by E. C. Tubb
The fellow seemed unable to take it all in immediately. He hovered. The publisher’s eyes became frosty hard. “On your way. Beat it.” He turned, not bothering if the fellow was within earshot. “Tramps—make the place look untidy.”
Butty hated him because tramps are human and more wanting humanity than most other people. He thought, “Why don’t I get the treatment?” Then bleakly changed it to, “When will I get the same treatment?” He knew when.
When the publisher grew tired of him. Why wasn’t he tired of him now?
Because of two things. One was that he was cheap labor, efficient at turning bad crap into not quite so bad crap. The other was, he was public school and university. Oh, sure, not Eton, Harrow or Winchester. Lancing. Not Oxford or Cambridge. Redbrick—Southampton. And the publisher wasn’t either, and it kept him in good humor to think that he could employ at mean rates a man of education; every time he humbled Butty by overriding him it filled him with a sense of superiority and put him in good humor.
A whipping boy There to do the humble work, there to be shown mercilessly every day that his boss was superior and all that taxpayers’ money invested in him was just down the educational drain. “If only I had spine,” he thought tiredly but he hated trying to find jobs and here he could sit in a corner and read.
The queer fellow turned and went out, quickly, looking back as if expecting a blow to follow. Funny small eyes surprised in a vague way, bewildered.
Geniality returned. Even a slight triumph at disposing of a fellow creature. “Sounds on the right lines, that story,” said the publisher. “It’s got the right cover material, and covers sell.” Which reminded him. “Butteridge. Make sure if you use it you have an all-action cover. Show the laser gun blasting. Show the what-d’you-call-it hit and in pain. And the girl.”
Butteridge glowered over his glasses.
“Her milk rounds. The last cover didn’t show ’em up to advantage. A bit on the spare side. Make ’em big, stand out.”
“Too big, they’re conical.” Butty truculent, cold getting worse. Wish he could go home. Wish he’d drop dead. The publisher.
“You don’t know readers.” Just for once impatient. The publisher explaining. “They’ve got to attract attention on the bookstall, our sci-fi. So they’ve got to be big, stand out. See? Simple, isn’t it?”
“But they’ve got to be decent,” said Butty, and young Dickie almost gasped, for the editor was mimicking the boss. “Musn’t show their nipples, eh? Got to sling ’em in a bra—brass roundels with no visible means of support.”
“Gold.” The publisher was serious, upgrading then. But he frowned. He didn’t like sex made fun of. He was a family man, and sex was for books he published but wasn’t really real and didn’t harm anyone but it wasn’t a Fit Subject for Humor. Butty could have taken the mickey to the last syllable.
The door darkening again. Old Dalrymple dragging in his catarrh. That was sixty seconds exactly before it began. Saying, “I saw him come out. That chap.” Dalrymple who bought odd lots of books at knockdown prices from the publisher, to sell in his book-shambles next door. But the publisher didn’t mind—ready cash and he didn’t have to declare it.
The publisher, able to be kind to Lancing and Soton. “I don’t say I don’t admire you for being an intellectual, Butteridge. God knows life’s in need of an uplift. But.…” A gesture. The shoulders hunching helplessly. The brown eyes saddened. Two hands untouched by toil turned appealingly. “Someone’s got to be commercial. Someone’s got to know what the market really wants. If we had to publish what appeals to you, we’d all be in Carey Street, now wouldn’t we?” He made it sound jocular, but that was part of the game. He was wounding Butty, delicately touching him up with barbed words.
Dalrymple was teetering in the doorway, no one taking any notice of him. Only thirty seconds to go. “What was he wanting? In my place every day. Never buys. And trouble.…”
The catarrh was thick. The Liverpool sound. Butty was thinking, “Yes, you bastard, but you’d drive from Carey Street in your Jag. You’re the kind to come out on top.” But not him, Butty. Not the commercial touch, he supposed. Couldn’t bargain. Just wanted to be left alone to live with the thoughts of other men. To read. But not this crap.
Young Dickie’s desk was nearer the door. Three desks only in this room, once a budgerigar shop. His, Dickie’s and the boss’s, rarely used. Next door another shop constructed into an office where the sales manager, crease-waist-coated, chain smoking, and two typists lived.
Dalrymple fixed on Dickie. Dalrymple was mad fit to bust a gasket. “Every day, I tell you. There he is, head stuck in a book. Never buys. And always something happens when he’s in my shop.”
“Something?” Dickie’s bright, intelligent face prompting. Everything in life was superbly interesting to Dickie Armstrong.
“He’s a walking jinx. One day a bookcase collapsed. Another day a shelf fell down.”
Ten seconds.
Butty was looking yearningly into the patch of sunshine wanting them all to shove off, wanting five-thirty so that he could take his head and running nose home. Looked across at Dunn & Co next door to Pricerite, then above the High Street shops to the tall chimneys of the industrial estate beyond. Smokeless zone. No smoke. A bit of steam from one of the chimneys. Steam? He supposed steam was all right in a smokeless zone. The wind whipping it downwards in eddies. Lasting a long time for steam. Picketing didn’t seem to stop industrial activities. WAR CRIMINALS. BAN GERM WARFARE. Funny, his tired mind said, you can see banners go on picket every day and the ads on commercial telly, you never remember what they’re proclaiming. It wasn’t germ warfare. That was down in Dorset.
“He just comes in and books fall off top shelves and lay old ladies out. Right now a whole table collapsed. He wasn’t within yards of it.” Dalrymple scrubbed his gray stubble with a coarse fingernail. “But it’s him, he’s the cause. Some people are like that. Wherever they go they bring disaster around them.”
Three seconds. He shot off, in case someone was helping himself to his precious, secondhand books. His voice floated back: “Don’t have him near you.”
The publisher smiled indulgently, he knew how to handle bums. And then there were no seconds left; and it was happening and they were all on their feet and minds were racing with shock and emotions close to fear and Butty for the moment forgot his throat and head, Dickie forgot he wanted to go to the toilet, and the publisher thought, “It’s a smash and grab,” and slammed the office safe door shut.
What happened outside was reconstructed from the evidence of many, many people, curiously including Dickie Armstrong, who bolted out into the street immediately things began. No one person was able to give the whole complete story. But when the police car arrived—which it did within a minute or so of the occurrence; it was cruising the length of the High Street—the hysteria was at its height and they had to use extreme patience to cut through the gabble.
As they reconstructed it, this was what happened. A bus came along the High Street. Nothing remarkable in that. Buses came like bananas along that High Street, in bunches. Dickie told the cops he was sure it was a 99A; he’d seen it for a glimpse. Which puzzled the cops, because a 99A did not run along that route.
Butty and the publisher watched from the doorway. Then the publisher went running towards the group, and he seemed excited and that wasn’t usual. But Butty didn’t move. Behind his glasses his eyes took in the picture. All traffic at a standstill in the High Street. One car mounted on the pavement, bonnet thrust through the window of Jolly’s Sandwich Bar—‘Take Away Or Consume On Premises’. People lying on the ground in a state of shock. Like a battlefield. Some people running around in hysterics, but most just standing, looking dazed, or walking irresolutely, as if in some trance-like state. And that group now surrounding the police car, all talking, arguing among themselves, shouting. And young Dickie’s bright face there, somehow the center of events.
All witnesses at a certain
stage agreed that there was Something Funny About That Bus. Funny? queried the senior policeman. He was Welsh, from the Valleys, and you had to be smart to put one past his acute mind. What did they mean by funny? And at that they all seemed to hesitate, at a loss, and look at each other, and only young Dickie had the answer.
“The passengers. They didn’t seem—well, real, human. You know what I mean. Well, like tailors’ dummies. I caught a glimpse.”
Everyone began to talk, to agree. Yes, that was it, that’s what it was like, why the bus was funny. The passengers, swaying there, smiling or not smiling, staring fixedly ahead. Tailors’ dummies. That’s what they thought at the time.
“All right, so the bus was full of tailors’ dummies,” said the Welsh bobby, not allowing even a hint of sarcasm, surprise or disbelief to mar his tones. “So what happened?”
They told him, prompting each other, and it was surprising how much sharp young Dickie knew of events.
The bus came along. It pulled into a stop outside Boots. The conductress, shortish, fattish, blue uniform very shiny from use (curious how observant some of those people were, each supplementing the other’s details), called, “Plenty of room on top!” Very brisk and hearty, everyone said. And then?
Now, that was puzzling. The story varied only slightly. A tiny queue of people shuffled forward to get on the bus. An oldish woman—some said a very old woman—was first in the queue. She was reaching for the handrail to haul herself on to the platform and then—
“And then what?” asked the Welsh cop as all seemed to pause. His oppo, a big young bobby from Bradford, was trying to keep pace with the talk, looking somewhat unfamiliar with pencil and notebook.
Then the conductress lifted a stout leg, her foot planted itself on the chest of the oldish woman, straightened and the poor old duck went flying back into the queue, knocking them for six.
And then the conductress rang the bell three times, which means, keep going, mate, we don’t stop for anyone now, and the bus seemed to jump into top speed immediately and went careering along the High Street, while the conductress held on to the brass rail and laughed uproariously at the tumbled queue and shouted, “Plenty of room on top!”
The Welsh cop looked startled for a moment, tried to see how his Bradford chum was reacting, then recovered. He stared at a High Street that looked as if war had come to it—crowds of people seemed to be racing in from side streets. Someone had phoned the ambulance service and now they were coming in relays on to the street. A motorcycle cop parked his machine, then like a thing from outer space came pushing through to join his comrades.
It was what happened when the bus leapt away from the stop that was so startling. So many people clamored to tell the story, and again Dickie was one of them, more articulate than the rest, so that in time the Welsh cop was addressing most of his questions to the young editorial dogsbody.
People had been crossing the High Street at the zebra crossing between the Co-op and the George. A woman pushing a pram was there—one of those pushcart things designed to take twins, and twins were in it. An oldish man with a limp was on the crossing. Two or three housewives with their shopping. Another old woman, though everyone agreed she’d been pretty sprightly and leapt for it, clear of danger.
And the bus didn’t stop. On the contrary it was accelerating all the way from Boots. The horror of that moment was too strong for many of them and someone fainted and others had to go and sit down and not be reminded of it.
The bus deliberately drove into the people on the crossing. The woman with the pushchair thing saw it bearing down on her, towering above her, and started to scream and everyone down that street heard the terrible sound.
The big red London bus knocked her flat. The front offside wheel smashed the pushchair and went over the two children. The old man went down, the shoppers, their bags and baskets flying. All down under the wheels of the bus.
“Carnage,” someone in the crowd said. Sobbing broke out at the memory.
Hysteria was in the air again.
“Crushed. Bits of stuff scattered across the road. And—blood.” A man with a hoarse voice, face white. He kept on about “Crushed” and “Bits of stuff” until the Welsh bobby asked him to shut up, people were going down like ninepins. Ambulance men were getting the driver out of the car that had made unusual entry into Jolly’s Sandwich Bar.
“Heart,” thought Butty, from the doorway, watching. “Shock.” It was only later that he got the story. Just now what surprised him was to keep seeing young Dickie right there amid the crowd, talking at times very animatedly to the policeman, and the publisher there, too, beside Dickie, and shoving a verbal oar in occasionally himself. Butty was puzzled. He could have gone over and joined the crowd, but he didn’t like crowds and anyway his cold made him feel anti-social. Roll on five-thirty.
But it was the crew of the bus that created the hysteria that was subtly changing into anger among the crowd.
“It was deliberate,” protested a decent-looking chap who was probably an accountant or a local government official. “Quite deliberate. The driver not only drove callously and deliberately into those people on the crossing, but he seemed to feel it was an enormous joke.”
“Joke?” The Bradford cop made his solitary verbal contribution to the occasion.
“He was laughing. Roaring his head off. Could hardly keep the bus straight. Sitting up in his cab howling away as if it was the funniest thing in the world.” One voice after another taking up the patchwork tale, creating a picture that shocked.
Even the Welsh bobby was set aback. “It was no accident?” They shouted him down. “And he drove away laughing?”
“Blood on his wheels,” someone said hysterically and screamed to draw attention to herself.
“Bits of stuff scattered all over,” said the man with the hoarse voice, getting it in again.
“Laughing his bloody head off,” Confirmation from all points of the crowd. Even Dickie could confirm it. And the publisher. Butty asked questíons later, when he knew of the publisher’s confirmation. In fact it probably started him off in his thoughts.
The Welsh cop was looking a bit dazed. This was something beyond his normal ken. Helplessly he stared round. Ambulance men were picking people up on stretchers. A police car came sirening through the shocked but excited crowd.
Dickie made a contribution: “The conductress. I saw her as I ran out. She was simply rolling around on the platform. Hanging on to the pole. Laughing so much I thought she’d fall off any minute. She was still shouting, ‘Plenty of room on top’!”
The crowd remembered then. A roar of utter fury went up from them, pressing round the police. The utter heartlessness of the bus crew incensed them, so that if they had fallen into the crowd’s hands at that moment undoubtedly they would have been lynched.
“Over them pore kids,” a woman said, then sobbed and broke down.
“Wheel right over them,” a man said quietly, face ashen remembering. The publisher nodded, feeling sick.
Police from the other car were pushing through the crowd. Some of the pickets from the industrial estate were there, banners waving above the crowd. BAN YOG 45, Butty read from a distance. “It’s a capitalist trick,” shouted one of the demonstrators. The Welshman, who had secretly voted Labour ever since he could say ‘Nye Bevan’ looked his scorn at this political solution to the problem perplexing him.
“Frank,” he said when the other crew came up. “Better get a call out for a bus, driver and conductress behaving curiously. Probably drunk. Mowed down some people on a pedestrian crossing then drove off at speed.” He turned to the crowd. “What happened to the bus? I mean, which way did it go?”
A pause. The crowd looking at each other, pondering. Then someone said, hesitantly, “Well, it sort of—well, disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?” The Welshman.
They looked at each other again, all those faces pressing close around him.
The man said, he
lplessly, “Well…just that. One moment it was there. The next it wasn’t. It disappeared.”
Too much for the Welshman at last. A snap of temper in his voice, his language un-policelike. “What the bloody hell are you talking about? A bus—disappeared? You mean, dissolved like smoke?”
Nobody would answer him. No one would confirm what he said. No one wanted to be told he was off his head by that caustic Welsh voice, yet they all looked at each other and all knew. They had seen it with their own eyes, they were able to tell themselves, just as they had witnessed the dreadful tragedy on the crossing, and then the car taking avoiding action as the bus swerved and Jolly’s Take Away Sandwich Bar suffering in consequence.
Somehow the hysteria was abating now. The street was almost solidly packed with people, and perhaps comfort came with crowdedness and fear went, though still some cried their anguish at what they had seen.
“Those poor bairns,” a girl-mother cried over and over again. “And their poor mother. I’ll never forget it. Never. Seeing her just before.…” They couldn’t stop her talking.
An ambulance pushed slowly along the road. The Welsh cop called out to the driver. “What’s the damage, Nobby? Killed, I mean. How many?” And the crowd waited in horror for the score.
Nobby looked vague. “Killed? I’ve got some shock patients aboard. Killed?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He drove on.
The police were moving the crowd now. A superintendent from the Ambulance Division could be seen along the road by the Co-op. The Welsh bobby took some names—Dickie’s first; even the publisher’s, curiously—then headed towards the zebra crossing.
The superintendent said, “It’s a to-do, Taffy, it’s a to-do.” A migrant from Yorkshire, affable behind gleaming false teeth, eyes happy at the turmoil behind their glasses. He said, cheerfully, “Everybody gone mad, or someat?” But it was good for trade.