“Who took over, then?”
“There were a lot of women, and after they were there for some time, other women came in and seemed to manage the inn. The cottages round, too. I don’t know why. You hear people talk, but they don’t explain, and you can’t ask...” She sighed and touched his hand.
“How did you come here?”
“I was scientifically killed.”
“It was violent?”
“I suppose so. I didn’t feel anything.”
She looked at him again.
“There is something different,” she said.
A sudden need to boast rose in him, just as if he were again a boy round the Churchyard, saying how different he was, how different his father was—
“They’re going to bring me back—send me back—whichever way you put it,” he said, and laughed shortly.
Her melancholy became more marked as she stared at him, and then turned away. He touched her hand.
“Where are we?” he asked urgently. “I know it’s my village and perhaps a different time, but—where are we?” “Waiting,” she said. “Some of us have to wait. You know that.”
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She threw his hand aside, got up and walked away down the willow path, pulling her shawl back over her head. The sun was hot. He heard the vegetation humming in the drowsy summer. He looked round. The clock still said half past three.
How long ago since the woman had beaten him? Hadn’t that been morning? How long did he love with Helen? A long time, or a short time, or what?
Suddenly he wanted to be wtih Helen again, cuddled against her soft, rich bosom, because he was frightened and uneasy with the quiet strangeness of the summer world.
4
“Look,” Packard said angrily, “I want to see Miss Gill!”
The porter of the flats regarded him stonily, as if the growing fury of the visitor made him all the more determined to stonewall.
“You can’t,” said the porter. “She’s gone.!’
The cold fear of sudden loss held Packard still. She had done it after all.
“Gone where?”
“1 don’t know.” A look of quiet satisfaction smoothed the open insolence on the man’s face. “Unless you’re Professor Packard.”
The cold went; heat rushed up in him.
“Yes. I am!”
“Then there’s a message for you,” said the porter. “Just a minute.” He went into his glass office, rummaged under the racing paper on his desk and brought out an envelope.
Packard snatched it and ripped it with a finger so the envelope split out. He had ripped the note as well. As he pulled it out, one piece floated to the floor. He bent and snatched it up. The words stared up in her big round hand.
“. . . so goodbye, David darling. I love you.”
He gasped in breath and held it, then turned over the opening of the note.
“I can’t go any more. You’ll be better alone, as you said.
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Don’t bother with me. You must go ahead. You have the faith, I haven’t . . .”
He stared blankly at the porter’s slow grin.
“Where did she go?” Packard was whispering, then repeated the words in a shout.
“I don’t know. She packed in, paid, handed in the key and went. With cases. I put them in the car.”
“But didn’t she say something? Didn’t she give an address?” He was desperate, and he showed it.
“She wasn’t in the mood to—” the porter chose his word carefully and licked his lips before he said it, “—to have anybody follow.”
Packard turned and pushed out of the glass doors on to
the broad curving steps. He stood looking out into the night beyond the light glare of the entrance.
A moon was showing behind silver edged clouds. The thin piles of office blocks stood against the patchwork sky like fingers to Heaven.
“I didn’t mean that!” he muttered. “God knows I didn’t mean that!” He strode away along the empty pavement, his heels beating a tattoo of despair. “I’ll bring John Brunt back. I promise I’ll bring him back!”
The Halloween skull of a phone booth appeared round a corner. He ran to it, digging in his pocket for his book of special numbers. He began to ring . . .
“Daisy, do you know where Ann lived before she came to London?” “... Roger, do you know where Ann lived ... ?”
“For God’s sake, Bill, where did she come from?”
Where did she come from? Where did she come from? For all the years he had worked with her, he had never known. Had he asked? He could not remember. Whenever they had talked, he had talked. He had talked about his work, new projects, new discoveries, new ideas. There had been all the enthusiasm, the excitement of new worlds, and the sweetness of the old was taken for granted, affection overlooked, left to rot for the second time in his life. He had raged over the fusions of atoms and never known where she had come from or where she might run to when he failed her.
He came out of the booth, his collar and tie undone again. He kept getting the feeling he would choke, his big body tried to burst out of the shirt.
“Sod it, sod it!” he cried out. “What the hell am I going to do?” He was alone. If anything went wrong with Brunt
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now there would be nobody with him. They’d blown the
whole thing up so big it would smother him, just as she’d said. Dicky wouldn’t stand by. He’d scuttle. He’d turn away calmly, glowing with self-reproach, like a glorious sunset. The bubbling waters of treachery would rush up through his open sea cocks and he would sink, smiling with patient regret, and upon his watery grave he would insist upon the inscription, “I was not told the truth. Packard sank me.”
And Ann had gone, the inconstant cow!
Shame and regret flooded him as the words flashed in his mind. For she had been constant all along. For years she had stood by him, in most difficult decisions where everybody had thought him mad, or criminally wrong, she had stood by until he had won, neither mad nor wrong. She had seen him come through to where now the legend was that, however mad he sounded, the world would listen. She had stood by in the difficult days, when it had seemed there was no hope for his career, his faith, even his existence. She had never wavered then. She had been true.
But she had been against the Brunt experiment all along. From the very start there had been something about it that had frightened her. Surely it couldn’t have been more than a woman’s instinct? Who could say that it had gone wrong now?
But Brunt had disintegrated.
He gritted his teeth and swore again. A mountain of depression was settling on him. He began to walk along the Embankment, beneath the flicking shadows of the big trees cutting the lamplight into pools of shadow. Over the Embankment wall the foam-decked river spread to the far shore where solitary tall buildings stood against the starlit sky.
He stopped in deep shadow and watched the stars. His eyes fixed on one and sight traveled suddenly up a dizzy stairway toward it.
Was Brunt there?
Another thought jostled Brunt aside.
Tomorrow the stars would be blocked out over half the modern world by an invisible blanket of terror. His belly cramped with cold.
It was the size of failure, should it come, that griped him. And why shouldn’t it come? Not for the first time, that day thousands of people had died by a miscalculation. Thousands would still die by such errors, such side-effects. The eternal
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struggle to wrench more money out of nature could have no other end but in death, a Midas death.
And if these little failures were suddenly multiplied by a force bigger than all the poisons going adrift, would not the side-effect be the same? But on a scale sufficient to push aside the balance of the world forever.
That was the difference. If it did go wrong nothing achieved by man could ever readjust the error.
It might
be that he had a big enough voice to make a pause, but without a specific reason he could not speak.
But was his feeling of depression caused by Brunt? The tension caused by waiting on these things to know if they were right? What was the use of worrying, anyway? Brunt was dead. Tomorrow a hundred million could be dead. What could anyone do against the wide determination to know the Truth? Even when the only Truth that had ever been found was Death?
He was standing quite still by a tree watching the stars across the Surrey hills when the man came. He came quickly, and yet with some uncertainty. He was furtive in looking round him, but the look was too quick, too careless to be effective.
Packard watched, some instinct telling him the feelings of the man. In the silence before the final movements began, Packard heard the water of high tide lapping against the Embankment steps, twenty feet below the parapet.
The man used the stone of a lamp standard to get up on to the parapet. Packard went forward as the man balanced precariously, teetering on the edge of life.
Packard raised his hand in the quivering silence, put it in the man’s back and pushed firmly. Instantly the man’s forward start changed. He pressed back against the force in his back. Packard took his hand away and stood aside, his big body poised like a boxer’s, waiting after dealing a shocking blow.
The man toppled over backward and landed on the pavement on all fours, his head hanging. Then he started to sob. Packard took a thin cigar from his dinner jacket pocket, relaxed, and put it between his teeth. He flicked a lighter and watched the man squat upward, wiping his face with an outspread hand. He was shivering.
“You tried to push me in!” he said hoarsely.
“On the contrary, I stopped you killing yourself,” Packard said, blowing out a long cloud of smoke. “One of man’s
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few arte is that of making a force do the work for him. If I’d grabbed you and tried to pull you back, I would have broken my arm, slipped a disc and crushed my ribs against the parapet. You would have drowned, as intended. By pushing you, you naturally pushed back. Which means you should have another think. Man is always willing to kill himself, but unwilling to be pushed into it. That is what we call sanity. You still have it.”
He bent and looked at the shaking man as he squatted there.
“Why?” he said.
The man just shook his head. He was only one of many.
Packard took his trembling wrist and felt the pulse thudding, quick with the nearness of death.
“You’ve been taking drugs,” he said. He let the wrist go. The man’s arm fell back by his side lifelessly. “Take my advice. I’m a doctor. There are very good places where they get rid of the need.” He reached into his pocket and pressed the button of his DF radio. It was constantly tuned to the Ministry day and night service, and gave his position to within yards.
“They started it,” the man said suddenly. “The bloody doctors. They gave it to me. There was an accident. They filled me with the stuff. After that, it came naturally. My wife’s gone. So’s everything else. I’ve got nothing left now. What’s the bloody good, when it’s like that?”
“I don’t know,” Packard said. “I don’t know if it’s any good when it isn’t like that.”
The man got up and leaned against the parapet. He stared.
“You’re queer,” he said. “You don’t understand.”
The Ministry car came up to the curb. Packard took the man’s arm.
“You come with me,” he said. “We can help.”
Again the man resisted.
“No,” he said.
Packard let go and watched his greenish face in the lamp- light.
“You want to die?” he asked.
“That’s my business.”
Packard nodded. He went to the car and got in. He saw the man leaning against the parapet, glaring resentfully.
“He won’t do it now,” Packard said. The car drew off. “But that’s a guess, like everything else.”
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“Where to, sir?” the driver said.
“Just drive around the empty streets of the city,” Packard said. He felt very tired, like the man who had stood a moment on the parapet. But he had no pavement to fall on. There was water both sides. “Froomb,” he muttered. “Real and true.”
General Macnamara looked unimpressive in a lounge suit.
His eyes did not gleam with the upward reflection of his brass and medals, in fact until he spoke he looked almost sorry. His gray hair, cropped all over as if recovering from some scalp disease, made him look very old. As he stared at Parker Moll, the fire of a lifetime in the Army burned in his eyes.
“What in hell does Packard’s angle count?” he said. “He
may be boss here, but he isn’t boss with me. What’s he scared of, anyway?”
“He’s not scared,” Parker said, fondling his glass. “He’s just got doubts.”
“We’ve passed time for doubts,” the general said. “What’s the matter with him? Tell me, Park. Make it plain.” He looked at his watch to indicate the importance of the interview.
He nodded as some club members went by. “Good evening, General.” “Hi, General.” His ears pricked for general.
Parker’s mouth tightened.
“He’s uneasy. He was speaking about odds against chain- reaction. He’s been right so often.”
“Sure, he’s an impressive guy, and some talker, too. I could listen to him for hours, for pleasure, that is. I wouldn’t take him for gilt.”
“He has a twisted sense of humor, General.”
‘Twisted? It nearly screws my head off sometimes.” The general remembered something and burst into a wild laugh* “I’d guess that’s what he’s doing now, Park. Just fooling. Or maybe he has a little froomb. Nothing to speak of. We all get it before battle. Every fighting man knows the feeling, Park. But it goes with the action. I’ve seen too much of it, Park. Too much not to be wise to the deeps before the action. Yes, sir.”
“In the case of Dave Packard—”
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“If a man doesn’t have this feeling when he faces action, then he’s just a no-good soldier. Yes, sir. It shows he makes an appreciation of his situation, and a man who can make an appreciation of his situation, sir, is the man most likely to win. I’ve seen too much—”
Park drank as if to stop words coming up his throat. He swallowed hard and waited as other club members respectfully hailed the general.
“Suppose he is right, something goes wrong—”
“Nothing to go wrong, Park,” said the general beaming and slapping Parker’s arm. “You’ve checked everything personally.”
“It’s impossible to check everything, because it’s impossible to figure exactly what it entails. If there is some tiny force, maybe a side-effect of this radiation that can’t be appreciated until it’s actually created—”
“If my fellow Americans created this device,” said the general, still slapping his arm, “I’m with it all the way. I trust you boys like I trust my own men.”
He stopped slapping.
“Guess I’m froomb, too,” Parker said, and turned away. He was depressed. He never liked the days before something big, not since the Des Moines disaster. There were so many tiny components in the complicated apparatuses used, but even then they numbered only a fraction of the atoms distorted and misplaced in a single, simple fission. And Blackout was neither single, nor simple.
He went into the booth and telephoned his wife back home. He felt almost normal afterward. The general was talking to a group of officers in the bar. Parker watched for a moment.
Yes, sir, they were a fine body of men, but they didn’t give a damn what happened, until it had happened. They had weapons put into their hands and expected them to work. Perhaps it was the fault of the scientists for giving them such confidence. But then they didn’t know how often weapons failed that never came into the soldiers’ hands.
It wasn’t their job to know, anyhow, and the scientists didn’t want to tell. It was all so natural.
“Maybe I rate Dave too high,” Parker said to himself as he ordered another drink. “Maybe he talked me into it. Maybe it’ll be all right tomorrow.”
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As they slid along the shining, empty street by the bank Packard sat forward.
“Ring the office, George. See if my secretary has called.”
The sudden hope did not die until he heard the chauffeur talking on the phone. Then he sat back in the seat again, mouthing oaths like a frustrated boy.
“There’s Professor Artivel at the office, sir. Says it’s very important.”
Packard shut his eyes. He had been an enemy of Artivel since Cambridge and could almost foretell the conversation that would follow their meeting.
“Take me back,” said Packard.
Professor Artivel was a radio astronomer operating at Cambridge. He was continually complaining about high altitude detonations which upset his telescopes. He was totally against using any form of nuclear fission for attack, defense or any kind of fight.
Artivel was bearded and usually pursued by a number of young men eager to catch any pearls that might drop from his sweating brow. Artivel always sweated. He was sweating when Packard came into his office and assumed his seat at the desk. Packard opened the special drawer and took out the drink tray.
“For you?” Packard asked slyly.
Artivel did not trouble to reply. He did not drink.
“Are you aware that the Americans are proposing to test this idiotic cobalt radiation shield tomorrow, Packard?”
“Yes,” said Packard, pouring out raw Scotch.
“You are concerned with it!”
“I am. I share your uneasiness. There is an unjustifiable risk in it. My instincts say it could backfire. Anything could, but my instincts seem a bit fixed on this one. Yet I don’t know
why.”
“Can’t you persuade them to stop?”
“Me?” Packard grimaced and began to laugh. “What could I do?”
“Such an experiment will distort all the interstellar echoes for the next two years!” Artivel shouted. “Our work will be held up for all that time!”
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