The Duty Engineer tore the offending spectacles from his face, and made his viewpoint clear in a single word I can’t bring myself to print. Then he added, with a certain deadly calm: ‘She won’t come up you know. How, might one ask, did it get down there?’
With miserable reluctance, a mass of control rods were lifting with woeful caution out of the bowels of the reactor. You could see from the indicator it just wasn’t going to happen in time. Someone was jumping up and down on the floor, encouraging the thing. He could have saved his calories. He was up against fail-safe. The reactor was drowsy from the sleeping pill.
While they were fascinated with this new problem, I crossed to the other pulpit. This one would take longer. But the man in charge had been called across to my earlier homework.
I got hold of the lever and slammed it over as I had the other one, shielding my action from view by standing with my back to it.
I held the handle across just long enough — I hoped — to render the situation more depressing without yet making disaster appear conclusive. That had to come later, in time for the commercial break.
I was able to time this roughly from the effects of having turned the lever to Reactor Number Two just before.
I let the handle go.
— And found myself locked in a stare, right across that ecclesiastical-looking control room, with the preacher of a chief engineer. His expression signified that I had Sinned ... but he hadn’t yet guessed which Commandment I had broken.
Obsequiously, I started to sidle around the control room towards the door; knowing that those thick black spectacles, lenses now polished, followed my languid path.
Too languid. It contrasted a shade too much with the urgency displayed by the others.
Then the ding-dong chimes rang out from one belfry which didn’t rely on instinct but on the simple evidence that a second reactor was slumping towards its sleeping-point.
Slowly, quietly, but with hideous inner certainty as that of a man of Faith, the chief said: ‘That author ... the man who came here yesterday on research ...’ He gazed around the room in general, as two and two added together in several minds at once. The shout went up with the unanimity of Responses:
‘Stop — that — man!’
Regarded purely dispassionately it would have been an interesting moment. Engineers are not violent by nature. They’re pretty good with oscilloscopes and things; but when it comes to the chase they tend to be slightly unco-ordinated. In this instance their tendency was to take the pursuit without regard to the fact that there was only one door and half a dozen stalwarts to go through it.
They met head-on with a crunch of impacting spectacles while I bolted the hell out of there, across the tarmac to the grass by the tunnel doors. Here I propped open the decoy door and hurled myself through the other one.
Which one would they take?
I didn’t wait to find out, but bolted superfast. I was certain my footsteps, greatly amplified by the echo which radared up and down the tube with ever-increasing volume, must be heard beyond.
But so far my tunnel was private. They were inside the other one. Probably without the key. Yet.
The journey seemed eternal. I dropped the torch — not the TV, thank God — but didn’t have time to go back for it. Would they think of the lights, in time? ... bring me crashing to a halt that way?
I passed one, two, three subsidiary entrances to the tunnel. At any point they could cut me off. But my trick with the door must have been working. I sensed they were level with me, sideways on.
I reached the far end and clanged up the steps.
As I did so I heard someone banging on the inside of the other door with the frenzy borne of a sudden, awful conviction. They’d been had, and knew it. How quickly could they get back and try something else?
Men as angry as they were don’t take long.
I emerged into the night and heard whistles blowing, over on the far side. Their communications breakdown was happily clear. The men who had followed me to the tunnel entrances had not yet got a message back to those who still assumed me to be on the seaward side ... with both reactors en route for slumberland.
But I hadn’t got long. A quarter of a mile of road separated me from the outside world. This had always been the weakest part of my plan, and I’d known it. But some things have to be left to chance.
Was chance on my side?
I looked around for possible transport. Nothing. There were a few cars right the other side of the parking lot but I dared not risk the time crossing. I started to run. Erratic from exhaustion.
— By now the power-output of the station should be seriously dropping, but I had no means of knowing whether this would be enough to beat the clock.
By now, London would be switching in all available standby power at full blast. In Wales, the start-up of the hydroelectric plant would be in hand — the machines at Ffestiniog were built for the express purpose of coming straight on the line. But they were needed ten minutes ahead of the expected peak load due when the national brew-up would begin during the first commercial break. The situation should be sliding gradually away from under their feet, reserves used up just that much before they were due. I’d know soon. Because all these lights would go out like candles quenched by the sea.
At present they shone like beacons and I wasn’t getting anywhere fast enough. If I could just get around the corner of the road? — to get out of sight? — buy time?
I felt there was hardly a breath left in my body, and things were beginning to spin around me. I realized I couldn’t run straight. But I was still making ground. A hundred yards to go and I’d be around the corner.
The hue and cry resumed in earnest. But the shouts came at me almost as if in a dream. All I could think of was to clutch somehow on to the things I had to carry. I did, stumbling, loping forward till there was a roaring in my ears.
As if in mirage, a parked truck loomed ahead. It was only some thirty yards off. Yet to cover such a distance seemed insuperable. My whole body flooded with sweat, I panted like someone crouping on carbon-monoxide fumes.
But the distance was closing. I still stood a chance. If only the ignition key was in the dash. The sidelights were on, as if someone had recently stopped there. Please God, may they have left the keys in position! — then I’ll believe!
Somewhere a siren was screaming. I had no idea where. I’d got to the cab of the truck, hauled myself up into the driver’s seat, groping for those keys.
The discovery that they were there seemed like the eighth wonder of the world. Then it became a sort of disappointment — as if I’d already adjusted to total disaster and now had to go to the trouble of starting to live all over again.
But the thing started. Somehow that gave me fresh strength. Grinding the gears wildly, I let the clutch in with a thump and the truck leapt forward in a succession of agonized spasms.
I raced for the outer gates. I could see in the mirror that lights behind were getting close. But they hadn’t yet reached the bend in the road. I had some two hundred yards lead. That might be just enough if I could swing straight off the road beyond the perimeter. I could cross the verge, then cut around the field which would lead me over the Pixie Mound to my rendezvous.
As I swung around the final ‘S’ giving on to the highway I could see car-lights bearing down on me from ahead. I knew what this meant and switched out mine instantly, driving blind. The approaching police cars were more than half a mile off. I could flash my lights again once I had done the three quarter turn into the field. By then I’d virtually be masked from the road by the Pixie Mound. But first I had to clear that.
I glanced to my right for a fraction of a second. All the buildings were still brilliantly lit. No power failure yet. Would it, would it?
Now.
I just flicked the lights for a second, then off. I was too far left for the grass bank. I touched the wheel to the right, then jammed my foot on the floorboards.
The truck s
eemed to take off, trying to slam its suspension to bits. I kept my foot down. I wasn’t going to spare this vehicle anything. My teeth were grinding like the gears themselves as I thrashed it down into first and revved still more. The Mound was steep and soft and squelching.
The front went down with an almighty crash of broken springs as I tipped down the other side of the bank. Soft ground took sufficient of the shock to prevent my back actually snapping in two. But the front end of the truck buried itself and quit.
I was out of sight of the road. I heard tyres squeal as my pursuers took the ‘S’. Then a screaming change into third as they continued on. They hadn’t seen me turn!
I slumped forward, exhausted.
But Duncan was right there, heard the smash, came dashing up a few seconds later. Miraculously the flashlight-TV still worked. It was Duncan who switched it on, just in time to see a few wild, incredible pictures before the first commercial became due.
I can still see, in my mind’s eye, Michael Nobody coming to close-up and saying: ‘Tell all your friends to switch on. Baby, you’re gonna see history being made! ...’ Some rapid cuts of nude limbs — so fast you could hardly see one shot before the next one replaced it — alternated to music crashes until the caption End of Part One ...
I was dimly aware, then, that we’d reached the crisis point. Duncan was gripping my arm so tight it hurt more than my head.
The first commercial was a repeat of the horrible cornflakes routine. It got confused in my mind with Duncan’s face right up to mine, his face twisted into tormented enquiry ...
Then everything in the world just stopped.
Over at the power station, where seconds before there had still been a brilliant halo of light which lit the sky over the brow of the hump, the blackness — complete and absolute, like an eyelid closing in death upon all things beyond it — coincided exactly with the sudden blankness of the tiny screen.
SEVENTEEN
I remember only certain things.
Most of all I remember an agonizing pain down my right side. Something had broken there when the truck plummeted.
But the mission wasn’t completed yet. For we couldn’t know what wild gestures at destruction Stergen might make, now that there remained no chance for him to bring about his mad maelstrom of total war.
Duncan had a jeep. We got in, but the moment it started bumping over gravel I passed out.
We wound up somewhere near the shore but further west. I remember there was a crashed aircraft still burning in the sand. Dreadfully scorched bodies were lying in a scatter pattern for hundreds of yards. Cars kept arriving, as if curiosity was the only human mechanism relevant to the situation. One carload of souvenir enthusiasts had actually brought a fullscale picnic — transistor record -player and all.
Stergen’s body was almost unmarked. What was odd about it was the head. Part of the brain seemed to have been surgically removed. Why, no one ever discovered.
*
And I remember certain other things which came later ...
I was in hospital somewhere and I’d been delirious. It took me a long time to realize this was no ordinary hospital. The instant my mind started working normally again was abrupt. Through glass I could see a huge, spacial cavity around which was wrapped a great hollow tube, coiling top to bottom like the thread of a screw. That is to say, helically. In the centre of the space under a blue dome were two mechanized operating tables. The place was thick with police.
Near me, in this weird-looking ward, was a miniature version of the glistening, brilliant-coloured layer-cake I had stumbled upon in Fluidics. Spreading over it was an ugly green mould as if slowly decaying. Here, Chindale was chatting with Seale Taggard. Then they saw me stirring. Chindale, his face disproportionately large to my confused powers of perception, was peering over me. For once there was no diary-pencil cigarette dangling between his lips. He seemed strained but somehow serene — as if he’d emerged from some intolerable experience but hadn’t quite caught up to date with a vastly changed turn of events. He started to say something quietly, but for a terrible moment I found I couldn’t move my limbs. My eyes darted across to the pseudo-biological structure in plastic and the horror of what it might mean lent a frightful slant to my immobility.
Was he, in fact, peering at the disembodied eyes on the front of a small metal box?
Desperately I tried to move my arms. Nothing.
Chindale spoke as if he’d sensed what was going on in my mind. ‘You’ll be in plaster for another week,’ he said. ‘You broke a collar bone.’
I must have raised my head slightly for it was then that I felt pain. My head sank back on the pillow. I could feel it there, soft and billowing, magnificently physical. My voice remained detached and I could only croak: Louise? ... Where? ... Did? ...’
‘She managed to phone us —’
‘ — She phoned you?’ I started to sit up with a paroxysmic jolt. The movement sent an agonizing spasm down and across my back and I lay down again. A doctor in a white coat saw this and muttered something to Chindale, who nodded to him. To me he spoke with unaccustomed gentleness. ‘You’ll be seeing Mike Duncan later. He’ll tell you ...’ I was given an injection. The images blurred away.
*
I’m told I awoke several times, asking for Louise. On these occasions there were snatches of information unconnected with her. I was ill from exhaustion and don’t remember very much now. But I was systematically interrogated and learned back certain things from the experts who interviewed me. These facts related to how close the call had really been. Action in America had been taken on a presidential level as a result of two factors: a report from the UN which was at first considered inconclusive — if not hysterical — and a last-minute corroboration, the source of which I still wasn’t told. The power failure, brought about jointly by Duncan and me, had destroyed all ground-based operations — telecommunications, satellite telemetering, radar tracking, computing-control — but the launch-submarines had to be intercepted at sea by carrier-based aircraft and the RAF. As you must know, none of this reached the public or the press. In the light of the highly sensitive political situations both in Czechoslovakia and Vietnam the whole thing was far too hot. Most of it is still Classified but we know at least that one Russian spyship was contacted via the Washington hot-line and Moscow to intercept those PV-controlled subs.
Whenever I begged for information about Louise, my interrogators were frowned away from the bedside.
*
As promised, Mike Duncan told me the rest. It came as an immense, brain-snapping shock because during my illness — apparently I had gone almost mental — there’d been hallucinations about Louise herself. She’d been close to me and warm and terribly real. Now I was to learn the truth from this gentle man.
It seemed that the cerebral units prepared in advance for NCBMS were kept alive, during the storage period, by means of mass, organ-sharing facilities, sectionalized by blood groups, and controlled by the Fluidic system I have described. In this state the brain-units, divided into lobes and sensory extremities as Thorne had been in the submarine, were stored in racks which were linked by organic tape to normal electronic media such as the telephone system.
It was via this means that the Voice Unit of Louise had contacted the outside world. This was the ‘second factor’ which had borne out the UN report and enabled the Pentagon to act. This had been her aim all the way through. It seemed to me, as Duncan recounted these terrible insanities, merciful in some unaccountable way that Louise had never reached the stage when, equipped with micro-miniaturized versions of Fluidic, plastic chips, scaled down to tiny slivers, the Units were welded into a warhead.
I understood, now, the root cause of my unhinged state. It was Grief. I had a lifetime in which to sob it away; but to Duncan I said:
‘But did she die? When it was over, did she die as one day I will? ...’ I somehow controlled tears which so badly wanted to well up and cancel this hygienic, mechanical detachm
ent. ‘Wasn’t she allowed even that dignity?’
He placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘She would have anyway,’ he said, ‘as I’m sure you instinctively knew. But ... yes, she did.’
‘But when?’
‘The moment the power failed.’
POSTSCRIPT
I see that in an earlier book I wrote, ‘This novel is by no means the work of one person’ and I’m always a bit stung by the evident fact that nearly every fiction writer there is manages single-handed. Expert in every field — aviation, psychiatry, nuclear physics or navigating ocean liners, it’s all one to them — my literary brothers need no jog to the elbow. True, there is sometimes a cryptic reference in the dedication to ‘Howard T., without whom ...’ or occasionally it transpires that apart from this ‘Howard T.’ there were advisers who were ‘too numerous to mention’ — despite the 800 odd pages of text which follows which (one might have thought) would have left room for just one or two.
Frankly, when I write a book, everyone has to get out and push. Baffled as they are by the meanderings hopefully described by me as a first draft, editors provide technical assistance, technical advisers provide editorial comment, people I approach suddenly in pubs write snatches of dialogue, benevolent industrialists buy me lunch and what with one thing and another a book finally emerges to which I blandly sign my name.
In this case, Elsie Herron, my indefatigable editor, extracted my story from me rather as one might dig an allotment — if not for gold, at least for something other than stinging nettles. At a well-known pharmaceutical factory some experts I mustn’t name discussed with me some of the weirder aspects of the hallucinogenic drugs upon the kindly request of Dr M. B. Clyne. At the Central Electricity Generating Board, F. R. R. Jones, Station Superintendent of one of the nuclear power stations fashioned after the original model at Calder Hall, generously authorized me to haunt a huge power station and Charles Carr — the training officer there — spent more time than he could afford making some kind of sense of my narrative so that the engineers in the book talked like engineers and the act of sabotage herein described actually worked. Here also, G. Barnbrook demonstrated the trend of building methods and suggested how the technology of tunnelling might develop in the future.
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