Futuretrack 5 (26 page)

It was a clear-up morning, a morning of endings. In the fields, every tractor stood silent. The fields were brown, bare and empty, except for the wintergreens, all the way to the horizon, where the towers of Ely Cathedral were lost in a dark blue mist that spoke of coming cold. The sense of things ending made me panicky, as I called up to Pete, “Can I borrow the Velocette? Keri’s taken Mitzi.”

Pete looked down and considered, the autumn sun glinting on the bald patches under his ginger hair.

“Yeah, help yourself. You not working today? Fred Johnson wants his harrow seeing to.”

“In a bit.”

Pete gave Joan a glance, over my head. But I didn’t want to tell even them; and they were too nice to ask me. I got the Velocette out and went through the complex fiddle of starting her. I knew they were watching me sympathetically, which only made things worse. Had Keri told Joan what was the matter?
They’d
been married awhile;
they
were experienced.

The Velocette was a bitch; there’d been a heavy dew; the grass was still wet. Finally, she fired. At least I knew which way Keri had gone. In the Fens, she didn’t have much choice of roads… But after two miles I did come to a crossroads. Luckily there was a damp patch of mud on the corner, from the last heavy rains. Mitzi’s distinctive tires had cut right across it. She’d turned left for Sutton. Then I realised where she’d gone. Nine Mile Bank. Where we’d been happy that first day. She always went there, when she wanted to think. And indeed Mitzi was there, parked as usual by the third hawthorn bush.

I smiled. I’d known she’d never harm Mitzi…

Harm? What did I mean, harm? Suddenly dry-mouthed, I ran up the bank.

She was sitting with her booted legs thrust down toward the rippling waters of the drain. One gauntleted hand rested on her crash helmet beside her. Still as a statue; as if she’d been sitting there for a very long time; staring out over the Fen landscape. Or the cloudscape above. Probably the clouds; her face was wistful…

“Keri?”

She turned; wide, blank eyes full of sky. Then she pushed her hair back, and I could see where tears had cut channels down through the light brown road dust on her face.

She said nothing. Her eyes remained remote; hostile now, as if my coming had robbed her of something.

“Keri—are you ill?”

“I’m pregnant.” She said it so flatly that at first I didn’t take it in.

“But… but…”

“But girls don’t get pregnant these days? You forget, mate, I was on Futuretrack Five when you caught me. Us girls didn’t need the Pill—we’re usually dead inside the month. I’m not your little friend from Futuretrack Six.”

“But-but-but-but,” she mocked. “You sound like the bloody Velocette. But
nothing.
You’ve really done it, mate.” She turned away, back to the infinite Fen. “I was
free
when you found me. Now what do I do? Wait till I end up a Valium-sodden old cow on some estate?”

“I love you, Keri.”

“You love me now, ‘cause I’m free. Will you still love me when I’m up to my eyeballs in Valium?”

“But if I’d let you go on racing, you’d be dead by now!

“Yeah!”

“What do you mean, yeah?”

“Yeah, I know I would be dead. That was the best part—why I could enjoy every minute. On a bike, they can’t touch you. Before they can get their hands on you, you’re dead.”

I reached out a feeble hand.

“Don’t touch me.
DON’T TOUCH ME.”

I touched her. She lashed out like an unleashed spring.

I had to fall over backward, or she’d have broken my nose.

“How can I help?”

“Give me Mitzi.”

“Okay.” Then I grasped what she meant. “To race? To race again?”

“To get back the Championship before… I’ve still got a few months riding before… it… starts to show. On Mitzi, I could set a lap record they’d
never
break. They’d never forget me… Even when I was dead.”

“No,” I said.

Her face turned white; her eyes deep-sunk. She bit on the scar where she always bit when she was racing. The little trickle of blood ran down her chin.

“Keri, I can’t … it would be murder … I don’t want …”

“You don’t want me wrecking your precious bike. Well, you’ve ridden
me
often enough. Night after night. Wasn’t that better than riding your rotten electric toaster? You’ve ridden me to
death.
You owe me that bike.”

“But Joan… wants kids.”

“Joan lives here—Joan’s got a good house. What’d we do in the winter with a kid, when the water butt’s frozen an’ we can’t even wash? I’d have to have a doctor an’ he’d register the birth and that would bring in the inspectors an’ they’d put me back on one of the estates. Or do you want me to have the kid in the corner of some field? Deliver the kid with your own hands, Supertech? I’m not some rotten gadget you can fix.”

“Keri, I’ll think of something. Give me time. …”

No reply, except the distant noise of a helicopter, faint as the chirr of a cricket.

“Keri, please. Look at me.”

“If you don’t give me Mitzi, I’ll
drown
myself. What d’you think I’ve been sitting here for, staring at the water for hours? Only I haven’t got the guts—yet.”

I became aware of a faint ping, ping, ping inside my head. I’d been feeling it for some time; not paying it any attention…

We were close to the Wire here. Too close to be having feelings like Keri’s. They could be onto her. Psycho-radar always picked up the suicidal, clearest of all. The biggest blips on the radar screen were always the suicidal…

“Keri—they’re on to you.”

“See if I care. Maybe after the lobo-farm it doesn’t hurt at all.”

I, in turn, looked up into the glorious cloudscape. I could see the psychopter now; a tiny black speck in a purple and gold canyon of cloud, beautiful with sunbeams streaming down like searchlights. The psychopter was heading straight for us.

“Keri, suppose I told you I was going to smash all this—psychopters, Paramils, Wires, the lot. …”

“Cripes.” She turned on me a face of total disgust. “You and who’s army?”

“I smashed the Arcdos for you. …”

“This is a bit bigger than a rotten Arcdos. …”

“I’m going to blow up Laura, when we go to Cambridge next month.”

That made her look at me. “You mean you’re going to try.” But there was a flicker of interest: her white, bony look was starting to fade.

I glanced up at the psychopter. I could see the pods on its undercarriage. In five minutes, Keri would be inside; in an hour, no longer human.

“Keri, I
know
Laura. I worked with her. I know how she’s defended.”

“You’ll get yourself killed, you mad bastard.” But there was color in her cheeks.

“Come and get killed with me. I need your help.”

“Why didn’t you ask me? Oh, you bastard, you lovely, mad bastard.” She flung her arms round me. “Can I ride

Mitzi when we do it?” Tears were streaming down her face. “What do we do now?”

The psychopter roared in low, the waves of air from its blades beating through my hair.

“We make love,” I shouted. “Make love, or they’ll have us.” Desperately I fumbled with the zips of her leathers, the zips of my own.

“In front of them?” she shouted.

“Especially in front of them.” We must look, from up there, like two wriggling white maggots, naked on the waving grass of the bankside… But lovers’ quarrels, even rape, were not a crime in the Paramil’s book. Especially in the Fens, where fertility is at all times to be encouraged…

“If I blow up Laura,” I shouted, “there’ll be
chaos.
”

“Oh, God, give me chaos,” she screamed, and writhed into her ecstasy.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the psychopter zoom away angrily at zero feet. The observer was thumping the screen of his psycho-radar.

They always had trouble filtering out sexual frenzy.

Once you’ve made up your mind to do something, it’s only a matter of working out techniques. Techniques, to a Tech, are like nuts to a monkey. I stayed very cool throughout.
Why
you’re doing something is what gets you het up.
How
is as soothing as a crossroad puzzle.

“Hey, Pete?”

“Yeah?”

“I been thinking. We can’t take the play to Cambridge with that tatty old proscenium. Least puff of wind will knock it over. We’ll look right idiots. …”

“Look, if you think I’ve got the time, with all these roofs needing mending. …”

“No sweat—leave it to me. I’ll knock you up a solid job with light steel scaffolding—steel guy ropes and everything. Stand up to a hurricane.”

“All on your own?”

“Razzer and Tommo will help—they’re slack after harvest.”

“Get on with it, then. None of your fancy ideas, mind.”

“Just one, Pete. At the end of the play, I thought it’d be nice to have two steel flagpoles rising up out of the proscenium, carrying Union Jacks. Worked by pulleys.”

“Suit yourself.”

I pulled on the pulleys. Out of the vertical tubes of the proscenium rose two thinner steel tubes. They doubled the height of the proscenium. I pulled another rope, and Union Jacks broke out at the top and fluttered bravely in the evening Fen breeze.

“Smart that,” said Pete. “Who pulls the pulleys on the night?”

“Me—I’m offstage at the end.”

Pete walked across and tugged at the whole proscenium. It was rock solid, didn’t even sway, held by guy ropes spreading out on either side.

“Good piece of craftsmanship. But heavy… Think the old truck’ll take the weight?”

“I’m going to reinforce the front of the truck with a lot of scaffolding round the cab. That’ll hold her.”

“Yeah,” said Pete wearily. “Just as long as you take it off afterward.”

“I’ll do that,” I said. Knowing there wasn’t going to be any afterward.

I rode into the middle of the spinney, deep among the fir trees, out of sight of the road. I took the hinged plastic board off the Velocette and opened it out. A life-size cutout of a Paramil, not very well painted. Still, there was the painted blaster hand, the crash helmet, and visor. It looked nasty enough. I set it up against a tree, rode the Velocette back to the edge of the spinney. Walked about a bit till I was thoroughly lost, then took the Smith and Wesson from my pocket.

Pete wouldn’t miss it. I’d carved a wooden replica to hang on his front room wall. He never touched the Smith and Wesson from one year’s end to another. It had been thick with dust. I loaded it now: six brass shells, seventy year-old relics. Then I slipped deeper into the wood, hunting my Paramil.

Tricky: afternoon sun was falling through the branches, dappling the trunks and breaking up their shapes. It’d be doing the same to my Paramil. If I could hit him first time, I could hit any of them. Funny, hunting something you’d made yourself. I wondered if the ammo would work; I’d better find out now. I wondered how out of practice I was. Pistol club at college was two years ago…

You don’t forget, though. Like swimming, or riding a bike—once you’ve learned, you never forget.

The image flicked on my eye suddenly, out of the light and shade. My feet leaped apart, straddled. My arms came up together, both hands on the gun. My neck retracted into my shoulders like an old tortoise and I pulled the trigger twice. Perfect, my old instructor would have said.

Except there’d only been one bang. One bullet was dud. I broke the gun and emptied out the shells. One fired shell, with a hollow, black smoking end. One dud, with the little dent the firing pin had made. Four unused shells, looking as good as the dud.

I walked across to my Paramil. The plastic board was smashed right in the middle of the chest. Not bad, at twenty meters among foliage. But it still didn’t console me for the dud.

I settled down to wait for quarter of an hour. The bangs coming out of the spinney
must
sound like a Fen-man shooting pigeons, bang, bang, both barrels. Not like Custer’s last stand…

It’s hard to find a bit of wasteland anywhere in the Fens. The soil’s so fertile, Fenmen use every inch. Often rent out ten square yards to each other for a henhouse, a garage, or a cabbage patch. Fenland’s like a patchwork quilt, with stitches of temporary fencing. A big, bright square of yellow mustard here; a smaller square of white crysanthemums there, for sale at roadside tables (“Take what you want and put the money in the bowl—beware of the dog”).

But I found a patch of wasteland eventually—a corner where the field drains had clogged and the ground gone marshy. Willows grew in dense clumps; in the middle was a disused hen hut, sodden black with damp. Into that I placed my trial bomb, German incendiaries dropped into the Forty-foot seventy years before; thin grey cylinders, casings corroded with pale dust. The triggering device was another Fenlistener, acquired in a Chatteris junk shop. The old man had the decency to tell me the radio didn’t work, except for boring plays, and not even those at night… The technicalities of the detonator I won’t bore you with.

It was a bright, sunny day, about noon, when the tractors stop for two hours, and every Fenman puts up his feet after a heavy dinner before groaning back to work. I retired to a safe distance, took a blue flypaper from its wrapping, and shouted into it.

For a second, nothing happened. Then there was a tinkle, as the hut window blew out; a puff of solid white smoke; then the whole hut dissolved into a raging blue-white firework, brighter than the sun. After two minutes there was nothing left to burn, only a slight haze where the grass was smouldering.

Good craftsmen, those old Germans; better than the Yanks who made the ammo for the Smith and Wesson.

This bomb had used two incendiaries. I had eight in my second bomb, a leather satchel hanging in a cupboard at home. A leather satchel that was a careful replica of the electronic test kits that some Techs carried round the Centre, to test for faults in the wiring.

I imagined the satchel hung round Laura’s neck by a thick steel wire; imagined the blue-white fire burning into her stainless-steel casing, turning it white hot, melting her marvellous brain into dribbles of metal and glass. And as she slowly distorted, melted, and died, she might send out strange, garbled signals that would ruin the programs of her sisters, those other computers she had long ago burgled and dominated at Idris’s command. Maybe she could blow their minds, too; wreck the whole national control system. Techs hammering away at the keyboards and getting nothing back but garbage…