Stand on Zanzibar

context (23)

TO BE AVOIDED

Transcript—SECRET—for secure file

Dr. Corning (at State)

We have Scramble A on, don’t we? Good, yes, we do. Dick, sorry to bother you.

Mr. Richard Ruze (Engrelay)

No trouble, Raphael. What can we do for you that we aren’t doing already?

Dr. Corning

Yes, we are asking a lot of you just now, aren’t we? I have to ask something else, though, I’m afraid. You’re carrying this tremendous story filed by the man you sent to Gongilung, Donald Hogan—

Mr. Ruze

Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? We’re extremely grateful to you for giving him to us—we didn’t expect to get anything out of him, let alone a sensaysh like this.

Dr. Corning

I’m sorry, I didn’t quite follow that. It unscrambled as something about giving him to you and I think it must—

Mr. Ruze

You mean you don’t know about that?

Dr. Corning

(inaudible)

Mr. Ruze

He’s one of your own people. We’re giving him his cover for the trip—hired him as a special correspondent. That was what I thought you had in mind when you said we were doing a lot for you at—

Dr. Corning

No, Dick, I was thinking of something else entirely. A matter I guess is uppermost in my mind. Well, look, this means you’re going to feel I’m applying leverage, but—

Mr. Ruze

Lever away, Raphael. We show a sheeting great profit on the Hogan scene so far and we can afford to be generous.

Dr. Corning

I’ll go straight to the point, then. You know we run trend-studies on all the big media. Our computers say you’re liable to involve Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere in the Yatakangi scene soon. (Pause of 8 sec.) All right, you didn’t say yes, but we were right last time and the time before.

Mr. Ruze

You want it not. Tell me why?

Dr. Corning

Yatakang means one thing to the audience right now, and we’re taking that subject straight and slow.

Mr. Ruze

I have Shalmaneser time booked for SCANALYZER as usual in an hour or so. I put in a Yatakangi programme for evaluation.

Dr. Corning

Think he’ll tell me the details? I’d like a sight of that, if you don’t mind, to see if it agrees our own study.

Mr. Ruze

Which said …

Dr. Corning

Gave them a sixty-forty chance of bringing it off when we first checked. We programmed in some new material about Yatakangi human resources and dragged it down to fifty-fifty. Since then we’ve been re-evaluating every forty-eight hours and currently it’s seventy-three to twenty seven against. (Pause of 11 sec.)

Mr. Ruze

I see. You think it might raise false hopes.

Dr. Corning

The impact of Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere would give the claim sort of automatic cachet. It would save you possible later embarrassment and us a lot of definite problems if you—

Mr. Ruze

I read you. Guess we can send them back to MAMP … By the way, Raphael, when you asked us to lay that on heavy you hinted there was a big breakthrough due shortly. It’s a long time and no roughage.

Dr. Corning

On that, we have eighty-two to eighteen in favour. When it breaks ninety the whole story will bust loose.

Mr. Ruze

It’d better be worth the wait.

Dr. Corning

I so testify. Well, thanks very much, Dick—glad you saw what I set course for.

Mr. Ruze

Don’t I always? I’ll call you the results from Shal when I have them. ’Bye.

Dr. Corning

’Bye.

continuity (30)

TURN HER ON AND LET HER ROLL

At the head of his cabinet table, in the rather mean and ill-maintained Parliament building, President Obomi struggled to focus his surviving eye on those who had joined him. There was a small patch where vision blurred into meaningless dots and swirls; the doctors said something about a retinal trauma and talked of optic nerve regrafting and regretted that it would take a month to heal if they did operate. There might, now, be a month to spare. He hoped so.

Immediately to his left were Ram Ibusa and Leon Elai; beyond them, Kitty Gbe sat next to Gideon Horsfall. Facing the president from the foot of the table was Elihu Masters. And on the other side were the representatives from GT led by Norman House.

“Well?” said the president at length.

Norman licked his lips and pushed across the shiny top of the table a thick pile of green printouts from Shalmaneser.

“It’ll work,” he said, and wondered what he would have done if he had not been able to utter that simple phrase.

“Have you any reservations, Norman?” Elihu inquired.

“I—no. None. I don’t believe anyone else has.”

Terence, Worthy, Consuela, all shook their heads. Their faces had a uniformly dazed expression, as though they found it impossible to accept the evidence of their own judgment.

“So we think it will work,” the president said. “Ought it to be done? Leon?”

Dr. Leon Elai also clutched a thick file of Shalmaneser printouts. He said, “Zad, I’ve never had material like this to work with before. I’ve barely had time to read it, there’s so much! But I’ve extracted a kind of digest, and…”

“Let me hear it, please.”

“Well, first there are the problems with our neighbours.” Dr. Elai extracted a handwritten white sheet from among the stack of green. “The probabilities are high that for about two years there will be accusations against us for submitting to neo-colonialism. By that time the economic pressure to cooperate in the subsidiary aspects of the project such as placing contracts for manufactures which will by then show signs of being cheaper here than anywhere else on the continent will tend to reduce their violence. Also there will be a chance for them to buy cheap power from us. Within a decade at most, it says, they will become reconciled to the idea.

“Chinese and Egyptian interference is likely to be worse and go on longer. However, we can count on South African support, Kenyan, Tanzanian—shall I read the list?”

“Tell us how it comes out on balance.”

“There appears to be no chance of outside intervention halting the project unless some country is prepared to launch a major missile attack on us. And the probability of United Nations retaliation for such a crime is ninety-one per cent.” A trace of awe coloured Elai’s voice, as though he had never expected to be talking of the foreign affairs interests of his country in such terms.

“Very well. We may expect to be safe from other people’s jealousy, then.” Obomi’s eye switched to Ram Ibusa. “Ram, I have worried about the impact of so much money on our precarious economy. Are we going to suffer from inflation, unjust distribution of income, a top-heavy tax-structure?”

Ibusa gave an emphatic headshake. “Until I saw what this computer Shalmaneser can tell us, I was afraid of that too. But I do now believe we can cope with all those problems, provided we can continue to rely on General Technics’ assistance in processing the information. What it comes down to is that we have here the first-ever chance in history to control a country’s economy directly. There will not be any taxes in the traditional sense!”

He leafed through his own set of Shalmaneser printouts.

“There will first be the loan in which the American government will take its fifty-one per cent share. From it we will make a series of loans of our own, some of which will be into investment funds the interest on which will pay for the following: a subsistence ration of food, an issue of clothing to all working people and children of school age, and medical care of an improved standard. There will also be a building allowance to heads of families which will by law have to be spent on domestic improvements such as house-repairs.

“But the cost of the project will at once be of the order of three times our present GNP. Simply by controlling what the computer says we shall be controlling directly a higher proportion of the money circulating in the country than is possible anywhere in the world.

“At the worst possible reading of the factors concerned, the gain to Beninia will consist in the removal of starvation and the improvement of personal and public health. That is, if returns from the markets we intend going into do no more than pay for the guaranteed interest on the original loan.

“Much more likely, we shall also enjoy a very high standard of literacy and technical skill, the fruits of better housing, transport, harbour facilities, housing, school buildings, everything. Especially we shall have power in every house for the first time ever.”

His voice dropped away to a whisper and his eyes went out of focus as though he were staring at a dream.

“When you say there will be no taxes, Ram!” Obomi said sharply. “You mean there will be fixed prices and deductions of income at source? There will have to be a great deal of enforcement, and I have always hated enforcing regulations on my people!”

“Ah—it should not be necessary,” Ibusa muttered.

“Why not?”

“Suppose inflation actually runs at the probable level of five per cent in the first year,” Ibusa said. “We shall withhold the amount of purchasing power corresponding to what would cause a ten per cent increase. There will be a real rise in the standard of living anyway because of the free issues and the loans; the pinch will not be felt. We shall then have surplus purchasing power to release in the year following, when people are growing accustomed to their new prosperity. But in the meantime we shall have loaned out the money we withheld and it will have grown, giving us the power to withhold a further portion, and so on. At the end of twenty years, when the groundwork of the project is complete and everything is in operation, that fund of reserved purchasing power will be used to buy back for the country whatever item still mortgaged is judged most essential to our independent development. It might be the new harbour facilities, it might be the power-system, it might be anything, but there will be enough to let us make the right choice.”

He suddenly gave a broad grin.

“Kitty?” Obomi said.

The plump minister of education hesitated. She said after the pause, “I made the best guess I could of what we might need to turn our people into the sort of skilled labour force our American friends are talking about and asked them to have their computer look at it. The machine says we can have everything I asked for three times over, and I can’t quite see how!”

“As I recall,” Norman said, “you suggested trebling the number of teachers, increasing school accommodation to the best modern standards, and expanding the business college here into a national university with a student body of ten thousand, the rest of the training to be left to trade instructors on an on-the-job basis. Well, according to what I gather from Shalmaneser’s report, you don’t know yourself what you have to play with. You have a feedback element you left out completely. If the average runs no higher than one in ten, then in any class of forty children you have four who are capable of additional training so that they can relieve part of the teacher’s duty in respect of the class next below but one. Your thirteen-year-olds can spare an hour a day to supplement the instruction the ten- or eleven-year-olds are getting. The other day I met a boy called Simon Bethakazi at a hamlet on the Lalendi road. I met him at random—remember him, Gideon?”

“The one who gave me that nasty question about the Chinese in California,” Gideon nodded.

“Right. If he gets the chance, that boy will be teaching his own class of forty sub-teenagers in three years’ time and because he’s not teaching them anything he hasn’t already learned backwards he’s going to be able to study—perhaps more slowly than in Europe or America, but it’ll only add one year to a standard three-year course—he’ll be able to study a subject at college level.

“Additionally, we envisage bringing in foreign advisors and teachers at generous rates of pay who will cost your taxpayers nothing—they’ll be GT staffers—who will combine a job for the project with a compulsory course-leadership assignment. Some of them won’t like the idea, and we’ll weed them out fast. Others will take to it because their skills are the kind which are being automated away from them at home and they’ll react favourably to the chance of handing on their knowledge to human successors. Shalmaneser’s been fed the results of surveys we’ve done in Europe and estimates we can hope for a minimum of twenty-five hundred of suitable calibre.

“And there’s one other thing you left out of your own calculations, Kitty.” Norman hesitated. “I guess it was owing to modesty, but there are times when modesty has drawbacks. Mr. President, may I address you a compliment which will probably sound fulsome but I assure you is quite sincere?”

“Elihu will tell you I’m as vain as the next man,” Obomi said, and chuckled.

“Well, it made me very sceptical when he told me about this country for the first time,” Norman said. “I didn’t see how a broken-down hole-in-corner place like Beninia could be as good as he claimed. I still don’t see how! All I know is this—here’s a place where there aren’t any murders, there aren’t any muckers, there aren’t any tempers lost, there aren’t any tribal squabbles, there aren’t any riots, there’s nothing of what people in supposedly more fortunate countries have come to take for granted. Yet your people are poor, sometimes hungry, pretty often sick, living in leaky huts and scratching up the ground with wooden ploughs hauled by scrawny oxen … Prophet’s beard, I can’t even hear myself say it without thinking it’s ridiculous! But what I wind up thinking is—is that I half-wish the slave-traders hadn’t steered clear of Beninia. Because I’d be rather proud to think my own African ancestors came from Shinka stock.”

There: it was out. Breathing heavily, Norman sought for a response among the people gathered at the table. Elihu was nodding like a benign Buddha, as though this was precisely what he’d expected, and the cabinet ministers were exchanging embarrassed grins. Of his own team, the only one he could see without twisting his head and staring was Derek Quimby, at the end of the line, and the little tubby linguist was apparently nodding violent agreement, not a reaction one would look for from a Caucasian in Beninia.

Obomi said finally, “Thank you, Norman. I appreciate that. It’s the way I’ve always felt about my compatriots, and it’s good to hear visitors agree with what I might otherwise mistake for parochialism. Well, are we decided, then?”

Everyone signified assent.

“Excellent. We shall present the project to Parliament for ratification as soon as possible, and then you’ll go right ahead with the loan and with your campaign to recruit the foreign advisors. That’s correct, Norman?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Norman said.

* * *

Going out of the room, Gideon Horsfall drew him aside with a conspiratorial air.

“Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “Beninia would digest you! And here you are—digested!”

the happening world (13)

RÉSUMÉ

Shalmaneser is a Micryogenic® computer bathed in liquid helium and there’s no sign of Teresa.

When Eric Ellerman tried to get at the Too Much cultivating section of the Hitrip plant, they asked some very awkward questions.

They gave Poppy Shelton clearance when they karyotyped the embryo and she celebrated with a party. Roger caught some bleeder trying to slip her a cap of Yaginol and knocked him arse over eyebrows.

Norman Niblock House is in virtually sole charge of the Beninia project.

Guinevere Steel is wondering how to reconcile that metallic name she adopted with the trend towards a more natural look that is going to dominate the fashion scene by fall.

Frank thinks Sheena has become quite unreasonable. After all, in a little while the baby will start to show and it’s simply not legal.

Arthur Golightly found something else he’d forgotten he owned.

Donald Hogan proved to be the right man for the job just as the Washington computers promised.

Stal Lucas has pretty well made up his mind about the shiggy Eric Ellerman was supposed to have had in Ellay. Her name was Helen and she was a blonde of five foot five.

Philip Peterson has just lost another girl-friend.

Sasha Peterson thought she was quite unsuitable.

Victor and Mary Whatmough had a row after the Harringhams’ cocktail party but they’re used to that.

Elihu Masters is delighted at having been able to do his old friend the right sort of favour.

Gerry Lindt’s first offence became the second. And the third. And …

Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung is afraid for his country.

Grace Rowley is dead.

The Right Honourable Zadkiel F. Obomi is under sentence of death from his doctors.

Olive Almeiro is in serious trouble with the Spanish authorities for advertising genuine Castilian ova for sale.

Chad C. Mulligan couldn’t give up being a sociologist after all, but since he hates the idea he’s mostly drunk these days.

Jogajong is encamped with a small group of loyal followers waiting for the current mood of wild enthusiasm in favour of the Solukarta régime to die away.

Pierre Clodard has mentioned the idea of divorcing his wife Rosalie, but so far only to his sister Jeannine.

Jeff Young sold that batch of GT aluminophage, and it did very satisfactory damage.

Henry Butcher is in jail.

There’s a new Begi story. Nobody knows where it got started. It’s called “Begi and the American”.

Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere have not yet been to Yatakang. If they go, all hell will break loose.

Occasionally Bennie Noakes says, “Christ! What an imagination I’ve got!”

Meanwhile, back at the planet Earth, it would no longer be possible to stand everyone on the island of Zanzibar without some of them being over ankles in the sea.

(POPULATION EXPLOSION Unique in human experience, an event which happened yesterday but which everyone swears won’t happen until tomorrow.

—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

tracking with closeups (22)

THE CLIMAX OF MORE THAN A LIFETIME OF ACHIEVEMENT

It was not a good day for Georgette Tallon Buckfast. It had begun with her weekly checkup and the doctor had said she was over-exerting herself again. She told him he was a liar, and when he pointed to the mute evidence of her body—high levels of fatigue-products, excessive blood-pressure—she cursed it and him.

“I’m putting through a deal bigger than you could even think of!” she snapped. “Bigger than even I have handled before! All you have to do is keep me going!”

The body was becoming a burden. She would have liked to trade it in for a new model. But all the medical experts could do was add to it, supplement it, furnish it with props.

She could not accept that with the funds that sufficed to buy a whole country she could not buy health.

It’s not as though I’m being greedy. I’m not asking for youth and beauty.

Why should she? She had never been beautiful; gradually she had come to feel beauty would have been a handicap, put a brake on her ambitions. As for youth, they called her “Old GT” and she found it flattering. It put the creation whose initials she shared on the same footing as other “old” concepts—Old Faithful, Old Glory …

Now, today, with the culmination of her greatest ever gamble, it was right that there should be some ceremony, some formality. If only it didn’t have to be here, in this chilly computer shrine …

Alert, an attendant saw to it that she was more warmly insulated, and the irritation passed. Waiting for the exact, pre-set moment, her mind wandered.

I worried about Elihu’s recommendation, never thought too highly of young House, but in my time I’ve learned to recognise when a man digs in his heels. And we could have pulled him out if we’d had to. But instead he’s managed to sell the entire Beninian government and tomorrow I shall no longer be running just a corporation but a whole country I’ve never seen!

“Ready now, ma’am,” a soft voice advised her, and she stared at the enigmatic shape of Shalmaneser, which she had made possible and did not understand.

I wonder if God sometimes feels that way about His creatures.

She liked speech-making and show because she fed on tributes to herself, but the mood of the times was against it. She rationed it, warily, to people who might appreciate it: meetings of stockholders who liked to sense the majesty and solemnity of a multi-billion dollar enterprise. This was only a gathering of staffers, most of whom were scientists not connected to the big scene of real life. Down there, a man in white moving some switches, watched attentively by his colleagues and the assembled members of the board. Consultations. It all seemed to be taking an appallingly long time.

Surely one of those reports said something about Shalmaneser reacting in nanoseconds?

“What’s going on?” demanded Old GT.

Her secretary went to inquire, and spent another long time in whispered discussion, and eventually came back with a man who looked very worried indeed.

“I hate to have to tell you this, ma’am,” he informed Old GT. “But something appears to be slightly wrong somewhere. I imagine we’ll sort it out soon but it’ll require a bit of work.”

“What?”

“Well, ma’am…” The man’s face grew actively unhappy. “As you know, we’ve run scores of programmes through Shalmaneser in connection with this Beninia project, and he’s functioned perfectly in all of them. It just so happens that today—”

“Come to the point, you fool!”

“Yes, ma’am.” The man wiped his face with the back of his hand. “All those other programmes were run on a hypothetical basis, the entire group of assumptions being ‘given’ and derived from our own researches. What we’ve done now is to switch over the optimum programme, the one we’ve decided to put into practice, so that it enters Shalmaneser’s real-world consciousness and interacts with everything else he knows about the world.”

“And—?”

“He’s rejected it out of hand, ma’am. Says it’s absurd.”

Black fury flooded up from the bottom of Old GT’s mind, engulfing first her belly, where it made her guts seem to twist into knots and pull tight, then her lungs, which gasped air and strained to fill with gases suddenly turned to sluggish pitch, then her heart, which thundered and battered at her ribs as though it would break out of their cage, her throat and tongue which grew stiff, cracking like old dry paper folded and pressed, and at last her brain, which composed the thought:

“!!!!!”

* * *

“Get the doc!” someone said.

“Xx xxx xx,” said someone else.

“_____”

“.….”

“ ”

.

continuity (31)

GROUNDWORK

The phone went again. Cursing, Donald stumbled to the switch. At first there was only a loud background noise, as of many people hurrying to and fro. Suddenly a woman’s voice blared at him, charged with anger.

“Hogan? You there? This is Deirdre Kwa-Loop! Engrelay head office just called me. There was a bargain, remember? Four hours on a beat!”

Stunned, Donald stared at the phone as though he could look along the cable despite the lack of a screen and see the face of the person he was talking to.

“Nothing to say, huh? I’m not surprised! I should have known better than to trust one of you bleeders! Well, I’ve been around this scene a while. I’m going to fix it so you never get—”

“Fasten it!” Donald snapped.

“The hole I will! Listen to me, paleass—”

“Where were you while I was tangling with a mucker?” Donald roared. In the mirror adjacent to the phone he saw the light in Bronwen’s room go on, a peach-coloured glow.

“Whatinole has that got to do with it?”

“A hundred people saw that mucker nearly kill Sugaiguntung! What did you want me to do—count off four hours and call you by a critonium clock? The word must have been all around the press club within five minutes!”

Heavy breathing. At length, reluctantly: “Well, after about four poppa-momma things are usually quiet, and—”

“So what you did you went out on the town, hm?”

No answer.

“I see,” Donald said with heavy sarcasm. “You thought I’d hire a gang of messengers and tell them, ‘I made a promise to this woman who can’t cover her own stories—you have four hours to find out where she’s hiding herself!’ Know where I was four hours after it happened? Drugged into coma at the university clinic! Will you take that as an excuse?”

Silence.

“The hole with you, then—I’m going back to bed!”

He cut the circuit. Almost at once, the phone buzzed again.

“Sheeting hole! What is it?”

“Management, Mr. Hogan,” said a young man’s voice, very nervous. “Is very many persons wish talk with you. Is saying most urgent, sir.”

Donald changed to Yatakangi and spoke loudly enough for the sound at the other end to carry if it wasn’t directionalised.

“Tell them to go peddle their grandmother’s urine. If there is another call on this phone before nine o’clock I shall have you—you personally—wrapped in the hide of a gangrened cow and hung up for the buzzards, do you understand?”

One thing I never appreciated before I came here: Yatakangi is a very satisfying language to invent insults in.

He thought for a while. Eventually he gathered up his clothes, his communikit and anything else that looked as though it might come in handy in the morning, carried them through into Bronwen’s room, and bolted the door from the far side before rejoining her.

This time, however, he did not manage to go back to sleep. It was as though his mind had sent unpleasant information garnered from Delahanty’s earlier call and the events of the day down echo-delay circuits of varying lengths, and all the echoes had coincided at this point in time.

He only vaguely noticed what he had been half-expecting: footsteps in the corridor, a thunderous knocking on his own room’s door, chinking and scratching sounds as someone tried a pass-key. But he had remembered to put over the deadlock. The would-be intruder cursed and went away, probably regretting the bribe he had given the reception clerk for the room number.

That, though, was less important than the conflicting thoughts and images reverberating in the gong of his skull. Ten years of behaving like a sponge, doing no more than absorb second-hand information, had not equipped him for action of the kind now expected of him. Even the new version of himself produced by eptification could not cope with the demands on him.

Beside him, Bronwen whispered invitations to lose himself in animal sensation, but he was drained of the capacity to respond. He told her to be quiet and let him think, and at once regretted it because out of the darkness a moron-face emerged, slack silly mouth reflected in a gash below. He repressed a moan and rolled over on his side, terrified.

There’s got to be a way—think, think!

Gradually possibilities developed towards plans. The mucker’s image faded, taking with it his sense of sick dismay, and it was replaced by a vague pride in what he was being relied on to do—an act that could determine the course of history.

I know how to get at Sugaiguntung. I know how to contact Jogajong. Between the two it’s just a matter of …

His body relaxed, and was rested even as his busy mind shaped and patterned the events of the day.

* * *

At eight o’clock he sent for breakfast and picked his way through many small dishes of cold fried and pickled delicacies—fish, fruit, vegetables. Gulps of scalding tea washed down the food. Bronwen, as naked as she had been all night, served him silently and made sure he was replete before taking any herself.

He found he liked that. It was sultanesque. It was foreign enough to match the strange country he had wandered to.

Couldn’t imagine Gennice doing it …

“I have to go out,” he said eventually. “Perhaps I’ll see you again this evening.”

She smiled and embraced him while he was thinking that if he did see her again something would have gone disastrously wrong. But it was bad to imagine such catastrophes. He put on his clothes, equipped himself, slung his communikit over his shoulder and went down brazenly to the main lobby.

It was morning-busy, but there were, in addition to the staff and clients, people of every possible colour who were simply sitting around until they spotted him. Then they closed in like sharks approaching a wounded swimmer, raising cameras, recorders and voices.

“Mr. Hogan you must—Mr. Hogan let me please—listen and I will—”

A fat Arab woman who had reacted faster than the others put a camera practically under his nose. He snatched it away and threw it in the face of a Japanese on the other side of him. When a burly turbaned Sikh got in his way he hit him with the side of his hand and stepped over his falling body. At the side of the main door there was an indoor palm in a pot, which he jumped at and pulled over, delaying all of the reporters except a persistent African whom he had to kick in the shins. The man stumbled and tripped up the next person coming after him, which gave Donald the chance to get out on the street and signal an empty cab.

A car with two impassive men in it followed him: proof of Totilung’s promise, he guessed. He offered his driver fifty talas if he could lose them, and the man took him through a series of narrow alleys half-blocked by bazaar-stalls, contriving eventually to get a herd of goats between his own vehicle and the one following.

Well pleased, Donald paid the man off and changed to a rixa next time they passed one. He could do nothing to make himself wholly inconspicuous, owing to his complexion and appearance, but at least for the moment no one knew for sure where he was.

Three rixas later, he reached the vicinity of Sugaiguntung’s home. He had no expectation of finding the professor in, unless his doctors had insisted that he rest following the attack by the mucker, but he wasn’t here to take advantage of the promised interview.

Scouting the district on foot, he found it to be much as he had guessed from the city-maps he had seen—quiet, prosperous, aloof from the bustling life of the centre of the city, having a fine view of the Shongao Strait. There were houses here, not apts, each one enclosed by a wall and surrounded by gardens—either set with flowers and shrubs in the Western style, or paved, gravelled and ornamented with water-worn rocks. Only three wide roads traversed the area, to allow taxis and delivery-trucks access. For the rest, especially on the seaward, lower side, there was only a maze of paths which he explored with his ears always open for the approach of a curious stranger.

Fortunately, he had picked a quiet time. The heads of families would mostly be at work, the children in school, the servants cleaning house or away marketing.

Sugaiguntung’s own home was in the shape of a very short-legged T, set in a garden of pentagonal form with its shortest side fronting a road. He walked all around except along that short side, where there was a bored policeman swinging a truncheon, noting certain interesting facts such as the location of a stunted tree which overhung the wall and the presence in the house—silhouetted against a window-wall—of a dumpy woman busy at her chores.

Wife, housekeeper? More likely the latter. Donald recalled a report that Sugaiguntung’s wife, a woman older than himself to whom he had been married almost twenty years, had drowned while boating four or five years ago, but no mention of a second marriage.

He was about to make one more tour when the peace of the morning was interrupted by the appearance, trudging up the main road, of a party of dedicated-looking youths and girls carrying slogan-boards praising Sugaiguntung and Solukarta. Their intention was clearly to gawp at the great man’s home. Although it provided a distraction for the policeman, who ran to meet them and engaged in fierce argument with the leaders, their arrival meant that thirty or forty curious pairs of eyes were staring in Donald’s direction. He melted away behind the wall and began to work towards the seashore, along the route by which he would have to take the professor if he persuaded him to leave.

He lunched in a reed-thatched inn and watched a juggler with a tame monkey while the other patrons—who had seen many more monkeys than Caucasians—watched him. Beginning to grow alarmed, he abandoned his last glass of local rice-beer when he decided that the proprietor was spending too long staring at him.

He doubled away inland for a bit before returning to the waterfront during the siesta period. Apart from fishermen dozing in the shade of their beached praus, there were few people about, but nonetheless he wandered along to a totally deserted stretch before he discreetly produced a compass which had been included in his equipment. By its aid he determined which of the six or seven dark indentations he could see in the green shoreline at the foot of Grandfather Loa must be the one leading to Jogajong’s secret encampment.

About then it began to rain again, and he made his way back into the city, heading for the office of the man on whom he must rely to get across the Strait, the so-called freelance reporter Zulfikar Halal. He found him on the third floor above a carpet importer’s warehouse, fast asleep amid the pungent scent of hashish.

Christ. This is my contact with Jogajong?

Halal himself was shabby and unshaven; the room was littered with old newspapers, labelless tape-spools and packets of holographic photos. Obviously this was not merely his office but his home, for a screen in the corner failed to hide a heap of tumbled clothing and shoes. However …

Donald woke him with some difficulty. Startled, Halal forced his eyes to focus and looked first bewildered, then scared. Scrambling to his feet, he said, “Hazoor! Is your honour not the reporter, the American reporter?”

“That’s right.”

Halal licked his lips. “Hazoor, forgive me, I was not expecting you to come here in this fashion! I was told—” He recollected himself, darted to the door and peered out. Satisfied there was no one eavesdropping, he nonetheless continued in a whisper.

“I thought your honour was not supposed to contact me until much later, until—”

“There isn’t going to be a much later,” Donald snapped. “Sit down and listen hard.”

He outlined what he wanted, and when, and Halal’s eyes rolled.

“Hazoor! It is risky, it is difficulty, it is expensive!”

“The hole with the cost. Can you do it?” He produced a roll of fifty-tala bills and fanned them with his thumb.

“Your honour,” Halal said fawningly, fascinated by the money, “I will do my best, by the grave of my mother I swear it.”

Donald felt a little frightened. For all that Delahanty had vouched for this Pakistani, he neither looked nor acted like a trustworthy agent. Still, there was no one else. Short of stealing a boat to cross the Strait, he had to put himself in Halal’s hands.

He said toughly, hoping to impress the other, “I don’t want you to do your best. I want you to do what I’ve told you to do—understand? If you let me down … Well, you heard how I tackled that mucker at the university?”

Halal’s mouth gaped open. “That is true? I thought it a piece of bazaar nonsense!”

“With these hands,” Donald said. “And if you fail me I shall take you and wring the blood from you like water from a wet washcloth. I promise that on my mother’s grave.”

* * *

He was back, now, in the bazaar quarter where his taxi of the morning had lost his pursuers. There was one more thing to attend to before the city re-awoke from its siesta, and he would have to hurry.

He picked his way between rows of merchants’ stalls closed up while their owners slumbered, until in a little side-alley he spotted a phone-booth well concealed from passers-by. Someone had voided his bowels on the floor, but that was a minor nuisance. He kept a careful watch all the time he was composing his two messages on the communikit, his disguised gas-gun in his hand. He was very much aware that the moment he put in his call to the nearest Engrelay satellite someone might realise he was the caller.

But he thought he had got away with it until, gathering up his equipment and making to open the door of the booth, he recognised Totilung standing on the far side of the narrow alley.

tracking with closeups (23)

BEGI AND THE ORACLE

Begi came to a village where the people believed in omens, signs and portents. He asked them, “What is this about?”

They said, “We pay that old wise woman and she tells us what day is best to hunt, or court a wife, or build a new house, or bury the dead so that ghosts will not walk.”

Begi said, “How does she do that?”

They said, “She is very old and very wise and she must be right because she has become very rich.”

So Begi went to the house of the wise woman and said, “I shall go hunting tomorrow. Tell me if it will be a good day.”

The woman said, “Promise to pay me half of anything you bring home.” Begi promised, and she took bones and threw them on the ground. Also she made a little fire with feathers and herbs.

“Tomorrow will be a good day for hunting,” she said.

So next day Begi went into the bush taking his spear and shield and also some meat and a gourd of palm-wine and rice boiled and folded in a leaf and wearing his best leopard-skin around him. At night he came back naked without anything at all and went into the wise woman’s house.

He broke a spear on the wall and with the head he cut in half a shield that was there and gave away half the meat she had and half the rice she had to the other people and poured out on the ground half her pot of palm-wine.

The old woman said, “That is mine! What are you doing?”

“I am giving you half of what I brought back from my hunting,” said Begi.

Then he tore off half the old woman’s cloak and put it on and went away.

After that the people made up their own minds and did not have to pay the old woman anything.

continuity (32)

FIRST WITH THE NEWS

Still a little dazed, having been called from bed, Norman stared at the face in the phone-screen. It was that of E. Prosper Rankin, the company secretary of GT.

“Norman, I thought I’d better call you at once and tell you the news before it breaks over the TV. You may have to take some urgent precautionary measures. Old GT has had a cerebral haemorrhage and isn’t expected to last the day.”

The identity of initials between creator and creation filled Norman’s mind briefly with a vision of the GT tower bursting apart in its upper storeys and pouring dark red blood from its windows. He said after a pause, “What should we do here, then—slack the tempo?”

“The exact opposite,” grunted Rankin. His manner indicated that he had not expected Norman to mouth any conventional professions of regret. Georgette Tallon Buckfast, all her life, had been a person to admire but not to love. “The first effect is bound to be a wave of panic selling in GT shares and all the subsidiary companies. Our estimates are that prices will drop by thirty to forty million today regardless of what we do. We desperately need something to kick them back up again as soon as possible.”

“And you’re counting on the Beninia project to provide the rebound.” Norman frowned. “Well, I don’t see why it shouldn’t—we secured our parliamentary ratification yesterday, on schedule, and Dr. Ram Ibusa is making arrangements to fly to New York with me and sign the contracts on behalf of the government.”

“I see a reason why it shouldn’t,” Rankin countered grimly. “I haven’t told you what the shock was which caved in Old GT.”

Premonition filled Norman’s mind with the sound of earthquakes.

“When we switched Shalmaneser’s own programme for the project from ‘hypothetical’ to ‘actual’, he rejected it. And the technicians can’t find out why.”

“But—!” Norman groped for words. “But Shal must have some sort of grounds for the rejection!”

“Oh, the first thing they did was ask him pointblank why. He spat back everything he’d been fed about Beninia and its people and announced that it was inconsistent with the larger mass of data already in store.” Rankin pounded fist into palm. “And that’s absurd! Every last item has been checked out on the ground by you and your team … Any ideas?”

Norman shook his head, numbed.

“Well, you’d better start thinking hard. My feeling is that we’re going to have to launch the project anyhow and pray for a miracle to save us from calamity. If we don’t get out the grand slam publicity in forty-eight hours at the latest, a calamity of a different kind is due beyond doubt. According to a digest of data about Beninia which I viewed the other day, the people there were alleged by their neighbours to be pretty competent wizards. You’re on the spot—go see if they can conjure up the miracle we need!”

He cut the circuit and the screen died slowly into dark.

the happening world (14)

RECRUITING POSTERS

THE BENINIA CONSORTIUM

(General Technics Inc.

General Technics (Great Britain and Commonwealth) Ltd.

General Technics (Australasia) Pty.

General Technics (France) SA

General Technics (Deutschland) GmbH

General Technics (Scandinavia) Aktiebolaget

General Technics (Latin America) SA

General Technics (Johannesburg) Pty.

Mid-Atlantic Mining Inc.

and all subsidiary companies and corporations of the above)

TOGETHER WITH THE GOVERNMENT AND PEOPLE OF BENINIA

announce the flotation of a substantial PUBLIC LOAN FUND yielding a warranted FIVE PER CENT PER ANNUM with excellent prospect of a yield approaching EIGHT PER CENT (fully computed by General Technics’ “Shalmaneser”)

The term of the loan to be in the first instance 20 YEARS with option of reversion or continued participation for a further 30 YEARS making 50 YEARS IN ALL

Prospectus and certified true copies of the above-mentioned computer analysis available on request from …

* * *

THE BENINIA CONSORTIUM

invites applications for contracts of employment in the country of Beninia from persons having experience of West African conditions particularly in the former colonial territories. Salaries will be generous. The term of employment will depend on circumstances but is expected to average five years. Round-trip allowance; one month home vacation and two months local vacation per two-year period; removal and resettlement expenses; generous weighting for sub-standard conditions of accomodation. Write, giving details of time spent in West Africa and full description of posts occupied, to …

* * *

THE BENINIA CONSORTIUM

requires staff preferably but not necessarily having experience in West Africa, in the following specialities:

Architecture

Education

Transportation

Communications

Civil engineering

Mechanical engineering

City planning

Medicine (esp. tropical)

Law

Economics

Cybernetics

Power, light and heat

Plant erection

Human ecology

Water purification

Public health & sanitation

Textiles

Agriculture

Ore refining

Production planning

Plastics synthesis

Electronics

Mining, mineralogy

Printing & publishing

—and literally EVERY OTHER DISCIPLINE involved in the running of a 21st-century nation! Applications to …

* * *

WANT TO GET OUT AND SEE THE WORLD BEFORE YOU SETTLE DOWN?

WANT TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE?

WANT TO ENJOY TOP PAY AND UNIQUE EXPERIENCE?

The Beninia Project is one of the most exciting ideas ever conceived and YOU can be part of it!

Call us at …

* * *

Stock cue VISUAL: white boy age appx. 17 lifts up negro child to see handsome tall new building under blue sky.

Stock cue SOUND: “Thinking about … Beninia?”

Stock cue VISUAL: BCU child’s wondering face.

Stock cue SOUND: “That’s the part of the big scene where more things will be happening … more marvels will be wrought!”

Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage splitscreen—jungle with animals, building in course of erection, children running, river with boats, etc.

Stock cue SOUND: “Beninia Theme” specially recorded by the Em Thirty-Ones.

Stock cue VISUAL: Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere walk across village square with tame deer following towards (pan) fine new sky-line of buildings and people of village fall in behind, children playing with deer and trying to get on for a ride.

Stock cue SOUND: “Beninia Theme” down and speech over—“You too could be part of this fantastic, magnificent, unprecedented twenty-first century venture! Note the number of the nearest agency hiring volunteers!”

Live cue SOUND: local station reads in call-code as appropriate.

* * *

“Mary dear, I’ve been thinking about these advertisements for Beninia.”

“Yes, Victor, I know you have. But things must have changed out there, you know.”

“They’re changing here, aren’t they? Faster and less palatably! I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to send them an application.”

“T’avais raison, Jeannine. T’as parlé au sujet des Américains qui allaient s’intéresser à la Béninie, et voici une réclame que je viens de trouver dans le journal. Tu l’as vue?”

“Montre-le-moi … Ah, Pierre! C’est épatant! Moi, je vais y écrire sur le champ! Toi?”

“Je leur ai déjà donné un coup de téléphone.”

“Mais … qu’est-ce que pense Rosalie de tout cela?”

“Sais pas.”

“Tu n’as pas demandé à ta femme si elle veut—?”

“Heu! Je m’en fiche, Jeannine. Je te dis franchement: je m’en fiche!”

“Frank, do you suppose they have eugenic laws in a backward country like Beninia?”

“What?”

“GT is hiring people to go there. And they’ve established an office right here in the city to interview candidates.”

* * *

Teach: mathematics, English, French, geography, economics, law …

Train: teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, meteorologists, mechanics, agronomists …

Build: houses, schools, hospitals, roads, docks, power stations, factories …

Process: iron, aluminium, wolfram, germanium, uranium, water, polythene, glass …

Sell: power, antibiotics, knives, shoes, television sets, bull-sperm, liquor …

Live: faster, longer, higher off the hog.

* * *

THE BENINIA CONSORTIUM WANTS—WANTS—WANTS—!

continuity (33)

GOT IT AND GONE

The rain had ceased while Donald was making his phone-call, but water was still running in the gutters. It seemed for a short eternity that the only sound anywhere was the trickling of it as it drained through the grating of a sewer.

At last Superintendent Totilung spoke.

“Mr. Hogan, I believe Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung has been expecting a visit from you. He told me he had offered you a private interview.”

“That’s right,” Donald said, his voice creaking like an old iron gate. Still half inside the phone-booth, gas-gun in hand, communikit slung over his shoulder, he glanced sidelong towards the mouth of the valley. It was blocked by a policeman with his bolt-gun drawn.

“And a personally guided tour of his laboratories.”

“That’s right too.”

“You’re full of contradictions, Mr. Hogan. Any number of foreign reporters would have given their arms for the privilege you’ve been accorded. Yet you haven’t been in touch with the professor all day. Will your head office be as pleased with you tomorrow as they were this morning?”

Totilung’s eyes, bright, sharp, dark like currants in a suet roll, fixed him. Mere shock began to cede place in Donald’s mind to honest fear; he felt the agonising prickle of sweat inside his clothes.

“I propose to call on Dr. Sugaiguntung this evening, at his home.”

“You expect to find there all the information you want—his experimental animals, his charts and graphs, his computer analyses, films, instruments?” Totilung’s manner was deliberately scathing.

“You let me plan my work and I’ll be pleased to let you get on with yours,” Donald said tightly. “In my judgment the interview comes before the guided tour of the labs, so—”

“You’ve wasted your chance, then,” Totilung shrugged. “I’m carrying a warrant for your arrest on charges of assault and battery, and of damaging a camera the property of Miss Fatima Saud.” She added in Yatakangi to her companion, “Bring those handcuffs over here—but keep your gun ready! This man’s a trained killer.”

Wary, not taking his eyes off Donald, the policeman drew the cuffs from his pocket and approached Totilung.

* * *

I’ve been tricked. I’ve been conned. I’ve been driven down a blind alley of life. I never wanted to be herded into corners where I had to kill or be killed. To be back where I was, bored and ordinary and dull, I’d give anything, anything!

But he could not afford to be arrested and waste time and perhaps be deported. Tonight he must pull the plum from the tree and carry it home.

He forced himself towards calm with a deep, controlled breath. Assuming Totilung had been hunting him when someone reported that he was calling an Engrelay satellite from this booth, she would have come straight here. The street on which the alley debouched was too narrow for a prowl car; it, and the driver, must be waiting at the end of the block. With luck he had only Totilung and one man to contend with for the moment.

He let his shoulders slump in resignation as she took the cuffs and stepped up to him, making sure her body did not block her companion’s fire. The latter followed close behind her, gun levelled. Donald held up his hands as though meekly preparing for the cuffs to be put on and fired the gas-gun—not at Totilung, but at the man.

The searing jet struck his cheek, blinded one eye, poured into his mouth as he gasped, scalded his lungs and doubled him over, choking. Reflex triggered his gun and a bolt went to ground with a sizzling noise in a pile of rubbish twenty feet away. Donald wasted no time on him, though. He accelerated the upward motion of his hands and drove the fingers that did not hold the gas-gun into Totilung’s fleshy jowl. Distracted by the handcuffs, she was slow in bringing up her arms to cover her face. He kicked her leg below the kneecap and as she twisted sideways in agony he dropped the gas-gun, grasped her arm and tripped her.

She fell backwards, sprawling, mouth open to scream, and he jumped on her belly with both feet, driving all the wind out of her. The man was recovering: choking and weeping, he was waving the gun as though mortally terrified of shooting his chief instead of Donald.

Donald leapt off Totilung and butted the policeman back against the opposite wall of the alley. His soft cap was no protection as his head slammed into the brickwork. He howled and let the gun fall.

Donald caught it before it hit the ground, turned it over in his hand as he stepped aside, and shot first the policeman and then Totilung to death.

It’s the thing we know best how to do to a man. We’re marvellous at it, wonderful, unparalleled.

Working fast, he pulled the bodies together, his hands becoming sticky with the melted fat on their crisp skins, turned to the consistency of pork-crackling by the energy bolts. He wiped them on an uncharred portion of the policeman’s uniform and unslung his communikit. He placed a book of matches inside the lid as he had been shown. Hand on the control knob, he forced himself to review the layout of the streets nearby and decided that if the prowl car which had brought Totilung had come as close as possible it must be on the right of the alley. There seemed to be more noise than a few minutes ago; the siesta was at an end.

He turned the control knob to its unmarked final setting and ran.

Coming in sight of other people after leaving the alley, he had to force himself to walk with deliberate slowness, his right hand in the side-pocket of his shirjack to disguise the bulge of the gun. After twenty paces like that he heard the dull crumping sound behind him. All around him people started and looked and pointed. He copied them, for fear of seeming more conspicuous than his complexion made him, and saw that two whole buildings extending right the way from the alley to where he stood had abruptly leaned back with a cloud of smoke and dust. The air was full of screams.

Shortly, the screams were drowned out by the noise of the buildings as they folded up wet cardboard fashion and slumped into rubble and corpses.

* * *

From then until sunset time was sliced into disconnected images that might be not visual, but internal. Once he was in a corner of two walls bringing back the lunch he had eaten at the reed-thatched inn by the sea, wondering with detached curiosity at the way his stomach had altered the colour of the food. Another time he was leaning over the counter of one of the ubiquitous street-corner kiosks, pretending to argue with the proprietor over prices because there was a police car passing. But there was no sequence in the experiences. There was a fixed, due moment at which he must return to contact with the world, and until then he preferred not to perceive.

Darkness came, and triggered the command he had given himself. Shaking with the weakness that stemmed from terror, revulsion and vomiting, he made his way like a man in a dream to the district where Sugaiguntung had his home.

By half past seven he was within a block of it, and regaining his self-control. Concealed from a prowl car by a little clump of scented bushes, he felt his awareness mesh anew with exterior events. He re-learned how to frame coherent thoughts.

There’s a lot of activity around here. They can’t have dug out Totilung’s body yet, surely? But it wouldn’t take a genius to deduce what I did.

He fingered the gun in his pocket. It still had almost the full charge with which he had left the police-station armoury. He tried to find comfort in telling himself that he had been trained with the most advanced techniques to use such a weapon and win. It was no good. The only escape lay in action.

Action, distraction, fraction—I’m less than a man.

Circumspectly he moved on. A little way, and he had to throw himself flat in the shadow of an ornamental hedge to escape notice by a man on foot carrying a gun.

They’re waiting for me. Has Sugaiguntung repented of the confession he made, changed his mind about wanting out? I won’t let him. I daren’t.

It took him another half-hour to establish exactly how the premises were guarded. Apart from the prowl car, which was moving quietly back and forth along each of the three roads that served the area, there were seven police stationed around Sugaiguntung’s pentagonal garden, one sentry responsible for each side and paired men at the gates. Otherwise, he was relieved to discover, life seemed to be going on as usual. He caught snatches of sound from TV sets and in one of the nearby houses a group of people seemed to be rehearsing a scene from a traditional opera, singing in high forced voices and beating gongs.

At least he ran small risk of having to cope with inquisitive neighbours as well as the guards.

On leaving the hotel this morning, he had brought one trank with him to steady himself in the final emergency. He choked it down, praying that his stomach would not reject it before the capsule dissolved.

When it had taken effect, and his teeth no longer threatened to chatter, he made his way to the ornamentally deformed tree he had noticed this morning, which overhung the wall of Sugaiguntung’s home. The man responsible for guarding this side of the house always seemed to pass directly beneath it.

On his next tour, he did as previously, and Donald’s feet took him at the back of the neck, toes together. His whole weight followed and slammed the man face foremost into the ground, muddy from the rain. He struggled for only a few seconds before fainting, nose and mouth blocked against breath.

Donald shorted out his gun by tossing it into a puddle, where it discharged in a cloud of hissing steam, and clambered back into the tree. Edging along the stoutest of the branches which overhung the wall, he was able to drop on the far side where a flowering bush would break his fall. He was in sight of the main gate from here, where the two guards stood side by side in the glow of a lamp, but they were looking the other way.

On this side, the house’s windows were all in darkness except one, which was screened by wooden slats. He headed for it, avoiding the pool of light cast by a lamp over the front door, and stole a glance inside. He saw Sugaiguntung sitting alone on a low pouffe before a table laden with empty bowls and dishes, just finishing his evening meal. The door of the room opened and the woman he had seen this morning came in, to ask whether she should clear away.

He dodged around the nearest corner of the house and went to the opposite side, hurrying at the expense of silence because it could not be long before the policeman’s absence was noticed by his colleagues. At the back of the house there was a pair of sliding glass doors leading into the garden. He peered in, but saw nothing because the room beyond was so completely dark. He made to move on—and brilliant light leapt up in his face.

He was dazzled for an instant, too startled to move. Then his tortured eyes told him that the man who had put on the light was Sugaiguntung, and Sugaiguntung had recognised him and was coming to open the door.

He fell back, hand hovering by his gun, and hoped desperately that no one was looking in this direction from outside the grounds.

“Mr. Hogan! What are you doing here?” Sugaiguntung exclaimed.

“You invited me to call,” Donald said dryly, his moment of shock obliterated by the swift assistance of the trank he had taken.

“Yes! But the police say they want to arrest you, and—”

“I know. I hit someone with a camera this morning and because Totilung would dearly love to deport me she’s using it as an excuse. What’s more, she’ll have the chance if you don’t put out that light!”

“Come inside,” Sugaiguntung muttered, drawing back. “In the house is nobody but my housekeeper, and she is growing deaf.”

Donald darted past him. Sugaiguntung closed the door and let slatted blinds fall over it, blocking the view from outside.

“Professor, do you still want what you said you wanted yesterday?” Anxious for the answer, Donald kept his hand close to his gun.

Sugaiguntung looked blank.

“Do you want the chance to get away from being used as a political tool?” Donald rapped. “I said I could give you that. I’ve risked my life to make it possible. Well?”

“I have been thinking about it all day,” Sugaiguntung said after a pause. “I think—yes, I think it would be like a dream coming true.”

In the distance there was a shout and the sound of running feet. Donald suddenly felt as limp as a rag.

“Thank God. Then you must do as I tell you. At once. It may be too late even now, but I think not.”

* * *

Down the back pathway to the other gate, at which there were two more guards stationed, Sugaiguntung running on the path itself, Donald parelleling him noiselessly on soft ground. The guards looked behind them and turned a hand-lamp.

“Quickly!” Sugaiguntung panted. “Your sergeant wants you to go to that side of the house!” He pointed to his left. “Someone has knocked out the man who was on guard there!”

The policeman stared in the indicated direction. They saw the swivelling beams of handlamps and heard a voice bark an order. At once they took it for granted that Sugaiguntung was telling the truth and doubled away.

The moment they had rounded the corner of the wall, Donald flung open the gate and herded Sugaiguntung through. The gate gave on to the series of winding paths which he had scouted this morning. To the right and down-slope lay the sea.

If that bleeder Halal has let me down, what shall I do?

But it was too soon to think of such terrible possibilities. He hurried Sugaiguntung along as much as he dared, listening over the sound of his own breathing for any noise of pursuit. None had arisen before they emerged from the end of the path on to a quiet residential street. Now they had to walk without hurrying, occasionally crossing over to escape recognition by an evening stroller.

After an interminable time they saw a taxi at an intersection, which they were able to hail. In it, they rode to the waterfront and left it at a place popular with tourists where there were several restaurants specialising in grilled fish and Yatakangi folksongs. Mingling with the crowd but taking every advantage of awnings, screens and corners to avoid showing themselves directly to the curious, Donald led the way to a stretch of beach where during the day there had been thirty or forty fishing-boats.

His heart was in his mouth on the last lap. He nearly fainted with relief when he saw that—in keeping with Halal’s promise—although many of the praus had already put to sea, their lights bobbing against the looming bulk of Grandfather Loa, a few were still nosed into the sand, their crews assembling one by one and laughing together, passing bottles of arrack and cigarettes.

“A man is supposed to have arranged for one of these boats to take us across the Strait,” Donald explained to Sugaiguntung in a low voice. “Wait here. I’ll go and find him.”

Sugaiguntung gave a nod. His face was mask-like, empty of emotion, as though he had not yet had time to digest the implications of what he was committed to. Leaving him on his own worried Donald, but there was no alternative: that face was far too well known to be shown to all these fishermen.

Halal had said he would arrange to have a blue lamp hung from the mast of the boat assigned to carry them. There was no such lamp on any of the boats, Donald discovered with renewed dismay. But there was one with a lamp on the mast even if it wasn’t blue. Growing desperate, he tried to persuade himself that the colour did not matter—perhaps they had not managed to find the necessary blue glass for it.

Three men were readying the boat for sea, coiling the typical Yatakangi seine-nets on the bow thwart and sluicing them down so that they would sink at once when they were tossed overside.

Gambling everything on guesswork, Donald hailed the man who appeared to be the skipper.

“I seek the man from Pakistan, Zulfikar Halal!”

If that kief-sodden coward caved in on this job, I’ll … But I wouldn’t have the chance. I’ll be jailed, or dead!

The skipper paused in his work and turned his head. He gazed for a long moment. Then he picked up a handlamp and flashed it directly at Donald.

He said, “Are you the American, Hogan?”

For an instant Donald failed to understand the question—the man had given his name a Yatakangi inflection. Directly the words sank in, the world seemed to capsize. Thinking that at any moment police might emerge from the hold of the prau, he jumped back, tugging his gun free from his pocket.

“No need for that!” the skipper said sharply, and laughed. “I know you. I know where you want to go. To Jogajong. He has many supporters among us fisherfolk. The word went around today that if you asked for help we should give it. Come aboard.”