Froomb!

by John Lymington

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  “Those are all questions, presumably,” Packard said, jerking

  his hand at the sheaf of papers.

  Jack Bart cleared his throat.

  “Just a few jottings, Professor,” he said, sharply.

  His lower jaw stuck out further than the top one, making his nose look flat. He was just like a boxer. Packard was pleased with the likeness.

  The make-up girl came and peered into his face.

  “Not for me, dear,” Packard said. “You remember? I have the bloody, rubicund look that comes over so well on the better boxes.”

  She laughed.

  “You look fine,” she said. “But you always do.”

  “And please switch off your DF,” the producer said, “It screams like a banshee on the sound.”

  “It will be a pleasure, I assure you,” Packard said, and looked at his watch. Twenty to ten. “Just get me the latest from your newsroom. Figures.”

  “I have them,” the producer said. “Right here. They’ll bring any more as they come.”

  Packard made no remark as he read the figures. Jack Bart watched intently. Packard grimaced inadvertently and crammed the paper into his pocket.

  “What sort of questions?” Packard said.

  “Just the routine you use for testing and checking these products at your Ministry.” Jack Bart put his papers behind him with both hands, as a sort of mannerism.

  The Chinese representative came into the room with two officials attending him closely, putting him at ease.

  “Chiang!” Packard cried.

  “David,” said the Chinese, hurrying forward. “So they have you, too! Is this to be a pyre of scientists? Will they they burn us for witches, as you say?”

  “What are you dragged in for?”

  “A little talk on scientific progress in China. Nothing very much. You know, how to boil water by breathing on it.”

  Packard laughed, then suddenly remembered the Prime Minister’s visit that afternoon, and the story of the heat ray. He felt a strong urge to ask Chiang about it. Jack Bart stood by, watching both men, his head forward, nose twitching, as if choosing which one to bite.

  Packard and Chiang had met several times at international

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  science organizations, where scientists of all nations got together and discussed new developments, excluding those which were being developed secretly for defense. Yet, somehow, everybody always knew a little about them. There was a strong tendency for new developments to travel along similar lines, gaining the same shape in different places.

  “Are you going to the States tomorrow?” Chiang asked blandly.

  “No,” Packard said.

  “It will be interesting,” said Chiang.

  And Blackout would be a lot of bloody good against land-borne heat machines, Packard thought. But it was likely they had been developed for use against the Russians, who, like the Americans, had their fears turned skyward and would not expect anything on the level. It was a fascinating, schoolboy thought to imagine an armored vehicle scooting over the land at some sixty miles an hour, just melting everything in front of it, weapons, people and all. For at the moment, there was no known defense against it. Steel and man would be dispersed in the same way, thought Packard, except that you would get a little puff of steam off the man.

  He watched Bart talking to Chiang, but did not hear what they said. The rolling tanks of the heat rays were pounding in his mind, mixed up with the rocky foundations of Blackout, about to collapse like the pillars of Samson’s temple, and the killing pains of Flightend and the disintegration of John Brunt. In that moment each matter seemed of equal importance, as if they all had some horror in common. It was a gathering of dread. The nightmare was on him and would not shake off.

  “You feel all right?” The producer was at his elbow, watching. “You wouldn’t like a pill?”

  “I wouldn’t like a pill,” Packard said. “What I will have is a large Scotch, afterward. Please have it ready. I shall be thirsty.”

  “How are you going to treat this?” the producer asked curiously.

  “With due regret,” Packard said. “Also with a warning.”

  “You have withdrawn the stuff, have you?”

  “Stopped it.”

  “Isn’t it funny is should have shown itself all at once?” said Bart, barking suddenly.

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  “No. Its toxic qualities may need special conditions which have been met up in East Anglia. We don’t know what they are, but we have to make sure no other place gives these conditions.”

  Bart took a quick look at his sheaf.

  “You know that Quickswell stuff they’ve been using?” he said. “They’ve got cabbages four feet across in three weeks and carrots like bombs.”

  “I know. But I don’t advise you to eat any of them. It’s like eating plastic.” Packard’s face was hard.

  “Did you know, Professor, a herd of dairy cows got into a field of these cabbages near Stratford?”

  “Really, my Ministry cannot keep track of lowing wanderers in search of fodder,” said Packard.

  “But the cows have been dry ever since,” Bart snarled, his head jerking forward. “They’re sick. Their hind legs are giving way. Twelve of them have been put down.”

  Oh Christ! Packard thought: is he going to trot out every small case of side-effect he’s come across this year? I’ll never last the course.

  “Suppose you give me the rough questions,” he said.

  Bart looked at him and turned quickly as the producer gave a signal.

  “May we have you in the studio, please?*’

  They marched off into the great studio with the mass of hanging lights overhead, like an upside-down forest in the gloom. One corner of the great studio was bright with spots directed on two chairs. Two cameras were nosing at the chairs.

  Packard knew the routine. They tested for sound, for for picture. The clock flicked its big hand. The producer peered through the glass window of his bridge, far off in the gloom beyond the bright spot. The floor manager read his notes, his headphones trailing away from his lanky body, tying him to a reality beyond the cave.

  The “Air” signal glowed. Bart began to bully, but in four questions added a respectful “Professor,” and two after that, “Sirs” came frequently. Packard was in his stride. He was always all right so long as he could talk.

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  Lord Lorrellmore looked at the shadow of- Packard’s face as he lounged back in a deep armchair, balancing a drink on the arm. Edward Marshall watched, sitting forward anxiously in his chair.

  “He’s handling it,” said Lorrellmore gently. “You ought to feel thankful you’ve got such a champion, instead of wanting to kick him out.”

  “He has a remarkable presence,” said Parson-Jones, the newly appointed Foreign Minister.

  “He can fool the people most of the time,” said Lorrellmore. “They think he means it.”

  “The trouble is we’ve exported shiploads of the stuff,” said Parson-Jones. “We’ve had enough trouble from overseas just recently through Packard’s department. Those contraceptives. The women eat them like sweets, and can have children up to the age of seventy. Nobody checked on that.” “How do you know it’s seventy?” Lorrellmore inquired. “They’ve only been taking them fifteen years.”

  ‘That appears to be long enough,” said Parson-Jones. “Long enough to tell, I mean. But there’s those nerve pick-me-ups, those green things. The side-effects of those make contraceptives superfluous.”

  “Do they?” asked Lorrellmore. “I didn’t know it was that. I thought it was the stuff they manure the vegetables with.”

  The Home Secretary took no part in the conversation. He watched and listened to Packard, odd feelings of admiration, relief and guilt pushing about inside him “He’s not constant,” said Parson-Jones. “He turned down the plastic chicken.”

  “I didn’t know you
were in that.” Lorrellmore looked

  at him evenly.

  “Not me—my family,” said Parson-Jones, brushing nothing off his knee. “And when we—the family—asked him point blank why, he said the public’s nerves had been mauled

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  around enough already, without sending them off into a screaming fit of frustration.”

  “What plastic chicken?” said Marshall, flicking off the set at the end of the interview.

  “It’s a new system. The broilers got so tasteless they had to start injecting flavor,” said Lorrellmore. “Then we found as long as it was tender and tasted they could make it in plastic by the millions at a tenth the cost of keeping a chicken.”

  Marshall stared.

  “I hadn’t heard of that one,” he said, his mouth twisting with distaste.

  “You won’t, while Packard’s there,” said Parson-Jones. “He says he fears side-effects. He had the effrontery to say if we ate plastic, plastic would come out the other end and at once the paper manufacturers would lose half their market, the drains would crack, the sewage plants choke up, rivers fill with the debris, seas become fouled with floating rafts of the stuff like the Sargasso Sea—” “Oh don’t repeat his balderdash!” said Marshall. “The man’s cracked!”

  “Why so jagged?” asked Lorrellmore sharply. “Have you something to tell us about Packard?”

  “Hoskins rang. He’s found Brunt’s things in-a cupboard at Packard’s flat—things he wouldn’t leave behind.”

  “So it looks as if my Lord Archbishop was right. Packard has taken the final plunge in the cause of science.” Lorrellmore stared beyond Marshall’s head for a moment before concentrating again. “What now?”

  “What can we do now?” Marshall asked. “It looks as if he’s done a murder. If he has, well, it’s a murder.” “It seems strange when they’re dying like worms all over Norfolk to lynch a man for killing just one,” said Lorrellmore. “But, as you say, it’s justice.”

  “He might prove insanity,” said Parson-Jones.

  “That would be a farce,” said Lorrellmore. “The man’s a brilliantly sane nonconformist, and strange as it may seem, he has a very deep respect for the ordinary man, and the ordinary man is not so dumb that he can’t sense it.” Marshall stood up.

  “I’m going to stop Hoskins,” he said. “Say there’s been an error.”

  “Then where’s John Brunt?” asked Lorrellmore.

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  “Hundreds of people disappear every week,” said Marshall, sharply.

  Lorrellmore sat back, watching Marshall coolly. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I happened to let slip an idea to Rugeley.”

  Marshall went paler.

  “You did that deliberately! You know he’s got millions sunk in this Flightend. It’ll he all over his paper tomorrow— Brunt’s disappearance. He’ll fix it, you know that, and that’s why you did it. Of all people! Rugeley!”

  “Look, I thought we were all agreed on this matter,” said Lorrellmore smoothly. “But if you would like me to contact Rugeley again—”

  “When you’ve just had a nationwide splonk that Packard promises to withdraw Flightend?” shouted Marshall, paler still. “Good God! Nothing will stop Rugeley now, and what he hasn’t got he’ll get his writers to make up!”

  “But surely your powers—” said Parson-Jones.

  “I dare not misuse my powers in a case like this. A leading member of the government like Packard. Good God! We should all be in it if it leaked.”

  “Why the devil did you start it?” Lorrellmore said, sharp with anger. “What’s the use of getting cold feet now? The time to have shivered was when Cantuar blew up on the phone today.”

  “The Archbishop’s idea was to stop him doing it!” snapped Marshall. “It was Hoskins who took the line it had already been done.”

  “Somebody’s not being very honest,” Lorrellmore said. “The idea was to get rid of Dicky Wayling and Packard and step in to the holes. If there’s been a change in the motive, I want to be informed.”

  “I thought suspicion would be enough. If this is a murder, then my idea of it has gone awry.”

  “Don’t crab,” said Lorrellmore angrily. “You’re Dicky’s best friend, closest confidant of the years of pushing up together. You know he’ll send you up to the Palace when he has to resign. That was a certainty. That’s why this has gone on. Don’t shiver now. Once that’s settled it’s plain sailing for us.”

  Parson-Jones nodded in agreement.

  “It only means hanging on till Hoskins is sure,” he said.

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  “But I should have thought now that the Flightend business would have been enough.”

  “It’s happened before,” said Marshall. “Errors in the administration are always excused. Personal weaknesses aren’t.”

  “Flightend needs watering down and renaming,” said Lor- rellmore. “There’s a stack of money in it, poison or not. You don’t stop selling gas ovens because some people go to sleep in ’em. Now look, Eddie, catch my eye. Tell me whether you’re going on or not.”

  “For Heaven’s sake, Eddie!” Parson-Jones said with a snort. “You look as if you’ve done something wrong! Packard’s the man who’s guilty, not you. If you ask me, he leaked to the Archbishop that he was going to kill somebody to find out what happens, and he hadn’t done it at the time. But when he saw the effect on his brother he advanced his program. All right. Now how can we be blamed for this?”

  “I wish it wasn’t Packard,” said Marshall.

  “Don’t go on being frightened of Packard,” said Lorrell- more. “He’s big and rolling and colorful and jovial, and he’s brilliant too, but that doesn’t make him the worst enemy in the world. Or are you really frightened of your conscience?”

  “You haven’t done anything,” Parson-Jones repeated. “You had to act on the Archbishop’s information. How the hell can you be blamed for that?”

  Lorrellmore turned away with a bitter grin.

  “He loves Packard,” he said. “He loves everybody in order of importance, using the best for his purpose—”

  “How dare you say a thing like that!” Marshall said, hissing the words.

  Lorrellmore turned back.

  “You wouldn’t sooner I said it behind your back, like the rest of your friends?”

  Marshall was white and shaking.

  “How can you say that to me?” he whispered. “How can you?”

  “Because you make me mad,” Lorrellmore said. “Go on. Go and tell Hoskins, and the Archbishop. But what you’ll tell them is beyond my inventive capacity to imagine.” He went out of the room leaving an effective silence.

  Parson-Jones got up and followed the young man. Mar

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  shall remained standing, white, trembling. He was frightened. Frightened of Packard, frightened of Lorrellmore, frightened of the shoes he stood in.

  He ran an open hand down his face as if to wipe fear off it, then took a silver snuffbox from his pocket. He shook out some pills into his palm, swallowed them and then drank water from the jug on the drinks tray.

  In a moment, fear would have gone.

  4

  Parker stopped his fork shovelwise in mid-air as the general sat down at his table.

  “An impressive man,” said the general. “Yes, sir. He handled that matter with confidence. A personality, yes, sir.” He watched Parker with faded blue eyes. “Dave Packard. Just did a broadcast on this poisoning.”

  Parker put his fork down.

  “Don’t let me halt you,” the general said. “I’ve been trying to figure out what he has itchwise with Blackout.”

  “It’s a hunch,” Parker said briefly.

  “I don’t rate him hunchwise. I reckon he talks when he knows.”

  “He just had a feeling, and he got sore about the subliminal conditioning. It just made him uneasy. He has no reason. He told me straight.”

 
The general got up.

  “Well,” he said, putting a fat cigar into his mouth, “I guess everything’s moving along now. I’ll get a little rest.”

  “You flying over tomorrow?”

  “Yay. Three a.m. Reckon on a busy day. I shall be on watch patrol during the operation, sector two. So long, Park. Seeing you Tuesday.”

  He walked off, casual, slow, yet a little bent about the shoulder. Parker felt suddenly cold, as if he knew he would not see the general again.

  For a moment in his mind he saw the clumsy steel aircraft streaking down to the horizon as suddenly the

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  whole arch of the sky began to bum with a brilliant, whitening light. The aircraft glowed, blazed like a star and was gone in the holocaust.

  Parker got up.

  “If the goddam test did go wrong—” he muttered. “Jesus!” He screwed his eyes tight shut as if already seeing the devastation, then opened them and walked out of the dining room.

  He inclined toward the phone booths then turned his back on them. If he rang Madge again so soon she would begin to think something was wrong.

  And nothing was wrong. Nothing at all. Everything, as he knew, was going ahead to schedule. There was no reason to fear an error that nobody had spotted.

  As the general said, it was just nerves before the battle. Even Packard suffered that.

  -5

  Before Packard his personal offices stretched, a honeycomb of glass cases for humanity. Here everybody in the Ministry, big, gross, fat, frail, skimpy, ugly, beautiful, spotted, besotted, misbegotted together with any attendant soul, was dabbed on the slide like a specimen of pond water and stored. Everything they had done, everything they had ever been concerned with, every ache, every heartbeat that had failed, every spoken word that could be traced and might be useful, favorable and unfavorable; all was stacked in this place.

  Packard was lost in the silent mausoleum, glow-lit like a fish tank. He had been in it but rarely, when little people had rushed about as if he had jerked their strings. He had not known what they did. He did not know how they had found what he wanted. The old system of looking under A or M or Y had gone. Now there was a code to find a key to find a combination; then the combination found a key which found a final code which found the item.