The Future Makers (v1.0), page 14
Turning he saw two figures, black against the sand, climb out of his trap and run to the water. They fired again. The big bullets whined out to sea as Tyne dropped flat.
Rosks could swim like sharks. In their first year on Earth, before the trouble began, they had entered the Olympic Games and won all the aquatic events with ease. No doubt they could swim as fast as a fishing boat moving in a light breeze.
Fumbling into the bottom of the boat, Tyne’s steel left hand found the gun dropped by the Rosk he had overpowered. He grabbed it with a whispered word of thanks.
Budda and his companion were wading out, still firing and clutching their torch. They made perfect targets. Steadying his aim over the side of the boat, Tyne drew a bead on the War-Colonel. The wind was taking the sail now, making the boat dip as it left the lee of the island. He tried to synchronize his firing with the motion, ignoring a hissing missile that slashed through a plank not a foot from his face.
It was funny to be trying to kill someone on such a grand night…Now!
The Rosk weapon was superb. Recoil was non-existent. Across the level waters, not so many yards from the boat, Budda croaked once like a frog and pitched forward into the sea, carrying the torch with him.
“My God!” Tyne said. He said it again and again, as his boat gathered speed, dragging him over the moon-smeared waves. After the shock of killing came the exultation of it; he was almost frightened by the savage delight of his new mood. He could do anything. He could save the world.
The exultation quenched itself as he wondered where Budo Budda was now; whether anything of the Rosk survived apart from the body peering fixedly down into dark water. Then Tyne deliberately turned to face more practical matters.
Midnight was an hour and a half away. Time slid away from him like the wake of the boat. Murray had to be found before the Rosks reached him—unless he had been found already. Obviously, the first thing to be done on reaching the mainland was for Tyne to report all he knew to Stobart, or to someone in authority. To think to continue a lone hunt for Murray was foolish: yet Tyne found himself longing to do just that, to confront the monster, to…
Yes, he wanted to kill the big, laconic space captain. Even—and it was shrinkingly he recognized the urge in himself—he wanted to feel that terrible exhilaration of killing for its own sake.
But another side of his nature merely wanted to solve the puzzle of Murray’s disappearance and all that hung along it. Merely! Tyne fumed to think he had been unconscious during those vital seconds in Area 101, of which Murray had given one account, Stobart another. The truth might lie in either or neither of them, and the truth might never be revealed. Truth was a primal force, almost like gravity; like gravity, it was always there, yet some people never even realized its presence.
Pocketing the .88 gun, Tyne steadied the high, stiff, tiller. One of his earlier memories, half embedded in the silt of forgetting, was of himself in his pram and certainly not more than three years old. He was throwing a toy out of his pram. The toy fell to the ground. Every time he threw it, the fool thing went down. He tried with other toys, with his shoes, his hat, his blankets. They all went down. He still remembered the disappointment of it. Even today he still hated that lack of choice.
Truth had the same inevitability about it; he just had to go on throwing facts overboard and it would eventually reveal itself to him. This time it was worth persevering: the future of Earth hung upon it.
At the moment, it seemed to him almost an abstract problem. He knew he should be hating the Rosks, the five thousand of them here, the millions of them mustering back on Alpha II. Yet the hate did not work; could that be merely because he knew one of them to be both brave and beautiful?
He switched his attention to sailing. The sail was cumbersome, the boat did not handle readily. It would probably, Tyne reflected, take him longer to get back from the island to Sumatra than the scout ships took from Sumatra to Luna. Progress was a fever from which many parts of the world were immune; a thousand centuries on, and paddy fields would still be cultivated by hand. For a race set on attaining their blessings in the life to come, material innovation may be a complete irrelevance. Tyne, consequently, was going where the wind blew.
But he was lucky. A south-east monsoon wind had him. In half an hour, the coast was in sight. In another hour, Tyne was steering in under the dark cliffs, looking for a place to scramble ashore. On a small, rocky promontory, two native huts sagged under their load of thatch; a yellow light burned in one of them. Running the boat ashore on sand and stones, Tyne climbed out and made for the dwellings.
Among the trees stood a small kampong. It smelt good: smoky and sweet. Tyne found an old man, smoking the last half-inch of a cheroot in the moonlight, who would lead him to a road. As they walked, Tyne learnt with relief that he was no more than a dozen miles south of Padang.
“Not an hour’s walking from here,” the old man said, “is a telephone in which you may speak to certain people at the capital. If you say to them to send a fast car, a fast car will come.”
“Thanks for the suggestion. Ill certainly do as you say. Whereabouts is this phone? In a house or a shop?”
“No, the telephone is in the new sea water works, where sea water is turned into food.”
Tyne recognized this description; the old man was referring’ to the plankton plant at Semapang. He thanked him gratefully when they reached the road, asking him to accept the fishing boat as a present Much delighted with this, the native in return produced some food wrapped in a palm leaf which he insisted Tyne should have. Tyne thanked him and set off with a good heart. The folded leaf contained boiled rice, pleasantly spiced and with a few shreds of asswabi added. Tyne ate ravenously as he walked. Though the road was no more than a track, every rut in it lay clearly exposed in the moonlight On either side stood the jungle, still as an English wood, forbidding as an English summer.
Fifty minutes passed before he gained the first sight of the plankton plant By then, Tyne was feeling less fresh than he had done. The moon was inclined to hide behind accumulating cloud. Leaning against a tree, he paused to rest and consider. Thunder grumbled like thought above the treetops.
Mina, when Tyne questioned her in the Roxy, had said that Murray was coming here, to the plankton plant. The spy patrol captain could have only one reason for visiting this place. The plant was completely automated; at the most, it was peopled only by an odd engineer during the day and a guard at night. Murray must have chosen the spot as a hideout until he could make contact with his Rosk agent. On the face of it, it seemed a remote and unlikely spot to choose: but that in itself might be a good reason for choosing it.
Tyne’s mind was made up. In his pocket was the Roskian .88 gun. He would hunt down Murray himself; if he were here, he would find him. There was a personal score to be settled with Murray. After that would be time enough to phone Stobart of the U.N.C.
Through the enamelled outlines of the trees, the bulk of the plankton plant loomed. It looked, in the wan moonlight like an iceberg. And like an iceberg, much of its bulk lay below water, for it stood on the edge of the sea, its rear facing onto land, its massive front thrusting out into the Indian Ocean.
Every day, millions of tons of sea water were sucked into its great vats, to be regurgitated later, robbed of their plankton content. These minute organisms were filtered into tanks of nutrient solution, fed and fattened, before being passed over to the synthesizing processes, which turned them into compressed foodstuffs, highly nourishing if barely palatable. Such plants, established at intervals round the shores of the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, had done much to alleviate the semi-famine conditions hitherto prevailing in the more populous areas of the tropics.
Tyne approached the place cautiously.
Though he had never been here before, he found it all familiar, thanks to the publicity it enjoyed. He knew that the plant was almost impossible to break into. Where, then, would a hunted man hide? One answer seemed most likely: on the seaward facade.
There, numerous arches and buttresses over the submarine mouth of the plant would afford shelter from the elements—and from all but a personal, on-the-spot-search.
Now Tyne was going to make that search.
He slid round a deserted car park. Clouds drifted over the moon; he was happy to take advantage of them. At the end of the park was a high wall. Over the wall was a narrow passage, and then the main building, rising sheer. Carrying an empty oil drum across to the wall, Tyne stood on it, crouched, jumped upwards. Clawing desperately, he pulled himself on top of the wall. He crouched and listened. Nothing. Only the murmur of the sea, the stammering call of a night bird.
Hie impossibility of getting onto the building now dawned on him. The white walls rose a hundred and fifty feet above him, stretching away unbrokenly on either side, and punctuated only by a dark streak some yards away. Keeping his head down, Tyne wormed along the top of the wall; the dark streak resolved itself into a steel ladder, starting some fourteen feet above the ground and going right up to the roof.
Tyne, getting opposite to it, stood up on the wall and jumped forward, across the passage below. Seizing the rungs with both hands, he got a foothold. His steel hand was nearly wrenched from its socket with the sudden exertion; he clung there motionless until the pain in his arm had subsided. The darkness grew thicker and thicker while he waited. Thunder rumbled overhead. Then he began the upward climb.
Even as he started, the rain began. Tyne heard it swishing through the jungle towards him. Next moment, it hit him as if trying to squash him against the wall. He wondered grimly how long it was since he had last been completely dry and continued to climb.
Once on the roof, he squatted and peered about him, trying to see through the wet darkness. Raincloud now obscured the moon. To his right, he saw tall ventilation stacks and heard the rain drumming against them. He was cursing, half-aloud. He was cursing the whole universe, suns and moons and planets but especially planets, for harbouring freak phenomena like life and weather.
Advancing on hands and knees, he made for the seaward side. One last ridge to crawl up, one last ridge to slither perilously down, and he crouched on the top of the facade of the building. Below him were the arches and cavities in which he expected to find Murray. Below that, irritable now, lay the sea.
He could dimly see it, needled unceasingly by the downpour, sucking and slumping against the plant. Immediately below him was a patch of relatively calm water. This lay inside the plankton mesh, a vast perforated screen which ensured that nothing larger than a small shrimp would be sucked into the plant’s internal processes. On the other side of the mesh, spray fountained.
In the noise about him, Tyne had lost the need for concealment. He stood up now and shouted, cupping his hands round his mouth.
“Murray!”
The cry was washed away at once into the gutters of soundlessness. He did not shout again.
With water streaming down his face, Tyne dropped onto hands and knees, to begin a crawl along the leading parapet, looking for another inspection ladder that would enable him to get down the facade.
He found one. Grinning to himself with satisfaction, he swung his legs over the edge of the drop. As he took his first foothold, a shot rang out.
Tyne froze. He crouched with his head against the streaming concrete, body tensed against pain. It was impossible to tell where the shot had come from, from above or from below. For the space of ten unendurable seconds, he lay rigid. Then he slithered down the ladder as fast as he could go, heedless of the pain in his good hand and wrist. The wind buffeted him as he went.
No more shots sounded. But in the dark, someone was trailing him.
Tyne climbed off the ladder onto a narrow catwalk. Here was shelter. The architects responsible for the elaborate artificiality of this seaward facade had arched off this layer of it with a row of small, blind tunnels. If Murray was anywhere in the vicinity, the chances were that he would be here. As Tyne entered the first arch, a startled seabird clattered past his face, squawking. He stood quite still until his heart stopped jumping.
Then he began to move from one arch to the next, fumbling, looking for Murray. It was a nerve-racking business. Underfoot, a slippery mess of bird droppings made the going doubly perilous.
He had reached the third arch along when a watery moon slid through for a moment. Glancing back over his shoulder, Tyne saw a figure climbing down the steps he had just left. Man or Rosk? And if man: was it Murray? Acting hurriedly but indecisively, Tyne swung round to face his pursuer. His foot slid across the slippery concrete, went over the edge.
Before he could save himself, Tyne had fallen from the catwalk. For an instant, his ten fingers, five steel, five painfully flesh, scraped safety; then he was dropping freely, plunging down towards the sea.
Dark water slammed up to meet him. He hit it shoulder first and went under. As he came up gasping, he saw he was inside the plankton mesh.
Someone seemed to be calling from a long way off. The rain beat down like a solid thing, raising slashes from the sea, so that the surface was impossible to define. Tyne choked down water as he swam for the wall.
Then over all the rest of the noise came a new one. It was low and continuous, the roar of a superhumanly angry bull. Tyne felt his legs caught, his progress halted, as if the sound itself had hold of him. He was being drawn underwater. Fighting, shouting, he realized what was happening. The plant’s subterranean intake gates had opened. He was inside the screen. He was going to be turned into plankton juice.
Somewhere below him, sluices swung wide. The man was dragged under, over and over, swept into the throat of the great plant, helpless as a leaf in a storm. The last shreds Of light and air were tom from his world.
V
The swamping pounding liquid registered on his tousled sense as sound: sound roaring him to death.
In the blundering blackness before Tyne’s eyes, pictures squirmed like worms, sharing his agony. They were images of his past life bubbling up, scum-like, to the surface of his drowning brain. Incidents from his personal history returned to him, enfolding him as if to protect him from present pain. Then they were gone.
The bubble of the past had burst His head was above water again. Exhaustedly, gulping down air, Tyne paddled to keep afloat in the racing water. Faint reflected lights rode on the flood round him. He was somewhere inside the huge, automated plant, which was dimly lit by multicoloured guide-lights here and there. The factory was cybemetically controlled, tenanted by robot devices. No one would save him if he could not save himself.
In his relief at finding his head above water, Tyne did not for a minute realize the grimness of his new predicament. He was simply content to float at the top of a rising tide of water, breathing and snorting painfully. Beyond thick glass, he could see the interior of the plant, where a shadowy file of processing tanks, moving by jerks, slowly revolved vats of jelly; endless pipes and presses marched into the background. He could see too, negligently, successive floors of the edifice sink from his gaze as the water lifted him up and up.
His mind snapped back into something like its normal degree of awareness. Searchingly, Tyne looked about. He had come up through the bottom of, and was now imprisoned in, a great glass tube with a diameter of some fifteen feet, standing a full six stories high.
Peering through the glass in sudden agitation, Tyne saw other giant tubes ranged alongside his, like the pipes of some overblown organ. The tubes stretched from base to roof of the plant, through all floors, and were filling rapidly with the incoming sea water.
Tyne looked up. The ceiling was growing closer. The tube was filling right up to the top.
This was inevitable. He knew immediately where he was. These entry tubes took each intake of water. When they were filled, great filter plungers came down from the top like slow pistons, filtering through the sea water, compressing plankton to the bottom of the tube: and not only plankton, but any other solid which happened to be there. Mercifully, Tyne Leslie would be dead by drowning before he was crushed against the bottom.
Between the turbulent water surface and the underside of the plunger, only some nine feet remained; the distance was decreasing rapidly.
Groaning, treading water, Tyne felt in his trouser pocket. The Rosk .88 was still there. Tearing it free, Tyne lifted it above the surface of the water.
Six feet left between him and the plunger.
He prayed that a man who had once told him that these weapons were unaffected by water had spoken the truth. Shaking it, he turned over onto his back, floated, aimed at the glass imprisoning him.
Five feet of air above him.
He squeezed the trigger. As always with this incredible weapon, there was no recoil. The big slug shattered the tube up, down and sideways, converting it in a flash into a multitude of glass shards, a foot thick and some of them a couple of stories long. Tyne was swept at this fearsome barrier by the weight of released water.
It carried him right out into the factory. For a moment, a great gulf extending down into the bowels of the plant hung below him. Then he snatched at and clung to a balcony railing. His arms creaked at their sockets but he clung there. As though for an age, Tyne hung on; as though for an age, water and glass cascaded past him, a waterfall containing death. With a great effort, he climbed over the rail to safety, hardly realizing himself alive.
Another sound roused him, a sound easy to identify: a siren was wailing; directly he punctured the big tube, an automatic alarm had gone off.
To be caught in there would mean the end of everything. Forfeiting his freedom might mean losing the last chance of finding Murray, even the last chance of passing the vital information gained from Benda Ittai on to the proper authorities. Tyne got up, dripping, pushing the wet hair back from his eyes. He was on a catwalk; a couple of feet away, crates of processed plankton, now disguised as steaks and pastes and spreads, moved briskly on a conveyor belt. And rapid footsteps sounded near at hand.
