He took her hand to pat it, but she gripped his fingers convulsively and wouldn’t let go. He thought of Mr. Mann, with the cricket bats on his tie, walking towards the trap he had laid for him. He wondered whether there was anything else he could have done to make more sure that Mr. Mann himself would come into the hands of those doctors, those plumbers, who would sigh and try something else. But that was a secondary consideration. Humayan’s horoscope said that he was born to be a healer. A man who heals one person is a healer. In that one person he may fulfil his destiny.
“We are going away,” he said. “Away from this horrible country.”
“But they’ll never give me a passport. I’ve been in prison.”
“That is all fixed. Tomorrow we are to be married at the airport, so you will be on my passport. I have the permits and the tickets. I hope you do not object.”
She tilted her head over the other way and considered him.
“Poor Pete,” she said. “Pravi I mean. Will I like India? Will your mother mind?”
He was pleased by her grasp of essentials.
“You have been in this room all day?” he asked.
“Except to go to the loo.”
“Good. You were not disturbed?”
“What do you mean?”
He cupped a theatrical hand behind one ear and pointed to the ceiling. She frowned and shook her head. How they despised him! Not even to bug his girl’s room!
“We will not go to India,” he said. “I must hide for a little, because things will happen at the RRB and then they may come looking for me. We will leave the flight at Rome, and then I think go to South America. Anyway, somewhere where people do not understand us—where they understand us so little that they do not even believe they understand us.”
“That’d be great. There’ll have to be a university or something, for you to get a job.”
“No good. If they look for me, they will start at universities.”
“But what will we live on?”
“Oh, don’t you bother about that. I have still some of my back pay, enough for tickets and all that. We will travel in a cheap steamer, and when we get there we will be an astounding team. You will read my mind. We will do astonishing tricks with numbers—very simple—I will teach you. I will perform miracles of memory. Oh yes, even if they discover how we do it they will still be astonished at our cleverness. South Americans are a naïve people.”
She fidgeted with the elastic of her eye-patch and looked at him with her head cocked slightly to one side, a mannerism inherited from her mother. At the moment it made her look like a sick crow, bedraggled and weary, but less sick than it had been yesterday, so that now it was ready to consider the acceptance of a crumb. He was worrying about whether Mr. Mann might have ordered a bomb to be placed on their aircraft (it could be blamed on the Greens) and so whether it was worth the extra fuss and delays to ring the airport anonymously and warn them, when she spoke.
“I’ll wear gauzy green and a veil. Silver eyelids. Nobody’ll mind about my squint if I have silver eyelids. And I’ll talk in a voice like this. We can get someone on the boat to teach us Spanish and it’ll be all right about the accents because magicians ought to sound foreign. But we’ll have to have a brilliant name, P-Pravi. You aren’t anything if you haven’t got a name.”
“The Great Minus One?”
“It’s a start, anyway.”
About the Author
Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.
The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: Skin Deep (1968) and A Pride of Heroes (1969).
A collection of Dickinson’s poetry, The Weir, was published in 2007. His latest book, In the Palace of the Khans, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.
Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1973 by Peter Dickinson
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-5040-0340-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EARLY BIRD BOOKS
FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT
FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS
NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY
EBOOKS BY PETER DICKINSON
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
The Green Gene Page 20