He drove down Kensington High Street as fast as he could. He hoped Koutrouboussis and the rest were okay. If they'd been able to get out they should be safe enough at the Sunny-dale Reclamation Centre.
He didn't feel particularly disappointed. After all, things had gone very easily up to now.
He made for Milton Keynes.
Extraction
Jews get out of Palestine it's not your home anyway! Moses was the first traitor and Hitler was the Messiah!!!
I
Outlaw in the sky
Jerry left the burning city behind and headed up the Mi. It was a wide, lonely road, through the hushed countryside.
He turned on the radio and tuned it to Radio Potemkin. It was playing The Yardbirds, The Moquettes, The Zephyrs, Mickie Most, The Downliners Sect, Key Anton and The Peppermint Men, The Syndicats, The Cheynes, The Cherokees, Cliff Bennett and The Rebel Rousers. Unable to bear either the nostalgia or the quality, Jerry switched over to Radio John Paul Jones which was in the middle of putting over The Vibrating Ether Proves The Cosmic Vortex, the latest hit by Orniroffa, the Nip Nightingale. All art, thought Jerry, aspired to the condition of Muzak. What would William Morris have thought?
It was at times like this that the brain needed balming. He turned to his taper and selected Schoenberg's Quartet No .2, left the Mi and took a winding lane towards Oxford.
Soon he could see the white shell of the city shining in the distance. The concrete roof was good for anything except the H-Bomb.
He slowed as he reached the opening of the tunnel and drove through to emerge in the shadowy darkness of Magdalen Bridge.
The dim light from the central lamp at the highest part of the roof was reflected by the spires of the city. Power was failing, but Oxford survived.
Jerry felt the cold. The High was full of a strange, sticky dampness and black-cloaked figures crept miserably along be-side the walls, while every so often hollow, echoing shouts and clatterings broke the stillness. The hissing noise of his own car seemed menacing.
Stopping the Phantom VI in the car park of the Randolph Hotel he walked to the Ashmolean Museum, pushed open the heavy wooden doors and paused. A few candles in brackets on the walls lit a sinister avenue of Tompion and Knibb longcase clocks which had all stopped at a quarter past twelve. He began to walk.
The sound of his footsteps was like that of a huge pendulum, regular and ponderous. He came to the locked door at the end of the aventue and took a key from his pocket, turned it in the lock, opened the door and descended the stone staircase, lighting his way with his torch.
Climbing downwards for half an hour he at last reached a tunnel which led to another door. Unlocking this, he came to a room containing a small power plant. He crossed to the plant and depressed a lever.
The plant whispered and then hummed softly and steadily. Lights went on. Jerry switched off his torch, passed through two more empty chambers until he came to a fourth room which was lined on three sides with cupboards that had mirrors set into their panels. The cupboards had been imported from Sweden nine years earlier. The mirrors were more recent.
The room was carpeted with a deep, red Russian rug. On it stood a couch draped with white mink covers and yellow silk sheets. It was unmade. Against the wall near the door was a neat console operating a series of small monitor screens and micro-tronic indicator boards, all slightly archaic in design and function but still in good working order. Jerry had not been here since he had left the seminary.
Sitting on the couch, he tugged off his block-heeled boots; he removed his jacket and his shoulder holster and dropped them on the floor, pulled back the pillows and touched a stud on the control panel set in the low headboard. The console activated, he lay and watched it for a bit until he felt up to visiting the morgue.
The room had become unfamiliar, yet a lot of things had happened here. The Shifter gateways had been erected, the earliest prototype of the machine had been built, the Web completed and, of course, those ridiculous books had been written.
It had been a rapid development really, from priest to politician to physicist, but it had been necessary and, he supposed, inevitable.
He was drained. He smiled and shrugged. Perhaps he had better visit the Web before he went to the morgue. It was still very cold in the room. It would take a while for the place to warm up.
This had been. his grandfather's complex. originally, before the old man had moved to Normandy, and his father had inherited it, passing it on to him. His father had built and stocked the morgue, too.
He got up shivering, opened one of the mirrored panels and stepped through into a well-lit corridor with four steel doors on each side and another steel door at the end. He rested his palm against the fourth door on the right and it opened. A peg behind the door supported a clean black car coat. Jerry put it on and buttoned up. The schizophrenia had been bad at first, his father had said. He had been lucky not to inherit the worst of it.
There were ten drawers set low into the far wall. Each drawer was labelled with a name. Jerry opened the first drawer on the left and looked down into the eyes of the pale, beautiful girl with the tangled black hair.
He touched the cold skin of her breasts.
'Catherine...'
He stroked the face and drew a deep breath.
Then he bent down and picked her up, carrying her from the morgue and back to the bedchamber with the console.
Placing her in the bed, he stripped off the rest of his clothes and lay beside her, feeling the heat flow out of his body into hers.
His life was so dissipated, he thought. But there was no other way to spend it. « 'Catherine...'
She stirred. He knew there could only be a few seconds left.
'Catherine.'
The eyes opened and the lips moved. 'Frank?'
'Jerry.'
'Jerry?' Her perfect brow frowned slightly.
'I've got a message for you. There's some hope. That's the message.'
Her eyes warmed, then faded, then closed.
Trembling with a terrible cold, Jerry began to cry. He staggered from the bed, fell to his knees, got up and lurched from the chamber into the corridor, pressing his frozen palm against the first door on his left.
The door opened stiffly, almost reluctantly.
Jerry leaned against it as it closed, peering through his blurred eyes at the rustling machine before him.
Then he flung himself at the singing red, gold and silver webs and gasped and grinned as they enmeshed him.
Why was resurrection so easy for some and so difficult for others?
2
Beyond the X ecliptic
When he had filed Catherine again, Jerry whistled a complicated piece of Bartok and returned, radiant and replete, to his cosy room to look at himself in the mirrors.
Time to be moving; moves to be timing.
He opened a cupboard and regarded his wardrobe. The clothes were somewhat theatrical and old-fashioned but he had no choice. His nearest wardrobe to Oxford was now in Birmingham, the only major city in the area which had not needed cleaning, and he had never fancied Birmingham much at the best of times.
He selected a military-style green jacket, a suede shako with a strap that buttoned under his chin, matching suede britches, green jackboots and a shiny green Sam Browne belt with a button-down holster for his vibragun. A short green pvc cape secured by a silver chain over one shoulder, and the ensemble was complete.