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  How much did I really know, then? Was it significant that the purpose of the merger had been to gain a contract with NASA, and that three years later NASA had pulled out? ...

  I struck a match and peered around the dusty little stable I now found myself in. No sign of hay and even less of a horse. Actually I could see no reason why Stergen should go to great lengths to conceal the entrance and I fell ridiculous prodding around among old tins looking for Aladdin’s cave.

  Think on, you bum! Why are you here, anyway?

  Well, a lot of companies — especially those concerned with telecommunications as we were — have contracts with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And presumably a lot of them lose their contracts if they don’t come up with the answers. The funny thing was that Group Three went from strength to strength after NASA backed out. Why was that? Questions, questions ...

  And then I found the entrance. It turned out to be a back-handed boost to my pride: the expensive and elaborate interlocking security system was my own design! — my electronic messing around at Elstree had endured a major breach of copyright. Ludicrously, the code I had to break was the one I had invented. Nevertheless I gaped at what I saw. You don’t expect the cool countryside to be riddled with tunnels like this one.

  A do-it-yourself kit for this sort of work would run you into a million pound bill and the instruction book might be a bit tough on the handyman: ... Take a nine-foot capstan incorporating twin laser beams which are biased inward so that when they rotate they burn a cone out of solid rock by meeting at a focal point six feet into the working. Thrust the entire machine on its rails forward towards the face at a rate of twenty-five feet per hour and line up automatically on a third pencil beam from a fixed ruby laser focused slap through the middle of tool.

  ‘Now suck the rubble out behind you and insert a thing like a rotary garden spray gone mad, so that plasto-concrete is gunnited on to the tube you have just bored ... only keep well out of the way or you’ll be coated with three inches of the toughest material since tungsten which even an earthquake wouldn’t crack; and if you take one breath your lungs will harden into a fossil.

  ‘Press forward between bulkheads which seal-in the working at an air-pressure of two atmospheres and make sure that your special suit and helmet doesn’t spring a leak; or the sound-level of over two hundred and fifty db will shake you to pieces for the duration of one very short scream. Stand back and gape.’

  I did. The tunnel ran out of sight ahead of me and I was the toothpaste in the tube, which glistened as if it had just been polished. It was a claustrophobic, eerie experience.

  At the end of this section another circular bulkhead, fitted with my device, gave me a view through an inch-thick peephole which ended my smugness for keeps: whatever they were doing with whatever was left of Philip Thorne, it wasn’t going to be an amateur job. The technology was altogether too advanced to fail.

  Beyond the bulkhead, the tunnel was coiled downward like a corkscrew fifty feet across; and a continuous window — forming a slit in the side of the bent tunnel — revealed that the corkscrew was wrapped around a brilliantly lighted chamber in which there floated, apparently disembodied, bulbous bits of machinery straight out of a schizophrenic’s nightmare.

  Something about the blue-tinted lights — they didn’t throw shadows — reminded me on some level of an operating theatre; and as I gazed at the spectacle in what must have been one of the longest double-takes in history, the first vague splinters of an idea began to form. For one of the salient points of Stergen’s second scientific paper had included the phrase: ‘The biggest waste in space technology is the dead weight of the human frame ...’

  If I tried to describe what I now saw in the exact way it hit me personally it would be like expecting your mind to work like mine. I won’t attempt it. In these things the emphasis varies person to person, and my impression won’t make sense to anyone else. So here’s simply what was in there:

  Suspended from somewhere above me — somewhere above the chamber itself — were two enormous bubbles. These were clearly sterile compartments and each contained a kind of operating table, but totally automated. Above each respective slab were steel claws like mechanical grabs ... and don’t guess at the purpose of having two of these units because that was my guess too and I was utterly wrong.

  Connecting the two bubbles, which hung about fifteen feet apart, were slung a number of cables and tubes, as well as plastic strip to which were attached lengths of what looked like magnetic tape (but which we know of course was not magnetic tape) along its surface.

  The operating tables were tipped slightly so that whatever was strapped on them was only visible from the other side of the chamber, and in view of what I learned much later I am more than grateful that this was so. But across there was the elongated window of a control booth, from which whatever was happening was being controlled remotely. I couldn’t see in clearly enough to make out who was there and in any case I only knew Stergen from press photographs. But it was reasonable to suppose that he was supervising. What I could see, though, were the screens of television sets, responding to cameras mounted over each bubble in the chamber.

  In cold blood this all sounds so normal — a perfectly reasonable piece of engineering, whatever it did. The fact that above me — perhaps fifty feet, not more — was an uncut cornfield and the smell of pigs and some scuttling rabbits and a hayloft doesn’t convey what I mean when I state there was something deranged in the total concept. But it was as if someone had taken a long hard look at Cape Kennedy, then applied the same sort of architecture to something utterly different, like a Laundromat. It simply didn’t belong.

  But I wasn’t at the Cape, nor Atlantis, nor a lunatic asylum for little green men with antennae. I was four hundred yards from a forlornly kept farmhouse containing a woman whose immediate impact on me was at least compelling enough to jolt my brain into functioning for the first time in months. And my brain was telling me coolly enough, now that I’d got used to the view, that some organization — which wasn’t NASA but must have been as big — had financed, designed and built all this real-time engineering for a definite purpose; and that the men in the booth opposite had impressive medical degrees and world reputations. I was practically a bum.

  So I decided to take a closer look. To do this I would have to walk one and a half times around the corkscrew.

  I passed two entrances on its outer rim. But the third was a kind of tunnel mouth. Over it was a cryptic electric sign:

  LINK TUNNEL

  it said. Opposite this heading were a number of panels which could be lighted from the back — like a train indicator on the Piccadilly Line. The only one with a legible message was second from the bottom and this said:

  PHASE F. COMPLETION IMMINENT

  I thought they’d got enough tunnels already. But the habit was evidently compulsive. Presumably they got longer each time.

  — It would have paid off if I’d stopped my mind wandering. The man who suddenly emerged from the tunnel wasn’t subject to such lack of concentration. Almost amiable, relaxed, he decided I was in the wrong place and that it was up to him to do something about it. To look at he was absurdly like Roy Emerson.

  When he spoke, though, that irritating pink English spoken throughout South Kensington demolished the illusion. He said quietly: ‘We knew the only person who could neutralize the entry locks was the designer, Mr Yenn. But I’m afraid we can’t have you wandering around the Helical. What an extremely awkward situation! Will you please come to my office?’

  I did. This lank security man who escorted me refrained, however, from producing a tennis racket and the room we now entered wasn’t a changing room smelling of plimsolls; but a cold-steel alert-centre equipped with every precaution from smoke-warning tracer boxes to a huge red knob labelled FLOOD-OUT. I must say I was hoping he wouldn’t pull that one.

  He caught my look and smiled superciliously and stopped looking like Roy Emerson. ‘You
are certainly an embarrassment, but not, I think, quite as bad as that!’ He reached into a cabinet somewhere underneath all that gear and said! ‘We might as well have a beer while we talk.’ He dithered about, looking for an opener, got one and poured two drinks. ‘I’m just the duty man. You can’t talk to the chief — unfortunately — until after Stage One.’

  ‘Stage One?’

  ‘The first part of the operation,’ he said airily, as if that explained it all. Then briskly: ‘Now, some details, please. You’re Nigel Yenn, of 49 Leek Road, London South-West 7.’

  ‘South-West 10,’ I corrected, leaning forward and feeling unaccountably anxious to please. I felt I had barged into someone else’s cocktail party.

  ‘Oh. Is it?’ Out came the dapper little fountain pen. ‘You were with Group Two at Elstree until you resigned’

  ‘ — until I was fired’

  ‘ — or whatever, two weeks ago. Age?’

  ‘Forty-one.’

  He wrote in a minute and indescribably neat little hand. ‘Since then, of course, we’ve had to keep tabs on you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Never mind. Nothing wrong really. I mean until you blundered in here.’

  ‘Is that serious?’

  He gazed at me with an odd combination of sheer incredulity and fascinated amusement. ‘Is that serious? Er, yes.’ Hastily he went on: ‘I really think you’d better wait till I’ve seen the Chief, over that. Meanwhile of course we’ve contacted Lord Dineham. I should know the answers by ...’ — a beautiful sweep of his forehand exposed one of those complicated wristwatches with more than the obligatory pair of hands ‘... by the end of Stage One.’ He sipped a cautious quantity of beer, then blurted anxiously: ‘Unfortunately the Americans regard this place as virtual consecrated ground.’ He got bland again as he resumed the formal interrogation and the little handwriting encephalographed once more across the pad. ‘What have you said to the Russians?’ he asked. ‘Anything that might upset Lord Dineham?’

  ‘I don’t know any Russians.’ I said stupidly.

  ‘Well, they know you. all right.’

  I was to discover in the morning that by this time Russia had in fact rolled her tanks in great numbers across the Czech border. Thus a brand of communism which contained real elements of humane Marxism was about to receive correction for the crime of making sense. There was ugly similarity between this event and the encroachment of Group Three — and all that it meant — on British independence. It seemed you can’t have sovereignty in either ideology. Mankind panics when somebody reduces the tantalizing imminence of war.

  Tim Fine, my affable jailer of the tennis elbow, received a flashed signal from the panel of electrical wonders in front of him which apparently confirmed the completion of Stage One. I was left in the care of a thug — he looked like a bouncer in a Mafia restaurant — while Fine went off to see some overlord. The bouncer didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. Half an hour passed. Fine returned with his Brompton Road charm and the bouncer removed himself without comment. ‘It has been decided,’ Fine announced jovially, ‘that you should go free.’

  ‘You could hardly keep me here,’ I said.

  He looked shocked at this ill-mannered reminder that I was a citizen of what was supposed to be a free country, but made no comment. ‘Certain conditions will be imposed.’

  ‘What are the conditions?’ — Actually I was wandering how they could afford anything of the kind. In a minute it became clear that they were doing the classical thing of keeping me on the hook. And I could see why.

  The conditions were stringent. First. I was to wear, at all times, one of their lovely bleepers ... this was simply a thing that would transmit my whereabouts. If I left it anywhere, by mistake on purpose, ‘it would know’, so to speak, and transmit a different signal. The thing was sealed and a Little Man would come and inspect it every twenty-four hours.

  Next, all my phone calls would be tapped. They could (they assured me) locate whatever phone I might try and use within seconds (the bleeper was a clever bleeper) even if I used an extension of some switchboard in a hotel or office block.

  Then, I was to forfeit my passport ...

  I said of this: ‘Anyone can get out of this country.’

  ‘Anyone except you,’ he said coolly.

  ‘Under what interesting new law do you propose to enforce this regime? Or have you hired the Daleks?’

  He smiled politely about the Daleks but his teeth were showing by now. ‘We think the bleeper more effective.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it,’ I asked innocently, ‘have been more effective if you hadn’t told me about it?’

  ‘Aha. No. We don’t think so.’ Having ceased to impersonate Roy Emerson he was now using the we of Sammy Davis Junior. ‘We feel that it’s better to stop you getting into trouble than wait until We have to take further action.’ — What he meant was that the bleeper was supposed to stop me communicating with whoever it was We thought I was acting for. Fortunately for me, We were obsessed by the idea that it must be the Russians. I could see the semblance of logic behind this — it bore on Thorne’s own activities over the preceding years — but I didn’t much like it. Chindale wouldn’t want to stir up Our imagination that much. But I said: ‘What further action do you have in mind?’

  He beamed. ‘There’s probably a skeleton or two we might prod out of your cupboard.’ — Predictably, this made me sweat. Group Three had formidable standing with the Home Office, who — on the utterance of the magic phrase security risk — would surely co-operate with the imposing of whatever restrictions on my freedom were felt necessary. As Chindale had said, Whitehall saw nothing wrong with an organization which under Act of Parliament was deemed to represent the national interest within the alliance.

  Moreover, the Home Secretary would accept the word of the Establishment, not mine. The ‘wild life’ to which Fine was no doubt referring concerned an episode six years before, and upon which the whole merger had hinged. The alleged skeleton in my cupboard would dance to the tune of whatever bent facts suited them.

  Tim Fine was saying quietly, reasonably: ‘It’s the sort of thing that could happen to any of us; and it is our good fortune that it happened to you. If it hadn’t we might not have been able to let you out at all. Your longstanding indiscretions at St Tropez,’ he smiled, ‘could still be slanted as a means of blackmailing you. I’m sure you won’t do anything that forces us to twist your arm that way.’

  The most interesting part of all this was the fact that evidently it wasn’t thought that I had seen or learned anything important.

  ‘Though, of course,’ said Fine, ‘it would be a serious breach of security were you to tell anyone about the government installations upon which you have intruded.’ That sounded official enough.

  Moreover they meant to catapult me right out of the area. Any hope of seeing Louise just now faded immediately. Contact with her would imply additional knowledge which might not strike them as nearly so trivial.

  — So they strapped the bleeper to my chest and then drove me as far as Taunton. My own car was waiting for me there in the station car park.

  It was pointing due east; and that was the way I was required to travel ... my reassuring bleeps trailing away from Somerset, loud and clear.

  FIVE

  Though the claim that I wasn’t born yesterday may by now be in serious dispute, I had the bleeper thing X-rayed by a doctor pal to see whether it contained the means of transmitting my actual conversations — an aspect which had been carefully left out by Tim Fine. It did. Moreover, its watchfulness was maintained by being placed on my body so as to hear my heartbeat — an ingenious enough arrangement since if it didn’t, I was either dead or not wearing the bleeper. In the latter case there was provision for a few minutes’ delay, during which it could make up its mind whether or not to tell tales.

  The bleeper was worn hard against my chest; and in its eavesdropping capacity was only intended to hear what I had to say and not the voic
e of anyone I might be with. An instrument capable of hearing only one side of the argument might conceivable be tricked — unless, of course, my companion had her head buried against my chest. But since this was a contingency I urgently hoped to arrange, something far more elaborate was required. In any case I could hardly do my job thus hampered.

  It didn’t seem at first that there could be any way around it. Even if I manufactured another machine that transmitted phoney signals — tape recordings of my own voice and heartbeat — and then mounted it permanently at my flat, the impression that I was at home the entire time would do nothing to increase the credulity of those listening at the far end if I was seen hailing a taxi in Oxford Street.

  I’d almost given up. On the second day (I think it was) I was strolling along the Kings Road feeling an idiot when I passed a radio shop and glanced in the window. Henry (I’d already got on improperly intimate terms with their bleeper) was strapped to my chest, thumping out my heartbeat and probably giving the service engineers in the shop a rather eerie radio show. But one of those tiny tape recorders was displayed in the window and of course I realized.

  I must make a Black Box.

  A ‘Black Box’ can be anything; the one essential that entitles it to the name (Black Boxes are technologically in fashion) being that it must be portable. What I needed was a machine which would go with me as faithfully as Henry, but which would radiate conversations that had nothing to do with what I was actually saying at the time. Thus Group Three would know where I was, without knowing with whom I was passing the time or what I was up to.

  So I bought the minitape in dumb-crambo from a bewildered assistant who was sorry for me, and I took it back to 49 Leek Road, South-West 10 for some extensive re-engineering.