Froomb!

by John Lymington

  “They are entitled to do what they like over their own

  109

  heads,” Packard said. “If they want to fill their own air with flying cow manure, that’s their business.”

  “But they are not entitled to upset the work of every other nation studying the universe!”

  “I feel that myself,” said Packard stonily.

  Artivel was taken aback. Suddenly he found the enemy was behind him pushing him forward.

  “Good lord! But if that’s so, why don’t you use your influence?”

  “Have you ever tried to use your influence on a gang of Service chiefs, who are, remember, no longer fighting men but sparring politicians? Have you? Do you know what it’s like to try?”

  “I have made many objections in the past—"

  “And what has happened to them?” Packard grinned. “They have been noted, that is, written down and hung up in the clerks’ toilet. Surely you know how things go by now?” “But you’re a member of the Cabinet! You have—”

  “I don’t happen to be a member of the American government, which is perhaps fortunate for them. They would not act on what I said. You have to remember their attitude to the British. They stole our law and language when they set up shop, and to their eternal shame have never been able to replace either. Owing so much engenders dislike. Lend somebody some money, and you’ll know. Have you ever thought how rich the English and the Spanish would this day be if each charged a royalty on the use of their languages?”

  “Are you mad, David?” Artivel always found himself blunted by these deviations, and to him madness was the only explanation.

  “Conveniently,” said Packard.

  Artivel surrendered the line and took another.

  •“You could organize a government protest—”

  “It wouldn’t do any good, Arty. We have to go on. We’ve put in more than we can afford. Something’s got to show for all that money next year, when the figures come out.” “But why—why do it at all?”

  “One must. One must find out.” Packard drank again. “You want to find out. So does everybody.”

  “But this is being done just like a prize fighter flexing his muscles, trying to frighten the other man.”

  “Well, that’s life,” said Packard. “That’s why animals snarl

  110

  and men talk, I suppose. I know what you feel, Arty. I should be the same in your shoes. In fact, I think you’re being magnificently restrained when I think what I’d do. But there’s nothing I can do, unless—”

  “What?” Artivel stared at Packard as the Minister leaned suddenly across the desk.

  “Unless you can give me a definite scientific reason why this thing is fatal for mankind.”

  Artivel remained staring, then began to laugh so that sweat drops shook off his chin.

  “God, you’re madder than you used to be,” he said. “How could I tell? I haven’t been taken into the confidence of these lunatics.”

  “I believe that when—if, this thing goes wrong, it will be because of some simple, natural reaction that nobody thought of,” Packard said angrily. “We have lived on complication, multiplication, stupefaction by figures, made a god of bumbled arithmetic, spent our lives unraveling knots in string we made ourselves and forgot how. The reason I am worried is that I believe there is some simple thing that has been overlooked. Some simple, homely little thing that every man in the street would understand.”

  “Impossible!” Artivel said. “Men aren’t such fools.”

  A smile spread slowly over Packard’s face.

  “So you are on their side, too,” he said quietly. He shrugged and looked away. “But remember it was the nail that lost the battle.”

  “But hundreds of physicists have been at work on this,”

  Artivel said contemptuously. “If they’ve missed anything, it isn’t likely that anyone else will find it.”

  “Until afterward,” said Packard.

  Artivel’s eyes shrank, his face hardened, linen drying in wrinkles. The sweat gathered under his chin.

  “If you really think like that, you ought to stop it!” he said, his yellow teeth showing.

  “I can’t,” said Packard.

  Artivel bowed his head once, turned and strode out of the room. Packard remained sitting, looking out of the great window at the powdered fields of yellow lights gathered about the black snake of the river, writhing toward the East and tomorrow.

  Where was Brunt? Where was Ann?

  He sat back, buttoned his collar and retied the bow with

  111

  skillful fingers. He shoved his hand through his hair. It was

  hot. He felt sticky after watching Artivel sweat. He took some Cologne out of a drawer and dabbed his face with it. He stood up and looked at the phone, but it didn’t make her ring.

  “Silly bitch!” he said, and marched to the door. He switched the lights to glow and went out.

  As he walked beside long glass-paneled walls of soft light he thought of an error in Blackout, the error in Flightend, the error in John Brunt. The error, the error, the error. Where had it been in John Brunt? Where was it going to be shown? Like Blackout, it would have to wait until afterward to show.

  Flightend? Well, that was just straightforward poisoning. Such a disaster had been on its way for years, had long been happening in smaller doses. There was no longer any doubt that nervous diseases had been caused for years by artificial additions to foods growing and grown; the whole art of the artificial was accumulating into systematic poisoning. It was known to be happening, but without starving a percentage of the population while agriculture got back on to another line, nothing could be done. Like the insects, it had been hoped mankind would adapt itself. Unfortunately humans did not seem to be so adaptable.

  Flightend was another step in a foreseen direction. Brunt was not. Blackout was as unpredictable as Brunt had been. Each point had been reached step by step using known facts, but in Brunt’s case somewhere back along the line a bit of dirt had been picked up on the shoe and changed everything in the end.

  Why did he keep thinking Blackout would be the same?

  He had sometimes mentioned Blackout to Brunt. Apart from that was the only connection failure, and the possibility of another failure?

  “No, no!” He stopped and looked into a mirror, his brilliant blue eyes challenging, his mouth curled, trying to see into his own lionish head. “No, it’s something in the back of my beetle brain. If Brunt meets God he might ask what it is. Only Brunt wouldn’t know anything technical about Blackout to tell Him.” He turned away. “Maybe Brunt doesn’t know anything about anything any more.”

  Suddenly he realized what Ann had been to him in these last years.

  112

  A sorter-out of confusion, quieter of alarm and easer of tension.

  And by her going she had increased all three.

  “Damn it!” he snorted in the empty vestibule. “I’m not dependent on a woman!”

  He marched on. Into his head flashed a memory of a new Chinese system of pumping a man’s blood out of him and shooting back a liquid to make him last a thousand years.

  “I won’t let any damn woman pump the blood out of me!” he said, bursting aside a pair of blue metallic doors. “God, what a sight I’d look in a thousand years if I went on worrying about women!”

  The porter turned as he entered the hall, but did not look

  surprised.

  “Leave them alone, Watkins!” Packard thundered. “They’re damned illusionists. They make you think you must have them. Hypnotism, suggestion, subliminal bloody penetration, Watkins. Get me a table at Farrano’s, Watkins. On the floor. I’m going to watch lots of ’em prancing about with no clothes on and I’m going to sneer. Do you want to last a thousand years?”

  “Me, sir? I haven’t the chance.”

  “Lucky sod,” said Packard, profoundly admiring. “I wish I had your o
utlook. Severely practical, pessimistic, real. No horror at the thought of what it would be like, just clean, straightforward don’t-want-to-know, don’t-want-to- waste-time-guessing. Do you know where we’d be if we all thought like you, Watkins? We’d be drawing pictures on cave walls and banging the women on the head with rocks. And that is what it ought to be like. Good night, Watkins. Stay with your primeval preoccupations.”

  Watkins saluted, grinning as Packard marched through the open door and then looked back.

  “How’s that boy of yours?”

  “Better, sir, thank you.”

  “He shouldn’t make his own fireworks.” He turned to go down the steps. “No more should we.” He went down the steps, big, black-outlined, head forward, hair straying, hands in his pockets showing his white shirt in the lamplight. The chauffeur braced himself. There was something impressive, powerful, even fearsome about the big, raging, bewildered scientist.

  Packard did not see the open car door but turned and

  113

  walked across the steps slantwise down to the pavement. Then he remembered and turned back.

  “Sorry, George. You can pack in. I’m walking.”

  George saluted, then drove the car slowly round into the garage to rejoin the poker game in the driver’s room.

  Packard walked on under the trees. The pavement was hot under his feet. The air was very warm. Beneath the striped awnings of the pub on the corner people were drinking out on the apron, yellow light from inside pouring out on them as if they stood before the doors of a furnace, drinking, laughing.

  Packard was arrested by the thought, and stopped his giant strides. Hell, it was. Laughing and drinking at the furnace doors, living in the moment, this moment. Just for a little moment in time held in life that was being, not sorry for what it had been, or fearing what it might be. The scene was Now.

  Somebody bumped into him as the thought flashed in his head and kept flashing, trying to make him recognize it.

  He started forward again, went among the merry people of the moment and into the pub. There were people sitting around at the tables. It was all green leather and light oak decoration, all plastic, sprayed once a week with oak and leather smells.

  There were three barmaids, all busy, all pretty, all desirable, all looking somehow like Ann. When one smiled and came to him he growled like a bear.

  “Worthington,” he said, and turned his head away.

  He had to talk about this idea, as he always did talk about ideas, but Ann wasn’t there any more. She was sitting in a dozen places at the tables scattered around, and outside on the pavement, laughing and drinking with strangers.

  Extractors drew out the heated smoke and cold air was blown in to be heated up before its relief was noticed. A young bearded man was leaning on the counter, staring at a barmaid’s bosom, contemplating it, but when she moved to serve, his eyes stayed in the same place. Then something disturbed him and he turned his head and looked at Packard.

  Packard stared back over the rim of his glass. He put the glass down.

  114

  “Have you read Dunne's Experiment with Time?" Packard said.

  The young man stared.

  “Should I?” he said.

  Packard watched him keenly.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” he said.

  “So long as you don’t vanish—yes.” The young man laughed.

  “It is based on a theory of Time Belts, that other worlds exist at the same time as ours, in the same places, but only occasionally can you tune in from our waveband to another. That’s when you contact a ghost.”

  The young man’s eyes gleamed.

  “You wouldn’t fool me,” he said. “I happen to have seen a ghost. Twenty people with me also saw it. The rest didn’t, but they might not have been looking.”

  “Interesting,” said Packard, watching intently. “Ever • thought about Heaven?”

  “Heaven? Well, my idea is a place where you have large credits, large cars, large flats, large girls. That would be my idea.”

  “And where would this be, in your idea?”

  “Round the corner. That’s the whole idea of Heaven. It’s got to be round the corner. Nobody would bother with it otherwise.”

  “Not on another time belt?”

  “That would do of course.”

  “Future or past?” Packard’s eyes gleamed like porcelain.

  The young man stared. Smooth brow furrowed.

  “Never thought,” he said.

  “But at your age you should be discussing these things into the small hours every night.”

  “We don’t always think, though.” He drank some of a pint of beer, watching the barmaids for inspiration. “It would have to be future,” he said firmly, putting the tankard down.

  “Yes,” said Packard. “It would have to be future. It couldn’t be past, because you wouldn’t have been conceived. Anyhow, there could be nothing new about the past. Heaven would have to be part of a progression, if there is such a place.”

  “Well, you go on. I could do a thesis on this. Just go on. It’ll save me thinking.”

  115

  “But if it’s in a time belt ahead of us, it couldn’t be too far ahead. There must be some identification with the fife we know and have led.”

  “Well, if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be us, so we would, in fact, be dead.”

  “Exactly. If the spark of life changes, as the body does, into manure to enrich other forms of life, that would be death for the soul.”

  “You don’t look the sort of man to believe in souls.” The young man was puzzled.

  Packard looked right through him as he drank his beer.

  “But if the spark goes on, even in another form, it might still be recoverable,” he said.

  “Recoverable? What on earth do you mean?”

  Packard gestured.

  “Bringing back to life.”

  “Is that what you do?” The young man was fascinated, his eyes widening. “You look different, but you don’t look like a sort of Jesus.”

  Packard slammed the glass down and then money.

  “Worthington,” he said, his eyes far away.

  “Do you come here often? I’ve seen you before,” the young man said. “I know! On telly. You’re a professor of something.”

  “It could be the past, but not ours. A different past on a different belt.”

  “No, that would be the same as you said before, changing altogether. You couldn’t identify yourself with another past, or another world. That would be completely new existence, which wouldn’t be you at all.”

  “The trouble is that in that realm, anything is possible,” Packard said.. “Our little heads are so bound by limits of imagination that much is possible that we can’t achieve.” He drank, and the brightness of his eyes dimmed. “I’m talking like a fool, like a schoolboy, like a student.”

  “Thanks,” said the young man, and grinned.

  “My view of it before has always been to discover, to find out what is there beyond this life,” Packard went on. “There are so many worlds one can imagine. I was willing to wait and find out. Then suddenly it occurred to me that it could only lie in the future, this Heaven, whatever sort it is.

  “Then I argued against myself by stating that such an

  116

  idea is purely a human one, bound by the limitations of the human understanding. That seemed to put it out.

  “But then again, Heaven or a life beyond concerns merely the animals in this world, and Heaven itself is part of that limited understanding. Therefore the chances are it must lie in our future. Our future, let me emphasize.”

  “There isn’t any other,” said the young man.

  “Because we can only understand time as going in a straight line, past, present, future. We can’t imagine it as a medium with four dimensions. We can’t imagine it and such a form of Time would not affect us or our lives. So tha
t it’s quite likely that such a form doesn’t exist, and that its only form is a progression despite theories to the contrary. In fact, I could be right, that a future existence is what it says, in the future!”

  He smiled and stared over the counter as if some great relief had come upon him, even if only temporary.

  “What are you thinking about now?” said the student curiously.

  “I was thinking what a beautiful pair of tits that girl has,” said Packard, and finished his beer.

  He was reminded of Ann. More curious than ever, the student watched his face surge with anger; then saw him turn and go out, striding, as if needing to escape.

  “Perhaps he’s a sex maniac,” said the student, and began to make notes on the back of his overdue lodgings bill for his thesis. “Time, Heaven and Tits,” he wrote, and looked up at the nearest barmaid.

  -5

  Hoskins looked at the sentinel row of clocks, all showing

  a different time. But the master clock in the middle said ten-fifteen, twenty-two-fifteen. The figures on their green dials glowed softly in glass. He turned slightly and looked at the rows of television tubes, idly flicking worms across a green vacuity. Inside crystal cases in the steel cabinets tapes moved slowly, winding endlessly. The humming of elec

  117

  trical business made his skin tingle uneasily. Hoskins did not feel easy with things he did not understand.

  He understood practically nothing of this, except that he hoped Packard would not come back.

  Hoskins kept looking at the crystal chair with its armored cables like silver worms leading away out of it and into steel boxes. Secret steel boxes. The crystal chair seemed to be a centerpiece, an altar.

  It was some kind of crystal plastic, with silver cables running in it, to metal plates at various points, on the arms, behind the head, at the feet.

  It could be an electric chair. But Hoskins had seen electric chairs, and never one as elaborate as this. There were too many other connections, so many snaking cables running into secret steel boxes and making meters kick uneasily, the screens flicker, and the tapes roll; There was a tense feeling—almost a smell—of complicated electronics.

  Once Hoskins had an idea he grasped it, squeezed it, twisted it, beat it and put it through the mangle of his mind until every possibility had been extracted from it.