A Cage of Butterflies (14 page)

XXXI

MIKKI'S STORY

Poor Susan. She felt awful about it. But hell, she'd held it together for months. She was the one who'd had to work in close contact on a professional level with Larsen, trying to hide her true feelings, trying to curb his excesses without giving too much away. I was amazed she lasted anywhere near that long.

Greg was pushing the positive aspects of the situation. He was awfully good at it; even had her smiling in spite of herself.

“I really liked that line about Easter,” she told him.

He smiled self-effacingly. “Yeah, well, when Myriam realised what was going down, she tuned me in on the situation. You had to give him a reason for knowing about Brady which didn't involve the Babies – or little black discs and radio-receivers. I toyed with blaming MacIntyre, but that would have been too easy to check, so the old ‘double-bluff seemed a reasonable alternative. I mean, he's very unlikely to phone Brady and ask him if he's planted a spy. And even if he called to abuse him, gnome-features would probably just figure he' s fallen a little further out of his tree and gone all paranoid. Either way, it was the best I could think of on the spur of the moment.”

“Well, I think it was brilliant.” An unusual compliment, coming from Lesley. Greg smiled appreciatively.

“Just chalk one up for instinct.” Then he looked at Susan, serious again. “And don't worry, Susan. It really makes very little difference to the plan whether you're inside the complex or working outside. Just as long as we can prevent Larsen from using that drug. If he does that, we're gone. Any ideas?”

He was being particularly democratic. Which meant he didn't have an idea himself. Neither did I.

But Chris did. “Why don't we just give him what he wants?” He paused expectantly, waiting for the flood of opposition, but he received only silence, so he went on. “Larsen's desperate. No argument, no threat is going to stop him from trying one last throw of the dice. And he sees that as whacking the Babies with another dose of ga-ga juice. We can't stop him, and the Babies won't. We know that. The only solution is to give him what he wants, so that he feels no need to resort to chemical persuasion.”

Now, Gordon objected. “Oh, great. We've just spent the best part of a year using all our ingenuity to keep everything from him, and now, when the light's at the end of the tunnel, you want to give him everything. You must be —”

“What difference does it make now?” Lesley, who was standing right beside me, suddenly cut in. She had caught on to Chris's line of reasoning. “You're supposed to be the lateral thinker, Gord, so start thinking. What's the date today?”

“December twelfth, why?”

“Why? Don't you get it? After all this time, we only have to buy a couple more weeks – less, even. Even if we get the Babies to open up to Larsen, he can't learn enough to make much difference. And he'll be so excited that he'll probably get careless. If we fail, it'll make very little difference anyway. But at least it'll stop him blowing it with a hypodermic full of Pentothal.”

Susan had been quiet until now, but she spoke in support. “Chris is right. They can open up without revealing too much. And it could buy us just enough time.”

And so it was decided.

The rest of the kids gathered around the coffee-table, making plans, revising strategies, but I was watching Susan. A look of extreme tiredness passed across her face. And something else. An expression of … almost despair, which settled for a fleeting moment then was gone.

But it worried me.

* * *

So Larsen got his wish at last. Almost two years after the project began, the Babies talked to him.

Not in words, you understand, but in a way he could accept. They began by writing his name,
Doctor Larsen,
over and over on sheets of paper until he came from behind the one-way glass to talk to them.

He'd ask them questions and they'd write down answers. Vague replies, but satisfying ones, while he took meticulous notes.

Yes, they could “hear” each others' minds. Yes, the other people in the complex gave out thoughts, but they were fuzzy, hard to “hear”. And yes, they would like to play some “games” with him.

I thought that last one was beautifully ironic. They really were playing games with him, but he was so ecstatic with the “breakthrough” that he actually thought they meant his puerile intelligence tests.

And all the time, D-Day was getting closer. Erik was fine-tuning the bus and Chris was checking for the hundred-thousandth time the intricate patterns of his “special program”.

While I was busy waiting around for something to happen.

“What's so special about your ‘special program'?” When I get bored, I ask a lot of annoying questions, but Chris rarely got annoyed; not when he was talking about his pet projects.

“It's a virus.”

“What, like pneumonia?” I was only stirring him. I knew what a computer virus was, but I liked to hear him explain things. When he was tied up in a project, he had no sense of humour; he was so intense.

“More like AIDS.” Now he had me going. “I had to design a virus that would ruin his whole hard-disc memory and corrupt any copies he made of particular files, but didn't alert him until it was too late …”

I must have looked confused, because he paused and moved into simpleton-mode; the tone he used for cretins who couldn't understand simple gobbledy-gook.

“Look, it's really not very complicated in principle. A program is just a series of instructions, telling the computer to do a series of things. I needed to tell Larsen's computer to do things he didn't want it to do, at a time when he really didn't want it to do them. So I had to introduce a ‘virus' – a program which corrupts the way the computer does things.

“And I'm really rather proud of this one. It's so frustratingly simple. It's tied in to the computer's internal clock, and set to activate itself the first time the computer is turned on after a given time and date. I'll leave you to work out when that is.”

I didn't need to work it out. I knew. D-Day. H-hour. The Point of No Return.

“And, what exactly will it do?”

“Oh, nothing much. It just wipes every document file and every back-up file on the hard-disc and replaces them with a cryptic little message.”

“But what about the copies he's already made? How can it corrupt them?”

“Oh, it already has. I had Erik feed the virus into the central computer back in September. Part of its beauty is that it transfers to the disc every time a file is copied then infects every machine that disc is put into. That's why it's like AIDS. Once it's in there, it's incurable. In the past couple of months, Larsen's worked with just about every one of the files, searching for his breakthrough. They're all corrupted already, only it won't show up until the right moment. But after that point, as soon as they're loaded, they'll disappear, and the message will come to screen.”

He waited, but I wasn't going to bite.

“Well, don't you want to know what the message is? It wasn't actually my idea. I asked Greg if he could think of a suitable message, and he came up with it. He said it was ‘fitting'.”

“Okay, I'll go for it. What does it say?”

“It's a quote. Greg told me where it was from, but I forget. When it appears, it fills the whole screen. I thought it was sort of appropriate.”

And when Chris told me what it was, so did I.

XXXII

Point of No Return

December 24, 1990. 9pm

Most of the research staff had left on the weekend for the holiday break, and Larsen was alone in the observation room. The Babies had presented him with the best Christmas present of his life; he was feeling better than he had in years.

Let Brady try to steal his thunder now. Let him just try. The Wall was down. He had won. The world was his. And once the mysteries were unravelled … Then he had only to find the original cause, and – the end of the rainbow.

Nothing could ruin the feeling …

From the passage outside came the sound of running feet and Sanderson's voice, crying out. A single man, with no family, Sanderson had volunteered to stay over and assist during the holiday break; with his help and MacIntyre's (he lived close by), Larsen was running the Institute. Which really meant the Babies' complex, as all the other children had been packed off home for the break.

The young scientist burst into the room, breathless from running.

“What is it, man?” Larsen was impatient with anything that interrupted his dreams of grandeur.

“F-fire! The whole residential block is alight. I've called the fire-brigade, but it's a ten-minute drive from town. We've got to do something.”

An icy fear chilled the pit of Larsen's stomach. The residential block included his personal office and all his private notes and files.

The two men left the room at a run.

By the time they arrived the fire had a strong hold. There was little they could do to save anything inside. Larsen ran around the back to the window of his study, but the flames were already licking the ceiling and the interior of the room was an inferno.

The glass had shattered with the intense heat, but before the rolling smoke forced him away from the window, he noticed something which froze him momentarily where he stood.

The fireproof safe in which he kept all the most important notes, all the proofs of his research, stood open to the flames. Everything was destroyed. Worse even than that, it proved beyond a doubt that the fire had been deliberately lit.

And that meant …

Desperately, he turned and ran back towards the other complex, across the lawn and past the old eucalypt. But he was too late. As he approached, the Institute bus was just pulling away from the building. The firelight reflecting from the bus windows blinded him to what was inside, but he did not need to see. He knew.

Five young children and at least one other person. The mysterious dark man had returned.

Inside, nothing appeared to be out of place. He ran to the office. Everything was tidy. There was nothing … except a strangely familiar odour. The tart smell of acid. Looking towards the filing cabinet, he saw the empty bottle, and he guessed. The fight was draining out of him rapidly as he made his way slowly across the room.

Opening the top drawer, he staggered back as the acrid fumes burned his eyes and tore at the lining of his nose. Someone had poured highly concentrated acid into every drawer of the cabinet, and it was eating its way through the notes and files. Through all the evidence he had collected so painstakingly over the past two long years.

He was crying now, but not from the fumes. His world was caving in around him; he could only go through the motions of seeing if there was anything left to save.

The video cabinet stood half-open and the wisp of smoke that drifted out told him that there too the acid was at work.

Finally, he gazed towards the computer. It stood on the desk. A final forlorn hope. He pressed the switch, and the mechanism started up.

As it went through its set-up sequence, he held his breath. Then … the final nail. For a moment, the screen went blank, then red. A message appeared. Three words which filled the entire screen and mocked his broken dreams.

He read the words in silence.

KNOW FIRST THYSELF

9.15 pm

The policeman who took the call sounded young, but he was quite efficient. He took all the details of the bus and the direction in which it had been heading. A car was on its way to the complex, and should arrive soon. Or so he said.

Where the hell was the fire-brigade?
They
should have arrived ages ago. Larsen looked out of the window. The flames leapt high, curling over the roof, exploding from windows. Already, there was nothing left to save. Absolutely nothing.

The minutes stretched endlessly, but no help came. Nor would it.

Outside the fence, at the point where the underground phone cable entered the complex, Gordon and Lesley began to pack away the gear Chris had supplied. Carefully Gordon unplugged the portable handset from the socket which they had spliced into the line a few days earlier. Once it was removed the line resumed its normal function.

In minutes, the line was buried once more. Then the young “policeman” took his girlfriend's hand and together they made their way back up to the road and the waiting car.

Susan waved as they approached, but they were talking excitedly and didn't notice.

9.40 pm

The ringing of the phone took a few moments to penetrate Larsen's despair. Sanderson was outside, staring helplessly at the flaming remains of the other building, waiting for the fire-engine which would never arrive. He willed it to stop its shrilling, but forced himself, finally, to reach out and pick up the receiver.

The voice on the other end of the line was familiar.

“Hello, Doctor Larsen? This is Ted Gleeson … from the boatyard.” There was hesitation, then the words gushed out. “Could you get down here right away, sir? Your boat's been stolen.”

10.15 pm

The old Jaguar skidded to a halt at the gate to the boatyard and Larsen emerged, filthy from his efforts. A match, snapped off inside the valve of one of the tyres had effectively disabled the car; and it had taken almost fifteen minutes for him to change the wheel. They had thought of everything. Even if he had considered giving chase to the fleeing bus, it would have been impossible.

Gleeson was waiting for him, but there were no polite formalities.

“Did you call the police? Are they searching?”

“I called them, but there's not much they can do. The boat and the rescue helicopter are out answering a distress call from somewhere down south. It came in about nine, and they were long gone by the time your boat was taken.”

Everything …

“Which direction did they go?” There was no urgency in the question. Larsen was a beaten man.

Before the man could answer, another car pulled up and MacIntyre climbed out.

“Sanderson told me where you were. I came as quickly as I could. Is there anything I can do?”

Larsen just stared at him, and said nothing.

“They went north.” The young man spoke to break the growing tension. “I didn't see them myself, but a young couple did. They reported it, because they said the kids looked scared —”

“Kids?” Larsen turned to face him.

“Yeah, that's what seems weird. If you were going to steal a boat, why would you take along a bunch of young kids?”

But the two men were already heading for their cars.

“North!” Larsen shouted the word over the sound of his starter-motor.

11.30pm

It was cold on the beach, and the gusting wind blew the sand up into their faces.

“What's the point of standing here?” MacIntyre turned his back to the sea – and the wind – and gazed up into the sky. “It's going to pour down in a minute.”

“Look, if you don't want to be here, just go. This has nothing to do with you … Not any more.”

“Oh, no. I've just got a couple of years of my life tied up in it, that's all.”

“Damn it, man, it's over. Don't you understand? It's finished. The Babies are gone. All the research has been destroyed. We're beaten …” There was a distant tone in his voice suddenly, as if he were talking to himself. “They couldn't have got this far. Not yet. Not in this weather.”

MacIntyre began to walk away. There was no point in standing there. Larsen was slowly going mad, and it wasn't a pleasant sight. Then the older man shouted.

“There, I see it! Over there!” He was pointing along the silver moon-path. MacIntyre followed the line of his gaze, and for a moment he saw it. A tiny black speck, barely visible.

But only for a moment.

Suddenly, a bright flash lit the horizon, and a sound like distant thunder reached their ears. Larsen dropped to his knees in the sand.

“No! No it can't be!”

Then he started laughing, a frightening uncontrolled sound that drew MacIntyre towards him. His eyes were wide in the moonlight, and he was mumbling to himself.

“The fuel-line … I never got around to fixing the fuel-line.”

Then the rain began, falling in giant drops which struck his upturned face and merged with the tears that were streaming freely down his cheeks.

From high up on the cliff-top, Susan Grace tossed a small black box down into the surf below and paused a moment to whisper a few words into the howling wind. Then she made her way back down to the waiting car, alone.