Stand on Zanzibar (66 page)

He cut the circuit and the screen died slowly into dark.

the happening world (14)

RECRUITING POSTERS

THE BENINIA CONSORTIUM

(General Technics Inc.

General Technics (Great Britain and Commonwealth) Ltd.

General Technics (Australasia) Pty.

General Technics (France) SA

General Technics (Deutschland) GmbH

General Technics (Scandinavia) Aktiebolaget

General Technics (Latin America) SA

General Technics (Johannesburg) Pty.

Mid-Atlantic Mining Inc.

and all subsidiary companies and corporations of the above)

TOGETHER WITH THE GOVERNMENT AND PEOPLE OF BENINIA

announce the flotation of a substantial PUBLIC LOAN FUND yielding a warranted FIVE PER CENT PER ANNUM with excellent prospect of a yield approaching EIGHT PER CENT (fully computed by General Technics’ “Shalmaneser”)

The term of the loan to be in the first instance 20 YEARS with option of reversion or continued participation for a further 30 YEARS making 50 YEARS IN ALL

Prospectus and certified true copies of the above-mentioned computer analysis available on request from …

*   *   *

THE BENINIA CONSORTIUM

invites applications for contracts of employment in the country of Beninia from persons having experience of West African conditions particularly in the former colonial territories. Salaries will be generous. The term of employment will depend on circumstances but is expected to average five years. Round-trip allowance; one month home vacation and two months local vacation per two-year period; removal and resettlement expenses; generous weighting for sub-standard conditions of accomodation. Write, giving details of time spent in West Africa and full description of posts occupied, to …

*   *   *

THE BENINIA CONSORTIUM

requires staff preferably but not necessarily having experience in West Africa, in the following specialities:

—and literally EVERY OTHER DISCIPLINE involved in the running of a 21st-century nation! Applications to …

*   *   *

WANT TO GET OUT AND SEE THE WORLD BEFORE YOU SETTLE DOWN
?

WANT TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE
?

WANT TO ENJOY TOP PAY AND UNIQUE EXPERIENCE
?

The Beninia Project is one of the most exciting ideas ever conceived and YOU can be part of it!

Call us at …

*   *   *

Stock cue VISUAL:
white boy age appx. 17 lifts up negro child to see handsome tall new building under blue sky.

Stock cue SOUND:
“Thinking about … Beninia?”

Stock cue VISUAL:
BCU child’s wondering face.

Stock cue SOUND:
“That’s the part of the big scene where more things will be happening … more marvels will be wrought!”

Stock cue VISUAL:
cliptage splitscreen—jungle with animals, building in course of erection, children running, river with boats, etc.

Stock cue SOUND:
“Beninia Theme” specially recorded by the Em Thirty-Ones.

Stock cue VISUAL:
Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere walk across village square with tame deer following towards (pan) fine new sky-line of buildings and people of village fall in behind, children playing with deer and trying to get on for a ride.

Stock cue SOUND:
“Beninia Theme” down and speech over—“You too could be part of this fantastic, magnificent, unprecedented twenty-first century venture! Note the number of the nearest agency hiring volunteers!”

Live cue SOUND:
local station reads in call-code as appropriate.

*   *   *

“Mary dear, I’ve been thinking about these advertisements for Beninia.”

“Yes, Victor, I know you have. But things must have changed out there, you know.”

“They’re changing here, aren’t they? Faster and less palatably! I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to send them an application.”

“T’avais raison, Jeannine. T’as parlé au sujet des Américains qui allaient s’intéresser à la Béninie, et voici une réclame que je viens de trouver dans le journal. Tu l’as vue?”

“Montre-le-moi … Ah, Pierre! C’est épatant! Moi, je vais y écrire sur le champ! Toi?”

“Je leur ai déjà donné un coup de téléphone.”

“Mais … qu’est-ce que pense Rosalie de tout cela?”

“Sais pas.”

“Tu n’as pas demandé à ta femme si elle veut—?”

“Heu! Je m’en fiche, Jeannine. Je te dis franchement: je m’en fiche!”

“Frank, do you suppose they have eugenic laws in a backward country like Beninia?”

“What?”

“GT is hiring people to go there. And they’ve established an office right here in the city to interview candidates.”

*   *   *

Teach:
mathematics, English, French, geography, economics, law …

Train:
teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, meteorologists, mechanics, agronomists …

Build:
houses, schools, hospitals, roads, docks, power stations, factories …

Process:
iron, aluminium, wolfram, germanium, uranium, water, polythene, glass …

Sell:
power, antibiotics, knives, shoes, television sets, bull-sperm, liquor …

Live:
faster, longer, higher off the hog.

*   *   *

THE BENINIA CONSORTIUM WANTS—WANTS—WANTS—
!

continuity (33)

GOT IT AND GONE

The rain had ceased while Donald was making his phone-call, but water was still running in the gutters. It seemed for a short eternity that the only sound anywhere was the trickling of it as it drained through the grating of a sewer.

At last Superintendent Totilung spoke.

“Mr. Hogan, I believe Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung has been expecting a visit from you. He told me he had offered you a private interview.”

“That’s right,” Donald said, his voice creaking like an old iron gate. Still half inside the phone-booth, gas-gun in hand, communikit slung over his shoulder, he glanced sidelong towards the mouth of the valley. It was blocked by a policeman with his bolt-gun drawn.

“And a personally guided tour of his laboratories.”

“That’s right too.”

“You’re full of contradictions, Mr. Hogan. Any number of foreign reporters would have given their arms for the privilege you’ve been accorded. Yet you haven’t been in touch with the professor all day. Will your head office be as pleased with you tomorrow as they were this morning?”

Totilung’s eyes, bright, sharp, dark like currants in a suet roll, fixed him. Mere shock began to cede place in Donald’s mind to honest fear; he felt the agonising prickle of sweat inside his clothes.

“I propose to call on Dr. Sugaiguntung this evening, at his home.”

“You expect to find there all the information you want—his experimental animals, his charts and graphs, his computer analyses, films, instruments?” Totilung’s manner was deliberately scathing.

“You let me plan my work and I’ll be pleased to let you get on with yours,” Donald said tightly. “In my judgment the interview comes before the guided tour of the labs, so—”

“You’ve wasted your chance, then,” Totilung shrugged. “I’m carrying a warrant for your arrest on charges of assault and battery, and of damaging a camera the property of Miss Fatima Saud.” She added in Yatakangi to her companion, “Bring those handcuffs over here—but keep your gun ready! This man’s a trained killer.”

Wary, not taking his eyes off Donald, the policeman drew the cuffs from his pocket and approached Totilung.

*   *   *

I’ve been tricked. I’ve been conned. I’ve been driven down a blind alley of life. I never wanted to be herded into corners where I had to kill or be killed. To be back where I was, bored and ordinary and dull, I’d give anything, anything!

But he could not afford to be arrested and waste time and perhaps be deported. Tonight he must pull the plum from the tree and carry it home.

He forced himself towards calm with a deep, controlled breath. Assuming Totilung had been hunting him when someone reported that he was calling an Engrelay satellite from this booth, she would have come straight here. The street on which the alley debouched was too narrow for a prowl car; it, and the driver, must be waiting at the end of the block. With luck he had only Totilung and one man to contend with for the moment.

He let his shoulders slump in resignation as she took the cuffs and stepped up to him, making sure her body did not block her companion’s fire. The latter followed close behind her, gun levelled. Donald held up his hands as though meekly preparing for the cuffs to be put on and fired the gas-gun—not at Totilung, but at the man.

The searing jet struck his cheek, blinded one eye, poured into his mouth as he gasped, scalded his lungs and doubled him over, choking. Reflex triggered his gun and a bolt went to ground with a sizzling noise in a pile of rubbish twenty feet away. Donald wasted no time on him, though. He accelerated the upward motion of his hands and drove the fingers that did not hold the gas-gun into Totilung’s fleshy jowl. Distracted by the handcuffs, she was slow in bringing up her arms to cover her face. He kicked her leg below the kneecap and as she twisted sideways in agony he dropped the gas-gun, grasped her arm and tripped her.

She fell backwards, sprawling, mouth open to scream, and he jumped on her belly with both feet, driving all the wind out of her. The man was recovering: choking and weeping, he was waving the gun as though mortally terrified of shooting his chief instead of Donald.

Donald leapt off Totilung and butted the policeman back against the opposite wall of the alley. His soft cap was no protection as his head slammed into the brickwork. He howled and let the gun fall.

Donald caught it before it hit the ground, turned it over in his hand as he stepped aside, and shot first the policeman and then Totilung to death.

It’s the thing we know best how to do to a man. We’re marvellous at it, wonderful, unparalleled.

Working fast, he pulled the bodies together, his hands becoming sticky with the melted fat on their crisp skins, turned to the consistency of pork-crackling by the energy bolts. He wiped them on an uncharred portion of the policeman’s uniform and unslung his communikit. He placed a book of matches inside the lid as he had been shown. Hand on the control knob, he forced himself to review the layout of the streets nearby and decided that if the prowl car which had brought Totilung had come as close as possible it must be on the right of the alley. There seemed to be more noise than a few minutes ago; the siesta was at an end.

He turned the control knob to its unmarked final setting and ran.

Coming in sight of other people after leaving the alley, he had to force himself to walk with deliberate slowness, his right hand in the side-pocket of his shirjack to disguise the bulge of the gun. After twenty paces like that he heard the dull crumping sound behind him. All around him people started and looked and pointed. He copied them, for fear of seeming more conspicuous than his complexion made him, and saw that two whole buildings extending right the way from the alley to where he stood had abruptly leaned back with a cloud of smoke and dust. The air was full of screams.

Shortly, the screams were drowned out by the noise of the buildings as they folded up wet cardboard fashion and slumped into rubble and corpses.

*   *   *

From then until sunset time was sliced into disconnected images that might be not visual, but internal. Once he was in a corner of two walls bringing back the lunch he had eaten at the reed-thatched inn by the sea, wondering with detached curiosity at the way his stomach had altered the colour of the food. Another time he was leaning over the counter of one of the ubiquitous street-corner kiosks, pretending to argue with the proprietor over prices because there was a police car passing. But there was no sequence in the experiences. There was a fixed, due moment at which he must return to contact with the world, and until then he preferred not to perceive.

Darkness came, and triggered the command he had given himself. Shaking with the weakness that stemmed from terror, revulsion and vomiting, he made his way like a man in a dream to the district where Sugaiguntung had his home.

By half past seven he was within a block of it, and regaining his self-control. Concealed from a prowl car by a little clump of scented bushes, he felt his awareness mesh anew with exterior events. He re-learned how to frame coherent thoughts.

There’s a lot of activity around here. They can’t have dug out Totilung’s body yet, surely? But it wouldn’t take a genius to deduce what I did.

He fingered the gun in his pocket. It still had almost the full charge with which he had left the police-station armoury. He tried to find comfort in telling himself that he had been trained with the most advanced techniques to use such a weapon and win. It was no good. The only escape lay in action.