The Black Corridor Read online

  Ryan took a fork and dug into the plate. The food was now thoroughly heated.

  Once he had eaten he felt even more relaxed. He had thought it all out. He didn't waste time when it came to decisions. No point in moralising.

  He wiped his lips.

  The problem had assumed its proper proportions. It would cost him a bit in golden and silver handshakes, but it was worth it. He could probably get cheaper staff anyway, considering the huge volume of unemployment, and recoup his losses by the end of the year.

  This way everybody gains something. Nobody lost.

  He picked up the sheets of names and figures and began to study them closely.

  CHAPTER TEN

  That's how it was, thinks Ryan. A cop out, now he looked back, but a graceful cop out. No one got badly hurt. It could have been worse. It was the difference between a stupid approach and an intelligent approach to the same problem.

  It had been the same when he had got the group out of that riot at the Patriot meeting. When had that been? January. Yes.

  January 2000. The civilised world had been expecting the end.

  There had been all the usual sort of apocalyptic stuff which Ryan had dismissed as a symptom of radical social change. He had not been able to believe then that things were going to get worse. There had been penitential marches through the streets. Even scourgings, public confessions.

  And January had been the month of that oddball move to close the camps for foreigners. The camps had been decently maintained.

  The people lived as well as anyone outside the camps—perhaps better in certain circumstances. It had also been the month when the Patriots had tried to open the camps up to more people—to a more sinister, less identifiable group.

  Ryan remembers the crowd in Trafalgar Square. A crowd fifty thousand strong, covering the square, pushed up the steps of the National Gallery and St Martin's, pushed inside the Gallery and the Church, right up against the altar. The crowd had blocked the streets all around. It was horrifying. Disgusting. People like rats in a box.

  Even now Ryan feels sick, remembering how he felt then.

  He and the group had gone along, but they were now regretting it.

  Whenever the crowd got too noisy or violent the troops fired over their heads.

  It had been snowing. The searchlights played over the plinth where the leading Patriots stood and they flashed over the heads of the crowd, picked up large flakes of snow as they drifted down on the dense mass of people.

  The Patriot leaders, collars of their dark coats turned up, stood in the snow looking over the crowd. And as they spoke their voices were enormously amplified. Deafeningly amplified; reaching all the way up the Mall to where Queen Anne sat in her lonely room, hearing the words on TV and from the meeting itself a quarter of a mile away; reaching all the way down Whitehall to Parliament itself.

  Parliament. That discredited institution.

  They are turning on each other now, thought Ryan, looking at the faces of the Patriots. There were signs of dissension there if he wasn't mistaken. There would be a split soon.

  But meanwhile there were the usual speeches, coming distorted into the mind partly because of the amplification system, partly because of the wind, partly because of the usual ungraspable political cliches the speakers used.

  The snow kept falling on the upturned faces of the crowd—an orderly crowd of responsible people. There were few interrupters.

  The presence of the troops and the paid Patriot Guards made sure of that.

  Colin Beesley, Patriot leader and Member of Parliament, stood up to speak.

  Beesley, a large, thickset man in a long, black overcoat and a large hat, was an extremist. His political manner was of the old school—the Churchillian school which still touched many people who wanted their politicians to be 'strong'. His tone was ponderous. His words, spoken slowly and relatively clearly, were portentous.

  Unlike the others, he did not speak generally about the Patriot cause, for he had come to make a fresh statement.

  As he began to speak the wind dropped and his words came through with a sudden clarity—over the crowd in the square, the crowds in the streets, down as far as Westminster, along to Buckingham Palace, as far as Piccadilly Circus in the other direction.

  'Aliens among us,' he said, his head lowered and thrust towards the crowd. 'There are aliens among us. We do not know where they come from. We do not know how they landed. We do not know how many there are. But we do know one thing, my friends, people of England—they are among us!'

  Ryan, standing uncomfortably in the middle of the crowd in the square grimaced sceptically at his friend Masterson who stood beside him. Ryan couldn't believe in a group of aliens contriving to land on Earth without anyone's knowledge. Not when the skies were scanned for invaders from special observation posts built all over the country. But Masterson was listening seriously and intently to Beesley.

  Ryan turned his attention back to the platform.

  'We cannot tell who they are, yet they are among us.' Beesley's voice droned on. "They look like us, sound like us—in every respect they are human—but they are not human. They are nonhuman—they are anti-human.' He paused, lowered his voice.

  'How, you say, do we know about the aliens? How have we found out about the existence of this pollution, of these creatures who move about our society, like cancer cells in a healthy body? We know, by the evidence of our own eyes. We know the aliens exist because of who they are, what happens when they are about.

  'Otherwise how can we explain the existence of chaos, bloodlust, law-breaking, riot, revolution in our midst? How can we explain the deaths of the little children battered to death by the fanatics of Yorkshire? The waves of rioting and looting all over the West Country? The satanic practices of religious maniacs in the Fens? How can we explain the hatred and the suspicion, the murder rate—now three times what it was five years ago, a full ten times what it was in 1990? How can we explain the fact that we have so few children when a few years ago the birth rate had doubled? Disaster is upon us! Who is stirring up and fomenting all this disorder, bloodshed and ruin. Who? Who?'

  Ryan, glancing into the faces of the people about him, could almost believe they were listening seriously. Were they? Or was the presence of the troops and the Patriot Guards preventing them from catcalling or just walking away from this nonsense?

  He looked at the faces of the police around the platform. They were staring up at Beesley—brute-faced men listening to him with close attention. Ryan, scarcely able to believe it, realised that Beesley's stories of the hidden invaders was being taken seriously by the majority of the vast crowd. As Beesley went on speaking, describing the hidden marauders, makers of chaos in their midst, the crowd began to murmur in agreement.

  'Their bases are somewhere,' Beesley went on. 'We must find them, fellow patriots. We must eliminate them, like wasp nests...'

  And there came from the crowd a great hissed susurrus 'Yesssss.'

  'We must find the polluters and wipe them out forever. Whether they come from space or are the agents of another Power, we do not know as yet. We must discover where they originate!'

  And the crowd like a cold wind through the ruins, answered 'Yessssss.'

  He's lost them, thought Ryan sceptically, if he doesn't give them something a bit more concrete than that. He's got to tell them how to pick out these menacing figures they have to destroy.

  'Who are they? How do we find them?' asked Beesley. 'How?

  How? How indeed?' His tone became divinely reasonable. 'You all know, in your heart of hearts, who they are. They are the men— and women, too, make no mistake, they are women as well—who are different. You know them. You can tell them at a glance. They look different. Their eyes are different. They express doubt where you and I know certainty. They are the men who associate with strangers and people of doubtful character, the men and women who throw suspicion on what we are fighting for. They are the sceptics, the heretics, the mockers. When
you meet them they make you doubt everything, even yourself. They laugh a lot, and smile too often. They attempt, by jesting, to throw a poor light on our ideals. They are the people who hang back when plans are suggested for purifying our land. They defend the objects of our patriotic anger. They hang back from duty. Many are drunkards, licentious scoffers. You know these people, friends. You know them—these men who have been sent here to undermine a righteous society.

  You have always known them. Now is the time to pluck them out and deal with them as they deserve.'

  And, before he had finished speaking, the crowd was in uproar.

  There were shouts and screams.

  Ryan poked Masterson, who was staring incredulously at the platform, in the ribs. 'Let's get out,' he said. 'There's going to be trouble.'

  'Only for the aliens,' said James Henry at his other elbow. 'Come on, Ryan. Let's sniff 'em out and snuff 'em out.'

  Ryan looked at Henry in astonishment. Henry's green eyes were ablaze. 'For crying out loud, Henry...'

  He turned to his brother John. John looked back vaguely and suddenly, under the gaze of his elder brother, seemed to pull himself together. 'He's right,' said John. 'We'd better think of getting home. This is real mass hysteria. Jesus Christ.'

  Henry's mouth hardened. 'I'm staying.'

  'Look——' Ryan was jolted by the crowd. Snow fell down his neck.'—Henry! You can't possibly...'

  'Do what you like, Ryan. We've heard the call to deal with these aliens—let's deal with them.'

  'They wouldn't be likely to come here tonight would they?'

  Ryan shouted. Then he stopped, realising that he was beginning to answer in Henry's terms. That was the first step towards being convinced. 'Good God, Henry—this is too classic for words.

  We're rational men.'

  'Agreed. Which makes our duty even clearer!'

  The crowd was pushing the four men backwards and forwards.

  The men had to shout to be heard over the roar of the rabble.

  'James—come home and talk it over. This isn't the place...'

  Ryan insisted, standing his ground with difficulty. From somewhere came the sound of gunfire. Then the gunfire stopped. Ryan found he was shouting into relative silence. 'You won't take that "aliens" nonsense seriously when you've got a drink inside you back at our flat!'

  A man put his head over Henry's shoulder. His red face was flushed. 'What was that, friend?' he said to Ryan.

  'I wasn't talking to you.'

  'Oh no? I heard what you said. That's of interest to everyone here. You're one of them, if you ask me.'

  'I didn't.' Ryan looked contemptuously at the sweating face.

  'But we're all entitled to our own opinions. If you think it's true, I won't argue with you.'

  'Shut up,' Masterson cried, tugging at Ryan's sleeve. 'Shut up and come home.'

  'Bloody alien!' the red-faced man shouted. 'A bloody nest of them!'

  Instantly, it seemed to Ryan, the crowd was on them. He came rapidly to a decision, keeping his head even in this situation.

  'Calm down all of you,' he said in his most commanding voice.

  'My point is that we might make mistakes in this situation. The aliens have to be found. But we need to work systematically to find them. Use a scientific approach. Don't you see—the aliens themselves could be stirring things up for us—making us turn on each other.'

  The red-faced man frowned. 'It's a point,' he said grudgingly.

  'Now I believe that if there are aliens here tonight they are not going to be in the middle of the crowd. They are going to be on the edges, trying to sneak away,' Ryan continued.

  'That seems reasonable,' said James Henry. 'Let's get after them.'

  Ryan led the way shouting with the rest.

  'Aliens! Aliens! Stop the aliens. Get them now. Over there—in the streets!'

  Pushing through the crowd was like trying to trudge through a quagmire. Every step, every breath Ryan took was painful.

  Ryan led them, pace by pace, through the packed throng, up the steps into the National Gallery and, as the crowd thinned out in the galleries themselves, through a window at the back, through yards, over walls and car parks until they escaped the red-faced man and his friends and were finally in the moving mass of Oxford Street.

  Only James Henry didn't seem aware of what Ryan had done.

  As they reached Hyde Park he pulled at Ryan's torn coat.

  'Hey! What are we supposed to be doing. I thought we were going after the aliens.'

  'I know something about the aliens that wasn't mentioned tonight,' Ryan said.

  'What?'

  'I'll tell you when we get back to my place.'

  When they finally reached Ryan's flat they were exhausted.

  'What about the aliens, then?' James Henry asked as the door closed behind them.

  "The worst aliens are the Patriots,' said Ryan. 'They are the most obvious of the anti-humans.'

  Henry was puzzled. 'Surely not...'

  Ryan took a deep breath and went to the drinks cabinet, began fixing drinks for them all as they sat panting in the chairs in the living room.

  "The Patriots...' murmured Henry. 'I suppose it's just possible...'

  Ryan handed him his drink. 'I thought,' he said, 'that the discoveries in Space would give us all a better perspective. Instead it seems that the perspective has been even more narrowed and distorted. Once people only feared other races, other nations, other groups with opposed or different interests. Now they fear everything. It's gone too far, Henry.'

  'I'm still not with you,' James Henry said.

  'Simply—paranoia. What is paranoia, Henry?'

  'Being afraid of things—suspecting plots—all that stuff.'

  'It can be defined more closely. It is an irrational fear, an irrational suspicion. Often it is in fact a refusal to face the real cause of one's anxiety, to invent causes because the true cause is either too disturbing, too frightening, too horrible to face or too difficult to cope with. That's what paranoia actually is, Henry.'

  'So...?'

  'So the Patriots have offered us a surrogate. They have offered us something to concentrate on that is nothing really to do with the true causes of the ills of Society. It's common enough. Hitler supplied it to the Germans in the form of the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Mc Carthy supplied it to the Americans in the form of the Communist Conspiracy. Even our own Enoch Powell supplied it in the form of the West Indian immigrants in the sixties and seventies. There are plenty of examples.'

  James Henry frowned. 'You say they were wrong, eh? Well, I'm not so sure. We were right to get rid of the West Indians when we did. We were right to restrict jobs to Englishmen when we did.

  You have to draw the line somewhere, Ryan.'

  Ryan sighed. 'And what about these "aliens" from space, then?

  Where do they fit in? What are they doing to the economy? They are an invention—a crude invention, at that—of the Patriots to describe anyone who is opposed to their insane schemes. Where do you think the term "witch-hunt" comes from, Henry?'

  James Henry sipped his drink thoughtfully. 'Perhaps I did get a bit over-excited...'

  Ryan patted him on the shoulder. 'We all are. It's the strain, the tension—and it is particularly the uncertainty. We don't know where we're going. We've no goals, because we can't rely on Society any longer. The Patriots offer certainty. And that's what we've got to find for ourselves.'

  'You'd better explain,' John Ryan said from his chair. 'Have you got any suggestions?'

  Ryan spread his hands. 'That was my suggestion. That we find a goal—a rational goal. Find a way out of this mess...'

  And Ryan, now sitting at his desk in the great ship, reflects that it was that evening which was the turning point, that decision which brought him to where he is now, aboard the spaceship Hope Dempsey, heading towards Munich 15040, Barnard's Star, at point nine of c...

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  There is no sound here in space. No light. No
life. Only the dim glow of distant stars as the tiny craft moves, so slowly, through the great neutral blackness.

  And Ryan, as he goes methodically about his duties, thinks with a heavy heart of the familiarity and warmth of his early years—of the births of his children, of studying their first schoolbooks, talking to his friends in the evenings at their flat, of his wife, now resting like some comfortable Sleeping Beauty, unaware of him in the fluids of her casket.

  Just a pellet travelling through space, thinks Ryan. Nearly all the living tissue contained in the pellet is unconscious in the waters of the caskets. Once they had moved and acted. They had been happy, until the threats had become obvious, until life had become unbearable for them...

  Ryan rubs his eyes and writes out his routine report. He underlines it in red, reads it into the machine, sits down again before the log book.

  He writes: Another day has passed.

  I am frightened, sometimes, that I am becoming too much of a vegetable. I am an active man by nature. I will need to be active when we land. I wonder if I have become too passive. Still, this is idle speculation...

  His speculations were never idle, he reflects. The moment the problem was clearly seen, he began to think along positive lines.

  The problem was straightforward: society was breaking down and death and destruction were becoming increasingly widespread. He wished to survive and he wished for his friends and family to survive. There was nowhere in the world that could any longer be considered a safe refuge. Nuclear war was bound to arise soon.

  There had been only one answer: the stars. And there had been only one project for reaching the stars. Unmanned research craft had brought back evidence that there was a planetary system circling Barnard's Star and that two of those planets were in many respects similar to Earth.

  The research project had been United Nations sponsored— the first important multilateral project between the Great Powers...

  It had been a last attempt to draw the nations of the world together, to make them consider themselves one race.