Making History

MAKING HISTORY

Rats

I wished it were winter. In winter it got bitterly cold in Princeton, Steve had said. Maybe as much as twenty below. There would have been snow and ice everywhere and the bicycle ride to Windsor would have been difficult, miserable and dangerous. But at least it would have been dark. Blessedly, wonderfully dark. As I pedalled along, I would have been able to see any headlights behind me and that luxury would have made up for a lot of physical discomfort.

There again, I thought, as I turned off the road and hid myself and my bicycle behind a tree for the fourth time, maybe Hubbard and Brown had all kinds of night-vision gear available to them, so perhaps it made no difference whether it was dark or light.

I waited behind the tree for fifteen minutes before pushing the bike back out into the highway and resuming the ride south.

West Windsor lay only a mile or so from Princeton, but Steve and I had agreed that I should allow four hours for the journey. Just to be sure.

I leaned round a corner and at last saw what I was looking for, a turning left towards the lake.

Somewhere on another road, I prayed, Leo was undertaking the same kind of cautious journey, with Steve a safe distance behind him.

Or maybe Leo was sitting around that shiny maple table, under the framed Gettysburg Address, talking to Hubbard and Brown about his strange morning with the mysterious Englishman who shared Michael D Young’s fingerprints, but knew things Michael D Young shouldn’t.

If that was the case, then that meant they must have got to Steve too, because for the last three hours my compad had been silent. No alarms, no changes of plan.

I realised now, far too late, that it would have been much more sensible to have arranged instead for Steve to bleep me every hour on the hour whatever was happening, just to let me know that everything was cool. I cursed myself for not thinking of this. The silence of the compad didn’t really tell me anything at all. I debated calling him just to set my mind at rest. I decided against it; if you make a plan, you should stick to it. Maybe he was in a place where a sudden bleeping noise would draw attention to him at exactly the most disastrous time. I didn’t understand the technology of these compads enough to know whether or not the bleepers could be turned off, or whether their calls were traceable. Maybe, I realised, that’s why Steve hadn’t suggested regular communication between us in the first place, because our positions could be calculated by someone listening in. For all I knew, Hubbard and Brown could track us in a scanning van the moment our compads were in use.

I wondered if Leo would be any good at this kind of thing. He had managed to escape from his conference in Venice and make his way to the American consulate. That argued some kind of gumption.

I had remembered to warn him about Steve. ‘A friend of mine will watch your back. He will be wearing red.’ Once Leo got to the lake, Steve would make himself known to him and lead him to me. That was the plan.

But suppose Hubbard or one of his men, by some ghastly coincidence, was also wearing red?

Suppose, suppose, suppose. All kind of things might happen. It was no use my worrying about them. All I could do was follow my part of the plan and hope for the best.

The sweat on me was attracting the midges and mosquitoes that hung around in gangs on the lakeside like street-corner thugs. I was off the bike now, and wheeling it along a narrow path that skirted the lake on its north side. Across the water I heard the traffic on Highway One, a mile to the south, and in the center of the lake, a rowing eight skimmed by at an astonishing speed, the barking of the cox coming to me clear over the unruffled surface.

A sudden movement in the bushes on my left stopped me dead in my tracks. I stood where I was, my heart beginning to thrash about in my chest like a trapped bird.

Suddenly, a rat, big as an otter, its fur damply streaked, jumped onto the path in front of me almost colliding with my brand new Cyclorama front wheel. I let out an instant involuntary shout of horror and fear and the rat, shocked out of its wits, skidded and scrambled like a rally-car out of control, obviously a great deal more scared than me. It rolled over twice, regained its footing and dived back into the undergrowth, leaves, twigs and stones sticking to its back like totems on a Mexican bride’s wedding-dress.

‘Rats,’ I said in an Indiana Jones voice. ‘I hate rats.’

I saw and heard more of them as I hurried on towards the rendezvous point.

Maybe they weren’t rats, though. Maybe they were groundhogs or gophers. Not that I was exactly sure what those were. I only knew about them from those Bill Murray movies, Groundhog Day and Caddyshack. Was a groundhog the same as a gopher? There was yet another kind of American rodent too, wasn’t there? A coypu. Maybe they were coypus. Or possums even.

Whatever they were, I hated them to buggery and made as much noise as possible as I worked my way along, just to alert them to my presence.

After twenty more minutes, I came at last to a place where the path divided. To the right it snaked round, following the outline of the lake, to the left it led into the land of rats, gophers, coypus, possums and groundhogs. Slapping the back of my neck like a true jungle explorer, I took the left-hand path.

Two hundred yards in, after battling through some overhanging greenery, a clearing came into view. I saw a tall silver birch and next to it, the huge, lichen-covered tree-stump that Steve had told me about. On this stump I sat, smoking busily to keep the noseeums and mozzies at bay.

There was a repulsive stench about this place, something far worse than the usual rotten marshy pong characteristic of land near water. I began to feel my gorge rise. For gorge read lunch. The cigarette smoke was of no help at all, either in deterring the insects or in masking the foul reek. I stood up, almost unable to breathe. As I moved away, things improved. The smell was localised it seemed.

Pulling out a handkerchief and holding it over my mouth and nose, I edged back towards the stump where a funnel of gnats still swirled. I peeped cautiously over the stump and instantly vomited.

In the long grass a pair of dead rats nestled, clinging to each other with tightly closed eyes like sleeping children, their fur alive with little white squirming maggots, no bigger than commas. The soup of vomit now beside them, I supposed, as I wiped my mouth, would be another treat for the malevolent insect-life which seemed to own this part of the woods.

I leaned against a tree which was as far away from the stump as I could find, and contemplated the foulness of nature.

Hot red lumps had begun to break out on my neck and hands. They were not the bite marks of insects, but more like some kind of allergic reaction. As a child I had suffered from mild hay fever. I thought I had outgrown it, but out here the rich density of lakeside life, of pollen and lichen and rats and bugs and grasses and seeds and spores seemed to give off a toxic cloud of allergens at which my skin and lungs revolted. I felt my chest tighten into a wheeze and my eyes, I knew, were puffing up like marshmallows.

I lit another cigarette. I couldn’t inhale because of the asthma, but there was a comfort in the synthetic sterility of its sleek, urban poison. I wished I had brought along a rug. Not wool or cotton or anything natural or organic, but a nasty, tacky nylon or polyester mat. It would have been like a raft of civilisation over this crawling Sargasso.

Jumpy, I was getting decidedly jumpy. I looked at my watch.

Nearly time, very nearly time. In five minutes or so I would know whether Leo trusted me. I would know whether—

OH JESUS, MY LEGS ARE ON FIRE!

What had I done? Set light to the fucking tree with my fucking cigarette?

I slapped at my legs, screaming in agony.

There were no flames and no clouds of smoke. By the time the tears had cleared from my eyes enough to enable me to see, it was plain to me that it was not fire that scorched my legs.

Just ants.

Hundreds of the bastards. Thousands. From the knee down it looked like I was wearing long ant socks of an especially tight weave.

I tried frantically to wipe them off, yelling and kicking and bucking all the while like a maddened bull.

The touch of a human hand on my shoulder as I danced away from the tree, nearly, unseated my reason entirely.

Letting out a huge scream, I thrashed with my fist backwards over my shoulder. It met nothing but air, which, as it turned out, was just as well.

‘Mikey, what’s the matter?’

Merely the sound of Steve’s soft, easy voice did something to calm me down.

‘Ants,’ I screeched, turning and falling into his arms. ‘Ants, rats, mosquitoes. Everything. Oh, Steve, why the fuck did you choose this place?’

He pushed me gently away from him. Over his shoulder I saw Leo’s frightened face peering at me in alarm.

‘Fire ants,’ said Steve, trying to keep the amusement out of his voice. Tm sorry, guess I should have warned you to look out for them.’

‘Fire ants?’ I said. ‘Are they poisonous?’

‘They just sting a little. Come on, sit down. I’ll get the rest off you.’

‘A little! They sting a little?’

Steve brushed the rest of the ants from my shins. ‘They’re real smart little critters actually. What happens is they crawl up your leg but they don’t do anything at first. They wait for a signal from the leader and then they all bite at once, in one united attack. See, if the first one bit you as soon as he had gotten there, you would feel him and brush the rest off before the others had a chance to get a feast too. Real smart. You gotta hand it to evolution. I brought along some stuff. Looks like you had an encounter with some poison ivy too.’

‘Poison ivy?’

‘Yeah,’ he started to spread a cold gel all over my legs, neck and arms. ‘Nasty, huh?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Leo, as he edged nervously forwards, blinking like an owl. ‘You must think I’m hysterical. It’s just that I’m not used to the American countryside. I had a vision of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I had no idea it would more like the dark heart of the Amazonian rainforest. My mistake.’

Leo looked about him uneasily as if he too, wondered what horrors lay within these woods. Steve’s next remark was not helpful.

‘Let’s just hope there aren’t any lime ticks hereabouts.’

‘Lime ticks?’ I said, a new horror dawning. ‘What the fuck are lime ticks?’

‘You don’t wanna know, buddy. Trust me on this.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ I moaned.

Steve screwed the top onto the tube of ointment and slapped me cheerfully on the thigh like a no-nonsense nurse. ‘Okay. That feel better?’

The gel had soothed me slightly, but I still felt as if I was on fire.

‘A little,’ I said. There was no use complaining. Too much to do. I got painfully to my feet. ‘The main thing is, you’re here.’

‘Sure we’re here,’ said Steve.

‘And you weren’t followed?’

Leo shook his head forcefully. ‘Not followed,’ he said.

‘It went great,’ chirruped Steve, who in his bright red T-shirt and shorts looked like Mephistopheles’ junior apprentice on a seaside holiday.

‘Now perhaps,’ said Leo. ‘You will be kind enough to tell me what is the meaning of all this? Who you are. Why you arrange this meeting. How it comes that you know so much of me?’

‘I will explain everything to you, sir,’ I said. ‘I promise. But first I have to know something from you. About your work. I have to ask you to confirm a guess.’

There was one detail of my plan that I had not worked out. I think I had been hoping that something would occur to Leo. No doubt it would have done so. It was with great pleasure, though, as darkness fell and we were preparing to leave each other and go our separate ways back to Princeton, that I let out a shout as inspiration hit me with a thrilling kiss.

‘Oh shit, not more fire ants?’ said Steve.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not ants. I’ve had an idea. I don’t suppose either of you has a container of some kind?’

‘Like this?’ Steve held up his blue nylon bag.

‘Well, I don’t want to ruin it. Something smaller would do. More like a shopping bag. A plastic bag maybe. Or a box.’

‘I have many bags and boxes at home,’ said Leo.

‘That’s no good I’m afraid. I need something right here and now.’

‘For why?’

‘Hey!’ said Steve, who had been hunting through his nylon bag. ‘How ‘bout this?’

He was holding up a silver-surfaced case about half the size of a shoe box.

‘That’s perfect,’ I said. ‘What the hell is it?’

‘I keep my filters and lenses in it.’

He undipped the lid and showed me.

‘Mm,’ I said doubtfully. ‘The space is all divided up.’

‘The partitions just slide out,’ said Steve. ‘See?’

Steve scooped out the lenses and filters and then pulled out the dividing slots.

‘Brilliant. Simply brilliant. Better than a bag. With any luck it might be almost airtight. Now, Steve,’ I said, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘Do you think you have a strong stomach?’

He wrinkled his brow in puzzlement. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Pretty strong. Why?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Behind that tree stump there, you will find two dead rats. But I warn you, they are crawling with maggots and they stink to heaven.’

Five hours later Steve and I met outside the statue of Science Triumphant and waited for Leo.

‘He is coming, isn’t he?’ I said. ‘I mean, he will come?’

‘He said he would come. He’ll come,’ said Steve.

‘Why are you so calm? How come you’re so bloody calm? I’m not calm. I’m jumping like a Mexican bean. But you…you’ve been so in control all day. How come? How come you’re calm? I’m not calm. I’m not even slightly calm.’

‘You could’ve fooled me,’ grinned Steve.

‘I mean, this might be a disaster. It might start all over again. I might wake up in the middle of an Iraqi punishment cell or a Siberian gulag. Jesus, I might be destined to do this for the rest of my life, like the Flying Dutchman or Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap. Without even the dubious advantage of Dean Stockwell.’

‘I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ said Steve, ‘but just have faith buddy. The world you wake up in can’t be worse than this.’

‘Oh no?’ I said. ‘I’m not so sure that this world is really so much worse than mine.’

‘From what you’ve told me, it’s a lot worse.’

‘Yeah, but I haven’t told you about Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch and fundamentalists and infant crack addicts with Uzis. I haven’t told you about lottery scratch-cards and mad cow disease and Larry King Live. Maybe we should just forget this whole thing.’

‘You’ve just got the jitters, is all. You told me about political correctness and gay quarters in towns and rock and roll and Clinton Eastwood movies and kids not having to call their dads “sir” but saying “motherfucker” and “no way, dude” and chilling off in Ecstasy dance clubs. I want some of that. I want to be cool.’

‘That’s chilling out, actually, not chilling off.’

‘Whatever. I want to wear weird clothes and grow my hair long without being fined by the college or having a fight with my parents. If you want to do that here, you live in a ghetto and the police round you up and harassle you.’

‘And that’s hassle, in fact. Hassle or harass. Not harassle. And I’ve a feeling I may have given you a false impression of my world. I mean it’s not all one long party you know. Ecstasy is illegal and people don’t use the word motherfucker in front of their parents. I mean, not white middle-class people anyway.’

‘Yeah? Well, give me the chance to find out, okay? Give me a chance to use these words and live this life, okay? It’s you that denied me the right in the first place.’

‘Mm,’ I said, doubtfully. ‘I just wonder if…’

‘Besides,’ he interrupted. ‘That’s just the present we’re talking about. You’re forgetting history. You think you can just leave that?’

‘All right, all right!’ I said. ‘I know. I’m being hysterical. But what if something goes wrong?’

‘Something has already gone wrong, hasn’t it? We’re gonna put it right.’

‘But this time I might wake up and never remember.’

‘So what’s the difference? You’ll never know.’

‘But what about you? Suppose you find yourself, with your old consciousness in another country with the wrong accent, knowing nothing about it, like I did? People will think you’re nuts. Christ, suppose it’s a country where you don’t even speak the language?’

‘That’s a chance I’m gonna have to take.’

‘No,’ I said, grabbing his arm. ‘Christ, I’m glad I thought of this. What you’re going to have to do is not be in the room. Nowhere near the event when it takes place. That way, what happened to me can’t happen to you.’

‘Hell, Mikey. Don’t say that! We’re in this together.’

‘No way, Steve. You have to— ’

‘Why are you making so much noise!’ Leo appeared out of the darkness, hissing angrily. ‘You want everyone in Princeton should know we are here?’

‘Mikey is saying I can’t come in with you,’ said Steve, whining like a child denied a treat. ‘Tell him I can.’

I explained my reasoning to Leo.

He thought about it carefully before speaking. ‘I think Mikey is right,’ he said at last. ‘If you were caught up in the event horizon and retained this identity it could make your life very difficult afterwards. We cannot take such a risk.’

‘But— ’

‘No. I think it is better you help us by leaving alone,’ said Leo with decision. ‘You have been much service to us already.’

It took ten minutes of argument and wheedling to convince Steve.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, as he sulkily handed me the silvered lens case. ‘But you do see…’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘I see.’

I held out my hand. ‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘After all, this may never work. For all we know, in two hours time we’ll discover that it can never work in this world. I may be stuck here for ever.’

He took my outstretched hand. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But more likely I’ll never see you again and…’

‘And what?’

‘You’ve been kind to me, Mikey. I know that’s all it was. Just kindness. But you’ve made me happier in the last couple of days than I ever was before. In my whole life. Maybe happier than I ever could be, in any world.’

‘What do you mean by saying that’s all it was? It wasn’t kindness. I like you, Steve. You must know that.’

‘Yeah. You like me. But back in England you’ll have a girlfriend.’

‘I doubt it. I only ever had one and she left me. But back here, when everything is as it should be, you’ll have a boyfriend. Dozens of them. Hundreds. As many as you can handle. More than you can handle. A cute dude like you. You’ll be beating them off…as it were.’

‘But they won’t be you, will they?’

‘Gentlemen, please!’ said Leo, who had been listening to this with mounting impatience. ‘It is almost light already. We may be seen.’

Steve hugged me tightly and disappeared into the shadows.

‘He’s very fond of me,’ I explained to Leo.

‘My glasses I need only for reading,’ he replied, somewhat elliptically. ‘You have the rats?’

‘Yup,’ I said, showing him the box.

As he input his security code into the panel by the entrance door, I cast my mind back to the night outside the New Cavendish building, when I had raced round on a bike to meet him in the Cambridge starlight, my pocket full of little orange pills.

He led me silently to the elevators whose whooping hum seemed devastatingly loud in the dead silence. Down a maze of third-floor corridors I followed him until we arrived at a door in front of which he stopped.

‘How the hell did you come up with Chester Franklin?’ I whispered, indicating the name-plate on the door.

‘That was Hubbard’s idea,’ he answered, as the door clicked open.

It was dark as a cellar inside. I stood, not daring to move, listening to him fiddling with blinds. At last he flicked a light-switch and I could look around.

He pointed to a stool, like a sea-lion trainer. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘Please say nothing to lose me my concentration.’

I sat watching him in obedient silence.

There was a Tim, or a machine not unlike the Tim I had known. But its casing was white, tinged with duck-egg blue. That may have been a trick of the overhead lights, however, whose glow seemed to cast a faint blue over everything.

There was no mouse on this machine, but instead a joystick stuck up from the side like a lollipop. The screen was larger and there was no vestige of keyboard. Instead of Centronix cabling and yards of spaghetti, clear plastic pipes emerged from the rear, like the tubes on an intravenous drip.

A sudden horrible thought struck me and made my mouth go dry.

Suppose the Nazis had abolished the Greenwich meridian?

Leo had not asked me about the coordinates of Brunau when we had talked out there in the woods.

His first idea four years ago, as I had guessed, knowing my Leo, had been to do something to destroy his father’s factory in Auschwitz. Then he had seen that this might not be enough, and he had considered the possibility of assassinating Rudolf Gloder. He did not know how this could be done but, although his heart had been set against murder, he had toyed with the idea of sending a bomb to an early Nazi congress. He decided such a project was too full of imponderables, so he considered next the possibility of sending Brunau Water to Bayreuth to stop Gloder’s birth. He believed it would be a fitting irony. His difficulty was that Brunau Water no longer existed. At least, it might exist somewhere, but he did not know where and dared not ask. Then he heard, through an academic colleague in Cambridge, that there was work being done in Princeton, America, which pointed towards the possibility of contraceptive drugs. Such work was forbidden in Europe on the grounds of ‘ethics’, a hypocritical irony the macabre humour of which Leo had never been able to share with anyone. So, logical and single-minded as ever, Leo had decided to defect to the United States. He was the same Leo all right. The same overwhelming burden of inherited guilt, the same fanatical belief that he could and must atone for his father’s guilt.

He had found it difficult however, once installed in Princeton, to pursue his private quest. The government authorities here believed him to be working on a quantum weapon that would give America the chance to gain a final decisive advantage over Europe. There was no justification for his asking a lot of questions about contraceptives under such circumstances. He had expected to find academic freedom in the United States, freedom of a kind denied European scientists. He had been greatly mistaken. If anything, the security and secrecy here was more intense than in Cambridge.

Then I had shown up. Now he and I were preparing to make the world a better place by ensuring that Adolf Hitler lived and prospered.

The idea of the rats had made him laugh. Steve had laughed too. It was so foolish.

‘But it makes sense!’ I had protested. ‘What would you do if you pumped up water one morning and it was full of maggots and bits of dead animal and smelt like a sewer? You wouldn’t drink it, that’s for sure. The whole cistern would be pumped out and disinfected. It stands to reason.’

Neither of them had been able to come up with a better suggestion, so into Steve’s lens box the rats had gone, their suppurating bodies almost falling to pieces as a retching Steve scooped them up between two pieces of cardboard.

Leo had taken the cardboard from Steve and finished the job. His was the strongest stomach of all.

I watched him working now: his strong blue eyes darting over his creation, his long fingers operating switches, his whole restless body almost trembling with the intense concentration of his actions.

He seemed to sense my gaze for he looked up at me.

‘It goes well,’ he whispered.

‘About Brunau,’ I said. ‘You’ll need the coordinates. I’m worried that…

‘You think I don’t know them?’

‘Forty-seven degrees, thirteen minutes, twenty-eight seconds north, ten degrees, fifty-two minutes, thirty-one minutes east.’

He nodded. ‘Your memory is good. See. We are looking there now.’

‘I remember something else,’ I said. ‘You once told me that in this life you are either a rat or a mouse. Rats do good or evil by changing things and mice do good or evil by doing nothing.’

His eyes flicked over to the silvered lens-case. ‘Most appropriate,’ he said. ‘Now, if you are ready. It is time.’

The tubes that ran from the back of the machine gleamed with shooting pulses of red light. The screen swirled and glowed with colour.

‘That’s it?’ I asked. ‘Brunau?’

‘1st of June. Four a.m.’

‘The colours are different from last time.’

‘They are meaningless,’ he replied in that faintly contemptuous tone of voice scientists use with dumb laymen. ‘The representation can be any color you choose to assign.’

‘What are the red lights in the tubes there?’

Data,’ he said, a note of worry and surprise in his voice. ‘It is data. This is not how it was before?’

‘Pretty much the same,’ I said, reassuring him. ‘The wires coming out of the back were different, that’s all.’

‘How did they look?’

‘Well, they weren’t transparent, that’s all. The data ran through copper wires.’

‘Copper wires?’ he sounded amazed. ‘Like old-fashioned telephones? But that is primitive.’

‘It worked didn’t it?’ I said, springing rather illogically to the defence of my own world.

He looked back at the screen. ‘Can it be so simple?’ he asked. ‘I just press this and my father’s factory at Auschwitz never happened?’ His finger was stroking a small black button below the screen.

I had not told Leo that in our previous world his father had also been at Auschwitz. I thought it might unhinge him to know that, no matter what he did to history, his father seemed to be destined to supervise the bestial destruction of Jews.

He turned from the screen and from his pocket he took two white masks. He attached one to his face, hooking the strings over his ears, and handed the other to me. I put it on, and great waves of menthol filled my nose and lungs, making my eyes run. I saw that he was weeping too. He blinked back his tears and pointed at the lens-case.

I undipped the lid of the box, opened it, swallowed hard and looked inside.

A huge, flapping, trail-legged insect flew out and hit me in the eye.

I dropped the lid and shouted in terror.

‘Quiet!’ Leo hissed. ‘It is not a wolf.’

He handed me two sheets of card with a frown.

I lifted the lid again, keeping my head at an angle, ready to duck any more flying creatures.

There didn’t seem to be many flying creatures in there. A few fleas maybe, but nothing as substantial as that first horrible bug. No, most of the creatures left in this Pandora’s box were of the slithery kind. They had been busy over the past few hours: breeding and busy. The whole box heaved and shuddered with life. It was all too gloopy and broken up to be lifted between two bits of card.

‘I think…’ I said, my voice sounding deep and muffled under the mask, ‘I think it’s best if I just empty it, don’t you?’

He looked into the box, nodded silently and pointed me towards what looked like a tall church font. The top part, the bowl or basin, was where I supposed the bits of rotting rat should go. From the underside, pulsing data tubes led to the back of the machine.

Leo signalled for me to get it over with and I held my breath and emptied the contents of the box into the basin.

Even through a menthol-soaked mask I could tell how great the stench was. Averting my eyes, I banged the edge of the box against the lip of the bowl and heard the sludging slither of rotting flesh slap out onto the plastic of the font basin, like gruel being doled into bowls by a workhouse matron. I took a quick look at the box and saw that there was more stuck in the corners.

‘Could you pass me something to scoop out the rest with?’ I said to Leo.

He rose, looked quickly about him and picked up a coffee mug from a table in the corner of the room.

He gave it to me and watched as I scraped at the sides and corners.

‘Well, well, well. And just what in consarned tarnation is going on here?’

I looked up in horror. The coffee mug and lens-case fell from my hands and hit the floor with a crash.

Brown and Hubbard stood in the doorway. They each held a gun in their hands.

‘Now don’t either of you go moving,’ said Brown moving into the room. ‘I want to find out — Jesus fucking Christ!’

His hand flew to his mouth and he backed away, gagging. I saw vomit leak from between his fingers.

The smell had reached Hubbard and I saw him pull a handkerchief from his pocket. I looked at Leo and I saw that he was staring at the black button below the screen ten yards away from us. The clouds of color were still rolling on the screen. Everything was ready.

I took a small step to my left towards the machine.

‘Oh, no you don’t/ said Hubbard, handing the handkerchief to Brown. ‘Not one step.’ He raised the hand holding the gun to shoulder height and pointed it straight at my head.

Brown wiped his mouth and, still holding the handkerchief against his lips, glared at us with fury and distrust. I felt that for some reason he was more angered by his uncharacteristic outburst of profanity than by the throwing up. I had sensed when we had first met that he set a lot of store by his soft-spoken cowboy image. No doubt his underlings celebrated him as a wonderful eccentric Gary Cooper-like kind of eccentric. Gary Cooper never said ‘Jesus fucking Christ’. At least not in any movie I ever saw.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, through the handkerchief, ‘just what sick perversions we have stumbled on here, but I sure as the deuce mean to find out. You stay right where you are, you hear? Don’t say a word. Just nod or shake your head, understood?’

Leo and I nodded in unison.

‘Good boys. Now. You got any more of them there masks in this room?’

Leo nodded.

‘Where are they?’

Leo pointed to his pocket.

‘All right now. You reach into that pocket, nice and slow and you throw them to me, okay?’

Leo shook his head and put up a finger.

‘What’s that? You mean you only got one of the suckers?’

Leo nodded. He had thought, I realised, to bring one for Steve, expecting him to be with us for our moment of triumph.

‘Shoot. Well, never mind. You throw that one mask over then.’

Leo did so. Hubbard caught it neatly and passed it to Brown, who gave him in return the vomit-filled handkerchief.

Hubbard stared at this offering for a moment and then threw it into the corridor behind him.

Brown adjusted the mask over his face and came fully into the room, his gun at hip level.

‘You just make sure these boys are covered/ he said over his shoulder to Hubbard. Hubbard nodded weakly and leaned against the doorframe. The smell was getting to him and he didn’t have a handkerchief.

His movement to one side revealed, crouched behind him in the shadows of the opposite doorway, Steve.

I swallowed, not daring to look to see if Leo had seen him too. Brown was moving slowly towards us, his eyes darting suspiciously about the room.

He was now close enough to see the bowl of rats, maggots, lice and other crawling horrors.

‘Holy dang!’ he said. ‘Just what in the name of heckfire is going on here?’

I stole another look at Hubbard, who was looking at Brown and trying not to breathe. I let my eyes slide slowly over to Steve. He was staring at me, white-faced and frightened. I swallowed again and spoke, as loudly and clearly as I could through the mask.

‘It’s just an experiment,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’ asked Brown. ‘Experiment? What kind of disgusting, God-forsaken, heathen experiment could this ever be, boy? Answer me that?’

‘All you have to do is press that black button. The one just below that screen there. The black button. Then you’ll find out.’

‘Oh no, son. No one is going to go pressing any buttons round here until I’ve heard some explanations.’

I flicked my eyes over to Steve again and saw him straighten. He would need a diversion just to start.

‘Explanations?’ I bellowed. ‘Explanations? There’s your explanation…there? I stabbed a finger dramatically towards the far corner of the room.

Pathetic really. I mean, talk about the oldest trick in the book. But it’s a good book, and the trick would have been cut from subsequent editions if it didn’t sometimes work.

I won’t say it worked this time. Not fully. Brown did look in that direction for a fraction of a second, but that was the extent of it. In that same fraction of a second Steve, God bless him, hurled himself through the doorway, knocking Hubbard sideways, and threw himself almost lengthways at the screen.

At the same time, Brown turned and fired his gun.

I heard Leo whimper and I heard Hubbard’s body collide with a bookshelf as he tried to regain his balance from Steve’s onslaught. I saw blood and gristle explode from out of the back of Steve’s neck and splatter against the wall. I saw a wisp of blue smoke come from the end of Brown’s gun. And I saw Brown, God rot his soul, raise the muzzle of the gun to his mouth and make to blow the wisp away like the mean, no good gun-slinger he was. The mask was in the way, of course, so the noise that should have gone with the gesture, the little flute of triumph, was missing…

And, reader, I saw this. I saw Steve’s flailing hand feel for the little black button below the screen and press it hard with the strength of ten men and I swear, and will swear to my dying day, that as I leaped forwards to catch his falling body, a smile — a radiant smile for me and me alone — flickered on his face as he fell back and died in my arms.