The Yellow Glass (30 page)

“Oh God.
 
You didn’t kill her, did you, Jay?”

“Frying-pan,” moaned Magnus from
the floor.

That was something.
 
I got myself upright and dived under the bunk
beds for the gun, which had careered out of my hand when we’d crashed.

“Up and at it!” I shouted to
Tamang, and we stormed back up the ladder to the crazily-angled deck.

There were swarms of them by now
and we hadn’t a hope in hell, but that didn’t stop us giving it a good go.
 
I fired a few warning shots and may have got
at least one man, while Jay performed heroically with the cat o’three, but they
kept on coming; more and more of them streaming out of the cliff, having
clocked the almighty row that had heralded our arrival.
 
I’d jumped onto the wheelhouse roof when my
ammo ran out.
 
Whatever game we’d been
playing, was most certainly up.
 

Two of them wrestled my arms
behind my back, while Severs - who’d come to in the crash - beat me black and
blue, until I couldn’t stand straight.
 
They had to pull him off me, or I’d have been a goner.
 
As they carted me off the barge, I’d just
time to see them reach up to unwind Joe Bloggs from the mainmast, where he clung,
winched up high in the blue sky, like a flag.
 

Then they dragged me up the
beach and through the gaping mouth of the cliff and all kinds of darkness
swallowed me up.

——

 
I couldn’t believe
the pain; it was hellish.
 
It’d be more
than a miracle if I ever walked again, ever held a pint in my hand, or used a
typewriter.
 
What had they done to the
barge?
 
Were we all about to drown?

“Frying-pan,” I moaned.
 
And then, “Save me, man,” because there was
nothing I could do to save myself.

Nobody answered.
 
They’d left me all alone on the cabin
floor.
 
The noise stopped and there was
total silence in that metal sarcophagus.
 
I lay there, just waiting for the waves to come gushing down the hatch to
drown me.
 

“We’re going to drown.
 
We’re all going to drown,” I sobbed out loud;
so loud I didn’t hear the steps coming down the ladder.

“Who’s going to drown, soft
lad?”

It was my Uncle Reg, leering
over me with his white eyes.
 
Now I knew
I really
was
in hell.

 
‘It is better to die
than be a coward.’
 

The sacred words of my regiment
returned to me when they took us down.
 
I
had been a scientist for a number of years and could no longer remember how it
would feel to be ‘in the field’ (as Mr Upshott so liked to call it).
 
To tell you the truth, it felt most odd - as
if my years of diligent study had never been: the physics, the chemistry, the
mathematics and my scholarship to Cambridge - and, yet, so very familiar.
 
The Gorkha in me had not gone and I was glad
to discover that I had no fear of death.
 
Only the thought that there would be no Lama for my passing - to rescue
my soul and allow it to be born again - disturbed my Tamang heart (for I could
not think that any Lama would
choose
to live beside the barbaric British sea).
 

Barbaric, yes.
 
I cannot describe the foreign nature of that
grey ocean to a man born in the Kathmandu Valley!
 
We Tamangs are men of stone, not water; from
the earliest age we are accustomed to traversing the foothills of great
mountains and thinking nothing of it.
 
We
Tamangs may not be Sherpas, but we have worked alongside them (whenever they
allowed us to do so) and proved to be as expert climbers and guides as
they.
 
So, to be strapped to the mast of
a ship with the waves spitting in my face!
 
To be borne into a chamber within the cliff, where the sea cried out at
such a volume that it threatened to burst the eardrums!
 
The sea was a stranger to me, where death was
not.
 

Which was not to say that I felt
no fear of
any
kind.
 
All soldiers live with some fear and the
Gorkha is no exception.
 
But the fear
that I felt in that moment brought to mind my long-passed father; my father who
had pulled a rickshaw all his life (for low porters and rickshaw pullers,
drinkers and easy women: these are what Tamangs are supposed to be in the Kathmandu
Valley).
 
My father who had been so proud
when I became a soldier in the British Army (despite his insistence that I
would never be accepted unless I changed my name to ‘Gurung’, or any other name
that wasn’t ‘Tamang’, which I
refused
to do).
  

‘It is better to die than be a
coward’.

Mr Upshott may have been many
things, but he wasn’t a coward.
 
They
beat him severely and he was in a bad way when they dragged him off the barge
and into the chamber in the cliff.
 
I
followed soon after, allowing myself to be taken so that I might pay full
attention to the strange new place where we now found ourselves.
 
It was a place that belonged to the sea, as if
the waters had only parted for our entrance and would rush in behind our backs.
 
So close and shadowed and filled with the
most powerful aroma.
 
A large-leafed,
brown seaweed had colonised the ground and clouds of tiny flies swarmed around
our feet.
 
Kelp, I thought.
  
Oarweed, or
Laminaria digitalis
, to be precise.
 
The smell was deep and savoury as one of our fermented Nepali chutneys,
or a fish sauce.

However, that is the limit of
what I can describe in the first chamber, because we soon left it behind to
enter a tunnel that opened up in the back wall, loosely stepped with the
strange, white chalk, and graduating down into the belly of the earth.
 
It was narrow and airless and what air there
was seemed to heat up with each step we took.
 
Every now and again the ground trembled, distinctly, beneath our
feet.
 
We would have been in darkness
except that a cable of electric lights had been strung, most carelessly, over
protruding nails, to light our way down.
 
I couldn’t help being reminded of our journey down the slide and - by
association - of my disappointment at the performance of my hat with the
concealed ion chamber in the band.
 
I
wasn’t used to such failure and it still rankled with me.
 
Even the remarkable success of my distance
controlling device couldn’t compensate for it. Yes: I believe those were the
very
thoughts that were running through
my brain as we arrived at a polished, steel door.

So, imagine my astonishment when
the door slid open and we were confronted with a man wearing the familiar,
protective suit and mask, and holding a distance controlling device identical
in
every
way
to the model that I, Jayagaon Tamang, had invented!
  

Now, I must say here that,
during the course of my scientific career, I’ve found that ideas belong to no
one
person, alone; that they run like
electric currents and we merely scramble to pick them up.
 
If a scientist does not discover such and
such a thing and make it known to the world at large as quickly as he is able,
then another scientist surely will.
 
The
times in which we live dispose us to think along the same lines, and no idea is
ours and ours alone.
 
(In my humble
opinion it is certain that the West puts far too much importance upon the
individual in
every
aspect of
life.)
  
Therefore, I was prepared to
admit that others would be at work on Jay Tamang’s distance controlling device,
despite the ‘spec.’ - the exact specification of the dimensions and materials
used - being so similar.
 

I decided to waste no further
time on this problem and to turn my attention to the room in which we found
ourselves; an area of much activity, suggestive of an engine-room, or
power-house (and not
wholly
unlike
our own technical department in the basement of HQ).
 
These are my observations:
 

It was intensely hot and busy,
for ten, or more, men in protective suits were congregated around a singular
apparatus.
 
The noise of the sea had been
replaced by the rumble of a mighty generator.
 
What could all of these men be up to?
 
I thought of turbines; the heat energy of combustion being converted
into mechanical energy and sent to power a generator.
 
A closed loop cycle?
 
The second law of thermodynamics concerned me
[47]
.
 
Were they using the
sea
to cool the waste heat?
 
But, burning fossil fuels so far down in the depths of the earth would
present problems.
 
They would be forced
to pump out the sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, methane and mercury compounds,
for a start.
 
The protective suits
suggested nuclear power, of course, yet I hesitated to assume that a nuclear
power station was being operated below ground . . when my questions were
abruptly curtailed.
 
For I’d caught sight
of some equipment that reminded me, peculiarly, of my own work on the
production of uranium from diverse sources.

“Blindfold them, you
morons!”
 
Somebody shouted.

Straight away, a hood came down
over my face, shutting out the possibility of further speculation.
 
Then a knee pushed me in the back, urging me
to move and I set off once more, stumbling forward into black heat.
 
After a time, I collided with a wall and
heard the mechanism of a lift grind into play, before the floor jolted beneath
my feet.
 
I was shoeless and could feel
the warmth of the metal floor underfoot.
 
It was as if the whole of that underground power-house was warmed by its
own, hidden, sun.

The lift bore us up to the top
of the cliff and a whistling rush of chill sea air.
 
Voices came and went nearby and I strained to
pick them out.

“Permission to . .
now
, sir,” said one man.

“No.
 
I said
no
and I . . .” answered another.

“If you’d seen, sir . . what he
did . .
 
barge . . pay for that with his
. . .”

“Listen, you jumped-up . . not
now . . later . . coming later . . .”

Later?
 
I didn’t like the sound of this ‘later’.
 
I flexed my torso and managed to dig into
whoever was behind me with both elbows.

“Aargh!”
 

A boot kicked out and caught me
on the back, so that I fell onto the grass, but I was still wearing the
protective suit and it did no damage.

“Watch the Chink, you
moron!
 
That’s what comes of using
Gyppos.
 
Christ, do I have to do
everybody’s job for them?
 
Right, this
one’ll do . . .”
 

A padlock was unlocked.
 

“Into the caravan with the both
of them.
 
I want arms
and
legs tied.
 
Got that?”
 

They threw me in and I collided
with the long limbs of Mr Upshott, who moaned, so very quietly.
 
Then they tied my arms behind my back with a
flexible strap that I surmised was leather and secured my ankles with
another.
   

“You, you and you on guard
duty.
 
As for
you
, you’re coming with me.
 
I don’t trust you.
 
You can have
your bit of fun, later.”

The door slammed shut, leaving
us bound and hooded and lying side by side on the cold floor of a caravan,
which was, presumably, parked above a hollow cliff.

“Mr Upshott?”
 
I whispered into the dark.
 
My voice was muffled by my hood, so I spoke a
fraction louder to make myself heard.
 
“Are you able to hear me, Mr Upshott?”

“ . . not deaf,” his voice came
back - a little slurred - but sounding reassuringly much as he always did.

“Are you in much pain?”

“I’ve felt better, Tamang.”

“I am sure.
 
Listen, Mr Upshott, I believe that strange
coincidences are at work here.”

He gave a snort of laughter,
which I found more reassuring, still.

“Truly.
 
I hesitate to boast, but I believe that these
men may be familiar with my work on the production of uranium from diverse
sources.
 
They also possess a distance
controlling device identical to my own invention, which you may recall from our
travels along the slide.”
  

You see, I had been prepared to
apply my theorem of the multiple ownership of ideas to the distance controlling
device, but the distillation apparatus that I had glimpsed - boiler, condenser,
fractioning tower and centrifuge designed to an unusual spec. of my own
devising - was a step too far.
 
I heard
Mr Upshott shuffle about beside me, bravely suppressing a gasp of pain.

“Are you suggesting you’ve a
mole in the technical department, Tamang?”
 
The curiosity in his voice sprung out of the darkness, as if it were a
flame flaring from a match.

“I think that might be the
case.”
 

“Interesting.
 
Tell me, what’ve you been up to in the
lab?
 
With uranium?”

“Well, I’ve been running a
series of tests on the uranium-bearing capacities of glass, obviously; although
I must admit that I still don’t fully understand how such quantities could be
contained within the fabric of an inert material, despite all the information
we have received on Operation Crystal Clear.
 
However . .” I continued, warming to my subject, “ . . I have
also
been experimenting with the
production of uranium from seawater.
 
We
know the rich mix of chemical compounds in marine water, of course, and I’ve
been separating the mineral ions - such as sodium, iron and calcium, at a very
basic level - and employing a fractional still to divide many substances from
each other by means of evaporation and condensation to
 
. .”

“I
had
to go and ask,” he moaned.
 
“D’you know, I’m not sure I’m up to this, Tamang.”

“However, the results are not
encouraging, I must admit.
 
Trace
elements are all I have been able to produce so far.
 
And hydrogen, of course.
 
I believe I can say, with complete
confidence, that while uranium
is
present, viable levels
cannot
be
harvested from the sea at this moment in time.”

“Right; I think I’m with
you.
 
What you’re making such a song and
dance about is, in effect, that parts of your work have been stolen and that
Arkonnen has succeeded where you failed . .”

“Well, I’m not sure that . .”

Again, that wry laugh of his, so
unfathomably British.

“Ha, ha.
 
Bite the bullet.
 
Looks like they’ve got one over on you!”

“You are certainly feeling
better, Mr Upshott.”

“Oh, God, no I’m
not
,” he sighed.
 

There was a protracted silence
and then he said, most unexpectedly:

“I
hate
all this, you know, Jay.”