"Your colonel." colonel."
"Not my my colonel. Colonel Elgar, who is nothing to do with me. He told the Germans we were coming, and that we were spies. He rumbled us. It wasn"t my fault!" colonel. Colonel Elgar, who is nothing to do with me. He told the Germans we were coming, and that we were spies. He rumbled us. It wasn"t my fault!"
I turned round, returned to the sheltered s.p.a.ce under the wing, and grabbed the Doctor gently but firmly by the throat.
"When people say it isn"t their fault," I told him, "it usually is. Which means you deserve to be arrested. But since you"re not going to be arrested and you"re still trying to get me killed, has it occurred to you that if the Germans are on the lookout for you and have got you down as a spy, that you might not live long once you get to Dresden?"
"They won"t be expecting me to arrive by parachute."
"They"ll see you arrive by parachute and they"ll know you"re a spy. Even if Colonel Elgar hasn"t tipped them off this time you won"t survive an hour."
"Not if the plane is shot down. That will give us the perfect cover story."
My grip on the Doctor"s throat tightened, and I lost the power of coherent argument. "No," I babbled. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no no!"
It made a bit more sense than quacking, but it didn"t work any better. I really didn"t have any choice. I had stolen an airplane. I could be shot, with full process of law, without even the mad colonel to try me. So we took off for Dresden within the hour, and within another couple of hours we"d been shot down, and were struggling through the smoke-filled, disintegrating carca.s.s of the plane, hoping to h.e.l.l we could get far enough clear to use our parachutes.
"It wasn"t supposed to happen quite like this!" said the Doctor. He didn"t seem at all afraid, more amused, as if nothing could possibly happen to him. Perhaps nothing could. But things could happen to me, many cold, painful and unpleasant things, and looking at the trailing lights of flak in the dark atmosphere below I knew that there was a good chance that they would.
Turing, the plump, ineffective English mathematician who had officially been our navigator for the "mission", was somewhere far below, falling to his death without a parachute. I yelled at the Doctor to do something, anything, but all I got was another one of those insouciant smiles. Then he jumped off into the empty s.p.a.ce below the plane, with a spare parachute in its canvas pack extruding from the end of his arm like the bud of a new human body.
He couldn"t possibly save Turing. He couldn"t possibly even catch him up. I jumped after him, through the cold, screaming air, pulled my ripcord and watched the huge, visible, vulnerable canvas of the parachute blossom above me in the crazy flickering light. As I examined it fearfully for signs of impact or burning, the Doctor made a death-defying, life-saving miracle happen a couple of thousand feet below, but I didn"t know about this until later. So when I looked down and saw the single parachute zigzag through the flak toward the Elbe, then lost it in the darkness, my head became filled with inaccurate but realistic images of Turing dying, his organs ruptured by the impact with the ground. I thought about his pain and his terror, and I cursed the Doctor, who must be as mad as the mad colonel, and a better and more ruthless liar. I watched the dim buildings of Dresden get closer, and landed easily in a deserted street, surrounded by the smell of air raid.
The Doctor and I had agreed a rendezvous at a restaurant in Chemnitzstra.s.se. I had a map, but in the occasional light all I could see were dim strings of road, river and railway that seemed to twitch on the paper like the broken veins of a dead man. I threw away the map, and started to walk at random. It didn"t seem to matter much where I went, if I was going to die soon anyway, and that seemed likely.
After about ten minutes, I reached the church. It was the church you"ve read about already, a dark and gloomy church, with a short spire and the dusty smell of ancients about it, the thick silty accretion of gargoyles and coloured gla.s.s carried by European churches, a testament to the centuries of candle grease and worship. There was a dim candlelight within, but the candles were hidden in recesses so that I couldn"t see the flames. Gothic shadows danced among the choir stalls and swayed in the nave.
The dance wasn"t quite silent: as Greene said, there was a faint susurration, like huge wings moving slowly. It felt creepy, but less creepy than the mechanical click of a safety catch would have felt.
"Is anyone there?" I whispered.
A figure rustled out of the shadows, a tall, oddly built figure with a long robe, a long face and a distinctive nose, large and yet graceful. I mistook him for a priest, and took a chance. "I am American," I said. "I have been shot down. I beg the protection of your church."
It was hypocritical, because I was an atheist then, but I still didn"t expect the severity of his reaction. Without altering the grave, calm, priestly expression on his face, he pulled a gun on me. Then he loosed the safety catch.
"No!" shouted the Doctor, which was just in time. When I turned round he was there, his face dark and anxious, and behind him was Turing, very much alive.
It was about then that I decided that I must be dead, and fainted.
Chapter Twenty-one.
Alan Turing was a dull, opportunistic man, intelligent and obtuse, observant and self-centred, kind-hearted and willfully cold. A fleshy man, he nonetheless minced around, filled with uncertainty about his every gesture, yet he was always certain that his overall outlook on life was all right. It would never occur to him to doubt himself, and it would never occur to him to trust anyone else, though he always believed everything they told him. I was glad he wasn"t dead, but I wasn"t pleased to see him. I particularly wasn"t pleased to see his puffy, obsequious face not far above mine as I regained consciousness, my back cold and my feet warm, the skin of my hands tingling.
"Are you all right now?" he asked, his voice prancing around the question.
"I haven"t been all right since 1942," I told him. "The war disagrees with my const.i.tution."
He made a giggling noise.
"It wasn"t a joke," I said. "Well, not one you"re meant to laugh at."
He examined me a bit more closely. "Well, it"s nearly over," he said eventually, but without a trace of sympathy. He was just looking for the right words, something to say that sounded right. I began to dislike him intensely.
I sat up, and saw the Doctor looking at me. "We can"t all be perfect," he commented. Whether he was referring to me or Turing wasn"t clear. The Doctor was given to making p.r.o.nouncements that were both clear and enigmatic, observant, intelligent and useless. He knew what he meant, but communication often wasn"t his first priority.
"How come you"re still alive?" I asked Turing.
He nodded at the Doctor, who shrugged. "That was easy. Simple physics, air resistance, gravity. What"s more important is that we help our friends here." He nodded sidelong at the man who had been about to kill me.
"Friends?" I was prepared to be open-minded on the subject. The man I"d thought was a priest didn"t seem interested in me now, and he had put away the gun. He was looking at me with his long, strange face, his eyes unsettlingly clear. Perhaps we could be friends.
"They need to return to the place they came from." He muttered something else after that, in a frustrated undertone: it may have been, "So do I. If I only knew where it was!"
I looked around me, and saw a high, arched, stone room. It had to be underneath the church, but it wasn"t the shape you"d expect of a crypt. The curves were high and musical, indescribably odd, not quite meeting. Gleaming steel was bonded to the stone, flowing with it. Everything was clean, and there was no smell of ancients: instead, the dry scent of dust and cut rock. This place was new.
"Where is this?"
"I can"t tell you," said the Doctor and Turing together.
The "priest" was still there, presiding over a communion of curved steel that might have been a musical instrument, the controls of a submarine, or the ribcage of a dead steel monster. He didn"t look German, or European, at all: his bones hung wrongly. Yet he didn"t seem Asiatic, and certainly not African. In fact, he didn"t seem human, and neither did the place around him. Panic began to wobble in my gut.
He spoke to me, in a low voice that contained undertones, almost musical harmonies. "We can"t tell you where we are going. But we can tell you that if we are not set free, the consequences will be serious for us, and for you."
"That sounds like a threat to me." I was trying to be brave, but the wobble was creeping into my voice.
"It"s just a statement of the facts, h.e.l.ler." The Doctor"s voice was impatient. He was pulling at the lapels of his worn-out jacket as if he were in charge of the situation, though my money was on the guy communing with the submarine controls.
I was about to tell the Doctor what I thought of his facts when he spoke again, in an entirely different tone. "And it"s my fault, too. I should have helped them earlier."
"I don"t care whose fault it is, Doctor, I just want explanations."
"I"ve just given you explanations! We have to catch Elgar."
"Why? And what about me? I"ve risked my life. So has Turing. Why?"
"Because we have to." His voice was hard again. He added more lightly: "You won"t die, h.e.l.ler. The world has a destiny for you."
"How do you know?"
He stamped his foot. "I don"t know, and if I did, I might not choose to tell you."
"You sound like your friends."
He nodded. "Sometimes too much like them."
"You"re from the same place." I looked around me again, at the light and music, and wondered if we were in that place already. And, if so, where it was.
"The thought had occurred to me." A pause. "But I don"t think so." A longer pause. "Not quite the same, anyway."
The distinction didn"t matter very much to me. "So, would you like to tell me what exactly the h.e.l.l is going on? Where are we? No, no, wait. You haven"t answered my first question. Why is Elgar so important?"
The Doctor ignored me, and paced up and down, his footsteps chiming like church bells, a dark expression on his face. It was very theatrical, but told me nothing.
Turing tried resolutely to fill the gap. "As long as Elgar"s around anywhere these people can"t go," he explained. "He interferes with the encryption apparatus."
"I"m sorry?"
"They"re going to encode themselves," Turing told me. His face was earnest, excited and innocent. "This " he waved at the bright room around us "is a quantum resonator." He made it sound like a small G.o.d. "They"ll leave as quantum particles. They"re able to turn matter itself into a code!"
For the first time I noticed that the curved s.p.a.ce didn"t end where the lighting ended. The Deco curves of stone and metal receded into a modernist darkness. I could imagine an audience crouched there, a dark, winged audience, indifferent and alien. I felt that little twist of panic in my gut again.
Turing had stopped talking, and was looking at me, eager-eyed, like a first-grader hoping the schoolteacher will see how clever he is.
"Where are we?" I asked him.
He frowned at me. "Oh! Under the church, of course."
There was no "of course" about it, but I didn"t argue. "You"re telling me that they"re made of equations?" I asked him.
"Well, in a sense we"re all made of equations. This flesh " he pinched his hand "is the effect of a wave on a particle. It isn"t "solid", except in a theoretical, geometrical sense. Changing the nature of the mathematics that describes my hand would change the nature of its reality "
I interrupted quickly, before he became completely incomprehensible. "So the world is just arithmetic made flesh."
"Yes!"
"And that makes a difference?"
He stared at me. "Of course it makes a difference! If the world can be explained entirely in terms of mathematics, and you can alter that description and you can alter that description, then you can do anything you like!"
"So why can"t can"t we do anything we like? I mean, miraculously make the sky green, wave a hand and be back home, tucked up in bed with a nice warm woman " we do anything we like? I mean, miraculously make the sky green, wave a hand and be back home, tucked up in bed with a nice warm woman "
"Well, I don"t know how they manage the practical implementation," he admitted. "Besides, mathematics has no absolute logical foundation. I"d forgotten." He looked close to tears.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was sorry I"d made him cry.
"I"m sorry," I said. "I didn"t mean to upset you, I just wanted to know why you think that this theory of yours "
He interrupted. "If you can just break life down into a series of simple steps then it can be replicated. Anywhere. By a very simple machine. It doesn"t need to end, you see." He looked at me pleadingly.
I saw where the argument was heading. "You mean we don"t die, we just get solved?"
He blushed. "No no." He was crying now, tears running down his face. "You don"t know what happened," he whispered.
"You mean the Germans who died when you tried to cross before?"
He nodded.
"The Pied Piper over there told me. Wanted me to get rid of the bodies. I think we just left them at the air base in the end."
Turing leaned forward until he was practically spitting in my face. "They were on the plane," he whispered. "That"s why we had to crash it." He put a hand over mine. "I had to help him, he didn"t want to tell you."
I could understand that. I wanted to be angry, but Turing was caught up in his own emotions and didn"t give me the chance. Anyway it was too late to be angry about dead men I didn"t know, hadn"t killed and had never even seen.
"I just want to I just want there to be something "
I could understand Turing"s feelings, but I "just wanted" to know a bit more about the Doctor"s motives. "What exactly did happen when you tried to get into Germany the first time?" I asked him. "And why didn"t the Doctor come straight to me? He"d already arranged it gone to some trouble."
Turing"s eyes met mine. "The Doctor "
"The problem is " It was the Doctor"s voice.
Turing and I both jumped, and both turned to look at him, probably with identical caught-out expressions.
" Elgar will know them," the Doctor went on. "And he"ll know me, and he"ll know Turing. So we need someone to arrest him. Someone who he won"t dare stand up to. An SS officer will do. We can"t get a real one, but we have several uniforms. We thought you might do it."
I smiled at him. This was idiotic, and it certainly wouldn"t work, but at least it was an idiocy that I understood. I felt close to tears with relief.
"I think the large uniform " the Doctor began.
"Hold on." Relief was one thing, suicidal behavior another. "You want me to dress up in an enemy uniform in an enemy city to arrest someone I don"t know and hand him over to some very weird people who are probably going to kill him? Is there an alternative deal here?"
There was a long pause. The Doctor was looking at me, caressing his chin with his hand in a strangely feline gesture.
"All right," he said. "You"re right. It isn"t fair." He crouched down in front of me. I had propped myself up by now, one elbow on the stone. It was cold and angular, the surface too clean. Close to mine, the Doctor"s face, evenly lit from the all sides, seemed to shape-shift, long half-shadows flicking across the flesh. It was creepy, and his words weren"t rea.s.suring either.
"Have you ever thought about what"s up there?" He gestured at the roof.
"Somewhere normal? A church?"
"And above that?"
"Empty air? USAF bombers?"
He just looked at me. "And then?"
"Outer s.p.a.ce. A vacuum. Emptiness. Very cold. Or is it very hot?"
He shrugged. "And other worlds?"
I"d known where the argument was going from the start. "Not G.o.d, please, Doctor. G.o.d isn"t on your side. Any more than he"s on ours. In fact I sometimes think G.o.d is a great big glutinous monster, sticky-fingered with young men"s blood, sitting up there in the sky and laughing at us."