The Stone That Never Came Down

by John Brunner

  “I told you before,” Randolph said. “If you do that, you risk losing him completely. I can’t imagine him being overjoyed, can you, if the police come hunting for him and all he’s done is go off quietly by himself to think for a while?”

  “You’ve said that before,” Kneller countered stubbornly. “The more time goes by, the less I believe you. It simply isn’t like Maurice to vanish this way. And nobody knows what’s become of him. His landlady hasn’t seen hide or hair of him, he hasn’t been in touch with his sister at Folkestone, nor with any of his professional colleagues–I mean apart from us. And he doesn’t seem to have any private friends to speak of, and he doesn’t belong to a church, and … I don’t see any alternative, really I don’t.” He tugged at his beard. It was grizzled, and out of style now that razor-sales were back to their previous peak, and several people had said it made him look older than his years. But he had worn it since his mid-twenties, and did not feel inclined to abandon it after more than a quarter-century.

  Turning to his desk and gesturing for Randolph to sit down, he pursued, “Tell me candidly, Arthur. Has Maurice done or said anything recently to indicate he might have been–well–overworking?”

  With a wave of his hand to acknowledge the tactful equivalent of “had a nervous breakdown”, Randolph answered, “I wouldn’t have said so. He’s always been a funny sort of person, like most confirmed bachelors: a bit irritable, a bit unpredictable … Of course, lately he has been very upset about the state of the world. But isn’t everybody who bothers to pay attention?”

  Kneller gave a wry grimace at that. “I know what you mean! Every damned day the news seems to get worse, doesn’t it? You saw that they found a poor devil of a Pakistani beaten to death in a park in Birmingham?”

  “I did indeed. And what’s more I noticed it in the ‘News in Brief’ column. We’re in a hell of a mess, aren’t we, when something like that doesn’t make headlines on the front page? But it’s not the crimes of violence that scare me. I mean, not the small crimes of violence. I’m worried about the big ones. The kind that could stem from this crisis in Italy, for example.”

  Kneller shrugged. “What do you expect in a country where it’s practically a matter of honour to lie about your income and avoid paying tax? Small wonder they’re going broke!”

  “That’s only the half of it. When the Italians signed the Treaty of Rome they expected to be a net food-exporting country. Within a few years they’d become net importers. So of course they’re being bled white by the subsidies given to inefficient farmers in other countries. So are we, come to that. If they do decide to try and pull Italy out of the Common Market, close their frontiers and reimpose protective tariffs … Well, the Treaty of Rome is meant to be irrevocable, isn’t it?”

  “Was it Maurice who sold that line of argument to you?” Kneller demanded.

  Randolph looked faintly surprised. “Come to think of it, it must have been. A week or two ago. Why, was he talking about it to you?”

  “He did say something about the Third World War being more likely to start that way than by a clash between East and West, or rich and poor. But that’s not quite the point. I recall you as having been a fervent pro-Market man ever since we first met.”

  “Well, I still am!” Randolph declared with a hint of belligerence. “But if the system is this badly mismanaged … I do have to confess, though, that the way Maurice put his case made me see things in a different light. But why are you making such a meal of this? That’s always been Maurice’s special talent: shedding a different light on things.”

  “I’m not sure,” Kneller admitted. “It’s just that at the edge of my mind there’s something … No, I can’t pin it down.”

  “Well, if you really are worried about Maurice,” Randolph said, “there’s one thing you could do. You’re wrong to say we don’t know about any of his private friends. Surely his GP is a friend, too. Weren’t they at school together?”

  Kneller snapped his fingers. “Yes, of course! I should have thought of that before. Isn’t his name … Hamilton? No, Campbell, that’s it. And his address is bound to be on Maurice’s file. I’ll send for it.”

  Hand outstretched towards his desk intercom, he checked. “Arthur, this will probably sound ridiculous, but … Look, describe to me what, in your view, Maurice expects VC to do if and when we decide it’s safe to administer it to a human subject.”

  “What?” Randolph stared blankly at him. “Why, you know as well as I do.”

  “I think I do.” Kneller was suddenly very grave. “The stuff’s volatile, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course. Or rather, not the stuff itself, but. the supportive medium we keep it in. Why?”

  “Would it be possible to determine whether there’s been a stock loss?”

  “A stock loss?” Randolph echoed in perplexity. “Lord, on the molecular level? The quantities we’re working with are so damned small! Not a chance.”

  “Very well, then. Who issues test-samples to the lab technicians and the postgrads–you or Maurice?”

  “Maurice. Nine times out of ten at any rate.”

  “In other words, he’s the person who most often opens the sealed vats.” Kneller leaned forward earnestly. “And could not the hoped-for effect of VC be described as enabling one to cast fresh light on every single kind of subject?”

  There was dead silence for a moment. Randolph turned pale.

  “If you mean what I think you mean–”

  “You know damned well what I mean!”

  “Then you had better get hold of his doctor. Right away!”

  Down a half-deserted side-street in Kentish Town marched a pair of godheads, one a few years older than the other.

  “Come to Jesus! Come and be saved!”

  It was a good area to pick up converts, this, especially in winter. The original inhabitants had been cleared out to make room for a motorway which in fact had not been extended this far. Consequently many of the houses were intact except that their doors had been nailed up and their windows were blocked with corrugated iron and neglect had dug holes in every other roof.

  Down-and-outs congregated here now, some of them former residents driven to despair because they had not been rehoused, some simply unemployed, some outright social misfits like meths-drinkers and even a few of the remaining hard-drug addicts. Only four or five sources of illegal supply survived in London, and one of those was a little north of here, a mile or two.

  All of a sudden the younger of the godheads gave a stifled cry, and his companion hastened to see what he had found.

  Poking out from behind a stub of wall, partly covered by the snow, which was still sifting down although more lightly than an hour before, yet absolutely unmistakable: a pair of human legs.

  “What–what shall we do?” the younger godhead whimpered, having to lean on his plastic cross for support. “Should we tell the police?”

  The older considered for a moment, and pronounced, “No, I don’t think so. Aren’t we told to let the dead bury their dead? And the last thing we want is to get mixed up in a police investigation. It would seriously hamper our work.”

  “I–I suppose you’re right,” the younger admitted, and added in surprise: “But what are you doing?”

  The other had bent over the corpse and after scraping snow away with the end of his cross was fumbling with gloved fingers inside the coat it wore.

  “Just checking to see whether he was carrying any–ah–worldly goods,” was his answer. “We could make better use of them now than he can … No, nothing. No wallet, no billfold, just a comb and some keys and–what’s this? Oh, only a letter. What a shame. Okay, let’s move on. And pray the snow lasts long enough to cover our footprints.”

  IV

  “Lay him down there, nurse,” Dr Hector Campbell instructed as he led the way into the white-walled casualty examination room adjacent to his office at the North-West London General Clinic. He had to speak loudly. Not only was it blood-transfusion da
y–which meant that the pride of the haematological department was in operation, the continuous-throughput plasma centrifuge–but the friend who had brought in this Jewish-looking man with the cut head was keeping pp a nonstop flow of excuses.

  “I had no shoes on, you see, and there was snow on the road, so by the time I’d gone back for my slippers they’d …”

  But Hector forgot about him the instant he opened the office door. He froze, muttering an oath.

  “Is something wrong?” demanded the girl who was helping the casualty onto the examination couch: “Nurse Diana Rouse” according to the name-badge pinned on her stiff apron.

  “Yes! This is wrong!” Furious, Hector advanced into the office. Books had been pulled down from every shelf and lay randomly on the floor, while an attempt had been made to start a fire in a metal wastebin. Griming his fingers with charred paper, he retrieved some of the less completely burned sheets and discovered just what he might have expected: pictures of the genital organs, descriptions of the sexual act.

  “Oh, no!” the nurse exclaimed from the doorway. “Who could have done such a dreadful thing?”

  “I could make a few guesses,” Hector grunted. “What kind of people set themselves up as arbiters of what shall and what shall not appear in print? Now I’ll have to send for the police, I suppose … Oh, get on with cleaning up that man’s head. And tell his friend to wait outside!”

  On the point of reaching for the phone, he hesitated before deciding that the intruders were unlikely to have touched it and hence he would not be spoiling any prints, and during his hesitation it rang. He snatched it up.

  “Dr Campbell? This is Professor Kneller at the Gull-Grant Research Institute. I believe Maurice Post is a patient of yours, and we’re very anxious to get in touch with him–”

  “Professor, I haven’t seen Maurice .since a week ago!” Hector broke in. “And I don’t have time to talk now. I just came into my office, and it’s been vandalised. Looks like godhead work.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “Well, I won’t keep you, then, but if you do hear anything from Maurice–”

  “Yes, of course! Goodbye!”

  The magazines provided in the waiting-area for patients and their friends were approved and donated, according to a rubber stamp on each, by the Campaign Against Moral Pollution, and hence predictably were dull as ditchwater. Malcolm recalled that at about the same time as he had lost his job there had been a rash of letters to the press, master-minded no doubt by Lady Washgrave, saying how horrified parents had been to find Playboy or Penthouse when taking their children to see a doctor.

  –The devils. When you think of how they pervert kids …!

  In response to pressure from an influential group of parents the headmaster of the school at which Malcolm had been a popular and respected teacher had invited a speaker from the Campaign to address the morning assembly. The man had declared, with some justification, that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and then gone on to claim that the only solution lay in returning to the Good Old Moral Values of the glorious past.

  Unable to stand any more, Malcolm had demanded why, if those values were so marvellous, the people who paid lip-service to them had involved mankind in two world wars with all their accoutrements from poison gas to atom-bombs. Taking their cue from him, his class had burst out laughing, and the laughter spread, and the visitor was prevented from completing his talk.

  Whereupon, the next day, the headlines, bold and black: teacher “corrupting children”, parents claim. And, after the lapse of a week: “atheist teacher” sacked after row.

  There had been a petition raised by his pupils for his reinstatement, and even now, a year later, some of them occasionally called on him. But if they were found out their parents created hell, so the visits were growing fewer.

  –And what do those smug clerks at the Employment Exchange have to say to me through their glass screens? Armour-glass, naturally, because now and then somebody loses his temper at the way they sneer from the security of their Civil Service posts. Why, that I’d make twice as much at a factory bench in Germany! But I don’t want that. I want the job I’m trained for, the one I’m good at. Besides, the Germans have started to send their Gastarbeiter home to Yugoslavia and Greece and Spain, and some of them are being forced to go.

  It had been in the news a few days ago, not prominent.

  –Come to think of it, this hospital reminds me of the Employment Exchange. All these people sitting in rows with hopeless looks on their faces … But that’s wrong. It’s a place of healing. It should be a happy place. It should be as splendid as a great cathedral, built of the most magnificent materials and lavish with the master-work of fine artists. Instead, look at it. Barely ten years old, and falling apart already. Thrown up as cheaply as possible, and you can tell just by looking at the staff they don’t enjoy working here. Christ, I’m glad I’m only visiting!

  He wondered in passing whether anybody had explained to these people waiting that the delay was due to the police being called to the doctor’s vandalised office. Probably not.

  –I hope I’m not heading for another bout of suicidal depression like yesterday’s. If I hadn’t run across that guy Morris …

  He had been to a private school a few miles north of London to be interviewed for a job he had seen advertised, and had known the moment he got there that he was having his time wasted, perhaps deliberately, for the place was plastered with Moral Pollution stickers. On the way home he had felt he must have a drink, despite the prohibitive price of liquor, so he had wandered at random into a pub, and …

  –Fantastic fellow, that Morris. Must have an amazing memory for faces. I mean, to have recognised me from those lousy pictures that appeared in the papers. But it was so reassuring when he asked how I was getting on. The mere fact that someone I’d never met should care about me …!

  The conversation had taken off like a rocket, and lasted long past the point at which he should have gone home to meet Ruth, with whom he had a date.

  –But it was such fun talking to him!

  For more than three hours they had chatted away–and gone on drinking, mostly at Morris’s expense because as usual Malcolm was broke. They had reviewed the state of the world, the government’s incompetence, the hypocrisy of the Moral Polluters, all the subjects Malcolm felt most strongly about … plus one other, new to him, which Morris had reverted to several times.

  –Can it really be on the cards that we’ll see a military coup in Italy, like the Greek one? And that a junta of generals would try to pull them out of the Common Market?

  Morris had predicted that, and he’d talked about a certain Marshal Dalessandro whom Malcolm had never heard of, and one way and another he had painted a dreadfully gloomy picture of the immediate future. He had said in so many words, “Like the First and the Second, the Third World War is going to start right here in Europe.”

  –And I said, “Do you really think there’s no hope for us at all?” And he looked at me for a bit, with that odd quizzical expression, and then he produced that little phial of capsules, tiny little yellow things no bigger than rice-grains, and said, “This may be the answer. I hope it is.” And I said … God, I must have been drunk by then! I said, “If that’s the case, I’d like some.” And he said, “Okay, here you are. You deserve it more than most people.” And like a crazy fool I took it!

  In the rush to bring Billy, bleeding rivers, to the clinic (by taxi, and was he going to refund the fare? It had swallowed three pounds from Malcolm’s scanty weekly budget), he had had no time to reflect on that capsule and its possible side-effects. But there was that strange point Ruth had raised: how had he known that four godheads were crossing the street when deep snow muffled their tread?

  Briefly, however, he was distracted from worrying about that. The door of the casualty-examination room was fractionally ajar, and through it drifted a snatch of conversation: Nurse Rouse and Dr Campbell. He listened, hoping to catch some clue as to what h
ad become of Billy.

  “Thank goodness they’ve gone!” From the nurse. “We’ll never get through the morning schedule at this rate.”

  “Don’t I know it! Jesus, if only … Why, what’s wrong?”

  Stiffly: “I don’t like to hear the Name taken in vain.”

  “Oh, no. Not you too! Since when have you been on the side of the book-burners, the self-appointed censors, the petty street-corner dictators?”

  “You have no proof!”

  “Proof? I’ve proved that a gang of them invaded the wards yesterday evening at what should have been the patients’ bedtime and marched around singing and begging. Everybody was furious, but there wasn’t anything they dared do. You know how they hit back if you cross them.”

  “Godheads aren’t like that! They’re ordinary decent people trying to put some proper standards back into our lives.”

  “You can say that, after seeing what they did to Mr Cohen?”

  “You heard what his friend said–he picked a quarrel deliberately!”

  “So what became of the injunction to turn the other cheek?”

  –Good question!

  In the privacy of his head, Malcolm applauded the doctor’s argument.

  But, a moment later, Campbell wearily changed the subject. “Speaking of Cohen, what did you do with him?”

  “Oh … Told him to lie down until we’ve seen the X rays. But I don’t think he’s seriously hurt. More shocked than anything.”

  “Yes, if there’s nothing on the plates tell him to go home, not to go to work until tomorrow, dome back if he feels at all giddy or unwell. Is his friend still here?”

  “I think so. Perhaps if he can wait until the X rays are ready he can see Mr Cohen safely home. I don’t think we could possibly spare an ambulance.”

  Rising fretfully, in need of a toilet, Malcolm heard what he had already heard when Nurse Rouse repeated it, and asked directions to a men’s room. She sent him down a long echoing corridor where there was a constant to-ing and fro-ing of staff and patients.