by Ben Elton
‘So what’s the problem then?’
‘There is no problem. It is just that the world is about to realize it is dying. Even the suspicion that there is an escape route might cause the more volatile to investigate. There is no room on Stark for panic-stricken hordes. The chances of information leakage are at present small but then again so are the microbes at the bottom of the food chain and look at the damage they have wrought. It would certainly be preferable if we could locate the American.’
‘Locate’ of course being Durf-speak for kill.
190: POWERS OF PERSUASION
Neither Sly nor Tyron had mentioned to Durf that they held all but one of the journalist’s friends who, one presumed, must hold the key to her whereabouts. Sly had kept quiet because he was concerned for Rachel, and Tyron because he was determined to sort the situation out himself. He would make them talk, he would find the American and everything could proceed as planned.
Therefore, while Sly returned to his quarters to tell Rachel that the moment had come and that she’d better decide, Tyron collected Du Pont and returned to his prisoners.
191: ADMINISTRATIVE METHODS
The prisoners had now spent nearly an entire night tied up on chairs and were looking pretty bedraggled — which in Walter’s case meant exactly the same as usual. However, Tyron was disappointed to discover that their long hours of discomfort had made them no more co-operative. With only eight days left, Tyron determined to dispense with the charm idea altogether and get straight down to business.
He ordered Du Pont to do his stuff.
Du Pont had the guards drag CD, still bound to a chair, into the middle of the room.
‘Guys, guys, guys,’ said CD, trying to lighten the tone a little. ‘Really this is so medieval, surely there is a better way. I mean, we just don’t do this sort of thing any more.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Du Pont, who loved saying things like ‘on the contrary’ to helpless prisoners. It ranked up there with phrases like ‘that was very foolish’ and ‘please do not underestimate me, Mr Bond’. Despite his bandaged nose, Du Pont was feeling particularly tough and hard. ‘Torture is more prevalent today as an accepted part of the armoury of the busy administrator than it has ever been,’ continued Du Pont.
CD watched in cold horror as Du Pont opened his small suitcase and took from it, amongst other things, a kind of wire sponge, rather like an enormous pan scrubber. CD wondered if he was to be flayed alive with a huge scouring pad.
‘I’ll tell you a good way of torturing people,’ CD babbled. ‘Water! It’s a sure fire one, water! That’s right, the Chinese water torture. What you do is you drip water on a person’s head…Ugh! It’s just horrible! I mean, it drives people into agony and insanity through the sort of maddening inevitability of it. Why don’t you do that one to me? Go on, drip water on my head, phew! I bet I wouldn’t be able to take that one.’
But it was a futile effort. CD was relying on the old war movie cliche that the worst tortures are not physical, but ingeniously psychological. Well doubtless you end up with less mess on the carpet, but if one were to ask the average victim whether, given the choice, they would opt to be irritated by water, or have five billion volts shot through their nipples, that person might just choose to learn to live with the splish, splish, splish.
CD was not to be given such an option. It was to be straight physical intimidation for him. He realized he had been wrong with the flaying theory when Du Pont put on thick rubber gloves and attached two jump leads to the wire wool. The leads ran back into a variable transformer, which was, in its turn, plugged into the wall.
‘Look, man, please, I mean, you know!’ said Walter. He was a hard man but what was going on would have upset a horny sadist in a party mood. ‘Look, this is ridiculous, I mean, please.’
‘Just tell us where the Yank bitch is,’ barked Tyron, using the word ‘bitch’ in order to enter into the spirit of the occasion. CD was thinking hard. To disclose the location of the Culboons’ holiday home, where Chrissy was waiting, would almost certainly mean her death. On the other hand, he had no illusions as to what his performance would be under torture. He was faced with what must be the classic dilemma in such circumstances. Why not give in immediately? Since the chances are almost certain that you’re going to capitulate in the end, should one not simply collapse in the first place and save oneself a great deal of unnecessary unpleasantness.
CD had considered lying of course, saying something along the lines of, ‘The Yank bitch is holed up in the old quarry’. But he knew it would be pointless, his interrogators knew that Chrissy was either in or around Bullens Creek. A helicopter could check out any story in less than fifteen minutes, and then no doubt it would be a bigger sponge and longer jump leads.
Du Pont instructed one of the guards to pour a jug of water over CD. The guard had to fill it, because it was the same jug that Zimmerman had gargled with the previous morning as a health precaution after biting into Du Pont’s nose.
They soaked CD down, but he was under no illusions that he was to be subjected to Chinese water torture.
192: WARTIME MEMORIES
On the roof Zimmerman wondered how long he could afford to give it before he made a move. He did not particularly wish to make a move. He was, after all, pretty heavily outnumbered and a day and a night hiding on top of a roof in the searing greenhouse heat had made him wilt a little. But he would have to do something. Through a tiny crack in the guttering he could see the steel-grey sponge and he recalled the last time he had encountered such a device.
The Vietnam war had been an unpleasant one even considering the high standards of horror set by modern conflicts. Both sides paid scant regard to the Geneva Convention. Zimmerman had himself taken part in Napalming civilians although he had never committed the private cruelties of rape and pillage that were so common. On the other hand, he had himself been subjected to inhuman cruelties by the other side. The Vietcong had caught him on a forward reconnaissance, and had, with the aid of the battery from a crashed US helicopter gunship, subjected him to electric shock treatment in order to discover where the rest of his Yankee unit were. In vain had Zimmerman protested that he was Australian, they were not interested.
Zimmerman had been almost as mad at the time as he later became and so he was able to withstand the torment for the ten minutes he underwent it. That is until a low-level bombing raid mercifully dispersed the party. On the other hand, he was aware that he would not have lasted much longer. It hurt.
193: SHOCK TREATMENT
CD’s whole body convulsed. Despite the fact that he was tied to a chair, he managed to jump about six feet in the air. He screamed. Walter screamed. Mrs Culboon bit her rag grimly.
The world will never know how much CD could have taken, although he himself later admitted with disarming honesty that as the water dispersed the shock across his whole body, he knew that he could have taken absolutely no more whatsoever. But, before anyone had a chance to find out if this was the case, Zimmerman sailed back in through the window out of which he had made his exit so many hours before.
Everyone was shocked at this sudden apparition. It was Tyron’s second shock within a few seconds. He had not really imagined that the disgusting Du Pont would actually start torturing anybody for real. Even Tyron balked a bit at that. He had presumed that the whole purpose of the torture threats had been to scare the prisoners into submission. Oh sure, a punch or two maybe, but not this. Tyron was a businessman, and this wasn’t his business. He was quite capable of ordering death and beatings at long distance, and had done so in the case of Linda Reeve, but this close up horror was too near the knuckle by half.
Du Pont had rather shocked himself as it happened, he was just a little git really and for all his bluster he had never had the chance to properly do something like this before. Zimmerman had been surprised too. He never thought Du Pont would do it. He thought, like Tyron, that the whole thing was bluster and intimidation. That was why he had let C
D take the first shot, he hadn’t believed that it would happen. Of course, now that it had, he was forced to act.
Of course, the person most shocked of all was CD, but that was because he had just had about a million volts up him.
When he heard CD scream, Zimmerman realized that his only allies were speed and surprise, hence the entry had to be good. He flipped over onto his back, gripped the guttering, kicked hard, throwing his legs over his body, off the edge of the roof and swinging down in through the open window.
‘Zimm!!’ shouted a delighted Walter, ‘Oh man…‘ He was about to add that Zimmerman’s sudden appearance just had to be one of the very finest trips since the Beatles released ‘Pepper’, but there simply wasn’t time.
‘Freeze!’ said Zimmerman, brandishing the gun that he had taken from Du Pont.
At least he would have been brandishing it if he hadn’t accidentally left it on the roof. All he was actually brandishing at the surprised guards was fingers. Luckily he realized his mistake before anyone else did and he was able to grab the gun of the guard standing nearest. Zimm did not even have to hit him, the guard just let go. This is the sort of effect that you can get if you start a fight by flying in unexpectedly through the window.
‘Right,’ said Zimmerman, ‘I’ll start again. Freeze!!’
194: CONTEMPLATING TREACHERY
195: HORROR MOVIES
The previous night, after Rachel had told Sly that she would think about his unusual chat up line, he had very considerately left her with what he hoped would be sufficient evidence to bring her around to his way of thinking.
The evidence was in the form of a video film and it made your average horror movie look like something intended for Granny and the wee ones. Any Hollywood producer worth his salt who had chanced to see Sly’s video, would have quickly realized that all the stuff about monsters exploding out of people’s stomachs and small girls being raped by the devil, was totally out of the window. Once you’ve been chilled and thrilled by the story of the Sandoz Chemical Plant screwing up the Rhine or the slow death of the Baikal Lake, it no longer seems particularly worrying that a group of teenagers on a holiday camp get cut to bits with chainsaws because they’re too stupid not to go down to the old boat shed.
The Sandoz and Baikal stories were just two of the many that were touched upon in the videos that Rachel watched with increasing despair. It opened with the bleak announcement that it was a top secret preparation to be viewed by members of the Stark consortium only. Sly was still in the room when this message came on…
‘I’m not a member of the Stark consortium,’ Rachel protested.
‘Once you’ve watched that you will be,’ smiled Sly and left her to it.
The show opened with a smart-alec looking fellow in an eye patch, addressing the camera. Professor Durf announced that the time had come to leave. That the long feared moment of truth was finally upon the Stark consortium.
‘I can think of no better illustration to underline the urgency of our situation than to suggest that were God to attempt to take out an insurance policy on the world, he would not be able to afford the premiums.’
This was Durf’s little joke. He had decided to kick-off with a gag just to show that, despite things being in a terrible state, he at least could maintain his suave intellectual detachment.
‘What an arrogant creep,’ thought Rachel. Durf followed his little gag with a warning against a false sense of security engendered by current political cant.
‘Of late, certain politicians have been attempting to play the green card in their grubby scramble for public support. Believe me, such tokenism is entirely cynical. The situation can never be reversed whilst market forces remain superior to political will. The politicians have always left us alone, and they will always leave us alone, because we pay the piper, and we call the tune.’
Much of what followed Rachel already knew something about, but the sheer weight of current catastrophe certainly took her by surprise. It could not have been a more unmitigated tale of gloom and impotent despair if it had been written by Dostoyevsky.
It started on a fairly light note, briefly detailing the world’s smaller disasters, like the 1986 Sandoz Chemical leak in Switzerland. This minor incident, which at the time was entirely overshadowed by the World Cup, concerned the accidental discharge of thirty tonnes of toxic waste into the Rhine. Of course, thirty tonnes doesn’t sound that much — the lead singers of heavy metal bands can sometimes weigh as much as that — but the seriousness of a toxic leak depends entirely on how toxic the leak is. Well, in the case of Sandoz, the words ‘very, very’ spring to mind, and then spring out again as being scarcely adequate. And then spring back again for the want of a better alternative. Put it this way, if the universe is very, very, big, then the Sandoz leak was very, very toxic. That thirty tonnes leaked from one factory, into one river, swept through France, Germany and Holland and killed every single living organism in its path.
The catalogue of disaster unfolded before Rachel. She learnt of the Baikal. Situated in the Soviet Union it is the world’s largest lake. The Russian people harbour a love for it of huge and mystical proportions, which is rather apt because the lake is itself of huge and mystical proportions, being a kilometre and a half deep and containing, according to some, 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water. ‘Fresh’ of course being a loose description for something that is being filled with shit and industrial waste.
Everything that Sly had attempted to impress upon Rachel unfolded before her on the TV. The message was always the same. The myriad destruction in every single area of the natural world must soon provoke a total breakdown. The time had come to bugger off.
Rachel’s head was numb. It couldn’t have been more numb if she’d woken up in the middle of the night to discover that she’d been sleeping on it in an awkward position…So this was the way the world was to end. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with retching nausea as the teeming billions struggled for their final gulps of food and air before sinking for ever into the stench, filth, disease and slime that would certainly be our final environment in the huge rubbish dump and toilet that we have created out of Paradise.
196: LORDS OF CREATION
Professor Durf was speaking again…‘As you all know, as principal creators of the world’s wealth — the one human creation, I am happy to say, that remains untainted and unpolluted — we have known for many years now that were human activity to continue unchecked it would and must lead to oblivion. We declined to interfere though, believing social engineering to be immoral. We all hoped, of course, that market forces would produce a solution; that ecologically responsible activity would somehow become profitable. As we know, it hasn’t and that is just too bad. We had a duty to progress, to make money and create wealth, that was our bounden mission. If the earth had to die in the defence of a free market economy, then it is a noble death.’
Rachel glanced around for a bucket, this man was the human equivalent of sticking two fingers down your neck.
‘Now is the time to look to the future,’ the televised Durf continued. ‘Now is the time to board the ‘Starks’, the Star Arks. It is fitting that you, the world’s richest men, should lead the human race to fresh fields and pastures new. For in the time of the first Ark the people worshipped God and hence, Noah, the most pious of men, was chosen to survive the flood and shape the future. In modern times people worship money, Money God in that it has been deified and can clearly be said to rule our lives. Hence, as I say, it is fitting that you, the super-rich, those who have worshipped money with a diligence and conviction far above the faith of lesser men, that you should board the Star Arks and carry our faith to a new civilization beyond the flood, on the moon.’
197: A DIFFICULT OFFER TO REFUSE
Clearly Rachel’s moral dilemma was a considerable one. Such was the depth of her concentration that she scarcely noticed the thunder in the sky which signalled the arrival of Nagasyu’s final deliveries.
&
nbsp; On the one hand she was disgusted. It was worse than the time she had inadvertently seen someone pick their nose and eat it. These repulsive people, having made a very large contribution to screwing up the world, now intended to slink off and leave everybody literally in the shit. Rachel would no more wish to associate with this type of human slug than she would voluntarily set up home in a nest of game-show hosts…And yet…and yet.
One thing was certain, Rachel no longer doubted the Vanishing Point scenario. Everybody was going to die, and die pretty unpleasantly at that. Except of course, not everybody. There was, it seemed, a flight out, and because a man with the hots for her had got a couple of tickets, she was being offered salvation.
She played the situation around and around in her mind. Strangely she was not over-exercised about the imminent end of earth. Despite the fact that she believed in it now, it still seemed like a story. What Rachel was wrestling with was simply the moral dilemma. The choice between a pointless act of suicidal courage and an act of pragmatic self-preservation. It was clear that no useful purpose could be served by her staying and she flattered herself that she deserved to live as much, if not more, than some bimbo that Moorcock might choose to take if she declined to go. The morals of the situation were by no means cut and dried. Rachel was no more guilty than anyone else, it wasn’t her fault that we killed the world.
She kept on thinking. Wondering what she would do; wondering where her friends were; wondering what she thought about Sly.
And so the long night wore on, the last night before the Stark count-down began.