Camilla stood up, swaying a little. She felt weak at the knees, but it was a weakness not entirely due to the whisky. Gabriel held her close, remembering how he had held her on the bridge. Suddenly he was full of fierce possession. He had saved her from death and now she would repay with life. Big joke.
Camilla seemed to be shivering. “Let’s deal with the cats quickly,” she whispered.
“Elizabeth of Austria is in season.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Lulu Tower, which stood where Buckingham Palace had been before the exigencies of economics and tourism caused it to be removed to Monarchiland in the Scottish Highlands, was the tallest building in London. Being a slender, domed cylinder exactly five hundred metres high, it was also one of the finest phallic symbols in Western Europe.
It was occupied in descending order by the most important institutions in the United Kingdom. The dome and the top fifty storeys housed NaTel, its governors, director-general, public relations officers, controllers, accountants, producers, telefamilies, camera crews, technicians, and make-up girls — even unto the lowly script spinners. Immediately under NaTel were the storeys that contained what was left of the Mother of Parliaments. And immediately beneath the two Parliament levels were the various ministries and government departments necessary to give the illusion of running a small country containing a mere seventy million people.
The branches of the Civil Service extended downwards for nearly one hundred storeys to the base of the building. At ground level, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Mental Health waged unending total war upon each other for possession of the greater number of eighty-eight small cell-like rooms. In fact both were fighting for a lost cause, since the Ministry of Sport was expanding downwards.
Occupying a south-facing room well above the critical halfway mark in the great glass and titanium phallus, Dr. Peregrine Perrywit found some cause for satisfaction. Few men had climbed the Thing from base to shining dome; but Dr. Perrywit, who had started with MinEd ten years ago, had now reached the seventy-seventh level. Not only that, but he was already on drinking terms with two NaTel producers (Get High With Mother and The Junior Sex Hour) and his wife had attracted the attention of a lush lezzy NaTel accountant. Dr. Perrywit, although still only in the mid-level of the Ministry of International Security and Race Harmony, was confident that he had far to go.
The possession of a B2 security pass carried with it certain advantages. He was, for example, able even now to shoot up to NaTel reception level without being challenged. He made it a practice to do so at least three times a week. Sometimes, he would walk out to one of the helicopter decks as if he had been assigned to meet an important incognito; and at other times he would take a drink in the guest bar, again with the air of one keeping a vital assignation.
But, as Dr. Perrywit sat at his desk and gazed through his double glazing on this fine summer morning, he was aware that before he could aspire to the giddy heights of NaTel, he needed to be at least two grades higher in Insect Race. And that would require talent and initiative. Both of which, naturally, he had in plenty.
Perhaps his chief talent was for the reduction of expenditure. Originally, he had specialized in divinity, gaining his Ph.D. in this skill. Divinity had been a necessary discipline because, in his youth, he had yearned to become a computer designer, specializing in the then new God Machines. It was a time of great opportunity. The Christian churches had integrated into Romaprot, which had hired the best business efficiency firm in the U.S.A. to switch the church to automation and restore the waning fortunes of religion to a sound commercial basis.
The computerization of God had caught not only the imagination of prollies and think tanks but also the imagination of Peregrine Perrywit, who was neither. The Instant Absolution advertising campaign (masterminded by the legendary Homer T. Krappe Associates) that followed the first phase of automation had started the folding money rolling in once more.
Romaprot went public as a limited liability company and was oversubscribed instantly. Share values doubled, tripled, quadrupled. Peregrine Perrywit, hot from University and with the ink still wet on his Ph.D., had a thirty-five second interview with Cardinal Archbishop Cyril Cantuar and got hired on the spot.
To design God Machines.
Unfortunately, there was an almost immediate misunderstanding. Dr. Perrywit, of North Country origin and with a wired-in compulsion to thrift, was under the impression that he was to operate on a cost-efficiency basis. He was not. He was hired to spend money not to save it, Romaprot having reached that critical stage where it could no longer afford to think small.
Dr. Perrywit, after two years’ intensive work, produced the design for a mobile, confessionhearing, advice-proffering, absolution-dispensing, French/English/German/Italian-speaking God Machine that could be manufactured for less than nine hundred thousand pounds.
He was fired. Not only as project-leader but from Romaprot employment altogether.
His rival project-leader had had the wit to produce a machine that could do all that Dr.
Perrywit’s machine could do. Further, it could play the organ, produce plainsong, conduct baptism, confirmation, expulsion, marriage, divorce, eutahanasia and death ceremonies while simultaneously playing a useful part in Romaprot’s vast accounting procedures. The fact that it would cost five million to build was an additional argument in its favour.
So Dr. Perrywit was consigned to the limbo of MinEd. His thrift compulsion went with him. He succeeded in cutting the budget of his first project — the computerized control of nappy changing in State crèches — by twenty per cent. MinEd saw the writing on the wall and shot him upstairs.
MinSport suffered a similar ordeal by Perrywit when he attempted to introduce plastic grass in two thousand football stadia throughout the country. The saving would have amounted to more than twenty million pounds a year. Perrywit was clearly dangerous, so again they shot him upstairs.
Insect Race, however, knew how to make use of Dr. Perrywit’s peculiar talent. As the largest and most expensive ministry in the Thing, Insect Race swallowed one quarter of the nation’s annual income. And at times it had come dangerously near to spending one third. It needed Dr. Perrywit. It needed him badly. The Ministry of International Security and Race Harmony was basically responsible for the armed forces, the diplomatic service, foreign aid, scientific research and the maintenance and organization of an élite cadre of agents provocateurs.
At present, Dr. Perrywit’s talent was devoted to scientific research. And for the past few weeks he had been concentrating on decimation of the Microbiological Warfare Division with a target of reducing its overall budget by fifty per cent.
That is why he had fired Professor Eustace Greylaw after forty years of almost blameless and even, on occasion, almost meritorious service. That is also why he was concerned with the problem of disposing of various animals, while at the same time ascertaining what had happened to one tiger, one squirrel, one lion, one lamb, one panther and one white rabbit.
Ten years before, Professor Greylaw had received an important brief from the then Chief of MicroWar (since elevated to anchor man for NaTel’s Beauties of Mother Nature series).
Professor Greylaw had been instructed to develop a micro-organism that could be used over a period of time to ease any aggressive nation out of its war psychology without it looking as if there had been external interference. This was a tall, if not impossible, order. Which is why O.C. MicroWar had chosen Professor Greylaw.
Throughout his generally undistinguished career, Eustace Greylaw had been accident prone. Ask him to develop a new Black Death, and the chances were he would have absentmindedly wiped out the Home Counties before he had finished proving the bug. Ask him to develop a form of instant trypanosomiasis suitable for use in a cold climate and he would have put half Scandinavia to sleep before he was satisfied that he had accomplished the task.