This Other Eden (3 page)

‘Holed
both sides, you say?’ Judy inquired. ‘Seems rather unusual, doesn’t it? The
rocky coast is only on the one side.’

‘There’s
plenty of channels, we must have got caught in one.’

‘And
yet the captain was a good seaman?’

‘As
good as I’ve sailed with … They say he’d been drinking.’

‘Did he
often drink on duty?’

Jackson
hesitated. She was a loyal crew member, but did not wish to lie to the FBI.

‘He may
have touched it. But, as I say, he was a good seaman. I never saw him even
remotely drunk on watch.’

Judy
was lost in thought for a moment. The captain was a drinker, that much was
clear, which could certainly make him the culprit … but it could also make
him a very convenient scapegoat.

‘Do you
think he got drunk and ran the ship aground?’ he asked Jackson.

‘I
suppose he must have done,’ she replied.

Inside,
the coastguard and police chief, having completed their perfunctory
investigation, were preparing to leave.

‘Can I
see where the ship’s ruptured?’ Judy asked hurriedly.

‘Sure,
if you’re a fish, they’re both below the waterline,’ Jackson replied.

‘But
the ship’s listing, eventually the port-side rupture will emerge.’

‘It
might,’ Jackson conceded, ‘if the ship hasn’t broken up by then, which it
probably will have, the way this storm’s blowing.’

But
Judy was insistent, he wanted to see the hole in the side of the ship. The
coastguard people were astonished, and informed him that if he wished to risk
his neck on damn fool errands he could do it alone. Then they left in their
helicopter without him. Jackson, despite Judy’s protestations, elected to
stay, arguing that Judy would have no hope whatsoever of finding his way into
the ship’s hold without guidance.

Judy thanked
her and radioed the helicopter, which had by now winched the crew aboard,
requesting it to stand by overhead. The pilot was not overjoyed.

‘Lieutenant
Schwartz!’ the pilot called back. ‘We’re getting blown all over the damn sky!
What the hell are you
doing
down there?’

Judy
replied that he was conducting the fullest investigation possible into the
source of a major environmental catastrophe before the principal piece of
evidence was lost to the elements.

‘Something,’
Judy added angrily, ‘which the coastguard has signally failed to do. Now shut
your face and do your job or I’ll give your address to the Mormons.’

Hidden
depths.

With one side of the ship
shuddering slowly upward and every inch of the vehicle screaming and groaning
and loudly announcing its imminent break-up, Judy and Jackson edged their way
below. It is not easy trying to descend a ship’s stairway at the best of times,
but when those stairs are leaning over at an angle of forty-five degrees it is
very nearly impossible. Particularly if you are extremely conscious of the fact
that at any moment the entire million-tonne ship is going to snap in two and
hurl you into a freezing vortex of oil, rock and toxic seawater. It was also
pitch-black, of course, the ship’s emergency lights having given up at the
first sign of an emergency. Jackson led the way with a flashlight.

They
found the breach in a vast container dock still half-filled with oil and water.
There was no way they could actually reach the great tear in the side of the
ship, because the flood stood between them and it. Judy played the flashlight
around the edges of the rupture.

‘Notice
anything strange about this hole?’ he inquired, shouting himself hoarse above
the crashing of the sea outside and the huge booming and creaking of the ship
itself.

‘Only
that it’s pretty big. I didn’t think we’d done that much damage. If the hole on
the other side is as drastic, we’d better get out now. I don’t give this hulk
five more minutes.’ But Judy continued to play the light around the edges of
the hole, or at least those parts that the torch beam could reach.

‘It is
strange, though, isn’t it?’ he said, almost to himself.

‘I
can’t hear you,’ Jackson shouted. ‘Give me the flashlight. We have to leave!’

Judy
took no notice. He was still thinking, his mind elsewhere. His body was in
danger of being elsewhere shortly, too. The ship was shuddering its last and it
was a question of get out now or go down with it. Fortunately for Judy, Jackson
was much stronger than he was. As he mused, she wrenched the torch from his
grasp and let them both out of the huge half-kilometre chamber that could so
nearly have become a rather loose-fitting coffin.

As they
ascended the stairs, Judy could not resist taking one last look back despite
the danger.

‘It is
strange, though, don’t you think?’ he said.

But
Jackson was way ahead of him.

Chapter
Three

On a drive through Hollywood

The
city that Liz built.

Before you can be
green-lighted or knocked back, you have to make a pitch, and it was Nathan’s
day to pitch. The biggest day of his life.

The
riots were dying down as he drove his hire car through Century City; the city,
legend had it, that Liz Taylor built. Nathan had heard the story a number of
times in various versions. The facts seemed to be that the whole area had once
been the back-lot of Twentieth Century Fox. It was here that in another, more
innocent age they had re-enacted great wagon trains, built medieval castles and
re-fought the Pacific battles of the US marines.

Anyway,
the story went that Fox lost so much money on Liz Taylor’s movie
Cleopatra
that
they had to sell most of the back-lot to real estate developers. This débâcle
was a direct result of the curious Hollywood belief that equates gossip column
inches with potential ticket revenue. The extraordinary idea that, just because
the public is interested in who some celebrity is screwing, they will go and
see them in a movie is a delusion that nearly cripples the industry regularly.

So Fox
sold their back-lot, and a mighty city of steel and glass skyscrapers grew up,
and was subsequently burnt down as a result of the civil unrest that became
part of day to day life in the LA area. It was through this urban strife that
Liz’s city gained a far more significant claim to fame than as a mere monument
to the fiction of the star-system. For it was here that pollution was first
used as a means to facilitate social engineering.

Environmental
protection.

The problem was a serious
one. Every time the city was rebuilt, the disaffected have-nots would come up
from the badlands to loot it and burn it down again. This, obviously, was a
source of considerable irritation to the civic authorities. Even more galling,
though, was the fact that these regular acts of vandalism were perpetrated
under the protection of top quality filtered sun and the very cleanest air, for
which the victims of the attacks were paying.

Century
City, by dint of its great wealth, boasted a state-of-the-art municipal
eco-defence system. Its sun was UV-filtered by the satellite method, whereby a
solar screen was placed in orbit over the city. The air was kept reasonable by
the simple blow system, where huge fans prevented smog from gathering by
blowing it away into other parts of the city.

All
this safe sun and clean air made life in Century City very pleasant.
Unfortunately, it was as pleasant for the visiting vandals, as for the
legitimate residents. The outrageous fact was that honest citizens were paying
local tax, so that the people who robbed them might be protected from skin
cancer and lung disease. Something had to be done.

Something
was. The world’s first pollution-based security system was installed. The
orbital sun-shield was sent spinning away to join the ever growing slicks of
debris caught in the gravitational pull of other planets and the giant fans
were silenced. The sun-screen was replaced by a solar cell intensifier which
acted in the manner of a vast UV magnifying glass. A deal was done with the
electricity people, who stopped pumping their exhaust out over the Pacific and
let it out on the Avenue of the Stars instead. Parking lots were connected to
buildings via BioTube, so that the legitimate citizen could step from the
safety of his or her car directly into a sealed environment. Anybody without
BioTube access was in big trouble.

The
effect was dramatic. Signs went up on the freeways entering the district:
‘WARNING. This Area is Environmentally Protected!! Even short-term exposure to
the Century City environment will result in serious illness leading to death!
Stay in your car and keep moving unless you have access to a BioTube.’

By this
simple method, unfiltered sunlight and industrial smog were transformed from
problems into solutions. Pollution became a saleable commodity.

Fame
is the spur.

Nathan eased his car to a
halt. He lowered his windows only very slightly because the atmosphere outside
was pretty foul. He would have liked to have dealt with the guards via his
car-roof air-lock, but that might have appeared furtive, and the last thing you
did with the Beverly Hills Perimeter Private Police Force was appear in any way
furtive.

Looking
furtive was crazy behaviour and, as far as the Beverly Hills Perimeter Private
Police Force was concerned, crazies were the principal targets of their
profession. Beverly Hills was the home of the stars and hence attracted crazies
like bees to honey. Crazies would queue up in line to get a chance to try and
murder the object of their love and admiration. There were hot-dog stalls and
cheap hotels all over the surrounding area, set up purely to cater for the
number of unbalanced sad-acts who flocked to Hollywood in pursuit of this
vicarious and violent brush with celebrity.

How
Hollywood had changed. There had been a time when every bus that pulled into LA
had ten kids on it, all desperate to be a star. Suddenly it was ten kids, all
desperate to kill one.

The
problem, as always, was one of celebrity. Just about everybody seemed to want
it, but not everybody could have it. Celebrity could be achieved by becoming a
star, but that was a very tough call. The crazies had discovered an easier way.

Why,
they argued, spend years going to acting and improv’ classes, exhaust oneself
moonlighting as bar-staff and waiters, suffer the endless auditioning for
adverts and pleading for bit-parts in exploitative cheapo vids, torture one’s
conscience wondering whether to sleep with producers or not, generally fritter
one’s life away looking for that million to one break that would make you a
star? Why do all that when you could get just as famous by finding some idiot
who had already done it, and shooting them?

It was
this kind of remorseless logic that had led some people to ask themselves who
were the crazies.

Agencies
had sprung up to deal with what had become a major part of the industry. The
life of a star-killer was big news; there were the book rights, the movie
rights, the exclusive interviews, the exclusive photos. These things needed
careful handling.

‘Lock
up your past,’ was the first thing an agent would tell a hopeful young crazie
who approached them for representation. ‘If you get lucky and waste a biggy,
every childhood photo of you becomes a gold mine. Believe me, the press will
have stripped your ol’ mama’s home clean before the gunshots die away. You have
to have every document, every picture relating to you hidden away, ready for me
to sell the first day you go on trial. We need to do exclusive interview deals
with all your old pals and school teachers
before
you kill your star.
Believe me, even your own family will start seeing dollar signs once they
realise what you’re going to be worth.’

By the
time Nathan arrived in Hollywood, the worst excesses of stardom via murder were
over. At its height, though, people were walking out of prison straight into
talk-show host jobs and six-picture deals. A vicious circle developed. Scarcely
would the ex-murderer have time to adjust to his or her new-found celebrity
when they themselves would be shot, and so the dreadful cycle continued.

Some
agencies who represented both genuine stars and crazy stars (and of course
crazy stars who had become genuine stars) even discussed the possibilities of
mutually profitable deals between both parties, whereby a star who was in big
financial trouble might do a deal with a crazie, whereby the crazie only
wounded the star and they split all revenues that ensued. These deals never
really took off. For one thing, there was a distinct whiff of insider trading
about the whole thing. Besides which, in the midst of all the wheeling and
dealing, it was easy to forget that the crazies involved were, by the very
nature of their profession, crazy, and could rarely bring themselves merely to
wound a target.