‘No. I’m a physiologist. The Company’s reorganising, changing. The new emphasis is going to be transnational threats, economic opportunities. We have to become more scientific, technological, financial.’
‘Or you’ll be out of a job.’
He smiled and sipped his drink. ‘We foresee the day when we’ll be working with the KGB, the GRU or whatever they become. But there’ll still be things we won’t want our new friends to get too far with.’
‘Like poltergeists.’
‘Sounds strange?’
He nodded.
‘No, I’m not Intelligence Division. I’m with Research — a branch called the Phenomena Unit. The USSR was into this early. Vasiliev at the Bekhterev Institute? You know the history?’
‘No.’
‘We have people working on remote viewing. But my group is focused on psychokinesis. The Soviets did a lot of work on that. Now they’re broke and heading for a graft-based kleptocracy. The interest is military, of course. You know how the air force is working on thought-controlled fighters?’
He nodded.
‘And SOFs are looking at what they call synthetic telepathy. A bit more practical are under-the-skin devices which are still a physical and training matter but things are moving that way. Now phenomena are simply a step beyond the limits we know. We’re trying to expand our understanding — discover how it works.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Just so much one can cope with in a day.’
‘And tomorrow’s an early call for me.’
They got up and Frost held out his hand. ‘Thank you for your time. This one’s on me.’ He waved his door-key tag at the waiter.
‘I’d be interested,’ Cain smiled, ‘to see an intangible entity that creates physical phenomena.’
Frost looked at him quizzically. ‘Everyone thinks it’s a laugh until they’re confronted with direct experience. But when they do, they don’t find it funny. You’re a resourceful and dangerous man. But I’ve seen men like you shocked into jelly.’
‘Great. And I’m your new patsy?’
‘You’re it.’
20
BETA
The roaring forties buffet three lands, Tasmania’s southwest, New Zealand’s fiordland and southern Patagonia. All are rugged, wild places still, misted in a sense of foreboding. All once were joined. Fossils show biological links. In Tasmania’s museums you can still see a relative of the South American prothylacinus, the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine — mounted and on display. The large marsupial carnivore with striped back and kangaroo-like tail was hunted to extinction by European settlers, as was the indigenous human population.
The inheritors of this terrible past consider themselves overlooked by the mainland and resent jokes about in-breeding. (How do you circumcise a Tasmanian? Punch his sister in the mouth.) But the island state still has one treasure beyond price — a huge wet and wild wilderness — one of the last on earth.
In an almost inaccessible mountain treescape, deep in the southwest, where some still hope a breeding pair of thylacines might survive, a narrow 40-kilometre-long fire trail winds beneath the rainforest canopy. The neglected-looking track is impassable, even to four-wheel-drives. It’s cut by two deep river crossings, with collapsed wooden bridges, and a huge fallen tree. It ends at a rusty set of doors set deep in a rock wall. A faded sign reads: PROSPERITY MINE — CLOSED 1880. KEEP OUT. GROUND SUBJECT TO SUBSIDENCE. None of it explains why fresh tyre tracks reach to the concrete sill beneath the doors.
Cain braked the LandCruiser near the remains of the first bridge and switched the concealed FLIR to 360 scan. He checked the readout on the slide-out interactive display. A PROCEED cue showed that parameters had been met. Satisfied, he touched a square at the side of the screen and, in front of him, the centre of the bridge rose smoothly out of the torrent to form a dripping but drivable surface. Once he’d crossed, it sank back into the stream. Five kilometres on, the second bridge did the same. Further on still, the fallen tree rose, levered by hydraulics deep in the earth. It disturbed an echidna which, spines bristling, waddled across the road. The small creature paused between the ruts as if determined to stay there. Cain waited, watching its heat signature on the display and wondering if it had an egg in its pouch. When the monotreme left the track he drove on.
As he neared the ‘mine’, hidden active arrays and cameras observed his progress. He keyed in the day’s code, waited for clearance. Finally the ancient doors, the facade of a blast-rated, vault-like entrance, slid into the rock.
He drove down the dimly lit ramp as the doors rumbled shut behind him. The tunnel, a kilometre long, took him under the bluff and under the next valley — a valley surrounded by steep, heavily wooded slopes, ringed by security fences, sensing devices and 24-hour patrols equipped at night with IR aimers only visible through night vision goggles. On the perimeter fence were signs: HYDRO ELECTRIC COMMISSION FACILITY. KEEP OUT.
In the valley were rows of barrack-like buildings several storeys high — featureless and painted to blend with the surroundings from the air. They had no doors and windows only at the top. One had a flat roof with concealed lights to assist night helicopter landings. A fenced-off gravelled area enclosed cooling boxes and vents.
Cain left the wagon in the transport bay and walked to Verification. Half an hour later he was cleared and in the lift heading for B4 — one of the seven underground floors. He now wore a metal wristband with a transmitter that tracked him and transmitted the codes that allowed him to enter each section.
‘Welcome back, Mr Cain,’ the duty surgeon on the B4 desk said with deference. ‘A message from 2IC.’
Cain took it. Pat’s handwriting:
Dear One,
I’m flat out like a lizard drinking. And Ronnie’s not back yet. So settle in and visit Detainment. John knows you’re coming today — been asking about you all week. We’ll sort you out ASAP.
Love
P
He dumped his things in his berth on B6 and rode the lift down again to B7.
In the ‘guest wing’, as Detainment was called, not even a rat could move unseen. The level crawled with surgeons, surgeon instructors and cadets. The only creatures unchallenged were brown and had six legs.
He passed Zia’s suite, not wanting to make contact, surprised they hadn’t shipped him south.
He passed Stern’s lab, still wondering what the guy was doing. The history of most of these people was ‘need to know’. Stern was a likeable type. He went in.
Stern’s domain was now an Amazon of drooping laboratory hoses. There was a spectrometer and so much test equipment it took him a moment to spot the scientist. ‘Still at it?’
Stern, a small-boned Jew with a pleasant expression, looked up from the bench. ‘I know that face.’ He brushed through the festoon and shook Cain’s hand. ‘Been years. What have you been up to?’ The standard joke. As if anyone would tell you. The man had a funny bone, a valuable quality for those robbed of their lives.
‘I’m retired.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘They need a babysitter.’ He waved at the tubes. ‘What’s this?’
‘Same old shtick. It’s a pilot plant. Just needs scaling up.’
‘And it does what?’
Stern cackled. ‘Ah, I have a secret too.’
Cain walked further down the corridor past the doors of more ‘originals’, preparing for the next encounter. He wasn’t ready or worthy. But, as with most events in life, one rarely was.
He paused outside the pope’s door.
A Grade One duty surgeon crept up to him as if confronting an icon. ‘He’s in the library, sir — alone.’
He nodded, continued to the originals’ library, a long thickly carpeted room with a central row of tables, each with its brass reading lamp. John sat in an alcove, reading a book. He looked older, shrunken, but still wore a neat cassock and a cross. A good sign. He’d always been scrupulous. Cain stared at the grey face, feeling a stab of affection and concern. How old was he now? He’d been born in 1912. Almost eighty.