A spokesman was impassive. ‘Yours also, Albert.’
Raft’s face grew congested. ‘I disown you!’ It was the voice of judgement dismissing the damned. ‘I am I. My name is not legion.’
The spokesman did not reply, probably did not understand. There was altogether too much biblical reminiscence here, and of the wrong kind. Parker said to David, ‘Tell us about them.’
‘Joseph and Henry communicate in fragmentary fashion, the level of understanding not as high as low IQ vocal exchanges; they use speech to assist them. Their range is about forty feet.’
‘And they can’t switch on and off?’
‘How could they? The brain isn’t an on-off switchboard. You only cease to think by dying.’
‘That makes an appalling prospect.’
‘So far. Of course we hope some form of control will appear.’ The implications really meant nothing to his insular intelligence.
‘Do they try to find ways?’
‘How? How do you think a quiet thought or a noisy thought or a thought in one direction only? Can you expect more of beginners, telepathic babies? The brain is an autonomic mechanism.’
Parker jerked his head at Raft. ‘He has some control over his heart and glands, I believe. Those are autonomic.’
‘The Commander’s control is limited and he cannot describe it in meaningful terms. Rather, the clone cannot. Can you, Commander?’ Raft shook his head. ‘Nor can these novices describe what they do or how they do it.’
An insinuating voice said, ‘I can control.’
One of the telepaths had approached as they talked. He was about seventeen, vaguely a Raft in features but in body shapeless and flabby.
‘You can’t hear me yet because I’m not pushing. Now I’ll push!’ He clamped his lips, clasped his arms across his stomach and crouched; veins in his temples swelled. ‘Now you can hear me.’
They ‘heard’ nothing. A nurse appeared. ‘Joseph, come away.’
‘No. You can hear me, can’t you?’
David said, ‘The others hear him faintly. Nobody else does.’
Parker said, ‘An idiot. And the others?’
‘All – disturbed.’
Joseph burst into tears and stamped. ‘They’re pretending! They won’t admit—’ He squealed and turned to Raft. ‘I heard you! The Doctor will have you killed for that!’
The nurse cooed in his ear, wheedling, ‘I’ll play music for you.’ The effect was immediate; he left them precipitately, dragging the girl. When soft music started in his island he listened with his head thrown back and an expression of inspired stupidity.
David asked, ‘Commander, what was in your mind then?’
Raft spat but otherwise ignored him.
Parker said, ‘What about the fourth one?’
‘Robert is best left alone. He – his nurse wears a shielded head-dress.’
Parker had noticed her – and the girl was two hundred feet away – and the metallic something covering her hair, part helmet, part pudding-basin. ‘Is he dangerous?’
Raft’s head swivelled intently to David.
‘Discomforting. He broadcasts patterns.’
‘Geometrical patterns?’
‘No, no. Patterns of abstract thought. At least, we think so; they come through as emotional effects and they can be very disturbing. Exciting at times, depressing at others, even frightening. I suppose that in unshielded company he could be psychologically dangerous. There’s so much to be understood; it will be years before we achieve anything useful.’
‘Before,’ Raft said, ‘you produce anything but idiots in my name. In my name!’
At the far end of the hall Robert rose from his couch, disturbed by their voices and resentful. He was immense – immensely tall and broad and fat. He sagged with flesh.
His helmeted nurse ran to his side and he squeaked at her in a high counter-tenor whose words were indistinguishable. He pointed an elephantine arm and waved with imperial arrogance, apparently willing them to vanish. The nurse spoke inaudibly and he swung his ham fist at her, so slowly that she evaded it with ease. She spoke again and again he squawked, but lowered himself obediently from sight on the couch. She returned to her desk at the wall.
‘Another of my sons? This abortion I must inspect.’
In mid-speech he was off down the hall, dodging through the pattern of areas. The police reached for their guns and Parker stopped them with a word. He saw a moment for testing his strength. He said to the clone-brothers, ‘You! After him. See he does no damage to it.’
They hesitated for their voiceless conference, perhaps half a second, agreed with his decision and set off after Raft. Parker’s opportunist soul hugged itself; he would have them yet as disillusionment with the clone-father grew. The elation faltered at a prick of doubt that he understood properly what took place in those outlandish minds. Swiftly as he had acted, so swiftly was he convinced that he had acted foolishly, but with all of them half-way down the hall fresh interference could only cause confusion. He patted the comforting gun in its holster.
Arthur came from the rear and silently placed himself at their head, knees a little bent as if he might leap after Raft.
‘What is it, Arthur?’ He was impelled to a paternal caution, ‘Don’t do anything foolish.’
Arthur sighed at him, ‘Shut up. Watch. Listen. And don’t shoot.’
Police eyes queried and Parker showed them empty hands; they accepted the order uneasily. Perhaps he had compounded error, but he was beginning to think that Arthur possessed the coolest mind of any of them.
Raft’s footsteps were loud; his clone, plastic-soled, went unheard. Robert heard him and raised his great head over the back of the couch, resting his chin there, jowls spread like dewlaps. Perhaps because he saw five where he had heard only one he suspected some unholy intention and bleated out a baby’s unreasoning terror, raising his blubber to its feet, shaking and shrill.
His nurse cried out to Raft, ‘Please go away. You’re frightening him,’ and Raft proceeded as though she had not spoken. ‘You’re upsetting him; you don’t understand!’
It seemed that at once Raft did understand. Perhaps twenty feet from Robert he staggered and came abruptly to a halt, and lifted his hands to his eyes while Robert squealed and fluttered and the nurse at her desk made anxious signs to David. Raft retreated, a long pace at a time, until he found a bearable distance.
David shouted, ‘Stay where you are, Marion. Let his damned ignorance suffer.’
Another mistake, however meant, for it focused Raft’s attention on the girl. He moved sideways while the brothers halted, unable to approach Robert’s radiant fear. She saw the intention and began to run and had the chance of a rabbit with a tiger. He went over the furniture in smooth, beautiful strides as she skirted round it, caught and swung her about, snatched the helmet from her head and placed it on his own.
He pushed her away and continued a curving course until he stood behind Robert, the squealing jelly rotating to face him, the huge flesh blocking him completely from their view. The entire manoeuvre had been carried out in seconds.
Robert’s fear noises crescendoed to screams and the brothers retreated further; whatever the stripped-naked mind gave out was insupportable.
Parker mumbled shame and rage; with every advantage, he had let the man get out of his control. Arthur heard him and spoke without looking round: ‘Do nothing.’
Raft was engaged in some complex action behind Robert’s bulk; his elbows jerked in and out of sight in hidden manipulation. The nurse, who alone could see him from the side, shrieked unintelligibly to David, the words lost in hysteria. Simultaneously it seemed that Raft pushed Robert off his feet, toppling him on to the couch.
They saw him with bitter clarity now, the white metal in his hand unmistakably a gun even at that distance, its barrel trained on Parker.
Arthur cried in soft anguish, ‘Fool! And I let him do it!’
The voice of the Commander Raft of the parade gro
unds cracked down the hall.
‘One of you moves and Parker dies. This is a monopole gun; once aimed, it cannot miss. Cannot. At two hundred feet or ten thousand. It is the ultimate gun.’
Parker relaxed a trifle. He might have guessed – talk, talk, talk; that sort of man. But where had he obtained the disastrous thing?
‘David, listen! You will transfer control of Gangoil to the dummy Heathcote at once. The dummy will work under my direction. The line of descent of the new men is from myself through Ian Campion, not through a farrago of freaks.’
At least he knew what he wanted – a field officer giving an operation order. And Parker himself was not forgotten.
‘You, Controller, will either make yourself useful or die here and now. The Prime Minister will be arrested, killed if necessary, and the State administration taken over by your police until Ian can assume control. Organisation and coup should take no more than four hours.’ He paused. The nurse sobbed loudly and Robert’s wails rose from his cover. ‘Well, Parker?’
‘Campion to be front man, I take it, with you as the real power.’
‘Invent your own construction; Ian is my beloved son.’ They gained the impression that with the repetition he had surprised himself. He smiled, considering matters removed from them though he never ceased to watch, and Parker could have sworn that behind the flesh of his face began the ghost of a transcendental glow. For a moment body and personality reached for the superhuman; he said with the quietness of a final certitude, ‘You know who I must be. What I am.’
Parker had no thought of dying. Best go along with the man and wait on opportunity, even if he required an occasional hymn to be sung. He had forgotten the brothers, and afterwards ruminated that in all the world only the clone, as crazy in their way as Raft in his, could have brushed aside the announcement of divinity to concentrate on private philosophies.
They protested with solemn sternness, ‘You must not order killing, or speak of killing. The clone does not kill.’
The eyes of the god never left Parker but his face changed horribly. ‘I am no clone-doll to be stuffed with nonsense. Be quiet, because I kill.’
The clone spokesman was clear, precise and unafraid. ‘You are Albert, the forefather. You live for ever if you wish, through us and through those taken from us. How should we fear to die? We regret death but need not fear it. But those with only single lives need them, having no other. If they kill, that is error and stupidity. If we should kill, it would be a cruelty. If you kill it will be a denial of the world yet to flow from you.’
Raft’s eyes left Parker at last and flickered to the spokesman. Parker thought that Arthur tensed. The monopole gun moved gently to cover the clone-brother. Raft said, ‘The good servant must understand his master.’
He squeezed the trigger.
The superb, ultimate, infallible gun kicked wildly in his hand.
The round thudded loudly somewhere in concrete.
Raft, unbelieving, waited for the clone-brother to fall.
Finally his incredulous eyes dropped to the gun in stunned wonderment.
Arthur was off and running, and Parker had never seen anything like it in his life. Like Raft he went over the furniture, without breaking stride, at a speed that made Raft’s a jog trot. Parker had scarcely grasped the fact of action when Arthur was half-way down the hall and Raft had not discovered that a man had moved.
As he flashed past the clone-brothers Parker thought the blurring stride broke, jerked, recovered. Perhaps it was there he entered Robert’s radiating disturbance and took the shock of abomination. But his velocity then was unstoppable; at the last moment Raft became aware of him.
They calculated later that Arthur was moving at more than seventy miles an hour when he cleared the couch to strike Raft head on. Both of them died instantly in the shattering of their bones.
9
‘David!’ The biologist stared blankly at an urgent Parker who shook him until his brain rattled back to sense. ‘I want them alive, David! Both of them!’
‘In the name of sanity, why?’ Dispassionately Parker hit him, not too hard, hard enough. Professionalism asserted itself; he bellowed for the nurses, who came running. ‘Prepare two slow chambers. Instantly. You have ten minutes.’
They ran.
Down the hall the brothers made futile dashes at the couch and retired, stumbling; Robert was in hysterics.
David obtained helmets from a wall cupboard and gave one to Parker. They ran down the hall. ‘Put the helmet on, Controller.’
Parker wanted to know for himself what manner of beastliness emanated from Robert. Swiftly he found out. His mind evolved fear when he was fifty feet from the couch, increasing with each step. It was an unfocused fear, without an object; he was simply afraid. He had no sense of being imposed on from without; it was he himself who feared with an intensity he had never encountered. Nor was it Robert’s fear felt or reflected, but his own capacity for terror touched off and amplified. He retreated like a frightened animal until he recalled the helmet and placed it on his head.
Panic receded, fading to a generalised uneasiness. As he followed David the uneasiness increased, until he felt a tension like the familiar state of nerves before a possibly dangerous action. The insulation was barely good enough.
David swerved away to the nurse’s desk and Parker rounded the end of the couch. He thought of knocking Robert out and doubted that he could succeed against such a sponge of flesh.
He bent over the bodies, sagged together in a crush of limbs. He had had no doubt of them as anything but dead. There was little blood; some trickled from Arthur’s mouth, evidence of a burst of haemorrhage instantly stopped. Both necks were broken, and Raft’s back.
He disengaged the aluminium gun from Raft’s fingers.
David came running and Robert shrieked afresh at sight of the hypodermic. Parker had to hold him while he thrashed in slow motion, a physique barely able to support its own weight, until the needle went home. The shrieking ran down a lunatic scale and stopped; Robert pouted, slept and almost at once emitted a raucous, ponderous snore. They took off their helmets.
David signalled the clone-brothers and Parker wondered aloud how Robert’s heart stood the strain.
‘He has two excellent hearts.’
Just dream up an unlikely answer and don’t bother with the question.
The brothers carried the bodies into the slow-chamber hall. Their exaggeratedly reverent treatment of Raft was wasted; carelessness could do no significant harm to either of the wrecked carcases.
Parker examined the gun. It looked and felt utterly useless; it was the lightest, most unbalanced weapon he had ever handled.
The perfect gun?
Well, it had failed.
Why?
Carrying it gingerly, his fingers well away from the unidentified buttons in the butt, he followed the carrying party.
The two slow chambers were ready. ‘Twelve minutes,’ a nurse said, expecting praise and getting it; it seemed that the preparation, including check of banks of instruments, was a twenty-minute routine.
Installation of the bodies and cooling to preservative level occupied another half-hour. Too long for Parker. ‘There will be brain damage.’
David, remote and a touch supercilious in his resumed role as Director, tut-tutted. ‘Cerebral tissue regrowth is a simple matter. There may be some trifling memory loss.’
‘Indeed!’ Not to worry; leave it to Ole Doc David. He began to feel light-headed as problems resolved themselves.
Under the slow-chamber carapaces, square-nosed instruments were extruded from the walls and moved purposefully through the fluid on jointed arms, trailing thin cables and extending hair-fine sensors which felt the bodies and selected points for attention.
‘X-ray cameras. There may have to be mechanical and electronic inserts before we can even begin to think of stimulation of the involuntary muscles – perhaps an external heart and lungs, temporarily, and some nervous system bypa
sses.’
Parker had been about to ask whether specialist assistance from the Melbourne Town hospitals would be welcomed; he held his tongue.
‘Then, perhaps, we will be able to induce slow metabolism and commence regrowth techniques. In ten or twelve days from now, perhaps. Once begun, we can apply speeded-metabolism methods to the injured areas and bring the whole organism to simultaneous recovery.’ Parker accepted the exhibitionism with grace; the man had humiliations enough needing compensation. ‘These chambers are, of course, a considerable improvement on the crude model used in Columbus.’
I shall enjoy repeating that to designer Raft some day. It was a pity to cut him short, but Campion and Lindley would be worrying. He held out the gun.
‘Where did this come from?’
‘Lindley gave it to him.’
And hadn’t mentioned it! But Lindley had imagined a Raft-Parker alliance, so why should he? There had been no time to explain the maddening subtleties of all the relationships involved. But David …
‘You denied knowledge.’
David indicated the brothers. ‘They threatened me.’
Four heads nodded disinterested admission and Parker knew better now than to waste time disentangling their motives. ‘Where would Lindley get it?’
‘I have wondered. He did not bring it to Gangoil with him, and the only persons he associated with here were Miss White and Heathcote.’
Pawn-Alice he could ignore, but he would have to see Heathcote again.
David said with a new, gentlemanly distaste, ‘I am not familiar with guns, but that is surely a peculiar model.’
‘I know nothing like it.’
‘It comes apart into small pieces. That’s how he carried it distributed in his pockets.’
‘So.’ Parker examined it closely and found plain seams everywhere; the whole ridiculous thing appeared to be held together by simple ball and spring tongues. Just twist and pull. As though it generated no firing pressures to shake it apart. Such a gun could not, absolutely could not, buck in the hand; it would have to be recoilless to fire at all. He pointed it down, grasped the barrel, twisted and removed it from the butt, which he laid aside.
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