The Doomsday Men

by J. B. Priestley

  While he was rambling on, Malcolm was telling himself that he was in love with the daughter, the only daughter, of some fantastic American multimillionaire, probably a dyspeptic old tyrant. But did that explain the girl’s queer moods, the inexplicable things she said, that strange last minute with her? Just too much money? Dollar princess nonsense? No, it didn’t. She wasn’t that kind of a girl. There was something more, he felt sure, something that no Bellowby-Sayers would be able to account for, something that was going to haunt and tantalise him endlessly until he saw her again. And for all her good-byes-for-ever, her millions and Californias, he was going to see her again, somehow or other. Now he heard himself, above the beating of his heart, asking her name.

  “Probably means nothing to you, my boy,” replied Bellowby-Sayers, “and it’s dropped out a bit over there. But one time in Wall Street it frightened the lives out of some of ’em. Henry MacMichael. He’s retired to California now, I believe; probably one of these ranch places up in the hills back of Los Angeles.”

  So there she was then, living in the hills somewhere in Southern California when she was at home, his girl if he was ever to have a girl: Andrea, daughter of Henry MacMichael.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING PROFESSOR

  In an unfashionable and not very comfortable hotel within sight of the British Museum a tall young American sat in a little chair, now perilously tilted back, with his stockinged feet on the bed, eating an apple and staring gloomily at the steamy window. It was the middle of summer, but here in London the summer did not seem to know when to begin. This morning it had rained again; though the sun was somewhere about, so that the streets appeared to be smoking and the window was steamy. The young American was deciding that a good baking hot day would do him good. His name was George Glenway Hooker; he had long large bones with very little flesh on them, deep-set eyes and delicate finger-tips, untidy dark hair, an awkward manner, and clothes that appeared to have been made for somebody else; he had three different scientific degrees and a gold medal; already he had been a demonstrator, a research student, an assistant professor, a full professor, and now he had a research fellowship from the Weinberger Institute of Tech-nology; but what he really was—although he would have been the first to deny it—was a magician. It is doubtful if anybody in Bloomsbury would have given the tall young man more than one quick glance, for within the shadow of the great Museum there are always dozens of young men who look very untidy, rather learned, dullish; yet the fact remains that this George Glenway Hooker was the only genuine magician in the neighbourhood. And he was not only a magician; he was also an explorer, moving slowly forward in regions where he left the rest of mankind, with its pitiful fusses and squabbles, far behind. Most of them neither knew nor cared what he and his handful of colleagues, scattered over the world, were doing. Now and again when he made an attempt to tell a few of them, they almost yawned in his face. They did not realise—and he never told them, because he did not realise it himself—that they were staring, with a glazed bored eye, at a magician, a fantastic explorer, one of the greatest of the American pioneers, working along the very frontier of life itself.

  What George Glenway Hooker could do, and had done several times already, was to transform what we call matter, but which he knew as the tiniest charges of positive electricity, into light, and also to conjure light itself, in the form of photons, back again into the bases of matter. He spent his working hours in a magical world of infinitely minute solar systems, where the very elements themselves can be instantly transmuted. He and his friends had forced their way into the secret laboratory of Nature herself. It was quite possible, that is, if the next barbaric outburst did not blow them and their workshops to smithereens, that one of them might emerge, with a handful of mathematical and chemical symbols, to announce that the universe that houses us is quite different from what we have so far imagined, and might prove what many have guessed at, namely, that Newton, with his solid engine of a cosmos, was wrong, and that Shakespeare, with his dissolving towers and palaces and universal stuff of dream, was strangely right. There was, indeed, nothing too fantastic that they might not announce at any moment, they were so far removed, in their adventure of research, from the common run of men. Yet all this did not prevent George Glenway Hooker from being an awkward young man with a shy manner, disgraceful trousers, and an ability, almost amounting to genius, for landing himself in uncomfortable hotels.

  He had come to England this summer not simply because he was temporarily free to travel, for he did not enjoy travelling, being a poor hand at it, and regarding it as a waste of precious time. He had two reasons for crossing the Atlantic, and the second of them he hardly acknowledged even to himself. The first was far more sensible: he wanted to visit that Mecca of good physicists, the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, and indeed had just returned from a happy visit there. It had been during the vacation, what these cool drawling Cambridge men, with their elaborately off-hand manner, called “the Long,” but several good fellows had been still at work, at some very pretty little experiments too, and once he had accepted their odd manner, which had seemed conceited at first until he had realised that it was their English equivalent of his own gruff shyness, he had had a fine time with them. Now that was over, and he ought to be thinking about getting back to New York. This brought him, reluctantly, face-to-face with his second reason for coming over here.

  It sounded foolish, just to say it, but there it was: a distinguished American physicist had disappeared, vanished as completely as if every electron in his being had suddenly been charged with positive instead of negative electricity. He had not disappeared dramatically, with the police and the newspapers looking for him: that would have been much easier. No, Professor Paul Engelfield had coolly and quietly resigned from his last chair, at Chicago, had given out that he preferred independent research, which was not surprising for he was known to have plenty of money at his disposal; and then he had completely vanished. Nobody Hooker had talked to, and he had made a special journey to Chicago, only this Spring, to enquire, knew where Professor Engelfield had gone. For nearly two years now, Hooker had been waiting for some dramatic announcement—for the missing scientist was not without a touch of the histrionic—from Professor Engelfield about his favourite heavy nuclei, which he had been persistently bombarding with both electrons and photons, in his own type of cyclotron. But not a word. This might mean that he had failed and was sulking in some obscure laboratory of his own. (And Hooker could imagine him sulking.) It might mean that he was on the edge of something tremendous, and refused to say anything, even to admit he was experimenting, until he was certain of success. It was just possible that he was ill somewhere, but it was not likely, for Hooker, who had met him once or twice at conferences, remembered him as a strong-looking man only in his early fifties, filled with energy, not at all the kind of man to be feebly decaying in some unknown nursing-home. And if anything had happened to him, there would have been something in the Press, for Engelfield was a very distinguished scientist indeed, a man who might have walked off with a Nobel Prize at any moment. Other physicists were puzzled by his disappearance, but not one of them had been fool enough to go looking for him. And now Hooker was compelled to admit to himself that he had been fool enough, had not only enquired extensively throughout the States but had also come over here to England in the hope that he might discover that Engelfield, now free to roam and with ample means from some private source, had decided to continue his experiments in Europe, probably in Cambridge. But he had not come upon a single trace of him. At the Cavendish, of course, they had heard of Engelfield, but, ironically enough, had asked Hooker what Engelfield was doing now. And that was precisely what was worrying George Glenway Hooker. What was Engelfield doing now?

  For they had both been working in the same remote field, with Engelfield, older by twenty years at least and with far more resources of every kind at his command
, some way ahead. Hooker was anxious to get to work again, but first he badly needed some news of what Engelfield was doing. His interest was purely scientific and professional. Remembering Engelfield again now, as he stared at his steamy bedroom window and finished the apple, Hooker decided that he had disliked rather than liked the man, even though he had been such a swell. He called to mind again Engelfield’s thick-set figure, heavy dark face, with its bristling brows and big moustache (he had looked not unlike Stalin), and fiercely arrogant manner, which had kept him changing, to the bewilderment of his colleagues, from one university or technological institute to another. There was nothing of the teacher about Engelfield; he had been the pure research student, looking always for a good laboratory and a university president who would leave him alone with his apparatus and not be always summoning him to clap-trap conferences. That was all right. George Hooker could understand and sympathise with that. But there had always been a bit too much of the lone wolf about Engelfield, who would arrogantly demand information when he badly needed it, but hated to give any; and he had been very contemptuous, very much the sneering senior, that time they had had a sharp clash at the Cleveland Conference. “Our promising young colleague, in his praiseworthy enthusiasm, but rash endeavour to obtain results . . .” that was the line of talk he had handed out, and Hooker still smarted a little at the remembrance of it. But he was not a young man who bore malice, and after all, they were both scientists, weren’t they, both working in the same remote field? “Aw, shucks!” cried Dr. George Glenway Hooker, neatly pitching the remains of the apple into the wastepaper basket, and uncoiling his lean length. Where in hell was Engelfield?

  The Cavendish crowd at Cambridge didn’t know where he was. Bergler had replied from Berlin that he was sure Engelfield had not been in Germany recently. Stuvert from Brussels hadn’t heard anything about him. The Radium Institute in Paris had not seen him, for Hooker had gone there himself when he first landed. There was Russia, but Hooker didn’t believe Engelfield had tried Russia: he looked too much like Stalin himself, Engelfield did, to try Russia. So Hooker told himself now that he might as well pack up and get a little real sunshine before settling down to work in the fall. Engelfield, the selfish devil, had meant to walk right out and leave the rest of them guessing, and he had done it only too well. How he had done it, Hooker could not imagine. All that he could imagine, unfortunately, was that just when he was in distant sight of a result, Engelfield would suddenly bob up from nowhere to announce the success of some tremendous experiment of his own.

  So George Hooker walked from his hotel down Charing Cross Road and then along Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly Circus, to tell the American Express that he had decided to sail as soon as possible. He did not enjoy the walk; in fact, he did not enjoy London at all; it seemed to him an unnecessarily squat, cheerless, dingy sort of city, with a lot of old buildings in it that were not worth preserving, and a good many new buildings that were only a poor and miniature imitation of New York and Chicago. The museums were good, but the best place in it was the National Gallery, which he had visited several times, for he had an eye for pictures, and there, he had to confess, was a dandy collection. Take the National Gallery out of the city, adding to it the Science and British Museums, and you could have the rest—too damp, too cold, too dark, too gloomy, a mournful Old World monster of a town, terrified now that it would have all hell bombed out of it at the drop of a hat.

  The American Express was busy, as usual, and there was the customary chattering swarm of American women with bright orange lips and hard eyes, the sort of women Hooker never noticed at all when he was back home. But there was one he knew, the wife of a chemistry man now at the Rockefeller Institute, and this little woman, who had been quiet and sensible enough at home, now behaved like a mad magpie and screamed all kinds of nonsense at him. London seemed to do something to these women. The thought of royalty and Life Guards and glass coaches and ostrich feathers just round the corner appeared to be too much for them. Usually he was a tolerant young man, so long as he was allowed to work in peace and wear comfortable old clothes, but now he meditated sourly on these phenomena. But after waiting half the morning, he was lucky enough to obtain a berth in the Queen Mary, sailing from Southampton in two days’ time, on Wednesday afternoon.

  After a watery and absent-minded sort of lunch at his Bloomsbury hotel, he did a little packing, so that he could send his trunk on in advance, then decided to pay a final call on the Camford Instrument Company, from whom he had bought a few things and whose calm clean showroom seemed to him a haven of peace and good sense. He had still to finish his talk with Morrison there about evacuated tubes. The Cavendish crowd had shown him a thing or two that Morrison ought to have known, for he sometimes did jobs for the Cavendish, and Hooker thought he could cheer himself up and pass the remainder of the afternoon nicely by having a good companionable jeer at Morrison. So, a little after three, he arrived at the entrance to the Camford Instrument Company’s premises, which hid themselves away, like so many concerns in this strange dark island, up a mouldy little side-street, just as if they made burglars’ tools. Just inside the door he waited a moment, to see if Morrison were visible. He was not. But there was a thick-set fellow giving instructions to one of the assistants, and there was something about the cut of this fellow, even from the back, that seemed vaguely familiar to Hooker. So he waited a little longer.

  The thick-set man had now finished with the assistant, who brought him a step or two nearer the door. But the thick-set man now waved him away, as if he did not need any further attendance.

  “Now don’t forget,” Hooker heard the man say, sharply, “Suite Seven A—the Savoy. Everything else delivered to Barstow, California. Got that? Right.”

  Now he was rapidly approaching Hooker, who still stood just in front of the door. The man was wearing spectacles and a short but thick beard; the face was thinner, browner, than the one Hooker remembered; but nevertheless, if this was not Professor Paul Engelfield, late of the University of Chicago and other American institutions of learning, then George Glenway Hooker was no longer quite right in his head. And what luck! At the last minute! Quite excited now, Hooker took a step or two forward, held out his hand, smiled broadly.

  “Professor Engelfield,” he cried rapturously, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Gosh!—this is great!”

  The bearded man stopped dead, stared at him, then said coldly: “There’s some mistake, my dear sir. I don’t know you.”

  “But you’re Professor Engelfield, who used to be at Chicago, aren’t you?” said poor Hooker. The light was not good where they had stopped, and he might have made a mistake. But the voice, he could have sworn, was the same.

  It had been the same, but now it suddenly changed, was harsher, more guttural, almost a foreign voice: “No. My name’s not Engelfield. Some mistake. Good day to you.” And the man brushed past him and marched straight out.

  Hooker remained rooted, staring. Something was wrong. On a sudden impulse he hurried outside, but the man had disappeared, possibly into the taxi that was just pulling out of the street. He returned slowly, trying to puzzle it out, then went across to the assistant, one of those superior dim young Englishmen who never seemed pleased to see a chap.

  “I’m Dr. Hooker of the Weinberger Institute of Technology,” he began, giving the assistant the works in a vain hope of impressing him. “I’ve been here before.” He paused, to let this sink in.

  If the assistant was impressed, he gave no sign of it. He merely made a polite sound towards the back of his throat.

  “Now wasn’t that Professor Engelfield who just went out?”

  “No, sir.”

  Hooker stared at him. The stare was returned, and there was the faint dawn of an outraged look on the assistant’s pale fair face. This kind of thing, it was beginning to say, simply was Not Done.

  “You sure?” Hooker sounded incr
edulous.

  The assistant raised his pale fine eyebrows. Bad Form, they proclaimed, Very Bad Form. “That is not the name, sir. Evidently you’ve made a mistake.”

  “Well, what is his name then?” Hooker demanded.

  The assistant did not say “Mind your own business!” He merely looked it. The effect was the same.

  “Look here,” said Hooker desperately. “Didn’t I overhear him tell you to deliver some stuff to Barstow, California?”

  “We are delivering an order there,” replied the assistant distantly.

  “Then he must be an American. And he looked like Engelfield, except for the beard and the spectacles, and talked like him too—at first. I don’t understand this. And I might as well tell you, I’ve been looking for Engelfield all over the place. Now—come on—I’m a customer here just as much as that chap is. Tell me the truth.”

  “I can only assure you, sir,” said the assistant, wincing a little at all this crude Americanism, but quite firmly, “that the gentleman who just left, so far as I know, is not your Professor Engelfield. I am sorry I can’t give you his name, but as I saw you address him yourself and he did not choose to give it, I really don’t feel at liberty to do so myself. That would amount to a breach of confidence.”