Edmund Cooper - Kronk

Mercifully, the weakness of the flesh was on the side of the righteous. During the course of events, Gabriel managed to lure successively one NaTel nurse and two hostesses briefly away from the champagne and canapés. The ground was damp, but the nurse did not seem to mind too much. Gabriel, working methodically and quickly, was somewhat discountenanced to find starlight reflected in her vacant eyes. It almost deterred him from orgasm. He took the hostesses, one at a time, into the roomy NaTel chopper. The operations did not take long. He could hardly have been missed from the party.

Dennis Progg talked. He talked the night and the champagne away; and he talked Camilla to sleep. In the end, they had to bring her round with needle-juice; and then, the night’s work accomplished to NaTel satisfaction and protocol, the chopper obligingly deposited the two new involuntary stars of This Is Your World in Hampstead.

Camilla did not place her thumb in the id ring until the chopper had lifted away. She was sufficiently alert not to wish to interest the genius of This Is Your World in house-trained lions and tigers. Tomorrow, she thought, yawning, no, later today, she and Gabriel would have to decide what to do about the poor creatures.

She need not have concerned herself with the problem. There was no problem. Not a single pacifist animal remained in the house.

Camilla and Gabriel were instantly sober, though still tired. They searched the house, but there was no sign of animals or of illegal entry or exit. In theory, and unless otherwise programmed, the outside doors would respond only to the thumbprint patterns of Camilla and Eustace. Therefore, how could a person or persons unknown have entered? The windows, possibly. But both Camilla and Gabriel were too weary to face a detailed examination.

Further, how had the animals been taken away? Though each could have been led docilely on the end of a pink ribbon, it was not a method that had any great recommendation as a reasonable explanation.

Gabriel tried to think, and couldn’t. Camilla tried to think, and couldn’t. The events of recent hours, beginning with the nerve-shattering debacle at St. Paul’s, seemed suddenly to have transformed their brains into masses of quick-setting glue. Wearily, and hand in hand, they went up to the bedroom. The bed was still rumpled from their previous orgy, which seemed now to have taken place millennia ago when the world was young. Camilla was too tired even to take off her NaTel dress. Gabriel tried to help her and failed miserably.

They fell on to the bed and into each other’s arms. But, oddly, sleep was difficult. Gabriel yawned, belched, and broke wind in a dying cadenza.

“What is it, love?” Camilla was semi-consciously solicitous.

“I’ve been thinking.”

“What… what — hokum — have you been thinking?”

“It couldn’t be MicroWar.”

“No. It couldn’t, could it? What couldn’t be MicroWar?”

“The animals,” mumbled Gabriel. “It… it couldn’t be MicroWar because somebody would have been staked to snatch us also. Logic.”

“Logic,” agreed Camilla. She yawned fit to swallow herself. “I love you.”

“I love you, too… We’ll have to go away.”

“Not — haouh — until we have rested… They paid to have me raped. Could there be a link?”

Gabriel thought about it, or thought he thought about it. “They paid to have somebody raped,” he announced at last. “That’s different.”

“What’s… different?”

“Not NaTel.”

Camilla suddenly revived sufficiently to laugh. “What a scream it was at St. Paul’s! What a scream, darling. An absolutely marvellous scream!”

“Ultrasonic,” agreed Gabriel with an eyes-closed grin. “Also a damned close-run thing.

Still, we got the message.”

“What message?”

Gabriel took a deep breath and did his poor best to imitate that final, demented, high-speed gabble from the Depthorama screen. “Go forth and multiply! Go forth and multiply! Go forth and multiply!”

Then they both feel asleep — laughing.

Throughout the night, the brothers Karamazov had been driving at high speed towards Scotland in a large covered road vehicle gaily labelled Cirque Russe. Every hundred kilometres they stopped the van and changed places, democratically taking turns at the wheel.

There was still a coolness between them; but the success of their smoothly executed animal snatches in Sussex and Hampstead had briefly reduced the quotient of mutual mistrust.

It was Ilyich who had conceived the plan for stealing the animals; but it was Peter who had thought of hiring a small Scottish castle where they could be hidden in splendid seclusion. It was Ilyich who had obtained the van; but it was Peter who had invented the Cirque Russe.

And it was a combined operation that had yielded the means of entry to the zoo in Sussex and the house in Hampstead; for both of them had raided Dr. Slink’s office in Lulu Tower. Peter had discovered a set of keys to the Sussex zoo, and Ilyich had found a copy of Professor Greylaw’s thumb print in the personnel files.

In retrospect it all seemed like a subtle harmony of motion, like the old days when, working as one, the brothers Karamazov could whip up an instant brush-fire war in the near east or depose a European premier in twenty-four hours from a cold start. Glancing at Ilyich, Peter was almost tempted, as a renewal of faith, to drop the idea of a second Swiss numbered account. But then he recollected once again that Ilyich had a) denied killing Professor Greylaw and b) denied hearing his last words. Again Peter was saddened. There would have to be a second account. If one could not absolutely trust one’s identical twin, who in this world could one possibly trust?

The night’s drive was fairly uneventful, except that now and then the Cirque Russe had to slow down or take small diversiions because of multiple crashes, chiefly in the hover lanes, and the occasional pitched battles between procs, meds and bounty hunters.

Most bounty teams operated from high-speed hover wagons; but a few adventurous spirits took the risk of using unlicensed choppers. The really experienced ones could spot a pile-up, drop down, lift the bodies or parts thereof and pull out in little more than three or four minutes. A healthy body with, say, no major organ damage except a scrambled brain, could be worth four thousand pounds in a bulk sale or five thousand in a carve up.

As he watched with professional interest a team of bounty hunters swarm like uniformed locusts over the wreckage of two overturned ground cars and extract three limp bodies before the wheels had stopped spinning, Ilyich reflected that if the bottom ever fell out of the spy market he and Peter, with their talent for organization, would not be without a means of livelihood. But then a shadow came over his face as he thought of Peter. Could Peter still be trusted? How much reliance could one place on a man who, without any provocation, had suddenly become suspicious of his brother? Ilyich signed regretfully for the fine thing that was now dead. Peter had changed. He had become withdrawn. Perhaps he was planning some kind of double-cross in Scotland. Well, two could play at that game. But that a Karamazov should have to think in terms of protecting himself against a Karamazov. The world was growing older, values were crumbling, there was little that one could believe in any more…

Shortly before dawn, the Cirque Russe turned off the Great North Transit and eventually rolled to a halt in a deserted Yorkshire lane. It was time for the brothers to get some rest. Also, assuming the theft of the animals to have been discovered and assuming their significance to be known or suspected by someone in MicroWar, it would be wiser to lie low during the daylight hours.