London Wild

by V. E. Shearman

  ‘I’ll remember,’ Myajes replied woodenly.

  ‘Then there’s just one more thing for me to say for now.’ Doctor Foster seemed to pause for dramatic effect before adding, ‘Welcome to Mars!’ Then the screen was turned off and returned to its previous state as an opaque glass wall.

  Mars, thought Myajes, lying back on the bed again and staring up at the ceiling. Mars, how had he gotten to Mars? And what were the implications of being on Mars? If he should escape from the cell somehow, where could he go? Mars was an enclosed community. Even if the laboratory were hidden in a less frequented part of the colony, he wouldn’t be able to get off the planet without someone noticing him. He still wanted to escape. Whatever it was that had nullified his anger hadn’t removed his desire to live. But how could he escape, and where could he go if he did escape? The first step was to escape. There was no point worrying about how he was going to get off the planet if he couldn’t even get out of the cell.

  He was still considering options when he heard a gentle buzz from the corridor. This was followed by a sound similar to rushing air but which Myajes assumed was probably the outer door of his airlock prison opening. When a figure appeared in full view just behind the glass door of his cell a moment later, he realized he had assumed correctly.

  She was female and probably no taller than about five foot two. Her hair was predominantly black and carefree, but it had regular veins of red through it. Her eyes were yellow with vertical pupils, and her skin was covered in thick stripes.

  It took him less than a second to realize that the woman beyond the door, the woman bringing him lunch, was Herbaht. He watched her carefully, sitting up on the bed and waiting as she opened the door with another rushing air noise and came in.

  ‘M-Myajes?’ she said. There was fear in her voice, or was it awe at being so close to him? ‘I’ve brought you some lunch, s-some beef and p-pork and s-s-something to drink.’

  Myajes was taken in at first, but it didn’t take too long for him to realize that something was wrong. It was her scent. He hadn’t been able to smell her properly when she had been outside the door. It was obviously an airtight door, which would also explain the rushing air noise when it was opened. Once she had walked in, however, it became obvious. It wasn’t that she smelt of herd; she didn’t, but nor did she smell of anything else that he could really put a name to. She was female; he could tell that with his eyes, but not with his nose. That part of her scent seemed to be missing. She was obviously scared or in awe of him, but again there was nothing to suggest that in her scent. True, she did smell vaguely of Herbaht, but it was wrong, weak, more of a suggestion than a fact. It was as if someone had been playing with smells, trying to create the scent, and they had forgotten to allow for emotions. The upshot was that Myajes knew he couldn’t trust her. ‘I have no table, yet. Just put it on the floor for now and I’ll eat it later.’

  ‘Okay,’ she replied. She put the plate down as commanded. Then she turned to approach him.

  ‘Stop,’ he said, eyeing her suspiciously.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘I have to hand you this pill thing; it’s to supplement your diet.’

  ‘And keep me docile?’ Myajes countered. That might explain his lack of anger, he realized.

  ‘To keep you alive,’ she replied imploringly. ‘I’m supposed to watch you take it.’

  ‘Why should I bother?’ he asked calmly. ‘They intend to kill me anyway in a week or two, and I’ll survive easily without taking a pill until then.’

  ‘Please,’ she pleaded, ‘they’ll kill me if I fail.’

  ‘And why should I care if they kill you?’ Myajes replied coldly. ‘Who are you anyway? I can tell you’re herd, despite what you appear to be. Maybe you’re the elusive Doctor Jones?’

  She sighed and turned to face the camera. ‘Okay, I guess this stuff doesn’t work,’ she told it with no thought to the fact that Myajes sat right there in earshot.

  ‘Back to the drawing board,’ came the reply. It sounded like the man Myajes had spoken to earlier. ‘I think we must be close, though.’

  ‘What is it?’ Myajes asked; he didn’t really expect an answer.

  ‘Oh, just some stuff that was picked up from one of your laboratories in Sou’nd,’ was the reply. ‘It was supposed to block the scent of the wearer from our sniffer dogs. We’re trying to create a similar version that can fool cats. It’s adding the actual Herbaht smell that’s the tricky part.’

  ‘Oh, that bit’s fine,’ Myajes lied. ‘I was taken in by her scent. It was her mannerisms and her stripes that were wrong; the stripes were a dead giveaway.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ was the reply. ‘Anyway, may I introduce the fourth member of my staff, as you’ve deduced, Doctor Jones?’

  The striped woman inclined her head gently towards Myajes in acknowledgement.

  ‘Now,’ continued the voice, ‘I really think you should do as the lady asks and take the pill. We have ways of ensuring you do, you know, and I’ve warned you about disobedience.’

  Myajes decided to push the point; his mindset was such that he wasn’t sure he could swallow the pill anyway. Even the idea of it made him feel a little queasy. Besides, if he was ever going to find a way out of this cell he would rather not be dragged down with docility drugs. ‘No,’ he told the voice.

  There was a sigh from the other side of the speaker. ‘Very well, the next time we speak will be tomorrow. That will be when I introduce you to the truth drug. Until then, Doctor Jones, if you would be kind enough to rejoin me out here. And get out of that ridiculous makeup.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor,’ she replied. She walked out of the door, taking the pill with her.

  Myajes watched her go for a minute. He felt he had won a moral victory. They hadn’t tried to press the issue with him, and hopefully in a day or two he would get the full use of his emotions back. He sniffed the air absently as he leaned back on the bed. The smell of her lingered since she had only recently left; there was no herd in that smell. It was the lack of emotions more than anything that had given her away. It might be enough to fool a sniffer dog looking for one scent perhaps, but not enough to fool someone who might realize that certain other smells were missing.

  Then he noticed another smell, a sickly sweet smell. At first he tried to remember if she had brought it in with her, and then he realized they were gassing him. He looked around quickly for the air vent. His headache started pounding worse with the stress. There was no air vent in the room, but there must be; the breathable air had to be piped in somehow. A thought struck him; it had to be under the bed. Although it looked like a hospital bed at first glance, the main frame of the bed left a gap of no more than half an inch off of the bottom between it and the floor. It had been designed to make the air vent inaccessible. Myajes tried desperately to move the bed, but it was either too heavy for him, which he doubted, or it had been fixed into position.

  The gas was slow and subtle. Had he been human, he would probably have been unconscious before he’d realized it was even there. As it was, it took five minutes to knock him out from when he first caught scent of it on the air. Four and half of those he had spent trying to move the bed or feel under it for the air vent with a mind to block it with something.

  Day Eight

  Skirmish

  The docility drug that is found in the human made version of the pill is designed to inhibit but not prevent the body’s ability to produce adrenalin. Its effects can actually be overcome with a lot of willpower, but this is extremely difficult and is greatly dependent on the general attitude of the subject.

  31

  The Moon

  It was evident that somebody had pressed the panic button. Gatwick Spaceport had been extremely busy for the last couple of days as people tried to leave the city in their millions, leaving London virtually deserted. Now the crowds of passengers at the spaceport had dropped to a mere shadow of what they had been before Sou’nd had even been mentioned.

  As if to fill th
e void left by the lack of customers, a small army of soldiers, police, and spaceport security, and their numerous sniffer dogs could be found in every corridor and in every room of every terminal at the spaceport. It was obvious that someone had decided Gatwick was an obvious target for the cats to hit, and maybe it was.

  Charles had gotten there early, partly because the dossier he had been handed at yesterday’s meeting suggested he get there an hour earlier, but mainly because he was still unprepared for just how empty the streets of London were these days. With so few vehicles on the road, he had made the trip in a little over a fifth of the time it might have taken a week or two previous.

  The dossier actually told him very few of the things he felt he needed to know about his mission. It didn’t even go into any real detail of the mission itself. There was only a short sentence telling him he would be briefed when he arrived on the moon. There was nothing that he might consider useful, and he had read it several times in case he had missed some hidden cryptic message. There was no mention of anything he might need to take with him. Should he bring a weapon, or would they be supplied? How long was the mission for; should he pack clothes for three days or three months? What about the evenings? Did the networks still transmit the news to the moon, or would he need to take his own entertainment? What about holomovies or computer games or even books? He knew there was a library on the moon, but since anyone considered not vital to what was happening there had been kicked off, would he be able to get something to read? None of this information was listed in the dossier. So he packed for three months; he brought books and games and yes, even a laser pistol. Charles didn’t expect the weapon to be a problem; he was assuming that his flight to the moon would bypass the usual check-in procedures, especially as big yellow banners with sharp blue writing were hanging above the arrival and departures boards declaring no flights were currently being made to or from the moon.

  He wandered through the waiting lounge, unsure of what he should be doing or where he should be going. He had arrived at the spaceport a good two hours before his flight was due, and all he had was the name of the pilot of his shuttle. The people who had put his dossier together hadn’t even supplied him with a picture of the pilot. However, since his own face had been on the various newspaper networks so often, especially in the last few days, he hoped that the pilot would walk by and recognize him, and thus save Charles the trouble of having to page him. The terminal’s waiting lounge was a good place to pass the time. He wouldn’t look out of place here, and it was an obvious place for the pilot to come and look for him.

  He took a seat in a part of the waiting lounge near the sign that indicated which way people should go to reach the gates from which all the moon-bound shuttles had previously left. They were currently being used as an overflow for some of the other gates, but with so few actual customers in the spaceport they were really no longer needed as such.

  Almost as soon as he had sat down, a news story on the nearest public newspaper caught his attention. He moved to a new seat to get a better view and then watched attentively.

  A man appeared on the screen. He appeared to be standing in his living room beside a wall mirror that was reflecting part of him. He was very young, black-haired and clean-shaven, and he wore a royal blue top complete with a badly tied tie that looked as if he had only just put it on just for the camera. The voice from the monitor was both soft and quiet. It was hard to hear with the hubbub in the main body of the lounge. Had Charles wanted to ignore it he would have found it very easy to do, and as it was it seemed to take a lot of effort to hear clearly what was being said.

  ‘It was at about three o’clock last night that Lindsey Cooper was disturbed by a band of cats breaking into his house. They were no doubt out for blood after that fiasco with Slim Dorris and Sou’nd. Lindsey, known to his friends simply as ‘Chip’ because he likes the occasional gamble, was woken up by the intruders as they broke through the kitchen window, having first knocked out the protective field generator. Without even a moment’s thought to consider the danger he might be in, he sprang into action. Obviously the first thing he tried to do was call the police, not aware then that it was cats and not just a burglar that he was up against. But it would take time for the police to get there. If he was going to stay alive in the interim, he’d have to do it himself. Fortunately, ever since Slim first announced his move on Sou’nd, Chip had been expecting trouble, and he had gotten himself a small holdout laser pistol which he kept in a cabinet beside his bed for just such a situation as this.’

  ‘Well,’ said the man in the blue top, obviously very nervous and not used to talking to a camera, ‘I wasn’t about to let the cats chase me out of my rightful home, was I? Like many, I have decided to stay in London and try to make a stand.’

  The first voice continued as the camera moved from the man who had just spoken and started moving about the house, concentrating on the areas which Lindsey and the cats had apparently fought over. There showed some blood stains splattered on a few of the walls, the broken windows through which the cats had originally entered the house, and the damage that had been done about the house in the exchange of gunfire. ‘Lindsey kept his head about him, intending at first just to keep his assailants away from where he was hiding. However, it soon became a bit more hectic as the cats tried to use small explosive devices to try and dislodge Chip from his cover.’ The camera zoomed in to show the damage around the bedroom doorway caused by these small explosives. ‘It is clear that the cats weren’t worried that neighbors might overhear what was happening and come to help. Maybe they had correctly assumed that the neighbors had already left the city for safer climes.’

  There was a short pause as more of the damage around the bedroom door was shown, and then the voice continued, ‘Although we can’t be sure, the forensics experts say they think the firefight was fought for well over an hour.’

  Chip’s voice cut in, ‘I couldn’t say for sure how long the fight lasted. It only seemed like a few minutes to me, but time seems to do funny things when your life is on the line.’

  Then the first voice returned. ‘After the first of the explosive devices had been used on his room, Chip decided he’d better keep on the move, and thus try to keep the cats busy, buying time for the police who he was sure must be on their way by now.’

  ‘All I cared about was staying alive and keeping the cats back,’ said the voice of Chip as the camera continued to survey the scene. ‘I had no idea of how well I was doing until I came across the first dead body. All I was trying to do was force the cats to keep their distance and leave me alone. I had no way of telling that I had actually killed three of them until after the gunfight was over. I had no idea how many there had been in the first place. Then I began checking the rooms in my house, one at a time. I was still scared that they might just be waiting for me, but by now the cops were appearing and I felt I was better able to relax after my ordeal and let the cops take over.’

  The first voice cut in, ‘It appears that there was a fourth cat that managed to escape back the way they had first gotten in, through the kitchen window. It is believed he or she had a car waiting and fled just before the police arrived. It is also thought from blood stains found on the broken window that the fourth cat had been injured.’

  Charles shook his head sadly and found a new seat where he couldn’t see the screen quite so well. He hadn’t even left the Earth yet, but already they had found a replacement for him. Chip, what sort of nickname was that for a hero? And what would the police have to say about the claim that they took over an hour to reach the scene, especially as the streets were so empty of traffic these days? He had little doubt that if he were to examine the film he would find many errors with it, errors that most people would simply ignore because they knew no better. He decided he didn’t really care if they were dumping him for this new hero. In a week’s time they would have forgotten all about him and maybe he’d be able to walk down the street without being hassled. Okay, he d
id care a little. Twice the broadcast had denigrated his actions as if the whole thing with Sou’nd had been his idea, and okay, maybe it was supposed to have been. But in the end he had been little more than a scapegoat for the government’s foul-up. He had warned them, they had ignored him, and he got the blame. He wondered if the network supplying the news had been one of those to lose a reporter on that day. That might help explain their biased way of reporting.

  He decided not to worry about it. In a few short hours he would be on the moon and the world would be a long way behind him. Besides, if he were such a failure, why would the Prime Minister have asked for him specifically? He glanced at his watch; there was still a good hour to go before he was supposed to be here. He piled his suitcases one upon the other and rested his feet on them, so he would know if anyone tried to disturb them while he took a quick nap. It was more to pass the time than because he was tired; there wasn’t really a lot else to do in the waiting lounge.

  It was a waste of time trying to sleep, though. There were too many people wandering past the area in which he was sitting, and every so often someone would call out his name as if they somehow expected him to know who they were. Even when they didn’t seem to be addressing him directly, he could hear people talking about him as they walked by, and not always in a complimentary fashion.

  Sniffer dogs were so well trained and their sense of smell so good that a dog at one end of the room could almost definitely smell a cat that happened to be lurking at the other. However, several times he noticed dogs with their handlers walk by, and occasionally one of the handlers would get overzealous and insist on having their dog within a foot or two of those that were sitting in the waiting areas. This happened twice to Charles. The first time, within about a quarter of an hour of him taking a seat, the handler—a policeman in this case—didn’t seem to recognize who he had disturbed and, making a quick apology, was gone shortly afterwards.