by Ben Elton
There was a sullen silence. Tyron grabbed a gun from one of the guards and pointed it at them. Sly tensed up and watched Tyron carefully.
‘You answer me right now or you’re dead, you hear,’ Tyron barked. ‘I don’t suppose there’ll be anybody much mourning any of you, we’ll just leave you for the dingos. Now come on, answer me.’
Walter’s reply was a shrewd one.
‘You ain’t going to shoot us man. No way,’ he said. ‘Because you don’t know what we know and…and…you don’t know what the Yank chick knows. And you don’t know who we’ve told…and you don’t know, uhm…‘ Walter seemed about to flag, but then he got his second wind, he always did love to bullshit, ‘…and you don’t know how many of us are out there. Yeah, that’s right, you have no idea of the hugeness of our network, yeah, you have no concept of its almost cosmic enormity. You don’t know how many heavily armed and totally dedicated hippies are out there just waiting to come in here and…and…‘ endless late nights watching American cop shows came to his aid, ‘…come in here and cream your arse, yeah, that’s it, cream your arse…and uhm…expose all the things that we know to the world.’ He finished and then added ‘man’ as a kind of full stop.
It was a good performance. CD nearly spoilt it by applauding. Luckily his hands were tied behind his back. Unfortunately for Walter, Sly was not stupid, he simply smiled and said, ‘Oh yeah, if you’re all so heavily armed mate, how come you came in carrying only the guns you pinched off us in the first place?’
There was a pause. ‘Uhm…irony, man,’ said Walter. ‘Yeah, that’s it, we have a keen sense of irony.’
‘These people don’t know shit,’ said Sly, ‘they’re shooting in the dark.’
‘And bringing down helicopters,’ added Du Pont, who saw no reason why he should be the only person to feel a dickhead that day.
Tyron was not satisfied with Sly’s confidence.
‘I agree there’s no way they can know much,’ he said, ‘but we have to find out what little it is. Besides that, we’ve got to find the American girl. Du Pont, can you make them talk?’
‘Of course I can make them talk,’ said Du Pont and his tone was not pleasant, especially if you happened to be his prisoner.
‘Now, what the hell do you two think you’re talking about?’ Sly shouted. In a way he was going through a similar learning process to that which CD and the others were going through. They had never been involved in gun battles before and he had never heard colleagues casually hint at torturing total strangers. It was being brought home to all of them just how high the stakes were getting.
‘What I am talking about,’ Tyron shouted back, ‘is the Stark project and the countless billions that we have all invested in our future. I have no intention of letting a few adventurous idiots like this ruin everything. Ruin the biggest thing in the world…’
There was a moment’s embarrassed silence as everybody realized that Tyron had been about to reveal all. He turned to the four captives. ‘Now you can either tell us peaceably what you know, or Colonel Du Pont here can force it out of you. What do you know?’
‘We don’t know shit, man. But you sure are making it all sound interesting,’ said Walter. ‘Why don’t you tell us?’
‘Right, Du Pont, which will be easiest?’ said Tyron.
‘The kid in glasses maybe, or the girl,’ he replied.
‘No!’ barked Sly.
Mrs Culboon decided to have her say. ‘Listen! My friend’s telling the truth, we don’t know nothing about your big stuff and your damn future. We’re here because I got beaten up on my own land by racists and that’s all we know. And if you don’t tell us no more, then we’ll still know nothing, and you can let us go.’
‘That’s right,’ said Sly and Rachel thought he was acting extremely reasonably considering that they had shot down his helicopter.
‘Like fuck they don’t know anything,’ asserted Tyron, heating up. ‘They have to know where the Yank is, maybe even where this hippy Zimmerman fellah got to.’
‘Oh yeah? Thought you said you had him safe,’ taunted CD. Tyron turned towards him with a look like granite. ‘Get on with it, Du Pont,’ he said. ‘Stay exactly where you are Du Pont,’ Sly countered. ‘Tyron, can we have a private word please?’
He ushered Tyron out of the room leaving Du Pont to guard the prisoners. Despite the fact that this time he had four guards with him, Du Pont was careful to keep his nose out of reach.
168: ORIGINAL SIN
Outside the room there was yet another tense altercation between Sly and Tyron. ‘For God’s sake, Tyron, you were about to have those people tortured!’ said a rather disturbed Sly. ‘I still am, mate, if it’s necessary,’ Tyron replied.
And of course Sly could see his point. They had no way of knowing what these irritating people knew, and who, if anyone, they had told it to. Besides this there was the much bigger problem of the American journalist still being at large, they really did need to find her. On the other hand to discard any civilized behaviour so quickly, right at the very beginning of the great plan, did not bode at all well for the future. After all, the whole point of the Stark project was to reshape civilization and give it a new start; a fresh chance. Stark was to be a phoenix rising out of the dead ashes of a failed and disgraced civilization. If they started this way, they were bound to fail again. It was almost as if Sly was looking the Original Sin in the eye.
169: LOVE FINDS A WAY
Of course, Sly did not consider all these thoughts so coherently in the few seconds that elapsed before he replied to Tyron. Mainly he was thinking about Rachel. His natural repugnance to Tyron’s casual acceptance of brutality as a viable course of action was multiplied ad infinitum by the thought that he intended to practise it upon the girl Rachel. He really did seem to have gone soft on her.
‘Listen,’ Sly replied, ‘I agree that the situation is touchy. But don’t forget that nothing we’re doing here is actually illegal. Totally shithouse morals-wise, perhaps, but not actually illegal. They can’t possibly have anything on us yet and if the American does try to make a move, well, let’s face it, we’ve got her. We control the police, the phones, the transport, the credit. We control everything.’
‘Yes I know, but they’ve still got this far,’ replied Tyron.
‘Look, just give me a day or two to sort this situation out my way, all right? Leave them alone for the time being, eh? I mean, the minute anyone makes a move anywhere in the world, let alone in Bullens Creek, Durf will know. So what’s the problem? Let me talk to them, I’ll find out what they’ve got and it will be nothing.’ Sly had already decided on the course of action he must take.
He and Tyron re-entered the room.
‘Don’t worry,’ Sly said. ‘We’re not going to hurt you. I will simply be questioning you one at a time. You first.’ He pointed at Rachel and motioned a guard to untie her and lead her out.
It nearly broke CD’s heart to see Rachel thus contemptuously ordered about. Luckily he was securely bound and so was not forced to try and do something about it. Better a broken heart than a broken neck.
170: THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES
While CD’s heart was breaking in northern WA, not too far away, just off the coast, near a place called Shark Bay, something else was breaking, something that was going to make a broken heart seem small beer and even a broken neck a minor inconvenience.
171: SHARK BAY
The early Aussies, as was their unerring habit, had named Shark Bay after the sharks which were the bay’s most prominent feature; apart from water of course. Undeniably the most prominent feature of all in the bay was water and so for a while there was a strong movement amongst those tough, hard bitten and laconic men and women, to call it ‘Waterlogged Bay.’
The more sophisticated souls countered that if you started calling bays ‘Waterlogged Bay’ because they were waterlogged, then all bays would have the same name and it would be impossible to tell the buggers apart. And they got called a bunch o
f poofs for their pains.
‘If you can have a Great Sandy Desert, a Snowy Mountains and a Southern Sea, you can have a Waterlogged Bay,’ the laconics claimed.
‘But there’s only one of those things,’ pleaded the more sophisticated souls, ‘there are loads of bays.’
In the end, the logic of this statement had been grudgingly accepted and so it was decided to name the bay after its most prominent feature apart from water.
Somebody suggested that the fact that it was a bay was a pretty major feature, but ‘BAY BAY’ had been rejected as sounding too childish. ‘Horizon BAY’ had been considered for a while, it was a pretty name, but was eventually thought to have the same problem as ‘water’; i.e., that it could describe any bay (as could ‘wave’ and ‘tide’).
Eventually, after a fellow called Jim had come home from a fishing trip minus a leg, having been gored by a shark, it had been decided to call the bay ‘Shark Bay’ and to call Jim, ‘One- Legged Jim’. There had been a small group of poetic, erudite individuals who had lobbied hard for ‘Bay of the Bitten Jim’ but they were told to fuck off back to Sydney where their type were tolerated.
And so Shark Bay it became, because there were sharks in it.
Not everyone was happy of course. One-Legged Jim, for instance, was monumentally pissed off, but this wasn’t because of the name business. He was unhappy because he had been horribly mutilated and now he only had one leg. Jim’s pragmatic, no bullshit attitude to life was much admired by all.
Some of the citizens of Carnarvorn, the town on the northern tip of the bay, had wanted to call it Carnarvorn Bay and wandered around for weeks muttering under their breath that there were sharks in every bloody bay in Australia. None the less, Shark Bay it had stayed for a hundred and fifty years until the the thread broke on the Sword of Damocles and rendered life for a shark in Shark Bay utterly impossible.
172: THE SWORD
As the Domesday Group had constantly made clear to Stark over the years the ecological cause and effect syndromes which they had isolated as The Swords of Damocles were very different indeed from those which were categorized under the Avalanche Effect.
The actual story of Damocles and his monarch Dionysius is of no relevance here, except, that is, for the punch line, which left Damocles sitting at dinner beneath a naked sword suspended from the ceiling by a single thread. The moral of the legend being that a person’s situation in life is always chancy. Another moral might have been that if you find yourself at dinner with a sword hanging over your head, move seats.
And that was exactly the point made by the Domesday Group. Ecologically, the difference between avalanches and Swords of Damocles was that with avalanches you didn’t know about them until they fell on you; but Swords of Damocles were slightly less serious because the danger was there for all to see, and hence it was possible to do something about it. A typical example of the Swords that Domesday regularly put before Stark were the so called Leper Ships; ships so loaded with appallingly toxic chemicals that no country would let them enter their ports. Alone and virtually stateless, they roam the seas searching for a place to disgorge their vile load.
‘One of them’s going to sink one of these days,’ the Domesday Group would say. At Shark Bay the thread broke.
173: THE ATARIA C42
If Captain Robertson on his North Sea shit sludger thought he had a tough job, he should have tried carting the real crap around like poor old Captain Popplewell had to.
Captain Popplewell, the master of the Liberian registered Ataria C42, had three years of hell then died. It started when his ship was chartered by a company called Dispo Holdings, who wished him to ship a few barrels of ash and sludge to a toxic- waste disposal company in Britain — a country with a world reputation for taking on other peoples’ shit. Whilst at sea a scandal burst revealing the true nature of the load which turned out to be a horrifying cocktail of chemical and heavy metal poisons. A mix of aluminium, arsenic, barium, cadmium, lead and mercury, so potent that no port in the world would take it. At first Captain Popplewell was instructed to do what so many others had done before when faced with a cargo that cannot be offloaded. He was told to dump it in the Third World. For years, contrary to every legal and moral objection, Africa has been used as a dustbin for the impossibly toxic residue of the life-styles of the West.
Unfortunately for the Ataria C42, her cargo had become somewhat notorious and environmental activists were on to her — hence even Third World ports were barred to the ship. It was bitter gall indeed for Captain Popplewell to see other Leper Ships successfully slipping in and dumping their terrible loads and having wild leper ship parties, whilst he was forced to skulk about in mid-ocean like the pariah he was. Of course, he and the ship’s owners turned to the company that had chartered them, but, as happens too often in these situations, they had gone into liquidation. In fact Dispo Holdings might be said to have pulled off a brilliant business coup in the same way that Sly did by destroying healthy businesses with his corporate raids. Dispo had accepted a contract to dispose of large quantities of appallingly toxic waste. They had performed their duties by chartering a ship and putting the waste on the ship. When it proved impossible for the ship to find anywhere to sail to, Dispo had gone into liquidation. Brilliant.
Sly’s attitude would probably have been that business is a tough game; dog-eat-dog, and you had to admire their audacity.
174: THE FIRST OF MANY
During the three years that the Ataria C42 drifted about, occasionally being allowed to take on more fuel or food, the seas became crowded with lepers. Slowly, as people began to wake up to the appalling danger of this stuff, fewer and fewer were prepared to even consider trying to deal with it. Unfortunately, the poisons still got made and so more and more ships found themselves floating about, sitting on enough poison to wipe out an ocean. These were the Swords of Damocles.
Just as CD was crying over Rachel, crying over the sort of small, human things that make life worth living, the sword fell for the Ataria C42. In a terrible storm just west of Shark Bay, the ship ruptured and fifty-five thousand gallons of the choicest contents of Pandora’s Box flowed into the Indian Ocean, and hence into all the seas of the world.
175: RACHEL AND SLY
Why are you doing this?’ Sly asked bluntly, once he and Rachel were installed in the lounge room of his private quarters and he had poured out a couple of gin and tonics.
‘Doing what?’ replied Rachel, wondering hard how to play the situation. ‘Pursuing me and my business. Don’t you have anything better to do?’ he asked.
‘We’re concerned citizens. You’re the sort of person who will have bribed and bought out all the usual restraining influences so it’s up to people like us to keep an eye on you,’ Rachel replied.
‘And what is it that you think I’m doing that is so very wrong?’ asked Sly.
‘Well, shipping in high-grade missile fuel disguised as petrol, for a start.’ Rachel was gratified to note that Sly was extremely taken aback by this bald statement. She realized that in making it she had removed a card from her sleeve and placed it on the table, but there seemed little point in concealing her knowledge. After all, he could not tell from it what else she knew. Rachel felt that Walter had been right, if inept, in his efforts to convince Moorcock that he was up against a formidable force. Rachel did not know whether her life was in danger or not, but she thought that if it was, Moorcock would be less likely to do away with her if it seemed likely that there would be others to follow on and avenge her.
‘What do you know about the rocket fuel?’ asked Sly. ‘I don’t intend to answer any more of your questions. Let me and my friends go, or you’ll be sorry.’ Rachel was well aware that this statement had a credibility reading of zero but she didn’t have anything else to say. She had absolutely no idea of how to handle the situation for the best and so had decided to shut up. She needn’t have worried, Sly was going to be doing most of the talking. For a moment he sat staring at her across
the room. She was sitting cross legged on the sofa, holding her glass defensively, like a shield. She looked great.
Sly was preparing to throw caution to the wind.
176: CRUSH
Not everybody falls in love as impulsively as Sly had done. For some, love grows; it slowly dawns on them. One day they might think ‘mmm nice bum’ and leave it at that. Later, perhaps at the office party, whilst casually chatting, they discover a mutual interest in religious music. After that, dinner and a movie just seem like a logical step…
‘No way is it serious, I don’t even know if we get on, actually.’
A massively disappointing first-shag serves to cement a mutual sympathy and finally, about a decade later, comes the, ‘You know, I don’t know, but I think I might be in love with you, what do you think? Or is that stupid, I mean, if it is, forget it?’
But not everybody is so cautious.
Once, whilst driving along a country highway late at night, Sly had caught a seven foot Red Kangaroo in his head-lights and, seconds later, had slammed into it full across the ‘roo bars at a highly illegal hundred and forty kilometres. This is how some people fall in love. Sly had always wondered how the ‘roo must have felt. Now he knew.
The reason so many ‘roos get spread across bonnets is because they have an instinctive fascination for light sources. Unfortunately for them, when they get caught in head-lamps, they stop dead still and stare straight into the light; oblivious of the consequences; entirely captured by the magic of the beams. Sly was just the same, except of course that he didn’t have a huge long tail and a pouch with a baby in it. He was mesmerized by Rachel’s light.