by Mick Farren
"What's your name?"
"Hodding."
Vickers had already decided that Hodding was quite useless to him even in the event that he decided he'd go on with the Contec mission. His tone was one of patient contempt.
"Well, okay. Hodding, the first thing you need to know is that I was terminated by Contec and I'm now under exclusive contract to Global Leisure. You hear me?"
The piece of information seemed to shake Hodding. Vickers didn't give him the time to relax.
"And even if there might be some unfinished Contec business to concern me here, only a fucking idiot would try to buttonhole me about it in a place that's without a doubt under full eavesdrop!"
"You want to go somewhere?"
This sucker had a death wish.
"No, I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to talk to you. I want you to get away from me and stay away from me. I don't want you to speak to me again unless it's in the course of your duties around the bunker. Are you understanding me?"
"Yes, but…"
"If you don't, I might be tempted to break your neck. Remember who I am, Hodding. You said it. I am Victoria Morgenstern's favorite hired gun."
For a few seconds, Hodding stood rooted and open mouthed. He had come to Vickers as a possible way out of a situation and he'd apparently turned up a monster. It took a final glare from Vickers to finally remind him what he should be doing. His mouth suddenly snapped shut and he moved away from Vickers as though he were infectious. Vickers also moved. He fought down the urge to look for cameras and microphones. Abbie Singer was back again. She gave him something on which to focus.
"Maybe I'll have that drink now."
She looked at him sharply. "Problem?"
Vickers took a deep breath and tried to look unconcerned.
"No, nothing. It was just some old business from before."
Abbie singer glanced at the ceiling.
"There are times when it seems a million miles away. It's all so locked in down here, it's another world."
"How long have you been down here?"
"Two months."
"When do you rotate out?"
"We don't know, nobody's been told."
"Nobody seems to be told anything in this place."
"They say it's security. You don't hear that you're getting out until literally a few hours before you go."
"Doesn't that make you crazy?"
As though to confirm that it did indeed make her crazy, she finished her drink in a single belt and moved to the bar for another.
"Sure it does, but you have to figure that it's going to be worth it in the long run."
Debbie was also at the bar. She eyed Vickers and Abbie and smiled nastily.
"Getting acquainted over there?"
Vickers spread his hands.
"Isn't this the get acquainted party?" He turned back to Abbie. "What do you mean you figure that it's got to be worth it in the long run? What's got to be worth it in the long run? Is this something else I don't know?"
Abbie looked at him as though he was an idiot who'd missed the obvious.
"We get to survive. If we're lucky enough to be down here when it happens."
"When it happens? I'd always hoped it was a matter of if."
"Not the way things are going lately. It's really starting to look grim."
Vickers was genuinely surprised. "You get news from outside?"
"Oh yeah, once you're out of quarantine, you get the internal news system piped in. These days, it's pretty much bad."
"I've been out of circulation for a while. What's been going on?"
"Basically the Soviets are finally and totally coming apart." She glanced around as though looking for some kind of confrontation. "I suppose it's all right to tell you. If we weren't supposed to talk they wouldn't have put us all here together."
"But the Soviets have been falling apart for decades."
"Yeah, but this seems to be it. It's really the last days. There's apparently been a whole string of military coups in Moscow and some of the regional centers. It's starting to look as though it's only a matter of time before bombs get loose one way or the other."
"Jesus Christ."
"The only consolation is that those of us who survive will inherit a new and cleansed world."
There was something in her eyes, a gleam that wasn't quite that of the brainwashed but was certainly some way down the road.
"Where are you recruited from?"
"The San Francisco Police Department; I was a Lieutenant of Detectives. Why do you ask?"
"No reason."
She put a hand on his arm. "Listen, I know this place can be confusing at first but you'll be thinking straighter tomorrow."
"Tomorrow? Why tomorrow?"
"They really don't tell you anything. I guess that's what happens when you pull Deakin. He's the kind of bastard who can turn a coffee break into a conspiracy. Believe me, I had to deal with plenty of his kind in the police force."
"What's going to happen tomorrow?"
"I'm sorry, I'm just running off at the mouth. Doctor Lutesinger is what's happening tomorrow. All four of us security squads are going down to the main lecture hall on the fifth level. He's coming up from the lowers to address us. It'll be the first time you'll have heard him speak. He's pretty impressive."
"Lutesinger is coming here? To speak to us?"
Again there was the slightest trace of fervor. "He's really something, you'll see. He's able to get things across so they make complete sense."
It was turning out to be a highly interesting evening. Vickers tried not to show the keenness of his interest.
"Lutesinger is in actual residence here? He lives in the bunker?"
"Sure he lives here. He rarely strays from the bottoms, though. That's why this lecture is quite an honor."
"Is Lloyd-Ransom here as well?"
Abbie Singer laughed. There was an edge of bitterness to it.
"Oh sure, Lloyd-Ransom's here. Once you get out of quarantine, you can't miss him, what with the smile and the gold braid and the pencil moustache. He's always parading around with his guards and his damn dogs." There was none of the same awe. That seemed to be reserved exclusively for Lutesinger. "They say he had a knack for turning up exactly where he's not wanted. He's also supposed to be the one behind all these Ruritanian uniforms."
"You sound like you don't like him."
"Yeah, but I know enough to be scared of him." Vickers signalled for another drink. There was suddenly a hell of a lot to think about. He wasn't sure that he was ready to see Lutesinger in the morning. Suddenly he realized it was the usual trepidation he experienced when he was about to look over a target for the first time. He hadn't given up the mission. Deep inside, he was still a Contec corpse on a mission to kill Lutesinger and Lloyd-Ransom. He'd never known that he possessed such illogical reserves of loyalty. Over on the other side of the room, Eggy was imitating Marlon Brando. "Charlie, I could have been a contender. Charlie."
"You all know the story of the ant and the grasshopper. How all summer the ant toiled ceaselessly storing up food for the winter while the grasshopper merely sang and sunned himself. You remember how, as the nights drew in and the winter turned cold, the grasshopper knew that he was going to starve. How, too late, he saw the error of his ways. Then he whipped out a gun, shot the ant stone dead and stole all his food."
There was a ripple of polite laughter from the small crowd. Doctor Lutesinger permitted himself a narrow acid smile and then returned to the business at hand.
"This poor fragment of humor in fact sums up the entire function of security in this complex. We have labored through a long summer to build this place and we must now guard that no grasshopper with a gun takes it away from us."
The term lecture hall was an extreme understatement. It was a spectacular multi-purpose theater down on the fifth level, where it seemed that few expenses were spared. It was a steep banking of some two hundred seats set into a high arching, acousticall
y perfect sound shell. The style was lavishly neo-deco complete with smoke mirrors and soft-light diffusion panels. Vickers found it more suited to a symphony concert than to an address by an elderly academic madman. Not that the elderly madman was doing all that badly. Just as the term lecture hall had been a major understatement, so was the title lecture. It was a full-scale theatrical production. White light fell on Lutesinger like the approval of God. Behind him, in the shadows at the rear of the stage was the forbidding, grim dark line of his dozen-strong bodyguard. Even the dumbest of the audience couldn't help but perceive that everything had been done to invest Lutesinger with every last wringing of authority. When Vickers and his companions had arrived, a hidden sound system had been playing Mahler.
"Some of those among you are newcomers, and for your benefit I shall first try to define the nature of this terrible winter that is so close upon us."
Lutesinger paused, as if for dramatic effect. In contrast to the pomp and circumstance of his surrounding, Lutesinger was a stooped, spindly, fragile figure. He seemed to lean heavily on the lucite column that served him as a lecturn. His long skeletal hands clung to it and he only removed them long enough to briefly emphasize a point. His suit was very plain and about twenty years out of date, charcoal gray in a style favored by conservative tax analysts. His voice was equally unimpressive. It could have been of an elderly teutonic speech synthesiser. There was, however, something hypnotic about the slow, almost reptilian way that he swayed slightly as he spoke. The overhead lights turned his eye sockets into black holes of certainty. He was a paradox. He seemed so ancient and frail and yet there was an energy and menace that was more than just stage effects.
"The truth is that we don't know."
Again he paused. The house lights came down and the audience vanished in the darkness. Lutesinger was all there was.
"No matter how far our computers project, no matter how long we sit and speculate, in the final analysis we always come to the admission that we have no confident idea of what a nuclear war is really like. We have a mass of data but it is wholly the result of controlled tests. We have never seen the nuclear fire blazing with the heat of anger and conflict. Our only practical experience comes from the primitive bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that ludicrous Pakistani explosion and the single airburst that destroyed Porto Alegre and terminated the incident between Brazil and Argentina. In every instance we were surprised by how little we knew and how wrong our projections had been. It would seem that if there is a single constant rule that can be applied to the belligerent use of nuclear weapons it is that both the construction and the operation of this installation was planned according to the dictates of an almost infinite pessimism."
Lutesinger's expression made it absolutely clear that the infinite pessimism had been all his. There was the smell of cigar smoke in the lecture hall. As far as Vickers could tell, it was drifting back from the front rows. It was not only expensive, it was also unusual in the largely nicotine free bunker. The front rows were taken up by the considerable entourage that had accompanied Lutesinger up from the bottoms. There was a sizeable clique of the overdone, comic opera uniforms in among them, and now he discovered that they smoked top-grade cigars. Vickers couldn't raise Eggy's quaintly socialist ire over the bunker's caste-like inequalities but the combination of blatant privilege and the stupid uniforms did disturb him more than a little, mainly regarding the insecurities of whoever designed the system. They not only verged on mania but were a direct throwback to a very Neanderthal, dress-up facism. It probably wasn't Lutesinger in the drably prim, dark suit. As Abbie Singer had told him, Lloyd-Ransom was a far more likely candidate, a career soldier with a delusion of Napoleonic grandeur. It was almost certain that he'd been one of a group of officers who'd been forced to resign their commissions in the SAS and flee London after an abortive but hastily hushed up military coup.
"In the early 1980s, a polymath group fronted by a Doctor Carl Sagan postulated the idea of a nuclear winter, a temporary ice age that might grip the earth in the aftermath of any major or prolonged nuclear exchange. The sun would be obscured by the clouds of dust that would be thrown up by so many monstrous explosions. Sagan and his group estimated that the nuclear winter might last for as long as two years. Here in Phoenix we could survive one that lasted five.
"Only science fiction has speculated on what we might ultimately find when the short-term horror abates and we finally emerge from this underground cocoon of ours. I suppose it's possible that we might find a monster-movie world of fused green sand that glows in the dark and hideous mutations. It is also possible, at the opposite extreme, that we will find we've inherited nothing, a severe, barren planet with continents that are endless desert surrounded by dead, poisoned oceans. One school of thought claims a world of grass and insects, another fantasizes about one that rapidly repopulates itself as if the atomic holocaust had never burned across the sky.
"These, however, are luxury predictions. They were framed in the luxury of pretending that the worst would never happen. These are the possibilities of 'what if rather than 'what will be.' To the idle speculator the possible is limitless. For us, the probable is likely to be something that even outstrips from their imaginings."
There was something else bothering Vickers. He'd started to sweat slightly and there were tension pains growing at the base of his skull. There was little doubt that the symptoms indicated the room was in some way gimmicked. Vickers had an exceptionally high tolerance to subliminals. Instead of blindly accepting, he suffered something akin to allergy reactions, physical side effects, when anyone was beaming suggestion at him. Vickers was quite proud of this quirk of his DNA. The physical reactions were a discomfort; a really bad burst of motivation could break him out in hives, but it was infinitely preferable to being semi-brainwashed each time he walked into the supermarket. Whatever was being used to back up Lutesinger was fairly low key, probably just enough to lull the crowd into an uncritical acceptance of the flat Germanic delivery. The room was too big for anything really direct like sub-bass boomers, squarks or miniclicks. They'd probably floated a bunch of microdelics into the air conditioner. Not enough to make anyone weird, just sufficient to make the people passive. It occurred to Vickers that it was a pretty cavalier way of treating the bunker's self-contained atmosphere. If they kept on pumping out psychotropics each time they wanted to make a point, the air in the bunker would slowly be turned into a soup capable of sending half the population off to chase dinosaurs.
"From the time that nuclear weapons were developed during the final days of World War II, there was a human pretense that we could somehow control, even prevent, their spread and their ultimate use. It was a piece of supreme arrogance to believe that, once something so powerful and so devastating had been loosed on the earth, we could stop it fulfilling its eventual purpose, fulfilling its destructive destiny, if you like.
For a while it seemed as though our arrogance was justified. From the 1950s to the mid-90s, the Pax Atomica held. We had MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction-such an appropriate acronym-to steady the balance of power. There was one factor, however, for which no one had allowed. For the mutual assurance of destruction, there also had to be a degree of equality between the protagonists. The world expected matched superpowers to remain matched. When the Soviets began their slow descent into anarchy and chaos, the balance of terror was no longer a balance. It became clear to many of us that the coming of Red Armageddon, the ultimate failure of the communists' system and the panic unleashing of their nuclear arsenal was only a matter of time."
Fenton leaned over to Vickers. "Maybe if we hadn't organized the Panic of '96, the Reds might still be okay."
"I didn't know you were a communist."
"I'm not. It's like I told you, I'm a sociopath. I'll take the opposite side at the slightest provocation."
Somebody in front of them hissed. Fenton gave them the finger. It was almost like being back in school. The front rows were taken u
p by Lutesinger's flunkies. Behind them were the security in the yellow uniforms-the nice kids. The hoodlums-the one's who'd hung onto their own clothes-had made straight for the back row. Lutesinger was above them all, whispering in the darkness. He continued with his chill visions.
"With the financial support of the major corporations, the bunker scheme became active. For those of us directly involved, it was a daunting task. It was possibly the most awesome construction project since the building of the pyramids. This was more than a pharaoh's vanity. Our purpose was the continuation of the human race, the survival of mankind. With so much at stake we had no alternative but an absolute determination."
Vickers thought about killing Lutesinger. Physically it'd be a breeze. He could snap the man's neck with one hand. The trick would be to get close to him. He wondered if there was any time when the man was on his own without the guards and the entourage.
"Here in Phoenix, and the other bunkers like this across the Free World, we will preserve the seeds of humanity. We will be buried here, safe while the firestorms rage and the nuclear winter closes its grip. It will be a dormant stage in the history of mankind. A waiting period until we can emerge to build once again upon the ashes. In doing this, we have become like insects going into the pupa stage. Indeed, as a species we could be seen to have mutated."
Lutesinger let everyone think about this.
"In this rebuilding, there is one great consolation. All we have to build on may be ashes but down here, in addition to the people, we have, in our storerooms, in our data banks and in our technology, the products of ten thousand years of the struggle toward civilization. We have the best that man has conceived and achieved. We have the good while the bad will have been swept away in the atomic fires. When we finally emerge it will be into a world that has been cleansed of man's superstition and folly. We will inherit a purified world."
"He talks as though it was all a foregone conclusion."
"He talks as though he couldn't wait for it to happen."