Nothing So Strange

by James Hilton

  “You see world conquest as a real possibility?”

  “Provided other countries are not already ahead of us in these matters. And provided our Quatschkopf can be persuaded to look further than the end of one of his long howitzers.”

  “What makes you think the world would gain by being under German domination?”

  “Bradley, I think there must be a world order if there is to be any world worth living in. I can see no possibility of world order unless it is imposed on those who would be too selfish or too stupid to submit voluntarily. I can think of no country with both the power and the will to perform this task but Germany…. And Germany is now at the mercy of a crystal-gazer!”

  He seemed after that to regret having been so outspoken, and there was a barrier between them, as if he could sense in Brad’s attitude some new dimension of hostility.

  * * * * *

  Dan brought us cocktails and Brad said: “Dan, these are always so good. Where did you learn to make them like this?”

  “In San Francisco,” Dan replied. “I used to mix drinks at the Seacomber bar there.”

  “Ever been in Houston?”

  “No, sir. You wouldn’t get a drink like this in any bar in Texas. They don’t sell hard liquor.”

  After he had gone, Brad said: “I keep on thinking I’ve seen Dan somewhere before…. Maybe not…. Where was I?”

  I said: “You were telling me what Framm said about Germany.”

  “Oh yes…. Well, I decided then there was no more time to waste. The truth was, I’d been postponing things because I’d been so damned interested in the work we’d been doing.”

  He sipped at the drink and looked at me over the rim of the glass. “Would you want any more proof?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the state of my mind. How I hated that man and loved the work I did with him. I hated him more than I’d ever hated anybody—more than I’d ever loved Pauli, for that matter.”

  “How can you compare love and hate?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, but you can.” He went on: “He was away, out of Berlin, wrangling as usual with the big shots. So I didn’t get any chances…. I think I told you before that we often worked all night, when the building was practically empty—only janitors and guards who knew us well and never came near…. But he was away…. You see how it was?”

  I caught the rising excitement in his eyes; I said quietly: “Yes, I see.”

  “Actually, he did go to Berchtesgaden, though I didn’t learn that till later. Everything was racing to a climax. The British were threatening war if Poland were attacked. Framm’s personal enemies were closing in on him—he was in the doghouse, the way it looked. Mostly his own fault—too many tricks and treacheries had caught up with him. But it was also the war emergency that put him in a real spot—because the mounting hue and cry was for less theory, more practice—for results certain and immediate, not distant and problematical. That gave his enemies just the weapon they needed, so that his last chance became his only chance—to sell some enormous novelty in the very highest market, and entirely on trust. If he could pull it off it would be a master stroke, but from the point of view of sober science, it was all far too premature. Some of our earlier checks had been encouraging, but there was a crucial one still to come. I was working on that while Framm was at Berchtesgaden, or perhaps I should rather say on those because it included a statistical analysis of all the checks. Nothing absolutely accurate was either expected or conceivable, but 95 per cent would be encouraging, 80 per cent would leave us still in doubt, and less than 70 would put us back where we’d been before we started. It was an especially delicate part of our calculations that was involved—something speculative and—if you can imagine that in mathematics—a bit inspired. I’ve been trying to think of a rather wild parallel—not to the thing itself—but to the kind of wild-goose chase it was. Suppose that by sheer chance in reading a certain chapter of the Bible you discovered that the forty-ninth word from the beginning was “Shake” and the forty-ninth word from the end was “spear.” Suppose some mad genius told you that this wasn’t a coincidence, but a secret clue to the meaning of the universe provided you could find other poets’ names embedded similarly in other books. Suppose you were crazy enough to try, by picking up books and counting words at random in a public library. Then suppose some even madder genius offered a formula for taking you directly to a certain page of a certain book on a certain shelf. So you tried it, and there, counting up and down, you found the words ‘bitter’ and ‘nut.’ But you’d never heard of a poet called Bitternut— his name wasn’t in any of the encyclopedias—maybe he was only a very minor poet indeed…. Does all that sound too fantastic?”

  “Probably less so than the mathematics would.”

  “Well, anyhow, it was the sort of question I’d got as far as—How much of a poet was Mr. Bitternut? Was he even a poet at all? All night I tried to find out, alternating between the laboratory and my office desk, assembling the results and fitting them into place. I was very tired—I’d been on the job, more or less, for two days and two nights. I hadn’t even gone back to my rooms in Wilmersdorf, but had snatched a few intermittent hours of sleep on the couch in Framm’s office. And meanwhile, if I looked through the window, I could see ominous signs of events—armored cars rattling by, men in field-gray scampering along the pavements. The radio, whenever I turned it on, gave fresh news of the crisis, instructions for mobilization, rationing, air-raid precautions. It was all cold and efficient, with no jubilant crowds, cheers, or flag waving. Never, it seemed to me, had a country moved to war with less enthusiasm—yet the lack of it had its own peculiarly frightening quality. During the evening the sirens shrieked and a few minutes later a rather agitated janitor rushed into the room to order me to the air-raid shelter in the basement. I told the old man I’d rather stay where I was, I was very busy—which wasn’t bravery, by the way, but just my own guess that it could only be either a false alarm or a practice drill. The janitor finally compromised by saying I could stay there provided I put out all the electric lights. I said all right, I could work by candlelight. So I did, and when he’d gone, with the city blacking out all round me, I ate a sandwich and drank some cold coffee. Then I got down to the job again. Within an hour, I reckoned, I should have pushed the results to a point where success or failure could be tentatively applied to the work of many months. The calculations were not only fairly difficult, but extremely laborious. Towards four o’clock (I had been too optimistic in my forecasting) I came to the last calculation. It was one in which two sets of figures, neither of them predictable, should—according to the theory—bear an algebraic relationship; the final process was the plotting of positions on a graph. As the minutes passed and I got closer to what I knew must be the finish, I couldn’t have imagined anything in the world more dramatic than my own solitary behavior in that lonely room, working by candlelight in the middle of the night at the outbreak of a world war—and yet I suppose most people would have reckoned it, compared with events outside, a very dull business. Even by technical standards it didn’t look much of a climax. There were no color changes on litmus paper, no test tubes held up to the light, no retorts bubbling over Bunsen burners, none of the rigmarole of magazine-ad science … even the X-ray machine, which usually made noises, had been switched off into silence. All I had to do was to sit at a desk and put a few pencil points on paper. I did so, then joined them up to make a curve. The curve bulged to a position that gave a reading, by a prefigured scale, of three- point-five-seven-five-five; the predictable reading, based on theory alone, had been three-point-five-five-nine-three. It was near enough. Mr. Bitternut was a poet.”

  He drank the rest of his cocktail at a gulp, but waved away any more. Presently he continued: “When I realized what this amounted to, the word success did come, but it had a strange sound, almost like a sound without meaning. What I chiefly felt was an overwhelming weariness, both of mind and body. I gave myself a shot of Framm’s b
randy and lay down on his couch. I must have slept instantly, for when I woke there was dawn at the edge of the window blinds. I had not heard the ‘all clear’ sirens even if there had been any. I crossed the room to look down at the street; there was a line of trucks and armored cars parked outside the building and knots of men were gathered about. I turned on the radio; the voices of announcers, full of their ghastly tired eagerness, were repeating old news, but it was new to me: that the German Army was already far across the Polish frontier; war had begun.

  “I suppose that was a turning point of my life—a moment of complete flux, when I might have done almost anything if one of a number of impulses had been a mite stronger—perhaps if I had had a few drops more brandy, or even a few drops less. If Framm had returned exactly then I think I should have killed him somehow or other—and been promptly caught, tried, sentenced, and hanged. An American spy, they’d probably have said—not a real scientist at all. I thought of that as I stared down at the street, and then the thought came to me- -supposing that was what I had been, all along, would Framm have suspected it? But of course America doesn’t have spies—or didn’t have then. We were so God- damned innocent in those days. We’d debunked the First World War so thoroughly that it was hard to believe in another—much easier to sell scrap to Japan and at the same time blame the munition makers…. I won’t try to tell you all the thoughts that ran riot in my mind, while every now and then the announcer on the radio would say ‘Achtung‘ and give out an emergency instruction about something or other … that word echoed inside me like a bell tolling … Achtung … Achtung….

  “Perhaps I was only five or ten minutes in that condition, but it seemed a long while, and then all at once it came to me that there was only one thing I could do, in Framm’s absence, and now indeed because of Framm’s absence. It was something very quiet, involving no one else, and it was also something no one else could do. But it would take time, perhaps not less than several hours, and whether I should have that much time I could not forecast. So there was the need to begin immediately and not stop till it was either finished or interrupted.”

  “And forget about killing him?”

  He nodded. “Private revenge would only have got in the way of what I intended to do. Don’t you see, he trusted me—and that was more essential to what I now planned than his death could ever have been. I wanted him to live—and to go on trusting me for a while longer. Viewed against that, my original desire to kill him seemed almost like a sort of self- indulgence—like putting my own affairs first. The enemy I really hated wasn’t to be countered by any personal vendetta, and the hate I had wasn’t sharp and emotional, but glum and also rather limitless. That was the mood I was in as I set to work. First I assembled all the results on the desk before me. They were roughly penciled with many erasures already; this helped rather than hindered. Framm had never looked them over; he had had (and it was ironic now to think of it) implicit confidence in my ability to do the job, and there was also a certain basic laziness in him that made it tempting to hand work to others. He had never checked where another type of man might have been concerned to do so, and he had been far too busy lately, fighting his battles with the authorities, to acquaint himself with even a minimum of detail. All this made it less difficult to do what I set out to do. It took me just over two hours. By the time the sun was hot on that early September morning there was a collection of rough notes, computations, and graphs, in perfect shape for him to examine. But the end-result now was a reading of two-point-one-three- four-eight. Not near enough any more.

  “When I had written it down I was not only utterly exhausted but also— and this is a confession—I had a deep depression of spirit. It was so different from anything I had ever felt before that I tried to analyze it in my mind; it could not be remorse, because I had accomplished my purpose, and I was tremendously relieved at having been lucky enough to have the chance. And yet I felt worse, not better, for having done something I did not regret. It was as if I had committed the sin I always puzzled over when I was a small boy at Sunday School—I puzzled over it because I didn’t know what it was, and for that reason I suspected that, like most sins, it must be something pleasant to do even if one were wicked for doing it. But now it occurred to me as something exactly the opposite—it was horrible to do, even if, in this particular instance, it was justifiable. It was the sin against the Holy Ghost, if one believed in science as I did, and as Framm did too, with one part of his damned schizophrenic soul.”

  The dinner bell sounded from the house. “Don’t bother,” I said. “My father isn’t coming down, so it can wait as long as we like.”

  “Why isn’t he?”

  “He’s not too well. I suppose when you’ve had a stroke you never really get completely better.”

  “Sometimes you do.”

  “Not at his age.”

  “Yes, he’s old, isn’t he?… Much older, I remember, than your mother was.”

  “Yes.”

  He was moody for a moment, then said: “Let’s have dinner, though. I’ve talked enough.”

  “I’d like to know what happened when Framm came back. I suppose he did?”

  “Yes. I’ll tell you afterwards—if we can come out here again.”

  “We’ll have coffee here. It’ll still be warm. You could even bathe again if you wanted to.”

  * * * * *

  He went off to change, and we dined alone, talking little while Dan was around. Not that there was anything special that mustn’t be overheard, or so it seemed to me; but I had noticed before that suspicion was deep-sunk in his general attitude towards people and circumstances—doubtless part of the snarl of phobias and complexes that made up what was wrong with him. And in the dining room, so full of shadows and dark perspectives, his unease was very noticeable. It lifted a little afterwards, when we sat by the pool again. The air was still warm—even warmer than sometimes during the day, for the breeze came from the long valley, full of earth scents. A small moon curved over a hill and lit the edge of it.

  * * * * *

  Brad went on:

  … I was asleep when Framm arrived, about ten o’clock on that September morning, but the commotion he made woke me. He had the radio on at full force so that he could hear it as he moved from room to room. As soon as I saw him I knew he was in a mood that would make it easier for me. The war news, or else the trip to Berchtesgaden, had brought out the Junker stuff in him—he was Prussian-born though he had lived most of his life in Vienna. And his mood had a peculiar way of showing this in his movements; when the Junker superseded the scientist, he seemed to stiffen to a height of a few extra inches and his walk became quick and military. At other times he would stoop and amble; it was an extraordinary phenomenon of change—as if he felt a need to dramatize something that went on inside him.

  He did not tell me whether he had seen the man whom he sometimes called “our Quatschkopf.” But he radiated an impression that his mission had been well worth while, that he had done much of what he wanted to do, and had prepared the way for more. That also—his air of mystery and secrecy—was part of the transformation; he did not confide at such times, but snapped out minimum facts like communiqués. So now I got only part of a story. I didn’t care. It was better for me not to have him put his arm on my shoulder and say: “Well, how goes it, Bradley? Have we yet found out what makes the universe tick, or only the philosopher’s stone?” But now he just said: “Been working? Not finished yet? We’ve got to hurry.”

  I said: “It’s finished. The results are on your desk.”

  He picked up the papers, briskly but without apparent excitement, merely muttering: “I think they will show that I am right.” For a moment then the sick depression came over me afresh. His whole attitude was a mixture of something superb and something arrogant, and at the last moment of all, with a touch of the inconsequent that so often intrudes, he couldn’t find his glasses—he wondered if he had left them on the plane, or if he had a spare pair at his
house. “Well, tell me, tell me,” he said irritably. “I can’t read without them….”

  So I told him. “It doesn’t work out,” I said. “The bulge is in the wrong place.”

  He glared at me, and for an incredible second I wondered if he could read in my eyes what I had done; but I knew that without his glasses he couldn’t even see me properly. The sudden fierceness was just the Prussianism, the age- old barbarian reaction to the bearer of bad news. He banged his fist on the desk. “So it is in the wrong place, eh? And it could not have happened at a worse time! No—not in a century!”

  Behind him on the blackboard were a number of equations connected with the general plan of the work we had been doing. He swung round to give them a stare that lasted several moments, then in an access of rage seized the duster and wiped the rows of chalked symbols into a smudge. “Very well … since these are our mistakes, the truth must lie elsewhere.” It was clear that any idea of doubting the accuracy of my calculations had not even remotely entered his mind- -which was in a way dreadful, and yet exactly what I had hoped. “But I shall find it,” he muttered angrily, as if even the truth were capable of yielding to threats.

  That gave me my chance to say: “I’m afraid I shan’t be able to help you in it, Dr. Framm. The war makes it necessary for me to return to America.”

  He seemed hardly interested. “Oh it does, does it? When do you want to go?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Very well.”

  I left his office a few minutes later. At the doorway as we shook hands he turned on the charm for a few seconds, but it was tired and semiautomatic; I could see his mind was elsewhere. “Of course you are deserting me,” he said, but that too was automatic, just one of his numerous attitudes, posing as a martyr when he was in no position to play the tyrant. I had seen it work so often, but now there was nothing for it to work on … and it was hardly a wasted effort because it was not even an effort.