Rollerball (Commander Shaw Book 17)

by Philip McCutchan

  I went over and spoke to the geologist.

  “Can you pick up Rollerball for me?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Of course. I am listening throughout.” He was almost obliterated with earphones and wires and he seemed to be plugged into something so I might have guessed. “What do you wish to know?”

  “I want to know if it stops.”

  “Yes, you will be told.”

  “Then here goes,” I said, and put the control box on the ground and knelt down beside it. One knob would be as good as the others in my state of non-knowledge though the effects of each would be different. I shut my eyes and prodded. I pushed a button, then looked up at the geologist. He was still listening but made no report. I saw that I had pressed the white button. I next tried the green; nothing. Then the red.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Rollerball still moves,” the geologist said and I felt like giving the control box a good kick into the night. We had to go on sinking the shaft and I had to go down it, box in hand, to make a clear transmission and then take the unknown consequences. Presumably those consequences could be an induced self destruct, in which case the bacteria and fungus spores would be released to dwell in the earth and multiply, or they could be a complete blow-up which might or might not kill the bugs though it would certainly kill me. Ignorance was no bliss at all.

  The dig went on amid shattering noise. The Russian team worked hard and efficiently. It was like sinking an oil bore hole, only thankfully nothing like so far to go. It would have been a fast job if the shaft hadn’t to be widened out to take a human being … according to the geologist, the fault would be met in a mere thirty feet, which was chickenfeed, but of course that was only to the roof. In this spot the fissure’s course, the bottom of the fault line, was more or less on a level with the rest of the way through to the exit, but the roof rose sharply towards the surface. That meant I would have a long drop from roof to floor; fortunately ropes were being provided. One for me, one for Seiko’s box of tricks.

  Short dig or not, the dawn was in the sky before they were through, the dawn that showed up the horrible bleakness of this part of the Soviet Union. Only Siberia itself could be worse, I thought.

  I stood on the lip of the shaft and looked down. It was narrow and, of course, it was black as pitch. You really needed to be a potholer to take it. The geologist was unconcerned; there was nothing in it, he said. In conversation with him while the shaft was being sunk, he’d said that he would give ten years of his life to be able to explore the Yorkshire cave systems, especially around Ingleborough, but he couldn’t get an exit visa. I noted, however, that he made no offer to go down this shaft with me, not that I blamed him, and gathered that he was solidly behind the Russian brass in considering this whole thing to be the fault of the capitalists in the first place for allowing Seiko into the country and it was up to them to sort out the dangerous bit for themselves.

  “You are ready?” he asked now. I nodded, and he gestured for the ropes. When both I and the control box had been secured, he handed me a long torch encased in rubber. I put this in a pocket and sat on the lip of the shaft with my legs dangling while the comrades tailed onto the ropes and took the strain.

  “You will be quite safe,” the geologist assured me. “For now, goodbye.”

  I reckoned a more tactful word than goodbye would have been kinder. I slid my bottom off the edge of the shaft and the bight of the rope was taken up. Before I vanished from sight I asked for a last check on Rollerball’s current position.

  “Perhaps sixteen kilometres.”

  So I had half an hour. It ought to be enough. I went down, badly scraped against the sides of the shaft. It was a tight fit even though I had removed the fur coat provided by the Russians, leaving it on the surface like a sloughed-off chrysalis vacated by a doomed caterpillar. Rubble dislodged by my progress rattled down ahead of me. The control box was coming behind, resting now and again on my head. I don’t think it was long before I felt my legs swing free, then found my body coming clear. After that, it seemed a long while before my feet met solid ground and the rope went slack. I stumbled a bit in the darkness, then brought out the torch and flicked it on. I laid hold of the control box, then beamed the torch along the fissure. It was a frightful place of jagged protuberances and an uneven floor; in the powerful beam of the torch I saw how the ceiling, very high where I was standing, so high that it was lost in the darkness beyond the beam, came down in both directions to something very much lower. My flesh crawling with a sense of the unknown, not to say sheer terror, I kept still and listened. It could have been imagination but I believed I could hear the advance of Rollerball from the distance. But I wasn’t sure; the sound I had heard stopped within half a minute or so of my hearing it.

  There was a dead silence. I waited some while, hearing only the thud of my own heart. I was starting, with extreme reluctance, to move south-westwards along the fissure to see what had happened when I heard noise from the shaft above me and rubble started to come down. I waited. Soon my torch picked up the geologist, surprisingly coming down on another rope. When he was beside me I reported the sound ahead and its cessation.

  “Yes,” he said. “Rollerball has stopped.”

  “I thought as much. You came to tell me that?”

  “Yes.”

  And to impress the comrades in Moscow, who might well expect his presence after all, I thought. We went along to see what was happening. I was very glad of any company at all in that grim earth fault, which was the sort of place in which you half expect witches and devils to appear suddenly, the sort of place where a lurking, apparently silent Rollerball might be expected to live, and if asleep to wake up and pounce. I fought down such fantasies; the situation was hair-raising enough without them. My companion seemed to have no particular fear; he had taken over the torch and was examining the fault structure as we moved on. His English was good and he gave me a running commentary; I didn’t take much of it in, being more concerned with Rollerball. He talked about upthrows and downthrows and hades, by which he meant not hell but inclines from the vertical, and I gathered that this particular fault was really more of a vast cave running through the earth than a pure fault as such. Apparently the upthrow and downthrow effect didn’t normally produce the sort of surface that we were walking along; a fault was more a fracture, a slip of rock, where a section of the strata moved straight downwards away from its other part. He was yacking away when suddenly I picked up Rollerball. The geologist had beamed the torch onto the rocky side ahead and in its glow I saw that dull, flanged metal, sitting there like some gigantic bomb or sea mine.

  I said, “This is it.”

  He stopped; so did I. He drew in a sharp, alarmed breath. I was sweating like a pig; the air was foul and close, maintaining an even temperature, not too high — the sweat wasn’t due to that. Rollerball loomed, silent, motionless, menacing in its very calm that seemed to underline its potential. We both stared, almost petrified. To see Rollerball in this enclosed space was far worse than up in the open air. It looked even more immense, and though so still, so silent, it looked curiously alive and vibrant.

  I found speech. I said, “I came down to use the control box. I’d better use it … but not here. Definitely not here.”

  The geologist gabbled something in Russian, his face taut and glistening in the back-glow from the torch. I didn’t catch what he’d said. I went on, “We’ll go back. The control should operate from a distance, now we’ve a clear field. Your people can hoist us up, and I’ll make a transmission just before we enter the shaft.”

  “Why has it stopped?”

  I said I didn’t know, but suspected that something had gone wrong internally. I’d been suspecting that for some time, what with the increased speed and the fungus-spore exudation up by Hawick. “Let’s get back to the ropes,” I added, and we both turned away. But it seemed that Rollerball had other ideas. We’d gone only a few yards when I heard the familiar crunching sound and when I loo
ked round there it was, spinning down upon us and moving fast, its great flanges digging into the hard ground as though it were soft mud. We ran ahead of it, flat out, with me clutching Seiko’s box to my chest.

  Then the geologist tripped and went flat in its path. He was a little behind me and at first I didn’t realise. Then I heard him give a cry and I looked round and ran back towards him. I started to drag him away — there was just room on either side of Rollerball — but there simply wasn’t the time. I felt the scrape of one of the flanges myself as the monstrous sphere rolled over the Russian’s head and chest, then it was past and headed for the naval base. The torch had been thrown clear when the geologist had fallen and it was intact. I retrieved it; it showed me that there was almost nothing left. The remains, except for the legs, had been ground right in.

  My hands shook but I put the control box on the floor of the fissure and almost in a frenzy I operated the buttons. Red, white, green.

  Nothing.

  Rollerball moved on, crunching towards the fate of millions of people.

  *

  I found the ropes intact and pulled on one of them like a man possessed. There was an answering jiggle and I secured one of the ropes around my body and gave another tug once I had also secured the control box. I felt the rope tauten at once and then I was on my way up, feeling above me for the lower lip of the shaft to guide myself through. When I reached the surface and was hauled out, I lay for a while till I’d started to co-ordinate mind and matter, then I gave it to them straight. Failure, and a man dead. I said, “We have to get back to the base. As fast as we can make it.”

  The atmosphere was hostile, but they saw the point. We got on the move fast. There was very little time left though I had no means currently of assessing just how much. With Rollerball’s brain on the blink and its programme thus gone for a burton anything might happen; it might speed up, it might slow down, it might stop again. The one thing that seemed certain was that it wasn’t receiving any messages from Seiko’s control outfit.

  On arrival at the base I reported to the admiral. With him were the hard-line Moscow men, looking grimmer than ever. Demichevich was looking as though he faced death or Siberia, which perhaps he was now. His advice had been poor stuff: the faces of the hard-liners said that more clearly than any words.

  Just after I had made my report a telephone burred on the admiral’s desk. He took it and his face grew as hard as those of the Moscow contingent. Ringing off, he looked down at his desk for a moment, seemed to study his hands, then looked up at me and said, “The Kremlin. Comrade Chairman Solushev.”

  “Yes, Admiral?”

  “The British nuclear submarines Repulse and Renown have been reported at war stations.”

  I swallowed. “Have they?” I said.

  “We know what that means. So do you.”

  I knew it meant the situation was very, very tricky. The admiral put it into words. He said, “It was expected, of course. We also are ready. It is not so much Rollerball now. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. I did understand, only too well. Whitehall had estimated the present score-card and was determined to be ready for the worst. It was a case of fingers hovering over buttons, of those in authority on both sides having to assess when the moment had come to make sure of getting the first strike in. Whoever did that would be in a fair way to winning from the start, and with everything at stake there would be plenty of people in high places in NATO and in Moscow who would be very anxious to ensure that the moment was seized. It had escalated that far; all trust, temporarily secured in Moscow only the day before, was coming rapidly to an end. The Russians, who from the sound of it had pin-pointed the positions of the Renown and the Repulse, might start with destroying them.

  I said, “I take your point, Admiral. But Rollerball’s still very much concerned. It’s going to reach the base soon, I don’t know when. If it can be destroyed, surely everyone’s going to stand down?”

  He shrugged. “The Soviet Union cannot afford delay. Your missiles are not going to be allowed to fall upon our land.”

  “Give me one chance at least,” I said. “I repeat, if Rollerball can be negatived — ”

  “If,” the admiral broke in sourly. “Such a very big if! Also, such negativing must not only come in time but be known to come in time so that decisions can be made before it is too late.” Once again he went back to a study of his hands, big, capable ones, the hands of a seaman. With luck he might think as a seaman too, not as a politician, a warmonger. The world over, genuine seamen were, by and large, a pretty fair-thinking bunch and they acted straight. There was a long silence in the room and then the admiral looked up at me and said, “Very well, you shall have your chance. Tell me what you want.”

  I said, “I’d like the way cleared from the fissure exit, right the way through to the sea. I want Rollerball to have a free run — ”

  “The blocks will still not be removed,” Ashimov said flatly. “Moscow will not permit.”

  I went on regardless. “Next, I’ll want all radio and telecommunications channels open and operators standing by to contact Moscow and London immediately.”

  “Immediately you have negatived Rollerball, do you mean? I think you are too confident, Commander — ”

  “If you believe in God,” I broke in, “start praying now.” I didn’t press him on his belief or lack of it; to do so in the Soviet Union would have been tactless. “We’re going to need faith — and luck.”

  Ashimov gave a tight smile. If he didn’t believe in God he could probably find someone else. Marx, Lenin, Stalin if he could reach them. He started giving his orders to his Chief of Staff. I was to have every assistance, full co-operation. Before I left his office he paid me a compliment. He got to his feet and reached out his hand and shook mine with a firm and friendly grip and said, “I believe that you at all events are an honest man who wishes peace, as I do.”

  So I went about what might prove to be the last business that would ever have my attention and as I went out of the room I saw Demichevich make to go with me. He was halted by the hard-faced brigade, looking immensely sinister in their all-covering fur. I saw that Demichevich’s arms were being seized. The hard-liners didn’t believe for a moment that Rollerball would be controlled and they were no doubt intending to offer Demichevich up as a sacrifice. He’d backed a loser and it wasn’t going to be any use appealing to Buckingham Palace. Or even the TUC. They would perhaps hold a requiem afterwards amid the few bricks still left standing of Congress House in remembrance of a brother — poor consolation, that.

  When I reached the great concrete blocks standing firm across the fissure exit, a report from the geologists was brought to me. Rollerball was moving on. More slowly now, much more slowly. It was five miles more or less from where we stood. The estimated time of arrival at its current speed was two and a quarter hours. I watched the clearance of the base going on: the lifting of the blast screens, the shifting of a number of frigates and submarines from their berths to the open sea, the removal of all the usual clutter of any dockyard — ropes, oil drums, rusty anchors, deck gear, ships’ boats under repair, all that sort of thing.

  I was joined by Ashimov. He said, “You seem certain the sphere will come through.”

  “I’m hopeful it will,” I said. “We can’t be a hundred per cent sure, but if it remains inside the problem could be worse.”

  “You will use the canister?”

  I said, “I’ll try it again, yes. If necessary.”

  “Not knowing what will happen?”

  “That’s right. I know all the risks. But the alternative’s worse, isn’t it?”

  He knew what I meant: the alternative was war. But he said, “The alternative will be used if Rollerball is allowed to spread out the spores.”

  “I know that as well. I won’t try the control right away. I want Rollerball to go out to sea first. Far out.”

  The admiral didn’t like it and he hadn’t much confidence in any success, but
he was committed now. A few minutes later I saw the men from Moscow coming, but they didn’t come all the way, they stopped in the cover of a heavy shield-wall protecting an oil storage tank and peered round it from time to time. Possibly their function was to render an eye-witness account to the Comrade Chairman of the Council as a check on the admiral. Like in Hitler’s Germany, the armed forces in Russia were never allowed too much freedom.

  The wait seemed endless, the time dragging itself out. I walked up and down with the admiral, who was showing his nerves badly. We chatted about his hobby to pass a bad time away, and believe it or not that hobby was train spotting. He’d spotted everything there was to be spotted in Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and some in East Germany. He’d once been in Britain, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy, and he’d spotted the Flying Scotsman, doing a nostalgic if unaccustomed southerly run in the middle sixties, her very last run he believed. He’d made a special trip for the purpose accompanied by a First Secretary whom I guessed to be a KGB man, down to Worthing. He’d stood on the platform of Worthing Central Station and waved with the capitalists …

  We had got to Worthing Central when we heard Rollerball.

  Ashimov stared. His eyes met mine. His face was working. He asked, “What is that?”

  I said, “I believe Rollerball’s smashing through.” There was a thunderous din from the other side of the stressed-concrete blocks. The whole of the outer tunnel leading to the fissure began to shake alarmingly. There were a series of sharp reports and cracks began to appear in the walls. Rock splinters flew dangerously.

  “You see?” I said. “The blocks might just as well have been removed.”

  “The ball will break itself up!”

  “No,” I said. “That’s one thing that won’t happen — not as the result of meeting that concrete, anyway.”