rumor, and the rumors in question seemed to me to be suspiciously akin to the urban legends that had sprung up everywhere since the tabloids’ yuck factor campaign had finally forced the government to pass stringent laws controlling the uses of genetic engineering and to set up the GE-Crime Unit to enforce them. Once it existed, the Unit had to dosomething to justify its budget, and its senior staff obviously reckoned that whatever was going on at Hollinghurst Manor had to be yucky enough to allow them to get that invaluable first goal on the great scoresheet.
It seemed to me that the whole affair had always had a faint air of surreal absurdity about it. The illegal experiments that Hemans and his fellows were alleged by rumor to be conducting were unfortunately conducive to silly jokes, ranging from lame references to flying pigs to covert references to the raid as the Boar War. Even the Home Office joined in the jokey name game; it was some idiot under-secretary who decided to codename the “target” Animal Farm, borrowing the most popular of the derisory nicknames it had accumulated during the surveillance. It was, alas, my own people who took some delight in explaining to anyone who would listen why the people inside had allegedly taken to calling the project “Commoner’s Isle.” (It was because the place where the ambitious scientist had conducted his unsuccessful experiment in H. G. Wells’sThe Island of Doctor Moreau had been called Noble’s Isle.) When the inspector in charge of the Armed Response Unit assured us at the final briefing that the people in the manor didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past his men he couldn’t understand why the men from the ministry snickered. (InAnimal Farm, Snowball is the idealist who gets purged by the ruthless Napoleon.) In a sense, the inspector was right. When the Animal Farmers found out that they were being raided and ran like hell theydidn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past his men. Unfortunately, that didn’t make them stop running and give up.
The part of the plan that included me involved uniformed policemen smashing their way through the main door and making as many arrests as possible while my people went for the computers and any paper files that were still around. We didn’t expect to get all the records out-we’d been told at the briefing that Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby would probably start crunching diskettes and reformatting hard disks as soon as they were roused from sleep-but we figured that there’d be more than enough left to salvage. They were scientists, after all; keeping backup files ought to have been second nature to them.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The Animal Farmers didn’t bother with shredding and reformatting; they just torched the place. Nobody had thought to give us gas-masks, and the fumes that met us in the corridors of the manor were so foul and instantly dizzying that we should have known that they were toxic and turned back immediately. Actually, that was what most of my colleagues did. I was the only thoroughly stupid one. I kept on going, determined to get to the office that was my designated objective.
It was hopeless-but it was my one and only Boy’s Own adventure and I hadn’t been trained to an adequate sense of self-preservation. I was just on the point of blacking out when I heard shots fired in the woods, and realized just how badly awry the operation had gone.
I would certainly have died if I hadn’t been pulled out of the fume-filled corridor-and by the time my own team got around to noticing that I was missing it was far too late forthem to do anything constructive.
It was the Animal Farmers who saved me-not the scientists who had actually set up the illegal experiments, but a handful of lesser beings who’d turned back when the shooting started in the hope of finding a safer way out on the other side of the house.
I woke up with a terrible headache and stinging eyes, coughing weakly. It felt for a minute or two as though my lungs had been so badly scorched that I could no longer draw sufficient oxygen from the warm and musty air that I drew into them-but that, mercifully, was an illusion born of distress.
I managed to crack open my weeping eyes just long enough to perceive that it was too dark to see what was happening, then shut them tight and hoped that the pain would go away.
Somebody lifted my head and pressed a cup of water to my lips. I managed to take a few sips, and decided not to protest when a female voice said: “He’s okay.”
While I lay there collecting myself a different female voice said: “It’s no good. There’s no way out up there. As the fire draws air upward our supply’s being renewed via the tunnel to the old icehouse, but there’s no way through the grilles. They haven’t been opened in half a century and the locks are rusted solid. Hemans should have taken care of them years ago. He should have known that this would happen one day.”
“There’s a hacksaw in the toolbox,” a male voice put in. “If we get to work right away…”
“They wereshooting, Ed,” the second female told him. “They’re trying to wipe us out, just like Bradby always said they would. They don’t even want to ask the questions, let alone hear the answers. They just want us dead. Even if we could get to the lake side, they’re probably waiting for us. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“What chance have we got if we wait here, Ali?” Ed replied. “Even if the fire burns all day tomorrow, they’ll come to pick over the ruins as soon as they can. If they’re still in the woods by then, they’ll certainly be all around what’s left of the house. The tunnel’s our only chance. If we can just get to Brighton, to a crowd. Then London…we can pass, Ali. I know we can. We can hide.”
I wanted to tell them that nobody wanted to shoot them, that they’d be fine if they sat tight until it was safe to go upstairs and then surrendered, but I knew that they wouldn’t believe me. What on earth had made them so paranoid? And why had the ARU men opened fire? “Ed’s right,” said the female who’d given me the water to drink. “If they have the icehouse covered, we’re dead-but all the exits upstairs will still be useless when the fire dies down. We have to start work on the grilles. Somebody ought to watch this one, though-he’s not badly hurt. If he doesn’t come at us, he’ll give us away.”
“We should have left him where he was,” Ed opined, bitterly. “He’s not going to be any use as a hostage, is he?”
“He wouldn’t be any use as a corpse,” the unnamed female retorted. “He’d just be an excuse for branding us as murderers, justifying the ethnic cleansing.”
Ethnic cleansing!What on earth had Bradby been telling them? And who the hell were they, anyway? I couldn’t help jumping to the obvious conclusion, but I refused to entertain it. I was supposed to be a scientist, not some sucker who’d swallow any urban legend that happened along.
“We don’t know that the others who came in with him all got out,” Ali pointed out.
“No, we don’t,” the other female admitted, “but we did know that he hadn’t. If we’d left him where he went down, itwould have been murder.”
“It would have been suicide,” said Ed, “But Kath’s right, Ali. They’d havecalled it murder. They’ll have to justify the shooting somehow.”
I coughed again, partly because I needed to and partly because I wanted to remind them that I had a voice too, even if I hadn’t yet obtained sufficient control of it to formulate meaningful utterances.
“You’d better stay with him, Ali,” the male voice said. “If he gets aggressive, hit him with this.”
At that stage, I could only guess what “this” might be-some time passed before I was able to make out that it was an axe-but I wasn’t about to make any trouble. I was still trying to convince myself that I hadn’t breathed in enough poison to be mortally hurt, and that I hadn’t done sufficient damage to my lungs to prejudice my long-term ability to breathe. I heard two sets of feet moving away across a stone floor, and I forced myself to relax, collecting myself together by slow degrees.
Eventually, I felt well enough to begin to feel angry. I stopped being grateful for being alive and started resenting the fact that I had come so close to dying. Setting the fire had been an act of pure spite on the part of the mad scientists. People like me-law-abiding geneticists, that is-had collaborated with the Home Office in drawing up the careful legislation which presumably defined whatever the Animal Farmers were doing as unacceptable, but they had simply been too arrogant to comply with the law. On top of that, it seemed, they had taken the view that if we wouldn’t countenance the research then we couldn’t have the results. They had obviously decided that if they had to go to jail, they’d take all their hard-won understanding with them-and woe betide anyone who got in their way.
Once I began to get angry, I didn’t stop. If Hemans and Co. really had been transplanting human genes into the embryos of pigs in order to turn out simulacra of human beings, it was unforgivable, and the murderous fire was piling injury on insult. I’d never been convinced that the Animal Farmershad done what Special Branch said they’d done-I’d gone through the doors of Commoner’s Isle still wondering whether it was all going to turn out to be a big mistake, exaggerated out of all proportion-but the fact that the place had been torched with such alacrity suggested that they must have donesomething that they were desperate to conceal.
Unless, of course, that was what we weresupposed to think. There was still a possibility that we were all being
