly tied to a chair, which was something that normally took Sly ages to persuade his girlfriends to put up with.
167: QUESTION AND ANSWER
Sly pulled himself together. This was a time for masterly self- assurance. He stood before the sorry gang of renegades and addressed the
m with what he hoped would be an icy and intimidating tone.
‘What in the name of fuck do you think you’re doing?’ he blurted.
Walter looked at him defiantly.
‘Trying to find out what you’re up to, man,’ he said. ‘Just like last time, you know, like, still trying to suss out what goes down.’
‘What goes down, you filthy bastard,’ shouted ‘Tyron, ‘is one of my helicopters!!’
Sly tried to calm himself. They couldn’t both stand there screaming at a bunch of hippies. It was so unreal. Here he was, a colossus in the world of power and money and he was standing shouting and screaming at a Carlton drop-out. That’s the trouble with spending all your time on the twenty fifth floor, when you come down there’s a hell of a bump.
‘Why are you so interested in what I’m doing?’ he asked.
‘We, we won’t know that until we find out what it is, will we man?’ replied Walter. ‘But we have a pretty good idea that whatever it is, it’s heavy. Now where’s my man Zimmerman? If you’ve harmed him I swear…I swear, I’ll lay some very bad Karma on your head. Dig?’
Walter’s three comrades felt slightly embarrassed at this. Having Walter lay some very bad Karma on your head sounded something akin to being savaged by Bambi.
Sly did not even realize that he had been threatened.
‘Who are you talking about?’ he asked.
‘My man Zimmerman, a kind of hippy dude, he ate your hamburger at Facefulls.’
Sly was about to add that since then he had eaten his security chief’s nose as well, but he decided to be more circumspect. ‘We have him safe, don’t trouble about that,’ Sly lied.
‘You’d better start worrying about yourselves,’ Tyron chipped in. ‘Now what the fuck do you know? All of it, everything. What do you know and where’s the Yank bitch? Come on, out with it. Now!!’