‘Who the hell might you be?’ Whiteley demanded, jumping out of the tiled cubicle and crossing the floor angrily.
‘You’re Dashiell Whiteley, aren’t you?’ the man asked. He was a small fellow, his voice weak but self-assured. He looked about sixty, except that the beard he wore down to his first jacket button was barely streaked with grey. In compensation for that, his face was grey all over; and that included his eyes, which looked no pleasanter up close than they had when Whiteley first saw them.
‘What’s my name to you?’ Whiteley asked nastily. He was still trying to forget how this cream cheese countenance had jarred his nerves. ‘If you’re looking for the nearest bus stop, it’s down the other end of the corridor.’
‘You don’t mind if I come in, do you?’
‘Hell, don’t bother to ask me! You are in, aren’t you?’
The bearded man shrugged, as if the stupidity of the question offended him. His indifference to the conventions was something Whiteley might have pondered over in a cooler mood.
‘There is such a disgusting noise coming from overhead,’ he said. ‘And you were noisy in here, too – so I had to enter to make myself heard. That’s reasonable, surely?’
Whiteley snatched himself a towel and turned off the shower. ‘Look, pop,’ he said angrily, ‘you’re a bit low on etiquette, aren’t you?’
‘Etiquette!’ Bearded spoke the word as if savouring its Freudian connotations. ‘Don’t bother me with inessentials. I’ve had time to think …’
He commenced to undo his top coat and take it off. What he might be doing in a top coat on a warm summer evening was no business of Whiteley’s, but he did not like to see the little man so complacently making himself at home. Dropping his towel, Whiteley grabbed the two coat lapels and wrapped the coat tightly and savagely back on, afterwards belting it securely round the man’s bony body.
‘Now,’ he breathed, ‘you either about turn, quick march through that door, or you tell me something that catches my fancy, and pronto.’
‘Your shower’s still running,’ the little man said quietly.
Whiteley released him and turned slowly round. The shower indicator was hard over ‘Hot’, scalding water fell in a steamy column. He knew he had switched it off – anyhow he had had it running only at Tepid. But – nobody else was in here, he’d had hold of the little man: ergo, Whiteley had not switched the shower off when he supposed he had. You have to kill creepy notions with logic, man! Whiteley switched the shower off now.
When he turned round the visitor had got his coat off. The little fellow had gone into the living room and coolly switched on the bar fire – and now the bearded man was warming his hands!
Irritated again, Whiteley began hurriedly to dress, pulling his clothes over damp limbs. This old boy had qualified for the bum’s rush. He was switching the desk light on, now. But as Whiteley dressed, the old boy began to talk. His voice seemed to float clearly through the ole-ing from above.
‘I can tell you’re Dashiell Whiteley now,’ he said. ‘You’ve got that same overbearing manner. No, I feel no surprise that you don’t recall me; yet we roomed next door to each other one semester at Balt Tech. You were always the extrovert, I was the introvert … Nothing changes a man in that sort of respect.’
‘Sorry, I don’t remember you, buster,’ Whiteley said, struggling into slacks. What was this anyway, a touch? Besides, the bearded man was at least fifteen years Whiteley’s senior; they could never have been together at Tech.
‘My name’s Herbert Farthingdale,’ the intruder said. ‘We used to play the rhine-cards together.’
The rhine-cards! That at least was distantly familiar, like a well-known picture seen from a long way off. The Tech days were, after all, nearly two dozen years ago. Whiteley had made the cards himself; he had rigged up a table in his room with a shield bisecting it in approved fashion. It had been a craze with the guys at one time to come and try to guess which card Dash Whiteley was flipping up: a craze soon finished and forgotten.
And one of the boys, Whiteley began to remember, consistently did better than average. Not much better, just enough to show. A long-faced guy with an odd name … Farthingdale. Herb Farthingdale.
Tugging on a sweater, Whiteley went and stared into the other’s face. That was no fun; the strangeness of the eyes loomed large. Something in the facial shape did seem familiar.
‘So you’re Herb Farthingdale’s father, huh?’ Whiteley said, as one might say, ‘So what?’
‘I’m Herb Farthingdale himself,’ the other said. ‘There’s a car outside waiting for us; I want to take you somewhere and show you something.’
But Whiteley was still catching up. ‘You’re Herb Farthingdale? Man, you’ve aged! Where’ve you been? Been sick? Doing a stretch? Late nights?’
‘You might say twenty years of late nights. I’ve been engaged in an experiment; it has aged me in some ways, as you observe, but the experience has been worth the sacrifice of what otherwise would be wasted years. I want you to come and see some of the fruits of the experiment.’
A decision was needed. Either Whiteley stuck to his original plan and threw the intruder out, or he scrapped it and went out with him. Tempting as the first alternative still was, it was the second Whiteley chose, without really knowing why. Something in Farthingdale’s face urged him to play along: it was that look as if the man had broken through some sort of barrier and become a member of another species.
‘What makes you so keen to show me?’ he asked. ‘We were never what you’d call friends. As you say, we were different types.’
That look of Farthingdale’s suddenly blazed with a wild hunger; if eyes ever turned nova, those did. As though aware of his reaction, Farthingdale looked away.
‘I feel I owe you a lot, Whiteley,’ he said. ‘You accidentally set me on the trail I’ve followed ever since.’ His bloodless hands arched together on his lap, remaining locked and trembling.
Nothing in his aspect suggested that the trail had been pleasant, or that he was particularly grateful for it; he looked more like a man out for revenge. Farthingdale was lying – there was a mystery. A tiny pulse of excitement began to beat in Whiteley. He knew suddenly why he was going with this bearded spectre: that prospect felt less monotonous than the prospect of an evening in his flat alone.
Muttering a vague excuse about going to comb his hair, Whiteley slipped into the bedroom and rifled through his sock drawer. With a pleasing sense of melodrama, he pulled out his small automatic, loaded it, and slipped it with some spare slugs into his trouser pocket. He walked casually back into the other room. Farthingdale was putting his coat on again, methodically switching off the heater.
‘Where are we going?’ Whiteley asked.
‘Little Thistle.’
Whiteley whistled. ‘You out there, Farthingdale? What exactly is your line of research?’
‘Let’s say I’m working for the government.’
Little Thistle lay some ten or twelve miles south west of Baltimore, across the Patapsco River. It was a big atomic research station built two and a half decades ago, in the early sixties; whatever went on in that acres-wide straggle of buildings, it was plenty private to judge by the security precautions surrounding the place.
‘How did you happen on me after all these years?’ Whiteley asked as they dropped in the lift down to ground level.
‘Our organisation can trace anyone.’
‘Is that so? This better be good. Farthingdale; you’re giving yourself a big build-up.’
‘You talk too much, Whiteley. As ever.’
This, thought Whiteley, is not the sort of conversation I have with anyone. Not since I was out of knee-pants. ‘Come and have a drink and snap out of it, Farthingdale,’ he said with all the patience he could muster, as they emerged into the foyer.
‘I don’t drink. Besides, the sedan’s waiting.’
Not only the sedan, but a uniformed driver, who turned a hard, searching face on them as they climbed
into the rear seat. It suggested a jolly, social evening, Whiteley thought. A reunion of good old school pals and all that. ‘You used to drive,’ he said, tugging his door shut.
‘Not since – not for twenty years,’ Farthingdale replied. ‘I’ve forgotten how.’ As soon as they started moving through the lighted city, his reserve faded. He seemed suddenly animated, almost intoxicated, jerking his head first to stare through one window then the other. It was as if the sight were entirely new to him. A flashing neon sign almost sent him into ecstasies.
‘How an ad man would love to see you now,’ Whiteley observed. This vivacity riled him as much as the earlier taciturnity. ‘Where’ve you been hiding all these years, Farthingdale – up on the moon?’
‘We’ve been further than that – in another direction,’ Farthingdale said uninterestedly.
There flew another hidden meaning. It was one too many for Whiteley. He pressed the young-old man for an explanation. Now that they were clear of the suburbs, and licking through Catonsville, Farthingdale acted as if his seat were more comfortable. He allowed his companion another iceman-cometh look.
‘What powers industry, Whiteley? And trade? And war? And human enterprise generally?’
Dumbly, Whiteley stared at him. ‘Listen friend,’ he said slowly. ‘If you turn out to be some sort of quiz-master, and it turns out I’m on some sort of crummy video show – I’m going to break your neck!’
‘The way you broke Ollie Grant’s?’
Whiteley stiffened. ‘That was an accident, and you know it. We weren’t fighting, we weren’t even mad. Everyone agreed that it was an accident.’
Farthingdale croaked with irritation. ‘You asked me for an explanation, and if you want one you had better answer my question. What is it that powers civilisation in general?’
‘This I suppose I asked for … Lord Almighty, man – atomic power, I presume.’
‘Wrong. Typical engineer’s answer. Look, think of the billions of dollars and floods of ingenuity spent on all branches of the auto industry. Not a tenth of it need be spent to maintain essential travel; the rest goes on frills – fashion, gadgets, or the playboy traffic. Or take the confectionery trade; not a tenth of that satisfies hunger – it’s all frills: candies, chocolates, gum, mere jaw activators. Or take the jewellery trade: it has no core of necessity; it’s entirely frills. And the same sort of thing can be said of every branch of commerce.’
‘Sure, sure,’ Whiteley agreed. ‘These frills as you call them are a yardstick to the richness of our civilisation.’
‘In a way you do not realise,’ Farthingdale said sternly. ‘I am going to tell you that these frills are as necessary to the heart of man as the supposed necessities themselves. They are products of the basic thrust in human nature. Now take the supposed necessities themselves: transport, communication, power. Take more, Whiteley – take any human activity. Love-making, war, litigation … What creates them, what’s the basic thrust behind them?’
In the darkness, Whiteley shrugged his shoulders.
‘Love of power, I guess,’ he replied, indifferently. ‘Sex, maybe. If you’ve spent twenty years mugging up Freud, I’d say you wasted your time, Farthingdale.’
‘Not love of power. Not sex,’ the other snapped, ignoring Whiteley’s jibe. ‘I’ll tell you the basic thrust: boredom!’
As he spoke, the sedan swung left up a short road and stopped in front of a floodlit barrier. Concrete blockhouses stood to each side of the barrier and a double wire gate some distance behind. An armed guard approached them.
‘Sorry to spoil your punch line, brother, but here’s Little Thistle,’ Whiteley announced. ‘Now maybe you’ll tell me what you think will induce them to let me into their holy of holies.’
‘This,’ Farthingdale said, unperturbed. He produced a document from an inside pocket and unfolded it. It was headed by three photographs of Whiteley, full face, half-profile and profile. For the first time, Whiteley realised in astonishment that this episode was not some weird jeu d’esprit on Farthingdale’s part; an organisation was interested in him, and Whiteley was not fond of organisations.
‘Will you three get out and stand in the road,’ the guard said, sticking his face close to a window. They complied, and the guard looked them over cursorily in the glare of a floodlight, glancing afterwards into the sedan to see nothing or nobody was hiding there.
The barrier was lifted, they moved to the wire-gates. More inspections, this time more thoroughly by a captain, a phone call to somewhere unspecified, and the double gates swung open for them. Ground lights flicked into being along a straight, tarmac drive. They climbed back into their seats and rolled on.
‘Boredom,’ Farthingdale said, satisfaction in his feeble voice. ‘All of this created by boredom.’
Whiteley had seen Little Thistle from the highway a score of times. It was little more impressive from close to – far less, in fact, than its fictional counterparts, with which he was familiar on TV and film. The buildings, most of them low and dispersed, were mainly lost in darkness now.
They drew up outside a concrete block where several lights burned, and went in, to find themselves in a waiting room. It looked to Whiteley as if there was no entrance to the interior of the building except through this room, where locked turnstiles guarded a corridor at the rear. Farthingdale led the way over to a counter behind which a nonentity in uniform nodded to them through a thick steel grille.
‘Friendly place this,’ Whiteley observed. ‘Alcatraz without the home comforts.’
An intercom buzzed at the nonentity’s elbow. He flicked a switch, listened to a distant crackle of speech, said laconically, ‘Yeah, just arrived … Yeah, that’s them … Yeah,’ and stood up.
‘I’ll get the key man,’ he said to Farthingdale, and pressed a button. In a moment, a door behind the counter opened and a uniformed guard appeared; after conferring with the nonentity, he disappeared again, to reappear a few seconds later with a single key as big as Whiteley’s automatic.
The nonentity freed the turnstiles by an unseen lever, and they followed the guard down the corridor, their footfalls silent on rubber tiling.
‘What have you in this joint anyway?’ Whiteley asked, impressed despite himself. ‘Dirty postcards?’
‘No, bud,’ the guard answered unexpectedly. ‘Your freedom.’
He stopped them at a massive door that would have suited a bank strong-room. It bore the superfluous sign: Keep Out. The guard inserted his key and three small lids snapped open on the door; these revealed combination locks, which the guard whirled efficiently. As the last number clicked into place, the door hinged inwards under its own power. Farthingdale stepped importantly through. Whiteley paused to look at the guard as if he expected that dignitary to bow at the end of his performance.
‘Thanks, tovarich,’ Whiteley said, and stepped after Farthingdale. The big door swung shut behind them.
Farthingdale turned and gripped Whiteley’s arms. His expression was one of almost insane eagerness. Whiteley turned uneasily away. ‘Feel my big strong muscles some other time,’ he said. ‘Right now, I want to know what goes on. What is this place to you?’
‘I am – they call me the manager.’
‘You live in a joint like this, Farthingdale?’
‘Of course, of course! Down these stairs, please.’
The lower they went, the warmer it grew. At the bottom of the staircase, a carpeted circular hall served a dozen doors, all closed. The walls were bare, the doors unpainted, the lighting not as good as poor. Total effect: depressing in the extreme. A faint explanation of Farthingdale’s anti-social behaviour began to glimmer.
‘Welcome to Project Tedium,’ Farthingdale said, leading through one of the doors into a small, bare office which boasted little more than a desk and a hatch in one wall. He began to remove his coat. ‘This is the manager’s office, by the way,’ he added.
‘Just what is all this about boredom and tedium?’ Whiteley said, sorry he had missed th
at drink at the flats, ‘And how do they tie in with this atomic plant?’
‘Smart question,’ Farthingdale said. ‘Answer: they don’t tie in at all. This project down here has nothing whatsoever to do with Little Thistle. It’s just an arrangement of convenience. Look at it this way: you have two hush-hush projects, like ours and Little Thistle. Right? No matter that ours is a small set-up, it still needs to be guarded with as much care as the atomics. Well then – put them behind the same protected perimeter: one lot of security precautions covers them both. Neat, eh? Saves the government quite a few dollars in a year!’
‘A nice thought,’ Whiteley admitted.
‘And of course Little Thistle serves as an ideal cover for us – for Project Tedium,’ Farthingdale added.
‘Sure, sure. You were going to tell me about that. Remember?’
‘I tried to, Whiteley, but you failed to listen attentively. Perhaps you’d better have a practical demonstration of what we do here.’
Again that look returned to his face. He picked up a microphone lying on a table, pressed its switch and said ominously into it, ‘Farthingdale here. I’ve got him, boys; I’ll bring him round.’
I want out, Whiteley thought. This place has the bright and cheery feeling of an old graveyard. Whatever they do down here, I want no part of it – and I don’t want them wanting a part of me. However, that’s a thought I might have thought before the philosophical character shut the safe door on us. Right now, I’d be more usefully employed humouring mine host; it might be a useful idea to find out just what he is mixed up in.
So he stood up, making sure Farthingdale saw the head and shoulder difference between their respective heights. ‘Let’s go see the boys,’ he beamed.
Without exactly managing to beam back, Farthingdale did produce a sort of sly all-the-better-to-eat-you-with grin as he led the way back into the circular hall.
‘Behind each of these other doors,’ he said, ‘lie short corridors with twelve rooms branching off each of them. We’ve a gymnasium down here and a small swimming pool and a medical bay; otherwise the rooms are all private – one man per room.’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 95