Stark (41 page)

205: LEARNER DRIVER

T
he little EcoAction team were not the only people to be trying to get out of the compound that morning. There was a constant roar as trucks carried off workers whose tasks were now finished. There was much whooping and hollering from the happy ex-employees of Stark as they headed for Bullens Creek airport. They were all suddenly very rich, having received upwards of a year’s salary for a couple of months’ work. Stark had paid well for fourteen hour days with no questions asked and now they were laying off the workforce, giving them the sort of severance pay normally reserved for loyal employees of fifty years standing.

‘Maybe,’ suggested Mrs Culboon, ‘we should try and hitch a ride out on one of these trucks because even if I can find the route, it’s going to be a hell of a walk.’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Zimmerman.

A couple of hundred metres or so from where they stood was the source of Zimmerman’s idea, a heli-pad, on which stood four helicopters.

‘You think we should steal a chopper?’ asked CD, momentarily forgetting his misery over Rachel in this new excitement.

‘I don’t really accept the term ‘steal’,’ replied Zimmerman. ‘I mean, in the greater scheme of things, like that helicopter is as much ours as it is anybody’s.’

‘You should have studied law, man,’ said Walter. ‘You’d blow the average wig-head away.’ Zimmerman began to lead the little group towards the helicopters, strolling casually, as if he was off to the shops. ‘Take it easy everyone,’ he suggested, ‘it is important to be inconspicuous…CD, what goes down?’ It looked like CD was going down. He had adopted a sort of crouched, low lope, dodging about behind parked cars and piles of equipment, scurrying from one thing to another.

‘We’re trying to steal a helicopter, Zimm,’ said CD reprovingly, ‘don’t you think maybe we should take some cover?’

They were having to shout to make themselves heard, they were close to the heli-pad and one of the machines was ticking over noisily.

‘Hey listen, CD, I didn’t expect the SAS you know? But you are a definite liability,’ shouted Zimmerman. ‘Did you take lessons in looking suspicious, or is this a natural talent? I mean if you lope around like that, you might as well hang a sign around your neck saying ‘I shouldn’t be here, please shoot me’. The art of camouflage is to blend in, man, be inconspicuous.’

There was a pause.

‘What?’ shouted CD.

Zimmerman gave up, reflecting that despite the impracticality of CD’s approach, it was probably better karma if everybody did their own thing. And anyway, there were no rights and wrongs in life, only different ways of being.

They walked along together, both pursuing entirely contradictory methods of disguise. Zimmerman, strolling with confidence and brazenly nodding greetings at passers by. CD crouched low, dodging about, occasionally jumping behind piles of equipment to emerge moments later glancing furtively over his shoulder with his collar turned up. Zimmerman made a mental note to ask CD why he felt that turning up his collar made a man about to steal a helicopter less easy to spot.

Of course, Zimmerman never did enquire, because for him, making a mental note was about as reliable a memory-jogger as writing condensation in the window.

The four of them strolled onto the pad and a great big man with a leather jacket and a gun asked them who they were. Zimmerman grunted and waved the pass that Sly had given him. This seemed to satisfy his macho challenger, who, if he thought them a pretty strange crew, decided to let it go. Live and let live was the guard’s philosophy. He believed that everyone should be different, that was what made the world go around. In fact, under the leather belts and buckles and bullets, he himself was wearing white silk panties. Why should he worry because some bloke doesn’t comb his beard, no reason to start a war. Private security attracts all sorts of types. Wearing a crash helmet for a living is, after all, a fairly weird job in itself.

There was an engineer working on the craft that had its engine running. Zimmerman approached him.

‘This bird work good?’ he asked.

‘Sure, just fixed it up myself,’ the man replied.

‘Good, we’re taking it.’ Zimmerman did not even need to use his pass. The whole Stark operation had come together so quickly that everyone was a stranger to everyone else. What’s more, none of the people employed in security had the faintest idea what it was that they were supposed to be guarding. The helicopter engineer accepted the arrival of the four weird looking strangers with the same fatalism that he greeted his enormous pay packet. He didn’t know what it was about, but he certainly wasn’t going to start rocking any boats.

They squeezed into the machine. It was a tight fit because it was clearly really only designed to take three, which meant it would have been tight for Walter on his own. CD grimaced, it had been one of these same craft that he had shot at, he could imagine the men screaming and writhing desperately in the tiny space as they burnt to death.

‘I must say, Zimmerman,’ said Mrs Culboon, sitting in Walter’s lap, ‘I must say, there doesn’t seem much that you can’t do mate. All this fighting, and shooting and stuff and now knowing how to fly a helicopter. Yep, I reckon you’re a pretty spunky all-rounder and no mistake.’

Having delivered this magnificent compliment she settled herself as comfortably as she could on top of Walter.

‘I don’t know how to fly a helicopter,’ said Zimmerman, waggling the stick and punching buttons. ‘Ha ha!’ shrieked Mrs Culboon, ‘and I reckon you’re quite a card with it, ain’t that so mates?’ She twisted around, soliciting Walter’s agreement for her sentiments, but Walter knew Zimmerman better. ‘You say you can’t fly this thing man?’ he asked nervously as Zimmerman experimented with the levers under his seat. ‘I didn’t say I couldn’t, I just said I didn’t know how to,’ Zimm replied. ‘Oh yeah? Well like, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?’ asked Walter, not unreasonably.

‘Well, there’s a difference you know? Like I might be able to guess.’ With that Zimm must have pushed a particularly significant button, or pulled on an unusually sensitive knob, because the whole craft screamed and shuddered and rattled and vibrated so that the poor occupants could scarcely focus on each other. Fortunately it resolutely refused to leave the ground.

‘I think maybe the anchor is out or something,’ shouted Zimmerman. ‘I mean we have plenty of power here, but no rising-up scene, is going down.’ The others could not hear him, they could not even hear themselves think. Had they been able to they would probably have heard themselves thinking, ‘Get the fuck out of the helicopter’. However, before this idea had a chance to percolate through the shuddering and the noise and penetrate into their rattling brains, an alternative course of action presented itself. The engineer whom Zimmerman had addressed before, came charging out of a nearby hangar to see who was making a puree of his chopper’s gear box. He rushed up to Zimmerman’s window and began frantically banging on it, jumping up and down, mouthing obscenities and generally employing body language to express distress.

Zimmerman opened the window — probably the only function in the whole helicopter that he was capable of working. He hung his elbow out and turned his head slightly. He looked for all the world like he’d just parked his ‘57 Chevvy down by the boardwalk and was preparing to eye the chicks, catch some rays and take it nice and easy. The fact he was sitting in the middle of what was beginning to resemble a mini-earthquake, had yet to dent his sang-froid.

‘Yeah?’ he mouthed at the frantic engineer.

The engineer leaned in through the window and flipped the controls about a bit; here a knob, there a lever. The machine spluttered and the juddering mercifully calmed itself, the noise dropped to something just below ear bleeding, and the vibrations no longer threatened to actually remove teeth.

CD, Walter and Mrs Culboon breathed a sigh of relief. Now it was merely intolerable, before it had been like a disco. ‘Don’t you know how to fly a chopper, Mister!!’ shouted the angry engineer.

‘Nope,’ confided Zimm with disarming honesty. ‘Do you?’

‘Well of course I do,’ the man screamed, ‘but that’s not the point. What I want to know is…’

He stopped there, not because he had suddenly lost his thirst for knowledge but because Zimmerman was pointing a gun at him.

‘Get in,’ Zimm said. ‘Don’t be absurd, look what the hell is going on…There isn’t any room.’

But a glance at Zimmerman’s expression convinced the engineer that it was time to make room. With resignation he squeezed in and sat on Zimmerman’s lap.

‘Ha ha!’ laughed Mrs Culboon, mightily relieved that Zimmerman had relinquished the controls. ‘Take us towards Bullens Creek, cab driver, and no racist aneCDotes.’

206: BIRDS EYE VIEW OF GENESIS

T
hey soared above it all. Above Tyron and Moorcock and the ghastly betrayal in which they were both involved. They soared above Rachel too. CD stared desperately downwards, in the absurd hope that he might be able to spot her amongst all the trucks and construction and scurrying figures. Under normal circumstances, the thrill of his first ever ride in a helicopter would have driven all other considerations from his mind, but this was different. Already he didn’t care, he only cared about Rachel, despite the fact that she had betrayed them. Except he could not think of her in those terms, not as a betrayer, as a Judas. He knew that however weak-willed she had shown herself, he would always forgive her. In the midst of these fine emotions, it was bitter gall indeed for CD to know that Rachel almost certainly didn’t give a flying bugger whether he forgave her or not.

Mrs Culboon and Walter had no such romantic distractions to block their view of the fascinating scene beneath them. Five rockets were already in place, towering out of their silos and jutting up towards the helicopter. The rockets were supported by the spindly latticework towers that the previous night Walter and Mrs Culboon had taken for cranes. The final rocket was still awaiting installation. It lay on its colossal transport, like a designer biro, silver and white shining in the terrible burning sun. It bore the legend ‘Star Ark’ and beneath that a stylized representation of the moon. Even at this desperate moment, the grey figures of Stark, whose lives had been ruled by obsessive marketing, had not been able to resist the temptation to imbue their final product with a logo, designer graphics and a corporate image.

With the exception of the final rocket that had not yet been stood on its end, the Stark edifice was pretty much complete. It was an awe-inspiring sight.

‘This really is vaguely out of sight,’ said Walter.

‘Sure is,’ said their pilot, ‘weirdest hotels I ever saw. Still, I guess the kids will like them and it’ll certainly bring a lot of money into the state.’

It’s quite difficult for an astonished silence to fall upon a group of people who are bursting out of an over-stuffed and roaring helicopter, especially when the group includes such gregarious individuals as CD and Mrs Culboon. None the less, an astonished silence is what descended in reaction to the pilot’s statement.

Walter recovered first. ‘Uhm, listen, forgive me man, but you do not need to be Dan Dare to work out that those are rockets down there,’ he said.

‘Rocket shaped hotels,’ replied the man.

Silence returned; a silence sufficiently imbued with awe to deaden the tumultuous thwaka thwaka of the blades spinning above them.

‘Rocket shaped hotels?’ inquired Walter.

‘Sure,’ said the pilot cheerfully, who did not seem to mind being abducted. ‘I guess it’s some kind of theme park, you know, like Disney. Reckon kids could get pretty excited about sleeping in a rocket. Yeah, it sure will bring a heap of money into the state.’

207: A FINE STATE

I
t is a strange feature of federated countries like the United States or Australia that there is often even more pig ignorant xenophobic tunnel vision regarding the rivalry between states than there is in the area of national patriotism. It is common to hear some brain-dead tub of lard politico, running for office, whose principal argument for being elected is that he was born in the same state as those whom he seeks to lead. The fact that his qualifications for being a leader of men extend no further than the fact that he is human, is less relevant than where his mother happened to drop him.

‘Intellectually he may be a vegetable but at least he’s a vegetable from Texas’ which of course makes him superior to an Einstein figure from any other state.

Likewise, in the field of economics, more can be excused if it can be proved to be of benefit to the state than would be acceptable if it were the business of the entire nation…

‘Slavery is clearly a grey area and certainly there must be a proper regulating body. None the less, it provides work and more than that it will bring money into the state.’

It is this parochial patriotism that explains Sly’s early popularity despite his selfish and destructive business practices. He may have been a bastard but he was a West Australian bastard. People would have liked to see any of those poofters in Sydney or Melbourne produce an entrepreneur with half his ability to create misery and unhappiness.

208: TOUCH-DOWN

N
one the less, localized xenophobia notwithstanding, it was still a deep shock to all in the helicopter, excluding the pilot of course, to discover that people were still happy to swallow the leisure story.

‘Yeah, I heard there’ll be planetariums and stuff and weightlessness and everything, I guess the parents’ll love it as much as the kids.’

They had crossed the site now and were heading for the wire. Walter seized the opportunity to try a little control experiment.

‘Yeah well, that’s shit man,’ he said, trying to sound sincere, ‘there ain’t going to be no hotels, and there ain’t going to be no money for WA. Those are real rockets man! The world’s dying and the fat cats are splitting.’

But of course it was no use, the man just laughed and said that he had guessed that his abductors were weird, but they were really weird.

Walter gave up. Zimmerman asked Mrs Culboon to point to where they had left the wheels.

The helicopter put down with a bump and the squashed occupants burst out. As they unloaded the weaponry that they had taken plus that which was in the helicopter, the pilot spoke up rather nervously.

‘Hey, listen you people, I want to thank you,’ said the pilot, whose name, it turned out, was Eugene.

They were all a bit surprised at this, they had after all abducted him at gunpoint which hardly seemed like grounds for gratitude. None the less, Eugene seemed quite happy. In fact he had been surprisingly cheerful throughout the whole experience.

‘It’s just that I’ve never flown before,’ Eugene explained.

This was worse than Zimmerman, at least he had admitted that he didn’t know how to fly before they took off. Mrs Culboon, Walter, and CD all shouted in their own shocked and individual ways that Eugene had said he could fly.

‘I can fly,’ protested Eugene, ‘and I did didn’t I? We’re here aren’t we? Of course I can fly. But I’m just a mechanic,’ he added bitterly.

‘Just a mechanic, ha!! I’d like to know how long they’d stay in the air without us mechanics. But do we get any thanks? Do we hell…Excuse my language Ma’am,’ he directed this at Mrs Culboon.

‘I don’t give a fuck what you say, Eugene,’ she replied.

‘They just strut around and insult you,’ continued Eugene, who had clearly hit a pet subject, ‘they say it’s not clean enough or it’s missing on a cylinder when you know that it’s as sweet as a nut and it’s just that the big-headed twerps can’t fly properly. But will they give you a go? No way ha! They just —’

‘Yeah, OK Eugene, we get it,’ said Zimmerman.

‘They just tell you it takes training and that you have to have a degree. Oh yeah? Well I’ve been trained mate, yes, in the school of life, I’ve got a degree in hard knocks.’

‘Yeah, fine, Eugene…‘ Zimmerman interrupted again.

‘They always say that we don’t have a class thing in this country, but we do, we’re worse than the pom’s. I couldn’t train as a pilot, oh no, not poncey enough, I had to be a mechanic because my dad was only a door-to-door trouser salesman…’

‘Eugene! Shut the fuck up!!!’ screamed Zimmerman. ‘No, but really, I mean, really, you don’t have to be a daddy’s boy to…‘ They left him and headed for the car.

‘So, what next?’ Mrs Culboon asked as she drove them all towards the holiday home. ‘I can’t think of a single thing we can do.’

‘Well all that stuff we discovered,’ protested CD, ‘the launch silos and everything. I mean it must be illegal…’

‘Hey man, it’s a wicked world you know?’ said Walter. ‘Like, if a couple of bread-heads want to dig holes, they can.’

‘And that’s just the point isn’t it?’ whined Zimmerman. ‘The whole system of values is just so screwed. Like they bust me for having maybe one tiny toot on a mild and tension relieving doobie for my own personal private use. The world gets protected from me lying on the carpet for twelve hours giggling and then eating fifteen Mars Bars. I get hassled by the pigs for destroying nothing more than what’s left of my own brain, man, and you’re saying that some freaked out, off- the-planet world domination mind-fuck can launch rockets to the moon and everything is cool?’

‘I’m just saying, man, that a dude can dig a hole. OK? I mean — ’

‘Oh shut up will you fellahs?’ said Mrs Culboon. ‘First Eugene, now you, going on and on, I’d rather listen to a didgereedoo, and that’s saying something.’

They drove on in silence feeling awful about everything.