Earthworks (10 page)

Only as I flung myself under the vehicle, sprawling down between the two cogged tracks, did I realize that the fire came not from the vehicle itself but from the ship. My timing had not been as good, my haste not as speedy, as I had imagined. The four Angolese had climbed already on to the deck of the freighter and were sniping at me.

This, of course, came into my head in an instant. I knew it without looking round. Just as well I did not! Goaded on with fear, I grovelled behind the light tank, burrowing my way into the sand.

The shots attracted the alarm of the soldiers in the vehicle. The hatch slammed up, I heard an exclamation above me. At any moment, the Angolese would look down and see me.

In that fearful moment, I knew I was not a man of action — my nerve gave. I could not rise to meet him, to challenge my fate. I could only burrow spinelessly into the sand, awaiting the fatal shot.

It was then that the universe erupted.

First it was light, then sound, then a terrible heat that shrivelled my skin. I died then, or if I didn’t, I knew death. Consciousness was consumed in a great crimson inferno. When I crawled, minutes later, stunned and stifled, out of my self-dug pit, the tracked vehicle was burning; over the sea, rising high into the morning air, was an ugly pall of smoke, familiar in shape, the remains of a mighty fire ball. Of the
Trieste Star,
little was left but scattered wreckage up and down the beach. Of the New Angolese patrol, there was no sign.

The freighter’s nuclear heart had burst! Though by a freak it had saved me, I was now alone without provisions on the dreaded coast. I sank back into my pit of sand, trying to think, trying not to fear.

I lay in the pit of sand until the intolerable heat of the burning vehicle drove me out. By then, I thought, much of the radiation should have passed. The cloud of smoke that hung over the shore was drifting far out to sea on the breeze, and this I took as a good sign that danger was being carried away from me. But I was terribly ignorant of radiation hazard, and could only hope that, sheltered as I had been, I had escaped a lethal dose.

Now it seemed advisable to get away from this grim spot as soon as possible.

Accordingly, I rose and started along the beach at a steady jogtrot. I headed south, for it was in that direction that I had seen from the bridge of the
Trieste Star
a tower a little way down the coast.

Although the power of the sun was already strong, I had high hopes of finding the city and saving myself from death in the desert. In my mind I made an inventory of the things I had. But what had I but the clothes that now began to cling damply to me and, in my inner pocket, the bundle of those tantalizing letters from a woman called Justine to a man called Peter? Certainly I had no water or food. The inventory was so brief and depressing that I closed it, and concentrated on moving rapidly down the beach. It was another time for body above mind.

I paused when I saw a GEM speeding along the foreshore in my direction. The dramatic end of the
Trieste Star
must have been heard and registered fifty miles away, and would surely have attracted attention. I feared that this oncoming vehicle might contain a detachment of troops from New Angola; but even if they came from Waterberg State, which lay south of here, I knew they might very well be hostile. Although Africa was uneasily at peace with itself after a succession of civil wars, it was only the very strong President, Abdul el Mahasset, who kept the nations under him from warring again, as many of them had made war on South Africa some decades ago. It might be difficult for me to establish my peaceful intent after the firework display I had just provided on their doorstep.

So I stood on the beach, shading my eyes and watching the craft come near. It was a sledge-shaped hovercraft with a canvas hood which had been folded back, so that I could see the heads of the men inside. Everything was pearly clear in the sunlight.

The craft executed a showy half-circle, flinging up sand, and drew to a halt facing back the way it had come, sinking on to the beach as it did so. A tall black man in a colourful silk skull cap and long robes climbed out and walked over to me as I stood there uncertainly. I was relieved to see that neither he nor his companion, the driver, were in military uniform, though it gave me no great pleasure to see the automatic weapon he held in his hand. He kept it levelled at me as he came forward.

“Whoever you are, come with us,” he said.

“Wait a minute — who are you? Where are you going?”

He motioned with the gun.

“No time for talk or argument. We are going to Walvis Bay; you come with us quickly, before there is trouble.”

“What sort of trouble are you expecting?”

He shook his great grey head as if in reproach. “You want Angolese to get a hold of you, man? Do as I say and hurry up!”

On the whole, this did not sound as if they directed a deal of antagonism at me. I was, in any case, not in very good shape to argue. As I climbed up the steel ladder into the GEM, I glanced back down the beach to where the freighter had been. A figure was coming towards us, lifting a hand and waving as it came.

Hot though I was, chill came over me. That black face, surely I recognized it, surely it was the Figure? Even here on this parched strand, it seemed I could not shake off that phantom who pursued me. Then I saw it was Doctor Thunderpeck, and sighed with relief.

At the same time, the driver of the GEM muttered an exclamation and pointed. He pointed not at Thunderpeck but inland. A light tank was racing towards us, flying the flag of New Angola. At once the tall man pushed me into the craft, the driver revved the engine, and we lifted.

“My friend! Don’t leave my friend!” I shouted, grasping the tall man by the arm and pointing towards Thunderpeck.

The tall man, whose name I found later was Israt, spoke sharply to the driver. We wheeled again and scudded low over the beach towards Thunderpeck, showering grit as we went. I leant over the side of the cabin and extended an arm to him. Hovering, we stopped just long enough for him to swing himself up through the blast and noise of our air column; then we turned once more and headed in the direction from which the GEM had originally come.

The light tank showed every sign of hostile intent. It was ploughing forward at a great rate, heading for a point where its course would intersect ours. The strategy was obvious. If they could get underneath us and spill our air, we would crash. They were already doing their best to ensure this by directing a haser at us. Once, a burn slashed across our side, narrowly missing us; but with the combined speeds of the two vehicles and the bumpiness of the going, their aim with a thin-beamed heat weapon was not good.

They brought a loud-hailer into play.

“That vehicle! That vehicle! Halt before we destroy you! You are violating the El Mahasset Treaty! This is New Angola territory. Stop before we knock you out the air!”

We replied with another burst of speed. We were almost at the point where our tracks would intersect the other vehicle’s. Since our craft seemed to be a civilian machine, we had no weapons with which to defend ourselves. At the last moment, the driver swerved out to the right, skidding low over a bar of shingle, and bounced out to sea in a great sweep of spray.

As we plunged on, I looked back. The tank, unable to kill its speed in time, ploughed across the bar of shingle and plunged into the ocean. I cheered and turned to see how pleased Thunderpeck was. But Thunderpeck had collapsed.

For the first time, I wondered how he had survived the nuclear detonation and in what sort of shape he was. I had assumed he was immolated inside the burning tracked vehicle.

Israt passed me a vacuum flask with iced water in. Some of this I forced down Thunderpeck’s throat, afterwards taking a hearty swig myself. He revived then, partially at least, and explained what had happened inside the vehicle during those fateful moments when the freighter’s pile blew. When one of the Angolese soldiers climbed up to see what the shouting was about, the other tried to tie up the doctor and Abdul Demone.

Thunderpeck offered him some resistance, and the soldier knocked him down on to the floor. That action had been his saving. He had fallen under a table when the interior of the tank was suddenly filled with flame. He had covered his head to protect it from kicks but still saw the fire, even through closed eyes. He guessed at once what had happened, since only one thing could have caused such a wave of heat.

Shocked, he staggered up. Abdul and the soldier were still on their feet but already burning fiercely. The shock must have killed them stone-dead; of the other Angolese, there was no sign. The blast must have carried him out and spread him across miles of desert.

Half-stifled by the heat, and with his lungs afire, Thunderpeck managed to climb out of the turret and fling himself down on to the sand on the other side of the vehicle from me. Though the sand was burning, he managed to scoop himself a hole where he could lie covered until the particles with shorter half-lives had dispersed.

Before he had finished telling me this, we were approaching the town I came to know as Walvis Bay.

I will leave a description of this city until later. It is sufficient to record here that it was not built upon a platform, as were all the other cities of which I had ever heard, but stood direct on a stony promontory overlooking the sea. This was by no means its sole peculiarity, but when we first looked at it, we noticed only that it possessed a number of spires pointing to the sky, so that it presented a spiked outline against the desert; our cities have no spires and few high buildings.

The way to the city was barred by a slow-flowing yellow stream, the Swakop, which presented no obstacle to our GEM. On the far bank were set up barbed wire and sentry boxes and gun emplacements, and all the traditional equipment of a frontier; but when a signalman there waved a signal flag at us, we swerved to follow the river and entered Walvis Bay from the sea-front.

We had no time to admire the fantastic architectural effects, for it was now made apparent to us that although we had been rescued, we had also been captured. Thunderpeck and I had our wrists clipped together and were made to dismount from the GEM, which sank to a stop. We were marched across a wide promenade and into a towering white building.

“Where are we being taken?” I asked the tall black man. “I shall get orders from my superiors, and they will decide what will happen to you. It is useless to ask me questions.”

“Who are your superiors?”

“I told you, it is useless to ask questions.”

The building we had entered was no prison. It suggested rather a luxury hotel, though the luxury was as yet of a rather rudimentary kind. The foyer was equipped in extremely sumptuous taste, panelled with exotic woods, ceilinged with a three-dimensional representation of night sky, ornamented with magnificent plants and trees, many of them apparently growing from the floor. Yet the floor itself was of naked concrete, and that chiselled away in some parts to reveal cables running underneath. Carpenters’ trestles obstructed our way, insulation panels were piled against a wall mosaic. The stairs were sumptuously carpeted, although the decorators’ ladders lying there against the balustrade ruined the effect aimed for.

Some men, three of them, sat smoking and leaning against ornamental pillars as we went by; they paid no attention to us. We were led up to the first floor, and there separated. Thunderpeck was thrust through one door. I through another. The man who had picked us up in the desert came into my room with me.

He ran his hands — with obvious distaste — through my clothes, taking out anything he found in my pockets and throwing it into a bag he placed on a side table. Helplessly, I watched those strange letters from the unknown Justine being thrown into the bag.

When the fellow had skinned me of everything, he nodded solemnly to me.

“Behave yourself here for a little while; I shall be back.” And with that he took up the bag and left me. I heard the door lock behind him.

I was in a sort of washroom which had another door to it. Before I tried to investigate that — I was sure I would find it locked — I staggered over to the wash-basin and turned on the cold tap, for I was faint from the ordeal of the day. A trickle of rust ran from the tap, then nothing. I tried the other tap, the hot one; nothing came. Dust lay in the basin.

Suddenly overcome by nausea, I sat back on the little table and closed my eyes. At once the world seemed to recede from me at a great rate. In alarm, I tried to open my eyes again. The lids had taken on an immense weight. Through the lashes, as a man through bars sees his executioner, I saw the Figure approaching. I could do nothing.

He came from a long way off, his damned eye on me. That black countenance — why should it have the power to paralyse my soul? The Figure came to me, stood against me, and released me from the metal clip that held my wrists together. Then again the world receded, for how long I could not tell. When I roused once more, a beautiful and fatal woman was regarding me.

Chapter Seven

Immensity. That is part of my illusion; I struggle to express it in words. Even for the short while I jog-trotted between desert and sea, running for the promised shelter of a city, I was aware of the being of the desert and the sea. I knew that on a planetary scale those two great creations were heaving with an activity meaningless to man.