The Empty House

by Michael Gilbert

  “Yes,” said Peter.

  “Very well. Then you will appreciate the importance of the fact that when a cell divides, the nucleus of the daughter cell must correspond in every particular with the nucleus of the parent cell. This is achieved in a series of six steps, each of which has been noted by geneticists and separately identified and named, by which the nucleotides attach themselves to the daughter cell in a correct and prearranged order, thus ensuring that the genetic code is reproduced accurately. Sometimes, by accident, this does not happen. This is what we call a mutation. The logical sequence of the body’s development is interrupted. The results are almost always catastrophic. The loss of resistance to disease. Mental inequilibrium. Freakish growths, unrecognisable as human beings, ranging from the moron whose body grows but whose mind remains that of an infant, to those poor creatures who, if they live, may be exhibited for gain in circuses. More usually, and mercifully, they die and are preserved for the instruction of students in the museums of our teaching hospitals.”

  “You spoke of this being the result of some accident. Has anyone discovered what sort of accident is involved? I mean, what causes the accident?”

  “Until recently there has been very little knowledge but a great deal of speculation. The work of Dr. Daniella Rhodes at Cambridge, which I mentioned to you earlier, has led to advances in the search for reasons, but whole areas are still in darkness. The results of lawless development, on the other hand, have long been noted. Cancer is only one of the more obvious. Some of the predisposing factors are also known. Radiation, for instance. It is now realised that in its earliest applications the incautious use of radium probably caused more cancerous growth than it cured. The inhalation of fumes can be another predisposing cause. But the fundamental cause, the trigger which actually sets the mutations into motion, is still a mystery. It is a mystery to the solution of which the researches of leading geneticists in all countries are being applied. Because if it could be determined, we might be able to find out how to control it.”

  “And this is what Dr. Wolfe was working on?”

  “He was working on it, almost continuously, for the whole of his time here. It was a natural development, you see, of the work he had been doing before he came. The papers which he wrote at the end of his second and fourth years, and which I was privileged to see, demonstrated how far he had advanced.”

  “And in the last two years?”

  “During the last two years, and more particularly recently, I could not help noticing a change in Dr. Wolfe. It was not apparent to everyone. He was a very controlled man. A man who planned his own actions meticulously. I will give you a small example. He kept a bag with spare clothes and other necessities ready packed in the back of his car. In this way, no one could tell, when he drove out of the camp, whether he was going down to the Doone Valley Hotel for a drink or was leaving on a four months’ holiday. In the same way that he regulated his actions, he regulated his speech. He would tell you what he wished you to know. He would make the exact impressions on you that he wished to make. I alone, I think, who knew him very well, was in a position to identify the change which had come over him. But recently I realised the truth. He was afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “It seems a remarkable word to use of such a man. But yes. He was afraid. Something, I am certain, happened to him during his last vacation. He was away for nearly five months in the middle of last year. He came back in September. One could not help noticing the scar. It was nearly healed, but quite distinct.”

  Dr. Bishwas put one hand up to his own face.

  “It started underneath the left ear and ran down almost to the point of his jaw. A sensitive man might have grown a beard to conceal it. Dr. Wolfe was not sensitive about it, but he was not communicative either. No one liked to press him for an explanation. It was after he returned, at the end of last year and in the first months of this year, that I noticed the change. Sometimes as I watched him working in the laboratory by day, or glimpsed him, through the window of his room in the evening, writing or perhaps just sitting in his chair and thinking, I got the impression – you may laugh at this – of a scientist of medieval times. We make fun of them now, Friar Bacon and Duns Scotus, but they were scientists, you know. Indeed, they were men of great mental power and wide-ranging imaginations. All that they lacked was the infrastructure of scientific knowledge on which we build today with such blind confidence. Can you not visualise such a man seated alone in his library at night, surrounded by books full of curious learning, delving deeper and deeper into the half-understood mysteries of life and death, of good and evil, of white magic and black magic, until at last he felt, almost within his grasp, round the next corner, on the next page, the answer to the ultimate question? Was it God or the Devil who ruled the universe? Might they not be afraid – would you not be afraid – to turn that page?”

  Peter said nothing. A car which had been coming down the main road slowed and checked for a moment. Was it going to stop? No, it had gathered speed and was moving away. If Dr. Bishwas had heard it, he gave no sign. He was swaying very gently backward and forward on his perch, and Peter thought, though he could not be sure, that he was smiling.

  “You find such thoughts fanciful,” he said at last. “They are no more fanciful than the truth, which I learned, quite by chance, four weeks ago. The Colonel will have told you that Dr. Wolfe very rarely left the camp. He had one relaxation: that was fishing. Near the coast the rivers are too deep and too swift, but a few miles inland, on the moors, there are stretches where you can get good sport. Dr. Wolfe had an arrangement with one of the farmers – a place called Watersmeet. He would sometimes take his lunch and spend the day out there. On this occasion, most unusually, he suggested that I should go with him.”

  “You think he was nervous about going alone?”

  “He did not seem to be nervous. I should have been small protection had he been attacked. I am not pugilistic. No, I think he had been making up his mind for some time to confide in me, and he saw this as a good opportunity. It was a better opportunity than he had conceived. At midday the rain commenced. We spent much of the afternoon in a hay barn.

  “I will explain as simply as I can what he told me that afternoon. He had concluded that the orderly process of cell division was governed by a factor – he had named it the H-factor since it was connected with the haemoglobin. It was only when this factor was disturbed that mutations occurred. He was still a long way from discovering how the H-factor carried out its complex work, which he described somewhat in the terms of the conductor of an orchestra. But he had come to one conclusion, and it was the implications of this conclusion which were terrifying him. He had concluded theoretically – there was absolutely no clinical work, you understand, to support his theories – that the H-factor could be arbitrarily disrupted by an additive to the bloodstream, taken in through the stomach and the gut in the ordinary way, just as alcohol, for instance, enters the bloodstream. It was an additive which could be mixed with water without losing its potency. Do you see what this meant, Mr. Manciple? Do you observe its implications, in practical terms? Can you visualise what would happen if a suitable quantity were added to the water supply of a small country? The effects would not be immediate, so that no countermeasures would be taken. Or they would not be taken until it was much too late. It would take years for the full effects to be apparent. But in a single generation you would have destroyed a whole people beyond any chance of repair. Perhaps destruction is too kind a word. You would have produced, out of sound stock, a generation of mindless freaks, sports of nature, useful only to be exhibited to the curious in tents.”

  Peter said, under his breath, almost as though speaking to himself, “Can such a vile thing possibly be true?”

  Dr. Bishwas said, “There is no final proof. Dr. Wolfe explained his reasoning to me that afternoon. It took him several hours to cover the ground, and you must remember that we speak the same language. With me he could use scientific
shorthand. With anyone not trained in that particular discipline, the explanation would have taken a week – perhaps many weeks. I can only tell you that, at the end, I was convinced.”

  “If it is true—if there was any possibility that it might be true”—Peter found that he was almost stuttering—”could Dr. Wolfe, could any responsible scientist have suggested it as a possible weapon of war? Would he even have committed his conclusions to paper? Suppose they got into the wrong hands.”

  “I can answer only the second of your questions. All of Dr. Wolfe’s conclusions, and the data and calculations which supported them, were microfilmed. The paperwork was then meticulously destroyed. Thus, the totality of his records could be carried in a small briefcase, which never left his possession. He even brought it out with him when we went fishing.”

  “And you think it was with him in the car when he left the camp last week?”

  “I am sure of it.”

  “And is now at the bottom of the sea, off Rackthorn Point?”

  “If that is where Dr. Wolfe is, yes.”

  Peter let that go. He wanted an interval to get his breath back, to assimilate objectively what he had been told. Finally, he said, “If the record of his work over the last two years is lost, does that mean that the work stops? Or does someone else start, two years back?”

  “Not even two years back. When one man has trodden out a path, it is easier for the next man to follow.”

  “But would this particular line of inquiry necessarily be followed?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Even if you knew that it would lead to such an unthinkably horrible conclusion?”

  “Science is not concerned with the use made of its discoveries, only with discovery itself.”

  “And look where that led us. Straight to the atom bomb.”

  “That last war produced the atom bomb, true. It also produced penicillin and other antibiotics, which have saved more lives, Mr. Manciple, than the war itself destroyed.”

  “All right,” said Peter. “All right, I’m not going to argue. It’s a futile argument, anyway. But there is one thing I must know. Why are you telling me this?”

  “For two reasons,” said Dr. Bishwas. He was leaning so far forward that he seemed almost to be falling on top of Peter. “The first is that if anyone is asked to continue Dr. Wolfe’s work, it will almost certainly be me. I was his principal assistant. In much of his work, his only assistant. It is known that I was in his confidence.”

  “And you would not refuse?”

  “I could not refuse. But, equally, I shall be in a position to know when this research has reached a point where it might leave the laboratory and come into the arena of field usage. It is at that point that the possible consequences of this horrible weapon must be explained to the world. I cannot do so myself. I am bound by the Acts and by the terms of the many undertakings they exact from all of us before we are allowed to work here. If I were to attempt to publish anything, it would be immediately, and effectively, repressed, of that I can assure you. But you are a free agent, Mr. Manciple. You could not be stopped from obtaining publicity for these matters.”

  “Yes,” said Peter slowly. “Yes, I should be able to do that.” He thought of the various organisations concerned with pacifism and human rights, of all of which his mother was an enthusiastic member. “There shouldn’t be much difficulty about that. How would you get the stuff to me?”

  “It would not be difficult. They cannot keep us under lock and key, although they supervise our movements and our contacts as closely as they can. I was allowed out tonight without any trouble because it is known that I sometimes sleep with a girl in the next village. Such relaxations are thought to be good for us, and to bring us refreshed to our work in the morning.”

  “They ought to introduce it into schools as a substitute for PT,” said Peter. But he was not devoting the whole of his mind to Dr. Bishwas. It was on a lot of different things. The car which had stopped at the end of the road. He wished that he were safely home in bed. He wished that he had not come out.

  “You realise, of course,” said Dr. Bishwas, “that we must have no further personal contact. If it were even suspected that I have talked to you, that would place you in a most ambiguous position.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “And now – if you don’t mind—”

  “You are fatigued. I am not surprised. If you will give me a few minutes’ start, I shall make my own way back to the camp on foot. Goodbye, Mr. Manciple.”

  “Goodbye,” said Peter.

  He heard the light footsteps dying away in the distance. Then he went out and sat in his car, summoning the courage to move.

  “If there is any trouble,” he thought, “it will be at the end of the path, where it joins the main road.”

  There was no trouble. Ten minutes later he was back in his bedroom. The letter was still on the mantelpiece. As he picked it up, he felt that it was not exactly as he had left it. There was nothing obviously wrong with it. It was still firmly sealed. There was something which his sense of touch was trying to tell him, but which his brain was too tired to interpret. He was on the point of tearing the letter up and depositing it in the wastepaper basket when he changed his mind and put it, unopened, into his briefcase. Then he undressed and climbed into bed.

  Usually, he found it difficult to get to sleep for the first night or two in a strange bed. On this occasion, as soon as his head touched the pillow, he seemed to pitch head foremost into a land of dreams; dreams which started with the innocent fantasies of Alice in Wonderland, where rabbits talked and turtles sang, but which changed to horror when he saw that the animals were really people; children with elephant trunks and children with flippers instead of hands, children who moaned and howled and trumpeted through their grotesquely elongated noses.

  It was a scream which broke the nightmare. A scream so loud and close that it jerked him upright in bed. It was some seconds before he realised that it was he himself who had screamed.

  8

  “Looks like a change in the weather,” said Dave Brewer. “Most mornings we’ve had a bit of sunshine first thing, then down comes the rain.”

  “Fine before seven, rain before eleven,” agreed Kevin.

  “Now we’ve started with a nice bit of mist. We might get a real scorcher. More toast, Miss Mansergh?”

  “You’re such a terrible tempter,” said Anna. “More toast, more cream, more potatoes. I believe you’re trying to turn me into a roly-poly pudding.”

  “Becoming fat,” said Professor Petros, “has very little to do with what you eat. What matters is what happens to the food once it is inside you. If your mind is constantly under stress, food can pass straight through your body without being ingested at all. This was demonstrated in the Chindit operations in Burma, where men died of malnutrition although they were apparently eating adequate quantities of food.”

  “Is that so?” said Kevin. “Then I must be a very stressful person, because I eat what I like and never get any fatter. What about you, Mr. Manciple?”

  “I’m much the same,” said Peter. “When I was at school, I was so thin you could hardly see me if I turned sideways, and I certainly ate an enormous amount. Most boarding schools starve their pupils, but we had an exceptionally nice housemaster. He was a bachelor, of course.”

  “Why do you say ‘of course’?” asked the Professor.

  “When a housemaster is married, his wife economises on the food. Look at Mrs. Squeers.”

  “Mr. Key from the garage tells me you were both at Blundell’s School,” said Kevin. “I’d like to talk to you about that sometime. I’ve always thought that there must be a lot of autobiography in the opening chapters of Loma Doone.”

  Peter said doubtfully, “By the time Blackmore himself was at Blundell’s, I think it was a little more civilised than it was in John Ridd’s time.”

  “Did the bigger boys still throw the little ones into the River Loman?”

  “Not when I w
as there.”

  “What about fights?” said Anna. “You must have had fights.”

  Peter thought hard. He would have liked to oblige Anna, but he couldn’t honestly recall that two boys had ever fought in any formal manner.

  “Scuffles,” he said. “Nothing like Tom Brown’s Schooldays.”

  “I should surmise,” said Professor Petros, “that boys’ schools are a great deal softer now than they were a hundred years ago.”

  “They’re not exactly soft,” said Peter. “Just more grown-up. The only ordeal I can remember was a terrible race called the Russell. It was all across ploughed fields and it was about a hundred miles long.”

  “A hundred miles?”

  “It seemed like it. And the course had been artfully designed so that you had to cross the Loman six times. It was usually in flood.”

  “I believe you enjoyed it,” said Anna.

  “Only in retrospect.”

  “The sun is beginning to come through,” said the Professor. “If you’d care to follow me in your car, I could show you something of the work I’m presently engaged on.”

  “It’s very good of you to take the trouble,” said Peter. He looked hopefully across the table. “There’s plenty of room in the car if both of you would care to come along.”

  Anna grinned at him and shook her head. She said, “We’re going to be busy today. We’re looking for the Wizard’s Slough.”

  As she said this, she shuddered. It was partly an artificial gesture; perhaps not entirely so, Peter thought.

  Four miles out of Bridgetown on the Cryde road, the Professor, driving the little Austin, swung to the right and, a mile later, sharply right again, up an unmarked, roughly macadamised track. The big Savoia negotiated this turn with some difficulty. The track climbed steadily between high banks, emerging at the top onto the moor itself. Peter had walked on both Dartmoor and Exmoor, and he loved them both; but it had not taken him long to recognise the difference between them. Dartmoor was the man, rugged, stark, honest, sometimes friendly but more often disobliging. Exmoor was the woman, soft, undulating, superficially attractive, and full of unexpected depths and dangers.