“She told you all that?” Arnold said bitterly. Was there no end to the way the power could be perverted? He saw suddenly the way it could be used for mental blackmail—actual blackmail, come to that.
Vic recognized, by Arnold’s tone, what he meant.
“She told me that, and more besides, long before we hooked up. Since then she’s a reformed character—by Drusilla’s standards. She only sleeps with one other man. She’s still on reefers, but it used to be cocaine. Which do you think is the worst evil?”
Arnold grimaced.
“Look, Arn,” Vic said earnestly. “You introduced me to this. How did you expect a person like me to react?”
“I didn’t know then that anybody else could pass it on.”
“All right, but if you had known perhaps you wouldn’t have passed it on to me, in that case but how else would you expect me to behave? Do you think it will really change people’s lives?”
“That had been one small hope.”
“Maybe I should have said character. Of course it will change people’s lives. It is a great thing and, if you think I’ve used it for pretty shabby ends, you’re probably right. But I haven’t done any harm with it, believe me. And I can’t help being as I am, any more than you can help worrying yourself sick about the power. Maybe that’s because you were the first one, but if I had had it first I wouldn’t have been any different. But it doesn’t mean that I’ll always treat it like that. It’s only because it’s new. I know it will change people’s lives—it must—but not so simply and immediately as you seem to think.”
“You mean when your approach is an outworn gimmick?”
“Go on, get me wrong if you like. And if you came down here just to punch me between the eyes, for chrissake do it, and then we can talk.”
Arnold shrugged. “Punching you between the eyes wouldn’t do much good.”
“Well, don’t ever say I didn’t offer. But, seriously, you’re going to see a lot of harm done. You can’t turn everybody’s way of thinking upside down without that happening.”
“I hoped that the power would bring the wisdom to use it properly.”
“Wishful thinking, and you know it. The wisdom will come, and so will the good, but it won’t come all at once. And, let’s face it, it’s begun. Whether you like the way it’s going Of not. If you were to go away and bury yourself on a desert island for the rest of your life, it wouldn’t make a scrap of difference. It would even catch up with you there eventually. So the sooner you forget about your personal responsibility the better.
“Now, how about that drink? For some curious reason the management here dislikes people sitting around and not drinking…”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
He came back home from what turned out to be a full evening’s drinking with Vic, feeling as he had never felt since the power had been thrust upon him. It wasn’t just the effect of the drinks—they had stuck to beer and had talked too animatedly for that to have taken much hold. What was odd about this mood was that all the elation and the pain, the conviction and the fear that he had felt seemed now to be cancelled out. He remembered what Green had said about counterbalancing forces and felt them operating in him.
He had thought that what he had to offer people was precious—and had seen it debased. He had rejected the thought of the power being dissected but had gladly submitted to just that. That had seemed to lift a burden from him. Vic had restored it, then showed him that the burden was not his alone. He had gone to Vic—to do what, he hadn’t known—to assault him perhaps, certainly to warn him that he was wrong. And had only discovered that it was he himself who was wrong—or not entirely right.
Determination, he recognized, had never been a strong factor in his make-up. Stubbornness sometimes, perhaps, impatience with stupidity, but not determination. He could accept the fact that Vic had parried his charge without resenting it. Vic was, after all, the only person who appreciated his own personal problems. Green and his men had tactfully skirted them in the interests of research. Claire—he must write to Claire—had her own problems which were not the same as his. He smiled wryly at the fact, but here he was, potentially capable of communicating directly with almost anybody—and Vic, an extrovert who lived only for the day… or night… and its pleasures, was the only person who really understood.
He went to sleep, more contented than he felt he had a right to be. He slept on his lonely bed in his yellow-painted room, but it was as if he slept among the stars in a hammock strung out of all the opposing forces that had entered his life. Green’s Hammock. Like Occam’s Razor.
His lips freaked in a smile…
He was wakened by a loud noise. He reached out to shut the waker bell off before he realized that it had been a knock at the door. He got up, muttered when he saw that it was only seven-thirty, and threw on a robe. The knock was repeated before he got to the door. He opened it.
Standing there were two men in bowler hats, black jackets and striped trousers.
“Mr. Ash?” asked one of them. “Arnold Ash?”
Arnold hesitated, caution groping its way into his still sleep-drugged mind. Who were they? They couldn’t be police, surely, in that kind of outfit. Anyway, what had he done? In any case—his mind struggled towards clarity—it was no use denying his identity. If they were policemen they. could easily check it.
He nodded.
“We’re from M.I.9.” The man flashed a card at him, which to Arnold at half-past-seven in the morning might have been anything from a union card to a driver’s licence.
“M.I.9?” he queried. “I’ve heard of M.I.5, but who are you?”
“A special branch of security,” the one who had so far done all the talking informed him. “We’d like you to come with us.”
“But what for? I’ve got nothing to do with security.”
“Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Ash.” The man’s manner was polite, but insistent. “We only want you to come to Whitehall with us to meet our chief. He will explain. We have conveyance waiting downstairs for you.”
Arnold realized that he would get no further information out of him. He shrugged. “I’ll have to get dressed.” He went to close the door upon them. But their manner was so deferential that he found himself adding, “You’d better come in and wait.”
He dressed and went down with them. The “conveyance” that awaited them at the entrance to the yard was a gleaming turbo car. It contrasted oddly, in its sleek modernity, with the archaic garb of his escort. Some things, Arnold reflected, died hard. The British colony on the moon probably dressed for dinner.
The morning rush to the centre of London had not yet built up. Within ten minutes Arnold was being led into a building at the back of Whitehall. They wheeled out of the main entrance into a small vestibule. The man who had not spoken took a key from his vest pocket and opened a door into an elevator that was just big enough to hold the three of them. He used a key, too, before he pressed an unnumbered button on the operating panel.
They reached the numberless floor of their destination. The elevator opened directly into an anteroom, and that into a room which contained a large desk and a large man who rose from it as Arnold was ushered in. The escort retreated. Arnold thought for a moment that they bowed as they did so, but dismissed it as a figment of his imagination.
The big man stretched out a hand. “Mr. Ash? So glad you could come. Take a seat.” He resumed his own.
Arnold did not start to debate the implication that his attendance was entirely voluntary. He would have had a job to substantiate any objection to the contrary. He sat down and looked at the man who had summoned him here.
He must have been well over six feet tall, and he looked at least half that wide. He was in his fifties, maybe older; his scrubby fair hair was shot with grey. It was cut to old-fashioned long sideburns that flanked a brick-red face.
“Can I offer you a drink?” the big man asked genially. “Sure? Pity. I’ve always mourned the vanished habits of more spacious days.
I’m sure our ancestors wouldn’t have been the men they were without their gin for breakfast.” He sighed, and Arnold could picture him quite easily in a nineteenth-century hunting print, galloping over the shires in a red coat.
“Well, coffee, then,” his host said and pressed a button on his desk. Without any subsequent action or perceptible delay, a tray was borne in. Its bearer departed.
“That’s better,” said the big man, settling back in his leather chair. “Now, Mr. Ash, you must be wondering why you’ve been asked here. The reason is that a government employee, for whose security and welfare I am ultimately responsible, has fallen ill. We want you to go and take a look at him and see what you can do.”
The feeling of unreality which had been hovering round Arnold ever since he had been prematurely awakened from his sleep congealed into certainty. These people, with their striped trousers and sleek cars and secret elevators were mad. Either that—or he was.
“I’m sorry. I think you’ve got the wrong person,” he told the big man.
“But—” The man reached down beneath his desk and brought up a folder which he opened. “Your name is Arnold Eric Ash?”
Arnold nodded.
“You have certain abnormal mental powers?”
Arnold nodded slowly. This man knew then, even if the way he put it sounded rather patronizing. But what had the power to do with sick civil servants?
The big man’s next words enlightened him.
“The man in question is a key worker… the key worker… on a national project of the highest priority. He is mentally disturbed. The doctors diagnose schizophrenia, but haven’t succeeded in curing him. This is the second breakdown he has had. The first time shock therapy did the trick. The only resource open now is lobotomy, which might cut the intelligence out with the disability. With this man we can’t afford the risk.”
“Can he?” Arnold asked scathingly. “Anyway, what can I do?”
“We don’t know. What we do know is that we have to get this man’s mind back and we know no way of doing it. We’ve tried every orthodox treatment in the book; now I’m going outside the book. It has come to our knowledge that you can get in contact directly with another person’s mind. We want you to do that in this case.”
“What!”
The feeling of unreality deepened.
“But you don’t understand. My record isn’t a hundred per cent for one thing. But the main point is that contact has to be voluntary. How can a mad mind give its consent?”
“You needn’t worry about the legal aspect. I assure you that can be taken care of.”
“Legal aspect?” He hadn’t realized there could be one. Could there? “I’m not talking about that. I can’t achieve results with a mind that can’t readily enter into the process.”
“How do you know? Have you tried?”
“No,” Arnold admitted, “but I don’t claim any healing powers. Heaven knows what lists you keep in your files, but you’ve got the wrong department. You want the healers. The witch doctors the layers-on of hands.” He was beginning to get angry. “How did you find out about me, anyway?”
“We have our methods.”
“Oh no, you can do better than that.” A thought had struck him. There was only one person who knew of it whose word would carry enough weight to make a government department sit up and take notice. “Was it Green?”
“Professor Green? My dear chap=—”
“So it was. I didn’t say Professor Green.”
Arnold could cheerfully have throttled the little professor at this moment. This was the last direction in which he would want knowledge of the power to be spread.
“I did rather slip there, didn’t I? But Professor Green did not give me my information directly. We learned that his department was up to something rather special, so we took steps to find out about it. It all seemed harmless enough, then it occurred to me that you could be useful to us.
“You see, Mr. Ash, government departments have—quite unwarrantedly, in my opinion—a reputation for being unadventurous. Perhaps they are when things are running smoothly. But when an emergency arises we’re ready to try anything. My own training was gained in the ’39–’45 war in a department for screwball inventions. One was a floating airbase made of ice, I remember.” He chuckled reminiscently. “We didn’t have to try that one, but we nearly did. But to come back to our present problem. We don’t know what you can achieve, but we want you to have a shot.”
Arnold felt vehement rejection rise up in him. It wasn’t hearing the power parcelled with screwball inventions so much as sheer resentment of the workings of the governmental mind. Instead of studying his power, offering their aid—though he was sure he didn’t want that—this department wanted to use it for their own narrow ends to attempt something utterly beyond its scope.
The other, prompted by Arnold’s silence, said: “This man is most important, believe me. Otherwise you would not have been approached. His brains, and what they can do, are vital to us.”
“Perhaps they are to you,” Arnold told him tersely, “but not to me.”
The big man gazed intently at him. His words were measured. “On the contrary, they are vital to everybody in the country.”
Arnold laughed in his face.
“You won’t get me on that one. ‘Beside my hatred for one fat patriot my hatred for the enemy is love true’ to paraphrase a poet who was killed in the war before the one you mentioned. I’m not interested in the struggle for power. If it ever made sense it certainly doesn’t any longer.”
The big man leaned back in his chair.
“Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.”
He greeted Arnold’s look of surprise with a quiet laugh. “You’re not the only one who knows Edward Thomas. The poem is called ‘This is No Petty Case of Right or Wrong’, which is very apposite. I’m glad you quoted it.”
“I’m sorry. You’ll have to look elsewhere.”
The big man shrugged and consulted his folder again.
“Born February 15, 1945. Educated at Lombard Wall primary school, Greenwich, and South-East London Grammar. Started work 1962 for Global Correspondence Schools. 1964 worked for a short time in Contemporary Archives, switched to advertising 1965. Family history: only child. Father died 1958—”
“What’s all this in aid of?” Arnold interrupted angrily, and knew, before he had finished the sentence, just what. It was to demonstrate that these people, once they got their teeth in, could strip him bare, could find at least one place in his naked history where a thrust would strike home. That was the way they worked, wasn’t it?
Well, let them try. They had nothing on him. And then he remembered. There was something, somebody, who was vulnerable—Claire. If he finally refused, they could find her, browbeat her—
Something else moved him to a decision. A man had lost his mind. He remembered what Claire had said to him before she had gone off with Sally—whatever pain the power had caused could only be remedied by the power. Even though he felt in his bones that the power would be helpless in the task that was being demanded of it.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll do what you ask.”
“Good man. I’m glad you see it our way.”
“I don’t. But what do you want me to do?”
The big man smiled regretfully.
“Don’t blame me if I can’t tell you yet. It’s simply a matter of security until we’ve reached our destination. Even modern methods of transport are not entirely infallible.”
“Transport? Where is the man I have to see?”
The big man smiled. “We’re catching the noon jet for Australia. So there are things to arrange for you. Kit, money, anything else you may need.” He looked at his wrist. “We’ll have to look sharp. Jets don’t wait—even for this department.”
CHAPTER F
IFTEEN
Dawn was breaking as the jet’s forward tubes flared over Adelaide and the underjets took over the job that they had relinquished twenty miles above London Airport. Arnold suddenly realized that, although the trip had taken a scant six hours, this was tomorrow’s dawn. Hurtling against the sun brought the flight into perspective. Nearly a day and a night had elapsed by the sun since he had been wakened to start this fantastic errand. That he could accept. To think that it was only ten hours—which, in fact, it had been—would have screwed unreality a pitch higher.
For here he was, in khaki drill, stepping out of the giant jet half a world away from London. Stepping from the chill mists of autumn into the blazing dawn of an Australian summer.
His companion, garbed similarly to himself, ushered him to a jeep which bore them across the airport to a private plane.
“Well,” said Colonel Jay, as the plane took off, “next stop Woomera.”
Jay was the name he had given Arnold, but its alphabetical quality made him suspect that it was probably only one of a dozen. That was the only particular, if such it could be called, that the big man had given him so far. On the jet they had talked and quoted Georgian poetry, which was one of Arnold’s favourite periods, but about which it was soon apparent that Jay knew more than he did. His quotation of Edward Thomas was no isolated snippet. He could discourse on Davies, Hardy, Charlotte Mew, with equal facility. Such an interest seemed odd to Arnold in a security chief. He would have though the job and the interest mutually antagonistic.
But his conversation now was strictly to the job at hand.
“It’s time to fill you in,” he told Arnold, “with some of the background. Not the case history; the medicos will do that for you. But the general picture.
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