With a low metallic sigh, the burning capsule of the dead astronaut soared over our heads, the vaporizing metal pouring from its hull. A few seconds later, as I shielded my eyes, an explosion of detonating sand rose from the ground behind me. A curtain of dust lifted into the darkening air like a vast spectre of powdered bone. The sounds of the impact rolled across the dunes. Near the launching gantries, fires flickered where fragments of the capsule had landed. A pall of phosphorescing gas hung in the air, particles within it beading and winking.
Judith had gone, running after the relic hunters through the swerving spotlights. When I caught up with them, the last fires of the explosion were dying among the gantries. The capsule had landed near the old Atlas launching pads, forming a shallow crater fifty yards in diameter. The slopes were scattered with glowing particles, sparkling like fading eyes. Judith ran distraughtly up and down, searching the fragments of smouldering metal.
Someone struck my shoulder. Quinton and his men, hot ash on their scarred hands, ran past like a troop of madmen, eyes wild in the crazed night. As we darted away through the flaring spotlights, I looked back at the beach. The gantries were enveloped in a pale-silver sheen that hovered there, and then moved away like a dying wraith over the sea.
At dawn, as the engines growled among the dunes, we collected the last remains of Robert Hamilton. The old man came into our cabin. As Judith watched from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel, he gave me a cardboard shoebox.
I held the box in my hands. 'Is this all you could get?'
'It's all there was. Look at them, if you want.'
'That's all right. We'll be leaving in half an hour.'
He shook his head. 'Not now. They're all around. If you move, they'll find us.'
He waited for me to open the shoe-box, then grimaced and went out into the pale light.
We stayed for another four days, as the Army patrols searched the surrounding dunes. Day and night, the half-tracks lumbered among the wrecked cars and cabins. Once, as I watched with Quinton from a fallen water tower, a half-track and two jeeps came within four hundred yards of the basin, held back only by the stench from the settling beds and the cracked concrete causeways.
During this time, Judith sat in the cabin, the shoe-box on her lap. She said nothing to me, as if she had lost all interest in me and the salvage-filled hollow at Cape Kennedy. Mechanically, she combed her hair, making and remaking her face.
On the second day, I came in after helping Quinton bury the cabins to their windows in the sand. Judith was standing by the table.
The shoe-box was open. In the centre of the table lay a pile of charred sticks, as if she had tried to light a small fire. Then I realized what was there. As she stirred the ash with her fingers, grey flakes fell from the joints, revealing the bony points of a clutch of ribs, a right hand and shoulder blade.
She looked at me with puzzled eyes. 'They're black,' she said.
Holding her in my arms, I lay with her on the bed. A loudspeaker reverberated among the dunes, fragments of the amplified commands drumming at the panes.
When they moved away, Judith said: 'We can go now.'
'In a little while, when it's clear. What about these?'
'Bury them. Anywhere, it doesn't matter.' She seemed calm at last, giving me a brief smile, as if to agree that this grim charade was at last over.
Yet, when I had packed the bones into the shoe-box, scraping up Robert Hamilton's ash with a dessert spoon, she kept it with her, carrying it into the kitchen while she prepared our meals.
It was on the third day that we fell ill.
After a long, noise-filled night, I found Judith sitting in front of the mirror, combing thick clumps of hair from her scalp. Her mouth was open, as if her lips were stained with acid. As she dusted the loose hair from her lap, I was struck by the leprous whiteness of her face.
Standing up with an effort, I walked listlessly into the kitchen and stared at the saucepan of cold coffee. A sense of indefinable exhaustion had come over me, as if the bones in my body had softened and lost their rigidity. On the lapels of my jacket, loose hair lay like spinning waste.
'Philip...' Judith swayed towards me. 'Do you feel - What is it?'
'The water.' I poured the coffee into the sink and massaged my throat. 'It must be fouled.'
'Can we leave?' She put a hand up to her forehead. Her brittle nails brought down a handful of frayed ash hair. 'Philip, for God's sake - I'm losing all my hair!'
Neither of us was able to eat. After forcing myself through a few slices of cold meat, I went out and vomited behind the cabin.
Quinton and his men were crouched by the wall of the settling tank. As I walked towards them, steadying myself against the hull of the weather satellite, Quinton came down. When I told him that the water supplies were contaminated, he stared at me with his hard bird's eyes.
Half an hour later, they were gone.
The next day, our last there, we were worse. Judith lay on the bed, shivering in her jacket, the shoe-box held in one hand. I spent hours searching for fresh water in the cabins. Exhausted, I could barely cross the sandy basin. The Army patrols were closer. By now, I could hear the hard gear-changes of the half-tracks. The sounds from the loudspeakers drummed like fists on my head.
Then, as I looked down at Judith from the cabin doorway, a few words stuck for a moment in my mind. contaminated area.., evacuate.., radioactive...'
I walked forward and pulled the box from Judith's hands.
'Philip...' She looked up at me weakly. 'Give it back to me.'
Her face was a puffy mask. On her wrists, white flecks were forming. Her left hand reached towards me like the claw of a cadaver.
I shook the box with blunted anger. The bones rattled inside. 'For God's sake, it's this! Don't you see - why we're ill?'
'Philip - where are the others? The old man. Get them to help you.'
'They've gone. They went yesterday, I told you.' I let the box fall on to the table. The lid broke off, spilling the ribs tied together like a bundle of firewood. 'Quinton knew what was happening - why the Army is here. They're trying to warn us.'
'What do you mean?' Judith sat up, the focus of her eyes sustained only by a continuous effort. 'Don't let them take Robert. Bury him here somewhere. We'll come back later.'
'Judith!' I bent over the bed and shouted hoarsely at her. 'Don't you realize - there was a bomb on board! Robert Hamilton was carrying an atomic weapon!' I pulled back the curtains from the window. 'My God, what a joke. For twenty years, I put up with him because I couldn't ever be really sure..
'Philip...'
'Don't worry, I used him - thinking about him was the only thing that kept us going. And all the time, he was waiting up there to pay us back!'
There was a rumble of exhaust outside. A half-track with red crosses on its doors and hood had reached the edge of the basin. Two men in vinyl suits jumped down, counters raised in front of them.
'Judith, before we go, tell me... I never asked you - , Judith was sitting up, touching the hair on her pillow. One half of her scalp was almost bald. She stared at her weak hands with their silvering skin. On her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of betrayal.
As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my answer.
1968
The Comsat Angels
When I first heard about the assignment, in the summer of 1968, I did my best to turn it down. Charles Whitehead, producer of BBC TV's science programme Horizon, asked me to fly over to France with him and record a press conference being held by a fourteen-year-old child prodigy, Georges Duval, who was attracting attention in the Paris newspapers. The film would form part of Horizon's new series, which I was scripting, 'The Expanding Mind', about the role of communications satellites and data-processing devices in the so-called information explosion. What annoyed me was this insertion of irrelevant and sensational material into an otherwise serious programme.
'C
harles, you'll destroy the whole thing,' I protested across his desk that morning. 'These child prodigies are all the same. Either they simply have some freak talent or they're being manipulated by ambitious parents. Do you honestly believe this boy is a genius?'
'He might be, James. Who can say?' Charles waved a plump hand at the contact prints of orbiting satellites pinned to the walls. 'We're doing a programme about advanced communications systems - if they have any justification at all, it's that they bring rare talents like this one to light.'
'Rubbish - these prodigies have been exposed time and again. They bear the same relation to true genius that a crosschannel swimmer does to a lunar astronaut.'
In the end, despite my protests, Charles won me over, but I was still sceptical when we flew to Orly Airport the next morning. Every two or three years there were reports of some newly discovered child genius. The pattern was always the same: the prodigy had mastered chess at the age of three, Sanskrit and calculus at six, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity at twelve. The universities and conservatories of America and Europe opened their doors.
For some reason, though, nothing ever came of these precocious talents. Once the parents, or an unscrupulous commercial sponsor, had squeezed the last drop of publicity out of the child, his so-called genius seemed to evaporate and he vanished into oblivion.
'Do you remember Minou Drouet?' I asked Charles as we drove from Orly. 'A child prodigy of a few years back. Cocteau read her poems and said, "Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet."
'James, relax... Like all scientists, you can't bear anything that challenges your own prejudices. Let's wait until we see him. He might surprise us.'
He certainly did, though not as we expected.
Georges Duval lived with his widowed mother in the small town of Montereau, on the Seine thirty miles south of Paris. As we drove across the cobbled square past the faded police prefecture, it seemed an unlikely birthplace for another Darwin, Freud or Curie. However, the Duvals' house was an expensively built white-walled villa overlooking a placid arm of the river. A well-tended lawn ran down to a vista of swans and water-meadows.
Parked in the drive was the location truck of the film unit we had hired, and next to it a radio van from RadioTelevision-Franaise and a Mercedes with a Paris-Match sticker across the rear window. Sound cables ran across the gravel into a kitchen window. A sharp-faced maid led us without ado towards the press conference. In the lounge, four rows of gilt chairs brought in from the Hotel de Ville faced a mahogany table by the windows. Here a dozen cameramen were photographing Madame Duval, a handsome woman of thirty-five with calm grey eyes, arms circumspectly folded below two strands of pearls. A trio of solemn-faced men in formal suits protected her from the technicians setting up microphones and trailing their cables under the table.
Already, fifteen minutes before Georges Duval appeared, I felt there was something bogus about the atmosphere. The three dark-suited men - the Director of Studies at the Sorbonne, a senior bureaucrat from the French Ministry of Education, and a representative of the Institut Pascal, a centre of advanced study - gave the conference an overstuffed air only slightly eased by the presence of the local mayor, a homely figure in a shiny suit, and the boy's schoolmaster, a lantern-jawed man hunched around his pipe.
Needless to say, when Georges Duval arrived, he was a total disappointment. Accompanied by a young priest, the family counsellor, he took his seat behind the table, bowing to the three officials and giving his mother a dutiful buss on the cheek. As the lights came on and the cameras began to turn, his eyes stared down at us without embarrassment.
Georges Duval was then fourteen, a slim-shouldered boy small for his age, self-composed in a grey flannel suit. His face was pale and anaemic, hair plastered down to hide his huge bony forehead. He kept his hands in his pockets, concealing his over-large wrists. What struck me immediately was the lack of any emotion or expression on his face, as if he had left his mind in the next room, hard at work on some intricate problem.
Professor Leroux of the Sorbonne opened the press conference. Georges had first come to light when he had taken his mathematics degree at thirteen, the youngest since Descartes. Leroux described Georges's career: reading at the age of two, by nine he had passed his full matriculation exam - usually taken at fifteen or sixteen. As a vacation hobby he had mastered English and German, by eleven had passed the diploma of the Paris Conservatoire in music theory, by twelve was working for his degree. He had shown a precocious interest in molecular biology, and already corresponded with biochemists at Harvard and Cambridge.
While this familiar catalogue was being unfolded, Georges's eyes, below that large carapace of a skull, showed not a glimmer of emotion. Now and then he glanced at a balding young man in a soft grey suit sitting by himself in the front row. At the time I thought he was Georges's elder brother - he had the same high bony temples and closed face. Later, however, I discovered that he had a very different role.
Questions were invited for Georges. These followed the usual pattern - what did he think of Vietnam, the space-race, the psychedelic scene, miniskirts, girls, Brigitte Bardot? In short, not a question of a serious nature. Georges answered in good humour, stating that outside his studies he had no worthwhile opinions. His voice was firm and reasonably modest, but he looked more and more bored by the conference, and as soon as it broke up, he joined the young man in the front row. Together they left the room, the same abstracted look on their faces that one sees in the insane, as if crossing our own universe at a slight angle.
While we made our way out, I talked to the other journalists. Georges's father had been an assembly worker at the Renault plant in Paris; neither he nor Madame Duval was in the least educated, and the house, into which the widow and son had moved only two months earlier, was paid for by a large research foundation. Evidently there were unseen powers standing guard over Georges Duval. He apparently never played with the boys from the town.
As we drove away, Charles Whitehead said slyly: 'I notice you didn't ask any questions yourself.'
'The whole thing was a complete set-up. We might as well have been interviewing De Gaulle.'
'Perhaps we were.'
'You think the General may be behind all this?'
'It's possible. Let's face it, if the boy is outstanding, it makes it more difficult for him to go off and work for Du Pont or IBM.'
'But is he? He was intelligent, of course, but all the same, I'll bet you that three years from now no one will even remember him.'
After we returned to London my curiosity came back a little. In the Air France bus to the TV Centre at White City I scanned the children on the pavement. Without a doubt none of them had the maturity and intelligence of Georges Duval. Two mornings later, when I found myself still thinking about Georges, I went up to the research library.
As I turned through the clippings, going back twenty years, I made an interesting discovery. Starting in 1948, I found that a major news story about a child prodigy came up once every two years. The last celebrity had been Bobby Silverberg, a fifteen-year-old from Tampa, Florida. The photographs in the Look, Paris-Match and Oggi profiles might have been taken of Georges Duval. Apart from the American setting, every ingredient was the same: the press conference, TV cameras, presiding officials, the high-school principal, doting mother - and the young genius himself, this time with a crew-cut and nothing to hide that high bony skull. There were two college degrees already passed, postgraduate fellowships offered by MIT, Princeton and CalTech.
And then what?
'That was nearly three years ago,' I said to Judy Walsh, my secretary. 'What's he doing now?'
She flicked through the index cards, then shook her head. 'Nothing. I suppose he's taking another degree at a university somewhere.'
'He's already got two degrees. By now he should have come up with a faster-than-light drive or a method of synthesizing life.'
'He's only seventeen. Wait until he's a little older.'
'Older? You've given me an idea. Let's go back to the beginning - 1948.'
Judy handed me the bundle of clippings. Life magazine had picked up the story of Gunther Bergman, the first postwar prodigy, a seventeenyear-old Swedish youth whose pale, over-large eyes stared out from the photographs. An unusual feature was the presence at the graduation ceremony at Uppsala University of three representatives from the Nobel Foundation. Perhaps because he was older than Silverberg and Georges Duval, his intellectual achievements seemed prodigious. The degree he was collecting was his third; already he had done original research in radioastronomy, helping to identify the unusual radio-sources that a decade later were termed 'quasars'.
'A spectacular career in astronomy seems guaranteed. It should be easy to track him down. He'll be, what?, thirtyseven now, professor at least, well on his way to a Nobel Prize.'
We searched through the professional directories, telephoned Greenwich Observatory and the London Secretariat of the World Astronomical Federation.
No one had heard of Gunther Bergman.
'Right, where is he?' I asked Judy when we had exhausted all lines of inquiry. 'For heaven's sake, it's twenty years; he should be world-famous by now.'
'Perhaps he's dead.'
'That's possible.' I gazed down pensively at Judy's quizzical face. 'Put in a call to the Nobel Foundation. In fact, clear your desk and get all the international directories we can up here. We're going to make the Comsats sing.'
Three weeks later, when I carried my bulky briefcase into Charles Whitehead's office, there was an electric spring in my step.
Charles eyed me warily over his glasses. 'James, I hear you've been hard on the trail of our missing geniuses. What have you got?'
'A new programme.'
'New? We've already got Georges Duval listed in Radio Times.'
The Complete Short Stories Page 110
