Matt blue, two white bands. Tab says:.OTJ/487/A — Cat. V.
And somewhere in the background the failure to understand the urgency,he wished to inform me personally that your mission is the key to a critical situation of the highest international proportions, a top echelon director sent in with his signature on a 6-K form and the death-pill in his pocket, a shut-ended crash-priority mission with the final phase now running, and nothing going on to the tape except these hieroglyphs. Cylinders of BCW gas or something newer than that, something more lethal, but surely it didn't matter any more how destructive a weapon was or what it was made of within a given hour today or tomorrow the cities of New York and Moscow and Peking could effortlessly be laid waste and the present concern at the conference tables was how to dismantle, piece by piece, the structure of the kill and overkill. I didn't understand why I was here.
Matt red with black bands. Tab: YCJ/2829/E. There's no reference to any category on this one.
They wanted my report on the cargo of Tango Victor and they were getting it and it wasn't my concern to ask why. I was a ferret and this was the rabbit and my teeth were in its neck.
GF/A-9/Cat. XII. A point is that 'Cat.' might stand for 'catalyst', not for 'category'.
Noted.
I began work on the cylinders that had broken out of their clamps and were lying askew on the cabin floor. The nearest of them had smashed its protective cap and the brass nozzle had been snapped off at the neck, and this I reported to Loman. The metal tab was edge-on and I had to kneel between two of the other cylinders to read it. The torch beam centred on it and I struck out blindly to force the thing away but it screamed and I hit a shoulder and crashed across the loose sand with the blaze of the sun bursting over me as the wind came howling and threw me whirling over the roaring dunes and I spun dying, drifting and spinning, falling.
The world burning and the whirl of dunes rising as high as mountains round the dizzying horizon, dwarfing me and dominating, looming over me in darkness while the giant birds came screaming as they gathered for the carrion, red of eyeand enraged and swooping on me, scream of the mad Arab in my skull repeating, repeating,mountains in the sky, and great birds darkening the heavens, their long necks stretching and reaching and the first strike of a beak and my hands too feeble, the terror trickling in the blood as the sun burst and I fell again and lay sand-drowned.
Sharp pain finger, hit again, hideous, the beak hooked, hooking and a talon tugging, horror and their red eyes raging and the foul wind of their wings beating at the air and the sand flying up, pain again and tugging and my living hand for carrionthey will not and quicker and snatching at a wing with cunning, pulling and the gross black body closer, Irefuse and my fingers stronger, pulling again and now the talons hooking in a frenzy and my red blood running but a killing to be made, the bald head turning on the gristly neck, my hands closing and twisting on the last thin scream from the beak and the others fainter now, their cackling farther away, my legs buckling but up again and I stood with it, a dead weight dangling from the broken neck and I swung it, turning, swinging the heavy scarecrow body in a circle till the dead wings caught the air and flapped open and I let it go, you red-eyed bastards, show you, fall and breath knocked out and lying numbed, the sand bloodied and the night coming waves soundlessly breaking drowning.
Lightheadedness: the mind hollow as a shell but the few thoughts lucid and of an extreme simplicity, diamond-bright and surrealistic, a return to pre-maturity, A is for Apple, This Little Boy has Killed a Bird.
Ague, the limbs jerking, I would like to be somewhere warm, I am so cold here, S is for Snow but this is Sand. The big birds had attacked me and tried to eat me but I won.
The sand reddish, the spots becoming brown in the sun, one finger a curious shape and the white of bone shining, peck-peck yes I remember.
Remember all right, the memory functioning satisfactorily, somewhere the forebrain trying to seize on facts, desperate to know and to act but blocked, frustrating.
Tango.
They were circling, as theyhad been before. I thought I heard them making sounds like chickens, but the brain was so busy that it wouldn't let me listen properly to anything. It wanted to know the facts. Obviously psychochemicals but not related to mescaline or lysergic acid, not Sarin or the Soman-Tabun group although there was this jerking of the muscles but no paralysis yet. Vision unimpaired, on the contrary, the vultures had the exaggerated 3-D effect you see in stereoscopes, the outline of their moving wings very sharp against the sky.
Acetylcholinesterase, the memory super-clear like the vision, the GF, GE and VX group destroying this substance and thus blocking the nerve signals to prevent resetting, my legs jerking worse than my arms, nothing definite.
Blackout sensations, possible onset of coma, try to keep cerebration clear and coherent: the gas was heavier than air and the residue had stayed in the fuselage, pooling in the trough of the freight section, and that was why I'd been all right till I'd had to crouch over the fallen cylinders to read the tabs. The initial psycho-shock had made me think of a creature, something that had to be fought off, classic reaction: terror is ancient and animistic, fear of a predator, of being eaten.
Check time I'd been unconscious between ten and thirteen minutes blackout still threatening, secondary stage of the syndrome in some nerve-target agents is coma: muscular trembling, coma, death. Finger not good, bone exposed,how can I tell extent of blood loss and its contribution to syndrome, other injuries, the thing had pecked at lot, the dunes beginning to float and the dark aeroplane increasing at the rim of the vision-field and I got up because they were drifting lower and I didn't want that again, couldn't stand that again, the surrealistic clarity darkening now and things becoming confused and the memory going, what was tango, who was tango,get up and hide, can't stay out here. The dunes beginning to roar and I was running, falling, running again.
Tango. Tango.
Voice faint whose voice get up or they'll have you, eyes out.
It was different this time because the terror was less. The maelstrom was whirling round me and the birds grew monstrous, cackling overhead and one of them making a dive at me and going away and trying again, but the coma was blunting the nightmare and there was room for an area of almost rational thought: I was trying to run as far as the group of rocks because if I fell again and couldn't get up they'd come and squabble over me.
The rocks grew enormous and I thought I'd reached them but they floated away and I had to run in a curve because the desert was a vortex, circling round me, then one of the birds was suddenly right against my face with its hooked beak screeching and I felt the draught of its wings and caught the acrid farmyard stench of the thing as it came for me red-eyed with the talons spread from the stiffened legs and the screeching didn't stop but when my hands went into the storm of feathers it beat frantically and there was blue-black plumage in my clenched fingers as it rose out of my reach, my legs trying to buckle but I stopped them because I had to run, go on running, the sky was murderous.
Rocks loomed again and I tripped and crashed down and slid across loose shale, really here, really home, a dark cloud floating under me, the spread of fabric rumpling into folds as I crawled deeper, deeper into the niche where the lizards lived, where I would live, safe from the cackling sky.