‘Why?’
He heard the Senior Tech move slightly in his position by the door.
‘For the present this should be for your ears only.’
‘No; I’m out of commission. Senior Colley will listen and act for me. Come here, Laurie.’
Colley took the chair at the other side of the bed.
‘Now, then.’
‘It depends on something I’m not sure of. Have you been told about the substitute Commissioner?’ Campion had. ‘I think my rejection of him could be known to the clone. Possible?’
Colley was sure of it. ‘He wore Security uniform; every word spoken would have been picked up until we defused him.’
‘Defused.’ As though they realised such gadgetry had the potential of a psychological bomb. He hoped they did.
Campion’s lips slurred, ‘That’s why they dumped me; the abduction was pointless.’
Colley added, ‘They dropped him by the roadside; just dropped him and left.’
To Raft it made sense. ‘They don’t know why I rejected their man; to them it’s unthinkable – or so we see it. If they regard the clone as literally indivisible, my reaction becomes wilful treachery. They thought I could be milked at leisure once non-Campion was installed, and I have knowledge they want.’
‘What’s that?’
‘How to run Columbus. They would have expected me to run the ship for them.’
Their blankness made nothing of that. He continued, ‘I think it would have been a last resort, but they needed to have control of a major threat.’
Campion asked, ‘Threat?’ Colley seemed lost.
It seemed so obvious to Raft. ‘Who controls Columbus can control the world. She is – can be – the ultimate weapon. And I am the only pilot.’
His climax fell flat; they reacted not at all. He told them angrily, ‘You’ve left her out there empty, unguarded; a shuttle and a cutting torch and she’s anybody’s. In a few days any good engineer could work out the control system in essence. They may even have the plans; there were scores of copies. Now, as an enemy they want me dead; they’ll take Columbus the hard way.’
He ran down, beaten by silence. At last Colley said, ‘You seem to mean that the ship can be used to blackmail authority into submission.’
‘Yes.’
‘How? It isn’t armed.’
‘She is a weapon. The range of the monopole extends for thousands of miles; Columbus can stand off in space and suck the air off the planet.’
They were startled but not convinced. At length Campion murmured, ‘No. She would crash herself doing it. Almost at once.’
‘Not in reverse.’ He scrabbled for the notebook he had stuffed into a pocket. ‘It’s like this –’ He sketched rapidly. ‘The hull is only a web; the real structure is a complex of magnetic forces; dozens of small monopoles shape the direction of the plasma after intake. To reverse, we don’t somersault or invert the intake, we simply change the focusing monopole bearings to direct the intake on to baffles for deceleration. I tell you she can sit in space and strip Earth down to strangulation.’
But Colley had been figuring times in his head. ‘We could take the ship out with homing missiles before she did much damage.’ He speculated, ‘There could be some hellish storms for an hour or so.’
Colley was no man’s fool and Raft knew he had gone too far too fast; he couldn’t panic them. He said quickly, ‘But the ionosphere could be cut to ribbons in minutes. It’s very thin; from an oblique angle great strips could be torn out of it and tossed into space. It would take months to close over and solar radiation would fry the Earth. The Van Allen belts could be disorganised in the same way and God only knows what the results of that would be.’
Campion rolled enquiring eyes at Colley, who nodded. ‘Sounds possible. Disruption of the belts would be catastrophic. Hard radiation flooding in … a sterilised planet, at the least.’
Campion asked, ‘And if the plans no longer exist?’
‘As an engineer I’d back myself to elucidate the system from scratch, and each clone-member is presumably as good as I am.’
‘Would they know of the possibility?’
‘Who can tell? But Heathcote would. You people would have realised it for yourselves eventually.’
Campion said tersely, ‘Blow the thing out of the sky.’
That was too much; Raft howled, ‘No!’
‘Your baby? Your beloved? Our world!’
‘I’m not just sentimental. A weapon for them is a weapon for us, too. And she can do other things.’ He sought the other things and found an outrageous one. ‘Pinpoint their headquarters and I can sit her down on them tail first, spitting plasma at twenty thousand degrees.’
He heard himself with amazement, knowing he would not do it and not honestly sure he could control her so finely near a planetary surface, but desperate to save his ship. And this world which had deferred the stars might need them sooner than they imagined; but they would not believe that yet.
Colley said, ‘We don’t need to answer barbarity in its own terms, but the ship should be preserved if possible. We need the monopole and probably other things that have dropped out of current knowledge.’
‘If possible. But can we?’ Campion’s eyes flickered at Raft, unreadably, probably hiding speculation under the bandages. ‘You have some advice, Commander?’
The question was a triumph for Raft, offering what he would not have dared broach for himself, marking a first rung on the ladder of position, stature, responsibility. He was ready for it. ‘Put a Security guard aboard, armed to repel boarders. Then let it be known that you have her and what she can do. That should keep them well away.’
‘Laurie?’
‘Yes, of course. Better still if they are too scared to make the attempt. No methods of combat have been worked out for such conditions.’
Raft said, ‘Nobody ever did fight in space that I know of. The opposition will also have to think it out. I have some ideas.’
He was needed; he would see to it that they continued to need him, at least until this viciousness was over.
Campion’s head moved sharply. ‘See to it, Laurie. Tonight.’
Colley started for the door. ‘A dozen men, Commander?’
‘Should be enough.’
Campion called painfully, ‘Not to go yourself. I need you here.’
At the door Colley paused; ‘Commander!’ He placed his hand over his heart, seriously, not in the usual sketchy fashion, said, ‘You think ahead of us,’ and left them.
Campion gave a stiff-lipped grunt of a laugh. ‘Laurie’s your man!’
‘What does it mean?’
‘Salute for an Ombudsman; he shouldn’t have done it, but we need an adviser with experience of violence.’ Do they think our streets ran round the clock with blood? ‘I can’t make you an Ombudsman; nobody can; there’ll be no more of them. But you can advise me.’ He added quickly, ‘No power of override.’
‘I wouldn’t want it.’
Campion brought him bluntly to earth. ‘Wouldn’t you? Don’t you want power? Then why do you offer loyalty? Lindley left the decision open and he was right. How do you justify loyalty?’
Raft risked a long shot, making it forceful. ‘Who harms mine, harms me.’
Campion said calmly, ‘We don’t make much of blood relationships. Am I in fact your grandson?’
Did a smile hide there, or a cat-and-mouse grin? Raft wished he knew. ‘Perhaps I was too definite, but we’ll know certainly when you get Heathcote. He has to be found.’
‘Yes.’ Campion’s voice remained bland. ‘The idea of you takes getting used to. Oh, I’m impressed; we’ll get along with or without a bloodline. You’re a sort of honorary Dad now that Stephen’s gone. But not Grandad; not yet.’
‘I’m sorry I jumped the gun there.’
‘Did what? What does that mean? Stay and talk; tell me about the old world, the old slang speech, the – oh, anything. I never got much out of Stephen.’
&
nbsp; Campion’s request was as much political as friendly, as much an attempt to gloss inept beginnings as to recognise a possible blood tie. Yet he was more taken with the idea of relationship than his caution admitted.
A Security man’s training began in extreme youth. Its procedures, designed to replace and obscure the emotional complex of family environment, could scarcely avoid creating alternative areas of extreme vulnerability, and one of these had been struck a considerable blow. He was tantalised, a little excited by the possible family closeness, which he and his kind knew only as a prerogative of those they served.
The flip style of the youngsters had it that Security was in the world but not of it, and the saying had its core of fact. Campion was before all things a Security man and his most urgent thinking circulated in areas beyond personality and pleasure. Raft the man was a part of his calculation of events; Raft the putative forebear was a relaxation.
And must remain so.
Because outside, in Melbourne Town, that tiny echo of a resounding city, dead policemen were being taken away. In the streets, in the gardens, in the houses, drug-sodden youngsters were being rounded up before the stare faded from their hypnoed eyes, and Campion was sick at heart. His kids had been used like herded beasts. His very bruises ached to stamp and destroy.
Only half his mind listened to Raft speaking of the chaotic, deadly past and he was asleep when Colley brought the starman a fresh uniform.
4
The dragonfly cruised with windows blacked out. The big man in shorts and shirt, wrapped in quiet reticence as if he were not a guard, was a Raft simulacrum but less than a perfect image. He was a shade more slender over-all, which might signify immediate vagaries of physical condition, but his face was differently lined, printing an expression Lindley could not fit to Raft as he knew him – something of the fanatic, something of the saint – and he moved more relaxedly. So the clone resemblance could be muted by factors of environment and training; it was to be expected.
This was a professionally automatic observation; Lindley’s deeper attention was inward, towards his frightening mental condition. Memory recorded all he had said and done since Alice appeared at his room door, and self-knowledge was derided by facts; he seemed to be watching a peculiar and shocking case of schizophrenia from the inside but intellect, slowly taking hold, insisted that he had acted both voluntarily and against his will. This could only mean duress of a special kind.
He said over the muffled roar of the dragonfly, ‘I’ve been drugged!’
Alice recoiled from his anger but whispered, ‘Yes.’ Then, as if in release, she became babblingly appeasing. ‘But it can’t harm you. A short term hypnotic. And it won’t harm you. I know it won’t—’ She broke off, ashamed, and said drearily, ‘It must be wearing off.’
He thought it was. He concentrated on visualising a complex geometrical figure in three dimensions, a calming exercise he had devised long ago. It helped.
He contradicted her, calmly because information took precedence over anger. ‘Not a hypnotic. I was fully aware and always basically hostile. A sapper of initiative; something new in the pharmacopoeia. Why was it done?’
‘The Lady sent for you.’
‘What lady?’
The girl frowned. ‘I don’t know who she is.’ The fact appeared to puzzle herself, a point he held for future consideration.
The clone-brother broke silence to talk nonsense in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘She is the soul of the remaking, the promise of tomorrow, the symbol of the world.’
It was the ancient profession of faith in a charismatic phantom, familiar and contemptible down the years. But the man was sincere. The real Raft could not have said it; his occasional enthusiasms were never blurred or mystical.
‘What does she want with me?’
Alice answered uncertainly, ‘I think it is John Heathcote who really wants you.’
So he lived. ‘Why?’
She had no idea. The clone-brother spoke again and it could have been Albert’s voice, softened and smoothed. ‘He feels you may be able to explain Albert.’
Speaking the name seemed to depress him.
‘Why not take Albert and let him explain himself?’
Alice said shakily, ‘Commander Raft is dead. He was dead before the dragonfly picked us up.’
The mob; the screaming mob. At the edges of his shock he saw that the clone-brother also was stunned by the news.
‘Killed? Murdered?’ She nodded fearfully. ‘Why?’
‘Perhaps he was dangerous.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’ Again the flash of wretchedness at her own ignorance.
Lindley snarled at the clone-brother, ‘Whose responsibility?’
‘I do not know that – yet. I did not know what the drugged children were to do.’ The Raft face darkened with menace. ‘But I shall know; we shall know.’ Threat gave way to slow thoughtfulness. ‘I did not feel him die. If he were half the world away I should have felt the vanishing. He was different in his fashion – but so different?’
Alice suggested timidly, ‘Perhaps the blind interfered with your perception.’
He shot her a grin of contempt and spoke to Lindley. ‘We know you for his friend, Doctor, and you might have been ours. Will you now be an enemy?’
The poor thing was too naïve for credibility. Lindley mocked, ‘The clone does not kill.’
‘Do you doubt us?’
‘If not the clone, then who?’
‘Other agents.’
‘So you do not kill but “do not strive officiously to keep alive”?’
The brother said primly – and ‘primly’ was the word for it – ‘What others do is not our responsibility.’
‘And your hands and your souls are thereby clean?’
‘Clean.’
‘Dear Jesus!’ He contemplated with grudging awe the monstrous conditioning that could produce such a rationalisation in a group of – ‘How many of you are there?’
‘Throughout the world there are eighty-three units.’
‘Eighty-three robots?’
The thing said stiffly, ‘We are highly individualised.’
‘Yes? I bet you can even tell each other apart. Or can you?’ He turned to Alice. ‘Now, little traitress, tell me where we are going.’
‘Don’t abuse me; I am loyal to a belief, not to a social system.’ But she hadn’t much spirit left for defiance
‘The final refuge of the thoroughly confused. Where are we going?’
‘I told you, to Gangoil.’
He knew of Heathcote’s little private joke; he had earned a gusher of scrambled reminiscence aboard Columbus once the Raft ice had broken. (Raft gone and himself alone among strangers? Irrational need clung to the small fact that the brother had not felt him die.)
‘Is it far?’
The brother reverted to apostleship. ‘Not far in distance, infinitely far in meaning.’
It was not worth pursuing; fanatics are as determinedly obscurantist as they are potentially dangerous.
Alice’s nerves were strung beyond restraint. She prattled, ‘Gangoil isn’t an Australian name. We have old native names like Croajingalong and Tallangatta –’ through the gabble Lindley began to make tentative deductions concerning her condition – ‘and Caddibarrawirracanna’ – her cluttered tongue barely compassed that one – ‘but Gangoil sounds wrong.’
Lindley said, ‘Trollope had an affection for the Irish,’ mystifying her completely. She was a woefully ignorant conspirator. So, for that matter, was the clone-brother.
5
Raft woke to the voice of the doorcom. ‘Who is it?’
‘Senior Colley.’
‘Wait on.’ He shuffled into a bathrobe and pressed the window sash. Summer rushed into the room with a shout of gold light and blue glazed sky and the promise of heat; it was the Australian special, blazing and bruising as soon as the sun cleared the horizon. It brought the sensation of homing all things had so far lacked.
He admitted a Colley who had probably slept little and that little in his overall. ‘What’s up?’
‘A lot. I’m to keep you up to date on everything.’
Ombudsman Raft, Acting, Unpaid. It was time they cut away their umbilical dependence on outdated experience, but for the time being it could be a useful status prop.
‘Sit down, Senior.’
‘I’ve ordered breakfast sent up. Eggs and coffee all right?’
‘Anything. I suppose the dining-room is wreckage?’
‘Not too bad. It will be mostly a matter of replacing panels – prefabricated stuff.’ He did not mention blood and shredded flesh. ‘I want some private conversation – conference – while we sort out what matters and what doesn’t, so I’ve had your room bugs blanked.’
‘Bugs?’
‘We have to keep an eye on you after what’s happened.’
‘Yes, but every move and word!’ He stopped because Colley seemed surprised at the protest and because in an environment so sophisticated in the apparatus of watchfulness he might need all the protective surveillance they could offer.
Colley said, ‘It shouldn’t be for long. Where’s your overall? It’s broadcasting, so we’d better defuse it for the moment. Like this – tab under the lapel.’
Raft pitched it on the bed. ‘When’s the funeral?’
‘The what?’
‘I’d like to attend Jackson’s funeral.’
Colley was rueful. ‘You keep taking me back to things I’ve only read about. We don’t have funerals. That was a grisly business, holding a sort of social gathering round a dead host. We just cremate; the remains of the Ombudsman were burned hours ago.’
Eminently practical and dauntingly cold. With usefulness finished, toss it into the incinerator. Would no one want to farewell Jackson except himself? Or was he indulging sentimental crap, letting blue funk pay its offering to luck?
He could not help asking, ‘Do you people believe in an afterlife?’
‘You mean as though the psyche or some such doesn’t knock off with the body? I’ve never thought about it; I enjoy life too much to worry. A couple of religious sects among the aesthetic groups are based on ideas like that – where a soul, whatever that is, keeps going indefinitely. Do you have those ideas?’
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