Froomb!
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He looked around, bewildered. The bright steel desks stretched into the glowing distance, regimented like a futile army, defenders to the glass rooms of the files, the films, the
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tapes, the projectors and the playback desks, where one could sit and see and listen to the whole story of F/AG/764/ 16B/RC, Oldsworthy, Jane Titania, down to the lopsided situation of her navel.
Packard stared about him, panicking in his helplessness. He was master of it all and could do nothing with it. The mighty army of assistance sat in silent satisfaction, smiling like a God who works shop hours only.
He muttered angrily, turned and hurried out of the place, back into the lift. He sailed up to his own office suite. As the doors slid wide he ran out, driven by the thought that there might be a message for him.
She might even be there, waiting!
His office glowed with soft light. Eagerly he searched the desk as he switched on the reading lamp. There was no note. He snapped on the telephone recorder to playback, listening anxiously; the only message was on scramble. He ran back again and thumbed the unscramble button.
“In view of all the circumstances following your television appearance,” said the Prime Minister’s voice, “I think now that the proper procedure for the difficulty over Flightend is to recall the stop notice, issue public warnings over broadcast networks and the newspapers, and to make a stipulation that every can sold hereafter is stamped with a death’s head of unmistakable size. Once the public is warned and used to the toxic qualities I think we may feel confident that—”
In a rage Packard spun it to fast wind and the Prime Minister’s voice zizzled like a screaming bird and died.
“The miserable, windblown, revolving stinker!” Packard cried out. “So that’s put that right, has it? Jesus! Where the hell are we heading? What is this? Froomb with Dicky letting the fluid out before we start?”
He covered his face with his hands to let his temper fall a little. Then he got himself a drink. With the glass in his hand he looked down through the great window at the light clusters of the city, quiet, peaceful under the night.
He crossed the room and opened the door of the television room, a direct line from the United States. He switched on. Half a dozen big television screens began to glow, and he waited, drinking until the pictures faded on. Two were marked Waiting on blank backgrounds. Three showed full color pictures. The first an air view of an Idaho plateau,
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brownish from the long heat of summer, and a collection of power trucks and caravans gathered beneath a rock shelf. Above it, a quarter mile away, a rocket was being raised in a great cradle.
The next scene was a close-up of the layout of operational trucks moving a rocket up a narrow mountain road in Colorado. The third, a still, black and white, showed the present state of preparedness of the site in Missouri; the fourth a direct down air view of a site, like a maggot ring in the purple of the Kentucky mountains. These four sites marked the arc of the defense experiment. Among the screens intermittent voices whispered in the dark room. Packard did not bring them up. He could recognize in them the orderly progress toward countdown.
As it was purely a defense operation, it was portable and quick to assemble, but Blackout was being carried out with extraordinary care, recognizing the risk that might lie in failure.
Packard watched a little while, and the whispering, cricket- like voices went on, counting out the state of preparation on each site.
Packard switched off, his depression worse, making him angrier by its utter lack of true reason.
Flightend was a monstrosity. All right. He was being told to go back on what he had said at nine o’clock. He could refuse and resign, but that would mean immediate vacation of the Ministerial suite.
And somewhere held in that room beyond the office was the spirit of John Brunt. If that apparatus was taken apart now, the last chance of Brunt’s revival had gone. The experiment must fail.
But if it was not to fail, then his integrity must fail. He had deliberately to keep his office and operate a decision he believed to be disastrous and immoral.
Always he had fought against things he did not believe in, forced a way for what he had thought to be right, and till now he had always won. Now he had to cringe, to crawl, to have his strings jerked by a smiling weathercock because he dared not let go of John Brunt.
The heat of shame ran through him, then rage at utter helplessness. He began to walk about the room, talking to himself for want of Ann to talk to.
“Be reasonable, mate! We can’t stop Flightend like that.
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We can’t put ten thousand out of work overnight. You put ten thousand out here, it grows like a snowball. This industry affects that, that one, then the other, soon a few thousand come out here, are laid off there, doled-up further on and you’ve got the beginning of an economic crisis. All because you made stuff to kill bugs and people were careless.
“They start everything too big these days. If you start it that big, you can’t stop it. They should submit samples before the stuff is ready for the public. But they don’t. They treat the Ministry as a send-off. ‘May we make this?* they ask, and they’ve already got fifty thousand tons of it lined up. If we say ‘No,’ they go worming round the back door to Dicky and all the other Dickies, screaming and yelling and groaning in the lobbies and threatening disaster if it isn’t let through. That’s all it is, mate. It isn’t murder. It’s necessary economics, and the more we progress and the bigger things get, the less we can do to stop it.”
He drank Scotch and looked down at the city.
“That’s all malarkey,” he said hoarsely. “Why don’t you come back and straighten me out, you stupid jackass?”
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■Five
—1
John Brunt stood by the altar steps and watched the women coming toward him. The short-haired woman stayed back and shoved the old doors to. The grunt of the sagging door on the stone rang in the quiet. A few more streaks of red wood dust spilled down from the high beams.
“Why did you run?” Petra said, halting. “You can’t get away from here.”
“I ran because I didn’t want to be whipped again,” he said.
They stood about, watching him. They were suspicious, hard, watchful.
“Where have you come from?” Petra asked.
“We’ve been through that already,” he said. He leaned against the rail behind him.
“Tell me the truth this time.”
“Look, after what you gave me with that stick, I wouldn’t lie to you. Why should I, anyway? I’ve got no more to lose. I just don’t want to spend any more time suffering. I tried to dodge suffering all my life, I’m going on doing it now I know you can still feel when you’re dead.”
He saw their eyes flick, exchanging glances.
“You went with Helen,” Jo said. “What did you expect to find out from her?”
“Find out?” Something in the back of his mind was urging him to understand, but he could not. His information had gone into reverse. “In what sense?”
“You come from the government,” Petra said.
“I do not! I knew one or two of my own government, but
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that was a hundred years ago. What kind of a mob you have now is beyond me. What kind is it that lets the whole countryside run to seed, rot, let the rivers run foul, clog up—?”
“Where did you come from? Which way?” Jo asked.
He had to say again all that Margaret had already heard. He saw she had a paper she kept checking as he spoke.
Then, one after the other, they asked questions that came at him from four angles, shot at him so that there was no pause, no chance to think of a lie. It was an inquisition, their voices whipping in the quiet of the forgotten place. Anger rose in him as the questions gave him no rest. They pressed him like a physical suffocation, testing him to the point of extortion.
A silence fell. His own voice rang away into the echoing roof, repeating the last word in fading whispers.
No one spoke. The women watched him.
“So that’s it,” he said, and felt easier. “You can’t believe what I tell you, so you think I must be a spy. If I was, would I come with a story like this? Do you think I would start out by making you disbelieve me?”
No one answered. He felt stronger.
“You are afraid of spies,” he said, looking into face after face. “From where? Who sends spies here? You thought I was from the government. Government spies? Is that what scares you? Yet I understood that only members of the government stay here. You serve them, wait upon them—”
Margaret spoke, pushing forward the paper she held.
“You said you came from the Minister of Science.”
“Yes. But on a private venture.”
“There is no Ministry of Science,” Petra said stonily.
“Well, there was, when I was a lad—” He stopped from shock. “God! Packard’s dead!” As alarm set in, he felt a strong sense of personal loss, as if a part that had sustained him in this dream world had fallen away. “No! He must still be alive somewhere. It’s his time belt theory—”
The women started talking among themselves.
“He ran into the fence. He didn’t know it was there,” Margaret said. “He couldn’t answer anything about the government. He didn’t know!”
Point by point they fixed on his strangenesses, the alien
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way he had behaved', the way he did not match up with the
people who came to the inn from the government. He was strange, a throwback.
“Why don’t you ask the government?” he said. ‘They’ll tell you they’ve never seen me!”
They stopped discussing and looked at him. And in their expressions he understood why they feared the government. They were themselves anti-government. Didn’t they wait upon the members? Didn’t they hear intimacies? Didn’t they know the petty weaknesses, the latest plans? Weren’t they in command of keyholes at the inn? But they were not confirming the loyalty of the faithful; they were rooting out their weaknesses, using them for subversion.
He had run into the hands of a political cell. A cell, it seemed, composed entirely of women.
He was relieved by the discovery.
“Why did you choose this place?” Jo asked.
“There was no choice. It seems I have been sent back to my childhood scene. I can’t explain it.”
There was another rattle of questions, checking what he knew of the village and the people who had lived there. His weakness, he realized, was that so much they did not believe. He began to realize that they had never known a world like this. He already knew that something very big had changed since his day. When he asked them questions, like Edna, they did not answer, for they did not know. It was a cold, uneasy business, talking with them. Fear made them unapproachable. They were not really interested in that they lived in his future; they were concerned solely with their own.
They drew away beside the lectern, whispering. At the end of the conference, Margaret came to him alone.
“You are to come with me through the village, and see what has changed.”
He realized that what they wanted was a comparison of what existed with what had been, in the hope that the differences might be used for political ends. How dangerous this might be he could not guess, but from the things he had heard already he knew that both government and antigovernment were fierce, brutal, and afraid of each other. This was not a matter of shouting on a street corner that he had known, the idiot banners stretched across a ragged column of demonstrators. This was all secret, and if it was secret, then it meant the penalty was heavy. He had heard
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the midnight knocking on the little house door, heard the shot, and the scream of despair; reward of the dissenter from rule by oppression. It had been something that had never lost its sickening impact for him. It was incredible that such tyranny had not died, that it could exist even in the anteroom to Heaven, or Hell.
“I’d like to do that,” he said.
“You can’t escape from here,” Petra reminded him.
He nodded. The three went out ahead, leaving the doors yawning as before. Margaret stayed with him, fingering her paper.
“You don’t go to church any more?” he asked curiously. “It was a way people tried to find happiness.” she said. “But the government gradually squeezed it out. Now we are left to try and find our own ways.”
“What ways are there?”
“You have to find the way that’s best for you. The old one offered too much punishment, misery, despair and fear. That kind of God lost its appeal, I suppose. Now we have to find our own ways.”
“Secretly?”
She looked at him a moment. “Yes. It isn’t safe any other way. They let these churches stand and the clergyman stick until he dies, so that people can see the whole thing rotting. It’s part of the policy.”
“What is the policy?”
“Control. Privilege.”
“Those with money control?”
“Money? Oh no. That went. It is based on mental ability and influence, both being the same. The dull ones get the means to live, the intelligent ones get everything they want.” “What chance has the son of a dull one to reach the top?” “None. How can he learn?”
“Schools?”
“The government selects children to go to school.” “Millions and millions don’t go at all?”
She looked askance at him. “Millions and millions?” She shook her head. “No, it isn’t like that. You talk in such big numbers.”
“You mean they’re all dead?” He was frightened and angry that she could not give him the facts of change in eighty years. “You went to school, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
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“Well, there was history, wasn’t there?"
“That was in Political Obedience.”
“How far did that go back?”
“Why are you so angry?”
“I’m sorry. How far back?”
“To the beginning of this government system."
“What about before?”
“The old world died. A bad system killed it. That’s what you are taught. You can read about it, if you like. The books are there, but somehow something always interferes. People come to talk to you, take you out for games, or a government lecture. You can see what they are doing, and in the end you give up. What’s the good anyway? The old world died. You can learn nothing from death.”
“Except how it happened?”
“No. It doesn’t matter how it happened. Death comes sooner or later.”
They walked out of the church along the lane, then through a footpath between fields which he remembered led to the end of the village. It was warm, humming with life, peaceful. The image of a dying world and the decay it had left became hard to hold in his hand.
“You don’t like this government,” he said. ,
“It has gone rotten.” She looked behind along the empty path, as if someone might be there. “It is cruel. Cruelty means that confidence has gone, and it is no good any more.” “You are spying here, down at the pub,” he said.
She did not answer.
“You send back what you find to someone in London?” “It’s no good guessing, is it?”
“What sort of government do you believe in, then?” “Where things are more equal.”
“You can’t have equality. It’s a fallacy, like Democracy, Security, all the rest of the things people chase. Rainbows. Equality is the oldest fallacy. People aren’t equal. They’re different heights, weights, shapes, colors, most of all brain powers. You can’t equalize those.”
“You can try to even things out more. Peop
le should have more chance. Now, if they can’t influence other people in the government, they can’t get on at all. It’s supposed to be for the benefit of learning. It’s since the women took over.” “Women?” he said, startled. ,
“Nearly all women now. Children are precious, and a
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woman naturally wants her own to be with her and get on with her. Insemination hasn’t made much difference to what used to be the Matriarch. Perhaps it’s made it worse. We can’t tell.”
“What are the men that come and stay at the inn, then?” “The sons. What else?”
“We used to have a term, beautiful but dumb. Where would such a woman be now?”
Margaret laughed a little.
“In a plastic factory.”
“What happened to the United States of America?”
“Your mind jumps like a flea,” she said frowning.
“Did you ever read that in the history books?”
“I think there was an accident, I don’t know. It was a long time ago. Stand still.”
He stood still. She went behind him and brushed the dust off the back of his white shirt, then gave him a comb from her dress pocket.
“I have to look respectable,” he said, with a brief grin. “You should look like a governor on holiday.”
He washed his face in a brook running beside the footpath where the hedges ended. As he sat back on his knees, his face cool with the water, he saw honeysuckle in the hedges, like pretty straw woven in. It reminded him of Helen Murphy all those years ago. To her it had been the prettiest smell in the world. Unaccountably, his heart ached for her.
They went on into the village. There were the cottages, the smithy, and an old tannery, now brought back to life, with skins hanging in the sun.
He turned suddenly and looked back along the winding black road between the fields. He saw cows gathered in the shade of a clump of trees at the side of a cornfield.
‘The cattle’s in the corn,” he said. “Who farms this?” “The people do it. They don’t care. They don’t eat the food you see. They prefer the government food sent in. All this meat and milk and bread goes into the hotel.”