Chronocules

by D. G. Compton

  She would find this crude. She would be able to despise it and yet still be persuaded of its truth. She laughed (one had to say it) unpleasantly, and walked to the window. She was deciding that to deal with him would be no problem at all. She looked scornfully down on the Village, dusty and brown under what was now the forty-ninth day of heat-wave. She would deal with the Village as easily as she would deal with its O.S. She was a thick-set woman, strong-jawed but not unbeautiful, dressed with a sensible disregard for prevailing fashion, in a loose silk smock that did not advertise her probably excessive bust.

  “Penheniot Experimental Research Village. . . .” She leaned against the glass of the window. “Presumably the initials are meant as a joke.”

  “Admittedly our Founder has a troublesome sense of humor.”

  “Experimental Research is a woolly phrase. What exactly do you do here?”

  “I’m sure you don’t expect me to answer that.”

  “I can think of no other reason for your agreeing to my visit.”

  If her letter had arrived at any other time he certainly would not have. There was a special form, polite but unequivocal, that was sent out to interfering busy- bodies. But her letter came four days after the Founder’s disastrous inspection tour, four days after the dog had died, four days after Roses Varco’s tears.’ David Silberstein now had something to conceal, a shame to be

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  denied. To be denied, above all, to the secretary of the Committee for Moral Responsibility in Science. From what he knew of Mis. Lampton, she was unlikeable, nosy, often hysterical. But she represented an organization engaged in morally essential work. She was thus both odious and admirable. She had written to him at the time of his shame. She had spoken of damaging local allegations. She had requested an interview, a chance to see for herself.

  “I agreed to your visit, Mrs. Lampton . . .” He paused, saving the grand lie for later. “I agreed to your visit because I approve of the work done by your Committee, and because I will do everything in my power to encourage it.”

  “Anything in your power . . . except tell me what you really do here.”

  “You’ve heard of industrial espionage, Mrs. Lampton. How can I be sure of your discretion?”

  “Because if I proved myself to be untrustworthy just once, all the rest of my work would become impossible.”

  It was the obvious answer. He decided he had delayed his lie long enough to make it credible. He opened his heart.

  “Teleportage, Mrs. Lampton. Our Founder is interested in studying the commercial possibilities of teleportage.” She would want to see the laboratory. The equipment was compatible. “As yet we’ve had little success.”

  “It sounds like an innocent project. They all do.”

  “See for yourself.” He spread his hands. “See from the window. No one dies from mysterious diseases. We do not pollute, we over-exploit no natural resources, we do not disfigure the countryside. We seek to exert no power, political or economic.”

  “A country idylL” Mrs. Lampton turned back from

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  the window, smiling (she hoped) dangerously. “I understand you have no vivisection license from the Home Office.”

  “We have no need of one.” And spotty dog? Could she have heard of spotty dog?

  “Local opinion thinks otherwise.”

  If she had had a particular she would have stated it. “Local opinion is wrong.”

  “And the deliveries here of caged animals in large quantities?”

  “Totally imaginary.” Thank God.

  “I have eyewitness reports.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lampton. They just aren’t true.”

  Mrs. Lampton pressed the matter no further. David could guess the nature of her eyewitnesses: sky-high loons. Otherwise she’d have gone to the police with them. She shifted her attack.

  “Health records show you have your own medical service. Your own doctors and your own small hospital.”

  “Inspected regularly by the Government Health Authorities. That is so.”

  “Why do you choose to be so self-contained, Mr. Sil-

  berstein?”

  “You yourself have four children, Mrs. Lampton.” This was going to be a palpable hit. “Wouldn’t you prefer them to have conditions where the ratio of patients to doctors wasn’t ten thousand to one?”

  She rode it. “Shall I be allowed to inspect your medical records?”

  “Of course. We’re a healthy lot. You’ll find them very dull reading.”

  “How many people on the staff here have died since this center was started?”

  “None.” The true number was fourteen, deaths from

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  inadmissibility, every one. “I’m sure you already have the statistic.”

  “I find it hard to credit, Mr. Silberstein. And the man who was seen two days ago being carried through St. Kinnow? The man your Founder said was dead when asked by a policeman?”

  “Mr. Littlejohn says these things. . . . The man was high, of course. Which is strictly against Village regulations.”

  “Shall I be allowed to see him?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Lampton.” He made a note on his pad, as if intending to make arrangements later. There was little risk—he thought Mrs. Lampton was far more interested in what she was not allowed to see than in what was offered for her immediate inspection. If worse came to worse, Mervyn could always be found to be unavailable. And Mrs. Lampton could make what she liked of it. Certainly none of the Villagers would enlighten her.

  “So the man needed drugs enough to defy regulations, Mr. Silberstein. Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “Of course it worries me. But this isn’t a desert island. The world presses in on every side. Perhaps his curiosity was aroused. It’s a pity, but it’s hardly surprising.”

  “I was afraid you’d think like that. In the young a spirit of healthy experiment is necessary. I approve of it.”

  (Healthy experiment was the current liberal cant phrase for anything from sexing it up with the donkeys on Bournemouth sands to human sacrifice—with a signed statement from the victim to say he was willing—during anti-war rituals on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.)

  “The trouble is, Mrs. Lampton, that Mervyn is no longer young.” He shouldn’t have mentioned the name. At least he had remembered to get the tense right He

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  pressed on, caught up in a matter of conviction. “He’s quite old enough to know better. Quite old enough to obey rules, to know that they are helpful even.”

  “I shan’t argue with you, Mr. Silberstein.” He recognized her pitying smile from a dozen discussion programs. “Establishments like yours always attract the more reactionary elements.”

  He didn’t rise. Letting her think she had won made him feel enormous.

  “If there’s nothing more I can tell you, perhaps you’d like to come and see for yourself.”

  “I understand your men were recently involved in a riot in St. Kinnow.” Her idiot board was well prepared, he had to give her that.

  “Riots occur. This latest was very mild.”

  “Why do you think this place is so unpopular among the townspeople?”

  “If we were unpopular, Mrs. Lampton, I would say it was on account of people like you. People whose success against social evils leads them to see further evils, even where none exist. As it is, however, none of this applies. We are not in the least unpopular in St Kinnow.”

  “From what I hear of the riot, Mr. Silberstein, it was hardly an expression of brotherly love.

  “The riot was conducted entirely by outsiders, tourists —in a spirit of healthy experiment, no doubt.” He was getting as cheap as she.

  “Fifteen people died, Mr. Silberstein. Were murdered, I should say, by employees of your humo
rous Founder.” “Twelve people, Mrs. Lampton. Twelve people, and three totally innocent security men.”

  “What does that prove?”

  “It proves that healthy experiment is frequently expensive.”

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  “It proves that I will be right to rouse public indignation about this place. It proves that you, in common with most scientists, are socially and environmentally irresponsible. Criminally so.”

  Such a conclusion was Mrs. Lampton at her most emotive. There should have been a millionfold audience. Bested, David stood up, went to the door, opened it. “Shall we go and look around the Village?” he said. Often, as he led Mrs. Lampton from place to place— the generating station, Workshops, the catering section —his mind slipped back four days to the similar tour he had made with Manny Littlejohn. Beside Manny Littlejohn, Mrs. Lampton was a joy, a source of bounding light. The Founder, frightened into aggression by the affair of the spotty dog, had stabbed and stabbed, and stabbed again. The Maypole festivities he had withered with a short speech about time-wasting in industry. Paul Kronheimer (and also public confidence in Paul Kronheimer’s bank) he had shattered by a demand for detailed statements for every Village employee— for what purpose, none could guess. The chief engineer’s wife, an attractive but insecure woman, Manny Littlejohn had destroyed by the loud suggestion that she should try either cosmetic surgery or clothes. And so on. . . . Even Joseph’s masterly luncheon, as kosher as kosher could be, had been found unfitting.

  The climax to Manny Littlejohn’s malignant ingenuity came with the funeral he insisted on organizing for the security man, Mervyn, in the little burial ground up among the trees that doubled as the hospital’s vegetable patch. It was a triumph for Littlejohn bad taste. Even through the poignancy of his grief, the Founder insisted on delivering the funeral oration, spicing it with a lively moral. Mervyn, he said, was a victim, not of his own folly, but of a malaise that had struck the entire

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  Village. Standards were low, ideals were forgotten, acquiescence and time-serving were rife on every side. He hoped, he said (as the sun sank bloodily over the trees above the rooftops), he hoped that Mervyn would not have died in vain. Otherwise, his voice fading to a sad whisper, otherwise the continuance of the whole project might be in danger. . . . As a parting shot he became very Orthodox. He stooped, found a reverent small pebble, and put it, a year early, on Mervyn’s mound. It was a gesture nobody, especially not the ignored Professor Kravchensky, mistook.

  Mrs. Lampton, interrupting David’s painful recollections, saw a clearing among the trees up behind the cottage hospital. She asked what it was.

  “Vegetables,” said David Silberstein. “Only vegetables. The doctor and his two nurses grow them for their own use.”

  “Natural cultivation methods, I hope?”

  “Of course.” What more natural than Mervyn and his thirteen fellow inadmissibles? “Though even here the chemicals do sometimes blow in from the farmland around.”

  “It’s no use blaming the farmers, Mr. Silberstein. They only use the tools science gave them.”

  It was no use blaming anybody. They had reached the stage where questions of blame were irrelevant. He took Mrs. Lampton into the hospital and she examined the register. An appendectomy, several antibiotic-resistant syphilitics, a couple of pollution poisonings . . . nothing more. The Villagers were, as the O.S. had said, a healthy lot. Deaths from inadmissibility, not being susceptible to hospital treatment, were not listed.

  Mrs. Lampton’s next stop was Workshops, hoping no doubt to find badly shielded isotopes or carelessly handled germ cultures. Instead she found a set of new

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  desks for the Village School, and two hot men repairing a coffee grinder. She moved on to the chrononauts, described by the O.S. as trainee technologists.

  “More like members of the Hitler Youth,” she said. But there were only six of them, poor evidence of a private army or other such unconstitutional device.

  David let her go everywhere, and everywhere she went she questioned the prepared Villagers. Any unexplained sickness? Any animals used for unorthodox purposes? Any intrusions of the liberty of the individual? From all of his staff except one the O.S. had nothing to fear. They answered freely, speaking if not the whole truth at least nothing but the truth. And the odd man out, the personal friend of an accidentally vivisected spotty dog, what must Roses Varco do but blunder out of the Village Library at the precise moment when Mrs. Lampton was passing? He was accompanied, oddly enough, by Liza Simmons.

  Inevitably Mrs. Lampton accosted him. He hid his book of SF strips behind his back and smoothed his hair with the wetted palm of his hand, identifying her at once as a Social Worker.

  David Silberstein sighed. As the scene of his crime, Roses Varco was bound to be revisited.

  “Mrs. Lampton, this is Liza Simmons, laboratory assistant, and Mr. Roses Varco.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Varco,” picking the obviously more vulnerable. “I wonder if you’d mind telling me how long you’ve been working here.”

  “Working?” A Social Worker’s word. His mind ran out of the cracks in his head like smoke. “Me? Working?” “Come now, Mr. Varco,” suspecting evasion. “Presumably you have a job of some kind here in Penhen- iot.”

  “Job?”

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  Only recently someone else had asked him that same question. It reminded him . . . it reminded him of . . . it reminded him of the Founder. And then of the band playing, of the laboratory, of the little spotty dog. What smoke was left whirled faster.

  “Job? I don’ know about no job.” He choked slightly. “All I know is . . . Well, I mean, how was I to know? He didn’ never have no cause to . . . Just picked he up. I mean, how was I to know he’d . . . he’d go an’ . .” Roses’ eyes filled with tears at the memory, and his throat swelled so that he could say no more. One painful word short of too much. Mrs. Lampton smelled a rat, became professionally kind.

  “Never mind, Mr. Varco. Perhaps I can help. Just tell me what he did, and perhaps I can help. Just you tell me what he did. I’m sure nobody’s blaming you.” Professionally kind. . . . Even through his transitory grief Roses had an accurate, intuitive ear. There were inflections he had heard before, inflections, meant to put him at ease, inflections that roused in him an animal caution. Liza and David Silberstein waited agonized in the seconds before he replied. They could not know, nobody could know, the pictures taking shape in his head: the brisk young woman, professionally kind, standing in the doorway of his kitchen; the men, professionally kind, who came later; the somewhere, professionally kind, he learned was a hospital; the having to take his clothes off, the shame and the bits of colored plastic to put into holes they never seemed quite to fit; the talk, professionally kind and far above his head which he understood perfectly well (would he be locked away or wouldn’t he?); all this was clearly to be heard in Mrs. Lampton’s voice. Mrs. Lampton was a trap.

  “What he did?” Trap: questions with trap behind them, they short-circuited thought. “What he did? He

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  dicin’ do nothing. Don’ know who you mean. Who didn’ do nothing. Don know what you mean. Nobody don’ do nothing. ’Tes always the same—questions, poking. Leave a man in peace, I say. Just leave a man in peace. Idn’ no use, though. Talk till I’m blue in the face and it wouldn’ make no odds.” '

  “But Mr. Varco . .,”

  David let Mrs. Lampton struggle on. She was pushing him further and further into an unfair but useful appearance of total imbecility. Finally he could stand no more and broke away, barely coordinated enough to walk. He went off down the street. Liza excused herself and followed him.

  “He’s not usually so incoherent,” David said, his mind on why Liza was bothering. “I suppose he thought you were crowding him.�
��

  “Has he always been like that?”

  “Indeed he has. He was living in a hovel here, so we let him stay. The Fovmder likes to feel humane.” “You’re sure it’s not something that’s happened to him? Something in connection with your research?”

  “Don’t believe me, Mrs. Lampton. Ask in St. Kinnow. He’s living here all his life. They all know him in St. Kinnow.”

  “I see.”

  Mrs. Lampton kept her own counsel, recognizing gold where there was but iron pyrites.

  David Silberstein took her on down the street, his gaze still on the wicket gate through which Roses had gone on his way home, closely followed by Liza. It wasn’t right. (Right?) Very well, it wasn’t dignified, suitable, socially acceptable. He censored the image of what might happen, before it was more than a blur of dark hairy hands and black bull shoulders. He took Mrs. Lampton in to show her the Post Office.

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  To Liza, who had never seen Roses’ home before, the little sacking-curtained kitchen was deeply shocking. It moved her out of everything she knew, into a life that was medieval, contagious, utterly repulsive. A person who could live like this must be scarcely human. And indeed, Roses Varco—whom she had touched—appeared at that moment to be precisely that. Twitching and moaning, scarcely human. So her shock was at herself. '

  Something made her stay in spite of it. More than stay.

  Roses was sitting at his table. When his mind returned—without the spotty dog, certainly without Mrs. Lampton—he saw that the girl had filled his kettle. He saw her doing inexplicable things with his primus. Finally he saw that she was trying to light it, but didn’t know how. He showed her the way, patiently, without words, as someone had showed him long ago, holding up the can of methylated spirits for her to smell what it was, pouring it into the circular channel, lighting it with elaborate gestures. His fingers, neat at the beloved task, tightened the vent screw and pumped till an arc of purple flame blossomed from the burner. He stood back, the trick successful, and smiled and smiled and smiled.

  The kettle boiled, and he made cocoa with hot water and a lot of sugar. He’d been given enamel mugs, which he treasured. His bean tins had no handles, and often burned his fingers. He gave the girl a mug of his cocoa so that she had to take it. He remembered running away from her, and he was capable now of excuses.