6. WHAT WAS SECRET OF ‘THING IN THE CELLAR’?
It was a machine of intense beauty consisting of delicate red, gold and silver webs, strands of which brushed his face and had the vital warmth of human skin.
The webs rustled as he entered them, and they began to sing. He relaxed. Beesley’s plan had almost worked and the Shifter, in this instance, hadn’t really helped, either. Still, the machine would set all that right. They certainly needed each other.
Refreshed, sobered, he contemplated the possibilities.
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ANAESTHETIC
Along with the Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin, [Mort Sahl] is part of that radical fringe who try to tear down American decency and democracy.
—Howard Miller,
WCFL, Chicago
1. LYNDA BIRD TO WED GEORGE HAMILTON?
The next day Jerry and Karen went to the pictures. They sat in the front seats of the circle and ate popcorn as they watched Drums Along the Mersey. Sir William Harrison played the moody, introverted explorer, Ina Shorrock was the proud Queen of Port Sunlight and Eric Bentcliffe emerged in one of his best rôles as the rascally trader from the interior.
2. MY TEENAGE WIFE WON’T LET ME OUT OF HER SIGHT
Leaving the cinema they walked hand in hand down Westbourne Grove in the late sunshine. A West Indian with a tray around his neck sold Jerry a pot of Chaulmoogra, guaranteed as treatment for leprosy.
A squadron of M-60 tanks, mounted on guarded flat-cars, went past them towards Queensway. A crowd of dancing children followed the tanks. The grinning soldiers threw Hershey Bars and Tootsie Rolls to the children.
‘Flash’ Gordon Gavin was seen, walking rapidly towards the nearest tank.
3. HOW A BANANA ENDANGERS THE LENNON SISTERS
Jerry signalled for the gate of his Ladbroke Grove HQ to be opened. A Corporation Dustcart turned the corner.
Balanced on the cab was a man in a fur jacket and a fez. His right hand clung to the truck’s canopy and he shouted vigorously through a megaphone.
“Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”
It was Mo Collier, collecting for charity again.
4. WHY CONNIE THREATENED EDDIE WITH A LAWYER
Jerry poured himself a Pernod and handed the glass of Tio Pepe to Karen von Krupp. They were dressed in identical velvet suits of violent violet from Mr Fish. The effect was a little more pleasing than a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Their flies were undone.
5. THE SECRET MIA WON’T TELL FRANK
They lay naked on the red plush bed cover staring up at the blue plush canopy of the brass four-poster. Their skins, black and pink, shone with health.
“Fresh air,” he said. “That’s it.”
“Why?”
“It’ll be necessary to go to the country sooner or later. We’ve been in London a fortnight, you know.”
“And nothing’s happened. Are you worried by the stillness?”
“I suppose so. There’s a shipment tomorrow. It could go straight out again.” He sniffed at her hair.
She began to stroke the skin of his inner thigh.
“It’s too good to be true.” She nipped his forearm with her teeth.
FIRST INCISION
Newly and/or unexpectedly imposed tyranny can make people commit suicide.
—Tomáš Masaryk
1. HOW MUCH LONGER CAN THIS LAST????
Having left one Phantom VI in Paris, Jerry didn’t feel up to using another. Besides, he was in no hurry. “We’ll go by river, I think.”
He drew his vibragun and went upstairs.
When he next passed the door he was herding a group of sullen transmog patients in front of him. They all wore strait-waistcoats and most of them would have looked handsome or pretty if they had been able to manage a smile or two. Karen von Krupp patted her hair.
Jerry reassured her as they reached the cool main hall. “They’ll soon be laughing on the other side of their faces.”
It was a lovely day.
Waiting in the courtyard was a white hovertruck with red crosses painted on its sides. When he’d stowed the passengers comfortably at the back Jerry joined Karen in the cockpit and started the engines. Whining, they lifted up and began to move forward through the open gates.
Soon they were whistling down the road, passed the scarlet gloom of Chelsea, and reached the Thames Embankment. “Oh, it is wunderbar!” Karen von Krupp looked out at the wrecks of the tankers poking up through oil that shone with dozens of bright colours.
“You can’t beat it,” Jerry agreed affectionately.
They crossed Waterloo Bridge with the siren going and were waved through by a marine with a sensitive earnest face who leaned one hand on the butt of his Navy Colt and held a cigar in the other. The white hovertruck sang onwards into the ruined roads of south London that were full of colombine, ragged robin, foxglove, golden rain, dog rose, danewort, ivy, creeping cinquefoil, Venus’s Comb, deadnettle, shepherd’s purse and dandelion, then turned towards Greenwich where Jerry’s cruiser, The Pierrot, was moored.
* * *
As Jerry directed his patients up the gangplank Karen von Krupp pointed to a battered, broken-looking building in the distance. “What is that, Jerry?”
“Greenwich Observatory,” he said. “It’s a bit redundant now, I suppose.”
She came aboard and he cast off.
In a moment they were chugging away from London, moving strongly against the current.
The banks of the river and the fields and ruins beyond them were carpeted with flowers of every description. While Jerry switched the boat over to automatic steering, Karen stretched out on the deck, breathing the warm summer air, staring up at the deep blue sky and listening to the bees and the crickets on the shore.
When they were sailing through a forest of oaks and elms Jerry came and lay down beside her. From the cabin came the faint strains of Ives’s Symphony No. 1.
“That is a favourite of yours, I would say,” she said.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“This is the life, is it not?”
“Which?”
“Which do you like?”
“Oh, all of them really.”
; The prow pushed on through the rainbow oil and every so often a quaintly shaped fish would leap out and rest on the surface until the ripples opened the top up and it would fall back under again.
The river turned out of the forest and they sailed between fields and old, ruined farmhouses, deserted villages and abandoned pubs. Once, as they moved under a bridge, an armoured car roared over their heads and moaned off down the road. A little later a scrawny young woman threw stones at them from the bank and screamed incoherent insults. Jerry caught a few words. “Pantalones—el jardin zoologico—la iglesia inglesa! Lavabo—negra—queremos un—vino dulce—de oro, plata, platino, diamantes, rubies, zafiros, esmeraldas, perlas…”
“American immigrant, poor cow.”
Karen cocked her head, brushing back her long red hair. “What was that? Not bees.”
The woman had disappeared into the undergrowth.
Jerry listened.
“Hornets?” Karen suggested.
Jerry shook his head. “Westland Whirlwinds. I’d better just…” He jumped and ran to the bridge. Karen got up and then fell over on her bottom as a small missile launcher purred from the forward hatch. She crawled to the bridge. He was watching the radar.
“About eight of them,” he said. “Hard to say whose they are.” He peered through the window. “They’ve seen us. They’re coming to take a closer look.”
“Are they ours, Jerry?”
“No, I think they’re yours. Perhaps your husband…”
“My husband?”
“Maybe.”
Jerry switched on the laservision and tuned it to the radar. Now he had a close-up of the leading Whirlwind and its pilot.
The pilot was thoughtfully chewing through a chocolate layer cake as he stared down at Jerry’s boat.
“I wonder where he’s been,” Jerry’s hand went to the launcher’s controls. “I wouldn’t like to hurt him.”
“Does he know this is your boat?”
“I shouldn’t think so. It’s registered in the name of Beesley.”
“A peculiar coincidence.”
“What’s peculiar about it?”
But now the helicopters had spotted the launcher and, even though equipped with superior Nord SS 11 air-to-surface missiles, began to bank away.
“Velocidad maxima, I think…” Jerry murmured.
“What?”
“The sloop. Time to be on the move.”
“Saints…”
The helicopters vanished over the horizon.
“They’re heading for London,” she said. “I think we got away just in time.”
“You could be right.”
“Do you think I’m wrong?”
“Well, they weren’t carrying their full complement of missiles, but they were lying rather heavy on the air, wouldn’t you say?” He depressed a button and his own launcher disappeared into the bowels of the boat.
2. IT’S A FAD, DAD!
Jerry took over the steering as they turned into the Urzel tributary and moved slowly along beneath a canopy of tall aromatic grass. It was evening now and the sun was low, but a little light filtered through to them.
Since the departure of the helicopters, Karen von Krupp had become introspective and had stayed beside him in the cabin, repeatedly playing the Ives piece. Something was bothering her. Finally, as they approached a wooden landing stage, she said, “Is this, do you think, the answer to our relationship?”
“Of course not.” He squeezed her hand and steered the boat in. “It’s merely the key to the future. Possibly not even that. Don’t worry about it.”
With a pout she took the mooring line and jumped to the landing stage, winding the line round and round the oak capstan as he guided the boat into its position. He cut the engines.
“Now let’s get those lubbers ashore.” Drawing his vibragun he kicked open the stern hatch. “All right, mates, out you come. Slowly now.”
Blinking in the last of the sunlight, the transmog patients stumbled on deck and trooped down the gangplank that Karen von Krupp had erected for them.
They all set off along the landing stage towards a field of corn.
“Have you ever wondered about the morality of what you are doing?” she asked. “These creatures never asked…”
“They prayed. We heard. We merely serve the people, Karen.”
“Beesley says…”
“… he does, too. I know. Beesley knows what’s good for them. I simply do what they want me to do. There it is. I’m all for equilibrium.”
They walked along a small path through the corn. A rabbit ran away from them and a partridge whirled into the sky. The roof of a large house could now be seen in the distance. It was Sunnydales Reclamation Centre. Welcoming smoke rose from the chimneys. “Not much further now,” Jerry told the transmog patients who tramped ahead, looking at the ground.
“You never question…”
“What is there to question?”
“I…”
“I do what they want me to do.”
“It’s like prostitution.”
“It’s a lot like prostitution, isn’t it?”
“You see nothing wrong…?”
“The customer’s always right.”
“And you have no,” she shuddered, “ethics?”
“I give the public what it wants, if that’s what you mean.”
“You have no sense of mission! Ach! At least Beesley has that!” She laughed harshly. “Ha!”
“I thought it was the same as mine.”
“Nein. It is different. He knows that people want a sense of security.”
“Of course. Do you smell burning?”
“Ja, I do.”
3. THE EROTIC GHOSTS OF VIET NAM
Sunnydales was burning. The staff stood about in the grounds staring helplessly at the Reclamation Centre. Incendiary rockets had done their worst.
“What about the patients?” Jerry asked Matron.
“All gone, Doctor Finlay. Kidnapped. Months of work! Och…”
“Calm yourself, woman,” said Jerry with gruff kindness. “Was it the Westland Whirlwinds?”
“Aye, doctor. Eight Mark Tens. We didna have a chance tae activate the defences. We lased London. Mister Koutrouboussis is on his way. He said he’d try tae bring ye with him.”
“I’m ahead of him. Is the laser still working?”
“Noo…”
“Then you’d better get off to Soho as fast as you can, Janet. Tell them the choppers were heading for London when last seen.”
“Aye, Doctor.” Matron ran for the one hangar still intact. Soon a small OH-6A turbine-powered copter moaned upwards, its pilot hastily pulling on her American uniform to conform with the machine’s markings. It flew away over the fields of flowers.
The sun set and the fire went down.
“The damage isn’t too bad, considering,” said Mo, one of the male nurses, vainly trying to brush off the black patches on his smock with a limp hand. “All the East wing is okay, Mr C.”
“They had these big bazookas and stuff,” said Fowles, the Transplant Chief. Fowles was a tall, pale man with unhealthy hands, a sweaty nature. “We didn’t stand a chance. We were rounded up, marked in this stuff,” he pointed to the blob of green paint on his forehead, “and herded into the garden. Then they took away the patients.”
“Their leader…?” Jerry raised a finger to his nose.
“Dressed in clerical gear. He stole the birthday cake Matron had made for the ex-chairman of the Arts Council, the poor cunt had lost so much weight!”
“You’ve had the cake, I’m afraid,” said Jerry, “but I’ll see if I can get the patients back. Miserable things. They must be in a state.”
“To say the least, sir.” Fowles tucked his hands under his arms. “Timid little creatures at that stage, you know. Don’t understand. Couldn’t tell you their own names, half of them.”
“You’d better get this lot into the East wing.” Jerry indicated the new batch. Most of them h
ad seated themselves on the ground and were staring moodily at the Centre’s smoking skeleton. “I’ll be over at my place if you want me. Come on, Karen.”
He led her across the lawns to his little Dutch mansion and stopped under the carved portal.
“Open, als’t u blieft!” The door swung open.
They stepped inside.
“Waar is de nooduitgang?” asked Karen absently as the door shut behind her. Jerry turned on the lights.
“You’re getting very tense,” he said.
“Ik hank det wel…”
“Sad…”
“Ja, das i seben schade…”
They walked along the hall. All the wood was dark and shiny with polish. A clean old man rounded a corner and tottered towards them. “Ah, sir! Ah, sir!”
“What have we got to eat, ‘de Vossenberg’?”
“Gekookte eieren, kaas, fazant…”
“Fine. We’ll have it in the parlour, I think.”
The parlour had walls of the same dark, panelled wood. The armchairs were deep and old-fashioned, covered in loose folds of floral material. The room was full of clocks in painted wooden cases, each keeping perfect time.
They sat in the chairs and said nothing.
After a while ‘de Vossenberg’ wheeled in the dumb waiter. “Ah, sir.”
He gave them trays then he gave them plates then he served them with cold pheasant, cheese and boiled eggs. Then he opened a bottle of Niersteiner and poured it into two long-stemmed Czech hock glasses.
“What is going to happen now?” asked Karen von Krupp. “You have lost most of your victims.”
“I suppose we should try to get them back.”
“Your duty?”
“Well…”
“But Beesley will take them to America!”
“How do you know?”
“I just think he would.”
“He told you.”
“No.”
“You knew.”