Time story v1 0, p.1
Time Story (v1.0), page 1
24-03-2023
TIME STORY
Time Story
Stuart Gordon
NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY
times mirror
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
To My Parents
And Also…
Not Forgetting,
The Fungoid Being…
An NEL original
© by Stuart Gordon. 1971
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FIRST NEL PAPERBACK EDITION JUNE 1972
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Conditions of sale: This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it i s published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
NEL Books are published by
New English Library Limited from Barnard’s inn, Holborn, London, E.C.l.
Made and printed in Great Britain by Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd,, Aylesbury, Bucks.
45001143 7
1
WIPEOUT!
The hunted man’s streaking towards the trap.
He knows he’s going to pay for his crime.
Afraid, he knows he might already have done so, fearing, he probes his mind for the craters that WIPEOUT might already have left.
The motorway throbs beneath his new model ’96 cruiser. Above it, the arclights throw great yellow fans across the vaulted night.
While the passage of his flight is tracked by twin columns of radar eyes which unwind at twenty metre intervals on either shoulder.
What did they do to Arkrod?
But he knows the answer. And it’s no consolation to him.
Because they might have done it to him as well.
Even if not, he knows they have him plastered with electronic fixes. He knows the big black Highway Control cruisers are roosting in the blackness at the end of the motorway.
He knows they’ve been alerted, they lurk at every exit.
Occasionally a copter checks out his insane progress, droning invisibly beyond the tunnel of light. He’s driving like a madman on MANUAL, flashing narrowly past lumbering commercial behemoths and dinosaurs. They’re all on AUTOMATIC, impelled and directed by Highway Control’s Central Transmitter in Hendon. That’s where the radar eyes are screening their information about the fugitive. This is another thing he knows, and that’s why he drives like a crazed man.
Desperately trying to maintain the illusion of self-control.
Trying to thrust away the thought that it’s all a WIPED OUT fantasy. Either way, WIPEOUT’s what he’s headed for.
The judge can deliver no other verdict.
Not given the spirit of the times.
Kitson’s friends thought he’d gone crazy.
‘You dream too many fantasies!’ said Jake Tyler, ‘Moon-gems!’
‘Yeah, they’ll shrivel up your mind,’ Andre interrupted. ‘You gotta protect yourself if you wanna nick Moongems. They burn out the neurons!’
‘Aw, his are already burned out.’ And Jake Tyler shook his head.
Kitson got impatient then. Sketched future intention in the yellow smoky air with one fingertip. His hands were delicate.
‘I’ve got it all worked out,’ he insisted.
And the two guys just looked at him and shrugged.
‘You remember the fellow who robbed the data bank in Hemel Hempstead?’ Kitson demanded, ’they never busted him!*
’That was an organised scene, man,’ said Jake Tyler.
‘Jake’s not saying you ain’t pro, Kitson!’ Andre was quick.
Kitson had known then he ought to be worried. But he was committed. He’d planned this for months. ‘You think I won’t make it!’ he snapped, aggressive, almost sulky. ‘I’ve got it planned…’
‘So have the cops,’ said Jake. ‘Stick to account frauds, man.’ But his curiosity was kindled. ‘How’re you going to get rid of these things without anything showing up on your Giraccount?’ He shook his head. ‘You nick those, it’ll dent somebody’s economy. They only dug up a handful of the things. Are you planning to bust into the Institute?’
‘I know a guy,’ was all Kitson said.
‘A programmer?…listen, these people get their heads probed about once every fortnight in case they’ve been corrupted in the meantime!’
’Those guys get turned into walking zombies!’ interjected Andre. ’Establishment doesn’t dare have ’em any other way.’
The basement room was hot.
’This fellow works in the Institute,’ Kitson said. ‘He’s got an exemption.’
‘Blackmailing him?’ demanded Jake Tyler, half-rising.
Kitson was blank, so Jake shrugged and sat back in the comer.
‘You should think about it some more,’ he said. ‘I hate seeing,you commit suicide like this.’ He was emphatic. He liked Kitson, even if the guy was an arrogant and romantic reactionary. ‘WIPEOUT’S lurking at the end of penal psychiatry for people like us’
Kitson’s confidence was almost a magnificent fabrication.
‘I’m not headed there,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working on it. Got the Cook’s Lunar Tour booked, yeah, it’s all in there!’ And he tapped his head complacently.
But Jake Tyler knew how to bring him down.
’For a start, man,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t be gabbling like that. You have no real means of knowing who I am - or anybody else, for that matter. You should wake up - fast!’
Underneath his mask Kitson was wide awake.
And scared. But he had no option.
Not the way he’d been working out his life.
His right hand is white, tight upon the steering bar.
His left adjusts the infra-red night glasses, they lie crookedly across the bridge of his high, thin nose. Beneath, his grey eyes lie deep and tense. Centre-parted black hair is tangled past his ears. Possibly, the silhouetted cast of his chin suggests stubbornness, perhaps there is something evasive in his forehead.
His left hand reaches for the can of fruit juice propped against the passenger seat. His eyes flash danger signals! He slides his right fingers along the impact-sensitive steering bar, a collision with the Tyneside-bound sausage freighter is narrowly averted.
Momentarily able to breathe, he tilts the can against his thin lips. Just a little left. He empties it.
The touch-responsive ad on the plastican label fluoresces, a thin voice squeaks:
Sorry, customer, but you’ve drained me dry …
The fluorescing features of the Vitamin Cee Kid grin cutely -
.…so why don’t you just stud out an Order to Friends Of The Vitamin Cee Kid Co Limited… . ? the Kid lisps entrancingly.
Kitson hurls the can to the floor.
His mind is sick with strain.
The registered speed on the column is 170 kph.
He searches the blackness either side, seeking for some unorthodox exit point, an old sideroad still connected with this concrete tentacle. But not many of them are still operated.
And always hovering in his brain, the thought:
What if this is just a WIPED OUT fantasy.…?
His left foot slides over to touch the black bag.
There are fifteen Moongems in that bag.
Their harsh radiations muted.
The cause of the pursuit.
So, it was the perfect plan all right.
The Classified maps he’d obtained of the underground systems beneath the Institute were right on. He worked on schedules plotting the movement of Institute employees for months.
And tonight, everything went like a dream trip….
The dream trip of a WIPED OUT man.…?
Until -
He almost kept his rendezvous with Arkrod. He was an idiot to trust that weak man. He was fooled by the strength of his desire to do this one really big job. For the Institute’s Master Programmer was enslaved by the enforced secrecy of his pleasures which were condemned by a scared, militantly moral society. Was enslaved, thinks Kitson, noting with alarm that the cruiser batteries are very low, they won’t have left him with any problems now. Christ, 1 was a fool to think they didn’t know.…!
At any rate, whoever the guy that was waiting for him was, he wasn’t Arkrod. Peering through the small alleyway window into the dimness of the restaurant, Kitson sussed him out for a Protector.
The man’s silhouette was cadaverous and hangdog like Arkrod’s, old at thirty, but he was too still. Kitson knew Arkrod well enough to know the programmer would be tapping or jiggling, doing something to ease his tension.
They must have picked him up in the Institute. On the sly, no questions asked. If anyone asks, he resigned, or got transferred …
Brainprobing would have done the rest. The ‘Mind-leeches’ were still officially illegal, but the law was coming in next year.
Kitson didn’t quite panic. His life since he lost his sculpting grant had been rough enough round the edges so he knew the score.
He left the vicinity of the restaurant very quickly.
And only just spotted in time the cruiser idling behind tattered ad hoardings. The turret observer was lighting a cigarette, silhouetted against the sulphurou
He reached his cruiser. Thank God the net wasn’t that tight!
Almost let himself wonder if he might have the time to clear the mouldering city and get to the apartment he rents in a country megablock. Lately, he’s not been lacking for the stuff that makes a Giraccount computer whirr.
He fled for the northbound motorway, passing under the very eye of the Highway Control Centre. They must have swooped at the toll-tunnel only seconds after the computer allotted him a channel.
He swerves round a long shuttle of convoying oil balloons, past the ugly-snouted security wagons guarding the convoy. His mind is working furiously, he’s seen no way off this cursed automatic concrete snake. And looming larger in his mind all the time is the fear that already he inhabits a WIPED OUT fantasy.
He knows little of the theory or the operation of this device beyond what has been darkly hinted by the clandestine underground press, always on the run…But already people have seen the WIPED OUT that some guy working in a psychiatric ward let out on to the streets to show people what was happening.…
There was the news film which blew up into a major political row. Footage of the WIPED OUT, shambling and unseeing of the twentieth century, the operation of their pineal glands delicately adjusted.
He must get off the motorway!
Kitson chases useless thoughts from his brain. The light outside is a hollow yellow. He must get away from this! Abandon the cruiser, strike across country to the apartment! There they call him Denzil Amiss, he managed to deceive the face- finger- and voiceprint identification process which had to precede the lease.
Angrily he pulls the cruiser into the fast central lane, juggling his fate, he knows he should be on the outside. But - WIPED OUT! He’s deeply sure he must be. The near certainty into which he has built the suspicion undermines his volition, his independence, his desire to fight free, lie low, tape the fictitious Emergency Will of Denzil Amiss, hide the Moongems in their sheathing, and take a fifty-year Twilight Journey at the clinic -
So they’ll bring Denzil Amiss back to consciousness in 2046, into a brave new world with plenty of opportunities for a bom opportunist.
A beautiful fantasy.
But there’s a crashing roar above his head, he jerks his head up, the copter seems almost to settle upon the transparent perspex of the cruiser’s roof, a monstrous shining insect caught in the arclit glare.
The cruiser swerves, nips at the gargantuan bows of a slowcoach carrying two hundred tranked passengers up from London, the copter lifts away, Kitson furiously fights for control, shaken, pulling away from the AUTOMATIC slowcoach.
He’s just three kilometres from the turnoff route to his country megablock apartment, no chance, he’s getting very tired, the cruiser is slowly losing power, the tension is burning up his head.
To his right -
‘What’s that…?’
Somebody flashing a…
No, it’s a road.…!
‘A bloody road!’ he screams through the perspex at the lowering airblown lip of a sliding hovercruiser, glimpsing the puppet-like jerks of the horrified passengers roused from their motorway stupor.
He pulls his cruiser straight for the low white crash barrier, juggling again, everything starts to happen in slow motion, the arclights glare on the whiteness, the nearest radar eyes swivel frantically on their rustproof stalks, the cruiser smashes through, alarm lights flash red in maintenance depots up and down the motorway.
The cruiser leaps and half-turns like a frightened animal, it screams with protest, Kitson is momentarily helpless, the magnetic clamps hold him tightly in their invisible harness, the cruiser strikes the grassless downgrade, slews and slides down the shale. . .
Frantically Kitson snaps the harness, overrides the AUTOMATIC cut-in as the cruiser threatens to topple into the black well of the sad discontinued sideroad. The stabilisers whine, fibre body buckles, perspex starts to crinkle, Kitson brings the cruiser down square and bouncing into the high leafy narrowness of the lane, like he’s shooting a severe ski-rapids.
No lights, and he doesn’t dare to use his own.
He cuts speed just in time for the first corner, dimly-glimpsed.
But his glasses give him just the edge he needs. And this country is wooded, even better, an indifferent agricultural policy leaves it sparsely peopled. Farmers are fighting their last stand, it seems.
Ten kilometres to the apartment. The road goes in the right direction. He’s hardly covered a kilometre before the buzz warns him. He throws the cruiser into a sharp skid for the cover of the roadside trees from the far side of which the copter approaches.
The copter dead-centres above his tree.
Kitson holds his breath. It stays there for a long time.
Why not ditch it here?
But the argument in favour of swift progress seems irresistible.
When he can no longer hear the buzz he backs out, moves on…
Coming to a crossroads, he takes the northern fork.
To his left the motorway curves in arclit grandeur to the darkness of the western horizon. Behind, headlights sweep the darkness from the road he’s just vacated. He pulls beneath a hedge and waits.
Another helicopter crabs past low overhead.
It’s a miracle they haven’t already pulled him in…
WIPEOUT fantasy-type miracle?
He rejects the inner whisper angrily, eases the cruiser into cautious forward motion, driving for the dark blur of the next belt of trees. Many of them are elms, dead with blight. He turns off the road, runs the cruiser deep into the darkness, gets stopped by a tree trunk. He’s maybe twenty-five metres in. enough to evade immediate discovery of the cruiser. Above, the foliage is dense. Leaving the cruiser, taking the black bag, he removes his ID papers and pockets the unlicensed needleray.
He hopes he doesn’t have to use it.
There’s a torch stuffed in a pocket of his denim jacket, he leaves it there and thrusts blindly into the wood. Brambles tear at his body, saplings whip at his face, something scurries, a pheasant scuttles away, the remnants of wildlife hanging on grimly by fang and claw.
Above, the sky is getting lighter.
It’s obvious he can’t stay in the wood. He stumbles on, barking his shins badly, once running jawfirst into a low malicious branch.
The growing light betrays him, he runs faster now through the depths of the belt. He swishes through a thinned portion, thick with dew-hung ferns. A mist is coalescing as he strikes a low stone wall concealed by thick tussocks of grass.
Uncultivated agricultural pasture lies the other side, it is decayed. Compulsory Purchase Order, he thinks irrelevantly.
Another cursed copter drones, he hugs the wall. The machine passes heavily over the untenanted farmstead at the centre of the undernourished pasture, dieldrin-sapped.
Kitson makes his break for the farmstead, he flees through the pasture and into stunted wild green barley, the mist is already thinner here, the sky is grey, he feels like a moth trapped on the ceiling, he takes ten seconds, it feels like ten hours.
He bypasses the rusting silo into the overgrown still-cobbled yard. In the middle there’s an old well which he’s bypassing, intending to cross to the further perimeter of the pasture, to plunge into the peripheral woods. But - another copter fills the air -
Abandoning himself to his karma he swings on to the black oil-slicked and rotten rope dangling from the equally rotten wooden pulley system. The black briefcase-like bag crooked in his left arm, his feet scrabbling for projecting stones within the well-mouth, he lowers himself with desperate speed.
The roar of the spying machine fills the sky.
