PHASE 1

(written 1965)

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS RAINING.

The house was in south-east London, in Blackheath. It stood back from the main road, looming out of its overgrown garden. The gravel drive was weedy, and the house needed painting. It had originally been painted a light mauve. Through the grimy ground-floor windows Jerry Cornelius could glimpse five people seated in the big front room. It was full of dark furniture and poorly lit, the fire giving more light than the standard lamp in one corner. The faces were all shadowed. On the mantelpiece stood a baroque figurine of Diana holding two candlesticks; there were two candles in each stick.

The garage door slammed, and Jerry made no effort to become any less visible, but the bulky, tweed-coated man didn’t notice him as he patted water from his heavy black beard, took off his hat, and opened the door. He wiped his feet and went inside. Jerry had recognized him as Mr. Smiles. Mr. Smiles owned the house.

After a moment Jerry went up to the door and took out his key ring. He found the right key and opened the door. He saw Mr. Smiles enter the front room.

The hallway smelled a little damp, in spite of the radiator burning close to the hat rack; and the walls, each painted a different colour (tangerine, red, black, and blue), were all cold as Jerry leaned on first one and then another.

Jerry was dressed in his usual black car coat, dark trousers, and high heels. His hair was wet and did not fall as softly as normal.

He folded his arms and settled down to wait.

“What’s the time? My watch has stopped.” Mr. Smiles entered the room, shaking rain off his Robin Hood hat and still patting at his beard. He walked to the fire and stood there, turning the hat round and round to dry it.

The five others said nothing. All seemed introspective, hardly aware of his arrival. Then one of them got up and approached Mr. Smiles. His name was Mr. Lucas. He had the decadent good looks of a Roman patrician. He was forty-five and a successful casino owner. Except for Mr. Smiles (who was forty-nine), he was the oldest.

“Twelve-forty, Mr. Smiles. He’s late.”

Mr. Smiles concentrated on drying his hat. “I’ve never known him not to do something he said he’d do, if that’s any comfort,” he said.

“Oh, it is,” said Miss Brunner.

Miss Brunner was sitting nearest to the fire. She was a sharp-faced, attractive young woman with the look of a predator. She sprawled back in her chair with her legs crossed. One foot tapped at the air.

Mr. Smiles turned towards her.

“He’ll come, Miss Brunner.” He gave her a glare. “He’ll come.” His tone was self-assuring.

Mr. Lucas glanced at his watch again.

Miss Brunner’s foot tapped more quickly. “Why are you so certain, Mr. Smiles?”

“I know him—at least, as well as anyone could. He’s reliable, Miss Brunner.”

Miss Brunner was a computer programmer of some experience and power. Seated closest to her was Dimitri, her slave, lover, and sometime unwilling pimp. She wore a straight fawn Courrèges suit and matching buttoned boots. He also wore a Courrèges suit of dark blue and brown tweed. Her hair was red and long, curving outward at the ends. It was nice red hair, but not on her. He was the son of Dimitri Oil, rich, with the fresh, ingenuous appearance of a boy. His disguise was complete.

Behind Miss Brunner and Dimitri, in shadow, sat Mr. Crookshank, the entertainers’ agent. Mr. Crookshank was very fat and tall. He had a heavy gold signet ring on the third finger of his right hand. It gave him the common touch. He wore a silk Ivy League suit.

In the corner, opposite Mr. Crookshank, nearer the fire, sat dark Mr. Powys, hunched in his perpetual neurotic stoop. Mr. Powys, who lived comfortably off the inheritance left him by his mine-owning great-uncle, sipped a glass of Bell’s cream whisky, staring at it as he sipped.

The fire did not heat the room sufficiently. Even Mr. Smiles, who was usually unaffected by cold, rubbed his hands together after he had taken off his coat. Mr. Smiles was a banker, main owner of the Smiles Bank, which had catered to the linen trade since 1832. The bank was not doing well, though Mr. Smiles couldn’t complain personally. Mr. Smiles poured himself a large glass of Teacher’s whisky and moved back to the fire.

None of them was well acquainted, except with Miss Brunner, who had introduced them all. They all knew Miss Brunner.

She uncrossed her legs and smoothed her skirt, smiling up unpleasantly at the bearded man. “It’s unusual to find such confidence these days.” She paused and looked round at the others. “I think…” She opened her handbag and began picking at its contents.

“What do you think?” Mr. Smiles spoke sharply. “When I first put this deal to you, Miss Brunner, you were uncertain about it. Now you’re impatient to get started. What do you think, then, Miss Brunner?”

“I think we shouldn’t include him in our plans. Let’s get going now, while he’s not expecting anything. He could be planning some kind of double-cross. We stand to lose too much by hanging about waiting for Cornelius. I don’t trust him, Mr. Smiles.”

“You don’t trust him because you haven’t met him and given him the Brunner Test, is that it?” Mr. Lucas kicked at a log sticking from the fire. “We couldn’t get into that house without Cornelius’s knowledge of those booby traps of his father’s. If Cornelius doesn’t come, then we’ll have to give up the whole idea.”

Miss Brunner’s sharp teeth showed as she smiled again. “You’re getting old and cautious, Mr. Lucas. And Mr. Smiles, by the sound of it, is getting soft as well. As far as I’m concerned, the risk is part of it.”

“You silly cow!” Dimitri was often rude to Miss Brunner in public, much as he loved to fear her. Public insults; private punishments. “We’re not all in it for the risks; we’re in it for what old Cornelius hid in his house. Without Jerry Cornelius, we’ll never get it. We need him. That’s the truth.”

“I’m pleased to hear it.” Jerry’s voice was sardonic as he entered the room rather theatrically and closed the door behind him.

Miss Brunner looked him over. He was very tall, and that pale face, framed by the hair, resembled the young Swinburne’s. His black eyes did not seem at all kindly. He seemed about twenty-seven and had been, so they said, a Jesuit. He had something of a Church intellectual’s decadent, ascetic appearance. He had possibilities, she thought.

Jerry dropped his head a trifle as he turned and gave Miss Brunner a slightly amused stare, half-chiding. She crossed her legs and began tapping. He walked gracefully towards Mr. Smiles and shook hands with a certain degree of pleasure.

Mr. Smiles sighed. “I’m glad you could make it, Mr. Cornelius. How soon can we start?”

Jerry shrugged. “As soon as you like. I need a day or so to do a few things.”

“Tomorrow?” Miss Brunner’s voice was pitched somewhat higher than usual.

“In three days.” Cornelius pursed his lips. “Sunday.”

Mr. Powys spoke from behind his glass. “Three days is too long, man. The longer we wait, the more chance there is of someone getting to know what we’re planning. Don’t forget that Simons and Harvey both backed out, and Harvey in particular isn’t well known for his tact and diplomacy.”

“Don’t worry about them,” Cornelius said with finality.

“What have you done?” Miss Brunner’s voice was still sharp.

“Nothing much. They’re taking a cruise on a tramp bound for New York. It’ll be a long trip, and they won’t mix with the crew.”

“How did you get them to go?” Mr. Lucas dropped his eyes as Cornelius turned.

“Well,” said Jerry, “there were one or two things they wanted. On condition that they took the trip, I fixed them up.”

“What things?” asked Mr. Crookshank with interest. Jerry ignored him.

“What have you to do that’s so important?” Miss Brunner enquired.

“I want to visit the house before our trip.”

“Why?”

“For my own reasons, Miss Brunner.”

Mr. Powys’s brooding Welsh face didn’t look up. “I’d like to know just why you’re helping us, mind you, Mr. Cornelius.”

“Would you understand if I told you that it was for revenge?”

“Revenge.” Mr. Powys shook his head rapidly. “Oh, yes. We all have these grudges from time to time, don’t we?”

“Then it’s revenge,” Jerry said lightly. “Now, Mr. Smiles has told you my conditions, I think. You must burn the house to the ground when you’ve got what you wanted, and you must leave my brother Francis and my sister Catherine unharmed. There is also an old servant, John. He must not be hurt in any way.”

“The rest of the staff?” Dimitri waved a questioning hand. It was an impolite gesture.

“Do whatever you like. You’ll be taking on some help, I understand?”

“About twenty men. Mr. Smiles has arranged them. He says they’ll be sufficient.” Mr. Lucas glanced at Mr. Smiles, who nodded.

“They should be,” Jerry said thoughtfully. “The house is well guarded, but naturally they won’t call the police. With our special equipment you ought to be all right. Don’t forget to burn the house.”

“Mr. Smiles has already reminded us of that, Mr. Cornelius,” said Dimitri. “As have you. We will do exactly as you say.”

Jerry turned up the wide collar of his coat. “Right. I’ll be off.”

“Take care, Mr. Cornelius,” said Miss Brunner smoothly as he went out.

“Oh, I will, I think,” he said.

The six people didn’t talk much after Cornelius had left. Only Miss Brunner moved to another chair. She seemed out of sorts.

CHAPTER TWO

Beat music filled the old Duesenberg as Jerry Cornelius drove towards the Kent coast—Zoot Money, The Who, the Moody Blues, The Beatles, Manfred Mann, and The Animals. Jerry played only the best on his built-in tape machine.

The volume was turned up to full blast. There were three speakers in various parts of the car, and it was impossible for Jerry to hear even the sound of the engine. In the spring clip near the steering wheel the contents of a glass danced to the thud of the bass. From time to time Cornelius would reach for the glass, take a sip, and fix it back in the clip. Once he put his hand inside the glove compartment and brought it out full of pills. He had not slept for the best part of a week, and the pills no longer stopped him from feeling edgy; but he crammed his mouth with them, just the same, washing them down. A little later he took out a half-bottle of Bell’s and refilled the glass.

The road ahead was wet, and rain still beat at the windscreen. The two pairs of wipers swished away in time with the music. Though the heater was on, he felt cold.

Just outside Dover he stopped at a filling station while he rolled himself a thin cigarette out of licorice paper and Old Holborn. He paid the man, lit his cigarette, and rode on in the general direction of the coast, turning off onto a side-road and eventually driving down the main street of the harbour village of Southquay, strains of guitars, organs, and high voices drifting in the car’s wake. The sea was black under the overcast sky. He drove slowly along the quayside, the car’s wheels bumping on cobbles. He switched off the tape machine.

There was a small hotel set back from the road. It was called The Yachtsman. Its sign showed a smiling man in yachting gear. Behind him was a view of the harbour as seen from the hotel. The sign moved a little in the wind. Jerry backed the Duesenberg into the hotel’s courtyard, left the keys in the ignition, and got out. He put his hands in the high pockets of his coat and stood stretching his legs by the car for a moment, looking over the black water at the moored boats. One of them was his launch, which he’d had converted from a modern lifeboat.

He glanced back at the hotel, noting that no lights had gone on and that no-one seemed to be stirring. He crossed to the waterside. A metal ladder led down into the sea. He climbed down a few rungs and then jumped from the ladder to the deck of his launch. Pausing for a moment to get his sea legs, he made straight for the well-kept bridge. He didn’t switch on the lights but, by finding the instruments by touch, got the motor warming up.

He went out on deck again and cast off.

Soon he was steering his way out of the harbour towards the open sea.

         

Only the man in the harbourmaster’s office saw him leave. Happily for Jerry, the man was quite as corrupt as the six people who had been at the house in Blackheath. He had, as they used to say, his price.

Steering a familiar course, Jerry headed the boat towards the coasts of Normandy, where his late father had built his fake Le Corbusier château. It was an ancient building, built well before the Second World War.

Once outside the three-mile limit, Jerry switched on the radio and got the latest station, Radio K-Nine (“the Station With Bite”). There was some funny stuff on; it sounded like a mixture of Greek and Persian music very badly played. It was probably by one of the new groups the publicity people were still trying in vain to push. They were completely non-musical themselves, so still found it a mystery that one group should be popular and another unpopular, were convinced that a new sound would start things moving for them again. All that was over—for the time being at least, thought Jerry. He changed stations until he got a reasonable one.

The music echoed over the water. Although he was careful not to show any lights, Jerry could be heard half a mile away; but when he saw the faint outline of the coast ahead, he switched off the radio.

After a while his father’s fake Le Corbusier château came in sight, a large six-storey building with that quaint, dated appearance that all the “futuristic” buildings of the twenties and thirties had. This château had a dash of German expressionism in its architecture to boot.

To Jerry the house symbolized the very spirit of transience, and he enjoyed the feeling he got from looking at its silhouette, much as he sometimes enjoyed listening to last year’s hits. The house stood, in its corny old way, on the very edge of a cliff that curved steeply above the nearest village, some four miles distant. A searchlight was trained on the house, making it look rather like some grotesque war memorial. Jerry knew the house was staffed by a small private army of German mercenaries, men who were as much part of the past as the house and yet intratemporally reflected something of the spirit of the 1970s.

It was November 196–, however, as Jerry cut the engine and drifted on the current he knew would carry him towards the cliff beneath the house.

The cliff was worse than sheer. It sloped outward about a hundred feet up and was loaded with alarm devices. Not even Wolfe could have taken it. The nature of the cliff was to Jerry Cornelius an advantage, for it hid his boat from the TV scanners in the house. The radar did not sweep low enough to find his launch, but the TV cameras were trained on any likely place where someone might attempt a landing. But Jerry’s brother Frank didn’t know of the secret entrance.

He moored the boat to the cliff by means of the powerful suction cups he’d brought for the purpose. The cups had metal rings in them, and Jerry tied his mooring lines to the rings. He would be away again before the tide went out.

Part of the cliff was made of plastic. Cornelius tapped lightly on it, waiting a couple of moments as it inched inward and a gaunt, anxious face peered out at him. It was the face of a lugubrious Scot, Jerry’s old servant and mentor, John Gnatbeelson.

“Ah, sir!”

The face retreated, leaving the entrance clear.

“Is she all right, John?” Jerry asked as he eased himself into the metal-walled cubicle behind the plastic door. John Gnatbeelson stepped backward and then forward to close the door. He was about six feet four, a gangling man with almost non-existent cheekbones and a wisp of chin whiskers. He wore an old Norfolk jacket and corduroy trousers. His bones seemed barely joined together, and he moved loosely like a badly controlled puppet.

“She’s not dead, sir, I think,” Gnatbeelson assured Jerry. “It’s fine to see you, sir. I hope you’ve returned for good this time, sir, to kick that brother of yours out of our house.” He glared into the middle distance. “He has…had…” The old man’s eyes filled with tears.

“Cheer up, John. What’s he been doing now?”

“That’s what I don’t know, sir. I just haven’t been allowed to see Miss Catherine for the past week. He says she’s sleeping. Sleeping. What kind of sleep lasts for a week, sir?”

“Could be a number of kinds.” Jerry spoke calmly enough. “Drugs, I expect.”

“God knows he uses enough of them himself, sir. He lives on them. All he ever eats is bars of chocolate.”

“Catherine wouldn’t use sleepers voluntarily, I shouldn’t think.”

“She never would, sir.”

“Is she still in her old rooms?”

“Yes, sir. But there’s a guard on the door.”

“Have you prepared for that?”

“I have, but I am worried.”

“Of course you are. And you’ve switched off the master control for this entrance?”

“It seemed unnecessary, sir, but I have done it.”

“Better safe than sorry, John.”

“I suppose so, aye. But there again, it would only be a matter of time before…”

“It’s all a matter of time, John. Let’s get going. If the control’s dead, we won’t be able to use the lift.”

“No, sir. We must climb.”

“Off we go, then.”

They left the metal chamber and entered a similar, slightly larger one. John lit the way with his torch. A lift cage became visible, the shaft rising above it. Paralleling the cables and running up one side into the darkness was a metal ladder. John tucked the torch into the waistband of his trousers and stepped back. Jerry reached the ladder and began to climb.

They went up in silence for more than fifty feet until they stood at the top of the shaft. Ahead of them were five entrances to corridors. They took the central entrance. The corridor twisted and turned for a long time. It formed part of a complicated maze and, even though the two men were familiar with it, they sometimes hesitated at various turnings and forks.

Eventually, and with some relief, they entered a white, neon-lighted room, which housed a small control console. The Scotsman went to the panel and clicked a switch. A red light above the panel went off and a green one went on. Dials quivered, and several monitor screens focused on various parts of the route they had just taken. Views of the room at the bottom of the shaft, the shaft itself, the corridors in the maze—now brilliantly lit—came and went on the screens. The equipment operated in silence.

On the door leading out of the room was a fairly large ovoid of a milky greenish colour. John pressed his palm against it. Responding to the palm print, which it recognized, the door slid open. They entered a short tunnel, which led them to an identical door. This John opened in the same way.

Now they stood in a dark library. Through a transparent wall to their right they could see the sea, like black marble streaked with veins of grey and white.

Most of the other three walls were covered with shelves of pink fibreglass. They were filled mainly with paperbacks. The half-dozen or so books bound in leather and titled in gold stood out incongruously. John shone his light on them and smiled at Jerry, who was embarrassed.

“They’re still there, sir. He doesn’t often come here; otherwise he might have got rid of them. Not that it would matter that much, for I have another set.”

Jerry winced and looked at the books. One of the titles was Time-Search Through the Declining West by Jeremiah Cornelius, MAHS; another was called Toward the Ultimate Paradox, and beside it was The Ethical Simulation. Jerry felt he was right to be embarrassed.

Part of the library wall, naturally enough, was false. It swung back to show a white metal door and a button. Jerry pressed the button and the door opened.

Another lift cage.

John stooped and picked up a small case before they got in and went up. It was one of the few lifts in the house that, as far as they knew, did not register on one of the many control panels located in the château.

On the sixth floor the lift stopped, and John opened the door and looked cautiously out. The landing was empty. They both left the lift, and the door (a wall-length painting reminiscent of Picasso at his latest and tritest) slid back into place.

The room they wanted was in a passage off the main landing. They walked silently to the corner, glanced round, and ducked back again.

They had seen the guard. He had an automatic rifle crooked in his arm. He was a big, fat German with the appearance of a eunuch. He had looked very wakeful—hoping, perhaps, for an opportunity to use his Belgian gun.

Now John opened the case he’d been carrying. He took out a small steel crossbow, very modern and beautifully made, and handed it to Jerry Cornelius. Jerry held it in one hand, waiting for the moment when the guard would look completely away from him. Shortly, the man’s attention shifted towards the window at the end of the passage.

Jerry stepped out, aimed the crossbow, and pulled the trigger. But the guard had heard him and jumped. The bolt grazed his neck. There was only one bolt.

As the guard began to bring up his gun, Jerry ran towards him and grabbed the fingers of his right hand, hauling them off the gun. One finger snapped. The guard gurgled and his mouth gaped, showing that he was tongueless. He kicked at Jerry as John came in with a knife, missed his neck, and stabbed him through the left eye. The blade went in for almost its entire six inches, driving downward and coming out just below the left ear. As the German’s CNS packed it in, his body was momentarily paralyzed.

It softened as Jerry lowered it to the floor; he reached down and slid the knife out of the German’s face, handing it to John, who was as limp as the corpse.

“Get away from here, John,” Jerry muttered. “If I make it, I’ll see you in the cliff room.”

As John Gnatbeelson rolled off, Jerry turned the handle of the door. It was of the conventional kind, and the key was in the lock. He turned the key when the door resisted. The door opened. Jerry took the key out of the lock. Inside the room he closed the door quietly and locked it again.

He stood in a woman’s bedroom.

The heavy curtains were drawn across the big windows. The place smelled of stale air and misery. He crossed the familiar room and found the bedside lamp, switching it on.

Red light filled the place. A beautiful girl lay in a pale dress on the bed. Her features were delicate and resembled his own. Her black hair was tangled. Her small breasts rose and fell jerkily, and her breathing was shallow. She was not sleeping at all naturally. Jerry looked for hypodermic marks and found them in her upper right arm. Plainly she hadn’t used a needle on herself. Frank had done that.

Jerry stroked her bared shoulder. “Catherine.” He bent down and kissed her cold, soft lips, caressing her. Anger, self-pity, despair, passion were all there then, flooding up to the surface, and for once he didn’t stop them. “Catherine.”

She didn’t move. Jerry was crying now. His body trembled. He tried to control the trembling and failed. He gripped her hand, and it was like holding hands with a corpse. He tightened his grip, as if hoping pain would wake her. Then he dropped it and stood up.

“The shit!”

He pulled the curtains back from the windows and opened them. The night air blew away the odour in the room.

On her dressing-table there were no cosmetics, only bottles of drugs and several hypodermics.

The labels on the bottles were in Frank’s tiny printing. Frank had been experimenting.

Outside, someone shouted and began to bang on the metal door. He stared at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, then crossed to it and shot bolts at top and bottom.

A sharper, colder voice interrupted the yelling.

“What’s the trouble? Has someone been boorish enough to enter Miss Catherine’s room without her permission?”

It was Frank’s voice, and Frank doubtless guessed that his brother Jerry was in the room.

There were confused shouts from the guards, and Frank had to raise his voice. “Whoever you are, you’ll suffer for invading my sister’s privacy. You can’t get out. If she’s harmed or disturbed in any way, you won’t die for a long time, I promise. But you’ll wish you could.”

“As corny as ever, Frank!” Jerry shouted back. “I know you know it’s me—and I know you’re shit-scared. I’ve more right here than you. I own this house!”

“Then you should have stayed and not turned it over to me and Catherine. I meant what I said, Jerry!”

“Send your Krauts off and come in and talk it over. All I want is Catherine.”

“I’m not that naïve. You’ll never know what I fed her, Jerry. Only I can wake her up. It’s like magic, isn’t it? She’s well turned on. If I turned her off now, you wouldn’t be so keen on hopping into bed with her after ten minutes.” Frank laughed. “You’d need a dose of what I’ve got out here before you’d feel up to it—and then you wouldn’t want it any more. You can’t have your fix and make it, Jerry!”

Frank was in high spirits. Jerry wondered what he’d found to pep him up. Frank was always after a new synthesis and, as a good chemist, usually came up with a nice new habit every so often. Was it the same stuff as Catherine had in her veins right now? Probably not.

“Throw in your needle and come in with your veins clear, Frank,” Jerry shouted back, joining in the spirit of the thing. He took something out of his pocket and waited, but Frank didn’t seem willing to rise to this. Bullets began to rattle on the door. They’d soon stop as the ricochets got too much for Frank. They stopped.

Jerry went to the bed and heaved his sister off it. Then he put her down again. It was no good. He wouldn’t have a chance of getting out with her. He’d have to leave her and hope that Frank’s mind didn’t turn to thoughts of murder. It was unlikely. Slow death was the only good kind in Frank’s book.

From the inside pocket of his coat Jerry brought out a flat box like a snuff box. He opened it. There were two small filters there. He packed one into each nostril and clamped his mouth shut, sealing it with some surgical tape from another pocket.

Then he unbolted the door and slowly turned the key. He opened the door slightly. Frank stood some distance away, talking to four of his stormtroopers. Frank’s skin was grey, drawn over his near-fleshless skeleton like a lifeless film of plastic. They hadn’t yet noticed that the door was open.

Jerry tossed the neurade into the passage. They saw it fall. Only Frank recognized the nerve grenade for what it was, and he dashed off down the passage without stopping to give the guards the benefit of his knowledge.

Jerry stepped swiftly out of the room and closed the door tight behind him. The guards tried to aim at him, but the gas was already working. As they jerked like epileptics and fell down to bounce about spasmodically on the floor, Jerry gave them an amused, appreciative glance.

         

Jerry Cornelius went after Frank Cornelius and saw Frank pushing the button of the lift that went down to the library. When Frank saw Jerry, he swore and ran towards the end of the passage and the stairs. Jerry decided that he didn’t want Frank alive any more, and he drew out his needle pistol. The air pistol could hold a magazine of a hundred sliver bullets and was just as effective at short range as any small-calibre pistol—and far more accurate. Neither was it messy. Its only drawback was that it had to be repressured after every volley.

Jerry ran after his brother. Frank was evidently unarmed. He was scuttling down the spiral stairs now. Leaning on the banister, Jerry took aim at Frank’s head.

But when he put his arm down, he realized that he’d caught a sniff of the nerve gas himself, for the arm jumped twice and he involuntarily pulled the trigger. The needles went wide, and Frank had left the stairs on the third floor. He was now out of sight.

Jerry heard voices and noisy feet and knew that Frank had called in another section of the militia. He had no more nerve bombs with him. It was time, perhaps, to be leaving.

He ran back down the landing. The lift was waiting for him. Frank might assume that it wasn’t working, since he’d had no luck himself. He got into the lift and went down to the library. It was empty. In the library he paused and hauled his books off the shelf. He opened the door in the window and stepped out onto the balcony. Then he flung the books into the sea, re-entered the library, closed the door carefully, and knocked on the other entrance. It slid back. John was there. He still looked pale.

“What happened, sir?”

“Maybe he’ll never guess completely, John, so you might get away with it. He’s fazed, I think. Now it’s up to you. On Sunday you must somehow get Catherine away from the house and into the lodge on the village side of the grounds. There’ll probably be enough confusion and you’ll be able to do it easily. Don’t make a mistake. I want you both at that lodge. And Sunday starts at about 10 p.m., I’d guess.”

“Yes, sir—but…”

“No time for details, John. Do it. Don’t bother to see me out.”

Jerry Cornelius went through the control room, and John shut off the equipment again.

Then Jerry was on his way, torch in hand, back to his boat.

Within twenty minutes he was looking up at the house as his launch throbbed towards the English coast. The house was full of light now. It looked as if the residents were having a party.

It was still an hour until dawn. He had a chance of making it back to Southquay before the new man came on watch at the harbourmaster’s office.

CHAPTER THREE

On Sunday morning Miss Brunner and Dimitri left for Blackheath. She locked the door of her Holland Park house and tucked the note for the milkman into an empty bottle on the step. Dimitri had the Lotus 15 ready and running by the time she had put on her gloves and walked daintily down the path.

Later, as they waited for the Knightsbridge traffic to move, Miss Brunner decided that she would drive, and she and Dimitri changed places. They were used to changing places; it held them together in those uncertain times.

“Mr. Cornelius had better be there,” Miss Brunner said obsessively as she drove down Sloane Street, which was less crowded than it would have been on a weekday.

Dimitri sat back and smoked. He’d had a tiring night, and he hadn’t enjoyed himself as much as usual, particularly since Miss Brunner had insisted on calling him Cornelius the whole time.

Let her work it out, he thought. He was rather jealous of Cornelius, all the same; it had taken him two cups of strong coffee when he’d got up to convince himself that he was not in any way Jerry Cornelius. Miss Brunner, on the other hand, had evidently not been so easily convinced, and she was as bad today as she’d been since Thursday.

Well, with luck it would all be over by Monday, and they could begin the next phase of their plan—a much more sophisticated phase that involved thought and little energetic action.

It was a pity that attacking the house was the only way. He hadn’t liked the idea at all when it was first proposed, but since he’d had time to think about it, he was half looking forward to it. The fact disturbed him.

Miss Brunner drove the throbbing Lotus 15 over Westminster Bridge with gusto and entered the maze of streets beyond, then went down the Old Kent Road.

She had decided that she must have Jerry Cornelius, but she knew that this was one situation in which she must act for herself and not rely on Dimitri. A savoury chick, she thought, a nice spicy chick. She began to feel better.

         

Mr. Crookshank, the entertainers’ agent, kissed Little Miss Dazzle goodbye. Little Miss Dazzle was quite naked and did not appear on stage like that, if for no other reason than that the public would see that she was in fact equipped with the daintiest masculine genitals you ever saw.

It was not yet time, Mr. Crookshank had decided, to reveal that particular secret; not while Miss Dazzle was still smoothing up to the number one spot in the Top Ten Girl Chart within three days to a week with every disc she cut. When number five came to be her ceiling, then a few rumours might start. Then perhaps a marriage, he thought, though he’d hate to lose Miss Dazzle.

Mr. Crookshank’s Rolls, complete with chauffeur, waited downstairs outside the entrance hall to Miss Dazzle’s Bloomsbury flat.

The chauffeur knew the way.

Mr. Crookshank lit a panatella as the car cruised off in the general direction of Blackfriars Bridge. He switched on the radio and, as luck would have it, Little Miss Dazzle’s latest hit on Big Beat Call, the nonstop pop programme, was playing. It was a moving song, and Mr. Crookshank was duly moved. The words seemed to be for him.

I am a part of you, the heart of you,

I want to start with you,

And know…

The beat changed from 4/4 to 3/4, and the guitars tumbled into the minor fifth when she sang:

Just what it is,

Just what it is,

Just what it is,

I want to know.

He looked out of the window as the car went down Farringdon Street towards the bridge. The Sunday workers all seemed to be moving in the same direction, as if the voice of the lemming had been heard in the land. In a philosophical mood, Mr. Crookshank decided that it had been heard indeed, through the whole of Europe.

         

Mr. Powys was running late, for Sunday was normally his day of rest, and he had got up early only after he had realized that he was due in Blackheath that morning. He left his Hyde Park Gate maisonette with a shaving cut on his face and yesterday’s shirt on his back. He got his blue Aston Martin from the garage round the corner and put the top down so that the wet breeze would wake him up as he drove.

He switched on the radio for the same purpose, though he was too late to hear Little Miss Dazzle’s “Just What It Is.” Instead he came in on the middle of Tall Tom’s Tailmen singing “Suckers Deserve It.” If Mr. Powys had a destiny, then Tall Tom’s Tailmen were singing its tune—not that it occurred to Mr. Powys, but then he was like that. The only thing the song did for him at that moment was to make him feel hungry, though he didn’t know why. His thoughts turned to Miss Brunner and Dimitri, both of whom he knew intimately. In fact, it was extremely unlikely that he would have agreed to this venture if he hadn’t known them so well.

Miss Brunner and Dimitri had a persuasive manner. Except in moments of extreme sobriety, they were usually mingled together in his mind, Miss Brunner and Dimitri.

Mr. Powys was a baffled, unhappy man.

He drove through the park under the impression that the air was clearer there, turned left, and entered Knightsbridge, London’s fabulous thieves’ quarter, where every shop doorway (or, to be more accurate, every shop) held a thief of some description. Sloane Street was also his choice, but he went over Battersea Bridge and realized only after he’d reached Clapham Common that he’d made a mistake and was going to be later than ever.

         

By the time all the cars had crossed the river, Mr. Smiles was having breakfast in his Blackheath house and wondering how he’d got into this in the first place. His knowledge of the information (probably on microfilm) to be found in old Cornelius’s house had come from a friend of Frank Cornelius, a successful drug importer who supplied Frank with the rarer chemicals for his experiments. In a high moment Frank had let something slip, and Mr. Harvey, the importer, had later let the same thing slip to Mr. Smiles, also in a high moment.

Only Mr. Smiles had fully realized the significance of the information, if it was correct, for he knew the City better than it knew him. He had told Miss Brunner, and Miss Brunner had organized it from there.

Mr. Smiles had then got in touch with Jerry Cornelius, whom he hadn’t seen for some time—not, in fact, since the day he and Jerry had robbed the City United Bank of some two million pounds and, with a million each, split up. The investigation by the police had been very half-hearted, as if they were concentrating on the important crimes of the day, realizing that the inflating pound was no longer worth attempting to protect.

Mr. Smiles could read the signs, for he was something of a visionary. He could see that the entire Western European economy, including Sweden and Switzerland, was soon to collapse. The information Mr. Harvey had kindly passed on to him would probably hasten the collapse, but it would, if used properly, put Mr. Smiles and his colleagues on top. They would hold pretty well nearly all the power there was to hold when anarchy at last set in.

Mr. Smiles toyed with a fried egg, wondering why the yolks always broke these days.

         

In his permanently booked room in The Yachtsman, Jerry Cornelius had woken up at seven o’clock that morning and dressed himself in a lemon shirt with small ebony cuff-links, a wide black cravat, dark green waistcoat and matching hipster pants, black socks and black handmade boots. He had washed his fine hair, and now he brushed it carefully until it shone.

Then he brushed one of his double-breasted black car coats and put it on.

He pulled on black calf gloves and was ready to face the world as soon as he slipped on his dark glasses.

From the bed, he picked up what appeared to be a dark leather toilet case. He snapped it open to check that his needle gun was pressured. He put the gun back and closed the case.

Holding the case in his left hand, he went downstairs; nodded to the proprietor, who nodded back; and got into the newly polished Duesenberg.

He sat in the car for a moment, looking out over the grey sea. There was still a quarter of a glass of Bell’s in the clip on the dashboard. He took it out, wound down the window, and threw the glass to the ground. He reached into the glove compartment and found a wrapped, fresh glass, fixed it in the clip, and filled it half full from his bottle. Then he started the engine, turned the car around, and drove off, switching on the tape machine as soon as he was on Southquay’s main street.

John, George, Paul, and Ringo serenaded him with the old standard “Baby’s in Black” from all three speakers.

“Oh dear what can l do, baby’s in black and I’m feeling blue…”

They were still his favourite group.

“She thinks of him and so she dresses in black, and though he’ll never come back, she’s dressed in black.”

Halfway to Blackheath he stopped off at a newsagent’s shop and bought himself two Mars Bars, two cups of strong black coffee, and a pound or two of newsprint labeled NEWS SECTION, BUSINESS SECTION, LEISURE SECTION, ARTS SECTION, POP SECTION, CAR SECTION, COMIC SUPPLEMENT, COLOUR SUPPLEMENT, NOVEL SUPPLEMENT and HOLIDAY ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT. The News Section was a single sheet and the news was brief, to the point, uninterpreted. Jerry didn’t read it. In fact, he didn’t read anything except part of the Comic Supplement. There was plenty to look at, though. Communications were taking the form of pictures more and more these days. Jerry was well catered to.

He ate his sweets, drank his coffee, and folded up his sections and left them on the table, by way of a tip. Then he went back to his car to continue the journey to Blackheath.

Apart from his pills and his sweets, Jerry had eaten nothing for almost a week.

He found that he didn’t need to eat much, because he could live off other people’s energy just as well, though it was exhausting for them, of course. He didn’t keep many acquaintances long, and Catherine was the only person off whom he hadn’t fed. Indeed, it had been his delight to feed her with some of his stolen vitality when she was feeling low. She hadn’t liked it much, but she’d need it when he eventually got her away from that house and back to normal again, if he could ever get her back to normal.

He would certainly kill Frank when they raided the house. Frank’s final needle would come from Jerry’s gun. It would give him his final kick—the one he kept looking for.

         

Only Mr. Lucas hadn’t arrived by two o’clock, and they gave him up, feeling annoyed with him—which wasn’t quite fair, for Mr. Lucas had been stabbed to death in Islington the previous evening and robbed of the best part of his casino’s takings by a much-embittered all-time loser who, by the following Monday, would fall downstairs and kill himself while taking his money to the bank, such being the fate of all-time losers.

Miss Brunner and Dimitri, Mr. Smiles, Mr. Crookshank, and Mr. Powys were all looking at a map, which Mr. Smiles had laid out on the table. Jerry Cornelius stood by the window smoking a thin cigarette and half-listening to them as they talked over the details of the expedition.

Mr. Smiles pointed one of his strong fingers at a cross that had been drawn roughly in the middle of the English Channel between Dover and Normandy. “That’s where the boat will be waiting. The men were all hired by me in Tangier. They answered an advertisement. At first they thought they were going to shoot Africans, but I managed to talk them round. They consist mainly of white South Africans, Belgians, and French. There are a couple of British ex-officers. I put them in charge, of course. Apart from the South Africans, they got keener when I told them that they’d be fighting mainly Germans. Amazing how some people manage to hang on, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it?” Mr. Powys was, as ever, a trifle uncertain. “They’ll be anchored here waiting for us, will they?”

“We thought that was best, you know. Actually, coastguard patrols aren’t seen about as often as they were. We won’t need to worry too much.”

Miss Brunner pointed at the village near the Cornelius mansion. “What about this?”

“An advance force of five men will isolate the village communications-wise. They’ll be able to see something of what will be going on, of course, but we don’t anticipate any bother from them. All outgoing radio and telephone calls will be scrambled.”

Miss Brunner looked up at Jerry Cornelius. “Do you expect any trouble before we get into this cliff-opening place, Mr. Cornelius?”

Jerry nodded.

“Boats about as big as your hoverlaunch, plus my own, are almost bound to be spotted. They’ve got radar. My guess is that my brother will still rely mainly on the traps in the maze and so on. But the house will have some other surprises. As I told you, we’ll have to get to the main control room as soon as we can. That’s in the centre of the house. Once there, we can shut it down, and it will be straight fighting until we have Frank. I estimate that if you keep him off his junk for a couple of hours, he’ll tell you exactly where the microfilm is.”

Miss Brunner said quietly, “So we must preserve Frank at all costs.”

“Until you have your information, yes. Then I’ll deal with him.”

“You do sound vengeful, Mr. Cornelius.” Miss Brunner smiled at him. Jerry shrugged and turned to the window again.

“There seems little else to discuss.” Mr. Smiles offered them all his cigarettes. “We have an hour or two to kill.”

“Nearly three hours to kill, if we’re leaving at five,” said Miss Brunner.

“Is it three hours?” Mr. Powys glanced about.

“Three hours,” said Mr. Crookshank, nodding and looking at his watch. “Almost.”

“What’s the exact time?” Mr. Smiles asked. “My watch seems to have stopped.”

“I see that lire are thirty cents a million.” Mr. Crookshank lit Miss Brunner’s cigarette with a large gold gas lighter.

“They should never have backed out of the Common Market,” Miss Brunner said pitilessly.

“What else could they do?”

“The mark’s still strong,” said Mr. Powys.

“Ah, the Russo-American mark. They can’t go on supporting it at this rate.” Mr. Smiles smiled a satisfied smile. “No, indeed.”

“I’m still not sure that we were in the right.” Mr. Powys sounded as if he were still not sure of anything. He glanced enquiringly towards the Scotch on the sideboard. Mr. Smiles waved a hostly hand towards it. Mr. Powys got up and poured himself a stiff one. “Refusing to pay back all those European loans, I mean. I think.”

“It wasn’t exactly a refusal,” Dimitri reminded him. “You just asked for an indefinite time limit. Britain certainly is the black sheep of the family today, isn’t she?”

“It can’t be helped, and if we’re lucky tonight, it will all be to our advantage in the long run.” Mr. Smiles rubbed his beard and walked to the sideboard. “Would anyone like a drink?”

“Yes, please,” said Mr. Powys.

The rest accepted, too, except for Jerry, who continued to look out of the window.

“Mr. Cornelius?”

“What?” Dimitri glanced up. “Sorry.” Mr. Powys gave him a baffled look. He held a glass of Scotch in each hand. Miss Brunner glared at Dimitri.

“I’ll have a small one.” Jerry appeared not to have noticed Dimitri’s mistake, though, as he took the glass from Mr. Smiles, he grinned broadly for a moment.

“Oh, we are living in an odd kind of limbo, aren’t we?” Ever since the weary lemming image had occurred to him, Mr. Crookshank had retained his philosophical mood. “Society hovers on the point of collapse, eh? Chaos threatens!”

Mr. Powys had begun trying to pour one full glass of Scotch into the other. Whisky ran onto the carpet.

Cornelius felt that Mr. Powys was overdoing it a bit. He smiled a little as he sat down on the arm of Miss Brunner’s chair. Miss Brunner shifted in the chair, trying to face him and failing.

“Maybe the West has got to the quasar stage—you know, 3C286 or whatever it is.” Miss Brunner spoke rapidly, half angrily, leaning away from Jerry Cornelius.

“What’s that?” Mr. Powys sucked his fingers.

“Yes, what is it?” Mr. Crookshank seemed to dismiss Mr. Powys’s question as he asked his identical one.

“Quasars are stellar objects,” Jerry said, “so massive that they’ve reached the stage of gravitational collapse.”

“What’s that got to do with the West?” Mr. Smiles asked. “Astronomy?”

“The more massive, in terms of population, an area becomes, the more mass it attracts, until the state of gravitational collapse is reached,” Miss Brunner explained.

“Entropy, I think, Mr. Crookshank, rather than chaos,” Jerry said kindly.

Mr. Crookshank smiled and shook his head. “You’re going a bit beyond me, Mr. Cornelius.” He looked around at the others. “Beyond all of us, I should say.”

“Not beyond me.” Miss Brunner spoke firmly.

“The sciences are becoming curiously interdependent, aren’t they, Mr. Cornelius?” said Dimitri, whose statement seemed to echo one he’d picked up earlier. “History, physics, geography, psychology, anthropology, ontology. A Hindu I met—”

“I’d love to do a programme,” said Miss Brunner.

“I don’t think there’s a computer for the job,” Jerry said.

“I intend to do a programme,” she said, as if she’d made up her mind on the spot.

“You’d have to include the arts, too,” he said. “Not to mention philosophy. It could be just a matter of time, come to think of it, before all the data crystallized into something interesting.”

“Of Time?”

“That, too.”

Miss Brunner smiled up at Jerry. “We have something in common. I hadn’t quite realized what.”

“Oh, only our ambivalence,” Jerry grinned again.

“You’re in a good mood,” said Mr. Powys suddenly to Jerry.

“I’ve got something to do,” Jerry answered, but Mr. Powys was staring at his Scotch again.

Miss Brunner felt extremely satisfied. She returned to the subject. “I’d like more information. You know that this computer could be built. And what would it, in turn, create? Where are we heading?”

“Towards permanent flux perhaps, if you’ll forgive the paradox. Not many would have the intelligence to survive. When Europe’s finally divvied up between the Russians and Americans—not in my lifetime, I hope—what expertise the survivors will have! Won’t they be valuable to their new masters, eh? You should remember that, Miss Brunner, if ever events look like exceeding their present speed.” Jerry tapped her playfully on the shoulder.

She reached up to touch his hand, but it had gone. He got up.

“Can Time exceed c?” She laughed. “I’m sliding off, Mr. Cornelius. But we must take up this conversation again.”

“Now or never,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll be away, and we shan’t meet again.”

“You’re very certain.”

“I have to be.” He no longer grinned as he went back to the window, remembering Catherine and what he must do to Frank.

Behind him, the conversation continued.

         

Miss Brunner was in a savage, exhilarated mood now.

“And what’s your philosophy for the coming Light Age, Mr. Powys? You know, the c age. That’s a better term, on second thoughts.”

“Second thoughts?” Mr. Powys could summon nothing else. He was now on his fifth thought, trying to equate it with his fourth and, as he remembered it, his third.

Mr. Powys was busily disintegrating.

Mr. Smiles kindly filled his glass up, there being some good in all of us.

CHAPTER FOUR

Jerry steered the boat towards the light that had suddenly flashed out from a point near his port. Illuminated by the greenish glow from his indicator panel, his face looked stranger than ever to the others who waited on the deck outside his cabin.

Miss Brunner, most prone to that sort of thing, reflected that the conflicting time streams of the second half of the twentieth century were apparently mirrored in him, and it seemed that the mind behind cried forward while the mind in front cried back.

What had Cornelius been getting at? Time disintegrating? She’d never read one of his books, but she’d heard of them. Didn’t some of them talk about cyclical time, like Dunne? The ultimate point in the past would therefore be the ultimate point in the future. But what if something interrupted the cycle? An historical event, perhaps, of such importance that the whole pattern was changed. The nature of time, assuming that it was cyclical, would be disrupted. The circle broken, what might happen? It would certainly make Spengler look silly, she thought, amused.

If she could get her computer built and start her other project as well, she might be the person who could save something from the wreckage. She could consolidate everything left into one big programme—the final programme, she thought. Idea and reality, brought together, unified. The attempt had never succeeded in the past; but now she might have the opportunity to do it, for the time seemed ripe. She would need more power and more money, but with a bit of luck and intelligent exploitation of a shaky world situation she could get both.

Jerry was bringing the boat up alongside the bigger hoverlaunch. He watched as his passengers boarded the vessel, but he didn’t join them, preferring to have his own boat waiting for him when the expedition was over.

The hoverlaunch whispered away towards Normandy, and he began to follow behind it, positioning his boat slightly to one side to avoid the main disturbance of the launch’s wake. The launch belonged to Mr. Smiles, who, like Jerry, had invested his money in tangibles while it had still had some value.

Bit by bit the Normandy coastline became visible. Jerry cut his engine, and the hoverlaunch followed suit. Jerry went out on deck as a line was shot to him from the hoverlaunch. He made it fast. It was a cold night.

The hoverlaunch started up again, with Jerry in tow. It headed towards the cliff where the fake Le Corbusier château stood, a silhouette in the moonlight.

There was a slight chance that the bigger boat wouldn’t register on the mansion’s radar. Jerry’s boat didn’t, but it was much lower in the water. The hoverlaunch’s central control bridge, a squat tube rising above the passenger disc and power section, was what might just blip on the radar.

Old Cornelius’s microfilms were buried deep within the château, in a strongroom that would not resist a high-explosive blast but would, if attacked in this manner, automatically destroy the film.

The information the intrepid band required was probably there, but the only sure-fire means of getting the film was to open the strongroom in the conventional way, and that was why Frank, who knew the various codes and techniques necessary, had to be preserved and questioned and, with luck, made to open the strongroom himself.

The whole house was designed around the strongroom. It had been built to protect the microfilms. Very little in the house was what it seemed to be. It was armed with strange weapons.

As he looked up at it, Jerry thought how strongly the house resembled his father’s tricky skull.

Virtually every room, every passage, every alcove had booby traps, which was why Jerry was so valuable to the expedition. He didn’t know the strongroom combination, but he knew the rest of the house well, having been brought up there.

If he hadn’t gone off after that night when his father had found him with Catherine, he would have inherited the microfilms as his birthright, since he was the elder son, but Frank had got that honour.

The wind was up. It whistled through the trees, groaned among the towers of the château. The clouds ripped across the sky to reveal the moon.

The hoverlaunch rocked.

From the house, searchlights came on. The searchlights were focused mainly on the house itself, lighting it up like some historic monument—which, indeed, it was.

The lights blinked off, and another one came on, a powerful beam, moving across the water. It struck the hoverlaunch.

The other lights came on, concentrated on the house, particularly the roof.

Jerry shouted, “Keep your eyes off the roof! Don’t look at the towers! Remember what I told you!”

Water splashed against the sides of the hoverlaunch as they waited.

From the roof three circular towers had risen. They began to rotate in the blue beam of a searchlight. The colour changed to red, then yellow, then lilac. The towers rotated slowly at first. They looked like big round machine-gun bunkers, with slots located at intervals down their length. Through these oblong slots shone bright lights, geometric shapes in garish primary colours, fizzing like neon. The towers whirled faster. It was almost impossible to take the eye away.

Jerry Cornelius knew what the giant towers were. Michelson’s Stroboscope Type 8. The eye was trapped by them and so were the limbs, the will. Pseudo-epilepsy was only one result of watching them for too long.

The wind and the hissing towers produced a high-pitched, ululating whine. Round and round, faster and faster, whirled the towers, with bright metal colours replacing the primaries—silver, bronze, gold, copper, steel.

First the eye and then the mind, thought Jerry.

He saw that one of the mercenaries on the boat stood transfixed; glazed, unblinking eyes staring up at the huge stroboscopes. His limbs were stiff.

A searchlight found him, and, from two concrete emplacements on the cliff, machine-guns smacked a couple of dozen rounds into him.

His bloody body was thrown violently backward; it softened and collapsed. Jerry was still yelling at him to take his eyes away from the stroboscopes.

Jerry stopped yelling. He hadn’t expected such a display of violence so soon. Evidently Frank wasn’t taking chances. He crouched behind the cabin as the boats drifted towards the cliffs. The overhang offered them some shelter.

Within a minute the towers were no longer visible. They had been designed primarily for use against land attack.

As his boat bumped against the hoverlaunch, Jerry glanced at the body of the dead mercenary. It represented the start of an interesting anarchic process.

He leaned over and got a grip on a handrail, hauling himself aboard the hoverlaunch. He took out his needle gun and held it in his gloved right hand.

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Cornelius,” said Miss Brunner, her legs astraddle, her hair blowing back from her head.

Jerry walked forward as the hoverlaunch knocked itself against the cliff. Behind him a mercenary jumped to the deck of his boat and made it fast.

Another mercenary—darkly tanned, with oiled, wavy hair—came forward holding a suction mine intended to destroy the door. The man steadied himself and bent to attach it to the spot Jerry indicated. They backed up the deck as the mine exploded, bits of wreckage pattering down.

The door was open.

Jerry led the way forward, put his foot on the handrail, and pushed himself into the opening. He began to walk down the short passage.

The main force of mercenaries, dressed in the lightweight khaki they were never without, followed him with their machine-guns ready. Behind them, not so swiftly, stepped Mr. Smiles, Miss Brunner and Dimitri, Mr. Crookshank, and Mr. Powys. They all carried their big machine pistols awkwardly.

An explosion rocked the cliff. They looked back as fire spread over the water.

“Let’s hope they don’t spend too much time on the boats,” Mr. Smiles said, speaking adenoidally because his nostrils were stuffed with the filters that Jerry had issued to them all.

Jerry reached the inner room and pointed at two places on the walls. The leading mercenary raised his gun and shot out the two cameras. From the control chamber above, the lights were switched off by way of retaliation.

“Frank’s found this entrance, anyway,” Jerry said. It was really only what he’d expected.

The mercenaries now unhooked heavy helmets from their belts and fitted them on their heads. The helmets were equipped with miners’ lamps. One mercenary had a long coil of nylon rope over his shoulder.

“Perhaps the lift’s still working?” Mr. Powys suggested as Jerry set foot on the ladder.

“Probably.” Jerry began to climb. “But we’d look great if they switched the power off when we were halfway up.”

They all started to climb. Miss Brunner went last. As she put her foot on the first rung, she said thoughtfully, “Silly. They forgot to electrify the ladder.”

Jerry heard some sounds above. He looked up as a light went on in the shaft, making him blink. A hard-faced German was looking down at him, sighting along his automatic rifle.

Jerry snapped up his needle gun and shot the German full of steel. He paused, arm curled around the ladder, to repressure the gun, shouting, “Look out!” as the guard rolled off the edge and fell down the shaft.

As the guard’s body thumped to the bottom, Jerry reached the top, his needle gun ready, but no-one was there. Frank had spared only one guard here, being sure that the maze would serve him best.

Everyone else scrambled up, and they all stood at the entrance to the maze while the soldier with the rope paid it out to them. They roped up.

Knotting her bit of the rope around her waist, Miss Brunner looked uncomfortable.

“I don’t like this sort of thing,” she said.

Jerry ignored her, leading them into the maze.

“Keep your mouths tightly shut,” he reminded them. “And whatever happens, keep your attention on following me.”

Their helmet lights lit the way as Jerry walked cautiously ahead, pointing out television cameras to the mercenaries, who shot them as they passed.

Then the first wave of gas hissed into the passageways. It was LSD gas, refined by old Cornelius. The nose filters, sophisticated by his son, could cope with it if they got through it fast enough. Old Cornelius had invented or modified all the hallucinatory protective devices in the house. Frank had added the guns and guards.

Hallucinogenic gases had been old Cornelius’s speciality, though an offshoot had been his hallucinomats such as the rooftop stroboscopic towers.

Old Cornelius had exhausted and killed himself searching for the ultimate hallucinogenic device (“total dissociation in under one second” had been his aim, his war-cry), just as his son Frank was destroying himself fairly slowly by looking for the ultimate kick in the veins.

Someone began to giggle, and Jerry looked back.

It was Mr. Powys.

Mr. Powys had his arms high and was shaking all over, just as if someone were tickling his armpits. Every so often he would stretch out his arms in front of him and make pushing motions at wisps of gas.

Then he began to skip about.

Mouths thin and firm now that they had seen the example of Mr. Powys, Mr. Smiles and Mr. Crookshank stepped in, striving to hold him still.

Jerry signed for the expedition to stop, unhooked the rope from his belt, and went back to hit Mr. Powys on the back of the neck with his pistol barrel.

Mr. Powys relaxed, and Mr. Smiles and Mr. Crookshank hefted him up between them.

In silence they walked on through the faintly yellowish gas that clouded the air of the maze. Those who had absorbed a little of it thought they saw shapes in the writhing stuff: malevolent faces, grotesque figures, beautiful designs. Everyone was sweating, particularly Mr. Smiles and Mr. Crookshank, who carried Mr. Powys who would soon have breathed enough LSD to kill him.

At a junction Jerry hesitated, his judgment slightly impaired. Then he was off again, taking the gang down the tunnel that branched off to the right.

They moved on, the silence sometimes interrupted by the sound of a rifle shooting out a camera.

It was a little ironic, he thought, that his father should have become so obsessed with the problem of increasing incidence of neurotic disorders in the world that he himself had gone round the bend towards the end.

Now Jerry rounded the last bend and the door of the control chamber was ahead of him. He was quite surprised that so far there had been only two casualties and only one of those actually dead.

About fifteen yards before they got to the door Jerry gave a signal, and a bazooka was passed down the line to him. Leaving Jerry and his loader, the remainder of the party retreated down the passage a short way and stood in a disorderly knot waiting.

Jerry got the bazooka comfortably onto his shoulder and pulled the trigger. The rocket bomb whooshed straight through the door and exploded in the control room itself.

A booted foot came sailing out and hit Jerry in the face. He kicked it to one side, his mouth still tightly shut, and waved the others on.

The explosion had wrecked the control panel, but the opposite door was still intact. Since it would open only to the thermal code of someone it knew, they could either blast through into the library or wait for someone to blast through to them. Jerry knew that armed men would definitely be waiting in the library.

The other members of the expedition were unhooking their ropes and dropping them to the floor. It was unlikely they would be leaving by the same route, and therefore they wouldn’t need the ropes again. Jerry pondered the problem as Miss Brunner squeezed into the room and studied the wreckage of the panel.

Her big eyes looked up at him quizzically. “A nice little board; and this is only a minor control panel?”

“Yes. There’s a large roomful in the cellars—the main console. That’s got to be our objective, as I told you.”

“You did. What now?”

Jerry smoothed the hair at the side of his face. “There’s an alternative to waiting for them. We could try the bazooka. But there’s another door behind this one, and I doubt if a rocket would go through them both. If it didn’t, we’d get the worst of the explosion. They must be waiting there—probably with a grenade thrower or a big Bren or something. It’s stalemate for the moment.”

“You should have anticipated this.” Miss Brunner frowned.

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think of it,” Jerry said with a sigh.

“Someone else should have.” She turned to look accusingly at the others.

Dimitri was kneeling beside Mr. Powys, trying to revive him.

“Not for Mr. Powys,” said Mr. Crookshank, unable to restrain a slight smile. “The LSD always gets you in the end, eh?”

“You, too,” he said. “Looks as if poor old Mr. Powys has had it.”

“I thought it had been too easy,” said Mr. Smiles.

“I’ve got it.” Jerry looked up. Over the door was a metal panel, secured by wing nuts. He pointed to it. “Air conditioning. A grenade thrower, a single neurade and a good eye should do the trick if the grille at the other end isn’t closed.”

He put his hand on the arm of a big South African. “You’ll do. I’ll stand on your shoulders. Hang on to my legs when the recoil comes. Who’s got a grenade attachment?”

One of the Belgians handed him the attachment. He fitted it to the automatic rifle and detached the ammunition clip. The Belgian handed him a different clip. He fitted this to the rifle, too. Then he took a neurade out of his pocket and popped it into the thrower’s basket.

“Someone give me a hand up,” he said. One of the British mercenaries helped him climb onto the South African’s broad shoulders. He pushed back the metal panel and began to bash in the wire grille with the gun butt. He could see down the pipe to where the lights of the library shone. He heard muted voices.

Shoving the rifle into the pipe, he put it to his shoulder. The space between the fan blades was just big enough. Now if the neurade wasn’t deflected by the grille at the other end, which wasn’t likely, they’d have a chance of getting the guards there in silence and have time to blast open the doors with small charges of explosive before anyone realized that the detachment in the library was out of action.

He squeezed the trigger. The neurade shot down the pipe, was missed by the fan blades, and burst through the grille.

He smiled as voices at the other end shouted in surprise. He heard dull thumps and knew that the neurade had exploded. Then he started to lose his footing on the South African; half-jumped, half-fell to the ground; and handed the Belgian’s gun back to him.

“Okay, let’s get these doors open. Hurry. And keep your mouths closed again.”

The charges burst both locks, and they were through. On the floor of the library beside an overturned machine-gun three Germans jerked limply, mouths in rictus grins, eyes full of tears, muscles and limbs contorted as the gas worked on their nerves. It seemed a mercy to bayonet them; so they did.

They tumbled out of the library and into the ground-floor hall as the ceiling suddenly rose and the walls widened out, light glaring like magnesium, blinding them for a moment. Jerry fished goggles from his pocket and put them on, noticing that the others were doing the same.

They could now see shapes flickering around them, like a colour-film negative. Traceries of deep red and luminous blue veined the walls.

Then the lights went out and they were in pitch blackness.

One wall became transparent all at once. Behind it a huge black-and-white disc began to whirl, and a rhythmic boom swam up the decibel scale, almost to pain level. It seemed that the enlarged room swayed like a ship as they staggered after Jerry, who was none too steady on his pins himself, heading straight for the disc.

Jerry grabbed a gun from one of the dazed, mesmerized mercenaries, switched it to full automatic, and fired an entire magazine into the wall. Plastic cracked, but the disc continued to whirl. As he turned to take another gun, Jerry saw that all of them were now transfixed by the disc.

Another burst and the plastic shattered. The bullets struck the disc, and it began to slow down.

Behind them the far wall slid upwards, and half a dozen of Frank’s guards stood there.

Jerry ignored them as he kicked a larger hole in the wall and smashed at the big disc with his gun butt until it crumpled.

“Throw down your arms!” ordered the chief guard.

Jerry flung himself through the hole. Aiming between Miss Brunner and Dimitri, who were beginning to blink back into wakefulness, he killed the chief guard.

The shot seemed to be enough to bring the others round quickly. Almost before Jerry knew it Miss Brunner had jumped through the hole, her high heels catching him on his buttocks.

Firing broke out generally, but Mr. Smiles, Dimitri and Mr. Crookshank all got through safely, although several of the mercenaries, including the big South African, died.

They fought back until they had killed all Frank’s guards. It was fairly easy from their cover.

They were in a small room, now bathed in a soft red light, a sound like the swish of the sea in their ears.

Something dropped from the ceiling and bounced on the floor until its sides opened up.

“Nerve bomb!” Jerry yelled. “Cover your mouths!”

He knew there was an exit somewhere to the right of the smashed disc. He edged in that direction and found it, using his gun to prise it open. If they didn’t get out shortly, their nose filters wouldn’t help them.

He went through the doorway, and they followed him.

The next room was yellow, full of soothing murmurs. A remote-control camera panned around close to the ceiling. One of the mercenaries shot it. A normal door, unlocked, opened onto a flight of stairs leading upward.

There wasn’t another door. They ascended the stairs. At the top three men waited for them.

“Frank’s spreading his guards thin,” said Jerry.

Their first burst missed him but shot the head of one of the Belgians to bits. Feeling panicky, Jerry hugged the wall, raising his needle gun and shooting a guard in the throat.

Behind him the leading mercenaries opened up. One guard fell at once, blood spurting from his stomach. The second fired down the stairwell and got two more mercenaries, including one of the Britons.

Jerry, rapidly repressuring his gun, shot him, too.

On the first-floor landing everything was silent, and Jerry relaxed his pursed lips. The mercenaries, with the civilians behind them, moved up onto the landing and looked at him questioningly.

“My brother’s almost certainly in the main control room,” Jerry said. “That’s two floors down now, and there’ll be extra guards turning up at any moment.” Jerry pointed at a television camera near the ceiling. “Don’t shoot it. He isn’t using it at the moment for some reason, and if we put it out he’ll know we’re here.”

“He must have guessed, surely,” said Miss Brunner.

“You’d think so. Also, he would have sent some reinforcements here by now. He could have a trap waiting somewhere for us—wants us to relax a little. This landing’s equipped with a Schizomat in a panel in that wall. My father’s crowning achievement, he always thought.”

“And Frank isn’t using it.” Miss Brunner tidied her long red hair.

“I had to leave Mr. Powys behind, I’m afraid.” Dimitri leaned on a wall. “This house certainly is full of colourful surprises, Mr. Cornelius.”

“He’ll be dead by now,” said Jerry.

“What could your brother be planning?” Miss Brunner asked.

“Something funny. He’s got a rich sense of humour. He may have cooked up a new ploy, but it’s not like Frank to be subtle at a time like this. It’s just possible that he’s run away.”

“And all our efforts have been wasted,” she said sourly. “I hope not.”

“Oh, so do I, Miss Brunner.”

He walked along the landing, with them following him. Jerry led them through the quiet house until they reached a point where they looked down, through what was evidently a two-way mirror, into the partitioned hall where the nerve bomb had exploded. Stairs led down alongside the far wall.

“These stairs normally lead to the basement,” Jerry told them. “We might as well go back the way we came now. There’s no obvious danger as far as I can see.”

They began to descend.

“There are steel gates farther down,” he said. “They can shut off any part of the stairs. Remember what I told you: use your guns to wedge them, stop them fully closing.”

“No rifle’s going to stop steel,” Mr. Crookshank said doubtfully.

“True—but the door mechanism’s delicate. It’ll work.”

They passed openings in the walls where the steel gates were housed, but none of them closed.

They reached the ground floor and entered a curiously narrow passage, obviously created by the widening of the hall walls earlier. At the far end Mr. Powys suddenly appeared and came staggering towards them.

“He should be dead!” exclaimed Mr. Smiles, offended.

“It’s haunted! It’s haunted!” moaned Mr. Powys.

Jerry couldn’t work out how he’d got there. Neither could he guess how Mr. Powys had survived the LSD, not to mention everything else.

“It’s haunted! It’s haunted!” Mr. Powys repeated.

Jerry grabbed him. “Mr. Powys! Pull yourself together.”

Mr. Powys gave Jerry an intelligent look that was suddenly sardonic. He raised his thick eyebrows. “Too late for that, I’m afraid, Mr. Cornelius. This house—it’s like a giant head. Do you know what I mean? Or is it my skull? If it is, what am I?”

“I know whose bloody head this house is,” Jerry said, shaking him. “I know, you bastard.”

“Mine!”

“No!”

“What’s the matter, Mr. Powys?” Dimitri slid up. “Can I help?”

“It’s haunted. It’s my mind haunted by me, I think. That can’t really be right, Dimitri. You are Dimitri. I’d always thought…It must be my mind haunting me. That must be it. Oh, dear!” He rocked his poor head in his hands.

Dimitri looked at Jerry Cornelius. “What do we do with him?”

“He needs a converter.” Jerry Cornelius smiled at Mr. Powys, raised his gun, and shot him in the eye.

The party stopped.

CHAPTER FIVE

“It was for the best,” Jerry said. “His brain was already badly damaged, and we couldn’t have him running around.”

“Aren’t you being exceptionally ruthless, Mr. Cornelius?” Mr. Smiles took a very deep breath.

“Oh, now, now, Mr. Smiles.”

They pressed on until they reached a big metal door in the basement. “This is where he should be,” said Jerry. “But I can’t help thinking he’s cooked up a big surprise.” He signaled to the surviving Briton and a couple of Belgians. They saluted smartly.

“Have a go at that door, will you?”

“Any particular method, sir?” asked the Briton.

“No. Just get it down. We’ll be round the comer.”

They retreated while the soldiers got to work affixing things to the door.

There came a loud and unexpectedly violent explosion (obviously far bigger than the soldiers had planned). When the smoke cleared, Jerry saw blood all over the walls, but very little recognizable of the soldiers.

“Great lads,” he laughed. “What a good thing, their thing about orders.” And then they were all stumbling backward as a sub-machine-gun began to bang rapidly from within the room.

Peering through the smoke from behind the cover of a South African, Jerry saw that Frank was in there, apparently alone, with the machine-gun cradled in his arms, firing steadily.

Mr. Crookshank got in the path of one of the bursts, making a ludicrous attempt to duck the bullets even as they danced into his chest. Two soldiers collapsed on top of him.

Frank chuckled away as he fired.

“I think he’s gone barmy,” said Mr. Smiles. “This poses a problem, Mr. Cornelius.”

Jerry nodded. “Stop this nonsense, Frank!” he shouted, trying to make his tone firm. “What about a truce?”

“Jerry!

“Jerry!

“Jerry!” sang Frank from the room, firing more sporadically. “What do you want, Jerry? A Time Fix?

“Tempodex is my remedy for everyone. It’ll turn you on lovely, sport—can’t you feel those millions of years just waiting in your spine—waiting to move up into your back-brain—”

The gun stopped altogether and they began to move cautiously forward. Then Frank stooped to pick up an identical, fully loaded weapon. He began emptying it.

“—your mid-brain, your fore-brain—all your many brains, Jerry—when the tempodex starts opening them up?”

“He is in a jolly mood,” said Miss Brunner from somewhere well behind the front line.

Jerry just didn’t feel like doing anything except duck bullets at that moment. He felt very tired. Another couple of mercenaries piled themselves up neatly. They were running out of help, Jerry thought.

“Can’t we throw something at him? Isn’t there any more gas?” Miss Brunner sounded vexed.

“Well, look here, he’s got to run out of bullets sooner or later.” Mr. Smiles believed that if you waited long enough, the right situation always presented itself. A thought struck him, and he turned angrily to the mercenaries. “Why aren’t you retaliating?”

They began retaliating.

Mr. Smiles quickly realized his mistake and shouted: “Stop! We want him alive!”

They stopped.

Frank sang and kept his finger on the trigger.

“He’ll get an overheated barrel if he’s not careful,” said Mr. Smiles, remembering his mythology. “I hope he doesn’t blow himself up.”

Miss Brunner was picking her nose. She discarded the filters. “I don’t care if there is any more gas,” she said. “I’m not having the filthy things up there any longer.”

“Well, look,” said Jerry, “I’ve got one neurade left, but it could kill him, the state he’s in.”

“It wouldn’t do me much good now. You might have warned me.” Miss Brunner scanned the floor.

Another mercenary groaned and went down.

The sub-machine-gun stopped. The last bullet ricocheted off the wall. There came the sound of sobbing.

Jerry peered round the corner. Among his guns, Frank sat weeping with his head in his hands.

“He’s all yours.” Jerry walked towards the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Miss Brunner took a step after him.

“I’ve done my bit of group effort, Miss Brunner. Now there’s something else I’ve got to do. Goodbye.”

Jerry went up to the ground floor and found the front door. He still felt nervous and realized that not all Frank’s guards had been accounted for. He opened the door and peered out of the house. There didn’t seem to be anyone about.

Gun still in his hand, he walked down the sloping drive towards the lodge where John ought to be with Catherine.

The lights were out in the lodge, but he didn’t think it strange in the circumstances. He looked down the hill towards the village. All the lights were out there, too. Mr. Smiles had paid someone to fuse the power supply. Jerry found the lodge door open and walked in.

In a corner, a bag of bones gave him a welcoming groan.

“John! Where’s Catherine?”

“I got her here, sir. I—”

“But where is she now? Upstairs?”

“You said after ten, sir. I was here by eleven. Everything went smoothly. She was a weight. I’m dying, sir, I think.”

“What happened?”

“He must have followed me.” John spoke with increasing faintness. “I got her here…Then he came in with a couple of the men. He shot me, sir.”

“And took her back to the house?”

“I’m sorry, sir…”

“So you should be. Did you hear where he was taking her?”

“He—said—putting her—back to—bed, sir…”

Jerry left the lodge and began to run up the drive. It was odd how normal the house looked from the outside. He re-entered it.

On the ground floor he found the lift and discovered that it was still operating. He got in and went up to the sixth. He got out and ran to Catherine’s bedroom. The door was locked. He kicked at it, but it wouldn’t budge. He reached into his top pocket and fished out something that looked like a cigarette. Two thin wires were attached to it, leading to another object the size of a matchbox. He uncoiled the wires. He put the slim object into the keyhole of the door and walked backward a yard or so with the box in his hand.

It was actually a tiny detonator. He touched the wires to the detonator, and the explosive at the other end burst the lock with a flash.

He pushed at the wrecked door and walked in to find Frank already there.

Frank did not look at all well. In his right hand was a needle gun, twin to Jerry’s. There were only two such guns; their father had had them made and given them one each.

“How did you get away?” Jerry asked Frank.

Frank’s answer was not a direct one. He put his head on one side and stared at Jerry unblinkingly, looking like an old, sick vulture.

“Well, actually I was hoping to get you, Jerry. As it was I got all your military friends, though I think I missed some of the others. They’re still wandering about, I think. I’m not sure why I bothered with the shooting—probably just because I enjoyed it. I feel much better now. But if you’d crossed into the room you’d have found that a couple—ha, ha—of my men were on either side of the door waiting for you. I was the bait, the bait to the trap.”

Frank’s head seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into his shoulders as he talked, his whole body screwed up in a neurotic stoop. “You certainly made a good try at getting our sister, didn’t you? Look—I’ve woken the sleeping beauty up.”

Catherine, looking dazed, was propped on pillows.

She smiled when she saw Jerry. It was a sweet smile, but it wasn’t all that confident. Her skin was more than naturally pale, and her dark hair was still tangled.

Jerry’s gun hand rose a trifle, and Frank grinned. “Let’s get ready, then,” he said.

He began to back around the bed in order to get on the other side of Catherine. She was now between them, looking slowly from one to the other, her smile fading very gradually.

Jerry was trembling. “You bastard.”

Frank giggled. “That’s something we all have in common.”

Frank’s junkie’s face was immobile. The only movement in it came when the light caught his bright, beady eyes. Jerry didn’t realize that Frank had pulled the trigger of his gun until he felt the sting in his shoulder. Frank’s hand wasn’t as steady as it had seemed.

Frank didn’t repressure his gun at once. Jerry raised his arm to shoot Frank.

Then Catherine moved. She reached out towards Frank, her fingers clutching at his coat. “Stop it!”

“Shut up,” said Frank. He moved his left hand towards the pressure lever of his needle gun.

Catherine tried to stand up on the bed and fell forward in a kneeling position. Her face was full of wild fear.

“Jerry!” she screamed.

Jerry took a step towards her.

“That needle could work into your heart, Jerry,” smiled Frank.

“So I’ll need a magnet.”

Jerry fired and ran towards the window as a needle grazed his face. He repressured and turned. Frank ducked; Catherine rose, and Jerry’s needle caught her. She collapsed, Jerry repressured and discharged another needle at the same time as Frank. They both missed again.

Jerry began to feel puzzled. This was going on far too long. He jumped towards Frank and grabbed at his body. Frank’s weak fists struck him on the head and back. He punched Frank in the stomach, and Frank groaned. They stepped apart. Jerry felt dizzy; saw Frank grin and wheel.

“You had something in those needles…”

“Find out,” grinned Frank, and he sprang from the room.

Jerry sat himself down on the edge of the bed.

He was riding a black ferris wheel of emotions. His brain and body exploded in a torrent of mingled ecstasy and pain. Regret. Guilt. Relief. Waves of pale light flickered. He fell down a never-ending slope of obsidian rock surrounded by clouds of green, purple, yellow, black. The rock vanished, but he continued to fall. World of phosphorescence drifting like golden spheres into the black night. Green, blue, red explosions. Flickering world of phosphorescent tears falling into timeless, spaceless wastes. World of Guilt. Guilt—guilt—guilt…Another wave flowed up his spine. No-mind, no-body, no-where. Dying waves of light danced out of his eyes and away through the dark world. Everything was dying. Cells, sinews, nerves, synapses—all crumbling. Tears of light, fading, fading. Brilliant rockets streaking into the sky and exploding all together and sending their multicoloured globes of light—balls on an Xmas tree—x-mass—drifting slowly. Black mist swirled across a bleak, horizonless nightscape. Catherine. As he approached her she fell away, fell down like a cardboard dummy. Just before his mind cleared, he thought he saw a creature bending over them both—a creature without a navel, hermaphrodite and sweetly smiling…

He felt weaker as his head cleared, and he realized that some time must have passed. Catherine lay on the bed in much the same position in which he’d seen her earlier. There was a spot of blood on her white dress, over the left breast.

He put his hand on it and noticed that the heart wasn’t beating.

He had killed her.

In agony, he began to caress her stiff.

         

Meanwhile, Frank was also in agony, for he had been trapped by Miss Brunner and she was giving his genitals a cruel squeeze. They were in one of the rooms on the second floor. Dimitri and Mr. Smiles stood at his left and right, holding his arms.

Miss Brunner knelt on one knee in front of him. She squeezed again, and Frank grimaced.

“Look here,” he said. “I’ve got to get myself fixed up.”

“You get the fix when we get the microfilm,” snarled Miss Brunner, hoping he wouldn’t give in right away.

Smiles got the joke and laughed. Dimitri joined in, somewhat vacantly.

“This is serious,” said Miss Brunner, and she gave Frank another squeeze.

“I’ll tell you as soon as I’m fixed up.”

“Mr. Cornelius, we can’t allow that,” said Mr. Smiles. “Come along, let’s have the information.”

Mr. Smiles hit Frank clumsily on the face. Discovering a taste for it, he did it several more times. Frank didn’t seem to mind. He had other things to worry about.

“Pain doesn’t have much effect,” Miss Brunner said thoughtfully. “We’ll just have to wait and hope he doesn’t become too incoherent.”

“Look, he’s slavering.” Dimitri pointed in disgust. He let go of Frank’s arm.

Eyes unblinking, Frank wiped his grey mouth. A great shudder brought his body briefly to life. Then he was still again.

After a moment, while they watched in curiosity, he shuddered again.

“You know the microfilm is in the strongroom?” Frank said between shudders.

“He’s coming through!” Mr. Smiles smacked his leg.

Dimitri frowned.

“Only you can open the strongroom; is that right, Mr. Cornelius?” Miss Brunner sighed rather disappointedly.

“That’s right.”

“Will you take us there and open the strongroom? Then we will let you go and you can get your fix.”

“Yes, I will.”

Mr. Smiles bent Frank’s arm behind his back. “Lead the way,” he said firmly.

         

When they had reached the strongroom and Frank had opened it for them, Miss Brunner looked at the ranks of metal files lining the walls and said, “You can go now, Mr. Cornelius. We’ll find what we want.”

Frank skipped off, out of the littered room behind the strongroom and up the stairs.

“I think I’ll just pop after him and check he hasn’t got something up his sleeve,” Mr. Smiles said eagerly.

“We’ll be waiting.”

Dimitri helped Miss Brunner lift the files from their shelves and cart them into the room. When Mr. Smiles had disappeared, Miss Brunner began to stroke Dimitri. “We’ve done it, Dimitri!”

Dimitri had soon forgotten the boxes and had become totally absorbed in Miss Brunner.

         

Mr. Smiles came back a short time later, looking upset. “I was right,” he said. “He’s left the house and is talking to his guards. We should have kept him as a hostage. We’re not behaving very rationally, Miss Brunner.”

“This isn’t the time or place for that sort of thing,” she said as she searched through the box files.

“Where’s Mr. Cornelius?”

“Jerry Cornelius?” she murmured abstractedly.

“Yes.”

“We should have asked Frank. Silly of me.”

“Where’s Dimitri?”

“He gave up.”

“Gave himself up?” Mr. Smiles looked bemused. He glanced round the strongroom. On the floor, in a dark corner, lay a neatly folded Courrèges suit, a shirt, underpants, socks, shoes, tie, valuables.

“Well, he must have gone for an early-morning swim,” said Mr. Smiles, trembling and noticing how healthy Miss Brunner’s skin looked.

         

It was dawn as Jerry walked down the stairs. On the second floor he found Miss Brunner and Mr. Smiles going through the big metal box files. They were sitting on the carpet with the files between them, studying the papers and microfilm they had removed.

“I assumed you were dead,” said Miss Brunner. “We’re the only survivors, I’m afraid.”

“Where is Frank?”

“We let him go after he’d opened the strongroom for us. It was a mistake.” She looked petulantly at Mr. Smiles. “They aren’t here, are they?”

Mr. Smiles shook his head. “It doesn’t look like it, Miss Brunner. We’ve been fooled by young Frank. At the rate he was trembling and drooling, you’d have thought he was telling the truth. He’s more cunning than we guessed.”

“Instinctive,” said Miss Brunner, her lips pursed.

“What happened to Dimitri?” Jerry looked at Miss Brunner. For a moment, in the dawn light, he had half-mistaken her for the Greek.

“He disappeared,” said Mr. Smiles. “After I went to check on Frank. I didn’t realize the strength of character your brother had, Mr. Cornelius.”

“You shouldn’t have let him go.” Jerry kicked at the papers.

“You told us we mustn’t harm him.”

“Did I?” Jerry spoke listlessly now.

“I’m not sure he was lying,” said Miss Brunner to Mr. Smiles. She got up, dusting off her skirt as best she could. “He might really have believed the stuff was in there. Do you think it exists any more?”

“I was convinced. Convinced.” Mr. Smiles sighed. “A lot of time, energy, and money has been wasted, and we’re not even likely to survive now. This is a great disappointment.”

“Why not?” Jerry asked. “Likely to survive?”

“Outside, Mr. Cornelius, is the remainder of your brother’s private army. They’ve ringed the place and are ready to shoot us. Your brother commands them.”

“I must get to a doctor,” said Jerry.

“What’s the matter?” Miss Brunner’s voice wasn’t sympathetic.

“I’m wounded in a couple of places. One in the shoulder—not sure where the other one went in, but I think it must be very bad.”

“What about your sister?”

“My sister’s dead. I shot her.”

“Really, then you must—”

“I want to live!” Jerry stumbled towards the window and looked out into the cold morning. Men were waiting there, though Frank couldn’t be seen. The grey bushes seemed made of delicately carved granite, and grey gulls wheeled in a grey sky.

“By Christ, I want you to live, too!” Miss Brunner grasped him. “Can you think of a way we can all get out?”

“There is a chance.” He began to speak calmly. “The main control chamber wasn’t destroyed, was it?”

“No—perhaps we should have…”

“Let’s get down there. Come on, Mr. Smiles.”

         

Jerry sat limply in the chair by the control board. He checked first that the power was on; then he activated the monitors so that they had a view all round the house. He locked the monitors on the armed men who were waiting outside.

His hand reached for another bank of switches and flipped them over. “We’ll try the towers,” he said.

Green, red, and yellow lights went on above the board. “They’re working, anyway.” He stared carefully at the monitors. He felt very sick.

“Towers are spinning,” he said. “Look!”

The armed men were all gaping at the roof. They could not have had any sleep all night, which would help the process. They stood transfixed.

“Get going,” Jerry said as he got up and leaned on Mr. Smiles, pushing him towards the door. “But once out of the house, don’t look back or you’ll be turned into a pillar of salt.”

They helped him up the stairs. He was almost fainting now. Cautiously, they opened the front door.

“Go, tiger!” he said weakly as they began to run, still supporting him.

“How are we going to get down to the boats?” asked Miss Brunner when they had helped him round the side of the house facing the cliff edge.

Jerry didn’t care. “I suppose we’ll have to jump,” he murmured. “Hope the tide hasn’t dropped too low.”

“It’s a long way down, and I’m not so sure I can swim.” Mr. Smiles slowed his pace.

“You’ll have to try,” said Miss Brunner.

They stumbled across the rough turf and got to the edge. Far below, water still washed the cliff. Behind them a strong-minded guard had spotted them. They could tell this because his bullets had begun to whine past them.

“Are you fit enough, Mr. Cornelius?”

“I hope so, Miss Brunner.”

They jumped together and fell together towards the sea.

Mr. Smiles didn’t follow them. He looked back, saw the stroboscopes, and could not turn away again. A smile appeared on his lips. Mr. Smiles died smiling, at the hand of the strong-minded guard.

Jerry, now unaware of who or where he was, felt himself being dragged from the sea. Someone slapped his face. What, he wondered, was the nature of reality after all? Could all this be the result of mankind’s will—even his natural surroundings, the shape of the hand that slapped his face?

“You’re going to have to steer, I’m afraid, Mr. Cornelius. I can’t.”

He smiled. “Steer? Okay.” But what sort of place would he steer into? The world he had left? This world? Or another altogether. A world, perhaps, where killer girls roved metropolitan streets in bands, working for faceless tycoons who bought and sold hydrogen bombs on an international level, supplying the entire market with H—Hydrogen, Heroin, Heroines…

“Catherine,” he murmured. Miss Brunner was kindly helping him to the cabin, he realized.

Tired but happy, unconvinced by the reality of his hallucination, he started the boat and swung out to sea.

Hi-Fi, Holiness, a hope in hell…

         

He would never have a memory of what happened until he cried “Catherine!” and woke to find that he was in a very comfortable hospital bed.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said politely to the lemon-faced woman in uniform who entered after a while, “where would I be?”

“You’re in the Sunnydales Nursing Home, Mr. Cornelius, and you are much better. On the way to recovery, they say. A friend brought you here after your accident at that French funfair.”

“You know about that?”

“I know very little about it. Some trick gun went off the wrong way and shot you, I believe.”

“Is that what happened? Are all nursing homes called Sunnydales?”

“Most of them.”

“Am I receiving the very best medical attention?”

“You have had three specialists at your friend’s expense.”

“Who’s the friend?”

“I don’t know the name. The doctor might. A lady, I think.”

“Miss Brunner?”

“The name’s familiar.”

“Will there be any complications? When will I be fit enough to leave?”

“I don’t think any complications are expected. You will not leave until you are fit enough to do so.”

“You have my word of honour—I shan’t leave until I’m fit enough. My life’s all I’ve got.”

“Very wise. If there are any business matters you need arranging—any relatives?”

“I’m self-employed,” he said self-consciously.

The nurse said, “Try getting some sleep.”

“I don’t need any sleep.”

“You don’t, but it’s easier to run a hospital with all the patients sleeping. They’re less demanding. Now you can do me a favour. Groan, beg for medical details, complain about the lack of attention we give you and the inferior way we run the hospital, but don’t try to make me laugh.”

“I don’t think I could, could I?” said Jerry.

“It’s a waste of time,” she agreed.

“Then I wouldn’t dream of it.”

He felt fresh and relaxed and he wondered why he should, considering his recent activities. He’d probably have plenty of time in which to work it out. He knew he’d be fighting trauma on all fronts, and the long coma had equipped him to fight well.

As best he could, he began putting his mind in order. During the weeks in the hospital, all he asked for was a tape recorder, tape, and an earbead so that there would be no trouble when he turned up the sound in moments of heavy concentration.