‘Not an hour’s walking from here,’ the old man said, ‘is a telephone in which you may speak to certain people at the capital. If you say to them to send a fast car a fast car will come.’
‘Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll certainly do as you say. Whereabouts is this phone? In a house or a shop?’
‘No, the telephone is in the new sea water works, where sea water is turned into food.’
Tyne recognised this description; the old man was referring to the plankton plant at Semapang. He thanked him gratefully when they reached the road, asking him to accept the fishing boat as a present. Much delighted with this, the native in return produced some food wrapped in a palm leaf, which he insisted Tyne should have. Tyne thanked him and set off with a good heart. The folded leaf contained boiled rice, pleasantly spiced and with a few shreds of asswabi added. Tyne ate ravenously as he walked. Though the road was no more than a track, every rut in it lay clearly exposed in the moonlight. On either side stood the jungle, still as an English wood, forbidding as an English summer.
Fifty minutes passed before he gained the first sight of the plankton plant. By then, Tyne was feeling less fresh than he had done. The moon was inclined to hide behind accumulating cloud. Leaning against a tree, he paused to rest and consider. Thunder grumbled like thought above the treetops.
Mina, when Tyne questioned her in the Roxy, had said that Murray was coming here, to the plankton plant. The spy patrol captain could have only one reason for visiting this place. The plant was completely automated; at the most, it was peopled only by an odd engineer during the day and a guard at night. Murray must have chosen the spot as a hideout until he could make contact with his Rosk agent. On the face of it, it seemed a remote and unlikely spot to choose: but that in itself might be a good reason for choosing it.
Tyne’s mind was made up. In his pocket was a Roskian .88 gun. He would hunt down Murray himself; if he was here, he would find him. There was a personal score to be settled with Murray. After that would be time enough to phone Stobart of the UNC.
Through the enamelled outlines of the trees, the bulk of the plankton plant loomed. It looked, in the wan moonlight, like an iceberg. And like an iceberg, much of its bulk lay below water, for it stood on the edge of the sea, its rear facing on to land, its massive front thrusting out into the Indian Ocean.
Every day, millions of tons of sea water were sucked into its great vats, to be regurgitated later, robbed of their plankton content. These minute organisms were filtered into tanks of nutrient solution, fed and fattened, before being passed over to the synthesising process, which turned them into compressed foodstuffs, highly nourishing if barely palatable. Such plants, established at intervals round the shores of the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, had done much to alleviate the semi-famine conditions hitherto prevailing in the more populous areas of the tropics.
Tyne approached the place cautiously.
Though he had never been here before, he found it all familiar, thanks to the publicity it enjoyed. He knew that the plant was almost impossible to break into. Where, then, would a hunted man hide? One answer seemed most likely: on the seaward façade.
There, numerous arches and buttresses over the submarine mouth of the plant would afford shelter from the elements – and from all but a personal, on-the-spot search.
Now Tyne was going to make that search.
He slid round a deserted car park. Clouds drifted over the moon; he was happy to take advantage of them. At the end of the park was a high wall. Over the wall was a narrow passage, and then the main building, rising sheer. Carrying an empty oil drum across to the wall, Tyne stood on it, crouched, jumped upwards. Clawing desperately, he pulled himself on top of the wall. He crouched and listened. Nothing. Only the murmur of the sea, the stammering call of a night bird.
The impossibility of getting on to the building now dawned on him. The white walls rose a hundred and fifty feet above him, stretching away unbrokenly on either side, and punctuated only by a dark streak some yards away. Keeping his head down, Tyne wormed along the top of the wall; the dark streak resolved itself into a steel ladder, starting some fourteen feet above the ground and going right up to the roof.
Tyne, getting opposite to it, stood up on the wall and jumped forward, across the passage below. Seizing the rungs with both hands, he got a foothold. His steel hand was nearly wrenched from its socket with the sudden exertion; he clung there motionless until the pain in his arm had subsided. The darkness grew thicker and thicker while he waited. Thunder rumbled overhead. Then he began the upward climb.
Even as he started, the rain began. Tyne heard it swishing through the jungle towards him. Next moment it hit him as if trying to squash him against the wall. He wondered grimly how long it was since he had last been completely dry and continued to climb.
Once on the roof, he squatted and peered about him, trying to see through the wet darkness. Raincloud now obscured the moon. To his right, he saw tall ventilation stacks and heard the rain drumming against them. He was cursing, half-aloud. He was cursing the whole universe, suns and moons and planets but especially planets, for harbouring freak phenomena like life and weather.
Advancing on hands and knees, he made for the seaward side. One last ridge to crawl up, one last ridge to slither perciously down, and he crouched on the top of the façade of the building. Below him were the arches and cavities in which he expected to find Murray. Below that, irritable now, lay the sea.
He could dimly see it, needled unceasingly by the downpour, sucking and slumping against the plant. Immediately below him was a patch of relatively calm water. This lay inside the plankton mesh, a vast perforated screen which ensured that nothing larger than a small shrimp would be sucked into the plant’s internal processes. On the other side of the mesh, spray fountained.
In the noise about him, Tyne had lost the need for concealment. He stood up now and shouted, cupping his hands round his mouth.
‘Murray!’
The cry was washed away at once into the gutters of soundlessness. He did not shout again.
With water streaming down his face, Tyne dropped on to hands and knees, to begin a crawl along the leading parapet, looking for another inspection ladder that would enable him to get down the façade.
He found one. Grinning to himself with satisfation, he swung his legs over the edge of the drop. As he took his first foothold, a shot rang out.
Tyne froze. He crouched with his head against the streaming concrete, body tensed against pain. It was impossible to tell where the shot had come from, from above or from below. For the space of ten unendurable seconds, he lay rigid. Then he slithered down the ladder as fast as he could go, heedless of the pain in his good hand and wrist. The wind buffeted him as he went.
No more shots sounded. But in the dark, someone was trailing him.
Tyne climbed off the ladder on to a narrow catwalk. Here was shelter. The architects responsible for the elaborate artificiality of this seaward façade had arched off this layer of it with a row of small, blind tunnels. If Murray was anywhere in the vicinity, the chances were that he would be here. As Tyne entered the first arch, a startled seabird clattered past his face, squawking. He stood quite still until his heart stopped jumping.
Then he began to move from one arch to the next, fumbling, looking for Murray. It was a nerve-racking business. Underfoot, a slippery mess of bird droppings made the going doubly perilous.
He had reached the third arch along when a watery moon slid through for a moment. Glancing back over his shoulder, Tyne saw a figure climbing down the steps he had just left. Man or Rosk? And if man: was it Murray? Acting hurriedly but indecisively, Tyne swung round to face his pursuer. His foot slid across the slippery concrete, went over the edge.
Before he could save himself, Tyne had fallen from the catwalk. For an instant, his ten fingers, five steel, five painfully flesh, scraped safety; then he was dropping freely, plunging down towards the sea.
Dark water slammed u
p to meet him. He hit it shoulder first and went under. As he came up gasping, he saw he was inside the plankton mesh.
Someone seemed to be calling from a long way off. The rain beat down like a solid thing, raising slashes from the sea, so that the surface was impossible to define. Tyne choked down water as he swam for the wall.
Then over all the rest of the noise came a new one. It was low and continuous, the roar of a superhumanly angry bull. Tyne felt his legs caught, his progress halted, as if the sound itself had hold of him. He was being drawn underwater. Fighting, shouting, he realised what was happening. The plant’s subterranean intake gates had opened. He was inside the screen. He was going to be turned into plankton juice.
Somewhere below him, sluices swung wide. The man was dragged under, over and over, swept into the throat of the great plant, helpless as a leaf in a storm. The last shreds of light and air were torn from his world.
V
THE swamping pounding liquid registered on his tousled sense as sound: sound roaring him to death.
In the blundering blackness before Tyne’s eyes, pictures squirmed like worms, sharing his agony. They were images of his past life bubbling up, scum-like, to the surface of his drowning brain. Incidents from his personal history returned to him, enfolding him as if to protect him from present pain. Then they were gone.
The bubble of the past had burst. His head was above water again. Exhaustedly, gulping down air, Tyne paddled to keep afloat in the racing water. Faint, reflected lights rode on the flood round him. He was somewhere inside the huge, automated plant, which was dimly lit by multicoloured guidelights here and there. The factory was cybernetically controlled, tenanted by robot devices. No one would save him if he could not save himself.
In his relief at finding his head above water, Tyne did not for a minute realise the grimness of his new predicament. He was simply content to float at the top of a rising tide of water, breathing and snorting painfully. Beyond thick glass, he could see the interior of the plant, where a shadowy file of processing tanks, moving by jerks, slowly revolved vats of jelly; endless pipes and presses marched into the background. He could see too, negligently, successive floors of the edifice sink from his gaze as the water lifted him up and up.
His mind snapped back into something like its normal degree of awareness. Searchingly, Tyne looked about. He had come up through the bottom of, and was now imprisoned in, a great glass tube with a diameter of some fifteen feet, standing a full six storeys high.
Peering through the glass in sudden agitation, Tyne saw other giant tubes ranged alongside his, like the pipes of some overblown organ. The tubes stretched from base to roof of the plant, through all floors, and were filling rapidly with the incoming sea water.
Tyne looked up. The ceiling was growing closer. The tube was filling right up to the top.
This was inevitable. He knew immediately where he was. These entry tubes took each intake of water. When they were filled, great filter plungers came down from the top like slow pistons, filtering through the sea water, compressing plankton to the bottom of the tube; and not only plankton, but any other solid which happened to be there. Mercifully, Tyne Leslie would be dead by drowning before he was crushed against the bottom.
Between the turbulent water surface and the underside of the plunger, only some nine feet remained; the distance was decreasingly rapidly.
Groaning, treading water, Tyne felt in his trouser pocket. The Rosk .88 was still there. Tearing it free, Tyne lifted it above the surface of the water.
Six feet left between him and the plunger.
He prayed that a man who had once told him that these weapons were unaffected by water had spoken the truth. Shaking it, he turned over on to his back, floated, aimed at the glass imprisoning him.
Five feet of air above him.
He squeezed the trigger. As always with this incredible weapon, there was no recoil. The big slug shattered the tube up, down and sideways, converting it in a flash into a multitude of glass shards, a foot thick and some of them a couple of storeys long. Tyne was swept at this fearsome barrier by the weight of released water.
It carried him right out into the factory. For a moment, a great gulf extending down into the bowels of the plant hung below him. Then he snatched at and clung to a balcony railing. His arms creaked at their sockets but he clung there. As though for an age, Tyne hung on; as though for an age, water and glass cascaded past him, a waterfall containing death. With a great effort he climbed over the rail to safety, hardly realising himself alive.
Another sound roused him, a sound easy to identify: a siren was wailing; directly he punctured the big tube, an automatic alarm had gone off.
To be caught in here would mean the end of everything. Forfeiting his freedom might mean losing the last chance of finding Murray, even the last chance of passing the vital information gained from Benda Ittai on to the proper authorities. Tyne got up, dripping, pushing the wet hair back from his eyes. He was on a catwalk; a couple of feet away, crates of processed plankton, now disguised as steaks and pastes and spreads, moved briskly on a conveyor belt. And rapid footsteps sounded near at hand.
The dark was penetrated by widely spaced lights, some red, some orange, some blue. Peering through the gravy blackness in which swabs of light swam, Tyne saw a figure running round the catwalk towards him. Two figures! Whoever had pursued him outside, had managed to follow him into here. Someone with keys to the place.
‘Leslie! Tyne Leslie!’ a voice called.
It was magnified, distorted, made metallic, by the acoustics of the building; Tyne did not think he would have recognised it, even in more favourable circumstances. With sudden fear, he felt convinced that the Rosks were after him. He jumped on to the conveyor belt.
He slipped, knocking a crate off the other side; the belt was travelling considerably faster than he had estimated. In some alarm, Tyne knelt up, staring back to see where his pursuer was. At that moment, he himself was borne under an orange light. Cursing lest he had given himself away, Tyne turned to see where he was being carried.
A low entrance loomed just ahead.
Involuntarily, Tyne shouted with alarm. He ducked. At once, impenetrable darkness swallowed him. He was in a tunnel. His elbow hissed against a moving side wall, and he tucked it in hastily. He dared not raise his head. There was nothing to be done but crouch between crates.
The conveyor emerged suddenly into a packing bay. A robot loader under a bright light was pushing the crates from the belt into waiting trucks, whose doors slammed shut when they filled. That was not for Tyne. He rolled off the belt just before the robot got to him.
There was no time to choose how he was going to drop. He fell painfully flat on the floor, picking himself up slowly and wearily. His watch told him that it was nearly 3.30 a.m. He should be in bed and asleep. He ached all over.
Even as he got to his feet, the conveyor exit ejected his two pursuers. They, apparently, knew better than Tyne what to expect; as they catapulted into the packing room, they jumped clear one after the other, landing nimbly on their feet. Before Tyne could make up his mind to move, they had collared him.
‘Come on, Leslie; let’s get you out of here,’ one of them said, holding tightly on to his arm.
They were masked.
Tyne could see nothing of their faces beyond their forehead and their eyes, which looked at him over the top of knotted handkerchiefs.
‘Who are you?’ he asked feebly. ‘Why the yashmak effect?’
‘Explanation later,’ one of the men said. ‘Let’s concentrate on getting you out of this building before half Padang arrives to investigate that alarm.’
The siren was still shrilling as the men led Tyne down a couple of floors, unlocked a door with a special key, and pushed him into the open. At an awkward jog trot, they hurried down a slope, their way intermittently lit by lightning. Although rain still fell, its force was hesitant now; the storm had worn itself out. Water gurgled down into storm drains beside th
eir path.
A door stood at the end of the passage. The burlier of the two men, evidently the one in authority, produced another key, unlocked the door and flung it open.
They emerged behind an almost deserted car park, not far from the point at which Tyne had first tackled the building. Trotting across the puddle-strewn ground, they ran to an ancient model of a Moeweg, a German atomicar. Burly flung himself into the driver’s seat as the others bundled into the back. He jerked the dipstick and they were moving at once.
As they accelerated past the front of the plant, the first car to answer the alarm call arrived from the opposite direction. It had a searchlight mounted on the roof; it was a police car. As the old Moeweg dashed by, a uniformed man leant out of the police car and bellowed to them to stop. Burly accelerated.
‘Damn it, they’ll have our number,’ he said over his shoulder, to the man beside Tyne. ‘We’ll meet trouble as sure as eggs. I’m going to turn off before we hit traffic; this is no time to play questions and answers with a bunch of local cops.’
A fire engine dashed past them. A helicopter thundered overhead. Bright headlights through the trees indicated a stream of traffic heading round a bend for the scene of the alarm. Burly wrenched the dip; they slewed across the road and squealed into a narrow lane leading into jungle.
The lane had been intended for nothing bigger than a cowcart. Foliage whapped and smacked against the windows as the car lunged forward.
‘It’s crazy!’ Tyne thought, ‘all absolutely crazy!’ He had time to wonder about the respect he had held for men of action. He had seen them as people at the equator of life, in the hottest spots, going round the fastest; he saw now it was true only in a limited sense. These people merely went in circles. One minute they were hunters, the next hunted. They made decisions rapidly, yet those decisions seemed based less on a rational understanding and interpretation of their opponent’s motives than on a desire to keep hopping continually in an immense, indeterminate game.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 57