Walking Dead Page 8

  “No,” he said. “I’d rather they didn’t fire me. But I’d rather be fired than take this other thing on. And if you’re right about the way things are run here, the longer I stay the harder it’s going to be to get out.”

  “All right,” said Dreiser. “What I suggest is this. You go to the labs tonight and immediately set the computer up for its printout and start it running. How long will it take to finish?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “OK. You been going to the labs most evenings?”

  “Yes. Every evening. I like to stick to an exact routine.”

  “So if they’ve been watching you they won’t think you’re doing anything unusual … I guess you can get some notes together at the same time, just to give a few clues to anyone who’s not familiar with what you’ve been doing. Right? Then you get all that stuff together, take it back to your apartment. Don’t pack like you were going to be away for more than a few days. I’ll send your stuff after you, once you’re out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Flight out tomorrow’s 0820. Get to the airport with plenty of time to spare.”

  “Why? I was going to turn up at the last minute and …”

  “No. You’ve got to give them time to photocopy your papers. There’s a seat booked in the Company’s name on every flight out, so you needn’t bother about reservations. They’ll take your case off you and say they’re taking it away to search it for bombs, but if you don’t give them time for photocopying they won’t let you on the plane. OK?”

  “I suppose so. It seems very … um …”

  “Dreiserish? Sure. But it’ll work. And you’ll have got the report where the Company want it, so the only battle you’ll have to fight at Head Office is whether you go to Main Island.”

  They fished for another couple of hours. Foxe caught a handsome olive and black creature with a great pale eye, which Dreiser said was good to eat the day it was caught and rotten the next. Towards the middle of the afternoon they stowed their tackle, Dreiser started the engine and they began the hour-long journey down the coast, with the orange cruiser shadowing them all the way. Foxe began to feel very tired, washed out with emotion and dizzy with the endless dazzle off the wavelets. The shore—black volcanic promontories, little beaches, spiky and feathery trees, a few clusters of shacks, and once or twice a spruce new villa—filled him with a sense of otherness, of rejection. He didn’t belong here. From tomorrow he was going to cut all that loose and let it drift away, gone, nothing to do with him, not even a callus in his memory.

  Dreiser’s motor was remarkably quiet and the man on the deck of the cruiser had his microphone constantly trained on them, so they spoke very little until they reached the jagged hulk of the final promontory before Main Beach. The laboratories crowned it with a series of gleaming white planes, elegant and clinical, quite inappropriate to the welter of tropical growth and the shapeless outcroppings of barren rock.

  “Looks its best from here,” said Dreiser, glancing up.

  Foxe grunted, thinking it would look better still in Paris, or Amsterdam, or even Wigan.

  They passed the tourist-swarming beach, the water skiers, the precarious-looking tiny boats that consisted of one tall sail and a shaped board for a hull. The hotels grimaced along the coastline, one by one. Only as Dreiser began to swing in towards the marina entrance did the orange cruiser sheer away.

  “Now, see here,” said Dreiser suddenly. “I’ve got to protect my own position. I want it to look like I’ve tried to persuade you not to go. Would you mind acting pretty stiff with me while we’re tying up, like we’ve had a row?”

  “Not at all. It’ll be a relief. I’ll just say thanks now, though.”

  “OK.”

  The scene went quite well, Foxe thought. Any watcher—and there were several loungers about—would have found it easy to interpret the tight-lipped mutterings, the brusque farewells. Dreiser refused any help with stowage, so Foxe climbed ashore and walked rapidly along the jetty with his catch dangling from his hand. He was surprised to see that it would soon be dusk, and the ice-cream glow of neon was already beginning to seep its aureole into the sky above Front Town. A small girl came cringing out of a gap between two stores; her glance, furtive but brilliant, flashed up and down the street before she cupped her hand in the illegal gesture—Hog’s Cay brochures always boasted that visitors were not troubled by beggars.

  “Got a penny, Mistah?” she whined.

  Without hesitation Foxe shoved the fish into her arms and strode on while she was staring at him with mixed horror and astonishment. He hoped the irritation of his own gesture had been as obvious. Probably, because he found it difficult to shake himself free of this itchy skin of anger even when he was in the privacy of his own flat. He showered, changed, made a thick spam-and-onion sandwich and ate it with a stiff scotch-and-soda. Mentally he began to sort out his belongings into things he really valued and which it wouldn’t be unreasonable to take on a supposed three-day trip. If he pretended the record player was out of order, for instance, and he was taking it home for repairs …

  These stratagems were interrupted by sudden thoughts of Lisa-Anna, not the old randy or wistful fancies—they’d been coming to him less and less during the past few weeks—but fragments of imagined arguings, part angry (as though the mess were somehow her fault) and part self-excusing. Surely she could see … But these ghostly conversations all petered out almost before they’d begun. A third party intervened, a silent presence, even more ghostly than the imagined Lisa-Anna. The Company stood there, deaf and silent, a stultifying presence. As Foxe tried to get her to agree that he was right to protest at the way he’d been shoved around like a mindless pawn, her eyes kept wandering to this … this … it wasn’t in Foxe’s mind a visible creature. Her image wavered, shadowy as the diver’s had been under the glassy water of the bay.

  All right, if you began to protest, where did you stop? If it was intolerable to cheat Foxe of a couple of months of useful working life, was it any less intolerable to encourage Galdi in work which everyone knew to be pointless? And what about the larger, vaguer pawn-pushings at which Dreiser had hinted—the bribed governments, the rigged markets, the defrauded litigants? What about the advertisements for liver-tonic which plastered Back Town—a Company product which, under a variety of names, had had its sales banned in the United States, Japan, and most European countries? What about the rats? Foxe was used to being attacked in casual conversation for using experimental animals at all, and had been forced to think out his position with some care. On the whole he’d decided it was reasonable to use rats for almost anything that had a chance of advancing knowledge or improving the lot of mankind—that was what laboratory rats were for. Foxe liked rats and didn’t like monkeys, but he thought one needed stronger reasons for using monkeys—it was hard to say why, perhaps because they were more nearly human. He had not, in fact, been entirely happy about the last experiment in Vienna, but had decided that as well as saving the Company money it provided a small clue about the nature of certain receptor areas in the cortex, because of the similarity of the two drugs being tested. So that had been OK, just.

  But breeding, injecting, testing and finally killing animals as a blind! Foxe was surprised at the strength of his own repugnance. There was a sort of moral insolence about it … Perhaps, he suddenly realised, somebody in the Company had guessed that this might be his reaction and that was why he had not been told the real purpose of the tests.

  Of course he’d known for years that the Company operated in ugly ways in some areas, but that knowledge seemed to belong to a different grammar from the awareness which was now forced on him. Once before, years ago, he’d gone through a comparable experience, the disintegration of a heroin-addicted friend. He’d had the theoretical knowledge, had smoked a bit of pot, had seen TV documentaries, had gossiped about friends of friends; but none of that seemed to bear on the a
ctual, visible, tangible falling apart, the vomiting, the dirt, the disappearance of trust, the fury at Toni’s stupidity in letting this happen to herself, the horror at his own gladness when she took the necessary step and wiped herself out. I wish I’d told Lisa-Anna about Toni, he thought. It might have helped her understand …

  As usual the Caribbean nightfall had taken him by surprise, the quick dusk vanishing unnoticed. He went downstairs, took his bike out of the garage and used the operation of fixing its lamps on to inspect the street. A man was leaning against a palm tree twenty yards up the slope; rather further down the other way a large car was parked—unusual, because few cars were left unattended in Front Town after dark, there being a tendency for wheels to disappear from them even when the driver was only away ten minutes. So somebody must be sitting there, waiting.

  Foxe pedalled slowly up the slope, trying to behave exactly as he’d done every evening for the past two months. He knew he must be easy to follow as his appeared to be the only properly lit bike on Hog’s Cay—in fact he sometimes wondered for what purpose his previous set of bike-lamps had been stolen; certainly the thief would have made himself very conspicuous by attaching them to his own machine. Down the hill the car’s engine started. It too climbed slowly. A door slammed in the dark—presumably the second watcher was now aboard—but the engine note didn’t change. Foxe threaded himself carefully into the traffic of Independence Square, busy with unpredictable taxis just now as the tourists began to arrive at the big casino for a preprandial flutter—a sort of appetiser for the real money-losing sessions of the evening. Galdi wouldn’t be there yet, he had a theory that one’s awareness of the flow of chance is keenest when one is exactly two-fifths drunk, so he’d still be in his warm-up procedure. Foxe let the slight slope freewheel him along the far side of the square and into the market, where the last of the fruit-stalls were closing down but the knick-knack and souvenir stalls glittered, as they would till the small hours, under their butane lamps.

  The car followed Foxe down over the cobbles. The clatter of his bike drowned minor noises, but twice he heard its sharp hoot, and once a crash of scraped timber, perhaps where it had knocked over one of the tottering towers of empty fruit-boxes. Several voices shouted angrily at it. The market crossed the border at the bottom of the hill and all of a sudden you were in Back Town, with its ranker smells, and ramshackle houses, and stalls selling cheap pots and garish cloths and patent medicines. By this time of night all these were closed and folded away, leaving the road hummocked with litter through which bold rats—wild rats, alien as Martians from Foxe’s charges—rummaged. The road ended in a stagnant pool where some drain surfaced, so Foxe as usual dismounted and portaged his bike across the stepping stones. As he rode out into the wider street beyond he heard the tires behind him squelch through the muck.

  This was the road where he’d been stopped by the Prime Minister’s procession. He turned right along it, then almost at once left into the dark alley beside the lightless dance-hall, or pub, or whatever it was. Again, as on that day, there was a ladder leaning against the wall with a man at the top and another watching at the bottom—in fact Foxe, swerving to miss the sudden loom of the ladder in his headlight beam actually crashed into this second man.

  “What you doing? Where you going?” shouted the man.

  “Sorry,” said Foxe, half-dismounted. He glanced up and saw by the glow from Front Town that the painter at the top had almost completed the symbol which had been obliterated on that other day—the big circle with the fuse-like bar protruding at the top.

  “Police car coming,” he muttered, then remounted and pedalled on. The man shouted. Lights shone into the alley. A horn blared, ending in a crash and a scream, another crash and more shouting. Foxe rode on round the corner, following the familiar twisting journey between the shanties. Smells apart, the place was rather attractive at this time of night; flaring light shone through irregular doors and windows, the air was full of music, mostly from several Caribbean stations but some actually made on the spot by groups sitting in front of their houses, bashing or tootling at improvised instruments; some of these people were so used to Foxe passing that they had familiar jokes about the sex and habits of his bike, which they shouted at him. He answered as usual, but thought as he clattered along that the police car would have trouble following him through this obstructed maze. They must know where he was going. Why didn’t they simply drive round to the bottom of the promontory road and wait?

  He came out at last on to the shore road and as usual pedalled faster over the good surface, trying with the wind behind him to get up speed for the climb through the wood. Under the trees it was pitch dark apart from the fire-flies, silent apart from the light swish of surf on the headland and the shrilling of night insects. He had seen no sign of his followers, but pumped himself up the slope with all his nerves alert. Perhaps, indeed, they had made the detour and would be waiting for him here, in ambush. But when a huge moth floated out of the blackness and baffed against his headlight, soft and sinister, he was far less startled than he might have been on an ordinary night. Panting slightly he coasted over the hill-top and down to the side door below his own rooms. He had his own key for these night visits. As always, he wheeled the bike into the narrow hallway and locked the door behind him, then climbed the stairs, switching on lights as he went. In his office he dialled the caretaker’s number.

  “Doctor Foxe, sir?” said Charley’s rasping voice.

  “That’s right. I’ll be a bit longer than usual.”

  “How are the fishing go, sir?”

  “Not bad. I only got one, but the Director caught several. I’ll give you another ring when I go, Charley.”

  “OK OK. You see that wife of mine, tell her come home give her man his meal uh?”

  “Right.”

  Rats are nocturnal animals. Human experimenters are not. So rats are normally asked to perform during their natural rest-cycle. Short of installing an expensive reverse daylight system, one can either keep the rats under constant illumination or make certain that any particular animal is always put through its paces at the same time of day, so that, although they may be performing below their peak because they’re in a natural rest-period, their results remain comparable with each other. Because Foxe preferred the latter system on his night-time visits to the lab he kept all the lights he was using shaded. Most evenings there was nothing special to do, but he made these visits every night, so that when one really was necessary it caused no change in the routine to which the rats were accustomed.

  Tonight was a necessary night. He sat down at the computer console, switched on the lamp above the key board, and began to tap out the instructions he had mentally prepared during his ride. Almost at once the printout clicked into duet with him. The activity was soothing because it was something he was used to, something where he was in control. When he paused to consider a new section the printout continued, clicking away dosages, timings, averages, spreads. It was a very good machine, much larger than was really needed for a lab of this kind, because (Foxe now guessed) coiled away in its memory-discs in the humming, dust-proof basement were endless details of secret Company activities. Sometimes it too paused, and when these pauses coincided with Foxe’s the silence of the lab became a wall, the bastion of Foxe’s castle, inside which he was lord of all destinies, including his own. A rat fidgeted in its box—a safe sound, a member of Foxe’s garrison, wakeful to his will.

  Except that he should not have been able to hear it. The animal room was soundproofed, so that meant that someone had left the door open. Automatically Foxe rose and walked down past the maze-room to close it, though there was no longer any point in this; all the meaningless figures were in and it didn’t matter a bean now if the rats were disturbed or excited by the clicking of the computer. Still, habit is habit. The suicide hangs his coat up and puts the change from his pockets into neat piles on the dresser before he lies down to
wait for darkness.

  Yes, the door of the animal room was wide open. The stainless steel bars of the boxes gleamed in faint rows, reflecting the light from the computer console, but below waist-level everything was in the blackest dark. No. Very faint, down at floor level, two small lights gleamed, nacreous but with a pinkness behind the pearl. Foxe sighed. An escaped rat was the last thing he wanted.

  He crouched and moved gently towards the gleaming eyes. They vanished as claws scuttled on cork tiles, then there they were again, a few feet further in. Gently Foxe shut the door and crouched again. Somebody, that stupid old bag Ladyblossom almost certainly, had been in here, trying to work her messy little magicks, and had taken at least one rat out of its box. Laboratory rats are not quite tame, in the way that, say, domestic cats are tame. They are used to handling and not afraid of man, but a couple of careless grabs can arouse forgotten layers of wildness, and then a single rat can take all morning to catch. Foxe decided to have one more go in the dark and if that failed to snap the lights on and try and catch the creature while it was still dazed with sudden glare. He crept forward, making the little clicking noise with his tongue which he used to calm young rats while they were becoming used to handling. An old lab assistant had once shown him that it is possible to pick up city pigeons provided that once you are close to them you move in a non-hunting manner and watch them only with your peripheral vision, so now he moved without any of the tenseness of the hunter. The eyes stayed where they were, even as Foxe reached smoothly out for them. This was odd—normally even a tame rat will back to a wall and huddle there before it lets itself be caught, but this one seemed to wait in the middle of the open floor.

  No. The back of his fingers touched cloth. It was huddled against something, a fabric-covered object like a cushion. When he was handling rats Foxe’s movements were too schooled to smoothness and restraint for him not to carry through now until his fingers closed round the soft, quivering but unresisting fur. His tongue stopped clicking. He rose, stiff with sudden tension.