Each vehicle towed a big square vat. The four of them wouldn’t enable us to carry away all the contents of the tank with us if need be, but they would give us a good part of it; and organics are the most precious thing there is on Killibol.
Becmath drove. In the seat next to him was Tone the Taker, a skinny, nervous individual who had taken pop in the arm before we set out. Pop addicts nearly always go to pieces if they’re without their supply. Their nervous systems need it.
Crowded in between the driving seat and the main troop force were myself and Reeth, another of Bec’s inner circle. Reeth was slight-bodied, slick and nimble. Becmath had chosen him well. He kept his eyes skinned and alone of all the henchmen he was sometimes openly critical of his boss’s decisions, a quality which Bec seemed to value.
“Slow here,” Tone said, “there’s a hidden turning on your right.”
As the sloop slowed to a dawdle we saw an arch closed off with a big sheet of steel. It could be opened, Tone had explained, only from the inside, but that, of course, would not detain us long. We had brought impact explosives with us, the same that are used to punch out odd-shaped sheets of metal.
In less than a minute the stuff was taped in place. There was a short, sharp bang and a piece of steel clanged to the floor, leaving a hole large enough for a man to get through. Tone stepped inside and shortly afterwards the arch’s door slid upwards and disappeared.
Our convoy bumped in darkness down a sloping, uneven surface. Tone instructed us to stop. We got out and proceeded on foot by the light of hand-lamps.
I felt an irrepressible excitement. Never before had I seen one of those places where they make food; I felt, in fact, a vague kind of mystique about it, like you would about your own mother’s womb. No wonder, I thought, that the tank controllers had found it easy to hang on to them and make other men subservient by means of them. It took a man like Becmath to overcome that unspoken feeling of reverence and claim a tank for himself.
Suddenly Tone flung open a door and we were there. Faces turned towards us in bewilderment as we blundered in, handguns and repeaters darting about on the look-out for trouble.
There wasn’t much to see. We were in a gallery, not very large — maybe twenty or thirty feet long — one wall of which was covered with dials and switches. At either end were doors leading to the culture banks.
We herded the shocked technical crew to the far end. Out of curiosity I opened one of the doors and peered in. The light was dim and the air had a dank, musky smell. There were a number of short corridors. And that was all. The tank itself, I knew, was sealed.
I closed the door again. “What now?” I asked Bec in a low tone.
“Better not try to hold this place,” he said. “We could, for a while, but what then? We’ll get a better bargaining position from our own territory.”
He called over Tone. “You said we could drain nutrient fluid off. Are you still sure?”
“Yes, if we get the crew to help us.”
“They’ll help us,” Bec said, with one glance at the frightened technicians. They wore long white gowns and white gloves. I’d never seen a costume like that before.
Underneath the gallery there was a valve where the organics from the tank could be drained off. Apparently they used it regularly in order to clean out wastes and replenish the nutrient fluid from recycled material in an adjoining chamber.
The technicians were reluctant at first; they took quite a knocking about before we persuaded them to co-operate in opening the valve. The stuff that came gushing out was thick and slimy and the smell was so strong it made us gag. We started to fill up the vats. In spite of the smell we were all excited, like kids, because we were doing something that had never been done before.
“O.K.,” Bec said to Tone while the work was going on. “Now take me to this old man.”
Tone led the way to the exit. “You come too, Klein,” Bec told me, “I’d like you to see this.”
We went part way back up the ramp in the darkness. Tone found a smaller passage that went off at right angles and then curved round in a crazy spiral. Shortly light shone round the edges of a thick door. Tone thumped on it with his fist.
“Open up, Harmen,” he cried in his reedy voice. “It’s me, Tone.”
After a brief shuffling noise from the other side, the door swung open. An old man stood there. His hair was unkempt and down to his shoulders. He was tall, thin, but still energetic and hardly stooped at all. His face made an impression on you the instant you saw it: the nose was bony and hooked, the corners of the mouth turned down, and the eyes were intense and penetrating. But the corners of those eyes were wrinkled with humour-lines, and somehow the total effect was kindly despite its bizarreness.
“I’ve brought some friends; they wanted to meet you,” Tone told him.
Harmen’s eyes followed us with displeasure as we walked into the room. “I told you never to bring anyone here.”
“You should never trust a taker,” Bec told him with a smile.
Even before the door opened I had heard a faint buzzing noise. Now it was louder, but intermittent. The air was heavy with the smell of electricity and unidentified substances. The room was large. The light was erratic, and came mainly from various instruments that gave off illumination in irregular pulses and flamed colour against the walls and ceiling.
These instruments were set up on a number of tables. The whole effect was weird, unbelievable. Something started to creep up my spine.
“Harmen used to be a tank technician,” Bec murmured to me. “All the time, though, he was interested in something else, as you can see. When he retired he set up this little place here. It’s perfect for him, as you can see. Nice and private. Only Tone knew about it — Harmen was sorry for him and helped him get pop.”
“He’s an alchemist,” I whispered. “What the hell are we doing here?”
I’d heard of alchemists — alks — before, but naturally never seen one. They were something you threatened your children with. They were supposed to have evil magic powers and to indulge in nasty habits like sucking the blood from live babies. I didn’t know they really existed any more, but of course it would have to be in secret. There were city ordinances against “unauthorised or secret experimentation”, and popular fear of alks was strong.
“Alchemy is the only field of scientific endeavour left in the world,” Bec said quietly, trying to calm me. “Don’t believe what you hear about alks. Harmen doesn’t drink blood, and he can’t take away your will and make you his puppet by remote control. At least, I don’t think he can.” He gazed around him. “Just look at all this stuff! I bet this guy knows more electronics than anybody in the city.”
Some of the apparatus on the tables seemed to be modelled on discharge tubes of various shapes and sizes, some globular, some retort-shaped with several electrodes discharging into the same chamber. What was going on in those discharge tubes was weird, frightening, but kind of beautiful. Colours — all the colours you can think of. The discharge tubes — flasks, or whatever — seemed to have various substances in them which the electrical charges were acting on. In one, the stuff was splashing against the sides of the retort in colour changes of a definite sequence: black, red, white, then yellow with brilliant islands of green, then deep purple. It was hypnotic. I tore my eyes away, suddenly remembering the stories about how an alk can steal your will and put it in a little mechanical doll.
“What do you want here?” the alk demanded in gravelly tones.
“We’ve come to see what you can do, old man. What you know.” I sensed that Bec was unexpectedly discomfited in these new surroundings. He suddenly felt himself to be a clumsy mobster.