by Fred Hoyle
All the local radio and television channels were blank. He tried the Continental channels and they too were blank. There was nothing on the short-wave radio. It added up to only one thing, the chain reaction had swept entirely round the globe. The meaning of it all Conway didn’t understand yet, but granted the starting point, that they had been made
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to see their own thoughts and their own memories, then the rest followed pretty easily. After all they’d lived with those thoughts and those visions for a whole lifetime, literally from their first thinking moments. Everybody had done so since the middle of the twentieth century.
They didn’t say much to each other. Conway had never seen Cathy in a serious mood before. It wasn’t as if many people would come to real harm. But driving out devils was a serious business. Devils might be absurd and monstrous in themselves, but their effect was very real. The very strength of his own reaction - he still remembered the blindness, the sickening crash on his shoulder, and the gamma rays — the very strength of his reaction showed just how far he himself had been indoctrinated, rebel that he was.
He tried the radio again and there was still nothing, so he went off to make tea. In a sense it was absurd, but why not make tea?
Chapter Fifteen
The Aftermath
Conway hadn’t realized how remarkably quick his own recovery had been. It took the rest of the world more than three hours to make the same recovery. The people rose up from the pavement, they came out of the fall-out shelters, they came out of their graves, and they found that the sun was still shining and that their children were still alive. For the most part they broke down and wept as they had not done since they were young themselves, waking to security from the worst nightmare. They didn’t know how it had happened but they knew that in some way a hellish disaster had been avoided. Yesterday their rulers had brandished their fists and shouted in loud voices at each other, and all the commentators and leader-writers had told them that the situation was very serious. And because they were very simple people they had believed it all, just as they had believed what they had been told all their lives. But today all this bluster, all this raving, this psychological calculation had suddenly been made to seem what it really was - the currency of the mad-house.
The people were much too numb yet to be angry. But soon they would come to realize the enormity of the things that had been done to them. Five hundred years earlier they had endured physical subjection. But now they would come to see that what had been done to their minds in the last hundred years by stick-at-nothing politicians, by the ambitious military and by die lickspittle psychologists - was appallingly and vastly worse. Soon with sure instinct they would know all this and the outcry would begin.
There was not a government anywhere that had shuffled
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its pieces on the chessboard of power that did not appraise the situation with complete accuracy. It was known both in the East and the West, in Britain even, that not only the days of governments but of the whole anonymous social structure that had grown up over the past two centuries were numbered. The days were numbered unless a culprit could be found and a new scare generated. The semi- paralysis that had overtaken even the highest administrative officials may be judged from the fact that it took almost six hours before the testimony of Tom Fiske was remembered.
It had of course been inevitable that the authorities would catch up with Tom. They did so in fact on the very same day that Cathy had gone to the hospital in Washington. And it was also to Washington that Tom was taken. He and Ilyana were put into the grill box. Not together, which would have been easier, but separately. Their testimonies were taken by different groups of inquisitors in different buildings.
They both knew their stories must check and since they had not talked very seriously in their night together they could only stick to the truth. Both Fiske and Ilyana told the whole story, exactly as they knew it. So their completely sceptical questioners, keen fellows from Intelligence, learned about the abortive circular trips in the vast grasslands of Achilles, about the strange translucent sheets and of how the four men had really died.
They were of course put under what was effectively house arrest. Nobody had any doubts at first that the authorities were being given a vatful of the purest eyewash. They knew that Fiske and Ilyana would come clean in the end.
As the Governments began to recover from the horror of the great vision, as the pulses of administration slowly began to beat again, the statements of Fiske and Ilyana were remembered. They were doubted, pulled to pieces, put together again, argued about at the highest level of secrecy, and finally accepted as a tentative working hypothesis. Gradually the hypothesis that someone or something could
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make you see what you didn’t want to see gained ground. It was the only way in which the vision could be explained. And it needed little deductive power to see that this ghastly thing had come from Achilles. It must be some sort of bug that attacked the nervous system in a manner as yet unknown to science.
Four people had returned alive from Achilles. Three of them, Fiske, Ilyana, and Pitoyan in the East, were essentially under lock and key. They could be looked into in detail and at leisure, the tops of their heads sliced off if need be.
The highest-level teams were instantly put on to the job. The stress induced by the medico-psychiatric treatment had little or no effect on either Fiske or I'lyana. It was minor league stuff compared with what they had experienced on Achilles. But Pitoyan cracked badly under the strain, and was obliged thereafter to spend several years recovering in a mental institution.
The authorities in Washington remembered that there had been a fourth traveller on the returning ship — Fawsett. They remembered the strange illness he had suffered from, and they began to wonder. Perhaps Fiske and Ilyana were really giving them the gen after all.
The real inspiration came from a balding thirty-nine- year-old executive, described in the ancient Time-Life circuit as a rising star among Washington’s topmen. He was one of those going-places-fast young men who work thirteen hours a day at his desk, and give their wives hell after it. His job was in the Department of Inconsequential Facts. He remembered, while dallying with his secretary, the odd story of the man at Washington airport. A quick research by two of his assistants refreshed his mind with the facts of the case. The statements of witnesses had similarities with what he himself had seen during the vision. Plainly the story rated investigation in depth.
The next thirteen hours at the desk were well spent. One line of investigation lay with the ferry flight-lists. There had
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been almost a hundred flights around the time of the incident and it was quite some job to round up the dossiers of all the passengers. But at last several boxes of punched cards were assembled on the desk of the young executive. A quick programme was run up by the department’s computer experts, and soon the big machine on the seventeenth floor of the building was dissecting the lives of the seven thousand odd passengers, comparing them with a collation of facts concerning the space-ship and its crew. The computer only needed to chew its cud for about~three minutes and there was the name of Cathy Conway, printed out for all the world to see. Following Cathy’s name, the essential facts of the case were neatly listed. She had been a ‘friend’ of Mike Fawsett - the machine even put the word friend in inverted commas - Fawsett had been sick with an unknown disease, Mrs Conway had visited him on the day before the airport incident, and finally Mrs Conway and her husband had checked in at the reception desk less than fifteen minutes before the reported time of the incident. The balding young man knew that 'he had it, both the solution to the problem that was baffling the top echelon, and also certain promotion.
The top echelon also knew he had it, both the solution and his promotion. Within an hour the
ir agent in London was contacting the British Government. The British were characteristically slow in the uptake, and it was not until well into the day following the vision that they acted.
But when they did they acted with decision. A small, highly-trained military unit was directed by Intelligence to move in and surround the village of Alderbourne. The Head of Intelligence, Brigadier Fitzalan, put himself in charge of the operation. It was in fact a great mistake not to brief the police, for as it turned out the ordinary London bobby might have been more use to the Government than the highly-trained unit deployed by Intelligence.
It was about six o’clock in the evening when Conway opened his door to find Brigadier Fitzalan and a young
The Aftermath
major standing oq^his threshold. Conway and Cathy had pretty well recovered from the previous day, but Conway was in no mood for visitors.
‘Professor Conway?’ inquired Fitzalan.
‘Indeed,’ answered Conway.
‘1 wonder if you would mind me putting a few questions to your wife, Mrs Catherine Conway.’
‘Put questions to Cathy? What on earth for?’
Conway knew perfectly well what for, he knew that they must have connected yesterday’s events with the space-ship from Achilles. He knew they must be investigating every conceivable line. Every stone would be upturned and every little insect under it would be examined to see that it had showered properly and brushed its teeth. Cathy was obviously one of those lines. Or rather one of those stones, and he himself was one of the insects. He motioned the Brigadier and the fresh-faced Major into the house.
‘I think I would like to see Mrs Conway alone, if you ' don’t mind?’ said the Brigadier. ‘Major Stanley will wait. He only accompanied me for the walk.’
It was here that Conway made a big mistake. He had of course no knowledge of the story that Fiske and Ilyana told to the authorities. So he had no reason to think that this was anything more than a routine check-up. He had foreseen of course that there would be such a check-up. But Fitzalan had been shrewd enough not to arouse his suspicion by a show of force, although motorized units had already surrounded the village.
‘Oh, certainly,’ he said, ‘you’ll find my wife through there in the drawing-room.’
When the Brigadier had gone the young Major said, ‘You’ve got a very fine garden here, sir.’
Conway decided that it would be stupid of him to seem in any way concerned, and in any case Cathy could more than look after herself. She seemed to need his help ju9t as much as before in a lot of small things, but on the big things she knew perfectly well what she was doing.
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‘Would you like to take a stroll around?’ he asked.
The young Major said he would and they went outside into the- late afternoon sunshine. They’d made two tours around the garden before they heard the shouting. Conway was astonished to see the young Major draw a pistol and begin moving towards the house at a trot. Conway thought fast now. Either Cathy had lost patience or this was more serious than it looked on the face of it. If they really were on to her then things were going to be very awkward, not only for Cathy and himself but for everybody in general. The Major’s gun showed that they were going to shoot first and ask questions afterwards, so he shouted, ‘The bastard’s attacking her.’
This ambiguous, but in a sense correct, statement caused the Major to waver for a moment. In an instant Conway threw himself in front of the man in an American-style football block. The boy came down heavily and the pistol slipped away from him. Conway got to it first.
‘Come on, baby boy, march! ’
They found the Brigadier lying back in a deep chair. He was breathing in big shuddering gasps and his face was a rich purple.
‘I loosened his collar. That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?’ said Cathy.
‘Jesus,’ muttered Conway, and that was all he could think of to say. It was clear it would be many a long day before the Brigadier would again step up in sprightly fashion to a professor’s door at six o’clock on a fine autumn evening. It was very abundantly clear.
‘You’d better get him out of here,’ he said to the Major. ‘I don’t know how many men you’ve got, but please understand that there’s just nothing you can do. The more you try the harder you’ll get hurt.’
‘Can I go down and fetch a vehicle?’
‘No, get out.’
The Major left, supporting the Brigadier as best he could. The retreat from Moscow, thought Conway as he watched
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diem stagger down the pathway to the road. Very quickly he threw the bare necessities of existence, a razor, toothbrushes, a few clothes, and what he could see of Cathy’s things into a bag.
‘Why are you doing that?’she asked.
‘Because this is a serious business. Now that they know that you did it they’ll hunt us down.’
‘But I can fix them all as easily as I fixed the General.’
‘Brigadier. Brigadier Fitzalan. You can fix them if they come to the door and walk politely in here and sit themselves down by your side. Then you can fix them all right. But how if they lob half a dozen mortar bombs on the house? What happens then?’
‘You think they might do that?’
‘If they couldn’t get you any other way they’d do just that. The army would start shooting. Even if they couldn’t see you they’d shoot at random, just on the chance of hitting you, even if it meant killing hundreds Of innocent people. And if our army didn’t do it every military force in the world would close in on these islands. It is the only way they can save themselves. The whole of this society is run on an idea. If you remain loose that idea collapses. They’ve simply got to get you.’
Cathy became more serious now. ‘Then we shouldn’t have let those two men go.’
‘No, we should have killed them, but that’s not the sort of thing I like to do. It’s better to get out.’
They drove out on to the main road and made off to the village. They got a couple of hundred yards beyond the outskirts, turned a corner and saw the first roadblock. Conway backed up the car until he could turn it. Then he drove off down a lane in the opposite direction. There was of course another roadblock. The place was surrounded. He had been badly mistaken to let the Brigadier go. Then Conway saw that the fresh-faced Major was in charge and on an impulse drove up to the barrier.
- ‘Look, this sort of thing isn’t any good. You can’t hope to
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deal with what happened yesterday by playing toy soldiers. You’re not in the right league.’
‘What are you threatening us with, sir?’
‘You saw perfectly well what happened to Fitzalan. There isn’t any problem in dealing with the whole lot of you in the same sort of way.’
Conway wasn’t quite sure if this was true or not but it seemed a fair presumption. The boy in front of him went pale and said, ‘You won’t get away with it, sir. We’ll get you in the end.’
They opened up the barrier. Conway accelerated towards it, and was within about ten yards of the opening when a shot came from his left. He heard Cathy cry out and at the same instant realized that it was. the young Major who had fired. Instinctively he braked the car to a standstill. As he heard his wife moan there was a deep rage in his heart. Something larger than himself seemed to be expanding his mind, and he knew now why he had stopped the car. He couldn’t describe what he did, but it was like loosing a bolt. He saw the Major collapse. The man didn’t even cry out as he fell. Conway never knew exactly how it had happened. The other guards scattered pell-mell, with all the devils of hell on their tails as far as Conway could see. He didn’t know what he’d done but it was enough. He had the car moving again now. Soon they were clear of the village, and as the road opened before them a strange influence seemed to go out of him. Cathy’s eyes were open, and she murmure
d, ‘My shoulder hurts.’
He got the car on to the side roads and looked for somewhere to stop where he could examine Cathy’s wounds. He carefully tore away her blouse and saw a dark patch on her right shoulder. ‘It won’t kill you,’ he said.
But it was going to be painful and it had carried them a long way downhill. Cathy would have to have immediate treatment. It would be difficult to get this without their whereabouts becoming known to the authorities. And Cathy herself wouldn’t be in the right sort of shape to deal very
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jffectively with their pursuers. He cursed himself for being tool enough to be taken in by Fitzalan and by that young jackass.
‘I’m going to get you into London to see a friend just as soon as I can. I daren’t risk the main highway, so I’m going to take the side route as far as the outskirts and it may take quite a while. They may put up barriers and you’ll have to get them to open up. Do you think you can hold on for a couple of hours?’
‘I think I can.’ Her voice was weak but it sounded firm. He drove out from behind the hedge and started on their journey.
He couldn’t be certain that the main highway would be clear. If they threw a barrier across it the sheer volume of the traffic would be an unsurmountable block. But if they merely put something across the road in one of the country villages, then Cathy would still be able to deal with that without too much trouble.
He knew that in the brief moment when she had been hit something had passed between them. It had been prepared to leave just in case the shot had killed her. Conway himself would have been the new home. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to give up easily. He shivered and he couldn’t help wondering what it would have been like if the thing had stayed with him. Would he still have known who he was? He supposed he probably would.
They got three-quarters of the way to London without any trouble; then they came to a makeshift barrier set up by a village policeman and two civilian helpers. They simply stood without noticing him as he moved the obstacle. They just weren’t seeing either it or him. Probably they weren’t even seeing the village High Street at all. They had satisfied smiles on their faces and their arms appeared to be clutching something which Conway took to be imaginary females.