Garnett remained silent—this was what he had dreaded since the first slithering premonitions the night he had sat on the motel steps and stared into a hostile sky.
“Neither Xoanon nor any of his race,” Dermott continued, ‘have ever set foot on Earth. They are human, but from a world with lower gravity. Their craft is in a three-hundred kilometre orbit.”
“That’s impossible. They couldn’t get away with it. Our radar would lamp them the first time round, unless …’
Dermott nodded. “Electron absorption screens—we’ll have something like that ourselves soon.”
Futile as it was, Garnett was unable to prevent himself from arguing. ‘But why do they want an aircraft wing?”
“There is a very important reason, but it can’t be disclosed.”
A pressure was building up within Garnett’s temples. “It still doesn’t make sense. If they can’t land—how do they expect to get hold of the wing unit?”
Dermott seemed slightly surprised by the question. “We will deliver, of course. Using a T.6.” Something about the way he spoke caused a convulsive upheaval in Garnett’s subconscious but he had no time to guess what it might mean. The anger, dulled by shock, was growing in him again.
“What sort of a person are you, Dermott? What did they buy you with?”
“I wasn’t bought, Tony—any more than you were.”
“Than I was!” The room slanted momentarily, then righted itself.
“Yes, Tony. You still don’t understand, do you? They got you before any of us. The instrument they use has been hidden in the sea close to the Welsh coast for years. It seems to be a device for recording the patterns of electrical activity in a person’s brain and then transmitting it to the spacecraft. Up there they construct an analogue—don’t ask me how—and by adjusting it force the weaker electrical activity of the brain into new patterns.
“What it boils down to is, if you get close enough to the device for an initial reading to be made they can influence you from that moment on. If necessary absolute control can be exerted but usually it is enough just to nudge a person’s thinking in the desired direction—that was how the twenty-metre wing project got under way in the first place. There were only half a dozen key men involved, you and I being two of them, but you had to go and lose part of your skull. The metal plate riveted into it acted like a screen and broke your link with Xoanon. When you cancelled the project we had to go underground, which meant that a total of forty personnel had to be put under almost complete control so that they would finish the wing unit and do it in secrecy.
“It would have been much easier to kill you, of course, but Xoanon doesn’t work that way. I’m explaining all this in the hope that you can eventually be persuaded to join us again.”
Garnett shook his head, unable to speak as he struggled to assimilate all he had just heard.
“Think it over,” Dermot said. “I’ll get you a drink. You look as though you could use one.” He moved to a sideboard which glittered with cut glass and silver.
“I am thinking it over. I’m thinking about Janice Villiers. I take it Xoanon is dismissing that as an unfortunate error.”
“Errors,” Dermott said, still busy at the sideboard, ‘can be compensated for.” When he turned round again only one of his hands held a glass. The other trembled slightly under the weight of an obsolescent, but nonetheless effective, automatic pistol. “We are sorry about this, Tony, but the project is too important….”
“You wouldn’t dare fire that thing. Somebody would hear it.”
Dermott shook his head. “I’ve sent Jean and the two boys away for a week, so let me assure you I will use it, but …”
Garnett had been shifting his balance while the other man spoke. He leaped sideways and dived for the cover of the massive desk which occupied a corner of the room. Dermott’s arm jerked up, the big pistol went off like a ton of high explosive and Garnett felt himself stopped as though he had run into a wall, his chest muscles paralysed with agony. He caught the desk for support then realised the bullet had almost missed him, scribing a bloody tangent across his ribs. The discovery brought with it a surge of elation. Honour’s satisfied, he thought illogically. Ian has made his point. He’ll call it quits now and I’ll go away and stay out of his life for ever.
But Dermott lurched forward, arm outstretched stiffly and face contorted with the loathing a man always feels for an animal he has failed to dispatch at the first blow. Garnett tried desperately to move, but there was no time. Dermott pointed the automatic at his head at a range of only a few feet and fired again. As he tried to jerk his head out of the way Garnett felt himself flicked off the edge of the desk like a fly. He landed heavily on the floor behind the desk and lay motionless, wondering why he was still alive. One side of his face, including the eye, was raw with a burning pain he recognised as being caused by muzzle blast and his ear was ringing like an anvil, but where had the bullet gone? Something hard was lodged in the back of his mouth. For an instant he recalled stories of soldiers who had bullets pierce their skulls and travel all round their heads on the inside, then he realised the hard object was a tooth. The bullet had hit him high on the cheek and had passed straight out the other side, smashing his back teeth on the way. He had been lucky.
Several cautious footsteps sounded as Dermott approached.
Garnett held his breath and hoped there was enough blood distributed over his head and chest to convince Dermott a coup de grace was unnecessary. After a few seconds he heard him pick up his televu from the desk and punch out a number.
“Hello, Bill.”
“Hello, Ian. Has it happened?” Garnett recognised the voice of his chief test pilot, Bill Makin.
“Yes—he came here, as we expected. I had to take certain steps. You know what I mean.”
“I know.”
“There’ll be trouble, of course. This is as far as we can go. You’d better deliver the unit right away.”
“I thought there still were difficulties with dimensional stability.”
“Only a centimetre or so at maximum chord. It’s acceptable. Anyway, we’ve run out of time.”
“What will you do with the … ah … waste products?”
“Don’t worry about that. Just deliver the goods.”
“I’m already plotting the flight profile. See you.”
Dermott set the televu down, stood for a moment then came round the desk and grabbed a fistful of Garnett’s jacket. He screamed in terror as Garnett brought up his legs and kicked, then he went down clutching his belly. Garnett propelled himself upwards, grunting with the effort. The televu set almost flew out of his fingers as he lifted and swung, but it connected with Dermott’s head. The screaming stopped. Garnett lifted the pistol purposively, hesitated, then worked it into his belt—Dermott had just tried to murder him but he had not been responsible for his own actions. Nor was he the one responsible for what had happened to Janice.
He dragged the unconscious man all the way into the kitchen, tied his wrists with the silk dressing gown cord and locked him in a cupboard. By the time he had finished he was drenched with perspiration and was leaving bloody footprints on the floor. He cleaned himself up in the bathroom as best he could, taped a clean towel across his ribs and put patches of skin-coloured medical plastic on his cheeks. Blood from the ruptured gums kept trickling into his throat so he made two plugs of cotton and bit down on them. The whole operation took only a matter of minutes, at the end of which his image in the full-length mirror appeared almost normal. There was a certain spiky look, like that of a sick bird, but that was pretty good considering the way he felt.