Stand on Zanzibar (38 page)

Some administered drugs, chiefly to destroy perceptual sets. When new knowledge was laid across his plastic mind it sank in deep with neither preconceptions nor independent judgment to hinder its passage. It was as though one were to remove a man’s skeleton and replace it with another of stainless steel—and nowadays, in fact, bones could be changed.

In Donald’s case, of course, nothing so immediately detectable could be risked. Whatever was done to him had to be confined to that citadel of private thought no one had yet penetrated except with weapons as clumsy as blunderbusses.

But they did make him allergic to “Truth or Consequences”. Administration of a usable dose for interrogation purposes would drive him into fever and delirium.

Certain other drugs stimulated his auditory and tactile memory, atrophied by long years of studying the printed page and the replay screens of recorders. Another heightened his kinesthetic faculty, giving him an almost painful awareness of the relative positions of his limbs. There were more, which he didn’t bother to ask about. He was not co-operating in what was done to him, so much as passively accepting it as a possible cure for the impending death of his old self.

After that, they moulded him. In a drugged trance designed to ensure that something told to him once would reverberate in his circulating memory until it had grooved as deeply into his brain as something rehearsed a thousand times in real life, they taught him what he might need to know during the task ahead.

Engrelay Satelserv equipped all their reporters with a communikit in a nine-inch case, specially designed and built for them by GT’s electronics section. It combined an instreplay recorder with a polytelly, a miniature TV adaptable to the line standards and sound frequencies used anywhere in the world. Army experts modified one of these and gave it to him. Now, it incorporated a transceiver hidden under a changeochrome coating, the circuit elements reduced to molecular monofilaments. He was supposed to book routine calls to headquarters via whichever of Engrelay Satelserv’s satellites was overheard at the time, precisely as a legitimate correspondent would. But if he had something to say which he didn’t want overheard, he could record it in advance and the communikit would impose it as a parasite modulation on the phone signal, automatically scrambled and compressed into half-second blips.

Additional frills were dealt with by sleep-teaching; he was taught an acrostic verbal code, an association-code, and a cipher.

They did not, however, allow him to sleep while teaching him the serious aspects of his subject. As one of the interchangeable instructors told him, the last service a secret agent could perform after his cover had been broken was to tie up a disproportionate number of the opposition while they were trying to capture him, and in pursuit of that end they were going to make him capable of taking on a battalion.

That promise stirred the first emotion in Donald Hogan Mark II.

There was something impressive about it.

*   *   *

To begin with: bare hands.

“Now on this dummy of a yellowbelly I’ve marked the most vulnerable points: blue for temporary disablement, like the groin, the solar plexus and the eyes; red for the places at which a blow can kill, like the vocal cords. A blow with the closed fist works best here, here and here. If you can get a shod foot to any of these points, so much the better, of course. Here, the bunched fingers are the optimum choice. Here, stabbing with a single stiff finger. And at these places you grip and press, at these you apply leverage and at these you twist. Now we’ll move on to attacks from the rear, which are always to be preferred.”

Next: with a blade.

“There are two main classes of blade, the close and the extended. The former and latter classes each divide into the same two types, the stabbing type and the slashing type. The former are typified by the stiletto and the cut-throat razor respectively, while the later are typified by the rapier and the axe.”

Next: with a cord.

“This group of weapons exhibits the common characteristic of thinness and flexibility. They include the whip and tripwire, which are disabling weapons, and the noose and the garrotte, which are killing weapons. The lasso and bolas fall into either category according to the user’s purpose.”

Next: with traditional guns.

“Projectile weapons fall into three classes: side-arms, calling for extreme skill especially in the smaller calibres, long arms, calling for almost as much skill, and spray-guns firing large numbers of slugs, which are the best for unskilled operators at medium and close range.”

Next: with power-weapons.

“Bolt-guns exist as side-arms, firing about twelve to fifteen bolts between rechargings, and as long arms firing up to forty. Advantages include the fact that a direct hit anywhere in the body is fatal and a near-miss may be so if the target is for example touching a metal hand-rail or standing on wet ground in uninsulated footwear. Also, they can be re-charged from domestic current of one hundred volts and up, or from cross-country power-lines. However, they require a lot of down-time and are normally reserved for situations where at least three weapons are available per user, two on charge and one in the field.”

Next: with modern military weapons.

“This is a kazow, standard equipment for marines going in for such tasks as raid on an enemy supply-dump. The magazines each contain twenty miniature rockets, discharged in five seconds, and the heads can be set—in darkness, by counting the clicks as you turn the fuze-knob—to seek a human being, a refrigerated tank, and metal against a background of vegetation. Or, naturally, to fly a straight course to wherever the kazow is pointing.”

Next: with portable nukes.

“These have the drawback that their half-life is rather short, a matter of a few months, so they become poisoned with their own decay-products during long-term storage. Also the radiation level is high enough to show on police scanners, which incidentally makes them dangerous to anyone who carries them for more than a few hours at a time. However, nothing else, of course, matches them for destructive power combined with portability. Current types can be time-fuzed and placed by hand, or launched by a special attachment from a Mark IX kazow.”

Next: with chemical explosives.

“Two main types are in use: grenade or bomb packages, and disguised packages. The former are chiefly for military purposes, so we’ll concentrate on the latter. Modern explosives have the great advantage that they can be moulded to look like almost anything and won’t go off without the proper catalyst. For example, the casing of your communikit is made of about half a pound of PDQ. It would completely wreck a room of two thousand cubic feet. But it won’t explode, even if it’s dropped in a hot fire, unless you combine it with phosphorus. The regular way to detonate it is by laying a full match-book face down inside the lid and turning the volume knob to the unmarked setting. This gives you eighteen seconds to get clear before the full charge of the battery is shorted across the uppermost face and triggers the bang.”

Next: with gas-guns and grenades.

“You’ve used a Jettigun, I gather. You’ll be equipped with its military counterpart, which is about as large as a regular pen and cartridge-filled on the same principle. There’s a choice of fatal nerve-gases including the old standby, potassium cyanide, which is a thirty-second killer provided you get it into the target’s nose or mouth and not to be disregarded merely because it’s been around for a while. Then there are disabling gases—emetics, vesicants, strangulants and so forth—which have the drawback that they don’t dilute so fast and may all too easily affect the user as well as the target.”

And finally: with ad-hoc weapons.

“Anything which was said about attacks with the unaided human body applies to the use of improvised weapons. Some are obvious, like the use of a pillow for suffocation, which is quick and if properly managed is also silent. Some, like smashing a bottle or a window to obtain a sharp cutting-edge, are reasonably self-evident. But some require a good deal of insight. In the vicinity of a machine-shop, for example, magnesium swarf may be available, and that becomes thermite. On a building-site, a man can be suffocated very efficiently with quicklime or undamped cement-dust. Cracking a man’s hand or foot in a door as you slam it; pushing his face at a window; smearing a regular domestic needle with a compound from a home medicine-cabinet and putting it where he’ll scratch himself on it; strangling a long-haired codder or shiggy with his or her own hair; placing pressure-sensitive tape over the mouth or nose; biting through the windpipe; tripping at the head of a steep flight of steps; throwing a pan of scalding water off a stove—the possibilities are endless.”

Donald Hogan Mark II, born into a strange hostile world where any innocent thing in the home or on the street could become an implement of death, where any other person no matter how apparently polite and civilised might turn and rend him, nodded intently and absorbed the information as gospel.

*   *   *

When Delahanty flew in to give him his final briefing before departure, four short days after his arrival at Boat Camp, Donald sat opposite him in the office of the colonel who had welcomed him originally and waited while he checked through the various reports that had been compiled to show his progress. There was one other man present, a sergeant who had discreetly accompanied Donald wherever he went for the past twenty-four hours, unquestioned and nameless, his individuality fined down to his gun and his constantly worn Karatand.

Sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair, wearing the anonymous fatigues of a draftee but with incongruous lieutenant’s bars on the shoulders, Donald paid the sergeant no more attention than hitherto.

He was much too puzzled by Delahanty. He had a curious feeling that the man was not real. He came out of the life of Donald Hogan Mark I, a dead man. There was a bridge where there ought to have been at most a ford with a few stepping-stones. Since leaving home he had moved into another zone of time, which nowhere connected with the customary world. He had existed for ten years on the assumption that he was linked to exterior events through his study of reports of them, through talking with people he knew, through surveying the streets he walked along and checking the news daily on TV. All that, suddenly, had been switched off.

Delahanty finished his perusal of the reports. Without looking up, he said, “That’ll be all, sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said—the first words Donald had heard him utter—and went out of the room, his feet making the inevitable soft clanging because all the floors everywhere in Boat Camp were of resonant metal.

“You figured out who he was, presumably,” Delahanty said almost affably, raising his head at last to look at Donald. Donald shrugged. It was obvious the man must be a bodyguard.

“Fast eptification of the kind you’ve undergone can be risky,” Delahanty amplified. “The killer instinct exists in all of us, but it has to be overlaid with certain social inhibitions. Taking them all off at once occasionally leads to random outbreaks of violence in the subject. You seem to have responded very well, though. All that remains for me is to issue you with your travelling kit and documents, and then we’d better get you along to the emergency expressport.”

“Emergency?” Donald repeated.

Delahanty betrayed faint surprise. “Of course. You don’t imagine they could already have—Ah, you wouldn’t have heard, possibly. The yellowbellies put another one over on us. An express from Manila went to the refuelling bay and proved to be carrying a static charge on its tanks. When they coupled up the hoses it blew the entire fuel-store.”

Donald nodded with new-found professional appreciation of an ingenious trick.

“However, it’s perhaps a blessing in disguise for our purposes,” Delahanty continued. “There’s forty-eight hours’ worth of accumulated traffic being pressure-hosed out of the emergency port, and with luck they’ll also be bottlenecked at the arrival end, so you won’t rate too intense a scrutiny. You can’t exactly call it turning the tables, but when the advantage presents itself one grabs it—as no doubt you’ve been taught. Now, as to your equipment!”

He pointed at a pile of baggage stacked in the corner. “Some of that is gear reclaimed from your own apt. Some of it’s new. All the new stuff is trigger-rigid, like a Karatand. Make sure you’re wearing some of the new clothing all the time over your vital organs. It’s almost bullet-proof and an excellent insulator.

“Your communikit, as you’ve been shown, is a bomb. But that’s for dire emergency only. For minor emergencies—which had sheeting well better
be
emergencies, nonetheless—you’ll have a well-disguised gas-gun. We daren’t give you anything more in the way of weaponry. You must have gathered from your study of Yatakangi that no slit-eye government these days gives a pint of whaledreck whether a round-eye gets lynched or mugged or chased through the streets with a halter round his neck. That’s why we decided we’d have to eptify you. Otherwise you’d be defenceless. Okay?”

Donald nodded.

“Good. As to your professional cover, then! You’ve been taught the use of the standard communikit. I’m going to give you a press authorisation and a Satelserv credit card, and a correspondent’s manual which you must study at the first opportunity. It’s been convincingly well-thumbed, with facsimiles of your own prints, but there’s nothing like the genuine article.

“Your main contact in Gongilung is Engrelay Satelserv’s regular stringer, an English-speaking woman called Deirdre Kwa-Loop. She’s a black South African, which is why her name and picture aren’t much used over internal American services, but they think very highly of her indeed—so highly, they’ve been satisfied to rely on her dispatches throughout this big sensational series of stories from Yatakang. If we hadn’t asked for their co-operation, they wouldn’t have planned on sending anybody to give special coverage. As it is, you may find her a little touchy—she’s apt to feel that your assignment is an expression of lack of confidence in what she’s been doing. Watch that, won’t you? Be tactful.