Psychomech (13 page)

Garrison dreamed.

He dreamed of ice. A glacier. He climbed a glacier. Clad in rags, bloodied and cold to the marrow, he trod steep and treacherous snows until he reached a glassy peak. He stood at the top of the world, conqueror! Then—

He remembered why he had come, his quest.

A great block of ice stood upon the peak. It was blue, white-streaked and opaque with rime, its square foot bedded in crisp snow with an icy crust. He went to it, cleared away the frost from its surface. He gazed upon a face. A slim face, elfin, with small ears and red hair brushed back. Her slightly slanted eyes were closed, but Garrison knew they would be green. No breath of life moved her breast.

He beat on the ice with his fists and the Mock flew apart, burst like a grenade. Unsupported, she swayed and would have fallen but he caught her, kissed her, breathed on her. He kissed her eyes and they opened.

And they were green as emeralds—

—
And utterly lifeless!

Her stomach and breasts burst open in rotten tatters and great leprous tentacles sprang out, like the guts of a ruptured golf ball. She was dead but the cancerous thing in her was alive! Before his eyes it began to devour her shell…

He came awake screaming, sensed, felt and smelled Vicki’s room around him and shudderingly reached for her.

She was not beside him.

Beyond the windows the sun was high, its beams slanting into the room. He had overslept.

He dressed quickly, omitted to wash and shave, took the elevator to the ground floor. The results of Vicki’s tests were in. She had left half an hour ago. Schroeder did not know where she had gone. One of his men had taken her away, possibly to Hildesheim. Or she might be in St Andreasberg. She had friends in both places, and a companion in the latter. And now… now she could go anywhere. Anywhere in the whole wide world. There would probably be a great deal she wanted to do. Things she had always wanted to do.

‘It was the very least I could do for her, Richard,’ Schroeder explained. ‘She is not without means, but—for the rest of her time her bills come to me. I want her to do what she wants to do. You, surely, would want that also?’

‘Meeting you,’ Garrison finally ground the words out, ‘has been a nonstop curse! You’ve turned my life upside-down and me inside-out.’

‘I did not make her go, Richard. She wanted to leave. You may follow her if you wish, but—’ He took the other’s shoulders. ‘It would be slow torture for both of you. Vicki obviously understands this. Why can’t you?’

Garrison had no answer. He made fists until his nails dug into his palms, then slowly turned away…

The rest of the week seemed to pass almost as a day, so that later he would have difficulty recalling much of it. He did remember his session with Schroeder’s hypnotist, however—if not its middle, when he was ‘under’, certainly its beginning and its end—and its result: that quickening of Schroeder’s already intense interest, his seemingly
proprietary
interest, in the blind Corporal. For indeed it appeared that Garrison had lived before, if the hypnotist’s probing could be trusted and his findings credited. These previous lives were not distinct, no, but deep in his subconscious there was an awareness of them.

One other thing Garrison specially remembered of those last few days in the mountains was his request, right at the end of his stay, that Schroeder do his best to ensure that Vicki’s body, when and if she died (he still had hopes that she would not), be placed in cryogenic suspension.

Schroeder asked no questions but said it would be done, he would obtain Vicki’s permission if it were at all possible, and that of her guardian, and he would make all other arrangements and lay aside a sum to cover recurrent fees. There was a place in Switzerland, a shrine built into the side of a mountain, where she could rest through the years in deep-frozen repose. Schroeder himself had little faith in such methods, but—

‘I dreamed I saw her locked in ice,’ Garrison had told him.

‘Ah! Then it shall be done…’

At the Hotel International Major Marchant was waiting, immaculate, as usual, in number two dress uniform. He had been contacted earlier and told to prepare for the journey back to England. It was 9.30 in the morning when Koenig drove up in the silver Mercedes, Garrison seated beside him. ‘What the devil’s going on?’ the Major wanted to know. He stuck his head in through Koenig’s window as the car halted at the kerb before the hotel.

‘Why,’ answered Koenig, ‘we are going to the airport, of course!’

‘Of course? Man, if you’d only check the flight schedules you’d know that our flight to Gatwick doesn’t leave until 3.30!’ He waved his own and Garrison’s air tickets in Koenig’s face. ‘And whose idea was it to phone me and tell me—no, damn it,
order me
—to be ready inside an hour? Do you have any idea what sort of a rush I—’

Koenig lifted the tickets from the Major’s hand with a deceptively casual movement and calmly tore them up. He stuffed the fragments into the car’s ashtray. ‘Please, Major, do not wave things at me. And do not shout at me. My nerves, you know. Please get into the car.’

‘I will not! And the tickets! Who the hell do you—?’

Garrison leaned across, his dark lenses glinting. ‘Either get in or go and arrange another flight for yourself. Thomas Schroeder’s private jet leaves in half an hour, and I’ll be on it with or without you!’

‘Corporal Garrison, I—’

‘Call me mister, Major Marchant,’ said Garrison. ‘I was discharged,
in absentia
, first thing this morning.’

‘What? How—?’

‘Thomas Schroeder requested it, that’s how.’ Garrison sat back and said to Koenig. ‘If he’s not in the car on a count of ten, leave the bastard.’

Marchant heard him, hesitated for a single moment, got in. A hotel porter dumped his luggage in the boot. The Major sat stiffly in the back as Koenig pulled away from the hotel, then leaned forward and tapped Garrison brusquely on the shoulder. ‘And is that the uniform you’ll be handing in now that you’re discharged, “Mr” Garrison?’

Garrison turned and grinned. ‘Right, two of them. Not quite regulation issue, I know, but pretty good stuff, eh?’

‘Don’t be too cocky, Garrison,’ Marchant growled. ‘The quartermaster would be perfectly entitled to make you pay for the originals.’

The quartermaster can “require” whatever he likes,’ said Garrison. ‘But just think about it: some lucky sod will probably draw this lot up. He’ll be the best dressed Corporal in the whole British Army!’

‘But where did you get these… clothes?’ Marchant demanded to know. ‘What on earth has been going on?’

Garrison’s grin left his face. He frowned and turned away. ‘You know,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘I was going to sit and talk to you on the way back to Blighty. Put you partly in the picture. Tell you my good fortune. Let bygones be bygones, sort of thing. But you’ve just decided me not to. That stiff upper lip of yours keeps getting in the way. Actually, you rather piss me off.’

Maddened almost beyond caution, Marchant sharply drew breath and raised his short cane above Garrison’s shoulder. In all likelihood he never would have struck the threatened blow. Reason would have prevailed. But Willy Koenig was taking no chances. Having foreseen the outcome of Garrison’s deliberate impertinence, the bulky German had pressed a button on the dash to send a thick pane of plate glass hissing up from behind the front seats, snapping the thin bamboo neatly in half and sliding firmly into a slot in the ceiling. Behind the glass Marchant roared and raged, but the two in the front seats heard only their own laughter.

By the time they reached the airport, Marchant had calmed down. Garrison allowed him to sit in the rear of the small executive jet; but when drinks were served by the pretty hostess he made sure that the tray went no further than Willy Koenig and himself where they sat in luxurious comfort at the front. The trip was a very short one, and for Major Marchant very dry.

At Gatwick Garrison was taken out of Koenig’s care by the Provost Marshal’s own driver while the Major was left to fend for himself. Garrison tried but couldn’t feel sorry for the man. And what the hell?—he had his stiff upper lip, didn’t he?

T
here are centres across the land where soldiers, sailors and airmen may rest, recuperate and rehabilitate following illness, accident or injurious acts of war. The same is mainly true of establishments catering for the civilian population, but military rehabilitation centres are generally acknowledged as being amongst .the best. The place where Garrison went was no exception. Spacious in its own grounds and only a stone’s throw from the sea, the Hayling Island Recovery (as the inmates knew it) was a haven, or would have been without its strict routine and dedicated adherence to military method and regimentation.

Matron (or ‘the RSM’, as Garrison designated her) was a lady of some forty-five years whose prior service in the QARANC had endowed her personality with just such qualities as the ex-Corporal had always detested. Not that he was completely rebellious; he never had been, for he understood the elements of discipline; but he did believe that the ‘born leader’ bit and bullshit and parade-ground vulgarity and harsh, barking voices had their own place and time. For which reason, whenever Matron encroached too closely upon his privacy in supposedly ‘private’ hours, he would take every opportunity to remind her that while he was making use of the centre he was nevertheless a ‘civvy’; that he was merely blind, not deaf; that she could pin as many Dymotape name tags to his clothes as she liked but he would always find and remove them; and (which annoyed her most of all) that while she could legitimately ‘order’ him to attend Braille classes she could never compel him to study or learn the damned thing, for it was not his intention to spend the rest of his life fumbling about with printed Morse code when he could always find himself a pretty girl to read things to him.

For these and several other reasons, Garrison was not Matron’s favourite.

He was not to be deflated, however, and certainly not to be defeated. In attempting, by whichever method, to knock him down, Matron merely succeeded in getting his back even further up—which happened to be exactly what she wanted! For perceptive as he was, Garrison had quite failed to recognize that Matron was just as important to the centre’s operation and well-being as the doctors, psychiatrists, physiotherapists, nurses, teachers, cooks and dishwashers. She formed, in fact, a high percentage of the incentive to ‘get the fuck out of here’ which all of her charges shared as a man. And for all her bluster she was highly intelligent, compassionate, and extremely perceptive in her own right.

For example, she had not failed to note Garrison’s involvement with one of the prettiest and youngest nurses, Judy, an affair which started in his second week and carried on into the sixth. Even then it might not have finished if Matron had not inadvertently let the nurse know that she knew of the thing; this by reminding her one morning that she had forgotten to take her pill. There was also the matter of an impending posting and imminent promotion which, together with Matron’s sure knowledge of her affair and not knowing which way the old bird would jump, convinced Judy that the fire must now be allowed to burn itself out. She and Garrison did not, after all, love each other; they had merely been attracted to and delighted in each other’s bodies.

With or without Matron’s assistance the affair was destined to end abruptly. For as Garrison’s sixth week came to a close the centre’s Commandant, Doctor Harwell, sent for him and had him brought to his office in an ocean-facing wing of the complex. Garrison feared that he might be in for the Big Ticking Off, for he had certain other things moving as well as his running battle with Matron, but his fears proved groundless. It was simply that he had ‘an appointment in Harley Street, where one of Britain’s finest surgeons wished to see him.

Completely in the dark (Garrison was quite up to that sort of pun now) he let himself be taken to London and delivered to the clinic in question, and there discovered that he was to undergo surgery. Something of panic had set in then—until Thomas Schroeder’s name was mentioned in connection with a German firm specializing in optical instruments, and Garrison found himself introduced once again to a man he had met once before. In the Harz.

It was the same tiny dome-headed boffin who could only talk through an interpreter, and on this occasion he had brought one with him. Garrison was surprised, for he had thought that episode conclusively killed off by his own (and by Schroeder’s) tantrums that day; but no, Herr Killig was here at Schroeder’s request, and now it was up to Garrison to say whether or not the operation went ahead.

It would be a simple matter: the positioning of tiny silver discs under the skin of Garrison’s temples just above the cheek bones and immediately in front of his ears, one to each side. It was a small thing and there would be no scars to mention. Killig would direct the surgery, which itself would be performed by the British specialist. Since that specialist was Sir Ralph Howe, with more letters after his name than Garrison could ever hope to remember or even identify, everything seemed very much in order. When it was over Killig would return to Paderborn where final adjustments would be made to Garrison’s ‘instruments’, which the ex-Corporal would receive at a later date. All concerned were very persuasive and Garrison knew why. This must be costing Thomas Schroeder a small fortune.

When he got back to Hayling Island five days later Judy had been promoted and moved to a centre in the Midlands, which move Garrison immediately assumed to be foul play on the part of Matron. Still, he held no grudge. Life, like every other physical thing, must move on; when it becomes static it stagnates. And so with a shrug of his shoulders he settled once more to his life of (Matron’s phraseology) ‘near-criminal activities’.

There was, for instance, the matter of his keeping an especially vile brand of alleged cognac in his tiny room, and of inveigling others of the patients in to sample it, with occasionally uproarious and now and then near-catastrophic results. And it would not be the first time that centre staff had been called out to a local seafront pub where patients (who by all rights should be safely tucked up in their beds) were drunk, disorderly and refusing to leave the premises despite the fact that time had been called; and where invariably Garrison was discovered to be the ringleader. A case of the blind leading the lame and sometimes maimed…