Destination Unknown

by Agatha Christie

  Appraising Mrs. Baker's attitude, Hilary found more difficult. At first Mrs. Baker seemed a natural and normal person after the inhumanity of the German woman specialist. But as the sun sank lower in the sky she felt almost more intrigued and repelled by Mrs. Baker than by Helga Needheim. Mrs. Baker's social manner was almost robotlike in its perfection. All her comments and remarks were natural, normal, everyday currency, but one had a suspicion that the whole thing was like an actor playing a part for perhaps the seven hundredth time. It was an automatic performance, completely divorced from what Mrs. Baker might really have been thinking or feeling. Who was Mrs. Calvin Baker, Hilary wondered? Why had she come to play her part with such machinelike perfection? Was she, too, a fanatic? Had she dreams of a brave new world - was she in violent revolt against the capitalist system? Had she given up all normal life because of her political beliefs and aspirations? Impossible to tell.

  They resumed their journey that evening. It was no longer the station wagon. This time it was an open touring car. Everyone was in native dress, the men with white djellabos round them, the women with their faces hidden. Packed tightly in, they started off once more, driving all through the night.

  "How are you feeling, Mrs. Betterton?"

  Hilary smiled up at Andy Peters. The sun had just risen and they had stopped for breakfast. Native bread, eggs, and tea made over a primus.

  "I feel as though I were taking part in a dream," said Hilary.

  "Yes, it has rather that quality."

  "Where are we?"

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  "Who knows? Our Mrs. Calvin Baker, no doubt, but no other."

  "It's a very lonely country."

  "Yes, practically desert. But then it would have to be, wouldn't it."

  "You mean so as to leave no trace?"

  "Yes. One realises, doesn't one, that the whole thing must be very carefully thought out. Each stage of our journey is, as it were, quite independent of the other. A plane goes up in flames. An old station wagon drives through the night. If anyone notices it, it has on it a plate stating that it belongs to a certain archaeological Expedition that is excavating in these parts. The following day there is a touring car full of Berbers, one of the commonest sights on the road to be seen. For the next stage -" he shrugged his shoulders "- who knows?"

  "But where are we going?"

  Andy Peters shook his head.

  "No use to ask. We shall find out."

  The Frenchman, Dr. Barron, had joined them.

  "Yes," he said, "we shall find out. But how true it is that we cannot but ask? That is our western blood. We can never say 'sufficient for the day.' It is always tomorrow, tomorrow with us. To leave yesterday behind, to proceed to tomorrow. That is what we demand."

  "You want to hurry the world on, Doctor, is that it?" asked Peters.

  "There is so much to achieve," said Dr. Barron, "life is too short. One must have more time. More time, more time." He flung out his hands in a passionate gesture.

  Peters turned to Hilary.

  "What are the four freedoms you talk about in your country? Freedom from want, freedom from fear..."

  The Frenchman interrupted. "Freedom from fools," he said bitterly. "That is what I want! That is what my work needs. Freedom from incessant, pettifogging economies! Freedom from all the nagging restrictions that hamper one's work!"

  "You are a bacteriologist, are you not, Dr. Barron?"

  "Yes, I am a bacteriologist. Ah, you have no idea, my friend, what a fascinating study that is! But it needs patience, infinite patience, repeated experiment - and money - much money! One must have equipment, assistants, raw materials! Given that you have all you ask for, what can one not achieve?"

  "Happiness?" asked Hilary.

  He flashed her a quick smile, suddenly human again.

  "Ah, you are a woman, Madame. It is women who ask always for happiness."

  "And seldom get it?" asked Hilary.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  "That may be."

  "Individual happiness does not matter," said Peters seriously, "there must be the happiness of all, the brotherhood of the spirit! The workers, free and united, owning the means of production, free of the warmongers, of the greedy, insatiable men who keep everything in their own hands. Science is for all, and must not be held jealously by one power or the other."

  "So!" said Ericsson appreciatively, "you are right. The scientists must be masters. They must control and rule. They and they alone are the Supermen. It is only the Supermen who matter. The slaves must be well treated, but they are slaves."

  Hilary walked a little way away from the group. After a minute or two Peters followed her.

  "You look just a little scared," he said humourously.

  "I think I am." She gave a short, breathless laugh. "Of course what Dr. Barron said was quite true. I'm only a woman. I'm not a scientist, I don't do research or surgery, or bacteriology. I haven't, I suppose, much mental ability. I'm looking, as Dr. Barron said, for happiness - just like any other fool of a woman."

  "And what's wrong with that?" said Peters.

  "Well, maybe I feel a little out of my depth in this company. You see, I'm just a woman who's going to join her husband."

  "Good enough," said Peters. "You represent the fundamental."

  "It's nice of you to put it that way."

  "Well, it's true." He added in a lower voice, "You care for your husband very much?"

  "Would I be here if I didn't?"

  "I suppose not. You share his views? I take it that he's a Communist?"

  Hilary avoided giving a direct answer.

  "Talking of being a Communist," she said, "has something about our little group struck you as curious?"

  "What's that?"

  "Well, that although we're all bound for the same destination, the views of our fellow travellers don't seem really alike."

  Peters said thoughtfully,

  "Why, no. You've got something there. I hadn't thought of it quite that way - but I believe you're right."

  "I don't think," said Hilary, "that Dr. Barron is politically minded at all! He wants money for his experiments. Helga Needheim talks like a Fascist, not a Communist. And Ericsson -"

  "What about Ericsson?"

  "I find him frightening - he's got a dangerous kind of single-mindedness. He's like a mad scientist in a film!"

  "And I believe in the Brotherhood of men, and you're a loving wife, and our Mrs. Calvin Baker - where would you place her?"

  "I don't know. I find her more hard to place than anyone."

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that. I'd say she was easy enough."

  "How do you mean?"

  "I'd say it was money all the way with her. She's just a well-paid cog in the wheel."

  "She frightens me, too," said Hilary.

  "Why? Why on earth does she frighten you? No touch of the mad scientist about her."

  "She frightens me because she's so ordinary. You know, just like anybody else. And yet she's mixed up in all this."

  Peters said grimly,

  "The Party is realistic, you know. It employs the best man or woman for the job."

  "But is someone who only wants money the best person for the job? Mightn't they desert to the other side?"

  "That would be a very big risk to take," said Peters, quietly. "Mrs. Calvin Baker's a shrewd woman. I don't think she'd take that risk."

  Hilary shivered suddenly.

  "Cold?"

  "Yes. It is a bit cold."

  "Let's move around a little."

  They walked up and down. As they did so Peters stooped and picked up something.

  "Here. You're dropping things."

  Hilary took it from him.

  "Oh, yes, it's a pearl from my choker. I broke it the other day - no, yesterday. What ages ago that seems already."

  "Not real pearls, I hope."

  Hilary smiled.

  "No, of course not. Costume jewellery."

  Peters took a
cigarette case from his pocket.

  "Costume jewellery," he said, "what a term!"

  He offered her a cigarette.

  "It does sound foolish - here." She took a cigarette. "What an odd case. How heavy it is."

  "Made of lead, that's why. It's a war souvenir - made out of a bit of a bomb that just failed to blow me up."

  "You were - in the war then?"

  "I was one of the backroom boys who tickled things to see if they'd go bang. Don't let's talk about wars. Let's concentrate on tomorrow."

  "Where are we going?" asked Hilary. "Nobody's told me anything. Are we -"

  He stopped her.

  "Speculations," he said, "are not encouraged. You go where you're told and do what you're told."

  With sudden passion Hilary said,

  "Do you like being dragooned, being ordered about, having no say of your own?"

  "I'm prepared to accept it if it's necessary. And it is necessary. We've got to have World Peace, World Discipline, World Order."

  "Is it possible? Can it be got?"

  "Anything's better than the muddle we live in. Don't you agree to that?"

  For a moment, carried away by fatigue, by the loneliness of her surroundings and the strange beauty of the early morning light, Hilary nearly burst out into a passionate denial.

  She wanted to say,

  "Why do you decry the world we live in? There are good people in it. Isn't muddle a better breeding ground for kindliness and individuality than a world order that's imposed, a world order that may be right today and wrong tomorrow? I would rather have a world of kindly, faulty, human beings, than a world of superior robots who've said goodbye to pity and understanding and sympathy."

  But she restrained herself in time. She said instead, with a deliberate subdued enthusiasm,

  "How right you are. I was tired. We must obey and go forward."

  He grinned.

  "That's better."

  Chapter 10

  A dream journey. So it seemed; more so every day. It was as though, Hilary felt, she had been travelling all her life with these five strangely assorted companions. They had stepped off from the beaten track into the void. In one sense this journey of theirs could not be called a flight. They were all, she supposed, free agents; free, that is, to go where they chose. As far as she knew they had committed no crime, they were not wanted by the police. Yet great pains had been taken to hide their tracks. Sometimes she wondered why this was, since they were not fugitives. It was as though they were in process of becoming not themselves but someone else.

  That indeed was literally true in her case. She who had left England as Hilary Craven had become Olive Betterton, and perhaps her strange feeling of unreality had something to do with that. Every day the glib political slogans seemed to come more easily to her lips. She felt herself becoming earnest and intense, and that again she put down to the influence of her companions.

  She knew now that she was afraid of them. She had never before spent any time in close intimacy with people of genius. This was genius at close quarters, and genius had that something above normal in it that was a great strain upon the ordinary mind and feeling. All five were different from each other, yet each had that curious quality of burning intensity, the single-mindedness of purpose that made such a terrifying impression. She did not know whether it were a quality of brain or rather a quality of outlook, of intensity. But each of them, she thought, was in his or her way a passionate idealist. To Dr. Barron life was a passionate desire to be once more in his laboratory, to be able to calculate and experiment and work with unlimited money and unlimited resources. To work for what? She doubted if he ever put that question to himself. He spoke to her once of the powers of destruction that he could let loose on a vast continent, which could be contained in one little phial. She had said to him,

  "But could you ever do that? Actually really do it?"

  And he replied, looking at her with faint surprise,

  "Yes. Yes, of course, if it became necessary."

  He had said it in a merely perfunctory fashion. He had gone on,

  "It would be amazingly interesting to see the exact course, the exact progress." And he had added with a deep half sigh, "You see, there's so much more to know, so much more to find out."

  For a moment Hilary understood. For a moment she stood where he stood, impregnated with that single hearted desire for knowledge which swept aside life and death for millions of human beings as essentially unimportant. It was a point of view and in a way a not ignoble one. Towards Helga Needheim she felt more antagonistic. The young woman's superb arrogance revolted her. Peters she liked but was from time to time repulsed and frightened by the sudden fanatical gleam in his eye. She said to him once,

  "It is not a new world you want to create. It is destroying the old one that you will enjoy."

  "You're wrong, Olive. What a thing to say."

  "No, I'm not wrong. There's hate in you. I can feel it. Hate. The wish to destroy."

  Ericsson she found the most puzzling of all. Ericsson, she thought, was a dreamer, less practical than the Frenchman, further removed from destructive passion than the American. He had the strange, fanatical idealism of the Norseman.

  "We must conquer," he said, "we must conquer the world. Then we can rule."

  "We?" she asked.

  He nodded, his face strange and gentle with a deceptive mildness about the eyes.

  "Yes," he said, "we few who count. The brains. That is all that matters."

  Hilary thought, where are we going? Where is all this leading. These people are mad, but they're not mad in the same way as each other. It's as though they were all going towards different goals, different mirages. Yes, that was the word. Mirages. And from them she turned to a contemplation of Mrs. Calvin Baker. Here there was no fanaticism, no hate, no dream, no arrogance, no aspiration. There was nothing here that Hilary could find or take notice of. She was a woman, Hilary thought, without either heart or conscience. She was the efficient instrument in the hands of a big unknown force.

  It was the end of the third day. They had come to a small town and alighted at a small native hotel. Here, Hilary found, they were to resume European clothing. She slept that night in a small, bare, white-washed room, rather like a cell. At early dawn Mrs. Baker woke her.

  "We're going off right now," said Mrs. Baker. "The plane's waiting."

  "The plane?"

  "Why yes, my dear. We're returning to civilised travelling, thank the Lord."

  They came to the airfield and the plane after about an hour's drive. It looked like a disused army airfield. The pilot was a Frenchman. They flew for some hours, their flight taking them over mountains, looking down from the plane Hilary thought what a curious sameness the world has, seen from above. Mountains, valleys, roads, houses. Unless one was really an aerial expert all places looked alike. That in some the population was denser than in others, was about all that one could say. And half of the time one saw nothing owing to travelling over clouds.

  In the early afternoon they began to lose height and circle down. They were in mountainous country still but coming down in a flat plain. There was a well-marked aerodrome here and a white building beside it. They made a perfect landing.

  Mrs. Baker led the way towards the building. Beside it were two powerful cars with chauffeurs standing by them. It was clearly a private aerodrome of some kind, since there appeared to be no official reception.

  "Journey's end," said Mrs. Baker cheerfully. "We all go in and have a good wash and brush up. And then the cars will be ready."