The Stone That Never Came Down

by John Brunner

  “Yes, how terrible, I should have thought of it before, with so little time to go before the great occasion …!” The priest was close to babbling in his agitation.

  “Never mind, leave it to me,” Bradshaw said.

  “You, Mr Barton? You can help me?”

  “I can indeed. By pure chance I happen to have with me one of the newest aerosol products from America. It will disguise unpleasant stinks more efficiently than the finest of all possible incense. Allow me to offer it to you in the morning prior to the mass which Marshal Dalessandro will attend.”

  “And two other cabinet ministers, and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and hundreds of journalists, and–oh, the Good Lord knows who else!” Clasping his hands, the priest turned to Barton-Bradshaw.

  “What requires to be done?”

  “Merely that I should come here a little early, perhaps by half an hour, and wander around spraying it in the most strategic places. That is all.”

  “I shall make sure you are admitted,” the priest promised, and could not restrain himself from embracing the marvellously helpful stranger. “What a shame, Signor Barton, that you are not of our persuasion, for clearly you have its interests at heart, and what is more those of the country from which your ancestors hailed!”

  “But of course,” Bradshaw said modestly. “Would a man be able to call himself a man if he did not?”

  –If the officer who searched my bag on the train were to learn of this and start wondering how I laid hands on this “new aerosol from America”, there’d be trouble. Thank goodness (a very interesting phrase, indicative of the way human thinking may well develop in the next age after ours, invoking pure concepts rather than hypothesising personal deities … but skip that!) it takes VC to make one treat that kind of insight as a matter of course. I’m half-scared by the success of this plan. One could not be sure until his helicopter landed that Dalessandro was going to do the “obvious thing” and celebrate his birthday in a suitably symbolic fashion, here on the land his ancestors used to farm. One makes a guess: human beings react more predictably the more stress they have to endure. Small wonder, if so, that governments have always found it easier to cope with a population threatened by war, unemployment, epidemic, injustice, what have, you? A totally free man is also totally unpredictable to anyone else who is not himself free. And in Donald Michael’s immortal phrase, “anyone who offers himself for election under a democratic system automatically disqualifies himself, because those who crave power are those least fitted to wield it!” Addicts. That’s what they are.

  “Why do you smile, Signor Barton?” the priest inquired.

  “Because I’m pleased to do you this small service,” Bradshaw returned, bowing. “You, and everybody!”

  The news was of a form of narcolepsy.

  It seemed to have no aftereffects worth mentioning. It certainly did not adversely affect the health of any known patient.

  And it did not appear to be an epidemic in the formal sense. There was no clear vector-pattern, as far as computer studies could reveal.

  It was fairly common in Glasgow.

  There was a discernible incidence in London and elsewhere in the Southern Counties of England.

  There were foci in Bonn and in the South of France, not far from the Italian border.

  There were minor outbreaks in and around Rome, connected in a manner which did hint at the possibility of a link with other affected areas, inasmuch as everyone concerned had been at the same place at the same time.

  But on the other hand there was a totally separate outbreak in Australia, and it was suggested by authoritative experts that the likeliest common cause was stress. The persons who succumbed were typically involved in politics or some other extremely demanding occupation, such as active service with the forces, or else were facing a crisis of conscience of unparalleled severity. The spokesmen cited army chaplains in particular, who were confronted with the dilemma posed by the risk of nuclear war, and those soldiers who had been day and night on patrol in the riot areas of Glasgow.

  Meantime, Down Under, there was the traumatic experience in progress of taking for the first time in Australian history a genuinely independent policy decision without reference to an overriding loyalty.

  Not that, in fact, a great deal of attention was paid to this minor mystery. There was too much else to worry about: above all, the warning just issued by the Soviet Union that the United States was to treat the dissension in the Common Market as a purely internal matter, or must face the consequences of meddling in it.

  The world was singing a note of hysteria now, like the string of a violin tightened to the limit of its strength.

  XXIII

  “Voici le journal, m’sieur,” the chambermaid said, and added as she set down the paper and a tray with his morning coffee at Malcolm’s bedside, “Quelque chose d’incroyable vient d’ar-river à. Londres, paraît-il!”

  Malcolm sat up frantically and seized the paper, giving only a glance at the window beyond which the grey morning light typical of Brussels showed him roofs dripping moisture like leafless boughs in a lonely forest … though with no expectation of turning green upon the advent of spring. It had taken a while to work out why he found this city the most depressing of any he had ever visited, barring the dismal towns of the industrial north of England. He had deduced at last that what it lacked was water. A river, or even a canal, would have given it shape and some extra dimension the human psyche needed on a deep obscure level.

  But this was no time for reflection. The headlines stated that the new British Prime Minister, M. Charkall, was …

  He stared, not believing his eyes, and then began to laugh. And laughed, and laughed, so loudly and so long that the girl who had delivered his tray came back to inquire anxiously what was wrong.

  “Oh, bless you, David!” he forced out at last. “Helping the police with their inquiries into offences under the … No, it’s too much!”

  –Has there ever been a case like this before? There have been MP’s who ran afoul of the law, like Horatio Bottomley, and others who were screwed by a scandal, from Profumo to Parnell. But a Prime Minister …! How? How?

  He was scanning the story as fast as he could. It was continued on page two. Turning, he discovered the key to the puzzle.

  “Amelia,” he said softly. “So it worked even on a case-hardened old figurehead like her.”

  What had happened was not spelled out in the paper. It was all plain to him, though. Lady Washgrave had suffered a fit of conscience on realising with intolerable clarity where the fortune she had inherited had stemmed from. And she had gone to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

  And prior to his entry into politics, ten years ago, one of the directors of Washgrave Properties had been Henry Charkall-Phelps.

  And very likely thanks to David Sawyer, the PM had not been able to hide the fact that he had connived at the kind of unsavoury–

  Another paragraph elsewhere on the page caught his eye, and his train of thought broke off, derailed.

  –Troops deserting in Glasgow? Fourteen courts-martial? Oh, it’s all happening, it’s really all happening! But how about the bloody French? Surely by now something ought to– But there it is! On page three!

  He read hungrily, scarcely daring to credit the agency the dispatch was from. Reassignment of the 18th Infantry Division … resignation of a senior officer … political differences in the ranks leading to …

  Aloud he told the air, “If I’d written my own script, I couldn’t have improved on this.”

  “So what do you think will happen?” Sawyer asked the barman who was drawing his mid-morning pint.

  “Dunno,” the man grunted. “Except one thing. I know we’ve been led by fools and rogues, but this is the first time we’ve ever been led by a criminal!”

  With a snort he turned to serve someone else. Sawyer smiled quietly into his beer.

  “Ach, Liebchen, it is beyond belief!” sighed the owner of Am
Weissen Pferd. “Last night, it was a calamity! Nobody ate anything–anything at all bar a token mouthful! There was the most terrible scene in front of all the other customers, when this member of the Bundestag shouted across the room at Herr General Kleindienst, calling him a crazy killer who wanted to play with atom-bombs like children’s toys, to sit safely in a concrete bunker and watch the pretty flames as they exploded!”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?” Ruth murmured, stirring her coffee.

  “True? But of course not! It is necessary that we have these weapons to save us from the Russians, who would otherwise walk in and steal our land from us! Not that someone with a memory as long as mine could entirely hold that against them, for I myself …”

  Patiently she endured for the umpteenth time the recital of his experiences on the Russian front in World War II, and noted with interest that today, unprecedentedly, he interspersed accounts of his own heroism with references to the plight of the peasants whose land the great battles had been fought over.

  –It’s working. I wish I knew where Malcolm was! I’d so love to phone him and share this triumph.

  “Morning, Val,” said the sergeant in a dispirited tone. He and Valentine had become quite well acquainted now. “The usual, please … No, make it a sausage-roll today. I feel like a change.”

  “Coming up, sarge!” Valentine said, turning to his urns. And unable to resist glancing at the sugar he had so carefully doctored every evening in his squalid lodgings since he arrived. Once you had the knack of growing VC, it was no more difficult than, say, making cottage cheese. Though it did provoke raised eyebrows when he bought the ingredients for the substrate.

  “You been having trouble, sarge?” he added in a sympathetic tone.

  “Trouble? Trouble is putting it mildly!” The sergeant took a moody bite of his roll. “Losing Lieutenant Cordery that way–never saw nothing like it in my life. You know what he did?”

  “Well, I heard something …”

  “Probably didn’t hear the half! Called us all together and started giving us this lecture on how if the government had worked everything out properly to start with, there wouldn’t be any strikers throwing bombs and sniping at us, and then the colonel interrupted and had him put under arrest, and … But tell me something, Val. How do you feel?”

  Valentine hesitated only fractionally. He put on a disapproving tone.

  “Sarge, I was brought up to think that this was a good country, a great country. Even if they did drag my grandfather off to be a lousy slave, they realised it was wrong, they passed laws, they gave us something to make up. And to be here now and see what’s damned near civil war–well!” He handed over the plastic cup with four spoonfuls of sugar, which he knew this customer liked.

  “Right. I didn’t sign on to shoot at jocks,” the sergeant said. “Nor at micks. Hell, I’ve served with both, and there’s some good and some bad in them all, same as with English people. I’ve had my bellyful. And, what’s more”–with growing decision–”I’m going to go tell that bugger of a captain! Just as soon as I finish this tea. You make bloody good tea, you know.”

  Valentine shrugged and spread his hands.

  “No, I mean it! Funny, but I only just got to thinking about it. Good food. Best fish and chips I ever ate came from a shop run by a bod from Cyprus. Near where I used to live. That was all you could do for a meal late on Saturday after the pubs shut, until a Chinese restaurant opened up, and then an Indian one just around the corner, too. Good scoff, most of it. Bit weird for the likes of me to start with, but– No, I was forgetting. You were born here, Val, right? I mean in London, same as me!”

  He gulped the last of his tea and replaced his empty cup on the counter of the van. “Thanks! Now I am going to give ’em a piece of my mind!”

  Very cautiously the adjudant moved aside the branches of the bush at the crest of the hill, still so tightly wrapped in frozen snow that he could hear them crackle, and raised his binoculars to look towards Italy.

  And uttered a gasp that must have been audible for half a mile.

  Of all the spectacles that could be presented to an officer commanding troops there was none, in his opinion, more ghastly than the sight that now met his eyes.

  Down there, scarcely a hundred metres off, were the members of the patrol he had sent out at dawn, and who had been missing since an hour later. He had signalled the Quartier-Général about them. Now, more than likely, indignant notes would be flying back and forth between Paris and Rome–by way of Geneva, since of course the French government had broken off diplomatic relations with the Italians after their appalling treachery–and they were not dead at all!

  They were here in plain sight, sitting around and chatting and exchanging cigarettes and gulps of wine with their Italian enemies-to-be!

  Careless of consequences, he rose into plain sight and approached them at a crunching run, drawing his automatic.

  “Are you mad?” he screamed at the corporal leading the patrol.

  The latter looked at him coolly, and answered in a lazy drawling voice.

  “Why, no, mon adjudant. Rather, we have come to our senses. We have been thinking, you know. We have been wondering why, if our leaders are so eager for us to the on their behalf, they couldn’t have given us something first. I speak little Italian, but enough to discover that this poor bougre”–pointing at one of the nearer bersaglieri, in white except for the dark panes of his snow-goggles–“is a Catholic like myself, and has three children, like myself, and had to join the army because he could not find another job that would pay to support his family. Like myself.”

  He calmly took a swig of wine; the bottle being passed contained, according to its label, Valpolicella.

  “Want some?” he added. “It’s not bad. Not good, because it’s so cold, but not bad.”

  “You’re under arrest!” the adjudant barked. He raised his gun. Instantly, twenty other guns were levelled at him, both French and Italian … although in fact they were all made in Belgium. Identical.

  “Mon adjudant,” the corporal said, “we have been talking for about an hour. Despite our lack of interpreters, we have made better progress in that hour than the United Nations can make in a year! We are agreed that before we kill each other we should better serve mankind by killing those who order us to kill each other. Why do you not behave sensibly and sit down and discuss your views with us? We had just touched on something that I myself detest about the army life: the way we soldiers are given the chance of contact with a woman as a kind of supplement to our pay, whereas it is the natural right of us all. I do not deny that I have myself taken advantage of such offers, and indeed did so the night before we were sent here. But in principle I think it is not right, because such a commercial transaction … Ah, forgive me. You would not of course have indulged, would you?”

  The adjudant, with a cry of rage, aimed his pistol. A shot rang out. The pistol vanished from his hand like a conjuring trick and flew into a bank of snow.

  “I hope that did not hurt so very much,” the Italian who had fired said in broken French with a terrible accent. “Is better, though, not? Please, sir, have cheese, a cigarette, something! Is better French cheese yes, we agree, but is better Italian cigarettes, we think. Each have something proudly of … Ah, hm, uh?” He appealed with his “eyes for assistance, bogged down in the morass of translation.

  But the adjudant had turned and fled. Behind him he heard laughter.

  And jokes about his inability to satisfy a woman.

  “Tell me something, Professor,” said the lawyer Kneller had engaged to represent himself and Randolph.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you ever studied law?”

  “No, never.”

  “Then how on earth did you manage to give me the best layman’s brief I’ve ever received? I never saw anything clearer or more detailed in all my–what is it now?–twenty-eight years of practice!”

  Kneller gazed modestly at the floor. “Well, one of m
y best friends at Oxford was reading law, and I do number quite a few solicitors and barristers among my personal acquaintances.”

  The lawyer snorted. “Then all I can say is that you’ve missed your vocation. You have a rare aptitude for legal argument.” He was turning the pages of the brief as he spoke. “Beautifully organised–beautifully! And there isn’t a hole anywhere!”

  “That’s very kind of you. But the important question is: will it do its job?”

  “You mean will it get you and Dr Randolph out from under these absurd charges? Of course it will–not a shadow of a doubt.” The lawyer hesitated. “As a matter of fact I believe the charges would be set aside anyway, but it’s always more satisfying, so to speak, to know you had a winning hand despite your opponent throwing in his cards. You are aware that one of the most extraordinary cases in the whole of English jurisprudence is just about to break?”

  “I take it you’re referring to the remarkable coincidence in time between the selection of Charkall-Phelps as the new PM, and his investigation by the police for various rather unsavoury offences connived at, if not committed, during his time as a director of Washgrave Properties?”

  The lawyer threw up his hands. “God’s name! If half the charges are true, he should have spent the past ten years in jail, not in the House of Commons!”

  “As a matter of purely clinical interest,” Kneller said, “they are all true. But if you don’t mind my changing the subject–how soon are you going to get me out of here?”

  “Oh, within a few minutes. Just as soon as Chief Superintendent Gladwin arrives. You heard he’s taken over from Owsley?”

  “I hadn’t heard, in fact, but I’m not surprised. Is Owsley going to face disciplinary action?”

  Staring, the lawyer said, “For a man who’s been under arrest since before this affair came into the open, you’re astonishingly well informed. Yes, it seems likely, and among the things he’s going to have to answer for I’ll make sure they include unreasonable opposition to bail for you and Dr Randolph.”