by James White
‘How ridiculous would you like it to be?’ She paused then added drily, ‘Perhaps you could tell me about your own ridiculous theory and give me some sort of guide.’
‘I don’t have enough information to form a theory,’ Carson said angrily. ‘I need the sort of data which is not found in psychological texts and periodicals for interested laymen like myself, but reports of experimental and probably dangerous work, so far as the patients would be concerned. It might be the psychological equivalent of nerve gas, the kind of thing that is hinted at or mentioned speculatively in the more restricted journals. New methods of brainwashing, drug-reinforced hypnotic techniques, that sort of thing. The truth is that I’m not quite sure what sort of information I’m looking for.’
‘I see,’ she said.
Carson kept his eyes on the tape deck while the silence began to drag. Finally he said, ‘Some things go out of fashion faster than others. Take patriotism, for instance. The out-and-out “my country-right-or-wrong” type of patriot is very rare these days--which is a good thing, because fanaticism of any kind is not a good thing. In its place we have intelligent self-interest. This is much better, I suppose, than blind patriotism. But self-interest and selfishness are synonymous so far as I’m concerned--I mean, who ever heard of intelligent self-interest winning someone the Victoria Cross or the Congressional Medal?’
It was a purely rhetorical question so he did not wait for an answer. ‘Something more than intelligent self-interest motivates the feelings of parents and children, relatives and friends, for each other. A self-interested and really intelligent man could find lots of ways of not doing anything but enjoying himself all his life by using the mental shortcomings or sympathy or generosity or love of those around him. But very few people live this way. They prefer to work because, in my opinion, they feel that they owe something to the people and country where they were born--even though they disagree with the politics of the government in power, and insist that the Russians or the Japanese manage things so much better, and complain bitterly about the proportion of their income tax which goes to defence and generally carry on as if they were on the verge of rebellion. I’m over-simplifying, but do you see what I mean?’
He was still staring at the recorder, his right index finger moving around the dimpled top of the Hold button.
‘I can see that you have a perhaps juvenile hankering for the days of cavalry charges and deeds of derring-do, but you are too intelligent to ignore the spitted and dismembered people, disembowelled horses and the other gory by-products of that romantic age. I can also see you trying hard to put up very good reasons for doing something which you yourself feel is very wrong, and the fact that you are an open-eyed patriot is keeping you from taking the easy way out. Or am I analysing the wrong patient again?’
‘You are,’ said Carson.
‘Maybe the reason,’ she said, in a surprisingly gentle tone, ‘is that you are supplying me with more material on Joe Carson than on John Pebbles.’
‘I was simply trying to make the point,’ said Carson, ‘that it is possible to like a man or love a girl and still feel angry because he or she is something different.’
‘All right, Joe. But you started to tell me about a ridiculous theory you had. Maybe you should stick to that point instead of trying to make another one ...’
They were both sitting tense and upright on a couch which was designed to topple the occupants backwards into its deep, soft upholstery and enfold them so comfortably that they would feel it impossible to climb out again without the help of ropes. The muscular strain involved in fighting that seductive piece of furniture was considerable. Carson flopped back and tried to relax mentally as well as physically before he spoke.
‘Very well. My ridiculous theory is that Dreamy Daniels is heading a Most Secret project which requires guinea-pigs with a high degree of flying aptitude and no close relatives or friends. John Pebbles is a natural choice--simple-minded in practically everything other than aeronautics, impressionable, nobody really to care what happens to him and, with his background, completely above suspicion so far as the security of the project is concerned.
‘Someone has been very clever with their John Pebbles,’ Carson continued. ‘He or they have displayed considerable finesse by so arranging things that it has been project men who have actually invited him in instead of putting the spy to the trouble and risk of penetrating project security. They have been even cleverer by sending in an agent whose cover cannot possibly be blown because he does not even know that he is a spy, and won’t until they contact him and play back the organic tape-recorder that is John Pebbles’s mind.’
He paused, waiting for a reaction which did not come, then went on, ‘The way I see it, John Pebbles had a normal childhood. He was fit and intelligent and probably wanted to be a pilot when he grew up, and eventually he did. I would say that flying was probably the biggest thing in his life, that he really loved being a pilot and that he was certainly one of the best--a top-level test pilot, at least, possibly a potential or actual cosmonaut.
‘Then a little over four years ago someone wiped his memory clean ...’
They had left him on a beach before first light, at a spot where rocky outcroppings made it difficult and uncomfortable for him to crawl into the sea and drown. There was not much risk of his dying from exposure--they could not, of course, dress him because of the risk of the clothing being traced--since they would have already been aware of the habits of the clinic personnel.
The result was that a mature, physically fit and highly trained man with the mind of a new-born baby was brought to the clinic and the process of re-education was begun. John Pebbles learned fast because, apart from the fact that it was completely empty, there was nothing at all wrong with his mind.
And sometimes, when the wind was in the right quarter, aircraft from the club would slide in over the hospital grounds on finals ...
‘... It was all carefully planned from the very beginning,’ Carson went on angrily. ‘His memory was wiped clean, but his training and aptitudes remained to nag at his subconscious and gradually break the conditioning which had made him forget. But they must have planned even this as well … ‘
‘There’s no need to shout, Joe.’
‘... Doctor Morris and Nurse Sampson were right when they thought he might be an amnesia victim,’ Carson went on in a calmer tone. ‘He was the most complete amnesia case they are ever likely to meet. And the cure for amnesia is to surround the patient with familiar people, places and things, remember. The trips to the club airfield were the beginning of his “cure” and the process accelerated rapidly when he joined Hart-Ewing’s--familiar surroundings, you see. But the familiar faces and spoken or written language he did not have, so he had to learn to read and write from scratch.
‘But now his virtual return to normal in the aviation area is causing the rest of the conditioning to crack. He’s beginning to dream about people talking to him in another language and have nightmares because he has begun to remember what it was they were going to do to him--destroy his memory! Very soon he will remember who he is and which country he belongs to. He will probably feel grateful to us and will not want to pass on all the very valuable information he has absorbed to his own people, and for a while he will be very confused and unhappy and not quite sane. So if his own people are going to finish this job as cold-bloodedly as they began it, they may send someone to contact him and secure his knowledge before he recovers his memory completely.
‘I would say,’ Carson ended grimly, ‘that the contact could occur any day now.’
Jean Marshall was silent for a moment, then she said quietly, ‘Everything you’ve said is possible, Joe, if a little melodramatic. But what are you going to do? Denounce him?’
Carson shook his head. ‘It’s what I should do. Not that they would shoot him--that is very rarely done these days. But they would subject him to continuous and intensive interrogation, most of it in his own language. His memory wo
uld come back and he would realise that he was in fact the spy that they accused him of being, and that there was nothing he could do about it.’
‘I would hate anything like that to happen to him,’ he went on, ‘because he is innocent--at least, he is at the moment. And even if I did decide to turn him in and put my country’s security above personal feelings, it is still not that simple.’
‘You must remember that the project is secret,’ Carson continued, ‘really secret. I am not supposed to know that it exists and can therefore expect serious trouble if I reveal a threat to something which is not supposed to exist. You could expect serious trouble, too, because I did not keep my knowledge of it to myself. There is also the fact that this penetration was planned five or more years ago at a time when the project was just getting under way. This means that the project already may have contained someone sympathetic to the other side, in which case why should they go to all the trouble of setting up the Pebbles operation--they already knew about the project! You see, even now I could be entirely wrong about John Pebbles ...’
‘But what are you going to do, Joe?’
She was still sitting upright on the edge of the couch, looking straight ahead so that all he could see was the line of her cheek, jaw and neck which showed as a complex pink curve against the dark bookcases on the other side of the room. One ear-lobe showed below the sweep of rich auburn hair, a very nice ear-lobe but not exactly expressive.
Why did she have to fight with him over Pebbles all the time? Surely he was doing enough fighting with himself over the man.
He said, ‘I don’t know what to do, Jean. The project is too important for me to forget it and do nothing. I think that we should continue working on him until we find out who and what he is. Is it possible to cure or de-condition him before his own people make contact?’
Still she did not look at him. ‘And if we did bring back his memory, then what?’
‘Then I’ll have the slightly comforting knowledge that he as well as we knew that he was a spy. I would find out a lot more about the project. I might not have to turn him in after all, if he was angry enough at his own people for what they did to him and, of course, grateful enough to us. If I did denounce him we might find ourselves locked away for the rest of our lives or until the project was declassified, a very long time in either event. I would also get some idea of the methods used by these people to produce a Pebbles-type agent so that we would be on the lookout for them in the future.
‘I would also,’ he ended worriedly, ‘get rid of this very strong feeling I have that this business is even more important and complex than it looks at the moment...’
He broke off as Jean relaxed and lay back in the couch beside him. Her expression, when she looked at him, was sympathetic but not at all clinical.
‘Let’s have the tape again,’ she said, ‘but later...’
Chapter Sixteen
It was a cold, wet, blustery Sunday afternoon. The dull grey breakers thumped steadily against the rocky beach, sending up thick clouds of spray to join the slightly thinner curtain of falling rain. As they picked their way over the rocks the drops rattled against their macs like hail and the wind was a great soft pillow pushing against their faces and muffling everything they said.
‘Here,’ said Nurse Sampson, stopping suddenly and pointing. Despite her heavy coat the cold had made her face closer to grey than chocolate brown. ‘You were curled up behind this rock when I found you. But can you remember anything before that time, anything at all, John?’
‘I seem to remember your finding me,’ Pebbles replied, ‘although at the time I was too stupid to know what it was I was remembering. Before that...’ He stared hard at the dark, wet sand and dripping rock for several minutes, then went on, ‘Water. I can remember being in the water, swallowing some of it and being frightened. Nothing else, I’m afraid ...’
‘You might have accidentally crawled into the water,’ said Jean Marshall, ‘or crawled out of it. Can you remember being on any kind of boat?’
A submarine, perhaps? Carson added, but under his breath. They were getting so very close to the beginning now. Surely the end of the mystery was in sight.
‘You didn’t have any clothes on,’ Jean went on, when Pebbles had shaken his head. ‘Can you remember anyone taking them off. Or you taking them off or struggling out of them because you were in the water and could not swim so well with them on? You can swim, John?’
‘Yes,’ said Pebbles. ‘I always could. When Nurse Sampson started to teach me at the clinic’s pool she said that she didn’t have to, that I could swim very well. I ... I did it without thinking. I’m sorry, I can’t remember getting undressed.’
‘Betty,’ said Jean, turning to the nurse, ‘are you sure there was no clothing near him, or marks on his body of clothing recently worn? I’m thinking of the indentations left by, say, a tight belt or tight sock tops or even a wrist-watch. You see, he was in such good physical condition--whoever it was who had been taking care of him had done such a good job of it--that the sheer cruelty of leaving him without clothing before dawn on a beach at that time of year just doesn’t fit. Do you see what I’m getting .at? Why take away his clothes?’
They didn’t, want to give us the name of his tailor, said Carson with silent cynicism. There was no need for him to speak when Jean was asking all the right questions.
‘I didn’t see any clothing and with John in that condition I didn’t waste very much time looking,’ Betty Sampson said sharply. Perhaps she was irritated by what she thought was an implied criticism or it might simply have been the cold making her tense. The smooth chocolate skin of her face was roughened by goosebumps, and when she spoke again the hissing rain reinforced the sibilants in her words, making her sound like a stage oriental.
‘Besides, the marks made by clothing, even tight clothing, fade in a few hours. And we examined him very closely--we thought he might be a drug addict, you see, or a diabetic in hypoglycaemic shock or maybe an epileptic.’ She looked an apology at Pebbles for referring to him so often in the third person, then went on, ‘His arms showed a number of fairly recent punctures--they could have been made anything from a week to three weeks earlier--but blood tests showed no residual traces of drugs, or anything unusual, in his bloodstream … ‘
And so it went on, the two girls questioning and Pebbles trying hard and hiding nothing but not helping at all. Carson’s impatience and anger was growing until it was almost a pain. A few days ago he had told Jean that Pebbles was innocent--as innocent as an unfused bomb--and that he should be treated gently and deconditioned by Jean and himself rather than interrogated by one of the intelligence agencies. Carson was beginning to wonder if he had said those things just to avoid sounding like a louse.
But the cold-blooded, callous way that John Pebbles had been used, how the clinic and Mrs Kirk had been used to give him an unbreakable cover, how Hart-Ewing’s and Dreamy Daniels had been used and manipulated made him angry in a way he had never been angry before. He was a little like Bill Savage, he supposed, in that he preferred to think of men as people instead of useful or potentially useful things. This thing called Pebbles could be very useful to Carson as well as to its masters and after all, what did a bomb casing care about a few dents and scratches when its fate was to be blown to pieces anyway ... ?
He found himself looking up at the dark, shredded clouds while raindrops scored near misses on his eyes, imagining the clean, cold rain and spray rotten with radio-activity and the clear, still air above them empty of aircraft and nobody on the moon or Mars or on the extrasolar planets beyond which were now almost within reach. A weapon against which there was absolutely no protection was bad because the only deterrent was to use it first.
This was too big a thing for one man’s feelings to be given any weight, much too big for it to be important whether a certain doctor thought Carson a louse or even whether he thought the same himself...
Carson became aware that Jean was talking to him.
He said, ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking. Let’s go back to the car. The club isn’t far from here and we can all get a nice, hot lunch...’
It was what you said that was important to most people, not what you thought. Carson was thinking that starting tomorrow he was going to get very tough with John Pebbles.
But next day Pebbles was gone. Despite a large number of carefully offhand enquiries, Carson could not find out why or where. He did not show on the following two days either. Carson began to wonder if he had already been contacted and was in the process of being deconditioned, if one of his own people had beaten him to the punch. He thought of the language tuition tapes he had just bought that were waiting for Pebbles’s next visit to the flat.
Jean Marshall had not wanted him to experiment with the language records too soon. Rushing things like this, she had insisted, might give rise to all sorts of emotional disturbances in their patient, especially if Carson’s theory was correct.
She seemed to think that they had all the time in the world.
On the fourth day of Pebbles’s absence Carson took an afternoon off and spent it going through the local newspaper files for the approximate date of Pebbles’s discovery on the beach. He found out nothing beyond the fact that the area had been covered by a late-autumn fog around that time, and nobody had reported seeing small boats, submarines or even UFOs. He wondered if the plastic material Nurse Sampson had mentioned, and which she had insisted was not rubber dinghy material, was some kind of parachute.
He had just about decided that there was nothing he could do until Pebbles returned when, early on the fifth day, Simpson in Publicity rang to say that he had something for him.
It turned out to be a large envelope full of magazine clippings. Carson took them back to his office to examine them at leisure, not expecting very much from them, but ten minutes later he was on the phone to Simpson.