Rabies (3rd part)

PHASE II – PRODROME

'Rabies is a killer!
One selfish act of animal smuggling could bring rabies permanently into this country.
There is no cure for rabies.
The symptoms are very painful and distressing.
The disease affects both animals and people.
Rabies is now widespread in Europe and is getting closer to our shores.
Please help to keep rabies out of Britain!'
(POSTER, CENTRAL OFFICE OF INFORMATION, MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES AND FOOD. LONDON, 1976)

1./I

The six electronic clocks of Heathrow Central Underground Station, on the Piccadilly line at London Airport, simultaneously indicated 07.15 hours as the train from Hatton Cross emerged with a hollow rumble from the eastern tunnel and stopped opposite the entrance to the western one where a dead-end section of the track, wrapped in darkness, led towards the end of the line. The automatic doors of the neon-lit carriages opened with a hiss and from them, as out of the glistening cocoon of some magical, mechanical birth-form, poured the passengers with the exuberance of prisoners unexpectedly set free.

Random patterns of nomadic humanity of different sexes, races, shapes and sizes, but all united by travel fever; bent beneath the weight of their luggage, they jostled each other frantically along the platform, colliding with others whose less agitated behavior showed that the temptations of summer or the excitement of departure had passed them by. Unhurriedly they stepped into the empty train waiting to take them back to London, whilst the newcomers pushed forwards impatiently towards the escalator and rapidly disappeared from the view of the angular clergyman, the only person to have remained seated on the torn seat of one of the smokers' compartments. The train opposite on the left hand platform closed its doors and disappeared into the tunnel in the direction of Hatton Cross. A few tardy passengers began to get into the train on the right. Only then did the clergyman stand up and step out onto the platform.

He stumbled and almost fell. His Pan-Am travel bag had got caught up round his legs. He swore loudly before managing to straighten up, regain control of himself and glance around him. He'd have to watch that damn tongue of his, he thought. Although for the rest the Church had kept in close ecumenical step with time, as far as language was concerned, She was still hesitant about accepting obscenities as the most efficacious medium of understanding between people.

He was a man of about forty with quick, mobile features whose sharpness was tempered by his bronzed skin, light-brown hair and tall, thin body in the depths of his too-large suit. Over his shoulder hung the blue Pan-Am travel bag and in his hand he held a black, leather breviary with a gold cross engraved on the cover.

His train too closed its doors and disappeared towards Hatton Cross. He looked round about him. The station was empty. He walked past the escalator in order to examine the platform from the other side. There was no one standing along the left-hand track either. He wasn't surprised – he had counted on this very kind of favorable circumstance. Unless, of course, there was some hidden trap. An observation post which kept watch on the station unseen.

He didn't think they'd got round to that. One day televised surveillance would be installed here too. Magic spying like in the big stores and banks. But only after something serious had happened. Not before. Never in time. In Britain no one ever hurries. In Britain, in principle, as Heinrich Heine said, everything happens a hundred years late. A German, of course, that explained the impatience of the remark. This time the lethargy of the Authorities, in the majority of cases intolerable, was working in his favor. He was satisfied. He was quite definitely alone. He knew that he wouldn't be alone for long, but he wanted to check once again for exactly how long that would be.

After 59 seconds the first group of passengers, Africans in tribal dress, came noisily down the escalator. They were quickly followed by others. And immediately afterwards a train from Hatton Cross drew in. The catacombs of the Underground were once more filled with the noises of that jungle which optimists have called civilization.

The clergyman with the Pan-Am bag made a mental note, in such a public place he couldn't risk writing it down in his breviary, right beneath the already recorded information that on weekdays the first train for London left from Heathrow Central at 05.07, and the first arrival was at 05.45, that the last departure was at 23.50 and the last arrival at 01.21, but that the frequency of trains between those times varied with the time of day: during the morning and evening rush hours, trains ran every four minutes, but during the day the interval could be between three and a half and six and a half, and in the evening, after the rush hour, it was even seven and a half minutes.

Paying no attention to the bustle around him, he walked slowly round several concentric circles along the platform stretching out between the two parallel tracks. He checked the position of the escalator, built into their twin massive supporting pillars. Two more, cutting deep into east and west walls of the station, hid, behind thickly iodized glass, stores and offices whose function, as now, he had not been able to detect on earlier visits. On both sides of the oblong platform, the four-pronged furrows of the rails disappeared in the impenetrable darkness of the tunnel. But the station itself was uncomfortably well lit. Too well for what he had in mind. He wondered if it was equally extravagantly illuminated between 01.21 and 05.07 when the Underground was not working. And whether perhaps part of his task should not have been carried out the night before.

Once again the platform emptied. The clergyman with the Pan-Am bag verified once again that in the morning Heathrow Central was empty for a variable number of seconds every four minutes. This time it was no more than forty. After a fortieth second he saw the graceful calves of an Air France hostess coming down the escalator.

The first time, Heathrow Central had been empty for fifty-nine seconds. Then for forty. The third time most probably it would be still tighter. The time was shrinking like shagreen leather. And it seemed not likely that for fourth time he checked, nothing at all would be left of it. More particularly, that there would be no time at all when it was needed. Castor, of course, was experienced; he'd get round it somehow. After everything that he, Pollux, had made of him, resourcefulness in unexpected situation was something that could be logically taken for granted. But in this business the skill lay not in being able to cope with unexpected eventualities, but to eliminating them by logical forward planning.

He should never have made his tours of the Airport by daylight only. He ought to have come at night as well. In any case, it was quieter here at night. Flights were cut to a minimum by the Noise Abatement Act, the legal consequence of the ban on overlying the Royal Castle at Windsor. There were very few passengers and security measures were lax. And for anyone with that aim in mind it was easier to take note of things, one's thoughts were clearer, more logical. As if on a dark, photographic plate, details lost in the daytime chaos became more visible. He would have realized the unreliability of his calculations.

On the other hand, they had to make up the essential part of the conditions in which 'Operation Dioscuri' was to be carried out. Otherwise they would be of no use at all. It had been an inspired place of foresight to dress Castor and his companions in the everyday suit of a protestant minister. Consisting officially of a dark suit with a white clerical collar, but in practice reduced to the 'dog-collar' below which one could wear a sack if one felt like it, it threatened no unpleasant surprises. He admitted, of course, that the whole masquerade somewhat resembled a comic opera, but there was a certain consoling irony in disguising men of War and Chaos as men of Peace and Order.

Along the wall above the empty track was a placard several meters high. On the black background, like the universe strewn with gilt, wasp-like stars shimmered a haze, also golden, filled with the elaborate coat of arms of Harrods. Beneath this commercial cosmic vista was written in huge letters:
WHERE THE FUTURE BEGINS!
Quite an ambitious advertisement, he thought. As if its inventor had the magic power to blow away the unknown, which, like a cloud of condensed possibilities kept hidden from people what lay in store for them tomorrow. The imaginative artist had erred only with the last word. Had he been truly clairvoyant the advertisement would have read:
WHERE THE FUTURE ENDS!
And there, on the other wall where it said:
WELCOME! YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUR HOTEL! should be:
WELCOME! YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUR GRAVE!
The escalator hummed dully beneath his in its monotonous movement, like the mechanism of a time bomb. Constructive machinery still had a destructive sound to it. Castor would probably have said - like everything else made by a human hand. He liked to gild his bombs with the philosophy with which he formulated them. The circle was complete. In that Janus-like duality of human products there was a certain perversely perceptive mockery. Beneath the metal staircase which seemed unending, like evil, suffering, injustice, there was, of course, nothing. Not yet. But there was would be. Beneath the whole Airport. A damning memorial to man's treachery. A matricide which right from the Golden Age of the Greek gods had forgiven no one.

Mother nature, said Castor, created us for us to perfect her. Instead of that we are killing her. We shall have to pay for it. All right, he thought, but 'abused and offended' nature would have to wait a while. The Airport would suffer today, but only incidentally. They weren't challenging the shortcomings of civilization, only the shortcomings of the politics which made that civilization possible. There's no point in fighting a hole dug in the wrong place, you have to fight the idiots who dug it. The hole gets filled in any case. He himself, in fact, was not so mad about nature. Privately he considered that a little less nature, especially in the shape of the vulgar, aggressive instincts of lower carnivores and higher bank employees, would in no way detract from mankind's well being. But he needed Castor. Castor could perform tasks of which the castrated brain of any ordinary citizen would not have been capable.

With a short, soft jolt the escalator deposited him on the station's upper level. He found himself in a marble foyer from which pedestrian subways led to various Terminal Buildings. He had read somewhere that the Central Terminal Area covered 158 acres, and the whole Heathrow Airport with its auxiliary buildings, hangars, workshops, depots and runways, 2819 acres, ringed by a perimeter road 9.3 miles long. The mammoth proportions of this aeronautical domain suited his plans to the highest degree. At one time he had thought of choosing a transatlantic liner for his operation. But however big, a ship would not have allowed the freedom of action which Castor would have at the Airport complex. True, on some tourist cruise ships there were areas more easily accessible than the Airport, which was certainly more strictly guarded but on the other hand, the surveillance of a relatively small boat was comparatively easier.

The fact that at Heathrow Airport during the summer season and at the period of the densest air traffic, there sometimes came together at one time more than 200 000 passengers and people accompanying them daily, together with more than 60 000 airport staff, made any kind of surveillance at best unsatisfactory.

Finally, an official state delegation was flying out today. Everywhere, everyone was in a hurry. Even trains, which in their day had replaced the earlier diplomatic mules, had become too slow for the general rush towards a rapid lack of mutual understanding. So, that morning at Heathrow Airport a top-level Soviet State Delegation would be accompanied on their departure from London by important representatives of H. M. Government. There would have been no logical or revolutionary purpose in laying in wait for the Russians with bombs beneath the deck of some ocean liner bound for Murmansk.

He gave up his ticket at the ramp and with a light step set off to walk across the foyer. He was humiliatingly aware that he was imitating Castor's professional calm, but he consoled himself with the thought that he was only taking back what he himself had once given. Castor was his product. He had both conceived and created him just as he was. But he sensed a certain creative reciprocity linking them together, that of an author and his hero. Instead, Castor had now begun to shape him, Pollux. Creator and the created had come together in an unusual mixture in which it was barely clear which was which.

With a camera's precision his apparently uninterested eyes took in for the 9th time the architectural details of the station hall, the features of its internal layout, communications and he distances between them, each and every slightest, most insignificant detail of the confused life going on around him. If he had been followed, he would have been seen to stop a little longer in front of the escalator leading to the underground bus station, but it would have been impossible to guess why. He would have been lost to view amongst the bustling crowd of passengers and appeared again opposite the battery of wall telephones under their glass domes, for all the world like oversized space helmets.