First Horseman, The (27 page)

‘Mine?’ boomed Cardini, in outrage. ‘How can it have been my doing?’

‘You’re the common factor, aren’t you?’

Cardini looked at him gravely. ‘Are you not also a common factor?’

It was Jim’s turn to think. ‘If the maniacs were my friends then you might have a leg to stand on, but as they’re yours I think I’m safe in reckoning you’re the guy in the frame here.’

‘We could continue this debate, Jim, but that would serve little purpose.’ Cardini smiled. ‘I can see so much in you that was in me when I was your age. You are full of drive and energy. You have the courage to challenge the situations you find yourself in and overcome the barriers that others find insurmountable. You have a brilliant mind and you have the character and foresight to use it to rise above the rest. You and I shouldn’t be at odds. We should work together. Together we can overcome the petty considerations of our finite lifespan and be the first to transcend this shoddy existence.’

Cardini’s face suddenly seemed fatherly and benign – he was beaming at Jim. ‘Now that, to all intents and purposes, I have overcome mortality, at least for someone as young as you, I can expand my work on the human mind.’ He leant forward on the desk. ‘The mind may appear a wondrous thing, but it is as simple as any muscle. It just takes a little more intellect than we are naturally blessed with to understand it.’

There was a twinkle in his eye. ‘I have, of course, been able to leap above that limiting intellect and see the mind for what it is and how one may interface with it. Our predecessors knew that a little electricity would make the leg of a dead frog kick. It has long been a scientific dream to be able to fuse the mind with electricity and somehow expand it. Of course, with a gross understanding of electricity and the mind, treatments like electric-shock therapy were the initial brutal steps towards developments that now, in our still-primitive era of medicine, mean some mental processes, which cause Alzheimer’s, Tourette’s and epilepsy, are at last being ameliorated by electrical charges discharged deep within the brain.

‘I have gone much further than that. I am on the edge of another breakthrough that is as revolutionary as my elixir: the ability to connect the mind with the machine.’ He sat back. ‘We can think and move a muscle and we can read that muscle, but I know how to connect a mind directly to a machine, a computer. That computer in turn offers mental processes far in excess of human capacity. A computer can calculate in a second what a mind might calculate in a lifetime. It can remember everything. Every piece of knowledge ever discovered, every song sung, book written, formula proved or postulated, it can simulate in its silicon mind environments beyond our ability to conceptualise. A human mind is the soul and spirit of a human, but it is a weak calculating device and a poor, slow thinker. Soon I will be able to expand our consciousness by orders of magnitude, increase our intelligence by a thousand-fold, then a million-fold.’

He smiled at Jim.

‘Imagine what would happen if you could be even a little bit smarter than everyone else. The world of limitations as we know them just falls away, doesn’t it?’ He was nodding, clearly fishing for Jim’s agreement. ‘Then imagine again if you were ten times smarter.’

‘You’d be very lonely,’ said Jim.

‘Pah!’ exclaimed Cardini. ‘Lonely! Why would you care when you would be the ruler of the world?’

‘I’d care,’ said Jim. ‘It’s bad enough being richer than everybody else, but if you were that much cleverer, it’d be like living on your own at the top of Mount Everest. You’d freeze to death.’

Cardini let out a sigh. ‘Why can’t you see the grandeur? How can you not want to embrace an expanded potential?’

They looked at each other, like two totally different species wondering which was the more dangerous and which was about to be the other’s lunch.

‘Where’s Renton?’ asked Jim.

‘How should I know? He is, or rather was, just one of my many lab technicians. I don’t run their lives.’

‘Just one of your technicians?’

‘Well, an important one, but still just another.’

‘He needs to be taken off the streets,’ said Jim.

‘Jim,’ said Cardini, ‘there are more important things right now than Renton. I’m sure the police will find him soon enough. It’s not for me to turn into a sleuth. My concerns are just as pressing. Now that McCloud is dead I need to replace him with a new source of funds and, as you know, the cost of my project is significant.’

‘Not my problem.’

‘Jim, you simply cannot pass up this opportunity! You cannot turn away the one and only chance you will have to live for ever. I am not prepared to believe you are mad enough to turn that down.’

‘I’m mad enough,’ said Jim. ‘I don’t want to live for five hundred years as a paranoid lunatic like McCloud.’

‘I did not do that to him. That was always his personality.’

‘Or as a psychotic sadistic sicko like Renton.’

‘That was not my doing either. Look at me – do you see madness in my demeanour? Do I demonstrate behaviour like that of either McCloud or Renton?’

‘Maybe, your experiments are pretty sick.’

Cardini moaned in frustration. ‘The experiments you saw are the norm for medical research,’ he said, waving his hands in the air as his voice rose. ‘They are science, plain science. I appreciate they are not pretty for the non-scientific observer but they are normal, quite normal.’

‘Whatever,’ said Jim. ‘I’m not interested.’

‘What if I can show you the serum is safe? After all, you can go without it for many years, perhaps as long as decades, and still have the prospect of hundreds of years ahead of you.’ Cardini slumped back in his chair. ‘I must say, the request is not totally unselfish. The project will fund my longevity too. Funding the project funds my research. Without money, you will see the end of me and my knowledge.’ He looked dolefully at Jim. ‘Why not think of my project as the ultimate life insurance for yourself, and a way of helping me to extend my research?’ He fixed Jim with a penetrating stare. ‘What I have in store will truly change the world for the better, for ever.’ A powerful, confident smile lit Cardini’s face, but there was something knowing in it too – and something evil.

‘If you publish the formula of TRT in the public domain I’ll fund you.’

Cardini sat bolt upright. ‘Publish the formula?’ His forehead creased and his nostrils flared. ‘Are you mad? Do you realise what that would mean?’

‘Yes. Everyone would live a lot longer.’

‘Yes, yes,’ replied Cardini, almost laughing with contempt. ‘The population would explode – eight billion, twelve billion, thirty billion, fifty, a hundred … Where would it stop?’

‘But you said it would make people smart enough to overcome our barriers.’

‘We can’t all be gods,’ said Cardini. ‘When everyone is a giant we are all dwarfs again. If I released the formula and knowledge behind TRT, and it could be manufactured like aspirin or penicillin, the world would be set on a course of destruction. Its population is already too large to support itself. With TRT, the whole of humanity would be pitched into a vicious circle of conflict and resource depredation that would throw the whole of civilisation into the abyss within a generation.’

‘So instead you want the two of us to rule the world as immortals, like two Greek gods sitting on Vesuvius?’

Cardini looked pained. ‘Olympus.’

‘Wherever,’ said Jim.

‘Doesn’t the idea appeal to you? Haven’t you earned it?’ said Cardini.

‘You’re mad as well,’ said Jim. ‘You might not be as off your trolley as McCloud or Renton, but you’re still in Cloud Cuckoo Land.’

Cardini put his hands on the desk and lifted himself up a little. ‘Do you mean to tell me you cannot see the amazing opportunities I am offering, that you cannot comprehend the vast potential for you and your line? Can you not appreciate that, in the history of the world and of mankind, this is the first time that anyone has had the chance of escaping their mortal fate? This is not a fable or a myth. This is the destiny of humanity. If it is not you, or it is not me, it will be another at some time in the future. If not you, if not me, then who?’

They heard a crash in the hallway and jumped to their feet. They stared at each other, shocked.

‘I have no idea what that was,’ said Cardini.

Jim suddenly regretted being unarmed. Someone or something was coming down the hallway. Now they could hear a whining, screeching, crying noise that sent a shiver down Jim’s spine.

The door was flung open. A figure, bent double, tottered into the room supported on the door handle.

‘Master,’ cried Renton, red drool spiralling from his mouth on to the floor.

Jim jumped forward and vaulted over the desk to Cardini and stood beside him, aghast.

Renton fell to his knees. ‘Master,’ he squeaked. His eyes were red orbs, and blood streamed in tears down his cheeks. ‘Help me,’ he begged. ‘Save me. I couldn’t release the horseman because one has infected me.’ He held up the box, then thumped it to the floor. ‘Forgive me. Forgive me.’ He shuddered, belching, and blood poured from his lips. ‘But save me, save me, so I can try again.’

‘Be still,’ shouted Cardini.

‘Save me.’ His head fell forward, the blood trickling from his face in long red streams.

‘Be still and I will save you.’

Cardini pulled open a drawer and took out a syringe. He shuffled among a collection of small bottles.

‘What are you going to give him?’ barked Jim.

‘Be quiet,’ snapped Cardini.

Renton looked up, his face a mass of sticky blood. ‘Master?’ He turned to Jim, staring blindly at the space he occupied. ‘Master?’

‘Be still, child,’ boomed Cardini.

Renton coughed blood, which showered across his chest.

Cardini filled the syringe and stepped around the desk. ‘Be still,’ he commanded again.

‘Master,’ croaked Renton.

Cardini’s long arm stretched out at an angle to avoid contact with Renton and his blood and he pressed the needle into the man’s neck. He pushed the barrel in and stepped away quickly.

Renton looked up at him and then at Jim. His eyes widened, his head tilted and then he fell backwards.

Jim looked down at the lifeless body. ‘You’ve killed him.’

When he glanced up, the needle, still in Cardini’s hand, was swinging towards him. He caught the professor’s wrist and his left fist was on its way. It connected. The old man fell back and landed on the floor.

‘The tip of this syringe is laced with the Ebola virus. If you come towards me I will make sure it pierces your skin.’ Cardini struggled to his feet, holding it out like a knife. ‘The tiniest drop will finish you, just as it killed Renton.’

Jim regarded him with a gimlet stare.

‘Contact with even a drop of Renton’s blood will be enough so leaving this room uninfected will be difficult. A struggle with me will doom us both to a terrible death. I did Renton a service in ending his misery and now I am letting you go.’

‘What’s in the box?’

‘Go, before it’s too late.’

‘If I die, you die,’ said Jim, ‘so tell me.’

‘What?’

‘What’s in the box?’

‘Don’t you want to live, you fool?’

‘Less than you do, so tell me what’s in the box.’

Cardini straightened. ‘You really want to know?’

‘Too right I do.’

‘You would stay in a room that is dripping with death to know?’

‘Get on with it.’

‘Very well.’ He paused, then sighed. ‘Bio-weapons.’

‘What for?’

‘Ridding the world of its excess population.’

Jim’s mouth fell open. He closed it hurriedly. ‘Is that what you and McCloud were up to, ridding the world of its excess population?’

‘It was McCloud’s idea but I warmed to it. It is just accelerating the inevitable, managing the process, separating the winners from the losers.’

Jim vaulted back over the desk. Cardini turned to him, too far away to lunge but gripping the syringe with evident intent.

Jim glanced at Renton’s body and the bloody mess around it. ‘Stay back, Cardini, I’m out of this room first.’ He inched along the wall, one eye on Cardini and one on the pool of bloody filth around Renton’s prostrate body. The technician’s face looked much younger than he remembered it: it was like his own, still holding the trace of the teenager he had been. Jim was shuddering with revulsion as he stepped around the body slowly, watching Cardini in case the old man decided to come at him with the syringe.

The door handle looked clean. He took it and swung the door open. One touch of the wrong thing and his life was over. He leapt awkwardly out of the room and sighed with relief. He was clear.

Then he looked at the wall just in front of his nose. ‘Oh, fuck,’ he cried.

A bloody handprint was still dripping just a few millimetres away. He balanced back without moving his feet and peered down the hallway. Renton’s blood was splashed everywhere, on the floor, the walls – it was even sprayed on the ceiling.

He looked back at Cardini, who was eyeing him. The professor was backing away now, pressing something behind him. He smiled. ‘Good luck, Jim,’ he said, in a deep voice. ‘You’d better get yourself to a hospital as soon as you can.’ A panel in the wall behind him slid to one side and he stepped backwards. The panel closed over him. There was the click of a latch and a locking sound.

Jim was going to have to play hopscotch for his life.

Cardini walked quickly down the spiral stairs and into the main production area. McCloud had made him build a failsafe device and had actually come to check it had been installed. He had wanted Cardini to be able to destroy the lab so that no one could ever work out what had gone on there.

It was child’s play for Cardini to turn the place into an inferno. He had actually enjoyed building a system that would create a fire so hot that it would turn anything inside into a charred wreck or a pool of molten metal. Iron had been the solution, an everyday material, cheap and innocuous: it burnt under the right chemical conditions with a heat that was unstoppable. When the trigger fired, the lab would become one giant thermite reaction and a ball of fire as iron turned to rust in hours rather than years.