The whole thing began quite innocently. In the house I was renting there was an electric boiler, for heating water. Next to it was a vent, and the pipe behind the vent was covered in the tendrils and fibres of a hideous black mould. I decided the mould had to be cleaned off somehow, and I began by unscrewing the vent cover, with my head next to the boiler.
The boiler was old, almost unbelievably so, and barely worked. At times it made an odd buzzing sound, and at other times it emitted a high-pitched whining. I had grown slightly afraid of it, and I didn’t much like having my head next to it, but there was no alternative if I was to tackle the mould.
My head was almost pressed against it when the thermostat happened to turn on. There was enough time for me to perceive the red light blinking on, and then the next thing I remembered, I woke up lying in the bath, the back of my head bleeding.
I gingerly washed the blood off my hair. It was painful but it didn’t seem as though I’d sustained any really serious injury. What bothered me more than the blood was the question of how I’d ended up unconscious in the bath.
I ran through several different theories. It was possible I’d fainted due to some underlying condition, but it seemed too much of a coincidence that the thermostat had turned itself on at that exact moment. I wondered if I’d received an electric shock to my head from the boiler, but my head hadn’t actually been touching it and it didn’t seem possible that a spark had made such a long leap, of several centimetres at the minimum.
I decided to carry out systematic experiments, placing a chair under the boiler and putting cushions on the chair, so that I could sit on it with my head as close to the boiler as possible, but a little less close than previously.
You may imagine my astonishment when I discovered that every time the boiler switched itself on, when my head was within fifty millimetres of it, it created a strong stupefying effect. Forty millimetres was as close as I dare place my head to it; at that distance, it almost rendered me unconscious.
I bought a new boiler and substituted it for the old one, hoping my landlord wouldn’t notice, or would be pleased, since the replacement was clearly superior to the one it was replacing.
As for the old boiler, I sealed off its pipes, fixed a vent into the top of it and stood it on the floor in my bedroom, a quarter full of water, so I could better investigate its curious emanations.
By analysing the electromagnetic radiation it emitted upon activation of the heating coil with an oscilloscope attached to a small coil, I was able to determine that it emitted a spectrum of very particular frequencies. An internal spark, created by the corrosion at the site of a previous effort at repair, was somehow resonating in a way that was quite distinctive.
I set to work building a system of coils and capacitors, driven by an external circuit, that would replicate those precise frequencies. When I’d finished, the new circuit created an oscilloscope trace that appeared nearly identical to the boiler itself. I place the circuit on my pillow, set a timer to activate it, and lay down with my head next to it, waiting to see what would happen. The circuit was supposed to sound a buzzer at the same time that it produced the electromagnetic wave pulse, so that I would know when I was being exposed to the radiation.
The next thing I remember, I was confused, having emerged apparently from a deep sleep. I couldn’t understand why I had been asleep. I looked around, saw the circuit and remembered everything.
I hadn’t even remained conscious long enough to consciously perceive the sound of the buzzer; either that, or the pulse had created a kind of fleeting amnesia that had prevented the sound of the buzzer being recorded in my memory.
I jumped up, very excited. I had clearly discovered something extremely interesting, with many possible applications. Brief operations, such as the extraction of a tooth, could be performed without any traditional anaesthetic. Dangerous criminals wielding guns could be pacified without a shot being fired. Rabid wild animals could be harmlessly and temporarily put to sleep. Really the possibilities were endless. Then it occurred to me that my discovery could form the basis of a powerful military-grade weapon, and I realised that I probably ought to think very carefully about the implications of publicising my work, before going full steam ahead with it.
I decided to push that issue to the back of my mind for a time, while I investigated the phenomenon more fully. There was much to be done. I needed to quantify the precise field strengths needed to exert the effect. The exact frequencies that brought it about would need to be determined accurately. I needed to figure out whether a sustained half-sleep could be produced, or only full unconsciousness.
Then, of course, there was the question of safety. That was going to be harder to tackle. The nature of the thing, being a simple brief EM pulse, incapable of directly damaging DNA, seemed to argue in favour of its harmlessness, but my study of the history of science had taught me that one cannot simply assume the answers to questions on the basis of plausible-sounding theory. The matter must be determined empirically somehow.
All too often, even scientists themselves have confused plausibility for fact. The two are not the same. A plausible-sounding but incorrect theory can often successfully deceive even people who consider themselves scientifically-minded sceptics. I would even suggest those people are particularly easy to deceive via a theory that “sounds scientific”. The lack of empirical proof of the key thing that’s being asserted is surprisingly easy to gloss over.
I began to work enthusiastically on answering all of these questions, except for the matter of whether the technique caused any kind of brain damage. On that score, as long as I was only experimenting on myself, I was willing to be optimistic.
Up until this point in the story, I haven’t said much about my circumstances at the time.
My name is Peter Ainsley. A year earlier I had graduated from a minor university with a degree in physics. My only uncle had died shortly before that, and he had been absolutely loaded. He had left me enough money in his will to live on for perhaps two years. So after graduating, rather than get a job, I had decided to just take some time to think about what I might do next, rather than having to jump immediately into something due to financial necessity.
After thinking about it, I’d figured out that if I moved somewhere cheap, I might make the money stretch out even three or four years. That seemed very appealing to me. I had thought I might write a novel. So I’d rented a cheap place in a small town, near enough to the coast that I could make a trip to the sea from time to time.
I knew no-one else in the area, but a sort of friend/acquaintance from university happened to be working in a large town about eight miles away. His name was Alan.
You can imagine that I badly wanted to share my discovery with someone, even though I didn’t, at that point, want to tell the whole world about it. One weekend Alan and I arranged to meet up for a drink and a chat, and after drinking a couple of beers I decided, somewhat impetuously, to tell him about it.
He was immediately intrigued, which quite surprised me. Although I knew Alan from university, he hadn’t studied physics; he was in another faculty entirely, studying economics, and he now had a job doing something financial, which I didn’t understand, at some small obscure firm that I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of, or so he said. He’d never shown any particular interest in science, but when I told him that I was working on a machine that could render a person unconscious, he wanted to know everything about it.
This didn’t seem all that strange, because after all, it really was fascinating discovery. Most people would probably have been fascinated by it.
Alan wanted to come to my house so I could demonstrate it to him.
The day after our conversation, I woke up and immediately regretted saying anything about it at all. Alan was too much of an unknown quantity. Somehow I didn’t quite fully trust him, but I couldn’t see any real harm in giving him a demonstration. It wasn’t like I was proposing to hand over the entire secret of how the machine worked to him.
I bought a plastic box for electronics projects off the internet and glued all the bits of the device inside it. I drilled holes for a variable resistor to set the strength of the pulse, for a push-button switch to activate it, and also a key switch so the device couldn’t be turned on without a key. Obviously it wasn’t very secure since anyone could just break it open and short the wires, but the point was to stop it going off accidentally. I also fixed up a green LED that blinked on when when the box was transmitting EM pulses.
I powered the whole thing with the biggest lithium battery I could fit in the box.
The whole thing was maybe half the size of a shoe box. I also bought an aluminium case for it so I could carry it around.
Why I did all this, I can’t really explain, except that I found the idea of packing the mechanism up like that very satisfying on an aesthetic level. Probably I was also thinking that I might have to take the machine somewhere to demonstrate it to people.
Alan came over a couple of days later. It’s strange, but when he rang the bell I had a bad feeling about it. It’s amazing the things I can find myself going through with out of embarrassment; perhaps it’s an English thing or perhaps I’m just weak, but at that moment I really wanted to tell him to go away. Instead, since he’d come all that way, I felt as though I really had no choice but to demonstrate the machine to him.
I invited him in. They say demons can’t enter a place unless they’re invited, or is that vampires? But I had no idea what he was capable of, at the time.
After I’d finished showing him the machine, he said, “So can I try it?”
“What, you want me to make you unconscious?” I said.
“Sure, why not? I mean, otherwise there could be anything in that box, for all I know.”
“I can’t be sure it doesn’t cause brain damage. I mean, I don’t think it does; I don’t see how it would, but then, at the moment I have no idea why it causes unconsciousness either.”
He clicked his fingers several times in various positions around my face, which was frankly extremely annoying, as if testing my reflexes, and said “You seem all right. I want to try it.”
I reluctantly agreed.
I had him lie down by the side of the box and it was only then that I realised it would have made more sense to build a timer into it, so you could push the button and retreat. The way I’d built it, you could only render yourself unconscious, not someone else. There was no way to even try it out on, for example, mice. I made a mental note to modify the thing.
“You’ll have to push the button yourself.” I said, inserting the key into the lock and turning it.
“What, this button here?” said Alan.
“Yes, that one.”
“Shall I press it now?”
“Let me get over to the other side of the room first.”
“The range is so long?” he asked.
“I’ve set the power low, so it won’t render anyone unconscious more than a metre away, but I’m afraid that repeated exposure to faint pulses might not be good for me.”
I took phone out of my pocket so I could set the stopwatch.
“I see.” he said. “Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.”
He pushed the button. I started the stopwatch on my phone.
I had actually been wondering if the machine would work on anyone else apart from me. I hadn’t tried it on anyone else. It was possible that it only worked on me because of some abnormal, or at least idiosyncratic, aspect of my brain structure.
So when Alan immediately fell under, I was actually quite relieved.
The box was configured to send pulses for about ten seconds, which by experiment I’d found to generally render me unconscious for about a minute. I hadn’t been able to find a way to shorten the period of unconsciousness; that was the shortest I could manage. Shorter pulses only created a sense of confusion.
It was interesting to observe the effect on Alan. For about forty seconds he seemed to have dropped into a deep sleep, with slow rhythmic breathing. Then at around the forty-second mark his breathing became more shallow, and almost exactly at the sixty-second mark, he opened his eyes.
For approximately fifteen seconds he seemed confused, and he said, “What’s going on?” in a slurred sleepy voice. Then he said, “Did it work?”
“It worked.” I told him.
“I’m not sure I was actually unconscious.” he said.
“You definitely were.” I said.
He refused to believe me, and we repeated the experiment, but this time I filmed him. While he was asleep, after the pulse train had completed, I ran over and slapped his face lightly and shouted “Alan!”
He didn’t react at all, but this time he opened his eyes around 55 seconds after activating the device.
This could have been due to chance, but it did seem to me that I myself was gradually developing a tolerance to the pulses. I hadn’t studied the thing well enough or made detailed enough observations to be sure, but I had already formed the impression that it was taking larger amounts of energy to put me to sleep for shorter periods of time.
Again he was confused, for about ten seconds this time, but soon he snapped out of it and said, excitedly, “Show me the video!”
When he saw it he was absolutely astonished.
He proceeded to rattle on excitedly about all the possibilities for nearly two hours, until I finally told him that I had work to do, and he left, but not before I’d again strongly emphasised that the project was secret, and that he shouldn’t tell anyone.
I sort of knew that Alan probably wasn’t going to keep it to himself, but I hoped my instructions would at least prevent him shouting about it from the rooftops. If he quietly told one or two friends then so be it; I couldn’t see what harm could come from that.
I wasn’t all that surprised when, a few days later, I received an email from a Dr. Ivan Luce in Italy somewhere. He said Alan had got in touch with him and that he had been researching methods of putting people to sleep using EM pulses—in other words, the exact same thing that I had discovered.
He suggested I write up the specifications of my device and go and visit him. He said he would demonstrate his research to me, and he suggested we submit a joint paper to a prestigious journal, as co-discoverers of the phenomenon.
I honestly don’t know why I wasn’t more suspicious. His email had the logo of a research institute on it. I checked and the institute existed, or at least it had an internet site, and he really did work there, and was apparently a legitimate researcher, and beyond that I made no attempt to verify anything he’d told me.
I could have asked him what frequencies he used or I could have given him silly information to test whether he’d spot that it was silly, but at that point I did neither of those things.
Instead, I told him I’d bring a working device to him and explain how it worked.
He told me he lived halfway up a mountain, and suggested I take a plane to Verona, where he would pick me up in his car. I checked the map and Verona was a couple of hours from where he said he lived, so I agreed. He said hotels were expensive round there and I could stay at his house for as long as I liked. I said I wouldn’t mind at all staying in a hotel, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He also didn’t want to meet me at the institute where he worked, because he said his research was purely a private thing, carried out at his house.
I’m not fond of staying in the houses of strangers, or even really friends, but I figured I could tolerate one night in someone’s house. I told him I was pretty busy but could manage one day. That way, I could get the plane back in the evening of the next day after I’d arrived.
A couple of days later, after booking a ticket, I put the machine in its little case, and I put the case in a suitcase together with a few necessities, and I made my way to the airport.
When I got off the plane at Verona, Ivan was waiting for me.
I knew I had made a mistake the second I set eyes on him. There was something about his appearance that set me on edge. I can’t say what it was, exactly. It was partly a matter of physiognomy. He didn’t have a trustworthy face.
Some people scoff at that kind of thing and argue that you should give everyone a chance, regardless of their face, but to me that’s idiotic. Some people look untrustworthy and I avoid those people whenever possible.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a position to change my mind at that point. I suppose technically I could have made some excuse and got on the next plane home, but it wasn’t as if I thought him a serial murderer or anything. I just didn’t warm to him. So, like a lamb to the slaughter, I followed him to his car and got into it.
All the way to the tiny hamlet where he lived, he rattled on ceaselessly about all kinds of things—but aside from some pointed questions that he put to me, he avoided the topic at hand and he talked about his own research only in the vaguest of generalities.
We followed a motorway out of Verona for about an hour and a half, then got onto a more minor road. Soon we were driving upwards and upwards, my ears popping with the increasing altitude.
The ascent was like driving into another world, almost. I’ve always enjoyed the way the environment changes as you ascend mountains, but I was too on edge to properly enjoy it this time. In Verona the weather had been a bit chilly, but as we ascended we began to see more and more snow.
“It snowed a few weeks ago.” Ivan explained. “Still hasn’t completely melted. We don’t usually have much snow this early.”
Eventually his house came into view. It stood alone between flattish grassy fields, forming almost a plateau halfway up the mountain.
When I saw the house, a curious instinct, arising from where I don’t know, told me to run. I had to suppress an almost overwhelming desire to scamper off into the hills. I could find a village somewhere, perhaps on the other side of the little range of mountains, then a main road, and then a bus, and get the hell out of there.
But I didn’t do that. Instead, I let him usher me right into the house.
From the outside, I can’t say what it was that had bothered me. Perhaps only the isolation of the place. Inside, I began to think something was definitely wrong.
That old farmhouse just didn’t look like Ivan lived there. For example, on one of the walls was a collection of dolls, hanging from little hooks. No doubt they were some kind of local speciality, probably illustrating various forms of traditional dress, but Ivan didn’t strike me as the kind of man to take an interest in dolls, and he hadn’t mentioned any kind of wife or partner.
“Do sit down.” he said, waving at a sofa. “Do you have the device with you?”
“Yes, it’s here.” I said, patting the suitcase.
“Well, I’d love to see it.” he said.
I opened the suitcase and took out the inner aluminium case. This, I unlocked, and I placed the device on the table in front of us.
“Very simple controls.” he said.
“Yes, you just turn the key in the lock, set the power and press the button.” I said.
Everything was off, out of kilter, wrong. He was too eager, for a man who supposedly had already built such a device himself. Where was his own apparatus? I thought I’d better ask him.
“Where do you do your own work?” I said. “I’m anxious to see it.”
“In the cellar.” he said. “We’ll take a look shortly. First, you must try the local wine.”
He got up to go to the kitchen.
“There’s a little collection of dolls here.” I said. “Are they some sort of local thing?”
“Oh, those.” he replied. “The people who rented this house before me put them up. They’re nice enough so I’ve just left them there. Wait one second while I fetch the wine.”
His explanation was plausible. The bit that I found suspicious was that leaving those dolls up didn’t really fit with his character. They didn’t fit with his face, nor the fact that he was apparently a scientist. But I was in a foreign country, and for all I knew, northern Italian men of Ivan’s age regard collections of dolls pinned to the wall as completely normal.
By that stage I was completely paranoid and was trying hard not to let my fears run away with me.
He brought out a pair of wine glasses filled with white wine.
“This wine comes from the next valley.” he said. “You’ll never taste anything like it, I promise.”
For a second I was sure I saw a fleeting expression make its way unbidden across his face, like a brief dropping of a mask, and what I saw chilled me to my bones. There was real evil lurking behind that smiling facade. I was sure of it.
It also bothered me a lot that he’d poured the wine in the kitchen instead of opening the bottle in front of me and pouring it right there.
“Why don’t we take a look at your research?” I said. “Afterwards we’ll enjoy the wine. I can’t give the wine the attention it deserves while my curiosity is running wild.”
It was a desperate ploy, especially since I don’t even like wine, and it didn’t work.
“Oh, no!” he said. “First we must raise a toast to success. How do you say it in England? Cheers?”
“Yes, cheers.” I said.
“Cheers.” he said, and he clinked his glass against mine.
I took a minute sip of the wine. It tasted exactly like I’d imagine something would taste if it was poisoned, but then, as I’ve said, I don’t like wine anyway.
I was becoming desperate. I wondered what would happen if I simply packed up the device and left. Would he try to stop me? Something told me that he definitely would, and not in any kind of a way that I was going to find at all pleasant.
He was probably around sixty years of age, and strongly built. He was slightly shorter than me but I didn’t fancy my chances in a fight at all. Especially if he happened to have a weapon.
Now that I really began to examine him properly from that point of view, he didn’t really even look like he’d spent his life tweaking apparatus on laboratory benches. He looked more like ex-military. If someone had told me he’d trained in the Italian special forces and had then gone on to make a living as a mercenary overthrowing or possibly installing African dictators, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.
Suddenly I found myself springing to my feet.
“So do these dolls illustrate various forms of traditional dress or something?” I said, walking briskly over to the dolls.
“I couldn’t really tell you much about them.” he said, not budging from where he sat.
“This one looks more Austrian than Italian, don’t you think?” I said.
“If you say so.” he said, with a horribly fake attempt at an amused smile. “Why don’t you sit down so we can discuss our work?”
I pretended to become intrigued by the stitching on one of the doll’s dresses.
“Incredible.” I said. “I’m sure it’s machine-stitched but it looks almost like they’ve tried to make it look hand-crafted.”
I had no idea what I was talking about. I just wanted him to get up and look at the dolls, because I wanted to try to get rid of the wine when he wasn’t looking.
“I’ve really no idea.” he said.
“Come and tell me what you think.” I said. “I won’t be able to relax till I’ve got to the bottom of it. I’m a bit autistic or obsessive, I suppose.”
“Really I don’t know.” he said.
“I’d really like your opinion on it.”
He sighed and got up from the sofa, and wandered over to look at the doll.
“Look, just there.” I said. “At the edge of the hem.”
Without turning around I deftly tipped the rest of the wine into the pot of a half-desiccated plant that stood by the window, coughing loudly as I did so to cover the noise.
I figured the ruse had a 50% chance of succeeding, and if he noticed I’d ditched the wine and blew his top about it, I was ready to run, even if I had to leave the device behind, in the worst case. I was completely sure Ivan was up to no good, and I was in danger.
He peered at the doll’s dress.
“I think it’s hand-stitched.” he said.
When he turned around to face me again, he saw me apparently finishing off the wine. I gulped conspicuously to try to further confirm the idea in his mind.
He seemed pleased that I’d apparently drunk the whole thing.
“Well, let’s get to work.” he said. “I’m interested to hear precisely how your machine works. Then we’ll go to my lab in the cellar.”
I went and sat down again on the sofa with him and began to feed him a load of nonsense. He nodded gravely.
I was beginning to feel fairly sure that he wasn’t a scientist at all. If he was, then he knew suprisingly little about electromagnetic fields.
I was babbling on, wondering how best to extract myself from the situation, rather hoping he’d go to the bathroom to spend a penny or something, when I saw a car drawing up outside the house.
Four men got out. They were entirely dressed in black and two of them had rifles.
I didn’t bother with any further pretence. I grabbed the machine and bolted for the back of the house, hoping to find a door or an open window.
“There’s no point running!” Ivan shouted after me. “You’ve just drunk enough ketamine to put a horse out.”
The back door was locked, but it was extremely flimsy. In a kind of adrenaline-fuelled delirium, I threw my whole body against it, and it broke clean off its rusty old hinges. Then I ran across the open field.
“Where are you going?” shouted Ivan behind me. “You can’t get away. There’s nowhere to go! In five minutes you’ll be asleep!”
I ran faster than I’ve ever run in my whole life. At the foot of the hills was a patch of trees, hardly enough to cover me, some of them having turned brown and dropped half their needles for the winter, but it was better than nothing.
As I was running into the trees I heard a soft thwack, and wood splintered off one of the trees. That was followed immediately, almost simultaneously, by the sound of a gunshot. The four men and Ivan were standing outside the house watching me, and one of them had his rifle pointed at me. They were trying to shoot me. I don’t know anything about guns but I suppose the bullet travelled faster than sound, so I heard it land fractionally before I heard the retort of the gun.
As I entered the trees they started off in pursuit.
The side of the mountain didn’t look very promising. The slope was steep but mostly still gentle enough to walk up and it was criss-crossed with tracks and old ski slopes, meaning anyone who knew the lie of the land would probably have no problem cutting me off. Here and there were patches of trees but not really big enough to lose myself in.
I ran up steep slopes with all the desperation of a man running for his life, listening to the cries of the men behind me. From time to time the gun went off, and once I’m sure I heard a bullet literally whistle by my head, but they couldn’t get a clear shot at me.
I once read somewhere that if someone’s shooting at you, you should weave from side to side so it’s more difficult for them to target you, and that’s what I did. This also helped with getting up the hill, but at the cost of slowing my progress.
After a while I saw clearly they were gaining on me. I had spent my life studying and sitting in cafes; they were clearly the sort of men who eat up assault courses. My chances didn’t seem good.
All the while I was trying to think of some way of using the device, which I still had in my hands, as a weapon. The problem was, I hadn’t got around to modifying it by fitting a timer. To activate it, I had to press the button, and that would render me unconscious along with anyone else in a radius of several metres, with the power dialled up to maximum. That is, assuming it even worked on everyone else, but it had worked on me and on Alan, so it probably would work on the nutcases who were pursuing me.
Alan! This was clearly his doing. I wondered whether he had actually known what he was getting me into, or had they deceived him too?
I was gasping for air and my legs were turning to jelly with the exertion of running up the hillside. My lungs were burning in the cold air. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep going.
I’d made it almost halfway to the top when a shout behind me caught my attention, and I realised they were almost upon me. I looked around desperately for somewhere to hide, but nowhere seemed suitable.
Then I spotted a structure standing tall at the edge of the patch of trees I was traversing. The mountain was littered with the remnants of a defunct ski resort, and the structure supported old rusting wires that had once formed a ski lift. A sign in Italian looked like it was probably telling people to jump off the lift. The structure was basically a tall metal pole with a ladder up the side and a platform at the top. If I got on the platform, it might protect me from bullets from below, and perhaps I could work out some way of deploying the device on my pursuers.
I don’t have much of a head for heights but I almost ran up the ladder like a cat. When I was climbing onto the platform at the top, a gun went off and a bullet bounced off a metal rail near my head.
I pulled myself onto the platform and lay there, ignoring their shouts, desperately trying to catch my breath. It seemed my remaining lifespan was likely to be numbered in minutes unless I thought of something quickly.
I took the key from my pocket and armed the device. All kinds of thoughts went through my head. Could I somehow drop the device so that it landed on the button? Could I open it up and somehow fix the wires from the power supply so they touched when the device landed below? Nothing seemed workable.
One of the men shouted up at me. He spoke good English, with a faint accent that didn’t sound Italian.
“There are two ways we can do this, Peter.” he said. “You can die quickly, like a man, from a bullet. Or, if we have to come up there and get you, we’ll make sure you suffer. You’ll die begging and crying.”
“Who are you?” I shouted down to them.
“We work for the government.” he said.
“Which government?”
At this, they laughed.
“That doesn’t matter.” shouted one of the other men.
I was still gasping for air, but a little less urgently than a minute earlier.
“Come and get me you worthless bastards.” I shouted down to them.
My voice was shaking and I don’t think I sounded too brave. They laughed again. One of them said, “OK” and he began to climb the ladder.
There was only one thing I could do. I would have to activate the device when he reached the top, but that would render both of us unconscious. If I were to crank it up to maximum power, it might even affect the men at the foot of the ladder, but then I’d probably be out for five minutes, so I didn’t dare to try it.
I half-wondered whether, were I to connect the output solenoids to the galvanised metal structure, I could transmit the pulses all the way to the people on the ground, but the idea didn’t really seem workable. The solenoids themselves generated the pulses—there were several of them and there was no antenna as such.
If only I had added a timer! I was about to lose my life just for lack of a 555 chip that might be had at the price of fifty for £5.
The man put his hands on the platform. He had a rifle strapped to his back. It was time to do or die.
Then I thought, why not just kick him off? I aimed a kick at his face but instead of dislodging him, I almost caught a bullet from one of his companions down below, and he only became enraged, shouting curses at me. I saw that he was about to haul himself onto the platform, so I did the only thing that would definitely work, and I pressed the button, holding the device as close to him and as far away from myself as possible.
My last thought before I pressed it, panicking, was that it was a shame I didn’t have a roll of aluminium foil. I could have wrapped my head in it, forming a Faraday cage, and protected myself from the device’s emanations completely.
The next thing I remember, I was sprawled out on the platform, dangerously close to falling off it, my head hanging over the edge. I hurriedly scrambled to a sitting position.
Down below an animated discussion seemed to be taking place. I peered over the edge, drawing my head back quickly before they could shoot at me, and in that brief moment I saw the body of the man who’d been climbing the ladder, sprawled out below, and the other men poring over him. One of them seemed to be taking his pulse.
As I sat there, wondering what to do next, one of them fired three bullets at the platform in quick succession. That made my heart race, but none of the bullets penetrated the thick steel struts of the platform.
“He’s dead!” shouted one of the men—the first one who had spoken to me, who seemed to be their leader. “Are you happy now? You’re next!”
He must have hit his head on a rock. Otherwise, the fall looked enough to break a leg, but not enough to kill someone. I can’t say I wasn’t pleased with this result.
In spite of the threats I could tell they were confused about what best to do. From where they stood, they couldn’t shoot me, and they also couldn’t risk climbing the ladder.
They stood around talking about it in a language I couldn’t understand for perhaps half an hour. I began to shiver convulsively.
Eventually one of them began to walk off.
“Don’t worry!” the leader shouted. “We’re going to fetch benzine so we can burn you off there!”
By benzine, I assume he meant petrol. Or at any rate, some flammable substance. I couldn’t imagine quite how they planned to set fire to a steel platform, but maybe if they packed wood around the ladder they could manage to kill me, or at least drive me off it.
“What if I give myself up?” I shouted down to the two remaining men.
They began talking animatedly to each other but said nothing in reply.
“I can tell you how the device works.” I shouted. “You want the device, don’t you? I can draw you detailed diagrams if you let me live.”
After a pause filled with more discussion, the leader shouted, “OK. It’s a deal. But throw the device down first.”
“No way.” I replied. “You’ll kill me. I’ll bring it down with me.”
“How do we know you won’t activate the device? You’ve killed Jurgen.”
A little smile came unbidden to my lips, even though I was shivering uncontrollably from fear and cold.
“If I activate the device, it’ll make me go to sleep as well as you.” I shouted. “It won’t do me any good.”
They discussed the matter a bit more, then the leader shouted, “OK. Come down.”
I stuffed the device underneath my sweater and began to descend the ladder. Either they would shoot me or they wouldn’t. I just wanted to get close enough to them to try one last desperate gambit.
They didn’t shoot. They watched me descend, the less senior man training his rifle on me.
When I reached the bottom and faced them, the leader said, “Where is the device?”
“Here.” I said, and I clapped my hand to my chest, pressing the button that activates the pulse.
I was counting on the tolerance I’d built up to the device’s effects.
When I awoke, to my enormous relief, the two men were still asleep. With trembling hands I grabbed the weapon off the subordinate. I had little idea how it worked, except I knew there was probably some kind of safety catch.
The leader began to wake up, groggily looking around, while I was still fiddling with the rifle, trying to figure out how it worked. I managed to slide something back and I pulled the trigger. A shot rang out and the leader fell back dead, with a hole in his head.
I was gawping at the sight of the man I had killed, simultaneously relieved and appalled, when the other man grabbed me around the waist. I hit him with the rifle. He fell back, and I turned around and shot him, twice.
The mood I was in after that was a terrible one. I had gone from a helpless sitting duck, waiting for death, to a victorious avenger. I no longer cared what I did, as long as I got home.
I’d got almost halfway down towards the farmhouse when I encountered the other man, running towards me. He must have somehow known something was wrong. When he saw me carrying the rifle, he visibly paled and pulled out a pistol from somewhere. He died before he could fire it, and I shot him twice more to be sure.
Why I went to the farmhouse, I can’t say, except that something evil had got into me. I walked straight in through the front door. The scientist, if that’s what he was, immediately tried to compose his face into a fake smile. Then he saw my gun and the rictus grin changed to a look of abject terror. Two seconds later he was dead, lying in a slowly-spreading pool of his own blood.
I collected my belongings, putting the device back in its case and the case back in the suitcase. Then I searched for and successfully located the keys to Ivan’s car. They were in his pocket.
I still had no idea who any of those people were, except that one of them posed as a scientist and there was a page about him on the website of what was supposedly a reputable institute. I had no idea whether the Italian government was involved in the whole thing, and I strongly suspected that these men were all employed by forces that transcended national boundaries, but I wasn’t going to take a risk with the airport. I drove north without stopping until, five hours later, I crossed into Austria.
I didn’t feel much like stopping in Austria either, and in the end I drove another twelve hours, all the way to Calais, fully expecting to hear police sirens behind me at any moment, but it never happened. If they had tried to stop me, I probably would have used the device again. I was absolutely paranoid, and not without reason.
At Calais I ditched the car and got on a ferry. No-one stopped me.
After I got home, which involved a long train journey, I had a drink to calm my nerves and fell asleep on my bed, fully clothed.
I met up with Alan just once after that. I went to his house, intending to sound him out, to try to figure out exactly who he had got in touch with, and how much he knew about what they had planned to do with me.
That turned out to be unnecessary. His face told me everything. Alan hadn’t expected me to return.
What kind of contacts he had, and how he’d acquired them, I have no idea. I’ll never know now, because a month later, Alan mysteriously fainted while driving on the motorway, and he died of his injuries two days later.
I have continued to work on the device, refining it. I no longer feel inclined to share it with the world. It’s too dangerous.
Perhaps I can find a use for it myself, who knows.
