An Island Called Moreau Page 14

  “What happened? Did Bella attack him? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know for sure what happened. It was Bella okay—hey, you don’t imagine I scratch like that, I hope! My guess is that he fell or tripped or something, and she attacked when he was down. I didn’t dare go in. He fired at her and she disappeared.”

  “She’s with the Beast People?”

  “Oh, how I wish she were! No, she’s somewhere right here. She ran through to the laboratories and locked herself in. Cal, you’ll have to go in there and kill her—and anything else you find in there alive.”

  I liked the way they all assumed I was on their side.

  We unlocked the outer door and went into the compound, where Maastricht’s paint cans still lay around. I could smell George over the palisade.

  “Let me out and I’ll drag the pole in here. Then nobody else can use it.” I had accepted the idea of siege without question.

  “Can’t you get rid of that grisly object they stuck up out there?”

  “Maybe at some other time.”

  “That stink would make me throw up, if throwing up wasn’t so undignified …”

  Considering the circumstances, Heather was cool and efficient. I tried to feel less hostile toward her as I heaved the pole into the enclosure. She stood by the gate and kept watch. I recalled that she was a karate adept and knew that she would be prepared to use her art on the Beast People if the occasion demanded.

  In short time, we had the pole stowed against the stockade and the outer door locked again.

  As we went inside, glad to be away from the sick-sweet aromas of corruption, I said, “Dart left me to die at the cemetery—I’ve been through hell to get back here. You wouldn’t fetch a guy a sandwich, would you?”

  She said, “I guess I’m worrying too much about Morty. He’ll lose the sight of that left eye, unless he strikes lucky.… Sure, I’ll fix you something to eat—you must be hungry. Then maybe you could use a shower and change of clothes. You smell almost as high as George out yonder.”

  Yes, a civilized girl, I thought. I’d been away for four nights, and four nights survival on Moreau Island was like a century elsewhere; all she said was, “I’ll fix you something to eat.” She was wise not to wish to know what had happened to me.

  I wasted no time thinking about her. As soon as I heard her in the kitchen, I was through into the other corridor, trying each door as I came to it. With the second door, I was in luck. It was the radio room. I went in, locking the door behind me.

  The amount of equipment was imposing. Most of it was familiar. In fact, most of it was a standard USCF station, an Mk IV MVFQ12. It hummed contentedly to itself, its tapes alert to roll when triggered by any incoming signal. Beautiful was what it looked.

  Tuning in to the San Diego wavelength, I switched to Send and put out a carrier. Response almost at once. Crisp American voices came up, and a few seconds later I was speaking to Captain Jimmy Hobarts of Naval Search-Rescue. As precisely as I could, I gave him my geographical position and outlined the situation.

  “Sounds like home from home,” he said. “Hang on.” Silence for ten seconds. “We’ll have a Navy chopper over from Fiji base for you. Should be with you—wait while I get a weather check …”

  I could hear the background noises of his office in San Diego before he came up again. “Weather in your area is set fine for the next twenty-four hours, though enemy interceptor activity is reported. But we’ll order the chopper to keep low, and she should be with you in, say, seven hours, seven and a half. No, later. Eight hours maximum.”

  I looked up at the clock. The time was 1609. It would be midnight before the helicopter made it.

  “I’ll be waiting,” I told Hobarts.

  “They’ll have room for five people and a stretcher case, okay?”

  “More than enough.” I gave him a number to dial in Washington, to alert my department of my continued existence, and he acknowledged.

  “See you.”

  Let’s hope you will, I thought, as I switched off. Midnight was still a long way off.

  11

  Another Visitor for the Big Master

  I was in command of my own destiny again, as far as that is possible in our complex societies. The war was making changes in everything. Old orders and states might be going down in murk, and new ones rising; but at least radio stations were still manned and helicopters flown. Those were the kinds of things I understood and set store by, although my experience on Seal Island was still too vivid for me to rejoice in them at present.

  No matter. Arrangements could be made. Administration could take over from chaos. I was thinking ahead even before I left the radio desk. When the helicopter arrived, Dart, Heather, and Satsu would go aboard with me. Dart needed hospitalization.

  I would make a report on conditions on the island directly I returned to Washington. An official inquiry would follow, and a shakeup for whatever department funded the experiments so laxly. Those experiments would be investigated, closed down, and financial support withdrawn, if I had any say in the matter. A skeleton medical administration would be established to see that the Beast People were humanely treated for the rest of their natural existence. It might be as well to suggest sterilization, in order that they should not breed a further generation of unfortunates.

  Right. With Dart out of action, that left only two problems to be sorted out before midnight. Those problems centered round Bella and Foxy. Bella had to be found and assured that no further harm would come to her. As for Foxy, I thought that if I could only reason with him, then he might bring the Beast People under control—perhaps we might make him their legitimate leader—then we might expect no further disruptions of law and order.

  There should be no more bloodshed. While talking to Foxy, I also wanted to find out what had happened to poor Bernie. It might be possible to take him to a happier life, if he still survived. I might even be able to find him a light menial job at home, maybe on my father’s farm.

  So much I determined to my satisfaction before leaving the radio room.

  Heather was outside the door.

  All softness had left her. In the lines of her face, the tensions of her body, I saw a lethal determination. She was covering me with a weapon I had seen before—the twin of the one Da Silva had toted a few days earlier. I saw that my moment had come. Truth sprang up, fanged, between us.

  Neither of us needed speech. She had caught me in the radio room and was intending to kill me! I was going to stop her, and disarm or kill her.

  I jumped at her.

  But it was a long jump; in the electric air between us, I saw her right arm come up. Without otherwise changing her stance, she fired the weapon at me. It made a noise like ZZlitt, very quietly.

  It works on compressed air, I told myself irrelevantly, while my knees collapsed and I fell forward, trying but unable to clutch at a burning sting which radiated from under my left shoulder to the rest of my body. Heather stood back and watched me go.

  All my muscles had gone slack. There was no way I could save myself. I fell like a doomed tree, rolling over to lie face upward in a crumpled position. Heather stepped over me, looking down with a professional coldness more ghastly than hate.

  Heat coursed through my body; I thought I was dying. Yet my brain remained lucid. Detachedly, I decided that I had been hit by a needle containing deadly poison which worked instantly.

  Meanwhile, I heard Dart calling feebly down the corridor. Heather stooped over me and said, “The Master always thought you were an enemy agent. I did not, but it seems that I was wrong. Now I can check.” She went into the radio room. I had heard what she said, but it was difficult to put the words together and make sense of them.

  I lay there while whole landscapes of pain and time came by. Eventually, Heather reappeared. She stepped round me and disappeared in the direction of—what was that man’s name?—of Dart’s room.

  More landscapes, more eternities. I tried to think of Lorta.

/>   Heather was back, and bending over me. She lifted my head.

  “Cal, I know you can hear me. Listen, you are in the clear. Every message leaving here is automatically recorded, so I’ve been able to play your message back. You’re in the clear. You’re no enemy agent, you’re just the goddamned blundering shipwrecked politician you always claimed to be. I’m going to give you something to counteract the anesthetic that’s gotten into your system, and you’ll be right as rain again in no time.”

  The fighting woman was set aside. With nurse-like care, she propped me up against the wall, fetched a hypodermic, and injected a clear fluid into my bloodstream. Then she brought me a cup of coffee—real and not synthetic coffee. Time began for me again.

  She got me to my feet and half dragged me to my old bed, where she made me comfortable.

  “You tricked me, Cal, you bastard, asking for a sandwich,” she said. “I was a fool to be so easily fooled. It’s worked out okay—you’re in the clear now. The Master was convinced that you were not what you pretended to be. I suppose you know why?”

  I didn’t know why, but I was unable to speak, to put my question into words. I could feel the antidote working, stirring me up.

  “Now I’ve got to adjust to you as someone with a lot of pull in Washington,” she said. “It’s funny having Mort in bed in one room here and you in bed in another.… It gives me the chance to intercede for him. He really needs more funds and more assistants; the Department is so stingy in that respect. You could put in a good word for us. I know you’re prejudiced against what’s going on here, Cal, but I’ll escort you round the labs, which you haven’t visited yet, and you’ll see how well run they are, despite our difficulties. We need your help, Cal, really …”

  She sat on the bed and snuggled against me, looking down sweetly into my eyes.

  “It was the Department sent me here. I have trained with animals. The Department’s idea was that I should be Morty’s personal bodyguard and assistant …”

  Her warmth and her pleasant perfume were things I fought against even in my weakness. I also rejected what she said, and croaked in protest.

  “You didn’t know that, Cal, did you?” She gazed rather wistfully into space. “Maybe Morty’s twigged by now. Remember when Islam was on the warpath and at the same time Cuban forces invaded Samoa? A bad time at home. I arrived on Moreau Island in a private plane, courtesy of the Department, letting on I was escaping from Samoa. Morty accepted me and my story. And why not? He knows the whole damned world’s falling apart.…” She sighed.

  Silence lay heavy in the room—the roaring I heard was not of the ocean outside the building but of my inner ear, where tides of life were returning. Then she spoke again, her lips close to mine.

  “What I want to put across to you, Cal, is how important Morty is to the war effort. I’m proud to serve, to do something, anything—to feel that at last I, well, it’s hard to put into words, but I guess at last I have a job here which is equal to my capacities. Sure, I get bored at times, because of the isolation, but it isn’t every woman who finds the kind of opportunities I do here. I mean, I’m doing a man’s job—well, more than that …”

  She squirmed and settled lower. “Give it eight or maybe ten years, and I think we’ll see a woman President of the United States—what’s left of the States, anyway. My boss in the Department feels the way I do.”

  She stroked my face.

  “That is one plus you can mark up to the war. I know it’s awful, thousands of people getting slaughtered like cattle all over the globe, but at least attitudes are clear-cut and you can see them as they really are. No pretenses. People are either your friends or your enemies, you know what I mean? I mean, either we win or they win, and that simplifies all sorts of issues. It’s like watching an old gangster film, in a way.”

  She was lying against me now.

  “You must give us a good report when you get back to Washington, Cal. Otherwise, it could be you in trouble. I mean, it is wartime, and secrets have to be kept. You threatened the Master with death and he didn’t like that.… We’re your friends, remember. Okay, you don’t exactly go for some of the things that happen here, but far far worse things go on in the Soviet and Islam blocs, on a far far larger scale. Moreau Island is just a drop in the ocean. People have to suffer …”

  I managed a loud groan.

  “Cal, are you getting any feeling?”

  “What department employs you, Heather?” At last I got the words out.

  She smiled. “That was what had the Master puzzled, I guess. You see, we’re funded here by your department—the Department of State. We assumed that if you were who you claimed to be, you’d have known all about Moreau Island all along.”

  Life and control were returned to me. Perhaps the shock Heather had given me helped. I persuaded her to go and get me some food and drink and sat on the side of the bed. It was 1710.

  Her revelation would make no difference in terms of what I had to do when I returned to Washington. I would make my report and tender my resignation. Somewhere in the building in which I worked, maybe in a safe in an office in my corridor, was a file. It would have a fancy code name. In that file lived Moreau’s other island, a doppelgänger of the real island, a tidy little utopia docketed into paragraphs and subheads. It would make dry legal sense. It would be an abstract. And there would be neatly entered figures, with all columns carefully balanced by accountants once a year.

  It was that other island I had to destroy. The real island could not exist in its present form without that other shadow island in a file in a safe in my department in Washington.

  Carefully, I levered myself off the bed and began pacing up and down. When Heather returned with a neat little snack on a tray, I was feeling more the man I used to be.

  As I finished the meal, we heard a distant crash.

  “That’s Morty,” Heather said, looking alarmed. “He’s trying to get out of bed. I must go and look after him, or he’ll do himself an injury.”

  I sat alone for a moment, then rose, left the room, and walked quietly along the main corridor. Heather had gone down the side corridor to Dart’s room. I continued until I came to the door opposite the control room. It served as one of the entrances into the laboratory area.

  Although Heather had offered me a conducted tour of the labs, it might be a better idea to have a look on my own. For one thing, I wanted to find out what had happened to Bella. Heather had claimed that Bella was at large in the labs; but the more of Heather’s statements that could be checked against reality the better.

  I listened outside the door. I tried the handle. It was locked, as expected. In the control room were monitor screens, some of which would show me what was happening in the labs, of that I felt convinced. Before trying them, I called Bella’s name softly at the lab door.

  At once, there was movement in the room beyond. Someone had been standing in silence listening to me. There was a sound like a snake crossing a bare plank floor. A key clicked in the lock. As the door began to open, I knew it would not be Bella standing there.

  What I did see was a thing so fearful, so unlikely, that it might have stepped from the pages of an evil fairy story. I stepped back a pace as it spoke.

  “I do not know who you are,” it said, “but if you are in the Master’s service then I must welcome you in.”

  That perfect diction, even and well turned! How much more acceptable were the shattered vocabularies of the Beast People, reflecting in every distorted syllable their distorted lives.

  The creature confronting me was even more of an aberration of the human form than they. It stood under one and a half meters high and was disproportionately thick of body. It had extremely short legs, so that the arms trailed almost to the ground. Its head was distorted into cephalic form, the skull tapering almost to a point at the rear. This cranial abnormality was emphasized by the creature’s lack of hair.

  Distorted bone structure also accounted for the ugliness of the creatur
e’s face, which was inordinately fleshy. Its forehead bulged and came low over the eyes, while the chin curved upward almost concealing the mouth. There was no nose to speak of. I was reminded of drawings of the faces of seven-month fetuses. Yet the overall effect of the creature was of a malignant gnome.

  Natural disgust at being confronted by this figure was increased by the curious quality of its skin, which had a dead, grayish color and the texture almost of scales, so flaky was it. The gnome was encased in sloughed snakeskin.

  Because it was forced to gaze up at me, the impression I got was of a long-drowned face. Even the eyes looked watery and without life.

  Yet it moved naturally and easily, standing aside for me to enter the room and even extending a hand to me. The nails of the hand curved protectively right over the tips. I could not take hold of it.

  “Bella,” I said. “I came to see Bella.”

  “Did you, indeed? Bella caused a great deal of destruction, I fear, so we had to take care of her. She is dying in the next room. We persuaded her that her life was not worth living, and gave her the wherewithal for suicide. You have no need to worry further.”

  “I must see her. Take me to her quickly.”

  As I started forward toward the door the gnome had indicated, he said, “You Father People have many impulses.” So uninflected was his diction that I could not tell whether he spoke in envy or sneeringly.

  The room I was in was the first of the laboratory complex, which was full of different rooms and divisions. This anteroom was an office, an array of filing cabinets and a computer terminal being the chief things I noted. What caught the eye was blood everywhere, as if a battle had taken place. In the corner by the far door lay four small gnome bodies, dreadfully mauled.

  The next room, a full-blown laboratory with expensive equipment grouped about it and rows of cultures under glass along one side, presented a scene of even greater havoc. I marveled at how many of the gnome-men must be housed here. At least a dozen of them lay sprawled in death about the room. I saw by their wounds that Bella had killed them. They lay in their own blood, the heavy smell of which saturated the air.