Futuretrack 5

by Robert Westall

  High up, a formation of geese flew west: getting to school on time. I didn’t have to go to school today. I didn’t have to go anywhere. There was a flicker of white tails across the burn. Brer Rabbit getting busy, getting used to me. The sun reached a long ray into the valley, warming my whiskers. It was rough, trying to shave in cold water.

  I looked at my watch. Nearly six. Time for Brer Fox. I’d got into the habit of waiting up for Brer Fox. Every morning he turned up at three minutes past six, finishing his night’s work, as I was finishing mine. Zigzagging down the hillside to the burn, twenty yards below where I sat.

  Scuttering panic among the rabbits. Suddenly, not a rabbit in sight. Then Brer Fox on the far bank, paw upraised. We regarded each other; I drank in his lovely, wild soul. He dismissed me as a creature of no importance, bent, and drank. Ran his long, pink tongue round his lips. Silver drops of water fell back into the ripples. Then he tensed, dropped his haunches, leaped the burn, and vanished.

  Even then I was reluctant to go to bed. Behind me stretched a winding gulley, floored with springy turf between high bracken. Overhead, up the gulley, ran a huge pipe. Once it must have carried water to Glasgow or Edinburgh. Now, rich-red with rust, it clanged hollowly. But had its uses. If psychopters came looking for us with metal scanners, they’d get a screenful of water pipe. Same if they tried to use heat scanners—the pipe heated quickly in the sun. Mitzi was stored in a deep, dry cave. Our tent was camouflaged with bracken fronds, tied across. I’d taken care not to break any branches. Dead bracken is a dead giveaway to infrared cameras.

  As Vic Huggett still said in my fading nightmares, we were snug as a bug in a rug.

  I sensed the dawn psychopter before I heard it. Its psycho-radar was set on unfocused scan, sweeping as wide an area as possible. I slipped among the bracken, filled my mind with the sound of the burn, became the burn. In the tent, Keri would be asleep: she always dropped off the moment her head hit the groundsheet. She’d leave no more impression on their screen than a dozing sheep…

  The psychopter passed and vanished, leaving a thin stitching of sound that got lost in the hugeness of the hills. I crawled into the tent. Watched Keri sleeping in the dim green light. A tiny white feather had escaped from her sleeping bag and got stuck to the groundsheet; it trembled at her every breath. Her hand clutched the edge of the sleeping bag, as a child might clutch a teddy bear. She’d never let me hold her hand. Couldn’t bear me touching her, awake or asleep. But she was happy, and that was something.

  I’d been right about the Fort William depot. I’d watched the old yellow choppers fly out, muddy robo-dozers slung underneath. Noticed the direction they went. The following night, we found where they were working. It was deserted after dark.

  “Looks like a castle in a fairy tale,” said Keri. A very small castle: more a fortified house, with steep roof and pointed turrets. The kind you get in Scotland.

  “What’re they building it for?” she asked.

  “They’re not building it, they’re restoring it. It’s been ruined hundreds of years. …”

  “But what for?”

  “For a fairy tale,” I said bitterly. “They’re potty—restoring ruins and letting the roads go to hell. Making Scotland like it was before the Battle of Bannock-burn. …”

  “Except Scotland had people, then.”

  I poked through the portable huts and scattered machinery. There was a petrol-driven generator that could recharge Mitzi. One hut held a shotgun and half a box of cartridges. A would-be big-game hunter? Or somebody with wolf-phobia, like Keri? She borrowed the gun permanently; it cheered her up no end, though I warned her it wouldn’t stop a charging highland bull.

  The same night, we’d found this lovely gulley. The next two nights we sussed out Scotland from coast to coast. But apart from the Aberdeen road, in good repair, and the Aberdeen oil terminal glittering behind its Wire, we found nothing but crumbling roads and ancient ruins restored. The electricity pylons of the national grid no longer festooned the hills; we found their rusting stumps beneath the heather. No radio masts, radar stations, heavy engineering, runways, helicopter pads. Nothing.

  Last night, we’d given up looking and enjoyed ourselves instead. Walked our night valley like foxes, eyes and ears pricked in the patchy moonlight. Seen fish jumping in our lake, sending out rings of phosphorescence. Watched fox cubs tumbling like kittens in a moonlit glade…

  Five more minutes watching Keri’s face, and I slept like a baby.

  I was wakened by a shower of water on my face.

  “It’s raining,” I said. “Where’s the tent?”

  Giggle. I opened my eyes, and Keri was kneeling over me, her hair hanging in long, wet snakes, and her T-shirt clinging to her in damp patches.

  “I had a bathe—in the nuddy. While you were snoring. You Ests don’t ‘alf miss your chances.” Her cheeks were glowing with the cold water, her eyes shining with the joke. I grabbed for her, but she was gone.

  “Get my breakfast, Kitson-slave.”

  I didn’t really mind. I yawned, stretched, felt good. Waking up here was just like Cambridge. No half-dreaming swamp time.

  “Hey, Keri? You feel different here? Waking up in the mornings?”

  “Full of beans? Yeah.”

  “Wonder what’s causing it?”

  I thoughtfully opened a can of slimy pink luncheon meat, pale as a leper. Gave it to her with a few uncrunchy biscuits.

  “Can’t be a change of diet,” she said wryly, swallowing a slice of meat whole, like a seal engulfing a rotten herring. “Mebbe it’s the change of water—the burn’s so clear and fresh, I could drink it all day.”

  “Ever felt this way before?”

  “Funny you should ask. Once when I broke a bone in my foot, just after I’d won the Championship. Two mates of mine—Techs on the razzle—got me into the Cambridge hospital. I was awake half the night with the pain of my foot, but I still wakened fresh in the mornings.”

  “What about the other time?”

  She laughed. “Some Est—said he’d won a lot of money betting on me, but I think he fancied me really— sent me two crates of that fizzy wine.”

  “Champagne?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, I told him to get lost, but me and a girl friend drank it nonstop for a week. Everyone reckoned we’d get hangovers, but we wakened fresh as daisies. Then we finished the last bottle and went back to feeling lousy in the mornings. Is champagne a sort of tonic?”

  “No,” I said, shutting my mouth like a rattrap. I didn’t want to spoil her day.

  “Hey, what you hiding, Kitson? Are you bloody Ests putting something in the water back home? My old dad used to think that. He reckoned they did it to soldiers in World War II. Something called bromine—turned them off sex and gave them more bottle for fighting. Mind you, it doesn’t put people off sex nowadays… hey, what’s up wi’ you? You look like you seen a ghost!”

  “I have. The ghosts of a lot of babies.”

  “Wotcher mean? That sounds horrible.”

  “Know anybody your age who’s had a kid, Keri?”

  She puckered up her face. “One or two. Not many. People are just too busy living it up. And the girls can get stuff at the clinic. I mean, who wants to bring up a kid these days… you haven’t got time.”

  “There hasn’t been time for years, Keri. Remember Mrs. Nairn? So many people dying, so few babies being born?”

  “Christ, what’re they trying to do to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was silent for a long time. Then she said, “I don’t want to go back to all that. Couldn’t we just stay here? Catch rabbits to eat? There’s bilberries an’ mushrooms. Wild cabbage and apples in the old back gardens. …”

  “These hills are six feet deep in snow in winter.”

  But I knew how she felt. The last week had turned my mind inside out. Suddenly, Scotland seemed enormous, England small as a zoo with its Wires and watchtowers. Even my father, in his Cotswold manor, seemed only
a rarer kind of monkey in a lusher cage. Once you camped up here…

  I suddenly knew why campers got sent to the lobo-farm. But as for the rest, the rotting roads, restored ruins, possible poison in the water … it was still a crazy mystery, with Scott-Astbury’s mistake wrapped up in the middle of it…

  She nudged me in the ribs. “Penny for ‘em?” Then she added, “You’re a funny sod, Kitson. You share a tent with me and never try to lay a finger… any of our lads would’ve grabbed me by now … or tried!”

  “I don’t grab.”

  “Expectin’ me to grab you?” No.

  “You are a funny sod. Always brooding. Come for a walk. I want to go the other way tonight. There’s another lake up there. …”

  “Loch.”

  “Up you!” She was happy again. “Let’s go while the sun’s still shining.”

  I sniffed the air. It was like a warm bath, full of the scent of pines. I could hear bees buzzing, fifty yards away. It was the sort of sunset the hero and heroine walk away into. And the psychopters always seemed to vanish around sunset, like butterflies…

  I reached for the shotgun.

  “You won’t need that,” she said.

  She offered me her hand.

  I put the gun back into the tent.

  The sign at the fork in the path said: RSPB BIRD RESERVE. LOCH GARTEN.

  White lettering on a red board; normally the color-coding for danger. Funny old RSPB; I couldn’t think of any organisation less dangerous. We’d seen their films at college. They were fantastic cameramen—could show you the parasites on a heron’s wing at fifty paces. And wasn’t their Loch Garten film the best of the lot? Ospreys, dive-bombing from a great height and catching bloody great salmon underwater. I saw it all again, in slow motion. The splash, with foam climbing slowly, slowly. White wings beating, lifting, against a background of dark-green pines. The salmon twisting itself in horseshoes, trying to escape, falling back into the water, splashing on the surface, weakly. The osprey coming round and catching it again…

  Years ago idiots had nearly wiped out the osprey, by stealing its eggs. I remembered, on the film, great coils of barbed wire round the nesting tree. Dedicated birdwatchers, guarding the nest night and day, till the young hatched. Even a security microphone, at the base of the tree… RSPB had won in the end: the osprey was safe from extinction.

  I told Keri; her eyes shone even brighter. We turned down the path. The setting sun was shining through the pines like great golden searchlights, picking out a patch of bark here, a tuft of fern there, making them glow like jewels.

  Two hundred yards on there was a bigger signboard. Then another, a real giant: RSPB LOCH GARTEN.

  “They don’t want anyone to miss it!” said Keri. She let go of my hand, took of her boots, and danced a sort of hopscotch dance down the path ahead. Beyond her, the water of Loch Garten glinted through the pines. I felt so great, I picked up an old damp branch and threw it over her head, as hard as I could. It hit the branches of a pine, bringing down a shower of pine cones, as it thudded to earth.

  Keri glowered back over her shoulder. “You!”

  Twenty meters beyond her, where my branch had fallen, a streak of flame shot up in the air, carrying huge black lumps of turf. A thunderclap broke the world in half, echoed all round the valley, and came back to us through the pines.

  Another streak of flame; another fountain of black earth. Another. And another.

  Keri spun round and round, hands over her ears, eyes like saucers, shouting something I couldn’t hear. And all the time the explosions were leaping down the path toward her.

  I pulled her behind a massive tree trunk just in time; lay on top of her. The bangs went on. I could hear the metal fragments cutting up the trees. Cones and pine needles showered on my back.

  Then it stopped.

  “What was it?”

  “A minefield,” I said. “Antipersonnel mines. Only, the fools planted them too close together, so they’re setting each other off.”

  “Which fools?”

  “The RSPB, presumably. Still protecting their precious ospreys.”

  “They’re mad. Let’s get out of here.” She put one hand up the tree to lift herself. There was a distant, whiplike crack, and the tip of her little finger vanished in a splodge of blood.

  “Oh!” she said, beginning to kneel upright, staring at where her fingernail had been.

  I pulled her down again. The bark of the tree exploded, just where her head had been.

  “They’re shooting at us!”

  But I was starting to have suspicions: the firing was too regular—“Don’t shoot,” I shouted. “We surrender.” As I expected, no reply. I shouted again. Still no reply. Keeping flat, I found a pine branch brought down by the explosions. Waved it gently above my head. Started to count, one, two, three.

  On the count of three, a bullet whipped through it.

  I counted to three again.

  Another bullet whipped through it.

  “It’s only a mickey mouse,” I said. “Probably an old Arcdos Mark 3. Automatic, radar-controlled defence system. Bought as army surplus, left too long out in the rain, not serviced properly. Getting rusty and slow. But good enough to defend the ospreys, when they made this a forbidden zone, and the RSPB had to leave. …”

  “But it could’ve killed somebody.” She was sucking the end of her finger. “People are more important than bloody birds.”

  “Try telling the RSPB that. We’d better leave now.”

  Already I was looking over my shoulder, searching out the dead ground of gullies where the aroused Arcdos couldn’t sense us.

  “No,” she said stubbornly, tying a filthy handkerchief round her finger and pulling the knot tight with her teeth. “We’ve got to stop it. It could blow a deer’s leg off and leave it to die. It could shoot a little kid.”

  I tried to argue with her.

  “Please, Kit,” she said. No point in telling her someone would only come and repair it. No point to telling her there’d be other Arcdoses, spread all round Loch Garten.

  “Please!”

  It was the first thing she’d ever asked me for. Maybe I wanted to show off. Maybe I wanted to outwit the geriatric mickey mouse that had nearly killed her. I just know I did a crazy thing…

  “Okay, duckie. Just keep on waving this branch.”

  She waved it. Another bullet smacked through it. This time I saw where the bullet came from. A grey mushroom, set in the hillside beyond the pines that fringed the path.

  Then I was up and sprinting for it. But not straight. I counted as I ran and, on the count of three, leaped to the right.

  The bullet missed.

  Then three more steps, and a leap to the left. The whole point was never to do the same thing twice; never let the Arcdos catch the pattern of my thoughts in its puny brain.

  Two more bullets zipped past. Then I jumped on Arcdos with both boots. The metal cover dented but didn’t break. It swivelled under me, trying to turn its evil little gun barrel high enough to shoot me in the crotch. I stamped and stamped on the barrel, till it bent over. Then the swivelling ball bearings ground to a halt under my weight. It whined feebly. I heaved up the metal cover and put my boot into its electronics. A very satisfying crunch; nearly the last thing I did.

  The whiplike crack came again, from further up the hill. A bullet tugged at the flapping tail of my shirt.

  Hell, it was a multi-Arcdos. There were other grey mushrooms on that slope, programmed to protect each other. Knock one out, you got three more firing at you.

  Still prancing to and fro, and counting one, two, three like a lunatic, I sussed out the system. The multi-Arcdos is shaped like a spider, with gun domes at the tip of each leg and the radar control in the middle. The “legs” are underground cables, but, over the years, the trenches in which they’re laid show up as shallow depressions, especially when the sun is low and setting. I saw the shadow of the spider, ran for the radar control. It was getting hard to run tr
uly at random; soon my tiring brain would do the same thing twice…

  Fortunately the radar control is underground, too. Access by a shallow trench, for the servicing Tech. I flung myself in, bullets plucking at my heels, and undid the wing nuts to the servicing hatch. Luckily for me, they were only hand-tight. I reached inside, and pulled the plug on old Arcdos, and he went as quiet as a mouse.

  I stood up and waved to Keri.

  At that moment, a psychopter zoomed up over the pines.

  A crafty psychopter, coming in at zero height, so I couldn’t hear him come. A crafty psychopter who’d switched off his radar, so I wouldn’t hear that, either. A crafty psychopter summoned by Arcdos as soon as I’d begun to damage it.

  I lay in that trench in despair. The psychopter weaved in neat circles above me, while its instruments made sure I wasn’t armed and that Arcdos was out of order and dead. Then it picked out a place to land where there weren’t any antipersonnel mines. It wasn’t in any hurry: I wasn’t going anywhere.

  It would land, the Paramils would stun us with a light touch of blaster, then ship us, in their undercarriage pods, to the nearest lobo-farm. I signalled to Keri to run, but she just stood by the tree trunk, the pine branch still in her hand. An awful inertia swept over me. They said once you’d been to the farm, you didn’t care anymore…

  The psychopter landed, sagging gently on its undercarriage. The rotors spun… stopped. The Paramils stepped out, blasters at the ready…

  Then I had a vision of Idris’s face, shouting, “Sodding little idiot.” Implying I’d left something undone…

  What?

  I looked at the plugs I’d pulled out of Arcdos.

  It seemed only natural to replace them in their proper place. Neatly.

  There were several gun mushrooms still in working order. I watched them swivel gently. The Paramils never noticed: too busy watching me. I counted, one, two, three, only my eyes visible over the lip of the trench.

  There were several whip cracks that hardly disturbed the evening air. The two Paramils collapsed gently on the turf, their bodies twitching and kicking as more shots hit them.