The Black Cloud

by Fred Hoyle; Fred Hoyle

  Helen was angry because she had become dependent for information on her rival, Mrs Alsop. Peggy, Agnes Alsop’s daughter, was employed as a secretary at the manor, and Peggy was endowed with a curiosity not even surpassed by Helen or by her mother. In consequence a steady stream of information flowed into the Alsop household. Thanks in part to this bounty and in part to the skilful way in which she dispensed it, Agnes Alsop’s prestige ranked high among her neighbours.

  To this must be added a gift for speculation. On the day that Peggy solved the mystery of the contents of the vast number of crates marked ‘Fragile: with the Greatest Care’ Mrs Alsop’s stock attained a new high.

  ‘Full of wireless valves, that’s what they are,’ she told her assembled court, ‘millions of ’em.’

  ‘But what would they want millions of valves for?’ asked Helen.

  ‘You might well ask,’ answered Mrs Alsop. ‘And what would they want all those towers and wires in the five-hundred-acre field for? If you ask me, it’s a death-ray that they’re building.’

  Subsequent events never shook her faith in this opinion.

  Excitement in ‘Highlands Estate’ knew no bounds on the day ‘they’ arrived. Peggy became well nigh incoherent when she told her mother how a tall man with blue eyes had talked to important people from the Government ‘as if they were office boys, Mum’. ‘It’s a death-ray all right,’ breathed Mrs Alsop in ecstasy.

  One of the tit-bits fell to Helen Stoddard after all, perhaps the most important tit-bit from a practical point of view. The day after ‘they’ moved in, she started off early in the morning to cycle to the neighbouring village of Far Striding only to discover that a barrier had been thrown across the road. The barrier was guarded by a sergeant of police. Yes, she would be allowed this once to go on to the village, but in future no one could come into or out of Nortonstowe unless a pass was shown. Passes were going to be issued later that day. Everyone was to be photographed and the photos would be added to the passes later in the week. What about the children going to school? Well, he believed that a teacher was being sent up from Stroud so that it wouldn’t be necessary for the children to go into the village at all. He was sorry that he knew no more about it.

  The death-ray theory gained further ground.

  It was an odd commission. It came through Ann Halsey’s agent. Would she accept an engagement on 25 February to play two sonatas, one by Mozart, the other by Beethoven, at some place in Gloucestershire? The fee named was high, very high even for an able young pianist. There would also be a quartet. No other details were given, except that a car would be waiting at Bristol for the 2 p.m. Paddington train.

  It wasn’t until Ann went along to the restaurant car for tea that she discovered the identity of the quartet, which turned out to be none other than Harry Hargreaves and his crowd.

  ‘We’re doing some Schönberg,’ said Harry. ‘Just to file their ear-drums down a bit. Who are they, by the way?’

  ‘A country-house party, as far as I can gather.’

  ‘Must be pretty wealthy, judging by the fees they’re willing to pay.’

  The drive from Bristol to Nortonstowe passed very pleasantly. There was already a hint of an early spring. The chauffeur took them into the manor house, along corridors, opened a door. ‘The visitors from Bristol, sir!’

  Kingsley had not been expecting anyone, but he recovered quickly. ‘Hello, Ann! Hello, Harry! How nice!’

  ‘Nice to see you, Chris. But what is all this? How did you come to turn yourself into a country squire? Lord, more like, considering the magnificence of this place – rolling acres and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, we’re on a special job for the Government. They apparently think we’re in need of some cultural uplift. Hence your presence,’ explained Kingsley.

  The evening was a great success, both the dinner and the concert, and it was with great regret that the musicians prepared to leave the following morning.

  ‘Well, good-bye, Chris, and thanks for the pleasant stay,’ said Ann.

  ‘Your car ought to be waiting. It’s a pity that you should have to leave so soon.’

  But there was neither chauffeur nor car waiting.

  ‘No matter,’ said Kingsley, ‘I’m sure that Dave Weichart will be willing to run you to Bristol in his own car, although it’ll be quite a squeeze with all those instruments.’

  Yes, Dave Weichart would run them to Bristol, and it was quite a squeeze, but after about a quarter of an hour and much laughter they were under way.

  Within half an hour the whole party was back again. The musicians were puzzled. Weichart was in a flaming rage. He marched the whole party into Kingsley’s office.

  ‘What’s going on around here, Kingsley? When we got down to the guard’s place, he wouldn’t let us through the barrier. Said he had orders not to let anyone out.’

  ‘We’ve all got engagements in London this evening,’ said Ann, ‘and if we don’t get away soon we shall miss our train.’

  ‘Well, if you can’t get out of the front gate, there are lots of other ways out,’ answered Kingsley. ‘Let me make a few inquiries.’

  He spent ten minutes at the phone while the others fretted and fumed. At length he put the receiver down.

  ‘You’re not the only ones in a bit of a temper. People from the estate have been trying to get out into the village, and they’ve all been stopped. It appears as if there’s a guard around the whole perimeter. I think I’d better get on to London.’

  Kingsley pressed a switch.

  ‘Hello, is that the guard’s office at the front gate? Yes, yes, I accept that you are only acting under the Chief Constable’s orders. I understand that. What I want you to do is this. Listen carefully, I want you to ring Whitehall 9700. When you get that number you will give the code letters QUE and ask for Mr Francis Parkinson, Secretary to the Prime Minister. When Mr Parkinson comes on the line you will tell him that Professor Kingsley wishes to speak to him. Then you will put the call through to me. Please repeat these instructions.’

  After a few minutes Parkinson came through. Kingsley began:

  ‘Hello, Parkinson. I hear you sprang your trap this morning … No, no, I’m not complaining. I expected it. You may put as many guards as you please on the perimeter of Nortonstowe, but I will have none of them inside. I am ringing now to tell you that communication with Nortonstowe will henceforth be on a different basis. There are to be no more telephone calls. We intend cutting all wires leading to the guard posts. If you wish to communicate with us you must use the radio link … If you haven’t finished the transmitter yet, that’s your own affair. You shouldn’t insist on the Home Secretary doing all the wiring … You don’t understand? Then you ought to. If you chaps are competent enough to run this country at a time of crisis you ought to be competent enough to build a transmitter, especially when we’ve given you the design. There’s one other thing and I’d like you to take careful note of it. If you won’t allow anyone to go out, we shall allow nobody to come into Nortonstowe. Or on second thoughts you yourself, Parkinson, may come in if you please, but you will not be allowed out. That’s all.’

  ‘But the whole thing’s preposterous,’ said Weichart. ‘Why, it’s practically like being imprisoned. I didn’t know this could happen in England.’

  ‘Anything can happen in England,’ answered Kingsley, ‘only the reasons that are given may be somewhat unusual. If you want to keep a body of men and women imprisoned in a country estate somewhere in England, You don’t tell the guards that they are guarding a prison. You tell them that those inside need protection against desperate characters who are trying to break in from outside. Protection, not confinement, is the watchword here.’

  And indeed the Chief Constable was under the impression that Nortonstowe held atomic secrets that would revolutionize the application of nuclear power to industry. He was also under the impression that foreign espionage would do its utmost to prise out these secrets. He knew that the most likely leak would be
from someone actually working at Nortonstowe. It was therefore a simple deduction that the best form of security would be to prevent all access to, or egress from, the place. In this belief he had been confirmed by the Home Secretary himself. He was even willing to concede that it might be necessary to augment his police guard by calling in the military.

  ‘But what has this, whatever it may mean, to do with us?’ asked Ann Halsey.

  ‘It’d be easy for me to pretend that you happened to be here by accident,’ said Kingsley, ‘but I don’t think so. You’re here as part of a plan. There are others here as well. You see George Fisher, the artist, was commissioned by the Government to do some drawings of Nortonstowe. Then there’s John McNeil, a young physician, and Bill Price, the historian, working on the old library. I think we’d better try to rope ’em all in, and then I’ll explain as best I can.’

  When Fisher, McNeil, and Price had been added to their company, Kingsley gave the assembled non-scientists a general but fairly detailed account of the discovery of the Black Cloud, and of the events that had led up to the establishment of Nortonstowe.

  ‘I can see why this explains the guards and so forth. But it doesn’t explain why we’re here. You said it wasn’t an accident. Why us and not someone else?’ asked Ann Halsey.

  ‘My fault,’ answered Kingsley. ‘What I believe to have happened is this. An address book of mine was found by Government agents. In that book were the names of scientists that I consulted about the Black Cloud. What I presume to have happened is that when some of my contacts were discovered, the Government decided to take no chances. They simply roped in everybody in the address book. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That was damned careless of you, Chris,’ exclaimed Fisher.

  ‘Well, frankly I’ve had quite a lot to worry about during the last six weeks. And after all your situation is really pretty good. You’ve said, without exception, what a nice place this is. And when the crisis comes you’ve a vastly better chance of surviving than you could possibly have had otherwise. We shall survive here if survival is at all possible. So at root you may think that you’ve been pretty fortunate.’

  ‘This address book business, Kingsley,’ said McNeil, ‘doesn’t seem to apply at all in my case. As far as I’m aware we never met until a few days ago.’

  ‘Incidentally, McNeil, why are you here, if I may ask?’

  ‘Cock and bull story evidently. I’ve been concerned with finding a site for a new sanatorium, and Nortonstowe was recommended to me. Ministry of Health suggested I might like to see the place for myself. But why me I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Perhaps so that we had a doctor on the spot.’

  Kingsley got up and walked to the window. Cloud shadows were chasing each other across the meadows.

  One afternoon in mid-April, Kingsley returned to the house after a brisk walk round the Nortonstowe estate, to find aniseed smoke pervading his room.

  ‘What the …!’ he exclaimed. ‘By all that’s wonderful, Geoff Marlowe. I’d given up hopes of you getting here. How did you manage it?’

  ‘By deception and treachery,’ replied Marlowe between large mouthfuls of toast. ‘Nice place you’ve got here. Have some tea?’

  ‘Thanks, it’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Not at all. After you left we were moved down to Palomar, where I was able to do a certain amount of work. Then we were all transported into the desert, with the exception of Emerson, who I believe was sent over here.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got Emerson, Barnett, and Weichart. I was rather afraid they’d given you the desert treatment. That’s why I cleared out so quickly as soon as Herrick said he was going to Washington. Did he get a thick ear for allowing me to leave the country?’

  ‘I gather so, but he didn’t say much about it.’

  ‘Incidentally, am I right in supposing that the A.R. was sent over to your side?’

  ‘Yes, sir! The Astronomer Royal is Chief British Liaison Officer to the whole U.S. project.’

  ‘Good for him. That’ll be exactly up his alley, I expect. But you haven’t told me how you managed to give the desert the slip, and why you decided to leave.’

  ‘The why of it is easy. Because of the way we were organized to death.’

  Marlowe took a handful of lumps out of the sugar bowl. He laid one on the table.

  ‘This is the guy who does the work.’

  ‘What do you call him?’

  ‘I don’t know that we call him anything in particular.’

  ‘We call him a “bod” over here.’

  ‘A “bod”?’

  ‘That’s right. Short for “body”.’

  ‘Well, even though we don’t call him a “bod”, he’s a “bod” all right,’ went on Marlowe. ‘In fact he’s a hell of a “bod”, as you’ll soon see.’

  Next he laid down a row of sugar lumps.

  ‘Above the “bod” comes his Section Leader. In view of my seniority I’m a Section Leader. Then comes the Deputy Director. Herrick became a Deputy Director in spite of his being in the doghouse. Then here’s our old friend the Director himself. Above him comes the Assistant Controller, then who else but the Controller? They’re the military, of course. Next comes the Project Coordinator. He’s a politician. And so by degrees we come to the President’s Deputy. After that I suppose comes the President, although I can’t be sure because I never got as high as that.’

  ‘You didn’t like it, I suppose?’

  ‘No, sir, I didn’t,’ continued Marlowe as he crunched another piece of toast. ‘I was too near the bottom of the hierarchy to like it. Besides I could never find out what was going on outside my own section. The policy was to keep everything in watertight compartments. In the interests of security, they said, but more likely in the interests of inefficiency, I think. Well, I didn’t like it as you can imagine. It isn’t my way of going about a problem. So I started agitating for a transfer, a transfer to this show over here. I had an idea that things would be done a lot better here. And I see they are,’ he added, as he took up another piece of toast.

  ‘Besides I suddenly got a longing for a sight of green grass. When that comes on you it isn’t to be denied.’

  ‘This is all very well, Geoff, but it doesn’t explain how you prised yourself loose from this formidable organization.’

  ‘Pure luck,’ answered Marlowe. ‘The people over in Washington got the idea that maybe you people weren’t telling everything you knew. And as I’d let it be known that I’d welcome a transfer, I was sent over here as a spy. That’s where the treachery comes in.’

  ‘You mean you’re supposed to report on anything we may be concealing?’

  ‘That’s exactly the situation. And now that you know why I’m here, am I to be allowed to stay or are you going to throw me out?’

  ‘It’s the rule here that everyone who comes into Nortonstowe stays. We don’t let anyone out.’

  ‘Then it’ll be all right if Mary comes along? She’s been doing some shopping in London. But she’ll be right along some time tomorrow.’

  ‘That’ll be fine. This is a big place. We’ve got plenty of room.We shall be glad to have Mrs Marlowe here. Frankly, there’s an awful lot of work to be done, and far too few people to do it.’

  ‘And maybe occasionally I might send a crumb of information to Washington, just to keep them happy?’

  ‘You can tell ’em anything you like. I find the more I tell the politicians the more depressed they get. So it’s our policy to tell ’em everything. There’s no secrecy at all here. You can send anything you wish on the direct radio link to Washington. We got it working about a week ago.’

  ‘In that case maybe you’d give me an outline of what’s been happening at this end. Personally, I’m very little wiser than on the day we talked out in the Mohave Desert. I have done a bit, but it isn’t optical work we need just now. By the fall we could get something. But this is a business for the radio boys, as I think we agreed.’

  ‘We did. And I stirred up John Marl
borough as soon as I got back to Cambridge in January. It took some persuasion to start him on the job, because I didn’t tell him the real reason to begin with – although he knows now of course. Well, we got out a temperature for the Cloud. It’s a little above two hundred degrees, two hundred degrees absolute of course.’

  ‘That’s pretty good. About what we’d hoped for. A bit cold, but possible.’

  ‘It’s really better than it sounds. Because, as the Cloud approaches the Sun, internal motions must develop inside it. My first calculations showed that the resulting rise of temperature might be somewhere between fifty and a hundred per cent, making in total a temperature somewhere around freezing point. So it looked as if we might be in for a frosty spell and nothing more.’

  ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  ‘That’s what I thought at the time. But I’m not really an expert in gas dynamics, so I wrote off to Alexandrov.’

  ‘My God, you were taking a chance in writing to Moscow.’

  ‘I don’t think so. The problem could be put in a purely academic form. And there’s nobody better suited to tackle it than Alexandrov. In any case it led to us getting him here. He regards this as the best concentration camp in the world.’

  ‘I see there’s still a lot that I don’t know. Go on.’

  ‘At this time, still in January, I was feeling pretty clever. So I decided to take the political authorities for a really rough trip. I perceived that two things the politicians must have at all costs – scientific information and secrecy. I determined to give both to them, on my own conditions – the conditions you see around you here at Nortonstowe.’

  ‘I see, a pleasant place to live in, no military to badger you, no secrecy. And how was the team recruited?’

  ‘Simply by indiscretions in the right quarters, like the letter to Alexandrov. What could be more natural than that everyone should be brought here who might have learned anything from me? I did play one dirty trick, and it still lies on my conscience. Sooner or later you will meet a charming girl who plays the piano extremely well. You will meet an artist, an historian, other musicians. It seemed to me that incarceration at Nortonstowe for over a year would be quite intolerable if there were only scientists here. So I arranged the appropriate indiscretions. Don’t breathe a word of this, Geoff. In the circumstances I think perhaps I was justified. But it’s better they shouldn’t know that I was deliberately responsible for their being sent here. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.’