Do you want pictures?
No.
It was the cargo they were more interested in.
The extension lead got caught on a seat strut and I freed it and moved back towards the freight section, my boots grinding on the loose sand across the floor. I didn't hurry because there were a lot of questions crowding in, one of them worrying me. If it was something in the cargo that had driven the two men out of here with the fearof Christ in them I couldn't see why the door was no more than ajar; the four-inch gap seemed too narrow to allow anything to attack through it, and obviously theywouldn't have stopped to pull the door shut after them.
It worried me also to think that the vultures had died with them, as if something had followed them out of the plane to kill anything that lived.
I looped the extension lead across one shoulder to stop it fouling and opened the Pentax, setting it for flash and keeping it slung in front of me so that I could operate it with one hand. There was a chance that if anything happened when I went in there I could got a picture of it and if one day someone thought of processing the film they'd see what had finished me off.
Loman. I'm going into the freight section.
His voice was more distant now because the 200 °CA was standing outside on the sand.
Understood.
I sent the torch beam through the gap and swung the door wider by one inch, stopping and listening, the nerves reacting again and the scalp tightening. Kept seeing their faces, and the gaping beaks of the birds. Another inch and stop and listen and take a gripand bloody well think with the brain instead of the plexus.
But it was difficult because the organism was aware of danger and preparing its defences, draining the blood from the surface to the internal organs, increasing the breathing-rhythm to feed more oxygen to the muscles, dilating the pupils to admit more light and refining the nervesuntil they reached the state where they could be activated by stimuli below the normal threshold of sensitivity. The brain was being by-passed by the nervous system, the automatic defence mechanism that snatches the hand from a hot object, that snaps the eyes shut as a spark flies, without the aid of the brain.
Another inch and stop and listen. Nothing. The beam of light shifting in a calculated zig-zag from high to low: the ribbed wall of the fuselage and alloy racks, an emergency hatchet clipped to a bracket alongside an extinguisher.
A depth of silence I couldn't remember having experienced ever before; the silence of the desert, of the dead.
Quiller.
The sound of his voice explosive.
Wait. Release the breath.
Hear you.
Is there any problem?
No problem.
I'd been off the air for more than a minute and he was having to sweat it out, couldn't see what I was doing, couldn't hear.
Swing it another inch and stop and listen.
Faint metallic clicking.
Not perfectly regular.
Quite close and below me.
It stopped when I held my breath and began again when I breathed. Satisfactory: the Pentax was slung from the neck and the case buckle was intermittently registering my heartbeat when my diaphragm expanded and contracted in breathing.
Trickle of sweat into the corner of one eye, stinging a little. Shielded from the intense direct sunshine, the skin was releasing through the pores. The heat in here was of a different quality: it oppressed, stifling.
Another inch and the beam passed over a cylinder standing erect, clamped to the alloy rack, and I shut my eyes before I triggered the flash to minimize the effect on the dark-adaptation process but even so the torch beam looked almost yellowwhen I opened them again.
Loman. First picture: a cylinder, compressed-air type, four feet high, clamped vertically.
Only one?
So far. There may be others.
Forebrain thinking was becoming clearer: the psyche had been too dominant, concerning itself with occult responses, indulging in a sick belief in fiends, in spectral fantasy, dwelling on creaturehood rather than inanimation.
Nothing had moved, even when the flash had gone off. Nothing in here was alive. Logic found no case for a rigged trap of any kind: they wouldn't have left one themselves and nobody had been here since they'd died.
I swung the door at right-angles and took two shots.
General scene: freight compartment. Two frames.
Thank you.
They looked like people.
Some stood in a group, two or three of them leaning one against the other, about a half-dozen had fallen, either to the floor or piled against the end of the rack at varying angles. They looked like people because at the top of each cylinder was a round protective shield fixed over the nozzle, and below it was the neck widening into shoulders. Scotopic vision had been affected by the last use of the flash and I couldn't see any details.
Two shots to allow for panorama montage.
Thank you.
There are about twenty more cylinders, same size, and the impact broke some of them away from their anchorage. It looks as if they were all stowed vertically between buffers of foam plastic. The nozzles have got protective caps. Three shots, close-up.
Blinding light and I waited, shutting my eyes and switching off the torch. First theories at random: the crew had known what theywere transporting on this trip and they knew it was lethal and perhaps explosive in terms of chemical expansion or in terms of gas compression sensitive to release. Possible risk of fire or gross reactive burning without flame, nitric acid, so forth. But I wouldn't have thought this kind of hazard would have induced actual terror in reasonable men.
Slid the switch, the beam less yellow now.
There were four racks, two on each side, padded with shock-resistant material and fitted with straps and clamps. For some reason the cylinders couldn't be shipped horizontally or in crates and their stowage precautions had been quite good to have left some of them still in place after the high deceleration loads of the forced landing. Five oblong crates filled the space between the racks, hard against the rear bulkhead, and they had been protected with a matt black liquid material with rapid hardening qualities: Bostik or a thermal sealing product. Two domed canisters were stowed one each side of the compartment with restraint bands and protective jacketing. A red label was common to every crate, cylinder and canister, with the wordsFlashpoint Zero: the Lloyds designation for dangerous cargo.
I gave Loman a general picture and began on the individual labels, starting with the containers that were easy to reach without clambering across the disorder.
Cylinder. Matt grey, three parallel red bands, metal tabs reading: PH/18179/M-Cat. IX. Next cylinder same markings, tab reading PH/18180/M-Cat. IX. Next cylinder painted matt green with four yellow bands. Tab: ZRG/635/2 — Cat. XII.
There were thirteen in one group, three in another, with markings that tied with one of the domed canisters. The crates contained identical material, all tabs the same.
His voice came faintly from outside.
Have you a problem?
What?
Have you a problem?
He meant was everything all right and I got annoyed because I'd only taken half a minute's respite: the heat was coming mainly from overhead and sweating was profuse. The need for concentrating on the labels was inducing nausea, the beam of the torch wavering, sensation of extreme fatigue.
No problem.
I'd been in this bloody oven for twenty minutes and I didn't want him to poke me to see if I was done.