Empire State (26 page)

  "He was supposed to call earlier this morning, but he didn't, and he's not answering at home," said McKee. "Can you send someone downtown to run a message for me?"

  Max nodded sharply. "Certainly, Mr McKee. In fact, he's due in chambers in..." He looked at his watch with a flourish. He wanted McKee to know he was now running late and that he had an awful lot to do before Joe arrived and it was all his fault. Not that McKee would realise, or if he did, he'd never show it.

  "... Right about now, actually." Max raised an eyebrow at McKee, who sat there with that blank expression on his face, mouth slightly open, eyes almost unfocussed. How men like him got into offices like this he really had no idea on Earth.

  Finally McKee seemed to snap out of it, nodded, and waved the clerk away. Max gulped again, but McKee was already looking at some papers. All Max could see was his superior's greased crown.

  "Thank you, sir. I'll make sure to tell Judge Crater to call his office."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 
 

WARM RED LIGHT. Shapes swam, crescents and arches and semicircles. They darted around his vision, the movements jerky. The red light pulsed, each change a physical vibration. It felt like someone trying to pull his eyes out with icy fingers.

  Rad snapped them open, and lifted his neck, then let his head fall back with a yell.

  Those bastards were torturing him. Drilling into his head while he was awake.
Psychopaths!
Rad yelled again, raining abuse on his captors, but his tongue was numb and it was just a sound, an animal moan.

  He stopped, and the buzzing in his head died down, to be replaced by the characteristic pound of a killer headache. Rad bit into his numb tongue and rolled his head left and right, feeling a cold, sticky leather cushion underneath his skull.

  He looked at the ceiling. White, brown, red, bright, dark. Nothing. It was a ceiling in a room, nothing more. There were lights. There were also shadows and black shapes. Two people, occasionally leaning over his face, occasionally standing next to whatever it was he was lying on. Talking to each other, passing instruments of torture over his body. Rad shouted again, perhaps clearer this time, but then the buzzing started. His eyes felt like they would burst like rotten grapes.

  Then hands on his head. More than one, more than a pair. One set of fingertips were cold, and pressed into his scalp painfully. They pulled his head and held it, and the more Rad tried to shake them off, the harder they gripped. A second pair, warm and soft, moved over his face and then the back of his head. They tugged, lifting Rad's head from the surface. Then something else: cold and frightening, pressing, slicing into the thick skin of his scalp. Rad shouted again, but a big deep shadow blocked his vision. Abstract shapes appeared in the darkness, two windows of light, and something enclosed his chin and stuck to the sweat of his forehead.

  Rad gasped for air, and the buzzing stopped, and the headache faded. His tongue regained life, and he licked his lips. His eyes throbbed and his ears were filled with the sound of a sea that he had never seen. He took another breath. He tasted rubber and something else, something chemical, hot and spiced.

  He blinked, and looked at the two people standing over him, through the goggles of the mask he was now wearing. He raised his head, and found nothing to stop him. He tried his hands, flexing his fingers, then moved his arms. They felt heavy, but there was no pain, no impediment to the motion. His hands found his face, and moved across leather, rubber and plastic. There was something heavy pulling on the mask from the front. Rad couldn't see it, but he could feel it. Connected to the mask, over the mouth, was a short corrugated tube, leading to a large cylinder, the size and shape of a soup can.

  The two men standing over him were not masked. They wore blue pinstripe suits of an odd cut, and had short hair, shaved at the sides, longer on top. One was thickset with a bullet-shaped head and hardly any neck at all. The other was thinner, with a long face ending in a chin a mother could only call "disappointing". Both had very faint red and white marks on their faces, and the chinless wonder's hair, longer than his colleague's ugly crew cut, probably parted quite neatly most of the time, was askew and stood up a little in random bunches. Bullethead frowned; Chinless smiled. Rad wasn't sure which expression made him feel better.

  "Mr Bradley," said a voice – one which didn't come from either of the two goons, but from somewhere near Rad's feet. He raised himself up on his elbow, wincing as the bottom of the mask cut into the flab of his neck. Another man walked closer, moving to the left and stopping next to Bullethead. He leaned in, too close, peering at Rad through the mask goggles like he was some kind of specimen. It crossed Rad's mind that perhaps he was as he gasped for breath, pulling air through the mask's soup can for everything he was worth.

  The third man was old (but he couldn't be old because it was the year Nineteen), and his accent was foreign (but it couldn't be foreign because there was nowhere else apart from the Empire State). A thick shock of white hair, properly combed. Moustache, also white, also thick, trimmed in perfect symmetry over a small mouth. The clothes were the same too, belted jacket, somehow out of place, with epaulets and silver buttons. The third man laughed at some triumph. The sound was high, short, and sharp; a staccato exclamation. After it came the smile, showing teeth straight but yellow and grey with age.

  Rad felt his heart settle. "Captain Carson! What's going on?"

  But the third man shook his head, the smile plastered on his features. "No, my dear chap, my name is Nimrod.

  "Welcome to New York City."

 

 
 

 
 

NIMROD STROKED HIS MOUSTACHE. Rad had a great deal of trouble thinking of him as anyone other than Captain Carson. He was identical. The voice with strange clipped accent. The smile. The way his eyes shrank to slits when he smiled. The same grey and yellow patina across his front teeth. Identical, like Rad was identical to Sam Saturn's killer. That didn't make him feel any better.

  Rad sucked in another breath. The mask was comfortable enough, sure, although the way the heavy filter pulled out and down was annoying. He could feel the rubberised edge of the mask stuck all around his face, forming a tight seal. The goggles misted just slightly, but it was no problem. He could still see fine.

  It was the breathing that was the problem. If he sat still, and didn't speak, he could pull air into his lungs, and push air out. He could breathe, but it was a conscious effort. He had to take over the manual controls from his brain stem, and move the muscles of his ribcage himself. It was tiring, and somewhere in the back of his mind the seed of panic was sown. It was the same spark that entered the mind of someone being strangled, or drowned. People with asthma had it bad, Rad suspected. They'd get that spark every time they had an attack.

  It was worse when he spoke. He had to time his breaths with his words, which resulted in strange pauses and broken sentences. He remembered his first encounter with the masks in the alley. The two goons – who now stood in the office, picking their nails and choosing their cigarettes with the greatest of ease – had not only moved with agility, they'd sucker-punched him good and proper, and had still been able to hold a conversation. Well, one of them had. Rad glanced at Chinless on his left and Bullethead on his right, trying to remember the voice and match it to the face. The man who had applied his fists to Rad's face and asked the questions had been the heavy man with no neck – Bullethead – while his friend had stood back and not done much at all – Chinless here, who Rad remembered the Bullethead had called Grieves when the Skyguard had dropped on him. Rad looked at their faces and thought he preferred them with their masks on.

  Another breath. In, out. The intake felt like sucking on elastic, as if the rubbery air was resisting and would snap back into the soup can if Rad let up the pressure. Breathing out made the goggles mist, momentarily, and his eyes hurt as the pressure inside the mask increased, the foreign air, absolutely, positively refusing to be pushed back out into the atmosphere through the respirator.

  Rad figured he'd get used to it. Perhaps it was a case of learning the rhythms of the mask. He imagined they would become second nature after a while. He didn't know how long that would take. He didn't want to find out either. He needed to get back to the Empire State.

  Chinless lit a cigarette, wreathing his face in smoke. He put the cigarette to his lips, then pulled it away, holding it in midair while transferring thick grey smoke from his mouth to his nose. It wasn't particularly classy, but Rad was fascinated. The Prohibition in the Empire State covered tobacco as well as alcohol. While the latter was easy enough to distil and sell in places like Jerry's speakeasy, tobacco was another matter. Rad was then very glad of the mask. Before Wartime he'd been a chain smoker. Safe in his little rubber and glass universe, not a single whiff of the rich smoke was available to him. Then the thought occurred to him that maybe there was no "before Wartime" and that maybe he'd never smoked in his life, that the tingle in his nose the sight of the smoke produced – and the sharp craving that followed it – was another element of his life "reflected" from his New York City original.

  "I apologise for the way my agents Mr Grieves and Mr Jones here were forced to manhandle you, Mr Bradley, but I felt it was really time for us to meet." Nimrod vaguely indicated the two goons as he spoke. Rad glanced at them again but neither seemed particularly interested in the conversation.

  Rad shifted in his wooden chair, then regretted the motion as he struggled to pull a proper, full breath. He wasn't restrained at all, which was a pleasant feeling, even though he knew he wouldn't make it to the door without getting dizzy. They knew it too. That was why he wasn't restrained to the chair. He was restrained by the mask.

  Rad managed, "They're making a...
(breath)
... habit of it. A bad habit
(breath)
."

  Nimrod laughed, and clapped his hands. At this sign of humour from their boss, Chinless Grieves and Bullethead Jones smirked.

  "My point being, Mr Bradley, that I was most displeased you failed to make our previous appointment. Getting in touch with you in the Empire State requires considerable organisation and expense. Travelling to the Empire State, even more so." Nimrod leaned over his desk on his elbows. The desk was covered with papers, in stacks, in file folders, in loose sheaves covering the blotter. The paper crinkled under his elbows.

  "You have cost me a lot of time, and a lot of money." Nimrod paused, then sat back and folded his arms. "There is a lot riding on this. We can't let one unreliable factor ruin our plans. There is too much at stake."

  "That so?"

  Nimrod nodded in exactly the same way that Carson would nod. Rad's eyes flicked to some pictures on the wall behind Nimrod's head. A certificate or diploma, with a bright red seal. Something else that was also text, too small to read from his chair. But three pictures, sepia photographs, showing the impossible landscapes in white. Carson – no,
Nimrod
– as a young man; the airship; the companion with blond hair. Rad frowned.

  If Nimrod could see Rad's eyes roving behind the mask goggles, he gave no indication.

  "That is so, Mr Bradley. I'm not sure you are taking this seriously."

  A hard-won intake of oxygen. "Oh, the end of the world seems pretty serious to me." And another. "That's what you said on the phone anyway."

  Nimrod nodded.

  "How did you call me, anyway?"

  "We have the Fissure tapped for a variety of purposes. Communication is one. Monitoring and observation is another."

  Rad nodded. "Carson explained the Fissure. A tear in the world, he called it. So, it allows travel too?"

  "Yes," said Nimrod. "Although the two realms are not entirely... compatible, shall we say. The environment in each rejects material from its opposite." With one arm still folded, he pointed at Rad's face with the other hand. "The mask helps. The environment is not
lethally
toxic, but it is exceedingly uncomfortable."

  As if to prove his point, Nimrod stopped speaking and the office was filled with the sounds of Rad's heavy, slow breaths coming through the respirator. Nimrod smiled. "You'll get used to it. You
acclimatise
."

  "So you pulled me through the... Fissure?"

  Nimrod's mouth turned upside down. "Not through the Fissure itself, but using its power. The Fissure is a single, physical location, but its influence spreads out across the whole city. A 'field' of sorts. If you can detect the field,
measure
it, you can tap it as a power source and use it for all sorts of things. You can even use that power to cross from
here
to
there
, using mirrors and reflections. Fascinating really, quite a trick. But physical transfer between the Origin and the Pocket is even more expensive than a telephone conversation. I'm going to have the department accountants on my back for this one, eh?"

  Grieves and Jones sniggered. Grieves puffed his cigarette and said something back to Nimrod, although Rad couldn't catch it. Nimrod exploded with laughter, slapping the top of his desk.

  "So if you're Nimrod, who's Captain Carson?"

  Nimrod's laughter died. "I was hoping you could tell me. I am Captain Nimrod."