New Year’s Eve, 1995, 11:45 P.M.
J
on Bannerman, who had been known to describe himself as a tourist, stood at the top of the Royal Mile where its cobbles met the tarmac of Edinburgh Castle’s esplanade, and gazed with dark and mildly foreign eyes down the long, steep, narrow way at the laughing, thronging, frenetically weaving crowds where they sang and danced, celebrating the death of the old and the imminent birth of a brand-new year. He leaned against a wall which bore a plaque commemorating the burning of the last of the Scottish witches on this very spot. It hadn’t been so very long ago, not in Bannerman’s eyes.
Bannerman had recorded the plaque’s legend; now, with the recorder still working in his pocket, he concentrated his attention on the crowds. Their celebration was a rite, very nearly barbaric, not too far removed from a state of orgy. Men and women, for the most part total strangers, embraced and kissed quite openly; in darker doorways lovers who didn’t even know each other’s name panted and groped fumblingly; the bitter cold air reeked of the alcoholic exhalations pluming from laughing mouths no less than from the small-paned windows of a nearby pub, where inner lights told of a private party still in progress.
Young men and women with bright eyes and gleaming teeth roamed to and fro, shouting and joking, seeking partners, while bottle-hugging drunks teetered this way and that, jostled from one gyrating group to the next.
To Bannerman the whole seemed a very decadent scene, and he dutifully recorded it. Then a girl came bursting from nowhere and bumped into him, jerking him erect from where he leaned against the wall.
“Whoa!”
she said, her brandy breath whooshing in Bannerman’s face. She clutched at him for support, tried to focus on the dark face frowning at her. “Head’s spinnin’,” she said. “Canna seem tae stan’ on ma aen feet!”
Bannerman steadied her, held her upright, hugged her close. It was the easiest way to keep her from falling while she found her balance.
“You’ve had a few,” he told her, without accusation.
“Eh? A few? Ah’ve had a
lot,
laddie!” Her eyes swam and she was dizzy again. Then she screwed up her pretty face. “God—the noise! Ah’ll be sick.” She buried her face in Bannerman’s overcoat.
“Not on me, I hope!” he said.
This time when she lifted her face she was steadier; her eyes focused more readily; she cocked her head on one side and managed a smile. “You’re no frae here—frae Edinburgh, I mean?”
“I’m … a tourist.” He shrugged.
“In Edinburgh, in the winter?” She seemed astonished. Then, still hugging close to him, she burst into easy laughter. “The Bahamas,” she said as her giggles subsided. “You should have gone there. Lord, what ah wouldnae gi’ for a spot o’ sunshine!”
He pulled gently away from her, steadied her elbow with only one hand. “Are you okay now?”
She swayed a little, got a grip of herself, looked towards the crowds of milling people. Most of them were heading in a crush now down the Royal Mile. “Ten to midnight!” someone shouted, and the crush moved that much faster.
“They’re all off to the Auld Cross!” The girl was breathless, excited. She smiled at Bannerman. “Shall we no join them?”
“The Auld Cross?” he repeated. “Is it something special?”
“What, the Mercat Cross? You’re no much of a tourist, eh?”
Again he shrugged. “Are you on your own?” he asked. Strange if she was, for by local standards she’d be very attractive.
The smile left her face in a moment. “Ah say I am,” she muttered, “but the two who filled me wi’ drink would probably dispute it. Aye, and ah know what
they
were after, too.”
She glanced again at the receding crowd, peered into the crush of faces and figures—and gasped. She drew Bannerman into the shadows. “They’re there,” she whispered. “Lookin’ for me!”
He peered out from cover. The “two” she was afraid of stood out clearly in the crowd. Where all else was drunken or half-drunken or at the very least tipsy merriment, these two were sober, furtive, sneaky, intent. All eyes were bright but theirs were even brighter. Their smiles were frozen on their faces until they were little more than grimaces painted there. They’d lost something, someone, and were intent upon finding her again.
In the local parlance they’d be “hard men,” Bannerman reckoned, and eager. They’d sniffed the spoor, come close to snaring the game, and now the chase was on for real. And he, Bannerman, might easily get caught up in it. Of course, he could simply walk away. But on the other hand …
Across the narrow road, stone steps went steeply down into the darkness of a maze of streets. With everyone heading for the Mercat Cross, the levels down there would be deserted. Bannerman looked back into the shadows, took the girl’s hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
She shrank back, whispered, “I don’t want they two tae see me!”
“They’ve gone,” he lied. For in fact the two men were standing in the doorway eyeing the stragglers, their eyes flitting this way and that.
“clone?” she repeated. “No, they’ll be waitin’ doon the Mile. At the Cross. It’s only five minutes now.”
“Then we’ll cross the road and go down those steps there.”
“We? Are ye comin’ wi’ me, then?”
Again Bannerman’s shrug. “If you wish.”
“No verra eager for it, are ye?” Again she’d cocked her head on one side. She had dark hair, gleaming green eyes, a lush mouth. “No like they two. But ah know
them.
They like a’ sorts of weird games, them. Well, are ye keen or no?”
Not very,
Bannerman thought—but out loud he said, “Come on.”
They left the shadows, crossed the road. Even the stragglers were thinning out now. The girl’s pursuers were moving off, their faces angry, following the crowd. Then one of them glanced back, saw Bannerman and the girl starting down the steps and out of sight.
Bannerman thought,
Maybe now that she’s with someone, they won’t bother her.
Down the steps they went, the girl much recovered now, almost dragging Bannerman after her. “This way, this way!” she hissed back to him, leading him through the dark alleys between high stone walls. She knew the maze of streets intimately, and the urge was on her to know Bannerman that way, too.
In his pocket the recorder worked on, noting every smallest detail of what was occurring here. Then—
“Here,” said the girl. “Here!” The alley was narrow, dark, cold and dry. In the shadows on one side stood an arched-over alcove. There’d been a door here once, now obliterated with mortar and smooth stone. She drew Bannerman in, shivered, swiftly unfastened the buttons of his coat, and crept in with him. Her clothes were flimsy and he could feel her body pressed to him. “There,” she said, opening her blouse for him. “See?”
Bannerman saw, even in the dark. Her breasts were perfectly shaped, brown-tipped—utterly repulsive. He forced himself to weigh the left one in his hand.
Incredibly massive; heavy; full of blood; but the temperature so low it seemed impossible that life—
“Hot!” she gasped, breaking his chain of thought. For the first time she’d felt his body heat. “Why, you’re like a furnace! Have ye got the hots for me, then?”
Her long-fingered hand shifted from his chest, slipped down the front of Bannerman to the zip of his trousers, lowered it in a smooth, practised movement. A moment later she said, “No underpants! Were ye perhaps expectin’ something?” She chuckled coarsely—and froze. He felt the fingers of her cold, searching hand stiffen. For down there in the crotch of his legs she’d found nothing! Just hot, smooth, featureless flesh, like the inner contours of a sharply bent elbow.
“Jesus!” she cried, leaping from the recess in the wall, her breasts swinging free. “Oh, sweet Je—”
Her pursuers were in the alley, creeping there. One of them grabbed her from behind, one hand over her mouth and the other fumbling roughly at her breasts. “Heard us coming for ye, did ye?” he whispered, his voice a threat in itself.
While she kicked and snorted through her nose, the second man lit a cigarette and held his lighter close to the alcove. Its flaring light caught Bannerman there, coat unbuttoned and fly open. “Laddie,” said this one. “We’re not much round here for strangers feelin’ free with our women. Now you’d best hold your breath, son, for ye’re about to lose your ba’s!”
He snapped his lighter shut and lashed out with his left foot, driving it straight to Bannerman’s groin. In the next moment, clenching his heavy lighter tightly in a balled fist to stiffen it and give it weight, the thug swung for Bannerman’s face. The blows were delivered as swiftly as that—one, two—exactly where they were aimed.
Thrown back by the force and suddenness of the attack, Bannerman snatched what looked like a fountain pen from his top pocket.
The girl had meanwhile broken free. The man who had held her tried to strike her in the face but missed his aim. Her fingernails had opened up the side of his face in straight red lines. At first she gasped for breath, but then she started to shout. But not for help. She shouted
at
the men:
“Leave him! For God’s sake leave him be—
or he’ll have ye!”
Animals they might be—but they were human animals. Then she turned and fled into the night.
“Oh, a big-yin, is it?” said the one with the threatening whisper and the bleeding face. “Well then, let’s be seeing the bastard!” He reached into the alcove, caught hold of Bannerman’s lapels and bunched the material in a huge scarred fist.
His friend, however, had drawn back a little. When he’d kicked the stranger and struck him, Bannerman hadn’t gasped or cried out. He hadn’t even grunted. He should be on his knees, crippled, but he wasn’t.
“Out ye come,” said the one holding Bannerman’s coat. “Out here where we can stomp on ye a bit and—” He jerked his arm out of the alcove, but Bannerman didn’t come with it. Neither did the thug’s hand. Severed at the wrist, his stump sprayed his companion’s face with hot blood.
Then
Bannerman came out. He breathed and his breath whooshed like a great bellows. His eyes glowed internally, swinging like searchlight beams to scan the men and the alley. Something gleamed in his hand and made a soft whirring sound. He swung that something in an arc and opened up the one who had struck him in a curving line across the chest.
Bannerman’s weapon sliced through clothing and the man wearing it down to a depth of five inches. It slid through skin, flesh, cartilage, ribs, heart, lungs, with as little effort as an egg slicer. His victim didn’t draw another breath; he was dead before he sagged to the cobbles; his companion was still gaping in disbelief at his own crimson-spurting stump.
Bannerman waved his weapon again, almost dismissively, and decapitated him where he stood. The cut was so clean and effortless that the man’s head remained upright on his neck until a moment after he began to topple sideways … .
T
he pubs in Killin—the old pubs and the three new. ones alike—were doing a roaring trade, as they had been since the arrival of the “Killin Castle” some twenty months ago. In the main bar of one of the new ones, called simply The Castle, Jack Turnbull and Spencer Gill got better acquainted. Turnbull was a minder looking after his boss from the MOD (Ministry of Defence), and in that capacity he’d earlier attended a briefing given by Gill to the two dozen or more VIPs currently here to make this or that decision in respect of that weighty phenomenon guarding and now guarded on the lower slopes of Ben Lawers.
“Lackluster?” Gill repeated Turnbull’s terse but not deliberately unfriendly critique of his talk. Turnbull was outspoken, that was all. Gill shrugged. “I suppose it was. Hell, it always is! If you tell the same story twice weekly with occasional matinees for the best part of a year, it’s bound to get boring, isn’t it? I mean, it isn’t
The Mousetrap.
And it’s not like a joke where you can spice up or tone down the story to suit your audience. I can’t embellish the facts: they are what they are. And the Castle is what it is: a machine. That’s what I was telling them, and I did it as best I could.”
“It wasn’t a criticism,” Turnbull told him. “Or at least I didn’t mean it that way. But I just sat there listening to you, and I thought: This bloke’s knackered, and it’s showing. He’s saying something exciting and it comes out dull as ditchwater.”
Gill smiled wryly. “Actually,” he said. “I don’t have much to be excited about. Not a hell of a lot, anyway. Maybe that’s why it comes out so dry. You see, you don’t know all the facts.”
“Actually,” Turnbull mimicked him, but unsmilingly, “I do know the facts. Most of them. I know more about you than you’d believe. Want to hear?”
Gill raised an eyebrow, nodded. “Why not?” he said. “I’m flattered that my confidential reports are that interesting! Go right ahead.”
Turnbull looked at him almost speculatively. A curious look. It wasn’t appraisal; perhaps it was an attempt at understanding what must be going on in there; or maybe he was simply remembering what he’d researched or been told. Gill thought:
There can’t be all that much of the intellectual in him, not in his line of work.
But Turnbull looked at Gill anyway, and took a mental photograph of him, his way of remembering. Now, if he saw Gill again ten years from now, he’d know him on the instant. Except, of course, Gill didn’t have ten years. He’d be lucky if he had two.
Gill was maybe five-eleven, a little underweight at around eleven stone, thirty-three years old but already looking more like forty. And he was dying. Fifteen years ago as a teenager he’d caused something of a stir; they’d recognized him as a new phenomenon, a quantum leap of Nature to keep pace with Science. Gill had “understood” machines. His great-grandfather had been an engineer, which seemed to be Gill’s only qualification for the trick his genes or whatever had played on him. But nothing his great-grandfather had done could possibly have anything in common with Spencer Gill’s ability.
“In the Age of Computers,” some sensationalist journalist had written, “there will have to be minds which are
like
computers! This young man has that sort of mind … .” Of course, he’d had it wrong: Gill’s mind wasn’t like a computer at all. It was simply that he understood them, them and all other machines: by touch, taste, smell, sight; by listening to them and feeling for them. He was a mechanical empath; or rather, he had empathy with mechanical things. And people had first taken note of him when, at the age of eighteen, he’d described Heath Robinson’s mobiles and mechanisms as “soulless Frankenstein monsters.” He hadn’t understood them, because
they
hadn’t understood themselves. “If they were men,” he’d said, “they’d be idiots.”
“Well?” Gill prompted now, when Turnbull’s stare began to irritate him. “Are you going to tell me the story of my life, or aren’t you?”
Turnbull’s eyes seemed suddenly to focus and he said, “You’re the Machine Man.”
Gill grinned sourly and nodded his head. “You’ve a good memory,” he said. “No one has called me that in ten years!” He brushed back unruly grey-flecked sandy hair from his forehead, picked up his drink and sipped at it. It was brandy: his doctors had told him not to but he’d reached the stage where he believed that if you enjoyed it you should have it.
Not
drinking brandy wasn’t going to save him, so what the hell?
“And is that it?” he asked Turnbull. “Is that the lot? Hardly a dossier.”
Turnbull continued to study him. Gill was a little thin in the face, had a high forehead, unfathomable eyes which were green one moment and grey the next. His teeth were even behind thin, slightly crooked lips; his skin overall, while generally unblemished, wore that certain pallor which spoke of severe physical disorders. Problems which were surfacing and wouldn’t stop until Gill himself was submerged.
“You have a rare blood cancer,” Turnbull finally said, and looked for Gill’s flinch but failed to detect it. “That’s the other reason you’re up here: the air is good for you.”
“Scotland,” said Gill. “Somebody called it the last bastion of air-breathing man. I’m here for that, yes, but you’re not one hundred percent right. It’s not leukemia I have but something else. My system’s all to cock. When I breathe in poisons, my lungs pass them right on into my blood. They’re not blocked or filtered, and I have trouble voiding them. Also, I’ve no great tolerance for them. Just breathing is killing me. In the cities it’s a fast train to the next world, but up here it’s a bike ride—the object being not to pedal too fast, of course.”
“And yet you take a drink now and then,” said Turnbull. “You come into places like this where people are smoking, where even the fumes off the alcohol have to be bad for you.”
Gill shook off the gloom he could feel settling on him like a heavy cloak. He’d had all of these arguments (with himself) many times over. He didn’t need reminding. “The cities are one thing,” he said with a shrug. “I can do without them—never liked them anyway. But I won’t give up the things I do like. Is it worth it for an extra week or two? I don’t think so. I just thank my lucky stars I never got hooked on smoking! Anyway, can we change the subject?”
“Sure,” said Turnbull. “We can talk about everyone’s favourite subject, if you like.”
“The Castle?” Gill was at once uneasy again. “What’s to talk about? It is. It’s there. It’s a machine. That’s it.”
“No.” Turnbull shook his head. “That’s not it. Not all of it. There’s something you know that you’re not saying.”
Now it was Gill’s turn to study Turnbull. He did so thoughtfully, narrow-eyed and for the first time with something other than friendly curiosity. Today had been his first meeting with the man, when he’d been introduced to him by Turnbull’s MOD minister. Security was so thick on the ground up here that the Minister had given his minder the weekend off. Knowing that Gill had rooms in Killin, and that lodgings were otherwise almost impossible to come by, it had been suggested that Turnbull put up at his place. Gill hadn’t minded; company was something he’d been going short on. Lecturing VIPs wasn’t his idea of company. And anyway the big man interested him. Perhaps even more so, now. An intellectual he wasn’t, but shrewd he most certainly was.
Turnbull was just over six feet tall, shaped like a slender wedge, with a bullet head supported by very little neck to speak of. His hair was black, fairly long, and swept back into something of a mane; he kept it stuck down with something that gave it a shine without making it greasy. But that wasn’t out of vanity, it was just to keep it out of his eyes. Those eyes were heavy-lidded, blue when they flashed a smile or when he opened them in surprise. But his smiles were rare and the creases in his forehead many and deep. He seemed to be always on his guard: his training, Gill supposed. And his hands were huge, blunt, extremely strong and yet very fast and flexible. All of him looked fast and flexible. And efficient.
Gill looked at Turnbull’s face. One eyebrow sat fractionally higher than the other, giving him a quizzical look even when he wasn’t quizzing. His angular chin was scarred a little, with small white pocks showing through the brown. Brown, healthy skin, yes—from many a trip to the sun with his boss, no doubt. That’s where Gill would be if he weren’t required here: somewhere in the sun. The Greek islands, maybe.
He controlled his train of thought. He
was
here, and Turnbull had seen through him. Or seen through something of him, anyway. Finally he met the other’s blue unblinking eyes behind their heavy lids, said, “What am I to make of a remark like that? Have you been tasked to me or something? Am I under suspicion, even surveillance?” He was only half joking; the security services of the entire world were interested in the Castle, from the CIA to the KGB, stopping at all stations along the way. But when Turnbull’s eyes flashed blue in genuine surprise, Gill relaxed a little.
“Hell, no!” said Turnbull. “It’s just that I can see you’re worried about something—over and above your big worry, I mean. Part of my training was in interrogation. If I got hold of someone who looked like you, the first thing I’d think was that he was holding something back. I thought it during your talk. What you said boiled down to the Castle being a machine. You said a lot, but basically you could have said it in three words: it’s a machine. That’s what you
said,
but you were thinking something else.”
Gill thought:
I’ve underestimated you!
And out loud, “So what was I thinking?”
Turnbull picked up his drink, shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong. Christ knows you must have plenty of other things to think about. Plenty of things on your mind.”
“Like dying? So we’re back to that again. You know, I’ve just realized why I dislike company. I’d forgotten for a little while, but you’ve reminded me. People always want to know what it feels like.”
Turnbull ordered more drinks. The bar was filling up. There were people here from all over the world, so that Turnbull must raise his voice to make himself heard over the hubbub. But when he turned back to Gill, he was quieter. “Well, I don’t. Okay, that subject is … finished. Let’s try something else. Like, how did you get started?”
Gill raised his eyebrows.
“This machine thing. This trick of yours.”
“It’s no trick.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know you didn’t.” Gill tossed back his fresh drink in one, gulped, and made a face. “Can we get out of here? This atmosphere really is killing me!” He elbowed his way a little unsteadily from the bar; Turnbull drank half of his malt whisky and followed him.
They walked through the bitter late February night, through streets an inch deep in ice-crusted snow, back to Gill’s rooms on the outskirts of the village. As they went Gill said, “Look at this place, will you! Killin? You’d think it was Gstaad midseason! Two years ago this was a sleepy little village. But check out these car registrations. They’re here from all over Europe—and some from a lot farther than that.”
“Like Mars?” Turnbull said.
Now it was Gill’s turn to say, “That isn’t what I meant.”
“But you do think the Castle’s alien, right?” Turnbull pressed.
“I didn’t say so.” Gill was evasive.
“Not in your lecture, no,” said Turnbull. “But then you were talking to a whole lot of heavies: Russians, French, Germans, Americans, even a couple of Chinese! You’ve been told not to be as open with outsiders as you’ve been with the home team. But my Old Man talks to me now and then when he’s not busy, you know? He practices his speeches on me, or just says things to get my reaction. And just occasionally he lets things slip. It may not have been on BBC One—may not be for common consumption—but the word is that you’ve opted for an alien origin.”
Gill snorted, almost laughed out loud. “The whole world has opted for an alien origin, for God’s sake! What else would they opt for? It’s either that or the biggest damned hoax in the history of the planet.”
They had reached Gill’s rooms. As he unlocked the door and let them in, Turnbull said, “But it isn’t a hoax, right?”
Gill put on the lights. Shrugging out of his overcoat, he looked Turnbull straight in the eye. “No,” he said, “it’s no hoax.”
Turnbull clutched his arm and Gill could feel the big man’s excitement. “So where’s it from? And why is it here? I mean, you’re the Machine Man—the man who talks to machines—so if anyone knows it has to be you.”
Gill shook his head (sadly, Turnbull thought) and turned up the heating. Collapsing into a chair he said, “I don’t talk to the damn things. I have … a
feel
for them, that’s all. I understand them like Einstein understood numbers, or like a paleontologist understands old bones. Just like Einstein could find a missing equation, or a fossil hunter put together a dinosaur, I can rebuild a machine. No, even that’s not strictly true, for I haven’t the skill. But I can tell someone who has the skill how to do it. I sense things about machines. Show me a car engine and I’ll tell you what year it was made. I can listen to a Jumbo and tell you if one of the turbo blades is cracked. But as for talking to them …”