Exit Alpha

by Clinton Smith

  Were other D field staff here? He and Hunt could be it. He’d need her help. But how to tip her off?

  She joined him again, face carefully expressionless. As they reached the annexe, he said, ‘You can bunk with me.’

  She glanced at him, weighing the statement, knowing his motive wasn’t sex. Threats shrank the penis wonderfully. But would she realise that sex could serve them as a blind?

  As they started to kit up, she gave him a look that seemed to ask, ‘Are they going to kill us? Is that why you want us together?’

  It was a start.

  They pulled on their outer gloves in silence.

  BODY LANGUAGE

  The accommodation block was a relic but they were permitted to share the same cubicle. It was designed as a single berth — its hanging space and small desk/table separated by open shelves which doubled as a ladder to the single bunk above. Heat was blown through a duct below the desk. But like most buildings here, it was no warmer than mid-winter.

  The curtain that screened them from traffic in the corridor had enough space behind it for someone to sleep on the floor. There were bedrolls on the floor in other cubicles, so the rest were doubling up as well. He asked a man in the next space, ‘How are the showers?’

  ‘Turned off. They’re short of water. Some problem about a . . . melt bell? It’s our first time here. We don’t know a thing.’

  That made them support staff. ‘What’s your base?’

  ‘Gamma.’

  Gamma was in Argentina.

  After they’d unpacked some of their stuff, he and Hunt went downstairs to the tatty lounge. It was packed with bewildered people — many speaking Spanish.

  He glanced at Hunt’s madonna face. ‘See anyone you know?’

  She shook her head.

  They walked into the mess. Harried staff served a line of people. He spotted the bald head and luxurious beard of Pohl, the Alpha base commander. Good old Pohl. Serving food? Had Vanqua demoted him to slushie?

  When Cain drew level with him in the line he said, ‘Hello, Adam. Slumming?’

  Pohl blinked at him over the counter, ‘Hello, Ray. Some event.’ He began to fill a plate with the one meal available.

  ‘Got any new jokes?’

  ‘I’m not feeling funny right now.’ He spooned peas onto the plate.

  I bet you’re not, Cain thought and began verbal fishing. ‘Stuffy in this old can. Thought I might stretch the legs later. Want to join me? Or is that off-limits?’

  ‘Wouldn’t advise it.’ Pohl glanced nervously to the side.

  ‘Seen any other D field staff?’

  ‘No.’ Pohl, blinking fast, handed the plate across. Two men came out of the kitchen and stood behind him. They weren’t cooks.

  Cain changed the subject. ‘Seen Pat?’

  ‘She got one of our doctors to turn her off last week.’

  His reaction would have been visible.

  Pohl said, ‘Sorry, old mate.’

  He took his meal and moved away, body flooded with emotion.

  He joined Hunt beside the wall bench. He found it hard to swallow the food. He felt her watching him.

  ‘She must have meant a lot.’

  ‘Big sister. Lover. Friend.’

  ‘At least she’s out of this. Have you seen any of our field staff?’

  ‘No. And, according to Pohl, we’re it.’

  * * *

  When they’d eaten, they went back to the cubicle and drew the curtain across. Experience told him that the space was wired — that eyes and ears saw or heard everything they did.

  They stripped off a couple of layers. She even looked superb in thermal underwear. He pointed up to the bunk. She frowned, then climbed up, displaying shapely flanks.

  Strange, he thought, how affection transcended appearances. He would have given three of her for the scraggy breastless Pat.

  He climbed after her and joined her in the bag. There was a duvet. He dragged it over them. The corridor light remained on. Pinhole cameras and pick-ups would be relaying their every sound and move.

  She lay facing the wall. He turned behind her to face the same way, reached over until his hand was on her diaphragm, then used his finger to inscribe a ‘Y’. She shied a little when he touched her, then understood, lay still.

  Y . . . O . . . U.

  He moved his finger straight across her ribs to indicate the end of the word, started the next word. READ. Slash. ME? He drew the question mark, then crossed her ribs twice to signify ‘end of transmission’. If the watchers noticed any movement, they’d think he was feeling her up.

  She reached down and back to his thigh, began her reply. He concentrated, trying to get it. It wasn’t as easy as he’d thought.

  Y . . . E . . . S. Double slash.

  Encouraged, he started again. THEY INTEND KILL ALL D STAFF HERE.

  Her hand moved again on his thigh. AGREE. GAMEPLAN?

  WE STAY CLOSE. STRIKE TOGETHER WHEN CAN.

  OK.

  THEY WILL DO NOTHING DIRECT AS TOO MANY PEOPLE. SUSPECT THEY ISOLATING BATCHES FOR COVERT KILLS.

  GOT IT.

  TOMORROW WE RECCE.

  OK.

  The effort to communicate was tedious. They both needed sleep, were too tired to think well now. But he decided to tell her that she hadn’t caused the fall of EXIT D. He needed her to believe in herself again. The emotional release would make her strong.

  YOU WERE SABOTAGED WITH RAUL. INTERNAL. VANQUA.

  Her body became a plank.

  He went on. HE USED MURCHISON. HAS SPIKED D PROJECTS FOR YEARS. SO NOT YOUR FAULT. WAS SETUP TO DESTROY RON AND D.

  Her every muscle tensed with rage. Her moving hand dug into his leg. WILL KILL HIM.

  GOT ME TOO. STROMLO DEAD AND I WAS SHOT UP.

  WHY DO IT?

  HE HATES RON. ALL I CAN WORK OUT.

  Then came a sentence that astonished him.

  IS SHE RON?

  WHAT?

  NOT SURE SHE IS RON!

  He was thunderstruck. A duplicate? Was it possible? If so, the double was amazingly good. Hunt was Ron’s lover. What had she noticed?

  She drew a query on his leg again.

  He signed. AM STUNNED. WHY A DOUBLE?

  SAVE HER LIFE? BUY TIME? GIVE HER CHANCE FOR COUNTER ATTACK?

  It was possible, he thought. Just. The peculiar eyes . . . The Latin slip . . . Pat’s last and greatest job?

  A duplicate ready to die?

  He signed. INCREDIBLE IF TRUE.

  She murmured, ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  She said, ‘Thank you, brother. Meant a lot.’

  He squeezed her arm in reply.

  She, too, had begun as a parentless child, seconded to the cause. They were orphans, he thought. Waifs. Monstrous ones certainly. But still . . .

  She took his hand and held it between her breasts.

  He appreciated that.

  ACID DROP

  Vanqua watched the big woman winched up. She hung suspended, feet just off the ground. The improvised rope harness cut into her bulbous thighs. She looked lewd trussed like this — stripped to inner field garments and bound.

  This was the climactic act. The culmination of years. Obscene, but it had to be done.

  Zuiden, the only other person in the gloomy space, stood holding the chain hoist’s control stalk. He wore the attendant’s protective clothing — overalls, helmet, acid-resistant boots.

  Fitting, Vanqua thought. Just the two of them. The act, too intimate to be a spectacle, was like a sacrament in a crypt. He stared again at the gone-to-seed body that once had pressed against his sister . . . corrupted her flesh, provoked her death.

  ‘So, finally,’ he said, ‘you know why. Now you’ll feel how.’

  Rhonda’s face remained a sneer, her voice a satirical lilt. ‘I could forgive you for being a one-dimensional bourgeois twit — except you’re so bloody boring.’

  His whole body trembled. He suspected his hands were shakin
g. The effect of the moment was like wind chill blowing from his core. She hadn’t given an inch. He was reluctantly impressed.

  He signalled Zuiden to begin. The chain hoist whirred and dragged her up. Zuiden ran it along the overhead rail until she dangled above the vat.

  Interesting that both ‘department heads’ were here to witness the dissolving, one intimately.

  Unfortunately the alloy lip of the vat obscured his view, but he knew her swollen feet were only inches above the acid.

  He called, ‘You’re about to suffer terribly. How do you feel?’

  ‘Clad in the beauty of a thousand suns.’

  ‘I don’t take your meaning.’

  ‘You’re too dreary to understand.’

  His shaking was embarrassing. He disliked Zuiden seeing him like this. It made him feel exposed. Disassociation, essential to killing technique, was part of Department S philosophy.

  Zuiden said tonelessly, ‘Your call,’ his face death-mask sober.

  This was the moment, the culmination of revenge.

  The shaking. My God. He grabbed one of the metal chairs, turned it so he could prop a knee on it, then held the back with both hands. That was better. He took two deep breaths, called, ‘Very slow. Begin.’

  Zuiden prodded a button. The perverted bitch dropped 3 inches and stopped, her mass slightly bouncing on the rope. But she’d lifted her legs.

  He motioned to Zuiden again. Her body dropped more. No matter how she writhed, her toes would soon be dissolving.

  He waited for the agonised bellows.

  They never came.

  Her face contorted. Her legs dropped. Steam rose from the vat.

  Cyanide!

  He howled with rage and smashed the chair against the wall.

  JOHN

  The next morning the showers were on. They waited in queues to get clean. The naked Hunt was so stunning that no one in the bathroom, male or female, could drag away their eyes.

  As they dressed, he said, ‘You’ve got an amazing body.’

  ‘And EXIT’s fully exploited it, I assure you.’

  They queued again for breakfast, then joined the crowd in the lounge while lists were posted on the board. Everyone had been allocated times when they were authorised to leave the building. Their time was 3 pm.

  Cain said, ‘Bugger this. Let’s try and get out of here.’

  They followed the first batch to the alcove for kitting up. Each person was ticked off at the door by two over-large young surgeons.

  ‘Must be cadets,’ Hunt murmured.

  ‘Just shows how stretched they are.’

  When they reached for their hanging outer suits, one of the youths confronted them. ‘You two aren’t scheduled till afternoon.’ The thickness of his neck, the sloping set of his shoulders, everything about him was hostile. The second cadet closed ranks behind the first.

  Young punks, Cain thought — super-sensitive to hierarchy, measuring personal success by the degree of intimidation. He said, ‘Stop strutting. I’m not impressed.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Ever killed anyone, son?’ He doubted they had. He knew that Hunt was probably wired enough to take them single-handed — chopping throats and poking eyes without them seeing it coming. But he could no longer trust his damaged body in a fight against young animal fitness.

  Then Zuiden entered the porch, eyebrows encrusted, breathing vapour. The apprentice thugs snapped to attention.

  Zuiden said, ‘Two against the world, huh? Don’t try it, Cain. You’ll lose.’

  ‘Been monitoring us, have you?’

  ‘Yes, God knows why. You’re an invalid and you’ve lost it. Without a gun you’re stuffed. So what’s your beef?’

  ‘I want to see John.’

  ‘Your wants don’t count.’

  Cain knew the surgeon had expected him to say Rhonda and that the request had surprised him. He also knew they didn’t want fuss and were barely coping as it was. And that despite Zuiden’s blustering, a dentist Grade Four was the biggest threat in the base. ‘I want to see him, or I’ll make things very difficult for you here.’

  Zuiden weighed it up, then turned to the two thugs. ‘Let him through. Not her.’

  Cain flashed a glance at the savage-eyed Hunt that said, ‘Hold your fire. I’ll be back.’

  He walked with Zuiden across the cold vault beneath the domes, his felt-lined rubber-soled boots slipping on the overtrodden ice.

  ‘If you took the cadets,’ Zuiden said, ‘there’s still the guardhouse. And if you got past that we’d come after you. And even if we didn’t, where the hell would you go?’

  Cain knew he was right. Sixteen countries operated over thirty permanent bases in Antarctica and all kinds of expeditions shared the ice. For an uninhabitable wilderness it was becoming rather densely populated. Even tourism was becoming a problem. But Alpha was as isolated as Vostok, 800 kilometres from anywhere, with the only workable egress by a full-scale traverse or a Herc. And two fleeing people couldn’t organise either. He turned to Zuiden. ‘If reincarnation exists, I bet you come back as a bird.’

  ‘I’ll bite.’ Zuiden drawled. ‘Why?’

  ‘So you can shit on people.’

  Zuiden chuckled. ‘I’ll piss on your grave before I go.’ He walked up steps into the cold porch of a red-painted building and told the two cadets inside the entrance, ‘This piece of Paki shit has clearance to see number three. He gets an hour in there. Any fuss, buzz me.’

  The pope had a cabin-like room with a desk and a bed. He wore polar clothes too big for him and was correcting a typed manuscript. As Cain entered, he looked around, astonished. ‘Ray!’ He lurched up from his chair to embrace him, knocking papers flying.

  Cain said, ‘Thank God you’re all right.’

  ‘They said you were almost killed.’

  ‘They’ve patched me up. But I’m not good.’

  ‘How wonderful to see you.’ He sat down again a little breathless, beaming with delight.

  Cain helped gather up the papers. ‘I think they’re going to kill us. I don’t trust things here.’

  ‘No. But events don’t matter. Only what we are.’

  ‘But I’m afraid for you.’

  John smiled. ‘Leave what happens to God. Why complain? What we are now is all there ever is.’

  ‘I know that theoretically but . . .’ He sat on the bunk. There wasn’t a second chair.

  John leaned forward and held Cain’s hand in both of his, his face full of kindness. ‘Relax. Come back inside.’

  He tried to bring his attention back to his body.

  ‘You remember when we were children? How we stared with such wonder at the sun? So naive. But the sentiment was true. Perhaps that youthful aspiration is the finest thing we have. Truer than our fashionable despair. Truer than the ruins of a life.’

  The words went in as they always did with him, soothing, reaffirming, and the year since their last meeting dropped away.

  ‘You feel it?’ John went on. ‘Why did primeval cultures worship the virgin?’

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Reading. Sufi poems. The Taoists. Gurdjieff.’ He pointed to boxes stacked against the wall. ‘They let me bring a few books.’

  ‘Gurdjieff was a giant. A shame the Jesuits made a dog’s breakfast of the enneagram.’

  ‘Yes. The inevitable distortion. It shows how dry our doctrine’s become and how desperate people are to infuse it. Gurdjieff offered practice but most people just respond to his theory. The approach to Being is incomprehensible to most because it belongs to eternity, not time.’

  ‘May I ask you a daring question?’

  ‘Daring?’ John lifted something off his desk.

  ‘Have you abandoned the concept of God?’

  ‘Why name it? Labels shut you off. Fear God. Why? Because one attracts what one fears?’ A smile. ‘What a creaking construction.’

  Cain nodded slowly. ‘Concepts hiding truth? Is that the tragedy of
the Church?’

  ‘That depends on the level of perception.’

  ‘So there are no steps to the throne?’

  ‘Too sweeping. Read this — from here.’ He handed over bound sheets of typescript.

  Cain took the manuscript and read aloud: ‘Religion is the ruse of the wise. It aims to bring the unsuspecting aspirant to a heightened inner vibration that reasoning can’t reach. So it promotes irrationality — for a worthy aim. It is the only deception that can’t be called untrue.

  ‘This is beautiful.’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s the best of me. The need to express, you see? God’s journalist.’

  He skipped a few pages, read on, silently this time.

  ‘When not “I” then AM. When the observer is abandoned, seeing simply is — an experience that reaches through diversity to unity in an enfolding verticality to time. “And there shall be time no longer.” These words are literally true. Eternity is not duration but the infinite potential of all ages in the sunburst of unified awareness. We need to die to be born to that experience. But who is interested in inner death?’

  He looked up, filled with the truth of it. ‘What would the Curia make of this?’

  ‘The dead would bury the living.’

  He read on:

  ‘Belief is superstition, piety straw and chastity without knowledge mistaking the means for the end. The end is the blind, true probing into that core predating time where knowledge and bliss are made flesh. The resurrection of the body is not a historical event but the central transformation of consciousness. We are asked to incarnate Christ. Not the spirit but the flesh must be transformed. The organism must be afire — the kingdom of God on earth.’

  He looked away from the words, intensely moved.

  The old pope smiled. ‘You know what it’s saying, don’t you? And to know is a great achievement. But blessed are ye if ye do it.’

  So this was what John had been working on through long years — distilling his wisdom far beyond the point of heresy. He knew the manuscript had to survive — for Ray Cain if for no one else.

  He handed back the pages with care. ‘Have you read Krishnamurti?’

  ‘Life begins where thought ends. Yes.’

  ‘I discovered such a clear expression of his recently. “In attention there is no centre. There is no me attending.”’