A Cure for Cancer

  The planes passed and the helicopters chattered by. As far as Jerry could make out they were all heading due north, which meant that Derry & Toms, if it had so far missed the strike, would probably be okay for a little while.

  He took a bearing off the Albert Memorial and bumped over the dying grass until he splashed into the Round Pond by accident and had to operate the screws for an instant as he crossed the pond and at last got to the Broad Walk near the London Museum, drove down the Broad Walk and came out onto a Kensington Road that was red with reflected firelight, but seemed as yet undamaged, though clouds of sodium cacodylate mixed with free cacodylic acid, water and sodium chloride drifted in the streets.

  Elsewhere Jerry recognised n-butyl ester, isobutyl ester, tri-isopropanolamine, salt picloram and other chemicals and he knew that the park had got everything—Orange, Purple, White and Blue.

  “Better safe than sorry.” He pulled up outside Derry & Toms.

  Business appeared to have fallen off badly in the last few hours, though it was relatively peaceful here. In the distance Jerry heard the sound of falling buildings, the scream of rockets, the boom of the bombs, the shouts of the dying.

  A boy and a girl ran out of the smoke, hand in hand, as he entered the store; they were on fire, making for the drinking fountain on the corner of Kensington Church Street.

  The fire would probably help cope with the plague.

  There was nothing like the chance of a fresh start.

  2. THE MAN BEHIND THE FACE THAT 350 MILLION TV VIEWERS KNOW AS THE SAINT

  Although the defoliants hadn’t yet reached the roof garden, there was a strong chemical smell as Jerry used his vibragun to shake down the door of an emergency exit and emerge into the Tudor Garden.

  He wondered at first if the machine batteries had started to leak. They had been manufactured hastily, for the machine had originally been intended only as a prototype. It was Jerry’s fault that he had tried it out in the Shifter and had lost it in the ensuing confusion.

  Jerry placed the odour at last. It was Dettol.

  The disinfectant had been used to hide another smell which he now recognised as the smell of corruption. It would have been good for the garden, of course, if things had been left alone. He wondered who had been here recently.

  Everything was tidy and there wasn’t a trace of an old lady. Jerry noticed with disappointment that the ducks had flown.

  He wandered across to the Spanish Garden, watching as the blue heaven gradually filled with black smoke, and climbed the wall to look at the burning city and the insane jets wheeling about the sky in their dance of death. Napalm fell. Rockets raced.

  “Out of time, out of touch,” murmured Jerry. It was what his father had always taught him. He didn’t often feel this complacent. “Goodbye, America.”

  “Europe,” said a voice with a thick Russian resonance, “can become the ultimate possibility pool. You’re slowing down, Comrade Cornelius.”

  Jerry shifted his position on the wall and looked down at the little man standing among the flowering ferns and dwarf palms, tugging at his goatee. “You’ve been taking speech training.”

  The man looked embarrassed and removed his rimless glasses. “I can’t stay long.”

  “Is my machine here?”

  “That’s what I came to tell you about, comrade. I didn’t think it was safe. I gave it to a friend of yours to look after. She was here until recently.”

  “Captain Hargreaves?”

  “I didn’t realise, until she put on her uniform, that she was with the defenders.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Presumably with the rest of her comrades, wherever that may be.”

  “You’ve never been able to do anything right, have you, you old softie.” Jerry jumped down from the wall. “Ah, well. It was nice of you to tell me.”

  “I’m sure everything will work out. Won’t it?”

  “Keep your fingers crossed, comrade.”

  The little man extended his hand. “Well, if I don’t see you again.” He vanished.

  Jerry yawned. He was getting behind on his sleep. He left the roof garden as the first wave of planes arrived in Sector D-7, leapt down the stairs as the building began to shake, and reached the street as spluttering napalm flooded through the store.

  He drove down Kensington High Street as fast as he could. He hoped Koutrouboussis and the rest were okay. If they’d been able to get out they should be safe enough at the Sunnydales Reclamation Centre.

  He didn’t feel particularly disappointed. After all, things had gone very easily up to now.

  He made for Milton Keynes.

  EXTRACTION

  Jews get out of Palistine it’s not your home anyway! Moses was the first traitor and Hitler was the Messiah!!!

  Black militant placard, Harlem

  1. OUTLAW IN THE SKY

  Jerry left the burning city behind and headed up the M1. It was a wide, lonely road, through the hushed countryside.

  He turned on the radio and tuned it to Radio Potemkin. It was playing The Yardbirds, The Moquettes, The Zephyrs, Mickie Most, the Downliners Sect, Rey Anton and the Peppermint Men, The Syndicats, The Cheynes, The Cherokees, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers. Unable to bear either the nostalgia or the quality, Jerry switched over to Radio John Paul Jones which was in the middle of putting over ‘The Vibrating Ether Proves the Cosmic Vortex’, the latest hit by Orniroffa, the Nip Nightingale. All art, thought Jerry, aspired to the condition of Muzak. What would William Morris have thought?

  It was at times like that the brain needed balming. He turned to his taper and selected Schoenberg’s Quartet No. 2, left the M1 and took a winding lane towards Oxford.

  Soon he could see the white shell of the city shining in the distance. The concrete roof was good for anything except the H-Bomb.

  He slowed down as he reached the opening of the tunnel and drove through to emerge in the shadowy darkness of Magdalen Bridge.

  The dim light from the central lamp at the highest part of the roof was reflected by the spires of the city. Power was failing, but Oxford survived.

  Jerry felt the cold. The High was full of a strange sticky dampness and black-coated figures crept miserably along beside the walls, while every so often hollow, echoing shouts and clatterings broke the stillness. The hissing noise of his own car seemed menacing.

  Stopping the Phantom VI in the car park of the Randolph Hotel he walked to the Ashmolean Museum, pushed open the heavy wooden doors and paused. A few candles in brackets on the walls lit a sinister avenue of Tompion and Knibb longcase clocks which had all stopped at a quarter past twelve. He began to walk.

  The sound of his footsteps was like that of a huge pendulum, regular and ponderous. He came to the locked door at the end of the avenue and took a key from his pocket, turned it in the lock, opened the door and descended the stone staircase, lighting his way with his torch.

  Climbing downwards for half an hour he at last reached a tunnel which led to another door. Unlocking this, he came to a room containing a small power plant. He crossed to the plant and depressed a lever.

  The plant whispered and then hummed softly and steadily. Lights went on. Jerry switched off his torch, passed through two more empty chambers until he came to a fourth room which was lined on three sides with cupboards that had mirrors set into their panels. The cupboards had been imported from Sweden nine years earlier. The mirrors were more recent.

  The room was carpeted with a deep, red, Russian rug. On it stood a couch draped with white mink covers and yellow silk sheets. It was unmade. Against the wall near the door was a neat console operating a series of small monitor screens and microtronic indicator boards, all slightly archaic in design and function but still in good working order. Jerry had not been here since he had left the seminary.

  Sitting on the couch, he tugged off his block-heeled boots; he removed his jacket and his shoulder holster and dropped them on the floor, pulled back the pillows and touched a
stud on the control panel set in the low headboard. The console activated, he lay and watched it for a bit until he felt up to visiting the morgue.

  * * *

  The room had become unfamiliar, yet a lot of things had happened here. The Shifter gateways had been erected, the earliest prototype of the machine had been built, the Web completed and, of course, those ridiculous books had been written. It had been a rapid development really, from priest to politician to physicist, but it had been necessary and, he supposed, inevitable.

  He was drained. He smiled and shrugged. Perhaps he had better visit the Web before he went to the morgue. It was still very cold in the room. It would take a while for the place to warm up.

  This had been his grandfather’s complex originally, before the old man had moved to Normandy, and his father had inherited it, passing it on to him. His father had built and stocked the morgue, too.

  He got up shivering, opened one of the mirrored panels and stepped through into a well-lit corridor with four steel doors on each side and another steel door at the end. He rested his palm against the fourth door on the right and it opened. A peg behind the door supported a clean black car coat. Jerry put it on and buttoned up. The schizophrenia had been bad at first, his father had said. He had been lucky not to inherit the worst of it.

  There were ten drawers set low into the far wall. Each drawer was labelled with a name. Jerry opened the first drawer on the left and looked down into the eyes of the pale, beautiful girl with the tangled black hair.

  He touched the cold skin of her breasts.

  “Catherine…”

  He stroked the face and drew a deep breath.

  Then he bent down and picked her up, carrying her from the morgue and back to the bedchamber with the console.

  Placing her in the bed, he stripped off the rest of his clothes and lay beside her, feeling the heat flow out of his body into hers.

  His life was so dissipated, he thought. But there was no other way to spend it.

  “Catherine…”

  She stirred.

  He knew there could only be a few seconds left.

  “Catherine.”

  The eyes opened and the lips moved. “Frank?”

  “Jerry.”

  “Jerry?” Her perfect brow frowned slightly.

  “I’ve got a message for you. There’s some hope. That’s the message. There’s a chance of love. Mum…”

  Her eyes warmed, then faded, then closed.

  Trembling with a terrible cold, Jerry began to cry. He staggered from the bed, fell to his knees, got up and lurched from the chamber into the corridor, pressing his frozen palm against the first door on his left.

  The door opened stiffly, almost reluctantly.

  Jerry leaned against it as it closed, peering through his blurred eyes at the rustling machine before him.

  Then he flung himself at the singing red, gold and silver webs and gasped and grinned as they enmeshed him.

  Why was resurrection so easy for some and so difficult for others?

  2. BEYOND THE X ECLIPTIC

  When he had filed Catherine again, Jerry whistled a complicated piece of Bartók and returned, radiant and replete, to his cosy room to look at himself in the mirrors.

  Time to be moving; moves to be timing.

  He opened a cupboard and regarded his wardrobe. The clothes were somewhat theatrical and old-fashioned but he had no choice. His nearest wardrobe to Oxford was now in Birmingham, the only major city in the area which had not needed cleaning, and he had never fancied Birmingham much at the best of times.

  He selected a military-style green jacket, a suède shako with a strap that buttoned under his chin, matching suède britches, green jackboots and a shiny green Sam Browne belt with a button-down holster for his vibragun. A short green PVC cape secured by a silver chain over one shoulder, and the ensemble was complete.

  He left the little complex and closed the door behind him.

  Shining the torch up the stone staircase he climbed to the top and opened the surface door. Then, stopping at each and winding them up, he walked back down the avenue of longcase clocks. The gallery was soon filled with their merry ticking.

  As he strolled away from the Ashmolean towards the car park of the Randolph Hotel, he heard the clocks begin to strike nine o’clock.

  He started the Phantom VI and turned the car into the Broad, switched the taper to Nina Simone singing ‘Black Swan’, and lay well back in the driving seat until he reached the Western airlock which he passed through without difficulty. He blinked as he broke into the bright, warm morning.

  Soon he could see Milton Keynes.

  The new conurbation rose out of the greenish ground mist, each great tower block a different pastel shade of pale chrome yellow, purple, gamboge, yellow ochre, chrome orange, vermilion, scarlet, red (ost), crimson, burnt sienna, light red, cobalt, cerulean blue, turquoise, ultramarine, prussian blue, mauve, leaf green, emerald, sap green, viridian, hookers green, burnt umber, vandyke brown, orange (ost), ivory black and grey (ost).

  Entering the quiet streets of the great village, with its trim grass verges and shady trees, Jerry was filled with a sense of peace that he rarely experienced in rural settlements. Perhaps the size of the empty buildings helped, for most of them were over eighty feet high, arranged around a series of pleasant squares with central fountains splashing a variety of coloured, sparkling water or with freeform sculptures set in flower gardens. There were terraced gardens with vines and creepers on the buildings themselves and the air was full of butterflies, mainly red admirals and cabbage whites.

  Jerry drove at a leisurely pace until he came to the middle of the conurbation. Here were the main administration buildings and shopping arcades, the schools and the play areas, and here were parked the armoured vehicles, the tanks and the helicopters of the advisory force. Neat, newly painted signs had been put up and it was easy for Jerry to park his car and make for General Cumberland’s headquarters in the tall, domed building that the planners had intended for the town hall and which now flew the Stars and Stripes.

  As Jerry climbed the steps, a detachment of unhappy marines broke from the building and surrounded him with a ring of sub-machine guns. “I was hoping I’d find Frank Cornelius here,” Jerry said mildly.

  “What you want with Colonel Cornelius, boy?”

  “I have some information for him.” A faint shock ran from the left hemisphere to the right of Jerry’s brain.

  “What sort of information, fella?”

  “It’s rather secret.”

  The marines sniffed and rubbed their noses with their forearms, keeping their steely eyes fixed on him.

  “You’d better tell the colonel I’m here, I think.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “He’ll know who it is if you describe me.”

  One of the marines broke away and trotted inside. The circle closed up. Jerry lit a Romeo y Julieta and dropped the aluminium tube on the ground. Still staring unblinkingly at his prisoner’s face, a marine with pursed lips kicked the tube violently away.

  Frank hurried out.

  “Jerry! You made it! Great!”

  The marines withdrew behind Jerry and came to the salute with a crash of boots and armour.

  “Did you have any luck with the machine?” Frank put a cold arm round Jerry’s shoulder and guided him into the new town hall.

  “I can’t complain.” Jerry spoke through his cigar. “And are you satisfied?”

  “Relatively, Jerry. Look, we’ll go to my private quarters. That’s the best idea, eh?”

  They went through a glass door, crossed the open quadrangle and entered the building’s northern wing. “It’s just here.” Frank stopped, unlocked his door and led Jerry into an airy, pleasant room in which Rose Barrie was arranging flowers on a sideboard.

  “That’s fine, Rose, thanks,” Frank smiled. The girl left.

  “You’re pretty loathsome, Frank.” Jerry took a golden chrysanthemum from the vase and
smelled it.

  “So would you be. I was never the favoured son, Jerry. I had to fight for what I wanted. You had it easy.”

  “Until you fought for what you wanted.”

  “Oh, that…”

  “I’ve just been to see Catherine.”

  “How is she? I was wilder in those days, Jerry.”

  “She’s keeping pretty well.”

  “Our family always were great survivors.” Frank grinned. “Do you want a…? No, I suppose not. But let’s face it, Jerry. You got where you were by luck—by intuition, if you like. I had to do everything by thinking. Hard thinking. Logical thinking.”

  “It made you tense, Frank.”

  “That’s the price you pay.”

  Jerry put the chrysanth back. Then he smashed the vase from the sideboard and looked at the fallen flowers, the spilled water and the broken glass on the carpet.

  “Don’t lose your temper, Jerry.” Frank was laughing. “You are a hothead! What’s wrong, old sweat?”

  “I’d love to be able to kill you, Frank. Kill you, Frank. Kill you, Frank.”

  Frank spread the fingers at the end of his extended right arm. “Jesus, Jerry, so would I…”

  “I’d love to be able to kill you, Frank.”

  “That’s a remote possibility.”

  “It’s all too fucking remote.”

  Jerry swayed from the waist, eager for his gun.

  “Calm down, Jerry, for Christ’s sake.” Frank snapped his fingers at his sides. “You’ll need removing. Is this the time? Is this the place?”