The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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the now empty hall with his companion. Through the thin partition, Wyvern could hear every word he said.
‘You see what happens,’ he was saying. ‘Nobody can be relied on. I tell you the whole set-up must be reorganised from top to bottom. Once I’m Leader –’
‘But we haven’t time,’ replied the other voice. It was H’s secretary, his tones full of spinsterish annoyance.
‘After this crisis, yes, by all means. But we can’t change horses in midstream.’
‘You argue too much,’ H bellowed. ‘I’ll ask when I want your advice in future. It’s done me no good so far. Now we’ve lost Wyvern –’
‘No,’ said the secretary, ‘we haven’t lost him. He must be in the building.’
‘He’d better be!’
‘Personally I rather admire Wyvern; he is what a century ago, would have been called a good all-rounder. But we have allowed ourselves to be diverted from our original topic,’ said the secretary icily, ‘which was the question of the disposal of Parrodyce and his assistant, Rakister.’
‘How can we dispose of them when we can’t lay our hands on either of them?’
‘That is a question merely of time.’
‘Time, time!’ shouted the Colonel. ‘Too many of the underground – these so-called wretched Democratics – have seeped into the military for it to be merely a question of time! There’s got to be a reorganisation. There’s got to be a purge. Bull had to have one when he came to power.’ Abruptly, he controlled himself and said in a lower voice, ‘Give orders that they are both to be shot on sight. Parrodyce is a traitor.’
‘Rakister is not,’ the secretary said.
‘Then why didn’t he report back to us when he’d done the job? I told you long ago, never trust a man who prefers a knife to a gun – they’re always neurotics. Anyhow, he knows too much about Dorgen. He must go.’
Their conversation grew indistinct. They had moved off into the corridor. Wyvern heard the door click behind them. He could not stay where he was: doubtless the building was now being combed. One obvious avenue of hope lay open to him.
He came out of the cupboard and ran up the stairs which H and his secretary had just descended. As he reached the first landing, he heard a door open on the level he had left. Double doors stood on the landing; he tried them, and they were locked. Softly, he hurried up another flight.
The stairs ended here in a single door. It was of clear glass, and also locked. The whole building below Wyvern was housed beneath the lunar rock, for gazing out he could see he had just reached ground level. In a tiny square, a helicopter waited. This, no doubt, was the VIP entrance to the hospital.
Urgently, he pushed at the door. It did not budge. The glass was dauntingly thick. He was praying in the cavern of his dry mouth. Now footsteps were ascending the stairs behind him, rapidly, confidently.
If he could not get out of here, he was trapped in a dead end. Abandoning any idea of secrecy, Wyvern struck at the glass with his cable and point. It starred, but did not shatter. He was still battering when a voice behind him said, ‘You’d need dynamite to make a go of it, Wyvern.’
He turned to stare into the muzzle of the secretary’s revolver.
A long, tasty silence. Wyvern dropped his cable.
‘I suddenly had this thought, you see,’ the secretary explained. ‘I left the Colonel to do all the shouting and doubled back on our tracks. It occurred to me that you might somehow have sneaked past us. Come on down.’
‘Listen,’ Wyvern said. ‘I don’t even know your name, but you’re not cut out for this sort of stunt. The régime’s doomed anyway, so why not help me out of this? You should have enough intelligence to recognise a moral stink when you smell one.’
‘A puzzling and illogical appeal,’ commented the secretary, ‘with a lot of rich ingredients: an argument of necessity, a moral argument, something which sounded suspiciously like an appeal to the old school tie, and a yen to be formally introduced to me. My name’s Bottom, if you must know; for obvious reasons I use it as little as possible. Now we must get you back on your couch.’
‘H would shoot you as soon as look at you!’ Wyvern exclaimed.
‘Won’t wash, old boy – too obvious a ruse, and a lie anyway. Oh, granted he’s a bit boorish. But stick by him and he’ll stick by you; I don’t pretend to understand that type of idealism, but there it is. Now come on down.’
‘Look here –’
‘Come on down before I shoot your foot off. Don’t you believe me when I ask you nicely?’
There was no alternative. Wyvern started slowly forward. Then he stopped, shaken by a vast strangeness. Almost at once – it seemed intuitively – he knew what was happening: Bert the Brain had come back into action.
The secretary fired deliberately at his captive’s legs. But it was too late. Wyvern’s figure grew blurred, shadowy, and then disappeared.
The ricocheting bullet spanged dismally down the stairwell.
VII
From the orange-tinted windows of the ‘Single Z’ bar there was a fine view of one of the Sector’s airlocks, Trafalgar Gate. For the price of a drink, anyone with nothing better to do could sit all day and watch the traffic in and out of the big dome. Eugene Parrodyce sat and watched it now, from a concealed seat, wistfully.
A deal of military activity was taking place. There had been a demonstration here the evening before, and a home-made bomb thrown. Now a light tank stood by the gate, with new and military police reinforcing the usual lunar guard.
The sectionalised glass of the dome began fifteen feet from the ground, and rested on reinforced steel. The entire gate consisted of three pairs of double doors, two of them wide and full fifteen feet high for freight, and one much smaller for personnel. There was also a guard room which contained a door into the outside wall of the dome.
Behind all these doors stretched a vast, compartmented hangar containing decontamination rooms, showers, first aid posts, an isolation ward, a fire station and a repair base, besides the runways which terminated at the double airlocks leading to the lunar surface. A large team of men worked in this complex hangar, so that a stream of people moved in and out of Trafalgar Gate whether or not spaceships happened to be on the landing ramps outside.
Parrodyce knew that besides the actual airlocks at the far end of the hangar, there were also emergency locks in the sides. The knowledge was of no use to him. He did not know whereabouts they were; he had no spacesuit; he could not get into the hangar without at least four special passes. And to cap it all, he was tied to his seat with funk and indecision.
In his heart, he blamed it all on Wyvern. It was Wyvern’s fault. Now he, Parrodyce, was a hopeless fugitive. The only element of comfort in the matter was that nobody was likely to betray him to the detested police if they recognised him; and the police seemed to have more urgent matters afoot. He thought longingly of his snug little questioning chamber below Norwich barracks, and of the timid friendship he had felt for his assistant until that amiable giant had disappeared.
And now the agent of his misery, Conrad Wyvern, was probably connected to Big Bert. For a moment, Parrodyce wished he might also be so connected. He visualised yearningly a vast father-mother figure who would take him over completely, know all his secrets. Then, recalling the pain this process would involve, he let his attention wander again to the window.
A Turkish six-piece band was haggling with the guard at the Trafalgar Gate. It had come to the British Sector as a seven-piece band; but the zither (doubling guitar) man had been disqualified from anything bar harp music the night before in a political brawl. As a protest, the rest of the band was leaving the sector. Besides