THE DAY BEFORE NEVER

by Robert Presslie

Defeated, subjugated, almost exterminated, yet there is a force in some men which will drive them to any lengths in order to find a means of retaliation and revenge.

* * * *

Yesterday was a quiet day. I didn’t kill anyone and nobody killed me. Not even a try. Almost like old times. Hard to remember there used to be a world where you could meet a stranger without throwing anything more offensive than a smile at him. Apart from wars, of course. There is something about a war that repeals the Commandments, a lobotomy of the conscience that syrups the distaste of killing. Any other time it takes a special kind of man to be able to kill without compunction; to terminate the span of another human without the slightest urge to puke, either in the gullet or in the mind. This talent is mine. Not inborn. Not deliberately achieved. Thrust on me? That depends. Depends on whether it is possible to compel anyone to do something he inherently abhors. So maybe I am wrong: maybe I had this talent all the time and it took a special set of circumstances to bring it to flower.

Anyhow, there were twenty-four hours of innocence behind me. Or thirty hours if we are going to be precise about it. Thirty hours at the wheel of the red Berlinetta. One thousand miles in thirty hours.

If people ever get back to a state of affairs where they can pursue trivialities like erecting statues somebody should propose they perpetuate the memory of Enzo Ferrari. You can’t punish many cars the way I had the Berlinetta. It was reckoned to be the finest sports car made. I’m not arguing. Six hundred miles through Poland; from Krakow to Warsaw and from Warsaw to Kaliningrad on the other side of the border. Then nearly four hundred miles through Russia from Kaliningrad to Riga. Almost nonstop.

On and under the seat at my right there was enough canned, processed or freeze-dried food to eliminate the necessity for stopping to beat the hell out of somebody to steal their supper. The only stops I had made were to refuel the Berlinetta at abandoned petrol stations. One of the few things I can still feel proud about is my skill in unlocking the pumps with a paper clip and warm spittle.

Sometimes the stations are not abandoned. There is still the odd idiot who hasn’t got his values sorted out. It stares him in the face that sooner or later he must lose his prized possessions or his life. He still lives in yesterday, hasn’t got himself adjusted. So he gets blasted and he dies because he couldn’t adjust.

But the idiots are getting fewer and fewer. Nobody got in my way this part of the trip. I didn’t kill anyone because I didn’t meet anyone. One thousand miles without the sight of another human. Mostly because I used the main trunk roads and nobody in their right senses travels along them on foot. And a lot of countryside this far north was pretty bleak and thinly populated at the best of times. Which this isn’t. And every time there was a town or village signposted up ahead I had made a deliberate detour. The easiest way to avoid trouble is just that. Avoid it.

When I stopped to think about it—and it surprised even me that I still did—I was always faced with the conclusion that if I was not the most unpopular man alive then I was definitely on everybody’s short list of candidates. Understandable. You can’t do what I’ve done, what I’ve had to do, without setting yourself up as public enemy number two. Number one being the Barbarians of course. But hating them is a lot less futile than hating me. Them, you can do nothing about. Me, you could shoot, knife, strangle or otherwise dispose of. Provided I didn’t shoot, knife, etcetera, first. Which I have been able to do so far.

The last stretch of road—between Jelgava and Riga— was reeling off under the Berlinetta’s wheels. This was the final lap of a long, long journey that had started a long, long time ago. And this was the moment, the last but most critical moment for alertness. This was one town I couldn’t skirt. Any more than I had been able to skirt Milan or Belgrade.

The drill for self-preservation gets more automatic with practice. Make sure the road ahead is straight and clear. Grip the wheel firmly with one hand. Send the other scrabbling around you. Get the precise location of every weapon. The faithful Smith and Wesson first. The Magnum naturally. Holds one more shot than the .38 and gives you the choice of two sizes of cartridge when ammo is hard to come by. Then the rifles. The Schmeisser machine carbine for when you aren’t too fussy who gets hit and the Russian Tokarev for those special shots at a distant target. Grenades? Check. Bombs? Take your pick: plastic, magnetic, smoke. All there. Snuggle the right foot under the seat, trace out the curve of the sixty-pound bow, hear the clink of the aluminium arrows. Then the furtive touch of your own fingers at your own crotch. You keep your most secret weapon in your most secret place. A Baby Browning. Absolutely useless unless you are close enough to spit between the eyes where you have marked your target. But undetectable at the same range. A woman’s weapon really. Significant you should keep it there? You wonder. And from wondering about the gun you begin wondering about women. About all the women you haven’t had lately. But you can’t afford the erotic distraction. So you get both hands back on the wheel and both eyes flicking along the street. For the road has become a street. The first street of the town you were visiting. In this case Riga.

Mnemographic recall on Riga: population 400,000. That’s what the book said. Visible population: nil. Which is the liar ? The book or the eyes ? Experience says it has to be both. The book was printed before the advent of the Barbarians taught people it didn’t pay to congregate. And even if the streets looked empty to me I had sallied through sufficient other streets to know I had more scrutineers than the rows of blank windows would suggest. No doubt either about whether the looks I was getting were hostile or otherwise. There was no otherwise to consider. Geographically this was part of Russia. But to bank on the legendary stolid Russian nature making the locals indifferent? Suicide. Anyhow it was Latvian before it was Russian; and Swedish before that; and it was Polish before the Swedes captured it. Throw in the paradox that the city was more German than anything else and you get what ? You get the common denominator that they hate your guts whatever the race or creed and you had better not relax.

The Berlinetta responded to the nervous pressure of my foot, carried me racing out of these newer parts of Riga across the upper bridge on the Dvina and into the old city where the buildings look more German than they do in Germany.

Fear gets suspended by the oddest things. Just for a minute I lost hold of conscious vigilance—although I long ago learned that the body does its own sentry work at these moments—and I remembered how often I had come across this before. I’m talking about the way residual national colonies or ghettos are always much more typically nationalistic than the mother country.

Due west now. Still no sign of life. But the testaments of death abounded. For one more time I cursed the Barbarians and their abominable glazers. There were immense vacant lots where they had used their bigger glazers to reduce whole streets of houses to a ghastly flux of molten stone and flesh. A flux that had hardened after flowing so that the wheel of the Berlinetta jumped in response to every corrugation that overlaid the surface of the road. This was what made it easy to hate the Barbarians. Their utterly ruthless killings and their insensible destruction of property. Maybe my emotions are not yet altogether calloused. Maybe the Barbarians are right: an enemy is an enemy, and if part of it chooses to hide in buildings with fine old ringing names like the Castle of the Knights of the Sword and the House of the Blackheads it is just too bad. All I could find of the castle was an amorphous glazed blob, streaked with greys and browns like a massive lump of Swedish glass. When I passed the House of the Blackheads it was almost entire.

Almost. A group of humans had been caught as they had sidled round one of the corners. Now they were smeared there for eternity. Or until the Barbarians decided to raze the building completely. Some were fused shallow reliefs on the ancient stone. Others hadn’t been so lucky. Not for them the quick, unfelt death. The glazer beams—powered by God-knows-what—had caught them in motion. The terrible grimace on an oldster’s face told the agonies of every minute of life he had left to him after an arm and a leg had been fluidly bonded to the house. There was half a torso here, a grisly fraction there. The worst I saw before I passed the building was the girl. About fourteen or fifteen to judge by the nubile breasts laid bare by a glazer’s freakish heat. If it hadn’t been for the breasts I would never have known it was a girl who hung against the wall, headless, suspended only by the strips of flesh-and-silicon compound that stretched upwards from her shoulders.

On. Drive on. Drive on and forget.

No. Don’t forget. Just don’t let hatred refreshed be a weapon against yourself. Don’t let it dull your vigilance or in any way interfere with the intricate web of intrigue you have spun. You will be picking up the final thread soon. Wait. Be patient. All the murders you have committed, all the vilification you have brought on yourself because you couldn’t disclose your objective will be erased when you knit in the last thread and the enemy is reduced to lifeless dust.

It is involuntary, this ejaculation of adrenalin. You mean to keep your emotions at a subliminal level, but you can’t control your glands. The needle was flickering on a suicidal hundred when a change in the character of the streets made me glance down.

The houses were less dense. Older. I eased my foot off the pedal before I missed my target. None too soon. Another couple of seconds and I would have swept past the long, low, one-storeyed decrepit arrangement of masonry that proclaimed itself in faded letters to be an inn. It looked more like a string of stables that had been converted from equine to human stowage. Later I found this idle guess was correct.

The inn and the Berlinetta, battered and filthy as it was, were as compatible as two feet in the same sock. The sight of the car would have made the most incurious of men stop and wonder. So I swung the wheel and tucked the sportster round the back of the building.

Before getting out I stuffed my pockets with an assortment of artillery. Theoretically this place was safe. But you never can tell. The other thing I remembered to do was indulge in a few moments of pre-disembarkation callisthenics. More than once after a long drive I had fallen flat on my face due to cramp. That had been in open country. I couldn’t afford to take the same chance here.

The inn was no example of modern architecture, but at least it was a tribute to the way men used to build. There was no bell. The door was locked. When I pounded my knuckles on it there was only a flat padding sound as if the vibrations of my knock had been disseminated through four or five inches of timber. I switched from hand to foot.

For a moment it was a question of who would shoot first. The old man who creaked the door open might have been harmless enough in himself. Which was more than could be said about the shotgun he had aimed at my belly. Reaction, as always, outpaced the threat. I swung the Schmeisser sideways, spun the shotgun out of his hands and into the doorway. Maybe I should have stopped there. I can only blame habit for planting the boot that had kicked at the door into his groin. It struck me as illogical that he should scream. A young man and I could have understood it. But him? Then I was jumping over his body and spewing the room with death.

Nobody was around to die. I hauled the old man to his feet, held him in front of me while I made for the racked bottles. He roused when he had half a bottle of brandy inside him. He had to. Or drown.

“Who’s here besides you?”

He coughed. Tried his voice. Vomited. Tried again. “My wife and my daughter. Are you him?”

“Don’t be stupid.” I cuffed him. “Don’t even give me that much recognition. I’m a passer-by. I want accommodation. What can you offer?”

He was scared to hell, but he got hold of himself and went into the proscribed routine. “It is a small place, sir. We can give a traveller refreshment and no more. It is many years since we were able to offer accommodation.”

“It looks big enough to me. Surely you have a room.”

“Nothing. We are too far out of the city to receive many callers. It became uneconomical to operate as a guest house. The beds and furniture are gone. Some of the rooms are used for storage. The rest are empty—except for mildew and dampness.”

“You’ve got a room.”

“With only one bed. I would gladly give it up to you. But my wife...”

“What about your wife?”

“An invalid. For many years. She cannot leave the bed.”

“She could if I kicked her out. What else? Your daughter —where does she sleep?”

“She has a room.”

“Put her into yours. You can all sleep together.”

He shook his head. “It’s the disease. My wife has great pain. She needs the whole bed. Even I have to sleep on the floor.” He anticipated my next suggestion. “And it is not possible for my daughter to do the same. There are no more mattresses or bedclothes. Unless...”

I followed the script and finished the sentence. “Unless I bundle up with your daughter.”

He hung his head. It could have been a nod or it could have been a gesture of shame.

Maybe I should have done the same. But shame was just one more emotion the coming of the Barbarians had diluted. This was the situation and I was stuck with it. A charade on a dirty joke. With me as the principal actor.

“I’ll bring some food from the car,” I told the old man.

“We have enough to go round. Nothing elaborate. But enough.”

“I prefer what comes out of a can. I know it isn’t doctored.”     

The inn-keeper blinked. “You are quite safe here.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

I tipped the brandy bottle, drained what was left in it into myself. “We’ll see about food later. I’m too tired to be hungry right now. Show me my room.”

He shuffled out of the bar. Anyone watching us would have been hard pressed to tell which of us was the elder. I couldn’t lift my feet any higher than he could. I hadn’t been exaggerating when I had said I was tired.

After twice ducking under low-hung beams in the connecting corridor we stopped at the door the old man indicated. I gave him back the shotgun.

“Don’t be tempted,” I warned. “I want four hours’ rest. This is to make sure I get it. If anybody—or anything— looks like interrupting, use it. As for you—the door will be locked. And I sleep lightly, tired or not. If I hear the slightest sound I’ll rake the door with this Schmeisser. You wouldn’t stand a chance. Understood?”

It wasn’t necessary to wait for an answer. The old man was still gripping himself where he had been kicked. Our introduction would keep him scared for a considerable time. Maybe later he would start wondering how expendable he was and whether he would come out of this alive. He wouldn’t need too much calculation to arrive at the only possible conclusion. Hence the warning. But he would be harmless for a while. He wasn’t the only one who could calculate. This balancing of fear against the instinct for self-preservation was a familiar equation. The factor I knew and he didn’t was that I didn’t intend to spend anything like as much as four hours in bed with his daughter.

* * * *

She sat on the edge of the bed. Her face, pretty enough—not that it mattered—was arranged in an expression of wary anticipation. But she sat quite loosely and I guessed the look she wore was more for the old man’s benefit than mine. I gave her full, marks for professionalism: few people in her situation would have been so relaxed. And her eyes ran me over with the fluent efficiency of an accountant vetting a suspect balance sheet.

“The wrong responses,” she said, “and you’ll leave this room faster than you entered it. I’d have to go with you and we’d both be in finely shredded pieces, but the thought of it doesn’t worry me.” “I’ll try to remember that.” “That’s good. Anything else?”

“Just that I have a very good and a very long memory. How do you find me?”

“Same way I would find anything. By looking.” “And do you always find what you’re looking for?” “I find what needs to be found.”

We both grinned. Without giving anything away to unseen ears we had established our identities. This was the girl I had been sent to meet. The girl who knew where the big bomb was hidden. She was the last of a long chain of Finders. Some of them were Finders of people—people with special talents I had made use of. Some of them had dug out the information I had needed. A few, like this one, had been Finders of places and things hidden in places.

“I’m Elke,” she said. “I suppose it’s a waste of time asking your name.”

“The less you know the less you can tell if you ever get caught.”

She was still smiling. “I thought people like you had ways of making sure nobody talked. You know—tchk!” She drew a finger across her throat.

“You don’t sound too scared at the prospect.” She shrugged. “What’s so good about living? Life expectancy is the interval between now and the moment a Barb decides you’re in his way.” She squirmed her bottom on the bed and said, “Excuse me.”

When she was resting all her weight on one cheek she prised her fingers between herself and the bedcovers. Slowly, but with sure deliberation, she drew out a contrivance that looked like a shallow metal jar with its lid not quite properly screwed down.

“Simple but nasty,” she said. “It’s got a fifty-pound spring between the top and the bottom. If you hadn’t said the right words I only had to shift my weight a little. End of you and me.” She lifted two side clips and pressed them down to anchor the two parts of the bomb together. “Now,” she said. “Let’s talk.” A real professional, as I had already classed her. You would have thought I was back in England and my hostess had just poured the afternoon tea.

“It’s safe? What about the old man and his wife?”

“Them! They’re only part of the set-up. They’re not my parents, of course. In fact they’re not even married. They didn’t meet until I got word of your coming. This place is his but his real wife died more than twenty years ago. The woman is really an invalid—we try to use part truths to give an image of total truth. But they’re just... actors, you could say.”

“Like us?”

“Except that they’re only bit players. They’re safe. I saw to that. Got them so scared that he pussyfoots around and she daren’t leave the bed if she could. They think I’ve got the whole place booby-trapped.”

“And have you?”

“I’ll tell you later. You gave me the right passwords. But the real you could be dead and you could be a Barb wearing his human make-up kit. It’s up to you. Maybe early morning is a funny time to be going to bed, but the sooner you get stripped off and into bed with me the sooner I’ll know you really are a Memory and not a Barb.”

“If I don’t come up to expectations?”

“That’ll be when you find out about the booby-traps.”

“You know,” I said as I started to strip off, “this identification business isn’t foolproof. I’ve been thirty hours on the road. I could get myself killed just because I was too tired to function.”

She laughed. “Why do you think I got this job ? I used to be in another line of business. In Berlin. A business that happens to provide the qualifications needed for this one. With me, mister, nobody is too tired to function. I guarantee it.”

The least she could have done was turn her head. I guess it didn’t occur to her that some men are modest. Even at the moments when modesty would appear to be uncalled far. She watched until I was skin naked.

“You certainly look human,” she conceded. “Very much so if you don’t mind a compliment. But I’ve heard they can fake even that. There’s only one thing they can’t fake.” She did that womanish contortion that allows them to undo a full length back zipper in one movement.

“You’re pretty human yourself,” I returned the compliment.

She crooked a coquettish finger. “Let’s see if you are or aren’t.”

* * * *

Precisely one hour and fifteen minutes later she woke me as I had asked. We got dressed immediately. Nothing to do with modesty now. Modesty was a forgotten luxury. But there’s something about being naked that makes you feel defenceless. You can be armed to the teeth as they say, but without your clothes you can’t convince yourself you’re not more vulnerable than you would be dressed. And we were vulnerable enough as it was without being psychologically hampered in any way.

“How long have we got?” I asked the girl.

“Not long. They’re generally out and about around eight every morning. It’s almost that now.”

“Where do they hang out?”

“In the university. Took the building over soon after they landed. You know what I mean by soon ?”

“I know. As long as it took them to destroy every source of electricity with an orgy of mass atrocities thrown in just to hammer home the impression of how futile it would be to organize any resistance. You seem to have fared better than some cities I’ve seen. If it wasn’t that I’ve learned how thorough they are I would have been surprised to find them this far north. Cold seems to be the only thing that gets them.”

Elke said, “January and February, when the estuary was iced over, they never left the university. That’s how I managed to dig up the information you want.”

“Even then,” I admired, “it couldn’t have been easy. Their Eyes are everywhere.”

She nodded. “We were worried about them at first.” She didn’t explain, but I guessed she meant the local resistance group. “We couldn’t understand how they worked. The Barbs had robbed us of electrical power; we couldn’t communicate, we couldn’t fabricate. And, as you well know, any sort of transmission—radio, television, what-have-you —is lethal to them after a few minutes’ exposure. So we couldn’t tally this with the Eyes. Not until we found they were alive.”

I executed my party piece as a Memory. “Uni-functional laboratory grown protoplasm. Non-sentient. Capable only of aerial motion, pseudo-ocular observation and of reporting its findings to its masters by what Montilla of Madrid believed to have been telepathic means.”

“Believed? Past tense? One of yours?”

“Montilla? No. They got him. Inevitable. He couldn’t dissect the Eyes quick enough. Not before they reported he was taking hostile action. Got to admire him. He must have known what would happen.”

“Oh, sure. Everybody’s a hero.”

I could have asked about the flat cynicism in her voice. But I didn’t have to. There was nothing especially heroic about fighting for your very existence. Maybe you could say not everybody did it, but then the world always was made up of those who accept the boot of oppression on the neck and those who kick back. And because the kickers brought down even sterner oppression they were no more loved than the enemy. Elke and myself, we were kickers. We were two out of many. Or if you took it globally we were two out of a very small proportion of the human race.

We survived—and most of us had a pitifully ephemeral span—by one simple stratagem: we licked the boot of oppression. We were latter day stool pigeons. Finks incorporated. What the Barbarians couldn’t discover with their Eyes they got from us. An Eye can’t see into a man’s mind and read the insurrection bubbling there. We could. And did. Which is the reason they let me use a car, steal petrol and food, carry weapons, scour the globe for potential rebels.

So far I had been lucky. They pulled their spies in regularly for questioning. For questioning read inquisition. Nobody told them lies. Extreme pain has this effect. Monstrous inflictions on the body and the mental agony of watching your body melt away under the beams of their modified lasers. Hence glazers. You talk. Oh, yes, you talk. There’s a man inside you who thought he had self-respect and would tell them nothing. You know that even if you blab your end off you’re still going to end up as two kilos of vitreous slag. But you talk.

Insurance is the thing. You get in first. Survival of the fastest. You make your contact. Get your information. Then destroy your informant. They can’t ask questions of a dead man. Trust no one. Except a corpse. And we all know this. So we even hate each other.

“Well,” said Elke, “if you didn’t kill Montilla, you would have. Lucky for me that this is the end of the line. I suppose if it hadn’t been, if you had had another stage to go, you would have removed me too ?”

“Naturally.”

“No regrets?”

“When did you last have regrets? Anyhow, you were telling me about the Eyes.”

“Simple. Aerosol flykillers. Don’t ask me why, but it works.”

“The propellant gas. It’s a fairly universal weapon. Some use hair sprays. Perfumes sometimes. That’s how they found it was the propellant and not the other constituents. Of course it’s only a matter of time before an Eye manages to report back before its protoplasm curdles. Then ...”

She laughed. “Stop worrying. It’s too late now. For the Barbs. Or is it? When’s the big bang?”

“Tonight.”

“Then we’re safe.”

“Probably. You found the right location?”

“Sorry?”

“The bomb. We know the area is well seeded with bombs and missile warheads laid down by the Russians, ready to be used in the event of hostilities. Not the sort of hostility that turned up, of course. We also know that most of them were far from being in a state of readiness. They were simply being stored. These it would take a team of scientists to prepare for use. But there were two-—it might have been three—laid down in this region, precisely sited some half a mile deep near a weak spot in the crust; they were primed, fully wired to long-life storage cells, set to detonate at the touch of a button.”

“I found one.”

“How far from here?”

“No distance at all. Right here. In the cellar. Not the bomb, of course. The activating panel.”

I grinned. Couldn’t stop the silly grin relaxing the taut muscles of my face. I made the most of it. I think if I hadn’t grinned I would have wept. After months, months, months of seeming helplessness it was good—so damn, damn good—to find something going right at last.

The girl said, “I thought you’d be pleased. That’s why I said we should be safe now. There’s no danger of them catching you in the open. It’s almost over, isn’t it?” •

“Almost. If it works. And it should. Fabricci did the calculations. The late Fabricci. I wish...”

The next few minutes were mine. Nobody’s business but mine. Enough to say she understood. Her reactions were womanly. Just right. Not as a lover. Motherly. The mammary offering. We never grow up completely. Men. Women do. Maybe they’re adults at birth.

* * * *

“When you said it was nearly over—I know you meant the Barbarians. Getting rid of them. But I was thinking of the other things. Like having to kill people like Fabricci. People who were part of the scheme. People whose skills we couldn’t have done without. It ... well, was it necessary?”                                     

“You know it was.”

“I suppose. Damn them! Damn the Barbarians! So few of them really, but how well they did their job of crushing us. Rascak in Belgrade—another good man I had to dispose of—he had the best way of putting it. He said it was like a disease. A virus infection. Relative to the body it invades the virus is infinitesimally small. But because it is mindless and ruthless it can kill. If it doesn’t kill it lays the body low. So low that the body can only muster its defences in slow growing progression. Like us. And sometimes the body, like us again, has to kill part of itself to cut off the infection.”

She spoke softly, consoling. “It’s over. It’s over now.”

I got my spine back. Stood up. “Not quite. For you maybe. I’ve still got work to do. Let’s go.”

On the way to the cellar I waggled the Schmeisser at the old man. Just to remind him. But the menace was not the same as before.

The cellar was spotlessly clean. The walls had been covered with white formica panelling. The floor was vinyl tiled. The control board, considering the complexity of its function, was a masterpiece of miniaturized simplicity.

“Can you understand it?” the girl asked.

“Not in the slightest. I’m no scientist. But I don’t have to understand it. Like we were saying about the body—it fights its invaders by conscripting many different cells with specialized functions. Phagocytes, leucocytes, cells that produce antitoxins, cells that manufacture coagulants—so it is with us. I’m a specialist. As you are. And Fabricci and all the others. You have a way of finding things. Fabricci was our finest mathematician. Rascak knew atomics. Me— I’ve got a freak memory. My job was to trot the globe, pick the brains of the other experts and file their combined talents in my memory. But there is very little of what I was told that I could honestly say I understood.”

“Suppose you had been killed along the way? It seems strange to put so much reliance on one man.”

“There you have one of the reasons I had to be so uncaring when I killed. I had to get here. I’m not the only one. I don’t know the exact number of Memories but I do know—or I trust—that at the precise moment tonight there will be a sufficient number of them to set off the reaction we want. It was one of my countrymen who conceived the plan originally. Gerald Blackmore. You’ve heard of him? No, probably not. A biologist. Working with the Atomic Research Authority. A lucky combination. Since we had no dead Barbarians to work on and absolutely no hope of using a live one, he had to work entirely from little bits of reported data. Like they can’t stand cold. Or that radio waves can kill them. Or that noise makes them angry. Blackmore put all the data into a pot and cooked up the theory that we could destroy them once and for all by resonance. But the effect he asked for seemed impossible to produce. Fifty thousand megatons equivalent. And all of it to be triggered simultaneously from eighteen specifically located places. So a team of freaks was assembled. While others like yourself were doing other jobs, we had to collect and co-ordinate all the information available. Actually we’ve budgeted for ten thousand megatons over the top. Somebody’s bound to be not where he should be tonight.”

It wasn’t cold in the cellar yet the girl shivered. “Wouldn’t it be terrible? Suppose less of them arrived at their stations than you hoped for?”

“We’ll just have to wait and see. Don’t think about it. Now you’d better leave me. The time settings on this thing have to be very precise. I must have no distractions.”

She went reluctantly, claiming she felt useless. I had to take my turn as consoler. Told her she had done all that was required of her and the rest was up to me. Got the impression she wasn’t altogether satisfied with this, but insisted she left.

Having a built-in mnemographic image of the world time clock helped in making the settings. Base time was taken on Hamilton, Bermuda. Four hours down on GMT. That made the big bang due at 11.13 here in Riga. Margin of error plus or minus two minutes. Checked with my Ingersoll. Flipped the three switches that brought in the nicads, watched the meters register a satisfactory surge. Set the bomb’s clock for ten hours, twelve minutes rundown. Pushed home the red button. Now, and only now, could I say it was Safe. Nothing could stop the bomb now.

Nothing to do but wait. Sweat it out. Went upstairs and spent the afternoon and evening getting a calculated degree of mild intoxication. Thought I deserved it.

Around ten-thirty we stopped kidding ourselves that we were relaxed. Even the glorious stew that Elke had contrived to produce out of my stock of cans hadn’t helped. There was absolutely nothing to do downstairs, nothing to see. But downstairs we went.

It didn’t seem possible in these clinical surroundings with their silence and with nothing in motion except the sweep hand of the clock that destiny was in the making.

“Will it be all right?” the girl asked. “For us? The explosion, I mean. All the explosions.”

“You’ll hardly know it happened. If all goes well and the lot goes up, the whole sixty thousand megatons, the most you’ll feel will be an eight minute tremor that will barely tickle your feet. Nothing as big as an earthquake. This is only a man-made thing. We can’t begin to compete with natural forces in magnitude.”

“Then how is everybody so sure it will shift the Barbarians?”

“They’re not. Only Blackmore was sure. We just have to believe him. Every bomb is sited at an existing fault in the crust. This doesn’t mean the globe is going to crack apart. What the faults will do is send the subterranean vibrations out and across the world instead of being localized near each explosion. If Blackmore is right the optimum resonance will occur one minute after detonation and will last for four minutes. Long enough, he said, to granulate the bones of the Barbarians. Less than quarter of an hour and we’ll know how right he was.”

She lapsed into silence. Then the silence worried her and she said, nervously, “Quiet, isn’t it?”

Agreed. But could not think of anything worth saying to break the quietness. Didn’t want to either. Preoccupied with fascination of sudden heightening of perception. Discovered it’s true—you really can hear your own heart beating.

Seven minutes.

Cellar was warm. Very. Could feel the sodden halfmoons of my shirt clinging to armpits. Not Elke, though. Frowning, but didn’t appear to be physically disturbed.

One minute. My skin came alive. I swear it. Became a separate entity from me. A thing with a fear of its own. I believe that if a flea had adopted me my skin would have shrunk off the underlying flesh in terror.

Stupidly I wanted the sweep hand to halt in its inexorable orbit round the face of the clock. Then it passed the zenith with mechanical disdain and was on the last circuit it would ever make.

Tiny erector muscles wrenched body hairs to the perpendicular. I was furred. A ciliated motionless breathless lump of expectancy.

For all of fifteen seconds after the clock should have stopped I remained motionless and stupid. I knew it was fifteen seconds. I was watching. The revelation of the impossible had me tied in knots.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No stoppage of the clock. No sudden surge on the meters. No tremble underfoot.

Animation boiled into being. A fleeting notion that somewhere along the line I had made a mistake was discarded without consideration. The only mistake was in leaning the Schmeisser against the cellar wall. But I had the knife in my belt.

“You bitch. You treacherous bitch.” And I hadn’t finished the first short, sentence before I was already carving criss-cross up and down her face and chest. No quick despatch for this one.

“You sold us out,” I screamed. “For once they didn’t kill an informer. Because they had to get me.”

She had her hands over her face, trying to protect it. I couldn’t actually make out the words she was mouthing, but I gathered she was putting up a big denial. I wasn’t particular. If I couldn’t get her face, her body would do. The dress came apart at the neck, slashed horizontally by the knife. It flopped to her waist. The blade followed through to the skin. And I stepped back in disbelief.

Like the dress, the skin was unsupported at the neck. It slumped down, dragged by the weight of the spurious breasts. And where bleeding flesh should have been revealed there was a horny mottled epidermis, the colour of early morning sputum.

The knife clattered to the floor and the Schmeisser was in my hand instead.

She pushed her arms out full length. As if arms could stop bullets. She—he, she, it—called out. “No. I’m not. Please listen.”

“Listen to what? More lies? You’re getting very clever, you Barbarians. And I was dense. I thought our system was foolproof. Our man-woman method of identification couldn’t be faked, I thought, because you couldn’t imitate all the functions of a man. But I overlooked the possibility that it was far easier to make a fully functioning copy of a woman.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes and no. I deceived you, but not in the way you think. It wasn’t my fault your plan went wrong. Nobody has more reason than I—than us—for seeing your plan succeed.”

Deaf to her words and blind to the truth I squeezed the trigger. Kept my finger crooked until the magazine was empty and the thing was shredded. A shattered alien thing so well endowed with life that even the tattered fragments still twitched.

“You people,” said the voice at my back, “are immensely vain. Your vanity leads you into so many mistakes.”

The last time I had seen the old man he had carried an ancient shotgun and had watered at the eyes with fright. Now the eyes were dry and malicious. Carried death in them. Mine. The shotgun had been replaced by a glazer.

“You should have listened to that,” he said. He pointed to the mess on the floor. “It would have told you about your vanity. It would have laid bare your conceit that yours was the one and only world we had acquired.”

The threat of death doesn’t weaken curiosity. I asked: “She really was trying to help?”

“By replacing your real contact. The one we removed while you were still half a continent away. They are a race like yours. Sentimental and emotional. And they have the same stubbornness, the same foolish bent for trying to fight the inevitable.”

He fired at my feet. I fainted. I came to, swayed on the stumps of my legs where they formed a glutinous unity with the floor, and fainted again. Repeated the process four times before I could dig the Indian trick of detachment out of my memory.

The stuff that was me and vinyl plastic and concrete had solidified by this time.

And I was alone.

I am alone. I am alone and a long time dying.

He should have stayed. I would have talked. Through pain or through pride. Better he left. He’ll have to learn the hard way the things I could have told him. Only proves that conceit is universal. He thought killing me was the end of it.

Maybe it is. Certainly it is. For now. We failed. Miserably. Glad I didn’t talk. Didn’t tell him how we are. How I hope we still are.

Bending forward is impossible. Find, though, that if I take it slowly I can fold at the knees without too much agony. Trick will be to drop my hands behind me at the right moment. Mustn’t let my tibia off the vertical.

It won’t be soon. Too much organization required. But the day will come. Another day. Another time when another fanatic like me will try to trigger another weapon.

Passed out again. Didn’t get the hands quite right. One leg has snapped off at the stump. Bleeding. Must look like octogenarian lowering himself on the bedpan. Trying to get all my weight shifted to one hand. To get the other free.

Find it strange that only now, when it’s all over and all the pressure is off, I can think kindly of the human race. Verdict: pretty good. There’s a word ...

Mind hazy. Remember it now. Indomitable. That’s the word. Indomitable. Riddled with a thousand weaknesses. Yet indomitable.

Made it. Haunched and balanced on left hand. Three more inches and the right hand will reach the knife I dropped. A one-man final gesture. I was intended to die slowly. So it must be otherwise. If they can’t do a simple thing like that right then I have hopes. Great hopes. For tomorrow.