by Hammond, Ray
‘May I ask if you signed a waiver when you bought that, Mr Harriman?’
There was a silence. Then the counsellor nodded.
‘I suppose I must have done,’ he admitted, looking around the table for support. ‘Well, none of us read standard retail sales conditions, do we?’
Without waiting for the waiver forms to be passed around or read, Joe stepped back from the table.
‘Now let’s look at the Solar Energy Division and the projected global take-up of Tye Corp’s high-efficiency solar-energy fuel cells,’ he said authoritatively.
*
Hope Island had an early-rising culture and, just after eleven p.m., the seaside suburbs of Hope Town became quieter as less noise drifted across the small bay.
Calypso had chosen as her home a beach bungalow a mile away from Little Venice, the main harbour frontage and marina with its ‘world restaurants’ and themed bars. The Island’s Welcome brochure, which had been given to her on her arrival three months before, boasted that every cuisine in the world was available along a one-mile stretch of waterside restaurants.
And so it was, but Calypso did not feel like walking out to eat this evening. The scare over Tom Jnr’s accident had left her feeling both alert and drained at the same time and, once the boy had been returned to his latest nanny in the great house up on the mountain terraces, Calypso had been grateful just to take the Mag back to her bungalow, open a bottle of wine and heat a frozen pepperoni pizza. It was made at Mario’s, down by the marina, and contained delicious and medicinally active ingredients. As a doctor she loved the idea that she could adjust and protect her body’s biochemistry with a meal she enjoyed but that could not help to make her overweight. The pepperoni topping had become one of her firm favourites.
She had kept communication open, of course. Tommy’s VideoMate broadcast updates from his LifeWatch every thirty seconds and she was sure there would be little change. When she had eaten she had tried to catch up on her reading, her VideoMate, open beside her, displaying Tommy’s steady life signs. She could tell he was asleep, still mildly sedated.
Calypso logged on to two journal discussion centres and skimmed through the postings but, even as she did, she knew she was too distracted to concentrate properly. She marked articles and threads that she would revisit and turned away from her screens. She had changed into a white silk dressing gown and now she switched off the air-conditioning and opened the door to the small veranda.
Within seconds a close heat filled the small room and she smiled. She often did this at the end of an evening. It reminded her of how it had been back home, when there were seven of them and the nights were so hot she would go out and sleep on the beach.
On a whim, she turned out the house lights and stepped into the night. The white beach sloped gently in front of her, down towards the dark, glittering sea. High above, innumerable satellites pierced the black sky with their staccato bursts of laser communications – like those old Star Wars movies, she thought. Beyond were the soft pinpricks of light clusters that made up the constellations of the Corona Borealis and Hercules.
She heard a roar in the distance and she looked south. Far over the Atlantic, beyond the floating spaceport, she saw the white flame of one of the Tye Aerospace space shuttles as it graduated from jet propulsion to rocket power. She had become used to the spectacle since she had arrived on the island but still she stood and watched the white light grow smaller as the vehicle accelerated towards orbit. In a few minutes it was just another pinprick of light in the sky.
She looked to her left and right. There was no movement. Nobody else was sufficiently interested to come out into their gardens to watch a routine launch. The beach bungalows had been placed at eighty-yard intervals, enough space to give privacy but, the planners claimed, close enough for a community to emerge. All lights were out. Most of the other residents on this beach were professional staff, medics, like herself, or teachers from the school and the university, pilots, astronauts, air traffic movement supervisors or spaceport personnel. There were also many patent attorneys. All took early nights.
Calypso walked down the beach and grabbed a swimsuit and a pair of goggles she had left to dry over her hammock. She slipped the costume up over her legs and allowed her robe to fall from her shoulders at the water’s edge. She slipped her arms into the suit, fitted the goggles, waded forward and then dived, exhilarating in the tang of the cool salt water as it swept over her body.
Clear advice was given to all residents not to swim in the seas around Hope Island. The currents were strong and the beaches shelved sharply. Also, sharks were regularly sighted.
But Calypso had grown up with this sea. It was the same sea that had lapped her beach on Mayaguana and she understood its ways and those of its inhabitants. Like her namesake in Homer’s Odyssey, she was a sea nymph, the daughter of Oceanus. Her brothers had teased her that it had been her constant swimming that had produced her statuesque frame, those shoulders, that neck, those breasts – a body providing the perfect complement to the breathtaking, fine-boned symmetry of her face. It was a feature so provocative it had prompted an ebony-black and somewhat platyrrhine runner-up in one beauty contest to describe Calypso, rather uncharitably, as ‘beautiful but undeniably mulatta’ in an interview for the Jamaica Gleaner. But where had those startling amber eyes come from? They had to be an atavistic attribute, perhaps from her maternal Arawak Indian grandmother.
As an adult, Calypso still swam three or four times a week. She could cross the bay and back again in two hours but this evening she decided that she would merely venture around the small headland before returning – a mile’s journey that would take her forty-five minutes. In truth, she didn’t want to be away for too long from her VideoMate and its link to her charge.
She stroked her way past the Gene Scene, a beach so named because the DNA snippers from the biotechnology research campus broke every island rule on this small strip of sand they had made their own. Rumour had it that they made all their own recreational drugs, each one tuned for its own user, and they certainly did like to party all night. As her body rolled with her strong easy freestyle crawl, she could see half a dozen bonfires flickering in the darkness.
She ploughed on for a further ten minutes until she felt a colder shaft of water hit her from below. That meant she had reached the headland and would soon be leaving the Caribbean Sea for the Atlantic Ocean, so she turned and headed for the low rocks at the water’s edge. As she often did, she would haul herself onto the rocks and sit for ten minutes, before starting on her return. Even this late in the evening, the limestone would still be warm from the day’s sun.
A figure was sitting on her favourite rock. She paused, treading water. He stood suddenly – he had seen her.
‘You OK?’ His voice sounded thin across the water, even though only a dozen yards separated them.
Calypso pulled off her goggles and waved an acknowledgement. She realized it was Jack Hendriksen. He stood up and held out a white towel.
Chapter Five
The bicycle won’t go! Won’t go. Go on, push. It’s hard. Breaths are coming in laboured gasps. He hears her running behind the bicycle. He can feel her, he can smell her. She is pushing. It is too fast too fast too fast.
He soars up and over the girl and her propulsion. Her stupid clothes will get caught. It’s stupid stupid. All these strange people are laughing.
Look how I ride. Look how I ride. I can go fast. Are they looking? See. See.
The lawn and its narrow winding path are sunlit. People are gathered for something, all staring at the little girl.
Clothes catching. Pull at them pull at them, pull pull. He is tearing her stupid clothes off. But the tree always comes. No matter how many times he tries to control it, the tree just keeps on coming.
She is crying, the tears are hot, of shame, not hurt. Then she is carrying him. Alone together. The smells again, the smells. She is touching him between his legs the way The Doctor does when she si
ts on his knee.
Thomas Tye woke, bathed in sweat, both hands scrabbling down there where, as always, they had no busyness.
He looked at his VideoMate on the bedside table. He had woken one minute before the alarm time he’d set. He cursed as he saw that the DreamDial software he used to save him from that dream had not been activated. He was sure he had set it, even for this short nap before the important appointment he was now to keep on the terrace below. It would be a long time before he fumbled the settings again. He personally championed the DreamDial project through Consumer Electronics in order to protect him from her and The Doctor.
He showered, pulled on a dark sweatsuit and tied his hair back. He took the elevator down to the main viewing terrace in front of the house and walked out into the warm night air. As he had instructed, the rest of the huge house was without lights and the many garden lamps along the terrace pathways had been switched off Four hundred feet below, the white sand of his private beach stretched out to meet the dark, gentle swell of the Atlantic.
Connie was fully dressed and waiting for him beside a small patio table. She handed him a cup of jasmine tea.
He heard a sound and the Russian president emerged from the darkened house, dressed in a red silk dressing gown. His valet and his two most senior ministers – General Padorin, the Armed Forces Commander, and Leonid Konstantine, the Interior Minister – followed him. Anton Vlasik, another house guest despite Jack Hendriksen’s many objections, brought up the rear. The rest of the Russian party was lodged in VIP accommodation in Hope Town and they had not been asked to disturb their sleep for this demonstration.
Tye turned and nodded without saying anything. The President and his party did the same. Connie poured tea for them all.
The night was dark despite the intermittent laser-bursts of satellite communication overhead but it was as clear and cloudless as the meteorologists and their powerful Halcyon weather computer had predicted. The moon was very new and, unless an observer knew precisely where to search, almost invisible to the naked eye. Tye looked at his Piaget LifeWatch and scanned the quadrant of the sky where he knew the event would occur. He found Pegasus in the north-east and followed it up to Equuleus. It would be just a few degrees to the east. There.
The island was quiet and unlit. From this northern vantage point the observing party could see down the whole length of the corporate state past the main campus and out to Cape Hope and its floating white extension, where the spaceport runways and deep-water harbour were located. Tye knew they would all be watching down there too, the video cameras and sensors already recording.
Apart from those whose job it was to observe this experiment, and those on Hope Island whose duties kept them up until three a.m., few others on the planet would see the results of this first mid-power trial at close quarters. Hope Island ATC had re-routed all night-time air traffic well to the south.
Despite these precautions, Thomas Tye knew that the forthcoming celestial event would be widely recorded. But he doubted that any of the world’s observatories would be able to make sense of it. Each of the energy stations was cloaked in light-absorbent, radio-wave-dispersing materials and all communications had been encrypted and buried in the vast mass of inter-satellite radio transmissions. The fourteen large space stations had initially assumed their pre-booked orbit positions as granted by the UN Space Agency but, when the constructions had been finished, each had been boosted out of earth’s orbit and away to specific locations that Tye Aerospace had described as ‘part of the Space Location and Positioning System – a network of satellites to aid navigation in the solar system’. After that, they had become invisible to the world’s terrestrial observatories and the scores of orbiting telescopes.
None of the world’s many space agencies and observatories had publicly identified or queried any of the low-intensity tests undertaken around the planet in previous months. Most had been carried out in regions where it was just before dawn or immediately after dusk. Nor had they noticed any of the tests conducted in the non-visible frequencies. The assumption by the Phoebus Project Team was that the tests had simply been misinterpreted as natural phenomena.
In the next few weeks the controllers would have to take more chances by running high-energy tests in the visible spectrum, but they would choose unpopulated areas such as the South Pacific or the Arctic and, perhaps, an uninhabited forest area. They had to find a balance between the need for successful trials and their desire to keep details of the new service secret until its global launch on 30 August. Tye wanted his Russian deal to become a fait accompli before the world’s analysts had a chance to consider and pontificate on the implications of his new technology. Cuba would present tonight’s biggest problem as their patrol craft would undoubtedly witness the test first-hand, but Tye doubted whether the country’s astronomers or physicists were equipped to make a meaningful analysis.
He held his wrist up and switched his LifeWatch to a digital display. With just a hint of trepidation that things might not work as planned, he turned to the president and counted down the seconds to three a.m. – the darkest part of the summer night. He knew that if it worked delivery would be almost instantaneous.
Suddenly the island was bathed in light from end to end. Tye and the others squinted and averted their gaze. He pulled sunglasses from his sweatsuit pocket and put them on. He blinked as his eyes adapted.
The President’s valet had handed out sunglasses to his party, and they brought their heads back up as their eyes adjusted to the light.
Tye picked up a solarimeter from a coffee table and checked its reading. ‘That’s just one at mid-power,’ he said and he passed it to the president. The Russian leader read the display and nodded before passing it to the others.
Now that his eyes had become accustomed, Tye quickly scanned the horizon. He smiled. The square of light ended abruptly a few miles offshore. The focus calculations had been perfect and there seemed to be little leakage.
He then looked up at the source of the light. It had obliterated the illumination from the satellite laser beams as well as that from all the stars in the north-eastern sky.
Suddenly the light split into its component wavelengths and a brilliant vertical rainbow held Hope Island within a prism of colours. Tye heard Connie gasp at the beauty of the experience, even though she alone amongst the other observers on the terrace had been prepared for this aspect of the demonstration.
From the trees on the mountain behind them, and from the cliffs below, they heard the songs of frigate birds, sugar-birds, gulls and puffins as they woke to the false dawn.
The light integrated back to the full visible spectrum. Tye looked at his watch again and counted down the seconds until the end of the time scheduled for his brief demonstration.
As suddenly as it had arrived, the light was gone.
The president and his party began to clap with gusto, the sound bouncing off the plate-glass windows and the Dolomite marble flooring of the terrace.
On the beach far below, Jack Hendriksen was still staring up at the sky, at the point where the light had come from.
*
‘This place is a bloody shit-hole,’ spat the uniformed sergeant in his thin, squashed Afrikaner accent as the four-wheel-drive vehicle bounced over another pothole in the battered bridge that spanned the almost dry Hunyani River. ‘The worst in Africa.’
Ahead squatted a cluster of old stone buildings inside three rings of a high razor-wire fence. The sign at the entrance to the approach track identified the complex: Chikirubi Maximum Security Facility. Harare.
At the gate the guards took their passports, visas and visiting permits off to their post and examined them for fifteen minutes.
‘What’s the hold-up?’ shouted the sergeant eventually, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. He knew his accent and colour could provoke trigger-happiness almost instantly in Zimbabwe. He got no response.
‘It’s OK,’ said his black passenger quietly. ‘They just l
ike the feeling of self-importance it gives them.’
‘Skelms!’ hissed the sergeant quietly. ‘Do they want money?’
His passenger shook his head. ‘That’s all been done.’
After a further ten minutes one of the soldiers sauntered out of the guard post with their papers. The sergeant lowered his window again and the heat speared into the air-conditioned interior.
‘Recording equipment?’ asked the soldier, looking in the rear windows of the vehicle.
‘We don’t have any,’ said the sergeant.
‘Get down,’ ordered the soldier, opening the door. Three other guards lounged outside the gate house, their old AK47s crooked in their arms, ready for rapid use.
The visitors stepped out onto the dried mud. The soldier patted the sergeant down first, deliberately making his hand movements hard and personal. Then he ran his fingers over the passenger.
‘Block F.’ The guard pointed as he handed back their papers. The electric gate slid open. The fencing, towers and floodlights were all new and looked expensive.
But Block F, like all the other buildings inside the compound, had not been new for a very long time. The sergeant led his passenger along a filth-strewn concrete corridor to the governor’s office. A secretary rose instantly and walked around her desk to open the door to the inner office. She did not knock.
With a nod in her direction the sergeant entered, followed by his passenger.
The overweight governor wore civilian clothes: a tan suit with a pink, open-necked shirt, his fingers adorned with gold. He rose and shook hands with both visitors. The door closed behind them. They sat on two upright chairs in front of his large desk.