Nothing But Blue Skies (25 page)

‘Suppose not,' Gordon grunted. ‘All right, let's get going.'

They turned round and trudged back up the corridor. When they encountered the eighth fire door, Gordon relieved his feelings to a certain limited extent by opening it with a vicious kick.

That was when all hell broke loose. Sirens wailed, lights flashed, bells rang, and the wall vents started to exude a foul yellow cloud, probably some kind of anaesthetic gas. Fortunately, all this was happening on the far side of the door.

‘Oh God,' Neville shrieked. ‘What do we do?'

With a squeal and a clunk, the door in front of them swung back and locked itself. Through the glass panel, they could see that the corridor beyond was now full of the yellow gas; just as well, in fact, that the door was apparently airtight.

‘Let's run away,' Gordon suggested.

‘As far as the other locked fire door, you mean? Brilliant.'

‘All right, then, let's stay here. I really don't care any more.' Gordon sat down on the ground and closed his eyes. ‘You stupid bloody twat, this is all your fault. If it wasn't for you I'd be sitting in my nice friendly office right now, drinking coffee and reading the paper. In about ten minutes' time I'd be sauntering down to the canteen to ask if anybody'd found out what happened to that aggravating little nerd Neville, and they'd say no, but who the fuck cares? And I'd say yes, good point, only if nobody else wants it I was thinking of nicking his waste-paper basket, it's bigger than mine.' He sighed. ‘Instead . . .'

‘Shut up,' Neville interrupted. ‘I'm trying to think.'

Gordon shook his head. ‘After forty-odd years, why start now? It's hardly the time and place for learning new skills.'

‘Shut
up
.' Neville glowered at him, like a tortoise filled with hatred. ‘That's better. Now, let's try and figure this out. These doors seem like they're rigged to go apeshit when someone goes through them
that
way, agreed?'

Gordon took a deep breath and made himself loosen up. ‘I suppose so, yes,' he said.

‘Implying they don't want people going that way.'

‘Possibly.'

‘And,' Neville went on, ‘my guess is that wherever they don't want us going is the way we don't want to go.'

Gordon woke up. ‘Huh? I don't get that.'

‘Use your brain.' Neville was on his feet again, looking round. ‘Whatever it is they're really doing in here that they want to keep secret, that's what the self-locking doors and sirens and gas and so on are designed to protect. From intruders.' He thumped the wall with his small fist. ‘People coming in. Agreed?'

Gordon frowned. ‘Go on,' he said.

‘Which means,' Neville continued, ‘that they're figuring on people coming in going
that
way. The direction we've just come from.'

‘Ah.' Gordon looked up at him.

‘And the opposite of coming in is going out,' Neville went on excitedly, ‘which suggests to me that Out has to be in the
opposite
direction—'

‘The way we were going when we ran into the locked fire door.' Gordon nodded. ‘That's fine. Now we know that we were going in the right direction when we met the impassable obstacle. That gives me a warm glow of satisfaction in the pit of my stomach, but it's not going to open that door. Face it, Neville, we're buggered. We might just as well wait here till they come and round us up. That way, we're less likely to walk into a lethal booby-trap or grab hold of a door handle with five million volts running through it.'

Neville rounded on him angrily. ‘That's it, is it? You're just going to sit there on your bum and give up?'

‘Yes.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes.'

‘Suit yourself.
I
'm not.'

‘That is, of course, your right as an idiot.' Gordon sighed.

‘I've had enough of this. I mean, let's be sensible, shall we? All this—' He made an all-encompassing gesture. ‘It's just fooling about, isn't it? This is real life, for Christ's sake. In real life, crazy things like this don't happen. In real life, innocent weathermen, even psychotic loons like you, don't just get scooped up by faceless government agencies, shipped off to vast labyrinthine secret installations and squalidly killed by out-of-control megalomaniacs. This is
England
, dammit. You don't get weird stuff like that in England, it's not that kind of country. It's too—'

‘Boring?'

‘Exactly. Too boring. What you're imagining is what happens in hot desert countries inhabited by excitable, volatile Latin types or Americans. No.' He shook his head. ‘Sooner or later, someone's going to come and tell us it's all been a terrible mistake, or that really it was one of those games shows with Noel Edmonds or Chris Tarrant, and we'll all be jolly good sports about it and get given a free radio alarm clock. You'll see.'

Neville thought about that for a moment. ‘In other words,' he said, ‘you're relying on the British traditions of justice, individual liberty, common sense and fair play?'

‘Yes.'

They looked at each other for two, maybe three seconds.

‘Like I was saying,' Gordon said eventually. ‘Let's start running.'

 

‘SHOT!' the dragon yelled.

The scientist cringed and put her hands over her ears. Things weren't going entirely to plan.

‘Did you see that?' the dragon said. ‘Three-ball plant off the side cushion to pot the last red, perfect position on the yellow. Come on, Stevie, my son!'

The scientist raised a pained eyebrow. ‘How do you know that's the yellow ball?' she asked. ‘It's a black-and-white TV.'

The dragon chuckled. ‘To you, maybe. But of course, you don't have a third eye, you helpless, snivelling little - oh, for crying out loud, he missed it. How the hell could he miss that? There's no way a blind man with a prosthetic arm could have missed that, in the dark, facing the other way. Pull your finger out, you moron!' he bellowed at the screen. ‘Ye gods and little goldfish, he was one ball away from having the goddamn' title
sewn up
!'

The scientist closed her eyes. She wasn't to know. The odds against the dragon falling instantly in love with the game of snooker were astronomical, so bizarrely improbable as to defy calculation—'

As is usually the case with the statistical probabilities governing true love
, she wryly reflected. Not that love, true, false or the more usual mixture of the two, was something she regarded herself as qualified to pontificate about. She'd always been too busy for that sort of thing, and apart from one rather nebulous and wholly impractical encounter in the late 1980s, the hit-and-run sniper with the pink wings and the armour-piercing arrows had let her pretty much alone. And that—

—Was entirely beside the point. Things were going yellow on her. Instead of a dragon bored past all endurance and begging piteously for mercy, she now had a happy, revitalised dragon who was rapidly turning into a snooker freak.
Life
, she reflected,
can be so unfair
.

‘I don't believe it,' the dragon roared. ‘Oh, for fuck's sake, he's practically given the game away. I could have made that shot wearing boxing gloves, using my tail for a frigging cue.'

The scientist couldn't take any more. She grabbed the remote and hit the off button, and the screen immediately reverted to black.

‘Hey,' growled the dragon, ‘what do you think you're playing at? Switch it back on.'

‘Why should I? You're enjoying it. You aren't here to enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be torture, dammit.'

‘You can't turn it off now,' the dragon shrieked, ‘it's the decider. All square going into the last frame. The whole championship's hanging on this. It's sporting history.'

‘Tell you what.' The scientist grinned. ‘I'll turn the TV back on if you answer a few simple questions. Deal?'

‘What? Oh, yes, right. Whatever you say. Just turn the damn' set
on
. Thank you,' he added, as the picture came back. ‘Oh snot, I've missed the break. I hate missing the break, it's so important.'

‘Okay.' The scientist leaned forward and touched the record button on the tape deck. ‘Now then, first question. What—?'

‘Shhh!' the dragon hissed, making a noise like a kettleful of snakes. ‘I'm trying to concentrate here.'

‘You can watch and answer questions at the same time, can't you?'

‘Yeah, yeah, in a minute. Let me just watch this shot.'

‘Not in a minute. Now.'

‘
Quiet!
' The dragon's voice was so vehement that for a moment the scientist felt deeply ashamed of her lack of consideration. Then she remembered just who was supposed to be torturing who. She made a tut-tut sound to signify disapproval and switched the TV off again.

‘Priorities,' she said. ‘And the first priority is, answer my questions. Otherwise - are you listening to me?'

The dragon obviously wasn't. His eyes were closed, and although he didn't even have a face in any conventional sense, it didn't take a giant leap of intuition to realise that the set of the muscles around his jaws and snout signified rapt attention.
Shit
, the scientist growled to herself,
he's figured out how to watch the snooker with his third eye
. The thought of it appalled her rather, from an ethical and cultural viewpoint. Causing dragons to use their awe-inspiring enhanced perceptual abilities for watching the Embassy World Championships was behavioural pollution of the worst possible kind; worse than all the carrion-eating sparrowhawks on motorway verges or urban foxes ripping open dustbin bags put together. She felt as if she'd just bought Texas from the Comanches for a crate of firewater and a couple of strings of cheap beads.

And it wasn't getting the goddamn' questions answered, either. She'd had virtually no contact with her employer as yet, but (like everybody on the planet with the exception of a few small tribes in the depths of the rain forest) she knew that he was reckoned to have a quick temper and about as much patience as a mayfly in a dole queue. No two ways about it, she was going to have to think of something, and she didn't have much time to do it in.

Which brought her back to the same old question: how the hell do you torture a huge, massively-armoured lizard without damaging him severely in the process? Boredom had seemed to be the obvious way to go, and for a while there it had looked like it was going to work; but the critter's tenacity and adaptability had been too much for her. Outclassed; there was no other word for it. Weighed in the balance and found wanting. Pathetic.

Pathetic . . .

Abandoning Operation Self-Pity in mid-flow, she applied her mind. She remembered having read somewhere (probably on one of those thought-for-the-day desk calendars; it was that kind of sentiment) that the way to overthrow an opponent stronger than oneself is to lead to his strengths, not his weaknesses. Trite, but valid; the weak spots on the wall are the ones that are heavily guarded, leaving the strong points virtually unmanned and ripe for a sneak attack with scaling ladders.

‘It's all right for you,' she said quietly.

‘Shh.'

‘I mean to say,' she went on, ‘nothing I can do's going to get to you, so I might as well stop wasting my time and go home now. I mean, better to quit voluntarily than be fired.'

The dragon didn't say anything, but one eyelid twitched uneasily.

‘Not that you'd be able to grasp the concept of
fired
,' she went on. ‘I doubt very much whether it's much of an issue with dragons. Is there even such a word as ‘unemployment', where you come from?'

‘No,' the dragon muttered. ‘Now be quiet.'

‘Didn't think so,' the scientist continued, in a small, sad voice. ‘Not in your vocabulary. Like such concepts as mortgage repayments, tax demands, health-insurance premiums, pension contributions, utility bills, living expenses - Oh, I suppose you could look them up in a dictionary, but there's no way you could ever understand what they
mean
. After all, you aren't human.'

‘Quite true,' the dragon said. ‘Fortunately.'

‘Very fortunately,' the scientist sighed. ‘What wonderful luck, not to have all that garbage hanging over you all the time, making you lie awake at night worrying, still there the next morning even if you do manage to grab a few hours' sleep. Talk about privilege. You people don't know you're born.'

The tip of the dragon's tail flicked to and fro. ‘Nobody's going to sack you for not being able to do the impossible. All you've got to do is explain; you gave it your very best shot—'

‘Hah! Like I said, you're just not human. If you were, you'd understand.'

‘That would be a high price to pay for understanding,' the dragon replied. ‘Why should I care about what's going to happen to you if you fail to bully me into betraying my own kind? Do you agonise over whether your food forgives you before you eat it?'

‘As it happens,' the scientist lied, ‘I'm a vegetarian.'

‘Really.' The dragon clicked its tongue. ‘If you could see through your third eye, I'd show you the sound of a carrot being boiled. You'd never be able to sleep again.'

The scientist didn't want to think about that; it gave a whole new, rich penumbra of meaning to the expression ‘eating something that disagrees with you.' ‘Be that as it may,' she said, ‘when all this is over, you're not the one who'll be working night shifts in a hamburger bar. I'd hate to think what your precious third eye would make of that.'