The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 15

  ‘It seems we’re expected,’ Richard drawled.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Dr Ballance.

  Fred looked at her, anger in his eyes. He made fists.

  ‘It’s not her fault,’ Richard told him. ‘She’s not quite herself.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Fred spat at Dr Ballance.

  Mrs Empty cringed in distaste at the language.

  Dr Ballance said, ‘Veevee, if you would…’

  She took her scalpel out and put it to Richard’s neck, just behind the ear. She knew just how much pressure to apply, how deep to cut, how long the incision should be. He would bleed to death inside a minute. She even judged the angle so her ankle-length brown suede coat and calfskin high-heeled thigh boots would not be splattered.

  ‘She’s a treasure, you know,’ Dr Ballance said to Richard. ‘Thank you for sending her to us. She has enlivened the whole Group. Really. We’re going to have need of her, of people like her. She’s so sharp, so perfect, so pointed.’

  Richard was relaxed in her embrace. She felt his heart beating, normally.

  ‘And quite mad, surely?’ Richard said.

  ‘Mad? What does that mean, Mr Jeperson? Out of step with the rest of the world? What if the rest of the world is mad? And what if your sanity is what is holding you back, preventing you from attaining your potential? Who among us can say that they are really sane? Really normal?’

  ‘I can,’ said Mrs Empty, quietly and firmly.

  ‘We have always needed mad people,’ Dr Ballance continues. ‘At Rorke’s Drift, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Festival of Britain, we must have been mad to carry on as we did, and thank mercy for that madness. Times are a-changing, and we will need new types of madness. I can provide that, Mr Jeperson. These women are perfect, you know. They have no conscience at all, no feeling for others. Do you know how hard it is to expunge that from the female psyche? We teach our daughters all their lives to become mothers, to love and sacrifice. These two are my masterpieces. Lieutenant Veevee, your gift to us, will be the greatest assassin of the era. And Mrs Empty is even more special. She will take my madness and spread it over the whole world.’

  ‘I suppose it would be redundant to call you mad?’ Richard ventured.

  Dr Ballance giggled.

  Vanessa had Richard slightly off-balance, but was holding him up. The line of her scalpel was impressed against his jugular, steady.

  ‘Ness won’t do it,’ Fred said.

  ‘You think not?’ Dr Ballance smiled. ‘Anybody would. You would, to me, right now. It’s just a matter of redirecting the circuits, to apply the willingness to a worthwhile end. She feels no anger or remorse or hate or joy in what she does. She just does it. Like a tin-opener.’

  ‘Vanessa,’ Richard said.

  Click.

  That was her name. Not Veevee.

  Just his voice and her name. It was a switch thrown inside her.

  Long ago, they had agreed. When she first came to Richard, under the control of something else, she had been at that zero to which the Pleasant Green treatment was supposed to reduce her. She had escaped, with his help, then built herself up, with his love and encouragement. She was the stronger for it. Her name, which she had chosen, was the core of her strength. It was the code-word which brought her out of a trance.

  Everything Pleasant Green had done to her was meaningless now. She was Vanessa.

  Not Veevee.

  She didn’t change, didn’t move.

  But she was herself again.

  ‘That’s all it takes,’ Richard said, straightening up. ‘A name. You don’t really make people, Doctor. You just fake them. Like wind-up toys, they may work for a while. Then they run down. Like Mr Joyful… Mr Achy… Mr Enemy… Miss Essex… Lieutenant-Commander Hero?’

  He enunciated the names clearly. Each one was a jab at Dr Ballance. The living half of his face froze, matching the dead side.

  ‘This Group is better than them.’

  ‘No more crack-ups, eh? They’re just mad enough, but not too broken to function?’

  Mrs Empty’s cold eyes were fixed on them.

  ‘To survive in the world we are making,’ Dr Ballance said, ‘everybody will have to be mad.’

  He reached into his coat and brought out a gun. In a blink, Vanessa tossed her scalpel. It spun over and over, catching moonlight, and embedded its point in Dr Ballance’s forehead. A red tear dripped and he crashed backwards.

  When he had gone for the gun, he had admitted defeat. He had doubted her. At the last, he had been proved wrong.

  It all came crashing in. The programming, the torture, the disorientation – there had been drugs as well as everything else – fell apart.

  With a scream, Miss Dove flew at her. She pirouetted and landed a foot in the attendant’s face. The girl was knocked backwards and sprawled on the ground. She bounced back up, and came for her.

  It was no match. Miss Dove was a master of disco-style roughhouse. All her movements came from her hips and her shoulders. Vanessa fell back on the all-purpose jeet kune do – the style developed by Bruce Lee which was starting to be called kung fu – and launched kicks and punches at the girl, battering her on her feet until she dropped.

  The others backed away. Mrs Empty walked off, into the dark.

  Fred checked Dr Ballance, and shook his head.

  ‘Well done,’ Richard said. ‘I never doubted you.’

  She was completely wrung out. Again, she was on the point of exploding into tears.

  Richard held her and kissed her.

  ‘I trusted you here, rather than coming myself or sending Fred, because I know your heart,’ he said, kindly. ‘Neither of us could have survived Pleasant Green. We’re too dark to begin with. We could be made into killers. You couldn’t. You can’t. You’re an angel of mercy, my love, not of death.’

  Over his shoulder, she saw Ballance stretched out with a stick of steel in his head. She loved Richard for what he felt about her, but he was wrong. The Pleasant Green treatment might have failed to make her a malleable assassin, but Dr Ballance had turned her into a killer all the same. After his doubt, had he known a split-second of triumph?

  ‘It was about Winthrop,’ she said. ‘After you and Fred, he wanted me to kill Winthrop. It was part of some plan.’

  He nodded grimly, understanding.

  CODA: MRS M. T.

  On the croquet lawn of the Pleasant Green manor house, Richard found a Eurasian woman feeding a bonfire with an armful of file-folders. Fred took hold of her and wrestled her to the ground, but she had done her job with swift efficiency. Filing cabinets had been dragged out of the pre-fab buildings and emptied. Documents turned to ash and photographs curled in flame.

  Vanessa, cloaked with her coat, was still pale. It would take a while for her to recover fully, but he had been right about her. She had steel.

  The Eurasian – Miss Lark – produced a stiletto and made a few passes at Fred’s stomach, forcing him back. Then, she tried to slip the blade into her own heart. Vanessa, snapping out of her daze, grabbed the woman’s wrist and made her drop the knife.

  ‘No more,’ she said.

  Miss Lark looked at them with loathing. Dr Ballance would never have approved of an emotion like that.

  The rest of the staff had vanished into the night, melting away to wherever it was minions languished between paying jobs. Bewildered folks in dressing gowns, among them the electric-eyed woman who had been in the wood, had drifted out to see what the fuss was all about and found themselves abandoned. The other members of the Group.

  Car headlamps raked the lawns, throwing shadows against the big house. Doors opened and people got out. They were all anonymous men, except for one.

  ‘Jeperson,’ shouted Garnett.

  The Whitehall man strode across the lawn, waving his umbrella like a truncheon.

  Richard opened his hands and felt no guilt.

  ‘I think you’ll find Dr Ballance exceeded his authority, Mr Garnett. If you look around, you’ll
find serious questions raised.’

  ‘Where is the Doctor?’ demanded Garnett.

  ‘In the wood. He seems to be dead.’

  The civil servant was furious.

  ‘He has a gun in his hand. I think he intended to kill someone or other. Very possibly me.’

  Garnett obviously thought it a pity Ballance hadn’t finished the job. It was a shame this would end here, Richard thought. Important folk had been sponsoring Dr Ballance, and had passed down orders to act against the Diogenes Club. Winthrop would be grimly amused to learn he was the eventual target of the plan.

  ‘It wasn’t working, though,’ Richard said.

  ‘What?’ Garnett said.

  ‘The Ballance Process or whatever he called it. He was trying to manufacture functioning psychotics, wasn’t he? Well, none of them ever functioned. Didn’t you notice? Look at them, poor lost souls.’

  He indicated the people in dressing gowns. Ambulances had arrived, and the Pleasant Green guests were being helped into them.

  ‘What use do you think they’ll be now?’

  By the ambulances was parked a car whose silhouette Richard knew all too well. There were only five Rolls-Royce ShadowSharks in existence; and he owned three of them, all silver. This was painted night black, with opaque windows to match. A junior functionary like Garnett wouldn’t run to this antichrist of the road.

  He would know the machine again. And the man inside it, who had ordered his death and Edwin’s.

  Garnett turned away and scurried across the lawn, to report to the man in the ShadowShark. The woman from the wood firmly resisted orderlies who were trying to help her into an ambulance. She asked no questions and made no protests, but wouldn’t be manhandled, wouldn’t be turned.

  ‘Who is that?’ he asked Vanessa.

  ‘Mrs Empty,’ she said. ‘The star pupil.’

  He shuddered. Mrs Empty was quite, quite mad, he intuited. Yet she was strong, mind unclouded by compassion or uncertainty, character untempered by humour or generosity. In a precognitive flash that made him momentarily weak with terror, he saw a cold blue flame burning in the future.

  She was assisted finally into an ambulance, but made the action seem like that of a queen ascending a throne, surrounded by courtiers.

  The ambulances left. The ShadowShark stayed behind a moment. Richard imagined cold eyes looking out at him through the one-way black glass. Then, the motor turned over and the Rolls withdrew.

  He looked at Fred and Vanessa.

  ‘Let’s forget this place,’ he said.

  ‘That might not be easy,’ Vanessa said.

  ‘Then we shall have to try very hard.’

  TOMORROW TOWN

  The message, in Helvetica typeface, was repeated on arrow-shaped signs.

  ‘That’ll be us, Vanessa,’ said Richard Jeperson, striding along the platform in the indicated direction, toting his shoulder-slung hold-all. He tried to feel as if he were about to time-travel from 1971 to the future, though in practice he was just changing trains.

  Vanessa was distracted by one of the arrow-signs, fresh face arranged into a comely frown. Richard’s associate was a tall redhead in hot-pants, halter top, beret and stack-heeled go-go boots – all blinding white, as if fresh from the machine in a soap-powder advert. She drew unconcealed attention from late-morning passengers milling about the railway station. Then again, in his lime dayglo blazer edged with gold braid and salmon-pink bell-bottom trousers, so did he. Here in Preston, the fashion watchword, for the eighteenth consecutive season, was ‘drab’.

  ‘It’s misspelled,’ said Vanessa. ‘Y Double-E R.’

  ‘No, it’s F O N E T I K,’ he corrected. ‘Within the next thirty years, English spelling will be rationalised.’

  ‘You reckon?’ She pouted sceptically.

  ‘Not my theory,’ he said, stroking his mandarin moustaches. ‘I assume the lingo will muddle along with magical illogic as it has since “the Yeer Dot”. But orthographic reform is a tenet of Tomorrow Town.’

  ‘Alliteration. Very Century 21.’

  They had travelled up from London, sharing a rattly first-class carriage and a welcome magnum of Bollinger with a liberal bishop on a lecture tour billed as ‘Peace and the Pill’ and a working-class playwright revisiting his slag-heap roots. To continue their journey, Richard and Vanessa had to change at Preston.

  The arrows led to a guarded gate. The guard wore a British Rail uniform in shiny black plastic with silver highlights. His oversized cap had a chemical lighting element in the brim.

  ‘You need special tickets, Ms and Mm,’ said the guard.

  ‘Mm,’ said Vanessa, amused.

  ‘Ms,’ Richard buzzed at her.

  He searched through his pockets, finally turning up the special tickets. They were strips of foil, like ironed-flat chocolate-bar wrappers with punched-hole patterns. The guard carefully posted the tickets into a slot in a metal box. Gears whirred and lights flashed. The gate came apart and sank into the ground. Richard let Vanessa step through first. She seemed to float off, arms out for balance.

  ‘Best not to be left behind, Mm,’ said the guard.

  ‘Mm,’ said Richard, agreeing.

  He stepped onto the special platform. Beneath his rubber-soled winkle-pickers, a knitted chain-mail surface moved on large rollers. It creaked and rippled, but gave a smooth ride.

  ‘I wonder how it manages corners,’ Vanessa said.

  The moving platform conveyed them towards a giant silver bullet. The train of the future hummed slightly, at rest on a single gleaming rail which was raised ten feet above the gravel railbed by chromed tubular trestles. A hatchway was open, lowered to form a ramp.

  Richard and Vanessa clambered through the hatch and found themselves in a space little roomier than an Apollo capsule. They half-sat, half-lay in over-padded seats which wobbled on gyro-gimbals. Safety straps automatically snaked across them and drew tight.

  ‘Not sure I’ll ever get used to this,’ said Richard. A strap across his forehead noosed his long, tangled hair, and he had to free a hand to fix it.

  Vanessa wriggled to get comfortable, doing a near-horizontal dance as the straps adjusted to her.

  With a hiss the ramp raised and became a hatch-cover, then sealed shut. The capsule-cum-carriage had seat-berths for eight, but today they were the only passengers.

  A mechanical voice counted down from ten.

  ‘Richard, that’s a Dalek,’ said Vanessa, giggling.

  As if offended, the voice stuttered on five, like a record stuck in a groove, then hopped to three.

  At zero, they heard a rush of rocketry and the monorail moved off. Richard tensed against the expected g-force slam, but it didn’t come. Through thick-glassed slit windows, he saw green countryside passing by at about 25 miles per hour. They might have been on a leisurely cycle to the village pub rather than taking the fast train to the future.

  ‘So this is the transport of tomorrow?’ said Vanessa.

  ‘A best-guess design,’ explained Richard. ‘That’s the point of Tomorrow Town. To experiment with the lives we’ll all be living at the turn of the century.’

  ‘No teleportation then?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Matter transmission is a fantasy. This is a reasonable extrapolation from present-day or in-development technology. The Foundation is rigorous about probabilities. Everything in Tomorrow Town is viable.’

  The community was funded partially by government research grants and partially by private sources. It was projected that it would soon be a profitable concern, with monies pouring in from scientific wonders developed by the visioneers of the new technomeritocracy. The Foundation, which had proposed the ‘Town of 2000’ experiment, was a think tank, an academic-industrial coalition dedicated to applying to present-day life lessons learned from contemplating the likely future. Tomorrow Town’s two-thousand-odd citizen-volunteers (‘zenvols’) were boffins, engineers, social visionaries, health-food cranks and science fiction fans.

&nb
sp; Three years ago, when the town was given its charter by the Wilson government, there had been a white heat of publicity: television programmes hosted by James Burke and Raymond Baxter, picture features in all the Sunday colour supplements, a novelty single (‘Take Me to Tomorrow’ by Big Thinks and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) which peaked at Number 2 (prevented from being Top of the Pops by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s ‘Fire’), a line of ‘futopian fashions’ from Carnaby Street, a heated debate in the letter columns of New Scientist between Arthur C. Clarke (pro), Auberon Waugh (anti) and J. G. Ballard (hard to tell). Then the brouhaha died down and Tomorrow Town was left to get on by itself, mostly forgotten. Until the murder of Varno Zhoule.

  Richard Jeperson, agent of the Diogenes Club – least-known branch of the United Kingdom’s intelligence and investigative services – was detailed to look into the supposedly open-and-shut case and report back to the current Prime Minister on the advisability of maintaining government support for Tomorrow Town.

  He had given Vanessa the barest facts.

  ‘What does the murder weapon of the future turn out to be?’ she asked. ‘Laser-beam? Poisoned moon-rock?’

  ‘No, the proverbial blunt instrument. Letting the side down, really. Anyone who murders the co-founder of Tomorrow Town should have the decency to stick to the spirit of the game. I doubt if it’s much comfort to the deceased, but the offending bludgeon was vaguely futurist, a stylised steel rocketship with a heavy stone base.’

  ‘No home should be without one.’

  ‘It was a Hugo Award, the highest honour the science fiction field can bestow. Zhoule won his murder weapon for Best Novelette of 1958, with the oft-anthologised “Court Martian”.’

  ‘Are we then to be the police of the future? Do we get to design our own uniforms?’

  ‘We’re here because Tomorrow Town has no police force as such. It is a fundamental of the social design that there will be no crime by the year 2000.’

  ‘Ooops.’

  ‘This is a utopian vision, Vanessa. No money to steal. No inequality to foster resentment. All disputes arbitrated with unquestionable fairness. All zenvols constantly monitored for emotional instability.’