Time in the World
by Philip J. Lees
“The red nine on the black ten.”
Don’t you just hate it when people do that? I looked up, ready to say something snappy, then thought again. Quickly. I picked up the nine and placed it on the ten.
“You’re right.” Not the most witty rejoinder I’ve ever come up with, but better than what had been in my mind before. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
She was around the thirty mark, I judged—the best age for a woman—and wearing it well. Her ice blue, cotton pants suit was drawn in at the waist, looser above and below, and she filled it out perfectly. Chestnut hair hung straight to the collar of her jacket. It was parted in the middle and when she turned her head it swung as if it had been cut and brushed a thousand times in preparation for just that movement. I could almost smell it. A strong jaw was tempered by a soft smile, set in a complexion that made me think of whipped cream and apricots. There were a few dark freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. She wore no makeup and she needed none.
But it was her eyes that kept my attention. They were the same color as the suit, but shot through with darker flecks that were of a violet hue I didn’t remember ever seeing before. I looked at them and they looked back. If she’d said “I’m Mandy. Fly me,” I would have reached for my boarding pass.
“I’m Vivian,” she said. “May I sit down?”
For some reason the back room at O’Callaghan’s felt suddenly quiet. Even the clatter from the pool tables out front seemed to have taken itself off somewhere further away. I had the sensation that everybody there was looking at me, at us, but when I glanced around I saw that the other patrons were still sipping their coffee, talking across the tables, reading their papers, just as before. Yet in that moment the day had become special.
Taking my eyes off hers for a second let me find my voice again.
“Sure,” I said. “Please do.”
“Thank you.”
I almost said “You’re welcome,” but this was getting to be like something out of those audio disks foreigners learn English from and I managed to limit myself to a smile and a shrug as she slid into the chair opposite mine. I gathered up the solitaire game and riffle shuffled the two stacks together into a deck.
“You’re Jack Kincaid?”
For one terrible instant I had the premonition that she’d sat down with the wrong guy and that another person’s name was going to emerge from between those gracefully curved lips.
“That’s right,” I said, trying to sound as if it was something I said every day. Hell, it was something I said every day, but at that point it was hard not to make it sound like the pledge of allegiance.
“They told me I might find you here.”
Her voice came from deep in her throat and tasted like the smoke of a fine cigar. I let it hang in the air between us for a second before I opened my mouth again.
“Well,” I said. “You’ve found me.” I was progressing from monosyllables to more complex sentences now, some part of me noted, albeit slowly.
“I have a job for you, if you’re interested.”
“Why me?”
“I need an experienced Sky Guard.”
Suddenly the spell was broken. The laugh came out before I could stop it. It sounded bitter, even to me, and she frowned. It didn’t make her one bit less beautiful.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I can’t help wondering why it’s my experience as a Sky Guard in particular that you’re looking for.”
“It’s not that.”
The way she stressed the ‘that’ told me she knew about it. My last assignment for the Sky Security Bureau. There had been fifteen survivors on board that plane and I was one of them. I shouldn’t have been. It was part of my job not to be. All through the countless operations, the days of pain that followed, the weeks of physiotherapy, I passed the hours wishing I had died in place of any one of the other passengers and thinking back, playing the whole scene over and over, trying to see the chance I had missed. There must have been a chance. There always was, I knew that. It was part of my training. But I couldn’t see it, no matter how many times I replayed those few minutes. Only the bullying of the therapists had got me out of the bed and eventually out of the hospital so that I could spend my time nursing a coffee in the back room at O’Callaghan’s, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life and concluding that I didn’t give a damn.
“What then?”
“I work for my father. Ted Townsend.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Time in the World Townsend?”
She nodded. Now I began to understand. Ted Townsend had founded the Time in the World company and with it had almost single-handedly rehabilitated the airship. When fuel costs went through the ceiling it had started to make sense to use a cheaper form of transport for goods where a delay of a few days wasn’t critical. Townsend’s cargo vessels soared through the stratosphere, soaking up solar energy to maintain their stately progress, needing only a skeleton crew in pressurized quarters to check the automated systems now and then. But where Townsend had really made his fortune was by coming up with the idea of luxury cruises for the very rich and sky congresses for the very paranoid.
All well and good, but Townsend was a maverick who used his connections to flout the law and get away with it. No self respecting SSB agent would consider working a dirigible. So that’s why she was talking to me.
“They took my weapon,” I said. “You do know that, don’t you? They took my weapon and used it to hijack the plane.”
She leaned forward, clasped her hands together and set them gently down on the table top as if they were holding something precious and fragile.
“You were set up,” Vivian Townsend said. “It wasn’t your fault. I’ve seen the report of the inquiry.”
“It still shouldn’t have happened. Forget the official version. They pensioned me off, remember?”
“That would have happened anyway.”
So she’d done her homework. When things got difficult a few years back they’d had to change the rules, up the ante. It was the only way to keep up the recruitment figures. In my former profession now one ‘incident’ was the limit. After that, you—or your family, depending on how it went—were guaranteed a good income for the rest of your life. That was the deal when you graduated from training and formally signed up. It was referred to officially as a ‘retirement bonus’. None of us was in any hurry to retire.
I had never expected to cash out personally without a successful seizure and it didn’t feel right, even though for some complicated legal reason my own ‘bonus’ was some thirty percent less than it would have been otherwise. I hadn’t complained.
I was still trying to think how to explain all that to her when suddenly she pushed back her chair and stood up. The violet in those eyes flashed at me so brightly I winced.
“You disappoint me, Kincaid,” she said. Not cigar smoke in her voice now, more like burning cotton. She pulled a card from a side pocket of the small shoulder bag she carried and tossed it onto the table.
“If you ever get over feeling sorry for yourself,” she said, “give me a call.”
She turned to go, fine chestnut hair swinging, and I felt a pang of regret. At least I felt something.
“Wait,” I said, trying to sound strong and not desperate. I didn’t manage it, not quite, but she turned back and looked at me again.
“Sit down,” I said. “Tell me more.”
§
So a couple of weeks later I found myself occupying a luxury suite fifteen miles above the eastern Atlantic.
“It isn’t always like this,” Vivian told me. “Sometimes the staff have to share.” She smiled wickedly, because in fact the night before we had shared—dinner, a dance, her bed.
Her own suite, as befitted a company vice president, was even larger and more sumptuously fitted out than my own and included an open fireplace and a Jacuzzi, in which we were finishing our breakfast. I had jokingly complained about the relative poverty of my own quarters.
We had boarded the airship the previous afternoon at an airfield some way outside Lisbon, just before what Vivian termed ‘lift off’, and one thing had led to another. As far as I could tell we were the only passengers on board.
If I hadn’t read up on it in advance the airship would probably have surprised me. I would have expected one of those huge, cigar-shaped craft, not thinking how much technology had progressed since then. The Jules Verne was shaped like an oval burger the size of a football field and taller than a house, flat on the top and bottom. Underneath it, like a wart on the belly of an elephant and barely visible in the shadow, was the bulge of the control compartment and crew quarters. Sprawled across the center of the top face, and considerably larger, was a collection of interconnected structures officially called the ‘Congress and Recreational Facility’, or CARF. In my own mind I dubbed it the hotel, because that’s what it was.
The main section, which contained the hundreds of gasbags from which the airship derived its lift, was colored bright primrose yellow on the underside and walls and a sooty black on top—to maximize energy absorption, Vivian explained unnecessarily in an almost apologetic tone. It certainly wasn’t going to improve the view. Hundreds of thermocouples, mounted vertically throughout the hull, converted the temperature difference between the top and bottom faces into electric current through the hours of daylight. This was used to charge the batteries that powered the steering and propulsion jets mounted halfway down six sturdy pylons, which were spaced evenly around the craft’s circumference. Stretching out over it from a tower on one side was a hinged, movable arm, a larger version of the ones that connect to the doors of regular airplanes, joined at its far end to the hotel’s reception area.
Accepting Vivian’s offer, getting here, boarding this monster, checking into my suite, all that time I’d felt as if it was happening to somebody else, not me. I still wasn’t sure what I was doing there.
“Regulations,” she had informed me towards the end of our first encounter. “Papa likes to show his respect for the law.” She didn’t smile, so I didn’t either. “Besides, they only allow us to use the airfields if we have security on board every flight. As far as you’re concerned it’s mainly for show—at least on the first trip. We have some VIP passengers and we want them to know we’re concerned for their safety.”
That made a kind of sense, although I didn’t see how it justified the expense of putting me on a conventional flight to Lisbon just so that I could travel back to Delaware again. And now here I was, here was Vivian, but where were these VIPs?
I put the question to her.
“Not that I’m complaining,” I said, reaching down into the hot water to tweak one of her toes.
“They’ll be joining us later today,” she said, sounding uninterested. She had ordered toast and caviar for breakfast—not my choice, but it takes all sorts—and she popped the remains of a slice into her mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Don’t worry about it.”
So it was to be a midair rendezvous. That was taking privacy to the extreme, I thought, but if she could be so nonchalant about it, then so could I.
“Does that mean we have more time to ourselves?”
From the toe my fingers walked across the sole of her foot, encircled the ankle, stroked their way up her calf to the back of her knee. Her hair was damp and her face glowed from the heat. She smiled.
“A little,” she said. “But enough.”
§
Later, while Vivian went to prepare a welcome for our mysterious guests, I set off on my ‘rounds’, feeling that I should at least make a token effort to earn my fee. Most of the CARF was sealed off for this trip, depressurized and unheated, Vivian had told me, so anybody who might have been misguided enough to stow away in those sections would be of no concern by the time we reached cruising height.
I started my tour in the circular observation lounge, which lay at the top of a short staircase just off the main reception area. I came up conveniently close to the bar that took up the center of a large, thickly carpeted salon with clusters of low tables, armchairs and sofas placed at discreet intervals. The pastel shades of the upholstery contrasted pleasantly with the deep red and gold pattern of the carpet in what I imagined represented someone’s conscious effort to create a relaxing atmosphere. The lounge was separated from the outside by one continuous long window resting on a thigh-high wall. I was comforted by the knowledge that the glass was reinforced and triple glazed against the icy near-vacuum through which we were sailing at sixty miles per hour.
There was nobody there, so I wandered over to look out, not expecting very much. I was wrong. The energy-absorbing top of the airship was dull, sure enough, but that only made it less able to draw the attention away from the stunning backdrop that lay beyond. I looked out over the featureless black to the vast, blue curve of the horizon and for the first time in my life I appreciated the true beauty of the planet I inhabited. It was hard for me to think of the Jules Verne as an airship now; it was a spaceship, skimming the very top fringes of Earth’s atmosphere like a surfer riding a wave. I stood there, motionless and awed, for what must have been several minutes. Then I shook my head and went downstairs again.
Passengers’ quarters were off limits, I had been told. That seemed stupid to me, but I didn’t argue. That left the health club, the dining room, the kitchens and service areas. Everywhere was the Time in the World logo—a holographic spinning globe with an analog clock face in front, its hands keeping time with the rotation.
It took me just under an hour, all told, and the only thing that even made me pause was one of the three industrial-sized freezers in the corridor that ran behind the main kitchen. There were two on one side and one on the other, each with tall, stainless steel doors held closed by chunky lever bolts. I almost missed it, but as I went past the second one on the left there was a flicker in the corner of my eye so I stopped and walked back. There was an electronic combination lock attached low on the doorframe with a tiny green lamp that flashed briefly every few seconds to show it was active. That was what had caught my attention. I hunkered down to have a closer look.
This was a serious lock, I saw at once. To open it you needed a card with an embedded magnetic strip. You also needed to enter the code that went with the card, using the phone-style number pad.
Curious, I thought. Why would anyone put a high security lock on a freezer? I took my hands out of my pockets and rubbed my thumb along the black casing below the keypad. I could ask Vivian about it, but I had the feeling she probably wouldn’t be very forthcoming.
I stood up and tried raising the lever out of its mortise setting, but as I expected the door didn’t open, so I replaced it and returned to the observation lounge. Vivian was there now, with two men, sitting around one of the tables. The bar was staffed by one young man who had his back turned to them. Vivian beckoned me over.
Both her companions had dark skin, straight dark hair, and wore dark suits over high-collared white shirts and identically patterned blue ties. I wondered if they had rented the outfits as a pair. Each of them was holding a coffee cup, but as I approached they replaced them on the table in unison, as if they had rehearsed the movement. Vivian didn’t offer me coffee and I didn’t ask.
“This is Mr. Jablonski,” she said, indicating the man on the left. Sure, I thought. I nodded to ‘Jablonski’ and he nodded back, looking me up and down with steady black eyes, sizing me up. I knew that look and so did he, because he was getting it right back from me.
“And this is Mr. McPherson.” Mr. McPherson barely gave me a glance. All his attention was on Vivian and I couldn’t blame him. The cream silk blouse she was wearing was undone one button too far, but Mr. McPherson didn’t appear to mind that one bit. He was shorter and slimmer than Jablonski and his narrow jaw was framed by a wispy beard.
“This is Mr. Kincaid,” Vivian told them. “Our security officer for this flight. Mr. Kincaid is highly qualified. You need have no worries on that score.”
Jablonski managed a thin smile and McPherson continued to ignore me. I nodded again.
“Everything’s secure,” I said, trying to sound alert and professional. I wasn’t used to my role being so public.
“Good,” Vivian said. “We’ll talk later.”
I took this as a dismissal and turned away as she began talking to McPherson again—something about the dinner menu. I didn’t bother to listen. I somehow knew I wasn’t going to be invited.
They must have come aboard while I was doing my inspection, I thought as I left. A pity. I would have liked to watch the docking, landing, or whatever procedure their craft had used to transfer them to the Jules Verne. Maybe another time.
Back in my suite I shucked my shoes off, lay on the bed and pondered the meaning of locked freezers, midair meetings and two men named Jablonski and McPherson. Time will tell, I thought. Patience. I called room service and ordered fettuccini, green salad and a half bottle of Chianti.
§
I waited until after midnight, by which time I was sure I wouldn’t be hearing from Vivian before morning. Then I pulled my ‘survival kit’ out of my bag, unrolled it and selected what I thought I would need: a pencil flashlight, lightweight night goggles, various miniaturized electronic devices for opening things that weren’t intended to be opened. I paused for a moment, then picked up the short-barreled Ruger .357 Magnum and slipped it into my shoulder holster. I was almost sure I wouldn’t need it, but almost wasn’t enough.
As I moved along the darkened corridors towards the kitchen area there was absolutely no sound except my own breathing. There were no lights on in the kitchens, nor in the corridor behind, but the night goggles let me find my way easily, turning the indicator lamp on the doorframe into a stabbing green explosion of light.
I knelt down carefully and ran a scanner along the memory gel strip I had stuck on the lock’s casing earlier. The acquisition icon flashed three times. Good! Someone had opened the door between then and now. That should make it easy. Otherwise it would have taken much longer.
I pulled the skelektron device out of my other pocket and plugged the scanner into its base. The skelektron’s magslip extension went into the card reader slot on the lock and after a few seconds a series of numbers filled its LED display. I punched them into the lock’s keypad, using the tip of the flashlight, and was rewarded by the sound of a soft click. A warning light flashed on the skelektron, telling me that another code would be needed to relock the door without setting off an alarm. A lot of people overlooked that.
Still on my knees I reached up to disengage the lever lock. Immediately the door eased open a couple of inches and I felt a puff of icy cold air. I shuffled back and pulled it wide, then put the skelektron down at the foot of the doorframe. Security officer indeed! I got to my feet and stepped inside.
I could put the light on now, I reasoned. If anyone came this way I wouldn’t have time to let myself out and close the freezer door again. I would have to talk my way out of it somehow. Working in the dark would only slow me down and I could already feel my nostrils starting to ice up. There was a switch at shoulder height just inside the door. I pulled off the night goggles and let them dangle around my neck. I closed my eyes to a squint so I wouldn’t be dazzled, then felt for the switch and pressed it down.
As my eyes readjusted to the sudden bright light I tried to make sense of what was in front of me. The freezer was empty except for some kind of workbench, on which lay a … a what? It was a huge, shapeless mass of meat, long enough to hang over the end of the bench at the nearer end, bulging to around three feet across in the middle. It could have been an entry in a fat pig contest, or a giant bird carcass, plucked and boned, but the shape was somehow wrong for both. I walked slowly around to look at it from the other side. I was starting to shiver and my every breath left a small cloud that drifted slowly upwards as it cleared.
The far end of the meatloaf was partly obscured by a dark mane that hung down almost to the floor. I reached out to move it aside. When I saw what it had been hiding, recognition hit me so hard I shuddered and I had to force myself not to gag. I turned my back on it, shivering violently now—and it wasn’t just the cold.
The body was human, naked and bloated to grotesque proportions. Behind the cascade of hair was a face whose every feature was swollen into a caricature, the lips like purple plums, the nose a cauliflower, the eyes a pair of boiled duck eggs exploding out of the mottled face and shockingly open, brown irises smeared across them. What could have done this?
Get out! I thought fiercely, and forced myself to take one step, then two. I backed around that obscene horror keeping my eyes averted until I was facing the door. After that it was easier. Light off. Through doorway. Close door. As if I was following numbered instructions. Night goggles on. Engage lever. Just in time, I remembered to enter the locking code, still displayed on the skelektron. Remove magslip. Disconnect scanner. Peel off memory gel—the skelektron would remember and at that moment I had no wish to reenter that room anyway. Don’t drop gel on floor, put in pocket. Likewise skelektron, scanner. Final check with flashlight.
Then back to my suite. But I just knew I wasn’t going to sleep.
§
I did sleep, if only for a couple of hours around dawn. During the restless night hours I had come up with and discarded several theories, but as often happens, by the time I awoke things were starting to fit into place. I showered and shaved. Room service wasn’t responding, so I headed for the dining room.
Vivian was there, with coffee and croissants. She had tied her hair back this morning in a loose ponytail. She smiled and beckoned me over.
“Where are your guests?” I asked as I sat down.
“They left at first light.”
Well, there went my best theory. She must have seen something in my face.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said with a shrug. “I would just like to have seen how people get on and off in midair.
“You can’t see it from here,” Vivian said. It happens underneath us. Another airship, smaller than this one. Their top compartment docks with our crew nacelle. I’ll show you a recording of it later, on one of our promotional disks. It’s quite beautiful, really, like whales mating.“
That confirmed something I had supposed must be true without knowing it for a fact: that there was communication between the upper and lower sides of the Jules Verne. A pressurized stairway, even an elevator. There would have to be some kind of emergency exits in the sections where the guest quarters were.
“That would be interesting,” I said.
“Later though,” she said, pouring me coffee and adding cream without asking. “I have some things to check on this morning.”
“What time do we land?” We were due in some time that evening, as far as I remembered. She seemed startled by the question, but only for an instant.
“Oh, around nine p.m. I think.” She flashed me a quick smile. “It depends on the wind. We start our descent this afternoon.”
She slurped the rest of her coffee, then rose to her feet.
“I must go,” she said. “See you in the lounge at lunch time.” It wasn’t a question. “I’ll arrange for a snack.”
She was all business. As she walked quickly away I sipped my own coffee thoughtfully. It looked as if our one night of intimacy wasn’t to be repeated. Oh well.
§
The morning passed quickly. With no passengers left to protect there didn’t seem much point in patrolling, so I paid a quick reconnaissance visit to the one open guest section, then retired to my quarters and spent the next few hours using the built-in computer’s Internet connection to learn all I could about the Jules Verne and one or two other related subjects. By the time I returned to the observation lounge I felt as prepared as I was ever going to be. The weight of the Ruger felt reassuring under my arm.
I was enjoying the view when Vivian joined me. To my surprise, she slipped her arm through mine and stood close beside me. I could feel the curve of her breast pressing above my elbow.
“Sorry if I seemed cranky this morning,” she said. “Last night was … difficult.”
She didn’t offer any further explanation and I certainly wasn’t going to ask.
“I’m not usually a morning person either,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I want you to think well of me, Jack,” she said softly.
She half turned towards me and pulled me around until we were facing each other. Her hands slipped around my waist and pressed against my back as she drew us closer together, raising her face towards mine. I kissed her, since that seemed to be what she wanted. It lasted a long time. Then she broke it off abruptly, pushed me away and took three steps back. Her arms were stretched towards me and her hands held my Ruger aimed steadily at a point just above my belt buckle. The safety was off and she looked as if she knew exactly what she was doing. I glanced in the direction of the window to my right.
“It’s bullet proof, Jack,” she said. “I will fire.”
I raised my hands to the sides, well away from my body.
“You really should be more careful with this, Jack,” she said. “You’re much too easy.”
I shrugged, arms held out like wings. She was right.
“You just had to be curious,” she said, shaking her head. “You couldn’t just go through the motions and take your money. You had to poke your nose in.”
“The freezer?”
“The freezer. The lock records how many times it’s been opened. One time too many in this case.”
I nodded.
“I should have thought of that.”
“You should. I’m disappointed in you, Jack. If you’re going to do it, do it right.”
“You shouldn’t be disappointed,” I said. “That’s why you picked me for this trip, isn’t it? Because you thought I was all washed up?”
She chuckled, more contempt than amusement.
“I suppose you’re right. But I was starting to like you, Jack, and now it’s such a pity. Things could have been different.”
“So where’s the virus?” I asked.
Her eyes widened—those beautiful blue eyes with the violet flecks—but there was no sign of that soft smile any more.
“Very clever, Jack. What else do you know?”
I kept my hands still, focusing my eyes on the freckles on the bridge of her nose and letting my peripheral vision watch for any sign of relaxation, any chance.
“Carcinogenic adenovirus.” I had seen that ominous phrase for the first time on the computer screen that morning and I hoped I was pronouncing it right. “That’s what happened to your friend in the freezer. Right?”
She let out one short bark of laughter.
“Right,” she said. “Very good, Jack. Rapid action, spreads through the bloodstream.”
“And turns healthy cells into tumor cells that keep on growing and dividing,” I supplied. “How long?”
“I brought Mr. English in there along as a demonstration. He took less than half an hour to die. Or so they told me. I didn’t watch.” She gave me a sharp look. “The lungs and airway close up. The cell multiplication goes on for some hours after that, though. Then the adenovirus dies.”
“Contagious?”
Another short laugh.
“Oh no. This virus is bioengineered. It could never survive in the wild. It can only live in air for a couple of hours, but that’s long enough for it to be … delivered. It mutates as soon as it enters a host.”
“The perfect bioweapon,” I said. “Lethal for a while and safe soon afterwards. And the Jules Verne is the delivery vehicle.”
She nodded.
“In a helium atmosphere the virus will stay inert indefinitely.”
“The gas bags,” I said, suddenly understanding. That was the part I hadn’t figured out. “What about the crew, the staff?”
“They … left. With Jablonski and McPherson. It’s just you and me now, Jack.”
It seemed as if she hadn’t been told their real names, either. Through all this she had showed no sign of relaxing, nothing that could give me an opening.
“So the ship’s on automatic pilot. Where to?”
“She’s programmed to come down in Detroit. Chicago, maybe, even Cleveland. It depends on the wind. Once she’s below a thousand feet the charges will blow and she’ll pull herself apart.”
All of a sudden I was angry. Vivian actually didn’t care where this weapon struck.
“Why are you doing this?”
Her smile widened.
“Me, Jack? I’m not on board this airship. Now you, on the other hand …”
She steadied her stance and raised her aim slightly.
“You sympathize with terrorists?” I tried to put as much disgust into my voice as I could.
She scowled. Like that she wasn’t beautiful, not beautiful at all.
“I want the company, Jack, and Papa is holding me back. He’s got around the law until now, but this will finish him.”
“And you can step in and take over.” She was a psychopath, I realized, completely unfettered by conscience or scruples. I had to keep her talking until I had the whole story.
“A new broom,” she said. “A new leaf. Tighter security measures. You know the kind of thing.”
I knew. It was exactly the same process the regular airlines had gone through some years earlier. It was why I’d had my job.
“And how do you get out of here?”
“There are chutes in the crew nacelle. When we’re low enough I’ll take one. Come down somewhere safely upwind.”
I had everything I needed now. All I had to do was to find a way out. I lowered my hands a little.
“Don’t try anything, Jack. You don’t stand a chance.”
It looked that way, I thought.
“I was starting to like you Jack, so if you keep still I’ll make it quick. A head shot.”
She raised the gun slowly until I was looking straight into the barrel. I could see her finger starting to tighten on the trigger. Head or belly, a bullet from that gun would leave me just as dead. The head would be less painful, I supposed, but I wasn’t about to thank her. There’s always a chance, I thought.
She pulled the trigger. I heard the click of the hammer striking an empty chamber. Her face changed, She pulled the trigger again.
Any misgivings I might once have had about striking women had been beaten out of me long ago by a series of female martial arts instructors who were faster and meaner than I was. I took a step forward and let her have a kick to the belly while she was still futilely trying to fire the weapon.
“Looks like I forgot to load it,” I said savagely. “I must be too much of a deadbeat.”
She had doubled over so I took another half step and straightened her up with a knee to the face. She started to make a noise like a wounded animal, halfway between a scream and a roar. Her hands raked towards me like claws, but a broken nose will upset your vision for a few seconds and I had already moved aside. A quick chop to the nerve center in the angle between neck and shoulder blade and she dropped to the richly carpeted floor. She should be out long enough for me to do what I needed to do.
Whatever that was. I thought furiously. I couldn’t risk letting the Jules Verne descend. Even if I could disable the explosive charges I could never be sure I’d found all of them. One small leak would be enough. Up here though, above the ozone layer, even if the virus was released it couldn’t survive the ultraviolet radiation for long. It would be long dead before it ever reached the ground. I had to destroy the airship now.
And what about myself. Well, I thought I had an answer for that, too, but if I was wrong that was just too bad. Maybe this was my time to pay. A pity I had no family to collect the retirement bonus, but at least nobody could say I hadn’t done my job this time. It was time to move.
I retrieved the Ruger and headed for the entry to the emergency exit I had located earlier in the day. A spiral staircase ran around the wall of a cylindrical chamber that passed down directly through the middle of the largest helium bag in the center of the buoyancy hull. It was a sensible arrangement that minimized the danger of decompression. At the bottom of the stairs a doorway opened into the nacelle. It was there that I hoped to find the detonation mechanism.
I was about two thirds of the way down when a shot rang out from above me. It seemed I had underestimated both Vivian’s resilience and her resourcefulness. She must have had another gun stashed somewhere in reserve. I ducked down and scuttled a few steps around the curve of the stairwell, hoping to keep out of her field of vision.
Another shot, followed by a sudden loud hissing sound. The bullet had passed through the wall and pierced the gas bag! The hissing became louder as the puncture widened under the pressure difference. Under normal circumstances there would have been little danger, but before long the gas flow would stop being just one way and the helium in the bag would start to mix with the air in the stairwell. I couldn’t be certain whether that particular gasbag contained the virus or not, but I didn’t want to be there to find out.
Trying not to breathe, I carried on down as fast as I could. I could hear Vivian’s erratic, hurried tread on the stairs above my head. As long as I kept it that way she couldn’t see me. Each curve of the stairs had that Time in the World logo embossed on the wall, the hands of the clock whirling around as my own time ran out.
Vivian had stopped and I knew why. She had reached a point where she could see the nacelle entrance and she was intending to shoot me as I went through it. Well, there was no other way. I had to take my chance. It would be a tricky shot for her, anyway—much more difficult than the head shot at point blank range she had proposed before.
The nacelle doorway was suddenly ahead of me and it was open. My lucky day, I thought. I didn’t even pause, just ran towards it and hurled myself through, trying to keep low and present as small a target as possible. I heard another shot and felt something like a red hot poker placed against my left thigh. Then I was through and scrambling to close the door.
“Try not to inhale,” I hurled back at her with the last of the air in my lungs, then I slammed it shut.
It was the kind of oval steel door you see in submarine movies, with a pressure seal all around it and a circle of thick glass in the center of its upper half. I hoped that this glass, too, would be bullet proof. It certainly should be. There were two solid bolts at top and bottom and I wrenched them home. It would be a nice irony, I thought, for Vivian to be thwarted by the airship’s anti-hijack features.
Her last shot had creased my left leg and it was starting to go numb. I was having difficulty keeping my balance. I looked around. I was in the upper part of the nacelle, still within the buoyancy hull, and the crew’s quarters were to either side. The crew, in the form of one young woman and one middle-aged man, both in uniform, were here, on the floor, looking very dead. Ahead of me a staircase led down to the cockpit below and I headed for it.
Suddenly there was a banging from the hatch and I turned to look back. Vivian’s face was on the other side of the glass, an almost unrecognizable mask of rage and fear. Her mouth was gaping wide open and she appeared to be gasping for breath. I thought her lips were already starting to swell, but it could have been my imagination. I went down the stairs.
I found myself in a small cabin, about ten feet long by six wide. In front of me was a instrument panel backed by a curved windscreen. The view from here was even more spectacular than from the observation lounge and irresistible enough to stop me in my tracks for a second while I dealt with a surge of vertigo. For a moment the floor beneath me felt flimsy and insubstantial. I pulled myself together and looked around.
They hadn’t been kind enough to label it ‘Detonator’, but there was one box with wires running away from it that obviously wasn’t part of the regular equipment. Now I just had to figure out how it worked. The banging was still coming from upstairs, but it was growing more irregular now.
There was a timer on the top face of the box, and below it a key pad—numbers and arrows. I looked at my watch, tried to calculate how long I would need, assuming that things went well and certain of my assumptions held true. I tapped the keys, set the timer, now all I had to do was activate it. If I was wrong, if the timer didn’t override the altitude sensor—well, there was nothing else I could do about it.
There was always a chance. And no matter how small it was, it was better than no chance at all. That held for the airship’s crew, not just for me, and I was hoping to find some form of emergency escape kit here in the cockpit. Vivian had told me that there were parachutes, but at this altitude that wouldn’t be enough.
I was right. A closet on one side held two lockers, each of which contained a simple zip-up pressure suit, a full-face oxygen mask with a small cylinder attached, and a parachute sack. I pulled out the larger of the suits and wrestled my way into it.
The banging had stopped now. I fastened myself into the parachute straps and pulled the gas mask over my head, trying not to think about what was happening to Vivian’s exquisite body. That left only the thought that I was fifteen miles high in the stratosphere. Fifteen miles—almost eighty thousand feet. Sternly I repeated to myself that people had parachuted from much higher than that and survived. I had a chance.
I had set the detonator delay for fifteen minutes and had already used almost ten of them. No time to wait. I checked the parachute straps and the fit of the mask one last time and opened the oxygen valve.
I had already located the escape hatch. It opened through a wheel and lever combination that could be operated quickly if needed, but was impossible to trip by accident. As I turned the wheel there was a hiss that quickly became a roar and I felt my ears pop as the small cabin decompressed. Good design, I thought, as the hatch fell away and I looked down into the empty sky, the Earth’s surface just a vague blur far away beneath me.
Let it go, I thought. Let everything go. I balanced myself as best I could, leaned my weight forward, closed my eyes and let myself topple out into nothingness.
§
I landed in a turnip field, twisting my ankle. The right one, so now I was limping on both sides. I sat down on the damp earth, pulled the mask from my face and took one long breath, then another. I looked up. High above me I thought I saw a momentary flare of light, like a match at the far end of the street, but I could have been mistaken.
Someone, the farmer, perhaps, had seen me land and was rushing over to me.
“Are you okay?” he called out over and again. “Are you okay?
I watched him until he reached me and crouched down at my side. Only then did I speak.
“You know,” I said. “I think I am.”
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2004