by Bob Shaw
“There’s no point getting into a state about it.” Hutchman was suddenly impatient to get into the office and start going through Westfield’s catalogue library. He should also be able to get advice from someone in the purchasing department.
“I can’t stand hypocrisy,” Vicky snapped.
“There’s hypocrisy about hypocrisy,” Hutchman said incautiously, his thoughts now wholly centered on the antibomb machine.
“What do you mean?”
Hutchman saw the danger of suggesting that his wife was jealous rather than indignant. “Nothing. Just playing with words.” He swallowed the cold remainder of his coffee, not because he wanted it, but to indicate that he was in a hurry to go to work.
Walking through the Westfield research building toward his office, he saw the first indications that the annihilation of a crowded city had made some kind of mark on everyday life. A few of the smaller offices and cubicles were empty, and others were unusually populated as staff got together to discuss the newscasts. There was an atmosphere of tension, heightened rather than relieved by occasional bursts of defiant laughter. Hutchman was strangely reassured. He knew perfectly well that Vicky was capable of concern for other human beings — more than once she had fled from the room in tears when surprised by the face of a murdered child on the television screen — but her determined, pragmatical insularity of the previous evening had frightened him. That, perhaps, was what the dream had been about. A woman, a womb-carrier, a life-source, looking at death with coolly disinterested eyes.
Muriel Burnley arrived at his office at the same time as Hutchman. She was carrying the straw basket which served her in place of a handbag, arid under her arm was a roll of paper which looked like yet another travel poster for her office.
“Good morning, Mr. Hutchman,” she said watchfully, the verbal equivalent of moving pawn to king four in the day’s new battle.
“Morning, Muriel.” Without quite understanding it, Hutchman could sense the importance Muriel attached to the daily exchange of formal greetings and he had never risked not responding. He opened the door to her office, followed her into the claustrophobic cave, and picked up the small sheaf of mail from her desk. Muriel slipped out of her brown tweed coat, a movement which involved a zooming upward of her incongruously large bosom. Hutchman averted his eyes — knowing she was studying him from behind her brown lenses — and riffled through the mail.
“There’s nothing very pressing here,” he said. “Take care of it for me, will you? Use your own judgment. I’m going to be busy today and I don’t want any interruptions.”
Muriel sniffed disapprovingly and took the bunch of envelopes from him. He went into his own office, closed the connecting door carefully, and after a few moments’ thought rang Cliff Taylor, Westfield’s chief of electronic development. Taylor sounded both surprised and sleepy, but he made no complaint about being called so early in the morning.
“What can I do for you, Hutch?”
“Ah… well, I’m trying out something involving microwave radiation and I want to do the breadboard work myself. I wondered if you could give me the use of a room for a month or so.”
“I don’t know, Hutch. We’ve got all kinds of requirements being thrown at us on the Jack-and-Jill program… Is it important?”
“Very.” Hutchman traced a large D on the glassy surface of his desk. D for death. Big D used to mean Dallas and death, now it means Damascus and…
“Well, why don’t you get Mackeson to slap a few priority points on it to satisfy the computer gang?”
“It’s a semiprivate job, Cliff. Could be valuable to Westfield eventually, but I want to keep it to myself in case the whole thing fizzles out into nothing. I couldn’t go to Mackeson.”
“Can’t help you then. I mean… what sort of facilities did ou want?” Taylor was beginning to sound querulous, apparentlY sensing that Hutchman was being dishonest with him.
“Nothing much. A bench in a room I can lock up. The power supplies don’t even have to be stabilized.”
“Just a minute, Hutch. You said microwave a minute ago. How micro is micro?”
“Pretty micro.” Hutchman could feel the conversation getting out of hand — the very first person to whom he had mentioned what would have to be the world’s most secret project was becoming suspicious and asking pertinent questions. “Maybe 6 x 10^18 Hertz.”
“Christ! That kills it altogether. The zoning regulations don’t allow us to squirt that sort of radiation around unless we have all kinds of special shielding installed in the building. Sorry, Hutch.”
“It’s all right.” Hutchman put the phone down and sat staring at the frosted-glass partition and the moving gray blur which meant that Don Spain had arrived in the office earlier than usual. The project was going as he might have predicted, following the same pattern as his previous brushes with physical reality — at the lowest level — the “ten-minute” car repair jobs in which, after a full hour, he was still struggling to budge the first nut. Some people had the blessed knack of controlling their circumstances and mastering materials — others, like Hutchman, had to be content with building beautiful edifices in logic, knowing all the while they were incapable of translating them into actuality. His throat was constricting with helpless rage when the internal phone rang. He snatched it before Muriel could pick up the extension.
“Hello, Hutch.” It was Taylor again. “I’ve been thinking around your problem. Did you know that Westfield’s have the use of a lab in the Jeavons Institute over at Camburn?”
“I’d heard about it, vaguely.” Hutchman’s heart began a steady, peaceful pounding.
“It’s a fairly informal arrangement we fixed up about the time they got old man Westfield to outfit their cryogenics suite. What it boils down to is that we have the use of the lab when they aren’t pushed for space.”
“And what’s the situation now?”
“As far as I know they’ll be pretty well marking time till after Christmas. If you like I’ll ring Professor Duering and see if I can fix it for you to go over there.”
“I’d be grateful if you would, Cliff.” Hutchman, choking on a tide of warm thankfulness, had difficulty getting the words out in a normal tone. When he set the phone down he experienced a heady moment of certitude. He left his office and hurried upstairs to the purchasing department, where he spent more than two hours making notes in the catalogue library and checking on the availability of major items. In the afternoon he got confirmation from Taylor that the Jeavons Institute Laboratory was available, and drove over to look at it and collect the keys from Duering. By five o’clock, his normal quitting time, he had not done a single stroke of work on behalf of Westfield’s, but he was ready to begin drawing detailed schematics for the antibomb machine. He got Muriel to order him a pot of tea as she was leaving, and, as the building fell silent for the weekend, settled in to preparing the first drawings.
An hour later, when his concentration was at its height, he became aware of a sudden unease, a sense that something was wrong. His mind had sunk too deeply into the complex of lines and symbols to be easily distracted, but part of him began to keep guard, to spread its network of perception. There’s trouble. That gray object which Muriel has left lying against the partition on her side looks like a face. That’s what’s been making me feel jumpy. Hutchman lifted his pocket computer and was adjusting the cursor when his eyes focused on the gray object. Its cloudy features stared back impassively.
It is a face!
He started convulsively as he realized he was being observed through the frosty glass, then came the secondary realization that it had to be Don Spain. The accountant must also have been working late, but the unnatural silence which had made Hutchman unaware of his presence for an hour could only have been achieved by intent. With cool ripples of shock still coursing through his system, Hutchman casually slid his sheets of graph paper into a folder and covered it with his blotter. Spain’s face remained motionless at the partition. Hutchma
n took a small pencil sharpener from a drawer and threw it hard at the ghostly face. It struck the partition with a sharp crack, almost splintering the glass, and Spain disappeared from view. A few seconds later he opened the connecting door and entered from Muriel’s office.
“What’s the idea, Hutch?” he asked indignantly. “You might have smashed that glass into my face.”
“What the hell’s the idea of standing out there staring at me?”
“I didn’t know you were here. I was working late and I thought I heard a noise in your office so I came out to see what it was.”
“Thanks,” Hutchman said heavily, making no attempt to conceal his dislike of the other man. “It didn’t occur to you to open the door?”
“I didn’t want to burst in on you. After all…” Spain chuckled throatily “…you might have had a woman in here.”
“That’s the first thought that popped into your mind, is it?”
Spain shrugged and continued to grin. “It isn’t like you to work late, Hutch, and you’ve been acting a bit strange all day. Those symptoms are all part of the Batterbee syndrome. You remember Batterbee, don’t you?”
Hutchman nodded as his dread of Spain returned in full force. Batterbee had been a senior project engineer, much celebrated in Westfield lore, who had lost his job through being caught flagrante delicto with his secretary on the office carpet while supposed to be working overtime. Spain never tired of retelling the Story.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Hutchman said. He picked up his pencil and made a show of jotting figures on his notepad, but Spain stayed around for a further fifteen minutes discussing office politics. By the time he left Hutchman’s ability to concentrate had been seriously impaired and he had begun to feel tired. He forced himself to work on, intending to have the schematics worked out before going to bed so that in the morning he could concentrate on the problems of buying hardware. It was past nine when he crammed all the paperwork into his briefcase and went out into the darkness. The soft, thick October air was filled with the smell of decaying chestnut leaves and a brilliant planet shone low in the western sky, like a coachlamp. He breathed deeply while walking to his car — inhale for four paces, hold for four paces, exhale for four paces — and waved goodnight to the officer in the security kiosk at the main gate. It was a pleasant night, providing one didn’t think too deeply about man-made suns in brief blossom over defenseless cities.
The Home Counties evening traffic was at its incredible worst and at one point, where he should have made a right turn onto the Crymchurch road, he had to turn left and make a twenty-minute detour with the result that he did not reach home until well past ten o’clock. The house was ablaze with light behind its screen of poplars, as though a party were in progress, but there was utter silence when he went in through the side door from the carport. He found Vicky scanning a magazine in the lounge and one glance at her white, set face reminded him that he had omitted to telephone and let her know he would be late. A standard lamp close behind her chair cast a cone of apricot-coloured light in which the magazine’s turning pages flared briefly.
“Sorry,” he said, setting his briefcase on a chair. “I was working late at the office.”
Vicky flipped two pages before replying “Is that what you call it?”
“I do call working, working; late, late; and the office, the office,” Hutchman said tartly. “Which particular word are you having difficulty with?”
Vicky nodded silently, continuing to flick through the magazine. This was the phase of an argument in which Hutchman usually did well because his wife disdained word-spinning. Later on, when the rapiers were broken and the cudgels came out, she would gain the upper hand, but it would be the small hours of the morning before that stage was reached, and there would be very little sleep for either of them. The prospect of another tortured night filled Hutchman with helpless anger.
He stood in front of Vicky and addressed the top of her head. “Listen, Vicky, you don’t really think I’ve been with another woman, do you?”
She tilted her gaze to meet his, a look of polite surprise on the small desperate face. “I didn’t mention another woman, Lucas. Why did you?”
“Because you were about to.”
“Don’t let your conscience put words into my mouth.” Vicky reached the end of the magazine, turned it over, and began flicking pages at precisely the same rate as before.
“I haven’t got a conscience.”
“I know that. What’s her name, Lucas? Was it Maudie Werner?”
“Who’s Maudie Werner, for God’s sake?”
“The new… tart in data processing.”
Hutchman blinked incredulously. “Look, I work in Westfield’s and I don’t know this person — how can you possibly know her?”
“You must be very slow, Lucas,” Vicky said. “Or you’re pretending to be. I was talking to Mrs. Dunwoody last week and she told me the word went round the firm about Maudie Werner the day she arrived.”
Hutchman turned without speaking and went into the kitchen, the struggle to control his nerves making the act of walking seem difficult. He took some cold chicken and a carton of Russian salad from the refrigerator and put them on a plate.
It’s happened again, he thought. Like telepathy. Spain’s mind and Vicky’s working in exactly the same way, on exactly the same subterranean level. He salted the chicken, took a fork from a drawer, and went back into the lounge.
“Tell me, Vicky,” he said, “am I some kind of a sexual simpleton? When I leave a room do the men and women in it leap at each other and frig like rabbits till they hear me returning?”
“What are you talking about?”
“About the impression I sometimes get from you and one or two other people.”
“And you,” Vicky said scathingly, “try to tell me that I’m crazy!”
Even when his wife had finally gone to sleep, Hutchman lay in the darkness for a long time listening to the invisible tides of night air flow around and through the house. His mind was racing, taking fragments of the day — glossy catalogues heavy with a smell like that of fresh paint, the complex schematics drawn by hand, Spain’s blurred face staring, the evening news of mobilizations and fleet movements, Vicky’s neurotic jealousy — assembling them in fantastic composites of foreboding which dissolved and reformed into new patterns of menace. Sleep came suddenly, bringing with it another dream, in which he was shopping in a supermarket. A frozen-food bin was close by and two women were examining its contents.
“I like this new idea,” one of them said. She reached into the bin and lifted out a white spiky object, like a skinless and terribly misshapen fish. It had two sad gray eyes. “It’s the latest thing in food preservation. They give it a pseudo-life which maintains it in perfect condition till its ready for the pan.”
The other woman looked alarmed. “Isn’t that cruel?”
“No. It has no soul, and it feels no pain.” To prove her point, she began snapping off the white fleshy extrusions and dropping them into her basket. Hutchman backed away from the scene in horror, because, although the fish-thing lay motionless and allowed itself to be demolished, its eyes were fixed on his — calmly, sadly, reproachfully.
CHAPTER 4
October — the entire span of which was occupied by the building of the machine — was a difficult road, in Hutchman’s mind. It was a road measured by double-sided milestones showing both the decreasing distance to the project’s completion and the everwidening gulf over which he and Vicky viewed each other.
One of the first had been the day on which he had acquired the praseodymium crystal and enough of the green isotope to produce the necessary fifty milligrams of cestron in a reasonable time. He had gone straight from work to the refectory at the Jeavons and eaten a quick snack, avoiding conversation with others even though he had a feeling that a dark-haired woman several tables away had been known to him in the past. That night he had worked later than usual to set up the gas-collecting system, and o
n reaching home had found himself locked out.
This can’t be happening to me! Hutchman shook his head in disbelief, but his key was unable to turn the lock of the front door and the side entrance was securely bolted against him. He paused, staring down at his silhouette on the moonlit path, one part of his mind sliding into irrelevant thoughts as to why the shadow cast by the moon made his head seem smaller than in the shadow cast by a streetlighi. The house was dark and silent, robbed of its familiarity by circumstance. It suddenly came to him what a shocking thing it would be if he, Lucas Hutchman, were forced to stay outside all night. Even more appalling was the discovery of how effective the childishness of one adult can be against the reasonableness of another. He tried all the windows in vain then returned to the main bedroom window and began tapping the glass. As the minutes went by with no response his self-control began to fail and he drove his fist harder and harder, hoping the pane would shatter.
“Vicky!” He called her name in a fierce low chant. “Vicky! Vicky!”
The lock clicked loudly on the front door. He ran to it eagerly, yet half-afraid of what he might do to Vicky with the clublike objects his fists had become, and found David peering at him with the eyes of a tarsier.
“Sorry, son. I got locked out.” Hutchman lifted the pyjamaclad child and carried him into the house, closing the door with his heel. He put David into bed then went into the main bedroom where Vicky was lying perfectly still, pretending to be asleep. The thought of being able to lay his cold, weary body down beside her, and of not having to stay outside in the ancient England of runes and robbers which seemed to recreate itself in the darkness, drained away his anger. He undressed quickly, got in between the sheets, and slid his arm around the familiar torso. On the instant, Vicky was out of bed and standing at the far side of the room, her naked body voluptuously shaded by the moonlight.