Walking Dead (9 page)

The plane whined in, flaps down. The glittering sea raced past so close on either side that Foxe felt they were about to pancake on the waves, but then the wheels banged into concrete and juddered with fierce braking. There was none of the normal sense of easing up which comes when a plane has slowed to its taxiing speed and can rumble safely to its berth; this one stopped like a car pulled up suddenly at traffic lights. Captain Angiah rose, stretching and yawning.

“Every time I think he's going to hit the castle,” he said. “This runway is too short for jets.”

“I'm glad you didn't tell me,” muttered Foxe, collecting Quentin from the table, and sliding him into the pocket of his jacket.

The pilot came laughing out of the flight-deck and opened the door. Short steps unfolded themselves downwards. Foxe put on his sunglasses and climbed down into the heavy glare of another Caribbean morning. Two other aeroplanes—naval fighters to judge by the way their wings were folded back above their cockpits—were parked opposite him, and a little further off a large helicopter. Only twenty yards away to the right the castle wall rose impressively into the hot blue sky, too close for Foxe to judge why it had seemed from the
aeroplane to be a mere facade; but it was certainly theatrical in another sense, with the muzzles of ancient cannon jutting from its battlements, black as the black stone. Although it was obviously old it had none of the weather-gentled look of European castles, which have ceased to be guardians or oppressors and become playthings. This one was functional.

The sleepless night and the long tension made Foxe feel as though he'd just finished a fifteen-hour flight, so it was odd to find that there were no airport formalities at all, beyond a slouching salute to Captain Angiah from a sentry at the base of the runway. The Captain nodded and strolled on; Foxe had to trot to catch him up.

No car was waiting for them, neither jeep nor Rolls; in fact there was a curious lack of transport of any kind along the quay, where one might have expected to see queues of juggernaut lorries waiting to load or unload, or at least the battered and panting trucks that swarmed like horseflies round all minor Caribbean harbours. The only wheel Foxe saw in two hundred yards belonged to a barrow, laden with one bulging sack, which a gaunt cheeked labourer was trundling towards the castle. But this was clearly a working harbour; the merchantmen were there, the derricks gesturing beside them like insect antennae wavering above dead prey.

Captain Angiah led the way over cobbles which looked ancient but were in far better repair than any Foxe had seen on Hog's Cay; their path lay mostly across open stretches of quay, but sometimes twisted among sheds and warehouses, and they were just reaching the largest of these, into which the merchantmen seemed to be unloading, when the growl and clatter from the derricks was drowned by an appalling whistle, so shrill and loud that Foxe's ears continued to wince from the sound of it for some time after it had stopped. Captain Angiah halted and gestured to Foxe to do the same.

For a moment the warehouse seemed to be on fire, with an eruption of black and yellow smoke streaming through its open end and up into the virgin sky; then, out of the black and reeking pother crawled an extraordinary machine. It ran on rails, but was otherwise quite unlike anything Foxe had seen before; it looked like part of the innards of an early industrial pumping-house, staggering over the cobbles, flailing brass crankshafts, gouting steam and smoke. From the front it seemed absurdly broad, but when it rounded a curve and came thumping across Foxe's path, it looked stunted fore-and-aft. It was a steam traction-engine, eighty years old perhaps, but looking as though it had been built from a drawing in a medieval manuscript, with all its perspectives wrong. The harsh clarity of the tropic morning was smudged and then lost in the smoke which rose in gulping puffs from its tubby funnel, but before this smut-raining cloud engulfed Foxe he saw that the four wheels at the corners ran free on ordinary rails, while in the middle, just behind the furiously shovelling fireman, the rods of two colossal cylinders rose and fell, driving a monstrous cog. The device, trailing a short line of quite ordinary-looking trucks, moved towards the cliff at the speed of a fast walk. A lot of its energy was dissipated in noise. As the cloud thinned the awful whistle drowned the racket once more.

Foxe stopped choking and saw the last of the three, or possibly only two, trucks vanishing beyond a shed at the back of the quay; it seemed a foolishly little burden for that huge display of effort, and to add to the absurdity there seemed to be nowhere for the monster to go; Foxe was unconsciously readying his nerves for the crash of its collision with the cliff when a couple of men in blue overalls emerged at the point where the engine had disappeared; they had the same starved, exhausted look as the man with the wheelbarrow and were covered with sweat and grime. When they saw Captain Angiah they halted and backed to the corner of the shed, where they stood in feeble parody of the attention position. Meanwhile the rhythmic racket of the engine continued, slower now and more muffled, and the smoke of it streamed up the cliff face.

Captain Angiah, who had been picking smuts from his uniform, paid no attention to the men but gestured to Foxe and strolled on across the rails. There were three of these, the outer two like any railway tracks anywhere in the world, but the middle one a continuous rack of cogteeth, four inches wide, very solid, mostly black with grease and soot but gleaming like a sword wherever the great driving cog of the engine engaged. From the track Foxe could see the mouth of the tunnel into which the thing had crawled; smoke still poured from it, and it boomed monotonously with the distant piston-strokes. Foxe stared like a tourist, then trotted to catch Captain Angiah.

“That's an unusual sort of gadget,” he said.

“I guess so. Only one in the world. One time the Americans were going to build us a road up the cliff, but …”

He shrugged. Foxe guessed that that was one of the projects which had lapsed when Doctor Trotter took over.

“How long has the tunnel been there?” he asked.

“Million years. I don't know. Volcano made it. There's no good harbours except on this coast, and no way up the cliffs except this tunnel. British put the railway in—before that it was mules, carrying every parcel of goods up and down from Saint Foudre at the top … That engine, that's our colonialist past—you could say it made us what we are. Listen, it will take trade in and out, everything the imperialists wanted off us, everything they pushed on us. But while it's working a man can't use the tunnel. Goods, yes. Men, no. They would suffocate to death.”

The Captain had changed. His enormous nostrils, tunnels themselves, seemed to stare at Foxe in accusation. His voice had lost its accentless neutrality—almost scholarly in its detachment—and become more lively, more like the sing-song of peasant Islanders. It was as though he felt the freedom of his native soil. Suddenly he lengthened his stride, as if determined to outdistance Foxe, the representative of imperial-mercantilist oppression.

Foxe didn't try to catch up, but followed in a daze of weariness, his mind still full of the strange machine. There was something about its age and dirt and peculiarity that marked very clearly the difference between Hog's Cay and Main Island. There such a machine would have been prettied for the tourists, driven by electricity, emitting white, hygienic, smut-free puffs of artificial smoke, but most of the time it would be out of action, waiting for spare parts. Here it was what it had always been, an ancient, clumsy, labouring slave, still working. Somehow the noise and stench of it told Foxe that certain illusions and pretensions, customary or necessary in most parts of the modern world, did not exist in this place.

2

T
he constraints of politeness can be extraordinarily powerful, especially when allied with fear. A man is arrested, absurdly and inconveniently, and as it were shanghaied to an island where he has no wish to be. He has been kept awake most of the night, but has not been allowed to ring his friends or his consul. There has been no warrant, no judicial safeguard of any kind. So he has every cause to complain. But when he finds himself, showered and shaved and dressed in clean clothes, breakfasting with the only man to whom there would be any point in complaining, a strange inward protocol prevents him from mentioning the subject until his host chooses to do so.

“More coffee, Doctor?”

“Er, yes, thank you, sir.”

Foxe had been watching half-hypnotised while a white coated servant standing beside his chair stirred scrambled eggs in a little porcelain saucepan over a silver spirit-lamp. Beyond that another servant was turning bacon in a fryingpan, and beyond both of them the sea glittered through inch-thick glass that ran from floor to ceiling across one end of the room. Foxe and the Prime Minister were breakfasting in the President's palace, the modern white building which Foxe, seeing it from the aeroplane, had thought might be a hospital. They were looking sideways across the harbour towards the old fort at the other end of the quay.

“My mother was very impressed with you, Doctor,” said the Prime Minister affably. “She will be sorry to learn that you have arrived in her absence. She's attending a convention.”

“I'm sorry to miss her too, sir,” lied Foxe. “What sort of a convention?”

“People with similar interests, you know.”

“Oh … er … you mean … I thought …”

“That that sort of thing was illegal? Quite right. But we are intelligent men, Doctor, and we know that the law has its limitations. You have to realise that these people I am trying to govern are the scum of the earth—I mean that in a quite scientific sense. They are the product of negative evolution, the survival of the unfittest. My islands, you see, are physically the worst in the Caribbean, with the poorest land, the rockiest coasts, the worst harbours. Until tourism came to Hog's Cay we had no natural resources at all, no tar lakes, no tungsten, nothing. In five centuries we have been ruled by four imperialist powers—Spain, Holland, France, Britain—and not one of them was not glad to haul their flag down. In the days of slavery the planters came, and they all went bankrupt and their slaves were sold, the strong men and women to richer planters on other islands, while the weak and the diseased stayed here. Other people arrived because there was nowhere else to go—usually because they were running away from the consequences of some crime. And meanwhile those who chose to leave the Islands were the men and women with initiative and intelligence. Through fifteen generations we have attracted the worst and then lost the best of that worst—that is the stock from which we are bred, you see. Now, how do you govern a people like this? On the one hand you must labour to help them see the world as it is, and to fit them to cope with that world, and so you must wean them or bully them away from superstitions which distort their vision of the world. That is the task of the right hand of the law. But on the other hand you have to control them with rewards and threats which they can understand, and this is the task of the left hand of the law. The central brain coordinates the left hand and the right. I use the left hand to help the right. I set a witch to catch a witch. Especially I set the older witches to catch the younger witches, and that means that in a few years, when the older ones die off, the problem will suddenly have almost cured itself. It is a sort of social homeopathy. There are not many witches of your generation, Doctor.”

He closed with a curious vague tone of threat, to which Foxe had no idea how to respond, but at this moment the egg-scrambler decided that the eggs had reached their peak of succulence and made a signal to the brown frier, who sidled forward and deftly tweaked the rashers on to Foxe's plate. One might have thought that the events of the past twenty-four hours would have jaded Foxe's appetite beyond stimulus, but at the prickly odour of crisped fat his mouth glands jetted with saliva and his fingers twitched for knife and fork.

Quentin responded even more violently to the signal. There had been nowhere sensible for Foxe to leave the rat in his room, and he had seemed after the erratic lights and darks of the night to be ready to go into a doze, so Foxe had kept him in his pocket. Now he woke into startling life, scrabbled the flap open, dashed up Foxe's lapel and leaped on to the table, only to find that Foxe's plate was too hot for him to get anywhere near the bacon. He halted, a quivering blob of sleek mottled fur with the violet Q glowing on his back.

He had arrived at the plate the same time as the egg scrambler, who started, dropped the little saucepan and rushed from the room. With a lucky snatch Foxe managed to catch the pan as it was going over the table-edge without spilling more than a spoonful on the glossy rose wood. Quentin stopped sniffing at the unreachable bacon and started to groom himself, apparently unperturbed by the Prime Minister's volleying laughter.

“I'm sorry, sir,” mumbled Foxe. “I thought he was asleep.”

Doctor Trotter laughed all the more. Foxe spooned egg onto his plate and a servant came to take the saucepan from him and to wipe up the spill with a trembling hand. Foxe reached out to put Quentin away, but Doctor Trotter said, “No, leave it there. That is your subversive rat, I think. He is running true to form.” So Foxe cut a corner of bacon for Quentin and put it on the table for him, thinking it was remarkable that the Prime Minister should remember something about an individual rat. No, perhaps not, if the upside-down Q had a special magical meaning.

Foxe was about to ask what this might be when the Prime Minister said, “Now we must get down to business. I mustn't waste your time. It is very good of your company to release you for a few weeks to help me.”

Now was Foxe's chance.

“I haven't really been consulted about this, sir …” he began.

“That is why I am consulting you now, Doctor.”

The reproof, though quiet, was loaded with extraordinary energy, like a suddenly switched-on magnetic field which grips movement into stillness. The effect lasted even while Doctor Trotter took a gross cigar from a silver box on the table and began to go through the ritual of getting it alight. Foxe waited.

“You told me a story about a substance called SG 19,” said the Prime Minister suddenly. “It appeared to make a group of rats under stress more virtuous than rats which were not injected with it.”

“Yes, sir, but …”

“You are going to tell me that it was only a sedative.”

“No, sir. We stopped evaluation at an early stage—I don't know why. That quite often happens. My guess is that it was a mild sedative. Experiments have been done with rats to study the effect of sedatives on over-crowding, and it is well known that they reduce the stress-symptoms. The minor difference in this case was that only some of the symptoms, the fighting and cannibalism, seemed to be reduced. And I can't even be sure of that. That's the whole point. This wasn't an experiment—it was just an incident. Nothing was measured or recorded. If I'd been an academic researcher with nothing more important to do, I might have checked it out a bit, perhaps, but …”

“That is what we are going to do now. Check it out. You may not think the manipulation of social behaviour important, Doctor, but I do. I do.”

The Prime Minister took a long suck at his cigar, then laid it aside and leaned forward in a pose which made his head seem too large even for his enormous body. He stared, unblinking, at Foxe. His eyes were very bloodshot, and seemed to waver slightly as the smoke from the corners of his mouth floated up past them. Foxe found it very difficult to look elsewhere until, in the periphery of his vision, he glimpsed a movement of white and brown and violet. Almost without noticing what he was doing he reached out a hand and picked up Quentin before he could reach the Prime Minister's cigar, smouldering its blue wisp on an ash-tray. The touch of fur broke the half-trance.

“Honestly, sir, I wouldn't know where to begin,” he said. “This is the sort of project which, supposing there's anything in it, takes years to map out. It's so vague. You have to find areas where you can get animals to behave in specific ways in which a particular, measurable alteration in their behaviour can only be interpreted as the result of your experiment. And there's practically nothing on it in the literature—that's what I mean about not knowing where to begin. The only thing I can think of off-hand is some work by Franck on flight behaviour and submission behaviour which in human terms might have something to do with cowardice. And that's another point. I don't think any reputable scientist would consider making the leap into human terms which is what you seem to want. So I …”

Doctor Trotter cut him short with a gesture of his cigar and a dragon-spout of smoke from his nostrils.

“You are making difficulties,” he said. “It is excellent that there is nothing in the literature, because there is no literature available. I am not asking you to map out the whole area, I am asking you to do a preliminary study to see whether there is anything in this drug worth further investigation. As for the leap into human terms …”

He shrugged, inhaling a long draught of smoke, which oozed from his lips as he spoke again.

“You can spare us the time for that, Doctor?”

Now or never! Foxe, half way to trying to make the point about the difference between animal and human behaviour in a way which this suave maniac could grasp, changed tack.

“Apparently I've got to spare you the time, sir. Captain Angiah says I'm under arrest in connection with a murder. But I haven't seen a warrant. I haven't even been allowed to see the British Consul.”

“A murder? Whose murder?”

“I went to my laboratory last night—I always do that—and I found the body of one of the cleaners on the floor. I thought it was a heart-attack, but Captain Angiah, who'd been following me for some reason, turned up and said it was a magical murder. He arrested me as what he called a potential witness.”

“How unfortunate,” said Doctor Trotter soothingly. “We must see what we can do.”

He strolled to a side table, picked up a telephone and spoke quietly into it. For a while he stood listening and nodding, then put the receiver down and turned, shaking his head.

“Most unfortunate,” he said, as solemnly as a solicitor breaking the news of a death. “I cannot even say that Angiah has exceeded his duties, though he could certainly have been more tactful. He's a good man, but he has strong views on magical practices, and a death like this—snake-apple poison by the sound of it—might throw him off his balance. No doubt that was it. I imagine you have a work-permit, Doctor.”

“Yes, of course. But what's that got to do with it?”

“It means you are not a tourist. I've explained to you, Doctor, the nature of this people I try to govern. You can imagine that when a crime occurs the witnesses vanish, like water into sand. So we have to arrest them. Of course we make an exception for tourists, or they would not come, but as you have a work-permit you are subject to this law. You will see that it is politically impossible to make an exception for you simply because you have a white skin. But do not be alarmed. I, personally, will see that the case is investigated with the utmost vigour, so that it is cleared up by the time you have finished our little experiment. And meanwhile you can reside here … in a way the death of this poor woman is fortunate, because as you say it means I can ask you to spare the time for this experiment without either of us feeling that I am robbing you … Oh, yes, the consul. Mr Palamine. A helicopter has already been sent to bring him here. A very good man. He will explain the legal position to you with great clarity, I am sure. He will be here in half an hour, and that will give you just time to present yourself to my brother, the President. It is he, after all, and not I, who is your host. And after you have seen Mr Palamine Captain Angiah will take you and show you the resources we have arranged for your experiment. Now, if you will excuse me …”

Foxe waited for Mr Palamine in a large, plush, characterless room like a hotel lounge. It too was lit by a single huge window facing the harbour. Foxe was glad to be alone for a moment, after his battering from the Prime Minister and his eerie interview with the President—Doctor Timothy Trotter.

Foxe had been led from the breakfast-room by another of the white-jacketed servants, elderly and plump, with the solid walk of the traditional butler but with a haggard, greyish face and ceaselessly flickering side-glances. This man had shown him into a much smaller room, windowless, with a curious sweet reek in the air. After a few minutes another door had opened and two men had come in, the first moon-faced, yellow-grey, enormously fat, a little shorter than Foxe, wearing a crumpled linen suit; the second another palace servant, but with the rubber muscled face of a professional boxer. All in one sentence the second man had said, “His Excellency Doctor Timothy Trotter President of the Southward Islands tell him your name, mister.”

“I'm Doctor David Foxe, your excellency.”

At a nudge from the servant Doctor Timothy had moved forward, extending his right hand for Foxe to shake. His fingers seemed to have no bones in them. He began to mumble in a gasping bass that made the loose folds of flesh round his chin, like the pouches of a male orang, quiver in sympathy with the incomprehensible syllables.

“I'm very honoured to be staying here,” said Foxe when he paused.

The servant had nodded, touched Doctor Timothy on the elbow and led him away. The first servant, who had been waiting by the door, had then shown Foxe to this other room and left him here.