Faust Among Equals (27 page)

‘Bloody dark down here, skip.'

‘All right, so it's a bit dimpsy. We'll just have to do the best we can.'

‘We seem to do rather a lot of that, skip, if you don't mind me saying so.'

‘It'th what we're betht at,' replied his colleague proudly. ‘Muddling through.'

‘Right. Now look, maybe we haven't exactly got off to a copybook start here, but so long as we all keep our heads and don't go all to pieces, this is going to be a piece of cake, all right? Or would you rather go back to playing seek and destroy with Kurt Lundqvist?'

There was a heavy silence.

‘It's dogged as does it, skip, that's what I always say.'

‘You bloody liar, Keith, what you always say is, “Oh my God, we're all going to die.”'

‘With good reason, skip, be fair.'

‘Ekthcuthe me.'

‘What?'

‘Would thith help?'

The other two turned, and became conscious of a light. Not a wholesome, help-you-see-in-the-dark sort of light, more your ghastly livid green glow. It proceeded from the tail of a sort of flatfish thing; a flatfish, that is, such as Ronnie Bosch might have thought up on one of his gloomier days and then painted over because it gave him the willies.

‘Stone me, Vern,' gasped the Captain, ‘what the hell have you got there? It's awful.'

‘It'th a fith, thkip, with a light in itth tail. I thought it might come in handy, thkip, inthtead of a torch . . .'

‘All right, all right.You hold the, er, thing while we do the hole.'

In order to dig holes in the bottom of the deepest point in the ocean, you need a large cordless drill, an enormously long drill bit and a pressure hose to blast away millions of years of accumulated, undisturbed slime. And, of course, the chuck key for the drill.

‘Right, Keith,' panted the Captain. ‘Gimme the chuck key, and I'll just . . .'

‘Now hold on a minute, skip, you know perfectly well you've got the . . .'

‘Oh
shit
!'

‘Ekthcuthe me again, Thkip, but would thith be any good?'

The other two engineers turned and stared.

Basically, it was a sort of depraved looking crab. With a most peculiarly shaped tail.

‘This is bloody ridiculous,' muttered the Captain.

‘Dead handy, though.'

‘There's still no guarantee it'll
fit
,' the Captain grumbled. ‘I mean, it might be a metric size or something . . .'

It wasn't. Nor, unlike your common or garden inanimate chuck key, did it slip out of your hand just when you're giving it that last half-turn and hide under the workbench. The Captain dabbed the trigger-button lightly, thereby confirming that all systems were operational.

‘Lads,' he said quietly, just before setting drill to rock, ‘don't you get the funny feeling that things are going a bit too well on this job?'

The drill screamed, and started to bite. As he guided the thing, the Captain could feel his whole body juddering and stretching as the vibrations twanged through him and out into the water all around.

‘Thkip!'

‘What is it?' the Captain screamed. ‘You'll have to shout, I can't hear you very well because of the noise of this thing.'

‘I thaid thkip!'

‘Yes, I heard that bit.'

‘Well, that'th all I'd thaid tho far.'

‘Then carry on,' the Captain screamed above the sound of the drill, whining in the rock like a baby Tyrannosaurus with wind. ‘Try and maintain the admirable standard of narrative clarity you've set yourself up till now.'

‘Thorry?'

‘It's all right, I was only . . .'

‘It'th very hard to hear you, thkip, becauthe of the drill. Can you thpeak up a bit?'

‘Yes. Get on with it.'

The spectral engineer shrugged. ‘I jutht wanted to athk, thkip, why are we doing thith?'

The Captain shuddered horribly. The drill had just touched on something it couldn't cut, and the side-effects radiated out across the sea-bed, giving rise to duff seismographic readings right across the world.

‘Good question,' he said, as soon as his teeth had stopped waltzing about in his mouth. ‘Something to do with this EuroBosch thing, they told me. Apparently, he wants to tap into this lot for the fountains in the main courtyard.'

‘I think,' said the other spectral engineer, ‘it's for drains or something like that.'

The other two looked at him.

‘Drains?'

‘This hole we're digging. It's either drains or telephone wires, one or the other. Stands to reason,' the spectral engineer asserted confidently.

‘You reckon?'

‘Use your loaf, skip. Why else do people dig holes?'

The Captain paused, drill in hand, the light from the flatfish making strange shadows on the ocean floor. Why
do
people dig holes? he wondered.

Graves.

Mantraps.

Planting land mines.

Because they get told to, mostly.

And, of course, drains. He straightened his back and looked around. Nothing to be seen, except the solid walls of the darkness all around them.

‘As simple as that?' he said at last.

‘Yeah.'

‘No hidden or ulterior motive?'

‘Why should there be?'

The Captain shrugged and repositioned the drill bit in the hole. ‘No reason,' he said. ‘It just seems too, well, normal to me. Useful, too.'

The drill made contact, and there was a long interval of screeching metal, spine-jarring vibrations and Keith whistling (the latter audible despite the Captain jamming the drill on to full speed). Then something gave way, and before the Captain could call out ‘I think we're through, lads', the water around them started to seethe and boil. Like the emptying of God's bath, it gurgled, whirlpooled and sucked. The drill, the three engineers and forty thousand tons of yucky black goo were swept up and swallowed whole.

The last two thoughts to pass through the Captain's mind, before the whirlpool got him and catapulted him back into the whole tedious rigmarole of temporary death and routine reincarnation, were:

Maybe we drilled a bit too deep.

Funny. I didn't remember seeing Lundqvist anywhere.

 

Water. Mother Nature's flexible jackhammer.

Billions of gallons of the stuff, enough to fill all the swimming pools in Beverley Hills, roaring and burping down a molybdenum steel drain towards the centre of the earth.

Ronnie Bosch was proud of that drain. Not because it was a miracle of engineering (walls only ninety thou. thick, but proofed to twenty-six tons per square inch; machined from solid out of one of the pillars used for thousands of years to support the sky until they discovered it stayed up there perfectly happily of its own accord); more because he'd managed to get it made and installed in twelve hours flat, and nobody had even troubled to ask him what he wanted it for. When you've been used to having to sign four pink chits and a green requisition every time you want your pencil sharpened, it comes as a bit of a shock.

Makes you think, really.

Anyway, down the water went until it emerged in the form of white high-velocity spray in an enormous cauldron arrangement, seated slap bang above Hell Holdings plc's very latest, state-of-the-art Number Six furnace.

Let nobody say that the management buy-out hasn't led to some pretty radical changes in the way Hell operates. Number Six furnace is one of the new regime's most impressive show-pieces. By the simple expedient of converting it to oil-burning from sabbath-breaker burning, it has been possible to double calorific output and halve running costs, thereby saving enough to finance a whole new sabbath-breakers' wing equipped with the latest in microwave technology. Just to add to the ingenuity of it all, the electricity to power the microwaves comes from a steam turbine built into Number Six; resulting in further savings, which in turn pay for twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock canned laughter in the extremely unpleasant corner of the Hell complex set aside for game show hosts.

It was because of the steam turbine that Ronnie Bosch had routed the water down on to Number Six. A few surreptitious modifications here and there were enough to divert the steam from the boiler away from the turbines and up another molybdenum steel tube, bigger and better than the first, proofed to an incredible thirty-seven tons per square inch, running straight up through the earth's core and coming out in an expansion chamber several thousand feet under North America.

The rest of the design was basically very simple.

The rising steam powered a piston.

The piston went up.

 

And all across America, in the cool stillness of the early evening of the day before the bailiffs were due to move in, people out walking were tripping over enormous steel girders that hadn't been there an hour or so earlier, and wondering what on earth was going on.

Then they remembered. They remembered that, for reasons which at the time had seemed very cogent, they had voted into the White House a centuries-dead Italian inventor whose sole proposal to the electorate had been that every building in the USA be rigidly attached to its neighbour with bloody great steel rods.

America loves cleverness. In a land where inventors of better mousetraps really do have six-inch-deep ruts worn in the tarmac of their driveways, a man who can come up with an entirely practical plan for doing something previously thought to be impossible must inevitably become the hero of the hour, even if the thing he's able to do is something nobody would ever have dreamed of doing in the first place. Otherwise, how do you explain Mount Rushmore, or the space programme, or the atomic bomb?

Even the sceptics had to admit that it was a goddamn colossal achievement. To take just one example: between Las Vegas and the small but by no means indispensable township of Pahrump, Nevada, lie fifty miles of tyre-meltingly hot desert, scarcely improved in terms of habitability by having a range of twelve-thousand-foot razor-edged rocks fatuously named the Spring Mountains running slap bang through the middle. It's the sort of geographical entity that can only be fitted into the Christian world-view by accepting that somewhere around lunchtime on the third day of creation, He stopped for a breather and left a few bits for the Youth Opportunities lad to finish off.

Yet, within fifteen hours of the Da Vinci Act becoming law, Pahrump had been welded on to Vegas by a single continuous high-tensile steel link, with spurs off it at intervals to connect in the few outlying homesteads in the middle of the desert. In fact, the whole Sierra Nevada was covered with what looked from the air like silver varicose veins, glinting and twinkling in the dazzling desert sun and playing merry hell with satellite TV reception from Bakersfield to Redding.

Or take the vast single-span bridges connecting Immokalee, Florida with Clewiston, Sunnilands and Fort Myers, arrow-straight across the soggiest excesses of the Big Cypress Swamp; the massive iron beam supporting Riley, Oregon between Burns and Wagontire; the absurd lengths gone to in order to attach Wolf Point, Montana securely to its neighbours; or, on another plane entirely, the scintillating spider's webs of carbon steel enveloping Brooklyn, San Francisco, Chicago and similar hamlets.

A message banged out on the girders in Morse code in the northern suburbs of Seattle could, in theory, be picked up by someone with a stethoscope in San Diego or Miami or Boston, although it would probably be just as easy to telephone.

And America said to itself:

Hey,
we
did that!

Hey,
why
did we do that?

 

‘Fine,' said Lucky George, replacing the receiver.

‘Well?'

‘Sounds like Lenny's side of things is tied up all right. Ronnie's part . . .' He glanced at his watch, and nodded. ‘If everything's running on time, Ronnie's part should already be under way. Any word yet from Larry and Mike?'

Helen nodded. ‘They called in about three minutes ago. It's all ready.'

‘Good.' Lucky George pulled out the original envelope on which the whole thing had been sketched out, and ran his finger down it, checklist fashion. ‘And Chris is ready to cover all the legal stuff?'

‘He's waiting outside the Registry right now.'

‘Martin and Julius got their people in position?'

‘Standing by.'

‘That's all right then.' Lucky George folded up the envelope, sat down on the sofa and put his feet up. ‘I could murder a coffee if you're making one.'

Helen folded her arms and frowned. ‘Hold on,' she said. ‘While everyone else is hard at it, what precisely are you going to do?'

George smiled. ‘Nothing,' he said. ‘And everything too, of course, but only after I've had my coffee. Two sugars, please, and a digestive biscuit.'

 

It was, needless to say, the biggest moment in all the seventeen years of Links Jotapian's life.

‘Scanners,' he commanded, ‘on.'

There is a convention that people who sit in front of screens giving orders have to speak funny; it's all ‘Activate thruster motors' and ‘Uncouple forward connecting gear' and ‘Initiating docking routine'. Anybody in the least self-conscious about sounding a complete nana wouldn't last five minutes.

‘Scanning,' said one of the men in white coats. ‘All functions normal for phase two initiation.'

Up above the world so high, like a death ray in the sky, the Denver Blowtorch was muttering drowsily. A few lights began to flash here and there on its titanium carapace, like the jewels with which a dragon's belly is reputedly encrusted. It bleeped, twitched in its orbit and dreamed strange dreams. Radio waves crackled off it into space like the hairs of a moulting cat.