A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (148 page)

 

 

 

 

S
o what's the plan?” asked Bowden as we drove towards the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. It was about ten in the morning, and we were traveling in Bowden's Welsh-built Griffin Sportina with Millon de Floss and Stig in the backseat. Behind us was a convoy of ten lorries, all loaded with banned Danish books.

“Well,” I said, “ever thought it odd that parliament just rolls over and does anything that Kaine asks?”

“I've given up with even
trying
to understand parliament,” said Bowden.

“They're all sniveling toadies,” put in Millon.

“If you even
need
a government,” added Stig, “you are a life-form flawed beyond redemption.”

“I was confused, too,” I continued. “A government wholly agreeable to the worst excesses of Kaine could mean only one thing: some form of short-range mind control wielded by unscrupulous power brokers.”

“Now, that's
my
kind of theory!” exclaimed Millon excitedly.

“I couldn't figure it out at first, but then when I was up at Goliathopolis, I felt it myself. A sort of mind-numbing go-with-the-flow feeling, where I just wanted to follow the path of least resistance, no matter how pointless or wrong. I had seen its effect at the
Evade the Question
TV show, too—the front row was eating out of Kaine's hand, no matter what he said.”

“So what's the connection?”

“I felt it again in Mycroft's lab. It was only when Landen made a sarcastic comment that it twigged. The Ovinator. We all thought the ‘ovi' part of it was to do with eggs, but it's not. Think ‘ovine.' It's to do with
sheep.
The Ovinator transmits subalpha brain waves that inhibit free will and instill sheeplike tendencies into the minds of anyone close by. It can be tuned to the user so he is unaffected; it's possible that Goliath might have developed a long-range version called the Ovitron and an antiserum. Mycroft thinks he probably invented it to transmit public health messages, but he can't remember. Goliath gets hold of it, Stricknene gives it to Kaine—bingo. Parliament does everything Kaine asks. The only reason Formby is still anti-Yorrick is because he refuses to go anywhere near him.”

There was silence in the car.

“What can we do about it?”

“Mycroft's working on an Ovi-negator that should cancel it out, but our plans carry on as before. The Elan—and win the SuperHoop.”

“Even I'm finding this hard to believe,” murmured Millon, “and that's a first for me.”

“How does it get us out of England?” asked Bowden.

I patted the briefcase that was sitting on my lap. “With the Ovinator on our side, no one will want to oppose us.”

“I'm not sure that's morally acceptable,” said Bowden. “I mean, doesn't that make us as bad as Kaine?”

“I think we should stop and talk this through,” added Millon. “It's one thing making up stories about mind-control experiments but quite another actually
using
them.”

I opened the briefcase and switched the Ovinator on.

“Who's with me to go to the Elan, guys?”

“Well, all right then,” conceded Bowden, “I guess I'm with you on this.”

“Millon?”

“I'll do whatever Bowden does.”

“It really does work, doesn't it?” observed Stig, giving a short, snorty cough. I chuckled slightly myself, too.

 

Getting through the English checkpoint at Clifford was even easier than I had imagined. I went ahead with the Ovinator in my briefcase and stood for some time at the border station, chatting to the duty guard and giving him and the small garrison a good soaking with Ovinator rays for half an hour before Bowden drove up with the ten trucks behind him.

“What's in those trucks?” asked the guard with a certain degree of torpidity in his voice.

“You don't need to look in the trucks,” I told him.

“We don't need to look in the trucks,” echoed the border guard.

“We can go through unimpeded.”

“You can go through unimpeded.”

“You're going to be nicer to your girlfriend.”

“I'm
definitely
going to be nicer to my girlfriend. . . . Move along.”

He waved us through, and we drove across the demilitarized zone to the Welsh border guards who called their colonel as soon as we explained that we had ten truckloads of Danish books that required safekeeping. There was a long and convoluted phone call with someone from the Danish consulate, and after about an hour, we and the trucks were escorted to a disused hangar at the Llan-drindod Wells airfield park. The colonel in charge offered us free passage back to the border, but I switched on the Ovinator again and told him that he could take the truck drivers back but to let us go on our way, a plan that he quickly decided was probably the best thing.

Ten minutes later we were on the road north towards the Elan, Millon directing us all the way according to a 1950s tourist map. By the time we were past Rhayder, the countryside became more rugged and the farms less and less frequent and the road more and more potholed until, as the sun reached its zenith and started its downward track, we arrived at a tall set of gates, strung liberally with rusty barbed wire. There was an old stone-built guardhouse with two very bored guards who needed only a short burst from the Ovinator to switch off the electrified fence, allowing us to pass. Bowden drove the car through and stopped at another internal fence twenty yards inside the first. This was unelectrified, and I pushed it open to let the car pass.

The road was in worse repair on the Area 21 side of the gates. Tussocky grass was growing from the cracks in the concrete roadway, and on occasion trees that had fallen across the road impeded our progress.

“Now can you tell me what we're doing here?” asked Millon, staring intently out the window and taking frequent photographs.

“Two reasons,” I said, looking at the map that Millon had obtained from his conspiracy buddies. “First, because we think someone's been cloning Shakespeares and I need one as a matter of some urgency, and second, to find vital reproductive information for Stig.”

“So it's true you can't have children?”

Stig liked Millon because he asked such direct questions.

“It is true,” he replied simply, loading up his dart gun with tranqs the size of Havana cigars.

“Take a left here, Bowd.”

He changed gear, pulled the wheel around, and we entered a stretch of road with dark woodland on either side. We drove up a hill, took a left-hand turn past an outcrop of rock, then stopped. There was a rusty car upside down on the road in front of us, blocking the way.

“Stay in the car, keep it running,” I said to Bowden. “Millon, stay put. Stig—with me.”

Stig and I climbed out of the car and cautiously approached the upturned vehicle. It was a custom-made Studebaker, probably about ten years old. I peered in. Vandals never came here. The glass in the speedometer was unbroken, the rusty keys still in the ignition, the leather from the seats hanging in rotten strands. There was a sun-bleached briefcase lying on the ground, and it was full of water-related technical stuff, now all mushy and faded by the wind and rain. Of the occupants there was no sign. I had thought Millon was overcooking it with all his “chimeras running wild” stuff, but suddenly I felt nervous.

“Miss Next!”

It was Stig. He was about ten yards ahead of the car and was squatting down, rifle across his knees. I walked slowly up to him, looking anxiously into the deep woodland on either side of the road. It was quiet. Rather
too
quiet. The sound of my own footfalls felt deafening.

“What's up?”

He pointed to the ground. There was a human ulna lying on the road. Whoever had been in this accident, one of them never left.

“Hear that?” asked Stig.

I listened. “No.”

“Exactly. No noise at all. We think it advisable to leave.”

We pivoted the car on its roof to give us room to pass and drove on, this time much slower, and in silence. There were three other cars on that stretch of road, two on their sides and one pushed into the verge. None of them had the least sign of the occupants, and the woods to either side seemed somehow even darker and deeper and more impenetrable as we drove past. I was glad when we reached the top of the hill, cleared the forest and drove down past a small dam and a lake before a rise in the road brought us within sight of the old Goliath BioEngineering labs. I asked Bowden to stop. He pulled up silently, and we all got out to observe the old factory through binoculars.

It was in a glorious location, right on the edge of the reservoir. But from what we had been led to expect from Millon's hyperactive imagination and a tatty photograph taken in its heyday, it was something of a disappointment. The plant had once been a vast, sprawling complex, built in the art deco style popular for factories in the thirties, but now it looked as though a hurried and not entirely successful effort had been made to demolish it a long time ago. Although much of the building had been destroyed or collapsed, the east wing looked as though it had survived relatively unscathed. Even so, it didn't appear that anyone had been there for years, if not decades.

“What was that?” said Millon.

“What was what?”

“A sort of
yummy
noise.”

“Hopefully just the wind. Let's have a closer look at the plant.” We motored down the hill and parked in front of the building. The front facade was still imposing, though half collapsed, and even retained much of the ceramic tile exterior and decoration. Clearly Goliath had great things planned for this place. We picked our way amongst the rubble that lay strewn across the steps and approached the main doors. They had both been pushed off their hinges, and one of them had large gouge marks, something that Millon was most interested in. I stepped inside. Broken furniture and fallen masonry lay everywhere in the oval lobby. The once fine suspended glass ceiling had long since collapsed, bringing natural light to an otherwise gloomy interior. The glass squeaked and cracked as we stepped across it.

“Where are the main labs?” I asked, not wanting to be here a minute longer than I had to.

Millon unfolded a blueprint.

“Where do you get all this stuff?” asked Bowden incredulously.

“I swapped it for a Cairngorm yeti's foot,” he replied, as though talking about bubble-gum cards. “It's this way.”

We walked through the building, amongst more fallen masonry and partially collapsed ceilings towards the relatively undamaged east wing. The roof was more intact here, and our torches flicked into offices and incubating rooms where rows upon rows of abandoned glass amniojars were lined up against the wall. In many of them, the liquefied remnant of a potential life-form had pooled in the bottom. Goliath had left in a hurry.

“What was this place?” I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper.

“This was,” muttered Millon, consulting his blueprint, “the main saber-toothed tiger manufacturing facility. The neanderthal wing should be through there and the first on the left.”

The door was locked and bolted, but it was dry and rotten, and it didn't take much to force it open. There were papers scattered everywhere, and a halfhearted attempt had been made to destroy them. We stopped at the doorway and let Stiggins walk in alone. The room was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It was similar to the tiger facility next door, but the amniojars were larger. The glass nutrient pipes were still in evidence, and I shivered. To me the room was undeniably creepy, but to Stig it was his first home. He, along with many thousands of his fellow extinctees, had been grown here. I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg. Birds and reptiles were one thing, umbilical cultivation of mammals quite another. Stig trod carefully amongst the twisted pipes and broken glass to a far door and found the decanting room, where the infant neanderthals were taken out of their amniojars and breathed for the first time. Beyond this the nursery, where the young had been brought up. We followed Stig through, and he stood at the large window that overlooked the reservoir.

“When we dream, it is of this,” he said quietly. Then, obviously feeling that he was wasting time, he strode back to the incubating room and started rummaging in filing cabinets and desk drawers. I told him we'd meet him outside and rejoined Millon, who was trying to make sense of his floor plan.

After walking in silence through several more rooms with even more ranks of amniojars, we arrived at a steel-gated secure area. The gate was open, and we stepped through, entering what had once been the most secret area of the entire plant.

A dozen or more paces farther on, the corridor led into a large hall, and we knew we had found what we had been looking for. Built within the large room was a full-scale copy of the Globe Theatre. The stage and groundling area were strewn with torn-out pages of Shakespeare's plays, heavily annotated in black ink. In a room leading off, we found a dormitory that might have contained two hundred beds. All the bedding was upended in a corner, the bedsteads broken and lying askew.

“How many do you think went through here?” asked Bowden in a whisper.

“Hundreds and hundreds,” replied Millon, holding up a battered copy of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
with the name “Shaxpreke, W, 769” written on the inside front cover. He shook his head sadly.

“What happened to them all?”

“Dead,” said a voice, “dead as a ducat!”