Froomb!

by John Lymington

  “That’s what?” Packard shouted. “It’s what? Is it where they hanged the scientists? Is it? From trees?”

  “It must be. I don’t know why. I was dead, wasn’t I? It could have been a book I read. I just seem to have the picture of lynching.”

  “And you’ve got the rest of the bloody thing there somewhere, too!” Packard stormed. “Park, listen to me. A progression with two heads. Remember I said this thing could go one of two ways, success or absolute disaster. That would surely prove a progression with two heads.”

  “Mathematically impossible,” said Parker. “You know that.”

  “I know that science is continually finding die impossible to be a fact,” said Packard. “The original progression used in the first atomic research was thought to be impossible. The actual Blackout project, when first suggested, was thought to be impossible. Somehow, Park, we have to get this progression reworked before Blackout takes place.”

  “But it would take weeks!”

  “It’s got to be done.”

  “You would try and stop the whole of this vast project because of a few scattered words from what might be nothing more than a dream?”

  “Nothing more than a dream? What the hell was Blackout a year or two ago?” He strode out of the dark room into the office. “There’s a telephone, Park. Ring back to your colleagues. Put the suggestion that this progression had a fault way back—may be years back. Do this for me!

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  Tell them a He. Say I know there’s a false value that could give a double result later. Say I know it!”

  “I couldn’t do that. Billions of dollars. The—”

  “The subliminal persuasion!” Packard said between his teeth. “Go on! If you can use that on the pubHc you can bloody well tell a lie to your scientists!”

  “But it’s a lie! You couldn’t get away with it. I couldn’t persuade them, Dave. They know me too well. They’d smell it a mile off. I’m no actor.”

  Packard turned away.

  “All right,” he said. “But there’s just one thing. Do you believe there could be a double result in this thing?”

  “Anything’s possible, Dave. This is the last thing I would believe possible, but—” he shrugged, “—could be.”

  “Don’t you see I must be right? Haven’t I said all along I had a doubt? Why should I have had a doubt if it wasn’t there in my subconscious that I knew there could be an error? Do you think I felt that because I don’t like bangs?” He turned and faced Parker. The American was tense. “You have done something today, Dave, no other man has ever done. It does justify giving you more than a normal share of—faith, if you like. But—”

  “Think of it,” said Packard, “as obeying a sign from Heaven!”

  His laugh boomed in the room.

  “If we could get more out of him,” Parker said. “It surely makes me itchy thinking there’s something there we can’t touch— Why not get a He detector on him? You could find the behavior peaks, wordwise.”

  “Do that!” said Packard, then began bawHng excitedly, “Ann, Ann!”

  John Brunt came out of the view room.

  “There’s something about that—those scenes,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s something important.”

  “What did you know about Blackout before you went?” Parker asked.

  “I knew what anybody else knew,” John said. “Nothing technical. Packard didn’t leak anything.” He grinned briefly. “No, I keep getting the feeling I know, but when I try and tack it down, I don’t know.”

  “We’re going to put a lie detector on you,” Parker said. “It might show us a line to press.”

  “Yep.” John Brunt sat on the arm of a chair. “But it’s

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  beginning to occur to me that if I did get into Heaven, or Hell, or even just the anteroom Packard talks about, isn’t it likely my head’s been drained of what I saw?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody does know.”

  “Just supposing I have been away from this world, in another, which Packard says can only practically be on another time belt. Well, it seems that belt could only be in the future. You couldn’t die before you were bom this time. Well, if it’s ahead, it’s in the future. And you can’t remember the future. You can only remember backward.”

  “Words. Mere terminology,” Parker said. “You can remember any way if you’ve been there. But I’d say you have something in this brainwash theme.”

  The detector was brought in a small case. Packard and Parker shot words at the victim; words he had already said that did not seem to fit with his normal behavior. Some of them made the pen jump. But the more they were repeated and probed the less excited the pen became. It kept coming back to the double headed progression. “For God’s sake!” Packard shouted, jumping up and mopping his shining face. “If there’s a fault in the progression what is it? Can you tell us what it is? Where? When? It must have been a long time ago. Was it a computer error or human? Look at the bloody time, man! In forty minutes I’ve got to be there, and I’ve got to know by then!”

  But he was not to know by then, not in figures. He knew in his soul. He knew beyond any doubt that if it was humanly possible to stop Blackout, he had got to do it.

  “You’re crazy,” Parker said at the end. “You may be right, but you’re crazy all the same.”

  “I’m going to try something,” said Packard. “It’ll be a trick, like your subliminal trick, but no one can know who’s right and who’s wrong yet. You do agree on that?”

  “I go with that. Yes.”

  “Then go with me on this. Do not deny what I am going to tell that meeting.”

  “But what are you telling them, Dave?”

  “That there is an error and there must be a halt till we find it. John Brunt knows, but he can’t bring it out. I believed that if he came back, that he would know. I believed in that possibility all along.”

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  “Was that behind it, Dave? Was your idea that if he did get to Heaven or anywhere beyond us, he’d know what would happen to us over Blackout?”

  “Not only over Blackout. About the whole trend of our affairs in science. It’s parted from humanity. I’m restless about the whole way of it. Something, somehow has got to call a halt and rethink, as you stinkingly put it. I believed that if John Brunt came back and knew where he had been, he’d be able to stop the froomb. Well, he can’t remember. Perhaps he will hereafter. We can’t wait for that because of this meeting. So I’m going to take the chance that what he has brought back—his mathematical monster—is part of the truth. I’m staking everything on it that I have, but I don’t ask you to do anything. Anything at all. Just stay mum. You won’t find that hard.”

  “I’m uneasy about Blackout, Dave, you know that. But it’s come to the pass now I’m not sure whether I felt it some way back, or whether you planted it in me. I’ve got to make a stand on that doubt but was it my original thought?”

  “Of course it was. Don’t kid yourself you're so puttylike in my great hands. Either way, with the smallest doubt, your duty is to be neutral at least at the meeting.”

  “It would be difficult,” Parker said. “Let me tell you how it shapes. We sit in an arc, facing a wall. On that wall are TV tubes showing the rest of our meeting in the Pentagon. TV cameras cover us for them. Now what you ask me is to look dumb to the people on either side of me, who’ll turn to look at me and also to the cameras ahead of me, who’ll look harder than anybody. I’m no actor, Dave. I couldn’t guarantee.”

  “Just be neutral!” Packard pleaded. “Don’t talk. Will you do that?”

  “I know my side will say it’s a Limey attempt to steal thunder from the States,” Parker said.

  “Hard words, my friend, won’t hurt as much as Blackout, if it fails,” said Packard and pointed to John. “Look, he knows! But he can’t talk. You don’t know, but you can. If I prove a progression fault—”

  “How can you
do that?”

  “I can show them a faulty progression,” Packard said. “I can get one out of the files. It may be to do with making syphilis serum from margarine. It doesn’t matter.

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  It won’t be recognizable. Nobody remembers what the early Blackout progressions were, stored away those years ago, over here and with you, but it’s going to take them a damn long time to find it isn’t there, and by then we have a chance to find where the real error is!”

  Parker burst into a sudden laugh.

  “Goddam, you are crazy!” he said.

  “You are a hanging jury, Park, and if you have any reasonable doubt you know what your duty is.”

  “I have a reasonable doubt, but is it right, or just cowardice? That’s what I can’t make up my mind about.”

  “Then you must be neutral. There is no other course.” The American stared through the tormentor. For several seconds he did nothing, then at last he turned away.

  “Ann, Ann!” Packard called out. “Get Records opened upl Ring them. I’m coming down, tell them!”

  At the telephone, Ann put the call through:

  “Do your tie up,” she said. “If you show up like that, they’ll think you’re squiffy.”

  When Packard went out after Parker, it felt to John that an essential tidal wave of life had gone with him. He suddenly felt deflated, emptied.

  A little while after, the tension started again.

  “I know,” he told her. “I do know! Why can’t I remember? If it’s so important, why won’t They let me remember?” “Perhaps,” she said slowly, “They don’t interfere. If They did, how would your life here be any test of what you were?” He stared.

  “Shouldn’t have thought you were—relidgewise,” he said. “No,” she said. “I’m not. I wish I were.”

  At nine-fifty, John Brunt looked down through the great window to the river. The foam was breaking up, floating away downstream like ice floes. He opened part of the window. From somewhere in the city he heard church bells, soft and sweet as the morning air. The sound puzzled him,

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  like a memory he could not place; a feeling that he had been in just this place, in just this way, before.

  “He won’t be able to do it,” Ann Gill said. “Not even he can swing that crowd. You know some of them. You don’t know what they’re like all together, set on one thing.” He turned and leaned his back against the steel frame of the window.

  “The SS,” he said. “Scientists and the Services. It’s funny to think that when I was a kid they frightened each other with weapons. Now they frighten each other with their defenses against weapons. Do you think they’ve become morally afraid, and to justify horror pretend it’s to save?” “I wouldn’t put anything past them,” she said. “We’ve got physicists on this staff that make your hair crawl. They just cannot see past science. Humanity doesn’t exist for them. I don’t know how they live with their wives!”

  “But the blood-soaked generals are just the same,” he said, quietly. “It’s their job. I was once eavesdropping on a service conference down in the Philippines. I always remember a five-star general making the remark that there was nothing to beat natural ammunition—men. In land warfare it seems there is nothing better than bullet-blotters to pave the way for the fighters behind. . . . What will Packard say?” “I don’t know. He tore through some old files down in Progress Records. Left stuff all over the floor.”

  John looked down through the window again.

  “Hear those church bells?” he said, with a puzzled frown. “They give me the same feeling as the States did—a feeling they shouldn’t be there.”

  She watched him.

  “Do you think you will remember?”

  “I don’t know, but I thought Packard would record as he went along.”

  “We lost touch. There wasn’t anything at all.”

  “So I gather.” He waved his hand at the great scene rolling away down the Estuary and the purple haze of a summer day in the distance. “Look at this! What more peaceful and balmy scene? The sort of day that a man like me, come back to life, should revel in. Yet I keep getting the feeling it’s the end of the bloody world. I’m depressed. That trip upset my metabolism or something.” She looked at the clock. It was on ten.

  “We shall know soon,” she said. “Heavens, I’m tired!”

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  The church bells stopped.

  “If he wins this, he’ll win everything else,” John said. “What do you feel about it?”

  “I feel he’s right. But nobody can tell.”

  The sweep hand walked slowly round the wall-clock face. She watched it.

  “Well it’s begun now, anyway.”

  “He said he’d ring as soon as it was over.”

  “Yes. He always does. In case anything happens on the way back.”

  It was very quiet. They said very little. In a while more distant church bells began to ring.

  ‘Ten forty-five,” John Brunt said.

  “If the meeting is normal it should take an hour. It’s just a check on everything.”

  “Last rites,” he said.

  She gave him a cold look. He turned to the window again.

  “It’s so quiet on Sunday,” he said.

  The church bells died away. The sweeping hand went on.

  John went to the old trunk and propped the lid back against the wall. He looked at the lurid covers, bloodcurdling etchings, their horrors so long faded.

  “It’s the most complete collection there is,” Ann said.

  He took up one or two, dropped them back and walked away again.

  “You love him, don’t you?” he said.

  “Yes.” She saw the clock behind him, swinging on in the quiet.

  “Funny,” he said, walking about. “I’ve had lots of girls, but there was one when I was a kid. I never had the same feeling about anybody since. I’ve a mind to go down and see her tomorrow—” He looked at the clock suddenly.

  Eleven-thirty.

  “It’s overrunning your hour,” he said.

  “There may be last minute adjustments to discuss,” she said. It hurt to speak.

  He wiped his face.

  “Didn’t feel as bad as this yesterday,” he said. “I trusted him. It takes a lot of trust to let yourself be killed, even when you’ve seen him do it to animals. . .”

  A thunder grew in the air. He went to the window and looked up at a big aircraft approaching on a field miles

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  away. Its roar made the morning tremble. When it had died away in the west he turned back from the window. Eleven forty-five.

  “Have you ever realized a phone bell goes froomb-froomb, froomb-froomb?” he said.

  She laughed shortly.

  “No.”

  “God, I’m stretched,” he said. “There’s something to be said for relaxer pills.” He went to the window again. “Why is it so long?”

  “He took some mathematical formulas from Records,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “He said he would show them over the direct television line and say there was an error in them. I think—” she looked down, “—I think it was a bluff. Just to gain time. To make them put it off until they could check for certain.” “But won’t they see it as a bluff?”

  ‘To make sure they would have to go back through all the computer programing for months past.”

  “So it boils down to whether they feel cocksure or whether he can shake them?”

  “Yes.”

  John turned as he heard Big Ben strike twelve.

  “The wind must have changed,” he said. “I didn’t hear it before.”

  “East wind,” she said.

  “A good wind for summer,” he said.

  The clock crawled on.

  “Anyone else likely to ring?” John asked.

  “Only David. The phone’s direct to the conference cha
mber.”

  “Deep in the bowels,” John said. “Imagine them down there in the depths like a lot of moles deciding the future of man.”

  “He’ll resign after this.”

  He looked surprised. “You think so?”

  “Unless Wayling changes his mind. David won’t.”

  “Why can’t they ever get on? It’s always bloody fights.” He walked away.

  “He’s right, you know,” he said. “It will wipe them out.” She stared at him. “Why did you say that?”

  “I can’t remember why,” he said. “It’s no good. The more

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  I try to snatch this ghost, the more like steam it gets.” He listened to half past twelve strike.

  “It’s funny the way that girl keeps coming back,” he said. “It was years ago. We were only kids.”

  “Have you ever thought of her since?”

  “Oh yes!” He laughed and walked around. “She was the first sweetheart. She was sweet, too.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Back in Blastard Pistrumpet—” He looked up sharply. “That’s what Packard called it. That’s funny!”

  “Why? What is it called?”

  “Wynyard Paunceford.”

  “That’s nearly as bad. But if you go back now, she’ll probably be married,” Ann said. “You can wait too long, you know.”

  He watched her look into a small mirror, then put it down again.

  “Do you know, I haven’t been back there since father died,” he said. Yet it seems like yesterday. I almost feel I’ve been there, but I haven’t.”

  “Memory plays funny tricks,” she said.

  “This doesn’t feel like a memory,” he said. “There’s something different about it.”

  “Well, you have been dead, you know,” she said ironically.

  “Yes. I don’t suppose it can really do much good.”

  He went to the window again. Ben struck another quarter.

  “Did you really go somewhere?”

  There was an odd note in her voice which made him turn and catch her stare.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “I can’t remember,” he said. “Perhaps I will; perhaps, as you say, I won’t be allowed to. But there are some things a man knows without querying himself. This is one. I know this as I know I was born, but I don’t remember that, either.”