Rollerball (Commander Shaw Book 17)

by Philip McCutchan

  I shifted from the road as I saw the lights of a car coming down from ahead. I stumbled across scrubby country, not very flat. It took me longer than I’d expected — so much drifted snow, an unkind contrast with Australia’s sun, and the thick darkness didn’t help. When I came to the industrial site I skirted round it to the north. Another car came along the road, from the west this time, and turned into the road leading to the factory buildings. In the beam of its headlights I saw KYOTO ELECTRONICS painted in big black letters across the top of what looked like office windows. The Kyoto building was sited on the perimeter of the complex, with open country on two sides — a corner site. Using the discretion demanded by Max I approached this corner, fully alert and making no sound, not that any would be heard in what was starting to become a howling wind, bitterly cold.

  I stopped and crouched down when I began to make out figures moving behind a fence. I heard the whine of a dog — a guard dog, no doubt, but one accompanied by humans. I heard something else and felt it too: a subdued hum, and a vibration that seemed to reach right out into the ground where I was crouched. I stayed in situ, doing a lot of hard thinking. That humming and vibrating … air conditioning plant? Too heavy, much too heavy.

  Nothing stirred elsewhere, only the wind. The patrolling of the grounds went on; there was a faint loom of light from somewhere around the side of the building, enough for me to make out the guards but not enough to assess their nationality for sure. I watched and listened, pondering the next step. I felt in my bones that this was the base, the heart of the matter. If so, it had to be taken, but not by me alone. To hell with what Max had said: he wasn’t infallible in his judgments. The whole show had to be inhibited and that meant bringing in the heavies.

  I moved cautiously backwards, heading out for the Datsun. It wouldn’t be possible to risk the radio telephone; I had to drive fast into Perth and talk to Max on the security line. I was still some way off the car when I heard a racket behind me, back beyond the Kyoto buildings I believed, a hell of a din like something being bulldozed down.

  I put on speed. When I reached the Datsun it was empty. I caught my breath and jerked the door open. The courtesy light showed bloodstains and knife gashes in the seats. I still had my head through the open door when I became aware of figures closing in from the darkness. As a gun went into my back, a hand clamped across my mouth. I was roughly swung round and I saw Japanese faces, grinning like toothy idols in a temple, not that there was anything religious about them. A cloth was pushed between my teeth, my jaw being wrenched open to receive it, and the ends were tied behind my head.

  Not a word was spoken.

  I was thrust at gunpoint back from the car and made to ( limb a fence into some waste ground, rough underfoot and snow-covered. There we waited; I had no idea what for. But there was an undercurrent of excitement and anticipation emanating from the Japanese. Alter a while I heard a distant racket like bricks falling; then I began to hear a curious rumble accompanied by a crunching noise. This grew louder and louder until it was like a steam-roller at full belt, crushing rocks. Then I saw a greater loom of darkness than had been there before, a sort of blank wall of sheer dark coming along the road from the direction of the industrial site.

  From this darkness something terrifying emerged, something than even at first sight gave an overwhelming impression of' might, might unstoppable and unyielding, a massive thing some twelve feet high, twelve feet wide — a ball, as I saw a moment later. Rollerball. The very road showed ( racks behind it as it passed and as I watched in growing, sick horror it overran the Datsun. There was a rending, tearing sound, a creaking sound, and as the ball rolled inexorably on down the hill but at a controlled speed I saw the car, quite flat, a thin sheet of metal ground into the road surface. Farther on there was the sound of crashing brick and stone as the houses went. A voice in my ear said, “Too late, Commander Shaw. Already too late, unless demands met and ball is stopped.”

  8.

  Behind the massive ball a Range Rover came along the road from the industrial site. At gun point, I was put aboard. The ball crunched on through Pitlochry’s outskirts, demolishing buildings. Before the Range Rover had turned back for the complex, I heard shouts and cries of alarm, of terror as the thing was seen, inexorably, impassively rolling. I was full of questions that I couldn’t ask through the gag: what motivated it, what was the objective? Where was Felicity?

  The Range Rover drove in among the buildings and went through a gateway into the Kyoto premises. In the headlights I saw the guards, and the dogs. Little squat men mostly, with Alsatians on heavy leashes. The buildings were in darkness and both the hum and the vibration had stopped now. Desperately worried about Felicity, I was ordered out of the Range Rover when it stopped in front of a doorway. The door was opened by one of the guards, who bowed the Japanese through and looked at me with a malevolent grimace as I entered. I went into a lobby with a reception desk and a number of doors opening off. I was told to go through one that seemed to lead straight into the works area. A light came on; the place looked clean and tidy, almost antiseptically so. Quite a hospital air in a sense. Not much in the way of machinery or assembly lines. To me it looked like a collection of fruit machines and Space Invader cabinets. In one corner stood a big square screen with a brilliant green dot expanding and contracting and now and again shooting around, up, down and across like some disorientated star. As I looked at it all, one of the Japs removed the gag from my mouth and I took the opportunity of asking about Felicity. The man who appeared to be the boss, an arrogant little bastard, said she was safe and unharmed. I asked about the blood in the Datsun. He said that had come from one of his own men. Miss Mandrake, he said angrily, hissing the words out, was a she-devil.

  “When do I see her?” I asked.

  “In good time.” Dismissing consideration of Felicity, he waved an arm around. “Legitimate area for construction of computers,” he said.

  I asked him about that horrifying lump of metal, presumably moving through Pitlochry, shouldering buildings aside. He grinned at me. “Learn very soon now. Come.” And he added as we got on the move again, “Need for secrecy at an end. Nothing anyone can do.”

  “You sound confident.”

  Again a grin. “Fully confident. Nothing can stop large ball, although necessary to start motion before originally planned. Fault of man from ministry, who got away after inquisitive probe.”

  I said, “Suppose this place is attacked? It’s not impregnable. And I got here. So will the police and the army.”

  The Jap shrugged. “Does not matter. Explanations soon.”

  He walked on. We went through a doorway leading into a small vestibule with two more doors opening off. The Jap opened one of them; it was a lavatory. He didn’t go in. He reached out and pressed on a tile in the right-hand wall and there was a subdued whine of an electric motor and the lavatory, pan, flush and all, began to sink through the apparently solid floor as a rubber pipe for the water supply uncoiled behind it. Down and down it went, slowly, leaving an empty manhole. I saw a ladder formed by rungs set into the concrete wall below the opening. I was to go down it; with the revolver still covering me behind, I went down after the Jap spokesman. We must have gone about fifteen or twenty feet before the Jap alighted on the pan and flicked on another electric light that showed the entrance to a tunnel. He went in and I followed. There was a light in the tunnel wall ahead, with more in the distance. The tunnel was a long one, and low, and I had to go along bent almost double. When the Jap spoke his voice sounded deadened, flat. He said, “Man from ministry enter tunnel.”

  “How?”

  “Mistake. Electric fault in system. Sit on seat … mechanism operate.”

  I could see it all; there was an undeniable element of humour in the situation, something endearing about a civil servant going for a crap and being slowly lowered right to the heart of all that was worrying the government stiff. The Jap, however, saw no humour in it at all; he was deadly serious. I asked,
“Why didn’t he climb back up?”

  “Found tunnel. British Civil Service always follow duty. Rules say ministry inspector inspects.”

  So somebody still believed that we British did our duty whatever the consequences. Some, of course, do; Hector MacNaughton undoubtedly had and I was grateful. But evidently too late so I found no reason to be exactly overjoyed. We moved on; the air was going thick and stale, but after some while I saw the end in sight, or anyway I assumed it was: a solid-looking wall blocking the way. There would be a door; there was, and it operated when the leading Jap flicked an unconcealed switch some four feet back from it.

  We entered an astonishing place — astonishing, that is, to find in an inland situation like Pitlochry. It had the look of a boatyard, complete with stocks and a slipway, the difference being that the stocks were round in construction, with a ramp leading at a shallow angle to a slipway that sloped upwards instead of downwards. The place was deserted except for me and my escort; after all, the job had been done, the ball was gone. The stocks had obviously supported that gigantic ball. They were very heavily reinforced with concrete and with steel girders and looked as though they could have supported even the QE 2 if she had been concentrated into a ball. At the upper end of the slipway the place stood open to the night sky. Below the opening there was a mass of rubble.

  I asked in amazement, “Why was it never found?” The Jap grinned and said there had been no problem at all. The exit was in wild country and had been covered very adequately and securely by an unoccupied cottage with boarded-up windows that had been bought in by Kyoto Electronics. And the gap had only just been opened up. Penetration from the workshop below had not been made until this very night when the ball had simply pushed its way through, demolished the cottage — hence the racket I had heard when returning to the hired Datsun — and proceeded on its destructive and, to me, as yet uncharted path.

  “Look,” the Japanese said, pointing.

  I looked. I saw what I can only describe as an incubator. It was large, running right along one wall of the workshop — around fifty feet at a guess. It was glass fronted and divided by glass partitions into sections. The whole lot appeared to be empty at first glance, but when I walked across I saw what the Jap said were cultures. There was no apparent movement, but I suppose bacteria don’t make much overt motion. Knowing what it was all about, I asked just the same.

  The Jap indicated the sections. “Tetradoxin, Fusarium Sporotrichoides — ”

  “The man from the ministry?”

  “Yes. So tragic. So foolish. My work-force of course fully protected by special clothing. Man from ministry not. Last-minute work then in progress, spore and bacteria containers open.” The Jap shrugged. “So stupid! Blunder in, become contaminated. No danger now,” he added. “All closed safely.”

  I said, “I’m glad. But the man from the ministry got away, didn’t he?” I could see that disease-ridden civil servant staggering about, horribly ill, falling into the Tay, a sickening picture.

  The Jap answered me. He said, “Yes. Workers restricted by heavy rubber clothing … man run back up tunnel, only way out at that time. Climb ladder from sunken lavatory pan, run through computer assembly shop. Two and two added by female supervisors who keep away from possibly contaminated man … allowed to leave, then shots fired at car. Miss vital parts.” He shrugged. “No matter now.”

  I licked at my dry lips. The Jap was cold-blooded, icy, no humanity in him, talking in an utterly matter-of-fact way. Hoarsely I asked, “And those heavy balls, the small ones?”

  “Built-in disease. Very special metal, fooled even the great Professor Railton in Sydney.”

  Well, I suppose he knew it all. I asked him what the point of the small balls was. Had they, I asked, been shed by accident? He said they hadn’t. “To impress upon British authorities and public that we could succeed,” he said blandly, “when we were all ready. Ready for some weeks now, but were waiting for best time.”

  “The election?”

  “Yes. Government will fall if no concession. Government well aware of this. Cannot lose now.”

  My heart felt like lead. Savagely I said, “Don’t spend it all at once. And don’t underestimate the British public. We don’t like surrender. And often enough the government and the opposition have put the country before popularity. Don’t forget that.”

  The grin was wider than ever. “Not this time,” he said.

  *

  We went back along the tunnel, leaving the great gap open to the sky. Before we’d started back, the Jap, who had now given me his name as Dr Seiko, doubly qualified in microbiology and metallurgy, had told me that Rollerball was filled with the spores of Fusarium Sporotrichoides, which would proliferate in their billions when released. Tetradoxin was present as well, as also were other diseases of escalating horror and virulence, and there was something extra diabolic insofar as some of it was man made, which was to say Seiko made; and these man-made organisms had built into them not one but two death producing agents. That was far from all: although each would be susceptible to an antibiotic — which Fusarium Sporotrichoides, being a fungus, would not be — the only antibiotics that would kill the one would aggravate the other. There was no escape from one form or another of nasty death.

  The British public might be stoic, phlegmatic — all the Churchillian attributes might remain, but they weren’t going to like this.

  Leaving the tunnel, we crossed back through the computer assembly shop. I was shepherded, still under the revolvers, into Dr Seiko’s private apartment. This was bare and functional, but I wasn’t paying much attention to that because Felicity was sitting in the room with a grim-faced woman standing by her side. She was roped to a chair and was looking white and shaken but otherwise intact; and when I asked her she confirmed that she hadn’t been hurt in any way. After this brief exchange we were interrupted by Dr Seiko. The authorities, he said, would be reacting by now even though Miss Mandrake had had no time to send messages. Rollerball would speak for itself. He was ready to evacuate and there might not be much time and he still had things to tell me. As he said this he pressed a bell. A man came in and Dr Seiko spoke to him in Japanese and within a couple of minutes I heard vehicles moving up and stopping outside the offices. Seiko told me that Rollerball had no further need of the Pitlochry base; its control was independent, he said. And he told me a lot more as well. It was shattering and it shook me rigid. Ten thousand million pounds sterling was a hell of a lot of money but it wasn’t the end of the story. And the fact that Seiko was telling me the rest of it was proof of his total confidence that he couldn’t fail. I knew that confidence could be justified because I’d been myself — years ago now — right where Roller-ball was finally to fetch up. Seiko told me plenty; he was very specific.

  *

  I was to be released. The news astonished me at first, but when he explained I saw his point. Rollerball was in fact impregnable, unstoppable as he’d said earlier, couldn’t be deflected from its path by any outside influence or by any building no matter how large or even by rocket fire from army gunners. That being so, I could do it no harm — but I could do him, Seiko, a lot of good. I could warn the government that he meant exactly what he said and was fully capable of carrying it out. They would listen to me and it was up to me to convince them.

  I’d guessed the rest: Felicity was to remain in Seiko’s hands to encourage me to do my best, leaving no stone unturned in the persuasion effort. If the government dug its toes in, then Rollerball went on rolling and Felicity would pay the penalty.

  “Do not be in doubt,” Seiko said, and I wasn’t. Seiko was a maker of bacteria and death, Satan in human form, capable of anything.

  Within the next few minutes we were under way. Outside the door was a big, fast Toyota and four minibuses. Into the latter filed a number of young Japanese women, under the eagle eye of an elderly matronic woman who could have been the twin of the one mounting guard over Felicity, who went into one of the minibuses with
her escort. The male guards and the dogs were distributed among the vehicles and I went in the Toyota with Dr Seiko and his top brass plus one of the guards armed with a revolver. We drove down the road, heading away from Pitlochry. That way, the road ran through Strathardle to join the A93 from Blairgowrie to Braemar and Aberdeen. At the intersection Dr Seiko could turn either north or south but I wasn’t intended to find that out. I was pushed from the car when we were a couple or so miles from the base.

  I waved at Felicity as she went past and then I started back for Pitlochry, taking it at a run. I didn’t know what I was going to do about getting Felicity free but I was going to do it if it was the last thing I ever did. I didn’t even feel, in that moment, especially patriotic. Or British. Maybe I wasn’t built of the same stuff as Hector MacNaughton. But when, as I entered Pitlochry, I saw what Rollerball had achieved at the very start of its journey, I knew that I couldn’t avoid my duty. There was a trail of destruction, hotels and houses shattered. Down towards the main road a souvenir shop, a laundrette and a chemist had been destroyed; and Rollerball had veered across the road to smash in the front of the Regal cinema before entering the main road and heading south. Before making that southward turn Rollerball had done a good deal of damage to the buildings opposite. Menzies the grocers had gone, so had Moffatt the weaver, and even Fisher’s Hotel had its forecourt, plus some parked cars, crunched. It was like the aftermath of a bombing raid and there were bodies in the piles of rubble. Living persons too: I could hear the screams. There were plenty of police around and the blue lights of the mobiles were flashing all the way south. Somewhere ahead of them would be Rollerball, programmed according to Seiko to follow its set route, ploughing through all obstacles, leaving misery and death behind it. It could not be deflected by anyone other than its Japanese masters, it could cross water, it was self-contained with its inbuilt programme, its motive power and its disease. There was no defence against Rollerball.