The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  Mallory sat in a deck chair beside the pool, watching the cheetahs as they rested in the shade under the glider. They crossed and uncrossed their paws like card-dealers palming an ace, now and then lifting their noses at the scent of this strange man and his blood.

  Despite their sharp teeth, Mallory felt calm and rested, a sleeper waking from a complex but satisfying dream. He was glad to be surrounded by this little zoo with its backdrop of playful rockets, as innocent as an illustration from the children’s book.

  The young woman stood next to Mallory, keeping a concerned watch on him. She had dressed while Mallory recovered from his collision with the cheetah. After dragging away the boisterous beast she settled Mallory in the deck chair, then pulled on a patched leather flying suit. Was this the only clothing she had ever worn? A true child of the air, born and sleeping on the wing. With her over-bright mascara and blond hair brushed into a vivid peruke, she resembled a leather-garbed parakeet, a punk madonna of the airways. Worn NASA flashes on her shoulder gave her a biker’s swagger. On the name-plate above her right breast was printed: Nightingale.

  ‘Poor man – are you back? You’re far, far away.’ Behind the child-like features, the soft mouth and boneless nose, a pair of adult eyes watched him warily. ‘Hey, you – what happened to your uniform? Are you in the police?’

  Mallory took her hand, touching the heavy Apollo signet ring she wore on her wedding finger. From somewhere came the absurd notion that she was married to Hinton. Then he noticed her enlarged pupils, a hint of fever.

  ‘Don’t worry – I’m a doctor, Edward Mallory. I’m on holiday here with my wife.’

  ‘Holiday?’ The girl shook her head, relieved but baffled. ‘That patrol car – I thought someone had stolen your uniform while you were… out, Dear doctor, no one comes on holiday to Florida any more. If you don’t leave soon this is one vacation that may last forever.’

  ‘I know…’ Mallory looked round at the zoo with its dozing tiger, the gay fountain and cheerful rockets. This was the amiable world of the Douanier Rousseau’s Merry Jesters. He accepted the jeans and shirt which the girl gave him. He had liked being naked, not from any exhibitionist urge, but because it suited the vanished realm he had just visited. The impassive tiger with his skin of fire belonged to that world of light. ‘Perhaps I’ve come to the right place, though – I’d like to spend forever here. To tell the truth, I’ve just had a small taste of what forever is going to be like.’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Intrigued by Mallory, the girl squatted on the grass beside him. ‘Tell me, how often are you getting the attacks?’

  ‘Every day. Probably more than I realize. And you… ?’ When she shook her head a little too quickly, Mallory added: ‘They’re not that frightening, you know. In a way you want to go back.’

  ‘I can see. Doctor, you ought to be worried by that. Take your wife and leave – any moment now all the clocks are going to stop.’

  ‘That’s why we’re here – it’s our one chance. My wife has even less time than I have. We want to come to terms with everything – whatever that means. Not much any more.’

  ‘Doctor… The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head, not out here.’ Clearly unsettled by the presence of this marooned physician, the girl pulled on her flying helmet. She scanned the sky, where the gulls and swallows were again gathering, drawn into the air by the distant drone of an aero-engine. ‘Listen – an hour ago you were nearly killed. I tried to warn you. Our local stunt pilot doesn’t like the police.’

  ‘So I found out. I’m glad he didn’t hit you. I thought he was flying your glider.’

  ‘Hinton? He wouldn’t be seen dead in that. He needs speed. Hinton’s trying to join the birds.’

  ‘Hinton…’ Repeating the name, Mallory felt a surge of fear and relief, realizing that he was committed now to the course of action he had planned months ago when he left the clinic in Vancouver. ‘So Hinton is here.’

  ‘He’s here.’ The girl nodded at Mallory, still unsure that he was not a policeman. ‘Not many people remember Hinton.’

  ‘I remember Hinton.’ As she fingered the Apollo signet ring he asked: ‘You’re not married to him?’

  ‘To Hinton? Doctor, you have some strange ideas. What are your patients like?’

  ‘I often wonder. But you know Hinton?’

  ‘Who does? He has other things in his mind. He fixed the pool here, and brought me the glider from the museum at Orlando.’ She added, archly: ‘Disneyland East – that’s what they called Cape Kennedy in the early days.’

  ‘I remember – twenty years ago I worked for NASA.’

  ‘So did my father.’ She spoke sharply, angered by the mention of the space agency. ‘He was the last astronaut – Alan Shepley – the only one who didn’t come back. And the only one they didn’t wait for.’

  ‘Shepley was your father?’ Startled, Mallory turned to look at the distant gantries of the launching grounds. ‘He died in the Shuttle. Then you know that Hinton…’

  ‘Doctor, I don’t think it was Hinton who really killed my father.’ Before Mallory could speak she lowered her goggles over her eyes. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. The important thing is that someone will be here when he comes down.’

  ‘You’re waiting for him?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I, doctor?’

  ‘Yes… but it was a long time ago. Besides, it’s a million to one against him coming down here.’

  ‘That’s not true. According to Hinton, Dad may actually come down somewhere along this coast. Hinton says the orbits are starting to decay. I search the beaches every day.’

  Mallory smiled at her encouragingly, admiring this spunky but sad child. He remembered the news photographs of the astronaut’s daughter, Gale Shepley, a babe in arms fiercely cradled by the widow outside the courtroom after the verdict. ‘I hope he comes. And your little zoo, Gale?’

  ‘Nightingale,’ she corrected. ‘The zoo is for Dad. I want the world to be a special place for us when we go.’

  ‘You’re leaving together?’

  ‘In a sense – like you, doctor, and everyone else here.’

  ‘So you do get the attacks.’

  ‘Not often – that’s why I keep moving. The birds are teaching me how to fly. Did you know that, doctor? The birds are trying to get out of time.’

  Already she was distracted by the unswept sky and the massing birds. After tying up the cheetahs she made her way quickly to the glider. ‘I have to leave, doctor. Can you ride a motorcycle? There’s a Yamaha in the hotel lobby you can borrow.’

  But before taking off she confided to Mallory: ‘It’s all wishful thinking, doctor, for Hinton too. When Dad comes it won’t matter any more.’

  Mallory tried to help her launch the glider, but the filmy craft took off within its own length. Pedalling swiftly, she propelled it into the air, climbing over the chromium rockets of the theme park. The glider circled the hotel, then levelled its long, tapering wings and set off for the empty beaches of the north.

  Restless without her, the tiger began to wrestle with the truck tyre suspended from the ceiling of its cage. For a moment Mallory was tempted to unlock the door and join it. Avoiding the cheetahs chained to the diving board, he entered the empty hotel and took the staircase to the roof. From the ladder of the elevator house he watched the glider moving towards the space centre.

  Alan Shepley – the first man to be murdered in space. All too well Mallory remembered the young pilot of the Shuttle, one of the last astronauts to be launched from Cape Kennedy before the curtain came down on the space age. A former Apollo pilot, Shepley had been a dedicated but likeable young man, as ambitious as the other astronauts and yet curiously naïve.

  Mallory, like everyone else, had much preferred him to the Shuttle’s co-pilot, a research physicist who was then the token civilian among the astronauts. Mallory remembered how he had instinctively disliked Hinton on their first meeting at the medical centre. But from the start he had been fascinated by the man’s
awkwardness and irritability. In its closing days, the space programme had begun to attract people who were slightly unbalanced, and he recognized that Hinton belonged to this second generation of astronauts, mavericks with complex motives of their own, quite unlike the disciplined service pilots who had furnished the Mercury and Apollo flight-crews. Hinton had the intense and obsessive temperament of a Cortez, Pizarro or Drake, the hot blood and cold heart. It was Hinton who had exposed for the first time so many of the latent conundrums at the heart of the space programme, those psychological dimensions that had been ignored from its start and subsequently revealed, too late, in the crack-ups of the early astronauts, their slides into mysticism and melancholia.

  ‘The best astronauts never dream,’ Russell Schweickart had once remarked. Not only did Hinton dream, he had torn the whole fabric of time and space, cracked the hour-glass from which time was running. Mallory was aware of his own complicity, he had been chiefly responsible for putting Shepley and Hinton together, guessing that the repressed and earnest Shepley might provide the trigger for a metaphysical experiment of a special sort.

  At all events, Shepley’s death had been the first murder in space, a crisis that Mallory had both stage-managed and unconsciously welcomed. The murder of the astronaut and the public unease that followed had marked the end of the space age, an awareness that man had committed an evolutionary crime by travelling into space, that he was tampering with the elements of his own consciousness. The fracture of that fragile continuum erected by the human psyche through millions of years had soon shown itself, in the confused sense of time displayed by the astronauts and NASA personnel, and then by the inhabitants of the towns near the space centre. Cape Kennedy and the whole of Florida itself became a poisoned land to be for ever avoided like the nuclear testing grounds of Nevada and Utah.

  Yet, perhaps, instead of going mad in space, Hinton had been the first man to ‘go sane’. During his trial he pleaded his innocence and then refused to defend himself, viewing the international media circus with a stoicism that at times seemed bizarre. That silence had unnerved everyone – how could Hinton believe himself innocent of a murder (he had locked Shepley into the docking module, vented his air supply and then cast him loose in his coffin, keeping up a matter-of-fact commentary the whole while) committed in full view of a thousand million television witnesses?

  Alcatraz had been re-commissioned for Hinton, for this solitary prisoner isolated on the frigid island to prevent him contaminating the rest of the human race. After twenty years he was safely forgotten, and even the report of his escape was only briefly mentioned. He was presumed to have died, after crashing into the icy waters of the bay in a small aircraft he had secretly constructed. Mallory had travelled down to San Francisco to see the waterlogged craft, a curious ornithopter built from the yew trees that Hinton had been allowed to grow in the prison island’s stony soil, boosted by a home-made rocket engine powered by a fertilizer-based explosive. He had waited twenty years for the slow-growing evergreens to be strong enough to form the wings that would carry him to freedom.

  Then, only six months after Hinton’s death, Mallory had been told by an old NASA colleague of the strange stunt pilot who had been seen flying his antique aircraft at Cape Kennedy, some native of the air who had so far eluded the half-hearted attempts to ground him. The descriptions of the bird-cage aeroplanes reminded Mallory of the drowned ornithopter dragged up on to the winter beach…

  So Hinton had returned to Cape Kennedy. As Mallory set off on the Yamaha along the coast road, past the deserted motels and cocktail bars of Cocoa Beach, he looked out at the bright Atlantic sand, so unlike the rocky shingle of the prison island. But was the ornithopter a decoy, like all the antique aircraft that Hinton flew above the space centre, machines that concealed some other aim?

  Some other escape?

  V

  Fifteen minutes later, as Mallory sped along the NASA causeway towards Titusville, he was overtaken by an old Wright biplane. Crossing the Banana River, he noticed that the noise of a second engine had drowned the Yamaha’s. The venerable flying machine appeared above the trees, the familiar gaunt-faced pilot sitting in the open cockpit. Barely managing to pull ahead of the Yamaha, the pilot flew down to within ten feet of the road, gesturing to Mallory to stop, then cut back his engine and settled the craft on to the weed-grown concrete.

  ‘Mallory, I’ve been looking for you! Come on, doctor!’

  Mallory hesitated, the gritty backwash of the Wright’s props stinging the open wounds under his shirt. As he peered among the struts Hinton seized his arm and lifted him on to the passenger seat.

  ‘Mallory, yes… it’s you still!’ Hinton pushed his goggles back on to his bony forehead, revealing a pair of blood-flecked eyes. He gazed at Mallory with open amazement, as if surprised that Mallory had aged at all in the past twenty years, but delighted that he had somehow survived. ‘Nightingale just told me you were here. Doctor Mysterium… I nearly killed you!’

  ‘You’re trying again… !’ Mallory clung to the frayed seat straps as Hinton opened the throttle. The biplane gazelled into the air. In a gust of wind across the exposed causeway it flew backwards for a few seconds, then climbed vertically and banked across the trees towards the distant gantries. Thousands of swallows and martins overtook them on all sides, ignoring Hinton as if well-used to this erratic aviator and his absurd machines.

  As Hinton worked the rudder tiller, Mallory glanced at this feverish and undernourished man. The years in prison and the rushing air above Cape Kennedy had leached all trace of iron salts from his pallid skin. His raw eyelids, the nail-picked septum of his strong nose and his scarred lips were blanched almost silver in the wind. He had gone beyond exhaustion and malnutrition into a nervous realm where the rival elements of his warring mind were locked together like the cogs of an overwound clock. As he pummelled Mallory’s arm it was clear that he had already forgotten the years since their last meeting. He pointed to the forest below them, to the viaducts, concrete decks and blockhouses, eager to show off his domain.

  They had reached the heart of the space complex, where the gantries rose like gallows put out to rent. In the centre was the giant crawler, the last of the Shuttles mounted vertically on its launching platform. Its rusting tracks lay around it, the chains of an unshackled colossus.

  Here at Cape Kennedy time had not stood still but moved into reverse. The huge fuel tank and auxiliary motors of the Shuttle resembled the domes and minarets of a replica Taj Mahal. Lines of antique aircraft were drawn up on the runway below the crawler – a Lilienthal glider lying on its side like an ornate fan window, a Mignet Flying Flea, the Fokker, Spad and Sopwith Camel, and a Wright Flyer that went back to the earliest days of aviation. As they circled the launch platform Mallory almost expected to see a crowd of Edwardian aviators thronging this display of ancient craft, pilots in gaiters and overcoats, women passengers in hats fitted with leather straps.

  Other ghosts haunted the daylight at Cape Kennedy. When they landed Mallory stepped into the shadow of the launch platform, an iron cathedral shunned by the sky. An unsettling silence came in from the dense forest that filled the once open decks of the space centre, from the eyeless bunkers and rusting camera towers.

  ‘Mallory, I’m glad you came!’ Hinton pulled off his flying helmet, exposing a lumpy scalp under his close-cropped hair – Mallory remembered that he had once been attacked by a berserk warder. ‘I couldn’t believe it was you! And Anne? Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s here, at the hotel in Titusville.’

  ‘I know, I’ve just seen her on the roof. She looked…’ Hinton’s voice dropped, in his concern he had forgotten what he was doing. He began to walk in a circle, and then rallied himself. ‘Still, it’s good to see you. It’s more than I hoped for – you were the one person who knew what was going on here.’

  ‘Did I?’ Mallory searched for the sun, hidden behind the cold bulk of the launch platform. Cape Kennedy was even more sinister than
he had expected, like some ancient death camp. ‘I don’t think I –’

  ‘Of course you knew! In a way we were collaborators – believe me, Mallory, we will be again. I’ve a lot to tell you…’ Happy to see Mallory, but concerned for the shivering physician, Hinton embraced him with his restless hands. When Mallory flinched, trying to protect his shoulders, Hinton whistled and peered solicitously inside his shirt.

  ‘Mallory, I’m sorry – that police car confused me. They’ll be coming for me soon, we have to move fast. But you don’t look too well, doctor. Time’s running out, I suppose, it’s difficult to understand at first…’

  ‘I’m starting to. What about you, Hinton? I need to talk to you about everything. You look –’

  Hinton grimaced. He slapped his lip, impatient with his undernourished body, an atrophied organ that he would soon discard. ‘I had to starve myself, the wingloading of that machine was so low. It took years, or they might have noticed. Those endless medical checks, they were terrified that I was brewing up an even more advanced psychosis – they couldn’t grasp that I was opening the door to a new world.’ He gazed round at the space centre, at the empty wind. ‘We had to get out of time – that’s what the space programme was all about…’

  He beckoned Mallory towards a steel staircase that led up to the assembly deck six storeys above them. ‘We’ll go topside. I’m living in the Shuttle – there’s a crew module of the Mars platform still inside the hold, a damn sight more comfortable than most of the hotels in Florida.’ He added, with an ironic gleam: ‘I imagine it’s the last place they’ll come to look for me.’

  Mallory began to climb the staircase. He tried not to touch the greasy rivets and sweating rails, lowering his eyes from the tiled skin of the Shuttle as it emerged above the assembly deck. After all the years of thinking about Cape Kennedy he was still unprepared for the strangeness of this vast, reductive machine, a Juggernaut that could be pushed by its worshippers across the planet, devouring the years and hours and seconds.