He called out again.
“Anybody there?”
His voice echoed, as if there was a larger, empty area outside the room where he was lying. He waited. Still, no one responded. He looked around, hoping to find a bell or buzzer he could use to attract attention. Instead, he found a pile of papers on the bedside table. He recognised them straight away—it was the material Suzie had been reading on the chopper. There was a note on the top.
“There’s a bit of a flap on. I’ll be back when I can. In the meantime, you need to read the rest of this. I think we’re in trouble.”
Noble laughed, but with little humour.
Tell me something I don’t know.
But it seemed he had nothing better to be getting on with. He picked up the papers and once more lost himself in the words of Ballantine, in a Nissen Hut, on the shores of Loch Long.
On the night before his big demonstration, Rankin sought me out in the mess. At first, I did not even know he had entered. I was intent on getting as much ale inside me as possible, in a search for oblivion—but I wasn’t to be allowed that small comfort. The mess fell quiet as he entered.
“Come with me, Ballantine,” he said. “You are the only one who will understand the import.”
I put my beer down, reluctantly. I was on my fifth and already looking forward to the sixth. But I could not refuse him. Technically, he was my Commanding Officer. And, despite my civilian status, I had, in effect, been drafted and as such, I was not exempt from military justice. With a heavy heart I followed him down to the lab.
The place had changed since my last visit. The heavy glass tank had been removed. But the network of piping was still in place overhead and the metal box still sat in the middle of the floor, its walls etched and pitted by the acid.
He saw me looking.
“I have another small demonstration for you, Ballantine,” he said. “And I hope this one will finally convince you of the import of our experiments.”
“If you’re going to be slaughtering some poor animal, I want nothing to do with it,” I said.
He smiled grimly.
“Not this time. Come. You need to see this.”
He led me to the long trestle. A thick forest of kelp and tentacles completely filled a glass jar some three feet high and over a foot in diameter. The whole column vibrated as the thing inside thrashed angrily.
“For pity’s sake, Rankin… how much of this thing did you make?” I asked.
“Enough,” he whispered. “But that is not why I brought you here. Watch.”
He walked away to our left. The kelp seemed to follow him, the thrashing fronds and tentacles now concentrated on that side of the glass. Rankin turned and came back towards me. The kelp tracked his movement, the thrashing becoming ever more insistent as Rankin got ever closer to the glass jar.
“For pity’s sake, Rankin—what kind of thing is this?”
“It knows me,” Rankin whispered in reply. “And I think I’ve made it angry.”
“That’s not possible,” I started.
“Neither is this,” he said and walked forward until his nose was almost pressed against the glass. The kelp thrashed, slapping moist tentacles against the surface, leaving streaks of yellow viscous fluid behind.
“Be careful, man,” I said. I had seen what those tentacles had done to a pony—I had no wish to see what they could do to a man.
Rankin waved at me to be quiet. He stared at the kelp and spoke in a loud voice, as if ordering a disobedient dog to heel.
“Quiet!”
The kelp stilled and the big jar stopped vibrating. Now it just looked like a glass filled with regular seaweed. Rankin motioned me forward. He had to do it twice before my legs would obey my order to move and even then, I sidled up to the trestle cautiously, ready to flee at any sign of trouble.
“Come closer,” Rankin said. “This is what I brought you to see.”
“I can see all I need to from here,” I replied, maintaining a distance of three feet between me and the thin sheet of glass that separated me from the kelp.
“Just look,” he said. There was wonder and awe in his voice. I saw why, seconds later.
I looked at the kelp.
And the kelp looked back. A single, lidless eye, pale green and milky, stared out from the fronds. Even as I watched, it changed, being sucked back into a new fold. A wet gash opened, like a thin-lipped mouth. It stretched wide and a high ululation filled the Nissen Hut, like a seagull on a storm wind.
Tekeli Li. Tekeli Li.
“What the hell is this shite?” I said softly.
Rankin laughed. The kelp squirmed, almost as if it was enjoying the experience.
“It knows me,” he said again. “It is as if our minds have become attuned.”
“Our minds? You are crediting this…thing, with intelligence? With rational thought?”
“Why not?” Rankin said. “After all, if it looks like a duck…”
It was my turn to laugh. When I did so, the kelp stayed still.
“Okay,” I said. “So, now that you’ve made it, would you care to tell me exactly what it is we have done here?”
Rankin dragged me away. Three new-formed eyes watched us intently.
“In all truth, I have no idea,” he said. “But I have sent a sample back to the Yanks. They’ve got more sophisticated equipment than we have. Maybe they can make something of it, where I cannot. But I do know something… I know that the top Brass will not be able to ignore me. Not this time.”
From inside the glass, the noise grew louder.
Tekeli Li. Tekeli Li.
The field test was scheduled for noon the next day. I spent most of the morning trying to convince the Colonel to postpone it, but a combination of the smell of beer on my breath and a fear of disappointing his superiors, led him to dismiss me out of hand. I watched the preparations in the harbour with a terrible, sinking feeling in my gut that had nothing to do with the booze from the night before.
Rankin was back into his full-blown show-off strut, with no sign of the confusion he had shown earlier in the laboratory. He marched around the harbour barking orders, a conductor marshalling his orchestra. By the time the Brass arrived at quarter to the hour, everything was in place. A fine drizzle started to fall and a chill settled in my spine. Suddenly, I wanted to be somewhere else—for I knew one thing for sure. This was not going to end well.
But it was too late. Everything was ready, and Rankin’s demonstration was imminent.
We stood in a rough semi-circle just above the shoreline. Several yards beneath us sat the now-familiar metal box. From where I stood, I could hear the thing thrash against the inside walls, like a manic drummer in some free-form jazz band.
A chain led from the top of the box along the shingle to lie at Rankin’s feet. The harbour wall stretched away to our left and ahead of us in the water, a small flotilla of boats made another rough semi-circle encasing a drift-net full of mackerel bought just that morning from some very grateful fishermen down in Helensburgh.
The fish was our bait. Rankin had wanted to use a couple of convicted murderers from Barlinnie, but even the Colonel had drawn the line at that. Rankin had also suggested using sheep, but those of us who had seen the test on the pony balked at that. I wasn’t the only one who did not need to see that depravity again.
The men on the boats were equipped with flame units and each boat contained several bottles filled with acid. I hoped it would be enough.