Something rotten (36 page)

I laughed. This was
exactly
the news I wanted to hear.

“You’ll see. Tell me,” I added, my hopes rising by the second, “what do you know about the old Goliath BioEngineering labs?”

“Hoooh!” he said, making a noise like any enthusiast invited to comment on his particular field of interest. “Now you’re talking! The old Goliath BioE is still standing in what we call Area 21—the empty quarter in Mid-Wales, the Elan.”

“Empty metaphorically or empty literally?”

“Empty as in no one goes there except water officials—and we have wholly uncorroborated evidence that we peddle as fact that an unspecified number of officials have vanished without a trace. In any event, it’s all off-limits to everyone, surrounded by an electrified fence.”

“To keep people out?”

“No,” said Millon slowly, “to keep whatever genetic experiments Goliath was working on
in.
The whole of Area 21 is infested with chimeras. I’ve got files and files of dubious stories about people breaking in, allegedly never to be seen again. What’s your interest in the Elan BioE plant anyway?”

“Illegal genetic experiments on humans undertaken covertly by an apparently innocent multinational.”

Millon nearly passed out with the conspiracy overload. When he had recovered, he asked how he could help.

“I need you to find any pictures, plans, layout drawings—anything that might be of use for a visit.”

Millon opened his eyes wide and scribbled in his notepad. “You’re going to go into Area 21?”

“No,” I replied, “we both are. Tomorrow. Leaving here at seven in the morning,
sharp.
Can you find what I asked for?”

He narrowed his eyes. “I can get you your information, Miss Next,” he said slowly and with a gleam in his eye, “but it will cost. Let me be your official biographer.”

I put out a hand and he shook it gratefully. “Deal.”

I walked back inside to find Landen talking to a man dressed in slightly punky clothes, with brightly colored spectacle frames, bleached-blond hair and an infinitesimally small goatee firmly planted just under his lower lip.

“Darling,” Landen said, grasping the hand that I had just rested on his shoulder, “this is my very good friend Handley Paige.”

I shook Paige’s hand. He seemed pretty much the same as any other SF writers I had ever met. Slightly geeky, but pleasant enough.

“You write the Emperor Zhark books,” I observed.

He winced slightly. “No one ever talks about the decent stuff I write,” he moaned. “They just ask me for more and more Zhark stuff. I did it as a joke—a pastiche of bad science fiction—and blow me down if it isn’t the most popular thing I’ve ever done.”

I remembered what Emperor Zhark had told me. “You’re going to kill him off, aren’t you?”

Handley started. “How did you know that?”

“She works for SO-27,” explained Landen. “They know
everything.
”

“I thought you guys were more hooked on the classics?”

“We deal with all genres,” I explained. “For reasons that I can’t reveal, I advise you to maroon Zhark on an uninhabited planet rather than expose him to the humiliation of a public execution.”

Handley laughed. “You talk about him as if he were a real person!”

“She takes her work very seriously, Handley,” said Landen without the glimmer of a smile. “I’d advise you to consider very seriously anything she happens to say. Wheels within wheels, Handley.”

But Handley was adamant. “I’m going to kill him off so utterly and completely that no one will ever ask me for another Zhark novel again. Thanks for lending me the book, Land. I’ll see myself out.”

“Is Handley in danger?” asked Landen as soon as he had gone.

“Quite possibly. I’m not sure the Zharkian death-ray works in the real world, and I’d hate for Handley to be the one who finds out.”

“This is a BookWorld thing, isn’t it? Let’s just change the subject. What did your stalker want?”

I smiled. “You know, Landen, things are beginning to look up. I must call Bowden.”

I quickly dialed his number.

“Bowd? It’s Thursday. I’ve figured out how we’re going to get across the border. Set everything up for tomorrow morning. We’ll muster at Leigh Delamare at eight. . . . I can’t tell you. . . . Stig and Millon. . . . See you there. Bye.”

I called Stig and told him the same, then kissed Landen and asked him if he’d mind feeding Friday on his own. He didn’t, of course, and I dashed off to speak to Mycroft.

I was back in time to help Landen scrub the food off Friday, read the boy a story and put him to bed. It wasn’t late, but we went to bed ourselves. Tonight there was no shyness or confusion, and we undressed quickly. He pushed me backwards onto the bed and with his fingertips—

“Wait!” I cried out.

“What?”

“I can’t concentrate with all those people!”

Landen looked around the empty bedroom. “What people?”

“Those people,” I repeated, waving a hand in the general direction of everywhere, “the ones
reading
us.”

Landen stared at me and raised an eyebrow. I felt stupid, then relaxed and gave out a nervous giggle.

“Sorry. I’ve been living inside fiction for too long; sometimes I get this weird feeling that you, me and everything else are just . . . well, characters in a book or something.”

“Plainly, that is ridiculous.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. Where were we?”

“Just here.”

32.

Area 21: The Elan

Freedom of Act a Step Closer, Announces Mr.

Open government came one step closer yesterday with the announcement that Mr. would lend his weight to the Freedom of Act. The act, which aims to bring once top- information from into the hands of the, was hailed as a “great leap forward” by Mr., the Department of ’s senior. The chief opponent to the draft bill, Mr., gave his assurance that “as long as my name is, I won’t allow this to be passed.”

Article in
The
, July, 19

S
o what’s the plan?” asked Bowden as we drove towards the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. It was about ten in the morning, and we were traveling in Bowden’s Welsh-built Griffin Sportina with Millon de Floss and Stig in the backseat. Behind us was a convoy of ten lorries, all loaded with banned Danish books.

“Well,” I said, “ever thought it odd that parliament just rolls over and does anything that Kaine asks?”

“I’ve given up with even
trying
to understand parliament,” said Bowden.

“They’re all sniveling toadies,” put in Millon.

“If you even
need
a government,” added Stig, “you are a life-form flawed beyond redemption.”

“I was confused, too,” I continued. “A government wholly agreeable to the worst excesses of Kaine could mean only one thing: some form of short-range mind control wielded by unscrupulous power brokers.”

“Now, that’s
my
kind of theory!” exclaimed Millon excitedly.

“I couldn’t figure it out at first, but then when I was up at Goliathopolis, I felt it myself. A sort of mind-numbing go-with-the-flow feeling, where I just wanted to follow the path of least resistance, no matter how pointless or wrong. I had seen its effect at the
Evade the Question
TV show, too—the front row was eating out of Kaine’s hand, no matter what he said.”

“So what’s the connection?”

“I felt it again in Mycroft’s lab. It was only when Landen made a sarcastic comment that it twigged. The Ovinator. We all thought the ‘ovi’ part of it was to do with eggs, but it’s not. Think ‘ovine.’ It’s to do with
sheep.
The Ovinator transmits subalpha brain waves that inhibit free will and instill sheeplike tendencies into the minds of anyone close by. It can be tuned to the user so he is unaffected; it’s possible that Goliath might have developed a long-range version called the Ovitron and an antiserum. Mycroft thinks he probably invented it to transmit public health messages, but he can’t remember. Goliath gets hold of it, Stricknene gives it to Kaine—bingo. Parliament does everything Kaine asks. The only reason Formby is still anti-Yorrick is because he refuses to go anywhere near him.”

There was silence in the car.

“What can we do about it?”

“Mycroft’s working on an Ovi-negator that should cancel it out, but our plans carry on as before. The Elan—and win the SuperHoop.”

“Even I’m finding this hard to believe,” murmured Millon, “and that’s a first for me.”

“How does it get us out of England?” asked Bowden.

I patted the briefcase that was sitting on my lap. “With the Ovinator on our side, no one will want to oppose us.”

“I’m not sure that’s morally acceptable,” said Bowden. “I mean, doesn’t that make us as bad as Kaine?”

“I think we should stop and talk this through,” added Millon. “It’s one thing making up stories about mind-control experiments but quite another actually
using
them.”

I opened the briefcase and switched the Ovinator on.

“Who’s with me to go to the Elan, guys?”

“Well, all right then,” conceded Bowden, “I guess I’m with you on this.”

“Millon?”

“I’ll do whatever Bowden does.”

“It really does work, doesn’t it?” observed Stig, giving a short, snorty cough. I chuckled slightly myself, too.

Getting through the English checkpoint at Clifford was even easier than I had imagined. I went ahead with the Ovinator in my briefcase and stood for some time at the border station, chatting to the duty guard and giving him and the small garrison a good soaking with Ovinator rays for half an hour before Bowden drove up with the ten trucks behind him.

“What’s in those trucks?” asked the guard with a certain degree of torpidity in his voice.

“You don’t need to look in the trucks,” I told him.

“We don’t need to look in the trucks,” echoed the border guard.

“We can go through unimpeded.”

“You can go through unimpeded.”

“You’re going to be nicer to your girlfriend.”

“I’m
definitely
going to be nicer to my girlfriend. . . . Move along.”

He waved us through, and we drove across the demilitarized zone to the Welsh border guards who called their colonel as soon as we explained that we had ten truckloads of Danish books that required safekeeping. There was a long and convoluted phone call with someone from the Danish consulate, and after about an hour, we and the trucks were escorted to a disused hangar at the Llan-drindod Wells airfield park. The colonel in charge offered us free passage back to the border, but I switched on the Ovinator again and told him that he could take the truck drivers back but to let us go on our way, a plan that he quickly decided was probably the best thing.

Ten minutes later we were on the road north towards the Elan, Millon directing us all the way according to a 1950s tourist map. By the time we were past Rhayder, the countryside became more rugged and the farms less and less frequent and the road more and more potholed until, as the sun reached its zenith and started its downward track, we arrived at a tall set of gates, strung liberally with rusty barbed wire. There was an old stone-built guardhouse with two very bored guards who needed only a short burst from the Ovinator to switch off the electrified fence, allowing us to pass. Bowden drove the car through and stopped at another internal fence twenty yards inside the first. This was unelectrified, and I pushed it open to let the car pass.

The road was in worse repair on the Area 21 side of the gates. Tussocky grass was growing from the cracks in the concrete roadway, and on occasion trees that had fallen across the road impeded our progress.

“Now can you tell me what we’re doing here?” asked Millon, staring intently out the window and taking frequent photographs.

“Two reasons,” I said, looking at the map that Millon had obtained from his conspiracy buddies. “First, because we think someone’s been cloning Shakespeares and I need one as a matter of some urgency, and second, to find vital reproductive information for Stig.”

“So it’s true you can’t have children?”

Stig liked Millon because he asked such direct questions.

“It is true,” he replied simply, loading up his dart gun with tranqs the size of Havana cigars.

“Take a left here, Bowd.”

He changed gear, pulled the wheel around, and we entered a stretch of road with dark woodland on either side. We drove up a hill, took a left-hand turn past an outcrop of rock, then stopped. There was a rusty car upside down on the road in front of us, blocking the way.

“Stay in the car, keep it running,” I said to Bowden. “Millon, stay put. Stig—with me.”

Stig and I climbed out of the car and cautiously approached the upturned vehicle. It was a custom-made Studebaker, probably about ten years old. I peered in. Vandals never came here. The glass in the speedometer was unbroken, the rusty keys still in the ignition, the leather from the seats hanging in rotten strands. There was a sun-bleached briefcase lying on the ground, and it was full of water-related technical stuff, now all mushy and faded by the wind and rain. Of the occupants there was no sign. I had thought Millon was overcooking it with all his “chimeras running wild” stuff, but suddenly I felt nervous.

“Miss Next!”

It was Stig. He was about ten yards ahead of the car and was squatting down, rifle across his knees. I walked slowly up to him, looking anxiously into the deep woodland on either side of the road. It was quiet. Rather
too
quiet. The sound of my own footfalls felt deafening.

“What’s up?”

He pointed to the ground. There was a human ulna lying on the road. Whoever had been in this accident, one of them never left.

“Hear that?” asked Stig.

I listened. “No.”

“Exactly. No noise at all. We think it advisable to leave.”

We pivoted the car on its roof to give us room to pass and drove on, this time much slower, and in silence. There were three other cars on that stretch of road, two on their sides and one pushed into the verge. None of them had the least sign of the occupants, and the woods to either side seemed somehow even darker and deeper and more impenetrable as we drove past. I was glad when we reached the top of the hill, cleared the forest and drove down past a small dam and a lake before a rise in the road brought us within sight of the old Goliath BioEngineering labs. I asked Bowden to stop. He pulled up silently, and we all got out to observe the old factory through binoculars.