It’s only a matter of sweating it out a few more years, boys. We’ll get back to Deneb one day. The times they are a-changing.
I
June 1st, 2020: Norwich, Capital of the British Republics. A sports car growled through the empty streets. Pouring rain was turning the evening green as the car ran slowly up the hill towards the barracks. Beside the driver a nervous man in a blue mac consulted his wrist watch every two seconds. He swallowed continually, peering out at the curtain of rain, muttering when the great barrack wall loomed into view.
The barracks, after some hasty redecoration, had been converted into a palace fortress for Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader of the State. Behind the plaster of the newly decorated rooms, a man crouched. The room was a bathroom belonging to the Leader’s suite, and the man was
armed.
For forty-two hours the armed man had waited in his two-foot-wide hiding place. He had dozed without daring to sleep, afraid of breaking through the wafer of plaster before him. He had provisions, a luminous watch – and his gun. He heard someone enter the bathroom.
Fixing his right eye to a hair-thin crack, he watched and waited. The man in the bathroom was out of his line of vision as yet; by the sound of it, he was undressing. Grinning his strange grin, the assassin twitched his leg muscles to exercise them. Soon, praise be, he’d need to move fast.
The man in the bathroom went over to the shower, presenting his bare back to the plaster wall; as he turned on the shower, he presented his profile. This was it! For this second the forty-two hours had been endured.
The assassin pushed aside the flimsy plaster and fired three times. Jim Bull, ex-spacehand, ex-firebrand, fell dead, head under the tepid spray. The water began to turn gravy-coloured as it drained away.
Still clutching his gun, the killer slid sideways in his recess to an old lift shaft. He jumped twelve feet onto a carefully planted mattress, and was on the ground floor. He flung back the folding lift door whose rusty padlock had been previously attended to, and emerged into a stone corridor at the back of the barrack block.
A soldier in shirt sleeves a few yards down the corridor turned and boggled as the killer flung open a window and jumped into the wet evening. Belatedly, the soldier called, ‘Hey!’
The killer ran round a wash-house, cursing his cramped legs, skirted the deserted cookhouse, dodged the swill bins and doubled into the closed way leading to the gym. Two sergeants were approaching him.
They stared in surprise. But the killer wore Army uniform with corporal’s stripes. He winked at them as he passed. The sergeants continued to walk slowly on.
He bolted into the open again at the gym, turned left at the NAAFI, jumped the low hedge into the officers’ quarters and swerved behind the bike shed.
Now he was in the small laundry square, the laundry standing silent at this late hour. Ahead was what was popularly known as Snoggers’ Exit, a narrow wooden gate in the high barracks wall. A sentry stood at the gate.
The fugitive stopped, took aim and, as the sentry hastily raised his light machine-gun, fired. He was running again before the sentry hit the stones. Sounds of whistles far behind spurred him on.
The wooden gate splintered and fell open, before he got to it. Outside on the hill track, the sports car stood. The driver, who had broken down the gate, was already jumping back into his seat. The nervous man in the mac held a back door open for the killer; directly he had scrambled in, the nervous man followed. The car was already on the move again.
They bucked down the track at sixty, skirting the high walls of the barracks. They slowed to turn down a slope, slipping and crashing through wet bracken, and curved among sparse trees. In a clearing they accelerated again, licked past a ruined bandstand and onto a gravelled road.
Rain was falling more heavily when, two minutes later, they swerved sharply left and climbed again. This track curved among pines and brought them suddenly into a chalk pit, once used as a small arms range.
In the middle of the range, a light passenger type spaceship waited, its single port open.
The killer broke from the car and ran across to the ship. He climbed in, ascending the narrow companionway. The pilot, swivelling in his seat, held a levelled revolver until he got a good look at the newcomer’s face; then he dropped it and turned to the controls.
‘Take off in one minute forty-five seconds,’ he said. ‘Strap yourself in quickly.’
Stratton Hall was a big, eighteenth century building a few miles from Norwich. Across the weed-infested courtyard stood a small stable. A horse and rider approached it over the hummocky turf, moving quietly through the downpour. At the stable door, the rider dismounted and led Nicky into the dry. As he did so, he broke off the mental union with the animal; instantly, the wild, wordless chiaroscuros of his vision disappeared, and he was back in his own senses.
The feeling of refreshment left Conrad Wyvern. At once, the memory of his sister’s death returned to him. He rubbed Nicky down less thoroughly than usual, watered him and turned to go.
He had ridden bare-back from East Hingham, as always. As always, he had taken the overland route, avoiding roads, so that Nicky could go unshod. He himself went with no shoes or weapon, and a piece of rope securing his trousers. The Flyspies which covered the country were good at detecting metal, and Wyvern kept his journeys to East Hingham as secret as possible.
It was eleven o’clock, Treble Summertime, as he peered out of the stable, and already growing dark. The rain fell steadily; the harvests would be ruined, turning sour on the stalk. Squinting up at the west gable of the house, Wyvern could see the Flyspy attached to the Hall resting in its recharge cradle, its double vane idle. Even as he looked, the rotors moved and it climbed pot-bellied out of its metal nest, circling the building like a tired barn-owl after mice.
The Flyspies were one of the few new inventions of the ill-financed Republics. At that, thought Wyvern, they weren’t much good. Certainly, they detected any moving metal, but that was something easily circumvented, as he had proved, to his own satisfaction. Their television eye was poor – useless in this light – and he walked over to the rear of the Hall with no effort at concealment, although the machine hovered fairly near.
He slipped quietly in and went up what had been the servants’ staircase to his own rooms to change his clothes. As he did so, he chewed over the evening’s events.
The disused railway station at East Hingham had established itself as a Black Market. You could buy anything there from a box of safety matches (for ten shillings) to a ticket on a moon-bound ship (no upper price limit). Wyvern’s sister Lucie was one of the organisers. Surreptitiously, the place thrived; the Republic, desperately short of manpower after the Fourth War, left it unmolested.
But when Wyvern had got there this evening, the station was a shambles.
He found an old woman dying in the ticket office. As he gave her a drink of water, she rendered him a broken account of the raid.
‘They – Our Leader’s soldiers – drove down in trucks,’ she said. ‘They surrounded the place. Anyone who ran out got shot. Then they came in – very rough! Interrogated us – asked us all questions, you know. I was only after a blanket, if I could get one. I thought it might be cheaper at this time of year.’
‘What about Lucie?’
‘Your sister was rounded up with the other organisers, sir. They were cross-questioned too, and stood against the far wall. Later, they were hustled out, into a lorry, I think. But she passed a note to someone. It must have been for you.’
‘Who did she pass it to?’ Wyvern asked urgently.
‘A little more water, please. It was to …