Now I was looking at one of these things again. Small, compact, beautifully-moulded, it could rock a street.
I had expected to find it – and had looked for it – because of the analogy, which was: they've cleared out of here as if there were an unexploded bomb in the place.
The chill of the concrete was seeping through my coat into my shoulder-blades but I lay there for half a minute to do some thinking. Oktober was a human computer and this idea would appeal to him. He didn't trust humans who were not computers. He had envisaged the remote possibility of my being unobserved when I finally got round to using the Mercedes in a last attempt to break clear. The orders were that if I had made no signal by first light I was to be switched off. Declining to chance even a remote possibility of failure in this, my death was to be arranged with precision: it was to be automatic.
The sweat was dangerous now and I wiped my hand on my coat before reaching up and taking the bomb from its perch on top of the exhaust-pipe. The set-up was that when I started the engine the vibration of the pipe would dislodge the bomb within the first few minutes of driving and it would hit the ground. Even at high speed the thing must fall immediately below the car.
I held it snug on my chest and slid out from under, standing up and listening from sheer habit. The night was mine.
The lock-ups were communal, with only three main partitions six feet high, and there was a side door at the far end, so I checked the gear for neutral and started the engine, moving round to the front of the car and resting the bomb on the slope of the bonnet about a third of the distance from the front edge, where the smooth plastic would slide on the smooth cellulose, given time. The engine was cold and the vibration at its highest. I stood and watched the bomb in the light of the torch. In fifteen seconds it began to slide and I kept my hand ready in case. Twenty seconds and it sped up and reached my hand.
I wanted roughly one minute, so I put the bomb a couple of inches higher than the first time and left it there, climbing the first partition and dropping over, climbing the second and dropping, kicking over an oil-tin and disregarding the noise, climbing the third partition and making for the side door. It had a Yale-type lock with a knurled knob and there was an interior bolt in addition; I had oiled them both when I had seen to the big double-doors two days ago.
When I was outside I shut the door after me and sat down with my back to the garage wall. There would be no breaching of the wall itself because of the partitions, but most of the roof would get up and go and there'd be a certain amount of old-fashioned brick-dust and splinter fall-out.
I could hear the engine of the Mercedes throbbing very faintly. Sixty seconds had gone by. I went on waiting, and thought: London isn't going to like this. There was a lot of private property in the place. But Pol had said a million lives so London would have to lump it.
Ninety seconds. I had misjudged the slope of the bonnet, put the thing too high. The throb of the engine was settling, with the automatic choke easing off and the mixture thinning. The sharpness of carbon monoxide soured the air. Time-check: 05.49. Eleven minutes to zero but that didn't come into it now. Along the high wall that made one boundary of the courtyard there was the first light of the new day showing; a spire pointed its grey finger at a star. Far away the sounds from the freight yards were getting louder. Then the first cock crowed.
Two minutes. Either there was a resinous adhesion setting up between the plastic and cellulose or the thing had slid to one side and was lodged in the trough of the fairing. If it had lodged, it might stick there forever or it might go on creeping and finally drop. I didn't want to go and have a look. The engine was barely audible now; the temperature gauge would have moved out of the cold sector; oil pressure would be dropping a fraction.
There would be three phases. Initial percussion, audible blast and air shock-wave. Fire was a certainty because of all the petrol about.
Two minutes and a half. The sweat-glands began working again. There was absolutely no way of timing a check-up safely; the whole thing would have to be worked out by chemistry (plastic-cellulose inter-reaction, allowance for heat change due to warming of engine), kinetics (movement of bomb across slope of bonnet, references weight, momentum potential of mass, gradient of slope), vibration theory (effect of given rate of mechanical oscillation by metal of bonnet against given mass) and algebra (terms of deduction in all three spheres). A whole team of picked scientists could sit here for weeks without succeeding in telling me when it would be safe for me to go and find out what was happening to that bloody thing.
Three minutes. The light was strengthening on the far spire and the matt uniformity of the sky was curdling into cloud.
If nothing happened in another ten minutes I'd have to go and take a look because they'd start moving in on the same principle and I couldn't afford to -
Three phases now operating. Percussion – the ground shook and the wall shuddered at my back. Audible blast – a crash of wild music as the roof went up and the glass over the courtyard shattered and fell away in a drift to the ground. Air shock-wave – the hot wind of it fanned past my face, stinking of sodium-chlorate.
I stayed where I was until the yard was ringed with people standing agape in the light of the flames, then I edged my way behind them. Another fuel-tank went up and the first fire-bells began sounding from the distance. Then the clock in the spire chimed six.
The taxi put me down in the Unter den Eichen and I went into the passage next to the hat shop, using the double-edged key. We had a notice on the service lift saying it was out of order, to discourage people. The ninth-floor button operated the lift and also switched on a red winking lamp in both rooms.
Five people were there including Hengel. They looked pasty and red-eyed because they'd been up all night waiting for me to signal. There was a tray of cups so I said: "Have you got some coffee?"
Hengel was already using the direct-line telephone, asking for Pol.
They kept looking me up and down and I remembered I was still wearing the white chef's coat. There would have been a whole bunch of tags in the crowd watching the fire and I'd had to get clear unrecognised.
I took off the coat and dropped it over a chair. We all talked a bit and in ten minutes Pol came, while I was holding my second cup of coffee in both hands to warm them. A chef's coat isn't much for a winter morning.
Pol had just gone to bed after the night-shift and Hengel had got him out again. The room had gone very quiet. A hot operator doesn't just show up at Control and ask for coffee.
I gave Pol the report I'd written during the early hours at the hotel and they all watched him reading it. He said:
"This will do for a start."
"It's all you'll get for the moment."
He told someone to get on to London and while we waited he said: "We'll have to go in, you know." He was speaking in English and I thought again of England and how much I needed her.
I said: "Give me till noon. Then you can go in."
"Why noon?" His featureless face was blanker than ever without the glasses.