The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  GRAY: I think once the Pacific war is over there’ll be quite a lot of money available for nuclear research…you know, thermal piles for generating stations and so on. Our group is probably powerful enough to go straight to the government with a dummy project.

  DAVVITT: What kind of dummy project?

  GRAY: Oh…say, a maritime application. Development of atomic turbines for ship propulsion. Something to give us a free hand.

  DAVVITT: Is this Herbie’s idea?

  GRAY: Herbie flew back to England to do some liaison with the Ministry recently. He found a site up north, a place called Moorbridge in Cumberland, where conditions are ideal.

  DAVVITT: I can’t understand why we can’t come out in the open and mount this as an official project as it stands.

  GRAY: But you will.

  DAVVITT: What do you mean, I will?

  GRAY: I mean, when you know the possible risks, you will.

  DAVVITT: They can hardly be worse risks than we’re taking here, with the Bomb.

  GRAY: There are more unknowns. What Herbie is now pro posing is virtually a ‘Relativity Machine’.

  DAVVITT: Which does what? A Relativity Machine that does what? I mean it’s such a vague term isn’t it? Like a Carpet Maclaine.

  GRAY: Don’t see what you’re getting at.

  DAVVITT: A carpet machine might be anything, provided it has to do with carpets. If you say vacuum cleaner you know what you’re talking about. Relativity is the Carpet itself. So what’s the machine for?

  GRAY: I see what you mean. Well the machine would be for amplifying the Uncertainty Principle so that a significant number of particles behaved in unison.

  DAVVITT: What’s that in English?

  GRAY: It doesn’t make much sense if you take it outside the mathematical principles involved. Why do you always do this?

  DAVVITT: Because so often these things may make perfect mathematical sense but are meaningless when you try to relate them to reality.

  GRAY: Interesting choice of word.

  DAVVITT: All right: everyday life…What’s it going to mean in terms of everyday life? A sort of statistical upset of the atom? For what purpose?

  GRAY: As a tool. Since it’s impossible to observe the atom without altering it by the mere fact of observation, you — in effect — amplify the process…duplicate it millions of times over. See what’s going on.

  DAVVITT: You want to be careful that by using Relativity, I mean if this can be done, by using Relativity to play around with statistical processes inside such a Machine, you don’t alter any Statistical processes outside it.

  GRAY: I don’t see what you…

  DAVVITT: Well I mean, life itself is a statistic. So is the half-life of a piece of Uranium. Anything…

  GRAY: To say you can alter basic laws of chance is just ridiculous. Chance occurs because it’s there. It’s unpredictable.

  DAVVITT: It isn’t if you look at it back to front. Look back at something after it’s happened and you have a sequence of events that isn’t chance any more — it’s history.

  GRAY: I don’t want to seem unduly sceptical, but in practice I can’t imagine a situation where you remember something before it’s even happened.

  DAVVITT: In terms of Relativity, if you really mean, if you and Herbie really mean, that you can bend Time and Space on an observable scale, then it could happen, yes.

  I looked up at Tesh. He was watching my expression all the time, knowing that when I came to that bit I was going to feel tire jolt.

  He grinned at me now. “Interesting stuff. Isn’t it?”

  “You knew this? I mean in relation to my own remark to the psychiatrist?”

  “Of course.”

  “But why was it me who made that remark?”

  “Because, my good James, you have in fact been involved with the BRUNDASH affair ever since nineteen fifty-nine…April the twenty-first of that year, in fact, if my deductions are right.” A silence.

  I exploded: “Nineteen fifty-nine! I hadn’t the slightest inkling of anything to do with, connected with, or touching on any of these people at that time! What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about something that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “I can believe that two frustrated professors out there on the mesa who had nothing better to do were discussing total impossibilities in nineteen forty-five.”

  “But what you must believe, for your own sake, is that you have given these people a very real reason to hate you.”

  I said deadpan: “For some naughty thing I haven’t really done at all. Yet!”

  “To whom?”

  “What do you mean, Tesh?”

  “This thing that hasn’t happened yet: from whose point of view has it not yet happened? — yours, theirs or both?”

  “Tesh, if you want to talk double-dutch it’s quite okay with me. But let’s not mix business with pleasure.”

  He grinned. “Isn’t it funny? Not long ago you had great difficulty in persuading me that what you said to your quack made sense. And look at the trouble I’m having trying to reverse the process!”

  “You’re suggesting some sort of shift in time? — that something-or-other could have happened, involving me, as far as Davvitt is concerned, but not as far as I’m concerned. Is that right?”

  “I’m trying to explain that when Davvitt helped Guy to bankrupt your company it was to punish you for that which you had not yet done.”

  We took a sort of ten-minute break, after that. I felt I needed it. So we simply paced the room, listening to the bathroom music and consuming liquor.

  When I couldn’t stand the tension any more I said: “A shift in time, if we are to believe Einstein, requires somebody to travel huge distances into space and back at something like the speed of light…a mere 186,000 miles per second. As far as I know, nobody has moved much farther than from Trasgate to here…some seventeen miles I believe it is. I agree that the way you drive — ”

  “All right, all right! But what about that transcript? Didn’t Gray refer to Relativity?”

  “You still talking about the thing they were going to build?”

  “I think they built it — James, what really happened to you on Davvitt’s roof?”

  “How did you know I was ever on Davvitt’s roof?”

  “Because I know something’s up there and you’ve announced you want to go housebreaking.”

  “In other words, you’re not prepared to admit that your people are tapping his phone.”

  Tesh beamed: “My own sentiments exactly.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you exactly what happened to me up there. There’s no way of describing it.”

  “But whatever it was, you’ve never come across anything else like it?”

  “Correct.”

  “It was something completely alien and didn’t obey any normal physical laws?”

  I looked at him suspiciously. “That is also correct.”

  He asked: “Could it have been only half there?”

  “Implying that the other half was somewhere else?”

  “Would that be any odder,” Tesh said, “than your thing that has only half happened?”

  I said: “What are you driving at, Tesh? Because one thing is inexplicable it doesn’t mean we have to make everything else absolute gibberish.”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know what I mean, really. You’re the one with the brains. Maybe I’m just chucking things your way to see if anything clicks.”

  “Well, I hope that doesn’t.”

  Tesh aimed his index finger. “Don’t be too surprised at anything. The BRUNDASH business is way out. It can’t have any normal solution. Even Einstein got taken by surprise, didn’t he, by the chain reaction he thought could not occur? Yet he started it, really. Maybe he started this thing too. Let’s keep an open mind.”

  Neither of us had noticed that Nicola had emerged from the bathroom, nor how long she’d been listening. I was so shocked
by the terrorized expression on her face I wanted to dash across and hold her.

  It was the word BRUNDASH that had so menaced her, taken her utterly by surprise and transformed her to the quivering figure who now indicated to me that she didn’t want to be touched.

  We both watched her without moving, as she crossed to the Stereo and switched it off, so that the music in the bathroom, tinny for the acoustics of the tiles, was severed off halfway through a phrase.

  She leaned heavily against the wall and spoke, at first, quite quietly. “A few months before my mother died — I think she knew she was going to and I think it was cancer…but those were the days before people talked about it so openly and I never knew. But a few months before she died my father gave her a puppy. It was a nice thing to do” — her voice acquired that edge I had heard once before in the car coming to London — “and my father very rarely did nice things for my mother, until of course it was too late.” She broke off a second. Then to Tesh: “My father is Julian Gray…in case you didn’t get my full name.”

  “I had guessed.”

  She paused, trying to gauge to what extent this affected so many things. It made her more hesitant. Eventually she said, almost inaudibly: “The puppy’s name was Bandy.”

  “Bow legs,” I put in. But my God she looked awful.

  Nicola didn’t smile but went on in the same flat voice: “The three of us — Pa, Ma and I — went up to…to a place in Cumberland…” To Tesh. “Do you know where I mean?”

  “Moorbridge.”

  She nodded. “Moorbridge…It’s closed down now, but then it was where my father worked. As I say, we took Bandy. Various parts of the place were strictly out of bounds; and one place in particular had an electric fence around it. We…had lunch with a few colleagues of daddy’s and they talked very technically. I remember feeling very bored. But from the dining-room you could see…certain things. One was a great copper sphere…actually it was very beautiful in a way, in a rather frightening way, because it caught the sun which shone on to the sphere and made it glow. Like another sun, only mounted close to the ground.”

  Nicola had gone limp; and stood against the wall, her hands behind her back, and spoke like someone trying to say something very important personally to a doctor in whom she just had to confide. I can’t explain her mood in any other way. I desperately wanted to touch her, to reassure her; she looked so beautiful and yet so stricken.

  “I was seventeen,” she explained. “Old enough not to be stupidly sentimental over a dog.”

  “No one,” I said, “is ever old enough for that.”

  “I don’t agree,” she managed. “And I’ll never do it again. Well, Bandy was bored with all this jargon and he saw I was too. So he decided to break up the party, dashing out of the dining-room and trying to get me to follow. He did this several times and I couldn’t make him behave. One of the learned bores at lunch said I wasn’t to worry, that if he threw himself against the electric fence he’d just get a mild shock and it would discourage him from going anywhere where he could get into trouble. I asked what kind of trouble he could get into and they changed the subject.

  “I could see Bandy through the window and he did rush the fence. I was anxious, because people can be wrong about things like electric shocks. Anyway, Bandy was very little and when he got to the fence he simply got straight through it without touching the wires. The mesh was too coarse to touch his body.”

  Nicola seemed to slip an inch or so, sliding down the wall as if the effort of telling us this had made her bodily weak. I must have made an involuntary movement but she said no, it was all right.

  “I was watching my mother’s face…when the scream rang out. It was…as if her own death had come.

  “That scream was terrifying…terrifying…and the smug professors, who had been so sure that nothing would happen to Bandy, got to their feet. My…my father restrained them. He said something like: ‘It won’t be any use,’ and we just stayed there, in a sort of horrible silence. They wouldn’t let me go outside.

  “I suppose I was morbid and foolish and silly, but I wanted a burial. I kept going on about this and my father got more and more uneasy and tense — this was in the hired car on the way back to the station. My mother couldn’t understand his attitude; she could see that I was even more upset than she was — I’m afraid — and wanted me to have my own way, even though she was far too sensible to indulge herself with animal funerals and things.

  “I don’t believe my father is really wicked, and I don’t think he meant to lash out in quite the way he did. But it was as if he couldn’t stand it any longer and as a matter of fact I’ve seen Miles build up to very much this sort of mood, though he’s never reached the point where he actually flared up.”

  Remembering Miles’ appearance, I suddenly had a stark impression of what he would be like if he ever did. And looking across at Nicola in this state I suddenly realized that I had had no reason to question my intuition in going back to London with her myself. Miles — I was now quite certain — could be dangerous…little girls or no little girls.

  Tesh glanced at me briefly, as if he were thinking the same, and went to pour himself another drink. I hadn’t yet finished mine…Nicola’s brandy glass stayed forgotten on the table near where she had been sitting. “What,” said Tesh, “did your father say?”

  “He yelled it. We were in a chauffeur-driven car provided by the establishment and the driver looked round sharply as if we had all gone mad. But daddy shouted: ‘How disappointing for you! No body — no funeral!’ Again, I looked at my mother’s face…It…it really was as if she had died, along with that puppy…if ‘died’ is quite the right word.

  “Then I happened to look at what she’d been doing with her right hand. It was a cold day, and the windows had steamed up. And without realizing it, she’d written a word with her finger, on the window next to her…” Nicola stared at Tesh, “The word you’ve just said” — as if she couldn’t bring herself to name it.

  Tesh, utterly dispassionate at this point and only concerned with the detail of what she was trying to say, glared hard at her and asked: “This copper thing. Are you quite sure it was really a sphere?”

  Already, as he spoke, I was beginning to get an idea that was pressing against my mind.

  I said I saw an easily recognizable shape, through those louvres. And I said that in some odd sort of way I couldn’t register what exactly that shape was.

  But something in Nicola’s face told me she somehow knew that what she thought she’d seen hadn’t been quite right.

  Certainly, as Nicola slid to the floor in a dead faint, it had been on the tip of her tongue.

  Certainly, as I rushed across to catch her before she fell, the idea had been forming in my own mind.

  But it was Tesh who rushed into the kitchen and came back holding one of the most prosaic objects on earth.

  He was still holding it in his hand when Nicola came round, lying where I had placed her on the settee. She looked at it a while and said perfectly calmly: “Yes. That’s right. That’s what I saw. A kind of egg-shaped thing.”

  Stage Two

  Chapter Five

  To remember things…to penetrate the layers in one’s mind, layers of sadness, layers of torture, of smugness and evasion, of intuition and belief…To remember things, lie there — and dream.

  Permit the mixing machine of unconscious whirlpool-swirlings to test and try each intermingling combination; the rushings of water, each fluid a different colour, each pouring from a different source, evocative.

  The fluid thought, the mental vortex, cascades in a state of apparent disorder…But does it? As the dream takes hold, as the sleep-miracle tests and selects and seeks then to symbolize, is there not a pattern here? The opening and closing of these tremendous sluice-gates, the sudden forming of a dam here, a funnel there…is not Thought itself precipitating out of the colour-wash?

  It hasn’t happened yet…Maybe, for the piddling trickle of the
conscious mind, the tiny fraction of the brain idly called upon in everyday life to make superficial decisions and to be adequate or not adequate and to communicate inarticulately with other bits of minds, maybe for such unrevealing top-surfaces the phrase ‘it hasn’t happened yet’ might be preclusive. Even absurd. Even insane.

  But for the subconscious mind! — the mind which is not pat. The mind which is not right or wrong. The mind which through poor processes of learning and hideous misunderstanding of great teachings, we think of as separate, as nothing to do with us, really.

  The subconscious mind, which, once entooled into the usable brain, gives us all things from Beethoven to Einstein, from the Michelangelo frescoes to the miraculous Quantum, the subconscious mind does not recognize the barriers of an imposed logic.

  Today is Thursday. Just so! Someone sat down and weaved a lattice, and laid it like a net across the top of time and space.

  They said, I know! We’ll make up things we’ll call days and nights, which we’ll invent from the fact that the world is turning around…‘Oh well, I know it hasn’t just started turning around, just because I’ve invented the Calendar. But it doesn’t matter what’s turning around what, any more. Because my calendar exists! Look! See it? Definite. No doubt about it.

  ‘Smith. You’re late! You were supposed to be here at eleven o’clock. On Thursday, which someone invented. And when that big hand points upward and the little hand is nearly pointing upward. On the clock which is part of this net someone sensible produced in order to make you late for your appointment, my dear young Smith, this morning. I haven’t got Time to see you now. There might be a Space next week.’

  ‘But, sir! What if I were to say that what made me late hasn’t happened yet?’

  ‘I don’t know what you would say, Smith. But I know what I would say, all right. I would say: you’re fired, Smith! That’s what I would say.’

  *

  On Thursday night I had a nightmare. It was in Technicolor.

  I seemed to be looking toward the bathroom window, and again the moon was up…as it had been on the night of the cats. But this time the silence of the night wasn’t total; for somewhere, in the far distance, I heard a metallic, high-pitched tapping noise. It was irregular and hollow…somewhat like the reverberative sound of a man tapping train wheels, only at the far end of the train.