The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  I sat with my heart thudding and thought over this. Through the slit in the curtains the sky was still luminous, a greenish-blue afterlight. Not much of it was getting into the room. With the lamp off, I could almost feel my pupils enlarging in the aquarium-like gloom. The sound, now I came to recollect it, had been the quiet snick of the front door. Who the devil had keys to it?

  Meyer and Julian had, Harold, Connie, Nellie; perhaps Ze’ev. Could it be Ze’ev, come to see if I wanted a lift? But I hadn’t heard the car or the clang of the lodge gates. Anyway, if he knew I was here, he’d have called to me. Whoever was below evidently didn’t know I was here. The desk lamp would scarcely have shown up in the sharp afterlight. Intuition, or premonition, had been right. Or could it be a security man, checking that all was well?

  I rose and tiptoed through to Nellie’s room and peeped through the open door to the landing. Dark below. As I watched, a faint reflected glow flickered in the stairwell and turned away again. Flashlight. Someone was poking about with a flashlight there. Wouldn’t a security man turn on the lights for a proper inspection?

  The thudding of my heart unpleasantly increased. It was accompanied by a general shaking in every limb as another thought occurred. It might be that the person below did know that I was in the House. This alert person might have been watching the House; perhaps from the garden, or from a position where the bicycle, hidden in the shrubbery, was in view. There was no other way for me to leave. The gates were locked at the lodge.

  But why should he come looking for me at the House? Perhaps he hadn’t planned to meet me at the House but in the garden. Falling darkness and the possibility of missing me might have brought him here. But why should he want to meet me at all? Perhaps because he thought I had grounds for suspecting him, or to gather some information from me? Both possibilities carried such grave auguries of my subsequent unavailability for further information that I scuttled back into Chaimchik’s room and stood there, my pupils enormous as an owl’s, peering about in the deepening gloom.

  What was needed was something in the nature of a hammer. There wasn’t even a bottle. There was the small candlesnuffer and the desk lamp. Far better, altogether more inviting, there was the wardrobe, with dozens of suits to hide behind. Except that a certain doggedness in the researches below suggested that the wardrobe wouldn’t go unchecked either. He seemed to be trying every door to see that it was locked from the outside. He would shortly be working upward.

  It suddenly struck me that I shouldn’t have run back in here but upstairs to Harold’s lair. Apart from allowing more time, it had the advantage of opening onto the flat roof. I remembered the rain bouncing there when I’d run about looking for a heater in December. There must be some way off the roof – a drain-pipe, at least, in some corner of the House.

  I scampered immediately back to Nellie’s room, and had got to the doorway when I saw the flashlight’s beam, no longer reflected but coming steadily upstairs. Christ!

  Back to Chaimchik’s room, where I stood and wondered what to do. Put the lamp back on and jolly the whole thing out? ‘Hello, old chap. How very nice to see you.’ Yes … ‘Broke in, did you? And what would you like to do, apart from murdering me?’ He might be a security man, of course, the flashlight a badge of caste or profession. He hadn’t broken in, anyway. He’d let himself in, with a key, through the front door.

  While considering these niceties, I found that I was standing by the other door out of Chaimchik’s room – the locked one that led out to the landing. It was the first door on the landing, facing the stairs. It was locked on the inside. Anyone familiar with the House would know this, and would either make for Nellie’s room or start methodically from Julian’s at the other end and work down. The thing to do was to let him enter Nellie’s room, or pass it, and then unlock the door and get the hell out of it.

  I felt for and found the key, while holding my other hand poised over the knob, and as I did this, it turned under my hand. The skin on my scalp crepitated as two thoughts surfaced. One was that he couldn’t be a security man, and the other that I hadn’t heard him, although I was only inches away and couldn’t have been listening harder. He knew I was here.

  He pushed the door very gently a couple of times, and then let the knob go. I felt it reverse under my palm, and kept my eye on the open door to Nellie’s room, and saw the glow of the flashlight there, and very delicately, with my heart in my mouth, turned the key. Miraculously, it wasn’t stuck, didn’t creak, just solidly moved. I turned the knob, opened the door a few inches, and peered out. There was a dim glow, the reflection of his flashlight from Nellie’s room. Not breathing at all, not even thinking any more, I slid out, closed the door behind me, and went tiptoeing down the stairs like a pantomime robber.

  It was almost pitch black in the hall. The front door was over to the right, the area between well stuffed with objets d’art. I felt my way between them, arms out like a sleepwalker. I found the door, and the latch, opened it, and thank God was outside. I took an enormous breath of fresh air, and lit off round the House in the general direction of the bike.

  Although a lifetime had passed, it couldn’t have been more than four or five minutes since he’d entered the House. All the same, the greenish-blue afterlight had already turned to an unearthly mauve. Nothing was quite real in it, flowers and trees straining forward as though poised for some new experience in the approaching night. The bike was in the shrubbery beyond the sunken lawn below. I went down the three flights of rock steps to it, and almost immeditely realized that this was not such a good thing to do. The grave glimmered pallidly in the lawn below, easily visible from Chaimchik’s window. So would I be. A quick look confirmed that this was the case. As I peered up, his face peered down through the slit in the curtains. I had an impression of a very tall figure hunched over the table in the dark. He saw me and immediately went. I had such a good idea where that I took the last flight in one jump and scuttled for the shrubbery.

  I was in such a panic that I couldn’t remember where I’d left the damned thing. It didn’t seem to be where I thought I’d left it. No time for investigation now. I took to my heels again, and in the deepening violet light went haring down the straight approach lane from the grave to the plaza.

  The enormous marble plaza was empty, except for the stark monument to the perished six million. I flew past it, to the long flight of ceremonial steps that led to the main avenue.

  There was not a soul in sight. As I tore down the steps, I heard him pounding behind me, rubber shoes squeaking on the marble. There was something extraordinarily unnerving and desperate in the sound. He was intent on stopping me before I got to people. Breath sobbing, barely conscious of my legs, I took the steps without noticing, made the empty avenue, and decided to get off it fast.

  There were trees on both sides. I suddenly remembered the hole in the chain-link fencing that bounded the orange grove to the right. At the same moment, the streetlighting came on, and I saw the hole, a ragged gap below a tree, and was through it, and had to slow in the blackness at the other side, and then had to slow a lot more, tall grass, old spreading trees.

  Once I’d slowed, I had to stop, couldn’t go on any longer, had never run faster in my life. I didn’t seem able to take in enough air, breath painful and choked in my throat, my legs like lead. I stood in deep foliage and tried to control my breathing and wondered how I’d got into this insane situation. I should have left hours before, as soon as I’d felt the first tremor of alarm; have pedaled away in good broad daylight, instead of being caught here, in the dark, paralytic with fright.

  I heard him suddenly, first some fumbling and then the swish of tall grass. He’d found the gap, had deduced what I’d done, knew I was here. This was a thinker, in a place that specialized in them. He came on for a moment, and abruptly stopped, realizing I’d stopped. He stood stock still and looked slowly round: a black indistinct figure, fifty yards away. Then he flashed his light, evidently had second thoughts, and put it
off again.

  Silence.

  He did something strange. He went away, back to the fence. I heard him for a while, and then couldn’t.

  I was slowly realizing what an idiot I’d been. Beyond the fence, a network of lights now glimmered, a couple of hundred yards away, at the other side of the avenue. There was another development of faculty villas there. The Sassoons lived in it. A few minutes more of running would have taken me there. It suddenly struck me what he was up to. He had stationed himself between me and the villas, had put enough distance between us to spot any movement of mine back to the fence.

  The last light had vanished from the sky; stars visible now. The hard glossy leaves exhaled the scent of oranges in the warm night. The new crop hung tightly like marbles, a clutch of them against my sweating head. I looked at my watch and saw it dimly shining at a few minutes to seven. Ham would be wondering why I hadn’t turned up. Just then a car came up the avenue, and I wondered if it was him, going to find out where I was. A moment later, in its headlights, I saw the man – at least where he was.

  He was standing quite still against the fence, facing into the grove. The car turned in to the villas, and darkness fell again. I tried to remember the topography of the pplace. The next building on this side must be the Institute of Nuclear Science. It stood in a landscaped area, set well back off the avenue, with a network of paths behind. Was it possible to get at it by going into the grove?

  Very cautiously, I got down and began to crawl, brushing the ground in front of me to avoid the crackle of twigs. There were various unpleasant messes from old rotted oranges. I passed several lines of trees and looked back. No movement. Away to my left now I could hear the soft thud of the heavy-water plant. Far enough. Time to turn.

  I crawled for six or seven minutes before I heard the rustling, and immediately froze. It wasn’t from behind. To the front and a bit to the left. Was he outflanking me?

  I kept absolutely still, and listened, heart thudding. The rustling was rather deliberate and investigative. Suddenly I got the lot, all at once. A growl, a rush. A dog! It had scented me, was on to me, with a series of rushes, a little snarling thing. I heard a clattering, well behind, and knew he’d heard it, too, and at once rose and gave the little bastard a heartfelt booting before taking off.

  On my feet, I could clearly see the upper stories of the Nuclear Building, coolly and discreetly lit, and the return line of the fence silhouetted against it, not fifty yards away. As I neared it, I saw how the dog had got in. Building work was going on beyond the fence, and the bottom of the wire mesh had been cut and rolled back to facilitate the digging. I took a running dive underneath it, kicked the dog back to keep the approaching brain busy, and spent a few seconds pulling the rolled-up fence down. A couple of boulders helped with this, and then I was off.

  A dangerously exposed road led to the frontage of the building on the avenue. It was quite empty. Service personnel might more reasonably be expected to be at the back – a prospect enhanced by a soft roar, evidently from a turbine house there.

  I took off in that direction, and found the turbine house. Hot air was venting from exhaust grilles, and its steel doors were firmly closed. I ran past it into a lane of service sheds. There were armies of oxygen cylinders and steel bottles, a network of piping, the odd engine roaring away, lights blazing: not a soul in sight. I kept to what shadow there was, rounded the back of the Nuclear Science Inistute and a complex of adjacent buildings. Still nobody.

  There was presently a great gap of churned-up earth and a rocketlike structure surrounded by cranes and tractors. A lit-up poster on stilts showed what it was going to be: the Koffler Accelerator. It was the skeleton of an advanced atom-smasher that would go nineteen stories high. Its roots were somewhere in an enormous hole. On all sides there were small mountains of spoil.

  I paused awhile, breathing heavily, and peered about. There was no obvious way out of the place, once in it: it offered plenty of cover, though. I thought of something else as I panted into this desolation. I suddenly recalled having seen the tops of these mountains of spoil before, also the cranes at work on the accelerator tower: I’d seen them through the windows of the plant genetics lab. It couldn’t be far away; and at the special greenhouse, at least, a guard was on duty day and night.

  I looked for a way through the mess, and heard the dog yelping from the direction of the sheds; which was cheering. In giving him the dog and a reliable early-warning system, I’d shown thinking as fast as his – faster, probably, if he hadn’t yet assassinated the dog, which would have been an early project of mine.

  There didn’t seem to be a way through the mess. The thing was simply an immense crater, rimmed for more than 180 degrees by the spoil. I took an uphill track between two mounds, sinking in the sandier soil, and reached the top drenched in sweat. I saw him from there; saw the dog, at least, snapping and jumping at an elusive shape in the shadow of a tractor. I sank down on my haunches and looked around.

  The greenhouses were a couple of hundred yards away on an opposite hilltop, and streetlighting was shining right through them. In the valley between was a road, and a building that I vaguely remembered but couldn’t identify. Puzzling over it, I thought of something else. The moment it occurred to him where I was trying to get to, he could easily run round by road and cut me off.

  No time for reflection here. I rolled over on hands and knees right away and got moving. He couldn’t have seen me, but earth must have tumbled down, because the next thing I heard was the dog yelping as it ran along the road. I got to my feet and went pellmell down the hill, almost skiing, and in a flash, quite a flash, slammed into a boulder, and blacked out.

  Everything black. There was earth in my mouth. I spat it out and tried to scramble to my feet but discovered that in some curious way I was stuck. I was in a pit. My feet were tangled in a cage. It took some scrambled moments to discover that I’d come to rest in some newly prepared foundations. A web of reinforcing iron was in them, ready for concrete-pouring, and my feet were jammed in. I tugged and wrenched them out, and one immediately twisted underneath me.

  I leaned back against the mound of spoil and felt the foot ache quite sickeningly. All the rest of me was aching. I’d collected a solid thump on the head and a bruise was swelling above my eyes. Another thing was that I couldn’t hear the dog.

  Strange.

  Stranger, now that the world was slowing, the unknown building was slowly turning itself into the back of the San Martin.

  How the devil had I got to the back of the San Martin? I couldn’t remember seeing it from this position. Ahead and a bit to the right were lit-up streets and buildings. My instinct was to go for them – to get away from the San Martin, anyway. Except that whatever I thought, wouldn’t this fast thinker have out-thought me? I felt the hairs prickling all over my body. Away from here, anyway!

  Resting on the good foot, I felt around and found a solid lump of rock with each hand, and at once began to hobble away from the San Martin. The damaged foot ached quite hideously, but it supported me. Toward the edge of the area of light, I paused and gradually began to orientate. Some of the buildings were definitely familiar. The Institute of Applied Science – wasn’t it? Definitely the Institute of Pure Mathematics. Quite close by, the heavy-water plant was thumping and gurgling: a cloud of steam hung in the air.

  Lit-up windows in the buildings, cars parked, air conditioners whirring. Safer here, surely, to stop skulking in shadow and come out into the light. There must be people about.

  I took a breath and hobbled out into the road, into the middle of it, and actually began to trot, clutching firmly to the rock. Weirdly, there still wasn’t a soul in sight. The whole Institute might have been hissing and clicking away like a robot installation on the moon. I had a distinct impression he was going to spring out at me from somewhere. I thought I’d send one rock through a lighted window and save the other for him. But nobody sprang and nobody appeared, and with a deepening sense of unreality I r
ealized I wasn’t destined to encounter another human being in this particular nightmare, until I looked to the left and saw one.

  A cosy and familiar building sat at the end of a narrow lane, and a cosy and familiar figure was coming down the steps of it. With the nightmare knowledge that nothing would avail and nobody hear, I inflated my lungs and roared.

  ‘Finster!’

  He stopped as though shot, and after a pause began turning this way and that, powerful nose almost scenting.

  ‘Finster!’

  He saw me, and by this time could hardly help it. In the empty lane I was springing high in the air on the good foot, both arms semaphoring. He continued slowly down the steps of the Daniel Sieff and I hobbled rapidly toward him.

  ‘Finster – I’m so glad to see you!’

  ‘Ah.’ He seemed pleased at this. ‘You are taking some exercise?’ he said.

  I was in a fine lather all over, the breath fairly singing from my nostrils. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Excellent. It is too easy to be lazy when the warm weather comes. What is it – specimens you have collected?’ He was adjusting his spectacles to examine more closely the rocks in my hand.

  I had a look, too, before throwing them away, and then back at Finster. He looked so real, so good. ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  He smiled indulgently. ‘A fermentation knows nothing of Remembrance Day. There are certain readings I must check … But I understand well the urge to pick up a specimen or two, however worthless. It’s hard to run, without an object. Although I understand Dr Patel does it. He runs also at night, I believe.’

  ‘I know he does,’ I said.

  I recalled Marie-Louise’s remarks about his night exercise, and at the same moment had a recollection from last December, looking out the window at the rapid, jerky movement of a running man. Patel.

  ‘It’s a question of temperament,’ Finster was saying. ‘It’s hard for a person of impatient temperament just to exercise. I myself use the stationary bicycle. One can take a reading at the same time.’