The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘You see, I’m too smart for you all,’ Rakister explained. ‘I cottoned on instantly. I messed up the killing of Dorgen – I heard someone come into the earth shop as I was doing it. And I thought, “The Colonel will get you for this, boy!” And then I realised that he was planning to get me any way, I’d go back for my reward and nobody would ever see me again. For some reason, it was important to him to get Dorgen out of the way secretly; but the secret would only be really safe with me out of the way too. Oh, I worked it all out, Parrodyce.’

‘Very clever of you, Joe,’ said Parrodyce. ‘Go on.’

‘I’ve seen the telecasts. I know they pinned the job on this bod Wyvern. But that’s just a blind to lull me into a sense of security and make me come out of hiding. It won’t wash. Now they’ve sent you along – to talk me into coming back, I suppose?’

So he did not know that Parrodyce was also on the run – but how could he? The sense of hope rose in Parrodyce again.

‘Well …’ he said.

‘Oh, don’t trouble to deny it. I’ve got no grudge against you, Parrodyce – you were a good boss, as bosses go. But now you’re here, you’re going to help me. With your assistance, I can carry out a little plan I’ve hatched. We’re going out through Trafalgar Gate, see? I’m beating it out of the sector.’

The sense of hope swelled into a sense of triumph. It interfered with Parrodyce’s breathing.

‘Once we’re in the open, you can please yourself what you do,’ Rakister continued. ‘I shan’t harm you if you co-operate. If you don’t co-operate, I’ll kill you soon as look at you. Get that?’

‘You know I’m no fool, Joe.’

Rakister laughed harshly.

‘See this get-up I’m wearing?’ he said. ‘Never mind how I came by it. It belonged to a lung-piper. Know what a lung-pipe is?’

The term meant nothing to Parrodyce.

‘A lung-piper is a chap who inspects the oxygen wells. You know how they get the liquid oxygen up here from underground lakes? The pipes run through the hangar, and the pumps are there. We’re going to inspect them; I’m the piper, you’re my mate. Now here’s exactly what we do, and keep your ears open because we’ve got to hurry.’

For a man who looked as mad as Rakister, the plan sounded a pretty cool one.

The substitute lung-piper and his mate, the latter in dungarees, the former equipped with a tool case and necessary credentials, crossed from the rear entrance of the ‘Single Z’ to the Trafalgar Gate.

There, the Turkish band was haggling its way through the smaller gate. Instruments blared saucily, for they had won a moral victory over the Customs officials and the coffin full of loot was getting through untouched. They were the centre of all eyes, which suited Rakister and Parrodyce well.

Rakister had obtained a good deal of information on lung-piping from the unfortunate off whom he had got his uniform. Parrodyce following, he marched boldly into the guard room, flashing a yellow pass.

They were well in before a corporal stopped them.

‘Out of my way, sergeant,’ Rakister said. ‘We’ve got to get through here. There’s an emergency job required on the underground piping. They phoned through about it, didn’t they?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ the corporal said, ‘but I’ve only just come off watch. I’ll have to wake up the sergeant, if you’ll hang on.’

‘Wake the bloody sergeant if you like, but we must get on with it unless you want to be floating out on liquid oxygen. There’s a break in X-235.’

He had brushed past the corporal, and was in the tiny store behind the guard room proper. Through a doorway on their right they could see the rest of the detail sleeping in steel cots with their boots on.

At the far end of the store was a trap door. Rakister knelt down beside it, pulled out a bunch of keys and began unlocking the locks and snapping the seals.

‘Hang on a bit for God’s sake, man,’ the corporal said. ‘It won’t take a minute, but whoever tampers with those seals has to sign a form.’

‘Give it me when I come up from the tunnel,’ said Rakister.

The corporal weakened. Evidently he did not consider that rousing a sleepy sergeant was too sound an idea.

‘How long are you going to be?’ he asked, indecision in his voice.

‘An hour – eighty minutes,’ Rakister said. ‘Bring us down some tea, eh?’

‘I’ll still be here then,’ the corporal said with evident relief. ‘I’ll go and get the form, if I can find it. I think it’s a KH 725A.’

He drifted back into the front room as Rakister pulled up the metal square. Parrodyce fished a torch out of the kit they had with them, and they climbed down into the depths, lowering the trap door on top of them.

‘Wouldn’t it have been playing safer if we had tipped that corporal down here and shut him up?’ Parrodyce enquired.

‘He knows he shouldn’t have let us down here. Therefore he’ll keep the secret better than we could,’ said Rakister, and Parrodyce knew he was right. In the old days, casual remarks like this, revealing Rakister’s considerable working knowledge of human psychology, had surprised Parrodyce; he could not understand how a man with such contempt for his fellows gained that sort of wisdom. Now he saw it had been picked up selfishly, to gain Rakister’s own ends. And in the same flash Parrodyce saw that his own usefulness was almost at an end. One of them was going to die shortly, and Parrodyce looked the likelier candidate so far.

‘Well, I didn’t need much help from you after all,’ Rakister said, almost as if reading the other’s thoughts. ‘I was afraid we might have more than one dumb double-striper to cope with.’

They stood beside the big, lagged, oxygen pipes; four of them ran straight from darkness to darkness, in a tolerably wide tunnel stretching from outside the dome to the centre of the city. A notice on the wall proclaimed, ‘It is Dangerous to touch these Pipes unless Insulated Gloves are worn’. It was colder than a vault; their breath clouded and fell as rime on to the pipes.

‘There should be a lung-piper’s hut here,’ Rakister said. He took the torch and swung it round.

The ‘hut’ was a deep alcove a couple of yards down the tunnel. They switched on an electric light and went in. Hoses hung on the wall, tools were stacked in racks. There were also two space suits.

‘Get ’em on,’ Rakister said briefly.

The suits felt icy and were difficult to put on. They helped each other, trembling with cold. One of Parrodyce’s teeth began to ache.

‘We’ve got no time to lose,’ he said, and then realised it was something he was repeating over and over.

At last they were into the suits. With relief they switched on the heating circuits.

‘Don’t close your face-plate yet,’ Rakister said. ‘Then we can talk without using the intercom; someone else might be listening in over it. You go on first down the corridor; I’ll follow. Stop at the outer lock.’

Very nice, Parrodyce thought. And at the lock you can shoot me if you feel like it. Do you feel like it? I can’t tell. I can’t tell what anyone ever thinks, despite this freak gift I have. So I walk down this tunnel of darkness, round-shouldered, with a gun following. Perhaps someone more observant would know what Rakister felt like. He may have given himself away by some tiny item, just as Wyvern was betrayed by an impossible smile.

Just ahead of him in the long tunnel, the oxygen pipes were punctuated with taps worked by wheels. Hoses could be attached to these taps and the liquid syphoned off if a section of pipe had to be emptied for repairs. The taps pointed back down the tunnel the way they had come.

Parrodyce had no two thoughts about the matter.

Judging his distance, he flicked off the torch and ran to the nearest wheel. As he heaved it round, he heard Rakister call in astonishment. Then the liquid oxygen was jetting out; he could feel it thundering through the cock. And he was shouting, cheering, blaspheming.

He switched the tap off after a long minute and flashed his torch.

Quickly he slammed his face plate shut. The lenses of his spectacles had iced over, and he had to wait till the suit heater had coped with the trouble before he could see again. The liquid he had released was boiling, misting up into the corridor, multiplying, writhing, blue, beastly, raw: the stuff of life in killer mood. Half hidden in the vapour, a figure lay across the pipes, frozen there. Parrodyce hurried away from it, a little nauseated.

It was not far to the overhead airlock. He climbed the ladder and heaved himself in, closing the hatch behind him with relief.

Three minutes later he was stepping out of the side of the hangar on to the moon’s surface.

He had never been out alone. It was terrifying! He stood in the shadow of the dome and it was absolutely black. Parrodyce could not see the ground, the hangar or any particle of himself.