Kitabı oku: «The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s», sayfa 3

Above this panorama, against a background of jet, hung a brilliant crescent. Blue and silver covered it like a sheen. Something within Grant quivered so wildly at the sight of it that he exclaimed involuntarily. It was not so much the luring beauty of that crescent as a knowledge – sure and undeniable – that he had never lived till that moment.

And at that moment Osa, with the poise of a Deliverer, turned the great wheel beside the lock door. Effortlessly, despite its centuries of disuse, the door sprang open: Missile Station Tycho Crater had been ably built.

The air gave a great roar of triumph as it burst out into space.

The Great Time Hiccup

Some twenty-two thousand miles above the troubled plains of earth, George Garstang crawled on his belly along a corridor two foot six high. He wore the standard snug-suit but nevertheless he sweated. On the other side of the thin metal sheet above his head beat the sun, softened by no atmosphere. Between the outer and middle skins of a space station there is little room. Usually it is occupied only by vacuum; now, in this emergency, it was air-filled, and the elaborate machinery of Operation Breakdown was being moved in.

George fitted the virus capsule nozzle deftly into its prepared socket, and rolling onto one side clamped the other end of the tube into the feed on the inner wall. Before moving on to the next, he flicked up the manual scanner-eyelid in the outer skin – bless the man that had thought of that unnecessary detail! – and peered out. Only space. Earth was round the other side of course, this being Tuesday morning early shift. He muttered to himself, collected up the slack of his welder and crawled to the next nozzle. Sliding a hand round to the holder on his back, he pulled out another capsule tube and fitted it into its socket.

Then, of a sudden, he was back in the tiny station bar, arguing with Colbey. Back in the middle of a drink, in the middle of a sentence.

… even if it is ruining the station, it is the only way of saving mankind’s sanity. The virus capsules will be shot down into the atmosphere and spread slowly and evenly over all the earth …’ (They had only been jerked back about eleven hours this time, he estimated: this scene was taking place on Monday evening).

‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Colbey impatiently. ‘But these psycho-biologists don’t know for sure when the effects of the virus will wear off. Supposing they don’t wear off and for the rest of his days man has to live with a slowed metabolism? Supposing that?’ He smacked his hand triumphantly on the table top. George recalled the gesture all too well.

‘And if they don’t try something soon, civilisation will crack anyway. This virus is a sort of last gamble,’ George said – George’s lips said, while something on the fringe of his mind wept at the fourth repetition of this scene. Thinking with that fringe was like looking at an object on which the eye is not focused: a poor substitute for direct scrutiny. He wrestled with despair while he argued and Colbey argued back.

George was a little runt of a man, a third grade electric engineer with trouble at home. He did not like symphonies, or authorities, or opinions which differed from his own. But he had enough sense, after four play-backs, to know he was about to make a fool of himself. Each time, that fringe area grew more ashamed. He could hardly sit it through again: yet he had no option.

‘These psycho-biol boys are forced to make this gamble, I tell you,’ he heard himself say angrily.

A tall man with a long rectangular face detached himself from the bar and made towards their table. By the uneasy way he managed the quarter G he had not been in twenty-four orbit long. He was one of the Breakdown organisation and George disliked him on sight.

The tall man lowered himself into a chair and said, ‘I couldn’t help hearing what you two fellows were saying – you kept getting louder all the time. No offence, but you’re both a little off the tracks.’

George ran a hand up the stubble that reached to the crown of his head and asked, deliberately roughing his voice (why did he have to use that trick?): ‘Like how do you mean, bud?’

‘The distribution of this virus is in no way a gamble,’ the other said. His name was Anderson Gray and he had a quiet, pedantic way of talking that at once irritated George, ever on the watch for signs of superiority in others. ‘The virus itself was developed in low-grav labs several years ago. Its label is perikaryon naphridia IIy 244 – ’

‘No need to pull the Latin on us – we just fix fuses,’ Colbey growled.

‘It has a complex inner structure,’ the Breakdowner continued, as if reciting, ‘and on contact with the human system it heads for the neurons, where it proceeds to dry out and govern the moisture in the perikaryon or cell-body. The only objective physical effect is an illusion of thirst, but at the same time the transfer of impulses across the synapses of the nerve-cells is greatly slowed. In short, the virus lowers the metabolism rate – and only by living at a much lower pitch can we survive the present storm without mass neurosis.’

‘Thanks for the speech. You ought to stand for Parliament,’ George said rudely. ‘But why do you say “storm”? You mean the Great Time Hiccup.’

The tall man gave him a level, tolerant stare.

‘I prefer the more correct term,’ he explained.

Colbey said, ‘He can see you were born ignorant, George,’ and guffawed. Ruffling George was one of Colbey’s favourite pastimes.

George sucked the rest of his drink out of its closed glass and said, ‘You go ahead with your neurosis, Joe. I may be ignorant but I’m sane.’ (Now he was saying it for the fourth time, he no longer believed it.)

And the tall man answered quietly, ‘Yes, one of the aspects of the problem that most concerns us is that if the virus fails it will be the sensitive and intelligent portion of the world who will crack first.’

The cold way in which he said it – George leaned forward and hit him across the mouth with a tough fist. (He exerted the fringe of his mind to the utmost, trying to stop the blow, but his arm travelled as eagerly the fourth time as it had the first.)

‘Mind if I sit this one out?’ Colbey cried, delighted at the incident, as the other two flung back their stools and stood up. (How much sickness fitted close under his delight this fourth time?)

All over the planet, business as yet went on outwardly as usual. Vehicles were still moving, tradition kept the wheels turning. But as consciousness was folded back and back upon itself, more and more links broke in the chain of organisation. There were numberless examples of broken people whose behaviour could be classified ‘sane’ only by courtesy of the rigor mortis effect of the time throwback: when past flowed back into present the damage would show …

A battered shooting brake stopped with a sigh and a straggling man climbed out onto the deserted highway to view a flat rear tyre. Instead of tackling it, he sat and waited for a lift; the fringes of his mind screamed at a delay that he knew would mean a lost job – but irrevocably this scene must be re-enacted. Beyond the road, an old woman in a rickety bungalow sat by her husband. He lay panting on a couch. Already she had watched out his life three times; within her, as she rigidly waited, something gibbered and wept but had no release. Everywhere … repetition …

Anderson Gray sat up in his foam bed and stretched. A tail-end of pleasant dream vanished into a never-to-be-rediscovered pocket as he recalled the Time Hiccup. As the phrase crossed his thoughts, he put a hand up to his lip. It felt five times its normal size, and he recalled the squabble with the electrician the night before. Well, he should have looked after his own business.

It was 05.40 Tuesday – early shift. That belligerent electrician would by now be crawling between skins, rigging the virus release apparatus. Today was Breakdown Day. And, the fringe of his mind mentioned, they were almost up to where the last Time jolt-back had occurred.

He was shaving when Dick Proust came in, blithe as a berry. The thick lip drew some sarcastic banter, and then suddenly the past caught up again with the present, and they were living over unused time. Everyone on the station knew it: the sensation was unmistakable – a return to sanity, a sense of freedom, a hope, a confluence of personality.

Dick cheered and observed, ‘These throw-backs will make philosophers of us all! It makes you see all too vividly the insignificance of human action when you have to repeat the slightest gesture, willy-nilly. Heigh-ho for the life of a cabbage!’

Anderson dropped his shaving kit, swore joyously and grabbed a piece of paper.

‘Come here, Dick,’ he called. ‘Let’s chart this latest freak of the storm while there’s the chance. You’ll see what I mean when I say the situation is getting worse.’

He drew neat, parallel lines down the page to represent two-hourly divisions of Monday and Tuesday. Between eighteen hundred and twenty hundred hours Monday, he struck a thicker line.

‘That’s purely personal,’ he said wryly. ‘It represents the time I got my lip improved. It’ll serve as a landmark.’

Across the page he drew a horizontal line.

‘That’s our flow of consciousness.’

Just after oh-two on Tuesday, he stopped the line.

‘That was where we ran into the first of this series of jerk-backs – hiccups if you like. From sleep we were whipped back to eleven a.m. Monday – as nasty an awakening as ever I knew.’

As he talked, he drew in a second horizontal line under the first, commencing at eleven and running forward to oh-four Tuesday.

‘There we were jerked back again, into mid-Monday afternoon. That session lasted till just after oh-six fifteen Tuesday. So we come to the final – we hope! – jerk-back.’

He commenced a fourth bar just before his ‘lip’ line.

‘And now we come out of it here, oh-six fifteen hours. There’s your pattern.’

He held it up for Dick’s inspection.

‘Pretty,’ Dick commented cautiously.

‘Ugly,’ Anderson said. ‘This happens to be a tight little coil of time-folds. The last hiccup was a month ago now, if I’ve managed to keep my memory straight, and then there were only two throwbacks, each lasting about three weeks.’

‘Quite right,’ Dick agreed. ‘That one was pleasant – I got my leave played over three times.’

‘The first hiccup of all was a year ago, when everyone did their previous eleven months over again – in consequence of which I can boast a sister who had the same baby twice.’ He fell silent, thinking, too, of how during that terrible period he had believed himself insane, only to emerge at the end of it into a world where everyone held the same suspicion about themselves.

‘What are you getting at with all this, Andy? It’s time to feed.’ He patted his stomach lovingly.

‘I’m demonstrating the obvious, and heaven help you if you have to hear it all over again later. The time snags are getting closer together and become more repetitive each dose. Suggest anything?’

‘Yes, food,’ Dick said.

They moved along the narrow curving corridor with their newcomers’ gait, and floated into the mess. A food smell filtered thinly through an aroma of scrubbed table.

‘Anything else?’ Anderson persisted, refusing to be interrupted by a dab of porridge and two half-size rashers.

‘The storm’s getting worse, you mean?’ Dick asked, wiping his spoon fastidiously on his handkerchief.

‘Yes – we’re moving into it, or it’s closing in on us; whichever way round is right, the effect on us is the same.’

Dick Proust pulled a wry face only partly on account of the porridge.

‘What happens in the middle of the storm?’ he asked.

Anderson shrugged. ‘Who can say? Maybe we’ll be frozen in our time tracks. Maybe we’ll become as hopelessly entangled as adhesive tape when it loops back on itself. But using the analogy of a weather storm, which is the only analogy we can work with, a space storm will have varying ridges of pressure. On this side of it, we’ve been jerked back in time. As yet, according to the radio-eyes, we’re only on the fringes of the upset. We may yet be jerked back whole years at a time – centuries.’

His friend nodded grimly. ‘In other words, it might be more comfortable to die now – except that even death’s no refuge when you can be flicked back ten years at a breath. Man! It’s bad … And on the other side of the storm?’

‘That may be even worse. You may be flung head first into your own future. Think over the possibilities of that!’

Betson entered the mess and strolled over to them smiling. Bald and cherubic in appearance, the mainspring of Operation Breakdown, he wore his burden lightly.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ he enquired. ‘You bear that jaded look! Feeling self-conscious with the ghosts of Gray – and Proust – future hanging over you?’

‘That is quite a feeling,’ Anderson admitted, and explained. Then he had to explain his lip.

Betson grinned. ‘Don’t blame that little cable-monkey. I know him – George Garstang’s his name. He’s seen their end of the job through in time, and it’s no fun either between skins, doing his job. That and the hiccup effect have worn his sense of proportion thin. Remember, Andy, all we have to do is keep IIy 244 warm. Everything should be ready to squirt in two hours. Then we climb into the orbital rockets, abandon station, and go down and drink the airs of Lethe.’

He rubbed his hands and added, ‘Doesn’t the prospect of five years at half-throttle appeal?’

‘Not to this boy,’ Dick said. ‘But I can’t think of a better solution.’

They took their used plates over to the hatch and walked with Betson to the upper deck. Here, all the usual equipment had been scrapped and every available inch housed the perikaryon cultures. Here, it was quiet except for a boiling-kettle noise from the solar converters. Two biologists walked watchfully by the container machinery, which was already siphoning the virus into the ejection canisters. These canisters would spin down in a chain round the globe, dissolving under friction a few thousand yards from surface, spreading their vital contents over every square mile of land.

‘Anything further we can do?’ Anderson asked.

Betson puffed out his cheeks until he looked like an ugly, intelligent baby. ‘Hope two hours passes without getting a reef-knot in it,’ he suggested.

He walked over to the nearest viewer and flipped it on. The wide-angle lens showed a well-furnished view of space: the corona, the night-side of Earth beautiful in moonlight, the moon. It looked almost cosy, with none of the blankness of deep space in it.

The same thought came to all the three men. The storm did not show. There was no sign in these blank depths of the light-year wide disturbance that hurtled through the System at a speed of something like a hundred thousand miles every second.

‘Odd thing,’ Anderson commented, laying a cool finger on his hot lip. ‘These interstellar storms have been known of in theory for a long time, long before we even got to the moon. The radarscopes have detected them moving beyond the galaxy. This one was traced all the way here, but somehow a whirlpool of nothing seemed no cause for worry.’

Betson switched the view off and they turned away. Even the shallows of heaven do not bear looking at for long.

‘It’s never any good just knowing a thing in theory,’ he said. ‘We talked glibly about space-time, never realising exactly how integrated the two were. A storm in space is a storm in time – disrupt one, you disrupt the other.’

An inspection lid above their heads slid open and a ladder whirred down. A man climbed down it and it returned smoothly into the bulkhead. The man was George Garstang, complete with red face and backache.

He unzipped his snug-suit, straightened his short figure and said respectfully to Betson, ‘That’s the last rejection nozzles all finished in this section, sir. They should be wound up everywhere in another half hour.’

Involuntarily, they all sighed with relief.

‘Everything else is ready for action. We’ll put zero hour sixty minutes ahead,’ Betson said decisively. ‘I’ll phone Centre, we’ll push it through before we are jerked back again.’

As he moved away, George caught sight of Anderson. He took in the long, sober face with its pouting upper lip and half-smiled. Then he rubbed a grimy palm against his suit.

‘Sorry I lost my temper last night,’ he said. ‘I only meant to do it once, you know – not four times.’

Anderson smiled. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘We’ve all had a bad time. Tempers’ll run slower at half-speed …’

George finished his drink and said, ‘You go ahead with your neurosis, Joe. I may be ignorant but I’m sane.’

‘Yes,’ Anderson said quietly. ‘One of the aspects of the problem that most concerns us is that if the virus fails it will be the sensitive and intelligent portion of the world who will crack first.’

George leaned forward and struck him across the mouth. (Anderson lied; they were all cracking together.)

Anderson broke into a sharp wailing cry.

‘Hush, dear, hush,’ his mother whispered, wrapping the blue christening robe more securely and rocking him gently.

Not for an Age

A bedspring groaned and pinged, mists cleared, Rodney Furnell awoke. From the bathroom next door came the crisp sound of shaving; his son was up. The bed next to his was empty; Valerie, his second wife, was up. Guiltily Rodney also rose, and performed several timid exercises to flex his backbone. Youth! When it was going it had to be husbanded. He touched his toes.

The audience had its first laugh there.

By the time Rodney had got into his Sunday suit, Valerie’s cuckoo clock was chuckling nine, followed by the more sardonic notes of his ormolu chimer. Valerie and Jim (Rodney had conscientiously shunned a literary name for his only offspring) were already at the cornflakes when he entered their gay little kitchenette.

More laughter at the first sight of that antiquated twentieth-century modernity.

‘Hello, both! Lovely morning,’ he boomed, kissing Valerie’s forehead. The September sun, in fact, was making a fair showing through damp mist; a man of forty-two instinctively arms himself with enthusiasm when facing a wife fifteen years younger.

The audience always loved the day’s meals, murmuring with delight as each quaint accessory – toaster, teapot, sugar tongs – was used.

Valerie looked fresh and immaculate. Jim sported an open-necked shirt and was attentive to his stepmother. At nineteen he was too manly and too attentive … He shared the Sunday paper companionably with her, chatting about the theatre and books. Sometimes Rodney could join in about one of the books. Under the notion that Valerie disliked seeing him in spectacles, he refrained from reading at breakfast.

How the audience roared later when he slipped them on in his study! How he hated that audience! How fervently he wished that he had the power to raise even one eyebrow in scorn of them!

The day wore on exactly as it had for over a thousand times, unable to deviate in the slightest from its original course. So it would go on and on, as meaningless as a cliché, or a tune endlessly repeated, for the benefit of these fools who stood on all four sides and laughed at the silliest things.

At first, Rodney had been frightened. This power to snatch them all, as it were, from the grave had seemed something occult. Then, becoming accustomed to it, he had been flattered. That these wise beings had wanted to review his day, disinter his modest life. But it was balm only for a time; Rodney soon discovered he was simply a glorified side-show at some latter-day fair, a butt for fools and not food for philosophers.

He walked in the tumble-down garden with Valerie, his arm around her waist. The north Oxford air was mild and sleepy; the neighbours’ radio was off.

‘Have you got to go and see that desiccated old Regius Professor, darling?’ she asked.

‘You know I must.’ He conquered his irritation and added: ‘We’ll go for a drive after lunch – just you and I.’

Unfailingly, each day’s audience laughed at that. Presumably ‘a drive after lunch’ had come to mean something dubious. Each time Rodney made that remark, he dreaded the reaction from those half-glimpsed countenances that pressed on all sides; yet he was powerless to alter what had once been said.

He kissed Valerie, he hoped elegantly; the audience tittered, and he stepped into the garage. His wife returned to the house, and Jim. What happened in there he would never know, however many times the day was repeated. There was no way of confirming his suspicion that his son was in love with Valerie and she attracted to him. She should have enough sense to prefer a mature man to a stripling of nineteen; besides, it was only eighteen months since he had been referred to in print as ‘one of our promising young men of litterae historicae’.

Rodney could have walked around to Septuagint College. But because the car was new and something that his don’s salary would hardly stretch to, he preferred to drive. The watchers, of course, shrieked with laughter at the sight of his little automobile. He occupied himself, as he polished the windshield, with hating the audience and all inhabitants of this future world.

That was the strange thing. There was room in the corner of the old Rodney mind for the new Rodney ghost. He depended on the old Rodney – the Rodney who had actually lived that fine, autumn day – for vision, motion, all the paraphernalia of life; but he could occupy independently a tiny cell of his consciousness. He was a helpless observer carried over and over in a cockpit of the past.

The irony of it lay there. He would have been spared all this humiliation if he did not know what was happening. But he did know, trapped though he was in an unknowing shell.

Even to Rodney, a history man and no scientist, the broad outline of what had happened was obvious enough. Somewhere in the future, man had ferreted out the secret of literally reclaiming the past. Bygone years lay in the rack of antiquity like film spools in a library. Like film spools, they were not amenable to change, but might be played over and over on a suitable projector. Rodney’s autumn day was being played over and over.

He had reflected helplessly on the situation so often that the horror of it had worn thin. That day had passed, quietly, trivially, had been forgotten; suddenly, long afterwards, it had been whipped back among the things that were. Its actions, even its thoughts, had been reconstituted, with only Rodney’s innermost ego to suffer from the imposition. How unsuspecting he had been then! How inadequate every one of his gestures seemed now, performed twice, ten, a hundred, a thousand times!

Had he been as smug every day as he was that day? And what had happened after that day? Having, naturally, no knowledge of the rest of his life then, he had none now. If he had been happy with Valerie for much longer, if his recently published work on feudal justice had been acclaimed – these were questions he could pose without answering.

A pair of Valerie’s gloves lay on the back seat of the car; Rodney threw them into a locker with an éclat quite divorced from his inner impotence. She, poor dear bright thing, was in the same predicament. In that they were united, although powerless to express the union in any slightest flicker of expression.

He drove slowly down Banbury Road. As ever, there were four subdivisions of reality. There was the external world of Oxford; there were Rodney’s original abstracted observations as he moved through the world; there were the ghost thoughts of the ‘present-I’, bitter and frustrated; there were the half-seen faces of the future which advanced or receded aimlessly. The four blended indefinably, one becoming another in Rodney’s moments of near-madness. (What would it be like to be insane, trapped in a sane mind? He was tempted by the luxury of letting go.)

Sometimes he caught snatches of talk from the onlookers. They at least varied from day to day. ‘If he knew what he looked like!’ they would exclaim. Or: ‘Do you see her hair-do?’ Or: ‘Can you beat that for a slum!’ Or: ‘Mummy, what’s that funny brown thing he’s eating?’ Or – how often he heard that one; ‘I just wish he knew we were watching him!’

Church bells were solemnly ringing as he pulled up outside Septuagint and switched off the ignition. Soon he would be in that fusty study, taking a glass of something with the creaking old Regius Professor. For the nth time he would be smiling a shade too much as the grip of ambition outreached the hand of friendship. His mind leaped ahead and back and ahead and back again in a frenzy. Oh, if he could only do something! So the day would pass. Finally, the night would come – one last gust of derision at Valerie’s nightgown and his pyjamas! – and then oblivion.

Oblivion … that lasted an eternity but took no time at all … And they wound the reel back and started it again, all over again.

He was pleased to see the Regius Professor. The Regius Professor was pleased to see him. Yes, it was a nice day. No, he hadn’t been out of college since, let’s see, it must be the summer before last. And then came that line that drew the biggest laugh of all; Rodney said, inevitably: ‘Oh, we must all hope for some sort of immortality.’

To have to say it again, to have to say it not a shade less glibly than when it had first been said, and when the wish had been granted already in such a ludicrous fashion! If only he might die first, if only the film would break down!

And then the film did break down.

The universe flickered to a standstill and faded into dim purple. Temperature and sound slid down to zero. Rodney Furnell stood transfixed, his arms extended in the middle of a gesture, a wineglass in his right hand. The flicker, the purple, the zeroness cut down through him; but even as he sensed himself beginning to fade, a great fierce hope was born within him. With a burst of avidity, the ghost of him took over the old Rodney. Confidence flooded him as he fought back the negativity.

The wineglass vanished from his hand. The Regius Professor sank into twilight and was gone. Blackness reigned. Rodney turned around. It was a voluntary movement; it was not in the script; he was alive, free.

The bubble of twentieth-century time had burst, leaving him alive in the future. He stood in the middle of a black and barren area. There had evidently been a slight explosion. Overhead was a crane-like affair as big as a locomotive with several funnels protruding from its underside; smoke issued from one of the funnels. Doubtless the thing was a time-projector or whatever it might be called, and obviously it had blown a fuse!

The scene about him engaged all Rodney’s attention. He was delighted to see that his late audience had been thrown into mild panic. They shouted and pushed and – in one quarter – fought vigorously. Male and female alike, they wore featureless, transparent bags which encased them from neck to ankle – and they had the impertinence to laugh at his pyjamas!

Cautiously, Rodney moved away. At first the idea of liberty overwhelmed him, he could scarcely believe himself alive. Then the realisation came: his liberty was precious – how doubly precious after that most terrible form of captivity! – and he must guard it by flight. He hurried beyond the projection area, pausing at a great sign that read:

CHRONOARCHEOLOGY LTD PRESENTS – THE SIGHTS OF THE CENTURIES

COME AND ENJOY THE ANTICS OF YOUR ANCESTORS!

YOU’LL LAUGH AS YOU LEARN

And underneath: Please Take One.

Shaking, Rodney seized a gaudy folder and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he ran.

His guess about the fair-ground was correct, and Valerie and he had been merely a glorified peepshow. Gigantic booths towered on all sides. Gay crowds sauntered or stood, taking little notice as Rodney passed. Flags flew, silvery music sounded; nearby, a flashing sign begged:

TRY ANTI-GRAV AND REALISE YOUR DREAMS

Farther on, a banner proclaimed:

THE SINISTER VENUSIANS ARE HERE!

Fortunately, a gateway was close. Dreading a detaining hand on his arm, Rodney made for it as quickly as possible. He passed a towering structure before which a waiting line of people gazed impatiently up at the words:

SAVOUR THE EROTIC POSSIBILITIES OF FREE-FALL

and came to the entrance.

An attendant called and tried to stop him. Rodney broke into a run. He ran down a satin-smooth road until exhaustion overcame him. A metal object shaped vaguely like a shoe but as big as a small bungalow stood at the kerb. Through its windows, Rodney saw couches and no human beings. Thankful at the mute offer of rest and concealment, he climbed in.

As he sank panting onto yielding rubber-foam, he realised what a horrible situation he was in. To be stranded centuries ahead of his own lifetime – and death – in a world of supertechnology and barbarism! – for so he visualised it. However, it was a vast improvement on the repetitive nightmare he had recently endured. Chiefly, now, he needed time to think quietly.

‘Are you ready to proceed, sir?’

Rodney jumped up, startled by a voice so near him. Nobody was in sight. The interior resembled a coach’s, with wide, soft seats, all of which were empty.

‘Are you ready to proceed, sir?’ There it was again.

‘Who is that?’ Rodney asked.

‘This is Auto-moto Seven Six One at your service, sir, awaiting instructions to proceed.’

‘You mean away from here?’