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want to die and leave his body behind, but he’s got to. But you, boy, you seem to be proving something else.”
He shook his head.
“Perhaps it means I shall get back—the other way,” John said.
The head went on slowly shaking. “Don’t understand it, frankly. That girl shivers when you talk.”
“I had to bring her,” John said. “I wanted to see if she could see or hear or feel—”
“Just for interest? More experiments?”
“No. It’s desperately necessary for me to get in touch with—with those behind. I must do it.”
“You said you expected to go back.”
“Not for a while. I want to get in touch now.”
Helen punched him in the chest. “I wish you wouldn’t keep moving. It makes me feel awful!”
“Sit her down,” Bassington said abruptly. “There’s some port in a cupboard in the dining room there. Make her comfortable if you want to talk.”
He sat there rather like Humpty Dumpty in a big tweed suit, cheeks shining like tomatoes, untidy hair a brilliant white. Perhaps it was John Brunt’s senses that recreated the man from the vibrations he received from his ghost, but it was unmistakably the man he had known.
He sat with solemn patience, staring at nothing while John sat with the girl on a packing chest, and gave her port and made her feel easy again. John told her it was a kind of game, ghost-baiting; they had played it as children, and she began to laugh and look around, excited and still apprehensive. She could feel Bassington’s presence all right, John saw: there was no doubt about that, but she couldn’t tune in to the wavelength that would let her see or hear him. How many people must have felt the same in haunted houses in the past? How many houses were haunted that people could not sense?
Helen was better, rather inclined to giggle, but looked round half hoping to see something.
“For you and I getting in touch isn’t easy,” Bassington said. “It’s a question of catching the living person at exactly the right moment, the moment when his mind is closely tuned to you. You can’t tell when this will be. Sleep is the easiest time, for the mind is on free range, but people wake and think of the contact as a dream, so its value is little . . . But I don’t know about you. This body makes a difference. I don’t
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understand how you’ve got the bloody thing. It’s almost as if Life is keeping a kind of line on you. Don’t trust the skipper of the ship, as it were.”
“It’s the only way I’ve ever done it, so it isn’t all that strange. But would it make it easier to get in touch?”
“Your problem is very complicated,” Bassington said, running his hands down his generous belly and holding it. “You’ve brought a body with you. So that your spirit is with us Waiting Ones, but the body still lives.”
“So it should be easier—”
“But the body itself by some means has jumped a time belt,” said Bassington. “So that if you go back now to the people you wish to get in touch with, you’ll probably find them long moldered in their graves.”
John clutched Helen tigthly to him.
“What’s the matter, love?” she gasped.
“Something made me jump,” he said. “Something I should have expected.”
“Time is a very difficult thing to understand, because it doesn’t exist,” Bassington went on. “It’s a measurement of the immeasurable. Time is different to each person. In a very simple way, time means a different thing to four people placed round the equator. To one it’s night, to another, afternoon, to the third, morning, to the fourth, noon. And all at the same instant. That is a simple way to understand these time belts that run together, and lets all worlds Man can know exist at the same instant, without his being aware of another.”
John Brunt felt her warm body against him. It lessened the incomprehensible fears Bassington was arousing in him. He tried to think clearly.
“Packard talked a lot about radio transmission of matter,” he said. "His experiment with me was to keep touch by radio, which, as you know, can operate free of time. Do you think it’s possible he achieved one thing instead of another?” “Possibly. But you are dead,” Bassington said. “No doubt about that, you know. You are lucky in having somehow tugged along the wherewithal to cuddle that girl. It could make waiting much easier. I wish I’d tried it.”
“How can I tell what time it would be—with Packard?” “You can’t. There’s no measuring rule to lay down against another. Time speeds—if such things exist—are different. You’re in the land of the infinitely variable unit now, lad.
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The calculus at last. No. You can’t tell until this man Packard completes the experiment.”
“You think I’ll know then?”
“I’m sure you will,” Bassington said very slowly. “It’s that body that makes me sure. Say they sent it accidentally, or whatever you like, but something’s got to happen to it. Either it goes back to where it came from, and all this will have been a dream, or it will die, as it’s supposed to do, and the dream will go on till They call you.”
“Am I dead now, then?”
“Yes. But the body’s still alive, too, in this particular world of human existence. How you’ve done it, as I say, I don’t know. One thing I’m sure about, lad, you can’t get into Heaven like it. This is the proof of the odd remark about getting a cable through the eye of a needle. I wonder what clot put in camel, and what other clots went on to show a needle was a name for a gate? The time and energy that was wasted in nothing. It makes you laugh when you can look at it in a detached sort of way.”
“So I must wait for Packard to act?”
Bassington patted his belly. “There isn’t any other way, that I can see.”
“Oh God!”
2
The inn was bright with flickering spears of candles. The few guests arrived from London were some in the paneled lounge, some in bed. Petra came into the kitchen. Jo and the redheaded waitress were talking together by the great table. The cook was washing her pots at the big sink.
“Where’s Helen?” Petra said.
“She went out after dinner,” the waitress said.
“Didn’t she tell you?” Jo asked. “She came back and went to your office. Then she went out again and I haven’t seen her since.”
Petra nodded to the waitress. “Look in her room.”
Their voices were low, below the level of the clanging of
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the cook’s pots and the brisk scrub and splash. The waitress went out.
Jo said, “She’s with the man.”
Petra shrugged and watched the broad cook’s back. “Why did she go into the office?”
They talked awhile of arrangements for the next day. A couple of moths circled under the oil lamp hanging from a ceiling beam. The waitress came back and shook her head. The three women went out of the kitchen. The waitress looked back at the cook as she went. The cook went on scrubbing a pot as if she were playing a stringless guitar. She had been making too much noise to hear.
But as they went, the cook looked at the reflection of the empty kitchen in the black window before her, then turned slowly, grinding on flat shoes and looking at the door where they had gone.
“Bloody witches,” she muttered. Then she wriggled her fat shoulders uneasily, wiped an itching nose on the back of a hand that clutched a brush, and went back to scrubbing.
She was frightened of them as people of bygone days had been frightened.
The three came into Petra’s office.
“There was a light at the Hall,” the waitress said, as Jo closed the door.
“The Hall?” Petra said, staring. She turned and looked at a board of keys -fixed to the wall by the fireplace. “The keys have gone!”
“He’s with her,” the waitress said.
“Why did she take him there?” Jo’s eyes were narrow and brilliant,
reflecting candle flames like fire. “They’ll find our things!”
“We shouldn’t have let him go,” the waitress said uneasily.
“Supposing he was sent by the government?” Jo said.
“He didn’t come from the government,” Petra said. “We know that!”
“Why has she taken him up there?” Jo asked. She was very sharp. “She’s scared of the place, yet she’s taken him there.”
“How do you know?” the waitress asked, very uneasy now.
“I can feel it,” Jo said. “Who else would go, but him? For whom would she steal the keys but him? Not for herself!”
“Why would she do it, then? He knows about us,” the 167
waitress said. “If he finds the things it’ll only be what he knows already—and what she guesses.”
Petra became suddenly alarmed.
“We must get up there now. Where’s Margaret? Fetch her, Lois.” The waitress turned and went quickly out of the room. “Margaret, go tell Dorothy to carry on. Meet me in the yard.”
Peter watched the three women go away through the dark yard, slapped a few pills into his mouth, then went toward the open kitchen door. The cook saw him appear suddenly beyond the window as he stepped into the path of light from the door. She drew in a sharp breath and dropped a pan into the sink.
Her face was hot, as she bent over the sink to try and cover her look of fear. Peter came in through the door.
“They’ve gone to the Hall,” he said. “Is he up there? The man?”
Her spirit quaked within her fat body.
“I don’t know where he is!” she said.
“He’s with them,” Peter said fiercely. “You know that! What did you hear?”
“I didn’t—I was washing up—I didn’t hear what they said ’cept about the hall.”
“The Inspectors are coming,” Peter said quietly.
She dropped a pan.
“Oh!” It was a little wail of fear.
“You’ll be safe so long as you say what you know,” Peter said. “He is a witch. He has been sent in to contact them. If you hide anything—”
“No, no! I wouldn’t—”
“Remember how he was trying to find out about the food here, who kept the pigs and milked the cows? Remember all that!”
“Yes. I won’t forget!”
“I don’t think you will,” Peter said, and smiled.
■3
“There is somebody there,” Helen said, in a puzzled voice. “Sometimes Pm sure I can hear somebody talking.” She
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looked up at him, big eyes bright with wonder in the yellow light of the lamp.
“She is closely attuned to you, John,” Bassington said. “What she is getting is through you. It’s not good reception, but it’s there. She isn’t frightened now.” He sighed. “You must have very much in common. Simplicity, perhaps. I wonder?”
“Is there no way of telling how long it will be before Packard acts?” John Brunt said.
“If you can count back the lost minutes over a hundred years or more, calculate the variations of the sun, the infinite correlations between the stars you might do something. But by the time you’d learned it all, you’d be—” Bassington hesitated, “—back where you started.” He leaned against the stairs. “You were traveling a lot when I knew you.” “Traveling, yes. Trying to get away from it, but never did.” “So there was change going on everywhere then?” “Change? I suppose that is the word. But every place was becoming the same as the last. Same habits, same customs, same clothes, same food, same dreary things to talk about. It was Fear for Me period. Everybody seemed to be thinking about themselves1 all the time. There was no sense of real humor; it was all manufactured stuff, banana-skin theater. I used to find older men all over the world who’d lament the passing of Characters. They didn’t find them any more. There were just a lot of men, stamped in the similar mold of Fear for Me. They were born with it stamped on their bottoms and couldn’t sit still afterward. You couldn’t get away from it anywhere. Quite primitive peoples who had lived good lives before chewed gum, sucked pills and wondered what would happen to them when the bomb went off. It was like traveling in endless circles and stopping off to meet the same faces, some painted white, some painted brown, some painted red, some painted yellow, all saying the same things, thinking the same things . . .”
He wondered how he could have resented the loss of this world if he had thought so badly of it. Why had he been angry at the village travesty three hours before? He was inconstant, his ideas changed with the view.
“Yes?” Bassington urged.
“When Packard offered me this job I looked at it as an adventure. At least I knew it would be different, and I was right. I didn’t get what I expected, and Packard didn’t expect
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this either. It’s travel, all right. It’s adventure all right. But it’s still earthbound, you see. And so am I. All my feelings, emotions, thoughts, are still of people and wondering what will happen to them. I’ve traveled, and though I feel at last I have got somewhere I can’t understand where or what it is.”
“It all takes time,” Bassington said. “You have to be
patient, so patient that you don’t measure the waiting any more. It brings a strange sort of peace, but it is empty because you know it is waiting.”
Helen was drowsy, her body growing heavier against him.
“What happened to you, that you had to wait so long?” John Brunt said curiously.
Bassington chuckled.
“Your father and I were rebels,” he said. “But I’m afraid the only lesson you learn from kicking against the bastards is that your boots break. It really isn’t much good fighting against uniformity. People want to be the same. That is what civilization did. There used to be a term: Keeping up with the Joneses. They all wanted to be Joneses, so in the end you couldn’t tell Jones from anybody else, and everybody was equal to nothing. It was all purely physical. Nobody wanted to have a better spirit, a better brain, they just wanted to think like Jones. I remember a best-selling novelist who used to stay with your father. His books had been in great demand for thirty years. Out of curiosity and because I knew him I read some. When I did it. was obvious that with great diligence and restraint of intellect he had produced over thirty years a rich variety of nondescription. This was exactly what Jones wanted. He couldn’t be bothered to understand anything else.”
Bassington regarded his bulging waistcoat and chuckled again.
“We saw it coming. The mass-produced people, eating mass-produced food, enjoying the limited mass-produced education, which brought with it a saving grace of uneasiness and the vague thought that perhaps they weren’t doing quite the right thing. That perhaps they might be wasting something important. You remember these people.
“When you were alive the prostitution of the food had begun. The sprays, the artificial this, that, the other were being used to produce more and more food. Your father and I rebelled solely from the reason that it destroyed the
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flavor and the quality. We evolved a plan to use the whole of my quite extensive estate to produce food entirely by the old and natural methods. It was upon this free-run food, as he called it, that your father founded the most successful inn I ever knew of. People came for miles to eat here. The cars blocked the roads. It was a treat for them to have, once a fortnight, a month, even once a year, food that tasted of food.
“But then it became clear that the insecticides and other chemicals being used on food generally elsewhere were compounding a poison. Some of them indeed, directly poisoned cattle and the people. Someone said, ‘If poison kills a fly, it must kill you, too, for there is only one form of animated life and you are part of it!’
“The incidence of nervous diseases became specially marked, and soon it became obvious that chemicals were doing irreparable harm to the nervous system; but the situation had become such that it
could not be stopped. Economically, and practically, their consumption had been brought to a pitch where nothing could replace them.
“Our little area of natural food became packed with customers, cranks, and government officials sent to persuade me to discontinue my policy, as harmful to the general situation.
“I refused. The trouble then rose to a treasonable plane.
“Everywhere else hormones were being used to make chicken, beef, everything bigger so there would be more of it to eat sooner and less to taste. This was not enough, and meat was tenderized, de-fiberized, devitalized—God knows what wasn’t done to it.
“On top of nervous troubles spreading at a rate profitable only to the chemists providing the manures and pills as a byproduct, the treatment of meat affected males most oddly. Men developed tits likes Amazons, and became, from the same cause, almost impotent.
“But it had to go on, you see, because half the world’s supply of food had been destroyed in the Error, and Europe was isolated. There was no other way to get the food except by intensifying the slaughter of insects, birds, and wild life and spreading chemicals to grow more, bigger, worse. They got to where they could produce a fat ox in six months instead of three years, and men grew more oddly still.
“Sprays had been killing people for many years before by actual contact. In the drive for food after the Holocaust,
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these accidents were regarded as conveniently easing the problem of feeding the millions.
“So, indeed, the fall in the birthrate was also looked upon with favor. It seemed almost a Godsend. But in fact, through the growing impotence among men, the sexual habits of people were, to coin a phrase, grinding to a halt.
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