They went over to where she stood beside a light armoured car. The paint had partially peeled off it, but the remains of a swastika could be seen.
“A German project. But the Swedish government was neutral during the war, and this couldn’t have been built in complete secrecy.” He translated for Marek.
“Maybe just one or two people in the government knew and covered up,” Marek suggested. “The Swedes were not always Anglophiles.”
“But why should they build it?”
Through the regular rows of bunkers they moved—living quarters, offices, radio posts, a complete military village hundreds of feet below ground. Abandoned.
“That expedition of Hitler’s may not have found the land at the earth’s core,” Miss Brunner was saying, “but evidently they thought this place worth using. I wonder what purpose they had for it.”
“Perhaps none at all. For a people who burbled all the time about purpose they were great ones for forgetting their reasons for doing things.”
The rock began to slope upward, and the light from the phosphorescent sea began to fade behind them.
“Those Nazis were born out of their time.” Jerry led the way. Though the blue light had faded, there was still light of a new quality which seemed almost like daylight. Larger buildings came into sight on the crest of the slope, and Jerry, looking upward into the distance, saw tiny rays of light like stars in a black sky. “I think that’s the open air beyond the roof. I think this cavern is only partially natural and the rest was hollowed out. Fabulous engineering.”
The larger buildings had probably been the private quarters of officers. Behind them they could just distinguish a long series of structures unlike any of the rest, some sort of scaffolding bearing heavier objects. “Gun emplacements, could they be?” Miss Brunner asked.
“That’s probably it.”
“Your brother does not seem to be here after all.” Marek looked about him.
“He must be. How did he know of this place, though?”
“Frank got around,” Miss Brunner pointed out. “He had all sorts of acquaintances. Even I had heard rumours about the entrance to the underground world. This is what started them, I’d guess.”
“Why should he come here? It’s lonely, disturbing. Frank never liked being lonely or disturbed.”
“Jerry, I am now not lonely and I am relaxed. Glad you could make it.” On the roof of one of the buildings Frank stood giggling, his needle gun pointing in their general direction.
“Show-off!” Jerry dived straight into the entrance of the building before Frank could shoot. He got his own gun out.
Frank yelled from the roof, “Come out, Jerry, or I’ll shoot your friends.”
“Shoot them, then.”
“Please come out, Jerry. I’ve been thinking what to do. I’m going to stitch your balls to your thighs. How about it?”
“Who told you I had any?”
“Please come out, Jerry.”
“You’re a sadist, Frank—I just realised it.”
“One of many pleasures. Please come out, Jerry.”
“What are you looking for here? Steamy, uterine seas, warm caves. Revealing, Frank.”
“You’re so common.”
“I am indeed.”
“Please, please come out, Jerry.”
“You’re frustrated, Frank, that’s all that’s wrong with you.”
He heard footsteps scramble on the roof, and a hatch opened above him. He fired up as Frank fired down. “This is ridiculous,” he said as they repressured. They had both missed. “Do you really want to kill me, Frank?”
“I thought I had, Jerry. I don’t know.”
“You’re all the family I have left now, Frank.” He laughed, fired and missed again.
“Whose fault was it that Catherine died?” Frank asked as he also missed. “Yours or mine?”
“We’re all victims of circumstance.” Jerry fired and missed. He had a lot of needles left.
“Yours or mine?”
“Fault, Frank? Blame?”
“Don’t you feel guilty, Jerry?” Frank missed.
“On and off, you know.”
“There you are, then! Missed!” Both statements were triumphant. “And what about Mum?”
“Missed!”
“Missed!”
“Missed!”
“Jerry.”
“What is this place, Frank? How did you find it?”
“It was on Father’s microfilm. The one your friends were looking for. Come to think of it, they tortured me, didn’t they?”
“I believe so. But what has it got to do with the European economic situation?”
“It would take someone who knew about those things to say. I can’t.”
“Have you got the Newman manuscript with you?”
“Yes. Missed!”
“Can I see it?”
“You’d laugh if you did. It would suit you down to the ground.”
“It’s interesting, is it? Missed.”
“Oh yes—aaah!”
“Got you!”
Frank’s feet stumbled away over Jerry’s head. Jerry ran out of the building and bumped into Miss Brunner and Marek. He paused and then ran round the building.
Frank was limping down towards the shore.
They ran after him.
Frank ducked behind a bunker, and they lost sight of him.
“Look here,” said Miss Brunner firmly, taking a .22 from her bag, “we’re not going to lose him again.”
“I wounded him. We’ll find him.” They searched among the bunkers, emerging on the shore.
“There’s your brother.” Marek pointed. He didn’t understand the game, but he was joining in enthusiastically.
Jerry and Miss Brunner fired together as Frank tried to push his boat out over the steaming lake. He turned, howled, and fell with a splash. He screamed, thrashing in the boiling water.
He was dead by the time they reached him and dragged him out. “Done to a turn,” said Jerry. “For the time being.”
There was a briefcase in the bottom of the boat. Miss Brunner covered Jerry with her gun as she stooped and picked it up. Resting it on her knee, she opened it with one hand and reached in. She came out with a microfilm spool and put it in her pocket. She put her gun back in her bag and handed him the briefcase. There was a thick cardboard file containing a typescript. In Frank’s handwriting were the words The Testament of S. Newman, Colonel, USAF, Astronaut. Jerry flicked off the rubber bands holding the manuscript together. He sat down on the damp rock and opened the file and began to read:
Not a variation on 203 neatly numbered pages of manuscript. Jerry sighed and tossed the book into the water.
PHASE
3
9
He rowed away, leaving Marek and Miss Brunner standing close together on the shore. He was very tired, and he had a long trip ahead of him.
Halfway up the sloping cavern, he lay down to sleep. When he woke up, he climbed on until he reached the cave’s mouth. The cold did not bother him as he inspected Frank’s snowmobile.
It seemed easy to operate, and the grey tracks it had made coming here were not completely obliterated by snow.
Sad and scared, he followed the tracks back to the station. He sighed deeply all the way, and a few tears even wetted his big black eyes when he stopped the sleigh by the rust-red meteorological post. He went in and opened a tin of herring. The stove had gone out, but the hut was still warmer than it was outside. He ate the herring and went to fetch his bottle from the copter. He sat in the pilot’s seat drinking whisky and trying to warm up the engine. He had finished the Scotch by the time it caught. He slid the door open and tossed the bottle out. The copter was a good one. There was probably enough fuel left to get him to one of the Baltic ports. Before he took off, he rummaged in the back and found his passport. There were only a few days to go before it expired.
He dumped the copter outside Lumea and was able to buy a ticket on a cargo sh
ip leaving that night. He convinced the officials that someone must have forgotten to stamp his entry visa in his passport and headed for Southampton, via Hamburg.
* * *
In London he opened his town house. The hotel-sized building on Holland Park Avenue stood well back from the street and was surrounded by a high wall topped with electrified spikes.
It was time, he decided, for a spot of exterior meditation. He would get a big party going and lose himself in it. With luck it would help him to work a few things out.
But first he filled himself with sleeping pills and took to his bed to sleep a dreamless sleep for three days and nights. When he woke his energy was low and people were even more urgently needed.
After his bath, he dressed in a high-collared white Bastille-style linen shirt, a black terylene cravat, black suède trousers and black doeskin jacket. From a wardrobe containing some fifteen of them, he took a black, double-breasted car coat and laid it on the chest near the window. He pulled on a pair of black boots with low cuban heels. He studied his pale features in the mirror that covered the far wall, brushed his hair and was satisfied. He was feeling very hungry and rather weak. He picked up the coat, took a new pair of gloves from the chest, and left the dressing room. There were actually two dressing rooms, one containing clothes he would probably never bother to wear.
The house was mid-Victorian, with six floors and two very large main rooms on each floor. Every room was sparsely furnished and gave the impression that the occupant was in the process of moving either in or out.
Jerry walked down the wide stairs until he reached the basement, where the kitchens were. Although they shone with mechanical equipment, the kitchens had hardly been used. Great cupboards were filled with canned and dehydrated food. The cellars below, apart from containing a vast selection of wines and spirits which he never drank, also contained a commercial cold-storage room filled with a mixed herd of carcasses. The whole collection, here and below, made Jerry feel sick when he thought about it. He mixed himself a pot of instant coffee and ate a packet of chocolate digestives.
There were two cars in the garage behind the house. One was a little Toyota mini-sports that the Japanese had just started to put on the market. The other was the oldest thing Jerry owned—the three-ton supercharged 1936 Duesenberg limousine. Custom-built for a successful Midwestern police chief, it had bulletproof glass and steel shutters operated by the push-button window control and automatic lubrication every seventy-five miles and did ninety in second gear. Jerry normally liked plenty of bonnet in front of him when he drove. His other car, the Phantom, was back in the Shaftesbury Avenue garage. His own garage was large enough to house several double-decker buses, and most of it was taken up by drums of fuel. There was also a small petrol reservoir below.
The door slid out of the ground and closed behind him as he drove the Toyota down the asphalt drive into Holland Park Hill, turned left towards Kensington High Street and had a fairly clear drive until he reached the main street.
He played the radio and relaxed in the great solid stream of traffic as it flowed slowly along. Within an hour and a half he had parked the Toyota in his reserved space in the Piccadilly Sky Garage and breathed the rich air of the centre with pleasure. He never felt really comfortable unless he had at least fifteen miles of built-up area on all sides; and here he was happiest, walking towards Leicester Square and the Blue Boar Tavern for a quick cocktail. It wasn’t natural, he felt, for a man to have to live any other way.
In times of change, the Blue Boar did not change. The blue neon sign still glimmered outside, the plastic trees on the way down to the cocktail bar still twittered with artificial birdsong, the plastic coat-of-arms still adorned the leatherette-upholstered walls, and the lighting was still low. It was quiet and pleasantly vulgar, and the cocktails were inexpensive.
A small, pretty, dark-haired girl brought Jerry a Woomera Special—milder than the name implied: bourbon with ginger ale. A couple were sitting in the corner, and they paid little attention to Jerry or each other. Once or twice the man asked an abrupt question in German and was answered abruptly. Jerry could rarely speak German.
Leaving the Blue Boar, he went into the Beat City showrooms round the corner to see if his guitar was ready. He had ordered it after his return from Angkor.
The man took him into the basement to see it. It had an oval belly and a 24-fret neck. The strings went up to the top of the neck into a small transistorised sensitiser which automatically kept them in tune. Six pick-ups were ranged between the bridge and the neck, and there was a control for each one, with a tremolo switch and echo play and fuzz buttons. It was one of the best pieces of musical engineering Jerry had seen. The cost was £4,200 plus £1,400 tax. They plugged it into their amplifier so he could test it. It was beautiful, sound as a bell. He gave them a cheque and took it with him.
In a Welbeck Street coffee bar Jerry put in his junk order, buying The Man’s entire stock. “If your regulars are put out,” he told The Man, “tell them my address and tell them it’s free.”
At beat clubs, at Emmett’s, at bars, in bookshops and boutiques, hairdressers, grills and record shops, Jerry toured and spread the word that an open party was about to start at his Holland Park house.
When he got back to the house, carrying his heavy guitar in its flat case, he was just in time to let in the first truckload of food from the catering firm that had agreed to supply the party with almost everything it would need.
As the white-coated men began to lay the stuff out, Jerry locked the doors leading down to the basement. They were steel, eight inches thick, and would open only to a specific vocal command from him.
On the ground floor, the two rooms could be opened out into one. The only furniture was cushions scattered about on the carpet and a large stereo tele-radiogram-tape-recorder combination. Ten-inch spools of tape were ready, and Jerry switched them on to test them. They relayed music through speakers everywhere in the house.
He began to feel depressed.
He opened the guitar case and took out the instrument. He plugged in the lead and plugged the other end into the combination’s amplifier, switching off the tape.
He played a brief E-flat progression, trying out a simple tune based on Rufus Thomas’s “All Night Worker”. It didn’t come out properly. He adjusted the pick-ups and tone controls and tried again, this time in B flat. It had nothing in it. He sighed.
He tried out a number of other basic progressions. Nothing was wrong with the guitar, but there was something wrong with him.
He put the guitar away, switched on the tapes again, and went upstairs to change.
* * *
The Man and a couple of friends were the first arrivals. “I thought I’d avail myself of the facilities,” said The Man, taking off his heavy raincoat. He wore a high-collared green corduroy jacket and Hamlet tights. He looked a wow.
The flood was on, and half-suspicious guests got the mood of the place before they let themselves relax. There were Turkish and Persian lesbians with huge houri eyes like those of sad, neutered cats; French tailors, German musicians; Jewish martyrs; a fire-eater from Suffolk; a barber-shop quartet from Britain’s remaining American base—the Columbia Club, in Lancaster Gate; two fat prudes; Hans Smith of Hampstead, Last of the Left-Wing Intellectuals—the Microfilm Mind; Shades; fourteen dealers in the same antique from Portobello Road, their faces sagging under the weight of their own self-deception; a jobless Polish french-polisher brought by one of the dealers; a pop group called the Deep Fix; a pop group called Les Coques Sucrés; a tall negro; a hunchbacked veterinarian named Marcus; the Swedish girl and a juicy youngster; three journalists, who had just finished spending their golden handshakes; Little Miss Dazzle, whom one of them had discovered in El Vino’s looking for Mr Crookshank; an Irishman called Poodles; the literary editor of the Oxford Mail and his sister; twenty-seven members of the Special Branch; a heterosexual; two small children; the late great Charlie Parker, just in from Mexico
under his alias Alan Bird—he had been cleaning up for years; a morose psychiatrist from Regent’s Park named Harper; a great many physicists, astrologers, geographers, mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, biologists, musicians, monks from disbanded monasteries, warlocks, out-of-work whores, students, Greeks, solicitors; a self-pitying albino; an architect; most of the pupils from the local comprehensive school, who had heard the noise and come in; most of their teachers; Jerry’s mum; a market gardener; less than one New Zealander; two hundred Hungarians who had Chosen Freedom and the chance to make a fast buck; a sewing-machine salesman; the mothers of twelve of the children from the comprehensive school; the father of one of the children from the comprehensive school, though he didn’t know it; a butcher; Major Nye and Una Persson; another Man; a Displaced Person; “Flash” Gordon Gavin; a small painter; and several hundred other individuals not immediately identifiable, including a Colonel Pyat.
Jerry, suffering from a little paramnesia—a recurrent but brief condition to which, like Miss Brunner, he was subject—had the impression that he had met everyone before but couldn’t place most of them. He also had the impression of having said everything before, but he recognised what was happening and paid no attention.
(“So you’ve been in Lapland,”) a fat bishop said. “So you’ve been in Lapland.”
(“Yes.”) “Yes.”
(“What for?”) “What for?”
(“You won’t believe me.”) “You won’t believe me.”
(“Tell me a convincing lie.”) “Tell me a convincing lie.”
(“To study the similarities between the Ragnarok theme and the second law of thermodynamics.”) “To study the similarities between the Ragnarok theme and the second law of thermodynamics.” Jerry’s mind jerked back onto its normal wavelength. “You know: the gods and men against the giants; fire against ice—heat against cold. Ragnarok and the Heat Death of the Universe, my next paper.”
The fat bishop giggled, patted Jerry’s bottom, and moved off to tell the embroidered anecdote to his colleagues.
The Swedish girl saw him. “Jerry! Where did you go?”