Cryptozoic! (13 page)

Amid the noise of drums, the viewpoint switched to a room in which a broad
old man in uniform stood behind a desk. The cameras moved in until only
his head and shoulders could be seen. He had a heavy and inflexible face,
the expression of which did not alter during his brief speech. His large
obtrusive jaw bit his sentences out of his mouth, while the tone of them
carried a reminder for Bush of Sergeant Pond's growl.
"We live in an uncertain time of transition. We must all accept severe
restrictions if we are to pull through the next critical year successfully.
Popular Action, the party I represent, has stepped in to ensure that the
nation emerges successfully from its troubles. The corrupt regime which
we have overthrown concealed from us all how bankrupt we are. General Bolt
was a traitor. We have documentary evidence that he was about to flee to
India, taking with him illegally acquired bullion and art treasures.
It was my painful duty to witness the execution of General Bolt yesterday
evening, carried out in full legality on behalf of the people of this nation.
"I ask you all to give me your full cooperation. Action is the party
of the people, but Action cannot brook any ill-advised activity from
the people at this grave time. All traitors who supported Bolt will be
rounded up for trial within the next few days; you are asked to assist
in their arrest. I will not beat about the bush. I have to tell you that
we have enemies abroad who would gladly take advantage of us in our time
of weakness. The sooner we can dispose of the enemies within our gates,
the sooner we shall be able to impose a strong peace, nationally and
internationally.
"Let our watchword be Union through Action. United, we shall win through
all our hardships."
His final words started the snare drums again. Gleason stood glaring
forward into the camera, never blinking, until he was faded out and
James Bush reached over his son's shoulder and switched the bowl off.
"Sounds as if he's going to be worse than Bolt was," Mrs. Annivale
said gloomily.
"Bolt was one of the moderates," James said. "He'll knock out all this
mind-travel, you wait and see!"
He uttered this warning in a sort of gloating tone that instantly offended
Bush.
"Let's hope that Action is transitory, then, Dad, just as your old poet
claimed!"
The atmosphere in the house was too claustrophobic; his studio was still
a shambles from the occasion when he had wrecked it. His head heavy from
the drink, he went out for an aimless walk. Whoever was boss of the ant
heap, his business would still be to kill Silverstone -- unless Howes
and Stanhope gave him fresh orders. Unthinkingly, he found his way back
to the stagnant pond. The ruined building lay quiet and sinister; had
he really heard those four men plotting the killing of Bolt, or was the
incident some strange sort of precognition?
Becalmed, Bush stood on the frowsty bank, watching a pair of frogs
struggle out of the water in a manner reminiscent of the lungfishes away
back in the Devonian. He built, in his mind, huge moving scenic SKGs
with grandiose titles like "The Course of Evolution" in which flippers
moved and transformed into legs which turned into wings which turned
into waves which turned into flippers.
His own mysterious and possibly also cyclic mental shifts in due course
went through another phase. The truck returned for him; his leave was up.
He said goodbye to his father and Mrs. Annivale and climbed aboard.
But it was all distant. They, too, might as well have been patterns in a
stratum of compressed sunlight. He seemed already to be falling into the
early stages of the hypnagogic state that Wenlock discipline required.
And in the strange and brutal misery he conspired in at the barracks,
he was still remote.
As they drove into the familiar square and the boom lowered behind them,
Bush saw that there were shadowy future figures here. This place was
being watched; but he wondered if they hoped for the collapse or the
survival of the new regime.
Climbing from the truck, he stood for a moment to watch a squad march
by. It was one of the new units, formed only two days before, and had
yet to learn the secret of moving in formation. Sergeant Pond, at his
hoarsest and most foul-mouthed, was scaring the wits out of the recruits
in an honest attempt to transform them into automata. Bolt, Gleason,
or no matter who, Pond held his own little acre of tyranny secure.
The squad halted clumsily to his order. One recruit's cap fell off.
Bush stared at the man. He recognized the scabby face. It was unlikely --
with the shaven head, it was difficult to be sure -- but after all,
the regime was roping in layabouts from the past. . . . It assuredly
was Lenny, sweating it out in Pond's new squad.
Bush mentioned the matter to Howes when he came before the captain.
Howes nodded, barked an order to a corporal standing by, and five minutes
later Lenny was standing rigidly at his version of attention before them,
his dimples dug deep, his gaze going anxiously from Howes to Bush and
back again.
He had been caught in the early Jurassic by a couple of plain-clothes
patrollers, "causing a disturbance." They had brought him back with them;
the rest of his gang had escaped.
Lenny denied he knew anything about Stein. Howes called in Stanhope,
since this was a security matter. The two captains, Bush, and Lenny
and his escort, walked down the passage to a small empty room. Lenny
began to cry out and protest directly he saw into the room. There were
blood stains round the walls and on the floor. In one corner stood some
battered golf clubs. Howes excused himself and left. The escort posted
himself outside the door.
Stanhope's mouth had gone a frightening shape. He picked up one of the
clubs and showed Bush what to do with it. Lenny groaned and fell to the
floor. Bush took the club, moist from Stanhope's grip. He brought it
smashing down into Lenny's ribs. It was easy -- pleasant. Action!
Afterwards he wondered at himself like a man betrayed. Lenny told them
nothing, beyond the reiterated fact that he and Stein had quarreled and
the older man had minded away from them; he told them nothing, but he
bled a good deal.
When Bush had washed, and eaten a solitary meal, he was kitted out for his
mission of assassination. They issued him with an excellent strong one-piece
and a pack. Both the suit, which was fitted with deep pouches and pockets,
and the pack, contained a multitude of things he might need on his journey,
including a light-gun that could kill at four hundred yards (the greatest
distance at which he was likely to be able to see his quarry in mind-travel),
a gas gun, and two knives, one which was sheathed at his belt, one which
flicked out of the toe of his right boot. He was loaded with vitamin pills,
pep pills, and concentrated water, and equipped with an up-to-date model
air-leaker.
Trepidation seized him when he was ordered to report to the colonel
commanding the barracks. With his full kit about his feet, he stood
outside the colonel's office and waited for the order to enter. Fifty
minutes dragged by before a sergeant marched him in.
The colonel was a mild-mannered little man, snowed under by a sheaf of orders
originating from the new Action regime. Presumably he was cleared of being
a Bolt man or he would not be here now.
He had nothing positive to say to Bush, and that little he put across
rather badly, scuffling miserably with his papers while he talked. In
closing he said, "Admiral Gleason approves of men who do well. Silverstone
is a state enemy because his teachings could confuse us all -- well,
not us, but our weaker brothers. They could confuse the issue, let's
say. If you can find Silverstone and kill him, I'll see your name goes
before the Admiral. Don't think of yourself as an assassin, think of
yourself as an executioner, on state business. Dismiss!"
The battered truck which had brought Bush in was waiting to drive him round
to the mind-station. Soon he could escape! As he piled his kit in the back,
Captain Howes marched up. He looked at Bush distastefully. Bush recalled
that he had worn the same expression when he left Bush at the door of the
torture room.
"You find yourself capable of killing Silverstone?" he asked.
Bush felt the urge to be frank with the man, to be open and expansive,
but there was nothing to come; he was closed even to himself.
"Yes."
"See you do then. A lot depends on you."
"Yes." The affirmative, so much more final than the negative.
He climbed into the truck. As the boom lifted, he saw that Pond was doubling
his squad through the shadows of the future.
At the mind-station, he became a different person again. He was a patient
now, delivered into the hands of surgeons and nurses.
They took special care with Bush. They had their orders, too. He was issued
with extra supplies of CSD -- he observed that it now came in crystal form.
He was installed in a special cubicle (so that he could never return to
his own time without being seen and called to account). A nurse with an
antiseptic smile forbidding lust took the statutory amount of his blood,
and deftly sliced tissue from his left breast. He was under light sedation
now, reciting a few fragments of the discipline, curling into the foetal
position. He took the drug.
Again he was becoming a different person: neither dead nor alive, in a
state where because there was no change there was no time. His mind was
opening, easing back doors that had been sealed to humanity for over
a million years, letting in a part of the universe. Because this was
sanity, he was happy. Golf clubs floated by, a curving leg, a bottle
with a tartan label; he let them drift. It was the universe he wanted,
not its minutiae. He was free.
Free and yet not aimless. The drug and discipline were working in conjunction
now, a sense of direction rising in him like a divine call. He was working
much as a diver might work who, poised on the edge of the continental shelf,
finds himself carried down into the abyss beyond, beyond reach of help;
Bush was being carried back down the vast entropy slope that could deliver
him -- where or when he knew not, but far back into the airless Cryptozoic
if he did not fight. He fought his way up the slope, swimming, kicking,
directing. The medium pulled him back but he squirted on, until exhaustion
overcame him and he felt he was about to slide away again. Then he surfaced.
BOOK TWO
Chapter 1
IN ANOTHER GARDEN
The houses climbed up the hill on either side of the gritty road. They were
small, generally with only two tiny rooms upstairs, wedged under the slate
roofs; but they were solidly built of stone, and tucked snug into the
hillside so as to shelter slightly from the chill east winds. Each house
possessed its own small back garden, which towards the crest of the hill
might pitch so steeply it could almost be weeded from an upper window.
At the crest of the hill, where the last stone house stood, the land
leveled out, later to go rolling on and on under the wide sky, revealing
more clearly that its true nature was untameable moorland. Walking by
this last stone house, which had been partly converted into a small
grocer's shop, Bush could look down at the small village which still
puzzled him. He could see almost all of it from here; to see the rest,
he had merely to turn about; for where the stone houses ended, another
sort of house began.
These other houses, which appeared hardly to belong to the village,
were built in miserable little terraces facing each other. They were
constructed of brick and stood in angular rows, defying the lie of the
land, like bricks a child arranges geometrically on his sickbed. From none
of these brick houses was it possible to see anything but the brownish
moors and the sky, which at this time of year frequently brought rain
to lash along the rotten undrained streets; the rest of the village was
concealed from them by the brow of the hill; the stone grocer's shop, the
roof of which peeped over the brow, could not be glimpsed even from the
house at the end of the terrace, since the occupants of that privileged
position had not been granted the benefit of windows in their side wall.
Bush stood in the middle of a downpour, taking in this scene. He knew
that the inhabitants of this dreary place were in some kind of trouble as
surely as he himself was, but as yet he had been unable to master even the
beginnings of what it was. No rain touched him; he was in mind-travel;
except on an emotional plane, there could be no contact between him
and this unknown zone of Earth's history. An unknown it seemed to be --
no shadows of the future moved here, there were no phantom buildings;
the Jursassic made this place seem a desert, remote from the enterprises
of the space-time world. He had been so determined to escape from the
Action regime, he had minded into a fairly late period of human history --
and it had been almost easy!
The rain tapered off with dusk, which seemed to draw over the land like
curtains, pulling the puny obstacles on the landscape back into its
clouded heart. The houses fought this process of digestion only feebly,
putting out dim lights from their windows when the process of darkness
was almost complete. There were exceptions to this, mainly at the bottom
of the bill, and it was in this direction that Bush now moved.
Below the stone houses stood one or two more imposing buildings, also
built of stone, some shops, and a church. Then came a level crossing,
with an untidy antique railway station of a kind that Bush had never
seen before. The main bulk of the metals curved away to a complex of
bulky and drab buildings that stood away on the far side of the village;
these buildings, as Bush had seen in the daylight, were crowned by a
huge unmoving wheel raised on the top of a wooden tower.
In the dark, it was possible to discern two or three lights among the
tangle of railway buildings; a few red lamps gleamed there; of the rail
that curved away from all this, to be carried by a stone viaduct away
from the valley and behind the great shoulders of land, there was no hint
at this hour. Nor was there a single light to relieve the dead bulk of
buildings beyond the level crossing.