Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘I’m afraid I just don’t buy your theory about Prev. And if something has gone wrong in the real world, then it would make sense to be ready for something going wrong in this one.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ said Gates. ‘It wasn’t much of a theory anyway. You sure you know how to use one of these?’

‘Only on paper,’ admitted Dallas.

‘Paper’s what it’ll make metal look like when it burns a hole in it. When we used these guns on Artemis you had to have another guy standing alongside you, just to help you watch out where the hell you were pointing the thing. Not only that but he had a safety switch to cut the power in an emergency. For all that, they’re surprisingly easy to use. You just point and squeeze the handle. Just try not to shoot it in here. The atmosphere will make it hard to be accurate.’

‘I think I can remember that,’ said Dallas.

Gates detached the short steel barrel from the UHT gun.

‘One more thing. Whatever you do, don’t take this off. A beam of hot electrons tends to generate X rays, even in a vacuum. This sleeve’ll shield you from those.’ He shrugged as he remembered the greater hazard of gamma rays in the reactor containment room. ‘Not that a few lousy X rays are going to concern a man like you.’ Gates sat down in the passenger seat of the electric car. ‘In the circumstances, you knowing how to use the gun on paper ’n’ all, I’d better ride shotgun. You drive.’

Dallas sat down and took hold of the steering wheel, an action that automatically started up the engine. He glanced at Gates. In his giant white glove, the UHT gun looked deceptively toylike. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

Dallas depressed the accelerator pedal, and they started their counterclockwise journey around the first radial arc. Silently the little car gathered speed until they were moving at almost twelve miles per hour.

‘How big is this facility?’ asked Gates.

‘About three thousand square meters.’

‘Place gives me the creeps.’

‘Under the circumstances, I’m forced to agree with you.’

A short distance on, they drew to a halt in front of the airlock door, which, finding the encrypted chips in the two men’s helmets, lit up in expectation of their imminent egress. As they drove inside, some interior lights came on, prompting each man to press the buttons on his life-support system computer that would pressurize his EVA suit.

Gates felt a reassuring breath of air on his face and some pressure in his ears as the suits expanded to accommodate around four pounds per square inch. Even before the airlock had been pumped out and the exit door was open he had the short silver barrel of the UHT gun leveled at the brightly lit but airless corridor ahead of them. Each man heard the other breathe a sigh of relief as they saw that the corridor was empty.

‘I don’t know what I was expecting to see,’ admitted Gates.

‘That’s the problem. If something has gone wrong, it might be anything. One simulacrum of reality transfigured by another. Whatever happens now, we are ourselves and our circumstances and nothing else. How we intereact with that is the only reality that matters right now, even if it has been ruptured by something we don’t know about.’

Dallas depressed the accelerator pedal again and moved them into the second radial arc. It looked exactly like the radial arc they had left on the other side of the airlock door.

‘But maybe this is a good thing,’ he said. ‘When we rob the real blood bank it’ll mean we’re prepared for the unexpected. The trouble with a completely schematic plan like this one is that sometimes there’s not enough margin for error. And I’m afraid you need to make errors in order to discover just where those margins exist.’

Dallas thought this was nonsense, but he kept on talking in an effort to try and take his mind off the sound in his headset of Gates’s loud and rhythmic breathing. It was like something mechanical and served only to remind Dallas of how provisional and uncertain life really was. Hearing Gates breathe — almost as if he was inside Dallas’s own head — it was easy to imagine that at any second the sound might end forever.

‘Did you hear something?’ asked Gates.

‘Just you, breathing away like a pervert.’

‘Don’t blame me, blame the simulation.’ Gates glanced around. ‘Where are we now?’

‘The supplies warehouse. Next stop the water plant.’

The car slowed and then stopped.

‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Dallas, stamping on the accelerator pedal. ‘We just did.’ It was plain from the voltmeter on the dash that there was still plenty of power in the battery. He slid off the seat and lifted the hatch on the front of the car to check the electrical terminals. ‘The connections look okay,’ observed Dallas, but he wiggled the wires to make sure. There was nothing loose. ‘No sign of a problem here.’ He closed the hatch and slid back behind the wheel. But still the car refused to budge.

Gates pointed the gun one way and then the other, as if expecting trouble to arrive at any minute.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘I think we’ll have to walk,’ said Dallas, and collecting another life-support pack and his own UHT gun, he stepped down from the car again, with Gates following. They hadn’t walked ten paces when Gates, glancing nervously over his shoulder, noticed that the electric car had disappeared.

‘Dallas,’ he said urgently.

Dallas turned, saw the empty space, and walked back to where the car had been standing just a few seconds earlier.

‘That bastard Prevezer,’ muttered Gates. ‘What the hell’s he playing at?’

‘You could be right,’ said Dallas. ‘It would seem that someone wants to play, anyway.’

‘Bloody simulation,’ said Gates. ‘I don’t like this, Dallas. I don’t like this at all.’

Dallas was about to answer when he noticed the corridor lights beginning to dim. Simultaneously each man hit a switch on his helmet that controlled two pairs of halogen lamps.

‘Let’s go back to the airlock, to the R&R area,’ Gates urged.

‘Why do you assume things will be any better there?’

‘Because I’ve been there already.’

‘You just think you have, that’s all. It’s probably already different from when we were there. Just look what happened to the car. No, there’s nothing to be served by going back.’

Dallas began to advance along the curving corridor, which was now illuminated only by their helmet lights. But the size of the light arc meant there was always part of the corridor ahead that remained unseen. For fifty slow yards neither man said a word, and it was Gates who finally broke the silence: His keener eyes had spotted something.

‘Lying on the floor, ahead of us,’ he said urgently. ‘Do you see it?’

‘I see it.’

Gates led their careful approach toward the object.

‘Looks like a space suit,’ he observed, and then they halted as, still lying on the floor, the suit moved. ‘There’s someone inside it.’

‘Can’t be one of our people,’ said Dallas.

‘I almost wish it was,’ confessed Gates.

‘Although I suppose anything’s possible now that we’ve seen the car disappear.’

The stricken figure seemed to writhe on the floor, and standing over it, Gates attempted to communicate on an open channel. Getting no response, he prodded the figure with the toe of his boot.

‘I suggest you leave it the fuck alone,’ Dallas said.

Gates shook his head. His curiosity was aroused by the discovery that the helmet’s gold-painted visor was covering the clear bubble that would have revealed the figure’s identity. ‘I’m just going to see who it is,’ he said, kneeling down.