She stopped brushing again and met my eyes hard on. “But that would mean —”
“ — I know what that would mean, and don’t think I haven’t been scaring myself with the thought for hours, Nesta. Contamination on an enormous scale. It was purely random that I took that particular cab … Of course, when I got back here I hardly knew what I was doing, I remember it was an effort getting up the steps from the street … Leaving you like that … But even then there was no physical contact between Paula and me.”
“Did you get her to fix you a drink? — Anything of that sort?”
“She made some coffee in the Cona and poured it into a cup. I picked up the cup. There’s no physical link between the handle of the Cona machine and the coffee itself. And if we’re right about the virus idea, don’t forget that the coffee itself was on the boil.”
“Who got out the cup?”
I said, “I did. I got the cup and the saucer and the spoon. I put the sugar and the milk in myself. Paula — God help her — certainly hadn’t been at the milk. It was in the fridge and I poured it to suit myself …” I glanced at my watch. It was 10 a.m. By then, I thought, Richter would be at Standard Electric Computers. “I’m going to call Richter.”
“I’d be extremely careful what you say.”
“I shall.”
Nesta said, “Let’s have a good look at that phone before you use it any more.”
“I have. It’s clean.”
“Let’s be sure. Have you got any disinfectant?”
“Would that do any good?”
Nesta said, “Let’s cling to what straws we have.”
We cleaned the earpiece and microphone thoroughly with TCP and I made the call.
It was redirected. I asked for Richter and I got Lee Crabtree. All he would say to me was, “Put my daughter on at once, Mr. Kepter.”
Nesta took the phone. I gather the call went like this: Lee said, “It goes without saying, Nesta, that I can hardly be expected to approve of the way you are conducting your private life.”
“It’s my life.”
“Quite. If you insist on a procedure which invariably gets you out of one frying pan into another fire that is — to coin a phrase — your affair.”
“What’s your objection to Mr. Kepter?”
“Another time. What I am concerned about is the joint political activity between Kepter and Richter.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the Soviet Union.”
“I wouldn’t describe Roger Kepter as exactly a Communist.”
“I happen to know that as a result of the meeting between you and Kepter and Dr. Richter there have been telexes sent from here to Moscow and Moscow has replied. It appears that these telexes are cryptic almost to the point of being in code. I have made it quite clear to Richter that he’s to have nothing further to do with Kepter and I must ask you to respect my wishes.”
Nesta remained cool. “I do not control Roger Kepter and I don’t intend to start now.”
“Then you’d better tell him that I have military commitments to NATO. If these commitments are in any way corrupted by improper political activity involving the Russians — of all people! — I shall have to take extremely rigorous steps to plug the leak. Dr. Richter happens to be on a number of top secret projects and up till now Security has had every reason to assume that Richter has dropped all Soviet connections. Since meeting your Mr. Kepter he seems to have resumed them and I have already instigated enquiries — as I must — with the War Office. Meanwhile I must warn you, Nesta, that your newfound boyfriend will be in extremely hot water if he gets involved in something that looks to me very like espionage.”
He hung up.
*
Up to the time of Lee Crabtree’s sudden political tantrums I had not wholely grasped the extent to which all that had happened spanned the enormous spectrum of human activities going on everywhere around us. Even through looking at the notes I kept at the time — notes that were sketchy to say the least — it’s difficult to see why I thought of the crystal mosaic business as being a sort of private challenge between the new species itself and just a handful of human beings. It had already penetrated the whole of society piecemeal.
Certainly Paula’s death, the new aspect this threw on things, marked the leap in my own thinking; but why hadn’t I grasped it before? Possibly I am not good at analysing a major catastrophe while falling in love at the same time. The two do not go together; and even Richter’s intervention hadn’t succeeded — yet — in prising my mind out of a personalized view of events … which I saw then as a series of subversive intrusions upon a small group of isolated individuals.
If any one factor drew me up short it was Lee’s mention on the phone of his commitments to NATO; and even this only jolted me into action because it gave us a line of investigation to pursue: There were gaping holes in the history of the Mosaic Species. How were we to reconcile Paula’s death with aberrations in the U.S. Navy?
I said, after she had put the phone down, “What we have is a whole series of links which don’t seem to be joined up into one chain.”
She said, “I’d noticed.”
“Just because Spender employs computers for something they were never meant for it doesn’t necessarily give rise to an entire synthetic species and a hook-up with the American Navy. Does it?”
Nesta said, “Possibly the boot is on the other foot.”
“Whose boot is on what foot?”
“I mean the Species is using the Sixth Fleet rather than the Sixth Fleet using the Species.”
“But how do we prove it?”
Nesta said, “And to whom? — Our own government people would assume that any dealings with the Sixth Fleet are the same as dealing with the American Navy — unless we can get Rear-Admiral Hartford discredited.”
I said, “Only a Senate Committee in the States could do that.”
“Couldn’t we do something this end?”
“We’ve tried Orscombe. The mosaics are totally in control.”
“Then what about getting into the main computer room?”
“Manchester. I’ve thought of that. We need to know what the computer prediction on the Soviet Union’s strike power amounted to. Armed with that, we might be able to warn our own government that Hartford will be forced to act on it. What we couldn’t say is the truth … that a hunk of crystals in his brain are all set to make him start a nuclear holocaust. We’d be driven away kindly by a couple of men in white suits.”
Nesta said, “Then the thing to do is to get into the Manchester Centre and somehow send a message via that satellite which Hartford himself can act upon.”
I pointed out, “That would have to go via the mosaics. They’d change it.”
“Then go to the authorities now.”
“We’ve already covered that — we can’t!”
Nesta said, “But there’s the evidence of Paula’s death. An autopsy —”
“ — It’s remote from the kind of thing the Ministry of Defence would be looking for. It’ll take months for the significance of what happened to Paula to show. By that time —”
“ — nearly everyone else will be stuffed full of mosaics anyway?”
“Precisely. But I agree with you that unless we get into Manchester we can’t make another move. I wish Richter would phone.”
*
He did. Very late at night. And very grim with it. He said to me, “I’m having to resign from S.E.C. Can’t say more on the phone. We must meet immediately.”
I asked him where.
“The Southall Motorway Service Centre. Say in half an hour. In the cafeteria. Can you manage that?”
“Yes of course.”
*
By the time we got there it was just after midnight. We took the MG and pulled in almost the same moment as Richter did. Slamming of car doors but otherwise a tense silence.
The cafeteria was deserted except for a group of yobos at
one table. We bought coffee and sat well away from them — Nesta, Richter and I. It was not a happy gathering.
Richter said, “Lee has gone all out to convince HM Government that I’ve gone over to the USSR. Meanwhile I’ve gathered from Swiss sources that the Sixth Fleet is regrouping in the South Pacific and can’t be raised by anyone. It’s rumoured that a United States Navy helicopter that flew out to investigate didn’t return to base. Sent no messages. It doesn’t look good.”
Nesta said, “Can’t we convince anyone of what’s happening?”
“Not a chance. We don’t know on whom the mosaics are working by this time but in any case we’re up against my reputation — as it now is — and plain ordinary red tape … ‘Red’ being the operative word.”
I said, “But what evidence has Lee managed to produce to incriminate you in this way?”
“I’ve been passing cryptic telexes between here and Moscow. Had to. The Russians developed this stuff and only they know how to deal with it. The telexes look suspect because they appear to be in code. I could hardly come out into the open over the Mosaic Species.”
Nesta said, “If it was developed in Russia, how did Spender get hold of it?”
“Colleagues of mine are going into that. But it’ll take time.”
I said, “We haven’t got time. Dr. Richter, I have to get into Manchester. At least I can get the details of that forecast. Possibly I can get a message out. At least it’s worth a try.”
“Dangerous.”
“I’m already contaminated.”
“We’re not talking only of contamination, Kepter. The mosaics are in command, now. We cannot predict them.”
“Can you see any alternative course?”
“None. I admit it.”
“Then I must try.”
He hesitated for a few seconds. A late aircraft flew overhead, on approach for Heathrow. We watched its blinking lights as it passed. “Very well. You know the system of entry?”
“No.”
“You’ll find a security guard — maybe two — at the desk. If you’re lucky, the guards won’t know me by sight. You therefore pretend to be me. There’s a video screen and a keyboard. You type in my own entry code — which I’ll give you — then insert this magnetic card …” He rummaged in his breast pocket and produced it. “On getting the message ‘identify’ on the screen, you insert this — magnetic strip upward — and hope for the best. It should open the steel doors. If it doesn’t, it means Lee has already cancelled the card … in which case alarm bells will ring all over the building. If that happens, run like hell.”
“Then what? When do we hear from you next?”
Richter said, “I’ll be tracking you. When the opportunity arises I’ll get in touch. But there’s a new slant to this: London International Airlines are somehow mixed up in it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how. But LIA belongs to a group of companies in which Lee Crabtree is involved.”
Nesta said, “But what’s the link? Him? — My father?”
Richter said, “I think Lee is infected. So he’s largely at the mercy of the crystal mosaics. More than that I don’t know. I’m doing some more investigating tonight, so don’t let’s waste time … and do watch it, up in Manchester. Don’t let Nesta into the computer room. In fact don’t take her up there at all.”
Nesta said, “I’m not staying in town. I’ll drive. If anything happens to Roger —”
Richter cut in, “—you can take care of it afterwards. Don’t precipitate anything beforehand. Okay, the two of you? I’ve got work to do.”
“One more thing,” I said. “What’s the name of the program that Rear-Admiral Hartford had run at Manchester? I’ll have to identify it.”
Richter got up. “Apocalypse,” he said crisply. He wrote down the key to this portentous mnemonic and left us there.
*
Most names employed to disguise the true purpose of a major computer program are heavily contrived mnemonics; and you can tell a great deal about the authors of these programs from the degree of diligence that has gone into the game of naming them. As we arrived at the Manchester Centre I read it out again to Nesta:
“Atomic Potential Of Communist Alliance Latently Yielding Political Supremacy for Extinction.”
Nesta’s grim little comment as we pulled up in the shadows: “I’ll bet the Admiral can do his crossword puzzles.”
I exchanged a final glance with Nesta. We didn’t say anything further. But plenty passed between us as I eased the door of the MG shut and trod the gravel up to the main doors of the building.
I got past the security guard all right; and the computer responded promisingly when I entered the access code.
It was when I slipped in Richter’s magnetic card that I must have unwittingly handed the System more information than I could afford to pass on. Of course, I now realize that by this time Richter had, in fact, been banned from all Lee’s operations; but all I noticed at the time was a whiff of that revolting smell Nesta and I had experienced when we’d discovered the mosaic growing out of the wall at Orscombe. The odour appeared to be coming from the air conditioning vent of the computer room itself.
I decided this was no reason to abandon my attempts to get in; and I felt encouraged when a heavy steel door slid open to my right. I’d signed in with the guard and he gestured for me to go through that door. As far as he was concerned, I was cleared.
I was no sooner through the steel door than it slithered back into place — surreptitiously, it seemed to me — then clicked into position as some electronically actuated catch engaged with a claw. Instinct made me whip around and look at that door. There was something unpleasantly final about the way it shut me in.
Once inside I found the stench so noxious that I could tangibly feel the transfer of evil — a unique and undreamed-of mode of communication picked up by the tissue inside my nostrils, so that an entire collage of revolting acts seemed to be performed within touching distance of my brain … the shrieking of women fleeing from crazed stormtroopers in a collective spasm of mass rape; the weeping of children entombed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz; the burning of human flesh inside a military tank that was blazing from fuel ignited by an incendiary shell, till the armour-plating glowed red and the men inside were cooked alive until their fat lavered down their burning uniforms and sizzled in a boiling bath of high octane gasoline … hellfire erupting and with it the terrible venom of eternal agony as the volcano fumed in white heat.
Heat! A fire had started in there. And I was trapped — alone. Somewhere inside the steel cabinet of the mainframe, hot waxed insulation had caught. Now it spat debris through the ventilation louvres. Blobs of smouldering pitch trajectoried onto the carpet and set it alight. In the distance — way beyond the steel doors — I could hear the klaxons. I had the sickening conviction that no one would be able to break in.
Fireproofed walls, put there for protection, were now the asbestos lining of my private oven. The mosaics had sentenced me and I was glued there in terror as I watched tongues of flame licking along the coloured insulation of cables as if they were lengths of demolition fuse. Already, in place of the chemically filtered air that swishes through any computer room were the acrid gases that had been generated to choke me.
I tried to kick-start my brain into fevered reasoning but the situation was getting so bad so fast that my thoughts lagged the encroaching of the collective inferno of several units erupting simultaneously, their heat-output conjoining in a line of fire that already had half the room blazing.
Worse, because computer rooms have false-flooring so as to allow the wiring that links each unit to be concealed, flames had blowtorched from under the steel cases and now the plastic tiling had caught.
I rushed back to the sliding door, found that the wiring for the electronic door mechanism was buried within a metal duct. Already half-asphyxiated by fumes I knew that in less than a minute I would be consumed in the white heat of a secret crem
ation.
I lurched around, looking for some means of escape that I knew didn’t exist, fell against one of the high speed printers.
From it there came a sudden, final burst of type …
USE LIA. PHASE FOUR
Not a message intended for me. The edges of the perforations browned; then the entire roll incendiaried into a paper barbecue, scorching my clothes as I dived clear. But for what? Already my brain had slowed through lack of oxygen and was deadened by an intellectual flame-out which stripped me of the ability to think.
Yet I still had Will. I wanted to live. And my inner voice was screaming something at me and I knew the message made sense, if only my conscious mind could pick it up. The problem was that I had to fight to be conscious.
Then I had it: if the flames were blow-torching under the false floor, it must mean an airway! The under side of the floor was hollow. Led somewhere!
I got as far away as possible from the centre of the furnace and feverishly ripped up floor tiles. The tiles came away easily but by this time I couldn’t focus my eyes, couldn’t breathe, could only half-think.
I had to keep reminding myself where I was, what I was doing, what and whom I had to live for. Plenty. Nesta. I saw here in a kind of vision, moving, naked, in slow motion, beckoning, no strain in her face, no terror, just reassurance. I remembered where I was, what there was still left to do: remove three more tiles, she nodded in assent, offered her thighs, beautiful, only Renoir could have depicted the gesture as I saw it then … sexual and aesthetic at the same time. How was this possible?
But one more tile. The heat was colossal. I knew I could not hope to last more than another few seconds. My strength was failing but I tore away that last slab. Flames were seething furiously toward me, as if the mosaic that had conspired to murder me had become conscious of my only possible means of escape and enraged at the thought of being cheated.
I tunnelled through. How do you breathe? I forget. It’s done with the lungs, isn’t it? Normally it happens spontaneously; you don’t have to strain at every chest muscle you’ve got in order to make the lungs work. Yes, that’s something like a breath, nearly all of it pure poison, but a percentage of oxygen in amongst the choking gases generated by scorched polyvinylchloride.
The Thinktank That Leaked Page 14