by Nevil Shute
“I know it is. But that’s what’s on her mind. She’s got a great sense of responsibility.” She turned to the dresser and picked up a dirty halfsheet of notepaper. “I do think it’s a blasted shame,” she said vehemently. “I went round to get her night things while Wintringham was here, and this is what I found in the kitchen.”
It was an ill-written note. It read:
Dear Miss,
I find I wont be able to come tonight as my husband is took poorly.
Yours respectfully,
E. Higgs.
I gave it back to her. “Just like that,” I said.
“Just like that,” she said angrily. “I’m keeping it to show to Mr. Honey.”
I thought for a minute. “About these bloody burglars,” I said. “I’ve got to sleep somewhere, anyway, and so have you. I could sleep round there tonight if that would help.”
“I think it would help, Dennis,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t quite know where else you are to sleep tonight, unless you went to a hotel. I thought I’d sleep on the sofa here.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go around and sleep there.” At any rate, I thought, it would be quiet, and I could take the “Performance Analysis of Aircraft Flying at High Mach Numbers” with me.
“I’m awfully sorry,” Shirley said. “But I think it might be quite a good thing if you did sleep there. I kicked the glass out of the kitchen window this morning, to get in to her, so there really might be a burglar tonight. I mean, the house is wide open.”
I went round there after supper, in the dusk. I found a piece of three-ply and a hammer and some tacks, and tacked the plywood up to the frame of the broken window; then I carried my bag up to the front bedroom, Honey’s room, and made the bed. I took the typescript of my thesis from the bag and went down to the sitting-room, meaning to settle down in the one armchair that the house possessed and concentrate upon it.
The house was still and quiet, but I could not concentrate. The Honey matter was so urgent that here, surrounded by all Honey’s personal belongings, I could not bring my mind to bear upon the aircraft flying at high Mach numbers. That afternoon various responsible people had stated bluntly their opinion that Mr. Honey was mad. I had taken my stand on my opinion that his work was valuable; very soon the matter would be decided one way or the other. If I was right there would be a complete disruption of C.A.T.O.’s Atlantic service. If events should prove that Honey’s work was worthless, my position would be very much in question; it would hardly be possible for me to continue in charge of the Department after having been proved wrong in such a major row as this was going to be.
Probably I should have to leave the R.A.E., leave Government service altogether, having put up such a black as that. I should have to start again in industry; possibly it would be better to make a complete break and emigrate and start again in aviation in Australia, or in Canada perhaps. If Honey’s work was worthless, that would be my future: to leave the country, go down in salary and in prestige, and start again in a strange place. But then, was Honey’s work worthless?
My eyes strayed to his books, untidily arranged upon three long shelves. The Psychology of the Transfiguration rubbed shoulders with An Experiment With Time, and next came A Discussion of the Infinite. Then there was The Serial Calculus Applied to Numerical Analysis and then, surprisingly, Great Motion Pictures, Past and Present. I picked this out in curiosity and opened it; upon the flyleaf there was written, “Mary with all my love, from Theo, March 16th, 1939”. I put it back, a little thoughtfully. There had been a human side at one time, long ago.
There was more such evidence farther along the shelf. Between The Pyramid in History and The Stability of a Harmonic Series there stood a large gift volume, richly illustrated and interspersed with musical scores, called Country Dancing. This was inscribed “Theo dear, from Mary, September 2nd, 1936”. It was a well-used book that lay open at any page; clearly it had seen some service on a music stand. Beside that was another well-worn, paper-covered volume called Rambles in Old World Sussex. I thought of the short hiker’s pants and the good strong boots; they would be upstairs somewhere, probably with a rucksack. It would be interesting, I thought, to look and see if the good strong boots had been used recently, if Honey still went hiking, if he took any exercise at the week-ends. It would all add up.
The thought got me out of my chair and set me wandering about the empty house. On the kitchen table somebody had put three or four letters. All were bills or receipts saving one, addressed to Miss Elspeth Honey in her father’s handwriting, the first from the pile standing on his office desk. I put it on one side to take to her in the morning.
The little house was rather dirty and rather bare of furniture. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, but one, although it had a bed set up in it, was clearly never used and served more for a box-room. At the back of the house looking over the small gardens of the row was Elspeth’s room, which I had seen: a small, bare, rather bleak little room. On the mantelpiece there was a photograph of a dark-haired young woman with a pleasant, rather appealing expression. I stared at it in thought for a minute; would that be the mother who had died? I came to the conclusion that almost certainly it was.
I went into Honey’s room, the room I was to sleep in. There was no such photograph there, and that seemed odd to me until it struck me that he might have taken it away with him in his bag, to Canada. In a cupboard in his room I found the strong hiking boots. There was mud on them, but it was very old and dry and flaked to dust beneath the pressure of my fingers. They had not been worn for years.
There was a small writing table, or bureau, by the window. I had lost all scruples by that time about intruding into his privacy; too much lay at stake for that. Here, alone in his house, I had the opportunity of learning more of Honey than I should ever get again. I wanted to find written arguments by him, essays, theses, papers for learned societies, or anything of that sort. I wanted to see how his mind worked, whether the conclusions and the inferences that he drew from given facts were reasonable on other matters than the Reindeer tail.
The bureau yielded nothing much to help me. He kept his cheque-book and his unpaid bills and his receipts there; I did not hesitate to look into his affairs. I found them in good order. There were two life insurance policies and his Will, which I did not read because I could guess very well what would be in it. His bills were paid up to date, but this was evidently not usual, because a study of the counterfoils in his cheque-book showed that he had had a field-day at them before leaving for Canada. He had a credit of about three hundred pounds in the bank. I found no evidence of anything but a modest and a frugal life.
In a drawer, at the back, there were a large number of letters, faded, all in the same girlish hand, tied up in bundles with red tape out of the office. I did not look at any of those.
I went downstairs again to his living-room, more like a drawing-office than a parlour, and there in a big cupboard was a row of files containing what I was in search of. These files were all labelled on the back—PYRAMID DEDUCTIONS, MIGRATION (ANIMALS), and MIGRATION (MEN). Then there was one called HEBRAIC FORMS IN DRUID RITUAL, and another, PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. I was interested to notice one called INTERPLANETARY (MASS ATTRACTION OF CELESTIAL BODIES), and another, INTERPLANETARY (VEHICLES). And there was one simply entitled OSMOSIS. In all there must have been about fifteen of them.
I pulled a few of them out of the cupboard and sat down at his table to study them.
An hour later I sat back, filling a pipe, very thoughtful. In the year 1932 he was already writing about the bi-fuel propulsion of rockets and had demonstrated clearly how a three-stage rocket projectile could be constructed which would have sufficient energy and range to escape from the gravitational field of the Earth, with an intent to reach the Moon. He had made weight estimates and he had gone in some detail into the technique of launching. He had not dealt with matters of control, so far as I could discover. His work here seemed to parallel very closel
y the early German investigations; indeed, in point of date, it seemed to me that he was some years in advance of German work. I could not say that there was evidence of madness in this work of his, but there was sad evidence that we had not made use of genius that lay under our hand, in the last war.
OSMOSIS was the same story, so far as I could understand the technicalities involved, which were quite outside my beat. It had arisen, queerly, from the design of a radio valve for use in centimetre wave reception; this had apparently been a little mental relaxation from his normal work. In the course of it the properties of the metal thorium had seemed to him unusual when in the presence of argon, and upon this he had built up a considerable research, apparently all carried out in this front sitting-room. It had not been completed, for some reason that I was unable to discover, perhaps because of prior publication by some other research worker. But the work was careful, reasonable and probably correct.
In the other subjects I was quite out of my depth; I knew nothing about the Pyramid and the Hebraic forms left me cold, except that they were interesting as evidence of his wide interests. Everybody, however ignorant, is attracted by psychic phenomena, or ghosts, and though I was growing sleepy I pulled that towards me, and opened it at random.
The first part of this set of papers consisted of a series of temperature recordings taken in a house that was troubled by a poltergeist. The evidence was that the house, a modern villa occupied by the manager of a motor garage and his wife, was the scene of various unexplainable occurrences. At a time when the family was at dinner and there was nobody else in the house, the barometer which normally hung in the hall had been thrown with a clatter into the kitchen sink, through a closed door. In similar circumstances a disused paraffin lamp, normally kept in the loft, was thrown downstairs; and kitchen plates were broken with a crash under the bed of the main upstairs bedroom. Unlike the majority of such cases, there was no adolescent in the house. In every instance observers had noticed an apparent fall of temperature at the time of the occurrence. Honey had installed three recording thermographs, probably borrowed from the R.A.E., at different points in the house, and a mass of these records occupied the first part of the file. I could not find that the research had yielded much result.
The rest of the file was filled with records of communications by planchette; in some cases these were transcripts of the questions and answers and in other cases the actual sheets covered with scrawled automatic writing were preserved. Most of them were concerned with a Roman aqueduct and water distribution system in the neighbourhood of Guildford; Honey had apparently selected this as a test case because the details of its plan had been lost in the passage of the centuries, and anything discovered by planchette could be verified fairly easily by excavation. He had amassed a thick bundle of communications from a spirit called Armiger, who was apparently a Roman soldier, but much of the other side of the investigation, the verifying excavations, was missing.
Next came a thin sheaf of papers filed in an envelope; upon the cover was the one word MARY. I hesitated over this, and finally passed on, leaving them unread.
Last came a draft for a thesis, perhaps a paper he had read before the local Society for Psychic Research; it was entitled AUTOMATIC WRITING. It was a carefully prepared description of the Guildford experiments, which showed considerable verification by digging of the facts stated by the planchette. What interested me most, however, as in every technical paper that one scans through quickly, was the paragraph headed “Conclusions”. Here Honey said:
“It is beyond question that information can be obtained by automatic writing which is not obtainable in any other way, provided that the matter is approached in a spirit of serious inquiry, and that the investigator is not put off by the somewhat bizarre donors of information on the other side. It is not possible to obtain information upon any subject that one chooses. It is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain information benefiting the inquirer. The information which appears to come most readily is that benefiting mankind as a whole, or which will benefit a third party who is not aware of the inquiry.”
I put the files back thoughtfully, and went to bed.
6
I WENT TO see the Director when I got in first thing next morning. “I had E. P. Prendergast upon the telephone last night, at my house,” he said. “He’s very much upset.”
“I suppose he told you that Honey’s off his head,” I replied. “I had him yesterday afternoon.”
“Yes, he said that. Of course, Honey lays himself wide open to that sort of thing, and that makes it rather difficult for us. Prendergast has been digging up a lot of Honey’s activities in regard to ghosts. I must say, that was news to me.”
“It was news to me, too, yesterday,” I said. “I know a bit more about it now.” There was nothing to be gained by concealing things; I told the Director that by no design of mine I had been forced to spend the night in Honey’s house, and that I had spent the evening going through his private papers. He smiled gently. “Very wise, if somewhat unconventional,” he said. “And what do you think of him now, Scott?”
It was sunny and fresh that morning. “I think exactly as I did,” I said. “I think that there’s a very fair chance that he’s right about the Reindeer tail. I think he has a very logical mind. The fact that his interests spread very wide doesn’t mean that he’s mad. It means that he’s sane.”
“And so you feel inclined to maintain your attitude?”
“I do indeed,” I said. “I don’t think we should dream of letting any Reindeer fly more than 700 hours.”
He smiled again, “Well, I don’t mind a fight.” He glanced at me. “I think we must get Transport Command to fetch Honey back for us,” he said. “I’ll see to that this morning. Then there arises the problem of who to send to Labrador in place of him. When are you reading your paper before the Royal Aeronautical Society, Scott?”
“On Thursday,” I said.
He nodded. “I want to come to that. But afterwards I think you had better go to Labrador yourself and get this thing cleared up. If we have the formal meeting on Thursday morning at the Ministry and then you read your paper on Thursday night, you should be able to get the night plane to Ottawa after that?”
“If C.A.T.O. will consent to carry me,” I said. “I think Honey is as sane as you or I, so they’ll probably look a bit old-fashioned at me.”
He laughed. “I want you to go yourself. It’s getting on to quite a high level, this thing is, and it’s obviously going to make some difficulties.”
“Well, I’d be very glad to go,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel a trip to Canada would do me good.”
I went out of his office; on my way back to my own place I had to cross the road outside the main administration block. A very large blue Daimler limousine was just drawing up to the door, driven by a chauffeur; everything about it shone in the sunlight, including the buttons on the man. I wondered sardonically which of the aircraft firms had thought fit to send their representative to us that way, until I saw that the only passenger in it was a woman. I passed on without thinking any more about it.
Five minutes later, in my office, Miss Learoyd came in and said, “There’s a lady downstairs wants to see you, Dr. Scott. Miss Teasdale.”
I stared at her. “Who the hell’s Miss Teasdale?”
“I don’t know. Shall I ring down and ask what her business is?”
I nodded. “Yes, do that. I’m very busy today.” I was, but I was rather intrigued; in my job it was quite unusual to have a stranger as a visitor, and especially a woman.
Miss Learoyd came back in a minute, round-eyed. “It’s Monica Teasdale, Dr. Scott. She says she’s come to see you about Mr. Honey.”
The name was vaguely familiar in some way, and anything about Honey now concerned me very much indeed. I wrinkled my brows. “Who is Monica Teasdale?” I asked.
Miss Learoyd gazed at me reproachfully. “Wouldn’t she be the film actress?”
I stared at h
er. “Well, I don’t know …” The thought offended me; I was too busy to be bothered by that sort of person. On the other hand, the Honey matter was now vitally important, and if a movie star had anything to say about him, I should see her. “You’d better tell them to send her up,” I said at last.
Miss Learoyd, pop-eyed, showed her in a few minutes later: I got up from my desk and met Monica Teasdale in the flesh, whom I had seen upon the screen so many times. She was an older woman than I had thought; she still had the same beauty and appeal, still the same slight figure, the same unwrinkled face, but there was an indefinable sense of age about her; she was not the young girl that I knew upon the screen. Later, I learned to my surprise that she was over fifty.
She came forward with a dazzling smile, with hand outstretched. “Dr. Scott?” she said. “Dr. Scott, I heard so much about you from Mr. Honey that I thought, maybe, since there’s a mite of trouble going on, I’d come right down and see you and tell you all about it.”
I said, “Well, Miss Teasdale—that’s very good of you. Er—have you known Mr. Honey long?” And then I said, “Would you sit down?”
She said, “I only met him night before last, flying over to Gander in an airplane.”
I was amazed. “But … did you go to Gander?”
“Sure I did,” she said. “I was at Gander with him yesterday, up till around midnight when my plane took off for London.”
“Then you know about the accident to the Reindeer?”
“Surely,” she said. “I actually saw it happen. I could have died laughing.”
It was satisfactory, perhaps, to hear that somebody had got some fun out of this business. I leaned over and offered her a cigarette, which she refused, and said, “But how did you get back here, then?”
She said, “I flew right back last night. Out there, your Mr. Honey’s got himself in quite a spot, Doctor. I guess you know he pulled the landing wheels up, so ‘Redgauntlet’ couldn’t take off from Gander.” I nodded. “Well, after that there was some trouble, as you’d suppose, and folks were going around declaring that he’s mentally deranged—that’s what they’re saying out there.” I nodded. “Well, I don’t think he’s mentally deranged at all, but it’s got so that no airline will carry him away from Gander, and as there is no other way to get away from Gander, it looks like he’ll stay there for quite a while. And that worried him a lot, because he thought he ought to get back and report to you, and tell you what he did.”