Heathcote was not and never had been the gentle old dear of Raft’s description; Raft, swaddled in his adolescent problems of rejection and dependence, had never been able to see him clearly and had left Earth at the time of disagreement when he might have begun to observe facts. Where his work, his personal drive was concerned, Heathcote was as capable of monstrosity as he probably was incapable of realising it.
His reaction now was resentful disbelief, refusal to accept what he had heard, inability to combat what could not conceivably be true.
What his final response might have been Lindley never discovered because their dialogue was scattered and dissolved in a fresh sound and fury.
They scarcely heard her coming because she was barefooted, had barely a slither of warning before her bursting entrance. She came as a breaking storm, scarlet-faced and screaming, ‘You miserable bastard! Give me back my boys!’
She was surely a little drunk. She was also stark-naked, which seemed to be her normal condition. She carried her bulk easily, chin raised in an attitude of formidable and furious dignity, all ruined by staring eyes and distorted mouth and disordered hair. Lindley thought briefly of a regal fishwife.
‘You’ve taken them from me and I want them! Why am I not attended?’ She dropped, not at all contemptibly, into a crouch of dangerous aggression. ‘What have you told them? What lies? They are The Lady’s minions. Mine, mine!’
She made preposterous noise in the confined space and Heathcote was practically liquefied with terror of her. He retreated until he was backed against the desk, bleating while she advanced on him, a screaming eagle at a rabbit. She certainly would have attacked him with her bare hands if Lindley had not spoken sharply and close to her ear.
‘You’re making an undignified exhibition of yourself.’
Totally concentrated, she had been unaware of him, but ‘undignified’ caught at self-love. She paused to survey him with annihilating contempt but her hands went to her hair, poking and patting, and grotesquely over her hips to smooth an invisible gown.
‘I am The Lady! Never forget it, skinny psychiatrist.’
Running feet sounded outside and two identical figures jostled through the door – Francis and Eric, if Lindley understood the colour coding correctly. They flung themselves on her, one to each arm, but trying to handle her gently. She treated gentleness with unfeminine ferocity, dragging them with her as her taloned fingers reached for Heathcote.
The scientist was sure of death if she reached him and his fright burst in panic. He scrambled at the desk, dragged out the monopole gun, incontinently dropped it and groped on the floor for it, distraught and gasping. From his knees he levelled it at her, clutched ridiculously in both shaking hands, bawling in an aged cackle of despair, ‘Kill you, Bitch, kill you!’
The scene froze. At sight of the gun she became utterly still and terror of death broke out of her like a sweat. All her living, her unguessable years rose up to reject ending. She did not try to run or plead but stared, hypnotised, into the monopole circle.
The enemies confronted each other in abject mutual cowardice.
Francis found speech, tension squeezing from him the tones of an enraged schoolmistress. ‘Do put that thing down, John; you know perfectly well you won’t use it. Oh, for pity’s sake, Doctor Lindley, don’t just stand there! Take it from him.’ He and his brother urged The Lady backwards to the door and a note of relieved spitefulness entered his voice. ‘Come on, duckie, and we’ll dish up a lovely meal of tranquillisers. Enough for a week.’
She went without resistance, probably not hearing him, her mind fixed on death.
Lindley took the weapon by the barrel and twitched it from Heathcote’s fingers. ‘To fire it you must first remove the safety catch and press the battery stud.’ He tossed it into the drawer so casually that Heathcote cowered again in wait for an explosion.
As they shepherded The Lady out, Eric said – or it could have been Francis – over his shoulder, ‘The service staff really has to overwork its sense of humour round here. And even so, who’s laughing?’ They vanished, coaxing the dreadful woman who must be obscenely old and who had dwelt too long in an erosive haze of gratification and power.
Doctor David’s face appeared in the doorway. ‘Some excitement? She’s a thoroughgoing nuisance now she can’t get her own way by calling the clone.’
‘Who is she?’
‘I don’t know. Nobody here knows. Her identity is lost in chaos and she won’t tell.’ He did not seem happy with the subject and changed it quickly. ‘Forget her now; we leave for Melbourne Town in an hour; I want to be there and concealed before first light. The information is that we can pick Raft up about nine-thirty in the morning.’
‘Albert!’ Heathcote screamed the name. ‘You’re bringing him here?’
‘If he’ll come, and we think he will. He was quite a friend of yours in, um, other circumstances, wasn’t he? The new look will surprise him, don’t you think?’
Lindley said, ‘Skip the petty cruelties. I must go, Doctor Heathcote; I’ll talk to you when I get back.’ He reached into the desk drawer, snapped down the lid of the guncase and lifted it out. ‘You won’t need this and I just might.’
Heathcote made no objection; he had retired into aggrieved sulkiness.
Lindley made no bones about hustling David out ahead of him and in the corridor said, ‘You’ve been lying, of course. You know who she is. If you didn’t, sheer curiosity would have set you searching Heathcote’s memory patterns until it showed.’
David ignored the accusation, asked, ‘What’s in that case?’
‘A gun.’
David’s pace slowed. The idea troubled him but after a moment he said, ‘I suppose we have to accept weaponry as part of your philosophy, but don’t let the clone know you have it. Where did it come from?’
‘Tell me, who is The Lady?’
David hurried again, throwing over his shoulder, ‘Very well, I know, but I’m not telling. You are armed, and with her so am I.’
‘Armed against whom?’
David walked faster. ‘Don’t be impatient. She’ll be more useful if she comes as a surprise.’
‘To whom? Security? The government?’
But he got nothing more from the biologist.
4
The grey-uniformed constable said the Controller waited outside, in the car.
‘Why couldn’t he come in?’
The constable smiled frostily. ‘He probably wishes to speak privately.’
The implication of inter-service distrust was most likely justified.
The vehicle was the first small car of its type Raft had seen, something like the sedans of the eighties but with the same blunt-ended, disconcertingly engineless appearance as the large freight and passenger buses. He knew now of the flattened rotary engines and compact storage batteries of fantastic charge but still marvelled at miniature perfection.
The constable ushered him into the front seat alongside Parker, who had the wheel, and himself sat in the back. Raft, trusting Parker not at all, saw reason in the arrangement and prepared for the unexpected and unpleasant.
‘Civilian clothes,’ Parker noted, without greeting. ‘Sensible of you not to opt for extreme fashion; it wouldn’t suit you.’
‘First steps with care. Always.’
‘Bugged to the neck, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’ And for once glad of it.
Parker chuckled, not nicely. ‘Not inside this car, Commander. You have just vanished from the listening tapes. A damper field.’
‘Perhaps,’ Raft said, testing the limits of his position, ‘I should leave now.’
Parker flicked the gear lever and the car moved into silent passage. ‘You should, but if you try Constable Smith will put bullets into both your shoulders.’
Down, Rover! But at least an exploratory yap: ‘Security would not approve of that.’
‘I don’t give a damn about Security.’
That was as menacing a statem
ent as Raft could imagine, but he conjured a wraith of politeness to ask, ‘So where to now?’
Parker did not answer. The car continued straight down St Kilda Road to Princes Bridge, where Raft had stood that afternoon and in his fashion mourned the desolation of a city, and there stopped.
The moon had not risen. On the far bank of the river a huge darkness brooded, save where the cathedral soared amazingly bathed in light. Against the night its floodlit yellow-grey stone floated in radiance, antique and warm, the three spires making their eternal demand of heaven. It was breathtaking rather than beautiful, more dramatic than reverent. And it seemed irrelevant to the time.
There he was wrong. Parker said, ‘Believers are spread thin these days but they preserve their church in such state as can be managed. Are you a Christian?’ He made the question important.
‘Probably not. I don’t reject God, but is he a necessity? You can be a good man without following a metaphysical creed.’
‘Goodness is a metaphysical creed. I am a Christian. I believe in God.’
The simplicity compelled belief, but was no paradox involved in Christianity linked with craft, threat, deviousness and latent cruelty? How many hecatombs had burned and screamed to the glory of God?
Parker would have had no difficulty following his thoughts. He said, ‘I am also a patriot – of my world as well as of my country.’ He turned his face to Raft, smiling. ‘That means I can kill without scruple.’ Raft did not move or speak. ‘I’ll have truth out of you tonight, Commander, if I have to put you to limit question. Which is illegal. And then I may have to kill you. Fair warning?’
If only to bolster his shocked courage, Raft matched the smile. ‘Warning, at any rate.’
‘Then, to business. Are you a telepath?’
The question he had thought dealt with and forgotten rocked Raft’s control. Parker’s tenacity was lethal.
‘No.’ He was not telepathic; he was sure of that.
Parker contemplated the yellow ember of the cathedral. Enquiring of his bloody-minded God? ‘I hope you are not. And a telepath probably would not have been trapped into the car. But there could be limitations of perception only you could know of – proximity, damping substances, electromagnetic interference and so on. For your sake I hope you are telling the truth. You will tell it.’
Persistent denial would mean nothing to Parker hounding down a fear. And Parker had worse in his armoury.
‘But if you are not, why did you kill Doctor Fraser?’
This was so unlooked for that thought ran like a mad thing. Sooner or later it had had to come, but not from Parker. The instinctive thought of escape he dismissed instantly; he could not outrun Smith’s gun and would only advertise guilt.
And Parker was saying equably, ‘You must keep talking, Commander. Do you know that the voice is affected by psychological fluctuations and that the most level tone includes microvariations imposed by changes in blood pressure, nervous tension, muscle flexure and so on? Or that the little thread-transceiver which seems to be somewhere round the back of your neck functions therefore as an efficient lie detector for Constable Smith’s hand monitor? Not one hundred per cent reliable; these things never are; but generally dependable. So, for your life, keep talking.’
Parker’s gadgetry worried Raft less than the man’s murderous attitude; he had only a doubtful card to play. ‘Kill me,’ he said, ‘and lose everything you hope to gain.’
Unexpectedly Smith supported him. ‘He means that. Comes up very steady.’
Parker studied Raft with dislike. ‘What a cold-blooded bastard you must be. So I can’t afford to kill you. Yet.’
Raft allowed him no time to think it over. ‘Why do you imagine I killed Fraser?’
‘Do you have to be convinced that I know? Security brought him down, metabolic bath and all, and handed it to us for post-mortem because big brother Security doesn’t waste its ethical time on side issues; it calls on the locals, which this time meant me and mine. Which goes to show that even gentlemen should do their own dirty work. That bath preserves perfectly, and the blood was still liquid, which proved to be an important point. Now, why should so healthy a physique as Fraser’s take heart failure? And such a gentle failure; not even a facial rictus. It didn’t take an imaginative man long to locate what your crew friends’ superficial examination could not get at – as you hoped and as it happened – a massive embolism which had not actually reached the right auricle. A very special embolism, not a clot but a big bubble of air. It must have had artificial origin; that is, it must have been injected. Why? As a murder weapon – and it just could have been one – it was too chancy; long odds against it proving fatal. But if it had been injected by one of those fascinating hypodermics which snake in and out of the bath walls, then some other required dosage must have been omitted. Right?’
With Smith watching the monitor and holding a gun, Raft conceded, ‘Your man seems to have gone straight to it.’
‘Why not? Full instructions concerning the bath were in the ship’s computers and blueprints in the library. It wasn’t difficult to decide that the missing dosage was an adrenalin injection, obviously crucial, at about the midpoint of the revivification process. Fraser died of total metabolic failure for lack of essential stimulation, because a needle failed to pick up its dose and injected a bolus of air which just might have served to divert attention from the real cause of death. But Commander Raft, the ship’s engineer, who knew all about the baths because he helped to design and build them, found no mechanical failure. He also checked the drug levels of the reservoirs and found them correct, no doubt saw to it that they were correct. And so complete mystery, even if Doronin and Lindley had found the bubble. But they didn’t open the corpse; they wanted it preserved intact. Perhaps they gambled that by 2032 some mode of resuscitation might be available.’
‘It was mentioned.’
‘By Commander Raft, in the interest of a quiet voyage? But you knew the truth must come to light back on Earth.’
‘It would have been dealt with on a level where murder could be a matter for congratulation.’
He heard Smith shifting uneasily and Parker’s distaste was a force in the small space. ‘One of your stinking political affairs! Knew too much, did he? About what? Telepathy?’
Raft searched his feeling about Fraser and found no remorse; the man had been a fool and a bloody unpleasant fool. He said tiredly, ‘There was nothing for him to know about telepathy.’
Parker snorted, unbelieving. Smith’s indifferent voice reported, ‘I think it’s true.’
‘Then why, Commander?’
‘He menaced the social balance of the ship, perhaps the ship itself. One man off-centre in a closed community—’
‘Understood. Be specific.’
‘Even in training we weren’t friendly. He would call me “dinkum cobber Albert”, smiling to pretend it wasn’t a sneer. Made jokes about how Australians had come up fast from the boomerang. Then in space there was an initial period when everybody suspected everybody else of political espionage; you’d be hard put to believe how tightly wound international suspicions were at that time. But Fraser went over the odds, insulting the Russians especially with innuendo about corrective asylums and straitjacket philosophy. Then he started a line of hints about my lack of academic standing, building a theory of political log-rolling behind my appointment—’
‘Which there was?’
Remembering Smith and his gadget, ‘Yes, there was.’
‘And he was on to it?’
‘He was guessing, but it disturbed the others, and his needling might eventually have driven me to some incaution. Because I did have a secret; you know that.’
‘After all your command training?’
‘Six months’ confinement with the same faces develops cracks in the personality; our psychiatrists were good but they hadn’t enough fingers to plug every hole in the dyke. Fraser worried them; they’ll corroborate that.’
‘If we ever
see them again.’
‘Read their bloody tapes; it’s all there.’ He said with renewed violence, ‘The bastard had to go! He wouldn’t take warning. Splitting the personnel, undermining discipline, undermining me!’
Parker said, ‘Smith!’
‘True, I think, sir. I mean he thinks it’s all true, but a man tends to exaggerate arguments in his favour, not meaning to.’
‘Meaning, whatever the monitor says you don’t believe him.’
‘It doesn’t seem enough to kill a man for, but perhaps it seemed enough to him. Under strain …’
‘Thank you, constable. How does it seem in retrospect, Commander?’
‘As it did then! Columbus cost more than a hundred billion dollars, if you know any longer what that sort of money means; you don’t build in space for the price of a breakfast food. All that at risk for one man? I removed him. Without fuss.’
Stridency and congestion warned him his anger had spilled over. He let his body loosen, his mind shift to neutral visions, but it was too late to care what signals danced on Smith’s instrument. Worse was the revelation of anger present after years; speaking of Fraser had tapped stored hatred.
Parker turned his eyes on Smith’s face as he agreed with the constable, ‘But it didn’t make a reason for murder.’
‘Stuff your ethics! As commander I saw it differently.’
Smith answered Parker’s gaze: ‘He believes it all right.’
Parker asked, ‘Do you often lose your temper, Commander?’
‘Rarely.’ The tone was controlled, wooden. ‘I practise restraint but like any man I can be pushed too hard.’
Parker extended a hand and Smith placed in it a black oblong the size of a matchbox from which a fine cable led to whatever apparatus snuggled in the back seat. Staring at the detector, he said, ‘Back to telepathy,’ nodded at a small flicker and continued, ‘The thing you were afraid of Fraser discovering was that your appointment was a direct result of Heathcote’s cloning experiments. Yes?’
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