Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘But shouldn’t people know in advance so they can make plans to survive?’

  ‘You mean another Noah’s Ark? Take to the hills with the Bible, a book club edition of Shakespeare and the Boy Scout Manual? It’s going to get a little crowded. And if you told people, who would take any notice? Groups of nuts have been rushing up mountains with canoes and cans of soup every year since I can remember, only to find four weeks later that they’ve picked the wrong year. Nobody takes that kind of prediction seriously.’

  ‘Not predictions, perhaps, but supposing there was proof?’

  ‘Proof? Proof is when it happens. How can anyone really know about this kind of thing? Didn’t Brecetti say that we had reached a point where the physical laws that underpin our scientific view of the universe may prove to be completely fallacious?’

  ‘Some of them may require modification,’ admitted Wedderkind. ‘But let’s suppose there was proof. Incontrovertible evidence. Would the world be better served if that knowledge were shared by only a few people?’

  Connors smiled. ‘Do you really believe that old intellectual pipe dream? The scientist, the philosopher, painter, poet, the surgeon, architect, and engineer? The elitist group who will preserve all that is good in our society and build anew? The trouble with that idea is that it is the power elite who decides who is to survive and they always put themselves at the top of the list. I know, for instance, that if nuclear war breaks out while I’m working at the White House, I’ve got six months’ guaranteed five-star bed and board in the Presidential fallout bunker. Morally, though, I have no more right to survive than any one of the millions of people who voted in the man I’m working for.’

  ‘What would you find more acceptable, survival of the fittest?’

  ‘That was Nature’s solution before we started to interfere. No favours. Everyone starts even.’

  ‘Not quite. Natural selection favours a physical elite. The blind, the old and the infirm wouldn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘If they are poor, black, and live south of the Sahara, what kind of chance do they have now?’

  ‘True…’ Wedderkind looked at Connors for a moment. ‘I wonder, if it came to the crunch, whether you’d really be so fairminded.’

  Connors got up with a grin. ‘Listen, if the world has to come to an end, make it early in the New Year. That’s when I get the worst bills.’

  ‘And ruin the January sales? That’s when Lillian does most of our shopping.’

  Connors spread out his hands. ‘That’s the trouble with Armageddon. Whatever you arrange, it is bound to inconvenience somebody.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Jesus, it’s twenty past one… When do you plan to start digging up Friday?’

  ‘About eight. I’m putting Max’s boys on to it.’

  ‘Do you really think there is a chance Crusoe will be willing to trade?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put money on it, but what else can we do?’

  Connors patted Wedderkind on the shoulder. ‘You’re right. Good night, Arnold.’

  ‘Sweet dreams, boychik. And don’t worry. Everything’s going to turn out fine.’

  Connors opened the door and stepped down from the hut. The fall night air was crisp and clean and scented with pine. The sound of bullets ricocheted from the nearby monitor hut where the duty crew sat watching a late-late Western. Overhead, the jet-black sky glittered like the jewellery counter at Tiffany’s. Don’t worry? The man had to be kidding… Connors showered and went to bed with a bizarre craving for the apricot pancakes his Hungarian grandmother used to make.

  In the morning, Max’s widowed crew of roughnecks cleared the shattered bulldozers from the top of Friday’s burial mound with the replacement machines, then carefully shaved the excess earth away. Underneath, the mud had dried into a solid lump that crumbled at the touch of the steel blade. It was no longer frozen solid, nor had it been baked hard. Friday had either changed his mind once he found out he was trapped, or he must have known they were going to dig him out and had decided to make life easier for everyone.

  Connors and Wedderkind drove up on to the plateau as the roughnecks began to uncover the steel cage. Inside the cage, parts of Friday could be seen where lumps of mud had crumbled away through the steel mesh. Lee, Aaron, T-Bone, and Fish crowbarred up the hooked steel spikes that pinned the cage to the ground while Cab and Dixie hooked up the hose and got the pressure pump going. Lee took over the nozzle end and washed off Friday’s mud overcoat.

  ‘He looks okay,’ said Connors.

  Wedderkind nodded and walked over to take a closer look with Neame, Gilligan, Tomkin, Davis, and Page. Vincent and Hadden were over on Crusoe’s hull with a squad of cadets clearing away the wooden platform and foot-frame from around the dome so that Friday could open up the hatch in the normal way.

  Friday lay tilted over at a slight angle with his eight legs folded tightly in against his body. He looked undamaged. The group backed off and formed a half circle. For about fifteen minutes there was no movement, no sign of life. Then the Air Force technician with the cannon mike picked up something in his earphones.

  ‘I’ve got some faint clicking sounds coming through.’ He twiddled a couple of knobs on his tape recorder and nodded. ‘It’s increasing in volume.’

  Friday was back in the game.

  Five minutes later he started to unfold with slow, jerky movements. After what seemed an age, he got all eight feet on the ground, hoisted his body into the air, then hesitantly flexed each leg as if he had a cramp in every joint. When his limb movements were smoothed out, Friday popped up the four curving eyestalks and rotated the top and bottom sections of his body in opposite directions.

  Lee dropped down on one knee and hosed the dirt off Friday’s folded tool kit. As the water sprayed over his belly and up under his legs, the four eyestalks shrank halfway in, then slowly eased out again. Lee waved to Cab to cut the motor on the pump and turned to Wedderkind.

  ‘Okay, there he is. Have fun.’ He rolled the hose away.

  Apparently satisfied that all systems were at ‘go’, Friday retracted the eyestalks and upped his body temperature to steam off the trickling rivulets of water. As soon as he was dry, the foot-long sensor hairs sprouted from the lower sections of each leg. Friday fixed each one of the watching group with his eye pod and his four hoselike feelers, then skirted carefully around them and wandered off towards the crest of the ridge.

  Connors watched him make a wide curve around the bulldozers and Max’s roughnecks. He turned to Wedderkind. ‘Wasn’t he supposed to go back to Crusoe and let the others out?’

  ‘That was the general idea. Don’t worry, he’ll go back eventually.’

  Friday picked his way up over the rocks, zigzagging across the slope in his usual aimless fashion, pausing now and then to examine something on the ground. Twice during the ascent, his eye pod swivelled around to gaze at the group.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Gilligan.

  ‘Perhaps he has a fixed mission sequence for each walk,’ suggested Neame. ‘Trapping him in the cage may have been like putting your hand in front of a battery-operated toy car. When you lift your hand away it just goes right on the way it was going.’

  ‘Didn’t he do more or less the same thing after he froze the field lab?’ asked Connors.

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Seeing as how he’s put us to so much trouble, I’d say that was downright rude.’

  Connors turned to find Lee Ryder and the other roughnecks behind him. They must have walked over and heard the last part of the conversation.

  Connors smiled. ‘I know how you feel, Lee. What do you want to do, Arnold, clear the Ridge?’

  ‘We might as well. We can keep them both on camera and come up again when Friday goes back in.’

  Vincent and Hadden walked over from Crusoe to join them. Everything had been stripped off the hull.

  ‘I thought we were going to see some action,’ said Vincent.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Neame. ‘Big anticlimax. He�
��s gone off for another Sermon on the Mount.’

  ‘Great… I could have had another hour in bed.’

  ‘Let’s grab some breakfast,’ said Hadden.

  ‘Okay. Oh, Lee, if your guys could get those wrecked bulldozers down to the workshops, our people could have a crack at repairing them.’

  ‘Sure, we’ll get on that right away.’

  Vincent and Hadden and the rest of the research group drove off in two of the waiting jeeps. Friday reached the top of the Ridge and climbed on his favourite rock.

  ‘Are you coming back?’ asked Wedderkind.

  Connors’ attention was focused on Friday. ‘I wonder what he’s doing up there…’ He turned to Wedderkind. ‘How about a little walk first?’

  ‘Sure…’

  They found a couple of rocks just below the crest on the western slope of the Ridge and sat down about ten yards away from Friday. The eye pod swivelled round at their approach, stayed on them for about five minutes after they had sat down, then appeared to lose interest.

  West of the Ridge, the ground fell away towards the head of a dry river whose course ran southward to join the Yellowstone between Forsyth and Miles City. On the other side of the riverbed lay another vast stretch of rolling high-plains country. A brief flash of sunlight from a moving windshield signalled the position of an invisible pickup travelling along a distant back road.

  Connors pictured the driver of the pickup, a rancher, probably, with his radio tuned into the local radio station, totally unaware of what was happening five miles to his right on Crow Ridge. Even to Connors, who had lived with the situation from the beginning, it still seemed incredible that here he was, in the second half of September, sitting on a hillside in the middle of Montana less than thirty feet from a wayward lump of machinery from another star system.

  ‘I wonder how people will react when this story gets out,’ said Connors.

  ‘Do you think it ever will?’ Wedderkind asked.

  ‘It’s bound to eventually.’ Connors smiled. ‘Ever since this thing started, I’ve been expecting chartered busloads of flag-waving delegates from groups like the Okefenokee Flying Saucer Society to land on our doorstep. If this visit has proved anything, it is that none of these nuts are really in touch with whoever’s out there.’

  ‘They may have got a message telling them to keep quiet,’ said Wedderkind.

  ‘Stop trying to frighten me. I know the idea was to keep this thing under wraps, but it’s still pretty amazing that the media haven’t got on to it yet.’

  Wedderkind shrugged. ‘It took the bloodhounds of the press six months to discover Reagan had been shipping arms to the Iranians.’

  ‘Yes… But suppose Crusoe decides to break out by tunnelling under the wire? Or if Friday freaks out on an antigravity trip, as Brecetti and Lovell suggested? That’s what I’m really worried about. I mean, that would really blow this thing wide open.’

  ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Bob, I’d feel a lot happier if a few more people did know what was going on.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll accuse me of being paranoid if I tell you.’

  ‘No, I won’t, I promise.’

  ‘Okay. At the back of my mind I have a nagging feeling that there could be someone planning a very simple solution to all the problems associated with Crusoe.’

  ‘How?’ asked Connors.

  ‘Oh, by, say, accidentally obliterating Crow Ridge. To make sure of destroying Crusoe, one would have to use something fairly potent.’ Wedderkind’s black-button eyes locked on to Connors to catch the slightest reaction.

  ‘Have you discussed this with anybody?’

  ‘Ah… Let’s say I discovered some of my colleagues share my uneasiness.’

  ‘I see. Just who do you visualize as being behind a thing like this – the President?’ asked Connors.

  ‘If the President had set up a plan like this, you would know about it.’

  ‘I would hope so,’ said Connors.

  ‘In which case, you’d tell me.’

  ‘That’s a reasonable assumption. So who’s Big X?’

  ‘Listen, Bob, don’t be coy. You can count on the fingers of one thumb the people who’ve got the balls to set up a deal like this.’

  ‘Fraser… Do you think it’s Fraser who could be planning to take out Crusoe?’

  ‘Not just Crusoe, the whole project. Everything. Everybody.’

  Connors’ eyes didn’t leave Wedderkind’s. ‘That’s a pretty drastic solution.’

  Wedderkind shrugged. ‘Are you saying it’s impossible?’

  ‘I hope so – otherwise it would mean that I’d be at the top of the casualty list.’

  ‘Or in charge of it.’

  ‘Me? Why would Fraser let me off the hook?’

  ‘This doesn’t have to be Fraser’s plan,’ said Wedderkind. ‘It could be yours.’

  ‘Now you are being paranoid,’ said Connors. ‘Christ Almighty, do you really think I’d pull a stunt like that?’

  Wedderkind cocked a finger at him. ‘That’s exactly what St Peter said when told by Jesus that he would deny him three times.’

  Connors grinned. ‘You disappoint me, Arnold. I didn’t realize that you saw yourself as the betrayed Messiah on this project.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Wedderkind. ‘It’s against my religion. I was just testing you out, boychik.’ Normally, Fraser was never far from Connors’ mind. His crucial hesitations, and the reluctance to mention Fraser’s name had confirmed Wedderkind’s suspicions. There was a plan. And Connors knew about it. Nyehh… let them keep their secrets. Let them play with their bombs. It wouldn’t change anything.

  Connors glanced away and looked out across the empty grassland beyond the river. How, he asked himself, could Wedderkind have heard of Operation CAMPFIRE? For him to have just plucked the same idea out of the air seemed to be stretching coincidence too far. Wait a minute… Connors’ brain backtracked. Plucked the idea out of the air… They had virtually accepted that Crusoe had established some form of telepathic contact. Was he also passing on everybody’s secrets?

  Just after eleven o’clock in the morning, Friday jerked out of his trance. For a full five minutes he clicked away like a convention of castanet players, then headed back down the hill towards Crusoe.

  In contrast to his zigzag ascent, Friday’s descent was on a straight line back to Crusoe. As they only had two legs each, Connors and Wedderkind took the long way down and, consequently, were a hundred yards behind him by the time he reached the level ground and entered the grid.

  Connors paused on the slope and saw that their jeep had gone. It didn’t matter. Their return would have been picked up by one or more of the TV cameras covering Friday so someone would be on their way to pick them up. Down over on their left, four of Max’s men in their telltale bright orange hard hats were hitching a towline to the last of the shattered bulldozers. Back in Rockville, everyone would probably be watching a TV set to see if Crusoe’s hatch would open for Friday. If it did, there was a chance Crusoe might also cough up Milsom, Max, and Spencer. Connors privately rated their chances of a return ticket as slim to nonexistent but whatever happened, the project would continue.

  In the monitor hut, Neal Zabrodski was heading up the six-man day shift. Seated in front of the bank of TV monitors, Neal saw Friday heading through the grid towards Crusoe. Connors and Wedderkind were still picking their way down from the crest. He glanced at the bottom left-hand screen and saw six men climb into a jeep and drive of towards Rockville.

  Neal picked up the phone and called the transport section. ‘Have you got the White Knight’s wheels down there?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s parked outside.’

  ‘Okay, get it up on the Ridge. He’s on his way down the hill.’

  As Neal hung up, the top sergeant on his right pointed up to the middle screen of the bottom bank of five. ‘Where are those guys going?’

  Neal looked up. Moving through the grid was the jeep with the six men
aboard. Instead of driving down from the plateau, it had turned eastward towards Crusoe and parallel with Friday.

  ‘Give me a close-up on that.’

  The sergeant hit the traverse button of the camera to the east of Crusoe and closed in tight on the jeep with the zoom lens. Neal put the picture on the main screen. It was Max’s six roughnecks. He couldn’t remember the name of the driver, but the man next to him was Lee Ryder. He had a sledgehammer across his lap.

  Neal leaned towards the mike and switched it to Allbright in the command hut. ‘Sir? We seem to have some unscheduled activity on Screens 5 and 8.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Zabrodski, I have the situation in view.’

  Connors and Wedderkind reached the bottom of the hill at the same time as their own jeep bounced on to the plateau. It came racing towards them, then slid the last five yards with all four wheels locked by the brakes. KINNER, D. J., was at the wheel. He had been Connors’ driver all week. Kinner seemed to be under the impression that everyone in the White House hurtled about their business at the speed of sound. Consequently, he drove Connors around as if he was out to win the Indianapolis 500.

  Allbright watched the TV screen. The roughnecks’ jeep turned towards Friday. When he was quite sure what was going to happen, he glanced up at his senior cadet commander. ‘Make sure it doesn’t get out of hand, Mr Harris.’

  Wedderkind climbed into the back of the jeep. Connors got in the front beside Kinner and put one foot up on the dashboard. Kinner looked across at him expectantly, his right arm braced against the gear lever for a racing start.

  ‘Tag along behind Friday.’

  Kinner gunned the motor.

  ‘Just keep it nice and slow,’ said Connors. ‘We’ve got all day.’

  The words were no sooner out of his mouth when the roughnecks’ jeep roared across their front and smacked into Friday at forty miles an hour. In the split second before they collided, Friday managed to dart a half pace backward so that instead of mowing him down, the jeep struck him a glancing blow, buckling his two front left legs and hurling him sideways into one of the grid posts. As Friday crashed against it, the thick post snapped over on top of him like a broken matchstick.