To the table Raft said, ‘Warn your golems not to irritate me. I intend to visit Gangoil, but on my terms. Be wise and treat me as a friend, whether I am or not – and you don’t know that.’
David’s self-possession splintered; it had been held together only by will and stimulants. He beat his hands on the table and yelled, to himself as much as any, ‘What the devil does it matter who dominates? Let the ignorant idiot have his way if it will save Gangoil.’
Raft looked to Lindley in silent enquiry.
‘You’ll be fascinated,’ the psychiatrist told him. ‘Fascinated and frightened. You were right – something will have to be done about biologists. But the thing that must not be done is that Gangoil be delivered over to any national government. Any government.’
Raft ruminated. Outside, the rain had exhausted its first fit, but if it had been dropping in sheets his need would still have been to end this useless confrontation and be on the way to Gangoil. He said, ‘All that’s understood, but it isn’t enough. Jim, you’ll have to stay behind.’ David’s mouth opened and Raft told him flatly, ‘You need me and my price is high. Do as I say or try to negotiate with Campion and Parker yourself. Just try.’
‘Parker!’
‘Surprise, surprise? He knows where you are, but for the moment he’s following Campion’s lead. And Campion will follow mine – and that’s your hope of salvation. So this is what will happen: Jim will stay behind. Joe will take him to Ian Campion and he’ll tell Ian everything he knows about Gangoil.’
David was mumbling about his missing drivers and pilots.
‘Then you can bet Parker has them.’
‘They don’t know anything about the internal activities.’
‘Lucky you. If they did Parker would have it out of them and I’d be no use to you. Now, Joe, can you get transport?’
Joe, only half comprehending but exalted with a sense of being at the heart of great affairs, stuttered that there would be a bus along. ‘Or we can hitch a commercial.’
Lindley objected, ‘This mightn’t be the best idea. You aren’t totally informed, Albert. There are facts you need to know before you get to the mountain.’
‘David can brief me. It’ll pay him to brief me.’
‘Not as I can. Heathcote, for instance, is not the same.’
‘After forty-two years? Do you think I expect a bloody youngster?’ He was tired of pressing his weight on them all; his temper slid off balance and he bellowed, ‘For Christ’s sake, Jim, do what I tell you and stop trying to push me.’
Then he was furious with himself for losing grip in front of a psychiatrist who knew him in and out, deep and shallow.
David said, ‘Have your way, Commander. You intend to have it anyway. I will brief you en route. Now let us get away from here.’
‘What about me?’ That was Peter.
Raft asked, ‘Does Gangoil want him?’
David shook his head. ‘I don’t know him; I don’t have contact with operatives. I’m a biologist trying to pick up the pieces, not the spider of the network.’
‘Who is?’
‘No one any longer.’
Raft grinned heartlessly at the boy. ‘So do what you like, lad. Nobody needs you any more. You’ve been used up. Try the Security clinic and find out how much post-command is crammed into your head.’
Lindley jumped to the floor and came to him and said, too quietly for the others to hear, ‘I don’t remember you as an unnecessarily cruel man.’
‘Or as a sentimentally kind one. If he needs help he can get it, so let’s not waste time on pity.’
He heard Joe, perhaps having second thoughts, say, ‘Stick with me, Pete. It’ll work out.’
Raft dismissed the youngsters from consideration. He was very satisfied that the unlooked-for presence of Lindley had solved a problem. With Jim at Campion’s ear, plainly sent as adviser and deputy, there would be no fuss, no tension, if he vanished for a short time. He could not estimate how much time. Gangoil seemed a flailing, inchoate group; it could well take a day or two to establish firm control. Old John would be the key, easily turned by the fingers of affection.
He realised that Lindley thrust something at him, and recognised incredulously a monopole gun.
‘Take it. You may need self-defence in that rubbish heap of unbalanced minds.’
The gun could have come from only one source in the world. For an instant he travelled in time, re-living the half-concerned, half-derisive moment when he had made the gift, hoping John could find the spirit to use it if the need arose.
Lindley’s voice returned him to the present. ‘Don’t be hasty with it. Gangoil needs understanding more than anger, but it can be dangerous. The magazine is loaded.’
‘I’d forgotten it existed.’
Laughing, he thrust it into his belt.
David called out, his voice cracking, ‘What are you doing, Lindley? Is he to make peace with a gun?’
Raft answered him calmly, ‘I’m not that kind of a fool, neither am I refusing protection when it’s offered.’
The rain ceased briefly; by a miracle of contraction the clouds parted to admit the stroke of a blazing sun. Lindley and the boys emerged into bright and steaming air.
At the last moment Peter raced back to the hall door to shout, ‘His clothes are wired! Every word …’ It penetrated at last that bugging and tracing and listening no longer mattered, that the fabulous Gangoil he had never seen was out of hiding.
Urging him away, Lindley surprised him wiping at tears and took him by the shoulders to shake without gentleness.
‘I haven’t time to purr and soothe. Just make up your mind that you’ve backed the wrong horse, that it wasn’t your fault and that nobody’s dwelling on making you pay for it. You brats have a world to build but not the one you think. The Gangoil caper’s finished and if you knew what I do you’d be damned glad of it.’
The boy sulked, which was as good a sign as any and better than having him afraid and unpredictable.
Almost Lindley turned back to give a message for Alice, but thought of nothing that wasn’t ridiculous or pointless. He had better accept that he had no future there.
He felt suddenly uneasy about Raft, sensing a hardness different in quality from the game-playing of a subtle commander. Something had happened to him, some internal shifting. Or, he thought, super-sensitivity was deceiving him, too finely honed by the rapid changing of his ideas as day by day the new world revealed new faces.
He had, he realised, been so occupied that he had not consciously thought of England in several days. Now he found the anger gone and only a grey sadness underlying his mind.
At the shattered gate thought fled as he was closed in on from both sides by grey uniforms. As if in sympathy the clouds began to draw together again; the light dulled.
‘Doctor Lindley, I think.’
‘Yes.’ So soon the planning for Gangoil was ended.
‘I suppose,’ Parker suggested with villainous brightness, ‘that Commander Raft and escort will vanish by rear exit to wherever their transport is waiting.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Don’t be downhearted, Doctor; I wouldn’t arrest that gang for my hope of paradise. So let us exchange news until our instruments tell us in which direction our birdie flies. To Gangoil, I presume?’
Exchanging news should have meant a furious pumping by Parker, but first it was necessary to convince Lindley of his good intentions, which he thought he managed reasonably well. If Lindley received the impression that Parker and Raft were deeply involved co-conspirators with a common lofty aim, that was all to the good. It held some elements of truth.
His first direct question brought an answer that tumbled all deviousness out of his mind. The twenty minutes which elapsed before the double beep which represented Raft rose upward, airborne, raced by in agitated probing. He could wait no longer though he left a hundred questions unanswered; he must greet Raft on the High Plain and not leave him again.
Lindley he despatched to Campion with a shower of instructions and a policeman in case the psychologist should have second thoughts and create difficulties.
Lindley, watching Parker’s dragonfly rise from the middle of the road where it had arrogantly forced traffic to stop or crawl round it, recalled that he had not mentioned the monopole gun. Parker would be interested in that simple and foolproof weapon, not that there was any likely need for it unless the unpredictable clone-brothers turned mulish and dangerous.
3
The Gangoil party went by back gate and back lane, through overgrown streets of collapsing houses lurking behind shrubbery come back into its own.
David’s dragonfly was hangared in a broken-down shed a mile from the hall, and turned out to be not a modern ’fly but an old helicopter-jet with a variable rotor design Raft recognised on sight. It had been the most ambitious design of 1989; this relic was in showpiece condition, beautifully maintained. It explained one puzzlement of Gangoil’s transport facilities, for it was not possible that they mounted a hypno-hijack every time a vehicle was needed; this one had been with the complex from the beginning. Given an adequate fuel dump and operation by night on courses away from regular flight lanes, secrecy in a world with eyes inturned was relatively easy.
Carrying six, with a clone-brother piloting, it was roomy enough. In elbow-touching proximity, but with automatic reactions suppressed, Raft felt only a normal distaste for propinquity with persons he disliked. Now, studying their mask-similar expressions, he came on a fact that pleased him immensely – given line for line repetition, their faces still were not the face he saw in his mirror. In their midst he would be seen as the lone individual, alike but distinguishable, as the expert separates the original work from all copies. His internal self registered in his face, and his self was not theirs. He began to think of them as a tool he might impersonally use.
As the machine rose he looked over Melbourne Town, incredibly small and compact, bright-roofed and complacent. In the surrounding desolation a great city was skeletally present in the squares and curves of a dead planning, spectrally blurring where vegetation reclaimed the ruined land.
He checked the position of the sun; they were heading approximately north-east. ‘Where is Gangoil?’
David grumbled, ‘You said you knew.’
‘I said Parker knows. Where?’
‘Beneath the Bogong High Plain.’
He was jolted to childhood, to the yearly motoring holidays, those short happinesses when he sat alone in the back seat, unspeaking, watching the world without, happy because it changed and changed with the miles and required nothing of him save that he look, and because the two in front lived inside themselves and forgot him, allowing him to forget them.
The High Plain had been a favourite run, up from the valley, up thousands of winding feet where the monstrous conduits of the hydro-electric plant plunged to the valley floor; up to the High Plain, the plateau where the waters gathered, where the cattle fed in summer and whence they were driven down before the snow reclaimed it in winter … Once John had taken him there, the two of them only, in the one ecstatic summer when They had been too firmly occupied to consider the need of a lonely boy …
‘It is the laboratory complex the last of the old governments built to hide Heathcote’s work.’
The name roused Raft from dreams. ‘What did Lindley mean about change in John?’
A few minutes of woollen greyness closed round them as the ’copter rose into the cloud layer; in near darkness David muttered that explanation was not simple, that Raft was not a biologist—
The word opened menace. ‘What have you done to him?’
He saw Raft as an overbearing thug, capable of any crudity, and retired into the face-saving of the non-violent man, a strained coolness proclaiming intelligence as a proper human weapon. ‘Not to him, but for him. You will be surprised at his youthfulness; he is probably younger-looking than you remember him.’
That did not commit him to an uncomfortable exactness; he had to depend on Heathcote and sentiment to calm Raft when he faced the – ‘revenant’ was the word he groped for but he had thought, ‘remnant’.
‘What did you do?’
David relaxed into lecture. ‘Studies of the ageing process were an offshoot of genetic manipulation, leading to experimental work in rejuvenation. Side issues of the cloning data opened new avenues, particularly with regard to the thymus and the immune system, which was really the key—’
‘Agreed I’m not a biologist, but you weren’t the first to see the immune system as basic to the study of senescence. So John permitted himself to be used for rejuvenation experiments?’
Sudden sunlight illuminated the cabin, revealing the clone-brothers intent on David’s words. He was reminded of what Lindley had told him of Raft’s loathing of the clone, of the cloning process and everything to do with it. His courage, a strictly intellectual trait, ebbed; he could not bear Raft’s style of larrikin brow beating. And there was the gun, silently evil. He said, ‘Yes.’
Something, not a movement but rather a sense of increased attention, passed over the clone-brothers. Raft’s residual sensitivity perceived it and even made some interpretation.
‘You’re lying.’
‘Simplifying,’ David protested. ‘I can’t sum up forty years of research in simple sentences.’
The pilot spoke without turning his head. ‘John has the appearance of youth and the brain of age. But there are deficiencies.’
They would not contradict him but he must not hide truth altogether; he improvised rapidly, smearing science fiction over science fact. ‘Doctor Heathcote was approaching senility when the treatments began. Some areas of memory were failing, and brain cells do not replace themselves.’ He found himself on the brink of another unnecessary lie, and said plainly, ‘His memory of life before rejuvenation is therefore imperfect.’
‘Does he remember me?’
‘Yes, oh, yes.’
‘With love,’ said a clone-brother reproachfully. Raft behaved as if he had not heard.
David said eagerly, ‘He was greatly upset when he learned of The Lady’s attempt to have you killed.’
‘Who is she?’
‘A cult object. I don’t know her name. Nobody knows.’ That was safe; for once the clone was not aware how much he knew. ‘John has forgotten. She was in Gangoil before I was born and she has always been The Lady. Even the clone don’t know.’
The pilot said over his shoulder, ‘She is a poor woman out of her wits. But she is the mother of the new world as John is its father.’
Raft laughed, a short and ugly sound. ‘I am the father.’
The immobile expressions surveyed him, betraying nothing, but David’s revelatory tic ran its course from surprise to a scared wariness and lapsed into speculation.
It was not a long trip, perhaps a hundred miles in a blaze of sunlight on cloud, until the clouds also reached for the sky; at the last, Bogong was invisible and they moved blindly to the mountain. A point of light on the instrument panel told of a radio beacon hidden in the gloom and whispering in the pilot’s ear, but it was the communicator grille in the ceiling that blared noisy panic.
‘Davy! Davy! Doctor David! There is a strange ’fly on the High Plain! Answer me, Davy!’
The pilot said to the ground, ‘Do not shout, please. Be calm.’
David spoke across him. ‘David. Report fully.’
The voice, deprived of drama, complained, ‘It landed only two minutes ago, in zero visibility, on radar reflection. It’s about a mile from the hangar lift. If you come in quickly you may get in undetected.’
David turned to Raft. ‘Your friends?’
‘Parker, I imagine. I arranged nothing, but how could he fail to take an interest?’ He let David stew a little in the steam of the Controller’s name; even navel-gazing Gangoil must know his reputation for dedicated ruthlessness.
The radio chattered, ‘He’s lifted again. Moving towards y
ou on a direct line.’
Raft fingered his betraying shirt collar for David’s sour understanding. ‘But he isn’t after you, Doctor; he has you any time he closes his fist. He’s keeping an eye on me. You might as well land; you’ve passed any possible usefulness of running.’
David scowled. ‘Take us in.’ The ’copter began to lose height, groping slowly into the murk.
Raft slipped the monopole gun from his belt and, without looking at it, began with a soldier’s familiar accuracy to take it to pieces. It came apart in a series of sliding motions, breaking the magnetic lines which were all that held it together. To David’s eye the construction seemed impossible; the chamber pressures in firing should be sufficient to scatter it into its component fragments.
Even the barrel split in short segments like collars. The butt came off, dividing laterally into two flat pieces of casing and disgorging a flat plate which David recognised as a sophisticated power pack as well as a flat magazine holding what appeared less like bullets than small slugs without cartridge cases. The firing chamber also split apart. The pieces disappeared into Raft’s pockets. Suddenly there was no gun.
David viewed the performance with an expression of affront at observing a known object constructed in impudent defiance of proper requirements.
Raft shook with quiet laughter. He moved his hands with conjurer’s accuracy; in ten seconds the assembled gun was pointed at David’s indignant head and as quickly was gone again into the Commander’s pockets. Throughout the demonstration he had not once looked at the weapon.
The clone-brothers were not impressed, each of them being gifted with the same ambidextrous accuracy and speed. They averted their eyes, registering virtuous disapproval of the weapon’s existence.
The ’copter landed in the grey gloom with little more than a cushioned bounce, the radio ejaculating useless reports until the pilot shut it off.
David asked him, ‘Are we on the lift?’
‘Directly central.’
‘Then signal for entrance.’
It was already too late. The cloud burst into diffused brilliance around them, the source racing in, separating into gauzy searchlight eyes as it came to rest only yards distant.
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