The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “For my sake?”

  “Yes, darling. Because I love you so much I want you to be saved.”

  “And you don’t think your father could have some other motive for splitting us apart? You don’t think he could be using such an argument as a guise for something else?”

  I managed another step toward her, edging toward the perimeter.

  She smiled a little. “Aren’t you saying what you want to believe?”

  “It’s true, isn’t it? Who did your father prefer? Your mother? — or you?”

  “Careful!” — again, that look over my shoulder. In her face abject terror now.

  I shouted: “He can’t touch you, Nicola! Perhaps for his own purposes he mixed science with superstition, but that egg has certain fixed properties at certain fixed times and he cannot reach out and hurt you now.”

  “But?”

  “He can’t bust up your life again and express the madness of Brundash that way! He can’t incestuously destroy your own purity and substitute all this in its stead! He can’t hide behind puppy-dogs and dedication to physics when all it means is the physical destruction of everything that exists, including you!”

  Four inches…

  I tried working my way, very slowly, around the edge of the pool toward her. She didn’t back away, just stood, numbed, neither convinced nor otherwise.

  For she was looking to the egg for her answer.

  What, in God’s name, did she expect from it now?

  More softly, I said: “Brundash made all those people up at Moorbridge believe he was more than human. He led them on into thinking that he alone understood the power of that horrific machine, that he could calculate its every move. Yet he was so desperately wrong that he himself became its victim! Don’t you see why? Don’t you see he was completely obsessed with the power it represented, a power which he could never have had without it? And isn’t that what always happens to people who find some horrible means of appearing strong when they are weak? Isn’t that why Reason never intervened in the crazy race to use the atom bomb? Wouldn’t it have been possible to show off its titanic beastliness some other way? — without murdering ordinary human beings who were no more misguided than their new masters?”

  Her voice, very low. “My father? — He was like this?”

  Quietly, I answered: “Not of himself. Your mother didn’t scrawl his name, in such terror, in the misted-up window of that car. Brundash just did what all of us can do to others…he alerted the latent Brundash that is there! And that’s what he’s been doing ever since he died, by whatever weird and frightening means lay at his disposal.”

  I reached her.

  I held her.

  And that was when we looked down into the pond.

  I do not know why we did so at that moment; I do not know why the event chose that particular moment to occur.

  But what I saw was no longer just a pair of placid swans, swimming circles in perfection, seeming the very quintessence of peace.

  Because I found, at what exact instant I do not know, I could no longer tell how many swans there actually were. Sometimes there were still two; sometimes I thought I saw three, then four, then a whole multitude of them. However many, or however few, they remained dignified, tranquil.

  And then I saw this.

  I saw the full structure of the atom, grown enormous.

  One single atom of Uranium, already filling half the pond and growing still.

  I backed away from it, in stupefied awe, clinging to Nicola.

  Because, though sweat of terror poured from every corpuscle in my parchmented skin, this was at once the most vividly beautiful and yet the most devastating experience of my life. It could not be faced alone.

  Though the theoretical explanations of the atom were expressed unmistakably — so that there could be no doubt whatsoever that here was a nucleus U-235, with its central core of protons and neutrons and the mesons which bound it, the presentation which we then beheld rendered ludicrous the pictorial images you see in books.

  The thing was perfect. It was the design of existence — or of destruction…according to how you looked at it.

  Somehow — perhaps to do with the vast magnification that had taken place — the electrons which orbited (though the word is monstrously out of place) around the central nucleus had been slowed down. Thus you could see that they really only existed in a kind of metaphysical way. Like the swans, you couldn’t tie them down; for as you watched, so the pattern changed.

  It had a mesmeric significance, so that one wanted to be a part of it, to dare to enter that central miracle, to be a part of Creation itself, to witness and experience and control the future and the past. To have power…such power as has never been known to Man.

  “Nicola!”

  I screamed her name. I had to. For she was falling, hypnotized, into that amazing, cultured-pearl of exquisite design. Her face! How it shone with the revelation!

  I clutched her body, held her; held her dreadfully tightly, to me.

  Soon, the mirage — if that is the word — shrank down, into the pond, toward those rods of Uranium underneath.

  Until two placid, secretive, knowing swans remained on the surface, leaving their almost imperceptible trace on the rippled water in their wake.

  We stood for a long time.

  Then I said: “No wonder Brundash couldn’t stop.”

  I’ve never been so relieved as I was then to see someone vomit.

  I’ve never in my life been so grateful for a blemish on so perfect a scene.

  Nicola was sick in the water. Her bile smashed the illusion of beauty with an ordinary human process. The imperfection of life. Something soiled and reminiscent of sin. The sin of Being. Instead of the sin of seeking.

  The swans, furious with her, flapped their wings and succeeded in looking silly and phoney and not symbolic at all of the perfection which had risen up from below.

  The fuel rods under the water were restored into perspective and were just the contents of a discharged reactor. Dangerous, dull, dirty…and by now, almost unshielded.

  It was perfectly obvious that Nicola was made at once her normal self and I saw no reason to dramatize it.

  I said quickly: “The control room! Where is it?”

  “You mean for the water level!”

  “Yes. There must be a main cock somewhere.”

  “This way!”

  Fifteen seconds later we had the full pressure of water running back into the pond.

  Then I told Nicola what had to be done.

  Chapter Fifteen

  There was something unarguable about the clanging bells of the police car. You don’t try and outstrip a Jaguar in a jeep. I was within one mile only of the hovercraft base when unceremoniously they edged me into the side of the road and pulled up at an angle across my front wheels.

  All four doors of the police car flew open and a flashing blue light on the roof semaphored urgency.

  As the highly business-like three-pipper came up to my scruffy, mud-splashed little vehicle I saw another patrol car coming down the hill at me from Brighton. It pulled over, radio squawking, and completed the wedge.

  The officer from the first car flashed a light in my face and said: “James Fulbright?”

  “Yes. What’s the trouble?”

  “Follow us.”

  “Why?”

  “Do as I say? Please?” The three-pip man turned to a sergeant. “Hobson…You better ride with Mr Fulbright.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The other car did a swift reversing turn and I travelled sandwiched between the two of them. The Jaguar led at one hell of a lick and I had trouble controlling the jeep at such a speed. There was no time to talk to the sergeant.

  But he said: “Watch out just here…We swing right for the police station in a hundred and fifty yards.”

  “By Christ what brakes he’s got.”

  “Thought I’d better warn you!”

  Three noisy skids outside the police
station and doors flying open everywhere like crazy.

  Disjointed conversations going on all around me.

  “Found him?”

  “Do you still have that London call on the line?”

  “Yes, wait a second; I’m sending a radio car on our frequency to join the Special Branch group.” Someone flashed a lamp at a map and four men locked shoulders around it. “At Square Four…got that, Tim?”

  My three-pipper: “Let’s go in, quick. We’ll get trampled underfoot…Sid, get this entrance clear, will you?”

  An acknowledging voice.

  Then I found myself in a small bare office. A telephone was off the hook, receiver lying on a bare table-top.

  The three-pipper slammed the door after us. He flung his cap on the table and said: “They want you.”

  “Who?”

  “Well…Not Peter Scott, anyway.”

  It was the Right Honourable Gordon Bennett, Minister for Power. He spoke slowly, distinctly, in the manner of one who hated telephones.

  “Mr Fulbright?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Can you tell me please, very briefly, what the picture is down there, so far as you know?”

  I did.

  “I see. Well, I’ve got Sanger here with me. I told him I didn’t think it was a frightfully good idea letting you go, like that. We were lucky, though, in that the garage proprietor reported you to the police. I understand your difficulties and naturally we can square that. Now. I’ve heard your plan, insofar as we know it. Frankly, ours is no good. Already certain countries have got very panicky and the political complications are endless because in failing to find Structure Number One (you know what I mean) we have to leak the problem so as to get equipment shut off all over Europe. As both you and Sanger foresaw, this plan has not succeeded because there is far too much international suspicion.”

  I agreed that this wasn’t surprising; and affirmed that Sanger was at least right about that.

  “Yes,” said the minister unenthusiastically. “But it does seem to me that a most unnecessary number of obstacles has been placed in your way…This, er, hovercraft you mention: have you any idea whether the crew are readily available?”

  “No. I was just on my way there when the police caught up with me.”

  “Oh, dear. Well ask them, will you, to send a car right away down to their base. Then you can continue to talk with me while they are getting things ready. They may need to fuel up.”

  I asked the three-pipper if this could be done.

  He immediately left the office to send a patrol car down. He also told me he would check at once on the home telephone numbers of the HoverSkim company officers.

  The Minister said: “Eve just been talking to a colleague here, while you were doing that. He tells me that he thinks HoverSkim have a couple of S.R.N.6s and that these are capable of carrying about three tons. According to Mr Philbar’s reports, Structure Number One is just over this figure, but it sounds a reasonable proposition. Certainly it would be quite exceptionally difficult to have the Structure transported to an airfield, and loaded into a jet aeroplane in the time. I think therefore that your plan is the one we should adopt. Later I shall ask you to hand this telephone back to the police, whom I shall then instruct regarding the security precautions to betaken, and the supplying of a suitable vehicle to get the Structure down to the craft.”

  I said I thought it might be better to pilot the hovercraft along the main road to Telscombe Cliffs and load it direct.

  “Do you think that would save you some time?”

  I said I thought so, because the loading was the longest operation.

  “Would you kindly hold the line a moment?”

  The Minister did not cover up his microphone; indeed, I got the impression that he felt there had been too much of that kind of thing already. So I heard the monosyllabic conference. Someone was assessing the difference in terms of time and distance between the competing methods of getting the egg away.

  The Minister came back with: “We think we should go by your judgement, made in collaboration with the police. No doubt they can help you by keeping traffic away from the roads. Now…Let me see. The time is just coming up to ten-fifteen…”

  *

  Captain Hugo Seldon had, they say, merely taken to the hovercraft as the logical outcome of his reputation for doing the longest take-off runs of any airline pilot in existence. The story goes that his lifelong search had been for an aircraft which would bowl along the runway for ever without actually leaving the ground at all. Then someone had rushed into the crew-room at London Airport with the news that they had found something that would only rise two feet. ‘That’s for me!’ cried Hugo Seldon, and had never looked back.

  There was substance to this pilots’ joke. During the war, in the murderous Burma Campaign, he had been last-pilot-out of a tough spot in the jungle, during the Japanese advance. There were more people on the airfield than, it was thought, you could even push into a C-47, let alone get the thing off the ground into the bargain. He took a brief look at them. “Strip to the bone, you lot!” he yelled, “and get those seats out of there!”

  The first four miles of the flight were achieved some twenty-five feet above the ground, to the confusion of the enemy, who had previously thought that aeroplanes were for flying.

  That was then — this was now.

  Down on the shore, to the east of the bathing beaches, I heard the whine of a jet engine starting up as I arrived there in a police car.

  The dark-bodied hulk which was the hovercraft, its cabin windows dimly lit from inside, rested on the sand as the co-pilot, a youngster named Alec, climbed in ahead of me through the jaw-like hatch in the front.

  He sat on the left and I went between him and Seldon, who was already in his place in the right-hand seat, to reach my own seat in the cabin.

  It looked like a local bus, in here.

  There was a swish of compressed air from underneath as the invisible air cushion lifted us clear and filled out the rubber skirt that surrounded the hull, which reeked kerosine with unashamed vulgarity and allowed itself to be hoiked farther off the ground as Seldon gave the throttle-grip a twist. Then standing on rudder and giving the stick that subtle flick that placed the air cushion just where it gave the best lift, Seldon heaved the brute into a vicious half circle in the hovercraft’s own length; with propeller whistling in fine pitch and rubber skirt indecorously raised to reveal nothing on underneath.

  All traffic had been held from both ends. The wide, six-lane highway was all ours and just ahead the tail-lights of the patrol cars — hard put to it to set a pace we couldn’t better — kept to the exact centre of the highway up and away in the ascent from sea-level toward the cliffs yonder.

  I would have given good money to have heard some of the comments as windows were flung wide along the route. But such elaborations as these were short-lived. I was discussing with Alec how best to load the egg on board.

  Seldon waited for the conversation to reach deadlock (the hatch at the front was clearly too narrow) then leaned across and told his colleague: “Alec, don’t be shy! We carve the roof off” — and this wouldn’t be the first time Seldon had had cause to rip seats out, either.

  Alec said: “Oh, what a pity!” — and giggled nervously.

  Down into the gully of Rottingdean, straight through the lights and up the incline the far side with a deafening roar…

  People had been kept clear of the pavement and some of them huddled, goggling, in the concrete bus shelters. This bus wasn’t stopping for anyone, though.

  …And desperate situation or not, you could not possibly deny that this shatteringly unusual race up the highway was rich in amusement value. Maybe it was hysteria that caused me to forget its purpose for a while, just to catch the spirit of effrontery so heathen a ride perpetrated upon the placid citizens of suburban Brighton.

  Soon, the signboard on our left proclaiming ‘Telscombe Cliffs’, and thereafter a whole galaxy of r
otating blue beacons on tripods erected by the police to mark the area.

  Tricky was the inch-worm route we had to weave down the narrow, undulating lane called Seaside Walk and we went to the end first — near the wire where I had parked the jeep in the first place — so we were turned and ready. Seldon put the monster down outside the garage of number forty-one and cut the motor. The silence was tremendous.

  The police had already got the door open, and the mouth of the entrance, leading to the downward ramp, gaped into the darkness.

  My three-pipper was there and some of his men had got the lifting tackle organized, had not attempted to move the egg as yet. I had explained that I didn’t think it was safe to shift the apparatus without keeping track of its controlling equipment.

  So while Seldon unceremoniously got going with a crash-axe on the hovercraft’s superstructure I went down the ramp to make sure that Nicola was all right.

  The great cavity — it must once have been hacked out of a natural cave within the cliff — still seemed magnificent, but it had lost that unearthly mystique which stemmed from its isolation. Milling with police and engineers, it had been invaded and stripped of its unwholesome privacy.

  The swans looked tarnished.

  I explored the equipment room near the pond, warned the workmen to keep clear, and did a quick radiation check of the surrounding area with a portable rate-meter I found with the rest of the instruments.

  The gamma count was negligible. It occurred to me that Nicola and I had been lucky in that the rods sunk into the pond, and only finally separated from us by mere inches of water over the top, had probably been drained of most of their radioactivity by that same Relativistic process that had burned-out the luminous dial of my watch.

  I couldn’t find Nicola and panic seized me.

  I dashed up the ramp and took the double doors back into the bungalow, searched frantically and at last found her on a bed, white as the swans, it seemed to me, and drained of hope and energy as the uranium was of its fundamental radiation which by all processes known to science cannot be altered in any way whatsoever. Now, all such rules had gone by the board; and I believe it was as much this fearful insecurity, sensed if not entirely understood by Nicola, as it was the emotional whirlpool brought about by the absorbing into the egg of the essence of her father, and of (I could only presume) Davvitt and Miles as well, that had sucked her basic life-lust dry and cast her so weakened on a mattress.