The Patient Dark

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

For something like two hundred and fifty years Earth had been dominated by humanoid aliens from the star world of Alishang. But man's spirit refused to be conquered. There was a world-wide underground planning for the day of final liberation. And there were four leaders who knew the secret that would guarantee victory - the secret of ZI. Rupert Clinton, intelligence man for this underground, was not one of those four; yet somewhere deep in the recesses of his subconscious mind, he knew ZI's secret.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

HAD it not been for the emotional shock caused by the murder, he would never have allowed himself to be trapped into driving his car on the highway at night. In an attempt at isolation that he knew would probably be futile, he had switched on all four headlamps and now drove looking from darkness into a bright dazzlement splashing the unwinding road ahead.

How long he could keep that antisocial behaviour up without being stopped by a highway patrol was questionable; he was hoping with futile anger that he could reach the turn-off before they——

“Stop pretending,” he said aloud, harshly.

The highway patrol and the police had an understandable place in the reality of things. He had no wish to be picked up for a murder he had not committed; if only Sheila had listened to him! But it was not fear of the police that threatened his sanity now, nor anything that he could have given a name to if pressed by a psychiatrist.

Driving habit broke through his enforced ban and forced him to glance into the rear-view mirror. At once vertigo seized him. He was drowning in that tiny oblong of reflections. Stretching away into prolonged perspective, and ranked in undeviating lines, the road lamps seemed to be beseeching arms pulling him gently backwards into their embrace.

He caught the flicker of the nearer lamps as they rushed in blurring speed past the car, and a red, confused madness mounted to his brain. It took a compulsive affort of will to reach up and switch on the dome light. The movement broke the mirror’s hypnotism; he could turn his aching neck and let his smarting eyes once more peer forward into the onrushing area of illuminated highway. He was trembling all over, and sweat lay cold and unpleasant upon him.

The automobile was a black spider unreeling on its thread of light, its four glaring eyes like pitiful antennae groping into the night. Somewhere above him black clouds massed, intermittently hiding the moon, and wind gusts prowled the turnpike and shook angry fists against the closed windows. Now that the dome light was on, it had become difficult to see through the glass. A defence against encroaching madness had brought also a new barrier against escape from that madness. Coloured dots of light swam towards him from the darkness beyond his headlamps. Before he could interpret them, they had passed, gone in a silent rush of brilliance. He thought, in his confusion of anger and fear, that it had been the turn-off for Leinster. That meant that the next would be Clarendon. And in Clarendon he could use his hotel room to change his identity again. If he was extraordinarily lucky, he might reach the midnight airship.

The idea of simply stopping the car and walking occurred to him, to be immediately rejected. The whole idea was to get away, even at the enormous risk he was running, and he was well enough aware of police efficiency to know that they would pounce on any solitary pedestrian.

He was driving as fast as he dared, half-blinded by lights in wrong places. And through all his self-contempt for the completeness of his failure, he yet had sufficient control to restrain his twitching nerves from thrusting the throttle to the floor boards. He had to balance himself nicely between too much speed, which would kill him in a smash, and not enough, which might allow either of the pursuers to catch him before he turned off this naked ridge of light.

He could still hear Sheila’s shrill, hating voice, and it was easy to open his mind and let the memories come spilling in: of Sheila, standing, panting in her dishevelled négligé; her husband dying on the carpet, with the fumes from the gun still stinking in the too-warm room; of Sheila again, loathing him, saying, “You’ll never get away. No matter where you go, they’ll find you.”

And before that, his own voice, for all his training, betraying raggedly his horror, “You didn’t have to shoot him.”

Again he saw Frank, Sheila’s husband, walking in, arrogant and assured, with the gun in his hand making very sure that he would no longer wear horns on his forehead.

The memories span the wheel of Time backwards ever faster. There was the memory of meeting Sheila, on instructions from Horner, and of making the big play for her. She had been wearing a white nylon blouse and skirt, crisp and pleated; he could see every fold as clearly now as though she were sitting in the car with him, but at the time he had scarcely noticed her dress.

And farther back still, he remembered old Horner saying, “Never forget, Rupert, that what you learn here may one day turn the scales in Earth’s favour.”

He remembered, too, a crystal-clear image of himself, young, fresh-faced, eager with that pathetic eagerness he could now only recognise with a cynically contradictory heart-pang of remorse, saying enthusiastically, “I understand, sir. You can rely on me.”

And of old Horner, grey lips grim under the grey moustache: “You’ll forget all you ever heard or saw here, Rupert. You will become an ordinary citizen until the time Earth calls upon you.”

The turnpike swooped round a wide sweeping curve, and he held the car to it blindly. Farther back into the pit of memory his mind excavated, drawing pictures of flashing moments that at the time had seemed of supreme importance: of being selected for special training; of understanding just what a Double-I man was and what he might be called upon to do. And even as his mind leaped down the long corridors of memory, he struggled against the backward tread, guessing with a craven’s fearful anticipation what lay at the end of that benighted journey.

The highway lamps flashed past his head now like tracer bullets. The turn-off to Clarendon and safety must lie only seconds away. But quicker than the speed of his car, quicker than the flashing wheels could carry him, the horror pounced.

It was as cold as death. In that cold lay blankness. And from that icy blankness streams of light burst and poured in a chain of fire.

His mouth was open and agape, his lungs expanded and bursting, his head flung back and his throat muscles rigid. Silently, he struggled to scream but could not. His fingers gripped the wheel to numbness. There was an awful hissing in his ears and his voice, in mental echoes alone, shrieked unintelligibly up the scale, piercing higher, octave by octave, until there was nothing but a bubbling silence that grew and swelled and burst in a silent flash of fire in his brain.

The car hit the kerb, the front wheels jarred once; then it turned completely over, and smashing through splintering fencing, rolled three times and flung itself down the embankment. It lay obscenely in the darkness, its four wheels spinning under the stars.

The statistics that Doctor Eddington considered vital were those having to do with the job of a brain specialist and neurologist, with a post-operative interest on the psychotherapeutic level. To those fortunate enough to be associated with Doctor Eddington—including her patients—the statistics of the doctor that were vital were thirty-six, twenty-one, thirty-five. These, added to a smoothly waved crown of unrepentantly carroty hair, and a mouth that, a complete stranger to lipstick, could raise goose-pimples on a man’s spine, had created complications in the doctor’s life, until it had been thoroughly understood by all that the doctor’s one interest was the human brain.

“I don’t know who you are,” Doctor Eddington was saying to the man whose armpit-holstered gun had worn a shiny patch on his suit. “And I don’t care what you want. This man is my patient and my duty is to him. You can’t move him. That’s final.”

The man sighed patiently and tried again. He was about the same height as the doctor, but it was obvious that he was having to buy trousers with a larger waistline at distressingly frequent intervals. He had thinning sandy hair and the porkpie hat he ran continuously in circles through his fingers showed traces of hair on the sweatband.

“Now, look, doc, my partner and me——”

“Doctor, please.”

“What’s that, doc?”

“My name is Doctor Eddington. You call me doctor.”

The second man broke in quickly. He was younger, with the freckled face and broad hands of a quondam farmer. “Sure, doctor. It’s just that this man has to come along with us.” He gestured around the operating theatre anteroom, white, aseptic, efficient, chilling. “We understand your feelings, doc—doctor, but we can look after him okay.”

“Don’t talk rubbish! Do you know what he’s——?”

Doctor Henderson, the senior house surgeon, grey-haired, flabby-faced, the husk of a once brilliant surgeon, harrumphed uncomfortably, and smiled placatingly. “You see, doctor, these gentlemen are from the police. They must have a very good reason for asking this. They insisted I bring them to the patient right away.”

The older policeman put his porkpie hat down carefully on a chair and visibly put on all the charm he was capable of. “My name’s Grandison, doctor. It is absolutely vital that that man in there”—he nodded towards the glass doors leading to the theatre—“comes with us now. We can take care of him.”

Doctor Eddington didn’t bother to argue it out. She knew that every second of delay might be the second that would kill the man lying in there with his skull smashed in. She walked calmly towards the theatre and assistants opened the doors for her. Doctor Henderson half-raised a futile hand, and then let it drop. He looked vaguely at the two policemen.

“Doctor Eddington is a brilliant surgeon … remarkable. I really don’t think that your police surgeons—begging your pardons, of course—could possibly better the care and attention your prisoner will receive here.”

“How bad is he, doc?”

“He has multiple contusions and a number of fractures of the lower limbs, but they can be dealt with in the normal way. What Doctor Eddington is particularly concerned about is a depression of the occipital. We are not yet sure of its precise degree of extent and damage. The dura matter and the cerebro-spinal fluid have probably done their job as shock-absorbers, but in these cases there has to be——”

“Spare me the gory details, doc,” Grandison said, and cut Henderson off in mid-flight. “He’s been hit on the back of the head. So okay. Our skull surgeon could take care of that, couldn’t he?”

Doctor Henderson might have been an old has-been, whose hands could no longer guide a scalpel with the precision of a microtome, but the semi-contemptuous reference to a “skull doctor,” coupled with the barely veiled insolence of these two policemen and his growing reliance on the judgments of Doctor Eddington, brought back a flash of the old fire. He put both hands in the small of his back and breathed deeply. “This man may be the criminal you say he is. But you are laymen and have no conception of the risks involved in what you demand. I have no choice but to refuse your request, and I warn you that if you persist and the man dies, then you will both be chargeable with murder.”

Grandison looked at Henderson admiringly. “Big words doc.” He turned on his partner and nodded his head towards the exit door. “You heard the doc, Jimenez. Ring the Chief and tell him we’re staying here. Tell him we’re sticking to Harris like a plaster. It’ll be a round-the-clock watch, so ask him to send along a relief.”

Jimenez said, “Okay, Grandison,” and went out.

“Now,” Grandison said briskly, turning to Henderson and stripping off his coat. “Where’s a mask and smock. I’m going in there.”

“But you can’t!”

“Listen, doc, and get this straight. Either me or one of my men will be on duty at all times with this Harris. Got that? At all times.”

“But why?”

Grandison smiled and let his eyes scan the anteroom. Apart from a few white-clad assistants at the far end, he and Henderson were alone. He bent closer.

He said, “Just in case—under the dope, you understand—he wants to get chummy … talkative.” Grandison stretched his shoulders under his shirt and began to unbuckle the gun harness. He took another look around and glanced through the glass portholes of the exit doors. His voice sank until Henderson in turn had to lean forward.

“Alishang,” Grandison said quietly.

The old doctor’s big flabby face jumped with reflexive shock. The pouches of skin tautened. But his eyes stared steadily back at Grandison. “If you’d told me that in the first place there would have been no argument.” He moistened his lips with a furtive flick of his tongue. “But what have those swine got to do with——?”

“Never mind. And forget it. They’ve got stooges everywhere.” Grandison chuckled nastily as he buttoned the neck of the smock under his chin. “We know we can trust you, doc. We haven’t forgotten, down at Headquarters, what you did in the Twenty-Five.”

“Ah, yes. The Twenty-Five.” For a moment there was a stillness, a silence of memory between them, a moment of memory that could be shared by every Earthman on Earth. Then Doctor Henderson sighed. “I was a damned young fool then. Twenty-Five. A long time ago.”

“Forty-seven years ago,” Grandison said. He added, inconsequentially, “I was in the process of being born. My old man’s told me a few of the things that went on.”

“A damned young idiot,” repeated Henderson.

“Like catching a couple of Shangs and running them through the sawmill—lengthways. My old man said the whole interior of the saw sh. . .