The Final Programme

  Jerry looked sideways at her little familiar.

  “You want to come to see DUEL?” Miss Brunner seemed unusually eager.

  “You seem unusually eager,” said Jerry.

  “Aha!” Marek’s eyes watered. “I think I’d like to leave London for a bit.”

  “The smell,” she said. “I suppose we are indirectly responsible for that.”

  Jerry grinned at her somewhat admiringly. “Well, yes, I suppose you are.”

  “This was a gift-wrapped, throwaway age, Mr Cornelius. Now the gift wrapping is off, it’s being thrown away.”

  “It’s certainly perishable.” Jerry wrinkled his nose.

  “Oh, you!”

  “I won’t join you just yet,” Jerry decided. “I haven’t been into the centre of town for a while. I’ll see what things are like there. If they’re better, I’ll stay for as long as I can.”

  * * *

  After Jerry had left, Miss Brunner and Marek ranged the party, mixing in but always staying close together.

  After a bit they found Jerry’s bedroom and went in.

  “He does himself well,” said Miss Brunner, sitting on the bed and bouncing up and down.

  “Why did you let him go?”

  “He hasn’t been downtown lately. It will do him good.”

  “But you might lose him.”

  “No. There are a limited number of places he will go to. I know them all.”

  She reached out and pulled Marek towards the bed. He crawled up it towards the pillows and then lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. His face was blank as Miss Brunner flung herself on top of him with a throaty cry.

  “Time for a last coming together, my tender,” she whispered as she nibbled his ear.

  Marek let out a great sigh, expelling all the air from his lungs.

  * * *

  A short while later, looking better than she had, Miss Brunner supervised the men she had hired. They were rapidly crating up Jerry’s threads and taking them down to a waiting van.

  While she supervised, ‘Flash’ Gordon Gavin passed by wearing Marek’s clothes. She gave him a swift glance. He noticed and turned, smiling rather wistfully. “I found them in the bedroom. Nobody seemed to own them, so…” He fingered the cloth. “Are they suitable?”

  “Oh, I should think so,” she said.

  * * *

  Jerry felt uneasy driving the Duesenberg through the ill-frequented streets. London was littered, London was grey, though here and there a crowd, extravagantly dressed, would give beauty to the picture. To Jerry, as he passed them, each crowd seemed a single unit, a composite creature, many-limbed and many-headed. Nearer the centre of town the crowds were bigger creatures, getting bigger as he came close to Piccadilly Circus. Jerry felt alone, and the crowd-creatures seemed menacing.

  In the Chicken Fry he found that chicken was off. It was flavoured algae and like it. He didn’t bother. The big place was poorly lit, and he sat near the back in shadow. He was the only customer—the only person, except for the Maltese counter-hand, who never looked up.

  As the light grew fainter, a crowd came in, its thick, snakelike body squeezing through the glass double doors and flowing out to fill the interior. It frightened Jerry, and Jerry loved crowds. But he was not in this one and did not want to be. It flowed forward and detached part of itself at him. He got up quickly, drawing his needle gun. At that moment, he wanted a gun with plenty of dum-dum bullets. The Part grinned slyly, and the rest of it mirrored the grin, all its heads turned towards him.

  Jerry drew a number of shallow breaths, and tears filled his eyes as he stood there looking into the face of the crowd.

  The Part sat down where Jerry had been sitting, and Jerry recognised it then.

  “Shades?” he whispered.

  “Who?” whispered back The Part.

  “Shades!”

  “No.”

  “Who are you?”

  “What?”

  “You!”

  “No.”

  Jerry shot The Part in the white throat. Spots of blood made a necklace round the pale flesh. The crowd gasped and began to undulate. Jerry pushed through it. It broke and re-formed behind him until he was in the centre. Then, when he tried to push on, it gave like the walls of a stomach but it didn’t break. It began to press inward.

  He shot some more needles into it and hacked and clawed his way towards the door. Outside was the big, safe Duesenberg. He wept as he made the street, turned and saw a hundred white faces, all with identical expressions, pressed against the glass staring at him.

  Trembling, sick, he climbed into the car and started it up. The crowd did not follow him, but its heads turned to watch him until he was out of sight.

  Jerry had pulled himself together by the time he had reached Trafalgar Square. He was not going to give up until he had tried the Friendly Bum.

  He heard the music at the entrance where the dead neon sign drooped. It was slowed-down music, dragging, monotonous, introspective. Tentatively he descended the stairs. The spotlights had been turned onto the stage and there sat the heavy-eyed musicians, moulded onto or around their instruments. The pianotron played deep, sonorous, over-sustained chords. In the centre of the place stood a tired pyramid of flesh that moved to the slow rhythm, near quiescent, and the temperature of the place seemed sub-zero.

  It hadn’t lasted, Jerry thought. It should not have reached this stage until he was at least forty. He was a fool to have helped Miss Brunner to accelerate the process. It left him adrift.

  Had Miss Brunner known this would happen to him? How long had she included him in her plans? How much was he a factor in her programme? He had been on top, right on top, at the beginning, when they had first met. She had become wiser, then? Or he had underestimated her.

  “You have lost the advantage, Mr Cornelius,” she said from behind him. He turned and looked at her standing at the top of the stairs, her legs as widely spaced as the tight skirt would allow, her long red hair drawn back behind the ears of her pointed face, her small, sharp teeth exposed. “You have a choice,” she said, and she spread her hand towards the pyramid.

  “Where is Marek?”

  “Where Dimitri is. And Jenny.”

  “He didn’t die at the house?”

  “He will never die.”

  “You won’t take me in like the others.” He smiled nervously.

  “A good try, but you can do even better. I won’t—not like the others. I promise.”

  He knew he was about to vomit. He tried to stop himself then he turned and his body shook mightily as he spewed. He felt her touch him and was too weak to shake her off. His head ached with the intensity of a migraine attack. “Get it out of your system,” he heard her say distantly as she led him up the stairs. “Will you bring the car round please, bishop?”

  12

  He drove according to her quiet instructions and obeyed her when she sat him in the cabin of her plane, a handy Hawker-Siddeley executive jet.

  “You will soon be almost your old self,” she promised as they flew towards the North Pole.

  They landed on the lush, swampy plain dominated by a huge sun, a swelling circle of blood on the horizon. It was hot, and mosquitoes swirled in thick clouds round them. She led him along a wooden catwalk through the marsh. She comforted him and calmed him as they moved towards the mountains. She fed strength to him through her hand, which tightly clasped his. He was duly grateful.

  “I’ve had your entire wardrobe shipped here,” she told him. “All your identities.”

  “Thank you, Miss Brunner.”

  By the time they reached the cave he had dropped her hand, and he followed her with a jauntier step into the forcefully lighted cavern. It was large and high, though not so large and high as he had thought when he had first traversed it in darkness.

  Farther down, buildings were being erected and gangs of men moved busily. The cavern moaned with all the voices of all the power tools, large and small.

  “You ow
n a lot of talent.” It was the first comment Jerry had made since their meeting at the Friendly Bum.

  “You’re feeling better. Good. Do I seem less of a threat now?” They walked on.

  The hot-lake cavern had a sheet of steel-hard plastic material as its floor. Great slabs of neon ranged its walls, and fat pipes curled among the neon lamps like the World Snake at rest. The roof was still hard to make out, the more so since it was obscured by cables, pipes and gridworks. Dwarfed by the cavern, hundreds of people darted, antlike, about.

  “It’s rather like an old Fritz Lang film, isn’t it?” She paused to look around her. He didn’t understand the reference. “Or the one they did of Things to Come.” Another reference that escaped him. She looked into his face. “I saw them as a child,” she said.

  It was the first defensive comment she had made since their meeting at the Friendly Bum.

  “Yes, I’m beginning to feel better,” said Jerry, and he grinned at her suddenly.

  “There’s no need to be rude,” she said. “Give a man an inch…”

  Jerry loosened his muscles and drew a deep breath. “You almost had me that time.”

  “What makes you think I wanted you?”

  “You want something from me.”

  “You should be flattered. I have most of the best brains in Europe working for me—and as many from other continents as I could hire or make enthusiastic.”

  “A noble enterprise. Directed where?”

  “Would you be surprised to learn I had a son, Mr Cornelius?”

  “Encore!”

  “How do you feel?”

  Jerry didn’t know. He felt odd, but he wasn’t going to say so. “But you look so young.”

  “I keep myself young, one way and another.”

  “You could follow it up, Miss Brunner, if you’re as well informed about me as you appear to be.”

  “Your father got around.”

  “So did my mum. She’s Russian, you know.”

  “What do you want me to say, Mr Cornelius? The man I’m referring to did have a connection with your father—Leslie Baxter.”

  “The so-called psychobiologist my father took under his wing. He’s a nut.”

  “They stopped a great many subsidies. He’d been living off them.”

  “Leslie Baxter’s your son? He picked my father’s brains.”

  “Do you mean he learned everything your father could teach him and then went off to do better on his own?”

  “Have it your way. Why did you tell me?”

  “That’s a very direct question for you. Did I say something to upset you?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “In time, Mr Cornelius, we’ll see about that. Look.” She pointed. “We’ve torn down all those Nazi buildings—jerry-built stuff.”

  “You should have preserved them for posterity.”

  “I have a different kind of posterity in mind.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve forgotten the question.”

  “Why did you tell me Baxter was your son?”

  “Are you mellowing, Mr Cornelius? Be a trifle more patient and I’ll explain.”

  “What happened to Dimitri and Jenny and Marek?”

  “They weren’t the only ones.”

  “They were the only ones I knew.”

  “They became absorbed in something—and forgot me.”

  “Oh, shit…”

  She laughed. “Come and look at DUEL—the pride of Laplab.”

  * * *

  DUEL was huge. Its great, angular, nearly featureless bulk stretched upward for nearly 200 feet. It was growing round the three walls of the far cavern in a green semicircle covering at least a third of a mile. At its base, teams of technicians sat, like a pool of office girls, tapping out data and feeding it in.

  “Nothing coming out, I see,” said Jerry, leaning back to look up at it.

  “Oh, not for a while yet,” she said. “There’s another cavern, you know—one you didn’t find on our first trip.”

  The entrance was small, barely higher than Jerry. A steel airlock had been fitted into it. “To keep a constant pressure inside,” she said, “and shut out smells and noise.”

  They went through. On the other side of the airlock was a cave about 200 feet high and 500 feet in diameter. It was lighted with yellow simulated sunshine, and part of it had been cultivated into a flower garden. The air was fresh and pleasant. In the centre stood a white, terraced building that looked familiar. It was extravagant, baroque, with a twin-towered Byzantine-Gothic appearance. There were crosses on top of the towers.

  “A touch of vulgarity in my personality,” she said as he stared at it smiling. “Do you recognise it?”

  “I think so.”

  “It’s Hearst’s palace of San Simeon. I had it transported from the States stone by stone. He was almost as big a collector as I am, though with different tastes on the whole. These things come and go, you know. Want to see the inside?”

  They walked up the steps and through the huge doors. They walked through the high, bare rooms. There was no furniture at all on the ground floor.

  “I thought you were doing a Chinese-box trick—you should have had a smaller house inside this one.”

  “That’s an idea. I might do it—we could probably get two more in and there I’d be, cosy in a three-roomed bijou, right at the centre.”

  “Is that how many layers you need?”

  “I don’t need any layers, Mr Cornelius. Your brother Frank was of that bent. Do you know I found some more of his papers? He believed that the human race originated inside the globe. How’s that for a big womb fixation? He didn’t come here just to check what he found on the microfilm, you know.”

  “You don’t like caves yourself, though. You didn’t want to go on, as I remember.”

  “You’re right. This isn’t a womb for me, Mr Cornelius—it is a womb for DUEL and what it will create.”

  “What will it create?”

  “The ultimate joke.”

  “Fine words.” He followed behind her as she walked up the great sweeping staircase.

  “Do you know what you’ll find soon behind the blank wall of that computer?”

  He paused and turned leaning on the banister. “Not a giant abacus—you told me at the party.”

  “Living human brains that can function for hundreds of years if I need them that long. That’s the sort of sophistication going into DUEL!”

  “Ah, that’s corny. Is that your ultimate joke?”

  “No, it’s just part of the food routine.”

  “You’re getting earnest, Miss Brunner.”

  “You’re right. Come on.”

  In a smallish room on the third floor she showed him his wardrobe. He inspected it. “All here,” he said. “You work fast.”

  “I arranged it as soon as you left your house.”

  “If you don’t mind, since you’ve been so thoughtful, I’ll have a bath and change.”

  “Go ahead. We’ve got hot water and central heating laid on by nature.”

  “I bet that’s all.”

  “More or less.”

  She showed him to a bathroom and stood watching him wash himself. He wasn’t embarrassed by her clinical once-over, but it didn’t help him to relax.

  She followed him back to the room where his wardrobe was and helped him on with his jacket. He felt better.

  “What you need is a good home-cooked meal,” she said.

  “Play it your way.”

  * * *

  The food was delicious and the wine perfect. He had never enjoyed a meal so much. “The calf is fatted,” he said as he sat back.

  “You’re becoming naïve.”

  “Now you’re trying to worry me again.”

  “You had a big supply of food and drink at your place in Holland Park.”

  “I won’t use it now. The breakdown was too fast.”

  “But the buildup will come sooner, Mr Cornelius.”

  “That hasn
’t got anything to do with me—you forced the pace. I was a creature of my time; now I’ve no natural environment. That’s what you’ve done to me.”

  She looked at her watch. “Let’s go and meet someone you know.”

  They left San Simeon and returned through the airlock, passing DUEL and going out onto the surface covering the hot lake, towards one of the new buildings.

  “The quarters are not austere,” she said. “I think we’ll find this mutual friend at home.”

  Inside one of the blocks they climbed stairs, Miss Brunner apologising that the elevators weren’t working yet. On the second floor she led him down a corridor and knocked on one of the simulated-wood Formica doors.

  After a short wait, it was opened by a man dressed only in a turban and a towel round his waist. He looked like a fakir. It was Professor Hira. “Hello, Mr Cornelius!” He beamed. “I had heard you were in these parts, old man. Good afternoon, Miss Brunner. An honour! Come in!”

  The bed-sitting room was bright with Swedish furniture—bed, desk, chairs, bookcase, a couple of scatter rugs. The Hindu sat down on the bed and they took the chairs.

  “What are you up to, Mr Cornelius?” He slipped the towel off and sat back comfortably on the bed. Jerry looked at him and smiled to himself. Hira was a kind of link unit between himself and Miss Brunner. Was it significant?

  “I’m just an observer,” Jerry said. “Or you could even say I’ve come seeking sanctuary.”

  “Ha, ha! What a magnificent example! I cannot tell you how delighted I was to be offered a position here by Miss Brunner. That you should think of me, Miss Brunner, still baffles me.”

  “I haven’t forgotten Delhi, professor,” she said. “You have special talents.”

  “Good of you to say so. Perhaps I will be able to make better use of them shortly. There hasn’t been much for me to do so far—a few interesting equations, a little speculation; I am not yet in my stride.”

  “Don’t worry, you soon will be.”

  He snorted, amused. “My God, I never thought I would have to brush up on my Sanskrit for professional reasons. That old man in the next flat—Professor Martin—he is a better scholar than I!” He pointed a finger at Jerry. “Remember what we talked about in Angkor last year?”