The Stone That Never Came Down

by John Brunner

  These at least could be trusted to inform her of important matters.

  “There were also a hundred and eighty Christmas cards,” murmured Tarquin. “And–ah–some abusive items which I took the liberty of extracting. For the police.”

  Lady Washgrave nodded absently, setting aside the topmost letter because, alas, it could not be relied on to generate action. It was a complaint about the theory of evolution being taught “as though it were a proven fact.” The second was a different matter, and ought to cost a teacher, perhaps some school governors and very possibly some local councillors their jobs. To think that a woman living openly in sin should be put in charge of hapless infants!

  “Mark that one ‘urgent’!” she directed. And, on the point of turning to the next, a description of the behaviour of courting couples on a Gloucestershire common, she checked.

  “Is there no communication from Brother Bradshaw?”

  “No, milady, I’m afraid there isn’t.”

  “How strange!” She drew her brows together. “The Reverend Mr Gebhart assured me that by today at latest we should be told whether he can join our New Year’s Crusade. Admittedly he’s greatly in demand, but even so … Not that I myself entirely approve of the “hard-sell’ approach, you know, but my committee did vote in favour of inviting him, and one must abide by the democratic principle, must one not?”

  “I’ll attempt to telephone him later,” Tarquin promised.

  “Yes, please do.” And, having taken a bite of the toast which was all she ever ate in the morning, Lady Washgrave sighed, gazing at the snow-covered lawn. “How beautiful it looks I” she murmured. “So–so pure … Which reminds me: you did, I trust, instruct the gardeners to drain the pipe leading to the swimming-pool?”

  “Of course, milady. A little more tea?”

  Detective Chief Inspector David Sawyer composed a signature block at the bottom of his report and rolled it out of the typewriter. It had been a long report. It had been a long job.

  “And completely bloody useless,” he said.

  On the other side of the office Sergeant Brian Epton glanced up from the charge-sheets he was compiling. “What’s useless, chief?” he demanded.

  “This whole night’s work!”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Epton countered. “Eighteen arrests, and some of them people who make news by catching cold … It’s going to look good on the crime-sheet, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I admit that,” Sawyer grunted, rising and crossing the office to look out of the window. In the yard beyond was a car with a dented wing. Yesterday evening it had been driven into a protest meeting of unemployed Italian immigrant workers, and a man had been sent to hospital with two legs broken. Snow was sifting down, fine as sugar from a dredger. A shivering constable was holding a plastic sheet as a kind of awning over the head of one of the forensic people while he examined the damage to the car.

  –Another pin for the map …

  His eyes strayed to the wall where a visual record was kept of unsolved crimes of violence, a big red, black, or yellow pin marking the spot where the incident occurred.

  Every day there seemed to be more of them. More often than not there actually were.

  –And what was I doing all night? Spoiling someone’s party, that’s what.

  Aloud, though, as he unhooked his coat from the stand by the door, he merely said to Epton, “See you this evening, then.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  High above Lambeth in his council flat, Harry Bott was woken by the sound of his children shouting in the adjacent kitchen, and his wife Vera desperately ordering them to shut up. Blearily he peered at the luminous Jesus clock beside the bed. It was just past nine, and he’d intended to lie in late today. He hadn’t come home until after 3 a.m., having spent long cold hours sitting in his car. It had not yet started to snow, but through the cloudless sky the heat of the land was being broadcast to the stars.

  Still, it had all been worth it. Now he knew exactly how he was going to carry out the job he’d been planning for so long.

  –Not this week, though. Not before Christmas. Directly after would be best, when trade’s at its slackest. Anyway, I’ll need help. Someone to drive, someone to stand lookout, someone to carry heavy crates.

  And with the scheme he had lined up, he could rely on recruiting the best talent in the manor.

  His good humour drove away his automatic intention to yell at the kids. Here in a high-rise block, when the lifts were so often out of order, where else was there for them to play when the weather was this bad except at home?

  –Of course their cousins …

  But he was in too good a mood even to feel his regular pang of jealousy at the luxury his brother-in-law–Vera’s brother–wallowed in, with his big house in Hampstead Garden Suburb and his two cars and the rest of it. A tickle or two like the one he was currently planning, and he might be on the way to similar prosperity.

  Humming, he pulled on a dressing-gown and padded into the kitchen in search of a cup of tea.

  “Here’s your dad!” Vera exclaimed. “Now you’re for it!”

  Except for the baby, yelling in his crib, the children fell silent, round-eyed, and she turned from her ironing-board to confront him with tear-stains on her once-pretty face.

  “I did try and keep ’em quiet, Harry, honest I did! It’s just that I feel so low. I don’t have any energy these days.” She put her hand on her belly, where three months of pregnancy were just beginning to bulge her cotton overall, and glanced at the picture of the Virgin in its place of honour as though in search of sympathy from another mother. “You know it was like this last time a baby was on the way, and the doctor did say I shouldn’t–”

  “None of that dirty talk in front of the children!” Harry roared.

  The first time the doorbell rang, Valentine Crawford failed to hear it. For one thing, he was trying to fix his baulky oil-heater. On being lit this morning it had uttered foul-smelling smoke, and he had had to let it cool down, take it to bits, and clean the charred wick. Actually he needed a new one, but he couldn’t afford it.

  And for another thing, he had the radio on. It was all he could offer Toussaint to keep him amused. He had had to turn in the TV last time the rental payments went up.

  –Kind of ironical, I guess. Me, a trained TV repairman, and I don’t have a set of my own!

  But he was out of work, of course. Had been since that horrible, incredible day when the boss had called him in and told him bluntly that he’d have to leave because so many women clients of the firm, on their own during the day, objected to having a black man enter their homes.

  –As though I could rape them! Me, a scrawny runt of five foot four! Hell, I couldn’t screw them buckra bitches without they help me, start to finish!

  He’d tried to lodge a complaint under the Race Relations Act, but nobody was paying much attention to that any more.

  The radio was saying, “According to informed sources the chief constable of Glasgow will appeal for the assistance of troops if yesterday’s order by the Industrial Relations Court is not obeyed. Now in its ninth week, the strike at …”

  Which was not calculated to amuse a six-year-old kid. He wound the knob around in search of music or a comedy show. Meantime the third thing which had prevented him from hearing the bell continued from the bedroom next door, a series of horrible racking coughs.

  –If I knew where that she-devil was, I’d …!

  But he couldn’t think of anything bad enough to do to her, the wife who had walked out on him when she grew sick of being mocked and taunted every time she went to the shops with Toussaint.

  –Moral, never marry an English girl, not even if you were born on the next street from her home. It oughtn’t to make any difference. Hell, I married her because she was pretty and fun to be with and wasn’t all made of wood from the waist down like half the English girls. Right from the next damned street! But she turned out the same as the rest in the end.


  This time the oil-heater lit cleanly and burned with a nice blue flame.

  “Okay, son!” he shouted. “It’ll be warmer in a minute!”

  Whereupon the bell rang a second time, and he answered cautiously, not really expecting that bastard, the local school attendance officer, who had been persecuting him these past few weeks because even with a doctor’s certificate he didn’t believe Toussaint was too sick to go out, and found Cissy Jones, bright and plump and sixteen and thoughtful, who had brought a bottle of a special cough-mixture her aunt said was very good and should be tried on Toussaint. He liked her, and even before she had measured out a spoonful of the medicine for him he had quietened, as though some of the time he were forcing himself to cough to attract attention.

  –But he looks so peaky and he shakes so much …

  The bell rang again, and here came the rest of them, the rest of the brothers and sisters for whom he ran an informal class in what the authorities at buckra schools didn’t want them to find out. A couple of them were playing truant, being not yet past the official leaving-age of fifteen. Some would have liked to stay on at school in spite of all, but hadn’t been allowed to. These days it was a common habit to pass over a black kid who talked back to the teachers, and slap on his record a rubber stamp saying ineducable. And half of them were glad to be out of school, but furious at being out of work as well. Altogether there were ten today.

  Five minutes’ socialising, and he called for order. From a stack on the mantel Cissy distributed copies of the pamphlet issued by RBR, Radical Black Revival, which they were currently using as a textbook. The pamphlets were numbered because they were precious. One couldn’t buy them any more.

  Stumbling a little, she read aloud the paragraph at which they had stopped last time.

  “‘Whereas Sicilian peasants, whose brutal Mafia-dominated culture has ruined their own homeland and who have no less tenuous connection with Britain than the fact that both islands were ruled by Norman bandits some nine centuries ago, are permitted to go and come as they please, blacks from the Commonwealth to whom the British owe an incalculable debt are barred from the nation that grew fat by sucking their ancestors’ blood, or if by some miracle they do achieve entry are constantly at risk of being deported.’ ”

  Valentine interrupted her with a gesture. “Now you all done like I said? You all bought different papers and marked up bits that prove the truth of what the man says there?”

  They had, and one by one they read out what they had found. Brooding, he sat and tried to listen, but found he was hearing more clearly the renewed coughs of his half-white son.

  III

  Brother Bradshaw was in California. His home overlooked a magnificent vista, clear down a long valley, over the silvery mist shrouding Los Angeles, and out to sea. It had been bought before his conversion, when he was one of the world’s highest-paid TV stars. If anything, he was handsomer now than he had been at the height of his career; a touch of grey at his temples added distinction, and a little more weight conveyed an impression of trustworthy maturity.

  In the old days, the wall of this huge room, which currently was decorated with pictures of him chatting to the Pope, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, and a great many Just Plain Folks who had Seen the Light because of him, had been covered with a montage of photos showing him in very different postures and many fewer clothes.

  “But I don’t want to go to England!” he kept insisting, in a voice which annoyance had heightened from its usual resonant baritone towards a querulous tenor. “Don’t I have enough to do over here? What with nearly three hundred murders in Greater Los Angeles last month–”

  “But this invitation is personal from Lady Washgrave,” Don Gebhart insisted. He had said it all before, but he had been a professional evangelist himself until he took over the management of Brother–formerly Bob–Bradshaw, so he was well used to saying the same thing over and over with equal conviction every time. “You know how much weight she swings. Her Campaign Against Moral Pollution has a hundred fifty local chapters. A cabinet minister regularly speaks at her meetings, this guy Charkall-Phelps. And she’s batting one-oh-oh in her drive to clean up literature and TV. It’s three years since she last had an obscenity verdict overturned on appeal. Nobody monkeys with Lady Washgrave!”

  “I know!” Bradshaw barked. “I know!”

  “So why won’t you accept?” Gebhart pressed.

  Bradshaw didn’t answer.

  “Listen, Bob,” Gebhart said at last. “You never knew me to give you bum advice, did you? Well, what I’m saying is this. You join in her New Year’s Crusade, and you’ll be on the map for good and all. It would make you–well, it would make you the Billy Graham of the nineteen-eighties!”

  More silence. Eventually, with dreadful reluctance, Bradshaw sketched a nod.

  “Great!” Gebhart exclaimed. “I’ll call her right away–I guess the time is okay in England now–and explain how you want to spend Christmas with your folks, of course, but you’ll be right there on December twenty-eighth ready to join in her grand crusade!”

  “Damn,” muttered Lance-Corporal Dennis Stevens after they had toured the block for the third time. “Nothing else for it, then. You’ll have to double-park while I go in alone.”

  “What else have I been telling you for the past half-hour?” his driver sighed. “Look, lance, the busies aren’t going to give us a ticket, are they?”

  “I suppose not,” Stevens admitted, reaching into the back seat of the olive-drab Army car for the cardboard roll containing the posters he was scheduled to deliver at this particular Employment Exchange. How to explain the reason for his unwillingness to enter by himself?

  In fact it was very simple. He knew this drab, forbidding building. It was right on his own home patch. He couldn’t count how many hours he had wasted waiting here for the chance of work that never materialised, or to claim from grudging clerks the benefit money due to him by law.

  So he might very well run into some of his mates here.

  And while there was a lot to be said for joining the Army in times of high unemployment–security, technical training, the chance of travel, plenty of sport, and all the rest of it, which had tempted him when he grew bored beyond endurance and certainly had been provided as promised–if it were true, as the headlines on today’s Daily Mirror claimed, that they were going to send troops to Glasgow and drive the men who’d been on strike these past nine weeks back to work at gunpoint … Well, those old mates of his weren’t likely to make a soldier very welcome, were they?

  “Get a move on, lance!” the driver pleaded.

  “Okay, okay!” Tucking the cardboard tube under his arm like a swagger-stick, he crossed the sidewalk with affected boldness, thinking about what the papers had said.

  –Never paid too much attention to that old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud I have for a father. But I do believe he’s right to say the power to strike is precious. What else are working folk to do if they can’t get a decent wage? Bloody fools in Parliament! What do they want, another Ireland on their hands?

  As it turned out, he’d worried needlessly; the only person who recognised him was the clerk who had to sign for the recruiting posters, and he offered congratulations on putting up a stripe, having done some Army time himself.

  –Thank goodness!

  Professor Wilfred Kneller stood gazing down from the window of his office at the sluggish traffic in the street below. He was director of the Gull-Grant Research Institute, which occupied the top floor of a four-storey block on the eastern edge of Soho, premises donated by its founder, who had been a tobacco millionaire with a guilty conscience.

  At the time of his appointment eight years ago this had been a lively district, maintaining Soho’s long-standing reputation as a centre of night-life–and, of course, prostitution. The recession, however, had taken its toll, and from here he could count half a dozen “to let” signs without craning his neck, testimony to the bankruptcy of restaurants, clubs, a
nd borderline pornography shops.

  –How tilings have changed!

  Moreover, during the night, a team of godhead flyposters had been by, and every wall and window in sight was decorated with stickers repeating their current slogan: put christ back in your christmas!

  –That is, apart from the windows that they smashed … I wonder how many proprietors went broke because they couldn’t afford to insure their plate-glass after the godheads moved in.

  “Morning, Wilfred,” a voice said from behind him.

  “Morning,” he grunted in reply. He knew without looking that the speaker was Dr Arthur Randolph, a portly man in his forties–ten years his junior–who, like himself, had been with the Institute since its foundation and who headed one of the two departments it was divided into. Officially his was called Biological, while his colleague Maurice Post’s was Organochemical; in practice, particularly since the inception of the VG project, they worked in double harness, sharing funds, lab facilities, and even staff.

  –Natural enough. How could you draw a line between living and nonliving where VC is involved?

  “Admiring the street decorations, are you?” Randolph went on, walking across the room to join him. “Makes me think of something Maurice once said to me. Maybe to you too, of course.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, he was wondering what society would have been like if we’d socialised cannabis instead of dangerous drugs like alcohol and religion.” Randolph chuckled.

  Kneller echoed him, but the sound rang hollow, and after a pause Randolph added, “I–uh–I don’t suppose there’s been any news of him, has there?”

  Kneller shook his head. “Arthur, I really do feel we should notify the police, you know. After all, he’s been missing since Monday, without a word of explanation or apology.”