by Bob Shaw
“Very well,” he said tiredly, reaching for his pipe. “That’s all.” As he loaded the bowl with moist yellow strands Garnett tentatively identified the emotion causing the fluttering hollowness in his chest—it was the beginnings of fear. His momentary glimpse of the other organisation hidden inside his own works had shown it to be disturbingly large, and he had a conviction Elkin’s sudden paralysis had merely been the first flexing of its muscles. Tackling Elkin direct had been not exactly a mistake—he searched for a suitable word—it had been a non-cybernetic move. The specific application of cybernetics to aircraft production control was a subject on which Garnett had written a book years before the T.6 had claimed his life, and now one of the opening paragraphs was assuming a new and nightmarish appearance of relevance to the present situation.
“An aircraft factory is a machine for producing aeroplanes and it may be disastrous to attempt to improve production by piecemeal tinkering with individual departments—one must seek out in all its ramifications, and destroy, the machine for stopping the production of aeroplanes, which lurks like a parasite within the organisation.”
Approaching Elkin had been the equivalent of tinkering with an individual department, but a good cyberneticist never grabbed a tiger by the tail, not without simultaneously taking a powerful grip of its other extremities. Garnett took a clean sheet of graph paper and began to draw a block diagram of the other organisation as he saw it. In the top square he put Ian Dermott’s name; in the bottom one Victor Elkin’s; in between he put question marks in departments he believed must be involved. It occurred to him that, except for the photograph, he had nothing to show but a very personal kind of evidence, which made the photograph an object of some value. He picked it up and scanned it closely.
s An impossibly long time dragged by before his heart resumed beating.
The beauty queen still smiled beneath the picture’s glazed surface, but none of the men behind her were carrying anything!
The obvious conclusion, the one every sane person in the world would agree on, was that Garnett had made a stupid mistake. After all, he had returned to work too soon and had been under a considerable strain. Garnett smiled wryly, almost grateful that all traces of doubt were eliminated. He took his pen, drew a new off-shoot to his diagram, and in it printed, “C. R. Moller, Chief Photographer.” Re-lighting his pipe he pulled the comforting smoke deep into his body. Chris Moller, the cadaverous ex-R.A.F. cameraman, must have realised his mistake and substituted a picture taken a few seconds earlier or later than the vital one. Again, it was hardly first-class evidence but it was good enough for Garnett. There were quite a few question marks on his diagram which had to be replaced with names, but when he finally had those identities the parasite—the machine for secretly producing aircraft parts nobody would ever buy—was going to find itself in trouble. I may be small, Garnett thought in an illogical surge of confidence, but I’ve never met anybody big enough to step on me. Impelled by the freshly released adrenalin in his blood he stood up, limped ferociously around the office, then calmed down enough to decide what he ought to do. It seemed fairly obvious.
“Next on the menu,” he muttered, ‘is a trip to Harlech.”
He picked up the televu on his private line and punched the number of the Carvill Clinic. As he waited for them to find Janice Villiers he felt the bright bubble of confidence begin to tremble. Since leaving the clinic he had had two rather unsatisfactory dinner dates with her, and a third which had been a downright fiasco. Right from the start she had talked freely about her affairs, (“Not love affairs, Tony—the qualification always sounds so excusatory!”), and the effect had been to throw him into a rage which cumulatively became uncontrollable. And yet, because he had deliberately entered her world and not she his, he had been unable to express his anger honestly and in the end had resorted to a vicious attack on her odd, epigrammatic mode of conversation.
“Talking to you,” he had said coldly, in the middle of a discourse on the incongruity of an infinitely small present sandwiched between an infinitely large past and a similar future, ‘is like standing by while somebody tears off every day on one of those ghastly calendars.” She had given him a level stare, displaying the deviation in her eye, and had smiled knowingly but sadly. After that there had been nothing—Garnett felt he had slammed a door.
“Hello, Jan.” He tried to sound casual as Janice’s face suddenly glowed in the depths of the little screen.
“Hello, Tony. How are you?”
“Quite well. I’ve been drinking my milk regularly. It … it does seem to help the nerves.” He wondered if she would find that acceptable.
“Apologies hurt me too,” she said with one of her white, perfect smiles. “What is it, Tony?”
“I’ve got to drive down to Wales tomorrow. I’ll be coming back over the weekend sometime. I wondered if you would go with me.” He waited, realising his attempt to sound like a different person had flopped, but she was kind and answered quickly, agreeing to go. When the arrangements were made and the connection broken, Garnett sat staring across his expanse of gooseberry-coloured carpet which was silvered in places by footprints. He was elated but his pleasure was tempered by the discovery of how deeply he was involved with Janice Villiers, the black-haired stranger who was two dismaying inches taller than he. On the surface he was planning a casual ‘affair’ but there was one disturbing fact the significance of which, even with his sketchy acquaintance with Freud, was obvious.
Ten minutes before, he had decided, with all the trappings of cold logic, that the next step ought to be the trip to Harlech—but this was not the case! There were half a dozen avenues of investigation open to him right here in the Pryce-Garnett works, any one of which could yield valuable information. It was not too late to call off the journey, and yet he knew he was going to go.
Hormones, he decided comfortably, are lousy cyberneticists.
4
Driving fast in Garnett’s superb, though oversized car, was a little like flying in an under-the-radar jet, and in normal circumstances he would have annihilated the distance from Coventry to Harlech in a very short time. But with the black-clad girl coiled like a whip on the seat beside him the journey was too pleasant not to prolong. He drove north to Rhyl then followed the coast road south against a sea whose clean blue horizon caused him a near-physical pain by its demands for emotional responses the adult Garnett had almost lost. He breathed deeply, trying to fill himself with the bright pastel colours of the morning air.
“Have you been to Harlech before?”
Garnett shook his head. “No. I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
“I am too. Places that have figured in songs are different somehow. There’s a kind of imminence.” Janice lit a cigarette. “You know, this trip may not help you much. It would have been better to hire a private detective.”
“Never thought of it,” Garnett said in genuine astonishment. “I suppose they really do exist.”
Janice laughed. “Of course they do! One of my best friends runs a small agency.”
Garnett tried to kill a pang of annoyance. “Interesting work, I suppose.”
“I’m sure it would only take him a matter of hours to find out which of your employees have been to Harlech. That’s the sort of thing he does all the time. Shall I give him a call?”
“Let’s see how I get on first,” Garnett said ungraciously. He had told Janice only enough to give her the impression he was on a commercial security investigation of some kind, and was beginning to wonder whether he had said too little or too much. Debating the point, he drove in silence for a while and it was then, just as he was beginning to relax, that the first cool tendrils of alarm began to reach up from the depths of his nervous system.
Filled with a kind of astonishment, Garnett instinctively slowed the car and the white road markers began arrowing beneath at a more leisurely rate. He was disturbed—his quickened pulse and breathing made that clear—but there was no discernible reason. I
f I were a Philip Marlowe, he thought, this feeling would be caused by the fact that I had subconsciously noted the too-frequent appearance of a certain car in the rear-view mirror, but I haven’t seen any vehicles at all for some time. Could that in itself be a wrong note? No, roads like this one would be relatively empty in late morning.
Garnett depressed his right foot again and the seat urged against his back as the car responded. Janice gave him a speculative stare through a grey voodoo mask of cigarette smoke. The machine continued its effortless, whispering progress between mountains and sea, but now Garnett could feel his alarm increase with every minute. It grew with each fresh glimpse of soaring rock faces and each new involution of the road until the psychic pressure became almost intolerable … then came a partial answer.
“Janice,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you know much about this déjà vu thing?”
“Nothing. I’ve heard it defined as the opposite of uncanniness.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, uncanniness is a feeling of strangeness in familiar circumstances, déjà vu is a feeling of familiarity in strange circumstances. Have you got that feeling now? Is that what’s the matter with you?”
Garnett nodded uncertainly. “I get the feeling I’ve been here before, and yet … Good God!”
“What is it?” Janice stubbed out her cigarette.
“I have been here before! With Clifford Pryce!”
“Problem solved,” Janice said cheerfully. “Gone the way of all para-normal phenomena.”
Garnett felt no better. The problem had been solved on one level—but how could he have forgotten? During one of his meetings in Liverpool with Pryce, while they were still discussing the terms of Garnett’s engagement, the old millionaire had decided the day was too hot for sitting indoors and insisted on going for a long drive. Garnett, drunk on visions of the new future opening before him, had not paid much attention to anything outside the car, but he should have remembered the exhilarating high-speed run down the Welsh coast. Why, at the turning point they had even lunched in Harlech! Garnett had travelled considerably and at the age of thirty-eight was beginning to realise he could not clearly remember every day of his life. He could, however, remember the high spots and they did not come any higher than the time he had been given the chance to create the T.6—so how could he have forgotten?
They reached Harlech at midday. Garnett stopped the car in the main street and sat for a moment deciding what he ought to do next. The village was a linear scatter of blocks of sunshine, shadow and stone which appeared not to have changed in the last hundred years. Where was he to start? And what was he to say? “Pardon me, is there a local establishment where men are trained to secretly manufacture aircraft components nobody would buy?”
It dawned on Garnett he had been nursing an illogical hope that the mere fact of his being in Harlech would trigger off new events which would lay all the answers out in front of him, but of course it was not going to be like that. This was a fact he had subconsciously understood all along and the sudden conscious realisation led him to his first direct thoughts about the forthcoming evening and night. It seemed too good to be true. He had never before met a girl who might have tempted him to try fitting marriage into his high-paced career, yet with Janice the question of legal entanglements did not arise. She preferred her ‘natural relationships’ and that being the case Garnett was more than happy to go along with her.
Janice patted her black hair into place. “Where are we staying, Tony? I ought to freshen up.”
“Not here. There’s a new motel at Llanbedr, about twenty minutes further down the coast. Shall I drop you there and come back?”
“No, I’ll be all right.” They got out and Garnett noticed she had not changed into flat-heeled shoes to help equalise their heights. He told himself it was because conventions about height, like all other conventions, were unimportant to her, all part of the wonderful grab-bag of goodies he was getting for nothing. After touring the village together they went into the dim coolness of an inn and ate incredibly good sandwiches of home-cured ham, washed down with heavy tankards of ale. She ate and drank with a kind of mannish gusto which he would have found disconcerting had it not fitted in so perfectly with his vision of her as his wayward child of nature, purveyor of guiltless enjoyments.
“You aren’t happy about all this, are you, Tony?”
Garnett looked up from filling his pipe. “I’m happy about us, but I’ve got … problems at the works and I probably ought to be back there doing something about them. You were quite right about the detective agency. I feel slightly lost.”
“Why do you worry so much about your work? From what you’ve told me you’ve spent: your whole life flying aeroplanes, or building them, or having them drop on your head.”
Garnett ruefully stroked the still-bristly hairs under which the stainless steel plate completed his skull. “Perhaps it’s egotism. Some people sell shoes for a living, or write in ledgers—I put those big birds up in the sky. And now they have my name on them, so I want them to be good.”
“So that your name will live on, etcetera.”
“Something like that, yes.” Garnett found himself on the defensive.
“You aren’t an egotist, Tony. You’re a solipsist.” Janice laughed without removing her cigarette, which gave her lips an unexpectedly cruel twist. “Your name won’t live on, you know. Look, you’re going to live for seventy or eighty years if you’re lucky. Supposing you were an all-round genius and you spent that time developing a longevity drug which increased your life span to a thousand years. You aren’t going to do that, but let’s suppose it anyway. Imagine then that you devoted your thousand years to studying science and became absolute master of the physical universe—which you aren’t going to do either. Suppose next that you used your fantastic powers to gather up every star in the galaxy and arrange them to spell out your name in letters a thousand light years high …’
“I sense,” Garnett put in, ‘you’re trying to get some message over to me.”
“The message is that, even after you had done all those things, still there would come a day when an intelligent being could survey the universe and find no trace of your existence.”
“It wouldn’t alter the fact that I had existed. It doesn’t matter how short a time I live—if I make something good, the fact that I did so will be just as real after a billion years as after ten minutes.”
“Horsefeathers!” Janice looked mildly surprised. “I think that’s the first time I ever said that word. The proper occasion must never have arisen before, but it did just then.”
“Same to you. Let’s get out before we have a stand-up fight.” Garnett drained his glass and they went out into the bright, impersonal infinities of the summer afternoon. He was relieved there was no need to talk as they walked, for this time he was determined nothing should go wrong between them yet he had felt himself being drawn into another row by her determined futility. At least, he thought, it provided a working explanation for the aimlessness of her personal life. Garnett found himself wishing Janice was not so blindingly attractive—born into a more homely body she might have been forced to explore the possibilities of a permanent relationship. As it was she had no shortage of philosophical fellow-travellers. Men, he admitted, like Tony Garnett.
They spent the afternoon walking in the village and its environs. Garnett’s pockets filled with pipe cleaners and boxes of matches as he worked round the local shops trying to talk to people without being conspicuous. Finally he had to give up. Almost by instinct he could put his finger on the subtlest flaw hidden behind the massed symbolism of an engineering drawing, but this village, as far as Garnett was concerned, remained simply an ordinary village.
He rolled the big car gently down the coast to Llanbedr and found the motel, which turned out to be a scattering of pink chalets on a hillside overlooking a sea-lapped airfield. Numb with excitement Garnett rented two chalets from the sports-coated proprietor, notin
g with satisfaction how the man gaped at Janice. The motel, he learned, had no restaurant facilities but a reasonable dinner could be had at the hotel in Llanbedr.
“My feet hurt,” Janice said as they walked up the winding path to the little single-roomed buildings. “Give me a couple of hours to get them back into shape, then I’ll be ready to eat.”
As he set the bags down inside her doorway she stepped out of her shoes and turned to him. Their first kiss was good, just as he had always known it would be; he kept his eyes open to print the few racing seconds on his memory.
“Easy, Tony, easy,” she murmured. “We’ve got lots of time.”
Garnett stepped back reluctantly and lifted his case. “We solipsists are all the same, you know. See you about eight.” His throat was dry.
In the silence of his own chalet he shaved, changed his clothes and lay tensely on the unfamiliar bed watching a pale, three-quarters moon slide across the window. Since the establishment of the permanent Lunar bases in the mid-Seventies, ten years earlier, Garnett had come to regard the moon as just another geographical location, a place he might visit someday. But tonight it was just the same old moon the poets knew, and nobody could ever walk on that.