Grant flushed. ‘Prime Minister, as head of British Intelligence you ought to know very well that not only does it exist but that I was almost killed by its managing director last year: that I have met and spoken with him, watched him execute a woman who had said too much and myself killed two of his staff. And, incidentally, before we met at close quarters we knew that it did exist, and we used to call it Force X. These are matters of fact accepted by my chief to whom I am responsible.’
‘Suggesting that although a British subject you are not now responsible to myself?’
‘If you care to put it that way, yes, sir.’ The atmosphere was electric, but Grant guessed that the Premier was trying to switch the subject from a British double agent to the much more subtle problem of SATAN. ‘The truth seems to be that Smith was really a treble agent on the pay-roll of both NATO and Whitehall but paying insurance as well to an organisation which will most probably turn out to be SATAN.’
‘And all that because you figured that a whiff of smoke was Greek.’ America’s Ambassador was a man of few words. ‘Hell, boy, lots of guys smoke Balkan cigarettes. But it don’t make them sons of SATAN.’
‘Possibly not, sir. But we know of no other people who are so well informed or who have enough contacts and resources to develop this sort of situation. The use of double agents is one of their specialities and we already have enough evidence of technique to suggest that we are on the right track.’
The Ambassador glanced at the Premier. ‘You hadn’t moved into Downing Street then, sir. So I dare say the President won’t hold you responsible for the sins of a predecessor even although you did nothing to put things right. But you will agree that this unfortunate affair hasn’t done anything to improve Anglo-American relations.’
‘Gentlemen.’ The Admiral was wearing his quarter-deck manner. ‘That is an ex-clusively private problem between two governments. And in the long term it will be rated unimportant by comparison with the background to this meeting. May I suggest that we get down to business and listen to Professor Juin, with whose work you must both be familiar.’
‘One or two points only,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘I shall listen with greater attention if I know that steps are being taken to trap the murderer of this man Smith. I would also like to hear more about this wire which led from your parlour to the moors and if there is any guarantee that there isn’t a similar link with this room or the laboratories?’
Grant shrugged his shoulders. A platoon of sappers were tracing the wire through the grounds and it had already been cut where it left the house. The pick-up had been discovered, together with a square of plastic-like material flush with the wooden floor and which had acted as a sounding board immediately below the fitted carpet. Every conceivable exit point from the lab had now been checked and for sure there was now no physical contact with the outside world. Mrs. Smith had been taken away in a car for further questioning in Edinburgh and the Black Watch were in control with a cordon round the house.
The Premier heard him out with rising impatience. ‘In fact everything possible has been arranged to ensure sensational headlines when the story eventually does leak out that I have come up here. Because it can now only be a question of time until someone discovers that I was in this house when a murder was committed right under the eyes of a former British Intelligence agent.’
Grant flushed with anger. ‘Again with respect, sir, what else could we have done? And surely you can use that old gag about it not being in the public interest to release information.’
Admiral Cooper snarled into his pipe and belched out a cloud of smoke. ‘It will be kept dark, all right. The man’s body has already been removed by air and I accept total responsibility. You may again care to remember, Prime Minister, that this is a NATO project and that Downing Street enters into it not at all. You have no need to worry. If necessary the Press can be told that you made the trip simply to watch a military exercise and that the Ambassador joined you for luncheon. And anyhow,’ he said quietly, ‘it is still good enough law that you can’t prove a murder unless there’s a body. So now, gentlemen,’ he stared menacingly round the room, ‘may we hand over to Juin and get down to something that really matters?’
‘One point only, sir.’ Grant had decided to be provocative. ‘The Prime Minister has implied that he doesn’t approve of my work. He may prefer if I now withdrew.’
The Admiral knew Grant well enough to recognise when he was looking for trouble. ‘You are on my staff and you are here because I said so.’
‘Even so, sir, I was seconded to ADSAD from London and it would be reassuring to know that my appointment is still approved by the Head of British Intelligence.’
‘Meaning the Prime Minister?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Grant felt the Premier’s eyes boring into the side of his face, but he continued to stare steadily at his chief. If the politicians were going to make an issue of anything affecting himself they could do so now and settle things one way or the other. And to hell with them. This total-secrecy stuff was washed up these days. Better by far to have called a straightforward meeting in London or Washington. Or even Paris. But the Admiral was still living in a cloak-and-mask sort of age and still obsessed with playing the cards close to his chest when the only things which now mattered were tactics. Espionage had become a precise science and a spy could monitor anything, given time, money and blackmail enough to fix contacts.
‘Dr. Grant.’ The Prime Minister was unexpectedly courteous. ‘This sort of thing may come naturally to men of your training but it is a little less normal for people like myself. Even if we did have experience of normal warfare in earlier life. And your own vigorous personality doesn’t make life easy for people who become involved with your work. But the fact remains that you are particularly suitable for the duties of your present posting and I can assure you that you still enjoy my confidence.’
Grant wriggled guiltily. The man had disarmed him and he cursed the occasional burst of temper which could still make him behave like a bull in a china shop.
The Premier held out a cigar. ‘I understand you’ve been trying to cut down on smoking. I tried myself recently but it played havoc with my temper. So let’s forget doctors and enjoy a last whiff before the Professor takes over.’ He nodded affably towards Juin. ‘Meanwhile perhaps we could begin with a general outline of what you have in mind.’
Grant drew sensuously at the Bolivar Petit Corona. The tiny room seemed even smaller now as he sensed the change of mood and watched the Ambassador settle back into his chair. The Admiral was hiding behind a cloud of smoke, but Grant knew that the old man was missing nothing in the play of personalities and that Professor Juin was waiting for his own cue like an actor in the wings preparing for his big scene.
The coffee percolator was still simmering and the Admiral poured another cup all round. ‘Tell me, gentlemen,’ he said at last, ‘what in your opinion could be worse than death?’ It was as good an opening gambit as any.
The Prime Minister pursed his lips. ‘Worse than death?’ The words seemed to fascinate him and he repeated them again. ‘Pain, possibly. The lingering pain of advanced cancer or the agony of torture.’
The Ambassador shook his head. ‘You can kill pain. I’ll settle for fear. The sort of fear we knew in the fifties. The thing that touched the world when it read On the Beach. The agony of suspense.’
‘And you, David?’
To Grant who knew him the Admiral seemed poised like a cat ready to spring. He shook his head. Lots of things could fit the bill. Survival with loss of all faculties which normally made life worth living. Or knowledge that one was losing grip and drifting into the twilight of insanity. Indeed that might be the worst thing of all for a sensitive man who knew the early symptoms and could do nothing about them.
The Prime Minister tipped off an inch of crisp ash and the gesture was strangely final. ‘Slavery,’ he said quietly. ‘Slavery with the loss of dignity and every human right which so many millions have kn
own throughout the centuries. Or am I wrong?’
‘Juin?’
The Professor was sitting motionless, his head silhouetting against the firelight. ‘Death, gentlemen, means that at least a life has first been lived.’ His voice became very soft. ‘To me it would be worse never to have lived at all.’
The men stared at him curiously. The Ambassador’s features looked as though they had been carved from teak and only his eyes showed the flash of sudden understanding. ‘You mean total world sterility?’
Juin nodded. ‘That has become a practical possibility. Or at least it has become possible easily to sterilise an immense proportion of the world population without them even knowing it had been done.’ He paused and then spoke with a passion which was almost terrifying as the meeting listened to a picture of what could lie just around the corner of time.
Spectacular advances in the development of a so-called ‘birth-control pill’ had created one of the most potentially dangerous chemicals ever used by man. It was a fluid, tasteless and odourless, but which remained stable even when mixed with a wide variety of other substances. Nor did it lose its potency with time, and it was effective in dilutions of one part in two and a half million. Production created no particular problems and distribution by any maniac who laid hands on it would be child’s play. Even a few hundred gallons poured into the reservoir of any large city must certainly reach many thousands of people. The chemical, called PENTER 15, had a specific and direct action upon females only. But one dose, even in such minute concentration, caused PERMANENT STERILITY.
‘Think of it,’ he continued. ‘A couple gets married. After a few years there are still no children. They both go through the routine of examinations in hospital. Both are found to be seemingly normal. Time passes and still there is no family. Sure. A test can be carried out to find whether or not the girl has unwittingly got a dose of the drug. But by then it will be humanly impossible for the doctors to cope. Because tests are complicated, and as you will see in a moment, although they are convincing, as matters presently stand tests of this sort are impracticable except under special circumstances.
‘But if millions of people were affected it would be impossible for the hospital services to control the situation. Many young couples would then have become not so young. Hope would have faded. There would also be an ageing population around them with no rising youth to compensate if the drug had been used for tactical purposes by an enemy power. The diminishing proportion of workers left wouldn’t be able to supply the others with necessities even allowing for possible automation. And eventually world population would drop to a fraction of its present size.
‘Think of it,’ he said quietly. ‘Hundreds of thousands of young people all over the world marrying with the hope and thrill of knowing that they were playing their part in the human story, living, loving and reproducing, watching their children grow into maturity and each subconsciously knowing that they were playing their part in the drama of life. Think of the disappointments which so many would suffer, the misery of childless homes and the quarrels which might break up so many marriages where there was no longer the anchor of real family life. Laughter would fade and the world grow old.’ He hesitated. ‘Tell me, sir. What would people do under these circumstances?’
The Prime Minister’s face was serious. ‘Live, love and cry,’ he said, ‘though before commenting further I would like to see your demonstration, Professor. But what else could they do, if what you suggest came true, but simply live—love—and cry?’
Chapter Three – ‘. . . One of the most sinister things I’ve ever seen.’
The laboratory was a spacious room, clean as an operating theatre. But in spite of earlier scientific and medical training Grant had never seen any similar display of apparatus.
A huge microscope was centred among a system of heating tubes thermostatically controlled to normal intra-uterine body temperature. A closed-circuit television occupied much of one large table, the camera attached to an eye-piece of the microscope and with Juin’s improvised system of insulation against his own electro-magnetic field forming a clumsy barrier around the controls.
A twenty-three-inch ‘ULTRA’ type television screen had been rigged in one corner and a trail of wires across the floor was anchored neatly with rubber bands.
‘Colour,’ said Juin briefly. ‘Not strictly essential, because the things we shall be working with are translucent, but I wish everything to be as convincing as possible.’
His assistants were dressed in white coats. And the others, who had changed into operating kit, blended easily with the mix-up of equipment. Not even Grant could now identify the Prime Minister, who was of much the same build as the Admiral, and the Ambassador could have been confused with himself. They had all been reduced to shapeless creatures swathed in linen gowns, shuffling clumsily in heavy waterproof boots and with even their faces reduced to patches of flesh between hat and mask.
Only eyes remained: the Ambassador’s grey-green and steady; the Prime Minister’s anxiously blue; and with Admiral Cooper’s hooded lids concealing the gimlet stare which was part of the man in action.
‘And now, gentlemen.’ Juin tapped gently on a glass-topped table. ‘The camera will pick up each object placed on the carrier of this highly developed microscope and televise an immensely magnified picture to the screen. We start with a slide of the human ovum. Taken from a dead teenager but showing the vitality we expect from a young organ.’
He slipped the oblong glass plate below a lens which magnified by one thousand diameters. ‘This is a mature ovum ready for fertilisation. But it grew as a sort of seed within the ovary, and during infancy there are about one hundred thousand of these, each a potential candidate for life. However,’ he added, ‘by puberty the number has been reduced to something around thirty thousand, and of these, in the end, only a very few are ever used. A good example of Nature’s efforts to provide a wide safety margin to protect the species. In fact,’ he continued, ‘a normal woman will produce only four hundred or so ripe ova during her whole fertile life and she will lose one in every month. Unless, of course, the ovum should be fertilised, when it will produce a baby.’
All eyes were turned to the screen from which the round blob of transparent protoplasm now stood out against the darker background like a swollen moon in an evening sky. ‘In reality this is less than one hundredth of an inch in size. A hundred and twentieth or 0·2 millimetres to be exact. But by blowing it up you can see the detail quite clearly: a central area which we call the nucleus, the rather spotty or granular material which surrounds it and the cell-membrane which keeps the whole thing together.’
He pointed to the taut outer layer. ‘This cell-membrane is vital, because during life the male germ cell is attracted towards it by a force called chemotaxis, which, in a split second of time, causes the male seed to penetrate the membrane, fuse with the central nucleus of the ovum itself and after a dramatic union of tiny particles create life.’
His voice rose slightly. ‘Chemotaxis, gentlemen, the force which attracts male seed, is probably the strongest thing in living nature. It lures the male seed through a complicated system of passages to conception deep inside the pelvis, and until now no one has even thought of interfering with this angle of the mystery of creation. But before we consider what we are up against I now propose to show you the actual fertilisation of a living ovum: and this, I must explain, is a technical achievement only very recently made possible. Indeed it is almost as though we were given the know-how in time to appreciate exactly what PENTER 15 can really mean to humanity.’
Grant sighed thoughtfully. If biologists could now actually demonstrate the origin of life under a microscope there had been a major technological breakthrough which had seemed impossible only a few years ago.
Juin’s explanation of everything he was doing had been cut down to near baby-talk. But it made the points and missed nothing. The second ovum had been removed that same morning during an operation of ele
ction in Edinburgh and immediately frozen. Temperature had been raised to just over blood heat during the previous hour and now the tiny cell was lying surrounded by normal body fluids inside a minute container which had been placed on the slide carrier. A less powerful lens had been substituted and the ovum stood out as a quivering gleam of creamy white shimmering in a pool of fluid. It was impossible to focus accurately, but enough could be seen to realise that the thing was alive, that its protoplasm had some mysterious quality absent in the prepared specimen from a dead woman.
The silence of the room was broken only by the quiet hum of Juin’s voice and an occasional rustle of clothes. Every man in the place was sitting forward in his seat: staring: staring at the wide screen and at a sudden inrush of tiny cells which looked like tadpoles. A fresh specimen had been collected from some unknown man in a side room and a pinpoint of fluid injected down a slender tube to the container on the slide carrier. There were now scores of these tiny, quivering, thrusting, wriggling cells on the edge of the screen, each wobbling uneasily behind its compact body. And then half a dozen or more darted across the field towards the bobbing ovum. There was a flurry of white and a heaving shimmer as the ovum seemed to disintegrate. For a fraction of time the viewers saw one tiny sperm fight its way through the cell wall into the depths of a living ovum: and then it was over. Confusion inside the blob of life made focussing even more difficult, but Grant knew that each man present had been thrilled as never before. He was later to learn that the complicated technique necessary to isolate and preserve a living ovum had been perfected only a few weeks earlier and that less than a dozen living people had ever seen the actual seconds of creation unfold before their eyes.
In the strange realm of micro-biological study this was as great a mystery, in its own way, as the earlier splitting of the atom had been or even the later fusion of hydrogen.
Live, Love, and Cry Page 3