The Human Front by Ken MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page A

tobacco, and heroin, three great blessings. And as the Greek said, nothing is terrible when you know that being nothing is not terrible. I’ll know when to ease myself out.”
    “Oh, God,” I said again, very inaptly.
    His yellow teeth glinted. “I have no worries about meeting my maker. But, ah, I do have something on my conscience. A monkey on my back, which I want to offload on yours.”
    “All right,” I said.
    He leaned back and closed his eyes.
    “Another time I treated a leg with a very similar injury …” he said. “You were there then, too. You were much smaller, and so was the patient. You do remember?”
    “Of course,” I said. My knees were shaking.
    His eyes opened and he stared out through the windscreen.
    “The last time we discussed this,” he said, “I suggested that you look into the origin of the bomber. No doubt you have read some books, given the matter thought, and drawn your own conclusions.”
    ”Yes,” I said, “I certainly have, it’s a—”
    He held up one hand. “Keep it,” he said. “I’ve had a lot longer to think about the origin of the pilot. My first thought was the same as yours, that it was a child. Then, when I got, ah, a closer look, I must confess that my second thought was that I was seeing the work of … another Mengele. The grey skin, the four digits on hands and feet, the huge eyes, the coppery colour of the blood … I thought for years that this was the result of some perverted Nazi science, you know. But, like you, I’ve read a great deal since. And as a medical man, I know what can and can’t be done. No rare syndrome, no surgery, no mutation, no foul tinkering with the germ-plasm could have made that body. It was not a deformed human body. It was a perfectly healthy, normal body, but it was not human.”
    He turned to me, shaking his head. “The memory plays tricks, of course. But in retrospect, and even taking that into account, I believe that the pilot was not only not human, but not mammalian. I’m not even sure that he was a
vertebrate.
The bones in the leg were—”
    His cheek twitched. “Like broken plastic, and hollow. Thin-walled, and filled with rigid tubes and struts rather than spongy bone and marrow.”
    I felt like giggling.
    “You’re saying the pilot was from
another planet?”
    “No,” he said, sharply. “I’m not. I’m telling you what I
saw.”
He waved a hand, his cigarette tip tracing a jiggly red line. “For all I know, the pilot may be a specimen of some race of intelligent beings that evolved on Earth and lurks unseen in the depths of the fucking Congo, or the Himalayas, like the Abominable Snowman!”
    He laughed, setting off another wheezing cough.
    “So there it is, John. A secret I won’t be taking to the grave.”
    We talked a bit more, and then I got out of the car and watched the tail-lights disappear around a corner.

    Scotland is not a good country for rural guerrilla warfare, having been long since stripped of trees and peasants. Without physical or social shelter, any guerrilla band in the hills and glens would be easily spotted and picked off, if they hadn’t starved first. The great spaces of the Highlands were militarily irrelevant anyway.
    So everybody believed, until the guerrilla war. Night, clouds and rain, gullies, boulders, bracken, isolated clumps of trees, the few real forests, burns and bridges and bothies all provided cover. The relatively sparse population could do little to betray us and—voluntarily or otherwise—much to help, and supplied few targets for enemy reprisals against civilians. Deer, sheep and rabbits abounded, edible wild plants and berries grew everywhere, and vegetables were easily enough bought or stolen. The strategic importance of the coastline and the offshore oilfields, and the vulnerability and propaganda value of the larger towns—Fort William, Inverness, Aberdeen, Thurso—compelled the state’s armed forces to hold the entire enormous area: to move troops and