Cryptozoic! Page 11

  "Sounds as if he's going to be worse than Bolt was," Mrs. Annivale said gloomily.

  "Bolt was one of the moderates," James said. "He'll knock out all this mind-travel, you wait and see!"

  He uttered this warning in a sort of gloating tone that instantly offended Bush.

  "Let's hope that Action is transitory, then, Dad, just as your old poet claimed!"

  The atmosphere in the house was too claustrophobic; his studio was still a shambles from the occasion when he had wrecked it. His head heavy from the drink, he went out for an aimless walk. Whoever was boss of the ant heap, his business would still be to kill Silverstone -- unless Howes and Stanhope gave him fresh orders. Unthinkingly, he found his way back to the stagnant pond. The ruined building lay quiet and sinister; had he really heard those four men plotting the killing of Bolt, or was the incident some strange sort of precognition?

  Becalmed, Bush stood on the frowsty bank, watching a pair of frogs struggle out of the water in a manner reminiscent of the lungfishes away back in the Devonian. He built, in his mind, huge moving scenic SKGs with grandiose titles like "The Course of Evolution" in which flippers moved and transformed into legs which turned into wings which turned into waves which turned into flippers.

  His own mysterious and possibly also cyclic mental shifts in due course went through another phase. The truck returned for him; his leave was up. He said goodbye to his father and Mrs. Annivale and climbed aboard. But it was all distant. They, too, might as well have been patterns in a stratum of compressed sunlight. He seemed already to be falling into the early stages of the hypnagogic state that Wenlock discipline required.

  And in the strange and brutal misery he conspired in at the barracks, he was still remote.

  As they drove into the familiar square and the boom lowered behind them, Bush saw that there were shadowy future figures here. This place was being watched; but he wondered if they hoped for the collapse or the survival of the new regime.

  Climbing from the truck, he stood for a moment to watch a squad march by. It was one of the new units, formed only two days before, and had yet to learn the secret of moving in formation. Sergeant Pond, at his hoarsest and most foul-mouthed, was scaring the wits out of the recruits in an honest attempt to transform them into automata. Bolt, Gleason, or no matter who, Pond held his own little acre of tyranny secure.

  The squad halted clumsily to his order. One recruit's cap fell off. Bush stared at the man. He recognized the scabby face. It was unlikely -- with the shaven head, it was difficult to be sure -- but after all, the regime was roping in layabouts from the past. . . . It assuredly was Lenny, sweating it out in Pond's new squad.

  Bush mentioned the matter to Howes when he came before the captain. Howes nodded, barked an order to a corporal standing by, and five minutes later Lenny was standing rigidly at his version of attention before them, his dimples dug deep, his gaze going anxiously from Howes to Bush and back again.

  He had been caught in the early Jurassic by a couple of plain-clothes patrollers, "causing a disturbance." They had brought him back with them; the rest of his gang had escaped.

  Lenny denied he knew anything about Stein. Howes called in Stanhope, since this was a security matter. The two captains, Bush, and Lenny and his escort, walked down the passage to a small empty room. Lenny began to cry out and protest directly he saw into the room. There were blood stains round the walls and on the floor. In one corner stood some battered golf clubs. Howes excused himself and left. The escort posted himself outside the door.

  Stanhope's mouth had gone a frightening shape. He picked up one of the clubs and showed Bush what to do with it. Lenny groaned and fell to the floor. Bush took the club, moist from Stanhope's grip. He brought it smashing down into Lenny's ribs. It was easy -- pleasant. Action!

  Afterwards he wondered at himself like a man betrayed. Lenny told them nothing, beyond the reiterated fact that he and Stein had quarreled and the older man had minded away from them; he told them nothing, but he bled a good deal.

  When Bush had washed, and eaten a solitary meal, he was kitted out for his mission of assassination. They issued him with an excellent strong one-piece and a pack. Both the suit, which was fitted with deep pouches and pockets, and the pack, contained a multitude of things he might need on his journey, including a light-gun that could kill at four hundred yards (the greatest distance at which he was likely to be able to see his quarry in mind-travel), a gas gun, and two knives, one which was sheathed at his belt, one which flicked out of the toe of his right boot. He was loaded with vitamin pills, pep pills, and concentrated water, and equipped with an up-to-date model air-leaker.

  Trepidation seized him when he was ordered to report to the colonel commanding the barracks. With his full kit about his feet, he stood outside the colonel's office and waited for the order to enter. Fifty minutes dragged by before a sergeant marched him in.

  The colonel was a mild-mannered little man, snowed under by a sheaf of orders originating from the new Action regime. Presumably he was cleared of being a Bolt man or he would not be here now.

  He had nothing positive to say to Bush, and that little he put across rather badly, scuffling miserably with his papers while he talked. In closing he said, "Admiral Gleason approves of men who do well. Silverstone is a state enemy because his teachings could confuse us all -- well, not us, but our weaker brothers. They could confuse the issue, let's say. If you can find Silverstone and kill him, I'll see your name goes before the Admiral. Don't think of yourself as an assassin, think of yourself as an executioner, on state business. Dismiss!"

  The battered truck which had brought Bush in was waiting to drive him round to the mind-station. Soon he could escape! As he piled his kit in the back, Captain Howes marched up. He looked at Bush distastefully. Bush recalled that he had worn the same expression when he left Bush at the door of the torture room.

  "You find yourself capable of killing Silverstone?" he asked.

  Bush felt the urge to be frank with the man, to be open and expansive, but there was nothing to come; he was closed even to himself.

  "Yes."

  "See you do then. A lot depends on you."

  "Yes." The affirmative, so much more final than the negative.

  He climbed into the truck. As the boom lifted, he saw that Pond was doubling his squad through the shadows of the future.

  At the mind-station, he became a different person again. He was a patient now, delivered into the hands of surgeons and nurses.

  They took special care with Bush. They had their orders, too. He was issued with extra supplies of CSD -- he observed that it now came in crystal form. He was installed in a special cubicle (so that he could never return to his own time without being seen and called to account). A nurse with an antiseptic smile forbidding lust took the statutory amount of his blood, and deftly sliced tissue from his left breast. He was under light sedation now, reciting a few fragments of the discipline, curling into the foetal position. He took the drug.

  Again he was becoming a different person: neither dead nor alive, in a state where because there was no change there was no time. His mind was opening, easing back doors that had been sealed to humanity for over a million years, letting in a part of the universe. Because this was sanity, he was happy. Golf clubs floated by, a curving leg, a bottle with a tartan label; he let them drift. It was the universe he wanted, not its minutiae. He was free.

  Free and yet not aimless. The drug and discipline were working in conjunction now, a sense of direction rising in him like a divine call. He was working much as a diver might work who, poised on the edge of the continental shelf, finds himself carried down into the abyss beyond, beyond reach of help; Bush was being carried back down the vast entropy slope that could deliver him -- where or when he knew not, but far back into the airless Cryptozoic if he did not fight. He fought his way up the slope, swimming, kicking, directing. The medium pulled him back but he squirted on, until exhaustion overcame him and he felt he was abo
ut to slide away again. Then he surfaced.

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 1

  IN ANOTHER GARDEN

  The houses climbed up the hill on either side of the gritty road. They were small, generally with only two tiny rooms upstairs, wedged under the slate roofs; but they were solidly built of stone, and tucked snug into the hillside so as to shelter slightly from the chill east winds. Each house possessed its own small back garden, which towards the crest of the hill might pitch so steeply it could almost be weeded from an upper window.

  At the crest of the hill, where the last stone house stood, the land leveled out, later to go rolling on and on under the wide sky, revealing more clearly that its true nature was untameable moorland. Walking by this last stone house, which had been partly converted into a small grocer's shop, Bush could look down at the small village which still puzzled him. He could see almost all of it from here; to see the rest, he had merely to turn about; for where the stone houses ended, another sort of house began.

  These other houses, which appeared hardly to belong to the village, were built in miserable little terraces facing each other. They were constructed of brick and stood in angular rows, defying the lie of the land, like bricks a child arranges geometrically on his sickbed. From none of these brick houses was it possible to see anything but the brownish moors and the sky, which at this time of year frequently brought rain to lash along the rotten undrained streets; the rest of the village was concealed from them by the brow of the hill; the stone grocer's shop, the roof of which peeped over the brow, could not be glimpsed even from the house at the end of the terrace, since the occupants of that privileged position had not been granted the benefit of windows in their side wall.

  Bush stood in the middle of a downpour, taking in this scene. He knew that the inhabitants of this dreary place were in some kind of trouble as surely as he himself was, but as yet he had been unable to master even the beginnings of what it was. No rain touched him; he was in mind-travel; except on an emotional plane, there could be no contact between him and this unknown zone of Earth's history. An unknown it seemed to be -- no shadows of the future moved here, there were no phantom buildings; the Jursassic made this place seem a desert, remote from the enterprises of the space-time world. He had been so determined to escape from the Action regime, he had minded into a fairly late period of human history -- and it had been almost easy!

  The rain tapered off with dusk, which seemed to draw over the land like curtains, pulling the puny obstacles on the landscape back into its clouded heart. The houses fought this process of digestion only feebly, putting out dim lights from their windows when the process of darkness was almost complete. There were exceptions to this, mainly at the bottom of the bill, and it was in this direction that Bush now moved.

  Below the stone houses stood one or two more imposing buildings, also built of stone, some shops, and a church. Then came a level crossing, with an untidy antique railway station of a kind that Bush had never seen before. The main bulk of the metals curved away to a complex of bulky and drab buildings that stood away on the far side of the village; these buildings, as Bush had seen in the daylight, were crowned by a huge unmoving wheel raised on the top of a wooden tower.

  In the dark, it was possible to discern two or three lights among the tangle of railway buildings; a few red lamps gleamed there; of the rail that curved away from all this, to be carried by a stone viaduct away from the valley and behind the great shoulders of land, there was no hint at this hour. Nor was there a single light to relieve the dead bulk of buildings beyond the level crossing.

  Most of the life of the place was concentrated in and about a drinking house, half a dozen doors up the hill from the church, its worn front step lying about on the same height as the guttering round the roof of the church. The only sign of its function from outside was a small sign over the porch that read THE FORGE INN * ALES. It had stood and would stand there a long while, for Bush, even in mind-travel, was unable to walk through its walls, and had to go through the doors like a legitimate customer.

  There was little life or light inside the Forge Inn. In the one bar, men sat on benches, their boots firm-planted on the sawdust floor. Several of them smoked cigarettes, few had anything to drink. They were all dressed similarly, in dark clothes, with thin overcoats buttoned tight even in the shelter of the pub, and cloth caps on their heads. They even looked somewhat alike, their faces somewhat eroded, their expressions sharp but guarded.

  One of the men drinking sat at a small table alone. Although the other men greeted him as they came in or left, they did not sit with him. He was dressed in the same poor manner as they, but his face was rounder and possibly had more color. It was on this man that Bush centered his attention, for he believed the man to bear his own name, Bush.

  When the man finished his drink, he looked round as if in hopes of some sort of diversion, found none, rose and handed his empty glass to the landlord, and said a general goodnight. It seemed there was a murmured goodnight in return, although no sound could penetrate to the isolation of Bush's position.

  He followed his namesake outside. The man clutched his coat collar tight round his neck, bowed his thin shoulders, and started up the hill, Bush after him. Bush observed that the floor on which he walked, following, followed closely the contour of the street, so long was it established.

  At the top of the hill, the man stopped by the small grocer's shop and went round to the back of it. Invisible to him, intangible, Bush's modest tent was pitched in his back garden, among the weeds and cabbage stumps. He knocked at the back door and was admitted. Bush slipped in after him.

  He had noticed when he first wandered dazedly through this village that a notice hung in the window of the grocer's -- a simple house window, the conversion of which to trade had been effected by the removal of curtains and the insertion of a pile of bars of red soap and a stack of cans containing corned beef -- and on inspection, the faded lettering of the notice read, "Amy Bush, Grocer, Etc." Although he was unable to determine why the instinctive drives of mind-travel had directed him here, he believed that his namesake would provide a clue. Indeed, he wondered if these Bushes were possibly ancestors of his.

  The back room in which he found himself was crowded to the point of madness. Three small boys of varying ages were running and skipping about -- shouting, although not a decibel leaked through the entropy wall to Bash. The smallest of these lads, who was also the palest and sharpest, in that his bones seemed to protrude painfully all over his body, was naked and wet; in resisting the attempts of an elder sister to capture him and return him to a big metal bath, he scampered wildly back and forth about the room. These gambits brought him into collision with a buxom woman in bedroom slippers who was washing a garment at a stone sink, and with an aged lady, evidently the grandmother of the family, who sat with a blanket over her knees in one corner of the room, chewing her false teeth.

  The man Bush had followed up the hilt waved his arms and was seen to be shouting savagely. The small sharp boy returned to his sister, who lifted him immediately into the bath, while the bigger brothers threw themselves down on some wooden packing cases that formed a sort of pew along the wall behind the inner door, and lapsed into apathy. The buxom woman at the sink turned to the man to demonstrate to him how thin and patched was the shirt she scrubbed at; this movement enabled Bush to see that she was far gone in pregnancy.

  Bush was unable to estimate the age of the daughter; she could have been anywhere between fifteen and nineteen. Her figure was developing and her hair pretty, but her teeth were not good, and a lack-lustre air added to her attitude and expression an unpleasant reminder of the few years that separated her from the old chewing woman in the corner. Nevertheless, she smiled at her brother as she scrubbed him, toweled him efficiently, and eventually, with marginal aid from her father, shooed the three boys upstairs to bed.

  The sleeping arrangements were of the poorest. The smallest boy slept with his parents in a dou
ble bed, beside which a palliasse accommodated the two other boys. This was in the larger of the two pokey rooms under the roof. In the smaller, there was barely enough space for the single bed in which the daughter slept with her grandmother.

  The man emptied the bath tub into the garden. When his daughter returned from upstairs, he sat her lovingly on his knee and worked at the table over some accounts, on which his wife eventually joined him. The daughter was content to put an arm round her father's neck and lean with her cheek against his head.

  This was the Bush household. In the days and weeks that followed, Bush came to know his namesakes well. He learned their names slowly. The expectant mother, who ran the shop, was Amy, as the sign in her window declared. When the old grandmother hobbled down the hill to the post office, Bush read from her pension book that her name was Alice Bush, Widow. When his namesake stood in the dole queue and thrust his cards through a window for stamping, the ghostly Bush peering through his shoulder discovered that this was Herbert William Bush. The girl's name was Joan. The two older boys were Derek and Tommy. Bush never discovered the youngest child's name.