The Captain repeated his message in language not primarily noted for its restraint. “I said, fuck off out of it unless you want to drown. What do you think you’re in? The QE-2? In less than thirty seconds you’ll be well on the way to the bottom and I don’t propose to join you there. So piss off out!”
… And from the two dinghies — one for the crew and one for us — we watched that beautiful thing go down.
Even in its sinking, the Concorde contrived to do it with grace and dignity. This was nothing like the failure of a ship that couldn’t stand the feel of the sea; this was the dignified surrender of a flying machine to a medium that it had never been designed for.
Still in one piece, despite her broken back, Sierra-Zebra raised one of her beautiful wings, a shining, clean thing that was hardly misshapen at all except at the trailing edge where the elevons had been damaged … She raised her port wing in a salute to the sky where she belonged. Then she succumbed to a death that didn’t appear to cause her much pain. She shuddered but maybe this was because, after all, the water was rather cold and she wasn’t yet used to it.
Then, without crying out or floundering or showing any sign of panic along the glittering length of her body, Sierra-Zebra disappeared from the surface. For a moment, she thought she’d take one more look at the sky with the other wing, just a final, yearning glance.
Then she was gone.
On this occasion I certainly forgot what I’d said to Mike Crabtree about aeroplanes being inanimate.
Each one of us was sobbing openly as the last of the vortices of disturbed water rose and swallowed her up.
Then, just for a while, there was a silence.
We were, for all our plight and bodily shiverings, in mourning.
10
We were aboard the Carrier. That in itself was a near miracle. It came about through three factors: One, our pilot had ditched the Concorde almost exactly in her computed path; Two, Richter was an inspired mathematician; Three, for some reason the lifeboat-derricks of the Carrier were outboard and lowered. Beneath them were grappling rungs which we were able to grasp as the enormous hulk of the ship, indescribably massive, glided through the ocean pond. At this speed she left no wake. There was only a whisper of wind. Hardly a ripple on the surface of the Pacific.
It must have been the combination of these ingredients that made us feel, more than ever, utterly alone and isolated. No one hailed us as we struggled up those rungs. Not a soul became visible as we reached deck level. And apart from the silent shadows which were the other ships in the convoy, ghosts on the surface of the vast expanse of water, the entire Pacific seemed dead. The second of the two rubber dinghies — the one containing the aircrew — was out of sight. Our captain had told us he would make for the nearest cruiser. We hoped he’d make it. If not, the aircrew would be isolated and lost for a very long time, if not forever. But for reasons best known to themselves, the aircrew refused to join us on the Carrier. In retrospect I can only assume that they were more afraid than they had seemed; knew more about this sombre mission than they had implied. Whatever, they would have nothing to do with us.
“Ahoy!” Once again, I marvelled at Nesta as, standing so proud and erect, hair disturbed very slightly in the breeze generated by the ship’s eerie progress, she offered the deserted deck her greeting. The crude, harsh lines of the superstructure rendered her femininity the more striking. Yet she didn’t seem dwarfed by it. It was as if the sanity of womanhood, lithe, streamlined, and elegantly durable, was challenging the ultimate in patriarch lunacy with all the authority of the custodian of the species. I loved her then as never before, worshipped every clean-etched line of her body as she demanded the attention she warranted.
She received none. The carrier seemed as deathlike and doomed as the Concorde itself as it now was, sinking, no doubt, in some kind of slow-motion spiral dive toward the bottom of the ocean.
Richter, not a man to give away to histrionic utterances, said quietly, “I have a terrible feeling about this … I lost one of my comrades in science at Hiroshima. This is like being in that city just before it was pulverized into oblivion, with the added irony of being in the Enola Gay at the same instant.” — The Enola Gay was the B.49 Superfortress that dropped the Bomb.
I looked fearfully toward Nesta. She hadn’t heard this. She stood in profile. I tried not to imagine that profile projected and scorched onto the buttress of the control tower’s base, a flash photograph as seen through a viewfinder for molten slaughter.
I remember saying, “The Manhattan Project was the incubator for the computer as we now know it. The world has grown no less obsessed by wilful paranoia … We must find the war room …”
‘We saw the Atlantic and the Pacific,
But the Pacific wasn’t terrific,
And the Atlantic wasn’t
What it’s cracked-up to be.’ …
… Words from some ditty, long-past, made an onslaught on my bewildered brain and I seemed to see, in mental cinema, the ludicrous irony of a deck crowded by female dancers, executing some banal routine. Abruptly, in my mind’s eye, the dancers changed into skeletons, macabre effigies which owed their annihilation to the uniformed males for whom they danced. I thought of Geoffrey Sale fleetingly, wondered if, deep down, all men envied the lustre of ripening womanhood, so that — even at the cost of their own lives — they sought to express sex-rivalry by erasing the soft texture to which they themselves could never aspire. Just then I hated men, including myself; and substituted the lines of John Addington Symonds for the cynical lyric of Mr. Irving Berlin:
‘These things shall be! A loftier race
Than e’er the world hath known, shall rise
With flame of freedom in their souls
And light of science in their eyes.
*
‘They shall be gentle, brave and strong,
Not to shed human blood, but dare
All that may plant man’s lordship firm
On earth and fire and sea and air …
*
‘These things — they are no dream — shall be
For happier men when we are gone:
Those golden days for them shall dawn,
Transcending all we gaze upon.’
*
Was it too late for that?
The three of us split up to explore the ship and seek help. Yet already there was an ache in the crimp of my stomach I couldn’t explain. Why the lowered derricks? How could we have boarded unchallenged? Where was the ship’s Commander? — Where was Rear-Admiral Hartford? — whose graphically illiterate portrait had hung, flat as an overgrown seaside postcard, at the London headquarters of the American Naval Attaché?
The entrails of the Carrier were labyrinthine and oddly ill-conceived, like Victorian plumbing superimposed on a spaceship. Unexpectedly I crossed Nesta’s path. Yet she had started out in a totally different direction.
“A lot of rivets but no people,” was what she said.
I told her, “They’re lying low. And you need a rest.” Her throat was still bruised where my crazed hands had tried to throttle her.
“There’s no time to rest.”
“Nesta, when we need you well really need you. Rest. Please.” I led the way clumsily forward. At the end of a sort of rabbit run the corridor opened out, became almost a luxury suite. There was a well fitted room with a couch. Nesta lay down on it and I thought she’d stay there. I should have known her better than that.
In a cabin designated Staff Captain I found, among other documents, a plan of the ship. It puzzled me slightly as I was sure it didn’t fit the route I’d taken. How dumb can you get?
I heard someone walking briskly as I listened from the top of an internal companionway. I flattened myself against a bulkhead, but I saw it was Richter. He was one deck below. I joined him there, showed him the ship’s plan. We stood there studying it. Just audible were the ship’s nuclear powered engines, running so slowly you could barely detect them. I asked him
, “Seen anyone?”
He replied coolly without looking up from the blueprint. “At this rate of knots they quite possibly only have a skeleton Watch. The rest are probably at the movies. Knowing the American navy there have to be at least half a dozen emporiums … a whorehouse as well, for all we know.” He rapped his fingernails against the ship’s plans. “The Yanks seem to assemble their ships like three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. We meet on deck in exactly fifteen minutes and report progress. Know how to get back, whatever you do.”
We separated again.
Two decks down I found myself in a huge mess deck. It was deserted but spotless. Neat tables fitted with recesses for plastic trays presented themselves for the next meal. When would that be? … For in there I got a whiff of the smell I most dreaded on this Earth. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Air is circulated very efficiently on such ships. It could have originated anywhere.
There was no mistaking it though and something all too like panic overtook me. I accelerated my inspection of the ship to a lumbering, ill-coordinated run. My footsteps sounded like a stampede as they echoed, spiralling, throughout the maze of tunnels and corridors and vents that led in every direction save toward humanity.
I arrived at a carpeted stairway. Getting a hold on myself, I calculated I must be directly below the suite where I’d left Nesta.
And I did find the Rear Admiral’s cabin.
I don’t know why it chilled me so. Maybe because, in part, it was a replication of the Chief of Staff s office in London. I say in part. On the desk was a cap flaunting the gold braid of scrambled egg. On the wall was a print of the dreadful painting that had also hung there.
I think it was the scribbled words on the message-pad that unnerved me. It read:
Ask Cipher boys what the hell is ‘Phase Four’ — Hartford.
I couldn’t shake off that trivial, maddening song that had got trapped in my brain …
‘Oh, they tell us that the Admiral
Is as nice as he can be;
But we’ve never seen the Admiral,
Because the Admiral has never been to sea …’
Damn you, Irving Berlin! You’re adding to the terrible sense of mockery. It’s yelling at me from every girder of this gigantic hull. Do you have to make it worse?
Now, terror took over completely. I dashed, stumbled, fell back along those twisting corridors … once again the stench … lights in the ceiling coming at me at all angles … vertigo. My God, what is happening? …
Then, at last, the cool breeze up on deck.
I waited for Richter.
*
I shouted to Richter, “There’s nobody aboard this carrier. No one.”
He stared at me. “There has to be. It doesn’t make sense. Look harder.”
“Where?”
He said, “Look, there’s miles and miles of ship in this bloody tin can.”
I said back, “I should know. I’ve covered it all — on the double.”
“Then you’ve missed a few turnings. There has to be a war room.”
“This might not be the headquarter ship.”
Richter snapped, “It is.”
We stopped talking abruptly. In the pitch-darkness the aircrew of Sierra-Zebra, now evidently aboard the nearest of the cruisers, signalled by Aldis lamp that their ship, also, appeared totally deserted. I acknowledge by flicking the switch of the glidepath array-lamps and added, ‘On no account attempt use radio.’
They acknowledged.
To Richter I said, like a fool on an empty stage, “Where is everybody?”
Richter said, “We haven’t been systematic enough.”
I said, “We’ve used the plan of the ship. I’d call that using a system.”
Richter said, “Not if she’s been refitted. How do we know we’ve been using the right plan?”
“We don’t.”
We stared at each other for seconds.
Then we both started running along that great tunnel of a corridor, a metal-rivetted artery that ran almost the entire length of the aircraft deck overhead. Our destination was the main day-cabin. It was there that I’d left Nesta to rest. She was now almost sick from exhaustion. Something else, too. Something I preferred not to think about. We’d all got it; but there seemed no doubt that she’d come off worst.
Dead though it was, the crystal mosaic was pressing against a part of her brain. Or so I thought when I looked at her. My heart was pounding mercilessly against my ribs. I knew I was thinking selfishly but the prospect of life without Nesta seemed unthinkable. And I thought, in those few moments, that she was going to die.
She looked up at us both and asked quietly, “What’s the problem? — a sudden attack of Future Shock?”
Richter said, “There’s no one aboard.”
She stirred slightly. When she spoke, her voice was flat and lifeless. I can remember that at that moment my feet seemed unbelievably heavy, as if the force of gravity had suddenly risen to 4g and I was to be pulled to the centre of the earth. “They’re aboard,” she said. “But you have the wrong plan of the ship. What’s the date on it?”
I told her.
“It’s two years out of date …” Her voice … so odd, distant. I still didn’t understand. She was dying. I wanted to hold her frantically to my own body, couple my bloodstream into hers so that I could pour back strength. She was shaking her head very slightly, almost as if it were lolling side to side with the motion of the ship. She said, “From the deck below this one you can get a view, through the glass, of the Operations Room. Some … some of them are in there. Only a few. Then you go aft. There’s a huge place, like an ordinary aircraft hangar but with a giant hoist …”
“Yes?” Richter, more alert to what she was trying to say than I, was clenching and unclenching his fists.
Nesta said, “I … think it might have been an attempt at mercy killing. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe the mosaic managed it — a last foul hating for mankind.” She looked straight at me. “Roger, do not look under that hoist. You wouldn’t be able to take it.”
Richter said, “And the Ops Room?”
Nesta said, “An hors d’oeuvre for the spectacle below decks. I’m afraid … I’m very much afraid you will have to go in there. You were right. It is equipped with war maps, plotters, God knows how many radar sets; and it’s built on two — possibly three — decks. I’m not sure … I didn’t stay long.
“The people are —” She could not speak for a few seconds. Then tried again. “Their skins have grown into each other and their limbs … their limbs have been redistributed. Arms … legs … in groups … in a kind of pool. The pool is — or was — shrinking and drying out as I looked. Some component parts of this huge treacle of human tissue are still alive. A conglomerate of flesh, part dead, part living … assembled the same way as a crystal mosaic itself, a sort of OH CHRIST! OH CHRIST!”
My instinct was to rush to her. I knew this would be wrong. It would be intrusion. Nesta, as far as I know completely areligious, was calling God, not me.
It’s too easy, fatuous, to hurl oneself lovingly at someone who was, at that moment, loving those who had suffered an unspeakable sentence, one that wasn’t yet fully carried out, even. Parts of it still moving. Oh, yes. Oh God.
Restraint. I had to have restraint.
Because I had to think, also.
Nesta knew it. She managed to move from that subject to another one. Her voice grew firmer. She was still completely without pigmentation. I marvelled that she could still speak and be conscious when so much blood had receded from her skin, left it without nutrition, like dead.
“I think,” she went on, “you may find that there is no longer any human control of this convoy at all. The pool of mucus must have been the means of connection between the Body-Thing and the crystal mosaic. I think you will find that the surviving mosaic on this ship is in charge of the entire convoy; and more than that, there is a succession of count-down indicators … you know, targets illumina
ted on the wall map, a huge wrap-around sphere that goes right around the Operations Room.” She added, “Of course it doesn’t know that all the other mosaics are dead — at least the ones we know about. It must be very puzzled.”
I could see this. Any one mosaic group would be wondering why the hell the failure of a single satellite — Y.33 — could fold all communications. By now the mosaics elsewhere should have arranged for emergency communication channels. Instead, an entire fleet felt cut off. It would have been the same had its human crews — from Rear-Admiral down to Seamen E1 — lowest rank in the United States Navy — been faced with the same problem: stuck with a ‘Go Unless Cancelled’ program, with no means of checking whether any effort had been made to cancel it.
My emotions were being ripped down the middle. Relieved as I was that Nesta’s drained appearance was due, not to what she herself was suffering from, but what she had observed others to be suffering, I could find no way of keeping my balance. I had never seen Spender in the condition Richter had seen him in: now I was to observe a multiple act, on the part of the mosaics, of dismembering — and simultaneously conjoining — the limbs and organs of my own species … whilst at the same time dissolving spare tissue into a phlegm-link with the mosaic system itself.
And that didn’t count what now lay pressed hydraulically beneath the aircraft hoist.
This was what Nesta had seen. This was the expression of hatred that Spender had unleashed on being brought into contact with the scrotum-baking wares of Geoffrey Sale. This was the final human degradation which dependence on obsessive technological Pursuit of the Unnecessary had produced.
Now, Richter and I were going to have to go into that War Room.
And I was terribly afraid.
The Thinktank That Leaked Page 25