Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

by Bob Shaw

  He called on Janice at eight and found her standing at her door, smoking as usual, and wearing a white dress fastened with gold clasps giving it a faintly classical look which suited the Delian atmosphere of the lush summer evening. They walked to the hotel in Llanbedr, had several drinks, a simple dinner, and returned to the motel in the twilight. Garnett thought vaguely that they should go to her chalet but Janice stopped determinedly at his so he led her in and closed the door.

  Their second kiss was much longer, even more perfect than the first and Garnett felt her lithe body drive forward against his own with a force he could barely match. It was everything he could have asked for, except for one tiny thing—the words. The words were unimportant but suddenly Garnett found himself greedy for them, needing them, and they forced themselves up from his throat.

  “I love you, Janice.” He waited, and felt her arms untwine slightly. You fool, he screamed inwardly, what are you doing?

  “I like you, Tony,” she said. “I like you a lot.”

  It isn’t too late, he thought, she has said she likes me and maybe that’s better than love—why ruin it all now? But aloud he found himself demanding the age-old response and in a few thunderous seconds they were standing apart, arguing. The words, all the wrong ones, came too fast for him to comprehend, and Janice stuck to everything she had ever said about human relationships with a ruthless, uncompromising honesty which filled him with rage. The realisation that he would have been content for her to lie about loving him made Garnett even more furious. Finally she turned away from him, shrugged, and took a cigarette from her purse.

  “If you light that thing,” he said coldly, “I’m leaving.”

  Janice flicked her lighter on. “What is the saying about ultimatums? You should never issue an ultimatum because …’

  Garnett snatched the cigarette from her mouth, crumpled it and shouldered his way outside, slamming the door behind him. He had taken a dozen steps in the darkness towards where he imagined his chalet to be when he remembered they had been in his chalet. Swearing incoherently he began to turn back then realised the ludicrousness would be too much for him. Once into Janice’s chalet, he ripped off his jacket and lay down on her bed, sick with dismay. He had no expectations of sleep, but the exhaustion inherited from the accident closed black arms around him within a matter of minutes and he dropped into an uneasy sleep.

  The explosion came hours later.

  Garnett sat up gasping in pitch darkness, so disorientated that for one panicky moment he was unable to find even his own identity. The air was still filled with reverberations from the heart-stopping blast and not far away someone had begun to scream patiently and regularly, like breathing. A shifting orange light was beginning to move across the window when Garnett got to his feet and opened the door. The light was coming from flames that were fanning up through the crazily twisted roof of the chalet where he …

  Janice!

  Garnett ran quickly, risking a broken ankle on the strange ground, and threw himself through the chalet’s gaping doorway, beyond which the air was almost solid with billowing mortar dust. Please Janice, he pleaded, please be all right. He found her, still in the white dress, lying face downwards beneath curling streamers of flowered wallpaper which the explosion had stripped from the walls. Sliding his hands under her, he lifted then hesitated, sickened, knowing he had no business moving a human body which felt like that. The flames increased their grip on the wreckage. Garnett clenched his teeth, stood up with the limp body in his arms and carried it out on to the grass where people in night clothes had begun to gather. He knew as he folded Janice down on the ground she was at that moment launching out across the eternity of which she had always been so afraid. Incredibly, her lips moved for a moment, so slightly that at first he thought it might be shadow movements from the fire. He put his ear to her mouth.

  ‘… difficult, very difficult. Late. I have it. I have it now, Xoanon. I …’ The words stopped with unmistakable finality and Garnett rolled away from her, burying his face in the grass. When he stood up again somebody had covered Janice with a yellow raincoat and the world was rocking around him, reduced to a meaningless montage of luridly-lit faces, black tree-shapes arid distant black reaches of impassive sea. The floating faces spoke to him excitedly, questioning, but he ignored them, standing beside the body until an ambulance arrived and the attendants loaded the strangely small bundle into it. The boyish-looking doctor’s eyes narrowed professionally as he looked at Garnett and suggested that he lie down, but Garnett brushed him away—for the second time that night nothing could satisfy him but ancient, formal words, this time with the police. F’accuse!

  Janice’s death had not been an accident.

  She died because she was sleeping in the wrong chalet, and the invisible others had made a mistake. Garnett felt he shared the responsibility—something his conscience would settle with him later—but it carried the tiniest seed of consolation in that the mistake had been bigger than the unknown organisation suspected. Until now all his evidence had been entirely negative or personal, the type of witness that would cause people’s eyes to drift away in embarrassment. But an attempt had been made on his life, the name Xoanon had been spoken again, and Janice was dead….

  The police inspector who took charge was a big man with a malarial complexion and baffled brown eyes. Garnett limped up the wooden steps into the motel office behind him, aware that his legs were weakening, and sat down on a magazine-littered couch. The inspector cleared a little space in the scurf of paperwork covering the desk then set his key-ring in the middle of it, somehow conveying his anxiety to get away.

  “You look pretty tired, sir. We’ll get this over as soon as we can. You can make an official statement tomorrow.”

  “I’m all right,” Garnett said. “I want to make a statement now. I’m Garnett of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company and I have reason to believe that tonight’s explosion was intended to kill me because …’

  The inspector’s hands made little swimming movements in the cone of light from the office’s single overhead fitting and he smiled uneasily. “Forgive me, Mr. Garnett. I think you should lie down. The shock …’

  “I’ve already told you I’m all right, inspector. Will you let me speak? The men who set the bomb, or whatever it was, are …’

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Garnett. I’m going to ask one of my men to have the doctor see you.” The inspector stood up and moved towards the dark rectangle of the open door.

  Garnett leaped to his feet and had to grab the desk for support. He tried hard to make his voice cool and reasonable. “Inspector, I’m trying to give you the facts about the bomb explosion that took place here a little while ago.”

  “That’s just the point, Mr. Garnett. We have all the facts. There was no bomb—it was a meteorite.”

  “A meteorite?”

  “That’s right. Quite a small one apparently, but was seen for miles. We’ve had reports of it from half a dozen places up and down the coast. A rare but entirely natural occurrence, sir—so there wasn’t any bomb. Now will you see the doctor? I think you should.” The inspector went out and Garnett heard him whispering to a waiting constable.

  Garnett lurched to the door and sat on the polished wooden steps, staring upwards as he waited for the doctor. The sky contained no answers. It remained impersonal, anonymous, and beyond the mountains dawn was already beginning to overpaint the fainter stars.

  5

  The Pryce-Garnett organisation was a ‘second generation’ aircraft firm, as distinct from the long-established giants all of which had been founded by World War I aviators. It employed a total of only eight thousand men based in factories at Liverpool and Coventry, and had been given its toe-hold in the fiercely competitive industry solely by the introduction of the Pryce generated wing. The bulk of the electronics equipment associated with the wing was still produced at Pryce’s original plant in Liverpool, but the airframe fabrication and assembly unit in Coventry had become the c
ompany’s headquarters. Most of its senior management lived close to Coventry and it was there that Garnett headed on Sunday afternoon as soon as he was freed of his obligations to the authorities at Llanbedr.

  He took the shorter route across the Welsh mountains, driving as fast as he dared in view of his condition. The events surrounding Janice’s death had punished him both mentally and physically, and he was reminded how the surgeon who had patched him up after the accident had commented that he might never fully get over it. Garnett had written that off at the time as pessimism but he was beginning to understand what the man had meant.

  The big car hissed occasionally as it flashed through scattered rain showers. Once or twice on the journey he glimpsed newspaper billboards on which were scrawled, MOTEL GIRL KILLED BY FIREBALL. Part of him was forced to admire how merely describing Janice as a ‘motel girl’—whatever that might be—had added just the right connotation of shady sexuality to the story. The rest of him was filled with a brooding anger which at times caused his forehead to prickle painfully with sweat and turned his heart into a pulsating pillow, threatening to explode his ribs. In a way he was almost glad of the anger because an adversary who could guide meteorites down on to pin-point targets was someone of whom he would normally have been very afraid. As it was, Garnett was going to come to grips with his enemy in the only way he knew, and was looking forward to it.

  It was late afternoon when he reached Coventry and swung round the outskirts to Baginton where Ian Dermott, his general manager, lived. Observation and deduction both indicated Dermott as top man in the mysterious ‘other’ production unit, but looking at his home Garnett was impressed by its sheer normality. The big redbrick house radiated friendliness through its helmet of rain-soaked ivy and the bright lawns vapoured introspectively in the sun. He parked outside the iron gates and walked up the drive, half expecting to be challenged at every step, but the place was silent until he rang the doorbell. As he waited Garnett began to feel foolish, but Janice was dead and there were questions which had to be answered, or at least asked. What was going on at the factory? Why had Janice mentioned someone known as Xoanon in her last breath? Was she one of them? How did one set about steering a meteorite? And why … ?

  The door opened. Dermott stood there in a maroon silk dressing gown and with a pair of television glasses in his hand.

  “We’ve got to have a talk,” Garnett said flatly.

  “Of course, Tony. It’s good to see you. Come in. How was your trip to Wales?” Dermott stood back and cheerfully ushered Garnett into the hall, smiling down at him. “I’ve been watching television alone—becoming addicted to it, I’m afraid. I was able to take it or leave it while big screens were popular but these little gadgets have hooked me.” He held up the glasses. The little eye-sized screens glowed with movement like distant bonfires and a thin wisp of music escaped from the earpiece.

  Garnett stared at the familiar, amiable face. “All right, Ian. You’ve done your sane, sensible, crumpets-for-tea bit—now let’s have our talk. What the hell have you been up to?”

  “Up to! What do you mean, Tony?” Dermott turned and led the way into the spacious sitting room he used as a kind of office.

  “I’m going to blast this thing out into the open,” Garnett said to the other man’s back. “I’m going to kick up the biggest row this country has ever seen, whether you talk or not. This is your only chance to talk about it in private—and you know me well enough to know I mean that.”

  Dermott’s shoulders sagged slightly and he turned round. His face was suddenly very pale, almost luminescent. After a long, clock-ticking pause he said, “I suppose we must make the effort.”

  “Never mind making efforts. Start making sense.”

  Dermott swayed slightly and when he spoke his voice was harsh. “We are, as you suspected, completing a twenty-metre wing unit.”

  Garnett had known, yet hearing it shocked him. ‘But why? For God’s sake why? Who wants it?”

  “The customer’s name is Xoanon. I’ve never seen him. He’s an … I suppose you’d call it an extraterrestrial.”

  Garnett remained silent—this was what he had dreaded since the first slithering premonitions the night he had sat on the motel steps and stared into a hostile sky.

  “Neither Xoanon nor any of his race,” Dermott continued, ‘have ever set foot on Earth. They are human, but from a world with lower gravity. Their craft is in a three-hundred kilometre orbit.”

  “That’s impossible. They couldn’t get away with it. Our radar would lamp them the first time round, unless …’

  Dermott nodded. “Electron absorption screens—we’ll have something like that ourselves soon.”

  Futile as it was, Garnett was unable to prevent himself from arguing. ‘But why do they want an aircraft wing?”

  “There is a very important reason, but it can’t be disclosed.”

  A pressure was building up within Garnett’s temples. “It still doesn’t make sense. If they can’t land—how do they expect to get hold of the wing unit?”

  Dermott seemed slightly surprised by the question. “We will deliver, of course. Using a T.6.” Something about the way he spoke caused a convulsive upheaval in Garnett’s subconscious but he had no time to guess what it might mean. The anger, dulled by shock, was growing in him again.

  “What sort of a person are you, Dermott? What did they buy you with?”

  “I wasn’t bought, Tony—any more than you were.”

  “Than I was!” The room slanted momentarily, then righted itself.

  “Yes, Tony. You still don’t understand, do you? They got you before any of us. The instrument they use has been hidden in the sea close to the Welsh coast for years. It seems to be a device for recording the patterns of electrical activity in a person’s brain and then transmitting it to the spacecraft. Up there they construct an analogue—don’t ask me how—and by adjusting it force the weaker electrical activity of the brain into new patterns.

  “What it boils down to is, if you get close enough to the device for an initial reading to be made they can influence you from that moment on. If necessary absolute control can be exerted but usually it is enough just to nudge a person’s thinking in the desired direction—that was how the twenty-metre wing project got under way in the first place. There were only half a dozen key men involved, you and I being two of them, but you had to go and lose part of your skull. The metal plate riveted into it acted like a screen and broke your link with Xoanon. When you cancelled the project we had to go underground, which meant that a total of forty personnel had to be put under almost complete control so that they would finish the wing unit and do it in secrecy.

  “It would have been much easier to kill you, of course, but Xoanon doesn’t work that way. I’m explaining all this in the hope that you can eventually be persuaded to join us again.”

  Garnett shook his head, unable to speak as he struggled to assimilate all he had just heard.

  “Think it over,” Dermot said. “I’ll get you a drink. You look as though you could use one.” He moved to a sideboard which glittered with cut glass and silver.

  “I am thinking it over. I’m thinking about Janice Villiers. I take it Xoanon is dismissing that as an unfortunate error.”

  “Errors,” Dermott said, still busy at the sideboard, ‘can be compensated for.” When he turned round again only one of his hands held a glass. The other trembled slightly under the weight of an obsolescent, but nonetheless effective, automatic pistol. “We are sorry about this, Tony, but the project is too important….”

  “You wouldn’t dare fire that thing. Somebody would hear it.”

  Dermott shook his head. “I’ve sent Jean and the two boys away for a week, so let me assure you I will use it, but …’

  Garnett had been shifting his balance while the other man spoke. He leaped sideways and dived for the cover of the massive desk which occupied a corner of the room. Dermott’s arm jerked up, the big pistol went off like a ton of hig
h explosive and Garnett felt himself stopped as though he had run into a wall, his chest muscles paralysed with agony. He caught the desk for support then realised the bullet had almost missed him, scribing a bloody tangent across his ribs. The discovery brought with it a surge of elation. Honour’s satisfied, he thought illogically. Ian has made his point. He’ll call it quits now and I’ll go away and stay out of his life for ever.

  But Dermott lurched forward, arm outstretched stiffly and face contorted with the loathing a man always feels for an animal he has failed to dispatch at the first blow. Garnett tried desperately to move, but there was no time. Dermott pointed the automatic at his head at a range of only a few feet and fired again. As he tried to jerk his head out of the way Garnett felt himself flicked off the edge of the desk like a fly. He landed heavily on the floor behind the desk and lay motionless, wondering why he was still alive. One side of his face, including the eye, was raw with a burning pain he recognised as being caused by muzzle blast and his ear was ringing like an anvil, but where had the bullet gone? Something hard was lodged in the back of his mouth. For an instant he recalled stories of soldiers who had bullets pierce their skulls and travel all round their heads on the inside, then he realised the hard object was a tooth. The bullet had hit him high on the cheek and had passed straight out the other side, smashing his back teeth on the way. He had been lucky.