The Final Programme

“An advance force of five men will isolate the village communications-wise. They’ll be able to see something of what will be going on, of course, but we don’t anticipate any bother from them. All outgoing radio and telephone calls will be scrambled.”

  Miss Brunner looked up at Jerry Cornelius. “Do you expect any trouble before we get into this cliff-opening place, Mr Cornelius?”

  Jerry nodded.

  “Boats about as big as your hoverlaunch, plus my own, are almost bound to be spotted. They’ve got radar. My guess is that my brother will still rely mainly on the traps in the maze and so on. But the house will have some other surprises. As I told you, we’ll have to get to the main control room as soon as we can. That’s in the centre of the house. Once there, we can shut it down, and it will be straight fighting until we have Frank. I estimate that if you keep him off his junk for a couple of hours, he’ll tell you exactly where the microfilm is.”

  Miss Brunner said quietly, “So we must preserve Frank at all costs.”

  “Until you have your information, yes. Then I’ll deal with him.”

  “You do sound vengeful, Mr Cornelius.” Miss Brunner smiled at him. Jerry shrugged and turned to the window again.

  “There seems little else to discuss.” Mr Smiles offered them all his cigarettes. “We have an hour or two to kill.”

  “Nearly three hours to kill, if we’re leaving at five,” said Miss Brunner.

  “Is it three hours?” Mr Powys glanced about.

  “Three hours,” said Mr Crookshank, nodding and looking at his watch. “Almost.”

  “What’s the exact time?” Mr Smiles asked. “My watch seems to have stopped.”

  * * *

  “I see that lire are thirty cents a million.” Mr Crookshank lit Miss Brunner’s cigarette with a large gold gas lighter.

  “They should never have backed out of the Common Market,” Miss Brunner said pitilessly.

  “What else could they do?”

  “The mark’s still strong,” said Mr Powys.

  “Ah, the Russo-American mark. They can’t go on supporting it at this rate.” Mr Smiles smiled a satisfied smile. “No, indeed.”

  “I’m still not sure that we were in the right.” Mr Powys sounded as if he were still not sure of anything. He glanced enquiringly towards the Scotch on the sideboard. Mr Smiles waved a hostly hand towards it. Mr Powys got up and poured himself a stiff one. “Refusing to pay back all those European loans, I mean. I think.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a refusal,” Dimitri reminded him. “You just asked for an indefinite time limit. Britain certainly is the black sheep of the family today, isn’t she?”

  “It can’t be helped, and if we’re lucky tonight, it will all be to our advantage in the long run.” Mr Smiles rubbed his beard and walked to the sideboard. “Would anyone like a drink?”

  “Yes, please,” said Mr Powys.

  The rest accepted, too, except for Jerry, who continued to look out of the window.

  “Mr Cornelius?”

  “What?” Dimitri glanced up. “Sorry.” Mr Powys gave him a baffled look. He held a glass of Scotch in each hand. Miss Brunner glared at Dimitri.

  “I’ll have a small one.” Jerry appeared not to have noticed Dimitri’s mistake, though, as he took the glass from Mr Smiles, he grinned broadly for a moment.

  “Oh, we are living in an odd kind of limbo, aren’t we?” Ever since the weary lemming image had occurred to him, Mr Crookshank had retained his philosophical mood. “Society hovers on the point of collapse, eh? Chaos threatens!”

  Mr Powys had begun trying to pour one full glass of Scotch into the other. Whisky ran onto the carpet.

  Cornelius felt that Mr Powys was overdoing it a bit. He smiled a little as he sat down on the arm of Miss Brunner’s chair. Miss Brunner shifted in the chair, trying to face him and failing.

  “Maybe the West has got to the quasar stage—you know, 3C286 or whatever it is.” Miss Brunner spoke rapidly, half angrily, leaning away from Jerry Cornelius.

  “What’s that?” Mr Powys sucked his fingers.

  “Yes, what is it?” Mr Crookshank seemed to dismiss Mr Powys’s question as he asked his identical one.

  “Quasars are quasi-stellar objects,” Jerry said, “so massive that they’ve reached the stage of gravitational collapse.”

  “What’s that got to do with the West?” Mr Smiles asked. “Astronomy?”

  “The more massive, in terms of population, an area becomes, the more mass it attracts, until the state of gravitational collapse is reached,” Miss Brunner explained.

  “Entropy, I think, Mr Crookshank, rather than chaos,” Jerry said kindly.

  Mr Crookshank smiled and shook his head. “You’re going a bit beyond me, Mr Cornelius.” He looked around at the others. “Beyond all of us, I should say.”

  “Not beyond me.” Miss Brunner spoke firmly.

  “The sciences are becoming curiously interdependent, aren’t they, Mr Cornelius?” said Dimitri, whose statement seemed to echo one he’d picked up earlier. “History, physics, geography, psychology, anthropology, ontology. A Hindu I met—”

  “I’d love to do a programme,” said Miss Brunner.

  “I don’t think there’s a computer for the job,” Jerry said.

  “I intend to do a programme,” she said, as if she’d made up her mind on the spot.

  “You’d have to include the arts, too,” he said. “Not to mention philosophy. It could be just a matter of time, come to think of it, before all the data crystallised into something interesting.”

  “Of Time?”

  “That, too.”

  Miss Brunner smiled up at Jerry. “We have something in common. I hadn’t quite realised what.”

  “Oh, only our ambivalence,” Jerry grinned again.

  “You’re in a good mood,” said Mr Powys suddenly to Jerry.

  “I’ve got something to do,” Jerry answered, but Mr Powys was staring at his Scotch again.

  Miss Brunner felt extremely satisfied. She returned to the subject. “I’d like more information. You know that this computer could be built. And what would it, in turn, create? Where are we heading?”

  “Towards permanent flux perhaps, if you’ll forgive the paradox. Not many would have the intelligence to survive. When Europe’s finally divvied up between the Russians and Americans—not in my lifetime, I hope—what expertise the survivors will have! Won’t they be valuable to their new masters, eh? You should remember that, Miss Brunner, if ever events look like exceeding their present speed.” Jerry tapped her playfully on the shoulder.

  She reached up to touch his hand, but it had gone. He got up.

  “Can Time exceed c?” She laughed. “I’m sliding off, Mr Cornelius. But we must take up this conversation again.”

  “Now or never,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll be away, and we shan’t meet again.”

  “You’re very certain.”

  “I have to be.” He no longer grinned as he went back to the window, remembering Catherine and what he must do to Frank.

  Behind him, the conversation continued.

  * * *

  Miss Brunner was in a savage, exhilarated mood now.

  “And what’s your philosophy for the coming Light Age, Mr Powys? You know, the c age. That’s a better term, on second thoughts.”

  “Second thoughts?” Mr Powys could summon nothing else. He was now on his fifth thought, trying to equate it with his fourth and, as he remembered it, his third “vasectomy”.

  Mr Powys was busily disintegrating.

  Mr Smiles kindly filled his glass up, there being some good in all of us.

  4

  Jerry steered the boat towards the light that had suddenly flashed out from a point near his port. Illuminated by the greenish glow from his indicator panel, his face looked stranger than ever to the others who waited on the deck outside his cabin.

  Miss Brunner, most prone to that sort of thing, reflected that the conflicting time streams of the second half of t
he twentieth century were apparently mirrored in him, and it seemed that the mind behind cried forward while the mind in front cried back.

  What had Cornelius been getting at? Time disintegrating? She’d never read one of his books, but she’d heard of them. Didn’t some of them talk about cyclical time, like Dunne? The ultimate point in the future. But what if something interrupted the cycle? An historical event, perhaps, of such importance that the whole pattern was changed. The nature of time, assuming that it was cyclical, would be disrupted. The circle broken, what might happen? It would certainly make Spengler look silly, she thought, amused.

  If she could get her computer built and start her other project as well, she might be the person who could save something from the wreckage. She could consolidate everything left into one big programme—the final programme, she thought. Idea and reality, brought together, unified. The attempt had never succeeded in the past; but now she might have the opportunity to do it, for the time seemed ripe. She would need more power and more money, but with a bit of luck and intelligent exploitation of a shaky world situation she could get both.

  Jerry was bringing the boat up alongside the bigger hoverlaunch. He watched as his passengers boarded the vessel, but he didn’t join them, preferring to have his own boat waiting for him when the expedition was over.

  The hoverlaunch whispered away towards Normandy, and he began to follow behind it, positioning his boat slightly to one side to avoid the main disturbance of the launch’s wake. The launch belonged to Mr Smiles, who, like Jerry, had invested his money in tangibles while it had still had some value.

  Bit by bit the Normandy coastline became visible. Jerry cut his engine, and the hoverlaunch followed suit. Jerry went out on deck as a line was shot to him from the hoverlaunch. He made it fast. It was a cold night.

  The hoverlaunch started up again, with Jerry in tow. It headed towards the cliff where the fake Le Corbusier château stood, a silhouette in the moonlight.

  There was a slight chance that the bigger boat wouldn’t register on the mansion’s radar. Jerry’s boat didn’t, but it was much lower in the water. The hoverlaunch’s central control bridge, a squat tube rising above the passenger disc and power section, was what might just blip on the radar.

  Old Cornelius’s microfilms were buried deep within the château, in a strongroom that would not resist a high-explosive blast but would, if attacked in this manner, automatically destroy the film.

  The information the intrepid band required was probably there, but the only sure-fire means of getting the film was to open the strongroom in the conventional way, and that was why Frank, who knew the various codes and techniques necessary, had to be preserved and questioned and, with luck, made to open the strongroom himself.

  The whole house was designed around the strongroom. It had been built to protect the microfilms. Very little in the house was what it seemed to be. It was armed with strange weapons.

  As he looked up at it, Jerry thought how strongly the house resembled his father’s tricky skull.

  Virtually every room, every passage, every alcove had booby traps, which was why Jerry was so valuable to the expedition. He didn’t know the strongroom combination, but he knew the rest of the house well, having been brought up there.

  If he hadn’t gone off after that night when his father had found him with Catherine, he would have inherited the microfilms as his birthright, since he was the elder son, but Frank had got that honour.

  The wind was up. It whistled through the trees, groaned among the towers of the château. The clouds ripped across the sky to reveal the moon.

  The hoverlaunch rocked.

  From the house, searchlights came on.

  The searchlights were focused mainly on the house itself, lighting it up like some historic monument—which, indeed, it was.

  The lights blinked off, and then another one came on, a powerful beam, moving across the water. It struck the hoverlaunch.

  The other lights came on, concentrated on the house, particularly the roof.

  Jerry shouted, “Keep your eyes off the roof! Don’t look at the towers! Remember what I told you!”

  Water splashed against the sides of the hoverlaunch as they waited.

  From the roof three circular towers had risen. They began to rotate in the blue beam of a searchlight. The colour changed to red, then yellow, then lilac. The towers rotated slowly at first. They looked like big round machine-gun bunkers, with slots located at intervals down their length. Through these oblong slots shone bright lights, geometric shapes in garish primary colours, fizzing like neon. The towers whirled faster. It was almost impossible to take the eye away.

  Jerry Cornelius knew what the giant towers were. Michelson’s Stroboscope Type 8. The eye was trapped by them and so were the limbs, the will. Pseudo-epilepsy was only one result of watching them for too long.

  The wind and the hissing towers produced a high-pitched, ululating whine. Round and round, faster and faster, whirled the towers, with bright metal colours replacing the primaries—silver, bronze, gold, copper, steel.

  First the eye and then the mind, thought Jerry.

  He saw that one of the mercenaries on the boat stood transfixed; glazed, unblinking eyes staring up at the huge stroboscopes. His limbs were stiff.

  A searchlight found him, and, from two concrete emplacements on the cliff, machine guns smacked a couple of dozen rounds into him.

  His bloody body was thrown violently backward; it softened and collapsed. Jerry was still yelling at him to take his eyes away from the stroboscopes.

  Jerry stopped yelling. He hadn’t expected such a display of violence so soon. Evidently Frank wasn’t taking chances. He crouched behind the cabin as the boats drifted towards the cliffs. The overhang offered them some shelter.

  Within a minute the towers were no longer visible. They had been designed primarily for use against land attack.

  As his boat bumped against the hoverlaunch, Jerry glanced at the body of the dead mercenary. It represented the start of an interesting anarchic process.

  He leaned over and got a grip on a handrail, hauling himself aboard the hoverlaunch. He took out his needle gun and held it in his gloved right hand.

  “Welcome aboard, Mr Cornelius,” said Miss Brunner, her legs astraddle, her hair blowing back from her head.

  Jerry walked forward as the hoverlaunch knocked itself against the cliff. Behind him a mercenary jumped to the deck of his boat and made it fast.

  Another mercenary—darkly tanned, with oiled, wavy hair—came forward holding a suction mine intended to destroy the door. The man steadied himself and bent to attach it to the spot Jerry indicated. They backed up the deck as the mine exploded, bits of wreckage pattering down.

  The door was open.

  Jerry led the way forward, put his foot on the handrail and pushed himself into the opening. He began to walk down the short passage.

  The main force of mercenaries, dressed in the lightweight khaki they were never without, followed him with their machine guns ready. Behind them, not so swiftly, stepped Mr Smiles, Miss Brunner and Dimitri, Mr Crook-shank and Mr Powys. They all carried their big machine pistols awkwardly.

  An explosion rocked the cliff. They looked back as fire spread over the water.

  “Let’s hope they don’t spend too much time on the boats,” Mr Smiles said, speaking adenoidally because his nostrils were stuffed with the filters that Jerry had issued to them all.

  Jerry reached the inner room and pointed at two places on the walls. The leading mercenary raised his gun and shot out the two cameras. From the control chamber above, the lights were switched off by way of retaliation.

  “Frank’s found this entrance, anyway,” Jerry said. It was really only what he’d expected.

  The mercenaries now unhooked heavy helmets from their belts and fitted them on their heads. The helmets were equipped with miners’ lamps. One mercenary had a long coil of nylon rope over his shoulder.

  “Perhaps the
lift’s still working?” Mr Powys suggested as Jerry set foot on the ladder.

  “Probably.” Jerry began to climb. “But we’d look great if they switched the power off when we were halfway up.”

  They all started to climb. Miss Brunner went last. As she put her foot on the first rung, she said thoughtfully, “Silly. They forgot to electrify the ladder.”

  Jerry heard some sounds above. He looked up as a light went on in the shaft, making him blink. A hard-faced German was looking down at him, sighting along his automatic rifle.

  Jerry snapped up his needle gun and shot the German full of steel. He paused, arm curled around the ladder, to repressure the gun, shouting “Look out!” as the guard rolled off the edge and fell down the shaft.

  As the guard’s body thumped to the bottom, Jerry reached the top, his needle gun ready, but no-one was there. Frank had spared only one guard here, being sure that the maze would serve him best.

  Everyone else scrambled up, and they all stood at the entrance to the maze while the soldier with the rope paid it out to them. They roped up.

  Knotting her bit of the rope around her waist, Miss Brunner looked uncomfortable.

  “I don’t like this sort of thing,” she said.

  Jerry ignored her, leading them into the maze.

  “Keep your mouths tightly shut,” he reminded them. “And whatever happens, keep your attention on following me.”

  Their helmet lights lit the way as Jerry walked cautiously ahead, pointing out television cameras to the mercenaries, who shot them as they passed.

  Then the first wave of gas hissed into the passageway. It was LSD gas, refined by old Cornelius. The nose filters, sophisticated by his son, could cope with it if they got through it fast enough. Old Cornelius had invented or modified all the hallucinatory protective devices in the house. Frank had added the guns and guards.

  Hallucinogenic gases had been old Cornelius’s speciality, though an offshoot had been his hallucimats such as the rooftop stroboscopic towers.

  Old Cornelius had exhausted and killed himself searching for the ultimate hallucinogenic device (“total dissociation in under one second” had been his aim, his war-cry), just as his son Frank was destroying himself fairly slowly by looking for the ultimate kick in the veins.