The commander got up. “That’s all, sir. If the dummies approached one of the boats on the anchorage they would be attacked. We have only three dummies left now, and we don’t like taking them to destruction. As I said, sir, they are extremely expensive.” The lighting came up. The monitors went off. “Would you like to go down and see him closer, sir?”
The admiral nodded. He had come to the Facility ready to tear it to shreds, and had been impressed in spite of himself. He looked at the commander with new respect. “Yeah. I should like to see the star of your show close-to. I can’t really get to grips with its size, though. How big is thirty-nine feet?”
The commander fished around for an analogy. He had read the highly edited file on Admiral Hope which had been made available to him, and he knew the man’s ruling passion was Second World War aircraft. “He’s six feet longer than a Spitfire; the same length as the two-seater Defiant. Twice the length of your Cadillac. As I said earlier, the length of three elephants.”
They went down again in the lift. The commander took the opportunity to give the admiral a little advice. “Please be careful, sir, how you stand. Do not reach out your arms anywhere near the water. Do not go near the water unaccompanied. Please remember that down there I am the expert, I know the dangers; you must do as I say, sir, irrespective of rank.”
The admiral nodded. “Does it actually eat the dummies?” he asked.
“No, sir. We made sure that the dummies tasted unpleasant: we didn’t want him hurting his insides with bits of metal. In a real situation, however, he will very soon find out that real human flesh tastes much more pleasant. Under those circumstances he would eat anyone he attacked.”
The lift doors opened. They went out into the mid-afternoon sun. Beside the slipway he had seen on Monitor One, the admiral noticed a platform, high above the water. It was like a short diving-board surrounded with a chest-high rail. The commander gestured towards it. “You’ll see everything more clearly from the pulpit, sir.” They climbed the steps up to the stubby platform, and the admiral went out along it first, until his chest was against the rail and he was gazing out over the placid blue of the anchorage. He found he was really quite excited; that sick sort of excitement he had felt as a boy doing something forbidden and dangerous.
“Longer than a Spitfire,” he said, and shook his head.
“Call him in now,” called the commander down to the seaman and the scientist still on the slipway. The admiral shaded his eyes, and searched the sparkling surface.
There! A distant flash of movement, by one of the ships.
“There he is.” He half turned to the commander, right hand on the rail, left hand pointing . . .
And the killer beneath the pulpit saw a reaching arm . . .
“SIR!” cried the commander . . .
But the killer was out of the water now, soaring up with careless ease: ten feet, twenty . . .
The admiral’s body was reacting to the roar of the killer’s leap before he even realised he had heard it, jerking body back, arm in . . .
Hope felt the rough tongue, the heat of the mouth: a great force whipped him over the rail, but he did not fall; there was a shrill hissing which filled his head and he could not straighten his back. His last feeling was one of immense frustration: over three weeks without a cigarette just so he would live longer . . .
He never really knew what happened, but the commander saw.
The killer jerked its head away from the admiral as its teeth closed on his arm, tearing it out of its socket. The arm came free, falling with the killer while the admiral remained hanging from the pulpit, held by his right hand gripped on the rail. From the crater of his left side arterial blood pulsed like steam out of a kettle in an arc ten feet away from the body. The admiral’s legs were working by instinct, trying to run away, pedalling in the air.
The commander knew what was going to happen then, and he knew he could do nothing to help, but he ran forward in any case, and he actually managed three steps before his legs gave, and he fell, striking his head upon the rough concrete. Everything went very bright for a moment, and there was a distant roaring. When he got up, the admiral was gone.
He pointed to the water, quite hysterical. “Kill it!” he yelled at the sentry. He staggered down to the slipway where it was fed. He knew it would be there, waiting for its reward. And it was. Its flippers hooked over the edge of the cement as it held itself and waited expectantly, its huge black and white harlequin’s face at rest.
Harper, his knees still weak, stumbled down the steps, dragging out the .38 Colt revolver he habitually wore with his best uniform. He took it in a two-handed grip, and even though it was wavering hopelessly, he fired three shots at the killer. One missed. The second made a small wound high on its nose. The third opened a great gash from the corner of its mouth, behind its eye, up the side of its face.
The killer screamed . . .
The commander and the sailors, horrified by the sound, stood still . . . and it was gone.
Trailing blood from its wounded face, the killer, terribly confused and in a blind panic, dived deep and made for the open sea. In just over forty seconds it was at the net, its sonar reading the echoes from the strands as from a solid wall. It dived down the net’s length until the hard rock bottom came up out of the dark; then up, straight up, trailing ropes of bubbles and blood, straight up to the surface, wild with hurt and panic, until its long black and white body tore out of the water at nearly thirty miles an hour, curved in a graceful arc to crash against the top of the net forty feet in the air, give one last gargantuan heave, fell free, into the open sea, and away.
“We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs . . .
Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe – gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy . . .
He sprang from the cabin window as he said this, upon the ice raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in the darkness and distance.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
* * *
“A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is . . . What others take him for, and what he guesses he might be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another.”
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship
Lecture 1: “The Hero As Divinity”
ONE
i
As the distant note of the engines dropped, Kate looked drowsily out of the window at New York, but most of the city was hidden by a huge arm of cloud reaching in from the sea. She settled back in her seat, hoping that she would sleep, but doubting it: flying frightened her, and her heart was beating too rapidly, busily pumping adrenalin through her body, preparing brain and muscles for galvanic action. And she was too tired to talk herself out of this childishness and simply go to sleep.
It was done now, she thought. Oxford, where the duplicity had seemed so adventurous, was far away, and Anchorage was coming ten miles closer every minute. Alaska, where she would meet the man whose assistant she would become, the man who thought she was called Elizabeth Edwards because that was how she had signed her letters to him, a man she loved but whom she hardly knew; a man whose every book she knew almost by heart; whose glowing career she had followed with eager eyes but from a series of great distances; a man she had not seen for nearly ten years: her father.