That was a poser! I could imagine the expression on the face of the colonel of the Royal Södermanland Regiment if I poked my nose into Strängnäs again. I needed no imagination at all to picture the cold grey eyes of Captain Morelius of Swedish Army Intelligence.
‘That may not be easy,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been transferred and my time isn’t my own.’
‘Transferred from your department?’
‘No, just within the department, but I may be office-bound from now on. Still, I’ll see what I can do.’ Which would be precisely nothing. ‘Look, Penny, how would it be if I arranged for you to talk with my chief? He can tell you all that’s known about your father in Sweden.’ And he can tell my damned lies for me, I thought savagely.
She thought about it, then said, ‘Very well. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to Sweden.’
‘I’ll arrange it.’ I rose to pour us some more coffee. ‘Penny, what’s happening to us? I still want to marry you, but every time I get near the subject you edge away. I’m very much in love with you and it’s becoming damned frustrating. Have you turned off?’
She cried, ‘Oh, Malcolm, I’m sorry; I really am. Everything turned topsy-turvy so suddenly. First there was Gillian, then Daddy - and then you. I’ve been going about looking at people I know and wondering if what I think I know is really so. Even Lummy has come under scrutiny - I’m beginning to worry him, I think. He imagines I’m going paranoid.’
‘It’s not been too easy for me, either,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to have anything to do with the Ashton case.’
‘The Ashton case,’ she repeated. ‘Is that what they call it?’ When I nodded, she said, ‘That takes the humanity out of it, doesn’t it? When it’s a “case” it’s easy to forget the flesh and blood because a case is mostly dockets and paperwork. How would you like to be referred to as the Jaggard case?’
‘Not much,’ I said sombrely.
Penny took my hand. ‘Malcolm, you’ll have to give me time. I think - no - I know I love you, but I’m still a bit mixed up; and I don’t know that I’m too happy about what you do with your life. That’s something else which needs thinking about.’
‘My God!’ I said. ‘You make it sound as though I go about eating live babies. I’m just a dreary counter-espionage man specializing in industry and making sure too many secrets don’t get pinched.’
‘You mean weapons?’
I shook my head. ‘Not necessarily. That’s not our pigeon - and we’re not interested in the latest toothpaste additive, either. But if an engineering firm has ploughed a couple of millions into research and come up with something revolutionary, then we don’t want some foreign Johnny nicking it and going into competition with a head start And, don’t forget, the foreign Johnnies from the East are state supported.’
‘But these things are patented, aren’t they?’
‘Patents are a dead giveaway. The really big stuff isn’t patented, especially in electronics. If you produce a new electronic chip which does the work of eleventy thousand transistors the opposition can put the thing under a microscope and see what you’ve done, but how the hell you’ve done it is quite another thing, and our boys aren’t telling. They’re certainly not going to disclose the process in a published patent.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘But that means you’re just another sort of policeman.’
‘Most of the time,’ I said. ‘Our problem is that the theft of information, as such, is not illegal in this country. Suppose I stole a sheet of paper from your lab, say, and I was caught. I’d be found guilty of the theft of a piece of paper worth one penny, and I’d suffer the appropriate penalty. The fact that written on that paper was some formula worth a million quid wouldn’t count’
Her voice rose. ‘But that’s silly.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘Do you want to hear something really silly? A few years ago a chap was caught tapping a post office line. The only charge they could get him on was the theft of a quantity of electricity, the property of the Postmaster-General. It was about a millionth of a watt.’ Penny laughed, and I said, ‘Anyway, that’s my job, and it doesn’t seem all that heinous to me.’
‘Nor to me, now you’ve explained it. But where did Daddy come into this?’
I said, ‘You may not realize how important a man your father was. The catalysts he was developing were revolutionizing the economics of the oil industry and helping the economics of the country. When a man like that goes missing we want to know if anyone has been putting pressure on him, and why. Of course, if he’s just running away from a shrewish wife then it’s his affair, and we drop it. That’s happened before,’
‘And what conclusions did you come to about Daddy?’
‘At first we tied it in with the attack on Gillian,’ I said. ‘But that’s a dead end; we know Mayberry was a loner. As it is, as far as the department could make out, your father was living quietly in Stockholm and apparently taking an extended holiday. There’s nothing we could do about that.’
‘No,’ said Penny. ‘We’re not yet a police state. What’s being done now?’
I shrugged. ‘The committee of brains at the top has decided to drop the matter.’
‘I see.’ She stared into the fire for a long time, then shook her head. ‘But you’ll have to give me time, Malcolm. Let me go to America. I’d like to get away from here and think. I’d like to…’
I held up my hand. ‘Point taken - no further argument. Change of subject. What were you doing in Scotland?’ I was damned glad to change the subject; I’d been shaving the truth a bit too finely.
‘Oh, that. Acting as adviser in the reconstruction of a laboratory. It’s been worrying me because they’re only willing to go up to P3 and I’m recommending P4. I was arguing it out with Lumsden this morning and he thinks I’m a bit…well, paranoiac about it.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ I said. ‘What’s P3? To say nothing of P4.’
‘Oh, I forgot.’ She waved her hand at the room. ‘I was so used to talking things out here with Daddy that I’d forgotten you’re a layman.’ She looked at me doubtfully. ‘It’s a bit technical,’ she warned.
‘That’s all right. Mine is a technical job.’
‘I suppose I’d better start with the big row,’ she said. ‘An American geneticist called Paul Berg…’
It seemed that Berg blew the whistle. He thought the geneticists were diddling around with the gene in the same way the physicist had diddled around with the atom in the ’20s and ’30s, and the potential hazards were even more horrendous. He pointed out some of them.
It seems that the favourite laboratory animal of the geneticists is a bacterium called Escherichia coli and it is the most studied organism on earth - more is known about E.coli than about any other living thing. It was natural that this creature be used for genetic experimentation.
‘There’s only one snag about that,’ said Penny. ‘E.coli is a natural inhabitant of the human gut, and I don’t mean by ones and twos - I mean by the million. So if you start tinkering around with E.coli you’re doing something potentially dangerous.’
‘For example?’ I asked.
‘You remember Lummy’s example of genetic transfer from Rhizobium to make an improved wheat. I said we’d have to be careful not to transfer another, more dangerous, gene. Now, consider this. Supposing you incorporated into E.coli, accidentally or on purpose, the gene specifying the male hormone, testosterone. And supposing that strain of E.coli escaped from the laboratory and entered the human population. It would inhabit the digestive tracts of women, too, you know. They might start growing beards and stop having babies.’
‘Christ!’ I said. ‘It would be a catastrophe.’
‘Berg and some of his concerned friends called an international conference at Asilomar in California in 1975. It was well attended by the world’s geneticists but there was much controversy. Gradually a policy was hammered out involving the concept of biological containment. Certain dangerous experiments were to be banned
pending the development of a strain of E.coli unable to survive outside the laboratory and unable to colonize the human gut. The specification laid down was that the survival rate of the new strain should not be more than one in a thousand million.’
I smiled. ‘That sounds like certainty.’
‘It’s not,’ said Penny soberly, ‘considering the numbers of E.coli around, but it’s close. I think that was the most important conference in the history of science. For the first time scientists had got together to police themselves without having restrictions thrust upon them. I think at the back of all our minds was the bad example set by the atomic physicists.’
Fifteen months later the development of the new strain was announced by the University of Alabama. Penny laughed. ‘A writer in New Scientist put it very well. He called it “the world’s first creature designed to choose death over liberty”.’
I said slowly, ‘The first creature designed…That’s a frightening concept.’
‘In a way - but we’ve been designing creatures for a long time. You don’t suppose the modern dairy cow is as nature intended it to be?’
‘Maybe, but this strikes me as being qualitatively different. It’s one thing to guide evolution and quite another to bypass it.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Sooner or later there’ll be some hack or graduate student who will go ahead with a bright idea without taking the time to study the consequences of what he’s doing. There’ll be a bad mistake made one day - but not if I can help it. And that brings us to Scotland.’
‘How?’
‘What I’ve just described is biological containment. There’s also physical containment to keep the bugs from escaping. Laboratories are classified from P1 to P4. P1 is the standard microbiological lab; P4 is the other extreme - the whole of the lab is under negative air pressure, there are air locks, showers inside and out, changes of clothing, special pressurized suits - all that kind of thing.’
‘And you’re running into trouble with your recommendations in Scotland?’
‘They’re upranking an existing P2 lab. In view of what they want to do I’m recommending P4, but they’ll only go to P3. The trouble is that a P4 lab is dreadfully expensive, not only in the building, but in the running and maintenance.’
‘Are there no statutory regulations?’
‘Not in this field; it’s too new. If they were working with recognized pathogens then, yes - there are regulations. But they’ll be working with good old E.coli, a harmless bacterium. You have about a couple of hundred million of them in your digestive tract right now. They’ll stay harmless, too, until some fool transfers the wrong gene.’ She sighed. ‘All we have are guidelines, not laws.’
‘Sounds a bit like my job - not enough laws.’
She ruefully agreed, and our talk turned to other things. Just before I left she said, ‘Malcolm; I want you to know that I think you’re being very patient with me - patient and thoughtful. I’m not the vapouring sort of female, and I usually don’t have much trouble in making up my mind; but events have been getting on top of me recently.’
‘Not to worry,’ I said lightly. ‘I can wait.’
‘And then there’s Gillian,’ she said. ‘It may have been silly of me but I was worrying about her even before all this happened. She’s never been too attractive to men and she looked like turning into an old maid; which would have been a pity because she’d make someone a marvellous wife. But now - ‘ she shook her head - ‘I don’t think there’s a chance for her with that face.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that, either,’ I advised. ‘Michaelis has a fond eye for her.’ I laughed. ‘With a bit of luck you’ll not have one, but two, spies in the family.’
And with that startling thought I left her.
TWENTY-NINE
The British weekend being what it is I didn’t get to the War Office until Monday. Anyone invading these islands would be advised to begin not earlier than four p.m. on a Friday; he’d have a walkover. I filled in the necessary form at the desk and was escorted by a porter to the wrong office. Two attempts later I found the man I needed, an elderly major called Gardner who was sitting on his bottom awaiting his pension. He heard what I had to say and looked at me with mournful eyes. ‘Do you realize the war has been over for thirty years?’
I disliked people who ask self-evident questions. ‘Yes, I’m aware of it; and I still want the information.’
He sighed, drew a sheet of paper towards him, and picked up a ball point pen. ‘It’s not going to be easy. Do you know how many millions of men were in the army? I suppose I’d better have the names.’
‘I suppose you had.’ I began to see why Gardner was still a grey-haired major. ‘George Ashton, private in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers; demobilized 4 January, 1947.’
‘In London?’
‘Probably.’
‘Could have been at Earl’s Court; that was used as a demob centre. The other man?’
‘Howard Greatorex Benson, sergeant in the Royal Army Service Corps. I don’t know where he was demobilized.’
‘Is that all you know of these men?’
‘That’s it.’
Gardner laid down his pen and looked at me glumly. ‘Very well, I’ll institute a search. You’d better give me your address or a phone number where I can find you.’ He sniffed lugubriously. ‘It’ll take about a month, I should say.’
‘That’s not good enough. I need the information a damned sight faster than that.’
He waved a languid hand. ‘So many records,’ he said weakly. ‘Millions of them.’
‘Don’t you have a system?’
‘System? Oh, yes; we have a system - when it works.’
I set out to jolly him along and by a combination of sweet talk, name-dropping and unspoken threats got him out of his chair and into action, if one could dignify his speed by such a name. He stood up, regarding me owlishly, and said, ‘You don’t suppose we keep five million army records here, do you?’
I smiled. ‘Shall we take your car or mine?’
I had what I wanted four hours later. At the time I thought I’d been lucky but later decided that luck had nothing to do with it because it had been planned that way thirty years earlier.
We started with the records of Earl’s Court, now an exhibition hall devoted to such things as cars and boats, but then a vast emporium for the processing of soldiers into civilians. There they exchanged their uniforms for civilian clothing from the skin out - underwear, shirt, socks, shoes, suit, overcoat and the inevitable trilby or fedora hat of the 1940s. There was also the equivalent of a bank which took in no money but which lashed it out by the million; the service-man’s gratuity, a small - very small - donation from a grateful nation. At its peak the throughput of Earl’s Court was 5000 men a day but by early 1947 it had dropped to a mere 2000.
The ledgers for 4 January were comparatively small; they had coped with only 1897 men - it had been a slack day. Infuriatingly, the ledgers were not listed in alphabetical order but by army number, which meant that every name and page had to be scanned. ‘What was the name again?’ said Gardner,
‘Ashton.’
‘Ashton,’ he muttered, as he started on the first page of a ledger. ‘Ashton…Ashton…Ashton.’ I think he had to repeat the name to himself because he had the attention span of a retarded five-year-old.
I took another ledger and started to check it. It was like reading a war memorial with the difference that these were the survivors; a long list of Anglo-Saxon names with the odd quirky foreigner for spice, and even more boring than checking Heathrow passenger lists. Half an hour later Gardner said, ‘What was that name again?’
I sighed. ‘Ashton. George Ashton.’
‘No - the other one.’
‘Benson, Howard Greatorex.’
‘He’s here,’ said Gardner placidly.
‘Benson!’ I went to the other side of the table and leaned over Gardner’s shoulder. Sure enough, his finger rested under
Benson’s name, and the rest of the information fitted. Sergeant H. G. Benson, RASC, had been discharged on the same day, and from the same place, as Private G. Ashton, REME. I didn’t think coincidence could stretch that far.
‘That’s a piece of luck,’ said Gardner with smug satisfaction. ‘Now we have his army number we shall find his file easily.’
‘We haven’t got Ashton yet,’ I said, and we both applied ourselves to the ledgers. Ashton came up three-quarters of an hour later. Gardner scribbled on a piece of paper and drifted away in his somnambulistic manner to organize the search for the files, while I sat down and began to sort out what we’d found.
I tried to figure out the odds against two specific men in the British Army being demobilized on the same day and from the same place, but the mathematics were too much for me - I couldn’t keep count of the zeroes, so I gave up. It was stretching the long arm a bit too far to suggest that it had happened by chance to two men who subsequently lived together as master and servant for the next quarter of a century. So if it wasn’t coincidence it must have been by arrangement.
So who arranged it?
I was still torturing my brain cells when Gardner came back an hour later with the files. There was a sticky moment when I said I wanted to take them away; he clung to them as though I was trying to kidnap his infant children. At last he agreed to accept my receipt and I left in triumph.
I studied the files at home, paying little attention to Ashton’s file because it had nothing to do with the Ashton I knew, but I went over Benson’s file in detail. His career was exactly as Ogilvie had described. He joined the army in 1940 and after his primary training and square-bashing he was transferred to the RASC and his promotions came pretty quickly at first - to lance-corporal, to corporal, and then to sergeant where he stuck for the rest of the war. All his service was in England and he never went overseas. Most of his duties were concerned with storekeeping, and from the comments of his superiors written in the file, he was quite efficient, although there were a few complaints of lack of initiative and willingness to pass the buck. Not many, but enough to block his further promotion.
The Tightrope Men / The Enemy Page 49