Faust Amongst Equals Tom Holt

by Faust Amongst Equals (lit)

  'Oh shit!'

  'Ekthcuthe me again, Thkip, but would thith be any good?'

  The other two engineers turned and stared.

  Basically, it was a sort of depraved looking crab. With a most peculiarly shaped tail.

  'This is bloody ridiculous,' muttered the Captain.

  'Dead handy, though.'

  'There's still no guarantee it'll fit,' the Captain grumbled. 'I mean, it might be a metric size or something...'

  It wasn't. Nor, unlike your common or garden inanimate chuck key, did it slip out of your hand just when you're giving it that last half-turn and hide under the workbench. The Captain dabbed the trigger-button lightly, thereby confirming that all systems were operational.

  'Lads,' he said quietly, just before setting drill to rock, 'don't you get the funny feeling that things are going a bit too well on this job?'

  The drill screamed, and started to bite. As he guided the thing, the Captain could feel his whole body juddering and stretching as the vibrations twanged through him and out into the water all around.

  'Thkip!'

  'What is it?' the Captain screamed. 'You'll have to shout, I can't hear you very well because of the noise of this thing.'

  'I thaid thkip!'

  'Yes, I heard that bit.'

  'Well, that'th all I'd thaid tho far.'

  'Then carry on,' the Captain screamed above the sound of the drill, whining in the rock like a baby Tyrannosaurus with wind. 'Try and maintain the admirable standard of narrative clarity you've set yourself up till now.'

  'Thorry?'

  'It's all right, I was only...'

  `It'th very hard to hear you, thkip, becauthe of the drill. Can you thpeak up a bit?'

  `Yes. Get on with it.'

  The spectral engineer shrugged. `I jutht wanted to athk, thkip, why are we doing thith?'

  The Captain shuddered horribly. The drill had just touched on something it couldn't cut, and the side-effects radiated out across the sea-bed, giving rise to duff seismographic readings right across the world.

  `Good question,' he said, as soon as his teeth had stopped waltzing about in his mouth. `Something to do with this EuroBosch thing, they told me. Apparently, he wants to tap into this lot for the fountains in the main courtyard.'

  `I think,' said the other spectral engineer, `it's for drains or something like that.'

  The other two looked at him.

  `Drains?'

  'This hole we're digging. It's either drains or telephone wires, one or the other. Stands to reason,' the spectral engineer asserted confidently.

  `You reckon?'

  `Use your loaf, skip. Why else do people dig holes?'

  The Captain paused, drill in hand, the light from the flatfish making strange shadows on the ocean floor. Why do people dig holes? he wondered.

  Graves.

  Mantraps.

  Planting land mines.

  Because they get told to, mostly.

  And, of course, drains. He straightened his back and looked around. Nothing to be seen, except the solid walls of the darkness all around them.

  `As simple as that?' he said at last.

  `Yeah.'

  `No hidden or ulterior motive?'

  `Why should there be?'

  The Captain shrugged and repositioned the drill bit in the hole. `No reason,' he said. `It just seems too, well, normal to me. Useful, too.'

  The drill made contact, and there was a long interval of screeching metal, spine-jarring vibrations and Keith whistling (the latter audible despite the Captain jamming the drill on to full speed). Then something gave way, and before the Captain could call out `I think we're through, lads', the water around them started to seethe and boil. Like the emptying of God's bath, it gurgled, whirlpooled and sucked. The drill, the three engineers and forty thousand tons of yucky black goo were swept up and swallowed whole.

  The last two thoughts to pass through the Captain's mind, before the whirlpool got him and catapulted him back into the whole tedious rigmarole of temporary death and routine reincarnation, were:

  Maybe we drilled a bit too deep.

  Funny. I didn't remember seeing Lundqvist anywhere.

  Water. Mother Nature's flexible jackhammer.

  Billions of gallons of the stuff, enough to fill all the swimming pools in Beverley Hills, roaring and burping down a molybdenum steel drain towards the centre of the earth.

  Ronnie Bosch was proud of that drain. Not because it was a miracle of engineering (walls only ninety thou. thick, but proofed to twenty-six tons per square inch; machined from solid out of one of the pillars used for thousands of years to support the sky until they discovered it stayed up there perfectly happily of its own accord); more because he'd managed to get it made and installed in twelve hours flat, and nobody had even troubled to ask him what he wanted it for. When you've been used to having to sign four pink chits and a green requisition every time you want your pencil sharpened, it comes as a bit of a shock.

  Makes you think, really.

  Anyway, down the water went until it emerged in' the form of white high-velocity spray in an enormous cauldron arrangement, seated slap bang above Hell Holdings plc's very latest, state-of-the-art Number Six furnace.

  Let nobody say that the management buy-out hasn't led to some pretty radical changes in the way Hell operates. Number Six furnace is one of the new regime's most impressive showpieces. By the simple expedient of converting it to oilburning from sabbath-breaker burning, it has been possible to double calorific output and halve running costs, thereby saving enough to finance a whole new sabbath-breakers' wing equipped with the latest in microwave technology. Just to add to the ingenuity of it all, the electricity to power the microwaves comes from a steam turbine built into Number Six; resulting in further savings, which in turn pay for twenty-fourhour, round-the-clock canned laughter in the extremely unpleasant corner of the Hell complex set aside for game show hosts.

  It was because of the steam turbine that Ronnie Bosch had routed the water down on to Number Six. A few surreptitious modifications here and there were enough to divert the steam from the boiler away from the turbines and up another molybdenum steel tube, bigger and better than the first, proofed to an incredible thirty-seven tons per square inch, running straight up through the earth's core and coming out in an expansion chamber several thousand feet under North America.

  The rest of the design was basically very simple. The rising steam powered a piston.

  The piston went up.

  And all across America, in the cool stillness of the early evening of the day before the bailiffs were due to move in, people out walking were tripping over enormous steel girders

  that hadn't been there an hour or so earlier, and wondering what on earth was going on.

  Then they remembered. They remembered that, for reasons which at the time had seemed very cogent, they had voted into the White House a centuries-dead Italian inventor whose sole proposal to the electorate had been that every building in the USA be rigidly attached to its neighbour with bloody great steel rods.

  America loves cleverness. In a land where inventors of better mousetraps really do have six-inch-deep ruts worn in the tarmac of their driveways, a man who can come up with an entirely practical plan for doing something previously thought to be impossible must inevitably become the hero of the hour, even if the thing he's able to do is something nobody would ever have dreamed of doing in the first place. Otherwise, how do you explain Mount Rushmore, or the space programme, or the atomic bomb?

  Even the sceptics had to admit that it was a goddamn colossal achievement. To take just one example: between Las Vegas and the small but by no means indispensable township of Pahrump, Nevada, lie fifty miles of tyre-meltingly hot desert, scarcely improved in terms of habitability by having a range of twelve-thousand-foot razor-edged rocks fatuously named the Spring Mountains running slap bang through the middle. It's the sort of geographical entity that can only be fitted into the Christian world-view by a
ccepting that somewhere around lunchtime on the third day of creation, He stopped for a breather and left a few bits for the Youth Opportunities lad to finish off.

  Yet, within fifteen hours of the Da Vinci Act becoming law, Pahrump had been welded on to Vegas by a single continuous high-tensile steel link, with spurs off it at intervals to connect in the few outlying homesteads in the middle of the desert. In fact, the whole Sierra Nevada was covered with what looked from the air like silver varicose veins, glinting and twinkling in the dazzling desert sun and playing merry hell with satellite TV reception from Bakersfield to Redding.

  Or take the vast single-span bridges connecting Immokalee, Florida with Clewiston, Sunnilands and Fort Myers, arrowstraight across the soggiest excesses of the Big Cypress Swamp; the massive iron beam supporting Riley, Oregon between Burns and Wagontire; the absurd lengths gone to in order to attach Wolf Point, Montana securely to its neighbours; or, on another plane entirely, the scintillating spider's webs of carbon steel enveloping Brooklyn, San Francisco, Chicago and similar hamlets.

  A message banged out on the girders in Morse code in the northern suburbs of Seattle could, in theory, be picked up by someone with a stethoscope in San Diego or Miami or Boston, although it would probably be just as easy to telephone.

  And America said to itself:

  Hey, we did that!

  Hey, why did we do that?

  `Fine,' said Lucky George, replacing the receiver. `Well?'

  `Sounds like Lenny's side of things is tied up all right. Ronnie's part ...' He glanced at his watch, and nodded. `If everything's running on time, Ronnie's part should already be under way. Any word yet from Larry and Mike?'

  Helen nodded. `They called in about three minutes ago. It's all ready.'

  `Good.' Lucky George pulled out the original envelope on which the whole thing had been sketched out, and ran his finger down it, checklist fashion. `And Chris is ready to cover all the legal stuff?'

  `He's waiting outside the Registry right now.' `Martin and Julius got their people in position?' `Standing by.'

  `That's all right then.' Lucky George folded up the envelope,

  sat down on the sofa and put his feet up. `I could murder a coffee if you're making one.'

  Helen folded her arms and frowned. `Hold on,' she said. `While everyone else is hard at it, what precisely are you going to do?'

  George smiled. `Nothing,' he said. `And everything too, of course, but only after I've had my coffee. Two sugars, please, and a digestive biscuit.'

  It was, needless to say, the biggest moment in all the seventeen years of Links Jotapian's life.

  `Scanners,' he commanded, `on.'

  There is a convention that people who sit in front of screens giving orders have to speak funny; it's all `Activate thruster motors' and `Uncouple forward connecting gear' and `Initiating docking routine'. Anybody in the least self-conscious about sounding a complete nana wouldn't last five minutes.

  `Scanning,' said one of the men in white coats. `All functions normal for phase two initiation.'

  Up above the world so high, like a death ray in the sky, the Denver Blowtorch was muttering drowsily. A few lights began to flash here and there on its titanium carapace, like the jewels with which a dragon's belly is reputedly encrusted. It bleeped, twitched in its orbit and dreamed strange dreams. Radio waves crackled off it into space like the hairs of a moulting cat.

  For crying out loud, it broadcast to the barren cosmos, there's some of us trying to sleep.

  Links consulted his watch. It was a pity that his Spyderco Combat Chronometer had chosen this day of all days to fall into the bath and get all clogged up with suds, because this was just the sort of special mission he'd bought it for ($14.95 plus postage). As it was, he'd had to rummage around in his dad's bedside drawer for his spare, the one he got free with five litres of oil at the gas station. It worked fine, sure, so far as telling the time was concerned, and all that stuff; but it wasn't black

  parkerised steel and it didn't have a camouflage strap with a built-in compass. Sometimes, Links reflected bitterly, Life can be so unfair.

  'Hello, Mr Lundqvist, are you receiving me? This is Links here, Mr Lundqvist. Ready when you are, Mr Lundqvist. Mr Lundqvist?'

  He was just about to try again, only louder, when the reply came in through the headphones. It took the form of an urgent request for radio silence until further notice, combined with a warning as to the anatomically complex consequences of noncompliance.

  `Sorry, Mr Lundqvist,' Links replied, `I didn't mean to speak so loud. Is that any better? Gee, I hope I haven't spoiled things, I'd feel really bad if-'

  `Links.'

  `Yes, Mr Lundqvist, I'm here.'

  `Shut up.'

  `Yes, Mr Lundqvist. Am receiving you, over and out.' Nothing to do, apparently, except wait.

  Links gazed round the operations room, his eye passing over the banks of computer consoles and the white-coated boffins behind them. So far, he hadn't got to the part in the course that dealt with stealthy waiting, but he felt confident that, with his newly acquired skills, he'd be able to work it out for himself from first principles.

  Waiting. Well, for a start, you obviously didn't just sit there like a sack of potatoes. Any dumb civilian could do that. Presumably you had to wait like a coiled spring, concentrating the mind's potential energy and regulating the adrenaline flow. Probably there was one of those mystic Eastern things you could do, but that was most likely somewhere around Lesson Thirty-Six. Links focused his mind and tried to imagine the sound of two hands clapping. It had said one hand in the book, but that was obviously a misprint.

  Just as he was getting the hang of it (Clap. Clap. Clap.) a light flashed on the console. Incoming message from Operative One.

  . `Operative One, this is Guadalahara Central,' he said brightly. 'Guadalahara Central receiving you, come in, Operative One,, over.'

  `Yeah,' said the voice. `This is Morrie Goldman here, can I talk to Mr Lundqvist, please?'

  Links frowned. `Negative, Operative One.' He paused, trying to translate what he wanted to say into commandspeak. He gave up; too difficult. `Mr Lundqvist isn't here right now, can I take a message?'

  `What? Oh, sure. Look, this is Goldman. I'm just about to go in and serve the possession notice right now. Have your guys standing by, because I have this feeling the tenants aren't going to be too happy.'

  `Receiving you, Operative One. Confirm all systems are operational, awaiting clearance to proceed, over.'

  `Yeah, well.' The voice hesitated. `Just tell him I called, okay?'

  `Positive. Message received and logged. Over and out.'

  Morrie Goldman hung up and looked around him.

  This, he felt, was as good a place as any. He walked up to the counter.

  After all, he reassured himself, the man had told him to serve the papers in Washington DC. And here he was in Washington. And besides, the whole goddamn country was going to be blown to antshit a few seconds after he'd effected service, so nobody was ever likely to know even if he did goof it up.

  `Hi, my name is Cindi, can I take your order, please?'

  Goldman froze. The papers were already in his hand. All he had to do was hand them to somebody, say what they were and time jump out of here; simple as that. He looked at the waitress and flexed his larynx.

  `Hi,' he said, `I'll have the double cheeseburger, the vanilla shake, regular, and, um, large fries.'

  `Coming right up.'

  He opened his mouth to say the next bit ...

  (This is a sealed copy of a possession order issued out of the Sublime Court, requiring you to surrender possession of the premises known as North America. If you are in any doubt as to the effect of this order or the likely consequences of failure to comply with the terms hereof, you should immediately seek the advice of your own legal adviser.)

  ... but the waitress had gone. She now had her back to him, and was yelling the order through to the kitchen. There was obviously more to process-s
erving than he'd originally anticipated.

  `Hi, I'm Ayesha, are you being served?'

  Goldman stared into the friendly brown eyes in front of him, closed his own,-thrust the papers over the counter and said the magic words. They came out in a sort of congealed lump, like melted popcorn.

  `Excuse me?' said the waitress.

  The sensible thing to have done would have been to turn away quickly and run for it. Instead, Goldman made a fatal mistake. He tried to explain.

  `Look,' he said, `I'm a process-server, and .. .

  The brown eyes clouded over. `Get outa here,' they said. `I'm telling you, I never owned the goddamn car. I never signed nothing. What you come in here hassling me for?'

  `No, it's not about a car,' Goldman said. `In fact, it's not you personally, it's...'

  `You wait there,' said the brown eyes. `I'm gonna get the manageress.'

  Goldman winced. `No, there's no need for that,' he said. `Look, it's perfectly in order for you to accept service, in fact service has now been effectually, um, effected, so...'

  `Don't you give me none of that bullshit, man. I ain't signing

  nothing. You think I'm crazy or something?'

  Meanwhile a large man in a cook's hat had materialised from somewhere out back. Was there, he enquired, some sort of a problem going on here?

  `You bet there's a problem,' said the brown eyes emphatically. `This guy here says he's a process-server, I told him, I ain't accepting no service, I ain't signing nothing, and he says -'

  `That's all right,' said the large man. `You just get Carla and everything's gonna be fine.'

  A statement which turned out to be more accurate than he could possibly have imagined.

  The building began to move ...

  It happened like this.

  The water from the Marianas Trench hits the boiler over Number Six furnace, turns to steam ...

  Which passes through a series of ports into an expansion chamber in the centre of the planet, fills the chamber and starts to move upwards ...

  Bearing against the piston, which is driven with staggering force up towards the surface of the Earth, until ...