Fistful of digits, p.23
Fistful of Digits, page 23
“All right, all right. Don’t get huffy! Who’s installing the camera?”
“That,” said Rawlins, tight-lipped, “will be arranged for you. All you have to do is to watch him on your pocket-monitor and make sure he doesn’t actually take a swipe at the wire. The tee-vee picture will, of course, be relayed here and analysed as to his actual intention.”
“I fail to see how you can tell what he means to do, if you don’t actually let him do it. How can you analyse something that doesn’t happen?”
Rawlins nagged: “Could you tell any better? — just by watching him?”
“Not if I’ve got to stop him doing it.”
“Exactly!”
Forbes was just about to say something when he got an indicator-light for Mike No. 1 — the microphone installed in Williams’ office down at Exeter. Simultaneously a tape recorder started up on the rack. Forbes turned up the volume on the monitor speaker. “Hang on, Rawlins…Someone’s in Williams’ office…”
The sound seemed to be that of a girl crying…Then Williams’ voice: “Nurse, what are you doing in here? It’s late. Hadn’t you better be getting to bed?”
“Is it true? That you’re going to send me away?”
“We think all this is too much of a strain on you. You were nearly attacked physically by Mr Friend tonight and I feel very badly about it…
And flop! — another paradox light came up on Forbes’ indicator panel. Forbes frowned, then called Rawlins again. “I’ve got another light.”
Rawlins’ voice, even when distorted by the intercom, sounded a little tense. “Yes, I know…Now why is that…? Wait a minute.”
Forbes didn’t wait, but said: “Why is she emotional?”
“I said, wait…I’m just getting a display here.”
“Well, kindly switch it through to my teleprinter.”
And the machine clacked into action:
QUERY EMOTIONAL REACTION NURSE ESSENTIAL POSITIVE INFM REGARDING FREID PROGRESS WHY RPT WHY NURSE NOT USING COMMUNICATIONS UNIT WHEN NEEDED
Forbes thought a second, then tapped out on the console machine:
SVX LCL FROM FORBES: DO THEY OR DO THEY NOT KNOW MIKES INSTALLED
There was quite a long pause before the answer came back:
SVX LCL TO FORBES: ESTIMATE LIKELIHOOD DISCOVERY OF MIKES NOW AT HJKY**PQQQQQ…CORRECTION ESTIMATE LIKELIHOOD DISCBBBLMMM CONTACT NUCLEAR SITE US INSTALLATION BASE O- FORTY AMBER ALERT RET AMBER ALERT HJKY**PQQQQQ ******** CANCEL THIS TRANSMISSION FAULT REPORT 911 INTERFERENCE DEFENCE CIRCUIT PENTAGON STANDBY…
Forbes just sat and stared at it. Then:
TFK TO CMC: TOP-SECRET/MOST IMMEDIATE…INVESTIGATE SOURCE OF INTERFERENCE RE CONTROL CIRCUIT BASE O-FORTY TREAT MAXIMUM URGENCY CALL WHITEHOUSE HOTLINE AND REPORT
Rawlins snapped on the squawkbox: “Okay, Forbes. This is our problem. Call us when you reach Porthcurno.”
All the way to Cornwall Peter had braced himself against the emotional desolation that awaited him in Porthcurno: and yet, when he swung down the lane at dawn, past the puritan white of the Cable & Wireless buildings, the full impact of sickening loneliness sent his body weak and produced a lump in his throat almost too humdrum for the situation which produced it.
He parked the car, then retrieved some suitably vicious-looking tools from the rear seat and chucked them on to the macadam. The clatter resounded through moist morning air, then echoed back from the buildings on either side. Few cars shared the tarmac with his. A forlorn GPO van; a battered station-wagon which — prosaically — Peter happened to remember from that other time; a maintenance truck belonging to some radio shop…these were the only vehicles left out in the weather.
Peter walked down to the shore.
Here, to the right, rising up from the vee-form of the beach, was the pathway along which Christina had initially led him. He observed it from the standpoint of the rusting tin of the diamond-shaped sign…Telegraph Cables…
It’s quite simple really. It’s got it written on the front.
The brisk coastal wind plucked at the loose bolts that held the diamond to the metal post. The resulting clatter was the stark voice of despair. Below, the sea slapped pebbles and drew them, rattling, out towards the receding tide. It was a rough, surfing commotion of salt and spray. Out of sight where the second, forbidden bay awaited him, thudding rollers impacted against granite where the inlet was unsheltered to the Atlantic.
Now, he started up the steep slope that had come second on their list that other morning. He dreaded reaching the place where the exposed cable was. It was a nook in the landscape for memories.
Gulls circled as Peter heaved all that gear up the gradient…Big rocks on the high cliff and a petulant coastal wind tearing at the other diamond.
“I’ve got to count sixty paces. That brings us to one of those gaps in the rocks. We have to hit the right gap. You’ll see why soon…”
The salt sting in Peter’s eyes did not now come from the sea. Nor was Peter ashamed of this sudden burst of sobbing, a long cry that heaved itself from inner depths and defied all pretensions of control and discretion. He ran/slid/ran along the narrow path cut in the crumbling side of the cliff, careless of the dangers.
And by the gulley he stood, with his lament tearing at his muscles so that they ached. The ache relented slightly as he focused on a ship, slowly traversing the far horizon.
There was waiting to be done…and Williams, thought Peter was not exactly original in stating that this was the truly difficult part…
So you wait, and you feel they are watching you — so that the flesh contracts and the stubble on it rises, as if the caress of danger could be met fractionally that much earlier by the extent of each short hair.
Watched…by whom? — by what? Supposing you did really slash at that cable? — slicing the spinal nerve and paralysing all beyond it? How could Servex afford to entertain even that remotest possibility?. No; they must know your every reflexive move…they must have sensitized this gusty shoreline, even to the extension of the tingling hairs on your forearm.
How? Where? Cameras?
Well, there’s that tee-vee van, down in the car park. What else could it be doing there? The wizards of Cable & Wireless would surely do their own radio repairs? It can’t be for their benefit…, must be for mine.
Cat and Mouse…me watching you watching me.
I have only to raise the axe in preparation and…
I can’t wait much longer…I’ll have to commit myself soon.
What a fatuous performance! — and what a farce if, after all, no one shows up…if, after all, this old bit of cable is a dud from long ago, leading nowhere, except to sheer ridicule…
I’ll just wait until that ship out there disappears behind the prick of Land’s End…
What will they do when they find me here? These people use cameras, not artillery. They haven’t the guts to open fire…haven’t the nerve to shoot down an airliner. Instead, they indoctrinate some family-minded captain — and to hell with his wife and kids…So what’s my brain in for? — a pair of electrical contacts?
I’m freezing to death and the ship’s round the point so I’ll take this damned axe and…
*
As if by magic — or at least by means of the thumbnail monitor in his hand — John Forbes was suddenly there on the path. He stoned his former, friendly self. Thick, over-long hair flipping untidily in the high breeze, he noted the axe with a grin and said: “Please don’t do that, Peter.”
Peter lowered the axe, waited.
Forbes gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder. “Why fight it, Peter? Why align with dinosaurs like Stranger? They can’t win, you know. I happen to be absolutely certain of that…” He shouldered Peter and steered the way back down the path. “Yesterday’s individual is merely today’s eccentric. No influence, you see. That’s what is different. There’s the rub! It’s all so inevitable, you see, Peter. I could have told you — I tried to tell you. Now I’m going to prove it. That is, if you’ll let me maintain a degree of secrecy. Will you?”
“I don’t know what that entails.”
“I’ll explain. The only way — and I’m convinced it’s the only way! — of persuading you to shed all that anachronistic armour of yours (you remember we talked about that?) is to show you, not what you’re up against, Peter, but what you’re missing. It’s the difference between negative and positive…Do you mind leaving your car here in Porthcurno?”
“No.”
“Good. I’m afraid I have to do something slightly melodramatic…I mean that’s the way you’ll see it. It’s not the way I intend it.” They had reached the top cable marker. Forbes flipped the diamond with his fingernails, “Then you won’t really want to cut up our cables, I promise you. Were you really going to do it? I suppose you were!” He led on down, “The point is, I can’t afford to let you find out where we’re going — industrial secrets are industrial secrets. But I can afford to show you some of the facilities at our disposal. You can then go and tell your charmingly misguided friends down at the Freid. Hell, someone’s got to tell them! We can’t have nice people making asses of themselves forever.” He pointed to the tee-vee van. “A ‘closed vehicle’ — as I believe such jalopies are officially referred to by the police. But this one is fitted out rather nicely. I can even boil you an egg for your breakfast. Or we could open a whisky bottle, if you prefer that. You can wash and clean up and sit dozing in a very comfortable armchair. What you can’t do is to look out. The doors will be locked from the outside and there are no windows. Do you mind that? Do you trust me?”
“Naturally. You people don’t commit crimes.”
Forbes smiled, repeating the phrase satirically. “You people! What a moral judgement that sounds! Never mind. This is the truck. My driver will now lock us in. We have our own loo so don’t panic.”
The truck moved off from Porthcurno. Peter felt no excitement — just exhaustion.
“What you need,” said Forbes helpfully, “is some sleep. But perhaps, in company with me, you wouldn’t care to risk it? You fear machines as you fear big money, Peter, but even doctors prescribe sleeping pills and we have a long way to go.”
“What has my fear of machines got to do with sleeping pills?”
Forbes started to get something out of a locker. “I was attempting —” he strained to reach his arm far enough down…I was attempting to break, somewhat gently, the concept of offering the use of my sleep inducer.” He grinned. “I thought that if I planted the notion that pills, in fact, are machines which manipulate the brain chemistry, I might — albeit gingerly — move from there to the idea of something more recognizably mechanical without shocking you too much…bearing in mind, you see, your primitive superstitions.”
The truck jerked to a halt and there was shouting outside. Forbes paused in the act of getting the equipment out of the locker, watching Peter with sardonic amusement. The truck started convulsively up a steep incline and Forbes still watched him. “At least,” said Forbes, when the truck had returned to the horizontal, “I can enlighten you about the next stage —”
But Peter had figured it. “But you don’t have to, John. We are boarding a freighter aircraft.”
“Bright boy.”
“Not really. Even dinosaurs have noses; and the smell of aviation spirit is coming through the air conditioning.” An aero engine started up. Clanks and clangings from below as clamps were fixed to the wheels of the van. Then the whine of a starter as the second engine turned. It fired, and the juddering rhythm of propellers pulsed up through the tyres and the springs, sloshing Scotch around in the bottle on the cocktail cabinet.
Peter said drily: “Isn’t the pilot supposed to check that things are secured, in here?”
“Don’t worry. Jim trusts me.” Forbes slid the bottle into a wall-mounted ring. “I’m afraid there are no seat belts and I agree it’s strictly illegal to carry passengers in this way. But it’s so comfortable in here.”
The aircraft brakes were released and they started to taxi. Peter said: “So go on about the sleep inducer.”
“I wanted to see how far your neurotic horror of electronic magic extends.”
“Not that far.” Sleep inducers were nothing new and Peter was prepared to resume the game of Cat and Mouse if it led anywhere.
And it did. The apparatus Forbes produced was not a sleep machine at all…it was a unit identical with the one Stranger had been handed by the police at the accident site; identical, also, with the apparatus used by the nurse before she hit the button which fired a fuse inside.
Forbes’ confidence in the mystique and secrecy of this was Peter’s real break. It evidently hadn’t occurred to anyone at Servex that the equipment might have been discovered.
And as the freighter took off, wallowing along an undulating runway, then heaving itself reluctantly into the morning air, Peter did a simple computation all his own.
It had struck him, when Forbes first announced his intention, that it would be unwise of the Servex people to admit an alien personality into premises which were clearly secret — unless rigorous steps could be taken to ensure the continued maintenance of security. Though it had occurred to Peter that they might have had it in mind to hold him prisoner there, he’d discarded this idea immediately because such a scheme would have been in conflict with all precedents. “You people don’t commit crimes” was true — they never did. Murder, their version, is no crime.
So as the aircraft banked and the pilot set course for whatever mystery destination happened to be detailed on his flight plan, Peter deduced that the use of the Communication Unit could only be to limit either his movements within Servex or the amount of detail he remembered once he’d left there.
He watched John Forbes’ poker face, and marvelled that anyone could have such blind faith in a machine. His plan naively ignored what any cheap detective would have considered: that the other side might be on to it. One facet of computerized behaviour seemed to be this very limited capacity for considering areas of possibility. It tallied, of course, with the correspondingly limited circuit-capacity of computers by comparison with the human brain.
Forbes removed the whisky bottle from its holding ring and topped up the glasses. During this, Peter did a sum: how to wear those headphones without succumbing to the hidden message?
And the answer? — to short-circuit the flex, leading from the little black box, in a way which would leave no trace.
The flex was ordinary fabric-covered lighting wire…the same sort that any table lamp sprouts from its base. Under the fabric would be a thickness of rubber insulation.
The thing to do would be to press something with a sharp edge across the two wires. This would make contact for as long as you held it there, while the thickness of the rubber would still maintain the insulation the moment you removed it. And the can opener would do very well, thank you.
Forbes, smiling through sadistic spectacles, asked: “Well?”
“Okay. Let’s play with your toy, John.”
Peter reached for his refurbished drink; and while Forbes glanced down in order to plug the black box into a point in the side of the van, Peter got hold of the can opener — one of those cheap metal ones — and kept it clenched in his fist.
All was ready. Peter put on the headphones; and it looked perfectly logical to pass the flex through a protective hand, to prevent the wire from fouling the whisky glass now on the chair arm.
Forbes, watching Peter closely, but — almost predictably — missing the one essential, smiled slightly and said: “Wanna go bye-byes?”
*
Peter’s ensuing sleep was genuine, though not stimulated by any artificial means. Anxiety and misery over Christina had shortened many consecutive nights; and the tension resulting from resisting the urge to take drastic, dramatic measures which would have resolved nothing had been a continual strain.
Though he awoke momentarily on touchdown he was conscious of nothing further until John’s sardonic, sneering lilt broke into his uneasy sleep. “Up we get!” said John.
The vehicle dipped downward and whined jerkily in bottom gear down a steep incline. For a moment Peter thought they were just quitting the carcass of the aircraft, till he realized that had already happened some time back.
So they must be entering Servex itself; and this alerted Peter the more sharply because he could only guess how he might be expected to respond. He chose, in fact, merely to obey obvious commands without resistance. At the same time he considered this should be done without any change in his general attitude. It was an exacting course to pursue.
The establishment they were now in endured the structural embarrassment of being unfinished; so that whatever pretensions to modernity applied higher up in the building they had not penetrated this level. In this low-ceilinged area there was merely the stuffy smell of fresh concrete and the sound of air conditioning plant…and the receding footsteps of the truck driver clacking across the damp stone floor. Flush-fitting manhole covers in the floor suggested an even lower level further down.
Once through the bulkhead door, Peter found the layout of the place — this section at any rate — was practical and conformed closely with the design practices currently in vogue in modern office premises or at airports or factory buildings. At the same time many of the fittings were recognizably identical with those at the Clinic of the Snows.
As he and Forbes left the elevator at the second floor Peter found that despite his ruse to ensure immunity from the Unit there was something about the superb efficiency evident here which made you want to believe in it. The effect of the cool proficiency of calm technologists in trim white coats, tending excellently designed equipment which receded, in orderly rows, all the way down the computer room, was hypnotically persuasive and gave you an acute attack of if you can’t fight ’em, join ’em. The faint, clean smell, conveyed by the air conditioning ducts, of pleasantly disinfected air…the meticulous placing of glare-free lighting…the immaculate, eye-pleasing detail in choice of colour, integrated furnishings, scrupulously neutral carpeting…crisply polite rejoinders from contented workers — all these combined to obliterate a succession of memories of the seamier side and the tendency now was to conform immediately and find some excuse for each so as to beg the question of before.
